The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  “They’re in the stairwell!” Chrima shouted up from an indeterminate distance below them. “Move! I’ll hold them off with the beamer.”

  But for how long? Alania wanted to ask, but she didn’t really have the breath for it. Danyl swore, slammed the gun back into its holster, and resumed climbing, Alania on his heels.

  They climbed in silence—ominous silence, Alania thought—for several more minutes. And then . . .

  Light. Blinding white light streaming up from below. They had climbed so far it barely reached them, but looking down through the metal mesh of the stairs, Alania saw Chrima silhouetted against it, taking aim with the beamer.

  The light flashed out.

  They climbed two more turns of the stairs. Alania’s heart pounded in her ears harder than even the exertion itself could account for, but she could still hear Chrima’s footsteps clattering down the stairs, farther and farther away from them. She heard her shout something, heard the barest whisper of answering shouts.

  Silence for four more turns of the stairs.

  Then a single rifle shot rang out from far below.

  An instant later, the bottom of the shaft exploded.

  This shockwave made the previous one seem like the gentle breezes that blew from the Twelfth Tier ventilation shafts. It not only hurled Alania from her feet, it blasted her into the air. She slammed against the wall, knocking her forehead on the stone, then crashed down on the stairs on her back.

  “Help!” Danyl gasped out above her, through the renewed ringing in her ears. She opened bleary eyes that didn’t want to focus, turned her head, and saw that he was dangling in space, barely hanging on to a twisted balustrade, all that remained of the long-gone railing, that stuck out from the steps. She rolled over and lunged for him, reaching out her hand. He let go of the balustrade with one hand to grab it and then was able to shift the grip of the other hand closer to the stairs. A few moments later she was pulling him back to safety . . . if you could call it that. She collapsed against the inside wall, breathing heavily. He sat beside her.

  “What happened?” she asked. Her ears still felt stuffed with cotton, if cotton could ring like a bell, and the front of her borrowed blue shirt was spattered with fresh blood from her nose.

  “Chrima,” Danyl panted. “When she opened her pack yesterday, I saw something . . . didn’t know what it was. A rectangular package. Now I know. A demolition charge.”

  “A demolition . . .” Alania peered down but could see nothing; the bottom of the shaft was filled with a cloud of dust. There was no sign of Chrima. “You mean . . .” Horror gripped her throat. “She blew herself up?”

  “Herself, and the stairs, and any Provosts who were in the shaft—if the blast didn’t get them, the falling rock and debris must have. If we’re lucky, they can’t even get into the shaft anymore.”

  Alania felt sick. “How could she do that?” She’d just met Chrima the day before. She’d liked her, they were almost the same age, and now, just like that, she was gone—and she’d done it to herself?

  So we can escape, Alania thought. Guilt mingled with her horror.

  “I wish I knew,” Danyl said. “I wish I knew why so many people are dying for us.” He looked down at her, his face corpse-gray in the green light. His nose had started bleeding after the explosion, too, and the blood glistened almost black on his upper lip and chin. “Alania, who are we? What are we?”

  “I don’t know,” Alania said. “But whoever we are, whatever we are, how can we possibly be worth . . .” Her throat closed as she looked down into the billowing dust and smoke.

  She felt Danyl’s hand on her shoulder, squeezing. She looked up at him through tear-blurred eyes. “All we can do,” Danyl said, his voice soft and yet somehow hard at the same time, “is to press on. To try to get to this Prime. To find out what makes us so important. And hope like hell it really is worth all this.”

  Alania took a deep, shuddering breath. “At least we’re on our own now. Nobody else will die because of us.”

  “Except for however many are dying in the resort,” Danyl said grimly. He struggled to his feet, wincing. “No bones broken . . . I don’t think.” He held out his hand. She took it, warm and strong in hers, and let him haul her to her feet. She felt a twinge from her left ankle, but it bore her weight, so she didn’t mention it.

  Danyl glanced at his watch. “0903. Less than an hour to get to the top.” He looked up, and Alania followed his gaze, but the dim lighting from the eternals gave no clue how much farther they had to climb. “Onward and upward?”

  “Onward and upward,” Alania agreed. She closed her eyes. Goodbye, Chrima, she thought. Thank you. Grief closed her throat. She swallowed hard, opened her eyes, and resumed climbing into the unknown.

  NINETEEN

  FIRST OFFICER KRANZ watched the assault on the River People from the comfort of his office. He watched the first helicopter crash, then saw the second one suffer the same fate, but he also saw the sniper be obliterated. The remaining four helicopters reached the old resort unopposed. Provosts swarmed down lines, entering the resort through the shattered windows that overlooked the once-scenic waterfall and pool—now cesspool. With a twitch of his finger, he switched from helmet cam to helmet cam. He saw a handful of his soldiers fall to crossbows and booby traps, but not very many, and one by the one, the defenders were eliminated or arrested.

  But there was no sign of Alania, no sign of Danyl—no sign of the two people the raid was intended to capture.

  He watched a door be forced open, saw children and their mothers cowering wide-eyed in the chamber beyond. The Provosts rounded them up. They’d be questioned, of course, but he doubted any of them knew where Alania and Danyl had gone. The leaders, whoever they were, would not have shared that information with the people most likely to survive the assault.

  Kranz’s fingers dug into the arms of his chair as the assault wound down. Damn it. Where the hell could they be?

  The final “battle” of the raid took place in a stairwell leading up from the resort to the Rim, where there had once been a garden, now a nest of deadly robot Guardians. What the woman fleeing up those stairs thought she could accomplish at the Rim, Kranz would never know; she blew up herself and much of the staircase, the debris crushing three Provosts at the bottom of the shaft and effectively closing it off.

  The River flowed underground from the waterfall’s pool, which had been artificially created with a dam when the resort was built. Could Alania and Danyl have fled along it somehow? It seemed unlikely—old records did not indicate any sort of traversable cavern down there, and the River remained underground for a kilometer before emerging through a spillway. But it would have to be checked out once divers could be brought in, equipped with sonar to penetrate the murk of the water.

  Kranz frowned at the resort’s plans, summoned from the City’s database. It showed only two ways out of the Canyon. There was a main elevator shaft and accompanying staircase up to the Rim above the resort’s glass-walled lobby in the Canyon’s east wall, and there was a matching elevator shaft and staircase on the far side of the pool in the west wall. The elevator on the lobby side still worked, but while its mechanism was intact, there was no longer an exit up on the Rim; the once-grand main entrance to the resort had long since been demolished.

  The elevator in the west wall had failed years ago, the Provosts had reported. Even its mechanism no longer remained atop the Rim. Now the woman they had pursued up the western stairs had blown herself up and brought the bottom half of them crashing down. Even if someone higher up had survived the blast and made it to the top, they would find themselves in what was once a pavilion offering resort guests pleasant dining in the Rim Garden but was now a Rim Guardian nest. Entering that would be suicide.

  And yet, unless Alania and Danyl turned up cowering in one of the dozens of guest rooms in the old resort—which had not all been cleared
, so that was still possible—the western staircase was the only route they could have taken, presumably ahead of the self-detonating woman. Which would at least explain why someone had been willing to destroy it so spectacularly, permanently . . . and fatally.

  Kranz continued to watch the cleanup operation for some time. As door after door was kicked in and Alania and Danyl remained missing, he became increasingly convinced he was right. He touched a control on his desk, opening his direct link to Commander Havelin. He’d refrained from speaking to the Commander until that moment; micromanaging a battle from afar was hardly a recipe for tactical success, and it was a very good way to damage morale.

  “Havelin here,” came the Commander’s voice in response to his signal.

  “First Officer Kranz here, Commander,” Kranz said.

  “Yes, sir?” Havelin’s voice sounded crisp, professional . . . and very slightly guarded.

  “Excellent work,” Kranz said. Except for losing two helicopters within five minutes of each other to a bloody sniper, he thought, but there was time enough for that discussion later. For now, he wanted the Commander entirely on his side.

  “Thank you, sir,” Commander Havelin said, and Kranz thought he sounded a little less guarded and a lot more relieved.

  “I’ve been studying the plans of the resort,” Kranz said. “Since our quarry has not turned up anywhere within the complex, I think they must be in the western stairwell leading to the old Rim Garden.”

  “As do I, sir,” Havelin said. “I have already had Rim Control deactivate the air defenses so I can send a helicopter up there, and I recalled a squad from the cleanup operation in the guest rooms. They’re resupplying as we speak and should be at the top within fifteen minutes. Rim Control is standing by to deactivate all other defenses once we’re ready to move in and enter the stairwell from the top.”

  “Excellent,” Kranz said again. Perhaps he would not have to have the Commander stripped of his rank after all. He glanced at the chronometer on his desk: almost 1000. “I will be observing with interest. Carry on.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Havelin out.”

  Kranz called up the camera feeds, selecting one that showed Provosts emerging onto the shelf of rock outside the now-shattered glass window of the resort lobby to be lifted one by one to the hovering helicopter. A thunderstorm had rolled over the Canyon. Rain sleeted down all around them.

  If Alania and Danyl had made it to the Rim, they wouldn’t be able to get past the robot sentries. They were trapped. Just a few more minutes, and this whole ridiculous and costly charade would come to an end.

  Kranz allowed himself one glance at the frightening array of yellow and red lights on the Captain’s medical monitor, which he now kept uncovered whenever he was in the office alone, and fought down the familiar surge of near panic that gripped him whenever he allowed himself to think too hard about the stakes involved in the search for Alania and Danyl. Then he went over to the bar that ran along one wall of his office, poured another cup of kaff, and returned to his desk. Sipping the hot, bittersweet liquid appreciatively, he settled in to watch what he desperately hoped would be the endgame of that search.

  Danyl and Alania reached the top of the stairs with five minutes to spare. It gave them little time to rest. “You remember the plan?” he asked Alania, panting.

  She gulped air, then nodded. “There’s a five-minute interval during which there are no robots in the hut beyond that door. We have that long to activate the safe passage to the nearest Rim gate. It will last for ten minutes, during which time the robots will not register our presence as long as we stay within the passage’s boundaries. Once that time is up, they’ll kill us on sight.”

  “Right. Although I don’t understand why this ‘safe passage’ protocol even exists.”

  “I do,” Alania said, and Danyl raised an eyebrow at her. “Normally techs carry transmitters that identify them as harmless to the robots,” she explained. “But if something went so seriously awry that the robots no longer accepted the transmitted security codes, you might need a safe way in and out of the nest. No doubt the protocol can be activated from the City as well.”

  “You seem to know a lot about robots.”

  She smiled briefly. “Misspent childhood. My guardian’s factory probably built these. He insisted I study robotics. Among other things.” Her smile faded. “I used to think he meant for me to take his place, since he had no children of his own. Then he handed me over to Kranz.”

  “Another part of the puzzle,” Danyl said. “All right, expert. Why do we have only ten minutes to get out? Why can’t we just shut down the robots completely and take our time?”

  “Because Prime didn’t tell us how,” Alania said. “He must have had a reason. Maybe it requires security codes he doesn’t have. Maybe it would raise alarms we don’t want to raise.” She looked over the side of the landing, back down the long, long shaft they had just climbed so laboriously. Danyl knew what she was thinking, because he was thinking it, too: Chrima’s grave. “The Provosts may have guessed where we’ve gone. Even if we get across the Rim, they may be waiting for us just beyond the Fence.”

  “I know,” Danyl said. He pulled out the slugthrower, checked it over, and then holstered it again. Ten shots before he’d have to reload. If the Provosts were waiting . . .

  They don’t want to kill us, he thought. They want to capture us. That gives us an edge.

  But not much of one.

  He checked his watch again. “One minute.” They were sitting side by side on the landing. He climbed to his feet, held out his hand to Alania. She took it. My sister, he thought with a sense of wonder. Probably, honesty compelled him to add, but in truth, he was certain of it. Her eyes, if nothing else, told the tale.

  He felt ashamed of how he’d originally seen her as nothing more than another salvage prize, his ticket to the City. She was clearly far more valuable than he’d ever dreamed—as was he, apparently (and astonishingly)—but whatever her value to the First Officer, she was even more valuable to him.

  He pulled her upright, then released her hand and took out the key Chrima had given him. He held it at the ready in front of the key-port in the lockplate to the right of the door. The green numerals on his watch flicked to 1000—and he thrust the rod into the waiting receptacle. The locking mechanism groaned and clanked, and then the door swung inward of its own accord.

  What Danyl had been imagining as a utilitarian shed proved to be nothing of the sort. Extending twenty meters to both the left and the right, it boasted a fancy (though badly scarred) parquet floor, three more-or-less-intact (though dark) crystal chandeliers, and a high ceiling bearing a painted and peeling representation of clouds. There were pillars half buried in the walls, as though the pavilion had originally been open to the Rim Garden on all sides. Had guests dined and danced here once upon a time?

  Danyl had never been to the Rim before, but he knew no gardens remained there now. Or anything else green and growing. The maps he had studied in the teaching machine showed that the Rim Defenses extended twenty kilometers to the north and south of the City, on both sides of the Canyon: hundred-meter-wide no-go zones of smooth concrete patrolled by the Guardian robots. Three-meter walls topped with razor wire and their own defense and surveillance systems enclosed the robot-defended strip on both the Canyon and Heartland sides: the one on the Heartland side was called “the Fence.” The defenses were broken only on the west side of the City, where the main gate and the warehouses and other structures surrounding it stood. Provosts guarded those, of course. The ladder and cargo crane associated with the Last Chance Market also stood within that gap.

  Danyl had asked Erl about those defenses, which seemed like ludicrous overkill just to keep Middens-dwellers from escaping into the Heartland. Erl had replied they’d been there for more than two centuries because of a failed attempt to overthrow the Officers, led by rebels from
the farm villages before they were as tightly controlled as they now were. “Like most things in the City, the Rim Defenses took on a life of their own,” he’d said. “Once something like that is created, it must continue. The Officers do not like change.”

  The defenses might have served little practical purpose, but that did nothing to lessen the problems they posed for him and Alania. And if the instructions provided to them did not work, the best they could hope for was to be trapped in the shaft they had just so laboriously climbed, awaiting the eventual arrival of the Provosts.

  At worst, of course, they would be laser pincushions.

  Guess we’re about to find out.

  A silvery cylinder about a meter in diameter punctured the ancient parquet floor at its center: the control station. Danyl looked both ways before stepping through the door, though the gesture was futile—if the robot sentries or some other automated defenses were active, they would react to his presence before he could even begin to register theirs.

  But his head remained firmly on his shoulders, and no smoking holes appeared in his body. “So far, so good,” he said over his shoulder to Alania, who followed him as he strode to the control station. The top of the cylinder was a blank gray screen; he touched it, and it lit with a series of numbers, meaningless to Danyl, presumably showing the status of the Guardians stationed in the pavilion “nest.” In the center of the screen glowed eight icons, abstract shapes that again conveyed no information to Danyl. From his pants pocket, he pulled Prime’s instructions as recorded by Yvelle, and he held the piece of paper out to Alania. They’d both studied it carefully in case something happened to that sheet of paper, but now he wouldn’t have to rely on his memory.