“Suck it up, we’re almost done,” Sava joked.
“I’m not a goddamned invalid. I don’t need this.”
“Well, the rest of us need you to do this. You’re ripe.” Sava grinned.
He was trying to make light, but with Mach’s naked body on display, it was nearly impossible. Mottled, withered, and deformed, his flesh and muscles were rawhide sinew. Bulbous joints, streaked with swollen redness, were hot to the touch and frozen stiff. Mach was the worst affected and an example of things to come.
Sava toweled him damp, then wheeled him into the bathroom’s locker room. The clipper’s electrical hum numbed his hand as he mowed over Mach’s scalp. No one had reported lice, but Sava decided Mach’s hygiene begged for precaution. Mach exploded with more rancor. Sava ignored him.
“It’s Illithium, isn’t it?” Mach whimpered.
“It looks the same, but to tell you the truth, I’m too exhausted to speculate.”
“But it was limited to the brain before. This is everywhere.”
Sava said nothing as he finished Mach’s haircut.
“Why did they do this to us?”
“I’m not a biologics engineer,” Sava said, putting away the clipper. “But maybe Alkonost, Morosov, whoever, had the best of intentions. Their explanation about inoculation and whatnot might’ve been the truth; this might’ve been a preventative treatment. The experiment just went sideways is all . . . unintended consequences. Unfortunately, we’re the test’s mutilated lab rats.”
“Little comfort that is.”
Wilco broke in over the intercom. Sava clumsily dressed Mach and wheeled him to the elevator. The Crown’s vault chamber was abuzz. Suspended from a hoist, Wilco dangled in the pit near the vault’s Cyclopean door. The men’s haggard smiles spoke of success.
“We got it!” Wilco exclaimed. “We wanted to get you here before we opened it.”
“Let me down. Careful, now.”
The men lowered Sava into the cramped confine to have a look. Wilco had highlighted the concentric dials to make them more readable. Using a knife, he’d scratched circumferential numbers into the brushed alloy, filling the jerky scrawls with chalk. Sava checked the girth of the door and realized there were no handles, levers, or actuators. He was about to push on the door when Wilco stopped him.
“I already tried that. It resets the dials. It’s bridged to a time-lock release as well.”
“Then how do you open it?”
“This way, I believe,” he said hovering his palm over the lock. “You ready?”
Sava nodded.
Wilco pressed his finger into the locus of the plate-sized mechanism. They heard a pneumatic whisper, the sounds of releasing mechanical interlocks inside the door’s inner workings. After a pause, the dials sank like an inverted wedding cake. Vapor hissed from the hermetic seals, warm and smelling of seawater. An electric blue traced the door’s perimeter as it opened to reveal the vault’s interior.
They looked inside.
“All this, for that?” Wilco gestured wide.
“It’s just the antechamber. Hold on.”
Sava stepped onto the metal grate. The room was barely the size of a closet, the floor hovering over a column of radiant indigo. He peered through the grille at the shaft and noticed a ladder descending into the watery glow. Like most utility flooring, the grille was removable; the obvious means of access before the chamber was flooded.
“Where’s it lead?” Wilco asked.
“It’s too deep to tell.”
Pipes of varying diameters ran the length of the shaft, disappearing into the low-ceiling ductwork. Hot to the touch, the radiant heat filled the room with a swampy humidity. Where the caliducts diverged to was impossible to say. No one had bothered to supply the sentinel crew with schematics for the Crown’s utilities, and reverse engineering the plumbing was impractical. Heat, water, electricity—this was the fortress’s beating heart.
Jan Mayen was the product of a rift in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, with the island’s Beerenberg volcano as its scion. Attached to a thermal vent, the Crown might be drawing the heat into a thermal-voltaic generator to supply power, Sava guessed. It was a likely possibility, until Wilco pointed out the obvious.
“There’s something on the wall.”
Like a shrine, Sava noticed a plaque mounted in a shallow alcove. A simple sentence printed in bas-relief repeated itself in dozens of languages. It referenced a date far into the future, probably coupled to the door’s time-lock; a nebulous message Sava didn’t have time to decipher. Above the runes was the ominous trefoil, its unmistakable three petals surrounding a dot, a universal warning.
“Close it!” Sava yelled.
“What?”
“We need to close this goddamned thing, now!”
Sava tugged and pounded on the heavy door. A slap reengaged its hydraulic clockwork. The door started its sealing sequence. Wilco protested, but Sava shoved his way through the breach and back into the pit.
“Get us out of here,” Sava ordered, grabbing hold of the hoist’s nylon straps.
“Why’d you do that?” Wilco’s eyeglasses were fogged with vault steam. “What the hell’s in there?”
Sava clambered onto the floor, dragging the hatch over the pit after Wilco was hoisted up. His comrades closed in, curious and unnerved. He got up and leaned against one of the chamber’s supply crates to catch his breath. The men gawked at him in anticipation.
“The vault . . . it’s a nuclear reactor,” Sava gasped. “Like the lighthouse, but more . . . ”
Exhalations filled the woe-heavy air.
“What? Are you sure?”
“Yes! The whole place was glowing with Cherenkov.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean, ‘Cherenkov’?” Wilco asked.
“Radiation, man! Didn’t you work aboard a Crimean carrier? Christ, you of all people. The plaque! The symbol in there was a warning.”
“We’re going to turn out like him, aren’t we?” one of the men exclaimed, pointing at Mach crumpled pathetically in his chair. “This synthetic disease they gave us, it’s interacting with the radiation, isn’t it?”
“I-I don’t know. Probably.”
“What’re we going to do, lieutenant?” Wilco whined. “There’s a dead zone inbound, and we’re like a gang of feeble oldsters, nearly immobile. We’ve got to get out of here!”
“I know, goddamn it, I know!” Sava paused, fumbling for a smoke. “I just need time to think.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
October 2163 C.E.
They were called the Van Dallens. Flemish, it was a tribal name adopted from a chieftain ancestor. “Vandals” seemed more appropriate and ironic, a nickname Uri could easily recall. Despite a few cases of developmental malformation, they’d survived the Rhine’s anoxia and remained a robustly tall people.
The warriors led the roped prisoners along the palm-lined riverbank toward central Rotterdam. The trail was a ferny maze of mud-slick wooden viaducts. The three Alkonost, forlorn and ragged—and, evidently, ill-prepared for emergencies—were having a harder go of it than Uri and Miriam. As agents of the caliphate, switching to survival mode was near automatic—an acquired skill not easily tempered.
Airboats glided downriver with the Antonov’s cargo neatly stacked on their flat-bottomed hulls. Uri strained to glimpse his duffel, but the vessels’ massive fans whipped up a rooster tail of froth, clouding detail. No doubt bound for the Vandal’s kraal, Uri would have to bide his time; an easy escape looked impossible.
In the faded gold of dusk, Uri saw the silhouettes of Rotterdam’s crumbling skyline emerge from the jungle canopy. Jumbled in with the cadaverous skyscrapers was the broken harp of Erasmus Bridge, a Pre-Shock landmark but now consumed by invasive creeper. Lit by the delta’s plentiful biogas, lamps ringed the city’s upper tiers. As a way to avoid the deoxygenated lowlands, the Flemish tribe lived in the towers above the asphyxiating haze.
Past the bridge, Rotterdam’s old Port
Center and Montevideo Tower emerged, most of their many panes of glass long shattered. With good vantage over the delta’s canals and saltwater lagoons, the redoubt functioned as the Vandals’ fortress. Floating quays skirted the building’s foundation where dockworkers unloaded the airboats of recent plunder. A construction crane, tethered to the fortress complex, lifted the cargo to a platform near a connecting sky-bridge.
Skiffs shuttled the prisoners from the riverbank to the docks, where the warriors marched them single-file up a rusted stairwell. The building’s gypsum interior had rotted away, leaving just the I-beams and aluminum framing. Undifferentiated debris sat heaped in piles on the floors, remnants of old office décor. The caustic humidity, insects, and rot had dissolved everything into loam.
Higher up, the Vandals removed their masks and the prisoners’ enrichment hoods. Uri breathed deep, feeling the cool relief.
They continued to climb skyward, past the colony’s rickety undercroft. High bays filled with spherical tanks held the kraal’s biogas reserves. A withered man attended to a pipe organ of gauges and valves. Uri strained to get a better look: Sephardim, swarthy, oddly dressed and out of place. Most likely a press-ganger.
Using a steam turbine as a crude dynamo, the Vandals extracted oxygen from cryo-stills. A wall of metal racks filled with gas cylinders fed the warriors’ personal supplies. Siphoned from the main filler valves, polyvinyl pipes branched into a tree of ductwork feeding oxygen to the Port Center’s upper levels and sister tower.
The warriors separated Uri and Miriam from the others. The recruits’ whimpers of protest were met with shoves and slaps as the captors led the men off into the tower’s ramshackle maze.
“You two have an audience with King Espen Van Dallen,” the war chief said, pointing at Uri and Miriam.
Occupying the mandrel of the Port Center’s lathe-like construction, what was once the sky lounge doubled as the barbarian’s court, complete with animist idols. The Vandals’ ashen king sat on his leather throne, a monarch in stark contrast to his supposed regality. A spiked crown beaten from palladium alloy sat cockeyed on his curly gray hair. Bled of his people’s blond glow, he looked hot and exhausted.
The war chief forced Miriam and Uri to their knees. The king mumbled to a slinky, goateed man beside him. Uri silently dubbed him the “Inquisitor.” A cross between a jester and a vicar, he wore a floppy hat jangling with trinkets and a motley, but drab, robe. The Inquisitor translated for King Espen, his accent thickly Germanic and guttural.
“The key to proper fishing is having the right bait,” the Inquisitor said, taking the filthy orbital console from the chieftain. Its LCD flashed in distress mode, the beacon triggered. “We noticed you both have one of these. True?”
Uri and Miriam said nothing, eyes downcast.
“Quiet ones, eh? Maybe this will get you talking.” From behind the lounge’s long granite bar, the Inquisitor brought over a tanned skin held taut by a frame of bowed sapling. Much to Uri’s disgust, the hide was marked with a centipede’s tattoo, the iconic arthropod coiled around a legionnaire standard. The trophy had been flayed from the missing archivist, an expatriated soldier from Nova Byzantium by the looks of it. Despite Nova Byzantium’s row with Al Fadah Madina, loyalists were known to defect to the caliphate.
“Why did you kill and skin this man?” Uri asked, stunned and bewildered.
“He was a warlock, insinuating malignancy into our clan. Unclean. King Espen has gone to great lengths to purge doppelgangers from our fiefdom.”
“Doppelgangers?” Uri exclaimed. “You’re lunatics.”
With a nod from the Inquisitor, the war chief whipped Uri’s back with a switch. He screamed from the sting. The shrill howl jolted Miriam from her daze.
“Your sky-demon brother entered a Van Dallen village and tried to bleed our people of their life force, luring children and the enfeebled away with trinkets of gold. He denied it, of course. As deacon, I knew the truth, and he confessed.”
“Please.” Uri warded off the war chief’s switch. “What was this man’s crime?” he asked, pointing to the skin.
The Inquisitor grabbed a metal case from a footlocker and brought it to Uri. Inside was a medical kit: marrow syringe, colloidal solutions, chemo-thermal packs, and specimen tubes: everything needed to collect and preserve human tissue. For unknown reasons, the caliphate had sent the archivist to take genetic samples of the Flemish Vandals.
“A demon, cast down from the hateful heavens,” the Inquisitor shouted, arms wildly gesticulating, “sent to build an army of impostors! And what do you think he was going to do with this?” he pointed at the kit.
Uri’s mouth was slack.
“I’ll tell you. By using the victim’s blood, this warlock was going to cast life into a clay-man doppelganger. The homunculus would grow, then feed on our people, taking the victim’s form. We knew what he was up to,” he cackled, shaking his finger. “His plan was to replace our kin with demons controlled from the aerial kingdom.”
The tirade was madness, a Dark Age blend of paranoia and fanaticism. Enthralled by myth and magical thinking, the Inquisitor was beyond reason. He looked to the quiet king, his eyes empty and sick. Uri had no doubt who ran the Vandals’ “kingdom.”
“You’re mistaken,” Uri said.
“Oh?” The Inquisitor crouched, eyes blinking in pools of black face paint. “How’s that, fiend?”
“This man you killed was an archivist. The Islamic Caliphate of Al Fadah Madina is our employer.” Uri gestured skyward. “We are conservators of artifacts used for research and preservation; it’s our mandate, our job.”
The Inquisitor mocked him, hand yammering puppet-like. “Lies! All lies! You’re Pazuzu’s playthings, the winged overlord’s foul-mouthed avatar.”
“It’s the truth, the same truth this man told you before you gutted and skinned him,” Uri sneered.
“And what about her,” the Inquisitor said, strutting over to Miriam. “What does this succubus have to say for herself?”
“Don’t fucking touch her.”
“Oh? She’s cast a spell over you, I see. Maybe in the coming days . . . weeks . . . months . . . years . . . this little slice—” he said, lifting a lock of her hair, “—will eventually be persuaded to speak.”
Miriam didn’t pull away, resigned. Wet hair hiding her face, she showed little defiance.
“A confession, then a quick, merciful death. Is that the deal you offered this archivist?” Uri huffed, nodding at the detritus.
“I am not offering you such a deal—not yet. You’re heretics, but useful heretics,” he sneered.
The war chief ripped Uri’s console out of his webbing pouch and brought it to the Inquisitor. He randomly pushed the buttons like a simpleton, his face manic and freakish. Feigning frustration, he threw the device to the floor, its LCD screen locked. Without Uri’s pin number and the archivist’s thumbprint, the device was useless.
“Call your friends,” the Inquisitor demanded. “Come get rescued.”
“Fuck you.”
The war chief cracked Uri on the back with the switch, drawing blood.
“Even if I did trigger the distress locator,” Uri winced, “they won’t come.”
“You two showed up in our kingdom with a small army of mercenaries, why wouldn’t the diabolical Pazuzu try to rescue you as well, hmm?”
“Because they know better.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. In time, you’ll come around.” The Inquisitor smirked. “Gregor! Take them away.”
The war chief and his men escorted Uri and Miriam back down through the Port Center’s labyrinths. Passing the jumbled warehouse area, the Antonov’s cargo sat stacked on metal shelves next to hooks of cured crocodile. The Vandals were busy sorting the crates, ripping apart the compressors, generators, air tools, and hydraulics for salvage.
Gregor stopped to talk to the storekeeper. Uri watched two men pull Zliva and Pravo from the duffel. Heads cocked, they ignorantly pried at the cylinder
’s elaborate super-structure. One kicked the container in frustration as another stabbed it with his metal-tipped assegai. A few more kicks and the Vandals abandoned their havoc, shelving the payload on the rack along with the duffel.
Uri tried to conceal his worry.
Through the cell window, Uri watched the daily business from the Montevideo Tower’s prison. The Vandals were an industrious bunch. Like flies buzzing a dung pile, airboats circled the quays as the crane reeled people and plunder into the Port Center’s bowels.
Fiberglass yurts, built atop rafted barges, functioned as the fortress’s gatehouse. At river level, the carbon dioxide fog was strangling. An umbilical of corrugated ducts wrapped down from the central vent exchange, feeding the warrior garrison oxygenated air. Uri counted twenty warriors manning the vertical portico, too many to sneak past.
He backed away from the slot and sat down on his musty cot. The cell walls were welded plate steel with small air vents linking the cordons. Strapped to his ankle and bolted with loop, a wire cable anchored him to the floor. It allowed him enough slack to reach the window but not much else.
Poking for protein, he sifted through the snap-turtle broth. For bush meat, it was better than most, reptilian white flesh and lean. He sat the bowl on the diamond plate and lay down. Pain. The daily beatings were getting worse with the Inquisitor’s frustration. Luckily, they’d spared Miriam the violence. Nor had they assaulted her in any way, except to strip her of her console and anything they thought she might use as a weapon.
Through a fist-sized vent, they could see each other. She said nothing, answering Uri with shakes and nods of her head, or—more often—neither. They still had their black ampoules of the cyanide failsafe, with Uri’s stashed in the leg of the cot’s aluminum frame. While bleak, he hadn’t succumbed to the malaise afflicting Miriam. He kept an obsessive watch over her, checking hourly for signs of life: an eye blink, breathing, swallows.
Cocking his head, he looked in on her. Curled up on her cot, bleary eyes gazed into a shaft of pale daylight as she kneaded the scars on her forearms. Content, Uri lay back down to nap and rebuild his ragged constitution.
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