Waking Hell

by Al Robertson

  Cassiel turned to Leila. ‘Is this really how East battles an existential threat to Station?’

  ‘Let him be,’ drawled the Caretaker. ‘Hando’s all right.’

  Leila ignored them. She let Hando see her. ‘You’ve got transport for us?’

  Hando took her appearance in his stride. ‘Ah. Yes. Over there.’ He waved towards the broken office block. Two other shadows were wheeling a small flyer out of the ground floor. ‘All ready and waiting. As specified in the mission briefing. And we got it here ahead of time, so we’ve scored bonus points!’ He beamed.

  ‘The shark!’ said Cassiel, frustrated beyond measure. ‘These idiots are a beacon for it. Another few seconds and it’ll be on us.’

  Leila glanced up. It was much lower now, still circling the area. It disappeared behind the office block. ‘Oh, that’s not a problem,’ said the gun kiddy cheerfully. ‘That’s why we waited. To draw it in.’ He waved towards the flyer. One of his companions stopped pushing, waved back, then unshouldered a cumbersome-looking weapon.

  Cassiel didn’t notice. ‘When it appears,’ she told Leila, ‘You must hit it. We have no other choice.’

  ‘Oh, Amara’ll zap it. She’s been a player since she was eleven,’ said the gun kiddy confidently. ‘She’s shit hot.’

  Leila felt her skull face within her. She told it to target the shark, then reached out to Cassiel. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told the mind. ‘I’ll break it.’

  And then it was there, a grey avatar of death arrowing towards them. Its shadow moved smoothly across the broken ground, twitching with every flip of its great tail. Its maw gaped open. Its compound eyes glittered dully in the night. Its fins seemed somehow transparent. It was their discovery and their death, and it was coming for them.

  ‘Wow,’ said the Caretaker. ‘It’s part fly. Heavy.’

  She felt the skull face probe the shark’s senses. It found a vast sensitivity, greater than anything it had encountered before, and pulled together a sensory assault package to match. It was far more complex and invasive than anything it had ever produced to attack a human, the weapon matching itself to a new kind of target. And then it was complete, and Leila was ready to fire.

  And there was a loud crack from the gun the distant shadow held. A long, thin bolt of light leapt out and hit the shark’s flank, knocking it sideways through the air. Its mouth opened and it thrashed, curling in around the wound. Then there was a loud electronic howl. Static shimmered through it and it was gone.

  The shadow in the distance cheered.

  ‘Fuck yeah!’ whooped Hando. ‘Full bonus achieved! Get in!’

  ‘Nice shooting,’ said the Caretaker. ‘What’s the weapon, kiddo?’

  ‘It’s a harpoon gun. It force crashes the shark. The crash reads as a serious memory error. Looks like an accident. Diagnostics and reboot will take an hour at least.’ He was jubilant. He chattered excitedly as he led them to the flyer. ‘Can’t wait for you to meet Dave and Amara. We won’t be able to talk about all this for a couple of months, but when it comes out – well, everyone’ll be so jealous! We’re so stoked. You hear about unlocking special missions, but you never think you’ll find one yourself.’

  ‘They really don’t know how serious this is,’ muttered Cassiel.

  Hando didn’t hear. ‘We’ve been playing as a squad for a couple of years, now,’ he continued. ‘Mostly in bigger teams, though. This is the first time we’ve just been out as ourselves. Steal a flyer, pick up some booty, bring it here. All carried out! Gods, this is worth the subscription on its own.’

  ‘You stole the flyer?’ asked the Caretaker. He sounded shocked. ‘That’s not cool.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not real,’ replied Hando. ‘None of it’s real. You should know that, you’re actors.’ He peered at them, expecting affirmation. They looked at him blankly. ‘I guess you can’t break role.’

  The flyer was painted a bland grey. Hando introduced Dave, who explained how he’d wiped its hard drive and reinstalled its operating system. ‘It’s completely anonymous now,’ he said. ‘Reads like it’s brand new, freshly registered as a roving maintenance unit. Nobody’ll know it’s you driving it and you can take it pretty much anywhere. Just pretend you’re fixing something if you get any hassle from InSec.’

  The cramped interior smelt of air freshener. There was a flat disc on the back seat, wrapped in webbing. It was identical to the ones that supported the slow travellers. ‘And this is for Leila,’ Amara explained, the harpoon back on her shoulder. ‘It’s a fully operational autonomous fetch server.’ She reached into the flyer, grabbed the disc by its webbing and pulled it out. ‘You can load yourself on to it and be present anywhere, regardless of whether or not there’s any local weave running.’

  ‘We broke into a storage vault and stole it,’ enthused Hando. ‘It was so exciting!’

  ‘It can receive data from any local sense feeds,’ continued Amara, ‘so you can experience what’s going on around you at all times. It’s got full weavecast capabilities, you can manifest as yourself to anyone within range of it. Oh, and these solar panels keep it charged.’

  Leila remembered the slow travellers. ‘And I can slow myself right down and turn silver if I want to, too.’

  Amara took her entirely seriously. ‘It’s set up for that if you need it, yes. It makes you pretty much invisible to sharks, too. You broadcast directly to local individuals, so you’re not onweave enough for them to see you.’

  ‘Not that we’ll meet too many of them in the Wart.’

  Amara nodded. ‘Yeah, there’s so little weave in there. So the shields are really a nice-to-have. The important thing is, we’ve found you a platform that’ll help you explore the Wart. Or anywhere else that doesn’t have any weave. It should hold the whole of your weaveself without any problems. Though it does need someone to carry it around for you.’ She tugged out some shoulder straps. ‘Either one of your companions can wear it like a backpack.’ She passed it to the Caretaker. ‘So, are you happy?’ she asked. ‘Every goal achieved?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leila. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Though you should perhaps find a less dangerous hobby,’ added Cassiel.

  ‘Woohoo!’ The gun kiddies high-fived each other.

  ‘So,’ said Hando, ‘we’ll be off now. Good luck.’

  ‘Er, yeah,’ said the Caretaker. ‘A pleasure to meet you.’

  The teenagers were already fading away, their black armour flowing up over their faces and reasserting an absence of light. For a moment, three silhouettes were visible. Then they merged with the darkness and were gone.

  ‘Those are great kids,’ continued the Caretaker. ‘They did a great job. But I hope my teenage years didn’t involve black ops missions for the gods.’

  ‘They could have left us with some bloody guns, at least,’ grumbled Leila, as she sent out the commands that would transfer her into the disc.

  ‘We don’t need guns,’ replied Cassiel. ‘We’ve got me.’

  Chapter 28

  Cassiel lifted the flyer up and over the sleeping landscape of Docklands. Leila fiddled with the disc’s settings until it showed Cassiel and the Caretaker her avatar, sitting in a rear seat. She reached out and connected with their senses. Cassiel’s Totality tech gave everything a pin-sharp precision. The Caretaker’s sound and image gathering systems were rather more glitchy. Even the smallest objects were overlaid with a soft, rainbow halo of colours. Each sound created a slow-dying echo. It was like being ever so slightly stoned. Leila followed their gazes out over the city. The dimly lit streets curved up and away above them, tucking themselves in behind the Spine. There was no spinelight, only a soft shine rising up from a thousand streetlamps. It made the round entrance to the Wart ahead seem even darker, as black as the armour the gun kiddies had worn to go into innocent battle.

  ‘I wonder if that’s my home,’ said the Caretaker. �
�It doesn’t seem very homely.’

  ‘Bringing back any memories?’ asked Leila.

  ‘Not yet. But I felt a definite connection with the Shining City. Like I should get in there, you know?’

  Leila nodded.

  They entered the Wart. There were far fewer lights. Scattered streetlamps implied a few long, straight roads, connecting clusters of shining windows hinting at factories and office blocks. Two power plants burned out of the darkness, security lights turning the globes of their fusion chambers into glowing pearls. Cassiel banked the flyer. As they flew over one, proximity degraded it.

  The fusion chamber was a rough, concrete orb, set on a pitted metal base. Pipes ran out of it and into the ground. It was such an inelegant thing, but a quarter of Station’s power came from it. Leila felt suddenly very aware that, without the energy these power plants provided, she would not exist. She’d still be present in the world as patterns of magnetism sketched across so many silicon disks, but there’d be nothing to bring those patterns to life. She felt very transient.

  Cassiel noticed her discomfort. ‘Worried?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  The mind pointed. ‘That’s where we’re headed…’

  Leila looked ahead through Cassiel’s eyes, glad to be distracted.

  The Caretaker craned forwards too. ‘Very impressive,’ he said.

  The pyramid loomed out of the darkness, a dense mass about a hundred metres high, clutching the curved floor of the Wart. It came to a sharp, pale tip, pointing towards the centre of the Wart. Its four triangular faces arced up from the rubble-scattered ground, leaping up at a steep angle. Each face had originally been finished with a smooth, translucent material. Some of it remained, gleaming at the pyramid’s point, but most had fallen away, revealing pitted stone.

  ‘The Alpha Pyramid,’ said Leila. ‘Cormac gave me a map of it. The layout’s very simple. Two ways in. An official front entrance at ground level. And a hole some urban explorer hacked into it, halfway up the rear face.’

  ‘We take the back way,’ replied Cassiel. A warning pinged on the flyer’s dashboard, distracting her. ‘ID query from a local security system,’ she explained.

  ‘That’s not good,’ said Leila. ‘Is it Deodatus?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Cassiel reassured her. ‘And the gun kiddies did a good job. We look entirely innocent. The Wart’s full of energy systems. If there’s a problem with them, no matter how minor, it needs to be checked out straight away. Just like we’re apparently doing.’

  The flyer landed with a barely perceptible bump. As they climbed out, Cassiel strapped Leila’s disc to her back. It still projected her avatar, making her appear physically present to Cassiel, the Caretaker and anyone else she chose to see her. ‘What next?’ she asked.

  ‘Find their security perimeter,’ replied Cassiel. ‘Then I’ll get us through it.’

  They set off. The going was hard. The darkness made the rough ground treacherous. Gravity shifted in intensity, sometimes crushing them down, sometimes almost vanishing. Cassiel flowed like a ghost through it all, Leila moving with her. The Caretaker found the going tough, every so often stumbling and swearing, then regaining his footing and pushing on again.

  ‘I should have come alone,’ Cassiel told Leila. ‘I’m built for this. Neither of you are.’

  Leila snorted. ‘There’s no way that Dieter will listen to you. And the Caretaker’s better than either of us at stopping pressure men.’

  The Alpha Pyramid loomed ahead of them, never seeming to get any closer, its pointed tip boring a hole in the darkness. As they started up a low incline, Leila thought she heard a soft buzzing. She strained through Cassiel’s sharp ears.

  Cassiel held a hand up. ‘Stop,’ she ordered. ‘Down. Now.’ It took the Caretaker a minute to catch up. He sank to the ground, grateful for the rest.

  ‘Flies,’ said Leila.

  ‘Yes. I think it’s the perimeter. Going to take a look.’ Her soft purple light flicked out.

  ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ exclaimed Leila. ‘I thought you were always purple.’

  ‘I’m an infiltration specialist.’ She held up a translucent arm. ‘Of course I can be invisible when I need to.’

  The mind slipped Leila’s disc off her back, sank forwards and down, and then was gone, elongating and moving like a snake, keeping low. Leila watched through her eyes. The mind flowed across dark rocks to the crest of the ridge, then looked down. The pyramid stood in the depression’s centre. Cassiel opened her eyes right up to inspect it. Darkness became light. At first it seemed that her vision was glitched with static. Tiny motes danced across it. Then Leila realised.

  [It’s a swarm,] she breathed. [The biggest we’ve ever seen.]

  [The perimeter,] said Cassiel. The flies framed the pyramid, a living shield dancing with movement. [A half-globe, surrounding their base.] Leila felt complex software architectures rise up in Cassiel’s mind as she scanned the flies. [The communications between them are very simple. Seem to be running a basic perimeter patrol programme,] the mind said. [I’ve queried them successfully, now I’m going to try a command. Needs concentration.]

  Leila found herself thrust out of her head and back into her disc. She had the disc project an image of her, sitting next to the Caretaker.

  ‘Hey there,’ he whispered as she shimmered into being. ‘Thought you’d be back once she started all that ninja shit.’ He’d almost got his breath back. ‘What’s she up to?’

  ‘Telling the flies to let us through.’

  ‘Cool. And how are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ replied Leila. ‘I’m fine.’

  A moment’s silence.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked the Caretaker gently. ‘You don’t sound entirely convinced.’

  ‘Gods,’ she sighed. ‘It’s just that – all this. Who knows what we’ll find in there. All kinds of fucked-up things. And Deodatus at the centre of it all. And it’s just the three of us…’ She tailed off.

  ‘That fucking pyramid,’ laughed the Caretaker. ‘Scares the shit out of me too!’

  ‘Seeing it in the darkness. Like a tombstone. It’s all so real, all of a sudden.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It always was real. You missing your brother, Cassiel cut off from her world, me losing myself. Poor Ambrose, even. All people dealing with some real, heavy shit. And you’ve done a pretty good job so far. You kept us safe from the Rose and the pressure men. You found East…’

  Leila remembered the Flurrytown restaurant. ‘She found me.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t been out there, looking for a way to go forwards. She was it. And because you found her, we’ve got everything we needed. And once we’re in the pyramid, it’ll be just the same. Cassiel will do her thing, you’ll do yours, I’ll do mine.’ His teeth flashed a smile in the gloom. ‘And we’ll all get to where we need to be.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I know so, Leila. Have a little faith in yourself. In the two of us too, come to that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…’

  ‘Oh, I know. It is hard. But it’s all going to be good, Leila.’ He wriggled in the darkness, making himself more comfortable. ‘You know,’ he mused, ‘I don’t have a past. And that means I don’t have much of a future, either. I don’t know what to expect from life, because I don’t have any reference points. So I just live in the present. Think about the moment, find the right response to it, that’s it. There are moments when I feel like I’ve found the real me.’ He paused. ‘Memory gets in the way sometimes, Leila. It’s too easy to lose yourself in it.’ A chuckle. ‘Just look at Deodatus.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Leila. ‘You’re not wrong. And it’s not just him.’ Cormac had fled irrevocably into the past when he found the present too harsh to bear. And Ambrose had always been trapped there too. Cormac was lost, but perhaps
she’d finally be able to help Ambrose move on when he returned as a fetch. And then there was Dieter. History had taken him from her. But his situation was a little different. He needed to find lost time again. She squeezed the pendant around her neck and imagined handing it to her brother. As soon as he touched it, he’d come back to her.

  Cassiel’s voice appeared in her mind. [I’ve meshed with the flies. Written a code block to tell them we’re the same as the minds controlling them. Then they’ll let us through. Firing it now. Thirty seconds and we’re going in.]

  Chapter 29

  Leila moved away from the pyramid, weighed down by disappointment, the pendant heavy round her neck. Now she would never reunite Dieter with the truth of his past. Cassiel walked with her, head bowed, glowing purple again. There was no need to hide themselves. Newly minted memories filled her mind – sneaking up to the pyramid’s vast outer wall, feeling its dense presence loom above her, casting round until they found its ground-level entrance, the doors that Cormac had said would be locked shut gaping open, stepping through and then – nothing.

  There was an unoccupied central chamber, its floor thick with rubble. Corroded pillars lanced up into the darkness. Cormac had mentioned a centuries-old tunnel, hacked into the wall by long-dead explorers. It was up there at the peak of one of the pillars, invisible in the gloom. A narrow, steep corridor led down to another empty space, a circular room as broad as the central chamber but oppressed by a low ceiling. Leila imagined the weight of the pyramid pressing down on them. The passageway that had so excited Cormac was still blocked. A couple of empty store rooms held nothing. Billows of dust rose around her as she walked. The air tasted of a past so old that it had reached some new inertness, far beyond death. The walls had once been dense with sculptures, but age had crumbled them, scoring anything legible out.