Waking Hell

by Al Robertson

  The ancient city had no comforting curve to it, no streets that reached up to left and to right to join far above in the sky, as Docklands or Homelands had. This was not Station, and it couldn’t have been Mars, or Venus, for there were no cities of this scale on either planet. It couldn’t have been the Moon, for the light was not hard and uncompromising, blazing down from a black vacuum sky. It wasn’t the Shining City, because it was hard and real and unidealised. It could only be Earth, long abandoned to the wrath of machines and the dreams of dead gods.

  ‘Do you recognise any of this?’ Leila asked the Caretaker. ‘Now that your memory’s coming back?’

  He shook his head, looking pained. ‘The bees told me about the tunnels and showed me how to zap the flies – but this – I just don’t know. They asked me if I wanted more memories pasted into my head. I said yes – but. It’s all so confused, too new to properly understand. It’s going to take a bit of time to put it all together.’

  Leila nodded. ‘The quicker the better,’ she told him. She turned back to Cassiel. ‘Redonda was so wrong. I mean – it’s not his fault. Nobody could have guessed – this.’

  ‘The data could be manipulated,’ said Cassiel.

  ‘The cuttlefish’s triple-checked the images. And they’re all marked with Deodatus tags. They were taken by one of his cameras. And he’s on Earth.’

  ‘Are they time stamped?’

  ‘Twenty minutes ago. How can they even link down there?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy enough,’ sighed Cassiel. ‘All you need is some sort of high-power comms array. Laser or maser, it doesn’t make much difference. It’ll punch through the clouds to the Earth’s surface without any problems. The Rose polices all that, so with Deodatus controlling her it’s easy enough for him to set up.’ Cassiel sounded exhausted. ‘We must recalibrate. We thought we were dealing with something small. A Kneale Pit that got out of hand. But this is a different order of problem. A hole that leads all the way down to Earth, and a god older and more aggressive than anything we’ve known who’s climbed all the way back up it.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Leila was terrified. But there was awe there, too. For so long, Earth had been a ghost planet, a story used to frighten children. All that remained of it were the broken relics that so fascinated Dieter, Ambrose and Cormac, implying an unreachable past. Now near-live images of it hung in front of her. ‘No wonder Dieter fell to Deodatus. How could he resist?’

  Cassiel ignored her. ‘This is what the Pantheon have been scared of for centuries.’ She sighed. ‘And they were right. We were too short-sighted to even consider it.’ Despair filled her voice. Leila felt it pulse through her mind. ‘The Totality has never faced a threat like it. He will enslave us once again.’ She pointed at the purple-glowing tower that appeared in some of the images. ‘And that’s the heart of the corruption. A snowflake, landed on Earth. Reduced by the fires of its fall. The fallen minds must have let gravity catch it. That’s what’s poisoning my people.’

  ‘How did Deodatus call one of them down there in the first place?’

  ‘He must have taken control of it somehow.’ She sighed. ‘The Pantheon never managed that. We’re fighting something very powerful. I’m not sure we can even win.’

  Leila, however, had already died twice. She felt that knowledge surge within her. As the train began to slow, it galvanised her. She remembered Dieter, breaking as she touched him. The memories had been worse than useless. And now they were lost to her. I’ll find another way of reaching him. I’ll get him out.

  ‘Of course we can,’ she told Cassiel. ‘We’ve got everything we need to go after Deodatus. We know who he is and where he’s based. We can shut down his fly swarms.’ The Caretaker nodded. ‘And we’ve got you. I’m sure you can get into that snowflake and break it. Damn it, Cassiel, we thought it would be nice and easy – unplug a server, beat up some fallen minds, leave something fun for the gun kiddies. It’s not. Tough. We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to put Deodatus back in the box he crawled out of. And I’ll rescue Dieter and you’ll save the Totality. Even if we have to go all the way back down to Earth.’

  ‘That’s impossible. How are we going to find a vehicle capable of an Earth landing? And even if we do, the Rose controls all access. She’ll never let us through.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake Cassiel, the Caretaker and I have visited Earth without even realising it! We’ll find a way down again. We have to. Or would you rather let Deodatus win?’

  Cassiel was silent.

  The train rattled out of the tunnel and into a large open space. A long platform loomed out of the darkness, lit by a single tripod-mounted spotlight. ‘This is our stop,’ said the Caretaker.

  Cassiel slowed the train. ‘Another dark, empty room. How marvellous.’

  The Caretaker nodded towards the platform. ‘If we want a way out, then this is where we get off.’ He smiled at Cassiel. ‘Going to solve your transport problem for you.’

  The train came to a jerky halt. There was a moment’s near-silence, the only sounds the hiss of releasing hydraulic brakes and the descending whine of electric engines powering down.

  ‘Now,’ Leila said to the Caretaker. ‘Where have you bought us to?’

  ‘The escape hatch,’ replied the Caretaker. ‘This is an evil lair, right? And you don’t build one of those without giving your top guys a way out. That’s what we’re headed for.’

  An identity query hit them. There was a soft, descending whistle, repeated three times. It came from the end of the platform. Two squat, heavy bipeds, carved out of nanogel, studded with flies, loomed towards them out of the darkness. An open pressure door was just visible behind them. The room beyond it glowed a soft purple.

  ‘Guards?’ asked Leila.

  ‘Combat specialists.’ Cassiel sang back a reply to them. ‘I just told them to go fuck themselves.’

  Then she was a fluid blur, leaping over the side of the truck and loping towards them. Deep satisfaction pulsed out of her as a mesh of combat systems booted into being. The termination mission was reassuringly simple, the experience and capabilities that made it so trusted and well tried.

  ‘Come back!’ shouted Leila, then: ‘Be careful’ when it was clear that Cassiel was ignoring her.

  A voice leaped back towards her. ‘This is what I do,’ it said. ‘Let me do it.’

  That was the last human-level communication that reached her. Then, there was nothing but hard, rapid calculations, reducing the two guards to a series of physical and digital problems waiting to be solved.

  ‘And off she goes,’ said the Caretaker.

  ‘She’s scared,’ replied Leila, ‘and this is therapy. Can you help her at all?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Minds are still a mystery to me. By the way, that thing you guys were talking about – a Totality snowflake – what is it exactly?

  ‘They’re how minds travel through space. Ice, metal and nanogel structures, with propulsion and power systems bolted on to them. Shaped like giant snowflakes, hence the name.’

  ‘Ah, that’s one mystery solved.’

  ‘And you’re a bit less of one. You’re called Mandala.’

  The Caretaker nodded.

  ‘Has anything else come through yet?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s coming together.’ He ran a hand through his hair, a thoughtful look on his face. ‘The bees gave me a lot of information, but it’s a bit of a jumble. I’ll tell you when I’ve worked it all out. I do know this place very well, though. We’re right where we need to be to get the hell out of here.’

  Chapter 33

  Leila watched the combat with the Caretaker, perceiving it on multiple levels. Visually, there was little but a purple blur, three nanogel bodies spinning together in a dance so complex and quick that the Caretaker’s senses could barely keep up. Seen through his eyes, the spinning purple forms left trails behind the
mselves, ghost images of past movements. They made Leila feel that she was witnessing shapes carved in time as well as space – memories made concrete.

  Every so often there would be a connection, and one of the three would stagger and drop back, and the locus of the battle would shift. Then the maelstrom resumed. Leila felt the action of Cassiel’s mind as she fought. The vast pleasure of summoning well-worn, secure skills suffused all levels of her consciousness.

  First of all, there was the work that memory did, shaping present attacks by playing back fragments of the past. Upcoming movements pulsed through Cassiel’s mind, giving Leila the uncanny feeling that she was witnessing moments plucked from the future, as each one so perfectly anticipated a manoeuvre to come.

  Beneath that higher level of struggle there was one that was deeper and more instinctive. Cassiel’s intrusion systems battered her opponents. She held in herself a storehouse of damage – code weapons built to corrupt operating systems, purge entire skill sets, crash primary and secondary consciousness elements and force full factory resets on entire live minds.

  These imps leapt to the attack, dense with invisible fury. At first, all died. She kept pumping out generation after generation, altering each new one according the feedback the last had hurled back. Each new wave broke that little bit deeper into its victims’ defences, until at last the fallen minds shuddered and started to break apart.

  When the guards finally fell, they went quickly. Complexity collapsed into a random jumble of electrical impulses, then fell away into a silence as complete as it was final. The guards dropped into liquid form, leaving only a sticky ooze behind them.

  A fierce, competent joy pulsed through Cassiel’s mind. Her close quarter combat systems folded themselves away. Leila thought of claws withdrawing back into flesh, of bloodied teeth disappearing into a closing mouth as a soft pink tongue licked them clean.

  ‘That was pretty impressive,’ commented the Caretaker as he struggled out of the train. ‘I’d say you were back to being one hundred per cent ninja.’ He chuckled. ‘I can start being a pacifist again.’

  ‘As long as you keep the flies down,’ Cassiel told him.

  ‘I’ll teach you the trick of it, when we’ve got a moment.’

  ‘Can you hear that?’ asked Leila. A distant sound – barely a whisper – echoed out of the tunnel behind them.

  ‘Crap,’ said the Caretaker. ‘They’re catching us up.’

  Cassiel turned and listened. Her sharper ears heard a vast gabble, a collection of sounds that included howling and screaming and crying and barking.

  ‘Sweatheads,’ she said. ‘Too many to fight. Run.’

  The first sweatheads burst out of the tunnel behind them. They came on as a great onrush of flesh. Their add-ons sparkled in the dim light. There were so many of them. Some ran. Others scuttled along walls, the lightness of their desiccated bodies making it easy to find purchase. The lighter ones leapt across their fellows’ heads and shoulders. They seemed to be a single entity, leaping out of the great burrow like a piston flying out of a cylinder.

  Panic flooded the Caretaker. He scrambled to catch up with Cassiel. She’d already made it through the pressure door. He and Leila were close behind. As they leapt through it, Cassiel slammed it closed and spun its locking wheel. The wheel blurred, then thunked to a stop.

  ‘Can they open it from the other side?’ asked Leila.

  Cassiel rammed a metal bar between its spokes, holding it closed. ‘It’ll take them a minute or so,’ she replied. ‘Now, where have you bought us?’

  Broken monitor screens, decayed server stacks and collapsed control consoles stretched away along one side of the room. They would have been a lifeless collage of dead technologies, but for the dense mass of purple ooze clotted within them. The blistered nanogel pulsed with sickly life, rioting like an out-of-control infection.

  ‘No flies,’ said Leila.

  ‘They’re hiding them,’ the Caretaker told her. ‘Don’t want to risk me breaking them. And there’s our way out.’ He pointed at the other end of the room. The wall was punctuated with a dozen round hatches. They looked freshly polished. ‘Escape pods.’ A small pile of abandoned body suits lay beneath them, bleached pale by age.

  He started across the room and triggered the trap.

  Cassiel reached out and pulled him back as the room exploded. Nanogel leapt from the walls, the ceilings, the floors, forming itself into dozens of biped attackers. The mass leapt towards them, and Cassiel was changing too, moving in the opposite direction – falling away from anything human, once again becoming a weapon. Scores of attackers, and so her mind ramped up to a velocity of response that burned Leila’s thoughts. As she broke close contact with Cassiel, there was one final exchange.

  ‘Not combat specialists. Knife through butter.’

  The mind became a vicious blur, a series of attacks moving with the speed of thought, devastating her opponents. Ahead of her, there was a tsunami of nanogel aggressors. Behind there was only decay, her attackers melting away into nothing. The Caretaker and Leila followed her across the room, shielded by the fury of her attack. There was no longer anything remotely human about her. She moved through her attackers like time through a life, leaving absence behind.

  ‘Yup, she’s good,’ whispered the Caretaker admiringly. ‘Real good.’

  It only took them a few seconds to reach the hatches. A vast bang echoed through the chamber, followed by a rhythmic thumping. The sweatheads had reached the pressure door. The metal rod groaned in the locking wheel.

  Cassiel melted back into human form. ‘The nanogel will reform in a couple of minutes.’ It oozed towards the door. ‘It’s getting ready to merge with the sweatheads.’

  ‘Be cool,’ the Caretaker told them, sounding infinitely relaxed. ‘I’m on it. You’re safe.’ He moved quickly down the hatches, inspecting them.

  There was a few seconds silence, a vast crash. The door started to thump and groan under the pressure of the aggressors behind it.

  ‘It won’t hold for long,’ warned Cassiel.

  ‘We’ll be gone by then,’ replied the Caretaker, fiddling with a control panel. ‘Grab one of the pressure suits. Bring it here.’ Three of the hatches hissed open. ‘Quickly!’

  The hollow banging continued. Metal shrieked and groaned, protesting against terrible pressure. The Caretaker typed numbers into the control panel faster than she could read.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Leila.

  ‘New coordinates,’ he replied.

  A long, low cracking sound echoed out into the room. The door shuddered. Cassiel stood by the Caretaker, holding up a pressure suit. He glanced away from the control panel, reached for the back of its neck and flicked a switch. The suit started to uncrumple itself.

  ‘Drop it,’ he hissed. The suit landed on two feet, lifting itself up into a human shape and swaying slightly as it finished expanding. ‘There,’ said the Caretaker. ‘Leila – your new home.’

  It was ancient. It looked like it had been stitched together from canvas and leather. The dry air had preserved it and the dust had penetrated it, turning it a soft reddish brown colour. The visor was fogged. The arm had a long, deep rip in it. Through it, Leila could see something hard and white – part of the suit’s support structure, she assumed.

  ‘It’s built round a fully powered exo-skeleton,’ explained the Caretaker. ‘You should be able to mesh with it and control it without too much trouble. Your own body, at last. Cassiel – attach her.’

  ‘But why do I need it?’ asked Leila as Cassiel strapped her disc to the rear of the suit. She leapt into its control systems. The suit’s sensors burst into action, creating a new version of the world for her. There were twin shoulder cameras, the world looking only lightly blurred through their dust-etched lenses. Not-quite-reliable auditory sensors turned voices into glitched, crackling recordings of themsel
ves. A battery warning pinged and she felt the suit’s systems start to drain power from her disc.

  ‘We need to split up,’ the Caretaker told her as three of the hatches opened. ‘Journey’s dangerous. Have to make sure at least one of us gets through. And even if we all make it we’ll probably get separated on landing. Down there you need to be able to move under your own steam.’

  ‘Down where?’ asked Leila. But she knew. She just couldn’t quite believe it.

  Cassiel was peering through one of the open hatches. ‘This is a planetary escape pod,’ she said.

  ‘She’s got it,’ beamed the Caretaker. ‘It’s like I told you. I’m sending us all the way back to Earth.’ A worried look. ‘If you guys are up for that, of course.’

  Leila glanced at Cassiel. She nodded.

  ‘Straight to Deodatus?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Can’t just go marching in, he’d catch you right away. You’re coming back to my place.’ He turned to Leila and looked somewhere between embarrassed and proud. ‘All my new memories are starting to come together. Down there, I run a city of my own. And I’m a god.’

  Chapter 34

  Leila came to in darkness. Wind howled around her, flaying the suit with dust. She spun up its senses and opened its wi-fi, calling out first to the escape pod, then to Cassiel and the Caretaker. There was no response. She was lying on hard, cold, dry earth, face down. She rolled over, the wind snatching at her and almost sending her tumbling across the landscape. She grabbed with both hands, scrabbling to find purchase. There was a stone, firmly embedded. She pushed her feet into the ground. A moment, then she was secure.

  It was strange to be touching the ground again – stranger still to be touching the rocks of Earth. She called the cameras into action and the world flickered into being. She cycled through their input modes. The camera’s daylight setting showed only darkness. Macro seemed pointless. Infrared showed her multiple rapidly cooling heat sources scattered around her. The escape pod had shattered on impact. She looked up and around. In the distance there was a horizon, and above her there was sky. There could be no mistaking where she was. She acknowledged the space, then turned her mind away from it. It was all too vast to take in.