The Great Game

by Lavie Tidhar

  "Kill them," she said, softly.

  PART VIII

  Der Erntemaschine

  THIRTY-NINE

  The observer was definitely feeling ill at ease. He had made his way inside the Parisian undercity easily, guided by the voices, at least two of whom seemed to know the city well.

  It was quite remarkable, he thought. There was something he found very comforting about a second, hidden urban space, lying this close to the other. There were people down there too, and he was very tempted to sample them, but the voices began to shout and he decided to stick to the objective without any further delay.

  He had expected the fog of radiation to reduce underground but the closer they came to the place the voices had described, the more intense it grew – not just what the humans called Tesla waves but a whole spectrum of wide-bandwidth signals, almost as though…

  Almost as though they belonged to his progenitors, he thought.

  But that should not have been the case. He was, he was quite certain, the only observer on this planet. His progenitors, in fact, had shown remarkably little enthusiasm for this expedition. Some form of historical amateur society existing in the Spectral Swarm had received the signal of the activated, obsolete quantum scanner and had despatched a vessel through the resultant wormhole before it had collapsed. The observer had been gestated in orbit around this curious blue-white planet, and dropped down without due ceremony to see what he could find.

  So why was there, suddenly, such an explosion of signatory radiation…?

  A dreadful thought had formed itself in the observer's think-cloud and slowly permeated his I-loop, born out of some deep archaic data and wild speculation. He tried to push it away.

  As he passed through the tunnels he came across a small human with a hunchback, and a grotesque, giant human. They did not see him. They were, in fact, occupied, somewhat to the observer's befuddlement, in what appeared to be a duet. They were singing.

  Again he was tempted to sample them, but the voices were growing quite hysterical by then: a routine diagnosis suggested their storage had become entangled with other historical data banks and that they may have been the cause of the alarming concept he was currently trying to ignore. Sighing a little – because a good observer learned from the specimens he collected – he ignored the two strange humans and went straight on, finding at last a primitive, abandoned research facility of some sort, and a dying human which one of the voices, that of the fat man, identified to him as one Viktor von Frankenstein, a research scientist working for the organisation called the Quiet Council. Delighted he could finally do his job, the observer knelt beside the man, whose eyes focused on him weakly and whose voice said, "Help… me."

  The observer was quite happy to do exactly that. He released the spike, which jutted out of the top of his hand, and inserted it deftly into the man's cortex, the data-spike extending like a telescope as it went, swiftly and assuredly, through the different layers of the man's brain, extracting neural pathways and the man's embedded I-loop and data storage into the observer's own, infinitely more advanced hardware.

  The man on the ground became a corpse. The eyes stopped seeing. The head lolled back. The man said, Where the hell am I?

  The observer was happy to let the other voices explain, even though a pre-prepared data-packet had already been introduced into the new I-loop's structure. Meanwhile he was studying this latest specimen with fascination, until he came to the last moments of the creature's biological incarnation, at which point he gave an involuntary shriek of alarm that set off explosions in several of the still-functioning devices in the underground research chamber.

  They're here! the voice that had been Viktor von Frankenstein said.

  No, the observer thought/said, that can't be.

  Another voice said, Smith? Smith is here?

  It was the woman he had collected in Bangkok.

  The observer let the voices go on, running in the background. He, too, was running now, suddenly desperate to get above-ground again. All the while he was running interrogatory routines over the entirety of the Viktor specimen's memories.

  Alarms were slowly popping up all over the observer's network. It ran through crowds of frightened humans (sweat, adrenalin, pheromones all registering briefly), through the tunnels and up, bursting at last onto the surface.

  A cacophony of voices he had been trying to ignore washed over him. Ancient voices, in a strange antique dialect. The observer watched the city, engulfed in flames. He observed the machines, half-ghostly in the twilight, as though they were fading in and out of existence.

  The device! the observer thought. A human curse rose into the forefront of his mind and he unconsciously used it.

  Where the hell was the device?

  Smith remembered the hours that followed fleetingly, in unreal snatches.

  At some point it seemed the Seine itself was on fire, its dark waters reflecting flames and destruction as he and Van Helsing ran–

  "There is a way," Van Helsing said.

  "How?"

  "Look!"

  He had made Smith look. The fires and the alien machines rampaging over the city, flicking in and out of existence as though they were pictures projected out of a camera obscura.

  "There is a focal point," Van Helsing said.

  "How can you tell?"

  "Look! The destruction moves, but it is bound by a circumference. The device must have activated them, but has a limited range."

  Smith looked. It was possible… he saw that, indeed, some parts of the city were passed by, while others were only now coming under attack–

  "It's moving!"

  "Yes."

  "But how can we find the focal point? We have to stop the device!" Smith said.

  "There is a way," Van Helsing said. "But it is dangerous–"

  Smith would have laughed, at that. After a moment Van Helsing gave a sheepish grin. "More dangerous, I mean," he said.

  "What do we need to do?" Smith said.

  "We need to find a vantage point," Van Helsing said. "From above we could see it more clearly, we could identify the source."

  Smith looked at the city's skyline.

  And Van Helsing's meaning sank in.

  "The Tour Eiffel," Smith said.

  They ran.

  Snatches of stolen time, Smith's lungs on fire. At some point they commandeered a baruch-landau, Van Helsing stoked the furnace as Smith drove. The city streets were on fire, coaches burning, people running this way and that; some were looting the shops, others were barricaded inside buildings. There was sporadic gunfire, flames reflected in windows, and high above, the tripods dominated the skyline, moving, now that he knew to look for it, moving in a single direction, sweeping over the city.

  The Tour Eiffel had been built only a few years earlier, during the French's Exposition Universelle. Smith had been involved in an operation, years before, to recruit its builder, Gustave Eiffel, when the man was building a train station in Africa, in the place the Portuguese, who had unsuccessfully tried to colonise it, called Mozambique.

  The operation had been a failure, and Eiffel returned to France, building at last this greatest of follies, a giant metal tower rising into the sky above the Champ de Mars, like a vast antennae aimed at the stars.

  Rumour had it that was the building's true purpose, that the Quiet Council had intended its use as a sort of communication device, sending messages into deep space… possibly receiving messages, too, if the rumours were true.

  "What's… up… there?" he shouted – a ray of flame from the sky hit the side of a building and they swerved madly to avoid the avalanche.

  "Aerial… experimentation… station!" Van Helsing shouted. "Drive! Drive, God damn it, Smith!"

  So Smith drove, avoiding debris and the corpses of the dead lying in the street, and the burning stalls and coaches and seas of cockroaches escaping as their habitats were destroyed, and swarms of rats, and looters, and militias, heading towards that great metal t
ower, hoping they would not be too late.

  FORTY

  The machines were moving.

  Their skeletal frames silhouetted against the dark skies. Their legs moved jerkily, yet there was something beautiful about it, too, their motion over the city skyline, taking no mind to the buildings and people below. Here and there, like stars in the skies, the machines winked in and out of existence, as though their light was passing through the atmosphere, distorted.

  "Where do they come from?"

  Van Helsing, rode shotgun on the swerving baruch-landau, face blackened with coal, the sweat from the stoker forming rivulets down his face so that he looked covered in war paint.

  "I don't know."

  "Some other world?" Smith persisted. "How can they materialise and dematerialise like this? Are they even real?"

  "The destruction they cause is real enough."

  "And they seem…" Smith hesitated. The baruch-landau, like an elderly assassin, puffing hard, was approaching the Eiffel Tower at last. It was quieter here, the machines had moved across the city. "Old," he said, with a note of wonder.

  "What?" Van Helsing shouted. Smith swerved to avoid the corpse of a donkey lying in the street. It was quiet now on the Champ de Mars:

  A long avenue of fantastical shapes, wizened four-armed creatures, semi-human, semi-ape, standing guard, carved in stone–

  Landscaped canals, built to reflect what could be seen on the surface of the planet Mars, a silver gondola, used to carry tourists, now upturned in the water. A giant model of the red planet itself had fallen off its dais and cracked, and Smith had to swerve around it. Groaning, the baruch-landau came to a halt.

  "We're out of coal," Van Helsing said, apologetically.

  But it had lasted them long enough. Smith jumped off the vehicle with a groan of his own – his relief echoed in the machine's own creaks and groans. Van Helsing climbed down and joined him. It was eerily quiet. They stood on the red surface of the Champs de Mars, the Tour Eiffel rising above them like a pointing finger. Above it the stars shone down, the Milky Way traversing the dome of the sky. Somewhere up there was Mars itself, surrounded by its two moons–

  Which, down here, were still on their pedestals, smooth round globes showing a lack of imagination, Smith thought, on the part of their anonymous sculptor.

  "Why old?" Van Helsing said.

  Smith couldn't answer him. He had imagined the threat from space to be something ill-defined, a technology so advanced it could remake human minds and shape whole planets. These machines, walking oddly over the Parisian cityscape, giant metal tripods spewing fire, flickering in and out of existence, seemed somehow to belong to a sideways world, conjured out of some alternate reality–

  "Could we have built them?" he said to Van Helsing.

  "The machines?"

  "Yes."

  "The technology involved… Oh." Van Helsing's eyes clouded and he said, "I see what you mean."

  "Could they be Babbage's?"

  "I find that unlikely. In any case, I have never heard of such war machines being designed, let alone constructed," Van Helsing said.

  "But it is not impossible."

  "But the device," Van Helsing said. "It is clearly extraterrestrial."

  "But are those machines–" Smith shrugged. For the moment it didn't matter. They were talking because talking was better for the moment than acting, because in a moment they would have to press on and, the truth be told, he was exhausted.

  The words of a long-ago instructor at the Ham facility came back to him. In every mission there comes a moment of near-breaking, the moment when you want to stop, to abandon the mission, to find a hole and crawl into it and sleep, forever. At those moments, stop. Give your mind and your body the time to catch up, even if the mission reaches a critical stage. You are no use to anyone at that stage. Take a break. Look back at how far you've come, and evaluate clearly how far you still have to go. Only then, act.

  It was quiet at the Champs de Mars, and in the distance the machines moved, the city burned, in the distance Charles Babbage sat in his dark castle and planned his dark plans, the Mechanical Turk was deactivated and dumped in storage, Alice was dead, the Harvester was moving, Mycroft's long-laid plans were forming or unravelling, he didn't know. He looked up at the tower rising above them, a graceful latticework of iron, worked by humans, two airships moored to its top. "What's up there?" he said, looking at it again, uneasily. There had been rumours at the Bureau…

  Van Helsing said, "Nothing much, I imagine. There had been restaurants during the Exposition Universelle, and a viewing deck."

  "And now?"

  Van Helsing shrugged.

  Smith shook his head, feeling uneasy. It was too quiet at the Champs de Mars, almost as though, somewhere, unseen eyes were watching them, and calculating… He took a deep breath, stretched aching muscles.

  "How do we get up there?" he said at last, resigned.

  "There's a lift," Van Helsing said.

  Smith said, "Oh."

  They found an opening at the foot of the tower. A lift, or – in the parlance of English-speaking Vespuccians, an elevator – apparently functional, and with a small, utilitarian sign on it of a skull and crossbones accompanied by the words Entry Forbidden. Biohazard in French.

  "What do you think?" Smith said. Van Helsing shrugged and pulled off the sign.

  The lift took them up, smoothly and without a fuss, travelling through latticework up to the second level of the Tour Eiffel. There the doors opened noiselessly and they stepped out onto what appeared to be an abandoned viewing deck–

  Shadows moving up there, a silhouette momentarily seen against the burning skyline, something feral and–

  A shot rang out. Smith hit the floor, his own gun out, the shadow moved again and he fired, once, twice, and it fell, tumbling over the parapet in silence.

  Smith swore. Why had he assumed the tower would be empty? He turned to Van Helsing–

  And saw the other man slumped on the floor, blood spreading across his chest. "No," Smith said. "Abraham, no…"

  "They got me, Smith," Van Helsing said. His voice was thick, surprised. He put his hand to his chest. It came away bloodied. He stared at it, confused. "They got me," he said, wonderingly.

  "Let me see it, Abraham."

  Smith reached for the other man, cut out his shirt. Shadows moving in the distance, coming closer. When he tore open Van Helsing's shirt the bullet hole was marked. Van Helsing coughed, and blood bubbled out of his mouth and fell down his chin.

  "Let it go, Smith," Van Helsing said. He smiled, or tried to. "Isn't this the way we always thought we'd go? Better than to lie in bed, riddled by cancers, or old age, or that sickness that eats away memory. I wanted one more job."

  "You had it," Smith said, and his own voice was thick.

  "Go up to the top of the tower. There are… machines there. Be… careful."

  "Abraham–"

  But his friend was sinking to the ground, his eyes fighting to stay open. Smith held him, cradling him in his arms, Van Helsing's blood seeping into his own clothes. "It was worth it," Van Helsing said. "Playing… the Great Game."

  His eyes closed. His breathing stopped. Gently, Smith lowered him to the ground. Abraham Van Helsing, another name added to the tally of the dead. Shadows moved, coming closer, snarling. Smith's gun was out of its holster and he fired, and watched them drop.

  What the hell lived up here? he thought.

  He examined the first body. His bullet had hit it in the chest, it was still alive. It would have been human, but…

  What were those things?

  The sign on the lift door. Biohazard.

  What use was the tower being put to?

  The creature would have been human but it was changed in some grotesque way. Not the way of the F-J serum, nor in a Moreau-style hybridisation (Smith had the unfortunate experience of meeting that exiled scientist once), not even in the bizarre methodology of that mad hunchback genius Ignacio Narbondo.r />
  The body below twitched and foam came out of its mouth and still it tried to move, to bite him, with shiny yellow teeth. Its eyes, too, were yellow, and it was hairy, with a naked chest. Somewhere, a bell dinged, faintly but unmistakably…

  Smith went around the foaming man-dog creature and went to the parapet and looked out over the city. Paris, in flames – but the machines were moving, heading… east?

  And now he could see the circle of influence, just as Van Helsing had said it would be. The machines were moving in a radius of about three miles, a hovering shape of fire and smoke moving slowly but inexorably over the Parisian skyline. A baleful moon glared down, and above, the stars were being stubbed out as the smoke rose to obscure them.