Broken Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “And we know the… frequency… of this reality.”

  Clyde reaches awkwardly into another rear-facing pocket and pulls out something that looks like a microphone that the Jetsons would own. He hands it to Tabitha who plugs it into the USB slot of her laptop. “Do it,” she says.

  Clyde slips another battery under his tongue, mutters, and twists. The key gyrates through realities, aligns, unfolds, emits its light. Tabitha holds the scifi microphone up to it.

  “Got a reading,” she says as the light blinks out. “Three hundred and eighty-four point oh six nine seven Woltz.”

  Her fingers fly over her keyboard. She grins. “And a match. Three hundred and eighty-four point oh six nine seven Woltz.”

  She spins the laptop around so we can see. In the center of an incredibly convoluted interface is a window where a series of interconnected blue lines intersect and diverge in a pattern that in no way resembles anything recognizable.

  “Erm.” Hannah and I harmonize again. I flick a glance in her direction but she isn’t looking at me. I’m not sure what I’d do if she was looking at me. I can hardly accuse her of stealing all my best lines.

  Tabitha zooms in heavily. Starts to zoom out. Slowly I start to see a vaguely familiar pattern.

  “Wait, isn’t that the Underground?”

  “That’s near Hammersmith, ain’t it?” Hannah is leaning forward again, a look of tight concentration nearby.

  Tabitha examines her screen. “Yeah,” she says, something that almost sounds grudgingly impressed. “Service tunnel. Got the GPS.”

  “All right then.” Felicity claps her hands. “Field team, you have your target. Tabitha, you stay here and run the forensics suite on that ornament, see if we can learn anything else about it.”

  We all stand, start milling toward the door. My heartbeat has picked up. Is this how I always feel before a mission? I’ve lost confidence in my body’s reactions.

  As we reach the door, Felicity taps Clyde’s arm. “Fix your trousers before you go,” she says. “You look a bit of a fool.”

  THREE HOURS LATER AND TWENTY METERS DOWN

  I always assumed that walking onto the London Underground tracks would be accompanied by crowds of aghast men and women, shrieking sirens, and officials in neon yellow safety vests bellowing that you were too young to die. Apparently, though, if you just stroll along with enough confidence no one gives a damn.

  The space feels narrow and cold. The smells of wet wood, gravel, and concrete are tight around us, along with a foul undercurrent that lies somewhere between stale urine and the cabbage that used to get served at school lunch. Graffiti is thick on the walls—taggers’ names in bold ballooning fonts, professions of love and hatred, an image of Hitler and Nelson Mandela making out.

  Metallic clanging echoes down the tunnel, impossible to locate.

  “Was that close?” Clyde asks. His voice jumps through several different registers. Considering how his morning went, I’d expect him to be a little calmer.

  Still, the tracks do seem to be emitting a faint hum.

  “We’re close, right?” I ask, trying to keep my voice flat.

  “Here it is.” Hannah has been leading the way, seemingly at ease with our trespass. She swings her flashlight to the right, illuminates a paint-crusted door. She fishes out a ring of keys, selects one. “It’s great the stuff MI6 gives you,” she says. She slips it into the lock.

  It doesn’t turn. “Oh bloody hell,” she says. “I hate it when they get like this.”

  The tracks are definitely humming now. Squeaks and clanks bounce down the tunnel walls toward us.

  “Kayla,” I say, “maybe this is one for you.”

  “I’ve got this,” Hannah says, still jiggling the key. “Give me a moment.”

  A loud screech—wheels changing tracks—that does not come from far away.

  I think about Hannah’s request. Not for very long. “Kayla,” I say. “Now, please.”

  Hannah is still bent over the lock when Kayla’s foot hits the door. Metal screams. It flies open, ripping the keys out of her hands.

  Hannah stands indignantly. “Was that entirely necessary?”

  Behind her the yellow glow of headlights starts to illuminate the tunnel.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I kind of think so.” And then Clyde and I are bundling after Kayla into the service tunnel as fast as our feet will carry us. I look back. Hannah stands there, shaking her head, and then finally, finally steps into the tunnel. Two seconds later, an underground train fills the tunnel behind her in a scream of sound and rushing air.

  Over-confident or just stupid—I try to work out what impression Hannah is trying to make on me. Or maybe it’s not for me, because Kayla fist bumps her for some reason.

  The door opens onto narrow stairs that take us another thirty feet down, before opening up into a much larger space. This tunnel—the one that supposedly houses Lang’s pocket reality—is three tracks wide, and lit by intermittent service lights, strung together by thick orange cable. The space feels almost luxurious after the confines of the tunnel above. It even smells better. Lang sure knew how to pick his subterranean lairs.

  “Should be about a hundred yards this way.” Clyde points, glancing down at a rather sophisticated GPS device Tabitha outfitted him with. “Then we’ll try activating the key.”

  We make our way forward, the silence slightly awkward. Kayla whistles. A noise devoid of tune. It doesn’t help.

  I’m trying to work out a way to talk to Hannah when she hesitates. I almost walk into her back.

  “What’s that?” She flicks her flashlight over to one side of the tunnel. I peer. Something glints. Something metal. Something big.

  Behind me I hear Kayla’s sword leaving its scabbard.

  And it takes me a moment, but… It’s a leg. A vast robotic leg.

  An Uhrwerkmänn’s leg.

  “Oh, I was really hoping this would be a quiet little jaunt into another reality.” Clyde sounds profoundly disappointed. “The furthering of human knowledge and understanding. Why does everything have to be about violence?”

  “OK,” I whisper. “Hannah, you—”

  She’s already rolling her eyes when a vast grating voice booms down the tunnel toward us.

  “Is it coming?” the Uhrwerkmänn calls. A Germanic gravity to its vowels.

  I’m not a hundred percent certain, but I’m pretty sure that means it knows we’re here.

  “I wait f-or it but it never c-omes.” The Uhrwerkmänn hitches oddly in the middle of words, sputtering through speech.

  Then it stands. As massive as all its kin. I hear the battery bouncing off the back of Clyde’s teeth. I draw my pistol. And oh shit, here we go.

  “I wait and I wait, but it never comes.”

  The Uhrwerkmänn steps into the light. Narrow frame, long limbs. Damaged too. One shoulder is exposed, gearwork clacking, pneumatic tubes wilting around the joint. Large convex dents mar its domed skull.

  But it stands tall. There is a sense of… nobility in its slow forward pacing. Something in the angle of the skull, in the bearing of its mangled shoulders. And though most of it is caked in grime, in places the metal still gleams brightly.

  Volk’s story flashes through my mind. The Uhrwerkmänner refusing to be seduced by the Nazi philosophy. Sacrificing themselves rather than oppress others.

  “I’ve got a clean shot,” Hannah whispers.

  “They twist, you know?” says the Uhrwerkmänn, shifting conversational gears without warning. “They twist and they twist, and they twist.”

  Clyde glances at me. I’ve lost track of Kayla.

  The Uhrwerkmänner’s hand hangs unmoving in the air between us.

  Curiosity overcomes me. “What does?” I say, loud enough for it to hear. It’s not like I’m giving our position away.

  “Oh, you had to bloody ask.” Hannah shakes her head slightly. Her gun never wavers.

  In answer the Uhrwerkmänn bends its arm, grasps one finger of the
hand, and twists. There is an audible snap of shearing metal.

  It’s not flesh. It’s not blood. But still, I wince.

  It stares at the finger, torn loose from its hand, its immobile features expressing as much melancholy as they can. Then it lets the digit fall, tumbling onto the track. It looks up at me again.

  “Maybe that will bring it sooner. Maybe it likes to eat them.”

  There’s almost a question in that last statement. An edge like pleading.

  “I’ve still got the shot,” Hannah says.

  It stands there, perfectly still, staring at the fallen finger. A shudder runs through it.

  Hannah glances at me. “That thing is one slipped gear from losing it.”

  And no. No it’s not. Jesus. Irritation is a rough spike tearing through my mood. “Oh just stand down already,” I snap at her. “It’s fine.”

  She hesitates.

  I sigh. In front of Clyde and a deranged robot was not at all where I wanted to have this conversation. “Look,” I say. “I appreciate that you have more field experience than me. I really do. But if anything is likely to antagonize this bastard it’s the fact that you’re pointing a gun at it. Now, I realize that you don’t agree with that assessment, but honestly the way this whole thing is set up, I’m your boss. I may make a mistake from time to time, but I’m better prepared to fix it if I know where the hell everyone is, and what the hell they’re doing. I can’t make contingency plans if I can’t count on you.”

  Hannah looks at me. Her gun is still up. “You’re asking me to endanger myself,” she says. “And you. And him.” She nods at Clyde. “And Kay—well, OK, probably not Kayla, I get that. But you’re asking me to knowingly put myself at risk on the say-so of some bloke who just admitted he doesn’t know what he’s doing half as well as me. You get that, right?”

  The Uhrwerkmänn spasms to life once more, takes a twitching, jerking step toward us.

  I am trying to be reasonable. I run that mantra through my head. What would Felicity say?

  “I’m asking for a little trust,” I say. It sounds Felicity-like.

  “You almost shot me yesterday,” Hannah points out. “Twice.”

  Another faltering step from the Uhrwerkmänn.

  “Erm… don’t mean to interrupt here—” Clyde starts up.

  “I know.” I manage to override Clyde, and talk to Hannah without gritting my teeth once. “And that’s exactly what I’m looking to avoid. That’s why I’m asking for you to trust me. So we don’t repeat yesterday.”

  “I trusted you more yesterday.” Hannah appears to be pretty far from the soft, warm trusting place. “Your case files seem to have left out a lot of the specifics of your successes.”

  “But they were successes. They may have been unorthodox—”

  “Unorthodox!” Hannah bites back bitter laughter. Another step from the Uhrwerkmänn.

  “Look,” says Clyde, “maybe this isn’t the time for politeness after all, because I really think—”

  “If you weren’t there,” I say, my calm slipping away, “you don’t get to judge. I have lost a lot of friends over the past year getting my job done, and—”

  “Yeah, and I don’t want to be one of them,” Hannah barks back.

  “Trust me,” I snap, “you are not my friend.”

  Another step from the Uhrwerkmänn, it is only six yards away now. Close enough to smell the oil leaking out of it.

  Hannah stares angrily at me.

  “You,” I say to her, “are my subordinate. Now I gave you an order. Put the bloody gun down.”

  Her hand wavers.

  The Uhrwerkmänn looms.

  And then the Uhrwerkmänn collapses.

  It lets out a slight gasp, almost a sigh, and then just slumps to the ground. Metal limbs clang against metal railtrack, a discordant xylophone. A deep ticking sound in its chest grows in magnitude then grinds, squeals, stutters, and finally stops.

  After a moment everything is still.

  We stare down at the Uhrwerkmänn’s massive corpse.

  “What just—” Clyde starts.

  Then Kayla steps out of the shadows. She’s wiping oil off her sword blade, leaving long black streaks on the legs of her jeans.

  “Unorthodox distraction, aye,” she says. “But I appreciate it.” She sheathes her sword, grins. “Stealthy like a feckin’ ninja,” she says. She points at Clyde. “You had bollocks all idea I was there, right?”

  Clyde is still blinking.

  I’m still staring at the corpse. Even now, even disheveled by madness and death, there is still a nobility to the body. It wasn’t going to attack us. I’m still sure of that. I think it just wanted us to understand. Because it couldn’t. It wanted us to understand so we could explain everything back to it. And instead we killed it.

  There’s a bunch of reasons why we do what we do at MI37. Right now we’re trying to stop a mad robot from setting off a Nazi doomsday device. But I think what we’re losing along the way is that we’re trying to save someone too. The Uhrwerkmänner need us to succeed to survive. To not lose their way, like this one did.

  We suddenly seem very far from our goal.

  22

  “Here,” Clyde says.

  This stretch of tunnel looks no different from any other. Still, it’s where the GPS says we should be. We dutifully obey our electronic master. Clyde pulls out the reality key, sucks on a battery, twists. Blue light floods the space around us.

  Again I feel the slight thump at the base of my skull, some bass beat in the rhythm of the universe. But this time it reverberates. Deep and sonorous. Painful. A headache ripples out to encase my skull. My vision seems to shimmer. For a moment there isn’t one tunnel in front of me, but a myriad of tunnels. Myriad realities. Nausea twists through me, sharp and sudden. Blue light floods everything.

  Then it’s gone. Everything. The pain. The nausea. The blurring of my vision. I am just standing, bewildered in the absence of my own suffering, trying to figure out what just happened.

  Apparently nothing.

  I stare about looking for evidence of a shift in… anything. But it’s the same dull tunnel. The same drab walls. It might have been a spectacular light show, but it didn’t seem to do much.

  Everyone else seems as confused as I do. Flashlights play on our surroundings looking for something different.

  “The Uhrwerkmänn’s gone,” Hannah says. Her flashlight’s circle of illumination flickers over an empty section of track. She looks at the key in Clyde’s hands. “Useful for tidying stuff up, I suppose. The psychotic murderer’s handy-helper?”

  For a moment I imagine a pocket reality full of dead bodies. I blanch.

  Then I see it. My flashlight comes to rest pointing at a wall. “That wasn’t there,” I say. “Not before.”

  A door. An unimpressive one. Small, shabby, and made of gnarled wood. However, right now I wouldn’t mind if it was small, shabby, and smeared in Lang’s fecal matter. It’s new. It’s a chance this trip isn’t just about Kayla euthanizing a robotic race.

  “Kayla,” I say. She crosses the tunnel, grabs the handle. While having her open the door means she is more likely to get hit by whatever abomination is behind it than anyone else on the team, she’s also more likely than anyone else to survive.

  Hannah looks at me. “Shouldn’t we…?” She taps her hand on her holster, nods at the door.

  “You are very keen to draw that thing,” I say. I get the impression the indulgent tone isn’t appreciated.

  Kayla kills any nascent bickering by applying her shoulder to the door. It flies open, swinging easily on well-oiled hinges. Kayla takes the three short sharp steps into the room. Somehow, in the intervening nanoseconds, she has her sword out of its scabbard. Hannah fills the doorway behind her, pokes her gun over Kayla’s right shoulder.

  The door opens onto a short corridor—maybe a yard long—before the space opens out. Blue light floods everything. Slowly we advance.

  The room is circular an
d achingly tall. The ceiling is distant, five or six stories up at least, the walls coming together to form a high peaked dome, like a vast, elongated egg. Every inch of the walls, from floor to that far-removed ceiling, is lined with books. The short corridor at the doorway was actually just a narrow channel cut through the shelves.

  Books are jammed into the space. Spines upside down, back to front. Titles in English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Latin. Titles in alphabets I don’t recognize. Books jammed in backwards so only the pages peer out at us, all browning with age and neglect. Some curled and tattered. And not just books. Curled scrolls, sheaves of loose writing, newspapers, notepads, maps. I see a stack of what appear to be movie posters. There’s even one shelf that appears to be dedicated to rolled-up tapestries.

  The floor is similarly cluttered. Yet more books in tattered piles. Empty picture frames. A few old hurricane lamps. A gas mask. It feels as if I have somehow stumbled into an overly complex I-spy photograph. I can’t tell where the blue light is coming from. It seems simply to suffuse the place.

  Kayla and Hannah stand in the center of the room, weapons still drawn.

  “You two done threatening the books yet?” I ask.

  Hannah slowly puts the gun away, not bothering to look sheepish. “Yeah,” she says, “because a rather-sorry-than-safe policy is totally the one we should be following.”

  Clyde isn’t paying any attention. He stares around the room. I think this is what he imagines heaven looks like. I am close enough to hear him whisper to himself, “Oh good lord. I have to show this place to Tabby.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “This is good work,” I tell him. “This has to put us ahead of that Friedrich arsehole.”

  He nods, but then a frown clouds his face.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I was just wondering…” He rubs the back of his head, ruffling his hair. “How the hell are we going to get all this back to the office?

  BECAUSE THE MOUNTAIN WON’T COME TO MUHAMMAD

  “Could call someone about this,” Tabitha says. “Oppressive work conditions, this is. Unsanitary. Plus the wireless signal down here is about as existent as the square root of minus one.” When no one responds she shakes her head. “Fucking philistines.”