“An army of what?”
“Guess,” said Rad.
Jennifer sighed. “So that’s why the King is building his own force?”
“Got it in one.”
Nobody in the car spoke for a while. The road ahead was clear.
“Agent Jones,” said Rad eventually, “what did the Corsair mean when he said you hadn’t told us?”
Jennifer didn’t say anything.
“You were on the trail of the robot gangs before you called me. What else were you looking for?”
Jennifer shook her head, and then said: “I’m looking for my brother.”
Rad whistled and drew breath to ask the next question when the car slid on the icy road as Jennifer yanked the wheel, hard.
She swore, leaning against Rad as the car turned. Looking out his window he saw the road slide past sideways as the car spun around. Ahead, the road was blocked by a huge group of robots, much larger than the pack they’d charged near the theater. These robots were silver, uniform, marching in a slow step in perfect time. In the Harlem night dozens of red eyes shone like coals.
Rad clung to the handle above his door as Jennifer pushed the huge vehicle to its limit. They shot down a side street, the side mirror on Rad’s side clipping the iced brick of the building on the corner. Then Jennifer pulled left, heading south via a different route. But it was no good; there were more of the warehouse robots blocking the road. Jennifer swore again and took the next left, turning just in time to kiss the first row of machine men with the rear of the car. The vehicle jumped and Rad bumped his head against the ceiling.
“Looks like they’ve rolled out the cavalry for us,” said Rad as the car skidded on the slick road as Jennifer pushed it down the next street. “Ah, this isn’t good.”
The road ahead narrowed alarmingly, but that wasn’t the worst part. A building had collapsed across the street, blocking their way entirely.
Jennifer jammed on the brakes and the car jackknifed, sliding on the ice. Rad grabbed the handle above his door with two hands as the car turned like the hands of a clock. Rad could see Kane lying flat on the floor in the backseat, thrown there by the sudden braking, and Jennifer’s hands were on the wheel, moving it, coaxing the car around, trying to regain control.
The rear of the vehicle collided with the rubble on the road, and the car kicked, the wheels spinning. Jennifer gunned the accelerator, her hands moving the gearshift, but Rad could hear the wheels spin on the ice and dirt even above the roar of the engine. The car jerked a little, but a wheel was caught on something. Rad and Jennifer both strained to see out of the back window as Kane pulled himself up. Jennifer played the accelerator, and the car rocked gently from side to side, but they weren’t going anywhere, not anymore.
Kane pointed forward.
“Ah, guys?”
Rad and Jennifer spun around to see. The end of the street from which they’d just come was now filled with robots. There was five hundred yards separating the group and the car, but the gap was closing fast. The robots marched forward, their pace slow but sure. They were going to box them in.
“Last resort,” muttered Rad. He wound his window down and raised himself up on the seat until he could get his whole upper body out of the car. He pointed the gun, not sure what to aim at, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. Rad glanced at the weapon, but aside from the trigger it was featureless, with no other controls.
“Thought you said this gizmo was recharged?” he yelled.
“It should be,” came Jennifer’s voice from inside the car. Rad frowned and tried again. Nothing. The weapon was dead.
“Well, ain’t that swell,” said Rad.
“Get back in!”
Rad obliged, the silver gun useless in his lap. The car’s engine barked and the whole vehicle shook, confirming Rad’s fears that there was more damage than a jammed wheel — until he realized the sound was from outside the car. A second later, the roadway was filled with a bright white light. As Rad’s eyes adjusted, two wide beams stabbed downwards. They swept back and forth across the road before one focused on the car, the other on the robots. The robots came to a halt and as one their red eyes pointed to the sky as they all looked up.
“What the?” Rad and Jennifer leaned over the dashboard to see, while Kane fumbled to get a window open in the back.
Something large descended onto the street, throwing a downwind that blew frost up from the road in huge, glittering clouds of particles that glinted like stars in the spotlights. The object moved over the car, towards the robots, then turned with surprising speed and touched down. It was an airship of some kind, although not one of the now-retired police aerostats. This was more like…
Rad’s eyes went wide. More like the Nimrod, the airship of Captain Carson. Rad raised a hand to cut out the glare and caught a glimpse of silver and metal
This thing was much larger than the Nimrod. And the last time Rad had seen the Captain’s explorer craft, it was jammed next to the bulk of an Enemy airship, the pair locked together and piloted out into the fog by the Captain’s companion, Byron.
Jennifer floored the accelerator with a yell and the car sprang free of the rubble, skidding to the right as the spinning wheels hit the ice. She turned, hard, but the road was too slick and although the car began to turn, it was still moving forward, towards the ship. Whatever it was, they were going to hit it, and Rad was fairly sure the car really was going to be wrecked this time.
Then the light cut out. For a moment the darkness was disorienting. Then the green of the car’s one remaining headlight flooded the view ahead, like there was suddenly a wall right in front of them. Rad flinched, throwing himself to one side instinctively, and the green light faded as the car continued to turn. There was a soft, deep thud as the car hit something and came to a stop.
Rad pulled himself upright.
They were inside the airship — it had opened a cargo door. The white spotlights illuminating the street were now out beyond the bay doors. Ahead, Rad could see the rubble of the collapsed building.
The car had collided with a collection of wooden crates and sacks of something softer, destroying several boxes and spilling the contents of the sacks. The air was filled with a harsh scraping — the sound, Rad realized, of the car’s stuck engine. Jennifer killed it, and the floor of the cargo bay tipped. The car slid against the wall, and the view of the road outside vanished as the airship lifted off and the cargo bay doors began to close.
Lights were thrown on outside. Rad looked around, and saw Jennifer and Kane were as surprised as he was that they been suddenly, unexpectedly, rescued from a dead end.
“Mr Bradley, a pleasure, as always,” came a voice, metallic and echoing, coming from all around them. The voice over the ship’s PA filled the cargo bay.
Rad felt Kane looking at him.
“Is that…?”
Rad nodded. Then he opened his door and swung a foot out. He leaned forward and looked at the cargo bay’s high ceiling. The place vibrated as the ship’s propeller engines carried them up and out to safety.
“Captain Carson, you sonovabitch.”
The PA squawked as the voice laughed.
“My dear detective, such a way with words,” said Carson. “Now, come up to the main deck, all of you. Follow the stairs. I’ll open the doors.”
Rad cracked a grin and slapped the top of Jennifer’s seat. “About time I started to count these blessings we all seem to have. Come on.”
He swung himself out of the car, Kane right behind him. Rad pointed to the narrow metal staircase ahead of them, leading to a walkway that ran around the hold halfway between the floor and ceiling. On the walkway at the back of the hold was the bulkhead door.
Kane took a step forward, but Rad turned back to the car. Jennifer hadn’t moved from the driver’s seat.
Rad peered in to the car’s interior. “You coming?”
She nodded, and Rad helped her out. But as she walked forward he kept his hand
on the small of her back.
They had a lot of talking to do, all of them.
Especially Special Agent Jennifer Jones.
THIRTY-SIX
Carson led the way from the Nimrod, unbuckling himself as soon as the craft had touched down in the dark tunnel. He had hardly spoken except to bark the order to follow as he hobbled off the flight deck, wooden leg and wooden stick banging on the floor. Rad was right behind, grateful that his old friend was still alive but wondering what the hell had happened to him out beyond the fog. Along with the wooden leg and Santa Claus beard, Captain Carson was older by a decade.
Despite Carson’s disability, Rad and the others had to jog to keep up with the old man. They walked out of the tunnel into a huge chamber, a concourse of elegant marble, the blue ceiling immensely high and studded with lights like the night sky.
“What is this place?” asked Rad as they crossed from one side of the chamber to the other.
Finally Carson broke his silence. “It is called Grand Central. It has been here always, although never used. It is a train station.”
Carson led them up an inclined passageway and then down a set of wide, shallow stairs. Rad jogged alongside him. “There are no trains in the Empire State.”
Rad saw Carson grin under his beard. “Precisely,” he said. “The City Commissioners were never interested in this place. A veritable fortress, right in the heart of the city! I always thought it would be useful one day, so I had one of the tunnels converted to an airship dock. Splendid, isn’t it?”
“That’s one word for it, sure,” said Rad.
“Oh, Mr Bradley, you haven’t changed, haven’t changed a bit.” Carson clapped, his face lit in a grin Rad remembered well. “And, Kane, my dear fellow,” he said, turning to the younger man, “it is a sheer delight to discover you did not perish as we all thought. The Fissure is a strange and wonderful thing.”
“It’s good to see you again, Captain,” said Kane.
“Aha!” Carson came to a halt. In front of them was another large room, as impressive as Rad’s fleeting glimpse of the concourse above, but in a different way. Here the ceiling was lower and curved into great vaulted arcs, illuminated by up-lights that cast triangular shadows against the walls. The vaulted ceiling came together to form the inside of a flattened dome in the center of the room, creating a series of separated spaces like the segments of an orange. There were tables of varying sizes scattered around, and plenty of chairs, like the place was some kind of restaurant.
Carson hobbled forward and pulled out one of the chairs.
“Now, then,” he said, gesturing for the others to sit. “It is time we had a good, old-fashioned chat.”
Jennifer filled Carson in on recent events.
Rad watched as the Captain studied her golden mask, his one good eye moving over the features constantly. Something bothered Rad, and Jennifer had left out a couple of details from her account — like her search for her brother and her own investigations.
Rad rolled his fingers on the tabletop. Finally, he turned to Jennifer. “We’ve got a robot army coming for us, but the thing that bothers me is that your old boss here doesn’t seem to know who you are. You wanna tell us about that?”
“I-”
“And about what your brother has to do with the King of 125th Street?”
Jennifer sighed behind her mask and looked at the three men seated at the table. She pulled off her gloves, and played her fingers along the edge of the wood. Rad felt a jolt of surprise when he realized that her naked hands were now the only part of her, apart from her hair, that was visible. He knew his turn would come to explain to the others what he’d found in the theater freezer, and he wondered what her reaction would be when he told her about the glass head.
“I wasn’t an agent,” she said. “And I didn’t work for Carson, I worked for the City Commissioner — the other one, during Wartime. I was just an ordinary desk clerk, like a hundred others.
“I was attached to the group liaison between the robot yards and the Empire State. It was fine, we were fighting a war, but… I found things out about the ratings used on the Ironclads.”
Rad nodded. “That they’re people?”
“Yes. I mean, why did nobody know? People — men — marched down to the Battery and into the factory, and they never came back, never. Then every Fleet Day the robots would march down Fifth Avenue until the ticker tape was a foot deep on the sidewalks, and they filed onto their Ironclads, and off they’d sail with fireworks and brass bands and… that was it. How could nobody figure that they were men? How could people be forgotten? Friends? Family members… everyone who volunteered or was conscripted?”
“The same way nobody remembered that the last Fleet had never returned from beyond the fog,” said Kane.
Jennifer turned her golden mask to his black one.
Carson brushed his mustache with the back of his index finger. “The Enemy,” he said, “is a living thing, an entity that is also a city. Nobody knew that either, except me, and the City Commissioners. But one thing we didn’t understand, didn’t even consider, was that if the Enemy was a thing alive, then so was the Empire State. The city fights against those in it. It makes you forget, Ms Jones — it has to. Otherwise our entire world, the whole of the Empire State, the whole of the pocket universe itself, becomes a logical fallacy, an impossibility.”
Jennifer shook her head slowly, clearly failing to follow the Captain’s explanation. Rad waved his hand. “Doesn’t matter, and I don’t understand it myself. But that’s not everything you found, right?”
“No,” said Jennifer. “It was my brother. He’d volunteered to join the navy. I knew that but… but I forgot. When I discovered the robots were men, I looked up the enlistment records, just to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding something. I found his name there, and then I remembered. My brother, I lost my brother.”
The others around the table were quiet. Rad glanced at the Captain, and saw his eye narrow, his brow knitted tightly in concentration. He wished that Kane and Jennifer didn’t have to wear the masks; it felt like they were robots as well.
He turned back to Jennifer. “That’s why you were on the trail of the robot gangs, right? You were looking for your brother.”
“He was in the last enlistment, and then the Chairman vanished and Wartime ended. I wasn’t in the Empire State Building when the robot, the one from the Ironclad, tore it up. But afterwards everything was in chaos. I got through to some people I knew in the robot yards. They were just shutting down, closing everything up. And they just… they just let them out, all of them.”
“The robots?” asked Kane.
Jennifer nodded. “They had several Ironclad complements ready to go, as well as four other batches that were partway through conversion. But I couldn’t get any information, things were… well, they were crazy. I tried to match up the records, but nothing tallied. It looked like they also had a whole lot of volunteers and conscripts who they hadn’t started processing yet.”
Rad nodded. “Your brother among them?”
“I didn’t know, but that’s what I hoped. There was no way to check who had already been turned into one of those monsters, or who had escaped. But the navy just… stopped. The doors opened, and they were left to fend for themselves. Where could they go? They were built and programmed for war, but now they had no function. They couldn’t go back to their old lives, because they didn’t remember them, and neither did their own families.”
“They’re in Harlem,” said Kane. “The ones that hadn’t been finished, they ended up there.”
Rad steepled his fingers and tapped his top lip. “The refugees. The King of 125th Street said he’d worked in the robot yards. So he gathered the leftovers up and began work.”
“Except he was a robot himself,” said Kane.
Rad nodded. “That was a just a diversion. The real king was a man, working while his mechanical assistant collected more refugees and kept them doped on that green stuff,
making them dependent on it so they’d have to stick close.”
“Yes,” said Jennifer. Then she fell silent. Rad wished he could see her face, what she was feeling, thinking, but her golden mask was frozen. But he had a feeling about what was coming next.
“I found him,” she said.
Rad nodded. “The Corsair.”
Jennifer shook her head. “James. His name is James. He was a doctor, a surgeon. When he volunteered, they said they could make use of his skills. I thought that if he had survived — if he hadn’t entered the processing — I thought maybe he would have done something. He would have tried to help.”
Carson stirred. “And help he did. Although perhaps not quite in the way you expected.”
“No,” said Jennifer. “They… they must have started the processing, the mental conditioning, anyway. He… they changed him.”
Rad nodded. “And then after finding Kane and discovering his vision, instead of turning robots back into people, he was continuing the work, turning people into robots.”
“To defend the Empire State,” said Kane.
“To prepare for war,” said Rad.
“He thinks — thought — he was doing the right thing,” said Jennifer. She raised both hands and fanned them out on the tabletop. “Maybe he was.”
The table fell silent. Then Carson hrmmed loudly.
“I see,” he said. “I come back to find the place full of robots, while the city itself crumbles away as entropy increases. It seems I have returned just in time.”
“Where did you go?” asked Rad. “And what happened to you? You’ve only been gone three months.”
“Well,” said Carson, stroking his beard. “By my reckoning, I have been away ten years, at least, although beyond the bounds of the city measuring time is a difficult task.
“But, yes, I abandoned the Empire State. And for that I am deeply sorry. But in the chaos that followed the… well, the you-know-what… while I was trying to pull the city back together, get everything running, removing Prohibition and the restrictions of Wartime and so on and so forth…” Carson rolled his hand in the air. Then he paused and let it drop to the table. “Well, it was Byron. Byron was gone; he had sacrificed himself to save us all. But I wondered, always, at the back of my mind, what had happened to him. Did he survive, perhaps? Did he fly out into the fog and into another world? Did he manage to detach from the Enemy airship and escape? Or did he land? Did he crash? So many possibilities, so many uncertainties. I just had to know. Every time I looked out into the wretched bank of fog I thought of him, and I remembered the two ships, stuck together, vanishing as they left the borders of the Empire State.”
The Age Atomic es-2 Page 19