“Well?” Darrick asked.
“It’s been used before,” Carolin said, stopping to catch his breath. He was covered in sweat. Every person there had lent a hand to move the fuel rods. Hard work, even with the hoists uncovered below the dome’s floor.
“Recently?”
“No, not in a dozen years, at a guess, but everything is set up for a quick start. Part of the fuel is unusable, so we’ll replace it.”
“What about water?”
“There’s a line to the rainwater tanks inside the compound. That’s enough to last most of a day. After that, who knows?”
Finally, Darrick climbed to the plant’s control room, letting Carolin know he could find him there. The room ran all the way around the top of the cooling tower, just below the lip of the cupola capping the massive concrete tube. It felt more like a hallway, but the monitors embedded into the inner wall were paper-thin and the wheeled stools were easily stowed out of the way.
Actual windows had been cut into the outer wall, offering an unsurpassed view of the island and its surroundings. They revealed an expanse of countryside that might have been the main justification for establishing the control room in such an exposed position. It was the island’s tallest watchtower.
Alone in the narrow gallery, Darrick completed several circuits, reading the instructions posted beside each workstation. He kept an eye on the windows, trying to spot attackers. However, while the other end of the compound was crawling with men and women at work, tiny ants picking their way through the demolished palace wing, the basilica’s vicinity was still quiet.
Darrick took out a spyglass to inspect the sea near Port-Sillery. Not a trace of the man called Ségole Portelance – the name still managed to make him smile. Too bad. The fishing would have been great.
Things only started happening by the early afternoon. Off Sillery, a whole flotilla made up of canoes and boats from all points of the compass – not just a single fishing dory – appeared.
The ironbearer’s spyglass did not let him make out the features of the men aboard the small craft, but he assumed they were the tribals. Newfs and Hicanos who’d sworn fealty to Ségole – whose real name was Fraser – to attempt an unprecedented raid. They were going to land on the island of Quebec and make off with anything that wasn’t nailed down. At the same time, a small armed company showed up in front of the basilica.
Darrick swore. The way he’d planned it, the tribal raid would have been his second diversion, forcing his father to split up his men and delay a full-out assault of the dome. However, the tribals had come too late. They hadn’t even landed yet and it might take several minutes for the good people of Port-Sillery to realize they were under attack. Several more minutes would pass before the commander in front of the dome was alerted, during which time the defenders of the basilica’s main entrance would be desperately outmatched.
Darrick was on the verge of heading down when a loud ringing shattered the tomb-like silence of the control room. He guessed it was a phone, found the handset, and answered.
“Carolin here. We’ve gotten the reactor going and the generators are spinning. It’s about a third of nominal, but we’re producing power.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“The dome walls are massive. But don’t try to come back through the choir. We’ve closed all the doors and flooded the entire ground floor. The pressurized water tubes are deployed and they will dump part of their heat into the pool. Very soon, it’s going to be a death zone, but everybody on the island will know we have a working nuclear reactor here.”
“Enemies are at the door.”
“Yes! Not only guards, but musketeers! Our guys asked me to call to let you know they need you downstairs.”
“No need. I’ll settle things from here.”
“What?”
Darrick hung up. Once more, he toured the control room, turning on each monitor in turn. At last, he settled down in front of the screen identified with the tag “Defence lasers.” The next screen over was connected to surveillance cameras. Not by coincidence.
In one document sent to Darrick by Carolin, the listing of the reactor’s equipment included lasers, unspecified. The young man hadn’t paid any attention to one more item, but Darrick had been willing to bet his life that these weren’t simple weather lidars.
He began by testing the cameras. Their magnification was far superior to that of his spyglass.
His augmented gaze swept over the landscape. Though the sky was clouding over, the diffuse sunlight was more than sufficient for the dome’s instruments. Darrick began with the land behind the basilica. He smiled when he spotted a handful of men trying to sneak up on a secondary entrance. The poor devils! They didn’t know he now controlled all of the dome’s machines.
Turning back to the master screen, he deployed the eight lasers positioned all around the dome, secreted inside decorative gargoyles according to the specs.
He identified the laser covering the back of the basilica, requested a targeting zoom, and centred the reticle on a man crouching behind some bushes. He squeezed the firing button. The foliage went up in flames, as well as the guard’s uniform, and then the man’s hair. The guard rolled on the ground, his mouth open as he uttered inaudible shrieks.
Darrick cried out, shocked. He hadn’t expected the weapon to work so well or to wield such power.
He tried again, aiming at a wall close to another would-be attacker. The man jumped and retreated hastily, spurred on by the phenomenon’s inexplicable origin. His flight encouraged the others to flee as well.
Darrick was plugging into the laser covering the front of the basilica when Carolin burst into the gallery, panting hard from the climb.
“What’s going on?”
The screen showed the plaza before the steps to the entrance. Half a musketeer company was standing in full battle array, guns shouldered, at the foot of the stairs. Among them, Darrick recognized Réjean Lacombe, sitting in a wheelchair. A man was leaning over, for a consultation perhaps or to tell him something. An officer maybe, since the man was older, pot-bellied, and white-haired. Or maybe not, since the stranger wasn’t wearing a uniform, but an exceedingly well-cut costume.
That face was familiar… Darrick turned to Carolin and pointed at the screen.
“That’s him? That’s my father?”
The student nodded.
Darrick fired before he’d even thought through what he was doing. He’d had 20 years to picture this very moment, and he’d exhausted all the possible pleasures he might draw from permutations of his revenge. All that was left was anger, and the urge to erase an error and start over again. It was simple, really. He’d waited too long not to do it.
The beam struck full in the chest and the man exploded more than he burned.
“I didn’t recognize him,” the ironbearer admitted, his voice hushed.
Twenty years gone… He didn’t feel that much older, but the years had counted double for his father. And they hadn’t counted at all for his mother, who had died at sea only a few days before the ship of exiles had sighted the French coast.
The governor’s nearest companions recoiled and backed away, their hair singed by the heat of the beam. A few guards tried to come to the governor’s aid, undoing their capes or uniform tops to throw on the charred body. Others rushed forth courageously, sword in hand, but Darrick swung the laser beam before the entire group, sweeping the entire plaza from left to right.
The intense heat would have discouraged the hardiest souls. The flagstones fissured, the weeds growing in the cracks turned into a scatter of ashes, and drops of molten rock rained outward wherever the beam tarried a few seconds too many.
The officers ordered their men back, retreating to the edge of the plaza. The musketeers lined up again, facing the basilica entrance.
Darrick gazed upon them with growing irritation. They were mad! Why were they so obstinate about staying there?
“Time to end it,” the ironbea
rer whispered.
“No!”
Carolin’s hand came down on Darrick’s, pulling back the joystick. The laser carved a glowing furrow across the plaza, only a few feet from the closest guards. Without Carolin, most of them would have been mowed down.
“What have you done!” Darrick roared.
I should have strangled him.
“But I… I couldn’t let you,” Carolin stammered. “It’s not what I wanted.”
Below, guards and musketeers broke and ran in spite of the orders shouted by their officers.
“Come on, look!”
The ironbearer grabbed the student’s arm and plugged into the surveillance cameras watching Sillery. The zoom allowed him to leap over the two kilometres between the basilica and the small streets of the seaside town. The tribals had landed. For a long while, Darrick admired the show with boundless delight. His father had been so proud of Quebec, the impregnable fortress, the last bastion of the civilization of yore. No revenge could have been sweeter.
Yes, Father, I called them, I coaxed them, I promised them the greatest raid of their miserable lives, the sack and pillage of the fabled riches of the island of Quebec. And they came, no doubt as unsure as young newlyweds, and just as unable to resist their lust.
“Where did they come from?” Carolin asked, appalled.
“Out West, of course.”
They were far more numerous than expected. Fraser had played it very close to his chest indeed… The tribals had to know that Quebec’s gunboats would keep them from fleeing toward the mouth of the St. Lawrence. They presumably planned on heading up the Appalachian rivers and following mountain trails back to their hideouts… But numbers didn’t matter, not for a man who had all the dome’s lasers to play with!
The cameras allowed Darrick to pick out scenes of carnage amid the ongoing sack of Port-Sillery. Bodies shot with a blunderbuss or a tribal bow littered the streets. Houses burned. A few tribals were already heading back to their boats with a first load of loot.
Others turned their back on the port to flood the streets of Upper Sillery. Darrick finally identified Fraser as the leader of a heavily armed band of Newfs.
“This fish is too big for you, old man!”
He selected his targets and triggered a volley at the first row of oncoming Newfs. Five times his finger squeezed the button and five times human torches burned.
But not the sixth and then the seventh time. He squeezed tighter, but the laser refused to fire. While the tribal ranks had wavered for a moment, Fraser called them back to him and they marched with new resolve. Were they now looking for the way to the dome?
Darrick tried to switch lasers, even though other angles were suboptimal. The first laser might have overheated, fallen victim to accumulated wear and tear, or broken down when it had tried to swing too fast…
He used the screen to change the number of the laser linked to the joystick and he selected the targeting function again. Fraser’s face filled the screen and Darrick fired.
Once again, nothing happened.
A quick glance at the secondary monitors showed him the reactor was still generating more than enough power. He tried the other lasers. Not a single one still worked. He finally gave up, staring at the pillars of smoke rising from Sillery’s streets. Somewhere, a chip in the control circuit of the lasers had failed. Obviously, most parts were long past their design lifetime. He should have expected it. Yet, he had come so close…
“And now?”
Carolin’s voice trembled, but it was shaking from anger, not astonishment as before. Darrick understood: the young man felt betrayed. Just as the ironbearer had been betrayed by his father.
“That was your plan? Killing all your enemies with the dome’s lasers and then replacing your father as our ruler?”
“Why not? He killed my older brother.”
“That’s because your older brother had the son from his first marriage assassinated.”
“I’m ridding you of a monster!”
“Did you really believe that the population would tolerate a new governor with a trigger-happy finger and an all-powerful weapon? Especially if he took power after killing his own father and dozens of guards? Most of these men have wives, families, kids. Do you actually think they won’t hate you for it? That we won’t fear what you might do? You’ve already made yourself into a new monster. Like father, like son!”
“But…”
He bit his tongue. He had been on the verge of confessing that he was behind the Newf attack, that he had expected to repulse it with the dome’s lasers to show the population that he would be their protector.
Only one thing left to do.
“Believe what you want. As my father’s heir, I’m leaving this reactor to the city of Quebec. So that you can dream of a better world.”
The surveillance screens showed guards and musketeers heading for Sillery. News of the Newf landing had finally reached them.
Carolin did not keep him from leaving. His arms crossed, the student stood in front of the controls, ready to prevent Darrick from trying to use the lasers again. By force, if necessary. Not that the ironbearer still wanted to.
Once he made it back down, Darrick used a whistle to gather his men. He would join the Sillery men fighting the tribals, along with anybody willing. Whatever happened next, he doubted that he would ever see his brothers again.
As he walked down the nave, his gaze wandered over the statuary erected along the side aisles. Each statue illustrated a vice or sin, both the ancient ones and the modern variants proscribed by the Church during the dark years.
There was a naked man standing erect and holding his own genitals torn off at the root. The carver had rendered its stance with a disturbing attention to the gory details: the ragged edge of the torn flesh, the dangling edge ends of veins and ligaments, the improbably gaping wounds of the groin, and the first signs of unbearable pain dawning on the lustful masturbator’s face.
Other statues condemned pollution and abortion, greed and jealousy.
Yet, Darrick now regretted bitterly the absence of one additional statue. After the dark years, though, nobody had thought it necessary to remind survivors of the dangers of the sin of pride.
KALOPSIA
E. Catherine Tobler
So, they had an elephant.
We had a roller coaster.
Didn’t matter how they got they elephant, did it? Zoo is a fair distance from our Playland in ’Couver, but I don’t know. You ride that elephant up they broken Trans-Canada Highway like a jaguar? You ease over to they rubble-shoulder should someone come up behind you on a camel? Camels outpace elephants mostly because they sleek, but come now. Those zoo walls fell with every other wall when they bombs come and it’s just a wonder they elephant doesn’t glow in they dark with they rest of us. Maybe him wandered up here. Don’t tell me they went all down zoo-way to get he. To intimidate us?
I can see they elephant over there, over they ugly wall of slabbed pavement. They wall divides their territory from our territory, worse than they saltwater-flooded deep-deep between. I can’t bear they water, much as I want they lake on they other side of they wall; they deep-deep swallowed Momma whole like fish with bug. Was easy to row over in a swan boat, around they bits of carnival trash still poked above they surface; less easy to knock that wall over. We had tried.
They elephant walks a never-ending path along they whole wall, ridden by sister.
Na’Talie who hoists a radio antenna and has lashed an umbrella to they saddle for a bit of shade even if they sun ain’t come out in days and they ain’t no radio. Thick clouds like it’s going to storm, but all it does is humidify. One hooked tusk of ivory protrudes from they left side of they face – they elephant, not Na’Talie – and I seen it used with great effect. Not that Na’Talie don’t have tusks. They just inside where they surprise more. My sister like that.
“Lady.”
“Tssst!”
Waved Robert silent, but could hear he
as him scrambled up they coaster lifthill toward me. Didn’t have to look to picture he, all elbows and knees and gawk despite being four decades old. Long black hair, longer black beard, eyes always hid behind goggles that had you looking at your own reflection. Was something to scold he and see my angry face shining right back at in they round lenses, dreadlock crown bobbing.
“Lady.”
“Tssst!”
Robert had they grace to drop to he belly when him reach they top of they hilled track; him wriggled to my side fishlike, peeking toward Na’Talie and they elephant. Wasn’t so much new news to be had up here, as it was finding a calm in things as they ever had been. They had they fresh water and we wanted it. I wouldn’t have hollered over someone bringing me that elephant, either.
When I looked at Robert, was my own face looking at me in they lenses. Him grinned through they grime that covered he, breathing a little hard from they climb up here, but he held him tongue until I nodded to tell he could finally talk. Wasn’t no express need for he to be quiet, but I sure did enjoy watching he squirm like a worm on my hook.
“Lady, there is a new boy come,” he said, and this surprised they way they elephant had first surprised because they hadn’t been no new people in a long while. No one wandering up from they south to see if things fared better near they harbour, no one looking for lost loved ones or lost hated ones; no babies born to my people, neither. No babies in far too long and this worried me more than some little.
“Boy say his name is Beth.”
“You sure that boy ain’t confused?”
After they bombs, most people weren’t right in one way or another. You could list they all down – people more angry, more aggressive, more outright stupid or cautious or hungry or lame or fierce or flighty or what ever – but mostly everyone was broken. Was a matter of figuring each out, how they pieces had been broke and pressed back together, like they wall that kept us from they fresh water. That was how we knew how to use people, how to use they broken to our advantage.
“Probably confused. I mean… you know.”
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