Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  I imagined brothers and sisters of the Cross, hiding in a blacked-out maze of tunnels, waiting to stave my head in with a weighted mace or cut me in half with a surgical laser. Then I nixed those ideas. Concentrate on what was, not what might be.

  I circled a sheepfold at a measured walk, forearm guns braced, and then headed towards the ravaged door of the abbey at a dead run. With my back to the outer wall I sidled along to a small hole and then used the subsidiary optical units in my right glove to take a look inside the nave. It was empty.

  Display lights shone on the short grass and worn stone, leaving large pools of shadow. At the far end, where the east and west transepts crossed, I could see the stone altar covered in a white cloth. Atop it sat a large silvered cross with the figure of Christ crucified hanging upon it in lifelike coloured lacquer. The wind blustered and whistled through the gaps in the masonry, creating a cacophonous song, almost tuneful, which I assumed was a design feature. The altar cloth fluttered.

  The sole entrance to the subterranean vaults was located in the west transept. A red dot blinked into life in my vision, and a series of orange trailer dots picked out a suitable line of approach, like a runway.

  I was halfway down the nave, crouched in a run, when I had the fleeting suspicion that this was stupid. I was a scientist, not a soldier, even with a vicious AI as a partner. But then a familiar feeling—pride—rose and choked that off before it damped itself like every other negative thought. For a brief flash I, Anjuli, had an insight into Augustine's behaviour and felt shock—Augustine was jealous of Roy—but then forgot it. It was time to trip the transport message.

  901 relayed the signal. The Greens had decided to help out by arranging evacuation and transport for the diary, as I had hoped they would. Ms. Carlyle, in one of her scrapheap jetfighters, would prepare to make the rendezvous journey, 901 as usual on air-traffic control. I didn't trust Carlyle 100 percent, mostly because I didn't trust the Greens even 1 percent. The latest hints from the networks suggested they had biological weapons in their arsenal and were waiting for a suitable moment to test them on some unsuspecting civilian population. They hadn't directly threatened use of them with regard to me, though. I had only had my message about dead meat and 901. Which was enough.

  I checked out the roof above me and delayed long enough at the end of the nave to deposit a cluster of grenades, my rifle (dangerous at such confined quarters as were down below), and a couple of flashes in preparation for what would probably be a hasty exit. Then I checked the doors on the crypt, running through as many lock types as I could.

  They were open. A hair's-breadth ajar.

  I eased one a few millimetres back—solid oak, but on well-oiled hinges. It made no sound. Soft recessed lighting showed a small room with two sconces, one containing a Madonna and the other a modernist St. Catherine, each with its own candle light. I analysed the spectrum of the naked flames. The inner atmosphere was normal.

  Between the sconces a dark circular stairwell gaped on the left, a pair of steel lift-doors on the right. The lift light showed ready.

  I liked this not at all and eased back to check outside again. There was no life except for the sheep, the ravens, and the grass riffling in the wind. I scanned thoroughly, double-checking everything. Then, as I was staring up through the absent windows towards the ragged heights of the nave, I saw them.

  Two gargoyles topped the support structures which had once been flying buttresses. Against the starlit sky they stood out, huge and clear-edged, as if newly chiselled. In infrared they were invisible, cold as stone. I had only caught a glimpse of them because I had changed scan to intensify as I moved my head. I couldn't detect any power trace from them, although they had a huge metal content, but the whole abbey had a weirdly high metal signature. I thought maybe it was made of ore-bearing stone, although in the desperate hunt for metals worldwide it seemed unlikely they'd have built with it, instead of extracting. The plans said something about field generators. Maybe the whole place was one big field generator.

  At that thought the combined fear-shudder of myself and Augustine briefly overrode Soldier and we were rooted to the spot for a second, sitting ducks. I imagined neutron-discharge fields cooking softshell crab. Augustine imagined deep ultrasonic saturation, our insides liquidizing at eleven hertz and running out of the suit in a red soup. Soldier imagined nothing, but took both ideas on advisory before it zapped us. An electric jolt hammered through my limbs and my mind seemed to flutter like the grass. ECT, I realized, of a kind.

  Stunned, we were reclaimed before there was time to think.

  Since the lift was there, it seemed stupid to take the stairs. I now comfortably anticipated a No Exit strategy to their half of the game, and walked straight in, keying the lowest indicator. The crypt had six floors, and their icons and relics were kept in the library, right at the bottom. As we passed the levels I was aware of the Cosmogenists, due to their motion and heat signatures—mostly gathered up on the first floor in a group. Possibly they were praying or waiting or organizing some action I couldn't forecast right now. There was something not right about the lift wiring either, but I wasn't in it long enough to run a full diagnostic. It moved swiftly and silently down.

  When the doors opened I was ready for ambush, but a quiet corridor greeted me, its stone-faced walls lit with replica medieval torches, the name of a saint carved in every alcove. No alternative routes here. At the end of the corridor an open doorway led into a vast hall which had once been crammed full of barrels of vitrified waste set in concrete. They'd done a nice job of reclaiming it, I noticed as I strode quickly towards it, aware of 901’s constant updates on the progress of Carlyle's journey. No time to linger.

  The circular hall was lined with secluded alcoves made by the alignment of bookshelves, tapestries, and display cases. Paintings were hung on the available wall space, and there were old wooden pulpits and a number of Bible stands in the form of eagles dotted here and there in a gallery arrangement (all highly flammable and the ventilation system was rather inadequate for handling smoke, so fire might be effective). But the real eye-kicker was a huge orrery sitting right in the middle of the floor.

  It was working. I could pick out the tiny ticks of its movement as it counted mechanically through the paces of the solar system. Even loaded down with a military brain and a mechanical ignoramus, I could tell it was a masterpiece. A second look held an even bigger surprise though. The sun was not in the middle. Instead the earth sat motionless at the core, and the sun, a tiny golden ball, perched meekly between it and the silvery globe of Venus. I was staring at it, and at the same time aware of a man coming into the room from another exit on the far side. He was unarmed so I didn't look up.

  The delicacy and manufacture was superb, but what I couldn't get my head around was the sheer gall of it, and the calculations that must have gone into making it credible—because it was credible. A quick runthrough in my battle-simulation editor proved to me that it worked. Physically it was an accurate representation of how things must move when the earth was the most important place in the universe.

  The man walked up and stopped on the other side of the orrery. He was some two feet shorter than I was and made no aggressive or surreptitious motion. A glance identified him readily enough. Even without a stored image comparison, I knew instantly I was looking at Roy and Jane's father. He was wearing long robes in two-tone brown wool that might have been elegant on someone thinner, but would certainly impede any kind of quick motion. He was going nowhere fast.

  “A nice piece of work, isn't it?” Abbot Croft said.

  “Where is the diary?” I asked. Filtered by the helm, whatever I said came out in a fairly unexpressive, utilitarian type of voice engineered to give little away. As I spoke I found I was almost unified in my historic dislike of this person. Shoot the bastard and be done, was suggested, but I ignored that for now. No need to compromise the mission so early.

  “My son made it for me,” Croft continued, pretending
not to be in the slightest worried by the aggressive thing I was, but a slight sweat started on his temples and I could hear his heartbeat speeding up. He attempted to make eye contact through the inches-thick faceplate. “When he was a boy.”

  My response was to simply stand as if frozen. This was because his words had started another unexpected emotional war inside me, and nobody had control. As the AI struggled to contain one more of us than it was set to deal with, Augustine and I heard one another very clearly.

  I was flooded with sadness—Roy's miserable semesters following his mother's death, and Jane's bitter voice of hatred—and in turn I loathed this smug, fat fellow pretending that he knew what was best and right for everyone, not least because he was endangering my life. Augustine by contrast was plunged into violent disappointment and seething envy. The force of them nearly blew me away. Automata were his, they were all his. Memes were Roy's ground, math and calculations, organic simulations. Clockwork belonged to Augustine and not Roy. Roy bettered him in everything, everything! And he had built this as a child! No! Destroy it! But, no, it was too good for that—and too good for this uncaring oaf. Proud of Roy underneath it all, glad.

  Blam. Another unsupervised dose of ECT, and we once again held together in a delicate balance. We were held together by the certainty that none of us wanted to go for the extended-dialogue-with-mad-genius's-father.

  My donation of flippancy under stress didn't make it through the gestalt to my voice. “Where is the diary?” I asked again, walking around the delicate web of wire and spheres to confront him directly. “Give it to me.”

  “Very well, I can see you're not in the mood for a conversation. A shame as I have no doubt you would be a most interesting interlocutor,” Croft burbled and lifted a keychain from the rope at his waist. He moved over to a small cabinet and began unlocking it. “Tell me, has Jane sent you?”

  I kept my distance from him and scanned for trouble. Still nothing. This was going to be bad. My only consolation, I promised myself, would be to take him with me. No, that was stupid: I wasn't out to murder. Just to get the book. My revenge on his thoughtlessness of old would simply be to ignore him, because one thing pompous bigots dislike the most is being ignored. A moment of sympathy for the man, sincere if misguided, doubtless more complex than I could appreciate, tried to come to life in my head, but it was stamped to death.

  Inside the cabinet, on a blue velvet bed, was the dog-eared, black, plastic-coated lump of Roy's diary, lit from all around by tiny reverential diamond lights.

  Abbot Croft crossed himself and bowed before it. He picked it up gently. No alarm sounded, no running of stealthy feet came.

  “It doesn't look like much, does it, but then most of our relics don't.” He inclined his hands to better show me the book. I had already detected several ancient human remains dotted about, as well as some animal bones and desiccated earth. I believed him.

  “You stole it,” I said. “Give it to me.”

  “It was written by my son, now dead. I hardly stole it when I had my agent remove it from there to here. Jane is in a very unfortunate state. I couldn't allow her to lose or even destroy it, when it is all that I had left of him. Also when it contains such powerful information,” the abbot countered, still looking for any clue as to who might be inside Armour. I put my hand out and he almost jumped backwards. If I hadn't been so confused, manipulated, and frightened, I might have felt sorry for him. I could see that he was conflicted about the diary himself. His face and voice remained steady but his hands gripped it, knuckles pale through the crimson of his poor circulation.

  “Roy left it to Jane,” I said. “If he'd wanted you to have it, he would have left it to you.” I brought forward my right hand as well, the one with the cannon attachment, and waved it significantly. How much of a hint did the old boy need?

  Croft clutched the diary and took a slow, deep breath. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse with emotion. “You have no idea what is in this book. Have they paid you enough to come looking for it, I wonder? To risk your life for it? Do you know that everyone in this compound would gladly die to keep it here? Are you up to the burden of failing here, or killing all of us in order to carry it away?”

  “Bollocks,” I said angrily, Anjuli temporarily winning out over the others, “I don't want to hurt anyone. Give me the book and we can all go home.”

  He glanced up and a crafty light flickered briefly in his eyes, which Soldier's diagnostics immediately responded to by activating the helm-laser and making it rise like an aggressive knight's crest, aiming it at Croft's face.

  “Don't fuck with me,” it said out of my mouth, its brute voice echoing. “Give me the book and everyone will be all right.” I had a feeling that swearing was a mistake, and was right when I saw Croft turn belligerent. Also righteous, the worst possible memetic result I could have triggered. Again it boded very badly, and I was getting late, too.

  “You haven't time to argue,” 901 said into the centre of my mind, “although I hoped that you would have. He seems to be hiding things a great deal.”

  I messaged it to stop harping on its petty personal interests. I was aware of the great extent of its powers, far beyond mine, and was covetous, but that could wait for another time.

  “This book,” Croft said, pressing it to his chest, “contains the Word of God. The Word of Creation. The Logos. It is the holiest of holies. Not only ourselves, but other creeds hold this to be true. Even now they will come to wrest it back from you with even greater bloodshed. But we are not stupid. We know the evil uses you want to put it to. It is the power of life and death.”

  “As you say,” I countered, calculating how much time I would get if I jumped him now before he could raise an alarm, “if I don't get it, someone else will.”

  “And you come here!” He raised his voice. “With so much violence and ill-intent, your crude words, your crass mind, your abomination of a weapon, and you expect to take it for nothing!” He had started to shake as I advanced on him step by step. Abruptly I was sorry I was frightening him so badly, and wished I could tell him it would have been nice to talk it through like theologists, but Carlyle was well under way.

  “I hope you will forgive me, Mr. Croft,” I said, “but I have to go—now.”

  “Take it!” He shoved it towards me—and snatched his hands back as, in doing so, he touched Armour's strange, skinlike surface. “But realize that we will do everything in our power to prevent it leaving here. It belongs to no one but God.”

  “Then I'm only borrowing it,” I said, opened the secure hatch in the chest plate, put the diary safely inside it, and turned around to somersault over the orrery, roll into a run, and make hell-for-leather down the corridor towards the lift.

  It was going well for almost four floors, and then it jammed. The lack of alarm calls was confusing, but I didn't believe it would choose now to quit working. The sense of relief at finally being opposed was so great I almost laughed. I fired up the cutting torch on my left gauntlet and reached up to slice a hatch in the roof. One fingerhold, and Armour pulled me quickly up through the hole. I got a grip on the cables and began to climb to the top of the shaft.

  “Airlift ETA seven minutes,” 901 reported.

  Deep below ground, someone brought a small fusion reactor online. The extra adrenalin this news brought shot me to within ten metres of my goal, when I noticed how hot my hands were getting. Beneath them the lift cables began to redden.

  The heat-absorbing power of the gauntlets, and on the inside of the thighs and feet, was well overloaded. My skin began to blacken and peel as the cables became crimson, then pink. Small servos began to malfunction, but I kept on moving. Then the weight of the lift car itself started to stretch the cable. I heard the metal creaking and felt the steel in my grasp begin to thin and shift. I was not going to make the top before the lot went. Then I had a stupid idea. Stupid for a human—perhaps possible for Soldier.

  I concentrated on gripping the worst cable with my right
hand and locked it in place even as the surface cauterized the shell to the depth of an inch. Pain suppressors and drugs were already in action as, with my left-hand torch, I cut through the line below my hold.

  The lift dropped like lead, and at the same time the piece of white hot metal I was attached to shot upwards, juddering, through the unevenly expanded mechanism at the top. Splinters of burning metal fell all around me from the ruined pulley, but I was already through them, rising disconnected through the air as I followed the acceleration. At the top of my leap there was a still moment, perfectly judged, in which magnets in my hands, knees, and feet came on and stuck me fast to the backs of the doors at the top level.

  With a groan and hiss the pulley parted company with the top of the shaft. It and the cable end whipped past me, missed, and plummeted into the darkness. I heard it crash, felt the vibrations as I pried the doors apart. At last they gave way and I flopped out into the little room at the head of the stairs, Mary and Catherine staring down at me benevolently. The doors closed behind me.

  The front door, which had been ajar, was completely blocked.

  The room was full of gas, I noticed, assessing the readings of my skin monitors, which were reporting a cocktail of neurotoxins odourlessly polluting the air. But it was hard to pay attention to that. I was transfixed by the thing which was blocking the door. In one of those idle, time-stretched moments, I wondered if Roy had built it, too. Then again, no—it was more like something Bush would make on a bad day. I hoped I lived long enough to tell her about it.

  It was part dog, part crocodile, part human, and all machine. Its shoulders seemed to be wedged into the door frame, and that was all there was preventing it from lunging forwards and grabbing me in its enormous steel-lined jaws. It didn't pounce immediately, so I had the luxury of being able to think things through. My shoulder missiles were no good—they'd fry me at this range. I detected active power cells located just below its spinal column, and fired a couple of rounds of the hand cannon into that, wincing as my scalded hand inside its gauntlet smarted with the kicks.