Among You Secret Children
Page 6
He came out on the third floor feeling spooked and restless, and stopped to take a pill. Hurrying on again, he came to a noticeboard festooned with memos, all new, stamped during his absence. One notice instructed personnel to renew their passes and be ready to present them whenever it was requested. Another announced that the vid lounges were to shut at 9pm sharp in the evenings, mentioning that more frequent gym activity was being encouraged by the Shared Need. Others spoke of cutbacks to the canteen menus, of a change to departmental reporting methods, mentioning newly-set targets. It appeared that a new corps of Ostgrenze-trained cadets would coordinate matters to ensure that ‘level accountability processes’ were followed. He swallowed anxiously.
More memos circulated in the following days; spot checks proliferated. He detected growing unrest in the base, saw it in the faces of those he passed among in haste as he put his new plan into action. Within a week he’d stolen a gun and a small box of ammunition from an unlocked guardroom, stolen more documents from the engineering archives. These various blueprints and diagrams he studied in his office with a new vigour and confidence, certain he’d found a solution. It appeared that the metsat pod was indeed his way out. He examined the construction of the firing head and measured the systems that powered it and saw that the mechanism would conceal and support him. All he had to do was squat low on the dish and take hold of the next primed balloon — right until the moment it was launched. He kept the long term weather forecast under close scrutiny, and with fresh storms due to arrive, shrouding his exit should others be watching the southern landscape, he prepared once more to leave.
~O~
He chose a day when some kind of sports tournament was due to take place on the lower floors, and as it got underway, with a match between guards and technical staff being keenly discussed around him, he went up to his office.
For once his pass was not asked for, nor did the two bulky guards at the top of his corridor do more than glance at him. With his bag ready, hidden under his desk, he got to work at once. He reset the cams and programmed a metsat device to launch at 10pm. Just before 9pm he descended to the basement to leave out his note and clothing, to shut off the extraction pipe as before. He returned to the office tense but emboldened: there’d been a great din of noise in the lower levels and nobody had paid him any attention. He made himself drink water, eat some high-glucose food. His main concern was that the maintenance shift would either be delayed or end up being cancelled due to the match. He knew he could go up alone, but it would surely create suspicion, and in any future inquiry there would be just the one lone operative to account for.
But Moth no scare now. No. At his desk he tapped a key. In fizzing monochrome he saw the vaulted jowl of the mountain. He checked his watch again. Not long now. He checked the logs, sent a lens tracking eastwards. Almost there, almost underway. He watched the landscape alter zone on zone. The winds were wild that evening. Manes of sediment tossed high into the stratosphere. He typed the commands which would keep the lens trained well away from his landing point. A compasswheel appeared on a side-monitor. He wheeled his chair back. Seconds to go. He was reaching down for his bag when something fluttered across the screen. Something like a bird that did not have a bird’s movements. Something black. He stopped the lens, uneasy. Nudged it back a few degrees. It passed something and he stopped it. Again the shape appeared.
He hit zoom. There was something in the wastes. Something dark, taller than a man. Draped, like something clad in flowing sheets or robes. Its great head erect. Slowly turning his way.
He froze.
Was he seeing it, or was it a dream? Was that it? Was he dreaming?
He whirled round staring at the room, whirled back again and struck the desk. Rustled some papers.
It was real. Everything was real.
The figure was real.
It had arrived. Had come for him.
Spoken word of that cruel and whispering vision that sat fixed in him like his vertebrae. Branching out like ice.
‘No,’ he croaked, ‘no … no,’ backing away with his hands to his head.
The figure stood faceless in its flapping robes, and within the blackness where its face should be there was a deep and malevolent hole that dragged at his mind like a vortex and which seemed to suck into its depths the teeming air and all that lay around it, dust and debris and brittle plants, everything twitching, lifting, flying up in its direction.
The figure reached out, beckoning him into the darkness of the hole. He stared at it. Then with a pained yelp he leapt forward slapping at the keys, and up in the turret the lens scythed round towards the west. When it stopped, the figure was there as well, slowly turning to face him. He sent the lens on again and found it once more, black and stark, the vortex rotating within the long trailing hood and the wilderness at its feet shuddering, warping, the ground shaking loose and lifting towards the hole like an upward-running waterfall. He sent the lens blurring to the south and it was still there, the face drawing in the swarming particles, and he sent it round again, and as he did, he noticed a flashing light at his fingertips and realised the console was recording the images. Whatever happened now, he’d have proof of what he’d seen.
Sweating, he wrenched himself away and went stumbling to the door and opened it. No guards, no fellow workers around. Most of the other offices were closed for the night and the dimmed fluoros confirmed that no one had passed through in a while. He set off wheezing. There had to be a mistake, just had to be. He needed a second opinion. Needed someone trustworthy. A friend.
~O~
Lütt-Ebbins studied the image for several seconds before reacting. ‘You’ve got something, all right,’ he murmured, hunched over Moth’s screen. ‘But it’s distorted. Think I can get something to help.’
Moth so scare, so horribly scare. In the foghorn distance he heard the word help and nodded. They ejected the disk and took it to the Daywatch office a few doors down, a room almost identical to his own but much tidier and more organised, where even Stoeckl’s photoplates of UV-bronzed women were spaced neatly beneath the shelving.
He watched numbly as Lütt-Ebbins wheeled a six foot screen into the room, then secured the stand and connected the unit to his console. Watched him go to his desk and feed in the disk and type some commands, looking across to where an enlarged series of green dots were bubbling. Watched him scrape the thin grey hair back from his face and type again, glancing at one of his desk monitors.
‘Would do you think?’ he said. ‘It’s Molst’s.’
Moth blinked.
‘The screen. What do you think?’
The foghorn had not said anything that was good. He kept quiet, hanging on in desperation.
‘Was his, I should say. He put it in storage when they moved him to Photometrics. Said he didn’t use it any more. Said it was giving him nightmares.’
By now an image had appeared, a grainy snapshot of anonymous wilderland. Lütt-Ebbins rattled at the keys and a large black web-like structure imposed itself over the image and made a series of revolutions around a cross-haired core.
Moth watched him a moment longer, waiting for a sign that all was well, that he was mistaken. When it didn’t come, he turned huge wet eyes to the screen and blinked at it.
‘Seems odd, all right. Something’s definitely there. Was it moving?’
‘I … I don’t know, it …’
‘Hold on. Think we can close in.’
The recording played on, the landscape shifting endlessly, swathes of ruffled ash overlaid by gusting particles. The black web continued ticking round, a host of coordinates and data streams zipping and trumpeting in a side column. Lütt-Ebbins peered at his monitors.
Moth swallowed tightly.
The web was expanding in thick black arches that loomed all the larger whenever an individual section of the landscape was selected for examination. The frames magnified until the arches disappeared at the edges, and as the search moved on, so the web grew out again from
the core. Lütt-Ebbins typed rapidly. One of the arches was flashing. ‘I’ll try to get it centred,’ he said.
Moth nodded, wetting his lips. At least he would know now; know the truth. Something to laugh about, surely, a big groan from them both and a couple of jokes and the whole stupid matter forgotten. He could sit in the pod unconcerned and leap boundlessly, wildly into the future.
As the next arch steered round, it was as if the world it held in its lens was in full deluge, a deteriorating sea which seemed to wash itself to nothing before washing back again, the details it held appearing in ever greater clarity before the next phase of disintegration began.
Seconds later, the picture froze dead.
For a moment the room was filled with a pulsing green haze. Then clumps of razor-sharp pixels began to assemble, building inward from the corners. Jigsaw prints of something enormous were joining together, forming a single entity.
Lütt-Ebbins sat back in his chair, giving a long, low whistle as the parts resolved themselves into the body of a mechanised vehicle.
Moth’s eyes narrowed, growing strained and watery behind his goggles.
The vehicle was huge, even without a proper scale to match it against, a terrible construction of plated steel moving alone in a howling gale of sediment.
Although it had a military bearing, it appeared to be some kind of industrial craft, the chassis built upon a skirted undercarriage where drivewheels turned within heavy looping treads. Thick steel chains secured various items of equipment in place around an upper ridge, and at the front, rearing into the darkness, was the apex of a tall steel A-frame mounted on some protrusion.
The vehicle was facing away from them at an angle. There was no visible command port or cockpit. There were no identifying markings along the chassis or at the rear, nothing to indicate its origin. Whatever it was, it was travelling anonymously, and with no apparent need for light.
It hung there ominously, malignantly, in a thick and growing silence. Moth couldn’t move. He remained rooted, his hands clutched together like bonework plaited on a frame. Lost, so lost. All he could do was watch the vessel glower before him, an image endlessly rekindling itself in a field of darkling emeralds. Then gradually he began to stir, to shift a little.
‘Oh dear,’ he breathed, ‘oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear,’ hopping uselessly in place as he turned to Lütt-Ebbins, who was sitting with his hands locked over his head as if concerned for his brain.
‘Lütt?’ he begged, ‘what is it?’
When the answer came, it came quietly: ‘I don’t know. Looks like a carrier, maybe a fuel tanker. I don’t know.’
There was another silence. Moth stared at him, unable to understand. Then, without warning, Lütt-Ebbins whipped into movement and began typing furiously. ‘Call Stütze,’ he said. ‘See if the radar was working when you got the signal. Just give them the time it happened, don’t say anything else.’
‘Wh-what?’
‘Call Stütze. Use my phone.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Just call them. Hurry.’
He ran to the phone on Lütt-Ebbins’ desk and snatched it up and dialled, hope and wonder flooding his mind like oxygen. Like a drug. The figure he’d seen must have been nothing more than passing debris. A sheet perhaps, no more than discarded cloth or rags of plastic.
As for the vehicle, it had to be some kind of electronic mirage; an image from an earlier recording which had somehow remained on the disk, or a rogue transmission from one of the lounges that had strayed upwards and found its way into his console, something no more substantial than an x-ray. All he could think was that somewhere around him was an answer to his problems. The call was answered by a tinny male voice: ‘Lütt? That you?’
‘Ah, no, it, ah … it —’
‘What do you want, Matthëus?’
‘I-I need some information …’ As he explained what he wanted, he turned, nudging a stack of papers on the desk. They slid and spread apart. Beneath a pile of report sheets were other documents stamped with an outdated insignia he hadn’t seen in years. He drew a sheet from the pile and the long muzzle of the animal on the crest smiled at him thinly in faded ink.
‘Ah, okay, ah, I’ll wait a minute …’
It was a technical blueprint of the base, from the early construction phase. Plans of a kind he’d first seen at home while his father’s early research trips were being pieced together under a desklamp. Clink of glasses, adults frowning, sketching, muttering indecipherably. Underneath it were more recent plans littered with arrows and question marks. He saw comments in Lütt-Ebbins’ handwriting. Questions in another hand lined the margins.
‘Ah, yes, just in the last hour …’
He checked over his shoulder. Lütt-Ebbins was still thundering away at the keyboard, making the graphic lines on his monitor branch and stack as he gathered together a datastream that looked frightening real.
The operator came back with another question, and as he replied he straightened the pile again, noticing a worn and dog-eared report.
The cover read:
VAN HAGENS BASE
STRICTLY CLASSIFIED
WARNING: TO BE VIEWED BY APPROVED ENGINEERS ONLY
ARCH ref: SNAE1009645
‘Okay, we’re there.’
‘Ah, yes?’
‘No reported malfunction. I checked the logs and we’ve been ticking over as usual. Nice and steady.’
‘Oh,’ he said, nodding emptily, picking through sensitive network diagrams of a sort he kept hidden in his bedroom.
‘Just as well, really.’
‘S-Sorry?’
‘Got a nasty looking storm on the way, thought you’d have spotted it. Maybe even told someone.’
‘Ah … ah, but that’s why —’
‘Get your console checked,’ said the operator, and cut the line.
For a few seconds he stood trying to work out the implications of the operator’s words, then, queasy, feeling faint, he hid the report in the pile and turned to find the vessel still frozen there, all details horribly, unaccountably clear. Like some dreadful green hallucination.
Lütt-Ebbins looked round expectantly. ‘Well?’
‘It’s, ah … it’s all fine.’
‘Thought so.’
‘How do you … wh-what’s going on?’
Lütt-Ebbins pointed to a small monitor, where a yellow arc stood jaggedly against a dark background. ‘That’s the trajectory, best I can do,’ he said. ‘If I had to make a guess, I’d say it was on its way from the eastern Ridge somewhere. Speed nudging fifty five miles an hour. Not bad over dunes, don’t you think?’
Moth backed away a little. He raised his arms but had no use for them, and they flopped down at his side. ‘I don’t understand,’ he wailed, ‘what is it?’
‘There’s not much to understand, is there? It’s a tanker, a landcraft, a vehicle. The point is it’s pure luck that we’ve seen it at all. It jammed the radar, that’s why you didn’t get an alarm signal. Everyone on the base ought to be alerted by now, but no one’s picked it up. That means it knows we’re here, and knows we can detect it, too. I think we can safely say it didn’t want to be seen.’
As Lütt-Ebbins turned to observe the throbbing image, Moth watched him a moment, seeing the profile of a man not in trouble, unlike himself. Any moment now the authorities would receive news that a foreign landcraft had been sighted outside the base and not reported to anyone. Perhaps the best thing he could do was call them himself. ‘I, ah ... I’d better call Derring,’ he said brokenly, with a familiar loosening sensation in his bowels. ‘Or security. Maybe I should call security.’ Turning with suicidal calm towards the phone on Stoeckl’s desk, he began to dial, confessions burning on his lips.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
He looked round to see Lütt-Ebbins outlined against the screen. ‘What?’ he said, ‘I’m calling Derring. He needs to be —’
‘You’re not phoning anyone.’
‘But I-I have to. You know that, Lütt. What’s wrong?’
‘No Derring. No officers. No one. Get away from the phone.’
He dropped the handset and edged back along the desk. ‘Lütt? What’s wrong?’
Lütt-Ebbins pointed to an empty seat. He sat down, trembling as his friend came forward and stood over him.
‘Who else knows about this?’
‘About ...?’
‘Don’t playact with me. I know you, Moth. I know your background.’
‘B-Background? What are you saying?’
‘Your parents, the protests. Everything. I know you think about things, and I also know you don’t want to get involved, but I think it’s time we spoke honestly for once.’
‘But I don’t —’
‘Listen to me. This vehicle, it’s all a part of what they’re doing to us. We’re getting locked in. Slammed down. Made too frightened to question them, or even answer back. All we do is work and provide for them while they plan a future for themselves — not down here, of course, but on the surface.’
Moth shrank in his seat. Never had he heard Lütt-Ebbins speak so passionately.
‘You can keep yourself hidden away or you can start doing something about it. Which is it to be?’
‘But I ...’
‘Come on. You must at least realise that you’re being lied to? That you’ve been disinherited?’