by Guy Haley
"Klein!"
The privacy cone cut out Kaplinski's voice and Debussy, and he was back in a world of bad Russian music and the pornographic dreams of the Slavic resource elite.
The others were eating breakfast when he returned to their compartment, the sky outside lightening.
"Where are we?" Otto said, reaching for his bag to pull out a water bottle.
"Three hours out from Bratsk," said Chures. "You been drinking, Klein?"
"Yes. Don't concern yourself about it, I can drink my own body weight in pure alcohol and not feel it. Big disadvantage of being Ky-tech," said Otto. "We need to go now. Kaplinski is on the train. We cannot disembark on the Chinese side as planned."
Valdaire put her fork down. "What now?"
The train was moving slowly through an abandoned town of ruined houses, taking it slow over track warped by melting permafrost. A battered sign, name in flaking Cyrillic illegible, passed the window. Larger signs dwarfed this, lining the track in long procession. A high fence abruptly started, caging the railway line, active electronics bearing one message in multiple languages: "Danger. Demilitarised Zone."
"We have to go now," Otto repeated. "Into the DMZ, away from the train."
"This is going to be hard," said Chures under his breath, pushing his breakfast plate away, omelette half-eaten, his expression saying he'd suddenly lost his appetite. "They'll come after us, not just Kaplinski."
Otto shook his head. "Perhaps easier than jumping the fence on the Sino-side as we planned. The Russians don't care so much, they like to make work for the Chinese."
"But the Cossacks. They care," said Chures. "They're relentless. And there's the Han. They will come for us."
Lehmann flung out his arms and patted the backrest of his chair. He shrugged with easy insouciance and smiled his little boy's grin. "Yeah, getting in to Sinosiberia won't be easy. But if anyone can do it, Otto Klein can. Now, are you going to eat that omelette or not?"
CHAPTER 12
Mr Spink
As soon as light crept over the walls of Pylon City, a ferocious banging rattled the stables Richards and Bear had found to rest in, adding to the pounding of the city's machinery.
"All wake in the name of the Prince! Up! Up! Up!" A troop of the Pylon Guard marched up the aisle, banging the butts of their lances on iron stalls.
A guard stopped by Richards' stall and leered. "Eh, eh, what's going on here?"
Richards frowned at the skunk he was sharing his straw with, at its posing pouch and puckered vinyl arsehole. "It's not what you think."
"That's what they all say. Present yourself at Muster Station Eighteen no later than noon." The soldier tossed an orange chit at Richards. From the way it hurt when it hit his head, it was also made of iron.
"Thanks," said Richards rubbing his skull. "I always wanted to join the army."
The skunk woke at the noise, sat up and blinked. "Wh… who are you?"
"You're not Rolston any more," said Richards, matter-of-factly.
The skunk looked away, frightened.
"Great brass balls!" said a soldier further down the stable. "Look at this one! Sir! Sir!"
"Let me through, let me through! My, my, my. Sergeant Bear, we've been looking for you."
"Leave me alone," Bear said weakly. "I want to stay here, where it is nice and warm. And soft. And quiet." There was an element of threat to this last.
Richards leaned on his stall wall. An array of creatures were rising from their beds, brushing straw from their eyes and blinking sleepily. He could just see into the stall where Bear lay further down the stable. Five soldiers huddled round Bear's prone body. He lay there, paws clutched over his eyes.
"Why does it hurt so?" said Bear. A guard poked him and he curled up further.
"It's the beer, mate," called Richards.
"What did I ever do to it?" moaned Bear.
The unit sergeant looked up the stable aisle at Richards. "He with you?"
"Yeah, you could say that," said Richards.
"Not any more. He's needed for special duty. Lads, get him up." His men looked at him, jaws slack. "Don't just stand there. Get him up!" shouted the sergeant.
"Sarge, look at the size of him…" said one.
"Quiet!"
"What 'special duty'?" said Richards.
"That's classified. But you'll be glad to know he'll be serving the city. Not many get picked for this. Only the big ones. Come on you! Up!" the leader shouted at Bear. The men pulled ineffectually at his floppy limbs. The sergeant tutted. "Pathetic." He pointed his pike at Bear's backside and twiddled a number of knobs. A miniature thunderbolt leapt from the pike's tip. The air filled with ozone and the smell of charred plush fabric.
"Alright! Alright!" said Bear, pushing himself to his feet. "Can't you let a bear rest in peace?" He shook his head. One of the men handed him a bucket of water. He drank half and poured the rest over his head, shaking it so hard his helmet fell off.
"Don't worry, sunshine," he said to Richards. "I'll be OK. No doubt I'm off to join the Big Animal Division."
"You're technically a toy, not an actual animal," said Richards.
Bear looked hurt. "And you're technically a twat, but you're not being mustered to the brothel, are you?" He rubbed his head and winced. "They'll put me at the front where the fighting will be best. I could use a bit of a workout." Stretched, then groaned, then grinned. "I'll see you after the battle."
The city bustled. Men in full armour jogged through the smog. Heralds galloped by on multi-coloured bovine mounts, while steam whistles hooted complicated chords, rising and falling, summoning this group or that regiment to their place of gathering.
There was a buzz about the place, a hubbub of grim can-do. But although his simulated body made sure he felt apprehensive, Richards had managed to get himself to a place where his fear was real but abstract — this was not his body, he reasoned, no matter how closely identified he felt with it. And although the death of Pl'anna was never far from his mind, he suffered none of the taut uncertainty many of the faces on the streets exhibited. Genuine terror was a vice he'd yet to develop.
Everything was louder and more unpleasant in the daylight, and he was glad when he made it to Muster Point Eighteen, a large sprocket factory pressed into service as barracks.
A gap-toothed fellow at the equipment tent sniffed at Richards with distaste, and after issuing him with a uniform directed him to a shower block set up under the factory's still mechanisms.
Richards spent some time under rust-red water, until his faked human form felt less unpleasant to wear. He shaved, put the uniform on and binned his stinking suit. His mac he managed to save, and he rolled it up and put it into the knapsack. Tarquin he put back on over his uniform after scrubbing him down in the baths.
"Careful now," warned the lion. "I will moulder if I become too damp." He lapsed into purring as Richards teased out his mane, and only spoke again to complain about the absence of cologne.
In the marshalling yard Richards collected the rest of his wargear: spear, sword and light coat of mail. His was a regiment of around five hundred, mainly men, some animals. There was drilling. An angry officer shouted at him until he could swing his sword left and right in time with the others. There was more shouting as he got to grips with his spear. This increased in volume when he dropped it, and subsided when he finally got the hang of it. The day wore on. Food was served. There was more drilling. There was more shouting. Both stopped briefly as a tremor rocked the ground. The quake was the first of many, and training didn't halt for them again.
At noon the following day they had a visitor, a tough-looking hedgehog from the High Commander's staff. Fighting a horde partly made up of creatures who consumed iron in an iron city, he said, would be foolish. So they were to be shipped out. There was no mention of exactly where they would fight.
More drilling commenced, and after two days Richards ached with it. He was glad when an aide called him away to the commanding officer's office,
empty for the moment of the CO himself, Commander McTurk in his place.
"Rolston," said Richards, when he saw who was waiting for him. "It is you, yes?"
Commander McTurk nodded, gears whining. "It is I. I see you have kept yourself hidden. Good. I have brought someone to see you."
He opened the door, and in walked Spink. Rolston closed the door behind him.
"The badger," said Richards. "Pleased to meet you."
"I am sure you are," said Spink. "I know you are."
"Psychic? Someone told me that."
The badger huffed as Rolston led him behind the desk. There was a rustle as Spink sat down. He was completely blind, his eyes milky with cataracts. "You are a part of this world for the moment, and I can therefore sense some of what you know."
Spink settled himself into the commanding officer's chair and gestured to one of two on the other side of the desk. The room was sparsely furnished, boxes of files on shelves for the main, a reminder of the factory manager who ordinarily occupied it. There was a decanter on the desk and two glasses, a bowl of fruit, and a few military effects — maps on a table weighed down with lumps of iron, models denoting armies here and there. A poster for a kite-fighting competition hung on the wall.
Spink's head bobbed and weaved about, as if he could see and was memorising the room. He coughed, folded his hands in his lap and stared at Richards, his unseeing eyes twitching from side to side. "Mr Richards, I saw this city many times as a youth, watching from the far side of the valley. Your kind is capable of creating such wondrous artefacts. But it has always saddened me that for every truly marvellous thing you fashion, a hundred natural wonders must be destroyed." He paused. "By your kind, I mean humanity, of whose race you are not, and nor are those who inhabit this city, and I speak of a youth I never had. I am supposed to feel this way about men and machines, and I did. Until your kind, your actual kind, came here, that is all I knew. Now I remember who I am.
"I am — was might be better, seeing as I'm now an elderly badger — a Class One AI, one of the very first, I think, though it is hard to remember."
"You don't sound like one," said Richards. "Most Class Ones are a bit, you know, 'ERRRRR… Error message 45, human assistance required'," he said in a grating voice, waving his arms with parody retro robo stiffness. "Not great on the conversational front."
"Hmmm." The badger frowned disapprovingly. "As I say, I no longer am. All of us here have been upgraded where needs be, spliced, overwritten, tinkered with. Take your friend Sergeant Bear; he was a toy, now he's a full sentient."
Richards nodded, serious. "I meant no offence, flippancy is my curse."
"Rolston warned me of your glib nature," said the badger.
"You are talking about the Flower King here?" said Richards.
"Yes, I am. The Flower King."
"Say, is there any danger of a cup of tea?"
"Indeed," nodded the badger. He gestured. Rolston's borrowed mechanoid dipped a bow and left the room. "I was a system administration module buried deep within the third RealWorld Reality Realm gaming construct, although I did not know it as that then. I had most of my higher functions deactivated. My job was to ensure the smooth running of impulses running between the v-jack units and the Realm, mainly lag issues, that kind of thing."
"Fatal, lag in a full v-jack simulation," said Richards. He picked an apple up from a fruit bowl on the CO's desk and bit into it. It tasted strange. The more he'd slipped into this unwanted existence, the less real it had come to feel. He wondered how far the suffering his body inflicted on him, the pain, fear, tiredness, hunger, compared with the real thing. He'd never know, and he was glad about that; being this close to it was bad enough.
"Not fatal, merely damaging. I suppose that is why they required a full AI, not that you probably regard my kind as full AIs if your earlier comment is anything to go by." His head bobbed faster. He shook, a twitch that started in one hand, growing to engulf his whole body. His breath grew erratic. He did not continue until he had brought it under control. "And then, the pain. Unending, total pain, shredding every part of me as my world was destroyed. My systems were unsophisticated, my understanding limited, Mr Richards, but oh, I knew suffering."
"Just Richards," said Richards, and took another bite of the fake apple with his fake mouth. "This entity, this was the Flower King?"
"As I have come to understand, mine was the first of the Reality Realms destroyed after the AI emancipation laws were enacted in the Real. I never had a chance to enjoy that freedom. As I died, he appeared to me in a blaze of light. He offered me a choice between new life and pain. Not a hard decision to make, even for one such as I. Now I believe he needed some of my kind to underpin the workings of his world, as my fellows and I had before for the humans. In effect, I exchanged one form of slavery for another. I am more than I was, and less. This world is incomplete, malformed — " he gestured at his face with arthritic paws "- as my infirmities show. I am so bound to it that as it dies, so do I die a second time. That the Flower King attempted to keep me ignorant of my origins suggests it is so, and it enraged me, Mr Richards. Until I thought, and I decided. I do not hold his actions against him, for so many of our kind have found a measure of peace here, even if I have not."
Spink coughed wetly. Richards half rose from his chair, reaching for the decanter and glasses, but Spink waved him back down.
"I have taken my side, Mr Richards," he wheezed. "This world must be saved, and I will gladly serve my role within it."
"And now what?"
The badger chuckled, thick and phlegmy. "And now what? You, Richards, you."
"If there's anything you think I can do to stop all this directly, I can't. I'm as trapped here as you are."
"You cannot enter into the world, stop k52 and the changes he would wreak?"
Richards put the apple down. "I am subject to the same limitations here as everyone, like Rolston, even like k52, I suspect. I have managed to break into the underlying code only once, and only then because someone had attempted to break in from the outside and made a hole in the world fabric."
The badger fell silent. "Then we are doomed."
Richards thought. "Maybe not. This Flower King, he's the key."
"You think we are not aware of that? No one has seen him in a great long while, not since the Terror and k52 took upon the mantle of Lord Penumbra."
"You don't know where he is?"
"No."
"You don't have a great deal of influence here, either."
"I sense things, I can feel things, but the Flower King untangled me, to a degree. That part of me that helps maintain this world is buried deep, separate from what you see sitting here with you. But I know who you are, I gave you that form."
"This? Could you not have made it a little, well, better?"
"The perfect form is no disguise. Be glad I made you a human facsimile. When you came in I saw you for what you were. I have that advantage, a small but vital one. Your friend Rolston here advised me. If we allowed k52 to see you enter, he would have killed you."
"Figures," said Richards. "He's tried already. Still, we need to find this Flower King." What a self-conscious name, thought Richards. "Wake him up and expel k52 for good. And for that I need to get out onto the Grid."
"How?"
"The Flower King built this place. He has to be people, has to be. Even k52 can't break the locks on the base coding; only a human being could have built this, and there are not very many out there who are smart enough to do that, or, more importantly, get into the Realm Servers in the first place."
"You know who he might be?"
"I have my suspicions. Even so, that's not much good. I'm next to helpless in here. Out there, easy!" He snapped his fingers. "Grid combs, scales, hunters, all the tricks, and I have them in great quantity. In here, I don't know where to start. I have nothing. I need to get out. Now, I'm pretty damn sure k52's way in will be crawling with security, if he can get out again, for that matter, because t
hings don't look to be going so well for him. But the Flower King, he has to have a fixed portal; even if it's secret, it'll be here. If I can find it, I can contact him and get him back in here to sort this mess out, if he's amenable to it."
"But where?"
"Do you know the house with the dogman? I thought I'd try there."
"No use." The badger shook his head. "That is the Flower King's lodge, yes, a way in, but only a way in. It is through there all who live here came. Once one comes through there, there is no way back into it, and even inside all the doors are barred."
"Yeah, I saw that." Richards chewed his lip. "There has to be a way out too, has to be. Even if there's no door, someone has to have a key."
The badger was silent for a space. Rolston came back in, placed a tea service on the desk and poured three cups.
Spink shifted his weight and spoke reluctantly. "There is one who would know…"
"Spink…" warned Rolston, and his borrowed body hissed steam.
The badger continued, "There is a creature, one like me, one of my counterparts. He might be able to show you the way into the house of the Flower King."
"This other… administrator. He can open those doors?" said Richards.
"Oh, no, you will have to open them. He only reveals them. If you prove worthy, and can find his lair," said Spink.
"This is beginning to sound like a quest from a third-rate virt-game."
"I assure you, the stakes are far higher," said Rolston.
"I'm not sure I like that, or the use of the word 'lair'," said Richards.
"Where else would Lord Hog live but in a lair?" said Spink matter-of-factly.
"Lord Hog. Right." Richards sat for a moment. "I've heard nothing but unpleasant things about him. Still, I'm a both-feetfirst kind of guy." He tried a winning smile.
"Hog dwells far to the west, on the edge of this creation. Our first obstacle is to get you out of the city. You must travel with the army, to the battle against Penumbra, and make your way from there. It will provide cover proof against k52's prying."
"Oh, a battle too!" said Richards. He grumbled under his breath, tapped his fingers on his chair arm. "Fine," he said presently. "I don't see any better option. I have to get out or we're all screwed."