The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  There was half an hour left before the bombs would begin to go off.

  He had never felt anger like this before, not really. He’d never needed to. His life was so secure, so well protected, that no opposition he had ever faced had threatened him enough for him to hate them. He had been vain enough to consider it a good quality of his own – a sense that his perspective was objective, untroubled by the emotional stakes others felt – rather than a perspective afforded to him by his situation. Hate was what people felt when something else had the power to destroy them. Nothing had ever fit this description for Ryan before. Now, faced with the knowledge that everything he’d taken for granted was going to be annihilated, it overwhelmed him. He hated the NCLC. He hated Maalik Moushian for destroying his city, and all the rest for enabling and empowering him to do so. He hated his father, for pushing the rebels further and further, for not just allowing them to leave, and he hated himself for doing so, and letting them win.

  He made his way back to the elevator, and pressed the button to return to the floor of his father’s office to rejoin Tafadzwa and the children. They needed to escape quickly. The shuttle elevator stations were back up and running and that meant that his father’s underground tunnel was now a viable escape route.

  Ryan strode out of the elevator to see that Tafadzwa Ali had nearly finished readying the children to leave. As she checked Vik’s rucksack, she looked over her shoulder at Ryan and said, ‘Is there somewhere safe we can go?’

  Ryan nodded curtly. ‘There’s a tunnel in the basement. It leads straight to Elevator Station Seven. It’s a long walk but it should be safe.’

  The group followed him back to the elevator.

  On arriving at the basement floor Ryan led them to a door with a keypad next to it. It was already ajar, and a great deal of noise was coming from the other side. Ryan pulled the door all the way open and looked through. What seemed like hundreds of people filled the poorly lit passageway, terrified and scrambling to get away from the bombs. More and more were streaming in from a linkway to the Council building.

  Someone got in and they let everyone know there was an escape route.

  Tafadzwa had already pushed past him, and was dragging the children with her. Vik looked up at Ryan, baffled. ‘Ryan, what’s happening?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Tafadzwa sharply, pulling at Vik’s hand. ‘This is our way out, come on.’ The boy stared at Ryan, scared and confused, as he disappeared into the sea of people.

  Ryan strode into the crowd. People began to recognize him and turn expectantly, as though he would have some way of saving them all.

  ‘Come on, let’s go!’ he yelled, waving everyone forward. For a moment, a look of disappointment flitted across their faces, but then the press of people became too much and they moved on, leaving him, Tafadzwa and the eight NCLC children to make their own way.

  The route to Elevator Station Seven was indeed long, running from the centre of the city to its perimeter. The distance eventually wore down even the most panicked evacuees, and after a while everyone had slowed to walking pace. With its entourage of children, and constant checks that they had not lost anyone, Ryan’s group slowed sooner than most.

  Then, from somewhere above them, came the muted, booming crump of a colossal explosion. People looked around uncertainly, glancing up at the tunnel roof for any signs of weakness. More blasts followed in quick succession, the low rumble coming from every direction. Everyone froze, uncertain of whether their next step could place them into an even more precarious position. The children huddled around Tafadzwa and Ryan, terrified. Ria Amirmoez’s affected stoicism melted away, and she held her bawling brother close.

  Ryan needed to say something, to try to pre-empt complete panic. Whatever authority he still held in the crowd’s minds might be all that stopped a stampede.

  ‘People, listen to me!’ His voice echoed down the tunnel. ‘You have to stay calm. You’ll be a danger to yourselves and those around you if you panic. We should be safe down here. You need to keep walking so we can all get away!’

  Steeling himself, Ryan continued to walk forward. Other people followed suit. The sounds of sobbing reverberated off the tunnel walls and ceiling.

  The next blast was louder and less muffled, accompanied by the crash of falling debris. Around the next corner, the cause became evident: the tunnel had caved in, breached by an explosion, completely blocking off the route to Elevator Station Seven. The air was thick with dust, and rubble littered the passage floor. The escaping workers stopped, horror-struck. What had happened to the people further ahead they couldn’t tell, but there was no way that they themselves could continue.

  Ryan felt someone push past him. He assumed it was Tafadzwa and continued to stare at the wreck of the tunnel, trying to figure out what to do next. Then the tunnel collapse released its hold on his attention and he realized that it was someone else, making their way to the front of the crowd. ‘Hey,’ he called out. The figure didn’t react. The people ahead of him, sensing that something was wrong, stepped back from the centre of the tunnel, clearing a path between Ryan and whoever it was had gone past.

  He called out again, and the person turned at last. Cropped hair, dark skin. The glowing pupils of someone wearing old monitor lenses. He recognized her from the wanted posters all over the network. It was the imprisoned fugitive, Zala Ulora.

  ‘You!’

  Zala looked back at him, surprised. ‘Councillor Granier!’ She seemed just as surprised as he was.

  Instantly, Ryan recoiled. This woman was dangerous – a wanted criminal. ‘How did you get out of prison?’

  The young woman shrugged with no animosity whatsoever. ‘The city’s imploding, Councillor. Prisons are only so secure right now.’

  ‘The place we’re currently imprisoned in looks pretty tight,’ said Tafadzwa from behind Ryan. ‘Does anyone have a plan to get us out of here?’

  With that, Zala turned back towards the cave-in, gesturing for Ryan to join her. ‘Now let’s both check out what kind of mess we’ve got into.’

  Ryan stared at the young woman. She was a suspected murderer to whom the creation of the Soucouyant virus had been publicly attributed, and yet she still stood in front of them, trying to get the crowd to safety. With no idea of what else to do, Ryan turned towards Tafadzwa and the children, muttered, ‘Wait here a minute,’ and then joined her.

  Together they edged forward, staring up at the collapsed tunnel roof. ‘We can’t go back,’ said Zala, muttering to herself. ‘The buildings on the other side aren’t in such good shape right now.’

  Ryan continued to peer upwards. ‘I wonder how much debris there is between us and the surface? The roof’s only a few feet below the road above. We might be able to dig our way up out of here and get to the elevator station along the surface.’

  Zala walked up to the pile of wreckage, then grabbed hold and climbed up the collapsed soil and concrete towards the ceiling. After making sure her footing was secure, she pulled her right arm back and then thrust it up into the ruined roof. Ryan watched as she scrabbled around for a few moments, then pulled down, bringing with her a chunk of broken cement. Light streamed in from the hole she had created, catching the motes of dust still in the air. She jumped back down, shaking out her hand. In places, the skin had peeled away, revealing metallic silver underneath. ‘Good call, Councillor,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you hated bio-augs?’ said Ryan.

  ‘This?’ Zala looked down at her chipped hand, eyebrow raised, as though she was checking her nails. ‘It’s grown on me. If we make it out of here alive, I’ll tell you how I caught the Soucouyant virus from the thing that made it and still got out the other side. Now step back, Councillor.’

  And before Ryan could ask more, Zala had clambered back up and resumed pulling at the debris. As chunks of wreckage came away, a sizeable hole started to form.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘If we’re going to get out of here, we’re going to need some help from the
se folks: digging out of this place and making a ramp. That way, we can go back up top and get to the elevator.’

  ‘You hear that everyone?’ yelled Ryan, turning to the rest, who had begun to crowd around them. ‘We’ve got to construct a ramp up to the roof so we can get out of here and make our way on the surface.’

  People began to press forwards, hesitantly at first – the woman they were going to assist had been branded as a serial killer by the newscasts – but Ryan’s words gave them hope.

  They still follow me, even though I could have opened the gates before and prevented all this.

  The office workers from the GeniSec Tower and Council building, spurred on by fear for their lives, joined Zala in pulling at the debris. Ryan sent Alice Amirmoez a quick message – whatever role she’d played in the city’s destruction, he couldn’t leave her wondering whether her children were okay. He then stepped forward towards the labouring throng.

  Zala turned and looked at him. ‘I saw what they did to your leg, Councillor. I wouldn’t blame you if you sat this one out.’

  Ryan shook his head. ‘I want to help.’

  He needed to do something. In the end, it didn’t hurt that much.

  Eventually, the last piece of rubble in the ramp was placed. People began to pull themselves up into the street, reaching down to help the rest out of the wrecked tunnel.

  As Ryan gathered Tafadzwa and the NCLC children to climb the ramp, he realized that he could hear renewed wailing and fitful sobs coming from those who were back on the surface. Heart in his stomach, Ryan made his way up the ramp and looked out.

  The whole Alexandria district was burning. The air was hot to the point of being suffocating, thick with dust and smoke. The buildings were near to collapse. Huge black remains of what appeared to be fallen pieces of the solar membrane littered the ground. One especially large array of solar panels was part sunk into the ground near the head of the ramp; it must have been that which had caused the collapse of the tunnel. They had emerged into a vision of hell: billowing plumes of black smog illuminated red and yellow by the inferno.

  Ryan looked around at the ruins of Alexandria for what seemed like an age.

  ‘Can you see the elevator?’ came Zala’s voice from below ground, all but drowned out by the roar of flames and distant explosions.

  Ryan shook his head. ‘No,’ he yelled, ‘the smoke’s too thick!’

  The contacts in Zala’s eyes glowed. ‘This way,’ she said, leading the rest of the crowd up the ramp and out of the tunnel.

  The trail of people, hundreds strong, snaked through the burning wreck of a district. Alexandria must have been a specific target for the INEDs, Ryan thought bitterly. To some, it had seemed a cesspit of the rich and privileged, but no one could deny that it had been a beautiful place. Now it was a great, mortal wound in the city’s side.

  ‘The NCLC really hated the people who lived here, huh?’ said Tafadzwa, her eyes wide as she led the children through the wreckage.

  ‘They hated that some people got to live here while they were born amid crime, poverty and decay,’ said Ryan. ‘I was born here. Most of the people who made the decision to keep them and all the other residents of Naj-Pur trapped in the city along with the Soucouyant virus were born here. Alexandria became a symbol for what they were put through. It’s easy to bring yourself to destroy a symbol, a reprehensible idea; much easier than to kill people or destroy homes and livelihoods.’

  He’d done the same. It wasn’t long ago that Ryan had confronted his father over the quarantine and let himself be persuaded that the opportunity to reduce the Soucouyant’s global death toll by several orders of magnitude justified the imposition on the people of New Cairo.

  ‘That sounds pretty damn contemptible,’ said Tafadzwa.

  ‘I don’t …’ Ryan paused. He understood. The inequality people like those who had made up the NCLC saw when they looked at Alexandria was real. It emerged from decades of economic and cultural trends all interacting, entrenching themselves in politics and business and media. This systemic inequality had pervaded the mind of the SecForce trooper who’d assumed Ava to be a violent criminal.

  But whatever people saw when they looked at it, Alexandria was also a place where families had made their homes, where children had been raised. It was where Ryan and Babirye had raised their children. Ryan didn’t know whether or not this burning world of his existed alongside the inequality or because of it. He didn’t know if gradual evolutionary change was less than what those suffering poverty and discrimination deserved. But men with bombs had taken his home and killed untold hundreds, thousands of people. With the Soucouyant and the old regime, or with the collapse of New Cairo and freedom to leave, it seemed the price was the same: nothing but misery and death.

  ‘Whatever their goals, however I feel about their ideology, I only hold contempt for the people who did this, yes.’ The dark voice in the back of his mind had never sounded more like his own. He hated that voice, too.

  Zala had dropped back in the crowd and was now walking beside Ryan, Tafadzwa and the children. She looked down at her glinting artificial arm.

  An explosion echoed out somewhere in the distance. Zala stopped, eyes unfocused, concentrating on some invisible computer interface, her jaw slack. ‘What is it?’ asked Ryan.

  ‘They wouldn’t—’ murmured Zala, her voice trembling. ‘Councillor Granier, I’m not sure what I just saw, but I think a bomb took out an elevator station in Naj-Pur. The tracks and shafts up to the surface are gone.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper of disbelief. ‘They’re destroying the elevators.’

  Ryan’s eyes widened. He wheeled around to face the others. ‘We need to go NOW!’

  They ran, walked and stumbled as fast as they could. Children who couldn’t keep up, the old and the injured were carried, though this only served to slow them further. The pain in Ryan’s leg flared back up again. It was vicious, and increased with every step, but it didn’t matter. To stop would mean the end. All around him were properties he recognized, now in ruins. The cracked, blackened ribcage of a school-friend’s house, the residence of some supporter of his reduced to rubble.

  Finally, wearily, they reached Elevator Station Seven. Surrounded by dozens of hastily abandoned cars, it was bustling with activity, the elevators firing up and down their tracks at their fastest and noisiest, in the attempt to get as many people up to the surface as possible. Ryan and his group of workers and evacuees wove between the vehicles and made their way inside the building, and into pandemonium.

  The place was packed to the walls. Every one of the twelve platforms was crowded with desperate people waiting their turn, overwhelming the abandoned security and immigration control stations in panic. The indicator boards showed that the massive shuttle elevators were on their way down and operating at maximum speed, but Ryan shuddered to think how many cycles it would take to clear the queues. Looking about him, he hoped against hope that most of the area’s population had already escaped. However, he’d seen the devastation outside. He couldn’t help but wonder what the final body count would be.

  A large, balding man in a security uniform squeezed along the waiting line, baton in hand. ‘No pushing, or we’ll leave you shitbags here for the bombs!’ he said. Then he spotted Ryan’s group and hurried over to them, pushing through the bustle. ‘Councillor! Good to see that you’re okay. We’ve got a SecForce explosives crew checking the tracks overhead for bombs. In the meantime, we can move you and your party to the front of the line and get you out of here!’

  His name tag said ‘Fernando Vinter’. He was drenched in sweat and was gasping for air.

  Ryan’s first instinct was to refuse. But he had children with him. He couldn’t jeopardize their safety simply in order to indulge his own moral principles. He looked again at the thousands of people waiting. The line for evacuation was already out of the doors and into the exposed street. The most important thing was to ensure that the children reached the surface before whatever hidde
n devices there might be detonated, trapping them all with no escape.

  ‘Put them on the first available shuttle,’ he instructed the guard, indicating Zala, Tafadzwa and the frightened children. ‘I’ll take my turn later. A captain must go down with his ship and all.’

  Fernando Vinter looked dumbfounded. ‘… All right, sir, if you say so.’

  Zala shook her head. ‘I’m waiting my turn too. Someone else can have my seat.’

  Vinter stared at her for a while, as though he recognized her, but said nothing. He nodded, and led the others off to the front of the queue. A light on the wall went green as the next shuttle elevator slid to a halt at the platform edge. The doors slid open in front of Tafadzwa and the children and, after casting a worried glance back at Ryan and Zala, they stepped inside the wide carriage. The three hundred others allowed through the security barriers scrambled on as quickly as possible, the doors hissed shut and the shuttle left, lifting vertically along its track within the elevator shaft. Ryan’s gaze followed it as it raced away towards the surface faster than he’d ever seen the elevators go before, wrenched upwards by powerful electromagnets. One by one, green lights on the other platforms indicated more shuttles arriving.

  Minute by agonizing minute, the crowd slowly began to diminish, dwindling from a terrified mass of people to a few hundred. At last, it was Ryan’s turn. He stepped into the next available carriage, with Zala alongside him.

  ‘I hate these things,’ murmured Ryan, as they sat and strapped themselves in. The seats were uncomfortable, but he was finally able to take the weight off his leg. ‘Whenever they set off, I feel like throwing up.’

  Zala looked at him, a smile flickering across her grime-covered face. ‘Please try not to. The only clothes I have right now are the ones I’m wearing. Technically I am still a fugitive from custody.’

  The shuttle lurched away from the platform and the councillor’s knuckles whitened.