by Oisin McGann
Cleo was in the door, holding it open, a powerful revolver in one hand, while Smith kicked and shoved the two day controllers back outside. Once they were out, Cleo slammed the door, letting the lock click back into place. Smith slung the bag off his back and took out a tube of denceramic resin. He squirted some all the way around the edges of the door; within two minutes it would be sealed tight. It would take an industrial laser to open it. With Cleo keeping her gun on the controllers, Sol crossed the windowless room to the only other way out – the double doors out to the roof, where all the antennae were mounted. He opened it and peered out. If anybody was going to force their way in, it would most likely be through here.
A winding ramp balcony led from the door up to the roof above. Keeping below the lip of the balcony, he scurried up the curve of the ramp until he could see both the door of the control room and the floor of the roof. Most of the control room’s transmissions went out over the antennae array. If it was attacked, the broadcast could be stopped. It was his job to protect it for as long as he could.
He hunkered down, pulled his bag off his shoulder and unzipped it. It was still dark, with a weak glow filtering through from the snow-covered dome. He took a set of goggles from the bag and put them on, pressing a switch on the side. They powered up, and he could see the world clearly, the light enhanced by the goggles’ lowlight scope. They were Maslow’s; the Clockworkers would have the same gear. It was cold up here – he could see his breath steam in the chilly air. He pulled up his hood, leaned back into the shadow of a solar panel and waited.
Smith walked up to the two controllers. He held out a data chip.
‘Put this in, download it to every screen,’ he told them. ‘Loop it and let it run. Don’t try and fake it – I know the system. Don’t reach for any alarms. We don’t need you alive.’
Cleo cocked the hammer on her pistol to punctuate the threat. She fervently hoped they would do as they were told – there was no way she would be able to shoot anybody. But the controller obeyed; faced with crazy people with guns, he was less concerned with calling their bluff and more worried about holding onto the contents of his bladder. He slotted the data chip into the panel in front of him and touched some buttons.
The woman was more defiant. She tried to out-stare Cleo.
‘Anything you do, we’ll undo later. You know that?’ she said sourly.
Cleo smirked.
‘Then you’re going to have your hands full.’
Throughout the city people were setting out for work, their movement pumping power into the Machine. The full day shift of trams began their clockwise and anti-clockwise routes around the streets, their weight and the weight of the crowds on the daily commute pushing down on pumps, pistons and shock-absorbers, turning flywheels that spun generators that converted the kinetic energy to electricity. Transformers in substations transferred the various power feeds into the central circuit that powered the Heart Engine. And the Heart Engine, its generators suspended in friction-free electromagnetic fields, fed all that power back out to the city’s most vital industries: water supplies, food processing, sewage treatment and ventilation. The Machine drew on this power, awakening to the new day.
All through the city, webscreens started to flicker. And then they went white. A whining buzz announced the speakers were being turned right up, something that only happened for emergency announcements. Everywhere, people conditioned to soak up whatever information the media threw at them turned to watch the screens. A man’s face appeared, his once-dark skin pale from some unspecified pain, and from a life spent beyond the dome’s daylight. His face was lined and his eyes hard – he had the look of a weakened and weary predator.
‘My name is Sergeant Elijah Osman Maslow, of the Fifth Unit of the Covert Operations Group – a group most of you know as the Clockworkers. On the orders of my commanders I have murdered fifty-six people, and have killed many more in acts of sabotage designed to look like accidents. All of these operations were ordered by Vincent Schaeffer, of the Schaeffer Corporation, and by men and women like him. Their sole purpose was to maintain absolute control of the Machine, even if it meant risking the lives of every person in it.’
While Maslow’s recording played, all the information that Smith had collected over the years on the accidents he had investigated was downloaded to individual hard-drives across the city. But this was something for later, to nurture the seeds of rage that were being planted as he spoke.
As Maslow began to relate the details of operations he had carried out, more and more people stopped to listen. They stopped walking, stopped climbing stairs, using elevators and escalators; they stopped moving. The drivers of the trams rolled to a halt near the huge adscreens to hear what was being said. People in the pedal stations stopped cycling; those in the foot stations stopped pumping on the stair-climbers. Standing motionless in the dark streets and half-lit buildings, the city’s inhabitants ceased feeding power to the Heart Engine.
Solomon, who could not see the control room’s monitors, watched the city instead. He had never seen it so still. A noise reached his ears over the quiet murmur from below. A mechanical whirring creaking. He looked up to see one of the gantry cranes sliding along the grid of stout girders that hung beneath the dome. He shouted a warning to Cleo and Smith. The Clockworkers were coming.
‘Look at them,’ Smith said softly, staring at the monitors, which showed various streets in the city centre. ‘They’re finally listening. We’ve woken them up.’
Sol kept himself hidden beneath the solar panel. A rope dropped down from the crane as it glided overhead. First one, followed by a second, then a third man started to slide down the rope. They were all wearing body armour. He took aim with the shotgun. His hands were shaking even worse now. Once he started shooting, they would zero in on him. Maslow had said to expect snipers in the cranes.
‘This is it,’ Smith was saying. ‘We’re finally going to turn this thing around.’
Sol steadied the gun, sighted on the first man as he descended towards the roof. He was only ten metres away – silhouetted against the dome. Sol pulled the trigger.
His shot caught the man in the hip, taking a chunk out of the Clockworker’s harness, knocking the rope loose. But the man managed to hold on with his hands and feet. Even as the report from the gunshot was fading from Sol’s ears, bullets started to impact around him. He kept his nerve, aimed and fired at the second man on the rope. The blast caught his target square in the chest. His armour saved him, but his hands released their grip on the rope and he crashed down onto the man below him. They both plummeted down to the roof and landed with a double crunch. Sol fired two more shots up at the crane itself, to try to deter the sniper, and then made a run for the control-room door.
Cleo was standing, firing her pistol up at the crane, when Sol came pounding down the ramp. He was almost at the door, when a sudden blast of heat and debris hit her from behind, throwing her forward. She screamed as she saw Sol lifted off his feet and pitched over the balcony wall towards the ground far below.
Her ears hurt from the blast, and the control room was full of dust and smoke. The door Smith had sealed was a ragged hole in the wall; Smith himself was lying in the middle of the floor, blood leaking from his ears. The two controllers were also unconscious. Cleo crawled towards Smith, lifting her gun as figures in grey fatigues and body armour rushed into the room. One of them kicked the weapon out of her hand and stamped her head down against the floor, her cheek slamming against the tiles.
‘Make sure of the other one,’ a voice commanded. ‘I don’t want any loose ends. Christ, did you have to do so much damage? The place is a wreck!’
Cleo coughed in the dust, tears streaming down her face. They should have had more time. A man had his knee on her back, pulling her arms behind her and cuffing her wrists.
‘It’s going to be hard to get them out past the police,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you want to keep them alive?’
‘Just make sure the
boy’s dead first.’
Cleo craned her neck to watch as one of the men walked across to the balcony doorway and peered over the wall. He leaned further over, looking right and left.
‘He’s gone! He must have fallen. Don’t see the body, though.’
‘Find it.’
Sol lay stunned for a moment, wondering why he wasn’t falling to his death. He opened his eyes and found himself looking straight up the outside of the Communications Hub. One of the lenses in the goggles was cracked, but they were still working. He was lying on a gold-coloured solar panel, which was just level enough to prevent him sliding off into empty space. But only just. The shotgun was lying by his side, but when he tried to grab it, it slipped away from his hand and dropped off the edge. He didn’t hear it land.
The panel was two metres square, and trembled when he moved. The flimsy construction was one of an array that stood out on thin arms from the wall of the building. They descended the wall in a spiral that complimented the architecture’s helical structure. The arm holding this panel creaked ominously.
He could hear men’s voices from the control room above him. It would not take them long to check over the balcony wall and find him. His first instinct was to help Cleo and Smith, but he would be no good to them against a team of Clockworkers – their best chance was for him to escape, to survive. How did the Clockworkers get here before Mercier? He had to get away and find some honest cops. The gantry crane was just out of sight beyond the roof. He had to move now.
As he shifted his weight, the panel tilted further and he only just grabbed the edge of it in time as he flailed with his legs for purchase. Gasping desperately, he stretched out and his feet found the arm of the panel alongside, and he reached out for the aluminium frame from which the arms jutted, and pulled himself under it. One glance down told him he should keep his eyes to the wall, his stomach attempting to hide up between his lungs.
‘He’s gone! He must have fallen,’ he heard someone shout. ‘Don’t see the body, though.’
Dangling precariously, he started to work his way along like an ape, swinging from one arm to the other, following the sloping curve of the frame around the building, struggling under each panel arm that blocked his way. Minutes later he was round the other side of the building, his arms feeling as if somebody was trying to pull them out of his shoulders.
He was perplexed to find a rope dangling out in front of him. Looking up, he realized it was the very same one that the Clockworkers had come down on. The shooters in the crane could still not see him beneath the solar panels. Two floors down, and less than three metres over, was a walkway connecting the building to the crater wall.
‘Ah, nuts!’ he grunted. Letting go with one hand, he stretched out, grabbed the rope and pulled it towards him. Bracing his feet against the wall, he shoved himself out, but as soon as he released his other hand from the frame he started to slide, and the rope started to burn his hands. He tried to squeeze harder, but the plastic rope was thin – impossible to grip. A scream erupted from his mouth as he forced his hands to clench tight, feeling the rope tear through his skin. He fell too fast, but his push had sent him out over the walkway, and he landed hard on its floor, his backside taking most of the impact. The automatic in his jacket pocket fell out and skittered towards the door. He lunged after it, but just as he did so, he saw a man and woman through the glass door, running across the foyer towards him.
Sol staggered to his feet, wincing as he pushed off the ground with his burned hands. His bottom felt as if he might have broken something, but he willed himself on, breaking into a run. The door slid open behind him, and he barely made it to the end of the walkway and round its support pillars as silenced gunshots sent bullets buzzing past him.
And so he found himself running again, his hands pressed to his sides to try to ease the intense pain in his palms and fingers. Down the empty promenade balcony he sprinted, darting past shocked individuals staring at the now-empty screens. Finding an entrance to a stairwell, he pushed through the door and scrambled up the steps. Behind him, from beyond the doorway, a taunting voice called out to him.
‘Where are you going, Sol? There’s nowhere left to run!’
He was halfway up the flight when the lights went out, and he was enveloped in darkness.
Section 23/24: End
THE MAN HIT Cleo hard across the face with the back of his hand, splitting her lip. She fell against the dead instrument panels, hurting her ribs. Getting to her feet again, she spat blood and glared defiantly at the Clockworker.
‘How many others are involved?’ he asked again.
‘It was just us,’ she rasped. ‘That was all it took.’
‘Where’s the boy gone?’
‘I don’t know.’
He slapped her again, snapping her head to the side. She sniffed as she felt blood drip down her left nostril. She wiped the drop away, determined not cry.
‘Where were you going to go, after you got away?’
‘We didn’t expect to get away,’ she said, with a tight throat.
‘Where’s Maslow?’
‘He’s dead. He died of gunshot wounds after he made the recording.’
Off to one side, Vincent Schaeffer was standing in front of the blank monitors. His plump face with its long white sideburns was burning with suppressed fury.
‘Can’t you get anything?’ he snapped.
The man sitting at the desk was one of the day controllers that Smith had forced out of the door before he’d sealed it. He was trying to restore any kind of function to the banks of equipment, so that they could counteract some of the damage done by Maslow’s broadcast.
‘The explosion knocked out a lot of the electronics; I’m doing my best,’ he retorted. ‘What was all that about anyway, sir? That guy made some serious charges.’
‘Shut up! Just do your goddamned job and get us back online.’
The controller had one of the panels open, trying to close some of the fuses. There were a few clicks, and then some of monitors fizzed into life. They were displaying the feed from the cameras on the streets in the city centre, showing people milling around, shouting and arguing.
‘Christ, they’re still there,’ Schaeffer growled. ‘This is turning into a goddamned mess.’
As the power from the city’s movement dwindled and died, the Heart Engine’s movement started to stutter and become erratic. Without external power from the Machine, the Heart Engine was slowing down. The city’s lights dimmed and flickered. Still, the crowds did not move. They waited in front of the screens, waiting for more, wanting answers. This sudden stall was more than the damaged, abused Machine could withstand. Its batteries holding onto the scantest electrical charge, the Machine’s Heart Engine ground to a halt. Every electric light in the city went out. Every electrical device went dead. With the dome covered, there was no sunlight for the solar panels to supplement the power. No electricity to open the valves allowing water to flow through the hydroelectric generators. Even the majority of the gas lamps fizzled out, their pumps dead. Here and there, battery-powered emergency generators hummed into life, but their temporary existence barely registered in the dark, quiet city.
In the control room of the Communications Hub, everybody was working their jaws, putting their hands to their ears, puzzled by a strange new sensation. Cleo felt it like a yawning emptiness. For the first time in her life, there was complete and utter, aching silence. The ever-present rumble that underscored their lives – the sound of the city – was gone.
‘Good God.’ Schaeffer stood on the balcony, gaping out at the black landscape before him. ‘The . . . the fools. The goddamned fools! They’ve let the Heart Engine die.’
He looked at the four Clockworkers who stood around him, then at the controller staring impotently at the blank screens.
‘For God’s sake, we need to talk to them! There’ll be panic . . . chaos! Get us online before they go berserk. We have to . . . we have to get it started again . . . We
can’t . . . There’ll be riots.’ He faltered, looking from one face to the next.
‘There’s nothing we can do.’ The controller sighed resignedly. ‘We have no power.’
Glaring over at Cleo, Schaeffer snarled like an animal.
‘You stupid, stupid bitch! You’ve . . . Do you know what you’ve done? We’re about to be made extinct because of your goddamn mindless . . . stupid stunt. We’re all going to freeze!’
Cleo ignored him, gazing dispassionately at the men around her. None of them seemed to know what to do. Brushing past the one who had been interrogating her, she walked out to the balcony. Schaeffer was crumbling.
‘Some of us can survive. Maybe a few years . . . maybe,’ he babbled to himself. ‘We have the weapons, we can fight off anybody who tries to stop us. Seal off a small section, stockpile the last of the food. There has to be something we can use as fuel . . . things to burn. If we can find enough things to burn . . .’
All his power and influence came from his control of the Machine. That had changed now. Cleo stood beside him and looked out over the city. She felt unnaturally calm, as if she were waiting for something she knew would happen, but she had no idea what or when. There was nothing for her to do but wait. Beside her, Schaeffer began to hyperventilate.
The goggles needed some kind of light to pick up and enhance, but in the stairwell there was almost none. Probing with outstretched hands through the darkness, Sol found the door at the top of the stairs and pushed it open, wincing as his shredded hands left blood on the handle. For a moment he was silhouetted against the faint light outside, and a bullet smacked off the door frame by his head. He ducked through, hearing footsteps hurrying up the stairs after him. He closed the door behind him, hoping that the darkness would slow down his pursuers, and ran on.
Sprinting headlong through the gloom, he looked around, disorientated. Out over the rail to his left, the city was cloaked in black, as if covered in shadows, and it took him a minute or two to realize what had happened. Everything had stopped moving. Ash Harbour was dying.