by Tara Basi
The silence lingered, and for a moment, Zip feared that Q had gone. His hearty laugh broke the silence, and Zip breathed again.
“Nothing’s ever easy with you. Damn, it’ll be like old times. Might be fun. When?”
Zip shivered. Part of her hoped he’d refuse. “Tomorrow, sunrise.”
“Take the Pilgrim bus, make an excuse and get off about ten klicks down the road. I’ll find you.”
Zip couldn’t stop from trembling at the image of herself standing by that old road, alone in the wastes. “Thanks.”
Zip stiffened. The wall wasn’t far away now. She hoisted her kitbag higher on her back and prepared to disembark from the little train. The laughter and obvious joy of her fellow travellers hadn’t lifted her mood. All the way from the Archway, they’d done nothing but babble fatuously about the Orb, as though it were some teenage pop idol and they were all school children. None of them questioned anything about it: its purpose, its intentions, what its arrival meant. No one blamed it for the wars. The carnage, the Mutinous AIs and the old-god dead in Rome, Jerusalem, everywhere, were never mentioned. The Orb was there to be worshiped; it was a Pilgrim’s duty and that’s all they wanted to do. Their nakedness only seemed to emphasise the banality of their discussions, as if they were babies babbling in a crèche. Zip stepped onto the platform and remembered that she was naked too; she was a Pilgrim. We can’t all be Pilgrims? Can we?
She followed the crowd from the train platform, down a tunnel and into the changing rooms. Keeping to the shadows, she donned her assault armour and covered it over with a suitably battered, bright yellow hazard suit. Its face mask was badly scratched. Unless someone pressed their face to hers, they wouldn’t see what she was wearing underneath. Exiting the shadows, she ran to catch up with the others, who were already halfway to the waiting bus. The kitbag still felt heavy and cut into the soft skin of her shoulders. She grabbed a seat near the front. It was crazy and frightening, but she was planning to get off very soon, and in the middle of nowhere.
Once the bus was moving, Zip began to take in her barren surroundings. There was nothing ahead but fine grain rubble, neatly raked. Nothing alive, no birds in the sky, not a weed to break the colourless monotony of the landscape. Zip turned awkwardly in her bulky, yellow radiation suit to look back along the ancient bus, past a few excited Pilgrims, to stare at the wall, slowly shrinking away as if it were sinking into the sand. It would be many hours down the road before the impossibly large structure completely vanished from view.
After twenty minutes, reluctantly, Zip reckoned it was time to get off the rattling, old crate. She jumped up from her seat and slammed her fist on the dashboard. “Stop, I’ve got to go back.”
The startled driver slammed on the brakes so hard the bus slithered across the tarmac like a snake before coming to a halt in a cloud of burning rubber. Startled Pilgrims hung onto the seats in front.
“Orb’s sake, are you crazy?” The driver’s muffled shout escaped softly through the yellow hood of his radiation suit. His face was turning orange. She worried the old man might have a heart attack.
“Take me back,” Zip insisted, praying he wouldn’t.
The driver got his breath back. “You get the return bus from Nottingham. You’ll die out here.”
“Let me off! I need to go back.”
“Girly, it’s too dangerous. You listen to the driver.” One of the Pilgrims had come up behind Zip.
Zip ignored the advice, grabbed her bag and started pushing at the old bus door.
“Stop that! You’ll break it!” the driver shouted, as he pulled at a handle on the dashboard. “Get off, you mad bitch!”
As soon as the door swung open, Zip jumped down onto the road.
“Be careful, dear. Watch out for spiders. Stay on the road,” a Pilgrim shouted after her.
Before Zip could even acknowledge the frightening warning or think about changing her mind, the door slammed shut and the rickety vehicle accelerated away, belching soot and puffing little clouds of black smoke. She was left utterly alone. Her Headgear was completely dead except for Peter’s app, which insisted Quattro was twenty klicks away somewhere to the northeast.
Zip dropped her bag and fell to her knees. What had she done? What if Q didn’t come? She was a tiny, yellow-suited figure on the side of an empty, black stripe that sliced across the endless gravel before disappearing over the horizon. Another bus wouldn’t be coming this way till nightfall. The sun cleared the horizon and started creeping up across a cloudless sky.
The Pilgrim’s warning about the spiders wouldn’t leave her mind. The tiny machines wandered this part of the wastes, patrolling the gravel. Virtually invisible hunters. A single bite would kill her. Not even the heavy assault armour that she was wearing under the radiation suit would stop the microscopic needle of one of the little killers. They were attracted to movement. Usually they stayed off the tarmac, where they could be more easily spotted. Usually. Zip got to her feet, grabbed her bag and moved to the centre of the road, nervously scanning for anything scuttling towards her. It was a terrible predicament: if she kept scanning for the miniscule monsters, her movements might call them to her; if she didn’t, one might creep up on her anyway. Only a couple of hours walk away was the wall and safety. Her body wanted to run back and forget about Quattro.
It would be getting hotter. The old bus had some clunky AC. Out here, on the rubble plain, the temperature would hit forty-five centigrade in a couple of hours. Then her cheerful yellow suit would cook her alive, as if she were wrapped in foil and sitting in an oven. The old suit was only camouflage to get her on the Pilgrim’s bus. Underneath, the Quartermaster-supplied assault armour was radiation-proof. Taking off the baggy overall and boxy helmet on her own would require a lot of jiggling about. Energetic movement was too big a risk; she’d wait until the pain of being cooked cancelled out the spider terror. Right now, it was still cool.
She searched the desolation for a sign. All around, the bleak landscape stretched out like an old, crocheted, grey shawl. The grainy ripples of small undulations contrasted with thick shadows, like rough old wool, loosely intertwined. It wasn’t soft to the touch, all of it unyielding and sharp. She knew there were miniature horrors in the shadows, lying as still as dead metal, waiting for the slightest vibration to set them scurrying towards the source.
Resting on her haunches, Zip tried to suppress her mounting panic and stay still. The Quartermaster would come. He’d never let her down; it was always the other way around. She stared fixedly at her yellow gloved hands and remembered how she used to be, before going on a mission. First thoughts were about the objectives, strategy, tactics, what might happen and how she’d respond. It was methodical, unemotional. It worked then because she expected to die. A fact of war, she was probably not coming back. So there really was nothing to worry about. New-found youth had gifted her many wonderful things, and new fears. Before this was all finished with, Zip guessed she’d have to get over her fear of dying again.
A mechanical whirring startled her. For a moment, she thought a bus was about to turn her into roadkill. She leapt to one side and looked up and down the empty road, then skyward in time to see a gyrocopter coming in to land. It was old, pre-God War and fragile. It landed clumsily on the road just ten metres away, sending up a billowing cloud of dust specks of black tarmac from the road and grey gravel grit from everywhere else. The Quartermaster jumped off the simple two-seater machine and ran towards Zip, brandishing a vicious-looking knife. Before Zip could react, he’d spun her around and sliced through the radiation suit from head to sternum. He wasn’t being particularly careful. The tip of the blade rasped out a horrible grating sound as it raced along her armoured spine. Ripping away the yellow covering, Q grabbed Zip’s elbow and dragged her back towards the trembling gyro, spitting grey smoke and sparks, like a tethered baby dragon. He bundled her into the rear seat. She strapped herself in as he briefly bumped his forehead to hers to establish a Headgear comms link. The gyro jumped into the sk
y as fast as it had landed. Moments later, they were speeding away from the road, heading northeast a few hundred metres above the ground.
The flimsy gyro whined, rattled and squealed as they skimmed across the desolation.
“Eighteen klicks, straight ahead, then we’ll have to set down and search on foot. I don’t have a tight fix,” Zip said through Headgear, avoiding the need to scream over the painful roar of their transport.
“Foot? Shit! You tooled?”
The Quartermaster’s resigned response and question were like whispers deep in her head. Zip patted her bag just to be sure. “Course I’m armed.”
Q grunted and on they flew, passing out of the bulldozed zone into the wastes proper: a rolling moonscape of craters, ruined buildings, lifeless pools, diseased-looking weeds and stunted shrubs. Thankfully, the armour scrubbed everything before she got a breath. It was as well it did: the air was saturated with toxins and engineered diseases.
As far as the eye could see, there were only shades of black and shitty brown with snaking veins of sickly green. It was all barren and dead, though it wasn’t empty. The whole area was awash with old mechanicals, still hunting for a kill, and she and Q were easy targets on their flying bicycle.
“Won’t the mechs try and shoot this old bird out of the sky?”
“We’re too small and lightly armed to waste missiles on. Different story when we land.”
It was a temporarily reassuring answer. Zip tried to relax and enjoy the ride.
“There?” Q asked, pointing at a ruin that still had a right angle of high brick walls partly enclosing an open, flat space. It offered some cover and the source of Quattro’s signal was somewhere close. Zip grunted in the affirmative and Q dropped the gyro like a stone.
“Jesus and the Tramp,” she squealed.
“Don’t you blaspheme, girl. You know I hate that damn Pilgrim talk. And I ain’t got no fuel to waste on any fancy flying,” Q hollered and waited till the last minute to slow their descent and land with a backbone crunch that forced a long hiss of air out of Zip’s mouth.
A weak-kneed Zip climbed off the gyro. She rested her hands on her thighs and got her breath back before asking, “This thing’s hardly stealthy; aren’t you worried we’ll be spotted?”
“By who? No one’s looking. There’s nothing out here. Except maybe your mysterious friend, and crazy ordnance,” Q said, busy checking a lethal-looking assault rifle before swinging it over his shoulder.
“You’re wanted. They’re looking for you,” Zip snapped, then winced when she remembered she’d turned Q in.
The Quartermaster gave her a hard stare, which left her in no doubt that he’d just thought the same thing. “I didn’t come through no official gate. You think I’m crazy? I got my own ways. I told you, we trade with people up north. Can’t go into London for supplies, can I?”
Zip didn’t answer. She removed her own rifle from her bag and checked it over before hoisting it onto her back. She’d forgotten how heavy these things were. It reminded her of how weak she’d become. Even in her sixties, she could run around carrying five times this weight. The old Quartermaster looked more physically capable than Zip felt. It was irritating.
“Why do you even stay in London? Northampton’s got to be better than Sediment Town.”
“Town’s home, and I’m going nowhere till that damn Orb’s busted to hell. Only reason I’m here, and it’s time you told me exactly who we’re looking for?”
“It’s complicated. Not sure myself. Let’s find her first. That way,” Zip answered, pointing east.
The Quartermaster grunted. For a moment, Zip thought he might turn back, maybe leave her out here. Instead, he pulled out a cigar, rolled it between his fingers for a while and then slipped it back in his pocket. “Her? Fine, but we ain’t flying out of here till I know everything you do. Stay close. Suit on deep scan. Crazy machines everywhere. Not like the south coast. No one controls them anymore, not even Industries.”
Zip flipped on the suit’s long-range scan and started hunting out targets. It couldn’t pick up anything as small as the metal spiders in the no-man’s gravel land, but if it was squirrel sized or bigger, the suit should spot it long before it became a threat. And then they’d detour around. Fighting was a last resort. If she could find Quattro and get close enough, Peter’s app would let her make contact.
As they moved forward, the suit was constantly picking up targets, mostly dormant or too far away to be a bother. Others, more menacing, they skirted around. The terrible aftermath of decades of total war was everywhere, and it frightened Zip. She’d helped make places like this, in the name of winning and keeping London safe. Looking around, she wondered where all the bones had gone. There were crushed, bombed and burnt machines strewn across the landscape but not a single skeleton, not a femur, not a skull, not a single bleached phalanx from some poor wretch’s hand. This was once a densely populated area; where had all the dead people gone? Had the weapons ground them to dust, incinerated their remains, or did the pathogens in the poisoned air eat up the leftovers and spit them out as vapour that drifted up towards the sun? Or did it hang around, and only the scrubbers in her suit stopped her suffocating on the dead?
“At least this’ll never happen again,” Zip half whispered to herself.
“What makes you think that?” Q asked, with a sneer in his voice.
Zip stopped. “What do you mean? Orb Industries would be crushed if the Church attacks. Sure, London would get pretty beat up, but nowhere else. It’ll all be over in days. Nothing like the God War.”
The Quartermaster sighed and turned to face Zip. “Industries got nukes at sea, an army of self-guided men-of-war hidden in the thermal mines and terrible bugs in missiles bunkered on the Isle of Wight. Church attacks, then your old buddies are gonna take everyone with them. No one survives the next one.”
Zip gasped. “You can’t know that.”
“I set a lot of it up. Hoped it’d be used against the Orb. Industries has other ideas. Orb makes them too much money,” Q shrugged and walked on.
“That doesn’t make any sense. Church wouldn’t threaten war if it knew.”
“Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Church isn’t exactly sane. Least the Orb would get bombed to shit as well. I hope your plan’s better.”
Zip was stunned and sickened, but it wasn’t hard to believe. Industries would burn the world rather than risk losing control of the Orb. Maybe it was time to confide in Q. “Look, the Orb is the key. I think it might be talking to us. If we knew what it was saying, it would change everything.”
The Quartermaster looked at Zip as though she had gone mad. “It’s not talking. It just needs blowing up. They’d have nothing to war over if it was gone.”
“We’re saying the same thing. I don’t think it can be blown up. If it says it’s not a god, then it’ll all be over.”
“What if it says it is a god? Blow it up!” Q shouted.
Zip shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. We can always blow it up if it won’t talk or says the wrong thing. Right?”
The Quartermaster laughed and walked away.
“What? What’s so funny,” Zip called after Q’s retreating back. She hated when he did that, laughed like he’d won the argument when they were still arguing. She missed his laugh and the way he could infuriate her and make her love him all at the same time.
“It’s not going to talk. We’re going to blow it up. I’m a very happy man.”
Zip was almost ready to ignore her own advice and argue. There was no point and maybe, in the end, it would be their only choice. Kill London, save the world. She shivered and prayed that Quattro would have better options.
She picked up the pace and narrowed the gap to Q. Her suit scan picked up four incoming targets, closing fast. The Quartermaster saw the same warnings, turned and threw her to the ground and covered her with his body.
Seconds later, four Orb Industries whirlybirds loaded with troops streaked past a hundred metres over t
heir heads, making directly for Quattro. The immense downdraft was kicking up a storm of debris, and the noise of the rotors was so loud it would have busted her eardrums if she hadn’t been armoured. Scan alerts lit up across her ranged view. The passage of the whirlybirds was dragging a small army of munitions on metal legs, tracks and wheels in their wake, and more were closing in from all sides, every one of them chasing after the muscular choppers. Zip and Q were directly in the path of the oncoming wave of metal death.
The Quartermaster dragged Zip to her feet, and they headed away as fast as they could, ignoring scan warnings, hurdling over debris, crashing headlong through ugly shrubs and splashing across stagnant pools, till Q felt they were far enough away to collapse in a heap and recover their breath.
“She must be important. Interesting,” Q gasped, mostly to himself.
Zip’s lungs were flapping in her chest like a pair of trapped pigeons. The pulsing, red dots in her scan, indicating imminent annihilation, were only just dying down and fading away. The whirlybirds were still showing up. They’d come down about a klick ahead. From the data Zip was getting, the troops were deploying heavy-duty EM-pulse turrets around the landing site, presumably to deal with the incoming horde of self-propelled armaments.
“We have to get closer. Quattro might need our help,” Zip whispered, almost fully recovered from their dash.
The Quartermaster didn’t answer straightaway. He concentrated on carefully checking his weapon and then his armour. It reminded Zip she should be doing the same, and she started checking over her own kit. Once Q was satisfied that neither of them had suffered any damage, he said, “Curious, such a big force for one woman?”
Zip started to panic. What if they killed the strange AI? “Yes. Let’s go, quickly.”
“We’ll be shredded if we get too close. We need to get some height.” Q headed towards a two-storey skeleton of a ruin a few hundred metres ahead. The building might once have been someone’s home, a hospital or just an ordinary warehouse. There was little left to tell its story. A frame of twisted, rusty metal supported a heavily damaged concrete staircase going nowhere except up to the open sky. Steps were heavily cracked, missing altogether, or a lot less than a footstep wide. It didn’t look safe.