Manifestations (45 page)

‘Okay, now let’s get to those stairs.’ They picked up Arthur and began jogging forward again.

‘What the — hey, stay down!’ Endo shouted.

‘This is crypped. They’re getting back up.’

One by one the Citizens stood. They were hunched more, arms dragging down, heads flopped over; like dolls with invisible fingers pulling them up from their necks. They began swaying towards the team.

Ten: Command, are you seeing this?

Command: Confirmed. Go defensive. Disable assailants.

‘Keep moving!’ Ten shouted. ‘Aiko, clear the entrance. Non-fatal only.’

Aiko began pushing the crowd back. But each time she knocked one down, the body lifted up again.

‘This isn’t working.’

Ten: We are at the door.

Command: It’s open.

The Services entrance was a flat metal trapdoor in the footpath. It slid to one side showing wide stairs leading down to the access level. The corridor began brightening as the lumens were activated.

‘Everyone inside. Girls, give us cover.’

Command: Full defensive.

Within a heartbeat the twinbots lit up the fog with lines of light, cutting the legs from under the front ranks of the encroaching mob. There were no cries of pain. Each of them fell to the ground, blood pumping out from their thickest arteries without even a gasp. The bodies didn’t stop. With their arms they reached forward and pulled themselves on, and behind them the crowd continued its rush.

‘This isn’t working either,’ Endo said, as her bot was overcome with the press of flesh. Then something else began pulling at their armour. Something strong and unseen.

From the safety of their van, in the comfort of their lounges, Aiko and Endo lost signal to their remotes.

‘Kutz. I’m going to need more lives,’ Endo said.

~ * ~

The dim underground was slowly getting brighter as the lights warmed up. The tunnel stretched in two directions before them. This was the Services level, where maintenance for the sectors could be performed easily.

Three was cursing about what he’d just seen, but the others held their tongues.

‘Did you see that? Did you see that? I’m freaking out.’

‘Don’t freak out, Three. Not until we’re home.’

‘Where to now?’ Six asked.

Command: We have a new strat-matrix building.

According to the grid schematics, every home in the sector had a node that connected to the access tunnel. These looked like cages that housed the piping, gauges and controls for the house above. Omnipoles marked the line of the streets, doubling their above-ground functions with ceiling lumens that lit their way below.

‘I guess we continue the way we were heading. If they didn’t like that, it could be the right direction.’ Pete looked at the helmeted faces. They were just waiting on the command. They had no opinion, so long as it wasn’t up.

In Pete’s overlay a familiar line appeared, showing them the route Command had planned, leading them to the centre of the sector.

‘This way,’ Ten said, leading off.

‘Will the door hold?’ Three asked.

‘Why don’t you stay and make sure?’ Five threw back, jogging with the rest of the squad.

They passed cross tunnels as they went that led to the neighbouring sectors. ‘Everyone pin these tunnels, these will be our exits if we need them,’ Ten called out. Everyone began dropping tracking crumbs as they went.

As they got further along, the tunnel widened out. Soon it divided into two separate passages with regularly spaced support columns between them. As it grew, it split into three sections then four, and soon they were in a vast open area broken only by the hundred or so columns.

‘It’s like a car park down here,’ Three said.

‘We’re under the pond. Reaching the storage tanks,’ Ten reported. On the schematics these showed as large circles where the sector had its water supply.

‘There’s nothing here.’

‘Ten,’ Eight said.

‘What is it?’

‘I’ve got audio coming from over there. Sounds like shuffling feet.’

‘Great. Okay. Odds and evens.’ Ten turned to Pete and pinched his shirt in her steel fingers. ‘Which way, tapper? Take a guess.’

‘Is there another level below this?’ Pete asked.

‘Not on the plans. Can you sense something?’ Ten asked.

‘I swear I can ...’He put a hand out towards the ground. He imagined he was the water, flooding down.

‘What is it, Lazarus?’

‘Something is down there. Right below us.’

‘There’s only crawl tubes under the tanks. For bots.’

Pete closed his eyes and felt around him. He couldn’t detect any minds outside of the squad. It was strange, though, that it wasn’t a complete void. The emptiness wasn’t totally silent. He lifted his arm and pointed. ‘I think that way.’

‘As you wish. Let’s light up this place, I’m tired of this darkness!’ Ten shouted.

The squad switched on their suit lights, flooding the chamber into an artificial day.

‘Hey, are these footprints?’ Seven asked. Ten and Peter went to look. The floor was dusted evenly except where some scuff marks had kicked up a line.

‘Someone has been passing through here regularly. Which way, tapper?’

Command: There is no record of unauthorised entry. Follow the path.

‘They’re coming,’ Eight called out.

‘Move out,’ Ten ordered.

They hurried, following the path across the side of the chamber until it ended at a manhole. The dirty footprints led towards it from all sides. ‘This looks promising. Three, get that thing open.’

The rest of the ten made a ring and opened fire as Three started forcing the trapdoor to open. The Citizens were shambling forward and the soldiers began disabling them brutally.

‘Cut through it,’ Ten ordered and Three pulled out a fist-sized arc laser.

The manhole eventually gave in and dropped into the space below, clanging down the shaft for a few seconds before hitting bottom. A ladder led down towards a soft green light. ‘Three, then Lazarus. Go,’ Ten ordered.

He watched it through Three’s eyes first. The soldier stepped off the ladder into an antechamber closed off by a thick vault door. Small portholes in a ring around the handle emitted the green light. Three dropped a crumb and a lumen and stood, weapon pointing at the door.

‘Keep moving!’ Nine shouted at Pete.

As Peter went through the hole, his connection to the Weave was cut off. He could hear shouting from above, and intense weapons fire. Two of the soldiers started following him down and he quickly made it to the bottom and moved to get out of the way.

There was only enough room for one more MU and Pete crouched into the corner to give them space. He put their cameras into his overlay and watched.

He knew what was in there. He could feel Pierre’s presence through the door.

Gingerly, Nine reached one hand forward and spun the locking handle. The vault door glided back. Green light swept over them as they stepped forward.

On either side of a long room, aquariums containing verdant green rested on complex pedestals of diodes and tubes. There, asleep, was the face of the boy Pete saw every time he closed his eyes. In each of the aquariums floated the same human boy with the enlarged skull in different stages of development.

In some Pierre was an infant, bulbous head the same size as the rest of his body, skin angry with growth.

‘Oh, mir.’ Another soldier came through into the vault. The others were silent.

Ten was the last of the MUs to come down the ladder, firing gloop up through the hole. ‘They’re blocked for now. What is down ...’ She slowly dragged her eyes from tank to tank. ‘He’s fucking cloning himself?’

The rest of the soldiers blurted out their own versions of the sentiment, while Ten tried to report to Command.

Ten: Command, are you seeing what’s down here? ... Command ... Do you read me?

‘It’s no good. They can’t hear us.’

‘What should we do, Ten?’

‘We wait for rescue. Command has our location. For now we bunker down and for the Will’s sake nobody touch anything.’

Pete walked away from them, wandering down the length of the room, circling and inspecting each of the tanks, looking at the star of consciousness that was flickering in each. They weren’t all perfect copies; cloning was never always perfect. There were a couple whose limbs had failed to develop, and a dark tank that had been powered down; it looked like the head had grown so fast it had ruptured.

That one was cold to touch. Each of the other tanks hummed with heating and life-support. Pumps extracted the fluids and recycled them, replenishing the amniotic and pushing the fluids back into the tank.

‘Of course he came to STOC,’ one of the soldiers exclaimed. Pete looked at him, reading the explanation in his mind before it was spoken. Cloning was banned across the WU, verboten. Where else would you go but the leftover Örjians? They were the master splicers.

Peter was standing by one tank that appeared to be empty, though it hummed and was lit to the same bright green murk. He could just make out a darker shape inside and sense that glimmer ... that tiny spark ...
Pierre
?

He was thrust backward. A shockwave threw him to the ground. His mind careened, lost in a random, epileptic spasm of memories. Nothing matched: visions, smells and sounds repeated themselves discordantly. Black, white, green, those eyes!, dry grass, the ocean pulling back and forth, his bones breaking, blue, green, sinking deeper into the water. Where the light doesn’t go and thoughts go out.

He didn’t see the other clones open their eyes or feel the splitting shriek they stabbed into the soldiers’ minds. The MUs crumpled over and rolled on the floor, clawing at their heads and helmets for it to stop. They began hitting their ears on the ground, harder and harder, desperate to reach unconsciousness.

Power was cut to the room and dark hit like a hammer. In the second before the emergency lighting took over, a lithe mechanical silhouette dove into the room. A blade of light, the length of its arm, carved like a sword through the tanks, before spinning to sweep the other side of the room and slicing through the cloning chambers. Warm fluids burst to the floor and the attacker leapt upon the bodies to make sure the job was done.

The red glow of the backup lights managed to fill the room and the figure drew itself up.

Peter looked up from the ground, his head hot and throbbing.

‘Who are you?’ Pete croaked.

The figure looked down and Pete saw now that it had no face, only a polished metal plate on a silicon scalp. They’d been rescued by a droid.

‘Who sent you?’ Pete asked, his voice nearly a whisper. The droid didn’t answer, perhaps it wasn’t built to speak. ‘Who sent you?’

~ * ~

‘Another blackout today, this time from one of the relocation zones in STOC,’ Phillipe Kinazee read out, updating viewers new to his stream. He was on his second shift, rolling the show to extended time while they were rating so highly.

His producer, Morley, had been tipped off that something was happening near Omskya and, for the first time, they had beaten one of the larger shows to the story. Their source was joining the panel via a link to the neighbouring sector. ‘Franky, what can you tell us about what is happening down there?’

The man the host called Franky, whose full name was written below him as Investigative Reporter Francis Lowell, was a thin forty-year-old with retreating hair. Behind him, a concertina fence was pulled across the footbridge that led to an empty but otherwise normal-looking suburb. In front of that, marauders stood unmoving while drones were flying in their hundreds over their heads.

‘As you can see, Phillipe, Services have established a cordon and no one is going in or out,’ Frank raised his voice, as if he was in a strong wind. ‘This is as close as we are allowed to get.’

‘And has anyone been able to ascertain what the situation is?’

‘Not yet, Phillipe. Services is keeping tight-lipped. As you can see, it looks from here as if Sector 261 is deserted. We haven’t seen any residents since we’ve been here, but we have detected traces of a large gas release. Clearly, there has been an altercation of some sort, but which event caused the other is the question and, at the moment, no one is releasing any information.’

‘And no one will until the hierarchy is re-established,’ a second panellist, Xanthe Ching, spoke without being prompted.

They cut back into the studio. Behind the line-up of speakers was the satellite view of the area ... the frond of 261 was etched out in red.

‘How can something like this be kept hidden? The Primacy is clearly using the cover of a reshuffle to delay releasing information.’ This was from a young blonde woman in a pinstripe jacket. Under her was her title: Sandrina Sibellio, Citizens for Universal Equality.

‘I think there are plenty of simpler explanations before we resort to conspiracy theories,’ Ching said.

‘Such as?’

‘There has always been unrest amongst the rehabilitated Örjians. A violent outbreak between them is the most logical explanation.’