The Covert Academy (17 page)

Damn
. He couldn’t use it to follow them down the shaft. The fall would break his neck.

The shield
! He tapped the button and it flared to life as a dozen guards rushed Joshua’s position, Two-Shots blazing. One of the beams found a gap around the small circular shield and grazed his mid-section, searing through the suit and burning his flesh.

Joshua grunted and took a reflexive step backwards.
His foot trod thin air and he teetered on the edge of the shaft. Shots rang off his shield as more guards entered the room, firing blindly. There was nothing for it. He jumped.

Joshua tucked his legs up under his chin in a foetal position, and swung his arm with the shield under his rear. He activated the jumpsuit’s anti-grav and fell at half the normal rate of
gravitational acceleration. It was still too fast. He scrunched his face and prepared to be crippled for life.

He opened his eyes. Ichiro and Sarah stood over him, mouths agape. He looked down, and saw the shield hovering centimetres off the ground underneath him.

Sarah didn’t linger. She jammed the
shaft door open the rest of the way and hopped through. Joshua got up off the shield projector and stood next to her and Ichiro.

The view was incredible. The room... it was more like a
cavern, Joshua realised. It extended for thousands of metres in every direction, light poured down from intense halogens far above, like a hundred tiny suns. The heat should have been unbearable, but there was a cool breeze that seemed to swirl around them. The power required to keep this room lit and temperate must be immense.

Where did they get so much electricity? There was no infrastructure left in the world
, that he knew of, capable of supporting such a place.

A long straight platform extended out from the elevator door, and the trio walked along it, taking in the sights. Drones hummed past far overhead, mercifully having not yet noticed the three snoopers.

The floor far below was crammed with machines of infinite variation. They were poles apart from the usual drones. Some scuttled along the floor like overgrown insects; others towered above, standing higher than the platform. Joshua could see at a glance what most of them were intended for. The little ones could be loaded with sensors or bombs for reconnaissance and sabotage. The large biped and quadrupedal monstrosities were bristling with guns. They were built for war.

Joshua was surp
rised none of the machines had any shields like the one he had strapped to his arm.

The Academy’s jumpsuits allowed the wearer to feel half their weight drop away like magic. But it was still limited by the Earth’s pull to some degree. This shield either had created a complete anti-gravity field... or else it somehow bounced off particles in the air, much like the Nyctalopia did. Either outcome was bursting with opportunity. Joshua couldn’t wait to get his find back
to Dr. Prewett to see what he could make of it.

These drudges had no defence and no anti-gravity, at least not yet. That could be useful.

Joshua saw the large drudges’ weaponry clearly from his vantage point on the platform. They almost looked like they were following him as he walked past. He stopped and let his two teammates keep walking for a few paces. The guns kept following Sarah and Ichiro, and then snapped back to Joshua when he moved. He stopped again, and the guns moved back to the two moving targets.

They
were tracking them! Motion trackers. These were no drones then, which would have been smart enough to identify and shoot them on the spot. Maybe they had simply not yet been outfitted with a proper AI unit. A loud whirring came from the depths of the nearest quadrupedal drudge machine.

‘Look out!’ Joshua called to his
teammates. They turned at the noise and saw the guns preparing to fire. Joshua dived away, and the sudden movement caught the guns’ attention. They fired, but hit the empty space between Joshua and the others. A huge crater marked the impact; it had sliced the platform in two.

‘Don’t move, stay absolutely still!’ Joshua warned. Sarah and Ichiro froze.

‘Oh guys, what do we do?!’ Panic rose in Ichiro’s voice, causing it to break. ‘We are going to die down here!’ The guns turned to him, but Ichiro shut up, and they didn’t fire.

Joshua could see
that the others couldn’t stay still for long with Brock and Meyrick slung over their shoulders. Only one of the giant machines had fired. They were inefficient, but sensitive to anything stirring nearby. It wouldn’t take much for this mechanical drudge to fire again. They couldn’t live as statues for the rest of their lives.

Joshua activated his suit’s strength. He felt his muscles stimulate far beyond normal human range and the thin suit material hardened around his body. He stood up, hefting his shield.

The machine aimed at him. It
s cannon fired, and the shot left a second gaping hole in the platform.

Joshua had already leaped across the void towards the machine. He flung the shield under his legs, effectively giving his jump an extra boost. He seemed to bounce in mid air. With the other hand, he flicked out his knife. He put the immense weight of his suit behind the thrust, and landed knife-first on the area he guessed was the machine’s head.

The entire structure was shaped much like a dog, but with short squat legs that all bent the same way. Two sets of guns were at the top of the front pair of legs, where the shoulders would be.

Joshua crashed down in the space above and between the guns, his knife tearing at the circuit boards and wiring within.

The drudge machine shuddered and fired wildly in every direction. Ichiro and Sarah grabbed the edge of the platform. Several of its supports took direct hits from the drudge and the platform fell down into the cavern. Ichiro and Sarah fired their ropes, swinging around the platform in a wide arc to ease their descent. The end of the platform finally crashed at the bottom, flinging loose machinery like dominoes. Explosions erupted around the cavern.

Joshua
couldn’t see what happened to Sarah and Ichiro. He hung on to his knife for all he was worth. The machine trembled, then its legs buckled. It fell forward, and Joshua’s knife came loose. He fell twenty metres onto his back, gouging a crater out of the concrete ground. The machine nosed deep into the ground in front of him, and toppled over on its side. Tools and workbenches were flattened under it, but nothing exploded.

Joshua let out a breath of relief, sank back into the crater, and promptly lost consciousness.

He opened his eyes. Everything was a blur, and his head felt two sizes too small. The jumpsuit’s auto-meds had finally kicked in, and given him an intoxicating dose.

A girl stood over him.

‘Sarah?’ he groggily shook his head. ‘Sarah, is that you?’

He blinked rapidly, and the image came into focus. It was his sister.

She was gaunt, her cheeks sunken and her hair coming loose in tufts. She wore a dress. Their mother’s dress.

‘Lucia... what are you doing here?’ Joshua dared to hope that he’d finally found his little sister. It had been six years since he’d lost her, on the outskirts of the Colonnade. She’d be fifteen by now, almost a woman. She extended a skinny arm down to him in the crater.

Too skinny. Knobbly.

Joshua picked himself up out of the hole. That dress didn’t fit her. It hung off her shoulders like a coat hanger. Had she lost a lot of weight in the Confederacy’s captivity?

‘Come on Josh! I wanna show you something,’ she giggled and ran ahead, disappearing around an abandoned workstation.

Josh
.
She called me Josh
.

S
he was the only one he’d ever allowed to call him that. He hated the name. Somehow, with him, she could get away with anything. He chased after her, joining in her infectious laughter. She was waiting for him around the next corner, facing away, standing still as stone.

‘Don’t move,’ she whispered. ‘Stay absolutely still.’

Joshua froze. Was it another machine drudge’s motion tracker? What was going on? He desperately wanted to hold his sister. He couldn’t even turn to check. They might be blasted into dust at any moment.

‘The floor is lava,’ Lucia said. Her voice seemed to echo. She spun around and flashed a brilliant smile. ‘Don’t touch the ground!’

She jumped on the patterns on the cavern floor, as though the dark patches were dangerous. Her favourite game. Joshua had taught it to her when she was little, as a way to practice jumping over rooftops. It hadn’t taken long for her to become better at it than him, like everything she put her mind to.

‘Aren’t you a bit old for this game?’ Joshua smiled despite himself. Lucia stopped and put her hands over her eyes.

‘Where’s Josh? Where is he?’ She began to tremble. ‘Joo-oosh! Hey. I can’t find my brother! I want Josh!’ she called out.

‘Stop that, you’re acting
silly...’ Joshua suddenly realised Lucia still looked nine years old. She was acting like a child. But that was impossible. That was years ago.

Lucia tore off again, but this time Joshua kept up. He jogged easily behind her, her little legs pumping hard to keep up the pace.

‘Lucia I’m right here. I found you. I never stopped looking. I never...’ his voice cracked, he couldn’t finish.

Lucia had stopped abruptly in front of a pit. She hopped up on the bottom rung of the safety fence.

Joshua looked down into the pit. It was shallow, compared to the cavern they had entered from the elevator, but deep enough to be difficult to climb out of. It was vast, taking up at least half the floor space of the cavern. The pit stretched on into the distance, further than Joshua could see. It was filled with people.

‘What is this Lucia?’ He looked down at her. ‘Where are we?’

Lucia was smiling now.

‘Home.’

Shoulder to shoulder, thousands maybe
millions of people were crammed into this hole in the ground. With a little co-ordination, they could easily have formed a ladder with their bodies and climbed out. No one seemed to want to bother.

Joshua looked at those closest to him. They were filthy. Emaciated. Their clothes were
torn; their skin was a sickly green. Joshua lifted a hand to cover his nose and mouth. The stench of unwashed bodies and human waste radiated up to mix with the grease and oil of the machinery. Those lucky few who had room to move in the pit shambled lifelessly about. One shuffled too close to the wall, and bumped into it. Then he did it again. And again. A blotchy red mark appeared on his face and dribbled down into his rags.

Joshua looked away, tears welling. The entire mass of people were all in the same bedraggled state. Cattle waiting for slaughter.

‘You are no longer prisoners of the Confederacy!’ he shouted at them. ‘I will free you! I...’

A chute overhead opened up, dropping bread and water. The liquid splashed over everything, soaking the bread and the crush of people alike. They grappled for the scraps, the weaker among them shoved away or trampled underfoot.

Feeding time at the zoo
, thought Joshua. He felt sick.

Just beyond the chute, he could make out another device pointed at the crowd. It looked almost like a computer and a jet engine that tapered down on one end.
What on Earth
...?

A noise from behind distracted him. Several of the pathetic, demented people shuffled towards him. This lot was more “angry mob” than “zombie horde”. They had sharp narrow eye
s and carried mechanic’s tools; soldiering irons, spanners, hammers. One fired up a blowtorch with a fwoosh. That got Joshua’s attention.

‘Whoa
there friends. I’m not here to hurt you.’ He backed up to the fence, caught between the pit and the newcomers. There was nowhere to go. Small chunks of dirt and dust rained down on him, getting in his eyes.

Lucia jumped off
the fence and ran over to the advancing mob. ‘Lucia! Come back.’

He reached out, but she kept running, seeming to vanish through the people at the front of the throng.

‘What the hell...?’ Joshua gaped.

The man with the blowtorch got close enough for Joshua to feel the heat.
He looked in the man’s eyes and saw he had an iPC. How could a common labourer, even a Confederate one, obtain an iPC? It didn’t look quite normal either. In fact, the metallic eye looked bloodshot.
How the
-?

Joshua
lifted his wrist and activated the projector shield. It bought him a few seconds. The blowtorch man was hurled back by the unseen power of the shield.

A ninja-rope wiggled down into Joshua’s peripheral vision. He gasped in relief, and grabbed it with his right arm. He locked his glove down, forcing it to clamp onto the rope like a vice. The crowd was almost on top of him, but at the last second the rope was tugged up. Joshua thought his arm was going to come out of the socket as he was pulled up to the roof of the cavern.