by Sean Cullen
Parveen felt a worm of panic uncoil in his belly. What would he do when the robot came to take Noor away? If he tried to disable the machine, an alert message would no doubt be transmitted back to whomever was controlling the robot. An agent would be sent to investigate. Parveen would be discovered and taken prisoner, helpless like all the other children captured in the attack. No, he had to remain at large and find a way to escape and a way to take at least Noor and as many of the others with him as possible.
He had to keep his presence a secret. He had to bide his time. He would learn as much as he could about the Grey Agents, try to find a weakness that might help destroy them. He had to be ready when Hamish X and Mimi came to rescue him. He was sure they would. It was just a matter of time.
Hiding would be very difficult, but he had an advantage. He dug in his knapsack and pulled out a compact bundle of cloth. Shaking out the grey fabric, he struggled into a tight-fitting jumpsuit, an operation made much more difficult by the confined space. In a desperate minute, he succeeded in donning the suit and zipped it up the front, pulling a hood over his head that left only his face visible.
A robot lifted the child out of the cubbyhole next door. Noor’s would be next. Parveen donned a pair of goggles that covered the last of his bare skin. He made sure he had packed everything up, leaving no evidence of his presence. Satisfied, he leaned over his sister’s sleeping face and whispered in her ear: “Don’t be afraid, Noor. I’m with you. I won’t let anything happen to you.” Parveen brushed a stray hair from her forehead and pressed himself against the side of the cubbyhole, trying to make himself as small as he could, which was very small indeed.
Chapter 4
The robot arrived at Noor’s cubbyhole. A small camera fixed to its black plastic front whirred, the lens extending and contracting as the robot scanned the inside of the compartment. Satisfied, the robot extended its two mechanical arms to grasp the pallet on which Noor lay and slowly pull it out into the cargo pod.
Why didn’t it see Parveen, you ask? Ah, well. One would have to blame the jumpsuit. Parveen had adapted it from the “sneaky sheet” of the airship Orphan Queen. Remember the camouflaging skin of the Chameleon whale?17 While staying at the Hollow Mountain, Parveen had been inspired to develop a synthetic version that could be manufactured and sewn into garments. The suit he wore was the prototype. The testing process had yielded excellent results. He had been in the midst of completing the final tests before making suits for all the Royal Swiss Guards. The invasion had cut short the work. He now wore the only working “sneaky suit,” and he thanked his lucky stars that he had stuffed it into his backpack (sewn from the same material) before he had set out on this mad rescue attempt.
As a result, when the robot surveyed the inside of the compartment, Parveen, pressed against the wall, had appeared to be just another innocent piece of the interior. A handy trick. Anyone searching the compartment would have to step directly on the hidden boy to discover him. He had also insulated the suit from heat and infrared because he had a suspicion that the Grey Agents’ goggles allowed them to see in spectra that normal humans couldn’t.
Lifting the pallet, the robot backed out and turned to make its way down the pod to the doors. Parveen had always been a very small and slight boy, making the extra weight as he clung to the underside of the pallet that held his sleeping sister negligible. He positioned himself so that he hung head forward, back to the floor, his fingers wrapped around the plastic struts of the pallet and his toes jammed under the short lip that ran around the edge. He lowered his head so that it skimmed the floor of the pod as they approached the doors and headed down the loading ramp.
He found himself in a giant open space brightly lit from above by banks of blue-white lights burning with nauseating intensity. The cargo pod he had arrived in was one of perhaps a hundred arranged in a semicircle around a central metal loading dock. Its surface was rubberized and textured to reduce slippage. All around the loading dock, robots were transferring their cargo of immobilized children on pallets into large racks. The racks, stacked with trays of humanity, reminded Parveen of the tray racks at the back of the cafeteria in Windcity Orphanage. Intent on sliding Noor into one of the vacant slots, the robot trundled across the loading dock towards an empty rack. Parveen quickly scanned the area to make sure no one was watching. He was just about to drop from his perch and roll to his feet when he heard a voice say …
“Stop!”
The robot carrying Noor and Parveen jerked to a halt. Footsteps approached until Parveen saw two pairs of polished grey shoes standing to one side of the pallet. He gripped the pallet tighter and prayed that the suit would hide him from close scrutiny.
“A good haul, Mr. Sweet.”
“Yes, Mr. Candy. Most will be utilized to provide conductivity for the final phase. Some may be eligible for promotion. This one here looks like she might be a fine candidate. A little young perhaps, but definitely a potential candidate.”
“The surgeons will have to decide, Mr. Sweet.”
Parveen clenched his teeth. Surgeons? He couldn’t understand what they were talking about, but it didn’t sound good. He wanted to leap out then and there, attack the agents, and attempt an escape. He held himself back with great difficulty. Best not to be hasty. He knew that if he were to make his presence known now, he could never fight his way free with Noor in her present state. His fingers and toes ached from clinging to his precarious perch under the pallet, but he gritted his teeth and hung on.
“Yes,” Mr. Candy said after a short pause. “She looks to be just about right. Unfortunately, most of the children we’ve netted are too young to be useful. I guess they can be hooked into the matrix and used for auxiliary power sources. Mother is always hungry for more power. But soon we won’t require these headquarters any more. The whole world will be ours. Still, for a while longer we need all the energy we can muster.”
“Indeed, Mr. Candy. Waste not, want not.”
“Indeed, Mr. Sweet. Indeed.”
At last, when Parveen’s fingers felt they would snap off, the grey shoes moved away from the pallet. The soft fall of the Grey Agents’ feet retreated across the loading dock. A hiss of hydraulics heralded the opening of a door and then a muted thud indicated that the agents had left the area.
“Headquarters?” Parveen’s mind reeled. He was in the ODA HQ?
Parveen dropped from the pallet, falling the scant inches to the cold metal floor. His fingers screamed in agony as he flexed them to force the blood through once again. The pallet moved silently away, leaving him exposed in the middle of the loading dock. He rolled onto his hands and knees and looked around.
The loading bay was a rubberized metal square with walls of brushed steel pierced only by one large white sliding door. The room was roughly the size of a football field. Banks of halogen spotlights burned from above, eradicating any trace of shadow, Parveen noted with some relief. The sneaky suit would meld with the grey surface of the floor, but he would still cast a shadow if the light hit him at the right angle, giving away his location to anyone who might be watching. Everywhere robots were lifting pallets, sorting the human cargo from the pods, shuttling inert children according to some predetermined system. Parveen stood for a moment, trying to puzzle out a pattern to the activity. With a start, he realized that the pallet carrying Noor was heading for the large white door on the far side of the loading dock. He had to hurry if he was going to keep it in sight.
Padding as softly as he could, he dodged robots and machines, following a winding path in pursuit of his sleeping sister. A steady stream of robots carried the children through the door and out of sight. Parveen desperately wanted to know where they were being taken, but he had to stay with Noor. All the prisoners were heading in the same direction, so he assumed that if he followed his sister he would learn the fate of all the others on the way.
He caught up with Noor’s pallet as it approached the large white door. The robot got into line behind a row of other
robots steadily inching forward through the door. One by one, they passed through the portal.
Parveen found himself in a long, plain corridor lit from above by fluorescent tubes. Once again he was reminded of the cafeteria and dormitory at Windcity. Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory seemed like a pleasure palace compared with the dismal sterility of ODA Headquarters. The robot headed off in procession behind its fellows as Parveen trotted alongside his sister’s sleeping form. Every few metres a fiercely bright light shone down from recessed holes in the stone ceiling, casting a harsh white beam over the pallets as they passed along. Parveen tried to stay against the wall to avoid making an obvious shadow. He couldn’t see any surveillance cameras, but he didn’t want to take any chances: they might have been hidden or too small to be seen by the naked eye. He had a suspicion that the ODA wasn’t terribly concerned about security inside their Headquarters. He doubted any child would have been crazy enough to want to stow away in a Grey Agent cargo pod before he had done it.
Parveen still wondered at his sanity. What could he possibly hope to accomplish? He looked down at his sister’s pale, sleeping face and felt a sliver of helplessness slide into his heart. He was completely alone. Hamish X wasn’t going to save him. Mimi was lost to him, too. What could he hope to achieve here in the belly of the beast that was the home of the Grey Agents? He would have been better off if Hamish X had never come along. At least when he was back in the Windcity Cheese Factory, slaving under the loathsome Viggo Schmatz, life had been simpler. All he had to worry about was getting up, doing his work, eating porridge, and going to sleep.
With a supreme effort, he pushed the rising despair out of his mind. No. Back in Windcity, he had lived from day to day, without hope, without a dream. He hadn’t really been alive then. Now he had Noor and his friends, and he had to do what he could for them.
“We are a family,” he whispered softly, reaching out to touch his sister’s cold hand as she glided along beside him. “I’m not alone any more.”
The corridor turned sharply and ended in a glass doorway that whisked aside as each robot and pallet approached, admitting them one at a time. Bright, antiseptic light flooded through the opening, blinding Parveen momentarily. He adjusted his goggles, filtering out the strongest glare, but he couldn’t see what waited on the other side of the doorway. Parveen kept in step with Noor’s pallet until it was next in line. The door whisked open and the robot trundled forward. Parveen moved after it.
He found himself in a glass chamber in the shape of a cube. The glass was fogged and impossible to see through. Parveen soon found out why. As soon as the glass door hissed shut behind them, the chamber filled with jets of cool steam, surrounding the pallet, Noor, and the robot. Parveen felt a shiver of panic but kept calm. It seemed to be some sort of disinfectant bath. Noor showed no signs of ill effects. After a few seconds, the other side of the cube slid back. The robot edged forward and Parveen went with it.
He stepped out of the steam cloud and almost blundered straight into a Grey Agent. He caught himself centimetres from collision and stepped to one side, his heart pounding so loudly he was sure the agent would hear it. The agent was oblivious to his presence, however, standing still as the steam bathed his grey-clothed body. Holding his breath, Parveen carefully sidled out of the chamber through another set of sliding glass doors and found himself on a metal catwalk, where he almost bumped into another Grey Agent waiting for his fellow to finish in the steam room. Sterilization chamber? Parveen guessed. The agent was dressed in a long grey lab coat and wore a filter mask over his mouth. As the first Grey Agent stepped out of the steam room onto the catwalk, Parveen managed to avoid contact by a hair’s breadth, sidestepping quick as a cat. He turned and looked out into the vast space beyond the chamber.
The room was enormous, the size of several football fields. Harsh blue light shone down from banks of halogen spotlights, adding to the overall impression that the chamber was a sports arena. The ODA didn’t seem to be playing any games here, though. Everywhere Parveen looked, automated machines swarmed about, performing strange tasks, moving hither and thither18 carrying pieces of equipment, machinery, and crates. There were Grey Agents supervising the activity, scurrying like drab ants through a bizarre picnic of metal and plastic.
What caught Parveen’s eye immediately was a vast pale grey hoop suspended over the far end of the chamber. The thing was immense, dwarfing all the other objects around it. The hoop hung above the activity below by a web of shining cables, pulsing eerily with a greenish-yellow light that made Parveen vaguely nauseated if he looked at it for too long. The cables ran down to the chamber floor and connected to a small mountain of black plastic, encrusted with clumps of crystal that pulsed with the same malevolent light.
Parveen stood with his mouth open, awestruck and sickened by the spectacle and scale of the ODA’s evil handiwork. He wondered what function the hoop might serve. And the thing below: was it a power source, a computer? He couldn’t figure it out without a closer examination. The scale of the operation threatened to overwhelm his fragile confidence. When faced with the scope of the ODA’s powerful technology, his heart almost failed him.
I’m just one boy, he thought to himself. And a small boy, also. What can I hope to do against the might of these creatures? He gripped the railing of the catwalk and mustered19 his courage. I have no choice. I have to be brave for Noor. There’s no one else who can help her.20
Parveen was so rapt in contemplation of the evil spectacle that he failed to notice when the robot carrying Noor set off along the catwalk, the two Grey Agents on either side of it now. He started out in pursuit as quickly and stealthily as he could.
The catwalk where Parveen stood was suspended a hundred metres above the floor below and ran the entire length of the chamber. Parveen caught up with his sister and her escort as they passed through another set of sliding glass doors. He nipped in just as the doors hissed shut.
Once inside, he stopped dead in his tracks. Looking up into the room he had to bite back an involuntary cry of horror.
The room was big, not as vast as the one he’d just left but very large. He stood at one end of a long stone causeway. On either side of the causeway was a yawning empty space. Well, not exactly empty. The space was filled with children.
Children were suspended in rows above and below him. Like fruit from a vine of wires and cables they hung, motionless and inert. They wore pale grey body stockings that clung like a sickly second skin and made them seem even more deathly pale, their faces wan and slack, eyes closed, comatose. Wires stretched from harnesses affixed to their shaven scalps. A tube ran from each of their mouths through which a sluggish green fluid oozed slowly. Parveen felt a horrible revulsion. As he watched, several metallic creatures with multiple silvery legs scurried up and down the wires and tubes like spiders, servicing the sleeping orchard of children. What is this place? he asked himself. He was so horrified that he had to shake his head to clear it of the vile setting. Keeping his attention on the path ahead, he set off after his sister.
The stone causeway stretched out across the chamber, passing through the terrible orchard of children. Parveen concentrated on the back of the robot as it carried his sister’s pallet flanked by the two Grey Agents in their surgical clothes. He felt terror uncoiling in his stomach like some tentacled creature at the bottom of the ocean that rarely felt the warmth of the sun. Was his sister doomed to become one of these children, hooked up to a bizarre network for who knew what purpose? He staggered along behind the party as they approached another black metal hatchway.
As the party approached the hatchway, it slid open with a soft, asthmatic hiss to reveal a dim room beyond. Parveen scooted in after them as the hatchway slid shut. After the relative brightness of the child orchard, this new place was quite dark. Parveen’s goggles took a moment to adjust to the ambient light. When they did, he almost fell to his knees. He stifled another cry of horror. He thought that nothing could be more terrifying than t
he child orchard. He was wrong. Horribly wrong.
“Noor,” he whispered softly. “Oh, Noor, no.”
Chapter 5
HAMISH X
Hamish X lay very still. He lay perfectly still because the knife at his throat was very sharp and the young girl holding said knife seemed very serious indeed. Lying still is always the best option when someone serious is pressing a knife to one’s throat.21, 22
The boy named Thomas looked at Hamish X with cold blue eyes.
“I think we should kill him now,” he whispered. “We don’t need his help and we can’t trust him.”
“I want to hear his story. How did he end up on this tub?”
“Who cares, Maggie? Just kill him and let’s get on with taking over the ship.”
“What are you talking about? Kill him? You wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“I would, too.”
“Well, I’m in charge, because I have the knife.”
“Right, sister Maggie, dear.”
“And I’m older,” Maggie said pointedly. Thomas made a rude noise and fell silent. Maggie turned her full attention back to Hamish X. As she pondered his immediate future, he had time to examine his captors.
