The Story of Martha

by Dan Abnett

  Korbov shrugged.

  ‘Beats me,’ he said. ‘There are groups, up in Hokkaido and down south in Kyushu, but Central Honshu, forget it. There are contacts, a few individual operatives, but nothing organised.’

  ‘Because of security?’

  He shrugged again.

  They were standing at the ship’s port rail, looking out across the bustling pier. Two members of the crew strolled past, and greeted Korbov amiably.

  ‘Talking to yourself again, Dimi?’ one of them laughed.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Korbov.

  The crewmen looked right through Martha and carried on along the deck.

  ‘All this time you’ve been on board,’ murmured Korbov, ‘it still gets me when they do that.’

  There were dull thumps and clangs from down below as the Xin Excel settled into her berth. Gantry cranes clattered forwards to grasp the first of the containers. Debarkation/handling alarms whooped and buzzed. There would be no preamble or customs delay. The Xin Excel would be unloaded immediately, almost prematurely, and then the ship would be sent off again without a pause to gather her breath.

  ‘You’ve got to remember,’ said Korbov, ‘the plants here in Japan are about the most high-tech of any in the Master’s manufacturing empire. This is what I’ve heard. We’re not talking about gross manufacture like in the shipyards, we’re talking about intensive, skill-specific industry. Word is, the Kuro and Shiro plants handle the guidance systems for the rocket fleet.’

  Korbov took a slip of paper out of his pocket.

  ‘Your contact’s name is Sugu,’ he said. ‘The address is a worker collective cafeteria near the old bus depot in Kannai.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘and this Sugu will get me into the labour camps?’

  ‘That’s the plan. Eight hours and we’ll be leaving again. Eight hours tops. So if you need to get back to me, do it inside that time frame or I’ll be long gone.’

  ‘Thanks for everything,’ Martha said.

  ‘The only person who deserves any thanks is you,’ said Korbov. ‘Be safe, Martha Jones.’

  No one saw her slip ashore. She hurried through the heaving Marine Terminal, avoiding the work gangs and the trundling bulk loaders with their flashing amber hazard lamps. It was noisy and hectic, the perfect place for someone who was all but invisible anyway to disappear.

  The warm air was noxious with smog. It had a dry, petrochemical taste to it. Martha noticed that almost every worker and guard in the terminal was wearing a disposable paper filter mask. As soon as the chance presented itself, Martha helped herself to a mask from an open carton inside the door of a pier office.

  The Master watched her progress with indulgent eyes, his arms folded, his great granite bulk rising above the city from its pedestal in Yamashita Park.

  Sugu never showed. Martha never found out why. She loitered around the cafeteria and the adjacent, derelict bus depot for five hours. She felt exposed, even with the perception filter, and hated to have to linger in one location for so long. The longer she stayed, the more likely it was that she would be noticed.

  The cafeteria was a steamy, glass-sided place that had once been a popular restaurant. Truck-loads of weary port workers were shipped in from the Marine Terminal every half an hour and fed miserable rations of thin gruel and claggy noodles. UCF guards watched over them, punished rule-breakers, and herded the workers on and off the trucks like sheep.

  The depot was a concrete lot, overgrown with weeds. The roof had caved in, and the rusting carcasses of half a dozen public buses lay rotting under the slumped canopy. The place had become the haunt of stray cats. They ran to her, mewing, or hissed at her as she wandered around the ruins.

  Martha realised that the cats could see her.

  She kept moving, circling the cafeteria, never staying in the same place for too long. She kept praying that Sugu would appear. After four hours waiting, and two heart-stopping moments when she was sure a security guard had noticed her, she vowed to give the contact one more hour.

  In the noonday heat, the wretched smog was at its worst. The sky had turned a thick, sludgy ochre colour, and everything was mired in a deep haze. The skyline was so overcast, she couldn’t see the mountains. She’d been hoping to see the mountains, but the Master had stolen the view too.

  It got hotter. Gloomy thunder muttered in the back of the sky.

  Five hours were up. She was going to have to make new plans.

  Alone, tense and friendless, she moved through the streets of Yokohama. Terrible damage had been wrought on Day Zero, but Martha noticed there was no sign at all of any Toclafane. She saw a few distant groups of refugees, and found litter-camps in backstreets and underwalks that had been used by vagrant souls.

  UCF patrols rolled by with monotonous regularity.

  Her original plan had been to enter the huge labour camps serving the Kuro and Shiro plants. She could see the plants from the northern sectors of the city: vast domes the colour of slate that seemed too big and improbable to have been built in six months, let alone set to use. It was amazing what you could accomplish when you had the whole world at your beck and call.

  Smaller, subsidiary domes, like metal blisters, surrounded the main plants. There were four of them: Ao, Midori, Aka and Kiiro – respectively, blue, green, red and yellow.

  Martha began to work out how she could get into the nearest one.

  ***

  Martha ducked into a doorway. It was late afternoon. Sirens had just started to scream in a street nearby. She heard voices raised in panic, and running footsteps. Then she heard gunshots.

  Ragged civilians dashed down the street past her in a frantic search for hiding places. A UCF patrol had surprised a sheltering vagrant group, and was rounding its members up for transportation to the labour camps. Those that ran or resisted were being gunned down. It reminded Martha of South London in the very early days. It brought back her oldest fears and anxieties.

  She tried the door she was cowering against, but it was locked. Just stay in the doorway, she told herself. Just stay in the shadows. They can’t see you.

  An old man staggered past her doorway, helped along by a teenage boy. Martha winced and looked away as a burst of automatic gunfire cut them down.

  Boots crunched closer. Two UCF guards ran past, chasing down the other fugitives. A third stopped to check the bodies of the old man and the teenager.

  Stay still. Just stay still. He can’t see you.

  The guard rose to his feet. He was Japanese. His lean body was packed into black fatigues. His assault rifle was cinched against his chest. He stared into the shadows of the doorway. He stared directly at Martha.

  He raised his weapon and aimed it at her.

  ‘Out!’ he ordered.

  The perception filter wasn’t working.

  Martha wasn’t hidden at all.

  Along with forty other outcasts and refugees, many of them weeping and sobbing, Martha was brought into the Aka Labour Camp just before dark. Martha did not cry.

  Black-painted lorries carried them in through the electric chain-link fences, past turrets and elevated guard posts. Inner gates opened and closed as they entered the camp dome. The lorries drew up in a dank concrete bay.

  The captives were ordered off the lorries at gun-point, and sent, single file, through processing. Martha expected to be identified at every step. Martha Jones. Martha Jones. The infamous Martha Jones.

  But she wasn’t thumb- or retina-printed, or photographed, or even asked to give her name. No one was. Grimly, she realised that they weren’t really being regarded as human at all. They were all just slaves, fodder, fresh blood to keep the engines of industry turning.

  The guards took her backpack. She never saw it or its contents again. There hadn’t been much in it, mostly her tools of survival like binoculars, matches and her dog whistle, but in its side pockets, there had been a few irreplaceable keepsakes of her walk: a Polaroid of her with Mathieu and Yves at Surcourt; a Saint Christopher
medal she’d been given by a woman in Ljubljana, whom Martha knew had later died so that Martha could live; a little silver Islamic pendant that Korbov had fancied she should take with her; a ridiculous lucky rabbit’s foot Brigadier Calvin had insisted on pressing into her hand as they’d said goodbye at another Cursus Hill, telling her, ‘My father gave it to me’; and a small plastic badge that read ‘Hooray! I am Nine!’

  Ironically, the guards didn’t take the key pendant from around her neck, or Jack’s vortex manipulator strapped in its leather case around her wrist. The manipulator only worked if the Doctor activated it, and it was painfully evident that the key had stopped performing the wonders it had been built to perform.

  She was issued with a stale bedroll, a dirty food pail, a colour-coded wristband to denote her work and sleep stations, and a slip of paper printed in eight languages that explained her duties and shifts.

  Aka Labour Camp was a huge, high-rise dormitory under the main dome. There were municipal shower blocks at ground level, and above those rose open-grilled, scaffolding decks of tightly packed cages containing metal cots. There was no privacy. Thousands of men and women were packed into the cage city, looking up and down and sideways into one another’s miserably confined lives. Sunlight shafted in through the camp dome, tinted into a grey twilight.

  Martha’s wristband told her she was aka/ao/ten/fifteen. Red camp, blue sector, tenth level, bunk fifteen.

  It took her half an hour to find her place and lay out her bed roll. It was weird and uncomfortable. After six months of invisibility, everyone could see her and, as a young, black woman in a predominately Japanese slave force, she really stood out.

  She’d barely got into her bunk when hooters sounded and electric cage gates crashed opened.

  ‘Work shift gamma!’ the speakers boomed.

  She checked her slip. She was work shift gamma. She got up, and followed the others as they filed out.

  They were led, in procession, through to Shiro, one of the gigantic plant domes.

  Martha looked in awe at the serried decks of heavy manufacture; entire work lines stacked one on top of another, with thousands of workers toiling at fabrication on every level.

  She was given her place on deck nineteen. The woman she was taking over from was almost dead with exhaustion.

  Martha studied the paper slip. The work was simple enough. As a conveyor belt brought the circuit boards past her, she had to solder two chips into place. She hadn’t counted on the speed of the belt. A guard snarled at her for being slow and delaying production. Her hands began to ache from repetition. Ftzz! Ftzz! next one… Ftzz! Ftzz! next one…

  She contemplated fusing the chips into the wrong slots until she saw a man dragged off the line two decks down and summarily executed for ‘crimes of sabotage’.

  Ftzz! Ftzz! next one… Ftzz! Ftzz! next one…

  When her shift ended, Martha was numb with fatigue. Her hands were bloody and scarred from slips and solder burns. Replacement workers were led in, and the guards filed her shift back to Aka camp. She had no idea how long they’d been working for. They were given plastic bottles of water, and noodle soup was ladled into their food pails.

  She returned to her cot on aka/ao/ten/fifteen. The bunk to her right was occupied by a middle-aged Japanese woman, who was weeping over a lost son. In the bunk to her left was a young man who was so tired he was shivering.

  ‘We’re going to die,’ he kept mumbling. ‘We’re all going to die.’

  Martha wanted to reassure him, speak to him. She knew she should be telling one of her stories to rally the spirits of the people around her. Though a captive, she knew she should be getting on with her work, but she was too tired.

  Fatigue, rather than sleep, swept over her and carried her away.

  The next day, and the ones that followed, were all exactly like the first. Martha’s production-line skills improved, and she kept her rate up, but every end-shift, she was too tired to talk.

  ‘Where are you from?’ the young man in the cot to her left kept asking her.

  ‘Everywhere,’ she murmured. ‘Let me sleep.’

  Her hands were sore and scabbed with burns. There was no sense of day or night. The accumulated smell in the camp was dire. Quite apart from the pitifully poor waste systems, people were regularly dying of exhaustion and malnutrition, and the guards took their time bothering to remove the bodies.

  Half-awake, Martha wondered why her perception filter had failed. Had it just worn out?

  Every now and then, the hooters would sound as fresh slaves were brought into Aka Camp. Three days after Martha was brought in, a new slave group was going through processing.

  ‘There’s been a mistake,’ a big Caucasian was telling the guards. ‘Look at my creds. Look at them!’

  ‘No mistake,’ the guards said.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ the man yelled.

  The guards pointed their weapons at him.

  A week had passed. Martha had almost forgotten what proper sunlight looked like. She’d become an automaton. She was very good at her job. Two jabs of the solder, move it on, two jabs of the solder, move it on…

  ‘Will we ever see the sky again?’ asked the young man in the bunk to her left. Martha had established his name was Hito.

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, wanting to sleep.

  ‘Will we?’ questioned the middle-aged woman in the bunk to her right. The middle-aged woman’s name was Tokami.

  Martha sighed. She had no strength left, but she summoned something from somewhere.

  ‘Hito?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Call everyone in, everyone from the nearby bunks, everyone who’s awake. I’ve got a story for them.’

  ‘A story?’ asked Tokami through the grille.

  ‘I can only tell it once, I’m so tired, but it is a good story.’

  Hito gathered about thirty people around Martha’s cell. She sat up, weary to the bone, and began.

  ‘Listen to me carefully. I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this, but it’s important…’

  The Frozen Wastes

  When Martha Jones was four years old, she broke her arm. She’d been playing in the park with her brother, riding the swings a little too enthusiastically. She flew off the seat, and for one moment she was actually airborne, it could only have been a split second, and Martha loved it, she was going up and up like an astronaut – and then there was gravity and the ground and dirt and a sharp crack.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ said Leo, ‘she kept asking me to push her harder.’ And then he burst into tears.

  Martha supposed she really ought to be crying too – after all, she was the one who was actually in pain. But she was being driven to hospital, it was an adventure, and the whole thing was rather too exciting for tears.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ said the doctor, ‘it’s a clean break, look.’ And he showed the Jones family the X-rays.

  Martha asked if that was really her arm, it looked so strange and ghostly.

  ‘That’s what it’s like underneath,’ explained the doctor, and smiled at her.

  Underneath. It was like a secret world, something which had been hidden from her until that moment.

  The doctor told her the arm would have to be put in a cast for a while, ‘just to give the bones time to knit back together.’

  ‘You mean,’ asked Martha, a little breathless, ‘that my arm is going to fix itself?’

  The doctor nodded. ‘You’ll be as right as rain,’ he told her. ‘You’re such a brave little girl.’

  Martha wanted to tell him that it wasn’t bravery at all, it was curiosity – but the doctor had been so nice, she didn’t want to seem rude.

  ‘I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,’ Martha told her parents that evening over dinner. They smiled and nodded and didn’t pay that much attention. They were just relieved her ordeal hadn’t upset her too much.

  But she didn’t change her mind. For Christmas that year she was given a toy s
tethoscope: it came in a plastic box, and on the cover there was a picture of a little boy trying very hard to look medical. Martha was disappointed that the stethoscope didn’t actually work. The nurse outfit her dad gave her was much more practical, and had a girl on the box instead, but Martha found that far less interesting. And books! – so many books, all about how the body worked, what the heart did, the lungs, the blood cells. By the time she was a teenager, and all her school friends had pictures of George Michael on their bedroom walls, Martha instead displayed posters of the human skeleton, each bone arrowed and named. Her mother thought it was all a bit grisly, but it was at least better than what Leo was hanging in his room – he was going through an Iron Maiden phase.

  And each night, with the skeleton gazing down at her, surrounded by increasingly complex books about anatomy, Martha would dream. She would dream about the doctor she would become.

  No two children in the world dream the same dream. Adults do. They get lost in nightmares about mortgages and internet shopping and having to make speeches in public. But children don’t yet believe the lie that there are limits to the imagination, and so when they close their eyes at night there are as many adventures as there are children thinking them. Take the case of Pierre Bruyère, for example. In 1868, as a 6-year-old boy, living in a suburb of Paris, he began to dream of white. And once he’d started, he never stopped. Each time he fell asleep the white would be there, waiting for him. He didn’t know this was unusual, only that it was sometimes so bright and unforgiving that he’d wake with a headache.

  His parents weren’t complex people; they had a little bakery, all they ever dreamed of was croissants and buns. ‘Maybe you’re colour blind or something,’ said his father. ‘Maybe you’re just seeing black as white. I don’t know.’

  Pierre told him that it wasn’t just white – it was different shades sometimes, and once in a while it had cracks in. The father had nothing to say to that. Instead he took him to a doctor.

  The doctor had heard there was some talk on the continent, in places where doctors could afford to worry about such things, that the dreams of a patient might have significance. But this doctor was a gruff sort of man, and told Pierre that dreams were just dreams and there was nothing to be done about them. ‘They’ll go away,’ he said, ‘or they won’t.’