Fault Lines

by Mark Lingane

  “The Corporal’s dead,” one said. “It killed him, with no weapons. Where did it go?”

  Another lantern shattered and the light diminished further within the chamber.

  “Confirm that the brainiacs are out?” the sergeant said.

  A soldier peered through the thick glass at the scientists huddling behind it. “Lucky bastards are all out.”

  “We’ll flare the place,” the sergeant said. “Set off one of the small EM grenades.”

  As the soldier turned, the ghostly blue-ringed face came floating out of the darkness, her navy eyes staring at him. Her arms rose up before he could swing around, and she had him tumbling over with unexpected strength. He tried to stabilize himself, but the force was unrelenting.

  She pushed the struggling man back against the wall. He swung wildly, hacking at her with both ends of his rifle, trying to get some space to fire. She blocked each attack. Her forearm pressed into his neck, crushing his throat.

  Another soldier ran in behind her and swung his rifle butt down on the back of her head. She half-turned and parried the blow, knocking the gun aside. He swung the gun around and fired into her body. The bullets flew through her and into his fellow soldier. The man screamed, but the scream was cut short when she snapped his neck.

  Her arm snapped out and grabbed the second soldier, punching him so hard that his head snapped around, driving him to the floor. He slid several yards then scrambled to his hands and knees, frantically crawling toward the collection of experimental EM weapons. A vicious punch to the back of his head drove him to the ground, knocking all sense of direction from him. Stars spun across his vision as he struggled to stand up. On his knees, he searched around wildly for his weapon. A foot flashed by and kicked the gun across the chamber, smashing into the last lantern. The chamber fell into darkness.

  “Solider, where are you?” the sergeant called out. He stepped toward the commotion. His foot slipped. He felt down on the floor, hoping it wasn’t blood. It smelled like oil. Sweat rolled down his face and throat. He wiped it away.

  “Sarge,” came a strangled response, cut short and leaving only the rasping of his own breathing.

  The sergeant stepped back toward the smoking remains of the last lantern. There was a hint of a glow in the room, and his only chance was to keep it at his back. His eyes darted from side to side. He would be a silhouette, but at least he could see the alien—

  She crashed into him, and they both smashed into the wall.

  —coming.

  A punch came in from his right, smashing into his weapon and buckling it. He swung a punch toward her chest. Their fists met. The blow was crippling. He felt the bones in his hand crack, and he cried out in pain. The alien grabbed his neck. The pressure was immense as she squeezed. Purple flooded over his vision as the sergeant lost his fight against consciousness. His broken weapon fell from his grip. His body sagged as he stared into her black eyes.

  Then he was on the ground, free of the alien’s grip that had been unable to squeeze his sweaty, oily throat. He rolled to the side, feeling for his weapon with his good hand. His fingers wrapped around the barrel. He pulled it forward and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  A kick landed in his chest, knocking him onto the oil-smeared floor. The rifle shattered in his hands. He quickly pulled apart the remaining components until he had the firing mechanism. The flint caught. A spark. A moment of silence then … fire.

  “Burn, freak.”

  The floor erupted in flames that captured both figures. The sergeant’s trousers lit and he leaped aside, rolling to kill the flames. Through the fire stepped the alien. Step by step the creature came, glowing as her skin charred. The swirls turned white and radiated out. The body slowly collapsed to the floor, thrashing wildly.

  “The chamber is on fire,” Braxton shouted from the control room.

  Power returned to the facility. The door mechanism released and thick smoke poured from the chamber into the control room. Braxton dashed in, covering his face with the collar of his lab coat. He slammed his fist down on the red emergency override button and the sprinklers burst into life.

  The sergeant was in a bad way but still breathing.

  Braxton shook his head. “Damn it, man, that deserves a medal.”

  Several scientists managed to shuffle a set of poles under the alien, then lift her onto a metal bench. The charred body thudded onto the surface. The scientists twisted the poles from underneath her and left the prone figure alone.

  Braxton stood back, observing the body. There was much about it that worried him. A junior mopping the floor swept past the bench, knocking the body. The body twitched, and the junior jumped almost clear across the room. Braxton stepped up to the body and prodded it with his finger. Where his finger touched the body, the muscles tightened and then relaxed. He signaled for Jones to join him.

  “Explain to me, young Mason, how the dead come alive.”

  “They don’t,” she replied.

  “This is correct. So how do we explain this?” Braxton ran his hand over the arm, which twitched and thrashed out at him. He leapt back. The arm fell dead. He touched it again, more quickly. The arm twitched. The swirls on the skin of the arm flickered pale blue.

  Jones stood by his side, wordless.

  “Interesting, isn’t it? Bring me the big microscope,” Braxton said.

  Jones searched through the scattered instruments and returned with a large microscope mounted on a set of wheels. Braxton maneuvered the equipment over the arm, twisting the focus knob until the skin came into sharp relief.

  “Fascinating,” he whispered. He moved the hand, prodding it with a pencil, bringing one of the blue swirls into the center of the viewer. He increased the magnification, zooming in by a factor of one thousand. The swirls were made up of angular blue lines.

  “These swirls make up an exoskeleton,” Braxton explained. “It moves the body. I’m not sure how far it integrates with the tissue, but it’s definitely technology, a sort of bionanotech. We have concepts that are similar, but this is the stuff of dreams.”

  “Biotech? Where does the power come from?”

  “It sucks the power off your skin and uses it as charge. We’re all walking biomass batteries that generate up to one hundred millivolts, but it’s a ridiculously small charge. An electric eel generates six hundred volts. To power an exoskin, it would need to be insanely efficient.”

  “What if these creatures generated more power than us, more along the lines of the eel?” Jones asked.

  He glanced at her as she took down notes. “Good point.” He pushed the microscope away. “It’s powering the body, but to what end? Where are the commands coming from? Is it the technology itself, thus making her a kind of techno zombie? Great. Blue space zombies!”

  “Not really zombies. Just controlled dead people. Ah,” Jones said.

  “Or, worse still, is it reading the instructions from her dead brain, actually carrying out the last desires of her mind from the grave, if you pardon the poetic language.”

  “Could it be radioed in from somewhere?”

  Braxton shrugged. “All we could say at this point is that every possibility is the worst possible situation.”

  “What if we supply it with power. Could it communicate with us?”

  “Good thinking, Mason. But her brain’s been deteriorating, so we’d hardly have time to get any kind of response. We don’t even know if we could communicate. How can we possibly understand what she’s going to say?”

  “We have the symbols in the craft. What if we got a linguistics expert?” Jones said, adjusting her glasses.

  Braxton smiled at Jones and said, “Check the database.”

  51

  NIGHT CLAIMED LONDON and the streets came alive. It was the safest time. The attacks lessened and people stepped outside for brief encounters. Civilization had changed as the power had drained from the city. They were now prisoners of their own ignorance, shackled by their reliance on instant and
easy communications. Society suddenly no longer knew anything. Rumor and fear were kings as the enemy systematically hunted the population of the city.

  Norton had seen similar acts of aggression in Afghanistan, although not at this level of intensity or superiority. He knew that when you’re fighting against a technologically advanced enemy the most decisive act you can perform is to neutralize their technology.

  Moonlight filtered in through the windows, allowing him to watch the two large speaker magnets on his desk. They were powerful, so they floated a third of an inch apart. He tapped the top magnet and watched it wobble until it regained stability. The magnets were repelling each other because they were the same. Polarity equalization. Fighting against each other, because they were the same. It was the same with close families.

  He looked over at the photo of his deceased wife. “I’m sorry you’re gone, Belle, but glad you’re not here to see this.”

  The face of Tracy Hanson floated in front of him. She was another one from a close family that had exploded. He’d never known what had happened between Hanson and her brigadier father, but it had been a bitter and loud rift. The army had lost its best young officer. He recalled that Hanson had tried to tell him something during the meeting at number ten, but Chief Inspector Booker had kept telling her to be sensible. There was something about magnetism. Tesla readings. Where was Wikipedia when you needed it?

  Absentmindedly, he watched the speaker magnets bounce off each other. Bounce. One magnet came down, touched the second one and bounced back up. Norton rummaged in his drawer for a lead pencil. He sharpened the end using the razor edge of his security pass, and let the lead and wood shavings fall onto a piece of paper. He picked out the wood and placed a magnet in the middle of the sheet. Some of the lead shavings were attracted to the magnet.

  He bounced the second magnet onto the first. The shavings spread out across the paper. Like an invisible wave.

  Hanson had spoken about a report she had written, and then Booker had put his head in his hands. Norton never heard anything further from Hanson regarding the assassination of the French marshal other than the disappointing message about some kind of specialist military sniper, one of his own soldiers.

  He knocked the table and the top magnet slipped sideways, coupling its charge to the lower magnet. Norton stared at them. What would happen if they could find these magnets and reverse the polarity? Spaceships came down. Spaceships stayed down, their power gone. But was this simplifying the physics to the point of error? He needed an expert in this. He knew just the man. If he was still alive.

  Bullets exploded through his window, shattering the glass over the floor. He dived for cover behind his solid-oak desk. A robot appeared at his window, flashing a floodlight into the office, searching the room. The light crawled over every surface, and then faded as the robot turned and moved on.

  Norton held his breath then peered around the remains of his desk. He crept toward the window and glanced out into the street. At the edge of his vision he saw movement. He jumped sideways as a metal fist crashed into the room. He rolled back then ran out into the corridor. The fist drove in through the thin walls, smashing all in its path. Norton sprinted down the long corridor until one leg buckled and he crashed to the floor.

  The hand opened and scraped around, looking for its victim. Norton whipped out his gun and fired until it emptied. One bullet lodged into a joint of the robot’s wrist, making the hand twitch. The arm shook, demolishing the wall, and Norton took the opportunity to jump up and run down to the emergency escape.

  He kicked open the door and burst into the concrete column. The door closed behind him and he was left in complete darkness. He waited until his breathing returned to normal. Slowly feeling his way, he descended the steps. As he approached the base of the staircase he heard a low humming, a human one.

  “Hello,” he whispered. “State your name and rank.”

  There was a gasp from the darkness. “Field Marshal, is that you?” The voice was young and terrified, but still a soldier’s voice.

  Norton knew that every soldier knew his voice. “Yes.”

  “Sir, it’s been terrifying, sir, horrific, sir. I’m Lance Corporal Jackson, sir. Your clerk.”

  “I think we can dispense with the formality of rank in this situation. You can call me Andrew. What’s your first name, Lance Corporal Jackson?”

  “Kevin, sir. Sorry, I didn’t mean to say sir, sir.”

  “It’s all right, Kevin. This is a good time to be scared. Are you all right?”

  “I’m really scared, sir.”

  “I meant are you injured? Do you need medical attention?”

  “No, sir, I mean Andrew, sir.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m guarding, sir,” Jackson said.

  “You don’t need to. You can go home.”

  “But I’ve got to do something. I can’t wait around waiting for them to come.”

  Norton nodded. He was doing the same thing, keeping the fear at bay by devoting every waking minute to his duty.

  “If you want something to do, then you’ve come to the right place,” Norton said. “I’m about to embark on a special mission and I’m going to need all available help, which at the moment is you.”

  He felt his way in the dark until he made out the shape of the door, then the handle. He pushed and peered out into the deserted street. “Follow me.”

  “Out there, sir? Wouldn’t it be safer to stay in here?”

  “I’m not sure it’s safe to be anywhere anymore, Kevin.”

  They cautiously made their way out into the street. London without lights was a different beast. Every corner was dangerous, every building a trap. Robots stomped around the streets with their great floodlights, searching for people who had surfaced and lit fires. As the temperature dropped, any kind of survival could easily backfire.

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “I need to get an answer from a man I once met. He’s over in West London. It should take us about forty-five minutes to walk. Maybe less if we see a robot, because then we’ll be running.” He gave the young soldier a smile. Jackson didn’t smile back.

  They made their way down the minor streets off Oxford down to Marble Arch, then headed west along Bayswater Road past Hyde Park. The arch was half destroyed, with only the bottom of the columns remaining. Groups of people were drinking, shouting, and indulging in other activities mankind fell back on when the apocalypse came calling.

  “Sir, how do you know the way?”

  “I’m old school, Kevin. I’m my own GPS. I grew up in London.”

  Norton led the way through the back streets until he came to the edge of Holland Park in Kensington. The area had been relatively protected, and most of the buildings were still standing, but when they came to the house Norton had been looking for, it was no longer there. It was just another pile of rubble and despair at the end of a gravel driveway.

  “I’m guessing this isn’t the result you were expecting, sir.”

  Norton shook his head. “Sorry to do this to you, lad. Got to head over to North London now.”

  “What are we going to find there, sir?”

  Norton glanced back at the rubble. “Hopefully some answers and not more of this.”

  Another fireball streaked across the night sky as the continual rain of satellites-turned-robots fell to Earth. Norton wondered why the silver crafts never appeared at night. Were they solar powered? Were they punishing the inhabitants of Earth for not being environmentally friendly enough?

  Someone had worked out that the silver crafts only appeared for seven seconds before vanishing again, or fourteen if they did a double bounce. Where they came from and where they went to, still no one knew. Although they did know that if one descended nearby, there was no chance of survival. What the EM waves didn’t destroy, the lasers did.

  But the silver craft were nothing compared to the deadly menace that was the robots. Unstoppable and unrelentin
g, the robots were a freight train of extermination.

  “Are we going to make it, sir?”

  “Some will. Someone always survives. That’s what we do as a species. Endure the impossible, then hate each other for it.”

  Norton looked up and down the street. There were important buildings in the mews, yet none of them had been touched. “Again, my bright young man, anything strike you as odd?” he said.

  “The street’s in pretty good nick,” Jackson said, “all except for this house.”

  “The house of the exact person I wanted to talk to. Possibly the only man in the United Kingdom who would have an inkling of how this technology works. And when we need to ask him some questions, he’s dead, and his entire house, probably with all the evidence in it, is destroyed. And by the warmth of the bricks, I’m guessing it was fairly recent. Who would know that I would want to talk to this man?”

  “Would he have had some kind of vault or something?”

  They looked over the wreckage. Norton picked up a few bricks and threw them aside. “Where would we start? We’d need weeks to comb through this lot.” He sat on a low pile of rubble and looked down the street.

  Jackson picked up a couple of large chunks of concrete and heaved them aside.

  “Last time I met him,” Norton said, “there was a hotshot with him. A young Indian boy, a physics genius fresh out of Cambridge.”

  “Can you remember his name?”

  Norton laughed. “I’m lucky if I can remember my own phone number. Don’t worry about moving the rubble, Kevin. Come on, we’d better get moving.”

  Jackson continued to kick aside some of the small pieces of brick and mortar. “What was the man like, the one you hoped to find?”

  “A man of indiscriminate necessity, and quite distracted in the way that super-smart people are. Clive Poundriff was the cleverest person I’d ever met. And the most unlikable. It was something he knew all too well, and he was happy to demonstrate it to all and sundry, in the most opinionated and obnoxious way possible. Other than that, he had a decent baritone singing voice. And threw a good party, of course, which is why I know what the inside of his house looked like. I felt like I needed to wash for a week afterward.”