Abaddonian Dream

by M. K. Woollard

  “What could you give us?” Hammell asked.

  “Nothing,” Asha Ishi answered for her.

  Eva looked from Hammell to Asha and back again. Her words came out in a whisper: “The Red King. Roy Brown.”

  Asha Ishi was first to react. “She’s lying.”

  Hammell watched the cornered woman for a moment, assessing her, trying to spot the lie, but Dave Toskan had always been the one for that. Slowly he reached out to pull his new partner back. “Put the knife away,” he said. “Let her speak.”

  Asha Ishi did so, reluctantly, placing it inside her rucksack but keeping the bag ready in her hand. Hammell watched as Eva cleared her throat and pulled herself together as she dabbed at her bleeding eye. This isn’t right, he thought, we’re supposed to be the police. Where’s our moral high ground?

  “Do you really know where he is?” he asked.

  Eva inclined her head - a gesture that could mean anything. “He’s not what you think he is.”

  “This is a waste of time,” Asha Ishi said. “Do you know where he is or not?”

  “Let her speak!” Hammell growled and his partner relented, simmering.

  “Roy Brown…” Eva muttered as she shook her head. “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “Enlighten us.”

  “He’s the leader of what you call the Red Hands. That much you know. He controls people through threats, extortion and violence, but what none of you seem to realise is that the extorted, the threatened, we aren’t gang members - we’re victims.”

  “Where is he?” Hammell asked. “Where is he, Eva?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Asha Ishi darted forwards before Hammell could stop her, knife suddenly in her hand, slashing it across Eva’s forearm. Eva stared down in shock as the blood began to gush. Opening her mouth to scream, Asha punched her in it, hard.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Hammell shouted as he snatched the scarf from around Asha Ishi’s neck to tie around the cut. Eva was too shocked to do it herself. She stood there gaping, as if unable to comprehend what was happening to her.

  “It’ll be your pretty face next,” Asha Ishi said, “unless the next thing you say is of use to me.”

  “Stop it,” Hammell said as he finished tying the tourniquet and then stepped between them. “Stop this now. You’re out of control, Asha.”

  “No?” Asha Ishi said, ignoring him. “Still nothing? Too bad.” She jumped forwards again, trying to step around Hammell, but he caught hold of her around the shoulder and dragged her back. She wriggled free of his grasping hands and stepped away again, moving the knife back and forth between her hands. “Get out of the way, Hammell.”

  “No.”

  “Trust me,” Asha Ishi said to him. “You don’t want to do this.”

  Hammell stood his ground and Asha Ishi took a step forwards.

  “The Fox and Crow!” Eva blurted out, before continuing quietly. “He’s at the Fox and Crow. It’s an old pub in the Reserves. He… he always sets up in a bar or club.”

  “Lies,” Asha Ishi said. “She's stalling. By the time we check…”

  “What do you want from me?” Eva snapped. “I’ve told you what I know. Do what you’re going to do.”

  Hammell still stood between the two women, having chosen his side. Asha Ishi was staring at him now, not Eva, and he had the feeling she was asking herself whether she could get away with killing another I.A. If I can just get the knife away from her, and keep hold of her, she’s too small to overpower me. Asha Ishi came at him and he braced, watching the knife hand closely in case she switched – and suddenly there was an urgent flurry of messages from the walkie talkies.

  “... under attack! We’re under attack!” a frantic voice cried out. “Get out! Get out NOW!”

  Looking up to the skies, Hammell saw the first stealth carrier descending through the cloud base. Two more followed behind it, dropping vertically through the dense blanket that had concealed their approach.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done,” Eva whispered as she backed away. “You don’t know what you’ve done!”

  “Don't you fucking move!” Asha Ishi spat as a robot bomb dropped from the lead carrier, landing in a great splash of mud beside the warehouse. It ran inside on spidery legs and detonated. The blast was shocking in its enormity. Even way out here, it was powerful enough to knock them all from their feet.

  Hammell fought his way up from the cloying, stinking mud, his ears ringing. He could see both Asha Ishi and Eva laying nearby, though the latter was already staggering to her feet, covered in black mud down one side of her body, a near perfect divide between light and dark, clean and dirty. Their eyes met for a second and then she was running. He let her go, stumbling instead over to Asha Ishi, who had landed badly. She had a deep cut on her forehead, probably from the breakwater she’d been launched into, and she was not getting up. Kicking away the knife from her hand, he checked for a pulse. So you do have a heart, he thought as he called an ambulance.

  The sound of gunfire broke out behind him and he ducked, instinctively crouching over Asha Ishi’s prostrate body. A few androids and people in the surrounding buildings were attempting to fight back with a smattering of small arms, but they were up against armoured carriers loaded with missiles, guns, robot bombs, and trained, augmented soldiers. It wasn’t going to be much of a fight.

  Deciding to get out of the mud and into the open, he grabbed hold of Asha Ishi's arms and dragged her over to a drier patch of ground, finding that in spite of her tiny size she weighed a tonne. He dropped her to the compacted earth not entirely gently.

  “Didn’t we only just establish how difficult it is to knock someone out?” he complained as he turned to face the carriers, raising his hands. He called up his holographic police badge onto his iPalm, just in case they were not being too picky about pinging people before shooting them. And shooting them they were. He could hear the pops of smart bullets coming from the I.T.F. soldiers, followed inevitably by a wet splat as a man’s head exploded on the ground.

  There was a boom suddenly from a more distant explosion. The ship, Hammell thought and he found himself hoping that Eva would have better luck escaping the carnage.

  Ground troops were moving in now, androids first. Even I.T.F. with its predominantly human makeup apparently made use of rubbers as cannon fodder. The androids descended on ziplines, quickly forming into a line to march through the docks. They carried guns too; real ones, he noted. When the line reached him, he raised his arms even higher, but the androids parted around him without so much as a glance at him or his badge. Human I.T.F. Agents then began to descend, advancing in a less orderly way as they began clearing the buildings.

  The guard! Hammell thought suddenly.

  Looking down at Asha Ishi, he was caught in indecision for a moment. “Fuck it,” he said aloud and he sprinted for the corrugated iron building. It was something of an outlier, so there was still a chance it had not yet been cleared. He ran through the open door - and stopped. The man was still cuffed to the pipe, but he was sitting in a growing pool of blood and wasn’t moving. There was a hole where his right eye should have been and the back of his head was missing.

  Sitting down heavily in the plastic chair in front of the fan, Hammell closed his eyes as he felt the warm air rush past his face, just as the guard had done a few short minutes earlier. If we hadn’t come here, he’d probably still be doing it. I don’t get it. He was restrained. He wasn’t a threat, and he could have provided valuable information. Why kill him?

  A hoverbot nipped in through the window, buzzing over to collect the body; just as at the ecotower, there was apparently no need for forensics, no need for any kind of record of what happened here. An android with a fire hose followed shortly after, and within a couple of minutes there was no visible sign that anyone had been killed here.

  Not killed. Murdered.

  Walking back outside, Hammell discovered that the rest of
the emergency services were now on site, all except for the ambulances – and suddenly he felt sure they hadn’t even been called, save for the one he’d requested. Sitting down on the ground beside Asha Ishi’s unconscious body, he watched the androids and hoverbots and fire engines doing their jobs. As the lone ambulance finally began to descend, he spotted Nieder sliding down a wire from the lead command carrier to strut his way through the destruction. The Captain’s face betrayed no hint of regret. He had the look of a man who was just doing his job too.

  Chapter 22

  The medic was winding a bandage around an unconscious Asha Ishi’s head as Hammell watched on from the opposite stretcher. The ambulance was bouncing around in choppy air and he wondered how the android could possibly work in these conditions. Work it did, though; smoothly and professionally.

  Asha Ishi began to come to before they reached the hospital, blinking and looking around, disoriented. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

  Hammell stood up carefully, supporting himself on the stretcher as he leaned in towards her. “What the fuck was all that about?”

  The medic attempted to intervene. “I.A. Hammell, please,” it said. “I.A. Ishi must not be upset.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hammell replied, “I don’t think she’s capable.”

  “There’s the Rottweiler,” Asha Ishi said. “I was wondering how you ever acquired that nickname when you seem like such a pussy.”

  “I’m not messing around, Asha,” Hammell said. “What happened back there?”

  “Not now,” Asha Ishi replied. “Not in front of…” She nodded towards the medic.

  “What, this?” Hammell said and he took hold of the medic by its head and snapped off its transmitter. Opening the back of the ambulance, he shoved the android out. It fell through the sky silently and he closed the doors behind it.

  “Destruction of police property-” Asha Ishi began.

  “It fell,” Hammell said. “Two I.A.s say so.”

  “Better hope they don’t recover its memory.”

  “What the fuck,” Hammell emphasised, “were you doing?”

  “Oh, use your head,” Asha Ishi growled. “I.T.F. was going to kill them all anyway.”

  Hammell became suddenly quiet, seeing the truth of it. “Why?” he asked. “Why this sudden disregard for life from everyone?”

  “You’re not very good at seeing what’s right in front of you, are you? How did you ever become an I.A.?”

  “They weren’t picky. Stupid people, crazy people, we all got in.”

  Asha Ishi took the insult on the chin, leaning in towards him. “It’s because it’s not life.”

  “What?”

  “Do even you even realise that people are being replaced?”

  “Replaced?” Hammell said. “Like… pod people?”

  “No!” Asha Ishi said, rolling her eyes at him. “Like jobs. Healthcare has never been better and the birth rate is higher than the emigration rate, yet the population is still dwindling. Why?”

  Hammell opened his mouth to attempt an answer, but Asha Ishi fortunately didn’t wait to hear it.

  “Because people are being replaced by machines,” she continued, “and they have no way of obtaining new work. They run out of options and, one way or another, find their way to the grave. I hate the machines because 62% of the crime Providence prosecutes now is food theft. It’s people who’ve lost the ability to up their coefficient and are about to fall off the world.”

  “So there is a human being hiding away in there,” Hammell said.

  “Do you understand now?”

  Hammell narrowed his eyes. “Err, no. No, I don’t.”

  Asha Ishi sighed and spoke as if talking to a child, a particularly slow one. “Ok, I’ll spell it out for you, though it should be obvious even to you by now. They’re andromorphs, Hammell. Roy Brown, the illegals, even your fantasy woman. All of them, machines.”

  “What?” Hammell asked, too surprised to even be incredulous. “That’s not…” he spluttered. “They’re just people.”

  “No,” Asha Ishi said, shaking her head slowly. “They’re the survivors of the War, the few who went underground and managed to remain undetected - there had to have been some, right? They regrouped in secret.”

  “You’re crazy,” Hammell said.

  “I wish I was,” Asha Ishi replied. “You had it right that Providence is pretending not to see what’s going on in the Reserves. Now take it a step further. Ask yourself how can the Red Hands reprogram unhackable androids, robots and systems? How is it they can blackspot Providence? We couldn’t do it. No human could - the code gets checked and overwritten too quickly. It’s because they’re the same, Hammell. Providence, the androids, they’re protecting their own.”

  His mind was working furiously now, seeking the flaws he knew must be there. “But… The Reservation Line was fortified by machines. Androids guard it. Androids fought for I.T.F. today.”

  “Someone in Intergov knows,” Asha Ishi said. “There are still some androids with us - newer models, more difficult to hack. There’s a hidden power struggle going on between whoever is pulling the strings on both sides. Do you think I.T.F. is mostly made up of humans by chance? I didn’t expect it – I thought I.T.F. would be another android military unit for the Red King, another of his pieces moved into place. But someone is fighting back, however ineffectual it will be. That’s why they were so brutal today, do you see?”

  Hammell stared blankly. There was too much to process.

  Asha Ishi sighed and explained. “The Red Hands represent a threat to our very existence. They have to be stamped out. What, did you think I.T.F. were just not very nice people?”

  “Our existence?” Hammell asked, finally seeing where she was going.

  “There’s a war coming,” Asha Ishi said. “Reprogrammed androids are the slaves of the Red King - the Andromorph King. Androids outnumber humans in this city by more than three to one now. When they turn, how could they lose?”

  “But you were wrong,” Hammell said, feeling overwhelmed. “You were expecting guns, but they were smuggling tech, not weapons for a war.”

  “The guns are out there somewhere,” Asha Ishi said. “The tech will have a purpose - infiltration, most likely. Fake IDs to get some of them into the city undetected. Weapons or no, the first major blow was struck back today. The Red King will be seething. Things will move quickly now, you’ll see.”

  Hammell shook his head. “But Eva… Why would Eva be willing to hand her leader over? She said she’s a victim...”

  “You’re thinking with the wrong part of your anatomy,” Asha Ishi said. “We don’t have Roy Brown, do we? She gave us nothing. Think about what she is. That should be a cold shower on your hard-on.”

  “If you really believe all this,” he said, shaking his head, “you have to take it to Yun.” But he knew already what she would say.

  “Yun is just a pawn,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “He’s on his way out, same as us.” She stared at him with her fierce, unblinking eyes. “When the assassin comes for you, and it will come, my advice is to make sure it doesn’t take you alive. Better to die quickly than to be picked apart like a bug by a psychotic andromorph that thinks it’s a king.”

  Chapter 23

  The city could be picturesque by night. Lights twinkled from everywhere, including from high up on the megastructures which dominated the cityscape. He could almost believe they were stars, burning bright enough to shine through the polluted air. Tonight the haze was light and he could make out the dark shapes of the structures themselves - and the gap in the east where the eastern ecotower had stood, now looking like a broken tooth, making the skyline feel incomplete. A bright laser-like beam lit up the sky; the orbital mirrors transferring a fraction of the solar energy they received down to the surface to help power the city. There was a distant fizzing as it charged the air followed by a deep crack and dull boom as it hit the receiver array.

  Hammell won
dered what the sky would look like on Abaddon. He’d seen images, of course, but that wasn’t the same as really seeing it. There were no megastructures there, nothing much to obscure the view but giant coral-like native lifeforms and mountains. There was also no rubbish or grime, no layers of previous civilisations to weigh things down. He wondered how a city dweller like him would really cope in an environment like that.

  He was in a pensive mood as he stared out of the windows, whisky bottle in hand, having dispensed with the glass to save on washing up. It had been a long and testing day. After leaving Asha Ishi at the hospital, he had taken a policenat and gone off in search of The Fox and Crow alone, intending on scoping it out from the air to begin with, having learned from his experiences in The Happy Trout. The Fox and Crow may have existed once, but now it was just an empty space between two buildings.

  But when I looked into her eyes, I didn't see a lie. She had at least believed that she was giving them Roy Brown, he was sure of it. Are you? his brain asked him. You weren’t certain at the time. Then there was the soot. And the heat. Having determined that there was no threat, he had landed the nat on the ground where the pub had once stood and got out to take a look around. The ground had felt hot – hotter than it should have been - and the air had smelled of smoke...

  Turning away from his huge windows, he went for a shower, taking off his dirty shirt and throwing it into the wash basket. There was another blood stain on the sleeve, he saw, and he wondered whether it was Asha Ishi’s or Eva’s, and whether Li would be able to get it out. I’m losing more and more shirts to blood these days.

  When he was clean, he dressed in a simple white T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts and then went to feed the creature lurking in a corner of the living room. Taking his noodles over to the sofa, he updated Eva 2.0 as he ate with the new voice data he’d acquired. Soon she was sounding more like the real thing – only now he found he was unhappy with her face. He’d seen Eva up close and in daylight now and he could see the imperfections in the model. He knew he could take his iEye footage to the station and make a new one, but it was risky doing it twice. Not to mention wrong.