The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  The machines of the larger caverns were of little interest. The true treasure lay in the smaller caverns further below ground.

  Laboratories and research stations, testing rooms filled with dusty robots and banks of computer equipment, they pierced Kurou’s long disused mind like a drug. As he wiped the dust off an old leather chair, wheeled it over to a laptop that creaked when he lifted the screen and pushed an optimistic finger against the start button, he felt the years shedding off him like a snake’s discarded skin. As the screen flickered into life, a beautiful butterfly of intelligence began to stretch its wings, years after taking refuge in the dark.

  Once, the whole world had been his canvas, until the fear of enemies more powerful than himself had made him blow out the light.

  Now it was growing bright once more.

  Of course the computers were encrypted with protection software, security too powerful for most hacking programs to break through. But within a couple of minutes Kurou was in, his hooked, twisted fingers buzzing over the keyboard as he executed a series of complex operating system shortcuts and bypasses that he had years before committed to memory. Once he had access, fearing other levels of tripwire security, he hacked into the mainframe and reconfigured the network and all associated security systems to answer to one person and one person only.

  Its new master.

  With the computer systems under his command, Kurou then got to work discovering just what extent of riches innocent little Victor had found beneath the Siberian snow, and how he might use it to his own advantage.

  The world will see the strokes of my brush again, I swear it.

  Patricia sat beside the doors for a long time, trying to decide what to do. She had found one set of footprints heading away, and from the clumsy way they moved through the snow, she guessed they belonged to Victor. The temptation to hunt and execute him was nearly overwhelming, but he was the easy one. He could wait.

  Whatever else lay beyond the doors, Kurou was in there. She stood up and swung the rifle back over her shoulder, wincing at the lingering soreness.

  There had to be a way to open the doors. If there was, she would find it.

  Within minutes of accessing the internet for the first time in half a decade, Kurou realised that the rot that had begun to set in years ago was now near absolute. Rather than fight it, people had instead begun to work the corruption to their own advantage, flooding the internet with so much fallacy and misinformation that the very nature of trust had been turned on its head. He found an article series denouncing the internet and declaring it dead, then another denying the claims of the first. It seemed that over time the infiltration had oozed forth from the computer screen into all forms of communication, to the extent that television broadcasts were routinely faked and that only commands given face to face could be trusted.

  Years and years of unchecked corruption had made the whole fabric of organised society unstable, to the extent that no one could be quite sure what was true and what was not beyond the borders of their own vision. Wars were fought blind, governments were falsely elected and then pushed from power without the players themselves ever having known.

  It was, in short, a right fucking mess.

  It would take some time to wade through the debris of what had begun as mankind’s greatest invention.

  Luckily, time was something he had in abundance.

  Pulling his chair closer so he was hunched over the screen, his keen eyes flicking over the lines and columns of data, he got to work, fingers clacking on the keyboard like a piano player for the dead.

  Victor, that pea-brained fool. Terrified that the doors would seal him outside, he had left a small square of rock jammed into the sliding mechanism. As soon as Patricia spotted it the way in revealed itself, and five minutes later she was standing at the end of a long corridor with the cold trapped outside. Somewhere from inside the walls came the soft hum of heating units, and Patricia felt a maddening urge to just sit down by the wall and enjoy the warmth.

  She pinched her fingers in between the gun barrel and the wall, causing a sharp pain that forced her to focus. Kurou was in here somewhere, waiting to die.

  Kurou had never panned for gold, but he understood the concept. Digging through the shredded remains of the internet in search of something useful and meaningful was rather similar, hours on end of trawling through shit in the hope of unearthing one little nugget of fortune.

  Unlike the hopeful shifter squatting in the middle of the river, he realised quickly that nothing of any use would come from anywhere that had once been trusted. All of the major websites he might have once browsed for information were a hacked, ruined mess. It was a thrill of sorts to tap into the defining fabric of each site and watch the battle between the hackers and the defenders play itself out in fluid lines of code, but trying to walk through the middle of the war and pick up some vegetables was a pointless, thankless task. After witnessing the same raging battle on the websites of several major governments and news agencies, he retreated to his old haunts in the corners of the internet where he had once planted his own seeds of misinformation, to the forums and the blogs and the nothing sites, the low-traffic, uneventful, simplistic pages that few hackers would ever feel the need to infiltrate.

  Even there, though, he found corruption, the fingers of decay stretching far, but out in the furthest reaches of the internet, on the sites long ignored and mostly abandoned, he began to use his own skills to find a way in, to sort the misinformation from the truth, to spin his own web around the hackers that were controlling everything and very slowly piece together what the fuck was going on in the world.

  It was impossible to keep the smile from his lips as he worked. The years of hiding were over and he had thrown open the doors to reveal the light.

  He wondered if the world had been waiting for him.

  For the return of the greatest hacker of them all.

  It would be beautiful. It would be flawless. The world would be his canvas once more, to be seared and burned and painted with the blood of its subjects.

  Kurou took a deep breath and muttered a little prayer. He could feel his wings spreading out around him, so long clipped. Soon, he would fly once more—

  Something cold and circular and hard pressed into the back of his head, nestling itself into a little nook of scar tissue. It felt almost comfortable.

  ‘You’re dead, you ugly fucking freak,’ came the sibilant hiss of a girl’s voice that sounded vaguely, remotely, intrinsically … like that of his own long lost daughter.

  28

  Remains in the snow

  The intern doubled over as the butt of the gun struck him in the stomach. Sergei Papanov lifted the gun to finish the man off, then thought better of it, some small inkling of mercy slipping into his thoughts as the heavy, scored teak was set to thunder down.

  ‘Leave him,’ Yevgeny Franko said. ‘Not his fault, is it?’

  Sergei waved at the two heavies waiting in the doorway. ‘Make him talk,’ he said. ‘If he knows anything, get it out of him. I want to know about vehicles and guns. Food stores. Anything that might keep us alive.’

  The two heavies dragged the intern away. Sergei turned towards the window, looking out at the snow-covered town below. A few groups still huddled in the streets, but most of the remaining townsfolk had returned to their homes. The cold had sucked the fight out of them.

  ‘I won’t just sit here and wait to die,’ Sergei said, sensing Yevgeny coming to stand beside him. ‘They abandoned us, but they also abandoned this town and everything in it. Fuck them. We’ll find a way out.’

  ‘Or we’ll die when the enemy rolls through. We should surrender. There are laws, you know. The Geneva Convention—’

  ‘Fuck the Geneva Convention. We fight or run or we die.’

  Yevgeny was silent a moment, thinking. ‘You don’t think it could be all bullshit, do you? All this talk of war? What if there’s no enemy? What if it’s all made up? They say hackers can do anyth
ing—’

  Sergei turned towards him. ‘Then you stand by and do nothing. But I intend to be prepared. If those bastards want a fight I’ll give them one.’

  Pain and whiteness. This was what Isabella had heard death was like, and now she believed it. The pain came from her shoulder, where a large triangle of glass had slashed a V through her dress and the flesh beneath; the whiteness was the floor below where the door of the toilet cubicle had once been.

  And then she reached down, and realised it was snow.

  She could hear people screaming now. She had been sitting on the toilet, sobbing into her hands, when a massive explosion had sent the world revolving around her. A lump the size of one of her mother’s antique vases now burned from her temple, probably the reason why she remembered nothing in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.

  ‘Father?’ she called softly, wondering if the enemy army had found the train and were now massing around it. She looked down at the shard of glass on the ground and wondered if pulling it across her throat might not save her from days of rape and torture at the hands of the heathen enemy soldiers.

  The thought of killing herself was terrifying. If only Victor was here—

  ‘Isabella!’

  His voice came out of the haze of her misery like a swooping silver bird, and for a moment she was certain she had actually died in the catastrophe which had befallen the train. She had to be dead, she had to be dreaming.

  ‘Isabella! Where are you? Are you alive?’

  ‘Victor!’

  ‘Hold on!’

  The sound of breaking wood came from outside, then the head of an axe appeared in the toilet door.

  ‘Stand back!’

  The axe landed a couple more times, then a boot came smashing through the splintered wood. Isabella screamed as splinters showered her, then the remains of the door flew open and Victor held out a hand.

  ‘Thank God you’re alive,’ he said. ‘Come on. We have to get away from the train in case the drones come back.’

  She didn’t want to ask what he was talking about, but she let him lead her out of the wreckage, climbing over the remains of the carriage and its mangled wheels, past heaps of burning wood that stank of cooking meat.

  ‘It might be best if you close your eyes,’ Victor said.

  She tried, but her curiosity got the better of her. All around them were the remains of the train, some of the carriages ripped in half, others standing on end, most engulfed in flame. Dead and dying people lay everywhere.

  ‘I had to get you away from the train,’ Victor said. ‘There’s a siding shed about half a mile back up the line. The survivors are heading there. There’s nothing to eat or drink because the supply wagon took a direct hit, so those who can walk will head back to Brevik and bring help for those who are too injured to move.’

  ‘My father…?’

  Victor nodded. ‘He’s alive. He’s in a bad way, but he’ll live. He’ll be happy to see you.’

  Isabella wanted to thank him, but as she opened her mouth to speak, a sudden dizziness came over her. In an instant her vision had gone blurry, and only a little gasp came out as her knees wobbled and she collapsed to the ground.

  Victor’s relief at finding Isabella alive was quickly replaced by frustration as she fainted in his arms. She didn’t weigh much but he was at the end of his strength, so carrying her through the knee-deep snow was an arduous chore. At the end of it her father waited, something that didn’t exactly spur him on, so as she started to come around he lowered her back down and tapped her cheek lightly until her eyes opened.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Victor, what happened to us?’

  ‘A drone strike. The whole train was hit. It must have been targeted by the enemy.’

  Isabella started to cry. ‘What happens to us now? We can’t go back to the town or we’ll all be killed.’

  Victor nodded. ‘I know somewhere we can go, but it’s a long walk.’

  ‘What about my father? I need to see him!’

  A plan began to manifest itself in Victor’s mind. The siding shed was still some way distant. Mortin had wanted to look for his daughter, but with a leg broken in at least two places as well as a broken arm and dislocated shoulder, he’d had no choice but to let two other survivors strap him to the charred remains of a partition door and drag him away across the snow. After surviving a volley of expletive-laden abuse, Victor had promised to search the wreckage for Isabella and bring her—dead or alive—to the siding shed.

  Now, that didn’t seem like such a good idea. There was too much danger back in the town, both from the people left behind and the approaching enemy. The only safety for either of them was in the secret place.

  ‘How well can you walk?’ Victor asked.

  ‘My feet are like frozen lumps of ice and I’m sure one of my ankles was nearly severed by a piece of glass.’

  ‘Hmm. But otherwise okay?’

  ‘I’ll never be okay again!’

  Over the course of their relationship Victor had learned to understand Isabella pretty well. The louder and more argumentative she became, the better she was feeling. Right now she could probably manage a Himalayan trek.

  ‘It’s this way,’ he said, pointing up the slope. ‘It’s quicker if we go this way.’

  ‘Where are we going? Are we going to find my father?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Victor said, hoping that by the time she figured out that he’d lied to her it would be too late to turn back.

  Robert Mortin shuddered at the screams coming from the corner, where a man with terrible burns was in the midst of dying. He’d heard several other survivors mention how it would have been more humane to leave the guy to die in the snow, but a couple of do-gooders had dragged him up here to the siding shed to inflict his misery on the rest of them.

  As if they didn’t all feel in their death throes already.

  Victor had yet to appear, which meant Isabella was probably dead. The fool wasn’t likely to show up empty handed, so Mortin feared the worst. The weight of losing his son and both daughters in the space of a couple of days was like a hammer thudding Mortin repeatedly over the head, but rather than any thoughts to end his own painful life and join them, all he could think about was revenge. Someone somewhere had to die for this, painfully and slowly. Killing himself was definitely an option, but not until he had wreaked his vengeance on as many people as possible.

  ‘We have to go back to Brevik,’ a voice said from nearby. Mortin looked up to see Mayor Andrev, his arm in a sling and a vicious gash down the side of his face, standing over him. ‘We have no choice.’

  Andrev was right, but that didn’t make it any more reassuring. They would all die if they stayed here, whereas if they went back to the town only some of them would die.

  ‘You know that we’ll be at the mercy of whoever assumed control in our absence? And that there’s no other way to get back to the town before nightfall other than follow the train tracks back in?’

  ‘I understand all of that.’

  Mortin sighed. ‘So when do we leave?’

  ‘Immediately.’

  Yevgeny could barely keep the smile off his face. ‘You’ll never guess what just came slinking back in,’ he said.

  Sergei turned away from the window and the few twinkling lights of the twilit town. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The train. It got destroyed. A trail of survivors just came limping back in along the train line.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘They’ve headed straight for St Peter’s Place. I think they’re heading for the town hospital.’

  ‘Have them intercepted and rounded up. I want them all in the city cells. We’ll decide what to do with them tomorrow morning.’

  Yevgeny didn’t move. ‘You sound like him, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mayor Andrev.’

  ‘So?’

  Yevgeny took a few more steps into the room. ‘I was jus
t wondering who put you in charge.’

  Sergei lifted the gun he had been concealing in his sleeve, pointed it at Yevgeny and pulled the trigger without hesitation. The blast seemed to fill the room, reverberating off the walls. Sergei walked over to Yevgeny’s twitching body and put two more shots into his former comrade, one in the chest and one between the eyes.

  ‘I did,’ he said.

  29

  Bargains and Bribes

  ‘No!’ Kurou screamed. ‘Don’t kill me, sweet princess! Don’t kill me or your father will die!’

  Her finger had tightened on the rifle’s trigger, but now it paused.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your father! He’s going to die!’

  A bony elbow slammed in to Kurou’s face and he found himself lying on the floor with the girl straddling him, the rifle barrel pressed against his throat.

  ‘Tell me what you meant!’

  Kurou hoped his black eyes made it difficult to see that he was looking around, searching for a way of escape.

  ‘I guess you’re not too caught up on the latest news—’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘That little escape train belonging to your dear townsfolk just got rather annihilated by a series of drone bombs.’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘Um, perhaps a glance out of the door might reveal a distant column of smoke?’

  Uncertainty appeared in the girl’s eyes. Aware he was quickly regaining control of the situation, Kurou made a point of tensing his arms and legs to give the impression of nervousness. It was important that the girl still thought she had the ascendancy.