The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  The old man gave one last long, gradual sigh, then his eyes closed, and his head slumped forward on to the mound of blankets covering his chest.

  The man he had called Massi stared for a moment, his mouth wrinkled in disgust. ‘No! Alek, you do not die unless I command it!’ Do you hear me?

  But for the first time in more years than he could remember, there was no voice to reply to his thoughts.

  The sudden confusion had been unexpected, but welcomed like a former lover come back to warm his cold, empty bed. Sharpened bones hidden in folds of skin where the fingertips would be on a normal man had made short work of the bonds, but they had never been much concern. The girl’s rifle had been more so, but most deadly had been the look in the girl’s eyes. The ease with which she might end his life had made patience essential.

  And now it had been rewarded.

  No one cared what a skinny, ugly man was doing while bullets were flying and glass was showering the crowd. Within seconds he had rolled off the top of the armoured vehicle and away into the crowd. Within a minute he had found the shelter of an unguarded doorway, and within five he was safely out of harm’s way.

  He surveyed his new abode with something like excitement. While getting back to his playground of new toys was his highest priority, he had landed on his feet with his choice of hiding place.

  If there was anywhere he could turn to his advantage, it was the office of the town mayor.

  It took some considerable time to secure the girl, but eventually she was captured and brought to the cells on the lower floor of City Hall. Sergei scowled as he followed his newly appointed head jailor down the freezing corridor towards the cells at the end.

  In the gunfight and proceeding chaos, the gallows had been damaged, the frame collapsing under the weight of the two dead men. With the crowd all but dispersed it had made sense to hold the other prisoners until a second execution ceremony could be arranged in the morning. Impressing the remaining populace to get them on side was imperative.

  What then, though? That idiot Yevgeny was dead, so was the mayor. Everyone else capable of opposing him was in the cells. Yet still his power was tenuous, on the verge of collapse. He had stood up in front of the people and assumed control, yet even his hired guns were barely loyal. His promises of rewards from the coffers he had yet to locate would only hold them so long. He had allowed them to take their pick of the townsfolk’s women for their bed partners, something which had temporarily appeased them, only to incite the rage of the wronged families in its place. The freezing temperatures had sent people back to their homes, but they would be rapping on the door of city hall come daybreak.

  He was starting to think that power wasn’t worth the effort.

  ‘Here, um, sir,’ the head jailor said, pointing towards a closed cell door. ‘That’s where we put her.’

  ‘Open it.’

  Inside, Patricia, looking slightly worse for wear, was sitting on a concrete bench wrapped in several blankets. The air temperature was suitably freezing, and the girl’s teeth chattered as she glared at him.

  ‘You have one chance to avoid death at first light,’ he told her. ‘You will come to my bedroom now, and you will do whatever I ask.’

  The girl snapped her teeth together sharply. ‘Not that it’s not small enough already,’ she said.

  ‘You little brat. I should have you shot.’

  She smiled. ‘You won’t be long behind me. Your supposed rule will be over before you know it. Once the people realise you’re just a small-time crook.’

  Sergei shrugged. ‘Everyone has to start somewhere.’

  The girl stared at him. There was something in her eyes he found unnerving. He was just taking a step forward to knock that look off her face when she flashed a smile.

  ‘He got away, didn’t he? Good luck out there. Make sure you lock the door on the way out. There’s no way I want him getting in.’

  Sergei scowled at her. He tried to think of a suitable retort, but failed and gave up. He barked at the head jailor to lock her up again, then headed back up towards his offices, where at least it was warm.

  He had to admit he had barely thought about the supposed murderer she had captured and brought to trade for her father, but now that things had settled down again he got to thinking about the room he had found in the basement of the bombed dormitory building, and the strips of meat he had seen on the floor that belonged to no animal he had ever seen.

  So what if the man was out there again? He’d been loose before, so what had changed?

  Sergei scowled again.

  Only everything.

  As he headed for the upper floors, he resolved to put an extra guard on the entrance, just to make sure.

  Isabella could barely stand by the time they made it to the underground base. She was so exhausted that Victor didn’t even need to explain where they were. The lights were still on and the heating systems were still pumping hot, musty air from ceiling vents, but of the professor there was no sign.

  Isabella was ready to fall asleep on her feet, so Victor guided her to an old office and laid her down on a cracked leather sofa. She was asleep before he had reached the door. He didn’t want to leave her, but he needed to know what was going on.

  Searching through the offices, labs, and hangars, he found evidence that Kurou had been here, but no idea where he had gone. Then, in a small control room adjacent to the largest of the hangars, he found a smashed computer screen and signs of a scuffle.

  One of the computer terminals was still online, so Victor sat down and searched through the files, looking for access to the security cameras he had seen hanging in the corners of some of the rooms.

  When he finally accessed the digital feeds and wound them back a few hours, he stared at the screen in shock.

  31

  The council of war

  Sergei Papanov was having a wonderful dream. He was sitting out in the sunshine, holding a vodka cocktail in one hand while a woman knelt in front of him. All around him, people were cheering and waving flags.

  He felt rather disappointed when the sensation of something nudging him broke off his dream at the stem and pulled his eyelids open. The ache of a vodka hangover immediately hit him, and as he looked up into the face of the tall, beautiful Russian woman standing over him, he wondered if he had merely ascended to a higher level of dreaming.

  Then the woman lifted a SS-issue pistol and held it up between his eyes.

  ‘I wanted to meet you before I killed you, you bastard,’ she said. ‘Your fun is over. This is for Pavel.’

  Sergei heard rather than felt the bullet as it entered his head and then exited again nearly immediately, condemning him forever to a level of dreaming from which there would be no escape.

  Patricia opened her eyes to the sound of a heavy key scraping in the lock. She opened her eyes to see Sergei’s head jailor, flanked by two soldiers. She pulled the blankets up around her, the chill forgotten as the fear of immediate execution clouded everything, then she noticed the resigned smile on the head jailor’s face as he stepped inside and motioned to her to follow the soldiers.

  ‘A changing of the guard,’ he said as she passed him. ‘Leave the blankets, please. I’m sure I’ll need them.’

  Robert Mortin was resting in a hospital bed when Patricia walked in. The guards had taken her straight to the hospital after freeing her. Her father was a mess of slings and plaster casts, but he was alive.

  ‘Patricia … I thought….’

  ‘I’d slap you if you weren’t already broken,’ she said, giving him the best hug she could in the circumstances.

  ‘I waited as long as I could. I thought you were dead like your brother. I hunted for you—’

  ‘You can save your excuses for later. What happened last night?’

  He smiled. ‘Lena Patrova returned. Mayor Andrev sent her out on a reconnaissance mission some weeks ago. She’s always been the darling of the people and she didn’t desert them like Pavel Andrev did. Sh
e walked right into City Hall without so much as needing to lift her gun. Sergei Papanov didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘Daddy, that man who captured me—’

  ‘Will be hunted down like a dog and killed. If either of my arms were working properly I’d rip him in half myself. Why I let that bastard Victor Mishin hang around your sister so long, I can’t fathom. I know she was never the brightest spark, but even so….’

  Patricia opened her mouth to say something else, then closed it again. There was too much to get out, too much to explain, that she couldn’t manage it all at once. For now, she was just happy to see her father alive, even though the bitterness at being left behind was still ripe on her tongue.

  ‘What happens now?’ she asked.

  ‘Councillor Patrova has called an emergency meeting for tonight. I am required to attend.’

  ‘How…?’

  ‘I’ve assigned you as my official aide, so you’ll be coming too. You’ll need to push my wheelchair, but that’s it.’

  Patricia gave him a sweet smile. ‘Anything for you, Daddy.’

  Anything that will get me closer to knowing what’s going on.

  Kurou found what he needed in a small room at the end of a corridor on the fourth floor of City Hall. It was an old computer terminal, perhaps once used by a secretary or accountant. The system was slow and cumbersome, but once he had cracked into the council’s wi-fi connection and realigned the system to use a power-saving bandwidth, he found it was adequate to his needs.

  He quickly tapped into the City Hall computer systems and from there hunted down the online marker he had set up on the mainframe computer at the underground base, just in case such a situation as this occurred. Within a few minutes he had regained complete control of the base’s systems, and had taps on all incoming and outgoing phone lines and signals in a five hundred-metre radius. He was ready and prepared to create havoc if necessary, but for now it was probably a good idea to sit tight and watch, find out what was going on. He knew what he knew, of course, but what did they know?

  As he browsed through the base’s video cameras, surprised to find Victor up there with some new woman, he felt it was no wonder no one trusted the internet any longer. It was like a thousand million balls of string all intertwined, with blind men tugging on the loose ends of each one.

  But just in case Victor managed to find a little intimate time with the girl, Kurou ordered a nearby vending machine to dispense a long out-of-date packet of cigarettes. He had heard that a post-coitus smoke had once been the done thing.

  Patricia knew rather more of the assembled people than she would have liked. Most of the former council members were absent due to death, so Lena Patrova had compiled a round table of the city’s best leftovers, a handful of businessmen who had made it on to the train, and a handful of crooks who had not. From where she stood at her father’s shoulder on one side of the room, it was obvious that before anything useful could be achieved the bitterness that had been fermenting since the moment the train departed would need an opportunity to air itself.

  ‘You fucking traitors!’ shouted one man, a well-to-do restaurant owner from just outside the train station. ‘You fucking left us to die! Every one of you should be strung up. That idiot had the right idea.’

  ‘Mayor Andrev did what he thought was best,’ Lena interjected. ‘Yes, it was an abuse of power, and yes it was wrong. But what’s done is done. When you hear what I have to say I think you’ll agree that we have no choice but to work together. It’s vital for the survival of us all.’

  ‘Fuck you, you damn whore,’ the man shouted. ‘Who the hell are you to come in here dictating terms? How can we believe anything you say? You were Andrev’s right hand, and for all we know you were in his pants as well.’

  Lena glared at him. ‘Had you said that on the street a bullet would be nestled between your eyes right now,’ she said. ‘But in the interests of public safety, I’ll let it pass.’

  Patricia couldn’t help but grin. This was the kind of woman she admired, not idiots like her dumb sister.

  ‘We were thinking of ourselves, I’ll admit,’ Robert said, making to stand up, then wincing in pain and sitting back in his wheelchair. ‘But wouldn’t you have done the same? What we face is total annihilation.’

  Lena stared at him for a long time. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she said.

  She let the arguments go on for a few more minutes, giving people a chance to air their grievances. Patricia was impressed; by the time they were all done the hate was smouldering rather than enflamed. The woman clearly knew how to deal with angry men.

  Finally, Lena raised a hand. ‘I think it’s time I told you what is coming for us,’ she said. ‘If you’ll all look up at the screen, I managed to get a few photographs.’

  Patricia turned as Lena switched on a projector, immediately displaying a view of a ruined city. Fires burned in the foreground, while what might have been bodies lay amongst the rubble of a collapsed building.

  ‘This was ten days ago,’ she said. ‘We got lost, trying to escape the oncoming army, and for a while we ended up behind them.’

  The images flicked over a few ghastly wartime scenes, then paused on one of what looked like a fallen humanoid shaped robot.

  ‘They’re machines,’ she said. ‘They’re controlled by an unknown source. All I know is that they’re eating their way across Russia like a wave of mechanical locusts.’ She paused, and wiped something out of the side of her eye. ‘Quite literally.’

  A few more images flicked past. There were ruined buildings, dead people, then a close up of a corpse that brought gasps from the assembled group.

  ‘What the hell happened to it?’ the restaurant owner asked.

  Lena sighed. ‘One thing I could establish about these machines, is that they’re self-maintaining. They don’t have a base, they don’t get serviced, they don’t sleep or stop. When my contact explained their food source, I didn’t believe him. Then I caught one refuelling.’ She gave a little cough as her voice began to crack.

  ‘They run on bio-fuel,’ she said.

  ‘Plant matter?’ someone asked.

  Lena gave a slow shake of her head. ‘No. They run on the bodies of their victims. Their fuel is human flesh.’

  Shocked gasps gave way to outrage. ‘So, you bastards left us to this?’ one man screamed, standing up to throw a cup at Patricia’s father. It bounced off the metal frame of the wheelchair, spilling vodka on to the carpet. ‘We have to leave!’ another man shouted. ‘We have to leave right away! We’ll walk if we have to!’

  Lena tapped the table until the commotion stilled. ‘On our side is that they’re moving slowly. They move on foot, covering only a few miles per day. I saw no sign of any heavy artillery, only a few drone aircraft which appear to serve the dual purpose of surveying the area and taking out any potential benefits to the defenders. We are being defended, by the way. Those were dead Russian soldiers. The army is broken and in disarray, but it fought like only our people can.’

  A general mood of pessimistic solemnity fell over everyone. The fight was gone, the ire that some had shown now doused.

  ‘What do we do?’ the restaurant owner moaned. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘As I see it,’ Lena said, ‘we have two choices. You saw what happened when a large scale evacuation was attempted. That drone strike on the train wasn’t a lucky shot. They were watching.’ She tapped a finger into her palm. ‘There’s a chance that small groups might get away, but most of the roads are now blocked, and there are no ways to refuel for hundreds of miles. It’s a huge risk.’

  ‘What’s the other choice?’ the restaurant owner said.

  Lena’s face hardened. ‘We fight. We stand up like warriors and we fight to defend our town until the last man is dead.’

  There were one or two small cheers, but the general reaction was muted. Patricia saw her father’s face harden and knew that he was resigned to die here. There would be no more attempts to escape.r />
  ‘How?’ someone asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lena said. ‘We’ll pool our resources, find what’s available in the town, use whatever we can.’

  Patricia raised a hand.

  ‘Yes?’

  She felt like all the eyes in the room were on her as she muttered, ‘North. There’s a base north of town. A military base.’

  Lena’s eyes widened. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I was kidnapped and taken there. I escaped, but I can show you where it is. It was full of military vehicles—’

  Lena gave a slow nod. ‘So they were right,’ she said.

  ‘We’re saved!’ the restaurant owner shouted, jumping up out of his chair.

  ‘Wait!’ Patricia raised a hand. ‘They were ancient, in bad condition. I don’t know how to get them to work—’

  The words cut off in her mouth as for a moment an image appeared to flicker on the screen, overlaying Lena’s photograph to show the outline of an animal, a bird.

  No, not just any bird.

  A crow.

  It was gone in an instant, and Patricia blinked, aware that every pair of eyes in the room was staring at her. Perhaps it had all been part of her imagination, but imagination or not, the threat to the town was real. They had no choice but to fight, and hope for some kind of a miracle.

  ‘I can take you there,’ she said again, and Lena gave another slow nod, as if she too knew that there was no other choice.

  32

  Isabella finds a throne

  The thought of starting work on another canvas was making Kurou’s skin tingle with anticipation. It was all so perfectly arranged that he felt divine intervention had set him up like this. He had his materials, his paints, his technology. He had everything he needed to make this the greatest work of his long career.