The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  ‘The big one,’ he muttered. ‘The one that puts all the others to shame.’

  So, the townsfolk wanted to fight. Without him, of course, they were just a little square of ice ready to be melted by the morning sun. But the machinery was just sitting there, waiting to be harnessed like a seam of newly discovered gold.

  All it needed was the right man to do it.

  He logged back into the computer and ran through the inventory of the underground base. More than half of the arsenal was made up of standard but out-of-date military vehicles and weaponry: tanks, armoured cars, guns and mortars. He might as well send the townsfolk out with rocks.

  Level Three, the lowest level of the complex that contained storage hangars, that was where things got interesting. The research and development bay, the experimental robotics technology.

  It was all so primitive by his standards, pale in comparison to his birdmen and his spiders, and his fondly remembered masterpieces, the bears. Yet with a little tweaking….

  The day was not lost. He had a little time. A week or two at least before the enemy came storming through.

  And the enemy, what of them? There was something familiar about it all, about the face he had found hidden deep in the darkest recesses of the internet that was allegedly behind it all.

  They had almost met before, and as a result Kurou had spent the last five years in hiding, keeping his continued existence a secret. This other, this creature—for it was surely no man—was not just his equal, but perhaps something more.

  Perhaps his eventual slayer.

  ‘A little jousting, a little jousting I do enjoy,’ Kurou muttered. ‘Why not a little dance together, Grey Man? A penny for your thoughts, grand sire?’

  There was nothing Victor could do about Kurou for the time being. He had to make sure Isabella was safe, and only then could he figure out how to help the professor. The girl had a number of minor cuts and bruises, but luckily nothing serious. In a lower level medical bay Victor found some medicines and bandages that were vacuum sealed and still in perfect condition. With Isabella a little drowsy from some painkillers he had found for her, he set about patching her up.

  ‘Victor,’ she moaned, as he cleaned a shallow cut on her wrist, ‘what do we do now? Can we just stay in this place until this crazy war is over?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. I’m sure they’ll find us eventually.’

  ‘Oh Victor!’ she wailed. ‘Don’t say that!’

  Victor shrugged. ‘I think its best to be pragmatic about all this. That way we might be better able to figure out a solution.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  Victor shrugged again. ‘Somewhere that probably shouldn’t exist. From what I’ve seen it’s obviously military, but it’s also old. And if even the town council doesn’t know about it, then it might not belong to the army at all. It might belong to someone else entirely.’

  Isabella stayed quiet for a while, barring the occasional yelp of pain. There was something in her eyes that Victor found unsettling, worrying even. For all the time he had known her, she had been a bastion of innocence in the middle of a dark, dark room, purity in a place where purity had long ago been consigned to memory. He knew what her father and sister thought about her, that she was naïve, ignorant, even dumb; but they were the fools as far as Victor was concerned. They were walking down one street with their eyes on another. Isabella had it right; everybody else had it wrong.

  But now something had changed. She had seen so much death and destruction that even her thick drapes of denial had been forced open.

  ‘I’ll just go and get us some water,’ he said, unable to look at her eyes any longer. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  There was a sink in the medical bay but the water supply was dry, the pipe probably long ago rusted solid. Luckily, a little way down the corridor was a washroom with a tap which after a few minutes of coughing up brown, putrid liquid, had begun to run clear. The base, despite its obvious age, had been built to last.

  As he filled up a plastic beaker under the tap, he wondered if it wasn’t indeed possible that they could stay here undetected from the oncoming invasion. The base had been hidden so long, of course, but there had to be a way to conceal the entrances. On the video footage, Patricia had exited via a long tunnel that opened out into the woods further down the valley, a second entrance even more secret than the first. There could be others, but Victor didn’t see why they couldn’t be sealed. The base had an air-circulation system, water supplies, food machines—and even a cigarette vendor, judging by the packet he had found randomly dispensed on the floor outside the old mess hall—so there was no reason why they wouldn’t be able to wait the war out, even if it took years.

  The skeptic in him however, wasn’t convinced. The oncoming army was relentless, and who wasn’t to say that they were coming here for the very reason of reclaiming this base? Victor and Isabella might find themselves an unwilling welcome party.

  He was still mulling over the best course of action when he walked back into the medical bay and found Isabella gone.

  ‘Our biggest issue will be fuel,’ Lena was saying from the front seat as the old jeep jerked and skidded through the drifted snow on the road heading up into the hills north of the town. ‘Whatever we find in this base, the fuel supply will likely be unusable. Refined oil and petroleum have a shelf-life like everything else. If it’s spoiled, anything that requires fuel will be useless.’

  ‘Then what the hell will we fight them with, snowballs?’ Robert said beside her. Despite having one leg in plaster, one arm in a sling, and another shoulder heavily bandaged, Mortin had insisted on coming. Patricia’s father was nothing if not tough.

  ‘Guns will still work, provided we clean and oil them,’ Lena said. ‘Though what use they’ll be, I don’t know. I’m praying there’ll be some kind of oil-refinery on site, or at least some alternative form of energy.’

  ‘Nuclear? A couple of nukes would certainly help slow down the invasion.’

  Lena gave Mortin a cold look. ‘I think we’ve learned our lesson about nukes already,’ she said. ‘It’s possible that some of these machines will have atomic power supplies, though. That’s what I’m hoping for. And that they haven’t decayed or leaked, of course.’ She gave Mortin a sideways look. ‘But then in all likelihood we’re going to die anyway.’

  Patricia sighed. On either side of her sat Lena’s trusted guards, staring out of their respective windows at the bland snowy landscape, seemingly obvious to the conversation going on in the front. For her part, Patricia was just hoping she would find someone worth taking her frustrations out on. Victor or preferably Kurou, although one was likely hiding in the town and the other probably dead. Maybe she would have to settle for smashing up some of these machines Lena was counting on.

  Up ahead, the road angled down into a hollow, then turned sharply uphill. Where the road turned back on itself a pair of tracks led out of the woods.

  ‘There,’ Patricia said. ‘That’s it.’

  In the gun battle, the armoured truck she had brought down from the secret base had been damaged, its tyres blown out by stray bullets. The jeep had no chance of making it up to the tunnel entrance, so Patricia told Lena to pull over.

  ‘It’s only a couple of hundred metres, but it’s hard going,’ she said. ‘Father, perhaps you should stay here?’

  Mortin glared at her. ‘You know me better than that, girl,’ he said.

  Patricia nodded and held up a pair of fold-out metal crutches. She just hoped his stubbornness wouldn’t hold the rest of them back.

  ‘Isabella!’ Victor shouted, jogging through the corridors, his panic slowly rising. She had just vanished into the air. Many of the floors were coated with a fine layer of dust, but he couldn’t find even a trace of her footprints. It was as if she had floated away.

  ‘Where are you?’

  His own voice came bouncing back. She couldn’t have gone far, yet he had looked down all of the adjacent
corridors, and there was no sign of her. Instead, he headed for the control room on the lower floor, sure he would be able to find her on the security cameras.

  As he descended the stairs to the lower level, he passed hangar after hangar of ancient machines. Caked in a dry grey dust, everything looked so empty and desolate, a graveyard of technology. It was a soulless, dead place, one which he had dreamed of inhabiting until he had brought Isabella here.

  Now all he wanted to do was get away.

  ‘Isabella!’ he screamed again, and this time a faint sound came back to him.

  ‘Victor? Over here!’

  He turned to see her at the far end of the nearest hangar, standing among rows of tall humanoid machines, her foot on the bottom rung of a stepladder pointed towards the nearest one.

  ‘What are you doing? Stay away from there!’ he shouted, but Isabella, being Isabella, just shrugged.

  ‘Look!’ she shouted. ‘They have places you can climb inside. I think they’re meant to be driven by people like we drive cars.’

  For a few seconds she just stood there at the foot of the ladder, in front of the tall machine, and Victor felt something popping in his chest, like a link to his heart going boom. He tried to scream at her to get the hell away, but his words came out as a dry, constricted croak.

  ‘Look, I told you,’ she said, reaching up and moving out of sight beneath another one of the machines.

  ‘No!’

  Victor sprinted as fast as he could, but as he reached the machine Isabella was just struggling into a tight concave alcove in the robot’s chest cavity, sliding her arms into control ports and ducking her head into a semi-circular chamber with a visor that fell down over her eyes.

  ‘Get out of there!’

  ‘Just a minute, Victor—oh, I … I can’t!’

  Something whirred and something else clicked. A series of lights came on along the machine’s flank and then a metal plate slid out of one side of its chest, arced around in front of Isabella’s wriggling body, and attached itself to a locking mechanism on the far side, sealing her in. Below it, her feet still kicked out, but a moment later braces jutted out of the machine’s lower torso and encircled her ankles, pulling her tight.

  ‘Hang on,’ Victor shouted. ‘I’ll get you out!’

  ‘I’m stuck!’

  Victor climbed up the ladder and reached out for the shield covering the front of the machine, but when his fingers touched it a bolt of electricity surged through his body. One moment he was reaching for Isabella, the next he was lying on his back, looking up at the rock roof of the hangar far above.

  ‘Victor? Victor, are you all right?’

  His muscles felt like cast iron as he inched his head around to face her. ‘I’m fine,’ he muttered out of a mouth that was reluctant to work. ‘What did you do to me?’

  ‘Nothing, I swear it!’

  ‘It … it shocked me.’

  ‘I didn’t touch anything! I can’t! It feels like my hands are trapped. I can’t move anything. Victor, please help me!’

  Victor tried to get up, but it was like climbing out of thick mud. He stared at his hands, compelling them to move, only to see them inch slowly back towards his body like he was reeling in a fish from a tar-filled pond.

  Perhaps if he rolled on to his front he might have a better chance, he thought. He craned his neck to the left, trying to use the momentum to turn himself over, but all he felt was a growing neck ache. Sensation was starting to return to his legs, so he kicked out with his feet and was finally able to turn himself over, flopping on to his front to stare back up the hangar towards the door he had entered through.

  Two people were standing there. Victor tried to gasp, but all that would come from his throat was a crushed wheeze.

  He didn’t recognise the taller of the two, an elegant but coldly attractive woman wearing a heavy fur jacket open at the waist where a gun holster was poking out. The other was shorter, younger, and apparently unarmed, but he considered her far more dangerous.

  His wannabe angel of death: Patricia Mortin.

  33

  Victor imprisoned

  The Grey Man closed his eyes, reaching out to his soldiers. They were spread out now, stretched wide across the Siberian plateau to maximize their effectiveness, but the cold was starting to wear. He’d lost three only yesterday, brought down not by enemy gunfire but by the relentless freezing air working on their control systems.

  It didn’t take long to go to work. Once the controls shut out, the heating systems switched down and their riders quickly died. He had teams heading out to retrieve those he could, but sometimes the riders were too integrated, and the system died with them.

  His head was thumping with pain like he hadn’t felt in decades. The skin on his arms was beginning to lighten again, after years of staying the same tint of grey-white. He knew his control was beginning to waver, that before long he would begin to lose his soldiers one by one and they would either regain autonomous control or perish in the harsh conditions. He was learning so much about himself at the same time as exacting a long overdue vengeance, but the time was coming when he would have to go underground again.

  Still, there was time left yet. Time for a little more devastation before he turned his attention back towards his primary objective: recovering what had been stolen from him.

  With his fingers pressed into the wooden window ledge until they left imprints and cracks in the paint, he reaffirmed his single command to his soldiers, the one solitary objective that had made controlling so many so easy:

  Destroy.

  One of the guards landed a token punch in Victor’s stomach as the other opened the door. Together they tossed him into the storage room and pulled the door shut.

  ‘Stand guard,’ Lena told one, then dispatched the other to fetch Robert from where he was resting upstairs. Turning to Patricia, she said, ‘Now let’s go see what we can do about your sister.’

  Patricia hurried to keep pace with Lena’s long strides as the councillor walked back up through the hangar towards the machine where Isabella was trapped. The tall woman had been quiet ever since they had discovered the machines, barely even noticing Isabella’s screams and struggles.

  It appeared that Victor had managed to pull Isabella from the train wreckage and bring her here, but while Patricia was happy because she would be able to tell her father and cheer him up, she was far more excited about the rooms of machines they had discovered.

  An entire war host was here just waiting for them. If only they could use the machines to their advantage, they might not have to give themselves up as lost.

  Isabella was still screaming when they returned to her. The machine hadn’t moved, but Isabella’s face was pale and her eyes were darting around as if following motes of dust floating in the air.

  ‘How do we get her out?’ Patricia asked. ‘My father will be heartbroken if she’s hurt.’ When Lena gave her a sideways glance, Patricia added, ‘So will I.’

  ‘There must be a mechanism on this thing. Perhaps he knows where it is?’

  Patricia scowled. Victor, whom they had found lying on the floor in near paralysis, claimed Isabella had climbed into the machine of her own accord. Patricia didn’t believe him for a second and had wanted to execute him on the spot. Lena had insisted they spare him, but his time was coming. Patricia had no intention of letting him leave the storage room alive.

  ‘Isabella, can you find a catch or an unlocking mechanism?’ Lena shouted, but Isabella just began to cry, shaking her head back and forth.

  The problem was the folded brace around the front of the machine. Isabella had warned them not to touch it, but if they could break it open somehow they might be able to free her.

  Back near the entrance to the hangar Patricia had seen a workshop. ‘Wait here,’ she said to Lena, leaving the older woman to stare up at the machine with a thoughtful look on her face.

  A lot of the tools were too heavy to carry, but in a cupboard Patricia found a
n old circular metal saw which still worked when she tested the power. Grabbing a couple of armfuls of cable, she ran back downstairs to the machine.

  Lena was still staring up at it with her eyes furrowed now. Isabella had gone quiet. A low noise was coming from the machine.

  Patricia found a plug and had switched on the saw before Lena looked up. ‘This will get her out,’ Patricia said, hefting the saw and arching it towards the central body guard, even as Lena screamed, ‘No!’

  The saw struck the metal casing, bounced off and narrowly missed severing Patricia’s arm. As it fell to the floor and began cutting into the concrete, Isabella’s screams filled the air.

  Lena jerked the cable from the socket and the saw’s noise cut out, leaving just Isabella’s high-pitched wail. The skin on her face was stretched unnaturally tight, her mouth open so far she resembled something from a horror movie.

  ‘Isabella, I’m sorry! What’s the matter?’

  ‘It hurts!’ the girl screamed. ‘You’re hurting me!’

  ‘I didn’t touch her,’ Patricia said. ‘What’s she talking about?’

  Lena was shaking her head slowly. ‘We need to think about this. It’s connecting to her in some way, perhaps running an electrical current through her. If you don’t want to hurt your sister, we need to be more careful.’

  ‘Hey! What’s going on? Isabella? Isabella!’

  At the far end of the hangar Robert Mortin had appeared, hobbling forward on his crutches. At the sight of his older daughter a wide beaming smile broke out on his face. Patricia felt a pang of jealousy, remembering how it had been Isabella who had made it on to the train and not her. She wished she still had the saw in her hands.

  ‘What’s happened to her? Get her down,’ Mortin said, hobbling up to them, then leaning back on his crutches, breathing hard.