The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  Then she turned a corner and ran right into Victor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, his eyelids fluttering like a village idiot caught stealing ice cream, a can of oil shaking in his hands. Was he really scared of her or was it just the cold?

  With more warning she might have buried the knife into his chest, but it would require her to unbutton her jacket and the pause would give him time to get out of range. Instead, wanting to see him hurt, she said, ‘She’s dying, do you know that? That stupid girlfriend of yours, she’s dying. Happy are you? It’s all your fault.’

  His eyes looked wounded and for a moment she thought he would cry. She wanted him to, she realised. She wanted him to feel some of the resentment and turmoil that she felt.

  ‘I wish I could help her,’ he said, then before she could reply he had hurried past. He dropped the oil can down in the snow and broke into a clumsy run.

  Patricia watched him until he went out of sight behind a distant truck. It made her a little sick to think it, but she wanted Isabella to die, just to see his misery.

  Around her, the snow had begun to fall harder. The oil can Victor had dropped was already almost obscured, the snowflakes piling up on top like a little white skullcap.

  41

  Victor heads into battle

  His name had once been Wilheim, a carpenter from Moscow who had signed up for a military experiment because the fee was more than he could earn in a year, and he had a daughter who dreamed of going to university somewhere far away, Paris or London or Rome. He didn’t tell his wife, because the interviewers at his initial contact interview said he would only be gone a few days.

  Easily covered as a work trip out of the city.

  He never returned. War had broken out, and he had found himself fitted into a four-legged killing machine that made his bones ache with the speed it covered the ground and his heart hurt with the terrible deeds it carried out in the name of its faceless master.

  Over time, he had stopped being Wilheim, and had become WH4-73, and the ache of the killing had ceased to be bothersome. His body no longer hurt because the metal skeleton of the machine had become his body, its warmth had become his warmth, and its orders had become his pleasure to carry out. Together as one they marched across the land, pillaging the enemy, dealing out the justice that was necessary and deserved.

  The human part of him had lost count of the towns ransacked and destroyed, but the machine part had logged each one in its database, and his kill count gave him shivers of pride. He was among the most successful killers in his division, and felt sure that if such a thing as promotion existed, he would be deserving.

  But all great things had to come to an end, and now his fuel reserves were running low. He had feasted in the last town, but the next campaign would be his last. Even if he feasted well again, his reserves were too low to get him much further.

  He was within fifty miles of what would be his last town. WH4-73 would ride one final time, and he would spill the blood of his enemies in his master’s honour.

  Fifty miles. The order had come in to make the greatest of haste, so he urged himself forward through the snowy landscape, the blizzard so thick he was forced to use his sensors to detect upcoming obstacles. The going was slow, and it would get slower, but fifty miles was fifty miles. Even at a gentle walk he would be there by nightfall.

  And then the excitement would begin.

  There had to be a way. Kurou stared at the computer screen, his fingernails drumming on the desktop.

  He could see from his satellite radar links that his liaison with the girl had got the Grey Man’s attention. The tiny flashing dots that indicated the oncoming War Horses had begun to move more swiftly, while those from further away—which had initially been uninvolved—had turned towards the town. The Grey Man was coming with one purpose only—to destroy the town and everyone in it.

  Good.

  The first War Horses would arrive within hours. Whether they would gather en masse before attacking or come in small groups remained to be seen. It depended on how well the Grey Man understood their capabilities and whether he thought the town could launch a decent defence. It was Kurou’s belief that they would come like a swarm of locusts from all sides at once, meaning the battle would be over in hours unless he could find a way to halt them.

  The only way he could comprehend that the girl and the Grey Man had shared a telepathic link was to assume it was a level of science that he—and most of humanity—was yet to break down into its component parts. It was something that existed out there and that one day a human being would break it. However, while he would like to be that person, there wasn’t time. He had to work with what he had.

  The human side of the War Horses was untouchable. If their orders were to move forward, pillage and destroy, he could do nothing about it. All he could do was try to manipulate the machine side, the part which he had designed.

  He punched the table, letting out a whoop of delight.

  ‘Mind’s eye going like the others,’ he muttered, shaking his head, his fingers racing with that familiar, comforting speed over the keyboard.

  Victor woke up slumped against the workbench, his body shaking with cold. He shoved himself roughly to his feet, angry that he had fallen asleep at so crucial a moment. The scattered tools lay around him in a circle, some pushed into the bag he had brought, others lying loose. The tiny electric component saw he had been trying to fix when he decided to close his eyes for just a second lay beside his left hand. He picked it up and stared at it, trying to remember whether before he passed out he had fixed it or not.

  He pressed a little button on the side and the blade began to whir, so at least something was going right. Water was dripping from a cracked pipe across the ceiling, beating out a rhythm like a ticking clock. Victor didn’t dare look at the time, in case it was already too late. Instead, he gathered up the tools and quickly put them into his bag.

  All night he had sat up, trying to figure out a way to save Isabella. He had finally stumbled upon something that might work in the early hours of the morning, and headed down here to collect what he would need from the bowels of the military base, out of sight of Kurou’s war effort.

  He tried to appear as innocuous as possible as he made his way up the stairs to Hanger Three, where Isabella’s machine still stood. He passed a couple of people heading down, but no one paid him much attention. Kurou, with his obviously distinctive looks, was regarded both as a demi-god and a demon, but Victor, despite being his designated assistant, was the kind of person that eyes saw past. Right now, as he headed into the hangar to find the machine, he was thankful that he wasn’t attracting any notice.

  There were few people around. Victor walked through the entrance and into the hangar proper, then stopped, staring in disbelief, a feeling of lightheadedness coming over him.

  Isabella’s machine was gone.

  He ran forward a few steps, sure he must have come to the wrong hangar by mistake, but the whole section was empty, the entire line of War Horses gone. Now that he looked around, he saw the hangar was in the process of being cleaned out, just a couple of troop vehicles left in one corner.

  Back by the stairs, he interrupted the first man he saw, who was pulling a cart full of old computer monitors towards the row of broken elevators.

  ‘Where’s everything gone?’ Victor said, struggling to keep the hysteria out of his voice.

  The man gave him a square look, frowning. ‘Where you been, sleeping? It’s all hands on deck, don’t you know. Everything that’s not working has been taken into the town.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They’re building roadblocks down there or something. Don’t ask me, I just lug stuff where I’m told.’

  Victor thanked the man, who just gave him a rude shrug and headed off, pushing his cart of computer monitors in front of him. Victor ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time until his heavy bag of tools began to sap his energy.

  In the control room on th
e first floor, there was no sign of Kurou. Victor jumped on to the nearest computer terminal and pulled up the list of War Horses, hunting for the serial number of Isabella’s. It was in a folder marked INACTIVE, but when he opened the file he was able to get a tracking signal that opened a link to a local satellite map.

  He let out a slow groan. There it was, flashing on the screen on the southern edge of town. Victor expanded the map to pinpoint its location.

  The Lenin District, right on the edge of St Peter’s Place.

  Victor rubbed his eyes and let out a long, frustrated sigh. The damaged robot had been moved right to where Kurou expected to meet the oncoming army, on the very front line of the battle.

  Isabella was perhaps hours from death, and the robot was in the worst place possible. With no other choice, Victor climbed to his feet and headed for the door, the bag of tools slung over his shoulder.

  42

  A lost treasure in the snow

  Lena had no intention of hiding away like many leaders might. The headquarters of the town’s only major banking corporation stood on the northern edge of St Peter’s Place, and from the ninth floor there was a view of most of the surrounding streets, particularly the wider thoroughfare cutting up through the town from the southern highway. The snow was still falling heavily, limiting her visibility to a few hundred metres, but it was enough to make out the lines of barricades Kurou had ordered to be built across the roads. Set back every fifty metres or so, they ranged in height from a few metres to ten or more. Built entirely of junked machines from the military base and cars taken from the streets, they were snow-covered, jagged mountains of metal blocking the way into the town. This was where Kurou had planned their biggest stand, with thinner lines of defence along the ridge to the west and the valley to the east. The mining operations to the north had been rigged with hundreds of mines and other booby traps, but with the largest concentration of War Horses set to come at the city from the south, it was the defence of the Lenin District that held the greatest importance.

  Lena shivered. She had barely slept in days; those few hours she had grabbed filled with nightmares. The blood on the lips of the machine creatures snapping at her heels was not something she would ever forget, but she had a feeling she’d be seeing a lot more of it before the day was out.

  Through the snow the smudgy shape of a midday sun was beginning to appear. Lena didn’t know if she wanted the snow to stop or not.

  A red light appeared in the snow to the south, just beyond the town limits. A short distance away it was joined by another one, then another. Lena put a hand over her chest as her heart began to pound. They were coming, oh God, they were coming.

  She had to reach out for the window ledge as more lights blinked on. Her legs felt unsteady beneath her, and the gun in her other hand so useless.

  This was the charge of a cavalry that such primitive weaponry could not down.

  The barricades stood still and silent. Not a thing moved anywhere below her except for the lights moving through the snow, coming closer.

  You’re not exactly trying to hide, are you? You feel no threat from us.

  Then something started to crackle above her, and she looked up, frowning. The sound wasn’t in the room but coming from outside, from higher up the building.

  ‘What the hell?’

  The sound of flutes joined piccolos and oboes. A broad grin broke out on her face as she recognised the piece, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, booming out across the Lenin District from a hundred speakers she’d had no idea Kurou had even ordered to be set up. As the first of the War Horses came into view, the red lights glowing from their LED eyes, bombs began to go off. Kurou’s own War Horses rose up out of the metallic scrap heaps like warriors rising from the dead, their weapons blazing, tearing into the attackers with a ferocity that was breathtaking. As clouds of smoke obscured the streets, the cacophonic symphony blared so loud it almost masked the explosions as the War Horses on both sides tore each other apart.

  As the enemy came on, breaking through the defensive lines with clinical speed and power, only to find another line of defenders rising up in front of them, she could only shake her head in awe. As the battle unfolded in the snow to the backdrop of booming classical music, Lena could almost imagine herself as a child at one of Moscow’s huge state theatres, watching the unfolding of some dramatic ballet.

  Tears streamed down her face, and she began to laugh as her gun fell uselessly to the floor at her feet.

  WH4-73 had never felt such excitement. As he rushed into battle, opening out his hand-to-hand weaponry to engage the machine rising out of the rubble in front of him, a bigger, more cumbersome version of himself, all he could feel was the bloodlust. It was like a fire in his belly making him burn brighter and hotter and brighter and hotter—

  He ripped into the enemy machine with all his might, his iron claws splitting apart the machine’s underside, tearing a hole in the casing where its rider was enclosed, ripping right through the inert man’s torso, drenching the snow around them with human blood. In its death throes the machine collapsed forward on to him, but WH4-73 reached into its body cavity and ripped right up through, tearing the metal apart, throwing the two pieces of the robot aside as he stepped through the piles of junk in search of his next conquest. He wanted to pillage and destroy, he wanted to ravage and kill and maim, he wanted to crush and tear and annihilate….

  To his left another machine was moving, smaller, more agile, one of his own, a brother, yet this brother was moving too slowly, too lethargically to be up for the fight, one leg dragging along the ground, some of its hydraulics broken. WH4-73 turned towards it, feeling a sudden surge of hate that was as welcome as it was unfamiliar. This robot was letting them down and it needed to be destroyed; he had never felt anything more certain. With a roar, he turned towards it, locking on with his missile systems.

  The other War Horse knew nothing as WH4-73 unleashed the full power of his missile armoury. Four twin surface-to-surface warheads turned the War Horse and its rider into a heap of scrap metal.

  You bastard, WH4-73 thought. You let us down. You weren’t fighting hard enough. You’re no better than the enemy. You’re all one and the same, you cowards.

  Lena stared. She leaned closer to the window, wiping away a sheen of condensation to see better. What was going on?

  She could swear that one of the enemy War Horses had just fired on another. Even as the lines of Kurou’s troops were retreating under heavy losses, the enemy was in disarray, the War Horses turning on each other, some even fighting hand to hand. One on the corner of St Peter’s Place suddenly turned on another, throwing it back against the wall of a nearby building as a timed bomb went off nearby, blowing it apart.

  Still more were coming, the red lights blinking on back in the snow and advancing into the town, but there was as much a battle between the enemy robots as there was between them and the defenders.

  ‘Kurou, whatever you’ve done, you’re a genius,’ she whispered, just as the entire wall in front of her exploded in a deafening roar of cracking mortar and shattering glass.

  Kurou sat at his main computer terminal in the control room, watching the battle unfold through a series of cameras his volunteers had set up around the town. He groaned as one suddenly blinked out and kicked the desk in frustration. Through the rising smoke and the snow that still fell, it was difficult to make out much of what was happening, but aided by the statistical chart displayed on an adjacent screen, he could follow the way the battle was going.

  His forces had been decimated, overrun along the ridgeline to the west, shattered in the valley to the east. To the north, the booby-trapped mining area had claimed its share of the spoils, but he was down to just four operational War Horses, all of which would likely fall within the hour.

  In the old Lenin District, his forces had put up a far greater fight, dancing with the Grey Man’s soldiers in a vast, apocalyptic war dance while some of his favourite music roared in the back
ground. Even there though, the lines had been broken through and his forces would be reduced to spare parts by the day’s end.

  From an outsider’s point of view, it might appear that his army had not just lost, but been routed. That might have been the case had the enemy not also been fighting itself.

  Adjusting the emotive settings on the Grey Man’s War Horses had been a huge but calculated risk. Turning up the anger to maximum might have caused them to fight harder, overrunning his forces even quicker, but his estimation had proved correct, that the overload would cloud their judgment, causing confusion, causing them to see all other machines as the enemy. While his troops had fought bravely but ultimately in vain, the Grey Man’s army had fought a magnificent battle amongst itself.

  Satisfied that there was nothing further to be done, Kurou began to switch off his computer systems, transferring the necessary data to a small handheld tablet, in preparation for the final battle, one which was fast approaching, and one which he would have to fight alone.

  He was reaching for the button to disable the video screens when he caught sight of a tiny figure running through the snow in St Peter’s Place while bombs exploded, buildings collapsed, and War Horses died around him. Impressed by the individual’s bravery, Kurou zoomed in to take a closer look.

  ‘Young Victor? What on earth are you doing?’

  The tracking device in Victor’s hand was flashing quicker, even though he could no longer hear the sound of the accompanying bleeps over the roar of the battle around him. He had configured the handheld tracker to the radio frequency given off by the damaged robot, and he knew he was getting close from the way the flashing light was now almost a solid dot of red. All around him the world was turning to hell, huge robots blowing each other apart, their stray missiles bringing the façades of buildings crashing down into the street.