Black Knight

by Andy Briggs

“What’re you doing here?” said Dev with a frown.

  “Miss Wade allowed me to come when I remembered something.” Dev inwardly smiled when he noticed a flirtatious glance swapping between them. “The Company. I remember something about it. I don’t know where from, but it’s in here somewhere.” He tapped his forehead. “During the Victorian period, they had massive resources and almost unlimited wealth. They recruited the best scientists from around the world and had access to long-lost texts from the libraries of Alexandria, Antioch and Xianyang. They will have had knowledge of the Antikythera Mechanism long before it was found again. I believe it was them who built Black Knight.”

  Mason gave a mocking laugh. “The Victorians? Listen, I do history in school and there’s no way they could’ve done that hundreds of years before NASA.”

  Eryl Stoker looked at him with a frown. “That would have been a mere eighty years later. What kind of school do you go to?”

  “A really poor one, apparently,” said Wade under her breath.

  Tyker continued. “Things change rapidly, especially in eighty years. If Lee unleashes the EMP now, then it will change for the worse.”

  Lot accompanied Dev up the sloping platform to the point where they could just reach one of the dangling cables. Dev ran his hand along it. It felt like smooth, cold chainmail, built from millions, perhaps billions, of interlocking loops. He peered up, the cable stretching away as far as he could see.

  “You know I hate heights.”

  Lot gave a small smile. “You keep complaining about it every now and again.”

  “And here I am about to go into orbit. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  She met his gaze. “Since when has anything made sense lately?”

  “That’s a very good point.” He expelled a long breath to calm his nerves and weighed Iron Fist in his hands. “I just hope this thing is space-proof.”

  “If it isn’t, you can ask for a refund.”

  Dev smiled. Lot was still looking at him, wanting to say something but finding it difficult.

  “When you thought I was the mole … that hurt, Dev. That hurt more than you snooping on my private texts.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  Lot held up a finger to silence him. “He kept texting me, telling me to stop hanging around you guys. He was not only a lousy speller, but he got weirdly jealous. He is also a complete idiot who loves the sound of his own voice.”

  Dev knew he shouldn’t be smiling with relief, but he was. He looked away and cleared his throat.

  “Well, maybe we should talk about this later. I have to go into space and save the world from … something.”

  Lot smirked and shoved the Iron Fist gauntlet on to his arm as hard as she could. “That sounds so lame.”

  Dev activated the Iron Fist mech. Metal scales flowed over his arm, encompassing his body as the battle suit moulded around him. The scales flowed over his head, completely encasing it. A visor appeared, allowing him to see that Lot had taken a few steps back as he grew in size, now some eight feet tall. She held the two rocket-packs up.

  “Incoming,” she yelled and threw one then the other.

  Dev quickly turned around, both packs anchoring to his back, held in place by small clamps that morphed from the suit. He explored the mech suit and rockets with his synaesthesia.

  “It’s good to be back,” he murmured as everything checked out.

  He watched as Lot carefully slid back down the sloping deck, then hopped aboard the Avro.

  “Good luck,” came Charles Parker’s voice over the intercom. He was no doubt watching all of this via a satellite somewhere above them.

  Dev saw Lot and Mason give him the thumbs up as the Avro’s ramp closed. Then he lay a hand flat against the cable and activated the rocket packs.

  The Iron Fist mech shot into the air. Despite his fear of heights, Dev couldn’t help but feel thrilled as his hand guided the way ever-upwards.

  “Yee-haa!” he yelped.

  “Perhaps some radio decorum is in order,” came Charles’s flat voice, always keen to suck the fun out of any situation.

  Just to annoy his uncle, Dev began to loudly hum. He smiled when he heard Charles tut over the intercom.

  The temperature in the mech notably dipped, despite the fact it was supposed to maintain its own climate control. The rumble from the rocket pack was the only noise accompanying him during his ascent and, after passing through a fine layer of clouds, Dev risked peeking down.

  “Wow!” he breathed.

  He was high. Really high. In an aeroplane, or the Avro, his view had always been restricted by the windows, but Iron Fist’s visor gave him an unhindered panoramic view. The sky around him was turning a deep blue, and he could now see a very prominent curvature to the horizon. He could even make out the coast of Brazil, a verdant green that he assumed was jungle, highlighted with sunlight glinting off a network of blue rivers that ran like veins across the landscape.

  He was relieved that his acrophobia hadn’t kicked in. It was as if his depth perception had been swamped, and he could no longer tell how high a cloud was from the trees below. It looked almost as flat as a painting.

  “You’ve just left the stratosphere,” Charles informed him. “You’re now in the mesopause. After that is the thermosphere, where it will start getting warmer again. We may also have issues with communication.”

  Looking ahead, the sky was inky black and the cables stretched into nothingness.

  Charles spoke again. “Dev, perhaps now is the time to tell you that you will have enough fuel to reach Black Knight.” In the overly long pause, Dev sensed there was a catch. “But not enough to make a controlled descent.”

  “Then how am I supposed to get back down?”

  Again, another pause from Charles. “The priority is getting you up there. I rather fancy we’ll work out the mechanics of getting you down at the appropriate time.”

  Dev couldn’t help but think that sounded like a one-way mission.

  “Congratulations. You have just crossed the Kármán line. One hundred kilometres up. You’re officially in outer space. You’re a quarter of the way there.”

  “A quarter?” said Dev incredulously. In his imagination he had thought he’d be in space in less than a minute. Then something else occurred to him. “Exactly how much air does this thing carry?”

  Charles’s reply came in a string of broken syllables.

  “Uncle Charles?” The distorted voice gave way to silence. “Anybody? Can anybody hear me?”

  Nothing.

  Dev’s heart was in his mouth and he felt a wave of fear grip him as the sky around him continued plunging into the void. He had no communication and no fuel to safely return to earth.

  Space was truly a frightening and unforgiving place.

  Then his eyes began to adjust and the darkness gave way to a field of stars. More stars than he had ever seen in his life. A million points of light dusting infinity. It was such an overwhelming sight that he felt tears in his eyes.

  Ahead, something glinted in the sun. Dev’s spirits suddenly rose as he realized he’d quite literally reached the end of the line: Black Knight. Looking at it straight on, it was impossible to discern any detail or features, and, with only the star field behind it, he was unable to judge its size. But as he got closer he knew one thing for sure: Black Knight was enormous. Its nose cone was spread open like a welcoming flower.

  Or the mouth of a carnivorous predator.

  Entering the cavernous mouth of Black Knight finally gave Dev a real sense of scale. The closest he could compare it to was that Black Knight must be the size of an aircraft carrier. He couldn’t comprehend how the Victorians had got it up there.

  The hangar he flew into housed winches the size of mansion houses, around which the three cables were strung. Like the inside of an old ship’s engine room, massive pistons towered from the floor and ceiling to power the winches. Metal gangways criss-crossed the edge of the hangar, so Dev made his way t
o one of these as he applied a little reverse thrust and killed his rockets. He slowed enough for the mech to engage its magnetic boots, anchoring him to the steel floor with a dull clang.

  One curved wall was filled with a brightly painted Union Jack flag. Without air or pollutants, it was perfectly preserved. The wall behind him had “The Company of Merchant Adventurers” emblazoned across it, leaving no doubt as to who had built the structure.

  If Lee had made it this far then there was no sign of him. A hatchway at the far end of the hangar had the word AIRLOCK on a brass plate above it. Dev approached. His mag-boots made walking difficult. He was moving like a jerky, stop-motion animation puppet.

  He opened the hatch by spinning a central wheel as he’d seen in submarine movies, and was forced to stoop low to fit the mech through.

  The airlock chamber beyond was quite small and illuminated by chemical strips that gave a pale green glow. There was enough room for three people – or one giant mech suit. There was another hatchway ahead. He closed and sealed the hatch behind him. The moment the locking wheel stopped turning, smoke began to jet into the room from a nozzle in the floor. Dev tensed, expecting a trap … but the smoke began to dissipate, and with it he heard a raspy klaxon slowly rise in volume, along with the hissing sound from the nozzle.

  The smoke must be air, he thought, which was why he could now hear the sounds. The room was no longer a vacuum. The klaxon stopped making its irritating noise. There was a sound like hundreds of old typewriter keys snapping away, then the door leading onwards opened on its own.

  Dev cautiously stepped into the corridor, which was similarly lit by the chemical strips in the floor and ceiling. He deactivated the mech’s helmet, which rolled away leaving him wearing just the suit. He breathed deeply. The air was crisp and cool, in fact he could see the vapour from his breath every time he exhaled. There was a stale smell, metallic and old.

  There was a blue line painted on the floor and Dev hoped that, like navigating the Inventory, it would take him to the control room.

  He passed through several more hatchways, the corridors all looking the same. The echoing clunk from his mag-boots echoed then fell eerily silent, reminding Dev that he was exploring a ghost ship.

  Dev pressed on until he reached a junction offering the usual choices – left, right, straight – but with the addition of up or down. The blue line continued upward, but there was no sign of a ladder to reach it. Dev was pondering if he should use the precious fuel in his jetpacks, before he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand.

  “Dev, you idiot!” he said aloud. It was comforting to hear a voice, even if it was his own. “Zero-G!”

  He deactivated his mag-boots then jumped upwards. Out of the clutches of earth’s gravity he effortlessly soared straight up the corridor. It was a joyous feeling and he slowly barrel-rolled to enjoy the freedom of movement.

  Ahead the corridor opened up into a wider space. Dev brushed his hand along the wall to slow himself down, and he gracefully emerged from the floor of the bridge beyond.

  The bridge was the size of a football pitch. The entire ceiling was a geodesic mesh of brass panels holding a mosaic of glass window panes in place. The view beyond was simply stunning: the entire earth was laid out before him. He could see across oceans and continents and trace the space elevator cables stretching far below.

  It took Dev a little mental orientation to work out Black Knight was pointing nose down and the bridge was mounted on the front top of the structure, just behind the hangar.

  There were banks of desks, like a primitive mission control, all arcing around a huge engine the size of a lorry. Dev edged closer and was struck by two things at once: it wasn’t an engine; it was a computer of sorts. A mass of whirling gears, cogs, valves capable of quite advanced calculations – if a little slow. Dev had seen a Difference Engine before, designed by Charles Babbage in 1822 and publically hailed as the first computer, able to make simple calculations. Obviously the Antikythera Mechanism had proved that it wasn’t. Dev seemed to recall there had been a Difference Engine stored in the Inventory before the engineers moved it out of the way and installed a ping-pong table.

  However, this machine went beyond a Difference Engine. The constant whirling arms and cogs made the same typewriter sound he’d heard in the airlock and he deduced that the whole ship was run by clockwork.

  The second thing that struck him were the four people who sat unmoving at the control desks.

  “Er, hello?”

  Dev activated his magnetic boots and walked in a wide semi-circle around the computer so he could get a better look at the men. They looked like waxworks, poised over the instruments, two were even frozen mid-conversation. Something had struck – killing then instantly. They wore smart navy blue uniforms that belonged in the pages of a history book.

  Dev reasoned that Black Knight hadn’t been filled with air when he’d landed, so there had been no oxygen to rot the bodies … although now he suspected the stale whiff he had smelled was the air reacting to long dead flesh. He felt sick at the thought of it.

  Fighting his revulsion, Dev edged closer to the instruments. There were no computer screens here, just a confusing array of dials and gauges. With no sign of Lee, all he had to do was shut Black Knight down – although that was easier said than done. While his synaesthesia would easily reset an electronic system, it was completely useless against an entirely mechanical one.

  He looked around the bridge wondering where to start. And that’s when his head swam. He braced himself against a control panel and closed his eyes to fight the nausea.

  “We can adjust the flow here!”

  The voice came from right next to him. With a sharp inhalation, Dev opened his eyes, expecting to see a corpse talking to him. But it wasn’t – this was another of Professor Liu’s memories. Dev forced himself to be calm. The bridge looked pretty much the same, the corpses in front of him hadn’t changed, and whoever was talking was standing just beyond his field of vision.

  He knew Liu had replied, but all he heard was an incomprehensible warble. Whatever was said got the other man angry.

  “No! The graviton generator is ground-breaking! We need to emulate this. Think what we could do!”

  Again Liu spoke. Dev attempted to see whom he was talking to, but his vision blurred and he felt dizzy. He had to remind himself this was a pre-recorded memory, not a virtual reality experience. If Liu hadn’t looked around, then Dev couldn’t either. He would just have to sit back and play the experience out.

  He saw Liu’s hand slam irritably on the control panel as his gaze switched to another bank of instruments to which he was wildly gesticulating to. Dev could read the brass plaque on the desk.

  EMP PULSE GENERATOR.

  Again the unseen man spoke with increasing irritation. “They thought a high energy electromagnetic pulse would help them pinpoint precious metals on the surface. They were fools living in a clockwork era! Could you imagine what that would do to our world now? Look what it did to these idiots who were standing right over the EMP generator! Fried from the inside out! We must destroy this place.”

  There was a garbled, angry response from Liu.

  “Then take the graviton tech if you wish, but if we do not destroy this place others will find it, and who knows what they will use it for.”

  Again, Dev couldn’t hear the response, but it was clearly an unhappy one.

  After dealing with Liu’s Newton’s Arrow invention, Dev knew all about the effect gravitons had. No, he corrected himself, it wasn’t Liu’s invention – it was theft. This is where Liu took his technology from. He wondered just what else the old man had pilfered and claimed as his own.

  The argument between the men continued – when Dev suddenly felt himself sway. He involuntarily fell face-first against the control desk and felt the switches and dials dig into his face.

  He was now not only experiencing the memory of being attacked, but his body was re-enacting it! He “remembered�
� the pressure on his neck lessening as his assailant moved off him. He wondered who would assault Professor Liu – and was excited as he followed Professor Liu’s memories and turned around to face his attacker…

  It was Professor Liu.

  Dev reeled in confusion. Last time he had seen that face, it was that of an old man, but he’d looked up photographs on the Inventory’s database and seen Professor Liu’s younger handsome face.

  Yet here he was, his face an unpleasant snarl as he glared at Dev…

  In utter confusion, Dev found himself walking over to the huge panoramic window as he relived his mysterious host’s memory, and gazed at the earth beyond. It was there that Dev caught sight of his host’s reflection in the dark glass. Like most window reflections it wasn’t terribly clear, more of a ghostly hint … but he was instantly recognizable.

  Dev hadn’t been reliving Professor Liu’s memories.

  They were the memories of a younger Klaus Tyker.

  The shock was so severe that it snapped Dev back to the present moment. He turned around – and saw a giant figure at the far side of the bridge had been watching him.

  “Now, that was weird.” Lee’s voice came from inside the monstrosity standing across the bridge. “Watching you stand there freaking out all over the place some kind of drunk puppet. There is something seriously wrong with you, kid.”

  Lee took a step closer, magnetic boots clunking heavily on the grated floor. Dev studied his opponent carefully. At first glance Lee’s suit resembled an oversized puffy white spacesuit, with the Union Jack on the sleeve. However, the helmet looked more like an old diver’s one. A large brass sphere with a circular glass face plate through which he could see Lee pulling a face at him. A small bellows pumped at the side of the helmet like a fish’s gills, and brass studs covered the suit. On his shoulders sat a pair of small Tesla coils and a piston-driven series of sliders and cogs forming a clockwork exo-skeleton similar to the more futuristic power-armour suits Dev had seen in the Inventory, that allowed Lee to quickly move and walk in zero-gravity.