I look at Volk again. And this just doesn’t seem right. He doesn’t look right. He looks like an amputee victim or… I don’t know. I mean, this was built into him. Lang designed all this to be possible. But Lang doesn’t strike me as the most charitable of people. He designed the Uhrwerkmänner as soldiers. As weapons. Apotheosis-mode doesn’t seem like something he would have taken the time to build in.
Though maybe… a repair function? That would make sense, I suppose. They were soldiers.
But something about that doesn’t sit right.
But I don’t have any other ideas, and it’s not like I’m the one who has read Lang’s journals.
The solution. That’s what Clyde said. A solution to…?
Clyde is still talking to himself. “…and that clips on there. OK.” He looks at his notes. “Tabby, terribly sorry to bother you, but this incantation. Is that a vishnu or a veshnu? Can’t quite make it out.”
Tabitha grunts and walks away.
“Well,” Clyde tells her back. “No worries, I’ll figure it out.”
Alarm bells are ringing in my head again. I step toward Volk, lying there, suddenly seeming small, feeling more other than he ever has before. “You’re sure, right?” I ask Clyde.
Hermann stops again, lunges toward us. “You said you were sure.” He is accusatory, the threat of violence clear in the set of his shoulders.
“He is sure,” Tabitha says. “Arthur’s not. Ignore Arthur. Not his area.”
Hermann hovers, wavering between the desire to pull the plug and the desire to see this over and done. For once, it seems Hermann and I are of the same two minds.
After a moment’s awkward silence, Clyde breaks it. “Well,” he says, “I’m just going to go ahead and say that spell now.” He clips the wires leading from Volk to a battery, then clips on a second pair. Clyde holds the second set gingerly.
“Mirehel bal mun keltar bar multarek mel pishtar. Bol gollon el nimtess shin.” Clyde forces his tongue through the gibberish phonemes of magic. “Col veshnu bal tenkoo. Al balrat mol collat. Tempra cal.” Without warning he grabs the live contacts. He manages one more word, maybe another, his head thrown back, howling. A jagged white spark spears out of his open mouth, arcs up, down, strikes Volk.
What is left of Volk begins to emit a dull grinding sound. A painful meshing of gears.
Every muscle in me tenses. I want to move, to push into action, but I have no idea which way to jump. I only know that the need to feels imminent.
Clyde makes another cawing sound. Lightning juts from his jaws, slams into Volk. The grind picks up an octave. Volk’s frame starts to rattle.
Around us the other Uhrwerkmänner seem caught in the moment. Too much rides on this moment. They are trapped by it. Hanging between fear and hope.
Clyde’s scream is awful. He falls to his knees, body convulsing. A thick stream of electricity explodes out of him. He projectile vomits it across the room. It slams into the crowd, blows the seating apart. Robots sprawl, scatter, desperately clambering over each other to escape.
I move half a step toward them, but there’s nothing I can do. I can feel the weight of my pistol in its holster beneath my armpit. But can I really shoot Clyde? This may be victory. This may be an end.
Clyde, jaw stretched wide, turns slowly. The lightning doodles destruction across the floor, approaching Volk.
Hermann is open-mouthed. He lunges toward Volk. The spitting stuttering lightning bolt brings him up short.
He turns toward Clyde.
Clyde’s spasming body finally makes its circuit. He vomits electricity at Volk, connects.
Hermann closes the distance.
The grinding from Volk becomes screaming. A metallic shriek like nails on a chalkboard. His limbless form bounces and crackles. Sparks spit out of him, hit the ground, hit other Uhrwerkmänner. Hermann is a pace from Clyde when one smashes into the side of his head. He is driven wide of Clyde, goes down on his knees.
The solid beam of white that connects Clyde to Volk stutters, blinks in, out, in, out of existence. Volk is glowing. Blue light shines through cracks in his carapace. Seems to shine even through the metal. And yet even as he starts to glow the air around him darkens. He is a single bright spot in a spreading ink stain in reality.
Felicity’s fingers squeeze deep into the flesh of my arm.
This does not feel like victory.
This does not feel like an end.
The lightning blinks out of existence. For a moment it seems like the room has been plunged into pitch darkness. But as I blink away after-images, no… Things are… normal? Not quite. Clyde is on his knees on the ground, still shaking slightly, still twitching. He has dropped the cables connecting him to the car battery. The clamps steam.
The Uhrwerkmänner’s jury-rigged seating is in ruins. Great holes are blasted in it. The Uhrwerkmänner themselves lie in gently jerking heaps, slowly, awkwardly picking themselves off each other. I can’t tell if their hesitance is the palsy in their movements or fear. Maybe it’s both.
Felicity’s grip does not lessen on my arm. Kayla has her sword drawn. Tabitha has taken cover behind a collapsed Uhrwerkmänn. Hannah stands staring with a sort of horrified fascination frozen on her features.
Hermann is on his knees, next to Clyde, staring.
And Volk simply lies there. No more darkness around him. No more blue light. No different from before the spell started. Just that odd bronze box, folded in upon himself. Headless.
The Uhrwerkmänner unfold themselves, find their feet. And Volk just lies there.
Was that it? Was that our big moment? Am I off the hook now? Am I going to live? But I can’t quite put the words into speech yet.
Hermann is the first to talk. “What have you done?” He stands, towering above Clyde. “What did you do to him?”
“W… w… well, we, erm. I… I… I… I mean p… perhaps,” Clyde stammers.
“What it said to do,” Tabitha cuts in, standing. “What Lang’s notes said. We did that. What you asked us to do.” There is not an atom of apology in her.
What Lang’s notes said to do. Lang’s solution. Something is very wrong.
“This?” Hermann is caught between mockery and horror. “I asked you to make my friend this? I do not remember that request. He wanted to live. He wanted to save. He wanted to—”
“BECOME.”
The word booms around the makeshift amphitheater. It seems to fill the whole hidden cavern. It bounces off the Uhrwerkmänners’ shanty-town walls.
Every head turns. Human and machine moving as one. Back toward the cavern’s entrance, the stairway. I shift, trying to see what is coming. And part of me already knows. But I keep telling it to shut up and just be wrong.
But it’s not. It never bloody is.
And, striding into view, comes Friedrich.
43
Oh shit. Oh balls.
“No,” Felicity says next to me. If she grips me much harder she’s going to break the skin.
But yes. Here he comes. Vast and towering. Dwarfing the Uhrwerkmänner that dwarf me. And his army comes with him. A sleek shining wake behind their flagship, HMS Asshat.
They stand in stark comparison to the jittering mob Hermann and Volk lead. Well… Hermann at this point. I’m not sure what Volk is doing. It looks suspiciously like the mechanical equivalent of a coma. But Friedrich’s forces are rigid. Their steel gleams. Their marching is synchronized. Not one of them looks like it’s on the verge of asking if I’m its grandson.
“Volk dreamed,” Friedrich booms. “He dreamed of a better life. A better future. He dreamed of escaping the limits of frailty. Of becoming better. Of becoming more. Of becoming what our father designed him to be.”
“No,” Hermann shouts. “No, you leave. You are not welcome.” It is a futile wail against Friedrich’s massive boom.
“Our father was misguided, twisted,” Friedrich carries on regardless. “His tragedy is all the greater for the goodness that lurked within hi
m—the spark of love that he bore us. Love that he tried to betray, but never fully could.”
He stares meaningfully around the room. His sloping axehead of a face taking them all in. “Lang locked within us all the opportunity to ascend ourselves, our degeneration,” he bellows. “He built within each of us the chance to be perfect.”
He sounds more like a preacher than a warlord. Or a cult leader perhaps. There is a dark charisma lurking in his chest. His voice is expressive in a way that his face can never be.
“Get out!” Hermann rails. Friedrich’s forces begin to ring our ruined amphitheater. Some push onto the central stage, surround what’s left of Volk.
For some reason they ignore us. Perhaps we are not a threat. I certainly don’t feel like one. Kayla may feel differently though.
“You betray all that we strove for!” Hermann is still shouting. “Everything we achieved when we walked away from our father. You are capitulation. You are cowardice.”
Hermann, it seems, has big old brass balls.
Actually, I realize, it’s possible that he literally does have them.
“I am success.” Friedrich enters the ring. His voice crashes against Hermann. “I am victory. I am everlasting. And you are defeat. You kneel at my feet.”
“I will nev—” Hermann starts.
Two Uhrwerkmänner kick out his knees. There is a violent crunch of metal, the sound of something thick snapping. Plates in Hermann’s legs buckle as he slams down to the ground.
“You kneel.” Friedrich’s voice is rich with satisfaction. “As Volk told me you would. As Volk promised me.”
The operator in my gut hits the down button. It plummets toward my ankles. Volk? Oh no. Oh crap.
“You lie,” Hermann spits.
“Volk wanted this. This moment. He believed in this. He saw the futility in you. In all of you.” He sweeps one colossal arm around the room, at all the Uhrwerkmänner. “He saw your doom. And I welcomed him to my fold. But he said, no, he would not come with me. He told me he would remain here, to guide you toward me, toward this moment. Toward the victory of our race over death. Toward apotheosis. Toward becoming.”
“No,” Hermann is saying over and over again. “No, no, no.”
“How was I always able to find you?” Friedrich asks. “How was I always one step ahead of you?”
God. It’s far from being the worst part of this, but all I can think is that Hannah was right. I am never going to hear the end of this.
“The tunnels…” Hermann starts, but his defiance is finally waning.
“You believed that?” Friedrich scoffs. “Then madness already eats at your reason. You are already lost.”
Goddamn it. I believed that too. There’s a chance that having had reality ripped out from under my feet so often, I have become a touch gullible.
But Volk? Of the two Uhrwerkmänner it was Volk who betrayed us? Shit and balls. God, if I survive the next few minutes I’m going to be left with some serious trust issues.
I glance over at Hannah.
OK… with worse trust issues.
Hermann himself has lapsed into silence. The rest of the Uhrwerkmänner are silent, horrified spectators.
Friedrich smells victory, switches back to his original topic. “Volk knew in his core that our father would not abandon us. That his love would triumph over his evil in the end. He knew the promise our father had made us.”
Friedrich steps forward, standing directly at the base of Volk’s body. His legs are set wide, his massive chest pushed out. Every inch the conquering hero. He bends, picks up Volk in both hands. Without any discernible effort he hoists several tons of metal above his head.
“Behold,” he booms, “our absolution. Behold the Uhrwerkgerät!”
44
Beside me, Felicity groans. “Oh, you have to be kidding me.”
Everything we fought for. Everything we strived to prevent. And we just handed it to Friedrich on a silver platter. We bloody crafted the Uhrwerkgerät for him in front of all the people we were meant to save.
And I let it happen. I knew we were rushing this. I knew Clyde and Tabitha were dysfunctional. And I let events ride over me. I let fear rule me. My goddamn fear of death. And it’s that fear that’s brought the future echo’s promise closer.
I am such a fucking jackass some days.
“This!” Friedrich bellows. “This is the power inside of us. This is the power of becoming. Volk has embraced it. One of the best among us. The one you trusted. He saw this truth and ran toward it with open arms. Do not betray him. Do not betray yourselves. We were promised more than decay and dysfunction. And we can embrace that promise. Come with me. Redefine this world. Reclaim yourselves. Your birthright. Be all you can be.”
A solution. Lang was writing about a solution. But Lang’s concept of a solution is a fucking reality-destroying bomb. And we didn’t take the time to get the context, to get the level of understanding we needed. We just plunged in. Because we’re desperate.
Hell, there might not even be another solution to the Uhrwerkmänner’s problems. We only have their word that there was one. And if we’re desperate, what are they? They stare at Friedrich now. A broken people. This last scrap of hope ripped away from them.
And they’ll go to him. Volk’s betrayal, real or not, has broken Hermann. There is no voice of resistance. There is no path to take other than the one Friedrich offers. Transform themselves into this bomb, to the vague hope it promises, or just lie down and die. God, in their place that’s probably the straw I’d grasp at.
Unfortunately, in the place that I’m actually in, that all leaves me rather fubarred.
Friedrich lays Volk’s limbless body down on the operating table, slowly, almost reverentially.
He’s going to keep talking. He’s going to keep going until he convinces them. And we’re just standing here watching him.
Why is the right thing to do also always the really dumb thing to do?
I step forward, out of the huddled ranks, pushing between the legs of Friedrich’s loyal Uhrwerkmänner. Felicity tries to pull me back, but I twist away from her.
It takes a moment for Friedrich to register my presence. I am very aware that I am surrounded by twenty or more robots all of whom could kill me with almost no effort whatsoever.
But something has to be said.
I clear my throat. It’s hard to read Friedrich’s expression, but there’s a chance it’s more amused than murderous.
“You realize this is all bullshit, right?” I say. My voice sounds pathetically small in the wake of Friedrich’s colossal boom. But I keep going. Because I don’t know what else to do. Because even in the face of death, we keep on thrashing. Some idiot response built into the lizard brain and reinforced by too much Hollywood bullshit.
“I know you lot have been buried down here for a long time,” I say, “but up on the surface we have this thing called an infomercial. It’s where a slimy fucker does his best to sell you something you don’t want. And he’ll go on and on for hours, and he’ll say anything he can, tell any lie he thinks is feasible, just to sell it to you.” I point straight at Friedrich. At his knee caps, actually. “That’s this bastard.”
I take a breath, hold it for a moment, expecting some great foot to come down like it’s the end of the Monty Python credits, to be reduced to the simplest of slapstick humor.
But it doesn’t come. I don’t know why the hell he’s doing it, but Friedrich’s giving me the floor.
“This Uhrwerkgerät he’s so excited about. It’s just a bomb. That’s all. A big one, yeah. I’ll give it that. But that’s all it is. It goes boom. Things die. And you know the thing about bombs? There’s not much left of them at the end. They don’t ever get a chance for an encore. Friedrich says he’s got your best interests at heart but—”
And that’s as far as I get.
It’s not a violent end, not a savage one. It’s laughter. Friedrich’s laughter simply drowns me out.
“Look
at him!” Friedrich booms. “Look at how small he is. How pathetic. Look at your oppressor. You live down here in squalor. Because of him.”
Which seems a little unfair.
“He says he has your best interests at heart. But since they first bombed us, shot us, hounded us, killed us, when has humanity ever had our best interests at heart?”
Ah, now I know why I’m still alive. I’m the straw man. The argument to be torn down.
Friedrich stares at the assembled Uhrwerkmänner. “He is scared now. Because he knows this is his end. The age of man is done. It is our time. Our time to rise. To become.”
“I’m fucking scared,” I shout back, “because I know where this ends. Sure, yes, with my death. But I’m not alone. We all die. You blow up reality itself. You pull the thread on the whole goddamn tapestry, you self-righteous jackass. You end everything. Me. Them.” I point at the assembled Uhrwerkmänner. “You.” I point at Friedrich. “We all die. Because you know what you’re doing about as much as I do.”
That was the future echo’s promise to me. This ends badly. For everyone. I just got the heads up first. Lucky me. I am the guy with the sign reading “The World’s Ending” standing on the street corner preaching to the uncaring crowds.
Except maybe, just maybe, this time they’re desperate enough to listen. And sometimes people just need something to cling to as their reality fractures.
Friedrich is laughing again. “He is pathetic,” he booms. “He is desperate. His time is over.”
And he raises one massive hand.
Oh shit.
Because I am not the straw man. It’s simpler than that. I’m the fly, and he’s the swatter.
45
Friedrich’s hand descends.
For a moment I am back in a bar in Scotland, watching a wooden beam come down. Watching death coming, unavoidable.
A massive crash. Steel on steel.
And I’m alive.
I look up. And there is Hermann. His right arm is a mangled ruin. But it holds Friedrich’s fist a yard or more above my head.
“No,” Hermann says.
Broken Hero Page 26
