Broken Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  I stand beside Kayla. We watch it sag. Finally she nods. “Feckin’ fine then. Sixty-forty yours.”

  Flame explodes overhead. We both duck, heat roiling over us. A ceiling of flame.

  Something massive and flaming lands in the lap of the Uhrwerkmänn we just killed. Maybe one of his kin. It’s so ruined I can’t tell. Flames obscure our kill.

  I think of the bullet holes, the ruined knee, the vast quantity of oil leaking from that bastard.

  I am throwing myself at Kayla, screaming “DOWN!” as it detonates.

  Too slow again.

  The shockwave punches me. Like being slapped by God. We fly through the air. A tangle of legs, and arms, and yells of “Get the feck off me.”

  My landing is bony, but softer than expected. Probably because it’s on top of Kayla. It saves me a number of broken ribs, but earns me a backhand that’ll leave me a bruise I’ll still be seeing next month.

  “Ow,” I say to her when I sit up, as pointedly as I can manage.

  “Not over yet.” She points.

  There is a charred ruin where the Uhrwerkmänn used to be. Behind it a black circle, blast marks radiating out like a sun shown in negative.

  And cracks.

  Great big, spreading cracks. Wider, and wider, and wider. Joining the craters of the guns like some catastrophic dot-to-dot puzzle, the solution to which is several tons of concrete pouring down on my head.

  “Run!” I yell just in case Kayla has become completely brain dead in the half second since she pointed out the collapse to me, and then I get on with following my own advice.

  I get further with this than I did with avoiding the exploding Uhrwerkmänn, though admittedly, it’s not very far.

  I have a good three paces between me and my starting place when the walls start to roar. A deep bass grunt of collapsing rock. Sound that becomes the world, that becomes physical substance I am running through, the air vibrating so much it fights my passage.

  Rocks and boulders bounce past me. I’m screaming something I can’t hear or understand. Waiting for the rocky rearrangement of my body from 3D idiot to 2D bloody smear.

  A fist of concrete zooms past me with enough speed to punch through one robot’s chest cavity. He dies in a glistening burst of gears and bronze spindles. To my right a boulder the size of Felicity’s minivan casually crushes a pair of Uhrwerkmänner still locked in combat, oblivious to the oncoming death. It carries on unimpeded, takes out a crawling Uhrwerkmänn that’s missing everything from the waist down, comes to rest as the gravemarker for another group of three. Around it, other boulders provide variations on the theme.

  After the rocks comes the cloud. Thick, gray, boiling, slowing me as I hack and cough. It rises, fills the cavern. I can’t see more than a few yards, a yard, I just plain can’t see. I am running in total blackness. A blackness I can feel, gritty and cloying, staining my skin and lungs. I cough harder, but I keep running. Keep pushing myself, until I hit my limit like a wall. My knees buckle, my arms flail, no strength left in them. The floor comes up to meet me.

  64

  Deep underground, something like dawn comes. It is gradual at first, nothing more than a realization that pitch black has become dark gray. Then the gray lightens. Shadows begin to move, size and distance still only vague suggestions, and then suddenly I am in defined known space. The lizard brain rejoices; another night survived.

  Except this space is in complete chaos. Uhrwerkmänner stumble looking for… friends, limbs, purpose? I never really understood these robots and I still don’t.

  I sit up, the last dregs of adrenaline still swilling in my system. I feel exhausted and stupid. And yet, beneath that some fundamental tension has unknotted slightly. We came, we saw, we kicked something’s arse at last. I’ll take that, I suppose.

  I cough, spit out a wadge of brown phlegm.

  “Tasty.” Kayla slaps me on the back, knocks another spray of brown out of me. “Gonna be tasting that for a feckin’ week.” For some reason she smiles when she says this. Her teeth are white in her gray-stained face.

  “Now, why did we even feckin’ come here again?” Kayla asks. “I honestly don’t remember.” She’s grinning.

  She’s right. We’re here for a reason. And it wasn’t to beat on anyone. It wasn’t to work through my ridiculous issues. “We came for answers,” I say.

  “Right.” Kayla nods, sheathes her sword. “So who do—”

  “You!”

  The single word cuts in. A lightning strike of accusation, rage, and humorless German inflection.

  “We talk to Hermann,” I say to Kayla.

  And then he is upon us.

  “This… This…” He spits the word out, as if trying to clear it from the cloying mess of the air. One of his arms is still mangled from our last encounter with Friedrich here. He sweeps his good one around the space, trying to convey the enormity of the destruction. “You did this,” he manages through his sputtering rage.

  “Yeah,” Kayla nods. “We were forty-nine heavily feckin’ armed Uhrwerkmänner who came in here and attacked you and set off a whole bunch of high-explosive bullshit. That was totally us.”

  Wait, Kayla actually counted the number of combatants on one side? Or did she make that number up?

  “We walked into the middle of this,” I try to say, while Hermann is still busy dealing with his rage issues. “We couldn’t abandon you. Of course we helped.”

  I have no real idea if we helped or not, but it seems a good idea to suggest we did.

  “I told you never to come back. Never.”

  A crowd of Uhrwerkmänner are gathering about us now. I may have underestimated how unwelcome we’d be. Why did Lang have to build the bastards so big?

  Kayla beckons to Hermann. “I’ve taken down bigger fecks than you. Want a feckin’ turn?”

  Well that’s not helping…

  I step between Kayla and Hermann. Wait until his attention is on me. All their attention.

  I sweep my arm around, echo his movement. “This is why we’re here.”

  “I—” Hermann starts, but I cut him off.

  “Not to cause it. Because this is just the beginning. Friedrich needs to build the Uhrwerkgerät bigger. And he’s going to use you to do it. He’s not going to use his own people. He’s going to use you. He’s going to kill you. Before your minds can rot away. He’s going to come in and take you and make you part of his bomb. And he can call that living forever, or he can call it evolution, but you and I both know it by its real name: murder.”

  I turn. A performer in the round, trying to address them all. “Look,” I say, “I know MI37 fucked up. I get that. But we were fighting for you when we did. And we haven’t stopped. We’re still going. Except we need your help. If we’re going to finish this fight, we’re going to need someone on our side. Friedrich’s forces are too big, and too much for us. We can’t even find them.”

  This doesn’t exactly sound like me selling our expertise, I realize. Time to change tack.

  “But you can,” I say. “It’s within your power. With us. Together. A whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. A gestalt. That’s a German concept, right? You get that. We could be that. Together we find him. Together we stop him.”

  Hermann hulks before me. And I almost think he’s going to pulp me right there and then.

  “So we can do what?” It’s another of the Uhrwerkmänner, not Hermann. Someone in the ring surrounding him and us. “Risk our lives so we can go mad and die?”

  It’s a fair question, I suppose. Bit defeatist for my tastes.

  “You were built to conquer this world,” I say. “To be the ultimate army. But you saw the hand that guided you was evil. And you stood up and refused to do simply as you were told. You chose to fight evil. You chose to matter.”

  “We ran away,” says another voice. “We were hunted until we found a hiding spot they could not.”

  Man, these guys really aren’t into the whole optimism thing at all.
r />   “Look around you,” I say. Giant metallic corpses litter the room. “You fought back today. You won some of these fights.”

  I decide not to push that point too hard. The ring of Uhrwerkmänner looks decidedly thinner than last time we were here. “You can beat these bastards. You can fulfill the promise of your rebellion against Lang.”

  For a mercy, nobody takes the opportunity to tell me how useless they all are. I seize the moment, march toward one corpse, swing myself up to stand on its chest.

  “You started this fight seventy years ago,” I say. “You thought it was over, but Friedrich’s here for round two.” I survey them all. “But you can finish him. You can end Lang’s poisonous legacy. You can prove you are… Hey, wait a minute, what’s that?”

  OK, not my most rabble-rousing finish. Except maybe I just saw something more important than an army. Maybe I just saw the answer I came here for.

  I stare closer. The way the Uhrwerkmänn is designed… It’s not exactly a utility belt, more a string of boxes and compartments at its waist. But jutting from one small metal box—it looks exactly like the desk ornament we rescued from Lang’s office in Summertown. A dull black oblong with a staggered grooves running down its side.

  I bend, pluck it from the Uhrwerkmänn, oblivious to my audience. I stare at it. More than a desk ornament. A reality key. It unlocked a pocket universe. And is this the same as the one we found? It looks the same…

  I jump down off the Uhrwerkmänn, hustle toward another corpse.

  “Where are you going?” I hear Hermann spit from behind me. “Come back here.”

  Funny, I could have sworn he was trying to get rid of me a moment ago. Anyway, I have bigger concerns than Hermann right now. What the hell is one of Friedrich’s men doing with a reality key? Is that how they’re getting about? Or hiding? Is that his secret?

  I reach the next Uhrwerkmänn. There’s nothing at its waist. No compartments at all. Then I remember Hermann stowing Lang’s notebooks in his leg. Their storage compartments aren’t always in plain sight. I start banging panels while Hermann harangues me from a distance. He seems unsure if he should chase me out or demand I come back to him. A panel pops open. I reach into the compartment.

  “So,” Kayla walks up to me, “is this the part where I realize you’ve lost your feckin’ mind, club you over the back of the head, and drag you off for the straight jacket and the little padded cell?”

  I pull out a second reality key from the Uhrwerkmänn’s storage compartment.

  “No,” I tell her, “this is the part where we start worrying.”

  65

  “To be totally feckin’ honest with you, Arthur,” Kayla says, “I’m a wee bit feckin’ far past starting to worry. It’s more a way of feckin’ life, truth be told and all.”

  “Worry more,” I tell her.

  “You keep this sort of encouragement up,” she tells me, “I might start to agree with Hannah about what a feckin’ shite field lead you are.”

  Oh God… Hannah… Oh no.

  “You will listen to me!” Hermann screams across the room. He stamps toward me. “You will—”

  “No,” I cut him off. “You will listen to me. Friedrich just came here and raided you for spare parts. He stole your family from you. Because he’s going to use them to make his bomb.” I wave the reality keys at him. “And no thanks to you, I think I finally know where.”

  “Wait,” Kayla says. “You do?”

  And deep underground, in the cloying smoke, massive robotic figures hazed by still-billowing dirt ringed around me, I do suddenly see very clearly.

  “London,” I say. “Lang’s pocket reality. Because they’re all carrying the keys to get in.”

  Kayla gets to the next step quicker than I did.

  “You feckin’ sent Hannah there.”

  “I know.”

  Hermann seems nonplussed by all of this. He stares back and forth between the pair of us. “You…” he starts, less certain this time.

  “No, you.” I’m sick of Hermann and his bickering. “This is it,” I say. “Unless this is an especially great day for porcine aviation fanatics, Friedrich just finished up amassing all the pieces he needs for his apocalyptic jigsaw puzzle. And now he’s hiding in a pocket reality in London sorting the corners from the edge pieces.”

  I sometimes wonder if metaphors are not my strong point…

  “I’m going there now. To save my team. To try and save the goddamn world. To do anything and everything I can, no matter how small and meaningless it may end up being. If you are even an echo of the people you used to be, the people you were trying to preserve, then you will come with me. Or you can sit on your hands and diddle yourselves. Quite frankly, I no longer care.”

  And with that I turn on my heel and march away.

  A moment later Kayla is at my elbow. “Not exactly General feckin’ Patton, are you?”

  I shrug. “General Patton probably didn’t ever head into a fight that the universe had promised him he was pre-destined to die in.”

  Because there’s no doubt in my mind now. These are the moments the future echoes foretold. This is the day. This shitty, hungover day. Today I die.

  On the plus side, Kayla doesn’t have a pithy comeback to that one.

  66

  I let Kayla drive. Her reflexes are better suited for the speeds we’re going to need to hit. And I need to make phone calls.

  First up is Hannah. I need her to get the hell away from the London Underground. If I’m right, I just sent her wandering into a death trap, and while she’s not exactly my BFF, we’re still several notches of antipathy away from me wanting robots to tear her limb from limb.

  She doesn’t answer. Which, to be fair, is a reasonable reaction given our working relationship. Still, frustration has me flinging my cellphone into the footwell. “You call her,” I tell Kayla. “She might actually talk to you.”

  It’s a mark of Kayla’s concern that I get no back-chat. But she gets no more of a response than I do. Which probably means that Hannah is underground already.

  Shit.

  I retrieve my phone, leave a message. It is slightly panicky and mostly consists of the phrase, “Get the hell out of there before something turns you into a person patty!” Hopefully it makes up in urgency what it lacks in eloquence.

  “An ear bud,” says Kayla, apropos of nothing.

  “Is this an artificial insemination thing?” I ask. “Because now may not be the time.”

  “The feckin’ things we use in the feckin’ field to talk to each other, you dumb feck.” I think it’s a good thing I had Kayla drive. It hampers her ability to skewer me.

  “Oh right.”

  I speed-dial Tabitha.

  “What?” she says as she picks up.

  I think, if the world survives I should talk to Felicity about MI37 getting a slightly better receptionist. Then I remember that Felicity has stormed off and MI37 is destined to die even if the world chooses not to do an impersonation of a wet tissue meeting a bullet today. So maybe a receptionist isn’t our top priority.

  “Has Hannah got an earbud?” I ask. Then for clarity, “Something she can put in her ear. Something you can talk to her through.” And then for good measure, “Nothing to do with artificial insemination.”

  There’s a chance I need to calm down a little.

  “Jesus,” I hear Tabitha say. And then something like, “Need to include an instruction manual with them.” Then she says more clearly, “No. Range is only a few miles. She’s in London. Me: Oxford. So, pointless.”

  I curse. “Can you try her mobile?”

  “Oh sure. Was doing important work to determine fate of the universe. But a secretary. Yeah, can totally be that.”

  I almost check to see if the venom coming through the phone has damaged the touchscreen.

  I try to remember what I’m interrupting. Tabitha had an idea, was doing research. About… About… About the damned bomb.

  “What did you find out?”
I ask.

  “Oh,” Tabitha switches from acidic to petulant with the ease of a teenager. “Now you want to know?”

  “I know where the bomb is,” I say. There is a satisfying pause after that.

  “For sure?” she asks.

  I need Clyde to answer that exactly. But I’m building my way up to Clyde, maximizing the time he has to cool off. I imagine Clyde loses his shit about as often as Halley’s comet passes the earth, so it might take him a while to put the pieces back together. I will have time for just one shot to get him back on board with us, and I don’t want to waste it. Still, Tabitha won’t benefit from any of that information, so I go with, “I’m certain enough.”

  “OK,” Tabitha says. “So… what I have. Theoretical. Not as rigorous as I’d like it to be. Needs confirmation.” Despite the staccato rhythm she’s waffling as much as Clyde.

  “Just hit me with it,” I tell her.

  “This is weird.” Weird enough that she’s still hedging. Which is worrying.

  Still, “I’ve dealt with weird before,” I point out.

  “OK.” Tabitha takes a deep breath. “Bomb goes off. Massive damage. Damage so monumental it causes echoes in reality.”

  “Intimately aware of that,” I point out. My sinuses are still stinging from my last encounter.

  “Except the bomb never goes off.”

  “Say what now?”

  “Manipulating realities. Playing with them. Lang’s whole thing. The Uhrwerkgerät—his biggest plaything. See, the echoes get larger and larger closer we get to the big boom. Eventually it causes one so large, it destroys the Uhrwerkgerät itself.” She pauses for effect. Because despite herself, Tabitha, loves a little drama. “Destroys it before it goes off.”

  OK, I concede the point. That’s weird.

  “A future echo of the Uhrwerkgerät going off destroys the Uhrwerkgerät before it goes off,” I say, just to make sure I’m still playing along at home. From the driver’s seat, Kayla gives me an odd look.