by Manda Benson
Dana and Tarrow stared at each other for a moment, and then both of them started laughing.
“Don’t tell anyone about the ANT or Torrmede, right?” said Tarrow.
“What is Torrmede?”
“I can’t tell you even more.” The nurse turned and headed back for the door. “I’ll see if I can find you a laptop,” she called over her shoulder as the door closed behind her.
Dana got up off the bed and went over to the window. The sky was still blue and empty, and the sun beat down on the glassy pyramids.
She turned at the sound of the door opening. It wasn’t Tarrow with a computer, but Jananin.
“Something you will be glad to hear, first. The police in Coventry inform us that Eric Cartwright returned home last night.”
“Oh.” So Eric had gone home, as she’d told him to, and he was safe and away from this chaos after all. Relief tempered the embarrassment accompanying the thought of him. Perhaps this would all have blown over when she eventually got back, and they might be able to go back to being friends. “Thank you.”
“Now, to the matter of where we were this morning. The bodies of the birds and rats we found have been examined. Their brains were implanted with cheap mass-produced chips. That seems to account for why they attacked the workers at the psychiatric unit. The police have found twelve bodies so far. Some of them are of the staff there... others are of... patients.”
“I let those rats and birds out. When I escaped from the Emerald Forge. I didn’t realise they would do that! I thought they were being held prisoner, like me.”
“What are you raving about now? It’s beside the point that you let them out.”
“I let them out, and they went somewhere and killed people! It’s my fault the... the doctors and the children... the psychiatric patients are dead!”
“They had computer chips in them and radio transceivers to control their behaviour. They didn’t go just anywhere, they went to a predetermined location that presumably was chosen as you said yourself because Gamma was interred there and escaped. That you released them does not matter, as they would likely have been released at some point anyway with exactly the same outcome.”
Dana sat on the bed and breathed hard. After her mind had run through it a few times, it started to make sense. Eric was safe at home, and the people in that prison from the dreams were still dead, but from this perspective it no longer felt as though it was her fault.
“They’re in the process of coming up with a way to examine that construct from the site.”
“The phoenix?”
“Personally I don’t see how it’s a phoenix, but if you prefer.”
Dana looked down at her feet and the hospital floor. “No, you have to understand it,” she said after a pause, because she hadn’t really realised it before, not until now. “That’s the way of it. I like plants. Cale likes beetles and flies and stuff. Peter likes fish. And Gamma likes made-up animals out of myths.”
“There’s some more information on the leads you gave me. Gemma Percival as we know was a patient at the hospital. You mentioned someone else, Sanderson. There is an Archibald Sanderson of whereabouts unknown. He was a neurosurgeon who worked on patients with mental illnesses. He was found guilty about a year ago of illegally performing lobotomies and other dubious treatments outside the remit of the NHS and struck off.”
“So he could have worked where Gamma was being held, and that’s how she met him, and how I recognise him from the dreams?”
“Almost certainly. The other man, now, you thought his name is Prendick. There was a Norman Prendick, a highly skilled metalworker, who was blinded in an industrial accident six years ago. He lived as a recluse in the vicinity of Ely, until he apparently disappeared, his house abandoned and with nobody in the area knowing his whereabouts.”
Norman Prendick. Blinded in an accident, his life ruined, his visage inspiring horror in anyone who set eyes on him, until Gamma and Sanderson found him and asked him for his skills in exchange for another sight. It had to have been Prendick who had so skilfully shaped the armour and joints of the wyvern. “So what happens now?”
“All we can do for the moment is wait for each of the other Spokesmen to reply with their view on the situation and recommendation on how to proceed. In the meantime, let’s take a look at this construct you found.”
Dana got down from the bed. “It’s kind of the other way round. It found me.”
Outside in the corridor, the lift down to the ground floor had a large window that faced out through a glass wall overlooking the fields of exotic plants. “Can you really grow anything, and feed everyone in the country, and have fuel as well, with genetically modified plants?”
“To a point,” Jananin replied. “Science is to all intents and purposes running only slightly ahead of a population tidal wave. All of this non-polluting technology― Stormcaller, nuclear engines — is just a means of stalling the inevitable. Much of the damage is already done, and there is no such thing as completely clean energy. Mankind will always damage its environment through the process of its development. Ultimately the problem boils down to there being too many people and insufficient resources and land to generate more resources to sustain them if they continue to grow at the same rate. All we can do is hope science stays ahead.”
The lift reached the base of its descent and the door opened. Jananin led Dana through a short corridor and out through a swipe-card controlled door and along a path that ran alongside the building.
“Perhaps you can provide some insight on it. I have to admit, every question I have come up with an answer for surrounding this construct has only engendered yet more questions.”
They were soon approaching a fence made from galvanised palisades, much like the ones surrounding the school Dana attended. She sensed a familiar signal, and something moved on the other side. The wyvern adjusted its position so one eye was visible through a gap in the fence. It transmitted a reassurance of a sort. It had been concerned, while Dana had been gone, particularly as its last sight of her had been when she’d fallen off aboard the Stormcaller.
Jananin opened the gate using a swipecard. The wyvern stepped forward, transmitting a happy signal along with a sentiment something along the lines of it being glad to see Dana and to know she was well.
“I don’t believe it to be dangerous,” said Jananin, “but it does appear to be completely autonomous. I understand when you came across it, it was aggressive, as though being controlled remotely, and you removed the device by which it was controlled?”
“Yes, there was a collar on it. It has a brain, an animal brain, connected to computer parts like Gamma and I do. Osric said it was an animal and not a human, but I don’t know that for sure. Gamma and Sanderson might have kidnapped a very young child, or a braindamaged person, or something else like that.”
The wyvern studied Dana as she spoke, and then it tilted its head and regarded Jananin quizzically.
“It’s very unlikely,” said Jananin. “It’s an intelligent animal for sure, but all the observations we made of it before I released it were consistent with it not being human. It did attempt to communicate with the researchers, but it didn’t demonstrate any behaviours specific to humans. I think the end guess was a dog or pig, but not a human and not any other primate. It’s not possible to tell for certain without euthanizing and dismantling it.”
Dana gazed out upon the long grass beyond the compound fence. “I was afraid Osric would do that. I don’t know if you can do this, but would you be able to make sure the wyvern was safe?”
Jananin closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m afraid I can make no such promise.”
Dana stared at the wyvern and considered this. Jananin couldn’t make any promise because her loyalty had to be to the Meritocracy, but Dana could make promises in her own name, and she made a silent promise to the wyvern that she would not abuse its trust and abandon it again. She tried to convey in her sincerest terms, that while it was safe here whi
le she was with it, and that it must not under any circumstances harm Jananin, or indeed anyone else, escape was the ultimate and only end. She didn’t know where she could hide it or what she would do after that, but she would find a way. She’d used the wyvern by contacting Osric, and she owed it to keep it safe after all it had done for her. She had shown it nothing but dishonour, while it had been loyal to her.
The wyvern’s thought in response surprised her when she realised what it meant: She had been the one who had saved it from Gamma’s control. It felt it was totally justified in returning the favour and rescuing her from the Emerald Forge.
Eyes blurring, Dana let out a gasping laugh, and reached out to put her hand on the metal plates covering the wyvern’s neck. I won’t fail you again. It was time to be responsible now. This was not school, where she could run away from her problems and hide behind an adult. This was real life, and what she did here could have effects on life and death and what happened in the future.
“Perhaps you have some ideas about why someone would go to such lengths to make something so elaborate, so complicated, instead of something simple that would work the same way?” Jananin said.
Dana wiped her eyes. “You mean, why a wyvern?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s Gamma,” Dana replied at length. “She’s lived all her life in a fantasy, because reality was so bad she couldn’t let herself believe it was real. So she has to turn her fantasies into a reality.” The realisation began to unfold, and more understanding came to her, and after a moment she spoke again. “They need Prendick to make the actual, like, hardware for the constructs. Then Sanderson does the stuff with brains and nerves and living flesh. But Gamma’s the one who controls them in the end. So she gets to say what they make, because if she won’t control it, they can’t use it.”
Jananin walked a little distance away and seated herself on a metal container. The place they were keeping the wyvern in was a concrete-floored yard surrounded by a high fence, with a large locked gate at the end so lorries could back in and various bottles and pieces of equipment locked up in cages. “There’s something more to it than that. There are too many features on that wyvern that don’t seem to do anything. The part of it that bewilders me most is the helium.”
“I thought the helium was put in for lift,” Dana said. “To help it fly, like in a balloon. Osric said it didn’t work like that, though.”
“You would need a much larger volume of helium gas in comparison to the wyvern if that were the case. What it appears to have is a bottle of helium connected to a second pair of lungs. Any small advantage filling the lungs with helium would give to flight is rendered utterly pointless by the significantly heavier mass of the bottle with the compressed helium in.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the combination of the helium bottle and the additional lungs, minus weight from the buoyancy gained by the volume of helium when the lungs are full, gives the wyvern a greater weight than if none of these things had been included. Certainly it does use the lungs for ballast when it’s flying, but it would fly much better had all of this simply not been part of its design.”
Dana couldn’t think of an answer to this. After a rather longer pause, Jananin spoke again. “The only solution I can come up with is that flight buoyancy was not the main intention of the lungs, and in this case, the gas bottle must have originally been intended to be something else.”
Dana turned away from watching the wyvern to face Jananin. “What something else?”
Jananin pointed to the wyvern’s head. “You see those serrated edges on the back of the teeth?”
Dana studied the wyvern’s metal beak. There were two fangs, upper and lower, on either side of the head, their surfaces meeting when the mouth was in its closed position. Each contacting surface was marked with minute closely-spaced grooves cut into the metal.
“It almost looks like an ignition source, designed to spark when the mouth is opened. That means this construct was meant to function as a flamethrower, and the bottle inside it was intended to contain hydrogen and not helium. So then why did it not contain helium when we examined it?”
“Because it has to be true to the myth?” Dana suggested. “Eric said wyverns have four limbs, not six like dragons. Perhaps wyverns don’t breathe fire either.”
Jananin shook her head. “There is too much that doesn’t add up. It has metal valves inside it that essentially function as a voicebox, allowing it to make different tones. And why make the control for it removable, as a collar? Surely it would have been a better design if the control mechanism had been an integral part of the brain, as it was in the birds and rats that attacked the hospital. It’s almost as though it’s a prototype that was built over a long period of time, with functions removed and added to its purpose as development went on.”
Dana tried to query the wyvern. She visualised bright, orange stuff billowing out of its mouth, but this didn’t seem to stir any recognition. “Is there a way we could try to see if it actually can breathe fire? If it went wrong, would it hurt it?”
“I don’t see that it would. There are valves inside its throat to prevent it from inhaling while it’s exhaling through the other lungs, and other protective designs. It’s worth a try, but you need to be sure you can control it. I do not think it is dangerous by its own intents, but if it panics and swings its head around, people could be seriously injured.”
Dana considered the wyvern’s state of mind. It understood about replacing the cylinder accessed by the hatch in its back, but it didn’t really understand what it was they were trying to do, although it was curious about this image of glowing orange stuff coming out of its mouth that Dana had come up with.
“Let’s try it.”
Jananin and Dana undid the plate on the wyvern’s back. Jananin took the bottle out and set it down on the concrete.
“It doesn’t look very heavy,” said Dana.
“This one’s nearly empty. And these days they’re made of polymer alloy, so the actual container weighs very little despite having extremely strong walls. What we do need to know is if we have a hydrogen one in the same size.”
They examined the cages of bottles and cylinders until Dana found some a similar size. Jananin unlocked the cage and tilted a hydrogen bottle onto the edge of its base so it could be rolled out. She compared the circumference and the fitting to the empty helium bottle. “This looks suitable.”
Dana helped her lift it up onto the wyvern’s back. Jananin eased it down into the space and connected the hose that ran down through the thick plastic sheeting protecting the wyvern’s organs. The hose stiffened with a faint hissing sound. The two of them fastened the panel back down.
“Now, let’s get out before we try anything.” Jananin headed back for the gate. Once she and Dana were both outside the yard, she closed it. “Make it turn away from us before it tries.”
Dana got the wyvern to turn around. She tried to think of exhaling hard and opening her mouth quickly. The wyvern jerked its neck and made a snorting noise. Nothing happened.
“It’s just breathing out. Wait a minute.” Dana closed her eyes and concentrated on the sensory feedback she was getting from the wyvern. She tried to think of her chest, and the muscles in it that moved when she breathed, and now here she could sense other parts that didn’t match up with anything she was familiar with. The wyvern coughed again, the sensation alien to her. She thought of when they’d risen from the roof of the Emerald Forge, chest expanding with lifting force. The wyvern exhaled and something gave way with the feeling of an enormous breath rushing up her throat, and something blinding bright startled her eyes open, and a jet of flame shot out in front of the wyvern. It let out a discordant bagpipe squeal and hopped backwards, flapping its wings with a sound like a cutlery drawer slamming.
An exclamation came from behind; a soldier on the path there was beckoning to Jananin. “Wait here,” she said.
Dana went back to the wyvern while Ja
nanin and the soldier disappeared from sight. The wyvern’s fire breathing attempt had left a blackened deposit on the concrete, a dark smear with a long tail, and it reminded her of something she’d seen at the destruction site, at the hospital. The buildings had been on fire, but rats and starlings wouldn’t know how to start a fire, would they? Even with chips implanted in their brains? If the wyvern was a prototype as Jananin thought, and a prototype was a simplified, scaled-down version of what it was ultimately intended to be, what might this construct look like?
When she tried to pry into the wyvern’s thoughts, all she got from it was a mingled sense of confusion and alarm. It had never expected that sort of thing to happen. If it did have an animal brain, as Jananin presumed, didn’t most animals fear fire by instinct? Perhaps that was why it had been fitted with a helium cylinder in place of hydrogen, because the brain and senses of a real living animal turned out not to be compatible with breathing fire.
Dana thought of the mildly suggestive idea of having another attempt, and the wyvern responded with a horrified balk.
Jananin reappeared behind the gate and entered once more, mouth set grimly and face inscrutable as ever.
“Some more information has come to light. The construct from the hospital, the phoenix, has just exploded.”
Dana swallowed. “It exploded?”
Jananin nodded. “As it turns out, it was what’s called a dirty bomb, designed to scatter radioactive contamination over an area. It was guided by some kind of organic brain that had been reprogrammed to seek out signals. Fortunately at the time it was still inside the car in a metal crate, securely contained in a hangar. The crate contained most of the blast. A few people were injured, but no-one was killed. The Spokesmen have voted that the Emerald Forge is a threat and that immediate action must be taken, without holding a public referendum.”
“So what’s going to happen?”
“It has been decided that sending military personnel into the Emerald Forge in an attempt to gain control of it would be too great a risk. The Stormcaller will be deployed at once, with instructions to Compton bomb the area.”
