Ways of the Doomed

by McPartlin, Moira;

  ‘What about you Ridgeway, what do you think we should do? Somhairle here reckons we should become pirates and hold you to ransom.’

  So he wasn’t letting go.

  ‘What do you think of that, eh?’

  I felt my face crimson. He had no right to dump on me like that. He keeked at my face from under those busy brows and I could see the laughter lines stretched. ‘Or maybe we could just use Ridgeway’s key to get in. It is, after all, why you’re here.’

  I remembered Scud’s words written with blood.

  Did you contact get them in here only you can

  My head throbbed, ready to burst. I hobbled to my feet and tiptoed to the cave mouth. At that moment I could have run into the sea and risked a drowning or a mine blast; I just wanted to escape from them, from this ridiculous ordeal.

  ‘Why am I here? Come on, tell me.’ They were determined to rip the piss out of me. ‘What sort of game are you people playing?’

  Kenneth put his hand on my shoulder to guide me back to sitting but I shook him off.

  ‘I am sick of this. All you can do is talk in riddles. Why didn’t Ishbel take me to Vanora? Why bring me to this hell to live in a prison cell? To find out I’m half native?’

  ‘Not half,’ he started, but I brushed Kenneth’s comment away with the contempt it deserved.

  ‘To find native kin. And everybody knows everyone else and everyone talks in riddles like some secret society. What’s going on?’

  ‘Somhairle.’

  ‘Sorlie,’ I shouted. ‘My name’s Sorlie. The only ones who call me Somhairle are – were – my parents.’ I wiped my eyes and nose on my cuff and this time I allowed Kenneth to guide me to sit. I’d had enough. I would stay in this cave for the rest of my life and eat Ishbel’s bogging pickles if I had to.

  ‘You are here as a catalyst, shake things up and to help pass a plan, but it seems Vanora failed to get it to you. That’s why she was here.’

  Ridgeway coughed and sat up. ‘Was that visitor Vanora?’

  ‘Yes, why? Did you see her?’ Kenneth asked.

  ‘I escorted her and her party to and from the Transport. I didn’t recognise her. She seemed so frail. The woman who supported her – was that Ishbel? I’ve never met Ishbel.’

  ‘Did Vanora speak to you? Did she recognise you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. No, there was nothing – they passed no words between them and seemed oblivious of me. Even when she stumbled and took my hand to steady herself she remained silent. Why? Do you think she was sending me a signal, that she recognised me?’

  Kenneth narrowed his eyes then walked to the edge of the inner cave and ran a finger along a painting of a submarine. The ever-present sound of the sea sloshed in my throbbing ears as we waited for him to speak. Like the tide Vanora came, Vanora went. Game over. Reload.

  Kenneth finished tracing the ship and rubbed his fingers to shake off a sliver of paint. He moved into dwam-time for a few minutes then spoke. ‘What were you wearing Ridgeway?’

  ‘My uniform.’

  ‘Search the pockets.’

  Ridgeway searched each pocket in turn. He stopped when he reached the side pocket and held out a button. ‘I don’t know what this is.’

  Kenneth took it and beamed through his beard. ‘Oh you wonderful woman,’ he said as he took the button and slanted it up to the light.

  ‘We don’t need to break into the systems now. I am sure we have all the information we need here.’ He laughed. ‘She never did trust anyone else to do important jobs for her – control freak. But oh what an efficient freak she is.’

  ‘She came to slip this to you, Sorlie. She knew you would get out and would give this to me. When she failed she made the decision to pass it to Ridgeway, whom she had seen on the way in. It was a risk. He might not have been assigned to escort her back to the Transport, but I am sure she would have thought of something.’

  He put his arm around Ridgeway and squeezed his shoulder and suddenly I understood their relationship. ‘She must have organised your transfer here.’

  His face soured as he pointed to my bruised forehead. ‘I think this is more fundamental. She shouldn’t have goaded him. He only ever needed to be in the same room as her for the spit to start flying. He’d probably been drinking Mash.’

  ‘He had.’ I remembered the smell.

  ‘The man is a fool and is only just beginning to grasp that. Of course Vanora never misses a chance to remind him of her Empire and how he sold his daughter into certain death,’ he said whilst examining the button. ‘The fact she asked to see you will have riled him. Sounds like she wanted him to know she has chosen you to be on her side soon, Sorlie. And the only way Davie has to hurt her is through you.’ He looked at the wound again. ‘Yes, I believe you’re right, you are in danger. I was wrong; he could kill you at any moment. A man who has nothing to lose is a dangerous beast.’

  ‘But why did she need to hand over the button in person?’ Kenneth asked himself. ‘She could have dropped it with the provisions but it sometimes takes a few days for me to retrieve them.’ He tugged his beard again. ‘Of course.’

  ‘What?’ This was baffling.

  He held up the button. ‘I think it’s a thought map. A T-map. This must contain one of her plans. A T-map can only hold good for five days. She couldn’t risk it being lost.’

  ‘There are no such things as thought maps.’ Both Ridgeway and Kenneth gasped at my statement. ‘Come on, its mumbo jumbo. Thought waves they can capture for sure, everyone knows that, but not images.’

  ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about, boy,’ Kenneth said. ‘Vanora has been using this technology for years.’

  ‘Yeah right, and is she a mystic too?’ I asked, sarcasm dripping from my words. ‘And if it lasts for only five days, how did she know I would get it to you? How did she know I got out of prison?’

  ‘I told her. When she missed the opportunity to give you the button she took a chance.’ Kenneth stared at the floor for a bit, then shook his head. ‘She must have organised your transfer here, Ridgeway. She never told me. I wonder why. It would have made all the difference to this operation.’ He chuckled. ‘Crafty old witch.’

  I could see from the shadows casting over the walls that it was beginning to get dark outside and yet Kenneth dawdled as if we had all the time in the world.

  ‘So, come on, what’s in the button?’

  ‘I told you, a T-map.’

  He was crazy but I let him get on with it. Something had to be in the button.

  Ridgeway looked pale. Maybe he was stunned by the mumbo jumbo, or perhaps still suffering the effects of his fall. Kenneth on the other hand was hopping about the cave like a loon, holding the button up to the light and passing it in front of the heater, mumbling to himself. I was beginning to wonder if I had stumbled into a freaking wonderland.

  ‘What will you do with it?’ Was I the only one who had thought of this major problem?

  ‘Read it, of course.’

  ‘How?’

  Yep, that stumped him. He looked at Ridgeway who shrugged a ‘search me’.

  Then they turned on me in unison.

  ‘Don’t look at me, I can’t help you.’

  ‘It must be you,’ Kenneth said, grabbing my arm. ‘Let me see your communicator.’ He scratched my wrist with his infested nails as he tried to yank if off.

  ‘Hey!’ I jerked my arm back. ‘At least Davie waited until I had handed it to him.’ Then another penny dropped. ‘Wait a minute – the plug-in. Pa gave it to me just before all this kicked off.’

  ‘Show me.’

  I unstrapped it and handed it over. ‘Pa loved gadgets and thought I would like this because it has a wicked imager.’

  ‘When did he give it to you?’

  ‘Last quarter, just after my birthday, which was strange but I wasn
’t complaining.’

  Kenneth twisted it this way and that in his grubby paws. I didn’t like the way he was levering his filthy fingernail into the grooves. He took the button and slid it over the surface. Nothing happened. He pressed it into a non-existent gap and I could hear metal grind against metal.

  ‘Don’t force it. Pa always said not to force it.’

  ‘Well did he give you any instructions other than that piece of useless advice?’

  I tried to snatch the plug-in back but he held it away from me like a bully who swipes your lunch bag just for laughs.

  ‘No, he just gave it to me and showed me the upgraded imager and the special battery that needs to be inserted there.’ I pressed the battery panel and a tiny card the size of a vitpill popped out. Kenneth’s disgusting fingernail split as he fully ejected the battery and moved the button into the now empty slot.

  He blew out some puffs of putrid breath and sat on the hide. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a cliché but we seem to have found a secret compartment.’ He pushed the button flush and the imager sparked to life, sending out a smoky blue apparition that spread the length and breadth of the floor. ‘Interesting,’ Kenneth said. ‘Fits to size.’

  The blue carpet travelled up the stone walls turning them a milky moonstone, obliterating the paintings. The only sound from the apparition was a small hum like an electrical appliance running somewhere in the background.

  ‘What…?’

  ‘Shush.’ Kenneth batted my question with his hiss.

  The blue on gravel began shape-shifting, settling on an image of a plan, a blueprint of a castle-esque structure.

  ‘Her mind, it’s incredible,’ Kenneth whispered, as a child would do in a magic show.

  ‘It’s a holo-caster.’ I’d been watching them on my Games Wall since I was a tot. The woman was a sham. Had he forgotten she used to be in broadcasting?

  The holo-caster showed a laboratory maze; the pieces fused together or fell apart like a jigsaw puzzle to show the interior of the castle. Within this image a man in a uniform stood at one end of a corridor. Above him more corridors unfurled, each separated into hundreds of single cells and in each cell, like a nucleus, a man sat on a bench or lay on a bed.

  I looked at Ridgeway and he nodded. ‘It’s inside the prison.’

  ‘Look,’ Kenneth whispered, pointing to the periphery of the building. A door opened to the outside. It was my door, the one that opened onto the stone stairs. Descending those stairs was a man in a red raincoat leading a smaller person in yellow.

  ‘It’s me and Ridgeway.’ I held my breath as I watched the pair teeter down the stairs which looked even steeper from this angle. As they reached the last step I expected them to veer from the prison on the cliff path, but they arched on the bottom step and continued descending by way of another stone stairway.

  Ridgeway connected with my eyes but remained silent. We followed the progress of the imaging pair to where they stopped in a small cove directly below the prison.

  ‘I know this cove; I’ve cleared the mines already,’ Kenneth whispered.

  The blue carpet shape-shifted as if in response to his words, and the images of Ridgeway and me standing in the cove jumped to us crawling along inside a tube, like a sewer or something. Then we were inside the grid of cells that stretched the breadth and height of the imager, stacked one on top of the other like a mountain of waffles without the sauce. There were hundreds of cells.

  ‘We can’t do this. How will we get them out?’ Even as I said this, each waffle collapsed, one after the other like a house of cards, and the doors swung open. Orderly chaos ensued as prisoners spilled from the cells and converged like a colony of ants scurrying into every nook and cranny of the waffle stack. But where was the regal ant? I left the concentration of the colony and searched the installation. Something about this was wrong. Where were the guards? The image omitted this crucial piece of information.

  My eyes journeyed the passages of the image until I found the long deep spiral staircase I’d descended that first day; ahead of it stretched the corridor which I now saw was one of many, but unlike that first day, there was now no guard on duty. The door at the end lay open, the large hallway deserted and dark. Finally my eyes reached the library. There he was, like a rat in his burrow behind the ornate door, barricaded with a table and the leather chair wedged against the other door. He was rooted in the middle of the room, his heavy revolver poised, pointing first to one door, then the other, ready for action. This was not a real plan, merely Vanora’s wish.

  Kenneth’s gasp brought me back to the main action.

  ‘Keep going, you fools.’ The swarm had shifted as one towards their escape; then they swerved like a wave in the turning tide and surged towards the library. The boy in the yellow jacket had disappeared from the scene but the man in red veered the crowd en masse to the tube entry point and one by one they disappeared into it. One figure stood alone from the pack. He scuttled one way then another, undecided. One minute his head was bowed and twisting towards the swarm then he walked purposefully towards the library.

  ‘What’s he waiting for? Come on, hurry!’ I screamed at the imager.

  Kenneth placed a hand on my arm.

  ‘Where will they go?’ Ridgeway asked.

  ‘Look,’ Kenneth nudged me to look towards the moonstone wall. ‘It’s the sea.’

  All the prisoners were walking into the sea towards five fishing trawlers anchored in the bay. Small landing craft scooped them up like collecting tadpoles into a jar.

  ‘That’s no good; there are hundreds of them and they can’t swim,’ I said.

  ‘There are nine hundred and fifty four prisoners at the moment,’ Ridgeway told us.

  And just as quickly as it arrived, the blue carpet flashed, the moonstone evaporated and we were left blinking in the dim of the cave lights.

  Kenneth sat back on his heels and slapped his thigh. ‘You beauty!’

  ‘What happened? Where did it go?’ Ridgeway looked as though he was going to puke at any minute.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe her thought powers were exhausted. It takes a ton of energy.’

  ‘Yeah or maybe she ran out of spin.’ But I could see these guys were hooked on the myth of Vanora. ‘So, what happened to the prisoners? And what about the one who was left behind?’ My voice sounded weak. Was the scuttling person me, left behind with my grandfather?

  ‘This is lunacy,’ I said. ‘Ridgeway, tell him we can’t do this. What about the guards? Where were the guards?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ridgeway said.

  ‘I suppose Vanora conveniently forgot about them in her plan.’ I couldn’t help my tone. It was OK for Kenneth to tell me that I needed to grow up, but he was delusional if he thought this was a sound plan to be acted upon in good faith. It was like re-enacting an action-caster in a live warzone.

  Kenneth leaned forward and scratched his beard so fiercely with both hands a flea circus trapezed in every direction.

  ‘How many guards are there?’ he asked Ridgeway.

  ‘Not that many. In the main block the prisoners are mostly political or professional. There are no violent prisoners in there and they do all the work. There are a few guards on the perimeter.’

  ‘So how many?’ I snapped. Jupe, did every detail have to be dragged out of this pair?

  ‘There’s six on each shift, so twelve. When one shift is on the other shift confine themselves to their quarters. There’s nothing else to do.’

  ‘You said in the main block. What else is there?’ I swear I saw the pinks of his eyes when I asked this.

  He coughed. ‘There’s the Infirmary but we’re not permitted to talk of this.’

  I searched the cave with my eyes. ‘Who’s not permitting you? We permit you, don’t we Kenneth?’

  ‘Don’t be flippant Sorlie.’ At last my uncle looked serious.
‘Don’t they destroy the failures?’ he asked Ridgeway. His voice held enough calm for me to believe for a nano I had imagined what he asked.

  ‘Destroyed!’ Even though I didn’t understand the term, the shiver that wound round my neck like a rope to choke me gave me all the clues I needed.

  Ridgeway looked as sick as I felt. ‘They are only destroyed when the experiment has run its full course.’ He squinted at me, pleading to be excused for what he was about to say. ‘There are always a few…works in progress.’

  My brain told me to jump and run. My body held me rooted. ‘This is monstrous.’ My voice could barely utter the words.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Kenneth, ‘and it is not something I am proud of.’ I baulked at his words. My nails bit the flesh on my palms, stopping the punch that was headed his way. He was the original architect of this horror after all.

  ‘We will have to leave them.’ He turned to Ridgeway. ‘How many guards in the Infirmary?’

  ‘One during the day and one at night. Only hardcore projects remain in the Infirmary and they’re sedated.’

  ‘Then we leave them,’ he said again.

  My mind raced through the possibilities and each scenario ended in doom, so I concentrated on the front game.

  Kenneth knelt on the cave floor, groaning like an old monk preparing for prostration. He lifted his stick and began to trace out the prison as depicted in the T-map and like a commander preparing for battle he talked us through his interpretation of the plan. When he had finished he sat back on his heels.

  ‘Why can’t we just use Ridgeway’s keys to get them out?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t have access to the whole building.’ Ridgeway sat up straight. ‘Anyway, it would take forever to lead a thousand men down the cliff to the beach.’

  ‘I know you have little faith in this Sorlie, but we have few choices.’ Kenneth’s voice was calm. Why was he so calm? ‘Like everyone in her Empire you must believe in Vanora’s power.’

  Sakes, that’s why. It was a religion.

  As if he read my thoughts he took a deep breath and added, ‘She would not have planned this and put you in danger if she believed we would fail. You must fully commit. We have no other choice.’