Broken Hero (18 page)

“Oh, you had to bloody ask.” Hannah shakes her head slightly. Her gun never wavers.

In answer the Uhrwerkmänn bends its arm, grasps one finger of the hand, and twists. There is an audible snap of shearing metal.

It’s not flesh. It’s not blood. But still, I wince.

It stares at the finger, torn loose from its hand, its immobile features expressing as much melancholy as they can. Then it lets the digit fall, tumbling onto the track. It looks up at me again.

“Maybe that will bring it sooner. Maybe it likes to eat them.”

There’s almost a question in that last statement. An edge like pleading.

“I’ve still got the shot,” Hannah says.

It stands there, perfectly still, staring at the fallen finger. A shudder runs through it.

Hannah glances at me. “That thing is one slipped gear from losing it.”

And no. No it’s not. Jesus. Irritation is a rough spike tearing through my mood. “Oh just stand down already,” I snap at her. “It’s fine.”

She hesitates.

I sigh. In front of Clyde and a deranged robot was not at all where I wanted to have this conversation. “Look,” I say. “I appreciate that you have more field experience than me. I really do. But if anything is likely to antagonize this bastard it’s the fact that you’re pointing a gun at it. Now, I realize that you don’t agree with that assessment, but honestly the way this whole thing is set up, I’m your boss. I may make a mistake from time to time, but I’m better prepared to fix it if I know where the hell everyone is, and what the hell they’re doing. I can’t make contingency plans if I can’t count on you.”

Hannah looks at me. Her gun is still up. “You’re asking me to endanger myself,” she says. “And you. And him.” She nods at Clyde. “And Kay—well, OK, probably not Kayla, I get that. But you’re asking me to knowingly put myself at risk on the say-so of some bloke who just admitted he doesn’t know what he’s doing half as well as me. You get that, right?”

The Uhrwerkmänn spasms to life once more, takes a twitching, jerking step toward us.

I am trying to be reasonable
. I run that mantra through my head. What would Felicity say?

“I’m asking for a little trust,” I say. It sounds Felicity-like.

“You almost shot me yesterday,” Hannah points out. “Twice.”

Another faltering step from the Uhrwerkmänn.

“Erm… don’t mean to interrupt here—” Clyde starts up.

“I know.” I manage to override Clyde, and talk to Hannah without gritting my teeth once. “And that’s exactly what I’m looking to avoid. That’s why I’m asking for you to trust me. So we don’t repeat yesterday.”

“I trusted you more yesterday.” Hannah appears to be pretty far from the soft, warm trusting place. “Your case files seem to have left out a lot of the specifics of your successes.”

“But they were successes. They may have been unorthodox—”

“Unorthodox!” Hannah bites back bitter laughter. Another step from the Uhrwerkmänn.

“Look,” says Clyde, “maybe this isn’t the time for politeness after all, because I really think—”

“If you weren’t there,” I say, my calm slipping away, “you don’t get to judge. I have lost a lot of friends over the past year getting my job done, and—”

“Yeah, and I don’t want to be one of them,” Hannah barks back.

“Trust me,” I snap, “you are not my friend.”

Another step from the Uhrwerkmänn, it is only six yards away now. Close enough to smell the oil leaking out of it.

Hannah stares angrily at me.

“You,” I say to her, “are my subordinate. Now I gave you an order. Put the bloody gun down.”

Her hand wavers.

The Uhrwerkmänn looms.

And then the Uhrwerkmänn collapses.

It lets out a slight gasp, almost a sigh, and then just slumps to the ground. Metal limbs clang against metal railtrack, a discordant xylophone. A deep ticking sound in its chest grows in magnitude then grinds, squeals, stutters, and finally stops.

After a moment everything is still.

We stare down at the Uhrwerkmänn’s massive corpse.

“What just—” Clyde starts.

Then Kayla steps out of the shadows. She’s wiping oil off her sword blade, leaving long black streaks on the legs of her jeans.

“Unorthodox distraction, aye,” she says. “But I appreciate it.” She sheathes her sword, grins. “Stealthy like a feckin’ ninja,” she says. She points at Clyde. “You had bollocks all idea I was there, right?”

Clyde is still blinking.

I’m still staring at the corpse. Even now, even disheveled by madness and death, there is still a nobility to the body. It wasn’t going to attack us. I’m still sure of that. I think it just wanted us to understand. Because it couldn’t. It wanted us to understand so we could explain everything back to it. And instead we killed it.

There’s a bunch of reasons why we do what we do at MI37. Right now we’re trying to stop a mad robot from setting off a Nazi doomsday device. But I think what we’re losing along the way is that we’re trying to save someone too. The Uhrwerkmänner need us to succeed to survive. To not lose their way, like this one did.

We suddenly seem very far from our goal.

“Here,” Clyde says.

This stretch of tunnel looks no different from any other. Still, it’s where the GPS says we should be. We dutifully obey our electronic master. Clyde pulls out the reality key, sucks on a battery, twists. Blue light floods the space around us.

Again I feel the slight thump at the base of my skull, some bass beat in the rhythm of the universe. But this time it reverberates. Deep and sonorous. Painful. A headache ripples out to encase my skull. My vision seems to shimmer. For a moment there isn’t one tunnel in front of me, but a myriad of tunnels. Myriad realities. Nausea twists through me, sharp and sudden. Blue light floods everything.

Then it’s gone. Everything. The pain. The nausea. The blurring of my vision. I am just standing, bewildered in the absence of my own suffering, trying to figure out what just happened.

Apparently nothing.

I stare about looking for evidence of a shift in… anything. But it’s the same dull tunnel. The same drab walls. It might have been a spectacular light show, but it didn’t seem to do much.

Everyone else seems as confused as I do. Flashlights play on our surroundings looking for something different.

“The Uhrwerkmänn’s gone,” Hannah says. Her flashlight’s circle of illumination flickers over an empty section of track. She looks at the key in Clyde’s hands. “Useful for tidying stuff up, I suppose. The psychotic murderer’s handy-helper?”

For a moment I imagine a pocket reality full of dead bodies. I blanch.

Then I see it. My flashlight comes to rest pointing at a wall. “That wasn’t there,” I say. “Not before.”

A door. An unimpressive one. Small, shabby, and made of gnarled wood. However, right now I wouldn’t mind if it was small, shabby, and smeared in Lang’s fecal matter. It’s new. It’s a chance this trip isn’t just about Kayla euthanizing a robotic race.

“Kayla,” I say. She crosses the tunnel, grabs the handle. While having her open the door means she is more likely to get hit by whatever abomination is behind it than anyone else on the team, she’s also more likely than anyone else to survive.

Hannah looks at me. “Shouldn’t we…?” She taps her hand on her holster, nods at the door.

“You are very keen to draw that thing,” I say. I get the impression the indulgent tone isn’t appreciated.

Kayla kills any nascent bickering by applying her shoulder to the door. It flies open, swinging easily on well-oiled hinges. Kayla takes the three short sharp steps into the room. Somehow, in the intervening nanoseconds, she has her sword out of its scabbard. Hannah fills the doorway behind her, pokes her gun over Kayla’s right shoulder.

The door opens onto a short corridor—maybe a yard long—before the space opens out. Blue light floods everything. Slowly we advance.

The room is circular and achingly tall. The ceiling is distant, five or six stories up at least, the walls coming together to form a high peaked dome, like a vast, elongated egg. Every inch of the walls, from floor to that far-removed ceiling, is lined with books. The short corridor at the doorway was actually just a narrow channel cut through the shelves.

Books are jammed into the space. Spines upside down, back to front. Titles in English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Latin. Titles in alphabets I don’t recognize. Books jammed in backwards so only the pages peer out at us, all browning with age and neglect. Some curled and tattered. And not just books. Curled scrolls, sheaves of loose writing, newspapers, notepads, maps. I see a stack of what appear to be movie posters. There’s even one shelf that appears to be dedicated to rolled-up tapestries.

The floor is similarly cluttered. Yet more books in tattered piles. Empty picture frames. A few old hurricane lamps. A gas mask. It feels as if I have somehow stumbled into an overly complex I-spy photograph. I can’t tell where the blue light is coming from. It seems simply to suffuse the place.

Kayla and Hannah stand in the center of the room, weapons still drawn.

“You two done threatening the books yet?” I ask.

Hannah slowly puts the gun away, not bothering to look sheepish. “Yeah,” she says, “because a rather-sorry-than-safe policy is totally the one we should be following.”

Clyde isn’t paying any attention. He stares around the room. I think this is what he imagines heaven looks like. I am close enough to hear him whisper to himself, “Oh good lord. I have to show this place to Tabby.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “This is good work,” I tell him. “This has to put us ahead of that Friedrich arsehole.”

He nods, but then a frown clouds his face.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I was just wondering…” He rubs the back of his head, ruffling his hair. “How the hell are we going to get all this back to the office?

“Could call someone about this,” Tabitha says. “Oppressive work conditions, this is. Unsanitary. Plus the wireless signal down here is about as existent as the square root of minus one.” When no one responds she shakes her head. “Fucking philistines.”

She ducks back down below her makeshift desk, set up in the middle of Lang’s underground tunnel. I happen to know for a fact that Felicity has organized for her to have a wired connection so fast it makes photons worry that something might be catching up to them.

Clyde sits cross-legged at the desk’s base making his way through one of the stacks of books Hannah, Kayla, and I have retrieved from Lang’s study. He has informed me that he’ll be sticking to the Latin texts as Tabitha’s ancient Greek is better than his.

Felicity stands next to me, surveying the mobile field office we’ve set up. “This is good,” she nods. “This gives us an edge.”

“I hope so.” This job has taught me that unbridled optimism is usually an invitation for the universe to deliver a swift and savage blow to the balls.

“You should set up some perimeter security,” Felicity says. “In case Friedrich uncovers details about this place, or about the key.”

I gaze into the blank darkness of the tunnels. I picture the unsettling image of them gazing back.

“Do you think he’ll stop?” I say. “Friedrich. If we find this cure the Uhrwerkmänner are looking for?”

Felicity is quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she says after a while. “I mean, that’s what he says he’s doing. Looking for a cure. So if we do it… he should. But… He’s on the sort of journey people have trouble stopping.”

I glance over at the Uhrwerkmänn Kayla killed. “God, I hope he does stop,” I say, with more feeling than I intended.

“Looking for a bit of peace and quiet?” Felicity’s smile is further from sympathetic and closer to mocking than I’d like.

I wrestle with that. Try to find the right words. “Looking for… a stop to pointless struggle,” I say. “And being pulled into other people’s pointless struggles. Why can’t people just be satisfied with what they have?” I reconsider that last bit. “At least, why can’t giant Nazi robots be satisfied?”

Felicity shrugs. “It’s like a fire fight,” she says. “Stasis is death. Nothing ever stays the way it is.” She pats me on the back. “We don’t fight for stasis, Arthur. We fight for the best change possible. And sometimes that’s still a shitty change. Sometimes we just fight for the least bad outcome.” She wraps an arm around me, squeezes.

I squeeze her back. It’s a little half-hearted. “Not exactly a motivational speaker, are you?”

Another shrug. “Fine then,” she says. “Just think about how your paycheck is dependent on you fighting the good fight instead then.”

Back in the upper underground tunnel, I hold the door open, so Felicity can slip past me onto the stairs leading back down below. Bags of Chinese food weigh my arms down. Felicity holds several steaming cups of coffee.

“We should tell Volk and Hermann about this place,” I say as we descend.

“I don’t know.” Felicity’s ahead of me and I can’t see her face, but she sounds dubious. “I think you’re right that they’re on our side, but I also think their network is leaky as hell. Anything we tell them will get to Friedrich sooner or later.”

Kayla waits at the bottom of the stairs tapping her phone. “I’m wasting feckin’ time here.” She doesn’t bother looking up. “Never be able to fix up a date for tonight at this point.”

“Aren’t you meant to be on perimeter guard duty?” I ask.

“Feckin’ doorway,” Kayla says. “Feckin’ perimeter. Feckin’ guarding it.”

Felicity nods. “I’ve got sweet and sour chicken for you when you’re ready.”

Kayla grimaces. Hopefully her chicken is heavy on the sweet side.

We put the bags down on Tabitha’s makeshift desk, which has been drowned in Lang’s papers. Clyde sits in the middle of what might well be a book fort. Even Hannah is reading. I peer over her shoulder. It looks like gibberish.

“
Beowulf
,” she says without looking up. “The Old English original version. Had to translate it my first year of uni. Only book in Lang’s stash that I recognized. Learning bollocks all from it. Just like back when I was at uni, actually.”