The Forgotten City (2 page)

Croy glanced down as she flew. Houses and factories lined the walls of Nÿr-Corum’s cavern, making up the Seven Boroughs of the city – Saint Smithy, Saint Emmanuel, Saint Agnes, Saint Boniface, Saint Mariread, Saint Lawless and Saint Arabel. Walkways and gridlines intertwined and over-crossed as far as she could see into the hazy distance below. Gigantic cogs and conveyor belts shunted through the factories of Emmanuel Borough. The three largest worksites here were occupied by the Mining Coalition, the Steel Works and the Oil Drill. Without these, the Fleetships that tracked and transported the essentials of food and water from the outer tunnels of Kullra Fornax into the city would not fly. Nothing had grown or been born in the city, save for humans, for longer than anyone alive could remember. These worksites, and all others, were owned by Purple Wings and manned by Grays.

At the very base of Nÿr-Corum, effectively marking the end of the city, burned the Mother Fire, the only thing that kept them from freezing to death. There had been several attempts at estimating exactly how long they’d last if the Mother died out. The results were varying, but all pointed to the same answer – not long.

Croy spotted Darius swooping downward and altered the course of her dragger. She followed him past all the upper factory floors. Workers paused to watch them fly – Grays with gray clothes, gray faces and gray hair from fire soot and industrial dust. Their lips were cracked and parched, flecked with white, and their bodies moved in a drudging way. They worked long and hard. The machines never stopped and neither did the shifts – as one ended the next immediately began. Both Darius’ parents had been miners killed in a Dray attack. He never spoke of it and Croy knew better than to ask.

Her partner was hovering above the Filter, the city’s primary water silo. She swooped in beside him, looking down, past the guards posted all around the topmost edges. The huge structure was eroded and stained where the water level had once reached. It used to stand almost full. Now conditions were critical. Rations were the lowest they had ever been, since the last major expedition into the outer tunnels had failed. The Drays had destroyed the city’s largest Fleetship, the
Chimera
, slaughtering all the Fleetsmen, both male and female, and looting everything on board. Now all hopes rode on the second-largest ship, the
Teriscoria
, which had been sent out shortly after. The latest reports said it was heavily laden with supplies and en route to the city. Normal life continued, no one yet saying aloud what everyone was thinking – if the
Teriscoria
didn’t make it back, people would start dying. The Conference had released a message claiming it had a backup plan. Even though she was a Controller of the Martial Corps and thus an employee of the Conference, Croy was highly doubtful such a plan existed.

The Conference was made up of the highest of the Purple Wings, who were far too rich and too soft to comprehend what starvation and thirst meant.

“They found a stinker in the silo,” Darius called out to her.

“Great – like we have water to spare,” Croy replied.

Darius grunted and plunged his dragger straight downward into the darkness of the storage tower. Croy followed him, their engines roaring in the enclosed space. The humidity closed in on them. It had an earthy, sediment scent to it. Croy saw light ahead and then smelled a riper, heavier stink. She felt an immediate reaction – her stomach and throat tightened, her eyes watered – as her body warned her to stay away.

Torch firelights grew larger and brighter and blurred forms took shape as Darius and Croy descended over a floating pier and jetty stretching out into the center of a large body of water. Groups of people were scattered along the jetty. Darius and Croy leveled out and brought their draggers down on the pier. The largest group of people was huddled around something at the end of the structure. Croy glanced at her partner and saw they were both feeling the same thing – here a life had been taken.

“
N
ow repeat after me –
I am in control. I am strong. I am a worthwhile person with valid and important ideas and beliefs
.” The hologram face of the self-esteem attendant, glowing in the darkness, paused to smile at Eli, and the absolute serenity of her conviction made it completely impossible for him to continue believing that she was a real person who could actually see him – unless she happened to be an attractive, perceptive woman who was also visually impaired or mildly to acutely insane. That way it was possibly conceivable that she could mistake the person she saw before her – the pale, shaking imp-breed with sweat damp spreading across his shirt – with someone to whom the words
in control
and
strong
were applicable.

Even to Eli, it didn’t seem likely. “Sorry,” Eli whispered to the hologram. “It’s not you, it’s … well, actually, it is you. I’m very sorry.”

He reached out and triggered the shut-down sequence, and the attendant’s certainty slipped into a wistful kind of disappointment before her image faltered and vanished. That look was all too familiar to Eli. Usually it followed failing someone’s expectations and came before an unavoidably bumpy guilt trip. And while disappointing a computer program might have been an all-time personal low, he really didn’t have time to dwell on it. Getting underground with all his body parts attached and intact needed to be his all-consuming thought at present. A tech-neutralizing ebomb, set off by gangsters still hunting Androt rebels, had paralysed the external security of his bunker workshop, so he’d brought along the esteem-machine to use its neural circuits in rebooting the system. At first he’d been all about focus and speed, but then the attendant’s voluptuous encouragements had distracted him.

“
Stupid
,” Eli whispered, prising up the esteem-machine’s hard cover. “
Focus. Focus
.”

Behind him, the twisted pitch-black silence of the transflyer graveyard exploded into a metallic crash and reverberating screech. Eli fumbled the machine and dropped it with a thud. He spun around, his night-vision glasses picking up heat shadows moving through the darkness. The specs framed and reframed the figures, feeding back their stats into Eli’s new front-core implant. Gangsters. Members of the Crook’d Town Pride – in a hunting formation and closing in fast.

Eli fell to his knees and dug frantically into the dirt with both hands, unearthing his security’s access box. He fused the esteem-machine’s CPU with the disarm function and waited for the connection. His breath steamed out in front of him, coming fast and ragged. At first nothing happened, then a distant mechanical whir started up beneath his boots. He jumped back as the dirt caved in to reveal a hidden spiral stairwell. Shielding his eyes, he ran through the rising dust cloud, heavy with the scents of must and old metal. He crashed down the stairs, triggering the re-close when he was halfway down, only just rolling clear of the vaulted doors as they slammed shut with a shuddering boom to seal the entrance.

Eli sat in the dark gulping back his gasps, listening for intruders, but the only sounds, apart from his breathing, were the re-settling metal and the usual laboratory beep-clattery. The relief left him lightheaded and he silently counted back to stop the faint. When the feeling passed, he clutched the wall and stood.

“Lights up,” he whispered.

From above, the glow of high-power fluoros flickered then flared, shunting on all the way down the length of an enormous bunker warehouse. It had been a transflyer crusher bay and recommissioning workshop in its former life, but Eli had converted it into his secret laboratory, and had been busy filling it with experiments and inventions. The tracker team had transferred most of its equipment and possessions here from its room in Moris-Isles, though they really hadn’t had that much. He, Silho and Jude had lost virtually everything in the bomb raids, Copernicus had managed to recover some of his weapons collection and Diega had brought in just one small square box, with strict instructions –
never ever open this – ever.
Eli’s love for his friend kept him to his word – but it was torturous. Saying something like that to an imp-breed would usually be followed by an instantaneous frenzy of box opening, but Eli liked to think of himself as a walking stereotype annihilation. He also liked to think of himself with three blonde pixie-breed sisters, but that was another story entirely. And another distraction.

Eli brushed the dirt off his hands, adjusted his new weapon belt and walked out into the hangar.

“Disable shields,” he said, shutting down the more experimental and advanced internal security that had protected everything inside the hangar from the ebomb blast. He stood surveying the scene before him and a smile crept across his dirt-smeared face.

Underneath a spotlight’s glow, two transflyers stood side by side – two of the most incredible craft ever made. Eli flinched at his own rampant immodesty, but really it was a fact undeniable. These flyers were the genesis of a new era of craft-tech. Before the Monarchy, the Standard and the United Regiment had fallen at the beginning of the war, almost a year-cycle ago, sky legislation had dictated the lawful specifications of airborne vehicles, but these laws, along with all others, had now disintegrated into wartime anarchy. Which meant, in the case of aeronautics, designers could create without restraint, except that of their imagination and intellect – a small and precious freedom in a time of so much horror.

On the right stood the almost completed
Ory-5
. Beautiful she was not, but the newest Tracker team craft certainly fit the commander’s brief –
make it fast, make it strong and do it now
. Built with parts Eli had pilfered from a thousand different wrecks, the newest
Ory
was a masterpiece of speed, a force to rival even the fastest fighterflyer. Its specially treated alloy shell was reinforced with a forceshield boasting a nuclear withstanding strength. Basically, inside this craft the team were untouchable – at least against all modern weaponry. Magics were another matter entirely, but Eli was working on that. Parked beside the
Ory-5
was Eli’s new personal flyer, to replace the much loved
Summer Holiday
. While the
Ory-5
had been a product of necessity, this craft was a labor of love. It was only partially constructed, but already it had a name – the
Gypsy Rose.

“What do you think, girl?” Eli spoke to his pet otter, who had so far snored through the entire ordeal of breaking in. When Nelly didn’t stir, he peeked inside his pocket. She lifted her head and gave him a look of absolute indifference and unadulterated boredom, then immediately fell back asleep. Eli took it as a compliment. Then he realized that he was standing there grinning to himself while time raced him to the deadline. He had to finish the
Ory-5
before the fight-in, which was – he checked his chronograph – only four hours away. It might as well have been four seconds, considering the amount of work still left to do.

“Penman!” Eli called, his voice echoing into the vastness of the hangar as he ran to his tooling desk. “I need you!”

A chirring beep sounded in response and two blue orbs appeared in one darkly shadowed corner. A machine-breed that looked like a mechanical flying squid zipped out to greet him, getting in his face and patting him enthusiastically all over the head with its long, dangling tendrils. Compared to Androts, the most advanced of the machine-breed race, a PenmanRamada0318 was an extremely basic robotic model. By the now defunct Laws, they had not even been classified “living”. But when Eli had found Penman hiding in the hangar, in fear of the Gangsters that were crushing every machine-breed they could find, he had looked into the little robot’s eyes and seen life. He’d seen fear, he’d seen confusion, hope, hunger – not just for food but company too – a desperate desire
to be
. He’d seen a being with a unique mind, looking back at him and reaching out, and he’d reached back. Penman’s former owners had kept him down here to disassemble transflyers and Eli had never met anyone who could build an engine so rapidly. Penman provided him with invaluable support while constructing the transflyers, and he also laughed at all of Eli’s terribly overused jokes. He’d become a friend.

“We’ve run out of time,” he told the robot. “The team needs the
Ory
in four hours.”

Penman gave a series of quizzical beeps, and even though Eli spoke only basic machine code, he understood the gist. He was asking about the meeting they’d just attended in Lancaster Square.

“Caesar wasn’t actually there,” Eli said.

Penman tooted shrilly and Eli replied, “I know – we were all surprised too. Everyone expected him to be there in person, but it was just a pre-recorded message. I copied it for you. Here.” Eli grabbed the recording bug out of his pocket and threw it into the air. It unfolded and initiated playback.

Eli buzzed his wings and flew to the top of the scaffolding beside the
Ory-5
’s open engine bay as a life-sized hologram of Caesar K-Ruz flashed into light and started to speak.

“
People of Scorpia. The war is over. The Ar Antarian king is dead without an heir. The machine-breeds have fallen, and I stand here before you – not as your king – but as a herald to a new era of time. I, and all of you, now live by gangster law. No boundaries are unchangeable. No places eternally off-limits. Each of you now has the right to protect your land, your people, your families. Each of you now has the right to better yourselves and change your circumstance. This is your awakening – your chance not just to make a living but to actually live, to determine your own life-path. Before, you were stuck where society had placed you. Now we all stand even. But do not be complacent. This new city is not a playing field, it is a battlefield. You can all gain land and wealth but you can equally lose it. Everyone is free – which means no one is untouchable …”

Eli ran a series of engine tests as the speech continued to play – basically Caesar had thrown out a challenge to anyone who considered themselves to be gangster boss material. They were to come to the highest level of Scorpia, Sirenseron, where they would compete in a traditional fight-in, a one-on-one rink fighting tournament, a negotiation where words were replaced by fists and contracts were drawn up in blood. There were no rules, as such, except that competitors could use all their innate skill, but not magics of any kind. It would be a bloodbath, but worse than that, even though the war was done and Caesar was touting freedom for all, the machine-breeds, always the most repressed racial group, were still being hunted down, including women and children who’d had nothing to do with the fighting. Those the gangsters didn’t kill outright they were locking into prison camps.

Just after the speech, the commander had received intel that the gangsters intended to mass-exterminate all the machine-breeds in the camps as well. Now that they’d won, they no longer needed the prisoners for bargaining and manipulation, and refused to free them – even the children and babies. Gangster law was merciless. When they’d heard this, Jude, one of Eli’s tracker teammates who was half-Androt, half-Ar Antarian, had fallen to his knees, devastated. Commander Kane had immediately decided that he himself would go into the rink against Caesar K-Ruz and win the machine-breeds’ freedom before the extermination could begin …

A feeling hit Eli so suddenly that his first thought was that the canned flint-beans he’d eaten that morning were repeating on him. He stumbled back from the
Ory-5
and leaped off the scaffolding. He landed unsteadily, one hand pressed over his mouth. Then tears stung his eyes and a sob started deep in his chest and exploded out. He staggered to his workbench, hemorrhaging emotions with every step. By the time he hit it, he was crying hysterically.

“Get it together …” he sobbed into his arm. “Everything is fine … I am not in control. I mean, I am in control. I am not strong … I mean … I’m …” He was finding it difficult to think straight and impossible in his distress to hold back his compulsive lying and stealing, issues he’d struggled with all his life thanks to the illegal mix of his bloodline.

As his hands uncontrollably shoved random objects into his pockets, Eli realized he must be having some kind of breakdown and pinched his arm viciously. It was something he used to do when he was a kid, trying to force himself to act normal, even though it just wasn’t possible. The bruises had blended in with the blue stripes and purples dots of his Glee and Greer bloodline marks.

“What’s wrong with you?” he gulped angrily at himself, struggling to regain composure.

He’d been under the belief that defeating a legion of demonic witches and saving the world would have boosted his confidence and resilience, and in ways it really had, but at times – times like this – he felt like a piece of ash – small, fragile and transient – as well as dangerously close to cracking up with inappropriate raucous laughter, either that or passing out cold – or, just as likely, pocketing everything in sight. He restrained himself on all accounts. Rationally, he suspected he was suffering delayed post-traumatic stress, triggered by the thought of the commander having to fight Caesar. For some reason the Pride King had become a kind of catastrophically handsome embodiment of all the horror and pain he’d experienced during the Skreaf uprising, and in the war that had followed. Just the thought of being close to Caesar again … A shudder ran through Eli. From the long dark of the wars they’d emerged blinking into this new era of possibilities and uncertainties. And, evidently, mental instabilities. It had only been a year-cycle since they’d defeated the Skreaf and the gangsters and machine-breeds had started fighting, but it felt as though it had been going on forever – the horror of it slowing time. Eli sniffled and Nelly crawled out of his pocket and wound herself around his neck like a fluffy constricting python, snuffling consolingly in his ear. He pressed his face against her warm fur and cried until the front-core implant in his forehead beeped and an incoming message signal popped up in front of his eyes. The commander spoke directly into his thoughts.