Twisted Metal (41 page)

‘They’re sacrificing part of their own city,’ said Kavan, in awed tones.

He looked around for Eleanor, chided himself for doing so. She would return if she would return. But he wanted to share this moment with her. She would understand. They hadn’t done it in Stark, they hadn’t done it in Wien, they hadn’t done it in Turing City. But they were doing it here. The enemy were giving their all to the fight. These people really
believed
in something.

He turned to a nearby Scout.

‘Tell the engineers to move quickly. We’re going to need more troops in here soon.’

Olam

Olam and the rest had moved virtually unchallenged through the maze of streets that ran amongst the hovels. A few of the pitifully thin robots had tried to form a line in order to defend their homes. Doe Capaldi and Parmissa and the rest had simply marched through it, their kicks and punches easily breaking their opponents’ badly constructed bodies. Olam had crashed into their homes, searching out the robots that sheltered there, shooting the adults, taking the children and swinging them by the legs, cracking open their heads against the sharp ground. Their bodies were left in piles to be collected later by the scavenger teams, the metal to be bundled up and sent back to Artemis City for recycling.

The killing lust was welling up inside him again; it pulsed in time with the movements of his electromuscles. As the streets had lit up with fire and the trees had begun to burn; as the patterns of the flames danced on the silver skins of the Scouts that darted back and forth along the paths; as the sound of metal twisting metal rose up on the gusts of the wind; as the battle moved to its climax, Olam finally surrendered himself totally to Artemis.

He was no longer a Wiener, he was an Artemisian. He was part of the ultimate power, the supreme race, the conquerors of Shull, the future rulers of the entire world of Penrose itself.

Smoke belched from the trees, from the burning ditches, enfolding him, hiding him . . .

Releasing him.

Karel

Karel stood alone in the valley, revving his engines, impatient to be off. Ahead of him the sky was slowly illuminated by a great orange glow, and he wondered what was happening over there. Thick black smoke was feeling its way down the tracks towards him, more and more of it pouring its way south, shouldering aside the falling snowflakes. It lapped over the tracks, lapped around his wheels, and then it slowly rose, engulfing him.

What was going on?

‘Hello?’ he said, tentatively. No reply, not that he had been expecting any.

He waited, seemingly suspended in the darkness. They had taken away his family, then his body . . . now they had taken away his sight. What next?

He revved the engines, felt the train shudder. The enfolding smoke cleared a little. He saw shapes out there, infantryrobots maybe, running past him. Running away? He revved the engines again. This time he saw nothing.

What was happening out there?

Then there was a voice.

‘Drive! Quickly! Get out of here!’

The voice thrilled with urgency. Karel revved the engines, released the brakes, started to roll. The smoke parted a little, and he saw more infantry running past.

‘Faster!’ urged the voice.

‘I can’t see where we’re going!’

‘It doesn’t matter. We need to get to the front!’

He felt a coughing splutter somewhere inside him.

‘Faster!’ said the voice. It seemed to guess his thoughts. ‘Ignore that sound!’

That splutter again. And then something else.

‘The wheels are slipping!’ protested Karel.

More spluttering. The engines. What was the matter with them?

‘There’s something wrong with the engines!’

‘It’s the smoke, it’s blocking your intakes.’

‘Then I must stop!’

‘No, go faster. You can coast to the front! They need you there!’

Again the engines spluttered. Karel increased his speed. Suspicion suddenly gripped him.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Banjo Macrodocious.’

‘Banjo Macro . . . ? But aren’t you the robot . . . ?’

And at that the engines gave a final splutter and died.

Karel swore. He had been tricked! Tricked into filling his own engines with the choking black smoke.

He jammed on the brakes, squeezed them hard, but they felt wrong too. They were mushy, and the wheels seemed to slip through his fingers.

‘But whose side are you on, anyway?’ asked Banjo Macrodocious.

Karel didn’t know. He just wanted to stop the train, and the brakes weren’t working. He was rushing through darkness, and then, suddenly, his vision cleared and he was running through a newly formed valley. There was a train in front of him, moving more slowly than he was.

Clenching desperately at the mushy brakes, he rolled forward, frantically trying to avoid a collision . . .

Olam

Olam killed and killed and killed, and yet his frustration grew.

It was getting harder to find new prey. The houses he came upon were nearly all empty. Those robots that he met were the very young, sheltering behind parents, or the very poor, or those with insufficient metal to make bodies capable of moving.

Fires burned all around him, black smoke engulfed him, and suddenly he realized he was all alone. Where had the rest of his section got to?

He saw a familiar shape through a break in the clouds and ran towards it.

‘Oh, it’s you, Parmissa,’

Parmissa turned awkwardly to look at him. Her legs seemed stiff, her arms hung loose at her sides.

‘Is that you, Olam? Are you feeling okay? I can’t seem to move my arms or neck at all how I want to.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Olam dismissively. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘Spreading out through the houses. Janet said that she’d heard the enemy were retreating. Pulling back to that tower in the centre. They were going to try and cut them off. Are you sure you feel okay?’

‘I told you, I’m fine.’

Although, now he thought about it, Olam did feel an odd stiffness in his own shoulders. He soon dismissed the thought. He didn’t care. He wanted to move on. He wanted to kill.

‘This is a strange place, isn’t it?’ said Parmissa, her arms dangling loose as she turned to look around the buildings that loomed on either side of the street. ‘Have you seen those funny plates they all have in their houses? Not enough metal to panel their own bodies, and yet they waste it on all those little signs. Circle on circle.’

‘Who cares?’ said Olam, impatient to be off. He turned in what he thought was the direction of the tower. ‘I’ll head this way. The others will need help. Are you coming?’

‘I think I need to sit down a moment,’ said Parmissa. ‘I feel tired.’

She slumped down heavily to the ground, slush and mud squirting over her body.

‘You stay here if you want to. I’m going on.’

But now he felt tired too. Like the lifeforce was draining from him.

‘What’s the matter with me, Parmissa?’ he asked, slumping down beside her.

‘Don’t know,’ said Parmissa. ‘Let’s just stay here. Don’t think I can move.’

Nor could Olam. All the killing lust evaporated from him in an instant. Suddenly the ever-present black cloud was not something in which to hide, instead it was something that was watching him. He tried to raise himself back to his feet, but his hand slipped and he fell forward, face-down. Slushy mud began leaking into his body.

‘Listen,’ said Parmissa. ‘I can hear footsteps,’

Eleanor

Eleanor was wrapped in blue-green wire. It had cut through the panelling of her legs, slicing right through the electromuscle beyond; it was tangled around her waist and her right arm. There was no pain, only a rising sense of disgust.

She was caught in the twisted wire of a mind!

The sky above her was dark, as if time had suddenly jumped forward to deepest night. Everything was in the wrong place, and the fighting had suddenly moved away from her. What was going on? It was as if she had fallen asleep.

But she hadn’t slept since she was a child!

Her body was half covered in snow. Nearby lay the body of the mining robot she had killed, the wire of its mind still trailing from its head. And there were other bodies there, too – Artemisian infantry, also wrapped in wire. She had been lucky, she realized, that this wire bomb had caught her around the legs. She gazed at what remained of another infantryrobot lying on the ground nearby. Blue-green wire had sliced into his skull, wrapping itself around the blue wire of the Artemisian‘s mind.

Carefully, Eleanor began to pull at the wire that entangled her own body. It peeled back easily, the lifeforce long drained from it. She freed her right arm and looked down at her ruined legs. There was no saving them, she decided. She detached them and then dragged herself over to the nearest dead infantryrobot, where she set about stripping the working parts from its body and attaching them to her own. Soon she was back on her feet again.

Where would Kavan be now, and why hadn’t he sent anyone to look for her?

She laughed at the thought. Like Kavan would care! He was probably just grateful to be rid of his rival.

The spot where she and Kavan had stood earlier had changed. The engineers had excavated deeper into the rock, cut a notch deep into the side of the bowl and had then run a railway line through it. The line now extended a few tens of feet into the Northern Kingdom and then petered out, first into bare sleepers and then ballast. There was no sign of the engineers who should have still been working on it.

Eleanor turned slowly, taking in the scene. Below, the bowl was filled with the dying flames of fire trenches, the snow gradually beating its way back against the heat. The trees that had once lined the paths of the kingdom were crumbling into glowing ash. What had she missed? She got the impression that the Artemis advance was faltering.

What had Kavan done, to throw away his advantage so?

Oh, Nyro
, she thought,
what would you have me do here?

Eleanor didn’t believe in signs. She wasn’t superstitious, like these robots of the north, but if she were ever to believe in such things, it would have been then. Because at that moment there was a rumbling and a shaking. A scraping noise screeched out into the night, and something came skidding and tumbling along the newly laid track.

A train. It ran to the edge of the rails and then slewed across the empty sleepers, tumbling and skidding its way down into the bowl of the North Kingdom.

What had caused it to do that, wondered Eleanor? Then she saw the second train that pushed along the first, saw how it was desperately trying to brake. Without success. It too came off the end of the rails, but this one skidded to a slow halt, only the engine and the first wagon resting on the freshly laid ballast. Slowly, that second engine tipped over and landed with a crash on its side.

An accident, she realized. There were always accidents in war. This was not a sign: Nyro was not speaking to her.

And then she recognized the train.

Kavan

First their artefacts will fail, then their bodies will fail, and finally their minds will fail
.

‘Superstition,’ declared Kavan.

‘That black smoke, full of carbon particles from the burning trees,’ said Wolfgang. ‘It’s getting into the electromuscle of the troops. It shorts out the spaces between the weave, stops it working properly. Wipe the residue away and they’ll be fine.’

An aide pushed her way forward. ‘What about the machinery?’ she asked. ‘The engines have stopped working,’ It was Ruth, General Fallan’s former aide, now wearing a Scout’s body. If only she had a Scout’s courage, thought Kavan. She had never dared to question him until now. Funny how people gained a little courage when things started going wrong.

‘It’s sabotage,’ said Kavan, firmly. ‘We are fighting a clever enemy, nothing more.’

‘Don’t forget the atomic bombs,’ said Ruth. ‘They didn’t go off either, and that was before the fires started. What about them?’

‘They obviously found our bombs in time and disarmed them. These things happen in war. The attack is otherwise proceeding satisfactorily.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ruth. ‘We’ve lost too many troops on the left flank. The smoke is lifting now, and our troops that were fighting there have disappeared. So have the enemy, what little of them there was for us to engage with.’

‘They’ll be falling back to the centre,’ said Kavan. ‘Make no mistake, they will attack us, but, when they do, we will be more than their match.’

‘No,’ said Ruth, gaining confidence all the time. ‘We should stop now; send for reinforcements from Artemis City. The railway lines are in place.’

‘No,’ insisted Kavan. ‘We still have sufficient numbers. There are three companies of infantry in reserve on the right flank. They will be enough.’