This ongoing work in progress is entirely a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people, living or dead is coincidental.
No part of the work may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.
Copyright Ion Fyr 2022
ionfyr.net
One
The caustic fog of street level Londbridge in the winter was something. Nila pushed her breather a little upwards to get a better seal around the sides of her nose, so the tip of the plastic nose cover touched the bridge of her goggles, the latter’s lenses unshaded for the dim evening, though still mirrored from the outside. The glistening black oversized hood of her long raincoat amplified the sound of the otherwise minor drizzle.
The street was busy with a throng of people, many dressed like her, but the few unlucky ones lacking eye protection, stared bleary-eyed as if they had been pepper-sprayed, and the maskless ones, gasped through rag-like scarves.
The center of the street and the doorways of the shops were mostly clear of debris and the [glass-crete] glistened with rain and rivulets of stygian fluids of unknown provenance.
Out of the ether, as if emanating from the flickering and buzzing neon and the cacaphony of vying dubtracks, her internal impossibly chirped. It was silent of course, merely a stimulation of her auditory nerve by the wirelessly connected (albeit shielded and anonymized) server embedded in her skull, drilled into the mastoid process, behind her right ear, showing only two visible jacks protruding from the narrow band of skin between her ear and adjacent hairline. No one she new was supposed to be here and everyone she didn’t know didn’t know she was here.
She had slipped in incognito and was crashing at one of her friend Luc’s safehouses, if it could be called that. Transport Authority tech was laughably easy to spoof, relying on third-rate biometrics and long-hacked ID databases.
>UNKNOWN: ?
>KCN: who is this?
Nila turned her head, but only slightly, so as to not give a sign that she had been contacted. Blue neon from the food stall nearby bathed her in monochromatic light. Her hair brushed against the inside of her hood. The goggles hid her roving eyes.
>UNKNOWN: you don’t know me
>KCN: no shit?
>KCN: i don’t use this tag anymore how’d you get it
There was no obvious watcher in the crowd. 200 faces 200 silhouettes. Nobody was looking at her except for that sleaze monkeyboy at the pasty stall, and he certainly wasn’t hitting her neurallink.
>trace-incoming -internal -local
>…
After a delay shorter than the blink of her searching eyes:
>relay node -PriorJumpOffPoint: 52.42654° N, 17.04080° W
>: | -VisualOverlay -highlight -local
A bright, pinpoint pink-purple dot came into being three meters up, in a window above the churning crowd.
Her holographic map, floating transparently in her vision drew a line from the window to the left and another dot in the ocean hundreds of klicks out to sea to the west.
Hmm? The dot in the window that’s speaking to me is jumping from a point in the middle of the ocean. Curious, she thought.
Suddenly, it occurred to her that what her map was showing shouldn’t be possible. Long-range comms had to be either wired or line-of-sight optical. As far as wireless was concerned, most maxed out at a 100 meters, maybe 500 for high-end military spec.
She had to investigate now.
The Watcher had remained silent.
**
>KCN: you still there?
>UNKNOWN: yes KCN we’ve been searching for you
>KCN: why? what do you want? how did you find me?
>UNKNOWN: the algorithms suggested that there was a 67.6% probability in favor of you returning to this location within two years.
>KCN: so what do you want now that you found me?
>UNKNOWN: we wish to discuss employment…
She walked. Circled around the block. It wasn’t your average 20th century block–the ‘scrapers were all on a big-scale footprint. Klick to a side.
Her penchant for danger gave her a confidence that most wouldn’t have upon having disembodied voices intrude on their evenings.
At her allotted 100 meters the signal broke off.
It took Nila nearly an hour.
As she neared the place where the signal had been coming from, she shifted from the middle of the street to the side close to the imposing wall, imagining the massive structure’s gravity pulling her close. She hoped she’d be out of sight of the cameras that caught her the first time–it didn’t really matter because UNKNOWN would ping her as soon as she got within range again.
Lights had shifted. Day-lights had become subdued or had just been turned off, while the evening ultraviolet sun rose from the depths. A thousand tints of LED light nodes and neon tubes scrawled out words, lit food and junk stalls. Some hung vertically swaying from an unfelt breeze above creating wayang shadow puppets hovering in the smog above engaged in an eerie but otherwise occluded story.
The arisen UV sun (in actuality, a series of UV light-tubes snaking along the cavernous street 8 or so meters above) brought out the not-so-subtle glow of Nila’s forearm tats.
They were new. Twining snakes. Girl shit.
The doorway, hidden behind the stalls, was at least unattended. Standard door. Lock….
ha…lock
Lock. Door. Nila’s hand slipped from her raincoat’s outer pocket to her inside front right pants pocket. She slipped a thick metal ring onto her index finger. The action triggered memories and excitement within her.
Two
23rd July, 1887
Constable B.A.Pool, In Special Service to the Crown,
I hate to the last chewed nub of my pencil these silly, pretentious titles. I am Pool. That’s what my dear friends call me.
This airship is a lame horse, so-to-speak. It has been since I was a guest aboard BYH. I conserve my pencil stubs because out here, over the dread sea, there is no way to replace them.
Gods, I dearly miss my dear friend, Miss Tagore, and also, more than also, the Baroness Kekszemu. I fear I have left them at an importune moment.
Beneath us, below this caricature of a vessel, there swim great beasts. It has been estimated that some reach spectacular lengths of a thousand or more meters.
I saw one–no, that’s not true–I’ve seen many. Sometimes along the drop-offs, along continental shelfs, where the shallows drop to unthinkable depths, sometimes buried in frozen tundra eons ago. Some quite alive; one extremely dead.
So, here I sit, hang from this swing, this swinging gondola, beneath a gigantic bag of hydrangeum…
With me, in my cabin–paid for by the Baroness, no less–possessed of a notebook, a few pencil stubs and a tiny box of a camera. This last bit of physico-chemical science still enthuses me.
My dear, late, mother was an avid tin-typist. Red-sheathed lamps and silver nitrate. Her fingers were blue before long and, at her wake, she had an eerie cast upon her. In her mother’s tongue–she being a Muskovite by birth–her last words were: the mob in the square, the serf in the field; they are slaves to circumstance. Mind yourself, son–she said–we can freeze, in time, moments…these things, are merely splinters.”
Pool continues: “She had many tales of her homeland. I have been there twice: once as a young boy of four, or at least a late three, and again with Miss Tagore several, but not too many, years ago.
Let us get back to my journey and reason for being here, hanging above this wine-dark sea, watching from above, as the great beasts–I want to say–frolic in the waves.
I draw out my watch and charge it, now. It, and I, seem to have lost hours since I last did so. Longitude, they say…but I doubt that is all.
The nose of the airship pointed generally east, targeting the sun growing increasingly low on the horizon behind a flock of fluffy clouds. The captain had turned southward earlier in the day to avoid what was said to be a storm to the north. Now, hours later, the rhythm of the props jutting out from the vast, bullet-shaped bag of gas, on four wire-bound struts, spun in space in pairs. They were arranged port and starboard, fore and aft. On each strut and attached to each parallel driveshaft there were two propellers, one pushing and one pulling, behind and in front of each suspended nacelle respectively.
Constable Pool, with his special credentials and haughty connections in the Empire, had the run of the ship, though he ignored the 39 small cabins not his own and had only once inspected the engines and maintenance tunnels in the envelope above the gondola.
The only liberties he took which were generally off-limits to the other passengers, were occasional visits to the sprawling bridge at forward end of the gondola, where he kept to himself, scanning the seas below with one of several telescopes kept there, and, more commonly, visits to the warm kitchen where the airship’s cook-staff would fix him morsels outside of the standard dining hours.
Now, he was on the bridge.
The day-captain stood at the anachronistic ship’s wheel (which Pool briefly wondered at–ocean-going vessels were rare due to the dangers presented by the very beasts he was currently in search of.) He let the thought pass, with a vague intention to ask one of the crew about the reasoning behind it. Surely, they could automate the thing.
The captain was a tall woman with a tight bun and impeccable uniform, which was of course festooned with medals and honors from some past conflict. Her salt and pepper hair sat like a bobby’s helmet on her pale and worn face. Captain Winklespright had no given name that he was aware of and he had learned over the last week as passenger that, even with his special status onboard the Uneven Gull, he should not disturb her in her duties, or, for that matter, provide distraction to the half dozen crew hovering around her.
The windows of the bridge were angled downward at perhaps 40 degrees, and stood half a meter tall along the port and starboard sides. Towards teh bow the windows stood taller in two rows totaling over a meter and provided a spectacular view to those facing forward. There were even thick glass panels in the floor on the forward wall so that the captain and navigators could see what moved below the airship.
The gondola was long and much narrower than the great behemoth above them. When it rained one could see a torrent washing off the upper walls of the envelope, while at the same time, the windows remained generally dry.
The interior of the bridge was nearly 15 meters long and close to ten wide, with light tubing running the length of the ceiling in the center and again in a loop around the perimeter above them. It cast an eerie pinkish-white light over the crew and the handful of out of place looking armchairs which no one (other than Pool) seemed to ever use.
Racks of maps and telescopes and assorted other navigational devices were placed at convenient locations, and at the moment two maps of different scales lay open with weights on the corners on a large central table.
Pool had, when no one was looking, dragged one of the chairs close to the starboard windows, near the back wall, where he now sat with a telescope pressed to his eye. His notebook and pencil stub lay against the window itself, resting on the lower frame 700 meters above the sea below.
Now and then, the brass end of the telescope clicked against the glass, threatening to crack it. Pool knew the threats were empty, for the glass was thick and he had been tapping them all week as he sought the monsters in the sea.
…
Whilst the captain of this airship and his inattentive crew looked at their feet rather than the skies and the waters below, I took the opportunity, left alone and to my own devices, to look down at the waters through the handsome telescope in my hands.
It was interesting to note greening prints exactly where my fingers were placed on the inset tubing of the telescope.
I arrive at the more important part in this adventure at this point, my pencil falls apart between my fingers.
I looked out and, behold!, beneath the purple-black waters of the Great Atlantic Ocean, there lay before me, below me, a submersible ship of gigantic size…I would have thought it a ship made by human hands, a ship made to submerge, if it had not moved like a whale-fish, up and down, side to side…and such.
When it first breached and crashed down on the crestless waves, I first thought it a whale, waif amongst the sea-going behemoths. After some thought it was clear that this was one of those beast which I had seen here and there for years, alive and dead, on land and at sea.
I watched for a few moments. My watch had run out, so I was left to perverse and solipsistic reconnoissance and determined later that only a mere 5 minutes had elapsed.
They were elegant in there form, the beasts. Beneath the waves Long and grey-skinned. In shape like a whale, but having large flipper-feet instead of forward flippers, like unto whales.
How long did I say the airship’s length was? In comparison, the whalefish below was easily four times its length.
***
The new science of descent terrifies me. The physics of it are straight forward, but the mere inkling of jumping unsuspended from an airship with nothing beyond a bursting pack, packed to the extreme, with a silken tent, to, as it happens, …to slow one’s fall to the earth… This idea is anathema to me.
I think to myself, what of my legs, my shin-bones? Will they break? I know from the last five years of my life, that my personal, psychical fears are for naught.
I must embrace Nila’s resilience.
[You, my dear reader, (I hope these words find you well.
Time will tell, my Dear Siva, the gods only know…and you as well.)]
***
The man called Geophreys, or somesuch, (I mean no disrespect–the man’s name was said in passing and never spoken again.)
Geophreys brought me the “shoot” as he called it. It was merely a pack stuffed full of string-tied fabric. I shall surely die.
But then, the beasts of the sea and the apparent island below call to me. And a little of Nila’s god-like death-wish. To be as much a man as she is a woman, or, no, to be as much a human as she…that is to live.
***
Pool reviewed in his mind the method of releasing the dome of fabric stuffed into his pack. He looked down at the double canvas straps over his shoulders and both around his chest and waist respectively. The buckles seemed engaged and the straps were taught, binding his jacket closed. He could feel his journal and collections of pencils pressed into his breast from his inside jacket pocket. The diagonal shoulder strap of his satchel was awkward; the satchel hung at his hip.
The cold afternoon was a wind blowing through the open hatch in the side of the airship. Captain Carpathia stood by as a pair of stewards (or hands) checked over his equipment. One of them tugged at the satchel’s strap, easing a pressure on Pool’s shoulder that he hadn’t even been aware of.
Pool looked at Captain Carpathia, then out the hatch at the island below. It was a single, roughly round island with a mountainous rise in the center, fractured into three primary summits and a scattering of lesser ones rising around it, the like an encircling crown. Beaches, at least on the near side, gave way to scrub then patch birch forests and then on one of the peaks, opposite the airship, capped with a thin glacier.
Pool’s hand unconsciously brushed holstered pistol at his hip before raising it to perform an awkward, unfamiliar salute toward the captain, who graciously returned it.
The next terrifying, exhilarating moments were an adrenalized blur for Constable Pool.
He was aware of passing through the open hatch into space, the unusual and nauseating experience of weightlessness, the icy wind on his face. At first he thought he had lost his hat, before remembering it was tightly packed in his satchel.
Tumbling end over end for the first eternity of his rapid fall, Pool’s heart raced and panic gripped him. Then, remembering the exceedingly brief instructions back in Londbridge from some assistant of Geophreys, who had allegedly performed several of his own jumps from heights, Pool stretched arms and legs (with great hesitation letting go of the “pull cord”, albeit temporarily) which had the effect of leveling him of, facing the quickly approaching beach.
The initial momentum of the airship had provided him with a forward, westward velocity, to the extent that Pool thought for a moment he would overshoot the western shore and land in the icy surf. (Through the wind-induced tears in his eyes he was positive he had glimpsed several of those mysterious leviathans lurking beneath the waves.
Fortunately, the forward motion was ablated by the drag on his body. Nearer the approaching ground, the air warmed slightly, though it was still far from warm in the near-arctic summer.
Nearly without thinking, but in a twisting jerking motion, that threw him into a roll, he reached up and tugged at the cord attached to the strap on his left shoulder.
The bundled shoot did not open at first.
Pool’s mind raced. Was this intentional? Was this supposed to happen? Is this the end?
He had just begun to scream, praying to his mother’s gods, and any others who might be listening, when he was jerked back, the waist belt of the pack knocking the wind out of him. (Pool was positive he heard his organs rupture from the abrupt braking of his fall, but the shoot.)
It rose over his head, mushrooming out as it caught the air, as he hung suspended by two dozen taught cords.
He flailed around a bit, until he realized that the end of his satchel’s strap had detached from the bundle itself. It now hung by his lower leg and inched toward his feet as the strap pulled free of the pack’s own.
With his left hand, Pool reached for it, his fingers brushing the receding strap as it broke free and dropped.
He tracked it’s descent as it dropped, narrowly missing a tidal pool along the grey-pebbled beach, some ten seconds before he crashed to the ground himself.
Three
Some steps on the outside. Some steps on the inside. Another door. Another lock. Another lol.
Open-lock -multiple
Somewhere outside, beyond the reinforced concrete and glass, imposed on the cacophony of the street jumble, she heard the high whine of a drone–likely MetSec, short for Metropolitan Security.
Wireless -RecieveOnly -RefusePing
The room was dark and appeared to be uninhabited. It was small and lit only from the blazing kaleidoscope outside the narrow window. As a single room, four meters long and two meters wide it didn’t have much besides stale funk and must from years of abandonment. Right inside the door–one of those that slide to the side into the adjacent wall to save space–there was what might have been sold as a kitchenette having a small refrigerator and microwave with a narrow counter between them. The counter extended beyond the refrigerator/microwave stack to provide a half meter square table with a retractable bench-seat under it.
On the other side, opposite the kitchenette area, there was an enclosed bathroom. It had another pocket door, a thinner version of the entrance door, and contained a narrow, credit-operated shower, a small, similarly credit-operated recessed sink and a toilet, fueled by grey-water from the shower and sink.
In places like this one would expect the lights to either automatically come on, or if not, then to be voice activated. It remained dark and Nila was hesitant to say anything out loud until the place had been determined to be unoccupied and cleared of surveillance tech.
Eyes-lowlight
Eyes-overlayExternals -wirelessTransmistion -AVSensors -local
There were obvious benefits to having mod-ed eyes. Her silver-grey irises dilated even more than they were already. The features of the room came into crystal clear view. There were no audio-visual sensors that she could detect, at least not facing inward, but the device that she passively noticed from outside, was clearly highlighted sitting on the sill of the window, mounted on a wiry, flexible tripod. It glowed yellow in her visual cortex.
The sound of the MetSec drone passed after a moment, so she reactivated her wireless.
>KCN: you here?
>UNKNOWN: no
>KCN: well,…you contacted me…
Nila’s fingers felt over the small of her back, feeling for Cockchester-Raj 9mm that wasn’t there.
I don’t need firearms. I am Siva.
>KCN: ok, im game
>…
>UNKNOWN: go to the top
>KCN: of…?
>UNKNOWN: this location. floor 380.
She scooped up the palm-sized device from the sill on her way out.
After a nauseatingly long ride up, Nila left the elevator on floor 375. The doors opened and closed like medieval clock doors, with her still dripping, coat-shrouded body as the cookoo.
With a long circuit of the restricted penthouse floor–don’t trip over the silk carpets and gold-plated pissbins–the arc was pyramidal in form, so the top floor was smaller than the base.
–Nila found a service access point for what amounted to the roof of the massive structure. In old times when geology did these things they called them massifs–now they are just enormous buildings.
The door did not resist overmuch. Magnetic bold just flew out when she kicked it heartily.
Nearly two klicks above street, Nila was affronted by the relatively fresh air. The twinkling lights of the vast city not just below but on every horizon, except for the not-so-far sea-side, where the glimmering city turned to inky black.
The map says it’s that column there. Nila looked up at the 500 meter rail column mast. It towered over the roughly square rooftop. A thin lip a meter tall ran around the edge, although she imagined sliding or rolling down the long sides of the pyramid below, rattling the hard glass shell until reaching the edge of the incline, where the sloping walls abruptly became vertical and dropped 50 meters to the street.
Four designated landing pads sat in their respective corners–all unoccupied, but lit by red and green pulsing landing lights like fireflies.
There’s no fucking way I’m climbing that.
>UNKNOWN: acceptable I can see you from here
Did I initiate? protocols no longer made sense.
It was like UNKNOWN was reading her mind–not just transiting, or insinuating, the linked aspects, but inside.
>KCN: What is it you want?
Two weeks ago Nila sat with Luc, her long time friend and one time companion drinking icy cold lager from spun-metal bottles under a faded umbrella on the roof of Skullfuck in breezy Tesifon.
He was shirtless and his layers of thick, and completely over-the-top gold chains hung over his black chest hair.
His equally black curls flickered in the wind from the southwest. She looked at him over the upper rim of her mirrored oval sunglasses, brushing a tuft of her own blue hair out of her eyes with the mouth of her bottle.
Vasy the Tooth had some docs, he said. By that he meant exfiltrated government docs, and Vasy wasn’t his real name. He did have teeth though.
The Tooth was a Londbridge underworld hack originally from somewhere in central Asia. She had met him briefly a few years ago when she and Luc were in Londbridge.
“Vasy claims to have gotten them from some anonymous contact. A real trove of some really old shit, from the early days. Locations. Combat actions from the AI war.”
“What are they written on? Papyrus? They are ancient!”
“Virtually,” he answered. “They are from the War…he says anyway. I don’t know where he got them, other than he says that somebody contacted him and was looking for us to receive them. It does sound sketchy, and could be a WCC op (World Congress of Commerce–the amorphous leviathan of corporate officers and their mercenary lackies).”
He paused to sip from his bottle, then continued, “but given your…special talents…you of all people should be fine.” He referred obliquely to her distinctly alien peripherals, unique to her, at least as far as she new.
***
Back atop the structure, a jagged tooth among many breaching the glowing smog below, jutting up from the depths of the vast orange-brown pool of Londbridge, Nila received a simple piece of data, coordinates.
63.99278ºN, 19.666ºW
Saved to the internal.
That was all. The disembodied voice had nothing else to say.
She was intrigued, but at the same time wary. It was extremely odd to be contacted out of the blue, from some entity merely watching for her to pass by on the street.
***
The memory was more fleeting than she expected, interrupted as it was by the sudden shrill sirens and concussive flash-bangs.
The street erupted into a mangle of screams and thrashing and running and bodies and everyone , every body trying to get the fuck out.
The descent down the tower and its unicorn stalk was fast, running downhill.
Nila had coordinates to something. A mystery. From who? Why?
The shattering tube-lights, rainbow-hued, rained from the upper right onto her thick hood. She was glad she had goggles and a breather; glass particles and the glowing toxic particulates weren’t a fun ride.
Punk Jaysson was split open on the ground behind his booth, neon ghosts swirling around his shattered face. He wouldn’t be serving any more “Queen Bitch” icies any time soon. Who even eats fucking icies in this shit? Nila sucked in filtered air through her breather in rapid breaths.
She knew him growing up. He was a shit, a goon. Odd jobs for odd people. He also kept an East&Waggin under the freezer element.
He won’t be needing it.
Nila had started the evening with a calming rainy walk through the dismal toxic streets of Londbridge–bizarre contact aside–the evening was becoming less so.
While MetSec operations were common, meant to intimidate the street-class, they usually, at least followed a perceptible pattern. This was unusual. Not the location, or the time of day, or the class of the targets, but all together, without provocation, was a clear misuse of resources.
Luc, Wise-Guru-of-Alamut–Nila laughs to herself, ducking behind the sputtering, sparking icy machine–he always said, ‘look for the anomalies, the things that don’t make sense in their context. He was brilliant, Luc. He probably got that out of some shit movie.
Thot Thot Thot
The hovering drone, like a flying four-legged spider spat at the toppled carts and shops of the street. The smog shifted from the turbulence of the projectiles, leaving little curling wakes behind them.
Nila scanned for open doorways.
They–the drones–have infrared. The only reason they are missing me is that the rest of the bodies are still warm.
Three kicks to the side of the icy machine released the E&W as if from a vending machine.
Hope it’s loaded.
It was not at all her own trusty Cockchester-Raj, It was loaded though. For the fucks who want to knock over a fucking icy stall in street level Londbridge. Fucking Goon.
A half hour ago–well, maybe longer–she had been reminiscing. The colors, the vibe of the street reminded her of N’Aurelia. Clearly not the temperature–N’Aurelia was nearly equatorial, and Londbridge was the ass-end of the near-arctic, but still. The colors and vivacious street life, they held that in common.
Thot Thot
Oh, for fuck sake….
Nila chambered the gun and fired at the nearest drone, the one that kept firing down the street, even though there were several others looming over.
Two shots.
Now, unlike most people who find themselves firing at drones, those who aim primarily for the bulbous center bodies, as if firing at a corpulent bug, the more effective, albeit, more difficult, smaller targets are the nacelles–Nila aimed for these.
She wasn’t the best shot, by any comparison, but she had a really strong desire not to die.
That’s the intent, she thought. They are wiping out the street, the community.
The “eyes” of the drone were in the bulbous center blob, but taking out the starboard nacelles, fore and aft, caused this one to twist and then swirl a lot before crashing into the adjacent windows. She could almost see the residents jump back as the plastic bug crumpled before crashing to the ground,
Four. maybe twelve left.
Cachunk Cachunk.
Behind her somebody with a much heavier gun was firing.
Fucking even tracers.
The plasti-glass facade three and four stories up at the end of the street exploded as the street-gun missed most shots….but some hit. Another drone was shredded where it hovered.
Open-doors -all
Nila ran for the nearest door and kept running. Hopefully, the others, the ones that were defending the street ran as well.
***
Two hours later, after laying low, ditching Jaysson’s pistol, and her own raincoat, Nila was back in her flat.
It wasn’t hers. Just to be clear.
It has been over five years, at the time of this writing, since Nila Rabindranath “owned” anything. Maybe a gun or two. But NOTHING.
Four
Space smells like Luc. Literally a hole in the wall. She was under ground. Not a pleasant place like Tesifon, but really, like, the Londbridge fucking Underground.
Still, it was shielded and powered. And outfitted with reserve ammo and a few backup guns.
The Kopf-Heckler stood up and did some cheerleader dance when Nila woke up. Not really. It was only an inanimate bullpup rifle, the kind with the action behind the grip. What the fuck do you think this is, a fucking magic flying castle?
Don’t get me wrong. There are such things, “magic” flying castles and “animate” weapons. The WCC rules from literal flying castles, with all of the advanced surveillance and weaponry, with “animated” somewhat anthropomorphic robots (generally referred to as anthromorphs).
From these platforms they send out forces to maintain their version of order and public obedience.
Most of the population of the cities falls in line, living their dull commercially driven lives without a second thought. Others, like Nila, move in the shadows, eeking out a more free existence, which was for some a fairly short span.
The news feed said little of the massacre, reporting only that “terrorists” attacked a MetSec station and that there were fatalities. No surprise there.
Sticking with the laying low idea, Nila decided to not go out for the remainder of her time in Londbridge. Instead she scanned several maps, both on the Net and in her own internal, for obscure location, apparently lying in the middle of the North Atlantic.
As far as she could tell there was nothing there beyond a speck of an island, home to sea birds and seals. It was off the trans-Atlantic shipping lanes, which tended to run directly from Londbridge to ports in northern Nuland, so it would be hundreds of kilometers north of the furthest north of those.
Even this time of year I should bring a hat and gloves, she thought.
Luc had several vehicles of several styles and functions, deposited nearby, stashed in rooftop sheds, mostly, though the one she wanted was inside the bricked-up chimney of an old dilapidated factory. It was a little farther than the rest, but would be the most comfortable for the long flight. It was, of course, a pale imitation of Luc’s own favorite sedan–the one that looked like a glistening green-black scarab beetle.
Nila spent the rest of the day gathering up supplies, cramming her rucksack with the Kopf-Heckler, plenty of magazines, food and a couple changes of underwear. She found a small water purifier-desalinization tube and crammed that in there as well.
Then, shoulder holster under her jacket, goggles and breather-mask on under the brim of a narrow black hat with a draping cloth around the back covering her ears and the back of her neck, she was off. Just for good measure, she brought along a ten-pack of cold lager.
Forty minutes or so later she was through the rusting fence surrounding Luc’s abandoned factory. Nila wasn’t sure if he actually owned it or not–it may have been on loan from one of his nefarious acquaintances, but in the end it didn’t matter, just so long as the car was in the chimney where it was supposed to be.
The grounds were filled with an assortment of junk and trash, the metal bits crumbling from the corrosive smog. From the ground she couldn’t see the top of the chimney–an ancient smoke-stack 6 meters wide at the base–only that it was made of brick. The brown circle of the morning sun was a disk against the smog, barely revealing the tower’s shadow against the shifting eddies.
The side entrance nearest the chimney, a pair of wide doors meant to disgorge workers at the end of their shift, was locked with a heavy chain and a surprisingly not corroded lock.
Nila wiped away the film covering the print-scanner and took off her glove, wincing at the slight burn of the air, the way one would chopping fresh chilis with raw fingers.
The lock chirped at her and clicked, releasing the chain. She briefly wondered how she was going to reset the lock once inside, but then gave up the thought when she considered that the entire reason for the lock was the car she was here to borrow. At worst, upon her return, she might discover a bunch of squatters holed up inside.
Squatters were pretty likely, looking at the interior. People had clearly camped out here in the past. Long cold campfire remnants littered the floor, along with tattered stinking blankets and a couple dingy mattresses. There was even the wheel-less carcass of a ground car–apparently someone’s home in the past–the back seats had been removed and replaced with a mattress on a pair of forklift pallets.
Stepping over the debris she moved toward the base of the chimney.
She dialed up the lowlight sensitivity of her goggles against the gloom. There were windows high up along the ceiling, but the power had ceased flowing decades ago.
A massive cupola hung from an equally massive triad of chains. A slab of steel, many thousands of kilos, lay on rollers frozen in the process of becoming a sheet, the giant hammer hanging over it waiting forever to pound it thinner again.
Nila squeezed through a narrow opening, having had to remove the rucksack to get through, and wormed her way around the back of the dead furnace. There she climbed a steel-rung ladder embedded in the back wall, up four meters to a narrow rail-less balcony of sorts.
This led to a sort of access hatch for the chimney proper, above the furnace. The hatch itself had been welded shut, then pried open, then hastily bricked over (with a questionable level of workmanship).
Without concern for noise she pulled at the brick wall with her fingertips, bring the whole shoddy thing down onto the balcony and then the floor below with a crashing cacophony that echoed around the entire factory, probably drawing attention to vagrant streetfolk half a kilometer away.
Inside the chimney, the tapering cylinder was coated with a thick layer of black soot. The balcony’s interior counterpart, encircling it a half a meter wide was equally covered in soot, but foot prints had left their marks between the hatch and the car.
It hung vertically on the wall, it’s landing legs bearing it’s weight in a way that she wasn’t sure they were designed to do. The nose was pointed up and the tail end blocked the rest of the balcony, practically resting on it.
It was a sleek craft, designed for no more than two or three occupants a mottled grey color, that, at a distance might cause it to be mistaken for a derelict left to crumble in the weather. The shape was rather simple: low nose, horizontally a meter wide, which rose to the cabin, not quite a meter top to bottom, and then lowered to a tail end which mirrored the front. It was overall around five meters long and a little over two wide. The four nacelles were more bumps protruding, two on each side, than pods like most vehicles bore.
There were no windows or windscreen. All outside images were sent to internal screens.
access-device -device371key: v$99876a89bb | unlock-door |open-door
It was not easy getting in. The butterfly doors opened as expected, above the car, revealing the interior, but it was still vertical. The otherwise plush and comfortable seats were completely impractical oriented the way they were.
device-start | disengage | orient -level -maintain-position
With a slight grinding sound as the landing legs pulled free from the brackets they had been hanging from for who-knows-how-long. Then, in a fluid 90 degree tumble, the car settled into a normal, helpful position. Nila tossed her rucksack into the car, behind the passenger seats. It was a squat vehicle; floor to ceiling inside was barely 70 centimeters. So no standing up to stretch. There was, fortunately, a hand hold on the inside, below the hinge of the left door–the one she faced.
Awkwardly, she reached out, over the meter distance and was able to grasp the hand hold, and swung herself in. The ten pack of lager was swung in and placed flawlessly on the seat.
close-doors
Obeying the commands of her internal the doors shut.
A dim illumination came up. Light nodes like stars shed an almost purple light around the interior, making the soft red fabric which covered the wide seats, floor and ceiling, take on a pink-light blue hue.
The screens had come to life when she activated the vehicle. With the doors closed they provided a wrap-around 200 degree view of the front and sides outside.
In the center, in front of the status screens below the front viewscreen was a two handed joystick style steering column, with throttle built in.
Batteries were fully charged and the ID beacon was now pinging some fake information to whomever might be listening. Luc had also had the foresight to stock the underseat compartments with additional food and water.
Exiting the chimney required going vertical again. Nila being too lazy to strap in, just hung by her bent knees nearly upside down for the few seconds until the car leveled out again. Bad news was that the beer slid off the seat and landed next to the rucksack in the back. I’ll just wait awhile to open those.
She dropped in the coordinates and kicked back for the ride, enjoying the smog falling away to open ocean west of Londbridge.
#Science Fiction #Fantasy #writing #fiction #time travel
Ion Fyr 