The projection dimmed, and they were back in the room again. The sunlight shone as before, but everything seemed changed now. Frine was pacing the room, his hands behind his back.
“If the Chaos Engine is destroyed, the Revenants will disappear, the probability storms will stop. All the systems in the Fulcrum will break down. Even the Skimmers will fail. Bane thinks that the Protectorate will control all of Orokos then, and there will be law and order and peace. But he would be treading the same path that the Faded trod, and he would come to the same end. A soulless world where all our decisions are made for us. Fortunately, however, he is wrong.”
“He’s wrong?” Rail said, brushing his dreadlocks away from his muzzled face.
“Quite wrong,” said Frine, with a strange smile. “Funny that he appears to think of me as one of his heroes. Life is full of little ironies like that. I said I’d make this world right again, but I meant to do it by creating chaos. He means to undo my work. But he’ll find out, like I did, that if you fool with chaos then you’re liable to find a few surprises in store.”
Moa didn’t like the sound of that. Frine’s smile became a grin.
“The Chaos Engine not only generates probability energy. It harnesses it. Once Bane destroys the Chaos Engine, he will unleash the most powerful probability storm there has ever been. This city will be turned inside out. All of Orokos will be utterly changed. Perhaps it will become a palace of glass, and all the people will be mice. Perhaps it will be a terrible slag-heap haunted by six-legged things the size of buildings. It could be a paradise of flowers and harmony. The possibilities are limitless. Once the Chaos Engine is destroyed, the world will start anew. We can only hope that humankind won’t screw it up a third time.”
“No!” Moa gasped. “No, you can’t do it to us again! You can’t gamble with all our lives like that!”
“It’s too late,” said Frine blandly. “The soldiers’ weapons are advanced enough to overcome the automated defences of the Fulcrum. And the Revenants can’t stop Bane, it seems, though they’re doing their best. The Chaos Engine is trying to defend itself, but it won’t win. He is already at the core. Soon it will be over.”
“Then we have to stop him!” Moa said.
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll have time,” said Frine. “And besides, you have your own problems.” He motioned at the door to the elevator. It chimed softly.
“There’s someone here to see you,” he said. “Goodbye.” And with that he was gone, fading from sight as the Fade-Science projector turned itself off.
The door slid open, and there, hunched and massive and terrifying, was Vago.
“There’s hundreds of them!” yelled one of the soldiers, as his aether cannon spat shrieking pulses of energy into the swarm of Revenants. They had appeared as if from nowhere. They came from the walls, up through the floor, out of the arches that led into the chamber of the Chaos Engine. The Protectorate forces had formed a tight defensive ring around the spire of the machine, packed on to the gantry that encircled it, protecting the men who were setting the explosive charges. Others were strung out along the walkway that ran from the spire to the arch they had entered from. Their guns swivelled as they fought to bring down the creatures that swam through the air in shoals overhead. Occasionally one of them dived down to snatch a soldier and turn him into an aether-filled Taken. More gunfire could be heard out in the tunnels, where hordes of the possessed were surging against the remainder of the soldiers, trying to batter through with suicidal fury.
“They’re throwing everything they’ve got at us!” said one of the Secret Police over the din.
“Then that means we’re doing something right!” Bane replied. “Once we destroy this thing, they’ll fade like smoke in the wind!”
“And how will you destroy it?” asked Finch, by his side. “We’re pinned here.”
“Then we have to fight our way clear.”
The Revenants swooped again, spiralling down towards the cluster of men which surrounded the control panel of the Chaos Engine. A volley of aether fire drove most of them back, but some got through. They swept up a dozen soldiers and pitched them screaming off the walkway towards the machine far below.
“Explosives are all set!” a commander informed Bane.
“Good work,” he said. “Advise your men to be careful with their targets. I don’t want any accidents. We’re packed too closely here, and there’s a lot of gunfire flying around. The slightest thing could set those explosives off.”
The commander departed to fulfil his orders, slipping along between the soldiers. Bane surveyed the state of his troops. The Revenants had whittled them down, and things were not looking good. There wasn’t enough room to manoeuvre here. Whenever a Revenant managed to possess one of the soldiers, they caused carnage with their lethal touch before they could be taken out. If they stuck here, the Revenants would batter them into extinction eventually. They needed to retreat back to the tunnels, through the arch they had entered from.
“How is the rearguard doing at holding them off?” Bane asked a soldier to his right; but the soldier didn’t know, and nor did the commander he asked when he returned.
“We’ll have to send someone to find out,” the commander said.
“I’ll go,” said Finch.
Bane turned to him, stared hard at the thief-boy through his visor. He was deciding whether to trust the boy. On the one hand, Finch was still ghetto stock, and it was too early to be sure of him. But then, Bane had brought him here to test his mettle as a potential recruit for the Secret Police, and this was a good chance to do so. Besides, there was no sense wasting a good soldier when he could send this ghetto rat instead.
“I’m smaller and faster than anyone you’ve got,” Finch said. “Let me do it.”
“All right,” Bane said at length. “But if you’re not back here. . .”
“I know, I know,” Finch snarled. “Three little beeps and bang. I’m not stupid.”
“We’ll see,” Bane replied. “Go on then. Report back to me when you’ve assessed the situation.”
Finch gave a mocking salute and a rotten grin, then he was gone, slipping through the soldiers that were crammed on to the gantry around the spire of the Chaos Engine.
The thief-boy halted at the end of the walkway which ran across the chamber to the arch. It was littered with bodies, staring sightlessly. There wasn’t a drop of blood to be seen. Death by aether was so much cleaner than the alternatives.
Several dozen soldiers were standing by the railings, coordinating fire on the Revenants swooping overhead in the haze of coloured mist that clung to the tip of the Chaos Engine’s spire. The Revenants took two or three hits to dissipate, but each time one was destroyed two more took its place.
Finch paused. He would have to time his run. He had no weapon, and didn’t even know how to fire an aether cannon. He would be an easy target.
But the Revenants attacked in no pattern, and they came from all directions: above, beneath, to the sides. They swooped in gangs, swimming through the air on their crackling manta-ray wings, tentacles trailing behind them. They were the essence of disorder, born of the Chaos Engine. Of course they were not organized.
“Freck it,” he muttered. In the end, like everything else in Orokos, it all came down to chance. He ran.
He heard the soldiers behind him open up to give him covering fire. His scalp prickled as aether bolts seared through the air around him. He saw two Revenants angle towards him, attracted by movement, but the soldiers had spotted the threat and they blew the energy ghosts into wisps. Finch sprinted with his head down, jumping over the bodies of the fallen, ignoring everything but the need to get to the other end. Soldiers flashed by him on either side, lighting up the inside of the chamber with fusillades of aether. The noise was deafening.
He saw the Revenant that was swooping at him with a fraction of a second to spa
re. It had slipped through the mesh of gunfire, appearing as a bright charcoal-sketch through his glimmer visor. He half-dived, half-tripped over the arm of a sprawled soldier, hit the ground in a roll, and came up on his feet again. The Revenant missed him by inches. It coiled back on itself, ready to fly at him again, but the nearby soldiers had seen it by now and they blew it apart.
Finch didn’t pause. He was running again, running, until there was no more walkway and he was beneath the arch.
It was scarcely any better through there. The soldiers had been all but overrun. They had formed a wall across the tunnel which was being steadily pushed back. In a short time, it was going to collapse entirely under the weight of the Taken.
He could see Bane, gazing expectantly across the chamber at Finch, waiting for a signal.
Well, Finch would give him a signal. Finch would let him know that nobody, not even one of the Secret Police, could use and manipulate him the way Bane had. After Moa had removed the Persuader from his arm, he could have simply disappeared, gone back to Anya-Jacana, got on with his life. But he was vengeful by nature. He had returned to the Secret Police to await his chance to even things up; and now it had come.
Bane had thought he could make him a pawn. That was a mistake. He might be a ghetto boy, but he would not be pushed around.
He held up his hand, and in it was a brass device shaped like a yo-yo. It was the device that would activate the Persuader Bane had put on him. Bane tore his glimmer visor from his eyes, his face twisting in fury as he saw it. Finch, among his other talents, was a very accomplished pickpocket. When he had fallen into Bane earlier, back in the tunnels, he had stolen it from the pocket of Bane’s trenchcoat. But that wasn’t all he had done.
Once we destroy this thing, Bane had said, they’ll fade like smoke in the wind.
“Let’s see if you’re right,” Finch murmured, and he twisted the device in his hand.
Bane saw what he did, but he didn’t understand until it was far too late. He thought that Finch had pilfered the device to gain his freedom. It hadn’t occurred to him that the thief-boy had managed to get the Persuader off. It was supposed to be impossible.
He only realized what had happened when he heard a noise in the pocket of his coat. A short, sharp beep.
He put his hand in there, felt it clasp around something cold and ring-shaped.
A second beep.
He pulled out Finch’s Persuader. His blood ran cold. And all he could do in that moment was wonder how a boy from the ghetto had foxed him so utterly, before the third beep sounded and the Persuader detonated.
The concussion of the blast caught the nearby pack of explosives, and they went up too, setting off a chain reaction that activated all the rest in less than a second. The result was catastrophic. The gantry that encircled the central spire of the Chaos Engine was obliterated in a cloud of flame. The force of it sheared the spire in half, smashing it into a pulverized mess which was blasted spinning in all directions. The tip leaned sideways with an ominous howl of metal and then slumped against the wall of the chamber, punching through and then snapping off. The body of the spire fell after it, pluming misty veils of probability energy. A chunk of the roof came crashing down, letting in the bright sunlight, and the whole avalanche of debris demolished one of the walkways and collapsed on to the great machine. Falling rubble crushed delicate mechanisms, cracked protective cases, flattened thin towers full of instruments. There were explosions from deep within the guts of the Chaos Engine.
The Revenants were in a frenzy now, whirling like maddened moths, spinning aimlessly this way and that. The Taken set up an awful keening, throwing themselves to the floor and flailing about or scratching at each other. The soldiers watched in amazement. Another explosion sounded from within the machine, this one much more violent. A gout of flame vomited from the depths of the chamber and sent huge chunks of metal wheeling through the air. There was a grinding noise coming from the Chaos Engine now, the noise of something broken that was still trying to operate, and the air was full of a choking smell.
Then the Revenants began to fade. They started to smear as they passed through the air, leaving more of themselves behind with each loop and spin, as if they were watercolours on a paintbrush that was drying out. Their trails became fainter and fainter until there was nothing left at all. The Taken sagged at the same time, like exhausted animals, slowing and becoming feeble until they lay down on the ground and were still.
The Protectorate soldiers that had survived the blast – those who hadn’t been near the centre of the chamber – stood stunned, both at the loss of their men and the disappearance of their enemy.
Finch pulled his glimmer visor off and tossed it over the railing of the walkway and on to the shattered hulk of the Chaos Engine below.
“Told you I wasn’t stupid,” he murmured, with a fang-toothed smile.
The next explosion almost knocked him off his feet. Something in the depths of the machine was fatally ruined, and it was beginning to tear itself apart. The soldiers looked about in alarm as the structure groaned. Jagged sparks of aether were lancing across the inside of the chamber, and strange colours were beginning to swirl.
“Fall back!” one of the commanders was calling. “Fall back! Get out of here! This operation is over!”
Finch didn’t need telling twice. He turned tail and ran for his life, with the sound of the Chaos Engine ripping itself to shreds echoing down the tunnel after him.
Rail and Moa felt the first of the explosions all the way up in the room near the top of the Fulcrum.
“Oh freck, we’re too late,” said Moa.
“You’re so right,” Vago growled, stepping out of the elevator. “Your time has run out.”
Rail was looking around the room for an escape route, but there were only two exits from the chamber. One was past Vago and into the elevator. The other was over the edge of the terrible drop at their backs, where one wall had folded away and left them with a panorama of the city. Neither of them were really an option.
“You can’t run,” said the golem. He was hunched low, his wings kinked sharply and to either side like a cloak, their thin metal framework catching the sunlight. His yellow eye skittered from Rail to Moa, and his fingers flexed with a scrape of jointed rods. The Fade-Science projector, the bizarre sculpture of rods and spheres, stood between them, but it was silent now. Benejes Frine had left them to their fate.
“Vago, listen!” Rail said, holding his hands up as if to ward him off. “Can’t you hear it? Bane has destroyed the Chaos Engine.”
Vago’s approach was slow and relentless. “Then the Protectorate has triumphed. As it always will.”
“It’s not what you think. Destroying the Chaos Engine is going to unleash the probability storm to end all storms. It’s going to remake Orokos! And it’ll remake us if we’re still here when it happens!” There was another explosion, dull and heavy, and the room shivered. “Can’t you hear? The Fulcrum is destroying itself.”
Vago paused then, and suddenly laughed. It was a horrible sound. They had never heard the golem laugh before, and it was like the wheezing of a sick dog. “Then let it. Let it remake us all. Do you think I want to remain like this? The Protectorate will rise again, and this time there will be no Revenants to stop us!”
Moa shook her head. Vago was a different person since he had gone to the Null Spire, since he had met Bane. He didn’t cringe any longer, and when he spoke he was more eloquent than he had been before. Something had changed inside him, something that made him like the Protectorate, something that made him hate Moa’s kind.
“Vago, this isn’t you,” she said.
“This is me,” the golem snapped. “That fawning, idiot creature that you knew before, that wasn’t me.”
The golem had advanced enough that Moa and Rail had retreated to the edge of the drop now. Rail was calculating the chances of ma
king a break for the elevator, but the golem would be too fast for them. Besides, he had no idea how he had activated it the first time. Even if they got past Vago, they couldn’t escape.
“Yes it was, Vago. That was you, before they got hold of you and filled your head with all their beliefs. You weren’t Protectorate when we found you. Were you? Can you look me in the eye and tell me you were, that you were a spy all this time?”
There was an edge of desperation in Moa’s voice, but Rail was frankly amazed at how calm she was being. At that moment he was struck by a fierce blaze of love for her, for the way she was, the way that she still fought to find the good in someone even when it was a maniacal golem bent on killing them. Her faith in people was perhaps the only weapon they had left now. Rail was all out of ideas.
“Tell me!” she demanded. “Tell me that you intended to betray us all that time!”
Vago didn’t reply, and that was answer enough.
“What did they do to you?” she asked, softer now. “Don’t you remember your friends?”
“We were never friends!” Vago spat.
“Yes we were,” she said. “And you saved my life once. That was the Vago that kept a dead bird with him because he thought it was beautiful. That was the Vago that was with me when I woke up after a Revenant almost killed me. We were friends. And it didn’t matter that you were a golem and I was from the ghetto. We—”
“I used to be a person!” Vago cried. “A murderer! That’s who I am! I deserve to look like this. I might not remember a thing, but what difference does that make to those people? They’re still dead. And I killed them.”
Moa was shocked into silence by the cruelty of his tone. She began to tremble, tears welling in her eyes.
“I don’t care,” Moa whispered.
Vago looked up at her, sunlight falling across the flesh half of his face. “What?”
Moa sniffed and wiped her eyes with her fingers. “I don’t care. That wasn’t you.”
“Yes, it was,” Vago said firmly. “You can’t forgive me for that, Moa.”