The Broken Isles

FOUR

She waited for him from within the shelter of an old doorway in the heart of the Ancient Quarter of Villiren. Diggsy had promised to take Jeza out tonight and he was true to his word. They were headed to her new favourite bistro, which had replaced the one on the seafront with the constantly steamed-up windows and the delicious crab cakes — that had been destroyed in the fighting. She had been devastated by its loss at first, until she realized it was silly to mourn a bistro when so many people had died in the war. Still, it was the little things like that which hurt just as much — the little pleasures she had previously taken for granted, which had been rendered important once they had been lost to her forever.

A lot of things took on a new context after the war. Once-important issues, such as what clothes she was wearing or what they might eat that night, didn’t seem to matter as much, not when the bodies of tens of thousands of people were being swept from the streets. Arguments with others seemed futile. She realized how close death could be, and that seemed to fill her with a sense of urgency — to do things, something, anything, though she didn’t quite know what.

Diggsy sauntered down the street towards her. He had made an effort with his hair, and wore customized breeches. He was also sporting a hooded jumper she had asked to be made for him with money she earned selling a bunch of dodgy relics. The sight of him warmed her insides. She smiled widely.

When he arrived, they kissed. He smelled good tonight and his tongue tasted of peppermint. He walked with his arm around her, and she liked that it was so casual. The stars were starting to show. Everything felt right.

‘What d’you think our next creation should be?’ Diggsy asked, before tucking into a mouthful of young, boiled sea trilobite. She laughed when he had difficulty prising open their shells, but she fared no better. She half wished she could bring some of the tools from their workbench, but that might not have gone down too well with the owners of the bistro.

The Mourning Wasps. . she thought. The shells were tough. Like armour.

‘I think we should really get to grips with the Mourning Wasps,’ she said. ‘I want us to work with the military — with that albino — and if we really work hard on the Mourning Wasps instead of procrastinating, we will get work with them.’

The waitress, a middle-aged lady with a limp, came over to ask them for their drinks order. Jeza wanted the wine while Diggsy, as always, stuck to water. He gave her that smug look of his: the one that questioned why she was drinking yet again.

‘It’s all right,’ she replied.

‘Don’t you think you drink too much these days?’ He meant it innocently. He laughed and smiled at her, making light of the issue.

‘I like the taste,’ she replied. ‘Plus it’s nice to unwind — my mind needs some way of relaxing after thinking about flesh matrices all day long.’

‘I know, I just worry about you, that’s all.’

As the waitress clanked the bottle and glasses on the bar, Jeza looked around. It wasn’t quite the same as the harbour — there wasn’t the same smell, and the windows were generally clean — but the place had a little charm about it, with polished tables, stone tiles on the floor, high wooden beams with bottles balanced on them for decoration, some with candles in.

‘I think you’re right,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘About what we should create next — on commission. I think you’re right. All of us at Factory 54 do.’ He leaned forward and held her hand. ‘Look, there’s something I want to ask.’

‘Ask away,’ she replied coolly. Secretly her heart was thumping away with expectation.

‘You know, I’ve been speaking to the others,’ he began, ‘and we’ve all been thinking that we should have some kind of representative. Like a boss. We’ve never had to deal with anyone other than ourselves, and now that we’re in a position where we’ll have to deal with stuff outside our usual world, we’re going to need someone to lead us. To have those conversations. We’re not kids any more, and have to start taking things seriously. We felt you should be in charge of all those kinds of things. To look after all of the gang at Factory 54.’

‘Wow,’ she replied. ‘I mean. . yeah. I’d love to. It’s not what I thought you’d say. .’

‘What were you expecting?’ he asked playfully.

For you to say you loved me. ‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘But this — I mean, everyone wanted me to be in charge?’

‘Yeah, everyone. Even Coren.’ Diggsy laughed at that. ‘I guess it’s probably what Lim would have wanted, too.’

She looked down at her plate for a moment. Then she met Diggsy’s gaze. ‘What kind of things will you want me to do exactly?’

‘You’re the real brains, we all know that. You see the bigger picture while we lose ourselves in the detail of animation. Coren’s too full of himself to care about such things. Me, I’m too laid back and just want to enjoy things as they are.’

‘And Pilli?’

Diggsy shrugged. ‘You’re the smart one, Jeza. You should be the one to deal with the guy in charge of the army. You’re much better than any of us at that sort of thing.’

‘Really?’

‘Really, and maybe it’s why I don’t want you drinking all the time.’

‘It’s not all the time,’ Jeza replied with a frown, but still, she couldn’t contain her excitement. She leaned over the table and kissed him, and sat back happy and determined. But first, she resumed her dinner and everything tasted just that little bit better than a moment ago.

They finished their meal and headed home, to their room at the top of Factory 54.

It wasn’t much, but it was nice to have everything all in one place, and certainly better than most other cultists lived, surviving in a windowless room with little but a few technical manuals to play with. As it was, most of their existence was actually spent in or around the factory. Every flesh-being, every mechanical device, every crude relic was manufactured by the team. Most of the meals she ate, most of the boys she’d slept with, were all under the one roof.

The hour was late, nearly thirteen, and a little tipsy from the drink Jeza shambled up the rusting metal stairs. Suddenly she realized what a noise she was making and then tried to act stealthily to make up for it. Diggsy chuckled as he pushed her towards their bedroom.

They opened the door, and she pulled Diggsy to the bed, one soft beam of moonlight hitting the wall behind them. Haphazardly, she pulled off his clothes, then her own, before dragging him clumsily under the bedclothes.

He was tender, too tender and too slow at times, when she wanted that little bit more. He did this thing with his tongue, which she appreciated, but he was more hesitant than she really liked.

Enough. .

Jeza pushed him over on his back, climbed on top of him and, once he was hard and inside her, she began to fuck him aggressively.

A little later and they both collapsed in a state of sweaty breathlessness. She’d needed that, even though he barely lasted five minutes. What was it with good-looking guys? Did they just not try that hard to hold it? Still, it had only been their fourth time. Maybe things would improve as they grew used to each other.

The room seemed hazy, she could taste the drying alcohol in her mouth and, just about satiated, she passed out.

Jeza woke up in the night, paranoid. Diggsy lay asleep beside her, his arm sticking out of the bed; she pulled the sheet over him to keep him warm, climbed out of bed and walked to the window that overlooked the streets behind Factory 54.

Hidden somewhere behind the clouds or over the horizon, none of the moons was present, and the place was in darkness. She stood there, naked and cold, suddenly afraid of what she was getting herself into.

She remembered the screams from the war. These streets were, not too long ago, littered with carts that carried dead bodies from the centre of the city. She remembered people crying and the carts becoming more frequent. Some of the bodies had limbs missing, and even though she spent her time working with the animation of flesh, her experiences had not desensitized her — she knew that they had been real people.

At the time they had all felt survivor guilt. They felt they should be doing something to help — but, as she said at the time, their contribution would come through what they were good at, not lining up to die with so many others. Now was their time. She knew that, and liked that the commander spoke to them like real people and didn’t dismiss them like other cultists.

She was only eighteen. Part of her wanted to spend time studying and drinking and sleeping with Diggsy. If she was to represent those who worked at Factory 54, would she be some kind of commander herself? When money began to flow in and out, would she be in charge of its distribution? Would she be assuring the commander that they would hit deadlines?

What seemed a wonderful idea in the bistro began to cause her concern and she realized, then, that she would not be able to sleep well.

Instead she reached into the drawer beside the bed and pulled out a small sketchbook and pencil, and immediately began to plan out what their next monster might look like and how it would function in a war like the one that had just passed.

‘What’re you still up for?’ Diggsy asked groggily.

‘I’m. .’ She paused. ‘I’m just thinking about projects, that’s all.’

‘You’re crazy,’ he said, smiling. ‘Knew you’d be excited about being in charge. Let’s worry about that in the morning, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. Sighing, she tossed her sketchbook to one side and climbed back into bed, allowing Diggsy’s warm body to consume her.

In the morning Jeza headed down the metal staircase with the sketchbook under her arm. Seeing the mess, she put it on the table and began clearing up the plates and beakers, the crusty bread and the warm cheese, from the night before. No one else was up yet; she was often the first down each day and liked the silence of the morning routine. It gave her time to think before things became hectic and Coren began wittering his usual nonsense at anyone within earshot.

The factory was cold so she began lighting the firegrain stove they’d hooked up to a larger system, which in turned channelled the heat around the entire building in one fairly efficient system. It coughed and spluttered like someone taking their first few drags, as the rich grain sparked and fired up.

That was usually the alarm call and, true to habit, moments later some of the others began stirring, banging drawers or doors upstairs.

‘Fucksake, Jeza. Don’t you ever sleep?’ It was Coren, lumbering down the metal stairwell, his heavy steps clanging as he came down.

Shortly after, Pilli strolled gracefully downstairs, wearing some fashionable jumper and boots with her laces undone. She sauntered into the kitchen area, said good morning, turned on the firegrain stove and placed the kettle on it.

The three of them sat down at the crude, stained table while the sun reached a point above the rooftops that shone a beam of light across them. The kettle began to boil; in the distance the firegrain system coughed.

‘Whose turn is it to make breakfast?’ Coren asked, his gaze flickering between the two girls. He yawned.

‘Yours,’ Jeza replied, glaring at him.

Pilli smiled, pulled back her hair to tie it. ‘Are you going to let him near the stove after last time? He tried to cook with a relic!’

‘Hey, those fish were edible,’ Coren protested. ‘They tasted fine.’

‘Sure — once Diggsy scraped them off the ceiling for you,’ Jeza said, standing. ‘OK, I’ll cook some oats. Happy now?’

After breakfast, Jeza gathered them all around the table, Pilli, Diggsy, Coren and Gorri, so that they could get on with business. At first she wanted to make some formal announcement, something to clear the way forward. She had rehearsed a few lines in her head but they all sounded ridiculous. In the end, she opted not to acknowledge her new position at all — it seemed to be largely a label she wore outside this room.

‘So,’ she said, ‘getting on board with the military-’

‘I’m excited,’ Gorri burst out. The young lad with red hair smiled at her. ‘We’re going to make a fortune.’

‘It’s only money,’ Pilli said. ‘I just love the fact that we’re finally going to be acknowledged, you know?’

‘You wouldn’t care about the money, rich girl,’ Coren said, leaning back on his chair and gripping the rim of the table, ‘but for us dregs, this’ll sort us out for years.’

‘Hey, guys,’ Jeza interrupted, ‘we’ve not got any money or prestige yet. Don’t you want to see what the plan is before you start spending the money you don’t have?’

‘Go for it,’ Coren said.

‘OK,’ Jeza said. ‘If our plan works — and even if it doesn’t we can still sell these on — I suspect they’re going to want some beasts for use in warfare, something more akin to a weapon. For that I think we can mass-produce the Mourning Wasps. But for a start, how about selling the soldiers something that’s not too distant from what they already have, something we can maybe clone and produce quite a few of?’

‘Mass-produced specimens?’ Diggsy suggested. ‘Some kind of monster?’

‘Not even monsters in this case. I’m thinking we give them a soldier that’s bigger, stronger — purely weaponry enhancements at first. Something that doesn’t even require anything but themselves.’

‘Hmm,’ Coren stared. ‘Sure, sounds OK, but it’s a little dull.’

‘It’s an investment,’ she replied. ‘It’s something they’ll feel comfortable with at first. They might not feel good fighting alongside something as weird as we can create, so it’s best to break them in easily to what we can provide.’

‘We don’t exactly churn things out at 54,’ Diggsy pointed out. ‘It could take weeks just to get a few enhancements. How long have we got?’

‘Working on Lim’s time theory, I think that we can produce what I’ve got in mind pretty quickly.’

‘Time theory. .’ Coren repeated, nodding his head. ‘Like it.’

‘So with that in mind. .’ She placed her large sketchbook in the centre of the table and began to describe what she’d drawn. ‘Look, I like the idea of Knights — they’re pretty noble things throughout history. They’re also warriors that will kick the shit out of things. This is how a knight used to look, but with biological armour. From that specimen of the Okun we took, just after the invasion, we can replicate its shell structure to form armour, as you can see here. Other than that, it’s pretty much a standard soldier, but much more resilient.’

‘How can you ensure this will be able to fight normally?’ Pilli asked. ‘This will, presumably, need to have some finesse on the battlefield?’

‘You’re missing the point here. We’re not making anything sentient at first. If we make just the armour, we can just sell that straight to the military. Using time theory in the replication process, we really can churn these out. They’re big enough to fit a human and, because it’s the shell material, as light as cloth. Afterwards we can start thinking about filling in the armour with something cloned and fleshy.’

There was a moment’s silence as everyone contemplated her drawings.

‘What’s it called?’ Coren asked.

‘I’m not sure. Black Knight Armour?’ Jeza suggested. ‘That’s something the army would fall for.’

Coren nodded again. ‘Is it easy to replicate and mould the shell?’

Jeza looked to Diggsy. ‘What do you think?’

Diggsy leaned back in his chair, lifting the front two legs up as he gripped the edge of the table. He seemed to contemplate the sketches a little longer before he said, ‘Yeah, we’ve done it before, haven’t we, Pilli?’

Jeza suddenly felt her heart beat a little quicker, but forced away her concerns. Not the time or the place. .

‘Absolutely,’ Pilli said. ‘Jeza, this is marvellous.’

Coren said, ‘Looks like it was the right choice putting you in charge of us lot.’

‘Seconded,’ Pilli said.

‘Thirded,’ Gorri said.

Coren stood up, grinning. ‘Doesn’t stop you from making post-meeting drinks though. Put the kettle on. Mine’s a tea.’

They had found the Okun during the fighting in Villiren, when they had been investigating reports of new relics recently discovered in the Scarhouse district. The five of them had wanted to get there before other cultists or the gangs got the relics for themselves, to put them on the black market.

It was Lim who had pointed out the corpse. The creature must have strayed away from its own lines and then died from severe wounds to its torso and neck, but the rest of the body remained intact. No longer interested in relics, Lim dragged it out of sight into a side street until he could fetch the others, whereupon they decided to keep it.

They brought it back to Factory 54. They wanted to study it and hopefully provide useful information to the military. Jeza had thought to herself that it seemed to appease their guilt for not being involved in the fighting. The boys seemed to feel it most — the guilt, the pressure that they should be doing something. Herself and Pilli had pledged that they would enlist if they did too, all together, the lot of them. But they did not sign up; they remained in the factory, listening to the sounds of war in the distance, occasionally retreating to the secure basement workshop in case the defensive lines were breached. Of course, they never were.

She had never known how Lim was killed. They simply found his body after a skirmish a few days after finding the Okun. He had bled to death from a cut to one of his major arteries. It could have been related to the war, or simply a casual murder, such was the way of things in Villiren at that time.

There had been daily reports of the ferocity of the attacks by the Okun — how they had cleared the island to the north of human and rumel life, how they had swarmed out of metallic vessels into Villiren harbour, how they had eradicated people effortlessly. That the commander had managed to prevent them taking the city was beyond any of their reasoning; but he had, and these things were — for the moment — not a threat.

She had to admit the Okun were frightening life forms, more sinister than anything they could ever create. Lim had commented at the time that nature was occasionally a sick beast herself, and could create weirder things than they could imagine themselves.

A blend between a hominid and a crustacean, the Okun were huge, bipedal creatures. Though alien-looking, they never seemed too alien — they possessed eyes, arms, legs — all in pairs, which seemed to suggest they were more a result of a perverted branch of evolution, rather than something monstrous from another realm. That was the military line, anyway, that they were flooding in from another world entirely, though everyone had their doubts about such claims.

With the Okun corpse back at the factory, the group immediately began a kind of post-mortem. Lim needed to know everything about its inner workings, about its structure, the way muscles functioned. He rolled up his sleeves, got all the tools organized, and together they got to work.

They bled its black, acidic fluids, which sat unused in containers. They tried for a while to cut through the shell, but in the end resorted to cutting through the joints and cutting flesh underneath the shell plates so that they could lift the segments whole. There were around three hundred different shell armour segments, the largest being a chest plate, the smallest being tiny forms of protection around their claws. Underneath, once the flesh had been cut away, they were amazed to see how similar it was to human or rumel anatomy, though augmented, transformed through alien means to be something genuinely awe-inspiring. There were two, slightly larger hearts, and four equivalents to the lungs. There were more tubes akin to veins and arteries, and strange, copper-coloured wires that led through the neck to the head.

The most difficult thing to prise open was the head. The gang tried all sorts of tools, but eventually used relics to burn open one side. When they managed to get it open, they stood back in disbelief: there was hair-thin copper wiring and dozens of small, metallic square plates with grid-like patterns etched into and raised up from the surface. There were objects that looked like gemstones, which they could not identify, and which were imbedded in a jelly-like substance that burned through their clothing yet not their skin. It was both organic and mechanical, with no clearly defined facial structure whatsoever.

The Okun, the most hideous and wonderful thing they had ever seen, was now reduced to hundreds of fragments. For days at a time, each of the group set about trying to establish whether or not anything could be gleaned from these pieces. They took detailed sketches of the way things slotted together, listed potential materials that these might have been made from, and how certain parts reacted to substances from their own world. But they were ultimately dumbfounded by the intricacies of its body. It was, quite simply, too much for them to understand.

All except the shell.

The shell was not all that distant from the chitinous exoskeletons found throughout the Archipelago, but this seemed more tactile, flexible and impenetrable. They decided they wanted to re-create it and Lim, after Jeza aided him, began to use a particularly large relic they had discovered to cast crude moulds to regenerate certain sections.

Reflecting on the process, Jeza now realized she’d loved working with Lim. He was so passionate and cared deeply about what she thought, what she felt. He encouraged her line of thought as much as his own and he trusted her opinions and did not dismiss one of her suggestions, no matter how wild it was. He was sensitive and she was intoxicated by his Varltung accent, and his broad face. Perhaps, looking back as she did now, she realized she had possessed deep feelings for him. He was special in a way no man had ever been. Such feelings weren’t comparable to those she had for Diggsy, of course — that was based on raw passion. Lim never seemed interested in any of that kind of stuff, never mentioned girls or sex. Lim’s energy was funnelled entirely into his research. He loved discovery. She loved him for being ever elusive. Despite her scientific ways, she could never quite work Lim out.

Why did I never say anything at the time?

In the afternoon sunlight, which spilled through a large circular window on the top floor of Factory 54, the group took the Okun’s dark, glossy exoskeleton out of storage and laid it out across the workbench.

First they separated it into several large sections, sifted through the pieces, deciding which section to concentrate on, before settling upon one of the breastplates.

‘It has to be this,’ Jeza said. ‘It’ll sit over people’s most vital areas. .’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Coren smirked, grabbing his crotch as if to hammer the point home.

‘Idiot,’ Jeza sighed. Then, to the others, ‘It’ll sit over the major organs: the heart, the lungs, the parts that can’t be repaired on the battlefield.’

Jeza lit several lanterns while Coren and Diggsy began to assemble the relics and tools. She fetched the notebooks from Lim’s unused room and, for the next hour, they began to work through pages and pages of his detailed instructions, most of them simply on how to operate the relics.

‘You OK?’ Diggsy asked. ‘You look pretty upset.’

‘I’m just concentrating,’ she replied. Had Lim’s death really affected her this much? It was a strange process, following his words; it was like having him there and alive once again, but he was dead — she had to keep reminding herself. I have to let him go.

Two relics the size of industrial equipment were dragged to sit either side of the breastplate specimen. The relics were called Haldorors, ‘true of word’ devices — they translated materials and retranslated them — or, in some cases, replicated them, in whatever shape or form was desired by the person setting the relics. The units, almost as tall as Jeza, were crafted from copper and silver, and possessed intricate ancient lettering that none of them had ever seen in a book, let alone understood.

Jeza made tweaks to the devices according to Lim’s notes on other creatures, moving the second of them about two armspans further down the workbench, so they were no longer opposite each other. She altered the frequencies and the measurements on the sixteen extra dials they had built into it, mainly by trial and error.

The relic was activated by placing a brass cylinder the size of her arm into the slot at the back, a process that was not immune to Coren’s crude innuendo. Diggsy switched on the second device and they all watched as a web of purple light spread out across the exoskeleton and hovered in the air above. The little crackles of energy never ceased to impress her; they signified ancient knowledge being reused, a line that spanned tens of thousands of years. No one spoke during the process, they were too focused.

Exactly as Lim’s theory described, a second replica of the breastplate began to fade into existence alongside. It finally materialized whole, in its own separate web of purple light, and when they were quite sure the process had finished, Jeza shut off one device, Diggsy the other, and soon all that was left was a dull hum, the faint smell of charred leather and a little smoke as if someone had blown out a match.

Jeza and Coren moved over to the cloned piece and inspected it, waiting for the thin, pale-blue smoke to dissipate. Coren prodded it, first with a metal rod to see if it was genuine, if it was physically there and not some illusion; then when he was more confident, he jabbed it with his finger. ‘Still warm,’ he said, and waited a moment longer while Diggsy and Pilli dragged the two Haldorors out of the way and against the wall.

Eventually, Coren picked up the original breastplate in one hand and the newly ‘translated’ one in his other. The others watched him, waiting. He moved them this way and that and wafted them around in the air, smiling. ‘Same light weight, same feel.’

‘Guess Lim’s tricks never fail to work,’ Diggsy said.

‘Is this what we want to show the military?’ Coren asked. He placed the breastplates back down while everyone turned to Jeza. They waited for her to speak, a new phenomenon for her, and she had to admit not entirely unpleasant.

‘We need to move our perceived roles on from spurious cultists — and in fact a bit of a motley crew to boot — to something more professional and businesslike. To most laymen, we might as well be casting runes or muttering dark spells.’

‘Go on. .’ Diggsy urged.

‘Now we know we can do this,’ she continued, ‘we should try to take things further, to show them what we think a more complete piece of soldier’s armour might look like. I think we should try our best to show the finished item. First we write to that albino commander. Get him here, see if he’s interested in the concept. Now’s the time. Later when we have refined this and he sees what we can sell him, he’ll have no trouble opening the Empire’s coffers.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ Coren said, and slapped her on the back.

Diggsy gave her a warm smile and placed his arm around her in that casual, cool way of his, and she couldn’t help but notice Pilli turning away now to fiddle with something on the workbench.