The Broken Isles

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