The Armourer smiled suddenly. “You know, it’s a crazy idea, but it just might work!”
I looked at Molly. “It always sounds so much worse when he says it.”
The Armourer looked at Molly. “If all you Metcalf sisters are linked to one another . . . does that mean the dreaded Louisa knows what’s happening?”
“Almost certainly,” said Molly. “But don’t worry; it’ll take even her a long time to get back from Mars.”
The Armourer’s face twitched. “I’m not even going to ask what she’s doing on Mars.”
“Best not to,” I said. “Now, where is Alpha Red Alpha, exactly? You said you
The Armourer’s mouth winced, as though he’d tasted something bitter. “I had hoped I’d never have to go down there again. Or at the very least, that I’d be very old and safely retired before some other poor bastard had to do it . . . Come with me.”
He got up out of his chair with a certain amount of effort and the usual pained noises, and led Molly and me to the very back of the Armoury, out beyond the firing range and the corrupt-spell dumps. Three lab assistants were standing around the sparkling watercooler, commenting excitedly on the miniature mermaid they’d dropped into it. The Armourer drove them back to their workstations with barked commands and harsh language. He finally stopped before a large, hulking piece of machinery of no immediate significance. It didn’t even have a nameplate.
“Armour up, Eddie,” said the Armourer. “I need you to move this machine two feet to the left. My left, not yours. And be careful. It’s heavier than it looks.”
“What is it?” I asked after I’d armoured up. Molly was already poking and prodding and kicking at the machine’s solid steel sides in an experimental sort of way.
“It was supposed to be a food synthesiser,” said the Armourer. “The idea was all the rage back in the seventies. And it would have helped to take the strain off feeding a family of our size. But we never could get it to work right. Francis tried, I tried, and now and again one of the more than usually ambitious lab assistants will take a crack at it, but even though the theory works out to a thousand decimal places . . . no matter what settings we try, all the machine ever produces is a kind of glowing green porridge that looks bad and smells worse.”
“What did it taste like?” said Molly, ever the practical one.
“We never found out, because if you got too close to the stuff, it ate you,” said the Armourer. “And once we had the stuff, we couldn’t get rid of it. We tried everything, including fire and acid and beating it with sticks, but it was a stubborn little organism. . . . In the end, we teleported every last bit of it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Where for all I know it still is, crawling across the ocean floor and scaring the crap out of the giant squids that live down there.” He paused for a moment. “The numbers do seem to be dropping off of late. . . .”
“Then . . . why haven’t you destroyed the machine?” I said.
“Oh, really, Eddie, you should know the answer to that. Because someday the family might have a need for really vicious green porridge that eats people,” the Armourer said. “The family never wastes anything. And the machine does serve a useful purpose in itself, as you’ll discover when you stop arguing and move the bloody thing two feet to the left. My left, not yours.”
I put my golden shoulder to the huge machine and applied a steady pressure. The machine didn’t budge an inch. I settled myself, dug my feet in and threw the whole of the armour’s strength against the damned thing. For a long moment nothing happened, except that the steel section under my shoulder began to buckle from the pressure; and then the machine jerked a few inches to the left. Reluctantly, and fighting me all the way, the stubborn machine moved two feet to the left, revealing a solid wooden trapdoor in the rough stone floor. I stood up slowly, stretching my aching back, while Molly crouched down to take a good look at the trapdoor.
“I’m not sensing any protections or defences,” she said.
“Of course not,” said the Armourer. “They would only have drawn attention. And besides, if we ever do need to get to the engine we’ll probably need to do it in a hurry.”
He knelt down beside the trapdoor, his knees complaining loudly. He picked up a solid steel padlock and hefted it in his hand for a moment before concentrating and armouring up his left hand. He then extended a complex golden key from his index finger and inserted it carefully into the padlock. The key turned easily, and the padlock opened. The Armourer removed the padlock, placed it carefully to one side and retracted the golden key into his fingertip. Then he hauled the heavy trapdoor open, the great wooden slab swinging back easily and silently, as though its massive brass hinges had been oiled only the day before. We all stared down into the dark hole in the floor.
All I could see was darkness, and the first few rungs of an iron ladder heading down into it. Even the overbright lighting of the Armoury couldn’t penetrate the darkness more than a few inches. I studied the opening through my armoured mask, using infrared and ultraviolet, and finally my Sight, and none of it helped. The darkness remained absolute, holding secrets within. I checked for electromagnetic radiation, and half a dozen other warning signs, but still, nothing. My armour couldn’t detect a single thing about what was down there. Which should have been impossible.
“I know the details of the key,” the Armourer said quietly. “So does the Sarjeant-at-Arms. No one else. Not even the Matriarch knew how to access Alpha Red Alpha, by her own command. It’s too dangerous. Eddie, you’re always complaining the family keeps secrets from you . . . this should cure you of that. Follow me down the ladder. Mind your step, don’t crowd me and when we get to the bottom don’t wander off and
He went down the iron steps with an ease and agility that belied his years. The show-off. I followed him down more cautiously, and Molly brought up the rear, sticking so close to me she practically trod on my fingers. The trapdoor slammed shut over us the moment we were all inside. I was still in my armour. I have a tendency to do that when descending into complete darkness containing unknown threats. The steps seemed to fall and fall away below me, going down and down until my leg and back muscles began to cramp from the strain. The only sounds were the clanging of our feet on the iron steps, and the Armourer’s loud breathing below.
“It’s all right!” he yelled back up cheerfully. “The trapdoor’s supposed to do that! Safety feature. Not so much to keep lab assistants out as to keep anything here from coming up into the Hall.”
“Like what?” Molly said immediately.
“No idea,” said the Armourer. “But it’s best not to take chances.”
After enough descending that I was getting really fed up with it, I finally reached the end of the ladder, and my armoured feet found a rough stone floor. I stepped away from the ladder to get out of Molly’s way, and lights suddenly flared up, dazzling me for a moment. My mask quickly compensated for the glare, and I looked round a massive stone cavern stretching away in all directions. My first impression was that the cavern had to be bigger than the Hall itself, but that couldn’t be right, or the Hall would have collapsed into it long ago. Even so, it was really big. . . . The stone walls were covered with line after line of carefully delineated mathematical symbols, none of which meant anything to me. I looked at Molly, and she shrugged.
“Mathemagics,” the Armourer said cheerfully. “Designer theory, only supercharged. Don’t look at them too long, or your eyes will start to bleed.”
He had more to say on the subject, but I wasn’t listening. I was looking at what the huge cave contained, packing it from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, with only narrow walkways between: strange machines and intricate technology, and weird objects that might have been really high-tech or particularly worrying examples of abstract art. No flashing lights, no obvious control panels; often one piece would seem to slide or evolve into the next. Some parts were actually blurred or indistinct, as though my eyes couldn’t properly understand what they were seeing. Mile upon mile of colour-coded cables stretched back and forth across the cavern, linking everything together, and hung in a complicated web between the upper heights and the ceiling. I moved slowly forward into what I reluctantly recognised as one big machine. It was like walking through a technological jungle. Molly stuck close by my side. The Armourer was, of course, already ahead of us, bumbling along with his hands in his coat pockets, muttering happily to himself.
Things were constantly moving, rising and falling, or turning this way and that. Other parts leaned and slumped and sort of merged into one another. Some were slowly changing shape, as though unable to settle, humming loudly to themselves in an important sort of way. There were even things that seemed to be watching me thoughtfully. I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Except that for a machine that hadn’t been used in years, an awful lot of it seemed to be very busy. . . . All I knew for sure was that being down here creeped the hell out of me. It didn’t feel like a place where people should be, where anything as limited and fragile as people had any business being.
