Chapter 142 The First Winter
The Iron City did not simply freeze, but it received a second death by the ice.
Six months had elapsed since we had put the blue fungicide into the Central Air Processor. The dead Ferro-fungus had long been bleached away by autumn rains, and all that remained of the brutalist skyscrapers was the polished obsidian look. We had spent the summer and the fall making a graveyard our fort.
But then the winter came. And it was bringing back the black.
I was in the 50th-floor Command Center reinforced window, and the thick and scavenged wool blanket I was wearing was tightly wrapped around my shoulders. There was a snowstorm blowing outside ripping through the man-made canyons of the city. It was not a falling snow, but a sideways driving snow, a white wall of blindness which absorbed the buildings opposite.
It is thirty below zero, said Vane, pluming in the command room air. He was cowering over a home-constructed comms array connected to the old mainframe of the building. The geothermal taps in the underground are sustaining the hydroponics of Sato, but the high-rise buildings are leaking heat.
We limit habitation to as low as the twenty levels, Ryker ordered, coming into the room.
He appeared to be another thing after half a year of being a real leader rather than a hunted rebel. He had long curly hair, which was pulled back, and the sunken fatigue in his cheeks had been filled up by the constant intake of Purist food supplies and underground produce. His golden Alpha eyes were as intense, though, and were at this moment examining a map of our defences along the perimeter, upon the mahogany desk.
Ferrous had already withdrawn his people, Jaxon said, and stamping his feet on his boots entered. The Iron Flesh--they are only the Iron Guard now--they have blocked up the subway entrances. An hour ago Baron has returned with his scouting pack. They replied that the perimeter was silent. Too quiet. The domestic Rot mutations are covered by the snow deep down below.
Or they are waiting, I said to myself, and gazing into the whiteout.
The cold here had a presence. It felt hungry. The city was a ghost-town in the deep snow, with no humming of the Foundry, or the screech of the Scrap-Hounds.
"The Valkyrie?" Ryker asked Vane.
Tarped and locked down in the Train Yard, Vane answered, and rub-a-dub-a-dub. "Engines are cold. In case we have to spin her we will have to wait twenty minutes before we can thaw the intake valves. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to fly her during this weather. The magnetic disturbance is not good enough, and a Category 5 blizzard throws the rotors into a static.
"Keep her grounded," Ryker said. We do not want to put our heat signature on the sky.
He strolled up to me, his arms round me at the back, his body like a furnace of Alpha heat in the cold.
You shivering, he said, and kissed me upon the crown of my head.
I said I could hear the wind, and leaned back against him. My left hand by instinct reached and touched the broken Origin Stone on my right. The magic was slumbering under the surface of the surface and sleeping. "It doesn't sound right today. It sounds... hollow."
The comms array on the desk of Vane came to crackle as though, in reply to my words.
KZZZT... SSSHHHH...
Vane sprang almost knocking over his mug of chicory coffee. "What the hell? I didn't touch anything."
...repeat... any surviving... KZZZT...
The voice that was bleeding through the static was faint and metallic and completely free of emotion. It did not resemble a distress signal. it was as though a notice of eviction.
"Is that coming from orbit?" Ryker inquired, and immediately he awoke, and looking out of the console, left me. "Did Valerius wake up?"
No, no, said Vane as his fingers flicked across the dials, in an attempt to separate the frequency. It is not the downward trend. It's ground-to-ground. Long wave radio. Bouncing off the ionosphere."
"From where?" I asked, holding my rifle.
Triangulating, Vane said to himself. "It's coming from the North. Deep North. Past the mountains. It is out of the Deadlands.
...This is General Marcus Vance... Commander 4 th Coalition Armored Division...
The Command Center was quieted down. even the wind without almost stopped.
"The 4th Armored?" Jaxon said in a whisper, and his face turned white. "That's impossible. The 4th had been posted on the Northern Defense Line a decade ago. The Rot Titans broke through the crust and fell first on them.
... To the unauthorized occupants of the Old Capital... the ghostly voice went on, with an absolute clearness now, cutting through the snowstorm.We have identified the Power signature of a Purist Class-A Drop-Ship in your grid. You have stolen Coalition military property.
How should he know about the Valkyrie? I enquired and a shiver ran along my stomach.
The drop, Ryker saw, and his jaw tightened. When we descended out of the Aether we lit up the sky. Any one who looked up with an old-fashioned radar-dish would have followed us.
...You have a hostile environment around you, and are out of supply lines, and the voice of the General Vance was continually heard.Thou hast not walls of scrap, Thou hast not walls of scrap, Thou hast not walls of scrap, Thou hast not walls of scrap. Hand-in the drop-ship, the Origin Asset and all arms. Open your gates within seventy two hours. Integration as a reward will be provided on compliance. Rebellion will bring about pacification.
A violent CLICK was the end of the transmission, and then the hiss of dead air came into play.
Incorporation, said Ryker, the name of which was like poison. This was what Valerius gave us.
He addressed me by the name Origin Asset, Vane said, and was studying me. "Just like the Purists did."
"Could it be a bluff?" Jaxon asked. Some vultures that discovered an old radio tower and they want to rattle us out of our tech?
Kaelen walked in the room abruptly. His old Coalition scientist had exchanged his grey cloak with a heavy fur-lined parka. His scarred face was grim.
Not a bluff, it is not, said Kaelen, throwing a heavy-looking, leather-bound dossier on to the mahogany desk. I had listened to the broadcast on the lower receivers.
"You know General Vance?" Ryker asked.
I knew him, I knew him, I said to myself, Kaelen, opening the dossier, turned to a pre-war photo of an unattractive, broad-shouldered man in a Coalition uniform. "Vance was a hardliner. At the time the Rot began to spread, it was not his wish to erect walls. He desired to employ scorched-earth politics. Bomb the infested towns to redeem the others.
But Jaxon said his division was wiped out, said I.
Kaelen said, They were swallowed by the Deadlands. But away out in the deep ice... the cold keeps things. Just as it kept the Fallen on the mountain pass"
"You're saying he's infected?" Baron enquired, as he just entered, stamping off snow on his grey fur. "Another puppet of the Rot?"
No, no, saw Kaelen, his eyes drawing up. The Fallen at the pass were senseless guards. This transmission was computed. Strategic. And if Vance had lived ten years in the Deadlands he did not do it by fighting the Rot. He did it by conquering it."
A warlord, Ryker thought, looking at the radio.
"Worse," Kaelen said. A general with an army dead, so it does not have to eat, does not have to sleep, does not feel the cold.
I peered out of the window at the raging snowstorm. Seventy-two hours. Now the ghosts of the old world were marching out of the ice to claim the home, at least to finish what we had started with its construction, and had just been constructed, a home.
Vane, said Ryker with a low, menacing rumble. Can you tell the very source of that signal?
I can, I can, I said to myself as I was typing. But it is the magnetic interference that is concealing the precise coordinates. I can allow you twenty miles radius.
"That's good enough," Ryker said. He turned to Baron and Jaxon. Increase the watch on the perimeter. I wish there were spotters on all the rooftops on the North side. Give snipers issue thermal optics.
We can see not ten feet in this snow, sir, we can see not ten feet in this snow, Jaxon complained.
They will not hide, they will not hide, Ryker said. It is the 4 th Armored, and they will just pull up to the front door.
His golden eyes were filled with the heavy burden of command, and he looked at me. We had no longer the short peace we had enjoyed. The game had changed again.
Get your gear, get your gear, room, said Ryker. We are not giving up the ship. And we by no means are giving up Elara. And, as long as General Vance desires the Iron City... he must bleed to it.