The Breach Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Zero Bomb

  By M.T. Hill and Available From Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Fire in the North

  The Landowner

  Part I: Look, Don’t Touch

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  Sunday Rites

  The Landowner

  Part II: Vertex Island

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  The Steeplejack

  The Journalist

  Home by the Sea

  The Landowner

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  PRAISE FOR ZERO BOMB

  “Suffocatingly real… An inventive thriller about the increasingly blurred lines between machine and man, animal and AI.”

  SFX

  “Gripping… Grim in places, bitterly funny in others.”

  SciFi Now

  “Hill is a true innovator, a brilliant prose stylist and a writer with a high level of invention. Zero Bomb mixes intense human drama and political struggle to show that great SF exists as much on the streets of today’s Britain as it does in the stars.”

  JEFF NOON, author of Vurt

  “A beautifully written and profoundly dislocating book about a chillingly plausible near future and its discontents. Absolutely essential reading.”

  DAVE HUTCHINSON, award-winning author of Europe in Winter

  “Thrilling, audacious and timely, M.T. Hill’s visions of the future feel closer to reality than they should.”

  HELEN MARSHALL, award-winning author of The Migration

  “Vivid and richly imagined, Zero Bomb is a passionate examination of who we are and a warning of what we could shortly become. I couldn’t put it down.”

  CATRIONA WARD, award-winning author of Rawblood

  “Conceived at the height of an unprecedented national crisis, M.T. Hill’s Zero Bomb is a violent, vital novel about virtue, loyalty, decency and love, even as we watch these timeless human attributes dissolve in the stomach acids of the World Machine. Think E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, written for the Westworld age, and you may just gain a fingerhold on this crazed colt of a book.”

  SIMON INGS, author Wolves and The Smoke

  BY M.T. HILL AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Zero Bomb

  THE BREACH

  M.T. HILL

  TITAN

  BOOKS

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  The Breach

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789090031

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090048

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition March 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © 2020 M.T. Hill. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For AI

  A FIRE IN THE NORTH

  The Landowner

  The burning starts mid-evening, when Lakeland greens have run to gold and the foxes on heat are shrieking.

  Em is on the phone to the solicitor when she notices the smell, a rich and bitter fug, though it doesn’t distract her much. After all, people burning stuff is normal up here in the Lakes. Bonfires, barbeques, campfires – walk any which way for miles and count the ash piles with your cowpats. It could be anglers on the tarn, a farmer clearing fallow fields, a young family gearing up for a restless night under canvas… anything like that. And so it’s easy for Em to blank it – especially easy given what the solicitor is saying. And when he’s done saying it, Em puts down the phone and stares into the grain of the desk.

  ‘Now what?’ she asks herself out loud. Now. What. And here it comes, sure as anything: the dread tide, the enormity of losing their home. The life she and her husband Ted have made here. There’s no ambiguity, no wriggle-room, because the solicitor has confirmed what they thought unlikely just months ago: the council is seizing land for development, and Em and Ted’s property – the farmhouse and its acreage, the barns, the old bunker – is now subject to a compulsory purchase order.

  Em reaches for the bottle of red she brought up fatalistically from the cellar, decants the whole thing and starts drinking straight from the carafe. She sits there, looking around the reading room, as if to quantify what they stand to lose. When she gets up, her quiet existence lurches sideways.

  The whole house. The whole thing. Another swig as Em goes to the window in a daze. The blinds are open, and gauzy smoke rises from the trees at the bottom of the lawn. Is that… is that on their land? Surely not. But Em settles the carafe on the sill and grimaces. What she’d assumed was woodsmoke has turned into a plastic stench she can taste. That, and the fox screams seem much closer than before. Closer and keener. She remembers that their gardener Graham is working down there, and now she’ll have to confront him. What the hell’s he burning? What’s he burning that could drive foxes up towards the house?

  A flash of nautical yellow in the thicket. Em’s focus narrows, one hand on the window. ‘Oh no,’ she whispers. A sickening jolt between her ears, behind her ribs. A pain like drowning.

  It isn’t foxes screaming.

  It’s the girls.

  Em splays her hands and pushes her face against the glass. The girls, sooty and screaming, are running up the garden. Before she can react, they’re in the house, tearing through the kitchen and the lounge and the diner and the conservatory. They’re still screaming, the worst kind of screaming, a rabid screaming, when they reach her in the drawing room.

  The girls are filthy and stinking and screaming for their mother, and their mother is her. And because Em i
s their mother – because she breathes that sound as well as she hears it – she understands the burning can’t be a simple bonfire at all.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she manages, biting her lip to try and stop it trembling. ‘What’s happened?’

  She takes them in alternately. Their eldest, Dolly, grey and snotty and blubbing down her yellow cagoule. Their youngest, Damson, staring shock-dumb.

  ‘Tell me,’ Em says. ‘Tell Mummy what happened.’

  She folds the children into her. She cradles Dolly’s face by the jawbone and wipes soot and ash from her cheeks with her own spit, with Dolly’s tears.

  ‘It was fairies, Mummy!’ Dolly says through her sobs. ‘It was fairies! We were making a den. We saw them come out. They said we shouldn’t look!’

  Em swallows. ‘What do you mean, fairies? Come out of where? For heaven’s sakes, girls, you’re scaring me to death.’

  But Damson and Dolly, six and eight years old, blinking and stinking of burning plastic, have no more words between them. Instead they take their mother by the sleeves and drag her through the house. She stumbles after them with her guts inside out.

  Behind the house, in a panic, Em catches a shin on the handle of an upturned wheelbarrow, sees Graham’s hand trowel wedged in the lawn as though he’d thrown it down like an axe. Beside her, the hose reel on the back of the house is unwinding rapidly, the pipe snaking away across the lawn.

  ‘Where’s Graham?’ Em asks the girls. ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Down with them!’ Dolly shouts. ‘He came to save us!’

  Em breaks for the treeline, towards the smoke. The girls keep up, still yelling, ‘It was them! It was the fairies! They went all over!’

  Here the smoke thickens, the same smell as on the children, and Em’s world is a chemical fire. First the ride-on mower, motor still going, and then Graham in a clearing. A ragged black line has been seared through the long grass, ending at the greenhouse, which is burning. Graham, in his tweed flat cap and wellies and fishing waders, has the hose nozzle aimed into the flames. He’s standing completely still.

  ‘Graham!’

  Graham can’t hear Em, or ignores her. The girls pull on her waist and cuffs. ‘Mummy!’ Dolly shouts. She clasps Em’s numb fingers. ‘The fairies made a fire!’

  ‘That’s their fire, Mummy,’ Damson adds.

  Em kneels in dewy grass. The clouds have closed over. She brings the girls close again. ‘Did you do this?’ she urges. ‘Did you set light to the greenhouse? Did you breathe that in?’

  ‘It was the fairies,’ Dolly insists. ‘We told you.’ She shakes off her mother’s embrace and crosses her arms. ‘Damson did a wee behind a tree and I was watching for strangers and there was a fizz in the air and the fire came up green and… and I said, “Damson – quick! What’s that?” And we only had a look, Mummy, just a very fast look, and they came whizzing about and one of them told us not to – not to snitch! And it called us all these mean things, it said we are so ugly, it said we are so small and useless—’

  ‘Damson.’ Em is staring at her youngest now, this little girl still too young to lie convincingly.

  ‘It was the fairies,’ Damson whispers. Then, quieter, ‘What if it was Marigold?’

  Em’s throat catches as she watches her daughter speak. It feels like the whole Lake District has contracted to the size of the clearing. The hiss of water boiling off. Graham standing too still. ‘There’s no such thing as a mean fairy,’ Em tells Damson. ‘Marigold’s a tooth fairy. She wouldn’t light a fire because she’s only there to mind your teeth, and she’s fond of you. Of both of you. Now, I want to know the truth, and I won’t be angry. I won’t be mad at all. I’ll ask you once more. One more time. Did you take matches from Mummy and Daddy’s kitchen? From Uncle Graham’s shed? Did you accidentally light a fire? You have to tell me. If you tell me, I can fix it.’

  ‘No!’ Dolly screeches, and she starts to cry again. ‘Ask them! Go and see the fairies!’

  Em looks to her youngest. ‘Damson?’

  Damson squirms like she needs the toilet. She shakes her head, and her brow darkens the way Ted’s does. ‘I promise, Mummy,’ she says. ‘Brownie’s Honour. It was them.’

  Em’s patience runs out. She looks to Graham, the shrinking fire, and points back up the hill, towards the house. ‘The pair of you, inside,’ she says. ‘Lock the back door and shut all the windows you can reach. Then I want you to call Daddy, but no video, okay? I want you to tell him Mummy needs him home.’

  The girls blink at her.

  ‘Do it,’ Em says, ‘and I’ll be up to run a bath. Don’t put your hands on the walls, either. Go on – scoot!’

  The girls sprint up the hill. The back door slams. Em approaches the gardener.

  ‘Graham?’

  Graham has the fire down, but the residual heat is immense. The greenhouse frame has deformed and blistered, and the roof glass drips gelatinously into what remains beneath.

  ‘What is it, Graham?’

  The gardener doesn’t answer.

  ‘Was this the girls, Graham? Was it them?’

  ‘I din’t see,’ Graham says. ‘There were a tearing sound, like a wave breaking.’ He points at the strip of burnt grass. ‘And this.’

  ‘So it wasn’t you, either?’

  He glares at her.

  ‘Then what? What the bloody hell’s that in there?’

  Graham takes off his flat cap and looks at his boots.

  ‘Did the girls do it?’

  Graham gestures to the seat of the fire with his hat. A black puddle, smouldering. Em doesn’t know why, but she worries it’s the neighbour’s cat.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Best you head inside,’ Graham says. He removes his hat, wipes his reddened brow. ‘See to them girls.’

  ‘Why’s no one telling me anything?’

  ‘Nowt worth telling, that’s why. Leave me at it. I’ll tidy now. Get it shovelled up and sling it down in the old bunker. We’ll hold it over till next bin collection day. Can’t have it stinking place out.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Em says. ‘You honestly didn’t see anything?’

  Graham shrugs. They stand before this black thing in the fire, the stripe of scorched grass, and Em thinks of Damson’s face when she asked her for the truth. And she has to wonder – have you ever believed in fairies? Has Em ever believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden?

  Because as far as Em could tell – assuming she still reads the girls better than anyone – Damson wasn’t lying to her.

  PART I

  LOOK, DON’T TOUCH

  The Steeplejack

  Not long after first light, Billy Shepherd, Shep for short, wakes up in the back of his work van. It’s a harsh start as mornings go. One side of his face is pressed numb against the cabin bulkhead, and overnight he’s spilled a tin of cheap lager inside his sleeping bag. He reaches for his phone, still flashing his missed alarm. He opens the back doors and swings his legs out over the bumper. Before him stand the huddled spires of Clemens, Scarborough’s new refinery. He should’ve been up the nearest chimney an hour ago.

  Coughing in the chill, Shep rebuttons his damp overalls, gathers his harness, helmet and tools, and staggers over scrubland to the crew entrance. A sign above the security gate reads, WELCOME TO CLEMENS: A SAFE SITE. Beneath that, SILENCE IS CONSENT.

  The site engineer is waiting for Shep near the stack’s base, clipboard ready. Around her a thrumming, fibrous copse of colour-coded pipework, cylinders and processing plant. Shep recognises the woman from the site’s training videos – an old roughneck, nearing obsolescence. Her face weathered, but her eyes still sharp. She watches Shep approach, sizing him up, then nods down at Shep’s waist.

  ‘That a real Stillson in there, lad?’

  Shep touches the cold wrench in his toolbelt.

  ‘Oh aye,’ she says. ‘I’d spot one a mile off. What you doing with that?’

  ‘I found it,’ Shep tells her.

&
nbsp; The engineer snorts. ‘You don’t find a Stilly, sunbeam. Best not be one of mine.’

  Shep shakes his head. ‘I was on Fawley before here,’ he says. ‘Couple of old boys robbed some of Heighter’s gear. Divvied it out.’

  The engineer goes quiet. She doesn’t seem to blink. ‘Hmm,’ she starts. ‘That’s about all you could say to make it morally right. But don’t feed me fibs. If you were on Fawley, how come you’re up here now?’

  Shep rubs his jaw.

  ‘And don’t act daft, neither,’ the engineer says. ‘Gaping black hole, that place. Greens go in there and don’t come out till they’re dead or riddled.’

  Shep shrugs with one shoulder. ‘It was inspection stuff,’ he says. ‘A fortnight, right through.’

  The engineer whistles. ‘Two weeks? And then you got off? Think we’d better watch you, hadn’t we?’

  Shep grins and slides past her towards the chimney ladder. Looks up along its panelling, the gentle undulation of its length. ‘Am I good?’ he asks.

  ‘Best be,’ the engineer says. ‘Since you’re an hour bloody late.’

  The stack they’re commissioning is a four-hundred-foot steely, the newest type. On an old refinery it would be brick and mortar, a hardwood strip running to its summit – with maybe a few forgotten iron dogs, access fixings smoothed into nubs by years of weather. These new ones are modular builds, very fancy, with integrated ladders.

  Parallel with the ladder runs Shep’s shunt line – his fall arrest system. Further round, the heavy-duty hand line the groundsman uses to run stuff up to the crew on top.

  ‘Best start thinking up excuses for them lot, too,’ the engineer says. ‘They’re waiting on you.’

  Shep nods once and checks his toolbelt. Podger, quickdraw clips, carabiners, scaffold spanner, hand-welder. His Stillson – the pipe wrench that makes him feel like a proper jack. In his docs pocket is a signed copy of the crew’s method statement, and behind that, with the LEDs he prepared in the van with his final beer last night, there’s a pouch of tobacco. Not to smoke, but to trade for coffee on breaks.