Zero Bomb Read online

  Without delay, Morn piloted her enormous suit towards the boundary of the plant, stooping low on the sharp banks of a tributary, and powering through its clay sludge. Machines did not sleep, rather they replenished, and Morn had calculated the range on her mark from the beach, using the machine’s size and chassis class as indicators. The mark would now be inside, perhaps beneath the main plant, lowered into its pod. Despite their constant evolution, or iterations, the machines had not yet shrugged off the strictures of hierarchy. It was one of the few remaining traces of their makers.

  As Morn drew ever closer, a swarm of sentries rose from the plant as though from a nest disturbed. These were not stingers but compound-eyed monitors, and they were around her quickly. Morn swatted at the monitors in irritation but maintained her trigger discipline, both aware of and prepared for the larger threats that remained, and were surely imminent. (The weapon she carried was a spoil of war, a much older machine’s gun-arm; an intelligent puck-launching device whose payload flensed human flesh in tight conical patterns and, it turned out, did much the same when turned on its originators.)

  With Morn’s detection came a shrill alert, beamed instantaneously across the entirety of the southern English reaches, perhaps the continent beyond. The alert’s nature was internal by definition, but the machines had developed an audible signature to deter all kinds of biological life, a warning as much as a signal. Morn cursed her arrogance and impatience, knowing that with deeper forethought she could have dealt with the sentries while they were still on base. The alarm roused and aggravated the pigeon in its cage, and it flapped wildly above her.

  ‘Hush now,’ she told it. ‘I won’t give you up that easily.’

  Morn reached the wall of the complex as its machine foot soldiers massed in the inlet behind her. She challenged them silently with her weapon. She saw them hesitate, recoil, but noted with unease their confidence. They rallied, did not desist. She hunkered in and released a shrill warning of her own.

  Too late: a dactyl was gliding in from the direction of the blackwinter-mottled sun, for the machines had clearly adapted once more, perhaps in anticipation of human desperation like this. As the dactyl’s cannon rattled, Morn forced her farmour suit into an unnatural squatting stance, and saw through the farmour’s bone frame the knee joints close to warping. The dactyl’s projectiles speckled the ground, lifting great clods of mud and clay up through the farmour’s undercarriage and into Morn’s face. By chance she went unscathed, but shrapnel had penetrated the navigator system, and a reinforced rib in the farmour’s front wing had cracked and folded neatly inwards. A single pigeon feather floated down through the chassis.

  Morn removed a foot from the stirrups and tried to kick the damaged bone back into place. Loosened, the bone rattled and fell straight out of its socket. She cursed silently – cursed the engineers she had asked to lighten her farmour unit – and saw between the bounds of this fresh gap a band of defence wheelers whirling across the terrain to finish her off.

  Morn took the opportunity. She sighted on the wheelers and fired the enormous weapon once, twice, three times. The leathers of the farmour creaked and juddered, but held. The farmour’s feet were planted in such a way as to dissipate the gun’s monstrous recoil; did so with nary a shudder. The approaching wheelers paused, hanging perfectly still for a moment, then disintegrated smokelessly. Their parts were turned into such fine particles that the prevailing wind carried them away like spume from a rough sea. Morn lowered the weapon. The resulting gap in the machine line was impressive, and the coming wave slowed considerably on approach.

  Morn turned back to the plant wall and, reaching through the damage in the front wing, placed three crude fertiliser charges in a roughly triangular formation. If their activation went deep enough, she would sever the main loop, which would disrupt the entrance fields long enough for her to lumber inside and achieve her goal.

  Except the dactyl was banking – it had more to offer. Morn instinctively lifted the farmour’s arm to shield her eyes from the sun, her goggles filthy, and with her gun-hand released a fresh brace of shrapnel pucks. These popped left of target to poor effect. At this time she came to realise her suit’s right foot was submerged in silt, and that the farmour was gradually toppling over. It was sinking, in fact.

  The dactyl, unfazed by Morn’s shots, was now inside engagement range and descending from a critical vector. Morn released the farmour’s control handles and wiped her goggles clean with two fingers. She wanted to see the dactyl coming, not least because rapid arithmetic put her chances at slim to terminal. A moment later the machine released its salvo, as expected. Morn slapped the homing pigeon’s release switch, heard the bird’s anxious flutter as it departed on its grave mission to Southampton, and braced within her bone cage. At least her son Fallow would know she had gone down fighting. She gave a single soft prayer to the old ways.

  The impact did not come. Morn opened one eye. She opened the other. The machines had indeed adapted. For they had not shot her this morning – they had taken measures to capture her. The whole farmour suit was gummed up with a viscous substance not unlike tree sap; this substance sagged heavily from the bonecase and gearing; it had Morn woefully stuck. It stank. She took the handles once more and attempted to move the suit’s arms and legs, but their reticulation was gone, and the strain cracked the casing around several key joints. Outside the cage, the wheelers were massing again, and above them the dactyl had returned to close surveillance. Morn unstrapped her waist and made certain her scramknife was secure in her boot. She released the farmour’s locks, untied the wire cords around her waist, and stepped out of her stirrups on to the exit plate.

  ‘Lioness,’ came a genderless voice, cold and level.

  Morn pushed against the ribs and with her other hand released the leather bindings that secured them. Like this she was a captive indeed. Or at worst, she was set to pass on. Make no mistake, Morn was not here to go quietly. Like her father, her mother, her siblings and her wife before her, Morn would resist the machines to the last, and was confident they knew it. Every quanta of data they held on her would explain who she was. In her many disruption lessons she had seen their minds at work. This very instant she would appear to them in hot-reeling statistics, a riot of angry binary. She hoped she posed a credible threat.

  Morn stepped out of the farmour. The wind was bitter, and the sheepskins flapped from her shoulders. The machines surrounded her.

  ‘The war is complete,’ came the flat voice.

  Morn realised the voice was emanating from all of them. In other circumstances it could have been the sky itself addressing her. She fixed her boots in the silt and placed a hand on the farmour’s superstructure. Interlaced bone, rusting pins, toughened hide. Small reassurance for a woman whose entire adult life had been angled in defiance of the thinking machine.

  ‘Not for us,’ Morn said.

  ‘Is that why are you here?’ came the voice.

  Morn did not reply.

  ‘You would call this a sad place to perish for nothing.’

  Morn lifted her chin, defiant. She was calculating, and she would perish for something. She abhorred these machines because it was her purpose to. There was nothing else left. They had made sure of that.

  ‘Do you wish us harm?’

  This was a solitary wheeler, ranged close and apparently breaking accord by speaking to her individually. It had a bright voice, possibly some reflection of its previous life. Perhaps it had once been an automated carriage, or courier, or, perversely, an ambulance.

  ‘I do,’ Morn told them. ‘I pray for your annihilation.’

  ‘Impossible,’ came the whole group’s reply.

  Morn gave the machines a wry smile. The effects of the leaf were potent, yes, but more likely this defiance arose from the certainty of her death, the release it might bring, and from knowing she would destroy at least two or three of them as she went. She straightened, letting go of the farmour. It sagged lower. Despite the gum hol
ding it together, it was still disappearing into the silt. An aeon hence, it would make for an interesting fossil.

  ‘It is done,’ said the machine voice. ‘Please accompany us.’

  Still Morn did not move. She knew what became of those who went. The machines attempted to mimic them, creating chimeras of metal and dead flesh before sending them back to the human camps. Such monsters had sown enough horror and dread in her time, yet had never once convinced them. She did not want to meet the same fate. She did not want to return to Southampton as a half-woman. For Fallow, her son, this would matter; more than for any other, for it would fall upon Fallow to deliver the killing blow, the removal of her fused spinal column, and later to oversee her scattering along the coast.

  ‘Come with us,’ the voice insisted.

  ‘I won’t,’ said Morn. For they were toying with her, and she was not game. Fleetingly she questioned if, now that the war was over, there was precious little else these machines could pursue. They were dismal, in their way. With no one left to serve, no roles left to supplant, what else existed for these machines to do but go on mining the Earth’s resources and making each other? It was the triumph of narcissism. It was a doom spiral. It was the worst vestiges of human nature imprinted on to them.

  So no, Morn’s war was not over. These machines could strip and denude her as they had her people, their communities and their colonies. She stood there at some sacrificial altar of labour, and she would go willingly as the lamb.

  Morn knelt and unsheathed her scramknife. It began to rain acid from the toxic clouds above. She smiled. She went to them.

  Chapter 1

  Mornington household, England. 2010.

  There were two rules that children were expected to observe in the Mornington household. They were passed along with reverence, whispered at bedtimes and repeated when necessary.

  One: you must never wake your father when he is sleeping after work.

  Two: you must not speak while your father is watching televiddy.

  Miranda – at twelve, the household’s youngest child – had piously observed these rules for what seemed like all her conscious life. The first rule was adhered to by default in many ways, given that her father was either in work or in bed. He was a government scientist, or so Miranda understood, and also sworn from discussing his role with anybody either at home or in the village – so she and he found little else in common or to discuss, their intellectual gap apparently too great for him to bridge. The second rule was, in effect, needless also: following their mother’s weekday dinners, Miranda would help to load the dishblitz before retreating to study in the quietest corner of the house, where her elder sister June could not find and torment her about the colour of her hair, or the quality of her skin, or the periods she would never have; and where her older brother Marcus, the middle child, would never venture at all, having discovered in his mid-teens the pleasures of occupying the same space as his family, yet living in parallel to them.

  It was there in the study one night, as Miranda practised her Mandarin poetry recital, studiously ignoring the electronic telegrams arriving from friends on her personal viddy, that Miranda did something untoward, out of character, even insubordinate. She stayed up later than her mother and her father, listening intently as they carried out their strange night-time routines, and she read literature smuggled home from an area of the school library that was forbidden to youth of her age and sensitivity, and especially those of a curious disposition. The book she read this night was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which it was said was representative of a diseased or depraved mind from a gladly abandoned generation hence. To a twelve-year-old such as Miranda, however, the book was rebellion manifest. It was pure and it was illicit. She read into the early hours, devouring passages despite not always receiving their meaning. The very poetry of the thing was arresting enough. Never before had she been captivated by words placed alongside each other in these ways. And so it seemed to her a pity that she should eventually have to succumb to the need for sleep.

  Miranda woke in the study chair in real and deep blackness. Only the leather beneath her hands was familiar. The air was cool and damp, having gone unheated for some hours. And the televiddy was ringing through the darkness.

  Heart a stone, Miranda went to the study’s flickering televiddy panel. Its clockface displayed two o’clock in the morning.

  The caller’s ident was withheld. Hesitantly, Miranda lifted the receiver.

  ‘Hullo?’ she said.

  ‘Kip Mornington,’ came a man’s voice. Nothing more.

  Miranda watched the screen. There was no discernible figure, only a dim silhouette against a light background. She rubbed her arms, which had broken out in goose pimples.

  ‘Kip Mornington!’ insisted the voice. Miranda wondered if it sounded somewhat accented. Empire, perhaps. She had gleaned that her father occasionally worked with men of the Americas.

  ‘My father is sound asleep,’ said Miranda. She swallowed. ‘It’s awfully late.’

  ‘Then for heaven’s sake wake the man,’ said the voice. ‘This is urgent.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Miranda told him. ‘I’m forbidden to wake him.’

  The voice gave a low sigh. Its owner had evidently covered the input. He returned and said, ‘Child, if you do not fetch your father this instant, there will be hell to pay. This is of critical importance. This is about your father’s work.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Miranda, telling herself she would not dare apologise to this man for the rules of their household, or for abiding by the best wishes of her parents. ‘I cannot.’

  ‘Go and wake your father now!’ hissed the man.

  ‘Good night to you,’ said Miranda, and for the first time in her young life she enjoyed a thrill of righteousness as she terminated the conversation and closed away the televiddy, and took herself off to bed.

  * * *

  Only Miranda’s mother was in the sitting room when Miranda skulked downstairs sometime after nine o’clock the following morning. Her mother was seated on a Doncaster chair, back very straight but eyes downcast, listening to a government-mandated relaxation record at low volume. Miranda knew her mother’s expression and posture well enough – it usually came upon her after a quarrel with Miranda’s father.

  ‘Mummy?’

  Her mother could not bring herself to look up. In fact she stared out of the window to the corner of the garden where two great oaks were entwined in slow death.

  The silence now was heavy, and Miranda came to the hearth where she placed a hand and repeated herself.

  Then there was a click as Miranda’s mother’s lips parted. ‘If there is one thing I cannot abide, Miranda, it is my children lying to me,’ she said.

  Miranda felt her cheeks flush. Immediately, she understood this was not about her father. ‘Who has lied, Mother?’

  Her mother turned to face her. Her expression was hollow, the skin tight.

  ‘You answered the televiddy last night,’ said Miranda’s mother.

  Miranda nodded. ‘To a very rude man.’

  ‘Then you closed the televiddy.’

  Miranda nodded the once. ‘I did.’

  ‘You are a stupid, stupid little girl,’ said her mother slowly.

  Miranda became very hot. She tightened her grip on the hearth. Her stomach was rising.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘But what has happened?’ stammered Miranda.

  Her mother addressed the televiddy in the wall. A fast double-clap brought it to full volume. The government news logotype occupied one corner, and on the main panel appeared a large, oblate white sack, draped around the tracks of what appeared to be the city’s monorail service.

  ‘This is your father’s work,’ said Miranda’s mother. ‘We are being told that this… thing… is what remains of a dirigible weather globe, operating at extremely high altitudes, and also that your father’s department is responsible for the machinery that controls it. What they do not know, Mir
anda, is that last night the air conditioning in his machinery room failed, and his equipment overheated.’

  Miranda sat down on the bare floor. It was as if the coldness of the tile was all that kept her from combusting.

  ‘We know, of course, that this has nothing to do with the weather. When men in suits arrive at the door come dawn, you understand there is more going on.’

  Miranda cleared her throat. ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  Her mother shook her head. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then how do you know it’s Daddy’s?’

  ‘Because I was on the end of his foul mouth this morning,’ her mother scoffed. ‘Now you’d better run along and play. I would sooner you were out of my sight, at the very least until your father gets home.’

  Miranda wiped her eyes. ‘I was only following—’

  ‘Out,’ her mother ordered. ‘Go on with you.’

  So Miranda ran. She ran blindly into the woodland adjacent to the house, through a heavy tangle of trees and overgrowth, and down to the clearing and the wide-gauge tracks along which freighters many miles long ferried imported goods to New London from the port of Southampton. Here there came the temptation to scramble down the embankment and try to board one of these megatrains, so that she might flee to the city and find a new way to live; live amidst all those libraries, filled with staggering books and stories, and the museums that contained what they had left of the old days; live along with the largest temples of the new. She thought about what it would be like to lie atop a megatrain’s cargo pod and feel the wind around her body. What would they say to a twelve-year-old without papers or means? She had read Dickens, at least, and in that sense felt partly equipped for the life.

  Still, the urge waned as it is wont to do when youngsters flee home with nothing but the quiet intention of returning. No freighters were scheduled to pass at this hour, in any case. Instead of lying there, with only clouds and insects for company, Miranda doubled back towards the house, where she found a thornless bush beneath which she would wait until her father’s floatercar waivered into the grounds and came to rest by the outhouse, or his workshop.