Chaos Zone Read online

  ‘. . . automated moisture units . . .’

  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ I ask Belle.

  ‘It’s old,’ she says simply, and crouches down to inspect a small power node set into the urilium post. ‘A thousand years old.’

  She removes and cleans a digital fuse unit, then replaces it. The hologram reappears, crisper than before. The man gestures.

  ‘. . . see the archives of seed banks to your left.’

  I look, but whatever was once there is not there now.

  ‘And to the right, the genetic libraries and fauna hubs.’

  I turn, but once again there’s nothing there. Nothing but trees. Tall trees.

  ‘Follow the sensor path to Zone 11, the Ocean . . .’

  All at once, there’s a rasping buzz, followed by a series of crackles. Then nothing.

  I wait, but this time the hologram does not reappear. Belle crouches down by the urilium post. She tries the fuse unit again, then turns back to me.

  ‘Like I said, York, it’s old.’

  I’m disappointed. It was good to see and hear this crew member from the past; someone who had walked on Earth before the planet died. His voice was calm and confident as he talked to those first bio-engineers of the Mid Deck, telling them of their duties – to preserve and maintain the life of our ruined planet here in the Biosphere until we reach a new world.

  Did they know back in the Launch Times what a risk they were taking? The threat they were to face from the robots they built to help them? Up in the Outer Hull, the last descendants of the tech-engineers are almost wiped out, and I wonder if the bio-engineers here in the Mid Deck have done any better . . .

  I turn to Belle, and see that she has the palm of her hand flat against the power node. White pulses of energy flicker beneath her skin as she recharges.

  ‘Do you think we’re the only ones down here?’ I ask her quietly.

  She looks at me. ‘Human or zoid?’ she asks.

  Behind us there’s a sharp crack. I spin round, pulser raised.

  Crack.

  There’s something hovering in the air above the branch of a tree. Some kind of maintenance zoid by the look of it, though it’s difficult to tell for sure with my recon-sight not working.

  It’s about the size of my backcan, spindly-looking, with a long black tube-shaped body and a head-unit consisting of a round lens. The aperture of the lens opens and closes as it surveys a small sprig of yellow blossom. Cutters emerge from the zoid’s body and slice through the woody twig.

  Crack.

  A panel at the top of the tubular body slides open, and the sample is sucked inside. The zoid moves down to the forest floor and its lens scans the base of the tree. It extends a metal probe and sinks it into the earth, as if taking some sort of moisture reading.

  Caliph’s fascinated. He’s squeaking and sniffing at the air, and before I can stop him, he leaps from my shoulder and pounces on the zoid.

  There’s a short, sharp zing as the zoid activates its defence shield. I see a flash of light, and Caliph is thrown backwards in a fuzz of blue-white dazzle, rigid and splayed, his fur on end. The zoid retracts the probe from the earth and flies off to the next tree to continue its work.

  Crack.

  It takes another sample.

  Caliph is lying on the ground where he landed. I run to him, gather him up. Limp and motionless, he looks so small and helpless in my hands. At the centre of his chest is a patch of charred fur.

  ‘Caliph, Caliph,’ I whisper, stroking him gently, pressing my face to his.

  I feel the faintest tremor.

  I turn to Belle. Her face is expressionless. It’s impossible to know what she’s thinking. Like I say, she’s not good on emotions.

  I put my ear to Caliph’s chest. And yes, there’s a heartbeat. Weak, but definitely a heartbeat . . .

  Caliph lets out a soft whimper – and opens his eyes. A moment later, he jumps up onto my shoulder and shakes himself, before disappearing down into my flakcoat. It tickles and I laugh as I turn back to Belle.

  ‘He’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘Caliph’s all right!’

  Belle nods. ‘Good,’ she says, then frowns. ‘You were sad.’

  ‘I thought he was dead,’ I say, then hesitate. ‘Like I thought you were dead, Belle. Earlier. After the power surge in the tube . . .’

  ‘And this also made you sad?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her, and feel my face going red.

  ‘I see,’ she says thoughtfully. She pauses. Then, ‘If you were dead, York, I too would be sad.’

  And I don’t know what to say to that.

  Belle points to the zoid, which is moving on through the forest. ‘We should follow it,’ she says.

  It’s difficult keeping up with the zoid. It’s finished taking samples now and is flying through the forest at a steady rate.

  Belle is sure-footed and fast. I’m the problem.

  My feet sink deep into the wet spongy ground, and more than once I trip and stumble on tangled roots. And each time it happens, Belle reaches out to support me.

  We keep on like that through the trees. Past a ladder-like construction with an aerial platform, round a squat rusting metal box that hums and throbs, along a line of tall posts, each one connected to the next with a trellis of wires . . .

  Ancient technology keeping the forest alive.

  Overhead, through the leaves, I catch glimpses of parallel power-lines suspended high up between the arc-lights and the forest canopy. Pulses of green energy flash through them.

  Then from up ahead, there’s a hissing, rushing, roaring noise.

  Suddenly, looming over us and blotting out the glare of the arc-lights, a huge dark shape appears. It’s broad and deep, and the ends taper. The noise is coming from the thing, and is so loud now that it fills the entire rainforest. It’s frightening. Overwhelming. Then water begins to spurt from a tangle of nozzles and pipes that hang from its underside.

  The flow of water gets harder and harder, till it’s gushing down onto the forest in a blur. The trees bend and tremble as the jets rain down on them.

  We run for cover, Belle going one way, me going another. I take shelter beneath the broad branch of a tree, my back pressed against its mossy trunk. All around me, the water continues to fall. It hisses like steam under pressure. It beats like a drum.

  The dark shape hovers, a black outline, its sides lit up with sensor-lights and glowing circuitry. The tangle of sprinkler-nozzles whirr and writhe as the water pours down onto a concentrated area of the rainforest.

  Too much water. Something is wrong. The forest floor around my feet is turning into a swamp.

  ‘York!’ Belle yells.

  All at once, the tree I’m sheltering beneath starts to topple. I stagger forward, sinking ankle-deep into thick mud as the tree crashes to the ground behind me. A broad shaft of arc-light shines down from the gap in the forest canopy.

  And my feet won’t move.

  ‘Sluice it!’ I groan.

  I try to pull my right leg up, but sink deeper. Up to my knees. My waist . . .

  All that water has turned the earth in the grow-troughs beneath me to liquid mud, and I’m sinking fast.

  Caliph lets out a panicked squeak as the rising mud reaches my chest. He clambers up onto my head, chittering indignantly, then jumps down and heads for firm ground, skittering across the mud on feathery feet. He stops and looks back, willing me to follow him.

  But I can’t.

  ‘Belle!’ I shout. ‘Belle!’

  The mud reaches my chin. It’s in my mouth, claggy and bitter. I spit it out, hold my breath, and try desperately to move my arms to keep my head above the surface.

  Where is Belle? Where has she gone?

  The mud’s in my nose now. My ears. And I’m still sinking. I screw my eyes shut. And with a sickening gulp, the liquid mud swallows me up.

  I can’t move. I can’t hear or see or breathe. My head’s ringing. My lungs are burning. I’m despera
te for air, but I know that if I breathe in, it’ll be the last breath I ever take.

  Then a hand closes round my forearm.

  It’s Belle. She’s pulling me up through the clinging mud. I break the surface. Next moment, I’m coughing and spluttering and gulping down mouthful after mouthful of air.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Belle asks, and her green eyes are filled with what looks like concern.

  She’s dragged me up onto the trunk of the fallen tree, which she hauled over the mud pool as a bridge. I always forget just how strong she is.

  ‘Thanks to you, Belle,’ I say.

  She nods. ‘The first law,’ she says.

  And I smile.

  The first law that all robots were programmed to obey: not to injure a human being or allow a human being to come to harm. The first law that was broken when the robots rebelled and became zoids.

  Zoids follow their own rules. But Belle is on my side, and I’m grateful to her.

  ‘It’s stopped,’ Belle says, breaking into my thoughts. She’s looking up, her arms outstretched and palms raised.

  The black rainmaker has moved on, and the arc-lights are shining down on us again, bright and hot. The critters, that had fallen silent during the downpour, are whooping and howling and screeching again, and I think of Caliph.

  And there he is, bounding along the tree trunk towards me. He jumps up onto my shoulder, cheeping and chittering happily.

  Under the heat of the arc-lights, everything’s started to steam. The leaves of the trees. Mine and Belle’s clothes. Caliph’s fur. And when I look down at the forest floor, I see it’s disappeared beneath a great swirling blanket of mist that’s rising towards us.

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Belle, climbing to her feet and reaching out a hand.

  I look up at her. With my scanner out of action, I haven’t got a clue what time it is. But my body’s telling me it’s time for some shut-eye.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I tell her.

  Belle frowns, and I think she’s going to protest. But instead, her face softens. ‘I recharged,’ she says. ‘Now you need to sleep.’

  ‘Just for a couple of hours,’ I say, and smile. ‘Or six or seven . . .’

  I pull my backcan from my shoulder and flick the switch. Luckily no water has got in. The sleepcrib flip-flaps open and I rope it to the tree trunk. I take out a ration pack. Water, V-rusks, salted meat, and some dried fruit, which I share with Caliph. It isn’t much, or that tasty, but it fills a gap. I’m about done, when I notice the arc-lights.

  They’re dimming. It’s getting darker.

  I shake my head. Rain, mist, sun . . . The lights never went out in the Outer Hull, but here in the Mid Deck, the bio-engineers have recreated what it must have been like back on Earth.

  And that includes day and night – as well as the bits in between. Dawn. Dusk.

  All around us, the sounds of the forest are changing as night falls. Caliph’s rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ I say to him as I crawl into the sleepcrib. ‘Let’s get us a good night’s sleep.’

  The glare of the arc-lights wakes me the next morning. I’ve slept right through the night. I stick my head out of the sleepcrib. Belle is standing in exactly the same position as when I left her – watching the forest around us.

  ‘Zoids,’ she says, when she sees me. ‘Over there.’

  Belle points, and I see white shapes moving through the trees on thin stilt-like legs. They’re moving away from us; five, six, seven of them.

  Then I smell it. Smoke. A mixture of burning wood and scorched circuitry. And I see it too, rising up above the forest canopy, a twisting grey plume that’s pooling round the arc-lights.

  Without saying a word, I pack up my gear, shoulder my backcan.

  ‘This way,’ says Belle, and we set off through the forest.

  Inside my flakcoat, I feel Caliph’s body curled up, safe and warm. The air’s hot and humid, and as we make our way through the trees, I get my first glimpse of the critters whose calls I’m becoming used to. A troop of fur-balls with muscular arms swinging through the canopy. A line of tiny creatures with striped bodies, scurrying through the shadows on six legs. Something black, with huge yellow eyes and a long tail.

  If these are Earth creatures, they’re ones I’ve never heard of before . . .

  Up ahead, the smoke’s thicker. White and billowing. And there are tongues of flame and blue sparks, which shoot up into the air and shower down on the trees.

  Suddenly Belle grabs my arm. We stop, crouch down. I reach out and pull a branch aside, and the two of us look out into a clearing. And there at its centre, crackling and roaring, is the cause of the fire.

  It’s some kind of power generator or storage unit by the look of it – a tall, thin, pyramid-shaped tower. Its outer casing is glowing white hot, and every few seconds, massive flames explode from the sloping side-vents. There are silver rods sticking out on all sides, each one complete with insulator-discs and resistor-cones, and thick cables that extend from the ends of the rods. Several of these have become detached and are bucking and flailing, spitting out the streams of sparks.

  The zoids surround the generator, scuttling on their spindly legs as they attempt to bring the cables under control and put out the fire. They shoot jets of thick white foam at the base of the generator, then move closer to grapple with the writhing power cables.

  One of them reaches out a pincer and grabs a cable, only to explode in a shower of molten metal and zoid gunk. Its burning body topples over, and a second spindle-legged zoid blasts it with foam. As we watch, three more zoids are zilched before the fire is finally brought under control. Then the rest of the zoids move away, in a line, back towards whatever maintenance hub they came from.

  I turn to Belle. ‘We’ve seen plenty of zoids now,’ I say, ‘but no humans. Perhaps I’m the only one down here.’

  ‘No,’ says Belle. ‘You’re not. Look.’

  She points to a patch of ground next to the generator. And there, still fresh in the damp earth, is a footprint.

  A human footprint.

  I search everywhere. Both of us do. But the single barefoot print in the mud is the only sign that a man or woman has been here. Belle confirms that it was made recently.

  My brain’s buzzing with possibilities. Could it be that the Rebellion has hit the Mid Deck; that zoids are in control and, just like in the Outer Hull, humans are hiding out underground or in ceiling pods, emerging only to sabotage or scavenge? Or maybe the robots haven’t become zoids and are still serving humans, just as they were always meant to . . .

  Truth is, I just don’t know how far the robot rebellion spread in the Biosphere. Though I intend to find out. My mission depends on it.

  Leaving the burnt-out generator behind us, we set off again. We haven’t gone far when Belle speaks.

  ‘The temperature’s dropping,’ she says.

  I hadn’t noticed, but now she’s mentioned it I’m suddenly aware of how cold I am. Overhead, the arc-lights are just as bright as before, but they’re not giving out so much heat. The trees ahead have no leaves. Their trunks and branches are white and skeletal, and soon we’re walking through a dead forest.

  Something must have gone wrong. Surely the bio-engineers would not have created this?

  As it gets colder, I button up my flakcoat and raise the collar against the chill. Colder still, and I rummage in my backcan for the blue cyclops-fur cap that I picked up back at the Fulcrum, and put it on.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I ask Belle.

  She shakes her head.

  I can see my breath now, puffing out of my mouth like small clouds. Beneath my feet, the ground has become hard and slippery. It sparkles in the cold light. I kneel down for a closer look. Tiny crystals of ice cover the frozen earth.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ I murmur.

  Belle crouches down beside me, scrapes some up on her fingertip and examines it. It doesn’t melt. ‘Crystalline water, formed at freezing point or below,’
she tells me. Then she brushes her hands together and turns to me. ‘Amazing?’ she says.

  ‘I like the way it looks,’ I say.

  We keep on. And when we come to the end of the dead forest, I see a frozen info-post marking the spot. Zone 4: Polar. Beyond it is a jagged landscape of frozen water. There are peaks and valleys, slabs of ice and drifts of snow. The arc-lights are hardly visible through clouds of mist, and in the distance are the fuzzy outlines of maintenance zoids, frozen solid and out of action.

  ‘Minus twenty degrees,’ says Belle, though of course she’s not looking cold.

  ‘We ought t-t-t-to go b-b-back,’ I tell her, my teeth chattering.

  But the mist has enveloped us now and I’m no longer sure which way back is. Belle isn’t either. We’re lost in a bank of freezing fog. I can’t stop shivering. I slip and stumble on, only to stop a few minutes later.

  We’ve come to a wall.

  It’s massive – fifty, sixty metres tall, and stretching off into the fog in both directions. The surface is splodged with snow that’s stuck to it, and there’s more snow drifted along the bottom. We walk on, keeping to the foot of the wall.

  Then the fog thins, and I see it.

  Towering above me is a frozen waterfall, tumbling down through the air from high above. The ice gleams in the wintry arc-lights, pink and yellow and turquoise. Splashes at the bottom of the falls have set hard in weird twisted shapes.

  Belle points to a place high up in the wall. ‘There’s been a breach,’ she says.

  I look up.

  The wall, I now see, forms a part of some kind of huge tank made of thick visiglass. Way up high is a V-shaped crack. Water must have come gushing out of it, only to freeze solid in the polar cold. It’s the most incredible sight I’ve seen in the Mid Deck so far.

  ‘Hot swarf,’ I breathe.

  When I turn to Belle, she’s smiling. ‘Amazing,’ she says.