Deep underground, something like dawn comes. It is gradual at first, nothing more than a realization that pitch black has become dark gray. Then the gray lightens. Shadows begin to move, size and distance still only vague suggestions, and then suddenly I am in defined known space. The lizard brain rejoices; another night survived.
Except this space is in complete chaos. Uhrwerkmänner stumble looking for… friends, limbs, purpose? I never really understood these robots and I still don’t.
I sit up, the last dregs of adrenaline still swilling in my system. I feel exhausted and stupid. And yet, beneath that some fundamental tension has unknotted slightly. We came, we saw, we kicked something’s arse at last. I’ll take that, I suppose.
I cough, spit out a wadge of brown phlegm.
“Tasty.” Kayla slaps me on the back, knocks another spray of brown out of me. “Gonna be tasting that for a feckin’ week.” For some reason she smiles when she says this. Her teeth are white in her gray-stained face.
“Now, why did we even feckin’ come here again?” Kayla asks. “I honestly don’t remember.” She’s grinning.
She’s right. We’re here for a reason. And it wasn’t to beat on anyone. It wasn’t to work through my ridiculous issues. “We came for answers,” I say.
“Right.” Kayla nods, sheathes her sword. “So who do—”
“You!”
The single word cuts in. A lightning strike of accusation, rage, and humorless German inflection.
“We talk to Hermann,” I say to Kayla.
And then he is upon us.
“This… This…” He spits the word out, as if trying to clear it from the cloying mess of the air. One of his arms is still mangled from our last encounter with Friedrich here. He sweeps his good one around the space, trying to convey the enormity of the destruction. “You did this,” he manages through his sputtering rage.
“Yeah,” Kayla nods. “We were forty-nine heavily feckin’ armed Uhrwerkmänner who came in here and attacked you and set off a whole bunch of high-explosive bullshit. That was totally us.”
Wait, Kayla actually counted the number of combatants on one side? Or did she make that number up?
“We walked into the middle of this,” I try to say, while Hermann is still busy dealing with his rage issues. “We couldn’t abandon you. Of course we helped.”
I have no real idea if we helped or not, but it seems a good idea to suggest we did.
“I told you never to come back. Never.”
A crowd of Uhrwerkmänner are gathering about us now. I may have underestimated how unwelcome we’d be. Why did Lang have to build the bastards so big?
Kayla beckons to Hermann. “I’ve taken down bigger fecks than you. Want a feckin’ turn?”
Well that’s not helping…
I step between Kayla and Hermann. Wait until his attention is on me. All their attention.
I sweep my arm around, echo his movement. “This is why we’re here.”
“I—” Hermann starts, but I cut him off.
“Not to cause it. Because this is just the beginning. Friedrich needs to build the Uhrwerkgerät bigger. And he’s going to use you to do it. He’s not going to use his own people. He’s going to use you. He’s going to kill you. Before your minds can rot away. He’s going to come in and take you and make you part of his bomb. And he can call that living forever, or he can call it evolution, but you and I both know it by its real name: murder.”
I turn. A performer in the round, trying to address them all. “Look,” I say, “I know MI37 fucked up. I get that. But we were fighting for you when we did. And we haven’t stopped. We’re still going. Except we need your help. If we’re going to finish this fight, we’re going to need someone on our side. Friedrich’s forces are too big, and too much for us. We can’t even find them.”
This doesn’t exactly sound like me selling our expertise, I realize. Time to change tack.
“But you can,” I say. “It’s within your power. With us. Together. A whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. A gestalt. That’s a German concept, right? You get that. We could be that. Together we find him. Together we stop him.”
Hermann hulks before me. And I almost think he’s going to pulp me right there and then.
“So we can do what?” It’s another of the Uhrwerkmänner, not Hermann. Someone in the ring surrounding him and us. “Risk our lives so we can go mad and die?”
It’s a fair question, I suppose. Bit defeatist for my tastes.
“You were built to conquer this world,” I say. “To be the ultimate army. But you saw the hand that guided you was evil. And you stood up and refused to do simply as you were told. You chose to fight evil. You chose to matter.”
“We ran away,” says another voice. “We were hunted until we found a hiding spot they could not.”
Man, these guys really aren’t into the whole optimism thing at all.
“Look around you,” I say. Giant metallic corpses litter the room. “You fought back today. You won some of these fights.”
I decide not to push that point too hard. The ring of Uhrwerkmänner looks decidedly thinner than last time we were here. “You can beat these bastards. You can fulfill the promise of your rebellion against Lang.”
For a mercy, nobody takes the opportunity to tell me how useless they all are. I seize the moment, march toward one corpse, swing myself up to stand on its chest.
“You started this fight seventy years ago,” I say. “You thought it was over, but Friedrich’s here for round two.” I survey them all. “But you can finish him. You can end Lang’s poisonous legacy. You can prove you are… Hey, wait a minute, what’s that?”
OK, not my most rabble-rousing finish. Except maybe I just saw something more important than an army. Maybe I just saw the answer I came here for.
I stare closer. The way the Uhrwerkmänn is designed… It’s not exactly a utility belt, more a string of boxes and compartments at its waist. But jutting from one small metal box—it looks exactly like the desk ornament we rescued from Lang’s office in Summertown. A dull black oblong with a staggered grooves running down its side.
I bend, pluck it from the Uhrwerkmänn, oblivious to my audience. I stare at it. More than a desk ornament. A reality key. It unlocked a pocket universe. And is this the same as the one we found? It looks the same…
I jump down off the Uhrwerkmänn, hustle toward another corpse.
“Where are you going?” I hear Hermann spit from behind me. “Come back here.”
Funny, I could have sworn he was trying to get rid of me a moment ago. Anyway, I have bigger concerns than Hermann right now. What the hell is one of Friedrich’s men doing with a reality key? Is that how they’re getting about? Or hiding? Is that his secret?
I reach the next Uhrwerkmänn. There’s nothing at its waist. No compartments at all. Then I remember Hermann stowing Lang’s notebooks in his leg. Their storage compartments aren’t always in plain sight. I start banging panels while Hermann harangues me from a distance. He seems unsure if he should chase me out or demand I come back to him. A panel pops open. I reach into the compartment.
“So,” Kayla walks up to me, “is this the part where I realize you’ve lost your feckin’ mind, club you over the back of the head, and drag you off for the straight jacket and the little padded cell?”
I pull out a second reality key from the Uhrwerkmänn’s storage compartment.
“No,” I tell her, “this is the part where we start worrying.”