Ironheart (25 page)

‘What do you believe this artefact to be, Mr Bentley?’ said Calculus. ‘You make it sound as though it was alive.’

Bentley nodded thoughtfully. ‘The artefact protects us,’ he said. ‘It has the power to determine whether we live or die. And, yes, I do believe it is alive and possibly even
intelligent.’

The words stirred a memory in India. ‘Nentu’s Elder Spirit?’ she whispered.

Bentley nodded. ‘Perhaps.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Bulldog, ‘but you’ve lost me entirely. What is an Elder Spirit when it’s at home with its feet up?’

‘Something that mad old crone was gibbering on about in the tent,’ supplied Clench. ‘No idea what she meant.’

Bentley stood up abruptly. ‘There’s no way to explain this without sounding like an utter lunatic, so the best thing is if I show you. But brace yourselves for what you’re
going to see because nothing will ever seem quite the same again.’

He led them down a flight of concrete stairs to a corroded metal door. The space beyond was the deepest black, making them all hesitate on the threshold. Bentley fumbled for a
switch and a series of overhead floodlights clanked on in sequence.

‘Holy mother of all riggers!’ said Bulldog. ‘Would you look at the size of this place?’

They stepped on to a metal gallery that ran around a cathedral of solid rock. The high roof was supported by natural stone columns and India guessed her entire village could have fitted
comfortably inside the space. The chamber was dominated by an enormous copper cauldron. The rim stood twenty feet high and two hundred feet wide. At evenly spaced points around the rim, pillars
made of the same metal rose towards the roof, curving and tapering gracefully like the petals of a vast copper tulip.

‘What is that thing?’ said Verity. ‘And who built it?’

‘It doesn’t look like it was built at all,’ said Bulldog. ‘It looks like it grew here.’

There wasn’t a hint of a join or a weld anywhere. The metal at the base appeared fused to the rock.

They peered over the lip of the cauldron, which sloped down to a yawning hole at the centre. Bentley picked up a stone and tossed it into the bowl. It rolled down the metal surface and dropped
into the hole. They strained their ears for a sound.

‘Didn’t hear it hit the bottom,’ said Clench, using the sort of voice people usually reserve for church.

‘That’s because it’s still falling,’ said Bentley, ‘and it will be for several hours yet.’ He leaned back on the railings. ‘When I first came down here
and saw this thing I was desperate to know what it was. I searched the offices for clues. That was when I found their records.’

‘Whose records?’ said India.

Bentley shrugged. ‘They were either the government or the military but they were very secretive about their work. All I know for certain is what I read in the files. About two hundred
years ago a massive explosion completely devastated this entire region. Eyewitnesses said they saw a huge fireball. It caused a blast which flattened the trees for twenty miles in every direction.
They thought it was a meteorite or an asteroid so they sent a scientific expedition out here to search for it. The team spent six months searching and found no trace of a meteorite or a crater
anywhere. But what they did discover was this chamber and the artefact, right here under the lake.’

Verity and India exchanged baffled glances.

‘Their first thought was that it was some kind of weapon that had been put here by their enemies. But when they examined it more closely they got their first surprise.’ He looked at
the cauldron. ‘What you see here is just the tip of it,’ he said slowly. ‘It goes down nearly a thousand miles.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Clench. ‘Nothing could go down that far.’

‘I hate to agree with Archie about anything,’ said Bulldog, ‘but that’s a quarter of the way to the centre of the Earth. I’ve been a rigger all my life and
nobody’s ever made a hole that deep.’

‘No one in living memory,’ said Bentley. ‘Which leads me to their second surprise. When they ran more tests, they found the artefact was over twelve thousand years
old!’

‘How is that possible – humans were still living in caves then,’ said Verity. ‘Who is supposed to have built it?’

‘They asked themselves the same question,’ said Bentley, ‘so they looked for anything that would give them a clue. They discovered that this cauldron tapped into the
Earth’s magnetic energy field and that it had the potential to generate more electricity than all the world’s cities put together. After that they started to call it
the
machine.
But it was still a complete mystery as to who had built it or what it was for.’

‘Then what?’ said India eagerly. ‘What did they find out?’

‘Nothing,’ said Bentley. ‘Over a hundred scientists came and went, carrying out thousands of tests. But nobody could say for certain what the machine was for or what it did.
The only thing that did happen was that nearly everyone who worked here reported an unpleasant sensation of being watched all the time.’

India cast an involuntary look over her shoulder.

‘After a while it got so bad that no one wanted to stay here. So they finally locked up this room and forgot all about it. Later on, when the Great Rains started, they used the caverns for
storage. The records got patchy after that. The Hunger Wars started and governments began to collapse. At some point during the enduring chaos, Ironheart was abandoned completely. I began to
develop a theory. I thought that the machine and the asteroid might be connected somehow. Then it struck me.’ He leaned towards them, his eyes gleaming. ‘The expedition that first came
here never found any trace of the actual asteroid. No craters, no fragments of rock, nothing!’

‘Well, meteorites don’t just disappear,’ said Clench. ‘It must have gone somewhere.’

‘There was only one explanation that fitted the facts,’ he said. ‘The reason they couldn’t find the asteroid was that it never reached the Earth. Before it could collide
with the planet, this machine blasted it out of the sky – hence the explosion.’

Everyone began to talk at once.

‘You can’t shoot down an asteroid,’ said Verity. ‘They’re too fast.’

‘I know it sounds impossible,’ said Bentley, ‘but the facts back up my theory. This machine detected an asteroid while it was still in deep space and destroyed it before it
could hit the Earth. Somehow the shamans in the region knew it was coming and led their people to safety. Incredible as it sounds, this is a machine designed to protect the Earth, and after twelve
thousand years it’s
still working
!

An eerie feeling stole over India as she listened to her father’s story. She thought of the empty tents by the frozen lake, the absence of animals in the forest, and the earth tremors and
shooting stars that had become more and more frequent on their journey. ‘It’s starting again, isn’t it?’ she whispered. ‘That’s what Nentu was trying to tell us.
The machine, the thing she called the Elder Spirit, has detected another asteroid.’

‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ said Bentley. ‘Something is shifting underground, causing the earthquakes. Not to mention –’ he dropped his voice –
‘the cauldron storms.’

‘What’s a cauldron storm?’ said Clench, looking nervously at the machine.

‘It’s a term I came up with. Some sort of electrical energy storm that moves across the surface of the metal. The first time I saw one I made the mistake of trying to touch it and I
got this for my trouble.’

He rolled up his sleeve and showed them an angry red scar that ran from his wrist to his elbow. India winced. ‘It’s always the same: first the earth tremors and then the cauldron
storm. It scares the hell out of me every time. The first time was after I’d been here for eight months, then it happened again four months later and then eight weeks after that.’

‘Half the elapsed time between each event,’ said Calculus.

‘It’s a countdown,’ said India in a hushed voice.

‘Exactly,’ said Bentley. ‘I think it’s measuring the time until the asteroid arrives. What’s more, the storms are only a few hours apart now. I think the asteroid
must be quite close.’

There was a stunned silence as they absorbed the implications of his words.

‘Well, what’s going to happen then?’ said Bulldog. ‘Is the machine going to shoot it down?’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ said Bentley, ‘but it is capable of producing an enormous amount of energy. If it did fire, it would probably release enough radiation to
vaporize everything in Ironheart.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘The gardens, the seed vaults, everything would be lost.’

‘But not the warheads,’ said India. ‘Stone will have taken them. They’ll be the only thing that gets saved.’

‘There’s nothing we can do about that now,’ said Verity. ‘How long do we have before the asteroid arrives?’

‘Nentu said a “bringer-of-death” called Nibiru was going to come. She must have been talking about the asteroid. If she was right, then we have less than a day left.’

Bentley’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Good grief! I had no idea it would be here so soon.’ He looked around anxiously. ‘I must collect my seeds and then we have to leave
immediately, before the machine fires.’ A faint tremor ran through the cavern and a light fall of dust and stones descended from the roof. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you how to
get out.’

He led them around the outside of the chamber to a ventilation grille, which he pulled away to reveal a broad tunnel bored into the rock. There was a steady trickle of water running from it.

‘These tunnels drain the meltwater from the lake in the summer,’ he said. ‘It’s how I get in and out when I go hunting. They come out on the far side of the lake and I
have a snow wagon parked up in the old boat shed.’

Verity crouched down and shone the torch into the narrow opening. ‘It’s a bit tight in there,’ she said, ‘but if we leave now we should have plenty of time to get to the
lake and then make some distance before the machine goes off. Let’s collect everything together and get moving.’

‘Wait,’ said Calculus. ‘I am picking up some strange readings from the machine. I think one of Mr Bentley’s cauldron storms may be starting.’

They turned to look but nothing seemed to have changed.

‘We’re wasting time here,’ said Clench, ‘I say we—’

He stopped short.

A sound like distant thunder rumbled around the chamber and the gallery began to sway. India gripped one of the handrails for support as the floodlights crackled and dimmed.

‘It’s starting again!’ shouted Bentley. ‘Take cover and whatever you do, don’t go anywhere near it!’

The air shimmered with a blue haze as a hot breeze sprang up from the cauldron. Waves of electrical energy shivered across the surface of the metal and every few moments a bolt
of white lightning arced across to the steel gantry.

‘How long does it do this for, Mr Bentley?’ said Calculus, raising his voice over the din.

‘About half an hour usually,’ he shouted back. ‘We’ll be all right as long as we stay out of the way.’

‘Them lightning bolts look like some kind of defence mechanism,’ said Sid, regarding the cauldron warily.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Calculus. ‘I can detect a signal within the electrical field. It’s a repeating pattern that resembles some computer authentication
protocols.’

‘What does that mean in English?’ shouted India.

‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that it may be waiting for someone to give it instructions.’

‘It’s been here for thousands of years,’ said Bulldog. ‘No one ever had to tell it what to do before.’

‘Perhaps they did,’ said India. ‘Nentu said the job of the soul voyagers was to speak to the mountain spirit. She said they’d been doing it for a hundred generations.
Maybe the shamans have to actively ask the machine for help.’

‘That’s what I mean to find out,’ said Calculus. ‘If I can replicate the same signal it might recognize me as a friend. I might be able to initiate some sort of log-on
procedure.’

‘It might also decide to vaporize you on the spot,’ said Verity. ‘Forget it, Calc! It’s too risky.’