Mark Newton - The Broken Isles

The most difficult thing to prise open was the head. The gang tried all sorts of tools, but eventually used relics to burn open one side. When they managed to get it open, they stood back in disbelief: there was hair-thin copper wiring and dozens of small, metallic square plates with grid-like patterns etched into and raised up from the surface. There were objects that looked like gemstones, which they could not identify, and which were imbedded in a jelly-like substance that burned through their clothing yet not their skin. It was both organic and mechanical, with no clearly defined facial structure whatsoever.

The Okun, the most hideous and wonderful thing they had ever seen, was now reduced to hundreds of fragments. For days at a time, each of the group set about trying to establish whether or not anything could be gleaned from these pieces. They took detailed sketches of the way things slotted together, listed potential materials that these might have been made from, and how certain parts reacted to substances from their own world. But they were ultimately dumbfounded by the intricacies of its body. It was, quite simply, too much for them to understand.

All except the shell.

The shell was not all that distant from the chitinous exoskeletons found throughout the Archipelago, but this seemed more tactile, flexible and impenetrable. They decided they wanted to re-create it and Lim, after Jeza aided him, began to use a particularly large relic they had discovered to cast crude moulds to regenerate certain sections.

Reflecting on the process, Jeza now realized she’d loved working with Lim. He was so passionate and cared deeply about what she thought, what she felt. He encouraged her line of thought as much as his own and he trusted her opinions and did not dismiss one of her suggestions, no matter how wild it was. He was sensitive and she was intoxicated by his Varltung accent, and his broad face. Perhaps, looking back as she did now, she realized she had possessed deep feelings for him. He was special in a way no man had ever been. Such feelings weren’t comparable to those she had for Diggsy, of course — that was based on raw passion. Lim never seemed interested in any of that kind of stuff, never mentioned girls or sex. Lim’s energy was funnelled entirely into his research. He loved discovery. She loved him for being ever elusive. Despite her scientific ways, she could never quite work Lim out.

Why did I never say anything at the time?

In the afternoon sunlight, which spilled through a large circular window on the top floor of Factory 54, the group took the Okun’s dark, glossy exoskeleton out of storage and laid it out across the workbench.

First they separated it into several large sections, sifted through the pieces, deciding which section to concentrate on, before settling upon one of the breastplates.

‘It has to be this,’ Jeza said. ‘It’ll sit over people’s most vital areas. .’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Coren smirked, grabbing his crotch as if to hammer the point home.

‘Idiot,’ Jeza sighed. Then, to the others, ‘It’ll sit over the major organs: the heart, the lungs, the parts that can’t be repaired on the battlefield.’

Jeza lit several lanterns while Coren and Diggsy began to assemble the relics and tools. She fetched the notebooks from Lim’s unused room and, for the next hour, they began to work through pages and pages of his detailed instructions, most of them simply on how to operate the relics.

‘You OK?’ Diggsy asked. ‘You look pretty upset.’

‘I’m just concentrating,’ she replied. Had Lim’s death really affected her this much? It was a strange process, following his words; it was like having him there and alive once again, but he was dead — she had to keep reminding herself. I have to let him go.

Two relics the size of industrial equipment were dragged to sit either side of the breastplate specimen. The relics were called Haldorors , ‘true of word’ devices — they translated materials and retranslated them — or, in some cases, replicated them, in whatever shape or form was desired by the person setting the relics. The units, almost as tall as Jeza, were crafted from copper and silver, and possessed intricate ancient lettering that none of them had ever seen in a book, let alone understood.

Jeza made tweaks to the devices according to Lim’s notes on other creatures, moving the second of them about two armspans further down the workbench, so they were no longer opposite each other. She altered the frequencies and the measurements on the sixteen extra dials they had built into it, mainly by trial and error.

The relic was activated by placing a brass cylinder the size of her arm into the slot at the back, a process that was not immune to Coren’s crude innuendo. Diggsy switched on the second device and they all watched as a web of purple light spread out across the exoskeleton and hovered in the air above. The little crackles of energy never ceased to impress her; they signified ancient knowledge being reused, a line that spanned tens of thousands of years. No one spoke during the process, they were too focused.

Exactly as Lim’s theory described, a second replica of the breastplate began to fade into existence alongside. It finally materialized whole, in its own separate web of purple light, and when they were quite sure the process had finished, Jeza shut off one device, Diggsy the other, and soon all that was left was a dull hum, the faint smell of charred leather and a little smoke as if someone had blown out a match.

Jeza and Coren moved over to the cloned piece and inspected it, waiting for the thin, pale-blue smoke to dissipate. Coren prodded it, first with a metal rod to see if it was genuine, if it was physically there and not some illusion; then when he was more confident, he jabbed it with his finger. ‘Still warm,’ he said, and waited a moment longer while Diggsy and Pilli dragged the two Haldorors out of the way and against the wall.

Eventually, Coren picked up the original breastplate in one hand and the newly ‘translated’ one in his other. The others watched him, waiting. He moved them this way and that and wafted them around in the air, smiling. ‘Same light weight, same feel.’

‘Guess Lim’s tricks never fail to work,’ Diggsy said.

‘Is this what we want to show the military?’ Coren asked. He placed the breastplates back down while everyone turned to Jeza. They waited for her to speak, a new phenomenon for her, and she had to admit not entirely unpleasant.

‘We need to move our perceived roles on from spurious cultists — and in fact a bit of a motley crew to boot — to something more professional and businesslike. To most laymen, we might as well be casting runes or muttering dark spells.’

‘Go on. .’ Diggsy urged.

‘Now we know we can do this,’ she continued, ‘we should try to take things further, to show them what we think a more complete piece of soldier’s armour might look like. I think we should try our best to show the finished item. First we write to that albino commander. Get him here, see if he’s interested in the concept. Now’s the time. Later when we have refined this and he sees what we can sell him, he’ll have no trouble opening the Empire’s coffers.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ Coren said, and slapped her on the back.

Diggsy gave her a warm smile and placed his arm around her in that casual, cool way of his, and she couldn’t help but notice Pilli turning away now to fiddle with something on the workbench.

She was back in Villjamur, back with Rika.

The warm sunlight falling through her opulent curtains was enough to tell her that this wasn’t quite real, though she didn’t know why. Bright coloured wall hangings and bed sheets, all the books she could wish for, trinkets and toys littered the floor. Everything seemed so pristine. Too pristine. As ever, there was frantic activity outside their bedroom door, which she took to be something to do with her father or his entourage.