“Okay ... lef s go!”
At the sound of Aidan’s voice they moved into action; as efficient as machines, each knowing what part he had to play.
It took less than five seconds for them to form up inside, Ju Dun, as pole man, taking his position at the front Ten seconds later the doors hissed shut behind them.
The outer doors slammed shut, massive bolts falling into place, and then the inner hatch popped as the explosive hinges were fired. Even as the circular metal plate flew outward, so Ju Dun threw himself through the gap and rolled, opening up with his automatic.
Less than a second later and Johann was through after him, Benoit almost bundling him out of the way as he too pushed through. All three were on the other side now, the sound of their gunfire deafening.
Daniel was next.
He slid through backwards then spun about, clicking the safety off his gun. Ju Dun was two paces out, kneeling, Johann and Benoit formed up at his shoulders, firing with a machine-like efficiency at anything that moved. The Entrance Gate was at the highest point in Eden. From where the team emerged they had a panoramic view of the terrain. To the right was the ruined village, its walls shot away over the years, the remaining brickwork heavily pocked; to the left a sharply descending slope and, just beyond it, the river. Beyond that was woodland, rising to low hills in the near distance, but the eye barely noticed them: what it saw was a flickering cloud of mechanoid hostility, a host of winged and clawed creatures - cycloids and mechanopods, scarabs and homers, assassin bugs and tinflies, screw-whips and stingers. The unheard signal drew them to the Gate like a scent, triggering the preprogrammed malevolence within them.
Daniel felt the adrenaline rush hit him as he took in the sight. The sky in front of him was dark with insect life, yet nothing was getting closer than ten metres. Shattered fragments littered the ground on every side. Twenty metres up, something small and black stopped fluttering and fell like a dropped stone, its jet-black facets glinting as it turned. Ju Dun was directly beneath it Daniel blasted it into a million pieces then turned, shooting the wing off a crab-beetle that was poised to leap from a wall just to Johann’s left Leon was through now, and Slaven. They took their places in the deadly line, their guns blasting away, filling the air in front of them with splintering forms.
Daniel, his back to the wall, fired over their heads, lobbing grenades into the seething mass of dark, crawling things that covered the ground just beyond the front wave.
Here were things that hopped and chattered, things that whirred and buzzed; here were a thousand different things that crawled and jumped and clicked with menace, and all much larger than life and ten times as deadly as the originals on which they had been so carefully modelled.
And whatever moved, they blasted, not letting anything get within ten metres of where they crouched, the circle of the hatch at their backs. Christian was through and then, finally, Aidan. And as the eighth gun began to bear on the swarm, so they began to make progress, the numbers of their assailants steadily diminishing.
Daniel was conscious of the movement all about him, of bodies jerking and turning, as target after target was picked out, such that the team seemed a single creature with eight deadly snouts that spat fire and steel, not a single enemy drone getting through.
And then, as suddenly as it began, it ended, the swarm withdrawing with a desultory buzz and whine.
Daniel looked about him, seeing through the visors of their combat helmets the elation on every face. But Aidan knew that such respite was brief. “Come on!” he yelled into his lip-mike, his voice resounding in their helmets, “lef s get moving!”
At once the team moved on, keeping close together, tightly organised and in perfect step, like a machine with sixteen legs and sixteen arms, heading down the slope towards the river, the black wall receding behind them as they began to make the crossing.
There had once been a war, many years before, between the Man and his enemy, Lee Wan, the King of the Han. From his bases in the south, the Man had struggled to liberate the north from the Tang’s tyrannical grip. The main thrust of that lengthy War had been fought out in a great trench between the two great cities, a long, narrow zone that was known only as The Rift, a place so inimical to mankind that a new form of life had evolved, a whole host of artificial life-forms dedicated not to their own propagation and survival, but to the destruction of all other living forms.
Evolved, men said, yet in truth these forms were not a genuine part of the great evolutionary tide; they were more a breaking of the great chain, a perverse twisting to breaking point of that age-old process. A reversal. And as they became more complex and more subtle, so - though they mimicked evolution’s drive to betterment and the fulfilment of some vague, far-future goal - they grew closer to the great Nullity from which they derived their being. Of this the boys knew little, other than what they had been told by the education officers back in the training camp. Only Daniel, intrigued by what he had seen in Eden, had taken the trouble to seek out Commandant Dublanc and ask why such things were and how they had come about. That query had produced no answers - only a long stay in the isolation cells. It was not, after all, the boys’ place to question, only to act upon instruction. They were soldiers, not scholars. What they needed to know they would be told, and nothing more.
Looking down at the great bank of screens, Dublanc saw how Daniel turned and looked back at the Gate, a long, thoughtful stare, his dark eyes taking in everything.
“Close on his eyes.”
The boy’s head grew, filling the screens until, from the shadows of his face, only the eyes shone out, massive, each sea-green eye spread out over nine screens.
It was like staring straight into his head. One could almost see what he was thinking.
“Do you think he knows?” one of them asked, turning from his desk to look up at Dublanc.
“Not yet,” Dublanc answered.
Yes, but he tviH, he thought, remembering Daniel’s persistence. That spell in isolation hadn’t cured him - he had still wanted to know. And finally - faced with the choice of indulging Daniel’s curiosity or doing away with the boy altogether - he had given him access to the camp library, such as it was. Yet if the boy thought he’d find all the answers there, he must have been disappointed, because these days no one knew the answers, least of all the scribes who had tampered with the ancient books.
The past was one huge fiction. And the future?
Dublanc turned in his seat, looking across at the map of Eden that glowed in the
shadows to his left
Inside the gates of Eden there was no future, only the endless present
“Leon, go left and come out behind the wall! Benoit, cover his back!” Aidan spoke urgently into his lip-mike, his voice sounding clearly inside their helmets as they crouched in the narrow road that ran through the ruined village. As he spoke, his instructions were punctuated by concussive thuds and bright laser flashes as one or other of the team fired off a gun, responding to the buzzing whine of some flickering, flashing attack. “Joh, Christian, take anchor. Slaven, you go in first Ju Dun and Daniel will back you up. Now go!”
At once the team moved into action, Benoif s flamer opening up on a coppice just to Leon’s left as he ran, toasting a group of three metamoths even as they launched themselves, their tiny egg-like bombs sparking explosively. Slaven had the worst job. At the centre of the village was a well, at the foot of which was an energy-tap. There were hundreds of them, scattered throughout the Garden, and the team could use the taps to recharge their weapons, but each taphad to be fought for, for they were also the main source of energy for the countless mechanoids that populated Eden.