LITMIR.BIZ

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Mechanism was over for the day. Soup and rest awaited them. The horror of their situation had long since dulled their senses. In the underground stabling, where humans and animals were indifferently herded together, the myrmidons of the Fleet Ones would bring round their rations. Then they could sleep.

      As for the weekly levy of blood to be paid while they slept … even that nightmare had become mere routine.

      So they negotiated the path through the bloodthirsty-plants and came with some relief to the stoma gaping at the base of the Bastion, waiting to swallow them. The guardian alighted, tucked away his wings, and directed them through the aperture. Hot and foetid air came up to meet them like a diseased breath.

      The concretion into which they disappeared rose high into the saffron-tinted atmosphere, dominating the landscape in which it stood. It resembled a huge anthill. No conceptions of symmetry or elegance of any kind had entered the limited minds of its architects. It had reared itself upwards on a random basis. Its highest central point resembled a rounded tower, reinforcing the impression that the whole structure was a kind of brute phallus which had thrust its way through the body of the planet.

      Here and there on the flanks of the Bastion, side features obtruded. Some resembled malformed limbs. Some twisted upwards, or sideways. Some turned down and burrowed again into the ravaged soil, serving as buttresses to the main structure.

      The main portions of the Bastion lay below ground, in its unending warrens, stables, and crypts. The structure above ground was blind. Not a window showed. The Fleet Ones were no friends of light.

      Yet on higher levels orifices showed, crudely shaped. Much coming and going was in evidence at these vents. Here the Fleet Ones could conveniently launch themselves into flight: as they had done at the beginning of time, so now at its end.

      Only the orifice at the top of the pile, larger than all the others, was free of sinister traffic. It was reserved for the Prince of Darkness himself, Lord Dracula. This was his castle. He would launch himself from this great height whenever he was about to go on a mission into the world – as even now he was preparing to do.

      As the shift of six began its winding descent into underground levels, to rest in the joyless inanition of slaves, four other men of different calibre were preparing to leave the Mechanism.

      These four, in luckier days, had been scientists. Captive, they remained free of shackles, so that they could move without impediment in the building. The genetically non-scientific species who held them in captivity had abducted them from various epochs of past history. They were guarded. But because they were necessary for the maintenance of the Mechanism, their well-being within the Bastion was assured. They merely had to work until they died.

      The leader of the quartet came down from the observatory, checking the time on his watch.

      This leader, elected by common consent, was a tall man in his late thirties. The Fleet Ones had captured him from the Obsidianal Century. His brilliant mind and indomitable spirit were such that others took courage from him. Someone once claimed that his brain represented the flowering of the sapient Homo sapiens. The plan about to be transformed from theory to action was a product of his thought.

      ‘We have two minutes to go, friends,’ he said now, as they were closing down their instruments.

      The Mechanism – ignorantly so called by the Fleet Ones – was a combined solar observatory and power house. All space observatories had long been destroyed by the deteriorating sun.

      It was the power function which was all important. From the platforms of the Mechanism, shelving out like giant fungi, the solar satellites were controlled which drained the energies of the sun. These energies were redirected to meet the needs of the Fleet Ones. And in particular the needs of the Fleet Ones’ single innovatory form of transportation.

      The scientists were forced to work for their hated enemies. They ran everything as inefficiently as possible. Because the Mechanism was lighted brilliantly to allow the humans to work, the Fleet Ones would not enter. They posted their guardians outside, continually circling the immense structure.

      ‘Delay here,’ said the leader, sharply. The four of them were in the foyer, preparing to go off shift and be returned to the Bastion. He glanced again at his watch.

      ‘According to our predictions, there’s now a minute to go.’

      Beyond the glass doors, they could see the familiar tarnished landscape like a furrowed brow. In the distance, failed hills, shattered river beds, all lost in an origami of light and shade. Nearer at hand, the prodigious thrust of the Bastion, circled by leathery fliers. As a sudden stormy wind buffeted them, the fliers resembled dead leaves blowing at autumn’s call. Shunning the light, they had no knowledge of the phenomenon approaching from space.

      Just outside the doors, fluttering like a bat, the lead guardian on duty came down to an unsteady landing. He braced himself against the wind.

      Lifting a hand to shield his brow, he stared in at the scientists, his red eyes set amid the dark skin and fur of the sharp-fanged visage. He beckoned to them.

      They made some pretence of moving towards the doors, heading instead for a metal reception counter.

      Thirty seconds to go.

      The lower western sky was filled with a sun like an enormous blossom. It was the flower which had already destroyed all the flowers of Earth. Imperfectly round, its crimson heart crackled with stamens of lightning. The solar wind blew its malevolent pollens about the planets. Round it orbiced the four solar stations which were leaching it of its energies, sucking them down into the subterranean storehouses of the Mechanism. On the face of this great helium-burner moved vortices which could swallow worlds. They showed like rashes of a disease, as if they worked at the débridement of an immense bloated organ.

      In the midst of this solar turmoil – as those in the observatory had discovered – a magnesium-white eruption flowered.

      ‘Now,’ cried the leader. The thirty seconds were up.

      They flung themselves down on the floor behind the metal barrier, burying their heads in their arms, closing their eyes.

      Precisely on the time they had estimated, the shell flash ejected from the sun. It illuminated the world with floods of light and fury. Screaming wind followed it in a shock wave, travelling along down the throat of the system until, many hours later, it punched itself out beyond the heliopause and far into outer space. As it radiated outwards, it licked with its scorching tongue much of the atmosphere from the vulnerable worlds in its path.

      Only the four scientists were prepared for the event.

      They lay behind their shelter while the world smouldered outside. Their guardian had fallen like a cinder.

      They rose cautiously at last. They stood. They stared at each other, stared at the blackened landscape outside, where the Bastion remained intact. Then, according to plan, they headed for the stairs leading to the upper floors.

      Their hair sparkled and sang as they moved. Electrostatic action in the tormented air rendered the elevators inoperative.

      Oxygen was scarce. Yet they forced themselves on, knowing they must act now, while the Fleet Ones were stunned.

      Through waves of heat they climbed, dragging the vitiated air into their lungs. On one landing they collected a wing from a store cupboard, on another landing another wing. Sections of body structure, improvised from dismantled parts of the Mechanism, were also gathered as they climbed. By the time they reached the observatory on the highest level, they needed merely to secure the various parts together and they had a glider large enough to carry a man.

      The landscape they surveyed was covered in fast-moving smoke. The pall washed against the two edifices of Bastion and Mechanism like a spring tide.

      One detail they did observe. The bloodthirst-plants were cautiously poking their muzzles from the ground again. They were intelligent enough, yet part of nature enough, to sense when the shell flash was coming, and to retreat underground from it. But the men wasted little time in observing the phenomenon.

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