Firestorm Book 2: Realm of Violence

Chapter 1: In the Afterglow

John Fulgar eased himself into the velo's cockpit and glanced back at the Robotics Lab. He knew he was being watched. It was ten years since the outbreak of war; ten years that they had been working to get ahead of what they all knew was coming. Since the last machine had vanished from Dis in 1881 there had been nothing. But another was coming. Sooner or later, it was coming.

Everyone was being watched these days. Spy balloons hung along the city wall and the Cerberites ruled the streets. It was how G4 liked to run things. They didn't appreciate surprises. And if G4 disliked surprises, Fulgar liked them even less. He had made a living by staying one step ahead of his paymasters. Every night he downloaded the files from the Time Project and smuggled them out with his legitimate robotics work. No one in Dis knew more about the machines than he did. It was how he liked the run things.

He slid the canopy closed above his head and pressed the starter. The electric motor purred into life. With the gentlest of pressure on the throttle the machine crept across empty vehicle park.

With a quick glance between the buildings, he pushed the stick forward and the velo's rear wheel span, leaving a slick of rubber behind it. The stabilisers retracted and he leaned into the corner at the edge of the compound. At the last moment he pressed a button on the dash and the razor-wire gate began to open. Full throttle: the motor sang like a cicada. He reached the gate just as it was wide enough to take the velo and he burst through onto the empty street beyond.

There was no need to check for other traffic; these days there was no other traffic. John Fulgar owned one of only three working velos in this ravaged and broken city.

He turned on to Acheron Avenue and saw a column of Cerberites in the distance. Whatever his relationship with the drones, they still had their orders. If he ran into them, they would stop him. He would then have the tedious job of showing his government pass and explaining where he was going. If he was unlucky and the drones had been issued with a new DOMA, he could lose the velo. Laws changed daily, without notice and without sense. The Council were clamping down on the use of technology again. If they decided the velo was no longer part of their greater plan, it would be confiscated. Even if the DOMA was reversed tomorrow it could take him months to get it back.

He did a quick recalculation. If he took 4th Street, past the new Council Centre to 1st, he could get around the Cerberites. It would take him close to the Citadel, but he figured it was worth the risk.

Barely slowing the velo from sixty miles an hour, he cut across the wide forecourt of a shop on the junction of 4th and headed towards the Ice Palace. He was keen to avoid the two densely populated ghettos that bordered this street six blocks apart on either side of his position. He bounced across an abandoned parking lot and onto 1st. From here it was a straight run until he met the coast road and the run down to his home in Middlesea. If he could get past the cooling towers.

Fulgar had chosen to live as far away from the Dis Robotics Lab as possible. It was safer on the south east coast, away from the machines he worked on by day, and the kind of attention they often got from the rulers of this place. It also gave him an opportunity to drive, hard and fast, through the traffic-free streets twice a day. He'd lobbied hard to get himself a vehicle, and he was going to get the best possible use out of it. With no laws left to hinder him, even riding through the fiery street that ran along the front of the Citadel could be fun.

Eight huge pipes spewed what appeared from a distance to be meteorites out into the moat at the foot of the Citadel's walls. What was coming out of them was actually burning water, vented from the nuclear-powered chillers built to lower the temperature inside the building to near absolute zero. Fulgar was lucky with his timing. Once an hour the pipes also dumped corroded and radioactive debris as the power plant's internal workings were cleaned to prevent clogging. It did not pay to get too close to that stuff.