The Man Who Lives Down Here

They were staring down a fresh commander and its drones in the middle of the assembly hall, and they ran for it — the length of the lane toward the stairway at the centre of the room. Randy held the moment open and Flint filled the lane behind them with fog, and all five made the stairs. On the way, Biz saw himself leaning casually on the stair railing. The figure flicked a coin, caught it, gave him a wink, and walked down the steps ahead of him.

Below the hall the stairway bottomed out onto grating in a shaft that dropped a hundred and twenty feet, pipework sweating on every wall, the heat of the factory gone. In the middle of the shaft stood a column of frost-rimed glass reservoirs feeding supercooled fluid out into the rest of the building. A construct stood watch on the platform, overseeing three lesser drones carrying a pipe on the platform below. Randy took a running start and drop-kicked it off the edge. They watched it fall the whole way, hit the bottom, and get back up — worse for wear, but not out. They took the ladder straight down through the middle, ignoring the three constructs on the middle platforms, and felt the cold bite into their skin. Randy found knobs on the supercoolant feed pipes and shut one off, which made the rest of the descent easier.

The commander was waiting at the bottom, on a plate of riveted steel ninety feet long with a sheer drop into the dark on either side. It netted Worm before anyone's boots were off the ladder. Most of them fought it, and it went down; as it came apart, the pipe being carried overhead clanged onto the steel platform — dropping the commander stops its subordinates dead. While that fight was on, Aelion went ahead alone. Dozens of rails overhead whipped half-built automata across the platform on hooked chains, with no cover and no pattern to read, and he took a hit that nearly put him over the edge. Biz and Flint were nearly knocked off it too. Worm crossed safely, and Randy went hand over hand along the outside edge, under the chains.

Past the steel platform Aelion found a tunnel leading to a large fan. He was well ahead of the others by then, and located a hatch holding a smaller fan and a gearbox — the thing driving the big one — submerged in a shallow pool of oil. He stepped through the air down the hatch alone, worked out where the gearbox was weakest, and spent a good long while punching it with his bare hands. By the time the rest caught up, Biz had pried a rusted wall plate loose and fed it into the smaller turbine below the hatch, which chewed it up and stalled. That tripped a failsafe, and the big fan reversed and began pulling air the other way — which let Worm climb down and, with Aelion's help, land a couple of well-placed strikes on the gearbox. The fan finally slowed to a standstill.

Beyond it they entered the next hall, and found a seawater main running its length under the floor grating with four drum-shaped manifolds standing along it, each with a window in its belly. In the first drum the water was clean — real seawater, drawn up from below. By the fourth it was the exact brown, rainbow-sheened filth they had waded through on the tide-flats on the way up. Black concentrate piped in from above and cut into clean seawater.

They shut the crown valves, and the water in the drums began to clear within seconds. But the concentrate kept coming from upstream with nowhere to go. Pressure climbed, the relief valves lifted, and black gas poured out of them into the hall while the doors at both ends began swinging shut with all five of them inside. They put the valves straight back the way they had been, the locks let go, and they were through before the gas did any real harm.

Down a short flight of stairs off a landing they found a service void about fifteen feet across, with a hooded lamp still burning in it — and, curiously, a bedroll and a workbench littered with tools and parts. They shut the door and decided it was as good a place as any to settle in and recover, the day's hike and fights and long descent having pushed them to exhaustion.

Within a few minutes there was a knocking at the door. A small, wiry, filthy man came in, adorned in scraps of hammered plate, a bandolier of vials at his belt, and a construct's arm fitted with a buzzsaw. He was deeply unhappy about the intrusion, and more than a little unstable. Aelion read his mind while he shouted: under the panic, the thought was are they also here for the conductor — and behind that, or are they actually here to save me, and good thing I took some of the pages out of my notes.

Aelion said the word conductor out loud, and the man stopped mid-sentence. Then Biz charmed him, and out it all came, friendly as anything. His name is Riml. He came here to retrieve the Conductor: a construct of the elder age, thousands of years old, powerful enough to command every other machine in the factory — which is why the place keeps working with nobody living in it. It is behind the last door in the lowest part of the factory, the one door he has never been able to reach, with an automaton bigger than anything they had fought standing in front of it. "A tinkerer at heart," he called himself: he hears about powerful old work and he wants to take it apart and see how it ticks. And if the Conductor comes out of there, he said, all of this stops.

Once the charm wore off he understood what had been done to his head, and grabbed a vial and threw it — badly, wide of everyone. They took him without killing him, stripped the vials off his belt, took the saw-arm, and tied him. Randy levelled with him and talked him down. They untied him and shared out rations. Worm and Riml did knife tricks. He looked over Flint's sickle and said there was nothing mechanical about it at all, that he would be about as much use to it as a brick wall, but that it was plainly magic and not the run-of-the-mill sort. He told Flint to stop guessing and attune to it. Flint did, over the rest, and the blade finally opened to him: the Moon Sickle, a rare druidic focus that lends its strength to healing.

Riml brewed them something to help them sleep, and they took a long rest in his den, the door shut and the lamp burning low over the bench.