Firestorm 2: Realm of Violence

By Alan Porter

Three months after escaping the horror of Dis, David and Sarah must return, this time into the heart of the fortress city itself. They arrive on the city wall one hundred years earlier than their previous visit.
With them they carry a note, a simple instruction, on which their lives and the lives of the inhabitants of Levantium depend.
But can they find the man who must receive the note, and is their very presence in the city changing a future they have already experienced?
'Realm of Violence' if the long-awaited sequel to the cult bestseller 'Descent'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eyelevel Books
• Release date: Jun 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781902528458

Book preview

Chapter One

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.

Ahead on 1st, clouds of steam obscured the view. Even four hundred yards from the first of the pipes the road was badly pock-marked. The velo jumped and bucked through potholes burned in the concrete by stray drops of water. Fulgar flicked the cabin vents closed to keep out the dry acrid smell of burning earth and the sweeter smell of human flesh. He turned up the tiny onboard reactor’s power to full and felt an extra surge of power. He had about ten seconds of this much red-line thrust before the engine’s power plant would go critical and he too would become just another hole in the road.

He aimed straight at the cloud of steam. The road here was little more than rutted dust, melted here and there into a slick glass-like surface that could shred the vehicle’s tyres at this speed. His visibility dropped to zero as he passed the first of the pipes. The only light now was the ethereal glow of flames that clung to the water’s surface before exploding on the ground. He pressed on, close to a hundred miles an hour now. The tyres sang a plaintive song beneath him.

He clipped something with the velo’s left panel, but out here it would not be anything worth stopping for. Things did live on the burning sands, but they could not be killed. They were already well past that.

Then, as suddenly as he had entered it, he burst out of the cloud and back into clear evening light. He let out a breath and turned the wick down on the reactor. The velo slowed to sixty and he glanced in the mirror.

Something was standing in the swirling mists watching him. Cerberite? He had not designed them to with stand such punishment, but these days, who knew? The machines were becoming their own developers these days, building in refinements known only to themselves. That was one of the reasons he lifted each day’s research notes from the Time Project. He needed to find a new job or he – and his family – could be in a very bad situation indeed.

He took one more minor detour, inland for half a mile, before swinging down 8th Street and driving for the coast. The clouds to the west faded from orange to blood-red and night crept across Dis. He flicked the velo’s lights on and followed their white beam home.

As he approached Middlesea he slowed and the stabilisers glided out, making a squealing complaint as they touched down on the road. He brought the machine to a stop as close to the gate as he could and climbed out. There was no one in sight.

The residents of this walled fortress had long since stripped out the pre-war security and replaced it with a good old-fashioned Pinsentry lock. Anything wireless was too easy to hack. He kept his body between the lock and the spy balloons that hovered above the city wall and tapped in the twelve-digit hex code. In the years since the war, hostiles had only once managed to get into Middlesea. What remained of the two youths after the chief groundsman had interrogated them had been thrown in the incinerator with the rest of the rubbish.

It was quarter to six when Fulgar parked the velo in the house’s underground garage. The heat of the day was giving way to another cold night. Since the war they had been spared the torrential storms that plagued Exdis, but their climate was still erratic. Nights were often frosty, days often too hot to venture out after noon. It was dark and quiet on this side of the city wall. Only the ever-present hum of the Citadel disturbed the silence, and after almost ten years of that Fulgar barely even heard it any more.

* * *

Rose came up the back steps with a trug of potatoes and spinach leaves. The water was already on the boil on the stove.

‘John,’ she said when she saw him standing in the entrance to the kitchen, ‘you startled me. What are you staring at?’

‘Look,’ he said, pulling her close and turning her towards the open back door. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

Julia was kneeling on the edge of the cabbage bed. She had something in her hand – they could not see what. She leaned over it, then raised her hand and a blue butterfly took to the air. She watched it fade into the deep blue sky.

Fulgar’s was one of only a few dozen gardens with a food production permit since the government had confiscated almost all private and communal land in the city. Most other city dwellers ate from public handouts while they lived by land overgrown by weeds. Rose worked hard in their little plot, but it was worth the effort. Even before the war food had rarely tasted so good, and her little family had rarely been so healthy. It was a place of small magic, an oasis rescued from the time before…

‘I just wanted to remember,’ John said.

‘Remember what?’

‘All of it.’

‘You’re not making any sense,’ Rose said. ‘Has something happened?’

‘No. No more than usual. A new DOMA was issued at noon. They’re rounding up more people in the city.’

‘But not us, not government workers?’

‘No. Outlanders, and they’re bringing more in too. It doesn’t look good. Something’s coming. I can feel it. The council are getting more and more twitchy. Those damn balloons are watching everything.’

‘The prophesy’s never going to happen. Not now. The war’s over. We’re safe, John.’

But he knew they weren’t. The paranoia was growing stronger by the day...

‘Go and clean up,’ Rose said. ‘Dinner’s nearly ready.’

Fulgar splashed water over his face and stood for a moment staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He stared into his own eyes, eyes that had seen too much horror already, but which he knew were destined to see much more.

His only crumb of comfort in an uncertain future was Tithonus. The old man was out of reach of the Keeper. Fulgar had held this one piece of information back during his trial; he had never breathed a word of any of it. It had been a huge risk, but one he had had to take. As long as Tithonus was safe within the White Cell, Fulgar’s family would be sheltered from the worst of what was coming.

He hoped.

He switched the light off and went back downstairs for dinner.

It was Saturday November 6th, 1910, in the uncertain afterglow of a war that had never really ended. Tonight Fulgar’s life, and the lives of everyone around him, was about to change for ever.

Chapter Two

The Known Unknown

It had not been difficult to get past the security guard. David was well-known in the university’s physics building and the flimsiest of excuses had been sufficient. He told Phil he was just going to collect something from his mum’s office, and the guard had let them through with barely a second glance. There was no need to hurry. However long they remained in Dis, the machine would deliver them back to the precise moment they had left. They could be back at the security hut just inside the main doors within seconds if they didn’t waste a little time.

David checked that the corridor was clear and slipped the key into the lock in Michael Ronson’s door. It opened silently and he and Sarah were inside in seconds, the door relocked behind them.

Sarah made her way to the sealed room that contained the pod while David went into the control booth to check the computers. They were on, their screens showing a diagnostic programme was running. He closed it and opened the subsystem that ran the pod. It booted into life, scrolling screen after screen of data as it checked the circuits and brought the slave computers online.

David had never mentioned the trip that he, Sarah and Toby had taken to Dis three months earlier. But he had gently quizzed the professor about the machine’s workings during their regular maths sessions. He needed to know how to direct the pod back to the exact location – and time – that they had arrived at in the forests on the edge of the Mormo Plain. Professor Ronson had been delighted to show him how all the data was logged in separate files on the main server. He had noticed the data packets relating to the Dis journey, but had put them down to a diagnostic fault. David had made a mental note of their exact location amongst the rest of the files. He had also made sure he knew how the data was structured. It was vital that he could pinpoint the location of Dis because he knew one day he would be going back.

Now, three months after their first visit, that day had come. It was June 12th. He and Sarah were going back, and they had decided months ago what date to choose for their return visit. They had, however, decided not to try crossing Mormo again. Despite the massive risk involved, this time they would land right where they needed to be on the edge of the city itself.

The screen of the main control computer cleared, leaving only a flashing cursor in the top left corner. David opened the file from their last journey and made two changes to the data set. The original grid coordinates that he had noted when Professor Ronson was explaining the data structure had given him the location of the dark forest where they had landed last time. From those he had been able to work out more or less where the walls of Dis were. He entered a grid matrix at what he hoped would be the eastern end of the wall as their destination.

The other change he made was to the date. He still had the note telling Fulgar to meet him at the walls of the city at midnight on November 6th 1910. He had no idea what the significance of this time was, and he needed to find out. If experience had taught him anything it was that their survival might depend on being one step ahead of John Fulgar. The battle-ravaged giant had saved their lives last time, but he had also drawn them into some lethally dangerous situations.

He set their destination time to 9pm on November 6th 1910. That would give them a couple of hours to figure out why this particular date was significant… and whether they should make a further journey to arrange the meeting.

Sarah had already changed into her spare jeans, t-shirt and fleece when David entered the secure booth and closed the airlock behind him. He waved a small pen-knife at her with a grin.

‘Remembered it,’ he said. Last time their only tool had been Sarah’s hair-grip; they weren’t going to make the same mistake again. He changed and stashed his walk-in clothes in a heap beside Sarah’s.

‘You sure you want to do this?’ he said.

Sarah nodded and opened the pod’s door. ‘There and back,’ she said. ‘We find out what’s there, then we come back. Any more plans, we make them here, and only here, OK?’

‘Yes.’ David squeezed past her to the control panel on the back wall and Sarah closed the door. Without another word he initiated the countdown. Five seconds, a brief lurch like stepping up to a step that isn’t there, and they would know. They would emerge into a world they were determined to destroy, whatever the cost.

* * *

The digital display counted out the seconds that allowed the magnetic field to dissipate, then changed to the simple declaration they had been waiting for: MISSION COMPLETE.

‘Door this time?’ David said in the dead air of the pod.

‘Let’s try it,’ Sarah said.

She turned the handle and pushed the door. It yielded, but she paused for a moment before opening it fully.

‘Go on,’ David whispered. ‘We’ve got to know.’

She pushed the door open a few inches.

Rain pattered through the gap, splattering on the floor of the pod and leaving tiny smears of ash on the grey concrete. The cold air brought with it a smell of burning, of old soot and decay. It was dark except for a single light that seemed to float in and out of focus somewhere high above them.

Sarah hauled the door open and they looked out on a world of such desolation that even their previous experiences among the ruins of Dis’s outer suburbs could not dull its impact.

They were high up. The pod had come to rest with the main door opening onto a view across a wide plain. In the distance was a solid black mass, beyond which the sky was spattered with shimmering orange patches of light. A few pinpricks of light came and went on the plain below them, glimpsed between sheets of rain blown on an icy breeze.

‘It’s Exdis,’ David said. ‘We’re on the city walls.’

He stepped out onto the wide iron ramparts of the wall. Behind them was another wall, twenty feet high and built some ten feet back from the steeply sloping face of the main wall. They were on an upper patrol walkway, although there was no sign of life.

A light swept over them and they both ducked back against the pod. High above them was a balloon, tethered to the wall by a thick steel cable. A light in its nose shone downwards towards the inner surface of the wall. Now and then a gust of wind caught it and the light moved across the walkway. There were other such balloons at intervals of about a quarter of a mile all along the wall, all focussed on the city side. If they could keep close to the foot of the secondary wall, they should be able to keep out of sight of them.

‘The fires are still burning,’ Sarah said. She pointed beyond the black mountains in the distance.

‘It’s more than ten years since Firestorm,’ David said.

‘Seyyal said they had burned for years.’

David laughed. ‘Seyyal’s not even been born yet. You know, we’re seeing things that for her were just the distant memories of her grandfather.’

‘Saul. Now, if only we could find him and kill him… think how much easier our lives would be!’

‘Yeah,’ David said. ‘Might wreck a lot of other stuff too though.’

She squeezed his shoulder and he placed his hand on hers. ‘Let’s take a look around and get out of here,’ she said.

‘The note I wrote for Fulgar said meet me in the walls beside the gate. In the walls. There must be something inside here, something important enough that we needed to meet there.’

‘Then that’s where we start.’

‘You really want to do this?’ David said.

‘Yes. It’ll be fine. We know we get out of here alive.’

‘If we can resist the temptation to go killing our enemies’ grandparents.’

‘Minimal impact,’ Sarah said. ‘Anyway, you’re not going to deliver that note to Fulgar tonight are you? Therefore we come back to do that, therefore we have to be able to get out of here now.’

David secured the pod’s door and scanned the area around the landing site. To the left of the pod was a rocky outcrop against which the iron wall had been built. Beyond that was the sea; he could just hear waves crashing against the shore hundreds of feet below them. The main gate, and their best hope of getting inside the wall, was to the right.

They walked along the sentry walk-way, keeping close to the inner wall. David glanced up now and then. There was no sign of the three Harpies that would guard the wall a century from now. There was no sign of life at all.

A brilliant flash of lightning illuminated Exdis for a moment: jagged huddles of low buildings, dark lakes, mud roads and smoke. Then it was swallowed by the darkness again.

It took half an hour to reach the towers that flanked the gate. Sarah caught David’s arm and pulled him to the wall.

‘I heard something,’ she whispered.

From far below them came a familiar rattling sound.

David crept forward and looked over the edge. Off to his right a column of Cerberites was mounting the tight twisting steps up the cliff. The river below had been a lazy, almost stagnant, trickle on their last visit. Now it was a furious torrent, reaching at least a mile into the suburbs of Exdis.

The first Cerberite appeared over the top of the cliff. A flash of lightning sparkled off the chrome bolts that held the visor to its exposed skull. Wrapped around the six bony fingers of its left hand was a chain, and on the end of the chain were humans, shackled by iron bands around their necks. Other Cerberites followed, each leading a dozen humans by chains around the necks.

This went on for several minutes. David lost count of the drones, but could see around two hundred humans. All looked fit and healthy, but all were totally subservient to their chains.

The sound of the gate being winched opened rumbled through the walls. A burly black guard stepped out, checked some papers, then waved the column through. One female prisoner tripped but her guard paid no heed. She was dragged through the gate with the rest of her group, frantically trying to take the weight off her throat before she choked to death.

‘We need to get down there,’ David said.

‘How? We can’t get down the walls, there’s nothing to hold on to.’

‘Wait here a minute.’

David moved to the battlements that crowned the tower above the main gate. He clambered up the rivets that held the smaller sheets of iron together until he stood on a narrow ledge. Beneath him was a flat recess of about ten feet square, in the centre of which was a small hatch.

‘Sarah,’ he called. ‘We can get in here.’

He helped her up then lowered her into the recess. Sarah opened the hatch and they looked down into the gloom. Hundreds of feet below them was a very faint light.

‘There’s a ladder against the wall. It must go somewhere,’ Sarah said.

‘I guess we’ve got no choice. You or me?’

‘I’ll go first,’ she said. ‘See you down there!’

And she was gone. David waited until she was a few feet below him and began to follow, pausing only to close the hatch behind him.

The rungs were slippery with algae that had grown in the dark and damp over the years. They moved slowly, but in under a minute he heard Sarah step off the ladder and onto a wooden floor.

They were in a small room with windows fore and aft. David stood for a moment at the narrow slit that looked out over Dis.

The Cerberites and their prisoners were some distance away now. They were walking along a wide tree-lined avenue towards a cluster of buildings in the distance. The roads were lit with flickering lamps. They did not illuminate much detail, but gave David the impression that this vast city was nowhere near as derelict as Exdis. A small vehicle purred along the avenue below them before turning onto the main avenue and gaining speed. It wove through the prisoners and disappeared.

At the end of the avenue, several miles away and shrouded in the gloom he could just make out the familiar outline of the ziggurat that was the Ice Palace.

‘David,’ Sarah whispered. ‘There’s a hatch in the wall here.’

‘Or we could keep going down.’ David had opened another hatch in the floor. ‘The ladder looks like it leads all the way to the ground.’

‘I don’t like the idea of going any further down unless we have to. That must lead into the guard room by the main gate. If we go through this way,’ she tapped on the small door set into the side wall of the little room, ‘it’ll take us back in the direction we came in.’

‘And maybe we shouldn’t stray too far from the pod: it’s not exactly well hidden.’

Sarah twisted the handle in the centre of the door and eased it open. The opening was about two feet square, and gave access onto a metal walkway, faintly illuminated from below.

‘We need to be careful out there,’ David said. ‘This door’s not big enough to be the main entrance. There must be others.’

Sarah nodded and began to crawl through the small opening. David took one last look over Dis and followed.

They walked for ten minutes in silence, their eyes adjusting to the dim light coming from lamps some three hundred feet below them. They were on some kind of service gantry, and one that was not in a good state of repair. Every step they took was accompanied by the creak and groan of old metal. Dust drifted down from the rotting supports that held the walkway against the wall. Although there was no sign of life in the echoing space below them, every sound they made must have been audible for miles. Due to the curvature of the wall, they could