Inside, the building’s long main section was basic, naked brick walls with misted-over windows that allowed a weak glimmer of the shield’s light to penetrate – a perfect setting for a small-scale industrial enterprise. The last one had been a bespoke ceramic crafts manufacturer that had shut down over a decade ago. But the kilns were still in place – five of them lined up along the middle of the floor, electricity-hungry brutes that fired artistically colourful glazes at temperatures well over a thousand degrees. Their doors were all shut tight, but Ollie smelt woodsmoke in the dank air as he walked past them and muttered a curse.
He’d spent more than a month modifying the kilns, covering the internal firebricks with high-efficiency thermocouples to extract energy from anything burned inside. Any fire was now strictly illegal in London, as in all of Earth’s cities that remained under siege from the Olyix. Fire was the one thing that unified every citizen these days, consuming the precious limited oxygen that people needed to breathe. See it – report it – and more often than not give the arsonist a good kicking before the police and firefighters arrived. Ollie could still remember the first time he’d seen a fire engine race past in the street: a magnificent ground vehicle out of history with lights blazing and siren screaming. He and Lolo had been mesmerized at its appearance, then cheered it on, waving at the crew like a pair of awestruck schoolkids. Dozens of the big machines had been brought out of museums and renovated since Blitz2 began.
So burning wood in the kilns was a precarious project that had to be well hidden from the neighbours. After fitting the thermocouples, Ollie had stripped the ancient air-conditioning ducts from the rafters and rerouted them. Fans sucked air through the kilns, maintaining a good flow over the logs they burned, before extracting it and sending it down into the old railway storm sewer where it could dissipate harmlessly among the fatbergs and rats.
On a bench at the end of the kilns, a one-hundred-and-twenty-centimetre model of the Nightstar starship shone a weird silver from the devil-sky light coming through the windows. Ollie had never even heard of the sci-fi show until a couple of months back, but Hong Kong had released a hundred interactive episodes back in 2130, sponsored by a fashion house that had long since vanished. Before Blitz2, he would have accessed solnet for every fact about it, but solnet was a bad idea these days for anything other than basic comms. Too much self-adaptive darkware was loose in the network, left over from the Olyix sabotage.
He’d heard about the model from a contact in the Rye Lane market not long after he’d started asking about collectibles. Adults paying ridiculous money for weird old trash fiction memorabilia was a whole genre he hadn’t ever known existed until he’d discovered Karno Larson – his golden link to Nikolaj and vengeance.
He didn’t even need to steal the model. Nobody paid anything for hobby stuff like that these days, so the owner had been happy to hand it over in exchange for a fully charged domestic quantum cell. Once Ollie got it home, in a trailer behind a bicycle he pedalled all the way back from Pimlico, he’d had to admit it was superb. Nightstar looked as if it had been designed by an insect race tripping on heavy-duty nark, and this was a handcrafted one-off, which elevated it to a genuine piece of art. He half expected it to lift off and vanish into hyperspace with a blaze of twisted starlight.
‘Time to go,’ Ollie called.
‘I know,’ Lolo replied from the room at the far end; it had been the ceramic company’s office and now served as their bedroom and living room. For Ollie it was a place to crash and have sex, but for Lolo it was their home, their honeymoon suite, their fortress castle sheltering them from the horrors of Blitz2. Which was why Ollie put up with the strips of white gauzy linen sie’d strung up around the bed and the little candles with mock flames that sprayed out a sweet musky scent to add to the romance, as well as rugs and pearl-and-jade trinkets and the antique black-lacquer furniture they’d acquired from a deserted house further along the street.
Lolo came out and smiled broadly. Sie was dressed as if they were going out to dinner in one of London’s restaurants from the time before. Given sie was in hir female cycle, sie’d chosen a purple-and-white flower-patterned dress with a plunging neckline. Hir face was expertly dusted with highlighter and rouge, with the devil-sky light shining on high-gloss cherry-red lipstick, hir hair in a peacock-blue Mohawk. Just looking at how gorgeous sie was, Ollie felt himself stiffening.
‘You look great,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
A quick kiss accompanied by strong perfume, and a smiling Lolo was holding up a basket with a gingham cloth draped across it. ‘Let’s go.’
Ollie gave his fleshmask a quick check in the mirror. As faces went, it was okay. He wasn’t happy with the rounded chin, nor the longer nose, and he still wasn’t sure about having white skin, but the dimples were nice. And the fleshmask responded well when it came to showing his expressions, although the creams he’d been applying to his own skin did inhibit the subtler emotions. He was strict with himself about keeping the fleshmask on the whole time, avoiding G8Turings zeroing in on him with feature recognition. But that freedom came with the price of inflammation and dry skin and some horrific outbreaks of tinea. For Ollie, who had always taken superb care with his appearance in the time before, that was almost unbearable. Fortunately, moisturizer and other basic skin creams could solve the crises – for a price.
He performed a few exaggerated grimaces as a final test. ‘Good to go,’ he announced.
‘I wish you didn’t have to wear that thing all the time. You have a lovely face. I adore looking at you.’
‘I wish you didn’t wear a bra all the time, but hey, those are the breaks.’
‘Turds! Don’t you binaries ever think about anything else?’
Laughing, Ollie put his arm around hir, and they went outside together. Sunglasses on in unison. Ollie’s were like ski goggles – hardly the kind of stylish image he wanted, but their thick rims didn’t allow the light from the devil-sky around the edges. Even with the additional protection afforded by his tarsus lenses, too much direct exposure always left him with a migraine.
It wasn’t far to Reedham Street, where the government nutrition agency had set up a public kitchen in the community centre. Plenty of people were walking towards it. Ollie recognized most of them from the daily visit and nodded occasionally. Saying anything was pointless, thanks to the constant background buzz from the shield straining to hold back the perpetual energy bombardment from the Olyix ships as they attempted to overload the shield generators. Consequently, conversations these days tended to be up close and loud.
‘I saw Mark today,’ Lolo said.
‘Right,’ Ollie acknowledged as they passed the end of Chadwick Road. One of the big old plane trees halfway along had survived since the siege began, but in the last couple of months it too had succumbed to the absence of rain and the eternal devil-sky. Ollie was mildly sad to see it was finally shedding its yellowed leaves. ‘Who’s Mark?’
‘He’s the one who always brings the mushrooms.’
‘Ah, okay.’
‘Anyway, his friend Sharon has a sister who works at the defence ministry. She said one of the seismologist techs told someone in her office that the Olyix aren’t tunnelling under the shield any more. They’re playing the long game now. Their ships are heading for the settled star systems, and when they get there they’ll cut the power those planets are feeding back to Earth, and the interstellar portals will die. We won’t have any food pellets for the printers, or electricity to run them. So they’ll starve us out.’