Season 03 - Episode 26

‘her attention frowning’

“Can we still be friends?” asks the little boy, looking straight into the camera.

Ga enters the command for a single flash of the crawler drone's light and then watches the boy's face light up in turn. Not for the first time she reflects on how much easier this would have been if that stupid rich boy Ak Williamston had just done as he was told.

As it is, she's now sending a child up into the unknown so it's only fair that she pretends to be his friend, to keep him happy. And it is pretending. Definitely. She doesn't do friends, no matter what the strange feeling in her stomach is saying.

Ty's questions are the closest she's come to actually speaking to someone in over a decade. Programming the crawler drone to lead the kid back into the old box transit tunnels and find him somewhere to sleep, she considers how well he's done. She's particularly impressed that he worked out the truth about the crawler drones.

Ga yawns and stretches and is just about to check back on Ak when motion across several monitors snatches her attention. Frowning and shifting in her chair, she starts flicking through her cameras and finds appalling scenes of violence and murder on all of them.

“What the...” she says as she watches what looks to be all the orders of The Church striking at once, attacking EnFo's and civilians alike. She pauses to listen as sounds of slaughter grow in the corridor outside her room. Wide eyed and open mouthed she attacks her keyboard, changing her view to cameras in The Offside.

They're offline.

Feed after feed is dead, as if the whole place has gone dark at once. When The Church seized The Offside, they rewired the cameras to stop GovCo accessing them but kept them for their own use. That didn't keep Ga out of course and it also meant she didn't need to install her own.

Now however she finds the cameras aren't even just switched off, they're being physically disconnected. Cycling through she manages to find a handful still live but even as she watches, swarms of tiny children with shaved heads and white tunics are clambering on furniture to smash the cameras.

Ga's seen The Cherubim before, but only ever picking battlefields clean. This is new. Now she races against them, trying to get ahead of their systematic camera purge. Each time she finds a live one she manages to snatch perhaps a few seconds of footage before it is taken down and from the final one just a few frames.

She throws herself back in her chair and curses, ignoring the screaming in the corridor right outside. Seething but focused, she takes a breath and starts again, triggering the machine she built to start churning out crawler drones and and sending them to The Offside. Even the new, self-improved drones however, will take at least an hour to get there.

While she waits she returns to the few frames of footage she managed to lift from the last camera and starts to analyse it. At first it's hard to tell what she's looking at. The camera is in a corridor and shows the tail end of what looks like a large group of people disappearing round a corner.

She runs the footage through a whole series of programmes, sharpening edges and analysing movement until finally she has something slightly clearer. The figures are soldiers, all dressed in heavy, metal armour, painted bright white and decorated in gold, topped off with ornate helmets. Are these The Seraphim she keeps hearing about?

Assuming The Cherubim were trying to hide these mysterious troops, Ga looks at the pattern in which the cameras went down and speculates. It looks as if a train of people over a mile long was moving through The Offside. If that's right and if most of them are these Seraphim, then there are a lot of them, an entire army of them in fact.

Eventually enough time passes for the terrible sounds in the corridor to quieten and for the crawler drones to reach The Offside. They spread out, pointing their little electric eyes all over the place. Ga cycles through the whole swarm, inspecting almost the whole of The Offside in less than twenty minutes.

There's no-one there.

The Great High Church of The Renovated Offside has completely disappeared.

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