Chương 9: Bad Options

"We seeded survival knowledge in institutions because institutions outlast individuals. We did not account for the possibility that all institutions would fail simultaneously. This was an error in our modelling. The candidate must function without institutional support. Adjust the selection parameters accordingly." - Codex of the Long Watch, excerpts from 'the fall of planet illis' Bad Options Donna stopped walking before they'd gone twenty metres.

"Hold on." Arthur turned. Steve, mid-sentence about the astronomical alignment of Mithraic temples, took another three steps before realising he'd lost his audience.

"Before we go chasing underground temples in the middle of the apocalypse," Donna said, "can we acknowledge the obvious play?" Arthur knew what she was going to say. He'd been thinking it himself since the stone's glow faded. A riddle wasn't a briefing. Three people with kitchen knives weren't a response team.

"We should tell someone," he said.

"Exactly." Steve rubbed the back of his neck.

"For a second there I thought we were about to start some kind of quest." Donna gave him a look.

"We just killed a monster with a multitool and a pipe, Steve. I'm fine with quests. I'd just prefer one where the authorities know what's happening and can provide backup with actual weapons." Arthur nodded.

"Nearest police station. We tell them what we've seen, show them the stone if we have to, and let people with resources handle it." The air beside them bent. Thin blue lines folded into the familiar geometry. Donna exhaled audibly.

"Authority response capacity is compromised," the construct stated. Arthur didn't turn his head.

"That so?"

"Emergency infrastructure demand exceeds functional thresholds. Institutional response probability is low." Arthur looked at the construct.

"That's still the right call," he said.

"And I'll be honest, I don't trust you enough to skip due diligence."

"I do not possess motivations that would warrant distrust."

"Everyone says that right before they start having them." The construct had assessed the probability of institutional failure. It had not, Arthur noticed, suggested what they should do instead. It remained a moment longer, then dissolved. Arthur turned east toward the station. The police station was six blocks east, near the junction with Bishopsgate. The walk took twenty minutes through streets that had deteriorated further in the hour since they'd last crossed them.

More survivors had emerged from buildings and were clustering in frightened groups on the pavement. Arguments broke out and died. A woman sat cross-legged in the middle of the road, crying quietly, surrounded by the dead phones of people who'd been trying to help her call someone. An elderly man in a suit walked purposefully to somewhere, briefcase in hand, as though sheer commitment to routine might undo whatever had happened to the sky. They passed two more bodies. Arthur had stopped checking pulses.

It was the same result every time, and each time he knelt and found nothing, the weight of it compounded. Donna noticed him not stopping but said nothing. She understood the calculation. The police station announced itself by smell before they turned the corner. Blood, sweat, and the sharp chemical tang of an overturned first-aid cabinet.

The crowd outside had spilled across the road, seventy maybe eighty people pressing toward the entrance while a handful of officers in high-vis jackets tried to maintain a perimeter with nothing but their voices and their bodies. The barricade across the road was improvised with overturned benches, traffic bollards, and a section of metal fencing dragged from a construction site. Something lay in the street directly in front of the station.

The creature was smaller than the one in the alley, its body hacked apart with a fire axe that still protruded from the mess. Two officers stood near it. They were looking everywhere except down. Arthur studied the barricade. The officers had decent instincts; the perimeter was tight and the weight distribution of the fencing section was sound. But the south side had a gap where the bollards didn't meet the wall, wide enough for anything low and fast. The inside of the station was worse.

The lobby was a portrait of human crisis. Shouting civilians. Injured people leaning against every available wall, some holding makeshift bandages to wounds that were still bleeding. A woman argued with an officer who had nothing to give her except empty assurances. A child sat alone on a plastic chair near the entrance, watching the room with eyes that had stopped expecting anyone to come. Arthur looked away from the child before his mind could lose its grip on the rest of him. Love this story?

Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! The power was out here too. Chem-lights cast the lobby in a flat green that made everyone look like they were already dead. An officer behind the desk was writing on paper with a pencil, actual paper, actual pencil, logging names and injuries in longhand because every computer in the building was a black screen.

Arthur looked at the scene and saw what any structural engineer sees when a system is at capacity - the point just before failure. The officers were the load-bearing elements. The civilians were the live load. And the ratio was wrong. Too much weight on too few supports. One more surge through those doors and the whole thing would collapse into a building full of frightened people with no one in charge. It took forty minutes to catch the attention of someone senior enough to listen.

The sergeant was a broad-shouldered man in his fifties, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, a smear of someone else's blood on his forearm that he either hadn't noticed or had stopped caring about. His eyes carried the exhaustion of a man who had been holding a position for hours and was running out of things to hold it with.

"Sir," Arthur said, leaning over the counter.

"Three things, fast. I'm a structural engineer. She's a security consultant. He's an archaeologist. We're not delusional and we're not in shock. We have a creature corpse in an alley two blocks east, killed forty minutes ago, same body plan as whatever your officers took down with the fire axe out front. Phones are dead citywide. The mass casualties were simultaneous. This does not look like a chemical attack."

The sergeant looked at Arthur the way you look at someone who has just told you something you cannot afford to engage with.

"There's more. A stone on Cannon Street activated about an hour ago. Well it started glowing and projected text, a specific reference to Roman infrastructure under the City. We think it's a coordinate. We think there's something underneath London that's connected to whatever is happening. We can take you to the stone now. We can take you to the corpse now. Either one. Both."

"Sir," he said carefully, "I've had a dozen people in here tonight telling me the sky is sending them messages. We're treating this as a mass-casualty event and stress reactions or hallucinations are part of that picture."

"It wasn't a hallucination," Steve said.

"I work on Roman London for a living. The text referenced the Walbrook river, the Temple of Mithras, and the relationship between the two. That's not a stress reaction. You don't hallucinate academically accurate archaeological riddles."

"Did you see any notifications?" Steve asked quietly.

"After the sky changed. Blue text. Calibration event. Anything like that." The sergeant paused, his eyes shifting. It was brief. Half a second at most. But Arthur had seen it, the micro-hesitation of a man whose mouth was about to say 'no' while his memory was saying 'yes.' He'd seen something. Every survivor with compatible genetics had seen the calibration notification.

This man had seen it and filed it away in the part of his brain where you put things that can't be real because you have a lobby full of bleeding civilians and admitting that floating text appeared in your vision is not compatible with maintaining command authority.

"No," the sergeant said.

"Look," the sergeant said, rubbing a hand across his face.

"We're working on the assumption this is a coordinated attack. Possibly chemical or biological. Maybe terrorism. Until we know otherwise, the priority is keeping people calm and off the streets."

"And the creatures?" Donna asked.

"We're aware of the… animals," the sergeant said. The hesitation before the word was its own kind of admission.

"Armed response has been deployed where possible. But communications are down and we're operating blind."

"Then I want a paper trail." Donna's voice stayed level.

"Get our names down. We're heading toward a possible secondary site near Cannon Street. If we come back with information, I want a callback path that doesn't start with forty minutes in your lobby." The s ergeant looked at her properly for the first time. Whatever he saw in her stance made him pause longer than he had with Arthur.

"You're going to investigate it yourselves. This riddle that you have seen?"

"We're going to look. We won't engage anything we don't have to. When we're back, who do we ask for?" He held her gaze for a beat, then lifted the pencil.

"Names." Donna spelled their names. Below their names the sergeant wrote a number, paused, crossed it out, then wrote his surname and a unit designation.

"S ergeant Garrick. Ask for me or for whoever's holding command if I'm not on shift."

"Garrick." Donna nodded.

"So you're not going to investigate the stone." Her voice was not accusatory. A professional recognising the limits of another professional's capacity.

"I'm saying that if there's a glowing rock somewhere in the City, it's going to have to wait until I've dealt with the people in my lobby who are actively dying." Arthur couldn't argue with that. The man was doing his job with the tools he had and the information he was willing to accept. That the tools were inadequate and the information was incomplete wasn't his fault. It was the world's.

"Well," Steve said once they were outside "That went exactly as the geometry predicted." Donna glanced back at the station doors.

"It's not their fault. They're drowning."

"Doesn't change our situation," Arthur said. The air folded beside them. The construct's geometry assembled itself with what Arthur was beginning to interpret as unhurried precision, the measured pace of a system that had never once been in a rush. Steve flinched.

"You really need to stop doing that. One of these days you're going to materialise and I'm going to swing the pipe before I think."

"Projected outcome of institutional escalation: unchanged," the construct stated.

"You're saying we wasted an hour," Arthur said.

"I previously indicated the probability of successful external intervention was minimal." Arthur stared at the construct. The thing had told them the police wouldn't help, and they'd gone anyway because that's what you do. You try the system before you abandon it. The fact that the system had nothing left to give didn't make trying it wrong, it just made the next decision harder. He looked back at the station. Through the glass doors he could see the sergeant, dealing with the next crisis.

The man would hold his lobby together for as long as he could, and when he couldn't, he'd hold it a little longer anyway, because that's what people like him did. Arthur understood that. It was the same instinct that made him shore up failing buildings. A decision had to be made. Follow a riddle from a glowing rock into an underground Roman temple, guided by a floating geometry that won't explain itself, armed with kitchen knives and a pipe. Or find shelter and wait for all of it to blow away.

Donna was looking south, toward Cannon Street. Toward the Mithraeum. Her tactical brain had processed the options and arrived at the same conclusion Arthur had. No cavalry, no backup, no institutional safety net. Just the three of them and whatever the stone was pointing toward.

"If we're doing this," she said, "we're not doing it with kitchen knives." Arthur looked at her.

"There's a Toolstation on the corner of Eastcheap," she said.

"Two blocks west. If the world wants us to go dungeon crawling, we're going properly equipped." Steve blinked.

"Did you just say 'dungeon crawling'?"

"I said what I said." Arthur smiled, it was the first time since the sky changed that anything had felt like a plan rather than a reaction.

"Toolstation," he said.

"Then the temple and whatever's waiting underneath it."