others as Lincoln clambered from the bench and shuffled to the leader of his companions, a young oval-faced Arab in his late twenties.
Latif Hadad. If Richard was the world’s last scholar to the last professor, then Latif was the last apprentice to Lincoln, the last engineer. He sported a threadbare baseball cap, and his copper skin was aglow, making him achingly handsome. He dismissed the other men with a flick of his head.
They fell back and took seats close to the front, leaving Lincoln and Latif hunched over the embalmed object. They stepped either side of it and, with a nod to one another, gripped the protective blanket and pulled it away. Underneath, a large cardboard box had been stuffed with sleeping bags, hay, rucksacks and spare clothing. Nestled amidst the wad of padding with almost religious care was a block of metal around fifteen inches square.
A HAM radio.
“The message you received, it was from this?” Alexander said. He sounded unlike himself, distant and awed.
Lincoln looked pleased by the gasps echoing around the chambers. “The very same.”
Norman leaned forward. He couldn’t bring himself to look away from the cobweb-strewn metal box, covered with knobs and switches. Ringing silence had taken the place of the restless whispering, as though the crate were warping space into a black hole that sucked in the light, sound, even fear.
“It works?” Thompson said. It sounded as if her throat had narrowed to the width of a needle. “Really works?”
By way of answer, Latif leaned over with reverential care and flicked a large red switch on top of the radio.
A screech like bear claws on a chalkboard filled the room, one that made Norman want to sink his teeth into the bench. Everyone was covering their ears and groaning, mostly with discomfort but also with disappointment. Latif, wincing, flicked it off again.
“Mr Lincoln?” Evelyn said.
The old lion grumbled. “I’ve spent the better part of forty years trying to fix communications equipment. Our only chance of reaching the wider world, and perhaps those stranded in the North by highwaymen, lay in establishing radio contact. But all I could ever pick up was that same scream, covering every frequency.”
The Blanket, Norman thought.
Lincoln continued. “As far as we can surmise, radio and microwave bands of the spectrum are useless for comms, and there’s been no sign of the Blanket decaying.”
Norman had heard stories of people going crazy listening to the Blanket’s wailing, searching for hidden messages.
“The whipper-snapper can barely keep his mouth shut since we found it, so why don’t I hand this to him?” Lincoln said.
Latif stepped forward with a courteous bow. “The Blanket is fractured,” he said. “A little over a fortnight ago, we were on a salvage run to the dockyards, gathering spares and backup components for our generators in anticipation of the siege. We knew we were pushing our luck staying so long after the recall order, but we thought we could make it—and we wouldn’t last long if we lost power—”
Just like New Canterbury. Despite Latif’s spiel, Norman’s mind conjured an image of the darkened city after nightfall, surrounded by a horde of black shadows perched on hilltops, predatory eyes glinting in the starlight.
“—by the time we knew they were after us, we were surrounded. We lost Hicks and Carmichael before they pushed us back to the airport. We set up in one of the hangers and sealed it off.” He shrugged. “We dug in, and held them for a day or so. But we’re tinkerers, not military men. Sitting so close to all those Old World air birds … We explored during the lulls. I think we all wanted to keep looking when the bullets starting flying again. We were boxed in, after all. We got into some deep, dusty corners; that’s the only reason we found the hatchway.”
“Hatchway?” Alexander said. He was leaning forward with brimming intensity.
“It was some kind of door. Secret, like, built into the wall. You’d have to know it was there to find it … or be a hell of a nosy so-and-so. That’s when we got our first surprise: there was a service elevator inside, which lit up ready as you like. There was power.”
He paused and knelt down, tinkering with the dials, consulting a dense scrawl of biro on his forearm. “They hadn’t attacked for an hour, but they were coming back, and we didn’t have a lot of help, so what the hell? We went down. It was a treasure trove, all kinds of delights.”