Alita Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  IRON CITY

  Also available from Titan Books

  Alita: Battle Angel – The Official Movie Novelization

  IRON CITY

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE PREQUEL

  BY PAT CADIGAN

  BASED UPON THE GRAPHIC NOVEL (“MANGA”) SERIES “GUNNM” BY YUKITO KISHIRO

  SCREENPLAY BY JAMES CAMERON AND LAETA KALOGRIDIS

  TITAN BOOKS

  Alita: Battle Angel – Iron City

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785658358

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658365

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: November 2018

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Alita: Battle Angel TM & © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  This one is for:

  Yvonne Navarro

  Who provided the road-map

  Couldn’t have done it without you

  And

  Amanda Hemingway aka Jan Siegel

  Don’t know where to begin

  To list all the things

  I couldn’t have done without you

  And always for The Original Chris Fowler,

  My one true love in all the universe

  PROLOGUE

  As General William Tecumseh Sheridan pointed out in the late 1870s, war is hell. In the hundreds of years that have passed since Sheridan and his army burned the city of Atlanta, Georgia, to the ground, many people have expressed their agreement with this statement.

  What no one has ever pointed out, however, is, war is temporary. Some wars have been short, some unbearably long. But all wars, without exception, come to an end.

  The same is not true of Hell.

  Hell does not finish. Hell is not temporary. Hell is eternal, and it is populated by the lost souls caught in the temporary insanity of war, those left behind with nowhere to go when it was over.

  Time moves on as it always does and recollections of war grow increasingly dim until they pass from living memory. Events become stories, which morph and mutate in a generations-long game of Chinese Whispers. Winston Churchill noted that history is written by the victors. But without reliable methods to create and preserve a record of events as they happen, history passes away with the people who made it and is replaced by whatever stories people remember. And when the major portion of daily life is taken up with matters of survival, people don’t remember much. Only those with full bellies and a strong sense of security indulge in the luxury of looking backward. For those not so blessed, history is merely what happened before they arrived.

  In this way, human history on Earth came to an end.

  Most people had always thought of the end of human history as the end of time itself, when the universe finally ran down or blew up or went out like a light, an event that might or might not involve the appearance of a deity who would sit in judgment of humanity. But there was no bang, just a whimper so faint no one heard it. History came to an end for a very simple reason: after the War no one wrote any.

  Before the War there had been a multitude of cultures that shared their advances in science and technology to accomplish extraordinary things. Chief among these were the sky cities, twelve shining metropolises that floated above various locations around the world. People had considered them proof that humanity had truly reached a high level of development, even enlightenment. At no other period in human history had there ever been cities that flew. People up there lived with privilege and comfort, and people down below looked up at them with pride and hope.

  Then the Great War broke out, harsh and violent and deadly as wars always are. It killed billions of people, laid waste to the world and everything good about it, and sent what mankind thought were their last, best creations crashing to the ground—all, that is, save one. Devastated and traumatised, humanity didn’t pause in its fight for survival to write history. There had been a war; an enemy had attacked and people had fought them with everything they had. Lives were lost, property destroyed, hope obliterated. What else was there to know?

  The survivors at ground level gathered in the shadow of Zalem, the only city still flying, and they cobbled together a semblance of civilisation—structures to live in made from scraps of metal and rubble, in a society made from scraps of ideals and order. A hierarchy developed, with those who could thrive and prosper at the top, and everyone else jockeying for the next most desirable position below them.

  Welcome to Hell.

  * * *

  In order for Hell to be truly hellish, however, it needs an audience, someone to watch and appreciate it, to be enlightened by what transpires or, at the very least, entertained. But not passively—pre-War technology had made many of the entertainments of the day interactive. There was no reason that shouldn’t continue.

  It was a small audience. But then, Zalem’s population wasn’t very large, to save wear and tear on the environment. This also allowed them to enjoy a more comfortable standard of living. There had been a lot of changes in the flying city—nothing could ever be the same after the War—and most of those changes were philosophical.

  Once the actual hostilities ceased, Zalem’s residents saw the virtue of a more structured society, with stronger leadership. Everyone hoped war would not come again for a very long time, but when it did, having a distinct and strong authority in place would prevent them from becoming hostages to misfortune.

  In fact, unambiguous leadership was crucial to their survival now. The carefree days of plenty, when there were a dozen sky cities and travellers came and went at will, were gone forever. What hadn’t changed—and never would—was Zalem’s complete dependence on ground-level support.

  The ground-level world would gladly, wi
llingly, continue to support the last remaining flying city. Zalem symbolised the peak of human accomplishments and showed that, someday, humanity might reach that peak again.

  Until then, however, there could be no travel between Zalem and the ground. Aeronautics was a lost technology, and besides, it was the best way to maintain stability in both places. Everyone had to agree to this—they had to be united under a single authority. The best single authority to oversee both Zalem and the ground-level society that came to be known as Iron City was someone who could literally oversee them. Zalem’s leader took charge, appointing a chosen few to be his representatives on the ground.

  The leader had lived a very long time, longer than most people knew, and far longer than any of them would have imagined. He was far too old to be excited merely by the prospect of having power over heaven and earth. Power was boring unless it was gratifying. His long lifespan made him an expert in gratification, and he knew there was none in simply being an overseer. He had to be a Watcher in situ, but without having to leave the comfort of the flying city.

  Thus Hell became interactive entertainment, and the Watcher’s feet never touched the ground.

  * * *

  As for history, it was irrelevant. What happened yesterday or the day before or last week was important. History was gone. So there was a Great War against an Enemy—so what? Nobody remembered who fought or why. It was three hundred years ago. Get over it, why dontcha.

  CHAPTER 1

  “Okay, Sarita, I want you to relax for a minute,” said the pale thin man to the patient on the treatment table. She was a middle-aged woman with a round, good-natured face, a halo of salt-and-pepper curls and, below her collarbone, nothing else—nothing she’d been born with anyway. She was one of the Total Replacement cyborgs the pale man regularly treated at the clinic. She’d gone TR early in life; no doubt someone at the Factory had told her it was the best way to get ahead. As if anyone ever really got ahead at the Factory.

  At the moment he was stretching her arm out on a support that put it perpendicular to her body, with her hand resting on a tray. The body she had swapped for her own had given her some years of reliable service, but probably not as many as she had been led to expect. For the last couple of months, she’d been showing up at the clinic at least once a week, needing this or that part replaced. She wasn’t the only cyborg in Iron City suffering the effects of shoddy workmanship. The pale man had been helping people like her since the day he had arrived.

  Back then the clinic had been a mom-and-pop operation. Now he wasn’t even pop any more, which made it harder to keep the sad reality of life in Iron City from getting to him, not just day-to-day in the clinic, but in his other, late-night job as well.

  “Okay, are you comfortable?” he asked. “Good. Now I want you to think about your right hand.”

  “Which one?” she asked.

  Across the room the kid sitting in one of the refurbished dentists’ chairs burst out laughing. The man had actually forgotten he was there; he turned and made an impatient shushing motion at the kid even though he couldn’t help chuckling a little himself.

  “As far as I know, Sarita, you only have one.”

  “Well, yeah, but—” The woman grimaced. “The first thing I thought of was my old flesh-and-blood hand. Not the real one.”

  “Both hands are real,” the man told her, trying to sound comforting as well as firm. “Remember how I told you your mind has a sort of reproduction of your body inside in it? Well, to your mind, your hand is your hand is your hand is your hand. In fact, it’s better if you imagine your organic hand. That’s what we want your brain to think, that this is the one you were born with.”

  “But if the nerves are all connected, shouldn’t it do that anyway?” the woman asked.

  “It would take me quite a while to explain. Even when everything should be working perfectly, we sometimes have to play little tricks on the mind to help it along,” the man replied. “I don’t think you can take that much time off work.”

  “Yeah, I suppose not.” The woman’s fingers wiggled, then began tapping on the tray. She heard the noise and raised her head. Her fingers kept moving. “Well, will ya look at that!”

  The man helped her sit up. “And that’s what it’s all about,” he said cheerfully. “How does it feel?”

  “Natural as anything,” she said, still tapping her fingers on the tray. “No drop-out sensation at all.” Her smile faded slightly. “I hope it lasts.”

  “If you have any trouble, just come back.” The pale man hesitated, wanting to tell her that he was working on something, and if it turned out the way he wanted, no cyborg would ever have any delayed motor function between older and newer parts again. It would make her happy and she deserved something to be happy about, to look forward to. But he didn’t know how long it would take him to get the chip working properly—another two weeks, or a month, or six months. Or the whole thing might blow up in his face and he’d have to start over from scratch.

  Meanwhile, she’d be waiting, patiently at first but eventually she’d get anxious, and so would all the people she told about it. And there he’d be, unable to produce an instant miracle and unable to explain why, at least in layman’s terms. So there they’d all be, with one more thing to be unhappy about.

  The cruellest thing he could do to these people was to give them too much hope too soon. If he wanted to be a nice guy he could give them lollipops. Lollipops were real, now, and all his patients loved them. He took one from the jar on his desk and handed it to her. “If you get caught short,” he said, “I can show you a trick with a box and a mirror that—”

  “You showed me already, remember?” the cyborg said, tucking the lollipop in the breast pocket of her overalls. “It was back when lefty here”—she flexed her hand—“fell apart, and the replacement was late, and it felt like someone was twisting my fingers, even though I didn’t have any.”

  “It can help with coordination too,” the man said.

  “Really?” said the kid in the reclining chair. “A mirror and a box?”

  The cyborg gave him a look. “What’s it to you, meat-boy?” She turned back to the man suddenly, looking apologetic. “No offence, Doc.”

  The pale man laughed. “None taken, Sarita.” He showed her out and went to call the next patient in. But the row of chairs in the hallway outside the treatment room was empty.

  The doctor frowned, trying to remember who had been waiting there earlier. Perhaps he should have sent the kid out with a clipboard to take names; it was important to acknowledge people who were waiting.

  And then again, maybe not, he thought as he heard a thump behind him. The kid had set the chair at an extreme angle without belting himself in and he’d slipped out onto the floor on his head.

  “Put it back the way it was, Hugo,” the man said. “Or at least fix it so people won’t have to sit upside down.”

  The kid’s face was pink with embarrassment as he readjusted the chair and then moved to the far less elaborate one beside the desk that had once belonged to the man’s former partner, who also happened to be his former spouse. The chair had not been easy to come by—his ex had insisted on good lumbar support. When he’d finally found this one for her, she had complained it wasn’t good enough. Not that anything ever was, not compared to what they’d had before they’d come to Iron City.

  Hugo was now rolling himself back and forth across the width of the office. The wheels rattled. The pale man might have thought it said something significant about Iron City that a seventeen-year-old amused himself with the chairs in a cyber-surgeon’s office rather than doing almost anything else. But he knew Hugo well enough to know the kid wasn’t merely bored. Hugo dropped by regularly, and no matter how busy he was he couldn’t bring himself to chase the kid out. Too many people had turned their backs on Hugo already.

  “You’re not fooling me,” Hugo said suddenly.

  “About what?” the man said with some alarm.

  “
I know how you got that mark,” Hugo said. He touched a spot in the middle of his own forehead. “It’s not from acne or chicken pox, or getting hit with a ball bearing at a Motorball game. And it’s not a birthmark either.”

  “Well, congratulations.” The man sat down at his workbench on the far side of the room and removed a sheet covering a partially disassembled shoulder joint attached to an arm. “Since there aren’t any other patients right now, I’m going to work on a project for a while, and I’d like a little peace and quiet so I can hear myself think.”

  “What is it?” Hugo asked.

  “A chip for better performance.”

  The kid laughed. “Are there any chips for lousier performance?”

  “In this town, too many,” the man said, angling a magnifying lamp over the ball joint.

  “I bet you could get all the peace and quiet you want in Zalem,” Hugo said. “They’ve probably got soundproof rooms and an army of security guards to keep punks like me from bothering you. Why would you ever leave?”

  The man turned on a monitor and studied a scrolling display of read-outs.

  “See, you being from there—that explains a lot,” Hugo went on after a few moments. “But, like, there are some pretty smart people in Iron City—I’m no dummy myself. You gotta have some smarts to survive here. But even the smartest people in town don’t know what you do. They aren’t—” The kid paused, searching for the right word. “Educated.”

  The pale man paused in the act of adjusting some very thin wires just below the shoulder joint to look at the kid from under his eyebrows. Hugo’s assessment of his own intellect was correct as far as it went—i.e., he was no dummy. But in truth, Hugo had no idea how smart he actually was, which made him too smart for his own good. Which might well get him killed.

  “We don’t get much education in Iron City,” the kid was saying. “The only reason they make anyone go to school is so they can work for the Factory when they grow up, worker bees that can read and write and count past ten without taking their shoes off. They—”