The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (44 page)

Burton, Swinburne, Wells and Raghavendra followed.

This stretch proved longer than the first. They traversed it as rapidly as they could until they neared the pump room, at which point they slowed down and trod with care so their footfalls wouldn’t echo. By the time the light shone upon another door, Burton’s clothes were damp with perspiration and his eyes were slightly wild. He’d been clenching his teeth so hard that his whole face ached, and he felt as if his sanity might break at any moment.

Get me out. Get me out. Get me out.

Trounce looked back and put a finger to his lips. He passed the torch to the king’s agent, but Burton’s hand was trembling so much that the illumination shuddered back and forth until Swinburne reached out and took hold of the device.

Pulling his pistol from his waistband, the cloned Scotland Yard man wrapped his fingers around the door handle, clicked it down, and put his shoulder to the portal. It swept open and he hurtled in, brandishing his gun.

The room beyond was large and humming with machinery. The wall to the right of the door was entirely covered with buttons, screens, levers and projecting valve wheels. A woman with pale, wormy blue skin was sitting on a high stool facing it. Her limbs—two legs and eight arms—were exceedingly long, thin and multi-jointed. Her slender hands bore fingers of outlandish length, extending across different sections of the control panel.

She turned her head as Trounce barrelled in. Her skull, horribly narrow and drawn upward into a pointed cranium, was dotted with a plethora of glittering black eyes. Her mouth, packed with crooked and spiny teeth, opened and produced an uncanny whistling as the detective inspector, having misjudged the force of his entry, collided with her and knocked her from her seat. She hit the floor with Trounce on top of her but immediately thrust him off with such force that he flew into the air, hit the low ceiling, and crashed back down with a loud grunt, the breath thumped out of him. His Penniforth Mark II went skittering across the floor into a corner. The woman scrabbled up, employing her arms as extra legs to quickly back away, like a monstrous arachnid.

“I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ but me job, m’lords,” she hissed. “I keep to the law, so I does.”

Burton stepped in and drew his weapon. “I have to render you unconscious, madam. It won’t hurt and you’ll recover in a little while.”

“Unconscious? Unconscious? I doesn’t want to be unconscious, m’lord, and I ain’t no madam.” Shook her head and put her hands to it. “I’m confused. Scared. Me head hurts.”

“The nanomechs in your system have stopped working,” Swinburne told her. “You can think freely.”

“I doesn’t want to think. You shouldn’t be ’ere. It’s the rules, m’lords.” She looked at Burton, at his uncovered face. “Oh gawd ’elp me, it’s you, ain’t it! I dunno what to do. I dunno. I dunno. I ain’t ready fer no revolution. I’m just a simple girl. I does me job an’ nuffink else. What should I do, m’lord?”

“Just sleep,” Burton said. He pointed his pistol and added, “Stun.”

Ptooff!

The technician fell backward. Her limbs spread outward. She twitched and became still.

“Poor thing,” Raghavendra said.

“The Lowlies are getting muddle-headed,” Swinburne observed. “We have to work as fast as we can. If we gain control of the Turing Fulcrum, maybe Lorena will find a way to use it to broadcast an encouraging message to them, something to calm them down.”

“And if we have to destroy it?” Burton asked.

“Then we’ll have to employ the old-fashioned method of word of mouth. We’ll recruit Mr. Grub. His was big and loud enough.”

Trounce retrieved his pistol. They moved past the prone woman and walked between two horizontal groupings of pipes to where a flat platform was positioned beneath a square hole in the ceiling.

Trounce said, “This lift will take us straight up to the second pump room on the palace roof. Inside, the air is heated and pressurised, but when we exit we’ll find the atmosphere too thin to breathe and freezing cold. Lorena will cause our BioProcs to compensate, but we’ll have to move fast, else the strain on our bodies will kill us.”

“It’s one thrill after another, isn’t it?” Swinburne commented.

The chrononauts mounted the platform, Trounce depressed a switch, and it rose through the opening into a dimly lit shaft. Looking up, Burton saw its four sides converging toward a far-distant vanishing point.

“It’s quite a way,” Trounce warned them all.

“And bloody slow,” Swinburne complained.

“When this is all over and done with,” Burton muttered, “I shall return to the desert where, in every direction, there’ll be nothing between me and the horizon.”

“Do you mean that?” Raghavendra asked. “Will you really go back?”

Burton looked into her eyes and felt a strange sensation in the middle of his chest, as if the lift was sinking rather than rising. “No,” he whispered. “I don’t suppose I ever will.”

He turned away from her.

Up and up the lift rose. After a while, the chrononauts became tired of standing, so sat and waited, glancing up frequently, hoping they’d see the top of the shaft.

“We must have travelled for miles,” Wells exclaimed after what felt like hours had passed.

“Up through the Underground,” Trounce said, “then out over the upper city, through the level of the royal parks, and on to the top of the palace. I doubt we’ve travelled a third of that distance yet, and we’ve been going for about thirty minutes, I’ll wager.”

“Just half an hour?” Swinburne protested. “Half a day, more like!”

“Funny,” Wells said, “how time feels different for everyone. I might say the day has dragged by, while you’ll say it’s raced. One man of fifty might feel sprightly, another feel that he’s in his dotage. I often wonder whether Chronos exists at all. Might it not be a figment of our imagination?”

“Could our imagination be the seed of all existence?” Burton added, remembering his earlier meditation—though it had occurred seventy-two years ago. “Is there any reality outside of it?”

“Is it possible,” Swinburne mused, “that the altitude is making you both delirious?”

Trounce chuckled. “And so the conversation is brought down to earth.”

“Great heavens!” Sadhvi Raghavendra cried out. “That’s a singularly inappropriate expression to use under our current circumstances.” She looked up. “No sign of our destination. It’s well past midnight already. It’ll be the small hours by the time we get to the roof. What can we expect, William?”

“We’re unlikely to find the greenhouse occupied at this time of night, so we’ll use it as our base of operations. Once we’re inside, I suggest you hold the fort, Sadhvi, while Carrots and I, and Richard and Bertie, split up and reconnoitre with the aim of establishing Her Majesty’s whereabouts. We may have to abduct a member of staff and drag them back for questioning.”

Raghavendra used her forefinger to give Trounce’s arm a hard prod. “So despite your childhood here in the twenty-third century, your nineteenth-century sensibilities haven’t seen any advancement. You still feel it necessary to deny the woman a meaningful role. Really, you’re thoroughly backward.”

“Not at all,” Trounce protested. “Any good general will tell you that the path of retreat must remain well guarded. If I were a chauvinist, I wouldn’t trust to leave the responsibility to you alone. If you want to exchange places with Carrots, I’ll be just as confident with you at my side.”

Raghavendra eyed Swinburne, who was compulsively drumming his left foot and wiggling his fingers.

“Thank you,” she said somewhat wryly. “I accept.”

The minutes ticked by, their number impossible to judge.

Burton squeezed his eyes shut.

You’re not underground. You’re rising high above it.

But I’m enclosed.

Not for much longer.

What if the lift mechanism freezes? What if we get stuck?

It won’t. This will end soon.

“The roof!” Wells exclaimed.

Praise Allah. Praise Jehovah. Praise Zeus. Praise every god that has or hasn’t ever existed.

The chrononauts got to their feet.

“Be ready,” Trounce whispered. “There might be another technician ahead of us.”

The platform slowed, slid up level with a floor, and came to a halt. They found themselves in a room very similar to the one they’d departed. It was unoccupied.

“Luck is with us,” Trounce muttered. He led them past heavy pipes, past a glowing control panel, and to a door. “This opens onto the roof. There’s a short distance to cross to the greenhouse.” He drew his pistol and put his finger to his earlobe. “Lorena?” then, after a pause, “We’re on the roof.” He listened to her reply then addressed his companions. “Our BioProcs are about to drive up our body temperatures and maximise our lung efficiency. It won’t feel pleasant. Follow my instructions exactly.”

Swinburne pulled his handgun from his waistband. Burton raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you sure, Algy? You’re a rotten shot.”

“Not with a pistol that does whatever I tell it.”

Suddenly, Burton felt overheated. His heart hammered. Dizziness and exhilaration gripped him. Too much oxygen!

Trounce eased open the door and led them through it. The roof beyond was clear of snow, being well above the clouds, and was illuminated by the lamps of the nearby greenhouse. The structure’s various angles and planes stood out with startling clarity in the frigid, still, and thin air.

“Softly, softly,” Trounce whispered.

Slowly, they proceeded toward the large rectangular block of glass. The light that shone from within it dazzled them, and Burton found himself squinting and averting his eyes. Nevertheless, he noticed that a plume of what appeared to be dense smoke was rising from the greenhouse’s roof.

Burton’s skin was burning, and his chest rose and fell with great rapidity, as if he was struggling for breath, though he felt no discomfort.

Swinburne whispered to him, “The upper city isn’t as closely monitored as the Underground and, as far as Lorena has been able to ascertain, the palace complex even less so. One of the benefits of elitism is that you’re granted a measure of privacy. Nevertheless, we’d be triggering alarms right now were it not for the destruction of the Embassy. Also, a full-scale information war has just commenced.”

“Information war? You mean Miss Brabrooke is accessing, infiltrating and manipulating?”

“Exactly that. She and her people are hard at work. Communications are being disrupted, reports falsified, files corrupted, diversions planted. If she’s judged it correctly—and I don’t doubt that she has—even a synthetic intelligence as powerful as the Turing Fulcrum will be thrown into confusion.”

“If the Fulcrum and Spring Heeled Jack are one and the same,” Burton responded, “then there’s a deal of confusion in it, anyway.”

“Yet still it has managed to create this ghastly world,” Wells interjected.

Trounce signalled for them to be quiet as they reached the side of the greenhouse. Crouching down, they peered through the glass.

“My hat!” Swinburne hissed. “I’m already here.”

Inside, from the waist-high growing troughs up to the high ceiling, from one side of the interior space to the other, there was a mass of red foliage, a great aggregation of fleshy leaves, tangled branches, exotic flowers, bulging pods, heavy gourds, luminescent fruits, and—especially in the upper reaches—thousands of huge fluffy seed heads. These were noticeably disintegrating, bits of them breaking off and floating out though ventilation grills to form the cloud Burton had noticed—not smoke, but seeds, red but rendered black by the starlight.

“I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by its presence,” the king’s agent murmured. “After all, it was the jungle that brought Spring Heeled Jack’s dictatorship to my attention. We wouldn’t be here were it not for the experiences it foisted upon me.”

“I don’t see anyone inside,” Trounce said.

He moved to the right until he came to a door, opened it, and quietly entered. Burton and the others filed in after him, senses alert. The change from frigid cloud to humid steam caused them to gasp and breathe heavily. Burton’s dizziness increased, and he felt blackness pressing in at the edges of his vision.

Trounce put his finger to his ear and murmured, “We’re in.”

Burton clutched his chest as his heart skipped arrhythmically. He sucked damp air into his lungs and fought to stay on his feet.

The discomfort passed. His body stabilised. The chrononauts glanced at one another, satisfying themselves that all were well. They discarded their robes.

“Let’s make certain we’re alone,” Trounce whispered.

Carefully, without a sound, they spread out and moved through the verdant corridors, passing back and forth between the troughs. Pungent fragrances filled their lungs, and Burton felt a slight headiness, though it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as that which he’d experienced in the Beetle’s factory.

No one else was present.

The king’s agent found a door that, when he cracked it open an inch, proved to be at the top of a stairwell. He closed it and turned to Trounce. “Here’s our route in.”

“A preliminary survey then. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“We’ll go down to the next floor, split into two teams, and separate. Let’s assess how populated it is downstairs. If you can render a member of the queen’s staff unconscious without detection, do so and bring them back here.” Trounce said to Swinburne, “You stay here, Carrots. If anyone enters, stun ’em.”

“Rightio.”

Burton turned and reached for the door handle again, but before he could grasp it, it suddenly moved and the door swung inward, bumping against him. With an exclamation, he stepped back and fumbled for his pistol. Before he could retrieve it, a young woman stepped in. She uttered a small exclamation and stared at them bemusedly.

“Hallo, hallo!” Swinburne cried out. “What ho!”

Burton gasped. His mouth fell open. He was overcome by an urge to rush forward and embrace her. His heart filled with love. Tears blurred his vision.

Isabel!
he thought.
Isabel!

But it wasn’t Isabel. The girl was short and broad rather than tall and graceful, dark rather than golden-haired. Though curvaceous and attractive, she couldn’t match his fiancée’s beauty.