“Aglœc-wif,” he murmurs afterwards, and she isn’t sure whether he means her or the train. Together, they wait for the beginning: the night of misrule.
It is known, among coppers and criminals alike, that society can be policed only because it consents. When the burden of law or government is too great, or too oppressive, or when economic need or famine breaks the normal course of life, there simply are not—can never be—enough coppers to hold the line. Thus, if a man wishes to commit a crime which by its nature must excite the immediate response of every policeman within twenty miles, his first precaution should be to await a volcano or a popular revolution, so that these diligent officers have other things on their minds.
On the other hand, if criminals were ever sufficiently organised as to commit a hundred major crimes on one night, or better yet, a thousand, the vast majority of them must get away scot-free. In such circumstances, a particular institution not immediately recognised as vital to the survival of the state—not, in fact, Downing Street, or the House of Commons, or the Palace—would have to fight for attention, might even be sorely neglected for some hours, especially if its champions in Whitehall were themselves distracted.
Of course, criminals being by and large self-interested and mistrustful of one another, such an event is generally thought by the forces of law and order to be quite impossible.
The night is very quiet, and very cold. On the Chantry Road in London’s financial heart, the tall, imperial buildings sleep. Even the modern additions, steel and glass statement-constructs seeking to overmatch a heritage of blood, art, and conquest by sheer size, are closed up and cold. Lights burn on the upper floors, traders and analysts letting commerce take precedence over family one more time in a desperate attempt to add to a Christmas bonus they won’t have time to spend. On the street, a fox wanders to and fro, plucking at the bulging dustbins and yowling.
At midnight oh one, with a flash so bright that for a moment it is daytime in the dark, open-plan offices all around, the doors come off the Ravenscroft Savings & Commodities Bank. The explosion is so unnecessarily huge that the great steel shutters on the front of the building are also torn away, flying across the street and destroying a vintage Aston Martin. The fox is flung bodily into a sculpture garden, and makes his displeasure at this imposition widely known. Policemen hasten to the spot. Terrorism or robbery, it hardly matters: the action has a blunt defiance which must be answered.
But when they get there, there’s no one robbing the place. It’s just open.
Which is when the alarm goes up from Ridley Street and Hatton Garden and Shottmore Park, and then from Bond Street, from the Silver Vaults, from the Strand, from the secure depository at Uxbridge and the Christie’s warehouse in Bethnal Green.
London is alive with crime.
Caro Cable is cracking a safe in the British Museum.
Dizzy Spencer has her foot over the accelerator outside the Tower of London. Because why the Hell not?
Across the capital, from Dartford Creek to Staines Bridge, alarm bells ring and klaxons sound; electronic sentinels wail for assistance and police call centres are swamped. The main emergency station shunts capacity to the Dundee office, which is protocol, but someone cuts the line ten minutes later in Oxfordshire, which bounces the whole catastrophe to the emergency satellite. No one’s going to steal that!
But Big Douggie’s daughter knows a boy whose brother is a cracker—a professional computer-systems intruder—who knows someone in Sweden who does this kind of work. The satellite is now carrying Dutch pornography, in vast quantity, to the delighted sailors of a Russian factory ship in mid-Atlantic.
In Pimlico, a very old man is caught three floors up stealing undergarments from the linen cupboard of a woman who once, long ago, was a noted music-hall entertainer. She declines to press charges, and invites him to join her for tea. The attending sergeant—overstretched and rushing to a break-in at the local Lloyds Bank—nonetheless takes time to record that the chief witness has a twinkle in her eye.
The fire service withdraw their operators from the police switchboard, and ten minutes later the ambulance crews do the same. They are entitled. In the chaos, normal catastrophe continues, and they can’t be swamped by police business.
At every crime scene, the same white card, and rumours of a hatted, spatted figure in the background, like the ghost of Humphrey Bogart.
YOU HAVE BEEN
ROBBED
BY CRAZY JOE.
Across the capital, amid the broken glass, a sense of outrage blossoms: He’s taunting us! He is! The natural censoriousness of England asserts itself. He ought to be ashamed!
Many of the banks being raided are the keepers of sensitive documents, business deals not entirely honest, controversial decisions involving the treatment of indigenous peoples or the environment, or choices about cutting costs by risking customer welfare, and these, instead of being decently discarded as worthless or used in perfectly respectable blackmail, the cheeky bastard takes pains to return through the good offices of national newspapers and quite inappropriate websites, who naturally peruse them in the course of handing them over and make trouble. The outrage grows: It’s cheeky! It’s revolution!
Crazy Joe must pay. To make such a mess, at this moment, with the bees incoming, spotted over the Channel. It’s irresponsible, is what it is. Lives will be lost. Reputations will suffer.
London is awake, and afraid, and excited. Families cluster around television sets, late bars with wireless internet fill with news-hungry clients. Long-distance lorry drivers, bus drivers and cabmen in traffic jams frown and grumble and turn on talk radio, and mutter about the state of things.
It’s a complete disgrace!
Shocking.
But, on the other hand, it’s crime. Not terrorism. Not war. Not drug violence or acid throwing or honour killing or celebrities or multiple rape. Not riots. Not financial collapse. Not magic, dreadful machines in the sky or the end of the world. Good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime.
And, you know. Knocking off five million in precious stones, or stealing that Picasso collection from the snob with the shiny suit, well.
You have to admit, it’s got class.
In green taxi shelters and terminals and postal depots, and in newsrooms and studios, bare whispers of smiles. You can’t be glad, of course. You can’t admire this sort of thing. It’s against the law.
But just the same.
It’s almost like the old days come again, isn’t it?
Rodney Titwhistle is dragged from a camp bed in his office to a ringing phone: London’s on fire, Rodney. It’s bloody insane. Is this your mess? Rumour says it is. Well, I don’t care, I’m taking the reserves. Yes, I bloody am, and you can bloody wake him if you think—Right, well, he knows where to find me!
With Arvin AWOL—Rodney suspects a sexual binge, though he has, of course, begun discreet inquiries—he must handle this himself. It’s not unusual to have to fight one’s corner in Whitehall. Some idiot always believes his crisis is more critical than yours, his secret darker. In Rodney Titwhistle’s experience, it never is.
This business with the banks, though, has an unsettling side. Sheamus wants the calibration drum for something—is it possible he’s just taking pot luck? A tombola approach to armed robbery and safety deposit boxes? After all, he is religious, and those people can be rather absolute about their goals. That would be embarrassing.
Asssuming Sholt was wrong. If Brother Ted had the right of it, well. It could be more serious. A lot more serious. But that’s ludicrous. Rodney Titwhistle has it on good authority that Brother Sheamus will not use the Apprehension Engine to destroy the world. He has personal assurances from Sheamus himself. He has looked into the man’s eyes.
Anyway, Sheamus doesn’t have the drum. So he can’t. If he had the drum, that would be different. If he were even now stealing it. But even then … who really destroys the world? More than sixty-five years since the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan
, most of it spent with America and Soviet Russia at daggers drawn, and neither of them ever pushed the button on purpose. Pushed and unpushed it by accident a couple of times, to be fair. But not on purpose.
Although it’s a brave new world out there, with all these non-state actors. A mad person might do it.
He doesn’t stop to consider Joe Spork as the culprit. The boy’s a nobody, after all.
With the world burning outside his window, Rodney Titwhistle glances at the red phone on his desk. Time to make the first call. Number 10, probably, or the Cabinet Office. He should have details first, but he can’t wait. He’ll have to wing it a little. He reaches out.
And then he hears what must be his least favourite voice in the entire world.
“My dear Rodney, hello, hello! I let myself in, I was sure you wouldn’t mind, so many friends we have in common, of course. So many. You may remember me, I threatened to sue you, frightfully coarse of me, I do apologise … My name is Mercer Cradle, I must have said, formerly of the old established firm of Noblewhite Cradle, now of Edelweiss Feldbett of Switzerland, a rather new organisation but we do like to make our mark early, it’s part of our institutional culture which I am even now, um, well, I suppose we shall have to say ‘culturing’, which is sadly redundant, but there you are, what can you do? And specifically, Rodney, what can you do? No, please, don’t touch the phone, these gentlemen might take exception, they are from a grass-roots organisation of concerned citizens, one might almost say a sort of informal police service, or more sinisterly a mob. Oh, and this paper, Mr. Titwhistle—well, these papers, being as they are plural—these are writs and warrants and all manner of unfortunate things which I am regrettably obliged to serve upon your good self on charge of complicity in torture and so much else, do please surrender in good order and I think we’ll sit the night out here, where it’s warm and there’s sherry, and deal with the paperwork in the morning if we’re all still alive …
“Because,” Mercer Cradle adds bleakly, “you may have killed us all with your bloody ignorant prideful mess, you stupid prick, so sit there and leave the rest to someone else or I really will have your bollocks in a jar. Rodney.”
On the second floor of a rather pretty vicarage in Camden Town, Harriet Spork listens to the chorus of sirens outside her window, and hears her dead, beloved husband’s voice. The radio in her room announces that the mysterious golden bees have been seen over the Channel, they’re an hour from London at most—but her son has all that in hand. He’s come good, hasn’t he? Despite everything. It just goes to show.
For the first time in years, Harriet sleeps quietly.
Arvin Cummerbund watches Stansted Airport fade behind him. Against his massive shoulder, the beautiful Helena slumbers, dreaming of Arvin and of her native Argentina. Below him, in the city he has called home for his entire life but will not remotely miss, he can see that Joe Spork is doing what Sporks do.
Arvin grins, and lets himself breathe in, and out, and in, and out, and very soon the first-class cabin is filled with snoring as of a hibernating walrus, if walruses hibernated, which Arvin Cummerbund would be the first to aver that they do not.
When the Captain announces nervously that they’re taking a slight detour today to avoid the incoming bees, he barely shifts in his seat.
In Milton Keynes, while London basks in scandalised delight, the ground is shaking. The sleeping city turns in its warm covers and wonders muzzily whether there’s been an earthquake somewhere far away. A few late drinkers turn sharply, pull their coats about them—the wind is bitter—and hurry home.
Bletchley Park shudders from its neo-Gothic battlements to the empty, decaying Nissen huts. The doors of the long barrow are open. Wooden sleepers twist and groan.
A great black shape rolls up and out, massive body uncoiling. For a few moments it lumbers, then gathers speed. Across the long, straight stretches of the London line it becomes a vast shadow, impossibly huge and quick, belching smoke and roaring.
Behind it, the rails are scraped clean by sheer traction, gleaming silver.
Titan passing.
Sarah Ryce is the regional controller of routing for the London & Shires Freight Rail System (night shift). She works in a temperature-controlled office. She goes to work by car, because there isn’t a passenger train which serves the only house she can afford. She can’t really afford the car, either.
The man who stops to help her when she realises that her front-right tyre has been slashed is extremely polite and rather dishy in a dishevelled, older-generation sort of way. He’s so nice that she absolutely doesn’t feel threatened when he explains that she should call him Tam, and that he works for Britain’s most wronged, most wanted man. He wants her to do something very simple, and will pay her more money than she has ever seen in one place at one time to help him save the world. It’s probably because he is fixing her tyre, and in a position so absolutely compromised and vulnerable that it’s clear he does not propose to do her harm. It might be because he’s a bit like her older brother Peter, who died last year of cancer. Or it might be the feeling she has, that everyone has, that something is happening which is really important.
So Sarah Ryce says yes, and at one a.m. she presses a sequence of buttons she’s never pressed before in that order, and watches the board light up with stopped locomotives dragging iron pilings from Hove to Carmarthen by way of Clapham Junction, and a bright green line shines in the darkness, its route clear all the way to central London and onward to the green reaches of Richmond and Barnes.
A few moments later, something passes her station going at what must be over a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and the old, rusted track protests, but holds. Sarah Ryce grins, secretly: whatever she’s done, it’s something big.
Green fields full of cows and sheep; occasional empty churches and shuttered pubs; the wide stretches of road alongside the railway line; the engine passes them by and is gone, trailing hot-metal stink, sulphurous coal smoke.
Past warehouses and school buildings, the backs of shops and restaurants and petrol stations, on and on and on into London. Brick houses shake, glasses jump from sideboards. Car alarms wail and windows crack. Polly Cradle’s empty bed, in its basement, comes right off its springs and crashes to the floor.
In the darkness of the night of misrule, the Ada Lovelace drives like a spear towards Sharrow House.
Titan passing.
Ruskinites patrol the grounds of Shem Shem Tsien’s fortress. There are machines and there are men, and there is very little to choose between them. The men are blank-faced in their linens, cold-eyed fragments of the Opium Khan walking and breathing, volitional only as sharks are. They feed, they fight, they sleep, and do it all again. They serve. They are part of something bigger.
And they hear something. They can feel it in their soles, in the gathering static in the air. Something big—no, huge.
In the grounds of Sharrow House, they gather, and wait. They are not afraid. They lack a sense of self; their identity is collective. Each is aware, peripherally, of his incompleteness, of the debt he owes to the template. They move like a swarm. They are a composite of horrors; endless hours of the life of Shem Shem Tsien embroidered with a pattern of torture and death, of theology and rage and hate.
They weave around one another, agitation growing. The sound is either much louder or much, much closer. The ground is thrumming. Other Ruskinites begin to emerge from Sharrow House in a seething mob, anticipating violence. Though each is driven by a different slice through the shape of Shem Shem Tsien’s mind, one thing they have in common is their progenitor’s love of murder.
And then, at this appointed hour, Queen Tosh expresses her irritation: with a great boiling detonation, the castle moat explodes.
Green water turns white and bows upward. It boils, collapses into bubbles, and then rushes up, on up and outwards like a mushroom cloud, then splatters down in blobs the size of packing crates. Individual Ruskinites are flattened to the ground, broken or dea
d. Ugly, triangle-toothed fish, stunned and semi-liquidised, fall like rain. For a moment, everything is mist and spume. Then the froth of pressure stops and the geyser vanishes, and the remaining water burbles away into the drains.
The Ruskinite swarm stares down into the empty ditch. Unexpected. Unexpected things are bad. Unwelcome. But there is nothing to strike out at, so they stare at the missing moat, and out towards whatever is coming, and wait.
Joe Spork, with twenty seconds to impact and both hands on the control yoke of the train, watches the wall around Sharrow House loom closer and closer, and knows that for the first time in his adult life he is not backing away from a showdown. In a heartbeat, half a heartbeat, this train will test itself against that wall. The skill of the Ruskinites of days gone—Ted Sholt’s Ruskinites, not these present bastards—will be set against the immutable physics of collision. The cowcatcher will hold, or it will not. If the giant steam cylinder on the front of the train does not survive the impact intact, the explosion will be vast—but its vastness will be utterly irrelevant to a man standing on top of it. Any sort of bang will surely kill him.
In his chest, a golden cauldron of sheer excitement, like whisky in the soul. He grins at Polly Cradle, sees an answering smile of anticipation and sheer delight.
Hell, yeah.
The wall is huge in front of them, seems to be curving over to embrace the Lovelace like a gloved fist—
Impact.
Silence made from thunder.
A moment of absolute stillness, the smallest humanly perceptible division of time.
Joe is slammed against the driver’s restraints, thinks he must surely be shaken apart. He can see the ground, then the sky. The train will flip, and then explode. He cannot possibly survive. He finds he has no regrets, or perhaps he has no time to summon them.
But the Lovelace’s maker knew his purpose: what he was tasked to build was not just a mobile laboratory or a code-station. It was a vessel of war, to withstand war’s appalling forces and torsions. The train would not function without its driver, and so the driver must be shielded.