They saw the monolithic jumble of King’s Cross and St. Pancras, with the streams of hansom cabs seemingly crawling from their brickwork like ants, and they heard the hellish chaos where the city’s coaches and chairs butted bumpers and the steam trains chud-chudded into northern and southern terminals, more than five hundred engines each day. Then through the railroad yards they skulked like criminals, past the spider’s web of tracks all leading into the shed for old locomotives, to the banks of Regent’s Canal, where the air once rang with the music of industry as the engineers worked their locks or wall cranes, but now were home only to the most tenacious of that industry who managed to eke out a subsistence in spite of crushing competition from the railway. Entire families living in a tea cabin, working for a single wage.
West then, to Camden, feeling the cold travel by piggyback on tendrils of fog, worming underneath their greatcoats and down the legs of their high boots. Witmeyer began to forget about more ethereal problems, such as her own loss of control and general dissatisfaction with her faith, and worry instead about freezing to death. She had never felt cold like this in London. The entire setup reminded her of a winter she had spent reeducating radicals in St. Petersburg, with its freezing fog and steam engines.
“To hell with this,” she said, stopping level with the ice-frosted cover of a canal boat. “I need a drink or a fight. Or something!”
The morphed shapes of Vallicose and Farley solidified beside her.
“What impedes us, Sister?” asked Clover.
Witmeyer swallowed a scowl. Clover had been here for five minutes, and already she was using words like impede. She was loving this. Loving it.
“Impedes us, Sister?” snapped Witmeyer. “Impedes us? Oh, a couple of things. The century we’re in, for one thing. Our mission, for another. What happened to eliminating Savano? That order came from on high, after all.”
Usually Vallicose had little patience for questions when her single-mindedness was focused on a task, but now she bore her partner’s moodiness with a beatific smile, which only served to further enrage Witmeyer.
“This is not a laughing matter, Sister. We are out on the end of a very long limb here. Yes, we have weapons, but not so many bullets. And anyway, my fingers are so cold and swollen, I don’t know if I could pull the trigger. And I don’t feel well, Clove. Seriously. Since that unholy time tunnel, my insides feel wrong. I think that machine reacted with our bulking steroids.”
Vallicose shifted Farley’s weight gently. “Don’t you see, Lunka? This is the Hangman, before he ascends to that glory. Before the Hangman’s Revolution. We have been chosen to stand at his right hand. At the right hand of the Blessed Colonel himself. All other missions are subject to that honor. Where, or indeed when, we are does not matter. All that matters is our holy mission, which is to take the Hangman to the colonel, and he is in the Camden Catacombs—every schoolchild knows this. We are so close.”
Witmeyer had long known that there was no point in trying to actually communicate with her partner about anything in an honest fashion. Vallicose was simply incapable of thinking outside the party lines. In order to achieve any sort of dialogue, Lunka Witmeyer knew she would have to construct an argument that her partner could understand.
“Of course, Sister. We are honored by this new mission—blessed—but the Holy Hangman is injured and freezing. We must seek food and shelter or we may forever be remembered as the Thundercats who allowed Anton Farley to die of exposure. Perhaps our mission is to simply save his life.”
This had to be considered, and Vallicose found her gaze drifting to the cottages on the canal’s far bank, their windows aglow with warm, welcoming light. A fire would indeed be a blessing. Even a brief stop would serve to fortify them all.
Vallicose looked down upon the Hangman, Farley, hanging limply in her arms.
Duty is so difficult, she thought. So many opportunities to make mistakes.
She wished that Farley would perk up so she could question him as to their exact orders.
Perhaps I am being tested. This is my personal valley of darkness.
As though he felt her gaze upon his brow, Farley’s eyes fluttered open.
“Awup,” he mumbled. “Haawuup.”
“He speaks,” said Vallicose. “My Lord Hangman speaks.”
“What does My Lord Hangman say?” asked Witmeyer, knowing that the sarcasm would not even register with her partner.
Vallicose cradled Farley’s skull gently in one massive hand and drew him close to her ear.
“Yes, Major Farley. Give us your instructions. We exist to serve.”
Farley spoke his order, a simple command that Vallicose had uttered herself countless times.
“Well?” said Witmeyer, the single word sending a cloud of iced breath puffing from her lips. “What is the good news?”
Vallicose half-smiled, perplexed. “He says, that is, my Lord Hangman says: Hands up.”
Witmeyer did not return the smile, but was instantly on her guard, sweeping her weapon around the canal. She found herself in the gunsight of a sentry standing in what she had thought was a covered punt but she now realized was a rigid inflatable boat with an outboard motor strapped to the stern. The man himself was rendered indistinct by his black uniform and shroud of fog, but the rifle barrel poking from the gloom was perfectly clear.
“Hands up, princess,” said the man. “And drop the weapon.”
Witmeyer bared her teeth. Now here was a situation she understood.
“What did you call me, little man?”
A clack echoed across the flat expanse of water as the man racked the slide on his weapon. “Hands up, that’s all you need to worry about.”
Witmeyer moved laterally away from her partner, making them separate targets. “Are you ready, Sister?” she called to Vallicose. “Remember what I said about conserving bullets.”
But her partner stood stock-still and said to the Hangman, “Put your hands around my neck, my Lord.”
When he’d done so, Vallicose raised her hands as ordered. Witmeyer could not remember ever having seen her partner in this position, and in spite of all she had experienced on this most eventful day, it was the sight of Clover Vallicose posed with such supplication that drove home to her that her partner had set them firmly on the road to ruin.
“Now you,” said the sentry, and Witmeyer had no choice but to comply, allowing her pistol to dangle by the trigger guard.
The man’s teeth must have been exceptionally white, because Witmeyer could have sworn they flashed from the gloom.
“See, princess? That wasn’t so hard.”
Witmeyer felt fury build like a physical pressure behind her eyes.
Unless that man is the colonel himself, she thought, I am going to injure him before this is all over.
They boarded the rigid inflatable—which should not have existed for another half-century—and the sentry pulled a couple of hoods from under the seat.
Farley saw the hoods and shook his head.
Why bother? the gesture said, and Witmeyer understood the implications. They were to be taken to the nerve center of operations, at which point they would join the revolution effort or they would be executed. Either way, hoods would not be necessary.
I have a dog, lovely little guy, eyes like chocolate buttons. Anyway, this dog, Justin, sits looking at me, nodding his little head, and you’d swear that he understands every word I say. Pretty much exactly like you people now.
—Professor Charles Smart
The Camden Catacombs were catacombs in name only, as there were no cobwebbed crypts under their vaulted ceilings. These so-called catacombs had been excavated not as a place of eternal rest for the souls of the departed, but as a crucible of labor for the living. Camden Lock Market had long been a center of commerce, and the arrival of the railway only increased the bustle of man and beast. So much
so that the railway company built a series of underground stable yards for their work ponies and even included a pool and a dock for boats coming off Regent’s Canal. These yards were constructed hurriedly and on a budget, and so they flooded regularly. After a heavy rain it was not uncommon for lovers strolling the canal to have their romantic vista ruined by the grisly sight of drowned, wide-eyed ponies heaped like sacks on the bank.
This water problem seemed insurmountable, so the railway company was nothing short of thrilled when, in 1884, a retired American colonel with more money than brains made it an extremely generous cash offer for the entire subterranean labyrinth. What this Colonel Box planned to do with the caverns, the railway folk did not give a single fig about, as his pile of money was sufficiently high for the doomed project to miraculously realize a profit.
A champagne reception was thrown for Box in the Savoy, and then the railway folk sent a clerk to bank the tender before it evaporated. As a footnote to the entire affair, the clerk who had been dispatched on his errand with a withering series of threats and insults from Director Rolls-Jameson took the impulsive decision to abscond on a ferry to Europe with a suitcase of pound notes and was never heard from again, though there were rumors that he bought an olive grove on the Côte d’Azur and lived a long and happy life.
Regardless of this embezzlement, the catacombs now belonged to the colonel, and he set his team’s engineer the task of flood-proofing the entire underground area, which, contrary to the universal rule of restoration, did not prove as difficult as first supposed. In fact, the entire problem was solved by the construction of a single buttressed, steel-reinforced wall between the catacombs and adjacent sewer network, which had never been equal to the task of conveying Camden sewage and rainwater to the distant Thames.
Once the wall had been scrupulously built to specifications and tested by a winter of torrential rainstorms, Colonel Box and his team of British and American special forces—drawn from Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and SAS Boat Squad, among others—transferred the future gear into their underground lair, satisfied to finally have a base of operations from which to move forward their master plan.
For the next decade and a half, Box and his men labored underground like beavering badgers, stripping down whatever twenty-first-century weaponry had made it through the Smarthole and fabricating facsimiles. There were setbacks, of course, including the mundane shortage of adequate tooling equipment, and an extraordinary takeover attempt by the Spiffy Squires, a gang of what could only be described as river pirates, who, upon hearing some third-hand legend of an Ali Baba’s cave of riches underneath Camden Lock, moved their operations from the Thames estuary to the canal and attacked on two fronts: by land and by water. The Spiffy Squires were little more than Oxford dropouts suffering from spoiled-brat syndrome, and they were no match for Box and his aging soldiers, though Box did lose two good men, which made him realize that he would need to eventually bolster his ranks with locals if his operation was to succeed. And so Major Anton Farley was dispatched to infiltrate London’s biggest and most organized criminal outfit: the Battering Rams. And when the time came, when all the weapons were ready, then the Rams’ war council would be executed and the rest of the gang would be offered a proposition.
That blessed day had finally arrived.
CAMDEN CATACOMBS, LONDON, 1899
The boatman left the engine in its cover and expertly poled the Zodiac inflatable along the Regent’s Canal portside bank, toward the brick-toothed mouths of Camden Bridge’s arches. Dark wavelets thumped the rubber floats, urging the inflatable to midstream, but the oarsman compensated unhurriedly with deep mixing swirls of his pole.
A thousand times, thought Witmeyer. He has made this trip a thousand times.
She glanced sideways at her partner, who sat beside her amidships, and was unsurprised to see Vallicose’s face shining with a zealot’s glow.
Clove thinks herself on the way to Paradise.
Ironic, as the dark canal waters could easily have been the River Styx and their ferryman might have been the legendary Charon, delivering them to the Underworld.
Why not? Is anything impossible now?
Witmeyer shook herself, partly for warmth, but also to dispel the philosophical nature of her thoughts. She had been quite interested in the great thinkers as a younger girl. As a cadet, she had even dated a poet as part of a teen undercover assignment, and she had been upset for hours when she had had to inform on him; but she had learned from that assignment that this was not a world for philosophy. The history shows on the Boxnet assured the faithful that Victorian London was the largest cesspool of human sin and corruption the planet had ever seen. Victorian London apparently made Sodom and Gomorrah look like Girl Scout camps.
I have survived on my instincts thus far and I will survive this trial, too.
The inflatable moved in rhythmic pushes, water hissing on the gunwales, until the bridge yawned over them, greasy stalactites dripping from its arches. They might have been rowing down the gullet of a whale for all the Thundercats could see, but the sentry hauled back on his long oar and guided the small boat toward an indistinct bank of flotsam and decomposing canal garbage. The prow cut cleanly through the soft belly of the bank, and suddenly they had slipped through a shadowed access arch and underneath the bridge itself.
Vallicose could barely contain her excitement.
The mouth of the Catacombs. I can feel the Blessed Colonel’s presence.
Of course, she had been here before. On school tours. For Boxites, this place was the equivalent of Bethlehem. This was where the Boxite Empire had been born, in this Spartan underground series of caverns.
A flashlight beam cut through the gloom and pinned the small boat to a white ring of water.
“What have you got there, Rosey?” said a northern English accent from the darkness.
“Farley and a couple of strays,” replied their escort.
Rosey? thought Vallicose, doing her surprised grunt. Sergeant Woodrow Rosenbaum, born in New Jersey. The Evangelist. I have his Bible trading card in my locker.
“Sergeant Rosenbaum,” she said with a curt bow of her head. “What an honor to meet the Evangelist. I didn’t recognize you in the fog.”
“The Evangelist?” said the second man, stepping from the shadows. “What’s she talking about, Rosey?”
The second man was all soldier, from crew cut to military-issue boots. The uniform was a strange hybrid of futuristic and Victorian. The flak jacket was definitely not from this century, but the clunky revolver on his belt and the battered top hat perched atop his shaven head anchored him in this time.
Vallicose studied him. “You are Aldridge,” she said. “Corporal Sonny Aldridge. Born in Newcastle.”
Aldridge raised the barrel of his rifle, which, like him, seemed to be cobbled together from parts.
“That sounds like surveillance information, miss. I don’t like people knowing things about me.”
“I have your trading card in my collection,” said Vallicose. “Every loyal citizen knows this information. It is written on the plinth of your taxidermic installation in the Hall of Heroes.”
Aldridge did not lower his weapon. “It is written on the what of my what in the where?”
Farley coughed and propped himself on one elbow. His face was pale in the flashlight beam, but his deep-set eyes sparkled from their recesses.
“Corporal, these people are future folk, and they saved my life. The colonel will want to see them immediately. This could change everything.”
Sonny Aldridge grimaced. “Are you sure, Major? The colonel doesn’t like surprises.”
Farley was adamant. “This is different, Corporal Aldridge. Today’s phrase is lizard king—now buzz us in. That’s an order.”
Aldridge shrugged, absolving himself of responsibility. What could he do but follow orders? He pulled a walkie-talkie from his ve
st, sent two bursts of squawk, and then pressed the speak button.
“Aldridge here. Lizard king. I say again, lizard king. Crank the gate. Four coming in.”
Behind him on a heavy steel panel, two thick chains shook off their slack, clinking rigid, and sprayed trails of water into the lit circle. The panel jerked straight up into a square frame set in the wall above, and from inside the catacombs tumbled a cacophony of industry, including the buzz of arc lights and weld sparks. The impression was of production and purpose.
“Oh,” said Vallicose. “Oh. Oh.”
Aldridge waved them past with the antenna of his walkie-talkie, and Sergeant Rosenbaum threaded the Zodiac through the canal gate into the belly of the catacombs.
Witmeyer was a tough woman to impress. After all, she had seen more wonders in the course of her fifteen years as a soldier for Box than most people might see in a dozen lifetimes. At the tender age of eighteen she had been one of the special forces team that had dynamited the Eiffel Tower, possibly the greatest propaganda coup ever achieved in the Jax wars. Before she had reached her third decade, Lunka Witmeyer had spearheaded the campaign to eliminate the unholy elephant from the continents of Africa and Asia. By twenty-three she was co-commander of her own search-and-destroy shuttle in low Earth orbit, hunting down resistance Internet satellites, so Lunka Witmeyer had literally seen the world. But the sights that greeted her wide eyes in those catacombs impressed her mightily—as much if not more than anything she had seen in her varied career. Colonel Box and his men were building an army underground, preparing for the first round of Boxstrike.
The gateway opened into a series of low rooms interconnected by brick arches and lit by a series of arc lights strung along the walls and powered by various portable generators that growled and shuddered in corners like watchdogs. The arches gave the space the feeling of a cathedral, and the impression was one of holy labor. Men worked on weapons, stripping them down or building them up. Witmeyer saw racks of mortar tubes, assault vehicles, grenade launchers, limpet mines, rifles that vaguely resembled AK-47’s, pump-action shotguns, and boxes of ammunition. And a cluster of Zodiacs bobbing on the leash at a steel ladder that led to a mini-jetty.