Angelmaker

XVIII Lovelace; Misrule; showdown.

Eighteen hours later, in the cave beneath the hill, the Ada Lovelace broods and grumbles. Arc lights burn and shadows jump on the walls. Joe Spork’s shoulders are covered in soot and grime, and his hair is matted. From time to time, he dips his whole head in a vat of water and lets the run-off cool him. It is too hot, too smoky, too choking, too metallic.

It’s perfect.

The Ruskinites—Ted Sholt’s Ruskinites—left clear instructions for waking the Lovelace. Joe is following a handwritten guide, step by step, the pages open on a barrelhead. He has opened the drive cavity, cleaned and oiled the gears and replaced them. He can smell the grease on his skin.

He works, and in between times, when something must cool or set, he sits with Frankie’s list, her off-switch, and reads them again and again. His hands twitch and twist in the air. Eyes closed, he can feel the outline of the Apprehension Engine, knows Frankie’s clever clips and catches, the route through the wires and coils from the beehive shell to the heart. He commits it to memory, and makes Polly Cradle test him. For each correct answer, he gets a kiss. For each wrong one, a frown.

On a length of discarded rail Joe pounds red-white metal, folds and flattens, replacing a control lever in the floor of the driver’s cab. There can be no weaknesses, not today.

The technique is called Mokume-gane. He laughs, suddenly, loudly, and it echoes through the enclosed space. Of course. If one were to do this with gold and iron, and then immerse the result in nitric acid, the iron would dissolve. A truly subtle metalworker—a genius—might fold the metal in leaf-thin layers, an origami so carefully executed that the resulting mesh of gold would flex like cloth, would appear to have been woven.

He takes the washed steel rod and quenches it, then—obedient to the requirements of the instruction manual—fits it and cools it again in place. There is a brief, high sound, like a chime as it settles into the mechanism. He hesitates.

“Try.”

The Lovelace growls again, and this time whines as well, and the engine—decoupled, for the moment, from its massive load—shifts slightly on the track.

All night and much of the day he has worked like that, and he is not tired. It is as if twenty years of sleep and certainty have stored themselves up in him for discharge in a time of need. The Lovelace is ready.

Polly Cradle catches him around the neck and drags him up into the driver’s cab. On the floor of the engine she makes love to him, skin slick with transferred grime.

“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.

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 dead. 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.

The Lovelace cuts through the wall, spraying concrete, brick, stone and mortar. The carriages shunt together, slotting into one another so that their combined kinetic energy is passed along the spine of the train to the front in a great heave. The black iron is thick and solid, the stress of the impact rebounds through interlocking buffers and supports is dispersed as heat and deafening noise. Rivets pop and wood panels crack. The engine shrieks. The great pressure tank sobs and moans.

But it holds.

Of course, it holds. This is what it was made for.

Just like me.

Joe is moving before the train is fully stationary. He surges from the driver’s cab and down onto the burning grass, knowing somewhere inside himself that these first seconds will count, that the first battles will sway the outcome. Whoever flinches will fight uphill from then on, will lose momentum. He snarls and crouches low. A shadow skitters towards him on heron’s feet, bobbing and weaving. The thing takes an iron pipe full in the chest and flies backwards, and Joe lets loose a yell of heady rage. That for Edie! And that for Ted! And that one for Billy and Joyce, and one for Tess and however many others along the way. And for me. Oh, yes. For me. He stalks through the fog, bludgeoning and crushing, teeth bared. When he feels them begin to gather around him, he steps back towards the wrecked train and a curtain of burning-rubber stink. Metal hands and swords flicker after him.

He’s already gone, silent on his big feet.

Behind him, from the Lovelace, the small but righteous army of Crazy Joe emerges into the beachhead: a collection of thugs and muggers, glad beyond anything they had expected at the chance of a day’s heroism; retired boxers and questionable bodyguards, occasional assassins and professional leg-breakers, hearts uplifted at the prospect of a good fight, the right kind of fight, just this once. This one time, to pay for all. Behind them come Fifth Floor Men and safebreakers, for ease of access; and behind them the Waiting Men—a dozen mournful faces with broad shoulders from carrying coffins, retired soldiers who came by their Acquaintanceship the hard way. Not just an army. A wrecking crew.

The engine howls and grumbles. The fire in her gut is still burning, the steam still building. There’s nowhere for it to go. The safety valves are blocked, the catches bent and hammered shut. One by one, fail-safes click on, and off again, each one meticulously sabotaged by a capable hand.

In the fog, Polly Cradle can hear her lover laughing at his enemy. She can see the shadow of his coat and hat, flicking, taunting, drawing them in. She can feel the steps of his dance, the rhythm of his humour.

She hopes he is fast enough. That he isn’t having too much fun to remember the plan.

She raises her hands, gestures. From his place in the bag over her shoulder, the dog Bastion whiffles.

The wrecking crew slips away from the fight.

Joe Spork laughs in the smoke, laughs through the bandit’s handkerchief over his nose and mouth. A long metal shaft slashes towards him. He lets it pass by, then tugs on it, then scampers away. He has them now, close behind him. He takes a second, gets his bearings. Yes. Yes. So, and so, and so. Snickersnack, as one might say.

Little by little, he draws his foes back towards the train, and the groaning engine. He wonders, briefly, if he will carry this through. There are men here. Real people, for all that they are unmade and mad. They may die. Then he thinks of Polly, and her brother, and of the whole, wide, impossible world beyond, which will stop if this night goes badly. And he thinks: these are my torturers.

So fuck ’em.

He laughs again, very loud, and hears them coming after him. He clangs his feet on the engine steps, then slides on his knees across the metal floor and ducks down and out the other side, off towards Polly Cradle and the others. He counts strides: onetwothreefourfivesix… twenty… thirty…

He hears the clank of metal on metal, of men and machines by the engine housing. They are looking for him. The Lovelace moans again. Too hot. Too full. Too much.

Joe Spork wrenches his body around into a sliding turn, skids into a ditch between two low walls, and points his father’s gun at the body of the engine, the great steam tank with its pent-up rage. He pulls the trigger.

Bangbangbang. And then: bang.

The night is white and orange, and the world is made of noise.

If he thought the crash was loud, now he knows the meaning of the word. Debris zings over him, whistling and whirring. A piece of wheel embeds itself in a statue. He lies on his back and laughs, and cannot hear himself. But here, at least, all the Ruskinites are gone. He picks himself up, and looks back at the site of the explosion.

A yawning black crater steams and smokes, strewn with bodies. None of them makes a sound.

He swallows guilt, and feels a tight burst of pride instead, a battlefield satisfaction, lets it rise in his chest.

Joe slings the tommy gun across his back, gathers his troops and gives orders. The wrecking crew strip the dead machines of their robes and everyone moves forward through the grounds, into the house.

Once upon a time, no doubt, this was a fine old manse, with marble floors and columns, and those big windows were the windows of the Empire Room, the Beaverbrook Suite and the Lady Hamilton Apartments.

Not any more. Now it’s just a shell in which something else has taken up residence, like those eerie ocean worms which grow in the flesh of crabs and eventually devour them from within.

From the glass cupola of the tower on down, Sharrow House has been consumed, walls knocked through to make a space like a cathedral. Here and there, upright pillars of brick, strands of wallpaper hanging off, have been allowed to remain, bearing the weight of stark steel joists. Black cables lie like creepers along the walls across what remains of the ballroom. The hand-painted frescoes have been drilled through and the statues clubbed and cut and shunted to one side. Even with the residue of the Lovelace’s fiery end still in his mouth, Joe can taste the broad rubber flavour of hot electrician’s tape, like a bar across the back of his tongue. In the middle of the floor, a gaping hole sinks down and down into the earth.

Of course. Everything must be as it was. The Opium Khan is living a fight from the last century, playing out his victory over Edie Banister and her lover and Abel Jasmine and Ted Sholt, over all of them. It isn’t important that they’re all dead. What’s important is that he wins, and sees himself winning.

From out of the chasm comes a sound like breathing, and in the same moment that he becomes aware of it, Joe recognises from above, somewhere in the distance, the deep, alien drone of a hundred thousand wings.

The bees are coming.

The pathway to the pit is lined with pipe and electrical gear; Shem Shem Tsien’s version of Frankie’s machinery lacks her economy, her sense of humanity. Instead of hives and metaphor, this is brute industrial technology, fit for the launching of missiles and the incineration of nations. It is all instrumentality, without heart.

They follow the trail to the inmost chambers of Sharrow House, where a gaping maw has been cut or ripped into the old stone floor, and the cellars and crypts of the castle have been opened to the rooms above. The drop to the bottom is as far, easily, as the top of the spire above them; a vertiginous two hundred feet. The way down is a makeshift staircase like a Bailey bridge, supported by a scaffold of girders and ropes. The cabling wraps around it or hangs beside it in a curtain of thick, choking vines.

Joe Spork peers. Down among the vines, he can see scarecrows. Or—no. No, of course, not scarecrows. Not for Shem Shem Tsien. No happy turnip-headed figures made from stuffed pyjamas and straw. Real people. Maintenance men and security guards and lab technicians, dead and hung out like so many rags. Newly dead; less than a day. Perhaps he intends them as messengers to God: a calling card before knocking on the door. Or possibly they were just in his way. Or for no reason at all. The Opium Khan never needed reasons, according to Edie Banister. He did what pleased him, and very often that was bloody and vicious.

Joe feels his face stretch in a rictus of anger, draws it back and holds onto it. He will need that. No sense sharing it up here.

The dog, Bastion, squirms out of Polly Cradle’s grip and scurries away, blind eyes searching for his enemy. From the gloom come flashes of electric light, like a thunderstorm in the depths of the sea.

Joe hefts his gun and leads the way down into the dark. The stair spirals, and at every turn there’s another body, gathering insects. The scaffold shakes as they go down, too many feet and too much weight, and Joe Spork reaches out to steady himself. Polly Cradle hauls his hand back and glowers at him, furious.

“Idiot!” she growls. “Use your head! Use your eyes!”

She points at the guard rail. It glistens, sparkles. He peers. Cut glass, and a smell like marzipan.

“What is it?”

“Cyanide, I expect. It ought to be, oughtn’t it?”

One of the bruisers has already cut himself. He collapses, choking, on the second landing. When his mate goes to help him, a trapdoor gives way beneath them and they fall into an electrified net.

Joe Spork swears under his breath. He doesn’t say “be careful,” because no one in his crew is stupid. Hard, and angry now, but not stupid.

The room at the bottom of the stair is a chasm, a blending of the house with open space from the Tosher’s Beat, cellars and tombs and all. It’s a giant whispering gallery, like being in the dome at St. Paul’s—sounds echo from the walls, from the upper floors, and from the tower and the sky above. Here the sound of the approaching bees is like a constant grumble, the hiss of static from a radio between stations.

The Opium Khan is waiting for them on a great wrought-iron throne, surrounded by his machines. The beehive from Wistithiel sits in the middle of all of it, crudely sliced open and wired and invaded. Black gooseneck flexes run out to huge banks of computers, and back again to another, half-familiar edifice, like the one in the indoctrination room at Happy Acres, but so much bigger: the archive of the Recorded Man.

All around, the flare of lightning, actinic snaps and pops from the older, stranger work of Frankie Fossoyeur, and a few remaining corpses fizzing and jerking on old electrified frames.

As Joe Spork steps off the stair and onto the floor, Shem Shem Tsien smiles, and pushes a lever to his right, and the whole apparatus shudders and boils. The beehive shrieks.

“Hello, Mr. Spork,” Shem Shem Tsien says.

“Vaughn.”

“Oh, please, spare me that, at least… You’re too late, by the way. It is done. The machine will show me Truth, and I will become as God.”

“And everyone will die. Even you. You’ll cease to be a person. You’ll just be…” Oh. A copy. A pattern, endlessly repeating.

Shem Shem Tsien opens his hands. “You see? I am the future. And, in fact, that is truer than you can imagine. When the world has been made ready by the Apprehension Engine, I shall bless you all with my own mind. With the calibration drum, I can use the Engine as a transmitter. Like my Ruskinites, Mr. Spork, you shall all know every detail of me. And, gradually, you will become me. I will be everyone, and everything, for ever. My perception will be the only perception. My mind, the only mind. Your mind, Mr. Spork. You will be part of me.

“I will become God. It is too late to prevent this. It has always been, will always have been, too late.”

After a moment, Joe Spork shrugs. “If I was too late, we wouldn’t be talking.”

Abruptly, he knows quite clearly and simply that this is true, and a moment later, he realises what that means: the Apprehension Engine is working. Stage one, Frankie called it. The thing she wanted. The safe zone. But that will change, very soon.

In a corner of his mind, the echo of confirmation.

He looks up, and sees a waterfall of bees, a tumbling, beautiful, appalling stream, and everything changes.

The Opium Khan snaps a command and men appear from the shadows, hard-bitten bastards to look at, and used to working together. Drug soldiers, maybe, or mercenaries. Mercenaries. As soon as Joe has the thought, he feels the rightness of it.

The bees descend, filling the air. They’re all over London, he knows that, too, and there’s a growing fear, an understanding that what is coming is very bad.

Shem Shem Tsien is laughing. Joe probes the edges of that name in his mind, but it seems there are limits to his comprehension; when he thinks of his enemy, he has no sense of who the Opium Khan truly is. A misunderstood question, then, insufficiently refined for the answer to be true or false. But soon that won’t matter. Soon, the redefinition will attend the asking, and after that, questions will cease to exist at all.

Death by footnote.

Battle is joined, brutal and intense. Street fighting, without an elegant kick or a clever trick in sight. The noises of it are grim and desperate: grunts, tearing sounds, cries and impacts; slicings and shatterings. This close to the machine, both sides are nervous of guns. With their hands and feet and old-fashioned weapons of mayhem, the mercenaries fight. The bruisers fight back.

The bees descend into the chamber, a humming cloud of confusion and dismay, and abruptly the whole scene is glossed. Each man has a life, a history, apparent and real and immanently understood. At this moment, Joe Spork suspects, Frankie imagined that war would be forever impossible, just as the theorists of poison gas and the atomic bomb fondly cherished a notion of mankind which made such weapons unusable and which would understand the stricture of them, that war is wasteful and pointless.

The fight continues, if anything more bitter.

Amid a haze of golden bees zinging to and fro, the botched and butchered remnant of the Apprehension Engine is running, deepening, and every answer is more and more fractal, more complete. It cannot be long now before everything is too late. Joe knows immediately exactly how long, can feel the measurement of time not in seconds or minutes but with the perfect timekeeping of atoms. But in minutes, yes, he’s right: not more than five to the end.

Joe charges forward through the tumbling, struggling figures, seeking Shem Shem Tsien. He slams his fist into a man’s face, ducks a counter, and laughs as he tips his foe over on his back and stamps on him. Laughs, because he can see his victory reflected in the other’s movements before it happens. He wades through the fight, knowing exactly where he is going, and where he needs to be. Briefly, he is beset by too many, even for him, but then a man cries out in alarm and horror and clutches at his leg, now missing a chunk of calf where Bastion’s narwhal tusk has torn into him. Joe ducks through the gap, weaves, engages and retreats. The dog vanishes into the melee, and his progress is audible in shrieks and curses.

Joe howls a berserker laugh, spreads his arms wide and springs forward to carry men down to the ground, rolls past them and onto his feet. He feels fingers underfoot, stamps and hears a curse, slips away. His path is a shifting ripple in the room, but he walks it with perfect certainty and his hands are full of power. He lets himself understand the pattern, knows his destination, can feel it drawing ever closer. And then, in the very middle of the swirl, they are face to face.

The Opium Khan and his enemy, in perfect balance. They are the fulcrum. What happens here will determine everything.

They know it to be true.

Shem Shem Tsien raises his hand: stop. Joe does the same.

And there is stillness, of a sort, over the moaning of the broken.

At the edges of the room, Ruskinites appear from the shadows, robes torn and bathed in smoke. Shem Shem Tsien smirks. “It is genuinely satisfying, Joe Spork, to have you here. To have an enemy to destroy while one ascends to godhead.”

Joe does not reply. He waits.

The Ruskinites reach up and draw back their hoods, revealing the faces of Simon Alleyn and the Waiting Men. The Opium Khan stares at them for a moment, bewildered, and then his face cracks into a broad smile. “You found the Waiting Men! You found them and brought them along as a special surprise! Oh, Joe. It’s too good. Did you think that would bring poor Vaughn back to life? Scare me with the terrible undertakers and up he pops, my old, buried soul? A struggle for dominance inside my own head, a master stroke? You did! Let me just take a moment to savour it. It’s splendid. And don’t you worry, Brother Simon. I’ll be with you directly.

“Do you know, Mr. Spork, I honestly think that under other circumstances, you and I—”

Joe Spork sighs. “Windbag,” he says. He rolls his neck to loosen it, tosses his hat to the floor, then screams his fury and his hate, and leaps…

Except, he doesn’t, because instantly he begins the motion, he knows infallibly what will happen if he follows through. He can feel the Apprehension Engine working inside his head, intimately and perfectly perceives action and consequence from every angle:

Joe leaps, huge hands grasping. Shem Shem Tsien receives him and they fall, together, rolling over and over. Joe bites off a piece of his enemy’s ear. The Opium Khan breaks two of Joe’s fingers. They tear one another apart; skill and savagery, evenly matched, so back and forth they go. On and on and on until, suddenly, nothing. The world stops. Finis.

Seeing him freeze, understanding in the same way the same causality, Shem Shem Tsien laughs and steps forward, raises his narrow sword, then stops:

The Opium Khan lunges. Joe twists to one side, the blade scoring a line along his hip. He brings up his gun and fires; a bullet bites the Opium Khan’s arm. They close.

“I’m very sorry, Brother Vaughn. It’s time.”

Simon Alleyn has covered the distance between them so fast it seems that he must have flown. He rises up behind Vaughn Parry, strong limbs reaching. His left arm folds across Parry’s throat, fingers reaching to catch the crook of his other elbow in a wrestler’s lock. He pushes Parry’s head forward from above, and slowly, slowly, the veterbrae separate, and the spinal cord snaps.

Vaughn Parry dies.

Shem Shem Tsien twists around, draws his gun and fires at Simon Alleyn. Alleyn cries out, falls, clutching his side. He may live. He may die. It’s not decided. Not yet.

The Opium Khan turns back towards Joe Spork, pistol in hand, and Joe brings up the tommy gun and sets his feet.

“Go ahead,” Joe says. “Let’s see what happens.”

Shem Shem Tsien stares.

And stares.

And does not know the answer.

For a moment, a look of panic flickers across the matinée-idol face. It is so swiftly suppressed that you could miss it. You could see it and never know it for what it was. Unless you were waiting for it.

“You like to be in the driving seat, don’t you?” Joe Spork murmurs. “You don’t like to gamble. You don’t have faith, so you want to force God to talk to you. You can’t control death, so you kill, because if you become death maybe you won’t die. And just for insurance, you become a dead man, too…” He grins, wolfishly toothy. “This must be a real pisser. Staring down the barrel of this gun, knowing that even if you shoot me dead first time, I’ll fire this thing, and there is absolutely no way of controlling whether it kills you or not. One of us will die, maybe both of us. But we can’t know in advance.”

“Stalemate,” snaps the Opium Khan. “It hardly matters. Time is on my side.”

Polly Cradle’s laughter trills out, clear and unafraid. “Not by half, it’s not,” she says. She steps through the ranks of the Waiting Men to rest her hand on her lover’s shoulder. “It’s now, Joe. It’s all right. Do what you have to do.”

Joe Spork has fought and maybe killed already tonight. It is not impossible that the explosion of the Lovelace ended living men who might have been returned to themselves. He has, in combat, inflicted injuries which may prove to be fatal. All the same, he has never been a killer, not an executioner nor an assassin, not from a standing start. But on the other hand, here he is, and this is his life, and if he blinks or hesitates, the world ends. Staring across the gap which separates them, he sees that the Opium Khan already knows what he will say. He says it anyway, with a sense of growing certainty which comes not from outside, not from the Apprehension Engine or the bees, but from himself. With Polly beside him, this choice is easy. He fixes his eyes on Shem Shem Tsien.

“You took my home and murdered my friends. You tortured me to death, twice, and brought me back. You hounded my grandmother.

“You tried to kill Polly to spite me.

“You break things which are beautiful, because it pleases you.”

The Opium Khan opens his mouth to say something in return.

The tommy gun blazes white fire.

Crazy Joe Spork, finger on the trigger, riding the thunder. His shoulders push down on the gangster’s gun, his chest labours to hold it on target. He sweeps it back and forth across the space where Shem Shem Tsien was standing. He feels the sting of something against his cheek as he turns, feels something pluck at his coat, and realises these are bullets, and does not care. He fires until the magazine is empty, letting the gangster’s gun have its head, seeking to erase his enemy from the world. When the gun clicks empty, he steps forward through a cloud of gun smoke of his own making to use the weapon’s butt if he has to, to grab and tear. There’s blood on his shirt, and his ear is torn and burned. He’s been shot. Dull paths of pain are scored across his face, and one arm aches.

Shot, but not killed.

Through the smoke, he sees Shem Shem Tsien’s mouth contort in a sneer of utter contempt—a sneer which cuts off sharply as Bastion Banister shuffles painfully forward to snarl a reply directly into his face. Joe can see—can feel, immanently—the Opium Khan’s confusion. How can a pug nine inches high stand eye to eye with a god? Some ridiculous last-minute prank? A dog on stilts? A stratagem involving strings?

Shem Shem Tsien’s head rests where it has fallen, a yard or more behind his body. The line of bullets from the tommy gun has cut through his neck like a sword.

Comprehension arrives, whether from the Apprehension Engine or from his fading vision, or from the feel of stone under his ravaged flesh and bone. Shem Shem Tsien’s eyes open wide in inexpressible horror. His mouth opens, as if to speak.

And then it’s done.

Joe Spork waits for a moment to be sure that his enemy has died, then walks past the Opium Khan’s severed head towards the machine which will devour the world.

The beehive growls and stutters, black cables humming with power bursting from its smooth organic lines. The bees are in the air, but they are coiling and spiralling in a more and more perfect pattern, more and more like a grid. They look less and less like bees, and more like cogs turning, one over another. Joe wonders how long he has left.

It’s nearly over. Two minutes. Maybe less.

Joe moves to the Apprehension Engine as if through a flow tide, pulled and buffeted, and then abruptly he has passed into the eye of the storm. The blanketing certainty is gone; the Engine’s effect, this close to its heart, is muted. He contemplates briefly a future in which he fails, and is left alive as the only conscious creature on Earth. In the Universe, even.

He kneels, stares at the beehive. The frontpiece is gone. The shape of the casement has been changed. This is not the sequence as he learned it.

For a moment, he doesn’t know what to do.

And then his hands move. The wordless part of him, ignorant of fear and peril and the destruction all around, sees the job and knows the shape of the machine. Shem Shem Tsien has ruined the art, oh, yes, and that’s a weak and ugly thing to have done—but the schematic remains the same. Turn this. Now this. Now, very quickly, both of these switches.

A plate comes away, revealing the inner coils.

Joe glances over his shoulder at the room and sees fear. Hard men and women are weeping. He finds Polly, sees her face urging him on. A minute left, she’s saying. Joe, please. So much left undone. No escape, no anything, just a stripping of the gears of the soul. A disintegration.

I love you.

Please.

Joe wrenches his head around, back to the machine. It feels like a betrayal. If Polly’s going to die, if he fails, he should be looking at her when it happens.

So, having chosen to look away, he can’t fail. The gangster digs his heels in. The craftsman rolls up his sleeves.

In the heart of the Engine, around the activation switch, there is a combination dial. The markings around the rim are not numbers, but letters:

O, P, E, J, A, H, U, S.

It was not in Frankie’s list. Added at the last minute. Added by her, he recognises her style… Added, but why? What’s the point?

What is the stricture?

Truth? Is there a word with those letters meaning truth? Is it Greek? French?

His hand hovers, withdraws. No.

When did she add it?

Late. Very late. While Sholt was Keeper. Mathew was grown up. Edie had left. And there, etched in the metal, the year: FF, 1974. And her goose-foot colophon. A last line of security, to preserve the machine. To keep it running. To hold to the truth in the face of those who would switch it off.

Why? What was she protecting? Herself? The world?

Behind him, people are falling to their knees—not in prayer, mostly, but exhaustion. They have screamed. Now they’re just waiting. Seconds.

The machine is the maker. What was it all for? In the end, what was Frankie’s heart?

He knows.

Edie.

Daniel.

Mathew.

And Mathew’s son. Born that year. He wonders if she came to the hospital, peered, alone, through the glass.

He looks at the dial, and sees the letters of his name. And switches off the Apprehension Engine.

Overhead, the bees cease their wild swirling. The cloud becomes orderly, then sedate, and finally they drop to the ground and settle, returning to the hive in neat little lines. Around the world, if Frankie is to be trusted—and Joe no longer knows, mercifully: he has to trust—the same thing is happening.

He follows the procedure through to the end, sending the last signal, the one which will cause the other hives to burn and die, leaving only this last one.

He cuts the power and removes the calibration drum, then the book.

It is the first time he has held them both. They’re very light and small to be so dangerous. He puts them in his pocket.

Finally, Joe hefts a discarded sledgehammer. In the rows upon rows of magnetic tape and cinematic film; in the books and records and photographs of his repugnant life, the Opium Khan persists. The potential for his resurrection lurks in every line and grain of it. This is the full and original copy of the Recorded Man. Even what was destroyed at Happy Acres will surely have been incomplete. Shem Shem Tsien would not permit the thing out of his hands, would not countenance the possible creation of a second true Khan.

And nor will Joe.

He hefts the hammer, and strikes.

It takes a very, very long time. Or perhaps just moments. His shoulders ache and his back screams at him. He batters the archive over and over, rips at it with his hands, bleeds from cuts and splinters. When he tires, he drives himself with images of the dead, of Polly’s fear in the last moments. He uses everything to make himself go on.

At some point, there’s nothing big enough left to smash, and Joe piles all the remains together and runs the main electric current through the stack, so that the tapes spit and sparkle and the celluloid burns. When the blaze has caught properly, he lifts the corpse of Shem Shem Tsien and throws it onto the flames.