“So she has direct communication with him?” Burton asked. “She receives her instructions from the Turing Fulcrum?”
“I don’t see how she can perform her role otherwise.”
“But kidnapping?” The king’s agent shook his head. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”
“Nor me. If there was any other way—” Trounce fell silent.
He steered the flier between towers, and Swinburne marked off districts as they passed over them. “Earl’s Court. Kensington. Notting Hill.” The vessel veered to the east. “Bayswater. Edgware Road.”
Smoothly, they descended and landed in a long and narrow lamp-lit public garden. As they disembarked, Wells shivered and said, “This snow is extraordinary.”
“Blame my brother,” Trounce muttered. He raised his hood and gave a grunt of satisfaction as the others did likewise. “Even when we’re below, it’ll be best if we keep our faces covered, especially you, Richard.”
“Why me in particular?” the king’s agent asked.
Swinburne giggled. “You might scare the natives. Have you looked in a mirror lately?”
Burton glared at him, then his face softened and he muttered, “The same old Algy.”
Trounce pointed at the glowing glass frontage of a tall edifice. “Does the position of that tower ring any bells?”
“No,” Burton said. “Should it?”
“Its foundations are rooted in the spot once occupied by fourteen Montagu Place.”
“Home! By God!”
Swinburne grinned and nudged him with an elbow. “Good old Mother Angell, hey! Never fear, you’ll be back there soon enough.”
They fell silent as three “Uppers” walked by. Though the trio was enveloped in cloaks, sufficient of them was visible for Burton to see they were thin and willowy in stature.
Trounce waited until they’d passed then said to Burton, Wells and Raghavendra, “Hand over your guns. They’re rather too antique for our requirements.”
This was done, and he put them into a small compartment inside the vehicle, drawing from it five replacement pistols, which he distributed.
“The Underground is heavily patrolled by constables. They’re identical to the creatures that attacked you in 1860, Richard. You’ll remember how we fought them off with truncheons and revolvers. These pistols will make a better job of it.”
“How does it load?” Burton asked, examining his gun with interest. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s a Penniforth Mark Two,” the detective inspector explained. “Invented by one of Monty’s descendants. The bullets are stored in compressed form inside the grip. There are five hundred. You’re unlikely to need more.”
“Five hundred? How is that possible?”
“Humph! A nanotech thing. Quite beyond me. All I know is that after each shot a fresh bullet is squirted into the chamber where it instantaneously expands to its full form.” Raising the weapon, he continued, “The gun has a small measure of intelligence. Watch.”
He aimed at the flier. A small red dot of light slid across the vehicle.
“That marks the target, and, as you can see, I can aim just like normal. However, I can also do this. Front end.”
The dot snapped across to the flier’s prow.
“Rear nearside window.”
In a blink, the dot moved to the vehicle’s rear window.
“Ground, ten inches in front of the middle of the flier.”
The point of illumination instantly snapped to the quoted position.
“If you need to shoot a weapon out of an opponent’s hand, just tell the pistol to do so and it will take care of the aiming.”
“Impressive!” Burton exclaimed.
“Better even than that,” Trounce said. “You can instruct the bullets to kill or to stun or to explode.”
Trounce pushed the weapon into his waistband and gestured toward an oddly shaped structure. “Our access point is over there. It leads down to the corner of Gloucester Place. Up here, we’re safe enough. Down there, we won’t be. Watch what you say and keep your faces shadowed by your hoods. Your BioProcs will work to divert attention away from you, but if you’re seen to do—or heard to say—anything suspicious, the constables will be on us before you can say Jack Robinson.” Trounce started, his eyebrows going up. “By Jove! I’ve not said ‘Jack Robinson’ for nigh on three and a half centuries! Funny how memory works when you’re a clone.”
They followed him to the structure, which proved to be the top of a spiral staircase.
“What’s to stop the people down there from coming up here?” Sadhvi Raghavendra asked.
“Superstitious dread,” Trounce answered. “The maxim ‘know your place’ has been drummed into them for nigh on a century.”
“Will we attract attention by going down?”
“We’re Uppers. We can go anywhere.” He checked that their faces were all sufficiently shadowed by the hoods, gave a nod of satisfaction, and started down the metal stairs. Burton followed, Raghavendra was next, then Wells, and lastly, Swinburne.
The stairwell—a plain metal tube—was lit by a strip of light that spiralled down anticlockwise just above the handrail to their right. The illumination served only to accentuate the narrowness of the cylinder, and, as they descended, Burton’s respiration became increasingly laboured, his claustrophobia gripping him like a vice.
Their footsteps clanged and echoed.
After five minutes, an orange radiance began to swell from below.
“Is the air getting thicker?” Burton mumbled.
“Actually, yes,” Trounce said. “The Underground is hotter, made humid by steam-powered vehicles, and is pretty much a soup of nanomechs.”
“That do what?”
“That keep the Lowlies placid.”
They suddenly emerged from the tube into an open space. As they continued down the steps, Burton and his fellow chrononauts looked around in amazement. They were in Montagu Place, not far from the corner of Gloucester Place, but aside from the configuration of the roads the area was completely unrecognisable. Where Burton’s house had once stood, there was now a row of derelict—but obviously inhabited—two-storey buildings. Toward Gloucester Place, and across it, visible along Dorset Street, much larger tenement buildings huddled. They were ill-built ramshackle affairs, mostly of wood, with upper storeys that overhung the streets. They were very similar to the old “rookeries” that had once existed in the East End, reflecting the same dire poverty and hellish conditions that had made of the Cauldron such a crime- and disease-ridden district.
In stark contrast to the overground, the streets here were densely populated. Slow-moving crowds were jammed to either side of a band of clanking, growling, hissing, chugging, popping, grinding, clattering traffic. The vehicles were more primitive than those of Burton’s age, for the most part comprised of leaking boilers, smoking furnaces, chopping crankshafts, wobbling drive bands, and belching funnels. Some were pulled by horses or donkeys or, unnervingly, by gigantic dogs. That such methods of transport existed contemporaneously with the saucer-like fliers of upper London was extraordinary.
From all these contraptions, steam billowed into the air, making the atmosphere, which reeked of sweat and filth and fossil fuels, so foggy that the far ends of Montagu Place and Dorset Street were lost in the haze.
Hanging high over the thoroughfares, suspended with no visible means of support, a multitude of large flat panels glowed with letters and disturbing images. The closest, right next to the spiral staircase, portrayed a ferocious and Brobdingnagian slant-eyed panda rampaging across a city, crushing towers beneath its clawed feet, and with hundreds of tiny people dribbling from the corners of its snarling, fanged and blood-wetted mouth. “ONLY YOU CAN SAVE THE UNITED REPUBLICS OF EURASIA FROM ITS OWN BARBARISM!” the floating placard urged.