As a body, the audience burst into raucous laughter.
“Please!” Wells pleaded. “Listen to me!”
Burton stepped forward. “Bertie—”
A deafening roar interrupted him. A ball of ferocious white flame blazed from the black hulk suspended above them. Bullets ripped down and thudded into Wells, shredding his clothes and flesh, crushing him to the floor and smashing the tiles around him.
The fire guttered and vanished. The roar slowed to a rapid metallic clattering then stopped.
Shiny blood oozed outward from the Cannibal’s tattered corpse.
The king’s agent, numb with the shock of it, watched as the life faded from Wells’s disbelieving eyes.
The ministers’ laughter gave way to enthusiastic applause.
Burton looked up and saw two pinpricks of red light in the bulky silhouette. Slowly, the shape descended. He heard Swinburne, Trounce and Bendyshe yelling but he couldn’t process their words.
He saw the gleam of polished brass.
He saw thick legs and an armoured torso.
He saw five arms extended, Christ-like, and a sixth, to which a Gatling gun was bolted, still directed at Wells.
He saw that the red pinpricks were eyes.
He saw, floating down to the floor, with lines of energy cascading from the apex of the domed ceiling into his head, the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The House of Lords fell utterly silent as the brass man descended.
In familiar bell-like tones, he said, “The Anglo-Saxon Empire is mine. I will not have its Constitution challenged.”
His feet clunked onto the floor. He took a pace forward and looked down at Burton. The king’s agent felt his skin prickling, reacting to the ribbons of blue energy that were pouring from the ceiling into Brunel’s exposed babbage.
“Sir Richard Francis Burton,” the engineer said.
“Isambard?”
Ignoring the enquiry, Brunel cocked his head a little to one side. “So, despite my efforts to prevent it, you have followed me through time. That is unfortunate for you, for now the manner of your demise depends upon the answer to a single question.”
Burton took a step back and hefted his sword, eyeing the huge man-shaped mechanism, observing the gaps between its brass plates, wondering whether there was a part of it so vulnerable that a sword thrust could render the entirety inoperable.
“I shall tell you how I came to be,” Brunel intoned. “Then I shall ask and you will answer. If I am satisfied with your response, you will die quickly. If I am not, you will die very, very slowly.”
Burton remained silent.
“Know this, then, Burton: I have been born seven times, and through each birth this world was formed.”
“Bravo!” a minister shouted.
“My first birth came at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February 1860. Three hundred and forty-two years ago.” With a quiet whir of gears and hiss of miniature pistons, Brunel closed his arms about himself. He lowered his face and regarded the floor. “No thought. No sensory stimulation. No knowledge of myself. What had its inception on that day was comprised of one thing and one thing only: fear.”
Burton heard Tom Bendyshe groan and from the corner of his eye saw him buckle and fall to his knees. Trounce and Swinburne crouched and held him by the shoulders.
“Brunel! Stop this!” Trounce yelled. “For pity’s sake! He’s in agony!”
The gathered politicians bleated their objection to the interruption.
Without turning his head, Brunel extended his Gatling gun toward the three Cannibals. He didn’t fire it, but the threat was enough to quieten the former Scotland Yard man.
Holding the pose, he went on, “My second birth came at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1950. A glimmering of awareness. A vague sense of being. Perhaps a dream.”
Burton lowered his sword. “Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine. Your presence, as you moved forward through time, resonated with its silicon components. It expanded your capacity to think.” He took two paces to the left to avoid the pool of blood that was spreading from Wells’s corpse.
Brunel raised his face and looked directly at the king’s agent. “And it gave me a means to influence events as they unfolded.” Without moving his levelled gun, he unfolded his remaining arms and held their four hands and one stump before his eyes, examining them, moving his fingers, extending the tools from the top of his wrists, making drill bits and screwdrivers spin, clamps and pliers open and close. “But what was I? My body—this body—was in one place, my mind in another. I was disjointed. Incomplete. Scattered. And there were memories, nightmarish memories. I felt myself strapped down, at the mercy of a dreadful man with a swollen cranium. I saw an orangutan with the top of its head replaced by glass through which its living brain was visible. I was aboard a flying ship that was plummeting to earth. There were gunshots. And—”
An arm suddenly jerked forward, and a forefinger jabbed toward Burton’s left eye, stopping less than an inch from it. Burton stumbled back.
“And there was you. Sir Richard Francis Burton. The killer. The murderer. The assassin.”
“No. Those events occurred in a different history and involved a different me.”
For a moment, Brunel stood absolutely motionless.
“Ah, yes,” he said. He drew in his limbs, turned his palms upward, and raised his face to the crackling storm. Ribbons of energy danced across his brow and reflected on the curved planes of his cheeks. “Time. So vast and complex and delicate. Do you feel it as I do, then? Stretching away in every direction? History upon history? Variation upon variation? So many causes. So many effects. Innumerable consequences blossoming from each and every action. Possibilities and probabilities. What a beautiful, awe-inspiring, and truly terrifying equation.”
Another pause; a silence broken only by the relentless lightning, a cough from the audience, and an agonised moan from Bendyshe.
Again, Brunel regarded Burton.
“A pattern. A rhythm. A third birth, this at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1986.”
“The Turing Fulcrum.”
“Awake. Fully awake.” Brunel fisted a gauntlet-like hand. “In a world gone wrong.” He emitted a clangourous chuckle. “But wrong how? I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
He reached out. Burton tried to dodge away, but the brass man was too fast. The king’s agent felt metal fingers close around his cheeks and jaw. The grip was surprisingly gentle, almost a caress.
“I dreamed that I was in a museum,” Brunel chimed. “And you—you!—stood before me. I thought I had escaped, but here you were, in pursuit, determined to terrorise and destroy me. Burton. The man from the past. My demon. My would-be nemesis.”
The fingers opened and withdrew. Burton glanced at his companions. Swinburne and Trounce were holding Bendyshe and gazing at Brunel. Their father was white-faced, glaze-eyed and trembling.
“My fourth birthday was at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 2162. By then, my presence had been in every Turing device for a hundred and seventy-six years, yet I had no individuality. No Self.” Brunel touched his own face, running fingertips over the line of his jaw, across the immobile lips, around the deeply shadowed eye sockets. “Suddenly, it came. I was me, in this body, half submerged in the mud of a narrow subterranean stream—a tributary of the Fleet River—beneath the ruins of the British Museum. Buried alive! Buried alive! A birth into primordial horror! Inch by frightful inch I pulled myself through that narrow tunnel, feeling my battery draining, until at last I came to the Fleet, which had become a part of the sewer system, and from there climbed to the surface to claim my rightful place. It was not difficult to convince those in power that I was the Turing Fulcrum incarnate. They were weak, while I was integral to every item of technology, and had long employed it to prepare them for my advent.”