From the gathered politicians, a voice shouted, “Three cheers for the prime minister!”
Brunel whipped around his Gatling gun and pointed it at the man. “Shut your damned mouth, you cretinous heap. All of you. Not another word.”
After a moment, satisfied that he’d not be interrupted again, he lowered his gun. Though his mask was fixed and incapable of showing emotion, he appeared to withdraw into himself and was silent.
Burton waited. A breeze brushed his skin. He looked at the dome of blue fire and noticed that the tendrils of energy were streaming from a great many nodes, flashing upward from one to the next before descending from the apogee in a long, twisting funnel to Brunel’s cranium. The hissing storm, he felt sure, was increasing in power, and the air in the chamber was starting to move, as if being dragged slowly around the centre.
Brunel resumed his narrative.
“My fifth birth occurred five years ago, at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 2197, when, amid the boundless chatter of information that passes through me, I discovered my queen. My saviour. Is it not said that only love can conquer fear? I know I have loved her before, though how and when eludes me. Perhaps I shall love her again, and the terror that drives me will finally be dispelled.”
“You do not feel that love now?” Burton asked.
“While you—the source of my dread—are alive? No, I have no love. Only the hope that it will come when you are gone.”
Brunel’s head jerked, as if he’d just realised something. He turned to the benches. “Beresford, where is the queen?”
Lord Robert Forest Beresford stood and nodded toward Thomas Bendyshe. “The entertainments upset her, My Lord Prime Minister. She left the chamber and went to tend her flowers in the palace greenhouse.”
“Fetch her. Bring her here.”
“Me, sir? Surely it would be more appropriate for one of the royal equerries to—”
“Go, damn you, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
Beresford gave a submissive bob, ran from his seat across the floor, and exited through the double door.
Brunel surveyed the benches, and Burton sensed that, if the metal face had been capable of it, it would have been sneering.
The polished visage turned and lowered to regard him again.
“My sixth birth came at nine o’clock this very night, the fifteenth of February, 2202, when, while I was instructing my Parliament to vote in favour of an attack against our rival empires, I suddenly perceived six events occurring simultaneously and knew there must come a seventh. Seven births, seven events. Such are the intricate synchronies of time, such its patterns and echoes.” Brunel raised a fist and extended from it a metal thumb. “A red snow began to fall, and I knew it to be from a different history.” He unfolded the forefinger. “An explosion crippled the city, and I knew the enemy long hidden within the populace had finally made a move.” His middle finger. “I remembered that it was you whom I fear, who you are, and where you are from.” The fourth finger. “I felt time fold, and I knew you had arrived.” The fifth finger. “I recalled my many births, and I knew I was almost complete.” He extended an adjustable spanner from his wrist to make the sixth digit. “And I became fully myself when, out of time, all around me, there arrived these—”
He threw back his head and opened his arms wide. The dome of energy started to slowly drop down, and, as it did so, lights flared in the ceiling above it, in the walls, and from the edge of the circular floor.
Burton squinted and shielded his eyes from the glare, blinked, dropped his hands, and stared dumbfounded as the true nature of the storm was revealed. He saw burned, torn and blistered time suits—hundreds and hundreds of garments and helmets and stilted boots—all identical, all floating just inches apart and forming a downturned hemisphere. Chronostatic energy blazed from their Nimtz generators, connecting them all and flowing down into Brunel’s babbage. As they gradually dropped, they rotated around a vertical axis, increasing speed, and now the air was moving faster too, quickly turning from a breeze into a wind.
“Power over time itself!” Brunel clanged loudly. “Now I could rid myself of that which has haunted me. Of you! Now I could send my equerries back to the source, back to 1860, where lay my genesis and my potential nemesis, there to hunt you, there to kill you. They never returned. Did you destroy them, killer? Murderer? Assassin?”
“Some,” Burton shouted above the increasing din of the lightning. “Most vanished of their own accord. They were confused. Disoriented.”
“Ah. Unfortunate. Perhaps when they leave my circle of influence they become erratic. I suppose those you allowed to live are lost amid the interstices of time. They have fallen between the lines of the equation.”
“How did you send them?” Burton demanded. “By what method? Surely you couldn’t—since nine o’clock this evening—so quickly have adapted them to travel through history?”
“No adaptation necessary.” The brass man pointed a hand at the benches. From his fingers, zig-zagging lines of chronostatic energy lashed out and hit the woman who’d announced herself as Lady Dolores Paddington Station, the Minister of War, Death and Destruction. She screamed as it first enshrouded her then expanded to form a bubble. It popped and she vanished, as did a section of the bench and the arm of the man beside her. He shrieked, stood up, and fainted.
“I sent her to 1860,” Brunel said. “She should have returned instantaneously. She hasn’t. It appears that, like my equerries, she didn’t fare too well there.” He looked back at Burton. “I’m right to fear you. You are indeed dangerous.”
Now Burton understood why he’d half-recognised the woman. “You deposited her right in the middle of a thoroughfare. She was hit by a vehicle.”
He felt it apposite to exclude the fact that he’d been driving it.
“It doesn’t matter. She was disposable. The demonstration is done.” Brunel turned a hand in front of Burton’s face. Blue sparks crawled up and down the fingers. “The stuff of time. I command it.”
“I see,” Burton responded. “And now you also have the ability to defy gravity. Floating down from the ceiling? Impressive, if somewhat theatrical.”
“Time and space are indivisible, Burton. The accretion of time suits has endowed me with dominion over both. Once I’ve properly learned how to employ the power—”
“Employ it? What do you intend to do with it?”
Brunel chimed a chuckle. “You said you came here to locate the Turing Fulcrum? The device you refer to is long obsolete. Its functions became spread across millions of devices, which grew in number and shrank in size. Now they number in trillions and are naked to the human eye.”
“Nanomechs.”
“Yes, and this—” The brass man gestured at the suits, which were now blurring around them. “This is in them all. And this is me.” He thumped a fist into his chest. “What shall I do? I have come home. I have fashioned the world. I am everything, and now I shall expand into the other histories and shape them, too. Every variant of every person will know their place; they will know where they belong and how they must contribute. They will feel safe. They will be content. They will have purpose.”