by George Mann
Hamilton thought of Liz as he broke her arm.
He enjoyed the scream.
He wanted to bellow for where the real Liz was as he slammed the impostor down onto the floor, and he was dragged from her in one motion as a dozen men grabbed them.
He caught a glimpse of Bertil, horrified, but not at Hamilton. It was a terror they shared. For her safety.
Hamilton suddenly felt like a traitor again.
He yelled out the words he’d had in mind since he’d put his name down for the dance. “They replaced her years ago! Years ago! At the mews!”
There were screams, cries that we were all undone.
There came the sound of two shots from the direction of the Vatican group, and Hamilton looked over to see Valentine standing over the corpse of a junior official.
Their gaze met. She understood why he’d shouted that.
Another man leapt up at a Vatican table behind her and turned to run and she turned and shot him twice in the chest, his body spinning backward over a table.
HAMILTON RAN WITH the rout. He used the crowds of dignitaries and their retinues, all roaring and competing and stampeding for safety, to hide himself. He made himself look like a man lost, agony on his face, his eyes closed. He was ignoring all the urgent cries from the embroidery.
He covertly acknowledged something directly from the Queen Mother.
He stumbled through the door of the pantry.
Parkes looked round. “Thank God you’re here, we’ve been trying to call, the Queen Mother’s office are urgently asking you to come in—”
“Never mind that now, come with me, on Her Royal Highness’s orders.”
Parkes grabbed the pods from his ears and got up. “What on Earth—?”
Hamilton shot him through the right knee.
Parkes screamed and fell. Every technician in the room leapt up. Hamilton bellowed at them to sit down or they’d get the same.
He shoved his foot into the back of Parkes’s injured leg. “Listen here, Matty. You know how hard it’s going to get. You’re not the sort to think your duty’s worth it. How much did they pay you? For how long?”
He was still yelling at the man on the ground as the Life Guards burst in and put a gun to everyone’s head, his own included.
The Queen Mother entered a minute later, and changed that situation to the extent of letting Hamilton go free. She looked carefully at Parkes, who was still screaming for pity, and aimed a precise little kick into his disintegrated kneecap.
Then she turned to the technicians. “Your minds will be stripped down and rebuilt, if you’re lucky, to see who was in on it.” She looked back to Hamilton as they started to be led from the room. “What you said in the ballroom obviously isn’t the case.”
“No. When you take him apart,” Hamilton nodded at Parkes, “you’ll find he tampered with the contour map. They used Sandels as the cover for substituting Her Royal Highness. They knew she was going to move around the room in a predetermined way. With Parkes’s help, they set up an open-ended fold in that corner—”
“The expense is staggering. The energy required—”
“There’ll be no Christmas tree for the Kaiser this year. Sandels deliberately stepped into the fold and vanished, in a very public way. And at that moment they made the switch, took Her Royal Highness into the fold too, covered by the visual disturbance of Sandels’s progress. And by old-fashioned sleight of hand.”
“Propped up by the Prussians’ people in the Vatican. Instead of a British bride influencing the Swedish court, there’d be a cuckoo from Berlin. Well played, Wilhelm. Worth that Christmas tree.”
“I’ll wager the unit are still in the fold, not knowing anything about the outside world, waiting for the room to be sealed off with pious care, so they can climb out and extract themselves. They probably have supplies for several days.”
“Do you think my granddaughter is still alive?”
Hamilton pursed his lips. “There are Prussian yachts on the river. They’re staying on for the season. I think they’d want the bonus of taking the Princess back for interrogation.”
“That’s the plan!” Parkes yelled. “Please—!”
“Get him some anesthetic,” said the Queen Mother. Then she turned back to Hamilton. “The balance will be kept. To give him his due, cousin Wilhelm was acting within it. There will be no diplomatic incident. The Prussians will be able to write off Sandels and any others as rogues. We will of course cooperate. The Black Eagle traditionally carry only that knowledge they need for their mission, and will order themselves to die before giving us orders of battle or any other strategic information. But the intelligence from Parkes and any others will give us some small power of potential shame over the Prussians in future months. The Vatican will be bending over backwards for us for some time to come.” She took his hand, and he felt the favor on his ring finger impressed with some notes that probably flattered him. He’d read them later. “Major, we will have the fold opened. You will enter it. Save Elizabeth. Kill them all.”
THEY GOT HIM a squad of fellow officers, four of them. They met in a trophy room, and sorted out how they’d go and what the rules of engagement would be once they got there. Substitutes for Parkes and his crew had been found from the few sappers present. Parkes had told them that those inside the fold had left a minuscule aerial trailing, but that messages were only to be passed down it in emergencies. No such communications had been sent. They were not aware of the world outside their bolt hole.
Hamilton felt nothing but disgust for a bought man, but he knew that such men told the truth under pressure, especially when they knew the fine detail of what could be done to them.
The false Liz had begun to be picked apart. Her real name would take a long time to discover. She had a maze of intersecting selves inside her head.
She must have been as big an investment as the fold. The court physicians who had examined her had been as horrified by what had been done to her as by what she was.
That baffled Hamilton. People like the duplicate had the power to be who they liked. But that power was bought at the cost of damage to the balance of their own souls. What were nations, after all, but a lot of souls who knew who they were and how they liked to live? To be as uncertain as the substitute Liz was to be lost and to endanger others. It went beyond treachery. It was living mixed metaphor. It was as if she had insinuated herself into the cogs of the balance, her puppet strings wrapping around the arteries which supplied hearts and minds.
They gathered in the empty dining room in their dress uniforms. The dinner things had not been cleared away. Nothing had been done. The party had been well and truly crashed. The representatives of the great powers would have vanished back to their embassies and yachts. Mother Valentine would be rooting out the details of who had been paid what inside her party. Excommunications post mortem would be issued, and those traitors would burn in hell.
He thought of Liz, and took his gun from the air beside him.
One of the sappers put a device in the floor, set a timer, saluted and withdrew.
“Up the Green Jackets,” said one of the men behind him, and a couple of the others mentioned their own regiments.
Hamilton felt a swell of fear and emotion.
The counter clicked to zero and the hole in the world opened in front of them, and they ran into it.
THERE WAS NOBODY immediately inside. A floor and curved ceiling of universal boundary material. It wrapped light around it in rainbows that always gave tunnels like this a slightly pantomime feel. It was like the entrance to Saint Nicholas’s cave. Or, of course, the vortex sighted upon death, the ladder to the hereafter. Hamilton got that familiar taste in his mouth, a pure adrenal jolt of fear, not the restlessness of combat deferred, but that sensation one got in other universes, of being too far from home, cut off from the godhead.
There was gravity. The Prussians certainly had spent some money.
The party made their way forward. They stepped ge
ntly on the edge of the universe. From around the corner of the short tunnel there were sounds.
The other four looked to Hamilton. He took a couple of gentle steps forward, grateful for the softness of his dress uniform shoes. He could hear Elizabeth’s voice. Not her words, not from here. She was angry, but engaged. Not defiant in the face of torture. Reasoning with them. A smile passed his lips for a moment. They’d have had a lot of that.
It told him there was no alert, not yet. It was almost impossible to set sensors close to the edge of a fold. This lot must have stood on guard for a couple of hours, heard no alarm from their friends outside, and then relaxed. They’d have been on the clock, waiting for the time when they would poke their heads out. Hamilton bet there was a man meant to be on guard, but that Liz had pulled him into the conversation too. He could imagine her face, just round that corner, one eye always toward the exit, maybe a couple of buttons undone, claiming it was the heat and excitement. She had a hair knife too, but it would do her no good to use it on just one of them.
He estimated the distance. He counted the other voices, three... four, there was a deeper tone, in German, not the pidgin the other three had been speaking. That would be him. Sandels. He didn’t sound like he was part of that conversation. He was angry, ordering, perhaps just back from sleep, wondering what the hell—!
Hamilton stopped all thoughts of Liz. He looked to the others, and they understood they were going to go and go now, trip the alarms and use the emergency against the enemy.
He nodded.
They leapt around the corner, ready for targets.
They expected the blaring horn. They rode it, finding their targets surprised, bodies reacting, reaching for weapons that were in a couple of cases a reach away among a kitchen, crates, tinned foods—
Hamilton had made himself know he was going to see Liz, so he didn’t react to her, he looked past her—
He ducked, cried out, as an automatic set off by the alarm chopped up the man who had been running beside him, the Green Jacket, gone in a burst of red. Meat all over the cave.
Hamilton reeled, stayed up, tried to pin a target. To left and right ahead, men were falling, flying, two shots in each body, and he was moving too slowly, stumbling, vulnerable—
One man got off a shot, into the ceiling, and then fell, pinned twice, exploding—
Every one of the Prussians gone but—
He found his target.
Sandels. With Elizabeth right in front of him. Covering every bit of his body. He had a gun pushed into her neck. He wasn’t looking at his three dead comrades.
The three men who were with Hamilton moved forward, slowly, their gun hands visible, their weapons pointing down.
They were looking to Hamilton again.
He hadn’t lowered his gun. He had his target. He was aiming right at Sandels and the Princess.
There was silence.
Liz made eye contact. She had indeed undone those two buttons. She was calm. “Well,” she began, “this is very—”
Sandels muttered something and she was quiet again.
Silence.
Sandels laughed, not unpleasantly. Soulful eyes were looking at them from that square face of his, a smile turning the corner of his mouth. He shared the irony that Hamilton had often found in people of their profession.
This was not the awkward absurdity that the soldiers had described. Hamilton realized that he was looking at an alternative. This man was a professional at the same things Hamilton did in the margins of his life. It was the strangeness of the alternative that had alienated the military men. Hamilton was fascinated by him.
“I don’t know why I did this,” said Sandels, indicating Elizabeth with a sway of the head. “Reflex.”
Hamilton nodded to him. They each knew all the other did. “Perhaps you needed a moment.”
“She’s a very pretty girl to be wasted on a Swede.”
Hamilton could feel Liz not looking at him. “It’s not a waste,” he said gently. “And you’ll refer to Her Royal Highness by her title.”
“No offense meant.”
“And none taken. But we’re in the presence, not in barracks.”
“I wish we were.”
“I think we all agree there.”
“I won’t lay down my weapon.”
Hamilton didn’t do his fellows the disservice of looking to them for confirmation. “This isn’t an execution.”
Sandels looked satisfied. “Seal this tunnel afterwards, that should be all we require for passage.”
“Not to Berlin, I presume.”
“No,” said Sandels, “to entirely the opposite.”
Hamilton nodded.
“Well, then.” Sandels stepped aside from Elizabeth.
Hamilton lowered his weapon and the others readied theirs. It wouldn’t be done to aim straight at Sandels. He had his own weapon at hip height. He would bring it up and they would cut him down as he moved.
But Elizabeth hadn’t moved. She was pushing back her hair, as if wanting to say something to him before leaving, but lost for the right words.
Hamilton, suddenly aware of how unlikely that was, started to say something.
But Liz had put a hand to Sandels’s cheek.
Hamilton saw the fine silver between her fingers.
Sandels’ fell to the ground thrashing, hoarsely yelling as he deliberately and precisely, as his nervous system was ordering him to, bit off his own tongue. Then the mechanism from the hair knife let him die.
The Princess looked at Hamilton. “It’s not a waste,” she said.
THEY SEALED THE fold as Sandels had asked them to, after the sappers had made an inspection.
Hamilton left them to it. He regarded his duty as done. And no message came to him to say otherwise.
Recklessly, he tried to find Mother Valentine. But she was gone with the rest of the Vatican party, and there weren’t even bloodstains left to mark where her feet had trod this evening.
He sat at a table, and tried to pour himself some champagne. He found that the bottle was empty.
His glass was filled by Lord Carney, who sat down next to him. Together, they watched as Elizabeth was joyfully reunited with Bertil. They swung each other round and round, oblivious to all around them. Elizabeth’s grandmother smiled at them and looked nowhere else.
“We are watching,” said Carney, “the balance incarnate. Or perhaps they’ll incarnate it tonight. As I said: if only there were an alternative.”
Hamilton drained his glass. “If only,” he said, “there weren’t.”
And he left before Carney could say anything more.
Woodpunk
Adam Roberts
MY STORY, SINCE you ask for it.
A wolf was rummaging among a bed of wild strawberries. We were in a clearing in the wood, and it was filled with hot bright light. The wolf made the noise of a newborn baby snuffling at the breast, he did, comical, though it didn’t stop me from being terrified. All around the forest hushed itself, as if trying to keep the lid on its own temper. Metaphorically counting to twenty before speaking. As for what it might say, if its temper were to flare—that’s no idle question.
Shh, shh.
We were making our way through what Conoley had described to me, not once but many times, as the greatest expanse of primal forest on the entire globe. The only expanse of primal forest on the entire globe. The greatest. The only. Conoley kept his rifle trained on the beast as we passed by, but it plain ignored us.
The name of this forest is Chernobyl.
And he was a larger than life auld Irish-American, was Conoley (that’s the one L, as he said when introducing himself). And he was a tall and muscular and red-faced individual, with hair the color and consistency of dandelion fluff. And he took another swig of The Great Enabler out of a flask, and breathed out noisily. And he sang, as we moved through the woods, and startled birds into the air. “Up here,” he said again. “Just through here.” The rifle poking up from his bac
k looked like a digital aerial.
“There’s something wrong with my,” I said, “my G-M tube.”
“Wrong,” Conoley drawled, “and because, why? Because it ain’t registering excessive radiation?”
“It’s not registering at all,” I said, and just as I said that, as if to mock me, the device popped, and then popped again.
“There you go,” he said. “Oh it’s active, round here. Active, sure. But that’s not to say it’s a desert where the sand has been turned to glass. I’ve been here plenty of times, and I’ve more to fear from my liquid narcotic than any radiation, I tells ya,” and he pulled out his flask again. “Kurt’s been here a year and a half now,” he added. “And no ill effects for him.”
Then I caught sight of a creature, in among the trees, among the fantastically prolific foliage with its tremendous range and variety of greens. Man, it was enormous, this creature—large as an elephant, but with raging scarlet eyes and pupils glinting with evil. It must have been forty foot high, and I yelled in the sheerest surprise and terror. But then the eye winked, and lifted away, and it was a butterfly shuddering upwards; and when that was removed the whole mirage fell apart.
“Jumpy, aren’t we,” said Conoley. Arrunt wi.
“I like city streets,” I said. “I like London and Paris. I know where I am when I’m in London.”
“You know where you are. You’re in London,” Conoley said, reasonably enough.
We moved through hip-high ferns, and the strangely urinous smell of the vegetation. The sun in its summer vigor flared and faded in among the canopy above as we went. There is something cathedral-like about the primal forests of Old Europe; something very striking about the sheer scale.
The greatest. The only.
Kurt had started out in the camp built in the overgrown remains of a village abandoned by its occupants and overgrown by the forest. But this had involved too great a disruption of the forest logic, he said; so he had moved into the middle of the growth with a tent and a scrollscreen. By the time I came to reclaim him, on behalf of Co, he had even given up the use of his tent. I barely recognized him: huge-bearded and tangle-haired. He was wearing a puffed-up Greensuit, the outside of which was messy with mud and adhered forest detritus. I assume he slept in it; that he just lay down where he was and pulled the hood over his face and went to sleep.