A tinny buzzing disturbed the doctor's reverie, forcing him to answer his personal communicator.
"Wilde," he said simply.
"Dr Wilde, the hour is upon us," a voice said at the other end of the line. "The plan is to proceed at the agreed time. Will you be ready?"
"I am ready, Agent Kane," Wilde confirmed.
"The Dawn is coming, brother."
Then the line went dead.
Cornelius Wilde felt a tingling surge of adrenalin and became aware of his heart jumping in his chest.
It was time, the Dawn was coming, and with it a glorious new epoch in the history of human kind. It was time that the social order be overturned and the masters of the sciences given the opportunity to stretch their wings, rather than remain bound to outdated and outmoded scientific principles. The age of steam was coming to an end and ahead lay a glorious era of opportunity. Such an age would need its pioneers, its scientific heroes, its leaders.
The ringmaster smiled. All that had come before was merely the warm-up act, the precursor to the main event. The three-ring finale was about to begin.
"Show time!" Wilde said to himself, as he watched the silhouette-black shapes of ravens clear the barbed wire battlements of the Tower and fly into the storm-dark sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Limehouse Connection
The Silver Phantom Mark IV rolled to a halt in the gathering gloom beside the warehouse, headlamps already doused, its tyres making almost no noise on the harbour side.
Nimrod peered out through the windscreen at the dusk-shadowed buildings of the Limehouse Basin. The smog-clouds, thicker and more cloying thanks to the summer heat, had helped accelerate the onset of night.
This run-down stretch of dockland appeared to be deserted. There was no sign of anyone about but then everyone, from the lowest of the low to the great and the good, would either be taking part in the Queen's jubilee celebrations in person or observing the proceedings as they were relayed via the huge broadcast screens on every street corner and through cathode ray sets in homes across the nation.
"You're sure this is the place, sir?" Nimrod turned to the man sitting in the passenger seat next to him.
"Absolutely," Ulysses Quicksilver assured him, a wicked gleam in his eye, as he checked the scanner he was holding in his lap. A red blip was repeatedly pinging at the centre of a lambently glowing green wire-frame image.
"So that Heath Robinson invention of Dr Methuselah's really works," Nimrod said with a hint of scorn.
"Yes. I have to say I'm rather impressed. Who'd have thought that old Methuselah was as handy with electronic trickery as he is with medical mumbo-jumbo?"
"You think Miss Galapagos is here?"
"Indeed I do," Ulysses said, his face suddenly grim again. "Genevieve Galapagos, my arse! She and I have unfinished business. The key is certainly here."
Ulysses stared out of the windscreen and back into the night of the explosion, when he had discovered Genevieve's betrayal. One good betrayal deserved another and so he had faked his own death, allowing Genevieve's parting gift to explode with dramatic consequences whilst making sure that he, and anyone else who mattered to him, was out of range of the blast.
With the parcel-bomb counting down the last seconds until destruction, it had been necessary for Ulysses to make a snap decision. He had decided that if he were considered to be dead, it would be much more straightforward for him to discover who was truly behind this conspiracy. Once he was in the grave, as it were, he would have the precious time and anonymity he needed to make a more careful assessment of what was really going on and what needed to be done to put an end to such devilish schemes.
He would be eternally glad that he had asked Dr Methuselah to examine Galapagos' locket before returning it to its allegedly rightful owner. The old curmudgeon had almost instantly identified it as an encoded access key. Seeing as how Ulysses had already worked out that it was a difference engine that had been stolen from the Natural History Museum it did not take a genius to deduce the connection and realise that, whatever it was that Professor Galapagos had created in his lab, the means to recreating it was locked inside that same data storage engine.
It had been Methuselah's idea to fit Galapagos' 'locket' with a tracking device. By means of the accompanying scanner, Ulysses had been able to follow the mysterious and capricious Genevieve Galapagos's movements as she went about her business. Meanwhile Ulysses had put his own spy network into operation through his ever-loyal manservant Nimrod who, himself, had most useful connections to the darker side of the capital.
Since the counterfeit Miss Galapagos had made such an unsubtle attempt on his life, Ulysses had managed to implicate her in the workings of the Darwinian Dawn, which, as it turned out, were not quite as done for as he might have hoped following his own personal Waterloo.
Had it been she who had tried to assassinate him with a bullet earlier on the same night as the explosion? She had certainly demonstrated a marksman's eye on the evening of their first meeting. Ulysses had also managed to uncover her true identity. She was, in reality, Kitty Hawke. Cat burglar, hustler, and consummate actress with her own revolutionary tendencies.
He wondered whether he had found himself his mysterious thief at last and that when she had been so insistent about accompanying him to the Natural History Museum the night they first met, whether she had not, in fact, been returning to the scene of the crime, hoping to bring to a conclusion what she had started by recovering the missing code-key.
It had been a gamble allowing Kitty Hawke and the Darwinian Dawn access to Galapagos's encrypted data files, but he had considered it a calculated risk. He had hoped to bring matters to a halt before they could reach their deadly conclusion.
"What time do you make it, Nimrod?" Ulysses asked, taking out his pocket watch. "Synchronise watches and all that, what?"
"Nine o'clock, sir," his manservant replied, checking the clock built into the automobile's dashboard.
"Good. Dead on. Same as me." Ulysses gazed out at the purpling sky. "I should think that the great and the good will be sitting down to their aperitifs about now," Ulysses said with a heartfelt sigh.
"Weren't you invited to the Hyde Park celebrations, sir?"
"I would be there right now myself if it weren't for the fact that I'm supposed to be dead. But then I'd have to miss out on all this, wouldn't I?" he said, turning to look over his shoulder into the back of the Phantom. The Neanderthal squatting on the back seat grunted, an amiable grin splitting the lumpen features of his subhuman face. "And besides, now the fun can really start!"
"Sir, I must protest. It should be I who attends you on this escapade. You know what happened the last time I left you to your own devices. You were nearly drowned, blown up and eaten by a de-evolving professor of evolutionary biology."
"But you're my getaway driver," Ulysses said. "You're my Plan B."
"I really don't know why you insisted on bringing him along," Nimrod grumbled.
"Think how useful he proved to be at the Waterloo bomb-making facility," Ulysses pointed out. "I thought he might help to - you know - mix things up a bit. It always pays to walk into a criminal HQ with a bit of muscle and a back-up plan."
Nimrod said nothing more but simply shot his employer a withering look.
"Besides, you've done very well with him. You should be pleased with yourself, Nimrod. I think our friend here looks very dashing in a suit and tie."
"Well..."
"You'll have him drinking Earl Grey out of a cup and not the saucer in no time."
Nimrod sighed tiredly. Ulysses carefully opened his door.
"It's time I returned to the land of the living!" Ulysses declared, with overly exuberant showmanship. "Keep the engine ticking over. We'll be back in a jiffy, just you wait and see."
"Keep behind me and try not to knock into anything," Ulysses told his Neanderthal companion in a hissed whisper.
They were inside the gloomy confines of the warehouse, acce
ss gained with the aid of a crowbar through an abandoned foreman's office. The hulking, rusted carcasses of dead machinery surrounded them. According to the blip on the scanner their target was only a matter of a hundred yards further inside.
Simeon looked like a most curious beast, dressed in an altered suit of Mr Prufrock's, buttons pulling against the stitching across the Neanderthal's barrel chest. He crouched behind a rusted iron cargo crane, hairy knuckles dragging on the ground. His feet were bare, his toes gripping the floor almost as fingers might. He was wearing a clean white shirt and one of Nimrod's black ties that the butler had tied for him. His lank dreadlocks had been trimmed and a comb run through his hair before it was slicked down in the same manner that Nimrod favoured.
Ulysses smiled. It looked like Nimrod would soon have an assistant to unburden him of some of his chores about the Quicksilver household.
Ulysses himself had decided to go with flamboyance over subtlety on this occasion. He was wearing a House of Leoparde waistcoat all in chartreuse and crimson thread, his cravat was held in place with a diamond pin, and his bloodstone cane was in his hand. He wanted to make an impact when he returned from the dead for a second time. He had set himself a tough act to follow after his last resurrection from the grave - although at least he had been reported dead this time rather than just having been missing presumed dead.
"Ready?" he asked the apeman.
Simeon nodded, his tongue lolling from his mouth like a happy dog.
Cautiously Ulysses led the way through the dead monoliths of the fish-packer's machinery. It might still only be dusk outside but in the warehouse it was dark as night, the skylights above merely grey panes of opacity, their translucence gone with the failing of the light.
Even now that his eyes had become more accustomed to the preternatural darkness, objects merely appeared to Ulysses as amorphous black clots against the only slightly lesser gloom of the warehouse's interior. And although he had a flashlight about his person, he did not want to use it here and draw unwanted attention to their presence.
Simeon didn't seem bothered by the lack of light at all, proving surprisingly nimble at negotiating the various obstacles that the gloom seemed to throw into their path. Ulysses wondered whether there were still some things that the more primitive evolutionary forms were better at coping with than the more sophisticated Homo sapiens.
The warehouse smelt dusty and dank, of dirt and mouldering wood. But there was something else - something acrid and unpleasantly familiar - almost subsumed by the smell of old oil and rust-eaten metal. Ulysses suspected that Simeon could smell it too, and probably more clearly than he could himself, for he kept sniffing and then holding back almost nervously after each intense inhalation. What did the aroma remind him of? Where had the Neanderthal experienced the smell before? And where had Ulysses? He could almost taste its sickly sweetness.
Then there were the sounds too. As they advanced across the warehouse they became steadily more distinct - muffled human voices, the rattle and thud of machinery, reminiscent of the Darwinian Dawn's Waterloo Station facility.
Ulysses could feel heat prickling his forehead. Was the closeness of the air and the heat a consequence of the early summer climate or as a result of the industrial processes taking place elsewhere within the warehouse?
The outline of a door became visible ahead of them. The glass pane set into it was so smeared with grime as to be almost entirely blacked out, but for tiny scrapes in the obscuring dirt. Slivers of muted light broke through into the darkness that enveloped them, turning swirls of dust into cascades of golden motes.
Ulysses put a hand to the door and held it there for a moment. Then, with a confident motion, he pulled it open and a waft of something hit him, immediately carrying him back to both Professor Galapagos' ransacked office and the macabre workroom beneath the house in Southwark. It was the lingering odour of meat on the turn and aniseed, like spoiled fennel and beef casserole.
Simeon flinched but the two of them ducked through the door, Ulysses shutting it swiftly behind them. Everything that they had sensed in the outer warehouse space was amplified here - the heat, the noise, the smells - but they still weren't at the heart of operations. Although there was light here and the condition of the machinery told of its recent use, the place was still devoid of any human or even robot presence.
It didn't take long for Ulysses to ascertain the purpose of this part of the complex. It was the still-wet vats, the lengths of glass piping and the all-pervading smell of aniseed and rancid meat that gave it away. Whatever it was that Professor Galapagos had been brewing in his Southwark workshop, the same stuff had been reproduced here but on a noticeably more grand and terrifying scale.
Confident that there was no one to observe their progress Ulysses darted between the distillation tanks and workbenches, always following the lure of the blip on the scanner.
He paused, realising that Simeon was no longer at his heel. Turning he saw the Neanderthal rocking from side to side where he stood between the benches of apparatus. He was whimpering to himself, almost overwhelmed by the now oh-so-familiar and disturbing aroma.
"Come on!" Ulysses hissed. The Neanderthal didn't budge. "Simeon, come here now!"
A grimace of anxiety contorted the primitive's ugly features, obviously torn between his fearful recollections and his desire to please his new master.
"Oh, have it your own way," Ulysses sighed, giving in to exasperation, and continued towards the other side of the workroom, following the thumping of machinery and what sounded like the purr of an engine running up to speed.
Simeon gave a little yelp and then, having overcome his demons - whatever they might have been - knuckled after Ulysses.
It had been a long time since Ulysses had seen anything like it and he froze for a moment in genuine, awestruck wonder. He found recollections of his hair-raising flight over the Himalayas springing to mind, but the balloon on which he had been a passenger was as nothing compared to this Leviathan.
Lit by flickering running lights, the zeppelin was huge - at least two hundred yards from nose to tail. The massive balloon of its inflated gas envelope was barely contained within the converted warehouse-hangar. From the locking clamps and iron cables beneath it hung an armoured gondola, itself as big as two railway carriages strung together. The whole thing was kept anchored in place by sturdy guy ropes.
The rear loading ramp of the dirigible's gondola was down and robot-drudges were loading the last of the Dawn's mine-bombs on board. Close to where Ulysses and the panting Simeon were hunkered down behind the hangar's fuel dump, there had also been discarded the straw-packed crates that had been used to transport the terrorists' surviving devices from the bomb factory. Ulysses had no idea how many the Darwinian Dawn had managed to recover but judging from the amount of robots trudging up the ramp into the bomb bay it was enough to do some serious damage.
And right at that moment, across London, thousands of people were crowded into and around Hyde Park and the newly-reconstructed Crystal Palace for a chance to be a part of Queen Victoria's 160th jubilee celebrations and perhaps even catch a rare glimpse of the monarch herself.
And there was not only the devastation that might be caused by the initial detonation of the devices, considering the level of destruction they had wrought inside the confines of the Waterloo facility. If Ulysses' suspicions were correct - and with all the evidence he had seen with his own eyes within the Limehouse complex, how could they not be? - those remaining devices now carried an added ingredient, an extra surprise for the beleaguered populace of London: Professor Galapagos' de-evolution formula.
Whatever else the Darwinian Dawn might have planned to help the Queen's jubilee go with a bang, Ulysses knew that he had to stop that zeppelin from leaving its warehouse-hangar. But for that he needed a distraction, and time was truly against him.
He cast the Neanderthal an anxious look. "For Queen and country, eh, old boy? You didn't know you were signing up for a suicide
mission, did you?" Simeon grinned back amiably, ridiculous in his strangely fitted suit. "That's the spirit."
Ulysses' pistol was out of its underarm holster and in his hand. He snapped off two precisely aimed shots. Two men fell.
There was a burst of furious shouting, a flurry of sudden, instinct-driven activity, as the guards' hours of brainwashed training kicked in and they took up firing positions of their own. A tattoo of gun reports resounded around the warehouse-hangar as the pitch of the airship's engines rose, its pilot preparing the craft for immediate take-off. If a stray bullet ruptured the zeppelin balloon the results could be catastrophic.
A bullet ricocheted from the ground in front of the fuel dump throwing off sparks as it did so. Ulysses was aware of the gentle whoomph as a single spark ignited a pool of oil that had collected in the uneven, rutted surface of the concrete floor. He also heard the shout from one of the guards that followed. However much it might gall the terrorists they realised that it they continued to fire on Ulysses' position they risked starting a conflagration, which would in turn jeopardise the safety of the airship.
It soon became apparent to those few armed guards left to oversee the loading of the zeppelin that they were not going to be able to put an end to the interlopers' attack by force of arms alone. Some other means of defence was needed now, something that was no longer required to fulfil any other duties, something entirely dispensable.
Pax Britannia: Unnatural History Page 20