“Good God almighty,” Bramble said in reverent tones.
Rutherston turned, automatically holding the photograph closer to his chest with the back outwards. A large trunk stood by the bed--evidently pulled from beneath it, and with the large, complex and extremely strong-looking lock hammered off. At a guess, Jon Wooton’s mother had done it when she realized that the police were on the doorstep. Part of the contents had gone into the metal waste-basket and been set on fire; the rest had been tossed on the bed. They included some diagrams... and several neat bundles of banknotes, with many noughts in their numbers. Buying the mill and ordering equipment from Portsmouth hadn’t exhausted young Jon’s profits from his putative illegal salvage trips by any means.
“I don’t want the money!” Kristin screeched. “Take the money! Just don’t you slander my Jon! Jon was a good boy!”
No, he was a man, and a very bad one, Rutherston thought. But that doesn’t mean it was all right to murder him.
Then he looked at the plans. A steam engine, right enough, he thought. There was the big rocking beam, the circular boiler, the huge six-foot piston, and the separate condenser. The rest of it made less sense. The channels for water were labeled cooling system. Surely the point was to heat the water up, though? And there was no provision for a coal store; simply a rectangular object with pipes running through it labeled heat source. And a weird geared arrangement to lower rods into it from above, each fitting neatly into a cylinder.
They were neatly titled control rods, with graphite in brackets after that and a note: test composition? Add fuel elements gradually to check necessary mass.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said to himself, baffled. “But Jon was brilliant at mechanical things; it’s the one virtue he had, and everyone agrees on it. What could--”
He felt his face go pale. “That’s impossible,” he added.
No, he realized after a moment. It’s just very implausible. Anything else is impossible.
“Dammit, I should have known better!” he said softly.
Kristin Wooton’s screeches had subsided into sobs. Bramble heard the older man’s words.
“Sir?” he said.
“Known that you see what you expect to find!”
“What was it you expected, exactly?” said Bramble, letting the woman down on her feet; she stumbled to a chair and dropped her face into her hands.
“I expected to find a murder.”
“The trail’s as plain as plain, sir,” Bramble said. “Now that we’ve got one end of it, I can follow it.”
The olive face was phlegmatic as usual, but there was a slight sheen of sweat on it. It was near sunset, and they’d been quartering the hanger north-east of Eddsford’s mill all afternoon. Half the corporal’s squad were helping--the ones with the best field-craft, as Bramble put it.
Or the ones that did the most poaching, Rutherston thought mordantly.
“Best get the rest of them out, then,” he said aloud. “We don’t need numbers to check on something.”
The detective and the non-commissioned officer looked at each other in perfect unspoken understanding; if you were a leader of King’s Men you didn’t send them where you wouldn’t go yourself. Or send them at all instead of going yourself, if accomplishing the mission was simply a matter of one man walking into danger. He’d been honor-bound to tell the corporal what he thought they were looking for. Corporal Bramble wouldn’t let him go in after it alone.
It felt eerily strange to walk through an English beechwood with the smooth gray bark dappled by the sun and feel this way. You were meant to feel like this amid a landscape of arid rock, knowing that hating black eyes were peering at you and quivering-eager hands gripped spears, while the armor was like a vise around your chest and the long clatter of boots and hooves on rock echoed back from the sides of the wadi. His hand ached for the hilt of his longsword, but there was nothing here from which a sword could protect him.
“Here,” he said.
Whatever-it-was had been buried skillfully, but you couldn’t sink a dozen boxes bigger than coffins into the dirt without leaving some trace. Rutherston forced his mind and memory back from a time more than a decade distant, swallowed, cleared his throat.
“This one,” he said.
They scrabbled at the duff with their gloved hands. The steel top of the box was still covered in chipped, faded olive-green paint, with faint black traces where words and code-sequences had been stenciled on. The rope handle was modern, though. Rutherston licked his lips again and bent to pull at it. The effort made him stagger, taken off-guard; the weight was far greater than a four-by-three section of stamped steel should be. Bramble stepped nearer and gave him a hand; there was room for both on the loop of hemp.
The lid began to creak upwards. As soon as it was open at all. he could see that the chest had been lined with thick plates of lead and then something else--graphite, he thought. Then he saw what was within, dull-shining metallic wedges, and he jumped back. Bramble did an instant later, and the lid fell back with an echoing whutnp. The softness of the sound meant that the fit must be very good, sealing the boxes airtight.
Thank God for Jon Wooton’s clever hands, Rutherston thought, scraping the back of one hand across his face. And damn him for a lunatic!
“Corporal, get your man out to the semaphore line. Code Seven-Seven-Eight, and send it emergency priority.”
“Yes sir!”
That gave Bramble a reason to run. Rutherston turned and walked instead. He couldn’t outrun what waited in those lead-lined boxes behind him... and you could never really outrun fear, anyway.
“He wanted to what?” Sir James said.
“Build a steam engine,” Ingmar Rutherston said.
He looked around the parlor in Royston Hall. Only the essential people were there: the Squire, his brother the vicar, and District Nurse Delia Medford, SRN. And Corporal Bramble, of course. The sheer normalcy of it was inexpressibly comforting, down to the tea-tray the maid had left, and the sheen on the mahogany of the table, the leather of the sofa and chairs and the large and rather bad oil of William the Great’s victory over the Moors at Tenerife that hung by the door.
“That is mad!” the Reverend Frances Broxby said.
The nurse stirred her cup, genteelly holding out the little finger of that hand. She nodded as the detective went on:
“Not if he had the right fuel,” Rutherston said. He lit one of his cigarillos and leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece. “Plutonium, I believe it was called, Father?”
The scholarly priest shook his head. “Plutonium--you’re all familiar with the name?--plutonium won’t explode any more. Even if the chemical explosives to drive the pieces together would work, or the electronic control mechanisms functioned. It won’t even get hot enough to melt. And thank God for that. Otherwise it would have poisoned half of England as it burned through the containment structures.”
“Thank God indeed. From my dimly recalled lessons one sort turns into another sort as it runs down, somehow, and only God and a few boffins know what it is by now.”
“Radium, cobalt-60, other decay products,” the priest said quietly. “Wooton’s chests probably came from an old power station. Whoever dug it out probably did so under duress, and died very quickly.”
Rutherston nodded; even if the slave laborers had been Wild Lands savages, it was an unpleasant thought. He went on:
“As you say, Padre. But though it won’t melt down, in concentrated form it will sit there and glow at about seven hundred degrees... which is quite hot enough to boil water, and to keep doing so for a very long time. I remember that from a course on the Dangerous Substances Act. Generally we leave the old reactors strictly alone--they’re safer repositories for the stuff than anything we can build now.”
He could see that the priest followed him, and Delia Medford was unsurprisingly unsurprised; it took Sir James a little longer.
“You mean... you mean it would have worked?” he said at las
t, blinking his one eye.
“In theory. In practice, no, and Jon Wooton would have killed everyone in Eddsford trying. It’s been looked into exhaustively, back around the turn of the century, though the studies were kept secret. The resources of the whole realm couldn’t do it, not with the machines we can make. That stuff is hellish dangerous.”
“Good God,” the baronet said, and drank blindly from his cup, looking as if he’d prefer something much stronger.
“Fortunately, the disposal squad says that nothing significant escaped. The boxes will be put in larger boxes, those will be encased in seamless lead castings, and the whole will be cast into very deep parts of the sea. What the boffins call a subduction zone, where evidently we won’t have to worry about it again this side of doomsday.”
Father Frances crossed himself. “So there was no murder here in Eddsford,” he said slowly. “Thank God indeed! Jon Wooton simply killed himself... by accident.”
All those present signed themselves as well, as the cleric murmured “Amen.”
“And no harm done to the village or the people,” Sir James said, with a gusty sigh. “I think, Frances, that a thanksgiving mass is in order... not that we need be too specific about the cause.” He looked at Rutherston. “And no crime was committed after all.”
“Oh, there were several crimes: smuggling, violation of the Treasure Trove Act, the Dangerous And Prohibited Substances Act... but all by the very late, and extremely unlamented, Jon Wooton. So my report will make plain.”
There will be an investigation, but not here and, thank God, by the Special Branch, not me. Aloud he went on:
“I don’t think any of you will be bothered further. Officially this will be simply a matter of a dead smuggler’s buried treasure being confiscated--sensational enough to satisfy village gossip. Provided everyone here is discreet.”
There were smiles and handshakes all around; Rutherston firmly declined the Squire’s invitation to dinner.
“My wife expects me back just as soon as possible, Sir James. Otherwise our first child might be born in the absence of his or her father, and I’d never hear the end of it.”
“I could lend you a phaeton and some fast horses...”
“Many thanks, but I think I can impose on the military for a pedalcab to Winchester along the line of rail. Miss Medford, shall I walk you home on my way to the Moor’s Head?”
Bramble fell discreetly behind as they walked down the drive from Royston Hall. Casually, Rutherston drew an envelope from his jacket and handed it to her.
“I suggest you burn these, Miss Medford,” he said. “I glanced at the first, but very briefly.”
The spare handsome face of the nurse was calm as she accepted the package. “You don’t feel obliged to include them in your report?”
Rutherston lit another cigarillo. “Why should I?” he said with a shrug. “There’s no indication of anything illegal... on your part; Jon Wooton was evidently a blackmailer, among his many other sins, but that will go with him to the grave. Nothing illegal, or in Winchester even cause for much remark. I’m a detective, not a priest.”
“But Eddsford is my home, and where my work is, and I very much wish to continue living here,” she said. “Thank you very much, inspector.” She drew a breath: “About the money--”
“Dear lady, I am a policeman. Intelligent blackmailers usually try to have as many strings on a victim as possible. It would be just like Jon Wooton to force you to accept part of his smuggling profits. If you feel you should donate to charity, that’s none of my affair either.”
“Thank you very much, inspector.” They came to the door of the clinic. “And you should stop smoking those things. They’ll kill you.”
Small children followed the two King’s Men as they walked toward the inn, and there was a ripple of nods and smiles from the adults; everyone was happy to have the murder settled so quickly and nobody in their tight-knit little world brought up before the law. The ostler of the Moor’s Head had his employer’s trap ready, with a good-looking horse between the shafts; it would be an hour’s travel to the semaphore station on the rail line, and then perhaps two back to Winchester. Rutherston smiled contentedly and drew the smoke into his lungs.
“She scragged ‘im, of course, sir,” Bramble said quietly.
“No names, no pack drill,” Rutherston said. “Yes, of course. At a guess, she gave him some worthless placebo and assured him it would protect him from the radiation, then told him to pick the pieces up and measure them against some part he’d ordered from Portsmouth, or something of that order. From someone who’d healed his illnesses since he was a child, he’d believe it.”
“She’d have grassed him up before much longer, any rate,” Bramble said thoughtfully. “Don’t blame her for waiting ‘till the last minute, sir, either.”
“Not at all,” Rutherston agreed.
The two men turned and faced each other. The detective held out his hand; they gave a single firm grip, no squeezing nonsense, but a mutual recognition of strength.
“You were of the greatest possible help, Corporal Bramble, and I will say so in my report.”
“Thank you kindly, sir.”
“And Bramble... have you considered what you’ll be doing after your current enlistment ends? Promotion is slow in peacetime.”
Bramble’s square face went a little slack for an instant. “Hadn’t thought much, sir... might take up a farm in Spain, p’raps. Under me own vine and fig tree. Though farming’s a mite too much like ‘ard work, when you come to think about it.”
“Have you considered the police? A good many ex-servicemen do... myself, for example.”
Bramble chuckled. “Honestly, sir, I can’t see meself in a leather bobby’s ‘elmet, rattling the doors of an evening and chatting up housemaids.”
“I meant the detective branch, of course. The pay and pension are reasonable, we can always use good men--and you’d be protecting King and Country just as surely as you would in that tin shirt.”
He held out his card. “Take this, think it over, and drop me a line if you want to talk it over a bit more.”
Bramble took the card, turning it over in his thick fingers. “I will give it a thought, sir.”
Then he grinned. “It hasn’t been as boring as road patrol, inspector, I’ll give you that.”
Rutherston put a hand on the side of the trap and vaulted into the seat. He tipped his hat to the corporal, and waved to the crowd of villagers. They were still waving back as the horse broke into a trot, hooves falling hollow as it trod the shadows of tree and cottage into the roadway.
The detective settled back as the ostler whistled to his horse, smiling as the long peace of Eddsford fell behind and the blue-shadowed line of the Downs rose ahead. The church bell rang as they crested the first hill above the river, calling the villagers to give thanks for God’s protecting hand.
And it’s no slight privilege, to share the work with Him.
Conspiracies: A Very Condensed 937-Page Novel:--Mike Resnick & Eric Flint
I could listen to Mike Resnick tell stories about the business all night. I just couldn’t repeat any of them here. In addition to being an all-around good guy, Mike is just a natural born storyteller, as his status as the most awarded short story writer, living or dead, in the history of the science fiction field attests (ranked as compiled by Locus).
Eric Flint is the best-selling author of, among many things, the 1632 series, about a small American town that finds itself transported back to Germany, May 1631. When they told me they were collaborating on a story, I got excited. When they told me they guaranteed it wouldn’t be like anything else I had in the book, I got scared. When I started reading it, I got delighted.
PROLOGUE
If you go to the northern end of Praslin Island in the Seychelles, a thousand miles off the coast of East Africa, there’s every likelihood that you’ll chance upon a pudgy, gray-haired man holding a cigar in one hand and a cold drink in the other. You can
nod a greeting to him, but if you try to start up a conversation, you may find yourself spending the next few years in a jail on Mahe, the main island in the chain.
So we figure it’s our job to tell you who he is and what he’s doing there.
1
“It was a dark and stormy night.”
The alien lapsed into silence thereafter. It seemed sullen and brooding, simply staring at a blank wall of the chamber with its peculiarly small eyes.
After a while, Fuyd turned to the interrogator. “What is the meaning of ‘stormy?’ I thought it referred to a tempest.”
“It does, more or less.”
Fuyd looked back at the lumpy, ugly creature. “That makes no sense at all. How can the simple effect of a planet’s rotation be tempestuous?”
The interrogator rippled its neck in the manner by which his species indicated uncertainty. Fuyd found the gesture vaguely unsettling. But then, she found much about the gnuzzit unsettling. It didn’t help that their names were unpronounceable by her species. By any other species, actually.
“This human seems prone to obfuscation, Mistress Fuyd. Very little that it tells us seems to convey any sensible meaning.”
“Try again,” Fuyd commanded. “More severely.”
The gnuzzit interrogator joggled a lever. The torture device’s arm stretched out and began twisting the slender body parts growing out of the human’s head. Some sort of feeding cilia, obviously. The pattern was not an uncommon one. They would be acutely sensitive to pain.
The brutish creature’s eyes seemed to narrow. Other than that...
Nothing.
Quite an astonishing pain threshold. Fuyd was tempted to order an anatomical analysis of the monster, on the remote chance its body type was unique among its species. But that would be in clear contravention to the Drasspunt Accord, and the matter simply wasn’t important enough to risk an altercation with the liucuz, and certainly not with the always-belligerent jatts.
Frustrated, she leaned forward and hissed at the creature. “Why did you murder the first Kennedy one? Did the jatts pay you to do so?”
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