2184: Beneath the Steel City: Book 1

by Ben Lovejoy

  With Saira powered-down in her recharge corner, I opened the jotter on my main computer and studied the information she had provided. Saira was only able to consult publicly-accessible data sources, but I would be able to supplement this as needed.

  The carriage was stored at the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, the King’s official home in London. Not the easiest of locations to penetrate, but one must be upbeat about these things. Perhaps it would be more vulnerable en-route from Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. I turned my attention to the details Saira had provided on that.

  It was being done as a State Procession. That is, with the King on board and the King’s Guard accompanying him. The route would be lined by police all the way, with more police in Skycars overhead. Not to mentioning cheering yokels and holovision footage covering the whole thing from both ground and air.

  Not quite as vulnerable as I’d hoped. Though I would get a free King with the carriage if I figured a way of pulling that one off.

  That left the Tower. If it was too big to fit through the arched entrance, perhaps it might be parked outside? I checked.

  No. It would be safely tucked away inside the Tower. The tower surrounded by solid stone walls 30 metres high by four metres thick, and which contained its very own army barracks designed to house 1,000 soldiers. I already knew one shouldn’t be fooled by those quaint old-world uniforms: these were real soldiers with real guns, and doubtless no compunction about using them were someone to wander in and try to make off with the King’s carriage.

  Hmm. My enthusiasm for a challenge was, I had to confess, slightly diminished.

  But lateral thinking was often the key. When all the obvious routes were blocked, you had to find a non-obvious one.

  Fortunately, I had a tool with a proven track-record in boosting my lateral thinking capabilities. I walked over to the cupboard in which it was stored. The door slid silently upwards as I approached it. The dispenser awaited my instructions.

  “Scapa. Double.”

  A whisky tumbler slid into sight and the dispenser poured me a double measure of the honey-flavoured single malt, the shelf extending out to present it to me. A famous private detective from two-and-a-half centuries earlier had his ‘two-pipe problems.’ This, I thought, was going to be a two-malt problem. At least.

  An hour later, I had an outline idea mapped out, and was feeling rather pleased with myself.

  There would, of course, be much detailed and careful planning needed. Whisky is an excellent aid to creative thinking; not so much to detailed analysis. That would be a job for the morning.

  5

  There were three main elements to my plan: taking temporary possession of the carriage; making that temporary possession permanent; and the conversion from a single large piece of carriage-shaped gold to a lot of small pieces of ingot-shaped gold.

  The first part was the easiest of the three. That would all be achieved by adding records to certain databases. Back when I’d been a lowly worker drone, I detested bureaucracy. It turned the simplest task into a ridiculous obstacle course. But in my new life, I’d made bureaucracy my friend and co-conspirator.

  The wonderful thing about bureaucratic processes is that all involved are slaves to them. It doesn’t matter whether those processes are reasonable, sensible or even sane. If the system says it happens that way, then nobody questions it. Everyone does exactly what the system tells them to.

  So the first part of the process was merely a case of making the necessary database entries – ensuring that what I wanted to happen was precisely what the system said should be happening.

  Of course, I make it sound easier than it is. Getting access to databases was trivial: I simply used my government key to generate logins as required. The tricky part was creating additional records in those databases: there are a hundred different ways that modifying an unfamiliar database can go very badly wrong.

  You have to know what each of the fields means – and governments do love their acronyms! When you work out what the fields mean, you need to know what is and isn’t a valid value for each. Well, I won’t bore you with chapter and verse, but there are a lot of steps involved, and just the first of those – figuring out what all the fields mean – can mean studying literally hundreds of different records to make sense of it all. It’s tedious work, but nobody ever said my new life would be all glamour.

  It had taken me most of the morning, but all the necessary database entries for phase 1 were safely in place. And it was still two days before the carriage was due to make its journey. The smile on my face might, had there been anyone present to observe it, have looked just a little self-satisfied.

  It was time now to tackle phase 2: making my temporary possession of the carriage permanent.

  There were only two companies in London who had the capabilities I needed. The work I would need them to perform was also likely to be extremely expensive, both because of the scale of the task and because my requirements were non-standard. But then I wouldn’t be picking up the tab – the government would. That was part of the beauty of my plan: the government would be meeting all of the expenses of the theft. I enjoyed little touches like that.

  Government databases showed that both companies had carried out work for the government on numerous occasions. My curiosity was sparked by this, and at a quieter moment I would look through the records in more detail to see just where and how the government had used taxpayer’s money to deceive the very people paying those taxes. But that was for later. My immediate task was to place urgent – and extremely confidential – commissions with both companies.

  The urgency would, I would see from the tariff sheets the company had agreed with the government, would incur a 25% surcharge on their already eye-watering scale of fees. The total for each of the two companies was impressive. I mentally apologised to the taxpayer, but needs must. I pressed the button to issue the necessary procurement documents.

  Finally, I needed secure transportation and a suitably impressive armed guard. That, too, would be contracted by the government. Fifteen minutes later that was taken care of.

  Problems 1 and 2 were solved: I would have first temporary and then permanent possession of the carriage. Problem 3 was one I’d had solved on a previous occasion – albeit on a different scale. A few modifications would be needed, but that was just scutwork.

  Finally, everything was in place. Two days before the procession, one day before the game began.

  With all the arrangements made, I could have simply sat things out until it was time for the smelting, but where’s the fun in that? I wanted to be on hand to witness every stage of the process. It was too good to miss! I left Saira powered down; what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt me.

  6

  I had told the transportation company that a government official would be accompanying them to ensure that all necessary care was taken. A modest disguise saw me as an elderly antiquities expert with a shock of white hair and a suit that was last in fashion about fifty years before I was born.

  I was careful to climb slowly and painfully into the cab of the air transporter as befitting a man of my apparent age. I sat alongside two crew, one man, one woman, each in their 30s.

  “Good morning,” I said, as I settled into my seat.

  “Morning,” said the woman, brightly. “I’m Laura.”

  “Gregory,” I said, holding out my wrinkled hand. The wrinkles were as convincing to the touch as they were to the eye.

  “Martin,” said her companion, likewise shaking hands.

  “I must say,” said Laura, “this is all very exciting. It’s not every day you get to land in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace!”

  “Indeed not,” I said. “You will be awfully careful, won’t you?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “we transport all kinds of delicate items. We’ll be gentle.”

  “It’s just that this particular delicate item, as you put it, is unique. Priceless, utterly priceless.” Which it
was, for the moment. By the next day, it would have an exact price – in the order of two hundred and six million credits.

  “No need to be concerned, old man,” said Martin. “We know what we’re doing.”

  We flew directly to the boundary of the permanent air exclusion surrounding Buckingham Palace. We were at 300 feet, a height that gave us a stunning view of the palace.

  “Identify,” came the brief demand over the cab radio.

  “Secure transport, Operation 206.” I’d chosen the codename – or code number – as a whimsical touch. Such things amused me.

  “Transmit authorisation,” came the reply.

  Martin reached down to touch a button on the screen in front of him.

  “Proceed,” came the instruction.

  The air transporter eased forward, crossed the courtyard in front of the palace, drifted slowly above the front of the building and descended gently into the main quadrangle – the large open square surrounded on all sides by the palace itself. Off to our left, the Gold State Coach was waiting. My prize!

  A prize currently surrounded by a rather impressive guard, but that was of no concern. We touched down gently in the centre of the quadrangle.

  I climbed down from the cab where a man in his 50s whose clothing looked like it belonged in another century was waiting.

  “Mr Freeman?” he asked.

  “Call me Gregory, please.” I replied. “And you must be Sir Nigel.”

  “I am he.”

  I handed over the keycard pass. He passed it under a handheld scanner which chirped briefly. He returned the pass to me, then scanned the transponder code of the air transporter. That too got a cheery chirp.

  “I must say,” Sir Nigel said, “I really don’t approve of these arrangements.”

  “No, I quite understand,” I assured him. He would approve even less if he knew the true extent of them, I thought.

  “The genuine Coach has been used since 1821,” he continued. “The King’s guard is perfectly capable of ensuring its safe passage. I really don’t see why this particular procession requires a replica. Especially as it will be carrying His Majesty.”

  “Nor I,” I replied. “But I’m told the threat of vandalism is quite real, and these decisions are made well above my pay-grade.”

  He nodded. “Still, we don’t have to like it.”

  “Indeed, indeed.”

  “So the replication will take a day, and we’ll have the original back this evening?” he asked.

  “Safe and sound,” I assured him, not entirely truthfully.

  “Very well,” he said, exactly as he had to. The systems told him that the carriage would be taken away and an exact replica created, indistinguishable from the real thing, and that the replica would be used for the procession. He accepted it because the systems said it was so.

  We both watched as the scutbots from the transporter carefully towed the carriage up the ramp into the cargo hold of the transporter. It was positioned inside what looked like a giant gossamer web, visible only where the work lights reflected off the shimmering surface. The material was nano-webbing, just a few molecules thick yet incredibly strong.

  The carriage in place, a vacuum system sucked the webbing around the carriage, completely enclosing it. The ramp withdrew, the door closed and we waited for the foam to be released. Hundreds of nozzles lining the walls and ceiling off the transporter injected self-expanding foam, completely filling the interior. Within two minutes, it had the carriage safely but gently immobilised, and bidding a fond farewell to Sir Nigel – whose expression of disapproval appeared a permanent fixture – we were on our way to the first of the two industrial-scale replication companies.

  We landed in the spacious loading area, where around a dozen people were waiting for us. I supposed it was not everyday they took temporary delivery of a priceless royal artefact. Climbing down from the cab, I was greeted by a tall brunette dressed fashionably in a mix of pastel colours and a broad smile.

  “Mr Freeman, I take it?” she asked brightly, not waiting for a response before continuing. “I’m Kay Patterson, CEO of Industrial Replication Technologies. “We’re so excited to be handling this project. We’ve carried out similar projects before, of course, but this is truly unique!”

  I didn’t mind the audience at all, but it was important for me to remain in character. I tried to mimic Sir Nigel’s scowl of disapproval as I surveyed the rest of the team gather around behind her.

  “You do understand the utterly confidential nature of this undertaking?” I asked. “We were assured that this matter would be handled on a need-to-know basis.”

  “Have no fear, Mr Freeman. Everyone here has full developed vetting security clearance, and only those who will be actively working on the project are present here today. All have worked on high-level government projects before, including some rather … special projects.”

  I adopted a suitably mollified expression, and looked forward to my examination of the past procurement records of both companies. Those ‘special’ projects sounded intriguing, and information governments liked to keep confidential was information I frequently found interesting, and sometimes profitable.

  “Very good, then,” I said. “And please call me Gregory.”

  We walked around to the rear of the transporter where we could hear the systems at work. The nozzles in the transporter hold released the counter-agent, and the foam appeared to be slowly melting as it slowly decompressed back into liquid form. The liquid ran into the drainage system in the floor, from where it was pumped back into the tanks for re-use.

  The door opened, the ramp extended and the nano-webbing was withdrawn.

  “Quite a sight,” said Patterson.

  I agreed wholeheartedly.

  The scutbots towed the carriage out onto the apron, from where IRT’s robots took over. A huge hanger-style door concertinaed open.

  “This is actually a relatively small-scale project for us, believe it or not,” said Patterson. “We can handle anything up to medium-sized spacecraft here.”

  “Impressive,” I replied, as we followed the carriage into the building. It was a huge hall, and appeared completely empty, though the walls were full of equipment.

  “Where is the scanning and replication equipment?” I asked, expecting to see the usual lattice framework of sensors and nozzles.

  Patterson smiled. “You’ll see them shortly,” she said, “assuming you’d like to watch?”

  “Very much so,” I said.

  The carriage was, by this time, positioned in the very centre of the hall. Patterson led the way to a door on one of the interior walls, and an elevator took us rapidly up ten floors. She led the way to a room with a glass wall on one side, overlooking the hall. The rest of the room was a lounge, with easy chairs, sofas, small tables and refreshment replicators on the rear wall.

  “You’ll be able to watch the entire process from here,” she said. She touched her watch and issued the instruction to commence.

  Huge vertical and horizontal beams emerged from the walls and ceiling, tracking silently across until they surrounded the carriage. That was why they hadn’t been visible before.

  “The scanning process will take just a few minutes,” said Patterson. “There’s nothing to see while that is happening, of course, but the replication process is quite remarkable. When you’re used to normal home and office replicators, the speed of our system is something most people find spectacular.”

  “How will the system manage the revised materials?” I asked. The outer layer of the replicated coach would be perfectly genuine gold. This would, however, merely be a thick plating over a tungsten core.

  “It’s a standard feature of our system,” she said. “We do a lot of work for holovision productions, for example, where only the outer surface is real. In this case, the tungsten core will be created first, and then the gold plating applied. The whole thing will take around an hour.”

  I sat and watched. It was, as advertised, s
pectacular. I was, though, more interested in the tungsten than the gold. Tungsten had been chosen as it has the same density as gold, and hence the same weight per volume. The replicated carriage would weigh exactly the same as the original.

  One hour later, there were two gold carriages instead of one. We walked back into the hall and I studied the replica closely. I ran my hand over it. The two were absolutely indistinguishable.

  “Remarkable,” I said, with genuine feeling.

  “We’ve attached a temporary label to the replica,” said Patterson with a smile, “wouldn’t want you getting the two mixed up!”

  “Indeed not,” I replied, “indeed not.”

  The process at the second replication plant was virtually identical. Each was unaware of the work of the other – I hadn’t wanted either of them wondering why they were creating two replicas when only one was needed. By the time we landed at the warehouse I’d rented and let the scutbots do their thing, there were three carriages inside it, each identical in every detail bar the attached tags identifying two of them as replicas.

  The transport crew were expecting replica 2 to be left in the warehouse, as a backup, while the original and replica 1 would be delivered back to Buckingham Palace. Which was almost exactly what would be happening.

  “So,” I told the transport crew, “I just need to wait for the work to be inspected here. The inspector is running about an hour behind schedule. There’s a diner across the street if you want to grab something to eat while we wait? I’ll call you once we’re ready to leave.”

  I was almost disappointed when they readily agreed. Had my suggestion failed, I’d come up with no fewer than four alternative ways to get them out of the warehouse for the short time it would take me to swap the tags.

  Ten minutes later, it was done. The genuine gold state coach was wearing a Industrial Replication Technologies tag, while the two replicas were waiting to be loaded back onto the air transporter – one labelled as such, the other ready to be returned as the genuine article. The scutbots had obediently swapped the positions of the original and one of the replicas so the transport crew would suspect nothing.