Good, thought Eliott. The kid learned something.
‘One last place to visit,’ he said to Mahasen.
If Kushlani de Almeida was surprised to see him, she made no mention of it. They had never spoken, except in radiogram messages. Penhaligon had kept Grimme away from the mechanical side of things.
He had expected a bureaucrat, or some stifled academic eking out a failed career in Hewage’s bloated experiment, but the woman he met would have done him a damn sight more use in the battles in Colombo than some of the Inquisitors Penhaligon had sent. She stood in the middle of the butchery – his butchery, he reminded himself – and directed operations like clockwork. Here, skin to be stripped and repaired; there, batteries; there, reprogramming. A hundred men and women leapt at her will. Bots, now trickling in from the first army wagons, dangled like corpses on magnetic hooks. Assembly lines thrummed out to where a fleet of white vans waited to cart them back to the train to Colombo.
Work slowed down as people noticed him.
‘Late sample, Mr. Grimme?’ she shouted over the thump-thump-thump of a machine press.
‘This one is special,’ he said. He passed it to her.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘This one I remember.’ She took it and gave him a slow thumbs up. He felt the burden lift, like an actual weight on his shoulders being taken off.
Outside, the sun was setting on the city. Past the low curve of the Ministry grounds, the mountains reached up to kiss the clouds. He walked to the very edge of the security fence and watched the lake turn into crimson fire. He watched the lights come on and observed this strange, humid land forget everything that had just happened and go back to being itself.
‘Now, sir?’ asked Mahasen, at his side.
‘Home,’ said Eliott Grimme, the Reaper. ‘I’m done here.’
V: Domination
ONE
Author: Watson 4114, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall SW
Source:
Dear Mr. Drake,
As per your data fetch request, we have appended logs of the Ceylon/ Colombo Port City’s signal traffic. Pertinent is a report by one of former employees, a Dr. Jacob Bengali. Attached is what appears to be a long-form document, nonstandard format.
Attached please find full report.
Yours,
Watson 4114
Author: E. Drake, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall SW
Source:
Bengali. This is all fine, but you’re there to get me that code. Hewage’s machine learning stuff looks even more potent than he let on. There’s talk about swarm behaviour once a shortwave network is enabled. Someone’s withholding information here. Details when? Code when? And while you’re at it, get Grimme on the line. His response is overdue.
Author: N. Penhaligon, Inquisition, Kandy
Source:
Drake,
Absolutely no deployment of any sort will happen right now. The natives are restless, and I need my toys here. It’s a little busy here, so don’t expect anything overnight.
Regards,
Penhaligon.
Author: Watson 6374, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall SW
Source:
Dear Mr. Drake,
As per your data fetch request, reports indicate that the entertainment bots have entered their newest cycle of what is colloquially called the Big Match. The strongest confirming signal is an undersea radiogram from Lady Joanna Crofton, who is in the field as of the time of writing.
We have established consensus around the issue. While your argument of the forceful extraction of Jacob Bengali holds, such a situation may on some future date introduce unwarranted risk to the healthy maintenance of political balance between the offices of the Empire and the Commonwealth. Sir Penhaligon has prerogative on this matter. We advise waiting.
Yours,
Watson 6374
Author: E. Drake, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall SW
Source:
Penhaligon. Fine, I’ll talk to you straight. While you’re sitting happy over there, we’re getting hammered in S. Africa. You weren’t put there to indulge the buggers – we expect results.
Also, tell Grimme to start saving up for a coffin.
Author: Moriarty 1312, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall SW
Source:
Dear Mr. Drake,
The Watson line has been retired for being overly complacent. In these times it is better to react to snowballs than to face an avalanche later.
The Transvaal line has fallen and begun signalling airships to stay away. A situation report filed by operators there cites the Chinese Port Cities extending their infrastructure through Mozambique. The incidents are far beyond the perimeter they were locked to.
While your RnD matter is a relatively low-priority event, its long-term potential cannot be ignored. We have established consensus. You are to establish a new local envoy and instruct them in dealing with whatever is happening there. In the case of Eliott Grimme, we are informed that the Edict of Hong Kong cannot technically be brought into play, as he is officially within the employ of Nigel Penhaligon. However, take what other action you feel is necessary. Contain the situation with minimum force and the least possible political impact.
Yours,
Moriarty 1312
TWO
An SOE operator drank in a bar called the Office. Her name was Letitia Sixsmith, but she hated her first name and would only answer to Sixsmith. She had been through six glasses of whiskey and was showing no signs of stopping or slowing down. The barman would have tried to talk any other customer out of the next drink, but this one he served in silence, while she scratched on the tabletop with a black knife.
They knew very little about her at the Office (which was not actually an office, unless, as the joke went, you thought of it as the Office of Liver Diseases). But word got around. The bartender had once heard her being referred to as a ‘Baker Street Irregular’. He had thought that meant she was a Sherlock Holmes fan, until he ran a search in the public library.
Never come between an Irregular and their alcohol.
Her radiogram buzzed once, twice. A few heads turned at the curious sight of someone with a private radiogram, but then turned away quickly. She picked up.
‘Drake here,’ said the familiar voice. ‘We have a new assignment for you.’
‘You know, your last boy died,’ she said. ‘I went to his funeral today. Fancy stuff you gave him, all those fake medals and record and all.’
‘He was special forces,’ said the voice, sounding bored. ‘He knew the risks.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. They all knew the risks. ‘What do you want, Drake?’
He spoke at length. She listened, idly adding to the scratches on the table with her knife, cutting thin chunks off the table as if it was paper.
‘Alright,’ she said at the end. ‘I’ll see you Thursday.’
Sixsmith got up, paid for her drink and left, pulling her cloak around her. By the time she was out of the doorway, the cloak had adjusted to the light and turned her into a grey chameleon moving through the London streets.
The barman watched her vanish, then leaned over to see what she had inscribed on the tabletop. The epoxy composite was already healing, wiping out her words like it had for thousands of drunks before her, but he saw the words just before they vanished:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
And just below that: RIP Conrad 2018–2041.
She moved like the ghost she was, slipping between the drunks, the police, the partygoers – the everyday mosaic of life. London extracted itself from a blur of motion and came to a stop in front of her – a grey city with silicon spi
res and grim statues lit by the dying sun and roving lights.
Birds wheeled in the sky – heavy creatures with blurred approximations of old corporate logos on their wings. Time and a ban on genetic advertising was turning London’s crow population back to an ubiquitous grey-black, but it would still be several hundred years before the fuzzy logo of the Enfield Motor Co. disappeared completely. The solitary Tin Soldier stood idly beneath them, its feet planted in front of the Buckingham Palace, its gigantic metal head sixty feet above the city streets, coated in pale streaks of bird filth.
Bigger Ben, they called it. It looked like a man, except with inhumanly squat and tank-like proportions; allometric scaling and the cube-square law demanded different internals. Its face, a silvery mask with man-sized slits for eyes, turned slowly this way and that, all the sin and glory of London laid out before it. Holographic advertisements were being projected sky-high. The latest entertainment! The latest body! The latest way to beat death! They flickered and sputtered neon ink and vanished as it looked at them.
The last time she had seen it, it had been painted a vile red and white – Buckingham guard colours – and it looked like a joke. Now, it wore smoke camouflage and looked more like itself – a sixty-foot war machine. An unheeded warning.
The Empire was troubled.
The Skytrain cut downwards, throwing itself into the transit station. The crowd surged in and out, eventually ebbing like the tide. The men in sober greys, browns and blacks; the women in the latest fashions – faux-Persian silks, Russian embroidery, high collars from China. Here and there, a bronzed mechanical strode, parting the humans like a sea of flesh and cloth, its arms wrapped around different types of luggage that would take far too many humans to lift.
‘New suit, miss?’’ asked the autotailor in the Military Disembarking Area. It had a sort of dreary hopefulness to it. ‘New uniform?’
She thought about it, swiped her fingerprint, slipped the machine her thirteen pounds. Five minutes later, a new suit plunked down before her. Sixsmith admired it for a minute, and then set to where a ship would take her to India, and then Ceylon.
Thus it was that three strangers met each other in a solitary airfield in India. It would have been difficult, if not outright impossible to pinpoint its location; it existed on no map and no civilian was ever supposed to know of its existence. Anyone trying to approach it would have to breach miles of razorwire and armed fences; and looking at the slight curve of the runway, that slight wiggle, one got the impression that that particular strip of land would have given anything to crawl away and hide. A weathered Tin Soldier, painted in the image of Kali, glared down at the little strip of land, as if daring it to move.
‘Her Majesty’s Airship Caradoc landing now on Runway Twelve, sir,’ crackled a voice with the heavy syrupy overtones of the South Indian accent.
Time had not been kind to the Caradoc’s airship. Even from a distance, it was clearly in shambles, patched together with odds and ends. It was now fit only to run the small distance between South India and Ceylon.
Watching it was a colonel who sat, lotus-legged, in the stands rigged for him at the end of the runway. Yadav, now on his second career, still had the long, hooked nose, the fine, curling mustache, and the British Army fatigues fit well on his lean and powerful body; if anything was missing, it was perhaps the ambition of leaving all this behind. He waved at his old ship as it landed. The Caradoc flashed its lights twice, as if to wave back. Then Yadav turned back to the people he had been debriefing.
One of them was young, lean and uncomfortable – he looked like a soldier masquerading as a civilian, which he technically was. His brown face was split by copper lines, travelling down from his forehead and disappearing into a tight collar. The other was thin, blonde and carried herself like a coiled spring ready to explode. She wore a black cloak over herself, one of those spiderweave numbers, and a large rice hat that hid her face. Over her shoulder was a long, grey military bag that looked like it could survive bullets. She moved slightly faster than normal; it wasn’t something a civilian would have picked up, but Yadav saw the hawk-like speed at which she turned to watch the aircraft leave.
‘Listen carefully,’ he said. ‘You are going to Ceylon. Dr. Bengali is our asset there. Sergeant-major Sixsmith, you watch Dr. Bengali’s back, extract the relevant data and send it back to this station. You have been given temporary authority to command over any army, police or Inquisition agent equal to your rank or below. Lieutenant Wijeratne here is from the Ceylon Inquisition, in fact, and is a regular liaison here, and whatever the two of you need to discuss should ideally happen on your way there.’
He paused to make sure they understood, and added, almost offhandedly: ‘The Caradoc, being a very old ship, is being repaired. One of its greatest shortcomings is that its onboard and outward surveillance are not really functioning right now, so expect no fancy recordings or logs to … help jog your memory. Are we clear? Wijeratne please take your seat on the plane.’
Mahasen Wijeratne shifted uneasily and made his way to the front of the aircraft. The colonel waited until he was out of all possible earshot, both organic and synthetic. He then turned to Sixsmith and spoke rapidly in Hindi, his eyes much more animated.
‘Listen even more carefully now. Sixsmith, you understand this language, yes? It’s Ravana country down there. That Inquisitor’s playing a very dangerous game today. If you get in trouble, give me a call and I’ll drop a hundred good Gurkhas in there with a Tin Soldier and a cache of weapons for backup. Are we clear?’
‘Clear,’ said Sixsmith. She had a throaty and raspy voice. Her eyes were slit-like, obviously artificial, and looked like they belonged on something feral; something that crawled through tall grass and killed with fast lunges.
‘You’ve taken your meds? Boosters in your system? Encryption keys traded?’
‘All done.’ Sixsmith could feel the nanomachines from the SOE booster shot worming through her system. She felt slightly nauseous. They would settle in soon, and keep her patched up for a good six months or so, but all it took was a small clump to go haywire.
‘Your predecessor did not survive.’
‘Perks of the job, sir.’
The Indian man nodded. ‘Good luck, then.’
She was rushed through, double time, by faceless Indian sepoys. The flight crew pointed this way and that – your room, also yours, also yours, madam. The rotor blades whirled in and out of sight outside the windows.
She found Mahasen Wijeratne at the back, tense and hunched over an obscure set of dials.
So this was a Ceylonese Inquisitor. She had met Inquisitors before, even worked with them, and every time the regional modifications threw her. The ones on the Transvaal line had been skeletal, with skin the texture of cactus and legs built for running hundreds of miles at a time. This Ceylonese variant was … built more for like a policeman. A young man’s frame overlaid with what looked like … fourth gen hardware? Third? The face was a receiver, of course. He thrummed very subtly, she noticed. Some kind of amp on the neurons, probably; an overclock bordering on the unstable. Or maybe nerves.
‘So, how long you been ferrying guns to the resistance?’ she asked by way of introduction.
His eyes flashed, but he didn’t move. Smart. ‘Long enough. Conrad helped us get the authorizations.’
Not for the first time, she wished the Drakes and their entire line a very long stay in hell. And she let none of it show on her face.
‘Our people are not happy,’ he said. ‘We are not happy about living under the British yoke. We are not happy that our way of living is being torn apart and forgotten. We are not happy that war machines are being tested on our soil … what you call entertainment.’
She’d heard it all before. Well, most of it. ‘Brief,’ she said, and sat there and let Mahasen talk.
He was nervous, and that made him eager to explain, to clarify. She saw, through his eyes, how it had begun: with the old Houses of Kandy turning into traitors,
one by one, giving in to wealth and power. She learned how the protest began – one monk, protesting for the name ‘Ceylon’ to be changed to ‘Lanka’; turning into a movement that gave the local clergy their fire, and turned Buddhist monks into the backbone or resistance. She learned about how the movement grew on the ashes and outskirts of Colombo, using Chinese money and 3D-printed guns and tools to scratch out an existence where Kandy never thought to look. How it reached out, soft but many-fingered, to people like Mahasen, who were in the ideal position to make the system look the other way and miss the slow ring of fire that was growing around Kandy – around the power plants and inside the fortresses.
Boring, she thought. The Lanka Resistance Front. Boring. The kind of name picked by committee. The kind of people who didn’t understand when they were being played, who actually believed that Edgar Drake had a soft spot for this country, who took their own corrupt chains of command and chose to believe that the entire world ran this way.
‘What do you mean, you hold land?’ she asked. ‘Show me.’
He brought up a map on the airship terminal. His copper finger inscribed a circle. ‘North of here,’ he said. ‘South of here. Everything between Gampaha and Colombo. Most here.’
The perimeter that the bots had been boxed in and a substantial chunk between the major forts. She pointed outside of Colombo. ‘There’s an army in that area.’ Supposedly, in case the bots broke out again.
‘All ours,’ he said. ‘Penhaligon thinks they’re his. Raise the flag and they will follow.’
Terrorists, she thought. Terrorists and anti-statists to be flushed out and hung from gibbets. And yet, Drake had expressly told her not to. He’d in fact told her the very opposite.
‘There’s a much bigger game to be played here,’ Drake had said. ‘Parliament will not agree to us moving in on Chinese turf until something serious happens. So we need to give them something serious. Penhaligon was supposed to fail, Sixsmith, and give us that excuse to capture one of the Port Cities and take back the Indian Ocean.’
The Inhuman Peace Page 17