The Great Game (31 page)

  
May mistook my gesture. The old gun was back in his hand and he
tsked
at me disapprovingly, like a headmaster with an errant pupil.

  
God, how I hated him at that moment!

  
"A drink?" I said, ignoring his weapon, and bringing out the bottle and two cups. At that his good humour returned, the gun disappeared, and he sat down. "By all means," he said. "Let us drink to old friends."

  
I poured; we drank. "What do you want, May?" I said.

  
"I?" he said. "I want nothing, for myself. It is Lord Babbage who has shown a renewed interest in you, my friend."

  
"
Babbage
?" I said.

  
"I will put it simply, Stoker," he said. "My Lord Babbage requires a… chronicler of the great work he is undertaking. And there are precious few who can be brought in. You, my friend, are already involved. And you have proven yourself reliable. It is, after all, why you are still alive."

  
"But why me?" I said, or wailed, and he smiled. "My Lord Babbage," he said, "has got it into his head that you are a man of a literary bent."

  
At that I gaped, for it was true, that I had dabbled in writing fictions, as most men do at one point or another, yet had taken no consideration of showing them to anyone but my wife.

  
"I thought so," Karl May said.

  
"But you're a writer," I said. "Why can't you–"

  
"My work lies elsewhere," he said, darkly.

  
I could not hold back a smirk, at that. "He does not value your fiction?" I said. At this he scowled even more. "You will make your way to Transylvania," he said. He took out an envelope and placed it on the desk. "Money, and train tickets," he said.

  
"And if I refuse?"

  
This made him smile again.

  
"Oh, how I wish you would," he said, and a shiver went down my spine at the way he said it. I picked up the envelope without further protest, and he nodded, once, and left without further words.

 

Castle Bran–

  
Mycroft, you had come to me, two weeks after that meeting with Karl May. I remember you coming in, a portly man, shadows at your back. You came alone.

  
Without preamble you told me of your suspicions back at that opening night, and told me of the conspiracy you were trying to unravel. An unholy alliance between Krupp and Babbage and that alien Book
man. What were they planning? you kept saying. What are they after?

  
You had kept sporadic checks on me, and on the Lyceum. And your spotters had seen the return of Karl May.

  
Now you confronted me. You wanted to know where my allegiance lay.

  
Choose, you told me.

  
Choose, which master to serve.

  
For Queen and Country, you told me.

  
My name is Abraham Stoker, called Abe by some, Bram by others. I am a theatrical manager, having worked for the great actor Henry Irving for many years as his personal assistant, and, on his behalf, as manager of the Lyceum Theatre in Covent Garden.

  
I am not a bad man, nor am I a traitor.

 

  Lucy closed the pages of the journal. She stared at the vellum-bound volume in her hands, thinking of the man she had failed to save.

  Thinking of the strange machinations of humans and machines… of Transylvania, and what Stoker had found there.

  
Transylvania.

  The strange word, like the name of another, distant world…

  She had to take this to someone, and Mycroft was dead, and Fogg was working for the Bookman. She felt lost, desperate.

  Then the moment passed and her head was clear, and the call of a bird sounded outside, a mimicked sound, not real, and she knew that it was time even before Bosie came to get her.

  "Ma'am, hostile force approaching."

  Lucy Westenra stood up and tucked the journal carefully into her pocket and pulled out her guns. She stepped out of the building into the dark world outside.

  "Kill them," she said, softly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 
 

  
It was quite remarkable, he thought. There was something he found very comforting about a second, hidden urban space, lying this close to the other. There were people down there too, and he was very tempted to sample them, but the voices began to shout and he decided to stick to the objective without any further delay.

  
He had expected the fog of radiation to reduce underground but the closer they came to the place the voices had described, the more intense it grew – not just what the humans called Tesla waves but a whole spectrum of wide-bandwidth signals, almost as though…

  
Almost as though they belonged to his progenitors, he thought.

  
But that should not have been the case. He was, he was quite certain, the only observer on this planet. His progenitors, in fact, had shown remarkably little enthusiasm for this expedition. Some form of historical amateur society existing in the Spectral Swarm had received the signal of the activated, obsolete quantum scanner and had despatched a vessel through the resultant wormhole before it had collapsed. The observer had been gestated in orbit around this curious blue-white planet, and dropped down without due ceremony to see what he could find.

  
So why was there, suddenly, such an explosion of signatory radiation…?

  
A dreadful thought had formed itself in the observer's think-cloud and slowly permeated his I-loop, born out of some deep archaic data and wild speculation. He tried to push it away.

  
As he passed through the tunnels he came across a small human with a hunchback, and a grotesque, giant human. They did not see him. They were, in fact, occupied, somewhat to the observer's befuddlement, in what appeared to be a duet. They were singing.

  
Again he was tempted to sample them, but the voices were growing quite hysterical by then: a routine diagnosis suggested their storage had become entangled with other historical data banks and that they may have been the cause of the alarming concept he was currently trying to ignore. Sighing a little – because a good observer learned from the specimens he collected – he ignored the two strange humans and went straight on, finding at last a primitive, abandoned research facility of some sort, and a dying human which one of the voices, that of the fat man, identified to him as one Viktor von Frankenstein, a research scientist working for the organisation called the Quiet Council. Delighted he could finally do his job, the observer knelt beside the man, whose eyes focused on him weakly and whose voice said, "Help… me."

  
The observer was quite happy to do exactly that. He released the spike, which jutted out of the top of his hand, and inserted it deftly into the man's cortex, the data-spike extending like a telescope as it went, swiftly and assuredly, through the different layers of the man's brain, extracting neural pathways and the man's embedded I-loop and data storage into the observer's own, infinitely more advanced hardware.

  
The man on the ground became a corpse. The eyes stopped seeing. The head lolled back. The man said,
Where the hell am I?

  
The observer was happy to let the other voices explain, even though a pre-prepared data-packet had already been introduced into the new I-loop's structure. Meanwhile he was studying this latest specimen with fascination, until he came to the last moments of the creature's biological incarnation, at which point he gave an involuntary shriek of alarm that set off explosions in several of the still-functioning devices in the underground research chamber.

  They're here!
the voice that had been Viktor von Frankenstein said.

  No,
the observer thought/said
, that can't be.

  
Another voice said,
Smith? Smith is here?

  
It was the woman he had collected in Bangkok.

  
The observer let the voices go on, running in the background. He, too, was running now, suddenly desperate to get above-ground again. All the while he was running interrogatory routines over the entirety of the Viktor specimen's memories.

  
Alarms were slowly popping up all over the observer's network. It ran through crowds of frightened humans (sweat, adrenalin, pheromones all registering briefly), through the tunnels and up, burst
ing at last onto the surface.

  
A cacophony of voices he had been trying to ignore washed over him. Ancient voices, in a strange antique dialect. The observer watched the city, engulfed in flames. He observed the machines, half-ghostly in the twilight, as though they were fading in and out of existence.

  
The device! the observer thought. A human curse rose into the fore
front of his mind and he unconsciously used it.

  
Where the
hell
was the device?

  Smith remembered the hours that followed fleetingly, in unreal snatches.

  At some point it seemed the Seine itself was on fire, its dark waters reflecting flames and destruction as he and Van Helsing ran–

  "There is a way," Van Helsing said.

  "How?"

  "Look!"

  He had made Smith look. The fires and the alien machines rampaging over the city, flicking in and out of existence as though they were pictures projected out of a camera obscura.

  "There is a focal point," Van Helsing said.

  "How can you tell?"

  "Look! The destruction moves, but it is bound by a circumference. The device must have activated them, but has a limited range."

  Smith looked. It was possible… he saw that, indeed, some parts of the city were passed by, while others were only now coming under attack–

  "It's moving!"

  "Yes."

  "But how can we find the focal point? We have to stop the device!" Smith said.

  "There is a way," Van Helsing said. "But it is dangerous–"

  Smith would have laughed, at that. After a moment Van Helsing gave a sheepish grin. "More dangerous, I mean," he said.

  "What do we need to do?" Smith said.

  "We need to find a vantage point," Van Helsing said. "From above we could see it more clearly, we could identify the source."

  Smith looked at the city's skyline.

  And Van Helsing's meaning sank in.

  "The
Tour Eiffel
," Smith said.

  They ran.

 

Snatches of stolen time, Smith's lungs on fire. At some point they commandeered a baruch-landau, Van Helsing stoked the furnace as Smith drove. The city streets were on fire, coaches burning, people running this way and that; some were looting the shops, others were barricaded inside buildings. There was sporadic gunfire, flames reflected in windows, and high above, the tripods dominated the skyline, moving, now that he knew to look for it, moving in a single direction, sweeping over the city.

  The Tour Eiffel had been built only a few years earlier, during the French's
Exposition Universelle
. Smith had been involved in an operation, years before, to recruit its builder, Gustave Eiffel, when the man was building a train station in Africa, in the place the Portuguese, who had unsuccessfully tried to colonise it, called Mozambique.

  The operation had been a failure, and Eiffel returned to France, building at last this greatest of follies, a giant metal tower rising into the sky above the Champ de Mars, like a vast antennae aimed at the stars.

  Rumour had it that was the building's true purpose, that the Quiet Council had intended its use as a sort of communication device, sending messages into deep space… possibly receiving messages, too, if the rumours were true.

  "What's… up… there?" he shouted – a ray of flame from the sky hit the side of a building and they swerved madly to avoid the avalanche.

  "Aerial… experimentation… station!" Van Helsing shouted. "Drive! Drive, God damn it, Smith!"

  So Smith drove, avoiding debris and the corpses of the dead lying in the street, and the burning stalls and coaches and seas of cockroaches escaping as their habitats were destroyed, and swarms of rats, and looters, and militias, heading towards that great metal tower, hoping they would not be too late.

 
 

 
 
 

The machines were moving.

  Their skeletal frames silhouetted against the dark skies. Their legs moved jerkily, yet there was something beautiful about it, too, their motion over the city skyline, taking no mind to the buildings and people below. Here and there, like stars in the skies, the machines winked in and out of existence, as though their light was passing through the atmosphere, distorted.

  "Where do they come from?"

  Van Helsing, rode shotgun on the swerving baruch-landau, face blackened with coal, the sweat from the stoker forming rivulets down his face so that he looked covered in war paint.