Evolution Expects

by Jonathan Green

  The chemical plant must have all existed before Uriah Wormwood was ever exposed as the mastermind behind the Darwinian Dawn. It had all been waiting there, in the shadows, ready to be brought into play as necessary, to further Wormwood’s master-plan to force the British empire to change for, what he believed to be, its own good. And now Ulysses saw the true scale of Wormwood’s operation, the extent of his ambition, how great an empire he had built for himself, hidden at the very heart of the stagnating monster that, after one hundred and fifty years, Magna Britannia had become.

  “Things have come full circle,” Wormwood stated, an icy smile on his face, and Ulysses felt the bottom drop out of his world. Trapped in the clutches of the madman’s droid, with Spring-Heeled Jack having fallen to his death and Nimrod too far away to help, there really was nothing more that he could do.

  “Shoot it down! Shoot it down!” Ulysses hissed under his breath, as if De Wynter might somehow hear him and have time to act before the whole of London paid the price for Wormwood’s revenge.

  How much time was left until their mutually agreed deadline? Had De Wynter uncharacteristically cut them some slack and allowed them longer to complete their mission? Ulysses sincerely hoped not.

  “What’s that?” Wormwood said with a cruel chuckle. “No-one’s going to shoot us out of the sky when I have so many very important people on board! They wouldn’t dare. Especially not since their precious Prime Minister is stuck up here with us. I doubt those on the ground will even know anything’s awry up here, until it’s too late.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “It matters not! Whatever they have planned, they’ll be too late!”

  “Do they really know what’s going on up here? Those on the ground, I mean?” Valentine asked softly.

  “Indeed they do, sir,” Ulysses replied. “Indeed they do! And right now there’s a whole squadron of zeppelins on their way to liberate the Jupiter.”

  A harsh bark of laughter cut through the tense atmosphere. “Helm, is there anything on the scopes?” Wormwood asked.

  “No, sir,” the helmsman replied. “There’s nothing. The skies are clear.”

  “You’re bluffing!” Wormwood snarled at Ulysses.

  “What are you going to do?” Valentine asked Wormwood, his voice rising in desperation. “What is it you want? Is it money? That’s why you’ve taken hostages isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t. What I want is change, the opportunity to wipe the slate clean, if you will, and start again. I want nothing less than the total destruction of Londinium Maximum, the city that has so far spurned my very best efforts to drag it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. I want to force it to evolve. I want the chance to re-build, to start again. To rule!

  “And now things have come full circle, and it seems almost poetic that you are here to witness my triumph, as I witness your minds shatter, as you are forced to accept that everything you have fought for has all been for naught!”

  “Is that what this is?” Ulysses shouted. “A competition? A test to see who’s the best? If you want to have this out with me, let’s do it, here and now!”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. This isn’t about you. What, you think that you’ve become my... my nemesis? You are not worthy of the title. Look at you. You’re a nobody. You’re nothing but a ridiculous fop with a monkey’s arm, an over-inflated sense of your own importance and delusions of grandeur. You couldn’t stop me before and you won’t stop me now. How does it feel, Quicksilver,” the old man gloated, “to know that you only managed to delay the inevitable, that all you have struggled for has been for nothing?”

  Ulysses was barely aware of what was happening around him on the bridge as the control room became a bustling hive of activity.

  He was roused from his shocked stupor by a commotion on the far side of the deck, as a pair of armed crewmen marched into the Hub, a tall, black-suited figure held forcibly between them.

  “Sorry to interrupt, sir,” the bolder of the two began, “but we found this character snooping around the storage tanks.”

  “Excellent. Excellent.” Wormwood crowed. “The more the merrier. Now, take a look all of you,” he said, taking in the view beyond the panoramic windows, “and marvel at what science and a superior intellect can achieve!

  “Gentlemen, the time had come. Activate the Weather Station. Initiate cloud-seeding. The command is given and the command is ‘Rainmaker’!”

  As the white-coated scientist and the crewmen operating the controls set to work a deep, bass hum rose to fill the control room, the steel plates of the walkway vibrating in sympathy with its harsh harmonics.

  “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Wormwood pronounced in a loud voice over the rising hum of esoteric machineries. “I’d say it looks like rain.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Valentine’s Day

  WITH A GREAT grinding of gears, grilles opened in the bottom of the Weather Station’s outer ring. Preceded by a hollow gurgling, with a gushing roar that reverberated throughout the vessel, a chemical torrent pumped from the reservoirs of storage tanks, along the twisting pipework intestines of the Jupiter, and a moment later it started to rain.

  The oily yellow downpour cascaded from the outlets all around the underside of the torus. Ulysses could see the chemical shower quite clearly, the droplets steaming acidly as they came into contact with the Smog layer below. And he fancied he saw something else through the toxic rain; a smattering of blinking red lights.

  As Ulysses and the others watched, thousands of gallons of the sickly yellow liquid rained down upon the stubborn cloud cover. The fat, greasy raindrops gave off acrid puffs of vapour as they came into contact with the pollution-suffused clouds.

  As the chemical shower continued, Ulysses could see discoloration occurring within the Smog, filthy trails darkening the surrounding morass, a shimmer of oily iridescence rippling across it.

  At last, the steady shower began to slow until it finally stopped, the last few droplets still clinging to the mouths of outlet pipes. A noisy gurgling, as of a cistern emptying, belched through the pipes located above the control room.

  “Cloud-seeding complete,” Wormwood’s pet meteorologist announced.

  “Excellent! Then commence ionisation of the atmosphere.”

  Switches were activated and levers were thrown and, slowly, the Jupiter Station began to spin. The motion was surprisingly smooth, Ulysses noticed, but the whole of the Weather Machine was turning, like a wheel – there could be no doubt of that.

  “Charging hull,” a crewman announced.

  As well as all the other sounds echoing throughout the Weather Station, Ulysses could now make out a crackling hum. As he continued to gaze helplessly out of the vast panoramic window he saw lightning crackling from the underside of the Jupiter – like St Elmo’s fire from themast of a tea-clipper. In response he discerned a darkening of the sky around them. Before their very eyes, water vapour was condensing out of the air, forming ragged scuds of cirrus that were then spiralling towards the rotating Weather Station, merging to form great grey cumulonimbus conglomerations.

  The rotations of the Jupiter continued, more water vapour condensing out of the ionised air. And it seemed that, the more clouds appeared, the more continued to appear with every rotation. Cloud cover over the city was increasing exponentially. The electrical discharge had spread beyond the Weather Station now, fitful flickers of lightning skittering across the darkening sky in a spectrum of colours.

  The Smog appeared to be rising, drawn towards the rotating wheel of the Jupiter, metallic pinks and greens, like a beetle’s wings, flashing through the massing storm, the morning sky now the colour of beaten pewter.

  A rumble of thunder rolled overhead. The gravity-defying Weather Station shook.

  Kitty gasped, looking all around her, scanning the storm massing beyond the glass and steel walls of the control room.

  “Have no fear, my dear,” Wormwood told her
. “The Jupiter is designed to withstand hurricane force winds and its insulated hull can withstand a direct lightning strike.”

  They appeared to be right in the middle of the massing thunderheads now, the spinning Weather Station dwarfed by the boiling black clouds. Thunder boomed directly overhead, so loud it seemed to shatter the sky, and sheet lightning, as bright as supernovae, sliced the sky apart. With another cacophonous crash, the heavens opened and the downpour commenced.

  A DELUGE OF Biblical proportions fell on the darkened city below.

  It fell on parks and gardens. It fell on chapels and churches. It fell on the homes of the rich and the slums of the East End. It fell on the Overground and the omnibuses, horses whinnying as the sudden cloudburst took them by surprise. It fell on the building works at the Tower of London maximum security prison and on St Paul’s Cathedral. It fell on the British Museum and the Palace of Westminster. It fell on the confused crowds gathered at Hyde Park. And where it fell, it changed people.

  A BUSINESSMAN, RUNNING for shelter, his copy of The Financial Times over his head, the pink paper disintegrating under the pounding acidic rain, collapsed at Oxford Circus, the contents of his dropped briefcase spilling across the pavement and into the gutter. A huddle of women passing by, running to get out of the rain themselves, muttered to each other that he was “falling down drunk” and “a disgrace.” They did not hang about and so did not see the transformation that suddenly overtook the spasming wretch.

  As he lay there, face-down in the street – legs kicking convulsively at the paving slabs, hands flailing in puddles of oily rain – the back of his coat suddenly lifted and shredded, as wing cases tore from his shoulder blades, the flesh falling from his arms and legs to reveal chitinous limbs, a third pair of limbs thrusting through the sides of his body as ribs re-shaped themselves into something altogether more befitting a cockroach.

  A woman screamed, frozen in terror at what had befallen the man, the mutating rain spilling down her face. Her shrill scream became a descending moan as her own face re-shaped itself, her jawbone fracturing and peeling back to become the chittering mouthparts of a giant insect.

  A TRAMP SHELTERING beneath London Bridge, the rain pounding the shingle of the river-beach, watched as the pilot of one of the myriad steam-ferries that criss-crossed the Thames – hour after hour, day in day out – lost control of his craft as, his whole body shaking, he fell onto his back and began to change. The boat, now out of control, collided with one of the piers of the bridge, the current swinging it round so that it blocked the central span of Blackfriars.

  The tramp, too intoxicated on cheap gin to understand what was going on, knocked back another slug of the strange brew from the brown glass bottle that he had been sharing with his dog – the image of a bearded man leering at him from the label. The laughter provoked by the ferryman’s unfortunate situation died on his lips as the canine’s head split open like an overripe tomato, the flesh of its muzzle tearing apart as the dog-sized bluebottle pulled itself free of its dog-skin pupa.

  THE RAIN DROPPED its deadly payload on the Old Montague Street Workhouse.

  Governor Trimble liked to think of himself as something of a social reformer. He saw it as his duty to make sure that those sent into his care improved themselves in body and mind during their stay, so that they might eventually leave and become useful members of society. It had been with this driving purpose in mind that he had invested a goodly sum of the money given to him by the government to run the facility each week, in Dr Feelgood’s Tonic Stout, distributing the patent panacea to the inmates every Thursday, encouraging them to take a measure of the tonic at every meal break.

  On the morning of the fourteenth of February, three hundred and sixty-one inmates were out in the exercise yard taking part in a compulsory PT session – another of Governor Trimble’s initiatives, part of his over-arching ‘Think Fit’ philosophy.

  By the time the cleanup crews reached the Old Montague Street Workhouse, nothing was found of Governor Trimble other than his false teeth.

  IN THE GARDEN of their home in Holland Park, the Pevensey children huddled together inside the tree house their father had built for them. They watched, eyes wide in shock and dread, as Nanny Goodison’s face melted beneath her bonnet and became a nightmarish mass of feeding tendrils, as their baby brother’s skin split to allow the pulsating caterpillar to escape from within.

  Nanny had always shown Baby how he should take his medicine, taking a spoonful herself first, first thing in the morning and last thing before bed.

  IRON HOOPS SCAVENGED from broken barrels to become children’s playthings, bowled and bounced along the gutters of cobbled streets as the urchins that had been playing with them lost the ability to even comprehend what play was, as they too de-evolved into something even lower down the social ladder than the orphaned children of working class slum dwellers.

  THE TRAIN RUNNING on the southbound section of the District Line failed to stop at Paddington and ploughed into the platform at Bayswater killing fourteen people instantly, as the driver, exposed to the wind and the rain in his cab, became a limbless gastropod, a half-finished bottle of stout still in his canvas bag lying on the floor at his feet.

  “OPEN FIRE!” DE Wynter bellowed into the personal communicator. “Open fire on the Jupiter! Captain? Captain!” he roared, but he obviously wasn’t getting any response from whoever was at the other end of the line.

  Eliza looked from the big man squeezed into the front passenger seat of the Silver Phantom to Nimrod, sat behind the wheel, staring at the rain-lashed windscreen.

  “Damn it all to hell!” De Wynter raged.

  “What happened? What’s going on?” the young tart asked, tears streaking her cheeks. She couldn’t quite believe that De Wynter had given the order to fire on the Weather Station, even though Ulysses, the vigilante and half the empire’s most important people were still on board. The blow he had laid against her, as she had tried to stop him, had split her lip and she could feel a bruise swelling on her cheek.

  Nimrod turned and looked at her with a mixture of sadness and sympathy, and was it her imagination or were his eyes also glistening with the rumour of tears?

  “I would imagine that the Battersea Battery is suffering the effects of the rain, just as the poor wretches caught out in the open here,” Ulysses’ butler said.

  “Thank God for that,” Eliza murmured as she turned to gaze out of the window, watching the figures flopping and twitching in the quagmire that the carefully manicured lawns of Hyde Park had so quickly become.

  FROM THEIR VANTAGE point aboard the bridge of the Jupiter Station, Wormwood’s prisoners could do nothing but watch as chaos consumed the streets below.

  Devlin Valentine stared slack-mouthed at the broiling clouds as the rain continued to fall, with no sign of it stopping – or so it seemed to his overwrought mind. All that he had worked for, the symbol he had wanted to give the nation, and the world, to demonstrate that Prime Minister Valentine meant business, the means by which he had hoped to make his mark upon the face of London, had all gone to wrack and ruin. The will of a madman had turned his greatest achievement into the worst disaster to befall the city since 1666.

  He had hoped that this day would go down in history as the day he left the capital changed forever. Well, he had certainly managed to achieve that. His own pride and over-reaching ambition had proved to be not only his downfall but also that of the city of which he was so proud.

  Of course that had been Halcyon Beaufort-Monsoon’s intention as well. The seemingly beneficent Beaufort-Monsoon had once said something along those lines, in fact, that he wanted to give something back to the city that had given him so much. Little had Valentine known then that what London had given him was a disfigured face, crippling injuries, and an unrivalled desire for revenge.

  Valentine looked helplessly from the grim-faced Quicksilver to the masked vigilante. Despite all the guilt and regret that was consuming his mind, there was still
one small part – the part that remembered that he was a politician – that was looking for a way out of this mess, searching for some way to turn the apparently hopeless situation to his advantage. This small part of his mind realised that the curiously-apparelled individual was the vigilante who had been terrorizing the Limehouse district, the one the press had dubbed the new Spring-Heeled Jack and who, at that moment, might well be the only one who could rescue them from their seemingly hopeless situation.

  If Spring-Heeled Jack was capable of only half the things the papers claimed he could do, then he might still have his part to play, if only he wasn’t being held prisoner. It really seemed as if Uriah Wormwood, disgraced former Prime Minister had won and stolen Valentine’s moment of glory.

  Somewhere deep within him a spark ignited and the words of a small, calm voice echoed inside his skull: “We are not beaten yet.”

  He might not have martial arts skills, prescience or a jetpack-powered flying suit, but he still had his intellect and his politician’s cunning. His quick-thinking had got him out of enough tricky situations before – usually during debates in the House of Commons – and had helped make him that man he was today. Why shouldn’t it save him now?

  And he wasn’t alone either; he didn’t have to do it all by himself, did he? All he needed to do was topple the first domino, then he was sure the others would follow, falling under the weight of destiny.

  Giving voice to a feeble moan, Devlin Valentine collapsed in a dead faint. The crewman watching him was taken momentarily by surprise. But a moment was all Valentine needed.

  As he dropped, he kicked out behind him, catching the crewman across the shin. Losing his balance and surprised by the pain, the man doubled up, bringing his gun within Valentine’s reach. Grabbing the barrel of the weapon Valentine sprang up, pushing the pistol up and out of his guard’s hands. Valentine then brought the butt round hard, smashing it into the man’s nose. He heard the wet crack of cartilage shattering and, with a stifled wail, the crewman went down.