Evolution Expects

by Jonathan Green

  Ulysses felt suddenly defenceless. He already knew that trying to shoot the thing would be about as effective as a mosquito trying to bite an elephant to death, and he didn’t even have his sword-cane to hand. The blade was still in the Prime Minister’s possession and the golem stood between him and Ulysses. The dandy didn’t even know if the Prime Minister was still conscious, or even alive.

  The golem-droid took another lumbering step forwards. And that was all the opportunity Ulysses needed. As the thing lunged and grabbed for him, Ulysses kept to its right and threw himself forwards under the sweeping hand and between the automaton’s widespread steam-hammer legs. As he slid across the smooth metal floor, he twisted and hurled the small object still clutched in his hands directly upwards.

  Kicking his heels against the floor, he pushed clear of the droid and scrambled to his feet. There in front of him, Devlin Valentine clung to the top of a ruined staircase.

  And then he was launching himself at the Prime Minister, grabbing him in a rugby tackle that would have seen him sent off the field, back in his schooldays at Eton, with a shout of: “Take cover!”

  Ulysses’ feet left the ground as he pushed Valentine back down the stairs. The two of them were still in mid-air when the magnet mine detonated.

  The golem came apart in an incendiary ball of light.

  The impact of the concussive wave hurled Ulysses and the Prime Minister over a fallen roof beam, to land in a heap behind the main control console.

  Scalding shards of metal and tiny red-hot ceramic fragments whickered through the air, pinging against the glass of the panoramic window as twisted pieces of steel – that might have once been the cogs and gears of a servo motor – clattered onto the deck-plate around them. Amongst the debris was what looked like the fused metallic vertebrae of a robotic spine.

  Ulysses cautiously raised himself from where he had landed on top of the Prime Minister. Something as large and as heavy as an anvil crashed down only a few feet away, the deck plate crumpling like cardboard beneath it.

  Ulysses looked up again and found himself staring into the still-glowing eyes of the droid. The light behind them died, as the jerking neck and one shoulder, with the grinding stump of an arm still attached to it became still.

  “Are you all right, Prime Minister?” Ulysses asked.

  “Er, yes. Yes, I think so. Thank you,” Valentine said, sitting up and brushing the dust and filth from his suit. “Thanks to you, I might add.”

  “Then I’d say we’re quits, wouldn’t you?”

  Valentine smiled grimly. “If you say so. What now?”

  “Well you’re getting out of here as quickly as possible,” Ulysses said, looking not at Valentine but at the vista visible through the panoramic window. The Jupiter had broken through the Smog now and the towering edifices of the Upper City were getting awfully close. The Jupiter could have collided with any one of them as it made its dramatic and unexpected descent, but by some miracle it appeared to be heading for a crash-landing in the Thames, somewhere between Waterloo Bridge and Blackfriars.

  “And what about you?” Valentine asked as Ulysses helped him negotiate the smouldering wreckage of the golem’s undercarriage.

  “I’m going after Wormwood!”

  Valentine risked a glance over his shoulder and the look of horror in his eyes said it all. “But there isn’t time, man! We’re going to hit the Thames!”

  “Justice must be served,” Ulysses said, leaving Valentine at the foot of the staircase again and making instead for the exit by which Wormwood and Kitty Hawke had, only seconds before, made their escape.

  “But we’re going down. You’ll be killed!”

  Ulysses had to shout to be heard over the sparking of sheared cables, the relentless metal moaning of the dying structure, and the howling wind circling the Hub. “Get out, now! You are our proud nation’s greatest hope. I, on the other hand, am only a hero of the empire, and heroes are expendable.”

  “You are a hero, sir, a veritable hero, and I salute you!” Valentine declared, and then he was gone, as he set off along the buckled passageway, searching for signs that would lead him to the nearest emergency life raft.

  “Heroes be damned!” Ulysses muttered under his breath as he entered the tunnel in front of him. Sprinting along it, as the Jupiter shook itself apart around him, he desperately hoped that he might still catch up with the fleeing Wormwood and Kitty Hawke before they managed to execute their own escape plan.

  Sprinting along the sloping corridor, he could feel the full force of the wind being forced through the falling Weather Station by its dramatic descent.

  Reaching the end of the corridor, where it joined with the main curving passageway, Ulysses found a neatly printed, framed sign, half hanging from the wall opposite, banging in the stiff breeze. It read:

  The wind grew stronger as he followed the passageway as it continued to bear right, and then suddenly the corridor came to an abrupt end where it had been sheared off completely by an explosion, with nothing beyond it but the cold rushing air and the rapidly approaching waters of the Thames.

  Ulysses skidded to a halt, grabbing the handrail running the length of the passageway and braced for impact.

  THE JUPITER HIT the Thames with a great whoomph.

  A wall of water was sent crashing over the traffic jam on Blackfriars Bridge and across the Victoria Embankment and out across the South Bank. The great wave put out a number of fires that had broken out amidst all the chaos and confusion that had resulted from the mutating downpour.

  The filthy river water washed along the city street, knocking people and their metamorphosing insect kin to the ground, and sending a host of locust-like creatures droning into the air before it. A wave, like a small tsunami, set the schooners, barges and steamers rocking, and jostling against each other, as it swept downstream.

  Across the capital a number of omnibuses, steam-wagons and hansom cabs were involved in collisions as – having already survived the chaos resulting from the spontaneous metamorphosis of a significant proportion of the city’s population – their drivers saw the Jupiter crash down in the river.

  For a moment it looked like the station might actually remain afloat, buoyed up on the scum-encrusted surface of the putrid Thames.

  And then the Jupiter Station started to sink, a shower of rain rising into the air from the exterior of the craft as more of its discharged cavorite carried droplets of river water with it as it escaped. What was left of the toxic soup sloshing around inside the Jupiter’s storage tanks discharged into the river, flooding the ancient waterway with a lethal cocktail of poisonous chemicals, that would continue to cause problems long after this dreadful day was over.

  THE FOUL WATERS of the Thames swirling into the open mouth of the passageway, lapping at his heels, Ulysses turned tail and ran. Following the curve of the passageway to the left now, as it wound slowly through the body of the devastated structure, he passed the access tunnel to the central Hub, and kept on round. He had soon left the rising waters behind, but he knew that it was only a matter of time before the entire vessel sank to the bottom of the river.

  Ulysses wondered how deep the Thames was at this point, but that wasn’t the biggest thing he had to worry about right at that moment. With the movement of the water washing the last of the toxic chemical waste from the craft’s storage tanks and straight into a river already awash with the outspill from the subterranean Fleet factory, Ulysses didn’t fancy taking a dip.

  And then he ran into Devlin Valentine.

  “Quicksilver!” the Prime Minister gasped, his face breaking into a delighted smile. “You’re alive!”

  “For the time being, at least. And I see you didn’t make it to the lifeboats in time.”

  “I hate to say I told you so, but...”

  “Tell me about it. Any sign of the other VIPs? Do you know what’s happened to them?”

  “I passed the viewing gallery where we were held prisoner on my way here, but that place
was empty.”

  “Good going, Jack. So they got away. Well now, let’s see about getting you off this sinking ship, shall we?”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “As the water level’s rising, it seems to me that the only way is up.”

  Ulysses started scanning the curved roof of the passageway above them. There had to be a way up onto the roof of the Weather Station.

  “Come on,” Ulysses said, setting off again along the corridor, “and keep your eyes on the ceiling.”

  It did not take them long to find what they were looking for. Ulysses led the way, his ape arm forcing the access hatch open. A telescoping ladder dropped down from the shaft and Ulysses scampered up it, Devlin Valentine close on his heels.

  With the Prime Minister ensconced within the narrow maintenance tunnel within the roof space, Ulysses closed the access hatch.

  “You first,” he said, indicating the rungs of the ladder as they continued up to another wheel-locked hatchway above.

  The death moans of the Jupiter Station reverberating all around them – the weight of water bearing down on parts of the wreck already starting to exert its own unwelcome influence – Ulysses felt disorientated by the continual pitch and yaw of the rocking station.

  Muted daylight spilled into the near-dark of the shaft as Valentine heaved open the hatch and the two of them climbed, blinking, onto the sloping roof of the Jupiter.

  Turning, Ulysses took in the view. The top of the Hub appeared like an island of burned and pitted metal above the choppy waters of the Thames, as the ancient river inexorably sucked the wreck down towards the sludge and silt at its bottom. The apex of the Hub, like some gigantic steel turtle shell, bore the scars of the Station’s destruction. Its hull-plates were riven by great gouges and discoloured by the scorch marks. Aerials and antennae had been sliced clean through by winnowing blades of twisted metal, like so many cornstalks before the scythe.

  There was little else visible above the hungry waters. The Thames was in turmoil, great bubbles rising to the surface from the sinking ship and agitating the leaking chemicals to create a frothing toxic soup.

  With another spouting eruption of compressed air the Jupiter shifted and heaved again. So great was the lurching motion that neither Ulysses nor Valentine was able to maintain his balance. Both fell awkwardly onto the slick surface of the hull. Unable to arrest their sliding descent, they slipped over the curve of the roof dropping towards the river.

  As Ulysses headed for the chemical spill surrounding the downed Jupiter, he saw a shadow streak across the sky above them, hurtling along on a cone of smoke and flame.

  And then the shadow was on them.

  Spring-Heeled Jack crashed down onto the metal roof, sliding towards Ulysses on his stomach, his breastplate kicking sparks from the metalwork.

  Instinctively reaching out towards the vigilante, Ulysses’ gloved hand found Jack’s gauntleted fist. His fall was sharply arrested as the activated magnet mine in Jack’s other hand clamped itself onto the surface of the drowning vessel.

  Ulysses snapped his head round and saw Valentine slipping feet first into the foaming water. He had been only seconds away from entering the chemical soup himself.

  Without thinking Ulysses plunged his chimpanzee hand into the Thames, after Valentine. He felt the acid burn of the befouled waters on the skin of his borrowed arm, as the long fingers of his left hand closed around something beneath the water.

  With Jack pulling him back towards the top of the still sinking outer ring, Ulysses heaved and pulled a spluttering Devlin Valentine from the viscous, cloying waters of the grotesquely-polluted Thames. The Prime Minister’s clothes were sodden, the left hand side of his body still covered in an oily yellow sheen.

  As Ulysses looked down at the barely-conscious Valentine, coughing the stinking river water from his lungs, he saw the man’s flesh begin to blister and redden, and felt the prickly stinging on the leathery skin of his chimpanzee’s arm become an angry burning pain. He closed his eyes in agony and gasped for breath.

  Feeling the Jupiter heave beneath them once again, Ulysses opened his eyes and saw the waters of the Thames rising ever higher. It could surely only be a matter of moments before they all entered the river for the last time.

  “Sir!”

  Hearing the shout, doing his best to suppress the pain in his arm by strength of will alone, Ulysses shot desperate glances all around him, trying to locate the source of the cry.

  Then there came another shout, a woman’s voice this time, and he felt his heart leap. “Ulysses!”

  And there, coming alongside the sinking Weather Station at the prow of a small steam-launch was Eliza, the ever reliable Nimrod at the wheel.

  “Coming aboard!” his indefatigable manservant called across to them.

  As Ulysses and Spring-Heeled Jack lifted the now unconscious Valentine into the launch, without any apparent emotion other than mild curiosity colouring his voice, Nimrod asked: “Close call was it, sir?”

  “Closer than you could ever imagine,” Ulysses replied, staring down at the disfigured mess of a man curled in a foetal ball in the bottom of the boat. He looked from Valentine’s blistered face to the reddening flesh of his own simian arm.

  “Oh no, I can imagine,” his manservant replied, a knowing smile playing about the corners of his eyes.

  EPILOGUE

  After The Rain

  “SO, MR QUICKSILVER, what do you think?” Doctor Pandora Doppelganger asked as she unwrapped the last of the bandages and removed the gauze from his bicep. The pair of identical nurses assisting her watched for his reaction with hawkish interest.

  If it hadn’t have been for the subtle scar circling his arm just below the shoulder joint, and the fact that the skin of the arm itself was as pink and smooth as a newborn baby’s he would never have known that it wasn’t the one he had been born with.

  He flexed his left hand, watching the fingers move, staring in child-like wonder as the digits opened and closed.

  “Can you feel this?” Doctor Doppelganger asked, touching the points of a pair of callipers to his forearm. Ulysses nodded. “And here? How about here? Here?” Ulysses felt every single contact, the sensation sending a tingling electrical crackle throughout his entire body.

  Behind where Mercy and Clemency were standing, Ulysses could see a stainless steel trolley. On top was a large kidney-shaped metal bowl covered with a green cloth, but Ulysses could still just see the tip of the half-simian, half-beetle-like limb protruding from beneath it.

  “So fast too,” Ulysses whispered. “It’s incredible.”

  He looked up at Doctor Doppelganger. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Thank you.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, over brandy and cigars in the Quartermain Room of the Inferno Club off St James’s Square – ironically slipping into the pattern established by his predecessor, amongst others, as a way of meeting with clandestine agents of the crown – Octavius De Wynter completed his de-briefing of the dandy.

  The Smog of blue tobacco smoke clouding the room was like the Smog that still lingered over the city. It was hot too. A fire was roaring in the grate, even though it was already the month of March.

  “We found him, you know?” De Wynter said.

  “Found him?” Ulysses perked up at mention of this. “You mean Wormwood?”

  “His body was recovered from the Thames.”

  Ulysses felt cold shock sink to the pit of his stomach. It was the news he had been hoping to hear but now that it was fact, and no longer mere wishful thinking on his part, Ulysses felt somehow cheated. It should have been him that had put an end to the traitor. Wormwood should have died on the end of his sword or by a bullet fired from his gun, staring into the stony face of his nemesis, knowing that he had been made to pay for the intolerable crimes he had committed against Magna Britannia.

  After all, Ulysses had been the one who had let Wormwood get away in the first place. He should have made sure he’d finished
him off when he had faced him aboard his zeppelin as he and Kitty Hawke made their escape from the stricken Crystal Palace.

  “You’re sure it was him?” Ulysses pressed.

  “I identified the body myself.”

  “But you’re sure it was him?” Did Ulysses really secretly hope that Uriah Wormwood had got away at the last minute, so that the two of them might clash swords again one day?

  “What about his accomplice?”

  “You mean the assassin who goes by the name of Kitty Hawke?”

  “Yes. Amongst others.”

  “Her body wasn’t recovered.”

  “Then she’s still alive,” Ulysses said, with possibly a little too much enthusiasm.

  “She could be alive or, which I think is more likely, she’s at the bottom of the Thames.”

  But Ulysses clung onto the slim possibility that she had survived to fight another day. And despite what De Wynter thought, Ulysses had a feeling that their paths would cross again.

  “So how’s the clear-up operation going?” Ulysses asked, moving the discussion on.

  “In a word, slowly. It’s a painstaking business, I tell you, and every day the clean-up crews are finding more nests. Entire areas have been infected by the rain and, for the time being, have become veritable no-go areas, especially the area surrounding St Paul’s.”

  Ulysses had heard those rumours himself. Sir Christopher Wren’s great cathedral had a new congregation now. And it wasn’t just St Paul’s that had become a refuge for those who had been changed by the toxic rain. The fallout from Wormwood’s attack had struck right at the heart of the empire and London would take months, if not years, to fully recover. It didn’t help that the Wellington Barracks had also been hit badly by the rain, changing a good quarter of the troops stationed there, the poor bastards having to be summarily executed by their superior officers.