Dark Side

by Jonathan Green

  “Yes, she is rather, isn’t she?” the industrialist replied, his own gaze lingering on the young woman as she leant forward and offered him his own steaming cup.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I mean Icarus, of course.”

  “Icarus is feminine?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Naturally,” Ulysses repeated, taking a tentative sip of the bitter liquid swirling in the white china in his hand. “And, I would hazard to say, just like the female of the species, potentially deadly.”

  To his credit, the dandy thought, Shurin’s expression of innocent amiability didn’t falter once.

  “At Syzygy Industries we strive only to make the world, and indeed the Moon, a better place. Imagine being able to drill through solid rock without the need for explosives or using heavy machinery that burns fossil fuels at an enormous rate. A clean energy source utilised to great effect, and one that does not burden the environment with yet more pollution.”

  “And imagine the potential for destruction. If it fell into the wrong hands, I mean.” Shurin chose not respond to that comment, but sipped at his own cup of coffee instead. “Don’t tell me you haven’t considered that scenario.”

  “And it is one that will never come to pass,” Shurin growled. “I can assure you, Mr Quicksilver, that Syzygy Industries is a highly reputable company and not an arms manufacturer.”

  “But once Icarus is out in the public domain, what’s to stop some ne’er-do-well or revolutionary tin pot jungle junta from taking your ‘greatest gift to mankind’ and turning it to their own evil purpose. That which has been discovered cannot be undiscovered. Once the technology is out there, someone will find a use for it.”

  “You are as persistent as your brother,” Shurin said, and pursed his lips. “I think perhaps you had better leave.”

  Ulysses felt a sudden surge of blood within his veins. “So, you came into contact with Barty then?”

  “Well,” Shurin floundered, quickly realising his mistake, “not in so many words. But he had arranged a meeting for,” – he consulted a desk diary open on the marble slab of his desk – “yes, it was for today, as it happens.

  “Of course, I heard about his untimely death on the news broadcast this morning.” Shurin’s face suddenly assumed a concerned expression of empathy. “I was so very sorry to hear of your loss.”

  “You knew my brother was dead and you didn’t think to offer your condolences when we first met?” Ulysses could feel his ire building inside. How could Shurin be so blasé about such a thing? How could he be so cold? “He had something on you, didn’t he?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  Ulysses’ eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what it was, but I’m going to find out, you mark my words. I swear on our mother’s grave that I will. And when I do... I’ll be back.”

  “Mr Quicksilver,” Shurin said, affronted, “you don’t mean to imply that I had something to do with your brother’s death, do you?”

  Ulysses leant across the desk, keeping his sword-stick where Shurin could see it.

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

  His manservant, who had been patiently taking in everything that had passed between the two men without passing comment, chose that moment to intervene.

  “Sir,” Nimrod said softly, that one simple word advising caution.

  “Mr Quicksilver,” Shurin said, not raising his voice by one iota, “I do not appreciate your thinly-veiled accusations and if this is how you are going to carry on then I feel we have nothing more to discuss. I would appreciate it if you would leave. At once.”

  “You can’t hide the truth forever, you know!” Ulysses growled. There were tears of rage in the corners of his eyes.

  Nimrod put a hand on his arm. “Sir, I think we should go.”

  Ulysses blinked the tears away and, taking a deep breath, took a step back from Shurin’s desk, putting some much-needed distance between them.

  “Yes, you’re quite right, Nimrod. We should go.”

  Suddenly he sprang forward, leaning across the marble slab until he was practically nose to nose with the lunar industrialist. “But you haven’t heard the last from me, you can count on that!”

  And with that, Ulysses Quicksilver turned and strode from the office, his manservant hurrying after him.

  WAS IT POSSIBLE that Quicksilver knew something of their plans? Jared Shurin wondered as the door closed after the dandy and his batman. The man certainly had a reputation for unearthing mysteries and then exposing them to the world. But then how could he know anything about what they had been working on here on the Moon? It was, quite literally, a quarter of a million miles away from his daily concerns.

  But it paid to take precautions, as he knew himself from bitter experience, he thought, reaching for the handset of his desktop telecom.

  A minute later the call was done and he replaced the receiver in its cradle.

  The sudden buzz of his office intercom made him jump. He hadn’t realised how jittery just talking to the man had made him feel. It wasn’t like him to be so on edge, but there was something about him – something unnatural. But then that was plain for all to see, it was just that he worked very hard to ensure that nobody did see him.

  “Yes?” he snapped irritably as he depressed the ‘speak’ button.

  “Message from reception, sir,” Miss Hunt, his personal secretary, explained. “There’s a Mr Chapter and a Miss Verse waiting in the lobby.”

  “At last!” Shurin exclaimed, smiling darkly to himself. “Then you’d best not keep them waiting any longer. Send them up, Miss Hunt. Send them up.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  R. U. R.

  T MINUS 1 DAY, 20 HOURS, 2 MINUTES, 27 SECONDS

  ULYSSES QUICKSILVER EXITED the cab without saying a word and stared up at the imposing sign emblazoned across the automaton works, as Nimrod exited the chugging hansom behind him.

  The letters stood thirty feet high – even more imposing than the sign outside the Syzygy Industries headquarters half a city away. Fashioned from wrought iron and studded with light bulbs, the letters were a statement of intent of lunar domination.

  Where Shurin’s head office had utilised the very latest in lunar construction techniques and materials – from mooncrete to bonded regolith – and favoured the Retro-Classical architectural style, the Rossum plant celebrated all things iron and steel and brass, the very materials from which their automatons were constructed. And much of Luna Prime and the other satellite cities had been constructed by Rossum’s Robots – the larger, Titan and Goliath-class droids at least – unimpeded as they were by the lack of an atmosphere or the reduced gravity.

  There was something almost of the funfair about the place, from the brightly-lit sign to the brightly-dressed attendants employed to take tourists on sight-seeing trips of the unrestricted parts of the factory.

  With Nimrod as ever at his side, Ulysses strode under the mighty sign and beneath arch after arch of shaped steel towards the main entrance to Rossum’s Universal Robots. The steel tunnel to the complex was large enough to steer a Titan-class construction droid down.

  Everything about the place spoke of great size – the scale of the labour being undertaken at the plant, the size of the workforce, the size and number of units being produced on a weekly basis, and size of the ego of the one man who had started it all, Dominic Rossum.

  They passed suited clerks, overalled mechanics and errand droids – not all of them humanoid in form – scurrying in and out of the building, from one part of the complex to another. Flashing neon arrows directed Ulysses and Nimrod, and the other excited individuals visiting that day, towards the grand wrought iron doors – decorated with a bas-relief of mighty robots bestriding the lunar plains and mountain ranges and cities, all formed from the metal of the doors themselves. They looked heavy enough to keep even a Titan-droid at bay.

  The amount of metal on display was testament to Rossum’s power and wealth. The Moon itself
had very little in the way of useful mineral resources – other than for the regolith used in the production of mooncrete – and even less in the way of usable iron ore. Much of what Ulysses and Nimrod could see must have been transported here from either Earth or Mars, or collected from captured asteroids that occasionally drifted in-system from the belt of planetary matter beyond the red planet itself.

  Ulysses’ dislike of the man was growing fast and he hadn’t even met him yet. Rossum was obviously a blatant show-off – worse even than Ulysses – for the doorman on duty before the huge iron portal was nothing less than a Titan-class droid, its vast hull emblazoned with the company crest. This alone was as good an indicator of the man’s ego, power and wealth as anything; a droid designed and built for the purpose of raising vast cities from the lunar regolith, employed to open and close his front door.

  Dwarfed by the vast automaton towering over it, to a height of sixty feet, it took Ulysses a moment to even register the pulpit-like reception desk positioned between the automaton’s tractor-sized feet.

  Before he could even open his mouth to speak, the young woman sat behind the desk – her russet hair scraped back into a bun as severe as the expression on her face and the flinty look in the grey eyes behind her horn-rimmed spectacles – put a finger to her brass and teak earpiece and got in first. “If you’d like to go through, Mr Quicksilver, Mr Rossum is expecting you.”

  “Is he now?”

  “There’s a drudge waiting to take you to his office.”

  The Titan-droid pushed with one huge shovel hand and one of the great doors eased open, its greased hinges not making a sound despite its immense size. Ulysses glanced warily at the towering colossus as he led the way through, memories of his various encounters with the Limehouse Golem suddenly fresh in his mind.

  Beyond the doors they found themselves in a vaulted semi-circular chamber. Great arched passageways led off from this central hub to various parts of the plant. A steady stream of employees and droids were negotiating the human and mechanoid traffic filling the corridors. As Ulysses watched, something that looked like a cross between an equine automaton and a hansom cab trundled past, carrying a group of smart-suited investors to another part of the factory.

  And sure enough, waiting for them on the other side of the huge doors was a droid wearing something like a bellhop’s uniform, also bearing the company crest. Its cap was positioned with clockwork precision on its polished brass head at an approved thirty-two degree angle, intended to suggest a jaunty demeanour, no doubt.

  “Mr Quicksilver?” the droid said in a chirpy, electronically-synthesised tone.

  “Yes,” Ulysses replied testily.

  “This way please.”

  “AH, MR QUICKSILVER,” the man standing at the window said, without turning round.

  Even though he was only looking at the back of the man, Ulysses could still see the trumpet of a teak and brass headset clamped around the man’s right ear while his left hand was sheathed in some sort of wired, leather glove.

  “Mr Rossum, I presume.”

  Turning from the window, Dominic Rossum crossed the office with powerful strides – looking just like he did in the sepia tint in Barty’s file, other than for the technological accoutrements that he was now sporting.

  His stance and gait suggested that he was still a physically powerful man, and yet, according to the information Ulysses had gleaned from the file, he had to be at least sixty years old, if he was a day. Ulysses wondered whether Dominic Rossum was really half the man he used to be. And, if so, what was the other half made up of now?

  The lift that had delivered Ulysses, Nimrod and their automaton guide here had emerged at the very centre of Dominic Rossum’s hemispherical office. As soon as they had exited the elevator, the bellhop pressed a button, the doors closed again and the lift carriage sank back into the floor, a protective hatch sliding into place over the shaft, allowing for an uninterrupted view from the glass dome at any point in the elevated chamber, and leaving the three men alone.

  From this position Rossum could look out over every part of his lunar domain, from the accounting cells to the research and development laboratories, and from the component manufactories to the automaton assembly lines a quarter of a mile away. He truly was master of all he surveyed.

  Ulysses took a moment to savour the view that Dominic Rossum enjoyed on a daily basis. Begrudgingly he had to admit that it was impressive.

  From the panoramic view of the plant he felt the urge to see what lay above, beyond the roof of Rossum’s tower.

  Through the leaded panes of the dome he could see the secondary skin that covered the entire plant and, beyond that, the complex many-layered meshing geodesic domes that covered the whole cityscape.

  Rossum halted before Ulysses. The man was much taller than he would have guessed from his photograph in Barty’s file, which had only shown him from his chest upwards.

  Stiffly, he offered his hand to the dandy.

  “Mr Quicksilver,” he said. “A pleasure.” There was no hint of an emotion in his voice.

  Ulysses took the proffered hand and shook it, fixing Rossum’s monocled gaze with a needling stare of his own. “Mr Rossum.”

  “And what is it I can do for you today?”

  “Oh, I assumed you already knew.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well you were obviously expecting me so I assumed your co-conspirator Mr Shurin had called ahead to warn you to expect a visit.”

  Rossum took a step back from Ulysses, observing him, unblinking, from behind his monocle – his other eye scrunched up in a squint.

  “Impressive set-up you have here.” Ulysses said.

  Rossum paused before answering, as if trying to fathom what kind of a confessional trap the dandy was trying to lure him into. “Why, thank you.”

  “It must have taken years to get it all established and build it up to this level.”

  “Well yes, yes it did. Almost fifty years, in fact.”

  “Then you’re looking very spry for your age, if I might say so.”

  “Why, thank you,” Rossum replied, still without any glimmer of emotion in his voice.

  “That must have taken some work.”

  The older man scowled. “I’m sorry, but what are you trying to say, Mr Quicksilver?”

  Was that a suggestion of anger colouring his words?

  “The sort of work requiring a spanner and a welding torch perhaps?”

  “Sir,” Nimrod muttered, putting a warning hand on Ulysses’ arm.

  “I’m sorry, but are you trying to be rude, Mr Quicksilver?”

  “Did you ever meet my brother, Barty?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Yes, so you keep saying. Bartholomew Quicksilver. Did the two of you ever meet?”

  “N-No,” Rossum stumbled over the word. “Not that I can recall. I suppose he might have run into me at some charity bash or other. Why do you ask?”

  “Because he knew a lot about you,” Ulysses said, joining Rossum in gazing out of the window across the factory complex.

  “I am sure that there are a lot of people who know a lot about me,” Rossum stated bluntly.

  “Really? Is that so?”

  “I expect it is, as it happens.”

  Ulysses took the folder from under his arm and opened it, keeping it tantalisingly out of the industrialist’s line of sight.

  Rossum craned his neck forwards, trying to sneak a peek.

  Ulysses raised the folder so that his body obscured the papers he was perusing.

  “Hmm... This makes for interesting reading, I must say.” Ulysses snapped the folder shut. “What did my brother have on you?”

  “What?”

  “What was your association with my brother?”

  “There was no association, as you put it,” Rossum said. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

  “Because he’s dead, and I found files on you, Shurin and Wilberforce Bainbridge in his apartment
. So, tell me, what is the nature of your association with Jared Shurin?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr Rossum,” Ulysses said, his temper rising, “but it would appear that that hearing aid of yours isn’t working very well.” He raised his voice still further. “What is your relationship with Jared Shurin of Syzygy Industries?”

  “We are fellow industrialists,” Rossum blustered. “We move in similar circles, that’s all. It would seem that you are looking for a conspiracy where there is none!”

  Ulysses kept the same flinty stare fixed on the white-haired, supposedly elderly man. “I didn’t mention a conspiracy, Mr Rossum. Did you hear me mention a conspiracy, Nimrod?”

  “No, sir,” his manservant replied loyally.

  “So, tell me about this conspiracy that you’ve got yourself mixed up in.”

  “There is no conspiracy!”

  “And you really expect me to believe that, do you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the truth!” Rossum roared, the monocle popping free of the orbit of his eye. Ulysses had woken the sleeping beast of his rage.

  Ah, Ulysses gloated to himself, an emotional reaction at last.

  For someone who had supposedly never had anything to do with his brother and who claimed that there was no conspiracy involving him and the other industrialists, the previously unemotional Rossum was getting very hot under the collar.

  “I think you should leave now, Mr Quicksilver,” Rossum seethed, screwing his monocle back into place.

  “But I’m not done yet.”

  “Well I am, sir!” Rossum bellowed. “And if you don’t leave,” he said, touching the trumpet-device in his ear, “I shall be forced to call the police.”

  Nimrod’s grip on Ulysses’ arm tightened. “Sir, it’s time to go.”

  Ulysses suddenly turned on Nimrod, his eyes wild. He shook himself free of the older man’s grip and opened his mouth to speak. But then something made him think better of it and he relaxed, shrugging his shoulders and smoothing his jacket into some semblance of order.