The queen had him cornered now, and the only thing Ulysses had about his person remotely resembling a weapon was the grappling gun slung across his back – the same compressed-gas gun that had served him so well in his race to catch up with the Darwinian Dawn’s zeppelin on Queen Victoria’s 160th jubilee celebrations.
He heard the schlock of the vigilante’s talons unsheathing and, trying not to make any sudden movements, reached for the grappling gun.
“You think we can take it?” Jack hissed.
The creature jerked its head as if it was listening to what was being said.
“We have to try. Besides, do we have any other choice?”
The giant insect gave a banshee wail and Ulysses was reminded of the fact that the thing rearing before him had once been human.
But just as he thought the queen was going to attack, great wings unfurled from its back and, with an inhuman shriek, the monstrous thing launched itself into the sky.
The dandy and the vigilante looked at each other.
“We have to stop her,” Ulysses gasped.
“Say no more. You ready for another aerial adventure?” Jack asked as he took hold of Ulysses firmly under his arms.
“As I’ll ever be.”
Ulysses heard the hiss of the jet-pack’s pilot light as the vigilante activated the rocket engine he had strapped to his back.
A cone of blue flame and choking oily smoke jetting from its exhaust, Spring-Heeled Jack leapt into the air. With a boom the jet-pack ignited and then the vigilante and his passenger were rocketing into the gathering dusk, after the locust queen.
“THERE SHE IS!” Ulysses yelled over the howling roar of the wind. He couldn’t be sure that Spring-Heeled Jack had heard him, but the vigilante must have spotted the fleeing queen as well, as he directed their soaring flight path to pursue the monstrous bug.
The locust was still visible, despite the rapidly failing light, the lights of the city below reflecting from its iridescent wings. It was moving west, possibly following the course of the sluggish river two hundred feet below.
They were high above the criss-crossing Overground lines now; although Ulysses preferred to focus on the creature they were pursuing, rather than the distance between him and the ground.
They were higher than the fleeing queen; the huge locust-thing moving much more quickly than he would have expected of such a huge insect. But they were closing on it now, Ulysses fighting to keep his eyes open in the face of the cold wind buffeting him.
St Paul’s was behind them. Ahead the dandy could just make out the shadows of the avenue of trees that bisected that, and beyond that, the twinkling lights of Buckingham Palace.
“What do we do now?” The vigilante’s distorted voice sounded loud in Ulysses ear.
“Just get us above that thing!” Ulysses screamed back into the wind.
“Will do.”
The two men hove in closer as the myriad maze of streets passed below them, amidst trailing columns of smoke and sooty clouds. And then the locust queen was directly below. It seemed oblivious to their presence, but that was a state of affairs that wouldn’t last for much longer.
“Here goes nothing,” Ulysses muttered under his breath, and then, clipping the grapple-gun to his belt again, shouted: “Let me go!”
There was a moment’s hesitation – and then Ulysses felt the vigilante release his hold and the next thing he knew, the wind was rushing into his face even more furiously as he dropped like a stone through the agitated air.
He landed astride the locust between thorax and abdomen. As the surprised insect lurched beneath him, he grabbed hold of the first thing he could to stop himself from falling, which happened to be the bone-hard stubs of the queen’s wings.
Ulysses’ muscles tensed as he fought to control the blurred beat of the delicate wings, and then something gave with a cartilaginous crack. The locust dropped, its legs kicking in panic It felt like he was riding a bucking bronco, a wild rodeo mustang. The world rushed up to meet them. Lights whirled and spun. Trees flickered past. Ulysses felt sick.
A vast white facade was rapidly filling the space before Ulysses’ eyes, and then he was hurtling past it, the locust still jerking beneath him.
The monstrous insect and its disorientated passenger slammed into the ground with the force of an omnibus crash. Chitinous limbs snapped and Ulysses was thrown free, landing in a carefully-clipped box hedge ten feet away.
Ulysses struggled to free himself of the shrubbery, his containment suit tearing on twigs as he did so, desperate eyes quickly finding the grounded locust again. Hissing violently, the queen struggled to rise and then flopped down on the tidy green sward of the lawn into which the collision had half buried it. Broken wings spasmed and the creature’s mandibles scissored angrily.
The dandy staggered to his feet, unhooking the grappling gun from his belt. Confidently, he strode towards the monster as the queen struggled to rise once more.
“The queen is dead,” he declared as he took aim with the device. “Long live the Queen!”
The grapple fired with a whoosh of compressed gas, the solid metal barbs punching through the carapace of the locust’s thorax.
The giant mutated insect gave what sounded like a hissing scream and then crumpled, collapsing onto the lawn, sticky ichor oozing from the hole punched clean through its body, and didn’t move again.
“Are you alright, sir?” a bewildered-looking footman asked as he hurried across the grass to Ulysses side, unable to take his eyes from the thing lying dead on the devastated lawn. And then, slowly, realisation dawned. “Oh my God,” he gasped, and turned away sharply, a hand to his mouth.
“Yes, I think so. Nothing a glass of cognac wouldn’t put right at any rate.”
Ulysses turned from the cooling carcass of the locust queen to see a troop of guardsmen followed by more footmen hurrying from the palace and across the carefully-tended gardens to join them.
For a moment he thought he heard the roar of Spring-Heeled Jack’s jet-pack above him, but then the sound faded into the distance again.
“If you can’t stand the heat,” he muttered under his breath.
The clatter of a rifle being raised and primed announced the arrival of the first of the guardsmen.
“What the hell’s going on?” the man demanded, his gun pointing squarely at the dandy.
“Rather a long story,” Ulysses mumbled. “How long have you got?”
“You’re coming with me!” the guardsmen snapped.
“Really?” Ulysses countered. “I take it then that you have no idea who I am.”
“Then perhaps you’d care to enlighten me, sir!”
“All in good time; all in good time. But how about that brandy first? Oh, and perhaps you’d like to pass on my deepest regrets to Her Majesty; it would appear that we have made a right royal mess of her croquet lawn.”
CHAPTER TEN
Genesis
VICTOR GALLOWGLASS FLUNG open the door before Ulysses could knock. “Is there any news?”
He broke off almost immediately, frantically searching eyes settling on the one thing he wanted to see more than any other.
His daughter cowered between the dandy and his manservant, still in the nightdress she had been wearing the night she had been abducted. As soon as she saw her father, a certain sparkle returned to her sunken, hollow-eyed expression.
“Miranda?” Gallowglass’s eyes were already brimming with tears as he stepped hesitantly over the threshold of his Belgravia townhouse, as if he couldn’t quite believe that it was really her.
“Daddy,” the child said, her voice barely more than a murmur, as if she was just waking from a dream.
And then father and daughter were reunited as Gallowglass dropped to his knees, there on the doormat. Parent and child threw their arms around each other, embracing in a hug that it seemed they never intended breaking. The girl’s governess watched from the hallway behind, wringing her handkerchief in her hands.
&nb
sp; Ulysses looked at his manservant. “Time to go, I think, don’t you, Nimrod?”
“Very good, sir.”
The two tired and filthy men turned and started to descend the steps of the Gallowglass family home.
Gallowglass looked up from where his face had been buried in his daughter’s neck. “Where’s the vigilante?”
Ulysses glanced up to where a smoky contrail described a curving path across the darkening sky.
“He had to fly,” he said. “And so must we.”
BACK HOME IN Mayfair, Ulysses collapsed into the leather armchair behind his desk, numb with shock.
He hadn’t even bothered to remove his muck-encrusted boots before reading the letter that had been left for him by his brother. Now they were simply forgotten, along with the rest of his befouled condition.
He raised the handwritten letter and read it again.
Dear Ulysses,
By the time you read this, I’ll be gone. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye, but this letter will just have to do. I never was very good with farewells. Besides, I didn’t want to hang around and give you the chance to dissuade me. This is something I should have done long ago.
Things are getting too hot for me round here. I’m an idiot, I know, but I’ve got myself in deeper than ever – than hopefully you’ll ever know. So fate forced my hand, you might say, and it was time to leave.
I’ve gone off-world. Like I say, I should have done this long ago, rather than go and bring all my troubles to your door. As if you don’t have enough of your own!
Anyway, don’t try to come after me. After all, the empire needs you. And don’t worry – I’ll be alright.
We’ll see each other again, when things have cooled down a little, I hope. But in the meantime, have a nice life.
Your brother,
B
P.S. – And if anyone comes looking for me, don’t let on, there’s a good chap.
WITHIN THE SMOULDERING shell of St Paul’s Cathedral, the fires had all but burnt themselves out.
And from the devastation left by the holy radiance of God’s vengeance, the survivors congregated beneath the great shattered dome at the end of the nave, before the smouldering pulpit.
From his elevated position, the Preacher gazed down at his new congregation.
He had been a man once, a priest for a short while, and a husband and father before that. But that was a lifetime ago now – two lifetimes. Now he was something else altogether.
The left side of his face was a mess of crisped skin and blisters. The other side was something else entirely.
He looked down upon the Children of the Catastrophe with new eyes. They had all been reborn, each of them rising again from the ashes left by the purging fires of God’s holy retribution; each like a phoenix rising from the flames, like Lazarus rising from the dead. Like the Son of God Himself rising to new life from the tomb.
His foot knocked against something heavy. He bent down and hefted it from the floor of the pulpit in his left hand. The chitinous claw that his right arm had become was of little use in that regard now.
It was a book; not some flimsy card and paper thing, but a weighty, leather-bound tome.
The Preacher studied the scorched leather tooling of the cover, his fingers tracing the shape of the cross worked into the dark, aged leather.
He opened the blackened Bible, letting the pages fall where they would. The good book open on the lectern in front of him, the Preacher looked again upon those gathered before him.
He had a new congregation now, more lost souls in need of spiritual succour and guidance than he had ever known before. There were those changed like himself but also the few remaining locusts, gathered now at the foot of the pulpit amidst the shrivelled larval forms and ruptured egg sacs.
Looking at the text before him, through one eye – red and irritated – he saw the word of God. Through the other a mind-numbing, sense-scrambling vision of God’s word revealed itself to him. God’s message leapt out at him from the page; the kaleidoscopic image repeating over and over again in a faceted visual cacophony, as he tried to adjust to seeing the world now through the compound eye of an insect.
He began to read.
“‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.’”
‘And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt,
and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they;
before them there were no such locusts as they,
neither after them shall be such.’
Exodus ch.10 v.14
Act Two
Something Wicked
March 1998
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Great Game
IT WAS UNCOMFORTABLY warm within the darkened chamber, but then that was how he liked it. He felt the cold so. The lamps had been turned down. Shuttered with crimson shades, they bathed the room in a dim ruddy glow. That was how he liked it too. He found bright light... uncomfortable.
His breathing was rapid and shallow, and was drowned out by the respiratory sounds of the pump. This was the part he hated, more than any other. A shiver of sickness passed through his body, leaving him with a knot of nausea in his stomach. He was slick with clammy perspiration. In the gloom of the subterranean chamber his fish-white skin almost seemed to glow with an eerie, inner luminescence. Sitting there in the dark he looked just like a ghost.
Sometimes he felt as though he had died a hundred deaths already; that a little more of him died every time he had to endure the process. It felt as though it was killing him, and all because of the ‘cure’. A cure, Grigori had told him, but what manner of cure was it that simply prolonged your death, rather than your life.
He hated being connected to the machine on a weekly basis, regular as the clockwork that ensured the transfusion device kept functioning. And yet, without it, he would have died long ago. Sometimes he wondered if that would have been such a bad thing. But he had suffered for too long, endured too much to give up now. Plain stubbornness was all that kept him going.
But it wouldn’t be for much longer. Soon he would have the cure he had been seeking for all these years. Soon he would be free of the arcane machine.
The abrupt crackling hum of static broke through the asthmatic wheezing of the bellows, the ticking of the plasma exchange pump’s regulator and the insistent drip-drip-drip of collected condensation dropping from the roof and hitting the stone-flagged floor.
Adjusting the chair in which he sat, operating the crank with his right hand, he brought the seat upright, pain lancing his body as the tubes inserted into his flesh pulled at the plug points.
Tapping a series of keys on the input keyboard in front of him he awoke his dormant Babbage engine. On the wall opposite a screen glowed into emerald life.
“This is London calling.” The electronically-altered voice echoed from the walls of the room, sending spiking soundwaves crackling across the view screen. There was no way of telling whether it had been male or female before it became the mechanical automaton voice he now found himself listening to.
He activated a switch on the control panel.
“And how is London during these difficult times of transition?” His accent was pronounced, its inflections unmistakeably Russian. “Who’s in charge these days?”
“Hello, Mother,” the crackling basso voice replied. “Lord De Wynter is maintaining the status quo.”
“Ah yes, of course. Your Prime Minister un-elect, as it were. So martial law prevails and the game continues. But enough of these pleasantries – what news?”
“It is my belief that the weapon has been successfully developed but we are not in possession of it yet.”
“I see. Do you know what form it takes?”
“Not yet, Mother.” The voice sounded nervous, uneasy.
“I see.”
Bellows hissed and wheezed in the background, and somewhere, someone moaned in their restless sleep.
“Continue to keep a close eye on the subject. It is vital that we claim the weapon before anyone else does.”
“Very good, Mother,” the voice said, with something approaching coquettishness.
“Mother out.”
“London out.”
There was an electronic click as the ether-net call was terminated and the screen faded, leaving the albino gentleman alone in the ruddy darkness of his chamber once more.
Although now his skin was not quite so pale as it had been and his bones did not ache quite so much.
Soon, he thought. Soon he would have all that he needed to put the final stages of his plan into operation. Then victory would be his. He could taste his imminent success on the air, smell it on the wind, feel the truth of it coursing through his veins. He could feel it in his blood and his was the blood of kings and queens, princes and emperors; the blood of Saxe-Coburg. Blood royal.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Guilty Secrets
IN THE LABORATORY at his London home, Doctor Victor Gallowglass, the renowned haematologist, was busy about his own personal affairs.
He lifted his pen from the writing paper and paused to re-read what he had just written. His brow was furrowed in consternation. He did not believe he had ever written anything so important in his whole life.
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