Black Swan (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow)

by Jonathan Green

  PAX BRITANNIA

  TIME’S ARROW

  PART TWO: BLACK SWAN

  By Jonathan Green

  Pax Britannia

  The Ulysses Quicksilver Books, by Jonathan Green

  Unnatural History

  Leviathan Rising

  Human Nature

  Evolution Expects

  Blood Royal

  Dark Side

  Anno Frankenstein

  Time's Arrow

  The El Sombra Books, by Al Ewing

  El Sombra

  Gods of Manhattan

  Pax Omega

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  abaddonsolaris@rebellion.co.uk

  First published in 2012 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editors: Jonathan Oliver & David Moore

  Cover: Mark Harrison

  Design: Simon Parr & Luke Preece

  Marketing and PR: Keith Richardson

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Pax Britannia™ created by Jonathan Green

  Copyright© 2012 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  Pax Britannia™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-84997-305-2

  ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-306-9

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Part Two

  Black Swan

  ~ May 1998 ~

  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”

  – William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming,’ 1920

  “I am not fond of expecting catastrophes,

  but there are cracks in the universe.”

  – Sydney Smith, 1771-1845

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monkey Business

  FORTUNE, AS IT is so often said, favours the bold, and for someone whose very DNA oozed charm, it wasn’t hard for Ulysses Quicksilver to acquire an address for the mysterious M. Lumière.

  Despite his photo-fit being proudly displayed on newsstands throughout Paris, nobody recognised him, even when he walked straight up to them and addressed them directly, asking if they had heard of a certain M. Lumière and, if they had, whether they would be so kind as to tell him where he might be found – all in flawless French, of course.

  It helped that he had temporarily flipped the eye-patch up out of the way, hiding it under the brim of the hat he had borrowed from Madame Marguerite’s dressing-up box. Pulling his fringe down as best he could, he hid the knot of scar tissue that filled his left eye-socket.

  And so it was that he came to M. Lumière’s apartment building later that evening, as the setting sun painted the domes of Sacré-Coeur a mixture of peach and burnished gold.

  It was as unremarkable as any other building in the district: seven storeys tall, its façade all French windows and narrow wrought iron balconies. The mysterious M. Lumière kept the penthouse apartment.

  Ulysses walked on by without once breaking his stride. He had developed a mistrust of front doors of late. As recent events had demonstrated so clearly, front doors were for salesmen and the police. Coming in by the front door warned people you were on your way and left the caller at a disadvantage. Ulysses felt he needed every advantage he could get at the moment, considering his current situation.

  It didn’t take the resourceful dandy long to find a way round the back, where the caged ladder fire escapes were hidden away along with all manner of exposed pipework.

  Exercising his shoulders, he tested Doctor Cossard’s surgical skills and caught his breath as he felt the stitches holding the ragged edges of the bullet wound pull taut.

  The sensible thing to do would be to take things easy. But then sensible had never really been Ulysses Quicksilver’s style.

  And yet, in the greater scheme of things, the sensible thing ultimately was to solve the mystery of the Rue Morgue murders, clearing his name in the eyes of the French police in the process, thereby enabling him to leave the French capital and return to England, to prevent the love of his life from ever setting out on a particularly ill-advised voyage to the Moon. And for any of that to happen, right now that meant paying M. Lumière a call.

  Two storeys from the roof, Ulysses paused to catch his breath. He hadn’t realised how much such simple physical exertion – such as climbing a ladder – would take its toll. And that was after two days of rest and recuperation at Madame Marguerite’s, being nursed by the lovelorn Josephine.

  A shadow, big and black, darted past above him, instantly catching Ulysses’ attention.

  “Merde!” he hissed.

  There was only one possible explanation as far as he could see and it meant that he had been on the right track all along. Only, Ulysses thought disconsolately, sometimes he hated being proved right.

  Reaching the top of the fire escape, ignoring the sharp pain in his shoulder, he swung himself over the raised parapet and onto the roof.

  Naturally there was no sign of the brute now, but it had been here, he was sure of it, and that meant that, unfortunately, he knew where it was now.

  Ulysses scampered across the roof. Reaching the parapet on the other side, he leaned out and looked down.

  Any doubts he might have had about having located the Lumière apartment were dispelled the moment he saw the curtain flapping through the open French doors on the balcony directly beneath him. Sounds rose from the apartment below, sounds that only confirmed his worst fears and set his heart racing: a man’s helpless cries, the crash of furniture, and the snorting barks of something large, bestial and angry.

  He grabbed the parapet with both hands, judging the distance to the balcony at a glance. “Here goes nothing,” he muttered and swung himself over the edge of the roof.

  He landed in a crouch, wincing at the pain in his shoulder. Rising, he peered through the open French doors into the room beyond.

  It looked like a sitting room that doubled as a study. Photographic portraits lined the walls in regimented fashion and there was a tall, glass-fronted cabinet to his left filled with clockwork toys. What was left of the rest of the furniture was now just so much splintered wood and torn upholstery; a chaise longue leaned peculiarly against one wall.

  To Ulysses’ right the sitting room door was open, revealing a hallway beyond where he glimpsed the closed front door. On the far side of the room stood a writing desk, a gleaming golden parrot perched on a stand on top of it, next to a device fashioned from a gramophone and a profusion of copper wire.

  The parrot was jerking and twitching on its perch, grating electronic squawks emanating from its beak.

  Pressed up against the desk was a clearly terrified middle-aged man. He was wearing a tweed three piece suit, his greying hair was swept back from a high forehead and he wore a goatee upon his pronounced chin.

  But the presence dominating the scene, that made the otherwise spacious sitting room seem small by comparison, was the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room.

>   Ulysses entered as the ape picked up a chair and hurled it at the wall above the man’s head. The parrot and the gramophone crashed to the floor where the broken chair joined them a moment later.

  As if half a ton of gorilla wasn’t unsettling enough, the great ape’s massive form was enhanced with all manner of cybernetic attachments. There were the heavy iron vambraces sheathing its forearms, the snaking cables that were wound around its limbs, and the metal-reinforced joints of its hips, its knees and its riveted knuckles. The primate’s body was criss-crossed with lines of stitching and the scars of old sutures which appeared almost white against the charcoal grey flesh, leaving hairless trails through its thick black fur.

  And there were the electrodes projecting from the top of its head, but Ulysses didn’t remember the thick steel collar from his last encounter with the beast. It completely covered the box of blinking lights that had been bolted between the animal’s shoulder blades.

  There was an unpleasant, acrid smell in the room that seemed to penetrate its every corner; a combination of lubricant grease, animal musk and ammonia.

  Ulysses went for the gun he kept holstered under his left arm, only neither the holster nor the gun were there, of course. And not for the first time since arriving in Paris, he wished his sword-stick wasn’t still lost somewhere in the past.

  There was no doubt in the dandy’s mind that the ape was wholly fixated on accomplishing only one goal – that of killing the middle-aged man cowering before the desk.

  Thanks to all the noise the ape was making and the desperate howls of its victim, the brute was wholly unaware of Ulysses’ presence. If he was to find out what was going on, and why the composer and the ordinateur engineer had been murdered by the gorilla, he needed to keep M. Lumière – for he was sure that’s who the man was – alive. And the ape’s obsession with its assigned target might actually enable him to do just that.

  But to get the animal’s attention without also possessing the means to defend himself from it was surely tantamount to madness.

  He quickly scanned the room. There were broken pieces of furniture that he could improvise as cudgels, but he doubted the delicate mahogany posts would stand up to giving the ape a good thrashing.

  He looked again at the ape. He supposed he might be able to pull out a few cables, touch them together and create a short circuit; that was bound to have an effect on the beast, although he wasn’t entirely sure what that effect would be. And to test out his theory he would need to get so close to the beast that he would put himself in immediate danger.

  The ape roared and lunged.

  Lumière screamed.

  Beyond the sitting room-cum-study, the front door opened.

  All eyes turned towards the young woman who had let herself into the apartment.

  Lumière gave a whimper. The young woman gave a strangled cry of fear. The ape gave a snarl.

  The time for ingenious plans and clever tricks was over. It was either now, or never.

  “Hey!” Ulysses shouted.

  The wide eyes of the pretty girl framed in the doorway met his. Lumière was making a strange snivelling sound and didn’t seem capable of stopping.

  The gorilla froze in its advance on the sobbing wretch and slowly turned its head, fixing its cruel gaze on Ulysses.

  “Er, hello,” Ulysses said. The ape let out a low growl, its lips peeling back to expose large chisel-like teeth and yellowing, tusk-like fangs. “My, what big teeth you have. Now why don’t you pick on someone your own size? But no, that would be silly, wouldn’t it? I suppose there can’t be many your size around; at least not in Paris. At least I hope not.”

  Confusion creased the great ape’s features, and for a moment the monster appeared to be wracked by indecision.

  “Come on then!” Ulysses shouted, some of his old bravado returning as he glanced about the room whilst keeping himself between the open French doors.

  Night was settling across the city, the street below a deeply shadowed canyon now that the sun had set beyond the Montmartre Cemetery. But the terrible tableau inside the penthouse apartment was bathed in the warm yellow glow from the corner behind Ulysses.

  He spun round, grabbing the standing lamp in both hands and holding it out before him like a quarterstaff. With one sharp swipe he knocked the lampshade off against the jamb of the open French doors. A second strike shattered the light bulb, the bared metal points at its cap sparking as electricity arced between the exposed wires.

  “Come on then,” he growled, advancing towards the savage brute, thrusting the crackling tip towards the ape’s face.

  The monster rose to its full height, raising its massive arms above its head. Its knuckles scraped grooves in the plastered ceiling, sending a shower of white dust down on their heads. The return sweep of the ape’s long limbs set a chandelier swinging, the jangling of its suspended teardrop crystals creating its own discordant protest.

  “Come on!”

  The gorilla grunted loudly and beat its chest. As the beast dropped onto all fours, Ulysses braced himself, sure that this was it.

  The beast snorted, batting at the lampstand as Ulysses kept up his goading.

  Any moment now, it would launch itself at him. Surely, any moment now.

  Only it didn’t.

  “Come on!” Ulysses shouted, in French and then English, just to make sure he covered all the bases. “What’s wrong with you? I’m right here. Come and get me!”

  The ape seemed frozen into inaction, an expression somewhere between utter confusion and unbridled rage knotting its leathery features. Bolts of blue-white lightning arced among the humming electrodes plugged into the ape’s skull, mirroring the snapping bursts of electricity popping from the broken light bulb.

  Behind the beast, the whimpering man shuffled tremulously towards the door, the young woman beckoning him towards her.

  “Come on, you evolutionary loser!” Ulysses screamed.

  The monster put its huge hands to its head, letting go again just as quickly as electricity sparked through its fingers from the crown of thick electrodes. With a snarl of frustrated fury, the gigantic primate turned its back on Ulysses.

  Lumière was halfway to the door. The beast grabbed the man with one huge hand. He let out a wail of terror as the ape pulled him within reach of its other sledgehammer fist.

  “No!” Ulysses screamed, leaping at the ape, still holding the lampstand.

  It was the futile action of a desperate man. With one sharp twist the deed was done. M. Lumière was dead.

  The cry of alarm died in Ulysses’ throat.

  The great ape cast the body carelessly aside. It bounced off the desk, a slack arm pulling a drift of technical drawings onto the floor after it.

  Its primary target eliminated, the gorilla was free to turn its angry attention to the daring dandy. There was murder in its beady black eyes.

  Slowly, Ulysses backed towards the open windows and the balcony beyond, holding the lampstand out before him.

  M. Lumière was dead, which meant there was only one lead left for Ulysses to follow, if he was to solve the mystery of the Rue Morgue murders – the murder weapon; the beast itself.

  If he could only follow it as it fled the murder scene, the ape might very well lead him to its masters. Only judging by the way it was clawing its way towards him now, the carpet rucking beneath its huge fingers, the gorilla wasn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future, at least not until Ulysses was dead.

  Ulysses could feel the curtain flapping at his back. He was going to have to decide which was more important to him – having a lead to follow or still having his life. All he had to do was stop the ape, save the girl and get out of there alive.

  Ulysses glimpsed movement away to his right, beyond the hulking heavily-muscled mass of bestial biology and crude cybernetics that was currently obscuring much of his view of the room.

  “Non!” came the woman’s voice. “No!” she cried again and a moment later a vase full of dried bloom
s smashed against one armoured vambrace.

  The ape snarled, half turning in the direction of this new annoyance.

  A crystal decanter hit it square in the face, shattering against its scarred snout. The ape shook its head in surprise and gave a bark of irritation.

  The obsidian pearls of its eyes narrowed as they focused on the young woman and a rumbling growl rose from within its broad barrel chest. The woman gave a startled gasp of terror.

  Still snarling, the ape turned back to the dandy, which was when Ulysses struck.

  He landed a blow with the lampstand across the cyber-ape’s snout, the jagged metal and glass remnants of the broken bulb scoring bloody gouges across its nose and lips.

  “Run! Get out of here!” Ulysses shouted.

  The girl didn’t need to be told twice, dashing from the room and slamming the door shut behind her.

  Barking with pain, putting one immense paw to its face, the primate lashed out with its other arm, furious primitive instinct overriding whatever instructions it was receiving from its mysterious master.

  The swipe sent Ulysses flying across the room as if he were nothing more than a ragdoll.

  He collided with a display case, glass and wooden staves shattering around him. Clockwork devices tumbled to the floor in a cascade of broken cogs and springs as Ulysses covered his head with his hands in a vain attempt to protect himself.

  THE APE WAS on him in seconds. Picking him up in one huge hairy hand, the raging beast hurled him violently across the room.