Pax Britannia: Unnatural History

by Jonathan Green

  "Where's your evidence?" Allardyce demanded.

  "Do you want to tell them, Prime Minister, or shall I?"

  Wormwood appeared not to have an answer for the dandy, for a moment. That in itself was unusual for the Prime Minister, who was used to verbal sparring on a daily basis in the House of Commons.

  "You have wasted enough of my time already," Wormwood said at last and then, changing the subject: "Her majesty must return to Buckingham Palace at once."

  "No? Shall I then? It was a dangerous game you were playing, involving me in your schemes. Arrogantly dangerous in fact, but then you had your get out clause planned from the start, didn't you?"

  Ulysses began to pace between the frozen constables, making expansive gestures with his hands as if giving an after dinner presentation.

  "I don't know what really happened at the Natural History Museum that first fateful night - I suspect only two people really do, and one of them is dead - but I think I have a pretty good idea."

  "The Natural History Museum? What's that got to do with anything?" Allardyce asked, incredulously. He was seriously out of his depth now.

  "Everything," Ulysses stated simply.

  "Would you care to enlighten us then, Mr Quicksilver?" It was Wormwood who spoke now, his voice like the hissing of a viper.

  "Inspector, tell me, did you ever discover what was taken the evening the night watchman died?"

  "Well..." Ulysses had caught him off guard.

  "You must have realised that the late Professor Galapagos' difference engine had been stolen. And who would go to all the trouble of stealing a very specific difference engine from the professor's lab at the museum, other than our mutual friend Jago Kane - eh, Prime Minister? - working on behalf of your good self, of course.

  "I can only surmise what happened. Kane broke in but was surprised by the professor who was working late that night. There was a scuffle, things got broken, including a beaker of Galapagos' regression formula, which splashed onto the professor. Kane was untouched and made his getaway but the doomed professor underwent a sudden and violent transformation, becoming the apeman that later escaped from the Museum."

  Ulysses was well into his stride now.

  "It wasn't the engine itself that you wanted as such, but the formula for the serum that was contained within its data files."

  "So who killed the night watchman?" Allardyce asked, having been so sure that it had been the same mysterious thief up until that point.

  "Ah, that would be Professor Ignatius Galapagos, or what had once been one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists before the formula changed him. But there's no point looking for him now, he's dead."

  "So you said. What happened to him? And how do you know so much about it?" the bewildered Allardyce pressed on. "Did you kill him, Quicksilver?"

  "Oh no, it wasn't me. You might say he was 'hoist by his own petard'."

  "You what?"

  "He got a taste of his own nasty medicine."

  "You've lost me."

  "Yes, I rather thought I had."

  "But how does all this rumour and supposition allegedly link the Prime Minister with the Darwinian Dawn?" Allardyce threw in, smiling proudly to himself as if he had just played his trump card.

  "Because Galapagos' difference engine contained the chemical breakdown of his regression formula, and the man who had that could reproduce as much of the stuff as he needed."

  "Needed? For what?"

  "For what you witnessed tonight: to create a suitably direct and dramatically devastating attack on the monarch, which would put his newly-introduced Anti-Terror Bill into action, thereby ensuring that he was given total control of the country and, by default, the entire empire. And all this would have been achieved perfectly legally, mind.

  "But to access the difference engine's data files first he needed the unit's coded decryption key, and that was where his agent Jago Kane had fouled up. The now transformed Galapagos still had it about his person and that was where I came in, to search for the missing professor.

  "If you hadn't given me that particular mission, I would never have stumbled upon the Dawn's secret bomb-making facility, but then you already know about that, don't you, inspector?"

  Both Ulysses and Wormwood could see that the resolute Allardyce was wavering. His black and white view of the world was rapidly turning into a messy, confusing grey.

  "You would trust the word of a known terrorist over that of your Prime Minister?" Wormwood yelled, his voice rising in pitch, his porcelain-pale skin flushing a deep crimson.

  "But I still don't see how this all connects to the Prime Minister!" Allardyce was floundering

  "I'm getting to that," Ulysses said darkly. "Two individuals have kept making regular appearances during the course of my investigations, either keeping me on track - giving me new clues, guiding me onwards - or alternatively attempting to frustrate my successful completion of the mission. Your accomplices, Prime Minister. You might call them your partners in crime. Jago Kane and Miss Genevieve Galapagos, the errant professor's lovely daughter."

  No one passed comment now. Ulysses had his audience enthralled.

  "The former a known terrorist now linked to the Darwinian Dawn, the latter, a fiction. There is no such person as Genevieve Galapagos is there, Prime Minister? This femme fatale goes by another name, does she not? Miss Kitty Hawke, assassin and strumpet extraordinaire!

  "And before the good Inspector asks me once again what all this has to do with you, I have the evidence that you have had direct dealings with both these individuals, thanks to hearing it straight from the horse's mouth - the nag in this case being a very ill-humoured and embittered Kane - and secondly because the professor's code-key, which I returned to his oh-so loving 'daughter', was fitted with a tracking device. Wherever your little kitten and her imagined father's locket went, I went too."

  Ulysses was interrupted by the abrupt roar of an aero-engine. All attention was diverted away from him and back to the ensnared zeppelin. The craft's remaining engine was firing back into life. Accompanied by a terrible screeching of tortured metal, the airship freed itself from the palace roof.

  All eyes in the park watched as the dirigible came about, yawing heavily to port with only one engine still in operation.

  There was a sudden shriek from one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting and a cry of, "Mon dieu!" from Dr Mabuse. Ulysses turned.

  "You argue a very convincing case, Quicksilver. Well done, very clever. Consider your mission successfully... concluded."

  Wormwood was standing beside the Queen's steam-powered throne, the cold grey muzzle of a gun pushed up against the forehead of the withered old woman smothered beneath her heavily-embroidered mourning clothes.

  "Mr Wormwood, we are not amused. What is going on?" an incongruously chiding voice issued from the throne's speaker-horn.

  "I am very sorry, Ma'am, but unfortunately it would appear that everything is unravelling around me. The best laid plans, as they say. Consider yourself my... hostage."

  A dumbstruck Inspector Allardyce made as if to direct his officers to act.

  "And before anybody does anything rash, Inspector, need I point out that a man who was prepared to accept the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Londoners, for the greater good, whose plans have fallen down about his ears and who has nothing at all left to lose, would not hesitate to put a bullet through your dear monarch's head?" Wormwood said.

  "Allardyce, stop!" Ulysses commanded. A crocodilian smile spread across Wormwood's lips as he saw a glint of panic in Ulysses eyes. "Just tell me this. Why would a man in your position, with your power, be interested in destabilising the status quo and throw in his lot with a group of zealous, quasi-religious revolutionaries?"

  "The Darwinian Dawn? A mere fabrication, an invention of mine. Oh, of course, those who pledged their all to the cause believed it was for real, but it was merely a tool. But the core tenet behind it all is still sound."

  "And t
hat is?"

  "Look around you, Quicksilver. Are you so blinkered by your own accepted worldview? Can you not see that there is so much wrong with London and, by extension, Magna Britannia itself? I could make it all so much better."

  "So the Darwinian Dawn and its actions were merely a means to an end for you?" Ulysses said with growing realisation. "Engineer a suitably threatening state of emergency and then, with the powers granted you by your Anti-Terror bill invoked you would..." Ulysses trailed off.

  "Have the power to do what I wanted. To go back to beginning, to start from scratch. I would have brought an end to slum-living, overcrowding and endemic disease and re-built London."

  "In your own image."

  "I had a great master plan for this city. The greatest advances this nation has ever known have followed times of trial and tribulation, times of enforced evolution, if you will. Consider the Great Fire of 1666. From the ashes rose a greater city, a better city for all. From the ashes of Londinium Maximum a still greater metropolis could have arisen, like a phoenix from the flames.

  "And change is always difficult and traumatic, I understand that, but I could have coaxed the nation through that time until it fulfilled its true potential. Magna Britannia is an out-moded dinosaur, a creature of a bygone age that should have become extinct long ago. Just think of me as the agent of evolution."

  "By Jingo! Finally I see what all this has been about," Ulysses declared.

  "Of course, I have just told you what it is all about you idiot!" Wormwood said.

  "Well yes, but you have given us the politician's answer. It is when we read between the lines that we see the truth. This is all about power. That's all it's ever been about from the start. Absolute power... corrupts absolutely."

  "The opinion of fearful fools."

  "You would have effectively re-written history according to your own warped view of how you think the world should be, your own unnatural history of the British Empire. But history is written by the victors. And you just lost!"

  "Sir!"

  Ulysses heard his manservant's shout at the same time as he became aware of the swelling sound of the zeppelin's straining engine and felt the howling gale of its downwash tugging at his clothes and hair.

  Nose angled towards the ground, the zeppelin powered across the spoiled lawns of the park on an apparent collision course with the royal party. Gunfire chattered and ricocheted from the body of the armoured shell of the airship as Victoria's personal guard opened fire.

  And then the dirigible was passing directly over them. Something swung out of the darkness beneath it. Ulysses ducked, the rattling rope ladder sweeping past him. As Ulysses rose again, following the airship's passing, his sixth sense flashing him a warning, he already knew what was going to happen. Time seeming to slow around him, he reacted without thinking, operating on instinct alone.

  Then the zeppelin was rising and the Queen stood alone again, Wormwood scrambling up the ladder as the airship climbed to move out of range of fire.

  Ulysses sprinted across the grass, paying no heed to how Allardyce and his robo-Bobbies might react, and then the last rung of the ladder soared away out of reach. The moment had passed. He had missed that vital window of opportunity.

  Prescience flared again and one of the craft's mooring cables swung out of the darkness behind him. Suddenly fate had presented him with a second chance, and Ulysses leapt.

  "Do you think he knows what's he's bloody well doing?" Allardyce asked the manservant.

  "Oh, I expect he's making it up as he goes along, sir. That's his usual strategy," Nimrod replied.

  Arms and legs aching, lungs heaving, heart pounding fit to burst, Uriah Wormwood staggered onto the flight deck of the airship. Air howled in through the shattered hemisphere of the gondola's burst glass bubble.

  Amidst the wreckage of the cockpit Kitty Hawke, clothes and skin cut by splinters of glass, clung to the ship's wheel, her half-leaning stance making it hard to discern whether she was struggling to maintain control of the craft or whether she was clinging tightly to the steering mechanism to hold herself up.

  Wormwood joined the young woman at the controls. Kitty turned, glaring at him in petulant, frustrated fury. Her hair hung down about her shoulders, in a wind-swept mess. Her perfectly-sculptured features were criss-crossed by the surgeon-fine red lines of myriad glass cuts and a bruise darkened the flesh above her right cheekbone.

  "We failed," she said, the fire suddenly gone from her.

  "No, my dear. This is not a failure. It is merely a... setback," Wormwood said, pulling himself up tall, staring into the distance. "We have merely lost the battle, not the war. I am not done with Londinium Maximum yet. No, this is not the end. The world has not heard the last of Uriah Wormwood. Or Kitty Hawke." Stiffly the elder statesman stretched out an arm and placed a hand on Kitty's shoulder.

  "No, father."

  Wormwood continued to stare out of the shattered cockpit, eyes narrowing against the rush of air. Below them the Victoria Embankment gave way to the rippling black mirror of the Thames, glistening with the lights of the sleepless city.

  "We appear to be losing height, my dear," he said at last, as the floodlit barbican of Tower Bridge filled more and more of his field of vision.

  "It's the balloon," Kitty said, sounding exhausted. "We've taken too much damage. I've lost rudder control and we're going down."

  "How vexing. Then it is time to take evasive action, my dear, would you not agree?"

  "Yes, father, only I think it might be too late for that."

  "It's never too late, my dear. Remember that. It's never too late."

  Ulysses clung on. His arms ached, his right shoulder numb with pain. He only wished he knew what he was supposed to do next. All he could do, it seemed, was hold on and hope to finally catch up with the errant Prime Minister when the airship finally came to ground, wherever that might be. But it seemed that the craft might be making its descent sooner rather than later.

  Tower Bridge loomed before it and, rather than rising to pass over the rather obvious obstacle the edifice presented, the zeppelin was dropping towards it. A hundred feet below the dark waters of the Thames swept on towards the sea.

  Ulysses considered his options and soon surmised that he didn't really have any. A fall into those turgid waters from this height would like as not prove just as fatal as a collision with the stone pylons of the bridge.

  Let go or hang on. "Damned if you do and damned if you don't," he found himself pondering aloud. "Come on, Quicksilver, you've got out of worse scrapes than this in the past." His mind suddenly rushed back to his plummeting descent through the freezing air over Mount Manaslu. He had escaped death then - thanks to the fickle whim of fate and the beneficent monks of Shangri-La - but could he again? Had he finally run out of last chances?

  And then the decision was taken out of his hands.

  The nose of the zeppelin struck the north tower of the bridge and crumpled. Moments later the gondola collided with the crenulated turret tops. There was the sound of metal scraping against ornately carved stonework as chunks of masonry came away from the towers. Then there was a spark.

  The balloon erupted into flame, a series of explosions blowing it apart as one gas compartment ignited after another. The zeppelin's final blaze of glory lit the City district and the tenements of Southwark for miles in every direction.

  Ulysses fell, the rope suddenly slack in his hands, eyebrows scorched by the explosion, the blazing carcass of the dirigible dropping after him.

  Then there was a stabbing pain in his right shoulder, as talons seized hold of him. The thump of leathery wings beat the air and Ulysses was suddenly pulled away over the water, away from the plummeting zeppelin.

  Ulysses looked up. Above him the pterodactyl that had decided that he would make a tasty snack was struggling to maintain height itself. A moment longer, Ulysses realised, and the flying reptile would let go again, abandoning him to his original fate.

  Now it was
Ulysses' turn to hang on, grabbing hold of the pterodactyl's scaly legs even as it released its grip on his protesting shoulder. Ulysses' descent continued, only now in a more bizarrely controlled manner. It was only when his feet were practically dragging through the muddy waters of the river that Ulysses let go, the pterodactyl flapping away, back to its roost on the bridge.

  He pulled himself from the river and climbed the iron rungs set into the embankment as the battered Silver Phantom pulled up on the road adjacent.

  "It would appear that you have prevailed once again, sir," his butler said stoically as he emerged from the car and opened the rear passenger door.

  "Indeed," Ulysses replied.

  "If you don't mind me remarking, sir, you appear to be a little worse for wear."

  "There's nothing quite like a night-time dip in the Thames is there Nimrod?"

  "I wouldn't know, sir."

  Nimrod shut the door after him and got back into the driver's seat. Ulysses gazed out through the darkened window.

  "How is her majesty?"

  "Returning to Buckingham Palace as we speak, sir."

  "Good. Then the status quo is maintained. Everything is as it should be."

  "I wouldn't say that, sir."

  "No, I suppose you're right, now you mention it. Wormwood has made a change after all," he said, watching the burning wreckage of the zeppelin slowly being carried away on the surface of the restless river. "It is how those of us who are left deal with it that will make all the difference."

  "Yes, sir."

  "But we can worry about that later. Magna Britannia will still be there, waiting for us, in the morning won't it, old chap?"

  "Thanks to you, sir."

  "Bully for me."

  And with that, the Silver Phantom slid away into the remains of the night and towards the dawning of a new day.

  EPILOGUE