The Ghost Rebellion (13 page)

The Enforcer was starting to tremble, reminding her of the familiar earthquakes that rippled through New Zealand. Then something underneath her disengaged. A series of clamps, she was fairly sure. Then another set behind her.

Her eyes returned to the panel. Six...that flickered to only five.

And in that flicker, Eliza’s breath was stolen away as the world disappeared from around her and she ascended into the clear skies of India as if shot from a cannon.

Interlude

In Which the Ministry’s Finest Cross into Unfriendly Territory

The boiler hatch groaned as it opened. Brandon, holding a small lantern by his face, peered in and cocked his head to one side. “Bruce, do you want to come out now?”

“
Gonna have to give me assistance, mate,” Bruce managed, extending a hand to his partner.

Locking arms with him, Brandon braced his foot against the side of the boiler and heaved. Bruce slipped halfway out of the iron container, which was about two feet shorter than his height. If his counterpart had not been there, Bruce would have faced a real challenge in trying to escape.

It took all of Bruce’s control not to slap the cheerful grin off his partner’s face as Brandon helped pull him out of the damned boiler.

“
One more,” Brandon said, “and heave!”

Bruce tried to push with his legs, numb as they were, and the boiler vomited him out. Brandon landed with a dull thud against the freight car floor and Bruce landed on top of him.

“
Sorry about that, mate,” Bruce groaned. “My legs are damned near frozen solid.”

“
Oh, right.” He gave Bruce a pat on his back. “Well, take your time, my friend. Feel free to roll off whenever you like.”

“
Damn Germans,” he grumbled. “They definitely gave you a better boiler to travel in.”

“
Well, maybe you could have been a bit nicer to our colleagues,” Brandon replied cheerfully.

“
Colleagues? Those blighters from Section P had it in for me the moment they laid eyes on my face.”

Bruce reached into his pocket and produced a key one of the Section P agents gave him just before setting off. Unlocking the only crate secured with a padlock, he pulled out the smaller of two long coats and passed it to Brandon. Bruce then slid into the remaining one, popped a fisherman’s cap on his head, and slid the boxcar door open. He looked about the rail yard—not that different from the border station rendezvous—and handed a similar cap to Brandon.

This had not been Bruce’s first trip to Russia, but he did not remember the Russian Empire being this dark.

“
What time is it?” he asked, slipping on a pair of leather gloves.

Checking his Mapping & Webb, Brandon replied, “Just past midnight.”

“
Six hours on the rail. Did you manage to get any sleep?”

“
Actually, yes,” Brandon answered with far too much vigour. “Been following that Kellogg regimen, don’t you know? I tell you, I feel fan-
tastic!”
 

“
I swear,” Bruce warned, stretching his back a bit, “if the word ‘enema’ leaves your lips, I will punch you. Hard. In the colon.”

The bitter cold of Grójec made this whole mission just that little bit less enjoyable. Three days ago, he was enjoying a coffee at Whiterock, and now he was sore, irritable, and on the verge of throttling his most-trusted field partner. Spies were supposed to enjoy the dark, but in his experience it only meant offering some bastard an opportunity to sneak up and stick a knife between your ribs.

“
Luckily we have been equipped for local conditions.” Brandon, since he had enjoyed a little more space on their journey, had carried a rucksack with field necessities in it. He handed Bruce a pair of Starlight Goggles. He slipped them on, and immediately after activating them, things improved. Bruce could now make out the long line of the train extending out before them, humps of snow piled high to the right, and behind them, the freight station itself.

And somewhere in the darkness of Grójec was their contact.

“
Don’t suppose Blackwell packed any of those little chemical packs to stick inside your gloves?”

Brandon shook his head, even as he pulled his jacket up tight around his face. “They turned out to be a little...unstable.”

“
Unstable?”

“
Flammable,” Brandon added. “The Director told her not to risk any more agents—or agents’ fingers to be exact.”

Shoving their gloved hands into their coat pockets, they resigned in toughing it out. The coats would be enough to maintain their body temperature, even in the Russian winter, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. Bruce always preferred things to be pleasant.

“
Where’s our bloody contact?” Bruce asked, staring out into the long lines of snow and train cars before them.

“
The Director was a little vague on how he was going to find us.” Brandon sounded only slightly concerned, but that might just have been the muffling effect of all those layers he wore. Still, he was the kind of bloke who would sound cheerful even if his fingers fell off from frostbite.

Just as Bruce was contemplating the risk behind going to the freight station—after all, a fistfight could not only keep them warm but effectively stave off boredom—a faint light moved in the distance. It was really just a pinprick among the darkness and could have gone missed without the Starlights. Brandon pulled a small torch from his pocket and flicked it on, then covered the light with his hand, revealing its glow three times in succession.

Wrapped like a mummy in a museum—which would be a lot warmer than present—Bruce judged his fighting form would not be at his best, and Brandon’s knife skills might be impaired in this wintery environment. He felt for the Bulldog holstered by his left breast. Most of their experimentals had been left behind, since in these temperatures they would be useless or dangerous. Blackwell had been most put off that they wouldn’t fire her æther-oscillating “Scarlet Pimpernel” in the cold of Russia. Having been at the receiving end of one of the mad scientist’s dry fires, Bruce had no desire to see what it would do in sub-zero conditions.

A small form emerged from the shadows and snow, and moved cautiously towards them.  It was impossible to tell if the form was male or female, friend or foe, since all he could make out through the Starlights was a bundle just as they appeared. They would have to wait until this unknown element got close to find out. Hopefully what they would discover would not prove fatal.

At his side, Bruce could feel Brandon’s tension. Many times they had been in this situation, and it never got any easier. In few too many instances, this kind of meeting had turned downright nasty.

Finally, the figure reached them, the new arrival removing her goggles and motioning for Brandon to use the torch. Bruce got a pleasant surprise when the modest light flickered on. A pair of stern blue eyes examined them both, and there was a hint of bright red hair tucked under her hood.

So their contact was an attractive woman.
Finally,
he thought,
a saving grace in this mission.
 

Bruce then looked at Brandon. “Mate,” he whispered, “what’s the security code?”

Brandon went to reply, then paused. “Oh, um, Section P never gave us one.”

“
What?
” he asked in a harsh whisper.

“
They said it wouldn’t be necessary.”

 “
Wouldn’t be necess—
we’re in bloody Russia, you git!”
 

“
They gave us a…gesture.”

He pulled Brandon back a few steps to make sure they could not be heard by the stranger. “Come again?”

“
She is supposed to identify herself with this,” and Brandon—concealing his hands with his body so she could not see it—covered his right hand with his left, and dealt himself a handshake.

Bruce knew this gesture.

His thoughts scattered on hearing a fist slam twice against a train car. They both looked at the young woman before them, who delivered the gesture Section P had said was their designated greeting. Brandon repeated it to her. She then jerked her head over her shoulder in a silent invitation to follow. She obviously expected them to follow as she immediately replaced her goggles back across her eyes and turned her back on them.

It wouldn’t be the first time he and Brandon had simply put their lives in a stranger’s hands. So, the two Ministry agents trailed after the silent woman. She had carefully stomped a path for them, and they dutifully stayed in it, though keeping their eyes on the surrounding hummocks of snow. They rounded a particularly tall one, and now out of sight of the station, the woman’s means of travel was revealed.

“
Well,” Bruce thought with a nod, “beats riding in the belly of a boiler.”

A snow vehicle unlike anything Bruce had ever seen towered before them. It appeared to be part of at least four other machines. At the heart of this thing Bruce could discern was a tractor, but he also saw what appeared to be the bow from an ironclad welded on the front. The back end looked cobbled together from a potbelly furnace, an array of meat grinders, and…

Was that a giant ceiling fan fitted into the face of a massive clock?

The odd configuration of the snow tractor meant that Bruce and Brandon were crammed into the rear, while their driver took the front. From where they sat, Bruce tried to make sense of the formidable collection of levers and gear shifts that surrounded the steering wheel. He would not have known where to begin in finding which was the throttle, which served as a brake, and which could be an accelerator. In their snug backseat, windows provided them some protection from howling winds and shifting snow. They were warming up quickly. The driver had less protection, but with her seat right next to the boilers she would be fine. Their contact reached underneath the tractor’s dash and flipped an unseen switch. The vehicle shuddered and rumbled around them, and then after a baffling sequence of levers pulled and pushed forward, they lumbered forward into the snow.

Stuffing his hands under his armpits as best he could, considering he was jammed up against Brandon, Bruce leaned forward and over the growing storm and the hammering of the machine yelled, “Are we far away from shelter?”

Either she didn’t hear him or chose to ignore him. Controlling this beast in this weather must have been quite enough for her to deal with, let alone putting up with a yammering Australian sitting in the back. At least that was the impression Bruce got as the tractor lurched to the left.

“
Let her concentrate, for God’s sake,” Brandon suggested ever so helpfully. “One wrong move and we’ll tumble into an unsafe snowbank or ditch, and then no one will find us until spring.”

“
Thanks, Brandon.” Bruce uncurled his shoulders a little, crunching his partner just a fraction. The rucksack was lying across their knees, adding to the discomfort. Wind railed against the tractor, snow blasting the window and scattering against the glass in a fashion that rendered Starlights useless. Their silent driver, however, piloted their vehicle so assuredly, showing plenty of local knowledge where solid ground instead of loose snow would be. The woman’s confidence reminded Bruce of a mad uncle who lived on a farm outside Melbourne. He drove his tractor with the same kind of reckless assurance. Of course he also had his tractor equipped with something he called the “Oh Shit!” handle for his occasional passengers. This contraption had no such convenience.

Finally, after inclines, declines, and controlled skids, Bruce could see a faint light in the distance. It was not much, just what a house might let out.

“
Signs of civilisation,” he said, pointing it out to Brandon. “Or a bit of warmth at least.”

His partner tilted his head. “You didn’t come to Russia expecting to be warm all the time, did you?”

“
Just thinking of my poor todger and tackle mate,” Bruce said, squirming where he sat. “I might want to have some more kids one day, and all this cold might freeze the whole package off.”

Brandon snorted. “How about we focus on the mission and not on your balls for a bit?”

“
You have your priorities, I’ll have mine, mate.”

The vehicle came to an abrupt stop right before the only light in the snow-tossed blackness, a low wooden building with only two shuttered windows on either side of the door. Hardly a fortress, but Bruce had long ago given up judging buildings by their initial impressions. He’d seen too many ruined castles serve as House of Usher lairs and the slums of London offer fronts for mad scientists.

Following their driver out of the snow tractor, they stomped their boots in front of the door before following her in. This time, Bruce found, initial impressions were very accurate. It was, to put it bluntly, a hovel. Those two shuttered windows were the only ones in the entire building. The rest was mud, wood, and not much warmer than outside. The light that had given him such hope came from a fireplace in the far corner of the building. Lines of clothes hung around it and provided so much cover that it took him a moment to realise that there was in fact a little wizened man in a chair in front of the hearth, snoring pleasantly.

“
Good evening,” Brandon said in accented Russian. Still, it was better than Bruce’s.

Their contact, still remaining quiet, had started stripping off her snow-kissed gloves and top coat. She was much more of Bruce’s type of woman, though he decided not to mention that immediately. Petite, tiny really, but he wasn’t letting her outward appearance fool him. He had known his share of Russian women, and from those painful encounters he considered them far more terrifying than the men. He still recalled one particular incident with a platoon of Russian female aerial marines, and it was that recollection which stayed his impulse to deliver her the usual smile and line. Personal growth was possible, apparently.