The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (50 page)

Burton twisted in midair, ground his teeth together, and hissed through them.

His head blurred. He had one. He had three. He had five. He had one.

“Whatever you are doing,” the Mark III said, “cease immediately.”

Burton let go of all resistance. He allowed the chronostatic energy to soak into him. He let the Oxford equation flower.

“No!”
Orpheus
shouted. “You cannot have that. It is mine. The knowledge is mine.”

The explorer felt the synthetic brain reaching out to all the babbages to which it was connected. It drew on their power to supplement its own. For a moment, his and
Orpheus
's wills were locked.

He heard, coming as if from a distance, Swinburne screech, “Stop it! Stop it, Orpheus! You're killing him!”

“I am removing him from his flesh,” the machine responded. “He will be inserted into crystalline silicates.”

Burton embraced the equation and, by spanning several of its calculations with others, made a complex sequence of folds in it.

“Orpheus,” he said. “Go to hell.”

He thrust the opposing intelligence across the fold then allowed time and space to resume its normal shape.

A detonation.

Burton hit the ground. Chronostatic energy sputtered and crackled around him. Swinburne gasped and reached out, clutching at his elbow.

Where the Mark III had been, a ball of incandescent white flame erupted outward and flowed in all directions, following the course of the dome down to the floor.

“Cripes!” Swinburne cried out, raising his arm to protect his face from the blistering heat. “What did you do?”

Burton blinked and moistened his lips with his tongue. He was dazed. All the strength had drained from him. “Um. I think—I think I just threw Orpheus into the heart of a distant sun.”

“Oh,” the poet responded. “Jolly good. That's that, then. Shall we get out of here?”

A burning corpse smacked onto the floor beside him. He yelped and jumped aside. More bodies, like blazing meteors, began to drop. Swinburne dodged left and right but Burton, limp and weak, couldn't move. His garments started to smoulder.

Bismillah. Fire again.

Through slitted and watering eyes, he saw the solid wall of flame become ragged as the inferno spread outward, and noticed that even the metal of the factory's machinery was starting to burn in defiance of the normal laws of combustion.

Swinburne dragged at his sleeve and pointed to his left, shouting over the roar of the conflagration, “I think the entrance is in that direction. Here, let's get you moving.”

The poet slid a narrow shoulder beneath Burton's arm and hoisted him up. They shuffled forward, and with the motion, a small amount of strength seeped back into the explorer's legs.

As they left the central area and navigated the spaces between the machines, he was able to rely less on Swinburne's support and was soon walking unaided.

They hurried through a narrow passage bordered on one side by a huge cylindrical boiler and on the other by a clanging, riveting machine. Even above the din, they heard a part of the roof collapse behind them.

Swinburne gestured to their left. His mouth moved, but his words were drowned. Peering in the indicated direction, Burton saw a group of men being ushered along a walkway by Daniel Gooch. The engineer looked down at them, his form momentarily wavering in the tremendous heat. He extended an arm, pointing in the direction they were going, and with one of his extra limbs made a rolling motion. The message was clear.
Run!

Burton gave a thumbs-up. He and Swinburne pushed onward. Something exploded behind them. A twisted beam of metal clattered past, missing the poet's head by mere inches. Their ears were assailed by detonations and crashes. The moisture was sucked out of their skin. Their hair began to shrivel and smoke.

Past an arrangement of cutters and drills, past a press, past a welding machine, they hurried on, gasping for every hot breath, feeling as if the very air itself was afire, beset by the notion that they were fleeing from the depths of Hades.

Finally, as, with a deafening roar, part of the building fell down behind them and the tall mast on the roof came crashing through it, they emerged into an area free of machinery but piled high with crates and boxes, all of which were fast blackening. Through curling smoke, they saw the entrance doors.

Flames were licking at Burton's sleeve. He slapped at them—Green Park all over again—staggered forward, but then halted, a puzzled expression passing across his features.

What did I just see?

“Come on! Come on!” Swinburne hollered.

“Wait! There's something here.”

“No, there isn't!”

Burton started to turn.

“Don't!” Swinburne insisted, snatching at his friend's jacket and pulling him on. “Keep going. Don't look back.”

Unable to resist the impulse, Burton looked back.

They'd just passed a stack of crates. On their sides, his own name was printed and he knew, in an instant, what they contained. This was the material he'd stored in Grindlays after his return from India and Arabia. The boxes contained books of his own poetry, journals, priceless Persian and Arabic manuscripts, costumes of every nation, and—

The Scented Garden of the Sheikh Nefzaoui.

The original manuscript. It was here. He could save it.

Undo past losses. Publish my translation. Erase Isabel's betrayal.

He took a step back the way they'd come. The wood of the crates was beginning to burn. He had to act fast.

Another step.

The heat was near unendurable, the smoke blinding, and the noise thunderous as machines disintegrated and the warehouse continued to cave in. Men emerged from the inferno and ran past, fleeing for the exit, desperate for clear, cool air, afraid for their lives, some with clothes alight.

Daniel Gooch, his hair gone from his head and his skin red and blistered, stumbled into view and bellowed, “For the love of God, what are you doing? Get out! The whole place is coming down!”

“Help me to move these crates,” Burton shouted.

“Don't be a bloody fool, man!”

Gooch paced forward and took hold of Burton's right arm.

Swinburne yanked at the left.

“No!” Burton yelled. “No! My manuscript. It's here. I have to save it. I'll never find another copy.”

Swinburne shouted into his ear, “Give it up. You're not that man anymore.”

“I'll translate it. The forbidden chapter. My name will live on through—”

Burton suddenly recalled the words uttered by Edward Oxford's ancestor, the man who'd killed Queen Victoria.

“My name must be remembered. I must live through history!”

His eyes widened. He stood and watched as the crates bearing his name burst into flames. He laughed.

It didn't matter.

He turned, and with Swinburne and Gooch at his side, headed toward the exit.

BATTLES IN TOOLEY STREET AND THE TOWER

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

—Alfred Russel Wallace, “Harmony of Spiritualism
and Science,”
Light
, 1885

Burton, Swinburne, and Gooch, amid a crowd of other men, stumbled out of the inferno into a scene of utter mayhem. Before they could properly assess it, an SPG unit leaped at them.

“Halt! You are enemies of the British Empire. You will be executed immediately.”

It swiped a baton at Burton's head. One of Gooch's supplementary arms shot out and blocked the blow. His metal fingers closed around the brass wrist, and, as the second baton was raised, he stepped in and grabbed that arm, too.

“Stop!” the machine commanded. “Do not resist.”

“I can't hold it for long!” the engineer gasped.

Swinburne hastily unslung his rifle, pushed the end of its barrel against the inky-blue machine's chin, and pulled the trigger.

Gooch thrust the contraption away, and they all shrank back as its babbage exploded. A twisted sliver of brass took a bite out of Burton's right ear as it whistled past his head. He clapped a hand to the wound. Warm blood dribbled between his fingers. Muttering an oath, he turned and took a measure of Tooley Street.

Night had fallen. A thick blizzard of sparks was rushing upward into the darkness, and at ground level everything was bathed in a ghastly orange glow. Already, the flames were raging through the warehouses to the left and right of Grindlays and chewing into the buildings beyond them.

Though the heat was near intolerable, Burton found himself rooted to the spot, bewildered to see, through smoke-saturated air, that the thoroughfare was filled from end to end by a milling crowd of constables and brass men. They were swiping truncheons, shooting pistols, jabbing swordsticks, lashing out with real and artificial fists, and grappling with one another at such close quarters that they appeared almost a single entity, an agitated sea of metal and fleshy limbs.

Evidently, Trounce had successfully gathered his people and led them here, though it felt to the explorer as if less than an hour had passed since he'd parted company with the detective inspector.

For how long, he wondered, had his mental battle with
Orpheus
lasted? Time had somehow dilated or contracted—he wasn't sure which.

He became aware of Swinburne's voice, though he couldn't hear what his friend was saying.

“What, Algy?” he yelled.

The poet pointed excitedly upward and bellowed, “Lawless!”

Looking in the indicated direction, Burton discovered that the battle was also raging in the sky.

Lawless's ship was directly overhead. It was circling the massive HMA
Eurypyle
with Gatling guns snarling and flashing, ploughing bullets into the mighty vessel.
Eurypyle
's cannons were returning fire, and the smaller ship was sustaining terrible damage, trailing thick smoke and raining shards of metal, glass, and wood down onto the street.

“By my Aunt Petunia's pleated petticoats!” Swinburne screeched. “What's he playing at? He doesn't stand a chance!”

Gooch gave the answer. “Distraction! He's keeping the other ship occupied so it can't shoot down at our people. Look out!”

A clockwork man—highly polished and with a crest engraved upon its chest—lunged out of the crowd and slashed a blade at Swinburne. The little man leaped back with a shriek. Gooch once again put his supplementary limbs to good use, thrusting one out to deflect the weapon. Burton reached over his shoulder, drew his
khopesh
, and sliced it down, straight through the machine's elbow.

“Aaah!” it cried out. “My head!”

“Head?” Swinburne queried.

“My mind is a furnace! Help me!”

Drawing back its remaining arm, the contraption threw a punch toward Burton's face. The explorer dodged to the side and swiped again with his blade, cutting through the thin neck. The clockwork man toppled backward and fell into the arms of Detective Inspector Trounce as he emerged from the crowd. The Yard man pushed it aside and, as it clanked to the ground, hailed his friends. He was panting, a thick smear of soot marked the left side of his face, and his bottom lip was bleeding, caking his untidy beard with gore. He reached out and shook Burton's hand. “By Jove! What a state you're in.”

“You're a fine one to talk,” Swinburne noted.

“The inner man is even more battered than the outer,” Burton admitted. He offered a grim smile. “But the principal enemy is defeated. Now we just have to clean up the mess. What's the state of play?”

He gestured for his companions to follow him away from Grindlays and a little way along the street to where the savage heat was more endurable. As they walked, skirting the battling mob, Trounce shouted his report.

“Humph! It was even easier to gather supporters than I'd anticipated. Slaughter, Spearing, and Honesty had already done most of the footwork. In my estimation, at least two-thirds of the Force is in open defiance of Chief Commissioner Mayne. I have little doubt he'll try to call in the army to oppose us but, frankly, I don't think he'll get the response he expects. So for now, at least, we only have the clockwork men to deal with. The Special Patrol Group machines are showing no constraint. The others, the automated aristocrats, appear to have gone dangerously insane. They're babbling nonsense and attacking everyone left, right, and centre. The fire seems to be heating up their brains.”