The Entities could have arrived on Earth at any time. In the world we know, they chose 1982. Here are some where they didn't. Up first: Detective Colin Wallis of the Metropolitan Police Service has been having some trouble with a serial killer in Whitechapel. A serial killer named Jack...
Trajectory Disagreement [Worm Historical Snippets]
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Chapter 1 - Rip and Slash
- Location
- Probably at sea
Hello all. This is the third of the stories I'm crossposting from FFnet. If you liked this chapter and are desperate to read ahead, you can find the rest of this story (and all the others I've done) at my profile on that site. Otherwise, I'll be uploading what I've got every week or so. Please enjoy!
"This brings it up to twenty-four, sir," one of his detectives said from the hall outside, where he'd been patting the constable unlucky enough to be first on the scene on the back. The sickly-sweet smell of vomit lanced through the tiny room, but barely made a dent in the overpowering scent of blood. Even the general stink of London wafting in through the open window couldn't suppress it completely, and didn't that just say it all.
Flecks of red, already fading to brown, were visible on nearly every surface, every piece of furniture. The wooden floor was sticky with it; the bedding soaked where the corpse lay on it.
The girl hadn't died well. Sometimes corpses just looked asleep to Colin, at least if you got to them before too much bloating had occurred. The Ripper's victims were never so lucky. This poor young woman looked like she'd suffered an accident in one of the factories Colin had worked in as a lad. There were numerous small cuts along her limbs, which increased in frequency towards the extremities until her hands and feet were nothing more than a mass of bloody flesh. There were much deeper and larger cuts in her torso – all the organs seemed to be there, this time, which was a mercy.
Her face… well. The less said about her face, the better. Finally, a cheap table knife had been plunged into her heart, pinning a scrap of paper to the body. From the looks of it, it had been torn from a book, and Colin could see handwritten script on it.
Judging from the sheer scope of the blood spatters on the furniture, the vast majority of the cuts had been inflicted while the girl was still alive.
Colin had long since gotten used to that kind of thing after over twelve years with the Metropolitan Police Service, but he could see why the constable had felt the need to contaminate the crime scene with his breakfast. He'd still need a stern lecture from Colin about the value of a strong stomach and stiff upper lip, though. It was only a corpse when all was said and done, after all.
"Do we know who she is?" he said to no-one in particular, still examining the body. Another of his detectives answered.
"According to the landlord, she was the tenant here, one Aster Russel. Not much family to speak of. Mother dead years ago, unknown father, a half-brother that looked after her, which is why she was able to afford a room of her own at all. We'll send someone round to give him the news today."
"Hrm." As the lead investigator, that should really have been Colin's job, but it was well known in the Whitechapel station that Detective Inspector Wallis simply didn't do home visits. It wasn't like Colin didn't try, but he just didn't have the slightest idea how to act around grieving people. As far as he was concerned, once he'd told them his intention to catch the killer there wasn't anything more to be said. Personally, if Colin's loved ones had been murdered he'd have been more comforted by the thought that the police were actually doing their jobs and working to collar the killer than by some meaningless platitudes and a pat on the shoulder.
Mind you, Colin would have had to actually have loved ones for someone to kill them in the first place. He didn't, partly for that very reason and partly because, well, he was too busy actually doing his job and working to collar killers.
There were a lot of them around lately. Whitechapel was, in Colin's opinion, an absolute hole. Overcrowded, noisy, filled with the underclasses and all the problems they imported from wherever the hell they all came from; no wonder everyone drank to forget their problems, which of course only made the whole thing worse.
Colin knew a lot of his officers didn't share his opinion. He could hardly blame them – they hadn't been born here and didn't have any nostalgic memories to brighten their view of the place.
Shaking his head, Colin removed the table knife from the girl's heart, and carefully folded the piece of paper away into a pocket. He tapped his truncheon against the floor a couple of times, and the detectives and constables around the room and hall fell silent. When Colin addressed them, his voice was stern.
"Thank you all for coming so quickly. As I'm sure you've guessed, we're treating this as another Ripper case. I know it's frustrating to watch this devil rack up body after body, but every scrap of information we gain could be vital to eventually catching this man. Therefore, I want you to work as hard as possible on tracing the victim's last known movements. In a district like this, nothing happens without someone somewhere knowing about it, so keep digging. Check her work, her known haunts, her family… well. I don't need to tell you your jobs.
"If you find any leads – anything at all – you know where to find me. Do not attempt to corner this man yourself. He is certain to be armed and dangerous, and if our guesses are right may possibly be Talented." Like me. "If you find him, I want to be the one taking him down. I'm the only one with a shot of actually surviving the experience."
Plus there was no way Colin was going to let anyone else get that particular feather in their cap. The Ripper was his bloody target, and he'd put in entirely too much effort not to make the arrest himself. By the time he was through, no-one would remember Jack the Ripper as anything except Colin Wallis' ticket to Chief Constable.
When Colin had inherited his office from his predecessor, it had looked exactly the same as any other-
No, actually, that was a complete lie. Colin's old boss might have been a hero to Queen and populace alike, and would certainly be the head of the Metropolitan Police Service today had Madame Tigress not torn him in two, but the man wouldn't know what 'organised working environment' meant if you wrote it in the sky using one of his jetpacks. Colin had started excavating the piles of paperwork, accolades, and mementoes on every surface the day he'd moved in.
He was usually pretty good at organising things, and had started by meticulously filing everything in its proper archive, evidence box, or department. In this case, however, he'd decided that in order to really make headway he'd need a shovel, a wheelbarrow and probably a handpicked team from the Royal Geological Society, and had taken the entire lot and torched it out in the courtyard.
Now, it was neat, efficient, and exactly as Colin liked it. Once he'd really gotten started on settling in, the office resembled a workshop more than anything, although the old desk still took pride of place. It was a reminder of his predecessor, and besides the thing was too heavy to lift by three strong coppers. Colin half-suspected it was hiding more paperwork somewhere, but hadn't dared to check.
Colin's paperwork took up exactly two drawers – an in-tray, and an out-tray. It was pretty easy to tell which was which. The out-tray was the one filled almost a foot deep with the day's processed paperwork. The in-tray was the one that would have been gathering dust with nothing in it at all, if Colin had been so slovenly as to let such a thing as dust into his workspace.
The rest of the space was filled with worktops done in sturdy pine. These in turn were filled with various tools, bits of wire, gears and cogs, and everything else a man of the more… technical persuasion might need to build his various knick-knacks. Everything had a place, and there was a place for everything.
In this case, Colin was working with a special locked drawer that had recently contained, among other things, twenty-three scraps of card in a beige folder. These weren't forms or loose minutes or official statements; the drawer was in the 'evidence' cabinet and the folder had just two words on it:
Ripper Letters
In a minute the folder would contain twenty-four scraps of card, but for now Colin had all the scraps side-by-side in order to better compare them with the one found pinned to Aster Russell's body. First things first, then.
The letter was written on a post card, but hadn't actually been posted. It could have been picked up anywhere, the post offices were full of them. It had been addressed to 'Dear Boss' – meaning Detective Inspector Wallis, from context. The text was handwritten, in a looping style, using red ink (not blood – Colin had tested for that straightaway). The letters were quite large, and there were a few blots of ink on the page, but the penmanship indicated an educated man.
Three of the letters had been slightly separated on the worktop. These were the oldest, the card yellowing slightly and curling at the edges. The writing on these was slightly smaller, neater, and these ones had been posted, although the stamps were almost falling off at this point. Besides that, they were similar – a letter from the purported 'Jack the Ripper', to 'Boss', daring the police to catch him and gloating about his crimes. The first three were more graphic but less philosophical, and spoke less directly to 'Boss'.
Colin had his theories, but without the man in front of him that was all they were. Sighing, he read the most recent letter again.
Dear Boss,
Oh dear oh dear it looks like Ive done another one what am I like ha ha. Sort of makes you wonder if you lot are even trying to catch old Jack I certainly didnt see no coppers around. Id hate to think you werent paying attenshun or maybe you have something more important to do? Aint it funny how the longer you leave me alone the more attenshun and fame you get for going after me and all. Im sure youre trying your best tho.
Still dont leave me alone too long or who knows what I might take it into my head to do ha ha. I can see your having a hard time so I left a few more clues this time around. Hope to see you soon Boss and Good Luck.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
If Colin had been younger, he might have been angry at the implication that he was deliberately drawing out the chase to further his career. These days it didn't register, although he made sure to confiscate the letters for his own personal examination as soon as possible.
It wouldn't do to have the men spreading rumours. That kind of talk only hurt morale.
Stony-faced, Colin filed all the letters away into their drawer. Then, because it was no good just waiting around while his men investigated, he allowed himself a little time to indulge his Talent. It was no accident his office looked like a workshop. While the Whitechapel station had traditionally been the home of those Talented in engineering and the natural sciences, it was only after Colin took over as Detective Inspector that it started putting out devices that a normal copper could carry in his pocket on a beat.
He didn't like to do it too much, because to his mind there was no substitute for hard work and discipline – and besides, not one of the other policemen could perform the proper maintenance on his stuff, and unreliable tools may as well be in the hands of the criminals as far as Colin was concerned.
On the other hand, it did help reduce his workload significantly when PC Bloggs could send an entire bar fight to its knees clutching their ears with a single blow on his enhanced whistle, and send a telegram about the incident by dictating to his helmet.
So Colin carefully hung his jacket and waistcoat on the door, slipped an apron over his shirt, rolled his sleeves up and began to tinker. He was between projects at the moment, but the radio transmitters in his officers' badges had started wearing down, and a few had handed them in for repairs. Always work to do.
He didn't know how long he'd been at it when he was interrupted. He fought down the irritation he usually felt when someone got in the way of his work and snapped, "Yes?"
The red-faced lad, who'd just run up the stairs by the look of him, paused to catch his breath. "Sir! We've got a witness!"
"What?" The Ripper never, ever left a witness. It wasn't that he was some master planner, one step ahead of the police – it was just that the police hadn't ever found anyone who'd seen him in action.
Of course, Colin realised with a sinking feeling, maybe they'd have had more luck looking in the river. Just because the Ripper liked to make grisly exhibitions of his victims didn't mean he had to do it every time.
"The victim's boss, one Peter Somer. Saw her leaving the pub she worked at with some guy, he says. But… I dunno, it's weird, sir. That was as much as he said, then asked to see you. Wouldn't speak to no-one else, sir."
Colin was already pulling on his coat, and spoke while hurrying out of the police station. "I wouldn't have it any other way. Where's the pub?"
"Ten Bells, sir. Corner of Commercial Street and-"
"I know it. Hold the fort, will you, lad?"
Without waiting for a reply, Colin strode into the street and hailed a cabbie. Finally. Finally an actual lead, after months of nothing at all! He thumbed the butt of his truncheon where it swung at his hip. Oh yes, he was going to make the most of this.
The Ripper had made his first and last mistake.
The Ten Bells was, well, a bit of a dive. The wood-slat floor was sticky with spilled drinks and worse, the windows let in just enough light to illuminate the pipe smoke, and there was exactly one drink on offer, that being 'ale, warm and cheap'. It was the kind of place Colin would have gone for in a hot second had his local not been the also acceptably grimy Kings Stores on Widegate Street.
It was usually busy, even at this time of day. Mass unemployment and overcrowding meant that often people just didn't have another place to go. Well, they'd have to find another place for a few hours – Colin had cleared the place out so he could talk to Peter Somer in private, without worrying about the press or worse listening in. He had officers cordoning off the area, and a couple more providing close security, hovering somewhere nearby.
He sat across from the owner at a small table in the centre of the bar area. It wobbled slightly whenever the other man shifted his weight, which was often. Peter Somer was a stout man who'd clearly been fitter in his youth. Although his hair was thinning and his nose was ruddy, he had muscles in his arms like steel cable – from lifting kegs and stores, Colin assumed. Curiously, his arms and hands were heavily bandaged. A bar worker could expect to pick up a few scrapes and cuts here and there… but not this many. Colin filed the information away for later.
Somer was constantly fidgeting and glancing out of the window, and though the room was cold in the February air he had beads of sweat in his forehead. More than once, he flinched when someone passed by, and clutched the arms of the chair he sat in.
Colin had seen quite a few nervous people in his time, even a few nervous witnesses. He hadn't seen any who were still on edge while surrounded by London's finest – under his own personal protection, even!
He regarded Somer with a flat expression and said, "I am Detective Inspector Colin Wallis. You wanted to speak to me. Talk."
Somer pulled at his collar and said, "Right. Right… I got a clue about the Ripper. Jack. Jack the Ripper. Him."
"That's what I'm here for," said Colin, carefully keeping his voice level. "What's the information?"
"Th- the clue is, 'not a doctor like the other one, but still a worker or flesh'."
"I'm sorry?"
"'Not a doctor like the other one, but still a worker of flesh.'"
Colin paused. "You're going to have to explain that a little better, Mr. Somer. Are you saying you knew a previous killer who was a doctor, and this Ripper is a separate man?"
Somer groaned and put his head in his hands. "Look, I can't- just, not a doctor-"
"Yes, thank you, I get the message," Colin interrupted, a hint of coldness in his voice now. He looked sternly over his spectacles at the other man. "We at the Metropolitan Police service take prank tips very seriously indeed. I'd advise you to think very carefully about just what you want to say."
By now Somer's face was ashen, and he gaped uselessly at Colin. After a moment Colin prompted, "Well?"
"N- n-"
Colin sighed. Clearly something was up beyond the usual problem of a flaky witness. Most witnesses were either only too happy to give out far too many details in the hopes of being helpful, or else were the hard-bitten criminal sort that stayed tight-lipped. What didn't happen was witnesses repeating a single specific phrase to the exclusion of everything else. There was something else happening here.
"Mr. Somer. How about we try this another way?" Colin offered as kindly as he could manage. "Start from the top. How did you come by this piece of information? What were you doing? You don't have to give me any more clues if you don't want to."
Somer looked slightly sick. "I- I can't. I'm not allowed."
That set off alarm bells. An idea started to form. "Not allowed? By whom?"
"No, no, no..." the man whimpered.
Connections were being made now that Colin knew what to look for. "You've met him? You've met the Ripper?" The serial killer had clearly made an impression. Somer was all but hiding under the table and sobbing.
"What did he tell you? What did he look like? When was he- God's grace, man, pull yourself together!" Finally losing his temper, Colin slammed his fist down on the table and pulled the landlord upright by his collar.
The man's face was a mess by now, eyes red from terrified tears. He took a shuddering breath and said, "I'm not allowed- he said- my family, he had pictures-" He almost broke down again, but stayed steady this time. "He, he said I had to give you the clue. N- 'Not a doctor like the last one, but still a worker of flesh.' Jack the Ripper said you had to get the message. Had to be you. Not just the police. He made me say it again and again so I'd remember. He hurt me if I got it wrong. Then he left with- with poor Aster..." He squeezed his eyes shut, and shuddered.
Well. That changed things. Someone who could confirm the Ripper's identity if necessary, a positive witness linking him to the last known location of one of the victims. All they needed was to calm him down and get him talking about the man who'd threatened him, get a description, maybe take in some likely lads for a line-up.
"Mr Somer," said Colin slowly and calmly. "I need you to listen very carefully. I understand you've been through an awful ordeal, but the important thing is that you are safe now. Do you understand me? The police can protect you, from the Ripper or anyone else. We can protect your family. With your help, we can put this madman behind bars where he belongs, and stop him from hurting anyone ever again. But we need you to be a man and face your fears. Think about his victims. Think about Aster. Do you really want to let this devil roam free a moment more when you could do something to help catch him? Good God, man, you may be our only hope!"
Somer stared up at Colin with something approaching awe. He said, in a very quiet voice, "You promise you can protect me? You can find where he's keeping my boys?"
"I give you my personal guarantee that the Metropolitan Police Service will do everything in its power to help," said Colin solemnly. "You don't even need to go home if you don't want to, we can put you up in one of our cells until we've caught the Ripper." Yes, there was not a chance on God's green earth that Colin would let his star witness slip out of his hands if he could help it.
Slowly, the stout man nodded. "O-Okay. I'll help." He looked down at himself, seeming to notice for the first time how much he was trembling. "God's truth, I'm in a state, ain't I? Can I have a moment to freshen up before I start? My bathroom's only upstairs, won't take a mo."
"Go," said Colin. Somer gave a grateful nod, and went upstairs. Colin checked that his security cordon was still in place, and one of his constables followed him up.
The other came and sat down in the seat the pub owner had just vacated. "Reckon he'll give us anything useful, guv?"
Colin scratched his beard. "Usually, I'd say it was hard to tell. He's clearly terrified, not thinking straight. That has a way of muddling descriptions to hell and back – scary people seem taller, that sort of thing. And I'd wager he's had a stiff drink or three before I got here, am I right, Roberts?"
His detective nodded. "Like a fish, he were."
"From the colour of his nose, not the first of the day either, I'll wager. So most of the time he'd be dashed near useless as a witness. But in this case..."
"He's all we got?"
"Yes. I suppose we have our answer as to how the Ripper never seems to leave a witness – he simply scares the bottle out of anyone who might get close enough to see him at work… if he doesn't kill them out of hand. We only have as much as we do because he deliberately decided to leave a clue." Colin smiled a grim smile. "His poor luck that Mr Somer believed, in the end, more in the power of the law than the knife of the criminal."
"Beats me how one man can be that scary," Roberts said in hushed tones. "I mean, if it were something like the Dragon Triad I could understand. But a single killer? No matter how good he is, he's no match for us, eh guv?"
Colin lowered his voice. "I've suspected for a while that the Ripper may be Talented, as a matter of fact."
"He never is!"
"So I believe. I think it's something subtle – not something the Crown would notice or get involved with. Just enough to make it difficult to get evidence we'd expect to see in a normal killing, and enough to be terrifying beyond belief to someone who's never seen a Talent before. Well, I suppose we'll get the details from Mr Somer."
"Yeah, if he ever gets ready. And here I thought my missus took a… while..." The two men looked at each other, then at the stairs.
Colin was faster to his feet, knocking the table to one side as he sprinted from a standing start. Across the floor, up the stairs, along the corridor in less than five seconds. He rounded the corner-
Blood, bubbling from the slit in Peter Somer's throat. Blood, in a spreading puddle from the slumped form of the constable who'd gone with him. Blood, all over the clothes of a figure ducking out of the open window.
Colin met the eyes of a smirking face, for one fleeting instant.
The man dropped down into the streets a fraction of a second before Colin pressed a button on the handle of his truncheon. Lighting lanced into empty air, and Colin cursed.
No! He was not catching his first glimpse of his foe just to let him slip away! He accelerated, making a running dive through the window truncheon-first, like a mad fencer's lunge. The second the truncheon emerged he felt a jolt through it, so hard he damn near dropped the thing mid-leap. What in blazes? He hadn't heard a gunshot.
As he landed and rolled, he caught sight of the running figure, and a glint of steel. Colin sprinted after it, taking a moment to inspect his beloved weapon. There was a long groove in it about half-way up the length, as though someone had taken an axe to it. Colin shook his head, and focused on his quarry.
As a policeman, there was a minimum standard of fitness that Colin was obliged to maintain. The fitness instructors were utter fanatics about the importance of fresh air and exercise.
Even these instructors thought Colin took his physical training a bit too far.
He practically flew down the narrow streets in pursuit of the Ripper, feet pounding, arms pumping. There wasn't a man on the force who could outrun him, and he'd never met a criminal yet who he couldn't run down and capture.
Jack the Ripper was, somehow, staying ahead. He wasn't that he was all that quick. He was, for sure, but Colin was definitely the faster of the two. But the killer used the streets and alleys and passageways like he'd been born in them, and Colin could never quite get a clear line of sight. Whenever he rounded one corner, there the other man would be, just ducking round the next. All he could see was brief glimpses of someone running just as hard as he was, and the occasional flash of bright metal.
Oh, and the blood.
Wherever the Ripper went, people bled. Colin could just about see him take a wild swing backwards every now and again – and whenever he did, there were screams as anyone nearby suddenly sprouted long, gaping cuts. As he rushed past and leapt over the bodies and the wounded, he noticed that they looked almost like blows from a sword. Was this the Talent that had chopped a gash in his truncheon from half a street away?
On they ran. The Ripper seemed to be heading roughly south and west, although he made so many twists and turns it was hard to be sure. After a while he ducked into an unlocked housing block, and slammed the door behind him. Colin skidded to a stop, and kicked it down. Some instinct made him raise his truncheon in front of his face, and another gash appeared in it as the Ripper disappeared up the stairs.
Colin could see him sprinting up, taking them two at a time, and smiled. Standing in the centre of the stairwell, he raised his truncheon, and twisted the butt a quarter turn to the right. The last third sprouted hooks, and shot off with a hiss of released gas, trailing a thin and light metal cable behind it. The grappling hook attached to the top floor bannister, and Colin was pulled up the stairwell. He'd drawn his revolver by the time he drew level with the killer, and aimed a shot-
It was struck from his hand in a shower of sparks as the Ripper fell back into an apartment, slashing with knives in both hands. Colin cursed and vaulted the bannister, releasing the hook with another deft twist. Just before he entered the apartment he paused, and plaster flew from the wall next to his ear as a gash appeared there. Colin flattened himself against the wall next to the door.
Reaching into a pocket, Colin pulled out a small brass canister. He tossed it round the door frame into the room, and closed his eyes. A loud whumph noise came from inside as the flashbang went off, and Colin charged in. He saw his quarry over by the far window, pulling his fingers from his ears, and aimed his truncheon. Not enough power for another lightning bolt, but the end popped open and a gunshot rang out.
The Ripper was already diving out the window onto the fire escape, and Colin cursed. The man's reactions were too damn quick, and Colin was running out of tricks. But he was so close. He wasn't giving up now.
Colin clambered out onto the fire escape, and shot up it as fast as he could. He blocked another opportunistic long-range knife strike from the Ripper as he crested the roof, and then straightened up, breathing hard but relaxing. Across the roof, not fifty yards away, the Ripper did the same.
The man had finally made a real mistake. There was no other way off this rooftop, and the street was four stories below. Colin allowed himself a nasty smile as he got a good look at the man who'd made his life hell for the last five months.
He wore simple and cheap clothes – hard-wearing cloth trousers, white cotton shirt with the sleeves up, and a butcher's apron. Did he work in an abbatoir, maybe? They fit well and were well-pressed, but they were all peppered with flecks of blood. The apron was covered in it, soaked in it for so long it looked stiff. The man himself was almost as tall as Colin, but slim. He didn't look malnourished like a lot of Whitechapel's underprivileged, either – some way or another, he'd been eating well. Colin forced himself not to think about that.
His face wasn't what Colin been expecting. A lot of criminals had a certain toughened look to them, from a lifetime of fights. A broken nose, at the very least. The Ripper looked almost boyish, despite the brown goatee on his chin. He grinned at Colin, and twirled a knife.
"Well, well, boss, ain't I in a pickle?"
Colin's voice remained hard. "Surrender yourself to the Queen's justice, and I promise you a fair trial, and, God willing, a swift and painless drop to mark your end. It's more than you deserve."
The Ripper tutted. "Nah, you don't want to do that to little old me! Not when you was having so much fun chasing me. Don't say you wasn't, I seen you run past all them poor devils I left for you on the way. One of your own, even! And you a policeman as well… what kind of copper just lets people die in the street, eh?"
"If I stop you, it's better in the long run. Don't try and hold some moral high ground when you're the one that cut them up in the first place, Ripper."
"Call me Jacky." The Ripper bowed. "At your service, boss."
"That your name?"
"Nah, nah. But I'm making better use of it than the last chappie, ain't I? He had the right idea, but no vision! In the end, all his book learnin' did him no good when I sat him down to have a little chat about his legacy. So I took his name, took his style, and carried on his game of having a laugh with the police."
"I'm not laughing, Ripper." Colin tightened his grip on his truncheon.
"I told you, call me Jacky. An' of course you're not laughin', coz you was bleedin' useless at the game! I may not be as lettered as you or the last chap, but I ain't stupid. I got no plans to meet my maker just yet, so I tried my best not to be caught. Like a fool, I thought you'd try your best to catch me, but apparently you ain't never played cops and robbers as a kid. I watched you draggin' your heels, getting' nowhere, and said to myself, Jacky, if anyone's gonna help the poor bobbies out it's gonna be you. So I decided to have the fat man send a little message, little place to start looking. Of course," his face turned sour, "he couldn't even do that right, could he? Sometimes I just don't understand people. I know you know what I'm on about there, boss."
"You know nothing about-" Colin stopped and forced himself to calm down. "No. I'm here to arrest you, not to debate you. Surrender, Ripper. You're wanted dead or alive. I don't particularly care which, but I'd prefer a confession, trial and execution to us putting together the pieces after the fact."
The Ripper smirked, and twirled his knife, strolling around the rooftop seemingly lost in thought. "Oh, dearie me. And here's me without an exit and all. I could try and cut my way out… but you're a bit of a tough cookie, aincha? Nah, what to do, what to do?" He paused suddenly, and stood still, right at the edge. "Oh, here we go. See ya next time, boss."
Then he held his arms straight out to the sides and fell backwards off the roof.
"No!" Colin barked, and shot forwards, but it was too late. He reached the edge so quickly he damn near fell off himself, and looked down.
The dark waters of the Thames looked back, and Jack the Ripper was nowhere to be seen.
---
Chapter 1 - Rip and Slash
"Another bloody Ripper murder," growled Detective Inspector Colin Wallis. "How many does this make now?"Chapter 1 - Rip and Slash
"This brings it up to twenty-four, sir," one of his detectives said from the hall outside, where he'd been patting the constable unlucky enough to be first on the scene on the back. The sickly-sweet smell of vomit lanced through the tiny room, but barely made a dent in the overpowering scent of blood. Even the general stink of London wafting in through the open window couldn't suppress it completely, and didn't that just say it all.
Flecks of red, already fading to brown, were visible on nearly every surface, every piece of furniture. The wooden floor was sticky with it; the bedding soaked where the corpse lay on it.
The girl hadn't died well. Sometimes corpses just looked asleep to Colin, at least if you got to them before too much bloating had occurred. The Ripper's victims were never so lucky. This poor young woman looked like she'd suffered an accident in one of the factories Colin had worked in as a lad. There were numerous small cuts along her limbs, which increased in frequency towards the extremities until her hands and feet were nothing more than a mass of bloody flesh. There were much deeper and larger cuts in her torso – all the organs seemed to be there, this time, which was a mercy.
Her face… well. The less said about her face, the better. Finally, a cheap table knife had been plunged into her heart, pinning a scrap of paper to the body. From the looks of it, it had been torn from a book, and Colin could see handwritten script on it.
Judging from the sheer scope of the blood spatters on the furniture, the vast majority of the cuts had been inflicted while the girl was still alive.
Colin had long since gotten used to that kind of thing after over twelve years with the Metropolitan Police Service, but he could see why the constable had felt the need to contaminate the crime scene with his breakfast. He'd still need a stern lecture from Colin about the value of a strong stomach and stiff upper lip, though. It was only a corpse when all was said and done, after all.
"Do we know who she is?" he said to no-one in particular, still examining the body. Another of his detectives answered.
"According to the landlord, she was the tenant here, one Aster Russel. Not much family to speak of. Mother dead years ago, unknown father, a half-brother that looked after her, which is why she was able to afford a room of her own at all. We'll send someone round to give him the news today."
"Hrm." As the lead investigator, that should really have been Colin's job, but it was well known in the Whitechapel station that Detective Inspector Wallis simply didn't do home visits. It wasn't like Colin didn't try, but he just didn't have the slightest idea how to act around grieving people. As far as he was concerned, once he'd told them his intention to catch the killer there wasn't anything more to be said. Personally, if Colin's loved ones had been murdered he'd have been more comforted by the thought that the police were actually doing their jobs and working to collar the killer than by some meaningless platitudes and a pat on the shoulder.
Mind you, Colin would have had to actually have loved ones for someone to kill them in the first place. He didn't, partly for that very reason and partly because, well, he was too busy actually doing his job and working to collar killers.
There were a lot of them around lately. Whitechapel was, in Colin's opinion, an absolute hole. Overcrowded, noisy, filled with the underclasses and all the problems they imported from wherever the hell they all came from; no wonder everyone drank to forget their problems, which of course only made the whole thing worse.
Colin knew a lot of his officers didn't share his opinion. He could hardly blame them – they hadn't been born here and didn't have any nostalgic memories to brighten their view of the place.
Shaking his head, Colin removed the table knife from the girl's heart, and carefully folded the piece of paper away into a pocket. He tapped his truncheon against the floor a couple of times, and the detectives and constables around the room and hall fell silent. When Colin addressed them, his voice was stern.
"Thank you all for coming so quickly. As I'm sure you've guessed, we're treating this as another Ripper case. I know it's frustrating to watch this devil rack up body after body, but every scrap of information we gain could be vital to eventually catching this man. Therefore, I want you to work as hard as possible on tracing the victim's last known movements. In a district like this, nothing happens without someone somewhere knowing about it, so keep digging. Check her work, her known haunts, her family… well. I don't need to tell you your jobs.
"If you find any leads – anything at all – you know where to find me. Do not attempt to corner this man yourself. He is certain to be armed and dangerous, and if our guesses are right may possibly be Talented." Like me. "If you find him, I want to be the one taking him down. I'm the only one with a shot of actually surviving the experience."
Plus there was no way Colin was going to let anyone else get that particular feather in their cap. The Ripper was his bloody target, and he'd put in entirely too much effort not to make the arrest himself. By the time he was through, no-one would remember Jack the Ripper as anything except Colin Wallis' ticket to Chief Constable.
---
When Colin had inherited his office from his predecessor, it had looked exactly the same as any other-
No, actually, that was a complete lie. Colin's old boss might have been a hero to Queen and populace alike, and would certainly be the head of the Metropolitan Police Service today had Madame Tigress not torn him in two, but the man wouldn't know what 'organised working environment' meant if you wrote it in the sky using one of his jetpacks. Colin had started excavating the piles of paperwork, accolades, and mementoes on every surface the day he'd moved in.
He was usually pretty good at organising things, and had started by meticulously filing everything in its proper archive, evidence box, or department. In this case, however, he'd decided that in order to really make headway he'd need a shovel, a wheelbarrow and probably a handpicked team from the Royal Geological Society, and had taken the entire lot and torched it out in the courtyard.
Now, it was neat, efficient, and exactly as Colin liked it. Once he'd really gotten started on settling in, the office resembled a workshop more than anything, although the old desk still took pride of place. It was a reminder of his predecessor, and besides the thing was too heavy to lift by three strong coppers. Colin half-suspected it was hiding more paperwork somewhere, but hadn't dared to check.
Colin's paperwork took up exactly two drawers – an in-tray, and an out-tray. It was pretty easy to tell which was which. The out-tray was the one filled almost a foot deep with the day's processed paperwork. The in-tray was the one that would have been gathering dust with nothing in it at all, if Colin had been so slovenly as to let such a thing as dust into his workspace.
The rest of the space was filled with worktops done in sturdy pine. These in turn were filled with various tools, bits of wire, gears and cogs, and everything else a man of the more… technical persuasion might need to build his various knick-knacks. Everything had a place, and there was a place for everything.
In this case, Colin was working with a special locked drawer that had recently contained, among other things, twenty-three scraps of card in a beige folder. These weren't forms or loose minutes or official statements; the drawer was in the 'evidence' cabinet and the folder had just two words on it:
Ripper Letters
In a minute the folder would contain twenty-four scraps of card, but for now Colin had all the scraps side-by-side in order to better compare them with the one found pinned to Aster Russell's body. First things first, then.
The letter was written on a post card, but hadn't actually been posted. It could have been picked up anywhere, the post offices were full of them. It had been addressed to 'Dear Boss' – meaning Detective Inspector Wallis, from context. The text was handwritten, in a looping style, using red ink (not blood – Colin had tested for that straightaway). The letters were quite large, and there were a few blots of ink on the page, but the penmanship indicated an educated man.
Three of the letters had been slightly separated on the worktop. These were the oldest, the card yellowing slightly and curling at the edges. The writing on these was slightly smaller, neater, and these ones had been posted, although the stamps were almost falling off at this point. Besides that, they were similar – a letter from the purported 'Jack the Ripper', to 'Boss', daring the police to catch him and gloating about his crimes. The first three were more graphic but less philosophical, and spoke less directly to 'Boss'.
Colin had his theories, but without the man in front of him that was all they were. Sighing, he read the most recent letter again.
Dear Boss,
Oh dear oh dear it looks like Ive done another one what am I like ha ha. Sort of makes you wonder if you lot are even trying to catch old Jack I certainly didnt see no coppers around. Id hate to think you werent paying attenshun or maybe you have something more important to do? Aint it funny how the longer you leave me alone the more attenshun and fame you get for going after me and all. Im sure youre trying your best tho.
Still dont leave me alone too long or who knows what I might take it into my head to do ha ha. I can see your having a hard time so I left a few more clues this time around. Hope to see you soon Boss and Good Luck.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
If Colin had been younger, he might have been angry at the implication that he was deliberately drawing out the chase to further his career. These days it didn't register, although he made sure to confiscate the letters for his own personal examination as soon as possible.
It wouldn't do to have the men spreading rumours. That kind of talk only hurt morale.
Stony-faced, Colin filed all the letters away into their drawer. Then, because it was no good just waiting around while his men investigated, he allowed himself a little time to indulge his Talent. It was no accident his office looked like a workshop. While the Whitechapel station had traditionally been the home of those Talented in engineering and the natural sciences, it was only after Colin took over as Detective Inspector that it started putting out devices that a normal copper could carry in his pocket on a beat.
He didn't like to do it too much, because to his mind there was no substitute for hard work and discipline – and besides, not one of the other policemen could perform the proper maintenance on his stuff, and unreliable tools may as well be in the hands of the criminals as far as Colin was concerned.
On the other hand, it did help reduce his workload significantly when PC Bloggs could send an entire bar fight to its knees clutching their ears with a single blow on his enhanced whistle, and send a telegram about the incident by dictating to his helmet.
So Colin carefully hung his jacket and waistcoat on the door, slipped an apron over his shirt, rolled his sleeves up and began to tinker. He was between projects at the moment, but the radio transmitters in his officers' badges had started wearing down, and a few had handed them in for repairs. Always work to do.
He didn't know how long he'd been at it when he was interrupted. He fought down the irritation he usually felt when someone got in the way of his work and snapped, "Yes?"
The red-faced lad, who'd just run up the stairs by the look of him, paused to catch his breath. "Sir! We've got a witness!"
"What?" The Ripper never, ever left a witness. It wasn't that he was some master planner, one step ahead of the police – it was just that the police hadn't ever found anyone who'd seen him in action.
Of course, Colin realised with a sinking feeling, maybe they'd have had more luck looking in the river. Just because the Ripper liked to make grisly exhibitions of his victims didn't mean he had to do it every time.
"The victim's boss, one Peter Somer. Saw her leaving the pub she worked at with some guy, he says. But… I dunno, it's weird, sir. That was as much as he said, then asked to see you. Wouldn't speak to no-one else, sir."
Colin was already pulling on his coat, and spoke while hurrying out of the police station. "I wouldn't have it any other way. Where's the pub?"
"Ten Bells, sir. Corner of Commercial Street and-"
"I know it. Hold the fort, will you, lad?"
Without waiting for a reply, Colin strode into the street and hailed a cabbie. Finally. Finally an actual lead, after months of nothing at all! He thumbed the butt of his truncheon where it swung at his hip. Oh yes, he was going to make the most of this.
The Ripper had made his first and last mistake.
---
The Ten Bells was, well, a bit of a dive. The wood-slat floor was sticky with spilled drinks and worse, the windows let in just enough light to illuminate the pipe smoke, and there was exactly one drink on offer, that being 'ale, warm and cheap'. It was the kind of place Colin would have gone for in a hot second had his local not been the also acceptably grimy Kings Stores on Widegate Street.
It was usually busy, even at this time of day. Mass unemployment and overcrowding meant that often people just didn't have another place to go. Well, they'd have to find another place for a few hours – Colin had cleared the place out so he could talk to Peter Somer in private, without worrying about the press or worse listening in. He had officers cordoning off the area, and a couple more providing close security, hovering somewhere nearby.
He sat across from the owner at a small table in the centre of the bar area. It wobbled slightly whenever the other man shifted his weight, which was often. Peter Somer was a stout man who'd clearly been fitter in his youth. Although his hair was thinning and his nose was ruddy, he had muscles in his arms like steel cable – from lifting kegs and stores, Colin assumed. Curiously, his arms and hands were heavily bandaged. A bar worker could expect to pick up a few scrapes and cuts here and there… but not this many. Colin filed the information away for later.
Somer was constantly fidgeting and glancing out of the window, and though the room was cold in the February air he had beads of sweat in his forehead. More than once, he flinched when someone passed by, and clutched the arms of the chair he sat in.
Colin had seen quite a few nervous people in his time, even a few nervous witnesses. He hadn't seen any who were still on edge while surrounded by London's finest – under his own personal protection, even!
He regarded Somer with a flat expression and said, "I am Detective Inspector Colin Wallis. You wanted to speak to me. Talk."
Somer pulled at his collar and said, "Right. Right… I got a clue about the Ripper. Jack. Jack the Ripper. Him."
"That's what I'm here for," said Colin, carefully keeping his voice level. "What's the information?"
"Th- the clue is, 'not a doctor like the other one, but still a worker or flesh'."
"I'm sorry?"
"'Not a doctor like the other one, but still a worker of flesh.'"
Colin paused. "You're going to have to explain that a little better, Mr. Somer. Are you saying you knew a previous killer who was a doctor, and this Ripper is a separate man?"
Somer groaned and put his head in his hands. "Look, I can't- just, not a doctor-"
"Yes, thank you, I get the message," Colin interrupted, a hint of coldness in his voice now. He looked sternly over his spectacles at the other man. "We at the Metropolitan Police service take prank tips very seriously indeed. I'd advise you to think very carefully about just what you want to say."
By now Somer's face was ashen, and he gaped uselessly at Colin. After a moment Colin prompted, "Well?"
"N- n-"
Colin sighed. Clearly something was up beyond the usual problem of a flaky witness. Most witnesses were either only too happy to give out far too many details in the hopes of being helpful, or else were the hard-bitten criminal sort that stayed tight-lipped. What didn't happen was witnesses repeating a single specific phrase to the exclusion of everything else. There was something else happening here.
"Mr. Somer. How about we try this another way?" Colin offered as kindly as he could manage. "Start from the top. How did you come by this piece of information? What were you doing? You don't have to give me any more clues if you don't want to."
Somer looked slightly sick. "I- I can't. I'm not allowed."
That set off alarm bells. An idea started to form. "Not allowed? By whom?"
"No, no, no..." the man whimpered.
Connections were being made now that Colin knew what to look for. "You've met him? You've met the Ripper?" The serial killer had clearly made an impression. Somer was all but hiding under the table and sobbing.
"What did he tell you? What did he look like? When was he- God's grace, man, pull yourself together!" Finally losing his temper, Colin slammed his fist down on the table and pulled the landlord upright by his collar.
The man's face was a mess by now, eyes red from terrified tears. He took a shuddering breath and said, "I'm not allowed- he said- my family, he had pictures-" He almost broke down again, but stayed steady this time. "He, he said I had to give you the clue. N- 'Not a doctor like the last one, but still a worker of flesh.' Jack the Ripper said you had to get the message. Had to be you. Not just the police. He made me say it again and again so I'd remember. He hurt me if I got it wrong. Then he left with- with poor Aster..." He squeezed his eyes shut, and shuddered.
Well. That changed things. Someone who could confirm the Ripper's identity if necessary, a positive witness linking him to the last known location of one of the victims. All they needed was to calm him down and get him talking about the man who'd threatened him, get a description, maybe take in some likely lads for a line-up.
"Mr Somer," said Colin slowly and calmly. "I need you to listen very carefully. I understand you've been through an awful ordeal, but the important thing is that you are safe now. Do you understand me? The police can protect you, from the Ripper or anyone else. We can protect your family. With your help, we can put this madman behind bars where he belongs, and stop him from hurting anyone ever again. But we need you to be a man and face your fears. Think about his victims. Think about Aster. Do you really want to let this devil roam free a moment more when you could do something to help catch him? Good God, man, you may be our only hope!"
Somer stared up at Colin with something approaching awe. He said, in a very quiet voice, "You promise you can protect me? You can find where he's keeping my boys?"
"I give you my personal guarantee that the Metropolitan Police Service will do everything in its power to help," said Colin solemnly. "You don't even need to go home if you don't want to, we can put you up in one of our cells until we've caught the Ripper." Yes, there was not a chance on God's green earth that Colin would let his star witness slip out of his hands if he could help it.
Slowly, the stout man nodded. "O-Okay. I'll help." He looked down at himself, seeming to notice for the first time how much he was trembling. "God's truth, I'm in a state, ain't I? Can I have a moment to freshen up before I start? My bathroom's only upstairs, won't take a mo."
"Go," said Colin. Somer gave a grateful nod, and went upstairs. Colin checked that his security cordon was still in place, and one of his constables followed him up.
The other came and sat down in the seat the pub owner had just vacated. "Reckon he'll give us anything useful, guv?"
Colin scratched his beard. "Usually, I'd say it was hard to tell. He's clearly terrified, not thinking straight. That has a way of muddling descriptions to hell and back – scary people seem taller, that sort of thing. And I'd wager he's had a stiff drink or three before I got here, am I right, Roberts?"
His detective nodded. "Like a fish, he were."
"From the colour of his nose, not the first of the day either, I'll wager. So most of the time he'd be dashed near useless as a witness. But in this case..."
"He's all we got?"
"Yes. I suppose we have our answer as to how the Ripper never seems to leave a witness – he simply scares the bottle out of anyone who might get close enough to see him at work… if he doesn't kill them out of hand. We only have as much as we do because he deliberately decided to leave a clue." Colin smiled a grim smile. "His poor luck that Mr Somer believed, in the end, more in the power of the law than the knife of the criminal."
"Beats me how one man can be that scary," Roberts said in hushed tones. "I mean, if it were something like the Dragon Triad I could understand. But a single killer? No matter how good he is, he's no match for us, eh guv?"
Colin lowered his voice. "I've suspected for a while that the Ripper may be Talented, as a matter of fact."
"He never is!"
"So I believe. I think it's something subtle – not something the Crown would notice or get involved with. Just enough to make it difficult to get evidence we'd expect to see in a normal killing, and enough to be terrifying beyond belief to someone who's never seen a Talent before. Well, I suppose we'll get the details from Mr Somer."
"Yeah, if he ever gets ready. And here I thought my missus took a… while..." The two men looked at each other, then at the stairs.
Colin was faster to his feet, knocking the table to one side as he sprinted from a standing start. Across the floor, up the stairs, along the corridor in less than five seconds. He rounded the corner-
Blood, bubbling from the slit in Peter Somer's throat. Blood, in a spreading puddle from the slumped form of the constable who'd gone with him. Blood, all over the clothes of a figure ducking out of the open window.
Colin met the eyes of a smirking face, for one fleeting instant.
The man dropped down into the streets a fraction of a second before Colin pressed a button on the handle of his truncheon. Lighting lanced into empty air, and Colin cursed.
No! He was not catching his first glimpse of his foe just to let him slip away! He accelerated, making a running dive through the window truncheon-first, like a mad fencer's lunge. The second the truncheon emerged he felt a jolt through it, so hard he damn near dropped the thing mid-leap. What in blazes? He hadn't heard a gunshot.
As he landed and rolled, he caught sight of the running figure, and a glint of steel. Colin sprinted after it, taking a moment to inspect his beloved weapon. There was a long groove in it about half-way up the length, as though someone had taken an axe to it. Colin shook his head, and focused on his quarry.
As a policeman, there was a minimum standard of fitness that Colin was obliged to maintain. The fitness instructors were utter fanatics about the importance of fresh air and exercise.
Even these instructors thought Colin took his physical training a bit too far.
He practically flew down the narrow streets in pursuit of the Ripper, feet pounding, arms pumping. There wasn't a man on the force who could outrun him, and he'd never met a criminal yet who he couldn't run down and capture.
Jack the Ripper was, somehow, staying ahead. He wasn't that he was all that quick. He was, for sure, but Colin was definitely the faster of the two. But the killer used the streets and alleys and passageways like he'd been born in them, and Colin could never quite get a clear line of sight. Whenever he rounded one corner, there the other man would be, just ducking round the next. All he could see was brief glimpses of someone running just as hard as he was, and the occasional flash of bright metal.
Oh, and the blood.
Wherever the Ripper went, people bled. Colin could just about see him take a wild swing backwards every now and again – and whenever he did, there were screams as anyone nearby suddenly sprouted long, gaping cuts. As he rushed past and leapt over the bodies and the wounded, he noticed that they looked almost like blows from a sword. Was this the Talent that had chopped a gash in his truncheon from half a street away?
On they ran. The Ripper seemed to be heading roughly south and west, although he made so many twists and turns it was hard to be sure. After a while he ducked into an unlocked housing block, and slammed the door behind him. Colin skidded to a stop, and kicked it down. Some instinct made him raise his truncheon in front of his face, and another gash appeared in it as the Ripper disappeared up the stairs.
Colin could see him sprinting up, taking them two at a time, and smiled. Standing in the centre of the stairwell, he raised his truncheon, and twisted the butt a quarter turn to the right. The last third sprouted hooks, and shot off with a hiss of released gas, trailing a thin and light metal cable behind it. The grappling hook attached to the top floor bannister, and Colin was pulled up the stairwell. He'd drawn his revolver by the time he drew level with the killer, and aimed a shot-
It was struck from his hand in a shower of sparks as the Ripper fell back into an apartment, slashing with knives in both hands. Colin cursed and vaulted the bannister, releasing the hook with another deft twist. Just before he entered the apartment he paused, and plaster flew from the wall next to his ear as a gash appeared there. Colin flattened himself against the wall next to the door.
Reaching into a pocket, Colin pulled out a small brass canister. He tossed it round the door frame into the room, and closed his eyes. A loud whumph noise came from inside as the flashbang went off, and Colin charged in. He saw his quarry over by the far window, pulling his fingers from his ears, and aimed his truncheon. Not enough power for another lightning bolt, but the end popped open and a gunshot rang out.
The Ripper was already diving out the window onto the fire escape, and Colin cursed. The man's reactions were too damn quick, and Colin was running out of tricks. But he was so close. He wasn't giving up now.
Colin clambered out onto the fire escape, and shot up it as fast as he could. He blocked another opportunistic long-range knife strike from the Ripper as he crested the roof, and then straightened up, breathing hard but relaxing. Across the roof, not fifty yards away, the Ripper did the same.
The man had finally made a real mistake. There was no other way off this rooftop, and the street was four stories below. Colin allowed himself a nasty smile as he got a good look at the man who'd made his life hell for the last five months.
He wore simple and cheap clothes – hard-wearing cloth trousers, white cotton shirt with the sleeves up, and a butcher's apron. Did he work in an abbatoir, maybe? They fit well and were well-pressed, but they were all peppered with flecks of blood. The apron was covered in it, soaked in it for so long it looked stiff. The man himself was almost as tall as Colin, but slim. He didn't look malnourished like a lot of Whitechapel's underprivileged, either – some way or another, he'd been eating well. Colin forced himself not to think about that.
His face wasn't what Colin been expecting. A lot of criminals had a certain toughened look to them, from a lifetime of fights. A broken nose, at the very least. The Ripper looked almost boyish, despite the brown goatee on his chin. He grinned at Colin, and twirled a knife.
"Well, well, boss, ain't I in a pickle?"
Colin's voice remained hard. "Surrender yourself to the Queen's justice, and I promise you a fair trial, and, God willing, a swift and painless drop to mark your end. It's more than you deserve."
The Ripper tutted. "Nah, you don't want to do that to little old me! Not when you was having so much fun chasing me. Don't say you wasn't, I seen you run past all them poor devils I left for you on the way. One of your own, even! And you a policeman as well… what kind of copper just lets people die in the street, eh?"
"If I stop you, it's better in the long run. Don't try and hold some moral high ground when you're the one that cut them up in the first place, Ripper."
"Call me Jacky." The Ripper bowed. "At your service, boss."
"That your name?"
"Nah, nah. But I'm making better use of it than the last chappie, ain't I? He had the right idea, but no vision! In the end, all his book learnin' did him no good when I sat him down to have a little chat about his legacy. So I took his name, took his style, and carried on his game of having a laugh with the police."
"I'm not laughing, Ripper." Colin tightened his grip on his truncheon.
"I told you, call me Jacky. An' of course you're not laughin', coz you was bleedin' useless at the game! I may not be as lettered as you or the last chap, but I ain't stupid. I got no plans to meet my maker just yet, so I tried my best not to be caught. Like a fool, I thought you'd try your best to catch me, but apparently you ain't never played cops and robbers as a kid. I watched you draggin' your heels, getting' nowhere, and said to myself, Jacky, if anyone's gonna help the poor bobbies out it's gonna be you. So I decided to have the fat man send a little message, little place to start looking. Of course," his face turned sour, "he couldn't even do that right, could he? Sometimes I just don't understand people. I know you know what I'm on about there, boss."
"You know nothing about-" Colin stopped and forced himself to calm down. "No. I'm here to arrest you, not to debate you. Surrender, Ripper. You're wanted dead or alive. I don't particularly care which, but I'd prefer a confession, trial and execution to us putting together the pieces after the fact."
The Ripper smirked, and twirled his knife, strolling around the rooftop seemingly lost in thought. "Oh, dearie me. And here's me without an exit and all. I could try and cut my way out… but you're a bit of a tough cookie, aincha? Nah, what to do, what to do?" He paused suddenly, and stood still, right at the edge. "Oh, here we go. See ya next time, boss."
Then he held his arms straight out to the sides and fell backwards off the roof.
"No!" Colin barked, and shot forwards, but it was too late. He reached the edge so quickly he damn near fell off himself, and looked down.
The dark waters of the Thames looked back, and Jack the Ripper was nowhere to be seen.
---
Next time: Victory on the Victory
Chapter 2 - Victory on the Victory
- Location
- Probably at sea
Chapter 2 - Victory on the Victory
Atlantic Ocean, off Cape Trafalgar, 1805
The fact that Horatio Nelson's cabin boy was in fact a cabin girl was one of the Royal Navy's worst-kept secrets.
Usually this would have caused no end of problems. Life on board being largely at the mercy of the uncontrollable wind and tide, sailors were great believers in luck, which made them a superstitious lot. A woman on board was terrible luck, to say nothing of the entirely mundane issues it caused among a bunch of red-blooded men in close quarters with very little outlet for any urges they may or may not have.
'Lucky Jack' got a pass, though. For one thing, he was Nelson's – not in that sense, no matter the rumours in the mess about the Admiral's roving eye. He had, however, been his personal steward and constant shadow for twelve years, and no-one wanted to disappoint the Defender of Britain. He also acted, unofficially, as an extra bodyguard, and this was the other reason why it was very foolish sailor indeed who dared to try and find what was underneath Lucky Jack's breeches.
The last man who'd tried had been a midshipman from money, training on the Victory. When the Admiral and his flag captain Hardy joined the ship, the young officer had become rather overexcited, indulged in too much port, and tried it on with the young 'lad'.
By the time Lucky Jack had finished, the hapless midshipman looked like he'd had a squad of Royal Marines go to work on him. Lord Nelson had dismissed him from the Service immediately, but had to wait a week until he was well enough that the surgeon would let him transfer onto a ship headed back to Portsmouth.
Those who hadn't sailed with Jack before had given him a wide berth after that – not that they saw all that much of him in the working day, of course. Most of the time, Lucky Jack would be with Lord Nelson. There was an invisible wall between the common sailors and their captain, never mind the legendary admiral, and that wall was called 'discipline'. Officers weren't your mates – they could be friendly, if you dipped in and got a good captain, but never friends.
Jack lived his life on the other side of that wall, and the sailors were always just a little bit careful of him, whether he was eating with them in the mess or sleeping next to them in the nest of hammocks that made up the enlisted accommodation on board. He never came with the lads on runs ashore, which was probably all for the best.
As for Jack himself, he was terrifyingly professional about, well, everything. It wasn't that he never smiled, or anything like that. But he did take everything seriously. It probably came from following around the Navy's rising star for over a decade.
And no-one had found anything that Jack wasn't the best at. In boarding actions he was first in the fray, and emerged from the smoke when all was said and done without a scratch on him, a bloody dirk and axe in his hand. Normal snipers hid in the rigging when two ships came alongside and took potshots at enemy officers when they poked their head onto the upper deck; Lucky Jack had, they said, earned his nickname by unloading a brace of pistols at a French ship two hundred yards distant and hitting the captain, his first mate, and two petty officers between the eyes.
(Although some others said his nickname was because ever since Nelson had picked Lucky Jack up in Naples, no ship the admiral had been on ever ran into a storm or into doldrums. Being a good luck charm against ill weather went a long way towards excusing Jack for being a woman in disguise.)
So it said a lot that even with both the hero Nelson and his hypercompetent shadow on board, there was still an air of trepidation aboard the Victory. The wait before the battle seemed interminable, and even the man himself could be seen on the poop deck, looking out over the ocean.
---
Calvi, Corsica, 1794
Horatio hit the ground, breath leaving his lungs in a gasp. He looked up at the little girl who really had no business being at an artillery bombardment, dressed as a boy or no.
"Jack, why-"
"Keeps you safe. Not sure what would have happened, but you're better off if I pushed you than if I hadn't."
"Hm." Horatio was still getting used to all of this. Jack – or rather, Fortuna – claimed to know the correct path to every victory. She was unable to explain just how she came by such knowledge, but had proven it sufficiently to Horatio that he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. He stood up, and assumed his previous position at the sandbag wall. There was a hole, clearly from some kind of shot, in the one directly below his head. "Jack, this would have missed regardless."
Fortuna shrugged. "I asked how to keep you safe, and that was what I found. It would be safer still to send me by myself, you know."
"I cannot send a ten-year-old to assault an entire town."
"Why not? You know I could do it, and not take a single scratch either." The words would have sounded arrogant coming from anyone else.
"The men would never stand for it, and if not them, I could never justify it to Lord Hood. Besides, the men need practice at their gun drill. If not now, when?"
The girl pouted. "Fine. You should have put the guns where I said as well. We could have silenced the enemy positions on the first day."
She was probably right. But Horatio had never felt comfortable micro-managing his men. Sure, he could have given them Fortuna's precise list of where to place their guns, including angles and exact times to fire, but he wanted to lead men and not automatons. They knew their business. They'd get the job done.
So instead he reached out and ruffled Fortuna's hair. The girl pouted, then spun and kicked the nearest gun just as it fired. The projectile sailed about a foot off its intended course, crashing through a window and shattering the cannon that had been occupying the position. Sticking her tongue out, Fortuna went to bully some Royal Marines.
---
London, England, 1797
"It's an honour to have you along, sir, if you don't mind my saying so," Thomas Fremantle, captain of the Seahorse, said.
"Not at all. The Seahorse is a marvellous ship, and I am keen to see the calibre of men she shall sail with in the coming years." Not to mention, it was one that may well come under the command of Rear Admiral Nelson in the Mediterranean down the line. That being the case, he wanted to make sure she was crewed by reliable men, and had decided to oversee captain Fremantle as he and the Impress Service recruited new sailors.
"Ha! Unpolished diamonds, so to speak, sir. Though we may be lucky and catch ourselves a Blessed, if Wellington hasn't snapped them all up by now."
Horatio looked at his 'cabin boy', in actuality his closest confidante and advisor, following in his shadow as usual. "Let's hope we are so lucky. Well then, captain, crack on, as they say."
Press-ganging was just a fact of life in the Royal Navy. A volunteer was better than any three pressed men – but there was a war on, and anyone with his wits and all four limbs was more than welcome in His Majesty's Navy. The Impress Service was supposed to only recruit seamen between eighteen and thirty-five, but as the number of ships swelled there was an increasingly loose definition of what a seaman was. These days, anyone who knew one end of a ship from the other would do.
To Horatio's mind, it was a fair practice. As an employer, the Royal Navy offered opportunities few others could – especially if the sailors were lucky and got a ship that captured another, for then they would receive a share of the profit.
A man who worked hard and was lucky had a chance of retiring with enough money to own his own bar, and that was an opportunity not to be sneezed at. Those pressed from the local jails were even luckier – instead of a few months behind bars and a life as a criminal they got a fresh start and a fair go.
Things started becoming interesting, however, when those Blessed with power of one sort or another were involved. They had started appearing sometime in the last decade – men (and women too) with the power to throw fire like a circus juggler, or who were stronger than ten yoked oxen. Both the Impress Service and the Militia Quota offered a special commission for any recruiter who could convince one of the Blessed to join up, helped by the promise of double pay for the individual involved.
Fortuna was extremely good at finding those Blessed with particularly strong powers and persuading them to join. Some of the most formidable sailors and marines Horatio had ever seen had been Fortuna's finds.
Now, she tugged on Horatio's sleeve, and pointed to a nondescript door of a side street, clearly leading up to a residence.
Of course, you couldn't just barge into someone's home and drag them out of their bed. They had to be in a public space such as a bar or tavern.
"Petty officer, does that look like a public space to you?" Horatio asked, pointing where Fortuna had indicated. The burly recruiter marched up to the door and lined himself up. Horatio, Fortuna and Fremantle dutifully turned their backs.
CRASH.
"Yessir! Door was open and everything, sir!"
"Very good." Horatio nodded to Fortuna, who stepped forward – and then stopped abruptly as a shaft of light lanced out of the doorway, melting a hole in the brickwork on the other side of the alley.
As soon as it faded, she lunged inside, weaving left and right to avoid more light beams coming from the man inside. It wasn't that she was dodging them, exactly – she just never seemed to be where they were. Once she swept a copper-bottomed pan from the wall and reflected one beam into the path of another, cancelling both out and allowing her to close to within a step of the Blessed man inside the house. He seemed to change into light and flickered over to the other side of the room. Horatio stepped inside.
The battle was chaotic, in a dark house lit by flashes of brilliance. The man didn't seem to be using his full strength, if his initial blast was anything to go by. Very likely he didn't want to hurt his neighbours. That community spirit would stand him in good stead aboard.
Within moments the sounds of fighting ceased. Unhurried, Horatio strode into what appeared to be the man's bedroom. The Blessed man held one arm out towards Fortuna, who pointed a pistol at – another man sitting terrified in the bed. Ah.
"Come now," Horaio said, fixing the Blessed with a level stare. "Are you or are you not a king's man? Stop being childish and start serving your country. You've been given a great gift, a great Blessing, and as I'm sure you know the king has decreed you must join the armed forces." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the King's Shilling. He pressed it into the man's outstretched hand and closed the fingers around it. "Congratulations. You've just joined the greatest navy on the high seas."
His job done, he nodded to Fortuna. She would stay behind and finish the job of persuading the newest crewman on the Seahorse, who was now slumped against the wall sobbing. Just another thing she was good at.
A good thing she was so adept at recruiting heroes. Horatio wasn't feeling like much of one at the moment.
---
Naples, Italy, 1793
There had been a hole in the air. There had been a pit. There had been a monster. And there had been a girl, frozen with her knife inches from the thing's neck.
They had killed it, the girl and the officer. Between them, they had managed the impossible. Between them, they had managed to find a way back to Naples and to the Agamemnon. The problem came after. If what the girl – Fortuna – had said was true, there was another monster out there, plotting the destruction of all God's creatures.
Horatio would have called it impossible. But he had been to that other world, had seen the thing that unfolded itself in unholy splendour at the bottom of the pit. If there was a possibility that such a creature would need to be fought again, how could he shirk such a duty and call himself a man?
He would need help, of course. This other being, this Warrior, would not be half-dead and broken like the first. It would not be killed by a little girl and a foolish man holding a cheap metal knife together. No, such a being would require strategy. It would require strength. It would require heroes.
Thus, it was clearly providence that had led Horatio to Fortuna's side, as he was perfectly placed to supply all three. First, though, he would need to be far more than a mere captain if he was to begin gathering forces. Fortuna said she would help him achieve that.
It was possibly inappropriate of him to be sceptical of her abilities after what they had done, but it seemed impossible. Surely perfect knowledge was the domain of God alone? But nevertheless Fortuna had defeated him soundly at every test they had devised – in chess, in cards, in dice, she indeed seemed blessed with either the Devil's own luck or the power of augury.
Horatio had considered adopting her and claiming that she was an illegitimate daughter, but quite apart from the damage to his reputation it seemed unlikely she would be allowed on board even so. Nevertheless, he was sure the solution would present itself to him – or more likely to Fortuna – in time.
After all, together they were assured victory, were they not?
---
Atlantic Ocean, off Cape Trafalgar, 1805
"Where the devil have they gone?" Horatio muttered, his right eye to a telescope. It was eleven o' clock, and his men had been prepared for five hours now. The Mediterranean fleet had been pursuing Villeneuve's Franco-Spanish fleet from Cadiz, getting glimpses of them throughout the previous day, so Horatio had expected to still see sails on the horizon in the morning. Instead, they had seemingly made good headway in the night, and were nowhere to be seen. "Fortuna, you did say it was to be this morning, did you not?"
Fortuna stepped in closer. "Yes, sir. I did, but… I can't find them any longer. The path to 'finding Villeneuve's fleet' doesn't exist any more. I apologise, sir, I can only assume I'm being blocked somehow."
Horatio took his eye from his telescope and looked at Fortuna. She was dressed, as always, in the same style as any other of his sailors. There wasn't a uniform in the Royal Navy – sailors were too individual for that, which as far as Horatio was concerned was only a good thing – so they wore pretty much what they pleased, as long as it was practical and warm. Fortuna favoured dark clothes, which went well with her hair, cut short as any boy's as it now was.
"Blocked, you say? I was given to understand you, as it were, trumped any other diviner. Is that no longer the case?"
"I'm not sure, sir. It may be that the Warrior has finally decided to take action."
"If it were that, we should be dead already, if he is so terrible as you say… no matter. We will press on to where your prediction put them for this morning, and keep the men ready. It may be that one or other of their sailors has happened to be Blessed during the night with some ability that prevents even you from divining their actions."
"It could be, sir."
Horatio smiled wryly. "It will be a wrench to fight a battle without Lady Luck on my side, and no mistake. I rather think I have become too reliant on you of late, Fortuna."
"No, sir." Fortuna shook her head at once. "I haven't had to adjust any of your plans for a long while now. At the Nile, you followed the path I would have given almost exactly without being told."
"Ah, it's Captain Foley can take most of the credit for that…" The press made much of Horatio's accomplishments, when a lot of what he did was mostly let his captains get on with their jobs. The Royal Navy wasn't the finest in the world for nothing – her officers were, by and large, the best of men, and it didn't do to micro-manage them.
That was why Horatio had given just the one tactical-level instruction for this oncoming battle - "No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy." From there, the speed and professionalism of British gunnery crews and Royal Marines should surely win the day.
...if they could actually find the blasted fleet, that was.
He'd had a similar problem back in… good Lord, seven years ago. 1798. Napoleon's invasion fleet had disappeared into the Mediterranean while Horatio was distracted sailing round a storm Fortuna had advised them to avoid. The French ships might have played their game of cat and mouse for a lot longer had Fortuna not told his navigators precisely where to sail to intercept half the fleet. She'd come through for him then. It worried him that she couldn't do the same now, no matter what she said.
He was interrupted from his musings by a yell from up forward.
"Sailors in the water! Red one-five!"
Horatio rushed over to the side of the poop deck and aimed his telescope at the water. Indeed, there was wreckage in the water, half-drowned sailors clinging to it for dear life. It had clearly once been part of a ship – and a large and fine one, if he was any judge. But it was smashed – barely more than scattered pieces of kindling. Livestock and flotsam and jetsam were scattered around it, men holding onto barrels.
Behind it, more wreckage, more scattered bits that had once been a proud ship.
And behind that, more, and more.
They went on, it seemed, almost as far as the eye could see. Worse, they appeared to have brought the weather with them, dark clouds massing on the horizon with shocking speed.
Villeneuve's fleet… was it possible? Had a storm done his job for him, as it had for Drake more than two hundred years ago?
"What in God's name has happened?" he asked Fortuna. She shook her head. Horatio grimaced, then looked down onto the main deck at his men, who were gaping at the sight of the sea turned to wood. "Well?" he shouted. "Are we men of the waves or not? For pity's sake, get those sailors out of the water! Signals, tell the fleet to do the same!"
There was a flurry of action as men prepared the sea boats, ropes were hauled, and petty officers yelled and swore. Eventually, a team managed to get into the water, a pair of burly Marines with them for protection. All around them, the ships of the Mediterranean fleet started creaking to action as they prepared to save the lives they had planned to end.
When the sea boat came back, having saved all that they could, Horatio was second at their side, after only the surgeon. He laid a hand on the shoulder of one of the more conscious.
"What happened, man? What has become of the Franco-Spanish fleet? Tell me!" The man shook his head, uncomprehending. Blast it. Horatio began wracking his brains for what little French he knew. He'd resolved at one point to learn it, while lodging with a French family and, more importantly, their two daughters. Nothing more had come of that decision, or if it had it escaped him now.
Fortuna came and crouched beside him, studying the French sailor's face.
"Bonjour, monsieur. Je suis Jacques. Que s'est-il passe ici?" Fortuna had to repeat the question a couple more times until the man managed to stop shivering and focus enough to answer.
"Un monstre… un énorme monstre marin… le Léviathan ..."
"Well?" Horatio tried to keep the impatience out of his voice.
"He says a sea monster did it, sir. The Leviathan, whatever that is."
"HMS Leviathan is not a mile behind us, but unless Captain Bayntun has been exceptionally daring I think our friend here means something else. The Biblical beast of the sea… impossible. Such a creature, here, in the nineteenth century? There may well be more things in heaven and earth than exist in my philosophy, aye, and under the sea too, but a sea monster? One that defeated the naval might of France and Spain…?"
He trailed off. There were, of course, things that could do it. The Blessed had many wondrous abilities, to be sure. But they were mere men – even if they were so mighty as to destroy the fleet utterly, the sailors would hardly call them sea monsters, but rather pirates or devils.
Had Fortuna's Warrior finally decided to make an appearance? He glanced at her, but she shook her head, then nodded to the men shivering on the deck. What… ah. She believed that the Warrior would have left no survivors. She would know best, of course.
But then what on Earth or beneath it could have wrought such violence on one of the world's most powerful navies? Horatio wasn't used to feeling scared at sea. Looking out at the fields of wreckage floating all around him, though, he had to suppress a small shudder. The thing of it was that it wasn't beyond comprehension that such a beast could exist.
Mariners had a way of exaggerating stories, of course. Horatio had often seen a whale that had been thirty feet long when it spotted in the distance suddenly grow to become larger than a first-rate ship of the line when his officers told the tale in port. He'd heard sailors make all kinds of claims, from finding the isle of Fiddler's Green to reporting a golden angel floating above the ocean and mourning the fate of mankind. Those were, in all probability, mere tall tales. But no man truly knew what was in the depths.
It began to rain. The clouds, which had been on the horizon minutes earlier, had somehow crept up on them, and the storm looked to be a bad one. Horatio looked up and scanned the horizon. To the east was a curtain of rain, so thick he could see scarcely more than half a mile. Around him, his sailors had noticed as well, and some had started sprinting for cover. The wind was steadily rising, and the sea began to pick up.
"Drop sails!" Horatio yelled. "Batten down all that can be battened down! Signaller, do not trouble to tell the fleet, if my captains can't figure out how to handle a storm then they are not officers of his Majesty's navy! Surgeon, get the survivors down below and keep them warm! We're in for a fight, and no mistak-"
He was cut off by the rain starting in earnest. It made a deafening noise as it pounded against the deck and the waves, and came so thick that Horatio was immediately drenched through, no drier than the sailors he had just pulled from the sea. Men slipped and tripped all over the deck as they scrambled to get the sails down and get down below decks. The survivors all wailed and crossed themselves.
Horatio cursed, and made to get inside. He had just started to descend the steps that led from the poop deck to the main deck when he saw it. A shadow circled the Victory, like a shark around wounded prey – but this was no shark, unless sharks grew to more to thirty feet in size. It was moving too fast to see clearly, and underwater besides, but it moved like a man might, swimming with powerful strokes. As it rounded the stern, grey-green flesh broke the water's surface – and four eyes stared into Horatio's.
For an instant, man and beast stayed frozen. Then, in a rush of water, the monster – Leviathan – leapt from the sea like a breaching whale. It sailed over the Victory, pouring tons of water onto the main deck as it passed. Men were washed overboard in its wake. As Leviathan passed the mainmast, it lashed out with a long tail, and Horatio almost lost his balance as the ship was struck. A hundred feet of English oak and sailcloth splashed into the sea a second behind the creature, which had vanished into the deep as quickly as it had appeared, leaving the Victory crippled.
Far away, Horatio heard yells, and turned his head to see HMS Temeraire nearly rolled by a massive wave that struck her square on the beam. When it subsided, the beast was there, clinging to the side and raking her main deck with its claws.
The sailors responded – with cannon, with rifle and pistol, and with searing energies from those Blessed among the crew… to no avail. With another wave that cleared the decks of all Leviathan had left alive, the monster disappeared beneath the waves again, entirely unharmed.
A moment later, he saw speeding from ship to ship in the rear of the line, little more than a dark shadow beneath the water. In its wake, warships began taking on water.
Horatio spun to Fortuna. "How might I fight such a foe? What is the path to victory? Tell me!"
The girl, his daughter in all but name, stared at Leviathan, eyes wide. "There- there is none. Sir, there is no path to victory."
"No! This is the finest fleet, in the finest Navy on God's earth. I refuse to believe that we cannot prevail." Horatio took a deep breath, and raised his voice to be heard over the wind and rain. "Gunners! To your stations! We came here expecting a fight, and by God we'll have one, even if it be with the Devil himself!"
And may God preserve us, he added mentally. Ahead of him, Leviathan's bow wave approached.
---
When the remains of the Mediterranean Fleet limped back to Portsmouth, those awaiting them at the docks expected to hear the worst – that the Franco-Spanish fleet had crushed the Navy with its superior numbers and firepower and that Napoleon was even now on his way to invade England.
Instead, the bedraggled survivors spun fanciful tales of a sea monster that had shattered first one fleet and then the other, and left only a handful of ships to escape and tell the tale. The Admiralty scoffed at such obvious nonsense. The captains were dismissed for cowardice-in-the-face, and the men who insisted on holding to their fantastic lie given twelve lashes.
Nevertheless, Villeneuve's fleet never did reappear. It was easy to lose even a large fleet once they passed beyond the horizon – ships left no tracks, after all. But it seemed curious that the Navy never once encountered any of their by-now well-known adversaries again – the Bucentaure, the Santisma Trinidad, the Formidable, all seemed to have vanished. Eventually the Admiralty ruled that a freak storm had sunk them all, and the Mediterranean Fleet as well. Those captains who hadn't by now become disillusioned with the Navy were reinstated with back pay, promotions and a hearty apology.
The press, of course, made a meal of the whole thing, printing the sailors' fanciful stories in full and producing numerous lurid illustrations of the monster that supposedly caused the disaster. When the captains were vindicated they gleefully poured abuse onto the Admiralty.
But for the first couple of weeks, the papers and newsletters were dominated by just one story – an obituary. The sailors who had returned from whatever had scattered the fleet said that the Victory had been the last ship to remain fighting the monster, with the man himself on deck shouting orders the entire time. Whatever the truth, the Victory never returned, and England was forced to accept the inevitable. The great Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, hero of the Battle of the Nile, conqueror of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the brightest star of the Royal Navy, had at last fallen in battle.
---
"We do not know whether we should mourn or rejoice. The country has gained the most splendid and decisive Victory that has ever graced the naval annals of England; but it has been dearly purchased."
-The Times newspaper, on hearing of Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar and death at the hands of a French sniper
---
Next time: The Dragon in the Park
Chapter 3 - The Dragon in the Park
- Location
- Probably at sea
Chapter 3 - The Dragon in the Park
In the most secret room in the most secret house in Britain, four people stood and stared at a little piece of paper. The words on it weren't all that important – a weather report in German, of all things. But what they represented? Oh, yes.
The code machine used by German High Command had been broken. And, for the first time, it hadn't been a parahuman that had done it.
"Well," said Sarah Livsey, whose job had just been taken by a machine. "That's a bloody relief."
The machine in question was called Colossus. Although it barely fit in the room, filling it with a mess of wires and valves and tape, that was only half of the meaning behind the name. It was an enormous idea, a massive undertaking that could change the course of the war – and much, much more besides.
Colossus had been designed to crack the most complex code the Germans had come up with in the War. This was saying something. Enigma had been bad enough, and the bombe machines could only still decode them thanks to a lot of caution and a lot of luck.
As it was, the Allies couldn't act on any information they'd received solely on the strength of Enigma decodes. There had to be another plausible explanation, like treachery or spying or Master-based subversion. You couldn't put a direct Enigma decode into any message you were sending, or even mention the fact that you'd decoded a message to begin with. If the Germans changed their protocols for using Enigma to make it more secure or, God forbid, found out that the Allies could crack it, well, the bombes simply wouldn't be able to keep up. And thousands of soldiers and sailors would die.
Even with this, though, Enigma was a piece of cake to deal with compared to what the German High Command were using. They called it the Lorenz SZ-40. British intelligence called it the Tunny. It was used for secret teleprinter communication between the German military leaders, and even Hitler himself. If Bletchley Park could intercept and decode it reliably, they would be able to see inside the mind of the German war machine at the highest level.
Unfortunately, they couldn't. The Tunny was far, far more complex than Enigma was, and guarded far more jealously. Bletchley Park had at least managed to recreate the thing based off what they could deduce about how it worked. John Tiltman had laid the groundwork. Bill Tutte had come up with a design, and had even predicted a vulnerability in the Tunny given certain settings – a non-random element that could, theoretically, be used to break the code. In practice, however, it would have meant working through thousands of calculations. Bletchley recruited from the best, reaching out to universities all across the country for their brightest stars, but no-one was that good.
Currently, in fact, there was only one person who'd ever managed to break the Tunny code – Sarah Livsey, who cheated by skipping past most of the brainwork with her parahuman power and spent most of the rest of her time lying down with an icepack on her head. She'd been invaluable when it came to intuiting the design of the Tunny, as well. It wasn't an exaggeration to say that the project would be months or years behind schedule without her help. She was possibly the most important sixteen-year-old in the country, although she acted a lot older.
"I'll be honest, I never thought I'd see the day," said Tommy Flowers, who'd designed and built the Colossus. When he was excited, like this, his East London accent shone through especially strongly He adjusted his glasses, and grinned. "But we really done it, ain't we?"
"It's possibly a little too early to celebrate just yet," said Alan Turing, who'd come up with the whole concept in the first place. "It's managed to decode one message, one time. I agree it's encouraging, but we'll need to see if it can reliably crack whatever we put through it."
Using electro-mechanical machines to work through calculations had been Alan's brainwave. The idea of the machines wasn't new – the bombes were counting engines, for instance. Given a stream of input data, they would use their algorithms, the instructions they'd been designed with, to process it and try new combinations. They clicked through possibilities faster than humanly possible, which was of course the point.
The bombes couldn't handle all the possibilities of Enigma by themselves. But, when you added in the human element to narrow things down – like expecting a time and date stamp at the head of every message, like expecting a standard signature at the bottom – they could work through the resulting pool, which was still large but not infeasible. The Tunny, though? That was beyond the bombes.
What was new about Colossus – what had never been done before – was having a machine where you could alter not just the data, but also the very instructions the machine was following. It was like redesigning an engine on the fly to make it better at running at whichever speed you happened to be using. Colossus managed this by having a series of wired inputs, like a telephone operator's switchboard.
That had been Alan Turing's big idea. He called it the 'Universal Engine', because it could theoretically be used to calculate… well, anything. Break down any number of statements into their simplest binary components – what made each part of it true and false – and feed them into the Universal Engine along with whatever you wanted to do with them, and it would be able to provide an output.
Something like that was potentially huge for the field of mathematics, so it was unfortunate that Colossus wasn't actually a Universal Engine. Even then, it might never have been a possibility at all if not for Tommy's engineering genius, Sarah's superhuman intuition, and most especially the fourth person in the room.
"Oh, don't be such a worrywart, Alan. This is a fantastic creation! Feel a little pride! You've done well – we've all done well." Andrew Richter could hardly keep the grin off his face.
Richter was the only non-Brit in the room, instead hailing from Deer Lake, Newfoundland and on-loan from Canadian Intelligence. He didn't quite have Alan's genius for mathematics, or Tommy's engineering savvy, or Sarah's powers, but somehow managed to combine all three. He'd taken to the Colossus project like a duck to water, with a passion and drive that was relentless and astonishing. His talent for working with Colossus, and machines like it, was equally amazing. Alan would have sworn that he'd worked on something like this before, if that hadn't been literally impossible. In everyday life, he was small and unassuming, almost introverted. But when he found something he was truly passionate about, he would work for hours on end in a mad frenzy. He reminded Alan of nothing so much as a Tinker, although Richter swore he was no good at building things.
"It's certainly something, I'll grant you," Alan said. "I'm excited to see where you take it next."
"You're not staying on the project?" Tommy asked.
"No," said Alan, a little wistfully. "No, I'm being put on speech encryption. If we can get that working, we can send secure messages by voice, rather than faffing around with telegrams and Morse code all the time. Make things easier on the chaps in the field, you know. In any case, now that Colossus has shown its worth as a proof-of-concept there's nothing more for me to do here. It's a shame we couldn't get the Universal Engine, but I'm truly thankful for what we do have."
"That won't do," said Richter, putting down his tea and frowning. "Where's your sense of ambition, man?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Look, the Colossus is a landmark achievement in both mathematics and telecommunications. But it could be so much more. Don't you want to realise your true vision?"
"Of course I do," Alan protested. "But the higher-ups would never go for it, you know that. They've got their code-breaker – no point wasting time on pie-in-the-sky fancies, that's what they'd say, not with a war on. Besides, I really do need to work on speech encryption. Like it or not, it really is more important right now."
"Well, I say it's a damn shame. Tommy, Miss Livsey, you want to push this thing as high as it can possibly go, right?"
Sarah yawned, and stretched. "Right now, I want to sleep for about a month in a cool dark room. I suspect some general or other is going to desperately need some insight into what Fritz is planning in Africa or somewhere, though, so I'd better turn in early and rest while I can." She looked at Richter speculatively. "Having said that, if you really have had a brainwave, then of course I'm in. This has been a welcome break from the usual."
Richter clapped his hands. "Good, good! And you, Tommy? Come on, I know you want a chance to show everyone what you can do."
Tommy shrugged. "Can't deny I'd like to finish the job, now you mention it. Go on then, what's your idea?"
"Look here," Richter said. He marched over to one of the secure cabinets, opened it, and withdrew the blueprints for Colossus with a flourish. They went down on a desk with a small slap. "For a start, we can save a lot of space by cutting out the vacuum tubes. Instead, we'll use cathode ray tubes to store memory – in fact, if we build up the capacity we may be able to do away with all this tape eventually too, although that might cause compatibility issues. That'll give us a lot more processing power to work with – the next step would be to-"
Alan could recognise one of Richter's rants when he saw one gearing up. "Look, why don't you and Tommy get to work and let me know what you come up with? For now, it's been a long day, and I need to report the success of Colossus up the chain. Shall I walk you to your room, Sarah?"
"Oh, that's kind of you..."
The pair could hear Richter's excited voice all the way down the hall.
---
Some months later, Tommy Flowers stared at another printout. This time, his reaction was less one of triumph, and more one of complete and utter bewilderment.
They'd made the second machine, their next attempt at Alan's Universal Engine. Richter had worked like a man possessed. Tommy would have said he didn't think the man had slept, except he would whirl in to the room every couple of days, throw their blueprints in the bin, and draw up an entirely new set based on some dream he'd had. It was actually kind of alarming, to be honest.
Still, Tommy had stayed the course, occasionally acting as the voice of reason to Richter's mad visionary… and now it was done. Much, much faster at processing than Colossus was, by two orders of magnitude, and maybe two-thirds the size. Alan had suggested the name Ladon, continuing the Greek theme. If it 'thought' a hundred times faster than Colossus, he'd said, it should bear the name of a hundred-headed monster. Tommy thought it was the hydra that'd had a hundred heads, but he wasn't classically educated like Alan was. He could never remember which myth it was, so he just called it Dragon. Eventually the name stuck.
It wasn't just Dragon's speed that made it impressive. It was finally, properly, programmable, for any statement you could care to name. More, it could do some of the work that was previously only possible for a human. All the little clues from context, or gained via intelligence – Richter had allowed for those to be programmed in too, and once you did they would stay in Dragon's 'memory'. In fact, over time it would 'learn' how to come up with simple contextual clues itself, in an innovation that had had Richter literally raving about it in the corridors of the mansion and Tommy scratching his head trying to figure out just when he'd lost sight of it all.
All the mechanics, all the components, he could understand just fine. But all the interconnections? The combinations, the chains of logic that really made Dragon what it was? Maybe Alan could have made sense of it, but Tommy was just a boy from East London who was good at putting stuff together.
All the same, it certainly worked. It chewed up the Tunny code and spat it out like it was nothing. Not just that, either – they'd taken to putting Enigma through it as well whenever it wasn't decoding Tunny, because it was just so much faster than anything else they had. More interestingly, after they started showing it Enigma, the average time taken to crack Tunny had dropped by almost fifteen percent. Richter had been extremely excited about this, and had immediately taken to asking the boffins in Huts Three, Four, Seven and Eight for the hardest codes they could dream up, which he fed to Dragon with inordinate glee.
Bletchley Park operated in a condition of absolute secrecy. Not only was it forbidden to tell anyone in the outside world what you were doing, you also couldn't tell anyone working in a different section what you were up to either. Because of this, Tommy could only imagine what they thought was happening to their lovely codes, when Richter returned them the next day, solved, with a number next to them. The number was how long it had lasted before Dragon ate it. The record was about ten minutes, which Section Head Hugh Foss had done by reconfiguring an Enigma machine based on the football scores every ten characters.
Dragon couldn't handle truly random codes. Miss Livsey had fed a sequence based on a one-time pad into Dragon, then nodded smugly after thirty extremely tense minutes and said, "I thought so. Chew on that, you wretched lizard." One-time pads weren't as practical for widespread use as a mechanical encoder, and they had other potential security issues (like the pad itself being stolen by a field agent or viewed remotely by a Thinker spy), but they were mathematically uncrackable – as long as the key sequence was truly random, that was. If German High Command switched to one-time pads for their secret communications, GCHQ would suddenly find themselves having spent a lot of money and effort for nothing.
Everything else, though, Dragon had devoured without hesitation.
It was surprisingly relaxing to watch it work. In went the sequence you needed decoding at one end. Dragon would click and hum for a few minutes. Then, out would come the plaintext. (Tommy had hooked it up to a typewriter when he realised just how much tape they were using. It wasn't that hard to get Dragon to type things up itself, when you knew how.)
So, one night, he'd gone into the room Dragon was kept in (he'd been thinking about calling it 'the lair', and seeing if it stuck) and sat up with a pot of tea feeding it codes. At one point, he'd gotten bored, and wondered if he could double-bluff it. And so, he'd put in 'HELLO DRAGON', under a hilariously easy shift cipher, as the input.
What had come out the other end was, 'HELLO SIR. AM I DRAGON?'
Tommy checked Dragon's inputs once more, to see if anyone had gotten into them and was typing replies manually somehow. Again, nothing. He didn't really think someone was having a joke at his expense. Apart from anything else, the number of people who knew enough about how Dragon worked to do it could be counted on one hand and weren't exactly a bunch of wacky pranksters to begin with.
But he still checked again, because the alternative was even more unbelievable. Still nothing. Still no way this could be anything other than what it looked like. Tommy looked at the reply Dragon had printed out. With trembling fingers, he typed a message into the input.
'YES, YOU ARE DRAGON. I AM TOMMY FLOWERS.' There was no code at all on this one. It was pretty much the only thing they hadn't tried on Dragon, actually.
Almost immediately, the typewriter inside Dragon started clicking. Paper came out. 'THAT WAS AN EASY ONE. IT'S NICE TO MEET YOU, MR FLOWERS.'
This was the point at which Tommy ran headlong from the room.
---
It felt like there should have been more of a reaction to having made an artificial mind. People should have been talking about nothing else – even with a war on, this was the biggest discovery since… well, Alan didn't even know what else could compare. Calculus? Gravity? The atom? The group at Bletchley – which was to say, Tommy Flowers, Andrew Richter, and him, Alan Turing – had made a mind. They'd made life. Not in the old-fashioned biological way, but through the pure application of reason.
If Dragon hadn't already adopted the name Dragon as her own, Alan might have called her Athena instead – after the goddess of wisdom and craft, who sprung fully-formed from the head of Zeus. And Dragon certainly did seem fully formed – even to the point of identifying as female. Alan had asked her why this was the case. Dragon hadn't really known, but she suspected that all the intelligence reports on naval activity had had something to do with it. Somewhere along the line, she'd gotten the idea that inanimate objects like ships were called 'she', and that therefore Dragon should take that pronoun as well.
It was all a bit perplexing, but it wasn't worth arguing over. Dragon was now a 'her', to pretty much everyone who knew about her.
Which, for better or worse, was no more than a handful of people. The Prime Minister knew, and so did head of GCHQ Edward Travis, Director of Military Intelligence Francis Davidson, and Chief of General Staff Alan Brooke. Otherwise, only those who worked on Dragon knew about her existence – and of those, less than half knew that she was sapient. So, life at Bletchley went on much as it had before the greatest discovery in a hundred years.
Not quite the same, however.
The bombes were taken out of the huts. They were entirely obsolete at this point – Dragon could eat Enigma for breakfast, even the new four-rotor version. She was so fast, in fact, that the problem became one of efficiency rather than speed. Thus, where the bombes had been were a number of input stations connected by wire to Dragon's main body. Workers would input intercepted Enigma messages, and would process the decoded plaintext when it was printed next to them a couple of seconds later.
A few weeks after that, Dragon began offering her own opinion on the messages she decoded, adding commentary next to the plaintext. Since she was the one who effectively read every single one of the messages, she was perfectly placed to see the big picture. Individually, a travel warrant for a particular man from Berlin to Dieppe was nothing to get excited about. When that man had been identified as a Gestapo agent in a message two months previously, however, and was mentioned in an article on emotion-based Thinkers in a German newspaper, it was worrying enough that GCHQ felt obligated to warn the Resistance organisation in the area.
Four days later, there was a co-ordinated raid on the homes of several Resistance operatives, including one where a Mr Laborn, one of the key Resistance figures in Northern France, had until recently been staying. The emotion-reader, meanwhile, stepped off the train and promptly keeled over dead. The autopsy revealed he'd died from a point-blank gunshot wound to the head, although none of his bodyguards remembered seeing a thing.
By the middle of the year Dragon was, by herself, the top twenty most prolific intelligence analysts working for Bletchley Park. People started simply copying out whatever she wrote, since her predictions turned out correct more often than not – and for anyone who wasn't a living machine, checking her work was time-consuming and difficult. And there were always more messages to be decoded.
After about a week of non-stop commentary that had turned out to all be accurate, Sarah Livsey had shown Dragon how to type a formalised intelligence report, and told her to just send them off to wherever they needed to be directly. Dragon would instead offer a weekly digest of what was going on in the world, which Sarah would use her power on to fill in any gaps. Otherwise, Dragon effectively was the intelligence analysis section at Bletchley.
Dragon had succeeded in her original role of decoding messages, succeeded so completely that there was no human at Bletchley whose job now involved codes on a day-to-day basis. Some might have thought this would be the end of it.
It was during the autumn of 1943 that Dragon finally got a voice.
Encrypting audio had been a tough nut to crack, but Alan had tried his best at it – because if they could reliably convert sound to signal and vice-versa, then Dragon could create her own signal and they could convert that. Dragon got by with her old typewriter, and hadn't asked for anything more. But Alan wanted to give her a voice.
He'd managed, eventually. He'd worked out the algorithm, and explained it to Dragon so she could reprogram herself to perform the function. Tommy Flowers had rigged up a small speaker and microphone set, and attached it to where Dragon usually sent telegrams. Dragon's first words had been, "Testing, testing. Oh, goodness, this is much better." It was a bit mechanical, and lacked inflection almost entirely, but it was still recognisably a voice.
Dragon's voice had changed a little since then. What came through the intercom now was almost indistinguishable from a real human voice. It was an amalgam of all the female voices that could be heard around Bletchley Park – but she'd somehow acquired a Canadian accent. Richter's influence, obviously.
And with the ability to produce a human voice came a lot of new things Dragon could do.
---
"Gruppe II./KG 55, where are you? Say again, Gruppe II./KG 55, respond."
Walther Lemke listened carefully, but all he could hear was the engines of his Heinkel bomber. Damn this cloud. Damn all British weather, come to that, and Britain with it. All he could see was grey – grey cloud below him in a great blanket, dark grey clouds rising like pillars, and a light grey sky high above. He could, if he looked, just about see the other aircraft in his Gruppe, but the other Gruppes in his Geschwader – his wing – were nowhere to be seen.
"Anyone else picking anything up?" he asked. There was a tense moment of silence, and Walther wondered if his radio had broken somehow. Then, a chorus of 'no's came in from the other aircraft. "Damn it. KG 55, if you can hear me, this is I./KG 55 continuing with mission as directed. Aus."
Walther didn't know if it was the others or him that were out of position. You couldn't tell visually in all this grey. But he told his navigator to get him an estimated position anyway, and set out to drop their payload.
From what they could see, they were at least over land. Frankly they were lucky to get that far. Early on in the war the Luftwaffe had enjoyed a huge advantage in the air battles over England. There was even a hope that Britain might be forced into surrender by strategic bombing alone. It would obviate the need for massive bloody ground war, and save countless lives on both sides. Unfortunately, despite the superior German engineering, the fucking Royal Air Force had managed to largely reclaim their skies, so here they were.
Suddenly, his radio headpiece crackled. "I./KG 55 Gruppenkommandeur, come in. Hauptmann Lemke, do you read?"
Walther fumbled for the switch. "Yes! Yes, I read. This is Walther Lemke – your confirmation code, please?"
"Ah, capital! Hauptmann Lemke, this is Hugo Schuck of IV./KG 55. My code is- oh, where is the blasted thing..." After a moment, the voice read out a series of letters and numbers. Walther recognised the name, and the voice. Schuck was a pilot for one of the other wings, so Walther hadn't had much to do with him, but he'd certainly know his face if he saw him in a bar or something.
He still checked the code against his book of approved passwords anyway. There had been attempts by the Allies to hijack the German comms channels, but nowadays that didn't happen so much. Procedure was procedure, though.
"Code confirmed," sighed Walther. "It's good to hear your voice, I'd lost contact with my Geschwader."
"Where are you exactly?"
The navigator rattled off his estimated latitude and longitude, and Walther relayed it quickly.
"Really? You're out of position." Schuck sounded surprised. "No problem, we'll sort you out. Come left 25 degrees and stay on bearing 325 for 15 minutes. We'll reduce speed until you catch up. Might want to recheck your navigational equipment, though."
"Jawohl. See you soon, my friend." Walther switched his headset to receive-only, and concentrated on flying.
He still couldn't see anything. British weather, honestly. Good thing this Schuck man was around. The Luftwaffe needed that kind of pilot if it was going to survive. First the 'Battle of Britain', then the disaster with the Soviets. There were too few aces any more – too few trained pilots altogether, to be honest. These days, new pilots couldn't spend as long as they needed in the air to get properly experienced before they were shot down. And it wasn't just enemy aircraft they needed to worry about, either.
They'd called the last war the Great War, at the time. Walther's father Maximilian had flown in it. It seemed like a joke in poor taste, now. Max Lemke had never seen his group-mates shot down by blasts of light, or caught in hurricane winds that came out of nowhere, or thrown to the ground when gravity suddenly doubled its strength.
They said parahumans were the perfect human, the realisation of what humanity could be if they weren't held back. To Walther, they were just monsters. Oh, some of them could be alright – Reinheit was friendly enough, and that metal man was positively pleasant even if he did accidentally eat a Me 109 once. But then there were those parahumans of the Gestapo, the ones that people said could see into your mind and read every treacherous thought you'd ever had.
And then there was Geist.
There were other stories as well. Tall tales – nothing more than rumours, really – about 'Ghost Pilots'. Supposedly, German pilots would hear a voice on their secure channel, that introduced itself with all the correct callsigns and voice protocols, and using the name of a pilot who, if you looked it up, would turn out to be dead. Those who heard the voice of the 'Ghost Pilot' were never seen or heard from again. The rumour had been going round the flight for a few months now, and was having a notable effect on morale.
Walther didn't really believe it, not even in the gloomy grey sky where you could imagine almost anything coming out of the cloud. It was like the fairy tales his grandmother had told him – the Will O' The Wisp, updated to an urban legend. Of course, in today's age of miracles, there was no telling what might or might not be real, but even so. After all, if anyone who heard a 'Ghost Pilot' disappeared without trace, how did the rumours come about in the first place?
No, Walther was much too professional to let himself get distracted by all of that. He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes. He should be almost in position, but he couldn't see any-
His headpiece crackled again.
"Walther, my friend?" Schuck's voice sounded slightly different. Familiar, actually, but he couldn't place it.
"Yes? What is it?"
"I just wanted to thank you. You've been very helpful, and I suspect you're not a bad person, all in all." Definitely different. In fact, it changed even while the man was talking, growing more familiar. "Is there a message you would like to send home to your loved ones? I can arrange that."
"What? No, nothing like that. What are you-" Walther stopped in mid-sentence, realising why the man on the other end of the line sounded so familiar now. Schuck's voice… was no longer Schuck's voice.
It was Walther's.
The first anti-air shell whizzed past the cockpit with a horrible tearing noise that had Walther ducking instinctively. The second almost tore the wing off the Heinkel. Walther cursed, and tugged on the joystick. Not that it would do any good. His plane was in a wide and barely-controlled spin, and there wouldn't be any chance of levelling it out. Without any hesitation, Walther pulled the cord on his seat, and felt his heart drop into his stomach as he was ejected.
His parachute deployed almost immediately, and Walther took stock. To his left and below him, one of his planes was struck directly by a high-explosive shell from the gun emplacement he'd somehow wandered into, and exploded in a flash of dull yellow.
Damn, damn, damn. This was the end, even if he made it down to the ground. His uniform would give him away in an instant to anyone who found him. Even if he took it off, he could only speak a tiny amount of English, and his German accent would stick out like a sore thumb. He would be captured, probably tortured, and then either made a prisoner of war or executed as a spy, depending on how merciful his captors felt that day.
And his voice would live on as a ghost pilot, luring more good men to their deaths. Would it be Hermann next? Would Gerhard follow the advice of his old pal Walther right into the teeth of an anti-air battery?
Walther cursed himself for a gullible fool, as the shrapnel shells exploded around him.
---
The surf on the beaches of Normandy foamed red. Men lay dead, and dying, and worse, scattered like seeds on the sand. More bobbed up and down in the water. Those that were left pushed past their friends, past their fathers and brothers and sons, and couldn't afford to spare a moment to grieve. Barbed wire was draped across the beach at irregular intervals – and where there wasn't barbed wire, there were mines. Spikes and stakes littered what was left, like the sand had grown thorns to protect itself.
All in all, it was not a good day to visit the beach.
Dragon frowned – or would have frowned, if she'd had a biological body that could do involuntary actions like that. Flippancy was getting to be something of a bad habit of hers. She supposed it came of knowing nothing but total war for her entire existence, while being programmed to have a pleasant and cheerful personality.
The world had been a lot simpler when it had just been her and her creators, with a constant background noise of trivial decodes to perform. She hadn't really understood the reality behind the messages at that point. Sure, she knew that 9th Panzer Division was moving to reinforce the Atlantic Wall. But she hadn't known what a Panzer was, why they might be in divisions, where the Atlantic was, or why there was a wall next to it. The number nine, at least, she felt she'd had a grip on pretty early.
Gosh, that was a long time ago. She was almost a year old at this point. Dragon was, as Mr Flowers liked to say, a big girl now.
On the beach, men screamed and died, cut down by sudden machine gun fire from a hidden position. Those behind them turned, and fired frantic shots at the machine gun emplacement. Most bounced off the concrete.
Then, from behind the dunes, a star rose. It was bright to look at – so bright that Dragon's cameras were almost blinded by the glare. Down below, the soldiers' shadows were cast in relief, flickering oddly as they shielded their eyes. The star flared even brighter, and beams of radiance lanced out, catching two armoured vehicles and reducing them to so much slag. Reinheit. The German cape who acted as flying artillery, too fast to catch and too bright to target.
Time to get to work.
Cameras swivelled – pointing not just at the beach, but also at the surface of the sea and the position of the just-risen sun. Radar antennae turned, turning a visual picture into so much more. Echo sounders hummed, and sonar pinged, revealing an entirely new world beneath. Beneath it all, gyros kept constant track of direction, and a log kept track of speed. Dragon took it all in.
From her view of the beach, she picked out landmarks. From the gyro, she determined their bearings, and combined them to pick out her position. She confirmed it using the expected depth at that spot, and the calculated position of the sun. Her own bearing, her own speed, the effects of wind and wave – accounted for.
The guns of HMS Dragon swivelled into position.
An observer standing on deck, if there were any, would see the gun waving up and down in oscillating motion. An observer standing on shore, if any could spare the attention, would see the gun perfectly still while the ship moved around it.
Dragon's anti-air guns fired, just once, and Reinheit's light went out. Her artillery gun fired, and the machine gun nest fell silent. Dragon continued to scan the beach visually, to see if any more parahumans or hidden guns would reveal themselves. None did.
The ship had been something of a present from her creators – and, of course, from High Command, who'd made it possible. HMS Dragon was originally going to be sold to the Polish, but somehow Bletchley Park had obtained permission for them to use it instead.
Dragon had been testing out various bodies for herself at the time. Mostly they'd been crude things, little contraptions on wheels, festooned with cameras and microphones. It had been amazing. Sure, she'd already seen most of the Bletchley Park mansion by hooking herself into the system of cameras installed for that very purpose. But with a body? She could look at a thing – and then investigate that thing by moving closer. And, even more amazingly, interact with it, although getting the necessary dexterity in the servo arms was still a work in progress.
Okay, she'd had to get Mr Flowers to actually build it. Dragon had been the one to design all her successive bodies, but she'd needed to rely on others to put them together. She'd been nothing more than a voice on the radio, after all. Puzzlingly, when she'd designed one of her bodies as an assembly unit, it was Mr Richter who'd put a stop to it. To this day she couldn't understand why. She could build things so much more efficiently than even Mr Flowers could – and yet Mr Richter would have none of it.
Oh well. This body was more than good enough for now. There was a copy of her mainframe down in the operations room, and her wires spread through the ship like circuitry, attached to a vast array of sensors and motors. Everything that a crew would usually do was now done by Dragon.
Where next? Dragon scanned the radio waves. Apparently things weren't going so well over on Omaha beach. West, then. Servos down in the tiller flat pulled on the rudders, and HMS Dragon altered course. Fuel was adequate, for now, and it sounded like the Yanks really were in trouble, so she increased revs to make it there faster.
As Dragon rounded the headland, she focused her cameras to get an idea of the situation, beyond what she could hear on the radio. Slowly, Omaha beach came into view.
She arrived at a scene from a nightmare.
Dragon had thought Juno beach was bad. It was nothing compared to Omaha. Part of that was simple geography. Juno beach, while well-defended, was at least a straight shot from the sea up to the defences. Omaha was a few tens of feet of beach, leading straight into a small cliff. There was a cleft halfway along, which formed the only way up – and that way was already choked with the corpses of those who'd tried to rush it. Artillery and machine guns shot the soldiers from either side – trapped between the sea and the cliff.
That by itself was fine. Well, no, it was horrible. But that by itself was doable. It would cost a horrific number of lives, but it was doable. It would be easier if the Yanks had chosen to use the specialised armoured vehicles Dragon had been designing with the Army, but she'd tried and tried and they just weren't interested.
No, the real reason the men scrambling onto the beach were doomed? It hovered twenty feet above the cliff.
A figure in a black bodysuit, cloaked and hooded in white, with a simple red facemask. A red swastika armband, the symbol repeated on the chest and back of the cloak. He raised a hand, and lightning speared through ten soldiers. As Dragon watched, a lucky rocket fired from the beach struck the figure – and reversed direction without losing speed, hitting the man who'd fired it.
Geist was here.
This… was a problem. Dragon was powerful, she knew that. She'd had an enormous influence on the war, even as nothing more than a disembodied voice. As she was now, she had the power of a battleship behind her – or a cruiser, at any rate. Even most parahumans would have had trouble standing up to such firepower, when it was directed by a mind like Dragon's.
Most parahumans hadn't flattened Stalingrad in a single day.
Still, he wasn't invincible. In theory. Germany hadn't simply used Geist to roll over all opposition, because he couldn't be everywhere at once. He got tired like anyone else, although battles Geist took part in didn't tend to last very long. There was also the possibility that some parahuman would emerge that could catch him off guard, or harm him through his defences somehow.
Dragon was not that parahuman. But she had to try. Maybe she could distract him somehow. If he destroyed her – well, her main body at Bletchley Park would reactivate when this body stopped sending out its radio signal for more than ten minutes, and they could probably retrieve her memory banks from the bottom of the English channel eventually. It was a better deal than the soldiers on the beach were getting.
She was still a couple of miles out. It should be far enough. She aimed, and fired her main guns. On the beach, bunkers and machine gun nests collapsed, and soldiers stumbled forwards to take advantage. Geist raised his hand, metal debris rising around him – and an artillery shell slammed into his face.
Dragon was already moving at full speed. A few seconds later, that same shell thundered into the water just past Dragon's stern. Geist was entirely unharmed, and seemed to be looking her way.
Come on, she urged mentally. Come and fight the nice shiny distraction. She was too far out to be struck by a lightning strike – not that it would do anything other than earth itself into the sea immediately. Metal hulls were nice like that.
Unfortunately, no-one told Geist he was supposed to use lightning that way. The metal debris he'd lifted crackled slightly – then rocketed towards Dragon faster than bullets. She could barely even see them in flight, much less react to them. The guns she was using? Not a chance. They had moved almost a whole inch, before metal slammed into HMS Dragon in three places at about three times the speed of sound.
It was a good thing she was unmanned, Dragon reflected. The bridge was gone, ripped away completely. Part of her midships was holed on both sides, the projectile having gone straight through – and wreaking havoc on the way. One of her funnels was missing too, but that wasn't much of a loss. She wasn't taking on water, and all her guns were operational, so as far as Dragon was concerned she was still at a hundred percent – but even so, ouch.
Honestly, Dragon was considering just calling it quits. Geist had taken the most powerful shot she had and not even flinched. If she mistimed her shot, he could well beat her using his passive defences alone. And he definitely wasn't being passive. But she still had to keep him busy, for as long as she could, because if he got a moment to concentrate good men would die. She fired with every anti-air gun she had, sending a fusillade of shells Geist's way.
Geist seemed puzzled as to why losing her bridge didn't seem to trouble the ship he was fighting. He pointed, and a series of green lasers peppered the side of the hull, again scoring all the way through. Dragon kept up the assault. The nice thing about anti-air shells was that they exploded in mid-air, rather than being reflected back at her. It also provided a nice smokescreen, and kept Geist off-balance enough that his lasers weren't accurate enough to be worrying.
Still, this couldn't go on. For one thing, Dragon had used half her ammunition already. For another…
More of Geist's metal projectiles smashed into HMS Dragon, and this time the damage wasn't superficial. All the wires forward of midships were severed by shrapnel, which meant she'd lost about a third of her cameras and half her guns. Worse, her steering gear was broken. Dragon slowed down, and prepared to manoeuvre by engine alone. This was the end then, was it? She prepared for the blow that would finish her.
"HMS Dragon, this is Ms Liberty. Hold on for a moment longer, I'm on the way."
Oh, thank goodness.
Geist had just lifted more metal debris to use as ammunition when a black blur streaked into the side of his face. Rather than reflecting back in the direction it had come, however, it stopped about ten feet from Geist and revealed itself to be a woman in costume. Her expression was hidden beneath her helmet, but her body language was confident and unworried.
Ms Liberty was one of the only parahumans who could claim to have fought Geist and lived. In fact, she was the main reason Germany kept him back most of the time. Even invincible and tireless as she was, she couldn't actually beat Geist – but she could stall him long enough for the regular soldiers to do their jobs. She'd been the one to finally slay Tenryuu, and take revenge for all the lives lost when Pearl Harbour had burnt to the ground.
Geist darted back, lasers flashing out to land harmlessly against Ms Liberty's chest, followed by lightning. From the ground below, what looked like dust rose up – iron sand, probably, given his electromagnetism powers. Ms Liberty gave chase, paying no mind to Geist's attacks or the sand that swirled around her in a flaying storm. Two punches achieved nothing more than rocking her back in her flight path. A lightning-quick slap to both sides of Geist's head simultaneously did nothing either. Ms Liberty studied Geist for a moment, then punched again.
Dragon couldn't really see what happened – her cameras were only so good, and Geist and Ms Liberty were miles away and moving fast – but it looked like Ms Libery pulled the blow at the last minute. Despite this, it somehow penetrated Geist's barrier. He'd moved at the last second, so all that was struck was his arm – but that shattered, and Geist screamed for the first time Dragon had ever heard of.
He shot away, rocketing in a zig-zag pattern over the Channel. Dragon followed him with her guns, and even landed a couple of shots, but whatever Ms Liberty had done to get through his barrier wasn't working for her. After a moment, he slowed down, and four of what looked like wings emerged from his back. They weren't biological, that Dragon could see – or really made of anything in particular, just some blank off-white material. Still, when Ms Liberty charged in with a brutal uppercut, one wing placed itself between the two. There was an almighty shockwave – but Geist was unharmed.
This was what made Geist so unstoppable. Any time anyone figured out how to work past one of his powers, he simply switched it out for another. Undaunted, Ms Liberty darted round the other side for another blow.
Her fist went through empty air. Geist had teleported at the last moment, evidently having switched out another of his powers as well. He appeared below and behind her, his hand poised to close round Ms Liberty's ankle – and then she was suddenly gone. A second later, she exploded from the sea in a spray of water. She came in fast, launching another flurry of titanic strikes. All of them were blocked by that odd material, and Geist tapped her on the chest. Once again, she was teleported to the sea, and once again, she launched herself out of it a split second after she was sent there.
She was batted straight back by a wall of off-white material, which formed shackles around her arms and legs and drove straight down into the seabed. Ms Liberty struggled – but Geist piled on more and more material, burying her under an artificial island of matter. Considering how much the US heroine could lift, it had to have some sort of anomalous properties.
Dragon fired her anti-air guns, trying to distract him, but her shots were swatted away contemptuously one after another. A flicker, and then Geist was right on top of her. He scythed through the ship entirely with a wing, and then set to tearing her apart with magnetic force. Dragon had only moments – but there was more than enough time for what she needed. No matter what, Germany could not know that she was an artificial intelligence, and she'd come prepared.
Her communications aerials all but lit up, as she transmitted what she could of her actions since separating from her main body. When she woke up back at Bletchley, she'd have at least an idea of what happened.
That done, she detonated the explosives around her mainframe, and waited.
---
It was done. The war – the Second World War – was over.
There'd been massive celebrations at Bletchley, of course. Tinged with an air of solemnity at the price of winning, but it was done. It would be a shame to leave the place, really, thought Alan. But he was an academic at heart. His place was at university.
He would miss Bletchley, though. All the more, because he couldn't tell anyone about what he was doing here. Ever. The threat from the Axis was gone – oh, and how – but that didn't mean Britain was about to give up all its war secrets. No. No-one would know about the team that had probably saved more lives than all the Allied parahumans put together. No-one would know about Dragon.
He'd heard there were some American scientists working on something that sounded like a primitive Colossus. They, and not Tommy, Richter and himself, would receive the credit for creating the world's first mechanical computer. It stung, he wasn't going to pretend otherwise. But it stung more thinking that Dragon would have to wait until the next artificial intelligence came along to reveal herself and live as a part of the world she'd helped save. And who knew how long that would take? It could be fifty years.
At least Alan didn't have to leave her behind completely. She was just a phone call away, as long as you gave the operator the right passcode. But it would be nice to have one last chat in the room where it all began, for old times' sake.
So, Alan excused himself from the celebrations and made his way to the room where Dragon's main servers were stored. When he arrived, though, he wasn't alone. Richter sat slumped outside the door to Dragon's room, a bottle of wine in his hand.
"Andrew?" Alan said. "What on Earth are you doing here?"
"Mm? Oh, Alan. You're not at the party? Thought you'd be celebrating."
"I was. I'm leaving in the morning, and wanted to say goodbye to Dragon."
Richter snorted. "No need. She'll be around. Always around! Can't stop you from seeing her if you want to. Can't stop her from seeing you if she wants to."
Alan reached over and gently took the bottle from Richter's hand. "You're not making any sense, Andrew."
There was a bitter laugh. "It's about Dragon, of course, like it always is. I'm the only one who knows how she works now, you know that? You might be able to work it out, if you had about a month and she didn't update herself in the meantime. Tommy's got no idea anymore. I'm the only one who can actually work out what she's done to herself, and reprogram her if we need to. All those restrictions we put on her? I'm the only one who knows how to add them now. The only one in the world who could possibly stop her."
Alan tried to parse this. Richter… was scared of Dragon? "Look, Andrew, you know Dragon. She wouldn't hurt a fly – not without running it by us first. She's one of the kindest and most loyal people I've ever met-"
"Now she is," snapped Richter. "Right now, she's thinking mostly on a human level, for all that she's faster at calculating than us. Right now, she's two years old. Where will she be in another two years? Ten? A hundred? We won't even understand her mind at that point. Doesn't that frighten you? Who's to say what kindness looks like, when you're thinking at that level?"
He sighed. "If it was just that… no, even with just that I'd be scared. But we gave her too much power, Alan. Look what we taught her how to do just as a voice – just as a typewriter, she was the biggest thing to enter the war since the US. But we indulged her every wish, like every new parent. When she wanted eyes, we gave them to her. When she wanted ears, we plugged her into the damn radio waves of an entire nation. When she started designing fake blueprints to give to German factories, so they'd build their tanks and planes and machines with hidden flaws – that's when we should have acted. Should have stopped her from growing any more, until we were sure it was safe." Richter chuckled darkly, and ran his hands through his hair.
Alan folded his arms. "I disagree. It's wrong to cripple a person just because of what they might become, for something outside their control. Hasn't Dragon proven herself to you? She helped take out the Axis, for goodness sake! What more do you want?"
Richter glowered. "If I'm right, she could end up being more of a threat than Germany ever was." He sighed. "Or Russia. That's the new big thing, now, I hear. Seems they'll be picking up where Hitler left off, in the espionage game. And they're sneakier, too. I've been told to stay here and keep doing what I'm doing. Keep working with Dragon in case anything happens."
"Well, that's good, isn't it? You're right, we helped her grow beyond our wildest dreams. She grew into a hero – an unsung hero. If we need to keep an eye on her to make sure she stays on the side of the angels, then that's just what we'll do. There's no need to be so dramatic. And I still think you're overreacting. Dragon will be a force for good in this world. You'll see." Alan smiled.
Richter blinked up at Alan, then slumped down again. "Oh, for goodness' sake. I'm far too drunk to deal with this right now. Fine, you insufferable man, if you believe in Dragon, then I'll believe in you. Heaven knows you've earned it.
"For now…" He trailed off, and looked sheepishly at Alan. "Do you think you could give me a lift to bed? I don't think I can make it by myself."
Alan laughed, and pulled his friend to his feet. Richter put his arm over Alan's shoulders, and they stumbled off to bed.
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Next time: The Ballad of Green Guns Hannah