Ник Харкуэй: Angelmaker

So Sarah Ryce says yes, and at one a.m. she presses a sequence of buttons she’s never pressed before in that order, and watches the board light up with stopped locomotives dragging iron pilings from Hove to Carmarthen by way of Clapham Junction, and a bright green line shines in the darkness, its route clear all the way to central London and onward to the green reaches of Richmond and Barnes.

A few moments later, something passes her station going at what must be over a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and the old, rusted track protests, but holds. Sarah Ryce grins, secretly: whatever she’s done, it’s something big.

Green fields full of cows and sheep; occasional empty churches and shuttered pubs; the wide stretches of road alongside the railway line; the engine passes them by and is gone, trailing hot-metal stink, sulphurous coal smoke.

Past warehouses and school buildings, the backs of shops and restaurants and petrol stations, on and on and on into London. Brick houses shake, glasses jump from sideboards. Car alarms wail and windows crack. Polly Cradle’s empty bed, in its basement, comes right off its springs and crashes to the floor.

In the darkness of the night of misrule, the Ada Lovelace drives like a spear towards Sharrow House.

Titan passing.

Ruskinites patrol the grounds of Shem Shem Tsien’s fortress. There are machines and there are men, and there is very little to choose between them. The men are blank-faced in their linens, cold-eyed fragments of the Opium Khan walking and breathing, volitional only as sharks are. They feed, they fight, they sleep, and do it all again. They serve. They are part of something bigger.

And they hear something. They can feel it in their soles, in the gathering static in the air. Something big—no, huge .

In the grounds of Sharrow House, they gather, and wait. They are not afraid. They lack a sense of self; their identity is collective. Each is aware, peripherally, of his incompleteness, of the debt he owes to the template. They move like a swarm. They are a composite of horrors; endless hours of the life of Shem Shem Tsien embroidered with a pattern of torture and death, of theology and rage and hate.

They weave around one another, agitation growing. The sound is either much louder or much, much closer. The ground is thrumming. Other Ruskinites begin to emerge from Sharrow House in a seething mob, anticipating violence. Though each is driven by a different slice through the shape of Shem Shem Tsien’s mind, one thing they have in common is their progenitor’s love of murder.

And then, at this appointed hour, Queen Tosh expresses her irritation: with a great boiling detonation, the castle moat explodes.

Green water turns white and bows upward. It boils, collapses into bubbles, and then rushes up, on up and outwards like a mushroom cloud, then splatters down in blobs the size of packing crates. Individual Ruskinites are flattened to the ground, broken or dead. Ugly, triangle-toothed fish, stunned and semi-liquidised, fall like rain. For a moment, everything is mist and spume. Then the froth of pressure stops and the geyser vanishes, and the remaining water burbles away into the drains.

The Ruskinite swarm stares down into the empty ditch. Unexpected. Unexpected things are bad. Unwelcome. But there is nothing to strike out at, so they stare at the missing moat, and out towards whatever is coming, and wait.

Joe Spork, with twenty seconds to impact and both hands on the control yoke of the train, watches the wall around Sharrow House loom closer and closer, and knows that for the first time in his adult life he is not backing away from a showdown. In a heartbeat, half a heartbeat, this train will test itself against that wall. The skill of the Ruskinites of days gone—Ted Sholt’s Ruskinites, not these present bastards—will be set against the immutable physics of collision. The cowcatcher will hold, or it will not. If the giant steam cylinder on the front of the train does not survive the impact intact, the explosion will be vast—but its vastness will be utterly irrelevant to a man standing on top of it. Any sort of bang will surely kill him.

In his chest, a golden cauldron of sheer excitement, like whisky in the soul. He grins at Polly Cradle, sees an answering smile of anticipation and sheer delight.

Hell, yeah.

The wall is huge in front of them, seems to be curving over to embrace the Lovelace like a gloved fist—

Impact .

Silence made from thunder.

A moment of absolute stillness, the smallest humanly perceptible division of time.

Joe is slammed against the driver’s restraints, thinks he must surely be shaken apart. He can see the ground, then the sky. The train will flip, and then explode. He cannot possibly survive. He finds he has no regrets, or perhaps he has no time to summon them.

But the Lovelace ’s maker knew his purpose: what he was tasked to build was not just a mobile laboratory or a code-station. It was a vessel of war, to withstand war’s appalling forces and torsions. The train would not function without its driver, and so the driver must be shielded.

The Lovelace cuts through the wall, spraying concrete, brick, stone and mortar. The carriages shunt together, slotting into one another so that their combined kinetic energy is passed along the spine of the train to the front in a great heave. The black iron is thick and solid, the stress of the impact rebounds through interlocking buffers and supports is dispersed as heat and deafening noise. Rivets pop and wood panels crack. The engine shrieks. The great pressure tank sobs and moans.

But it holds.

Of course, it holds. This is what it was made for.

Just like me .

Joe is moving before the train is fully stationary. He surges from the driver’s cab and down onto the burning grass, knowing somewhere inside himself that these first seconds will count, that the first battles will sway the outcome. Whoever flinches will fight uphill from then on, will lose momentum. He snarls and crouches low. A shadow skitters towards him on heron’s feet, bobbing and weaving. The thing takes an iron pipe full in the chest and flies backwards, and Joe lets loose a yell of heady rage. That for Edie! And that for Ted! And that one for Billy and Joyce, and one for Tess and however many others along the way. And for me. Oh, yes. For me . He stalks through the fog, bludgeoning and crushing, teeth bared. When he feels them begin to gather around him, he steps back towards the wrecked train and a curtain of burning-rubber stink. Metal hands and swords flicker after him.

He’s already gone, silent on his big feet.

Behind him, from the Lovelace , the small but righteous army of Crazy Joe emerges into the beachhead: a collection of thugs and muggers, glad beyond anything they had expected at the chance of a day’s heroism; retired boxers and questionable bodyguards, occasional assassins and professional leg-breakers, hearts uplifted at the prospect of a good fight, the right kind of fight, just this once. This one time, to pay for all. Behind them come Fifth Floor Men and safebreakers, for ease of access; and behind them the Waiting Men—a dozen mournful faces with broad shoulders from carrying coffins, retired soldiers who came by their Acquaintanceship the hard way. Not just an army. A wrecking crew.