Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

The ciphering machinery—if that is what it is—burps frenziedly. Edie’s hair stands up and she feels dust and grime rush to settle on her. She scowls and taps the earthing rod on her left before reaching out to adjust the pegs and feed a new set of numbers into the machine.

The Ada Lovelace is where Edie works and lives and—to her amazement—learns. Before her shift begins in Hothouse 6 (this being the secret designation of the machine room on board the Ada Lovelace ), she has four hours each morning spent studying any number of things girls are not generally encouraged to know, while the train rips across the British countryside, occupying empty sidings and blank slots in the timetable, rolling and slipping around the edges of the map.

The Ada Lovelace , she has begun to understand, is but one part of a curious pattern, a cross-hatched web of connections. Not all of them are trains, but each surely houses a machine room used for this kind of numerical unravelling. The work is not limited to code-breaking, but includes more generalised number problems and mathematical assessments of probability and chance. In the course of carrying answers from the machine to Abel Jasmine’s office at the head of the train, Edie has glimpsed enough to understand what the numbers signify: maps, armies, and fleets. She cannot begin to guess which numbers relate to which problem, but she knows now what is being asked in Hothouse 6: the rate of the enemy’s resupply; the depth of water in a harbour revealed by wave heights and frequencies; the presence of a secret installation by the early thawing of a snow-capped mountain. Properties of the real world, she realises, may be predicted by numbers on a slate. She has a sense that learning these things without ever being told them is a species of test, a continual assessment. Secrets, here, are prizes to be winkled out.

The train ducks into a tunnel, and Edie sighs as the heat immediately becomes stifling. She suggested a few weeks ago that they could probably go with a considerably less modest set of garments, and even the most reserved of the girls readily agreed until the Keeper respectfully submitted that a) it was hard enough to keep a group of monks and soldiers focused on running the engine and the galvanic system without surrounding them with sweating, naked girls and b) a lady should certainly not care, however patriotic she might be, to sustain a burn in a sensitive place such as might result from (here he hesitates, casting around for respectful terminology) an uncorseted bosom brushing against a hot pipe or valve.

Edie Banister: code-wife, secret engineer, plucking strange truths from the white-hot iron of progress to fight the advance of terror across Europe’s fields. Learning poetry and history and languages and marksmanship. And doing much of it all but nude, too, surrounded by other girls in similar undress.

Edie has read some Greek drama, and is feverishly aware of the possibilities. Such understanding is one of the benefits of a classical education.

Edie Banister glimpses her reflection in a smooth brass plate, and tries to see resolve in her own face. This is the day on which she has determined to find out more about where she is working. She understands that Abel Jasmine is practising a thing called information sequestration—which is a clever way of saying that no one is allowed to know much about Science 2 beyond what is required for them to perform their function within the network—but three things occur to her about this: the first, that Abel Jasmine knows and presumably also Captain Amanda Baines, and also whatever minister has governance of their efforts and any number of that person’s assistants and clerks, and that the addition of one junior employee to the list, while irregular, will not greatly compromise security; the second, that it is—while vanishingly unlikely—at least conceivable that Science 2 is in fact not a British operation at all, but a German one, and she has a duty to be sure she has not inadvertently been duped into betraying her country; and third, that she really, really wants to know about what’s going on. If she is caught—and assuming that, being caught, she has not also been shot by German spies for uncovering their evil plan—she will lean heavily on items [1] and [2] as justification and skate over item [3].

Thus Edie Banister, now eighteen years of age and slender as the rails she rides, prepares for her first covert mission.

Over the last weeks, she has surveyed the parts of Hothouse 6 to which she has ready access. The dormitories are at the rear; the monks’ last, with a small contingent of soldiers—it’s a barracks, really, and defensible—then the women’s, then the baths and communal mess, then the work area and the classrooms and finally a locked door leading to Abel Jasmine’s study and the output room, snuggled up against the engine and, like the barracks, armed to repel invasion. It seems to Edie—in her new guise as a student of strategy and war—that there is a tacit prioritisation here, a tactical triage. Edie has already ascertained that there is a remote decoupling system threaded through the train, operable only with a special key. There are access points along the main corridor, which zigzags around the rooms, making them more private but also obviating the possibility of an enfilade. A great deal of thought has gone into the construction of the Lovelace , above and beyond the strange, tactile prayers of the Ruskinites.

Which implies, of course, that measures have been taken to guard against infiltration as well as assault, but she’s fairly sure none of the security systems she is likely to encounter will kill her unless Abel Jasmine specifically orders them to.

Seventy per cent sure, at least.

Edie racks a new valve and glances at the girl next to her—Clarissa Foxglove—with some wistfulness. Clarissa Foxglove has smooth skin and short hair, and Edie, working beside her, has become acutely aware of her proximity and her energy, and the strong, purposeful way in which she does things. Clarissa Foxglove’s voice is husky, as if she has a throat cold all the time, and she smokes cheap cigarettes which her Free French uncle sends her in a monthly package which also contains admonishments to greater efforts in the cause of His Britannic Majesty’s United Kingdom. Edie, observing Clarissa purse her lips and wet each cigarette before they go in, suffers from pangs of envy. Not that she wants a cigarette. Just that she wishes, sometimes, with a belly-curdling lurch of desire, that Clarissa Foxglove would treat her in the same way. Two days ago, Edie had to pass a pair of pliers to Alice Hoyte, Clarissa’s neighbour on her other side, and at full stretch found herself pressed corps à corps with Clarissa, their hips rubbing gently and Clarissa’s shoulders moving under her chemise as she worked on replacing a blown fuse. Upon a soft cushion I dispose my limbs , oh, indeed.

Edie Banister pushes this thought firmly down—not because of its content, which she files away for extensive later consideration—but because it is liable to distract her from the task at hand. Before she can move her eyes away from Clarissa Foxglove, the girl catches her looking and smiles a conspiratorial smile, then quite deliberately leans forward to borrow Edie’s screwdriver, her lace-clad left breast drawing a line across Edie’s arm and shoulder which she can feel long after the contact has finished.

Focus .

The interior corridor of the Lovelace is patrolled and likely impassable. Thus, Edie has ruled it out. But in a few moments, the bell will sound for end-of-shift and another opportunity will present itself. Edie’s workmates (including Clarissa Foxglove, oh, my) will head for the showers. And isn’t that an opportunity worth savouring? Mm.