Eric Brown: Rites of Passage

“Then we must do what we must inside two hours,” Burns said.

Tommy spoke up, “What’s he sayin’, Mr Burns? He’s talkin’ about me, I’ll wager.”

“Tommy, you have nothing to fear. You will sleep for a period, and when you awaken all will be well.”

The Sentinel reached out, and with claw-like hand depressed a set of keys on a console to his right.

Burns felt a certain frisson, as if a charge of electricity filled the ship, and instantly the Sentinel’s head flopped back on its rest, and its great eyes fluttered shut.

Beside him, Tommy sat suddenly upright and beamed at Burns.

“Oh, to inhabit a form possessed of youth and vitality!” cried the Sentinel through Tommy’s lips; and the incongruity of the fine words expressed in Tommy’s Yorkshire brogue made Burns smile.

The Sentinel-in-Tommy leapt to his feet and pulled two short-barrelled devices from a rack; he brandished the first at Burns. “A disequaliser. This works very much like a crystal in reverse; one shot at the subject and it will eject the interloper’s mind from its host and capture it in this chamber.” He tapped a bulbous glass container beneath the gun barrel. “Then I can return with Turqan in custody and hand him over to the Galactic Federation for trial.” He passed Burns the second weapon. “This is a simple stunner. One pulse will render the victim comatose for up to an hour. You might find it of use.”

Burns tucked the weapon into his waist-band.

“Now,” said the Sentinel, “how to locate the individual you call Prince Albert?”

“Leave that to me,” Burns said, withdrawing a communicator from his waistcoat pocket. He activated the device and slipped it into his ear.

A second later a high, querulous voice said, “Burns? What is it? I’m entertaining the King of Belgium.”

“Your Majesty. My sincere apologies, but it is vital that I enquire as to the whereabouts of his Highness the Prince.”

“Albert? But why–?”

“Time is off the essence, your Majesty. If you could apprise me of his whereabouts?”

Burns willed Victoria to tell him that Albert had taken to his sick-bed, and his heart sank when the reply came. “Why, he is presently at the Crystal Palace, overseeing some technical business or other.”

“Thank you, your Majesty. Forgive me, but I will explain everything at our very next meeting.”

He pulled the communicator from his ear before Victoria could reply, and turned to the Sentinel. “As I feared, he is at Hyde Park.”

The hatch opened above their heads and they rose to the muddy surface of the Thames.

“To Hyde Park we go,” cried the Sentinel in the guise of the urchin mudlark, “for the very safety of the country, and the world, is at stake!”

They took a Hansom first to Kensington, and bade it wait while Burns dashed to his garret and changed his ruined boots and breeches; at the same time he affected a quick disguise, donning a false moustache and a fair wig he kept for such occasions. Five minutes later they were rattling south towards Hyde Park.

“I made the acquaintance of Turqan-in-Albert’s-guise earlier today at Buckingham Palace,” Burns explained. “Albert knows of my work as a Guardian, and as Turqan has access to his every memory… With luck he will fail to recognise me in this get up. But how to go about this business, Sentinel?”

After a moment’s contemplation, the Sentinel replied. “It should be, if all goes well, a simple matter. We need merely apprehend the Prince long enough for me to get one shot on target. After that, of course, we will need to locate the crystals.”

Burns gazed out at the passing streets, the buttery light of a hundred gas-lamps reflecting off piled snow and illuminating the continued fall. It should be a simple matter, but in his experience it boded ill to presume victory before the event. They were, after all, in opposition to a skilled practitioner in the ways of deceit and subterfuge. He fingered the butt of the weapon and told himself to keep his wits about him.

Five minutes later they arrived at Hyde Park, alighted and paid the driver. Despite the late hour, crowds still thronged the park in order to witness the architectural miracle of the Crystal Palace. Burns, with the Sentinel-in-Tommy skipping along beside him, hurried across the snow-covered grass towards the rearing edifice of the Palace, shining like a vast diamond against the night sky. Almost two thousand feet long and five hundred wide, it rose to a height of a hundred feet — a wonder indeed in which to exhibit the myriad marvels of the modern age.

Burns pushed through the crowds milling around outside the Palace. Tall, arched entrance-ways lined the length of the building, each one posted with a guard of Peelers pacing back and forth and stamping to ward off the cold.

Burns led the Sentinel along the length of the palace, to where the crowds thinned; he spotted an entrance patrolled by a lone bobby, and saw his opportunity.

He approached the bewhiskered custodian and concocted a sorry tale. He was exhibiting an invention within — none other than the Greenwood Helical Elevator — but had left earlier without assuring that it had shut down correctly; he needed now to return, with his apprentice Tommy, in order to ensure its safe deactivation.

“And your exhibitor’s pass, sir?”

“That’s the very deuce of it, my good man. In my haste to return I quite forgot the pass, but I can offer this.” And from his waistcoat he produced a crisp pound note.

The bobby goggled, then looked right and left to ensure the transaction went unobserved. He took the proffered note with alacrity and hissed, “Now slip inside, sir, and the boy. Quick smart!”

Burns and the Sentinel needed no second telling; they passed through the arched entrance, from cold and darkness into the warmth and gas-lit illumination of a veritable wonderland.

Crowds of workmen and supervisors filled the glass-walled Palace, milling hither and thither with the industry of ants. Right and left, seemingly as far as the eye could see, great displays of industrial, scientific and technological wonder receded into the distance, cordoned off by heavy red braid as if they were museum exhibits. Burns beheld bulbous tanks and pistons, engines and cranks, a multitude of industrial muscle miraculous — from his perspective — for its primitive might. Truly the human race combined indomitability and curiosity; to progress from an agrarian culture to this in so relatively short a time was little short of wondrous.

A tug at his sleeve brought him back to the present. A muck-smeared face grinned up at him. “There,” said the Sentinel, pointing.

The footprint of the Palace was laid out in the form of a great cross, at its centre a transept in which stood the base of a tiled fountain, currently shut off. In the fountain itself, which looked for all the world like a shallow paddling pool, a dozen workmen were hauling on ropes and pulleys as a sprawling, resplendent chandelier was hoisted, inch by inch, high into the glass dome overhead.

Burns and the Sentinel made their way towards the fountain, which was surrounded by other workmen who had downed tools in order to watch the laborious ascent of the chandelier.

They were standing beside a sweating workman who smiled at their astonished expressions and commented, “We had it up not two days ago, sirs. And then what? Just today Albert hisself, bless his whiskers, ’ad us haul it down and replace all the blessed gas-lights with some new-fangled bulbs. Strike me dead, but it isn’t as if his Highness has to do the haulin’, is it?”

The workman moved off, mopping his brow, and the Sentinel hissed to Burns, “Look! Behold the pendant crystals that form the mass of the chandelier.”