Mark Hodder - Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

“Yes, Sir Richard. My people will tarry-harry-excuse me, carry- everything aboard.”

“I say, Izzy!” Swinburne piped up, with a mischievous twinkle in his green eyes. “Has your new speech-rendering device broken?”

“No,” Brunel answered. “But it is not currently interacting sufficiently-effusively-expectantly-I mean, efficiently -with the calculating elephants-um- elements -of my cerebral impasse-er, impulse -calculators. Unanticipated variegations-vegetations-my apologies- variations are occurring in the calibration of the device's sensory nodes.”

“My hat!” Swinburne exclaimed. “The problem is obviously chronic! I didn't understand a single word you just said! It was absolute gibberish!”

“Algy,” Burton muttered. “Behave yourself!”

“It's all right, Sir Pilchard-er, Sir Richard,” Brunel interjected. “Mr. Spinbroom has not yet forgiven me for the way I treated him during the String Filled Sack affair. I mean the Spring Heeled Jack despair-um- affair. Kleep.”

“Kleep?” Swinburne asked, trying to stifle a giggle.

“Random noise,” Brunel replied. “A recurring poodle. I mean, problem.”

The poet clutched his sides, bent over, and let loose a peal of shrill laughter.

Burton sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Mr. Brunel's speakin' apparatus is the same as me own,” Herbert Spencer put in, raising a brass finger to touch the rounded arrangement of pipes on his head. “But, as you know, me intellect is knockin' around inside the structure o' black diamonds, whereas his ain't, and the instrument responds better to impulses from inorganic matter than from organic.”

“Ah-ha!” Swinburne cried out, wiping tears from his eyes. “So you still have fleshly form inside that big tank of yours, do you, Izzy?”

“That's quite enough,” Burton interrupted, pushing his diminutive assistant aside. He steered the conversation back to the business at hand: “Are we on schedule, Isambard?”

“Yes. We have to declare-compare- repair the ventilation and leaping-um, heating -system, but the League of Chimney Sweeps has guaranteed periphery-I mean, delivery -of a new section of pipe by six o'clock today, and the work itself will slake- take -but an hour or so.”

Swinburne, who'd regained control of himself, asked, “Why can't you fabricate the pipe yourself?”

“Reg-parp-ulations,” Brunel answered.

Burton explained: “The Beetle has recently secured the sole manufacturing and trading rights to any pipes through which his people must crawl to clean or service.”

“That boy is a genius,” Swinburne commented.

“Indeed,” Burton agreed. “Very well, we'll leave you to it, Isambard. The ship's crew will help your people to load the supplies. The passengers will reconvene here tomorrow morning at nine.”

“Would you like to suspect- inspect -the vehicles before you depart?”

“No time. We have a murder investigation under way. I have to go.”

“Before you do, may I peek- speak -with you privately for a moment?”

“Certainly.”

Burton followed Brunel and stood with him a short distance away. They conversed for a few minutes, then the Steam Man clanked off and rejoined the group of Technologists.

Burton returned.

“What was all that about?” Swinburne asked.

“He was telling me a few things about the babbage device that John Speke has fitted to his head. Let's go.”

“Should I join you, Boss?” Spencer asked.

“No, Herbert. I'd like you to stay and check the inventory against the supplies loaded.”

“Rightio.”

Leaving the clockwork man, Burton and Swinburne walked out through the doors, crossed the courtyard, and joined Detective Inspectors Trounce and Honesty, Commander Krishnamurthy, Constable Bhatti, Isabella Mayson, Mrs. Angell and Fidget, and various other passengers at the foot of the rotorship's boarding ramp. Crewmembers D'Aubigny, Bingham, and Butler were also there, having been granted a few hours' shore leave.

The pea-souper swirled around them all, dusting their clothes and skin with pollutants, clogging their nostrils with soot.

“Are we all ready?” Burton asked his friends. “Then let us go and bid civilisation farewell, except for you, Mother Angell. I fully expect you to maintain its standards while we're gone.”

The group walked out through the station gates and passed alongside the outer wall beside a patch of wasteland that stretched down to nearby railway lines-a location which held bad memories for the king's agent and his assistant, for two years ago they'd been pursued across it by wolf-men and had narrowly avoided being hit by a locomotive.

They followed a path down to Kirtling Street, which took them the short distance to Battersea Park Road. Here they waved down conveyances. Monckton Milnes's guests gradually disappeared, as they each caught cabs home. Mrs. Angell and Fidget climbed into a hansom, bound for 14 Montagu Place; Isabella Mayson took another, for Orange Street; and a growler stopped for Detective Inspector Honesty, Commander Krishnamurthy, and Constable Bhatti, ready to take them each in turn to their respective homes.

A fourth vehicle-a steam-horse-drawn growler-was hailed by Burton for himself, Swinburne, and Trounce.

“Scotland Yard, driver!” the latter ordered.

“Not to Otto Steinruck's house?” Burton asked, as he climbed into the carriage and settled himself on the seat.

“It's out in Ilford,” came the reply. “Too far by cab, so I thought we'd each borrow one of the Yard's rotorchairs.”

The growler swung out onto Nine Elms Lane and chugged along next to the Thames. Its passengers took out their handkerchiefs and held them over their noses, the stench from the river so intense it made their eyes water.

Burton looked out of the window. Somewhere along this road there was a courtyard in which a young girl named Sarah Lovitt had been assaulted by Spring Heeled Jack back in 1839-just one of many attacks Edward Oxford had committed while searching for his ancestor. That was twenty-four years ago, and in that short time Oxford's influence had totally transformed the British Empire. That one man could effect such a change so quickly seemed utterly incredible to Burton but it wasn't without precedent; after all, history was replete with individuals who'd done the same-the Caesars, Genghis Khans, and Napoleons. Oxford had caused the death of Queen Victoria. After that, his influence had been subtler; he'd simply made unguarded comments about the future to Henry Beresford. The marquess had passed that information on to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose remarkable creative talents had been set alight by the hints and suggestions, leading to the creation of the political and cultural juggernaut that was the Technologist caste.

While Brunel's Engineers and Eugenicists succumbed to their inventive zeal, Oxford's presence in the form of Spring Heeled Jack had also inspired an opposing force: the Libertines, who sought to change social policies and create a new species of liberated man.

All of these elements had given rise to a condition of rapidly growing chaos, as scientific developments and social experimentation accelerated without check. For Charles Darwin, the man they called “God's Executioner,” who'd fallen under the sway of his cousin, the Eugenicist Francis Galton, the possibilities had been so overwhelming they'd pushed him beyond the bounds of sanity.

How many others? Burton thought. How many have become something they should never have been?

The growler turned left onto Vauxhall Bridge and joined the queue of vehicles waiting to pay the toll to cross.

“The devil take it!” Trounce grumbled. “For how long are we to sit here breathing in this funk?”