Evolution Expects Read online

  PAX BRITANNIA

  EVOLUTION EXPECTS

  By Jonathan Green

  Pax Britannia

  The Ulysses Quicksilver Books, by Jonathan Green

  Unnatural History

  Leviathan Rising

  Human Nature

  Evolution Expects

  Blood Royal

  Dark Side

  Anno Frankenstein

  Time's Arrow

  The El Sombra Books, by Al Ewing

  El Sombra

  Gods of Manhattan

  Pax Omega

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2009 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editors: Jonathan Oliver & David Moore

  Cover: Mark Harrison

  Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne

  Marketing and PR: Rob Power

  Head of Comics and Book Publishing: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Pax Britannia™ created by Jonathan Green

  Copyright ©2009 Rebellion Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  Pax Britannia™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-84997-138-6

  ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-146-1

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  For Jonathan Oliver, who shared a vision.

  And for Mark Harrison, who helped bring that

  vision to life.

  PROLOGUE

  The House that Jack Built

  TAKING A DEEP breath to steady his nerves, feeling like he could vomit at any moment and his heart pounding nervously within his chest, wiping the sweat from his hand, Thomas Sanctuary put his palm to the brass plaque beside the front door. There came a harsh buzzing from somewhere behind it and Thomas’s heart sank. The biometric reader hadn’t recognised him.

  His anxious mind was suddenly filled with possible reasons for the mechanism’s failure to identify him. Had his palm-print been removed from the lock’s memory core? Or had he changed so much in the last ten years that his palm-print was no longer recognised by the device? Or was it simply that the device was faulty? Thomas put a hand to the solid iron door-knocker and then paused.

  Focusing on his breathing to calm himself, he wiped the sweat from his hand on the coarse fabric of his old tweed jacket and put his palm flat against the plaque once more. This time, after a second of whirring machine-cogitation, there was a faint click and the door swung open of its own accord – another of his father’s inventions.

  Thomas Sanctuary’s pulse quickened once again. He hadn’t felt this nervous since his first day spent at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Ten years had passed since then, and now here he was, back at his father’s door as if he had never been away. Taking another deep breath, he stepped over the threshold and into the house.

  Although he hadn’t set foot inside the house in over a decade, to him it seemed as if little had changed. In fact, the place had the rarefied air of a museum; the portraits hung on the walls of the circular atrium in which he now stood, the porcelain vase on the table beside the door and the display of stuffed and mounted hummingbird species imprisoned for all time inside the large glass cabinet at the bottom of the stairs.

  No, not a museum, Thomas thought as he stared up into the steely eyes of his father, the inventor and recluse James Sanctuary, a mausoleum.

  That was precisely what Sanctuary House had become, since his father’s passing, he could feel it in the cold, still air of the hall; a shrine to the man who had ruled this place with a rod of iron.

  The grand portrait of his father dominated the atrium, reminding all who entered who was master of this house, even now, five years after his death. It depicted James Sanctuary standing proudly beside his drawing board, the pen and ink outlines of his latest invention set out upon it. Whenever he had set eyes upon the painting in the past, Thomas Sanctuary had only ever seen his father, aloof and domineering, and hadn’t really taken in the background. Now that he looked more closely, he could see what appeared to be a sinister skeletal structure, metal rods and hinges replacing the bones and joints. Even the head of whatever it was looked not unlike a grinning skull with great empty eye sockets. Undoubtedly some hare-brained scheme of his father’s, another of his failures in the making.

  Bitterness suddenly welled up inside of Thomas. Nothing he had done had ever been good enough for his father. Not that his father had ever been a great success. His inventions, those that had worked, had never taken off. The palm-reader worked perfectly, of course, but his father stubbornly refused to share that particular idea with anyone else.

  The family fortune had already been there, and was not the result of James Sanctuary’s inventions or financial acumen. As a result, he had never been satisfied with his achievements. Every one of them had been a letdown, even those that made it past the planning to actual construction.

  James Sanctuary had beavered away in his study-cum-workroom at the top of the house, night and day when he was engaged on a new project. He filled the conservatory space there with all manner of apparatus along with his discarded creations, never once stopping to enjoy the unprecedented views the sun-room afforded of Hampstead Heath, Highgate Cemetery and the city beyond, while Thomas had tinkered with his father’s abandoned creations himself.

  There had been a time when Thomas and his father, who had always been distant and aloof, had come as close as they ever would to connecting over their mutual tinkering with a clockwork toy that Thomas was adapting or a wind-up automobile that his father had let him play with. But as he got older, and his tinkering had become something more focused and purposeful, his father had lost interest in Thomas’s little projects, to the point of being openly disdainful about them, as if trying to put him off.

  Now that Thomas found himself reappraising his relationship with his father, he began to wonder if it had been jealousy that had fuelled the rift between them – a father’s envy of what his own child appeared able to do and which he could not.

  Thomas was roused from his musings by the tapping of footfalls on the cold tiles of the atrium floor.

  Out of breath and obviously caught off-guard by his unexpected arrival, Mrs May, his father’s portly housekeeper, bustled into the hall, no doubt roused from her abode on the ground floor. If Sanctuary House was a museum of antiquities then Mrs May was its curator.

  “Why, Master Thomas, I wasn’t expecting you to... today,” the housekeeper blustered. Thomas knew that when the palm-reader admitted him to Sanctuary House that it would have sent a signal to the housekeeper’s room, setting the appropriate bell jangling, alerting her to his arrival. “It’s been... Why, it must have been...” She faltered, her cheeks flushed red, her chest heaving beneath her uncomfortably tight black housekeeper’s dress and white pinafore.

  “Ten years, Mrs May. It’s been ten years. It’s good to see you again.”

  “And it’s good to see you, Master Thomas,” the housekeeper puffed, the
rumour of a smile brightening her plump features. “You’re looking... well.”

  “Am I?” Thomas regarded himself sidelong in the mirror that formed part of a coat and hat rack, the moth-eaten elephant’s foot still beneath it, he noticed. The walking stick propped within it was instantly recognisable as his father’s.

  The same could not be said of the not so young man staring back at Thomas from the looking glass. His hair was flecked with grey and sparser than it had been, his cheeks more hollow, his eyes more sunken, his lips drawn thinner, his jaw less clean-shaven.

  “And you, Mrs May, are you well?”

  “Quite well, thank you.”

  “You didn’t need to have stayed, you know,” Thomas said, fixing her with the same steely gaze as his father. “After he died, I mean.”

  The housekeeper flinched at Thomas’s choice of words and screwed up the hem of her apron in her hands in discomfort.

  “It was what your father wished, Master Thomas.”

  “So I understand.”

  “It was his dy... last wish that Sanctuary House be kept as it was.”

  “As a memorial to his genius, I suppose.”

  “For you, Master Thomas. He wanted it kept ready for you.”

  For a moment neither of them said anything more, the housekeeper and the heir to James Sanctuary’s legacy watching one another across the hollow space of the hall. An uncomfortable silence filled the void in the conversation between them, heavy with all those things that were best left unsaid, for the time being. It soon proved too much for Mrs May and she quickly broke the silence, lest Thomas say something neither of them really wanted to hear.

  “I was just making myself a pot of tea, otherwise I would have been quicker coming to the door, but, like I said, I wasn’t expecting... you. Would you like a cup?”

  “To come back, you mean?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  “You weren’t expecting me to come back.”

  “I... I didn’t know, Master Thomas. The last time you were here... You did not leave on the best of terms.”

  The argument, Thomas thought, never to be forgotten.

  “You did not send word that you were coming.”

  “A cup of tea would be lovely,” Thomas said, his face set in a mournful grimace. He turned towards the stairs that curved around the inside wall of the circular void three-storeys high.

  “Very good, sir.”

  “I’ll be in my father’s study. Bring it to me there, would you?”

  “You wouldn’t like to wash and change first?”

  “Bring it to me there, if you would be so kind,” he replied dismissively.

  “Very good, sir.”

  THOMAS PUT HIS hand to the polished brass doorknob and opened the door to his father’s inner sanctum. As he stepped over the threshold into the room, he felt the same excited tingle of reverential awe he had on those rare occasions when he had been allowed to enter the place where his father’s mad ideas fought their way out of his head and onto paper, before manifesting as incredible contraptions of iron, brass and wood. Even though he understood his father all the better now – his faults and failings laid painfully bare – he still felt like an excited child again, for the moment at least, the memories of those wonderful visits to this veritable Aladdin’s Cave of invention blurring into one blissful kick of nostalgia.

  First there was his father’s desk, covered in tiny working models of larger inventions that themselves delighted both the eye and the mind. Then there was the billiards table. Thomas had never known his father partake in a game, or even so much as pick up a cue, but the table had always been here, and stacked neatly upon the green baize were his father’s fastidious journals and the meticulously annotated plans for scores of wizardly contraptions; the record of a life of invention.

  There were work tables too, laden with half-finished and half-forgotten pieces – an iron-gauntlet with what looked like a wrist-mounted catapult attached, a miniaturised explosive shell of some kind, and a steam-powered grappling gun. Larger pieces stood where they had been abandoned before completion, smothered by heavy dust sheets now, his father having given up and moved on to work on another idea that intrigued him. Other contraptions were suspended from the ceiling.

  He passed row after row of bookshelves – James Sanctuary’s personal library, containing everything from the histories of the Roman writers to more obscure texts on early Islamic scientific scriptures – built into gothic-arched alcoves in the walls. The library shelves gave way to the steel and glass construction of the conservatory, and Thomas threw a glance at the leafless trees of the apple orchard below the house, before turning his attention to the view of Highgate Cemetery and the Smog-laden city beyond. But it did not distract him for long; he was too intrigued at the potential his father’s workroom had to offer him.

  He felt like a boy who had been given the keys to the sweet shop. Rarely allowed in here as a child and never, since he left to pursue his own studies at University, suddenly all this was his, to do with as he pleased; the representative of Mephisto, Fanshaw and Screwtape had declared it so, as sole beneficiary of his father’s estate, other than for a small annual stipend for Mrs May.

  And Thomas was sure that somewhere within this room there lay the means to achieve recompense for what had been done to him a decade ago – the tools with which he could exact his revenge.

  Smiling properly for the first time in a long time, Thomas took in all that the study had to offer, passing the grandfather clock that stood to the right of his father’s desk, and which appeared to be stuck at twelve o’clock, even though it was now past three, and completed his circuit of his father’s sanctuary from the world.

  He stopped beside the desk and glanced down at the journal that lay open upon it. He read the date and then, feeling a flush of nervous excitement that he might be found prying into his father’s personal thoughts, read the entry beneath.

  Thomas, my son.

  Thomas felt a cold rush of blood as he read his name.

  All this is now yours. Sanctuary House, my unfinished projects, but most of all the suit. This is my legacy to you. See if you can succeed where I could not.

  It was as if his father was speaking to him from out of the past, but it wasn’t the man he had known. Here, within the pages of his journal, James Sanctuary was a man who not only knew his failings, but openly admitted to his own shortcomings, and who recognised in Thomas someone who could finish what he had started.

  Thomas only noticed the tears when they obscured his vision and he had to wipe them away to keep reading the journal entry. Salt water splashed onto the page, smudging his father’s careful copper-plate words.

  Tempus fugit, my boy.

  Make me proud.

  JS

  Thomas looked from the running ink of his father’s final words to him – those which he had never been able to pass on in person – to the grandfather clock again, stuck as it was at twelve.

  Time flies. Why of all the things his father could have written for him to read in his journal had he written that?

  Putting the book down, Thomas moved back to the clock. His father had been meticulous about time-keeping, even if he had been dire at it himself. He would miss whole mealtimes and even whole days in pursuit of his latest project, battling with whatever baffling puzzle it had thrown up for him, but he had always insisted on the clocks in the house being set to the right time – all the time. In fact, Thomas could remember the gentle ticking of the grandfather clock underscoring his visits to his father’s study.

  Checking the time again on his own battered fob watch, one of the few items he had managed to hold on to whilst incarcerated, Thomas opened the glass panel in front of the clock face, reading the words ‘Tempus Fugit’ engraved there too. The key to wind the mechanism was in its hole.

  It had become such a part of Mrs May’s daily routine, to check the clocks at his father’s behest, that Thomas found it hard to believe that she shou
ld have given up the practice when she had obviously been at pains to keep everything else just as it was when his father died.

  He turned the key; once, twice... At the third turn there was a click and the front of the clock-case opened. Thomas looked down in surprise and felt an adrenalin rush of excitement course through his weary body. It was no wonder the clock wasn’t working; it was missing its pendulum. In place of the pendulum, inside the clock, was a brass plaque palm-reader, like the one he had used to open the front door of the house.

  Without hesitation, Thomas reached inside the clock and pressed his hand firmly against the metal plate. There was a moment of mechanical cogitation from some hidden Babbage unit, and then a louder grinding of gears.

  Thomas took a step back as the section of wall against which the clock stood, between the towering bookcases, began to revolve, revealing what had previously been hidden within an alcove behind the wall.

  Thomas stared in awe at his father’s legacy to him, at the very thing that would become the instrument of his vengeance against those who had seen him put away for ten long years for a crime he didn’t commit, while his father became a recluse, festering away within this very house until he died of shame.

  And the red-glazed eyes of the skeletal thing from the drawing board in his father’s portrait stared back at him.

  Act One