Red-Handed (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow 01) Read online

  PAX BRITANNIA

  TIME’S ARROW

  PART ONE: RED-HANDED

  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

  For Isaac Jeffrey Zitron - one day

  An Abaddon BooksTM Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2010 by Abaddon BooksTM, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editors: Jonathan Oliver & David Moore

  Cover: Pye Parr

  Design: Simon Parr & Luke Preece

  Marketing and PR: Keith Richardson

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Pax BritanniaTM created by Jonathan Green

  Copyright© 2011 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  Pax BritanniaTM, 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): 978-1-84997-303-8

  ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-304-5

  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.

  WELCOME TO A BOLD NEW ADVENTURE IN EBOOK PUBLISHING!

  Red-Handed is the first part of the interactive steampunk novel, Time's Arrow. This is not a conventional ebook; in the best traditions of Charles Dickens, Jules Verne and their heroic contemporaries, it's a serial, released in three parts.

  But unlike those chapbooks of old, in Time's Arrow you get to help tell the story! When you have reached the end, go to the Abaddon Books website to vote on what Ulysses Quicksilver should do next.

  The next part, Black Swan, will be released early next year, when there will be a new turning point to vote on, and the final part will be released after that.

  When the voting is complete, all three parts will be collected and available for sale in all good bookstores as a complete Pax Britannia novel.

  abaddonbooks.com

  “Once I, Chang Chou, dreamed that I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly. I was conscious that I was quite pleased with myself but I did not know that I was Chou. Suddenly I awoke and there I was, visibly Chou. I do not know whether it was Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that it was Chou.”

  – Chang Tzu, c.369-286 BC

  “Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?”

  – Ray Bradbury, ‘A Sound of Thunder,’ 1952

  PROLOGUE

  Past Imperfect

  ULYSSES QUICKSILVER OPENED his one remaining eye. All he could see was a blur of black shadows and ice-white light. He felt cold all over, and yet sweat was beading on his brow.

  He had been shot enough times in his life to know that now was one of those times. He felt sick with pain; a dull, throbbing ache in his right shoulder.

  He blinked, trying to banish the grey patches from his clouded vision. He blinked again and only then realised that the lingering haziness was caused by the clouds of dust settling around him.

  He sat up carefully, feeling woozy.

  There in front of him, where the exit from the sepulchre should be, was a pile of rock debris as high as the chamber’s vaulted ceiling. He found himself wondering how much of the ancient fortress must have collapsed in the cave-in to create such a mountain of rubble.

  Ulysses felt the insistent throb in his bones and knew that danger hadn’t done with him yet.

  He turned to the source of the pulsing, ice-white light. The Sphere was still active, opening a tunnel through time and space, creating a hole in the skin of the world that should never have existed.

  Combined with the damage already caused by the Iron Eagle’s crash-landing, the eldritch energies so unleashed were worrying at the very fabric of the Schloss Adlerhorst, at a molecular level. They were tearing the ancient castle apart. This had already resulted in the devastation Ulysses could see before him, and he suspected that, if what he had witnessed on the Moon more than fifty years into the future was anything to go by, it was only a matter of time before the rest of the Alpine stronghold came down on top of them, burying them beneath innumerable tons of rock and rubble.

  Groggily getting to his feet, Ulysses took in the rest of the sepulchral cavern. Any doors or other access points there might once have been were buried behind the landslide, with no chance of Ulysses ever uncovering them in time. There was only one way out of here now.

  His left hand clamped over the bullet wound in his shoulder, Ulysses began to pace across the debris-strewn, stone-flagged floor. He moved from looming pillar to looming pillar. The cyclopean columns were all that was holding the roof up. All the while he kept his eye on the figure standing next to the time-transmat device.

  The warped freak that had once been Daniel Dashwood was busy atop the steel dais, silhouetted against the glare of the Sphere’s nimbus of searing white light. His face was still covered by the ion mask and he was pulling on an over-sized glove over his left hand. And he was utterly ignorant of Ulysses’ presence.

  Suddenly the universe had turned and he had been given a second chance.

  Judging by his behaviour, Dashwood must have recklessly assumed that Ulysses was already dead – or as good as. But where was he planning on going this time? Was it further back into the past, to try to put right all that had gone wrong at Schloss Adlerhorst? Did he intend to travel to somewhere else in 1943 to escape the imminent destruction of the castle? Or was he heading back to the future – back to what Ulysses still thought of as the present – eighteen months or so from the end of the twentieth century?

  Ulysses doubted Dashwood could hear his approaching footsteps, what with the droning whine of the device and the seismic rumbling of the mountain peak as it slowly shook itself apart. Besides, he was talking to himself; although from the tone of his voice, it sounded more like he was berating himself.

  Another voice – Germanic, feminine and synthesised – rang out over the throbbing hum of the machine and the ice-floe crack of the weakening walls. “Coordinates set. Launching in one minute.”

  Ulysses watched as Daniel Dashwood made an adjustment to one of the controls built into the thick vulcanised rubber glove and prepared to step into the temporal vortex.

  Flexing his back and straightening his body, Ulysses focused his mind on dispelling the numbness that was threatening to leech away the last of his strength. He concentrated on one thing and one thing only – the pulsing glow of the Sphere.

  Dashwood didn’t know anything about his approach until Ulysses was right behind him.

  Something having alerted him – a sound perhaps, a barely perceptible change in air pressure, some heightened sixth sense – Dashwood spun round.

  “Thirty seconds,” the
tinny female voice of the Enigma engine intoned, as it commenced the final countdown. The logic engine was a monolith of black metal and glittering components on the other side of the platform, glimpsed between the hurtling gyroscopic bands of the Sphere.

  Ulysses threw himself at the villain, all his anger and passion rising like a volcanic tide within him. His fury gave him the strength he needed, enabling him to blot out the throbbing ache of the gunshot wound.

  He slammed the traitorous Dashwood into the zone of the Sphere’s influence and the two of them were immediately assailed by unfathomable forces. Tendrils of light, like fingers of incorporeal mist, whirled about them, while their faces were buffeted by hurricane winds.

  “You!” Dashwood hissed from behind the ion mask as Ulysses landed on top of him and they came nose to nose.

  “Yes, me,” Ulysses snarled, kneeling across Dashwood’s body and pulling him up by the front of his robe.

  “I thought you were dead.” Dashwood spat, clawing at Ulysses’ hands with ragged fingernails. “Twice.”

  “You thought wrong,” Ulysses replied.

  Letting go with his right hand, he pulled the mask from Dashwood’s face, casting it aside.

  His one eye widened in momentary surprise. It was like looking at an anatomist’s model of a human head, made from layer upon layer of translucent material. There was Dashwood’s arrogantly handsome face, and beneath that, layers of moving muscle; a network of blood vessels and capillaries. He could see the man’s eyeballs quite clearly, as well as the thread of the optic nerve behind each one. Behind transparent lips he could see Dashwood’s teeth, set within the gums covering the jaw that was just as clearly visible beneath. He even fancied he could see right down to the skull, the layers of flesh and subcutaneous fat seeming to peel away under his close scrutiny.

  Forming his hand into a fist, he dealt Dashwood a resounding blow and winced. The transparent flesh and bone felt as solid as that of any other man.

  “Twenty seconds,” the Enigma engine tolled.

  The pronouncement was accompanied by a crack like a thunderclap from the roof of the chamber.

  Ulysses froze and looked up. He saw the treacherous tracery of the black fissure opening above him, crazing like a crack in the splintering ice of a winter pond.

  It was all the distraction Dashwood needed.

  His punch caught Ulysses in the stomach, putting his diaphragm into spasm and forcing the air from his lungs.

  Ulysses doubled up. Dashwood grabbed hold of him with both hands and, with startling strength, threw him off. Ulysses landed on the other side of the platform, outside of the Sphere’s influence.

  “Fifteen seconds,” the Enigma engine’s voice echoed from the walls of the collapsing crypt.

  Leaving Ulysses curled up in agony – wracked with pain from his shoulder wound as much as the punch to the stomach – Dashwood scrambled into the cradle at the heart of the trasmat device.

  “Come on, come on!” he hissed through clenched teeth. His whole body trembled as he waited for the machine to launch him through the hole it had opened in time and space.

  There was another apocalyptic crash and then a moment of eerie silence. It was followed only a few seconds later by the thunderous noise of a piece of masonry hitting the dais not five feet from Ulysses.

  “Ten seconds.”

  The threat of being crushed by another cave-in spurred him on, giving him the resolve to draw on every last scrap of strength he had. Forcing himself up onto his feet one last time, Ulysses turned towards the whirling Sphere. Flashes of actinic lightning were erupting from it now. The figure of Dashwood at the heart of the machine was nothing more than a blur.

  “Five seconds.”

  Ulysses leapt, but not at Dashwood. Instead he grabbed hold of one of the static rings that generated the energy lattice. It was that lattice that held the unimaginable forces of the temporal vortex at bay – effectively creating its own microcosm of time and space, separate from the rest of reality. Ulysses cried out as his exertions tore at his injured shoulder. But he held on.

  “Four.”

  His own momentum carrying him forwards, he brought his knees up to his chest and kicked out at Dashwood.

  The man shouted in alarm as Ulysses planted both feet firmly in the middle of his chest, the force of the blow sending him tumbling backwards out of the machine.

  “Three.”

  His shoulder’s own scream of pain silencing him, Ulysses let go.

  He landed, sprawled in the cradle, and felt another hand grab hold of his and hang on. A hand encased inside vulcanised rubber.

  Ulysses stared down through the lattice of the cradle as Dashwood’s death’s-head leer peered up at him, their faces separated by the rippling heat-haze distortion of the temporal field between them.

  The glove’s wrist-mounted controls thumped against one of the support rings of the Sphere; Ulysses heard the keys rattling.

  “Course change confirmed.”

  “One.”

  “Launch.”

  The body blow Dashwood had dealt him was as nothing compared to the forces that assailed Ulysses now as every atom of his being was blasted into the black oblivion of null-space.

  LIQUID LIGHT SWAM like mercury around him, cocooning him within a ball of shimmering silver. Time and space lost all meaning as reality unravelled.

  The present melted away into the past, as the past became the future, the skeins of fate unravelling into eternity.

  And as time unwound, so did consciousness.

  A melange of memories assaulted his mind in a torrent – recollections of events yet to happen – all there in his past.

  And then recollection became reality and he was re-living the moments that had made him the man he was today, whenever that might be...

  ...ANOTHER BLOCK OF mooncrete crashed to the ground, shattering upon contact with the platform and denting a handrail. That had been too close for comfort.

  With fumbling fingers, Ulysses finally managed to undo the knots that bound Emilia to the chair and pull the gag free of her mouth.

  As her father helped her up, Ulysses pushed them both along the walkway towards the exit from the domed chamber.

  A figure stood in the thick of the swarming Selenites, and yet remained untouched.

  Ulysses felt he should recognise the man, even though he could barely see him between the milling alien ants.

  Emilia looked up at him with desperate eyes. Her hair was a mess, hanging in ruffled tangles around her shoulders. Tears streaked her face.

  “Go!” Ulysses implored her. “You have to get out of here now!”

  “But what about you?” she said, grasping him by the shoulders.

  “I’ll catch you up.”

  “You’re going after Daniel, aren’t you?”

  “I have to. I can’t let him get away again. The consequences would be too terrible to contemplate.”

  Emilia’s own anxious expression sagged.

  “Will I ever see you again?”

  Ulysses smiled weakly. “Oh, I’m like a bad penny, me. You don’t get rid of me that easily.”

  “As if I’d want to.”

  Ulysses looked across the chamber, trying to get a good look at the man hiding in the shadows.

  There was something about him, something Ulysses couldn’t put his finger on, but without understanding why he felt that he could trust the man.

  “Go,” he urged Emilia and her father, sending them on their way. “I’ll be back, I promise.”

  The domed chamber at the heart of the moonbase reverberated with the insectoid clacking of the Selenites’ mandibles, the furious screams of Dashwood’s transmat clones and the ever-present white noise of the glowing Sphere.

  “Sir!” Nimrod called from the other end of the curving walkway. “They’re getting away.”

  Ulysses turned from his manservant to Emilia, to suddenly find her lips on his. Taken aback, he gave in to the moment.

  Emilia broke
contact and whispered, “And make sure you keep your promise this time.”

  With a crash of metal and mooncrete, another piece of the fractured dome came down on the walkway, dragging a steel girder down with it. Ulysses only just pulled himself back in time before the debris hit, tearing through the walkway and slamming into the fractured floor of the chamber.

  “Now go!” Ulysses shouted, blowing Emilia one last kiss, before turning and running for the dais.

  Shielding his eyes against the glare of the light pulsing from the whirling rings, Ulysses tensed.

  The power of the machine thrummed through his body. It felt as if the vibrations would unravel the very fibres of his being.

  This was it; there was no escaping his fate now. He had seen what repeated use of the Sphere had done to Dashwood – in both body and mind – but, as Nimrod had said, they had passed the point of no return.

  Ulysses glanced back down the buckled staircase. Waves of light rippled throughout the chamber as myriad fractures split the walls of the dome. It surely couldn’t be long before the structure gave way altogether.

  His eyes found Nimrod standing in front of the Babbage engine’s control console. And Nimrod’s gaze of steely resolve found his.

  “Go, sir!” he yelled, his voice barely audible over the thrumming whine of the Sphere.

  “I’m coming back for you!” Ulysses shouted, the tears streaming down his face. “I’ll come back, I promise!”

  And then through the waves of light, the tears, the smoke and the dust, Ulysses glimpsed movement on the far side of the chamber. The man standing at the entrance to the chamber had his hand outstretched towards Nimrod.