Broken Hero (16 page)

Lang’s desk ornament sits on one bench, surrounded by a pair of calipers, a bundle of pipettes, and a hammer. Modern thaumaturgical science at its finest.

Of Tabitha and Clyde there is no sign.

I’m about to turn around and head back upstairs when I hear a noise from the supply closet. I pause, strain my hearing. The noise comes again, a sort of muffled thump, followed by some almost inaudible… word? Is that someone talking?

I take a step toward the closet door. There’s a label on it saying in bold black letters, C
AUTION, CONTAINS CAUSTIC MATERIALS
. Then underneath someone has scribbled in red Sharpie,
That means you, Clyde
.

The noise comes again. A sort of rattling thump, then something else I can’t quite make out. The sound of movement. And then, a muffled… what? I can’t even tell if it was a human sound.

I pause, my hand inches from the closet door’s handle. This is not just any laboratory. It is MI37’s laboratory. Literally anything could be in there. And experience has led me to believe that if something could be anything then it is almost always something unspeakably awful.

Just in case, I draw my gun.

Another thump. The loudest so far. Something heavy colliding with… a shelf perhaps? Is someone tied up in there? Actually, that wouldn’t be that bad given all the other things that could be behind the door.

Slowly, as quietly as I can, I twist the handle down, and ease the door open an inch.

And then I see. And I… I… I…

Oh God.

There is a lot of pale white skin.

And black.

And thrusting.

And Clyde’s arse crack.

I let out something like a strangled cry of horror. Of all the things I could… no… no… oh dear God, no…

At my utterance, Tabitha shrieks. A high-pitched banshee howl. Oh God, I wish it was a banshee.

I stumble away, but in my haste I’ve forgotten to shut the door and it starts to swing open wider. I slam my hands over my eyes, momentarily debating the wisdom of clawing them out of my head altogether. My retinas are forever unclean.

“Oh good golly God,” which is apparently what you say at exceptionally traumatic junctures if you’re Clyde.

“Get out!” Tabitha screams. “Get out!”

“Did you need anything, old chap?” In his panic Clyde appears to have reverted to a 1940s stereotype.

I can’t think. Behind my eyelids I keep seeing that narrow line of horror again. Tabitha’s hands clawing at Clyde’s back. His head thrown back—

Oh God. Oh God. I think I’m hyperventilating.

“Felicity was wondering if you were going to attend this morning’s briefing session about—”

I realize that I’m talking, that my mouth is moving even as I back-pedal blindly across the room. I smack into a bench, half fall onto it, lie there like a turtle. I need to take my hands away from my eyes to get up properly, but I can’t quite bring myself to. But if I don’t then I’m trapped here longer.

“Oh yes!” says Clyde, sounding like he’s on the edge of hysteria. “The desk ornament. Of course. Be up in, well, erm… I don’t know… Shall we say twenty minutes?” His laugh scales up through octaves.

“Get out!” Tabitha screams again.

I manage to flip back over the table, land on the floor, and start in a belly crawl across the floor toward the door, steadfastly refusing to look behind me.

Tabitha’s screams follow me out the door.

When she finally enters the conference room, Tabitha looks remarkably together. Her hair is even gelled into its two devil horns. The eyeliner is applied as thickly and neatly as ever. Every earring is in place. Even her scowl seems no different from the one she wears to the meeting room every day.

Clyde rather ruins the impression.

While not exactly neat at the best of times—Clyde has somehow managed to make it to thirty without learning how to use an iron—today’s look is a study in post-coital dishevelment. His shirt is buttoned wrong, pale white skin showing through the gaps. His tie hangs loose, on top of one half of his collar. One sleeve of his tweed jacket is rolled up to his elbow, though I have no idea how that could have happened. And somehow his trousers are on backwards.

Felicity stares at them. “What the hell kept you?” she asks.

I decided to not go into the details. I just told her Clyde had said they’d be twenty minutes, and then tried desperately to not think about why. I wish I knew which bit of my frontal cortex to jab the screwdriver into.

I wait for Tabitha and Clyde’s answer with a sick sort of anticipation. It is like the train wreck you cannot help but stare at.

“Accidental spill in the lab,” Tabitha says, channeling the rage of coitus interruptus into the words. “Took forever to clean it up.”

“Caustic fluids lab, again,” Clyde says with an apologetic shrug. “Lost quite a bit of clothing to the accident. Which is why I had to get dressed again.”

That last bit seems like a rather unnecessary detail, but the story is well rehearsed at least. I can almost convince myself that Tabitha was just helping him clean up… caustic fluid.

I flashback again. No, I cannot quite believe that story. No matter how hard I try. I just cannot.

Felicity shakes her head. “Seriously, Clyde? Again? I think I’m just not going to let you go in that closet ever again.”

“Good idea,” I say before I can stop myself. Felicity stares at me, confused. “I totally agree,” I trail off.

“Well, erm…” Felicity is still staring at me. “Thank you for the support on that one.” Her eyes flick to Hannah, who seems to have a far better idea of what I walked in on, and who is smirking deeply.

“Maybe we can finally get down to it?” Felicity says.

“The presentation,” I snap out. Oh God, I need to get more control over my tongue.

Felicity is staring at me again. “Maybe a little less caffeine tomorrow morning,” she suggests.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course. Just thought we should be specific about what it was. When you said…” I stop talking again. That would probably be best.

Hannah’s smirk deepens.

“The presentation, totally, of course.” Clyde seems to realize halfway to the front of the table that his trousers are on backwards. “Oh bugger,” I hear him whisper.

He navigates his pocket awkwardly, reaching back around his thigh. “Is that a desk ornament in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?” He titters, high-pitched, looking wildly around the room, before retrieving the item and tugging it out.

I reconsider whether the decision to not claw out my eyes was really such a good one.

From the way Felicity is looking at me, I think she’s started to realize that something is a little off here.

“OK.” Clyde sets the ornament down on the table, smooths his hair down three times in a row. It springs back up, ignoring him. “So the desk ornament. Did a little digging, dated the thing to the 1930s, so contemporaneous with Lang. In fact we have reason to think he might have been the designer. Mostly, I do have to admit, because he initialed it at the bottom. Not exactly Sherlock Holmes levels of detective work. Though to be honest, I think expecting that of anyone is a little absurd. I mean that’s only really workable in fiction where someone knows the results and is backward engineering everything. It assumes omniscience really. Which, actually, makes me think of a number of experiments I’d love to run. I need to remember to write a proposal up for them, because I really do think even limited omniscience could have some very interesting combat implications. Not just violent and strategic, but also empathic. Maybe get us to some more peaceful solutions. Not that any of that is relevant of course, but if I tell you, then perhaps one of you will remind me.” He looks around hopefully.

“The ornament,” Felicity prompts.

“Oh yes. Well, ran some initial tests on it. Metal. Quite an interesting alloy actually. Poor conductivity, which generally suggests it’s not a magical object.”

“Wait,” Hannah holds up a hand, “is this all a long build-up to this being a desk ornament, or is there a good bit?”

Tabitha’s eyes lock onto Hannah and look ready to deploy surface-to-air missiles.

“He’s fucking explaining.”

Ah, young love.

“Well, to be fair,” Clyde says, “and I do think fairness is an important place for us to start from. Not that that’s really a revolutionary idea. Fundamental starting point of at least a few major world religions that I can think of, anyway. But, to Hannah’s point, I could probably cut…” He pulls a notebook out of his pocket, flicks it open, and scans a page. “Well, about the first twenty minutes of this if you just want to cut to what it does?”

“God, yes.” Felicity echoes the sentiment of the room. Well, the sentiment of everyone except possibly Tabitha.

“Well, it’s interesting actually. Totally Tabby’s idea. Moment of utter brilliance on her part. You see it’s all to do with the asymmetrical grooves on the sides.” He indicates the lines that stutter back and forth down the long sides of the ornament. “You have to line them up, you see. But there’s no way to actually do that. The way the thing pivots you can’t do it.”

He starts to wrench at it. With a series of grinding clicks, he transforms the ornament into a twisted polyhedron that vaguely resembles a drunk tower of Pisa. He waves it at us. “Useless, see?”

Hannah’s eyes narrow. “This is the bit where it does something, right?”

“Trust me,” I say, “this is the short version.”

“Giving context,” Tabitha snaps. “Important to
understanding
.” She makes it sound like the last term is going to be a bit of a reach for Hannah and myself. I’m not entirely sure I deserve to be painted with the same brush here.

“Oh, yes,” Clyde says, “got a little sidetracked, but I really do want you to understand how brilliant Tabby was here. Would never have got here in a hundred years. Well…” He considers, “Actually a hundred years is probably a viable time frame. Terribly long time, actually, a hundred years. I mean if you consider the twentieth century as a whole for example. We hadn’t even hit the World Wars going into it, and we were in the digital age at the end. Plenty of unthinkable things had been thought. Mind-boggling actually. So, yes, probably would have thought of it in a hundred years. Just trial-and-error by that point. Fifty years… Erm, ten, well, erm, maybe… probably would have taken me a week or so. That’s probably accurate. But, well, world on the line and all that, speed being of the essence probably. At least, I assume it is. It does tend to be in these situations. World-ending threats do always seem to be on a tight timeline. Maybe that’s why they fail so often. If they just gave themselves more time to plan it all out. I don’t know… Anyway, Tabby really cut the time down, that’s what I’m trying to communicate.”

“How?” Felicity’s one word is a gong ringing out loud against the background babble.

“Oh, hadn’t I got there yet?” Clyde looks genuinely surprised. “Sorry. Gives you a sense of how overwhelming Tabby’s brilliance was, really. Totally leading me—”

“How?” Felicity’s voice rings out again.

“Oh yes,” Clyde says. “There I go again.”

“HOW?”

Clyde blanches. “You have to twist it through realities,” he says in a rush. “The physics of it don’t work out in our reality, but with a little…” He pops a silver-cadmium battery into his mouth in a surprisingly smooth motion, and then twists at the ornament again.

There is no grinding this time. Instead there is a crackle and the sound of things sliding smoothly. In Clyde’s hands the ornament seems to… fold, somehow. It is shorter, longer, sections glide through each other as if suddenly insubstantial. It spits blue sparks.

And then Clyde spits the battery out, and is holding a simple rectangle again. In fact it looks exactly like it did before. Except now the grooves along the long sides are perfectly aligned.

“Sooo…” Hannah drags the word out. “Basically it’s a magical Rubik’s Cube?” As much as I think Hannah could be giving out a slightly more positive vibe this morning, I am also wallowing in a similar amount of underwhelm-ment.

Tabitha grins. “Not exactly.”

Clyde sets the ornament gingerly down on the table. Suddenly the base of it is suffused with blue light. It spreads up the grooves, growing brighter as it goes, almost white at the tip. Slowly the four corner sections seem to almost ripple. And then it blooms, a flower opening steel petals, spreading back with a series of mechanical clicks to reveal a column of blue light within, that shines brighter, brighter, a tiny newborn sun in the heart of the room, flooding it with cold light.

My vision burns, whites out, something deep in the base of my skull seems to click, and I wince, bracing for pain that doesn’t come—

And then it’s over. Then we’re standing in conference room B, staring at Clyde who’s standing in front of a rectangular desk ornament with a series of stagger-stepped grooves running up its four long sides.

“Neat, right?” says Clyde.

There is a long pause. Hannah breaks the silence. “Is this one of those things that’s much cooler when you’re high?”

“It’s a key!” Clyde stares at us as if he can’t believe we didn’t get it.

“Maybe,” I venture, “this is where that context might have been useful.”

“Told you.” Tabitha shakes her head.

“Huzzah!” says Clyde, pulling his notebook back out of his pocket. “I mean, yes, of course. You see a lot of this stuff is years ahead of its time. The whole folding the column through space to align the grooves. There wasn’t a working theory on that until the late sixties.
Theory
. I think the first documented case of someone successfully doing it isn’t until the late seventies. And Lang was doing this back in the thirties. It’s incredible!”

“The light,” Tabitha cuts in. “Not actually the important bit. Side effect of putting out strong thaumatic frequency.”

“Thaumatic what?” Hannah is fighting the cross-eyed look.

“Just go with it,” I say. “Even after they explain it, it won’t make any sense.”

“Well,” says Clyde, utterly oblivious to my snark, “each reality has its own thaumatic frequency. I mean, that’s the theory, about how we’re reaching through realities. It’s all to do with aligning the frequencies of the thaumatospheres, creating a junction. That’s how the composite reality works, pretty much. It’s this massive symphony of thaumatic resonance. All the frequencies meshing together to make one whole.”