Broken Hero (7 page)

There is a protracted moment of silence.

“So,” says Clyde, “I guess this means you’re not the new guy anymore, Arthur.”

I almost double take. “New guy?” I ask him. “I’ve been here a year now.”

“Well, yes.” He nods. “Totally valid point. Time marches on. Waits for no man. Lot of proverbial stuff. Very busy chap, Time. Or chapess. Don’t mean to be sexist. Though the image is Old Father Time. Though he was probably called that by sexists. Though, nice of them to show support for the seniors. Not ageist of them at least. Old Person Time, perhaps. Though that leads to all sorts of pronoun confusion. Anyway, I am now far from the garden path, in the bushes, floundering in cliché, trying to find my way back to pointing out, though, that you were—up until about a minute ago—technically speaking of course, the newest member of MI37. Now you’re not. Now you’re the old hand. Though not as old as Old Person Time, of course. Not that there would be anything wrong with you being that old. Except, well, I mean even the most pro-senior-citizen advocate couldn’t help but acknowledge that being an old man probably would make this job a lot harder. Difficult to perform acts of derring-do when your hip replacement is acting up, I suspect. Can’t speak from experience, but, well, I think you know what I’m saying.”

At least that makes one of us.

Hannah looks at me. “He always talk like that?”

Something defensive flares up in me. “We don’t judge here,” I say. I’m shocked to hear something close to a snap in my voice.

Hannah doesn’t react though. “Wasn’t, mate,” she says. “It’s just, you know, I’ve been hazed before. Though that did seem like a really bloody weird way to do it.”

“Well…” I flounder a bit, unsure of what direction I’m taking the conversation in. My emotions seem to have gone a little rogue of late. “You’ll find a lot of things are weird at MI37,” I say. Which I think confuses me as much as it does Hannah.

I am saved from digging myself out of this particular hole by Felicity’s arrival. She pushes into the cramped conference room, wedges herself in at the head of the table.

“Hello then,” she says, “I trust you’ve all had time to meet Hannah, so down to business. Tabitha, if you’d take us through your findings.”

Tabitha stands. She’s wearing a featureless gray tube of a dress, her neck and upper torso wreathed in loose gray scarves. It gives her an oddly top-heavy appearance.

“Right,” she says. “Recap: yesterday, in a pub, in the Highlands. Great big robot comes through the floor, attacks everything. We kill it. It knocks over the pub. We all wonder, ‘what the hell?’”

She looks for any signs of dissent. Hannah looks slightly dubious, but keeps her peace for now.

“Nothing in the digital databases,” Tabitha continues, “but we suck at scanning, so not the end of the world. Hit the analog data.” She points at the papers on the data. “Found something.”

She pushes a piece of blue-gray paper across the table, the edges brittle and flaking. Faded schematics recorded in a tight neat hand. Front view, side view. Detailed sketches of cogs meshing together. Tiny, indecipherable notes with arrows pointing to shoulder joints, to plates of armor.

It is not our robot, not exactly, but it is a pretty close cousin, if not a direct relation.

“Prototype schematic,” Tabitha says, “for an Uhrwerkmänn.”

“That means clockwork man in German,” Clyde throws in. “Not really a very imaginative name, but it sounds fantastic.”

Tabitha rolls her eyes at the interruption. “Whatever. Interesting bit: schematics drawn by Professor Joseph Lang.”

She leaves a pause for the reaction that doesn’t come. She hangs her head. “Fucking philistines.”

Clyde looks around the room. “Joseph Lang? Anybody? Seriously?” We all fail to spontaneously know things. “Oh, this is great stuff. Goes right back to the founding of MI37 itself in 1935. The whole discovery of The Book at the peak of Mount Everest, its revelations about the existence of multiple realities, plus bonus details how to access them. It’s the book that triggered the whole magical arms race of the seventies and eighties. Big deal. But the expedition to Everest—”

“Wait,” Hannah interrupts. “Everest weren’t climbed until Edmund Hillary in the fifties.”

“Exactly,” Clyde nods.

Hannah gives Clyde the perplexed stare that I thought I owned the copyright on.

“You see,” Clyde says, “the actual first expedition was in 1933, but because of the discovery of The Book, it was all hushed up. Stymied Himalayan exploration for years actually. A not much talked about consequence in the annals of magical history in fact. I considered writing a treatise on it once, but the problem with magical treatises is that they’re usually only read after you’ve died by the people ransacking your tomb. In fact, the whole publishing track in thaumaturgy is disastrous, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there, really. The point is that Joseph Lang was part of that original 1933 expedition.”

And that actually gets my attention. “Joseph Lang was involved in the founding of MI37?” I glance over at Felicity. This looks like it’s news to her as well.

“Oh yes, very much so. The Germans at that time were hugely into the whole occult thing.”

“Wait—” It’s Hannah again, apparently unable to let Clyde’s words just flow. “At that time? You mean, like, when the Nazis were oppressing the shit out of everybody, right?”

Clyde beams. “I do! Top marks. Oh wait, that’s horribly condescending. Scratch that from the record. But totally what I mean. Because that’s really the whole problem here. You see, while fundamental to the discovery of The Book, and the founding of MI37, Joseph Lang was also a hideous, hideous, bigoted arsehole of a Nazi. Terrible human being in almost every conceivable way actually. Brilliant thaumatophysicist, but that’s about all the positive things that can be said about him. He was kicked out of the organization in 1938 due to the whole brewing war thing. Plus the arsehole thing, I hope.”

“So MI37 was founded by a Nazi?” Hannah looks decidedly unimpressed. I would like to be able to take umbrage at this, but unfortunately I’m unimpressed with MI37 right now too.

“Well,” Clyde shrugs a few times for good measure. “One of the founders was a Nazi. One out of fifteen I think. Or maybe fourteen. I think it’s safe to say that less than ten percent of the people who founded the original MI37 followed the tenets of National Socialism. Not sure how that compares to national averages at the time, don’t have the data to hand, but I could look into it, if you wanted me—”

“No.” It’s my turn to cut Clyde off. “Let’s get back to the part where we had to fight a giant clockwork robot that was designed by a Nazi.”

“Oh.” Clyde stops for a moment, looks around himself, shrugs twice, then comes back to me. “Well, we did that. That was sort of the end point.”

I mull this over.

“So,” Hannah looks at me, “yesterday you guys fought a giant Nazi clockwork robot?”

Which, in the end, I suppose we did.

“Feckin’ sweet, right?” says Kayla.

“Maybe,” Felicity says, “we could be a little less self-congratulatory, and a little more outcomes-focused.” She points to the schematic. “This is for a prototype. What we fought yesterday was not a prototype. It was real. It was created by a man who for all we know was committed to serving one of the vilest evils to face mankind in the twentieth century. I doubt he stopped at just one.”

“But it’s 2015,” Hannah objects. “Why the piss are they coming out the woodwork now?”

“That,” says Felicity, laying both her hands on the table, “is exactly what you lot are going to find out.”

Work out if the Nazis hid a clockwork robot army somewhere in England. Just another everyday assignment at MI37. I wish I’d made a bigger coffee. In its absence I go with massaging my skull and trying to crack my neck. When that doesn’t work, I just study my hands.

“OK,” I say, working my way through it. “So two leads. Joseph Lang, and a Scottish pub. Front end and back end of the problem. Front end is located 1935—Lang conceives of this thing and draws up some plans. Back end is yesterday one of the bastards emerging from the ground up in Scotland. So trace the dots forward and back until they join up in the middle. That means two teams—”

I hear muttering and look up. Kayla has leaned across the table and is showing her phone to Tabitha.

She notices the silence and looks up. “What?”

“Yeah,” says Tabitha, still staring at the phone and ignoring both of us. “He looks OK.”

My eyes narrow. But given the conceivable array of scenarios that could have led to that statement, I decide that I really don’t want to know.

“Who looks OK?”

Damn you, Clyde. Damn you.

Tabitha grabs Kayla’s wrist and angles the phone toward Clyde. “Potential genetic material,” she says.

Clyde’s eyes narrow too. I think he’s just realized the course he’s steered us onto.

“Don’t ask,” I say. “Please for the love of all that is good and kind in this world, do not ask.”

Hannah looks around the room. “This still isn’t a hazing ritual, right?”

Felicity seems to be resisting the urge to facepalm.

Watching her struggle through her disappointment in us, her desire for us to, just once, behave like professionals, allows me to slough off one more layer of my hangover.

“This is the kid’s thing, isn’t it?” I say to Kayla. “If I were to look at that phone, I would see a man you are thinking of trying to coerce into sleeping with you.”

Tabitha’s hand twitches.

“Do NOT show me,” I say. “I just want to say two things, and then move rapidly on. One, I still think it is a staggeringly bad idea for you to retread the path of parenthood. Two, assuming this isn’t really relevant to the whole tracking down hidden clockwork robots thing, and that the young man on your phone is not the great grandson of a prominent Nazi thaumatophysicist, then can it please wait until later?”

Kayla grinds her teeth. Close enough to a yes.

“So,” I say, trying to smudge out the last of my headache with a palm to my temple. “Two teams. One heads up to Scotland, digs beneath the pub and sees what they can find. The other digs into Joseph Lang, see what we can learn about him.”

“Done.” Tabitha releases Kayla’s phone and grabs a manilla folder off the table. She slides it toward me. “All here.”

All right then, so we have a few more breadcrumbs than I’d assumed. I slip a smile over at Felicity. That seems a lot like professionalism.

“So,” I say, “do we have any idea where his belongings ended up? Anything not go with him back to Germany?”

Hannah stirs again beside me. “Well, if they kicked the bugger out,” she says, “they’re bound to have confiscated his research. Least, as much of it as they could lay their grubby fingers on, right?”

Tabitha’s expression lies somewhere between grin and grimace. “His whole apartment,” she says. “Confiscated his home. How we have the schematics. But most stuff is still on site.”

“On site?” I lean forward. “But he was kicked out in 1938. His apartment can’t still be—”

Tabitha stabs a finger at the folder. “Can be. Is. Bloody read that.”

“You literally just gave it to me.” The words escape my lips before I remember we’re trying to be professionals. “I mean, I will as soon as this briefing is over.” From Felicity’s expression that was too little, a little too late.

“It’s actually a rather interesting legal loophole,” Clyde starts before anyone can stop him. “You see early thoughts on magic resembled a lot of current popular fears about radiation. There were all these worries about extra-reality contamination around sites of magic. Sullivan’s Polluted Ether Theorem of ’36 to give it a name, though by any other name it would still be as awfully wrong as it is under that one. There’s not even such a thing as ether. The man barely deserves the name thaumaturgist, to be honest, and his Latin was laughable. Not that I want to brag about my own handling of a dead language, but if one commits to the path of tearing reality open, one might as well have the decency to learn one’s tools, I always say. Well not always. Just in this one case really. But if I were to talk about it more often, I would say it more often. Because it really is true. Just common decency really.

“Anyway,” Clyde continues, somehow failing to pause for breath, “because of that, there were a lot of concerns that the apartments of early government-sponsored thaumaturgists were horribly contaminated and would basically cause anyone who entered them to turn into mutated gloop. So they waited for the contamination to become more diffuse. Except no one knew when that was going to be. Well, not until Barkman got around to refuting Sullivan’s theory in ’76, though at that point it was basically common knowledge and Barkman was just a glory hound who managed to swing writing the actual paper. But at that point, no one really gave a damn about these old apartments. They were far more interested in creating something that would actually cause inter-reality contamination and turn people into mutant gloop. Really, the cold war was a very odd time for thaumaturgy.

“So the apartments basically stayed protected by these outdated laws that no one’s got around to repealing. There’s about eighty of them scattered around the country. Mostly in London really. Though there’s a concentration up in York too. Big hotbed of thaumaturgy in the late forties up in York, as it happens.”

And finally the breath happens.

“So,” I jump in as fast as I can, “basically you’re agreeing with Tabitha’s initial statement of, ‘yes.’”

Clyde thinks about that for a moment, opens his mouth, closes it again, then says, “Yes.”

“OK,” I nod, “so basically we can go there and clean out the rest of his stuff, right?”

Another pause. “Yes,” Clyde says. He opens his mouth again, checks my expression, closes it.

“All right then,” I say, “let’s head over there.”

We all stand. All except Hannah. “Wait,” she says. “Us?”

I nod. I think I was pretty clear about the whole thing. Hannah turns to Felicity. “You don’t have civil servants to…” She hesitates. “Wait. Is
this
the hazing thing?”

Felicity smiles a little sadly. “This, I am afraid,” she says, “is it. The entire staff of MI37. We are not quite as grand as you may be used to. Everyone chips in here.”