The Great Game (40 page)

Lucy, rising in the lift, which stopped with a jerk. The door opened. She climbed out.

  She found herself in the same room she had been in before. The lift's door closed and it disappeared, and now she saw it was hidden behind a wooden cabinet.

  A figure in silhouette stood by the window…

  Its long, graceful tail beat the thick curtain rhythmically. Moonlight streamed in, and Lucy's breath caught in her throat and she said, "Your Majesty…"

  Bending down was hard. The Queen turned. In the moonlight her face looked alien and unknowable. "Lucy Westenra," she said. "I have been expecting you."

  "Ma'am," Lucy said. "I have news."

  "Then tell me," the Queen said.

  Lucy opened her mouth to speak – to tell the Queen everything, about Babbage and his rockets, about Stoker and his journal, about Fogg, and the Bookman, and the betrayal – when the door to the room opened without a sound.

  Pale light came into the room from the corridor beyond and a small, rotund figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat stood in the doorway.

  "What is the meaning of this–" the Queen began to say.

  Lucy moved faster than she had thought possible. Even before a stiletto knife, or some sort of thin, sharp spike materialised in the man's hand as though it were a part of it, she was already moving, her own knife in her hand, and she buried it in the attacker's stomach. He gave a short
whoof
of surprise but she had already kneed him, then punched his face, fingers curled and palm open, with all her force, trying to break his nose and push the bones into the brain.

  Instead the small man seemed to
laugh
, and he grabbed her knife arm and twisted and she screamed as he broke it. Then he pushed her aside, slamming her against the wall, and approached the Queen.

  Lucy pulled out her gun.

  The Queen stood there calmly, and her tongue hissed out and tasted the air, and her long snout opened in what could have been a smile. She shook her head, briefly, at Lucy, then turned to the man–

  Who had taken off his hat. In the silver moonlight Lucy saw no face there; he was a smoothly shifting impossibility, as if he were composed of thousands and thousands of tiny things, all joined together to resemble a man.

  "An Observer…" the Queen said.

  The small man-like thing seemed to bow.

  "We had hoped never to see your like again," the Queen said.

  "Yet you sent out a flare," the observer said.

  The Queen hissed, and her powerful tail beat against the ground. "What would you do with us?" she said. Then, again, she seemed to smile. "But that is not for you to say…"

  "No."

  "You must complete your report."

  "Yes."

  "It is not so easy, is it," the Queen said, "to collect one of
us
."

  "No," the observer agreed. He looked suddenly ill at ease.

  "Tell me," the Queen said, and there was a strange longing in her voice. "Did it change much? Home?"

  The observer seemed indecisive. "There is only one way to find out," he said at last.

  "Yes," the Queen said.

  
No!
Lucy wanted to shout. She was still holding the gun but ultimately it was useless–

  The little man-thing, this observer, went around the Queen, carefully. Its knife flashed in the moonlight and Lucy realised it was no knife it all, it was a part of him, it, that thing–

  She had to stop it. She had to try.

  She stood up, she rushed the little man-thing even as the knife moved, and in one fluid movement the observer's blade entered the back of the Queen's head.

  "No!"

  It only lasted a moment, she was still charging him when he removed the knife and the Queen, that old, dignified royal lizard, dropped lifeless to the floor.

  When she slammed against the observer it was like hitting a wall. An electric charge ran through her body and she wanted to scream. She was on the floor beside the Queen; the Queen had bled, briefly, a green acidic blood, and it mixed with Lucy's own.

  She could not fight any more. The observer knelt down beside her. She knew it was wondering. She was ready. She saw the knife flash, waited for it to strike her–

  But then it withdrew. The observer stood up, opened the window. In the moonlight it was impossible to have ever thought of it as human. Slowly its shape changed, it became a silver ball of light.

  Something came crashing through the open door. She raised her eyes. She was not even surprised… the centipede-like creature she knew as the Bookman.

  "Stop him!"

  She would have laughed, if she could. The observer had become a silver sphere of light, spinning. Then it
stretched
, out of the window, out towards the moon and the stars–

  And was gone, like light, fading.

  "Too late," Lucy whispered. "You're too late."

  "I am always too late," the Bookman said, flatly.

  "Will you kill me now?"

  But the Bookman paid her no mind. It had moved over to the fallen Queen.

  "You hate them, don't you," Lucy said. There was blood in her mouth again. She knew it wouldn't be long, now. It was peaceful, resigning yourself to death, knowing there was nothing else waiting for you after it came…

  "My queen…" the Bookman said. It curled around the reptilian body. "Is she…?"

  "Dead, assassin. She is dead."

  "He did not take everything!" the Bookman said. She saw without disgust or emotion that it, too, had grown a sharp stalk and that it went into the Queen's brain. "There is still… A little of the Queen is left."

  "That's… good." Lucy said. Her eyes were closing.

  "They had outlasted their time," the Bookman said. It was speaking to itself, she thought. It must have been a very lonely creature. She almost felt pity for him, but she could feel nothing, nothing but tiredness…

  "Perhaps a new queen is what we need, for a new era," the Bookman said. "This century in your calendar is coming to an end, and a new century's about to dawn. Perhaps I was wrong… I will serve again. It has been… too long."

  "Good, good," Lucy said. "A cup of tea, how lovely."

  She heard the Bookman laugh, softly. "You will have all the tea in the world," it told her. She felt one of its stalks stroking her, gently. "I had tried to prepare you," it said. "You should not have run away."

  "Milk and two sugars, please, Berlyne," Lucy said. Her eyes were closed. She was floating… It was nice and warm.

  "Hush," the Bookman said. "Sleep now. There will be much work to do."

  The words came from a distance. She ignored them. She was floating on a sea of clouds and they bore her far far away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 
 

  

  Hmm… interesting.

  Our old colony ship has resurfaced, then.

  
I thought the quantum gate technology had been banned mil
lennia ago.

  
Affirmative.

  
Interesting…

  

  
Unstable pocket worlds may pose a problem.

  
Affirmative.

  
And the humans?

  

  
Bipedal, carbon-based… They seem to have strange notions of war.

  

  
What do they think, that we'd eat them?

  

  
Suggestions?

  

  
I don't know about you, but I could do with a holiday.

  

 

The pain was unbearable. It pulled her out of sleep, out of hiding, out of the dark. She was being torn apart…

  Then something happened. She was not alone in there. It was as if the world had expanded, and she had–

  She saw–

  
She had hatched out of the egg and lay on the rocks, bathing in the sun. Her tongue hissed out, tasting the new air.

  Where was she? she thought in panic.

  
She was at school with her governess and her tail beat on the floor, almost angrily, and the governess, a human woman, said, "One day you shall be queen, you know."

  No, Lucy thought, no, this couldn't happen–

  
But she remembered, she remembered what it was like to have been–

  
She remembered the coronation. Oh how she remembered the coro
nation. It had been a glorious day, and when the crown was placed on her head she had bowed, for its weight was unexpected.

  
She had stood on the palace balcony and they had looked up at her, a sea of humans, and she was their queen. She was Victoria I, Victoria Rex, and her tail beat a rhythm on the balcony and she hissed, and caught a fly…

  Lucy thrashed and moaned in her restraints. "No," she said. "No."

  But the memories flooded her, alien and strange and reptilian. "Stop," she begged.

  Then the flood of memories faltered, and the pain receded and became a distant memory. She felt rather than saw the Bookman, prodding and poking, tearing and joining, and a great fear overwhelmed her and then it, too, was gone.

  Then for the longest time there was nothing but a cool and quiet darkness, and when it was pulled away, at last, it was like a bed sheet being pulled from the furniture in a house that had been abandoned all winter, and now it was spring.

• • • •

She stood in the room, before the open window. The moon was on the horizon, sinking low, and the first rays of dawn were coming into being.

  A new day.

  In the distance Big Ben struck the hour.

  She was alone in the room.

  She knew where everything was. She knew this room, and every room in the palace, and the name of every human and lizard who dwelled within.

  She took two steps to the cabinet and pressed a button and it swivelled and the other side was a mirror, as she knew it would be.

  She looked in the mirror, and she saw herself.

 

  She turned, abruptly.

  No one there.

  No sign of the Bookman.

  What had he
done
?

  The door to her chambers had been left open. And now a figure appeared in it.

  She knew her.

  Chief Inspector Irene Adler, Scotland Yard.

  A gun in her hand.

  Saying, "Your Highness."

  Then, "Ma'am?"

  She didn't know what to say to her. She turned her face, looked again at her reflection. She was a composite being, she realised, she was not quite human any more, not quite reptilian, not quite machine…

  Something new.

  And she knew the world was changing.

  And they had to be ready. They had to be prepared.

  Slowly, she turned back to face the inspector.

  "The Queen is dead," she said.

  Adler's pale, drawn face stared back at her. After a moment Adler holstered her gun.

  She bowed her head, briefly.

  "Long live the Queen," Irene Adler said.

 

  Transfer.

  Engage.

 

Harry saw them.

  They materialised in space, between Earth and Mars. Huge, slowly rotating spheres, they obscured starlight and the sun.

  Night in the Carpathians, and through the observatory's telescope Harry watched the red planet. It was slowly being demolished.

  Floating in space, Harry saw them. He – they – were still on a trajectory to the moon.

  Something detached itself from the giant spheres. It came towards the small army of rockets at fantastic speed. It was the size of a small world.

  
Harry Houdini,
a voice said in his head. There was a bright flash, like flash-paper set alight, that a magician would use in an act.

  The next thing he knew he was somewhere else. The rockets had gone. He – they – were in a large space. He could breathe. The air was scented, strangely, with coconuts.

  A storm materialised before him. It hovered in the air. "We…" Harry said, and swallowed. "We come in peace." "So do we," the storm said.

 

Mars.

  Smith knew it was Mars, without quite knowing how. He'd began knowing things, as though his mind was no longer confined to his skull, as though it had been plugged into some vast superior mind that held aeons of knowledge and was happy to share them.

  They stood on the sand.

  "I'm not dead," he said.

  Then he remembered the observer, its termination. It had abandoned human shape and became pure energy and then it–

  Shot out–

  Into space and there–

  A gateway, and they were–

  
Somewhere else.

  The observer gave his report.
Their
report.

  For they
were
the report, Smith had come to realise. He and all the others.