Unobtainium 1: Kate on a Hot Tin Roof (20 page)

As far as she knew, no one had seen her crossing back towards Aldgate so there was every chance the Germans were concentrating their search on the East End which would be the last place they might
think
she had been heading. But then again, she was not sure that they had known she was heading there…

Trying to out-think the people chasing her was going to be almost impossible without information. She needed a plan and to come up with one she needed time to think, and somewhere secure to do it. Well, there was obviously no one coming to meet her tonight, so she checked the sky once more and then started off towards St Katherine’s Dock.

The railway lines that went through Shadwell forced her down to ground level, and it was as she was crossing the track near Dock Street that she spotted the three figures walking at the side of the rails. They had already passed the point she was crossing at and were all facing away from her, so she made a dash for the far side and hid behind a bush which had grown there, pausing because something seemed odd about the three men in thick great coats.

Each carried a storm lantern and they seemed to be searching, which made her suspect that they were looking for her, but they did so in a manner… She was not quite sure what was catching her attention. They seemed slow, overly deliberate, and none of them spoke, conducting their search in silence. As she watched, one of them turned, lifting his lantern and looking back in her direction. Kate covered her mouth to stop any sound escaping: the man was Morris, the fake detective. She could see a black mark at his throat where her boot heel had struck. There was no way he could have survived, but there he was… Except that even in the yellowish light of the lantern, his skin looked grey and his eyes were cast over, almost white.

He turned again, starting off after his compatriots, and Kate started into the buildings on the south side of the tracks. The implications of what she had seen were still with her when she had to drop down again to cross The Highway. These people could
raise the dead
? Or at least return to them a semblance of life. Her own existence defied God and Nature, but this was something else.

She made it to Wapping as quickly as was possible commensurate with remaining unseen and found the warehouse the slavers had used as empty as she had expected. Two of the three rooms on the upper floor had contained beds which the men had employed when not out stealing girls or guarding them. It would make a most acceptable place to hide for a while and was not too far from Aldgate that she could not return there each evening.

The rooms had no windows, but they did have lanterns, a state which Kate found very acceptable. She busied herself tidying one bed, setting a table with a lantern beside it, and then sitting down to a cold meal of ham, bread, cheese, and water, which managed to taste like a feast. She had her pills to take and a bed to sleep on, and it was unlikely anyone would look for her there, but she had placed crates at the top of the stairs to make it difficult to get onto the floor without making noise. A book would have been nice, but she had not thought to pack one. Instead, she turned off the lantern to save oil, lay back on the bed and considered her situation.

Her persecutors were well resourced and they seemed to have some numbers. She doubted they had people inside the police, but they had to have an informant, at least someone who had told them the route the Maria would take to pick her up and when it was leaving. They had effective weapons and, apparently, undead soldiers, and an airship which could travel quietly, unseen in the darkness of the night. All of this she knew.

What she needed was a motive and the name of their employer, for she was sure that there was one. A group of men like this would have a leader. It would be someone powerful, wealthy, and with influence. A man, she had no doubt, and she needed to know who he was. What she needed was a plan to get that information.

Westminster, 20
^th
August.

Longford reviewed the reports of the previous night, his face red with anger. Another dead officer, this one with a broken neck. It rankled all the more because Mrs Wooster’s words kept echoing in his head. He
knew
that the abomination they called a girl was responsible in the same way that he
knew
that there was a God on high. It was a matter of faith. Faith would not do for a policeman and Longford was a policeman as well as a Christian.

The fact that no one could
find
the girl was not helping, and now there were reports of the dead walking the streets in Whitechapel and Shadwell. The place was going to Hell, and if there were dead men
actually
walking out there, then perhaps that was a more literal expression than usual.

‘Sir!’ The constable at the door was out of breath and he had burst in as though the Hounds of Hell were on his heels.

‘Constable Matthews, there had better be a damn good reason for entering my office without knocking.’

‘Sir, she’s been sighted. Someone caught sight of her near Limehouse.’

‘Limehouse? No one has searched in that area, have they?’

‘No, sir. We’ve been concentratin’ on Soho and Whitechapel cos we knew she knew the area.’

‘I want squads out there looking in every place a woman could be hidden. Move, Constable!’

Stepney.

The streets were swarming with men in uniform. It looked like they had drafted in every constable they could find to hunt her down and Kate had to wonder whether the crime level in the rest of the city had gone crazy tonight. They were searching through every alleyway and dosshouse, knocking on every door, and generally making life a misery for the residents.

More importantly, as far as Kate was concerned, the blimp was in the sky overhead. It had been a calculated risk: allow a policeman to see her on the street, make sure she was seen, in fact. The news had reached the ears of her hunters and they were out looking for her. The policemen below would eliminate the possibility of using the undead creatures; Kate doubted very much that they wanted anyone to know about those things, though she had heard a few rumours that afternoon. Someone else had seen them and the locals around the docks were nervous.

Also, the police combing the streets would, naturally, have forced her up to the rooftops. The police did not know about that, it seemed, while the Germans did. She was, indeed, on the rooftops, but she had concealed herself sufficiently well that the airship was unlikely to spot her and now she was waiting, waiting for her chance to capture one of the hunters.

They were moving around in twos, which made things more difficult, and she was on the edge of the search territory, which reduced their numbers in her vicinity, but she felt it likely that they would look atop the building she had selected sooner or later.

It was close to midnight when, grunting from the climb, two men clambered up onto the top of the tenement Kate was stationed on. They were hunting by moonlight, their use of lights restricted by the men below, and Kate was hidden beneath a grey blanket which more or less matched the slates she was lying beside in the lee of a chimney stack. Neither saw her as they passed and, silently, she slipped out behind them, her sword already drawn and ready. Raising the weapon, she brought the pommel down on the back of the trailing man’s skull and the second turned at the sound of his colleague falling. His rifle began to rise as his eyes widened, and Kate stepped forward, running the blade through his chest. He looked at her, his hands going limp about the gun he was holding. The rifle clattered to the rooftop and then he joined it, unmoving.

Then, wrapping the unconscious man in her camouflage blanket, she hoisted her prize onto her shoulders and started for Wapping.

Wapping.

The man woke up to find himself tied firmly to a bed frame. Beside him, Kate sat quietly, his knife in her hands. It was a long, broad-bladed hunting knife with a wickedly pointed tip and he had employed it several times in a manner designed to inflict pain upon his victim. He had never imagined that it might be used on him, but then he was dealing with a woman…

‘Might I know your name?’ Kate asked. She had been waiting the better part of forty minutes for him to awaken and now that he had, she wished to push things along as expediently as possible.

‘Leutnant Heinrich Dittmar,’ he replied. ‘That is all you will get from me.’ He had a German accent, but his English seemed good.

‘Leutnant? That’s like lieutenant?’ She got a nod. ‘I’ll remember. Leutnant Dittmar, my name is Kate and I am the girl you have been hunting for these past several days, as I am sure you are aware. I wish to know why I am being hunted and who it is who wishes me captured.’

‘I will tell you nothing.’

‘No, Leutnant, you are mistaken. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with pain. I spent the first five years of my life at the mercy of my father who utilised me as one would a laboratory rat. He taught me all about pain. I know that, eventually, you will do whatever I ask, because your entire life will turn about avoiding more pain. Even when you know that there is
nothing
you can do or say to stop it, still you try.’

‘You are a woman–’

‘Women go through childbirth, Leutnant Dittmar. We are more resolute in the face of pain than men. But beyond that, did they not tell you what I was? I am part animal. I am stronger and faster than you. I heal abnormally quickly. My father thought it wondrous and used his scalpels freely, knowing that I would heal no matter what.’ Reaching out with the knife, she hooked one of his shirt buttons, pinging it off his chest with ease. ‘It’s sharp. That’s good. The edge will cut and you will feel nothing for a second. Then there will be the sting, the sharp, biting knowledge that nerves have been severed that continues long after the wound begins closing.’ She snipped off another button. ‘Have you fathered children, Leutnant? I ask because if you hold out long enough, I will be forced to ensure that you never do.’

‘I will tell you–’ Kate let the point of the blade slide into the skin over his breastbone and then drew it down an inch or so before lifting it away again. His teeth gritted and his fists clenched. ‘If I tell you what you wish to know, my fate will be worse than death. There is nothing you can do which can compare to that.’

Kate looked at him for a second. ‘Oh, then I shall let you go now. I do not wish to engage in this torture and if I can do nothing to persuade you, then I shall free you. Of course, I must blindfold you and deliver you to your comrades for I do not wish my location known. I am quite sure they will welcome your return.’

‘But if I return unharmed…’

‘I’ve seen them. The dead things. Do they have a name?’

‘We call them “necromenschen.”’

‘I assume one must be dead before the procedure can be carried out? Or can they do it to you while you are still live? I would assume that would be the more horrifying alternative.’

He was silent for a few seconds, and she allowed the room to remain quiet, waiting for his response. ‘If I tell you, you will let me go. There is no prison which they cannot take me from. My only chance is to run and hope I am too much effort to chase down.’

‘You have my word, Leutnant.’

‘I do not know why they want you. I have orders. You are to be taken alive at all cost. His plans depend upon it and he will not allow anything to disrupt his plans. That is why he came personally to London. He would see you taken and shipped back with him. He cannot stand this island and would not set foot on it otherwise.’

‘He?’

‘You cannot guess?’

‘Leutnant, my grasp of politics is weak. I would not know the name of the King were it not etched into the coins and the name of our Prime Minister is a fact I have never considered worthy of attention.’

‘Von Auttenberg. Count von Auttenberg. He amasses knowledge and those who can use it. You must be needed for one of his experiments. Like the necromenschen, he experiments in other transformations, but they have always been failures. Some of the things he has had made… It is… abscheulichkeit.’

‘Thank you, Leutnant. One last question. That was not our deal and you may decide to say nothing. I will not hold that against you. Where is it that they go when the sun rises? They have an airship which is almost invisible in darkness, but it cannot remain airborne in daylight without being seen.’

‘They have taken a warehouse to the east of the docks, past the double bend in the river. If you go there you will be taken. They have many men, but there is also Nachtigall. She will see you if you go.’

‘Nachtigall?’

‘It is a bird which sings in the night.’

‘A nightingale?’

‘Yes. She is his second. It is said she makes the bullets sing from her rifle.’

The sniper on the blimp. ‘Thank you, Leutnant Dittmar.’ Kate reached out and cut the rope holding his right wrist before placing the knife on his stomach and retreating across the room. ‘I wish you luck in your escape. Might I suggest the far north? It is not difficult to become lost in Scotland.’

He cut his other bonds and sat up. ‘You are not the animal we were told to hunt for, Fräulein. I wish you the same luck. I fear you will need it more than I. Von Auttenberg seeks you, but you are but one of his plans. The greater one is a weapon, a device so destructive that nations will cower in fear of his wrath. He seeks nothing less than the dominion of the Earth, Fräulein, and he will let nothing stand in his way.’

Poplar.

She had moved during the day. There were still policemen searching the streets, but they were easy to avoid and she moved east a few miles before finding the highest point she could, watching the skyline as the sun went down. There would be no chance of meeting a messenger at Aldgate tonight, but if she could identify their headquarters then she could go to Charles with the news and see what could be done.

There was, of course, every chance that she would miss the thing climbing into the sky. If that happened she would just have to try searching every warehouse she could find until she located the one she wanted. That might take days and she hoped it would not come to that.