The Hangman's Revolution (W.A.R.P. 2)

To Dr. William Colfer

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN…

Toward the end of the twentieth century, Scottish professor Charles Smart succeeded in stabilizing a time tunnel to Victorian London (constructed from exotic matter with negative energy density, duh). Within months the FBI had established the Witness Anonymous Relocation Program to stash federal witnesses in the past. When the professor learned that Colonel Box of WARP division was planning to use the wormhole to manipulate governments and regimes, he fled, horrified, into the past, taking his codes with him—a wasted gesture, really, since Colonel Box and his entire unit had disappeared on a mission only days before.

Smart returned to the twenty-first century some years later, but he was far too dead to share his secrets. His arrival had quantum repercussions, which ensnared young FBI consultant Chevron Savano and even younger Riley, a boy from Victorian London who wished to escape the career of assassin mapped out for him by his evil master, the conjurer and murderer for hire Albert Garrick.

Garrick pursued his apprentice to the future and back, but he was ultimately cut adrift in the Smarthole with no means to reassemble his physical person.

More stuff happened, too. High adventure, close calls, and belly laughs—but that’s another story (it’s quite the story, to be honest) and has no place muddling up this report.

So all’s well that ends well for our spirited pair of young adventurers?

For Chevie, not so much, as we will find out.

For Riley, even less so, which will become almost immediately apparent.

Chevie’s brief presence in Victorian London caused temporal ripples, which were to have a dire effect on the present. Simply put, Chevron Savano was noticed in the past by the previously mentioned Colonel Box, who had actually set up shop in Victorian London. As a result, the colonel was prompted to have Riley murdered and then move up his world-domination plan by a few days, causing the downfall of major world powers and the emergence of the Boxite Empire. If Chevie had not been noticed, then Box would have stuck to his original Emergence Day and the catacombs where he made his base would have flooded, foiling his plans forever.

Chevie now lives as a Boxite cadet in a timeline that is not her own. Her mind is rejecting modern-day London and allowing her original memories of time travel adventures and the FBI to bleed through. For cases like Chevie’s, Professor Smart predicted two hypothetical outcomes: either the time traveler drowns the visions in antipsychotic drugs so that he/she may live some kind of normal life, or the visions will become so vivid that their discordance with actual events will drive the subject insane.

When we join the story, Chevron Savano’s visions are becoming extremely vivid, and if there were antipsychotic drugs handy, they certainly would not be wasted on a mere army cadet.

If you go back in time and assassinate Rasputin, then there’s no need to go back and assassinate Rasputin. So is old Grigori dead, or isn’t he?

—Professor Charles Smart

BOXITE YOUTH ACADEMY, PRESENT-DAY LONDON, NEW ALBION, 115 BC (BOXITE CALENDAR)

London Town.

Once there had been a magic about the city. Just hearing the name conjured images of Dickens’s young trickster Dodger, or of Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street putting his mind to a three-pipe problem, or of any one of a thousand tales of adventure and derring-do that were woven through London’s magnificent avenues and shadowy network of backstreets and alleys. For centuries people had journeyed from across the world to England’s capital to see where their favorite stories were set, or perhaps to make their fortune, or maybe to simply stand and gaze at the wonders of Trafalgar Square or Big Ben.

Not anymore. Those days of magic were long gone.

For one thing, the tourist industry did not really exist in the Boxite Empire, and for another, Big Ben had been torn down decades ago to make room for a giant statue of the Blessed Colonel, whose stone eyes watched over the city and everyone in it. And Big Ben was not the only landmark dragged under by the Boxites. Brick by brick, the Empire was erasing relics of the past and remaking London in its own image: uniform, imposing, gray, and implacable.

Almost all of the office buildings were constructed out of poured concrete with little in the way of distinguishing marks, just row upon row of dimly lit windows, lidded by half-drawn blinds. As the older London buildings were worn away by acid rain, they were demolished and replaced by utility blocks dropped in place by mega-copters. The blocks were pre-wired and plumbed and just required connection to the main supplies to be fully operational. London’s history was being erased on a daily basis.

One such building that had fallen into disrepair and was due to be dynamited in six months’ time was the Boxite Youth Academy, the officer school for the Empire’s military, where cadets from all over the world came to be indoctrinated in the way of the Blessed Colonel.

Inside this most austere academy no attempt had been made to cater to the comfort or physical well-being of the cadets. Benches were hard stone, and thin mattresses were laid on flat planks. The Spartan model was often cited and weak candidates were not encouraged to play to their strengths but instead traded to one of the Boxite Empire’s harsher institutes.

Inside her cubicle, seventeen-year-old Cadet Chevron Savano woke before the morning’s reveille siren but kept her eyes closed in order to prepare herself for the day’s nightmares.

No, not nightmares, Chevie thought. Though the Blessed Colonel knows I have plenty of those. These are daymares. Waking visions.

Chevie tugged the cot’s rough army blanket over her head so that the wall-mounted Boxlights could not even cast a glow on the insides of her eyelids.

What’s wrong with me? she wondered. Why do I see things that aren’t there?

These visions were interfering catastrophically with her training at the Boxite Youth Academy. Chevie’s scores had dipped quite sharply in recent days, so much so that the file clipped to the foot of her bed had an orange card tucked into the folder.

An orange card. A review. The first warning and perhaps her last if she could not make a satisfactory show of herself. The academy rules were sacrosanct. One serious slip, and her place would be offered to the next in line.

And it was a long line. Millions of souls long.

Her review was today, and if it went badly, she could be sold to a Box soldier factory in Dublin—or worse, to the mines in Newcastle as a spade monkey.

Chevie shuddered.

A spade monkey? Surely that would be a fate worse than death.

Chevron could pinpoint exactly when the visions started. It had been six months ago, on the night she’d sleepwalked down to the academy’s musty basement and collapsed in a heap of mysterious half-formed clothes: long ropes of drenched, saturated cloth that looped her body like dark serpents. She had been wearing neither nightshirt nor slippers, just this strange material that dissolved into slop as she slowly woke. Then her stomach had convulsed and she’d vomited a strange glowing gel that turned to light particles and drifted away like fireflies.

Light? she remembered thinking.

Am I dying?

Is this death?

But her breath had come in rattling whoops, and Chevie’s heart had hammered a testimony to her hold on life.

How did I get here?

Where is here?

Cadet Savano had covered herself with an old dropcloth yanked from a pile of paint cans and she’d stumbled to the top of a wrought iron staircase, her legs as weak as a newborn’s.

I am in a basement of some sort, she’d thought.

This is where the Timepod was, dummy, said a voice in her head. You’ve come back.

This voice, which was to become very familiar, made no sense, and so Chevie had ignored it.

Chevie had pounded on the locked door, calling out for help, which arrived eventually in the lumpily muscled shapes of the academy’s night watch: two Thundercats, Clover Vallicose and Lunka Witmeyer, secret police attached to the academy. So Chevie was in the academy, at least.

Thundercats? Chevie had thought. She’d giggled and was instantly horrified.

Thundercats? Why would that name make her giggle? A person did not giggle around Thundercats. They were licensed to use necessary and unnecessary force up to, but not exceeding, the infliction of mortal wounds.

How do you exceed mortal wounds? wondered Chevie.

Two days, the Thundercats had told her that night, frowning above their splashback visors. Two days we’ve been looking for you, orphan. And you show up in a restricted area. How in the name of the Blessed Colonel did you get down here? And why are you laughing? Do you find us amusing?

Chevron could only shake her head dumbly. There was nothing in her mind but lingering dreams, confusion, and questions that truncated each other before they were fully born.

How did I…

What was that…

Riley?

Who?

Why?

It was at that moment the visions—visions that would rip her ordered life apart—began. Before her disbelieving eyes the Thundercats had cracked and split into broken mirror images of themselves. They were replaced by an elderly woman with an unruly cone of hair piled on top of her head.

I knew you’d come, she’d said. Charles said you would, and Charles Smart is never wrong.

Then the elderly lady had disappeared, and the Thundercats were reassembled—and Chevie found herself thrashing in their arms, desperate to beat her way free from whatever nightmare she had woken into.

Quietly does it, little bird, Sister Lunka Witmeyer had advised her.

Chevie had trembled like a criminal on the Trafalgar Square public rack.

Who was the elderly woman in her visions? And who was Charles Smart?

These were things she could neither answer nor ask aloud for fear of being judged unstable and being shipped off to a school for the hopeless. Chevie’s mind teemed with forbidden questions. They kept her awake at night and made her feel dopey all day.

It’s a tumor, she thought several times a minute. My brain is eating itself.

And now it was several months later and the visions had cracked the chalice of Chevie’s life, which had not exactly been brimming with golden hope to begin with. She was a cadet in a school that bred police, soldiers, and spies for the Boxite army. A hard life of mistrust and interrogation lay ahead of her, if she was lucky. And now it seemed that she would not be lucky. Just like her best friend DeeDee had not been lucky.

Chevie opened her eyes and, for the time being at least, the world was as her mind stubbornly insisted it should be. No hallucinations. No sharp pain in her temple, which lately had preceded the visions.

I am in the dormitory. Good.

The bunk above her was empty. DeeDee—her friend, counsel, and confederate ever since enrollment—had slept there. They had studied the Boxnet together and practiced their hand-to-hand combat with each other. But DeeDee was gone now, executed for spying, and Chevie herself had been under a pall of suspicion for months.

Chevie was no traitor, and even if she had questions or doubts about Box’s Empire she kept them to herself, because the alternatives to living under Box’s wing were the wilderness of the Blasted States or the mountain encampments of the barbarian Jax.

No one is happy all the time. The colonel himself was forced to hide in London’s catacombs for decades before he emerged with his divine machines.

Suddenly and without the warning of approaching footsteps, the curtain was whipped back, and Chevie’s view was obscured by the hulking forms of Thundercats Lunka Witmeyer and Clover Vallicose. Once again Chevie fought the impulse to giggle.

Thundercats? Why would that be funny?

The Thundercats were a special division within the Boxite army. A band of trained specialists who had a fearsome reputation for brutality and thoroughness. They specialized in party security and weeding out traitors. It was unusual that Thundercats would be assigned to the academy, but the director had requested them, claiming it was better to pull weeds than fell trees—meaning that young traitors were easier to kill.

“Box cherish you, Cadet,” said Vallicose.

“And you, Sister,” Chevie said automatically.

“I cherish you slightly less than Box,” said Witmeyer. “But then, I am a mere mortal.”

Witmeyer was the comedienne of the two.

Lightheartedness was a personality trait not encouraged by the military, unless it could be put to good use as an interrogation technique or battle distraction. It was said that, when she was stationed in France, Sister Witmeyer told knock-knock jokes even as her helmet wiper raked Jax gore from her splashback visor.

Chevie swung her legs out of bed, stood at attention, and awaited further instructions. The Thundercats were more than an hour ahead of the posted schedule, but it was not their place to offer an explanation, and hardly her place to ask for one. Today she would not stray even a single degree from protocol. For all she knew, the review had already begun.

“Don’t you have something to say to us?”

asked Vallicose.

What? wondered Chevie. What am I supposed to say?

Vallicose started off the sentence for her. “Happy…”

“Happy Emergence Eve, Sisters,” blurted Chevie.

“You had forgotten, perhaps, that on this day in 1899, the Blessed Colonel and his army were making their final preparations to emerge from the catacombs and take back the world?”

“No, Sister, I hadn’t forgotten. We owe everything to the Blessed Colonel.”

Vallicose scanned Chevie’s face, searching for any glint of insubordination, but Chevie kept her eyes front and her back ruler-straight. She was fit, focused, and one of an ethnic minority, a Shawnee Native American: a perfect model for the Boxite army posters that plastered every bus shelter and underground station.

“Hmph,” said Vallicose. Perhaps she was impressed, perhaps the opposite. Her grunt was difficult to interpret.

Lunka Witmeyer’s words were more straightforward.

“Are you seeing us, sweetie? We haven’t transmogrified into little old ladies?”

“I see you both clearly, Sisters,” responded Chevie evenly. “I apologize again for that night. It was just a fever.”

Vallicose grunted again and followed it with “A fever? Fevers don’t shunt a body through steel doors.”

They had no way of knowing, none of them, that it was not a fever that had transported Chevie to a sealed basement, but rather a time paradox that had blended the Chevie returning from Victorian London with the Chevie who was a native to this timeline.

Witmeyer snarled behind the high collar of her splashback visor, which she had absolutely no need to wear while on supervision duty inside an academy of unarmed students.

“That night, Savano? That night? But it was more than one night, wasn’t it? Seems like every night you’re collapsing into a hysterical heap; isn’t she, Sister Vallicose?”

Vallicose nodded, and her entire face bulged with suppressed anger. “She called me a Fed last Tuesday. What is a Fed? Sounds like Jax talk to me.”