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

“But God…”

The walls shook as successive surges battered them and several sections tumbled inward, allowing the floodwater to gush through the hole. Rat heads bobbed past the busted masonry as the rodents swam for dry land.

Box realized that time was dangerously short.

“But God? But God?” he said, wading toward the door. “Forget God, soldier. God is just the next rank up from general.” He took one hand from the vase remnant and jerked a thumb at Chevie. “Now, shoot the girl. Your new god commands it. Fall back to the air

ship hangar in the docklands and bring my trunk.”

Two words smacked Vallicose in the face like physical blows. And they were not airship hangar, as might have been expected in the 1890s, when such things were rare.

Forget God?

“Forget God?” she said, raising the gun. “Blasphemy.”

“Blasphemy is a tool,” said Box, not turning back. “Just like God is a tool.”

“God is a tool?” Vallicose said, reduced to repeating what she heard. It seemed as though her limbs belonged to somebody else and her skull was too small for her brain. She felt somehow numb and hypersensitive at the same time.

Everything I have ever believed is a lie. Everything I built my life around.

Wait. Not everything.

Not God. I may have been tricked, but not by God—by a man. Perhaps that is why I have been sent here.

Box realized that he had not heard a shot, and he turned back to Vallicose. There was no anger on his almost simian features, just mild disappointment.

“Don’t be a child, soldier. You have been to war. Religion is just a weapon in our arsenal. A very big stick.”

Vallicose shot him in the heart, and the colonel died so quickly that he never even got to change his expression. All his body did was jettison the tension it had been carrying around for decades and topple slowly forward into the rushing waters, which bore him into Vallicose’s waiting arms.

She wept tears of shock and confusion as she gathered him close. “Colonel, O Lord Colonel. God told me to do it. God is not a tool. We are the tools.”

Box didn’t hear. He was beyond listening. Clayton Box was simply beyond, and his great projected empire would never materialize.

Vallicose wept, her entire body shaking, and her mind snapped under the weight of what she had done. She pulled the colonel tight to her chest, shooting warning looks at the rats who rode the flotsam.

“You shall not have Him,” she called, using the last of her bullets on the rodents. “He is mine.” She wiped streaks of Box’s hair from his brow. “Don’t worry, Lord. I am here to protect you. Nothing will happen.”

She searched for an island in the chamber and her eyes settled on the desk, which was slowly spinning, half afloat, semi-anchored by Savano’s weight.

This is all her fault, Vallicose thought unreasonably, and she reached out with one arm, pushing Chevie into the floodwater. The current welcomed her into its load of detritus and she was borne swiftly to the door, where her head knocked against the last remaining panel.

Vallicose climbed onto the desktop, dragging Box’s body with her, and their combined weight anchoring the table for an extra moment. She settled him across her knees and waited underneath the newly installed painting of Michelangelo’s Pietà for God’s cleansing flood to wash over them both, eager for the Lord to assure her that she had acted according to His will.

Chevie heard the gunshots boom against the curved ceiling, but she was beyond any act of self-preservation. Her mind was packed tight with the struggle between two warring personalities.

Who was she now?

Cadet Chevron, or Special Agent Chevron? Just when it seemed quite possible that she would never emerge from the cocoon of this struggle, she was unceremoniously dumped into the water, and the shock took her a fraction closer to consciousness. But it wasn’t quite sufficient and she was a second away from inhaling a pint of cloudy water, which would have been the end, when her forehead crashed into an obstacle and the sharp pain brought an automatic reflex action from the FBI consultant in her.

Chevie floundered for a moment and then jerked herself upright, a hair’s breadth from panic, and took a huge gasp of air. The water tugged at her like a fat eel wrapped around her torso, flipping her over and dragging her legs and torso underneath the door’s busted central section. Only a ridge of her skull jammed against the top panel kept her in the chamber.

The last thing Chevie saw in Box’s apartment was the dead colonel cradled in Vallicose’s arms in an eerie echo of the Pietà copy hanging behind them. Then the door crumbled entirely and Chevron Savano was pulled along the corridor.

He is dead, she thought. I am free.

And she felt the grip of Cadet Savano lift from her mind. She still had the memories, but they were less potent.

Anyway, time to consider all of that later, when she wasn’t drowning in a catacomb and so forth.

There were just inches of air at the curve of the ceiling, and Chevie rode the space, tiptoes and fingers skidding along the brickwork, breathing as much as possible, enlarging her lungs for the final breath, which had to come soon and last until she cleared the catacombs entirely. He legs were buffeted by underwater missiles borne along by the sewer flush. Hundreds of rats swam past frantically, a few taking refuge on her head until she swiped them off.

But no bodies, Chevie thought. I haven’t seen any bodies.

Which was a comfort, because in spite of what these men had intended to do with their fantastic weapons, Chevie had no wish to see them murdered. The flush should have given them time to swim out.

Most of them, at any rate.

Her job now was to escape this claustrophobic place, find the rest of her team, and make sure they got away safely.

The corridor split in two, and Chevie took the left branch—or rather, was taken down the left branch—she didn’t have any choice in the matter and it was a pity she didn’t, because it was the wrong branch to take. The right-hand tunnel led into the underground dock and from there, underneath Camden Bridge and dry land. The left-hand branch led into the smelting room, which had a lower ceiling and was already full.

Imagine the horror, the sheer terror, of being suddenly completely underwater with the only sensory inputs being the frantic scrabble of rats and water pressure. Chevie slid into the foundry and the current changed from linear to swirling, and things began to bump against her.

Bodies, she realized, one twitch away from screaming underwater just for a quick death, but then she opened her eyes and saw a tunnel of light.

A tunnel of light?

But no, it wasn’t the afterlife. Some distance away, a pale cylinder of light cut six feet down into the water before raggedly fading into the gloom.

That must be a chimney! thought Chevie, and she pulled out of the current she was in, striking hard for the twenty-foot shaft that allowed machine smoke out of the catacombs.

She willed herself not to panic, even though the odds were stacked sky-high against her actually surviving this ordeal.

And even if I do survive, what then?

Amazingly, this was the first time Chevie’s own future had occurred to her beyond dealing with Clayton Box.

This is not the right moment to make a life-changing decision, she thought as she squinted through the murk, fixing on the blades of light cutting through the water.

Actually, it was the perfect time to think about something for half a minute, to distract herself from her situation and keep panic locked up in her mind.

The first fact to accept was that she could never go back to the twenty-first century. She could feel the Timekey lying on her breastbone, but the landing pad had been dismantled and destroyed, so now the pendant was nothing more than a complex ornament.

Chevie was surprised to find that she didn’t really care about the future. All she wanted to do was lie down somewhere dry and go to sleep for a long while.

And a medal from Queen Victoria would be nice. And a decent cup of coffee.

Dryness and sleep, she decided, were the priorities. Queen Vic would have to wait a few days.

She reached the chimney, thrust herself inside, and was mightily relieved to find a tube of air leading twenty feet up to the surface. The shaft was soot-blackened and rose steeply, but not vertically, so she had a fighting chance.

Chevie shared the chimney with hundreds of

rats, who trotted easily along the shaft. At another time she would have been disgusted and repulsed by their spiky wet fur and pink tails, but on this day she was almost relieved that the rats were taking the same route.

These guys know what they’re doing.

All the same, Chevie had no desire to get nipped and pick up a dose of some Victorian plague, so she placed her hands carefully and tried not to flinch when the rats clambered over her forearms, careless in their desperation.

On a good day, with sunshine and breezes, a twenty-foot climb with plenty of toeholds would not have inconvenienced Chevie much—in fact, her pulse probably would not have risen much above sixty—but now, with her uniform sopping wet and death all around, it seemed to Chevie that this sloping shaft could be the straw that not only broke the camel’s back, but its will to survive, too.

The chimney’s surface was treacherous for a climber. The bricks were coated with soot and oil, which had been slickened by the rats’ claws as they hurried to the surface. Chevie dug her fingers into the spaces between bricks and pulled herself upward inch by painful inch. She could see her hands now and was not surprised to find her knuckles bloodied from the climb. She lifted her face toward the sky and thought that the pale disk of evening light was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

I will survive this, she thought. I will swim in the ocean again. In clean, sparkling water.

Which was a lofty ambition indeed, given her current surroundings.

She was halfway there now, and the world had reduced itself to this struggle. What came before and after the climb did not matter. It was very simple: go on, or die. So she dug in her fingers and toes, dragging herself along, watching her blood seep out from cracks in her skin’s sooty coating.

There were too many rats now—a bubbling carpet of claws and teeth—and so Chevie began sweeping them off with her forearms, clearing a path for herself. The chimney narrowed as it rose, and Chevie fought back panic when it occurred to her that she might not be able to squeeze through the opening.

I will fit, she resolved. Cadet Chevie may not have had the resolve for this fight, but she is gone now. Forever.

But her mind was all Special Agent now. The cadet had been losing coherence from the moment she saw Box’s body. The Boxite Empire would never come to pass.