so that the railway company built a series of underground stable yards for their work ponies and even included a pool and a dock for boats coming off Regent’s Canal. These yards were constructed hurriedly and on a budget, and so they flooded regularly. After a heavy rain it was not uncommon for lovers strolling the canal to have their romantic vista ruined by the grisly sight of drowned, wide-eyed ponies heaped like sacks on the bank.
This water problem seemed insurmountable, so the railway company was nothing short of thrilled when, in 1884, a retired American colonel with more money than brains made it an extremely generous cash offer for the entire subterranean labyrinth. What this Colonel Box planned to do with the caverns, the railway folk did not give a single fig about, as his pile of money was sufficiently high for the doomed project to miraculously realize a profit.
A champagne reception was thrown for Box in the Savoy, and then the railway folk sent a clerk to bank the tender before it evaporated. As a footnote to the entire affair, the clerk who had been dispatched on his errand with a withering series of threats and insults from Director Rolls-Jameson took the impulsive decision to abscond on a ferry to Europe with a suitcase of pound notes and was never heard from again, though there were rumors that he bought an olive grove on the Côte d’Azur and lived a long and happy life.
Regardless of this embezzlement, the catacombs now belonged to the colonel, and he set his team’s engineer the task of flood-proofing the entire underground area, which, contrary to the universal rule of restoration, did not prove as difficult as first supposed. In fact, the entire problem was solved by the construction of a single buttressed, steel-reinforced wall between the catacombs and adjacent sewer network, which had never been equal to the task of conveying Camden sewage and rainwater to the distant Thames.
Once the wall had been scrupulously built to specifications and tested by a winter of torrential rainstorms, Colonel Box and his team of British and American special forces—drawn from Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and SAS Boat Squad, among others—transferred the future gear into their underground lair, satisfied to finally have a base of operations from which to move forward their master plan.
For the next decade and a half, Box and his men labored underground like beavering badgers, stripping down whatever twenty-first-century weaponry had made it through the Smarthole and fabricating facsimiles. There were setbacks, of course, including the mundane shortage of adequate tooling equipment, and an extraordinary takeover attempt by the Spiffy Squires, a gang of what could only be described as river pirates, who, upon hearing some third-hand legend of an Ali Baba’s cave of riches underneath Camden Lock, moved their operations from the Thames estuary to the canal and attacked on two fronts: by land and by water. The Spiffy Squires were little more than Oxford dropouts suffering from spoiled-brat syndrome, and they were no match for Box and his aging soldiers, though Box did lose two good men, which made him realize that he would need to eventually bolster his ranks with locals if his operation was to succeed. And so Major Anton Farley was dispatched to infiltrate London’s biggest and most organized criminal outfit: the Battering Rams. And when the time came, when all the weapons were ready, then the Rams’ war council would be executed and the rest of the gang would be offered a proposition.
That blessed day had finally arrived.
CAMDEN CATACOMBS, LONDON, 1899
The boatman left the engine in its cover and expertly poled the Zodiac inflatable along the Regent’s Canal portside bank, toward the brick-toothed mouths of Camden Bridge’s arches. Dark wavelets thumped the rubber floats, urging the inflatable to midstream, but the oarsman compensated unhurriedly with deep mixing swirls of his pole.
A thousand times, thought Witmeyer. He has made this trip a thousand times.
She glanced sideways at her partner, who sat beside her amidships, and was unsurprised to see Vallicose’s face shining with a zealot’s glow.
Clove thinks herself on the way to Paradise.
Ironic, as the dark canal waters could easily have been the River Styx and their ferryman might have been the legendary Charon, delivering them to the Underworld.
Why not? Is anything impossible now?
Witmeyer shook herself, partly for warmth, but also to dispel the philosophical nature of her thoughts. She had been quite interested in the great thinkers as a younger girl. As a cadet, she had even dated a poet as part of a teen undercover assignment, and she had been upset for hours when she had had to inform on him; but she had learned from that assignment that this was not a world for philosophy. The history shows on the Boxnet assured the faithful that Victorian London was the largest cesspool of human sin and corruption the planet had ever seen. Victorian London apparently made Sodom and Gomorrah look like Girl Scout camps.
I have survived on my instincts thus far and I will survive this trial, too.
The inflatable moved in rhythmic pushes, water hissing on the gunwales, until the bridge yawned over them, greasy stalactites dripping from its arches. They might have been rowing down the gullet of a whale for all the Thundercats could see, but the sentry hauled back on his long oar and guided the small boat toward an indistinct bank of flotsam and decomposing canal garbage. The prow cut cleanly through the soft belly of the bank, and suddenly they had slipped through a shadowed access arch and underneath the bridge itself.
Vallicose could barely contain her excitement.
The mouth of the Catacombs. I can feel the Blessed Colonel’s presence.
Of course, she had been here before. On school tours. For Boxites, this place was the equivalent of Bethlehem. This was where the Boxite Empire had been born, in this Spartan underground series of caverns.
A flashlight beam cut through the gloom and pinned the small boat to a white ring of water.
“What have you got there, Rosey?” said a northern English accent from the darkness.
“Farley and a couple of strays,” replied their escort.
Rosey? thought Vallicose, doing her surprised grunt. Sergeant Woodrow Rosenbaum, born in New Jersey. The Evangelist. I have his Bible trading card in my locker.
“Sergeant Rosenbaum,” she said with a curt bow of her head. “What an honor to meet the Evangelist. I didn’t recognize you in the fog.”
“The Evangelist?” said the second man, stepping from the shadows. “What’s she talking about, Rosey?”
The second man was all soldier, from crew cut to military-issue boots. The uniform was a strange hybrid of futuristic and Victorian. The flak jacket was definitely not from this century, but the clunky revolver on his belt and the battered top hat perched atop his shaven head anchored him in this time.
Vallicose studied him. “You are Aldridge,” she said. “Corporal Sonny Aldridge. Born in Newcastle.”
Aldridge raised the barrel of his rifle, which, like him, seemed to be cobbled together from parts.
“That sounds like surveillance information, miss. I don’t like people knowing things about me.”
“I have your trading card in my collection,” said Vallicose. “Every loyal citizen knows this information. It is written on the plinth of your taxidermic installation in the Hall of Heroes.”
Aldridge did not lower his weapon. “It is written on the what of my what in the where?”
Farley coughed and propped himself on one elbow. His face was pale in the flashlight beam, but his deep-set eyes sparkled from their recesses.
“Corporal, these people are future folk, and they saved my life. The colonel will want to see them immediately. This could change everything.”
Sonny Aldridge grimaced. “Are you sure, Major? The colonel doesn’t like surprises.”
Farley was adamant. “This is different, Corporal Aldridge. Today’s phrase is lizard king—now buzz us in. That’s an order.”
Aldridge shrugged, absolving himself of responsibility. What could he do but follow orders? He pulled a walkie-talkie from his ve
st, sent two bursts of squawk, and then pressed the speak button.
“Aldridge here. Lizard king. I say again, lizard king. Crank the gate. Four coming in.”
Behind him on a heavy steel panel, two thick chains shook off their slack, clinking rigid, and sprayed trails of water into the lit circle. The panel jerked straight up into a square frame set in the wall above, and from inside the catacombs tumbled a cacophony of industry, including the buzz of arc lights and weld sparks. The impression was of production and purpose.
“Oh,” said Vallicose. “Oh. Oh.”
Aldridge waved them past with the antenna of his walkie-talkie, and Sergeant Rosenbaum threaded the Zodiac through the canal gate into the belly of the catacombs.
Witmeyer was a tough woman to impress. After all, she had seen more wonders in the course of her fifteen years as a soldier for Box than most people might see in a dozen lifetimes. At the tender age of eighteen she had been one of the special forces team that had dynamited the Eiffel Tower, possibly the greatest propaganda coup ever achieved in the Jax wars. Before she had reached her third decade, Lunka Witmeyer had spearheaded the campaign to eliminate the unholy elephant from the continents of Africa and Asia. By twenty-three she was co-commander of her own search-and-destroy shuttle in low Earth orbit, hunting down resistance Internet satellites, so Lunka Witmeyer had literally seen the world. But the sights that greeted her wide eyes in those catacombs impressed her mightily—as much if not more than anything she had seen in her varied career. Colonel Box and his men were building an army underground, preparing for the first round of Boxstrike.
The gateway opened into a series of low rooms interconnected by brick arches and lit by a series of arc lights strung along the walls and powered by various portable generators that growled and shuddered in corners like watchdogs. The arches gave the space the feeling of a cathedral, and the impression was one of holy labor. Men worked on weapons, stripping them down or building them up. Witmeyer saw racks of mortar tubes, assault vehicles, grenade launchers, limpet mines, rifles that vaguely resembled AK-47’s, pump-action shotguns, and boxes of ammunition. And a cluster of Zodiacs bobbing on the leash at a steel ladder that led to a mini-jetty.