“This is quite an operation,” said Witmeyer, thinking that just maybe this was the team to join. Queen Victoria might have manpower on her side, but just one of those mortars could easily destroy an entire barracks, and a man with a single AK-47 plus unlimited bullets could mow down foot soldiers until his barrel overheated.
The working soldiers barely looked up as the boat passed, and Witmeyer saw that many of them were considerably younger than Rosenbaum.
The colonel has been recruiting.
It made sense. It didn’t matter how many guns you had if there were no soldiers to fire them. Firepower only worked with a certain amount of manpower.
A pity the colonel didn’t wait around until battle drones were invented, thought Witmeyer. He could have single-handedly won the holy war.
It was obvious to her now that if she and Clover had traveled back in time bearing arms, then so too had Colonel Box and his men. There were no divine weapons specifications handed down from on high. Box and Co. were simply time travelers. The Blessed Colonel was not so much blessed as lucky.
Witmeyer wondered how this bombshell would affect her partner, and the cruel streak in her looked forward to witnessing Clover’s reaction.
She is going to freak the hell out, she thought, not without satisfaction. All this time she has believed her precious colonel to be a god who walks among us, and it turns out that he is no more special than the rest of us.
Except Charles Smart. He’d been special, and Vallicose had shot him.
Rosenbaum threw a rope to a brother soldier, and they tied it to a dock post. With a jerk of his rifle, he urged his passengers onto the steel jetty. Vallicose refused to relinquish Farley, so she strode along the walkway bearing the Blessed Hangman in her arms.
“I can walk,” said Farley irritably. “Put me down.”
Vallicose didn’t hear; perhaps she was beyond hearing. The Thundercat seemed to have achieved a semi-trancelike state. Her legs moved and her heart pounded, but her mind was consumed by rapture.
I am here, she thought in disbelief. In the Catacombs, during the time of preparation, on my way to meet the Blessed Colonel.
How could any of this be happening were she not chosen? Her devotion had willed this event into being. Box had watched her, and this was her reward.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a small voice squeaked that maybe the Blessed Colonel had all these futuristic weapons because he was from the future, but the zealot in Clover Vallicose had no difficulty ignoring this little voice of reason.
Heads were turning now. These two particular Thundercats attracted enough attention walking through Thundercat headquarters in their own time, but here in Victorian London, under the full blaze of electric light, most of the recently hired soldiers would honestly have been less surprised to see a couple of crigs, the mythical crab-pig hybrid monster that, according to legend, roamed the sewer network. Even the men who had time-hopped from the 1980s had never seen specimens quite like these. Vallicose and Witmeyer were both over six feet tall, and each was striking in her own way. Vallicose’s skin was porcelain pale, and her green eyes were large and fringed by red eyelashes so long they almost curled back on themselves. Witmeyer was darker, with twin slashes of high cheekbones and a deep cleft in her chin. Her hair fell in dark sheaves around her shoulders and rippled as she walked. Add to these details the fact that both women had been fed steroids and various growth hormones from birth, and you had two beautiful women who could not fit through a doorway without both ducking and turning sideways.
“Look at this, me bully boys,” said one soldier, a native of this century. “I don’t know whether to kiss ’em or shoot ’em.”
Vallicose, who was usually quick to take offense, floated past in a holy cloud, so Witmeyer was forced to deliver the punitive head butt.
“You think about it for a while,” she told the unconscious kiss ’em/shoot ’em soldier. A chorus of caws and claps rose about them like circling crows as Witmeyer’s summary punishment was met with approval.
Rosenbaum ignored the mini-fracas and kept walking through the first of many arches, some of which had been bolstered with iron scaffolding, as they were already losing integrity due to the vibrations of the machinery below. The strange bunch passed through several large windowless rooms with clusters of soldiers either running drills or laboring over stripped-down war machines. The weapons were curious in that they resembled twenty-first-century equipment, but on closer inspection it became clear that the tooling was a little less refined. They were manufacturing weapons here based on futuristic prototypes.
One room contained a smelter that poured white-hot molten metal from a giant gourd into various molds while smoke was sucked up the funnel of a blackened chimney. The men working the gourd with long-handled gaffs were stripped to the waist, skin blasted black by the enormous heat. Witmeyer found it impossible to look at them and not think of demons in the fires of hell.
This is enough underworld imagery for one day, she told herself. First the River Styx, and now this.
The heat warmed their backs as they skirted the smelter, proceeding to a long narrow hallway with a row of smaller arches leading to a single steel door. Vallicose knew these arches well, as she had lingered in this corridor on her visits to the Camden Catacombs. The Corridor of Power was the name the guides would give to it; Clover had often pressed her cheek to the brick arches and imagined she felt a thrum from the residual Boxite power that had been absorbed into the stonework.
On the other side of that door, thought Vallicose, and she unconsciously tightened her grip on Farley.
“Put me down, damn you!” said Farley. “You are crushing me.”
Vallicose blinked the world into focus. “Oh, apologies, Major Farley. I am a little overwhelmed.”
Farley climbed down from her arms. “I will not appear before my commanding officer like a babe in arms.”
“Of course, sir. Forgive me. Should I fix…?” She pointed at Farley’s left shoulder. “It’s hanging a bit low. The sooner it is back in its rightful place, the better.”
Farley glared at his shoulder angrily, as though it had betrayed him by allowing itself to become dislocated by his fall into the music stands.
“We have a doctor and two medics here. I hardly think—”
While he was talking, Witmeyer stepped up behind Farley and grasped him by the shoulders. Before he could protest, she squeezed him as though he were an accordion, reattaching the shoulder joint.
“That’s a little thing we do,” she explained. “Clover distracts, and I perform the field surgery. I amputated a leg with a hatchet once that way.”
Fixing Farley’s dislocated shoulder actually cheered her up a little, as it was reminiscent of her glory days sweeping through the villages of northern France. Farley was not cheered even a jot. His knees quivered, and he howled in shock and pain.
“What are you doing, Sister?” Vallicose shouted in dismay.
“I thought we were doing a number. You distract, I heal. That’s what we always do.”
“This is the Hangman!” said Clover. “It is not our place to distract the Hangman.”
Witmeyer scowled, which on her face was a terrible expression indeed, and upon seeing it most right-minded people would beat a retreat and hide behind a thick concrete wall, but never Vallicose.
“Forget the war-face, Sister Witmeyer. We are in uncharted waters here. We are on hallowed ground. The old ways are dead.”
More’s the pity, thought Witmeyer. I preferred it when the Blessed Colonel and the Hangman were symbols of a history we twisted to suit our own purposes.
A confrontation between the Thundercats became inevitable at that moment, and perhaps it would have taken place right then and there had not the steel door been pushed open with such force that it clanged against the wall, sending brick-dust clouds floating from the frame. T
he door swung three quarters closed, humming like a tuning fork, and shielding the opening from Vallicose’s and Witmeyer’s view.
“What is that infernal noise?” asked a man’s voice. “How many times have I asked for dying men to be kept out of earshot?”
Farley gripped his shoulder tightly to contain the agony. “Sorry, Colonel. We have newcomers here; they don’t know the rules.”
“Newcomers at my door?” said the colonel, not sounding pleased to hear it. “There are rules for newcomers, but there are rules about newcomers too, Major.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but this is different. Extraordinary, in fact. I felt confident that you would wish to interview these two personally.”
“Did you indeed?” said the colonel. “And why would that be?”
“They are from the future, Colonel. The new future. The changed future.”
This news was greeted with a quick intake of breath and a long pause before the door swung open completely, revealing the man whom Farley had referred to as Colonel.
Vallicose genuflected, bowing her head and placing her left hand on the Boxite logo stitched into her greatcoat.