Chapter 13 - The Kraken Gate
‘Hello! You look gloomy,’ said a voice, utterly devoid of gloom.
I hadn’t been looking forward to this meeting, and my father’s condition had further soured my mood. He was beginning to look old. More than two decades of prison will do that to you. There was no way I would share those thoughts with the man responsible for my court-martial, so I deflected.
‘Have you seen the news, Lieutenant Scott?’ I was still carrying my copy of the Echo, a little crumpled and damp after a rough crossing back to the mainland. I brandished it under his nose. Benjamin had had his sideburns shaved off and looked more purposeful as a result. In place of army fatigues and boots he’d donned a fine-looking suit of grey worsted wool and a pair of brogues. If he had hoped to pass himself off as a mid-level clerk in the commercial district, he had failed. He stood, moved and spoke like an officer in the marines.
‘I have Ms. Derringer. I wouldn’t worry, if I were you. It will all be forgotten when people read the next breaking story. I heard through military channel this morning that the Nallian shock troops have annexed Ripolis.’
‘You don’t seem very troubled.’
‘I am concerned but not alarmed. They will be pushed back as they have been elsewhere. Our finest men and women are poised for a counterstrike.’
‘The Mighty Bean’ was an upmarket coffee shop on Bedrock Walk, so named because of the slabs of granite that emerged at strange angles from the paving stones. Some were no bigger than a hand while others were large enough and leaning sufficiently that the city council rented the space beneath them to shopkeepers. Bedrock walk was straddled by three small gardens; quadrangles of grass planted with tulips and ornamental trees. The well-heeled folk of Emberly perambulated here; dark-suited businessmen doing deals, husbands and wives in smart coats, some with nannies and children in tow. Here and there, students lounged in reckless indolence, the way only students can manage.
We queued beside mountainous cakes and creamy patisseries. I tried to avoid looking. Mrs. Underhill’s porridge was the only thing I’d eaten since the morning. My unhappy stomach growled. Lieutenant Scott pretended not to notice as he paid for two cups of steaming Rich Killary Roast. We navigated to a free table. I stowed the satchel under my chair, unclipping one end of the strap and threading it through the back staves before reattaching it. The founders of Emberland’s republic may have drafted a top-notch constitution, but mostly, that just meant that pickpockets and bag-snatchers were better versed in their rights.
‘Shouldn’t you be joining the counterstrike?’ I asked, hopefully. He laughed.
‘Ha-ha, no. You won’t get rid of me that easily. You and I have a vital mission that may change things forever for Emberland.’
‘We’re likely to have different missions.’
‘Alright, I concede the point. Different, but aligned.’
‘Oh really?’ Benjamin had paid for the coffee; I could only muster sarcasm by way of repayment. ‘What’s the purpose of your mission then?’
‘Secure Lannerville.’
‘Who for?’
‘Emberland, of course! Listen Connie…sorry, Ms. Derringer,’ his tone was earnest again and I hated myself for softening. ‘I know you can’t forget what happened, and I know you don’t want to forgive me, but I’m going to prove myself to you. We do have an important role in this.’ He pointed at the newspaper that lay folded on the coffee table. The daguerreotype beneath the headline depicted Nallian airships hovering over the rooftops of a city that might have been Ripolis.
‘These are dangerous times. The Nallians have their leverium, but they can’t feed their people. Everyone thinks of minerals when we talk about natural resources, but what good are they when the population is starving? The Nallian Collective have set their sights on our agricultural land, the rich plains of Sonden and Denborough.’
As if to underline his words about the war that was gathering momentum, a company of green-coated riflemen marched past us, weapons over their shoulders. I watched for the reactions of the people they passed. Many ignored them, while others spoke encouraging words or simply nodded their thanks. One young boy saluted smartly, his parents hands on his shoulders to keep him from joining temporary formation with them.
When they had gone I asked, ’Why don’t they sell the lifting gas to other countries and buy food?’
‘No one knows for sure, but I went to an intelligence briefing a few Meniah-cycles back where one expert said that there’s a very finite amount of leverium to be had. If it was sold to all the countries that wanted it, there wouldn’t be enough for any country to build a worthwhile fleet of airships, not even Nallia.’
I nodded, keeping watch as a spry young man in a top hat headed straight towards us. He was swinging a black cane with exaggerated relish. Benjamin was still talking. Like Benjamin, the young man was military. It was in his walk and his bearing. You get to recognise it if you’ve been a part of it yourself. Many bells of drill, marching in formation. “A life like no other!” said the recruitment posters, presumably because nowhere else in the world did Formation Boredom like the army.
‘Whenever there’s a loss, through accidents or leaks, it escapes into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, never to be retrieved.’ He saw my eyes tracking away from him and turned, just as the young man pulled up beside our table and rested both hands on the silver knob at the top of his cane.
‘Good morning, Lieutenant Scott.’
‘Good morning, Captain Banks.’ Benjamin stood. ‘May I introduce Ms. Derringer. Ms. Derringer, this excellent fellow who is doing a woeful job of impersonating a civilian is Captain Andrew Banks.’
I stood. Captain Banks swept the hat off his head, took my hand in his other and bowed. It was practiced, but not natural. He was a head shorter than me, but handsome, in a schoolboy sort of way. His face was clean-shaven, his precisely combed hair was black. His brown eyes were shrewd, but not unkind and he positively fizzed with bottled-up energy.
‘At your service, Ms. Derringer. I’ve heard a great deal about you, so it’s a pleasure to meet at last.’ The Captain had a slight accent, a glottal twang that might have originated from Yesper, where we were headed.
‘Captain,’ I nodded respectfully. ‘Forgive me, but I don’t recall you from my time in the Marines.’
‘Please ignore the title, Ms. Derringer,’ said Banks. ‘I’ve been temporarily assigned to the marines as a Second Lieutenant. I shall be subordinate to Lieutenant Scott for the duration of our mission in Lannerville.’
‘Assigned from where?’ The question briefly hung between us.
‘Another branch of the military,’ Banks replied smoothly. He wasn’t going to elaborate, but it had to be S.I.S., the Special Intelligence Corps, spies and counter-intelligence.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Benjamin. ‘I wanted you two to meet. Banks will be my right-hand man in Lannerville. He is something of an expert in Nallian matters, and our superiors are convinced that we will have need of him, even though Lannerville is about as far from Nallia as we could hope to be.’ Benjamin smiled.
Another chair was pulled up. Banks and I sat while Benjamin went to get the Captain a coffee. There was a brief silence. I could almost hear the young man’s energy crackling. I sipped at my coffee. He leaned forward.
‘You’re even more lovely than Benjamin described.’
Coffee shot out of my nostrils, burning my sinuses. Instinctively, I breathed in, inhaling more of the bitter brew, which set me to coughing violently. I fumbled for a handkerchief, but a soft, clean folded one was pressed into my palm.
‘Sorry.’ Captain Banks looked crestfallen.
I dabbed at my streaming eyes and nose. ‘Good timing,’ I said.
‘He’s never stopped talking about you since I met him.’
‘Really?’ I poured as much sarcasm into the word as I could, just to see if it was possible to strip paint just with one’s tone of voice. Our coffee table stayed resolutely white.
‘He told me what happened between you, you know!’
‘Long chat was it? Something like, “I shopped her for something she didn’t do”?’ I couldn’t help it, and then, maddeningly found that I despised myself for the way I was behaving. C’mon Connie, you’re a professional. You’ve founded your own company. You’re free from taking orders – well that bit wasn’t strictly true – but you’re independent now, more than just a cog in the military machine.
‘Everything alright?’ asked Benjamin, back with some horrible milky coffee for Banks. ‘It looked like you had some kind of a choking fit.’
‘No, well yes,’ I conceded. ‘Sorry. I was being a total shit. Shall we talk about work?’ Time to behave like a professional. I had no choice but to work with them. I wouldn’t trust them, but I was going to make damn sure that when they reported back to the chancellor that they would have nothing to complain about. Director Harman had made it clear that he wanted us to cooperate, so that’s what I’d do.
After an awkward start, Benjamin quickly steered the subject on to the Koulomb Gate. I didn’t see why he needed to know so much about it if he was going to be guarding the perimeter, but I could see no grounds to hold back.
‘Why is it called a “Koulomb Gate”?’
‘It’s named after the scientist who came up with the idea. Frederick Koulomb even built a prototype but he couldn’t get it to work.’
‘Why not?’
‘This was thirty years ago. There was no way to generate the huge energy levels needed to power it.’ Captain Banks took out a notebook and scribbled something in it. The pen movements were precise and staccato, like machine-gun fire. He wrote with so much energy I was convinced that he would set the paper on fire.
‘So it needs a power source,’ resumed Benjamin. ‘Is that it?’
‘No, that’s just the engine room,’ I replied. ‘The installation is huge. Professor Maddison would be the best person to describe it.’
‘No. I need someone non-technical to describe it. I wouldn’t understand anything a scientist tried to tell me.’
Benjamin was following orders, tasked with finding out everything he could. I shrugged and continued while Banks took notes.
‘Alright, well basically, it consists of five parts. I already mentioned the engine room which houses the power plant; two large steam engines that drive dynamos. Director Harman told me that the ones installed at Winslow Hall were the most powerful ever built; twenty bar of pressure with a theoretical maximum head volume of thirty-thousand gallons.’ Benjamin looked blankly at me. He clearly knew less about steam engines than I did.
‘Then there’s the storage room, a huge vault filled with hundreds of batteries. To begin with, the steam engines run normal electrical dynamos that charge the batteries. The business of connecting to another planet can only begin once they are fully charged.’
‘That’s really possible, is it?’ interrupted Benjamin.
Banks stopped scratching in his notebook and looked at me.
‘Yes. I’ve seen it.’
‘All right,’ Benjamin resumed after a brief shake of his head. ‘But how is the target world selected?’
‘There’s an observatory on top of the control room. One of the team uses an optical telescope to find the star around which the target world orbits. As they turn dials to direct the telescope, cogwheels point the lodestone in the same direction. When the operator is sure he has the correct star, he pulls a lever which generates a current in the lodestone and it locks onto the world.’
‘Do you know how it does that?’
‘No. I’ve a good memory for the words, but I’ve no idea what they really mean. Are you sure you’re not better off talking with the professor?’
Benjamin grinned. ‘No, no. You’re excellent! If you don’t know, just move on.’
Stay professional and courteous, Connie. ‘When a current is applied to the lodestone, it generates a magnetic field. Somehow, the lodestone senses the gravity of the distant objects, and the intensity of the magnetic field that it generates varies depending on how directly the lodestone is pointing at the distant object.’
‘Wait a moment,’ exclaimed Benjamin. ‘I don’t know much about these things, but aren’t stars are massive compared with the planets that orbit around them. Surely the lodestone would always end up pointing at the star and you’d walk through the gate and into a fiery death.’
I smiled. ‘That’s exactly what I thought when it was first explained to me, but no. In fact, you’re partly correct. The engineers do allow the lodestone to fix on the star, but apparently it wobbles slightly because of the influence of the planet’s own mass. Somehow, they can use this to precisely calculate where the planet should be, and that offset is fed into the Koulomb field generators.’
Benjamin closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘It just…doesn’t seem possible.’
‘Yes, I thought that too, until I stepped through the gate.’
Banks stopped taking notes. He scratched behind his ear using the end of the pencil.
‘The church elders won’t be pleased,’ he said.
‘You mean when they have to face the fact that there’s nothing special about Draxil and Aripole?’
‘Exactly. If our stars are just two in a limitless universe of stars, that detracts from their exalted status.’
‘Surely they’ve known this for a long while,’ said Benjamin.
‘They have,’ I agreed. ‘But the Church is very good at picking and choosing what it wants to believe.’
‘And burying its head in the sand,’ Banks cut in. Benjamin finished his coffee and put the cup down on the table.
‘Well now, Captain Banks, we’ll only need to worry about that when the Koulomb Gate becomes public knowledge,’ he said. ‘Now, Ms. Derringer, you said there were five main components to the device. Is the observatory one of those?’
‘Correct. Call it the third one. The control room is the fourth component, then the room that holds the Koulomb field generators and the portal is the fifth.’
‘Is that where these giant spinning things I’ve heard about are located?’
‘The Koulomb field generators, yes. Don’t ask me how they work though because I don’t have a clue. I do know that they are where all the battery power goes at the start. Keeping the gate open requires less power than making the opening to begin with.’
This carried on in the same vein for a little while, but there wasn’t a lot more detail I could add. At last Captain Banks asked a question.
‘What’s the layout of the Lannerville site?’
‘Sorry. I haven’t been. I guess we’ll all have to find out when we get there.’
‘And your mission?’ This was Benjamin again.
‘Cross to the other side, secure the landing zone, then scout the area and find a way to defeat the Charg. Child’s play.’ I gave them my winningest smile. The two men looked at me. They’d evidently heard something of the creature we were up against. Then I noticed something that wiped the smile off my face. A man in a greatcoat was watching us.
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