Chapter Eight

“Inside the Foundry”

1.

AFTERWORD FROM “THE FALL of Empire” by J Quinham.

“When they looked back on the events of that day, no-one could truly explain why it all happened. There were only two people who knew—one had the information but was unaware of its importance, and the other refused to comment. Not a single person noticed the connection between events beneath Luna and the glow above; those who saw the glow, the officers and crew of the Navy flyers that patrolled the orbit of Luna, just considered it a natural, if unusual, occurrence of Luna and paid it no mind. The people inside Luna didn’t see the glow, of course, and even if they did it’s possible that only one of the scientists would have worked out the connection—certainly Doctor Kaplan had the knowledge to join the dots, but he, like everybody else, was otherwise occupied and taken by surprise by the abrupt change in the behaviour of the Drobates and the Selenites.

“When reports were later made, events chronicled, it became clear that it all happened at the same time. At 22:00 hours Greenwich Mean Time, on Wednesday November 5th. Children all through England began to recite a traditional poem, changing it, giving it new meaning. It was a poem that was soon to pass into history—of an event even more important than that of Guy Fawkes and his gun powder, treason and plot.

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November, the day the Heart spoke.

I see no reason we should not remember, when all hell on Luna broke.

“It would become the chant throughout the British Empire when was the truth was finally announced to the nation. It was the moment when, all through the lunar underground, Drobates turned on the humans they had worked alongside for over eight months.

“It was the beginning of the end, the rout of the British Empire.”

2.

LOCKING THE SET OF double doors behind them, the brothers strode into the main workroom of the dismal factory. The runners that Annabelle had seen beyond the hatch on her workstation snaked around the ceiling, dangling chains to the dusty floor. Several half-completed cages were set up against the wall, with a couple of Souptown’s unfortunates working to bolt the various disparate and badly built components together. Like the poor women who scrubbed the mansion’s floors and walls, they worked all the harder as soon as they heard the brothers enter.

“It troubles me,” said Casey, as he strode across to the centre of the room, “that your zeal for the Christian faith will one day undermine our work here. We gotta protect ourselves first, Eustace. You can wage your holy war when we know we’re safe from Willie.”

“Willie is a demon, brother!” Eustace hollered, making his brother wince. “He showed us the way to that holiest of holy places, had us take away the spirit that Jesus in His mighty works had imbued within that great tree, taking it from those degenerate savages that would keep it from those who truly do the Lord’s work. And then he would dare to take it from us! To use for his own devilish ends. If it weren’t for the spirit running through me, brother, we wouldn’t be able to work for the glory of heaven at all.”

“Shut your yap, Eustace. You ain’t holy, yer’ insane. This is why I never let you meet our benefactor in the first place. You’d have scared him off, and then where would we be? Back in the poor house, that’s where, or scrabbling around robbing careless whores and miners for their pennies.”

“You gotta tell me, Casey. Tell me all about him so’s I can make sure I point him out to Jesus in my prayers, and let him and our glorious Father show me the way to punish him.”

“I ain’t tellin’ you diddly, Eustace. You’re a liability. Now, help me with this. You wanna do the Lord’s work? Pull yer’ finger out.”

Casey had reached a large slab set into an angle in the centre of the room and covered with a large sheet made stiff with dark brown bloodstains. He revealed a completed cage for his experiments, the ribs of the chest hinged open so that a man could be forced inside. On a surgical table next to this beastly mishmash of metal stood several rusty, hideous-looking implements, yards of rubber tubing and a jar of faintly glowing, green silicate stoppered with a large grubby cork.

3.

OH, HE’S A LIABILITY all right.

Enderby had been listening to the entire conversation. Willie. It didn’t mean much right now, but it was a start. After he’d been jumped on his way back from his reconnoitre two days hence, he had woken up strapped to the back wall of a small cage set into the foundry’s main room. He cursed himself for being so careless. He thought he’d been subtle enough with his enquiries, but it clearly wasn’t long before word had reached the Soup Twins or their captains that an outsider had been sniffing around where he wasn’t welcome. He’d tried to fight them off, but it had been at least half a dozen. Hardly a fair fight, but he took solace in the fact he’d broken a couple of noses before they’d overwhelmed him.

Even though he couldn’t move, he wasn’t totally powerless. Knowledge was power. Eustace was expendable; it was Casey that was the brains (if it could be called that) of this operation. Enderby tried not to think of the fate that awaited him in his sweltering industrial dungeon. Yesterday he had watched from the shadows as Casey had worked his perverted surgeon’s skills, forcing that wretched babbling young man into his cage and attempting to hook up a basic set of syringes into his veins.

The two creatures decked in black robes that he had seen on the balcony during the hanging were slumped against one wall, dead as a doornail. Every once in a while, Casey would go over and remove certain complex mechanisms from the bodies before attempting to graft it onto some unseen part of the unfortunate boy’s chest. Soon, his babbling stopped. The only sound that followed was Casey taking out the frustration of his failure on the table by kicking it.

Enderby watched as Casey prepared the equipment for his experiment once more. Eustace ambled along to the corner of the foundry reserved for their prisoners and unlocked the cage that neighboured Enderby’s. The man being kept there—who Enderby recognised as the ostensibly hanged Harry Mackett—was in no state to protest or fight against Eustace’s burly grip. The twin roughly yanked Mackett’s bonds away and carelessly dragged the prisoner across to the operating table, all the time singly softly to him, close to his ear, a faint version of the Lord’s Prayer.

“Don’t worry, brother,” he soothed. “You’ll be an angel for us now; the Lord has blessed you.”

This time the screaming and babbling continued far longer. When the grisly operation had finished, Casey did not seem to feel the need to kick the table.

4.

HE’D NEVER HAVE BELIEVED it to look at him, but Nathaniel was damn heavy. The professor was long, no doubt about it, but he was so thin there was almost nothing of him. Yet he weighed a ton. Tally prided himself on being a practical man, but even he was stumped for a way to get Nathaniel off the roof. He’d tried to wake him, even slapped his face a few times, but it had no effect. Nathaniel was out cold. Sure, they could remain on the roof until Nathaniel came around again, but what if he didn’t? It wasn’t a nice thought, but Tally couldn’t deny it was possible. What Tally had seen was way beyond anything he had experienced before—some form of technology that might as well have been magic for all that he understood. He’d seen the effects of aleksandrite enough as it was, and that glow was the same green, no doubt. Tally didn’t know what it had done—at least Nathaniel was breathing.

Tally knew he had to get Nathaniel back to Otterbein Base; there were doctors there, at least one of them might know how to help. Maybe Kaplan—he seemed a stout and clever feller. The trick was getting Nathaniel to the bottom of the dome and hopefully that compressed lift thing would do the rest. Tally had the picks, but he’d need his hands to use them or they’d end up sliding down the dome, and he didn’t like to think of the speed they’d pick after sliding down a smooth surface for three hundred feet. Then he remembered the rope that was still tied around his waist.

“What do you do, lace your food with lead? Yer feckin’ hefty bugger.”

The strain on his arms was intense, as he removed one of the picks from the roof surface, leaving all the weight of both him and Nathaniel on one arm for a few moments. It was when the weight shifted to his weak arm that he worried; he fancied he heard a crack. He’d need to get it seen to again—probably end up in plaster once more. At this rate the arm would be less than useless. Still, he’d rather a useless arm than a dead friend—he had enough of those, he didn’t need any more.

Nathaniel hung below him, held safely in a harness Tally had fashioned out of the rope by looping it under his arms and over his shoulders. He had done a similar thing with his end of the rope so that the weight was more evenly distributed. At first he was just going to leave the rope tied around both their waists, but he decided that to do so was to likely risk spine damage to both of them.

Once the picks were level again he rested for a moment, trying to control his breathing while the sweat continued to pour out of him. He looked down—probably another hundred feet to go. His fingers were starting to feel numb, his muscles cramping. He had to get on with this or soon they’d both fall. Gritting his teeth, Tally once more transferred the full weight to his weakened arm and continued his descent.

Haskett bloody Smith indeed!

It took some time, but finally he reached the bottom and for a while he remained unmoving, his body slumped against the dome, taking sharp breaths. He’d never consider himself unfit, but this had tested his limits. In some ways Tally felt quite proud of himself—and to think he used to be daunted by the hills of Howth. If he ever got back to Ireland he’d go for a run up those hills. He let out a small laugh. But not just yet. First, a wee bit of rest was in order.

He looked down at Nathaniel who was lying next to him. Still breathing. Tally nodded. Good, now he just needed to get them both to the bottom of the tower. He hoped the reverence the Drobates had shown Nathaniel would come in useful now.

The sound of movement alerted him to the presence of others. A rescue party, he hoped, not that anybody knew they needed rescuing, mind, but he could still hope.

He looked up to see three Drobates approach him. Now maybe he was getting used to their faces because he thought he recognised the expression they all shared. And it wasn’t friendly.

“Now steady on there, lads,” he said, raising his arms which now felt as stiff as girders. “I’ve been helping the professor here. I’m no threat to any of yer.”

The three of them stopped barely a foot away, and looked down at him. Their elongated heads seeming to fill his vision completely.

He felt a strange itch at the nape of his neck, and went to scratch it but found he couldn’t move his arms. In fact, come to think of it, he couldn’t move a single part of him. Even his eyes were locked on the Drobates. He tried to speak but his jaw wouldn’t move; all that passed his lips was a strange guttural sound.

They’re gonna kill me, he thought mere seconds before everything went black around him.

5.

THE TWO MEN WERE not shy about approaching him. Ever since Bedford had watched Annabelle disappear behind the doors of that great incongruous mansion his nerves had been shred; he was listening out for any dropped word or suspicious click, his eyes flicking every which way amongst the alleys and corners of Souptown, which stubbornly and maliciously remained darkened even in the heat of the midday sun.

He had decided to return to their room to prepare himself. He didn’t like any of this—not one bit. Though Annabelle still seemed cold with him for some reason, the agony of uncertainty had been gnawing at him, ramping up his nervousness another notch. It was not that he didn’t have ultimate faith in Annabelle and her abilities (though he wondered if her sour mood might not dim them somewhat), but the thought of her taking on one of those blasphemous brass behemoths single-handed was almost too much to bear. Bedford knew he would have to prepare for the worst.

He strapped the remaining pistol opposite its brother and filled the small leather straps across the belt’s length with bullets. He took two knives—one strapped to his chest, the other his thigh, and under his arm he slung a shotgun with the barrels sawn off in a hidden holster. It all proved too bulky-looking under his duster, so he cut a rough circle of fabric from the bed’s rough and itchy blanket with his bowie knife, and cut another smaller circle out of the middle of that. That saw to the lumps and bumps of his arsenal, though he didn’t doubt he may well sweat himself to death before he got the chance to use it.

He was, therefore, trying to be extra inconspicuous as he eased his way through the main bar, which made it all the more surprising when he was approached by the well-dressed gentleman. He had immaculately coiffed silver hair swept back and a neatly trimmed moustache, underneath which was a cheerful smile, all lips and cheekbones shining like freshly polished apples. There was a sort of sagginess to his face though, a sadness which was most apparent in his eyes. Bold as a brass button, he strode up to Bedford and stopped right in front of him, and with the hint of a twinkle in one of his sad eyes he spoke in a rich cultured English accent.

“Good day to you, sir. I believe we have things to discuss.”

“I’m sorry?” said Bedford, nonplussed by the gentleman’s refined dress and speech and consequently forgetting that he, too, was expected to be American.

“Please, step this way. My colleague is waiting for us upstairs.”

Though Bedford was deeply suspicious, there was something genuine about this man—polite, sturdy, totally lacking in guile. He wasn’t about to toddle off with him anywhere, though. There had been too many disappearances already.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister,” Bedford said, reverting to his inaccurate Texan drawl. He attempted to push past the polite man but as he did so he found the crook of his elbow gripped, not threateningly but still firm, and the man leaned in to whisper.

“Your friend,” he said. “Inside the foundry. The lady.”

Bedford’s eyes widened as he stared back at the man, who was still smiling as if he were enquiring after the cricket scores on a sunny July afternoon.

“Oh, yes,” he said simply. “It’s very good; she really has got everybody else here fooled. Don’t worry, m’boy. Your secret’s safe with me, eh?” He squinted gleefully and tapped his nose. “Still, that’s what this is all about. My colleague upstairs is in a similar predicament, with his nephew long since missing and this little…habitat being his last known whereabouts. We fear he may be suffering a similar fate to your own little friend.”

“Well what are you planning to do?”

“Come upstairs and I’ll show you. You’ve nothing to fear.”

Reluctantly, Bedford agreed. He kept one hand on his pistol under the poncho.

It turned out the polite man had a room just down the way from his own, with the same cracked mirrors, made-do-and-mend furniture and that odd, milky smell. Only in this room, a bombastic-looking man with a ruddy complexion and expansive muttonchops stood proudly in the middle.

“Be it ever so humble,” the man rumbled, “there’s no place like home.” He was dressed in a morning suit with a loud waistcoat and matching bow tie.

“Don’t mind him,” said the polite man. “He has a flair for the theatrical.”

“So what is your plan, exactly?” Bedford asked, his voice level while his eyes took in everything within the room. Just in case.

“It’s very simple, m’boy.” The polite one ambled over to the other side of the bed and pulled up an old carpet-bag with a faded paisley pattern. He opened it up and brought from it a long thin bundle, like a large cigar, wrapped in wax paper that was stained a tannin brown. “We’ve got about eight pounds of gelignite here. We were just going to blast our way in.”

6.

THE DARKNESS OF THE moors matched his mind perfectly. Le Boeuf stood at the large open windows, the cold air against his face. Now he knew everything Fontaine knew—every detail Stone had shared with him about his survival in London at the beginning of the year, about Stone rescuing him on Ceres, and their near death experience in the aether. And all the time the two men growing closer—a close bond of love and attraction cemented their fates together.

No. Stone would not have what he had been denied. He was less than Le Boeuf in every conceivable way, and yet somehow he had achieved by accident everything Le Boeuf deserved by right. Stone had worked for none of it—indeed, at each turn he had been forced into his current position. Forced to go to Luna April last year by the Admiralty, forced to continue on from Venus by Mrs Bedford which led to their arrival on Peregrine and brought Stone into Le Boeuf’s life. Forced into his recent mission to find the minerals on the inner worlds, and at the same time become an unwilling accomplice in the conspiracy of silence to protect the empire. An empire that had stole the life of his dearest brother. Fontaine had explained how Stone, at first bitter, had come to accept his role in the growth of the British Empire, how after they had all visited the afterlife (could it really be possible? Under the influence of aleksandrite it was impossible for Fontaine to lie, but it did not make things true, simply true to Fontaine’s mind) Stone’s focus doubled. All the while the two men drew closer, until they were forced to part by the joint orders of the Admiralty and the Bureau. Arnaud knew he had seen Stone since, but alas there had been so much aleksandrite in his system, his mind ravaged by the compound, that he barely remembered the reunion—only that Stone had not visited him once since he had been sent to the rest home. Not even a letter.

What had changed in Stone to warrant this behaviour? Le Boeuf wanted to know. He had agents everywhere. Soon he would send Delany out to contact one of his agents in the Navy, a man who would surely know something of Stone’s movements for, after all, this man served on the Royal Navy’s flagship.

“Nathaniel has betrayed you,” he had taken great pleasure in saying. Whether it was true or not mattered little. Stone did not deserve to be loved. “What other reason would he have for abandoning you? After all you’ve been through. There is no other explanation.”

He had turned from Fontaine at that point, smiling at the tears that fell from the Frenchman’s eyes.

“It is late,” Mortimer said, entering the drawing room. “Perhaps we should rest?”

“No.” Le Boeuf turned to look at his old friend. “We do it tonight. Any longer and someone may notice Fontaine’s absence. He must be returned tomorrow.”

“But…” Mortimer shook his head. “This surgery is delicate—I cannot afford to make a mistake. I am dealing with a substance I know so little about, and to implant it so close to the brain. No, Willie, I must rest.”

For a moment Le Boeuf just stared at him. Then he slowly nodded his head. “Very well. You have four hours to sleep; then we finish this.”

7.

ANNABELLE WAITED. SHE HEARD deep thuds and muffled sounds from the doors that led deeper into the foundry, but she couldn’t tell if it was talking, yells or the dull uneven rumble of a small mechanical motor. Then it all went silent.

She couldn’t just sit there. The hatch in front of her had been deadlocked from the other side, but she still had the lockpick hidden in the bandages wrapped around her chest. Relieved she could now breathe slightly easier, Annabelle teased the lockpick from the folds and set about heading down to the inner doors, grabbing a small length of thin metal to use as a lever in the lock.

There were several other men, a mix of ages but all bent-backed, working away in the recesses down the corridor. The incessant clink and clang of hammers on metal filled the air, already thick with oil and sweat. They paid Annabelle little heed as she made her way down—clearly they had seen this sort of behaviour before, from those whose spirits had not yet been broken like their backs. If they did do anything, they would shoot her a pitying glance and shake their heads slowly.

She reached the door and got to work. When the Soup Twins had opened the double doors before they had twisted their keys in unison. Annabelle just had to hope that was a bit of theatre on their part, and the lock was not more complicated than she initially had envisioned.

It didn’t take her long to unlock the first, but the door still wouldn’t budge. She swiftly set to work on the other lock, deftly gauging the resistance of the pick against the tumblers. She was pretty sure she had just about got it when there came one of the biggest explosions she had ever heard in her life.

8.

HAD ANNABELLE BEDFORD HAD one second more to unlock the other door to the deeper parts of the foundry, she would have been dead. The deafening roar of the blast made her ears ring and her vision dizzy as the whole building shook to its foundations. Chunks of brass fell to the floor as the weaker tables collapsed, and the heavy metal door Annabelle had already unlocked fell backwards, its rusted hinges sheared by the huge shockwave. It fell to the floor with a heavy clang, and had Annabelle been in its path she would have surely been crushed to death.

But what was she to do now? She had finally gained a way into the foundry’s inner belly, but what on Earth was that explosion all about? Was it George, or Gopan? Or had the Soup Twin’s meddling in sciences they could never hope to understand produced the blast? She remembered Nathaniel’s observation on how, under the right conditions, the mysterious green mineral could be a potent explosive.

She was about to peek her head around the door when the ample body of one Soup Twin, then the other, burst through the gap where the door used to be. Crouched as she was in the shadow of the other door, the brothers raced past her without even giving her a glance, and began bickering at the other end of the corridor as they tried to unlock the doors. If she stayed here she’d doubtless be spotted should one of the brothers turned around, so she slipped around the corner to hide on the other side of the remaining door. The Soup Twins finally managed to outfox their double lock, and both pulled the richly-decorated Winchesters they treasured from their shoulders. They nodded at each other in unison, and set off towards the mansion side of the amalgamation of buildings.

Annabelle turned around. Beyond the gloom of the small entranceway the room opened up into a bigger, better lit space. The metal walls made her feel uncomfortable. It seemed somehow unnatural to her, and the networks of interconnecting copper pipes that ran around the walls reminded her uncommonly of veins. They hissed from time to time, the gauges on their valves fluctuating wildly. There was a grisly surgeon’s table set on one side, blotched with bloodstains of various ages. The tools were no better. Behind this, a rack of the raggedy and badly-built metal skeletons were lined up. Between these two horror shows was something strapped to the wall that had been covered in a large creased tarpaulin.

Her first thought was to find a weapon. Any weapon. The surgeon’s table might have something appropriate, and any blade, however worn or rusty, would still be a step up at this juncture. She made her way stealthily across to it, all the while keeping one eye out for any movement stirring under that great green tarpaulin, and she jumped when she heard her name hissed.

Her head darted around to find the source of the noise. On the opposite side of the large room a series of cages had been welded onto the walls, and from the furthermost one the voice came again.

“Annabelle!”

She scurried across and got to work picking the lock. Enderby was strapped to the back wall, but only with a set of thick leather buckles that could easily be unstrapped.

“Have you learned anything?” Annabelle hissed as she worked.

“Casey,” said Enderby, still resolute despite the circumstances. “He’s the one we’ve got to go for. He knows who was behind the bandit attacks. I’m suspecting it’s some sort of Russian connection, but he’s the one we need to go for. He’s the one with surgeon’s hands, too. Does all of the dirty work. I watched him do it. Eustace just seems to be a zealot, but he’s not without his nasty side.”

“I’d guessed as much. There.” The lock clicked with a satisfying clunk and Annabelle pushed it open, tucking the lockpick back into her waistband as she yanked at the thick leather buckles that were binding Enderby’s wrists.

“I think he did it, too. Casey. Got one of those brutes up and running; working properly. He’d already killed one poor devil but the second seemed to survive.”

“Well,” said Annabelle pointedly, “they must have had some success or we wouldn’t have found that other body out in the desert.”

“Good point.” Enderby rubbed his sore wrists when both straps had finally come away. “Only problem is, how much other success have they had? Come on.”

“Enderby? Where are you going? Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“No, look. Round here somewhere there’s aleksandrite. There has to be. The empire needs it!”

“The empire, Enderby? Or you job prospects? Come on, man! Didn’t you hear that explosion?”

“Of course I heard the bloody explosion.”

“It might be George!”

“What, Cautious George? He’s hardly the cannonball type. Look, we’re here now and I don’t want to come back later. I’ll look for the mineral; you see if you can’t find us a couple of weapons, eh?”

9.

WHAT HE NEEDED WAS a good watch. Unfortunately, he never was the kind of man to carry a pocket watch, and the watch Nathaniel wore on his wrist appeared to be broken—the glass shattered, the face cracked and one dislodged arm rattling around inside. As such, with no way to tell the time Tally had no idea how long it had been since he’d passed out on the roof. But he guessed no more than half an hour had passed since he had awoken in this strange low-lit room.

It seemed the walls, crystal like everything else in the city, were made of various shapes all slotted together. They didn’t resemble any shapes he had seen before—no hint of a square or even an octagon. The room itself was largely deserted, save for what looked like two tables, standing side by side, their surface a strange metal the like of which Tally had never laid eyes on. Light appeared to refract just beneath the surface, giving it the illusion of constantly changing colour. At the top of each table was an odd protuberance, which seemed to serve no purpose but was a comfortable rest upon which to place one’s head, as he had learned when he woke up and found himself lying on one of the tables.

In the half hour since, no one had come to see them, and Nathaniel remained as conked out as he had before. In some ways Tally didn’t mind so much. He could still remember the feeling he had got as the Drobates advanced on him—a deep sense of dread, something almost primal had prevented him from moving. Petrified—quite literally. He supposed they’d come by soon enough, but he hoped not before Nathaniel awoke. They seemed to respect Nathaniel, but Tally wasn’t too proud to admit that they scared the bejaysus out of him.

There was door in one wall, or at least what he thought was a door. There was no handle, but the dimensions were about right. He walked over to it and pressed his ear against the surface. Nothing, couldn’t hear a damn thing. Maybe there was no-one out there.

“Tally?”

He turned around. Nathaniel was manoeuvring himself into a sitting position, stretching his arms and rotating his shoulders painfully.

“What the blazes happened? I ache all over. Feels like I’ve gone ten rounds with an irate Skreelan.”

Tally didn’t know what that was, but he knew damn well why Nathaniel ached, so he explained what had happened above the dome and their subsequent descent. “Yer don’t remember that?”

“I think I do. It was the Heart—guiding me. Has been since we first communicated. Although I seem to be a bit fuzzy on the details.” Nathaniel rubbed his head. “It will come back to me, I’m sure. Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Looking after me.”

“Aye well, I did me bit, but don’t ask me how we got here. Guess it must have been the Drobates, but they looked fit to kill when they found us.”

“Seems unlikely, although that is not say I haven’t seen them kill before. They have these electric rifles, quite nasty. And then there is this strange method of hand-to-hand combat. Strange but most…”

With an almost hydraulic hiss the door opened and two Drobates entered the room. One was female, and Tally felt sure he recognised her. Which was absurd—there appeared to be nothing that made one Drobate distinct from another, yet somehow he just knew it was Jappeth Kelp. Perhaps it was the look she gave him. He wanted to say it was concern, but he knew it was something more. Tally looked back at Nathaniel. He was wearing the same look he had worn when they had first ran into the Drobates upon entering the city. He was talking to them again, only this time there were no words, just the occasional movement of his eyebrows and slight shift in the muscles of his face.

“Oh, well that’s probably not a good thing,” Nathaniel said some time later, after the Drobates had left, the door still open.

“I can tell I’m not gonna like this, am I?” Tally asked, a familiar feeling of dread creeping up his spine.

“It is hard to put into words.” Nathaniel walked to the door. “Maybe it is best if I show you. Come on.”

They left the room and walked through what Tally suspected was a typical Drobate house—had they just left the bedroom? Those tables had to be beds. Not much for comfort, the Drobates, Tally decided. He couldn’t see himself spending too much time sleeping on one of those “beds”, although he had slept on worse and that was for sure. But not no more, not now he was an agent for the Bureau. Sure and he’d have to work himself up, but he wasn’t going to be having none of these dangerous jobs that required sleeping in slums to keep his tracks hidden. No, sir, Charles Cahalleret wasn’t going to be having none of that.

Once outside they were hit by a deathly silence. The streets were empty, not a single Drobate or human in sight.

“What in God’s name has happened? It’s like a ghost town.”

“This way,” Nathaniel said and, as they walked through the deserted city, Nathaniel explained, as best as he could, what had happened.

10.

AFTERWORD FROM “THE FALL of Empire” (cont.) by J Quinham.

“Everywhere on Luna the humans found themselves herded away from anything that wasn’t of their making. Drobates in the City of Light and Science forced the humans out, and those who resisted were less than politely removed. Marines who guarded the Heart Chambers were attacked, the Drobate electric rifles making short work of their resistance. It took some time for the news of the attack—as many later called it, although in truth it seemed to be little more than the Drobates taking back what was theirs—to reach Otterbein Base, since the Drobate presence there had lessened over the preceding months. Professor George favoured talking to the Drobates, perhaps to renegotiate terms. After all, they had made arrangements with them before, but Major Larkins believed swift military action was called for. His Royal Marines were there to protect the empire’s interests after all—from any enemy, foreign or domestic. And, although Luna had not officially been claimed as part of the empire, to those in the know such an act was merely a formality. Luna belonged to the British. Politics were never the purview of the military, but orders were, and when Larkins had been assigned to Luna it was with the express intent of keeping the British Empire as the sole holder of the technologies that the City of Light and Science offered.

“What followed was nothing short of a massacre.”