London.

1973. November.

There was panic on the streets of London, emanating out from the portal station. The Joint Council tower above the station still bloomed black smoke into the sky, its ordinarily pristine, reflective exterior tarnished and cracked. The roads below were covered in shattered glass.

A short distance to the north, across the Thames, were the docks. The industrial, beating heart of the city for hundreds of years, it was normally a never-sleeping cacophony of cranes and chains, ships and dockworkers, trucks and trains and airships, conveyor belts and furnaces, loading and unloading. Instead, the workers had downed tools and were abandoning their positions. London was under attack once more, the creature from Palinor earlier that year still fresh in everyone’s minds. This was no monster, but an explosion at the Joint Council tower - supposedly the most heavily defended building in the Kingdom. Word had gone out on all channels - television, radio, hurriedly printed newspapers - that an ultimatum had been issued. There would be more bombings.

And so everyone was leaving, looking for holes to hide in, home to return to, pubs to drown in. Anywhere off the streets, away from major buildings and gathering. The docks powered the city’s economy and made for an obvious target. The docks emptied, workers departing en masse.

Except for one crew, who moved in the opposite direction. They were quiet, calm, going about their business swiftly but without fear. There were about fifteen of them, of varying ages. A small crew to run the entire dock, but enough for a single wharf. They were the single remaining point of activity in docklands that morning.

The cargo vessel drifted in with a final burst of its engines, gently nudging against the jetty. Mooring ropes were fastened and gantries swung into position. The ship was full of containers, though the crew were only interested in one. They offloaded only what was necessary to access their prize, which was then attached to the crane and winched onto dry land. The foreman checked the details, double-checked the seals, and signalled for it to be processed.

The dock was carefully chosen for providing a direct rail transit to the portal station. The container would be there within ten minutes.

*

The Kaminski residence.

Currently home to Zoltan Kaminski, his parents and Nisha Chakraborty.

There was always something more, another reminder to come of just how bad things could get. Perhaps the most surprising aspect was that Kaminski was still surprised - his cynicism tended to be laced with a thin vein of optimism; a last hope that perhaps the world would prove him wrong. It always disappointed.

The small, rotund television in the kitchen displayed live footage from the city centre. London burning. He’d been feeling mostly recovered from the encounter for the dopur, emerging from the vague stupor of its poison about a week prior. He could have gone back to work already, had he not other responsibilities. For the first week there had been the unusual situation of his parents looking after him, rather than the other way around - not something he’d experienced since being a child. It wasn’t easy for any of them, his parents being old and barely capable of making a meal, and him more used to running the house. But they’d tried their best.

Nisha had moved in after a couple of days, taking the spare bedroom. She’d tried being at home on her own but the dopur’s effects had lingered in her system for longer, and more severely. Waking in the hospital was only the first step of recovery: then came the out-of-body hallucinations, the constant drowsiness and a general clumsiness. Controlling one’s limbs was not a simple matter following a dopur encounter, it had turned out.

Kaminski had got off lightly, having only brushed some fibres from Nisha’s clothes while wrestling her out of the house. She’d had direct contact. Doctors at the hospital, and a specialist consultant with Palinese expertise, had clearly not expected her to survive. While he’d moved into the latter stages of recovery, which primarily felt like a mix of the flu and a terrible hangover, Nisha had spent that same time re-learning how to move, how to dress, how to make a cup of tea. That’s why being on her own wasn’t an option, especially with the health service having decided they were done with her.

So there she was, in his house, for weeks now. Carrying on their strange little dance.

He knocked on her door, then stuck his head round. She was sat on the end of the bed and was pulling on her jacket. “I need to go in,” she said. “I just heard on the radio.”

“I was about to come tell you the same thing. Sure you’re up for it?”

“You might need to give me a hand on the stairs.”

“Which ones?”

“All of them.”

She wore no make-up. Her hair was tousled from uncomfortable days spent in bed. Her skin had gone almost greyish, as if the colour had been seeping out of her. She looked beautiful, of course. There was no disguising the tiredness, but her face said more than her posture: that classic Nisha scowl and set jaw.

He held out a hand and helped her to her feet. “What do you think? he asked.

“I think this is yet more weird shit, on top of all the other weird shit this year,” she said.

“You think this bombing is connected?”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“To everything else? I’d be stupid to bet against it.”

*

Ruins of the Koth Embassy.

Joint Council tower.

Clarke whistled. The place was a mess, barely recognisable as an embassy suite. Where the bomb had gone off, the floor and ceiling had been vaporised to the point that the floors above and below were visible. The interior partition walls were gone or blasted with holes, while desks were turned over and swept clean of anything identifiable.

“Tell the truth,” Holland said, “they’re lucky this wasn’t worse.”

“This seem pretty bad already,” Hobb said.

A space had been cleared to one side of the exceedingly open plan office, where medics were tending to wounded. Styles was there, talking to one of the survivors. Behind a pile of debris, blocked from the view of the injured, were two rows of occupied body bags.

“Nah,” Holland said, shaking his head. “Any bigger and this could have blown out the supports. Brought the whole upper floors crashing down. Imagine this tower coming down, right on top of the portal station. Jesus fucking Christ, that would be a mess.”

Standing straight and tilting his head back, Clarke inhaled loudly through his nose. “Can you smell that?”

Holland sniffed. There was a distinct odour in the air, acrid and sweet, cutting through the organic smells of shit and burning blood. He waved a hand in front of his face. “Could be from all this crap floating around in the air.”

“I’m not sure sure,” Clarke said. “I didn’t notice it by the stairs, or over by the windows. Seems to be concentrated primarily around the blast zone.”

“Chemical reaction in the explosion, perhaps. Best get forensics on it,” Holland said. The place was a war zone. He’d gone past this floor in the lift only recently, on his way to meet Lord Hutchinson. For a moment he wondered if Hutchinson had been caught up in the explosion, then realised that he didn’t particularly care. This was an attack on his city, though, and that did offend him. There was less than an hour until the timer ran out for the threatened next attack.

Hobb looked at him. Her face was a grimace of barely concealed anger. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think I am.” He stepped carefully over to where Clarke was examining what had been the secretary’s desk. “Clarke,” he said, tapping the man on his shoulder. “You good here? Me and Hobb, we’re thinking we’ll go do the rounds. The usual spots. We know the M.O., the ultimatum and demands makes it pretty obvious what kind of person or group is behind this. We know the scene, we know the pubs and the clubs. If you’re good here, we’ll go pound some heads.”

“Fine,” Clarke said. “I’ll see if the CCTV was working. Styles is trying to get a description of the delivery man.”

“OK. We’ll call in to Robin with updates.”

“Do that.”

*

Bruglia.

3291. Frostfield.

In the Brightsun months, when the sun was at its highest, Bruglia was sweltering. Its architecture had evolved to favour shade and cool spaces, with shadowed courtyards and cold stone materials. In Frostfield it never got uncomfortably cold, remaining generally temperate and unrelentingly dry.

The early morning was the coolest time of day, especially in the canyons surrounding the raised, interconnected mesas atop which the city was built. The cliffs were sheer and unforgiving, making Bruglia a city state that had never been successfully invaded. That’s why the university was there, and how the city had managed to prosper since the opening of the portals. Compared to the rest of Palinor, Bruglia represented stability and security. It was a safe bet for investors, traders, business people and politicians from across the triverse.

“Stay close,” Yana said, “and move slowly. No sudden changes of direction.” She was stood on the side of the canyon, halfway up the cliff. A couple hundred feet of air below and an equal climb still ahead of them. Her feet were planted on the smooth surface of the cliff, sanded down by ancient rivers and winds. One hand was planted palm-down on the rock. She used no climbing equipment yet was fixed securely in place.

There was a whimper from below. “You sure you’re good to keep going?” Zlati’s voice was small and nervous. Much like the rest of her.

“It’s the same distance up or down,” Yana said, “so we may as well keep going.”

“Yeah, but we still need to get back down again,” Myroslava said, just below Zlati’s position.

All three of them were fixed to the wall courtesy of Yana’s physology spell: a localised gravity well that pulled them into cliff side, as if they were crawling horizontally. It was a trick unique to physologists and even then required an exceptionally high level of natural skill and training. It also required immense concentration, especially when applied to more than one being. Each point of impact - hands, feet - required its own sub-spell, which all had to be maintained for the duration of the climb.

Fortunately, Bruglia was rarely short on light to draw from, though the deep shadows of the canyon floor had made it more challenging at first. As they climbed higher, Yana was able offset her fatigue with a more rapid power draw from the ambient light.

At the top of the cliff was a bank. A particularly flush bank, used by all sorts including many of the slave traders that used Bruglia as a useful hub. That was a satisfying bonus. If they pulled off the heist, not only would it finance the rebels for the next year, it’d also cut the profits of the traffickers. Nobody would even know they’d been there. The only vantage point from which someone could theoretically spot them was from Fountain University, which was visible in the distance, poking out from the side of one of the mesas.

First, they had to get to the top. Yana moved up - it felt like forward - shifting each limb with a deliberate caution. In theory they could stand straight and walk at ninety degrees, but that would put an increased strain on the spell - it was having to fight against the planet’s natural gravity, after all. Once they reached the outer wall of the bank she would hand over to Myroslava, who would use her micrologist expertise to unlock a window and grant them access. It paid to have skilled wielders on the team.

Plus Zlati. She was there because she was good at following orders and was small and sneaky. Once they were inside the building, Zlati had the best chance of reaching the vaults.

Quiet in, quiet out.

That was the idea, at least. The plan was interrupted by a loud, distant crack that echoed down the canyon. Yana felt the rock tremble beneath her hands and she adjusted the spell, increasing its power. A fine curtain of dust drifted off the side of the cliff.

“What was that?” Zlati asked.

Myroslava saw it first, pointing towards the university. “Look!”

One of the towers, housing the professors’ labs, had exploded outwards in a fine spray of white stone. The top of it was gone, the remains scattering down and around the stump. A horn blew, then bells began to ring.

“Shit,” Yana said. “That’s going to put everyone on high alert.”

“Was that one of ours?” Myroslava sighed. “Did we have another mission active that we didn’t know about? Another cell?”

“Not as far as I’m aware,” Yana said. She looked up at the cliff, knowing that the bank was perched on top, just out of sight. “We need to abort.”

Zlati harrumphed. “But we’re so close!”

“No way we’re going to be able to pull this off with every alarm in the city ringing.”

“Agreed,” Myroslava said. She smiled grimly. “I’d love to know who just ruined our day.”