I cannot claim to be exactly sure how Kayla parks the car. It seems to involve rotating through seven hundred and twenty degrees and using the curb as a brake. The car rocks up on two wheels for a moment, then settles. My stomach takes slightly longer.
We’re beside a brown brick building with a sign that announces in crisp white letters that this is Hammersmith Station. Clyde or Tabitha are nowhere to be seen on the street outside.
We bundle through to the station, shove tourists aside, and hurdle the gates. Several yells pursue us. I bat the objections away with wild waves of my badge.
Clyde and Tabitha aren’t on the station either. There again, if Kayla had driven a handful of miles per hour faster and pointed us against the spin of the earth I think we would have traveled back through time, so perhaps the fact that we got here first is not that surprising.
I grab my phone from my pocket.
“Just feckin’ text,” Kayla says, already heading for the tunnel. “Hannah is already down there.”
I tap keys on my phone, send “Going down,” to the rest of MI37, and hurry after Kayla’s rapidly retreating form.
Just before the tunnel swallows me, the phone buzzes again. Tabitha has replied. “No time for sex talk.”
Well, at least we’re going into this with a professional attitude…
One plus of racing to save the world is that it leaves you less time to worry about the dangers of oncoming trains. Plus there’s much less wrestling with the rusty door leading down to the service tunnel now that Kayla has kicked it open a second time. Still, I will admit to blanching when my foot hits the sixth step and a train’s passage slams the door shut behind me. It’s about now that some situational awareness might come in handy.
Time to slow down. Kayla is still well ahead of me, but I stop taking the steps two at a time. Lang’s pocket reality is about a hundred yards to my right once I’m through the door.
And if Friedrich has guards posted? He didn’t last time. Unless the mad machine we found last time was a guard who had slipped a few gears. But we saw no evidence of Friedrich last time… Wouldn’t he have stopped us raiding the place? Except, what if I have picked the wrong place? What if Friedrich is, right now, in a totally different pocket reality putting the finishing touches on his plan?
And about then I realize that I’ve stopped, paralyzed by indecision, and I’ll never know if I’m in the wrong place or not if I don’t make it to the bottom of these stairs.
I take another ten steps. The light of the workmen’s lamps in the tunnel beyond outlines the door before me.
If there are sentries, was there cover? I seem to remember a few piles of wood, and maybe one of electrical equipment.
Who the hell was doing work down here anyway? God, I wonder if Friedrich’s forces killed them. Jesus.
There weren’t sentries last time. It’ll be fine.
“Just so you know,” says Kayla’s voice from nowhere, “you breathe much louder and you’ll have the whole bloody lot of them down on us.”
So much for situational bloody awareness. I scan the darkness of the stairs, but can’t pick out her shadow from any of the others. I decide to forgive myself a little. Kayla is as close to a real life ninja as I’ve ever met.
“Crap,” I say quietly. “He left sentries, didn’t he? How many?”
“About ten.”
“Double crap.” I look around for silver linings. “At least we know we found the right place.”
“Or it’s a great big feckin’ trap.”
“Or that.” I close my eyes. It makes no real noticeable difference to my surroundings. “Any sign of Hannah?”
“No.” There’s an edge to her voice. I can’t tell if it’s fear or anger.
“Any sign of any large blood stains?” I probably could have phrased that better.
Kayla snorts. “Hannah is like a feckin’ black belt at stealth infiltrations of enemy-held facilities. Kind of her whole feckin’ thing. You read her file, right?”
I decide to skip right over that. “Think we might have similar luck?” I ask instead.
“I’m generally a wee bit feckin’ louder than that.”
It’s unsettling talking to Kayla in the dark. The black humor of her violence is more menacing without a wiry red-headed frame to fit it to.
“I wish I’d held onto that steel pipe,” I say.
There is the sound of steel being unsheathed.
“Ach, feck it,” Kayla says in the darkness. “You take this.”
It takes me a moment to work out what she’s trying to give to me. I mean, it’s obvious what it is. But… but…
“Your sword?” I say, complete in my incredulity. It’s like Kayla is offering me her arm, or her leg. Here, just use this body part for a while. I don’t need it.
I expect sarcasm, but instead there’s just a pause. Just long enough for me to feel how insubstantial everything seems in this much darkness.
“You know where I got this sword?” Kayla says finally.
I have no clue. I’ve never imagined her without it. “Is it a family thing?” I ask. It seems like something where the sentimental value would be high. The way she treats it I can imagine it being handed down from generation to generation. Some ancient MacDoyle heirloom won at a great price by some long-ago ancestor on a long sea voyage to Japan. Five hundred folds of steel and all that sort of thing.
Kayla chuckles, low and brief. “No. It was a feckin’ renaissance fair. I was sixteen. Trying to hunt down some lass with an alien in her head.”
I am forcibly reminded that Kayla’s teenage years were rather different than mine.
“I had this kitchen knife stuffed down the back of my shirt, and then I passed this good-looking chap, soot all over his arms. And he was bashing at some feckin’ bit of metal, and had a rack of all this medieval shite. And then there was a bucket with a bunch of samurai feckin’ swords sticking out of it. Should be feckin’ mentioned that the wanker hadn’t actually made any of the shite he was selling. Imported it all from Taiwan and then set up the wee forge to make himself like a big man. Feckin’ stupid. But I was feckin’ stupid too. I was sixteen. Comes with the feckin’ territory.” Another low chuckle. Something mocking in it, though I don’t think I’m the one being mocked. “Set me back ten feckin’ quid that sword did. Worth it though. Much easier to kill someone with that than with a feckin’ kitchen knife.”
I have to admit, it’s not quite the legend I expected. And yet the sword seems almost more personal for the telling.
“Why are you giving it to me?” I ask. I feel like I missed something.
“Because I stand a chance against those feckers without it. Not sure I can say the same for a skinny wee shite like yourself. And according to the plan you need to live long enough to get blown up by a feckin’ bomb.”
She’s a practical girl, is our Kayla.
Our Kayla.
I’ll miss her. The full impact of that thought takes a moment to hit me. And maybe she’ll miss me. Maybe that’s what that story is about. Letting me past her guard a little is a farewell gift.
I reach out gingerly, worried about cutting myself, but Kayla has the handle held unerringly close to my hand.
“Way I figure it,” Kayla says as I take the sword, “time might be best spent with me kicking these arseholes’ arses. You try and sneak past them, get to Hannah. Try to do something feckin’ right by her. It’s about feckin’ time you did.”
Kayla just gave me her sword, so I don’t object to that. There’s likely some truth to it.
“Ready to go on your feckin’ say so and everything,” Kayla says. “You being all acting head of MI-feckin’-37 and all that shite.”
“You want to take on ten Uhrwerkmänner unarmed?” I say. Just because there’s homicidal and then there’s suicidal.
“Feck, yes.” Kayla’s voice is a blade in the night.
“Well all right then.” I put a hand on the door. “Let’s go fuck some people up then.”