Conspiracies

A new member joins the underground investigation

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: There is a conspiracy at the highest levels, across all three of the known universes. Some of the detectives in the Specialist Dimensional Command are investigating, off the books. It’s a dangerous game - DC John Callihan was killed a year ago, and DC Kaminksi has escaped death twice. It’s hard to know who to trust, especially since discovering hidden microphones in their offices…

Early shift
On duty: DC Nisha Chakraborty & Zoltan Kaminski

London.
1973. August.

Lola yawned and stretched her arms, leaning back on her chair. The SDC office was about to change over for the day, which meant she would be on her way home any minute. Her bed beckoned. She could practically hear it calling out to her.

The night had been uneventful, especially by 1973’s standards. She’d filed some reports, run through some open case files with Yannick and put up with some of the usual edgy banter from Frank Holland. Everyone said he was good at his job, that he got results, but his attitude rubbed Lola the wrong way. No matter how many cases he’d closed, there was a rottenness at his core that she could feel seeping into the office whenever he was there. Like it was going to rub off on her and everyone else. He had that wandering man eye, too, always roving up and down and over her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Sometimes even when she clearly was. That leeriness she’d encountered elsewhere in the force, and during her training, but it was blessedly absent from the SDC for the most part. Except for Holland.

Fortunately for everyone, he’d gone home an hour earlier, as had Hobb. How that woman put up with him, Lola couldn’t begin to fathom.

She yawned again. “Right,” she said, mostly to herself. Standing up, she wearily pulled on her coat and hooked her satchel over her shoulder.

The door to the office swung open and Kaminski and Chakraborty arrived, waving cheerfully. Kaminski grunted a hello then disappeared immediately into Bakker’s office.

“You heading off?” Chakraborty asked, emptying her bag unceremoniously onto her desk. Lola caught a glimpse of a metal hip flask among the make-up, notepads and pens.

“Just going to nip to the loo,” she said, “then I’ll attempt to get home without collapsing in the street.”

“Long night?”

“Easy night, but that just makes it more boring and last longer.”

Waving, Lola pushed open the other door to the back corridors, then headed to the women’s wash room. She grimaced as she entered a cubicle and locked the door. Still, she’d bet the men’s was in an even worse state.

A couple of minutes later she opened the cubicle door to find Chakraborty leaning against the sink. “Hi, Lola.”

“Oh, hey.” She washed her hands as Chakraborty stood to one side. “You been there a while?”

“Just got here,” Chakraborty said, smiling.

She was being weird. “You’re being weird,” Lola said, drying her hands.

“Yeah, I don’t mean to be,” Chakraborty said. “Back to the office, then.”

Lola frowned and looked at the other woman quizzically. Sighing, assuming that her tiredness was making her misunderstand the conversation, she opened the door and walked back into the corridor towards the office. A hand gripped her shoulder.

Turning, she found Chakraborty with her other hand held up, a finger to her lips. She pointed in the other direction, away from the main office. Again, she emphasised the apparent need for silence.

What had at first seemed silly, or amusing, started to slide into something more sinister. Lola followed dutifully, as Chakraborty led her to the rear stairwell, then up to the top floor of the building. It was unused, other than by rats, and was used primarily for storage of ancient filing that wasn’t so confidential that it had to be moved to Scotland Yard. Chakraborty led her through a couple of doorways, past dusty cabinets and shelves, until they reached a pile of boxes stacked high to the ceiling. Pointing to a small gap at one side, hidden from view until Lola got close, Chakraborty shuffled around the stacked boxes and disappeared.

Wondering if she was already asleep and dreaming, Lola followed. There was another door, hidden behind the boxes, which Chakraborty now opened. She gestured for Lola to enter.

Clarke was sat on a chair in the middle of the room, arms crossed and looking unhappy. “Lola,” he said. “This is long overdue.”

Kaminski looked out of Bakker’s office through the blinds. “Fancy that coffee now, boss man?”

There was a creak as Bakker pushed himself up from his desk. “That sounds like a very good plan, detective. Nothing like some watered down SDC mud to start off the day.”

He gave a thumbs up gesture to Bakker as they left the room. As they crossed the office they made a point of discussing mundanities. “How are your parents, Zoltan?”

“Old,” he said. “Old and cranky. They don’t like me being away.”

“Funny how we look after our kids, until a certain point when they have to look after us.”

“Your kids ready to be cooking you meals, sir?”

Bakker laughed. “It’s hard enough getting them to lay and clear the table, let alone prepare the damned meal.”

A little way down the corridor they entered the tiny kitchen area and Kaminski filled and flicked on the kettle. He nodded to Bakker and they both headed for the stairwell and up to the top floor.

“OK, we should be good now,” Kaminski said. He’d scoured the entire building as best he could: there were several bugs in the main office, one in the kitchen, even a couple in each wash room. Best they could tell, they must have been installed when the lights were refitted in December. That was a long time for their conversations to have been listened to. It was just after he’d been shipped off to Max-Earth in a container - that must have been what put them on someone’s radar.

“Sneaking around in my own building,” Bakker said, grimacing. “I’m looking forward to making some progress.”

The others were already there. The five of them, up against something much larger. Lola was pacing back and forth with her hands on her hips, while Chakraborty and Clarke stood patiently on the opposite side of the room.

“Thanks for coming, Lola,” Bakker said.

“I didn’t even know I was coming until I got here.”

“We need to get more chairs for next time,” Clarke said, indicating the lone seat in the middle of the room that everyone was avoiding claiming.

“Let’s do this quickly,” Bakker said. “Lola, the first thing you need to know is that the SDC building is bugged. There’s been a covert surveillance op on us since at least December. Audio only as far as we are aware. This floor and this room is an exception.”

“What? Who’s responsible?”

“That’s what we’re working on. We think it’s connected back to DC Callihan’s death, Kaminski’s unscheduled trip to Max-Earth at the start of the year and the attack on them in Addis. Furthermore, the human trafficking operation run through the shipping company Barrindon that we uncovered last year, plus the incident that your contact Goldspeth was involved with on Palinor - both of those are linked.”

Kaminski watched Styles for her reaction. To her credit, she stayed remarkably calm.

“What? What’s this all about? And why are you telling me now?”

Bakker glanced at Clarke, who stepped forward. “We’ve wanted to bring you in for a while,” Clarke said. “But as events have shown, this is dangerous territory. I - we - didn’t want to put you in harm’s way. Once you’re in on this, there’s no getting out.”

“As for what it’s about,” Kaminski said, “we think they’re assembling a megaship on Max-Earth. But they’re doing it under the radar.”

“Quantum AI is heavily regulated there,” Chakraborty said. “Regulated by the AIs that already exist.”

Styles nodded. “So they’ve dispersed it across all three dimensions, making it harder to track.”

“Only us five are in on this,” Bakker said, “plus the AI Justin on Max-Earth. I want to keep it that way for now. Maybe we can bring others in later, but there’s a risk each time. For us and for them. This doesn’t go any higher, either. Whoever is running this op, it goes right to the top. No other way they’d be able to pull all these strings.”

“I guess that makes up my mind, then,” Styles said.

Clarke looked at her. “To do what?”

“While all of us are stuck here on Mid-Earth, we’re blind to what’s going on elsewhere,” she said, brow furrowed. “You say Justin on Max-Earth is working with us. We need someone on Palinor.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking about applying for the liaison officer post. This seems like as good a time as any.”

---

Thanks for coming by. How did you find out about Triverse? In fact, how about a poll?

Exciting Substack news today, in that they’ve added built-in serialisation navigation! This means you’ll find handy ‘previous’ and ‘next’ buttons at the bottom of the post, so once you’ve finished reading you can head over to the next chapter (well, once I’ve published it). Let me know how you get on with that.

Right, let’s get real behind the curtain…

A difficult week, I have to admit. Sometimes the on-going nature of a serial story, combined with the general uncertainty of being a creator of any kind, mixed with the completely batshit crazy stuff happening in the UK right now, makes it hard to stay motivated.

Between me and you, my lovely paid subscribers, I’m still wrestling with how to make this newsletter more financially viable. I clearly did something to convince each of you, and you have my eternal gratitude. But while we recently blasted past that 1,000 subscriber mark, precious few have converted over to being paid subscribers.

Now, this is of course fine. I make all the main content available for free for a reason. Well, several reason: I want the maximum number of people to read my stuff, I want to share knowledge freely with other writers, and I don’t want to lock people out simply because they don’t want or can’t afford to pay.

And, let’s face it, not being able to afford stuff is very 2022. And, I suspect, will be very #2023 as well.

Still, it’s a conundrum, one which a lot of fiction writers are trying to figure out. Sometimes that feels like an exciting frontier, sometimes it feels like a brick wall.

Anyway, back to this week’s chapter. This was one of those ‘moving the chess pieces’ chapters which had to happen at some point. Lola has been out of the loop for too long and it was time to bring her in. The risk, then, is that the chapter becomes a load of exposition, repeating stuff that regular readers already know.

To try to counter that I did two things:

1. The dual viewpoint. We get some Lola POV in the first half, but then when the reveal actually happens we switch to Kaminski. That denies the reader the opportunity to be in Lola’s head while she’s learning about all this, which adds a twist of uncertainty. What is she thinking? How is she going to react? That makes it more dramatic and hopefully more interesting.

2. As always, it has to be about character. Lola, we know, has been wrestling with her position - and, indeed, her entire life - for most of the year. She’s not happy, and she clearly wants to be somewhere else. At the same time, she didn’t want to abandon her colleagues, and is somewhat fearful of change. A tricky place to be. The revelations from Bakker and the others actually gives her the key: hence her decision to apply for a job on Palinor. It’s that moment which makes the chapter worthwhile (rather than doing it all ‘off-screen’), because it becomes about her big decision, which will shape much of her story arc from now onwards.

We’re nearing the end of this story chunk, and there’s some biiiig stuff coming down the pipe. Upheaval, in a word.

I read earlier that using gifs is a surefire way to mark yourself as a geriatric millennial. An Old Person.

Ah well.

*waves*