Rendition: Part 1

The clue is in the name

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

Previously: The Specialist Dimensional Command was set up to investigate portal-related crimes. They also get assigned all the weird stuff that the regular police doesn’t want to deal with. Detective Constable Frank Holland isn’t a nice man but he is good at his job.

Early shift
On duty: DC Frank Holland (DC Marion Hobb absent)

London.
1973. August.

The cases wouldn’t go away. No matter how hard Frank Holland tried to file it or hide it in a drawer, it kept on rearing its head. Missing persons, spread over the last two years, initially with no apparent link. They were considered as separate incidents, only registering on the SDC radar when the victims were of Palinese or Max-Earth origin. That was until Holland had been contacted by the mother of one of the more recent victims.

It was an aen’fa family, with all the usual cultural trappings that he despised. Religious quotations printed and framed on the wall, paintings of their homelands, a thick veil of incense drifting through the house at eye level, mud-like coffee and terrible biscuits, all wrapped up in a warped bohemian laissez-faire attitude. He’d shared a flat in his twenties with a human friend who had become increasingly obsessed with aen’fa customs and it had soured him on the experience forever. Styles was heading that way, always one eye on the other side of the portal rather than concentrating on where she was. Be a shame: she was a good detective to have in the department, even if she lacked experience.

Holland and Hobb had gone to the family’s home to talk to the mother. She’d alternated between distraught and angry, upset by the disappearance of her son and furious about what she thought had happened. Her skin was a dark blue and a little iridescent, one of the many shades of the aen’fa and a personal favourite of Holland. He liked to think of himself as a connoisseur of sorts.

“He was a good boy,” she said, like they always did, “never did anything wrong. Did his studies, worked whatever job he had. Avoided trouble. None of the gangs. Didn’t fall in with any of the New Palinor lot. He just did his own thing. Then they took him.”

Holland had smiled. He had a practised smile which he rolled out when needed; it was real enough to fool anyone who didn’t know him, which meant it was good enough for a victim’s relations. “Who do you think took him?”

“Government! Government men! Showed up in a van, bundled him in, drove him away. He was on his way home from work. Poor Hikkaido. He’s not the only one, you know. This has been happening for years.”

He’d thrown a glance at Hobb, who didn’t even try to hide her disdain. “How do you know this? Did you see it happen?”

“No, no of course not, I was at work,” the mother said, “but we’re a close community here. We look out for each other. See everything going on in the neighbourhood. And I was told: they came for Hikkaido, tied him up, drove off.”

After, outside the house, Hobb had laughed. “You see now why I need to get out of here? This department is driving me crazy. It was only ever supposed to be a stepping stone.”

“Good job you’ve got a spot in front of the promotion board, then, eh?” He liked her, she made for a good partner, but she underestimated the SDC. The department got the detritus, sure. Everything the Met didn’t want got shunted to them. All the weird cases, the unexplained nonsense. Anything politically awkward involving foreigners. None of that stopped Holland from taking it seriously, though. They were protecting the gates. He was keeping things from falling apart. It wouldn’t take much to tip the Triverse into utter chaos.

Hikkaido. The name of the missing boy sounded familiar but he couldn’t quite place it.

Clarke smacked the newspaper with the back of his hand. “Look at these arseholes. You read about this?” He straightened the paper and held it up so Styles could see.

The cafe was bustling, some punters sat at tables like them and a steady stream of office workers and commuters filing through to grab tea or coffee on their way through town. She took the paper and frowned as she read it.

“Bad enough that they’re running on an anti-everything ticket,” Clarke continued, “but look who they’ve wheeled out.”

“Oh, no,” Styles said. “This is terrible!”

“Yeah.” He took the paper back and looked again at the full page advertisement. A political ad masquerading as editorial, the headline The monsters at the door was accompanied by an image of a long queue of koth lining up to go through a portal. The line snaked and curved around the page and the words, as if stretching off into the far distance. Worse was the dual photographs of a young girl, presented in a ‘before and after’ style. It was Yvette Field, the abuse victim from the case back in April - who was still convalescing in the hybrid techno-mage hospital in Bruglia.

“There’s no way Yvette would have agreed to this,” Styles said. “And it’s blatant lies - no koth was involved in her attack. We proved it.”

“Sometimes,” Clarke said, “you have to wonder why we bother doing this job. Some people just don’t like facts.”

“It’s worrying,” Lola said. “Also, dragging her into this is doing the opposite of what they’re saying. They’re the ones harming her, by sticking her face back in the papers. This photo is old, too. She’s much more healed now.”

Clarke grunted. “Showing that Palinese and Earth doctors working together can get good results probably isn’t the message they want to send.” He stared at the paper, as if he could will it out of existence. “Earth First. That’s what they’re calling themselves.”

“Not Mid-Earth?”

“Just Earth. The one true Earth, and all that.” He sighed. “Worst of it is that I’d probably have swallowed it whole not too long ago.”

“I don’t know about that,” Styles said, smiling sympathetically. “But what do you think changed?”

He sipped from his tea. A proper cuppa, not the weak Thames water in the office. “I had to work with John Callihan, that’s what. He was a pain in my arse. Too good for this world.” He pointed at her. “Then I met you. You’re just as bad.”

“Glad to have been of service.”

He set the mug down on the table. “So you’re really going, then.”

“I think so, if I pass the interview.”

“You’ll pass,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “You’re precisely what they’re looking for.”

And then he’d be on his own again.

Holland leaned back with his feet up on the desk. A stack of case folders were open next to him, as he flicked through them one by one. Each a missing persons case, each still open and unsolved. A Max-Earth lawyer. A koth who had been involved with some sort of tribal rebellion before they came through the portal and set up shop in London. A Mid-Earth human with ties to the Subcontinent Freedom movement. All separate cases, but all linked by a common thread of being troublemakers. They were probably taken out by their own people.

“Hikkaido, Hikkaido,” he said out loud, “where do you fit into this?” Perhaps the aen’fa didn’t fit; it could be that he left home to get away from his family, or to hook up with a girl. He was extremely ordinary and didn’t match the pattern. Hobb was busy talking to an interview panel, which meant he didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off.

“What’s he done now?” Robin’s voice piped up from across the office.

Putting the files back on the desk, Holland swung his feet to the floor and stood up. “What was that, Robin?” He walked across the room towards her, grabbing Hikkaido’s case file.

“Oh, nothing, Frank,” she said, “I thought I heard you talking about that terrorist from Palinor. You know, Hikkaido. A couple years back he threatened to blow up the portal station.”

That’s why the name sounded familiar. “Look like this guy?” He showed Robin the photograph.

She shook her head. “Nah, this is someone else. The real Hikkaido was old.” She shrugged. “Missing, huh? Maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity.”

It seemed that someone was taking out the bad guys, and it wasn’t the SDC or the Met. There was something going on, and the Hikkaido kid had got caught up in it.

Time to talk to Miller. Take it up the pay scale.

Generated by MidJourney

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Thanks for reading. :) It’s not often we get a Frank Holland chapter, so there we go. This storyline has been burbling in my head for a while and I’m pleased to have finally got to it. Lots of background subplots running here, too. Let’s get into it…

Author notes

OK, so the name of this storyline rather reveals what’s going on. That’s always an interesting consideration: how much is supposed to be a ‘mystery’ and how much to divulge up front? In this case, I don’t think Holland’s realisation (next chapter) about what’s going on needs to be in sync with the reader’s. Thus calling the chapter ‘Rendition’ is likely to prompt specific thoughts for a lot of readers, and generally uncomfortable and unpleasant memories from the 2000s-era War on Terror.

The most interesting science fiction and fantasy is the stuff that is actually about the real world, with the genre trappings there to provide alternate context. By shifting the context to something fantastical, stories are able to illuminate real world issues. Not solve them, of course, but raise questions.

Reading up on extraordinary rendition in preparation for this chapter, the startling thing is how unresolved it is. The court cases relating to it were dropped or shut down in various ways - sometimes for that old convenient classic ‘national security reasons’ - and it’s never really been properly addressed as a moment in history. Some countries put out decent statements declaring they wouldn’t be involved, while others (hi, UK) were very wishy-washy about the whole thing.

Meanwhile. Yes, there’s a VERY overt Babylon 5 reference this week, with the reference to the hospital as being a techno-mage hospital. Not the same thing as the technomages in B5, but it was too tempting not to use. Originally I wrote ‘tech-magic hybrid’, before realising that ‘techno-mage’ is better in every way.

ALSO THIS WEEK:

I’ve talked about my fuzzy approach to plotting in my serialised fiction guide, whereby I have certain key moments planned out way ahead of time but everything in-between remains up for grabs. A consequence of this is that I occasionally need to take a pause, step back and assess the landscape. This week was one of those.

Triverse has a very unusual structure compared to my previous books. It’s designed to be more episodic, with lots of self-contained stories strung together. There’s a longer plot moving in the background - and occasionally the foreground - but it’s a very different writing experience. Rather than every chapter moving the primary plot forward, instead chapters are primarily advancing the episodic plot. Each episode averages out at perhaps 5 chapters, and then a new storyline begins.

As such, my focus is often on those episodes, and the mini-arcs within. Weaving the longer arc through the episodes has proven to be more complicated (and interesting) than I expected. The risk is to keep pumping out fun episodes, without advancing the main plot sufficiently. Hence taking this week to re-assess and check where I am. Fortunately, I’m not lost in the woods.

What it does mean is that the rest of this ‘season’ and the following two have now come into sharper focus. I know where I’m headed, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. Nothing is incidental, so do keep an eye out for those background plots and themes which might come to the surface down the line.

Right, that’s it for today. Thanks for reading, and for being an amazing paid subscriber!