Alliances: part 2

Night on Rainham Marshes

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: London is under martial law. The Triverse is on lockdown. A team of former detectives and rebel insurgents have a plan…

London. Mid-Earth.
1980. June.

The tunnels began far outside of the city, the entrance well hidden in the reeds and pools of Rainham Marshes. Watch closely on a moonlit night and the spiked ridges of large animals could be seen drifting through the waters, emerging from the Thames only momentarily before disappearing below ground. On other continents it would be a reasonable assumption to think that crocodiles were on the hunt.

These were not crocodiles, and the underground koth resistance fighters were far too clever to be out on moonlit nights.

An average koth was well over six feet tall, and could hold their breath for several minutes at a time without any significant effort. That made an approach through the marsh and the flooded cave entrance considerably easier than it was for former detective Yannick Clarke, who was exceedingly human and getting too old for this shit.

“Are you certain there’s no other way in?” He stared at the scuba diving equipment, turning the goggles and rebreather over in his hands.

Ganhkran smirked and patted the man on the back. “We didn’t want it to be overly welcoming for humans, for obvious reasons. No offence intended.”

“I don’t blame you,” Clarke said, fixing the mask over his face, “but if I drown before we get this revolution on the road, it’s your fault.”

The bulky koth was already wading through the water towards the tall reeds. Night hung on the marshes, a concealing blanket that hid them from prying eyes. Besides, Rainham Marshes was far enough from London to be beyond the view of the city overwatch.

They’d provided Clarke with a wetsuit, one which most decidedly was not intended for his somewhat imperfect frame. By all rights he should have been down the pub, or at home watching the rugby, comfortably retired on a police pension. If he had finished the job after Callihan’s death, or even before, would he really have been able to sit back and ignore the world burning all around? Would the distraction of television and sport and beer have been enough to ease his conscience? Then again, he sometimes wondered whether he’d even had one prior to meeting Callihan and Styles. Something had changed, slowly, imperceptibly, rewiring his brain. He saw the world differently than before.

They always said that you become more fixed in your ways, more rigid in your thinking, as you get older. More reactionary, more conservative, more fearful and suspicious of change. Clarke had absolutely been on that path, until being derailed by two young upstarts with their meddling optimism. Callihan had died for it; Styles came about as close as she could have. If anything, their predilection for hope had been repeatedly shown to be foolish and naive.

And yet.

He fixed the breather into his mouth and took a couple of test breaths, then showed a thumbs-up sign to Ganhkran. Clarke was led through the reeds, which stretched well above his head, the water of the marshes freezing. He ground his teeth and tried not to think about leeches and ticks and Lyme’s disease. He didn’t even know if any of those things were found in Rainham Marshes, and didn’t want to know. In one hand he carried a hopefully waterproof case, containing among other items a change of clothes.

The soft ground dropped away and then he was swimming, following the flicking tail of a koth as it sliced through the water just ahead. There had been a time, not all that long ago, when this exact scenario could only have played out in a nightmare. He kept his breath steady as his head dipped below the waterline, and flicked on his mask’s head torch. The water was thick with life, a soup of drifting plants and skittering, tiny things that might have been fish or insects. He tried not to think about any of them getting inside his wetsuit. A dark hole loomed ahead, and he followed Ganhkran into the tunnel.

There was some solace in the knowledge that, one way or another, he was unlikely to be coming back this way.

After what might have been twenty metres but felt like a mile, the tunnel began sloping upwards and he found himself crawling on all fours out of the water. He remained on his knees for a few seconds, still on the breather, then removed the unit from his mouth and pulled off the goggles.

“You did well, detective,” Ganhkran said, offering a hand to help him up.

“Not my natural habitat,” said Clarke, wiping water from his eyes.

“Your loss,” the koth said. “On Palinor we make our nests in the sides of mountains or the depths of canyons. The Appilan Abyss has both. Endless networks of tunnels, dug over hundreds of years. Thousands, in some of the oldest colonies.” They sighed wistfully. “Some of us think we should have stayed in those tunnels and never ventured down to the aen’fa and human settlements.”

Clarke started trying to extricate himself from the ill-fitting wetsuit, which suddenly felt very tight. “And you?”

“I’m an economist, Clarke. And a pragmatist. My world is numbers and logic and prediction. Or, it was.” They flexed their wings, the red feathers shuddering in the gloom, shaking droplets to the ground. “Times change. Society moves on. We keep some things, discard others. Nothing stands still.”

Nodding, Clarke grunted. “Taken me a while to notice, but I think you’ve got a point.” He unzipped the waterproof bag and pulled out his dry clothes, then starting changing into them. “So now what?”

The tunnel forked repeatedly until Clarke was entirely lost, but Ganhkran seemed confident. Clarke couldn’t imagine a human stumbling upon the entrance being able to find their way through the maze. He wondered if the koth tunnels on Ceres were like this; spider-webbing through the asteroid. They walked for miles in the dark, Clarke relying on his torch while Ganhkran seemed generally unhindered.

The network of passageways eventually led them to a ladder. Above was a metal hatch, wide enough to accommodate a koth.

“You’re the first human to be shown the way,” Ganhkran said. “You might get some odd looks.”

“Nothing I’m not used to.”

“We’re in the heart of the koth zone,” the koth explained. “This is how we get in and out unseen.”

“Why not just get everyone out through the tunnels?”

“It would be noticed,” Ganhkran said, making Clarke feel stupid for asking. “We sometimes extract the ill or wounded, but even that is a risk.” They fell silent for a moment. “Many sacrifices have been made.”

Rubbing the bridge of his nose, Clarke nodded and set his jaw. “Then let’s make sure they meant something.”

Vahko laughed, the noise reverberating through the house. “We are all former this or that, are we not, detective?”

“All change,” Clarke said, sipping at his tea. He welcomed the warmth after the swim and the walk in the dark.

“All change, as you say, yes,” Vahko said, leaning forward in their seat. “You, the former detective. Me, the former ambassador.” They waved at the other koth gathered in the room. “All of us, nurses, or accountants, or farmers, or teachers. They say life is change, don’t they? I have to admit to not realising they meant it quite so literally.”

They were somewhere in the walled-off part of London where koth had been rounded up. Outside, Clarke’s presence would draw the attention of the guards. Inside the safe house, with its hidden tunnel connection, they could talk freely. It was Vahko’s base, from where he organised the supposed resistance.

“So, Detective Clarke,” Vahko said, their voice sounding even deeper than he remembered, “what do you bring me? Good news, in these desperate times, perhaps?”

“That’s the plan,” Clarke said, tapping his tea cup with one finger. “We have a date. A synchronised series of events across the triverse. It’s a risky thing, but we think it might work. But only if it all happens at once.”

Vahko smiled, but it was one of regret. “All of us coming together for the common good, yes? It seems a little late in the day. But tell me of your plans. And of your friends. Let us plot, and scheme, and see if we can create some mischief. It is, after all, long overdue.”

Photo by the Essex Birdwatching Society

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Meanwhile.

I didn’t publish a chapter last week, which felt very odd. I was on holiday, which was the practical reason, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to give my brain a slight breather. We are, after all, about to dive into the non-stop madness that is the Triverse finale.

Anyway, I’m back. Woo. Also, as tends to be the case, the break has resulted in lots of good ideas bubbling to the surface, which I can now work into what comes next.

Before doing anything else, watch this:

Staggeringly accomplished animation from the 1950s, with several shots that have a solidity to them that I would normally assume were 3D rendered by a computer.

Also this:

I had a very lovely coffee at Bread Source in Norwich this week, but couldn’t quite work out the foam pattern:

The replies are worth reading, trust me. Just avoid

Brad Guigar

— you know what his brain is like.

Author notes

The ‘Alliances’ storyline that we’re in is three chapters long. There’s one more to come (that’s maths for you). We’re in Nazi-occupied France here, really. Our protagonists are moving things into place, are for the first time driving their own agenda, but it could all collapse with a single, tiny mistake.

I’d love to be a pacifist, and Triverse is, in some ways, about learning that sometimes you do have to fight. That the world is imperfect and that passivity isn’t always the solution.

As Geralt learns in The Witcher, trying to stay neutral is a statement in itself.

My previous epic novel, The Mechanical Crown, was about prisoners and princesses and explorers and kings and witches. They were people born to be heroes and villains, all too happy to embrace their destiny.

Tales from the Triverse was deliberately set up to feature a reluctant cast. None of our leads want to be heroes, or even to be a big deal. They just wanted to get on with doing their own thing, living their lives. The trick in the last season-or-two has been transitioning them into a place where they can realistically take a stand. They’re not superheroes or action heroes, so the key is to never tip into that territory in which they handle everything as if they’ve always been doing it.

It is, I think, a more realistic and more important examination of character. Nobody wants or expects war (except perhaps the crazed demagogues at the top), but it’s thrust upon us sometimes whether we like it or not. And then we have to make our individual decisions about what to do.

I’m not sure how foregrounded this would have been in the original treatment for Triverse. A lot of this has surfaced as a direct response to the real world around me; as I’ve noted before, writing fiction is my way of processing and dealing with the world. It’s my attempt to understand what’s going on, but also to put something back into the world that might be a more positive force.

It goes mostly unstated in this chapter, but it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what Clarke is doing, and the company he is keeping. He’s come a long way since the events of ‘The Koth’, back in 2021.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.