Ascent: part 2

Eyes in the sky

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. Tensions are rising across the capital as protests continue to spread. Kaminski and Chakraborty have arrived at the Joint Council tower, but the plan has already gone sideways…

London. Mid-Earth.
1980. July.

The first thing Golding learned about combat was that it was never like the movies, with long, drawn-out back-and-forth, repeated punches to the face and gut and groin, each participant getting back up over and over and carrying on. Fights were over fast, usually with the first punch or shot. Human bodies were soft and easily punctured, crushed and torn. Sometimes he marvelled that most people made it through the day.

Former Commissioner Graves hadn’t even hit the floor. Golding covered the distance to Scarra in three lunging steps, knowing that surprise was his only advantage and it wouldn’t last beyond the first move. Scarra didn’t expect someone to come at him from his own side, which made disarming him a quick and simple affair: the rifle was out of his hands and skittering across the foyer’s marble floor, his right wrist at an awkward angle. Golding could have pulled out his own weapon and taken out the entire squad before they’d known what was happening, but they were still his people. Still cops. If he could do it clean, that’s how he’d do it.

Then again, that attitude was likely to get him killed.

Scarra was already reacting, reaching for his side-arm with his remaining good hand. Golding blocked that arm, preventing the pistol from being lifted from its holster. He spun Scarra and pinned the arm behind his back. Pensthorpe and Jones were on the move, but were unsure of how to proceed. Jones’ rifle was raising, but dithered between Golding and Scarra and the new arrivals who were diving for cover.

“Stand down,” Golding ordered, not expecting them to obey. He’d known for years that there was no loyalty there; they allowed him to lead the squad because he was tactically the most experienced, but their allegiances were to Prime Minister Maxwell. Golding had felt like an inconvenient necessity in the SDC for some time.

“Shoot him!” Scarra shouted.

Pensthorpe’s barrel was lifting, but Golding got there first. He fired a shot from Scarra’s pistol into the woman’s shoulder and she staggered backwards, then dropped to the floor. Jones looked scared and didn’t have a clear shot at Golding, but looked ready to risk it anyway. Golding fired again, and Jones dropped.

He pushed Scarra away, then brought the pistol down on his head.

A quiet settled into the foyer, save for the scuffled noises of the others still trying to find cover. It had all taken less than ten seconds. In the moment, Pensthorpe, Scarra and Jones had hesitated. In their job, waiting got you killed.

He clicked his radio. “All clear. Golding out.”

The tinny response echoed in the foyer. “We heard gunshot. Do you need assistance?”

“Under control. Remain at your posts.”

Golding moved the dropped weapons away from his fallen colleagues, then crouched next to Jones. His shot had gone wide, hitting Jones in the chest rather than the shoulder as intended. The kid was bleeding out and would be dead within a minute.

His breath ragged, he spluttered and coughed and reached up with one hand. Golding took it. Jones’ expression was flat, not angry or sad or any other discernible emotion. “Never mind,” he said.

Taking a breath, Golding waved to Ford, Kaminski and Chakraborty. “We need to move these bodies before anyone comes for a closer look.” Walpole was kneeling next to Graves’ body, shaking his head. Pensthorpe was groaning in pain and writhing where she lay. He lifted her under her arms and dragged her towards a concealed cleaning cupboard next to the bank of lifts at the back of the foyer.

“Thank you,” Walpole said, sweating with exertion as he and Kaminski carried Graves away from the entrance.

“Don’t thank me,” Golding said, “just tell me it was the right thing to do.”

“Can I let you know tomorrow?”

The Joint Council elevators were spacious, which was fortunate. Golding was at the front, then Walpole and Ford. When the doors opened, anyone on the other side would see three people that had legitimate reason to be in the building. Kaminski and Chakraborty hung back.

“I’ll deal with any resistance,” Golding said. “I don’t think we’ll have a problem, not at first, at least. No alarms have been sounded. Nobody knows you’re here. I’ll get you to the security office.”

Nisha felt the absence of Commissioner Graves. She’d only been in the same room as him a handful of times when she’d been in the SDC, but his presence had always been felt. That they’d avoided scrutiny and interference for as long as they had was down to his efforts, shielding them from politicians who wanted to turn them into a talking point, or corners of the Met leadership who saw them as backdoor access to increased militarisation. Graves had kept them in that shithole of an office on Stamford and Coin and they’d got on with being detectives. He wasn’t even the Met Commissioner any more, and she hadn’t been in the force for five years, but losing him still felt like they’d lost a critical ally. It left them all exposed, without his invisible support.

“You know the codes, guv?” Kaminski was nervous, full of tics and twitches. He’d directed his question at DCS Walpole.

“As long as they haven’t been changed in the last two months. I should be able to get us into the system. Can’t promise I’ll understand what I’m looking at, mind.”

Kaminski nodded, as if trying to convince himself. “We’ll figure it out.”

The numbers counted up, as they neared the upper floors.

“It’s not just overwatch,” Chakraborty said to the room. “We need evidence. Anything we can get our hands on. I want to nail all of these sons of bitches. Nobody’s going to weasel out of this on a technicality.”

“I’m not sure Clarke and Vahko are entirely on board with the fair trial approach,” said Kaminski, that lopsided smile of his that teetered between amusement and pessimism.

“Even if we pull this off,” she said, “even if everything goes to plan, what happens tomorrow? The day after that? We need evidence. We need to make it stick to them like shit. Maxwell, Hutchinson, that lecturer guy on Palinor. Everyone working for them. For that we need information.”

Ford harrumphed. “Joint Council’s been complicit in this shitshow for years. There’ll be records. We just have to find them. Once we’re into the security station, we can split up. Me and you can go hunting for clues.”

This was it. Chakraborty wasn’t religious, and didn’t believe in much of anything, to her parents’ evident disappointment. But she liked the thought of John Callihan being out there somewhere, looking down, giving them a thumbs up. It had been his case, after all. He’d died for it.

“Here we go,” Golding said, and the lift doors slid open.

There was nobody in the hallway. They moved out, following Golding, walking at an enforced casual pace. Through frosted glass Chakraborty could see people working in offices, but nobody was paying attention to their arrival.

Golding’s pass got them through a series of security doors, then they were stood outside a room with Security emblazoned on its door. “Wait here,” he said, then disappeared inside. There was the sound of raised voices, a few seconds of silence, and then the door opened again. “Get inside,” Golding ordered.

There were two men standing against the back wall of the security office, arms raised above their heads. Opposite them was a bank of monitors, showing scenes from around the city. Below them was a console covered in buttons and joysticks and dials.

“These two good fellows,” Golding said, indicating towards the men, “have agreed to step aside.”

Walpole approached the console. “Good decision, boys,” he said. “The way this is going to go, you made the right choice.” He started tapping an access code into a keyboard.

Holding up rope they’d retrieved from the cleaning cupboard, Ford approached the men apologetically. “We’re still going to have to tie you up,” he said with a shrug.

“Probably better for us,” one of them said. “Makes it look like we had no choice.”

“Whatever floats your boat.”

Walpole stood straight. “I think I’m in. Anyone know how this works?”

“I do,” Golding said, grabbing a seat and swivelling into place. He paused, then looked up at the rest of them. “What is it you want to actually do?”

Kaminski stood in front of the monitors, bathed in their blue-grey glow. “Shut down anything that’s helping slow down the protest. Guard towers. Monitoring stations. Retract any barricades that have been activated. And anything designed to bring down koth. The air turrets, or whatever they’re called.”

“AK turrets.”

“Right. Shut it all down. Get them a clear route to Westminster.”

Golding was tapping away, and clicking buttons on and off. “There’s still going to be hundreds of police on the streets.”

Walpole moved to another console, which was equipped with a radio and microphone. “Maybe I can do something about that. Is this thing on?” He picked up the handset. “Can you connect me to the squad leaders’ frequencies?”

A restlessness was pulling at Chakraborty, as she stood in the security room with little to do. The others had it covered, and it was time for her to go to work. “I need to get to the top floor. The ambassadorial offices. Anywhere Matheson would have used. Hutchinson’s office is up there somewhere; I remember Holland talking about going there.”

One of the security officers sat up straighter, arms tied behind his back. “Lord Hutchinson? He’ll still be up there.”

“Shut up, Ian,” the other man said. “You don’t have to tell them everything.”

“But I thought we were helping them?”

The man rolled his eyes. “We’re not getting in their way. That’s different.”

From across the room, Ford stared at Chakraborty. There was a flash, a glimmer of something primal in his eyes. She knew it was there in her expression as well. The electric response of hunters sensing their prey.

---

Meanwhile.

I thought up a joke this week.

I’ve never thought up a joke before (can you tell?). It’s not very good, but it’s mine. My own. I’m a little bit proud.

Right, time for a bunch of links and interesting bits and bobs:

A thing about writing

Elsewhere on Notes, there’s been some chatter about how it’s important for writers to also be readers. This shouldn’t be a controversial notion, but it all got a bit out of hand and went down a weird rabbit hole of requiring people read a minimum number of books if they want to be a serious writer.

I might write some more about this in the Monday slot, but here are my general thoughts:

TL;DR — read widely, read well. I think we all agree with that one, right?

A thing about tech

Unrelated, I think it was

John Ward

who brought

ObsoleteSony

to my attention. Being born in 1980, this stuff is absolute nostalgia gold:

Talking of rabbit holes, I also ended up going down one after seeing that Sony computer image, delving into the games history of the Acorn Archimedes computer I had in the late-80s/early-90s. There’s a big list of released games for the platform here. More games are released every day on Steam in 2025 than were ever published for Acorn computers.

A thing about AI slop & misinformation

I read this a while back but I don’t think I shared it. It popped up again this week for some reason, and it’s still good:

Scamming Substack?

Related, Corridor Digital have been doing a series of videos on spotting AI content. It’s a curious move, as they’ve been knee-deep in AI content creation themselves. Regardless of what you think of that, it adds an interesting wrinkle to a topic that is often only covered by explicitly anti-AI folk:

Mind you, I do wish they hadn’t gendered the video quite so overtly.

A thing about publishing

This was good:

Author notes

Here’s a thing with ensemble casts: it can sometimes be difficult to find them things to do. Inevitably some characters come into the foreground and others recede, and that process is ongoing throughout the novel. The hope is that the ensemble builds up to something greater than its individual parts, and feels balanced overall. Characters should end up feeling more rounded and detailed than they perhaps are, based on actual page count.

In rewatching Babylon 5 for the first time in well over a decade, I’ve been surprised by how little screen time some characters receive. I remember Kosh being a major presence, but they are barely in it. Same with Lyta, or Talia. Even supposed lead characters like Ivanova and Garibaldi get sidelined for long periods. G’Kar and Londo disappear from the story for multiple episodes at a time.

Watching it back in the 90s, it didn’t feel like that. It came across as a busy universe full of deep characters. In my mind, every character was in every episode! That’s how I remember it. There’s a sleight of hand at work.

Back to Triverse. Much like ongoing network TV, Triverse is a ‘live’ serial. I’m writing and publishing as I go, before I have a finished manuscript, just as television creators have episodes on the air before having finished production on the season (let alone the entire series!). I don’t get to create the perfect edit on my fifth rewrite.

Removing Frank Holland from the story a while back made sense for his character, but it was also a practical consideration: I didn’t want too many characters running around the finale, especially if they’d already had their personal big moment. Holland being recruited into the conspiracy and then choosing to side with Clarke and the others is his big finale. His hero story climaxed at that point. That’s why he’s exited the main story.

Chakraborty is a character I wish I’d done more with. She had a strong start, and we’ve had some effective Chakraborty-led storylines. But I slightly regret having her recovery from alcoholism happen off-screen (even if it made sense for the overall story). That was her major struggle, and we didn’t get to see it. Which then led to me finding it hard to crack what her role should be in the finale.

It was actually bloody obvious, it just took me a while to see it. Waaay back at the start of the series (in 2021!), it was established that Chakraborty was having an affair with John Callihan, before he was murdered in the opening chapters of the serial. Given that he had a fiancee, this has remained a point of pain for her, enable to openly grieve or talk about her feelings. It’s an open secret at the SDC, but goes unsaid. At the same time, her relationship with Kaminski has blossomed, despite her self-destructive tendencies. She’s come through the dopur poisoning. It’s been a hard time. It feels like she’s overcome most of the darkness in her life already.

But it’s that link to Callihan which is the key. Of course. That’s her motivation, and always has been. She probably loved him, and he was murdered, and she’s been seeking revenge ever since. Or to avenge, at least. She might not have known that for a long while, given that the truth behind Callihan’s death didn’t come out until later in the story. Right now, though, as our former detectives and rebels put their plan into action, I had that big question: why is Chakraborty still here? Why didn’t she sit this one out, like Holland?

The answer is Callihan. She owes him, still. And she owes herself some closure. This awful thing happened, what, seven, eight years ago. It’s defined all of their lives. It’s less obvious with her, but her struggle with alcoholism and depression was massively exacerbated by his death.

That’s what I’ve been wrestling with the last few weeks. I’m not sure why it took me so long: perhaps I’m reaching the outer limits of what my brain can handle in serial form? I’m coming up on 4 years writing this thing.

Nearly there.