Biological weapons: part 1

A new story and a good jumping-on point for new readers!

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 handle portal-related crimes. Recently relocated to fancy new offices, the detectives are still getting used to their new digs…

Early shift
On duty: DC Frank Holland & DC Yannick Clarke

London.
1974. March.

Clarke ran his hand over the curved roof of the vehicle. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, marvelling at the squad car’s low profile and apparent lack of panels, screw, soldering or any of the other tell-tale signs that something had been made on Mid-Earth.

“It’s a hybrid,” DS Collins said, standing with hands on hips and nodding sagely. “Part-Mid-Earth engineering, part-Max-Earth tech. The chassis was manufactured on Max-Earth, but the engine was put together here. Max-Earth batteries not doing too well over here.”

“Looks like a bastard,” Holland declared, slamming the bonnet shut. He pointed at it. “Have you seen the state of this fucking engine? Might have been built here, but it’s a fucking black box. That breaks down when you’re out on a call and you’re not going to be able to fix it with a screwdriver and a hammer.”

Clarke grunted. “When was the last time you fixed a car engine?”

Holland pointed accusingly at him. “That’s not the point, Yannick, and you know it. Point is, if a steam valve pops or gets clogged up, or a piston comes off its bracket, there’s a chance you might be able to cobble it back together long enough to get where you’re going.” He placed a fingertip on the car. “This bag of tricks, though, no way. Probably needs a Max-Earth technician to plug into it.”

“Anyway,” Collins said pointedly, “we’re the first in the Met to get these, and we’ve got two of them. So don’t go moaning about it to anyone else. First in the country, I should say.”

“Another perk of the Commissioner getting all cosy with the Joint Council,” Holland said. “Fuck me. The more we rely on technology like this, the less control we have over what we’re doing. Which is exactly how they want us. Sucking maximum Max-Earth cock.”

Clarke sighed. “Nice.” He leaned in one of the open windows. “It does have cup holders, though.”

“What?” Holland hurried round to see for himself. “You should have said so. I’ve changed my mind. It’s great. Let’s get more.”

“I wonder if cup holders were what separated our two dimensions?” Collins said, immediately looking like he regretted vocalising his thoughts.

Holland threw him a disparaging look. “Really? Portals opening up are what separated our dimensions. And the only reason we don’t have cup holders is because we’re not living in a fucking tech-dystopia with everyone obeying robot overlords and pretending it’s a luxurious endgame.” He pointed towards the engine. “I tell you, if Max-Earth power cores did work here, then we’d really be in trouble. Because it wouldn’t just be fancy cars, but their robots would be here too. And you can bet the Kingdom of Great Britain wouldn’t still be a thing in 1974.” He took a deep breath. “Just like it isn’t a thing in their reality.”

“Well, actually,” Collins said, blinking rapidly, “I don’t think the Kingdom existed even if you go back to their version of the 1970s.”

Quietly observing the debate, Clarke chose to stay well clear. Holland had never had much respect for Collins, despite the DS supposedly having authority in the office. Chain of command wasn’t a concept that had ever really occurred to Holland, as far as Clarke could tell.

The garage led off to the small armoury where Sergeant Golding and his gang kept their kit. A staircase went up to the main office, which is where Clarke found himself spending most of his time - at least, when he wasn’t able to find an excuse to venture into the city. There was no shortage of cases, though they were all trivial and barely worth the paper their reports were written on.

The SDC had even been called in to help with ‘negotiations’ on a dock workers’ dispute at the portal station, much to DI Ford’s chagrin. Clarke had seen the man grinding his teeth while having to listen to Miller explain why it was a good public relations move. Ford’s family had a long history in the mines, so he understood what industrial action really meant. Miller saw it as a way to ingratiate themselves to the companies waiting to get their goods through the portals. Golding and his squad had been sent to the station fully armed. Nothing happened, but it was ugly enough.

That was one of the problems with being based in the Joint Council tower, which itself was symbolically perched atop the portal station. Any problem at the station and the SDC was the closest solution. Clarke was starting to feel like he was working private security, rather than being a police detective.

Regardless, he’d keep his head down, keep doing his job. Kaminski had indicated that he and Bakker had a solution to their lack of meeting place. Not that they were making any progress on that particular investigation. Hunches on guesses on gut feeling was all they got.

Mid-morning on a Tuesday was always busy at the London portal station. It was never as bustling or hectic as a train station or airship dock, but there was nevertheless a steady stream of dignitaries, professionals and the super-rich, moving through the hub of the triverse. Some were on their way from Palinor to London or beyond; others were coming from Max-Earth to offices in the city, or vice versa. Those making the journey to Max-Earth might travel further, up the space elevator and take a ride to one of the colony worlds.

It was the province of the rich and privileged. In the early days of the portals opening there had been a freer flow of bodies back and forth, until it was realised that there were too many pernicious diseases unique to each dimension. The two-level portal station was built, the lower half for trade and the upper for people. Regulations were tightened, paperwork made more complicated and expensive, and portal travel became an exclusive luxury. After all, a train station could be built anywhere: portals were in limited supply.

The two black portals faced each other across the long concourse, still in their original positions from their formation two hundred years prior, separated only by the apparatus of state: customs checks, a security office, passport control. Checks and balances woefully inadequate to the unnatural rifts in space.

Vietr was a human born in a small town in eastern Palinor, nestled in the mountains. At a young age it became apparent that his aptitude for wielding any form of magic was nil; other children his age joked that he might as well be an aen’fa, such was his inadequacy. Even the most unskilled Palinor-born humans could conjure up an artificial light, went the argument. But not Vietr. Unable to progress or make his way in the world, his parents sold him to the region’s warlord, ruler of an expansionist city state. He worked in servitude for ten years alongside aen’fa and other rejects unable to find independence in a magic-dominated economy.

When Vietr was sixteen there was a raid on the city’s fortress by insurgents, protesting against the treatment of aen’fa and koth. Seeing a way out, he fell in with them, drawn to their claims of a new way of living and of a change of the established social hierarchy. Of the many cells active around Palinor, this one was of the more violent variety, using ever more extreme tactics to raise the profile of their cause.

One day, it became Vietr’s turn to bear the cause’s burden. They gave him the words and the means. He was to memorise the former and execute the latter on arrival. He didn’t understand the precise series of events and manipulations required to get him passage through the Bruglia portal to Mid-Earth, but understanding was not required. He had his statement and carried with him all that he needed inside a brown trunk. His papers were deemed to be in order and the Bruglia portal staff waved him onto the moving walkway.

He slid through the portal and found himself in another universe. It smelled different. The air tingled on his skin. The ceiling of the London portal station towered above. Vietr walked the concourse towards the portal at the far end: the Max-Earth portal. He’d heard stories of that place, of many godless worlds and the boats that flew between the stars.

His instructions were followed to the letter. As he approached the moving walkway that shuffled travellers into and through the Max-Earth portal, Vietr unclasped the trunk and opened the lid. There was a hiss of released air. Inside the trunk were two smaller containers. He lifted one out and placed it on the moving walkway, where it began to make its way slowly towards the portal, and placed the other at his feet. The other travellers, occupied by their own stresses and concerns, paid him and the containers no heed.

The containers were on a short timer, designed to unlock shortly after the first passed through the Max-Earth portal. Vietr cleared his throat. “Freedom from servitude!” he shouted, drawing concerned looks from travellers and security staff. “Palinor is a slave world! You are allied with slavers! You live in luxury while we work until we die. I bring a message that a change is here. The true citizens of Palinor are rising up. The city states will fall, one-by-one! The structures you rely on, the scaffolds of injustice, will be torn down. I am a herald of more to come!”

A security officer put his hand on Vietr’s shoulder. “Alright, son,” he said, his grip powerful and his voice low, “come with us, let’s not cause any more of a fuss. We don’t want a scene.”

Vietr turned to look at him. “You’re too late.”

The container at his feet emitted a series of clicks and its sides fell away. It wasn’t a bomb, as Vietr had expected, or a targeted spell. It was far worse. At his feet were three pale, gelatinous larvae, each about the size of his forearm, surrounded by the cracked shells of eggs.

“What the fuck?” was all the security officer was able to say before one of the larvae curled up and launched itself at his face, burrowing in deep.

Vietr turned and ran.

---

Thanks for reading!

It’s been a very busy week, in and out of work, which is why this story is coming in a little late and very hot.

If you’re a new reader and are wondering what these larvae creatures are, you could check out this epic romp of a story that I published over a year ago:

The creature: Part 1

Being able to do long-term call backs to earlier story points is exceedingly satisfying.

Author notes

I’ve been paywalling these notes. I thought today I’d try making them available to all. That also has the side effect of opening up the comments area for everyone. In my ongoing experiments with Substack and publishing online I’ve tweaked the setup numerous times, and I’m thinking that this might be the latest one.

The ebook collection is the main perk for being a paid subscriber. Beyond that, I think I’ll be leaving comments and author notes open for everyone. Hopefully it’ll make for broader discussions and help out other writers. The main reason people upgrade their subscription is to support the writing itself, I think, rather than to access author notes. Do let me know if that isn’t the case!

So! Let’s talk about this chapter.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Clarke and Holland doing their thing. And, I mean, I doubt anyone especially missed Holland and his general unpleasantness, but it’s always good to check in with Clarke, right? Collins also shows up - he’s been a minor supporting character from the very beginning, as one of the key sergeants running the SDC office, but the direction of the stories hasn’t always given him much to do. We should be seeing more of these supporting roles this season.

Vehicles occupy a very different space on Mid-Earth. ‘The car’ never really became a thing, due to the wonky timeline caused by the portals opening. In an attempt to keep up with the Joneses, the Kingdom of Great Britain doubled-down on steam power and the tech they had two centuries prior, rejecting offers of help from Max-Earth. That’s why the London of this story is such a smog-filled hellhole. There are vehicles, but they’re either pedal-powered or reliant on steam of some sort - highly polluting, inefficient engines that have been downsized from trains and stuck into poorly engineered chassis. Weirdly, that makes public transport even more important than it is in the real, 2023 London. It was fun to explore some of that in this chapter, as always filtered through Clarke and the others. I wrote about exposition and avoiding the infodump just earlier this week, and this chapter then turned out to be a particular challenge in that regard.

How to do exposition without it turning into an infodump

The second chunk of the chapter, following guest star Vietr, is a very different beast. The perspective is a bit different, skewing almost into omniscient 3rd person for a while, before settling in on Vietr’s point of view as he portal transits. Some of the Palinor stuff does veer towards that style of writing: a little heightened, more flowery almost, embracing some of the fantasy genre’s indulgences. The characters of Palinor are the same: more emotive, more expressive, more passionate and direct. They exist in a more inherently dramatic universe, compared to the dirty, grungy slog of Mid-Earth.

That’s been one of the real pleasures of writing Tales from the Triverse. Most of the time I’m writing a gritty detective drama, borrowing ingredients from thrillers and movies like Seven and Taxi Driver. Occasionally I’m writing science fiction in the far future, riffing on Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, Kim Stanley Robinson’s amazing stuff and classic Asimov robot stories. And then when we’re on Palinor, I’m in fantasy mode, skewing towards a whole different set of references (one of which is

ND Stevenson

's superb rejig of the She-Ra TV series).

It’s a big cauldron of melty fun.

Anyway, a whole bunch of kengto eggs just hatched on Mid-Earth and Max-Earth. So that’s a problem.

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!