Martyrs: part 1

Rise up

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, which is about to be tested…

London. Mid-Earth.
1980. July.

A quirk of the armoury in the basement complex of the Joint Council tower was that it locked from both sides. Perhaps the room had been intended for another use, before being repurposed for the Specialist Dimensional Command.

Constable Marie Pensthorpe clicked the physical lock into place, then turned to face Philip Scarra. He was already dropping his trousers, removing his boxers, ready to go. Always in such a hurry. She crossed the room, striding past rifles and pistols and racks of ammunition, unbuttoning her shirt. The harsh fluorescent lighting, designed to show off the weapons, gave both their skin a sallow, jaundiced hue. One of the lights flickered in the corner. She shoved him against one of the weapons cases, biting at his lips, bracing him against the cabinet. His hands rummaged about her body, pulling awkwardly at her clothes, wrestling them down. Functional, to the point, unfussy. She lifted one leg up onto a stool, then lowered onto him. He wouldn’t last long, so it was up to her to make her own enjoyment, and she did so. Scarra was odd, but he’d come running at a click of her fingers.

It passed the time during the quieter shifts.

Not that there was much quiet. Every night there’d be a call to a disturbance somewhere, usually a migrant who had somehow escaped the clean-up crews. Sometimes she felt like the SDC was little more than a taxi service to the walled district, delivering koth and aen’fa to where they belonged. Sometimes they resisted, which made things more interesting.

As Scarra groaned beneath her, she ran a finger across her Earth First badge, proudly fixed to her uniform. It still amazed her that everything had gone so well. Prime Minister Maxwell was still in power, the city was safe at last, the streets were clean, and the Kingdom of Great Britain was, finally, taking back its rightful place in the world — and the wider triverse. All of those wet sympathiser cops had been dismissed, arrested or otherwise disposed of, leaving an efficient core in the Met that was ready to get the job done. She certainly didn’t miss having to take order from the likes of DI Bakker, or DI Ford, that total class traitor.

Scarrra had a gun held to her head, she realised.

She batted it away. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“What? It’s empty.” He held the pistol up, turned it around to show her.

“Don’t point it at my fucking head,” she said, pulling away. He was done, anyway.

He swaggered about the room, cock out, as if it were an attractive sight. “Calm down. It was just a joke.”

Pensthorpe buttoned herself up, then looked at her pager. “Shit,” she said. “There’s an all-hands.”

Darting long the east end of the Strand, Somerset House on his left, Zdan laughed giddily. It was all kicking off!

There’d been protests before, in the early days, but nothing on this scale for a couple of years at least. It was like the word had gone out, that everyone had decided at the same time to take to the streets, to not be afraid. Enough was enough. It began with what was probably fifty people converging on St Paul’s, mostly masked and singing anti-government songs. Zdan and the boys had been in the area by pure coincidence, having decided to go down to the river to fish for scraps. The protest was far more interesting than the Thames’ detritus.

Some had brought placards and paint, were making their signs up on the spot, and passing spares to anyone showing up. The sun was high overhead and there was a party atmosphere. At the first sign of overwatch the crowd left the the churchyard, dispersing into the nearby streets before reconvening on Ludgate Hill. That’s when more people had joined them, flowing out of nearby cafes and streets, first with curiosity and then with purpose. The gathering swelled and continued its march westwards, By the time they hit Fleet Street there were several hundred of them, edging a thousand, at Zdan’s best guess.

He ran to the front, waving at his buddies to follow closely. Finally time to take a stand and show those Earth First arseholes where to stick it.

London was rising up, and Zdan wanted to be at the vanguard.

“We’ve sent word beyond the walls,” Vahko said, striding up and down inside the old factory. It once would have produced machined parts to be transported by river; in recent years it had been a hostel for displaced koth — and now it served as the briefing room for the assembled koth warriors. “Timing is critical. We need unrest outside on the streets as well as in the walled city. We need the city overwatch to be stretched thin, to not know where to look.”

A younger koth, smaller, raised their hand. “Aren’t they just going to crack down on all of us? What chances do we have?”

Vahko looked out at their people, feeling a pride that had been absent those long five years. “It will be dangerous. I will not lie to you: we will not all survive this night.” They walked down the line, making sure to look each and every koth in the eyes. “But we are koth! We are unstoppable when we unite as one. We are fire and flight! Wouldn’t you rather die trying to take these bastards down, than live beneath their heel until we are all ground to dust?”

They reached a table at the far end and picked up a large pair of shears. “We are koth,” Vahko bellowed, their voice easily filling the empty factory. “Remember that! Be not what they have made you. Reclaim who you are.” Moving to the nearest koth, Vahko smiled and nodded. Raising the shears, Vahko fixed them to the clips on their large comrade’s wings and closed the blades.

The metal clasps snapped and fall to the floor. The freed koth roared and flexed their enormous wings, covered with a rainbow display of feathers. A beautiful sight. Vahko moved down the line, unclipping them one by one. Ganhkran would be doing the same from the opposite end.

“This day we will be remade as koth. We reclaim our place in society. And we tear down these walls.”

The roars were deafening, the walls of the old factory shaking in anticipation. Wingspans stretched, plumes of flame were belched. This was the moment that would matter, when the history books were written. Vahko was acutely aware that they were the distraction; a feint, a ruse. But the danger would be very real.

Timing would be everything.

---

References

Haven’t done one of these for a while:

• Zdan we first met in ‘Backdoors’, back in December 2021. He reappeared more recently in ‘Z’dan’s Diary’, in May.

• Pensthorpe and Scarra joined the SDC when it moved to the Joint Council tower and received more funding, first appearing in ‘Electioneering’ (March 2023). We saw them in action in ‘Biological Weapons’ (also March 2023), ‘Random Acts of Violence’ (June 2023) and ‘Shot Fired’ (Feb 2024). Scarra and the squad leader, Golding, both showed up briefly but vitally in ‘Assault on Stamford & Coin’ (May 2024).

• Vahko surely needs no introduction by this point but, if you need a reminder, head over to ‘The Ambassadors’ (November 2021).

Meanwhile.

Apologies for the missing audio today. My voice has turned into a hilarious croak due to a sudden cold — quite good for doing koth voices, but not much else. I’ll add it in a couple of days once I can do more than a bass rumble.

If you’re desperate to hear my dulcet tones, you’re still in luck. Next time you’re out for a walk / commuting / doing housework, stick this podcast on:

Featuring none other than myself and

Eleanor Anstruther

, this is a lovely chat about Eleanor’s book In Judgement of Others and Substack more generally. The Writing Life has quite a broad audience, so here’s hoping the episode introduces more people to this wonderful literature community.

Looking ahead, I’ve been pondering what to do with Triverse once the whole thing wraps up. My current thinking is that it will be paywalled once complete. I’m keen also to work on fancier ebook and paperback editions, most likely heavily edited.

It’s very strange to be thinking about post-Triverse world.

Author notes

As you’ve twigged by now, Triverse’s finale is to be a multi-pronged, layered story told across multiple dimensions and cohorts. Keeping track of that complexity, and making sure it doesn’t read as complex, is the main challenge. It’s when all the build-up hopefully pays off: we know the stakes, we know the characters (even minor supporting roles like Zdan and Scarra and Pensthorpe), we know the overall geography of how everything fits together.

As I noted yesterday:

I know what’s coming up and there’s a lot of really exciting stuff. I think it will be a satisfying ending for long-term readers, and make this absurd three-and-a-half year journey worthwhile. Thanks for coming along for the ride, whether you’re OG or have hopped on board more recently.

Something I’ve always enjoyed probing in Triverse is how the three worlds support different types of story. That’s going to be very evident in the coming weeks. Today we have the protests beginning in London, which could be set in any contemporary city (if you overlook the presence of koth). You can bet when we return to Palinor and the battle for Bruglia, it will have considerably more lashings of fantasy adventure. And let’s not forget about Max-Earth, where we still have the very unresolved matter of a rogue AI that recently went nuts in Addis Ababa and then tore up a space station.

Edit: I meant to write something about the Pensthorpe/Scarra scene. It’s intended to be about as unsexy as possible. This is not a healthy relationship, and these are not well people. The general air of distraction, of being disconnected from what’s in front of them, was the main thing to convey.

I don’t think I’ve talked about story/chapter titles before. They’re an important aspect of the storytelling, and that’s especially clear in this week’s. Naming this particular story ‘Martyrs’ is not an accident, and I knew that it wouldn’t quite make sense in the context of this first part. What it does do, hopefully, is ramp up the tension further and layer in some foreboding as to what is coming.

This is also the shortest instalment we’ve had for a long while. As the pace increases and we intercut between different scenes that may well be the case. We shall see!

Thanks, as ever, for reading. Home stretch, everyone! Home stretch.