The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: Detective Lola Styles is investigating a new case of disappearing cargo, which has been vanishing while transiting through the portal to London. There’s a fear that it’s being swallowed by the void, so she’s decided to go talk to an expert…
Bruglia.
3202. Leafless.
“What do you mean, playing games?” Lola sipped her tea and frowned, reconfiguring her understanding of the case. “You mean it’s a scam?”
Professor Simova shrugged, lifting his hands as if weighing the options. “I don’t have enough information to draw any firm conclusions, Lola. Based on my understanding of portal physics, though, if I had to choose between objects being swallowed by the portals or someone pulling a fast one, I’d assume it was someone being cheeky every time.”
“Sergeant Raelar will be disappointed.” She finished her tea and handed the cup back to Simova. “I’d best be going. What else are you working on at the moment?”
The professor walked her back towards the door to the bridge. “Lots of things. Yvette Field’s case presented many opportunities for papers and further study. The contribution of Palinor magic to surgery is really quite astonishing. Micrologists are able to suppress immune responses, did you know that? Combine that with the more advanced surgeries available on Mid-Earth and Max-Earth and the possibilities are immense. None of your antibiotics needed: just natural adjustment. Tissue, limb and organ transplantation is entering a whole new era. Potentially, anyway.”
“Potentially?”
“Yes. If your government goes ahead with it proposals and keeps portal travel restricted it will devastate the scientific community here. The only other option would be to take advantage of the other portal that connects to the middle of your Atlantic ocean. Hardly convenient. Hopefully sense will prevail.
They walked out of the courtyard and then back onto the bridge, with the university spread out below. “These new techniques only work on Palinor, though?”
“Correct,” Simova said with a deep sigh. “The surgery can be performed anywhere, of course, but the contribution of magic is restricted to our dimension. We need our healers to be trained with Mid-Earth techniques, but there is resistance to that on both sides.”
“We’ll get it sorted one way or another, Professor,” Lola said. She smiled, shook his hand, and began the long walk back down the spiralling staircase to the mesa plateau.
She watched as a container was lifted by a crane away from its stack and onto a rolling belt that would lead it on its way through the portal. There was some movement of cargo, at least, but what should have been a constant flow was reduced to a dozen-or-so per hour. The noise of the machinery echoed through the dock.
“I’ll need copies of all the shipment records for the period,” she said, grimacing even as she said it. There was a long and tedious session of comparing container numbers and customs files in her near future. “I doubt I’ll spot anything you haven’t already checked, but it’s worth a shot.”
Sergeant Raelar nodded. “That’s not a problem. But, you know, these professors over at the university, that don’t know everything. Academics, they’re always so confident in their declarations. Remember when they were so sure vaen’ka were extinct, then one showed up in Lairn a few years back? Or the mer-people of the Tortaro that were supposedly primitive and without language, right up until their underwater cities were discovered?”
“Even so,” Lola said with a smile, “it doesn’t mean portals have started swallowing things. Tellor’s Paradigm, I think it’s called?”
“Ah, yes. That the most boring explanation is always the correct one.” Raelar sighed and turned towards his office. “I’ll get you those files, detective. I was just hoping this one might bring a bit of excitement to the job.”
It was, indeed, a mind-numbingly dull task. Lola’s eyes swam across the row and columns of numbers and symbols, grateful at least that the data was primarily presented in English but finding nevertheless that her brain was becoming increasingly fogged.
The sun had already gone, dipped below the university’s towers in the distance. She didn’t like to stay in her office for long after dark, when the palace’s gardens become unsettlingly quiet and empty. There were lights on in the main building up the hill, and the city was out beyond the gates and as bustling as ever. She should call it a night, maybe hit a bar for an hour before heading home to bed. Daryla was out of town on official business, which made home and bed less appealing than usual.
The stars flickered in the sky as it darkened. The lamp-light of Bruglia made for a more visible night sky than the smog and electric lighting of London, giving an alien view once the sun was gone. A reminder of just how far she was from home, even if it was in theory only a step through a portal to get back. Since arriving she had imagined an invisible tether, stretching from her waist, through the void of the portal, back to Mid-Earth and her old life. There were times when the tether was loose, flexible, and adaptive to wherever she wanted to go; on other days it would be tight and restrictive, pulling her back. Very occasionally she wouldn’t sense it at all, and find herself entirely adrift. That’s when it was most exciting, and most frightening. She couldn’t decide which sensation was dominant.
It had been almost a year and she’d made very little progress in unpicking the tendrils of the conspiracy that Bakker had brought her in on. He’d trusted her, as had Clarke and the others. They didn’t need to trust her - hell, she’d been brought in to replace Callihan after he’d been killed. Scratch that: murdered. Applying for the liaison post had seemed like perfect timing, giving them a foothold on Palinor from where she could investigate anything untoward that was contributing to the tensions back home. They were counting on her, but she’d spent the whole time running cases, networking, going to parties and finding herself. She’d got distracted by her own personal progress. She hadn’t mentioned any of that in her letters to Clarke, still unsure of how he’d react. At some point she’d have to fill him in about her and Daryla, but it could wait until they were in person. She’d not even come out to her parents, yet it was Clarke that made her anxious.
Her eyes had glazed over, gliding past the numbers and codes on the page without registering any of them. Releasing a disgruntled sigh, she rubbed her forehead and yawned. One last look, then she’d come at it afresh in the morning when her thoughts wouldn’t go wandering.
What had the sergeant mentioned? Mer-people? And vaen’ka, whatever they were. She’d have to look them up. There was so much still to see and learn about in Palinor. Being stuck in Bruglia afforded only the tiniest glimpse, and the most Earth-centric impression of the planet’s cultures. She laughed to herself: she was never satisfied. There was always the next horizon.
And, her mind had wandered again.
Scrunching her eyelids shut, she took a deep breath, adjust her desk lamp and stretched her back. One last look.
The number swam nonsensically for a few seconds, then one of them started tugging on an old memory. One of the container codes. Then another. Why did they seem so familiar? She leaned back in her chair and tried to remember. Was it to do with another case? Something else she’d worked on here? No, it was older than that. Back in London, then. Standing and crossing the room, she opened her filing cabinet and started flicking through the cases she’d investigated with Clarke. Nothing clicked, until she went all the way back to that first case, with the dead aen’fa and Shona and the Palinese Express. A brothel caught up in a particularly nasty web of sex trafficking, which she and Clarke had busted wide open. The workers had been brought over under false pretences, shoved into hidden compartments within shipping containers owned by the Barrindon firm. That was it: the numbers on the papers from Sergeant Raelar matched some of those old Barrindon containers. The ones that had taken advantage of specific loopholes and security gaps.
Barrindon as company was no more. Many of the containers had vanished from the portal dock after the case, which they’d assumed was the same bad actors at work. They could well have been wiped from the books, along with the company itself. Perhaps a gang had seen it as an opportunity and re-opened the smuggling route, flying under the radar until the current disruption to the portal system.
If any of the containers on the list were still in the system, on the Palinor side of the portal, there was a chance she could pick them out and open them up. Before they went through and ‘disappeared’.
Lola groaned. Even in its current semi-suspended state, the portal station was still operating round the clock, and containers were being shipped off every hour. Taking her coat from the back of her chair, she rubbed her tired eyes and tried to stand up a little straighter. It was getting late, she was exhausted, but there was no time to waste.
Thank you for reading!
This one’s coming in late and hot, due to Christmas holidays entirely upending my usual schedule. Plus, my wife just tested positive for Covid-19, which is obviously fabulous timing. Thanks, virus.
As a heads-up, I’m going to be taking a bit of a break from the newsletter until January due to, you know, Christmas, but there’ll still be a new episode of Let’s Watch: Babylon 5 (latest ep here) on Wednesday. I hope you all have delightful weekends and weeks, whether you’re celebrating anything specific or not.
Meanwhile, there’s a vast amount of interesting reading material this week. I was excited to see the B5 Let’s Watch prompting a response today:
I also got lots of warm nostalgic feelings from this Dark City retrospective, which is primarily an ode to video rental shops:
My son is named after a 6th century East African musician, so this little glimpse into the influence of African musical history was a delight:
Discover many new writers this week through various conversations, also. I’ll be aiming to dig into their work over the rest of the holiday. Exciting!
Outside of Newsletter Land (I don’t think that name is going to catch on), I’m still massively enjoying Sea of Stars. I should probably do some sort of 2023 round-up of games/films/books/etc than I enjoyed, now I think about it.
On the comics front I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Void Rivals and its accompanying ‘Energon’ universe of stories. Ostensibly a new telling of Transformers (bear with), it’s from Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame and has a really interesting vibe. It is working the nostalgia, obviously, but it’s doing it in a knowing way, while also building something new and intriguing. I love that they release issue #1 of Void Rivals without telling anyone that it was connected to Transformers, and thus bamboozled everyone when a character shows up halfway through without explanation. That’s just really fun storytelling, and knowing your audience.
Lastly, here are some ebook giveaways, if you’re looking to stock up on holiday reads:
Urban Fantasy Freebies (there are a lot of muscley male torsos on these front covers. I reckon anyone downloading the Triverse sampler will be seriously disappointed)
Author notes
I’ll be completely honest here: this chapter was a struggle. I’ve simply not had enough time this week due to various non-writing factors, so have had to really scrabble about to get this out the door.
That said, it hopefully moves the story forward and does some fun world building along the way. The effort mainly went into Lola herself, and having some development in her character. She’s been on a big journey and there was an opportunity here to reflect on that a little. Given what I know about upcoming story arcs (hoo boy), it’s critical to take these moments. Might not get another chance.
Next week, this case gets split wide open. Don’t miss it! :)
Thanks so much for showing love for Dust On The VCR, Simon!
Simon, I appreciate your author's note, with its comment about world-building and character-deepening in this episode. Working in serial shorts now, I'm seeing that we're constrained by the delivery method: weekly segments, short enough to keep the reader's attention but long enough to do what the story demands. (Dickens wasn't and Trollope didn't deliver to somebody's inbox.) It's a challenge.
I enjoyed this episode. Thanks!