Shots fired: Part 1

The centre cannot hold

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Tensions continue to rise across the triverse. Oh dear.

London.
1974. November.

Frank Holland was suspicious by nature. A sceptic through-and-through, because that’s what made for a good cop. Innocent until proven guilty, sure, but, as far as Holland was concerned, everyone was a suspect. Always, at all times. Everyone had done something bad, was about to do something bad, or was thinking of doing something bad in the future.

That was just people.

He sat at a window table in the greasy spoon cafe, sipping at the lukewarm tea. The sparse remains of a fry up were on a plate in front of him, only the mushrooms uneaten. It was lunch time, after all, so why not? Even if he was there on business, there was no point in doing it on an empty stomach. The cafe was bustling, and had somehow resisted being gentrified despite its proximity to the portal station. Outside on the pavement a busker was playing an old pop tune, badly. So badly that it had taken Holland the best part of the song to even recognise it. The window was steamed up against the cold wintry air, such that he had to keep wiping a rainbow-shaped arc through which he could observe the opposite side of the street.

Leaving the offices on the corner of Stamford and Coin had been the easiest thing in the world. The place was a dump. A shithole reserved especially for the SDC a decade earlier, as a backhanded compliment. A special HQ all of your own: with no facilities, stuck out on a limb, hidden away from the rest of the Met’s resources. It’s where careers went to die, he’d heard someone mutter in a Scotland Yard corridor many years earlier.

None of that had bothered him. He wasn’t career-hungry. And he liked arresting koth and aen’fa and cheeky little fucking wizards that had come through the portal. It was the wizards that really stuck in his craw, still behaving as if they ruled the world despite being resoundingly powerless on Mid-Earth. Arrogant bastards, dreaming of better days. His only regret was that he’d rarely touched on cases that involved Max-Earth. Taking down a few of those rich motherfuckers would have been a job highlight. Hell, he’d have done it for free. But they kept themselves out of trouble, and policed their own portal more effectively, and had better extradition treaties. If some Max-Earth corpo got in over their head, they’d be whisked back home before a Mid-Earth judge would get anywhere near it. The cases weren’t worth bothering with.

The nondescript door of the old SDC offices stared back at him from across the street. Yeah, he missed it, but only in comparison to the squeaky clean futurist nightmare they were now holed up in. The arse end of the Joint Council tower was all glass and plastic and cladded steel, each desk and chair and filing cabinet looking like it had just walked off a catwalk in Italy. Needlessly posh, and Holland didn’t do posh.

DCI Miller had tasked him and Shaw with finding out if anything untoward was going on in the team. The Met was corrupt from top to bottom, obviously, but the SDC was a somewhat unknown quantity. With everything going on, all the uncertainty across the triverse and foreign actors interfering left, right and centre, it paid to know who was on whose side.

Through the fogged window he saw the door to the old offices crack open. It opened further and Clarke exited, hurriedly moving down the street and away from the building. Neither Clarke nor Holland were on duty. More to the point, this wasn’t their base of operations anymore. There was no reason for Clarke to be back at the old digs.

Holland thought about paying and heading straight across to investigate, but something held him back. He waited a minute, then two. Five minutes passed. The door across the street opened once more.

Zoltan Kaminski walked out, lit a cigarette, and departed in the opposite direction to Clarke. Another SDC detective, lurking around the old, abandoned offices. Kaminski was on duty, too. Holland pulled a small surveillance camera from his bag and pointed it through the window. It would be a shit photo, but better than nothing.

He waited some more.

DI Bakker was the next to emerge. Miller had said he had worries about Bakker. How high up the team did this go? Holland half expected to see the koth ambassador saunter out, briefcase in hand.

Holland watched the clock as another twenty minutes trudged by. The cafe began to empty out. Deciding it had been long enough, he left a fiver on the table and grabbed his coat and bag. Outside, the street was noisy with passing trams and jostling pedestrians. Rickshaws rattled past, moving faster than the occasional fume-spewing vehicle. The sky was supposedly somewhere overhead, but was obscured by a grey nothingness that could have been low cloud, or could have been smog. Holland rather enjoyed the smell.

He crossed the street and tried the door, which opened. Unlikely he was going to find anything valuable in there, then. Climbing the stairs was like stepping back in time, ascending into the previous year, when they’d all still been working out of that office. The corner of Stamford and Coin. A shithole, to be sure, but it had been their shithole.

On the upper floor, he pushed open the door into the old office. Turned out someone had decided to make it their literal shithole. The stink was appalling. Clearly it was being used by rough sleepers. The Met must really not have wanted to keep the place. Half the ceiling tiles had fallen out, exposing wires and vents above. The space was empty, save for human turds, all the old furniture gone. He explored further, checking the old partitioned office before heading into the narrow corridor that led to the rear stairs and the tiny galley. So many cups of tea made there over the years.

Up the stairs, to the floor that had been empty even when they’d been based in the building. There were footsteps in the dust, leading to a small room at the back in which was an upturned cable tumbler, being used as a makeshift table, and four chairs. A fifth chair was folded against the wall.

A meeting space, then. He could assume the fourth member was Chakraborty, given Kaminski’s involvement. Miller had tasked him with finding out what they were up to, if anything, and working out their loyalties. So far, the signs weren’t good.

Holland stood in the empty room with his hands in his coat pockets. On the other hand, Miller was an arsehole. A vain narcissist obsessed with the next newspaper headline.

He sighed. If there was one thing Holland hated - and there wasn’t, for he hated many things - it was factions. So unnecessarily dramatic.

The George & The Dragon pub was very popular with local koth, which they saw as a bit of an in-joke. It was east London, a good forty minutes on the tube from anywhere that could be called central. The area had a higher than usual number of koth, having been used for temporary housing when cross-portal migration first became a thing. That particular programme for new arrivals was long defunct but the streets had remained a popular destination for any koth that didn’t make it beyond London. And after all, London had over 80% of the planet’s entire koth population.

It was often a rowdy pub, though no more than any of the other rougher establishments in the city. The building had been adapted over time, with the first floor ceiling removed to accommodate a double-height bar area. One wing had been rebuilt after a fire had destroyed the original wooden structure. The local koth didn’t talk about it.

Qu’dan’s day had been better than usual. Production was up at the factory and they were the floor manager, which meant they’d been doing their job well. The owner of the business was a human, of course, but they were decent and didn’t take advantage of the koth community. He recognised the particular skills and natural abilities that koth could provide and rewarded them appropriately. That was a rare thing on Mid-Earth. Qu’dan liked to pass along that generosity, and so had taken their first pay rise after the promotion and invited the entire production team out for drinks.

It had been a long evening of merriment, drinking, song and dance. Tales were told of the homelands, with the old timers recalling the journey from Appilan to the portal, generations before. Many of the younger koth were second or third generation and had never lived on Palinor, Qu’dan included. They had been born there, but had moved to Mid-Earth when still very young and had no real memories of before.

There was a new community in London, though. It wasn’t the same - the elders assured them of that - but it was real, and meaningful. A new Appilan, on a new world. There were challenges, as there were anywhere in the universe, and they weren’t always welcomed, but it was better than it had ever been. Qu’dan felt nothing but optimism about the future, despite the wranglings of the human government and the stories published in the newspapers.

Accompanied by two friends, Qu’dan waved their goodbyes and wobbled out onto the street, the Mid-Earth beer suddenly making itself known. The night was cold, but that wasn’t really a concern for koth. Qu’dan took a deep breath, looked up at the sky and bellowed a plume of fire high into the air. The flame illuminated the street and the front of the pub, their two friends giggling.

There was a shout from across the street. “Stop!”

Qu’dan turned towards the sound, and glimpsed a police. They only saw it for a brief moment before a shot rang out and a bullet entered their skull, killing them instantly.

---

Thank you for reading!

This week I was sent a couple of amazing hardback books containing commentary and original scripts from Babylon 5 from long-time reader Mike Miller. Mike’s generously supported my fiction work for over eight years. He was there for A Day of Faces and the three-year run of The Mechanical Crown. He’s been reading Tales from the Triverse from its beginnings in 2021. He’s a part of my process by now.

Look at these beauties:

B5 is my favourite TV show, but it’s also a fascinating example of serial fiction. I’m not sure what came first - my love of long, serialised storytelling, or my love of Babylon 5. I suspect it was a simultaneous awakening.

So, thanks Mike. And a lovely reminder of the strong connections that writing can foster. Which brings me to this:

Quite pleased with that segue.

The attitude Ben mentions here is something I encountered - only very rarely - while I was at the National Centre for Writing. Sometimes it would manifest as a sense that writing should be an exclusive thing, given out only sparingly; other times it would be a strong disdain for any notion of community among writers. Some successful writers have got to that position without needing external support - and well done them - but are then unable to understand why other writers might benefit or enjoy it.

I’ve always thought it was a bit weird, given that writing is an exercise in empathy, more than anything. Fiction writing, at least.

Meanwhile, this amazing thing went out early December but in the last week-or-two suddenly did the rounds:

How I Grew My Substack From 439 to 451 Free Subscribers In Just 11 Months

If you’re looking for an antidote to all the irritating growth hack garbage on the internet, do give it a read.

On a vaguely related note, Alex Dobrenko` has been writing about competition, winning, losing, and all that entails. As a fiction writer it’s easy to feel competitive, or jealous of more ‘successful’ writers, and to have an all-or-nothing attitude. JK Rowling-level success or bust. This is a good leveller:

i am who i think you think i am

What else? I finished the game Sea of Stars, which was a remarkable thing. Currently checking out The Messenger, from the same developer. Each game is entirely different in mechanics and style, though exist in a shared story universe. Really intriguing, from a narrative perspective.

I did a rough sketch of Kaenamor, the wizard who kicked off the whole triverse thing:

At some point I’ll redo that illustrated opening to Triverse. The version that is in the archive currently was partially created using AI, which now fills me with ick. It would be a good exercise in trying to do my own comic. Fiddling around with character designs is part of that process.

Right, let’s talk about today’s chapter…

Author notes

A brand new storyline this week, and you can take the ‘Shots fired’ title to have multiple meanings.

This season of Triverse has been a long one but we’re coming to the conclusion, now, and it’s going to be the biggest one yet. A proper rug pull of a finale. There’s always a slight tension there, knowing that changes are coming. On the one hand, I’m excited for people to get to a critical moment in the story, and all the thrills associated with that. On other hand, change to the core structure/setup can be off-putting for some people.

We shall see where Triverse ends up falling. Ultimately with these things we can only write for ourselves, and if I was the main reader I’d be really thrilled by what’s coming up. 😏

This week we have more Frank Holland, being typically Hollandaise¹. Acerbic, unpleasant, and with that bloodhound mentality that has served him well as a detective. We gets glimpses of his inherent biases and his inability to really empathise with non-humans. He’s a hugely flawed man, and his involvement with Miller isn’t helping in that regard.

Finding out about Bakker’s team’s meetings so soon after the blackmail attempt on Bakker, there’s a definite ramping up of activity from Miller’s end, and the forces working at the top of the Joint Council. Many of our characters are going to get caught in that whirlwind, and few of them have much in the way of real agency at the moment.

MEANWHILE, in the coda we briefly meet Qu’dan. I imagine they would have been a lovely addition to the cast, if they’d survived for more than a couple of paragraphs. That end section is what really kicks off the central storyline of ‘Shots fired’, and it’s something I’ve had rattling around in my head for months. Good to finally get to it, and not a moment too soon. Next week I’ll be diving into it as the main focus.

As well as some other bits.

Lots of spinning plates.

Thanks for reading and supporting.

1. I use this term mainly because it would really annoy Holland.