Precious jewels

Author’s Note: It’s a tribute to Kage Baker that ended up as more of a pastiche of Kage’s Company stories than I expected. But it’s the sort of thing where I created a bunch of characters I’d be happy to re-use elsewhere.

“Vagabond!” Arkwright yelled from his first storey apartment window, down the cobbled, fog-wreathed, gaslight-smeared London street. He produced a trusty service revolver that still smelled of the oil he had used to clean it the night before and took aim at the quickly disappearing form of the burglar.
A loud report and a plume of smoke erupted from the weapon as its missile was propelled at the target, aside a cry of pure rage.
Arkwright had spent sometime with Buffalo Bill’s travelling show and more time yet in Crimea and was considered by diverse parties a crackshot. Yet still the bullet contrived to miss the miscreant.
His next words are best left unrecorded, though there are other testimonies that attest to the curses and epithets fired from his lips. (They also mention the spray of spittle and the rush of blood to his face and the slight twinge of pain in his left arm that indicated the start of a heart condition.)

“Steady on, old thing, you’ll blow a gasket,” said Aubrey Gethsemane. The albino boy was removing his felt hat and hanging his umbrella on the hat stand as Arkwright pulled the window shut with such force that the glass panes rattled.  Dressed in crushed purple velvet, Gethsemane’s delicate, nearly consumptive frame and translucent skin could not have been more removed from Arkwright’s bulky, hairy, flannelled form. His light, dancing movements were as unlike Arkwright’s forceful crashing around, as their manners.
“I’ll have him,” snarled Arkwright. “By Harry, I’ll have him. We’ll hang him from Nelson’s Column by his meat and two veg, sir. We’ll spread his guts out for the cats to lick at.”
“Oh, don’t go on,” said Aubrey, raising his hand to his mouth. “After all that absinthe I feel a bit squiffy. And I’m sure Mother Murphy will not be pleased to be scrubbing my squiff out of the carpet. (Not so soon after last time.)”
But Arkwright was already bolting out of the door, and thundering down the stairs, threatening to put his foot through every step and bellowing like a bull elephant. (Arkwright had taken down a rogue male, whilst in Africa, with an elephant gun. It was something he liked to think about before going to bed.)
Aubrey walked over to the window and watched Arkwright knock over a gypsy woman, and startle a horse as he rattled down the street. His tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth. “Won’t be seeing him again tonight. I guess it’s you and me tonight, right hand.”
**
The burglar was light on her feet. Her feet did have a metal soles grooved into grips that allowed her to easily grip the uneven terrain of cobbles, and her ankles did have carbon fibre under the skin (which was double the density of normal human flesh).
Inside her eye was a holographic representation of the local land management, projected from a small coil of information that had been inserted and integrated into her brain.
Inside her ear vibrations were being generated that equated to the sound of Apollo Four Forty’s Getting High On Your Own Supply. A sound that would not even be conceived of for another hundred years.
The Karr-han-ref nestled between her flat, plate of muscle bosoms. The jewel was cool against her flesh, but not in any way that felt unnerving. It was as perfect a crafting of natural, inorganic materials as she herself was of organic materials. There was a genius in mankind when it came to make things more beautiful than they ever would have been left to their own devices.
She glanced back over her shoulder and realised to her surprised that the big angry man with the big angry moustache was gaining on her.
Now that wasn’t right.
She shut off fifty pain receptors and increased her lung volume, and pushed herself to run faster. They would be in Limehouse soon and she would be able to lose the great white goofball with ease.
**
Arkwright was going to kill the blackguard. With his own two hands. Thumbs into the cartilage of the throat, crush the windpipe, smash the nose, knee to the stomach, double fist to the back. And if that didn’t do it, bullet through the skull.
Drool ran from the side of his mouth.
**

She executed a sudden and violent turn to run down a slim alleyway between two houses. It led into a courtyard, and she kept running, even as she heard the man huffing after her, straight into the corner and bounced up from one wall to the other, making her way up, up, up to the nearest second storey window.
“You bloody jackdaw! You pernicious little cutpurse! I will wear your goolies around my neck!”
She was very happy to see the window open and her hands snaked out to grip the window sill and haul herself through.
The tableau she entered was not so welcome a sight. A fat, short white man was hurried pulling up his checked trousers, whilst Betty Ting held a bedsheet over her unclothed form. The burglar suppressed the urge to put the man’s head through the wall, but used subsonics to bellow “Get out!” in such a way that the man could not help but leave, braces hanging down and shirt unbuttoned.
“You’re going to give me a bad reputation,” said Betty.
“You already have a bad reputation,” said the burglar.
Betty giggled. “If this were Paris, or China, I would be working in fine apartments and would wear beautiful jewels. I would be invited to all the best parties. But cold, cold England prefers its open deception of purity.”
“You could always request a transfer,” said the burglar, closing the door and locking it. She walked back across the room and gave Betty a kiss and the jewel that had been nestling in her cleavage.
“It was hard enough to get the transfer here. To get them to transfer me back again is going to be impossible.” She kissed the burglar back and held the jewel up to the light. “Fascinating. Were there any problems in the retrieval?”
The sound of wood splintering caught the burglar’s ear. “You know how you don’t think I’m capable of finesse?”
Betty put an arm around her waist. “It’s why I love you.”
“Well, you’re right. I’m crap. I’m really crap.” The burglar dived under the brass bed and pulled out a trunk. Or, at least, something that looked like a trunk, so as not to draw attention. In fact the trunk had a biometric lock on it and was full of technology that had yet to be invented.
“What did you do?”
There were raised voices downstairs, and heavy footfalls.
“You know you said I should bribe the maid to take the jewel?”
“Yes. You said you were going to do that. You had a five pound note, which I told you was too much, to give to her.”
Somebody had been struck very hard downstairs. Someone else was crying.
“Yeah well, the maid looked so cute and innocent, I couldn’t bear putting her in such a rotten position.”
Betty looked again at the jewel. “So how did you…”
“I stole it myself,” said the burglar.
The stairs creaked as if a rhinoceros had mounted them.
“You have to get out.”
Betty frowned. “Get out?” She began to move towards the door, but the burglar was up and guiding her to the window a moment later.
“This way. Just hide outside for a minute or two.”
Betty complied, climbing out of the window. Before she was wholly outside she turned back to the burglar. “Do you have a plan?”
The burglar began to slip out of her clothes. “Something brash,” she replied.
**
Despite being the product of dreams of Empire, Arkwright did not judge men by their colour. Even so, he hated the inhabitants of this house for their rat-like heavy occupancy. He had no compulsions regarding knocking them about, any more than he would of striking a white man who was in his way. He worked his way methodically through the rooms, looking for the burglar. The ground floor, the first floor.
It was the second floor where he felt sure his quarry had gone to ground.
He kicked in the nearest door, and stooped through the doorway.
“God’s balls!” he yelled.
A Nubian was knelt on the ground, naked and slim. The vision set him back fifteen years and caused his blood to rise inappropriately.
“Forgive me. You’re a long way from home,” he said, licking his lips, and starting to back out of the room. And then he noticed what she was kneeling on.
“Satan’s arse!”
The Nubian leapt to her feet as Arkwright lashed out to grab her, kicking up the burglar’s clothes.
“Where is it, you dirty little whore!”
She was fast, so fast she was always outside his reach, like a small bird in a day room. But the room was small and Arkwright was large, and he was blocking the door. And so he was able to push her into a corner. And then his hands were around her neck and head.
“Hand it back and maybe you can live,” he offered. “No promises, mind. My passions are aroused.”
God cracked his whip.
Arkwright went down.
“Crap,” said the burglar. Whose name was MacDonald.
“Double crap,” said Betty Ting.
**
Three miles away Aubrey Gethsemane raised a hand to his temple, while his body folded a little.
“Oh that’s not good. That’s not good at all.”
**
“What did you do?”
“Oh, this is bad,” said Betty, crossing the floor to examine the fallen man.
“Bad? Bad? Of course, it is! You’ve shot someone dead,” yelped MacDonald. “Someone who might have gone on to do something important! Heaven knows how you’ve buggered up causality.”
“He was going to kill you,” snapped Betty. “Thank you left out of your lexicon?”
MacDonald opened her mouth but managed to stop words coming out before she thought about them. “Thanks. But this is still major league bad. They’re going to put us in cold storage, or send us to the Moon.”
“No no no,” said Betty, her fingers working at the bullet hole. “You never studied temporal mechanics did you? The timeline is running exactly as it always would. Time travel would be impossible if there wasn’t a set chain of events we were following, the time machinery would just sort of… decohere. Any travel into the past would just create other timelines and this whole enterprise would be pointless. There has to be predestination. We’re just solidifying the structure by adding additional observance. Time will crystallise, it will be measured in both location and velocity…”
There was a pause here, as Betty let her words sink in.
“And anyway, this isn’t a man.”
“A very hairy woman?” asked MacDonald.
“No. I mean, he’s not a man. He’s some kind of highly advanced construct.”
“A cyborg like us?”
“No. Robot. Automaton.”
“Did they have robots in Victorian England?” asked MacDonald, doing a remote call up on the wiki.
“Not like this. This is tech from the future. This is our tech.”
**
Aubrey leapt out of his hansom cab and up the steps to the door of Lord Rookby’s house. He hammered at the door, whilst glancing around wildly, looking for pursuers. Under his jacket he had a cosh, having always been afraid of guns.
With no immediate response, he prepared to hammer on the door again, but before his fist fell, he was hit in the stomach so fast it knocked the wind out of him. Then something coarse was tied over his head and he was carried bodily.
This was not good at all.
**
When the sack came off his head he was in a pub basement, surrounded by cold, damp and dark and the smells of hops.
Stood around him were five figures. Two were women, three were men. The gloom made it difficult to make out specifics, except that they were a disparate quintet in size, shape and colour.
“Oh come on, now. You must realise that you have made a terrible mistake.” His voice came out less loud and strident than he had intended. It sounded more like a little boy’s voice.
“Who are you?” asked one of the women.
“I’m Aubrey Gethsemane. If you picked up a newspaper, you might recognise my name from the society pages.”
“No,” said the other woman. “Who are you really?”
Aubrey didn’t respond straightaway. However bad he had thought the situation was, it was a hundred times worse.
Oh well. If time spent playing Chemin de Fer had had no other profit, it had taught him when to go all in.
“I am a member of the Chronic Exploratory Club. We rank members who are in the highest offices in the country. If you think your little sewing circle is any threat to us, if you think that any action you might take will not result in your eradication, then you have no logic whatever.”
“Chronic…” said the darker of the women.
“Are you saying you travel in time?” said the other. It was clear that the women were in charge here. Aubrey was beginning to realise that the men were just window dressing, no doubt lured in by feminine wiles.
“We cast into time,” said Aubrey. “With our machinery, we cast our nets wide and draw back to ourselves the flotsam and jetsam of continuity.”
“And where did you get this machinery?”
“Why, our founder invented it,” said Aubrey.
“And that’s how you made the mechanical man.”
“So you did break Arkwright. That’s dashed bad show.”
“We could fix him for you.”
The dark woman made a noise, but was halted by a glance from the other.
“I’m sorry?” said Aubrey. This abduction was not following a familiar route.
“We’re going to cut you loose,” said the woman. “Tomorrow morning, Arkwright will arrive at your door, nursing little more than a hangover.”
“I don’t…”
“All that bluster,” said the woman, as the sack went over Aubrey’s head again, “you scared us.”
**
“I wasn’t scared,” said MacDonald.
“No,” said Betty. She was vacuum-packing the stolen jewel, and burying it in the basement of the tavern, a building that would survive the Blitz and be the subject of a preservation order until the 23rd Century, when a terrorist act half a mile away would weaken the foundations and reveal an unsuspected set of treasures thought long lost.
“So what did we do that for?”
“Weren’t you telling me we shouldn’t be killing people a couple of hours ago?”
MacDonald snorted. “Weren’t you telling me that we could kill whoever we wanted because it would all work out?”
Betty rolled her eyes. “You’re very unattractive when you act like this.”
MacDonald managed to keep the retort that was ricocheting around her larynx from escaping into the air.
“The Chronic Exploratory Club,” Betty said. “Is clearly one of ours. Either they are originators of the time travel tech we use, or they have tacked into some of our machinery. And even if they’re not, do we really need to alert them, when they’re clearly so smug and self-satisfied, that there are other time travellers?”
“There’d be conflict,” said MacDonald.
“There’d be conflict.”
“But Gethsemane…”
“Is hardly going to admit that he was bested by two women. That he lost a highly valuable jewel, and that Arkwright has been compromised. And anyway, Arkwright won’t just be fixed. We’ll put a little spyware in there so that we can keep an eye on what’s up. Or rather, our replacements will.”
“We’re being transferred,” said MacDonald flatly.
“Can you blame them? Really?”
“Crap, but I can’t.”
Betty patted down the last of the earth and stood up and kissed MacDonald on the lips. “At least we’re going together,” she said.
**
The next morning Arkwright was shown into Aubrey’s rooms.
“By glory,” he thundered, “but I had a rough old night.”