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  The chief revolutionary atop his reception desk pulpit time, chose that moment to declare, to no one and everyone, “Alright! They asked for it.” One tanned hand lifted high to give a signal to his men.

  Eleanor felt time begin to fragment again, felt the future-echoes of the upcoming tragedy wash over her.

  There was a sudden burst of activity from the bar, as some of the staff, or the tourists, began their desperate bid for freedom. The chief revolutionary calmly directed his gun at one of the hostages, aiming for the centre of the suitcase she clutched to herself.

  Eleanor began her long walk out into the lobby. I will leave now, she decided flatly. She activated the Ravless field in her suit and felt her feet leave the floor slightly as it pushed away the molecules of the carpet. She hoped it would be enough.

  She saw the government man from dinner with a phone to his ear. Perhaps he was going to call in, to tell the soldiers and the tank not to respond. Eleanor already knew he was too late. Shots had been fired, hostages were being killed. The government would have to act. She threw the Ravless field into overdrive and felt her feet leave the floor altogether, dancing up into the closed space of the lobby like an angel.

  If she closed her eyes she could almost believe she was home.

  She felt, rather than heard, the tank gun thunder, imagined it recoiling back, rocking the whole square before the hotel. She was walking forward in air. She opened her eyes as the shell struck the hotel’s glass front and shivered it, all at once, into a thousand million shards of flying glass that spun and bounded around her, caught momentarily in the Ravless field and then flung away. With time running slow as treacle she knew the rifling dot heading towards her, now coin-sized, now fist-sized, head-sized, was the tank shell. She reached out for it, palms forward, and it rebounded from her hands like a leaping salmon. She watched herself do this, and wondered, and watched on as she glided forwards through the ruined, glass-toothed maw into the open air. The Assumptor field was gone. She hung above the government soldiers in full armour like the ghost of Joan of Arc. Some part of her observed the looks of rapture, of terror, on all their faces. She passed on, alighted on the ground behind them, skated away over concrete made slippery by the Ravless field. It would not do to miss her footing, not with both sides of a civil war staring after her in awe.

  Any technology sufficiently advanced will be indistinguishable from magic. Some scientist had thought that up years ago, but how true, how true.

  The cold place. From the untemperatured Void she had found herself in the cold place. Blinding white when the sun shone on the snow. Blinding white when the snow obscured the sun. The heater units in her armour had strained and buzzed and fought and still she had been cold. Here was a world that never saw the positive end of the thermometer. If they had not found her she would have been killed by that cold.

  They had been a dozen in number. Squat, hairy, encased in the hides of dead animals. Their weapons had been bronze and iron, which should have told her there and then what had happened. They had treated her with a grudging reverence, as though fulfilling some unwanted but unavoidable duty. She never knew what they thought she was.

  Their faces were craggy, secretive, heavy-browed. There was a word for them, in historical texts, a word for a casualty of evolution fifty-thousand years old.

  She spent a long while thinking she had been sent back in time, although she knew from her classes that this was impossible. It was the metalworking that told the contrary tale, of course. This was not the vanished past of the Neander valley and its doomed souls, but a present where the ice age had never left, where the Cro-Magnons had never come. Fifty-thousand years of harsh weather and stunted growth to bring the world into a fragile iron age.

  When the Prod was repaired and charged she had activated it at once, confident in her return to the boundless sea-blue skies of the Void. There had been other places. Other presents. She scattered herself sideways through the universe like a mountaineer sliding inexorably off an ice ledge. There had been the European super-state where Mongolian was the Lingua Franca. There had been the silver city of the scientists, where she was laughed at as a primitive. There had been a world held in the clawed fist of the sabre-toothed cats, where men rode against beasts with mace and chain, and feline eyes held too great a depth of knowledge and understanding. There had been thirteen presents, now, in her past, and none of them was home.

  And in each world a violence had been brewing. Whilst the Neanderthals knuckled down before the anger of the elements, clinging on for the sake of lost humanity, the scientists plotted clinical wars against distant worlds and the cats unsheathed their claws and stalked human prey. There were wars, gangfights, regicides and uprisings, and each world was worse than the last. Three of the thirteen were wastelands, where place and people bore mute witness to a history of war that the final bombs had not ended, only made more local and more petty. The universe Lady Sealight travelled through chewed at itself like a mad dog, with more blood at every baring of the teeth.

  And now here she was, in some self-destructing island republic with the sands of her mind running ever faster through the hourglass. The next present, or the next, would find her a war that all her machines and trickery could not win through, and that would be the end of Lady Sealight.

  She had no mental map or plan of the city she was in. She simply walked away from the stilled conflict, and nobody called her back or made any move to stop her. She would never know whether her intervention, unintended and unasked, would make any difference.

  Her feet were searching for something. They had quietly taken over after declaring her mind unfit to govern, an internal insurrection. She walked on into the vacant streets because something was amiss – something other than all the things she knew to be amiss. From behind shutters and curtains the natives watched her pass: an apparition in battle-armour, face blank and eyes almost closed.

  With some determination, her feet led her to a square with a fitful fountain coughing up dirty water, and left her there, staring at the display on her bracers. Lights, red and green and white, winked on and off. Some were simply chanting the same mantra of damage and uncertainty that she had heard every day since her exile but there was a new voice in the mechanical chorus and it had news. This was what her feet had seen, whilst her eyes had been on other things.

  A power signature.

  The words fell into the sterile ground of her brain and lay there, stillborn. She turned them over, examined their shapes, as a dark-age savage might have handled the works of Plato.

  Realisation charged her, grabbed her ears and shook her until a grain of understanding fell into place. A power signature. Someone else’s power signature. Her suit had detected a sibling nearby. Some other with technology to dazzle the locals.

  She turned around and the woman was standing at the edge of the square. How long she had been following was beyond guesswork. When she saw she had Eleanor’s attention, the woams she walked forward and the walk betrayed her instantly. She was a slim, trim woman dressed in a local’s nondescripts but there was an ungainly awkwardness to her walk that screamed to Eleanor that she, too, felt the prison of the flesh, that she was born for the soaring Void and not this clumsy matter.

  “Lady Sealight,” the woman said slowly, hesitantly. She stopped walking after half a dozen paces, the fountain between them.

  Eleanor did not recognise her, but the woman was patently too old to be a new recruit. Even her crumbling mind could solve that particular equation.

  “Commonwealth,” she said wearily, feeling relatively little actual ire. “How did you find me?”

  “I do serve the Commonwealth of Great Britain,” the woman acknowledged. “We have been searching for you for some time. When you fought Icarus you… damaged the Void somehow. You fell through it, left a trail. I was sent to discover whether you had survived. To recover you.”

  Eleanor’s face had no expression, but some small song of battle was starting behind her e
yes. This was better than madness and slow decline. The enemy had found her at last, as she knew they must. She had been cornered and brought to bay. Now at last she could fight and die and, even if the battlefield was gross matter, she would still die as an Abyssonaut should.

  “You are here to stop me returning to aid the Crown…” she breathed, and felt all the controls of her weaponry beneath her fingertips. How much of this island, she wondered, would be standing and sane after two such warriors had battled. She would show the government and the revolutionaries what a war was!

  There was a long, awkward pause before the woman replied. Eleanor could see the fear in her eyes. A poor warrior, this one.

  “I want you to listen to me,” the Commonwealther said. “The war…” She steeled herself visibly. “The war is over.”

  Eleanor stared at her blankly. The words had passed through her brain without catching on anything.

  “Britain is at peace once more,” the woman told her. “The forces of the Commonwealth have deposed the Crown.” She was tense, ready for the explosion.

  It never came. Eleanor’s face was blank as a newborn’s. “I don’t believe a word of it,” she said, conversationally. “Commonwealth tricks. You must have a very low opinion of me.”

  “We have a very high opinion of you,” the woman told her. “You are something of a legend amongst our Chasmonauts. Listen to me, I thought that you would have trouble believing me. Were our positions reversed… well, I’d think just like you do. Which is why I didn’t come alone. Now don’t do anything rash. I’m going to bring someone else out here. A good friend of yours.”

  Emotion or expression had yet to touch Eleanor. She made a noncommittal gesture that the Commonwealther took for assent. The woman beckoned into the shadowed alley from which she had stepped and something wheeled its way into view and, at last, brought life back to Eleanor’s face.

  It was a mechanical chair, and she knew it almost as well as its occupant. She could have written a book on the distant breath-noise of its motors, the red velvet of its upholstery, the gilded owls that stood silent vigil atop the back. She could have written many books on the owner’s lop-sided shoulders and withered legs, his sunken cheeks and huge eyes and battle-weary smile.

  Something broke inside her, and it felt like dying. “Isender,” she said.

  “Hello again,” he told her, as he always did. “You’ve no idea what we’ve been through to find you.”

  Eleanor took at step towards them, and the Commonwealther started visibly. “Listen to me, before you come any closer, you’ve got to do something. You’ve got to power down all your weapons.”

  Eleanor shook her head irritably. “I won’t fire on you. I won’t fire on him.”

  “It’s not that. Listen to me. Haven’t you noticed the places you move through end up in chaos? You’ve noticed that? Your equipment is malfunctioning. Everything’s leaking power. Your Strife Gun is doing all of that. Setting up the violence around you. You’ve got to turn them all off.”

  “I’m doing that?” Eleanor was taking too many hits, too much damaging information impacting on her. She felt control slipping away again.

  “I’m afraid so,” Isender confirmed. “We’ve seen the damage caused. Believe me, it’s for the best.”

  Numbly, shaking inside, Eleanor stared at her hands. Of their own accord they were moving through the power-down sequence, shutting off her weapons one by one, sending them into a stand-by from whence they could do no more damage. The armour felt abruptly heavy on her, the ground suddenly coarse and hard beneath her feet.

  She thought of the deaths, the pointless, wasted deaths, all the worlds she had ruined. The magic of her technology that had become Pandora’s Box.

  She walked slowly towards Isender, and the Commonwealther stepped back to let them talk.

  “What happened?” she whispered. “How did they win the war?”

  Isender shrugged his mangled shrug. “We fought as well as we could,” he said softly. “What could we have known? We stopped Icarus, but they still had a Daedalus. We thought that secret weapons only came in ones. It was brief, that’s all. By the time we rematerialised, it was mostly over.”

  She stared at him. “You…”

  He looked up at her without embarrassment. “There was nothing left to fight for,” he said. “Besides, I wanted to do this. I wanted to find you. The Commonwealth was my only chance.”

  She nodded, simply. Everything had all fallen into place. How foolish she had been. It was a grand foolishness, in fact, one that soaked back through recent events to colour all her life. What had it all been for? What a colossal waste from start to finish.

  She looked down at Isender again, feeling wretched, helpless, naked.

  “Come back to us, Eleanor,” he told her. “It’s been too long. Come home.” The promise of the Void danced in his eyes.

  “Yes…” she said, but it was in response to a proposition made in her mind only. Her hands had found something at her belt that interested them.

  With detached dignity she watched as they drew the simple knife from its scabbard and, with an observer’s sense of wonder, buried it in Isender’s chest. The face she knew so well, had loved so much and yearned for constantly, gave her one agonised, betrayed look and then crumpled in upon itself. It swirled, creased and finally dispersed into the aether, leaving behind only the shell of a man in Commonwealth armour, his face self-disgusted, his breastplate and ribs neatly pierced by the plain blade of the knife. The chair still looked like Isender’s chair, though, for the Assumptor field had survived the death of its occupant.

  Eleanor looked around for the Commonwealther woman, her hands already powering up her weapons. Her quarry was at the edge of the square, backing and backing, her face the horrified rictus of a woman who discovers that the avenging demons of Commonwealth infamy are worse, far worse, in the flesh. Even as Eleanor brought her Jung-Saffer cannon online the woman backed into nothing and thin air, activating her own Prod to make her getaway.

  Her brain still trying to piece it all together, Eleanor stared down at the dead man in the chair. Later she would deduce that whilst Commonwealth spies might have reaped the prize of her real name, Isender himself never knew it, as she had never known his. She would tell herself that his “Eleanor” had sealed his fate and that was how she had unmasked him. Some deep part of her would always know, however, that as the knife pierced the man’s armour (made for the Void and modern weapons, not to ward off the toys of primitives) she had understood none of that. She had known nothing but that Isender had betrayed her, and that the Crown had betrayed her, and that she had nothing left to care about at all.

  In the dawn of a new day the city was eerily still, and Lady Sealight sat on a rooftop and stared into a sun still wet from the ocean. There had been occasional gunshots during the night, but nothing she would class as a revolution. She had kept the Strife Gun powered down, just in case.

  She supposed that the civil war probably still raged, back home, and that the real Isender and the others still fought it. She supposed that there was no Daedalus, and that Icarus had taken his secret to his insubstantial grave. She supposed that the Commonwealthers had come for her because she had been the one to strike Icarus, and they did not want her to return like King Arthur and save the nation in its hour of need. She supposed all of these things, because she had no information to the contrary.

  She had taken components from the dead Commonwealther and repaired some of her systems, but it had done little good, would do less good in the long run. This was the thirteenth world that was not her own, and there would be more.

  And yet, what choice did she have? After all, her country needed her.

  She sighed and stood, letting the dawn wind rustle through the food wrappers that kept her company up on the roof.

  “Once more into the breach,” she mouthed, that famous line from Shakespeare’s triumphal Richard III. Her hands found the switch that activated her Prod.


  She vanished into air with no witnesses or apologies and no one to mourn her leaving, gone to another battlefield that was not her home.

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  The Age of Entitlement

  Adam Nevill

  At dusk, when all about us faded, we walked in silence down the deserted street called Rue du Sous-Lieutenant de Loitière, that neither of us knew how to pronounce. Ahead of us, even though we could not see its surging beyond the white stone and slate-coloured buildings on Quai du Canada, we knew the sea was going black. That street was closest to the ocean and appeared more than empty. It was dead.

  The streets of Arromanche were not ruined. Not so much as a window was broken. Nor were they all yet derelict; though I was never sure which were and which were still occupied. The flags had been taken down; the tanks and field artillery preserved since the Second World War were rusted, the cafés and museums had closed, and the veterans who once visited here were long dead. But more than the desolate and sombre inland reach of the town, huddled into itself and shuffling away from the seafront, the buildings facing the ocean were completely lifeless; spent, somehow, as if they had already been overcome.

  We could sense the ocean’s swallowing of the watery light, and we could hear the endless tumult of its cold choppy heaving, the great restless sighs. Insensible, timeless, it pulled us down to the shore and into a terrifying orbit. To think I once regarded the sea with fondness; its fragrance and bird calls producing a sense of comfort. Now the mere thought of its existence as we are erased, nation by nation, made me shudder. And that morning, right after we arrived at Le Havre, while standing before the great expanse of water, my inner world was suddenly crushed to a thing insubstantial. As with my perception of the black infinite depths above the earth, the water’s unbreathable immensity felt closer to the land than it ever before. Too near, somehow. In Arromanche this very feeling was acute.