The Women, pt. 5
Title: The Women
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie films), Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Currently G, could be R in later parts
Warnings: None for this chapter
Notes: The outstanding
so_shhy promised to write me notes from a multi-Sherlock crossover orgy if I set up the scene. I am easily led by temptation.
Summary: Mary and Irene steal a time machine and things immediately get worse than they were before.
(Part One on my journal)
(Part Two onso_shhy's journal)
(Part Three on my journal)
(Part Four onso_shhy's journal)
Luminous automobiles coloured like children’s toys streaked past them. The noise they made was atrocious, a wailing that sent a shiver through Mary’s body at the peak of their crescendo. She watched them go, holding her skirts so she didn’t trip up as she followed close behind Irene.
“Fire engines?” she asked. At this stage, she'd believe anything, even that water tanks could be hidden in such small vehicles.
“Pardon?” Irene was flicking her thumb across her black glass box again. She realised what Mary was asking. “Police. Telling the traffic to get out of the way.”
“Do they usually go past every two minutes?”
“No,” Irene said grimly. “They don’t.”
"That's a telephone, right?" Mary asked, jogging to catch with Irene's brisk steps. "Have you tried telephoning your Mr Holmes again?"
"Of course I have," Irene replied.
"Then what are you doing with your little telephone?"
Irene looked up at her, impatience beginning to tinge her voice. "Trying to find someone to help us."
"I thought you didn't want help," Mary persisted. "You refused Mycroft's help."
"Because Mycroft was useless," Irene rolled her eyes. "Someone on this list, however-" she held up the phone. Mary took it and peered at the tiny screen. It was filled with unintelligible punctuation symbols and numbers, and occasional blocks of readable text in a squarish font. Mary quickly found she could make the image move up and down, like an unfurling scroll, by rubbing her thumb on it the way she'd seen Irene do.
"This doesn't mean anything to me," Mary shrugged.
"Yes, most of it's been corrupted," Irene winced. "Before he handcuffed me to the bed, I took this file from the agent who seemed to be working against the people who stole your husband. It's designed to be opened on our technology, so I think he's been undercover in London for a while, waiting for these bastards to turn up. I think it's a list of local people he was investigating, in suspicion of them being part of this," she waved her hands, "syndicate. I've been trying to figure out if any of them could be people I know. People I might hold sway with. So far, though, they're all strangers to me," with a sign, she pushed a strand of hair away from her face. "And usually I'm such a good networker."
"Well, I know this name," said Mary.
Irene glanced up sharply, "What?"
"This name. I've heard it before," Mary held out the phone and Irene leaned in to look, their shoulders pressed together. "Maynard Hudson. He was the husband of Mr Holmes' landlady,” Mary paused, thinking back to the scene, “When John and I went to clear out the man’s belongings I had a long chat with her about all the dead men she'd known. She mentioned her husband, but she was polite in that way folks are about people who they detest but aren’t around to defend themselves. It could be a coincidence, surely not everyone in my London matches up with yours."
"Maybe, maybe not," Irene was looking at her with a wicked little smile. "But Mrs Hudson, at least, exists. Come Mary, let's go have a chat with the old bird."
---
Mary had only visited the notorious Baker Street a handful of times, but she would certainly not have found it today without Irene’s help. The house fronts had completely different facades, the distance to recognisable buildings seemed to have shifted drastically and several of the alleys had been filled in with a number of shops and a glass-fronted room full of women having their hair done by professional maids. Mary wondered if in this emancipated era, servants could hire their services to whomever they liked.
The door to 221b opened on a tidy, short-haired spinster in a lurid plum dress. She took one look at Irene and shut the door again. Irene leapt up the last two stairs and put her shoulder against it just before the latch could snap closed.
“Mrs Hudson, stop! We need your help.”
“Now just get out of here, you – you harlot –“
“For goodness’ sake,” Irene didn’t force the door open, but wedged her heel against it so Mrs Hudson still couldn’t shut them out. “We’re trying to find Mr Holmes and Dr Watson. You must have noticed they’re missing.”
“Oh yes, and unless your timing’s an astounding coincidence, I’ve no doubt you’re responsible,” Mrs Hudson replied through the gap in the door. “Now remove yourself, or I’ll have the police on you, I promise!”
Mary climbed up beside Irene and tried to peer through the crack to catch the old woman’s eye. “My dear lady, please listen to us. I may be a stranger, but I swear on my husband’s life that our intentions are good. Trust me if not Miss Adler, I am a friend to any Watsons and even Holmes’ I cross paths with.”
After a moment of silence in which Mary could feel her heart racing, probably round and round her ribcage, the door was released and Irene pushed it open. Mrs Hudson stood on the far side with her arms crossed and eyes narrowed. Behind her, the flat was dark, the lamp hanging from the ceiling shattered, and Mary could see great lacerations in the wallpaper above the stairs.
“There’s been battle here,” Mary breathed.
“Battle?” Mrs Hudson leaned forward. “There’s been bloody pillory and damned pillaging,” she put her hand over her mouth, blinking for a moment. “It’s the last straw, damn it, I won’t have it, I won’t-“
She turned her face away, and Mary went to her and put her arm around her.
“What’s the boy got himself into?” the old woman whispered, quickly wiping the corners of her eyes and then straightening up. “You’ll come and have tea, both of you, I’m not gonna stand in the dark here. Shut the door, you.”
Mrs Hudson’s den was warmed by a fresh teapot and knitted afghans, and decorated with watercolours of London and incredibly detailed paintings – no, they were photographs, Mary realised – of smiling nieces and grand-nephews, but none pictures with her in them.
“Um. I’ll pour the tea, Mrs Hudson,” Mary said quickly. “You talk to Irene, she’s got a better grasp on things.”
“I bet she does,” Mrs Hudson scowled, but allowed Mary to raid her kitchen for cups and milk. As she left she heard the woman ask, “So who’s your friend then, Miss Adler?”
“Oh, she’s Dr Watson’s wife from another dimension.”
When Mary came back in, the landlady seemed to have ceded her trust to Irene about the matter of helping Mr Holmes (Mary hadn’t heard her reaction to the inter-dimensional wife claim). She thanked Mary for the tea, while Irene took hers without even looking at Mary.
“I like your dress, dear,” Mrs Hudson said, waving her hand at a pouffe for Mary to sit on since there weren’t any other chairs. “Very classic. There was a man in here first thing this morning dressed just as smartly.”
“Thank you-“ Mary’s brain caught up with what the woman had just said. “Wait, a man…? John! You saw John?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t catch his name.”
“Handsome. Brown moustache, blue eyes. Four inches taller than me,” Mary begged.
“Yes, that sounds like him,” Mrs Hudson pursed her lips. “He was gone by the time Sherlock was, though.”
“So he was alright,” Mary put down the tea tray before she could drop it. “He was alive, he came here!”
“That was this morning, a lot of things can happen in half a day,” Irene replied. When Mary’s face fell she added, “Er, but yes, good news,” she turned back to Mrs Hudson. “We need to know about your husband. We have reason to believe he could be involved in this business.”
“I doubt it, dear,” Mrs Hudson wrinkled his nose. “Harry’s very dead.”
“Harry?” Mary settled herself on a pouffe at last. “His name wasn’t Maynard?”
“Harold was his middle name, he always went by Harry. No one called him Maynard except, you know, in court,” Mrs Hudson whispered the last two words. “He was executed by the state of Florida a year ago.”
Mary choked on her tea and tried to hide it by pretending to sneeze.
“Dammit,” Irene leaned back in her threadbare armchair, tapping her nails on her chin. “I wonder why his name was on that list. What did he do, Mrs Hudson? What was his job?”
“Well,” Mrs Hudson smoothed her skirt over her lap. Mary’s aunt always did that when she was preparing for a particularly elaborate and gossip-rich story. “When we first married he was a lieutenant in the British Army, but he had dual citizenship on his mother’s side and after a couple of years we found out children were not going to be on their way,” she shook her head at Mary and said with a wince, “He had a low count, you know. His little soldiers.”
“Ah,” Mary said with a frown and no idea what that meant.
“Anyway, he got a job with the American secret service, or one of those departments, I never knew exactly,” Mrs Hudson shrugged. “Sometimes he’d be away for up to three months with no calls or letters, but he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Then one day – must have been almost ten years ago, I think – he came back and he was,” she stared at the fireplace, which had been tiled over and replaced with an electric heat-pump, “different. He was like my father when he came back from the war, tell the truth. He had this look he got, into the distance. And I hardly recognised him at first, his hair had gone almost white and his face was almost twenty years older, I’d swear.”
Irene raised her head sharply. “He looked older?”
“Stress, you know. Does awful things for the skin,” Mrs Hudson waved her hand. “Thing was, he was cruel after that. Not to me so much, but to people around him. And then, those girls what he did with them…” she gave a shiver. “When they took him in I cooperated with the police, I told them everything. But it wasn’t much, and it looked for a while like he was going to get off, but then they found another body and this poor girl had, you know, DNA evidence. So he was convicted at last. Then six months before his execution, Harry’s lawyer got them to do this test on the DNA that somehow showed it couldn’t possibly have come from a human and they started talking about overturning the whole thing. I was scared out of my wits, I was back in London by then but I knew Harry would come after me because of the way I’d gone against him so quickly. That’s when I got Sherlock on the case and well, you know what he’s like. So that was the end of Harry,” she smiled and sipped at her tea. “Oh, perfect amount of milk, lovey, thank you.”
“So your husband was a man who never talked about his work, aged twenty years in a month and apparently had inhuman sequences in his DNA,” Irene narrowed her eyes, leaning forward with her fingers entwined. “Mrs Hudson, do you think it’s possible that your husband was not, in fact, from this world?”
“I’m not an idiot, Miss Adler,” Mrs Hudson frowned. “I may not be Sherlock Holmes, but I’m still a woman of science. Oh, I do still have Harry’s time machine, though.”
Mary put down her cup so hard she was worried she’d chipped the bottom. Irene’s lips sat open for a moment and then she said quickly. “His time machine?”
“That’s what he called it. Which is bonkers, of course, but he was saying a lot of strange things as the execution got closer,” Mrs Hudson sighed. “Come on, I’ll show it to you. It’s definitely some kind of secret military technology, I was rather worried the CIA or something would bump me off if they learned I had it so I had it shipped over to London with me. Come on.”
Mrs Hudson got out of her chair and gestured for Irene and Mary to follow. She took a key from a hook by the door and they went into the shared corridor, stopping outside a door marked 221c. “That’s why I don’t advertise this place. I could make a bundle, I tell you, but I tell everyone the damp makes it unliveable. Barely managed to put Sherlock off when he arrived. He wanted to use it as a lab,” she had unlocked the door and led them through into a back bedroom which was barren of furniture or decoration.
“Here we are,” Mrs Hudson stopped in front of the closet set into the bedroom wall. She took another key and unlocked the closet, pulling it open to display an empty coat rack and a couple of dusty shelves. “Harry said to destroy it, but when I moved in here I opened the crate and found there were instructions on the back for setting it up. Chinese or something, but there were pictures too.”
Irene looked between the landlady and the empty space. “What, is it… in the closet?”
“No, dear, it is the closet.”
A wrinkle appeared between Irene’s brows, “Mrs Hudson, I don’t know if you think this is funny, but Sherlock and John really are in danger and-“
“Irene,” said Mary, her mouth hanging open. She tugged on the other woman’s sleeve without glancing over. “Irene, look.”
“What?” Irene snapped.
Mary reached out and unlatched the window in front of her, only a few feet to the right of the closet door. She shoved the pane up and leaned out, staring left and right.
“There’s no closet,” Mrs Hudson said patiently. “This wall backs onto the yard where I put my recycling. It’s solid brick and plaster.”
Irene looked out the window and then went and tentatively reached into the closet. She rapped on its back wall. Mary was still looking out the window. She moved her head back and forward, gaping between the yard with the blank brick, and the clear sight of Irene’s arm disappearing to a depth of three foot into the cavity.
Irene whispered, “That’s impossible.”
Mary laughed. “Remarkable! Oh, John will love this. A cupboard that doesn’t exist. Absolutely splendid!”
“But how does it work?” Irene said grittily. “I mean, if it’s a time machine, if it can help us control these windows between the two Londons… how do we make it work?” she turned to Mrs Hudson. “You said there were instructions. Was there a manual? Did it show you how to pilot it?”
“Nothing like that, just how to set it into the wall,” Mrs Hudson shrugged. “I don’t even know how to get it out again, that’s why I haven’t been able to get rid of it.”
“There’s a light switch,” Irene pointed at a chain hanging from the ceiling. “But a closet that doesn’t exist can’t be connected to the mains,” she tugged to the chain, but the bulb hanging into the closet simply flickered on with a buzz. Mary looked over her shoulder as Irene ran her hands across the interior walls, searching for hidden switches or panels. There was nothing.
“What if we get inside it?” Mary asked. Irene raised an eyebrow. “We may as well try everything once,” Mary replied.
“You’re a girl after my own heart,” Irene smiled. She waved at the closet. “Ladies first, harlots follow.”
“Oh, really,” Mary clicked her tongue, but she stepped as far into the closet as she could get. She had to turn her head right onto the side until her neck ached, and there wasn’t even enough room to move her arms when Irene got inside too. Before Mary could have second thoughts, she pulled the door closed and they were left in total darkness.
Mary muttered. “This does not seem like significant progress, Miss Adler.”
“I can think of some progress we could make, Mrs Watson. But on the other hand,” her body shifted, brushing against Mary’s, and then there was the rattle of the chain and the click of the light switch as Irene tugged it.
But the yellowed bulb didn’t come on. Instead, a blue glow illuminated the back of Irene’s neck and then flickered to become what seemed to be a panel of symbols on the back of the cupboard door, like a projection from a glass slide. Mary looked around but there was no sign of a lens or lamp to illuminate the projection. Irene glanced back in the dim light. Her face was as unsure as Mary felt. She reached up and with one delicately manicured fingertip, touched the simplest symbol on the panel, which was simply a circle that was half black and half white.
There was a ringing sound, very similar in its mix of tones to the one that had incapacitated them outside the police station, just before half the street had been swapped with a different century. This time the sound was far less intense, though Mary raised her hands to her ears. When it faded, the symbols had been replaced by the image of a woman’s face.
“This is IDP Headquarters, emergency collect call. Please identify yourself.”
“Ah, yes, this is Agent James Ashlaken Cooper,” Irene cleared her throat. “Badge number one-nine-four-nine-foxtrot-sierra. I’ve acquired this illegal vehicle and would like it brought to headquarters immediately. It seems to be malfunctioning.”
“Agent Cooper,” the woman seemed to be checking something out of sight, “Your appearance doesn’t seem to match your profile, Agent Cooper.”
“Well, I’m in disguise, obviously. As is my,” Irene glanced at Mary. “Colleague. She’s in deep cover, I’d rather she not identify herself at this stage. Is there a problem with my request?”
The woman paused and finally replied, “Your porta-pod seems fine, Agent Cooper, it just hasn’t been warmed up in the few years. It looks like it’s registered to a dishonourably discharged IDP researcher. Is he present?”
“I can confirmed he’s been deceased for some time. I’ll fill out the necessary paperwork later,” Irene said briskly.
“Very well. I’ll slingshot you into the local base of operations in forty seconds. Hold tight.”
The glowing face disappeared, replaced by words and numbers that flashed rapidly across the back of the door. There was a rumble that sounded like it came from deep beneath the earth. Mary grasped Irene’s shoulder as the closet shook, a wailed reverberated in her breastbone and then silence fell.
Irene reached out and opened the closet.
Mary blinked in the light of a clouded, naked sky. She walked across the threshold behind Irene and then found she couldn’t take another step. She was too stunned by what lay before her. It was a wide, green landscape of forest and low moor, windswept and punctuated by a few rocky outcrops in the distance. Straight ahead of them, however, was a mass of human industry. Huge white domes and tunnels made out of canvas supported by thin ribs created an enormous hive spread haphazardly over the grass. The dwellings were raised on platforms above marshy or rocky spots and even stretched up onto a couple of lows hills. Men and women in a grey and blue uniform were moving like ants across the scene, rushing in or out of the cloth doors of the structure, occasionally carrying what looked like strange rifles or metal equipment.
“Where are we?” Mary whispered.
“I think,” Irene said faintly. “We might still be in London.”
“Pardon?”
Irene shielded her eyes as she surveyed the headquarters, presuming that what the structure was. “Imagine for a moment, Mrs Watson, that these people – this agency, I think it is now fair to call them – has technology which makes time travel swift and easy, but leaves travel through space as costly and difficult as ever. Where would be the best place to set yourself up, if you wanted to be close to the action but still out of sight of your enemy and the local populace?”
Mary nodded. “In a time before either were present.”
“Precisely.”
“But it’s impossible. It’s absurd!”
“Many things are, these days,” Irene said.
“And are you really James Cooper?” Mary stared at her. “Is that how you know all this?”
Irene frowned at her, and then gave her low laugh. “No, Mary, I’m not. Cooper was the agent who handcuffed me to the bed. He called in to his boss before he left me, however, and I memorised his name and badge number. Idiot.”
“But how on earth did they think-“
“That he could disguise himself as this little thing?” Irene gave an alluring pose and ran her hand down the side of her torso, “I took a chance that they were either very stupid or particularly good at disguises, and it looks like I was right one way or the other.”
“Excuse me,” a voice drew their attention. “Excuse me, Agent Cooper?”
“Yes,” Irene turned towards the young woman, in the blue and grey uniform, who had emerged out of the nearest white door with a metal tablet under one arm.
“I called your arrival in to central and they said your C.O. is Captain Gallus,” the woman said. Her bearing and tone sounded like many of the military men whom Mary had met through her husband, but she had never seen such features on a woman before. “He’s on site and is rather eager to speak to you, if you’ll follow me.”
Irene and Mary glanced at each other, but let the woman lead them along a freshly-worn path in the grass and in through the canvas doors of the nearest dome. They passed through a honeycomb of desks and walled spaces where more uniformed officers, with black and grey devices over their ears, were speaking into glass panels and tapping away on more silver tablets. Down a round-ceilinged corridor lit by bright white bars of light, they took a sharp turn past a room full of closed doors and then into a five-way intersection in the hive. A man was storming towards them with a pair of subordinates close on his heels, scribbling on tablets.
“Cooper!” the man barked, his jowls wobbling. He narrowed his eyes at Irene. “What the hell is this, Cooper? Why’ve you got your holo still on?”
“Sir, it’s on the blink, sir,” Irene said in a low growl, straightening her back and holding her hands behind her in a perfect mimicry of a soldier at attention. “Got kicked by a local I was trying to help. The target I called in, sir.”
“What the hell are you doing back here?” Captain Gallus folded his arms. “You’re supposed to be in ground zero. We’ve got firefights breaking out across the city and temporal bleed-throughs splitting up our forces left right and centre-“
“Sorry, sir, I wanted to dispose of the, uh, the porta-pod I found,” Irene nodded. “I thought it belonged to the enemy.”
The man’s mouth stayed open for a moment, his eyes narrowed. He shifted his weight, glancing Irene up and down. Mary knew at once that Irene had said something suspicious, some incorrect terminology or just a tone that was out of character for Agent Cooper. She stepped forward quickly, holding out her hand, “Captain Gallus, I’m afraid it’s my fault. I’ve been in deep cover in 1892 when a, um, temporal bleed-through sent me into the middle of this mess. I asked… him to take me to headquarters.”
The commanding officer took her hand roughly. “I see. And you are?”
“I can’t give you my real name at this time, Captain, but you can call me Mary. I’m an undercover researcher, you see. Historical expert for the nineteenth century. I thought my skills could be useful for those of your men trapped there.”
Gallus still had a tough grip on her hand, but he let it go at last. “Then I’ll need you to go with Samson here for processing, Mary. You’ll have to get someone from headquarters to confirm your mission.”
“Of course. That won’t be a problem,” Mary smiled, cussing internally. One of the men behind Gallus stepped forward to escort her away. Mary looked over her shoulder at Irene, who was watching her go impassively. But there was a tenseness in her face that told Mary the other woman had realised how out of their depth they both were.
“I’ll see you back on the front line then, Mary,” Irene called after her. How she expected Mary to get back to one of their Londons was a mystery.
“Yes, Cooper, I want you geared up with the next patrol,” was the last thing Mary heard from Gallus as she was taken away down the nearest white corridor.
At least Samson, her escort, didn’t seem to be paying her that much attention. He was writing something on his tablet, and swore in a language Mary didn’t recognise (funny how no matter the language, swearing was still easily identified). He smacked the side of the tablet with his palm.
“Our damn wi-el keeps going on the blink in this sector,” he complained to Mary. “These stupid mass-produced batteries don’t last long without the power, and we’ve got a couple of prisoners being brought in. I don’t suppose you can type?”
“Type?” Mary said blankly.
“Yeah, they’ve shut down all periphery machines in the admin and processing domes while they fix the wi-el, so we’re having to use a couple of ancient plug-in machines. Without recording equipment we need someone to keep the minutes of the interview when these prisoners arrive and Jackson can only go with two fingers on the old ASKL keyboards. Can you type?”
Mary slotted together those parts of the explanation she could understand, which was very little of it. But she nodded confidently, “I can’t type, but I can write shorthand.”
“What’s shorthand?”
“You know,” Mary gesticulated vaguely, “Abbreviated writing. With a pencil and paper.”
Samson raised an eyebrow.
“I’m a historical expert, remember?” Mary said.
“Ok, that sounds like it’s good enough,” Samson shrugged. “Come on, I’ll see if anyone’s got any notepaper. We can do your processing once this is over.“
A few minutes later they were in a small, curtained-off cordon at the edge of a larger dome. Mary was sitting at a metal desk beside Jackson, who had been swapped out for Samson (though he looked almost identically bland and uniformed). He had in front of him a dead tablet he was staring at mournfully, another plugged-in one that was displaying several files in a language Mary couldn’t read, and a pair of strange tools. One looked like a switchbox and the other a broad-nosed pistol.
Mary herself had been given a pair of flat blue overalls and told to change them for her civilian clothes. The technicians hadn’t even given her the privacy to unclothe, but they weren’t leering at her either, so she’d stripped off her dress as quick as she could and pulled the overalls on, tucking her petticoats into the legs and zipping the ugly uniform right up to her chin. She wasn’t sure where they’d taken her dress. It was one of her favourites. But she had much greater hazards to think about right now.
Shortly, they heard a commotion approaching and Mary jumped as the curtain was torn aside. A red-haired man with stripes on the shoulders of his uniform burst in. He was followed by two privates, each pushing ahead of them a handcuffed man in the contemporary dress of Irene’s London.
“Lieutenant Horne,” Jackson stood up and held out his hand to the red-headed senior. “I’m Jackson from central. Thank you for-“
“Yeah, yeah, just tell me where to take these slave-trading bastards, I've got to get out with the next patrol,” the lieutenant waved Jackson’s hand aside and paced back and forth behind the two prisoners, who had been shoved down into chairs across the table from Mary and Jackson. One of them was small with a round face set in an expression of stoic fury, while the other appeared merely bored. He was strangely familiar, though Mary was sure she’d remember that thin face and bush of black curls.
“For the last time!” the shorter man cried, “We’re not slavers! They were the ones chasing us!”
And then it hit Mary. Her hand froze above the notepaper, her chest constricting beneath the many layers of the overalls and her underclothes, the blood rushing from her cheeks. The second prisoner was staring at her. Observing her. Of course he was. He was Irene’s Sherlock Holmes. She was sure of it, though she’d only seen him in a photograph at Scotland Yard. And that meant, surely, that his companion was Dr John Watson. There was nothing in the man that associated him with her true husband, not face, his voice, even the way he held himself gave no hint of a wounded leg or years marching with a regiment. And yet…
“Oh, right, so how the hell did you manage to operate an illegal trans-dimer wriststrap? And why did we have to chase you across six different zones if you’re innocent bystanders, huh?” Horne leaned right down into John’s face. Jackson elbowed Mary and she remembered she was supposed to be taking a record. She scribbled everything she remembered as fast as she could. “Why did you fire at us with deadly weapons from the thirty-eighth century if you’re from 2011?”
“We stole that strap and those weapons from the people chasing us,” John insisted through gritted teeth. “Sherlock worked out how to make it transport us. He’s clever like that.”
“I’ll give you clever-“ Horne grabbed the front of his jersey and shook him once.
“Lieutenant,” Jackson cleared his throat, and Horne let go, pushing John roughly back into the chair. “We’ve barcoded their blood. They’re not registered as citizens from any database.”
“There, that proves it,” Horne perched on the edge of the table, making it sink a until Mary’s paper started to slide away. She kept a stronger grip on it. “They’ve virally erased their own barcodes. Black market scum.”
“Is that like burning off your fingerprints?” Sherlock (Mary couldn’t think of him as Mr Holmes, it was too confusing) tipped his head to one side. “Interesting. So somatic genetic engineering is easy now? How do you prevent carcinogenesis-“
“Shut it!” Horne bellowed.
“What’s more, we have some inside information from a mole in the smuggling business,” Jackson checked something in his files, “There was an – wow, that’s a lot of zeroes – a very large reward put through the black market networks for a Mr Sherlock Holmes. The buyer is still unknown to us. Doesn’t say the century, but he could have been one of the targets the slavers were after.”
“No,” Horne shook his head. “Sherlock Holmes is from the nineteenth century, and a different dimension entirely. My men already confirmed him as missing when we were first got into the field.”
“Your information is incomplete,” Sherlock droned. “There’s more than one of us.”
Horne leaned forward. “Do you know what it means, not having an identity? You’re in international times zones now. No nation will demand your extradition. The IDP has complete military jurisdiction. You will find yourselves in the most hellish prisons in the universe for as long as we see fit, and given we’ve lost two good men today, you will find that is a very, very long time. Unless,” he said, lips pulled back as he enunciated every word, “you tell me everything about your gang’s little operation. Why you were here, where your central time-slicer is hidden, how many people you’ve kidnapped. Everything.”
Sherlock held his gaze for several long seconds. Finally he said, “It’s true. I am a slaver.”
“What?” John snapped.
“But my friend here isn’t. I’ve been living with him almost two years to keep myself incognito while I get things set up for my little gang,” Sherlock said distastefully. “I only dragged him along because I thought he’d be useful. He’s completely native.”
“Sherlock, don’t you dare,” John hissed. “Don’t do this.”
“Shut it!” Horne barked at him, then turned back to Sherlock. “You’re saying a some totally ordinary fellow let your lead him through all this shit? You really think anyone would be that dumb, or loyal, or both?”
“I chose him for those exact qualities. He’s been very helpful.”
Horne looked to John’s reaction. John spluttered, “It’s not true, he’s making this up. He’s not a – a criminal, or a kidnapper, or whatever you think, he’s just my flatmate.”
Horne turned his gaze to Sherlock’s face. “Well, at least one of you can't be telling the truth, and I don’t believe him,” Horne stabbed his thumb towards John. “So why should I believe you?”
“I’ll prove it,” Sherlock’s eyes widened. “Watching closely?”
“What do you mean by that?”
There was a flurry of movement and Mary squeaked in surprise. Sherlock had stood up and shoved Horne aside, one hand held to his chest while the handcuffs dangled from the other; Mary glimpsed a swollen mass of bruising and realised he must have broken his own hand to get it free of the bonds. With his good one he snatched up the gun-shaped device in front of Jackson, whipped around and pointed it at John, pressing the large grey trigger. There was a beep and John threw himself sideways off the chair, but there came no explosive blast as Mary expected.
With a quick scuffle, the two junior officers had grabbed Sherlock’s arms and pushed him to his knees – he had his hands behind his head and gave no resistance – while Horne hauled John up and sat him back in the chair.
“Jesus Christ,” John gasped, slumping in his chair. “You wretched sod, I thought you’d got a murder-suicide in mind.”
“There,” Sherlock said mildly. “Even the most uneducated smuggler would have recognised that device as harmless. But to a twenty-first century person it appeared to be a weapon. Proof enough for you? John is not involved in this.”
“Can I have my retinal scanner back, please?” Jackson asked, standing up and holding out his hand. One of the privates picked it up and returned it back to him. It had been stepped on in all the excitement, and Jackson inspected its scratched handle with a despairing sigh.
Horne was chewing the inside of his cheek, glaring at Sherlock. “Alright,” he rumbled. “But you’re still going for interrogation.”
“Naturally,” Sherlock sneered.
Horne jerked his head at John, “Private Hall, take the native bloke to the cleanup dome in the processing sector. Get him retconned before you send him back to 2011. Tell them to wipe at least two years, in case this slaver git has put some kind of subconscious programming into him.”
“No,” John tried to wrench himself out of the officer’s hands as he was pulled to his feet. “He guessed it was harmless, don’t you see, he’s just too smart for his own good – let me go –“ he writhed in the officer’s grip even when his arm was twisted sharply behind his back and the man dragged him towards the curtain, “Sherlock!” John yelled, as he watched the other officer secure Sherlock’s ankles in cuffs this time as well as tighter ones around his wrists. "Sherlock!”
Mary felt her throat closing up. She jumped to her feet, looking between the two strangers who seemed suddenly so much like her beloved Dr Watson and his dear friend. She couldn’t help them both. She didn’t even know how to help one of them. What did she do? What would her John do, or Irene or any of the infinitely cleverer and more experienced people she knew?
The curtain dropped closed as John’s white and desperate face was pulled away. Mary made up her mind. If half the stories about Sherlock Holmes were true and this version was half again as clever as the one from her century – well, then Sherlock still had a better chance than anyone of making it out alone. Mary needed to help John even if he wasn’t the John she loved.
“Wait,” she said, glancing at Jackson, “I’ve still got to get processed, sir. I’ll accompany the prisoner there. Private Hall looked like he needed the help.”
“Right you are,” Jackson nodded. “I’ll have to catch up with you later, get these, er, notes translated,” he peered at Mary’s shorthand writing with grimace.
Mary met Sherlock’s eyes as she scampered around the table. He gave no acknowledgement of her, but there was no hostility in his eyes. She didn’t dare nod or show any sign of her identity, but she reckoned he knew that she wasn’t his enemy.
She slipped out into the huge dome beyond and hurried to catch up with John and the officer dragging him away. Already, Mary was trying to construct some frantic plan of attack in her head. They were stuck in prehistoric Britain with no way out and she didn’t even know if Irene was still in the complex or if she’d been caught or, perhaps worse, sent back to twenty-first century London. And she still didn’t know if her real husband was safe, or whether she could trust Irene to help him – suppose Irene found Mary’s John and then used him as leverage to save her own menfolk?
Mary couldn’t do anything about that right now. She just had to focus on the task ahead.
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie films), Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Currently G, could be R in later parts
Warnings: None for this chapter
Notes: The outstanding
so_shhy promised to write me notes from a multi-Sherlock crossover orgy if I set up the scene. I am easily led by temptation.Summary: Mary and Irene steal a time machine and things immediately get worse than they were before.
(Part One on my journal)
(Part Two on
so_shhy's journal)(Part Three on my journal)
(Part Four on
so_shhy's journal)Luminous automobiles coloured like children’s toys streaked past them. The noise they made was atrocious, a wailing that sent a shiver through Mary’s body at the peak of their crescendo. She watched them go, holding her skirts so she didn’t trip up as she followed close behind Irene.
“Fire engines?” she asked. At this stage, she'd believe anything, even that water tanks could be hidden in such small vehicles.
“Pardon?” Irene was flicking her thumb across her black glass box again. She realised what Mary was asking. “Police. Telling the traffic to get out of the way.”
“Do they usually go past every two minutes?”
“No,” Irene said grimly. “They don’t.”
"That's a telephone, right?" Mary asked, jogging to catch with Irene's brisk steps. "Have you tried telephoning your Mr Holmes again?"
"Of course I have," Irene replied.
"Then what are you doing with your little telephone?"
Irene looked up at her, impatience beginning to tinge her voice. "Trying to find someone to help us."
"I thought you didn't want help," Mary persisted. "You refused Mycroft's help."
"Because Mycroft was useless," Irene rolled her eyes. "Someone on this list, however-" she held up the phone. Mary took it and peered at the tiny screen. It was filled with unintelligible punctuation symbols and numbers, and occasional blocks of readable text in a squarish font. Mary quickly found she could make the image move up and down, like an unfurling scroll, by rubbing her thumb on it the way she'd seen Irene do.
"This doesn't mean anything to me," Mary shrugged.
"Yes, most of it's been corrupted," Irene winced. "Before he handcuffed me to the bed, I took this file from the agent who seemed to be working against the people who stole your husband. It's designed to be opened on our technology, so I think he's been undercover in London for a while, waiting for these bastards to turn up. I think it's a list of local people he was investigating, in suspicion of them being part of this," she waved her hands, "syndicate. I've been trying to figure out if any of them could be people I know. People I might hold sway with. So far, though, they're all strangers to me," with a sign, she pushed a strand of hair away from her face. "And usually I'm such a good networker."
"Well, I know this name," said Mary.
Irene glanced up sharply, "What?"
"This name. I've heard it before," Mary held out the phone and Irene leaned in to look, their shoulders pressed together. "Maynard Hudson. He was the husband of Mr Holmes' landlady,” Mary paused, thinking back to the scene, “When John and I went to clear out the man’s belongings I had a long chat with her about all the dead men she'd known. She mentioned her husband, but she was polite in that way folks are about people who they detest but aren’t around to defend themselves. It could be a coincidence, surely not everyone in my London matches up with yours."
"Maybe, maybe not," Irene was looking at her with a wicked little smile. "But Mrs Hudson, at least, exists. Come Mary, let's go have a chat with the old bird."
---
Mary had only visited the notorious Baker Street a handful of times, but she would certainly not have found it today without Irene’s help. The house fronts had completely different facades, the distance to recognisable buildings seemed to have shifted drastically and several of the alleys had been filled in with a number of shops and a glass-fronted room full of women having their hair done by professional maids. Mary wondered if in this emancipated era, servants could hire their services to whomever they liked.
The door to 221b opened on a tidy, short-haired spinster in a lurid plum dress. She took one look at Irene and shut the door again. Irene leapt up the last two stairs and put her shoulder against it just before the latch could snap closed.
“Mrs Hudson, stop! We need your help.”
“Now just get out of here, you – you harlot –“
“For goodness’ sake,” Irene didn’t force the door open, but wedged her heel against it so Mrs Hudson still couldn’t shut them out. “We’re trying to find Mr Holmes and Dr Watson. You must have noticed they’re missing.”
“Oh yes, and unless your timing’s an astounding coincidence, I’ve no doubt you’re responsible,” Mrs Hudson replied through the gap in the door. “Now remove yourself, or I’ll have the police on you, I promise!”
Mary climbed up beside Irene and tried to peer through the crack to catch the old woman’s eye. “My dear lady, please listen to us. I may be a stranger, but I swear on my husband’s life that our intentions are good. Trust me if not Miss Adler, I am a friend to any Watsons and even Holmes’ I cross paths with.”
After a moment of silence in which Mary could feel her heart racing, probably round and round her ribcage, the door was released and Irene pushed it open. Mrs Hudson stood on the far side with her arms crossed and eyes narrowed. Behind her, the flat was dark, the lamp hanging from the ceiling shattered, and Mary could see great lacerations in the wallpaper above the stairs.
“There’s been battle here,” Mary breathed.
“Battle?” Mrs Hudson leaned forward. “There’s been bloody pillory and damned pillaging,” she put her hand over her mouth, blinking for a moment. “It’s the last straw, damn it, I won’t have it, I won’t-“
She turned her face away, and Mary went to her and put her arm around her.
“What’s the boy got himself into?” the old woman whispered, quickly wiping the corners of her eyes and then straightening up. “You’ll come and have tea, both of you, I’m not gonna stand in the dark here. Shut the door, you.”
Mrs Hudson’s den was warmed by a fresh teapot and knitted afghans, and decorated with watercolours of London and incredibly detailed paintings – no, they were photographs, Mary realised – of smiling nieces and grand-nephews, but none pictures with her in them.
“Um. I’ll pour the tea, Mrs Hudson,” Mary said quickly. “You talk to Irene, she’s got a better grasp on things.”
“I bet she does,” Mrs Hudson scowled, but allowed Mary to raid her kitchen for cups and milk. As she left she heard the woman ask, “So who’s your friend then, Miss Adler?”
“Oh, she’s Dr Watson’s wife from another dimension.”
When Mary came back in, the landlady seemed to have ceded her trust to Irene about the matter of helping Mr Holmes (Mary hadn’t heard her reaction to the inter-dimensional wife claim). She thanked Mary for the tea, while Irene took hers without even looking at Mary.
“I like your dress, dear,” Mrs Hudson said, waving her hand at a pouffe for Mary to sit on since there weren’t any other chairs. “Very classic. There was a man in here first thing this morning dressed just as smartly.”
“Thank you-“ Mary’s brain caught up with what the woman had just said. “Wait, a man…? John! You saw John?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t catch his name.”
“Handsome. Brown moustache, blue eyes. Four inches taller than me,” Mary begged.
“Yes, that sounds like him,” Mrs Hudson pursed her lips. “He was gone by the time Sherlock was, though.”
“So he was alright,” Mary put down the tea tray before she could drop it. “He was alive, he came here!”
“That was this morning, a lot of things can happen in half a day,” Irene replied. When Mary’s face fell she added, “Er, but yes, good news,” she turned back to Mrs Hudson. “We need to know about your husband. We have reason to believe he could be involved in this business.”
“I doubt it, dear,” Mrs Hudson wrinkled his nose. “Harry’s very dead.”
“Harry?” Mary settled herself on a pouffe at last. “His name wasn’t Maynard?”
“Harold was his middle name, he always went by Harry. No one called him Maynard except, you know, in court,” Mrs Hudson whispered the last two words. “He was executed by the state of Florida a year ago.”
Mary choked on her tea and tried to hide it by pretending to sneeze.
“Dammit,” Irene leaned back in her threadbare armchair, tapping her nails on her chin. “I wonder why his name was on that list. What did he do, Mrs Hudson? What was his job?”
“Well,” Mrs Hudson smoothed her skirt over her lap. Mary’s aunt always did that when she was preparing for a particularly elaborate and gossip-rich story. “When we first married he was a lieutenant in the British Army, but he had dual citizenship on his mother’s side and after a couple of years we found out children were not going to be on their way,” she shook her head at Mary and said with a wince, “He had a low count, you know. His little soldiers.”
“Ah,” Mary said with a frown and no idea what that meant.
“Anyway, he got a job with the American secret service, or one of those departments, I never knew exactly,” Mrs Hudson shrugged. “Sometimes he’d be away for up to three months with no calls or letters, but he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Then one day – must have been almost ten years ago, I think – he came back and he was,” she stared at the fireplace, which had been tiled over and replaced with an electric heat-pump, “different. He was like my father when he came back from the war, tell the truth. He had this look he got, into the distance. And I hardly recognised him at first, his hair had gone almost white and his face was almost twenty years older, I’d swear.”
Irene raised her head sharply. “He looked older?”
“Stress, you know. Does awful things for the skin,” Mrs Hudson waved her hand. “Thing was, he was cruel after that. Not to me so much, but to people around him. And then, those girls what he did with them…” she gave a shiver. “When they took him in I cooperated with the police, I told them everything. But it wasn’t much, and it looked for a while like he was going to get off, but then they found another body and this poor girl had, you know, DNA evidence. So he was convicted at last. Then six months before his execution, Harry’s lawyer got them to do this test on the DNA that somehow showed it couldn’t possibly have come from a human and they started talking about overturning the whole thing. I was scared out of my wits, I was back in London by then but I knew Harry would come after me because of the way I’d gone against him so quickly. That’s when I got Sherlock on the case and well, you know what he’s like. So that was the end of Harry,” she smiled and sipped at her tea. “Oh, perfect amount of milk, lovey, thank you.”
“So your husband was a man who never talked about his work, aged twenty years in a month and apparently had inhuman sequences in his DNA,” Irene narrowed her eyes, leaning forward with her fingers entwined. “Mrs Hudson, do you think it’s possible that your husband was not, in fact, from this world?”
“I’m not an idiot, Miss Adler,” Mrs Hudson frowned. “I may not be Sherlock Holmes, but I’m still a woman of science. Oh, I do still have Harry’s time machine, though.”
Mary put down her cup so hard she was worried she’d chipped the bottom. Irene’s lips sat open for a moment and then she said quickly. “His time machine?”
“That’s what he called it. Which is bonkers, of course, but he was saying a lot of strange things as the execution got closer,” Mrs Hudson sighed. “Come on, I’ll show it to you. It’s definitely some kind of secret military technology, I was rather worried the CIA or something would bump me off if they learned I had it so I had it shipped over to London with me. Come on.”
Mrs Hudson got out of her chair and gestured for Irene and Mary to follow. She took a key from a hook by the door and they went into the shared corridor, stopping outside a door marked 221c. “That’s why I don’t advertise this place. I could make a bundle, I tell you, but I tell everyone the damp makes it unliveable. Barely managed to put Sherlock off when he arrived. He wanted to use it as a lab,” she had unlocked the door and led them through into a back bedroom which was barren of furniture or decoration.
“Here we are,” Mrs Hudson stopped in front of the closet set into the bedroom wall. She took another key and unlocked the closet, pulling it open to display an empty coat rack and a couple of dusty shelves. “Harry said to destroy it, but when I moved in here I opened the crate and found there were instructions on the back for setting it up. Chinese or something, but there were pictures too.”
Irene looked between the landlady and the empty space. “What, is it… in the closet?”
“No, dear, it is the closet.”
A wrinkle appeared between Irene’s brows, “Mrs Hudson, I don’t know if you think this is funny, but Sherlock and John really are in danger and-“
“Irene,” said Mary, her mouth hanging open. She tugged on the other woman’s sleeve without glancing over. “Irene, look.”
“What?” Irene snapped.
Mary reached out and unlatched the window in front of her, only a few feet to the right of the closet door. She shoved the pane up and leaned out, staring left and right.
“There’s no closet,” Mrs Hudson said patiently. “This wall backs onto the yard where I put my recycling. It’s solid brick and plaster.”
Irene looked out the window and then went and tentatively reached into the closet. She rapped on its back wall. Mary was still looking out the window. She moved her head back and forward, gaping between the yard with the blank brick, and the clear sight of Irene’s arm disappearing to a depth of three foot into the cavity.
Irene whispered, “That’s impossible.”
Mary laughed. “Remarkable! Oh, John will love this. A cupboard that doesn’t exist. Absolutely splendid!”
“But how does it work?” Irene said grittily. “I mean, if it’s a time machine, if it can help us control these windows between the two Londons… how do we make it work?” she turned to Mrs Hudson. “You said there were instructions. Was there a manual? Did it show you how to pilot it?”
“Nothing like that, just how to set it into the wall,” Mrs Hudson shrugged. “I don’t even know how to get it out again, that’s why I haven’t been able to get rid of it.”
“There’s a light switch,” Irene pointed at a chain hanging from the ceiling. “But a closet that doesn’t exist can’t be connected to the mains,” she tugged to the chain, but the bulb hanging into the closet simply flickered on with a buzz. Mary looked over her shoulder as Irene ran her hands across the interior walls, searching for hidden switches or panels. There was nothing.
“What if we get inside it?” Mary asked. Irene raised an eyebrow. “We may as well try everything once,” Mary replied.
“You’re a girl after my own heart,” Irene smiled. She waved at the closet. “Ladies first, harlots follow.”
“Oh, really,” Mary clicked her tongue, but she stepped as far into the closet as she could get. She had to turn her head right onto the side until her neck ached, and there wasn’t even enough room to move her arms when Irene got inside too. Before Mary could have second thoughts, she pulled the door closed and they were left in total darkness.
Mary muttered. “This does not seem like significant progress, Miss Adler.”
“I can think of some progress we could make, Mrs Watson. But on the other hand,” her body shifted, brushing against Mary’s, and then there was the rattle of the chain and the click of the light switch as Irene tugged it.
But the yellowed bulb didn’t come on. Instead, a blue glow illuminated the back of Irene’s neck and then flickered to become what seemed to be a panel of symbols on the back of the cupboard door, like a projection from a glass slide. Mary looked around but there was no sign of a lens or lamp to illuminate the projection. Irene glanced back in the dim light. Her face was as unsure as Mary felt. She reached up and with one delicately manicured fingertip, touched the simplest symbol on the panel, which was simply a circle that was half black and half white.
There was a ringing sound, very similar in its mix of tones to the one that had incapacitated them outside the police station, just before half the street had been swapped with a different century. This time the sound was far less intense, though Mary raised her hands to her ears. When it faded, the symbols had been replaced by the image of a woman’s face.
“This is IDP Headquarters, emergency collect call. Please identify yourself.”
“Ah, yes, this is Agent James Ashlaken Cooper,” Irene cleared her throat. “Badge number one-nine-four-nine-foxtrot-sierra. I’ve acquired this illegal vehicle and would like it brought to headquarters immediately. It seems to be malfunctioning.”
“Agent Cooper,” the woman seemed to be checking something out of sight, “Your appearance doesn’t seem to match your profile, Agent Cooper.”
“Well, I’m in disguise, obviously. As is my,” Irene glanced at Mary. “Colleague. She’s in deep cover, I’d rather she not identify herself at this stage. Is there a problem with my request?”
The woman paused and finally replied, “Your porta-pod seems fine, Agent Cooper, it just hasn’t been warmed up in the few years. It looks like it’s registered to a dishonourably discharged IDP researcher. Is he present?”
“I can confirmed he’s been deceased for some time. I’ll fill out the necessary paperwork later,” Irene said briskly.
“Very well. I’ll slingshot you into the local base of operations in forty seconds. Hold tight.”
The glowing face disappeared, replaced by words and numbers that flashed rapidly across the back of the door. There was a rumble that sounded like it came from deep beneath the earth. Mary grasped Irene’s shoulder as the closet shook, a wailed reverberated in her breastbone and then silence fell.
Irene reached out and opened the closet.
Mary blinked in the light of a clouded, naked sky. She walked across the threshold behind Irene and then found she couldn’t take another step. She was too stunned by what lay before her. It was a wide, green landscape of forest and low moor, windswept and punctuated by a few rocky outcrops in the distance. Straight ahead of them, however, was a mass of human industry. Huge white domes and tunnels made out of canvas supported by thin ribs created an enormous hive spread haphazardly over the grass. The dwellings were raised on platforms above marshy or rocky spots and even stretched up onto a couple of lows hills. Men and women in a grey and blue uniform were moving like ants across the scene, rushing in or out of the cloth doors of the structure, occasionally carrying what looked like strange rifles or metal equipment.
“Where are we?” Mary whispered.
“I think,” Irene said faintly. “We might still be in London.”
“Pardon?”
Irene shielded her eyes as she surveyed the headquarters, presuming that what the structure was. “Imagine for a moment, Mrs Watson, that these people – this agency, I think it is now fair to call them – has technology which makes time travel swift and easy, but leaves travel through space as costly and difficult as ever. Where would be the best place to set yourself up, if you wanted to be close to the action but still out of sight of your enemy and the local populace?”
Mary nodded. “In a time before either were present.”
“Precisely.”
“But it’s impossible. It’s absurd!”
“Many things are, these days,” Irene said.
“And are you really James Cooper?” Mary stared at her. “Is that how you know all this?”
Irene frowned at her, and then gave her low laugh. “No, Mary, I’m not. Cooper was the agent who handcuffed me to the bed. He called in to his boss before he left me, however, and I memorised his name and badge number. Idiot.”
“But how on earth did they think-“
“That he could disguise himself as this little thing?” Irene gave an alluring pose and ran her hand down the side of her torso, “I took a chance that they were either very stupid or particularly good at disguises, and it looks like I was right one way or the other.”
“Excuse me,” a voice drew their attention. “Excuse me, Agent Cooper?”
“Yes,” Irene turned towards the young woman, in the blue and grey uniform, who had emerged out of the nearest white door with a metal tablet under one arm.
“I called your arrival in to central and they said your C.O. is Captain Gallus,” the woman said. Her bearing and tone sounded like many of the military men whom Mary had met through her husband, but she had never seen such features on a woman before. “He’s on site and is rather eager to speak to you, if you’ll follow me.”
Irene and Mary glanced at each other, but let the woman lead them along a freshly-worn path in the grass and in through the canvas doors of the nearest dome. They passed through a honeycomb of desks and walled spaces where more uniformed officers, with black and grey devices over their ears, were speaking into glass panels and tapping away on more silver tablets. Down a round-ceilinged corridor lit by bright white bars of light, they took a sharp turn past a room full of closed doors and then into a five-way intersection in the hive. A man was storming towards them with a pair of subordinates close on his heels, scribbling on tablets.
“Cooper!” the man barked, his jowls wobbling. He narrowed his eyes at Irene. “What the hell is this, Cooper? Why’ve you got your holo still on?”
“Sir, it’s on the blink, sir,” Irene said in a low growl, straightening her back and holding her hands behind her in a perfect mimicry of a soldier at attention. “Got kicked by a local I was trying to help. The target I called in, sir.”
“What the hell are you doing back here?” Captain Gallus folded his arms. “You’re supposed to be in ground zero. We’ve got firefights breaking out across the city and temporal bleed-throughs splitting up our forces left right and centre-“
“Sorry, sir, I wanted to dispose of the, uh, the porta-pod I found,” Irene nodded. “I thought it belonged to the enemy.”
The man’s mouth stayed open for a moment, his eyes narrowed. He shifted his weight, glancing Irene up and down. Mary knew at once that Irene had said something suspicious, some incorrect terminology or just a tone that was out of character for Agent Cooper. She stepped forward quickly, holding out her hand, “Captain Gallus, I’m afraid it’s my fault. I’ve been in deep cover in 1892 when a, um, temporal bleed-through sent me into the middle of this mess. I asked… him to take me to headquarters.”
The commanding officer took her hand roughly. “I see. And you are?”
“I can’t give you my real name at this time, Captain, but you can call me Mary. I’m an undercover researcher, you see. Historical expert for the nineteenth century. I thought my skills could be useful for those of your men trapped there.”
Gallus still had a tough grip on her hand, but he let it go at last. “Then I’ll need you to go with Samson here for processing, Mary. You’ll have to get someone from headquarters to confirm your mission.”
“Of course. That won’t be a problem,” Mary smiled, cussing internally. One of the men behind Gallus stepped forward to escort her away. Mary looked over her shoulder at Irene, who was watching her go impassively. But there was a tenseness in her face that told Mary the other woman had realised how out of their depth they both were.
“I’ll see you back on the front line then, Mary,” Irene called after her. How she expected Mary to get back to one of their Londons was a mystery.
“Yes, Cooper, I want you geared up with the next patrol,” was the last thing Mary heard from Gallus as she was taken away down the nearest white corridor.
At least Samson, her escort, didn’t seem to be paying her that much attention. He was writing something on his tablet, and swore in a language Mary didn’t recognise (funny how no matter the language, swearing was still easily identified). He smacked the side of the tablet with his palm.
“Our damn wi-el keeps going on the blink in this sector,” he complained to Mary. “These stupid mass-produced batteries don’t last long without the power, and we’ve got a couple of prisoners being brought in. I don’t suppose you can type?”
“Type?” Mary said blankly.
“Yeah, they’ve shut down all periphery machines in the admin and processing domes while they fix the wi-el, so we’re having to use a couple of ancient plug-in machines. Without recording equipment we need someone to keep the minutes of the interview when these prisoners arrive and Jackson can only go with two fingers on the old ASKL keyboards. Can you type?”
Mary slotted together those parts of the explanation she could understand, which was very little of it. But she nodded confidently, “I can’t type, but I can write shorthand.”
“What’s shorthand?”
“You know,” Mary gesticulated vaguely, “Abbreviated writing. With a pencil and paper.”
Samson raised an eyebrow.
“I’m a historical expert, remember?” Mary said.
“Ok, that sounds like it’s good enough,” Samson shrugged. “Come on, I’ll see if anyone’s got any notepaper. We can do your processing once this is over.“
A few minutes later they were in a small, curtained-off cordon at the edge of a larger dome. Mary was sitting at a metal desk beside Jackson, who had been swapped out for Samson (though he looked almost identically bland and uniformed). He had in front of him a dead tablet he was staring at mournfully, another plugged-in one that was displaying several files in a language Mary couldn’t read, and a pair of strange tools. One looked like a switchbox and the other a broad-nosed pistol.
Mary herself had been given a pair of flat blue overalls and told to change them for her civilian clothes. The technicians hadn’t even given her the privacy to unclothe, but they weren’t leering at her either, so she’d stripped off her dress as quick as she could and pulled the overalls on, tucking her petticoats into the legs and zipping the ugly uniform right up to her chin. She wasn’t sure where they’d taken her dress. It was one of her favourites. But she had much greater hazards to think about right now.
Shortly, they heard a commotion approaching and Mary jumped as the curtain was torn aside. A red-haired man with stripes on the shoulders of his uniform burst in. He was followed by two privates, each pushing ahead of them a handcuffed man in the contemporary dress of Irene’s London.
“Lieutenant Horne,” Jackson stood up and held out his hand to the red-headed senior. “I’m Jackson from central. Thank you for-“
“Yeah, yeah, just tell me where to take these slave-trading bastards, I've got to get out with the next patrol,” the lieutenant waved Jackson’s hand aside and paced back and forth behind the two prisoners, who had been shoved down into chairs across the table from Mary and Jackson. One of them was small with a round face set in an expression of stoic fury, while the other appeared merely bored. He was strangely familiar, though Mary was sure she’d remember that thin face and bush of black curls.
“For the last time!” the shorter man cried, “We’re not slavers! They were the ones chasing us!”
And then it hit Mary. Her hand froze above the notepaper, her chest constricting beneath the many layers of the overalls and her underclothes, the blood rushing from her cheeks. The second prisoner was staring at her. Observing her. Of course he was. He was Irene’s Sherlock Holmes. She was sure of it, though she’d only seen him in a photograph at Scotland Yard. And that meant, surely, that his companion was Dr John Watson. There was nothing in the man that associated him with her true husband, not face, his voice, even the way he held himself gave no hint of a wounded leg or years marching with a regiment. And yet…
“Oh, right, so how the hell did you manage to operate an illegal trans-dimer wriststrap? And why did we have to chase you across six different zones if you’re innocent bystanders, huh?” Horne leaned right down into John’s face. Jackson elbowed Mary and she remembered she was supposed to be taking a record. She scribbled everything she remembered as fast as she could. “Why did you fire at us with deadly weapons from the thirty-eighth century if you’re from 2011?”
“We stole that strap and those weapons from the people chasing us,” John insisted through gritted teeth. “Sherlock worked out how to make it transport us. He’s clever like that.”
“I’ll give you clever-“ Horne grabbed the front of his jersey and shook him once.
“Lieutenant,” Jackson cleared his throat, and Horne let go, pushing John roughly back into the chair. “We’ve barcoded their blood. They’re not registered as citizens from any database.”
“There, that proves it,” Horne perched on the edge of the table, making it sink a until Mary’s paper started to slide away. She kept a stronger grip on it. “They’ve virally erased their own barcodes. Black market scum.”
“Is that like burning off your fingerprints?” Sherlock (Mary couldn’t think of him as Mr Holmes, it was too confusing) tipped his head to one side. “Interesting. So somatic genetic engineering is easy now? How do you prevent carcinogenesis-“
“Shut it!” Horne bellowed.
“What’s more, we have some inside information from a mole in the smuggling business,” Jackson checked something in his files, “There was an – wow, that’s a lot of zeroes – a very large reward put through the black market networks for a Mr Sherlock Holmes. The buyer is still unknown to us. Doesn’t say the century, but he could have been one of the targets the slavers were after.”
“No,” Horne shook his head. “Sherlock Holmes is from the nineteenth century, and a different dimension entirely. My men already confirmed him as missing when we were first got into the field.”
“Your information is incomplete,” Sherlock droned. “There’s more than one of us.”
Horne leaned forward. “Do you know what it means, not having an identity? You’re in international times zones now. No nation will demand your extradition. The IDP has complete military jurisdiction. You will find yourselves in the most hellish prisons in the universe for as long as we see fit, and given we’ve lost two good men today, you will find that is a very, very long time. Unless,” he said, lips pulled back as he enunciated every word, “you tell me everything about your gang’s little operation. Why you were here, where your central time-slicer is hidden, how many people you’ve kidnapped. Everything.”
Sherlock held his gaze for several long seconds. Finally he said, “It’s true. I am a slaver.”
“What?” John snapped.
“But my friend here isn’t. I’ve been living with him almost two years to keep myself incognito while I get things set up for my little gang,” Sherlock said distastefully. “I only dragged him along because I thought he’d be useful. He’s completely native.”
“Sherlock, don’t you dare,” John hissed. “Don’t do this.”
“Shut it!” Horne barked at him, then turned back to Sherlock. “You’re saying a some totally ordinary fellow let your lead him through all this shit? You really think anyone would be that dumb, or loyal, or both?”
“I chose him for those exact qualities. He’s been very helpful.”
Horne looked to John’s reaction. John spluttered, “It’s not true, he’s making this up. He’s not a – a criminal, or a kidnapper, or whatever you think, he’s just my flatmate.”
Horne turned his gaze to Sherlock’s face. “Well, at least one of you can't be telling the truth, and I don’t believe him,” Horne stabbed his thumb towards John. “So why should I believe you?”
“I’ll prove it,” Sherlock’s eyes widened. “Watching closely?”
“What do you mean by that?”
There was a flurry of movement and Mary squeaked in surprise. Sherlock had stood up and shoved Horne aside, one hand held to his chest while the handcuffs dangled from the other; Mary glimpsed a swollen mass of bruising and realised he must have broken his own hand to get it free of the bonds. With his good one he snatched up the gun-shaped device in front of Jackson, whipped around and pointed it at John, pressing the large grey trigger. There was a beep and John threw himself sideways off the chair, but there came no explosive blast as Mary expected.
With a quick scuffle, the two junior officers had grabbed Sherlock’s arms and pushed him to his knees – he had his hands behind his head and gave no resistance – while Horne hauled John up and sat him back in the chair.
“Jesus Christ,” John gasped, slumping in his chair. “You wretched sod, I thought you’d got a murder-suicide in mind.”
“There,” Sherlock said mildly. “Even the most uneducated smuggler would have recognised that device as harmless. But to a twenty-first century person it appeared to be a weapon. Proof enough for you? John is not involved in this.”
“Can I have my retinal scanner back, please?” Jackson asked, standing up and holding out his hand. One of the privates picked it up and returned it back to him. It had been stepped on in all the excitement, and Jackson inspected its scratched handle with a despairing sigh.
Horne was chewing the inside of his cheek, glaring at Sherlock. “Alright,” he rumbled. “But you’re still going for interrogation.”
“Naturally,” Sherlock sneered.
Horne jerked his head at John, “Private Hall, take the native bloke to the cleanup dome in the processing sector. Get him retconned before you send him back to 2011. Tell them to wipe at least two years, in case this slaver git has put some kind of subconscious programming into him.”
“No,” John tried to wrench himself out of the officer’s hands as he was pulled to his feet. “He guessed it was harmless, don’t you see, he’s just too smart for his own good – let me go –“ he writhed in the officer’s grip even when his arm was twisted sharply behind his back and the man dragged him towards the curtain, “Sherlock!” John yelled, as he watched the other officer secure Sherlock’s ankles in cuffs this time as well as tighter ones around his wrists. "Sherlock!”
Mary felt her throat closing up. She jumped to her feet, looking between the two strangers who seemed suddenly so much like her beloved Dr Watson and his dear friend. She couldn’t help them both. She didn’t even know how to help one of them. What did she do? What would her John do, or Irene or any of the infinitely cleverer and more experienced people she knew?
The curtain dropped closed as John’s white and desperate face was pulled away. Mary made up her mind. If half the stories about Sherlock Holmes were true and this version was half again as clever as the one from her century – well, then Sherlock still had a better chance than anyone of making it out alone. Mary needed to help John even if he wasn’t the John she loved.
“Wait,” she said, glancing at Jackson, “I’ve still got to get processed, sir. I’ll accompany the prisoner there. Private Hall looked like he needed the help.”
“Right you are,” Jackson nodded. “I’ll have to catch up with you later, get these, er, notes translated,” he peered at Mary’s shorthand writing with grimace.
Mary met Sherlock’s eyes as she scampered around the table. He gave no acknowledgement of her, but there was no hostility in his eyes. She didn’t dare nod or show any sign of her identity, but she reckoned he knew that she wasn’t his enemy.
She slipped out into the huge dome beyond and hurried to catch up with John and the officer dragging him away. Already, Mary was trying to construct some frantic plan of attack in her head. They were stuck in prehistoric Britain with no way out and she didn’t even know if Irene was still in the complex or if she’d been caught or, perhaps worse, sent back to twenty-first century London. And she still didn’t know if her real husband was safe, or whether she could trust Irene to help him – suppose Irene found Mary’s John and then used him as leverage to save her own menfolk?
Mary couldn’t do anything about that right now. She just had to focus on the task ahead.