Unobtainium 1: Kate on a Hot Tin Roof (2 page)

Antonia was silent for a second. ‘Would it be within your power to allow David and myself to see your feral child, Doctor? Having had experience of such monstrous chimera before, we may be able to judge whether this new experiment is better suited to civilised existence than the ones we encountered in Africa.’

‘I should value your opinion, Mrs Wooster, but I would ask that you keep an open mind. Kate, for that is how she calls herself, is the victim in this detestable turn of events.’

There was a flicker of genuine surprise at his words. ‘Why, Doctor Barstow-Hall, you give me hope that she may, indeed, be more than a mere animal. The things we fought showed no signs of self-awareness, let alone enough to call themselves anything, and spoke only in grunts and growls. I find myself impatient to see the morning and my chance to meet your “Kate.”’

Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 12
^th
April.

Someone had found a light, cotton shift for Kate to wear, and she had been cleaned since Charles had last seen her. Her hair had been cut into a rather modern style, though the rough hacking it had taken before had necessitated a shorter cut. Charles believed the style was known as a bob, and it did suit the girl.

Her skin was no less dark for the washing. She did not have the black skin of those of Nubian blood, but she was no pale, English rose like Antonia Wooster, whom she regarded warily as the huntress entered the room with her husband. Then she saw Charles and her face lit up.

‘Sharles!’ she exclaimed, beaming at him and showing off her fangs.

‘Good morning, Kate,’ Charles said, returning her smile. ‘These are my friends, David and Antonia Wooster.’

‘Good morning, young lady,’ Antonia said, smiling rather as one might to a child. In truth, they had no idea how old the girl was. David hung back, allowing his wife to speak while he watched, eyes scanning over every detail.

Kate regarded Antonia for a second. ‘Pu-leased tooo make y’r ak-aquaint,’ she said. It was as though she was struggling with the simple sentence, but she managed a close approximation of what Charles had said to her the day before.

‘By George,’ David said softly, ‘I believe your assessment may be accurate, Doctor.’

Antonia was still looking less than sure. ‘May I come closer, Kate?’ she asked. ‘I won’t hurt you. I just want to look at you.’

Kate looked unsure, but at an encouraging nod from Charles she nodded to Antonia and the tall huntress closed the distance to the shorter girl. Reaching out, Antonia ran gentle fingers over Kate’s jawline and then lifted one of her arms, feeling the muscles all the way down to her hands. She stepped back, nodding. ‘Thank you very much, Kate,’ she said.

‘My pu-leasure,’ Kate intoned in her throaty voice.

‘Perhaps a cat of some sort,’ Antonia said. ‘The skin tone suggests something with dark fur. A panther? Her dentition is human, I’d say, aside from the extended canines. The jaw musculature is pronounced for a stronger bite, and the limbs appear strongly muscled. But her eyes…’

‘What about her eyes?’ Charles asked, stepping closer. ‘The colour is unusual, but…’ Kate turned to look at him, her amber eyes bright in the winter sunshine from the window, and he saw what Antonia meant. Kate had vertical slits for pupils now that she was in daylight, just like those of a cat.

‘Oh my dear child,’ Antonia said, addressing the bemused girl in front of her, ‘what did that foul man do to you.’

‘Fffather make me special,’ Kate said. ‘Fffather told me so.’

The three adults looked at each other and then back to Kate. ‘He was your father?’ Charles asked, shock evident in his voice.

‘How could any man do that to his own child?’ David breathed. ‘He’s burned her…’

Charles looked down at the reddened skin on Kate’s arm. He had seen it when they had brought her up from the cell and known then what it had meant. ‘I’m afraid it’s worse than that. That is a burn caused by Unobtainium radiation. He has been exposing her to the energy of the reactor. Though…’ He frowned and, gently, took Kate’s arm. She did not resist as he examined the back of her forearm. ‘This is healing substantially faster than I would have expected given the state of it yesterday. I’ve seen men plagued by these burns for weeks. Many suffer worse effects.’

‘Worse?’

‘Yes.’ He looked at Kate. ‘Your father? Does he put you in the blue light often?’ She nodded. ‘Does it make you feel sick?’

‘Once,’ Kate replied, half purr, half whisper.

‘Nausea is not infrequent in high enough doses, along with loss of motor skills and fatigue. Then comes chronic pain and loss of hair.’

‘She seems to have all her hair, if a little roughly cut,’ David commented.

Charles gave a cough. ‘Not… all of what one might expect, but she certainly has a full head of hair, yes.’ David gave a rumble of laughter at Charles’s discomfort; Charles was a little surprised to note that Antonia did not seem the least discomforted. ‘If your exposure exceeds a certain level, you die. If you’re lucky that is rapid, though it is never pleasant.’

‘That’s if you’re lucky?’

‘Some last for weeks as their bodies degrade. Sick, prone to disease. And those are the cumulative effects. Sudden large doses will blind you, sterilise you. Long-term sterility may be a godsend since children born to men exposed for long periods are prone to abnormalities.’

‘Then the question,’ Antonia said, her eyes on Kate, ‘is why our young kitten is still alive at all?’

‘Fffather make me special,’ Kate repeated.

‘I think I’d like to meet your father,’ Antonia replied, her tone dark, ‘but for now I think you can rely on Charles to take care of you.’

The fanged smile returned. ‘Sharles!’

‘Yes. I’ll see to obtaining suitable clothes for a young lady.’ Antonia held up a hand before Charles could even open his mouth. ‘I know. I’ll be sure to have it charged to your account, though what your accountant will think of a bill for a lady’s undergarments I cannot imagine. I’d wager she’s not full grown, so be ready for the bills when you have to have all her clothes handmade.’

Kate looked between them, blinking. She was eye-to-eye with Charles and Antonia, who were both around five feet nine. David was closer to six feet and the only one in the room taller than the yellow-eyed girl.

‘How old is she?’ David asked. ‘Do you know how old you are, Kate?’ That just got a shake of the head.

‘Fifteen,’ Antonia said, ‘or sixteen. Certainly no older and not much younger. I’ll see to the clothes. I know several establishments which cater to the taller woman, obviously.’

David gave a mocking sigh. ‘She costs us a fortune in riding britches. It’s the long legs.’

Charles gave a shrug. ‘Until I saw young Kate yesterday, I was unaware that women had legs. I thought they moved around on casters.’ His slight smile indicated that he was joking, but Antonia jumped on it anyway.

‘We really
must
find you a wife, Charles. It’s not healthy. A man without a wife is liable to all sorts of wrong habits.’

Now Charles gave a deep, fake sigh. ‘But all the best ones are taken, my dear Mrs Wooster.’ Well, he was more or less faking.

Richmond.

Charles watched as six men manoeuvred the reactor into a shielded case for transport. He frowned at his thought and amended it: four men and two women. It was the women who were doing the heavy lifting while the men handled the more delicate work of latching the case closed. It was a social change which his grandfather, Hunter Hall, had been responsible for thanks to his invention of the Mechman suit. The bulky mechanical frame wrapped around the operator’s body amplifying muscles using the power of stored electricity driving powerful motors. Unfortunately, or fortunately in Charles’s opinion, to make something which was a useful size and contained all the equipment needed left little space for the driver, so women had found an important place in industry, even if that had not resulted in all of the reforms some had hoped for.

Charles always had a pair of Mechman operators on his hazardous materials disposal teams, always women, of course, even though his father had pushed for the use of small boys for such dangerous work. Charles, however, viewed the women as more level-headed. In fact, generally more so than the adult men they worked with.

Everyone, including Charles and the Mechman operators, was working in the stifling suits required for protection against radiation. Another of Hunter Hall’s inventions, the suits were layered cloth, lead sheets, and adamantium mesh, doubled up to be sure. But if the women dropped the reactor and the case cracked, the suits might just stop them dying quickly, but that was the best they could hope for.

‘We got it, sir.’ The final latch had been locked in place and the team’s supervisor, who was one of the men, was giving his report with an air of relief. Charles was thinking the same thing.

‘Very good. As usual, you’ve all done an exemplary job and this one was not easy. Expect a little extra compensation in your pay this week.’

There was a pleased rumble from the workers as they began wheeling the container out. The Mechman suits were going to be needed again before they got it out of the building. For now, Charles was thankful that he could get out of the heavy suit and start looking around the laboratory. He was hoping to find something which would give more of a clue to Kate’s origins, but if he were honest, he was not hopeful.

The equipment was telling him some things; indeed, it was suggesting a level of maniacal genius which Charles almost respected. Almost.

The cables he had seen on first entering and taken for electrical conduits were actually somehow able to contain and direct radiation from the reactor. They worked if he shone his light down them. He had never seen anything like it and was sure that such a device could have enormous practical application. But what it had been used for was to direct a radiation source from one place to strike a contained human body from multiple angles.

Not just men or women, however. There was a box set in one corner of the room which had several of the radiation guides attached to it. There was nothing in the box now, and it could have been there for experiments on small animals, but something about it suggested another purpose. It finally hit him that the box was almost certainly airtight so animals were an unlikely target. What was it the man had been working with?

The most disturbing things in the building were in the cellars, in rooms beside the cell Kate had been kept in. Charles did his best to turn his emotions off as he walked through, cataloguing and checking. If he let himself feel, he was likely to do a poor job, and he wanted very much to do a good job. Kate deserved his best work.

The surgical instruments, most of them very much in need of a good cleaning and apparently largely there for autopsy, were one thing. There were some distinctly oddly shaped frames, often with leather restraints. Charles stood examining one of them for several minutes, trying to work out what experiment might have been performed on it. When he finally concluded that it was meant for a particularly invasive ‘experiment’ upon a restrained woman, he had to leave the building for several minutes.

Franklin was standing outside, a cigarette clutched between his fingers. Somehow Charles felt a little better seeing that the inspector’s hands were shaking.

‘Has any headway been made in the search for this mad man, Inspector?’

‘We obtained a description, sir. It’s been put out to every port and every station we could get it to. No one has seen him yet, but we’re still hopeful.’

Charles nodded. ‘When you find him, I wish to talk to him.’

‘You’ll pardon my presumption, sir, but talking to him doesn’t seem to be what you have in mind.’

‘I will indeed pardon your assertion, Inspector. Right at this moment, I have a need to do considerable violence to the man, but I believe I will have regained my objectivity sufficiently not to shoot him on sight. Just to be sure I’ll have myself disarmed before I encounter him. I hope this admission does not make you think less of me.’

Franklin took a drag on his cigarette, his hand still shaking. ‘Frankly, sir, I’d have thought less of you if you’d felt any other way.’

Knightsbridge, 15
^th
April.

Charles worked his way through the mathematics carefully, knowing that the result would almost certainly be the same as the first two times he had done the calculation. He was doing it again, while trying to control his breathing, because the first time had given him enough of a shock that he was doubting his abilities.

He was running a second mass spectrometer sample as well, in case the first had been in error. There was the possibility of contamination. Yes, there was, even if he had done all the preparatory work himself and was sure that there had not, in fact, been anything there to contaminate the samples from the box he had found in the lab. The samples were small, but he had confidence in his equipment.

And the numbers from the calculation came out the same as before. The substance had an atomic mass of two hundred and sixty-two. He looked over at the spectrometer, seeing the line on the display which told him he had got the same result as before.

‘That,’ he said to the empty room, ‘is impossible.’

Unobtainium-262 was found in microscopic quantities in the mines at Ullapool. There was an ounce in the vaults at Rhidorroch, two at the Royal Society. That was the world’s entire supply as far as anyone knew, but somehow this man had obtained some. No one knew what, if any, properties it had, but it was known to be stable, or sufficiently stable that any decay had never been detected.

His train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the laboratory door.

‘Come.’

Harroway entered and gave a short nod. ‘Sir, Inspector Franklin called.’ Harroway was not just Charles’s manservant, and Charles had tried to persuade the man that a little less formality was allowed these days, but Harroway only allowed his gentlemanly demeanour to slide a little while assisting in the lab. They were currently in the laboratory, but there was no assistance being undertaken. At forty-two Harroway was several years Charles’s senior, but he was a good man, an excellent housekeeper, and he knew how to use a pistol should someone attempt entry to the house for nefarious ends. He also had all his hair and teeth, and was quite fit and moderately handsome in an aging way. And he was always immaculately dressed, as was Charles, largely thanks to Harroway.