Chapter Text
Vimes first suspected something was wrong when no one came to interrupt him at home.
This wasn’t technically a strange set of affairs. He was on paternity leave (unwillingly, but not even Vimes could say no to Carrot when he was in a mood like that. It had been established some time ago, also Carrot’s idea, after a new Constable had a young wife at home. Vimes didn’t know if he would’ve gone along with it then if he knew Carrot was going to use it against him like this now.). Officers of the Watch were not supposed to disturb him at home unless there was a dire emergency.
Practically speaking, this meant he and his wife Sibyl got a lot of policemen (well, police-people, counting Cheri and a few others) wandering by for tea who nonetheless managed to pack quite a few pertinent questions into the space of time it took to drain a teacup[1]. It was only when the actual emergencies happened that everybody started avoiding letting Vimes know anything, so he wouldn’t find out what a mess they’d made of things in his absence.
Apparently, as Captain Carrot kept reminding him, he made a big impression on people as Commander of the Watch. Vimes was often tempted to reply that, despite Carrot being only captain, he cast a pretty big one too. It didn’t escape Vimes that wherever he went, people tended to expect Carrot to show up sooner or later.
When Young Sam was down for his nap and seemed likely to stay asleep, Vimes announced, “I’m going to stroll over by Pseudopolis Yard.” He didn’t think it was strange that he might want to take a walk past the Watch’s main station, but Sibyl gave him that particular look that wives gain the ability to dish out about three months after marriage. “Just to say hello. Maybe thank-you for all the flowers they sent ‘round after Sam was born. You’re always telling me to say thanks to people.”
“Yes, but I still write all your thank-you cards,” said Sibyl, who by dint of noble birth still gave in to the opinion that it was polite to thank people for gifts you hadn’t enjoyed receiving or ever used. Vimes would prefer to investigate them all for tax fraud and see who he could nab for which ugly vase they’d written off as a charitable donation. Even the Home-Improvement Automatic Calendar Sibyl had been given last week as a late baby shower gift (“It makes keeping things straight at home so easy!”), which she claimed to enjoy, was shut off so the imp running the machinery inside wouldn’t wake Young Sam with any ill-timed beeping.
“I’ll go down anyway,” Vimes said. “Take a walk for my health or something.” Healthy walks were another thing Sibyl believed in wholeheartedly, and Vimes regarded with suspicion. Sibyl kissed him goodbye, and Vimes went off down into the parts of the city which reassuringly lacked all the gilt and pointed iron fences of conspicuous consumption.
The Watch house on Pseudopolis Yard road was disappointingly quiet. A large advertisement had been pasted up, carefully just outside the limits of Watch property, showing off the newest Burleigh & Stronginthearm crossbows. On the other side was a poster for the Home-Improvement Automatic Calendar. Vimes briefly debated papering over it with something more wholesome—maybe the latest report on that string of recent murders that had just been tied up.
When Vimes went in he got a few strange looks, but nobody around felt senior enough to question it. Vimes sidled up to Constable Visit and said, “Been a quiet day, then, has it?”
Visit jumped, dislodging a stack of religious tracts that teetered on the edge of his desk (his proper Omnian name was Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets, and he did his best to live up to it). “Commander! As a matter of fact, we—”
Constable Cheery Littlebottom, at the desk behind him, coughed loudly, dislodging Visit’s promising confession. “Nothing to worry about, sir,” she told Vimes. “Everyone’s out on the usual patrol and we haven’t heard anything via clacks or pigeon.”
Vimes sighed. In the old days you waited for someone to ring the alarm bell and went running to their aid. Now with the clacks system sending messages in minutes where it used to take hours, and the pigeon messages, and the gargoyle-based semaphore system, you didn’t even have to leave the Watch house to find out about ten different crimes happening in ten different parts of the city.
“Is Carrot around?” Vimes asked hopefully, and was rewarded with Cheery’s response of:
“No sir, he’s on his usual round.”
“Ah. Well, I suppose I’ll just wait for him in his office.” Vimes went up to his own office, which Carrot was currently deputizing. Carrot had organized all the paperwork on his desk. Now instead of dangerously teetering piles, they formed a veritable fortress wall around whoever sat in the chair. It was incredibly structurally sound. Carrot had done his best to make four symmetrical towers with a lower curtain wall connecting them. Vimes half expected to spot flying buttresses made out of inkpots and dirty mugs.
Vimes sat down. He didn’t know why he was so disappointed that nothing was going wrong. He’d had a feeling that morning, but what was a feeling? He ought to be glad that the city wasn’t throwing itself at the nearest source of peril like usual.
Vimes dug in his pocket, and lit a cigar. If there was trouble, he was exactly in the right place for it to find him.
*******
On the opposite side of the city from the Pseudopolis Yard station stood Unseen University. Wizards from far and wide agreed it was the best place in the world to go for a magical education, and certainly, the university boasted some of the most cutting-edge arcane advancements in the world. Some of the students’ projects were so cutting edge, they were having quite a lot of difficulty shaving with them without nicking themselves—so to speak.
Currently, one wizard named Ponder Stibbons was talking to some very important people and hoping they wouldn’t notice all the sticking plasters on his neck and chin.
“I don’t understand,” Ponder said. “Didn’t we already give you what we agreed on?”
“Aha,” said the sharply dressed businessperson in front of him, as if Ponder had told a mildly amusing joke which propriety required them to react positively to. “As I explained, Tinks & Sons, Co., Ltd., is expanding their business. Surely you’ve noticed.”
“You mean those little imp-run units? Yes, of course, they’re everywhere these days, but that doesn’t mean you can just walk in here and—”
“Mr. Stibbons,” said the businessperson. “If you’ll check the contract you signed with us, I believe you will see that in clause (A), subsection B five-aught-twelve, that Tinks & Sons, Co., Ltd., reserves the right to scale up their use of your...ingenious little system in concert with any scaling-up of our manufacturing and sales goals.”
It was Ponder’s turn to say “Ah.” This time it was with the tone of a man who did not have the contract on him to check, was doubting whether he would be able to find such a clause in all the small print even if he did, and who most of all did not have the social status or wealth to argue with the person currently offering him a lot of money in exchange for something that was, theoretically, possible. Plus they had brought along a companion he suspected of being a lawyer, from the way the man was lurking so...uprightly.
Still, he hesitated.
“You have to understand,” Ponder began, “that it’s a very delicate setup—”
“And that is why we have licensed your help, Mr. Stibbons, not merely rented out your machine for our personal use.” The businessperson smiled. “What use would such an invention be without the mind of its inventor?”
Ponder wavered, debating whether or not to bring up all the other people who had helped him build (and still helped maintain) the invention in question. He decided it wouldn’t be received well. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “It will take some time...we obviously can’t just flip a switch and make this happen...”
“Of course!” Ponder received a pat on the shoulder which had been carefully calculated to the exact degree of force and warmth required to raise the morale of any employee it was applied to. Not knowing this, Ponder’s morale stubbornly refused to rise, and in fact sank a few centimeters. “We’ll be here tomorrow, then, to check in. How does twelve-thirty sound to you?”
“Fine,” Ponder said balefully.
“I’m glad we could work this out. Have a pleasant day, Mr. Stibbons.”
As the businesspersson walked out and the lawyerlike one drifted in his wake, Ponder readjusted his wizard’s hat for confidence, and sighed deeply. Instead of retreating back inside the High-Energy Magic Building, to make the adjustments that he’d just agreed to, he turned to face the main building of the university’s campus. He had to talk to the Archchancellor of Students about this. Needing funding for Ponder’s Department of Inadvisably Applied Magic was one thing; but the Archchancellor insisting that this business dealing was a good idea was something else. Ponder would have to try and make him see sense.
*******
It was extremely annoying to wake up and not know where I was. Mostly because I shouldn’t have been in a state I needed to wake up from in the first place.
I was having a perfectly normal recharge cycle inside my room on Preservation Station, the orbit-level station above one of the planets that belonged to PreservationAux, a non-corporate alliance I was starting to not hate existing in. Then suddenly my risk assessement module started blaring and jolted me out of recharge, but I came back to active awareness only to find every input I had filling up with garbage data.
I was so swamped with junk inputs I might as well have been an unconscious human, because I couldn’t make out anything about my environment or what was happening until I landed awkwardly on a hard surface and my inputs cleared up enough that I could get my bearings again.
My threat assessment module started going wild, and I was inclined to agree, because for some reason I was in a basement. It was the kind of moldy old basement you might see on Preservation (the planet, not the station), and that made my performance reliability drop a few percentage points, because a) I did not like being on planets, b) I didn’t WANT to be on a planet, and c) I had not gotten out of my chair, gone out of my room, booked a transport down to the planet’s surface, and finished riding in said transport. Much less a transport that landed in a damp stone basement.
I checked my internal clock, then double checked every piece of data I’d recorded in the last half hour. My clock was right; less than fifteen corporate standard seconds had passed from the first scrambled input I got to right now. That didn’t make sense unless the universe was somehow operating on the laws of physics from my favorite show, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (I had been having an argument with Ratthi, one of my clients, for weeks about the viability of the proposed official timeline. I was right. Ratthi did not agree).
So I was standing there, on an unknown planet I couldn’t identify. I couldn’t access any records of a security evaluation I hadn’t performed. I was a corporate-manufactured security unit which most residents of a freehold like Preservation regarded as a horrific anagram of human and machine (I don’t like being called human, because it’s not really accurate (I also don’t mean anagram, I mean the other thing)).
Constructs like me are forced to belong to a guardian, and that might have shielded me from the worst if a security officer walked into the basement, but my legal guardian, Dr. Mensah, was also on Preservation Station, and I didn’t see any sign that she was in this basement with me.
I hoped I was on the planet just below the station, because if I was anywhere outside of PresAux’s freehold the security that walked downstairs would be corporate, and if they figured out I was an unknown SecUnit, they’d shoot me on sight. Corporations manufacture SecUnits; the humans they hire know exactly how dangerous we are.
I shut off threat assessment and risk assessment because they wouldn’t stop screaming at me. I would say that it doesn’t pay to have a computer for half your brain that constantly yells at you, but I actually do use a lot of the processing power and storage space my hardware has capacity for. The cloned human brain half is mostly there to provide hormones and anxiety.
Still, it has its uses; the anxiety was currently dialling up the sensitivity on my hearing without my having to do it myself. The basement was mostly quiet, and looked unused, but there was noise above that suggested I was underneath a semi-crowded location. I compared it against some of my old data from transport stations, Dr. Mensah’s meeting room, and a Preservation festival, and turned up a station called DualNexus as the closest match. It was a station I hadn’t done anything interesting on. I remembered it being too crowded to go completely unnoticed, but not crowded enough to be able to blend in with the masses. So that sucked, because it meant I was going to have to work hard not to be spotted as I made my way out.
I reached for the feed. That would at least tell me where I was; I was stupid not to think of it faster. My ping returned error=NULL . That made my performance reliability drop so drastically I almost auto-diagnosed it as a crash and went into an emergency reboot. Overriding the default protocols, I tried again. No matter where I was, there had to be a feed, but I wasn’t picking up on one. Was I somehow out of range? Was this some kind of Preservation anti-technology commune? Even the most extreme communes still had some feed access for things like medical emergencies and natural disaster evacuation notices.
Maybe this was an illegal commune? I needed to get out of this basement and to somewhere with better reception. I was still at 83% performance reliability and wavering, and I needed to get moving before anything weirder happened that dropped me farther.
I was lucky that however I had gotten here, my spy drones were still with me. I sent two to position themselves just in front of the basement door, scanning for any security measures along the way. Their visual inputs didn’t help me spot any hidden cameras. Normally this would have made me nervous, but if I was on a Preservation commune, there might genuinely be no cameras. Which would suck, but at least I had my drones.
I cautiously sent both scouts under the gap at the bottom of the door and set them to monitor the hallway so I could build up a profile of ambient activity. The people walking by were wearing pointy hats with wide brims, different in appearance but all similar in construction, and robes similar to caftans that went down to the knee if not the ankle. There were a lot of interesting aesthetic choices being made on this planet.
I was glad for my own clothes, full of secure pockets and made from stab-resistant fabrics. I didn’t see any sign of weapons, but someone could be hiding a knife in the folds of those long caftans. I also didn’t see anything that looked like augments on the humans, or the removable kind of feed access devices.
I waited twenty minutes longer than I needed to finish gathering data and building the profile. There was a periodic lull in activity about ten times as long as the shorter periods of intense crowding. Humans were moving from place to place, and completing activities of some kind for a fixed duration; all the lulls were about the same length. I waited for the next lull, when the halls would be empty, scanned the halls for cameras or security devices for a fifth time, and exited the basement.
Obviously, even though I performed all reasonable (and some unreasonable) precautions, some human in a tall pointy hat saw me walking down the hall two minutes in and said something firm to me in a foreign language. It sounded an awful lot like the tone people used for “Who are you and what are you doing here.” They weren’t shouting, so I looked away and kept walking. When I didn’t answer, the human repeated the thing they said, louder and more frantic.
Clearly the clothes were more critical to showing that humans wearing them belonged there than I anticipated. I didn’t have time to guess why. I started running for the door at the end of the hall that had daylight beyond it. The lone human shouted something, but they weren’t moving to chase me, which meant they anticipated something else coming to do it for them, fast.
The doors slammed shut ahead of me. There was no feed. They weren’t automated. My drones, hovering in a cloud around me to deflect shots, would have spotted a mechanism. The only metal parts were the hinges. I was going too fast to slow down. Mid-sprint, I rolled up my sleeves.
*****
Trouble had come, all right. Vimes had still been at the Yard when the pigeons started coming in with an explosion of feathers and the gargoyle constable Downspout had sent news of an upset down by Unseen University. Wizards seemed like it was going to shape up to be something Vimes would have to worry about, and Carrot was still out on patrol, so no one could order him to stay out of it.
He was glad he’d gone. A few constables ran interference with the wizards while Vimes studied the scene from behind Cheery. Cheery, their forensics expert, was going it over with an experienced eye, but Vimes didn’t like the look of what he saw no matter his expertise.
The door at the end of an unremarkable hallway, along the edge of the main building, had been broken in half—not exactly in half, but along an unusually straight line. The iron barring was cut off by the damage as sharply as the wood, and their ends looked suspiciously melted. “Thoughts, Constable?” Vimes asked.
“Something came from the inside and broke through,” Cheery answered without looking away from the scattering of splinters outside the door. “Whatever it was was very hot.”
“I was worried you were going to say that.” Vimes braced himself for news that the wizards had summoned some kind of new horrible creature from what they called the “Dungeon Dimensions”, whatever those were.
The wizards had brought out a nervous one as a sort of virgin sacrifice to the fires of the Watch’s suspicion. “Who’re you?” Vimes asked, as the other wizards all backed a subtle step away from their spokesman.
“I want to know what you think you’re doing here,” the wizard demanded.
“Oh, yes, and I’m Commander What’s It To You. Out with it,” Vimes ordered. “What got summoned this time?”
“We didn’t summon anything,” the bespectacled wizard said hotly. “Nor did we ask for the Watch’s presence here!”
“When something explodes loud enough for the people up in the clacks towers nearby to notice, it becomes the Watch’s business,” Vimes said, stabbing a finger at the nearest offending tower. The clacks, in ignorance of their relevance, went on with the distant thump—thump of shutters opening and closing in copyrighted patterns. The wizard’s face went pale.
Vimes had heard from the pigeon message system, not from the clacks (the tightfisted owner wouldn’t have called the Watch for help if a clacks worker got strangled to death on the job). The wizards, however, didn’t need to know the specifics. If they thought the rising clacks company was involved, it would give Vimes a lever to shift them with.
“Now let’s try again,” Vimes said. “Who are you, and what happened here?”
“Ponder Stibbons,” the wizard said stiffly. Vimes managed to notice (finally, though the new-baby-induced haze) that he wore an odd loose shirt emblazoned with the slogan I AM A ROCKET WIZARD, ACTUALLY. There were several patches near the hems in need of darning, but they were mostly hidden by his robes over top. “I was in the middle of finding out what happened when you all showed up and interrupted.”
“So what’s there to know?” Vimes asked in his best Let’s All Cooperate So We Don’t Have To Keep Talking To Each Other voice.
Ponder sighed. “A student saw a strange person walking down the hall of the Rectory. That’s the building here, next to High-Energy Magic on the left there.” Ponder pointed the buildings out, indicating first the building the hallway belonged to, then a second with a large spire built on top of it.
“How strange?” Vimes eyed the assortment of patchy robes and wizardly hats adorning the crowd around Stibbons.
“Someone who wasn’t a wizard,” Ponder said. Vimes mentally shrugged. When everyone around you had the same fashion sense, it must register as normal after a point. “When they asked what that person was doing there, the person started running.”
“A description would help us find this person. I assume that would interest you, if anything was taken.”
“No,” said Ponder, surprising Vimes. “As far as we can tell nothing was taken.” From the look on his face, he shared the opinion that the lack of an obvious crime clearly meant something else had been going on.
“Nothing in your high-energy building over there worth stealing?” Vimes said, provoking a spark of anger in Ponder’s eyes. “You haven’t mentioned what did the exploding.”
“Other students heard the disturbance and tried to help by applying magic inadvisably,” said Ponder. “In the confusion, the stranger got away.”
Vimes considered this. He had gotten the alert at the Yard and come straight down; how far could a person get in that time, when they first had to get across the campus lawn and over the walls? With noonday traffic the way it was...traffic, there was a thought. “Constable,” he said, and the nearest head snapped up and alert. “Get someone to check all the traffic imps stationed within a block of the University. See if they might’ve caught someone who looked strange.” He looked back down at Ponder. “Your description would help.”
Ponder turned to one of the wizards, who turned to the constable that had been singled out. “Er, dark-haired human,” the wizard said, eyes tilted thoughtfully upwards. “Long jacket, pants down to the ankle. Lots of pockets. Don’t know where they got the stuff from, it was too nicely made to be homespun.”
While the constable pried more identifiable details, such as the color of their clothing, out of the wizard, Cheery called Vimes’ attention back to herself. “Look at how this fell apart,” she told Vimes, gesturing down the edge of the door’s break and then at the half lying on the ground. “It’s still a whole door.”
“So?”
“So barely any of it’s been actually broken. It’s like someone cut it with a sword instead of busting it to pieces. Except I don’t know any swords that can cut through iron at melting temperature, or that hit in little bursts like this.”
“Neither do I,” Vimes muttered, seeing the little details as they were pointed out. The door had been opened like perforated paper. “Why cut the door, anyway? Was it locked when this happened?”
“The bolt wasn’t thrown. If it was, this half”—Cheery gestured to the half that had the doorknob, which was the half on the ground—”might have held on to the frame better.”
Vimes stepped through the hole in the doorway. The hallway beyond was plainer than he expected from wizards. He studied the floor. No convenient muddy footprints. Someone ran down this hallway. Why break the door down instead of just pushing it open? Stopping to unsheathe a sword and swing it had got to be the slower option.
Vimes turned to face the doorway. Forget the door. Once outside, where was there to go? The thief—well, fugitive, nothing had been stolen—couldn’t have been familiar with the University if they weren’t a wizard. Nobody but wizards and a couple of brave shops lining the streets outside the walls enjoyed close proximity to magical experiments.
Just outside the door, a turn to the right would bring a person to the front of the building they’d just left. A turn to the left would take them to the building with the spire. If they hadn’t turned, they would have needed to make it across a sizable distance of open lawn before getting to the walls—however they had gotten past the walls themselves without using the gate.
A human being could only run so fast. The wizards hadn’t seen anything once the din of magic died down. Vimes’ familiarity with magic was mostly flash-bang types, but those didn’t stick around long unless they started some kind of fire, and there weren’t enough burn marks to produce a camouflaging amount of smoke.
“They didn’t try to leave,” Vimes said.
“Sorry, what?” Cheery startled upright, but Vimes was already moving towards the High-Energy Magic building.
1 A not insignificant amount of time, if you spent most of teatime talking about misdemeanors instead of drinking said tea.