Someone shouted, “Dreary! Get on with it!”

“Order! Order!” another countered.

Burton moved to Swinburne, Trounce and Bendyshe. “What’s going on here, Tom?”

“They were about to approve the invasion of the rival empires when I was dragged in. My torture has delayed mobilisation.” He managed a weak grin. “At least I know the pain was useful for something.”

“Are you holding up?”

“It comes in waves. I’m all right for the moment, but the nanomechs will start on me again in a short while.”

Wells was saying, “Surely, out of this commonality, it is possible for you to find in yourselves an affinity for your fellow man? I urge you, discover your mercy. Embrace compassion. Ask what there is to admire in a world where the majority are suppressed and monitored and designedly distracted by falsehoods; where a few maintain their privileged position by deceiving the rest, by sucking at them like leeches, by looking down upon them as little better than animals, by jealously guarding their own interests at the expense of the majority. Where is your honour?” He threw up his arms. “Great heavens! My contemporaries had such high hopes for the future! We envisioned a world in which all men and women were equal; where every person would reap the rewards of their efforts and willingly make contributions toward the betterment of all. Can you people not see that the only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other? Can you not understand that, by such a measure, you have failed utterly and miserably? I beseech you; destroy these terrible divisions you’ve created!”

As a body, the audience burst into raucous laughter.

“Please!” Wells pleaded. “Listen to me!”

Burton stepped forward. “Bertie—”

A deafening roar interrupted him. A ball of ferocious white flame blazed from the black hulk suspended above them. Bullets ripped down and thudded into Wells, shredding his clothes and flesh, crushing him to the floor and smashing the tiles around him.

The fire guttered and vanished. The roar slowed to a rapid metallic clattering then stopped.

Shiny blood oozed outward from the Cannibal’s tattered corpse.

The king’s agent, numb with the shock of it, watched as the life faded from Wells’s disbelieving eyes.

The ministers’ laughter gave way to enthusiastic applause.

Burton looked up and saw two pinpricks of red light in the bulky silhouette. Slowly, the shape descended. He heard Swinburne, Trounce and Bendyshe yelling but he couldn’t process their words.

He saw the gleam of polished brass.

He saw thick legs and an armoured torso.

He saw five arms extended, Christ-like, and a sixth, to which a Gatling gun was bolted, still directed at Wells.

He saw that the red pinpricks were eyes.

He saw, floating down to the floor, with lines of energy cascading from the apex of the domed ceiling into his head, the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The House of Lords fell utterly silent as the brass man descended.

In familiar bell-like tones, he said, “The Anglo-Saxon Empire is mine. I will not have its Constitution challenged.”

His feet clunked onto the floor. He took a pace forward and looked down at Burton. The king’s agent felt his skin prickling, reacting to the ribbons of blue energy that were pouring from the ceiling into Brunel’s exposed babbage.

“Sir Richard Francis Burton,” the engineer said.

“Isambard?”

Ignoring the enquiry, Brunel cocked his head a little to one side. “So, despite my efforts to prevent it, you have followed me through time. That is unfortunate for you, for now the manner of your demise depends upon the answer to a single question.”

Burton took a step back and hefted his sword, eyeing the huge man-shaped mechanism, observing the gaps between its brass plates, wondering whether there was a part of it so vulnerable that a sword thrust could render the entirety inoperable.

“I shall tell you how I came to be,” Brunel intoned. “Then I shall ask and you will answer. If I am satisfied with your response, you will die quickly. If I am not, you will die very, very slowly.”

Burton remained silent.

“Know this, then, Burton: I have been born seven times, and through each birth this world was formed.”

“Bravo!” a minister shouted.

“My first birth came at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February 1860. Three hundred and forty-two years ago.” With a quiet whir of gears and hiss of miniature pistons, Brunel closed his arms about himself. He lowered his face and regarded the floor. “No thought. No sensory stimulation. No knowledge of myself. What had its inception on that day was comprised of one thing and one thing only: fear.”

Burton heard Tom Bendyshe groan and from the corner of his eye saw him buckle and fall to his knees. Trounce and Swinburne crouched and held him by the shoulders.

“Brunel! Stop this!” Trounce yelled. “For pity’s sake! He’s in agony!”

The gathered politicians bleated their objection to the interruption.

Without turning his head, Brunel extended his Gatling gun toward the three Cannibals. He didn’t fire it, but the threat was enough to quieten the former Scotland Yard man.

Holding the pose, he went on, “My second birth came at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1950. A glimmering of awareness. A vague sense of being. Perhaps a dream.”

Burton lowered his sword. “Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine. Your presence, as you moved forward through time, resonated with its silicon components. It expanded your capacity to think.” He took two paces to the left to avoid the pool of blood that was spreading from Wells’s corpse.

Brunel raised his face and looked directly at the king’s agent. “And it gave me a means to influence events as they unfolded.” Without moving his levelled gun, he unfolded his remaining arms and held their four hands and one stump before his eyes, examining them, moving his fingers, extending the tools from the top of his wrists, making drill bits and screwdrivers spin, clamps and pliers open and close. “But what was I? My body—this body—was in one place, my mind in another. I was disjointed. Incomplete. Scattered. And there were memories, nightmarish memories. I felt myself strapped down, at the mercy of a dreadful man with a swollen cranium. I saw an orangutan with the top of its head replaced by glass through which its living brain was visible. I was aboard a flying ship that was plummeting to earth. There were gunshots. And—”

An arm suddenly jerked forward, and a forefinger jabbed toward Burton’s left eye, stopping less than an inch from it. Burton stumbled back.

“And there was you. Sir Richard Francis Burton. The killer. The murderer. The assassin.”

“No. Those events occurred in a different history and involved a different me.”

For a moment, Brunel stood absolutely motionless.

“Ah, yes,” he said. He drew in his limbs, turned his palms upward, and raised his face to the crackling storm. Ribbons of energy danced across his brow and reflected on the curved planes of his cheeks. “Time. So vast and complex and delicate. Do you feel it as I do, then? Stretching away in every direction? History upon history? Variation upon variation? So many causes. So many effects. Innumerable consequences blossoming from each and every action. Possibilities and probabilities. What a beautiful, awe-inspiring, and truly terrifying equation.”

Another pause; a silence broken only by the relentless lightning, a cough from the audience, and an agonised moan from Bendyshe.