The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg Read online

  THE QUANTUM CURATORS

  AND THE

  FABERGÉ EGG

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Quantum Curators and the Faberge Egg

  #1 Neith – Beta Earth

  #2 Julius- Beta Earth

  #3 Neith – Alpha Earth

  #4 Julius – Beta Earth

  #5 Neith – Alpha Earth

  #6 Julius – Beta Earth

  #7 Neith – Alpha Earth

  # 8 Julius – Beta Earth

  #9 Neith – Alpha Earth

  #10 Charles – Beta Earth

  # interlude 1

  #11 Neith – Beta Earth

  #12 Neith – Beta Earth

  #13 Julius -Beta Earth

  #14 Neith – Beta Earth

  #15 Neith -Beta Earth

  #16 Julius – Beta Earth

  #17 Neith – Beta Earth

  #18 Julius – Beta Earth

  #19 Neith – Beta Earth

  #20 Julius – Beta Earth

  #21 Neith – Beta Earth

  #22 Julius – Beta Earth

  #23 Julius – Beta Earth

  #24 Neith – Beta Earth

  # interlude 2

  #25 Neith – Beta Earth

  #26 Sam – Alpha Earth

  # interlude 3

  # 27 Julius – Beta Earth

  #28 Neith – Beta Earth

  #29 Julius – Beta Earth

  #30 Neith – Beta Earth

  #31 Julius – Beta Earth

  #32 Sam – Alpha Earth

  #33 Neith – Beta Earth

  #34 Sam – Alpha Earth

  # interlude 4

  #35 Julius – Beta Earth

  #36 Neith – Beta Earth

  #37 Julius – Beta Earth

  #38 Neith -Beta Earth

  #39 Neith – Alpha Earth

  #40 Neith – Alpha Earth

  #41 Sam & Ramin

  #42 Neith – Alpha

  # interlude 5

  #the end

  Coming Soon

  Hello and thank you

  The Quantum Curators and the Enemy Within

  and finally...

  EVA ST. JOHN

  MUDLARK’S PRESS

  #1 Neith – Beta Earth

  ‘Has she chucked the bloody thing in the lake yet?’

  My earpiece hissed. ‘No, hang on. Oh, you are not going to like this.’ Clio started sniggering. ‘Some of our intel may be wrong.’

  I didn't need to be able to see Clio to know that her eyes were rolling. ‘Patchy intel’ was our stock in trade. Especially the further back in time we had to go. Seventh-century Britain was about as patchy as it got. It was a wonder sometimes how a culture collapsed in on itself. One minute, Roman rules, the next, hello Dark Ages. And not so much dark, as, for fuck’s sake, you used to have underfloor heating, how could you let that go?

  Still, there were shining pockets of artistic wonder. However, they were then generally burnt, plundered, melted down, or in this case, dumped in a lake. Chucking stuff in water seemed to be a bizarre form of preservation, but then again, nothing about the British ever made sense.

  ‘So, what don't we know?’ I whispered. From where I was crouched, behind a large rock dripping in wet moss, I had no clear line of sight, so was relying on Clio who was sitting two miles back with her goggles on zoom.

  ‘Turns out these priestesses can't throw swords worth a damn. She lobbed it a whole foot.’

  ‘Bugger, I'd love to have seen that.’

  ‘Watch it on replay later and be bloody glad you didn't. You'd have laughed out loud.’

  Well, that explained the group of birds that had suddenly flown up into the sky over on the far ridge above the lake. I had wondered if a second extraction team had been sent over. God knows it wouldn't be the first time a screw up had occurred.

  The great Petersburg debacle of 1894 was still taught to first years as a salutary reminder of how not to explore a gunpowder factory. The first lesson was how to establish all friendly personnel in the vicinity. The second lesson, which seemed a surprisingly obvious one, was not to use combustible weapons in a fireworks factory. You'd think the curators of the Library of Alexandria would have been more attuned to fire-provoking situations. But hey, it's not like the library caught fire or anything. Oh, wait...

  ‘What are they doing now?’

  ‘There was a lot of undignified arm waving and shouting, then two of the priestesses went and dragged a boat down to the lake side. Now they're all getting into the boat, with the sword.’

  ‘Shit. Shit! Don't say it.’ Clio was not about to let me forget this. She had specifically mentioned the SCUBA gear, and I had just as specifically pooh-poohed it. Bugger. I looked at my rubber boots. Well, they were a waste of time.

  ‘Did you at least pack the lungs?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I knew what I had to do. Dammit. I was going to be a laughing stock when I got home.

  ‘Well, go fetch Lot DL278643,’

  ‘Can you not just call it Excalibur?’

  ‘That's sloppy. Now strip.’

  I was not in a good mood as I peeled off my layers on the cold and wet hillside with the wind blowing the rain into my face. Everything was making me bad tempered, including the stupid nomenclature of our system. The whole point of our organisation was that we retrieved the one-offs, the last of their kind, the unique pieces. They all had sodding names. If there were more than one of them, we wouldn't bother saving them. But no, for some reason, saving Excalibur, legendary sword of the totemic warlord Arthur, would be better identified as item DL278643. Whatever.

  I bit down on the portable bottled air we nicknamed lungs and slunk down to the water's edge. My skin was already covered in gooseflesh and my knickers and bra were hardly going to keep me warm, so I stripped those off as well. Next I emptied my utility belt, then filled it with stones and clipped it around my waist. If the people in the little boat glanced to their right, they might have spotted me, so I lay on my belly and pulled myself into the black water. Rocks and pebbles scratched my torso until the water became deep enough for me to start swimming freely. The rocks held me under the flat, inky surface as I kept my teeth clamped around my small re-breather.

  ‘Head north east,’ sounded Clio's voice in my ear, loud amongst the silence of the dark lake.

  I'd have replied, but obviously my mouth was full. Tapping on my wrist piece, I texted her a quick thumbs up and began to swim at speed to intercept the boat. I had an hour of air, but there was no point in risking it. Besides, I was cold. The quicker we finished this extraction, the better. I checked my little computer again. The light was even worse this far down and I tapped on the torch function.

  ‘Oh, nice effect. You've turned the lake a glowing green. Hang on... yep, they're rowing towards you.’

  My buoyancy was a perfect counterbalance, about three feet below the surface. I hung in the water and waited for instructions. It’s fair to say that waiting for instructions isn't a particular speciality of mine. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I was constantly passed over for promotion. It was felt that I wouldn't bring a positive influence to the key functions of the senior management structure. Which suited me just fine. But sometimes you had to rely on others, and if there was one person into whose hands I would willingly entrust my life, it was Clio. Unlike me, she had regularly been offered promotion. Although obviously not in personnel. That wasn’t her skill set, which is why I was team leader. Other than that, the girl was a wunderkind. But she too loved being out in the field, so we’d stuck together. Most retrieval units worked in pairs, though sometimes a couple of pairs would work together if it was a complicated ext
raction. Occasionally, there'd be a solo worker. One who no one else could work with. They did well enough, but they could be total pains in the arse as well. They were usually long in the tooth, and spent all their time telling us that back in their day blah blah blah. I have no time for lone wolf bravado.

  ‘Okay, they’re almost with you. Start your accent now.’

  Very carefully, I began kicking upwards. I knew the folklore for this event. It was essential that only my forearm broke the surface. Cold air blew across my fingers and I opened my palm. I was tempted to beckon with my finger, but I thought that might be too silly.

  ‘Oh wow. They are freaking out. Stay still, they’re turning towards you. Get ready.’

  The next moment I felt a hard pommel in my hand and I wrapped my fingers around it. The second they released it, both me and the sword plunged to the bottom of the lake.

  ‘That wasn't very graceful. You okay?’

  No, I was not okay. My arm had nearly been wrenched from its socket and I had to drag the wretched thing out of the soft mud that lined the bottom of the lake. This was how it was lost, simple silt and evaporation. Within only a few years this land would begin to dry up, old lake pits would be filled in and levelled up, and eventually Excalibur would sit under many metres of earth and tarmac, never to be seen again. Cue me.

  I began walking along the lakebed, dragging the stupid noble sword behind me and swearing at every step. At only five foot, I wasn’t much taller than the sword itself. I'd had to switch my torch off and now I was stubbing my bare feet on every branch and rock that littered the floor. At one point an eel slithered past my leg and I almost spat my lungs out. Pausing to regain my wits, I continued to trudge to the water’s edge.

  ‘Hold your position. They’re tying up the boat and heading towards their cart. I'll let you know when they're over the brow of the hill. I'm heading your way now.’

  I stood there, head still beneath the icy surface, shivering and cursing. This was one of my most tedious extractions ever. Where were the ropes, the guns, the fights, the chases? That was the sort of extraction I enjoyed, grabbing the item from the flame, out running a volcano, snatching it from gangsters. It was not shivering in a dark bog of a lake, waiting for some wafty priestess, with a proclivity for dumping precious artefacts into lakes, to slowly trundle away.

  ‘Out you come.’

  A few more steps and I emerged from the water, removing the breathers from my mouth. ‘Next time let's factor in the weight of the retrieval item, shall we?’

  Clio laughed at me. ‘Holy cow, Neith. Wait ‘til you see yourself on the replay. You look like the creature from the black lagoon.’

  She untangled me from the pond weed that I’d accumulated and took the sword from me. No slacker at the bench press, she also grunted in surprise at the sheer weight of it.

  ‘Crap. Yep, see your point. Get dressed and we'll step back. No point in stepping back naked.’ Nudity wasn’t an issue in our culture, but I didn’t need to give the guys a free laugh.

  ‘Not very showy, is it? I was expecting more bling.’

  We both looked at the sword. It was a beast of a weapon. I suppose anything capable of hacking through a body didn't also need to sparkle.

  I pulled on my trousers and was grateful for the wicking liner that absorbed the water. Being clammy would have been the final insult. With my jacket zipped up, we prepared to leave.

  ‘Protocols. Wrap the blade in the blanket, and keep the tip on the floor and your hand on the pommel. On the count of five, step through after me.’

  I agreed, and prepared the sword. Step through protocols were essential. The quantum functions of the field were normally the same for both parties, but sometimes things went wrong. People were known to come through hours apart, and, sometimes they arrived on top of each other. Early efforts had shown that being attached to another human didn't always work. The first person that stepped back discovered they were holding a hand. The second person stepped back screaming their head off with arterial blood pumping out on the floor. One time, an archivist had to come through at a run with their dagger still pointing forward. They impaled the Section Chief, who had died instantly. Hence all the protocols. Often the most dangerous parts of the extraction were not the volcanoes, earthquakes or the gangsters, but the simple laws of quantum mechanics. Anything could happen, and usually did.

  ‘Ready?’

  I nodded. We both tapped in the recall code, and then she was gone. Five seconds later, so was I.

  #2 Julius- Beta Earth

  Julius Strathclyde glanced up from his desk as someone loudly proclaimed their arrival at the far end of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s acquisitions department. Julius could only think of one person so lacking in the social conventions of the workplace: Charles Bradshaw. If Julius hadn't gone to school with him they’d probably never have been friends, they were so chalk and cheese. He smiled inwardly, thanking fate. Charlie might be colossally annoying at times, but he was still his best friend. It was just that, as always, his timing was appalling.

  He sighed as he checked his watch. There were three more box files to catalogue, and he was looking forward to a particularly knotty issue of provenance in the second box. There was no way Charlie was just going to sit quietly and wait whilst he did that. Hopefully he was simply popping by to say hello.

  ‘Julie, my boy!’ Charlie slapped his hands on the desk, causing other researchers to glare in annoyance. ‘Come on, I'm here to spring you from your dungeon.’

  Julius rolled his eyes. Charlie was a bright guy, so why couldn’t he remember how much he detested that nickname? However, Julius was due to go for drinks with Rebecca later on. If he got stuck into the catalogues now, he might lose track of time, and Rebecca didn't approve of tardiness. Losing track of time showed a lack of foresight. If you knew something was going to be interesting, she believed, then you should allot more time to it. Julius' problem was that he never knew what was going to be interesting until he opened the box. If he went for a drink with Charlie now, he wouldn’t get lost in his research and let Rebecca down. After telling Charlie to pipe down, he filled in the chits saying the boxes remained uncatalogued, then sent them back to the stacks.

  Julius had come to Cambridge to get his degree, and stayed for his fellowship and doctorate. Primarily, he was a research professor at Emmanuel College; his field of study was theology and philosophy of religions, with a specialism in folklore. It paid well enough for his needs, but he supplemented his wage by working part time in the Fitzwilliam as an archivist in the acquisitions department. The money was okay, but he would have been just as happy to do the work for free. There was no better way to spend his time than sat at a desk tracking down a footnote or establishing a provenance. He secretly thought of himself as an Indiana Jones of the library stacks.

  He laughed, thinking about his school friend, who was more an Indiana Jones figure in real life. Charlie was a freelancer working for a variety of prestigious museums. He would go out into the field, purchasing various items or travelling with certain collections. His portfolio was loose enough that he never got bored. There was one principal difference between the two men; Charlie went out and acquired the stuff from the darkest corners of the globe, while Julius waited until someone placed it in front of him.

  As the two men stepped out onto the street, they were almost immediately run down by a pod of cyclists. In the narrow mediaeval streets of Cambridge, a bicycle was easily the quickest way to get around, and indeed most of the buses and lorries had been banned from the centre of town.

  Walking along the street, they attracted the usual second glances from giggling students and tourists alike. Normally, Charlie would preen, knowing the world was his oyster. A tall, blond former rower, he regularly turned heads with his good looks and a cheerful smile. Standing next to Julius though, he couldn't guarantee the looks were meant for him. There was no getting away from the fact that Julius was a particularly handsome man.

  When he had
first joined school, his blue eyes had peeked out from below a dark floppy fringe. Yet the soft winsome features of a boy sharpened as he became a teenager, and his bone structure solidified into something you could chisel. In Charlie's eyes, Julius’s only redeeming features were that he was rubbish at sport, and had absolutely no comprehension of his own appearance.

  Julius believed what he looked like was completely irrelevant. If anything, at times it could be a misleading hindrance. He’d noticed early on in his studies that people didn't take him quite as seriously as some of the other scholars. He remembered hearing a female model once complaining that no one listened to her because of her looks. He had promptly bought her a drink, and the two of them had got into a lengthy debate on string theory. His friends had hoped that may have been the start of something beautiful, but there had been no chemistry, just academic attraction. Indeed, they still kept in touch, but only to discuss latest theories or discoveries.

  Julius had begun to walk towards the King's Arms, a rowdy sports pub that Charlie favoured, when Charlie suggested the Old Fox instead. They made their way to a quiet corner of the pub, then Julius ordered two pints of beer and some pork scratchings before the pair of them settled down into the booth.

  ‘So Julie, how's it hanging? It's been months since I saw you.’

  Julius mumbled non-committedly. No matter how interested Charlie was, he had something he wanted to tell Julius about. Julius loved to hear his friend’s adventures come to life. As he had chosen the Old Fox, he obviously had a good tale to tell, so Julius settled down to be entertained. Sure enough, having mentioned his plans for the weekend with Rebecca, Charlie nodded, then with great enthusiasm he promptly started to talk about himself.

  ‘The new exhibition? It's fascinating. I helped curate that when it opened in Rome. Well worth a visit. Check out the priest's head-piece. Some idiot had actually labelled it as a sword hilt, if you can believe that? I said to Claude, “Claude, I can't possibly put my name to this exhibition if you’re going to let that error be made public.” He was incredibly grateful. God, imagine the embarrassment?’