Tales from the Triverse

Expeditions & interrogations: part 1

Early shift
On duty: DC Frank Holland & DC Marion Hobb

London.
1973. June.

Frank Holland was not a happy man, Hobb could see that. She could hear it, too, in his incessant whining. "How is it we end up holding the phones back here," he was saying, "while everyone else gets to fuck about on jollies to every other bloody place?"

He had a point. They were both on duty, as they had been all week, the only properly trained detective constables available to the SDC while Kaminski, Chakraborty, Styles and Clarke were off on specialist missions of which few details had been shared. She knew that Clarke and Styles were on their way to Palinor on some sort of daft diplomatic activity, but Kaminski and Chakraborty's whereabouts had been oddly hush-hush. There had been an undercurrent of distrust in the SDC for months; a tension that had gripped the team with Callihan's death and never let go.

All the more reason to try to get out before the whole thing imploded. She had feelers out in half a dozen other departments, even some outside of London. The word was that if you stayed in the SDC too long you got tarred with the same brush that had kept Clarke stuck at DC level for his entire career. That wasn't for her. She wanted to get out, get a proper assignment dealing with real Earth issues, cases that really mattered to humans, rather than wasting time on complicated portal crimes that were little more than the unwanted cases discarded by the rest of the Met.

Marion Hobb had ambitions, grander than anything the SDC could offer. She needed out. That had been apparent for the last year, but with the team being stretched apart it had become urgent.

"Still there, Hobb?"

Blinking, she took a breath, looked at her partner. Nobody liked him. She didn't like him, though he was better than the rest. There was no bullshit with Holland. None of Styles' starry-eyed, girlish wonder, or Clarke's pathetic ambivalence. Or whatever the hell was going on with Kaminski and Chakraborty. Frank Holland was unpleasant, but he was the kind of reliable unpleasant that she could get along with.

"Still here, Frank. Still here."

*

Lola suppressed a squeal, double-checked that she had her rucksack and her wheeled case, then grinned at Clarke. "You ready for this, old man?"

"You're forgetting I've already been through a portal," he said. "You might say I'm an experienced traveller."

She hadn't forgotten, but there was still a bitterness at Clarke and Chakraborty having visited Max-Earth without her. Not that she was obligated a free trip to the future, and she understood that it had made most sense at the time. It had been Clarke's lack of enthusiasm before and after that had saddened her.

Now, though, it was her turn. To Palinor! Through a portal, a gateway to another world. Having read so many books about portal travel - fact and fiction - it was a remarkable thing to be finally experiencing it herself. Countless articles, photo essays, television documentaries and action and romance movies had made the portal station oddly familiar, like a phantom memory unmoored from her actual reality. It was as if she'd been here before, about to step onto the travelator that would shuffle them through to the other side. She'd made this journey in her dreams, which made being entirely awake seem somehow more fantastical.

"Well, this is portal number two for you, then."

"Number three, actually. I had to come back through the other one, remember?"

"Good point." She took a long, slow breath. Other travellers, suited dignitaries and professionals in a mix of local and Palinese dress, moved past them on their way, clearly used to the process. "Shall we?"