Knight and Squire #1: "The Unfair State, Part One"

“Looks like our hunch was right, Matron. There is a secret Oxford college, buried beneath the real university.” The Hood looked over to a blackboard illuminated by fiery candlelight. “A secret college with only one degree on the syllabus. The total annihilation of the British Isles.”

Chalked on the blackboard were the schematics for an atomic bomb, co-ordinated schedules for a small, private army and the chemical formula for the creation of monstrously overgrown mutants, all headed with the words, 'FINAL EXAM'.

The Hood stood silently for a moment, before raising his finger to his temple and flicking on the comm-set again.

“Found our sinister plot. Looks like the trigger's set to go off tonight. I can cover the private army and the monstrously overgrown mutants, but we'll need to outsource on the bomb situation. I'm thinking we call in the cavalry.”



Four Days Ago

The Costumed Gentlemen's Club, found on the corner of St James Square, was a stately Regency building with a prim, neat façade. The Club had been chartered in the latter half of the nineteenth century by the Viscount of Wordenshire, one Horatio Sheldrake, better known in the heyday of costumed colonialism as Cavalry-Man, mystery man and adventurer.

It was in the Card Room that Cyril Sheldrake, the present Earl of Wordenshire, stood leaning against the bar. He watched as the assembled gentlemen of the Club played out vingt et un, cribbage and bridge. It could have been any high society gathering, were it not for the brightly coloured capes, the tightly-fitted jumpsuits, the ethereal glowing of those robed, and the dark domino masks of the patrons. They were the high-rise entrepreneurs, the military educated and the aristocracy of the British superhero community.

Cyril adjusted his visor and took a sip from his glass. The figure making his way across the room towards him nodded, and took a place by the bar beside him.

“Didn't know you still drank,” the newcomer said, tapping the bar and gesturing to the barman.

“Ginger ale. I swear.” Cyril smiled.

“Good on you, old man. I'll take a gimlet, if you don't mind. You know my account.”

The barman nodded at the proffered black card. The newcomer slipped the card away into a pouch on his belt, and raised his red glove to push his mask up.

“Glad you could make it, George,” Cyril said.

“Not often I see you in your granddaddy’s club. Couldn't resist seeing what's brought you out. Is this for George or the Hood?”

“The Hood, I suppose. Heard you had a falling out with Matron and the rest of SI5. Everything cleared up now?”

The Hood folded his arms. The black mask, emblazoned with a white cross, creased as the man beneath frowned. “We're on talking terms. I still work for them, in case you were thinking about offering me a job. Can't see me fitting the Squire's pantaloons anyhow.”

Cyril laughed, and kept smiling while he finished his drink.
“I need to know whether you're working on the same case I am. If I'm right, there's a wider pattern to this that me and Beryl can't cover by ourselves. Heard the one about the exploding MP?”

“Christ, I've heard nothing else,” the Hood grumbled. “We're up to eight on the last count, and three of those are still state secrets. The men in Westminster don't want to cause any more panic than there already is. Can't figure out what's happening to them. Bombs are involved, obviously. They're being taken out in their homes. They're always the ones at the epicentre of the blast. Family members have been caught as collateral, but the blasts are still too precise to offer any real clue as to how the bomb was delivered. What's strangest is that they aren't even particularly important people. One member of the shadow cabinet, but the rest are just the local MPs of pigsties in the provinces. Matron has me busting gangs, paracriminal hideouts and terrorist cells after answers, but nothing so far.”

“It might not be the only attack on the government right now,” Cyril said, sliding a sheaf of papers across the bar. “Beryl has been monitoring the lesser rungs of Whitehall. Civil servants, secretaries, think tanks. All going missing in their dozens. I've got Beryl trying to find patterns, but nothing yet.”

“Then Whitehall's apparatchik are being targeted.” The Hood took a sharp, fast drink. “Our nation is being attacked at the foundation. The hard-working, bureaucratic foundation. Damn. At least an attempt to assassinate the PM we could foil in one big dramatic face-off.”

Cyril patted the Hood on the shoulder. The two men looked strange, against the understated elegance of the Club's Georgian interior. Cyril stood with the easy presence of a public school rugby player (and indeed he moonlighted as captain of the Worden Warriors at least once every fortnight), and the uneasy politeness of the modern peerage. His upper body was bulked up with reinforced metal pauldrons, a hefty chestplate, and winged gauntlets. Underneath that, a thick black canvas covered his bruiser's frame, and across his back a white cape hung, falling down in coiled piles to the varnished wood flooring. Cyril, in his Knight's attire, smiled beneath his high metal visor.

George Cross, special agent of Her Majesty's Superspy Intelligence Division 5, otherwise known as the Hood, had a slighter frame. Taller, and more gaunt than the Knight, his wiry figure was fitted into a thickened white and grey fabric jumpsuit, emblazoned with the Hood's red cross, and cloaked by a blood red hood and cape, of the same colour as his blocky gloves, boots and utility belt. His face was unseen, covered entirely by a black mask, and divided by a white cross.

“I need to get back to the Keep. See what you and Matron can figure out. If you need help, I'll be a phone call away. Until then, I'm glad we're on the same page.”

The Hood nodded, and watched Cyril wander seemingly at random over to an imposing statue of his ancestor, the Viscount Horatio Sheldrake, in the corner of the panelled room. The costumed card players, used to the scene, paid no attention to the man as he gave the Hood a last wave, and then twisted the stone arm of the statue thirty-nine degrees up. There was the sound of machinery grinding into life, and then the floor Cyril stood on clicked and began to descend.

When Cyril had disappeared completely, and a new section of wooden flooring had slid mechanically into place, the Hood raised his finger for another drink, and began to whistle.



The Knight stepped out into the Keep, the stone walled inner sanctuary of Worden Castle, the ancestral seat of the Sheldrake family.

“Hyper-sonic private bullet train, underground from London to sleepy Great Worden, all in under five minutes.” The Knight grinned. “It's nice having superhero toys sometimes.”

The Keep had been the central stronghold of the castle, once, where the Norman lord Baptiste Shelduc had planted his family's flag in victory over the local Saxon thanes. It had evolved with the times since then, rising with the Middle Ages and renovating in the Edwardian years, until finally it came into the hands of the current Sheldrake heir, Cyril. Under Cyril's management the Keep had been converted into a high-tech crime lab, complete with fourth gen tech armoury, vehicle garage and forensics department. Not to mention, as the Knight walked under the great nodding head of a gigantic robotic bulldog, superhero trophy room.

Beryl, twiddling a hairclip in one hand and slurping coke through a straw with the other, gave him a mumbled greeting as the Knight took his seat beside her before the humming super-computer.
“How's Georgie?” Beryl asked, slipping the hairclip in place and returning to running her fingers across the keyboard. The displays flashed and flickered through data feeds, casting a rainbow of colours and lights reflecting from the Knight's visor.

“He's fine. Still playing hired tough for the government. Knew about the bombs, but not about the missing bureaucrats. Your whiz kid metagene giving us anything?”

Beryl smiled. The teenaged sidekick was a colourful mix of schoolgirl and medieval minstrel, from the red and black striped tights to the feathered cap that sat on her red pigtails. From birth, Beryl Hutchinson, the girl from down the road, had possessed a brain that sparkled with the bright lights of the digital age, a mind perfectly suited to the lightning speeds at which the new, unseen mode of communiqué worked. When Twunter trended, Beryl knew. She could map social media in her mind, and process databanks between blinks.

She was, as her doting mother said, gifted.

“Plenty. Crime scene footage from the MP explosions that were put up on a police officer's OohTube account, eye-witness accounts of the blast on neighbours' blogs, and some misplaced evidence that was put up on eBuy.”

“So eight politicians, not the five we originally thought, all blown up by anti-personnel explosives. All in their homes, all at the centre of the blast, with no sign of forced entry, no sign of any intruders at all.”

“Locked room mystery,” Beryl said, hopping through internet windows.

“One I've been thinking about on the train over here, actually,” the Knight said. “Think about where the victims were. Two in their private studies, two at the kitchen and four in the hallway. Think about what you'd use there, and what you would use and not your wife or your kids.”

Beryl drummed her fingers on the keyboard and exhaled loudly. Then she frowned. “Urgh. But it's so low-tech.”

The Knight swept from the computer and pressed a button fixed into a stone pillar. There was unseen motion, and then a pair of grey motorcycles fitted with steel horses' heads rose up from beneath the floor on a treadmill, which rolled it into place on a runway heading out through an opening portcullis.

“The bombs got through the locked door because they were delivered by the postman. Stamped, addressed and parcelled.”

The Knight and Squire revved their engines, and tore off into the dusky countryside of Wordenshire.



The Hood swore, and pulled his cape around him.

The downpour of sewage water coursed down the contours of his arched back, the heavier contents sticking momentarily before sliding on along their way. When the torrent died down, the Hood straightened and swore again, shaking the water from his cape.

“Chin up and think of England, George,” he muttered, and resumed his climb up the grimy metal ladder. The micro-sensors in his mask had begun to register light somewhere overhead, among the mess of broken pipes and dripping grates.

It had been a slow, and pain-staking trail of clues that had led him to believe that Derrick Chatterly, civil servant (and not in the nuanced, implicitly sinister way in which George called himself a civil servant, rather the mundane, desk-bound civil civil servant) had gone from his desk in Whitehall down past his cramped flat in Clapham and down into the worse sort of winding back alleyways of London, from where he descended down into the maze of sewers and disused underground stations up to here, a ladder running up to God alone knows where in a miserable, damp and stinking tunnel.
The kind of clues that the Hood wasn't so certain about himself, now that it came to a lonely hole like this one. And still, the Hood climbed on, swearing with every rung of the ladder.

Then he saw it. Or rather, the micro-sensors did. The rung above him gleamed with clean (or at least, dirt that had been redistributed) just where a hand would grip. Someone had been here recently. The Hood climbed on.



“So, the postman sets out to deliver to his route. Only he gets jumped on the way. Someone grabs him, gets rid of him, takes his place. Delivers the letter-bomb looking like any other postman.”

The Knight nodded. “Seems like it. Didn't take long to find out that there were postmen going missing and mail going undelivered on the victims' routes, once we knew what we were looking at.”

“Right. So, the most sensible course of action was...” Squire gave the Knight a sidelong look from under her postman's cap.

The Knight, a blue cotton shirt stretched over his armoured costume, along with a bright red satchel on his waist, waited a moment for his companion to finish. When it was clear that she was not about to clarify, he coughed. “Well, to disguise ourselves as postmen and deliver the postal route for Great Worden. When they try to jump us, we surprise them.”

“Right,” Squire said. “The Postman Pat routine. Still not sure why we're sure it's going to be our local MP that gets hit next.”

“If I'm right about this being part of a bigger scheme, then the players behind this aren't small-time. And all the major players around here know the Knight and Squire work from Wordenshire. They'll want to send us a message now that they've got our attention. It has to be here. Now, act postal.”

The Knight whistled a jaunty tune as he and Squire rolled their modified motorcycles along the quiet countryside town's high street. Morning had not yet broken, but the sound of birdsong was already twittering in the air. They stopped every so often, each running along the doors to deliver their mail as they went by, and slowly but surely made their way down the street.

They had made it down to the corner shop before the red van appeared. The Knight signalled to Squire, and the pair dismounted. Slowly, they walked to the middle of the road. The town was still empty, and they faced off alone against the red van as it drove on towards them.

The van slowed, and pulled in. The red livery and the long gold stripes were familiar to the postal service, but the title etched along the side was not. In angry, clipped gold lettering, were the words, 'ROYAL HATE-MAIL'.

The van doors swung open, and a trio of men in tight blue shirts and navy shorts somersaulted out, scarves wrapped around their faces. They spread out in a line across the road, flicking out letter-knives. One of them moved, sharply, and there was a whistling sound. The Knight looked down to see a razor-edged postcard stuck quivering in his chest-plate.

“Looks like we can ditch the disguises, Beryl,” he said, tossing his postman's cap aside. “These gentlemen know why we're here.”

There was a beat, and then the two sides began to charge.



There was an echoing clang, followed by a hissing sound, and then the muffled sound of a controlled explosion.

A steel hatch flew off its hinges, and landed in shadow on a linoleum floor some way down the corridor. A red fist punched up, grasping briefly at the empty air, then found purchase. The Hood swung himself up, dripping gently on the floor of the sterile looking corridor he found himself in.

“God, I hate sewers,” he said, brushing himself down. “Let's see now...Matron, where am I?”

There was a buzzing in his ear. Static. The Hood wasn't unduly worried. Most of his more interesting missions involved him being cut off from his superiors. Often it allowed him to act with a greater degree of freedom than his motherly contact would condone.
He waited for his micro-sensors to adjust to the gloom, and examined the corridor wall. A sign screwed into the wall read 'BACTERIAL WARD'. This, along with the whitewashed paintwork and the heavy plastic sheeting that fell as a doorway further along the corridor was enough for the Hood to flick open a type-pad on his wrist and key in 'HOSPITAL – ABANDONED – CENTRAL LONDON – UNDERGROUND?'. Matron would get the message the moment contact was resumed. The Hood assumed he'd still be alive at that point, but it was always best to prepare for the worst.

He was about to try the wooden doors marked 'NURSING STATION' when he heard the clicking of a round being hammered into its chamber.

It wasn't usual for anyone to get the drop on the Hood, he reflected, as he threw himself backwards. Crashing into the gunman behind him, the Hood drove his elbow back and dug it into ribs. Turning before the gunman had a chance to recover, the Hood caught the gun between his hands, and twisted it free, throwing it aside. He then found himself face to face with a surgical mask, painted black and white into a skeletal grin.

“Not today, you bastard,” the Hood grunted, ducking his head forward. His forehead connected with the surgeon's nose, sending the assailant falling over himself with a sickening crunch.

Feeling the rush settle his nerves, the Hood took a moment to assess the situation. Fluorescent lighting was beginning to flicker into life above his head, illuminating where he stood, and nothing of the darkness further along.

The gunman lay twitching, blood gushing through the surgical mask, on the floor before him. To the Hood's left, five new figures had emerged through the plastic sheeting, all in the same soiled scrubs and skeletal surgical masks, all toting flick-knives and shotguns. To the Hood's right, a gurney was being wheeled into view by another two of the wastrel medical staff, racks of chemical tubes and vials, stacked one on top of the other, covering the trolley as it came along.

The Hood reached down to the holsters strapped into his utility belt and yanked out a set of heavy-duty tasers. Levelling them at right angles to his body, he formed a human cross, standing between the advancing medical henchmen.

There was a crackling, and a rusted intercom system rumbled into words. “Welcome, intruder. Please remain calm, and submit yourself to the care of your National Sickness Service. Report to the reception area to be directed to your viral shots, amputation surgery, and experimental reverse-pregnancy procedure.”

The Hood swore again. “Alright. Let's play doctor.”