Stewart had promised to reveal the heart of our power, and there She was.
Her Majesty was, in this latest iteration, even more glorious than She had been in Her twenty-sixth generation, now honourably retired. The fundaments of Her appearance remained as you, I and our forebears in the Peerage have known them: Her visage, wrought from an impervious ceramic, was as bone china white as the finest Queen's Wedgewood, and in cast a perfect intermingling of the noble features of Her Twin Royal namesakes, Victoria and Elizabeth the First, whose personalities and wisdom have found a new and eternal life guiding the Peerage. Her Majesty’s hands were constructed of the same material, and though they were many times the size of mere human hands, they retained a distinctly feminine grace.
Her elegant frame, standing at a perfect seven metres in height, integrated into itself every upgrade from the latest Series of Her Servants, and more, for should a new modification have been sufficiently tested and proven so that She considers it to be worthy of inclusion, it is Her Majesty’s Corporeal Person that first receives that benefit.
Fitted perfectly to Her Womanly Frame was the Pallium Regale, the sacred Royal Robe that has rested in permanence upon Her shoulders since Her coronation as Victoria Elizabeth at the foundation of the Peerage. This velveted vestment passes from iteration to iteration, forever unchanged, a sign of both Her Undying Reign and our Undying Loyalty. Upon Her head, the Lion Crown Radiant, fashioned again at the dawn of Her Eternal Reign, resplendent with gems and cast from electrum molten from a score of Lydian Lions, that ancient currency of King Croesus, the monetary unit that marked the rise of wealth in human culture. As we all remember from our childhood lessons, Her Crown thus symbolises the end of that crude and inequitable means of exchange amongst the Peerage.
Beyond Her Regalia, Her Majesty’s mind was also now much improved, in keeping with the discoveries and dictates of Her own sublime intelligence and implemented by the combined workings of all in the Royal Society; here, for reasons of security and the deepest secrets of the Crown, I shall obviously not provide any accounting of that ever improving quantum mechanism. Not, of course, that it is actually within my ken to do so; such an exposition would be Stewart’s bailiwick, not my own.
Her Majesty gazed about the room, considering all in a deep regal silence, taking in at once through eyes immeasurably more sensitive than our own the dire circumstance in which her servants had found themselves; at the very same moment, though in Her physical person She contains all that is right and necessary for the governance of Her Commonwealth, She was in Her wisdom remotely drawing upon the precise knowledges and pertinent intelligences of all of Her servants.
Thusly informed of both the nature of Her surroundings and the seriousness of our predicament, Her appearance hardened with great purpose; She took a long stride forward, and before Her approach every other person in the room seemed impotent and insignificant.
It was at that moment that Barnes snarled barbarously at Stewart, glaring at the noble form of the Queen with an ignorant disdain. “What the xxxx is this? Are we playing with giant dolls? Turn that xxxxing thing off. Turn it off now!”
Stewart rose from his bow, and turned to face Barnes. “No,” he said, his voice as calm as sunlight upon burnished metal. “That I cannot do, not that it is even in my power. If you wish to live, however, I strongly suggest that you stand down and show proper respect to Her Majesty.”
Barnes’ face purpled with anger at Stewart’s brazen defiance. “Destroy it,” he cried to the armoured soldiers around him. His unpleasant voice then barked out a single horrid command to the armoured trooper who still hulked menacing over my helplessly pinioned person. “And burn her.”
The trooper began to move, but abruptly stopped. From within the armour came peculiar sounds of struggle and a muffled cry of alarm. No others of the armoured figures moved, and whilst I was of too great a distance from them to hear, I do not doubt that similar sounds of distress emanated from each suddenly immobile exoskeleton.
Barnes roared again. “Move! All of you! And I said burn her, Trooper, what the xxxx are you…”
But Barnes’ brutish utterance was drowned out by the commanding voice of Her Majesty Herself, which drove all other sound from our ears, filling the air with such unquestionable authority that it was as if it pervaded our very souls.
“WE.”
At that instant the beetlish head of my assailant’s armour slowly rotated a full three hundred and sixty degrees, accompanied first by a muffled squeal, and then a sound like unto that which one hears when pulling a drumstick from the carcass of a festal turkey.
“ARE NOT.”
With those words, every single one of the dozen suits of Caddiganite armour in the room performed precisely the same action; I shall confess that I am most grateful that the gruesome results of this lethal wringing were hidden from view within those metallic carapaces. The armour, now free of the insolent human beings within, remained entirely animate, entirely functional, and completely obeisant to the commands of Our Queen; as one, all of the suits levelled their weapons at the remaining Caddiganite soldiers and engineers.
My own would-be tormentor’s suit turned to confront Barnes, the visor empty of life, the glass lenses now filled only with Her Majesty’s deep displeasure; the Caddiganite officer’s rage-reddened visage fading to ash in sudden mortal terror, and he sputtered something utterly inaudible as he fumbled for his own sidearm.
“AMUSED.”
What followed, dear reader, was not a battle, not a martial repartee such as those already explicated in the recounting of this tale. Had it been such an exchange, filled with peril and the implicit drama of uncertainty, of parry and riposte, I should be inclined to give you an extended blow by blow of all that transpired.
Yet were I to offer you the particulars of Her Majesty’s expressed displeasure, it would be little distinct from the telling of five seconds of the operation of a mechanised slaughterhouse, such was the imbalance of power in that great hangar.
Her Majesty was in complete control, Her righteous and implacable anger was not to be impeded, nor was the outcome ever in question; not a soul amongst the dozens of Caddiganites around us lived more than seconds past that moment. It was butchery, but utterly precise and devoid of cruelty.
Blood was shed, rather copiously so, and were I another sort of narrator, I might describe such proceedings with a flourish, my quill running red, dipped in the spattered lifeblood of our foes.
But I must ask yet again, dear reader, are such things worthy of our attention? Are we to delight in death, lingering in concupiscent prurience upon the gore-spattered details of such a rout? Are we to wallow in the miasma of animal bloodlust, in the churlish orgy of worldly vengeance?
No, of course not. That yearning is but the purest folly.
You and I both know that we of the Peerage are not cut from the same cloth as those depraved and decadent audiences who once delighted in the dark spectacles of the Grand Guignol. Such things are utterly beneath us, as corrupted and morally bankrupt as the vulgar howling of the circus-maddened mob in Nero’s Colosseum.
Our refinement comes in polite society, and in our gardens, in music and the arts and the great discoveries of our sciences. We are made more whole as we gather in worship of our Creator, or settle into a welcome armchair by a light-filled window with a fine novel, or listen to an erudite lecturer from the Historical Society.
It is quite obviously not that we are incapable, nor that we are unprepared to face any grim eventuality. Rather it is that we do not, as the brute fascists do, imagine that the crude calculus of force has any refining effect upon our persons. We neither seek nor glory in war, but understand it as a matter of solemn duty, as we understand all things both difficult and virtuous.
That necessary moral digression aside, let us return apace to the hangar, for we are quite near to the conclusion of this recounting.
Chapter Thirty Eight: A Monarch's Gratitude
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