The story is largely set on the same parallel on which the key events of
Luther Arkwright occurred. Twenty-three years have passed (putting the date of the events at 2007), and
England has emerged from its artificially prolonged
Civil War to become the predominant world power under the autocratic rule of its psychic Queen Anne. The decadent court exhibits a mixture of
Elizabethan,
Restoration and
Victorian styles. Ordinary people randomly "disappear" to an unknown fate in
St. George's Chapel, Windsor at
Windsor Castle. Anne's only heir is Princess Victoria, her daughter by the long-vanished Luther Arkwright, born during the climactic battle twenty-three years earlier. Victoria is an
engineering genius, but suffers constantly from
nausea and
headaches. Victoria's twin brother Henry was assassinated at the age of ten, but when Victoria is told she resembles the revolutionary leader Gabriel Shelley, she becomes fascinated by the possibility that he is her brother, and starts a quest to learn about the circumstances of Henry's death. Meanwhile, both a Papal Envoy and a group of
fascists within the government plan to assassinate Anne and Victoria in order to seize the Empire for the
Roman Catholic Church and themselves, respectively. Furthermore, the advanced society of parallel "zero-zero" has detected an imminent cataclysm centred on Victoria's world, and tries in vain to contact Luther. Gabriel Shelley is not Henry, but Victoria's contact with him helps open her eyes to the oppressive nature of her mother's empire. It also opens her eyes in other ways, as she accidentally takes a
hallucinogen instead of a
migraine remedy from his collection of homemade medicines. Under the influence of the potion, she makes her first jump across the parallels to meet her father. They return to Victoria's world to defeat the true Heart of Empire and source of the imminent catastrophe - a psychic monster lurking in St George's Chapel, created by Anne's attempts to keep her son Henry alive. Anne is mortally wounded in combat with the Papal Envoy, and Victoria intervenes decisively to stop a massacre of democracy campaigners and kill the fascist ringleaders. In the final scene, she abdicates the throne and dissolves the Empire. == In other media ==