Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

“Down the rabbit hole,” said Hargreaves in a fugue of battle calm. The earth shook as Priser bit deep into the loam, digging a deep furrow in Her Majesty’s front lawn. When they cracked the hatch, Feerick would be knocked quite unconscious by the blow, crumpled against the metal.

  “So what now?” Arturo asked in the shadow of the crumpled, defeated form of Driver.

  The remaining Yard automata had flanked the construction golem, avoiding the whistling pile driver that punched canned-ham holes in the turf. At first, the massive, wild machine had the upper hand over the Yard automata, but the oversize construction equipment proved more of a hindrance than a threat. After a bit Cid’s domestic began to jerk. It threw its heavy limbs round and round uncontrollably as it had in M.A.D. headquarters. The flailing blows pitched into Driver, and both toppled against Mile End’s beautiful foliage. The fearsome driver pin stuck in a tree, its hydraulics choked by branches, allowing Hallow’s automata to pierce the boiler with a truncheon the size of a lamppost. Steam billowed out in a painful whistling cloud that cooked the leaves on their branches.

  “Now we move the Cook box back to Yard for quarantine.” Hargreaves nodded Alphonse’s head towards the matte black drawer sitting in its own crater, where it had been dropped. She couldn’t bring herself to call it what it was: a coffin. Luckily, the seam had been riveted and welded; the containment procedure for the body had been absolute. Whatever lethal bug was trapped inside, it was staying there. Constables moved the moment the thrashing was over and the box seemed safe to handle.

  “By the book, Inspector?” Arturo called up to Hargreaves. His eyes showed nothing, but the set of his jaw indicated to Hargreaves that the swarm of constables would become a problem. Hargreaves had to agree, but how would any of them open the Cook box? There was no window to see in. For the moment Her Majesty’s dirty secret was safe.

  Hargreaves disembarked from Alphonse, marveling at the amount of superficial damage he had absorbed. Dents and paint scuffs dotted the gear’s armor. She went to Adler and the two of them stood on the grass a little apart from the constables trying to pry open the cockpit of Driver. Unlike Priser, this automata had been sealed with a heavy plate hatch, with the operator holed up within. Cid shouted hasty directions from his automata, while Hallow on the ground was shoulder-deep within the machine’s exposed workings.

  “The conundrum is on my mind as well, Adler,” Vanessa answered him in a low voice as they watched. She knew very well once Intelligence heard of M.A.D.’s successful mission, they would waste no time in securing Sergeant Cook’s body for their own study.

  The thought of Great Britain using such monstrous tactics in any situation made Hargreaves sick to her stomach, but she couldn’t think of any ready remedy. If she did anything but hand over the box to the shadows lurking under the Union flag, she would be branded a traitor. Yet, was there no other choice? There was but one hope, if she dared; getting the box out of the hole would require automata assistance. That meant MD6 had to be involved, and that presented some opportunities.

  Hargreaves liked to think she did know her queen well enough. The woman was no figurehead, but a powerhouse of connections and intrigues. Even when Her Majesty hosted Parliament at her summer home in the Isle of Wight, her agents in Whitehall and the Diogenes Club maintained a covert network of chambermaids and butlers loyal to the crown. How could Hargreaves evade that kind of power? No, what had to be done had to be done now, while she was in possession of the box. She didn’t know enough about the plague to risk its destruction. What if she threw the box into the river and poisoned all of London? What if burning it simply set the demon loose?

  “Damn!” A shout came up, and Vanessa snapped out of her torpor to see the hatch on Driver pop loose, dumping the spidery Hallow onto the turf below. He seemed unharmed, perhaps surprised to be suddenly in sunshine and greenery. Several constables were on hand with revolvers and truncheons, but that proved unnecessary.

  “Bollocks,” Hargreaves muttered under her breath, a profanity that stung her English Protestant lips as much as the acrid smoke rising from the cockpit. The pilot was dead, choked on the leak that had built up behind the hatch. Most likely an exhaust line had ruptured in the struggle, filling the cramped cabin with coal smoke. Speaking of butlers, it was the butler from Sturlusson’s who had served with the mismatched tea cups. Vanessa hoped he had been knocked out. She was not prepared to entertain the possibility of groping in the hot, choking darkness for a latch or lock, fast running out of air even as one roasted to death.

  Cid walked his automata over, using the hands to provide a platform for the rescuers to remove the body. Its face was horribly contorted and blackened, Hargreaves saw as the automata rolled the corpse gently onto a tarpaulin. She knew at once it had not been he who attacked her in the train yards. The arms were too short and the muscles too dense. This was a man closer to Feerick’s age, whose physiology had been adapted to heavy labor, not acrobatics.

  A terrible certainty struck Hargreaves. There had to be a third accomplice.

  4

  Hargreaves Hatches A Plot

  Vanessa Hargreaves’ Fjord tore into Scotland Yard, and hot on their heels were Yard engines bearing their quarry—one long truck for the automata and a shorter, covered cab for the box. She had reluctantly given Cezette control of Alphonse again, after a stern talking-to about leaving M.A.D. without Hargreaves’ say-so. The convoy made straight for the access ramp, a guarded back entrance that would serve to keep the papers at bay. Soon the journalists would crowd the narrow streets with their photogrammers and portable gramophones, cranking their arms off for a recorded quote. A sound-bite. Remarkably apt, given how cutting words without context could be.

  But for now, Hargreaves was alone in the vehicle with Arturo, and they both knew it was now a race against time. British Intelligence would be converging on them now that the Cook box had resurfaced.

  “There has to be a third accomplice.” She tugged at her shirt with a grimace, which was soaked through. Alphonse tended to produce that effect.

  “It would seem he was recovering in those stables,” Arturo answered her.

  In lieu of a partner, Vanessa Hargreaves found herself bouncing ideas off Adler instead. He seemed to arrive at a conclusion preternaturally, but for every time Hargreaves slapped herself for missing an obvious clue, she had to hold on to any shred of sense in Arturo’s bewildering train of thought. It didn’t help that he was right nearly all the time. Often she was tempted to purchase a supply of coca at the nearest snuff shop to catch up to his ranting. The only thing stopping her was the smug look of satisfaction Arturo would undoubtedly wear.

  “Your stocking is torn,” Arturo pointed out when her accelerator foot came into view. Vanessa observed the run, a line of fraying thread like a mauling. Then again, she thought, brilliance comes with a price.

  A blessing of cool cellar air and calm darkness met her as she climbed from the Fjord, but Hargreaves knew she had precious little time to enjoy it. She gestured wildly for the automata to be moved to the back, funneled into the bay just outside the catacombs, and the short cab into a Yard garage.

  Even though the other constables had brought Feerick in just before her, Intelligence had probably already sent their agents ahead. She took the stairs two at a time, arriving on the heels of her constables before the interrogation room. Straight away, she instructed them to leave her alone with Feerick, hoping Sergeant Cook would stay below the Yard in the interim.

  “Right,” Hargreaves said, attempting to keep her cool despite the four flights of stairs she had just run. “Fancy meeting you again.”

  Franklin Feerick’s neat composure had decomposed like a week-old corpse, and now he sat slumped on the interrogation room’s hard bench as if he were grateful for the seat. Strings of his sparse hair hung over his face, and he looked defeated. Good, Hargreaves thought. This will make it quicker.

  “I want answers,” Hargreaves said, preferring brass tacks and clichés over the lengthy
process of breaking down a witness.

  “So would I,” Feerick managed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re a band of petty thieves, Inspector. We operate in the shadows, we weren’t prepared for three Yard golems running a merry chase through Mile End Park. What was in the box that was so valuable?” He sounded about to break down, actually.

  “Someone hired you to steal it,” the inspector pieced together.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “All three of you?” Hargreaves asked.

  “Yes. You figured it out after you pried poor Gregor’s body out of our golem. There were three of us, Gregor the Strongman, me, Faustus the Clown, and the contortionist Orb Weaver. We were part of a circus troupe that broke up a year ago.”

  “Orb Weaver attacked me at Temple Mills. To cover your tracks,” Hargreaves prompted. She thought of the way the contortionist had scrabbled over the engines, exactly like a spider.

  “Yes.”

  “Who hired you, then?” Vanessa started to ask again, but the opening door cut her off.

  “Inspector?” A young constable stood in the doorway, a recent Academy graduate by the smooth jaw. Hargreaves bit her lip—she didn’t know this one. “The Commissioner wants to commend the inspector responsible for M.A.D.’s successful mission. Your presence is requested in the press room.”

  “Can’t you see I’m in the middle of an interrogation?”

  “Yes, but he was adamant about making a good impression, ma’am. You know how he gets.”

  Vanessa cursed, knowing full well the feeling of being given the runaround. Then again, the room had only one door, and no windows save a small one over the aperture. Easy to lock Feerick in.

  “I’ll be back,” she said to Feerick, and locked the door. If Hargreaves had turned back at the last second, she might have seen the look of horror on his face. Of course, when Hargreaves rounded the three flights of stairs and down the hall to the press room, there was nobody there.

  She barely had time to spit out an expletive before dashing pell-mell back up the stairs, shocking several clerks and young constables on the way. Even before she reached the interrogation room, she could see the glitter of glass in the hallway, and the broken window over the door where the Orb Weaver had squeezed himself in.

  A shard of glass lay bloodied on the table next to Feerick’s open throat.

  Hargreaves took the shortest way to her office, not stopping for anyone. She had no pretensions of catching up to a murderer who could slip unnoticed within the Yard and noiselessly murder a witness. Yet, she had one hope. Orb Weaver had come with two aims: Feerick, and the Cook box.

  Turning a corner, she spotted the Commissioner fending off a gaggle of paper-men. Doing an about-face, she darted up the rear stairwells and through the holding cells to a chorus of wolf-calls, finally making it to her office.

  In a flash, her coat flew across the room, followed by the damp shirt. Hargreaves was anything but unprepared. In her closet hung a backup outfit, a utilitarian waist jacket cropped at the waist to facilitate the quick draw on her .22 Tranter. Slipped between the laces of a deep purple underbust bodice was a line of hidden slugs and a bit of cash, accentuated by a darted hip line. She also grabbed a fresh linen blouse that reminded her of Arturo C. Adler for some demented reason. Her torn stockings were rubbish, so she replaced everything with riding trousers, made of a good elastic weave that clung to her hips.

  If she was to face the treacherous Orb Weaver, her next stop would have to be the armory. She’d danced this waltz before, and did not intend to go unprepared. A pair of constables guarded the secured room, who made a record of every weapon and officer who left with it. No dice, Vanessa concluded. Instead, she pulled her duster back on and clicked her buckled boots over to Firearms Division. There a friendly inspector thanked her for her assistance in their raid of Tony Macmillan’s Whitechapel basement, which had been stuffed to the rafters with a stash of five hundred illegal sparkers.

  “Inspector, would you be so kind as to show me the confiscated weapons? I’d like to compare them with the one we liberated at the Temple Mills train yard,” Vanessa asked with just a dash of a golden smile. Alfred Davies, thirty-four and happily married, was not immune to Vanessa Hargreaves’ statuesque physique, particularly in her current getup. Anglo-Saxon ancestry was strong in her family, with a dash of Swedish grandmother and a Scottish great-aunt somewhere. It gave her strawberry-and-honey locks and a fabulous bust perched on a tall frame that Artemis would approve of—she had a hunter’s body, an archer’s stance. Her legs went on forever under the duster. Soon enough Hargreaves found herself in Firearms Division’s evidence room, a fifteen-yard space jammed with gun lockers and racks of bagged weapons.

  “Like Christmas Eve at Em and Ess.” Hargreaves smiled. She strode past the racks of strange prototype sparkers glittering with toggles and dongles, heading straight for the matte black racks in the back. Tucked between all the muzzles and magazines was a fashionable bandolier belt. To accessorize, Hargreaves chose the following:

  1. One 9mm Browning, of a collection of illegally brokered American arms, magazine loaded. Assorted ammunition.

  2. Four potato mashers, souvenirs from a successful terrorist intercession. The bombs fit snugly in her duster, hanging on loops of fabric.

  3. One 14-inch ‘Bowie’ knife, lifted off an Australian stowaway. Satisfied with her armament, Hargreaves turned when something caught her eye.

  4. A palm-sized sparker in a fetching chocolate brown. “It worked on Orb Weaver once; at the very least it will scare the living daylights out of someone.”

  5. Lastly, almost as she was leaving, she picked up an object that resembled nothing more than a spindle of wire, a fishing hook, and a canister of Chantilly crème. Almost a child’s toy, really, that had been lifted from an inebriate in the tank who died from drink. The man had been far too gone to explain what it was, but the sharp-eyed inspector thought it might come in handy if she ever wanted to cross from one airship to another in a hurry.

  Just outside her office, she nearly ran down the man in the bow tie standing there with a bouquet.

  “What the deuce—! Martin?” said Hargreaves, her mouth agape.

  Martin, her ex-beau as of two days ago, took a step back. He took in Hargreaves, standing there loaded for bear. He opened his mouth, which flapped a bit. Then he quit it and just held up the flowers.

  “Oh… oh dear, these are lovely,” said Hargreaves. She took them in hand, smiled, and jammed them back into his. “But you really have terrible timing.” She spun on her tall bootheels and marched off. “Toodles!”

  For some reason, that felt more real than anything she’d felt in a long time.

  When she turned the corner, Vanessa Hargreaves stopped again, barely restraining herself from using her bevy of armaments on what she found there. She cursed a blue streak of blasphemies.

  “Going somewhere?” Arturo C. Adler said from his casual perch in the hallway of Scotland Yard. He waved away the attractive clerk he had been speaking to, her arms filled with pressed copies.

  “I suppose you deduced my plan as easily as you saw through our perpetrators’ intentions,” Hargreaves said, beginning to stride down the corridor and away from Adler. Not surprisingly, he began to follow, struggling to match her long steps. “Feerick’s dead.”

  “Bollocks.”

  “Slippery wanker got in through the window.”

  “You are aware that, by taking Sergeant Cook’s body yourself, you’re exposing yourself to fire from above?” Arturo reminded her. Luckily, there was nobody else in the corridor. Arturo’s demure date had darted into a side office in a dizzy of disappointment. “Intelligence won’t take kindly to you running off with their ace in the hole, and the Yard won’t understand at all.”

  “You are aware the hair products in those maddening spikes will catch fire if you walk too close to the lamps?” Vanessa shot back. Seeing the earnest look of concern on Arturo’s face, sh
e reeled it back. “The box isn’t safe in Scotland Yard either. Look how easily you got around in here. The three of them were circus performers together and highly skilled thieves after, but Orb Weaver had no problem killing Feerick.”

  “Feerick is dead?” said Arturo.

  “That’s the acrobat done it, a right jellied eel. But right now, I don’t want either him or the military getting hold of Cook.” Hargreaves reached the stairs, and took them at a gallop.

  “Whatever agents employed Feerick and his two cohorts, they know the box is in the Yard, and it won’t be here long. What they don’t know is who will be moving it, which will be me,” Hargreaves declared. “I’ve already sent word ahead by telegram. All the arrangements are made.” She had done no such thing, but if it was enough to steam-roll over Arturo, it seemed like a good thing to say. Vanessa did have a plan in mind; she just hoped the box would still be there. She felt distinctly less dagger and profoundly more hammer.

  “How are you going to move it?” Arturo said, but their destination soon put a plug in his mouth. Vanessa slipped through the dungeons of the Yard like a sylph, headed not for the covered short carriage but for M.A.D. headquarters.

  “Drat,” she cursed as soon as she stepped through. It was a milling sea of people eager to see the Yard’s shining metal knights. Not only were there Yard engineers following Cid and crew’s instructions in the automata repairs, there were higher-ups, including the Commissioner, milling around congratulating everyone. Where had those engineers been for four months? She cursed the Yard’s avarice for good publicity. On the bright side, there were too many press and personnel here now for anyone to pay her any mind.

  The shop was further crowded by the presence of both Priser and Driver, slung up with chains in the middle like trophies. Hargreaves caught scattered announcements by Commissioner Clarkson, informing everyone they were going to repurpose the illicit automata for M.A.D.’s use.

  Taking advantage of the hubbub, Hargreaves and Arturo wove through the parked lorries, homing in on the sugarplum fairy floating at the periphery. Cezette Louissaint had put on some long overalls to hide her shins, and stuffed her hair under a cap to approximate a mechanic’s young apprentice. But her features were still finely sculpted and distinctive. Hargreaves would have to give her a lesson in disguise later. If there was a later….