by Kin S. Law
“Where is Alphonse?” Hargreaves asked Cezette, taking care to keep some machinery between herself and the crowd. This would be the third time the big automata had aided her in this investigation. She was beginning to think of Alphonse as a guardian angel.
“In the parts room to the left. Clarkson and his cronies still think the box is an engine. Not an alchemist’s bone in their bodies,” the little French girl said with no small amount of satisfaction.
“Is Alphonse ready to go?”
“As ready as he’ll ever be. I filled him up with coal and water, et un petit amount of blue,” Cezette answered. She peered at the inspector through a pair of baffled riding glasses, likely part of the disguise. It also made her big eyes even more waifish and forlorn. Perhaps she knew what was about to come.
Vanessa held the girl close, trying to communicate her deep gratitude. It did not seem fair to abandon this girl she had scooped out of the innards of Mordemere’s abomination. When a new head of M.A.D. was appointed, she doubted Cezette would be considered an asset. Hargreaves hated what she was about to do, but Cid and Jean would have to take care of the girl.
“You’ll need a diversion,” Arturo said. She felt him touching her bottom, and slapped him roundly.
“Oh,” she said when he resurfaced with one of the potato mashers and a red flower on his face. “That seems a bit extreme. These are the good guys.”
“I’m just going to destroy Priser. The automata’s armor should contain the explosion,” Arturo said, still wincing and rubbing his face. “You should be my assistant sometimes. I need a strong right hook with me when I go detecting.”
Vanessa Hargreaves nodded, then, wincing, said, “I definitely owe you a favor for this, Adler.”
“I like it when you call me Arturo,” he said, smiling. “You only say Adler when you’re angry.”
Leaving the two by the lorry, Hargreaves snuck past them and through a lowered shutter on the left side of the room. She ducked to avoid the sharp edge. Inside, she found herself in an isolated room much like Firearms Division’s evidence locker. Instead of weapons, the racks were full of machine parts: boiler piping, long wrenches, and oiled copper artifices sharing space with more common parts like nuts, bolts, and gaffer tape. In the very back, half-veiled by a tarpaulin, sat Alphonse, his boilers slowly popping and simmering with fresh embers.
Knowing she didn’t have much time, Hargreaves ripped the tarpaulin off and began to climb the automata. When she got to the cockpit, she observed a harness of steel cable had been looped over Alphonse’s back, supporting the matte black of Sergeant Cook’s box. She shuddered, imagining the pox-ridden body inside.
A simmer of voices coming from beyond the shutter told her Arturo had made his move. There were curious voices, reassuring ones too, people thinking he was just another engineer. Seconds later, a snap-bang shook the cavern. Screams sounded. The shutter stopped most of the noise, whipping about like a living thing, but the air shook with the force of the explosion. Wasting no time, she put Alphonse into rolling mode and dropped an anvil on his accelerator.
With a shearing, screaming tear of metal, the big automata smashed through the shutter and into a thick curtain of smoke, similar to the one that had killed Driver’s pilot. Dimly she beheld a pile of yellow parts on the floor, but not the platinum flare of Arturo nor the dim blue of Cezette. Arturo had tossed a bomb inside of one of the thieves’ automata, containing the explosion.
Sparing no second glance, she accelerated Alphonse round the shop and up through the ramp on the other side, coughing and spitting as she went.
“Thank you,” she whispered, unsure of anyone’s fate in that basement, least of all her own.
Interlude I
Under the Verdurous Sargasso Sea
In the cities on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, a parasite was taking hold.
Like all parasites, this one camouflaged itself against the surrounding foliage. It took the colors of its prey, breeding, spreading. But nowhere was it more prevalent than with the market barge Verdurous, which made a slow circuit of the Sargasso Sea every three years. Winding gyres took in the currents from the north and the south, those whirling eddies that pulled in the flotsam of trade and stranded seafarers in the age before airship travel. Now those abandoned waters were home to another sort of flotsam: the human kind.
The parasite stalked the sun-bleached market tents and crawled through the dark passages belowdecks, taking root in the dim alleys between eateries, sleeping quarters, and workshops. Hunched piles of shivering rags were the evidence of its passage, and stilled, sprawled bodies in the blackest bilges were its strange fruit.
But such things were still unknown to the intrepid Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves, who had taken up with the airship Schwartzhaus out of London, bound for New York. She had purposefully found her old friend and captain, Zampano Ivanov, who would hide her if they were stopped by the Royal Navy. Alphonse and the dreaded Cook box were stowed safely below decks, but Hargreaves had bit her lip until the crane lifted away and a tight tarpaulin was drawn over her mechanical friend. She didn’t feel safe until the bloated, heavily armored airship drifted away from the Murkwood moorage towers and lurched across the Thames, headed over Reading, Bath, and the Bristol Channel to find the open sky of the Atlantic beyond.
Only when they had got that far did Hargreaves bother to inquire on their itinerary, which Zampano revealed to be a little circuitous. They were avoiding heavily trafficked channels, which suited Hargreaves just fine. But they were also making a few trade stops, which was a little out of the way. Still, the air outside the pea soup of London was crisp, and she had her own small cabin to retire to and plenty of good Russian poets to read in Zampano’s library, which had been the first thing he had refurbished when he purchased the Schwartzhaus from a German trader. The strong tea aboard was sweetened with beet sugar, a welcome novelty. It was enough to hold her until the Schwartzhaus stopped to trade on the Verdurous’ northerly loop, before heading the rest of the way to New York.
As she stepped off of Zampano’s airship and onto the plate steel of the Verdurous’ market deck, she breathed deeply an ocean air layered with ship’s oil, fried food, and subtly rotting vegetable matter from all the detritus floating in the Sargasso. Zampano raised an eyebrow and Vera, Zampano’s right hand, visibly held her nose. Hargreaves took in the experience. The bouquet was simply nonexistent high on the decks of an airship, and it was a useful thing to a detective inspector. For instance, she could tell the social strata at a whiff: profitable traders at the top, with their perfume of gardenias and musk. A middle layer of hucksters, vagabonds, and jacks of all trades with their richly spiced potpourri of lies and dirty deeds. There was a relatively small amount of old piss hidden under everything, which meant the place was booming with business—or they simply made the vagrants walk the plank.
Zampano had docked amongst a veritable storm of airships, their balloons and pressed gas hulls rubbing against each other in a profusion of colorful clouds. Though Hargreaves was anxious to be on her way and keep the Cook box far from prying eyes, she also knew there was little chance of someone finding them on a mobile market barge like the Verdurous. Zampano had put it like this: “When I held pirates and murderers in Siberia, they speak of ports like this, like the Straight Hook. Is place to go when you don’t care for the Tsar to catch you at play, da?”
Through this colorful banter, Hargreaves gathered moving ports were popular with pirates for their dislike of authority and multitude of services. Security through transience; if your place of dirty dealing was moving, it was harder to hit. The barge had once been a ship-shipping ship, one of the few steam-powered hulks that were capable of hauling seafarers within its capacious innards, or salvaging entire airships when they were downed at sea. A thousand feet across and five thousand feet long, the Verdurous had been designed as a horseshoe, with the bow and stern of the barge open to allow easier salvage, and sealed bows on the arms of the horseshoe. Each arm h
eld a deep stack of decks, well-tunneled with passages to allow crews access to various levels of the ship being hauled. Steaming lifts carried cargo from one level to another. At both sides of the stern, huge gears rose from the depths of the barge, pistoning sets of cams up and down like great oil wells. They drove the paddle wheels that moved the ship from below.
When the Verdurous was decommissioned, its captain had gone rogue, citing unpaid wages and horrible dental benefits. He had taken the barge out to the tempestuous gyre of the Sargasso Sea, where the fickle aeon storms made for treacherous sailing. As if that weren’t enough, when the Sargasso was calm the aeon fog was known to make sailors go mad. Men saw horrible apparitions. Somehow, the crew of the Verdurous were able to circumvent those effects, and it was legend itself as to how. Over the years they had raised the loading keel to become their market deck, and built dozens of bridges, envelopes, and towers, until the Verdurous was the Atlantic icon it was today.
Hargreaves expected a grubby collection of rogues, scalawags, and oily underhanded scoundrels. Instead, the Verdurous turned out to be bright and colorful, and reminded her of Brighton Beach. She peered towards the distant edge of the barge, but she couldn’t see where the deck ended and the ocean began. There was only a profusion of tents, an ocean of fabrics, bright stripes and spots under huge wooden billboards. Most of the boards moved, ratcheting back and forth distractingly and laced with the bulbs of arclights that would surely be a sea of stars in the night. The air smelt like sea salt, with a prevailing musk of grilled clams, fried fish, ginger beer, and potted shrimp. There were other smells too, but those were unfamiliar, a collection of whimsies from every shore in the world. She winced, as the criers’ and barkers’ voices reached her ears.
“Vigils! Colossus Vigors and Vigils, only a dollar apiece! Impress the missus! Stay awake longer; be more productive!”
“Hot off the press! Columbia—Peerless Amongst Her Rivals! Learn how America became the greatest nation on God’s green earth!”
“If it took a second shot, you’re not buying Hamish Arms! Good guys trust Hamish for fast, smooth action. Money-back guarantee!”
It was difficult to walk, actually, with the bear-like Zampano at her back and the tight press of criers on every side. She nearly fell over into a stall full of spices, cones of yellow turmeric, rich brown cinnamon, and blood-red mace. The proprietor opened his mouth and Hargreaves cringed, expecting rebuke. Instead, she got a smooth, practiced catalogue of the spices she had nearly gone face-first into.
“What is it you Brits say; sod off, wanker,” said Zampano, waving an enormous hand into the proprietor’s face. “Is not good to get close. Is like zoo, or prison, da? The tigers will take an arm if you let them.”
“Hang the tigers,” said Hargreaves. She reached behind her, coming up with a very small arm clutching a purse; Hargreaves’ petty cash. An urchin had nearly pickpocketed her whilst she was dangling over the bloody cardamom. “It’s the mice you have to watch for.”
Hargreaves tucked the purse into her bosom, smacked the child’s buttocks, and shouldered her harness a little tighter under her duster. As she turned back to Zampano, there came a rustle in the crowd somewhere behind her. Hargreaves looked back at Zampano’s ship docked between the roast chicken stall and the saltwater taffy, where a small crowd began to gather. Impossibly, a swirl of even brighter color appeared between all the variously attractive tents. A ribbon of cloth soared high overhead, followed by a sizzle of bells that cut through the crowd with its promise of jingling hips.
“Ah. That would be Vera Jasper. Is good show, we go, da?” said Ivanov gruffly. In addition to running a crane, fixing steamcraft, and being a champion at chess, Vera had mentioned offhandedly she could also belly dance. The small dusky girl hadn’t agreed to show them, citing the tightness of the Schwartzhaus’ decks, but when the Verdurous was proposed as a trade stop, Vera had wanted to “make a little extra coin at the bazaar.” Apparently the way to gain so many skills was to take every opportunity that presented itself—Hargreaves knew the feeling.
Zampano seemed embarrassed, even though his affection for Vera was plain to see. Vera had not paid Ivanov for passage; she was exchanging services, and the captain had not wanted the crew to think those services were untoward.
“Go on then,” said Hargreaves. “Go watch Vera dance.” Ivanov blushed beet-red, every part of his pale Russian skin lighting up.
“It is nothing! I simply wish to… that is, I am only curious… you will be fine on your own?”
“Yes, yes, Ivanov. I doubt my pursuers will have followed us this far. Now go,” said Hargreaves, laughing. “Besides, I have something I want to look into.”
As Zampano made a massive wake in the crowd, Hargreaves let out a deep breath. She was torn. On the one hand, she enjoyed the jovial banter with her old friend. Zampano had been invaluable during their fight with Mordemere, giving the Huckleberry her valuable hideaway just before Moscow and tracking the Russian airship traffic. On the other hand, Zampano stood out like an ugly couch. No, what Hargreaves needed to do, she needed to do with a set jaw and a stealthy step. There were characters of ill repute here on this barge, and she needed to grill them about the American automata used to rob a moving train in the French countryside.
Besides, Zampano was concerned about nothing. Inside her carpet bag was a veritable armory taken from Scotland Yard, along with baubles shed won off the ship’s poker table. Trinkets, really, ranging from a stash of smoking weed to a Remington rifle with a custom scope. Hargreaves had brought the cream of the crop. She grinned and stepped into one of the many open stairways into the bowels of the market barge. As she arrived onto the landing, somebody rushed past her and disappeared into the passages. A second person appeared, sallow and ill-shaven, clearly chasing the first. Beads of sweat covered his face, and a hungry look darkened his eyes. Hargreaves cared not why the second person looked so furtive, but when he shoved past her quite rudely, she turned her shoulder and put out her foot. When the sallow man hit the floor with a clang, she was already around the corner.
Oh, yes, Vanessa Hargreaves could take care of herself.
Far below the top deck of the Verdurous, nefarious doings were happening that Vanessa Hargreaves knew nothing about.
For instance, the person who ran past Hargreaves and disappeared into the passages was one Hopping Hare Lewis. She ran past Hargreaves without making note of the inspector and plunged headlong into the passages, taking the first turns she could see in the unfamiliar deck. Clothing stores, clockworks markets, and shamanic healers appeared and disappeared in a flash as she dashed past them in her strong calfskin riding boots. Her linen skirt swished around them, brushing walls on both sides as she squeezed through a gap in pile of old junk leaned against the ships’ cargo containers.
For good measure, she dashed down another stair and found herself in a red light district, where the men whistled and catcalled to her. She was about to take umbrage when she realized her plain bodice had come loose, and she looked a lot like the women working the halls of this level. Good; at least she would blend in. The lanterns on this level glowered at her in various shades of crimson, arc and gas lights crammed into the ribs of the bulkheads. Colorful silks veiled the passages, making it hard to tell where she was going. Lewis slowed to a stop, trying to calm her heart by leaning against the outside of a quiet enclosure that had been cobbled together with tenting and tin sheets.
As she caught her breath by the curtained windows, she started, but it was only her reflection in the glossy dark glass. Lewis had never thought of herself as pretty, but she did not kid herself either. Her strong jaw and aquiline nose might be considered masculine, but Lewis knew her rich brown skin and strong equestrian’s hips were very desirable. But as the blood returned painfully to her brain, she didn’t think pleasure was her pursuer’s intent. He had been too drawn, his look too hungry, and she didn’t think the Verdurous was bad enough to simply put up with that sort of behavior. Trade didn�
��t happen unless there was some stability, Lewis knew it from traveling all over the West… and farther.
Somebody had scrawled “Explicit Endeavors Undertaken Economically” over the door of the enclosure. It was a saloon of some kind, or a pub, and a burlesque dancer stared at her curiously from within. Lewis smiled awkwardly and moved on at a brisk trot. Her frontier frock, obvious heritage, and the eagle feather behind her ear made her stand out further from the mostly European and African passengers. She didn’t want to leave an impression, in case her attacker knew the barge better than she did.
Was it her imagination, or did a few people here have the same hungry look? The attack had come from shadows just like these. With every step it seemed like the alleys just grew deeper, the looks transformed to low plotting. Eyes glinted in the dark, their whites nearly pushed out by their dilated pupils. Strange how all of them had the same look—like they were staring out at a far-off land.
Lewis was going into bad territory, she could tell. The red lanterns were gone, and the materials in the walls were closer to junked than upcycled. Desperately, she turned corner after corner, trying to find her way out, but only when she tripped over a pile of rags that turned out to be a gaunt, reeking woman, did she realize she had only run deeper into the slums of this barge. But by then, it was too late. The darkness was full of glinting black eyes, and they surrounded her now.
“Stay back!” said Lewis, and she took up the nearest thing that might serve as a weapon: a broken, rusty pipe. Despite her youth running free with the horses of her tribe, she was winded. There was not enough room to exercise on the airships, and she had been traveling for a long time. She had told her father she wanted to see the world, and she had, but that had meant taking up the white man’s airships and the white man’s clothes. There were white men here, certainly, but there were freemen too with their inky skin, though it was hard to tell them apart. Everybody was covered in a layer of grime, and they clutched strange devices in their hands. Each of them had one, and as they crept around her, surrounding her, the contraptions made odd clicking noises. Like the ticking of a clock….
