Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  “Britain, as well,” Hargreaves said. “I’ve seen the Yard’s old charts and maps. There are nearly two hundred kilometers of abandoned tunnels under London.”

  “We’ve flown them,” Rosa said.

  They navigated the tunnel and through a rusty pair of steel gates to find themselves outside, underneath a wide suspended bridge. The Berry flew under a long, raised highway, in the shadow of multitudes of steam lorries and sedan engines packed bumper to bumper, until Hargreaves recognized the raised train tracks of the Bowery.

  Dragonwell set foot on the forecastle, its black cape hiding it from prying eyes. At a glance, the sleepless denizens might see a landing jaunt coming to rest on a beat-up old freighter. It extended a hand to Hargreaves, as if picking up a small animal. If Alphonse seemed a comforting old knight to the princess Hargreaves, Dragonwell was more of a veteran lance, battered but no less reliable.

  “How about it? We can take you anywhere you want to go. It’s only a matter of time before the police discover you’re not real British Intelligence,” Albion offered. “Having us along will make the investigation go smoother, and we can help you throw Cook into the Atlantic deeps after.”

  “How gallant to offer. Becoming of you, Captain,” Hargreaves said, with only a slight crinkle of schoolmarm about her.

  She stood there kitted out in her preferred combat wear, but she felt strangely, comfortably naked. When she was with M.A.D., they were all dependent on her in some way or another, mostly to stop them from tearing Scotland Yard apart. With Arturo, the mask was enjoyable, but not something she could do for long. It was pleasant, not having to hide before people who could speak to her as equals. Throwing away a catastrophic British engine of war was as natural as sipping tea to Clemens. The pirates’ very adversity to Hargreaves’ proper English way endeared them to her. Odd, that their presence should comfort the turmoil at her breast.

  “All right. I will bring Alphonse and the box to your safekeeping, but I will retain mastery over it until such time as your services to me are complete.” Besides, Hargreaves would need the big automata to move the enormous box about.

  “And no piracy. Don’t fret; we’re more explorers these days anyhow.”

  “Seeing as I have no jurisdiction here, and have committed an act of high treason, I may be closer to the gallows than you,” said Hargreaves.

  The night was cold. If becoming a pirate meant Auntie’s warm, comfortable galley, the inspector found she did not mind starting right away.

  9

  Britain Goes To War. Arturo Has a Drink

  Though Hargreaves could not know it, her reunion with the Huckleberry coincided with the arrival of her old crew. Arturo and the members of M.A.D. disembarked in New York to a hubbub sweeping through the city, though that was not immediately obvious from the famed skyline filling their portholes.

  As passengers on a mostly-leisure ship, they docked not at Coney Island, but at one of the ornate towers dotting the West Side. The Gretchen slipped up the Hudson, widdershins around Manhattan and sidled up to a forest of towers at Chelsea. They jutted out from the urban cluster at various angles, trees rooted in a mighty cliff of misty copper, steel, and gold. Steam-powered winches raised and lowered the beams to the appropriate height, their spools of cable spanning full city blocks.

  Arturo had mostly recovered by the time they arrived, and led the party down the ramp into a hall covered in sunbursts. It was a high-ceilinged place, partitioned into smaller lounges, with a gentle breeze that signaled large ventilation fans somewhere. Arturo guessed the hall ran all the way down the spine of Manhattan, sprouting nerve fibers of shopping arcades and recreation. Plate windows looked on the greenery of residential New Jersey, juxtaposed against the tall ziggurat towers of Uptown on the other side.

  The arrivals lounge was more of the same, full of rounded furniture, quadrilateral windows, and liberally gilt borders. A spiral staircase led up to a café area, where a barista was using a tall boiler to make heavenly-smelling drinks with spurts of steam. Underneath, counters with dedicated personnel in sharply tailored uniforms advertised various services. When they arrived, everyone in the lounge was gathered around a news service counter, where an aproned clerk on a stepladder was writing up the news points of the day on a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard.

  “Stop writing and read off the details for us!” a sharply suited man in his thirties demanded of the clerk. Beside him, a woman in a shift dress the color of her gray hair shook a manicured finger, one of a dozen accusatory digits.

  “What’s going on?” Arturo asked of a uniformed constable who had just arrived. The lawman wore blue, but the shield-shaped badge was clear enough to the amateur detective. Arturo checked the collar; he was Officer Paul McGrath.

  The police officer looked Arturo up and down, eyes catching on his glaringly magenta frock coat, his perfectly spiked hair, and the way he gingerly favored his stitched abdomen. Thankfully, the rest of M.A.D. were more neutrally attired. Cezette wore tall boots, and a beret poised atop her jet locks. Hallow was his usual pinstriped scarecrow, but Cid had found a bow tie and a frayed brown suit, looking more the aged professor than the plundering engineer.

  “You sound like you’re from merry England,” Officer McGrath said in a low voice. “I’m sorry to bear you bad news, but it looks like war has found Britain.”

  Arturo managed to snag the latest bulletin on the way out, plucking with fast fingers a printed missive from a businessman’s dispatch case. It was a telegraphed article, terse and mostly related to which stocks and bonds would be wise to trade for arms companies and logistics firms. Still, the facts were there.

  “As of 12:35, May 23rd, Prime Minister Meriweather Falstaff, on behalf of Queen Victoria III, Pax Britannia, and her allies, has declared a State of War with the Ottoman Empire,” Arturo read aloud from the missive. They had found a quiet park nearby, a long boulevard of man-made flowerbeds and tall oaks planted on a raised walkway. There were still signs of metal tracks and clinker, from when the platform used to carry trains instead of vegetation. Each of them had a hot drink from a nearby coffee cart, held in a plain pasteboard cup.

  “Why in God’s name?” Cid gaped.

  “According to this, the Ottoman’s aerial forces launched a surprise attack on the Falklands, with the aid of allied Argentina, which has long held the islands are a rightful part of their country. Troops were landed with automata units, which quickly occupied several key islands. British patrols nearby were called to respond, ensuing in a prolonged conflict. War Cabinet head Margie Tresser was quick to support the Navy’s decision, publicly calling the move ‘an informed and apt strike.’”

  “That is thousands of miles away from anywhere!” Cezette protested, her accent thick in her aggravation.

  “And full of pirates and ne’er-do-wells,” Arturo agreed.

  “The Pax has declared the Falklands sovereign territory,” Hallow explained. “An attack on the islands is an attack on British soil. Argentina has wanted the place back for decades, and for the Ottomans, it’s an ideal opening salvo.”

  “Britain will need to respond with a good portion of our forces, or we will appear weak,” Cid said gruffly. “But it will draw our navy away from Europe, where an Ottoman offensive is likely waiting.”

  Arturo looked about. Under the New York skyline, both Europe and South America seemed far away and irrelevant. These vaulted metropolitan obelisks were likely to be awash in red gold soon enough, but for now they seemed lofty, above it all.

  Pressingly, with first blood drawn, the powers that be would undoubtedly expend every effort to track down Vanessa Hargreaves. The Ottomans no doubt had their own agents, but the queen would want to end the conflict quickly, before the declaration escalated into actual war. As of now, it was still possible to reach an agreement with the Ottomans. A devastating retaliation, with a terrifying weapon like the Cook plague, would end the whole thing before anyone got in too deep. Whether the queen only wished to threaten with the w
eapon, or if she sided with iron hawks like Tresser or Lord Howser in making a demonstration of it, was still up in the air.

  “Let’s get somewhere more comfortable. I’ve booked a hotel nearby, and had our bags sent there. We can sort out how to find Hargreaves from the suites,” Arturo announced.

  “Follow the spiky head,” said Cezette, and pranced off between the blooming hydrangeas. They were the last of the autumn foliage, but here in the steel canyons of New York it was still unseasonably hot.

  “She’s become used to her new legs,” Arturo said, watching the girl pirouette and frolic without spilling a drop of coffee.

  “Too accustomed,” Cid grunted. “She thinks they’ll take her anywhere, but one faulty spring and they would tip her off the side of this garden.”

  “What is the point of new legs if they don’t go anywhere?” Arturo asked philosophically. “You have to let go soon, Papa.”

  “Harrumph.”

  At the hotel Arturo booked, they found their suites as luxurious as the Gretchen’s. The lavishly appointed rooms boasted some very modern ingenuities, including a small engine for hot bathwater, a long glass on a tripod for taking in a view of the skyline, and a vacuum delivery tube for the morning post or telegrams. There was also a handsomely folded card on a tray in the master suite. It was refreshingly sepia, with none of the glitz they had seen thus far.

  Cezette performed a perfect somersault into the Chesterfield sofa and began undoing the clasps that held her knees to her thighs. The skin was red, but not inflamed.

  “Where do you get the money for all of this?” Cid said, looking around.

  “I’ve had some successful cases with successful clients,” Arturo remarked. He felt it prudent not to mention exorbitant fees were those clients’ guarantees he would keep their secrets. Instead, he picked up the card, expecting some courteous reminder or missive.

  You are discovered. Leave immediately -I

  Ho-hum, Arturo thought to himself. First a stabbing, then a warning? Perhaps he was being coerced by a group of confused time travelers, who had got things back to front.

  “Arturo.” Hallow’s voice drifted in from the suite’s parlor. “There are men in the hallway.”

  Arturo entered the parlor to find Hallow at the peephole of the door. They were fortunately at the end of the hall, and Hallow had a commanding view of the corridor.

  “What do they look like?” said Arturo.

  “Prim. Neat. Like crows, with black hats and suits. Their canes are heavily topped,” Hallow answered.

  Arturo came up beside Hallow, putting his eye to the peephole. For a second he thought he heard the pinstriped scarecrow draw a very uncharacteristic breath. It was not the time to pursue it.

  “Those are government agents, or Cid’s a delicate Barnsley bird,” Arturo confirmed. Particularly the bearded one, he looked straight off an academy rugby team. They were knocking on each suite, behaving as if they were getting the wrong door.

  “Our mysterious ‘I’?”

  “I do not think so,” Arturo answered, showing him the card.

  He left Hallow at the door and rounded up Cid and Cezette. The old man had the engine going, about to fill a bath. Cezette gave a pout at first, but she enthusiastically clipped her legs back on and drew her stockings over the seam. The limbs were surprisingly natural, their brassy rims and black enamel clicking easily onto the porcelain caps where her knees ought to have been. They bent without a sound to lift the girl on to her feet. Arturo guessed there was some spring mechanism, transferring the nascent energy of Cezette’s thigh muscles into the springs in the calves.

  Before the men reached the end of the hall, Arturo had the group ready to go. Their luggage would have to be forfeit, but Arturo was able to liberate a few choice items into a traveling satchel. M.A.D. had few belongings to begin with. Cid had a heavy workman’s duffel, Hallow an understated messenger bag, and Cezette a utilitarian rucksack.

  “Quietly,” Arturo said as he slid the window open. They were several stories up, but like every other building in New York, this one was equipped with a fire escape. Metal slats and ladders created an external route to the street below. He had scarcely gotten the others onto the escape when an insistent knocking came at the door.

  “Go on, they’re not here for you,” Arturo said, shutting the window in M.A.D.’s faces. The detective slipped back through the suite of rooms as the knocking came a second time, more insistently.

  “Who is it?” Arturo called.

  “Hotel management. We’d like a word, sir.”

  Oh, that was some cheek. They’d even gone to the trouble of accents, an American frontier English the consistency of molasses. The trouble was, they were in fast-paced New York, and stuck out like sore thumbs.

  When the two black-suited men kicked down the door, they found Arturo waiting just beside the jamb. The first man fell to a vicious baritsu trip, accompanied by a jab to the throat. While he gasped like a fish on the plush hotel pile, the second man came through, flailing the heavy end of his cane. Arturo danced back, stepping lightly on the first man’s cane, which had fallen to the floor. It came willingly, coerced by physics and the fulcrum of the first man’s wrist into Arturo’s palm.

  “Now is the dance of death!” cried Arturo, succumbing to a dapper mood that suddenly overtook him.

  Arturo backed off, parrying his opponent’s attempts to bash his head in. The second man was a rugby player, all gruff and no finesse, but it was a trained sort of violence nonetheless. Arturo was not fooled, and used the tip of his cane to divert the blows into the hotel’s furnishings. He was no fencer, but the cane was weighted well enough, and the suites full of smashing good things to throw a man headlong into. Idly, his detective’s instinct for detail uncovered the slight pitch to his attacker’s heavy breath, the tint of his skin, the certain hereditary cut to his jaw.

  “Come now, you can do better, rarebit!” Arturo taunted the Welshman.

  His pinpoint deduction paid off, causing his attacker to lurch out of balance in a lunge. Arturo came down like a sack of bricks, laying his cane headmaster-style into the man’s backside. He went down, and the detective pinned the man’s fighting hand, while simultaneously producing an item he had liberated from his luggage; a stub-nosed, large-caliber revolver. Unexpectedly, his quarry smirked, before a resounding crash echoed through the suites.

  “Eh?” said Arturo. Instead of finding himself laid out on the floor, he spun round to behold the first attacker, his head caved in with a heavy tripod. The suit swanned dramatically into the Chesterfield.

  “Thought you might need a hand,” Jean Hallow called, still clutching the tripod. “Though it seemed you were having quite the spirited time.”

  Arturo struck at the rugby man with the point of the cane as he tried to get up, throwing him headfirst into the hot bath engine. A piercing cry came from him as a ruptured steam line seared the flesh from his chiseled jaw. The man fainted dead away.

  “If we have a free moment, Mr. Hallow, I will be quite happy to show you a spirited time,” Arturo mentioned. He had cheek too, oh yes.

  Before either of them had a chance to work out what exactly Arturo implied, the open doorway emitted a babble of concerned voices. It seemed the other inhabitants of the hotel were generally opposed to the sort of ruckus happening in the corner suite.

  Arturo and Hallow rushed down the fire escape into a warm New York afternoon. Cid and Cezette were already waiting beside a hired cab, a steaming Fjord Victoria.

  “That is the last woman I wanted to see,” Arturo said, giving the square grille-and-crown badge of the cab a once-over. They climbed in, urging the driver to go, and never mind the destination.

  “Hey, limey fuck, I don’t take kindly to no imperialist slurs. You can find your own way. Get out of my cab,” the driver chirped at Cid. New York hospitality at its finest.

  Just then, a string of sharp reports sounded, accompanied by alarming chunking sounds across the bonnet of the engine
. The paint flaked away to reveal strong Fjord iron, punched with regular biscuit-sized holes. Cezette squealed, but she kept her head, taking cover in the bottom of the cab.

  “Ah. Apologies, kind sir. And sorry about this,” Arturo said. He pistol-whipped the driver in the temple and Cid shoved him out of the engine, taking up the driver’s seat himself. The grimy street was probably a safer alternative than Arturo’s patronage. They sped sharply away.

  “Where are we going? What will we do?” Cezette asked from between the front seats of the cab. She had a big grin plastered across her cheeks. Down Seventh Avenue, the cab made good time for two blocks, but soon ran into traffic. “This engine is bright yellow. Wouldn’t that be conspicuous?”

  “It’s hard to find one particular tree in a forest,” Arturo said, indicating the broad sweep of yellow cabs darting in and out before them. They outnumbered the regular sedans, and no horses were in sight, even clockworked ones. “But the bullet holes are a bit jarring. Shall we adjourn to the underground?”

  It was easier said than done. Manhattan was a maze of cantilevered valleys, full to bursting with hustle and bustle. There was simply no quiet spot they could leave the engine without attracting undue attention. Surprisingly enough, the bullet holes seemed inconspicuous, unremarkable to the passersby, as far as they could tell. The pedestrians were more engrossed by the rows and rows of adverts overhead, outlined in glowing letters two or three stories high.

  “Whatever possessed you to take a hotel suite? You may as well have left our names in these great big arclights,” said Cid.

  “I did use a false name,” replied Arturo, but he felt like a green deckhand being scolded by the experienced captain.

  “I would have gone straight to the seediest motel in the city,” Cid grunted. “But I suppose they would have found us eventually.”

  “It was a stroke of luck this cab came along, though,” Arturo mused.