1636: The Devil's Opera

by Eric Flint

  “Go!” Bill waved his hand.

  “Got your whistle?” Byron demanded of his partner.

  Gotthilf pulled it out of his pocket.

  “Blow follow me, and come on!”

  Gotthilf put the whistle to his lips and pealed out the shrill rising and falling tones of that call. It pierced through the clamor of the crowd. Every watchman along the parade route and in the square headed toward them.

  Byron didn’t wait for them to gather, but took off at a dead run, heading for the nearest bridge over the Big Ditch. Gotthilf and the others followed.

  * * *

  Ciclope shook his head, trying to clear the fuzziness from his mind and the ringing from his ears. He suddenly became aware that he was propped up against the wall of the house across the road from the construction site, and he didn’t remember walking that far back. He looked around; the scope of the destruction in front of him was shocking, for a moment at least. But since he had been expecting a bomb to blow up, it didn’t occupy him for long.

  Pietro. Where was Pietro?

  There was a crumpled figure lying on the ground just outside the collapsed wall. Its clothing looked familiar. Ciclope stumbled forward, then bent to pull on an arm.

  “Hey, Pietro, what are you doing?” he rasped. “Get up! We need to get out of here.”

  Ciclope’s pulling on the arm turned the body on its back. It was Pietro, all right; Pietro with a hole in the middle of his forehead, oozing dark blood, vacant eyes staring up at Ciclope, a slack-jawed expression of surprise on his face. Ciclope recoiled for a moment.

  “Damn.”

  After a moment, he looked around to see if anyone was watching, then ran his hands through the dead man’s pockets. After all, they were partners, and Pietro wouldn’t need anything anymore. He relocated a small purse and Pietro’s revolver to his own pockets.

  Ciclope rested a hand on the dead thief’s shoulder. “Say hello to Satan for me, Pietro.”

  With that, he staggered to his feet and wobbled off, ears still ringing.

  * * *

  Reilly grabbed one of the trailing patrolmen.

  “Phillip, right?”

  The patrolman nodded.

  “Get to the fire company; tell them to muster immediately by the hospital construction site, and to not only look at the ground, but also the roofs. Repeat that.”

  Phillip recited it verbatim.

  “Good. Now get, and join the others at the hospital after that.”

  Phillip ran off, and Bill started up the steps.

  “No, I am not moving. That was not an attack. It did not sound like a gunpowder explosion,” Gustav was stating loudly as Bill arrived at the edge of the Marine cordon, “or not just a gunpowder explosion. What is over there?” He managed to remove the imperial hand from the clutch of his daughter and waved it in the direction of the growing plume.

  “I do not know,” Otto Gericke answered, “but he might,” pointing at Bill.

  “Let him through,” Gustav ordered.

  The Marines reluctantly opened their rank enough to let the police captain pass.

  “Well?” The focus of Gustav’s imperial eagle gaze shifted to the police captain.

  “My guess at the moment is there’s been an explosion of some kind, and the only thing that direction is the hospital construction site.”

  “What have they got that would explode like that?” Gericke frowned. “They don’t have gunpowder or explosives.”

  Bill started to shake his head, then stopped as one horrible possibility occurred to him. “They’ve got that steam crane. If something went wrong and the boiler blew…it could be pretty bad.” He pointed at the people below them slapping at coals in their hair and clothing, “And there’s a lot of roofs between there and here.”

  Gericke paled. “Fire…”

  “Fire company’s been called. My guys have already headed that way; I’ve got to get over there.”

  Reilly dashed back down the steps and followed the route his men had taken.

  Gericke’s face was still pale, but there was no quaver in his voice as he turned to Captain Beaton. “Captain, your men had best take over security, since the Polizei have gone to see what happened.”

  Beaton looked to Gustav, who nodded without a word. The captain saluted, then headed down the steps, bellowing orders as he did so. His marines moved back down the steps and fanned out before them. The emperor’s Scots started to move with them, but were called back by Major Graham after Beaton threw a couple of terse sentences his way.

  Gericke turned back to Gustav.

  “My apologies, Emperor. With your permission, I need to join Captain Reilly and his men.”

  “I will go with you,” Gustav said, tugging at his belt. “I want to see this for myself.”

  “Oh, no you won’t,” Dr. Nichols said, appearing at the emperor’s side. “Inside. Rest. Now. If anyone’s going, I will. If the police captain is right, they’re going to need another doctor a lot more than they’re going to need you.”

  Gustav stared down at the doctor. Nichols didn’t flinch, and his gaze bored back into the emperor’s eyes. Gustav finally sighed. “As you will, Doctor. You are a far greater tyrant than I could ever be. I hope that history records that.”

  The imperial gaze swiveled to Ulrik.

  “Go with them. Be my eyes and ears.”

  Ulrik nodded.

  Gustav turned and entered the palace, Kristina at one side, Caroline Platzer at the other, and Erling Ljungberg looming at his back.

  * * *

  Byron pulled up panting after the minute or so of flat-out sprinting. The back of his mind observed that his high school track coach would call him pathetic. But the front of his mind was occupied with looking at a scene that might have been found in Dante’s Inferno. The fence around the western edge of the construction site was leveled, and debris and detritus was scattered everywhere. Various piles of building materials were tumbled in heaps. Several of the partially-laid brick walls had been toppled. The crane structures were demolished, which he had suspected he’d find after seeing the derrick from the crane lying broken on top of a crumbled stretch of wall around the old city on the other side of the canal. So it must have been the crane’s boiler that blew.

  Clouds of smoke and steam drifted in the air, seemingly idling above the windrows of bodies inside the worksite. That was perhaps the most horrific sight of all, and they hadn’t even gotten up close and personal with the corpses yet. He knew that many of the men would be losing their last meal soon, as they began to recover the dead.

  People were starting to gather, some of them coming out of the nearby houses and buildings. Byron could see a lot of broken windows from where he stood, and there were a few people in the street who seemed to be injured.

  “Spread out,” he yelled. “Nobody goes in without my say-so.”

  “I see smoke, and I see coals all over,” Gotthilf huffed beside him, “but I don’t see any fire.”

  “Yeah,” Byron said. “And the coals seemed to be dimming, at least out there.” He waved a hand at the disaster area.

  “We need to get moving, try to help these people,” one of the sergeants proclaimed.

  “Wait, Milich,” Byron said, lifting a hand. There was a thought niggling at the back of his mind, but it wouldn’t step forward.

  “We can’t wait, they need us now!”

  Just as the sergeant started to move forward, the thought came to Byron. It was a memory of his old granddad talking about his days in a factory in Pittsburgh, and about the disaster that caused him to leave the city and move back to Grantville.

  “Yep,” Grandpa Buck had said, rocking in his chair on the front porch as his knife flashed in whittling a stick, “that job was great, until the big boiler blew. Steam filled the plant, killed everyone in it. Then it killed a bunch of guys from another building who tried to go in and help the others. Takes steam a while to cool off, it does, and them boys got fried just like the others. And w
hen the steam did cool off enough to let men in without scalding them, a few more went in and died before someone realized that the steam had driven all the breathable air out from the building.” He’d paused in the rocking and whittling both, and pointed his pocket knife at the young Byron, who was sitting on the porch, arms wrapped around his knees. “You don’t never have nothing to do with steam, boy. It’s a killer.”

  “Halt!” Byron yelled. He yanked Sergeant Milich back, faced the patrolmen and placed his hand on his pistol. “Nobody goes in until I say so, and I’ll shoot the first man who tries.”

  The Polizei sergeants and patrolmen knew Byron for a no-nonsense sort, who wouldn’t say something if he didn’t mean it. Most of them had also seen him shoot. They froze in place.

  At that moment, a pigeon launched off a roof across the street. It swooped down, headed for something that had caught its eye in the rubble. Three yards into the destruction zone, it flew through a patch of steam fog, folded in mid-air and crumpled to the ground.

  “There!” Byron said in a loud voice. “See that? That sky rat was killed by the steam from the exploded boiler. If you go in now, you’ll die, just like it did and just like they did.” He waved his free hand at the bodies.

  “But we need to help them!” the sergeant said again.

  “You can’t help them,” Byron said. “They’re dead, all of them. And if we rush in now, we’ll just add more bodies to the pile.”

  “So what do we do?” Karl Honister asked, pushing through the crowd.

  “Spread out, keep well away from the site, and keep people from going in. And find me some more birds, chickens, dogs, mice, donkey, horse; something.”

  “Chickens?” Gotthilf asked as the patrolmen began fanning out around the perimeter of the site.

  “Need something to toss in to tell us when the heat is gone and the air is good again.”

  “Ah.”

  “Go find me some rope, too. Lots of it.”

  Chapter 50

  “So, steam boiler explosion, huh?”

  Gotthilf looked around to see Dr. Nichols stop beside Captain Reilly. Reilly pointed at Byron. “He’s the site commander.”

  Nichols looked at Byron. “Yeah,” Byron said, waving his hand at the scene before them.

  Gotthilf looked around to see Otto Gericke arriving with an appalled look on his face, Prince Ulrik at his side and a handful of Marine guards following the prince. He craned his head around, and was relieved to see that the emperor had apparently decided to remain at the palace. That was a very good idea, in his opinion.

  “Hi, Doc,” Byron said. “You know Dr. Schlegel? He’s wearing his medical examiner’s hat today.” He pointed to a down-timer who turned from talking to Otto Gericke and came their direction.

  “We’ve worked together some,” Nichols said. “Hi, Paul.”

  The two men shook hands, then Nichols turned back to Byron.

  “How long since the explosion?”

  Byron looked at his watch. “Not quite ten minutes.”

  “Hmm.” Dr. Nichols looked around. He licked a finger and held it up. “I did part of my interning at a Chicago emergency room. You’d be surprised how many buildings still had steam boiler heating plants back in the ’80’s. I saw my fair share of scaldings, so I picked the brains of an old ER doc and his best friend, the retired fire chief.” He dropped his hand. “You let anyone enter the scene yet?”

  “No. Wasn’t sure how long it would take to be safe.”

  “Good man.” White teeth flashed in the dark face. “But the steam wasn’t contained by walls and there’s a bit of a breeze. My information says that if the steam fog is gone, it’s cool enough to enter, and the breeze will have refreshed the oxygen in the area, so it should be okay.”

  Byron nodded and looked to Gotthilf. “Need that rope now.”

  Gotthilf pointed to a large coil of one-inch rope lying nearby.

  “Right.” Byron raised his voice. “Need a volunteer, front and center!”

  Several of the patrolmen pushed forward. Byron pointed at Sergeant Milich. “You. Take a turn of that rope around your waist, then head into the worksite slowly. You’re headed for where that wagon was, but walk all over the place without messing the scene up any more than you have to. Got that?”

  “Got it,” the sergeant said, hands busy at tying the rope around his middle. “What’s the rope for?”

  “So if the doc’s wrong and you get hurt or drop, we can pull you out fast enough that we can maybe save your life. Still up for this?”

  Milich gave a firm nod. Dr. Nichols grinned, not insulted by Byron’s caution.

  Byron clapped the sergeant on the shoulder. “Okay, get moving.”

  Milich moved forward gingerly, taking one slow step after another. As he approached the first clump of bodies, he slowed even more, placing his feet with care.

  Gotthilf handed the rope to a couple of patrolmen with instructions to pay it out as Milich advanced.

  “So, where did you learn enough about steam that you knew to keep people out of there?” Nichols asked Byron.

  “Grandpa Buck was a factory hand in Pittsburgh when a big boiler blew,” Byron said, without turning his head from following Milich’s progress. “Told me to never have anything to do with steam.”

  “Smart man, your Grandpa Buck,” Nichols observed.

  “Yep.”

  Milich was about halfway through the worksite, nearing the largest group of bodies. He stopped suddenly, holding still, then stumbled a couple of steps away from the bodies and vomited.

  The sound of his retching reached the crowd that was building up outside the perimeter of patrolmen. A few of the patrolmen chuckled. Gotthilf turned and faced them.

  “Your turn is coming, boys. He’s not the only one who’s going to lose his breakfast today.”

  “What he said,” Nichols said with a chuckle of his own, but he sobered quickly. “This is going to be ugly. Have any of you ever seen bad burns?”

  “Yep. Worked a tanker truck fire as a policeman back before the Ring of Fire.” Byron spat, as if to clear his mouth of a bad taste.

  “I have treated several men who work around forges and foundries,” Schlegel added.

  “Okay, then, you know something of what to expect. It won’t be crispy critters, but it will be pretty bad, just the same.”

  Milich had staggered on after expelling everything in his stomach. Now he was standing beside the remains of the boiler wagon, waving his hand in the air.

  “Right,” Byron said, beckoning Milich to return and turning to the waiting police photographer. “You’re next.”

  They watched as the photographer and his assistant began taking pictures of the whole scene. After they had cleared the central area, Byron turned to the doctors and said, “Let’s you and me and Sergeant Hoch go look the scene over before we let anyone else in.” Gotthilf trailed in their wake as they stepped through the cordon of patrolmen.

  It didn’t take long for them to make their way through the scene. Nichols didn’t spend long at any group of corpses, but Gotthilf watched as his eyes darted everywhere, missing nothing.

  The final body, though—the one closest to the ruin of the wagon—apparently presented some sort of quandary to the doctor. He spent several minutes looking at the man, even going so far as to crouch beside the body and feel his arms and legs.

  Finally he straightened, and looked to the patiently waiting examiner and detectives.

  “Okay, here’s my read of it all. If my count’s correct, you’ve got forty-two dead guys here.”

  Gotthilf nodded. That matched his count. He pulled out his notepad, and started making notes.

  “I know that a lot of them appear to have sustained injuries from the explosion, some of them pretty severe, but the cause of death for thirty-nine of the men is going to be exposure to the super-heated steam. Massive second-degree burns of the face, hands, and any other exposed skin, but the true killer is that they inhaled that steam, s
calded their lungs, and ended up suffocating to death because of the blisters that formed internally. No questions, no mysteries there. And you can tell your men that death was certain after their first inhalation of the steam. Nothing anyone could have done about that, outside of a direct miracle from God.”

  Nichols nodded to Schlegel. “You might examine one of them, so you’ll see what the damage looks like. In fact, take some pictures and write up an article on it. We’ll get it published somehow. Steam power is going to be around for quite a while, and doctors and nurses need to know what accidents with steam can produce.”

  He waved a hand around. “Whether their other injuries would have been fatal is a moot point. That’s a very painful way to die, I might add, although it wouldn’t have lasted long, thank God.”

  Gotthilf found himself thanking God, indeed, that the torment of the workers had been brief.

  Dr. Nichols continued with, “But that leaves three guys who aren’t blistered, so that means they were dead before the steam got to them.” He looked to Schlegel again. “You need to examine all three of them,” he pointed back the way they came, “but I think the guy outside the gate just caught a golden BB of debris or something from the explosion. It looks just like he was shot in the head, but I’d bet you’ll find a bolt or something lodged somewhere in the brain.”

  Next he pointed off to a group a little to one side of the site. “And the guy whose head was almost torn off, that’s pretty self-explanatory.”

  Now he pointed down to the corpse at his feet. “But this guy, this guy I don’t get. He’s the closest one to where the boiler was, so he should have caught the brunt of the steam when the boiler blew. His jacket is wet, like the steam soaked into it, but there’s not a blister on him, so that’s not kosher. And he’s got at least one broken arm, maybe a leg as well.”

  Gotthilf jotted all that down. Nichols’ eyes were intent and he was now frowning. “Dr. Schlegel will need to go over this body with care,” he said. “This guy was already dead when the steam hit him, and that’s weird.”

  When he saw Gotthilf was frowning at his statement, the doctor elaborated. “Dead meat—and that’s all this guy is now—doesn’t blister. That’s because when the heart stops pumping, blisters stop forming.”