by Phil Foglio
Aboard the craft, Tarvek and Othar slowly raised their heads and looked about. When they saw they were provisionally safe, Othar stood tall and clapped Tarvek on the back. “Say,” he said appreciatively, “you’re better at this than I’d thought!” He hauled Tarvek to his feet. “We’ll make a proper hero out of you yet, young villain!”
“I hate, hate, hate flying,” Tarvek groaned. He had yanked his shoulder out from under Other’s hand and tentatively slid a leg up on top of the machine’s gunwale, when a voice yelled from behind them.
“Halt!” They turned to see several members of the Mechanicsburg Defense Force120 approaching cautiously, rifles leveled. Their leader sat astride a compact brass theropod of some sort that was badly in need of polishing. He spoke firmly, but it was obvious he was nervous. “Surrender and you’ll be taken safely into custody until we can send you back to your Baron. Resist and we’ll shoot!”
Othar gave a great bark of laughter and posed dramatically. “Never fear, good people! I am no agent of Wulfenbach. I am Othar Tryggvassen—Gentleman Adventurer!”
Tarvek rolled his eyes. “Oh, sure, that’ll sway them.” Then he looked at the townspeople, and his surety faltered. All of them were now staring at the two of them with awe in their eyes.
“The Othar?” the leader asked. “We’ll take you to the Lady Heterodyne right away!”
One of the townspeople nudged the other. “I’ll bet she’ll be thrilled!”
“Of course she will,” Othar breezily assured them. He then reached back into the airship. “Oh, and you’ll want to dispose of this.” He hauled a comatose and battered Vole into view.
The townspeople gasped and then stared at Othar with even more respect. “Holy Katzenjammer,” the leader muttered. He then turned to the youngest man beside him. “Run to the yards. Get a monster wagon121 over here. On the double!”
One of the soldiers noticed Tarvek and his face fell in disappointment. “Huh. I always heard that Othar Tryggvassen had these cool, spunky girl sidekicks.”
Tarvek’s nostrils flared in barely contained rage. “I am not this oaf’s sidekick, I am—” Tarvek suddenly realized that claiming to be the Storm King, hereditary enemy of the Heterodynes, might not be the most politic of declarations at this time. He quickly switched gears. “I am the chief political advisor to your Lady Heterodyne!”
The members of the Defense Force glanced at each other. “We’ll let her decide that,” the leader pronounced and, after Othar had nonchalantly slung the still-inert Vole, over his shoulder, the squad formed around them, and off they marched.
It was one of the larger balconies off of the eastern side of Castle Heterodyne, affording a fine view of the Greens, the large park that abutted the grounds of the Great Hospital. This is not to say the rest of the town was without visual interest, as a fair amount of it appeared to be either burning or involved in some sort of fighting. However, in the opinion of the observers, that was somebody else’s problem at the moment.
They were a collection of ex-prisoners, who were still marveling at the fact they were free and in no more danger of their heads exploding at any given moment than any other citizen of Mechanicsburg. An apparent invasion was of academic interest at best.
Squinaldo, a dark-skinned man adorned with disturbing tattoos, pulled an iron pot out of a battered chimeneya, sniffed the contents, gave a grunt of satisfaction, and poured out a dollop of steaming liquid into the odd assortment of mugs and cups that had been collected. He then passed them out. “Heya,” he declared, “it ain’t much, but it’s hot!”
Professor Mittelmind snagged a cup with a grin. “Much thanks! Your concoctions are always a treat.”
He raised the cup to his lips, but Squinaldo peremptorily raised a hand. “Hoy! Hold on.” Mittelmind raised his eyebrows. “Wait for everybody else.” The professor recognized the importance of the occasion and, soon enough, all had some sort of drink container in hand. Squinaldo raised his mug on high. “To the Lady Heterodyne,” he shouted. “Once again, we are free!”
“Huzzah,” the others cheered before downing their drinks.
“Delicious,” Mittelmind declared. He licked his lips. “And it isn’t even poisoned.”
Squinaldo sniffed and swirled his drink in his mug. “I am a new man.”
Sanaa vaulted up onto the balustrade, swung her feet out into empty space and just basked in the sunlight. Professor Mezzasalma clacked up beside her, rested his elbows on the stones, and dreamily rubbed his neck where the hated collar had recently been. Sanaa glanced at him. Professor Mezzasalma had been one of the more stable prisoners and had always treated newcomers well. She was pleased he had made it out alive. “So, what are your plans, Professor?”
Mezzasalma opened his eyes in surprise and considered this. His metallic feet tapped out the quick quadrille that indicated he was thinking. “To tell you the truth, I am not sure,” he said slowly. He glanced over at Mittelmind and Squinaldo. The older man was theatrically clutching at his throat and staggering about, much to the amusement of the others. He smiled. “I never really thought I would get out of here.”
From the doorway, an excited voice called out, “Professor!” And a moment later, Mittelmind found himself embraced by a puppy-like Fräulein Snaug. “Astonishing,” he said with a laugh. “You’re still alive!”
“And you’re still a twisted mockery of science, sir!”
Mittelmind chuckled in delight and hoisted her into the air. “Sauce!” Behind her, Moloch stepped onto the balcony and set down a loaded toolbox with a sigh of relief.
Seeing him, Sanaa grimaced and hunched her shoulders. “Oh, geez,” she muttered. “It’s him.”
Mezzasalma looked at her with concern. “Is there a problem?”
Sanaa rolled her eyes. “Ugh. It’s that Moloch guy. From the kitchen? He’s just such a total spaz and it’s obvious that he’s stupid in love with me. He’s so ridiculously useless.”
Mezzasalma spent several seconds glancing back and forth making sure that Sanaa wasn’t joking. “You’re . . . we’re talking about Herr von Zinzer?”
The man under discussion now clapped his hands and signaled for attention. Instantly, every eye was on him. “Listen up, people. The Castle’s given me a map of the town’s defenses. Most of them are broken or disconnected, but it doesn’t sound like anything we can’t handle.”
Doctor Wrench spat and folded his arms. “Hey. What part of ‘free’ do you not understand? We’re done here.” He paused and looked up at the looming Castle face in resignation. “Or is the Castle gonna kill us anyway?” At this, the others looked up in trepidation.
Moloch had clearly been expecting this. “Nope. Me and the Castle talked this out. You are totally free to go.” The others stared at him. Wrench looked nonplussed. Moloch gave them a second to think about this. “And where are you gonna go? What are you gonna do? Go work for the Wulfenbachs? That worked out real well for some of you already, didn’t it?” Many of them looked pensive. Moloch nodded. “Get back into piracy? Reopen that little back-alley resurrectionist business? Yeah, no.
“So I’ve been authorized to offer all of you a place here in Mechanicsburg.” They stared at him. “In case you haven’t noticed, this whole place is steeped in mad science crazy and there’s a new boss who’s going to have to do a whole bunch of rebuilding.”
Their gazes swiveled in unison out over the besieged town. “But they’re fighting the empire,” Squinaldo pointed out.
Moloch conceded the point. “Yeah, but here, even if the Baron wins, you’ll just be one of her minions. It won’t be your fault.”
There was sullenness on several faces. Moloch continued, “And I’m sure that, as you’re all experienced sparks, you’d have minions of your own.” There was now a guarded enthusiasm. “You’ll be paid, fed, and guaranteed housing . . . outside the Castle.” Mittelmind cleared his throat. Moloch rolled his eyes, and went on, “Which has promised not to kill any more of us for fun.” He took a deep breath. “
So when this is over, I expect all of you to come back inside and help collect and bury the dead.”
The great construct R-79 sneered at this. “Bury the dead? That seems like a waste. Surely we could use them to—”
Moloch shocked everyone by striding over and smacking the behemoth upside the head. “NO!” R-79 stared at him, fury rising in his face. “You madboys can do whatever sick stuff you want on your own turf.” He pointed back within the Castle. “But any one of them could have been you or me! You got lucky and you’ll acknowledge that by treating the ones who didn’t get lucky with respect. Got it?”
R-79 stared down at the smaller man who met his gaze full on and unblinking. The giant relaxed and nodded. “For luck,” he rumbled. “Where we go first?”
Moloch nodded back and clapped him on the arm, as high up as he could reach. “Into town. There’s plenty of work everywhere.”
Without a word, the rest of the ex-prisoners began following Moloch. Sanaa realized her jaw was resting lightly on her chest. “Hmmm, yesss . . . ” Mezzasalma said with an amused drawl. “A total spaz. I can see how his attentions must be very embarrassing for you.”
Aboard Castle Wulfenbach, Gilgamesh slowly swam back to consciousness. There was an ache across his face that experience told him would be about the size of Bangladesh’s fist. There was an awful taste in his mouth. He was lying on a padded bench of some sort and—he opened his eyes and came face to face with a wasp weasel less than fifteen centimeters away. The two stared at each other, and then the weasel screamed.
Gil recoiled, smacking his head on the bench, and saw the now-thrashing weasel was being held in the iron grip of his father, who stood ominously over him, even more stony-faced than usual. “Ah,” he said in a leaden tone, “it is as I feared.” Only now Gil became aware there were others in the room: the military and governing elite who tended to congregate around his father in times of crisis. What was it now? Suddenly, the weasel lunged and its toothy jaws snapped closed mere centimeters from his face. The implications crashed in on Gil and he saw the sick judgment on all of their faces.
His father turned towards them. “There is no longer any doubt. The girl is clearly—”
“NO!” Gil leapt to his feet—or, rather, would have, if he hadn’t been chained by his ankles to the table. As a result, he crashed face-first to the floor at his father’s feet. He could imagine the pained expression of barely concealed embarrassment on the Baron’s face as his gigantic hand gently, but firmly, pulled him to his feet. “Please refrain from any more foolishness,” his father said in a low voice. “You will only be confined until I can give this problem my full attention.” He turned to a mixed squad of troopers and clanks. “Take him to the Red Level. Place him under airtight Code Five restraint.”
The lead clank’s head swiveled towards Gil and its lenses swiveled as it examined him. “Force parameters?”
“Try not to kill him,” Klaus said slowly, “but he must not be allowed to escape.” Gil found himself shocked. This was becoming deadly serious. The clanks closed in on him and steel hands fastened gently, but inexorably, on his wrists and neck. Only then did his father face him fully. “Gilgamesh, my son, you have my word: no matter what happens, I will do everything in my power to help you.” He turned away. “But now I must deal with the Heterodyne girl and her accomplices. They, at least, cannot be allowed to live.”
“Father, no! I’m not wasped! How can I be? Agatha doesn’t even have that technology. She couldn’t have wasped me!”
Klaus paused and turned back to him. Gil blinked. There was something in his father’s face . . . “She herself didn’t have to do it. You were infected before you even met her.”
Before the calm certainty of his father, Gil tried to take a step back, only to discover he could not. “I . . . no . . . ” He considered his words. “That’s not possible.” He stared into his father’s eyes. “Is it?”
Klaus continued to regard him even as he snapped his fingers and held open his hand. An uncharacteristically arrogant gesture was the observation that skittered through Gil’s mind before an aide placed a notebook bearing the Sturmvarous sigil on its embossed leather cover into his hand. He held it up. “These documents were found in a secret lab in Sturmhalten Castle. According to them, you were infected with a new strain of wasp designed to control sparks while you were in Paris.”
Gil shook his head. “Sturmvarous said that the spark wasps were untested—”
“I warned you against Sturmvarous years ago,” Klaus declared hotly. “He and that Heterodyne girl have played you for a fool!”
“But-but when could he have . . . ?”
“It was done through an agent. That family never does its own dirty work if they can help it. Someone you encountered serendipitously . . . ”
“Zola,” Gil whispered.
“This is my fault,” Klaus muttered. “I knew there were risks in sending you to Paris. They’d obviously been planning this for years.”
Gil thought back to his discussion with Zola inside Castle Heterodyne. “Longer, sir. Much longer, if correct.” Gil shook his head. “But you’re overlooking the fact that DuPree was in Paris at the same time. She was with Tarvek a lot more than I ever was. You said she was clean, and if they knew about me, they certainly wouldn’t have passed her up. It would have been easy.”
Klaus nodded. “An excellent point. She will no doubt provide valuable insight— if she lives.”
Gil felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. “What do you mean, if—”
“She brought you to me and collapsed.” He looked at Gil questioningly. “She appears to have been poisoned.”
Gil desperately wished he was free enough that he could sit down. “Poisoned?” He shook his head. “No. Nothing in that formula should have done that.”
“Formula?” His father asked casually.
Gil continued, his mind grinding up to full speed. “And . . . and even if Sturmvarous’ people did do something to me, I cannot believe that Agatha—”
“Son!” The anguish in Klaus’ voice snapped Gil out of his reverie. “Listen to yourself! I understand you think you love this girl and I understand that you can’t help it. But she is more a child of the Mongfish family than a Heterodyne.” He paused. “Although, looking at the vast bulk of their history, the Heterodynes aren’t any better, really. Actually, they’re far, far worse. But your Agatha is her mother’s daughter and with that family, you can believe nothing.”
“But it’s absurd to think she could have planned all this! She was first brought here by mistake! We— you, father, you brought here! She was unconscious! She didn’t ask us to bring her here. She begged us to send her home. I’m supposed to be possessed? I’m supposed to be her thrall? She never told me to do anything!”
And standing there beside the Baron: Boris Dolokhov, a man possessed of an eidetic memory, started in shock. Yes, she had.
It had happened back in Beetleburg, when the Baron had stepped in to take the town away from the tyrant, Tarsus Beetle, who had been secretly experimenting with forbidden slaver wasp technology.122
It had been the first time Boris—or the Wulfenbachs—had encountered Agatha. She had been employed as one of Beetle’s lab assistants, serving under the Doctors Merlot and Glassvitch, and had been present when the Baron had given his son an impromptu test, during the course of which, he had demanded the schematics to a particularly impenetrable device:
Merlot looked around, then quickly turned to Agatha. “The plans, Miss Clay! They were on the main board. Where did you put them?”
Agatha looked surprised. “Oh,” she said. “They’re in with—” She swung her attention to the storage room door in time to see a rivet pop out of one of the door’s straining cross braces. She swung back and smeared a grin across her face. “A—heh. They’re in the files in the storage room, Doctors. How about everyone goes and has a nice cup of tea while I dig them out?”
Gil strode forward and pushed her aside. “B
ah! I’ll get them myself! I’m sure your pitiful filing system will be simple—” He turned the handle of the storage room door and yanked, even as Agatha shouted, “NOOOOOOO!”
Replaying the scene in his memory, by Boris’s reckoning, an argument could be made that Agatha’s initial suggestion alone (that they all retire for tea), should have been enough to trigger an obedience response from someone wasped. However, to be fair, she was nervous and hesitant. But when Gilgamesh had reached for the closet door, her scream of “No” had been full-throated and desperate. It should have frozen him in place without question. After almost twenty years of fighting revenants and those ensorcelled by the Other, Boris knew the mechanics of how they worked. Klaus should have known this as well. Klaus’ memory was just as sharp as Boris’s and, as experience had taught him, the Baron missed nothing.
Boris snapped back to the present and glanced at the Baron. A fist of ice gripped his heart as he saw Klaus regarding him. He stared and saw a glimmer of—was that relief?—flicker across the Baron’s face before he appeared to dismiss Boris from his mind and swung back towards his son.
“And yet,” he said in response to Gil’s last point, “here she was. On board Castle Wulfenbach. In your lab. A very unlikely coincidence—and I mistrust coincidences. Now, all of Europa is in danger. We will talk more when I return.”
Klaus turned away and a small, hidden part of him noted, and immediately tried to forget as unimportant, that Boris had already left. Like a man who has done all he could, the Lord of Europa strode from the room.
Back in Mechanicsburg, there seemed to be an endless line of people vying for Agatha’s attention. Mechanicsburg citizens relaying the status of the defenses and the ongoing repairs. Enemy soldiers brought before her while weeping, begging her to accept their surrender and help save comrades still engaged with the town’s numerous traps and defenses. A running military analysis was provided by Krosp, who was clearly in his element. A delegation from the Great Hospital, led by Doctor Sun himself, who requested an impossibly long list of supplies as well as a safe place to process the casualties.
