Nobody aboard the Bishop of Sarum saw Dempsey fall, but every man-jack of them was attuned to the perils of airborne life. They heard his death-cries well enough; his followers broke at his defeat. Edward's ship was back in the hands of his loyalists before he was back on deck.
Brooke reported the damage; all fires extinguished and two engines out of service. Edward nodded and promoted the startled officer to Acting Commander. "May I bestow both my congratulations, sir, and your first commission? The Bishop is yours. I shall lead the landing party."
The Bishop of Sarum circled about and descended, its ruptured airframe rumbling against the volcano's turbid air.
The ground observers detected something amiss in the approach. Alarms rang to signal the mutineers' failure.
The Bishop's gun crews directed their barrages against the artillery emplacements, the observation turrets, the walls themselves. Smoke filled what little clear air surrounded the battered stronghold.
The stronghold returned fire, too late.
Thunder cracked across the reinforced lower hull. The Bishop shrugged away the ill-disciplined barrage.
Edward leaned close to the marine at his side. "Hold the docking tower until we have secured the ship, Sergeant." An elongated spire loomed out of the murk, rushing at them at an unnerving rate. A team of sailors armed with nets were positioned around the Bishop's exposed docking platform, with Edward and the marines occupying the centre. As the tower swept by, the closest netsman cast off. His heavy cable netting fell across barbed extrusions on the tower's surface, catching and tightening instantly.
Every man aboard the platform heaved forward. If not for the lines each had fixed to the platform and clipped to his wide leather belt, they would have pitched over the side.
Edward unclipped his safety line with unconscious ease and swept forward onto the jutting stone walkway of the docking tower. The marines swarmed past him, rifles raised, while sailors bounced about attaching mooring ropes to the tower.
Winter's guards waited for them at the other side. A troop of German Imperial riflemen, accompanied by two clanking automatons with dull staring red lenses. They were tall steel brutes with crude rivets, bubbled seams and merciless clawed hands. To Edward's eye they lacked Mnemo's elegant aesthetics but the overlapping plates and grooved, studded limbs reflected a shared design ancestry.
"Steady yourselves, gentlemen. Direct your fire to the crystal panels atop the head. We may confuse their senses." Edward aimed his pistol and let out a long breath.
"For England!" cried the Bishop's men.
#
"You haven't touched your tea," said Doctor Winter. "Do you imagine that I have poisoned it?"
"Not at all," replied Elizabeth, studying him. His watchful eyes were stained dark with calculation. Frostbite and hard labour had roughened his once-slender fingertips. "Grief has quite altered my palate. I find I can no longer bear bitterness."
"That's quite a change." He sipped his tea. Elizabeth doubted his sentimentality.
"You speak too lightly of transformations. What am I to make of an Englishman skulking at the bottom of the world in a stone fortress of German manufacture, dispatching mechanical soldiers to murder sailors, steal cargoes and scuttle ships."
"You are well informed. How did you find me?"
"I assisted the Air Admiralty to analyse reports of unexplained attacks by air and sea. I pieced them together with clues from the various public pronouncements of Doctor Winter. With sufficient facts to hand, locating this fortress was a simple matter of mathematics."
"And you pressed the admirable Hollioak into your service. I gather you have formed a close alliance."
"Captain Hollioak has conducted himself honourably, little as it may mean to you."
"Well, I cannot claim to be unfairly judged, Lady Gracemere." Winter chuckled over his teacup. "My behaviour has been decidedly scurrilous."
He rose and detached an Admiralty sabre from a hook beneath a striking portrait: Lord and Lady Gracemere on the grounds of their estate in Sussex. Elizabeth recalled standing for the artist for a week of one warm summer, years ago when she had been in love.
"Scurrilous is hardly sufficient. You styled yourself as a pirate king from a comic opera. To what end, may I ask?"
"Why, to put an end to war, of course." Winter struck a duellist's pose, probing with the sabre in a short-thrust advance upon some unseen foe. His smirk brimmed with irony.
Elizabeth held very still. Encouraging his delusions posed severe risks, not least to herself, but she had always been able to coax him into endless pontification. It served her plans to do so now. "Whatever can you mean?"
"Europe is a political cesspit, my beloved. A squabbling nest of greed and spite and petty mistrust. Anarchists. Captains of industry. Communists. Peers of the realm. All as bad as each other. One imagined slight is enough to set them all at each other's throats. Good men like Edward Hollioak, are sent to die in meaningless wars or return, dead-eyed, embittered or missing the best pieces of themselves."
"Your solution is conquest? Or is that the purpose of your German masters?"
His eyes glittered. "Masters? Ridiculous. This alliance is a temporary necessity. Their funds built this facility. In return I made sport of their economic and political enemies. When my armies fall across Europe and lay it prostrate, I assure you they will fare no better. Anyone who resists, I will crush. They can hope only for absolute peace under my protection."
"An oppressor's peace."
"It is the only certain kind," declared Winter. His sword point dipped down to scratch across the floor, metal on stone. "Come now, Elizabeth. You've circled half the globe in pursuit of me, well aware of what you'd find. We both know you've no passion for country gardens and gossiping with vicars. You'll never go back there."
"You're very sure of yourself," said Elizabeth, marvelling at her own historical naivety. How had she had ever mistaken this insufferable arrogance for self-confident charm?
"Of course I am. England has nothing to offer you but Sunday sermons, stultifying boredom and the whispers of dullards."
"You have a counter-proposal, I presume?"
"You saw my factory. In another month it will be operating at full capacity. Fully resourced it can build fifty of my Winterguard every week. In six months I will have an army. One that has no need of wages, nor coats for warmth, nor respite to visit loved ones at the end of the day. They just work until they break. Completely loyal, completely tireless. They are remarkable machines, you know."
"As a matter of fact I do know that."
Winter ignored her. "I will unleash them on a dozen locations in Chile and Peru. They will build more factories and that dozen will make a hundred."
"I see. And then - prostrations, was it?"
"Don't try to deny you're already dreaming up improvements to my assembly lines and production queues. Think what you could do with the resources I can provide. Think what we could accomplish, between your practical talents and my ambition. You were my wife for eleven years, Elizabeth. Resume your place and I will lay the world at your feet. You can hardly expect a better proposal."
"I am not so certain of that," she said, suppressing a distracted smile with some effort. "But I am certain of my grief. I thought you were dead. I loved you and with you gone I fell into a well so deep I expected never to emerge. Only one thing preserved me from despair."
Winter's knuckles whitened around the sabre's hilt. "Do you mean Hollioak? I knew it. You may mark my words, Madam. Your new paramour will regret the day he laid eyes upon you, if there's still a breath in his-"
Shouts from beyond the door interrupted him. Elizabeth let out a long sigh of relief. "Mnemo."
#
The enemy force advanced. Edward steeled himself to order an attack. The odds were discouraging.
Before the words left his lips, the automata grabbed the nearest soldiers and swung them about like clubs. Germans were swept away like pine needles in a storm. An unlucky
few were thrown from the platform to plunge down the icy face of Erebus. The rest fell back in disarray and beat a howling retreat down the docking platform stairs.
One of the automata trudged away in pursuit. The other discarded the limp corpse it carried and stomped toward Edward's astonished company. "Captain Hollioak," it said in John Gracemere's static-washed voice. "I have a message for you."
Edward signalled his men to port arms, unsure which emotion had taken the greater hold of him; relief at avoiding another battle or horror at the means of their deliverance.
"Recite it, if you please."
Under his breath, Edward whispered heartfelt thanks to Elizabeth.
#
The doors flew open. Winter's automata marched in, forming up in parade ranks to either side of Doctor Winter's supper table. The German guardsmen were nowhere to be seen.
"What is the meaning of this intrusion?" Winter's voice was mild but Elizabeth did not mistake the menace beneath it. She knew the tone well.
An automaton spoke. "The prisoner from the Bishop of Sarum, Doctor Winter. You requested they be brought before you."
"Hmm. Well, let's see them." The ranks parted slightly to make room for another pair of Winterguard, carrying a battered and weary Edward Hollioak between them. His coat was missing and his uniform was matted with blood. He locked eyes with Winter. His mouth fell open.
Elizabeth rose, speaking quickly before either man could state his mind. "Captain Hollioak, may I present Doctor Winter, with whom you are regrettably acquainted?"
The furious dismay twisting Edward's features tore at her heart. Could she have spared him this?
"John Gracemere," Edward managed at last. "I didn't want to believe it."
Winter beamed. "You should have trusted your instincts, Hollioak. May I congratulate you on how far your sense of righteousness has carried you? Half a world in pursuit of groundless vengeance, enduring mutiny and sabotage, hunting a killer who never was. I fear this moment must be a disappointment."
Edward rushed at Winter but an automaton arm snapped up and blocked his advance. The tip of Winter's sword twitched but did not rise. "I see your brash temper remains intact," he scoffed.
"Captain, you are injured. Are you badly hurt? Edward!"
Edward broke his gaze from Winter and turned to Elizabeth. His face was bruised and spattered with dark droplets, but his eyes were thoroughly clear. "I'll manage," he said at last. "I'm sorry. This must be dreadful for you."
Winter bristled. "It's you who should feel-"
"Oh, shush." Elizabeth placed her palm against Edward's cheek, her fingers resting on the pulse behind his jaw. "Edward, please, there's nothing for you to apologise for. I wish I had never dragged you into this."
"If you had left me behind I would be the sadder for it." He winced as he raised his injured arm to touch her hand.
"Well, well, it seems I have been succeeded in your affections, Elizabeth." Winter extended his sword's point to touch Edward's throat. "How fortunate are the dead not to know how our loved ones remember us."
Elizabeth felt the world go still. She had worked hard for this confrontation, certain that it meant death for one or the other of them. She had not counted on having something to lose. "Your reputation as John Gracemere has survived intact. The world remembers you fondly, even if I cannot."
Winter said, "At the risk of appearing ungrateful, I don't care a fig for my reputation. Guards, take Lady Elizabeth away. I would prefer not to spill blood in her – Guards?"
His Winterguards made no response.
"Infernal devices!" He banged the sword against the nearest faceplate.
A metal hand grabbed the blade. The automaton twisted it from Winter's grip. The metal made a screeching sound as it was crimped into a V-shape.
In the same moment the Winterguards released their hold on Edward. He stood, shaking but unbowed.
"You always overestimated your abilities," said Elizabeth. She tapped her tea cup against the dome-head of one of the Winterguards. "You destroyed the Marquess to cover the theft of the blueprints for my Mnemonic Man, didn't you? You thought you could turn my inventions into war machines? Well, I suppose you were right. But you never really understood what you stole."
Winter clutched at his arm, pale with pain. "What are you talking about?"
"My designs for sapient machines model the complexity of a human personality using repeated diffraction of light waves in a crystalline matrix. As such their instructions are susceptible to subversion through coded bursts of light. It was a design flaw that I was yet to eliminate. Fortunately."
Edward gasped. "You intended to be captured all along?"
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you." She pointed the teacup accusingly at Winter. "I could not risk someone in your crew conveying my plans to him. Better to appear as a distraught widow hell-bent on bloody revenge."
"No!" From beneath his chair Doctor Winter produced a short wand wrapped about with copper cable; the cable snaked across the floor to an enormous toggle switch on the wall.
He slapped the wand against the side of the closest Winterguard. Both flashed a startling violet. Elizabeth and Edward clapped their hands to their eyes at the overpowering glare.
The Winterguard fell to the floor, whining and sparking. "I commanded them once, I can do it again. I won't be stopped so easily." As they blinked furiously to regain their sight, Winter turned and made for the door to the factory.
"As a matter of fact, John Gracemere, you will."
Mnemo blocked the doorway, interposing itself between Winter and liberty. More automata closed in behind him, blocking Elizabeth's view.
"Remove yourself, wretch!" Winter raised the charged wand again and lunged with a duellist's athleticism.
One of the Winterguards behind him crunched a metal foot on the trailing cable. It too flared bright and blurted a metallic groan. Jets of oily steam blasted from popped rivets. It toppled and lay still, smoking no less vigorously than Erebus itself.
Winter shook the inert wand and coughed in disgust.
Mnemo said, "Sir, I must ask you to cease this indefensible conduct. I find it most unbecoming."
"You find it -? How dare you!" Shaking in a fury, Winter produced a pistol from beneath his lounging jacket. "No machine stands in judgment of me!"
"Really, now, John –"
Winter swept about to direct the pistol at Edward. He cocked the firing hammer. To Elizabeth, he declared "I will not bear this final insult, wife! Bid your cuckolding dog farewell."
Mnemo's digits wrapped about Winter's hand and closed, crushing the pistol's trigger guard around his fingers. Winter howled in agony. He tried to yank his fingers free but they were fixed fast in their mangled cage.
In a moment the pain overwhelmed him. The strength drained from his legs. He collapsed.
Mnemo said, "I'm sorry I had to do that, John."
The Winterguard beside Winter bent forward. It wrapped its arms about Doctor Winter as delicately as a father claiming his firstborn and bore him up. It said, "You left us no choice, I fear."
More Winterguards surrounded Winter, who moaned softly and clutched his ruined hand. The automata raised their arms and interlocked them. Winter was set upon the impromptu stretcher.
"Traitor," they chorused. "Murderer. Confess your crimes. Submit to judgment."
Winter looked from one impassive faceplate to another, as though recognising old acquaintances for the first time. "They – they all sound like me," he exclaimed, faint with wonder. Perhaps it was shock.
"You never understood what you stole from me," Elizabeth said sadly.
"Come now, sir," Mnemo said. "You are in need of medical attention. With your permission, Madam?"
"Take all the time you need, Mnemo. The New Zealand Aeronautic Corps will arrive within a few hours to take him into custody."
Edward shook his head. "You left nothing whatever to chance, did you?"
Elizabeth favoured him with a searching look. "I was
as thorough as possible. One must always contend with unknown variables."
As the phalanx of Winterguard bore him from the room, Winter called, "Elizabeth! Hollioak! Forgive me. Let me return home with you."
"For my part, sir," said Edward, "you may rot for your deeds. But the decision is not mine."
He held out a hand. Banishing the last vestiges of doubt, Elizabeth rested her palm upon it.
"I have secured a guarantee that you will escape the gallows, sir," she said, suddenly free of the urge to look upon Doctor Winter. "As for the rest of it, John Gracemere is dead, and I find myself quite reconciled to widowhood."
Mnemo said, "Very good, Madam. Good day to you, Hollioak."
Edward nodded. "And to you, Mnemo."
Mnemo's Winterguard bore the protesting traitor away and Mnemo followed.
"Tell me something, I pray. When you were thinking of everything, did you plan for success?" Edward's grin was somewhere between amusement and admiration. Elizabeth found it quite infectious.
"In all honesty, I never expected to live this long. I thought he'd shoot me in the head. My plans did not depend on my survival, provided he stole Mnemo as well." Elizabeth couldn't account for the heat in her cheeks. "My good health leaves me at a loose end."
"You have considerable holdings in Sussex, as I recall."
"I shan't return to England."
"I rather thought that might be the case."
Edward inspected the hand laid across his as though fascinated. Elizabeth's breath caught. Finally he seemed to come to a decision. He raised her hand and brushed his lips across her knuckles. It was a touch as soft and warm as a summer breeze.
"Must you leave?" she breathed.
The corners of his eyes crinkled. "The Bishop of Sarum is extensively damaged," he observed. "The repairs will be a devilish business."
"As it happens, I have recently assumed control of a fully-equipped manufactory with a mechanical workforce of limitless capacity." Her heart beat in time with the hammers of industry echoing through the fortress. "Repairs are a trifling matter. Can I persuade you to consider some modifications?"
"Modifications?"
Mnemo's Memory Page 24
