Steampunk'd

by Jean Rabe

  It was impossible to know how much information French spies had been able to gather regarding the gap’s defenses. But if they knew about the muzzle loading nine pounders, then they knew roughly how long it would take to reload them, and would attempt to time their passage accordingly. So one of the things Landry feared most was the possibility that his most reliable weapons would be empty when he needed them.

  Metal clanked, steam hissed, and there was another loud boom as the Indomptable’s guns fired again. The French drew blood as a gun on the west side of the road took a direct hit and vanished in a flash of light.

  At least half a dozen British lives had been lost without a single shot being fired in return. Landry gritted his teeth as the land cruiser pushed deeper into what he hoped would be the kill zone. And as the colossal vessel drew closer, Landry was astounded to discover that her stacks towered above him. But there was no time to give the matter additional thought as he shouted, “Fire!”

  Rolling broadsides were fired from opposite hillsides and the results were devastating. The nine pounders might be old, but they were lethal, especially at such close quarters. The Indomptable shook like a thing possessed as pieces of the superstructure flew off, the navigation bridge was wiped away, and a secondary weapons platform was reduced to a mass of twisted metal.

  Landry was exultant at first, but that was before the Indomptable’s guns fired again, and two neighboring gun batteries were destroyed. The surviving guns were being reloaded, but the militiamen were slow. And Landry knew he wouldn’t be able to rely on them for more than a ragged volley or two. Like it or not the time had come to employ the Lawford steam cannons.

  Major Monfort appeared at that point. He was a genial man with a moonlike face, a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, and a belly that hung out over a wide leather belt. Though senior to Landry in terms of rank, Monfort had chosen to play a supportive role, which he had done to perfection. Since without him and his militiamen, it would have been impossible to mount any defense whatsoever. Monfort had to shout to make himself heard over the relentless rhythm of the Indomptable’s running gear, the snake-like hiss of steam, and the persistent rattle of gunfire. “So lad, I came to see the grand finale. You won’t disappoint me will you?”

  Then Monfort was gone as bullets from a Picard gun tore him apart and Landry was forced to dive for the ground. Banked earth protected him from the incoming hail of bullets, but steam sprayed the air as the control for the steam cannons was destroyed and half of the nine pounder’s crew was killed.

  Landry swore as he rolled over, stood, and began to scuttle south along the trail that led to the next gun battery. There was a back-up control there, but because the Indomptable was still in motion it would be only a matter of seconds before she cleared the point where the Lawfords could fire on her, and she would be free to attack the fort.

  Landry stumbled, fell, and made it back to his feet again. Bullets pinged, whined, and buzzed all around him as he struggled forward. “Fire the Lawfords!” he shouted. “Fire them now!”

  Landry felt a momentary sense of hope as he saw a militiaman step over to the row of levers and prepare to pull them. Doing so would release steam to the cannons, enabling them to fire. And even though they were worthless beyond five-hundred feet it was the engineer’s hope that they could cause a significant amount of damage close in.

  But as he staggered forward a bullet hit the militiaman’s chest and threw him back into the embankment. Then Landry was in the gun emplacement, his hands on the levers, as the Indomptable caught up with him. The front half of the warship had cleared the kill zone by that time, and it was only a matter of moments before the entire vessel would be safe.

  Time seemed to slow as a French officer turned to look at Landry from no more than fifty-feet away. He was standing on a bridge not far from the steel enclosed wheelhouse. An admiral? Yes, judging from all of the gold lace. And it was then, as their eyes made contact, that Landry began to pull the levers.

  Steam surged through the network of buried pipes, entered firing chambers, and sent explosive shells straight up out of holes hidden under the surface of the road. They went straight up. Half the shells shot into the air, but the rest penetrated the hull, where they went off and triggered secondary explosions.

  Landry saw the admiral stumble and reach out to steady himself as the main magazine went up. The resulting shock wave knocked Landry off his feet, destroyed a British gun position on the other side of the road, and sent a column of black smoke roiling into the sky. That was followed by a rockslide that buried part of the wreckage, thereby ensuring that nothing would pass through the gap for weeks to come. The price had been high. Very high. But a battle had been won.

  Colonel Wilson and the 17th Dragoons returned two days after what was already being called the Battle of Cumberland Gap. They were dusty, tired, and frustrated, having been ordered to return to the fort without seeing a French soldier much less firing at one. Because shortly after the Indomptable’s widely heralded defeat, the French army’s diversionary force had fled north. And making the situation that much worse was the fact that the real battle had been fought in their absence.

  So having been summoned to Wilson’s office, Landry felt a sense of trepidation as an unsmiling Sergeant Hopkins rose to greet him. “The Colonel is in his office, sir. He is expecting you.”

  Landry entered, came to attention, and announced himself.

  Wilson was on his feet, looking out through the window adjacent to his desk. He was silent for a moment before turning to face his visitor. The expression on his face was grim. “I read your report. We’ll come back to that in a moment. First there is the matter of Captain Samms to discuss. He claims that one of your men attacked him. Furthermore, he claims that you were present and did nothing to stop the assault. Is that true?”

  Landry felt a sudden emptiness at the pit of his stomach. Should he come clean? That would be the right thing to do. But the penalty for striking an officer was very severe. And if Landry confessed, Crowley would not only be broken back to private but sent to prison. All for doing the right thing. Landry kept his face professionally blank. “No, sir. Captain Samms was inebriated, fell down, and hit his head in the process.”

  Wilson was silent for a moment. Then he nodded soberly. “That matches what Sergeant Major Crowley said. I don’t believe a word of it of course—but I’m glad to see that you have your stories straight. But only because Samms is a disgrace to the uniform. I trust you won’t make a habit out of attacking superior officers. I won’t stand for it.

  “Now, as for your report. Using the Lawfords to fire upward into the Indomptable’s belly was quite unorthodox. How did you know her armor would be thinner there?”

  Landry swallowed. “I didn’t, sir. Not for sure. But it made sense from an engineering perspective.”

  Wilson’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps. But you took a great deal upon yourself, Lieutenant Landry. Still, a victory is a victory, and we could use one right about now. General Arnold will join us tomorrow, and I daresay he will take advantage of the opportunity to hang a medal on you. Try not to get a swelled head.”

  Landry kept his eyes straight ahead. “Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.”

  “And that brings us to the road,” Wilson said. “Leave things exactly as they are until the general and his men have had a chance to inspect the wreckage. Then clear it away and get the job done quickly. Traffic is starting to back up in both directions.”

  “Sir, yes sir.”

  “Good. That will be all.”

  Landry did an about face and was nearly to the door when Wilson stopped him. “And Lieutenant . . .”

  Landry turned. “Sir?”

  “I was ordered to invite you to dinner this evening. Try not to make a fool of yourself.”

  Landry felt a surge of joy. Ordered? By Sarah perhaps? Yes, he thought so. “Thank you, sir. I would be honored.”

  “Yes,” Wilson agreed as the slightest of smiles appeared on h
is face. “I should think so.”

  Portrait of a Lady in a Monocle

  Jody Lynn Nye

  Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” She lives northwest of Chicago with two of the above and her husband, author and packager Bill Fawcett. She has published more than thirty-five books, including six contemporary fantasies, four SF novels, four novels in collaboration with Anne McCaffrey, including The Ship Who Won; edited a humorous anthology about mothers, Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear!; and written more than a hundred short stories. Her latest books are A Forthcoming Wizard, and Myth-Fortunes, co-written with Robert Asprin.

  The portly man in the charcoal-gray pinstriped suit settled back in the heavy maroon leather armchair in the corner of the library and smiled at the tall, almost gangly young woman in the straight, ladder-backed chair opposite him. He took the pipe—unlit out of courtesy—from his mouth and gestured at her with the carved bowl. “You are so easy to confide in, Miss Galferd. Especially in light of your own most recent . . . misfortune.”

  Penelope tried not to crumple the plum-colored leather gloves she clutched in her lap. Everyone there in the Chicago Academy of Science, possibly the whole city, had heard about the end of her engagement to Albin Beauregard. To cover her discomfort, she fixed her gaze upon the stout gentleman, making certain to focus the elaborate bronze and steel contraption in her eye on his face. “It doesn’t give me any pleasure to speak of it, Professor Finbury. I’d rather hear about your work.”

  “It’s all highly confidential, of course,” Finbury said, sitting bolt upright in indignation. Penelope was undeterred. She held his gaze, knowing the spinning crystal lens was doing its work. As she knew he would, he began to relax. He resumed his slouch, casually tucking a thumb into his watch pocket. “Well, a lady like you wouldn’t tell a soul, would you?”

  Penelope lifted her long, capable hands in the air in a delicate pose, then let them fall as if they were too weak and helpless to keep aloft. It was a pretense, of course, but one that the gentlemen of the club were more prone to accept than her competence. “Whom would I tell?”

  Finbury regarded her with paternal approval. “Quite right, I guess, ma’am. Well, I’ve been working on a design for a portable icebox. I got quite a scare after that Columbian Exhibition a couple years ago. Everything I looked at seemed to be derived from my own work! I began to suspect even my own lab assistants of stealing my designs. Then I started talking to my fellow scientists . . .”

  “. . . Our fellow scientists,” Penelope said. Finbury smiled indulgently at her. Since she was on probation from the club of which he was president, her contact with the rest of the members was limited, and few outside would understand the details.

  “Sure, my dear, if you like, our fellows—and found that every single one of them felt the same way I did. Seems a lot of us have been working on parallel tracks this whole time, and never knew it. Well, we had some good conversations after that, I can tell you! It’s the synergy we have together as scientists that is going to create the modern age, my dear, synergy and cooperation.”

  “Do you really believe that, professor?” Penelope asked, her heart fluttering with agreement.

  He chuckled. “Oh, sure, I do, so long as I get my piece first. You see, once I figured out that nobody had an inkling as to the tack I was taking regarding refrigeration, I set to work like I was on fire. I started out with nitrogen derivatives. . . .” He expanded on his theory and the many trials he had made before finding the solution to the problem.

  Though Penelope kept nodding and smiling, she had ceased listening closely. Her thoughts were elsewhere. She would not lose his ideas, though. Thanks to a series of inventions of her own—for all Finbury’s dismissal of her ambition and skill—his voice was traveling through the air by means of a wireless device in her elaborate brooch, to the nearest electrical outlet, and thence through the new copper cables strung over the city of Chicago to her home not three miles from that spot, to a miniature gramophone with a wax cylinder that her maid had set going at an appointed hour. The brooch was powered by friction generated by the slightly elasticated strings of her corset beneath her shirtwaist that drove an equally miniaturized dynamo hidden in her floor-length corduroy skirt just above her knee. She could feel the small engine thrumming as her breathing increased its tempo. Finbury’s confidences to her would be stored securely, until she saw fit to deal with them.

  “But Beauregard is the one we’re all envying this week.” The mention of Albin’s name brought Penelope out of her reverie. “You know of your former beloved’s success of one of his inventions, Miss Galferd,” Finbury said. “It’s the talk of the town how the Pinkertons have just taken it to their bosom.”

  “Yes, I do,” Penelope said, grimly. “But it was my invention, Professor, not his, that has made for all the noise. He stole it. I told him about it in confidence, and he copied it.”

  Finbury chuckled a little uncomfortably. “Yes, we’ve all heard you say so before, my dear. But Beauregard is a talented scientist. Couldn’t it be a case just like my fellow heating-and-cooling investigators? I’m sure it was just a simple mistake. You can’t blame the boy for taking a parallel tack and making a success of it.”

  Penelope fumed. He had come as close as anyone in the club had to calling her a liar to her face. It was bad enough that her complaint had caused her membership to be called into question for accusations of plagiarism, but the truth was the truth! She could not restrain herself.

  “It was not parallel, it was exact! It is a twin-pronged graduated electrostatic probe that separates elements within a solution into fine layers. Even small amounts of a substance can be detected by its atomic weight!”

  “Aren’t you a clever girl to know all those details,” Finbury said, admiringly.

  Penelope did her best not to shriek. “I discovered them! I made a prototype, and I made the mistake of telling him about it. He stole my notes and my prototype. I foolishly had not signed the device anywhere, or sent in a patent application, trusting that my own laboratory was sacrosanct. Obviously it was not, to one I thought of as my nearest and dearest.”

  Finbury regarded her wisely. “Well, true entrepreneurs don’t give away the store, my dear, like I told you. We patent our inventions long before we ever reveal them to anyone who doesn’t work for us. Otherwise, well, that kind of accusation leads to slander.” It was a warning. Another warning.

  “I am not slandering him, professor,” Penelope said, wearily. The wax cylinder would, thank God, have run out by now. Finbury was the last of the interviews she had sought. She could go home. “I am telling God’s honest truth.”

  “Maybe there’s more than one kind of truth,” Finbury said, not unkindly. “I’d better get home before one of those truths is that Mrs. Finbury skins me alive because I’m late for supper. I’m curious, of course, if I may ask without intruding, about your monocle. What’s it do?”

  Penelope touched the jeweled prosthetic. “It strengthens my weak eye, at the same time giving me a different perspective of the people I observe. My own invention.”

  Finbury’s eyebrows went up. “Interesting. Might I try it?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” Penelope said, rising. “Come to my laboratory tomorrow, if you like, perhaps about eleven? I have to uninstall it from my own eye socket, but I am sure we can effect the transfer without . . . too much pain or loss of vision.”

  Finbury gulped. Penelope was amused to see his rubicund complexion pale a little. “Er, no, thank you, then. I’ll take a pass. Will we see you at the reception tonight, then?”

  “Try and keep me away,” Penelope promised. In spite of all the trouble, her invitation had not been rescinded. She was grateful to have him acknowledge it.

  Finbury took his top hat off the peg beside the door of the library. “Er, Miss Galferd, you did not ask me what I thought you would.”

  Penelope gave him a bright smile and set the crystal in her eyepiece twirli
ng. “And what is that, professor?”

  “Well, for my vote, Miss Galferd. To reinstate you as a member in this society. Seeing as how you didn’t have an invention to submit to the committee this year by May the first. Apart from the one you claim Mr. Beauregard, er . . .” He found himself without a polite verb that would not offend her. She smiled placidly.

  “I want you to make the judgment on your own as to whether or not I have done work worthy of this society, professor,” she said. She turned up the intensity of her eyepiece and focused upon him deeply. After a moment, she offered her hand to him. “Thank you for a most enlightening conversation. I got more out of it than you can ever believe.”

  He shook it and bowed over her hand with a puzzled expression. “What conversation, Miss Galferd?”

  Penelope went out to find a streetcar going west along Grand Avenue. The streets of Chicago were better lit than they had been before the grand Exposition, but no less crowded. The steam-powered car noted the additional weight on an overhead abacus as she and two other passengers stepped on board, engaged a stronger gear to its engine, and shot an ear-piercing blast of white smoke from its pumpkin-shaped smokestack as it trundled toward the setting sun. Penelope wedged herself into a tight corner of a wooden bench beside two elderly women returning from shopping. The nearer woman’s reticule kept poking against the dynamo on her leg. She would be bruised later, but that was purely a physical sensation.

  What really hurt her was the assumptions made by the senior members of the Chicago Academy was that she had no workable scientific ideas of her own, and that her complaint that she had been robbed by her former fiancé was a discredit to her more than to him. She was seen as jealous and petty, not to mention delusional. How could a girl of twenty-two, though she had a college degree, have conquered a complex electrical-chemical device when a gentleman of twenty-six had not? Society was changing so fast, what with the new technology coming along with advances every day, every hour it seemed, but some things were resistant to change, such as the attitudes of men. They were far more likely to believe Albin than her. He had slandered her openly, and they accepted his statements.