Steampunk'd

by Jean Rabe

  “Is that bad?” interjected Eduárd.

  “Possibly fatal, my friend,” croaked Elisabeth. “We must stop somewhere and unpack one of the trunks, then push on with all speed.”

  “Of course, Highness,” replied Eduárd.

  They brought the carriage to a halt outside Mayerling’s grounds, and Elisabeth ordered Eduárd to take the carriage to the nearest town and see to the exhausted horses. As the clatter of hooves and wheels faded into the distance, Elisabeth drew a pair of heavy pistols from under her cloak and handed them to Ludwina. “I think it is best we fly from here, but I don’t think I can carry so much weight aloft. Would you mind?”

  “Of course not,” replied Ludwina. “The eagle is ever at your service.”

  Alighting on a balcony at the lodge, eagle and dove returned to their human forms. Elisabeth accepted one pistol from Ludwina and turned to the French doors before them. Drawing the stiletto she kept in her boot, she slipped the slender blade between the twin doors and expertly jimmied the latch. The two women silently crept inside.

  After scurrying down several hallways and descending a few flights of stairs, they came to a great hall where a fire crackled in a hearth big enough for three men to stand in. A handsome couple stood silhouetted in the firelight. The man, tall and dashing, looked on bemusedly as his companion, a petite woman with a youthful face, toyed with a big brass watch.

  “I wish you’d stop fiddling with that thing, Mary,” he said. “You’re always playing around with it. It works fine!”

  “Oh, but my dear Rudolf!” the young woman replied sweetly. “When it works properly it’s just full of surprises, and you, my sweet, have yet to enjoy them all.”

  The metallic click of a pistol cocking broke the mood.

  “Step away from him, Baroness—if that’s who you really are!” said Elisabeth in a steely tone.

  “Mother!” exclaimed the man. “However did you get here? I thought you’d gone to Greece!”

  “I’ll explain later, Rudolf,” Elisabeth replied. “Do us a favor, though, and step away from that woman!”

  “That w-w-woman?” stammered Rudolf. “What has gotten into you, Mother? Where did you get that gun, and who is that with you?”

  During the conversation, the baroness had quietly slipped the watch into a pocket of her gown, deftly exchanging it for another. Now she stepped forward and offered the second watch to her companion.

  “Perhaps it would be best to humor your mother,” she cooed. Placing the watch in Rudolf’s hand, she glided away to sit on a divan, in front of which stood a low table laden with a bottle of champagne and other delicacies. She calmly helped herself to a canapé.

  “Drop that watch, Rudolf!” Elisabeth fairly shrieked.

  “What is the matter with you, Mother?”

  “It would have been best to do as Mommy says!” said the baroness. Her hand slipped into her pocket, and the watch in Rudolf’s hand came to life with a sickening snap. The archduke groaned in agony as metallic claws and a slim needle pierced his hand. Clutching at the watch, he sank to his knees.

  “Rudolf!” screamed Elisabeth.

  In a heartbeat, Baroness Vetsera produced yet another watch. Snapping open the case, she pointed it at the two other women. But before she could thumb the crown, two pistol shots rang out, and her frail body flew back onto the divan, crimson circles blossoming in her chest and torso.

  “Quickly, Ludwina!” breathed Elisabeth. “I think that spike is poisoned!”

  With practiced hands, Ludwina knelt over the archduke’s form.

  “Nice shooting, by the way,” added Elisabeth. “I fear my aim was a little low.”

  “You were distracted,” replied Ludwina. “Here, bandage his hand while I dig out some supplies.”

  Once Ludwina had finished treating the injured archduke, and the lodge staff had bundled him off to bed, king and empress met again in the Great Hall, where the baroness’s corpse still lay.

  “I’ve explained to the staff that there has been an attempt on the archduke’s life,” said Elisabeth, as Ludwina bent over the body.

  “It should not prove too difficult to invent a story everyone can remember,” replied Ludwina. “Wait! What’s that? I hear gunfire outside!”

  As the latch to a door at the far end of the chamber rattled, Elisabeth assumed her dove form and fluttered into the beams overhead.

  Elisabeth had barely hidden herself when the door burst open, revealing Colonel Ames, armed with a Colt revolver. Ludwina sprang away from the divan, upsetting the table and sending the champagne bottle rolling toward the door, its contents foaming and gurgling from the neck.

  Feigning terror, Ludwina stammered. “I-I-I heard a shot! I rushed here to find the baroness dead. Where is Archduke Rudolf?”

  “So the faerie prince got wise to her, eh?”Ames glanced at the dead woman. “Pity. She was a most useful operative. Good thing I decided to make sure the job was done right.” The colonel overstepped the empty bottle. “You play the role of the frightened servant well,” Ames hissed. “But you’re no servant, and I think you know where the archduke hides. Tell me, is he wounded, or merely cowering?”

  “Please, sir, you’re hurting me!” Ludwina managed to choke out.

  Ames dragged the gasping Ludwina back to the divan and forced her down next to the dead baroness. “You listen to me,” he whispered. “No more faeries, vampires, dryads, leprechauns, or other magical creatures will control Europe anymore. It’s time to level the playing field here, as we have in the States. Now tell me what I want to know.” He brought the barrel of the Colt to her temple.

  But he never heard her reply, for at that moment, Elisabeth, back in human form, brought the champagne bottle crashing down on his head, and he dropped like a stone.

  “Messy!” observed Ludwina, shaking shards of glass from her hair.

  “Colonel Ames!” shouted a voice from the doorway. Four armed men burst into the room, staring at the scene before them.

  Ludwina tossed Elisabeth the Colt and retrieved her own pistols from under the divan. Elisabeth dropped the first man with a neat shot through the forehead, while Ludwina blazed away with a pistol in each hand, sending two others reeling back into the doorframe. The last man fired at Ludwina, wounding her in the shoulder.

  “Ludwina!” cried Elisabeth. The empress leveled the Colt at the assassin and fired, blasting a hole through his chest.

  Falling to her knees beside Ludwina, Elisabeth began to stanch the blood flowing from the wound.

  Ludwina opened her eyes. “Duck.”

  Elisabeth ducked and rolled as Ludwina raised a pistol in her good arm and fired point-blank into the face of Colonel Ames, who had arisen behind her cousin.

  Later, the servants quietly cleared away the blood, broken glass, and stained furniture downstairs while Ludwina, ensconced in the archduke’s chamber, instructed Elisabeth and Rudolf on the treatment of her shoulder. “Now dab on some of that green paste and bandage the wound.”

  “I still don’t understand, Mother,” said Rudolf, wrapping the bandage around Ludwina’s shoulder. “Mary was trying to kill me?”

  “That’s right. She was a field operative for Colonel Ames, who had a plan to rid Europe of its magic and supernatural bloodlines. Apparently these pocket watches were intended as sophisticated assassination tools.”

  “My men all have those watches!” cried the archduke. “And so does Father! And most of the senior staff at the Schönbrunn!”

  “That could explain the row among your men,” said Ludwina, eyeing the array of watches they had taken from Baroness Vetsera and Colonel Ames. “Some of these watches seem to produce irritating subharmonic sounds.”

  “We’ll have to root them all out and destroy them when we return,” said Elisabeth. “But for now, we have some corpses to dispose of.”

  “I do not understand humans,” murmured Rudolf, gazing moodily at the body of the baroness. “She said she loved me.”

  “She lied,”
said his mother, putting an arm around his shoulder. “Did you love her?”

  “I’m not sure. She was delightful.”

  “He’ll have to convalesce for a while in the faerie realm,” confided Ludwina in a low voice. “My remedies lack some necessary ingredients.”

  “Perhaps it is best if he returns permanently,” said Elisabeth thoughtfully. “Besides, it wouldn’t be right for him to take the Hapsburg throne, since he really bears no blood of that line.”

  “Yes,” said Rudolf. “I believe I’ve had my fill of humans. Will you take me back to Faerie?”

  Ludwina pursed her lips. “He and the Colonel are about the same height,though Rudolf’s not quite as beefy. Do you think we could pass Ames off as Rudolf?”

  “You mean pretend the assassination attempt was successful?” asked Elisabeth, arching a brow.

  “Why not? We could claim that Rudolf and the baroness were so in love that they came here to kill themselves when others insisted they break off their affair.”

  “A suicide pact?” Rudolf snorted. “Who would believe that?”

  “People will believe nearly any lie if it’s told well enough,” replied his mother. “But her wounds won’t hold up as a suicide. We’ll have to make it a murder-suicide. You killed her, and then yourself.”

  “Well, I could have shot my own face off, I suppose,” mused the archduke.

  A few days later, all of Austria-Hungary mourned the loss of the crown prince. King Ludwig of Bavaria attended the state funeral, along with several other crowned heads of Europe. The wake went much later than expected, as not a single man in the palace could find his pocket watch.

  The Transmogrification Ray

  Robert E. Vardeman

  Robert E Vardeman has written more than eighty science fiction, fantasy and mystery novels. He recently co-authored the novelization of the Sony PlayStation game God of War. He has had short stories in the previous Jean Rabe & Martin Greenberg anthologies Renaissance Faire, Terribly Twisted Tales, and Timeshares. Vardeman’s collected short stories can be found in Stories from Desert Bob’s Reptile Ranch, with original stories published in e-format from Kindle and the Apple iTunes App store. He currently lives in Albuquerque, NM, with two cats, Isotope and X-ray. One out of three of them enjoy the high-tech hobby of geocaching. For more info, check out www.CenotaphRoad.com.

  The side of the mountain exploded, sending a roiling cloud of dust upward in perfect symmetry with the avalanche tumbling into the canyon beyond.

  “Drat,” Francis Barstow said. He pursed his lips, pushed up his protective goggles, and began scribbling in his laboratory notebook. As the last of the debris cascaded down on him, he absently brushed it off the shoulders of his white lab coat. Looking into the sky, he saw that brisk mountain winds carried away the dust in a thrice, but he frowned when a single white cloud moved in a direction opposite the ground wind. Air currents were so peculiar in the higher altitudes. He shrugged this off and returned to work, only distracted from entering the tiny, crabbed script when his robotic dog came snuffling over.

  “Not now, Fulton,” he said, using his booted foot to push away the compressed-air powered dog. The dog whistled and hissed as air escaped past poorly fitted gaskets. “I’ll fix your seals later.” Francis looked into the dog’s glowing ground glass optical lenses and sighed. Over the years he had owned dogs from large Afghan hounds to miniature poodles, but none had been as faithful or attentive as Fulton. He had built the brass gear and gutta-percha-jointed dog before coming to the desolate mountains of Colorado to conduct his alchemical experiments. There had been little else to keep him occupied while his brain masticated the intricate details of his current project. He might be an adequate theoretical scientist, but his hands had to be busy all the time like an engineer.

  “Very well, my friend,” Francis said, kneeling. He laid aside his lab book and tinkered with Fulton’s settings, adjusting the valve controlling the gas release from a pressurized canister until Fulton rocked back on his haunches and opened his mechanical mouth, as if panting. “There. Now let me work.” Fulton snapped his mouth shut. This was as close to a delighted bark as Fulton could get. Francis gave the robotic head a quick pat, then looked up to see his chief assistant struggling along the path from the mineshaft toward him.

  “Mr. Barstow, there wasn’t anything I could do. It just blew up.” Lawrence was covered with soot so black he might have been an African native. He took out a rag from his hip pocket and wiped the grime from his eyes, making him look like a raccoon in the negative. More work resulted in the removal of large patches of the soot, revealing a man with a big Roman nose, thin lips, and high cheekbones covered in weathered, swarthy skin. His dark eyes were deep-set and flashed in anger at almost being blown up.

  “A miscalculation, I assure you,” Francis said. “See?” He held up his lab book, but Fulton clacked his jaws a few times, warning him. If it hadn’t been for the robot’s constant vigilance, he would have shown his plans to everyone. After the Liverpool theft, he ought to have known better, but working on an experiment always filled him with enthusiasm that overrode common sense. He bit his lip to keep from thanking Fulton. Lawrence and the rest of the crew working here so high in the Rocky Mountains looked askance when he treated the robot better than he would have a real dog, as if a real dog could chew up six-inch-long 5/16”-24 steel bolts.

  “You weren’t trying for such a tremendous explosion?” Lawrence cocked his head to one side and peered at him. Francis waved off such an absurd idea.

  “The vacuum chamber. Did it rupture?”

  “It melted before the explosion. So much energy was concentrated at the end of the beam nothing could stop it, not even twenty feet of solid rock,” Lawrence said. “Only through the grace of God did we not lose any of the crew.”

  “Oh, bother, yes, of course. The men. Glad to hear that they are all right, yes, very glad.” Francis scribbled a few more notes, did the calculation, and shook his head. “There is a term in this equation that I do not understand. I’ll work on it because that might be the cause of so much . . . destruction. Get to work rebuilding the rig.”

  “The engines were untouched,” Lawrence said. He pointed toward the huge engines near the mouth of the lead mine and the tall billowing pillars of condensed steam rising from them. “I’ll shut them down.”

  “Such powerful devices,” Francis said absently. He stared at the bank of steam engines but saw something more. The mineshaft bored a hundred feet into the hillside and was lined with rings of Corrigan Rare Earth Magnets, invented by a brilliant one-eyed American only a year before. Francis thought he was the first to make use of the oscillating super-powered magnetic field to accelerate particles created in the modified Crooke’s tube down the length of the mineshaft into his target.

  “I wasn’t able to retrieve the lead target,” Lawrence said, shaking Francis from his reverie. “It was vaporized.”

  “Stop that,” he said. “You were reading my mind. That’s not good.”

  Lawrence turned pale under the soot remaining on his face and he sputtered.

  “You can read minds?” the man stammered.

  “No, you, oh, bother. Never mind. I refuse to believe such psychic nonsense, no matter what Sir Arthur claims.” Francis was as distraught as his assistant over a simple case of focused thought. Both of them had considered the lead target—the one he intended to turn to gold—but reading thoughts? Impossible. Unless . . .

  Fulton hissed and clacked his jaws, distracting him.

  “Yes, yes, you’re right. One experiment at a time.” He glanced guiltily at Lawrence, who stared at him as if he had gone quite mad. He knew the rest of the crew shared his chief assistant’s appraisal, and it did not bother him unduly. A certain cachet went with being considered a mad inventor.

  He would show them all madness when he performed the feat of the ages that had eluded the best minds since Albertus Magnus. Their alchemy had been primitive and the techniques entirely chemical. B
y sending his rays racing along an evacuated glass tube, accelerated by the Corrigan magnets, he would turn lead into gold through electrical means. The fortune that he had spent on buying the mountaintop and the necessary equipment would be a piddling amount compared to what he could produce at will. There was a reason he had chosen a lead mine, after all, beyond the way it so perfectly contained his transmogrification ray—it provided him with raw material and kept curious citizens in the nearby town of Leadville from wondering why he needed slabs of plumbum.

  “Are you all right?” Lawrence asked, moving closer. He reached out, but Francis shied from his touch.

  “Quite so, thank you. Get to work. Clean up. You and the crew. I need to finish my calculations.”

  “The explosion was remarkable,” Lawrence said. “It came at the end of the . . . ray.”

  “Not supposed to do that, not at all. But the engines worked well. No trouble with the leather power transfer belts slipping. The vacuum was adequate to permit easy transference of the ray to the target through super-rarefied aether. And the Crooke’s tube could not have worked better.”

  “The ray would have been deadly at a mile or more,” Lawrence said.

  “Oh, it would extend ever so much farther. That’s why I need it backstopped in the mineshaft. Now go, go.”

  Francis returned to the small line shack where he slept and kept his precision equipment. Meters, glass envelopes and electrodes for the Crooke’s tubes and other matériel littered the small interior. He kicked the door shut with his heel after Fulton clanked inside. The robot sat back on its haunches and hissed a little more.

  “I’ll repressurize you. All right, all right,” Francis said. He laid his lab book on the floor. Fulton leaned forward and a bright flash filled the darkened interior. “Stop that. Stop taking pictures of everything.”

  Fulton looked up, rotated his head to one side and his eyes flashed again. Francis tried to brush away the yellow and blue dots dancing in front of his eyes. The dog was only playing, and he should know this since he had built in the behaviors, all punched into a thin metal ribbon that ran through the creature’s innards to give it propulsion control and, it appeared, playfulness.