The flare ignited above them in the cloudy morning sky. Its phosphor glow would send out a clear message, as long as there was still someone in the Hall to see it.
“I wish you hadn't done that,” Tom said.
Nathaniel backed away from him until he felt himself pressing up against a worktable. “You don't want to hurt me as well, do you?”
“As I told you before…Mr. Wickham was deceased when I found him.”
Nathaniel's temper managed to overcome his fear. “I'm not a fool, Tom. I was in the house all night. I would have heard it if someone had come in and shot a man.”
“No. I don't believe you would have. Mr. Wickham was stabbed to death.” Tom took another step toward him, but Nathaniel had nowhere to go. “You were also heavily…inebriated, and you never reactivated the…alarms after you returned. Did you even know that…Mr. Wickham had reentered the house?”
“No…I…” Nathaniel suddenly felt himself desperately wanting the drink that he had promised himself when he first headed downstairs. “I saw you trying to take something out of his pocket.”
“I wish to find his…notebook. I am hoping that it contains some information I can use to determine the identity of the person who is betraying…the Paragons.”
“Betrayal?” He spat out a laugh. “The only traitor is you, Tom. If you weren't a machine I'd call you a madman and a murderer as well.”
Standing behind the new Turbine outfit, Nathaniel caught a glint of something that he recognized along the belt-line of the suit. He moved toward it, and Tom closed the gap.
“You are incorrect, sir….Darby's, and now…Mr. Wickham's deaths were, I believe, engineered by the same party.”
“That makes perfect sense.” He reached out and flicked the switch at the waist, and the machine let out a hiss, then a hum. Some of the rubber tubing jumped to life, stiffened by whatever pressures were building up inside. “I'm guessing that person would be you.” He hoped it would do what he expected.
The Automaton lifted up his hand. “I won't hurt you, sir, but I will…restrain you if you do not willingly cease your actions.” Tom leaned toward the harness, clearly intent on turning off the suit.
Nathaniel stepped around to the other side and pulled the gun out of its holster. Without hesitation he aimed and pulled the trigger.
It simply clicked, and for an instant it seemed as if the weapon wasn't going to fire at all. There was just a rising whine coming from the suit's engines, and a loud “clack” as all four turbines on the wing shifted to the same direction simultaneously.
The report that followed was short and sharp, somewhere between a roar and a loud cough. Nathaniel found himself flying backward in a whirlwind of tools and papers that were exploding out in every direction. As he traveled through the air he wondered what setting this was, and then he landed hard against the edge of the workbench and returned to the state of oblivion he had longed for when he first woke up.
Tom lay sprawled faceup on the snow-covered lawn of the Darby house. The already-tattered remains of his clothes had been completely torn away by the blast, exposing the scorched and battered metal of his body. His arms and legs were pointing off in different directions, and any stranger appearing on the scene would have been hard-pressed not to imagine that Tom was a giant puppet whose strings had been cut. The only hint that he was anything more than a discarded marionette was a thick jet of steam that was hissing out the right side of his chest into the winter air. Scattered around him were broken bricks and chunks of wood.
After a series of loud clicks, a whirring sound rose up from inside of him. His arms and legs began to move, spinning and turning in decidedly inhuman ways until all his limbs had returned straight to his sides.
A moment later he sat up. Water dripped down his back and landed in the puddle that had formed from the warmth of his metal body melting the snow underneath him.
He bent his right leg, but the left limb remained straight and unmoving, a loud series of clunks an obvious protest against his attempts to bend it at the knee. Tom tried once more, and the limb gave out a plunk, then a “plink” as a cog ejected from his knee and flew through air.
The Automaton lay back down. His only visible movement was a series of small twitches in his limbs, although all manner of noises rose up from inside of him, and a two-foot-long loop of stiff wire began to uncoil from his neck, looping out three feet of cable before it drew itself back into his body.
Tom's second try at standing was more successful, and he managed to rise up onto his feet in a single smooth motion. He reached down and tore away the trouser cuffs that had settled around his ankles, but ignored the leather belt hanging from the plates around his waist.
He walked back toward the house, pausing for a moment to examine the gaping hole he had created when the weapon flung him through the side of the house. Then he climbed back through it into the devastated workshop and walked over to Nathaniel's unconscious body. The young man had been smashed into one of benches, gaining a gash on the back of his head from the journey. “I'm sorry you didn't believe me, sir.”
Tom lifted the young man up into his arms in what appeared to be a tender embrace. Nathaniel's head rolled back and forth as the Automaton walked toward the corridor. “I'll need to confine you until I can prove my innocence to you.”
As he passed the Turbine suit, still hanging on its stand, he stopped in front of the pneumatic weapon. It lay on the floor, still attached by its tube.
Gently placing Nathaniel back down onto the ground he picked up the gun. Tucking the weapon into his belt, he tugged on the other end of the tubing until it snapped free. He shoved the broken end of the cloth-covered rubber into the empty hole at end of his right arm. After he had fed a few feet into himself, something grabbed it and reeled it up.
When it grew taut the tubing pulled the gun free of his belt, dragging it up until it was hanging flush against his wrist. Bent metal rods extended themselves around the weapon like skinny fingers. Each one of them had a crook on the end, and when they retracted they looped around the weapon, pulling the gun firmly into place.
Tom lifted up his new limb and pointed it back at the hole in the wall. The metal rod around the trigger twitched, and the gun fired. It was a far less devastating shot than the one that had been directed at him, but it still managed to further dislodge some of the loose bricks in the wall and send them tumbling out across the lawn.
Clearly satisfied with his jerry-built device, he reached down and took Nathaniel back into his arms. As he did so, a voice boomed out at him from the yard. “Attention, Automaton!”
It was being loudly amplified in some crude manner. The words were loud but broken and distorted by whatever process was being used to increase their volume. Even so, they were still clear enough to be comprehensible. “Attention, Automaton! Put down the boy, turn around, and walk toward me!”
Tom rotated his torso as the Iron-Clad rolled into view. It was a tower of metal, and although it was often referred to as “the modern colossus,” the actual armor was squat and round with a sharp line of metal down the center of it. It was as similar to the Civil War battleship that had given the suit its name as it was to the human form that inhabited it.
The chest itself was constructed from a metal cylinder five feet across and equally tall. Big enough for a man to sit in, even a man confined to a wheelchair. The locomotion system was hidden under a flexible skirt constructed from layers of springs and steel. The layered metal was an innovation that Darby had incorporated into all his designs after coming back from a trip to Nippon, having seen how effective it was in the armor of the Japanese samurai.
But while this outfit did share many things in common with the original Iron-Clad armor, it was also clearly not the same suit that Hughes had been wearing when the Automaton fought alongside him the year before. This outfit was bigger, and far more menacing. An evolution of Darby's work, perhaps, but certainly not created by his hand.
And the Iron-C
lad now had a face, staring down from a circular metal disk sitting high enough up on the chest that the crown of it was over a foot above the shoulders. It scowled with a grim visage of Ares, the Greek god of war. Two large cannons were mounted menacingly along its waist, giving it the appearance of a pair of deadly arms, and they were both pointed straight at Tom.
“I am afraid, sir, that I cannot comply,” Tom said as loudly as he could.
There followed a moment of quiet, punctuated only by a sudden gust of wind and the hiss of snow being blown across the icy ground.
“I need you to step away from the boy.”
“I assure you that I have not hurt him. He tried to use a…weapon against me with unfortunate results to his own person.” Tom lifted Nathaniel's unconscious form slightly higher, so that it could better be seen through the hole in the wall. “The longer he remains…exposed to this cold, the more likely it is that he will require medical attention.”
“We'll determine what happened here once you've turned yourself in. The other Paragons have been notified, and they are on their way.”
“I'm afraid, Mr. Hughes, that current circumstances would be far too…hard for me to explain to the other Paragons satisfactorily. I can only…assure you that what I'm about to do is for the…benefit of everyone concerned.”
Tom's legs, still pointed in the opposite direction, began to run away. He ducked his head as he sprinted down the corridor and back into the house, being careful to shield his unconscious cargo as well.
From outside the projected voice of the Iron-Clad was loud enough to rattle the walls. “Automaton! Please come out now. I'll come and get you if I have to. You have one minute to get back out here, or things will get very bad for you.”
Leaping over the splintered remains of the bookshelf that Nathaniel had used to block his way, Tom reached the door to the basement. He kicked it open, shards of wood flying as the lock tore free.
Tom moved down the stairs as swiftly as he could, landing in a small workshop that Darby had constructed in the cellar. It had been built as a compromise with his friends that allowed him to avoid his tendency to work in his lab at the Hall of Paragons well beyond the point of exhaustion, while fulfilling his need to be able to explore any new idea the moment it appeared in his head. The idea was good, but Darby had rarely bothered to use it for its intended purpose.
Since Darby's passing, Tom had made some minimal changes to the lab so that it could function as a place for him to spend his off-time. Nathaniel had told him that he found Tom's tendency to simply stand silently in different corners at night “horrifying.”
But he had avoided moving any of the half-completed concepts that Darby had been working on at the time of his death, and the projects still lingered on the worktable, covered in dust. He leaned Nathaniel's limp form in a broken chair in the corner of the room; the boy's rump stuck out through the torn wicker seat, holding him in place.
Tom leaned his head down toward the tabletop and pressed a button on the side of his forehead. The broken camera lens came sliding out of his face, smashing away the last piece of his porcelain mask as it fell.
He opened the doors of a wooden cabinet standing above the table and pulled another cartridge of a similar shape down off one of the shelves. He tipped it up into his head, pushing it back until a latch caught it with a snap. The new head-package had two green glass eyes in the front of it. They were suspended on wires so that they floated in front of his face. Tom rolled them around experimentally, looking up and down, then left and right.
He reached into the cabinet a second time and pulled out a new mask. This had been his first face, and it was much less realistic than his porcelain features. It was formed from a single hammered sheet of metal, with some simple features painted onto the steel. They were crude in comparison to the intricate details and subtle tones of his previous face.
He pulled off the remaining pieces of his current mask and locked the older one into place using the metal clips placed where a normal man's ears would have been.
Behind the new visage he moved his eyes again. Rather than making him appear “normal,” it gave the illusion that a living person was trapped somewhere inside of him, desperately trying to escape. And it was that disturbing appearance that had originally caused Darby to relegate this version of Tom's face to the basement. Now it was all he had.
There was a rumbling from above as the Iron-Clad's amplified voice filtered down through the floor of the house, but the words were too muffled and distorted to make any sense, although it was clear enough that whatever deadline Tom had been given had now passed.
A circular brass plate, almost like the one that might be found on a pocket watch, popped open just above Tom's right leg, revealing a metal tube underneath. He grabbed a series of paper-wrapped bundles that were sitting on the shelf. Each one of them had been carefully tied up with butcher's twine, like a small parcel. One by one he placed each of them down into the hole; each one slid in perfectly.
The first was a package of short metal rods, followed by three stacks of cogs, each a different size. Finally he stuffed in two skeins of thin metal wire. Once they all had been placed inside Tom closed the lid, and froze for a moment.
If anyone had been watching him it would have been a very strange sight indeed. Bits of metal moved underneath him as if he were some kind of clockwork anthill. The strips of steel could be seen in his joints and other exposed areas, subtle hints that he was rebuilding himself.
His reverie was broken by the sound of a horrendous crash that literally shook the foundations of the building all around him. Dust spilled out from the ceiling and the walls, and there was a terrible groaning from the floorboards up above, followed by a series of cracking and popping noises as the frame of the house protested the demands that were being made of it. The Iron-Clad had entered the mansion.
Tom didn't react for a moment, waiting as the new materials distributed themselves throughout his frame, and then he ran back up the stairs into the main hallway.
A cold wind whipped down the corridor. Picture frames thumped against the wall, and the pages of the books that Nathaniel had toppled to the floor flapped noisily in the breeze, like hundreds of stranded fish in desperate search of water.
When he reached the entrance, the source of the wind was obvious: the large oaken double doors on the far side of the stairs had been blown half off their hinges and were now wobbling in the wind.
The library had originally been constructed as a ballroom, although there had only ever been one actual ball—an event where only four of the one hundred invited guests actually showed up. After that debacle Dennis Darby's father had decided that any further attempts to enter New York society would only serve to make him a laughingstock, and the room quickly became a storeroom, as well as a refuge that Dennis had run to when he needed to escape from the family and be alone with his thoughts.
After his father's death, Darby had decided that it would be far better to keep his large collection of esoteric journals in the space rather than simply using it as a large closet. As a memorial to the room's original purpose he had kept the original chandelier, along with a corner square of the corked floor and a grand piano, which were all now covered in grit and debris.
As Tom crossed the threshold he was surrounded by pages from Darby's beloved collection that fluttered in the wind. They mingled with blowing snow to create a strange blizzard in the room.
Just beyond them was a large hole created by the Iron-Clad's cannons. The Paragon had attempted to shove his way in through the breach he had opened, but the metal suit had not been able to find the purchase it needed to completely tear down the wall. Debris rained down as it tried to push through, and the floor beneath it was starting to sag and bow underneath the weight of it.
Tom looked up. “I do not think the…floor will hold you. Perhaps you should wait outside.”
“You had your chance.” A pair of metal doors in the shoulders to either side of the m
etal giant's face mask popped open. Gatling guns rolled out of the holes and locked into place with a menacing clank. The weapons appeared to be very similar in design to the ones that had been used against Tom by the man who had called himself Rapid Fire. They were clearly aimed directly at him.
“Mr. Hughes!” Tom said as loudly as he could. “Mr. Hughes!”
The distorted voice thundered out again. “Give yourself up!”
“Please, sir, I don't think you should come any closer.” He held the brass palm of his hand out toward the Iron-Clad. “Also, it seems that your…flamboyant entrance has managed to rupture some of the…gas lines. Using your weapons is very likely to—”
“If you wish to save Darby's house, then give yourself up.”
Tom shook his head. “It is not my…welfare that I am most concerned with.”
“I'll take care of myself,” the booming voice replied.
“It is…Mr. Hughes inside of the suit, isn't it? I don't recognize the armor that you're wearing….It does not appear to be…Darby's design—although it is clearly based on his discoveries. May I ask…who created it for you?”
The planks under the floor let out a disconcerting squeal as the suit lurched forward another foot. “We've all had to become a little more self-sufficient since Sir Dennis was taken from us.”
Tom nodded. “A most excellent job…Mr. Hughes.” Tom swiveled up his new arm and held it up high so that the Iron-Clad could see it, the gun at the end pointed straight at the face of the Ares. “However, the workmanship does appear somewhat familiar. Would I be…mistaken to suggest that it was forged within the same…foundry where this arm was built?”
For a few long seconds there was no reply, and in the pause both machines faced each other completely motionless. The wind blew more gusts of snow in through the space between the Iron-Clad and the hole in the wall. The only other noises were a low hissing that came from the shattered pipes and the rustling of paper.
Falling Machine, The (The Society of Steam, Book One) Page 22
