Shelley Mary had a standing order to feature her regularly in her social columns.
Now, she reached for the Arrivals file. Perhaps the woman had come in on the last Steam Air Ship; in which case, where from? And why? Or had Pfarrer simply spotted her and scooped her up, a whim to disconcert those attending the function?
The Automatic Voice Communicator on her desk startled her. She picked the AvCom up, pulled the ‘speak’ lever that killed the bell and opened the speaking tube. She grasped the earpiece and brushed her hair back to put it to her ear.
“Ventura!” she said.
“The Incorruptibles,” the voice came down the line. “How much is the boss worth?”
“What?” she replied, instantly angry with herself for sounding vacant. What? Fuck, you could have come up with something better than that!
“I can give you name of the boss of the Incorruptibles,” the voice was patient. “How much is that worth?”
“A good question. One I can’t really answer. Not off the cuff.”
“I thought you was a reporter. Ambitious.” If Shelley Mary had to testify, she’d say that the ‘was’ was deliberate. An educated man trying to sound lower class.
“How would you know that? You don't know anything about me,” Shelley Mary said, determined to keep him on the AvCom while she figured out how much money she could lay her hands on, knowing that Bass would not only not fund her but would give the story to one of his cronies.
“I don't have time for this,” the voice said, “and neither do you. Get over to Efrain’s lab now and see for yourself.”
“Doctor Efrain?”
“You heard. But be careful. There’ll be action. Violence. Let’s see if you’re good for anything more than sucking up to affluenzos.” The line died and Shelley Mary tossed the earpiece back onto her desk, where it fell across the image of the tiny, deadly, Rooseveldt Franklyn Pfarrer.
She didn’t move immediately but sat wondering whether this might have been a crank call, someone who knew how frustrated she was with her current job; someone winding her up. Then again, there was something about the voice despite the AvCom distortion. A cadence. And that phony ‘I thought you was a reporter.’ She had a good ear and an excellent memory. She trusted her instincts, and instinct told her this was someone she knew. Or had met.
Only one way to find out. If she rode her Arielectro, narrow enough to run on the sidewalks if necessary, it shouldn’t take her more than ten minutes to get to the lab. And to be able to name the hitherto anonymous leader of the Incorruptibles? That would be a career-making scoop.
oOo
3
SHELLEY MARY TWISTED THE ARIELECTRO’S THROTTLE grip convulsively, but it was no good. She could feel the machine dying under her.
Fuck! I should have switched the sidecar battery last night!
But when she’d finally zigzagged in to her building’s underground garage after her night out, she was too drunk to bother. Her only chance now was to swap the dead battery-sidecar for a charged unit at one of the swap’n’go electro-stations that were beginning to appear around the city – but where was the nearest one?
First she had to get out of the traffic before the battery gave up the ghost completely and so, making an imperious hand signal, she cut across the lanes to the lay-by shoulder, causing a chorus of angry horns and shouted curses. She made it just in time. The Arielectro gave a final wheeze and lapsed into silence. Hackneys and jitneys sped past uncaringly. A tuk-tuk puttered by spewing foul fumes. Their boilers ran on shit: horse, cow, human, whichever the tuk-tuk drivers could lay their hands on. Whichever was cheaper on the day. Holding her gauntleted hand to her nose, Shelley Mary dismounted and gave the sidecar a frustrated kick.
Then she climbed on top of it so that she was able to see above the traffic. She peered through the swirling smoke and saw the tall sign of an electro-station in the distance – close, yet tantalizingly far. She couldn’t get the Arielectro to it without help. There was only one thing for it. Turning to face the traffic, Shelley Mary peered into the oncoming stream of hackneys and jitneys, looking for the sinister, smoking, black carapace of a cop kart.
Galvanized by the knowledge that their role as the Commission’s enforcers was gradually being superseded by the Silencios, the city-state’s police force was doubling its efforts to be everywhere, peering into every aspect of the life of The Smoke. The Motor Road Patrol was ubiquitous so Shelley Mary didn’t have long to wait. As soon as the black vehicle came into sight, cruising in the slow lane, Shelley Mary shook her head, so that her auburn hair cascaded around her shoulders. Almost immediately the flow of traffic slowed as rubberneckers twisted to look at this roadside vision. But Shelley Mary took no notice, saving her piece-de-resistance until the cops in the van couldn’t help but see her. Then, as if simply trying to cool down, she unbuckled her leather blouson, revealing a plain white, devastatingly close-fitting silk chemise.
The big wagon pulled in behind the marooned Arielectro, and a young cop got out. He sauntered towards Shelley Mary, nonchalantly swinging an ornately carved mahogany truncheon.
“You in trouble, miss?” he asked. Shelley Mary sighed expressively. Tough and self-possessed though she was, she found it easy to play the helpless female if she had to.
“Oh officer, I’ve been really silly. I’ve been so worried about my sick grandmother that I completely forgot to charge my battery, and she’s expecting me at the hospital right now… and if I don’t get there before visiting hours end…” Shelley Mary let her green eyes complete her sentence.
Three minutes later, the cop kart was careering down the outside lane, bell clanging, dense smoke pouring from its twin funnels, forcing other vehicles to change lanes or pull off the road altogether. In the front passenger seat sat Shelley Mary, glancing admiringly at the young cop on the tiller. His jaw jutted purposefully as he drove, keeping the power valves wide open. Behind them, taking up the majority of the space usually reserved for prisoners, sat Shelley Mary’s Arielectro.
Ten minutes later, at the swap’n’go, the cop finished attaching a new battery sidecar to Shelley Mary’s machine.
“There you go miss. That should take you where you want to go.” Shelley Mary smiled at him as she tucked her hair up inside her leather helmet and brought her goggles down over her eyes.
“Thank you so much, officer. I don’t what I would have done without you.” When Shelley Mary put on her gorgeous-but-helpless act, she sometimes found it hard not to burst out laughing. Men were so fucking stupid. Well, most of them anyway.
Watched hungrily by the cop, she slung her leg up over her saddle, leather-on-leather creaking as she sat. She accelerated away from the swap’n’go.
Motor softly thrumming, the Arielectro wove in and out of the traffic. Swapping the juicepack had held her up but, as she twisted the throttle to full power, she felt the battery’s heat rising. Sometimes they combusted spontaneously. She’d just have to take that risk.
She sliced through the traffic, almost all of it steam-powered and belching the black and white fumes of the coal or any other combustible shit – literally, in some cases – that generated the steam. She rode up onto the sidewalk when her way was blocked, scattering pedestrians and bicycles like a rat in a pigeon loft.
She checked the signs overhanging the freeway. Oil Street… Tannery Road… Carboy Street: that was it! The lab was at the dead end of Carboy.
Accelerating across three lanes, a riot of horns in her wake, Shelley Mary pulled off the freeway, bounced onto the slip road, almost capsized, and then turned left on Carboy, pushing the Arielectro to its maximum speed, watching the battery capacity needle record the rapidly unspooling charge. She didn’t care. Just as long as the three-wheeled contraption got her to the lab.
She was slowing when she heard the first shots, saw the windows of Efrain’s lab light up with the red flare of shotgun blasts and the brighter yellow of the Ximan shells.
Without even thinking about it, sh
e turned her machine towards the lab, thanked providence for the wide, ramp-like stairs which led to its big double doors – ramp and doors built to accommodate the heavy, bulky machinery Doctor Efrain so often worked on – and pushed the combo to its absolute limits. The Arielectro’s electric motors took on a deeper ominous, note and the heavy vehicle accelerated up the ramp and smashed straight through the laboratory doors.
Inside the lab, a tableau frozen in place by her dramatic entrance: gunmen had cornered three people, one of them a giant, now failing, on his knees in a pool of blood. Despite his extreme straits – surely no man could survive wounds that produced this much blood – the giant was holding up a lab bench, using it to shield himself and his two companions against the gunmen’s assault.
As the gunmen swung away from their victims to face this new threat, Shelley Mary aimed right at them and the massively constructed, lead-batteried Arielectro struck three of them almost simultaneously, crushing them under its solid rubber wheels, skidding in the slimy viscera which burst from their flattened bodies.
Cerval and Evangeline, both wounded, ripped Thorsten free of his shield. He fought them, sensing their plan and resisting, determined to die protecting his friends; but he was losing strength and consciousness fast, and Cerval and Evangeline were able to manoeuvre him up onto the Arielectro’s sidecar battery.
“Get him out of here!” screamed Cerval. “The parking lot, round the back! The hackney!”
Cerval Franks!
Shelley Mary had interviewed him for The Smoke’s Celebrity of the Month! The rich society kid! His was the AvCom voice. She remembered it. So he’s the Incorruptibles’ boss? But even as this realization hit her, she was turning the Arielectro, twisting the throttle, praying for the instant torque of the huge motors.
“Go! Go! Go!” yelled Evangeline, lunging, like Cerval, for the weapons of the flattened, burst, gunmen. As Shelley Mary headed back towards the big entrance doors, she heard the fearful killing rhythms of the Ximans opening up. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw Cerval and Evangeline following her, faces to the surviving gunmen, the Ximan rounds obliterating everything they hit, cutting one of the killers clean in half, vertically.
Out in the lot, Shelley Mary swung her machine round next to the hackney, a beautifully painted custom vehicle she’d seen before. Careless, she thought. If he wants to remain anonymous why use his own transport? Then realizing that he no longer wanted to be anonymous. Hence the tip. He wanted The Smoke to know his identity and he had chosen her to reveal it. What a scoop!
But why?
Who would care about the name Cerval Franks? How would making it public further the Incorruptibles’ cause? Shelley Mary had no time to ponder this question because, a moment later, Cerval and Evangeline were there, lifting, lugging, pushing, pulling – shoving the wounded giant into the hackney.
A Ximan opened up from the edge of the lot and Evangeline whirled to face it as Cerval sprang to the hackney’s controls, opening the steam power valves wide. A huge, whooshing eruption of steam and smoke melded with the ugly coughing of Evangeline’s Ximan. Shelley Mary saw the slugs rip into another of the gunman and in the ensuing moment of silence heard Cerval shout:
“Up here, Evangeline! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
And, completely ignoring Shelley Mary, they accelerated hard up Carboy, steel wheels throwing sparks.
Well, thank you, too, Mr. Franks. My pleasure entirely! muttered Shelley Mary angrily as the hackney sped away from her, but her thoughts were interrupted by twin shotgun blasts, one of which clattered deerslugs into the side of the Arielectro.
Fuck me!
She twisted the throttle hard and the combo accelerated in pursuit of Cerval. A beat later, another Ximan opened up behind her, but the gunman must have been too nervous to stand out in the open and aim. The bullets sprayed left and right, taking out streetlights, scouring paving stones, shattering windows, but leaving the Arielectro unharmed.
A moment later, Mary Shelley and her combo were swallowed up by the dark of the smog. She could barely see the lights of Cerval’s hackney up ahead, and even as she squinted through the smoke they died and the shape of the hackney faded.
Fuck!
oOo
4
“I BELIEVE IT TO BE THE FAULT OF THE OLD MEN,” Cerval had said to his closest friend Thorsten some years ago. Despite his youth, his speech was already a little formal, a pattern which would carry on into his adult life.
Thorsten Laverack was the son of Cerval’s family’s major domo, Gori. Cerval was fourteen at the time, Thorsten a couple of days older. They were holed up in one of their favourite spots, a ledge high in the castle’s battlements. The castle was built on top of a mountain and Cerval and Thorsten’s spot looked out over the estate that covered the slopes and some of the valley below, and offered spectacular vistas of the surrounding jungle and mountains.
It was all so different from The Smoke, that intriguing, mysterious, opaque, grimy and cruel city in which Cerval had spent his schooldays. Although as a child Thorsten stayed on the Frankenstein estate, his particular educational needs taken care of by his father Gori, he would visit Cerval in The Smoke a couple of times a year, and the two boys would wander the byways of the city-state. Thor accepted its highs and lows of wealth and poverty, the stunning differences between the affluenzos’ leafy Ussher and the degraded ruins of Harlesdon Marshes, but the longer Cerval spent in The Smoke, the more he became convinced that it was corrupt through and through, its foundations based in shifting and corrupt soil.
“So what do you think, Thor?”
“Whatever you say, Cervie.” Thorsten wasn’t stupid, just big. His forefathers had all been hunchbacks but Thorsten broke the mould. Heading into his fifteenth year, he stood a shade over seven feet and seemed half that across his shoulders. His neck was like a concrete pipe and his face was almost flat, featuring a Roman nose and monstrous unibrow, beneath which the slanted eyes were wide-set and apparently blank. He started to shave at eleven and now it was a twice a day chore. It was an obsession. He hated body hair.
“Change, Thor. It’s a necessity. I don’t know how, but The Smoke has to change. Would you not agree?”
“Whatever you say, Cervie,” said Thorsten, although he didn’t really mind either way. He doubted that he would have to, or want to, spend much of his life in the city. He had a good life here on the estate, only seven hundred yoettes from The Smoke but might as well be ten thousand, impassable terrain separating two entirely different worlds.
The Frankenstein estate was a community and had been even before Cerval’s great-great-grandfather had determined to create life in his lab in the castle. He’d had a vision of the world to come, the inferno of The Smoke, the compulsion of cash, the soul-slavery of brain-numbing work-for-hire, the dehumanizing of a potentially noble species. He thought that this craven new world would demand a new kind of worker-creature, dexterous and blindly obedient, without spiritual or psychological needs. A creature which could not naturally evolve fast enough to meet the needs of this new industrial world but might be created. The disastrous result of that experiment – Thorsten’s hunchback ancestor, Igor, central to it – almost destroyed the family, half the castle burned out by revengeful locals; but the Baron, chastened, had tried to make amends before he died. His progeny inherited not only his wealth and his unmatched knowledge of human physiology, but a terrible guilt, the knowledge that, somehow, they had to make up for the tragic results of the old man’s hubris.
The Baron’s son married an estate girl, a plain and unremarkable young woman, the original Igor’s grand-niece. Their children followed the family’s utopian idyll, continuing the work to create an oasis of community on the mountain. It had not been a simple or smooth path. How could it be? Men, women and egos were involved. But the family gradually discovered that most people craved a kind and peaceful life; only when they were scared, broke, cheated or consistently lied to might they rise up – an
d that only eventually. So a curious mix of altruism and self-interest created a peaceful, prosperous life for those who lived on the estate; they were, effectively, a tribe willing to accept the family as their chiefs, their first among equals.
Cerval had inherited this privilege and burden at the age of fourteen when his father died. He was so clearly imbued with altruism, so obviously free of self-interest, that even when a breakaway faction of followers plotted to remove the boy and loot the castle, the majority seized the rebels and packed them off to The Smoke, a damnable transportation. It was believed that their early-model P.A.V. – Personal Air Vehicle – crashed into the jungle en route, leaving them at the mercy of the Manus and Mancits, its cannibalistic inhabitants.
Cerval inherited more than the estate and the family idealism. He was racked by the abiding guilt that coursed through his bloodlines – to an extent so extreme that usually, and always when he was away from the estate, he used the name ‘Franks.’ That way, he would not have to answer the inevitable and predictable questions of strangers.
He was, too, a Mood Swinger who had to fight to remain in the active phase of that condition and not fall into the darkness of the inactive.
Nevertheless, despite the name change, he discovered quite soon that his guilt could not be outrun. So, how to assuage it? His community wasn’t the solution. It was almost perfect. But The Smoke? Cerval knew The Smoke. When his father first sent him there to be educated, it seemed to be a relatively calm place, albeit suffocated by the smog of its coal-fired industry. But even in his short life, Cerval saw the Commission and the iron and coal cartel move closer together; the korona-corruption of politics; the decline of the Smoke’s police force and the rise of the criminal Silencios as the city-state’s most effective, brutal, law enforcement, private contractors to the Commission; the shift of power and influence to an increasingly small percentage of affluenzos. Each time he walked the Smoke’s streets, the world seemed more dehumanized. The poorer and more stressed the UnderGrunts, the more they turned on each other, apparently unable to unite to fight for their own interests – or even to agree on those interests.
The Incorruptibles (Book One, Frankenstein Vigilante): Frankenstein Vigilante: The Steampunk Series (Frankenstein Vigilante. The Steampunk Series.) Page 2
