The horses and the chariot thundered on while, through a gap in the armour, Shelley Mary watched a knot of unshaven, skinny men and women fight over the double-shot flasks of mushka that Dalton had thrown among them. A strong psilocybin-based liquor, it would allow them to escape their squalid lives for a few hours.
Shelley Mary guessed they were on the outskirts of Harlesdon Marshes, an area she had never explored and would not have dared to without a heavily armed posse of bodyguards. She knew it was where the unemployed, the homeless, the penniless, the losers, the addicts, the mentally ill – that huge, amorphous class termed the UnderGrunts – lived their miserable, and usually short, lives. The Chavaliers were the only residents who didn’t fall into the category of abject, and that was only through Dalton’s leadership and their monopoly of ReForTin.
In general, Marshians were dangerous, uncontrollable and, most of all, poor. Smokies with any social or financial aspirations agreed that the Marshian UnderGrunts deserved whatever they got. In this belief, they were encouraged by the Commission’s drumbeat – that these degenerates, through their aberrant behaviour, their deliberate choices, had excluded themselves from the wealth that the Commission and its allies assured all Smokies was trickling down from the beneficent few at the top.
Contrary to Commission propaganda, the Marshie UnderGrunts were not a homogenous criminal, anti-social mass. Over the years, a great variety of subspecies had evolved and some had indeed made the deliberate choice to exclude themselves from The Smoke.
Daubers were artists who couldn’t or wouldn’t produce the mainstream art that the affluenzos and Toppers bought, preferring to work in real, close-to-the-earth media such as rotten wood, mud and stone. Hurst Pierpoint, now the wealthiest artist in the history of The Smoke, had begun as a Dauber and specialized in shit. He was glib and espoused a philosophy of art that no one would admit they didn’t understand. Somehow, Hurst Pierpoint’s shit caught on; affluenzos bought it and so he produced ever more shit.
Steamers were fanatical aficionados of old technology, who held electricidad to be the work of Sufud the anti-Dufus. Fuelled by ethylopium, a potent, highly addictive drug, the Steamers endlessly recycled and customised obsolete machinery in chaotic, crumbling workshops. No ReForTin for them, only heavy metal. They rarely finished projects they started.
Revoltistas made occasional forays into The Smoke to commit random violence in the name of a social revolution whose aims they couldn’t quite define. The Commission liked them because they could be blamed for every bad thing that happened in The Smoke.
Then there were Dynamistas, recruited by Bonnot Robertson Falwell from the more fanatical elements of the Revoltistas. Brain dead on ethylopium and Falwell’s preaching, a far more dangerous drug, they really came to the fore once they realised that if they didn’t come back from their explosive raids – if they actually planned not to come back – their stock would rise sky high. What’s more, with the almost guaranteed results that a suicide Dynamista could offer, Bonnot Robertson Falwell could ask a high price for the hire of his disciples. The Commission loved them because they could, via Bonnot, be hired covertly to carry out any suicidal mission and, at the same time, like the Revoltistas, carry blame. In the weirdly stratified and segregated outlaw society of Harlesdon Marshes, the Dynamistas became heroes despite the Marshians’ deep suspicion of Bonnot himself.
But the most secretive and hidden of the Marshes’ subcultures was the one of which Dalton Trager Rhineheart was the de facto leader: the dark-skinned but blue-eyed Chavaliers. They were the original inhabitants of the Marshes, when the area was a sparsely inhabited bog, its only asset huge underground seams of tin. The Chavaliers built the mines, trained the pit ponies, installed the heavy machinery, and extracted the metal by dint of backbreaking work and a willingness to bear a swingeing level of fatalities.
A ramshackle boomtown grew up around the mines, and outsiders moved in – shopkeepers, prostitutes, doctors, veterinarians - all offering their services to the cash-rich tin miners. The Chavaliers themselves took to brick-built houses instead of the yurts that had been their traditional abodes. But they never lost their love of and expertise with horses and, over the years, they bred a hardy race of animals that could cope equally with pit work, pulling a chariot, or racing.
In the end, most of the tin ran out. The grand houses and expensive stores that had been built in the wake of the tin boom became empty and eventually derelict.
The little ore that remained was deep-mined at great danger and only by the most skilled, the bravest of the Chavaliers. Some of the few miners who had saved their earnings chose not to work these often lethal seams. They moved out of the Marshes and tried to meld with The Smoke’s general population. Others who had not saved had no choice but to remain in the Marshes, increasingly powerless as their homes and way of life crumbled. There was no longer any pride in being a Chavalier and they dispersed among the other Harlesdon subspecies. However, the hardcore that stayed on, that worked the dangerous depths, determined to maintain their identity and isolated themselves from the other Marshan factions. They moved their living quarters underground, extending terraces of single-storey dwellings in the disused tunnels, along the exhausted seams. Their strength came from the little remaining accessible ore and, when Dalton and his inner circle discovered how to blend that now rare and precious tin with the resin riskily obtained in the wilderness, ReForTin promised these hardcore Chavaliers a new lease of life.
It also earned the furious enmity of the Commission and the iron, coal and steam cartel, as threatened by this new technology as they were by electricidad.
The horses drawing Dalton’s chariot were lathered up, having galloped full pelt all the way from the Senate to the Marshes. But they knew they weren’t far from home, and although Dalton had reined them in to a steady canter, they strained forward, snuffling noisily. Straggling a few yards behind were another couple of chariots, driven by Noemi Galindo and Tilden St. Vincent, Dalton’s two most trusted lieutenants. When they’d driven out that morning there had been a fourth, driven by Paulina Ellamova, scion of a long-established Chavalier family and a fearsome warrior. But she’d last been seen going down under a scrum of baton-wielding cops, who had carted her off before Dalton and his group could get to her. Had she been anyone other than Paulina, all the witnesses to her capture would have given her up for dead, but she had an extraordinary ability to resurrect herself.
The trio of chariots now passed houses and businesses that hadn’t been occupied for decades, and as the horses thundered by it seemed that the vibration might finally bring them down. At the last of the wrecked houses, Dalton’s chariot approached what looked like a massive scrapyard-cum-garbage dump. Wrecked steamers, parts of steamers, old ironware, smashed furniture, all were strewn around in chaotic disarray.
Dalton reined in the horses and brought the chariot to a halt. Shelley Mary watched as he rooted about among his weapons and finally came up with a wicked-looking short-stock crossbow with a mahogany pistol grip. The satin sheen of the bow and the bolts proclaimed them to be made of ReForTin, though the bolts were iron-tipped. Dalton cocked the weapon, and Shelley Mary found her voice: “What are you planning to do with that?” Dalton grinned. He had white, even teeth and that alone would have set him apart from the majority of UnderGrunts. “Relax, I didn’t bring you all this way to shoot you.” Shelley Mary started to answer, but Dalton had already turned his attention from her. He poked the crossbow through the chariot’s vista viewer and steadied it, squinting along the stubby shaft of the bolt. He squeezed the trigger slowly and steadily, and finally fired.
Anyone standing outside would have barely been able to register the sequence of events – the flight of the bolt was almost as fast and invisible as that of a bullet – but they might have heard the report as the bolt hit the knock-off hubcap on one of the front wheels of an ancient, rusty steamer, jammed halfway up the mountain of detritus.
A moment later, a carefully ba
lanced series of weights and counterweights ground into action, and what appeared to be nothing but a pile of tangled, rusty junk reshaped and realigned itself, with an asthmatic creaking and grinding, into the form of a wide gateway. It seemed to lead directly down into the darkest bowels of the earth.
oOo
17
THE REBUILT PROSTHETIC sat on an iron workbench.
Cerval, Evangeline, Thor’s father, Pitts father and son and everyone else who had helped build the device watched it balefully, warily, as if it were a wild animal that had attacked them once and was now just waiting for another opportunity. Thorsten himself was the only one present who remained equable, but that may simply have been a result of his bizarre Broca malfunction, his unpredictable disconnect.
Cerval glanced at his childhood friend and wondered what he was really thinking, whether he had any regrets about their friendship and the Incorruptible quest that had been responsible for his terrible mangling. But Thor’s blank expression gave nothing away. It rarely did. The only remarkable thing about his face was the series of shaving cuts around one knob of his massive jaw. Thorsten hated body hair of any kind, shaved twice a day, often slicing through surface layers of skin. In such a monumental man, the shaving cuts were strangely endearing.
The prosthetic sighed quietly as the relief valves responded to the ever-increasing steam pressure. In every steam machine Cerval had known to date, the steam would not sigh but hiss as it escaped into the atmosphere; but in his fanatic quest to keep the bulk of the boiler and its ignition and heating mechanisms as small as possible, Efrain had designed a system that recaptured and recycled the steam released by the relief valves. There was, therefore, only the faintest wisp hovering over the prosthetic, which made the whole system seem organic. Even animal.
The alien metals from which Donald Nathan had constructed the prosthetic reacted oddly to the heat generated within the boiler and the steam and hydraulic lines, glowing, so that the exterior pulsed from a rich onyx to a paler, opalescent shade. This phenomenon had at first concerned the Pitts. Did it indicate a weakness at high temperatures? In the end, however, they realized that just as iron could glow red- and then white-hot, so this material – for which they had not yet coined a name – changed colour according to temperature. But, until it actually melted, at a much higher temperature than the melting point of a basic iron ore, the alien material retained all its strength.
Producing a temperature which would melt it had been one of the problems the Pitts had had to solve. The flame wasn’t the question. Both Donald Nathan and D’Arcy Lord had learned to work with the mysterious marsh gases which could be captured in tanks and flagons (though deep in the heart of Mancit and Manu territory and therefore at considerable risk). These they pressurized and mixed with pure oxygen extracted from the air by another technology the Frankensteins had developed in their early search to create life. In the correct combination and under the right pressure, a temperature of over 4000 dinoz – 3000 C° in AMS – could be developed, where iron melted at around 2000. The crucibles were fashioned from a readily available mineral of almost identical composition to diamond. Widely available but lacking the inner fire of diamond, it had little value except to smiths like the Pitts and scientists like Doctor Efrain.
“Well, standing around gawping ain’t gonna buy the baby a new bonnet,” said Thor quietly. Cerval had never heard him use street slang before, and took it as a sign that Thor was perhaps more nervous than he appeared.
“Yes, let’s get on with it,” said Evangeline, then was instantly embarrassed that she had said anything. This was not her operation. Both Cerval and Thor smiled at her reassuringly. Everyone here was entitled to nerves, and they all understood that the sooner Thor was fighting fit the sooner they might return to The Smoke and take revenge on the Silencios.
Thor looked at Cerval, who nodded; then at the Pitts’s, who nodded. He stepped up to the bench, turned around and lowered his one sound shoulder so that the Pitts’s could position and adjust the straps that held the device to his back. It seemed to Cerval and Evangeline that the father and son team took much longer than one might expect to make those adjustments, as if they feared the next step – the second test of Efrain’s design and their workmanship. It was Thor who lost patience, another sign that he was not as sanguine as he seemed.
“That’s fine,” he said and stepped beyond their reach, shrugging his huge shoulders and reacting to the weight as if the prosthetic were no heavier than a winter overcoat. As before, the people in the room stepped aside, attempting discretion but staying out of reach of that fearsome arm which again featured a heavy club hammer as its fist.
As he had earlier, Thorsten reached for the prosthetic’s control panel with his uninjured arm. It had been modified since the first test and now featured only Efrain’s much-admired all-ways controller and a single dial. The controller directed the arm’s movements and the dial its power.
“Same routine,” Thor said, not so much a question as a statement.
“Same routine,” Cerval confirmed. “Extend!” said Thor as he manipulated the controller. The muffled sound of pressurized steam forced through the narrow lines and complex valves.
The arm extended slowly.
“Retract!” said Thorsten, reversing the direction of the controller. The device hissed, its stifled voice indicating monstrous but contained power.
The arm retracted slowly.
“Let’s try that at a higher power setting,” said Thorsten, dialling it up.
“Extend!” The arm shot out.
“Retract!” The arm retracted with such force that Thor had to step back to retain his balance. “So far so good,” he smiled at Cerval.
“So far so good,” agreed Cerval gravely.
“Up.” The arm reached up and straightened to its full reach.
“Down.” It came down, overshooting its ‘parked’ position until Thor made the necessary adjustment.
“To the right.” The arm swept right.
“To the left.” It swept left.
“Circle.” It circled. “Small circles.” The circles diminished. “Big circles.” The circles grew until the arm was windmilling, its power forcing Thor to plant his feet wider apart to stabilise himself. There wasn’t another man on the estate, in The Smoke, or in the surrounding wilderness sufficiently big and strong to control this power, and Thor began to revel in it. Cerval, Evangeline and the Pitts’s could only watch, not knowing the next manoeuvre, but smiling with increasing confidence and pride.
Thor parked the arm, turned to his friends triumphantly and at exactly that moment the prosthetic bit back, like the wild animal it had so oddly seemed to be before the test.
It flew out with a terrible power and had not the younger Pitts shoved his father violently to one side, the hammer would have caved in his skull. Its momentum all but threw Thor off his feet and no sooner had he regained his balance than the arm began to thrash violently, wild haymakers left and right, forcing everyone to dive to the floor.
Thor’s functioning hand worked the controls frantically but nothing would bring the prosthetic under control. Had the giant Incorruptible been able to remain in one place the chaos might not have been so dangerous, but the random swings had a terrible momentum which dragged Thor back and forth, from side to side, almost as though this artificial addition to his body was rejecting its host and trying to destroy those who had forced the marriage of bio to mechanical.
Neither Cerval, Evangeline, Thor’s father nor the Pitts’s was going to stand by and watch their creation beat the young man to death – and all piled on, trying to grab and quiet the arm, attempting to undo the straps which held it to its victim; but the arm possessed not just an apparent will of its own but the power of a shunting engine. No human or combination of humans could subdue it and they were flung aside – only to return to the fray, bloodied and bruised.
Violent death was in the air.
That no one did in fact die was thank
s to Donald Nathan Pitts’ quick thinking. He seized a wrench from the workbench and fastened on to one of the steam pressure lines, like a terrier on a giant rat, ignoring the battering until he loosened a fitting sufficient for the supercharged steam to escape.
With that escape, another risk. Scalding. A heat so fierce it would rip skin and tissue to the very bone – and then pierce the bone. But Cerval and Evangeline saw what the younger Pitts was trying to do and, rather than subdue the entire thrashing hybrid monster, they clung simply to the joint on which Pitts was working, miraculously avoiding the superheated jet until the arm lost pressure and therefore all its strength. It didn’t take long, for one of the brilliant elements of Efrain’s design was the miniaturization of the boiler. The question was not quantity of steam but quality – pressure – and as long as the system could be self-contained there was no great need for volume. But, that self-contained, circulating system breached, the boiler drained fast.
The arm died and the combatants sprawled, exhausted and shocked.
Thor himself was the first to stand, a tribute to his superhuman physiology. He looked down at his family and friends and smiled sardonically.
“As I was saying – back to the fucking drawing board.” Thor swore even less than he used slang, so that was an indication of how shocking the incident had been.
The ‘fucking drawing board’ was of course Doctor Pedro Robledo Efrain’s, and that genius was somewhere in The Smoke, ducking and diving from one secret location to another to avoid Silencio assassins. At this point, Cerval did not realize how dire Efrain’s circumstances were, but even if he had he still would have done the only thing he could: send Brutus to The Smoke with a report of the tests to date and an urgent request for Efrain to review and correct the prosthetic’s design, in particular its control system. At the very least, it required a kill switch, so that if it went berserk again Thor could immobilise it.
The Incorruptibles (Book One, Frankenstein Vigilante): Frankenstein Vigilante: The Steampunk Series (Frankenstein Vigilante. The Steampunk Series.) Page 12
