The Incorruptibles (Book One, Frankenstein Vigilante): Frankenstein Vigilante: The Steampunk Series (Frankenstein Vigilante. The Steampunk Series.)

by Peter Lawrence

  He turned to Paulina. “Shelley Mary’s writing the manifesto.” He pointed to the table, the pile of papers on which they’d been working. A half-empty bottle of mushka testified to the hours that they had put in.

  “Oh, the famous Chavalier manifesto,” Paulina laughed. “Of course. That’s why you’ve brought her here.” Shelley Mary looked from one to the other. If this was Dalton’s woman, first she didn’t want to go up against her and, second, she was angry. She’d been starting to think that she and Dalton might have something special. “I… I didn’t know… ”

  Paulina laughed again: “Nothing to know. We look out for each other and that’s it.”

  “But you’re a Chavalier, right?”

  “I’m a woman. No other label, thanks.” She poured herself a glass of mushka and drank deeply.

  “How many did you kill to get out?” said Dalton.

  “Who’s counting?”

  “So what kept you?”

  “Steamer crash on the West Circular.” There was always a steamer crash on the West Circular, The Smoke’s most notorious road, so Paulina’s answer was meaningless. Shelley Mary addressed Dalton:

  “You knew they had her? And you didn’t do anything to help her?”

  “If I had,” answered Dalton grimly, “I’d have been on the kill list. Paulina doesn’t care to be ‘helped.’”

  Paulina put down the empty mushka glass and casually riffled through the papers. Clearly she wasn’t prepared to be impressed.

  “So, what kind of revolutionary are you?” she asked finally. Shelley Mary bristled.

  “I’m a journalist actually.” She sounded precious, and not at all tough, even to herself. “Or was. On The News Of The Smoke.”

  “That rag? How do you sleep at night?”

  “I’m a writer. That’s how I make my living.”

  “What? Grovelling to the Silencios? Pandering to the affluenzos?”

  “No! I just did the social stuff,” Shelley Mary replied hotly – and knew she had made a mistake before the words were out of her mouth.

  “Even worse – a celebrities’ bitch!” What could Shelley Mary say? It was true.

  “Give her a break, Paulina,” said Dalton. “She did the Silencio who killed her photographer.”

  “That was you?” said Paulina, surprised.

  “That was me,” said Shelley Mary, glad to have something positive to say.

  “That’s how you got here?”

  “I brought her here,” said Dalton. “We’ve been looking for someone to write the manifesto and here she is.”

  “A star-fucker,” said Paulina disgustedly. “Some way to inspire a revolution.”

  Keira Specklestone Pfarrer’s day had started badly when her chauffeur had arrived late with some story about his mother having died. That old excuse! Keira would have sacked him on the spot but that would have meant having to roust out one of her other chauffeurs, and by the time she’d done that she would have been late for her appointment.

  So she simply made a mental note to sack him later, and commanded him to drive her to Bonne Gamage as fast as possible. Although Rrods & Phortnum was recognized as The Smoke’s top department store, Bonne Gamage was currently fashionable among the younger set; the younger set of affluenzos and Toppers, of course – the average citizen of The Smoke couldn’t even afford to tip the doorman.

  Everyone recognised the personal identity plate – PFA 2 – on her custom hackney, and her doomed driver was thus able to speed down the emergency lane without interference from the cops or anyone else, so she was only a few moments late for her appointment at Beau Treisse, Bonne Gamage’s beauty salon. Now she was ensconced in one of the its state-of-the-art cast-iron, sponge-padded, fur-lined reclining chairs, while head beautician Bernice fussed around her.

  Actually a slim, androgynous woman, Bernice found it advantageous in her profession to sound and act like a particularly camp man, and she made small talk in a high, keening voice, with an emphasis on the sibilants.

  “So, are we going anywhere nice on our holidays this year?” Keira gazed at her with a jaundiced eye. Bernice knew who she was – why was she asking her such a silly question? Of course she was going somewhere nice on holiday. She always went somewhere nice on holiday, ten or eleven times a year. She was about to make a caustic remark when Bernice interrupted her:

  “Oh, of course you are. Mr. Pfarrer’s Steam Airship at your command. All those young men in gold-braided uniforms. You can go where you like, when you like. Wonderful!”

  Was there a note of sarcasm there? Keira decided against having her sacked – she was the best manicurist in The Smoke. But Keira did wish she wouldn’t prattle on so, because she liked to use her beauty sessions to think about her favourite subject: herself.

  As Bernice’s hands fluttered around her fingertips, Keira’s mind wandered. She was seeing her boyfriend later. Should she have sex with him? He didn’t seem to mind whether they did or didn’t and Keira wondered whether he might be an officer in the opposing army. After all, any red-blooded male would want to bend her to his will as soon as look at her, and yet he seemed diffident. Still, he was tall, dark and handsome, and as he was the son of one of The Smoke’s leading senators Daddy approved of him. It didn’t matter that he was as thick as lentil soup. It was an advantage in fact, as he could make even Keira seem clever by comparison.

  While Bernice fluttered, Keira considered whether her wardrobe was large enough. Of the Pfarrer residence’s hundred and forty-eight rooms, seven were dedicated to storing her dresses, bodices, skirts, bustiers, blousons and breeches, with another four rooms solely for hats and fascinators. Undergarments – leather, lace, silk and satin – merited three rooms of their own, and a final two rooms were dedicated to her boots and shoes. All were kept at a constant cool temperature by air filtered up from the ice chambers in the basement of Cranbury Court, the Pfarrer mansion. Nevertheless, Keira was starting to feel that she wouldn’t be able to justify her number one position on The News Of The Smoke’s Best-Dressed List unless she jettisoned every garment and started all over again. At that art exhibition at The Senate, she’d almost been upstaged by that bitch with the crocheted jodhpurs and the hat in the shape of an airship!

  For a moment, she toyed with the idea of giving everything away. Poor people were so grateful when you gave them things. You almost started to feel sorry for them before you remembered that they preferred to live the way they did and, anyway, it was their fault. Keira’s reverie was interrupted when she realised that Bernice was prattling away again. She was about to shut her up when what she was saying penetrated her brain:

  “The Young Designers department is having a sale, twenty per cent off everything apparently and the thing is it’s a secret it’s like a surprise they’re just going to suddenly do it and it’ll be any minute now I’m going to go down there in my lunch break I mean I might be able to find something even on my wages a scarf maybe or some knickers.” She paused breathlessly.

  It’s a sign, Keira said to herself. Just at the moment Keira was thinking about updating her wardrobe, there was a sale on in Bonne Gamage’s Young Designers department! Not that she needed the discount. Daddy gave her a monthly allowance that was about fifty times what the average Smoke worker earned but she liked a bargain as much as the next spoilt nineteen-year-old. And she’d score points with him for having an eye to economy, too. For someone with more money than Dufus, he could be surprisingly parsniponerous… parsononimous… parsi… mean.

  Keira sat up abruptly, almost knocking to the floor the palette of moisturisers, colourisers and volumisers that was attached to the chair’s arm. Bernice started, managing to catch the tools of her trade before they fell.

  “Oh, Miss Pfarrer, you startled me! Is something wrong?”

  Keira swung round, put her feet to the ground. “No Bernice, nothing’s wrong. I just realised that while I’m lying here, I could be doing something more positive… more exciting… more dynamic!”


  Bernice looked puzzled. “You could?”

  Eyes shining, Keira replied, “Yes! I could be spending money!”

  oOo

  22

  PERHAPS IT WAS THE IMPOSSIBILITY of a young man with a violent speech defect going unnoticed as he tried to find a figure known to be wanted by the Silencios that caused Ricardo Cullington to fall into Rooseveldt Franklyn Pfarrer’s hands. And perhaps it was Ricardo’s good fortune that Pfarrer had decided not to put he search for the young Babbler into the hands of the usual Silencio goons, who might well kill him before his valuable information could be extracted, but into the hands of a different kind of henchman.

  Rod-Carlo Gerriman was interesting and despicable: a man of talent and charisma whose spinelessness overrode any other qualities he might possess. He had been an elite athlete in an age of amateurism and had struggled financially. Still young, he turned to coaching the new sport, triathlon, and persuaded affluenzos to sponsor his followers. They over-developed their heart-lung systems training hard in the filthy atmosphere of The Smoke, which is how they came to be known as the SuperOxygenators. Determined to cement his position and his financial security, Rod-Carlo created a Smoke-wide messenger service manned by SuperOxygenators. Running or biking, they were faster than any similar service and soon came to the Silencios’ attention. At this stage, they weren’t inherently corrupt or criminal; more like a cult – and, certainly, Rod-Carlo thought of himself as a religious leader.

  Just as Bonnot Falwell developed intimate ties with the Commission, Rod-Carlo grew closer and closer to the Silencios. Franklyn Rooseveldt Pfarrer valued him for his slavish attention, a personality too weak to oppose any task Pfarrer set him or his SuperOxygenator followers. The SuperOxygenators themselves – most of them – were only too happy to be paid to train for their demanding sport. They thought of themselves simply as messengers. The morality of the messages, the senders or the receivers, was of no concern to them. That was Rod-Carlo’s responsibility and he had an infinitely flexible view of right and wrong. And if Pfarrer demanded that Rod-Carlo’s followers act as spies and informers, that was an acceptable variation on messengering.

  Pfarrer taxed Rod-Carlo with finding Ricardo and bringing him in. Rod-Carlo knew that meant death and/or torture for the young man but that wasn’t Rod-Carlo’s problem. Pfarrer was much more important to Rod-Carlo’s future than the Babbler, and Rod-Carlo Gerriman’s future was everything.

  As he made his enquiries, Ricardo Cullington was very careful of his back. He did spot Rod-Carlo himself following him on one occasion; too many appearances on his path to be accounted for by coincidence. But Rod-Carlo realised he’d been made and passed the job on to his acolytes and from that moment on Ricardo’s tails changed every couple of hours. In their all-black body-hugging suits, Rod-Carlo’s SuperOxygenators were hard to spot in the smog, and particularly at night when Ricardo was most actively investigating.

  The reports came in to Pfarrer, confirmation that the strange young man who could not control his speech was searching for Doctor Pedro Robledo Efrain, himself known to be working with the Incorruptibles. The connections and conclusions weren’t hard to make and it wasn’t long before Pfarrer discovered Ricardo’s base, the brownstone. Pfarrer’s only remaining questions were: was Ricardo himself an Incorruptible? If so, could he lead the Silencios to the Incorruptible leader? Pfarrer could have answered these questions by continuing surveillance; but instead he had Ricardo Cullington abducted, to be placed under the tender care of Doctor Horst Van Der Hudspith. The doctor would undoubtedly extract the answers Pfarrer demanded.

  The moment Ricardo was picked up, Alaina sensed it, realised she had only hours to abandon the brownstone if she herself was to remain free. She went immediately to the roof and attached a short note to each karrier’s leg:

  Ricardo abducted. Possibly compromised. Abandoning HQ.

  Will communicate when I know more.

  Because she knew she would have to find out more and inform Cerval of what she had discovered, she held Brutus back. They watched the lesser karriers speed away from The Smoke, and then Alaina turned to Brutus.

  “Where are we going to hide, Brutus?” she asked but he, of course, being a bird, could only coo back at her, a deep, resonant and reassuring sound. She decided that she could risk one night in a hotel, despite the fact that all guests had to be identified and registered, details sent daily to the police. Brutus glided above her and, when he knew that this was her home for the night, he landed on the roof certain she would come to him and feed him.

  But when Alaina went to the roof an hour later, Brutus had disappeared.

  Keira Specklestone Pfarrer approached the ornately decorated bronze cash till, the centrepiece of the long dark-stained counter typical of Bonne Gamage. Despite the department being designated ‘Young Designers’, the area looked much like all the other departments in the store: dark woods, brass and etched glass.

  Behind Keira, a covey of assistants was boxing up the dozens of dresses, skirts, breeches and bodices she’d bought. Now it only remained for her to pay. Keira rummaged in her bag and came up with handfuls of thousand-korona notes. Flashing a rictus smile at the young heiress, the assistant took the money and the totalled invoice, inserted them into a brass cylinder, then slammed the cylinder into a copper pipe – part of the store’s compressed-air cash-handling system, the pneumo. With a soft hiss it was whisked away to who knew where.

  Keira took out her engraved silver powder compact and primped her make-up. She was feeling really good, experiencing the high that always came with spending a huge sum of money. Somewhere in the back of her brain she knew that a low would surely follow, but for now it didn’t matter. She had a dozen shiny bags to take home with her. She heard the pffft of her change and receipts arriving, and even managed a smile at the assistant as she handed over the brass cylinder.

  Keira opened the little door in the cylinder, scooped up her change, then saw a folded scrap of paper. Expecting a promotional leaflet of some sort, she unfolded the paper. She was confronted with just four words:

  YOU CONSUME!

  WE STARVE!

  Shelley Mary’s manifesto was brief, clear and hard-hitting. It laid out the truths of The Smoke’s social and economic rot. It named names: the leading lights of the Commission; the corporate tsars whose money ran the government; the cabal of criminal oligarchs (Pfarrer and his Silencios topped the list) acting as their muscle. It spoke of the deep corruption of the police, an armed private army who worked hand in glove with organized crime to protect the status quo.

  But its real genius was in the deconstruction of The Dream: that anyone who sincerely wished it, and worked hard, could be an affluenzo; that anyone who denied this truth was a subversive, and that the growing underclass – the UnderGrunts – had only themselves to blame. It was a call to awaken from that counterfeit dream and face reality.

  Of course, the manifesto should have been no more than a pinprick to the Commission. It was, after all, mere words. But inevitably, The Smoke’s powerful over-reacted. The Commission demanded that its enforcers hunt down and destroy everyone behind this call to revolution. The two enforcer chiefs, Franklyn Rooseveldt Pfarrer and The Smoke’s Police Commissioner Rolf-Adolph Thriel, arranged to meet to discuss a coordinated strategy. Pfarrer had no idea whether the Incorruptibles were behind the manifesto, but if Ricardo was one of their members, he’d soon find out. He hoped to bring that information to the table.

  No sooner had his AvCom with the Commissioner ended than his beloved daughter burst into the room and sobbed on his shoulder.

  “‘You Consume! We Starve!’” she wailed. “What are they saying? What does it mean? It was such a shock, daddy! There I was, feeling all happy, and looking forward to coming home and trying on all my lovely new clothes, when this… this… this nonsense… and all the other words… I don’t understand them but they’re horrible! I mean, how can they talk to us like this? Every korona we spend benefits those vile peop
le! Without us, they’d be… they’d be… they’d be… poor!”

  “There, there,” said Pfarrer comfortingly, stroking the small of her back. The Silencio minions who witnessed this encounter turned aside in embarrassment and fought to hide their true feelings. How could this cruellest, most ruthless criminal genius tolerate such a nitwit, even if she was his daughter?

  Keira snuffled. “It’s… it’s… terrorism.” She wasn’t sure what terrorism was. “Isn’t it?”

  Pfarrer tightened his grip on his beloved offspring – his own creation. “Don’t worry darling, it’s all being taken care of.’”

  “Really, daddy?” Pfarrer’s solicitous, fatherly voice was belied by the ice in his eyes. “It will all be over tomorrow.” He released her. “So, nothing to worry about. Why don’t you go and spend some more money? You’ll feel much better.”

  Keira sniffed. Dried her eyes. “I love you, daddy.”

  Meanwhile, Paulina Ellamova was thinking about Shelley Mary. Paulina was neither homosexual nor heterosexual. She didn’t think of herself as bisexual. She did not like to be defined and she never defined herself. She didn’t think of herself as a Chavalier, despite her family origins. She didn’t identify with any other UnderGrunt subclass. She certainly wasn’t an affluenzo, although she was never short of money – and she didn’t claim to be a Marshian. She wouldn’t even embrace individualism, although that’s what drove her. It was what made her, above anything else, a fighter. She would kill – and often did – to protect that individuality and, having lived this way for so long, she had come to love fighting.

  Now she made another appearance in Dalton’s world – Shelley Mary’s new world. Shelley Mary had not seen her since the day they met but the warrior woman’s presence loomed over her relationship with Dalton. Several times, she tried to question him about Paulina but he was noncommittal. All he would say was that her family and his went way back, being two of the original tin-mining Chavalier families. They’d grown up together, running around the Marshes, learning horsemanship, annoying any grown-ups they came across. Shelley Mary asked if part of growing up had been experimenting together sexually but she didn’t get a straight answer.