“I can’t believe it! It really is working – or at least causing a stir.” Her voice quivered with excitement as she spread out pieces of paper on the big table in the bowels of the old store, the main Pneumo Sender in the background providing an ambient noise of hisses and snorts.
Each piece of paper bore a scribble of writing, mostly in the kind of spidery handwriting that suggested it was executed in haste and clandestinely. Dalton picked up one of the scraps of paper, read the scrawl: Affluenzo got the message! Went white as a pillow case! Dalton laughed and pointed to the mass of similar scraps.
“They’re all like that?”
“Every one of them. You know we’ve got UnderGrunts and sympathizers working in stores all over The Smoke, and they’re all telling us the same thing. When you stick a message like this under people’s noses, they react.”
“Not always positively, I’m guessing.”
“No, course not. Some of them don’t understand what they’re reading. And there was an affluenzo in Bonne Gamage who just burst into tears. So, come to think of it, I don’t know how much we’re really achieving.”
“If it’s waking them up, that’s good enough. It’s a start. A first step.”
“So what’s the next step?”
“Maybe over time we can persuade enough people at the top that change is inevitable, that it’s in their own long term interests.”
“I’m proud of you, Dalton,” Florenza said and then when he seemed puzzled, continued: “We all thought you were only interested in ReForTin and the Chavalier way of life – but here you are working for a greater cause!”
“Well, thank you – but it’s commonsense, really, isn’t it? If I want to sell ReForTin, people have to be able to afford it. That means they have to be paid more than subsistence wages – and that there have to be jobs.”
“So it’s just self-interest.”
“Just self-interest.”
“And if this doesn’t work, doesn’t get Smokies off their arses and onto the streets?”
Dalton shrugged. “Old-fashioned violence, I suppose.”
“Better to die on your wheels,” Florenza laughed, flipping her wheels expertly, “than live on your knees.”
It was the last thing she did in her mortal life.
The chair was still twirling when her upper body disappeared in a storm of blood, viscera and cartilage. Her destroyed torso slowly turned circles in the wheel chair.
The Smallwood blast that vaporized Florenza came from the weapon of a huge black-clad man who headed up a similarly uniformed squad, each man Ximan- or Smallwood-armed. Dalton sprang away from them, drawing a serrated-edge blade from his boot. The leader shouted at him:
“Don’t do it, Rhineheart. It won’t get you anywhere.” Dalton made as if to hurl the knife but realized its futility. What point in killing one man out of twenty, and a voice in his head whispered: You’d be dead if they wanted to kill you. Live to fight another day.
“We’ll kill you if we have to,” the leader shrugged. “But they want you alive.”
“So if you want me, why did you kill her?” he asked. The leader shrugged again.
“Collateral damage. Who cares?”
“I care,” Dalton replied quietly, knowing that Florenza’s death was entirely his fault.
“Why? She’s a fucking cripple!” Dalton sprang at the man but his henchmen clubbed him to the ground. He was semi-conscious when they slipped the manushackles over his wrists.
A moment later, the Pneumo Sender, the old-fashioned, outmoded, grumbling compressed air machine that had distributed a message of dissent to the citizens of The Smoke, imploded in a sustained burst of Ximan and Smallwood fire. Even as he held the trigger down, the leader of the snatch squad momentarily wondered if the UnderGrunts and their manifesto might have a point. But he quickly put the thought out of his mind.
Shelley Mary woke, startled, unsure where she was for a moment. When she remembered, a glow spreading through her entire being, she turned towards Paulina, whose dark body was barely visible in the gloom. Her open eyes, however, shone brightly.
“You’re awake,” said Shelley Mary. “What are you doing?”
“Watching you. You’re worth watching.”
“I’m not sure what you see,” said Shelley Mary uneasily. “I’m sure you’ve had plenty of women more beautiful than me.”
“And men,” said Paulina.
“Oh… you go… ”
“Both ways?” Paulina laughed. “To a point, and never both ways at once. At least, not so far. Perhaps you should try it.”
“Shelley Mary laughed. Surprised herself. “I might, if I found the right man.”
“You’re too transparent,” said Paulina. “You’re thinking of Dalton. He’s close, but he’s not it.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s like every other man, or most of them, with their ridiculous little hydraulic daggers and wrinkly sacks. Got to be among the most laughable – not to say ugly – pieces of anatomy. Unreliable, too. Deep down, they know it and they’re always wondering if it’s going to work. What we’ll think if it doesn’t. Whether it works as well as the previous or not as impressively as the next. That’s why most of them lead with it, like a spear, as if they were organizing an invasion. The more action, the less they have to think. Well, no thanks. Not invading my body, not until you come about it a different way. I’m after something gentler, more mutual.”
“Wow,” said Shelley Mary, taken aback by the vehemence and surprised to hear ‘gentle’ or ‘mutual’ coming from this fierce woman’s lips.
“And another thing, how many of them actually understand how we work? What’s going on with us? That's why I like women – the brighter ones, anyway. At least they know how all the parts operate.” She reached up to Shelley Mary and drew her down to kiss her. “If you find a man like that, let me know.”
“Have you ever?” asked Shelley Mary.
“A couple. But then they wanted to do the possession thing and that doesn’t work for me either.”
“What does? Work for you?”
“This… ” And Shelley Mary had to admit that Paulina really did know how all the parts operated.
Later, both sated, Shelley Mary made the difficult decision to tell Paulina more or less everything she knew about Cerval, Thorsten and the Incorruptibles. She did it because she’d come to the conclusion that Dalton, his Chavaliers and their manifesto needed all the revolutionary help they could get. Equally, how much could Cerval and his Incorruptibles achieve alone? Perhaps if she could engineer an alliance between the working-class UnderGrunt hero and the wealthy justice-seeker who was prepared to risk both his life and his fortune for the greater good, she would be more than a supporting actress, the ingénue, in the drama that had to play out in The Smoke if the city-state’s slide into a dictatorial kleptocracy was to be halted.
Paulina let Shelley Mary talk on, contenting herself with stroking the girl’s beautiful back somewhat absently. Then she sat up.
“Where are they?” Paulina Ellamova asked Shelley Mary.
“The Incorruptibles? You know I’m not going to tell you that.”
“I could make you.”
“Torture me? Inflict pain?”
“Or pleasure,” Paulina laughed. Then suddenly serious: “Do you think they’re real?”
“The Incorruptibles? As real as Dalton’s Chavaliers but quite different.”
With no warning, the massive railway-sleeper door crashed into the room, hinges shattered, wood splintered. Three men in black coveralls burst in, firing into the air. The sound was shattering, paralysing Shelley Mary, but Paulina was already in action, naked except for her boots, diving to the floor and grabbing something from the folds of the fighting uniform she had abandoned for the lace dress.
One of the men seized Shelley Mary. She screamed, writhed to escape him, but he smashed her against the wall, holding his Ximan to her throat, crushing her windpipe. She gagged, grabbed the gun
and tried to force her way free, but the man was strong. Immovable and practised.
The other two rushed Paulina and, agonised and shocked though she was, Shelley Mary realized that they could not have known who Paulina was, otherwise, surely, there would have been more of them?
Paulina danced away, swinging an arm around, a scimitar-like sword in her hand.
Where had that been hidden?
Her movements were fluid, almost too fast to follow, and she caught the first man low in the leg, cutting deep to the bone. When he doubled up, the sword flashed again, severing his carotid. An eruption of blood sprayed all over Shelley Mary and her captor.
“Fuck’s sake!” he yelled, disgusted, and for an instant released his grip on her. Shelley Mary twisted away in time to see Paulina spring onto the bed, snarling like a feral beast, followed by the second pursuer.
“Run!” screamed Paulina but Shelley Mary’s captor had seized her again and now jammed the Ximan hard into her throat. Shelley Mary felt the bile rise and heard the man scream: “Throw down the sword or I’ll kill her right now!”
Paulina, however, ignored him – either because she was deafened by the heat of the murderous fight or because she was seized by a killing rage. She dived at her second attacker, blade leading. He parried the thrust with the barrel of his gun, but as he moved the gun horizontally he left himself open, and Paulina kicked him in the eye, her heel smashing through the bone surrounding the eyeball. The eyeball itself squelched from its socket and was left dangling from its optic nerve, squashed against his cheek. The man staggered back, screaming, and dropped his weapon.
In one graceful movement, Paulina slammed the sword into his gaping eye socket and grabbed the Ximan, but the third attacker had turned Shelley round and now had her in a headlock, the barrel of a small but wicked-looking Wills-Tucker pistol pressed into her ear. She was a shield, between her captor and Paulina.
“It’s over,” he said. “Drop the gun. There’s no way you can fire a Ximan without killing her as well.”
Shelley Mary looked at Paulina, the suspicion of tears in her eyes, but holding it together. The man screwed the pistol further into Shelley’s ear. A full five seconds passed. Then Paulina seemed to droop, as if the fight had suddenly gone out of her. She threw the gun onto the bed.
“You win. This thing’s too heavy duty for up-close stuff.” The man seemed to relax for a moment but Pauline continued: “On the other hand…” She stamped the heel of her right boot on the floor. A spring-loaded bolt flew from its toe-cap and slammed into the man’s forehead. He dropped the pistol, mouth gaping. He brought his hand up to the spot where the bolt protruded and seemed to caress it. Then he fell, soundlessly. In that briefest of moments, Shelley Mary was almost outraged. She had kissed that same boot, licked her way from toe to heel to the lean flesh of Paulina’s inner thigh just half an hour ago.
Paulina seized her. “Come on.” She grabbed the Ximan off the bed and led Shelley Mary out into the underground street. There seemed to be no one around.
“Where are we going?” asked Shelley Mary.
“The stables. We need transport!” Paulina in the lead, the two women ran down the street towards the stables. Shelley struggled to keep up with the booted Paulina, her feet crunching on the flinty surface of the tunnel. They got precisely five ahms before a commanding voice rang out behind them:
“Stop! Or die!” Paulina and Shelley Mary came to a halt. Turned. A phalanx of black-clad men seemed to have come from nowhere. Each was armed with a Ximan. The one who’d issued the order stepped forward: “Drop the weapon. You can’t escape. The whole area is flooded with our men.”
Paulina still held the Ximan, its barrel pointed downwards. From the corner of her mouth she whispered to Shelley Mary: “Find Cerval. If he’s half the man you say, now’s his chance.” And before Shelley Mary could respond or react, Paulina swung the Ximan up and pulled the trigger.
The leader of the platoon went down in a mist of red and Shelley Mary took off. Behind her, a fusillade of fire. Turning a corner, she risked a look back. There were the black clad men, some bloody, regrouping, but no sign of Paulina.
Shelley Mary ran for her life, ran like a greyhound. Her feet were cut to bloody ribbons by the stony street but she didn’t register the pain. She saw a side tunnel just ahead, plunged towards it, expecting any second to be cut down. A few ahms to go! She swerved round a corner.
Then the breath went out of her with a guttural gasp, as she slammed full pelt into the chest of a man, box-shaped and the size of an ice cabinet.
oOo
25
EVEN TO DALTON TRAGER RHINEHEART, who had known her from childhood, Paulina Ellamova was a mystery. It seemed that the older she became the more she was unknowable. Hers was a contradictory character. Brought up in the tight-knit and self-protective Chavalier society, she had rejected it and every other clique in her early teens. Fiercely sexual, she had always slept with anyone she pleased, men or women. Not an inordinate number of either. Wild as she was, she was discriminating too.
Independent to the point of obsession, she preferred death to subjugation – that meant anything that infringed on her privacy or her individuality.
Now she was leader of a small band of women who did not seek to simply be men in skirts, and revelled in both their female-ness and their femininity. They were feared by the opposite sex who, in the safety of numbers, derided and attempted to continue to subjugate them. They crossed all class and wealth barriers, which was what gave Paulina almost unlimited access to both underground and overground life in The Smoke. In this she differed from many Marshians, who were generally ill at ease in The Smoke, fearing that oppressive, class-structured and heavily policed place.
Dalton was no different. He was the undisputed leader of the Chavaliers but, deep in his heart and despite his courage and intelligence, he remained an UnderGrunt, intimidated by The Smoke’s higher society. So, unlike Paulina he did not move comfortably in those weathier and more powerful circles.
Now, darting nimbly through the smoking dawn shadows of the Marshes, clad in paint-stained overalls grabbed from a Dauber’s washing line, Paulina knew that, for the moment at least, it was a broken place; that the government of The Smoke had reached out and crushed an incipient rebellion.
She reviewed her options. She could tap into her circle of like-minded women for moral support and for information but she didn’t feel she could call any of them to action other than to give her shelter for the meantime. They were not an army, and even if she could mobilise them she knew they would be slaughtered by the Commission’s heavily-armed enforcers. She supposed she could trawl them for information but not much more.
That left Cerval Franks and his Incorruptibles, whoever and wherever they were. If Shelley Mary had been right in her assessment of this unknown quantity it was the one force that might help her rescue Dalton and Shelley Mary herself. The girl (and though she was older than Paulina, that’s how she thought of Shelley Mary) was bright and perceptive but she was also naïve, too easily led.
What other choices did Paulina have? And, if she was going to contact the Incorruptibles, how to go about it?
According to Shelley Mary, Cerval and his main force were beyond The Smoke, but a strange set of twins had remained behind. The girl adept with karriers and animals of all kinds. The boy a Babbler. That was an unusual combination. If she could get the word out, perhaps this odd couple had been spotted. And if she could contact them, they could surely contact Cerval.
Paulina visited several of her circle. She chose those who weren’t only concerned with the gender revolution but with the wider need for change. She didn’t broach that subject but simply asked them to help her find the odd twins, one an animal whisperer and the other a Babbler. If they asked why she wanted to know, she subtly dropped the subject and relied only on those who would help unquestioningly, unconditionally.
What Paulina didn’t know was that Hayden Cloudesley was a member of t
he loose circle of women into which she was tapped. Hayden was one of those rare people who had a genuine vocation, in her case to cook and to watch her guests enjoying her food. Yet, now that the Silencios used her beloved restaurant as a canteen, she did not stand or fall by her own talents and efforts but on their whim. Her dissatisfaction drove her to drink a little too much, and on occasion the drink loosened her lips.
On one such occasion she told a confidante about the extraordinary young man, the Babbler, whom Franklyn Pfarrer had picked up and was seducing – a remarkable, almost unknown event in itself; and she also mentioned the solitary young woman who had taken to dining every night at Spasso. Hayden didn’t realize that the young woman was the Babbler’s twin because the woman always wore a veil, even to eat, but that in itself was remarkable; and when Paulina heard the full story she put all the pieces together and went to the restaurant herself.
The night she visited, there was no sign of Pfarrer or of his youthful target, but the mysterious woman in the veil was there, as usual dining alone.
Risking everything, Paulina waylaid Alaina and, once she’d convinced her that she was real, asked how she could contact Cerval and the Incorruptibles. Paulina’s intervention created a wave of relief which all but overwhelmed Alaina and tears rolled down her cheeks from beneath the veil. She knew her brother was in mortal danger and that, following the manifesto raids, The Smoke was clamped down even more tightly than ever. She knew she had to get the information to Cerval but she had no karriers to work with, and Brutus was still missing.
“Where is he?” Paulina asked urgently. “This Cerval? Where can I find him?” Despite her relief at having an ally, Alaina couldn’t bring herself to betray the estate and, anyway, even though she had been there, that meant nothing. Its coordinates, bearing and distance were all secret. And even if could give them to Paulina, how would Paulina make the journey?
The Incorruptibles (Book One, Frankenstein Vigilante): Frankenstein Vigilante: The Steampunk Series (Frankenstein Vigilante. The Steampunk Series.) Page 18
