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

by Peter Lawrence

  The second support team was chosen by Cerval and Paulina from the Revoltistas, some of whom seemed never quite able to follow their mission statement “Progress through Explosives” and were as liable to blow themselves up as anyone they bombed. They had come to think of explosives as an end in themselves, and had to be reminded that they were supposed to be the shock troops of the revolution. Paulina and Cerval had worked hard to winnow the dilettante chaff from the hardcore, usually older, Revoltistas who had managed to keep their eyes on the prize.

  Finally, there were Paulina’s crack troops, the same handful of warrior women who had arrived on horseback at the aerodock, facilitating Josephine and Alaina’s escape. They were glamorous and romantic and unafraid of death. Only in the company of their own sisterhood did they ever let their guard down or allow their emotions to show, and they were always ready when Paulina needed them. Every one was a crossbow markswoman and a black belt karoeirista.

  The plan was simple. Cerval and his group would focus on the Silencio headquarters and free Ricardo. O.M. and her Chavaliers would invade The Smoke’s Police Headquarters, where Dalton and Shelley Mary were still being held. Paulina and her cavalry would be the wild card, ready to reinforce either of the two main attacks. And the operation would be prefaced by a series of Revoltista bombings designed to draw Silencios and cops out of their headquarters and onto the street.

  Meanwhile, Franklyn Rooseveldt Pfarrer was getting impatient, and his impatience only amplified the unfamiliar desire consuming him. When he had first encountered Ricardo and understood he was a Babbler, his emotions were tender, or as close to tender as this tiny, scorpion-like human might achieve. There had been a warmth, a feeling that this wide-eyed and innocent youth needed his protection. Pfarrer had never experienced tenderness, protectiveness, before and it changed him momentarily. His men were astounded at the change but saw that it didn’t last long, replaced as it was by burning desire. At first, they assumed Pfarrer’s desire was just another manifestation of his overriding lust – for possession, for control, for cruelty and death. When they saw that it was a driving passion for the Babbler, they were unsure how to react. They weren’t embarrassed by its homosexual nature. In The Smoke, the only equal opportunity was sexual. But they didn’t understand why he didn’t simply take the youth by force. Be done with it. What was the psychopath looking for? Love?

  Pfarrer was indeed looking for love – though he didn’t know it, had never experienced it – and its absence made him increasingly angry until, finally, he threw that want aside to focus simply on physical gratification. He summoned four of his most trusted men, told them to strip Ricardo and bring him to his bedroom.

  Ricardo knew this moment would come and he had prepared himself, retreated deep into his Babbler mind, so deep that he went beyond the random outbursts, beyond speech of any kind. He determined to endure whatever was inflicted on him and, when the opportunity arose, which he was sure it would, to kill his tormentor-rapist. Even if it meant that he died himself.

  Dalton Trager Rhineheart was chained to the wall of his cell like a mediaeval prisoner. His clothes were in tatters and his body was streaked with blood and filth. When he was first captured, Pfarrer had wanted to set Hudspith and Two-Face Puttick to work on him, but police chief Rolf-Adolph Thriel had demurred. He knew how much Hudspith loved his work, and feared that Dalton would die before he gave up the valuable formula for forging ReForTin. Pfarrer believed that the fastest way to learning that secret was to let Hudspith do what he did best, but he made a political decision. Let Thriel have his moment of glory. It would only make their working relationship easier.

  Thriel had therefore relied on more orthodox interrogations, without force or brutality at first. Dalton, however, had not only proved his mental toughness, he had showered his interrogators with a stream of vitriolic, articulate scorn which finally exhausted their patience. They beat the living daylights out of their prisoner and re-chained him to the cell wall while they planned their next move.

  Shelley Mary presented a quite different problem to her captors. At first, she had denied that she had written the manifesto, fearful that the admission would lead to her immediate execution. But then she had thought fuck it, why not? She was proud of what she had written and if she had to die for it, so be it. Just as she had come to this decision, her cell door clanged open, she looked up and to her horror saw Rupert Gilchrist Bass thrown into the cell with her. The man was filthy, stinking even more than usual. As he tottered across the stone floor and collided with the far wall, there was a loud report, and the smell worsened. Shelley Mary stared, wide-eyed, hand over her nose. R. G. slid down the wall and took up a sitting position. He looked blearily at Shelley Mary. Then the one-time editor spoke:

  “Make it easy on yourself.” His voice was a croak. “Admit you wrote it. I already told them it was you.”

  “So did I,” she replied, breathing as shallowly as possible.

  “Oh.” He seemed thoughtful. Looked up at her after a few moments. “It was pretty good,” he said. “What you wrote.” Despite herself, Shelley Mary felt a surge of pride – but then suspicion kicked in.

  “What do you want?” she asked, knowing the answer to the question. She wasn’t particularly afraid. She knew she could handle him physically but to her surprise he looked puzzled.

  “What do I want?” he repeated. “Good question. I’ve been able to think about it since I came off the VitaBeena. And the Viper Agua.” Shelley Mary looked askance. “They don’t supply you with drugs in here you know. It was rough to begin with, but after a while I found I could think straight.”

  “And?”

  “Truthfully? I suppose I’d like to be like you. Starting out. With hope and ambition. Stories to write. A belief I could change the world.”

  “What happened?”

  “Life,” he replied. “Life in The Smoke. I saw the reality. The inevitability of it all. That I was just one puny reporter. How could I overturn the Commission, expose the cops or indict the Silencios? So I looked the other way and pretty soon I was part of it. Then there was the VitaBeena. And the Viper Agua. And, well, you know…”

  Shelley Mary looked away. He was such a disgusting creature that she didn’t want to feel sympathy for him. But even so, she felt a little.

  “What will they do with us?” she asked, more to change the subject than for any other reason.

  “A show trial?” he shrugged. “Make us an example?” Shelley Mary shivered. She was proud of what she had written but she wasn’t sure that she could stand up to years in jail. Particularly if she had to share any of them with this wreck. She looked for hope. Dalton was jailed – maybe dead – but perhaps Paulina was alive? Even here, in this stinking cell, she felt Paulina’s hands, her lips. Remembered that she had said to her I want everything! Everywhere! All at once! Recalled the rolling explosions of pleasure. And the almost immediately returning hunger. Would Paulina save her?

  And where was Cerval?

  Colette Garcia Cognizo was The Smoke’s wealthiest and most powerful woman; when she spoke people listened. Now she stood on one of the many balconies of her walled mansion, Pura Vida, and looked out over the city-state that was her fiefdom. Descended from one of the original iron, coal and steam families, she had the resources to have built gigantic air purifiers into her estate, fans and filters integrated into the stone around the perimeter of her property. Pura Vida was, therefore, one of the few relatively clean air oases in The Smoke. From it, the views were crystal clear for about a mile, blending into light smog, and, finally, the impenetrable filth of the further distances.

  “Darling?” said a tentative voice, belonging to one of the most beautiful men The Smoke had ever seen.

  “Oh do fuck off,” replied Colette tiredly, and Cotton Franco disappeared fast. He knew his own best interests. Colette sighed. Cotton was less than half her age and tireless between her legs but as stupid as bok choy and just as bland. She sighed again and turned, bringing a ro
w of three identical cottages into view. They were situated on the boundary of her property and housed her three previous husbands. She thought of “Ya Blue,” her first, once almost as beautiful as Cotton, now possessed of chicken legs and turkey neck. But at least he had been able to make her laugh, and as the years passed she was beginning to realize that was as important as sex.

  She sighed again, the sigh turning into a incredulous gasp as four massive explosions took out the corner turrets of her estate walls, bringing down the huge air purifiers and fans. The air was instantly filled with debris, smoke and choking fumes.

  The shock waves threw her down and she struck her head on a marble planter. As she passed out, her last emotion was indignation.

  Who the fuck would dare bomb me?

  At almost exactly the same time as the Pura Vida bombings, more bombs went off through The Smoke: at the Senate buildings, the High Court, several outlying police stations and at the headquarters of three of the city’s most powerful corporations.

  Routine aerial surveillance was yet to come in The Smoke, but had there been an eye in the sky analyzing the bombings, it might have shown that each bomb site was some distance from both the main jail and the Silencios’ headquarters – a jagged circle surrounding them, but not closely.

  Ever since the Commission had ordered the post-manifesto lockdown, security had been tightened at all key locations, squads of cops and Silencios alternating and each squad including at least one SuperOxygenator for high speed messaging. And so every one of the Revoltistas’ diversionary bombings was witnessed by cops or Silencios – and news of the bombings was spread by SuperOxygenators running through the increasingly panicked Smoke streets.

  Now a second wave of Revoltista bombs exploded at key street junctions and known traffic bottlenecks.

  When the cop karts tried to manoeuvre to the bomb sites, the streets locked solid and the SuperOxygenators proved their value. Their over-developed lungs and smog-filtering masks enabled them to maintain their pace indefinitely, and, unlike even the nimblest vehicles or horses, they could navigate the back alleys and side streets; dart in and out of buildings, bringing news of the latest outrages to Franklyn Rooseveldt Pfarrer and to Rolf-Adolf Thriel.

  Pfarrer was distracted – consumed – by his fantasies of Ricardo and didn’t take the time to analyze the reports. In fact he dismissed them. How would a few random bombings affect the daily functioning of The Smoke? What difference would they make to the Silencios?

  Thriel was en route to Dalton’s cell, surprising himself at the glee with which he was looking forward to the next round of his interrogation. ReForTin! There was a secret worth uncovering! Briefly, Rolf-Adolph fantasized about the riches it would bring him, the desires and ambitions he could fulfill, and he was in this frame of mind when he received the reports of multiple bombings. He issued commands briskly:

  “Bring in every off-duty man you can find. Overtime authorized. Take every cop who can walk more than three steps without falling over his own truncheon. Send them out into the streets. Find the bombers. Arrest them. Kill them. I don’t fucking care. Make it stop.”

  Thriel landed the first kidney punches on the suspended Dalton. “I admire your courage, Rhineheart, but give it up. The ReForTin formula – that’s your key to freedom. No one has to know. Give it up, and there’ll be no more pain.”

  He had to pause in his punishment. They were hard, hard punches and Thriel was a sedentary man. He was out of breath. As he gathered himself, Dalton looked at him scornfully.

  “I hate to deliver a cliché, chief, but you’ll have to kill me first.” He spat – a glob that flew unerringly through the air and hit Thriel right in the mouth just as he was looking up and taking a deep breath. Involuntarily, he swallowed his victim’s phlegm and it drove him to new heights of brutality.

  As Thriel resumed his assault on Dalton, the Chavalier army slammed through the main and back entrances to Headquarters.

  “’Ere!” gasped the outraged desk sergeant at the main entrance, fatally under-estimating O.M., “whatchoo fink you’re doin’, you fuckin’ fairy… ”

  He got no further because O.M. slashed across the desk at him with her favoured close-fighting weapon, a leather sjambok embedded with tiny steel barbs. The whip coiled around the sergeant’s neck, the barbs bit, and O.M. – strong despite her slight frame – heaved him right over the desk and onto the floor. As he struggled, terrible, fearful, incoherent words choking in his throat, the next-up Chavalier warrior, who had lost three family members to police raids on the Marshes, put a captive bolt humane killer to the sergeant’s head and pulled the trigger. It caused instant death, but the sergeant’s legs trembled for fifteen seconds after the bolt penetrated his brain.

  Shelley Mary and Rupert Gilchrist Bass had come to a strange accommodation. She was surprisingly moved by his praise of her writing and remembered that when she was a young schoolgirl, determined to be a writer, she had admired Bass’s own reports. In those days, he came as close to rebelling against The News Of The Smoke’s editors and owners as any journalist. He had learned exactly where the line between outrage and instant dismissal (or a dark alley beating) was drawn and had gathered a considerable following, not least for his weekly column ‘Bass Voice,’ which highlighted legal cases in which justice clearly had not prevailed.

  Unknown to innocent schoolgirl Shelley Mary, the Commission tolerated Bass’s tightrope act because it added to the impression that The Smoke boasted a free press. But after a couple of more blatant transgressions, they swung into action. They knew Bass was newly married and that he was very short of money. So they bought him and, in time, made him editor. It was his knowledge, the shame that he had sold out, that turned him from a talented member of the human race into a perverted caricature of a gutter journalist. Here, sharing a cell with the object of his most extreme fantasies, and one who had humiliated him more than once, he had become almost human.

  “It was a little too didactic for me,” he said, referring to the manifesto, “and the final section perhaps a shade discursive.” He quoted entire passages in support of his criticism and Shelley Mary was surprised at his memory. She also had to admit that his criticisms were quite apposite.

  “If I were writing it,” Bass continued – only to be interrupted as the cell door smashed open and three grim-faced cops burst in, weapons drawn. They slammed past Bass, hurling him to the floor, and grabbed Shelley Mary, dragging her towards the door. Instinctively, she resisted, sure there was nothing official about their actions.

  “Let me go!” she shouted.

  “Shut the fuck up,” one of the cops snarled, slapping her hard, while his colleague wrapped a fist in her hair and dragged. “You’re our ticket out of here!”

  “No!” screamed Bass. He grabbed one set of ankles and sank his teeth deeply into another. The bitten cop screamed and turned on Bass, beating him over the head with his gun but the one time editor of The News Of The Smoke would not let go, suddenly more pit-bull than poodle.

  Shelley Mary took advantage of the chaos and tried to break free, but the cop who had her by the hair wasn’t going to give up his prize.

  “No chance, bitch, you’re coming with me!” Now Shelley Mary could hear approaching footsteps, shouts and orders, and she redoubled her efforts to escape.

  Bass, beaten semi-conscious, still maintained the bite. In fact, sank his teeth even further into the cop’s meaty leg; and this was the chaotic scene that greeted O.M. and her Chavaliers as she burst into the cell. She took it all in and instantly lashed out with the barbed sjambok. The cop who had Shelley Mary’s hair in his grasp immediately let her go and reached with both hands for the terrible whip that had fastened itself around his neck. O.M. pulled him towards her and eviscerated him with the short knife she held in her other hand.

  The other cops backed into a corner, terrified (Bass, bloodied and hallucinating, still fastened to one of their four ankles). O.M. left Shelley Mary to the care of her troops and face
d the trembling policemen, sjambok in one hand, short knife in the other.

  “Where's Rhineheart?” she asked quietly. The cops exchanged glances. She gave them no more time but flicked the sjambok at the nearest. As it sliced through his cheek, she asked again:

  “Dalton Trager Rhineheart. Name ring a bell, fuckwit? Where is he?” She turned to one of her followers. “And get that idiot off his ankle.”

  “He’s not an idiot,” Shelley Mary was surprised to hear herself saying. “He was trying to save me.” O.M. ignored her, still focussed on finding Dalton’s cell. She flicked the sjambok again, but before its barbs made contact, the cop whose ankle was still firmly anchored in Bass’s mouth fell to his knees blubbering.

  “I’ll show you! I’ll take you!” He repeated the words three times before subsiding into sobs and only then did Bass release him, spitting fabric, blood and flesh as he did so.

  Rolf-Adolph Thriel was almost blind with rage, the taste of Dalton’s saliva remaining in his mouth as he beat and kicked the chained prisoner to the point of his own exhaustion. He barely paused in his assault when one of his men erupted into the cell shouting:

  “Boss! Boss! We gotta get out of here! Now!” The man’s fear penetrated Thriel’s fury and he turned to the intruder.

  “UnderGrunts!” he shouted. “Chavaliers! A fucking rebellion! An invasion! They’re here! We gotta get out.”

  But the warning was too late. O.M. and her cohorts crowded the door, and the sjambok reached out and dragged the shouting cop backwards. Thriel, however, had not risen to Police Chief through slow thinking, and before O.M. and her Chavaliers could seize him, he spun around behind his prisoner, putting Dalton between himself and his attackers. At the same time, he drew a four-shot Blom pocket pistol and jammed it into the side of Dalton’s swollen and bloodied face.

  “One more step and he dies!” Thriel said to O.M. who stopped in her tracks, knowing that, for the moment, she was stalemated.