The Havoc Machine

by Steven Harper

  The automaton was human-shaped, but Thad couldn’t tell much more in the dim light. He rammed a shoulder into it without thinking, but he wasn’t able to get much force behind the gesture. The automaton staggered, but recovered. It punched Thad in the chest with a heavy fist. Thad’s breath whooshed out of him and he nearly went down. The automaton made a buzzing sound—an alarm?—and Thad jabbed the baton at its face. The metal end drove straight into the machine’s head. There was a wet snap and gears ground like bad teeth. The automaton clawed at the baton sticking out of its face for a moment, then slowed and stopped. Like a brass tree going down, it toppled backward to the floor. The buzzing sound died.

  “Bless my soul,” Dante said.

  Thad braced his foot on the automaton’s shoulder and yanked the baton free. The automaton looked strange, even in the bad light. He bent for closer look, then drew back with a hiss. Half the automaton’s metal head was flesh. One side of a woman’s head had been stitched unevenly to a metal one with staples or wire. The tip of Thad’s baton was stained with blood. The vodka in Thad’s pocket felt very heavy.

  Thad forced a number of reactions to the back of his mind. Later, when he had taken care of Havoc, he would have a private moment of horror and anxiety. Right now he was busy.

  The corridor opened unexpectedly onto a balcony that ringed a large hall. On the floor a story below lay yet another dreadful laboratory. Thad had seen so many now that they were blurring together. Clockworkers focused on different areas of science—mechanics, physics, automatics, biology, chemistry, even astronomy—but their labs tended to have the same equipment. They almost always had a forge, since they had to design and create their own machinery. They usually had a great deal of glassware, mechanical parts, medical equipment, and, sadly, chains, cages, and other restraints near some kind of operating table. Thad’s all-too-experienced eye ran over the similarities and picked out differences. A stack of barrels in one corner. A large cooking stove in another. Shelves lined with jars, each one containing a human brain in fluid. And on a worktable amid a jumble of half-built spiders, a very different spider, a large one with ten legs instead of eight and intricate wires and carvings all over its body. Havoc’s machine. Of Havoc himself, there was no sign.

  Thad narrowed his eyes. What was this machine and why did Sofiya’s employer want it so badly? It crossed his mind that the employer might be another clockworker, a rival, but Thad almost as quickly discarded the idea. Clockworkers didn’t work well with others. They became more and more self-centered and narcissistic as the plague progressed, and when they went into a sleepless fugue of inventing, they were singularly unpleasant to be around, which was one reason they built so many automatons—machines were the only beings that could withstand their abuse. The idea that an advanced clockworker might work so closely with normal people like Sofiya or Thad, even at a distance, seemed unlikely in the extreme. In any case, perhaps he should “accidentally” destroy the invention. Secret reasons for wanting it couldn’t be good reasons. On the other hand, he’d given his word and taken the money.

  Thad gave a mental shrug. He could decide later. First, he’d have to kill Havoc.

  As if on cue, a door in the lab below opened and a man emerged. He looked perfectly ordinary—nearing forty or so, a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, the long mustaches favored in this part of the world. His right arm was elaborately mechanical, though, and nearly twice as thick as his left. Steam even puffed from the joints. Thad wondered what surprises it contained. Havoc—Thad assumed the man was Havoc—was trailing a chain, and with it he towed into the laboratory another figure. Thad’s stomach went cold and his hand stole automatically up to his shoulder where it gripped Dante hard. The figure at the other end of the chain was a child, a boy from the look of it. He was wrapped in ragged clothing from head to foot, and a tattered scarf covered his face. Even his hands were wrapped in rags. He was shivering, and his size put him at the same age as David when he had died.

  The gut-wrenching memories threatened to drag Thad back into the past, and he fought to stay in the present as Havoc dragged the boy onto the operating table. A bear made of rage roared to life inside Thad, and he trembled with the effort of holding himself in check. Nothing else mattered now, not the machine, not the money, not Sofiya, not even Vilma and her sister Olga. Havoc would be dead before the sun rose. He looked around for a staircase so he could slip down to the main floor. Havoc bent over the boy on the operating table.

  “Bugger this,” Thad said, and leaped over the edge.

  Chapter Four

  Thad landed on the foot of the operating table intending to deliver a solid kick to Havoc’s face. Unfortunately, he lost his balance. Fortunately, he fell straight into Mr. Havoc. The two of them went down in a struggling bundle of arms and legs, brass and iron. Too late, Thad remembered the pistols under his coat. His anger had gotten the better of him.

  Havoc’s thick metal arm shoved hard, and Thad skidded halfway across the floor on his back. The clockworker sat up. Dante peered down at him from the operating table with his one good eye.

  “Who the hell are you?” Havoc boomed in Lithuanian. It would have been more impressive if he hadn’t been sitting on the ground with his legs open. “Have you come to steal my work?”

  In answer, Thad pulled the pistols from beneath his jacket and took aim. “Olga,” he said.

  Havoc blinked at him. “What?”

  “Olga. She was one of the women you took from the village.”

  “Oh. I take a lot of women. Sometimes dogs, too. Dogs are nice. I don’t remember a woman named Olga but I do remember a dog named Sunis, but a dog wouldn’t steal my work like you are trying to do.”

  Thad fired. Havoc’s metal arm moved so fast, it blurred, and the bullet ricocheted away. “It seems stupid to name a dog dog, but he wasn’t mine and he didn’t live very long. It looks like you’re trying to kill me, so it would be prudent to kill you straightaway, though I would like to know why you didn’t fall into my pit so I can fix the problem, and it would have been interesting to save your brain for my work, the work you want to steal, and I do not take kindly to thieves.”

  With a series of clicks and whirrs, an enormous pistol emerged from Havoc’s forearm. Thad scrambled to his feet and dove behind the worktable with the ten-legged spider on it just as Havoc fired. A spray of bullets chittered across the floor right behind Thad and pinged off the equipment piled on and around the table. Thad glanced up. The ten-legged spider sat on its pyramid of junk, just another piece of paraphernalia. Thad could almost touch it. Glass shattered as bullets zipped around for several seconds like deadly hummingbirds. Then they stopped. Thad risked a peek around the table. The fluid jars near him had been shattered, the gory contents pulped. Thad smelled sharp formaldehyde. Havoc, still sitting on the ground, was feeding bullet cartridges into his arm. Thad whipped his pistol around, then realized that from this angle, the boy on the table was partly in line of fire.

  “Damn it,” he muttered.

  “I hate it when people make a mess in my laboratory,” Havoc said, the words rippling endlessly from his mouth. “Especially thieves like you. It will take hours to clean this up, though I can use automatons to help me, but lately some haven’t been so cooperative, which is why I had to put some of my work aside, though this new breakthrough is very promising and I don’t appreciate that you have interrupted me, little thief.”

  He fired again, and Thad ducked back behind the table. Bullets pocked and pinged all around him. A red-hot line scored his forearm and he snatched himself farther back. Blood trickled down the inside of his sleeve.

  “I hit you, little thief. I can smell the blood. It’s funny how these days I can sense so much more than I could before I contracted this wonderful disease—”

  “Dante!” Thad shouted. “Shut it!”

  “Applesauce!” Dante’s interjection was followed by a scream from Havoc. Thad shoved himself away from the equipment pile and slid sideways on the floor
. Dante was at Havoc’s shoulder, his sharp beak piercing Havoc’s ear as his needle claws dug into Havoc’s neck. Blood flew in all directions. Havoc’s metal arm fired wildly into the ceiling. The boy huddled on the operating table, but Thad’s slide across the floor had changed the trajectory so that the child wasn’t in the line of fire. The pistol barked three times in Thad’s hand. All three shots went straight into Havoc’s upper body. His arm gun went silent, and the clockworker toppled backward with a burbling gasp. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

  “Olga!” Thad shouted at him.

  “Bless my soul,” Dante said, hopping free of Havoc. His claws were red. “Doom!”

  Thad glanced over at the ten-legged spider crouched atop the pile of equipment across the room. What about that thing was worth so much? In any case, it would keep for now. He ran to the table. The boy lay huddled on his side, shivering in his rags. For a terrible moment Thad was back in Poland looking down at David. But this wasn’t Poland, and this boy wasn’t David. There was no sheet, no blood, and Thad had arrived in time.

  “It’s all right,” Thad told him, then cursed himself for speaking English. He switched to his heavy Lithuanian. “I’ll get you out of here. The bad man is dead. He can’t hurt you.”

  The boy didn’t respond. Dante hopped up to Thad’s shoulder, blood still staining his beak and claws. Thad touched the boy’s shoulder. It was warm. “My name is Mr. Sharpe,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home. Can you sit up?”

  A soft sound from the rags, like the sound of someone trying not to cry. Thad’s heart half broke.

  “I’m going to pick you up,” Thad said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “But I…will…little thief.”

  Thad spun in time to see Havoc slap a button on the back of his mechanical hand. It pulsed red, and a high-pitched sound squealed through the room. Havoc was gasping, and blood gushed from his chest wounds.

  “You will not…steal…my work,” he panted. “No one…will steal…work.”

  Before Thad could react, rats poured into the room. Tens and dozens and hundreds of them. They poured in from the door Havoc had used. They swarmed down from the balcony. They scampered down the spiral stairs. Thad had seen them before, but hadn’t noticed that they were partly animal and partly mechanical. Metal claws scratched and sparked against the stones and their eyes pulsed a scarlet that matched the button on the back of Havoc’s heavy hand. The high-pitched squeal grew louder.

  “When enough arrive,” Havoc said, “rats reach…critical mass. Boom. You will die with my work…little thief.”

  Havoc slumped back and went still, but the button on his hand continued its red pulse. The half-mechanical rats flooding the room ignored Thad and Dante and the boy to swarm over Havoc’s body in a metal cairn, their scarlet eyes beating a dreadful rhythm that grew louder and pounded against Thad’s bones. A palpable heat suffused the very air and the pulse sped up.

  Thad shot a glance at the ten-legged spider on its junk pile all the way across the laboratory, then down at the boy on the table near him. The boy’s weight would slow Thad down and eat time. So would dashing across the room to grab the spider. Could he do both? Probably not. The pulse was blending now into a near-continuous sound of its own. He had to make a choice.

  Thad shook his head. There was no choice. Besides, he knew damned well he hadn’t really intended to save the invention anyway. Thad swept the ragged boy into his arms and sprinted for the doorway Havoc had used. A steady stream of rats rushed past him in the opposite direction, and his boots crunched some of them. They twitched, still trying to crawl toward Havoc’s laboratory. Thad ran up a ramp and found himself at door. Once again he was in Poland, but this time David was still alive. He smashed into the door with his shoulder, but it wasn’t locked, or even latched. It burst open and he stumbled into the chilly air of the courtyard, the boy still in his arms.

  “Sharpe is sharp,” Dante said. He had prudently moved to the back of Thad’s neck.

  The pulse had become a shriek. Thad ran. This time he would win. This time the boy would live. His arms ached and his lungs burned, but he ran. He vaulted over the pit and plunged through the curtain of vines. The boy huddled in his arms didn’t make a sound the entire time. Outside, the hill’s downward slope made it easier, though his legs were getting heavy and stitch cramped his side.

  The explosion shoved him forward with a rude hand. Heat washed over him and singed the hair from his neck. Thad curled around the boy and took the rolling bumps and bruises as his due penance. When they stopped rolling, Thad cautiously pulled himself away from the boy. His body ached in a way that told him his muscles would scream at him in the morning, but he didn’t seem to have any broken bones.

  “Bless my soul!” Dante squawked from the ground several paces away.

  “Are you all right?” Thad asked the boy in Lithuanian. “Can you walk?”

  The boy, still wrapped in his rags and scarf, nodded and got to his feet even as Thad, groaning, did the same. The castle, a ruin before, was now a total wreck. Multicolored flames danced against the night sky. So much for Havoc’s invention. Thad wondered if the villagers would come to investigate or if they’d stay huddled in their homes.

  “Let me see if you are injured.” Thad tried to pull the boy’s scarf away, but the boy yelped and snatched himself back.

  “Na, na,” he said. No.

  Thad put up his hands. What dreadful things had Havoc done that made the boy fear being touched? “All right. I’ll take your word. We should leave now.”

  At that moment, Sofiya came galloping up on her clockwork horse with Blackie on a lead rein behind her. “What happened?” she demanded in English. “Did you get the invention? Where is it?”

  “Havoc set off a doomsday device to destroy the castle,” Thad said shortly. He set Dante back on his shoulder. “I had time to save the device or the boy. Not both.”

  Sofiya went pale. “Our employer will be…upset.”

  “That I saved a human being instead of a machine?” Thad snarled. “Your employer can have the damn money back.”

  She looked away and her voice dropped. “You do not understand how important this was to him.”

  “He’ll have to do without.” Thad jerked a thumb at the burning castle. “It seems safe to say Havoc’s machine is gone.”

  “Hm.” Sofiya stared at the leaping flames, her mouth a hard, white line. The horse stamped a foot and snorted. “There will be trouble, Mr. Sharpe. A great deal of trouble.”

  “Applesauce,” said Dante.

  “Thank you,” the boy said in a clear, piping voice.

  Thad turned to him in surprise. “You speak English?”

  “Thank you,” the boy repeated softly. “For taking me out of there.”

  It was like hearing David again. Thad’s throat thickened, and he coughed. “It’s all…I mean, I’m glad to do it, son.”

  Son. He should have chosen a different word. Well, the boy wouldn’t know. He knelt in front of the boy while Sofiya shifted impatiently atop her brass horse.

  “What’s your name?” Thad asked.

  The boy shrugged.

  “You don’t know?” Thad said, puzzled. “Or you don’t remember?”

  “I don’t have one,” the boy said. “Mr. Havoc called me boy.”

  “What about before that?” Thad said. “What did your parents call you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Thad thought of the brains in Havoc’s laboratory and outrage bloomed like red fireworks. “He took your memories?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy repeated. His voice was sad. “I’m frightened.”

  Incensed and angry and horrified all at once, Thad barely restrained himself from scooping the boy up and embracing him to give him comfort.

  This is not David, he told himself firmly. This is not your son.

  Carefully, ready to pull back if the boy flinched, Thad put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. It was hard and bony. “Don’t
worry. We’ll help you. We’ll find your parents and see what we can do to bring back your memory.”

  “We?” Sofiya said.

  Thad rose and looked at her. “Was I being presumptuous, Miss Ekk?”

  “I suppose not,” she sighed. “Come along, then. We should probably check in the village first. Before we face our employer.”

  “Good idea. We can start with any families that speak English.”

  “In this place?” Sofiya scoffed. “Quite unlikely. But as you say, we must start somewhere. And I suppose we should tell the nice lady that her sister has been avenged.”

  Thad mounted Blackie and pulled the boy up behind him. The boy clung to Thad’s waist with fearful strength, and Thad wanted nothing more than to continue protecting this child. He hoped to find the parents soon—and that they were nice people.

  The ride to the village was quick and quiet. The sun was rising, putting hesitant fingers of light into an azure sky and setting Sofiya’s clockwork horse ablaze. She looked magnificent, Thad had to admit, in her scarlet cloak and waterfall of golden hair, though she was nothing like his Ekaterina. The wealth represented by her horse and her clothing stood in stark contrast to the rough houses and loose homespun of the peasants in the village. As Thad and Sofiya rode into town, the people crept out of their houses, and Thad caught metallic flashes—knives and pitchforks and other farming implements. A tension rode the air, like lightning ready to strike. He glanced at Sofiya, who also looked uncertain. What was going on?

  Thad pulled Blackie up. “The demon,” he announced in Lithuanian, “is dead!”

  The people burst into cheers. The tension evaporated, and Vilma, the woman who had given Thad the vodka, ran forward, reaching up to press her face into his hand, wetting it with her tears. Thad shrank into his coat. Usually after a kill, he left without looking back. To deflect the awkwardness, he asked if anyone was missing a child. But no one was.

  Vilma stepped forward again. “The demon, he only took adults. Or dogs. Sometimes young people who were sixteen or seventeen, but never children.”