Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

“We’ve run out of serum,” she said. “The rationing was not effective enough.”

  “Then it is decided,” I said, now entirely convinced of my decision. “We will end this tomorrow. I will bring the captain to our taskmaster.” But not, I decided, the Lees. They did not need to be a part of this.

  “You will have to go alone,” Ying said. “In this state, I will be of little help.”

  I could not meet her eyes. “Ying, I am sorry. I have caused you suffering.”

  She stroked my hair, even if her movements were slow. “Be careful,” she said, even though she knew that I always was.

  The next day I dressed in my fighting gear—subtle differences that only the trained eye would notice—outfitted it with both weapons and the poison vial. I examined myself in the mirror: my demeanor gave away nothing unusual. I was ready for the hunt.

  Bells was not where I expected to find him on a Saturday. Nor was he anywhere to be found in the port area, as I methodically combed through the sinuous length of the river. It was as if he had read my thoughts beforehand and had vanished from the surface of the island. Frustrated, I stared up at the sky, at the striped brass-and-canvas confection that was Bell’s ship, floating serenely and, as I fancied, uncaringly out of reach.

  “Do not hide from me like a coward,” I said, shouting up to the airship as if there were a chance that he might hear me.

  Someone tapped on my arm. It was the young girl from the godown, Uncle Lee’s granddaughter. She was carrying a bouquet of bird-of-paradise and handed the flowers to me.

  “From our friend,” she said, with a girlish smile.

  “Wait,” I said, impulsively taking her arm to stop her from running off.

  She simply looked at me curiously.

  “Is your family with the Merdeka Rebellion?” I asked.

  She gave me an unamused mask that was older than her years, and did not answer.

  I pressed on. “Why are you doing this? Aren’t you afraid it’s dangerous? Lord Louis will arrest your family if he finds out what you are up to.”

  She straightened up stubbornly. “Ye-ye says we shouldn’t stop making machines because the Empire says we cannot, because that would be stupid. And they won’t find out because nobody will tell them. That’s why it’s a secret.”

  I let her go. She knew so much, yet so little. It was disheartening. The bouquet she’d given me felt cumbersome and ludicrous in my hands, the distinctive bright-red flowers visible from half a street away. I felt an unreasonable anger at Bells, both for putting the girl in such a dangerous position and for stranding me with such unpleasant choices.

  Something within the fleshy red folds of the bird-of-paradise caught the light and I extracted it. It was a small tile of reader-glass, the sort used by portable transmissible-code devices to store messages. I vindictively threw it into a drainage gutter. There was nothing Bells could say that would interest me now.

  I returned to the shophouse, intending to rethink my strategy. But there was a terrible stillness in the house when I entered. Fearing the worst, I rushed into the bedchamber to find Ying curled upon the bed, barely breathing.

  “Ying,” I exclaimed, shaking her by the shoulders, but she responded to neither my touch nor my voice. For the first time in my adult life I found myself trembling, unable to think clearly. I had run out of time.

  The Imperial Palace sprawled across the top of the small hill that faced the seaport; a lumbering, solid-walled colossus guarded day and night by the Empire’s mechanical men. Lord Louis’s receiving chamber was right in the middle of the complex, a massive, high-ceilinged room supported by rows of forbidding white pillars, with Lord Louis’s seat on a raised platform inside. The marble floor was cold to my bent knees. It was absolutely deathly silent save for the muted clanks of the metal men patrolling outside, the soft clicks of Lord Louis’s nails on the edge of his chair, and the sound of my blood rushing in my ears.

  “I am so very, very disappointed with your lack of progress,” he drawled. He had a small and petulant voice, a pinched face, and a slight build dwarfed by the grandiosity around him. As he tapped the heavily ringed fingers of one hand on the armrest of his chair, his other hand toyed with a clear bottle of serum that Ying so badly needed.

  “I was told that you were the Empire’s best in this region, but it seems that information was less than accurate. Maybe I should send for someone from the homeland who would be better suited to the job, hmm?”

  “Please,” I said—nay, begged, “we have our reasons for the delay. Give us a week more and we will have him as you asked.”

  Lord Louis smiled, a curved little thing that did not reach his eyes. He tilted the bottle of serum back and forth. “And can your partner survive another week without this, hmm?”

  I did not know what else I could say. Our taskmaster was obviously bent on withholding the serum until he received some information he found valuable.

  “We found proof that the captain is indeed conspiring against the Empire,” I said. “We have uncovered links he has to the Merdeka Group.”

  “Oh?” Lord Louis leaned forward, suddenly and vividly interested. “Tell me more.”

  I hesitated. What other choice did I have? Eyes fixed on the bottle of serum Lord Louis held, I began.

  “There is a family of machinists living in a godown on the north side of the river....”

  That night I lay awake wrapped in Ying’s embrace, listening to her breathing smoothly and evenly. The warmth of her body and the sweet smell of her skin might have brought me solace on other nights but not this one. The windows of our rented shophouse opened over the river and an awful racket punctuated the night—the shouts of men and the sounds of explosions. I could see a red tint reflected on the clouds: somewhere along the river a godown was burning.

  “You could always leave,” Ying said, mumbling into the skin of my shoulder.

  “What sort of foolish notion is that?”

  I felt her shift her weight as she leaned a soft cheek against the plane of my shoulder blade. “You are not shackled to the Empire as I am. You could leave to find more amenable employers.”

  “I will not leave.” I gripped her hand and turned to face her. “To remain with you is my choice.”

  Her returning smile did not extend further than her lips and left the sorrow in her eyes untouched. In the background the fires of conquest burned. I did not sleep that night.

  The sun had barely risen the next morning when the pounding on the door started. “Let me deal with this,” I told Ying, short staff in hand as I headed toward the door.

  I had barely cracked it open when Bells barged through and spun around on me.

  “What have you done?” he demanded.

  I whipped the short staff up and pointed it at his throat. “Come no closer,” I said, “or I will discharge it.”

  “They arrested Uncle Lee’s family and burned down their home,” he exclaimed. “Everyone, including the children!”

  “They were breaking the laws of the land. It was to be expected.”

  He had his goggles on but I didn’t need to see his eyes to know how he felt. “You betrayed us. I thought better of you than that.”

  “I am a bounty hunter tethered to the Crown,” I spat. “The Empire’s bloodhound, as you so eloquently put it. What were you expecting me to do?”

  “You seemed an honorable person to me. I thought I saw that in you.”

  “Then you saw wrong!”

  With my back to the door and Bells facing it, he had failed to see Ying creeping up on him from behind. Something glinted in her hand: the poison vial, its needle ready.

  “Honor means less to me than Ying’s survival.”

  “I told you I could help her,” he said. “Did you not read the message I sent?”

  He did not get any farther. Ying chose that moment to attack, leaping at him from behind. He tried to fight her, but her hold on him was too firm.

  “Ying, no!” I shouted to warn her but I was to
o late. With a single move she struck, stabbing the point of the needle into his neck.

  He cried out and fell to his knees. I grabbed him as he collapsed. His cap had been knocked off in the scuffle and I pulled off his goggles to check his condition. His eyes were glassy and his pupils were dilated as he stared up at me, looking more confused than terrified.

  “Whhh,” he slurred, unable to form words.

  “A mild paralyzing toxin,” I told him. “Its effects are temporary.”

  But even as I said this I knew it was a lie, for the dosage in the vial had been far too much. His heartbeat was slowing and his eyes fluttered shut.

  “Bells?” I asked. There was no response. “Bells!”

  Ying had vanished out of a window after the attack and she leapt back in, quick and silent and deadly. “He was not followed this time. What happened?”

  “He was overdosed,” I said, cradling his head in my hands. “He is dying.”

  Ying knelt beside me and studied his prone form for a moment, and I thought I saw regret in her. Bells looked so small suddenly, lying on the floor of the cavernous shophouse.

  “We have to take him to Lord Louis,” she said. “The Palace will have the antidote.”

  “No,” I said, even though I could not explain why I felt this way.

  Her hand closed over mine. “He will die here otherwise.”

  I shut my eyes. Ying was right but thinking of it caused a heavy sinking feeling in my chest, as though a stone had been hurled at it and was even now vanishing into its depths.

  Ying slipped an arm under Bells’s shoulders.

  “Come on,” she said, “help me.”

  And I did, for there was nothing else I could do.

  That evening I watched the sun set over the river, studying the yellow patches of light that shifted in chaos. The docks seemed somehow quieter today, subdued and somber, as though a vital piece of their vibrancy had been taken. Above them still bobbed the fantastic airship that had belonged to Bells. I wondered what was happening on the ship’s deck at that moment. Were they wondering what had happened to their captain and their president? Or did they already know? Were they planning something?

  Ying came to stand by my side.

  “The justice of the Empire is swift and brutal. We know this.”

  “Tell me we did the right thing,” I implored of her.

  Ying did not answer immediately. She seemed to be in great thought, troubled. Finally she said, “We completed the job we were tasked with.”

  “That does not answer my question.”

  “And I do not think I can answer it.” Ying gazed over the horizon and did not meet my eyes. “Matters of right and wrong are subjective and I prefer to deal with fact. The fact is that we have finished the job we were tasked with and our role in the matter is over.”

  I stared at her. I had not imagined that she could be so cold.

  “It is also fact,” she continued, “that, in the eyes of the Empire, it would be none of our concern and none of our doing if the captain and his conspirators were to somehow escape from their cells tonight.” She turned to me, and in her I caught a glimpse of hope burning wild and fierce. A slow smile spread across my face. “Do you think so?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “Then perhaps it is time we planned for events that are none of our concern.”

  Beneath the indolent sprawl of the Imperial Palace lay the holding cells, the interrogation rooms, the laboratoriums, all the varied instruments essential to the Empire. They were connected by a series of narrow tunnels that opened out onto the side of the hill, each entrance guarded by a pair of mechanical men. These sentries were taken out with a touch of my ring: one tap for each of the brass contraptions and they fell in a mass of shorted circuits.

  Ying and I ran down the tunnel, heading inward until we reached the first branching point, two narrow paths leading to separate sections of the dungeon. Far off, I could hear the sounds of a tiny, familiar instrument.

  “That will be Bells,” I said.

  Ying took a deep breath of air. “I can smell the children.”

  “Then let us divide the tasks: you retrieve the family while I find Bells.”

  We headed in our different directions. The tunnel soon gave way to a set of cells, all of them eerily empty. Each was barely six feet by three feet, recessed into the walls and fronted by solid iron bars. I passed by them, searching for the source of the music—there!

  Bells leapt up at the sight of me, interrupted from the Russian folksong he was playing.

  “My lady,” he said. “Have you come to rescue me, then?”

  “Stand back,” I said, aiming my short staff at the bolt across the door.

  The report of the weapon discharging was unbearably loud in the enclosed space but it did the job. When the smoke had cleared I barged into the cell and grabbed Bells by the arm.

  “Hurry, we do not have much time.”

  “This is certainly unexpected,” he said, but he seemed pleased to see me. As I hauled him out of the cell he added, “And it seems I was right after all.”

  I ignored the hint of triumph in his voice and said, as we ran down the narrow confines of the tunnel, “I am surprised they let you keep the instrument.”

  “William and I cannot be separated,” he said, baring the huge, reassuringly boyish smile of his. And I was suddenly glad that I was there at that moment, doing what I was doing. It felt right.

  Bells pushed past me and took the lead as we continued.

  “Follow me,” he said. “I know where Uncle Lee’s family is being held.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this place,” I said. “One might suspect you have a certain amount of familiarity with it.”

  His returning smile was small and mysterious.

  We rounded a corner and came full-tilt upon Ying leading the children behind her, accompanied by Uncle Lee and a younger man and woman I did not recognize. The children squealed in delight. “Bells!”

  “There may be a problem,” Ying said. “There were armed guards posted to their cells. I may have inadvertently triggered an alarm.”

  “Inadvertently?” I closed my eyes. If the entire Palace were on alert, there was no chance of our reaching our planned jungle escape route without encountering trouble. “We need to think of a better way out of here.”

  Bells laughed. “It is fortunate, then, that some of us have more foresight than others.”

  He produced William and shook the instrument. Out of the sound hole came tumbling a small, round device, made of brass and adorned with a single glowing light. It looked like an emitting device of some sort.

  “Much as I am fond of Lord Louis, I never intended staying the night.”

  Uncle Lee, too, seemed to know what it was. “If your ship is coming, then we should go,” he said.

  We resumed our run toward the hillside egress.

  There came from behind the sound of metallic feet, a regular, ominous clank-clank-clank that could only mean one thing: we had run out of time much faster than we thought.

  “Take the family and go,” I instructed Ying. “I will hold them off.”

  Bells did not follow them. “You might find me handy in a fight,” he said. I did not have time to argue.

  From behind us came marching a pair of mechanical minions made of blackened metal and much taller and wider than the regular gatekeepers and guardsmen. Unlike the lightly armed guards I had incapacitated earlier, these two were armed with repeating pellet guns. Behind the twin monstrosities I glimpsed the silhouette of Lord Louis, looking even smaller than ever, framed as he was between automatons.

  “You must be quite something to warrant this much personal attention,” I muttered to Bells.

  “Fear not,” he whispered back. “I have a few tricks up my sleeve.” Then he leapt forward toward the marching minions and shouted, “By my command, I instruct you to halt!” He held William aloft. “I have a ukulele and I know how to use it!”

&n
bsp; Amazingly, the two mechanical men stopped in their tracks. Their beveled heads turned toward each other as if confused. “Seize them,” Lord Louis commanded but the machines made no move to do so. Bells tucked the tiny instrument into position and started dancing a jig right in front of them. Perhaps he was completely mad after all. “Oy, polnym polna moya korobushka, yest’ i sitets i parcha....”

  “What are you doing?” Lord Louis yelled at the immobile constructs. “Seize him!”

  The walls of the tunnels suddenly shook with distant thunder—bombardment from above. Bells’s airship had arrived.

  “That’s my cue to go!” Bells said, and quick as lightning struck the immobile machines with his ukulele. There must have been steel backing in the tiny instrument because he knocked their heads clean off.

  Lord Louis marched toward us, coming out of the shadow. “I should have known, James. You were always up to childish games!” He drew a pistol from its holster.

  “Oh, for mercy’s sake!” I exclaimed, rolling my eyes and without further ado discharged my short staff right at Lord Louis. The electrical beam arced, hit him in the chest, and he fell over. Having had quite enough, I grabbed Bells by the hand and started running toward the exit.

  “Good shot,” he told me as we ran.

  “How did you stop those mechanical men?” I asked.

  “Only royals can command them by voice! Oh, never mind, I suppose it doesn’t matter now.”

  He grinned.

  “Did you really mean it when you said you could help Ying with her affliction?”

  “Of course! The formulation for the serum is exceedingly simple, if you know the right ingredients.”

  “And you would happen to know these ingredients?”

  He laughed. “What do you take me for?” and laughed even harder when I answered, “A madman?”

  We burst out of the tunnel and were greeted by the magnificent sight of Bells’s ship filling the sky, a marvelous confection of brass and steel and striped canvas, gigantic thrust rotors angled downward, allowing the ship to hover in position while in battle mode. The firing batteries mounted on the side of the ship spoke and bolts of electricity seared the air over our heads. I smelled ozone on the wind whipping in a frenzy across the beaten ground.