Swords & Steam Short Stories

by S. T. Joshi

  “Look there at that curious little grey bush,” said Clara. “It actually looks as if it were striding towards us.”

  Nathaniel mechanically put his hand into his breast pocket – he found Coppola’s telescope, and pointed it to one side. Clara was in the way of the glass. His pulse and veins leapt convulsively. Pale as death, he stared at Clara, soon streams of fire flashed and glared from his rolling eyes, he roared frightfully, like a hunted beast. Then he sprang high into the air and, punctuating his words with horrible laughter, he shrieked out in a piercing tone, “Spin round, wooden doll! – spin round!” Then seizing Clara with immense force, he tried to hurl her down, but with the desperate strength of one battling against death she clutched the railings.

  Lothaire heard the raging of the madman – he heard Clara’s shriek of agony – fearful forebodings darted through his mind, he ran up, the door to the second flight was fastened, Clara’s shrieks became louder and still louder. Frantic with rage and anxiety, he threw himself against the door, which finally burst open. Clara’s voice was becoming weaker and weaker. “Help – help save me!” With these words the voice seemed to die on the air.

  “She is gone – murdered by that madman!” cried Lothaire.

  The door of the gallery was also closed, but despair gave him a giant’s strength, and he burst it from the hinges. Heavens! Grasped by the mad Nathaniel, Clara was hanging in the air over the gallery – with one hand only she still held one of the iron railings. Quick as lightning, Lothaire caught his sister and drew her in, at the same moment striking the madman in the face with his clenched fist to such effect that he reeled and let go his prey.

  Lothaire ran down with his fainting sister in his arms. She was saved. Nathaniel went raging about the gallery, leaping high in the air and crying, “Circle of fire, spin round! Spin round!”

  The people collected at the sound of his wild shrieks and among them, prominent for his gigantic stature, was the advocate Coppelius, who had just come to the town, and was proceeding straight to the market place. Some wished to climb up and secure the madman, but Coppelius only laughed, saying, “Ha, ha – just wait – he will soon come down of his own accord,” and looked up like the rest. Nathaniel suddenly stood still as if petrified.

  Then, perceiving Coppelius, he stooped down, and yelled out, “Ah, pretty eyes – pretty eyes!” with which he sprang over the railing.

  When Nathaniel lay on the stone pavement with his head shattered, Coppelius had disappeared in the crowd.

  Many years afterwards it is said that Clara was seen in a remote spot, sitting hand in hand with a kind-looking man before the door of a country house, while two lively boys played before her. From this it may be inferred that she at last found a quiet domestic happiness suitable to her serene and cheerful nature, a happiness which the morbid Nathaniel would never have given her.

  Spectrum

  Liam Hogan

  Neha rubbed the scar that ran down her cheek. It went further, as well; split and twisted, both inside and out, a permanent, painful, crippling reminder of their disastrous arrival twenty-five years ago: the Accra plummeting through the magnetic storms in Icaria’s turbulent, alien atmosphere; navigation, guidance, and even life-support systems glitching out before their inevitable crash.

  Then: the desperate fight of the survivors to awaken the sleeping cargo before the cryo-pods failed as well. The horror of that day; the futile efforts, the terrible losses.

  Instead of a colony of a thousand, with the best tools and technology their mother planet had to offer, they had been reduced to a mere fifty, reduced also to improvised and temperamental steam engines, every electronic component more complicated than a resistor snuffed out in the eddies and whorls of that unforeseen electromagnetic maelstrom.

  Almost unforeseen: of those awake for the landing, only Neha had seen the purple clouds spitting and snapping below, had not understood why no-one else on the bridge seemed concerned.

  It was a talent she’d long had, even though she’d never actually known it for what it was. Her uncanny ability to identify dead circuitry was part of it; a talent that had paved her way through University, that had earned her Second Engineer status for this prestigious African Federation mission. A skill that spoke to her superiors louder than her youth, her sex, or indeed, her mixed parentage; Indian mother, Ghanaian father: neither native nor foreign, an outsider wherever she went.

  A skill that, this day at least, was turned to new purpose.

  They were up on the high plateau a half mile from the crater the Accra had dug and where, in the aftermath, the settlers had carved their homes in the shattered rock. Neha had been hauled up by two of those born to this planet, young men who lifted her and her wheelchair over the boulders and crevasses. She had spent more time being carried than pushed; an undignified and arduous journey, but necessary.

  She’d consulted and advised on the plans for the flyer, The Daedalus; worked on the manual controls for rudder and aileron. But it was still so much more fragile than she’d expected; a chimera of pot-bellied stove and the glistening wings of a dragonfly, hi-tech material from a scavenged solar-sail stretched taut over a rude wooden frame.

  She marvelled at the bravery of the young pilot destined to sit in the cramped space behind the boiler. The young female pilot; it had to be a woman and a slim one at that, to attain the height they hoped to achieve.

  But her bravery would be for naught unless Neha could identify a window of opportunity for her ascent.

  She watched the electrical bands form and reform, tangled sheets dancing across the sky, sometimes threatening to dip to ground but never quite able to, torn to wisps still high above the plateau.

  “How long will it take you to get to altitude?” she asked the pilot.

  “Twenty to twenty-five minutes,” Ama replied, after a look that travelled the length of Neha’s broken body. Neha returned the appraisal, the comparison was not in her favour. Ama was brimming with vitality and youth, every ounce of fat expunged by the necessities of this mission, even her hair cropped short in a fashion that made Neha strangely wistful.

  She shook her head, conscious of the weight of her own hair that she’d grown out to hide where the old wound began.

  “Too long.”

  Abeni, nearby, overheard and strode up, his left arm stiff and withered. Their Captain had been lucky; he showed the scars of the crash less than most. Age and the harsh conditions of Icaria had not been so kind, he was an old man before his time, thin and stooped, the bristles of his moustache pure white.

  “What’s that? Is there a problem?”

  “No problem, Sir –” the pilot began.

  “– It won’t work.” Neha interrupted.

  Abeni turned rheumy eyes on her. “Why not?”

  “The fields are too volatile. Even if we spot the perfect window, it won’t last twenty-five minutes.”

  “Twenty …” muttered Ama.

  Abeni gazed up at the grey clouds above, as if for a moment he too could see the roiling streams of electromagnetic flux.

  The Captain’s voice was quiet, but firm. “The Niamey is due. We have to try.”

  “We only get one shot,” Neha pointed out. “If the electronics on the transmitter get fried then it’s game over. There are no spares.”

  Abeni spat into the thin dust. “Fifteen years we’ve been gearing up to this! Fifteen years of effort to reach this point. And now – and only now – you tell us it won’t work?”

  Neha shrugged. “This is my first time at the launch site. My first chance to observe the conditions.”

  The Captain’s one good hand clenched and unclenched. “Another day, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps,” Neha rubbed her scar again before dragging her fingers down to her lap, embarrassed by the nervous habit. “Though there are no guarantees this doesn’t count as a calm day. Or …or I could fly it.�
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  “You!” spluttered Ama, Abeni’s cold gaze cutting off the rest of her retort.

  “You can fly?” Abeni asked.

  “Yes.”

  “With no legs?” Ama cruelly added.

  “What use are they once you’re in the air? And I dare say my upper body strength is equal to yours, for about the same weight.”

  There was a snort. “But still, you’ve not trained –”

  “I have my wings,” Neha said. “Trained as a shuttle pilot. Which means I’m trained to fly anything. Flown more hours than Ama here. Trained by Obafemi himself.”

  That quietened them down. As well it should; it was Obafemi Mbadiwe who had managed to land the Accra blind, with no instruments and damned little in the way of control. Without him, there would be no conversation taking place.

  She didn’t bother pointing out that she’d never actually flown anything, that even gravity had been faked in the on-board simulators. She’d never really expected to; it had been something to pass the time, her training taking place in the six months between the awakening of the landing crew out on the outskirts of the solar system and the Accra digging its final resting place on the planet’s craggy surface.

  “What’s going on?”

  Their conference had been joined by The Daedalus’s engineer; Sam Clintock, the Scot who had, for a hobby, built and repaired steam engines in museums back on Earth. Skills that had turned out to be a lot more useful than Genetic Engineering, or Nano-Fabrication.

  So much had depended on modern electronics. Not just the tools, either: the scanning microscopes and the field manipulators. Advanced electronics were at the core of what should have been their knowledge base, their libraries. Only a scant few physical books, a thousand years worth of technology crammed onto tiny nickel plates, put on board for this worst of worse-case scenarios, had survived.

  But even they were useless without a certain level of prior knowledge, a familiarity with terms and concepts. Without Earth-trained engineers and without hobbyists like Sam. The steam-age on Icaria might only last another ten years, might fizzle out with the deaths of the original colonists, with the failure of the few devices that they had managed to construct. Such as the fragile flyer, The Daedalus.

  “Change of pilot.” Abeni said, simply.

  Sam looked between the sour-faced Ama and the wheelchair bound Neha. “For real?”

  “I should be the one,” Ama muttered, “She’s completely unprepared.”

  “This is the maiden flight, right?” Neha insisted, “No one’s prepared. No one’s flown The Daedalus yet. Not me, not Ama. No one.”

  “No, she hasn’t,” Clintock agreed, “But she’s flown – and crashed – the prototypes, and that counts for something.”

  “So she knows how to crash! If a crash is involved, we’ve already failed.” Neha smiled, as if realising something for the first time. “Only I can navigate what only I can see. So unless you’ve got a steam engine capable of lifting two people above the clouds, I was always going to have to be your pilot.”

  “You knew that? All along?” Ama looked horrified, and Neha quickly shook her head.

  “No. And believe me, it’s not something I want to do. But it’s obvious, isn’t it? It has to be me.”

  It took five minutes for the doubtful Ama to teach Neha the simple controls, while Clintock carefully primed the compact steam engine.

  “You’ll take off fully loaded,” he said, “but you’ll only achieve maximum height when the last of the fuel is burnt, when the last of the water is exhausted, and as long as you keep remembering to dump the ash.”

  He grinned, a hard grin behind his mask of soot. “Not a task for the faint of heart, Neha. You’ll have no power at all for the return, you’ll be gliding in.”

  “I’ve done plenty of that,” Neha said.

  “In the last twenty-five years?”

  “In the last twenty-five years, no.” She laughed.

  “Ah well. It’s a fool’s errand anyway. I, for one, would rather you crashed and burned than this young lassy.”

  He winked at Ama, who pursed her lips and turned away.

  Neha shook her head. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Clintock.”

  Samuel Clintock was one of the few Europeans aboard the Accra, and the only one still alive after the crash and twenty-five years of hard subsistence living. His thinning red hair would live on, though, as long as the colony didn’t die out; he’d already sired three children, all daughters, all the Pilot’s age; dark skinned, flame haired.

  An odd mix, but no odder than Neha’s: her muddy olive skin, hair somewhere between straight and tightly curled. Growing up, being teased mercilessly at school, her father had shown her photos of mixed-race afro-asian children, one a former Miss South Africa. The message was clear: she too could end up just as beautiful.

  She hadn’t. She’d ended up short, with bushy eyebrows and plain features, easily overlooked by the boys.

  As one University ‘friend’ had put it, “Ah, poor Neha. The worst of both worlds.”

  Fortunately, by then she’d moved on to other interests. Dedicated herself to diodes and transistors, to complex circuitry that didn’t judge her in return.

  All those early dreams had done was to leave her with a strange attraction to leggy, exotic beauties. Such as Clintock’s daughters. Tall and undeniably beautiful, though even in this small, struggling settlement, considered vain. And, of course, completely uninterested in crippled, old, solitary Neha.

  It was something she had not been able, nor, truth be told, wanted, to do: to add to the next generation. If this mission failed, if the Niamey crashed as they had, then perhaps that was for the best.

  “Show me again how to adjust the air-flow,” she demanded.

  “The lever, here,” Clintock said, “It’ll start half closed, but you’ll need to open it up as the oxygen level begins to drop at altitude, otherwise your steam pressure will fall.”

  Neha’s hands trembled as she pulled on a pair of thick gloves, a guard both against the cold wind and the hot boiler. A test flight would have been nice. Except this particular craft was too precious for such luxuries; an attempted landing was the second most dangerous thing it could do.

  The first being its difficult take-off, fully laden, into turbulent, uncertain skies.

  It could turn out to be the shortest mission ever.

  “Here,” Ama said, after watching for a while. “You’ll need these.” She handed over her pair of goggles, turned away before Neha could thank her, striding off to some vantage point nearby.

  It was all on the thinnest of margins; blind science with a fat finger stuck in the air. At what elevation would the electronic interference drop to the point where she could uncover the heavily shielded electronics without them being fried? At what elevation would they be able to transmit their desperately short message to one of the three satellites that were hopefully still in orbit, still capable of relaying that message to the colony ships on their way here?

  There had been some doubts that the message was even necessary. Would not their quarter-century of silence speak just as eloquently?

  And yet, it could not be left to chance. Not for the second ship to arrive, nor the stranded remnants of the first. Their colony was unsustainable despite the best efforts of the survivors. Only the safe arrival of the Niamey would assure their long term survival.

  Assuming it had ever set off. Assuming it was still on course. Assuming it had not already arrived and suffered a similar, or worse fate, than the Accra, its cargo of people and equipment strewn across this barely habitable planet.

  Gloomy thoughts, to match the raging storms above.

  Abeni was the last to shake her hand, his skin dry as parchment and feeling just as fragile. “Kwenda Nzuri,” he said, as he backed away with a bow.

  She raise
d her thumb, smiled a smile she didn’t feel. The small group waved as she began her taxi: Clintock, Abeni, the pair who had carried her wheelchair and lifted her into the aircraft, and a half-dozen besides. There was no sign of Ama.

  She pulled back on the throttle and the propeller glinted in the hazy light, turning faster and faster until it became a solid blur. That component, at least, was as high-tech as it got; the Accra had held a dozen such propellers of different sizes, all light weight and perfectly balanced. Most of them had survived.

  The boiler belched a thick cloud of black smoke and she coughed and spluttered in reply, glad of Ama’s goggles as she craned to the side to peer ahead.

  The edge of the plateau, the escarpment that fell a hundred feet towards the wreck of the Accra, was coming up fast. Much too fast. The Daedalus felt leaden, as earthbound as she was.

  Oh god; her muscles screamed as she pulled hard at the controls, as if somehow adding her meagre strength could force the craft into the air.

  She wasn’t sure if the wheels left the ground before the ground left the wheels. She felt her stomach lurch as she and flyer went over the side, dipped into the valley below, and then pulled up, pulled back level, and very slowly began to climb.

  Looking down, she saw she had an audience larger than the group up on the plateau. Around the shattered Accra, two dozen ant-like figures waved arms and sheets and whatever else they had to hand. She couldn’t hear them, of course, and she doubted she was much more to them than a solitary bird high in the sky, but she waved back anyway as she steered the flyer in an ascending loop back towards the plateau. She didn’t want to get too far away from her only landing site.

  She turned her attention to the turbulent skies, hoping for a gap.

  She needed to avoid the worst of the electromagnetic storm, the deep purple and blues that only she could see. The shielded electronics would still fall prey to the full force of their power; she wouldn’t be able to shed the cover and transmit the recording until she was above and clear.