by Ian Whates
With its wheels engaged on the track, steam hissing from piston-joints and smoke puffing from its chimney, the scowling engine began to move, quickly picking up speed.
“Well at least we now know how the robot managed to sneak up on everyone in Whitehall,” said Ulysses. “It was hiding in plain sight, probably at the Westminster Overground Station, and then transformed and climbed down from the Circle Line when Brunel’s brain signalled that the Vault had been opened.”
“Quite, sir,” acknowledged Nimrod.
The Silver Phantom continued to race along the platform, hurtling towards the barrier at its end, where the brickwork of the platform descended abruptly and became subsumed by the gravel, rails and sleepers of the railway as the multiple tracks emerged from the station.
For a moment, Ulysses considered flinging open the car door, balancing himself on the sill and then throwing himself at the altered automaton before it could escape. But, apart from the obvious risk to his own life, were he to try such a thing, what would he be able to achieve once he was on board? As far as he was aware, the newly-transformed locomotive didn’t come with controls for a driver, and what was to say it wouldn’t simply turn back into a robot and grind him into the track beneath its feet?
As the car accelerated towards the end of the platform, Ulysses wondered whether Nimrod was planning on somehow using a conveniently placed porter’s cart as a ramp to leap the Phantom onto the roof of the puffing locomotive. But then, with the cast iron barrier only a matter of yards away and with a snarl of annoyance, Nimrod slammed on the brakes. Accompanied by the smell of burning rubber, the automobile slewed to a halt, Nimrod thumping his hands down on the steering wheel in frustration.
Ulysses could do nothing but watch as the train-cum-automaton chugged out of the station and away down the line.
“Time for Plan B, I feel,” said Ulysses. “Back up, would you, old chap?”
“Of course, sir,” his faithful manservant replied, his more characteristic calm and unflappable veneer restored. Putting the car into reverse, Nimrod backed the vehicle along the platform.
Upon reaching what was left of the passenger turnstiles at the concourse end of the platform – that had also been flattened during the automaton’s rampage – Nimrod brought the car to a halt as an overweight individual in the uniform of a station manager puffed over to them.
Winding down the window, Ulysses poked his head out and asked, “Where does that line go to, my good man?”
“That’s the GWR line,” the fat controller replied. “Looks like your Great Western Robot’s on its way to Bristol.”
“Then Bristol it is, Nimrod,” Ulysses said, tapping the back of the leather-upholstered driver’s seat with his diamond-tipped cane.
IV – Shipshape and Bristol Fashion
The sun was setting over Bristol Harbour as the locomotive pulled into the dockyard, a ball of molten iron in a liquid gold sky painting the masts of the recently restored SS Great Britain crimson. The engine came to a stop with a great hiss of steam, as if relaxing its piston-muscles after its long run from the capital to the West Country. But then almost instantly, with another great exhalation of steam – the water vapour clouding in the evening air – the machine transformed once more.
Its iron chassis unfolding, the engine’s boiler becoming the trunk of its automaton body, the cab becoming legs again, and its truck wheels and piston rods folding back into its arms as it took on the form of a giant iron man once more, stove-pipe hat firmly in place upon its great cast iron head.
The automaton’s great head turned from left to right and back again, its machine senses scanning the barn-like industrial sheds, the dry docks and the construction yards, as if this brass Brunel was furtively checking to make sure that no one had been watching from the shadows as it changed. But the docks were quiet. The day shift had ended long ago and everyone had gone home for the night.
Moving as stealthily as a hundred-ton robot could, the iron giant made its way towards one of the colossal warehouse-like edifices. But before it could reach the great iron doors of the shed, it was caught in the wide beams of a barrage of blazing lights.
The robot came to an abrupt halt mid-stride. The lights were positioned atop two towering cranes that stood at the harbour-side.
As the automaton stood frozen, its mechanical mind reassessing the situation, the jibs of the cranes spun round, dragging the heavy, cast-iron hooks suspended at the end of their cable hoists through the air, swinging them towards the automaton like twin wrecking balls.
One of the hooks clanged into the cylindrical body of the robot, the booming echo of the contact resounding over the dockyards. The huge automaton stumbled, catching the hook suspended from the other derrick as it turned to face its attackers.
Grasping the hook in its huge hands, the robot sent it swinging back towards the crane gantry. The jib was pulled round, momentum swinging it away from the robot. But the first crane swung its hook again, hitting the robot from behind this time.
The brass Brunel stumbled again, but remained on its feet. And then the robot was on the move once more, but so were the cranes.
As the colossal automaton clumped towards the construction shed, the four gantry legs that supported the engine-house of each lifting engine disengaged from their dockside moorings and the two cranes galloped across the gravel surface of dockyard after the fleeing droid.
“What’s the plan, sir?” Nimrod’s voice crackled over the radio that connected the two cranes, so that those operating the machines could do so in perfect unison. Could Ulysses detect a suggestion of excitement in his manservant’s usual monotone drawl? “Knock the robot’s block off and once it’s out for the count recover Brunel’s brain?”
Ulysses pulled back on the drive lever and pushed down hard on the power pedal, putting the crane he was piloting into reverse as the Brunel-automaton suddenly turned. The heavy links of a chain in its vice-like hands, it swung the solid iron anchor attached to the end in Ulysses’ direction. One prong of the anchor clipped the side of the cab, tearing a hole in the hut-like construction and sending splintered planks and twisted spars of metal flying across the yard.
“Let’s just worry about knocking it down first, shall we?” came Ulysses’ breathless reply.
Ulysses battled to put the crane into a forward gear again. “Come on, you stubborn bastard!” he bellowed. And then, the gearbox stopped fighting and he found the gear he was looking for. Sooty black clouds puffing from its smokestack, Ulysses drove Lifting Engine No. 2 – also known as ‘Cranky’ to the men who worked the docks day in, day out – towards the automaton, before the robot could swing its lethal weapon again or try to turn tail and flee into the construction sheds.
Pulling on another lever, he spun the engine cab about, the crane’s long boom rotating with it, smashing into the robot once again. Nimrod had managed to steer his crane, Lifting Engine No. 1 – known as ‘Steeve’ to the yard’s work crews – round behind the brass Brunel so that his derrick now stood between the automaton and the corrugated iron barn.
The mobile gantry appeared – to Ulysses, at least – to hunker down, as if bracing itself, assuming a fighter’s stance. An articulated grappling claw that formed its secondary limb constricted, bunching into a fist, and then abruptly powered forward like a boxer. As the automaton tried to find its footing after the blow it had received from the boom of Lifting Engine No. 2, Engine No. 1 sent it reeling back the other way with a resounding blow to the head.
Under the force of the blow, the brass Brunel’s neck joint snapped with a sharp crack. The cast iron head lolled sideways at an unnatural angle, even for a transforming robot. The mechanical giant stumbled, a foot passing over the edge of one of the shipyard’s dry docks, and with a series of echoing clangs it tumbled into the waterless void. It collided with the SS Great Britain, currently occupying the dock while it underwent extensive restoration work, leaving the ship rocking on its wooden stays.
Ulysses peer
ed out through the grime-smeared cab windows, trying to see what had happened to the robot. Was it down? Had they truly defeated it at last? Perhaps if he could just get a little closer…
For a moment he considered climbing down from the crane to take a look but then thought better of it. Putting the drive lever into first gear and applying gentle pressure to the power pedal, he walked Lifting Engine No. 2 towards the black void of the dry dock. Nimrod did the same with Lifting Engine No. 1.
As the two cranes reached the edge of the pit, a large mechanical hand formed of gleaming brass pistons and sheet steel reached out of the blackness and clamped shut around one of the gantry legs of Nimrod’s machine. Even as Ulysses’ manservant tried to pull back, the brass Brunel pulled harder. With one leg no longer in contact with the ground, the remaining three splayed feet of the crane slid through the gravel and oil-soaked black earth of the yard, gouging great ruts in the filthy ground in the process.
Still holding the crane’s leg in its left hand, the automaton rose from the pit once more, its head still cantilevered strangely to the right, and swung its right hand – now bunched into a fist – at another of the lifting engine’s legs. The girder struts of the leg buckled under the force of the blow and suddenly Nimrod found his machine tipping forwards, unbalanced. Crane-arm and claw-limb flailing, there was nothing he could do to halt the derrick’s inexorable fall as the crane crashed to the ground, coming to rest with the driver’s cab protruding over the end of the dry dock. Window panes shattered under the impact, as the brass Brunel hauled itself out of the pit.
“I’m down, sir,” came Nimrod’s frustrated voice. “It’s floored me.”
“Have no fear!” Ulysses declared, putting Lifting Engine No. 2 into gear and driving its accelerator pedal to the floor. “Ulysses Quicksilver is here!”
The gantry galloped across the dockyard like some crazed giraffe. As it powered forward, rather than swing the jib of the crane at the automaton again, Ulysses lowered the boom so that the metalwork of the crane became a lance of reinforced steel, aimed directly at the robot’s boiler body.
The crane speared the iron giant, buckling under the impact, as did the cylindrical body of the robot. High pressure super-heated steam escaped from the split Cranky had ripped in the boiler sleeve and for a moment Ulysses thought he saw something like startled surprise in the headlamp eyes of the robot’s lolling head. In that moment he understood what was about to happen and threw himself to the floor of the cab as the boiler body of the brass Brunel exploded.
Every window of Lifting Engine No. 2 shattered, diamond shards raining down around Ulysses as well as on top of him, while a spear of twisted, scalding metal thudded into the wooden planks that formed the back wall of the cab and stayed there.
The boom of the catastrophic explosion still echoing around the warehouses and storage sheds, Ulysses cautiously picked himself up. As he peered out of the glass-less windows of the driver’s cab, into the deepening gloom, he could hear what sounded like the patter of rainfall, but he could not see any rain spots turning the grey gravel black. It took him a moment to realise that it wasn’t rain but the sound of tiny pieces of debris from the destruction of the automaton landing out in the harbour.
There was nothing left intact of the robot’s boiler body and Ulysses couldn’t see anything of its head either. He wouldn’t be surprised if, even now, the head was sinking into the water’s dark depths. What was left of the droid’s legs lay on the ground at the harbour’s edge.
Ulysses clambered down from the cab and joined Nimrod where he stood beside the ruined remains of the robot, his manservant having also climbed free of his fallen lifting engine.
“The bigger they are,” the older man remarked as they surveyed the shattered inner workings of the brass Brunel, the hot metal plinking as it began to cool.
“And they don’t get much bigger than Isambard Kingdom Brunel,” Ulysses replied. “But it looks as if his days of reckless engineering are over for good.”
“You don’t think his brain could have survived the destruction of the droid?” Nimrod hazarded.
“I suppose it’s possible that the containment unit protected it from the worst of the damage,” Ulysses pondered, “and splashed down in the river. But if that’s the case it would take a very concerted effort to find and retrieve it. I think it just as likely that the pod was ripped apart by the explosion too, and that his brain was flash-fried the instant the boiler blew.”
The two men peered at the settling black mirror of the harbour waters, lost in thought as each contemplated the fate of the greatest engineering mind Magna Britannia had ever known.
“But it’s for the authorities to decide whether they want to even attempt to find any evidence of Brunel’s demise amongst the wreckage here. And if they do, I’m sure when they’re done sifting the debris they’ll leave everything shipshape and Bristol fashion.”
“Talking of the authorities, sir,” Nimrod said.
“You think I should let Allardyce know what has happened to his missing brain? If I can get hold of him, that is.”
“You know what he’s like, sir.”
“Yes, and for that very reason, the good inspector can wait,” Ulysses said. “Besides, I’d rather deliver the bad news face to face, assuming he still has a face I can deliver to, if it’s all the same to you, old chap.”
V – Errors of Today
“Dead?!?”
“I assume so,” Ulysses Quicksilver said, “considering the mess made by the exploding robot.”
Inspector Maurice Allardyce winced, clearly dreading what sort of trouble he was going to get in with his bosses at Scotland Yard for not only losing Brunel’s brain on his watch but then failing to recover it.
It had been bad enough that the Met’s own vehicles had turned on them at the crucial moment, transforming into something akin to armoured knights. It turned out that they had been designed by the un-deceased Brunel as well; four officers had lost their lives, and another twelve had been seriously injured, before they were able to put them down. After that debacle, he had been pinning his hopes on Quicksilver bringing him some good news, not that he would ever admit that to the arrogant toff himself.
“I thought you said you were going to sort this mess out,” Allardyce challenged the dandy.
“We brought the guilty party to justice, didn’t we?”
“If by ‘guilty party’ you mean Isambard Kingdom Brunel, then yes, it would appear you well and truly stopped him, more’s the pity.”
“You didn’t tell me you were expecting us to recover his brain,” Quicksilver pointed out coldly.
“I would have thought that went without saying,” Allardyce snapped.
“Besides, it might still be lying at the bottom of the River Avon somewhere, although by now I expect it will have travelled some distance downstream.”
“I believe the search has already begun. The local constabulary seemed very eager. Something about Brunel being an adopted Bristol boy.”
“Well there you go then. All’s well that ends well, as they say.”
“But this hasn’t ended well.” The inspector’s shoulders slumped dejectedly.
“I think we’re done here just the same, don’t you?” Quicksilver turned, starting for the door.
“There is one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Allardyce said, as the dandy took hold of the door handle.
Quicksilver turned again and fixed Allardyce with his one remaining eye. “And what would that be, Maurice?”
“How did you beat the robot down to Bristol?”
“Well, for one thing I’ll have you know that Nimrod and I held the record for the Paris-Dakar rally between us for eight years running. But aside from that, you know what the rail network is like. Delays at Didcot, a points failure at Slough, the wrong kind of leaves on the line – there’s always something.”
VI – Kingdom
Isambard Kingdom Brunel stood at the arching apex of the Ironbridge and ga
zed across the acres of manufactory spread out before him, resembling some vast industrial metropolis, as clouds of smog drifted by high overhead. The sides of the gorge were still there, only now they were adorned with a tangle of pipework that covered the cliffs like a pernicious growth of iron ivy.
This was the place where the Industrial Revolution had begun, more than a century and a half before. The Ironbridge Gorge had been roofed over long ago, the village and some ten thousand acres becoming subsumed into one vast factory complex, along with Coalbrookdale and Jackfield as well, where automated production lines worked ceaselessly, day and night, to forge the machines that kept the British empire of Magna Britannia in operation.
The River Severn no longer passed under the bridge itself, having long ago been diverted to satisfy the water requirements of the industrial plant. Brick and tile works, blast furnaces and coal, iron and fire clay mines all existed now within the confines of the factory itself. The place even had its own network of canals.
A visitor to the region in the eighteenth century – upon witnessing Coalbrookdale by night, the settlement seeming as bright as day, with its endless clouds of smoke under-lit by the fires of the incessant foundries – had described the Gorge as being akin to a vision of Hell. Well, that description was only all the more apt now. And the factory was as hot as Hades as well, not that such things as temperature and atmospheric pollution mattered to Brunel.
An ordinary man would have found it hard to even catch his breath in this place, but Brunel was no ordinary man, and never had been.
