Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  He had followed his orders to the letter. The figure allowed himself a sliver of a smile – not that anyone could see it under his hood. He would be boarding a capsule with the other guild workers soon, but he wouldn't be going where those three were heading.

  Oblivion's eternal embrace. In about ten minute's time. Given his two companions' distant evolutionary origins as forest-dwelling primates, it was ironic, Boxiron considered, that it should be his inferior cobbled-together body that experienced the least trouble ascending the air vent to the surface of Hermetica City.

  Chalph urs Chalph had the advantage of youth, though, the young ursine climbing the rungs ahead of Jethro without the sweat that was now soaking the ex-parson's face. The three of them were getting near to the cliffs overlooking the Fire Sea, Boxiron steadily pulling his not inconsiderable metal weight up behind Chalph and Jethro. Then the ledge was in sight, giving onto a bare stone passage that led to a heavy steel door with a wheel-shaped handle to open it that wouldn't have looked out of place on the commodore's u-boat.

  They exited via a concrete bunker topped with rusted iron ventilation grilles, to find themselves on top of a black cliff with a view down to the boiling waters lapping against the shores of Jago far below. Chalph raised a finger to his lips and pointed to the massive iron battlements to their right, then indicated that they should proceed through the plain of boulders and concrete air vents towards the garden domes nesting under the towering presence of the Horn of Jago. It wasn't too hard for the three of them to stay hidden from the guard posts dotting the battlements – the ravages of a steam storm had recently passed, leaving behind a warm mist that cloaked them from the eyes of the Pericurian mercenaries – which should be focused on the monsters prowling outside the capital's walls anyway.

  Chalph took them to a concrete building standing a little taller than the steamman's own height, wedged in between two air vents. There were three iron circles stamped into the wall around the back of the structure, each the size of a drain hole cover.

  'This is it?' asked Jethro, his beak-nosed face swivelling about to make sure they hadn't been spotted by any of the sentries.

  Boxiron judged they were safe enough. The nearest of the geodesic domes was one of the abandoned overgrown parks that dotted the outskirts of the capital. There wasn't likely to be anyone inside.

  'This is what you asked for,' said Chalph. He lifted a steel tool out of his leather pocket and inserted it into a hole in the centre of one of the covers, levering the tool around until there was a muffled clunk – and then he heaved the cover out, pulling it away and resting it down on the stony ground.

  Jethro looked meaningfully at Boxiron and the steamman lurched forward to check the machinery inside. It was a nest of cables, clicking mechanics and etched steel circuits lit by a bank of flickering valves hanging from the roof like lanterns. It appeared primitive to Boxiron, but no doubt it served its purpose, allowing the guild's transaction engines to control this stretch of the battlement's defences.

  'What do you think, old steamer?' asked Jethro. 'Can it be cracked?'

  'All in all, I prefer the locks and systems of a Jackelian transaction engine.' But it would do. There was a connection from the guild's vaults to the wall's control system and what was sauce for the goose could easily become sauce for the gander.

  There really hadn't been many options open to a desecration like Boxiron after he had burnt down Aumerle House during his brief fit of madness. Shunned by his people, no longer a steamman knight, only a grave-robbed hybrid wandering the rookeries of Middlesteel begging for high-grade coke and water for his boiler heart. But desecration or no, Boxiron still had the mind of a steamman knight, a mind far superior to the Jackelians' primitive transaction-engine locks. And after the flash mob had found him and enlisted him into their criminal ranks, they had outfitted Boxiron's human-milled shell with many useful extras. There weren't many locks, doors or transaction-engine safeguards – physical or artificial – that could stand up to his talents.

  Boxiron sprung the concealed hatch on his chest and pulled out the highly illegal cables he would need for this piece of work, adjusting the variable heads to match the Jagonese non-standard sockets. Once he had patched in a workaround to bypass the machinery's obviously hostile protective valves, he pushed the other jack into the transaction engine's diagnostics system. Why, this old steamer, officer? He's just checking the jeweller's here for a malfunction on their doorway. Move along now. Nothing to see here.

  Boxiron dialled back the power to his body, trying to limit the spasms of his twitching iron fingers. It was like holding his breath, painful and potentially dangerous if the retained smog from his boiler heart started contaminating the rest of his systems. There. The connection was made, and Boxiron smashed through the protocols limiting the battlement's diagnostics to reporting only – establishing a two-way connection.

  'If you can't find anything in ten minutes,' said Jethro, 'you need to return. This mist looks like it could burn off soon.'

  'You worry too much, Jethro softbody,' said Boxiron. 'This is what I'm for.'

  The one function he could still perform with excellence. No more for him the honour of the battlefield, or whatever mundane tasks his body had performed for Damson Aumerle that had so endeared his frame to her. All that he had left to him was this.

  Boxiron noted Jethro's hand on his gear stick, a gentle yank and a squealing navigation though the rusty slots on his back, before he felt it reach the final groove with all the impact of running into a brick wall. Top gear.

  The light flickering across Boxiron's vision plate pulsed off as his consciousness entered the transaction engine like a bullet, hurtling towards the guild's vaults at the speed of electricity.

  He encountered a diagnostics handler at the guild's destination gate, sleepy at first, then outraged that the battlements had malfunctioned so badly they had sent it this. And what was this? Boxiron sent the diagnostics handler insane while it was still wondering how it could possibly report this oddity, making the handler's corruption look as if it had accidentally fallen into a recursive loop. The guildsman who had programmed the handler so many centuries before had templated portions of the diagnostics' code from the main core, and the lights of shared developer tokens sparkled like open doorways throughout the system as Boxiron traced them across the guild's transaction engines.

  Boxiron squeezed himself through one of the more central tokens, just far enough to observe the hundreds of handler functions shuttling back and forth outside, some carrying pieces of data from the archives in response to guildsmen's queries, far more shifting regular data streams between the capital's many systems: air circulation, gas leakage, temperature, the mortars and gunnery telemetry from emplacements around the foot of the Horn of Jago, power fluctuations from the distant, deep turbine halls. Boxiron changed his appearance to mimic one of the handlers, and then carried himself – looking for all the world as if he completely belonged there – towards the goal of his little foray.

  He didn't even need to rip into one of the catalogues of port addresses to find the militia's hub – squatting there so similar to Ham Yard back home, bristling with privacy guards and firewalls that spoke more of the self importance of the bureaucrats that maintained its routines than its effectiveness against a steamman mentality. Boxiron circled it. Oh yes, all of this would be fine for stopping a human card sharp bent on creating a little mischief, but how long could it stand against a mind such as his?

  Well, longer than it would have if Boxiron didn't need to be unobtrusive. A diagnostics handler bent out of shape would just be written off as one of those annoyances sent to plague the Guild of Valvemen's coders. But the central store for the police militia smashed to pieces? That was quite another thing altogether. Boxiron presented himself to the police store like a good little handler, and while the archive was extending itself across to him, he isolated the handshake protocol and extended a virtual environment around it so realistic that the p
rotocol never realized that what it was experiencing was a subsection of Boxiron's own mentality. After it was safely cut off and isolated, it was a matter of simplicity to break the protocol apart and reverse engineer it, then push his own tame copy back towards the police archives. The next bit was where Boxiron was going to get clever – he had even agreed with Jethro exactly how it needed to be done. He wasn't actually going to steal all the police records pertaining to the archbishop's murder. He wasn't even going to copy them and try to make off with them in his memory. This was going to be a clean job. So clean, in fact, that the Jagonese civil service were going to do the work for him.

  Boxiron found the police militia's case file for Alice Gray's murder and, seizing control of the archiving function, reset the clock on its timing synchronization forward five hundred years of their present date – long enough for the facts of the archbishop's murder to naturally declassify themselves. Then he sent a copy of the open files to the Jagonese public records office, along with instructions that they were to be immediately output onto paper, stamped and sealed inside an envelope as importation paperwork, then set aside for a certain Chalph urs Chalph of the Pericurian trade delegation to collect. Once Boxiron had reset the clock on the archive back to its original date, the record was automatically reclassified and all references to the copy automatically deleted as if they had never existed. Just to be on the safe side, Boxiron traced the physical bank of valves where the militia information had been stored in the guild's transaction-engine vaults and rotated that wall of valves to the top of the physical cleaning rota. The valves would be decharged, cleaned, re-powered up and not even a residual imprint of his crime would be left.

  Boxiron was on his way back to the destination gate when he saw it; a rotating green force, half cyclone and half frenzied spinning top. It was throwing itself down one of the major query channels; upending the clearly terrified data handlers and absorbing them into its gyrating mass before spitting them back out again to shakily resume their transit. By the Steamo Loas, this was something new – something sentient and dangerous scouring the transaction engines for an intruder. It could only be one of the valve-minds he had heard about. It must have discovered the breach and realized the collapsed diagnostics handler was not the result of a bug. Boxiron's chameleon-like exterior couldn't withstand the likes of that whirling monstrosity. If it got hold of him it would instantly realize he was an intruder and the chances of his mentality making its way back to his clunking, human-milled body would be minimal.

  Throwing caution to the wind, Boxiron selected an alternative query channel and sped towards the destination gate he had originally broken through, moving far faster than any mere data handler could possibly manage. It almost felt good; to be in a realm where the pathetic joke of a body that his steamman head had been joined to was not an encumbrance. But it would have felt a lot better if the green cyclone hadn't immediately changed course and come roaring after him.

  Boxiron increased speed and the valve-mind matched him. The gate was too far away and the distance between the steamman and the valve-mind too slight – and growing slighter with each millisecond.

  He was never going to outrun this enraged behemoth.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was Commodore Black who gave voice to what Nandi was thinking as their capsule started to decelerate. 'This is too blessed early to be stopping. It took us an hour to get out to the guild's vaults, and we haven't even been travelling for six minutes.'

  Hannah stood up and checked the panel at the front of the tube-shaped carriage. 'The destination arrival marker is showing here, but you're right. We're a long way from reaching Hermetica City.'

  A rattle sounded from outside, the unmistakable noise of clearing a rubber tunnel valve, then they slowed to a complete halt. Commodore Black reached into his jacket and drew out a snub-nosed pistol. He broke it and slipped a crystal charge into its breech, then pushed back the clockwork hammer mechanism. Nandi looked at the old u-boatman, horrified.

  'You've a nose for history, lass. I've a nose for ensuring poor old Blacky's bones aren't added to the dirt you and your college friends like to trowel through.' He pointed to the front of the windowless carriage. 'Get down there, ladies, as fast as you like. Trigger the door when I give you the nod.'

  Nandi shook her head and reluctantly pulled a small knife out of her boot. Used only for the purposes of excavation, until now.

  'I see the professor's taught you a few of her other skills, then,' said the commodore. 'That's fine. But if it cuts up rough, you leave the killing to me.'

  Hannah saw the commodore's signal, triggered the release handle and two iron levers pushed the door up and out with a squeal. It was dark outside; pitch black until Hannah switched on the carriage's external lamps. Commodore Black moved through the door, Nandi following close on his heel. They were in a large echoing cavern, freezing air blowing in from above them. The carriage had been shunted next to a dark platform.

  'It's an atmospheric platform,' said Hannah from the doorway, her voice probably louder than she intended across the echoing space.

  Nandi stooped down and ran her fingers along the concourse through a layer of dust. 'It hasn't been used in a long time.'

  Hannah emerged tentatively from the capsule, glancing around. She walked to the concourse wall and rubbed off a layer of frost and grime from a stone mosaic bearing the name of the station.

  'Worleyn,' said Hannah. 'As in Worleyn steel. This was a mining centre for metal ores, the only town apart from the guild's vaults sited away from the coastal ring. It was abandoned before I was born, though.'

  Nandi looked up towards the ceiling of the station. Now she was getting used to the darkness she could see there was a dim light coming from above. Not a diode panel, though. A domed skylight partially covered over with snow above, cracks of daylight slanting through. They were close to the surface here.

  'Mining is a sight too much like hard work for me,' said the commodore. 'Let's be out of here on that broken carriage of yours and leave this empty ruin to its ghosts.'

  'It's not broken,' said Hannah. 'There's no guidance system in the carriage; it only goes where it's sent. The fault that sent us here must lie in the line machinery. We need to find the controls for this station's platform turntable, then use them to rotate us back for another run towards the capital.'

  Nandi was moving towards the end of the station where Hannah was indicating the controls might be, when a fierce flash of light and intense heat hit her, smashing her off her feet. Her ears were ringing when she tried but failed to pull herself up into near darkness. The light from their carriage had gone – the carriage had gone! Replaced by shards of glowing metal littering the platform behind them, burning debris lying raked across the empty hall.

  Commodore Black recovered first, and moved over to Nandi and Hannah, feeling their limbs for signs of shrapnel wounds. 'That was no malfunction on the carriage, that was a blessed bomb!'

  'It was meant for me,' coughed Hannah. Her heavy robes had been torn by the blast. 'I think the guild have just found out what I've been doing with their transaction engines in my spare time – poking about in the details of the archbishop's death to prove it was their own bloody high guild master who murdered her.'

  'They're not subtle about it, then,' said the commodore.

  'If we'd been in a tunnel when the bomb went off it would have looked like a cave-in,' replied Hannah. 'We'd have been buried under tonnes of rubble.'

  'Let's be off before they find they've failed,' said the commodore. 'Can we call another carriage here, lass?'

  'We can try,' said Hannah. 'The station master's bay should be close to the maintenance yard.'

  Nandi bent down and picked up a burning piece of seat leather, wrapping it around one of the still-hot pieces of metal carriage rubble to form a make-shift torch for the three of them to navigate by.

  They found the equipment where their young guide thought it would be, but it didn't take long for t
hem to discover that the machinery on the station was no longer powered. The rat-eaten schematics on the instrument board indicated that the connection to the energies of the guild's turbines was on the surface, shared with the old opencast mine's ore mill.

  Hannah offered to go to the surface first, having – she claimed – ample experience of climbing the air vents back in the capital. But the commodore was having none of it, and the two young women followed him up the rusty ladder to the surface from inside the abandoned station. Nandi felt an inrush of freezing air and a scattering of snow as a hatch clanged open above them, bright white light flooding down their dark passage.

  The station's powerhouse had been built behind the dome of the atmospheric station's roof. The three of them were surrounded by deserted snow-covered buildings at the foot of a series of hills that had been chewed into by drift mining. There was a rise of iron battlements on the other side of the hills – not much of a barrier against whatever might be outside now that the protective wall wasn't charged.

  When they got to the shadow of the powerhouse it wasn't the drift of ice frozen around its foundations that nearly made Nandi scream before she caught herself – it was the figure captured within the ice.

  Nandi peered closely. The corpse was doubled up on the ground; a single hand reaching claw-like towards the switching machinery boxed against the powerhouse's stone walls. The floor of the ice block was crimson, as was the trail that led to the powerhouse – he had been bleeding profusely as he had crawled towards his final resting place.

  'He was trying to summon a carriage,' whispered Nandi. 'The same as us.'

  'Not quite the same as us,' said the commodore. 'Someone's put a wicked ball in his gut. Old Blacky they just tried to blow to bits like a firework.'