The inn’s lights were extinguished, Ike and the other hostages shushed and told to keep still or be shot. The three gang members ducked down behind windowsills, anticipating a fine view of the upcoming train wreck.
They waited.
The tension mounted as the wait went on, seemingly interminable. Ike felt that he had never in his life waited so long between the sound of the whistle and the arrival of a train.
And then came the chuffing of the engine, and Ike realized that his telegraph had been received. The train was not rushing toward disaster! Instead, it was slowing!
Slowly, slowly, the train pulled up to the damaged section of track and stopped. The three gang members, muttering amongst themselves, slipped out of the inn and arranged themselves in the deep shadows of the veranda; Ike and some of the townspeople took their vacated positions at the window sills so as to see the proceedings.
By the light of a gibbous moon Ike saw men boiling from the train, carrying pistols and rifles and taking up positions behind barrels and buildings. “Ned Kelly!” came a voice through a speaking trumpet. “This is Superintendent Hare. We have you outnumbered and outgunned. Surrender peaceably and you will be given a fair—dear God in Heaven!”
The reason for Hare’s outburst was clear. Ned had just stomped into view, with moonlight gleaming on the armour and sparks drifting from its chimneys. Pistols were fitted into their slots in both hands. “I will shoot no man if he gives up his arms and promises to leave the police force!” he called, the armour magnifying his voice into a resonating iron boom. “But let any policeman or other man who does not throw up his arms directly know the consequences, which is a speedy dispatch to Kingdom Come!”
In the veranda’s darkness Ike heard the other gang members shifting into position and cocking their weapons, but he knew that if he called them out to the constables he would immediately be shot. Heart pounding, he could do nothing more than wait.
Ned and the police stood facing each other for long minutes.
No one moved or spoke.
And then a shot broke the night’s silence, followed immediately by the bell-like tone of the ricochet off Ned’s armour.
In one smooth move Ned swivelled at the waist, levelled his pistol, and fired. One of the constables fell with a shriek of pain.
The night erupted into a bedlam of flashes, gunshots, and screams. Most of the shooting came from the police, and all of that was directed at Ned, who strode rapidly toward the train as though the storm of bullets were no more than a summer shower. He fired only sparingly, but each shot brought another policeman down. Meanwhile the gang was firing with abandon from their concealment on the veranda, but the police ignored them—between the noise of their own guns and the obvious target of Ned’s armoured figure, they did not seem to recognize that they were being killed from two directions.
It was a slaughter.
Ike bit his lip until the iron taste of blood filled his mouth. Goliath, his wonderful creation, was performing spectacularly—but what a terrible task it performed!
The armoured suit strode through the chaos like a juggernaut, extracting a deadly toll from the police. A few brave officers rushed it, hoping perhaps to find some weakness, only to be smacked brutally aside by an iron fist or smashed into the earth by a piston-like leg. The remaining police fell back behind the train engine, but with mechanical persistence Ned pursued them. So did the other gang members, who slipped from the veranda and fell in behind Ned to snipe at the police from behind the impregnable wall of Goliath’s bulk.
It seemed that within minutes the rout of the police would be complete.
And then, rising above the rattle and bang of gunfire and ricochets, Ike heard a terrific sound he’d heard only once before in his life: the high keening whistle of a steam boiler under too much pressure.
The last time he’d heard that sound had been on his great steamship’s shakedown cruise. Moments later the boiler had burst, with sufficient force to throw the No. 1 funnel into the air. Five stokers had died in the explosion.
Ike knew Goliath’s boiler design was near the limits of the materials. It had been the only way to achieve the necessary power-to-weight ratio. But now, it seemed, those limits were about to be exceeded.
All of Ike’s engineering instincts demanded he tell Ned to throw the relief valve wide open. A simple twist of one knob would release the excess pressure and prevent an explosion—preserving the equipment, the lives of those nearby, and Ike’s sense of himself as an engineer.
He shook himself, surged to his feet, and ran towards the battle.
“Close the relief valve, Ned!” he cried at the limit of his lungs. “Close the relief valve!”
In the midst of the gunfire, the clanging and hissing of the armour, and the shriek of the overloaded boiler, Ike heard a tiny squeak. The pitch of the anguished boiler’s whistle rose as the pressure built. Ike’s mind roiled with equations of tensile strength, steam pressure, and temperature…
And then, with a Brobdingnagian thunder, the armour exploded. Fragments of metal flew in every direction.
Blown backwards by the blast, Ike sprawled across the veranda steps. A series of crashes, loud enough to penetrate the ringing in his ears, followed as chunks of the armour landed all around him.
Then came a blow to the head, and darkness.
“He’s coming around!”
The words sounded as though they were pushing their way through a half-mile of cotton batting. Ike’s eyes blinked open, then immediately clenched shut against the pain of daylight. He clutched his aching head and felt bandages. “Ohh…” was all he could manage.
“Here, sir, have some tea!”
The tin cup scalded his lip. The tea was vile, bitter eucalyptus. He sipped gratefully.
“Constable Phillips, sir!” the man introduced himself. His face showed that he was shouting at the top of his lungs, but the words were barely audible. “I’ll need to take a statement, sir!”
The resulting shouted conversation would have been laughable if the matter hadn’t been so serious. So many had died—more than thirty police officers, eight of the hostages, and of course Ned himself, as well as all three members of his gang. Ike tried to give an honest report, as best as he could manage with the ringing in his ears, and not to try to excuse his own part in the debacle.
At least, in the end, he’d forced common sense to triumph over engineering instinct. For all the damage he’d caused, at least he’d managed that.
“You must have been terrified, sir!” the constable shouted. “With those bushrangers holding their guns to your head, making you build that armour, sir!”
Ike’s hearing was beginning to return, but that wasn’t the only reason he winced at the constable’s words. “Well, to be frank, I—”
But before Ike could explain, another policeman approached—an older and apparently superior officer—and the two men held a conversation Ike couldn’t hear. The second man addressed Ike. “Senior Constable Kelly, sir. We’re trying to identify the person who sent the telegram that warned us about the ambush.”
“That would be me.”
The senior constable’s face lit up with gratitude. “Then you are the hero of the day, sir!” He pumped Ike’s hand with painful enthusiasm, then ran off. Ike saw him conversing animatedly with a crowd of civilians, pointing in his direction. They immediately came running, shoving each other. “Well done, sir!” cried one, and “What’s your name, sir?” another.
There was no point in denying the truth. “Brunel,” he admitted. “Isambard Kingdom Brunel.”
The man who’d asked his name seemed nonplussed. “Isambard Kingdom Brunel? Like the famous engineer?” He studied Ike’s face. “Dear Lord—you are Brunel!”
“Who?” asked another man.
“The designer of Paddington Station, man! The Clifton Suspension Bridge! The Great Eastern, the greatest steamship in all history!”
Ike waved a dismissive hand. “Greatest failure of a stea
mship—”
“Not much of a passenger liner, perhaps, but she laid the great transatlantic telegraph cable!” The man blinked. “I’m John McWhirter, from The Argus, Mr. Brunel. Where have you been all these years, sir? The public think you dead!”
The press. Of course the press would be here; they’d come on the train with the constables, to report the apprehension of the notorious outlaw Ned Kelly. But they had gotten far more of a story than they’d dreamed of—the dramatic siege, the unprecedented steam-powered armour, the spectacular explosion, and now the discovery of a celebrated engineer thought dead for twenty years.
As they bombarded him with questions, the reporters insisted that Goliath was his crowning achievement. “You’ll make millions, sir,” said the man from the Herald. “Every military on Earth will want a thousand of ’em!”
The idea was tempting—very tempting. To return to England, to see his sons and his wife’s grave, to reap the financial rewards that had eluded him in his previous life…a very attractive notion indeed.
But then Ike considered the consequences of such a return. To be the father of an army of those death-dealing machines? Just one had caused more carnage and destruction in a single hour than Ike had witnessed in the rest of his entire long life.
And yet, now that the principle had been demonstrated, the genie was out of the bottle. He couldn’t just go back into hiding.
Though patents were anathema to his engineering sensibilities, common sense told him there was only one thing to do.
“No, gentlemen,” he said, shaking his head, “I will return to England, but only to patent Goliath and all the innovations that made it possible, licensing them for peaceful purposes only. I will do all I can, in whatever years remain to me, to prevent any such machine from ever being used to harm human beings again.”
The reporters clamoured questions. “But surely,” one of them shouted, “not even the great Brunel can prevent progress in the machines of war?”
Ike held up a hand for silence. “The way will not be easy, I admit. But today I have learned that the Great Eastern recovered from the disaster she suffered on her shakedown cruise and went on to serve mankind in another capacity.” He drew himself up to his full five-foot-four. “If a steamship can reform herself and change the world, then so perhaps can her builder.”
David D. Levine is a lifelong SF reader whose midlife crisis was to take a sabbatical from his high-tech job to attend Clarion West in 2000. It seems to have worked. He made his first professional sale in 2001, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002, was nominated for the John W. Campbell award in 2003, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Campbell again in 2004, and won a Hugo in 2006 (Best Short Story, for “Tk’Tk’Tk”). A collection of his short stories, Space Magic, from Wheatland Press, won the Endeavour Award in 2009. In January 2010, he spent two weeks at a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert, which you can read about at bentopress.com/mars. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Kate Yule, with whom he edits the fanzine Bento (BentoPress.com). He also has as story forthcoming in John Joseph Adams’s anthology The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination.
Field Test
Michael A. Stackpole
The UAV cockpit was almost finished with its warmup sequence, and Major Sarah “Mock” Ashton fought her rising annoyance. Just as she would do the walk-around on any plane she was going to be piloting herself, she preferred to start up her Unmanned Aerial Vehicle station and personally make sure everything loaded. My bird, my responsibility. I don’t want screw-ups.
A slender young man turned toward her as she entered the room and at least had the good graces flinch from her glare. “I signed you in.”
“I see that.” She brushed past him. “Where’s Trask?”
“Mr. Trask is, um, tasked with another assignment. I’m Frost. He gave me this, to run, you know.”
Oh, he must hate you a whole bunch to let me take your mission cherry. She slid into the command chair. “Does this mean my suspension is over?”
“Major Ashton, Mr. Trask said that you were the last person we wanted on this mission.” Frost glanced nervously at his tablet computer. “Works out, you really are the last person who could.”
She wanted to snap off some quip that would sting him, but Frost had that eager-to-please puppy-dog anxiety that she normally loathed. The fact that she’d actually been called in meant the situation was serious, so she decided to give him a break. “How black is this op?”
“I, ah, well…really, really black?” He glanced at the door, his head tucking down like he was expecting a cuff. “When you’re ready I’ll give you the brief.”
She slid herself forward and locked the command chair into position. Fingers flew over the keyboard, adjusting the UAV Flight Control System displays to her liking. She pulled on a headset and adjusted the microphone as the system worked through the handshaking that would let her drive a drone. “Spill it.”
“Support for a recovery op. At zero-three-three-zero hours local…”
He reached out to punch a button on her console, but she slapped his hand away. She punched the button, which parked a small picture-in-picture image down into the main display’s lower right corner. She touch-flicked it to a smaller auxiliary monitor. It blew up into a satellite image of a city on the coast of somewhere. The computer laid two colors over the image. Green dominated the eastern half, with a salient thrusting into the west. The western half had been colored red, and the two halves locked together like pieces of a puzzle.
A little gold star twinkled just inside the red zone, near the tip of the salient.
“That’s Zlitan, in Libya, you know, where—”
Sarah cursed under her breath. “I have cable, Frost.”
“Right. So green represents rebel forces controlled by Hassan Kayar, local tribal leader. He fought for Libya against Sudan, then fought for the Sudanese central government as a mercenary in the civil war—”
“No more History Channel.” Sarah poked the star and a tiny window popped up. “Twitpics, really? The Agency can’t do better than that?”
Frost looked crestfallen. “I was, um, trying for innovation, you know, showing initiative. That’s only twelve hours old.”
“Okay, good job.” You’re a virgin, I’ll be gentle. “What’s so important about Hotel Malta?”
“The Agency was developing some information—”
She laughed. “Agents got trapped?”
“Gaddafi’s forces proved more robust in their assault than we expected.” Frost chewed his lower lip. “Um, the guys there, at Langley—”
Sarah nodded. “You’re not leaving buddies in trouble. Got it.” She banished the hotel as her main screen flashed with the image that was mostly sky and just the hint of a destroyer’s fantail. She punched up the system diagnostics and frowned. “You’ve got me driving a Predator. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Trask said he wants less collateral damage than last time, Major.” Frost smiled weakly. “Really, all you have to do is act as eyes for our man.”
“Man? As in one man?” She shook her head. “What did we do, trade the Brits SEAL Team Six for James Bond?”
“Please, Major: launch. You’re five minutes to station.” Frost pulled on a headset, started pacing and glancing from his tablet to her screens and back. “I’ll keep tabs on the political situation and—”
“Yeah, eyes for our guy. Got it.” Sarah settled her right hand on the flight controller, punched the engines up, then eased her joystick back as the Predator drone shot into the sky. It responded to controls very well, despite the fact that they had to travel from Nevada up to a satellite, across to another and back down. The Predator, with its payload of only two Hellfire missiles, flew easy. She preferred its bigger brother, the MQ-9 Reaper, since it carried fourteen missiles and had much more powerful engines. Her problem, as Trask saw it, was that she liked using the missiles a bit too much.
She came in a kilometer above
the city. A small white star appeared on the tactical map, right at the port. She tapped it and one of the small communications displays lit up at the edge of her main screen, right above a glowing red mute button. She punched it, opening a channel. “Kane, this is Mock, orbiting above you.”
Static crackled though her earphone, then resolved itself into a bass voice. “Mock, this is Kane. You’ll put me on target, right?”
“I’m eyes only, but I do have a one-two punch if needed.”
“I’ll bear that in mind, thanks.”
The guy didn’t sound like a soulless Agency drone, which should have made Sarah feel better. It didn’t. Her having been recalled, coupled with Frost’s virginal jitters and Trask’s being AWOL, convinced her something wasn’t right.
Sarah brought the drone back around kicked the targeting camera on. She flicked it to a secondary monitor, then zoomed in on the docks. She was about to flick the white star up onto that monitor, when something disturbed the harbor waters.
I knew it. Trouble.
A thing emerged from the sea between two boats, water sheeting off it. From her angle she couldn’t guess its height, but it was moving on legs that bent back at the knees, like a bird. It had an ovoid body and two arms—the left ended in a pincer.
“Kane, you’re screwed. Head south fast. I’m not sure what I just saw come out of the sea, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want it on your ass.”
“You’re right, I don’t.”
“You have eyes on it?”
“Not really, but it’s okay.” Light laughter rolled through the radio. “You see, that is my ass.”
“You know Halloween isn’t for another five months.”
Francis Xavier Kell, nestled safely in the cockpit of the XMWP-1, couldn’t help smiling at the shock in Mock’s voice. “I wanted to be a pirate, but this isn’t Somalia.”
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