He moved back up front to the leg levers and grasped one of them. They had to be operated by someone standing, and the viewing ports gave the operator a clear field of vision—so clear that Evan could see the stars, as bright as lamps themselves, thickly sprinkled in the western sky.
The behemoth was pointed toward the west. Where the Ambassador would have taken Gloria, if it was indeed she that the women had seen.
All intentions to sleep faded as his perusal of the chamber became sharper. More filled with purpose. The gauges that measured steam pressure indicated the engines were nearly cold. But again, the speed with which the behemoth had been pressed into action meant that here was steam technology much newer and more advanced than any he had yet seen.
Trust Meriwether-Astor to pour his engineering resources into a war machine instead of, say, an undersea dirigible or an airship. But perhaps they might serve his daughter now.
For the first time, Evan wondered if the studies of the mind had been a wise choice for a student anxious to make his mark in the fields of science. Such study had certainly not done him any good, if the many nights he had dined on hardtack and cheese because he could not find a patron interested in his abilities were any indication. And his wealthiest client, who had kept him in roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for months, had turned out to be a criminal and a traitor, tricking him into nearly killing his cousins Lizzie and Maggie.
Well, he had come to the Americas to find a way to make reparation for that error in judgment, hadn’t he? If rescuing Gloria was not that way, he might as well climb down, invite the coyotes to dinner, and be done with it.
He took a deep breath of gear oil–scented air and filled his lungs with determination. Then he bent to the gauges, checked the coal and kerosene levels, and began the ignition sequence. The engine was not the Daimler he had become familiar with aboard Swan, but one manufactured by Gloria’s company. The principles of operation were the same, however, whether one was dealing with a steam landau, a locomotive, or a war machine that the world had never before seen.
The pressure gauges responded, the needles tilting out of the blue, into the yellow, and finally into the orange, where they held, waiting for the action on his part that would release the steam pressure into motion. It was borne in upon him rather belatedly that he only had one chance to do this properly. One error in the timing of the levers’ movement and the behemoth would topple over on its massive face, killing him. He must keep it in motion, turn the wheel to change its direction, and be prepared to adjust the length of its stride so that it did not plunge into an arroyo and pitch him forward to his death.
No wonder the crew had looked so frantic. Had they had much training before they were thrust into battle? And there had been four of them at least, not including the gunner. He was only one man.
You have the brains of two men, one of his professors at the University of Edinburgh had told him. You’ll do well in medicine and mental science—but you would do better in mechanics, my boy.
He should have listened.
But if he had, he would never have met his cousins, and through them, Alice and Lady Claire and Gloria. If he survived this and rescued the woman he admired, he would make changes.
But first things first.
He saw now why the levers floated on their truss. If one imagined the legs below, picking themselves up as they moved forward, the way a human did, one would have to build them this way. He grasped the rightmost lever and slowly lifted it as he moved it forward.
Nothing.
The behemoth stood, leaning on its rightmost arm, the pilot’s chamber level. It clearly possessed an assembly that allowed it to swing to level while at rest. Of course. He smacked his forehead.
“One straightens up before one takes a step, Evan, you idiot.”
What he wouldn’t give for Maggie or Lizzie’s assistance right now! Or Benny Stringfellow’s. The lad knew his way around an engine. Jake, he rather suspected, thought Evan was only a little short of useless, but he would welcome help from that quarter even if it were accompanied by silent disdain. But Evan was alone, and he would do this. Gloria’s life depended on it.
A push lever marked Vertical proved to be the solution. Slowly, steam pressure fed itself into the behemoth’s metal muscles and tendons, and the chamber swung into position once more as it straightened to full vertical. A switch marked Cannon Housing bent the arms and pulled them flat against themselves, much in the manner of a housewife expressing alarm at the sight of a mouse.
Once again, he activated the leg levers, and this time, the world in the viewing port rocked from side to side as the behemoth lifted its foot, took a single step forward, and paused.
“Left foot.”
Rock. Forward. Pause.
“Right.” Rock. Forward.
Oh, no, no, no. Mistake!
The behemoth’s foot slid into a hidden arroyo. It wasn’t deep, but just enough to throw off its forward momentum. The monster wobbled—creaked—tilted—
His heart kicked in his chest and with the jolt, Evan realized that his own body was creating the solution—bending his knees to recover his balance.
All his focus lay on the ground below, all his senses funneling down to balance and touch. He grasped the vertical lever to redistribute the torso’s weight, and bent the rightmost leg. It was utterly eerie to feel the machine respond and repeat his actions of a moment ago, saving itself in the process.
Rocking slightly, the behemoth regained the vertical. Evan did not, until his heart stopped pounding and he could breathe again.
“Left,” he croaked, as much to reassure himself that he was still alive as anything else. “Right. Pick it up, out of there. Yes, that’s it.”
His chest felt tight, and he hauled in a deep breath before he caused himself to faint. But he could not stop. He must keep going—only much more carefully this time.
“Left. Right. That’s it, you beautiful monster. Left. Right.”
In an astonishingly short time, he had left behind the valley, the promontory, and even the twisted and burned remains of the spur. The thing’s stride had to be twenty feet long—he felt a little like Jack up the beanstalk, riding on the shoulder of a giant. But as holes in a pasture could be a horse’s undoing, so could the weathering of the landscape be that of this machine. While it had running lights powered by electricks in its arms and legs, the light was not cast very far ahead, so he must be vigilant.
On the other hand, what in all this unfriendly country was as level as a lawn and always provided the shortest distance between two points?
The railway.
Why could he not follow the railway tracks, with their artificially level ground? The difficulty there would be to get the machine out of the way if a freight should come along, before it frightened the engineer and brakemen half to death. For they would certainly tell everyone they met what they had seen, and he had no desire for the news of his coming to reach the Ambassador’s party before he did.
He had never known before the relief that a workable plan provided. Evan slowed the machine as the switch gleamed in the running lights. A few minutes of experimentation with the turning wheel revealed that for each degree of movement of the wheel, the hip assembly would turn exactly the same amount. So one could not simply spin the wheel and hope for a looping turn, but must remember that metal responded in increments, unlike flesh.
Before long he was striding westward—awkwardly, hesitantly, but definitely striding—along the main line, not on the rails or ties, for they would be crushed beneath the weight, but to one side of them, where the ground had been leveled in preparation for laying the iron. Where there were hills, they had been blasted through, and where there were arroyos, gravel banks had been reinforced with iron to form bridges. And as he went, he spotted darker masses of rock in the starlight that might serve as camouflage if he had to abandon the track—which he would have to do soon, in order to get some rest.
He traveled until his ey
es began to close in spite of himself, in spite of his urgency to catch up to the locomotive. He must stop, for he would be of no use to Gloria if he fell asleep and the machine walked itself off course and fell face down in a canyon.
A mile or two in the distance, a light winked on. The midnight freight from Santa Fe, perhaps, cresting a hill and coming toward him? The one that Lorraine had said she was going to jump when it slowed for the switch?
Regardless of its destination, he must not be seen. He forced himself to breathe calmly and turned the behemoth off the line, moving slowly and carefully despite the growing size of the oncoming locomotive’s lamp. Several hundred yards away lay an outcropping of rock. He brought the behemoth closer, until he realized that the rising ground was more of a danger to him than the safety provided by the rocks.
So, he would become a rock himself, in the darkness.
He reversed the process he had begun hours before, tilting the torso forward and lowering the arm to form a tripod, that most stable of ancient configurations. By the time he had assured himself that he would not tip over and turned to shut down the boilers, the freight had gone by in a thundering rumble, ragged clouds of steam torn from her stack with the speed of her going.
She did not so much as slow to acknowledge the presence of an oddly shaped rock formation off to the north, nor stop to investigate in the dark. She had a destination and a schedule to keep—and, Evan supposed, would soon have a few more unticketed passengers to boot.
Silently, he wished Lorraine and her girls well, before he ate a little of his cheese and an apple. Then he found a piece of canvas to roll up under his head for a pillow, and made himself as comfortable as he could on the metal grille that formed the floor of the pilot’s chamber.
Like a bird in an iron eyrie, he thought with a combination of exhaustion and satisfaction, as the wind whistled through the behemoth’s legs and arms and he pitched into sleep.
CHAPTER 15
Dear Captain Hollys,
It is my sad duty to inform you that Captain Chalmers was wounded during a battle with the Californio forces at Resolution. She took a bullet to the shoulder and the doctor at the fort here in Santa Fe done his best, but he wasn’t too happy with us for taking so long to get her here. He ought to try flying an airship with only half a crew.
Jake told me to mind my own business—that the captain wouldn’t like me writing this, but the Lady taught me the difference between right and easy, and I thought you ought to know. You can come or not as you choose. But some things got to be said, no matter what Jake thinks.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Stringfellow
Gunner 2nd Class, Swan
L ady Claire Malvern smoothed the crumples out of the stained, blotted letter and folded it tenderly, as though it were the collar of a favorite child. She handed it back to Ian Hollys.
“Of course you are going to her, Ian—though it concerns me that Benny does not specify whether Alice is living or—never mind. Will you take Athena?”
Ian knew what it cost her to offer her personal vessel for such a long, uncertain journey—a ship that was such a part of her it was difficult to think of it and Claire separately. But the fact that she made the offer without hesitation told him volumes about her regard for Alice, and also her fear. The fact that she was not offering to go—that she acknowledged it was not her place, but his—told him volumes more.
He tucked the letter into the pocket of his tweed jacket. “I am so ashamed.”
Andrew looked up from the fire, which he was poking into a blaze against the January cold. Not that Carrick House was cold. But the snow was blowing horizontally past the windows and the iron gray of the clouds sulking over Wilton Crescent suited Ian’s mood perfectly. “Why should you be ashamed, man?”
“I cannot forget our last conversation.” His heart hurt at the thought of it. “She asked me to go with her, and I told her I had to see to the estate.” Sinking into a chair whose very comfort seemed to mock him, he said, “What a fool! How could I have put such concerns before the safety of the woman I love?”
“That is not the way I remember it at all,” Claire said briskly. “You offered to come and she laughed and told you she’d been sailing the skies long before you ever met. Which was true then, and is true now. We all knew the journey had its risks, especially with her letter saying she was going to Resolution to stop that train.”
“I should have lifted the moment I received it.”
“We all should have done things that we realize only in hindsight,” she told him more gently. “The question is, what are you going to do about it now?”
“I must go to her, of course. But I cannot crew a ship alone, and I will not ask the two of you to take me in Athena, when you have barely been married a month.” Claire’s mouth opened in protest, but he hurried on. “How long do you imagine it will take if I purchase a berth on Persephone, and then the train from New York to Santa Fe?”
“Too long,” Andrew said, the voice of experience. “That is a fortnight’s journey, in the best of circumstances. And travel in the winter is not what I would call the best.”
“What of the Dunsmuirs?” Claire said. “If you will not have us, their ships ply the air constantly between continents. Mightn’t you find a berth on one of them?”
He looked at her in admiration, amazed he had not thought of such a thing himself. “You are quite right. I will send a tube to Hatley House at once.”
“They are joining the Queen and the Prince Consort at Balmoral soon—I would not waste any time. Davina says the men will be stalking some sort of poor creature over the hills, but I think in actuality they will all be enjoying Scots whiskey while she and Her Majesty confer about the Californio problem.”
“I do not understand how that involves England,” Andrew grumbled. “It is for the colonials to sort out.”
“I believe the difficulty lies in the thirst for gold,” Claire said. “After the discovery of gold to the north fifty years ago, it is a miracle the western territories of the Canadas were not annexed at that time, Davina says.”
“Why does it concern Her Majesty now?” Ian wanted to know. “She has enough to do managing the empire she already rules, does she not?”
“I think the unmasking of Gerald Meriwether-Astor as a threat to the peace of the empire’s borders may have revealed this new danger to her,” Claire said. “When Maggie brought us the information about Sydney Meriwether-Astor’s plans on Twelfth Night, little did we think that it would cause such ripples in Whitehall and Buckingham Palace.”
“Does she mean to send ships to defend the borders?”
“I am not privy to that information,” Claire said primly. “But Davina let something slip the other day that caused me to believe the Walsingham Office had been rather busy.”
Which was a veiled way of saying that someone had kicked the anthill inhabited by Her Majesty’s network of spies. “I do not want Alice mixed up in English politics,” he said grimly. “I do not want her away from my side at all.”
“You may find that difficult to accomplish once she has recovered.” He noticed that Claire resolutely took the optimistic view—that in assuming Alice was still alive, it would prove to be so.
Silently, he prayed for the same. “I know. But while she is injured, my place is to care for and protect her. May I commandeer a piece of paper and a tube? A missive from Wilton Crescent might be read faster than one from Hanover Square.”
Claire did not comment further, for which he was grateful. She simply supplied him with brand new monogrammed stationery and a pen.
John—
I must beg your assistance. Alice has been injured and is at present in a hospital in Santa Fe. If one of your airships were to pass within a thousand miles of that place, I would be most grateful to be aboard it. I must go to her at once.
Ian
A tube came back before Andrew had even poured him a second glass of sherry, the brass cylinder dropping into the cham
ber in the wall with a pneumatic hiss.
Dearest cousin Ian,
Of course you must go, and take dear Alice our fondest wishes for her speedy recovery. Lady Lucy and her crew are at your disposal for as long as you need her. She is moored at Hampstead, crewed and ready. John will inform Captain Yau of the change in plans.
We will fly to Balmoral in another ship, and then return to London for my confinement. You could be in the Americas until spring, for John will not allow me to travel for some months after the baby is born. He is a dear to fuss, but I confess I will enjoy being at Hatley House for more than two minutes together.
Do not worry for Alice. She is a strong woman, one who is your equal in every way. I cannot wait for the day when we can claim her as our cousin, too. When are you going to set a date? May is a lovely time of year, is it not?
With my love,
Davina
* * *
TIME HAD LOST ITS MEANING, swirling in a miasma of fever dreams and darkness and fear. And pain. Alice had had her share of bumps and breaks, but she had not realized that pain like this could exist—the kind that blotted out consciousness and reduced intelligence to a gibbering vacuum, begging only for relief.
A century ago she had slid beneath the waves and had not expected to surface again. Had hoped she would not, in fact, if it meant surcease from pain. But here she was, swimming slowly up through glimmering levels of awareness, like those poor convicts in their diving bells beneath the canals of Venice. Sunlight wavered upon her eyelids like the water in the weeds, and a sudden fear stabbed her that she was back in Venice—with a price on her head and no way out.
She opened her eyes. Was blinded, and flinching, squeezed them closed again.
Fields of Air: A steampunk adventure novel (Magnificent Devices Book 10) Page 14
