Shanghai Steam

by Calvin D. Jim

  “It’s not good, Mr. Williams,” she said, sweeping aside a tendril of hair. “The piston valves are worn, there’s a crack in the crosshead, and the lines are shot. We’re losing a great deal of pressure between the boiler and the motive servos. We must have copper tubing.”

  “Well, mum, er … Miss, you see, I’m afraid we haven’t got any copper—“ Williams began, then blanched with the realization.

  “Surely it hasn’t come to that yet?” he gasped.

  “I’m afraid so,” she said grimly. “We shall have to disassemble the distillery.”

  Williams groaned but Sir Claude waved him to it.

  At dusk, MacReedy closed the housing and wiped sweat from her brow. “Those leather corset straps should hold. Bring it up to pressure. Mr. Williams, are the reach rods from the eccentrics to the valve mechanisms disconnected?”

  “Yes, Miss!”

  “Warm the cylinders. When she’s ready, release the control rods and let the governor take over. Sir Claude — stand clear of that flywheel, please.”

  The machine coughed and sputtered, then gave way to a smooth rhythmic chugging, the dual walking beams plunging the pistons up and down evenly.

  “Steady at one-hundred RPM,” Mitchell called from the controls. “Pressure stable!”

  “Very good, Mr. Mitchell!” MacReedy said. “Let’s see if she’ll move.”

  “Aye aye, Ma’am!” The marine began turning hand wheels and opening valves. He crossed himself, double clutched, and put the mechanism into gear. “C’mon, Betsey,” he urged.

  The International Gun blew a great cloud of steam from its cylinder cocks, and slowly rose on its three crablike legs. Mitchell traversed the cannon and the machine took several steps. He gave a thumbs-up. Soon the crump of the Russian shells joined the noise of the defenders’ hodgepodge assortment of arms.

  “Well done, A. M.,” exclaimed Sir Claude, pumping her arm. “However did you learn to do such things?”

  “My parents own a tool and die concern near Boston. I practically grew up in the machine shop.”

  “Three cheers for Morning MacReedy!” shouted Williams.

  Only three months before, Morning MacReedy had accompanied several of the other American women in their finest silk gowns to a ball at the British Consulate. Polly Condit Smith leaned against a column in the ballroom, struggling to breathe in her corset of beaten copper, imported at great expense from France.

  “That thing is ridiculous,” MacReedy chided.

  “It’s the latest style,” Polly gasped.

  They took their champagne close to the lobby doors where Polly might get some air and were there when the Chinese delegation arrived.

  “That fellow is quite handsome, don’t you think?” MacReedy said, casting her gaze upon a tall man in the formal uniform of a Captain of the Imperial Guard. “What a striking figure.”

  “Perhaps,” Polly said. “For an Oriental.”

  “You are unkind!”

  “Then I dare you to dance with him.”

  MacCreedy hesitated. Polly grinned mischievously, and MacCreedy knew she had lost.

  “Excuse me, then,” she said, and made her way across the floor, leaving Polly’s giggles behind.

  “Good evening, I…” she faltered, for she spoke little Chinese. She knew this would happen. Oh, Polly had put her in it! One of the men said something in Mandarin and a number of them laughed. The Captain bowed and extended his hand.

  “If it will help, I speak English,” he said and they stepped comfortably into the string quartet’s waltz.

  “Li-Quiang Ping of the Imperial Guard,” he said.

  “Ann Margaret MacCreedy with the American consulate.”

  They danced and talked without pause into the late evening, and all else fell away from them. Polly was scandalized, which only added to MacReedy’s pleasure. As they danced, drifting among the other guests, bits and pieces of conversation about the Boxers intruded. Demonstrations. Missionaries and converts massacred in the countryside. Trains and merchant goods burned. She did not wish to spoil the mood of the encounter, but she couldn’t ignore what she knew they both heard.

  “What is your opinion of the unrest in the countryside?”

  “Many are concerned about foreign influences and intentions,” he said carefully. “They call themselves the I-ho ch’üan, the ‘Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists.’ Your colleagues have a name for them that I am unfamiliar with.”

  “Yes, ‘Boxers’. We have no martial arts of your kind, so to call a man who trains to fight bare-handed a boxer respects him as something other than a common brawler.”

  “Ah, but does China have the respect of the Western powers?”

  “I would think that East and West have a great deal to offer one another.”

  “Perhaps as individuals,” he smiled. “It is not my place to have a position on foreign policy. My loyalty belongs solely to the Empress.”

  There was a commotion in the street and much shouting. The music stopped and people went to the windows to peer outside.

  Rough men walked through the streets in small groups, their queues tied in red cloth and red ribbons on their wrists and ankles. They carried banners and were armed with spears and knives. They were screaming “Sha! Sha!”

  “What are they saying?” MacReedy whispered.

  “They are saying ‘Kill!’” Ping said. “‘Kill the foreign devils.’”

  Imperial troops restored calm and the Boxers were sent outside the city. Ping and MacReedy saw one another as often as possible in the next weeks, strolling happily through the plazas in the city. She rode in the sidecar of his steam-powered velocipede, and repaired the Stephenson linkage with a hairpin and rubber band when it broke down.

  It grew increasingly difficult to see one another. The army was unwilling or unable to prevent demonstrations and riots, and Ping was restricted more and more to the Forbidden City. The last time they saw each other before the siege, they picnicked among the clockwork zodiac animals outside the Temple of Heaven in Tiantan Park.

  The Boxers burned down the club at the racetrack and dragged Chancellor Sugiyama in his top hat and tailcoat from his carriage and hacked him to death in the street. Children danced and poked the corpse with sticks. The legations were reinforced with 400 troops from the coast. Finally, Manchu officers shot Baron von Ketteler on his way to the foreign ministry, and all pretense that the Empress Dowager wished to prevent violence was lost. Soon after, the legations were surrounded and the population within swelled with Chinese Christians fleeing massacre.

  The siege had begun.

  “I am prepared to address the Ministers,” announced the Empress Dowager Cixi in her personal chambers beneath the audience hall in the Imperial Palace. She sat upon the Dragon Throne, eyes fixed on her hologram of Queen Victoria as an intricate glass dome was lowered over the throne and secured. Sealed within, she was surrounded by a Faraday cage of the most exquisite copper thread embedded within the surface of the glass.

  Ping stood to the front of the Empress Dowager’s dais in the hall above, prepared to draw his sword at any moment. His eyes searched for threats among the two thousand assembled generals and officials. The provincial magistrates were, at best, under nominal control and a warlord like General Dong Fuxiang was at the edge of open defiance. His personal guards were stripped of weapons but were formidable warriors even open-handed. Ping suspected that they had additional arms hidden upon their persons; various gears and rods within their armored carapaces seemed sharper than needed for their pure mechanical function. The Imperial Guard danced a complex diplomatic dance in their efforts to protect the Empress Dowager, even within her own court.

  The ministers themselves were arrayed on the floor before the dais according to rank and influence. Each brain floated in a glass jar decorated with sacred animals, each repository ornate in proportion to the occupant’s status. The most ancient were relegated to the shelves lining the walls of the perimeter, their pallid co
rtices atrophied, their jars collecting dust. The jars buzzed, exchanging tense whispers through speaker grills. The week prior she had ordered several of the liberal ministers smashed upon the floor.

  The enormous chamber grew silent as the Empress Dowager’s hyperbaric dome rose up through the floor. Behind her was a device with the appearance of an impossibly complex pipe organ, and attendant eunuchs scurried to attach hoses to fittings. Commissioned from the Australian firm of Fincham and Sons, it fed a stream of incense, perfume, and opium into her chamber. Taoist monks evaluated her qi and adjusted the blend according to their alchemies.

  The Empress Dowager spoke.

  “We cannot consent to the incursions of the Westerners and their ideas. They would carve China up among themselves. Even if we prevent this, some virulent ideological notion from Europe or America may infect the people and it will be the end of our culture and of Manchu rule.”

  Her mask was a complicated array of cylinders and lenses that gave her the appearance of a spider with its many eyes. It clicked and whirred quietly as lenses swapped in and out to magnify or shrink objects within her sight, or to change a variety of colored filters.

  “We must employ all our powers in defense of the Qing Dynasty,” her voice thundered from columns of speaker stacks. “Let the army take control of the Society of Fists. We declare war against all foreign powers.”

  General Dong scowled with pleasure and Ping’s heart ached, but of his pain he permitted no sign. The ministers buzzed and hissed their staticky approval from within their dusty jars.

  A barrage of fireworks illuminated the rubble and charred timbers surrounding the legations. Constant gunfire harassed the besieged. Within the compound, Morning MacReedy sat in an open courtyard and watched the colorful bursts. It had been a long day spent repairing the water jacket on the Austrian Maxim gun. Afterwards, she had cut bandages from petticoats and helped fill sandbags sewn from curtains. The stench of smoke and of the unburied dead hung heavily in the air.

  Sir Claude emerged. He had been a lean man before the siege began, and was leaner still after weeks of rice and scant pony meat.

  “Champagne?” she offered. There was little water but there were still cases of the stuff.

  “We’ve managed a fine defense,” he said as he joined her.

  “No need to put on a good face on my account. The army seems content to volley rifle fire when they could overrun us. They send Boxers piecemeal with scavenged weapons and joss sticks to slaughter against the barricades. A focused bombardment and their cannon would transmogrify the whole district to dust and tears.”

  Sir Claude almost continued his effort to comfort her but thought better of it. He stroked his mustache, which he kept neat, but the mustache wax had run out. A trifle, but sometimes it was the little things that a man noticed.

  “I must confess, I didn’t know what to make of you at first,” he said. “No matter the outcome, it has been an honor to have served with you.”

  “Thank you Sir Claude. I feel the same.”

  They toasted as the Maxim gave forth another staccato burst and rockets shrieked through the August night.

  The Empress Dowager Cixi sat in her chambers upon the Dragon Throne. Without her mask, her eyes were brown and her face worn with fatigue and age. She watched as the Imperial Scholars frantically fed memorials into her qílín’s dragon mouth. It was impossible to keep up, and most were simply burned unanalyzed. The wheels and gears within the gold-scaled torso hummed and the engine scribed predictions with its tail upon scrolls. The qílín was kept under constant guard, lest members of the court sabotage its calculations.

  “Captain Li-Quiang Ping,” she said. “I have been manipulated and misled about our enemy’s strength and intentions, and now we face grave danger. The Eight-Nation Alliance has sent a relief column from Tianjin. Even now they approach our walls. I will order the evacuation of the Forbidden City and instruct the army to lift the siege, but General Dong is strongly against the foreigners. He will seek to cause whatever harm he can.”

  “I shall prepare for the evacuation,” Ping said.

  She shook her head.

  “I know that people think me very hard, and it is true. But I remember love,” she smiled. “Did you think I did not know? Protect her, Li-Quiang Ping. See that she is safe from Dong Fuxiang’s assassins until her countrymen arrive, and then return to defend us against our enemies both without and within our palace.”

  The shells fell heavily as Morning MacReedy ran to the American barricades atop the Tartar Wall with her tool belt. Massive stone fortifications surrounded Peking and the small section directly overlooking the legations had been held by a small contingent of Germans and Americans, separated from the Chinese by make-shift barricades.

  “That two-pounder is murder!” shouted a private after a shell smashed into the wall below, jarring their teeth. “We’ll all be killed!”

  “It’s their last chance to overwhelm us before the relief column arrives. We’ve got to hold on!” she urged.

  Another shell exploded on the wall close by and MacReedy shielded the exposed workings of the Colt with her body from the debris. When the dust had settled she reconnected the gas piston to the retraction mechanism with sewing machine parts. She tested the repair and the machinegun’s action cycled smoothly.

  “That’s got it!” she shouted, and watched anxiously as the soldiers fed a fresh belt of ammunition and began firing on the Chinese cannon emplacement.

  “We need more ammunition,” the sergeant yelled. “Six millimeter!”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and made her way back to the ramp leading down into the diplomatic quarter. Bullets hissed through the air and smacked off the stone around her. She could hear the sound of bugles and bagpipes drifting in the distance. The relief force was approaching.

  She caught movement in the corner of her eye. Dong Fuxiang’s personal guard swooped through the air on wings of black silk, leather, and bamboo, silently in the evening sky, illuminated by the fires below. They set upon the German barricade, and soldiers screamed and fell beneath a fusillade of magazine-fed darts. More approached the American barricade behind her. She screamed a warning but they could not hear over the bombardment and the hammering of the Colt. She ran toward them drawing her semi-automatic and fired at the assassins. Two fell, but a third discharged a static bolt gun and the soldiers collapsed in a smoking heap.

  MacReedy paused to reload when she heard a sound behind her. She turned and confronted one of the Gansu. This was no Boxer peasant believing himself magically protected from bullets, but a deliberate killer in armor both elaborate and malignly functional. He raised his arm, on which was mounted a brass hand cannon on mechanical shock absorbers. The assassin sneered, and as she scrambled to replace her magazine she found herself marveling at the cannon’s bore, which must have been at least 35 mm.

  “You would be thinking of the engineering at a time like this, wouldn’t you?” she thought as she realized that he would shoot first.

  In the moment when he should have fired, an arrow lodged in the barrel and his arm exploded in a shower of rods and gears.

  She looked back.

  Ping stood beyond the barricade atop the Tung Pien gate, bow in hand. He ran down the side of the tower, leaping from gable to gable in majestic strides, then over the downed Americans toward his countrymen. His sword sliced easily through a Gansu, who fell in a spray of blood, wheels, and springs. MacReedy slapped her magazine home and opened fire, her rounds slamming another assassin back between the crenellations and over the wall. In the space of moments, they stood alone, untouched by the gunfire all around them.

  “You’re safe, my lady,” Ping said, sheathing his sword.

  “You came for me.”

  “I could do nothing else,” he said, touching her soot-stained cheek.

  There was a loud roar, and they were joined by an American soldier in a forced-steam jetpack, who landed atop the wall in a billowing cl
oud. He pulled back his goggles to reveal the youthful face beneath.

  “Calvin P. Titus, Corporal, United States Army, Ma’am. We’re here to rescue you,” he said, and all three exchanged handshakes.

  “Duty demands that I return to the Empress,” Ping said sadly.

  “I know. Will I ever see you again?”

  “Who can say in these times?”

  They kissed, for the first and last time, and the entire city shook. With a thunderous rumble the Imperial Palace began to rise, a massive cloud washing over the Forbidden City and Peking.

  “Fellah, I believe your ride is leaving,” Titus said. “I guess maybe you better borrow this contraption.” He shrugged the leather harness from his shoulders and extended the jetpack to Ping.

  “You are generous to an officer of your enemy,” Ping said.

  “Enemy?” Titus winked. “Well, then I guess I must have mistaken you for somebody else.”

  Ping flew away and Morning watched long after he vanished somewhere into the pagodas of the Imperial Palace. Bursts of fire reflected off the golden roof and pink walls as it gained altitude, massive vents below belching smoke and flame. It yawed slightly, and slowly accelerated to the west, fleeing the British gunships floating over the horizon toward them.

  She knew that she would never see him again.

  * * * * *

  In his other life, K. H. Vaughan is a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and refugee from academia who has taught, published, and presented professionally on a variety of topics, most related to forensic psychology and methodology. An avid sports fan, he is past chair of the Science Committee for the Society of American Baseball Researchers. He lives in New England with his wife and three children.

  The Master and the Guest

  Crystal Koo

  They sit under the brown tarp as the caravan shakes from the dirt rocks underneath. The conversation earlier, made tepid by their shock, has died into a murky, distracted silence.

  This is his first time trying to sleep in a body physically not able to. Wood for muscle, steel for bone. The events of the last few days pass behind his shuttered eyelids. Memories leave their places and come scraping toward him, separated only by thin lights that wave back and forth. His skin being shred off, his bones dislocated, his organs imploding, smoke filling every cavity in his body. Ribbons of tendons snap and muscle comes off in strips, swathes of nerves tear away from his spine, and somewhere in the back, the sound of forge welding. Below the sound of someone’s screams, a hammering like a low-voiced, workman’s chatter. Interrupted sensations — pain, the blackness of hatred, his terror — hang in the charged air, phantoms of his breath, his energy, flowing from his butchered carcass to the wooden coffin they’ve prepared for him, one conduit to another.