Shanghai Steam

by Calvin D. Jim

A spectacular fiery plume leaped from Ai Ouyang’s mouth. The plume shot through the darkness in a blinding arc toward the oncoming steam engine. The buildings and walls around the tracks danced in the flash of orange-gold light.

  Ai Ouyang’s lungs pushed flaming air out toward the Celestial Empire until he nearly fainted.

  The train’s whistle, followed by its brakes, was the shriek of a living thing. Ai Ouyang listened for the sound of pain. When it drew breath and redoubled its cry, the Celestial Empire’s whistle sounded even more alive — and triumphant.

  Ai Ouyang stopped to inhale. The plume of fire vanished.

  Throwing the torch aside, he grabbed the woman’s hand and pulled her behind him as he ran, catlike, up the stack of wooden crates.

  From the top of the crates Ai Ouyang and the woman watched the steam engine slide to a halt. Lanterns dipped and flashed in the twilight as the driver and brakeman jumped from the train and searched for the source of the fire. After several minutes, the lanterns climbed back into the engine’s cab. The train puffed and wheezed to life. It pulled away, toward Shanghai.

  “It was beautiful,” the woman said quietly.

  Ai Ouyang threw the gourd onto the tracks. The sound of it smashing to pieces was the smallest of consolations.

  The hero Ai Ouyang disappeared for six days.

  On the seventh day the woman received a message:

  I have the answer. Meet me near Shanghai Station before the first train tomorrow.

  It had been eight days since Ai Ouyang’s last attack on the Celestial Empire. They both knew this would bring luck.

  The April sun rose on Hero Ai Ouyang standing in the tracks of the Woosung Railway, on the spot in which another man had been killed.

  Ai Ouyang held no weapons, not even a drinking gourd. His arms rested loosely at his sides and his hands were empty.

  His skin was a deep reddish-brown, the color and consistency of dried blood. He had slicked his long black hair and his clothes with oil and rubbed them thoroughly with the same bloodlike substance. Against the stain, the pale pink of his fingernails and the whites of his eyes shone.

  When the woman arrived and saw him, she gasped. “You’ve been beaten!” she cried.

  Ai Ouyang smiled. His teeth gleamed white. He shook his head.

  Ignoring taboo, the woman reached out one finger and touched his sleeve. Powder and oil smudged her finger. When she raised it to her nose, she smelled bitterness mixed with iron.

  “Rust?” she asked.

  Ai Ouyang nodded. His smile broadened. “I had a dream two nights ago. I stood here on the tracks. In my hands was a weapon like a sword, but much heavier. It burned my fingers like fire when I tried to lift it. I looked down. It was a bucket of water.”

  At their feet, the steel rails chattered against one another.

  The whistle of the Celestial Empire blew long and steady from a distance away.

  “Though I couldn’t see him, I could hear the voice of my master, the Seven-Clawed Tiger.” Ai Ouyang gazed down the tracks. “He said ‘only water can defeat this dragon. Water will put out its fire and turn it to rust. Become rust. Let it fill your mind. If you feel fear, let the rust eat it away.’”

  The woman and Ai Ouyang heard brakes screeching as the engine began to slow.

  Ai Ouyang extended his arms and raised his hands, palms out, fingers together, as if pushing the train back to Shanghai by himself.

  “I lifted the bucket,” he said. “It weighed almost nothing. I tipped it. When the water splashed out, everything it touched turned to rust. The tracks. The gravel. Even the grass. Then I knew what I had to do. I raised the bucket over my head and poured. The water was warm, thick, like fresh blood. My fear was gone. I woke like this.”

  The woman examined the tip of her smudged finger. She opened her mouth to taste it.

  “No,” Ai Ouyang said sharply. “Don’t.”

  “Will I rust?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do when the train comes?”

  After a moment Ai Ouyang said, “I’m going to let it stare its own death in the eye.”

  “Please,” the woman said. Her voice was low and frightened. “Hero Ai. Don’t. It killed my brother. It’s going to kill you too.”

  The Celestial Empire’s whistle pierced the morning air.

  The train rocked to a stop about thirty yards from Ai Ouyang. The engine driver, a man with hair the color of egg custard and pink-sunburned skin, cupped his hands and shouted in English. They could not understand a word.

  The driver scrambled down to the tracks. He was followed by two more English-speaking men. From the cab a Chinese brakeman looked warily at Ai Ouyang but did not move. Nor did the passengers in the coaches, who were craning heads and necks out of the open windows to better see the disturbance on the tracks.

  The men circled Ai Ouyang, shouting in a mixture of English and Shanghainese.

  The hero stood without moving or speaking. His eyes were fixed on the Celestial Empire.

  Smoke rose from her smokestack as she stood, like a dragon chained, breathing steam. If she had been alive, the Celestial Empire would have raked the ground with her claws and writhed with fury.

  Historical Note: On August 3, 1876 in Shanghai, a man dressed as a soldier stepped in front of an oncoming steam train and was killed. The suicide ignited a political firestorm between Chinese authorities and diplomats from Britain. The train, called the Celestial Empire, was one of two engines on the first rail line built in China. The line was called the Woosung Railway and had been constructed by a British engineering firm to forge a commercial link under foreign control between central Shanghai and the Yangtze River.

  After the suicide, the taotai of Shanghai warned the public against riding the Celestial Empire and predicted that hundreds of men might follow the soldier’s example. The warning only increased public interest in the “fire dragon carriages.”

  In October 1877 the Chinese government bought the Woosung Railway from the British and shut down operations within 24 hours. The tracks were torn up and sold, along with the engines, to Formosa (now Taiwan) for use in a salt mine. For reasons unknown, the railway was never delivered to the mine, but dumped on a beach and left to rust, staining the water and sand the color of dried blood.

  Twenty years passed before another steam train ran in Shanghai.

  * * * * *

  Julia A. Rosenthal is a freelance writer and researcher in Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in Kaleidotrope and A Cappella Zoo and is forthcoming in an anthology from India-based Zubaan Books. She is working on a novel about the unsolved murder of King Edward the Martyr of England.

  Riding the Wind

  William H. Keith

  “Hey, Coolie! Yer wanted down in the bridge!”

  That hated nickname again. Sergeant John Coolidge sighed, handed his wrench to Li Kai, and made his way across the steel deck gratings between the towering masses of engine room machinery. Sergeant Boggs waited for him, hands on hips, face glowering.

  “Move it, Coolie. Get your lazy, monkey-lovin’ arse in gear!”

  “Yes, Staff Sergeant.”

  What could they possibly want with him in the bridge?

  At twenty-eight years of age, Coolidge was the oldest sergeant on board the airship Victoria Regina, with little chance for further promotion. He was American, after all, a colonial. Worse, however, both the British Army and the Imperial Airship Service frowned on any officer showing familiarity with the locals. Coolidge had lived in Hong Kong for six years, had learned to speak both Mandarin and Cantonese, and even studied guo shu … something the British Imperial authority always found suspicious, even sinister.

  He’d done it to increase his understanding of just what it was the British Empire faced in China. What he appeared to have achieved, however, was the complete stagnation of his military career.

  He followed Boggs down a long and narrow passageway. At the end, steel steps led down into the bridge,
though members of the Black Gang aft more usually referred to it as “the pit.” The Imperial Airship Victoria Regina was a full 912 feet long, with two main gondolas suspended beneath her immense envelope. The bridge was located within a secondary gondola at the airship’s chin, beneath the forward main gondola. The bulkheads were lined with large windows, slanted to allow the bridge crew to look both out and down at the landscape passing below. As he emerged from the ladder compartment behind Boggs, Coolidge blinked at the sudden explosion of light through those windows. Victoria Regina was cruising high above the forested ruggedness of the Dabie Mountains of central China, north of Wuhan.

  Colonel Albert Sutherland looked up from one of the bridge telescopes as he entered. “Ah, Staff Sergeant.”

  “Sah!” Boggs snapped, coming to rigid attention. The staff sergeant had served in the Raj, and his crisp execution of protocol showed it. “I have the individual you requested, Sah!”

  “Very good, Staff Sergeant.” Sutherland eyed Coolidge. “You’re Coolidge?”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!”

  “The Staff Sergeant tells me you know something of the wogs and their ways. Have a look, here, and tell me if this is something of theirs.”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!” Coolidge replied with sharp precision, but he wondered what the Colonel could be talking about. The telescope appeared to be trained aft on the airship’s keel … a long and narrow length of structural steel stretching from the bridge all the way aft to the lower stabilizer fin at the tail end of the immense vessel. Accessible from just behind the bridge and by ladder from both main gondolas, the keel possessed wire-rope handrails so that crew members could use it during landing evolutions. Structurally, of course, just as for a sea-going vessel, the keel helped hold the airship’s main structure rigid.

  The keel was supposed to be kept clear at all times, but there was something there, halfway aft and blocking the walkway. Peering into the eyepiece of the small, gimbals-mounted telescope, he tried to bring it into focus.

  A crate was lashed to the keel, its side marked with ideographs. A smaller metal box rested on top, with wires connecting the two.

  “What’s that woggish writing say?” Sutherland demanded.

  “The word on the side of the crate just reads ‘Canton,’ Colonel,” he said. “That smaller device … I’m not sure, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s one of those new Sakizou dry cells … a kind of electrical battery.”

  “I feared that was the case,” Sutherland said, scowling. “Damn and blast! An ID.”

  “An Infernal Device, yes, sir. There will be a timer of some sort inside the larger box, which probably contains explosives.”

  “We have saboteurs on this vessel. Mr. Markham! Sound general quarters!”

  “Yes, sir,” a lieutenant nearby said.

  “Staff Sergeant! We need to get rid of that … device before it damages the ship. I need a volunteer.”

  “Coolidge!” Boggs rasped. “You just volunteered.”

  “None of that, Staff Sergeant,” Sutherland said sharply. Behind him, an electric bell rasped out the alarm. “This is for volunteers only.”

  Coolidge licked his lips. The prospect of going out on that narrow walkway to disarm a saboteur’s bomb was not a pleasant one.

  On the other hand, neither was it pleasant to imagine what would happen if that device exploded before someone else could get out there and disarm it.

  “I’ll go, sir,” he said.

  “Eh? Good man. The assassins may be watching it. Markham!”

  “Sir!”

  “Issue this man a side arm and a knife.”

  “Sir!”

  “We’ll be watching from here, Mr. Coolidge,” Sutherland told him. “We will have marksmen here to cover you.”

  Coolidge gauged the distance to the bomb by eye. “That’s a good two hundred yards, sir. I hope your men are very good shots.”

  “None of your lip, Coolie,” Boggs said. “Just get out there, cut those lashings, and heave that thing over the side!”

  Minutes later, Coolidge stepped out into the thin, cold wind, feeling the grating beneath his feet tremble with the pound of the airship’s mighty Daimler engines. The Victoria Regina was currently at an altitude of 7,000 feet, high enough that the air bit with each breath despite the fact that it was August. Below, green and torturous mountains reached for the great airship’s keel; some of those mountains rose, he knew, to over two thousand feet.

  But it still was a long way to fall.

  As he stepped out of the shelter afforded by the rear of the bridge housing, the wind caught him from behind, snatching at his hair and clothing. The Victoria Regina was cruising at her top speed of approximately forty miles per hour. Her enormous propellers on their masts extending to port and starboard roared as they drove the ship forward and added to the swirling wind. Gripping the cables to right and left, he continued his long walk aft. The steel keel seemed to stretch on and on forever, but at last he was almost there.…

  Ahead, well beyond the bomb, he saw a figure step down from the aft ladder and begin moving toward him from the airship’s stern.

  He couldn’t tell details at that distance, but the figure wasn’t likely to be a friend. It looked like one of the Black Gang coolies. After a moment’s hesitation, Coolidge sheathed the knife and reached for his side arm, a heavy .445 Webley revolver. He turned to look back, wondering if Sutherland’s marksmen were in place yet … and only narrowly dodged the sword sweeping toward him.

  The sword, a peasant ni wei dao, sliced through the starboard-side rope railing and Coolidge’s attacker was momentarily off-balance. Where the hell had he come from? Coolidge lunged forward, slamming into the smaller man, pinning his sword arm against the other railing. The man, Coolidge now saw, was Ma Bin, one of the Black Gang coolies, and evidently a Boxer as well.

  Coolidge tried to raise his pistol, but Ma fired off a snap kick that caught Coolidge’s wrist and sent the heavy Webley spinning out over the railing and into the empty sky below. With his sword arm now free, Ma lunged.

  In response, Coolidge twisted and snapped a roundhouse kick that slammed into Ma Bin’s chest, knocking him to the side. Coolidge kicked again, higher this time, and Ma pinwheeled wildly for a second, losing his sword, then losing his balance as he gabbed for the rope railing he’d cut just moments before … and missed. With a shrill wail he went over, falling through the gap in the railing and hurtling into emptiness.

  A second coolie advanced behind the first. They’d come down onto the keel, Coolidge now saw, by way of the ladder from the forward gondola. Coolidge dropped into the xi shi, the empty-leg stance, all of his weight on his bent right leg, his left leg forward, lightly — “empty” — resting on the toe, hands extended and in line with his nose and forward knee. The second attacker stopped in mid-rush, eyes widening, as he saw Coolidge’s guo shu stance and realized had happened to his comrade.

  Gong fu. The term translated, roughly, as “achievement through great effort.” Coolidge had been studying gong fu for five years, now — specifically lung ch’uan, the southern dragon style.

  His interest had been sparked by the various nationalist movements within the Qing Empire of China — especially the Yi He Quan, the Fists of Righteous Harmony, a secret society better known in the West as the Boxers, a name invented by some of the local missionaries. The Boxers practiced various wu shu forms, and, like the Ghost Dancers of the American West, claimed supernatural invulnerability to foreign weapons through diet, chants, wu shu training, and belief. Superstitious nonsense, of course. Training, dieting, and chanting hadn’t helped Ma Bin learn to fly.

  The second man, Coolidge was pretty sure, was a coolie with the ship’s steward department, one of the boys who set the officer’s mess and cleaned up in the galley. He didn’t know his name; with fifty British airship personnel on board Victoria Regina, and perhaps thirty local workers — WOGS, or “Workers On Government Service” — it had been impossible to keep track of them all. He d
idn’t have a sword like Ma, but as he saw Coolidge’s stance, he dropped into a stance of his own — gong jian shi, the bow-and-arrow, right leg far out in front and bent, left leg almost straight with perhaps a third of his weight on the ball of the foot.

  And the other man, the first one Coolidge had glimpsed, would be coming up now behind him. Coolidge didn’t dare turn to look, but he could feel the vibration of the man’s feet as he pounded along the keel.

  Damn it, where were Sutherland’s marksmen? They must be watching from the bridge, must see what was happening.

  Don’t wait for them to help, he told himself. Find what you need within.…

  There were two basic approaches to guo shu. Where some schools stressed the need for exercise and conditioning, for sheer physical power in strikes and blocks, with an emphasis on the outer form, Dragon gong fu and some others stressed instead an inward approach … developing and raising the qi life force that coursed through the world. It was a difference most westerners didn’t yet acknowledge, much less understand.

  Coolidge drew in a deep breath, then let it hiss sharply on the exhale, a technique for channeling qi. Moving with the flow of energy, he crouched and twisted, lashing out with a kick against the steward as he spun to face the attacker behind. The first man shifted, avoiding the blow. Coolidge’s left hand snapped out, almost connecting with the second man’s throat. Blocked. He kicked, then spun again.

  During Coolidge’s early training, Sifu Hsu, his master in Kowloon, had stressed that one man was superior to two in any fight, because the one fought with a single mind, undivided. Unless these two were very good, their attack would be less than perfectly coordinated. The steward launched a roundhouse kick, his foot sweeping around inches above the railing. Coolidge blocked it with his forearm and snap kicked in return. His riposte was blocked as well, but Coolidge sensed the man was slightly off balance. He kicked again, this time aiming for a kneecap, and felt the crunch, heard the shriek as the blow connected. Twisting back again, he met the other man’s attack with clawed hands, twisting aside to avoid the hard-thrust heel of a hand.