Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “My God,” he whispered. “Who did you tell?”

  Alice looked away, and in that instant, all the ambassador’s studied composure left him.

  “You stupid girl!” he shouted, seizing her by the shoulders. “Who did you tell?”

  But I already knew.

  “Let go of her,” I said. “Now.”

  He released her, and she shrank away. As he buried his face in his hands, she began gathering her things in silence. By the time I heard her close the door behind her, I was already out of the window and making my way down to the street.

  CHAPTER

  32

  SUREYNA WAS WAITING FOR me at the corner. She was not alone. Tanish was with her and, trailing shyly, adoringly behind him, was Aab.

  “You’re all right,” said Sureyna, relieved. I nodded, and something in my face got her attention.

  “I found your missing railroad car, Ang,” said Tanish, proudly.

  “I knew you would,” I said.

  “It’s owned by a company called Montresat,” he added.

  “But you already know,” said Sureyna. “Don’t you?”

  “Most of it,” I said. “I need one question answered and then…” I hesitated. “Then we finish this.”

  Again Sureyna studied my face and drew her own somber conclusions.

  * * *

  IT TOOK ME TWENTY minutes to find the house in Morgessa, which I had visited only once before, and it would have taken much longer than that if I hadn’t used the underground, much to Aab’s speechless delight. She had taken to practicing her sign language with her fingers and hands whether the people around her could understand her or not. Tanish had learned a few words, and they played games, ignored by the other passengers, while I thought it all through and Sureyna scribbled feverishly in her notepad. Once she looked up, considered the others, and said, “I hope you have other reinforcements in mind. The four of us give new meaning to the term ‘irregulars.’”

  I gave her a bleak smile but didn’t say anything. I was hoping there wouldn’t be any need for force, not from us, anyway. If there was, we’d lose, even with a dozen armed policemen to back us up.

  * * *

  TSANWE EMTEZU OPENED THE door himself. He had shed his dragoon’s tunic, but was still wearing his uniform trousers. He was surprised to see me, doubly so when, having stepped aside to invite us in, I shook my head.

  “I can’t stay,” I said. “I just have one question.”

  “What’s that, Miss Sutonga?” he said, stately and calm, so that Aab, reverting to her pre-Bertha self, took shelter behind Tanish, peering up at the soldier warily.

  “That morning you went to meet Clara after her interview,” I said, “you were in uniform. Had you just come off duty?”

  “Yes,” he said, thinking back. “Why?”

  “Am I right in thinking that you had been ordered to cordon off a burned-out building?”

  “Yes,” he said, more than a little amazed. “How did you know that?”

  “You had ash on your boots,” I said. “But not your trousers, which I assume means you didn’t actually go into the site.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “We were just to secure the perimeter as a matter of public safety. Didn’t want people wandering in and falling through burned-out floors or anything. What is this about?”

  “Who gave that order?” I asked.

  “It came through the usual chain of command,” he said, cautious now. “I was under the impression that it came from the War Office itself, though I believe the message was initiated by the cabinet secretary.”

  “Abel Rathbone.”

  “Yes,” he said, confused and a little anxious. “Is that not correct?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think it is correct.”

  “It seems that this is not good news,” he said, considering my face.

  I managed a half smile and shook my head.

  “Thank you for your help,” I said. “Oh. One last thing. Does the name Georgie May mean anything to you?”

  He smiled suddenly.

  “A friend of mine is a marine,” he said, “so yes. Georgie May is the slightly disrespectful name for what the rest of us call the Georgiana Maria, a heavy steam clipper, named after the late empress consort. She’s a trader with a small military complement.”

  Of course she is.

  “Thank you,” I said again.

  He watched me in the doorway, and for a moment I wanted to beg him to come with me, but I had put his career in jeopardy before, and I would not do so again, whatever the peril. I walked away feeling at least that I had done him a kindness, even if it was one he would never know to thank me for.

  “You’re going to the docks,” Sureyna said.

  “I’m going to the docks,” I agreed, not looking at her.

  “The oceanfront, right? Not the river,” she said. “A heavy clipper needs more depth. Do you know exactly where?”

  “No, but it’s a large freighter. Shouldn’t be hard to find. I believe she sails at midnight.”

  “I’m coming with you,” said Sureyna.

  “No,” I said, turning abruptly to her. “Go to Willinghouse. Tell him where I’ve gone. Have him meet me there in an hour and a half. Tanish, take Aab and go with Sureyna.”

  “What?” said Tanish. “Not a chance. I’m coming with you.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I did not have time for this.

  “No,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. You go with Sureyna. And look after Aab, you hear me?”

  The fierceness in my face drove all the swagger from him, and he managed only a nod.

  “Tell Inspector Andrews too,” I said, “though I suspect he may already have been summoned.”

  “What?” said Sureyna. “Who by?”

  I scowled, and a great dread knotted around my stomach like the chain of a huge anchor so that the last thing I wanted to do was keep walking forward.

  “Richter,” I said.

  * * *

  THE OCEANFRONT DOCKS NEVER really slept, but by the time I got down there, it would be about as quiet as it was likely to get. I crossed the river on the catwalk of the unfinished suspension bridge, past the work camp there, and pushed steadily southeast, making for Blackstairs, walking briskly, eyes scouring the darkness ahead. I could cut through the alleys of the Warehouse District or work my way along the riverbank itself all the way to the sea, but both routes were dangerous after dark, and I did not know the docklands skyline well enough to trust to my skills as a climber. I followed the railroad tracks south, then cut east to the docks proper at Stallings Junction, watching every shadow, listening for every paw or footstep, and I reached the deepwater jetties of the oceanfront with a swelling sense of alarm.

  There were half a dozen ships moored at the harborside, but only one was a bustle of activity in the dark. It was a massive vessel, iron-hulled and three-masted, with a pair of great slanted chimneys set fore and aft of an engine room which, in the absence of visible paddlewheels, had to drive screw propellers below the waterline. I climbed the ladder to the roof of the closest warehouse, whose huge front doors opened onto the harborside, and watched with my spyglass. By the light of four oil lamps suspended from spars, a half dozen dragoons with rifles were overseeing the loading of the ship: crates with rope handles carried by pairs of soldiers up a gangplank and taken to a hold belowdecks, while three much larger crates were being loaded by steam crane from a train of flatcars on a track that ran to the very brink of the quayside. Among the flatcars were a pair of open goods wagons covered with tarpaulin and a familiar container wagon marked with a stenciled yellow M.

  The refugees.

  If they were still in there, then they were to be shipped back where they had come from. I watched the crane move the last of the three large crates out over the water and onto the deck where it was chained in place. I’d recognized those crates before I spotted the lightning-fist brand. These were the strange metal superstructure and turrets I had seen at Ric
hter’s factory. They were coming from Montresat’s works, which meant that they had been fitted to whatever had been waiting for them. The letters painted on the sides said TRACTOR PARTS.

  I remembered the yellow steam tractors that had bulldozed the remnants of Horritch’s factory—and the people who had died in it—into the river and recalled Sureyna saying something about Montresat’s nonmilitary merchandise.

  He has another factory that builds agricultural machinery, but unless we plan on defeating our enemies by riding over them with steam tractors, I suspect that’s a blind alley.…

  It wasn’t a blind alley. I pictured those hulking, steam-driven bulldozers overlaid with the armored shell made at Richter’s foundry, and in my head I added a Firebrand machine gun to the front of each turret. The hair on the back of my neck rose, and a chill stole through my limbs in spite of the warm night. A terrible new weapon was being loaded onto that ship, a kind of mobile, bullet-spitting fortress, unstoppable by anything but the most powerful artillery.

  Watching the work were three men and a woman: Thomas Markeson, who provided the ship; Eustace Montresat, who provided the tractor and the machine guns; Nathan Horritch, who provided the fabric belts for those guns; and his enigmatic daughter, Constance, who provided … what? The inspiration? A cool head for business and secrecy? It was surely Constance who had manipulated silly Alice Welborne into diverting police attention away from Elitus as well as providing an open ear for whatever the Grappoli ambassador and his Heritage friends might be planning.

  Because that much was clear. I had mistakenly assumed that everything that had happened had been a single plot orchestrated by a prime villain—the theft of the plans; the deaths of Darius and Agatha Markeson; the moving, hiding and, ultimately, sacrificing of dozens of refugees; the far-right maneuvering on behalf of their racial allies, the Grappoli … all of it orchestrated by a single leader or organization. But it wasn’t. There were, I thought, three separate crimes that were related only tangentially, through overlap at a fashionable city club.

  Some of the details were still coming into focus in my head, but I was pretty sure now that I had a solid grasp on the main facts. One of the most important was right in front of me in the form of that great hulk of a ship, looming out of the evening fog that sat on the bay like a faded fur mantle. The Georgie May might be bound for Belrand, but those armed tractors would be dropped off en route, not to serve the Grappoli but to fight them. Some of the machine guns were already in the hands of the northern tribes or the drug cartels who were doing the bulk of that fighting, much to the ambassador’s chagrin. That was why the Grappoli advance had slowed drastically over the last week or so. Where they had previously met resistance only in the form of spears and hide-covered shields, the Grappoli’s imperial forces suddenly found themselves up against state-of-the-art weaponry supplied secretly, and in violation of the nonintervention treaty, by Bar-Selehm.

  I had wanted to know the truth, but now that I had it, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Indeed, even though I had alerted Willinghouse and Andrews, a part of me wanted to see the ship leave now before it could be stopped, to complete its journey and deploy its illegal cargo to stop the further extermination of the northern tribes by the Grappoli’s colonial war machine.

  But only a part of me. Because I also knew what was in the hopper car. The refugees had been shuttled back and forth in their misery and despair, from a war zone to a cramped and brutal factory to do the work no one in the city could know about. Had Constance known and condoned that particular horror in the name of a greater good? I wanted to believe she had not, though I didn’t know what difference that would make. For all the tension and anxiety I had been feeling, the dread of what would happen next, I found what I felt most deeply in this moment was a drab and weary sadness.

  The jib of the steam crane swung back to the railway siding, and one of the black longshoreman clambered onto the roof of the container car and stood there like a statue or a beacon, one hand upraised as the crane’s hook wound down toward him. He took it and began securing the cable harness that would lift the container off its truck bed.

  It was dark on the quayside, and the gas lamps were too far apart to make much impression on the night smog, creating smudged patches of yellowish gray among the shadows, so it took me a moment to realize that the laborer on the train car was not alone. A small brown figure was clinging to the side of the wagon, just out of his line of sight, balancing on tiptoes on a latch at the back, tiny hands gripping the bars which had been welded over one of the makeshift ventilation slots.

  It was Aab.

  The deaf girl had followed me. Too intent on where I had been going, and too caught up in the confused implications of everything that had happened, I had not noticed her, and now she would be caught, thrown in with the refugees, perhaps. Or worse. I looked desperately around but saw no sign of Tanish. Had she given him the slip, or was he here too, hiding in the shadows? I got to my feet, dimly aware of the way she was twittering with her fingers at whoever could see her inside the train car, and ran back to the ladder.

  Heart throbbing, I slid down to the ground and rounded the corner of the warehouse at an incautious dash. Under the thin glow of the gas lamp, I could see Aab, now squatting on the roof itself, gesturing repeatedly to the longshoreman who stood frozen in his task, staring at her. As I got closer—no more than fifty yards from the rail car now, but still hidden by the darkness that pooled around the warehouse—he hesitated, glanced around him, then stooped to the roof of the container. I was close enough to hear the creak of the panel as he unlatched and opened it. For a moment, he gazed down into the metal box, one hand over his mouth, just as I had done when I had stumbled upon them in Markeson’s barge. In that instant, I realized that he had not known what he was loading onto the Georgie May.

  He came up shouting in some Mahweni dialect, and others came flocking to the car, leaping up to the vents to look in, and then turning angrily on the huddle of white overseers.

  “Machinery!” yelled one in a bold, accusatory voice. “You said we were loading machinery. This vessel is not licensed for passengers. Your paperwork is void!”

  His fury came from something far deeper than irritation over a bureaucratic technicality.

  “That’s not your concern,” said Markeson imperiously.

  “The hell it isn’t!” the longshoreman roared back. He threw down the long-handled wrench he had been holding, and it clanged on the dockside like a bell.

  “Passengers?” said Constance. “What does he mean?”

  So she didn’t know.

  I felt it like relief, though I knew it would not help.

  “None of your concern, my dear,” said Horritch. “Migrants. Illegals. They have to go back now.”

  “Migrants?” she repeated, incredulous. “You were going to ship refugees back to that war zone? Where did they come from?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” her father said.

  “What?” she gasped. “How long have they been here?”

  “Who do you think did the work?” Horritch demanded, all paternal care for her evaporating as he turned on her. “Citizens couldn’t do it. Who knows who they would have told! This way we keep our costs down and serve the city in multiple ways. Several birds, one stone.”

  “You knew?” she asked, still struggling to catch up to what he was saying. “All along, you knew? What about when the factory burned?”

  “Casualties of war,” said Montresat.

  She put her hands to her mouth as if she might throw up.

  “I helped you,” she said, appalled. “I covered for you, spied for you, because I thought you were helping the refugees, equipping them against the Grappoli, but all the while you were no better than the monsters we were fighting against.”

  “Nonsense,” said her father. “This was never about the Quundu or the other tribes. We were fighting the Grappoli on behalf of the city.”

  But Constance was picking up her skirts an
d running down the gangplank to the train car. She found the main hatch padlocked and turned back to the ship, bellowing, “Open this at once!”

  Markeson spoke up, nodding to one of the remaining soldiers, who was uneasily watching the longshoremen, his rifle gripped tightly in his hands. “Move her off,” said the big man I had last seen at his wife’s funeral, “and have those men complete their orders.”

  As the dragoon moved warily down the gangplank, Horritch turned on the shipping magnate.

  “Leave her out of this, Markeson!” he snapped.

  “We should have. All the way out,” Markeson replied.

  Constance, meanwhile, had snatched up the longshoreman’s wrench and was now hammering the padlock wildly. The lock snapped and fell, but before she could get the hatch open, the soldier had jabbed her in the midriff with the butt of his rifle and she sank to the concrete of the dockside, wheezing. Her father shouted his outrage, but the soldier was too mindful of the longshoremen—at least half a dozen of them—who were looking mutinous. They were picking up what had been tools—boat hooks, crowbars, spanners—but were now weapons. Aab had dropped to the ground and was watching fearfully as the tension thickened like the smog, promising violence.

  Moments before, I had been half hoping the ship would set sail before the police arrived, but now I would have given anything to have Andrews and a squad of constables with me. The ship had to go, but it had to leave the refugees here, and it had to do so without costing any more lives.

  I stepped out into what passed for light on the quayside, unsure of what I was going to do beyond getting Aab out, but before I could make myself known to the deaf girl, I became aware of running feet and raised voices.

  The police!

  I turned, and for a second or less, I thought my wish had been granted. But then I realized that the uniforms were wrong. The alley behind me was full of grim-looking men in gray with red armbands, several of them armed with pistols and shotguns. At their head were Richter and Barrington-Smythe. The former slowed to a cockerel strut, strode past the longshoremen as if he hadn’t seen them, and pointed a long, pale finger at Markeson and the others.