The Guild Conspiracy

by Brooke Johnson

  “I see,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Well, then . . . Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the chair opposite his desk and waited until she obeyed before folding his hands in his lap. “What is it you would like to discuss?”

  “The war machine,” she said hesitantly. “I thought about what you said, and I—­” Her voice wavered as she looked into his eyes, smoldering with a dark intensity that once again reminded her of Emmerich. “I would like to remain here, at the University, rather than . . . the alternative.”

  “I see.” He rested his elbows on his desk and clasped his hands. “I must say I am pleased to hear it. The Guild needs engineers of your caliber.”

  “Yes, well, the thing is . . .” she continued. “I need time to come up with a design, to work out the necessary functions and corresponding mechanisms, and—­”

  “You have a week.”

  Petra blinked, the rest of her carefully rehearsed proposal evaporating in an instant. “A week? But—­”

  “You will present your war machine to the Guild council first thing Thursday morning,” he said, dropping his gaze to a leather calendar book atop his desk. He grabbed a pen and scribbled a note at the bottom of the page. “Should we find the proposal satisfactory, a team will be assembled, the design finalized, and we will begin work on the project immediately. In exchange, you may remain here and continue your studies.”

  She gaped at him, struggling to find her voice. “You haven’t even told me what you want me to build!”

  “A war machine, Miss Wade,” he said, glancing up from his desk with the patience of a viper. “You are to build a device for war.”

  “I understand that, sir,” she said evenly. “But I need parameters, requisites.” She scrambled to think, anything to give her more time. “For starters, I’ll need to know the basic functions of the machine, and there are financial margins to consider, physical limitations, materials . . . not to mention more time. You can’t expect me to design something like this in a week, not on my own.”

  Julian relaxed in his chair, regarding her with the ease of a practiced businessman. “A week is what you have,” he said, a tone of finality to his voice. “Perhaps if you had complied with my request sooner, you would have more time to design the machine you already promised me. But here we are,” he said, gesturing grandly between the two of them. “As for parameters, we require the design accommodate direct personal control by a soldier of the British Armed Forces. The remainder of the design specifics I leave to your discretion and to that of your engineering team.”

  “Direct control?” Her professional curiosity got the better of her. “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to control it remotely, using Emmerich’s wireless control apparatus?”

  “Perhaps, but the wireless technology used in the automaton project has not been developed to the degree that the Royal Forces requires, and it has proved too costly for the Guild to produce on a large scale, which is why we are in need of an alternative.”

  She stared at him, realizing what he meant. “You built them, didn’t you? The automatons.” A hollow laugh escaped her lips. “You tried to build your army, but you failed.”

  A muscle twitched in his jaw. “The failure was not mine. The design was inferior, too flawed for our purposes, so the project was scrapped. The responsibility for its failure lies solely on its engineer.”

  “Its engineer? Your son, you mean?” She scoffed. “Emmerich could have revolutionized modern science with that design. Instead, you used him to create a weapon.”

  “My son knew what he was building the day he signed his contract. Make no mistake. He knew. And in choosing to break his agreement, he failed me. You will not.” Julian leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “You have your parameters now. I suggest you get started on your design. Your proposal is Thursday.”

  She held her ground. “What you’re asking is impossible. There are too many variables to consider for a machine this complex, not least of all the secondary systems I’ll need to implement, many of which I’ll need assistance with. I don’t know the first thing about weapons or manual control interfaces. I need time to—­”

  “You will have a team of engineers assigned to the project to make up for such shortcomings,” said Julian, his voice sharp, final. “What we need from you is the overall design, the base mechanical construction. You have the most experience with designing mobile war machines and understand best how such a machine needs to function. Therefore this task falls to you.”

  “But—­”

  “You have until Thursday.”

  “And if I can’t finish it in time?” she asked, her voice rising.

  “You will. You are rather resourceful when you need to be.”

  Petra just stared at him.

  “Now go,” he said, waving her off. “We are done here.”

  She swallowed hard, the last of her arguments dissolving into silence as she rose from her chair and turned toward the door. Her mind whirled through a jumble of half-­imagined designs, trying to think of what she might be able to cobble together in a week.

  “One more thing,” he said amiably, masking his words with the feigned politeness she so despised. “The arrangement I previously proposed still stands. Defy me, try to delay this project any further, and it will be the end of you.”

  She hesitated at the door, her throat suddenly dry. Slowly, she turned around and met his smoldering copper stare, her chin set, not daring to quail under his gaze. “Understood, sir.”

  “Good.” He smiled pleasantly then, his casual handsomeness lighting a fire in her stomach. “Then I look forward to hearing of your progress. Do keep me updated, Miss Wade.”

  She nodded curtly. “Of course.”

  When he said nothing else, she took it as her signal to leave. She clenched her hands into fists. A week! How could he expect her to come up with a workable design in so little time? And if she failed . . .

  She pushed through the door to the stairwell and leaned against the wall, kneading her brow. She’d have to come up with a design—­and fast.

  There was no time to panic.

  Petra stood over the drafting table in her hidden subcity office, a dozen nonviable war machine schematics littering the desk and floor, the designs crude and uninspired. She stared at the crumpled paper in her hand, anger rippling down her arms. She didn’t want to build this. She didn’t know how.

  Yet Julian had given her a week to deliver a completed design.

  She didn’t even know where to start.

  Because of the war machine’s requirements, any remnant of the automaton was useless. The new machine couldn’t be powered with clockwork or controlled remotely, which meant she would need to increase the internal cavities of the machine to house the pilot and controls. And accounting for the added size and weight of an engine, the leg frames would need to be much larger in order to support the additional weight and maintain stability. While balancing the machine with automatic gyroscopic adjustments was ideal, the technology was still in its infancy. Yet relying on manual compensation risked human error. She focused on her notes, absently tapping her pencil against the desk. Perhaps the potential danger of tipping the machine could be reduced if she designed a regulating feedback system to inform the pilot to manually adjust the machine as needed, but that would require a complex system of weights, levers, gyroscopes, and wiring to manage.

  And that still left the matter of her sabotage.

  She’d be damned if she gave Julian the designs for a fully functional war machine—­not without a backup plan.

  With sufficient time, she might be able to do it—­the complete design, the sabotage, the subterfuge to hide her treason. In fact, she was certain she could. But to design all of that within a single week, to present a buildable design to the council by Thursday, was next to impossible.

  But tha
t was the deadline given to her.

  She stared at the three sketches in front of her—­a big, hulking beast with stout arms and widely spaced legs, a four-­legged contraption with a swiveling control cabin, and a towering machine with jointed legs. There were too many possibilities, so many different ways she could build this war machine, and so many reasons she shouldn’t.

  She chewed on her lip. Rupert was bound to show up soon, and she’d have to put her war machine schematics away so that they could work on the mech. Part of her welcomed the distraction, but she also knew that if she didn’t finish the concept for the war machine in time for her proposal next week, she wouldn’t have the privilege of distractions.

  Julian would see to that.

  Focusing on the task at hand, she turned to the bipedal design again, trying to wrap her head around the idea of manual interior controls, but the thought of what such a machine could do in the hands of a soldier made her stomach churn. And the idea of a soldier inside such a devastating machine—­a machine of her own making—­made the war suddenly more personal, more real.

  She didn’t want to send men to war in her machines. Yet here she was, and for what? Because she feared for her own life? For her freedom?

  Was she really willing to put the lives of others before her own?

  Was she really that much of a coward?

  The belts in the dumbwaiter chute whirred to life and the platform rattled up into the darkness of the shaft. Resolved to finish the design concept later, Petra gathered her schematics and shoved the files into her bag. She needed to distract herself with something else for a while. The dumbwaiter descended a few moments later, clattering loudly down the tracks.

  Rupert appeared at the bottom, stepping down from the platform into her office, a bag over his shoulder. “Brought my design sketches,” he said, pulling a stack of drafting pages out of his bag—­the original designs for the mech. He laid the pages on the desk. “I wasn’t very meticulous with the measurements, but this is the basic layout.”

  “This will do fine,” she said, sifting through the draft notes, the pencil marks thick and smudged. “I just needed to see how you put it together so I would know what adjustments to make as we made repairs.”

  “Do you know what you’re going to build yet?”

  “Vaguely,” she said, pushing the war machine to the back of her mind as she glanced over the rough sketches of the mech’s central power mechanism. “I took a general inventory of the parts last night, and I think I can salvage most of what’s already there, though we’ll need to take it apart and remove what’s no longer usable.”

  Half the mech was a total ruin—­plating, gears, and part of the frame melted and warped—­but the rest seemed to be in working order, as best she could tell without firing up the engine.

  The worst damage was to the right arm, the frame destroyed beyond recognition.

  According to the schematics, Rupert had fitted the arm with a hidden blade, but the gear mechanism used to protract the knife was flawed—­the gears would never rotate properly, not with the joint movement of the elbow.

  “Rupert . . . these notes don’t make sense. How did you make this work?”

  He came to stand over her shoulder. “I didn’t,” he said, seeing what she meant. “I told you Darrow used his blowlamp to melt the transmission? Well, he never would have had the chance had I been able to activate the punch-­blade. But it locked up midfight, and Darrow found his opening.” He frowned at the schematics. “I’m not sure what I did wrong.”

  “It’s the gear makeup,” she explained. “The angle of the arm joint interferes with the rotation at this linkage here, and this one, knocking these two gears out of alignment. See?” She pointed to the fault. “Maybe if the arm were locked straight, it might have worked, but not with all of these rotational variables involved.” She tapped the edge of the page with her finger, thinking. “No, a spring launch would have worked better, or a pneumatic device.”

  “This is why I leave the mechanical genius to you,” he said with a laugh, rubbing his hand over the edge of his jaw. “There’s a reason I’m in aviation.”

  “Too bad you can’t build a flying mech.”

  “Not enough air clearance in the recreation hall.”

  Petra laughed and turned back to Rupert’s notes. The rest of the mech’s systems were mostly sound, with a few mistakes buried here and there. Nothing to cause the machine to malfunction outright, but enough to make it operate at suboptimal efficiency. She paused. That gave her an idea. A possible way to delay Julian’s war. But the war machine would have to wait.

  She looked over the designs more closely. With a few adjustments to the engine chambers and connecting gear trains, rerouting many of the linkage paths to provide optimal power distribution, she could easily bring it to full capacity. Calligaris’s combustion-­enginery lecture wasn’t a total waste, after all.

  She marked a few pages of draft notes for further study and then glanced up from the smudged sketches. “Did you bring the tools I asked for?”

  Rupert nodded, dropping his bag on the table with a clatter of metal. Riffling through the main compartment, he dragged out a collection of welding supplies—­a portable blowlamp, multiple spanners, two kinds of pliers, a pair of bolt cutters, several clamps, and a manual hand drill.

  Petra brushed her fingers across the smooth handle of an adjustable spanner and picked it up, the solid metal weight familiar to her hand. It was like coming back to a place she had almost forgotten, reminding her of days spent turning bolts and fitting linkages in a brightly lit office, Emmerich at her side and not a care in the world beyond the grease under her nails and the touch of metal beneath her fingers. She had missed it.

  “Let’s get started.”

  They spent the next ­couple of hours deconstructing what was left of Rupert’s mech, inspecting each piece of the machine for damage before sorting the parts into what could be reused and what couldn’t. Petra kept a detailed inventory, recording the measurements and dimensions of each piece before moving on to what was in the crates. When they had finished with that, she surveyed the list of parts, flipping through Rupert’s notes as she considered possible designs for the repaired mech. After watching the mech battle with Selby, she knew she needed a machine that was both fast and destructive, but also hardy enough to withstand a brutal amount of damage.

  There were several options for construction depending on how she wanted to focus her mech’s functions—­speed over hardiness, brute strength instead of agility, or resilience in sacrifice of an aggressive offense. Ideally, the machine would accomplish all of those things, but with a limited number of parts and the short amount of time before the first fight, she had to pick her battles.

  Of course, there was nothing in the rules that said she couldn’t alter her machine between fights. That ought to keep the other engineers on their toes.

  She drummed her fingers against her knee, chewing her lip as she considered the baseline construction of the new mech. Knowing Selby, he would make sure to pit her against the most difficult opponent first, get her out of the tournament as quickly as possible. Likely someone with a strong offense, a mech heavy on weapons, quick and dangerous.

  She glanced at Rupert. “You said anything goes once we’re in the ring, right? Everything but projectiles.”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  “What have you seen so far?” she asked. “I know you said Darrow had a supercharged blowlamp, but what else am I up against?”

  Rupert seemed to think about it for a minute. “Well . . . Darrow’s sure to equip his mech with as many rules-­legal weapons as he can squeeze into it, so I would expect a barrage of assault weapons from him. You saw Selby’s mech—­sturdy build, relied on precision attacks, getting behind his opponent’s defenses and wrecking them from the inside. Fletcher—­the engineer Selby beat in that last roun
d—­he relied on brute force, modeled his mech after the failed automaton project. It packed a hell of a punch. Beat all of his opponents to a pulp until Selby.”

  “What else?”

  “Let’s see . . . Lambert’s had hacksaws for arms; Salamanca tried some kind of protracted saber, but Greer damaged it when he rammed the thing. Most of the engineers went for sheer power over specialized weapons—­though I don’t expect many of them to use the same strategy again.”

  Petra chewed on the end of her pencil, thinking through defensive measures. Without knowing her opponents’ weapon choices, her best strategy was to equip her mech to survive anything—­double-­plated, reinforced frame, inner workings well protected. It would be slow, and she would need to maximize the engine efficiency just to get the mech in motion, but her first priority was survivability. She’d worry about the rest later.

  But that still left the matter of an offense.

  The goal of the fights was to incapacitate the other mech as quickly as possible—­disabling movement, gutting systems, or deactivating its power source. With a heavier machine, her strength was in her resilience, but she wasn’t really winning if all she did was outlast her opponent.

  She scowled at the dismantled mech, examining her half-­sketched designs for potential weapons, anything to add to the mech without jeopardizing the integrity of its defenses. The mech had two bulky arms she could fit with weapons, something to sabotage her opponent’s systems quickly and efficiently. A pneumatic fist, perhaps? She could overcome her mech’s lack of speed with a pressure-­charged punch. That could work; though she would need to calculate the recharge time between each punch. Perhaps one at the end of each arm?

  She pulled her drafting paper into her lap and scribbled a few notes, writing down a few other ideas—­electrified prongs, protractible saw-­blades, Darrow’s supercharged blowlamp. As much as she hated to take inspiration from her competition, she had no qualms against playing dirty, not when she had a score to settle with the other students.