Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures

by Alex Acks

  Perhaps it was the seriousness of her tone or the fire in her eye, but the older engineer mutely offered her the tool. He still did have the good grace to look away when she hitched up her skirts and squatted down to join the younger engineer under the bridge console.

  Simms backed away and headed toward for the door. Captain Murray grabbed his sleeve. “I thought you were here to help.”

  “Well, I’m afraid it’s more my wife’s interest.” Simms gave the man a sheepish smile. “She does like her little hobbies. As I said.”

  Captain Murray turned his head slowly to look behind him, where the two engineers had gathered around Captain Ramos, both obviously listening to her in all seriousness now. “Little hobbies,” he repeated.

  Simms shrugged, as if that were the answer to all possible questions. “Women. What can you do?”

  “Madam…uh…lady…uh…I don’t think—”

  Marta waved a dismissive hand in the general direction the younger engineer, who was in the middle of stammering out protests. “If you haven’t anything useful to say, hush.”

  The control panel was a mess of wires both neatly spliced and badly hacked apart. The former was obviously the work of attaching the so-called automaton to the ship’s systems, the latter from the ax that had been used liberally around the bridge. A larger problem than the cut wiring were gears for the gauges, many of them now bent past all repair. Humming to herself, Marta used the spanner to free one badly mangled piece of metal from where it had been locking up the mechanism of a nearby set of gears. She tossed the bent gear out onto the engineer’s shoe.

  “We’re going to have to do bypasses on all of these. Are there systems the captain can do without for piloting the ship?”

  There was a long pause, a whispered conference between the engineers that she ignored as she worked to clear away the worst of the damaged parts. A different man spoke, presumably the older engineer. “We can do without the thermohygrometer and the variometer if need be. I’ve manual instruments I can put out one of the windows. Be like the old days, that.”

  “Excellent. That’ll give us some spare parts to work with. Can Captain Murray make due with only one inclinometer?”

  “Aye, think so.”

  “Even better.” She tossed another mangled gear out from under the panel. “Does this ship use German or Imperial marking standards?”

  “Mix of both, I’m afraid.”

  Marta slid out from under the panel so she could give the man an incredulous look. Even she had taken pains to standardize the controls for her own railcars and aeroplanes. “Is this the dark ages, Mister…?”

  “Just call me Edmund, Lady. I’ll get the schematics.”

  “Yes, you’d better.” She turned her attention back to the younger engineer. She snapped her fingers at him until he stopped staring. “Your goggles, if you please. It’s about to get a bit messy.”

  He pried the goggles off his head and handed them slowly to her. “Harrison.”

  Marta slipped the goggles on, noting the smudges of fingerprints with immense annoyance. “I’ll keep that in mind for when you’ve been useful enough for me to bother with your name.”

  “Hey!”

  “Hey yourself,” she said as she crawled back under the panel. “If you want to be an engineer, you’d best get your knees dirty down here with me.” After a moment of silence, he crawled under the panel next to her. “There’s a good chap,” Marta said, far more sweetly than she normally would have bothered, but she needed someone to start checking if any of the wires were live. Better him than her.

  The state of the panels was not the worst mess Marta had ever worked through—and she’d certainly created more difficult messes herself in the past—but it was one of the more complex. She felt intensely relieved when Edmund returned with the schematics. The three of them bent over the drawings, which were laced with corrections and bypasses in myriad different hands, and laid out their course of action like a battle plan. Harrison had seemed to forget entirely at that point that she was a woman. Edmund hadn't seemed to much care to begin with, which she found even more gratifying. There were sensible people to be found on occasion, like priceless gems.

  Too bad she couldn’t just stick the man in her pocket and steal him away to the Roost. But she had a feeling Simms might object to that, and so might Edmund’s wife, if the level of care she saw in the hand-stitched handkerchief sticking from his pocket was any indication of her affections for him.

  After an interminable period of fiddling and cursing, at least the first panel, which was the most critical, had been put back in working order and an abbreviated set of instruments activated for it while Edmund got the rudder cables spliced into something approaching working order.

  “That ought to do for this one. It’s a bit ugly, but function over form.” An alarm began to go off in the second panel, the shrill chattering of a bell. A swift kick stopped it. “We’ll get to you soon enough.”

  Edmund laughed sharply. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you went to the Royal College. That’s how we dealt with alarms there, too.”

  Marta grinned at him. “Some things are universal, my friend. All right, what’s next…attitude control, yes?”

  Really, from the moment she and Simms had entered the bridge, it had been unquestionable that she’d eventually end up to her elbows in the ship’s nervous system. Clever of Simms to have framed it all as a challenge, though. She never had gotten the hang of turning those down. Intellectual fulfillment won over pragmatic survival every time, but there were certainly worse reasons to tweak the bony nose of death.

  They’d only begun to work on the next panel when the bridge door opened and Hartley was marched in, held firmly between two large guards in the Grand Duchess’s livery. The smile on his narrow face was a rictus of glee as he was brought to a halt before Captain Murray.

  “What, no Clarkson?” he crowed. “That thieving bastard couldn’t even stir himself for the ruin of all his dreams?”

  “Oh, there he is, the man for whom I’ve waited all this time. Edmund, hold this for a moment, if you please,” Marta said, handing him the spanner with the attitude of one who expected to be obeyed. He took the tool from her without hesitation. Marta had long ago noticed that when she entered this mode, the only two possible reactions to it seemed to be blind obedience or complete apoplexy. “If you can bend that gear a bit straighter, I think we’ll get lift controls back, by the way.”

  Edmund nodded, sliding into her place under the panel. Marta brushed her skirts down as she strode, having given up on even pretending to be ladylike, over to Hartley. Ignoring whatever appalled pronouncement Murray was in the process of making, she grabbed Hartley’s right wrist and jerked his hand up, sniffing at the fingers: alcohol, sweat, a bit of grease. Nothing more. She gave his fingernails a closer inspection, tightening her grip to the point of being nearly bone-grinding as he tried to jerk away.

  “Lady Parnell-Muttar…I say!” Captain Murray said.

  Satisfied, Marta let Hartley yank his hand back. He seemed the key to the most pressing question they faced, even if the lack of gunpowder residue on his hand indicated he was unlikely to answer the other, which was Clarkson’s demise via petite handgun.

  “What did you do with the mechanism in the cabinet?” she asked, jerking her head slightly toward the automaton.

  Hartley laughed. “Nothing! There was nothing in there, nothing to fly this ship! He denied my consortium the patent for that? And stole my puppet designs? Bastard!” Suddenly, the paper roughly cut from the bottom of the schematics made a good deal more sense—as did Clarkson's slapdash writing against the backdrop of such otherwise neatly-made plans.

  “I would not hand my ship over—” Captain Murray began.

  “But you did!” Hartley interrupted. “To a fraud and a thief!”

  “Gentlemen!” Marta interrupted them with her best authoritative bellow. “Thank you. Mister Hartley, three more questions.”

&nb
sp; “I don’t—”

  “Three more questions,” Marta continued, eyes once again falling on the pulled threads that fuzzed the man’s jacket around his shoulders. “And then you can return to your arguing. You entered the bridge by means of the air ducts, correct?”

  Hartley stared at her, open-mouthed. “Yes. And a tight fit too, but worth it!”

  “You what?” Captain Murray roared.

  “If I may continue!” It was definitely not a request. "You entered via the ceiling grate in the hallway outside the bridge, yes?” He could have moved the decorative table to stand on it and access the decorative grate that covered the duct along the ceiling.

  “Yes, how—”

  “How did you get through the grate on this side?" she asked Hartley.

  “I gave it a kick and it popped right out.” He sneered at Captain Murray. “Which just shows the sort of shoddy workmanship you allow on your bridge.”

  “You have endangered this entire ship with your vengeful stunt!” Murray bellowed.

  “You endangered your ship by handing control over to a clockwork puppet!”

  “It was no such thing. I watched Mister Clarkson’s demonstration myself.”

  “Well, then, why haven’t you called him down here to have him fix his marvelous device?”

  “He hasn’t been found!” Captain Murray paused, mouth open, eyes going a bit wide. “You haven’t done anything to him, have you?”

  “I couldn’t find him either! He’s probably hiding, like the base coward he is.”

  Marta let them bicker, considering both the entertainment value and wisdom of trying to direct Captain Murray’s search toward the cargo hold. Bad idea, though. Simms would be in there, and it would probably look a bit suspicious if he were caught in proximity to a corpse while in the middle of constructing a glider whose only obvious use was escape. However, the search would eventually make it to the cargo hold. The Titania had a very finite allotment of hiding places. It was inevitable. That meant she needed to be as swift as possible on the bridge and throw a red herring or two in front of Captain Murray to buy a little more time.

  She coughed discreetly, and then much more loudly when it didn’t cause either of the men to shut up. “If you are looking for Mister Clarkson,” she said, affecting the tones of an offended old auntie, on the off chance that it still might work even though the attitude was in direct opposition to her much more straightforward actions earlier, “I do believe I saw one of the young ladies flirting with him at the reception. I would not of course imply any sort of impropriety, but…”

  There, that ought to do for a distraction. If they were trying to catch a couple in some sort of tryst, the exceedingly cold and rather loud cargo hold was not one of the places they would look until they had exhausted everything that was at least fully pressurized.

  Marta left them to bicker. On the way back to check on Edmund’s progress, she paused to look in the ruined cabinet, noting scratches, smudges of dirt, and the ghost of a scent—tobacco, of all things, and she knew that Clarkson was no smoker. With everyone else, including Edmund and Harrison distracted, she bent to sift through the rather small scattering of debris in the cabinet and discovered a cracked stopwatch, a few torn shreds of paper, and a shattered pencil. There weren’t nearly enough mechanisms in evidence to provide the drive for a sophisticated puppet, but there were cracked levers and dangling, limp bits of rope.

  “Oh, is it really so simple? I’m disappointed.”

  Turning the broken stopwatch over in her hand, she walked slowly around the bridge, this time looking for more particular debris. Too bad Hartley had made such a pig’s ear of everything. The floor was one unending mess of shattered glass and twisted metal. But she eventually found just what she was looking for: a small brass screw, flat headed and too large to belong to any of the mechanisms in the control panels—and the panels themselves were put together with bolts. The screw pinched between her fingers, she crossed the short distance to the grate that covered the air duct letting out onto the bridge. Hartley must have been equal parts drunk, angry, and determined to squeeze himself through here. But as she’d begun to expect, the vent cover wasn’t at all bent. Hartley’s kick had knocked it loose because it hadn’t been fastened to begin with.

  But it had at least started the journey with one screw in it. And that screw had ended up rather carelessly discarded on the floor. Perhaps by someone on this side of the bridge, who had removed the vent cover to let him or herself out. Add to that the size of the controls, the space inside the cabinet, just the right size for a child or midget. Considering that the person who had resided in the cabinet had been in control of the ship at least until close to the time Clarkson had been murdered, she found herself hoping for the latter rather than the former. Children, in her estimation, were mysterious and sticky creatures best to be ignored until they had grown into something teenaged-shaped, and at that point they were to be avoided at all cost.

  She couldn’t help it, she laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Edmund demanded, voice oddly hollow as it came from under the console.

  “I do believe we were all taken in by one of the oldest tricks in the book,” Marta said. “And then it turned around and bit its perpetrator. Deliciously just, I should say.” She flicked the screw back into the wreckage and then dropped back down to her knees, holding one hand out for Edmund’s goggles. “Do keep your eye out for a midget.”

  Edmund tried to sit up and only succeeded in bashing his head against the console. He cursed. “A… I must have heard you wrong.”

  “A midget,” Marta said, once again considering the petite size of the pistol still in her possession. “He or she will be hiding in your duct work somewhere, I suspect. But don’t worry. They are unarmed.”

  Simms was pouring sweat and breathing heavily into his bellows mask, though mercifully this time he’d grabbed one that didn’t stink of garlic. He was also quite grateful that he’d rearranged the cargo earlier in the evening. Trying to do that and then subsequently construct the glider wasn’t a task he could have done without snapping from the stress.

  Nerves still drove him fast. Skinned knuckles and a split fingernail later, the glider was constructed and he sat by on a crate, waiting for Captain Ramos.

  And waiting.

  And waiting.

  And waiting.

  He was about to just say to hell with it and go looking for her—something that she’d sternly admonished him to never do, but she never kept him waiting this long on an escape. Then the woman in question entered the cargo hold at a sedate walk, a streak of grease on one cheek and her hair in complete disarray. She also looked decidedly smug, more so than normal.

  Simms crossed his arms and directed his most disapproving of looks at her.

  “Oh dear, Simms. You look quite constipated. Either we need to reconsider your diet or you’re a bit upset.”

  “You told me to put together the glider.”

  “I did indeed.”

  “As if it were some sort of emergency.”

  “Not at all. As if it were insurance. Which it is.”

  “I expected you to come racing down the hall, guns blazing.”

  Captain Ramos laughed, throwing her head back. “If it would make you feel better, I can go back and try again.”

  Simms laughed as well, in spite of himself. Perhaps that was the reason they’d gotten along so well over the years. He wasn’t the sort to hold on to his temper. “Don’t tell me all my hard work is for nothing.”

  “Oh no.” Captain Ramos paused to pull of her skirts, revealing a set of trousers beneath. She left the rumpled fabric discarded on a crate. “Even if I parted company with the bridge crew as the hero of the hour, I think it best if we avoid the uncomfortable questions that will begin to spring up like wildflowers after rain once the late and unlamented Mister Clarkson is at last discovered.”

  “So was it Hartley?”

  “Surprisingly, no,” the captain said. “
Recall how you showed me the way Clarkson lunged? It seemed a bit low, considering Hartley’s height, and the trajectory of the wound then makes no sense at all. And when he was brought to the bridge, there was no smell of powder to him, nor residue from the pistol you showed me. Which was also a bit small for him.”

  “Then who did it? I hardly think a jealous wife…”

  “No, not with a mustache like that. You noticed the automaton’s cabinet was empty?”

  “Hartley didn’t steal anything from it?”

  “It was empty when he arrived with that ax. It was that revelation that made him go a bit mad, I think. No, it started the voyage occupied by a midget, who controlled the automaton. An old trick, but well engineered. Clarkson really ought to have stuck with clockwork, he was quite good at that.”

  “You’re telling me that the midget killed him.”

  “Indeed—”

  A woman cleared her throat firmly. “Little person.” Simms surged to his feet, peering around Captain Ramos’s shoulder. The captain herself turned around more slowly. Had she been expecting this? There, behind her, stood the aforementioned self-named little person, a tiny woman with curly brown hair shorn close to her head and rather elfin features, her arms crossed over her chest. She wore the same sort of clothes Simms had seen on children in workhouses, stained with gray streaks of dust and black smears of grease.

  “Little person,” the woman repeated.

  “I beg pardon?” Captain Ramos inquired, still sounding damnably unsurprised.

  “This entire stupid mess has been a circus, but I’m no sideshow,” the woman said. “So the words you’re looking for are little person.”

  Simms was ever-so-slightly taken aback by that correction. While crime was most definitely a personal choice, what one got called by society certainly was not. He'd been treated to more than a few supremely acidic comments from Captain Ramos to that effect, often continuing on to a cold statement about the right to self-definition that men like him enjoyed and many other people lacked, which somehow had the effect of making him feel decidedly verminous. So little person it would be, if probably about to be appended with the adjective “murderous.”