Captain Albion Clemens and The Future that Never Was: A Steampunk Novel! (Lands Beyond Book 1)

by Kin Law

  “This is a blasted prison, it is,” he remarked, and sank into the opposite chair in despair. Blair began to scroll through the first news pages, fiddling with the machine’s tiny brass nodules.

  At the same moment Blair and Clemens were somewhere in the middle of their first volume of research, Rosa and Vanessa were standing beside the Leyland Cross, so declared by a plaque at the base of the lonely stone monument, simply called ‘the Cross’ by the locals. Standing alone in a tiny enclosure, not even grass grew on the tiny plot of land. Past some fragile fencing, the monument was by surrounded by tall factories, their foundations plunging some fifty exposed stories in naked supports and mined-out ground. The Cross lay completely in shadow.

  “It’s a bit…”

  “Sad,” Hargreaves finished for her.

  So it was; there was the spindly stone cross itself, a little bit taller than either of them. There was an ignored, eroded drinking fountain gone green with moss. Not a soul would find North here; the shadows were deep enough to grow moss on all sides, and the factories soared a whitewashed gray up to block the stars.

  “It’s a common story in Britain’s Steam Age,” Hargreaves continued as Rosa paced the little enclosure where the Leyland Cross was preserved. She was reading the plaque. “This Cross has stood since Saxon times. It’s the oldest thing in the city. They put it here to mark the crossroads. It used to light the way for miles around. There were shops, just there, and stockades, and a well. Leyland used to revolve around this cross. Now it just rots in this hole, eclipsed by all this industry.”

  “Look, I don’t much care,” Rosa said callously, and impatiently.

  “These are some pretty big names, Ursine, Ubique, big manufacturers making Her Majesty’s guns and bombs. They can do pretty much what they like.”

  “But why leave it at all? The air rights alone have got to be worth their trouble to buy.”

  “Then Valima Mordemere did it. The alchemist who runs the whole of Leyland must have some reason for leaving this old stone cross smack dab in the middle of the city. Maybe he kissed his first date here and left it as a monument to spite your Victorian sensibilities. Right now, all this cross means is a way we can talk to this Jonah Moore.”

  Hargreaves colored distraught, but opted to pursue the present, not the bygone past.

  “The inebriates were agreed on one thing: Jonah Moore arrives at the Leyland Cross at exactly five-thirty every Sunday to take his tea. If we are to believe them, he is the only person who has ever actually seen the Lapis Leviathan, and he never leaves Mordemere’s atelier- except for Sunday tea.”

  Rosa paced impatiently.

  “Moore is also a trusted associate of Mordemere. If anyone knows if and how the alchemic magnate is involved, it would be him,” continued Hargreaves, settling on a bench.

  “Harumph. I went to the pub so I wouldn’t have to wait,” replied Rosa.

  “Hmmmph,” Albion Clemens said for the forty-eighth time. Elric Blair knew the number for a fact- he had been counting.

  “Impatience won’t help matters,” Blair said. “You were the one who wanted to look at the records.”

  “I expected some pattern to emerge by now,” Clemens admitted, yet his brow was furrowed in sheepish thought.

  “It does seem like the search for the Leviathan has basically been as fruitless as our own. Other than a few fuzzy photograms and interviews, the people from the balloon seem to have disappeared.”

  “So you were paying attention,” Blair remarked. “The Fanciful Bugger, yes, it was the balloon that first caught sight of the Leviathan, before pressed helium, before the first steam engine was put on the first heavier-than-air craft. At the time, they were on a scientific survey mission over the Black Sea. Crew…” Blair consulted his notes. “Captain Georg Weiss, Airman Hansel Bergman, Engineer Valima Mordemere, Photogram Technician Jonah Moore.”

  “It was the beginning of an obsession,” Clemens remarked. “Mordemere was a young man who saw something amazing. It must have been like arriving onto a brand new world, seeing those iridescent towers rise out of the clouds, the galleries like translucent marble, if you believe the stories. A bit like Columbus and the Americas, or Lewis and Clark in the unexplored West, or…”

  “Dent and Dahl when they discovered the Lands Beyond? I read ‘The Adventurers’ when I was a boy, as well.”

  “That old magazine! The world seemed so much larger through the pages of a good romp. I assume this is the work that inspired your eventual foray into journalism?” Clemens said, his eyes traversing the blank stones of the old rectory room as if scouring a lawless jungle. Blair’s, in turn, seemed to range across the peaks of misty highlands.

  “There were penny dreadfuls, and pulp fiction when the airships opened trade with the Americas.”

  “Where I became enamored by the printed word, you seem to have taken those stories more literally,” Blair said, turning his attention back to the micro-fiche machine.

  The light threw strange, toothed shadows on the walls. Patiently clicking gears and the subtle buzz of the Edison bulb seemed to produce an atmosphere redolent of stories by the campfire. Albion Clemens seemed inclined to share, in this environment.

  “I didn’t really have a choice. Captain Sam loved them. He had boxes of them stored in a permanent corner of the hold. Reading them seemed to give me a little context. Even with no other point of reference, most boys wouldn’t think plying the high skies something normal people did,” Clemens recalled. Long hours reading by starlight on deck, by some errant glowing wire or candle flame, or the patient glow of the ship’s furnaces, surged through Clemens’ memory.

  “When I wasn’t reading about the threat of pirates lurking behind every cloud and mountain, I was the threat of pirates lurking behind every cloud and mountain. It was an oddly contradictory and reflective thing, my childhood.”

  “But you had a cutlass?”

  “I had a cutlass.”

  “Lucky bastard.”

  Blair and Clemens enjoyed a man-child guffaw over the shared fantasy. As Blair flipped through periodical after periodical, the pirate Captain suddenly had an idea.

  “Say… Blair…”

  “Yes?” The researcher said suspiciously, blithely plowing through yet another uninformative lead. One of the reasons interest in the Leviathan had waned was its surprising ability to stay hidden.

  “I know this is sort of your thing, the research and whatnot… but you used to have dreams of being a pirate. Has it turned out anything like you thought it would?”

  Blair stopped scribbling for a moment, giving their recent forays a good think.

  “In some respects. I have to say there’s a good deal more gray in it than I thought at eleven,” Blair settled.

  “Doing illegal crap is the definition of a pirate, but it’s not always a cardinal sin. There’s more than one pirate out there with a basket and balloon, going around liberating perfectly edible food waste from big cities and lifting off before anyone can catch them. There are specialists who are experts at misinformation and propaganda, and others who toss bushels of flyers over the rails of their ships trying to prove the existence of perpetual energy. I know a swarthy brother who flies around spray-painting geishas and litanies against big business. Blame your eleven year-old self for thinking too deep in the box.”

  “I assume you’re about to propose something out of the box?”

  “Aye!” Clemens declared, jumping up from his seat. The table gyrated violently from his feet leaving it.

  “There he is!” Rosa Marija exclaimed, gyrating impatiently in place.

  The two ladies, faced with their mutual, profound obnoxiousness when forced to be in each other’s company, had decided to mount a sting on the mysterious Jonah Moore.

  By all accounts, the fellow was older than the hills, nearing ninety by now.

  Mainly, the ladies held back because they didn’t want to see if the old codger’s ticker seize when confronted by two totally different kin
ds of pushy, attractive woman simultaneously.

  They hid themselves in plain sight, as two chattering acquaintances who had quite by chance encountered each other in the park: hours of conversation, thus, hours of cover.

  When Jonah Moore finally arrived, it was almost anticlimactic. Neither Hargreaves nor Rosa had really expected to see a little gray person putter up to the bench in front of the Cross and sit down.

  “Wait,” Hargreaves murmured to Rosa. On the outside, the two still maintained the façade of henlike patter. Jonah Moore sat down and immediately opened an attaché case, which turned out to contain a sandwich and a vacuum flask of steaming beverage, likely tea.

  His suit was immaculately tailored and the exact mountain glacier shade of his full head of hair. The curly mop was so full, in fact, it had aggressively expanded itself until it was occupying most of his face.

  The eyes and nose weren’t noble, but for that exact reason they were symmetrical, functional, and full of intelligence. One stylish monocle set off the feeling of academia perfectly. He was, well, exactly what one would expect of a respectable gentleman of means in one of the great technological organs of Britain.

  It was a fact that naturally made Vanessa Hargreaves highly suspicious.

  “Wait what? We wanted to talk to him, I’m going to talk to him,” Rosa insisted, nearly breaking cover. Her impatience was justified.

  The sandwich, though enjoyed at a thoroughly snail-like pace, was not substantial. It certainly seemed like each bite was a routine gesture, every miniscule movement a moment of savor, but soon Moore would be done and move on.

  “Doesn’t it strike you how odd this situation is? Here is one of the foremost men in Valima Mordemere’s atelier, just having luncheon at a monument like anyone else. There must be dozens of enclosures like this in the atelier’s courts,” Hargreaves argued under her breath.

  “I would think lunch would be more enjoyable in the many dirigibles tethered over the smog. Maybe an on-deck garden,” Rosa agreed reluctantly, her full lips drawing a certainly Clemens-felling pout. “So what?”

  “Look at the men over on the other side of the square. They’ve been eyeing us for a long time now, but as soon as Moore appeared they’ve decided to disappear. It seems more than passing strange,” Hargreaves continued, contemplatively.

  Something was adding up, but the Inspector found herself in the familiar occasion of not possessing the numbers. “He doesn’t look a day over sixty. There’s more than a cane supporting our Mr. Moore.”

  At this point the enigmatic Mr. Moore stood up and began to walk, though not in the direction he arrived from. He employed a cane with a rounded knob, sprightly, and tapped it as he walked. Rosa tugged Hargreaves out of the clouds and hurried to tail the elderly gentleman through the valleys of the shadow of industry.

  “Everything about him is strange,” Rosa replied quietly at Hargreaves’ insistence. “There are no liver spots, he stands without a problem, and none of his joints seem to be stiff. Good appetite to boot. Jonah Moore isn’t nearly as biblical as his name, but rich people keep well, its sort of a distinguishing characteristic.”

  “Hes ninety,” Hargreaves insisted. Secretly, she was fascinated with the helmswoman’s powers of observation. “The man should be an invalid! Even industry quails at defying entropy.”

  Meanwhile, Mr. Moore was leading them on a merry tour of Leyland. They walked north, with the sea at their left as far as Hargreaves reckoned.

  Tall buildings hid the sea itself, but Mordemere’s atelier was visible all throughout the city. It served as a guidepost; where it dipped behind a spire or outcropping, there were always the cables, pipes and aqueducts converging on it like some massive web.

  Nearer at hand, the greasy, cabled walls were plastered with missing person’s posters. Hargreaves recoiled, making Rosa look again. None of the posters featured the same person twice.

  Soon, the rhythmic clicking of Mr. Moore’s cane stopped. Rosa, with the Inspector in tow, found themselves at yet another cleft between the sheer cliffs of pipework and soot. This time they stood before a squat old brick warehouse. Here, Jonah Moore halted, stooping to touch a plaque in the door before moving on.

  Swiftly, Rosa Marija followed, while Hargreaves used the observant helmswoman as sort of a visual relay; the Inspector read the plaque, while Rosa Marija kept an eye on the trotting Moore, and they both kept an eye on each other.

  “This used to be one of the old nationalized carriage companies,” Hargreaves said as she caught up. “Mostly making lorries, busses and trolleys before Mordemere bought out everything here under special administrative permit. I read about the workers fighting the change, but put together they didn’t have a fifth of the leverage or coin the alchemist did.”

  “What was so bad about turning out dirigibles instead of lorries?” Rosa mused laconically. She was busy choosing their next cover from Moore, though the elderly chap didn’t seem keen on turning any way but the way he was going.

  “Most of the old Leyland workers were facing termination. Mordemere preferred to bring in fresh young workers at a fraction of the cost.”

  “Sounds like there’s more than one reason to bring some piracy into Mordemere’s private kingdom,” Rosa Marija sneered joyfully.

  Evidently, Moore was not done with the tour. Now the strange trio was passing an area of increased activity. Everywhere things whistled and groaned the lark cry of stressed metal. Dense heads of steam built up and frothed out of windows squirreled high between groves of machinery. Where openings cropped up, the shadows of bent forms could be seen laboring at tiny parts or moving silhouettes of things more at home at the top of a beanstalk. People were sprawled in the streets, some begging for change, others simply begging.

  They were passing a set of dense double doors when Rosa suddenly cried out.

  “Hargreaves, down!”

  And suddenly the Inspector was thrown back into her days as a fresh constabulary, for the air was thick with the sound of gunfire.

  “Even though nothing too illegal is going on, you seem to be sweating bullets,” Elric Blair was observing casually.

  “I will have you know, this coat is damnably hot,” Clemens answered irritably. He tugged at his collar, normally dashingly loose, now indecorously open. Not only was the service tunnel they were traversing hot and wet with steam, it was also narrow, forcing their breath back at them.

  After abandoning their reading room as dutiful law-breaking investigators, Blair found Clemens’ knack for destruction refreshingly useful. The pirate captain had sniffed, literally sniffed the air, before making a beeline towards a nondescript brown door.

  When kicked down, the passage beyond led underneath the building, where it seemed Valima Mordemere had an elaborate system of tunnels beneath Leyland.

  One of the myriad cables snaking through was a private telegraph wire, which Clemens had immediately become convinced would lead to an information hub of some kind where, quote, “Mordemere hides the Category Three salty wet stuff.” Blair assumed it was some cross-cultural euphemism, owing to the air pirate’s mercurial affectation for colorful language. Still, Elric agreed: the wire did look suspicious, what with thousands already trailing from the church tower above. The Captain was sweating, flapping his coat and grimacing.

  “Take your coat off,” Blair said, as they finally exited the tiny service passage and emerged into a sturdy, cavernous tunnel, good steel and clockworked ventilation shafts spaced every few meters. There was also some kind of track at the bottom. It was too small for a train, but a cart or trolley might comfortably glide along it.

  “The coat makes me look cool,” Clemens answered. “And the newest periodicals say our natural pheromones are more attractive to women than expensive cologne.”

  “I wasn’t aware dirigible pirates had access to academic papers!” Blair exclaimed, as it seemed safe to do so. There was enough vacant room in the tunnel for the two men to walk with arms spread open and not touch each othe
r or the walls, if they so chose.

  “It’s important to have true, reliable information if one is about to steal the latest batch of picture-house reels for early release.”

  “What I meant was-“ Blair began, but Clemens filled in the awkward gap with a comforting acknowledgement.

  “Generally, pirates don’t read. There are lots of folks who don’t do Italian, or read Cyrillic, but most everybody has some English, or Condensed Chinese, depending on the bit of sky they hunt in. There are those of us who fell into the profession because we couldn’t cut it in the rank and file. Then there are those of us who simply cannot be filed. There’s a difference,” Clemens informed conversationally.

  Blair felt he had been run over by a horse even higher than his was, but also a little curious. Before this whole adventure, he had assumed all air pirates, especially Albion Clemens, were scoundrels of the highest order. Strangely, and not for the first time, he found himself in the company of an unorthodox intellectual.

  “And yourself? How did Albion Clemens become the Manchu Marauder?”

  Clemens evaded elegantly by pretending to trip over a rail. The silence was heavier than pig iron, so deep underground. He eventually had to acquiesce.

  “I grew up with the real Manchu Marauder, but Captain Sam kicked me off his boat when I turned eighteen. Said it was the way it was done in America. I pointed out we were in the Australian outback at the time, and besides I had never been American, but he insisted it was the spirit of the thing.”

  “And you became a productive member of society, thus ending the legend forever,” Blair finished in jest. Clemens gave him a look that set them both grinning.

  “Piracy came later, but I was back on an airship in a heartbeat. “

  “I found out Captain Sam had taught me too well. People seemed slower, when they are stuck in one place. An airship opens you up to more things, more ways of living, more people than you would ever guess are out there. Once you know, the itch doesn’t let you go easily. Here we go,” Clemens grunted, kicking at a riveted, brassy door. It was one of many along the tunnel, but here the mysterious telegraph wire threaded through a port in the doorframe.