by Kin Law
Something about the story nagged at Blair’s keen paperman’s instincts. There were gaps in the five greats: How had Clemens reached an airship port, or any civilization, if he had been left in the infamous outback? Why had Captain Samuel left his adopted son in the middle of nowhere? Had he done like the lions of Africa, shoving their young over the cliff so they could become strong through the climb back? But before Blair could ask, Clemens was already opening the brass doors.
“Well butter my biscuits,” Clemens said, stepping through the door.
“Brilliant!” Blair echoed.
The shine was almost too bright.
As the two pulled the door free from its frame, a golden aura blasted through as if emitted by the lost city of Shangri-La.
It was arclight, pure and simple, from everyday Teslaic lighting, but what the light was reflecting off struck the child in both men’s testosterone-filled hearts.
Before them lay dozens of shining, beautifully painted, chrome-detailed, antique steam carriages.
“Real racing fenders!”
“An 1890’s vintage Fjord Eleanor!”
It was a veritable smorgasbord of delectable candy-red racers, chocolate-brown roadsters, and gleaming white engines lined up in a profusion of neat, shimmering rows.
There were ancient, well-maintained Fjords from the first days of line assembly, custom-fitted thoroughbreds culled from the Americas and Deutschland, rare one-offs and drifters from Nippon sitting in all their impractical glory.
“Why would you ladies be sitting here all by your lonesome?” Clemens declared unabashedly. He strolled over to stroke his target, the ‘97 Eleanor, with obvious enthusiasm, nearly tripping over something on the floor.
Blair strode forward towards a white ’86 Panther. The carriages were sleek and low, with immaculate paintwork and bursting with deliciously decadent devices. A quick peek at the gauges showed each one watered and fueled, needing only the requisite starter ember to push her sophisticated engine mechanics into gear.
Eventually, the boys got their knickers round the right way and began to look around. The underground chamber, while well lit, seemed deserted, and quite large, some twenty or so car spaces from end to end. There seemed to be no information hub here.
The telegraph wire ran along to the opposite end of the room, where there was a terminal for contacting the church above.
“This must be Mordemere’s private garage,” Clemens remarked. “Only he could afford such extravagance.”
Clemens climbed into the narrow bucket seat in the Eleanor and began to pump the sparker, to get the engine going, but stopped when he realized there was nowhere to go. The vehicles were parked bumper to shining bumper.
The door they had entered seemed to be a man-sized service hatchway. There was no other door, leaving a bit of a mystery.
How were these beautiful vehicles gathered here if there was no egress to drive through? Had they been disassembled and rebuilt here, to live the rest of their lives as Mordemere’s museum pieces?
Meanwhile, Blair walked over to one wall, where a large rectangular portal was cut a little ways over his head. A lonely stepladder led up into empty space. Naturally, he investigated this direction and in a moment discovered a series of gantries mounted into the ceiling, but no pulleys, wire or other equipment for raising or lowering a vehicle. Climbing onto the stepladder, he discovered a panel of switches.
“Captain Clemens,” Blair said. “Watch your step. There seems to be a raised divot demarking a sort of rectangle round each vehicle.”
Albion joined Blair on the ladder, and together they examined the panel. It seemed there were a series of toggles, and then a pair of flip-style numerical indicator dials.
“Very industrial-romance,” Clemens remarked.
“Almost like something out of a Philip K. novel. I always thought his work could use some chase scenes, like ‘Velocity,’ you know, the one with the bus.”
“I enjoyed the picture adaptation recently. The director really chose the best parts of a rather divergent work,” Blair answered. “And speaking of pictures, I believe those are the prop Koopers from ‘The Roman Heist.’ But never mind, let us tinker…”
Twiddling the number dials, Blair selected two random numbers, ratcheting the flipping tabs into place with satisfyingly clicks, and tripped a promising-looking toggle.
At once, a heretofore unseen device shot along the gantry like a hound after a rabbit, abruptly gliding across the ceiling as the entire frame slid along what seemed to be very thin rails.
The device was compact, rather round, and was connected to a line of cables quite like the ones Blair had seen aboard the ‘Berry.
“Quite a machine,” Blair admired openly. “But what does it do?”
“Like any other machine. Either a benefit or a hazard; if they’re a benefit, they’re not my problem,” Clemens quoted, fancying himself the role of Theckard.
Blair had to admit, watching the sliding gantry brought to mind the sophisticated anachronism of the picture. ‘Arclit Lambs’ had been about a society with advanced industrialization, and a remarkably retarded moral code. Blair wondered how others would judge their Steam Age; he wondered how he might do so himself.
The gantry was indeed like any other machine. Having arrived at a preset point, it now hovered, as if unsure whether to be a hazard or a benefit.
The rounded bottom of the device now hung over one of the many carriages, a rather fetching late ‘90s Ultra Eight, once called the Chapman Eight, striped British Green.
“Well? Do something else!” Clemens said impatiently. Blair flipped another toggle, this time a rather large, imposing one.
At once, the Chapman Eight shot up and detonated against the gantry with a spectacular bang, showering the room with shrapnel.
The air wasn’t filled with sizzling shot, Hargreaves soon discovered. It was, however, filled with pinging, irregular sounds quite a lot like gunfire, and something a lot more terrifying: the unreserved bellowing of grown men screaming in pain.
“Someone needs help!” Hargreaves shouted, and took off.
“But Moore went that way!” Rosa cried in dismay. When Hargreaves looked back, the helmswoman was following, a weather eye on the elderly Jonah Moore until he disappeared behind another soaring warehouse.
Hargreaves discovered all too soon where the rattling sounds were coming from. A knot of people cowered just outside a heavy loading door, and the wall facing it was pitted with holes. The sight was obvious for subjects who had grown up around steam engines of Victoria’s reign: a boiler had blown, and instead of rupturing in a spectacular cloud of metal and mist, it had simply fired its rivets outward like bullets.
“Is everyone all right?” Hargreaves yelled. A window shattered just before her, and the Inspector reacted by tumbling forward into a crouch, while Rosa Marija slid to the ground beside her in a flurry of little bells and swashbuckling agility.
“We’re unhurt!” One of the men lying face-first on the pavement replied, gesturing towards everyone outside. “But Hassim and Swarney were closest. I saw Harrod take a rivet to the knee!”
“Where is he?” Hargreaves yelled back, and the man made a wild, panicked motion, indicating somewhere inside the building.
“You had best be careful!” A woman, staring up from a sensible sprawl well away from the door cautioned, but Hargreaves paid no mind. She dove through the door into a darkness spitting sparks and death.
As the warm black of the factory enveloped her, Hargreaves felt like she was tumbling into a steaming iron maw. She was immediately blind, and cursed herself for forgetting the shock of transitioning from daylight to an unlit interior.
If a shooter was near, she would have been a sitting duck. Something hissed and crumpled to her right, and a tattoo of beats punctured a series of holes in the wall beside her.
The new pencil of light streaming in was an inch from her thigh.
Something whistled past her shoulder and embedded wit
h a solid ‘thunk.’ It ignited into a steady glow to reveal one of Rosa Marija’s slender throwing daggers. A fall of blue-white sparks fell from the handle, showing a boiler beneath it spilling water from half a dozen holes. Beneath the rusted bulk, a work boot sat in a growing puddle of red.
“Hurry!” Rosa’s voice called from the opening. Hargreaves barely registered the horseshoe over the door- a charm, to ward off ill luck.
Hargreaves grabbed the man’s leg, and immediately dropped it- the other end wasn’t connected to anything.
A moment’s search later, and she found the rest of him a few feet away, and then it was a matter of firmly grasping him by the collar and manhandling the weight. As she got closer to the door, some of the workmen jumped in to help.
“Pressure, here… “
“Yes, right… no, you bloomin’ idiot, there’s no way we can get it back on.”
“Oh my god… oh my god…”
After Vanessa whipped the belt off the closest workman for a tourniquet, the panic seemed to die down somewhat. Hargreaves barely got the buckle cinched tight before Rosa pulled her away from the crowd, trailing vaguely away from the sound of constabulary whistles in the air. Hargreaves balked; in her rush to save the unfortunate Hassim, she had forgotten she was not the law here.
“There are still people who need help, Rosa!” Hargreaves protested even as she fell into rhythm behind Rosa’s brisk footfalls.
“We dragged the other man, Swarney, out while you were tying up the first one. Waste of time, in my opinion, he’d lost too much blood. Everyone else is accounted for,” Rosa said, as they reached the corner where Jonah Moore disappeared.
“A waste of time!” sputtered Hargreaves, unable to comprehend the singular callousness with which this cutthroat handled human life.
“Did you really want to meet the Clankers again?” Rosa reminded Hargreaves. She sputtered, seemed to grasp for something to convince the Inspector to go. “If they find out you work for the Queen…”
“Rosa!” Hargreaves protested, but nearly ran into Rosa’s ample bosom as she spun to a stop on her heel.
“Vanessa,” Rosa said, gently. She put a hand on the Inspector’s shoulder, arresting her forward momentum.
“Saving a man’s life is not a waste of time,” Hargreaves insisted, staring deep into Rosa’s tawny eyes.
“No, it is not,” Rosa agreed, looking right back into hers. “If it can be saved. Everyone is all right. I made sure of it. The Clankers will deliver the injured to the nearest hospice, they’re strong enough with those piston arms. You bound the other man, Hassim, was it? You likely bought him time, but now there is nothing more we can do. The best thing for us, and for your mission, is to be on our way.”
The hardness in Rosa’s eyes scared Hargreaves, but it was the gentleness that made her back down.
For a moment, the Inspector was reminded of Albion Clemens, and the way he looked the first evening in Portsmouth when first he got the best of her: kind, but with an edge to cut diamond.
“Thankfully, it wasn’t a waste of time. I am starting to have an idea of Jonah Moore’s purpose, why he was visiting the Leyland Cross and the engine factory,” Rosa said, resuming her stride. Their boots were well past the point where Moore had disappeared, but Rosa walked as if she knew where she was going. Surely Moore had left them behind? Rosa was walking so quickly, Hargreaves almost missed a large statue of a man whose features were cut out of knives; the Inspector realized from the beaker in the right hand and the wand in his left, this was no other than an incarnation of the infamous Valima Mordemere.
Hargreaves was a good inch taller than Rosa, and she kept up easily once they drew level.
“Right, you had better share what you’ve figured out, or we’re stopping right this second!”
There was no need to actually stop; both women were professionals in their own right, in fields where time meant the difference between a successful collar and a successful escape. Rosa Marija kept clicking her hard boots while she spoke.
“They are like urchins,” Rosa began absentmindedly. She reached an intersection, peering intently at a faded signpost. She made a decision as she came up to it, turning firmly down an enclosed shopping avenue instead of a block of cookie-cutter houses.
“What the devil are you on about?”
“Street urchins,” Rosa said, “Are dependent on the kindness of strangers. But not really, you see, they’re more at the mercy of strangers. You see them all the time, begging in the street, dying by the score and surfacing beneath the snow in the springtime.”
As they walked, Hargreaves couldn’t help but look into the dark corners of the alleys between bright shop fronts.
Leyland, seemed void of a single small, dirty boy or girl, waiting to perform some queer errand for the odd shilling.
“They are ubiquitous. They go everywhere, and I’d bet a Spanish galleon no organ grinder in London would recognize one from another, even if they’d been his monkey all season.”
“Get to the point already,” Hargreaves said irritably.
“Sure, we will toss them the odd coin, put them to work, but there’s not a single parent to look after them, feed them, bathe them even when they caterwaul against it. And, just as surely, those workmen and women back there, not a soul’s looking after them either.”
Hargreaves was distracted. The shops they were passing sparkled with finery, filigree eggs, rare foodstuffs, clothing so fine they were tapestries.
Just a few streets back, the factories had been sitting in coal-black streets littered with garbage, choking the Cross with a foot of rot.
“I saw the state of their clothes, yes. Migrant Irish, some Indians and other foreign riff-raff.”
This time, it was Rosa Marija who whirled about, fury darkening her coffee brow.
“Those riff-raff,” Rosa hissed through gritted teeth, “Are making your guns, and your ships, and your Empire, but because he was born outside the Empire, that man you tied up can’t afford the bandages or the splints needed to treat his leg. Even if he were to get better, no factory will hire a man who can’t walk five paces to pick up a wrench. Don’t talk to me about saving people, you privileged, stupid Englishwoman.”
Rosa resumed walking, her legs churning the brilliantly polished cobbles to a frothing dust. Hargreaves opened her mouth to protest, but Rosa’s flushed, mocha skin choked her words, and only a garbled plea of nationalism emerged.
“But the Commonwealth-!”
“Rests on a great mountain of bodies just like Hassim, back there. Just like the bodies of the servant urchins, found dead under the snowmelt.” Rosa Marija spat. Though she had worked up a great head of steam, her eyes were constantly searching for the sharply tapping cane and gray mane of Jonah Moore.
“There, unfortunately, is also how I know what our Jonah Moore is up to,” Rosa Marija paused, evidently sighting something. Rosa had spotted Moore- the elderly gentleman was walking down a set of steps, his dark suit gradually disappearing into the subterranean dark. An underground? If Moore boarded a train, they would lose him for sure, but in an enclosed space, there was nowhere to run.
“Come on!” Rosa cried, and together they raced toward the opening. A mad dash down sheet metal steps, a moment of panic: what direction?
The tracks spread out beneath them, obscured by clouds of venting steam. They were suspended over a vaulted cavern with three platforms, two trains pulling into the station, one leaving. Had Moore boarded it?
Hargreaves made a decision, churning the stairs into flak beneath her. She vaulted across the platform, flinging a quid like an unerring pub dart into the collection tin, and skid to a halt inside the closest train. Rosa Marija’s boots beat staccato after her, just as the doors hissed to a close on smooth, pneumatic rails.
“Did we make it? Is he aboard?” Rosa asked, scanning the narrow train car. The brass handrails and standing passengers obscured their vision, and the helmswoman did a little dance, craning her neck up and dow
n to look around them.
For a moment, it looked as if they had lost their man.
The Inspector even thought she saw a glimmer of gray hair on the opposite train, headed towards the other direction. Then she let out a long-needed breath.
Moore was seated almost directly before them, smiling gently.
“Are you ladies all right? I had thought I lost you, a couple streets back. Glad you made it.”
“All right, my fault. I’m no Cid, you know, typewriters are more my speed,” Blair said sheepishly as he picked himself up off the floor. Clemens had thrown him into the closest vehicle from above, a comfortable convertible Bavarian, while sheltering behind the stepladder himself.
“I think even Cid would have trouble with this,” Clemens remarked, as he went up to the panel at the top of the ladder once again. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The Chapman Eight hadn’t actually exploded; what happened was, the little roadster shot straight up towards the roof so quickly, the gantry above crushed the delicate windscreen, spectacularly shattering the glass in all directions. What was more intriguing, as they peered out into the chamber, was how the carriage seemed to be floating in midair, with no helium or wires or anything. The platform it rested on, for the divots in the floor were the seams between plates of metal, was simply hanging in the middle of the chamber, dead still.
“I see… so the gantry lifts the plate, and moves it out of the rectangular hole there… this setting must be for the heavier vehicles,” Clemens mused, and reached out to fiddle with a dial.
The Chapman groaned as it left off snogging the gantry, and hung at a more reasonable height.
Clemens again moved some controls, and it came swinging across the room, stopping at the stepladder even as Blair halted in mid-cringe.
