Phantasmical Contraptions & Other Errors

by Jessica Augustsson

  “Yes, ma’am,” Watts’s voice came through, tinny as always, but clear.

  “Come on,” Jo turned to her uninvited, but not entirely unwanted guest. His face twisted in an attempt to hide his incredulity. “You doubted? You would not have come here if you had not anticipated that I would assist you.”

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “Then what is your dilemma now?”

  “You mock Haliphon after naming your airship Jellyfish?”

  Quade Reston, Scanlon’s first mate and co-pilot, eyed the pair as they climbed the rope ladder into Meduzoa’s launch basket.

  “Not but five minutes till cast-off, Captain,” he said, leaning against the woven side. Quade was as fair—blond haired, blue eyed, as the Captain was dark, with her mahogany coiffure and her flashing coffee-colored eyes. “Thought we were for Bath until Tynwald’s Day. Somethin’ happen?”

  “You might say that, Mr. Reston,” Scanlon said. She extended one gloved hand and Reston assisted in hauling her up the rest of the way, noting as he did so that the bespectacled toff behind her was not keeping his eyes appropriately downcast, but instead watching the flex of the Captain’s backside. “We’ll be giving Professor Landers here some assistance.”

  “He’s footing the bill, then? We’re up ten shillings for the early cast-off. The ’ship’s fund ain’t hardly endless, you know,” Reston said. He didn’t like the toffy fellow, his coat was expensive superfine, but ill-cared for and dirty.

  “I assure you, good sir,” the professor began, “when we retrieve the Haliphon, I shall have more than sufficient funds to reimburse your captain for her expenses and difficulties on my behalf.”

  “In other words, we ain’t getting’ paid.” Reston ignored the outstretched hand.

  “I’ve not failed on your contract yet, my lad.” Scanlon primed the lift’s pump, then released the mechanism, allowing the landing basket to be drawn up into the airship’s gondola. The moonhatch closed behind them. “Welcome aboard Meduzoa, Professor. Reston, have Tinks show him to a cabin and see to anything he needs, then meet me in the map room.” The unspoken command there was to have Tinks “look after” their guest; Tinks was a huge, muscular brute from Africa with arms capable of sundering iron chains. No one caused trouble when Tinks was looking after them.

  “Mr. Steele!” Scanlon hollered as she headed to the aft-end.

  Charlotte Steele, the Meduzoa’s navigator scrambled out of her bunk, knocking her tea mug to the deck. It exploded into ceramic shards, splattering lukewarm tea all over her trousers. She leaped over the mess with a curse, then stopped short as she nearly ran her captain down. “Yes, Captain?”

  “You watched the mark, like I asked?”

  “’Course ma’am. He launched off a fine ‘ship, but t’weren’t his. The Air Guard scrambled, but he were quick and outflew ‘em. Near to scraped himself off on the tree, there, but made south-southeast. I talked with Angie Mack, she was running the tower this morning. Good girl, there, Captain, if you ever need a communications officer—“

  “I know all about Angie Mack, and when I see fit to put your lover on the payroll, Mr. Steele, I’ll let you know. What did she say about our quarry?”

  “Filed a plan for Portsmouth, he did, as ship’s second, but were later recalled by the owner ‘imself. Says she doubts the file, but he did head in that direction. Hard to say what ‘e did after that. We can track ‘im, though. Ain’t so many airships with a slender line like that. May take a bit, but there’s gawkers everywhere. ‘Less it rains, o’ course, and then he’d be lost in clouds.”

  “This is England,” Jo signed. “It’s always raining.” She toggled the chatter-box near the aft cabin. “Finney!”

  “Captain?” The engineer’s voice erupted out of the ‘box. “We’re cleared by tower as soon as may be, and not after ten minutes from now. Got two rigids headed in for landing and Angie Mack don’t want her skies all cluttered up.”

  “Get us in the air, Finney. South, southeast, all-ahead full. Captain out.”

  The enormous man called by the misleading name of Tinks leaned on the door. McKeon wasn’t going anywhere. Unless he developed wings. And pioneered a shrinking potion. He would never be able to get his shoulders through that porthole.

  “They should have called you ‘Tank’ instead,” he muttered at the door. A deep rumble of a chuckle answered him. He was tempted to try the door again, but why exhaust himself. He’d been pushing at the unmoving mass of man for near to an hour without budging.

  McKeon examined his cabin; there was a bed-rack mounted to the wall with webbing to pull over himself—did the Captain really engage in such maneuvers as would risk passengers rolling out of bed? McKeon considered that for a moment, then firmly reminded himself to always engage the webbing.

  Painted onto the wall was an elaborate mural of the planets, including the now-disproved Vulcan. McKeon traced the tiny, dark planet with one finger. McKeon’s own father was one of the astronomers who looked into that particular bit of nonsense; whatever Edmond M. Lescarbault had seen, no one ever saw it again. It certainly wasn’t another planet. Landers the elder, however, would be interested in this contemporary artwork featuring the mistaken mathematics. McKeon took out his sketch book and made a quick copy.

  After he returned his notebook to his jacket pocket, he winced. Somehow, in all the excitement, he’d forgotten to tell the Captain that, in addition to abetting in the theft of the Haliphon along with former first mate Archibald Kernigan, his assistant, Piers Gorry, had also thrown McKeon out of the gondola. Admittedly, McKeon’d taken the landing well, falling into a wagon full of straw, and yet his chest ached every time he took a deep breath.

  Slowly, McKeon peeled off his dusty and torn jacket and stained white linen shirt. The tiny mirror nailed to the wall of the cabin revealed that his chest rather resembled a sunset, purple and red, orange and yellow bruising marked up most of his left side. Peeling the shirt away tore away the scabbing on the cuts under his arm, which started weeping blood.

  “I don’t suppose, Tinks, that I might prevail upon you to have some mercy? I could use bandages, and perhaps a surgeon, if you have one on board?”

  “Naw, don’t ship out wit’ no doctors, professor. But I kin get for ya some supplies, if ya give me ya’r word that ya won’t leaf the cabin. Cap’n’d be sore wit me, if ya did.”

  A few minutes later, there was a scratching on the door. Bemused, McKeon opened the door. Tinks was nowhere in sight. For a moment, McKeon considered bolting—the first obligation of a prisoner was to escape, after all. But perhaps he was not actually a prisoner. Just an untrustworthy passenger.

  He went to close the door and was nearly startled out of his skin by a cry somewhat like a small child who’d had a drawer shut on her fingers. Looking down, he saw a tiny primate of some obscure genus, clutching a basket. Tucked in the basket were several rolls of clean linen and a brown glass bottle of tonic.

  “Well, aren’t you a smart little fellow?” McKeon dropped to one knee and held out a hand. With a sing-song cry, the little creature handed over its parcel, then scrambled up McKeon’s arm and perched on his shoulder, grabbing great fistfuls of McKeon’s wheat-blonde hair. “Ow, little rascal...”

  “That be Baobab,” Tinks said, giving McKeon a second scare. How could someone that large move that quietly? “Cap’n got her on our last trip out to Madagascar. She be a lemur, and she got a powerful good sense about who she can just climb all over.”

  “And here I was hoping you’d tell me she was a good judge of character.”

  “No, sir, she ain’t. Just got a sense when someone might be talked into feedin’ her.”

  “Oh, spare me the morose look, Mr. Reston,” Jo said. She shut the door to the map room. “You know as well as I that we’d have been following Archibald Kernagan anyway, no matter that he seems to have drawn the professor into our little intrigue. The War Department was very clear on that; Kernagan is a traitor and a spy. While I can’t q
uite figure out what he’s up to—certainly I can’t comprehend anything that Landers has invented would be of use to the French—we can’t let him succeed, regardless.”

  “It’s more’n that, and you know it, Cap’n.”

  Jo glared at her first, lips pressed together tightly. “Explain what you mean.”

  “Permission to speak freely?”

  “Would it matter to you if I said no?”

  “Probably not, Cap’n,” Reston said. “If I wanted to follow orders blindly, I’d have taken up with the Fleet. You an’ I both know you need another set of eyes and ears, and a damn fine brain on this vessel. Ain’t no use in complainin’ about it, it’s the simple fact of the matter. You have an agenda; one that’s not ordered on you by the War Department, and the sooner you accept that revenge, not patriotic duty, is what’s steerin’ this airship, the better off we’ll be.”

  “There is no need that personal desires and duty cannot be served by the same winds, Reston,” Jo said. She twisted her fingers together. “Bronze Petticoat murdered my parents, you know that. We suspect that Kernagan knows something about them.”

  “Stupid name for a secret organization, if’n you ask me.”

  “I don’t recall asking, but I think it’s brilliant. No one takes them seriously, they sound like a ladies knitting circle. You know how hard it’s been, just getting the War Department to listen at all.”

  “Still, I don’t reckon I’d like to run about committing treason under the standard of belonging to a bunch of skirt-wearing sissies.”

  Jo snarled at her first, “I believe we’ve covered this point, Reston. And rest assured that while your captain might be skirt-wearing, I know I’ve proven to you already that I’m no sissy.”

  “But I didn’t mean you, Cap’n.”

  “Whether you believe you meant it or not, Reston, you’re lumping me in with a group of bonded gears and broken spokes with one off-hand remark. You want to be the extra brain on this ship, then, Mister, I advise you prove to me you know how to use it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, if I’ve reassured you that we’re pursuing this course in the interest of the War Department, would you care to give me your thoughts on Kernagan’s course. Portsmouth?”

  “Rumors, sir, that’s all,” Reston said. He searched through the scrolls, then pulled out the map of southern England. “There’s been stories, that’s all, just stories, of a great whale of a beast, or maybe an enormous clockwork, rising from the water, just south of the city. Few people have seen it, and some that reported it turned up dead not much after. That’s suspicious enough. Dr. Merrit Westcliff managed to obtain a very blurry daguerreotype of something rising from the seas. The plate later was stolen from her office.”

  “You think our double-agent is headed for some mysterious sea creature?” Jo looked up from the map to frown at her first.

  “Perhaps not, sir, but it gives us a place to start lookin’,” Reston replied.

  “Worth a try, I suppose. Follow the Haliphon, by rumor or by sight as long as we can,” Jo said. “Anything else, Reston?”

  “Just tell me, Cap’n,” Reston said, glaring darkly in the direction of guest cabins, “are ye planning on havin’ a tryst with the man?”

  “Ah, Quade old friend,” Jo laughed, “don’t you know? The best affairs are never planned.”

  By the time Ms. Scanlon made her way to the room where McKeon was—to be quite honest and forthright about the situation as it was—being held prisoner, the airship had been underway for quite a good long time. He’d made friends with the lemur, at least as well as anyone can make friends with a tiny, annoyingly loud primate whose main interest is stealing all of one’s food and rummaging through one’s pockets every time one attempted to nap.

  “Ms. Scanlon, there you are,” McKeon said. He didn’t stand at her entrance, the height of rudeness. She took no notice. The lemur clambered up her lean form and stuck a soft pointy noise in her ear.

  “Yes, here I am. Sorry for the discomfort, surely you must understand how little you are to be trusted in such an endeavor,” she said. “Let us be frank with each other, Professor. It seems the best foundation to build a working relationship.”

  “I agree.”

  “Then I shall start, sir,” she said, settling herself and her skirts onto the stool that was bolted to the floor to keep it from sliding around in mid-air maneuvers. “As you are currently within my demesne and I may have Tinks throw you overboard at any time if your answers displease me.”

  “That’s brutally frank,” he said. McKeon straightened in the bunk, slanting a cross look at her.

  “We may as well be truthful, Professor. If I pretended that the situation is otherwise, could you trust me?”

  “I’ve never had someone offer to defenestrate me on the one hand and extend the olive branch with the other,” he said. “Since I’ve apparently no alternative, I am above all else, eager to hear what you have to confess.”

  “My parents were murdered by an agent of Bronze Petticoat seven and a half years ago,” she started, twisting her gloved hands together, the knuckles cracking painfully. “As members of the War Department—not spies, you understand, but mere agents—my mother collated data and my father worked in administration assigning field operatives to choice positions across the globe. I spent three years trying to get the War Department to take me seriously about Bronze Petticoat and they finally allowed me as a full agent and assigned me to the task of tracking them down. Which, I believe, I had done so. I tracked one of their missives to one Archibald Kernigan.” Here she looked at McKeon expectantly.

  “My... not yet lamented first mate,” he said, chewing the side of his tongue nervously. If that was what she thought of his first mate, the link to her murdered parents, he was in trouble now. But then, she could have had him shot hours ago, or tossed overboard, as she had originally threatened. There must be something else. “You think I know something?”

  “No, actually, I don’t,” Ms. Scanlon said. “I think Kernigan was using you and your airship to transport missives without your knowledge. You’ll excuse me for saying that you don’t quite seem the type to be involved in murder and mayhem on such a scale.”

  “Of course you’re forgiven for that, Ms. Scanlon.”

  “Jo.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Jo. Just call me Jo. I don’t hold much to formality.”

  “Jo, then. My friends that call me familiar use McKeon,” he said, “and we seem to be more familiar than most.” He disentangled himself from the hammock with something almost resembling grace and offered his hand to her. “We’ll find Kernigan, for both our sakes.”

  She peeled off her glove, revealing pale skin marked with a few burns and scrapes and placed her palm against his. “Indeed, we shall, McKeon, indeed we shall.”

  McKeon didn’t release her fingers, bringing the strong digits up to his mouth and depositing a kiss on her knuckles. “Do you tinker, then?” He turned her hand in his, inspecting the scarred flesh, stroking a thumb against the heel of her hand. She flushed, attempted to tug her hand away with half-hearted dismay.

  “I’ve held a blacksmith hammer a time or two in my life,” she confessed. “Much as it dismayed both my parents, who wished that I was more ladylike.”

  “The science of being a lady is just as difficult; with marriage and manners being the goal, and no shame to those who pursue that line of query. I confess, however, that I vastly prefer those who are womanly, and well-used to hard work, confident in their own intellect and not the least bit scared of getting somewhat dirty.” He observed her from under sleepily lowered eyelids. Her pupils flared with sudden desire, her breath quickened, and her fingers curled involuntarily around his hand.

  “You may entertain me, now,” Jo said, and for just a moment, McKeon thought she meant something else entirely, which filled his mind with erotic images the sort he should never entertain about a respectable lady who had not yet invited h
im into her bed.

  “Oh!” Right. The exchange of information. He hastily released her hand. “Of course, madam. Your servant, as always. I do not know what I might tell you that begins to aid in this endeavor. I hired Kernigan six months ago, after my previous first mate was struck by a runaway carriage. He lived, but only barely, and he’s still recovering. I pensioned him off and pursued a new mate, as my second didn’t have the skills to step up. I am a tinkerer, a traveling lecturer, an architect, and a cartographer. My inventions, such as the one I rescued from your gondola earlier, help me in my endeavors. I have a line of clockworks that assist in accurate mapping—which I fear might be the most tempting item aboard my airship.”

  “Maps?”

  “Very accurate ones, madam,” McKeon said. “Hyper-accurate. They show not only the lay of the land, but can be expanded and examined; trees, hills, the placement of crates around a warehouse. The clockworks fly, crawl, and slink over the terrain, often unnoticed in the extreme, and returning to their contraptor-caisson. The caisson receives their input, and inside the sealed portion, it projects the landscape in a series of shutterings. With a quick enough clockwork team, spies would even be able to track the movements of a particular person, once she were acquired. Theoretically.”

  Jo nodded thoughtfully. “I can see where this device would be of use to Bronze Petticoat.”

  “Well, perhaps. If they can solve the problem of misaligned thrunge plates. I confess, I haven’t yet made that breakthrough. The device is incomplete. In fact, after several months of tinkering, I was quite prepared to put it aside. If they have a scientist who can rejigger the plate, they could accomplish what I have not yet been able to.”

  Jo lifted her chin. “We’ll see that they don’t have the time to do so, Professor.”

  “McKeon, my dear Jo. We’re familiar, remember?”

  McKeon didn’t consider himself dangerous to women, their hearts, or their reputations under normal circumstances, but Jo blushed deep crimson, hitched up the hem of her flight-dress and fled his chambers. He allowed himself a few moments of unattractive smugness. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance with the feisty airship captain. He would pursue that line of thought. Slowly, though. He wasn’t exactly a skilled navigator of the path to a woman’s heart, one of the few regions on the planet that could never be accurately mapped, no matter the skill of the cartographer.