Clockwork Universe

by Seanen McGuire

  A letter of marque was the distinction between a privateer and a pirate; the difference between official sanction and the gallows. The careers were the same, only their ends differed. Privateers could retire; retirement for a pirate meant a long drop and a short rope.

  Violet looked ready to choke the man. A vein throbbed in Turcotte’s forehead. He’d gone the color of a boiled beetroot. “You unbelievable arsehole.”

  “My hands are tied, I’m afraid. Although I have heard that certain letters may be reconsidered in situations where mitigating circumstances might apply.”

  “Mitigating circumstances.” Beads clicked when Sujata shook her head. “Such as accepting this warehouse job.”

  “Oh, captain. It would be untoward for me to speculate.”

  “Of course.”

  She sighed. “Very well. Tell us about this warehouse.”

  “You’ve changed your mind then? Capital!”

  “Yes, I’m all aflutter at the opportunity. So tell us about the gods-damned warehouse.”

  “Aha,” said Wellington. He made to cough again, thought better of it, and folded the silk into his pocket. “Tell me, captain. What do you know of cavorite?”

  * * *

  After the bureaucrat departed, Sujata studied her lieutenants. Now their expressions ranged from gobsmacked (Vi), to angry (Turcotte), to the narrowed eyes of profound wariness (de Vries).

  “Well?”

  Turcotte, never one to mince words, said, “I think we tell him to go bugger himself with a steam-powered badger.”

  Vi wrinkled her nose. “This doesn’t smell right.”

  “If it’s so easy,” said de Vries, “why haven’t they done this themselves?”

  “It does beg the question.” Sujata chewed her lip, thinking.

  “It’s dangerous as hell,” said Turcotte.

  “Unquestionably.”

  The engineer said, with the tone of voice like somebody testing the ice on a frozen lake, “One might suppose the warehouse wasn’t fully assayed, or that some fraction of its contents was lost in the confusion following the octo landings…” He left it at that. A simple observation, nothing more. Certainly nothing to suggest he was thinking about his share of any potential profits. And that such profits might be astronomical.

  “Can’t spend money when you’re croaked,” said Turcotte. The more Sujata chewed her lips, the unhappier he looked. “I reckon you know that, captain, mum.”

  “Rest assured I do,” she said. Long exhalations all around as the officers relaxed. She waited a moment before adding, nonchalantly, “Vi, just out of curiosity, how long would it take to crack open the phosphorus rounds?”

  Turcotte sighed. “Hell’s bloody bells. She’s already making a plan.”

  Vi ran her hands through her hair; they left sooty highlights in their wake. “We’re going to die,” she said.

  “Well. At least we’ll die rich,” said de Vries.

  “No,” said Turcotte. “We’ll die with our innards wrapped around our throats, wishing we’d had the chance to be rich.”

  * * *

  Sujata knew what every legitimate independent entrepreneur who occasionally profited from the hardships of others knew about cavorite: that the mere thought of carrying it was a shortcut to a slow and bloody execution.

  The mineral, named for its discoverer, some Royal Society egghead, was to the earth’s gravitational radiations as a lead plate was to Mr. Röntgen’s X-rays. As such, it was central to the Royal Navy’s operations at altitudes beyond those attainable by even the most advanced hydrogen airships. The aetherships designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel all relied upon a powerful stock of cavorite plating to shield them from the earth’s gravity, thereby making them nigh weightless and thus enabling their extra-atmospheric maneuverings.

  Which is why hanging was too good for a pirate caught pinching the Queen’s cavorite. They’d wreck you good and proper if they found so much as a single anti-dram in the hold. But that hadn’t been a worry for months, much less a temptation, as Dr. Cavor’s famous discovery was now nothing but a footnote in the history of natural philosophy. All the Queen’s cavorite had been lost when Jack Scaly routed the Royal Navy in orbit. By now, half of it was scattered across the celestial spheres; the other half had given rise to some spectacular displays of falling stars over the British Empire, the Czar’s Russia, and points beyond. As had the more mundane wreckage of the Royal Navy.

  Stealing cavorite was a shortcut to an abrupt end to one’s career. It was also, in theory, a shortcut to unimaginable profit: foreign powers would empty their national coffers just for a peek at the material.

  So if the Black Shiva took this job, and if the warehouse was just as Wellington described, and if the warehouse records weren’t entirely accurate (or easily forged), and if it just so happened that some of the cavorite from the warehouse accidentally slipped into hidden compartments in the Shiva’s hold through an entirely innocent mistake, and if the crew later found it and accidentally sold it to the highest bidder …

  Well, that would be enough money for a smart captain to retire and move somewhere very far away where she didn’t have to worry about a brace of alien tripods mucking up her morning tea.

  * * *

  Wellington gave them a map. The warehouse of T. David England and Sons, Victuallers to the Crown by Royal Charter since the Year of Our Lord 1822, lay hundreds of leagues away in the mountainous forests of the Uttarakhand province. (An improbably patriotic name, thought Sujata. She wondered what other names Mr. England had answered to before turning his back on the life of a confidence trickster to enjoy respectable employ as a war profiteer.) Fortunately for the Empire, the richest cavorite mine in the world lay inside its borders; the warehouse was actually a compound comprising a refinery for the raw mineral, a weighing station for the refined cavorite, and a storage facility.

  Wellington’s map conveniently omitted any indication that the nearest tripod landings had been less than twenty leagues from the warehouse. Strange that Jack Scaly had chosen to land in the hinterlands of the subcontinent; in Europe, the slimy devil had gone straight for the capital cities. When Sujata confronted him about the omission, he pulled out his handkerchief.

  “Aha,” he said. “An oversight, I’m quite certain. But you needn’t worry about the octos, for HM navy will be your beard, yes! Aha. Once we sight the Shiva north of the upper Ganges, we’ll send a sortie of frigates and corvettes straight into the heart of their nefarious nest. Jack Scaly will have his tentacles full dealing with the righteous fury of loyal tars armed with phosphorus, blades, and a taste for vengeance. That devil will never notice you.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s very reassuring. Aha.”

  Turcotte used the map to chart a course into the rolling hills of the north. Reports from inland were spotty; Jack Scaly had played merry hob with the telegraph lines. But rumors and grumblings among the denizens of Madras’s watering holes put at least four octo nests between the Shiva’s berth and the warehouse. Running that gauntlet required creative navigation. So Sujata was content to let Turcotte take the time he needed to do the job right. Besides. It took several days for the crew to offload their cargo and turn it into cash. The cash turned into a spool of steel cable, welding gear, fuel, additional miscellany of varied and sturdy purpose, plus a truly astonishing amount of ammunition, including phosphorus rounds. In spite of the extra weight they took on—in the words of de Vries, the spool alone was “heavier than a pregnant elephant dipped in lead”—they procured only a single bladder’s worth of spare hydrogen. They wouldn’t need it, if Wellington’s figures were correct.

  They couldn’t be. His figures were absurd.

  But Sujata did the math, and Turcotte checked her figures and found them sound. And then they re-did their sums assuming Wellington was a particularly well-dressed opium addict. After that, they revised their calculations downward yet again, on the logical assumption that a cavorite refinery would be paid on a sliding scale pinned to
the purity of its product. And the merchant hadn’t been born who wouldn’t occasionally let his thumb fall upon the scale when there were government guineas to be had. Or, in this case, under the scale.

  * * *

  On the docks, she had asked Wellington, “How much?”

  “Approximately seven hundred thousand anti-stones, with a purity between ninety-five and ninety-seven percent.”

  Vi said, “That sounds like … a lot.”

  Sujata did the math in her head; Turcotte, despite having taken no few blows to the head during his tournament, got there a second later. That’s why she paid him. His fists weren’t without their uses—occasionally his elbows, knees, feet, fingernails, and teeth, too—but she kept him around for his brain. A navigator had to know numbers; Turcotte knew them as though he’d gone on week-long benders through the sleaziest parts of Shanghai with each and every digit and returned with tattoos to prove it.

  “That’s a displacement of over forty-five hundred tons! Bugger me sideways and call me missus.”

  “Anti-tons,” Wellington said. “Technically.”

  De Vries cleared his throat. “Captain, this is absurd. That’s many times the Shiva’s displacement. It’s not possible.”

  Wellington came as close to displaying an emotion as Sujata had ever witnessed. Perhaps he had gas. “We have an entire navy to stock, Mr. de Vries.”

  Under his breath, Turcotte said to Vi, “Not any more, the way I hear it.”

  Sujata turned on him. “Stow it,” she said. Then to the government man, she added, “A cynical person—not me, mind you, but a cynical person—might wonder why, if you have all this cavorite sitting around doing nobody any good while Jack Scaly makes a hash of things on earth and in heaven, you haven’t scooped it up.”

  Vi giggled. “And up. And up. And …”

  “Aha. Well. As you can imagine, the octos have taken quite an interest in the navy since our engagement above the atmosphere. If we started outfitting a new fleet in the hinterlands of the Raj, Jack Scaly would notice. And set upon us immediately before we had a sporting chance.”

  “Bloody octos,” said Turcotte. “No honor!”

  “Yeah. They lack the benefit of an honorable profession like ours,” said Sujata. “But if we were to offload the warehouse …”

  Wellington nodded. “Jack Scaly wouldn’t blink twice. Assuming he has eyes to blink, the devil.”

  * * *

  Sujata’s stroke of genius—she felt comfortable calling it that, even if the crew hadn’t yet come around—was to realize that it would be easier and faster to steal the entire warehouse rather than just its contents. The key was to utilize the cavorite’s gravitational shielding properties to hasten its theft. Evenly distributed through the warehouse, it would reduce the weight of the metal dome to the merest fraction of its unshielded value. Meaning that once the foundation piles were severed—courtesy of demolition fuses built from the phosphorus Vi had extracted from the armaments—the Black Shiva could lift the entire building, cavorite and all, and feel nothing but the weight of the floor under the cavorite. Unloading the entire warehouse would take a day or more, but the building could be cut free in half the time: a worthy consideration with Jack Scaly prowling the jungles. Further, the anti-gravitational properties of the mineral would lessen the weight not only of the warehouse dome but of everything above it—including the Shiva itself, thereby boosting its lifting power.

  * * *

  The Shiva set sail two days later, turning inland just as a particularly unwelcome line of squalls crested the horizon behind them. A tropical depression in the Bay of Bengal set the mercury falling like a perforated frigate. Sujata watched the oncoming storm through her spyglass. Without benefit of the glass, and the Shiva’s altitude, the squalls would have been still hidden across the ocean. The storm couldn’t surprise them now, but it could still make them unhappy. What a shame that even the strongest wind couldn’t blow the octos back to the stars. More stubborn than a sack full of barnacles was old Jack Scaly.

  Turcotte stood at the wheel, keeping one eye on the cross winds, another on the engine readouts, and some unseen mystical third eye on the navigation chart he’d marked for the voyage. He somehow also noticed his captain’s preoccupation with the receding horizon.

  “Trouble, captain?”

  Sujata knocked the spyglass against her hip. It telescoped, clink-clink-clinking like fine china to become a tube small enough to fit in her coat pocket. She dropped it there, saying, “I was just thinking, Mr. Turcotte, that this might go down as one of my very best plans. The capstone of our careers.”

  “Really? Because I was thinking it would probably be the one where we all end up dead.”

  “Everybody dies, Mr. Turcotte. Even people as pretty as you and me. Well, pretty as me and as … elaborately decorated as yourself.”

  The deck shivered as a cross-gust shook the airship’s lifting body. Turcotte paused to adjust their bearing. This time he did consult the chart, just long enough to convince himself the Shiva still lay dead-center in the first of several emerald-green lines zigzagging across Wellington’s map. Each segment bisected a blood red line connecting the rumored locations of octo nests.

  He said, “This is a terrible idea, captain. We all feel it. Let’s say to hell with the octos and science and set course for a place where neither can follow.”

  “That’s the problem, Mr. Turcotte. If you can find me a place where Jack Scaly won’t soon follow, we’ll set course for it today. But I think you’ll find it exists nowhere on the Lord’s earth, and certainly not in the heavens above.”

  “So we’re doing this out of patriotic duty?”

  “We’re doing this because I want to one day retire and spend my afternoons sipping tea in a rose garden without worrying about some accursed octo tripod wobbling over the hills to trample the bushes and incinerate everything else.”

  “Oh.” Turcotte chewed on a fingernail. He worried it for half a minute, then spat the husk through a porthole. “I thought we were doing this to get rich.”

  “That, too, Mr. Turcotte.”

  “I suppose that when it comes to finding one’s fate, there are worse pursuits.”

  But Sujata had produced her spyglass again—snick, click—and returned her attention to the storm. She pulled the speaking tube from its clamp and said, “Mr. de Vries. Spin up the engines. Give them the reins a bit, let them gallop. Wellington hired us for speed. Let’s show him we can deliver.”

  The tube funneled his response, and a whiff of petrol, to her. “Aye, captain.”

  Turcotte turned a suspicious eye in her direction as she quit the bridge. “You’re sure there’s nothing worrying you, captain?”

  “Fetch me if you glimpse any tripods,” she said. “Otherwise, I’ll relieve you in six.”

  * * *

  They sailed for a night and a day. Sometimes their course let the Shiva ride the rising wind, earning them precious hours, and other times it put the ship bucking and thrashing straight into its teeth like a suicidal skipjack dead-set on hurling itself down a shark’s gullet. The whine of overworked engines became the atonal music by which the plan began to unravel. In other words, it was business as usual aboard the Shiva.

  The wind put them hours behind schedule. A bit past one in the morning, Sujata and Turcotte stood on the bridge in darkness broken only by the sepulchral glow from the phosphorescent paint on the instrumentation. A hundred yards underfoot the Ganges River gurgled through the lush valleys of Uttarakhand. But nobody could see them. The moonless night that enabled them to glide unnoticed past the octos also rendered them invisible to the sharpest eyes in the Royal Navy. Assuming Wellington’s talk about providing a beard hadn’t been a skein of lies.

  Turcotte asked, “What’s the word, captain?”

  They had three options. They could descend, drop anchor, and try to hold position until dawn, when navy eyes could spy the Shiva and initiate the promised diversion. But that would mean putting the
mselves at the mercy of the cyclone as the fringes they’d skirted all day and night passed over them. Or they could fire up the arclights and turn the ship into the brightest thing for leagues around. But that would draw attention from humans and octos alike, likely defeating the purpose of the diversion. Or they could stay the course and hope like hell there were enough bright sparks among Wellington’s people that the navy would do the sums and catch up soon after sunrise.

  Sujata weighed her choices. When the future contained nothing but bad, worse, and worst, it was the captain’s job to choose between them.

  “We plunge ahead, Mr. Turcotte. No lights.”

  And so they did. Which is how, two hours later, they soared through the middle of an octo nest.

  Sujata, who had given up on sleep until the conclusion of their venture, stood at the wheel. Turcotte, whom she had relieved but never felt entirely comfortable away from the wheel when things were tense, dozed in a chair that hung in a corner of the bridge. The green corpse light of the instrumentation glistened from the drool at the corner of his mouth. He snored loudly enough that she didn’t immediately notice how the timbre of the engine noise had changed.