eSteampunk Vol. 01 No. 03

by Anthology

  He prowled along to the next cell, which still held Sir Reginald. The cells had moved on many times since the engineer’s first night, but the two of them remained together, as exposed as they could be here at the top of hell. It was the longest Sarah had been left in one place since she arrived. Normally she would have seized the opportunity to carve her defiance into the walls, to kindle the fire of suffragettism in her fellow prisoners, but the heat and the sunlight made it impossible to focus. She was always thirsty and bewildered, frustrated at the muddle of her own mind. Night soothed, but more and more it brought screams and the terrible sounds of violence. The place was restless.

  Sir Reginald’s company was some compensation, his genteel presence a source of comfort, however cold. He was an interesting man, unconcerned perhaps for people and places, but able to talk at incredible length about the workings of crankshaft and piston, lever and gear. And he built an amazing array of devices from the scraps of material the prison afforded him. In his artful hands shards of bone and chips of crockery became tiny gears, twigs gearshafts, and strips of bedsheet fanbelts. He had built a miniature windmill that stirred in the slight breeze; a three legged figure that staggered downhill using swaying weights; a tiny clock that ticked for an hour before its hair spring wound down. And when he was not crafting constructs, he was looking at the prison around them, watching the way cells moved, the way the central tower rotated, how it was positioned to oversee every inmate’s cage, robbing them of privacy and peace.

  He looked up now as Scabbry rattled the bars of his cell.

  “What’s that?” the warder asked.

  “A sort of seismograph,” Sir Reginald said. “It measures movement between this cell and others, marking off the scale of change with taps on the ground.”

  Scabbry grunted. “What for?”

  “It helps me to understand how this place works.”

  A screech of grinding metal echoed around the prison. Scabbry ignored it as he watched the engineer, his eyes narrowing slyly.

  “I could get you better bits,” he said. “Bones ain’t much good for building with, I reckon. Maybe you’d like some wood instead?”

  “That would be very helpful,” Sir Reginald said. “Yes, please.”

  “Just answer me a question first.” Scabbry grinned. “Why’d you do it?”

  Sir Reginald looked up with a frown. “The ship, you mean?”

  Scabbry nodded. “The ship.”

  “Why must you grind on at this subject?” Sir Reginald said, his brow crumpling in frustration. “It was an unfortunate means to a significant end. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Not for a lot of folks,” Scabbry said. “A lot of important folks, who’ll be very pleased if I give them the answer. You help me out, I’ll help you out.”

  “I have not told anybody else,” Sir Reginald said. “Not my lawyer, not my sister, not the judge nor the press. The crown prince came to express his shock that I would destroy his pride and joy, an act of purest treason, but I said nothing. So what makes you think I will tell you?”

  “Because I can make your life a living hell,” Scabbry snarled, oblivious to the wail of stressed machinery growing behind him. “You think it’s hot and dry up here? Wait until it’s been a month. Think the food’s shit? Wait until you taste what we can serve special. Think your water cup’s small? Let me tell you–”

  He was interrupted by a scream of rending steel, followed by an almighty crash.

  Scabbry spun around in alarm, his truncheon raised to ward of whatever threat the noise portended. Across the chasm of the prison, a series of cells had broken off their rails. Two had crashed to the ground and lay, twisted and broken, their inhabitants crying out in pain as they crawled battered and bleeding from the wreckage. Another hung over the gap where those two had been, held in place by chains that squealed in protest at the weight. Whatever had happened, it had damaged other cells too. Bars were bent apart, and doors swung open or fell crashing from their hinges. Cackles of laughter echoed around the prison as scores of prisoners burst free.

  Scabbry blew a long, shrill blast on his tin whistle and rushed away, his footsteps clanging on the walkways as he raced towards the disturbance, other warders falling into step behind him.

  “What was that?” Sarah asked, staring aghast at the mangled mess, the poor unfortunate prisoners lying amongst the wreckage.

  “The beginning of Master Puma’s plan, I expect,” Sir Reginald said. “Suitably shaped objects — roughly spherical and sturdy enough to withstand the pressure — could disrupt the gears and throw these cells from their tracks.” He peered at the distant damage. “As I suspected, the damage reveals a cantilevered twin rail system. But the interesting workings are at the centre and won’t be exposed to us through this crude disruption.” He shook his head. “I shall need a better vantage point.”

  He pulled a fork from his pocket. Its prongs were twisted around two of his smallest gear wheels and levers like tiny teeth ran along one edge. He carefully inserted the end of the device into his cell’s sturdy lock, and with a click-click-click the door swung open.

  Sir Reginald stepped out onto the walkway, glanced around the prison and turned to Sarah’s door.

  “I recommend that you come with me, Miss Partington,” he said. “The layout of the prison provides few bottlenecks for the guards to control while the platforms are jammed, and a prison riot is no place for a lady.”

  “Will anywhere else be any safer?” she asked with trepidation as he opened her cell door.

  “Of course,” Sir Reginald said. “Follow me.”

  Sarah paused in the open cage, looking down at the turmoil below. Up here might be the safest place to be, away from the rioting, nowhere near any escape route. But Sir Reginald was intent on going, and she didn’t think he could survive this on his own. He was too focussed on his own thoughts, oblivious to the malign intentions of others. No, better to take a chance on safety in numbers and protect her best hope for sanity than to perch up here like a frightened sparrow. So, just as she had on that fateful derby day, she took a deep breath and stepped out from behind her barrier.

  Sir Reginald led her along the walkway and down two spirals of narrow steps, almost to the floor of the prison. There, just above the concrete base, more narrow walkways ran from the central tower to the cells, like the spokes of a wheel. The walkways above were frantic with activity. Some prisoners, freed from their own cells, were setting to work breaking others out, using all the skills of their criminal trades. As more inmates were released the chaos spread, a roiling mass of noise and rage, a braying mob battling the warders. The rioters carried improvised weapons: bed legs, broken bars, small knives they had kept hidden for this moment. The warders were armed as well, and more disciplined, but they lacked the inmates’ ferocity. Professional determination wavered in the face of a feral longing for release.

  Normally occupied by warders, the low level walkways were deserted. Their guards had gone to join the fight, and the prisoners had not got this far.

  Sir Reginald marched across the nearest walkway, glancing down at the mechanisms grounded in the concrete below. Having released her, he now seemed largely indifferent to Sarah’s existence, his fearsome intellect preoccupied with other matters. She didn’t mind. Just stretching her legs like this felt better than she could have imagined. Her whole body felt flush with movement, and a smile crept up her face.

  “As I suspected,” Sir Reginald muttered, pausing to peer at a pair of massive chains running through a series of gears. Halfway across he paused again, crouching to peer through the iron lattice of the bridge at the levers and pulleys below. “Interesting. Though it could be done far more efficiently. And there is a risk of excessive tension over time.”

  At the end of the walkway was a door into the base of the tower. Unlike the cell doors, it was solid
wood, reinforced with iron, but like them it was firmly locked. Sir Reginald thrust his fork key into the lock, twisting and tilting the handle, but it rattled ineffectively against the mechanism. He pocketed it and pressed his hands against the door, peered at the lock and hinges that fixed it in its frame. At last, he pulled a small wedge from his pocket, squeezed the tip beneath the door, and gave it a firm kick. The door lifted slightly and, with a click, swung open.

  Inside was an iron grid floor, green paint flaking away through years of wear, a complex series of grinding gears visible through the gaps. The room was even more sweltering than the cells had been, a furnace filling one half, pipes running off from it to the machine below and away around the prison.

  Sarah slammed the door behind them, shutting out the cries of anger and the echoing thuds of metal slamming against flesh. The riot was growing in size and intensity, and fear coiled like a snake in her belly. The violence she had seen in the past had been small, focussed acts, more symbolic than truly aggressive. Eggs and sticks thrown at politicians’ cabs. Policemen restraining lady protesters with the bare minimum of force. She had been shocked by the moment when Hapenny Bit came tumbling across her, hooves flailing as he slid across the track, and by her rough handling as the officers hauled her away. But the sickening sound as the horse’s leg snapped and he whinnied in fear and pain, even that was nothing compared with what was happening outside. It was raw aggression, the frustrations of caged animals caught in a blazing summer, stuck far from home, unleashing all their pent-up rage on each other. She felt sick just hearing the sounds.

  She slid a bolt across the door, its sturdy promise of defence filling her with relief. As she scurried around the room, bolting the doors from the other walkways, Sir Reginald peered at the blazing furnace, traced the pattern of pipes with his hand, squinted into the ever-shifting gloom below.

  “Of course!” he exclaimed. “Which means...”

  He turned and ran up the stairs that hugged one wall of the room, opposite the heat of the furnace. Sarah followed him, sweat running beneath her fatigues, dizzy with the heat and the bewildering intensity of events.

  The stairs ran up through two floors piled high with crates and boxes, heaps of coal and trays of tools. Sarah glanced around for weapon, and grabbed up a heavy headed wrench. She was determined to take on any rioters who caused them trouble. She saw no-one else, no warders guarding or porters carrying, no engineers tending the pipes and chains. Everyone, it seemed, had left at the sound of the riot, whether to beat it down or flee its wrath. Only she and Sir Reginald had taken the moment of violence to rush to the heart of the prison machine, the ever spying eye of the tower.

  Upwards they went, past a floor of spare parts and another where rickety chairs were gathered around a tea-chest table, spilt drinks and abandoned cards scattered around. A pan bubbled over onto a stove, sending up a smell of charred beef and beans.

  At last they arrived on the top floor, the watching gallery. The walls were glass, interlaced with wire mesh to prevent them shattering when hit. In the centre of the room a high backed chair dominated a control desk studded with levers, cranks and switches. A speaking tube dangled at head height.

  “Hey, what’re you doing up here?” A spotty youth in a warden’s uniform turned from the window, leaving a smear where he had been pressed against the glass. “How’d you get in?”

  Sir Reginald strode over to the control panel and flung himself down in the seat. He ran his gaze across the lever and switches, turned a dial and cocked his ear for the results.

  “You can’t do that!” the warden exclaimed, hurrying to turn the dial back. “Noone’s to touch anything, Mr Scabbry said so.”

  Sarah watched as Sir Reginald brushed the youth off and flicked another switch. Whatever he was doing, it had to be better than waiting for the riot to arrive or the guards to assert control and throw them back in their cells. As the youth struggled to pull Sir Reginald from the chair, Sarah mustered all the menace she could manage and clanged the wrench against a pipe.

  “Oy!” The warder snapped round at the sound. “You might break something!”

  “I will break your head if you do not unhand that man at once,” Sarah said, her attempt at a low growl coming out more like a croak.

  “Yes ma’am!” The warder jerked away from Sir Reginald and retreated trembling to the window. She must be better at menace than she thought, though a glance out the window reminded her that that was no good thing.

  “What now?” she asked. This sudden sense of liberation was wonderful, but their immediate future had become dangerously uncertain.

  Sir Reginald pulled a lever. Outside, a column of cells ground upwards along the concrete wall, dividing a group of warders in half. He turned a dial, pulled the lever again, and peered down at the tangle of cables beneath the control panel.

  Sarah glanced around. Her blood was pumping, urging her to instant action, to address the perils and urgency of their situation. But her eyes told her that they were safe for now, that it was all outside, and that whatever came next, she was in Sir Reginald’s liver-spotted hands. Deciding that the best thing she could do was to calmly wait, she fought down her animal instincts and settled into a corner of the room, just behind where the stairs emerged from the floor.

  “What is your name?” she asked the young warder.

  “Hemsworth, ma’am. Jason Hemsworth.”

  “Please sit down, Mr. Hemsworth. Nervous pacing doesn’t become you.”

  Jason swallowed and crossed his legs beneath himself, still trembling as he glanced between the violence outside and the wrench in her hands. A loud clang made him jump.

  “What was that?” he exclaimed.

  “Probably just one of Sir Reginald’s tests,” Sarah said. Hemsworth was already starting to get on her nerves, with his frightened hamster face and his terrified twitching. How had he ever expected to succeed as a prison warder? “Do calm down. This will all be over soon.”

  Sir Reginald tugged on a large lever. A ferocious grinding shook the viewing room as it sped up its slow rotations, cells drifting past the windows at ever increasing speed. There was a thumping sound as well, almost inaudible beneath the racket. Sarah rose to investigate, but the juddering floor threw her from her feet, and before she could get upright the thumps had emerged into footsteps, a wide, fearsome figure appearing at the top of the stairs.

  “You?” Shadow Puma said, staring incredulously at Sir Reginald. “What the fuck you doing here?”

  Puma loomed over Sir Reginald, lips pulled back to reveal the jagged line of his teeth. The upper half of his fatigues had been ripped away, leaving his tattooed and muscular flesh exposed. His skin was almost black with tribal markings, the spaces between them grey and sickly looking.

  “I am attempting to understand these controls,” Sir Reginald said, “and of course the workings of the mechanisms to which they are connected.”

  “Well there’s handy.” Shadow Puma grinned. One hand squeezed the edge of the console, the metal buckling beneath his grip. “I’m looking for someone to work them controls. Place shut tight as an unpaid whore, and I don’t plan to stay. So, you know which one opens the gate?”

  Sir Reginald nodded. “Of course. That was easy to find.”

  “Then pull it,” Puma said.

  “No.” Sir Reginald didn’t even look up, engrossed as he was in playing with the controls.

  “Do it,” Shadow Puma said, leaning forward and grabbing Sir Reginald’s arm. Something clicked, pain buckling the engineer’s face. “Or I smash your bones and lick out the marrow.”

  Puma twisted the arm back on itself, jerking Sir Reginald out of the seat.

  “No,” the engineer whimpered. “Won’t. Can’t.”

  Sarah rose from the floor and, as quietly as she could be, crept towards Puma’s exposed
back, the wrench heavy in her hands. She trembled at the thought of tangling with the brute, but the look on Sir Reginald’s face was terrible to behold. It reminded her of that moment on the track, of the grunt the horse made as it went over, full of pain and fear.

  Puma continued to twist and something crunched. Sir Reginald groaned.

  “Which one?” Puma demanded.

  Sarah took a final step forward and swung with all her strength. The wrench smacked against the back of Puma’s shaven skull and he lurched forward, dropping Sir Reginald. Sarah let out a deep sigh of relief.

  Then Puma turned, blood dripping across the console, and bared his teeth.

  “Like that, bitch?”

  He twisted round, a fist flying towards the terrified Sarah. But he lacked the speed of even the slowest policeman, and she had dodged the attentions of many constables. She ducked beneath the blow and, on instinct, swung the wrench up. It slammed into Puma’s crotch, and he curled over with a grunt. As his face sank towards the floor she lashed out one last time, a blow full of rage and fear, and he slumped limply to the ground.

  “Thank you,” Sir Reginald said, clutching his injured wrist. He peered at an exposed point of bone. “Almost like girders, aren’t they?”

  Sarah tore a sleeve from her fatigues and used it bind his wound.

  “What now?” she asked. “Can we leave?”

  “Not yet,” Sir Reginald said, gritting his teeth as she tightened the improvised bandage. “There is one more thing I want to know.”

  He took the wrench and began unbolting a brass plate from the floor. Sarah joined him. Anything was better than thinking about the tooth-grinding crunch of Shadow Puma’s bones, the blood trickling down his skin.

  They pulled the plate up and away, exposing more gears and levers, belts and pulleys. Sir Reginald stuck his head through the hole, peering around.