The Havoc Machine ce-4

by Steven Harper

  “Damn it,” he muttered.

  “I hate it when people make a mess in my laboratory,” Havoc said, the words rippling endlessly from his mouth. “Especially thieves like you. It will take hours to clean this up, though I can use automatons to help me, but lately some haven’t been so cooperative, which is why I had to put some of my work aside, though this new breakthrough is very promising and I don’t appreciate that you have interrupted me, little thief.”

  He fired again, and Thad ducked back behind the table. Bullets pocked and pinged all around him. A red-hot line scored his forearm and he snatched himself farther back. Blood trickled down the inside of his sleeve.

  “I hit you, little thief. I can smell the blood. It’s funny how these days I can sense so much more than I could before I contracted this wonderful disease-”

  “Dante!” Thad shouted. “Shut it!”

  “Applesauce!” Dante’s interjection was followed by a scream from Havoc. Thad shoved himself away from the equipment pile and slid sideways on the floor. Dante was at Havoc’s shoulder, his sharp beak piercing Havoc’s ear as his needle claws dug into Havoc’s neck. Blood flew in all directions. Havoc’s metal arm fired wildly into the ceiling. The boy huddled on the operating table, but Thad’s slide across the floor had changed the trajectory so that the child wasn’t in the line of fire. The pistol barked three times in Thad’s hand. All three shots went straight into Havoc’s upper body. His arm gun went silent, and the clockworker toppled backward with a burbling gasp. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

  “Olga!” Thad shouted at him.

  “Bless my soul,” Dante said, hopping free of Havoc. His claws were red. “Doom!”

  Thad glanced over at the ten-legged spider crouched atop the pile of equipment across the room. What about that thing was worth so much? In any case, it would keep for now. He ran to the table. The boy lay huddled on his side, shivering in his rags. For a terrible moment Thad was back in Poland looking down at David. But this wasn’t Poland, and this boy wasn’t David. There was no sheet, no blood, and Thad had arrived in time.

  “It’s all right,” Thad told him, then cursed himself for speaking English. He switched to his heavy Lithuanian. “I’ll get you out of here. The bad man is dead. He can’t hurt you.”

  The boy didn’t respond. Dante hopped up to Thad’s shoulder, blood still staining his beak and claws. Thad touched the boy’s shoulder. It was warm. “My name is Mr. Sharpe,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home. Can you sit up?”

  A soft sound from the rags, like the sound of someone trying not to cry. Thad’s heart half broke.

  “I’m going to pick you up,” Thad said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “But I…will…little thief.”

  Thad spun in time to see Havoc slap a button on the back of his mechanical hand. It pulsed red, and a high-pitched sound squealed through the room. Havoc was gasping, and blood gushed from his chest wounds.

  “You will not…steal…my work,” he panted. “No one…will steal…work.”

  Before Thad could react, rats poured into the room. Tens and dozens and hundreds of them. They poured in from the door Havoc had used. They swarmed down from the balcony. They scampered down the spiral stairs. Thad had seen them before, but hadn’t noticed that they were partly animal and partly mechanical. Metal claws scratched and sparked against the stones and their eyes pulsed a scarlet that matched the button on the back of Havoc’s heavy hand. The high-pitched squeal grew louder.

  “When enough arrive,” Havoc said, “rats reach…critical mass. Boom. You will die with my work…little thief.”

  Havoc slumped back and went still, but the button on his hand continued its red pulse. The half-mechanical rats flooding the room ignored Thad and Dante and the boy to swarm over Havoc’s body in a metal cairn, their scarlet eyes beating a dreadful rhythm that grew louder and pounded against Thad’s bones. A palpable heat suffused the very air and the pulse sped up.

  Thad shot a glance at the ten-legged spider on its junk pile all the way across the laboratory, then down at the boy on the table near him. The boy’s weight would slow Thad down and eat time. So would dashing across the room to grab the spider. Could he do both? Probably not. The pulse was blending now into a near-continuous sound of its own. He had to make a choice.

  Thad shook his head. There was no choice. Besides, he knew damned well he hadn’t really intended to save the invention anyway. Thad swept the ragged boy into his arms and sprinted for the doorway Havoc had used. A steady stream of rats rushed past him in the opposite direction, and his boots crunched some of them. They twitched, still trying to crawl toward Havoc’s laboratory. Thad ran up a ramp and found himself at door. Once again he was in Poland, but this time David was still alive. He smashed into the door with his shoulder, but it wasn’t locked, or even latched. It burst open and he stumbled into the chilly air of the courtyard, the boy still in his arms.

  “Sharpe is sharp,” Dante said. He had prudently moved to the back of Thad’s neck.

  The pulse had become a shriek. Thad ran. This time he would win. This time the boy would live. His arms ached and his lungs burned, but he ran. He vaulted over the pit and plunged through the curtain of vines. The boy huddled in his arms didn’t make a sound the entire time. Outside, the hill’s downward slope made it easier, though his legs were getting heavy and stitch cramped his side.

  The explosion shoved him forward with a rude hand. Heat washed over him and singed the hair from his neck. Thad curled around the boy and took the rolling bumps and bruises as his due penance. When they stopped rolling, Thad cautiously pulled himself away from the boy. His body ached in a way that told him his muscles would scream at him in the morning, but he didn’t seem to have any broken bones.

  “Bless my soul!” Dante squawked from the ground several paces away.

  “Are you all right?” Thad asked the boy in Lithuanian. “Can you walk?”

  The boy, still wrapped in his rags and scarf, nodded and got to his feet even as Thad, groaning, did the same. The castle, a ruin before, was now a total wreck. Multicolored flames danced against the night sky. So much for Havoc’s invention. Thad wondered if the villagers would come to investigate or if they’d stay huddled in their homes.

  “Let me see if you are injured.” Thad tried to pull the boy’s scarf away, but the boy yelped and snatched himself back.

  “Na, na,” he said. No.

  Thad put up his hands. What dreadful things had Havoc done that made the boy fear being touched? “All right. I’ll take your word. We should leave now.”

  At that moment, Sofiya came galloping up on her clockwork horse with Blackie on a lead rein behind her. “What happened?” she demanded in English. “Did you get the invention? Where is it?”

  “Havoc set off a doomsday device to destroy the castle,” Thad said shortly. He set Dante back on his shoulder. “I had time to save the device or the boy. Not both.”

  Sofiya went pale. “Our employer will be…upset.”

  “That I saved a human being instead of a machine?” Thad snarled. “Your employer can have the damn money back.”

  She looked away and her voice dropped. “You do not understand how important this was to him.”

  “He’ll have to do without.” Thad jerked a thumb at the burning castle. “It seems safe to say Havoc’s machine is gone.”

  “Hm.” Sofiya stared at the leaping flames, her mouth a hard, white line. The horse stamped a foot and snorted. “There will be trouble, Mr. Sharpe. A great deal of trouble.”

  “Applesauce,” said Dante.

  “Thank you,” the boy said in a clear, piping voice.

  Thad turned to him in surprise. “You speak English?”

  “Thank you,” the boy repeated softly. “For taking me out of there.”

  It was like hearing David again. Thad’s throat thickened, and he coughed. “It’s all…I mean, I’m glad to do it, son.”

  Son. He should have chosen a different word. W
ell, the boy wouldn’t know. He knelt in front of the boy while Sofiya shifted impatiently atop her brass horse.

  “What’s your name?” Thad asked.

  The boy shrugged.

  “You don’t know?” Thad said, puzzled. “Or you don’t remember?”

  “I don’t have one,” the boy said. “Mr. Havoc called me boy.”

  “What about before that?” Thad said. “What did your parents call you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Thad thought of the brains in Havoc’s laboratory and outrage bloomed like red fireworks. “He took your memories?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy repeated. His voice was sad. “I’m frightened.”

  Incensed and angry and horrified all at once, Thad barely restrained himself from scooping the boy up and embracing him to give him comfort.

  This is not David, he told himself firmly. This is not your son.

  Carefully, ready to pull back if the boy flinched, Thad put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. It was hard and bony. “Don’t worry. We’ll help you. We’ll find your parents and see what we can do to bring back your memory.”

  “We?” Sofiya said.

  Thad rose and looked at her. “Was I being presumptuous, Miss Ekk?”

  “I suppose not,” she sighed. “Come along, then. We should probably check in the village first. Before we face our employer.”

  “Good idea. We can start with any families that speak English.”

  “In this place?” Sofiya scoffed. “Quite unlikely. But as you say, we must start somewhere. And I suppose we should tell the nice lady that her sister has been avenged.”

  Thad mounted Blackie and pulled the boy up behind him. The boy clung to Thad’s waist with fearful strength, and Thad wanted nothing more than to continue protecting this child. He hoped to find the parents soon-and that they were nice people.

  The ride to the village was quick and quiet. The sun was rising, putting hesitant fingers of light into an azure sky and setting Sofiya’s clockwork horse ablaze. She looked magnificent, Thad had to admit, in her scarlet cloak and waterfall of golden hair, though she was nothing like his Ekaterina. The wealth represented by her horse and her clothing stood in stark contrast to the rough houses and loose homespun of the peasants in the village. As Thad and Sofiya rode into town, the people crept out of their houses, and Thad caught metallic flashes-knives and pitchforks and other farming implements. A tension rode the air, like lightning ready to strike. He glanced at Sofiya, who also looked uncertain. What was going on?

  Thad pulled Blackie up. “The demon,” he announced in Lithuanian, “is dead!”

  The people burst into cheers. The tension evaporated, and Vilma, the woman who had given Thad the vodka, ran forward, reaching up to press her face into his hand, wetting it with her tears. Thad shrank into his coat. Usually after a kill, he left without looking back. To deflect the awkwardness, he asked if anyone was missing a child. But no one was.

  Vilma stepped forward again. “The demon, he only took adults. Or dogs. Sometimes young people who were sixteen or seventeen, but never children.”

  “What about anyone from a nearby village? Is anyone else missing a child?”

  More murmuring. “No, my lord,” said Vilma.

  “Then we should go look for his parents,” Thad declared. “Ada. Farewell!”

  And, ignoring their pleas to stay, he spurred Blackie ahead. Sofiya was left with no choice but to follow.

  “I wonder how long it will take for this to evolve into a fairy tale,” Sofiya mused once they had cleared the village. “A variation of Hansel and Gretel, perhaps.”

  “Or the Pied Piper,” Thad said.

  “What?”

  But Thad didn’t answer. Sofiya rode beside him, Dante gripped his shoulder, and the boy clung to his waist behind him. It felt strange to be surrounded by so many people after spending so many years alone. Even in the circus he held himself apart from the other performers. The sun had fully risen now, and he caught a hint of salt on the crisp air, though the Baltic Sea was many miles to the northwest. Now that he wasn’t actually in danger, the long night and his aches were catching up with him, and he fervently wished there were some way around the long ride back to Vilnius.

  “Your horse is amazing, lady,” said the boy after a while. “He’s very pretty and I like the way his mane stands up. Like a warrior. What is his name?”

  “It has none,” Sofiya said. “It is a machine.”

  “Everyone has to have a name,” the boy said. He sounded upset. “Even a machine.”

  “Perhaps you could give him a name.”

  “Kalvis.”

  “The blacksmith god of the Lithuanians,” Sofiya said. “Fitting.”

  “Because he was made by a blacksmith,” the boy finished. “What’s your horse’s name, sir?”

  “Uh…Blackie.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  “Now look-” Thad began.

  “I’m hungry,” said the boy.

  Feeling guilty, Thad pulled the loaf of rye bread from his coat. He should have realized. “Here.”

  But the boy pushed it away. “Na, na. I can’t eat that. You have to give me something else.”

  “There isn’t anything else,” Thad said, annoyed again. He pulled the vodka jug from his pocket. It sloshed. “Except this. But you’re bit young for-”

  The boy snatched the jug from Thad’s startled hand, raised it to his mouth, and pulled his scarf down. Over his shoulder, Thad caught a glimpse of metal as the boy drank. Thad was off the horse so fast, Dante nearly lost his balance.

  “Applesauce,” he squawked with indignation.

  “What the hell?” Thad demanded.

  The boy clutched the empty jug to his chest. The scarf that covered his face and hair slipped, revealing brass. Thad reached up and yanked the cloth away.

  The boy was an automaton. The lower part of his face was metallic, with a square jaw that fitted neatly against a brass upper lip. A brass hinge was fitted neatly under a rubbery ear. The boy’s nose was a smooth bump complete with nostrils, though it was made of copper and didn’t match the rest of him. The upper half of his face was made of some flexible material. Rubber, perhaps. Eyelids blinked with quiet clicking sounds, and they even had tiny eyelashes. His eyes were wide and brown, but not glassy. Were they rubber as well? The boy’s forehead and the area around his eyes moved with easy fluidity and realism. In fact, the boy’s entire body moved with none of the stiffness Thad associated with other automatons, and his voice sounded pure and human, without the usual mechanical monotony or odd echo. His short brown hair even had a silky sheen. It probably was silk. Thad stared in shock.

  “Dear God,” he said.

  “Bless my-” Dante’s words were cut off when Thad grabbed his beak.

  “This explains much,” Sofiya said. “The boy remembers nothing because he no memories. He uses alcohol as fuel. Havoc experimented on living adults but this was his first-”

  “Shut it,” Thad snapped. “Just shut it!”

  “Why?” Sofiya’s voice was deceptively mild. “Did someone give you the right to hand me orders? Are you my good Polish husband now?”

  Thad wanted to round on her, snarl at her, but kept himself under control. Sofiya was a woman, and telling her to shut up was already a serious breach of etiquette, something his father would have bent him over one knee for when he was a child. And why was he worried about that now? He didn’t care what Sofiya thought. He made himself look up at Blackie and the thing in the saddle.

  A child. This automaton had fooled Thad into thinking it was a real child. He felt like he’d been kicked in the head and his stomach oozed nausea. His skin crawled. The boy was the product of a clockworker, and who knew what it might do? It had been riding behind him for miles now.

  “Thank you for taking me out of there.”

  But he was just a little boy. And he sounded like-

  “No,” Thad whispered.

  “This boy is a masterp
iece,” Sofiya went on. “So lifelike. I am impressed. Havoc was much better than I imagined.”

  “Get off my horse,” Thad said to the boy. “Now.”

  The boy shrank down inside the rags. “Are you going to hurt me?” he-it-asked in a tiny voice.

  Thad was shaking. This…thing was the product of a murderous lunatic, the same sort of lunatic who had tortured his son to death. Thad didn’t rescue such monstrosities; he destroyed them. This abomination should be melted down.

  But when he looked at those eyes and at the way he-it, Thad reminded himself fiercely-the way it huddled on the horse, frightened and alone…

  It’s not frightened, Thad snarled inwardly. It’s only mimicking fright because its memory wheels are pulling wires and pushing pistons.

  A sword threatened to divide Thad down the middle and he didn’t dare move in case it cut him.

  I love you, Daddy.

  “What are you going to do?” Sofiya asked. “Are you going to hurt him?”

  Hurt him.

  The sword shifted imperceptibly, changing his balance like the weight of the vodka bottle pulling him back from the pit.

  “I’ll have to decide later,” Thad said in a stony voice. “Get off my horse. You can ride with Miss Ekk back to Vilnius.”

  “Ha!” said Sofiya with a snort. “You rescued him. He rides with you.” And she turned her brass horse toward the road to make it clear there was no arguing.