The Havoc Machine ce-4

by Steven Harper

  “Now, then,” said the tsar with a gold cup of wine in his hand, “you must tell me from the beginning what happened and how you found the bomb.”

  With a sidelong glance at Sofiya’s cool demeanor, Thad did so. It occurred to him that this would probably not be the last time he would tell this story.

  “We must toast your bravery.” Alexander raised his glass. “To Thaddeus Sharpe Lawrenovich, without whom any of us would be sitting here right now.”

  They drank. The wine was smooth and soft and perfect. Thad eyed the food tray-decorated cakes, pate, cold chicken braised in wine, soft cheese, baked salmon, poached pear tartlets, pickled mushrooms, and caviar rolled into strips of sturgeon. He didn’t dare try a bite-his stomach alternated between tight tension and black nausea. The excess of wealth and power exuded by this room and its people made him uneasy and unhappy, and he wanted nothing more than to escape to familiar surroundings as soon as possible.

  “You must be rewarded, Mr. Lawrenovich,” the tsarina said. From around her neck she removed a long strand of pearls strung with gold wire. “Accept this favor.”

  It was on the tip of Thad’s tongue to refuse such a rich gift. But the circus man in him stepped up and snatched control. “Thank you, great lady,” he said, and slid the strand into his breast pocket. “It is too much.”

  “Not compared to lives of my husband and my children,” she said with a sniff. “Now tell me, where did you get the little automaton? My children won’t stop talking about it. Did you build it yourself?”

  “No,” Thad said quickly. “I took it-him-from a clockworker some time ago.”

  “Yes! You are the famous clockwork killer,” Alexander said. “I have heard your name. How many clockworkers have you destroyed?”

  Sofiya’s face remained perfectly impassive, and she fearlessly downed caviar and mushrooms. Thad flushed, then felt foolish for flushing. Why should he feel bad about slaying murderers like the one who had killed his son? The Tsar of Russia was praising him for it, for God’s sake. And yet the feeling remained.

  “I don’t…keep track,” Thad said.

  “It’s been that many, has it?” The tsar raised his glass again. “You do a great service to mankind. The tsarina and I would enjoy hearing of your exploits.”

  “Do tell,” Sofiya said with patently false eagerness. “He won’t speak of it to me, ser.”

  Thad saw the opening and exploited it. “It’s man’s talk,” he said. “Your Majesty might insist, of course, but such stories are…indelicate.”

  “Why do you do it?” the tsarina asked before her husband could respond. “Clockworkers are dangerous. If they got hold of you, they could kill you. Or much worse.”

  “It seemed necessary at the time,” Thad replied quietly. “Clockworkers are dangerous, yes, which means they endanger.” It was very hard to say these things with Sofiya in the room, true or not. Her eyes were perfectly calm, but he felt bad, hypocritical even.

  “Clockworkers have their uses,” the tsar said. “They build fantastic machines. But they also bring filth into the world, as you have pointed out. Once we have wrung every bit of use out of them down in the Peter and Paul Fortress, we exterminate them.”

  “We have seen,” Sofiya said mildly. “It was very instructive.”

  What the hell was she doing? “I have heard,” Thad put in as a way to guide the subject in a new direction, “that the Chinese venerate clockworkers, call them Dragon Men and give them places of honor in their emperor’s court.”

  The tsar made a disgusted sound. “Oriental barbarians. Not even the Cossacks would be so foolish. I assume you know what happened in Ukraine.”

  “I do,” said Thad.

  “That is what comes of letting clockworkers run around loose.” The vehemence in the tsar’s voice turned the air to bile. “They must be caged and controlled before they-”

  “Now, now.” The tsarina patted his hand. “You mustn’t let yourself get worked up. You’ve already had a difficult day.”

  “Yes, yes.” Alexander drained his cup and it was instantly refilled. “Difficult. Hm. You have a talent for understatement, my dear.”

  “If I may, ser,” Sofiya spoke up. “Is it true that you have been thinking of emancipating the serfs?”

  He eyed her over the rim of his cup. “These words have reached the streets, have they?”

  “Rumors and speculation,” Sofiya said. “I know the landowners largely oppose the idea, and I myself wonder why such a wise man as the tsar would-”

  “Huh!” Alexander snapped his cup down. “The landowners. They want to keep Russia in the dark ages. We are trapped with feudal ideas in a feudal economy. No other empire uses serfs in this day and age. Men must own their own land. Ownership creates pride and foments new ideas. Like Peter the Great before me, I traveled widely in my youth, and I have seen what new ideas can accomplish-navies and railroads and telegraphy and airships and electric power. None of these things were invented in Russia. Our people are stifled, and it’s to the good of the country that they are granted the freedom to do as they wish.”

  This was clearly an old argument, but it had steered the conversation away from clockworkers. Thad shot Sofiya a grateful look, which she now ignored.

  “So the rumors are true?” Sofiya asked pleasantly.

  “You are too blunt for court, my dear,” the tsar said. “Your attempts to tweak information out of me are blatant. But everyone already knows. My legal scholars are drawing up the ukaz as we speak. When the new law is finished and signed-probably sometime in January-the serfs will be freed of their obligations to the landowners. Except for taxes, of course. No empire can run without taxes.”

  “Is it possible, then,” Sofiya continued, “that the person who planted the bomb was a landowner who doesn’t want you to accomplish this feat?”

  Alexander stroked his chin. “The thought had occurred. Do you have information about it?”

  “Only speculation. It is why I-”

  The door burst open, and General Parkarov dashed into the room with a box in his hands. He gave a perfunctory bow before the sovereigns. “Your Majesties. I have news of the investigation.”

  The tsar half came to his feet. “What did you find, General?”

  “These.” From the box he extracted two spiders, or what was left of them. They had been blown to pieces. He laid them on a table. Thad recognized them as ones that belonged to Mr. Griffin. His skin went cold despite the heat of the room.

  “We found these bits in the Nicholas Hall.” he said. “Two working spiders escaped us. They are not ones employed by the Winter Palace.”

  “Did they plant the bomb?” Alexander asked.

  “I am certain.” The general’s eyes glittered as he spoke. “I inspected the throne room myself before you entered, and there was no bomb. No one approached the throne after my inspection, so it must have been these spiders who planted it, sent by a rogue clockworker. We must find him before he strikes again.”

  “This is not necessarily-” Sofiya began.

  “Do that,” Alexander ordered. “Whatever it takes. Send your men. Search the city. Bring him-or her-in.”

  “Majesty.” Parkarov bowed and withdrew.

  Sofiya looked like she wanted to say more, but the tsarina said, “Disgusting! Horrifying that some monster out there wants to murder my children!”

  This time the tsar patted her hand. “We’ll find him, my dear. And then we can watch the machines tear him to pieces, as he deserves.”

  “Ser, I wonder if you’ve considered-” Sofiya began.

  “Mr. Lawrenovich,” Maria interrupted, turning to Thad, “you’re an expert at hunting clockworkers down.”

  Uh-oh. Thad could see where this was going. He flicked his eyes toward Sofiya, but she just shook her head helplessly. “I…yes,” he said, trying to think.

  “Then join the men,” she said. “Use your skills. Find that clockworker for me. And kill him.”

  * * *

 
; The machine was enormous now, both physically and mentally. Its body had added so many memory wheels and creation devices that it could no longer move about. It squatted at the intersection of five tunnels, taking in more and more and more metal, whatever the spiders could bring. It controlled a great many spiders. They skittered about the tunnels and the city above, giving the machine a perfect picture of the place. Half a dozen spiders were stealing books from the engineering section at the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences and flipping through them at blinding speed, transmitting words and concepts to the machine, then leaving them about for the puzzled men in the library to reshelve. Already there was talk of hauntings and poltergeists, despite them being men of science. The Master did not mind as long as the machine and the spiders were not caught.

  The machine sent tentacles of wire and pipe through the tunnels. This was one of the few places in Saint Petersburg that actually had tunnels, an attempt on behalf of the Academy at a sewer and cargo transportation. The high water table meant tunnels were difficult to dig and expensive to maintain, however, and the project had been abandoned. The machine had taken advantage of the train tracks already laid down to transport the materials it needed, especially metal and books.

  Many of the books were written by people called clockworkers. These clockworkers were held in a prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress on yet another River Neva island of the sort Saint Petersburg seemed to be prone. Most of the books hadn’t been written so much as dictated, and some of them rambled rather a lot, though their insights into physics and engineering and clockwork technology were proving invaluable, and they allowed the machine to continue its improvements. The clockworkers seemed to interest the Master very much, though he seemed to espouse no interest whatsoever in the clockwork plague that spawned them. The machine noted both these facts without emotion and continued its research and its improvements.

  By now, the main part of the machine occupied the entire rather large intersection of the five tunnels beneath the Academy, and it no longer resembled a spider with ten legs, but was instead a chaotic mass of pipes and gears and boilers and claws and wheels and belts and mechanical hands. A cabinet that resembled a small brass wardrobe stood prominent in the center of this mass. The doors stood tightly shut. Next to it, a twisted chute coiled to the ground. The machine chuffed and puffed, and from an aperture at the top of the chute emerged a spider, gleaming and new. It spiraled down the chute and clattered to the concrete floor of the tunnel. It stumbled about drunkenly, then righted itself and scampered about as if excited. It bobbed on its new legs and made a squeaking sound. The machine chuffed and puffed again, and a second spider spiraled down the chute to land near the first. It also staggered. The first spider recoiled for a moment, then scampered over to investigate. The second spider came fully upright and, like the first spider, bobbed up and down, exploring its legs. The first spider extended a leg to touch the second. Abruptly, the second leaped on the first and tore at it with all eight of its own legs. The first spider squeaked in dismay and tried to disentangle itself, but to no avail.

  The machine extended two mechanical hands, plucked the two spiders apart, and held them wriggling at a distance from each other. The second continued its attempted attack on the first, and the first recoiled in the machine’s grip. Aggression. Interesting.

  The machine tossed the first spider into a hopper, sucked it inside, and crushed it to squeaking pieces. The second spider wriggled furiously in the machine’s hand until the machine set it down, whereupon it rushed about in angry circles. The machine exuded a third spider. This time, both of them fought until the machine sent a signal of its own that stopped them. The spiders came reluctantly under control even as the machine exuded a fourth aggressive spider.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Kill him!” Sofiya paced the wooden floor of the Black Tent in her new gown. “Why did you say you would kill him?”

  “I suppose I should have refused the tsarina?” Thad drummed his fingers heavily on a workbench. “The trouble is, the assassin wasn’t a clockworker.”

  Sofiya stopped pacing. “How do you mean?”

  “A clockworker wouldn’t use dynamite.” Thad was almost snarling now, though he wasn’t sure who he was angry at. “Too blunt. Too pedestrian. Too inelegant. Killing with mere dynamite is no fun. A clockworker who wanted to assassinate someone would use something elaborate or stylish, like a spider that delivered a drop of poison, or a thin wire that sliced your head off as you galloped past on a horse, or an automaton that disguised itself as a bootblack’s box until it sprang into action and sliced you into bits. Dynamite? Never.”

  “So who did it, then?”

  “Your hypothesis is probably the correct one,” Thad said. “Disgruntled landowner who doesn’t want to lose his serfs.”

  “And what do we do about this?”

  “How’s Nikolai?” Thad asked, deliberately changing the subject.

  She turned to look at the little automaton. Nikolai was sitting upright on the workbench next to Dante. The sparking in his head had died down, and he wasn’t speaking. Every so often he gave a twitch. His left hand jerked upward, then lowered itself over and over.

  “Failing,” she said. “He needs repairs badly.”

  “Are you going to do it, then?”

  She folded her arms. “Why do you care so much? He is just a machine, as you pointed out.”

  “Why don’t you care?” Thad shot back. The anger was growing. “You’re the one who loves machines so very much. You haven’t even repaired Dante yet.”

  “I was busy creating the act that saved this circus.” The heat rose in Sofiya’s voice as well. “I had to build the colt and put in-”

  “Don’t feed me more lies, woman,” Thad interrupted.

  “Lies? How dare you!”

  “And keep the indignation.” Thad lowered his voice to a deadly steadiness. “I know clockworkers. There’s no evidence in this boxcar that you built that colt here-no scraps of metal, no plans, no calculations, no chipped tools. That colt was inside your horse from the beginning. It’s why you thought it was funny that Nikolai gave it the name of a male deity. The only thing you’ve built lately was my hand.” He held it up. “And that was something you modified from a spider Mr. Griffin built. That’s very, very strange for a clockworker, Sofiya.”

  She looked frightened now. “So what? All clockworkers are strange.”

  “They’re all strange in the same way. I know,” Thad said relentlessly. A part of him was well aware that he was doing this to avoid what Sofiya had brought up with Nikolai, but he didn’t care. He kept going. “You don’t like to build, do you? But you want to do. You hunger to do. The machines and the numbers call to you, but you’re afraid of them. You said the madness comes on you and you have to build, but that was a lie. You haven’t built much of anything. You said you’re looking forward to going mad, and that was another lie. You’re terrified of the madness, and that’s why you don’t build anything. You’re afraid you’ll fall into a fugue and never come out.”

  “I built your hand!” she protested.

  “Only because I saved yours.” He locked eyes with her. “What happened, Sofiya? Did you fall into a fugue state and hurt someone when you built Kalvis and that little energy pistol you carry around? Or are you just afraid of what you might become?”

  “You kill people like me!” she shouted.

  “You made me swear to do it! Or don’t you want me to keep that promise anymore?”

  She spun away from him and leaned on the workbench. Her shoulders shook, and Thad realized she was weeping. The anger drained out of him, and he felt stupid and foolish. What had he been trying to prove? That he was smarter or stronger than she was? Shouting and yelling, that was always helpful. And with Nikolai sitting on the table with his head open. Thad was a schoolyard bully. His face burned with shame. He touched her shoulder. “Listen, Sofiya, I’m sorry I-”

  He was flat against the wall with her iron
grip around his throat and his feet a good six inches off the floor. His breath choked off. He clawed ineffectually at the air. Sofiya’s other hand reached down and clasped his groin. A dull ache snaked up his abdomen.

  “Fine,” she growled into his face. Her voice was not her own, and she was speaking Russian. “I will repair the child. I will even repair the parrot. And you”-she squeezed harder and his eyes rolled back from the gut-wrenching agony-“you will help me.”

  She casually flung him aside. Thad crashed to the floor, clutching at his neck, gasping for air, reeling from pain. Sofiya stomped about the Black Tent, snatching tools from racks and boxes and tossing them beside Nikolai. “Get up, boy!” she snapped at Thad. Coughing, Thad pushed himself upright. Sofiya crackled with energy. Her presence filled the boxcar and pushed at the walls. Every movement was fast and precise. Thad recognized the signs. She had fallen into a clockwork fugue.

  “Bring me that spanner!” she barked. “And that screwpick! Before I slice you open like a putrid rat.”

  Without a word, Thad handed her the tools. She snatched them from him as if he were nothing but an open drawer and bent over Nikolai’s exposed machinery. After some muttering and swearing, she grabbed Thad’s brass hand and shoved it into Nikolai’s head. “Hold this wheel in place. Don’t move it!”

  “I-” Thad began.

  The slap rocked his head back in an explosion of pain. It came so fast he didn’t even see Sofiya’s hand move. “Do not speak again unless I ask you a question. And then speak Russian, not that flea-ridden garbage you sodomite British call language.”

  Thad worked his jaw back and forth, so angry he felt he might explode. The thought flicked through his mind: She was a clockworker, just like the one who had killed David. His spring-loaded knives were sheathed in his sleeves. He could still use the right one perfectly well, and it was a better than even chance his brass left was up to the job now, too. If he backed up and waited until her back was turned, he could get in a perfect throw before she knew what was happening.