Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine

by Anthony Francis

  “No,” Patrick said. “The scrappy Confederates didn’t halt the Northern war machine with true Southern grit—they were already retreating when Victoria chose to pacify Georgia with a terror weapon and accidentally routed her own allies. After the blast, the Confederate fleet was intact—”

  “And while the North’s ships burned upon the hills of Georgia, the Confederates pushed all the way back to the Potomac,” Georgiana said. “That did in Queen Victoria. Bomb or barrage, wiping out a region is horrific, but wreak horror and not win, the sin becomes unforgivable.”

  “The story goes,” Patrick said, “Victoria’s own people had been plotting against her—”

  “When do courtiers ever not?” Jeremiah asked.

  “—but the destruction of Atlanta was the last straw,” Patrick said. “Being ruled by a half-machine monster that lived off blood was bad enough, but even her inner circle knew giving her the power to annihilate a city was madness—so the Peerage at last decided to depose Victoria.”

  “But many high ranking lords and ladies were implicated in the massacre,” Georgiana said. “Intended or not, change of heart or not, that could never get out. Poison clouds of shattered nuclei kept spreading, so a cover story was devised: a poison barrage, ordered by Victoria herself.”

  “The Peerage at last had the leverage they needed to stage a coup d’état,” Patrick said, “but they still needed the firepower—taking on Victoria’s Flying Castle and her undead hordes is no mean feat. But the Peerage already had an army within territories free of Victoria; all they needed to do was convince the North to sue for peace—and remobilize its armies for the fight for liberation.”

  “You mean the Realignment of the North,” Jeremiah said, “was actually a betrayal?”

  “Yes. The North pretended to run back to Empire with its tail between its legs,” Georgiana said. “In her greed, Victoria welcomed them with open arms—but once within her embrace, they promptly stabbed her in the back. As Victoria’s forces redeployed to guard the Confederate border, Northern airships flew to London—and overthrew Queen and Parliament. A perfect coup d’état.”

  “So . . . the North was beating the South?” Jeremiah said, dumbfounded. “On the run and all that, till Victoria torpedoed them? The Peerage let the Confederates go in a power play for Empire? The Confederacy went along, of course—it won them their freedom, and God knows how many more weapons the Empire had? But sounds like the ‘Territories Liberated from Victoria’—”

  “Were founded on lies,” Georgiana said. “Personally, I think Victoria had it coming to her, but more on point, nuclear weapons were banned, the technology suppressed—but the knowledge that made the weapons possible, now, that couldn’t be prudently destroyed. So it was restricted instead, and, naturally it was the Peerage that was entrusted with this knowledge.”

  “Naturally,” Patrick said, rolling his eyes.

  “You knew about this, Harbinger?” Jeremiah asked.

  “From Austria,” Patrick admitted. “The whole reason we went there wasn’t to scope out Einstein’s unified field theory. We were pumping him for information about Austrian atomic research, knowledge that in Victoriana was limited to the Peerage. Remember, I’m the one who robbed Einstein’s train while you had him . . . otherwise occupied—why are you smiling?”

  “Scope? Pump? My, goodness, Harbinger, I don’t know which innuendo to capitalize on,” she said, unable to keep the smile off her face as Patrick spluttered: he did know what she did for the Queen, after all. “Let’s see, I think it was him that had me occupied—”

  “Willstone!” Patrick said, a scowl and smile struggling on his face. “Regardless . . . I had to use a counter, a detection device, to search for supplies of bomb-making material, and to use it . . . Georgiana had to fill me in on the details of what I was looking for, and why.”

  “Which is why Birmingham wanted you on this mission,” she said. “You knew what to look for, if Lord Christopherson was here looking for a weapon.”

  “We lucked out that they used a recognizable word like nuclear and not something more obscure, like liberation of essential humors,” Patrick said darkly. “Though the special significance of the mathematical centroid of the atom eluded me before Georgiana’s explanation, the word itself was enough of a clue for me to pick up the meaning of this passage.”

  “That, and the words ‘ultimate destructive force,’” Georgiana said, flipping through the magazine rapidly. “God. These people . . . they have thousands of these weapons. Tens of thousands. Enough to destroy the surface of this world a dozen times over.”

  “More than enough,” Patrick said, “for him to use to take over Victoriana.”

  “And these people want to get rid of them,” Georgiana said. “What better solution than to give them to a man who will not just take them off their hands, but out of this reality entirely?”

  Jeremiah stared off in the distance, then sipped her Corona. It all sounded plausible . . . but she couldn’t help recalling Birmingham’s warning. As convinced as Georgiana was, this was starting to sound like precisely the kind of too-quick thinking that had nearly cost Jeremiah a finger in Shanghai. Why would he come here for these weapons at the height of these people’s power?

  “All right,” Jeremiah said at last. “It’s reasonable. Definitely something we should report to Birmingham. But we don’t know what Lord Christopherson is planning, and we shouldn’t go take up guard posts at the local weapons dump just to keep them out of his hands.”

  “But—” Georgiana said.

  “Something that he wanted was here. Right here,” Jeremiah said. “And it wasn’t an accident. He programmed at least two, perhaps three of those clockwork orbs to arrive at more or less this location at more or less this time. There was something he wanted in this city.”

  “The coordinates are only approximate,” Georgiana said. “We could be kilometers off from his target—”

  “So it might not be this building,” Jeremiah said, “but it would still be this city—but I can’t imagine they’d have an ammo dump capable of destroying a city at the heart of a city this size. It has to have half a million people in it. I think you’re right, Georgiana; my uncle came here. But I think Patrick was also right—he came here seeking something for that copper kettle.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Patrick asked.

  “Finish our reconnoiter,” Jeremiah said. “Find out if there’s anything in this building, or any of the ones around it, that looks like it could have been his target. Find out about this city and what Atlanta is known for in the twenty-first century. Find out any other plausible target—again, dealing with the copper kettle he brought with him. This place, all its wonders, keeps distracting us. The man called down an Incursion, captured a Foreigner, and brought it here. Why?”

  “Commander,” Georgiana said, “as long as I’m spilling secrets, there were many Foreign weapons in the Arsenal that Lord Christopherson could have taken. Martian death rays. A Venusian seedstone. He took the Egg of the Scarab—presumably, because it was the most dangerous.”

  “And he took it here. Could the Foreigner need atomically active material?” Patrick asked. “The Owl and Falcon said Christopherson’s secret society was called the Order of the Burning Scarab. Perhaps they didn’t mean literal fire, but atomic activity?”

  “Possibly,” Georgiana said. “Its metabolism might depend on it.”

  “He could get that in our world,” Jeremiah said.

  “Not if he needed it in bulk,” Georgiana said. “We have enough fissionable atomics to make two, maybe three bombs, and that took the production capabilities of half of the Empire for a decade. These people have ten thousand times as many bombs and hundreds of active reactors—so much atomic industry they’re having trouble finding places to put the waste.”

  “All right,” Jeremiah said. The c
ute boy with the wheeled plank yielded his table, and Jeremiah looked around: the place was filling up. “We can’t stay here much longer—no doubt that stunt with the Mechanical will attract attention. Go over these magazines, and I’ll query that helpful server. Perhaps she can direct us to a library, where we can find some form of private reading room where we can contact Birmingham and plan our next move.”

  She rose, following the cute young man out of the restaurant, but his pants were too baggy to give her the view she wanted, so she stopped by the door where the server was sweeping. “Excuse me, miss,” Jeremiah said. “Thanks for your help—”

  But just then a short woman in black pants, white shirt, and a crisp broad-brimmed hat stopped, stared at Jeremiah’s tailcoat, and marched straight up towards her. Gear adorned her belt, and trim glinted off her shoulders, and Jeremiah caught a glimpse of a badge on her chest.

  Oh, bollocks. A guard.

  ———

  “There you are, thief,” the guard said, drawing an actual pistol. “Gotcha.”

  20.

  A Simply Capital Reaction

  WITHOUT A SECOND thought, Jeremiah decked the guard. One fist, one punch, flying out, clocking the guard’s jaw and laying her out flat on the tile. The gun spun away, impacted, fired, the deadly bullet shattering a storefront of glass.

  There were shouts, screams, and panic, but to Jeremiah’s delighted horror the crowd did not scatter like civilians. A dark-suited man saw the guard fall and came at Jeremiah; a frilly young girl in a beret saw the gun and dove for it.

  “Capital,” Jeremiah said, ducking one punch, blocking the other, popping the man on the jaw, then kneeing him in the groin when he didn’t fall. “Absolutely capital!” she said, kicking the gun away into the glass just as the bereted girl seized it. Jeremiah clamped both hands on the girl’s arms to neutralize her, lifted her up, and said, “I’m so proud of you!” before head-butting the girl so hard her beret came off, and she fell back in a sudden spray of hair, eyes rolling.

  “We should go,” Patrick said, shepherding Georgiana out of the darkened cave of the restaurant.

  “Did you see,” Jeremiah said, blocking another punch from a new assailant, kicking him in the gut, then sweeping a second new defender off his feet with her blunderblast and decking the recovering first with the return swing. “These people have spines!”

  “Very much so,” Georgiana said. “Good for them, but for us—”

  “Fear not!” Jeremiah said; there were no more instant heroes popping out of the crowd, but there were still the shouts and screams and now whistles blowing, so it was very definitely time to go. “Follow me, thataway!”

  They bolted through the stunned crowd as more white-suited guards ran up, their wide-brimmed hats flying off as they wove through gawkers. Laughing, Jeremiah fled, Georgiana and Patrick at her heels as she darted to the left past the café, then right through the improbable sushi-serving cafeteria. She’d guessed correctly; the long line cut through to the other court.

  “There!” Jeremiah cried, pointing to the sign she’d seen when Georgiana had blown a fuse—Stairs to Peachtree Center Avenue. They blasted through the doors, chased by whistles and shouts, and ran down a long stair out onto the street.

  A rushing stream of autocarts barred their path, and they ran down along the sidewalk. At the cross street, they started to bolt to the left, but halfway up the hill, more guards rounded the corner, no doubt flooding out of the upper entrance.

  “Back this way,” Patrick said, crossing the street, Georgiana actually ahead of him, having popped the slits on her skirt.

  “No argument,” Jeremiah said, darting across the street, as more shouts brought more attention. Dark-suited policemen were popping up everywhere, and she and Patrick had to deck two more who darted through traffic at them. The ugly report of a pistol sounded, and Jeremiah ducked, unslinging her blunderblast as cement and tile sprayed out of the wall beside her. But Patrick was faster with his four-string blaster, zapping the third officer before he could fire again.

  “These people don’t play around,” he said, flinching as a bullet ricocheted off his helmet. Georgiana popped her bulletproof parasol just in time to stop another lethal shot, and Patrick spun, blasting back over the parasol with thermionic blasts that felled their newer assailant. “Damnation! We can’t stay on this street! This is untenable!”

  More unearthly sirens sounded, coming up behind them—but not yet from ahead; the traffic was one way, jammed up behind a red glowing traffic signal. There was an odd canyon in the traffic, and as they ran up the sidewalk she could see that a now-gobsmacked security guard had stopped traffic to let now-scattering pedestrians pass.

  Jeremiah thought about all the electrics in all the machines they’d seen, all the metal in those autocarts, and inspiration struck her. She dashed past the shocked guard and leapt up onto the boot of one of the autocarts.

  “Everybody down!” Jeremiah shouted, throwing the safety off her blunderblast, waiting for the people to scatter, her friends to pass her—and the police to catch up, drawing their weapons in a semicircle around her.

  Then she fired.

  The lightning shot over their heads, stray discharges knocking them down like ninepins before the central bolt slammed into the lead autocart behind them. Its lights exploded, and then a cascade of secondary aetheric arcs rippled out through the entire sea of carts behind it. Cart lights went out one by one in sparks until the wave of disruption hit the police carts, shattering their lights and shutting their squawking sirens down for good.

  “Everyone back!” Jeremiah snarled, legs spread apart on the boot of the cart, waving her gun over the heads of the terrified crowd and policemen. “There’s a lot more where that came from!”

  A total lie—she’d discharged the whole canister. But the threat worked, and Jeremiah hopped down and ran off to rejoin Georgiana and Patrick, who were already rounding the corner of one of the huge structures.

  “Good show,” Patrick said. “Capital show!”

  “It won’t last,” Jeremiah said. “Keep moving, let’s get back to those smaller buildings we started out in, at least there was cover there—”

  Sure enough, the shouts and cries of officers began to sound behind them. “Stop! Stop, thieves!” shouted a jumble of voices, all yelling over each other. “Stop! Stop them! Stop! Halt! NSA! Do not pursue! Halt! Halt! Stop where you are and stand down—”

  The voices faded as they ran down an increasingly empty block, first left then right, leading not where Jeremiah had precisely expected; no matter, you could not lose your way for long when the landmarks were half a kilometer high.

  So they pressed onward, and it was because they were running full tilt down a street that they did not know when it happened.

  ———

  “Hey, chiquita,” said a relaxed voice. “You really pantsed them.”

  21.

  Dark Eyed Angel

  JEREMIAH NEARLY tripped up and fell headlong. Then when she looked to see where the voice was coming from, she nearly ran into a pole, for floating along effortlessly beside them as they ran was a dark young man with black glasses, brown skin, and a rich head of angelic black curls.

  “Oh, my,” Georgiana said.

  “I saw him first,” Jeremiah hissed.

  The athletic young man leaned to the side, cutting in front of them, white shirt tight over rippled muscle, balancing with ripped brown arms covered in intricate tattoos, and now Jeremiah could see he stood on a tiny cart, no more than a board with wheels, upon which he glided with graceful, practiced skill. Suddenly Jeremiah remembered it, and him, when she’d seen that muscled brown arm carrying the board through the shopping arcade.

  “I mean, wow, chiquita,” the young buck said calmly, doing a little kick that hopped the board up onto the sidewalk. “You had to have fift
y of them after you, and you like, left them all in the dust. What was that gun, an electric traffic jamminator?”

  “Something like,” Jeremiah laughed, though she had no idea what he meant.

  “Sure did a number on your hair,” he said.

  “No,” Georgiana wheezed, “it’s always like that.”

  “Oi!” Jeremiah cried, shaking her head but not slowing her pace. “You’re the boy from the taver—from the grill in the mall.”

  “Oh yeaah,” he said, smiling and winking at her as he slid back out onto the street, snaking back and forth between them. “The girl from Willy’s.”

  “That I am,” she said. Then she spied a stairwell to her left, which looked as if it led to good cover. “I think this will have to be goodbye,” she said, darting to the left and dragging Georgiana and Patrick after her. “Nice to meet you!”

  “Oh, don’t call it quits so soon,” the dark young man said, hopping up on the sidewalk, then hopping again, bringing the board up between his feet so it landed right angles on the rail of the stair beside them. He squatted, hands out, board grinding against the rail, sliding down past them faster than running, then landed, spun once, and slid off, pointing. “If you need to escape the pigs, hang a right here. It’s a maze. They’ll never find you, I guarantee.”

  And the young man swept off sharply to the right, darting down a service corridor Jeremiah had barely seen, disappearing into clouds of steam and sparks. Cautiously, she followed him into the vapors belching out of grates and grilles lining the walls. Beyond the surging veil of mist, she found herself dwarfed in a vast, dim corridor of grey concrete, utilitarian and near featureless but for a tangled maze of steel pipes wrapped in peeling brown paint.