by Kin S. Law
“Cid, what the bloody—” Clemens’ profanity was interrupted soundly, by a canvas-wrapped package hitting him square in the chest.
“Forgot something, have you? Just remember, you’ve got three of those, and in a pinch, they can pack a punch. Best of luck to you now,” and Cid shuffled off once more, back into whatever grease-coated hole wherein he usually dwelt. We exchanged a brief glance, and he actually winked at me before being swallowed by the shadows.
“Bloody morlock,” I said.
“What was that?” Rosa gaped.
“Old man doesn’t like to say goodbyes,” Captain Clemens said. “Superstitious. Holy Cow, this is brilliant!”
So it was. In Clemens’ hands, unwrapped and gleaming, there lay a small, wooden box and a gigantic, burgundy weapon.
It was most definitely a firearm. It had an enameled grip, a hammer, and a heavy-duty trigger, but everything else was alien. I thought my experiences in the Yard had familiarized me with every type of pistol, but this was something else. There was only one chamber, and an oversize muzzle, probably fifty caliber at the outside. Bits and bobs clung to the barrel and the handle, including what looked to be a vacuum tube, a cat’s cradle of guitar string, and a little jade carving hanging off a chain at the grip.
“It’s not quite finished,” Clemens explained.
He passed off the weapon to Rosa, who thumbed the chamber open and started to test the weight. The captain himself opened the little box to show three metal cylinders nestled in velvet, tipped with twilight-blue points. “But Cid rushed through an assembly so we could use Moore’s crystals. This, my cohorts, is the Red Special.”
“Despite your obvious compensation disorder, I agree. It is most definitely a way to deliver the crystals into the Core,” Rosa said.
She flipped the chamber closed on its heavy-duty hinge and handed it back to the captain, grip-first. I felt a little uncomfortable with the gesture and didn’t know why. That is, until I realized none of Rosa’s movements made any sound. She had changed into her battle-ready attire once more, only with a decorative micro-bustle that was probably loaded down with weaponry.
“All right, all right. However we’re doing this, let’s do this already!” I finally gasped, and turned my back on the whole thing before I lost my nerve. These pirates seemed to think saving the world was one huge pub crawl!
At first I had been a little apprehensive when Captain Clemens suggested we drop in on the anchors. In the forests of Romania, and during our several dubious hijackings, I had glimpsed with a disapproving frown the violence of the anchors launched from the ’Berry like so many Cockney slurs. I was duly surprised when Clemens kicked at a lever on deck, loosing an anchor silently on oiled steel wire. It hung suspended about woman-height from the ground.
So, the captain can be subtle when he wishes, I thought.
Frost covered the deserted streets of Moscow, despite the coming spring. This was the country that had once seen winters freeze the lungs with a single unprotected breath. I realized with a jolt that it was already April. My birthday was in May. It suddenly occurred to me, nestled there between the latest Parisian boutiques and the slightly Asiatic, upturned eaves, I might not make it to my birthday. It was a very sobering thought.
But Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves was pragmatic to a fault. I had long ago come to terms with my own mortality. I could never see the point of living if life had no point. I had never willfully stepped foot in a church, though I was not so extreme as to assert atheism. Even as the thought occurred to me, I realized we were within sight of one of the most famous cathedrals in Europe–St. Basil’s. Glimpsed between the frozen arches, the festive swirling colors of its onion domes glared defiantly over the serious functionality of the rest of Moscow.
“Look there,” Blair whispered as we walked away from the cables and through quiet streets.
We four halted in the shade of a gargoyle. Blair’s finger pointed through an alley on the opposite side of the street where a glimpse of metal peeked through. In a moment, a Russian soldier in gray furs passed across their view, toting a rifle.
“Six-meter black powder cannon. Inches-thick barrel, fortified with cinder blocks. Nigh indestructible by air,” Clemens whispered. “Good old Russian utility. If it works, they use it, screw these newfangled steam works. Mordemere will have trouble with those.”
He lowered his pocket-glass and passed it on.
“The schematic shows The Nidhogg lies surrounded by the stolen landmarks. Will the cannons even work?” Blair asked. When the glass passed to me, I doubted his reluctance. The scale of the cannon was dumbfounding.
Still, Mordemere’s cloud hung over the southeast part of the sky, giving it an ominous look. As if the whole sky was a chessboard, and The Nidhogg was in momentary stalemate with the forces of Europe. Any moment now, the clouds above us might immolate in fire.
“The Muscovites don’t know if the guns will work,” Clemens said. “Mordemere loves architecture, according to Moore. He wouldn’t approach if the cannons might harm his precious booty.”
Ah, but Her Majesty Queen Victoria III knows that too, I thought. My latest missive. I could not guess what hand the young Queen wished to play. But with the Ottomans at their doorstep, any advantage over their neighbor the Russians was welcome.
“We should avoid them if we can,” cautioned Rosa. “The Ruskies don’t play the seduction game. They’ll shoot us without a second thought.”
Grim though she was, the possibility was too real to ignore. None of us wore any clanker armor. At best, we had thick coats against the frigid Russian cold.
We waited until we were sure the soldiers on the other street seemed to be more relaxed, then continued past. Rosa was of course quieter than a cat, but I was no slouch either. I crouched under the sparse cover of alley garbage. Clemens leaped across when the guards were looking the other way, and Blair followed me, cautious as ever. He seemed more comfortable with this sordid business, though.
Captain Clemens insisted on climbing a tall residential building at the first opportunity. We found an apartment that featured a ladder-like formation of bricks, going all the way up a decorative chimney, and climbed that. Now we could see the obvious placement of the cannons, six of them, spaced out in increments. From this formation, I was able to deduce something. I spoke up as Blair emerged onto the rooftop, exhausted.
“They are protecting the Kremlin,” I declared. I pointed out to them how the formation was laid as a perimeter defense. “If we are to infiltrate The Nidhogg, we ought to be headed there as well.”
“Ah. The pool!” bemoaned Rosa.
“I had bet on the Kremlin,” gasped Blair. He punched the air he wasn’t breathing, in triumph.
“That’s six quid from Auntie,” Clemens muttered. “And forty rupees from Prissy Jack.”
“Huh. Pirates,” I said. I had bet on the Kremlin too.
As we took a break on the rooftop, I pulled my little snuffbox out and had a listen. To my surprise, I was getting something, and it wasn’t being repeated. I was listening to a live ether line!
“Um. Captain Clemens?” I said. Clemens whipped his head around. Evidently, I had never spoken to him like this before. But what I was hearing changed everything. I needed to guide them, and I needed them to believe I was getting trustworthy information.
“I have something to show you,” I said. Together, we listened to the codex intently.
Apparently, aboard the Russian Balaenopteron-class carrier Vasillisa, Tsar Nikolai was beginning to have doubts. My codex seemed to be giving us a private ear into the command bridge of that tremendous vessel. Had Arturo snuck aboard? No, he valued his own skin too much. He must have tapped into an open telegraph channel somehow.
By my keen ear and a quick visual count of the airspace, The Vasillisa carried a full complement, thirty corsairs, with a rotation of ten more on patrol. Hovering over the Kremlin, the flagship overlooked a line of Howitzers along the fortress wall, each one modified an
d capable of launching jacketed ammunition at high velocity to reach the tallest dirigibles. In addition there were six functional copies of the Tsar’s cannon spread out in a rough perimeter. Then there were the other nations’ ships to contend with, spaced broadsides to the dark mass of precipitation hanging over the southeast of the city.
Still, The Vasillisa’s bridge seemed to carry an atmosphere of impending doom. Maybe it was because the cloud would not move, would not simply begin the attack. What was it waiting for? “Karelin. Hand me those bi-oculars,” Nikolai commanded. “Your Excellency,” Karelin said as he handed the ornate instrument over. There were sounds of scraping, the unclipping of a belt harness. “It is the fourth time you have checked the deployment. It remains unchanged.”
“Pyotr. General Karelin, I am aware of the fact. I wish to ascertain the enemy’s movements.”
General Pyotr Karelin did not deem it necessary to point out the enemy was wreathed in a cloud of manufactured cover.
“If you are concerned, Your Excellency, may I suggest a preemptive—”
“We have gone over this for the last time, Karelin. I will not risk the Motherland’s airships.”
“You fear the other nations will not follow in our attack, thus shifting the balance of power between us,” Karelin summed up. “Mother Russia possesses four Balaenopterons. We are far behind when compared to Britain’s Knights of the Round,” Nikolai snarled. “If we are to lose even one, and Queen Victoria III recalls her other three from the colonies, we would be completely at her mercy. Compared to the young, modern Queen, Russia is a big, fat, old babushka.”
“I do not like this. The Cossacks are liable to join the Ottomans against us any day. We should not speak of our allies in such a way, Your Excellency,” Karelin cautioned.
“The Tatar have always been a pirate people,” the Tsar replied. “They amount to no large threat…bozhe moi, what’s this?”
There were footsteps, and the clink of a scope.
“Something is falling from the cloud, Your Excellency.”
“Enemy troops?”
“They are individuals…looks like dropping in on wires, Your Excellency. I will have a platoon intercept. If they are scouts, we will engage and capture them.”
“Good, good. Karelin, you are a most capable general,” Nikolai replied. “The soldiers are moving.”
I noted this with some trepidation. I was looking into the street, now, though the codex still sounded with the Tsar’s voice. Clemens was looking into the cloud where it was possible to just see the lines dropping from it. They looked like spiders falling from the ceiling.
As far as I could tell the soldiers below seemed to be breaking up into groups, half to man the cannon, half again standing guard, and half again marching toward the southeast.
From our perch on one of the square avant-garde roofs, we looked on as the troops appeared to be mounting some kind of offense. The street our building stood on intersected not too far ahead. The troops seemed to be holding a line at the corner.
“There’s something coming,” Clemens said.
“Can you see it with your glass?” asked Blair.
“No, but the other cannon platoons are moving as if something is,” Rosa answered him.
She had the pocket glass, but that did not stop Albion from peering into the middle distance where a series of popping noises indicated the firing of arms. Suddenly, there came a horrendous boom and a thin line of smoke wormed its way over the roofs.
“They’re targeting the cannon,” Rosa noted.
“But they’re not clankers. Clankers arrive in force, in squads,” I said. “Kobolds, you think? But I thought Mordemere holds those against dirigibles.”
The Russian soldiers now shot at something around the corner. I could see them using the building for cover. What was odd was the way the long rifles seemed to align in a triangle, as if they were shooting at a single target. But what could give a platoon of soldiers trouble enough all by itself?
“Captain Sam!”
“What?” I cried, whirling around at the sound of Clemens’s voice.
But Clemens was gone, his red buccaneer coat flapping some ten yards away along the rooftops. He vaulted at the dividers, cutlass clinking, hand at his hip holster. But why should Clemens have his gun out?
“Oh, God,” I breathed with sudden realization. Clemens thought Captain Sam was down there!
As a body, we looked at each other and began to run after the loping form of Clemens.
“He can’t mean to intercept the soldiers! They outnumber us two to one!” Blair hollered, maybe in the vain hope Clemens would hear. Ahead, Clemens’ strides were enormous.
“You don’t even know if that’s the captain! He’s likely pinned down already!” Rosa delivered in a piercing screech.
Clemens launched himself across to the corner rooftop and jumped off. Only when we arrived did I see his coat fluttering down the side like a tussled fall leaf. He was using a drainage pipe to shimmy down the side of the building.
“Shit, that’s not The Victoria,” Rosa said. She was looking intently at Clemens’ hand.
Inside Clemens’s hand glimmered something the color of blood. It was the Red Special, and the stupid man was intending to use it against the soldiers.
“Stop! Clemens, you don’t know what it will do!” I yelled, not caring if the soldiers below heard.
Fortunately, or not, the corner of the building chose this moment to explode outward, showering the soldiers below with fine brick dust. The edge of the cloud swallowed Clemens, obscuring what happened below. For a moment, I was blinded. From the cries of protest and alarm, the others were as well.
Then, with a deafening sound I would later describe as a C sharp, and the odor of overheated arclighting, the mists parted in a blue glow. Clemens had fired one of Jonah Moore’s bullets.
Dust cleared in heavy moving clots, like the bricks we had come from. With a crunchy, frost-mired thud, my boots made contact with the ground beside Blair and Rosa. The pipe was rusty and not at all up to code, making the slide a dreadful plummet into blindness. It was peculiar how one could sail hundreds of feet in the air one day and be afraid of a two-story fall the next. I felt a bit like a cat, actually. If the fall was too low it would take one of my nine lives.
“There he is,” Rosa said, pointing to a crumpled heap at the side of a curled lamppost.
When she took a step toward Clemens, there came a sudden rumbling all up and down the street. The smell of hot machine oil filled the air.
“The cannon!” I yelled. “Get down!”
Everyone plastered themselves to Clemens, running and tripping and tumbling as it suited them. Not far away, the massive, ancient six-meter cannon was being tipped up and up, as if it were aiming at Mordemere’s evil cloud. Then, with a metallic clang, the thing tipped all the way up and over. Shattered gearing and cinder blocks trailed behind it. It reminded me of a poorly planned dive into water, belly-flopping in the midst of an elaborate somersault. As it turned out, the maneuver was complete with entry, for the tons and tons of metal sank right through the street on the way down, crumbling the masonry. A tidal wave of sound washed over me. Cracks streaked up and down the street, all the way to my boots.
“Would y’all get off my derry-air?” Clemens’s voice came muffled from the bottom of our impromptu pile-up.
He sounded downright Southern when he was in pain, I observed. We scrambled to our feet. I didn’t know where to look, Rosa’s disheveled front, Clemens’ fabulously mussed hair, or the wall of dust that blocked up the road, spilling over the tops of the buildings. Blair bent over to stand up, and his rear end drew taut. Foxy? Yes, a bit. I found myself focusing on it, trying to make sense of the destruction with silly things.
None of the soldiers had escaped the initial blast of the Red Special. Neither had Clemens emerged unharmed. From my standpoint, it seemed some mass of bright blue material had emerged from the tip of Clemens’s weapon, many times the size of C
lemens himself.
The blast had held still for a fraction of a second, then plowed into the mass of soldiers gathered behind their shattered cover. There was an immediate explosion, arcs of lightning everywhere. All the soldiers now lay face down on the ground, fate uncertain. Clemens himself had been thrown violently backward into a poor abused lamppost. The pirates had ended up in a pile on the other side of the street.
Now it seemed the soldiers manning the cannon had been defeated, and the cannon itself violently destroyed. Booms echoed somewhere close by. From airship cannons, maybe?
“The hell was that gun?” Rosa asked Clemens with a mixture of awe, fear.
Clemens still held the literally smoking gun, which also seemed to be sparking a little.
“An experiment. Sort of…Cid and I were trying to recreate Mordemere’s lightning weapon in The ’Berry’s basement,” Clemens said. “Sort of a free gaseous aeon weapon. Aeon pistol for short.”
“Were you trying to kill Captain Samuel too?” I demanded.
“I didn’t really know what it did! Besides, now we know what it does,” Clemens said. But he couldn’t look us in the eye.
“It was a good idea to give us some edge, but I don’t like secrets,” I answered. “The weapon isn’t the problem. Are we to expect you to fire that thing unexpectedly now and again? We only have two more of those!”
“If you want to mortally wound him, get in line,” Rosa cut in. “Why did you do it?”
“Ladies, ladies! What about Mordemere’s lackey over there?” Clemens complained.
“Don’t try to get out of this!”
“I believe the captain has a point,” Blair interrupted, pointing.
The dust was mostly clear, and the silence now hung like thick velvet curtain. Now I turned to see the last veils part over something monstrously big.
At first, the amateur adventuress in me—weaned on a slurry of detectives’ memoirs and constabulary horror stories—thought a vicious gorilla had gotten loose from some lax Muscovite zoo. Arms hung low, brushing great rounded knuckles close to the ground. Something about it seemed absurdly male. It was like a caricature of some muscular sideshow made terrifying by the joining of its head and chest in a low, primordial shape. As the rivets and dull, matte surfaces began to appear, I snapped back from my eight-year old self. This was no animal. This was one of Mordemere’s steamwork abominations, like his kobolds, like his clankers.
