by Kin S. Law
It was only halfway out of the forest when Hargreaves discovered the folded clothes slipped behind the seat of the rumbling Alphonse. By then it was too late to return. She stopped by a stream to clean and change, throwing on the sensible traveling ensemble and pinning her hair so she wouldn’t appear to have just survived a dirigible crash. There wasn’t much flair to it, only a thin line of lace at the hem, drifting over her ankles, but such was the point. The skirt was librarian green, just sufficient to set off her eyes but not flashy enough to draw unwanted attentions. She tucked one of the eight throwing knives into her hair, where it lay hidden with an anodized dullness, and slipped the rest into the heavy carpet bag full of firearms.
From over a sun-dappled ridge, Hargreaves looked back down on the Berry, her flanks speared and torn, ground beneath her soaked into a sucking mud. Hargreaves could just make out the sparks of a torch, the faint snoring of a saw at work on the forecastle.
“Thank you,” she said.
She steered Alphonse gently away to pick her way into the wilds of America.
Interlude Exeunt
Parting Shots
The customer had been going on about the third piston coil on his velocipede for ten minutes when the rattling taxi pulled into my lot. It was strange to see bright yellow so far North of its hunting grounds. Maybe it was a really fat fare.
Already I could tell from the sound it was going to be an easy fix, a loose belt or a leaky nut along the steam line. Those old Fjord cabs, if you gave them a good oiling every once in a while, they might just run forever. This one was not well maintained, likely a victim of round-the-clock business from drivers preoccupied with green mattress stuffing. Truth be told, I was just glad for the excuse to be rid of my first customer, even if the excuse chose to disgorge a load of tourists. My final exams were coming up, and I didn’t need the stress.
“Sir, for the last time, I can’t fix a third coil that doesn’t exist. Yours is a two-piston model—excuse me; it seems these folks need some assistance.”
Turning on my heel, I crossed the ten steps from the office to the lot like a man summoned by the President himself. I was glad. Any more of the customer and I might have taken a pair of valve calipers to his face.
“You folks all right?” I spoke to the nearest of them, a young slicker type in a bright frock. It was the graybeard coming around the front who began to give commands.
“Lad, we need a top-up and a new four-eighths belt, pronto. Hurry, now! time is short!”
Despite the state of the machine, the limey graybeard seemed to know what he was doing, so I jabbed the hot water hose into the port and went into the garage to get the part.
When I came back, a big circle of taffeta was buried in the hood of the cab. As I approached, the circle straightened up, and suddenly a girl stood there with killer legs and a smudge of grease at her brow.
“Bonjour. Is that a timing belt I see? Just the thing,” she said, and I was floored.
Those eyes captured me from the first. I’d only seen the like in the picture house, those dusky butterfly flutters in the first act. The girl had an air, like she would make it worthwhile to do anything for her. Her hair looked impossibly long, and deep, like it would suck up my hands if I stroked it. She’d clipped it in a barrette, and it flowed down one side of her like an ebony river.
The graybeard was deep in the other side of the cab, and his hands flew around inside it like nothing I’d ever seen before. I was so amazed by his expert dismantling, buffing, and spitting, I barely noticed those were my spanners and screwdrivers he was working his magic with. Even more amazingly, those tools he was pulling off the messy cart were being mystically sorted by size and type, as he enlisted one after another to work in the steaming hot engine. I saw the pointed tips of the fop’s hair in the garage shop.
“Blasted American standard!” the graybeard said. “Thank you, Cezette.”
“Don’t you Brits use the same measurements?” I said, idly watching the girl handing him a set of points. Cezette. Her name was Cezette. And she was just as familiar with my tools as he was, all the while doing it in a pair of wedge heels.
The graybeard looked up to reach for the tools, found them ready to hand, and gave me a searching kind of look. The tips of his beard quivered in the steam.
“Aye, more or less. I’m a convert to metric; the increments are smaller,” he replied. He tossed a rotted, melted canvas belt over his shoulder and I handed him the new one, which he fit to the timing gears with a few precise movements. I crouched in closer under the hood; the customer from earlier was loitering, poking his nose around like a pup, curious.
“Look, I’m glad you’re doing the work for me, but we still have to charge you for labor,” I said lamely. Undeterred by my assertion, the graybeard silently tested the new belt’s alignment. Unsure what else to say, I continued to hand him screwdrivers and bolts as he needed them, trying to keep my hands from touching the girl’s. With a final flutter of the pressure throttle, he slammed the hood down again. The taxi was still rickety, but at least the engine hummed a little smoother, spinning idly in an empty gear. The whole thing had taken maybe ten, fifteen minutes at best.
“Look, you seem a bright lad. You think a wise old mechanic like me would put up with a piece of rubbish like this?” the graybeard said, jerking his thumb toward the rumbling taxi. The clunker in question sputtered ominously. “Frankly, my boy, we are not the type to be taking the piss with.”
“We have a solution for that.” I jerked a thumb towards the hulking owner in the back of the garage, and mimed the cocking of a scatter-gun. There wasn’t actually a gun. Mr. Elmer just looked the part, but he was a gentle giant who paid all right. The best I might do was run someone over with my velocipede, parked next to the pickup.
“What’s your name, lad?” the graybeard asked.
“Frances Dolores Derry, on account of my birthplace and my dear aunt Dory,” I said, proudly. “Friends call me Derring-Do,” I made up on the spot. The girl Cezette must have been fourteen, fifteen. My age.
“Well, Derring-Dolt, why don’t you take a look here through this pocket-glass, and tell me what you see?”
Like any strapping American lad, I was possessed of a certain invincibility complex and what my poppa liked to call ‘damn fool antics.’ Yet, I had to be smart to keep all my fingers around fast-moving machines. Steam could be erratic, moving in sudden bursts, and a certain degree of long-nurtured caution seeped into my head at this point. When I put the long tube to my face, would I then find one of my own spanners headed for a collision course with the back of my head? The graybeard looked on, tapping his foot, as I backed up from him enough to watch him and the glass at the same time. Then I put the tube to my face.
Then I put the tube to my face again, one eye squeezed shut.
And a third time, just to be certain, turning the focus this way and that.
“But… but… but….”
“Yes, yes, it has a great big metal butt. I’m sure the bollocks are also quite impressive. The point is the thing is headed this way.”
It was something straight out of the Popular Steamcraft magazines in my room, in an article about today’s American arsenal. In the article, the government claimed to have an army of these things, all commissioned at great cost and able to defend our borders. In fact, the article claimed they were doing exactly this, in Ottoman-allied Argentina, which begged the question of what they were doing so far from our borders. They could be seen only on the elaborate propaganda picture-house reels.
The thing I had seen through the pocket-glass differed from the magazine articles in two major respects.
Firstly: The gear was four stories tall, quite a few heads over the ones I had seen in the periodical.Secondly: It had a rather prodigious amount of legs, some of which appeared to be damaged. Despite this, it seemed quite capable of crushing buildings and engines underfoot.
The one thing that appeared unchanged was the presence of two underslun
g, many-barreled guns. Unfortunately, as they were approaching with now-tangible shakings of the ground and the distant snaps and thundering of explosions, these were little comfort.
At this point the fop returned to the taxi, accompanied by what appeared to be an undertaker. He tipped his hat to the graybeard, who grunted and returned to work. I could only assume the copious amounts of snacks and sundry in the fop’s arms were offerings for the great metal god descending upon us.
“My word, everything they have is bacon flavored,” the fop said. He extended a paper bag of potato chips. He offered one to the girl, who took a nibble.
“My tongue is digging a grave through my jaw, and I have the French affair with lardons,” my beautiful angel said. I could feel a breeze on my teeth as a smile took over my face. The girl was a swan in black lace.
“Do not fret. Here is a boiled sweet,” the undertaker said. He spat. “I retract my statement. Fret, this candy tastes like bad laudanum.”
“Give it here!” the fop answered.
The undertaker delivered his judgment with what seemed like fondness, if one could call a minuscule crease in the pallor of a corpse ‘fond.’ Both he and the fop looked too old for my angel, a fact emitted from me as a dreamy sigh. They looked back and forth between the graybeard and me expectantly.
“All done,” the graybeard said calmly. Somewhere in the distance, a giant’s leg came down with a boom. My velocipede customer fell on his bottom, breaking something in the office with a tinkling crash.
“What are you, crazy? There’s a runaway gear over there!” I hollered. “Run! I mean, drive!”
“Run away? I think not,” the undertaker said. “At least not right away.”
“Yes… it might be looking for something,” the fop said.
“Maman?” my angel asked. Her whole face lit up as she said it.
“Possibly. Shall we investigate?”
Somewhere in the backwater of the country, there were some dedicated skywatchers who consorted with metallurgists to build some truly monstrous vehicles, which they then drove into the hearts of storms and twisters. I looked at the rickety taxi, sitting there without a single panel of armor, occasionally flatulent with a misfiring pressure piston.
“You people are insane,” I declared to empty air. The four of them piled into their cab, and the graybeard got the boiler started with a characteristic hiss. “And you haven’t paid for the timing belt!” I added, as they began to pull away.
I do not know what came over me, perhaps some ragged scrap of responsibility for settling the account. More likely it was the gleam from my angel’s eye as she passed within arm’s reach. Seizing the moment, I made a mad dash toward the garage, where my velocipede was parked, waiting. The starter churned the smoldering embers into a roaring flame, a flush of steam from the garage’s hose burbled through her streamlined chassis, and then I was off, the pressure churning her pistons from a ragged chortle into a roar. She shot out of the garage just in time for me to see the back of the taxi disappear round a corner.
Was I love-struck, as mad as the New England writer with the morbid fear of seafood? Very likely. The severe cut of her jaw, those graceful limbs, the color of her hair like some indescribably deep abyss, had in a short moment engraved in my mind like a pressure hammer on some warped velocipede frame. The cautious part of me was a reluctant passenger, watching on as the driver took our body closer and closer to some stomping, crushing doom. I think at one point I thought myself a hero, going to save her. So yes, I was an idiot, as all teen boys are.
When we reached the beginning of the destruction, the sane part of me began to regain control. By that time, it was far too late. As I whizzed over a covered bridge, the crushed bedrock under it gave way and the whole bridge collapsed in a spectacular spray of water and rocks. My rear wheel barely made it across.
The road was pocked with craters, new round, shallow manholes the footprints of the gear’s passing. The overcast sky and dust raised by the destruction occluded the monstrosity. From a distance it looked like an elder god, descended from the Tartarus of space to kill us all.
What the fuck was I doing?
My velocipede could weave between each crater, her enameled fairing reflecting the light of burning homes and carriages in streaks of writhing, glowing serpents. Soon the taxi in front of me slowed to a careful crawl. I pulled up beside them as they stopped before a downed tree.
“Hey!” I hollered.
“My, you are persistent,” the fop said, leaning out of the window. He began to leaf through a sheaf of notes, not all of them green.
“No, you have to get out of here! Before we all die! I know the way!” I said. There was a way, at an intersection just past the tree. If we turned left, we joined the larger road away from town. If we turned right….
“Listen, you seem a decent sort,” the fop continued, “there’s no reason you should endanger yourself on our account. Here’s some money. Run along and get somewhere safe.”
I took the wad he held out to me, and stood there with one foot on the ground as the little taxi started to bumble away.
“Aw, shucks,” I said, and pulled my velocipede’s big front wheel round to meet them on the other side. She was a direct descendant of the first two-wheeled vehicles to touch this side of the Atlantic, a finely tuned, 800 psi Jack Winner custom I’d refurbished myself. When the branches of the tree tore strips of paint from her sides, it was like tearing the skin from my flanks.
Fuck it. I’d already come this far.
“Allors! The knight returns!” cried the girl, as I pulled up beside them. They’d stopped at a shoulder, peering at the distant destruction, the ominous shadow of the colossus stomping through the dust of my home. That fact had barely even registered, but now it hit like a sack of bricks.
“Look! If you’re going to do this, let me come with you. I know all the shortcuts and roads around here,” I implored, one last time. I managed to push down the dread, the sinking feeling. The pretty girl at my elbow helped. “The least I can do is guide you out when you finally realize it’s a suicide mission.”
The four of them looked to one another, shrugging in turn. The girl turned to me and smiled. We reached the intersection, and turned right, not left. The ground rumbled beneath us. As we came on the town church, the bell tower veered past and the bulk of the gear swung grandly into view. Up close, the machine defied comprehension, even for me. There were materials and parts that were utterly alien, like growths, or cancers. And the way it moved, the scale of it! Not a machine but a tornado of howling, scraping steel slabs, bleeding miasma where it was torn.
“Whoa!” I cried, wheeling my velocipede around. We were close enough to hear some kind of staccato popping. It didn’t take long to see the flash of gunpowder, and the little trails of brick dust spurting out in a long line on the ground.
“Look at the bore of those guns!” my angel said, awed.
“And the perfect gear ratio.” The graybeard’s voice drifted over the rushing air.
I marveled at the seeming obliviousness of these people. Instead of running for their lives they were marveling at its construction like art fiends. I had to admit, however, the gear was magnificent, at the same time a feat of steam age engineering and some kind of childhood nightmare brought screaming to life. The only noticeable flaw was a deep gash along the ventral side, and a stubby limb that looked like it had been lopped off, but that didn’t stop it from continuing to smash my hometown with apparent glee.
One of the tree-trunk feet came down on a truck full of baking goods, momentarily blanketing the street with a cloud of flour. The limbs rose and fell, appearing and disappearing, as if we had entered some strange new planet, whose gargantuan inhabitants dwelt in a perpetual fog. It was a bad picture-house feature, an exploitation flick about something ludicrously impossible. As if self-reflective, one of the legs descended upon the town’s tiny one-screen palace, crushing a million little bulbs of arclight as if stepping into a bucket
of popcorn. I’d kissed Janet Winter there, two summers ago. That had been my first.
One of the bulbs must have ignited the cloud of flour, because there was a clap of thunder and a powerful wind rolled over us, stopping us screeching in our tracks.
“We’re in the thick of it!” I yelled. I pulled a rag from my pocket, tying it around my face so I wouldn’t breathe in the dust. My riding goggles came out of my saddlebag. “Can we leave yet?”
“No! Bring us somewhere we can get a good look at it!” the fop answered.
I nodded, the debris getting to be too much for my makeshift mask. We wheeled right, climbing a wooded path between the library and the Millers’ general store. There was a little promontory where the students would go for those fumbling nights of initiation.
From this vantage point, it was easy to see the trail of destruction. The beast had come from the South, stomping flat Delilah’s, my favorite roadside diner. A little caravan fled before it. I recognized the Finns’ little red wagon, Principal Meyers’ brand-new Paddy, and Sheriff Patterson parked by the tough old townhouse, taking potshots at the gear with her buck rifle. Occasionally it would sweep the Sheriff with its guns, riddling the brick hall and deflating the tires on every engine parked there.
“Ho-hum. It appears our dear inspector is not in the crosshairs,” the graybeard said. He had come out of the cab to get a better look.
“We had better get clear of this mess,” the undertaker said, behind him.
“Agreed. Derry, can you get us out?” said the fop.
“What? How can you say that? Those are people I know down there!” I protested. A sudden wave of indignation washed over me, taking me by surprise. Here I was, risking my ride and my life to help them, and they were so damnably calm. “You were all gung-ho to get close, but now your own people are safe, you’re going to flee? I know you know something about this. Help us!”
