by Kin S. Law
Before Arturo could investigate further, they reached a large room with twenty beds, partitioned from one another by swaths of white cloth. The more seriously injured train victims were here, many in slings or armored in great iron lungs pumped by engines in another part of the hospital. “Iron lung” was a colloquial. Arturo had no idea what functions the mechanical organs supplied in lieu of the patient’s own body, but his medical knowledge was not quite on the level of a surgeon’s. The glowing fluids coursing through their surfaces did not look particularly pleasant.
Gleaming silver equipment burbled near Hargreaves herself, but nothing was attached to the inspector except some gravitator tubing. It was dribbling clear serum, not blood. Her wound was invisible, hidden under a blanket, and her normally radiant mane looked damp and unkempt.
“We shouldn’t tell her,” Arturo said, standing at the foot of her bed.
“We have to,” Cid rumbled. “She will want to know.”
“The mark was obscured by the damage, circumstantial at best,” Arturo said. “In a couple days, the evidence might decay further, become unrecognizable.”
“Do you really want Maman to be like this for another day?” Cezette protested. “She will wake, and she will want to know.”
“Fine! Why don’t we all just push the inspector out into the crossfire, have her give everything for Queen and country?” Arturo’s wrath suddenly exploded, a flaming geyser the others hadn’t known existed. Hallow reared back like he’d been burned. Despite his apparent detachment, Arturo was extremely protective of his few friends. The sight of Hargreaves helplessly laid on a hospital bed was anathema to him. It was an insult. Bulletproof Hargreaves, struck down? Poppycock.
The group fell silent, and eventually drifted away from Hargreaves’ bedside, leaving Cezette slumped at the foot. The hospital was a fine one, with a common dining hall notable for its pleasing lack of cleanser smell and constant supply of coffee. It was no Cid-contrived gourmet espresso, but it was bracing, and the benches were comfortable enough to weather the night. Arturo retrieved a newspaper from the shop, which told him nothing, and a telegraphed missive from his account, which told him even less. His head ached terribly.
Sometime the next morning, the inspector awoke and dispatched Cezette to retrieve the members of MAD. Cid had contrived a spot repair for the girl’s leg, and though she wasn’t the agile ballerina any more, she could handle stairs. She found Arturo on the rooftop, a cold cup of coffee beside him frosted with pipe ashes. From Arturo’s spot, they could see the various hospital engines below, neatly parked beside a web of hot steam ports. The velocipede and sidecar he and Jean appropriated from a transport car in the train sat in the visitors’ lot, its terrible cargo lashed down with tarpaulin.
“Time to face the music,” Cezette said, following his gaze. Arturo stood up, and without a word, followed her down. Their steps clicked uncomfortably fast.
“Inspector,” Arturo said hesitantly, as he entered the door. The curtain was drawn, and Hargreaves was sitting up, reading a discarded paper and scowling at the hospital’s idea of a continental breakfast. She looked up, surprised, and arched an eyebrow.“Detective,” Hargreaves said cautiously. “What’s the matter, had a tiff with Jean?”
Arturo shot a dark look at Cezette, who was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Soon Hargreaves dropped the icy stare and smiled warmly.
“Oh, come here, you silly man,” Hargreaves declared. She set aside her tray, and pulled Arturo forcibly into her arms. “Thank you for coming for me.”
While they waited for the others to arrive, Arturo filled Hargreaves in on their journey, and what was going on in the world at large. It was difficult to strain hearsay from the simple news of the day. The Falklands conflict had escalated since they last heard of it in New York, and Arturo’s missive indicated Parliament committing as many as four Balaenopterons to taking the islands back. The papers were in the dark about the Ottoman retaliation, but everyone present knew of the Mordemere weapons the Empire possessed. Kobolds and clankers and ships equal to the Knights of the Round in size and firepower now threatened Her Majesty’s forces.
“As far as we can tell, it’s the threat of the Cook box that keeps the Ottomans at bay,” finished Arturo. “They don’t dare escalate for fear of it.”
“But once the Ottoman agent Orb Weaver delivers the box, the jig is up,” said Jean Hallow. “The Queen can only bluff if the Ottomans do not know the Box has no plague.”
“How do we know she is working for the Ottomans?” said Cid. “Arturo was attacked, we were helped by a third party. Burgess is invested somehow. There are too many guests at this table.”
“I should have delivered the box directly to the Queen,” said Hargreaves, her face drawn with guilt and pale with injury. “One decisive strike, and all of this could have been avoided.”
“You should not be so hard on yourself,” Arturo said. He suddenly felt differently about showing Hargreaves what they had found. She was not ready. She would insist on acting straight away. “You are still alive. The box had no plague.”
“Whatever was inside must have been of equal importance,” Hargreaves reasoned. “Her Majesty would not have entrusted it to me otherwise. I have failed her, and worse, betrayed her. I am a traitor.”
“Perhaps the Queen knew you would run off?” Cezette suggested.
Hargreaves seemed desolate, defeated. And that was not the inspector Arturo knew. He couldn’t stand to see her like this.
“We found something…in the wreckage—” Before Arturo could continue a doctor arrived. Although there were still sixty minutes left before visiting hours for the day were to begin she made no mention of Hargreaves’ guests. Instead she suggested the inspector would benefit from another few days in the hospital. Arturo saw a spark returning to the inspector’s eye. She’d heard him. She knew he had something up his sleeve. Sharp as a razor, as always. And soon enough…
“I’m fitter than the devil’s own fiddle. Cezette, I will require clothes. Arturo, fetch me coffee. Real coffee.”
By afternoon they had fetched the things Hargreaves required. The outfit Cezette found in the hospital’s Salvation Army donation center was a little too conservative for Hargreaves’ taste, but the plain linen and saloon-style skirt accommodated her .22 Tranter holster reasonably well. A logger’s coat and a jaunty, wide-brimmed hat lent her a frontiersman’s wildness, and then they were off, hobbling away right before an assemblage of nurses.
“I say, Cid, is Alphonse ready to go?” Hargreaves asked, striding across the lot as if she hadn’t just been gored like Christ on the cross.
Cid grunted, eyeing Arturo pointedly.
“Actually, that was what we wanted to tell you,” Arturo said delicately. They had reached the visitors’ lot, and now the moment was quite inevitable. Arturo flapped his mouth for a bit, then decided no quip was appropriate, and simply ripped off the tarpaulin’s cables.
Jammed into the sidecar, Alphonse’s severed arm clung, ruining the upholstery of the seat with black ichor.
“Right. I sort of expected this, Where’s the rest of him? ” Hargreaves said. When the silence stretched too long, she sighed, resigned. “Did you have to show me quite so dreadfully?” Before anyone could stop her, she reached out to touch the thing.
The fingers wiggled.
She leaped back in shock, nearly falling on her crutch. The arm shook the whole velocipede, springs creaking and squealing in protest.
“Look closer,” Jean prompted. Was there a dark edge to his voice? Arturo could not tell for sure.
Hargreaves had been backing away from the flailing limb, but now the thing slowed, she peered closer, at the stump where forearm had been cut at the elbow. The movement had loosened some fluid, and now the lot was filled with a rank, sour smell.
Instead of steel and oil, Alphonse’s frame was laced with silver skin and bleeding the unmistakable garnets of dark red blood. Hargreaves could not bear to look inside the frame, broken open by t
itanic forces, but when she dared, the horror of the damage faded in comparison. Inside the broken bones of her Alphonse, partially obscured by the break, the cog-and-cam mark of Ubique was distinctly visible.
Vanessa Hargreaves clung to hope like…well, like hope. Nothing else quite had the skin-of-the-teeth desperation that drove people to drink or religion. She remembered seeing the ghostly train behind the pass, like a fortress or a castle. A fort on the rails—a rail fort. But such things were still dependent on the tracks that crossed the country, and that was what she clung to. They had hope of catching the box.
Hargreaves could not shake the feeling of urgency. If this elusive, ghostly locomotive had an atelier for extracting the box contents without making berth, the game was done. If the train’s master berth was close, all was lost. If it gave over the box to a dirigible, all was lost. Where was she now? Nevada? Washington? California? Her only hope was to overtake the rail fort before the trail grew cold.
But, as they rocketed along the road in the last direction the rail fort had gone, her hunch seemed to be paying off. For one thing, the Gear that trailed them from the hospital still showed no signs it knew they had noticed its presence.
“Where is it now?” Hargreaves called over the rushing of the wind, as they sped down an unbelievably wide, paved road on their velocipede. The air felt bracing, cutting any exposed skin, except the gap between the hot engine and the sidecar’s mounts, where it was pressed into a formidable torrent. Her voice had to badger past a thick riding scarf and a pair of riding goggles. Its baffles restricted her vision, but it was that or be blinded by wind and road grit. The sidecar seat beneath her fingers and lap was still sticky from Alphonse’s fluids.
Arturo adjusted his mirror slightly, the clutch loose, the throttle fully opened in his other hand. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, to indicate the large covered lorry not far behind them. Hargreaves had a mirror on the corner of the sidecar, next to the wholly ineffective windshield. There was a momentary glimpse of something clinging to the back of the lorry.
The machine in question was small enough to hide behind lorries or in the outgrowth of Pacific forests. Their pursuer’s gentle footprints left ripples in the ground, subtle vibrations Arturo C. Adler listened for when they stopped for fuel. He put his head against the earth, sometimes with a glass drinking jar, and the sound came rumbling along, terrifying in its eight-beat tango. It had begun to follow them almost immediately from the hospital.
There had been a brief argument, but in the end Hargreaves had yielded the driver’s side of the velocipede to Arturo. The detective was the best choice for tracking their prey swiftly, given its immense head start. There was some discourse about who ought to go, but in the end Arturo’s obstinacy and Hargreaves’ stubbornness won out. Jean Hallow assured them they would find transport and catch up with the velocipede later, and went to find it himself. That was comforting. Hargreaves hadn’t liked the way Cid was eyeing a nearby ambulance, loitering from a recent patient delivery.
Now she watched the lorry in the mirror, hanging on to her riding scarf, until the barest glimpse of a green and purple limb hovered into view, scrabbling for purchase. The abomination was clinging like a wen to the side of the lorry.
“Look there,” Hargreaves indicated to a rest stop about a mile on. Her eyes were drawn to a cog-and-cam beneath the American symbols for fuel, lodging and food, but now was not the time to cherry-pick her opportunities.
They pulled into the fuel and water depot. It had been covered with thin slats and rough spun, to resemble a native tent. The coarse, sturdy-looking beams were shoddy and thin. They hid the real supports, rusty steel and panels drilled through with dozens of holes to save costs. A thin catwalk looped from the facade to the water tank, a steaming behemoth of thin steel over a furnace.
Arturo climbed out and drew a corrugated hose from above. A separate hopper supplied fresh coals, tumbling out in rods when money was inserted. Lighting embers could be scooped, a penny apiece, from a roiling furnace at the depot shop. There were a couple of pots of coffee on top, with paper cups, also a penny apiece. And of course, there were the facilities, surely a horrendous cesspool. If Hargreaves hadn’t been cautiously looking for their tail, she would never have seen the flash of purple disappear into the tree line, the colors blending into the foliage.
“Arturo, go into the woods and lure it in,” said Hargreaves. “When it gets close, I’ll shoot at it, then trip the furnace hopper release and dump those coals atop its beastly head.”
“A fine plan,” agreed Arturo, “save for the part where you send me into the woods to die.”
“More believable,” Hargreaves countered. “It is unsightly for a lady of good breeding to do her business in the woods. Besides, you wouldn’t step in a fueling stop lav if your bladder was exploding, you toff. Now go, you filthy man. Go.”
Arturo shrugged, but sauntered off anyway, hips swaying. Meanwhile, Hargreaves played at visiting the shop, at least until she was quite sure the shopkeeper had his head turned. Then, she picked the lock at the back, took a look behind the door, and ascended into the wobbly catwalk holding the fueling apparatus over the roadsters and lorries below. There were certainly many pleasure riders about. This part of the country seemed infested with them. Good weather and unspoiled nature, she supposed.
The ladder was shaky, and Hargreaves was not fully recovered from her ordeal, but she put one boot over the other and soon she was watching Arturo walk into the wood. She clung to a riveted strut, careful of the hot boiler not two inches from her back. The embers scorched her hair.
Artruo climbed a low ridge. Hargreaves looked on from above with wild abandon. Where was the automata? She should have been able to see it. From her vantage point, it should be impossible to keep the inspector’s keen eyes from detecting the machine. Where the blazes was it? Hargreaves barely registered the rumbling coming from the boiler behind her. Even in this age of advanced steam power, machinery was notorious for being noisy for no apparent reason.
When the boiler began to shake intensely, the inspector became alarmed. The rapidity with which the catwalk grew from a tremble to a bucking jolt left no doubt there was soon to be a boiler rupture. Now? With her side stitched up? In her condition she doubted she could descend the ladder before it burst. Hargreaves wondered if she should jump and if the trees would cushion her fall. It was a good three stories from the top of the platform, and no insurance against a boiler explosion. She caught the purple limb in her periphery a split second before it was too late.
With a metallic twang, the spider’s claw arched through the space where her head used to be, a stake of gritty paint and chrome. It looked like a scorpion’s stinger, dipping into the metal like it was the skin of a juicy milk bug. A cloud of searing steam sprayed into the crisp, dry air. Screams came from below, and shattering glass from shrapnel falling onto engines.
“Blithering idiot!” Hargreaves cursed from the floor of the platform, but it was reflective. She ought to have known, ought to have tracked better!
She rolled as the metal below her curled, the world coming about all shaky from the impact. It was clear the stalking tarantula had caught on, and instead of allowing the trap to close, decided to turn predator. No, not a tarantula—it was built like a daddy-long-legs, balanced precariously on stilts. The legs were telescoping slightly, slotted one length into the next like a pocket glass. Their reach was deceptive. She could also see Arturo running full-tilt to her rescue, hollering from below.
Hargreaves ran as best as she could along the catwalk as it began to buckle and twist beneath her feet. The spider clung to the supports, stabbing at her with its free limbs. As the spikes pierced the boiler, steam scoured the paint off the walk. The long-legs’ body blocked out the sun. Inside its smoked glass eyes the pilot moved within the spider almost like a part himself. As if the skeleton movement that made up the creature’s guts had a hold on someone eaten very recently.
The metal below her gave a
wrenching groan and collapsed, throwing her tumbling through the air. Her hands scrabbled for purchase, the skin under her gloves scraped raw against the rough metal. . They caught on something. When she screwed her eyes open, she found herself dangling from a rail still partially attached to the tower, like a worm on a hook. From this vantage point, it was easy to see one side of the station was crumbling from the shifting weight. Bolts flew like bullets from the stretching metal, and the log façade had caught fire.
“Hi! You great lout!” Arturo shouted from below, carrying on struggling to catch the automata’s attention. A stone whipped from his hand, clanging against the spider’s carapace.
“Bumbling fool!” said Hargreaves. The automata was, indeed, turning to address this new threat, but not only was Arturo as defenseless as she, the movement pulled the dense, sloshing boiler more to one side, crumbling the steel below with audible moans. An orange rain spilled from one side of the scaffolding, the embers cratering and melting the luxury engines below like tiny, flaming meteors. A loose beam fell on their velocipede, crushing the big front wheel and sending it rolling into the countryside.
Something green spit violently from the front of the automata. Arturo dove for cover, and the glob enveloped a tree just behind him, reducing it to a hissing, splintery puddle within seconds.
“A vitriol-thrower!” Hargreaves said, horrified.
She had little time to act—the automata was reaching forth with two limbs, balancing itself on the other six. Rearing like a real spider, it lined up horrible mandibles two stories over the ground. A second shot spurted, melting a boulder not two feet from Arturo to a beastly puddle. The shots were becoming alarmingly accurate.
