Tesla's Revenge
An Argon Adventures Novel
Renee Sebastian
Books In the Argon Adventures Series
Tesla’s Revenge
The Cthulhu Crisis
The Fall of Neverland
June 2014: The First Law
Coming 2015 Palladium
Book 5 in the Argon Adventure Series
Published by Séance Press
Text Copyright © 2013
4th edition © 2014
All Rights Reserved
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people, even if you received a downloaded free e-copy. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite book retailer and purchase your own copy.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1 - Wendy
Chapter 2 - Our Heroes Meet
Chapter 3 - Cyclocranes
Chapter 4 - Truce
Chapter 5 - Hemomages
Chapter 6 - Brownstones
Chapter 7 - The Abraham Station
Chapter 8 - Introducing Howard Lovecraft
Chapter 9 - Tesla and His T.R.A.M.s
Chapter 10 - Locomotives and Freemasons
Chapter 11 - Chiromancers and Caravans
Chapter 12 - Tinkerers and Their Toys
Chapter 13 - Fairy Fire
Chapter 14 - Niagara and Bullets
Chapter 15 - Flickerfloggin and Waterways
Chapter 16 - Of Leviathans
Chapter 17 - Estonians
Chapter 18 - The Falls
Chapter 19 - The Baron
Chapter 20 - Showdown in a Cemetery
Chapter 21 - The Laboratory
Chapter 22 - Assassins
Chapter 23 - Cowboy Karaoke
Chapter 24 - The Gate into Hell
Chapter 25 - Fight in the Oval Office
Epilogue
Preview for “The Cthulhu Crisis”
Prologue
Nikola Tesla threw up. He had witnessed the deaths of many innocent citizens as a result of his oscillating earthquake machine. If all went according to plan he was about to see more. Many more.
As he wiped his mouth precisely three times, to settle the obsessive thoughts echoing in his head, he meditated on the sickening difficulty of dropping his invisible hammer on the unsuspecting dank and dark Westington. To use his oscillator to annihilate every skyscraper and warehouse in sight and rendering lifeless all that moved was impossibly hard. It nauseated him. But it was necessary, in order to remove a danger, such as Edison, meant everything and everyone in the target zone must fall. There was no room for uncertainty.
“The greater good,” Tesla said to himself. “Remember. It is for the greater good.”
Nikola thought of his favorite pigeon, Faust that had passed away long ago, when he worked under the government's guise of science. The silence that surrounded him now was an ode to all the good citizens and pigeons about to meet their oblivion.
He pressed the triangular button on his hand-held decimator and a low, electric hum permeated the room. Tesla's abandoned iron works space vibrated wildly. All objects oscillated at a particular frequency, but with some careful calculations and a steady finger to manipulate the earthquake machine, Nikola Tesla would survive the catastrophe. Often times in the past, he wished he had not. Guilt was a fierce gravity from which he could not be ripped.
In the cavernous room high above the street, a bird fluttered its nervous feathers. With the slightest finger-flick of an almost-forgotten Serbian genius, a lever was shifted, causing several blocks of the city to come crashing down.
As the scientist fled his awful sanctuary, an unanticipated side effect of the oscillator was about to tear the shroud off this world. It was a phenomenon more potentially destructive than the earthquake itself. The portal exploded open at the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Paramount Street in the very heart of Westington. The blast surged through the gap, outward and into the soot and silence of the city. It was a silence broken only by the moans of the dying.
Chapter 1
Wendy
“As secrets of the universe unfold before us, the secrets of man remain hidden.”
- Elijah Jefferson, 2109
From Dorian's Journal of Memorable Quotes to Live By
It was raining again when the telegraph came. If you were to guess that some of the ubiquitous dark soot was purged from the city by the storm, you would be dead wrong. As a matter of fact, this storm also brought acid rain from the pulp factories, leaving the house exteriors not only prematurely blackened, but structurally weakened as well.
I was putting in some time in my alchemy kitchen, in the heart of my most ordinary townhouse on Clementine Street. Copper pots, mostly used and in need of a proper cleansing, sat amongst my salted counter with color-coded glass vials, that littered the counter here and there. I was replenishing my stock from my last outing.
I had just finished grinding the expensive and exotic kava kava and valerian roots with my ivory mortar and pestle, so now I turned my attention to measuring out the proper combination of the sundry dry powders, including kratum and amorbarbitol. I next measured out the requisite extract from the passionflower that I had previously placed in the pressing vise for twenty-four hours. I then poured it in the beaker, as well.
I gently stirred the concoction in the bowl and then I put it aside, since it needed to settle for a few minutes before adding the honey. It would act as the binder for the ingredients. I next examined in detail the .32 darts that I would be using to dip into the concoctions. They were clean, sharp, and overall, satisfactorily. Next came, the last morbid ingredient, a drop of my blood. It would act as a catalyst with the sedative properties of the preparation.
Altogether, the potion was not quite enough to kill a horse, but enough to put a man out of commission for a good long while. All this was in preparation for my blue darts that went into my weapon of choice, the Black Widow dart gun.
Just as I dipped the last dart tip, the telltale ticker began printing off an incoming message. Whether it was for a paying mercenary job or an assignment remained a mystery.
I wiped my hands on my rubber apron and hung it on the tree by the door. Then I took a sip of my chamomile and lavender tea. It was cool to the lips. I grimaced and muttered, “Too much work makes the tea grow cold.” I needed to calm my nerves and steel myself for the impending message. My crank phone stopped working a few months ago, but I never bothered to fix it. Why bother? It's not as if I have any friends or family left to call me. However, the Society, who is trying very hard to fill that void, would contact me through the ticker. According to Society sub-rules, best practice dictated as little in-person meetings or voice recognition as possible. Finally, the ticker was done producing the message.
I seated myself on the velvet settee by the dome and ripped off the end of the ticker tape. I peered closely at the message. So it was an assignment.
“Attention Miss Darling. Stop. Your presence is requested for tea at two o'clock. Stop. Factory. Stop. Urgent. Stop. Bring overnight bag. Stop. Revival in Westington. Stop. Lost one. Stop. Top priority. Stop.”
-S.O.A.R.
So the Society of Arcane Revelations, S.O.A.R., needed me for a Revival. It could only mean one thing: a zombie outbreak had occurred. There hadn't been a rogue Necromancer in over two hundred years, not since the Civil War, where the South fought for, and lost, the right to raise and use zombies in lieu of African slaves. I mulled over what the Society would need from me in
this scenario. After all, there weren't many living people that needed killing in the middle of an undead outbreak. Fretting over it was useless, since I would find out soon enough. But first, I was determined to enjoy my frigid tea. Yummy.
Chapter 2
Our Heroes Meet
“The objective eye can be more truthful than the mirror.”
- Constance Monroe, 2101
From Dorian's Journal of Memorable Quotes to Live By
I chose to travel by a mechcarriage. They were cheap, readily available, and with proper motivation, adequately private. The driver, not the best by any definition of the word, came to an abrupt halt. Usually, drivers learned to add the correct coal to the mechanical horses to allow for a gradual stop, but not this one.
I slammed my hand against the edge of the carriage and inwardly cursed that I hadn’t insisted upon riding shotgun. I slid in a respirator plug, also called simply a resplug, into my nostrils. I helped myself out of the carriage, before he could do something civilized and shatter my impression of him. He jumped down, and astonishingly, tried to help me with my bags, but I shot him a little look that screamed, “Nobody touches my bags, but thanks ever so much for offering.”
Two points to the driver. He understood and then I retrieved them myself. Finally, I paid him his poorly deserved greenbacks. He never even questioned my peculiar destination, but simply stoked the horse's belly, jumped back into his seat, and took off in the same jerky motion for which he was quickly becoming infamous. Maybe I would request him the next time I needed a coach.
Left by myself, I surveyed my destination. The glass factory was defunct now, but it used to supply much of the paned glass on the east coast before the war. Now, no one could or even wanted to look out their smut-covered windows. So the company went under, as did all the adjoining companies, including the lead purification company, the iron works foundry, and the crystal goblet manufacturer.
Today, the glass factory itself was a goldfish bowl or sorts. Once, it showed off its impressive products, but now that bowl was so blackened, that you might have sworn that it was windowless. The true distinction between the other buildings and the glass factory now was that the factory was not in fact abandoned.
The entire compound was owned by the Society, who utilized the glass building for basic operations, which included the three stories below ground where the day-to-day operations were carried out. The top floor was rumored to be used for temporary residences and meeting lounges, but it was not as if I ever had access to them. I was not important enough, nor of the correct gender.
In some aspects, life for women was better than ever. Women had gained the right to vote and claimed equal employment rights with the passage of the Equal Gender Opportunity Act, also known as E.G.O., during 2192. Once those bills passed into law, it didn't take long before women gained armory rights. Married women even received the right to own their own land, property, and bank accounts, independent of their husbands. But in my heart, I knew this Republic of America was still a gentleman's world.
The front door was always open, so it was easy enough to bring in my two carpetbags and wait. The door shut behind me, and the overhead air scrubbers began their purification hum, which in turn cleansed the air of the heavier particulates of the atmospheric pollution. The room was an electric lift with three doors before me. Each one was respectively on each side of the square room, matching the points of a compass, with the fourth door, the exit, located behind me.
After a few minutes, the scrubber kicked off and a voice crackled over a speaker, “Miss Darling, I hope you encountered no problems while on your journey here?” This was code talk for: Were you followed?
I knew the proper etiquette, but was still mildly insulted, so I responded, “I'm here aren't I, Sirs.”
The disembodied voice took a moment to clear its throat and then replied, “Sufficient, Miss Darling. Once the lift stops, you may take the door on the left. Good day to you then.”
The speaker clicked off and the mechanical contraption started to spew loud noises while a few puffs of white billowy smoke invaded the cubicle, making the scrubber kick on again. I removed my nasal respirator and allowed it to hang down from the antique chain I wore about my neck. The lift stopped with a jolt, one floor down in the sub-basement. I heard a click of the door to the left unlocking. I opened the door, picked up my bags, and prepared myself for whatever this new destiny held for me.
···•Ͽ Ѡ Ͼ•···
I had been seated in an elaborate library, at a table that was at least twenty feet long. I was left alone once the Society's version of a butler had escorted me in. He promptly took his leave once his job was done.
After I removed my floor length, black coat and placed it over an adjacent chair, I took a chair facing the door that I had just entered. The chair's back was ramrod straight, taller than I was, and was made of an unpleasantly hard wood. I surveyed all the floor to ceiling bookcases, loaded up with leather bound titles, with their various sliding ladders, acting as their accouterments. The stale smell of moldering paper permeated the air. I was unimpressed, and since this room was made to be impressive, I worried my bottom lip and waited.
A strand of my strawberry blond hair slid free of my coif. I removed my kid gloves that held an interior lining that was radiation proof, and then I repositioned the lost tendril. I looked at my left hand, and fingered the small black tattoo on the back of it, near the base of my thumb. In this world, tattoos always meant something, and this one was meant to be hidden.
I heard a click and then the door I was escorted through opened. Four men swept into the room, three of them were distinguished looking while parading varying shades of brown suits and white hair. The three all seemed to be well acquainted, since they appeared to be discussing something avidly amongst themselves in whispers. None bothered to introduce themselves to me before the triplets took the chairs near the head of the table, still arguing in hushed tones.
These men were members of the Board of S.O.A.R., and I knew from experience that I needed to wait before being addressed.
The last man in was different. He was dashing in a way most men were not and it wasn't because of his gray, silken suit or impeccable blue cravat. It was the manner in which he moved that caught my attention. As he laid a dove white leather trench coat across the chair next to me, I realized that this was a man who was comfortable in his own skin. It was easy for me to recognize such confident fluidity, because this was the way I moved. It was with the grace of an immortal. I have known only a few immortals and I took great pains to avoid them at all costs. This unsettling development made me nervous.
I quickly placed my hand back into its sheath and gathered my wits.
He said, “So, finally we meet, the remarkable Miss Wendy Darling.” A refined English accent greeted me. He extended his hand. I kept mine. I was not so refined and hadn't called myself English in over a hundred years. I lost the accent not terribly long after I accepted the Republic of America as my home. He made me feel unsettled, with his slick voice, cool blue eyes, and styled mahogany hair. I offered him my dead stare instead.
His easy grin faltered a moment, but then he smiled like the Cheshire Cat. He withdrew his hand and touched his chest lightly as he said, “Allow me to introduce myself, since our hosts are otherwise preoccupied. I am Sir Dorian Grey, and I am most pleased to make your acquaintance, Madam.”
I was not amused. Indeed, I had heard the tales of the infamous Dorian Grey. He had broken more than a few ladies' hearts, drinking was not a minor vice for him, and supposedly, gambled with the devil himself. Some said he painted a self-portrait that prevented him from aging and that a demon had taught him how. But, I wondered if the stories of him were as twisted as the famous tale about me in Neverland.
He must have expected more from me, a smile, or maybe a nod, but I gave none. A finely dressed man, with manners, was simply a show. One I had seen before and was immune from now. I was still unimpressed.
&n
bsp; When he realized I was snubbing him, he straightened himself in a rather stiff manner and placed his walking cane on the table before him as he took the empty seat next to me. The cane itself was of dark polished rosewood and was peaked with a silver dragon's head. He casually set his hand across the dragon, and I allowed my hand to drift to my skirt's pocket that contained one of my matching set of petite Iver Johnson pistols. They had a mother-of-pearl inlay set into the handles and I had plenty of bullets for everyone in the room.
The three brown men simultaneously grunted in congruence or disagreement, I wasn't sure, and then their conversation ended. They turned their attention to Mr. Grey and myself.
The one closest to me said, “Welcome, welcome. Apologies. Sir Grey, this is Miss Darling, a longtime employee of the Society. Miss Darling, this is Sir Grey, a recent loan from overseas from an affiliate office. I am Mr. Harbuck and respectively to my left are Mr. Remington and Mr. Van Moot. We are pleased you could join us today for this impromptu meeting.” Like I had any choice in the matter. More than likely, Mr. Grey had equally little say in the matter either.
“Events have come to our attention that are quite disturbing.”
Mr. Remington guffawed and exclaimed, “Disturbing indeed!”
Mr. Van Moot, who happened to have a Vandyke beard, took over, “Please allow me to speak plainly,” and then not waiting for a reply continued by saying, “There has been a most unnatural outbreak in the city of Westington. While the situation is under control, there appears to be a new kind of Necromancer on the playing field.” He then paused for effect. “There seems to be some rather dreadful business regarding some kind of new deader. We plan to send you to the crime scene to investigate, via a S.O.A.R. cyclocrane.”
Tesla's Revenge Page 1
