Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  “You are my trump card, Hargreaves. You were assigned MD6 because I have every faith in your abilities, in how you play by the book, but also by your knowledge of when to throw the book out of the window. You can do this.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Vanessa Hargreaves said and got up without another word. She left the Queen there in her sunroom, surrounded by her tropical foliage like some Amazon princess. Hargreaves had a nasty feeling that she was not any trump card, but a wild card in a game where she did not know the rules.

  “I want every machine shop, forge, and chisel-chucking monkey in London searched, I want every physician and physiologic alchemist raided, and I want it done immediately!” Hargreaves said back in the police cab below the Queen’s luxurious Soho loft.

  “And I want a boiled sweet every time a Whitechapel tart nips my gentleman’s sausage,” Arturo C. Adler answered her. “But we can’t always get what we want, now can we?”

  “Suddenly the voice of reason? Bugger off, Adler,” Vanessa huffed heavily into the cramped cabin, her breath competing with the boiler steaming outside the windows. She and Adler were the only people in the utilitarian vehicle, a Fjord signed out of the Yard pool. Grinning bars reinforced the front grille, and the roll cage inside featured handy lock-points to cuff a perpetrator’s hands. Right now, Vanessa felt she might need to lock herself in before she did anything stupid.

  “You found out what it was,” Arturo said blandly, his eyes never leaving the beige folder Hargreaves set between them.

  “Yes. You had better take a look while I get on some reckless driving.”

  Taking the wheel, Vanessa hurled the heavy Fjord into London traffic, letting the white and black of the cab’s police markings clear the way for her lead foot. While she marked London’s streets in smoking India rubber, Arturo’s brows knit gradually closer together until the wry cynicism made them a single furry worm across his face. He closed the file with a snap.

  “If the queen goes through with this, she could be tried for war crimes,” Arturo said.

  “She knows. Her Majesty doesn’t want to make that call unless she must,” Hargreaves answered him. “I know it sounds extreme, but I’ve come head-to-head with the monsters the Ottomans bought from a madman. It’s not an inconceivable tactic, though one of last resort. At any rate, we have to live with that mistake now, and I just want to focus on finding our perpetrators.”

  “Before they open the box.”

  “Precisely,” she said, and parked the Fjord in a long skid. A line of East End warehousing stood opposite, conveniently off a canal. Merrily playing in the still pool of a lock, a pair of ducks ignored Hargreaves and Adler as they stepped out of the car. The Sturlusson mark was stenciled on one of the warehouses.

  “Do you think they took the canal?” Hargreaves said, examining the ramp that led off into the waterway. There were recent signs of movement, but that could have been from the regular steamboat shipments to other warehouses.

  “It’s possible. The locks will admit boats that can take automata weight. I doubt it though. Feerick made a fast getaway.”

  Hargreaves looked at the drop of the lock, a ten-foot enclosure made by hinged doors, operated by nothing more than a clever manipulation of the water. An outlet to the Thames lay at the mouth of the canal, but it was too far to get to before the Yard’s dirigible scouts were called to canvas the area. They would have needed to move the two automata one boat at a time, raising and lowering the lock each time.

  “From Sturlusson to this warehouse, Feerick must have made a similar drive to the one we just did,” Hargreaves supposed. “That accounts for my trip to Logan’s, leaving about twenty minutes for the interval of my conversation and notifying the constables.”

  “In twenty minutes, where could they have gone?” Arturo mused along with her.

  “It is likely Feerick will want to either study the coffin or extract the contents for stealthy departure. Hermetically sealed coffins look like any other hardware or steamwork container. They will not know what is inside or have an easy job of opening it,” Hargreaves said, the photograms from the file in hand. She didn’t want to touch them with more than a thumb and a forefinger, as if the record itself was contagious.

  “D’accord. If they’re working for someone higher up, however, they will want to transport the entire package. Let us assume they moved their entire operation to a backup location, oui?”

  “I hate when you speak French, Arturo,” Hargreaves complained. She pushed open the heavy sliding door to the warehouse, and was greeted by the silence of a thousand packing crates and boxes. The slight breeze stirred up the dust and smell of mildew, unavoidable this close to water. Vanessa observed a row of skylights, and gas lighting.

  “We are probably looking for a space like this one,” Arturo said, looking round. “Adequate lighting for their automata maintenance, good open spaces to test movement, access to multiple avenues of escape, and within twenty minutes of this location.”

  “That narrows it down, but the constables have already scoured the area downstream of the canal and within twenty minutes range. It’s as if they disappeared into a cave.”

  “Has anybody looked upstream?” Arturo asked.

  “Why? It’s impossible to go upstream. The canal narrows.”

  “Impossible for a boat, perhaps,” Arturo said. “Look here: the tracks for the large lorry are not imprinted too deeply in the gravel.”

  “You’re suggesting they took off on automata?”

  “Stepping right up the shallow canal? Why not? An empty lorry driven away by an accomplice would have blended right into traffic.”

  Hargreaves spared no more words, but backtracked to the canal. Most of the embankment was built of square gray masonry or ancient stones dating back to Roman times, but further along the algae shifted to green grass, still bright for autumn. Soon the verdant path yielded to softer, less packed loam, where Vanessa found what she was looking for.

  “Footprints,” she said victoriously, observing the tracks while stepping carefully around them. The track was enormous, a square divot in the earth as if a line of filing cabinets had been dropped into the path.

  “One of them was in the river. The dirt is a little disturbed here where it climbed up for some yards,” Arturo observed keenly as only he could. Not to be outdone, Hargreaves squinted at the tracks.

  “The other followed the path, and it was carrying our box, perhaps a little clumsily,” she said. “The tracks are sunken in more, and there are signs of dragging where the coffin slipped.” Hargreaves felt the bite of fear again, as she considered how one unfortunate rock would have loosed a Biblical plague on London.

  The two investigators made their way along the tracks, to passersby a well-matched couple on a romantic waterway stroll. Hargreaves’ long legs kept up a good pace through the oddment of gardens, storage lots and public parks the canal wound itself through on its meander of the East End. Arturo’s tightly wrapped trotters were surprisingly deft in their Oxford shoes, dodging the occasional cyclist with little effort.

  They were in a residential neighborhood. The bridges over the canal were only iron walkways between cloistered clusters of biscuit-cutter homes. The trail marched up a wide dirt ramp and onto some gravel that held tracks nearly as well as the mud bank. In the near distance, a tall pastel government housing development reared over the crooked chimneys. Hargreaves thought, with some resentment, of the importance of repairs in this corner of the city, compared to the restoration of Westminster. Rotting holes full of sooty rainwater stood gaping like gangrenous wounds between the neat, square brick dwellings of Londoners. These knots of squalor had never been repaired since the War. There were hundreds of cloistered nooks for criminals to hide in.

  “Here, Adler,” she whispered, foregoing his first name’s audible consonants in favor of the surname. She used hand signs to point out a large building, connected to a Gregorian-style church, with the wide doors and stalls of a stable. All of the shutters and
doors were closed. The tracks disappeared in the general area, but there was no sizable building other than the stable.

  “Jackpot,” she said, using a word the pirate Rosa Marija used to say when she won their games of mahjong.

  In the back of the stables, a metal bucket held the remains of a mask and dark jacket discarded in haste. The edges looked raw and brown where they had fused to the man’s back, and were cut with a sharp knife.

  “Please tell me you don’t have a sparker again,” was too much to sign quietly, so she opted for waving her .22 and glaring at Arturo. He responded by producing a much more sensible 9mm magazine pistol, likely a German variety. They flanked around the stable, confirming the exits, and Hargreaves barred the rear door with a handy beam of wood. Around the front, a covered walkway connected the stable to the church proper. Hargreaves attempted to restrain Arturo.

  “No dice,” he whispered. “I have your back.”

  “Fine. But there will likely be little cover in there, and they will see us as soon as we go in.”

  “All the more reason,” Arturo insisted. Even his platinum spikes seemed to shiver. Hargreaves shrugged, reconciling herself to what help she had. She didn’t have time to call in reinforcements—these thugs might have left already.

  With a finely placed boot, Hargreaves stormed the place.

  “Metropolitan Police Service!” she cried. “Hands where I can see them!”

  “The pigs!” someone shouted, and suddenly the air rang with gunfire. She wouldn’t have expected it in the middle of Britain. A parked phaeton made the nearest cover, even as a lantern exploded in most vulgar fashion behind her.

  In a moment, she had the measure of the place; two of them, one in the rear stall near the back door, and a second behind a wheelbarrow three slots from the back. Now, Hargreaves thought, they will try the door and I can get the jump on them.

  What she hadn’t counted on were the automata, still warm from Feerick’s escape.

  “In the gears!” she heard a gruff, American voice say, the one who had said ‘pigs’ instead of ‘rozzers.’

  “Bollocks!” Hargreaves cursed, and a second later rolled out from under the phaeton to see a yellow shape smash through the rear door with a box the size of a morgue drawer.

  “Now what, Hargreaves?” Arturo yelled, suddenly beside her. The two of them were pinned by a sudden flurry of shots. A split second later, thundering steps told her the second golem had followed its friend.

  “Get the car, and when you pass a police box call for backup! Ask for Tanner or Hallow in Mobile Automata Division, and tell them to bring Alphonse!”

  “I’m not good enough to back you up, but this Alphonse fellow is?” Adler protested, but to empty air.

  Vanessa Hargreaves didn’t stop to see if her orders were obeyed, trusting instead to Arturo’s sense of urgency and hound-like knack of finding prey. She dashed past stomping, neighing horses and through the splintered hole of the stable. Then, she did a double-take.

  Two minutes later found Inspector Hargreaves riding bareback on a chestnut mare, galloping across the green meadows of Mile End Park. She rode gripping the mare’s flanks with her thighs and swatting at the buttocks with an appropriated crop. Her bright blond hair flapped freely, like the banners of a charging knight. She certainly didn’t feel particularly gallant—rather, she felt she’d probably cocked everything up.

  “Faster,” she urged the delighted horse, her eyes fixed on the lumbering yellow forms in the distance. Construction yellow, she blithely observed with her inspector’s sense for details. Construction automata had been appropriated for the crime, large and bumbling. Alphonse moved with much more grace, but he was smaller by a head.

  Flat out across the green, Hargreaves vaulted the fences of a low cricket pitch with barely a glance, the mare huffing and bulling her way through the field with wild abandon. The crazed gallop cut across a rolling hillock and put her within audible range of the villains.

  “Stop!” Hargreaves yelled, and fired off a warning shot to emphasize the point. The mare had an even temper, and did not buck. “You have no idea what you’re carrying!”

  The two lumbering titans did not miss a step, not even when Hargreaves rode around and cut them off. She could even see the pilots’ heads, Feerick in one and a bald head peeping from the other’s chest cockpit. This one carried the coffin, a matte, riveted truncheon for all the swinging the golem was putting it through. In reply, the golem simply swung the heavy weight in a circle around its waist joint, a roundhouse blow that nearly took Hargreaves’ head off.

  “Christ on a platter!” Vanessa blasphemed, pulling the panicked mare back. She let them flank her, moving around the slowing mare. She shied away from the thundering feet, falling back inexorably despite Hargreaves’ best efforts.

  Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, the countryside rang with the sound of a constable’s whistle, followed by the rumble of something heavy off to her right.

  “Alphonse!” she called in delight, recognizing the silver glint. Two more automata came into view, all of them loping quickly to her. One of them was the Yard’s other auto, a shuddering horror little removed from Mordemere’s kobolds. The other was the domestic recovery, hastily done up with the unicorn-and-lion livery of M.A.D.

  “Maman!” the familiar voice of Cezette called from Alphonse, sidling up to her. She yelped when the inspector leaped the short yard from the horse’s back and onto the automata’s arm. From there, Hargreaves made her way to the pilot’s seat.

  “Cezette? What are you doing in there? Budge up!” she said, undoing the girl’s loose harness and forcing her out of the seat. She took the controls herself, and, feeling for the familiar lever, activated Alphonse’s rolling mode. There was a clunk.

  “Mon Dieu!” Cezette yelped, and the machine surged forward.

  Beneath their feet, Hargreaves felt the boilers and gears in Alphonse’s abdomen pulse pleasurably, pushing the automata forward on hooves of India rubber. Alphonse’s ankles contained piston-powered wheels padded to handle hard London roads. The grass might as well have been smooth pavement as it whizzed past, until Hargreaves found herself suddenly on top of her prey.

  “You git! Get down from there,” she cried, feeling herself channel the pirate spirit of Clemens. She accelerated the heel of Alphonse’s foot into proximity with the closest golem. There came a grinding crash as both machines rolled atop the carpet of turf, rending the soil aloft in a shower of loam.

  When Hargreaves righted Alphonse, she found herself face-to-face with Feerick, whose machine had developed a rather large dent. She also found herself alone. Cezette had tumbled out, landing neatly on two spring-heeled feet. Long stockings hid their true nature, but human legs would never have taken the fall. She was now sprinting ably away from the fray. Hargreaves felt the pang of maternal guilt. She hadn’t thought of her charge, and though no harm was done, she knew she’d let the chase get the better of her.

  “Feerick!” Hargreaves yelled. “The game is up! Give up and disembark from the golem!” The other two M.A.D. automata, Jean Hallow and Cid in the pilot seats, were cautiously flanking their own prey. Hargreaves had Feerick all to herself.

  A hoarse yell came from the yellow machine. Striped black and yellow, the construction automata had been built to sustain heavy loads, practically bulging with purpose in its square shoulders and mesh-lined joints. The arms ended in heavy three-fingered pincers, ridged and deadly-looking.

  “Priser,” Hargreaves confirmed to herself, even as her opponent swung round a straight right. The blow jarred the teeth in her skull, even though she had thrown up Alphonse’s arm in a block—Priser was heavy.

  Never before M.A.D. had a royal peacekeeping authority engaged in automata-to-automata battle. Pistols were useless here; the shivering machines quickly becoming impossible to aim from. One might hit it as surely as a barn, but unless a bullet whizzed magically into the cockpit, the person inside was as good as bulletproof. Hargreaves found her
self recalling Yard training, the psychology of a criminal, and the writings of Freud and Schopenhauer. An automata was an elegant solution to the hedgehog’s dilemma. Covered in steel plate, one might wall oneself away from the world, absolutely protected from being hurt by the quills of other people. She saw how it might appeal to someone like Feerick, brilliant at deception but physically feeble.

  What became apparent, as she fought, was the need for pugilistic instincts. When Priser’s heavy pincers rammed forward, they jostled Alphonse hard enough to make steam hiss from the joins. Priser was heavier and taller than Alphonse, but Alphonse had more ratchets, making him more agile and more dexterous. As if to make the point, Hargreaves found a hole and landed two jabs, right-left like comets, pushing back Priser’s chest until the mesh sprang out of it.

  “Bloody Nora!” Vanessa cursed as she weathered the next barrage of punches. Each blow vibrated through her body more than the bass of a picture-house, and each jostle was a roller-coaster dip with no rails. Priser continued to move, and Feerick was not encumbered at all by the damaged chest.

  Vanessa Hargreaves was not out of the fight. She found her rhythm slowly, her hands working the various levers and foot-pedals to make Alphonse jump and dodge out of the way. The more she became accustomed to Priser’s movements, the more Feerick seemed to be punching in a blind panic. Priser was limited not only by the range of the construction golem but by Feerick’s own dwindling hope of escape. He wasn’t even trying to use those monstrous pincers. If it were one of Mordemere’s kobolds, Alphonse’s front would be a mess of shreds by now.

  Well, if he wasn’t, then Hargreaves would. She used Alphonse’s fingers to grapple for Priser’s outstretched pincer, pulling it forward. She rode the momentum, and pushed back, at the same time positioning Alphonse’s foot. Like a toppled mountain, Priser fell backward over the tripping limb, in a perfect, police-trained judo trip.