Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  “You had to sneak by the American blockade ships and find a way to come into the city. How did you do it?” Hargreaves, feeling a touch awkward, yielded to the old standby—common ground.

  “A magician never reveals—”

  “He snuck between two freighter seafarers being tugged into the harbor. We almost didn’t find this little bolt hole, but when the tide is right, it’s impregnable,” Rosa filled in.

  “It means you cannot leave, either, when the tide is high,” Hargreaves pointed out. “Still, as a hideout, it’s not rubbish. Well done.”

  “Thank you,” Clemens said pointedly. Rosa stuck a finger in the corner of his mouth and pulled gently. “Tho what bringth you here, Hargreavthe?”

  “It’s a long, embarrassing story,” Hargreaves began.

  “Our favorite,” said Auntie, who seemed to appear out of the woodwork. In a corner, Elric Blair waved, to show there was ample company to laugh at Hargreaves. She threw up two fingers in her fellow Englishman’s direction. Jog on! But it was with a grin.

  “Auntie, you know how our inspector takes to teasing,” said Rosa. “Vanessa is easy. No point in it.”

  “That’s Inspector—” But Hargreaves trailed off, realizing she was about to prove Rosa right. This sodding crew! She looked to the captain, but Albion was simply waiting patiently. His indifferent presence was familiar and calming.

  Something about the room’s warmth, being in the Berry again, reminded her of the basic nature of these pirates. Sordid thieves, surely, but they had never lacked decency. She told Albion Clemens everything, how she had investigated an automata theft from a moving train, of uncovering the Crown’s plot. Her face did not betray her feelings of failure at letting the Orb Weaver kill Feerick, her most important lead, but she allowed her gratitude to show when she spoke of her subsequent escape from London.

  Arturo and M.A.D. had been instrumental in securing Cook’s hermetically sealed coffin and one Scotland Yard patrol automata, at a cost she still did not fathom. She had not dared to wire to her friends. God, what had become of Cezette Louissaint? What of Cid?

  As she spoke, Auntie prepared tea, a perfectly steeped Darjeeling with little thumbprint jam biscuits. It quite took Hargreaves’ breath away, and almost made the sewer sojourn worth it.

  “In other words, you’re a crook, a brigand, on the lam from the law,” Clemens summarized. “If caught, you’d be as hanged as the rest of us. Finally decided to join the crew?”

  “Captain, I believe you missed the point. Inspector Hargreaves is defying the Pax Britannia to serve the Pax Britannia, isn’t that right?” Seated quietly, Elric Blair spoke up from a pub-height table in the corner. As usual, the diminutive man was never without his notebook, but his hair was completely black now, tied back with a thong. His clothes were taut, his pose relaxed, and there seemed to be tight muscle under his one-piece boiler suit. He was wearing a large utility belt jammed with pens, but also strangely, some long wrenches and hammers.

  “It’s good to see you again, Elric. You’re looking… well,” Hargreaves replied. Actually, she was having trouble looking into his blue eyes. She’d thought to snap him up herself, in her idle moments. “Yes, you have the right of it. If the British Empire is to use weapons such as this, it will be no victory at all. We will have cut off our nose to spite our face. I must find a way to dispose of this weapon, and to find the perpetrators responsible for attempting to steal it.”

  “Hum,” Albion muttered through a mouthful of biscuit.

  For a moment, Hargreaves honestly believed the Manchu Marauder had forgotten their months-long adventure, fighting Mordemere, falling through the sky and looking up at the Laputian Leviathan’s blighted promise above them. Of the brief moments of masochistic flirtation, the forbidden fruits, and their deal with each other. Of laughing drunkenly together as the world came apart around them, and their impossible quest to put it right again.

  “Oh come off it. You’re going to help the girl,” Auntie spoke up. As always, she was the voice of reason. “It’s just a matter of price.”

  “You didn’t have to be so blunt about it,” Albion griped good-naturedly. “I was just wondering how to ask… it seems like she’s a little attached to it.”

  “Attached to what?” said Hargreaves.

  “Maybe it will be easier if we show her first,” Rosa filled in. She bounced off the armchair and onto the thick pile carpet. “It’s always easier to bargain when both sides show their hands.”

  “Good idea,” Albion said, and suddenly Hargreaves found herself being trundled off down the hall, teacup in hand, pinky out.

  “Unhand me, you ruffian! Oh, not you too!” Hargreaves wailed. The two air pirates had her elbows in their firm grips, and were bundling her off down the corridor. Elric Blair followed, but Auntie stayed behind. Hargreaves’ Darjeeling sloshed pitifully, threatening to spill.

  “Hang on to that. You’ll need the drink,” advised Albion.

  It was not long before the inspector remembered the layout of the ship. Not much had changed. Odd trinkets and baubles still hung from pipes overhead, but they seemed more subdued, more feminine somehow. She noted a fluffy unicorn, a dancer with fairy’s wings, and a kris dagger in miniature, perhaps one half of a set of earrings. As she passed the crew’s quarters, she noticed the captain’s door was open, and Albion’s chipped cutlass lay over a large chair.

  The perilous pair released Hargreaves once they reached the cargo deck, a space she remembered as chaotic. There had been hoards of books and Cid’s machinery piled in every corner. Now, the space was clean, the books in shelves, and the tools hung up neatly on one wall. Bright arclights lit a section of workspace.

  “I’m not the sort of mechanic who remembers where everything is,” Elric Blair said sheepishly as he walked over to a workbench. He placed a hand on it possessively. “I spend a lot of time filing. Still, Cid taught me loads before he buggered off to work for you, and he’s been sending us spec telegrams for weeks.”

  “He’s been in contact with you lot? Without my leave?” Hargreaves said shrilly.

  “Why would he ask for it?” Albion said. It was true. Hargreaves had, for the most part, left Cid to his own devices. So long as he refrained from his criminal ways, she was content to let the old codger tinker and drink, and play the odd game of bridge with her every so often.

  “The frame is actually a kobold. We relieved a crew of Welsh smugglers of it, before they could sell it to a Syrian contact. We have enough trouble with the Ottomans, without the Arabs having these kind of steamcrafts.”

  “We, Blair? Still loyal to Queen and Country?”

  Blair gave her a sheepish grin. “Aye, ma’am,” Blair said.

  “Either you show me what you brought me here for or I’m going to find another air pirate in these Godforsaken sewers!” Hargreaves complained.

  Rosa pulled a lever nearby. A row of arclights sparked into life overhead, revealing a hulk of machinery next to the workbench. Hargreaves’ words nearly choked in her throat.

  It was undoubtedly an automata, but it was like nothing Hargreaves had ever seen. All trace of kobold was gone from it, and where the scissor claws and bulbous driver’s seat had been, there was only a smooth, enameled finish. Hargreaves could not help but draw a comparison. Where Alphonse was all lobstered steel, mail, and pauldrons, this sentinel was made of some light, hard metal, with joints covered in flexible canvas. A long black cloak draped around the shoulders, hiding much of the arms and hips. Grinning inanely, a jolly roger with a dragon skull had been stenciled on the chest plate, and the head had been sculpted to look like a brigandine hat. There was even an eye patch.

  “Dragonwell is supposed to be intimidating,” Rosa remarked, her brows shot through the roof.

  “What’s it for?” Hargreaves gaped. “I doubt many freighter captains field these. They would piss off into the ocean the first time a pirate dropped out of the sky in one of these.”

  “Come up and have a look, Inspe
ctor!” Like a child showing off his favorite toy, Albion clambered up a scaffold and into the automata’s cockpit. Hargreaves, behaving as if out of professional interest, but really bursting to fiddle with all the toggles in the big machine, followed.

  The driver’s seat was very different from Hargreaves’ own Alphonse, requiring a person not to recline, but lie astride much like on a velocipede. The position seemed unspeakably vulgar to Hargreaves, but then so was Captain Clemens.

  “Remember the aeon crystal we destroyed? The one on Mordemere’s bridge. A piece of it lodged itself into my shoulder, from the explosion. Cid’s always been after an aeon stone pure enough to finish his engine design, but this… We seated the shard in this frame.”

  “We used it to move my nana’s old wardrobe into the ship,” Rosa remarked, having appeared on the opposite side of the driver’s seat.

  “Nana?” Hargreaves asked, but immediately regretted it. Rosa Marija was an orphan, and any nana was likely some unusual, possibly unsavory acquaintance.

  Albion was still ranting, interspersed by supportive comments from Blair on the deck below.

  “The hardest part was the moisture reclamation, to keep the machine watered. We ended up putting cold condensation on the shoulders. Even the coals only need topping off every so often. Cid mentioned it’s an anthro-kinetic phenomenon, of how the aeon particles absorb energy from….”

  “The boys will be awhile. Why don’t we retire to the galley? You need tea,” Rosa said placidly. Hargreaves simply stared. It was hard to reconcile the statement, and the way Rosa looked, with the seductress dancing in Burgess’ club earlier that evening. Hargreaves realized she was still holding on to her teacup, and yes, it was ice-cold.

  “Yes, yes, I believe we shall. So this is where Burgess’ automata parts have gone.”

  “I did enjoy the work, gorgeous,” Rosa reminded her, winking.

  “Tell me, what are Queen Victoria III’s actual titles?” Albion asked.

  Back in the galley, Albion’s mechanical fascination finally spent itself, and he had wound down gradually. Hargreaves would have answered facetiously, but it sounded like he was actually about to enlighten her. She felt a bit like she was pulling clues from Arturo C. Adler.

  “Alexandrina Victoria Edwardia III, Matriarch of the British Commonwealth, Queen of the Pax Brittania and Ireland, Empress of India, Bastion of the Lands Beyond—”

  Albion Clemens seized on the word, never much for Socratic method. He was the most direct person Hargreaves knew, and that more than anything convinced Hargreaves he wanted her support on this, perhaps more than she needed the pirates.

  “Bastion. What exactly does that mean?”

  “Well, ruler, I suppose….” Hargreaves said.

  “Actually, ‘bastion’ derives from a fortification extruding from a main castle or fort,” Elric Blair corrected. “Or a heavily defended area of water.”

  “A point of no return,” Albion said. “The last safe place before the wild.”

  “The style was invented by Admiral Walter Wilkins of the 587th Dirigible Fleet with the approval of Her Majesty by proxy, on the occasion of establishing Derby Point, the farthest known outpost in the Lands Beyond. Derby was, of course, the hometown of Wilkins. The fortification was later dismantled, but records say a Union Flag still stands somewhere in those coordinates.”

  “587… that’s the fleet sent to explore the Lands Beyond, destroyed under mysterious circumstances,” Hargreaves filled in.

  “Victoria sacrificed twenty-nine airships to plant the flag there. She had to recognize the feat somehow. There are no queens or emperors in the Lands Beyond. I’ll grant her, not a soul has been able to explore deeper. There’s the shifting aeon rocks shooting through the air like gigantic bullets, and strange creatures living in the lagoons. Some airmen even swear there be dragons,” Clemens said. “But if we could clear the way, with something as adaptable as the Lands themselves….”

  “Hence the automata,” Hargreaves said, the light dawning. “You want Alphonse. You want the newest M.A.D. automata to go gallivanting into the Beyond!”

  “We call them gears, this side of the pond, but yes,” Clemens agreed.

  “But why?”

  “Look around,” said Albion, gesturing at the comfort all around him. “Do you think we are suited to a life of piracy any longer?”

  “We want to explore,” said Rosa. “See the world. Have a rock named after us, or something. Live happily, away from the dirt and chaos of the world.”

  Hargreaves suddenly felt this was the best possible thing the two could hope for from the future, and something fluttered helplessly in her chest. As usual, her way of coping focused on the logistics.

  “Automata will be useless in the Lands,” mused Hargreaves. “Every schoolchild has read of the horrors there. It takes a dirigible to fly high enough to even breach the storm walls, and few were ever made to weave through the floating maze. The Berry might be able to do it, but when it is too large to fly between the disastrous rocks? Your anchors are too inaccurate to move them, and automata do not fly,” Hargreaves said, and stopped to breathe. “Do they?”

  The looks the pirates gave each other, like they had swallowed the canary, said it all. Still, it took the pragmatic Elric Blair to convince her.

  “Every British schoolchild knows the dangers, yes. But the tales were spun in part to make Her Majesty’s feat seem greater. I have read the accounts. It can be done,” Blair insisted.

  Hargreaves stared at each of her friends in turn. Whom was she trying to fool? They had saved the world together, had gone through hell together. Hargreaves had even seen each of them naked: Albion, coming out of the bath, Rosa, on purpose and then recently, and Blair, who had torn off all his clothes seconds after they had been rescued from the Nidhogg, screaming about dead things seeping into his skin. Hargreaves wanted a vicarious measure of happiness for them, especially since she was hopelessly tethered to this world.

  “Show me.”

  Dragonwell took off like an airship, straight up off the deck. Hargreaves expected it to be louder, but the quiet whine of Cid’s aeon engine could have been mistaken for a black-breasted tit. It chirped for a few seconds, and then the clunky feet of the automata were suddenly an inch off the cargo hold floor.

  “I’ll be damned,” Hargreaves breathed, before the rush of air nearly knocked her over. Like it was shot out of a cannon, Dragonwell flew across the deck and out through a hatch.

  “Go on up to the bridge. We’ll show you how we can help,” Elric Blair said.

  “You’re not coming?” Hargreaves asked.

  “Don’t look so forlorn. I’ll be up shortly,” Blair said.

  “Careful, you’re turning into a bit of a rake,” Hargreaves cautioned, in jest.

  “Not if the missus has anything to say about it,” he said, flashing the most surprising thing yet: a ring, an antique of old gold. Hargreaves laughed, embraced him and headed up to the bridge. So he was married, was he? She wondered what his wife was like.

  Outside the tall bridge windows, the crew could clearly see Albion Clemens maneuvering Dragonwell through the overflow chamber deep beneath New York City. Lights on either shoulder picked out the silhouette of the automata’s billowing cape. The ship was quite high up, but it was clear the lock gates just before them would not admit passage. Huge gears held the gates tightly shut, with perhaps twenty feet between the ceiling and the gate. There were familiar shapes of steam engines at the sides of the locks, for opening and closing, but surely their operation would alert the subterranean masters of New York.

  Dragonwell soared up to these slabs of iron, trailing a thin line of steam, and over them.

  “And now he’s showing off,” Rosa murmured inside the bridge.

  The lock gears showed the first sign of movement, turning their chains with a groan of stressed metal. Each tooth slid down with a grating like continents, speeding up as they came. Slowly, the iron swung open, releasing a swell of wat
er where the levels were not quite even.

  Dragonwell came back into view, at the top of the gate. A dense, bluish steam was vigorously exiting its back, its metal hands braced against one half of the lock gate. It was bodily pushing the gate open.

  “How is it possible? There shouldn’t be enough room in the automata to hold the fuel and the water….” Hargreaves wondered aloud.

  “Now you’re interested in the mechanics? Auntie’s going to be the only woman aboard who favors a doily to a wrench.”

  Rosa reached for a throttle control, and the Berry slowly drifted forward, through the lock. As they passed between black mechanisms like twin monoliths, Dragonwell released the first lock and flew on ahead, to open the next. When they passed through this one, Hargreaves walked out onto the deck. Far below, she could see the water like a dark mirror before and behind the ship. Powerful lights shone on some blocky, broken shapes in the dark.

  “These flood tunnels were built over the first buildings of New York,” Rosa told Hargreaves when she came back in. “What you’re seeing are the foundations of the prosperity above. These are the homes of immigrants who came to settle in run-down tenements, breaking their backs so their children might find a better life.”

  “What happened to them?” Hargreaves asked. They were the only ones on the bridge, and the conversation seemed appropriately intimate.

  “Progress,” Rosa answered. “When space became scarce and the river started to rise, the city’s planners simply built over and through them: tunnels to run the trains, sewers to carry the plumbing into the river, and canals to flush the river. There’s a skyscraper over this very spot, now, a temple to wealth and power. Art deco, a ziggurat. They even copied the sacrificial altars of old. You can find thousands of these remnants under every large city in the world.”