Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  “Daddy, where did my lunch go?” Nathan asked.

  Geoffrey Wiseman looked at his son quizzically. It would never do for the boy to doubt his father, or have any inkling adults in general lacked the faculty of omniscience. Wiseman was a teacher at the local elementary school. The latest studies said a child who doubted his parents was likely to grow up a rebel, a criminal, or worse yet, an atheist.

  “Son, God works in mysterious ways. Now let’s step round the hole, and see if your Mother has some more of that salmon in the pantry.”

  Down in the tunnels, Hargreaves could tell Rosa was having trouble keeping ahead of their pursuer. Past the first couple of locks at the west end of the labyrinth, they found themselves flying through a wriggling section of tunnels. Though Rosa didn’t have to wait for the blue streak of Dragonwell to open the locks here; the turns were too tight to push the Berry through at full steam. As they fled, they cast their arclights back, to show their pursuer in all its ghastly detail.

  Furtive glances were all Hargreaves could afford to keep abreast of Rosa’s piloting. Hargreaves’ eyes were glued to her scope once again, which was only marginally effective as a means of targeting. Mostly, it gave just enough of a view to terrify the wee out of Hargreaves.

  The machine following them was having no trouble at all within the tunnel. Its six limbs punched deep into the stone. It moved like a tarantula, thick mechanical limbs scrabbling for purchase on all sides of the passageway, dragging along a vast cylindrical abdomen studded with rivets. Puffs of steam marked its passage, and the twang of steel cable echoed all down the tunnel. Terribly, as Hargreaves looked at it, it was looking back, with eight swiveling glass eyes rimmed in copper.

  Hargreaves fired a salvo of anchors, unhitched from their chains to make sharp, heavy cannonballs. The steam filled the tunnel, making it difficult to see, but she was a good enough shot to guess from a glimpse. She was also livid, and though the anchors did little, they served to bleed off some of her rage. Sparks flared off the sides of the tarantula, but the anchors did little to slow the machine. Its sides seemed impervious, gleaming a pale white like some cave-dwelling horror.

  Hargreaves considered tactics. Perhaps the six-legged machine might simply not have the angle to fire in the twisting tunnel. She remembered the explosives the smaller automata had fired upon the Berry earlier. As they shot into one of the large overflow chambers, the explosions did not resume. Instead, Hargreaves looked into a viewing scope to see two smaller limbs unfold from the machine’s belly. Those long metal tubes, the belts feeding into the body….

  “Gatlings!” Hargreaves cried. “Large caliber!” She had barely done so, before a ghastly thunder echoed from beyond the Berry’s flanks. The walls outside the ship began to powder in long lines of wet brick dust.

  “Albion! We can’t stay ahead of it!” Rosa’s voice came rolling from the horn on the forecastle. The motor guns wrung splinters of wood from the Berry’s flanks, as if great dogs were worrying at her sides.

  There was no way for Albion to respond, except to pilot Dragonwell in an acknowledging arc. He had jumped into the gear almost as soon as the trio scrabbled aboard the rescuing airship. Now the red streak of Dragonwell screamed over the bridge of the ship, towards the rumbling, stalking enemy. With a start, Hargreaves realized there was a six-foot long cutlass clutched in its metal hand.

  “He’s going to fight that thing? Up close?” Hargreaves protested. “It’s a Goliath to his David!”

  “Be quiet and help!” answered Rosa. Her brow was furrowed, her grip on the throttle lever white-knuckled. Pretty brown limbs braced desperately against the wood of the bridge.

  Hargreaves dearly wanted to comply, but the daring Clemens was flying in erratic arcs, staying just ahead of a line of bullets. She could not risk hitting him. Dragonwell would try a pass with the cutlass, or deliver a fast kick, knocking the pursuer for a loop. The Goliath tarantula leveled its globular eyes at the spot and lashed out with its heavy, squat legs. Ammunition glinted whenever it passed through the arclights, as if a mirage. Shots pummeled the walls to rubble, sending up great sprays of water and punching craters in the solid iron gates.

  “There’s a lock!” Hargreaves cried, pointing.

  “I see it; I see it,” Rosa answered. “The water is too high!”

  She was right. Tides were still draining from the other side of the chamber. If they opened the lock, the chamber would fill with brackish water.

  Rosa threw the ship round in a wide arc. The tarantula machine was focused entirely on Dragonwell now, which gave the ladies a second to recover. Hargreaves, out of anchors to fire, darted out of the seat and joined Rosa at the helm.

  From their vantage point the mirrors showed a cavern of horrors. Dragonwell was having difficulty keeping up with the tarantula, occasionally taking a blow from a lashing leg despite Clemens’ spirited piloting. Its cape was ragged with bullet holes. If they did nothing, eventually he would be shot.

  “We ram it,” Hargreaves suggested.

  “Don’t be stupid. This is not a Balaenopteron-class. We don’t even have a figurehead, let alone the alloy ram chassis,” berated Rosa. “What we do have….”

  Rosa ran a merry frolic up and down a panel of instruments at her elbows, releasing a furious whine from deep inside the Berry. Two leather greaves popped out of the panels, each digit wired within an inch of its life.

  “What are you up to, Rosa?” Elric Blair’s tinny voice sprung out of a speaking horn.

  “Elric! Move all the surplus pressure into the arms!”

  Hargreaves knew what would come next; the Huckleberry’s ace in the hole, the hidden manipulators tucked away inside her flanks. Each arm was two-thirds the length of the ship, fully articulated, and ran on smooth, agile rails. Its machinery took up a whole deck by themselves. Rounded alloy discs topped the knuckles, perfect for punching the lights out of an enemy dirigible. Now, it seemed, those hands would be made to squash an insect.

  Rosa grabbed for the tube connected to the external horn.

  “Albion! Get out of the way!”

  With a turbulent groan, the Berry surged forward, its right manipulator thrust out like an iron tree trunk. A red streak flashed through their forward arclights—Albion, dodging within a foot of the limb. Thunderous crashes announced their connection with the pale white tarantula. Hargreaves fell out of her post, and when she looked up there were eight glassy eyes spinning wildly outside the portholes. Then it was gone, punched away and out of a tunnel mouth they had just reached. The Goliath spun wildly and skidded into the water, throwing up a tidal wave. With shock, Hargreaves made out chunks of buildings and old foundations–the lock had been built over a flooded neighborhood of the old city.

  The Berry roared, surging forward, with Rosa lashing furiously at her controls. Instead of a punch, Rosa threw an open-handed blow, sinking the Berry’s fingers deep. They pinned the Goliath down, smashing it in a long, dragging ditch into the wall. Ominous rumblings and wildly flying debris went everywhere. Rosa threw the other arm in, pinning two of the tarantula’s thick legs.

  Before the enemy could swivel to bear on the ship, Rosa threw the first arm into the fray, forcing the main body of the tarantula away from them. Hellish rattling came from its cacophonous guns, but they did little but splinter the Berry’s carpentry some more. Her screw whined fearsomely, throwing a streak of white steam into the chamber, but she held.

  “Rosa? Oh, I see. You were trapped,” Albion’s voice drifted in from outside, tinny with machinery. He floated just over the deck.

  “What are you waiting for? Finish it!” Rosa screamed back.

  “Can’t. The steam cutlass just slides off. Some kind of reinforced ceramic,” said Albion. “Look, we can’t let it get a hold of the Cook box. I’ll distract it as long as I can. You open the locks and we’ll drown it!”

  “What about you?” Hargreaves yelled, snatching the tube from Rosa. The helmswoman gave a shrill noise of alarm, but was too busy holdin
g down the tarantula to take it back. “You’ll be caught in the deluge!”

  “There’s no time! It’s getting free!”

  Albion was right. At the expense of its trapped limbs, the horrific machine was tearing out of the Berry’s grip. Spurts of steam seared the walls clean. With a snap, one of the cables cut free and lashed a deep gouge in the Berry’s hull. One of the tarantula’s free limbs crashed down on the pinning arm, denting it deep enough to produce a worrying plume of steam. Gauges all over Rosa’s panel suddenly began to spin like whirligigs.

  “Don’t worry! This tunnel goes all the way to the Bronx. Dragonwell is tough. We’ll find you later!” said Albion.

  “Alby, no!” protested Rosa.

  He didn’t wait for a reply. Leveling the point of the cutlass like a knight’s lance, Dragonwell pointed it at an exposed chink in the tarantula’s armor. With a burst of bluish steam, the Gear leaped forward, sinking in deep and releasing a torrent of smoking machine oil. Where it touched Dragonwell’s chest, the enamel tarnished black.

  “Arghhh!” Albion screamed. One of the Gatling arms stopped moving, hanging limp.

  Albion thrust Dragonwell’s free arm into the thing’s glass eye. A vast column of thrust erupted from the back of Dragonwell, momentarily lighting the dank waterway blue. And impossibly, tremendously, the huge Goliath began to move. The metal beast scraped slowly along the wall, marking deep gouges before crashing into a corner of the chamber. Then faster, and faster, driven away from the Berry. Crushing limbs came down on Dragonwell’s shoulders. Regular flashes lit from where the tiny automata fought on, with Albion firing some kind of weapon from Dragonwell’s chest section, in bright blue arcs. With another boom, one of the tarantula’s limbs fell, sinking into the water in a dark plume.

  “Rosa!” Hargreaves shouted, stunning Rosa Marija out of her blank stare. Rosa looked round, dazed, then threw the wheel before her into a free spin. The chamber whirled about them. The screw at the stern of the ship gave a quick burst, and then Rosa was digging the Berry’s fingers into the space between the lock gates.

  “Open, you mother!” Rosa groaned, her arms wrenching at the control gloves. Gauges squealed and waved everywhere, and Elric Blair’s voice was barking reports from seemingly all over the ship.

  With the left manipulator arm still leaking from its wound, it seemed like the locks would never open. Hargreaves cinched it by rushing over to a bank of controls, throwing levers, and turning wheels according to Rosa’s orders. With a sudden groan, the arm surged with power, damaged lines circumvented by their combined efforts. The vast slabs began to grind agonizingly open.

  All at once, the lock gates burst apart, nearly overwhelming the Berry with a wall of surging, dark water. The torrent was high, but as the mass of water came, it left a space at the top. Rosa hurled the ship forward, instead of back, and they shot into the tiny corridor between stone and surge.

  “Albion! Albion! Albion!” Rosa cried, even as she put more and more distance between the ship and her captain. Hargreaves caught sight of the tarantula behind them striking out at the valiant Dragonwell, before the water overwhelmed them both.

  13

  Still Sharp

  Arturo could not believe he was standing over yet another crater, peering into the steaming darkness for a clue to help Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves. A column of dust and soot filled the concrete canyons, driving people to seek the shelter of cafés, stations, and public buildings. When the cry came up and down the block of sinkholes opening up in the street, Arturo had decided the only civilized thing to do was to carry on looking for a decent cup of tea. After all, he had just tracked his erstwhile crime-solving partner to an abattoir of horrific implications, only to have her chased into a sewer by a gigantic metal spider. Tea was, as in most circumstances, the correct answer.

  The police of New York, seemingly slothful, verbally abusive and dull-witted, took to a crisis like ducks to water. Barriers of wood and authority were erected. Curious tourists and journalists with photogrammers were efficiently herded away. Enormous Tesla lamps had been exhumed from enormous warehouses somewhere and brought to light the scene of the disaster. Arturo could see the glow of other spotlamps in the distance, other places where that enormous shadow had ripped through to the surface.

  At the lip of the hole, several plainclothes detectives consulted with each other and some men in hard hats, who were commanding a platoon of workers in sealing off the more dangerous apertures. A civic dirigible had been pressed into service to cast an arc lamp on the scene, and another flew ready to haul up the worst of the debris. It was a remarkable exercise in damage control, but it limited Arturo’s detective work considerably. All the more frustrating, as the sinkholes had crushed any hope of tracking Hargreaves and the Huckleberry in the first place.

  “Hand me another of those.” Arturo gestured, his eyes never leaving the pocket-glass. The soft fingers of Cezette Louissaint obligingly placed a ring-shaped pastry into his saucer. Arturo nibbled at it (amazingly, creamy and crumbly at the same time) following with a sip of black coffee, before scribbling something in a pad at his elbows.

  “This is a mockery of a failed croissant,” said Cezette, taking a luxurious bite of a pastry herself. “But not bad.”

  The four of them had finally parked the cab—no easy task even in the best of times—and climbed a set of narrow, advert-plastered stairs to find a trendy little coffee bar carved out of a pair of three-story brownstone suites. Naked bricks and wrought iron held a raftered ceiling over squashy armchairs and tasteful oil paintings, each one with a discrete price tag. Most importantly, an espresso machine sprawled in metallic tentacled glory over the back of the counter, like an old god risen from the caffeinated depths.

  From a teat so numinous must come a milk to end all coffee, Arturo thought.

  It was loads better than simply standing about eating the ubiquitous hot dogs from carts everywhere, although the cafés were not completely free of questionable meats. Arturo might be used to spotted dick from a can, but he wasn’t quite ready for the pink pudding that passed for tinned meat on this side of the pond.

  “If it weren’t for the businessmen, these artisanal coffee houses would never survive. Look at all the customers using it for a personal office,” Hallow remarked.

  The coffee and cloistered interior seemed to loosen his normally absent voice. It helped that the cafe was buzzing with a susurrus of voices; the businessmen’s ether boxes were chattering quietly on their tables. Their smooth black surfaces rippled. Words streamed across as intricate pins pushed up through the material, so it thinned out and was legible. If you skinned those tablets you would find a watchman’s nightmare combined with a toymaker’s wet dream: rows and rows of pin drums, delicate springs, ether crystals a hair’s breadth wide, captured in tiny bottles.

  “I don’t like it,” Cid grumbled. He had a badly brewed cup of English Breakfast in his paw. “They cheapen the whole experience somehow.”

  “It does not matter whether we like it,” Cezette reminded them. “We can see the whole scene, and it is only a matter of time before we find Maman.”

  “The girl is right,” Arturo said, putting down the glass. “There’s a line of destruction straight across Manhattan that can only be from the enormous spider we saw moving violently through the sewers. It was after our own dear Vanessa Hargreaves.”

  “We may simply be looking at the fruits of a city growing too quickly,” Hallow said. “Surely Alphonse would not be able to do this.”

  “How do you know it’s her?” said Cid. “How do we know she’s even alive?”

  “Look around,” said Arturo. “Do you see any heavy machines bigger than a steam shovel? That pattern is no explosion, or normal collapse. I’ve only seen such a wanton use of automata once before, at the stable in Mile End.” He shuddered to think of it, what little they had seen. But the ship had taken off, and he had seen Hargreaves at the rail. He had to believe she was alive. “Pursuit means the quarry is
running. The inspector is alive. And besides, our sometime malefactor ‘I’ must have led us here for a reason.”

  “Mais oui! Of course Maman is alive. The people after the Cook box want to know where the box is hidden,” Cezette said. Arturo felt a warm something welling up in his chest. The girl hadn’t doubted Hargreaves’ survival for a moment.

  “You are shaping up to be a fine little detective,” Arturo praised, and the teenage French girl purred. Really, they were getting on thick as thieves. “Indeed. The situation is more dire than I had supposed. Apparently we have stumbled into the enemy’s back garden, and they are comfortable enough to commit wholesale destruction in so fantastic a manner. There’s something afoot that doesn’t mind anyone knowing it is here.”

  “A deduction fraught with flaws,” Hallow said, in a way that was more constructive than not.

  “Induction, sir, is my method,” answered Arturo, but he was stung.

  “What’s your plan, lad?” Cid asked bluntly. He tried a scone, and spat.

  “It is not my plan, but Inspector Hargreaves’, we ought to fathom. I presume some as-yet-unknown pursuer is hot on the trail of our inspector,” said Arturo.

  “This ‘I’ personage who has hounded our steps?”

  “No. I get the singular impression our mysterious malefactor has changed tack, and intends on guiding us onto the inspector’s trail. We must assume they do not intend to harm the inspector, which leaves another party that does,” Arturo finished. “The Ottomans?”

  “More likely the person who murdered the circus man, Feerick,” Hallow said with unerring attention to detail.

  “It is unimportant. If Hargreaves is running from machines, where would she go?” Arturo said. “What is it all steamcraft have in common?”