The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

by Mark Hodder

  Swinburne shouted into his ear, “Give it up. You’re not that man anymore.”

  “I’ll translate it. The forbidden chapter. My name will live on through—”

  Burton suddenly recalled the words uttered by Edward Oxford’s ancestor, the man who’d killed Queen Victoria.

  “My name must be remembered. I must live through history!”

  His eyes widened. He stood and watched as the crates bearing his name burst into flames. He laughed.

  It didn’t matter.

  He turned, and with Swinburne and Gooch at his side, headed toward the exit.

  BATTLES IN TOOLEY STREET AND THE TOWER

  There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

  —Alfred Russel Wallace, “Harmony of Spiritualism

  and Science,” Light, 1885

  Burton, Swinburne, and Gooch, amid a crowd of other men, stumbled out of the inferno into a scene of utter mayhem. Before they could properly assess it, an SPG unit leaped at them.

  “Halt! You are enemies of the British Empire. You will be executed immediately.”

  It swiped a baton at Burton’s head. One of Gooch’s supplementary arms shot out and blocked the blow. His metal fingers closed around the brass wrist, and, as the second baton was raised, he stepped in and grabbed that arm, too.

  “Stop!” the machine commanded. “Do not resist.”

  “I can’t hold it for long!” the engineer gasped.

  Swinburne hastily unslung his rifle, pushed the end of its barrel against the inky-blue machine’s chin, and pulled the trigger.

  Gooch thrust the contraption away, and they all shrank back as its babbage exploded. A twisted sliver of brass took a bite out of Burton’s right ear as it whistled past his head. He clapped a hand to the wound. Warm blood dribbled between his fingers. Muttering an oath, he turned and took a measure of Tooley Street.

  Night had fallen. A thick blizzard of sparks was rushing upward into the darkness, and at ground level everything was bathed in a ghastly orange glow. Already, the flames were raging through the warehouses to the left and right of Grindlays and chewing into the buildings beyond them.

  Though the heat was near intolerable, Burton found himself rooted to the spot, bewildered to see, through smoke-saturated air, that the thoroughfare was filled from end to end by a milling crowd of constables and brass men. They were swiping truncheons, shooting pistols, jabbing swordsticks, lashing out with real and artificial fists, and grappling with one another at such close quarters that they appeared almost a single entity, an agitated sea of metal and fleshy limbs.

  Evidently, Trounce had successfully gathered his people and led them here, though it felt to the explorer as if less than an hour had passed since he’d parted company with the detective inspector.

  For how long, he wondered, had his mental battle with Orpheus lasted? Time had somehow dilated or contracted—he wasn’t sure which.

  He became aware of Swinburne’s voice, though he couldn’t hear what his friend was saying.

  “What, Algy?” he yelled.

  The poet pointed excitedly upward and bellowed, “Lawless!”

  Looking in the indicated direction, Burton discovered that the battle was also raging in the sky.

  Lawless’s ship was directly overhead. It was circling the massive HMA Eurypyle with Gatling guns snarling and flashing, ploughing bullets into the mighty vessel. Eurypyle’s cannons were returning fire, and the smaller ship was sustaining terrible damage, trailing thick smoke and raining shards of metal, glass, and wood down onto the street.

  “By my Aunt Petunia’s pleated petticoats!” Swinburne screeched. “What’s he playing at? He doesn’t stand a chance!”

  Gooch gave the answer. “Distraction! He’s keeping the other ship occupied so it can’t shoot down at our people. Look out!”

  A clockwork man—highly polished and with a crest engraved upon its chest—lunged out of the crowd and slashed a blade at Swinburne. The little man leaped back with a shriek. Gooch once again put his supplementary limbs to good use, thrusting one out to deflect the weapon. Burton reached over his shoulder, drew his khopesh, and sliced it down, straight through the machine’s elbow.

  “Aaah!” it cried out. “My head!”

  “Head?” Swinburne queried.

  “My mind is a furnace! Help me!”

  Drawing back its remaining arm, the contraption threw a punch toward Burton’s face. The explorer dodged to the side and swiped again with his blade, cutting through the thin neck. The clockwork man toppled backward and fell into the arms of Detective Inspector Trounce as he emerged from the crowd. The Yard man pushed it aside and, as it clanked to the ground, hailed his friends. He was panting, a thick smear of soot marked the left side of his face, and his bottom lip was bleeding, caking his untidy beard with gore. He reached out and shook Burton’s hand. “By Jove! What a state you’re in.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk,” Swinburne noted.

  “The inner man is even more battered than the outer,” Burton admitted. He offered a grim smile. “But the principal enemy is defeated. Now we just have to clean up the mess. What’s the state of play?”

  He gestured for his companions to follow him away from Grindlays and a little way along the street to where the savage heat was more endurable. As they walked, skirting the battling mob, Trounce shouted his report.

  “Humph! It was even easier to gather supporters than I’d anticipated. Slaughter, Spearing, and Honesty had already done most of the footwork. In my estimation, at least two-thirds of the Force is in open defiance of Chief Commissioner Mayne. I have little doubt he’ll try to call in the army to oppose us but, frankly, I don’t think he’ll get the response he expects. So for now, at least, we only have the clockwork men to deal with. The Special Patrol Group machines are showing no constraint. The others, the automated aristocrats, appear to have gone dangerously insane. They’re babbling nonsense and attacking everyone left, right, and centre. The fire seems to be heating up their brains.”

  “It’s doing exactly that,” Burton confirmed. “The black diamonds are being destroyed in the inferno. Their destruction is resonating with the silicates in the machines’ babbages. They are literally losing their minds.” He pulled his revolver from his belt and fired four shots over Trounce’s shoulder. Behind the detective inspector, a brass figure staggered and fell to its knees. “No more Young England, William. It ends this night.”

  “Thank the Lord. Back to good old British values, hey?”

  A tremendous roar drowned further conversation as the remainder of Grindlays Warehouse collapsed, sending an avalanche of bricks, glass, and masonry into the street. Men and machines fell beneath it.

  “Into the fray,” Burton announced, and led his companions into the brawling mass.

  For the next few minutes, he was fully occupied. The crush was such that the khopesh was impossible to wield and the rifle too cumbersome to use, so he relied on his pistol despite, as he already knew, multiple bullets being required to fell the spring-driven foe.

  He was battered by solid knuckles, bruised by truncheons—which, fortunately, like his blade, couldn’t be swiped with any great force amid the tumult—and pricked by clumsily thrust rapiers, but, as his mental exhaustion eased, the strength of many Burtons started to flow into him, and he was overcome by a savage euphoria.

  Covered from head to toe in blood, all pain forgotten and grinning ferociously, he drew on his knowledge of Thuggee wrestling techniques to snap piston-powered limbs and to forcibly twist canister heads from metal necks. He hammered the butt of his pistol into the sensory wires that projected from the base of blank expressionless faces. He pushed its barrel into the topmost of the machines’ three facial openings and drilled hot lead into intricate, finely crafted brains.

  He fought as if possessed and, at the back of his mind, it occurred to him that may
be he was, for there was a supernatural quality to the power that throbbed through his arteries, and he could sense that the Beetle was its source—and that strange rendition of a Burton was certainly something other than human, at least in the sense that humanity was currently understood.

  At one point, he found himself fighting back-to-back with Gooch and drew the engineer’s attention to a nearby wall against which the escapees from Grindlays were huddled. He hollered, “Get your people to safety, Daniel, or have them find some manner of weaponry and join the mêlée.”

  “They’ll bloody well fight, or I’ll have their hides. The clockwork men made slaves of us in that damned factory. There’s a reckoning to be had.”

  “Then for pity’s sake go to your colleagues and rouse their ire.”

  Gooch nodded and made off.

  Burton uttered an expletive as a truncheon smacked into his shoulder. His pistol fell from numbed fingers. He dropped to one knee. A Special Patrol Group machine loomed over him.

  “In the name of the king,” it said, “I hereby sentence you to—”

  With a loud clank, a bullet hole appeared in its face. It toppled sideways to reveal Swinburne standing behind it, his rifle raised, a whiff of smoke curling from its barrel.

  Burton arched his eyebrows by way of thanks and clambered back to his feet. He saw that the crowd had somewhat thinned, so he drew his khopesh and tested its edge with the pad of his thumb.

  Still sharp.

  Swinburne grinned, reloaded, turned, took aim at another SPG unit, and sent a bullet at least a foot wide of his target. The projectile ricocheted from the back of a second clockwork man and went thudding into the head of a third. As the machine’s babbage detonated, the poet lowered his weapon and shouted to Burton, “It’s like billiards, Richard. The balls never go where I intend, but they somehow make good anyway.”

  “We’re playing a rather more deadly game,” Burton responded. “Don’t pocket lead into one of our own.”

  He decapitated a police unit as it lunged at him. His attention was then caught by the familiar coat of arms emblazoned on a nearby brass man. The contraption had just pushed its blade through a constable’s thigh and was poised to make a more fatal strike when Burton jumped forward, slammed into it, and knocked it to the ground. He banged the heel of his hand down onto the machine’s slim sword, snapping the blade in half.

  “Great heavens!” the machine objected. “How dare you!”

  “My leg!” the policeman groaned.

  Burton crouched down, sheathed his khopesh, and held his pistol to the machine’s head. “Stay there, please, Mr. Hope. I’d like to converse for a moment.” He looked up and called to Swinburne. “Algy, keep us covered, will you?”

  “Rightio.” Swinburne strode over and stood guard, weapon poised.

  The constable moaned, hopping on one leg, and blinked at Burton. “Hello, sir. It’s me, Khapoor. The ornithopter incident, if you recall.”

  “Hello there,” Burton said. “Is it bad?”

  “Through to the bone. I’ll be off the cricket team for a while. Will you excuse me?”

  “Of course.”

  Khapoor saluted and hobbled away.

  “Why, you impertinent hound!” Thomas Henry Hope protested. “Who the devil do you think you are?”

  Burton regarded the clockwork man. “I’m Sir Richard Francis Burton. We’ve met before, though at the time I was wearing a disguise and went by the name of Count Palladino.”

  “Of Brindisi? I remember the chap. You look nothing like him. Let me up, curse you!”

  “You’ll stay where you are, else I’ll put a bullet through your babbage. As I say, I was disguised. I might add that you, also, were less than truthful about your identity. You presented yourself to me as Flywheel.”

  Hope held his hands in front of his face and appeared to examine them. “Babbage? By God, it’s true, then? This isn’t a nightmare?” He groaned. “You say your name is Burton? Tell me, man, why am I inside this machine? Why do my thoughts burn me so?”

  “You’ve been under the sway of a powerful clairvoyant influence. It affected your judgement. I just removed it.”

  “Influence? Whose influence? What are you talking about? Oh God! Oh God! The fire is inside me. Make the pain stop!”

  Burton watched with pity as the automated aristocrat writhed and began to thrash its limbs, crying out in apparent agony.

  “I’ll kill you,” it howled. “I’ll kill you all!”

  Hope screamed. His fingers clamped around Burton’s wrist.

  Burton said, “Damn. I’m sorry,” and pulled the trigger.

  He rose and stepped back as the brass head blew apart.

  “What got into him?” Swinburne asked. “Aside from your bullet, I mean.”

  “Orpheus did. Explanations later, Algy. I need to think it through. And right now we have more pressing matters to deal with.”

  More masonry and glass clattered into the street as a second warehouse folded. Flames rolled across the struggling throng. Burton and Swinburne shielded their faces with their arms. A wooden beam bounced past them, showering sparks, and thudded into an SPG unit and constable, sending both sprawling.

  William Trounce emerged again from the roiling smoke. His left trouser leg had been torn completely away and the exposed limb was glistening with blood. He was limping and in obvious pain. He pointed at the sky and yelled, “What are they doing?”

  Burton peered up at the two circling rotorships. The smaller—Lawless’s vessel—was listing to one side and looked as if it might plummet to the ground at any moment. For a second, he thought three huge vultures were circling it, as if eager for it to die, but then a fourth bird launched itself from the side of the ship, and he realised they weren’t vultures at all but men wearing mechanically operated wings.

  “Bismillah!” he whispered, recalling that Lawless and his crew had been commissioned to give a public demonstration of the wings but had disappeared before the event. Now, there they were, flapping away from their ailing vessel.

  As he watched, more men abandoned the ship and came gliding down toward Tooley Street. He experienced a moment of utter confusion as one of them swooped low and landed on his shoulder. Immediately, he realised the heat-warped air had played tricks with his vision, and it was Pox that had chosen him as a perch.

  “Message from Edward fat head Burton,” the bird squawked into his bleeding ear. “I’m sorry, Richard, I had to regain dribble-wit Disraeli’s confidence. I’m afraid you bore the brunt of it, you nincompoop. At least it got you to where you needed to be. I knew something bigger than the scum-snorting prime minister was at work, and I had to follow his path to find out what. The stomach tumour was a cheap lie designed to hasten my transference into a babbage. It worked. The truth was revealed to me. I know what you faced, and I know, too, that you have won the day. Loathsome hugger-mugger! Moron! The diamonds will soon be gone from our world, and the empire will be secure. Unfortunately, with their destruction, my demise is assured. I shall make my departure a useful one. Rigby is holed up in the tower. Find him and kill him. Richard, whichever bum-clenching version of yourself you are, you are above all else my brother. Of that, I am extraordinarily proud. Message ends. Arse tickler.”

  It was the longest message Burton had ever heard Pox deliver, and every single word of it, including the extraneous insults, he knew he would remember forever.

  He swallowed and stared up as the Eurypyle’s cannons continued to send barrage after barrage into the side of the other rotorship. He saw the observation deck, where he’d sat with Swinburne, Trounce, and the Beetle, explode into a cloud of powdered glass. He saw struts, panels, and pylons shattering and flying to pieces. He saw shredded material trailing from the sagging dirigible.

  With smoke spewing out of it, the smaller ship suddenly turned and accelerated toward the other machine.

  Unaware of his own actions, Burton reached out, dug his fingers into Swinburne’s arm, and croaked, “Pox, me
ssage for Edward Burton. Don’t do it. Don’t be a bloody fool. Message ends.”

  The parakeet clicked its beak. “Message undelivered.”

  Edward isn’t human. The bird doesn’t know how to locate a machine, even if it was just sent here by it.

  Lawless’s vessel had been called Orpheus—it still bore the word upon its side—but Burton couldn’t think of it as that any more, and he felt it somehow appropriate when, as he watched, a cannonade tore the letters from its hull.

  Nameless, disintegrating, abandoned by its crew, and steered by a dying mechanism of brass, the rotorship buried itself into the side of the Eurypyle.

  Debris erupted outward. A resounding boom echoed across the city.

  Locked together, spinning slowly, the burning vessels arced down through the night sky, angled out over the river, and disappeared from Burton’s line of sight.

  “Edward,” he whispered.

  Three gunshots sounded close to his ear. Pox screeched, “Cow dung!” bounded into the air, and flew off.

  Burton twisted and saw Trounce kicking away an SPG unit. Its head was spitting flame. It detonated before it hit the ground.

  The men with mechanical wings were now darting over the thoroughfare. One spotted Burton and his companions, made a tight turn, and flapped down, landing a few feet away. He ran to them, his wings automatically folding behind him.

  It was the medic, McGarrigle. “I have my kit,” he panted. “Shall I tend to your wounds? You look a state. Actually, I’ve never seen you otherwise, if you’ll pardon the observation.”

  Burton flicked a hand dismissively. “It’s accurate, unfortunately, and pardoned. I’m all right. You all got off the ship?”

  “Poor old Pryce was killed. And Wenham, too. The minister—” He glanced up at the now empty sky. “I’m sorry. He remained aboard. Took control of her and—and—”

  “We saw.”

  Another birdman landed. Nathaniel Lawless. He snapped at McGarrigle, “Get out of that harness,” and began to unbuckle his own. He glanced up at Burton and Swinburne. “You two have to get into these.” His eyes were brimming with the pain of a captain who’d lost his ship, but his tone was that of a military man—snappy, no nonsense. “The minister’s orders.”