by Kin S. Law
Of Stations Infernal
Kin S. Law
OF STATIONS INFERNAL
By
Kin S. Law
Copyright © 2019 Kin S. Law
Edited by Heather McCorkle.
Cover Design by Mibl Art.
All stock photos licensed appropriately.
Published in the United States by City Owl Press.
www.cityowlpress.com
For information on subsidiary rights, please contact the publisher at [email protected]
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior consent and permission of the publisher.
For the family who knows me.
Praise for the Works of Kin S. Law
“As befits steampunk, Law fills the pages with exciting gear action and fashion...His prose includes some brilliant descriptions including the opening sentence: ‘A black murder rose from the wound of a cliff’.”
- Publisher’s Weekly
“Adventure is what I expected going into this book, and adventure is what I got. The atmosphere was entrancing, the airships were captivating, the action was spot on. I can’t wait to see what the author has in store for us next!”
- Mystery Author, M. W. Griffith
“A different take on the steampunk genre. Most stories tend to explore the contraptions invented had the Industrial Revolution taken a different path, and the world remained stuck in the Victorian Era. Using Mark Twain as a pivotal character will likely bring about a chuckle or two.”
- M. P. Ceja, InD’Tale Magazine
“It's a fun story about a diverse group who comes together to save the world, something we've seen many times, but what sets this story apart is the quality of the writing- great dialogue, cool world building and wonderful characters, especially the women. Rosa and Vanessa are prickly, strong, smart, and capable, and couldn't be more different from one another. No damsels in distress in this Pirate story, I loved those ladies.”
- GoodReads Reviewer
“The characterization of the four main characters is exceptionally well done. The plot is a weave of two quests. The first is to find out who is stealing famous landmarks like Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, and of course to fight them and thus return the landmarks. The second is to find Albion’s mentor, Captain Sam Clemens, and resolve the issues that caused their separation. The fantasy elements were quite interesting and the author has been very creative.”
- ARC Reviewer
Contents
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1. Station 1
2. Station 2
3. Station 3
4. Station 4
5. Station 5
6. Station 6
7. Station 7
8. Station 8
9. Station 9
10. Station 10
11. Station 11
12. Station 12
13. Station 13
14. Station 14
15. Station 15
16. Station 16
17. Station 17
18. Station 18
19. Station 19
20. Station 20
21. Terminus
Unregistered Sneak Peek
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About the Author
About the Publisher
Additional Titles
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Living the ideal life is a human right, unless you’re unregistered.
Living under the watchful eye of the Metrics Worldwide Government has its perks. Citizens are assigned a life, so they don’t worry about finding schools, jobs, or spouses for themselves. They’re even allowed to have one child, enabling them to focus on raising an ideal son or daughter and experience an optimally satisfying family life.
The only people left out are the unlucky accidental second children, called the unregistered. For 20-year-old Bristol, this is the only life he knows. But he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong with his world, and spends his nights painting controversial murals in low-profile parts of town.
Metrics doesn’t like the murals, or the frustrations of the unregistered citizens they represent.
They enact their long-debated unregistered solution: publicly, they announce the relocation of all unregistered citizens to far-off desert states. But when Bristol and his friends discover the dark truth behind the plan, they must work together to escape the clutches of their motherland, and survive long enough to discover an unknown world.
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Station 1
Ghosts of the Lonely West
The inspector landed on soil that had little known the bite of tuppenny boots, breathing the burned-wood scent that prevailed in the American winter. Her boots had been bought for a song across an ocean in a market in Camden Town, which seemed all too far away now.
In sight of the dim evening lamps of a small town, Vanessa Hargreaves, expatriated from her beloved England, looked back up to her steel guardian. It was a ways down from the cockpit, but his hip plate made for a sturdy footstool to hop the ten feet to the ground. Alphonse certainly looked out of place here, a knight far west of the castles of Scotland where he had been built. As out of place as Hargreaves herself. To think of it! An agent of Victoria III, Queen of Pax Brittania, in exile in the wildness of America with only a steel golem for company!
But Hargreaves knew too well that what lay in the box on Alphonse’s back had the potential to destroy the world. There were forces high and low, standards under both the black flag and the Union Jack, that would do anything to get the Cook box. Though Hargreaves pined for the high streets and low alleys of their home in London, there were still dragons to be slain in the west. So she put the thought of merry England behind her and resolved to carry on.
Hargreaves rather thought she would be needing her steel friend before long. Sadly, his innards were starkly empty of fuel, and he would carry her no farther. Alphonse’s belly wouldn’t feed itself, which meant Hargreaves needed to impose on the local town for coal. The inspector supposed the papers might have exaggerated America’s famed conservatism just a tad, but she didn’t care to risk attracting her pursuers in any way by parading an automata down the streets. She slung her carpet bag over her shoulder and covered the bulk of Alphonse with canvas and branches. The covering served to protect her guardian from prying eyes and exposure to elements. The deep darkness of the giant’s metal eye slits seemed to appraise her with a sort of inanimate loneliness.
“Don’t blame me. It’s your fault for being a great big shiny lump,” Hargreaves admonished it, before covering the steel frog-head. From a distance, the disguise wouldn’t be anything of interest even in the daytime. That was of special importance. Alphonse carried on his back a box that could unleash a plague of biblical proportions on the unsuspecting tow
nsfolk. Nobody must touch the box!
Hargreaves gave a thought to herself. Her leonine mane whipped about, comforting in the cool of autumn. That would never do. She tied it back into a neat bun. Then, she set off down the path, trying to walk casually. Respectably. Her undercover instincts came alive. Soon, the spot where she had hidden Alphonse disappeared behind the trees, and some peaked roofs and a water tower came into view over the next copse. The tower had been painted with a huge red apple.
As she entered the town, a steaming omnibus rumbled down the nearly deserted main street. The rounded, riveted front marked it as an older model, not far removed from a locomotive. It stopped in front of the plate glass of an eatery that served double duty as a bus station. With her canvas bag and dusty clothes, Hargreaves easily blended into the group of harried passengers. There was a slight delay as the people packed on the sidewalk, apparently too polite to go onto the road. From the murmuring, it seemed there were more people than usual on the omnibus. One man mentioned something to do with the major rail lines being shut through the Midwest.
Hargreaves bought a paper and a notebook from a freeman’s newsstand, taking her change from his dark fingers. As she turned, one of the passengers remarked on how lucky he had been to catch this bus, otherwise he would have been obliged to wait an entire week for the next transport. Another bumped into her and kept going, not even raising his cap in apology. She nearly missed the lewd look of appraisal as he glanced back.
“Why, I never!” Hargreaves breathed. Sometimes she missed the vestiges of Victorian England. Back in the reign of the first Victoria, men were responsible for any untoward display of the baser natures. Even being alone with an unwed woman or remarking on her ankles was considered untoward. Today, women of the Pax Britannia still enjoyed the trace chivalry of that heyday, as was only proper. She reminded herself this was America, and these people had bucked English customs as easily as English rule. But she definitely felt they had thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this one.
Hargreaves hoped there was an inn or a boarding house somewhere. Alphonse’s seat was no place to weather the cold mountain nights. But the eatery seemed the only establishment open at the moment. Faint smells reminded her she hadn’t eaten since leaving Rosa and the crashed airship ’Berry yesterday afternoon.
Hargreaves walked into the eatery and settled into a warm, plush booth. A patina of wear had descended on everything, and the air carried just a hint of frying grease. The fare appeared to be the ubiquitous soup and Hamburg steak. A row of taps dispensed a bubbling effervescence, with a smell like sweet engine cleaner. There was an awful lot of paisley, but besides this slight, the place was welcoming in every sense of the word. It was to be expected; airships brought more than goods, they brought ideas, and not all of them were used the way it said on the tin. Hargreaves suddenly missed Auntie, the ’Berry’s resident matron, on a profound level.
“Blech,” she groaned under her breath, watching someone consume something that looked worse than naval rations. She should have been more subtle, but the stuff was truly foul. Some sort of potted pork or beef.
“We don’t have none of your fancy city grub,” said an apparent local. The man was two seats away. Whenever he spoke, crumbs dribbled from a spotty beard. “But I got somethin’ a lot tastier back here, legs.”
Hargreaves was in no mood for his low brand of repulsive.
“Beg pardon? Have you escaped from the chef, you unbearable swine?”
Scattered chuckles sounded from the nearby diners. A cook tipped his hat from behind a service window. The sally seemed to rile up the repulsive man, who slowly creaked to his feet. Surprisingly, the man wore threadbare suit trousers and a vest under the grime. The overall effect was of a solicitor rising from the grave to settle an account. Diners nearby crinkled their noses.
“Why, you limey little whore!” said this repulsive character.
There were twenty-one different ways Hargreaves could have dealt with the filth, seven of which did not involve stepping in the man’s aura of stench. Fortuitously, it seemed she required none of them, for another man stepped up and delivered a sharp left hook into the roiling swamp of the breathing hazard’s face. He went down with an admirable crack, right onto the tile where a busboy began to unceremoniously sweep the rubbish out the back door.
“Huzzah!” the diners cried, and began to congratulate Hargreaves’ savior. They looked meaningfully into the inspector’s eyes. Etiquette demanded some response, but Hargreaves lacked the social vocabulary. At last, she spotted a waitress enthusiastically lifting a half-full pot.
“Might I buy you a cup of coffee?” Hargreaves managed, wincing as she said the word. It elicited another round of applause.
Her rescuer turned out to be a well-dressed man of middling means, with a kempt brown beard and remarkably pale eyes. As first impressions went, Hargreaves could find no fault with his. He struck her as an earnest fellow perhaps a touch older than herself. His name was Herbert Holm Howard, or Howard, as the townspeople seemed to prefer calling him.
“Thank you,” Hargreaves managed, though she would have preferred a quiet meal and a soft bed to the drama. Her nerves were strained from imagined plots and actual danger.
“That was Wilford Appleby, one of Appleton’s fallen sons. We take care of our own,” Howard said, as he nursed a cup of black coffee. His knuckles, perched on long craftsman’s fingers, were flushed red where he had decked Appleby.
“What happened to him?” Hargreaves asked, curious despite herself.
“In life? Failed in the city, slunk back to Appleton with just the clothes on his back. It’s a common enough story. Jill, the waitress over there, tried her luck as an actress,” Herbert said, wincing as he shook out his hand. A heavy, paper-wrapped cylinder fell from it with a thunk. “Just now? I was palming a roll of quarters.”
Hargreaves laughed. Her food arrived then, a sad, limp bovine corpse on soggy bread and wilted salad greens. She was reasonably sure she had seen the chef take the patty out of a can before slapping it onto a grill. The chips were suitably greasy, but cut too small. The apple pie, however, was spectacular, and she was told it was on the house.
“I was under the impression America was a land of plenty, rich with industry, ingenuity and the fat of the land,” said Hargreaves. “But there were an awful lot of people like Mister Appleby, coming up from New York. I hope you do not mind my saying so, but the reality falls short of the dream.”
Hargreaves had passed shuttered houses and people destitute, living out of their still-warm jalopies. She had parked Alphonse by lots full of clacking boilers, with the windows blocked out by belongings, not yards from centers advertising the latest in clockworked home conveniences. As an enforcer of the law, she wondered where the destitute could turn if a woman amongst them fell prey to abusers. She wondered how many amongst them could afford to eat.
Howard glanced amusedly at Hargreaves’ table manners. At a nearby table, another diner was holding his burger with both hands, tucking in with a bloody gusto. Hargreaves snorted, and continued her surgery.
“Do not forget: we are a nation built by people leaving the old world. We’re stubbornly independent,” said Howard. He looked toward the street where he had just thrown out poor Mr. Appleby. “Even when we are demonstrably sick.”
Hargreaves suddenly felt like a right git.
“The coffee, at least, is strong,” Hargreaves said.
“If you need to stay awake this evening, there’s Miracle Drop at the fountain,” said Howard. Where he looked, Hargreaves saw no statues or vaulted sprays of water, only the row of vile-smelling faucets.
“Miracle Drop?” asked Hargreaves.
“Maybe it is the old country that is backward, if you’ve not heard of pop. Here, I’ll order us some,” Howard said.
Hargreaves did, in fact, know of pop. She was accustomed to a lovely amaretto fizz in summer, at her favorite Italian café in Leicester Square. Sometimes she would treat herself to
a dish of strawberries, inexpensive in season and matched with the nuttiness of the drink.
What the waitress brought roiling and whizzing to the table did not much smell like pop. In fact, Hargreaves rather fancied she saw the spilled droplets eating through the façade of the table.
“This is Miracle Drop,” Howard declared, inserting a straw and drinking, to Hargreaves’ horror.
“What does it taste like?”
“Err…red, I think.”
“That is not touching my lips,” Hargreaves declared. The stuff gave a protesting sort of gurgle, like mad science gone sentient.
“Amazing what our ateliers can do. The trains bring the raw material, and the contraptions turn it into a beverage on the spot. And for a fraction of the cost we used to pay for tonics,” said Howard.
“Cost that was paid for brewers and vintners. Jobs Mr. Appleby might have done,” said Hargreaves. “There’s value in the human touch.”