by Jay Barnson
TERRA MECHANICA: A STEAMPUNK ANTHOLOGY
Dots, Dashes, and Deceit © 2014 Jay Barnson
The Voyage of Valerie McGrath © 2014 Pete Ford
The Promise © 2014 Michael Cross
Ripper Bound © 2014 TC Phillips
Dr. Pax’s Great Unsinkable Bird © 2014 J. R. Potter
Seven-year Itch © 2014 Rie Sheridan Rose
The Journey of Inspector Roux © 2014 C. R. Simper
Priority Passage © 2014 S. D. Simper
Ganesh © 2014 Scott E. Tarbet
The Death of Dr. Marcus Wells © 2013 by J. Aurel Guay
All rights reserved.
Terra Mechanica
Published by Xchyler Publishing
an imprint of Hamilton Springs Press, LLC
Penny Freeman, Editor-in-chief
ISBN (eBook Version): 1940810183
ISBN-13 (eBook Version): 978-1-940810-18-8
eBook License Notes:
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1st Edition: May, 2014
Cover and Interior Design by D. Robert Pease, walkingstickbooks.com
Edited by Terri Wagner, Shauntel Simper, and Penny Freeman
Published in the United States of America
Xchyler Publishing
A shrill steam whistle pierces the cacophony raising from the milling crowd and echoing off the station’s high pavilion. The conductor’s call, deep and stentorian, reaches down the tracks. “Board!”
The private compartment doors shut with a luxurious thunk. The signalman waves his lantern from far down the line. The whistle screeches, the gears clank and grind as they engage with a jolt. The massive engine chuffs as it inches away from the platform.
A parting wave, a lingering kiss, a yearning hand reaching through an open window, a child’s tear-stained face visible through the glass, a disheveled man’s mad dash down the platform and leap of desperation onto the rapidly accelerating behemoth.
Find your berth, stow your gear, and settle well in, for this locomotive travels around the world and beyond. Enjoy the journey.
The tea trolley will be along momentarily.
pneu•mat•ic
n(y)ōō'matik/
adjective:
1. Containing or operated by air or gas under pressure.
2. Of or relating to the spirit.
noun:
1. An item of pneumatic equipment.
Nidj had spent half the morning working on the problem, checking wing after wing tirelessly in the hope of detecting the cause of the ship’s erratic behavior. Somewhere, 30,000 thousand feet above the island of Sumatra, the ship had begun listing off course and would not be righted by manual control again.
29,950 . . . 29,900 . . . 29,850 . . . The ship began sinking off the coast of Australia, fifty feet for every second by the Doctor’s calculations. Hovering barely above the clouds thanks to an errant trade wind, it was still a mystery what was threatening Dr. Pax's non-patented pneumatic “Whirly-Bird,” and it seemed that the fate of its seventeen-year-old mechanic and sixty-year-old inventor would soon be the same.
Nidj cursed. She leaned over the side of the Bird and peered down into the grey void luffing with the ghostly forms of clouds. Retracting her pneumatic-mechanic right arm from beneath the ship’s onionskin hull, she watched the arm’s gears and levers jitter and adjust in front of her nose as she gathered her wits for the hundredth time.
The arm still mesmerized her, even after so much time being a part of her own body. The pieces themselves were not fixed, but rather hovered in interlocking segments behind a clear cast of a human arm that ran all the way up to her shoulder.
The scapula and the beginning of the humerus bone had been salvaged from the accident, allowing Nidj still a degree of movement and control over the rest of the modified arm. It was a working substitute, and in some cases, a great advantage over the former arm the train door in Smolensk had crushed.
She could still remember the porter boy's eyes on the other side of the glass—how they filled with alarm andthen horror when the arm started spurting blood like a red fountain up into his terrified face. And then the bearded face of the Doctor hovering above her, the moment right before the world got drowned in diethyl ether.
“Intersection point A12 and B12 severed—correction!—make that the entire line severed!" she shouted, her voice ringing out through the conch shell the Doctor had modified into a flight mask.
Like most of the Doctor’s inventions, the mask’s secondary function was, perhaps, just as instrumental as its primary. As Nidj spoke, the buzzing widget installed near the mouthpiece translated the words into Morse code, which the Bird's outboard electro-magnetic receivers quickly picked up and retransmitted back to the Doctor pacing anxiously in the cabin above.
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick! Long, white tickertape spilled out over the cockpit’s teeming dashboard. The Doctor reached out and held the shoestring-size message up under the three sets of monocles hovering pneumatically above his beak-like nose. He cursed. Tossing the message over his shoulder, he began his feverish reply, tapping out the code with his patent-pending Morse Gloves worn whenever Nidj ventured out onto the deck to risk her life keeping the Bird afloat.
It took a moment for Nidj to translate the flurry of dots and dashes, but soon she could hear the Doctor's heavily accented voice as if he was standing right next to her: You know as well as I do what this means, Mein Liebling . . . We might have lost them back there, but one of the skyrates tagged us like a Chinese goose. This bird's going down. Unless . . .
Nidj didn't need to wait for ‘unless’.
Dr. Pax might have once regretted endowing his headstrong young charge with the gift of the experimental windsuit. But today those regrets would prove utterly unfounded.
Nidj leapt from the ship’s bow and twisted the quarter-size knob above her heart where the vast network of pneumatic capillaries and trembling levers that comprised the suit’s controls came together. With another swift turn, she could already feel the tubes extending out of the back of the suit, the scream of pressure beginning to rise within them, and then–the sudden jolt as the pneumatic jets kicked on.
Suddenly, she wasn't falling anymore. As she recovered the hundred feet of freefall through the clouds, she could make out the white belly of the Bird like an egg with several wings rising above her. There was its delicate, living-room-size hull wrapped in an exoskeleton of a thousand tubes like a more intricate, but no less extraordinary, version of her own windsuit.
She detected the cause of all their troubles: a mechanical midge, a roving sentinel for the pirates of the sky, the skyrates, hidden under the far side of one of the ship’s dozen wings. It was the one place the scanner attached to her arm couldn’t reach. The robot’s drill-like mouth had cut a wide seam down the center of the wing. It was the w
hole reason why they had started listing off course ever since Sumatra. It would also mean their death if the midge succeeded in severing the wing entirely.
The skyrate’s sentinel and the half-human girl locked eyes. As Nidj made two more quick turns on the knob at her chest, accelerating the windsuit's upward velocity, the midge unhooked its rotator claws from under the Bird’s wing and started falling towards her, claws raised in the air. It took Nidj two seconds to ready the three razor-sharp metal halos that only her mechanical hand could handle.
“Devil crowns,” the Doctor liked to call them. Formed of the same metallic compound the Doctor had dubbed “Paxanium,” the halos could only be returned to Nidj’s mechanical hand, being indifferent to magnetization with any other metal on earth.
It had taken her two months to master their use, decapitating scarecrow after scarecrow on the farm surrounding the Doctor’s research facility outside Bucharest. For three weeks the straw effigies just laughed at her. And then for three weeks the Doctor’s servants and maids let the house fill with dust, spending most of their time collecting the heads that the Doctor’s eight greyhounds were only so happy to redistribute and hide all over the mansion.
The midge’s mechanical wings opened to four times their size. Impressive, thought Nidj, letting fly the first halo aimed straight for the midge’s wasp-like face. Despite its tendency to favor its prey’s annihilation over surveying the details of its environment first, the midge anticipated the girl’s oncoming attack. Joining its metal wings together like a tulip, it quickly barrel-rolled out of the path of the first halo. Before Nidj could adjust the windsuit for evasive maneuvers, the robot inverted its body once more, dive-bombing directly down on top of her.
The robot’s wings wrapped around her body like a metal cocoon, blotting out the world or any understanding of up or down, and Nidj cried out in pain as its drill mouth tore down into her arm—the human one. The robot’s buzzing, chattering voice now rose like a chorus inside its metal cocoon, amplifying and joining with her own screams.
But the midge’s whole obsession with the annihilation of its prey would also be its downfall: did it see the other halos thrown behind me before it dive-bombed? It couldn’t have, she thought, the assumption the entire reason why she had let it latch on so long. Just long enough for. . .
A wild rending sound erupted through the cocoon as the twin halos sliced unperturbed through the unnecessary metal, desirous to return to rest once again in their holster. In a few short seconds, the twin disks had unseamed the robot like one might dissect a worm or a snake—top to bottom, exposing all the essential parts in the process. The robot’s chattering voice went silent as it exploded in a tremor of electricity and smoke.
Dash-dot . . . dot-dot . . . dash-dot-dot . . . dot-dash-dash-dash! Nidj! The Doctor tapped over and over, jumping madly from each of the ship’s seven periscopes rigged to provide the Bird with complete 360-degree vision.
But the girl, disappearing once more into the clouds, did not reply.
She was back in the bed, but the Doctor hadn’t come to wake her yet. The train had stopped to refuel just outside Moscow, unable to finish its thousand-mile journey from the Carpathians Mountains to the Slavic capital.
A Polish student had installed a hair-trigger bomb in the dining car, but it never went off. He had leapt from the train shortly afterwards, and the word circulating like a fever around the plush, cushioned cabins was that he was dead. Talk of the strange Turkish girl’s arm crushed by the train door quickly disappeared from the refined discourse of the train’s fifty passengers, most of them doctors and bankers, a few in the Czar’s own employ.
But the Doctor had not come back to wake her in the couchette yet. She floated above the cramped, five-by-three bed, drenched in the diethyl river, her mind coming in and out of consciousness, drifting between the drugged numbness and blinding, searing pain.
She could see he had returned. He was standing at the glass mosaic window looking in at her. His face separated into a dozen pieces, the eyes and mouth magnified in unnatural proportion to the rest of the face, like a carnival house mirror. He’s trying to tell me something.
The weathered lips framed whispered cadences that came mysteriously through the glass window into her brain, into the implant installed in her left ear to keep her in close contact in the event of danger. Danger . . . Dot-dash-dash . . . dot-dash . . . dash-dot-dash . . . dot . . . dot-dot-dash . . . dot-dash-dash-dot . . .
Wake up . . . Wake up . . . Wake up . . .
The endless ocean lay beneath her, one undulating plate of grey and blue rapidly approaching her plummeting body. The force of the downward rush was almost too much for her to contend with, the inevitable pull on all things that fell from the sky, or wingless from the tops of tall trees or buildings.
Nidj forced the bleeding arm up to her chest as the wind sucked a steady stream of crimson droplets up into her face. Her fingers were only an inch away from the knob . . . but the fall was fighting her. She closed her eyes and reached harder. Although the world beyond her eyes swirled into pure chaos, inside the forced darkness of her eyelids a stillness now came over her, a secret confidence hidden deep there in the closet of her soul.
The Doctor knew it, and somehow Nidj did, too, that she was not meant to die like this, like some wingless bird, but to fly like Icarus’ sister ever upwards towards the sun. But she wouldn’t melt—she was half-metal, half-human. And her modifications would redeem her—not doom her in the end.
The knob turned without a squeal twenty feet above the swelling waves that rose to almost brush her face. Like a great hand catching her, then launching her back up into the sky, she rose with the windsuit for a few seconds as the jets fired back on, then unexpectedly fired off. She had maxed out the experimental suit’s capabilities.
For a split second, she hung like a feather above the world, before a thousand grasping hands resumed their pull back down into the churning waters below. She hit the water a second later and sank like a stone. For a few choked moments, she floundered beneath the capsizing waves as the world fell away—one shimmering veil of white retreating above her head.
Fortunately for her, the mask hadn’t come off when she broke through the water. The Doctor had the foresight to make the mask waterproof, sealing the cracks and spiraling crevices of the shell with an impermeable gel. But the suit, designed for incredible lightness in the air, was now completely waterlogged. It felt like the shell of a great sea tortoise strapped to her back, working with the ocean to pull her under.
Nidj fought the pull with all the fury left in her, clawing and kicking her way back to the quicksilver surface while everything battled against her, insisting she give up and sink back into the nothingness the French called les ténèbres: the black nothingness, the soul deprived of even the rumor of light.
Clawing like a feral beast, she breached the silent, dark world, back into the sun and the waves. She didn’t know how much blood she had lost since the midge, only that her brain felt thin—like the high altitude feeling she felt crawling out on the wing of the ship.
She could see the log bobbing in the white caps about twenty feet off to her left . . . then it was gone. It was just her mind creating the illusion of hope before winking out forever. But there it was again, peeking above the waves, and beyond it, a long tan and green scar of land in the distance. An island!
But near or far, it was a long shot however one looked at it. The blood was pouring from her arm, the sting of the salt adding to its unbearable hemorrhage. She would bleed out before she ever reached the island. Nidj gritted her teeth and prayed for the log.
Pulling herself along sidestroke with her bleeding arm, she slipped one of the razor halos from its holster with her mechanical hand. Holding fast to the sharp disk, she stabbed out with it like an ice pick at the log floating just a few feet beyond her reach. She overcompensated. She plunged back into the swirling darkness.
Cursing and screaming, she fought her way back u
p into the sun world, lashing out at the log, no longer an illusion, but more real than anything she had ever known. This time, the makeshift pick connected. Heaving until she saw stars, she pulled her trembling body up onto the log.
It was actually two logs, she discovered, staring out at the world horizontally on her side. They had been bound together in a loose tangle of vines. The binding wasn’t firm: it was a gift of pure chance, not the artwork of some fastidious human hand. There was no knowing how long the binding would hold; if it would last long enough to bear her to the shelter of the island that taunted her, still half a mile off. And then what? It was like commuting one swift death sentence for a longer one.
She screamed again, holding her bleeding arm up to her chest to stop the flow. The arm felt on fire, and the rest would follow soon if she couldn’t find some way of stopping the bleeding.
Panting, she rolled over, onto her back, and stared up at the sky. She prayed to whatever god still existed that she would see the dozen wings of the Bird hovering just beyond a whiff of cloud, nestled like a white egg in the azure sky. But there was just the sky. Perhaps the old man had already crashed into the ocean. Perhaps he was already dead.
Perhaps him saving her that day on the train, and her subsequent oath in the Moscow hotel to help him prove the genius of his pneumatic science by flying round the world in the Bird. Perhaps all of it was just stating the inevitable fact of our biology: that death comes for the quick and the lucky, the slow and the wicked, for those who resist les ténèbres, and for those who call out to it like a distant lover.
The skyrates would have their victory over the aging Doctor, their theft of his great science forgotten in the success of their mission and subsequent incorporation into living myth as heroes of the New Age. It would come to pass. It was the whole fatalism pregnant in their dream of pure, autonomous flight above the nationalized earth.
The dead would only carry the dead down into the dark of nothingness—le néant—and she would be counted a friend and sister among them.