by Karen Garvin
Samuel fetched the binoculars and handed them to Edward. “See something interesting?”
“Hmm.” Edward toyed with the focusing, getting annoyed as the brass knob seemed to stick. Then he fell silent, staring at the canopy below.
“Well? What are you looking at?”
“My God!” bellowed Edward. His shout was so loud that Meade came running over to see what the fuss was about. “Those damn orchids! They’re everywhere!”
Meade wrangled the binoculars away from Edward and deftly adjusted the focus. “We can’t be sure they’re the correct species until we can get down there.” But his tone of voice revealed the excitement that his words did not.
* * *
As soon as they debarked from the airship, Edward and Samuel began the long trek down the hillside to Seacombe’s infirmary. Edward had to stop several times to catch his breath, but with twilight approaching he forced himself to keep moving. The path was difficult by day, but it could be dangerous at night and he had no wish to add a broken leg to his list of health complaints. Once they reached the infirmary, Edward wasted no time in getting into an argument with the doctor about his rash.
“I don’t care what you say, Mr. Grey,” said the heavy-set doctor. “You are going to spend at least the next three days in the infirmary where I can keep an eye on you. Nurse!”
With a huff, Edward gave in and allowed the middle-aged woman to escort him to a cot and help unpack his things. He climbed into bed reluctantly and allowed the doctor to examine his arms. When the doctor was gone, Samuel slid into the chair at Edward’s bedside and poured a glass of water for his uncle.
“There is something we need to discuss, Uncle.”
“Why the glum look? The doctor’s just told me that I’m not going to die, but now you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“It’s about the Hekatite.”
“And? It’s poisonous? Yes, I know that.” Edward plucked at the white bandages covering his arms.
Samuel gave him a dour look. “Professor Meade told me the other day that he was going to recommend cancelling the Hekatite program. He said he thought it was too dangerous to be used as a substitute for coal.”
Edward grunted. “I don’t think Meade is going to give the program up so easily. Besides, the trial was successful. The Hekatite produces more power than coal and it burns clean.”
“No, it doesn’t. It makes that awful purple smoke that you breathed.”
“That was only because some fool left the boiler door ajar and didn’t close it properly. Foster should have known better.” Edward drank the rest of the water and held out the cup for more. “If it’s burned properly it will reduce down to clean ash. And actually there’s very little residue.”
“I know that. But if the government agrees to terminate the Hekatite project, then you’re out of work, Uncle.”
“Stop worrying about me so much, Samuel. I’ll deal with it when – if the time comes.”
“But Uncle…”
“Hello?”
Meade poked his head around the privacy curtain that separated Edward’s bed from the rest of the ward and slowly stepped into view. It was the first time Edward had seen the man hesitate.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Gray,” said Meade. “May I?” He indicated the chair that Samuel had vacated and pulled it over next to Edward’s bedside.
Meade spent a few minutes engaging in niceties, and then his expression hardened. “I’m afraid I have bad news for you. As you know, the Hekatite has proven to be more dangerous than we had anticipated. I’ve sent a telegraph to London and recommended that the program be terminated. In the meantime, we will do a limited amount of research here at Seacombe on the remaining stores of orchids and try to determine how to treat people who have been exposed to the Hekatite.”
“Terminated! But the Hekatite can be handled safely. And we just found all those orchids! You can’t let them go to waste!”
Meade’s eyebrows shot up. “Look at yourself, Mr. Gray. You say it can be handled safely, and yet you’re covered with the nodules. God only knows what that poison is doing to you.”
“It’s just a rash, I tell you. I’ll be fine. It was the smoke that made me ill, and you know damn well if I’d breathed in coal smoke the result would have been the same.”
“Indeed.” Meade folded his arms. “Do you really believe that?”
“Yes, I do.” Edward’s voice had lost the raspiness and he pushed himself up against the pillows, ignoring the pain in his joints. “Look here, Professor, we all knew the Hekatite was a risk. But I believe the refinement procedure can be corrected. We can make the fuel less toxic.”
Meade sat quietly for a moment, examining Edward’s face. “What do you think, Samuel? Your uncle is very keen on returning to work. Do you agree with his assessment that the Hekatite can be made safer?”
“It worked!” interjected Edward. “We only need to limit direct exposure to the sap and the smoke.”
“I reluctantly agree with my uncle,” said Samuel. “It’s true that the Nares won the race by using the Hekatite, and we didn’t have to refuel during the entire flight.”
Meade nodded. “Yes, that’s true. Unfortunately, I have serious doubts about allowing Hekatite to reach the open market. It’s far too volatile. I’m not the one to make the final decision, but the government doesn’t want to risk having the Hekatite get out of control.”
“So we keep it to ourselves, is that it?”
“Yes. We simply can’t risk it otherwise.”
Meade turned to face Edward. “As for you, Mr. Grey, I’m afraid that if the research on this project does get cancelled, then I will have no further need of your services. You may want to consider alternative employment options.” Meade pushed his chair back and stood up.
“That’s it?” demanded Samuel. “After my uncle has risked his life for your project, this is all you have to say to him?”
“We’ve all been at risk,” countered Meade. “Your uncle was told to avoid touching the Hekatite, but he chose to ignore the warnings—and on multiple occasions, I might remind you.”
“I can’t believe this,” said Samuel, getting to his feet. “You’re firing him after all he’s done?”
“I’m not firing him, Samuel. At least, not until the project is officially cancelled, and while I have influence on that outcome, I can’t guarantee that the government will take my advice. In any case, may not be a problem for long.”
“What do you mean?”
Meade flicked his glance at Edward. “Your uncle is very ill. He might not live long enough for unemployment to be a problem.”
Samuel’s face turned ashen.
“You didn’t know?” Meade looked pointedly at Edward.
Sam collapsed onto the chair. “No.”
Edward swallowed. He wanted to say something to console his nephew, but the words stuck in his throat. Absently he rubbed at the bandages on his arms. “Samuel, please get me a blanket.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m cold, that’s why. I’m sitting here half undressed, what do you think?”
Samuel snatched a fraying blanket from one of the other beds and wrapped it around Edward’s shoulders. “I can’t believe you can be so callous, Professor.”
Meade took a deep breath. “I’m very sorry, Samuel, but you know that the doctors can’t make any promises. Edward has been exposed to the sap and the smoke, as well as the refined Hekatite, on a number of occasions. We don’t know what the long-term effects will be on his health, and we’re just going to have to wait and see.”
“And what about Foster?” asked Samuel.
“He’s much younger and fitter, and thanks to your uncle, he has already recovered. But Foster’s exposure to the smoke was relatively short.” Meade clapped Samuel on the shoulder, nodded to Edward, and took his leave. Samuel followed him out of the curtained area.
Edward could hear their voices, but they had walked far enough away that he couldn’t make out
what was being said. After a few minutes Samuel returned.
“Well? Gossiping about the old man, eh?” Edward thumped his chest. “If it concerns me, then you’d better tell me what’s going on.”
Samuel sat down heavily. “I resigned.”
“You what?”
* * *
A week later Edward and Samuel watched the Nares slip her mooring and float up into the brilliant blue sky. The huge ship glistened in the bright sunshine, just as the snow and ice had done at the Pole. The pilot allowed the airship to gain altitude while the mooring ropes were retracted, then started the engines and turned northeast, back to London.
Meade was heading back to the center of government while Edward remained behind. He was barred from further work on the Hekatite project, but would be allowed to continue working in the Seacombe offices. Samuel had taken a job in the warehouse, where he would be close enough to his uncle to monitor his health.
Edward watched the shadow of the Nares flow up the hillside until the airship disappeared behind the ridge of the hill. He wished he was returning to his home in London, but Meade had ordered him to stay on Seacombe until he fully recovered—or died, whichever happened.
Edward hadn’t told Samuel about that conversation.
Michelle Schad
“Again, Private Fallon!” Staff Sergeant Miller barked.
“Which one?” Tristan giggled, legs spread wide, hands spaced as if ready to catch a ball.
“Quiet, Number Two!” the staff sergeant said. They had been numbered upon conscription: Fallon One and Fallon Two. Right then, being labeled ‘Fallon One’ was the only thing Geiger had over his twin. His head hurt, the spells were too complicated, and the ring of military leadership watching him fail over and over made him want to vomit. The magical arts were Tristan’s specialty, not Geiger’s. No, that wasn’t entirely true, either. Geiger could do it but he hated the tests—they made him feel like an ant under a magnifying glass.
“Again!”
Geiger sighed and began forming the gestures and muttering the spell. Why couldn’t he do this later? Or go back to fixing George? The poor iron golem had taken quite a beating during munitions testing; someone had blown the automaton’s arm right off. Everyone used George like a giant punching bag—all the automatons, really. It didn’t seem right to Geiger. In fact, it made him angry. So angry that he finished the spell in a rush and poured all of his rage into it as well. Geiger was aware of someone screaming before he truly registered what had happened.
Wild licks of electricity rippled all over Tristan’s body. His eyes were shut tight but his mouth was wide open. The sound that came out curdled Geiger’s blood. What had he done?
“Tristan!”
“...Fallon? Sergeant?”
Geiger blinked, looking up from a messy desk. A tiny crablike mechanical skittered across his hand, dragging a large envelope over to one of the file stacks at the corner of the desk. Large bell speakers were wired up to all parts of the cramped office and out into an expansive warehouse.
“Sir,” a young man said nervously. “George is misbehaving again. Layla thinks it might be his soul gem.”
Geiger nodded, looking to a panel of grainy screens mounted on the wall to his left. He could see the fuzzy, green-hued image of the golem on the bottom left, its chest plate wide open for inspection.
“I’ll take a look at him tonight, Private,” Geiger said. “What’s the status of the battalion?”
“Nearly completed, sir. We’re putting the final touches on them now.”
Geiger nodded again. “Sebastian.”
The small, mechanical crab with its shell made of thick studded leather stopped, its tiny glass eyes regarding Geiger curiously.
“Let General Gray know his battalion is ready for pick up.”
Two hundred autonomous soldiers stood at the ready inside the warehouse. Each was outfitted with heavy artillery and a self-destruct mechanism that would take out three city blocks if necessary. The mill had burned ‘round the clock for nearly three whole months to make them. Now, Geiger watched Sebastian skitter over to a large keyboard of an older computing machine to hen peck a brief message on the rounded keys. Each tap created a heavy clicking sound, each one different from the last, that then created a perfectly formed letter on the black and white screen above. Sebastian could not read, of course, but he understood sound just fine and had been programmed to ‘know’ the sounds of the English language.
All of the automatons that Geiger designed had a purpose and a name. Some would even go so far as to say they had a soul. Geiger may not like the work he did too terribly much, but he took pride in it. He waited until the message had been sent and all of the recruits under his command had gone for the day before leaving his office. The warehouse was part of a large mill inside of Indiana Harbor in East Chicago, Indiana. The smell of the water was always very pungent—a mixture of oil and fish that would churn a weak stomach right quick. In fact, that was a recruit’s first test: survive the smell without retching.
Geiger moved along the grated floor panels, scooting around the child-sized automatons that moved things to and fro. In a larger alcove was a broad-shouldered copper golem with its chest plate wide open. Standing in front of the golem called George was a mechanical drider—a creature Geiger had read about as a boy: half spider, half dark-elf woman—pulling the four palm-sized gemstones from the inside of George.
“Thank you, Charlotte,” Geiger said to the large chrome drider.
Charlotte stopped, tilted her chrome head and then stepped back. Her gears clicked together when she moved, each leg tapping against the grates beneath her. She watched her creator examine the heart of one of her kin then ambled off on her own to clean a mess near the office or stow the tools that had been used that day in their proper places.
A small table folded down from where Geiger worked. He set the four stones down and took up a thick leather apron with tools and pockets and trinkets all over the surface. Once it was tied about his waist and neck, he set to work. George was beginning to show his age in more ways than one. Geiger’s mind went back to his first test, in which George had been a distraction. That incident had forever changed his life and that of his twin. Even as Geiger adjusted the lens patch worn over his left eye to examine the stones, Tristan remained at the forefront of his mind. Much like he could not afford the distraction then, he certainly could not afford it now. How ironic, he thought, that it would be his twin who would cause the distraction now when it had been the other way around then.
Geiger put it all out of his mind with a deep sigh and shake of his head, picked up the spirit quartz and took a good hard look at it. It had a pink hue with thousands of smaller crystals jutting out of the larger pillar so that it appeared to have been dipped in sugar and left to sit overnight. Each of the smaller outcroppings had been painstakingly carved with alchemical runes and supernatural formulae. Again, Geiger adjusted the lens on his left eye. It clicked in rapid succession, magnifying the crystal with each click. Without the patch, Geiger’s eye was all but useless. With it, however, he immediately saw the problem. The gem had a large crack right through the center pillar that was disrupting the natural flow of the formulae on the other three stones. The spirit crystal was what gave an automaton its life; its soul. The other three helped determine its purpose. It took significantly more time to make a golem or automaton run by what was known as a soul gem—all four alchemical stones together—than it did the two hundred sitting in the warehouse. Those merely had hearts of pumping water and pistons. George and Charlotte, Sebastian—they were special.
“Aw, buddy, what happened?” Geiger sighed. Carving a new spirit crystal would take months.
George was Geiger’s friend, probably one of the only ones he had. He’d nearly been court martialed twice for trying to save the giant golem, and ultimately proved his theory of the ghost in the shell—the living, growing, and learning soul of a machine—in his master thesis using George as the shell.
He made distinction between the two types of automaton by naming them the Soulless—those with standard gears and steam-operated parts—and the Anima—those like George and Charlotte with crystal hearts. Most had laughed at him at first, claiming it was all nonsense and useless conjecture to give a machine a ‘soul’—until they saw George; then Charlotte. Before Geiger knew it, his time was spent in the mill training others to do what he could do instead of repairing the mechanical soldiers on the battlefield. Teaching came with its own dangers. It took a lot of study in both alchemy and magical study to make the gems function and many were simply not willing to put that amount of work into it or were not adept at it. Steady hands were needed to carve the stones or the formulae would create a backlash that could do any number of awful things. The crack in George’s spirit crystal, for example, could easily cause the crystal to implode if it were used—and take the entire mill with it. Or, so Geiger had been told.
He sighed again and set the crystal down. He would need to procure a new one first thing in the morning and set to carving it almost immediately if he hoped to finish it before year’s end. To be thorough, Geiger examined the other three crystals and all of their tiny little carvings. One stone, made of clear quartz, had a crack equal to the spirit stone that made Geiger shake his head.
“Jesus, bud, what’d you do?” he asked, as if the now-still golem would answer his questions. Something else did, however, butting the back of Geiger’s calves as he worked. Looking down, he smiled at a big, rolly bulldog with his own tiny little apron tied about his girth. “Did you break my golem, Beau?”
The dog merely looked up, licking his chops innocently. Beaumont was another of Geiger’s friends, a favorite of all the recruits for relieving stress or just being Beaumont. He made himself comfortable at Geiger’s feet for a time until something caught his ear. He made a gruff noise and then began barking, rising to his feet again so that Geiger’s attention was diverted back to him instead of his work. The barking quickly turned to snarling howls and bays as the dog took off toward the front of the warehouse with the apron flapping behind him like a cape. Geiger frowned, following the faithful hound cautiously. On his way, he grabbed a sharp scrap of metal that was once a leg that was kept on hand just in case. It seemed like a useless weapon to have, but stranger things had happened and one could never be too careful during war time. The Union States had not been invaded—not yet— but there had been isolated attacks and a full-on invasion was inevitable at this point. The Harbor Works that the mill was part of was just inside the tip of Lake Michigan and was just deep enough to allow enemy forces up through the channels or an air battalion could open fire or... He stopped thinking of worst-case scenarios, idly scratching his right arm as he refocused on the present. Being invaded with two hundred mech soldiers and a handful of Anima as his only defense was not on Geiger’s list of things he wanted to deal with right at that moment, so, he wouldn’t.