The Shadow Conspiracy II

by Phyllis Irene Radford

  I fired point blank. A narrow line of bright purple fire burst from the muzzle. I swept the weapon right and left, raking the enemy. A rifle exploded from the last man on my right. I dove to the ground and fired another round at the shooter and his closest companion. It took out both of them with one shot. Their heads lolled at weird angles.

  False Junior bent awkwardly, firing his weapon randomly. He’d caught the full brunt of the ray in his chest. Fabric flamed. Leather skin fried. The acrid scent of singed metal filled the moist night air.

  Only one shot remained. I fired where I’d seen the last three. The purple ray looked dim, less powerful. One more automaton stopped dead in its tracks. Metal joints locked in place. The other two kept coming.

  Jimmy slammed the butt of his conventional rifle into the neck joint of one. The head jerked forward and back, loosened from its support.

  Two of my crew jumped behind the final menace. It slammed a metal fist into one man’s gut. The other received a kick to the groin. Neither of my men could rise to walk, let alone fight. The automaton ran into the darkness toward the meeting on the ridge.

  I heard the clank of metal joints and gears.

  My breath wheezed through labouring lungs as I let loose air I’d been holding. No time to linger. Awkwardly I scrambled to my feet.

  “Now what?” Jimmy stared at the now useless Gonne in my hands.

  Four automata down. I’d seen twelve disembark. One ran to alert his fellows that they faced armed opposition.

  “Give me your flask, Jimmy,” I demanded.

  “My rum? You want to drink now? Use your own.”

  I snapped my fingers in impatience. He reluctantly pulled his narrow flask from the chain at his belt. I bit off the top and spat it onto the ground.

  Jimmy whimpered and went to his knees, feeling for the chased silver cap.

  The tiny ember inside the fuel chamber flared when the rum hit it.

  Shouts of anger pierced the night.

  I tapped my foot anxiously as I added my own rum to the flame. Then I stuffed gun cotton into the chamber.

  The Yuenon crystal emitted a high-pitched hum as it gathered energy. More cries and the thud of fists hitting flesh drowned out the sound of my Gonne powering up.

  I bounded into the courtyard ahead of my men, landing next to short and wiry Joe Meek. A scowl marred his usually merry face. John Junior was nowhere in sight.

  All around us milling men yelled with fists raised and murder in their eyes. Everyone shouted louder to be heard above the increasing racket.

  The Gonne still whined, demanding more fuel.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Joe, hoping he heard me over the ruckus.

  His eyes widened as he spotted the Kinematric Galvatron. A low whistle erupted through the gap in his front teeth. “Babcock just called for a vote. Can’t tell the fers from the aginsts.”

  “We need laws, a government of our own. Not Sir George!” Doc Newell’s voice pierced through the cacophony.

  “Aye, the time’s come.” Joe spat into the ground.

  “Call for the divide, Joe. Call them all out here, make the ayes stand to the right and the nays to the left. Then count them each and every one. And know who you count, and that you only count the same man once,” I yelled over the growing din.

  He looked at my weapon, then gave a curt nod and stepped as close to the doorway as he could get. With a grin, he raised two fingers to his mouth and blew. The sharp whistle made more than a few men cringe. Others clapped hands to ears and turned immobile, near frozen in place, eyes staring blankly. Glass eyes. Each with a different face.

  John Junior and his twins must be the enforcers, to keep strangers like me out. They had intelligence, more sophisticated codices, I’d bet. These automata were the additional voters. Sir George must be very confident of the outcome if he needed only seven to sway to the vote.

  The humans kept on arguing.

  I cleared my throat and let the shrill battle cry ripple upward. My crew picked it up and added menace to the chant.

  The crowd stilled, wary and alert. Hands strayed toward weapons. They hunched their shoulders and steadied their feet, ready to fight or flee.

  With a grin at Joe, I stepped back.

  “I call for the divide,” Joe shouted in a stentorian voice that belied his bandy frame.

  “Done!” Doc Newell agreed.

  Over one hundred men marched out of the square plank house. They lined up on either side of the yard. The ones on the right wore calico shirts and canvas pants with slouch hats. A few sported coats and waistcoats finer than their neighbours’. They all looked grim, but determined to control their destiny.

  On the left, I noted an abundance of red bonnets. Hard to say which line was longer.

  I liberated a flask — bigger than mine and Jimmy’s combined — from Joe Meek’s hip pocket and poured the contents into the Kinematic Galvatron. The whine amplified. It wound up the scale to higher and higher tones.

  Seven men on the left stiffened, jerked, and bent double. Joe looked to me for explanation. I whispered a few words to him.

  John Junior lingered behind his men, fully upright and aware, untouched by the codex-scrambling whine of my Gonne.

  “See that!” Joe chortled. “See the metalmen Sir George sent to swing the vote his way. That’s what’s going to happen if we don’t do something to get organised. We need laws and officials to keep these unnatural beasts out of our Oregon. If we do nothing, we run the risk of Sir George or others of his kind imposing their laws on us. I say we make our own laws. Laws we can live with. Laws that benefit us and not some dandy sitting in London, reaping profits from our labours.”

  Three men ripped off their red bonnets. They approached middle age, with greying hair and wizened lines about their eyes and mouths from too many years in the sun. Too many winters spent trapping beaver in hostile weather.

  “I, Francis Xavier Mattieu, know Sir George to be treacherous,” the first said. “But I did not believe he would do this to the men who have served him well over the years. I change my vote.” He limped across the open yard from left to right, nay to yay.

  Two more men followed his example. I shook the hands of Étienne Lucier and Joseph Gervais as they joined the ranks of the free settlers.

  John Junior faded away into the darkness. I hoped — prayed—that Grimes and his men could stop him from reporting to Sir George.

  “Thank you, Captain Romanz,” Doc Newell whispered to me as Joe Meek walked up and down the two lines, counting and recording names. He peered cautiously into the eyes of each man, making sure none were made of glass.

  The Gonne had stopped whining and rested hot and heavy in my arms, ready to fire at my command. I levelled it in the direction of the metalmen, who stirred and moved upright with jerky, disrupted movements.

  Jimmy and the crew pushed them backward until they fell, useless limbs flailing. They croaked out a single word, “Nay,” the only word allowed in their codex cards.

  “You ain’t got names. You ain’t got land claims.” Joe kicked each one aside, not recording their votes.

  One by one they fought back to their feet, obeying the command in their codices. “Nay,” they said again.

  I mowed them all down with three short bursts of energy. As the purple sparkles settled and singed the weeds in the packed dirt, Doc Newell applauded. Joe followed suit, as did Mattieu, Lucier, Gervais, and forty-seven more.

  I bowed grandly to them.

  “Fifty-two for making our own government. Fifty against! The motion carries,” Joe proclaimed to one and all.

  A great cheer rang around the yard.

  “Busted my back and my heart carving a home out of the wilderness just so’s I wouldn’t have to put up with laws and taxes and govamint’s sticking their nose in my biznis,” a brawny man of middling years grumbled. “Soon’s I get a decent offer on my land, I’m leaving. Heading south, I reckon.”

  “Cain’t sell without a deed an’
a govamint to record it,” Joe said to his retreating back.

  The other men on the left side melted away, grumbling and uncertain.

  “Will you be settling here, Captain?” Newell asked. “We won’t be able to use Company bateaux anymore. So I guess we need an independent shipper to take our produce to markets.”

  I had to think about that. For about two heartbeats.

  John Junior was still out there, still able to report to Sir George, who could yet make a lot of trouble for me, especially if he knew where to find me and how to hurt friends and neighbors.

  “Not yet. The hiss of boilers, the clank of gears, and the wide open skies still call me. I need to fly where fate and the winds take me.”

  The Maiden Mechanical

  Brenda W. Clough

  Brass gears chattered, and the dumbwaiter trundled Mike’s book up from the library depths. He could see the gilt title clearly: A Year in a Den of Iniquity, by A Footman. Once again, the famous Steam Catalogue had made good! Just as the mechanism shunted the leather-bound tome into reach, another hand darted in and snatched it up.

  “Young man, this is the Babbage Institute of Mechanismic Sciences — you can have no business here!”

  Mike ground his teeth. On his short skinny frame his new black academical robe did look like a borrowed disguise. “I am a Cambridge student — first year, I concede, but admitted early for my engineering brilliance. I need that volume for my research!”

  “And you are — what — thirteen?” The librarian’s gelid eye behind the pince-nez assessed Mike’s hairless upper lip and bony chin free even of peach fuzz.

  “I am almost fifteen!”

  “Too young to have access to a work of this nature,” the librarian declared. He clutched the volume to his chest, as if to hide even the title from Mike’s virgin gaze. “Far, far too young! In Christian decency, lad, I must shield you from the moral pitfalls of this work. Come back when you are twenty — no, thirty.”

  Suppressing his fury, Mike turned and made his escape before the librarian could up the age to thirty-five. “You’ll thank me for this someday,” the librarian called after him.

  Dear Lord, these humiliations would not happen if only he had achieved puberty! And to cap his misery, here at the bottom of the library steps were Muntley and Whitgift. They had shed their academicals in favour of boaters and blazers. A large wicker picnic basket waited at their feet.

  “Ready to embark, HoHo?” Muntley drawled.

  The hated nickname made Mike wince. Without reply he flung off his own gown and followed in their sauntering wake to the banks of the Cam. He was in for it now.

  A late tea on the water was the aegis for their true destination. It was a convincing ruse, Michaelmas term being the most clement season for boating in Cambridge. The punt worked upstream with Muntley on the till, expertly managing the pole. Sheep and cattle grazed on the Backs between the noble facades of the college buildings. The rhythmic drip and splash of the pole was conducive to dreaming. Once past the village of Grantchester, Whitgift opened the basket and dug out a split of champagne. Mike was not offered a glass.

  He knew how it looked, a pair of aristocratic upperclassmen taking the new boy out on the water. In actuality his loathsome companions were invigilators, watching to ensure Mike followed through on his rash promise. When they pulled up at an old stone kerb on the further bank, Mike climbed out without a word and began to hack uphill through the thorny underbrush. The looming wall of Xanadu was invisible behind the thick growth, but they all three knew it was there.

  Sweat ran down Mike’s pale forehead, and the briars tore at his trousers. Was there anything, anything at all, more stupid than this sophomoric precedence display? He should be able to sneer at these snobs. Their comments about NTS—”not top shelf” — should not sting. He paused to mop his brow and practice the sneer, curling his upper lip. What could be done to accelerate that long-promised growth spurt — eat more? Lift dumb-bells? Being skinny and small, in addition to being young and brilliant, was like wearing a paper target pinned between his shoulder blades.

  No length of leg, however, was going to help him with the ruinous wall. The last Cambridge student who had tried a frontal assault had been nobbled by the mechanical at the gate; he hadn’t been sent down, but the broken ankle had achieved the same effect. Mike deduced that the wall was the way in. No one had maintained it for years. Oak and ash had taken root right up against the ramparts. Mike picked his spot and easily chimney-walked up between a tall trunk and the crumbling brick. From this vantage he could scramble onto a slanting roof beyond. Mossy slates shifted and cracked under his boots, and he had to climb up on hands and knees to distribute his weight.

  At the top of the slippery slope were broken windows, tall voids of darkness. He could make out nothing of the interior. Surely the floor could not be far below. Again he congratulated himself — brilliant forethought, to bring a coil of stout hempen rope! Perhaps it had not been completely wise, though, to carry it looped diagonally over his shoulder under his jacket. Removing the garment and rope was tricky, on his knees in the gathering dusk on the slick broken slates. The mullion was strong enough to bear his slight weight as he shinned down.

  But, damnation! Here he was at the end of the line, and there was nothing beneath his reaching boot toes. Five ells of rope should have been enough. What was this place, a cistern? This was where Den of Iniquity would have helped — to give him an idea of the layout of Xanadu. He had to return with a souvenir, a proof of his penetration into the sanctum. Perhaps a different window would give onto an easier chamber —

  With a crack of aged wood the mullion above gave. As he dropped, Mike instinctively curled like a spider whose line is cut. He fell only a yard or two into a deep drift of leaves, years’ worth piled deep on the floor. Crisp and dry, their noise and the crash of his fall seemed to make the darkness echo. He lay very still, catching his breath and listening.

  There were no humans in Xanadu anymore. But what machine watchers had he awakened? For a long, long moment only the rustle of settling leaves broke the silence. The patter of sawdust, sparkling as it fell in the shaft of light from the broken window near drew him into a trance. Mike was just telling himself that all was well, when a distinct chink of metal made him jump. Behind his left shoulder! Very carefully, trying not to rustle, he peered over his shoulder into the dark. It was Stygian. “Who — who’s there?” he demanded, his voice a hateful treble squeak.

  Another clank, and the groan of a long-unused hinge or gear. Mike jumped to his feet. He had no weapon but a penknife; he would have to run. But to be pursued through a dark haunted castle by an unknown terror was the stuff of nightmare.

  I am a scientist, he told himself. I will at least identify this death machine!

  And then into the shaft of dusty light stepped a girl. She was an automaton, she must be, but her slender arms, her dainty heart-shaped face, all cried out youth and innocence. “Please,” she whispered. “Help me.” She swayed and fell, but he leaped to break her fall. Yes, she was too heavy to be flesh. And he could feel now the grate and groan of the mechanism in the reed-slim waist, under the mildewed fabric of her gown.

  “What — who are you?”

  “I am Ellana. Please — save me.”

  “Of course! Of course I will. You may rely upon me.” He gazed down into her huge blue eyes, and knew he was lost forever.

  There could be no regulations against mechanical servitors at Queens, not with its reputation for engineering brilliance. The college buttery was even staffed by one, dubbed Erasmus after a noted alumnus. However, Mike knew that there would be an almighty dustup if he displayed an automaton formed like a comely young female. And if it got out that he had liberated it from Xanadu! It was bad enough that Whitgift and Muntley knew. The sight of him emerging from the ancient gate with Ellana on his arm had stunned them into respectful silence during the return trip downstream in the gloaming. But he had no faith this happy state of affai
rs would continue long.

  In the meantime there was work to be done. Ellana’s unknown fabricator had been a master. But Mike knew he could repair her. Her power cells could be rejuvenated, her joints aligned, the pressure seals renewed, the eidolonic manifold seated properly. He spent every waking moment working on the task, scamping on lectures, missing tutorials. It was like a vigil for his knighthood, consecrating himself to a life in her service. He had never been so happy.

  “I have never met a girl like you.” He knelt before her as she sat in his armchair. Adjusting his goggles for the best view, he carefully directed the welding arc onto the broken ankle strut.

  “I should hope not.” She had shed the mildewed rags of her gown and appropriated his mouse-coloured dressing gown. “Oh, Mikey, take care! You might burn me!”

  “You can feel the heat? Amazing. I wish I could see your nerve diagrams. You will find me very dexterous — it runs in the family.”

  “You are a respectable lad, I can tell. Who are your people?”

  “Country squires from Yorkshire,” he said, absently. He reached for a hex screwdriver, which she passed to him. “My parents are dead, but I have a younger brother.”

  “So you know no girls at all, really.”

  “I shall not need to now. ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief, that thou her maid art far more fair than she.’”

  “Ah! I played Juliet in the Speech Room.” So cunning was her fabrication that he could see the dimples leap in her cheek as she declaimed: “‘How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore? The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, And the place death, considering who thou art, If any of my kinsmen find thee here.’...You are a romantic.”

  “Only if it is romantic to yearn to explore you. ‘My America, my new found land.’”

  “Do you?” When her huge eyes widened in inquiry, she looked barely in her teens. “I would love to be your America.”