Alaina nodded to Ricardo as she headed towards the elevator. Like everything else in the building, it was powered by electricidad, channelled from massive banks of batteries in the lead-lined basement. Designed by Doctor Efrain, the battery banks were strictly prototypes. They were bulky and incredibly expensive to produce; out of the reach of anyone without the resources of the Frankensteins. Even before she nodded, Ricardo had turned his gaze towards her, knowing that she was about to leave. Spittle flying from his mouth, he shouted
“Analfistingshitbadger!”
Alaina didn’t have to process the words. She didn’t attempt to articulate a reply. She and Ricardo communicated by a subtle kind of telepathy supplemented by a system of looks and gestures. No one else was attuned to her like this except, to a lesser extent, the savant giant Thorsten Laverack.
Once on the roof, Alaina felt better, more alive. She walked across to the cages that contained the karriers, the big pigeon/condor cross-breeds that carried messages all over The Smoke on behalf of those with the resources to breed, house and train them. She ran her finger across the barred cage of Brutus, the largest of the birds, and heard him coo throatily at her. The size of a labrador, with a huge wingspan to match, he was the strongest of all the Incorruptibles’ karriers and could fly the furthest; if necessary, all the way to the Frankenstein estate seven hundred yoettes away.
The birdcages were nothing unusual. Looking across nearby rooftops, Alaina could see similar cages on several of the buildings. As the smog swirled, Alaina could also make out a lot of the surrounding Steamer Quarter, the semi-industrial area in which Cerval had chosen to set up the Incorruptibles’ HQ. Anonymous, run down, known mainly for the number of steamer repair workshops that dotted its narrow streets, it was the last place you’d expect to find a building like the one on whose roof she was standing: a building lit and powered by electricidad, with a state-of-the-art scientific workshop and a medical facility that would have been the envy of any affluenzo.
Alaina tried to suppress her fears. Where were Cerval, Evangeline and Thorsten? Like all Cerval’s plans, this one had been daring and simple. Perhaps too simple, remembering that the Silencios were cunning, ruthless and had eyes and ears everywhere. Perhaps the plan had been compromised. Betrayed?
She peered over the waist-high parapet that surrounded the roof, looking in the direction from which she knew Cerval should be coming. No sign. Her heart was heavy, her mind numb, but as she turned away from the rail, thinking to go back down and join Ricardo, she stumbled to her knees. It was as if she’d been clubbed. She staggered upright, put her hand to her brow, steadied herself against the rail. Of course she knew it was nothing physical, simply the prelude to someone tuning in. Was it Ricardo? Had he somehow managed to have an accident in his anxious state? She dashed towards the elevator, then almost fell again as a massive wave of psychic energy invaded her, a wave that spoke of distress and pain, pulsing stronger and weaker; stronger.
Then weaker, much weaker.
Home! Take me home!
Alaina shook her head to clear her thoughts, fought to remain upright and prevent the tears flowing, for she knew who it was. She’d never felt him talk to her like this before. He was normally so strong, precise, better able to ‘talk’ to her than he was to those with ordinary communication faculties.
It was Thorsten. He was on the point of death. And he was nearby.
Cameron Correia and Stefan Mueller were the only Silencio survivors of the showdown at Doctor Efrain’s laboratory; it was they who fired the Ximan bursts that almost did for Shelley Mary Ventura. Finding themselves surrounded by the bodies of their compadres, the objects of their murderous mission having fled, they rightly thought that their best bet would be to head for the Airship Station and take the first flight out. Didn’t matter where to, just as long as it was as far away as possible from Franklyn Rooseveldt Pfarrer, their boss.
In their hearts they both knew that they wouldn’t make it, but what other choice was there?
In the event, they got as far as the queue waiting to board the airship to Worplesden Key, a one-horse island once a vital Steam Airship fuelling station but redundant now that the ships were bigger and their engines more efficient.
At the last minute they were hustled out of the queue by a trio of frock-coated Travel Inspectors, and within the hour found themselves back at Silencio headquarters.
Which was where they still were. Naked. Bruised. Bloodied. Chained to an enormous butcher’s block in the underground chamber which was euphemistically referred to as The Interrogation Room,
Franklyn Rooseveldt Pfarrer peered down at them.
Pfarrer was small of build but sharp of intellect. Reserved in his demeanour but towering in his rage. At a distance he might be taken for a middle-ranking manager, albeit one who could afford the very best in bespoke tailoring. He was now keeping a suitable distance away from the butcher’s block, not wanting any stray spurts of blood to besmirch the butter-soft alpaca blend of his suit. He personally would not be causing such spurts. He left all that to his personal physician and torturer, balding, bespectacled Doctor Horst Van Der Hudspith, who was currently standing by, arms folded, face impassive, in one hand a pair of surgical forceps, in the other a scalpel.
“So, Cameron, remind me again,” Pfarrer said softly, “whose idea was it to make a break for the Airship Station?”
Cameron Correia tried to reply, but could only gurgle. He’d not actually lost the power of speech, but his throat was awash with blood, the result of Doctor Hudspith’s painstaking work with the medical instruments. Holding the forceps in one hand he had held Correia’s tongue, while with his other hand he had sliced slivers from it, as if preparing truffles. The slivers were now arranged on a nearby table in an artistic, petal-like pattern. No one could say the doctor didn’t have a creative side.
Correia gurgled again, struggled feebly against his chains. His eyes betrayed the glazed helplessness of the doomed. But if he had any hopes that Pfarrer might order Hudspith to effect a quick dispatch, he was disappointed. Sighing, Pfarrer turned his attention to Mueller.
“Your colleague’s not much of a conversationalist,” he said. “Perhaps you’re feeling a little more talkative?” Stefan Mueller still had the power of speech. So far, Hudspith had only taken a few truffle slivers from his ears. But, overwhelmed by the enormity and the inexorability of an unimaginable fate, he could barely articulate words.
Gently Pfarrer took the scalpel from Hudspith’s grasp, running his finger along the flat of its blade as he approached Mueller. The man’s eyes widened, and he gasped convulsively. The coppery smell of blood in the room was joined by the acrid tang of urine.
“P-p-p-lease Mr. Pfarrer,” Mueller sobbed. “P-please don’t kill me. I got a baby at home, a new baby. I’ll do anything you want… anything… but d-d-don’t kill me.”
“Oh, I’m not going to kill you Mueller.” Mueller gave a great sob.
“Thank you, Mr. Pfarrer, thank you! I’ll d-d-do better in the future, I promise you. I’ll do any job you want, anything you want. I’ll g-g-get it right next time, I will, trust me!”
“Ah,” said Pfarrer. “I think you may have misunderstood me. When I said I wasn’t going to kill you, I meant of course that I personally was not about to administer the coup de grace. I will leave that task to my trusted physician Doctor Hudspith.” Pfarrer handed the scalpel back to Hudspith, who nodded gravely. Mueller sobbed again, as the hope he’d enjoyed for a mere few seconds receded into the blackest abyss of despair.
Being careful to keep his suit away from the blood that dripped down the side of the butcher’s block, Pfarrer leant over and put his face close to Mueller’s. “One other thing. As you know, since that unfortunate business with the woman, Doctor Hudspith isn’t strictly speaking allowed to practice surgery. His skills are a little rusty.” Pfarrer glanced over at the bloody form of Correia. “Although I must say, Horst, you did a very creditable job on our friend here. Very neat.
” Again, Hudspith nodded gravely. “So he really does need an opportunity to polish up his skills. What do you think Horst? The lips?”
Doctor Hudspith spoke for the first time. “Lips are good, Mr. Pfarrer.”
“Very well then. Practise away.”
As the scalpel came down, the sound of Correia’s gurgling was overwhelmed by the keening sound of Mueller’s screams.
“Although… come to think of it, Horst… ” Hudspith paused, annoyed. He hated to be interrupted once the first cut had been made, but Pfarrer was well-known for his lightning changes of mind and Hudspith knew his place. As his torturer-executioner turned to the Silencio boss, Mueller sobbed convulsively, a gout of blood spurting from his mouth.
“I may have a job for him. So… a lot of pain, by all means, but do not kill him.”
Mueller fainted, his nervous system unable to reconcile the terror of the knowledge of forthcoming agony with the understanding that he would probably live.
“Is this going to work, Ricardo?” said Cerval, looking down at Thorsten’s body, now almost totally concealed by layers of crushed ice. Despite the up-to-date medical facilities of their HQ, the four unharmed members of the Incorruptibles were forced to improvise in their bid to keep Thorsten alive enough to reach Cerval’s estate, where the real work would begin. They’d gone to every icehouse in the Steamer Quarter to get enough ice to engulf the giant’s body.
“I think so,” said Ricardo, pouring on another bucketful. “Induced hypothermia can slow the body’s responses down to the point where it seems to be clinically dead, but can be restored at a later date.”
Ricardo was a prodigy. Despite his Babbler genes, and the fact that he was only seventeen, he was half way through his medical training. Even before he was a teenager, he had determined to become a doctor specialising in his own strange affliction. Cerval himself had read, memorised and analysed every scientific paper his ancestors had written, and had met Ricardo through Doctor Efrain, one of Ricardo’s teachers. Now, he agreed with Ricardo’s views as to how to prepare Thorsten’s remains for transport to the Frankenstein estate. There, Cerval knew, he and Thorsten’s father, Gori, might… just might… be able to repair some of the horrible damage Thor had suffered.
As to Ricardo’s tics and Babbler outbursts, they usually disappeared whenever he was called upon to concentrate or take action. Like his sister he greatly admired Thorsten, and his desire to keep the giant alive drove his babblings into whatever strange recesses of the brain were not affected by his rogue genes.
Nevertheless, none of the Incorruptibles was sanguine about Thorsten’s chances. Even if he survived till they got him to the estate, there was no guarantee that Cerval’s plan for him was going to work out. Alaina looked questioningly at Ricardo.
“Yes, that’s enough ice,” he replied. “You can dispatch Brutus.” Alaina headed towards the elevator.
“To the airfield then?” said Evangeline.
“To the airfield,” replied Cerval.
On the roof of the Incorruptibles’ headquarters, Alaina opened the cage and cocked her head at Brutus. For a second the big karrier looked back at her unblinkingly, then, with surprising delicacy, stepped along his perch and out onto the roof. He unfurled his wings and stretched, and Alaina once again marvelled at the beauty of the emerald and blue feathers at his neck.
She watched Brutus as he hopped up onto the parapet at the edge of the roof, extending one scaly leg. From a pocket, Alaina brought out a moleskin pouch wrapped loosely with a velvet ribbon. She held the pouch to Brutus’s leg, and carefully wound the ribbon round pouch and leg, tighter and tighter, until she was satisfied that there was no chance of the pouch coming loose.
She stood back, nodded almost imperceptibly at the big bird. He cooed once, stretched his great wings, and launched off the parapet and into the void. Alaina watched as he swiftly drew away, for a moment silhouetted against the moon, and then he was gone. She hoped he’d be delivering the message to Gori in Cerval’s estate within twenty hours. Then the old man would be prepared for the task which lay ahead. She hoped that the news the message would bring, that his son was more dead than alive, would spur him to action rather than paralyze him with grief.
Battersby Park was one of only a few green, outdoor spaces in The Smoke. The Commission officials who ran the city were intelligent enough to realise that they could keep the population suppressed more easily if they at least had the chance to occasionally enjoy a little sunshine, lie on the grass, walk their dogs or play ball.
The park wasn’t well looked after. Piles of dog crap were a perpetual hazard. But it was popular. There was a funfair of sorts, with battered steam-powered rides that occasionally flung fun-seekers into the undergrowth or blasted them with scalding steam. There was a mini-canal, in which youngsters could sail boats or paddle, so long as they could avoid the broken glass and debris that lurked beneath the murky water. And there was The Wall, a long, low wooden structure that overlooked the boating pond. Here people could pin up notices about missing dogs, coming events, even jobs and property to let. It was well-used, and only interfered with when a minion of the city state spotted something that might be interpreted as political or seditious.
This evening it was a little chilly, and only a few couples trying to escape the confines of their tiny flats were taking the park’s slightly less polluted air. Jamie Papadopolous and Verena Van Der Håsselblåd were among them. Newly engaged, they strolled along the path by the boating pond towards the wall. Unbeknown to Verena, Jamie was planning to add a ‘lovelock’ – a cast-iron padlock engraved with the couple’s initials – to the railing which had been attached to the wall for that purpose. It was a romantic gesture, which should have resulted in Verena embracing Jamie tenderly and whispering words of undying love in his ear. But Jamie was out of luck because as they couple rounded a big oak that hid one end of the wall, in the dying light of the day they saw, hanging, what at first appeared to be a huge starfish.
Disconcerted, but curious, they took a step closer. It was the more sharp-sighted Verena who first made out what the hanging object was. She gagged, doubled over, threw up the dinner that Jamie had just spent a week’s wages on. Jamie, wide-eyed, took a step closer, squinted at the object and realised it was once human: skinned, castrated, beheaded, hands and feet removed, nailed up and spread out in the form of a star. Like everyone else in The Smoke, he knew what the repellent tableau meant. Whoever this had once been had fallen foul of the Silencios.
oOo
6
THE SMOKE’S IMBALANCE OF WEALTH was astronomical. The richest one percent owned 90 per cent of everything and the richest half per cent – the Toppers – owned 80 per cent of that 90. Cerval Franks was somewhere in the top percentile. He could have lived a life of ease and luxury, either in The Smoke or on his remote estate.
Why then did he take a different tack?
The answer lay in his dynastic roots. Long before his ancestor had attempted to create life, the Frankensteins had been human traffickers. It was that familial conditioning as much as his burning desire for knowledge that permitted the otherwise urbane and sophisticated baron to dig up graves, hack at still-warm bodies, and assemble grotesque parodies of humanity. Ironically, even his disastrous attempts at creation only added to the family wealth – for they increased the Frankensteins’ unique knowledge of human physiology and brain functions, and raised the baron and his son to the apogee of medical science. The family was sought after by medical institutions and wealthy patients far beyond The Smoke’s boundaries.
All the Frankensteins had the magic touch when it came to investments. Generation after generation multiplied the family fortune until Cerval’s father died in a notorious Steam Air Ship disaster. The White Funnel’s newest and most luxurious air liner, known only as The 401, was on its maiden voyage when it was struck by a falling meteorite shower which punctured its lift systems. It crashed to earth from a thousand feet. The resulting explosion caused a crater h
alf a mile in diameter and there were no survivors.
Cerval had inherited everything.
At first he thought that giving it all away might assuage the guilt that dominated his days and his dreams, threatening always to Mood Swing him from active to inactive, but decided that in the long run that would achieve little. Instead, drawing on adolescent ideals of justice, liberty and fairness, he had proposed the Incorruptibles to Thorsten Laverack, and when his giant friend smilingly agreed to be his first recruit, Cerval poured finance and energy into the conscience-appeasing operation.
Despite his guilt, his conscience, his seriousness, Cerval had all the appetites of youth. Sometimes he longed just to be… a rich kid… with all the toys, the self-indulgence and the immunity that great wealth bought. He sublimated these desires by customizing his vehicles, ostensibly for practical reasons but loving their speed and the fact that they stood out from the crowd even while he himself, and his true purpose, remained secret.
His most prized toy was The Devil, Doctor Efrain’s most successful twin-engined Rubber Torsion Powered Personal Air Vehicle (R.T.P.P.A.V.) – nicknamed The Devil for seeming to have a forked tail. Cerval had financed its design and development and it remained only one of a handful of similar aircraft. Many copies of the design developed by others had suffered structural failure, the immense high-torsion rubber bands that powered them ripping through the fuselage, crushing everything inside, including the pilots and passengers. Efrain, however, understood RTP physics better than his imitators and The Devil was the perfection of the technology, able to fly non-stop from The Smoke to the Frankenstein estate.
‘Non-stop’ was the key for two reasons. First, there was nowhere to land en route; even if there had been, who knew how the murderous Mancits and Manus might respond to such a diabolical aerial intrusion? And, second, RTP craft could only fly from Winder Station to Winder Station, the winders being huge, heavy and (like all engines of any torque) steam-powered. Efrain was working both on electrical winders and synthetic rubber, two further reasons for the threats to his life: the rubber companies and the steam and coal industries knew that if he succeeded their profits would be at risk.
The Incorruptibles (Book One, Frankenstein Vigilante): Frankenstein Vigilante: The Steampunk Series (Frankenstein Vigilante. The Steampunk Series.) Page 4