The Incorruptibles (Book One, Frankenstein Vigilante): Frankenstein Vigilante: The Steampunk Series (Frankenstein Vigilante. The Steampunk Series.)

by Peter Lawrence

  There, Shelley Mary’s heart dropped… freefall… as she saw a Personal Air Vehicle, this one tiny, arrow-like, with a single paddle-prop. Projecting out from below it was a long box girder, and at the end of that girder a weight so heavy that it bowed it. Ropes and pulleys everywhere.

  In the background, a small paddle-prop winder – too small to handle The Devil but quite enough for this toy-like craft.

  “I can’t fly that thing!” Shelley Mary gasped.

  “You won’t have to,” Evangeline laughed, and then whistled sharply.

  A small head appeared in the P.A.V.’s cockpit, poking up over the sill. A child? Shelley Mary was about to object when the child stepped from the cockpit and revealed herself as a very small, wiry woman.

  “Say ‘hello’ to Josephine Douglas Bader,” said Evangeline.

  “Best pilot in The Smoke,” added Cerval. “You’ll be safe with her.”

  “With her, maybe, but not in that thing. It’s a toy!”

  “Fastest P.A.V. there is,” said Bader curtly.

  “We trust you, you trust us.” Evangeline was suddenly not so friendly. This seemed to be a challenge and Shelley Mary had to admit it was working. Right now, she wanted to be accepted by Evangeline more than anything else in life.

  “All right,” she said, knowing her future and her life were in the balance. “I trust you.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Cerval. He looked at Shelley Mary penetratingly.

  I wish he wouldn’t do that. It feels as if he can see right through me.

  A few moments later Shelley Mary was installed in the narrow cockpit, right behind Josephine. The P.A.V. was even tinier inside than it had seemed outside. Shelley Mary’s legs were stretched out in front of her, parallel to the ground, and beneath her she could see the mighty twelve-ply RTP bands, now torqued to their maximum.

  Her seat was different, too, from those of Cerval’s much larger twin-paddle Devil. It was ominously padded with several layers of deep-sea sponges. Shelley Mary strapped in tight and Evangeline leaned over her to check the buckles, so close that their cheeks touched. Evangeline turned and kissed Shelley Mary briefly, tongue flicking into her mouth. She had the most sensuous, the softest lips Shelley Mary had ever kissed in life – but perhaps no softer than those she had kissed in recent dreams.

  “Ascent mode,” Josephine Bader snapped. The moment was over.

  Shelley Mary wasn’t prepared for what happened next. It was nothing like the ordered launch of The Devil.

  Cerval and Evangeline stepped back from the P.A.V. and laid hands on a huge lever which Shelley Mary had not noticed before. When Josephine nodded at them once, sharply – she seemed to do everything sharply – Cerval and Evangeline heaved the lever back. There was a frighteningly loud twangggg! and the front end of the long girder sticking out from under the craft dropped away, plunging earthwards as gravity acted on the weight hanging from its end. It was a lever, a catapult that rocketed the P.A.V. forward and up. Shelley Mary screamed as she was thrust back into the thick padding of her seat.

  The P.A.V. climbed at a steep angle, and only when it began to flatten out, the castle dropping away behind them, did the diminutive pilot free up the paddle brake.

  The paddle prop began to spin. The RTP bands beneath Shelley Mary’s legs began to unspool as the PAV made a long, curving turn. Josephine twisted around to face Shelley Mary.

  “That’s always the worst part.” She was suddenly a different person, relaxed and easy. Clearly she hadn’t been snappish earlier, just tense. “It’s a new technique. In case we don’t have access to the aerodock.” A wry smile. “It doesn’t always work.”

  “I wish I’d known.”

  “No, you don’t,” replied Josephine. “You’d never have climbed aboard. Now, sit back and enjoy the ride. We’ll be there in maybe six hours.”

  Shelley Mary looked down at the castle, now far below. She could just make out the two figures on the roof, staring up at the departing P.A.V. When would she see them again? She felt her stomach lurch, but it wasn’t from the G-forces she’d just experienced.

  Though neither mentioned her, Cerval and Evangeline were relieved that Shelley Mary had left the castle. The tension that had built up so fast within the trio was a distraction, one that Evangeline dealt with far more effectively than Cerval. He did however, admit that Shelley Mary’s unexpected effect on them had a positive effect: the suppressed desires that had flashed between he and Evangeline from the moment they met were now out in the open.

  Right now, however, Thorsten was the priority.

  oOo

  9

  THE FIRST DECISION THAT CERVAL and Gori and their assistants had to make was how to repair Thorsten’s terrible skull wounds. Astonishingly there was no brain damage, but whole chunks of bone had been shaved down to the membrane and other areas shattered.

  The next decision would be where to cut. More specifically, what to amputate. Cerval was sure that the right arm would have to go, just below the shoulder; and, perhaps, the right leg, just below the knee. The other leg was still at risk but could probably be saved, and the left arm would be functional, though never as strong as it had been.

  Cerval did not want to be the one to make the critical decisions and he deferred to Gori, Thorsten’s father. They began with the skull.

  “We’ll have to remove and replace a lot of bone,” Gori concluded, pointing to the fearsome head wounds. Cerval breathed out, relieved that Thorsten’s father seemd prepared to go beyond a ‘safety first’ approach. Replacing large sections of skull would be dangerous, radical, but he was confident that the bronze and silver sections they’d screw into the healthy surrounding bone would be a far less risky solution than hoping for the ruined material to heal. And those metals, Cerval smiled to himself, were stronger than bone. The boy’s head would be a formidable weapon!

  Now Gori turned to the mangled limbs. Surprisingly, he proposed more radical surgery than Cerval, and Cerval had to persuade him that it was worth trying to save his son’s legs. There was time to see how – if – they healed.

  Meanwhile, they waited for Efrain’s blueprints to come through. Via karriers they knew that the Silencios were upping the pressure on the Doctor. His longtime assistant, Yip Harbottle, had disappeared. Fantasy Harbottle had put out a story that he had run off with a younger woman, but Cerval’s people didn’t believe it. The Doctor’s blueprints might be delayed, but Cerval was confident that, even in hiding, Efrain would respond to his request. The question was, when?

  Efrain lived under constant threat. He had survived more than one attempt on his life, the destruction of several of his fixed laboratories (which is why he now commuted between hidden bases – another advantage of being funded by Cerval Frankenstein) and now Yip had vanished. He took that loss hard. It forced him to realize that although Yip was to science as a child’s scooter to an Arielectro, he had been invaluable in his support and his straightforward commonsense. Efrain hoped against hope that Yip would show up one day, unharmed.

  Now, as he bent over a drawing board located in the back of an Oriental restaurant whose owners owed the Incorruptibles their lives, he put Yip out of his mind, concentrating intently on the half-finished blueprints.

  Miniaturization, thought Efrain. That’s the key. Prosthetics and controls small and light enough that a man could feel they were part of his own body. His advantage, here, was that the man in question was a giant. If he retained a reasonable fraction of his original strength, he ought to be able to tolerate the system Efrain had in mind.

  But the details? If the control medium were electricidad, the conduits and cables would have to be massive. Likewise the switch gear and the valves and capacitors. Even if Thorsten were big and strong enough to carry such a system, not even he could drag a quarter-ton battery pack behind him.

  So we’re back to steam, Efrain sighed.

  Conventionally, steam power required huge quantities of fuel to generate the pressure to drive turbines
and pistons but, in this case, the various motors could be made small, engineered by a blacksmith/watchmaker, and Efrain knew such a man lived on the Frankenstein estate.

  The pressure hoses that delivered the power to the motors/pumps: the system would need one coming. One going. And one to facilitate a reverse motion. Hydraulics were a miracle, particularly after the switch from water to high pressure steam and plant oils, only facilitated by his development of the densest artificial rubber; and that rubber meant that the pressure hoses might be kept down to a ricro in diameter. More weight savings. If Efrain could keep the overall weight below two hundred anchores – just over fifty kilos AMS – it should be manageable by someone as powerful as Thorsten. A hundred anchores would be better.

  The terminal – the ‘hand’ – could be interchangeable. Or adaptable. A hammer! Spin it around and it would be a spike. Spin it again – a claw!

  He continued sketching the system.

  The hydraulic tank didn't need to hold much. There’d be minimal leakage even at the pressures Efrain anticipated. Nor would the steam boiler be required to hold much water for short bursts of action. And the used steam would be condensed, fed back into the boiler, to be superheated and returned to miniature turbines which drove the pressure pumps which circulated the hydraulic oils.

  The furnace. Another problem to be solved. It could be primed with pressurized super-heated water, so that the furnace would simply have to maintain temperature rather than bring the water to operating heat from its ambient level. A saving in size and weight. But how to insulate the furnace and the tank from the body? And how to fasten the entire system to him without restricting his movement?

  Was there some way that superheated steam could maintain its temperature so that the boiler only required the smallest possible furnace? Could that furnace be powered not by coal or anthracite but by the strange will-o-the-wisp gases that rotting jungle vegetation sometimes produced? How could those gases be collected and stored? Compressed? Liquefied? If only he had more time to experiment.

  Efrain set aside these questions and turned to the simpler problem. Artificial legs were a snap. Especially if they were to be attached below the knee. He hoped they wouldn’t be necessary.

  oOo

  10

  OVER THE COURSE OF SEVENTEEN YEARS, Dam Superintendent P. G. Maguire had come to hate the River Latta. Overseeing the river and the Rowland Dam had taken up the best years of his life, and he’d had enough. Not only did he hate his job, but he hated his colleagues (half-witted grovellers and backstabbers) and, even more, his superiors (expenses-fiddling, animal-molesting perverts who couldn’t organise a shag in a bordello). Still and all, he maintained a perverse pride in his expertise. No one but he knew how to run a river that, polluted though it was, was still a commercial lifeline for The Smoke, and still – in parts – a leisure resource for its exhausted and worn-down citizens.

  Personally, P. G. Maguire dealt with being exhausted and worn-down by knocking back prodigious amounts of Doctor Garratt Baulcombe’s Medicinal Compound. Recommended for all ailments including influenza and haemorrhoids in humans, colic in dogs, fleas in cat and worms in dogs, it contained a high percentage of cocanana, a plant product much favoured by the Manus, who were prepared to die – and frequently did – to keep it out of the hands of the Mancits.

  Now P. G. got out his brown bottle of Doctor Baulcombe’s and took a good swig. He was in the machine room two-thirds of the way up the Rowland Dam, that bisected the Latta to the north of the city. Although, if Doctor Efrain was to be believed, the dam could have provided a fair amount of the city’s energy needs, in actuality it didn’t. P. G. didn’t know why it didn’t or why the Commission had not embraced Efrain’s radical proposals. To tell the truth, he no longer cared.

  His job was simply to make sure the dam regulated the tides; without it there would have been frequent floods. The machine room – the one aspect of his job that P. G. still enjoyed – overlooked the river on both sides, and was a symphony of brass, copper and cast-iron, a sonata of rivets, cables and cylinders. P. G. knew every inch of his system, knew exactly how to cajole it to raise or lower levels to a fraction of a ricro. So it offended him to execute as crude an adjustment as he was now being asked to make.

  Not asked. Told.

  By the stupid bastards on the top floor.

  P. G. took another swig, emptied the bottle, flung it into the rubbish bin. He made his way, swaying slightly, to the main control panel, a kaleidoscope of blinking bulbs, valves, switches and handles. He was pretty sure he was the only one who understood how to work it; he was certainly the only one who could fix it when it malfunctioned. He sighed, flexed his fingers. He could play the machinery as an expert musician might coax a melody from wood and catgut. He pulled a long knife-switch, pushed two thirty ricro diameter buttons, and then his fingers started to dance over the control panel. Maguire’s eyes were half-closed and his fingers might have had a life of their own.

  Beneath his feet, P. G. felt a tremor as the huge gates that regulated the water slid back further into their casings, allowing free rein to a crashing, foaming cascade.

  Dalton Trager Rhineheart looked nothing like most of the Chavaliers who revered him as their leader. Where they tended to be small and stunted, he was tall, gaunt and lean, projecting an aristocratic hauteur. The symmetry of his features should have been marred by his broken nose, but in fact this one blemish only made him handsomer and more commanding. People confided in Dalton, because he inspired in them a need to be liked by him. They ached for his approval. This meant that he had more intelligence about underground activities in The Smoke than even the best-informed Silencio, and certainly more than the police.

  Dalton Rhineheart and Cerval Franks might have been allies, since both were determined to transform The Smoke. But Rhineheart confined his fervour to the practical task of changing conditions in Harlesdon Marshes, and specifically for his Chavalier followers, whereas Cerval had a grander vision: to change the entire Smoke. And where Dalton had specific, practical ideas, Cerval’s were more abstract. Dalton was a pragmatist, Cerval an idealist. Moreover, at this point in their histories, Dalton could not bring himself to trust someone who originated in The Smoke’s privileged classes; and Cerval did not care to place the safety – the survival – of his small band of warriors in the hands of a Chavalier interested only in the advancement of his people.

  Dalton owed his leadership of the Chavaliers, and an increasingly single-minded following, to his role in the development of the revolutionary alloy, ReForTin (Resin Reinforced Tin). It was lighter, stronger and more versatile than iron and copper and their alloys, but it was a difficult technology. The required resin came from the dangerous deep forests, the home of Manus and Mancits, and the tin mines had been more or less exhausted. Only a few seams remained accessible, and Dalton and his followers, descendants of the original tin miners, guarded this resource with their lives. Their relationship with tin – and therefore with ReForTin – was as spiritual as it was practical. It had created their society, with all its quirks and customs. It was at the base of Chavalier culture and all the more significant because Dalton and his people believed that ReForTin could be their ticket to a better life.

  ReForTin’s threat extended beyond the iron industry to the coal and steam cartel because, where heavyweight machinery and vehicles required the pounding horsepower of steam engines, and the massive quantities of coal which steam power demanded, lighter ReForTin vehicles and equipment would run efficiently on far less energy. Worse, from the point of view of the industrial and economic status quo, ReForTin was perfect for the coming of electricidad which, as yet, did not have the brute power or stamina required to drive heavy machinery and transport.

  Iron, coal and steam interests pressed the Commission to act on ReForTin and since their contribution afforded the Commission power and the commissioners comfortable lifestyles, the Commission agreed. The commissioners were anyway growing wary of Dalton Trager Rh
ineheart. He, like Cerval Frankenstein, was one of the few prominent Smokies who might pose a credible threat to the status quo.

  Dalton Trager Rhineheart’s prominence in the Marshes, his growing power and the hope it generated, brought him many courtiers from the various Harlesdon groups. It was therefore no surprise when a renegade dynamista informed him of the plot to blow up the Senate. The dynamista had not had a change of political or religious heart. He had simply wanted to live a longer life, always a tough ambition for a suicide bomber.

  The suicidal dynamistas were terror for hire. Their leader, the Reverend Bonnot Robertson Falwell, had a remarkable hold over these anarcho-nihilists, hiring out his followers in exchange for huge payments to his church, a percentage of which he promised to his self-destroyed followers’ surviving relatives. Bonnot provided his fanatical congregation with the reassurance that suicide for their causes (and he defined the causes) would lead to a life of ease and sensual gratification on another plane.

  He wasn’t just the dynamistas’ priest, he was their organizer and manager. It occurred to very few of Falwell’s disciples that ‘organization’ and ‘anarchist’ or ‘nihilist’ were mutually exclusive concepts. One who did see that contradiction was Samwell McFee, the bomber chosen for the Senate mission. Even before he came to the conclusion that life, however miserable, was preferable to death by dynamite, he was beginning to question his faith in Bonnot. He therefore sought out Dalton and coughed up everything he knew, including his suspicion that it wasn’t Bonnot who wanted the Senate exploded. It was the Commission (presumably when no commissioners were in session). The sabotage, the violence and ensuing death would be pinned on Chavaliers, Incorruptibles, criminal gangs, foreign agitators – all the usual suspects. The more the Commission could inspire fear, the firmer its grip on society.