Dalton was lost. He didn’t know how to respond. And in that moment, his innermost thoughts were exposed. His idealism, his courage, his spirit all dematerialized as the fierce light of untold riches shone on them. By the time he reined in that understandable and human greed, he had lost the room.
First Cerval stood. Then Paulina, Thorsten, Alaina, Ricardo, Shelley Mary and Efrain. As one, they turned and headed for the big double doors through which Colette had entered.
“Wait!” said Dalton, desperation in his voice. Cerval stopped at the door and turned back to face him:
“Do what you think is right, Dalton. I’m not your conscience. None of us are.” As they left the room, Colette turned back to Dalton.
“Well,” she said. “Do we have a deal?”
Outside the room, Cerval hurried down the corridor.
“Do me a favour,” he said to Alaina and Ricardo, “have the Devil pre-flighted. And all our other P.A.V.s. We’re going back to the estate.”
“Consider it done,” said Alaina.
“We’re taking Evangeline home. She’s more important than The Smoke or anyone in it.”
oooOooo
The Fear
Book Two of Frankenstein Vigilante, The Steampunk Series
Chapter One
IT WAS DIFFICULT TO PINPOINT THE MOMENT when the smouldering fire of revolution in The Smoke finally sputtered and died. When the Incorruptibles retreated to the Frankenstein estate to nurse their wounds? When Dalton Trager Rhineheart sold out to Colette Garcia Cognito? In any event, it seemed only moments before the Commission regained its stranglehold on the city-state, and its allies in the coal, iron and steam cartels took heart. Colette would lead the way and life would be good.
At one minute past midnight, Battersby Power Station exploded.
The hulking, stone-built structure, more castle than industrial building, was blown to fragments, everyone in it vaporized. The explosion also blasted a massive crater in the accumulator caverns beneath the station, creating a basin as wide and long as Battersby Park itself. In the five minutes following midnight, every sub-accumulator in The Smoke blew up, in a catastrophic chain reaction that spread darkness, death and panic throughout The Smoke.
No one would ever be able to assess the real effect of the disaster, partly because many who died were reduced to dust, partly because The Smoke wasn’t the kind of place that could accurately account for its population. But the death roll was in the tens of thousands. Houses, offices, warehouses and factories were reduced to brick-sized pieces of rubble. Bridges collapsed, roads were cratered, vehicles tossed into the air like handfuls of nuts and bolts.
And then the disturbances began, what eventually became known as the Electricidad Riots. Since the downfall of the Silencios and the coming of electricidad, the citizens of The Smoke had lived in an uneasy limbo, hoping for things to get better, shrugging resignedly when they didn’t. It was as if the explosions had blown the lid off their frustration. Looting started within minutes of the blast. Individually and in marauding bands, Smokies stole whatever they could find, whatever had any value; and if anyone tried to stop them, that was an invitation to a brutal beating, a violent death.
Murder was a by-product of the looting. But it wasn’t long before it became an end in itself, street predators raping, assaulting, killing with a violence that might have shocked a Manu cannibal.
A couple of hours before the explosions, roiling black clouds had signalled a coming thunderstorm, and Battersby Power Station technicians had begun their routine preparations to capture the coming lightning to convert it into usable power. The father of electricidad, Doctor Pedro Robledo Efrain, and his young assistant Siddeley Yip-Harbottle, were in his lab working on a project for the Incorruptibles, trialling the latest version of Evangeline Evionne’s prosthetic legs. As the thunder rolled and the lightning flashed above his house in suburban Ussher, Efrain glanced up nervously, although Siddeley seemed barely aware of the threatening weather.
In the early days of electricidad, Efrain had supervised the power station during the critical lightning-collection moments. Then, he had been acutely aware that the success of the Electricidad Consortium that he had founded was dependent on the safe capture and conversion of lightning and, though he was a modest man, he had felt that his genius was vital to the process. By the time of the disaster, however, he was learning to trust his well-trained staff. Besides, tonight’s storm came in so fast, the rain pounding down so furiously, that he knew he could not get to the power station in time to oversee the operation.
He focussed on the work in hand.
“Don’t worry Doc,” said his young assistant, “they’ve done this loads of times. Nothing’s going to go wrong.” Smiling wryly at her self-possession, Efrain consoled himself with the thought that she was right. His staff had collected and stored the power of lightning many times before – why should tonight be any different?
But that night was different. Very different.
As the rain pelted down and the thunder rolled, the power station’s people worked the gigantic knife switches, turned the massive potentiometer dials and monitored the huge brass meters even as, with a powerful, humming energy, the control motors thrust Battersby’s cast-iron antennae up into the night sky, probing, searching for that lightning strike, to suck electricidad out of the heavens, transform it into controllable, functional energy.
Moments before midnight, the first lightning bolt struck the antennae, appeared to consume them as it travelled down through the above ground transformers – and at one minute past midnight, the imprisoned lightning began to detonate with unimaginable force.
The next day, as dawn rose bright and clear – clear as it could be in this filthy coal-smoky world – with no trace of the previous night’s extreme weather, the full extent of the damage to the city became clear. Most of the affluent suburbs, built on higher ground, had survived more or less unscathed – including, ironically, Doctor Efrain’s home base in Ussher. The serious damage was mostly in the areas where the sub-accums were situated: the poorer quarters and industrial zones like Burrowham.
More shocking than the physical damage, however, was the almost instant disintegration of The Smoke’s already rotting social fabric.
Police Chief Bar One mobilized his force but their free passage was hampered by huge piles of rubble, tangled metal wrecks which had once been steamers, jitneys and hackneys, as well as bodies, both human and animal.
Hampered, too, by the pitiless barbarity of looters, rioters and opportunistic thieves. Who were they, these people who seemed to appear from nowhere, pillaging shops and dwellings, barricading streets and setting fire to steamers? No one quite knew; although it was a fact that many in The Smoke had been un- or under-employed for decades, bitterly resentful of the concentration of wealth in the Commission’s and the affluenzos' hands. The brief period following the death of Silencio supremo Franklin Rooseveldt Pfarrer at the hands of the Incorruptibles, when it seemed there might be some hope for the future, had not been long enough for these hatreds to fade. Now the explosions and the chaos which followed provided an opportunity for sweet revenge.
Keira Specklestone Pfarrer, only daughter of the dead Silencio chief, had been woken by the detonations, which were close enough to shatter a couple of the bullet-proof windows of the mansion she had once shared with her father. Designed to look old, but actually built only a few years ago, Cranbury Court offered dozens of bedrooms, as well as dining and living rooms of cavernous proportions. Franklyn Rooseveldt had a preference for the baronial style, and those rooms were decorated with invented coats of arms and the heads of big game animals bought in bulk. Now Keira Specklestone lived in the huge house alone, apart from numerous maids, butlers, cooks, handymen, drivers and the handful of freelance Silencios who, like ronin, had attached themselves to her household as bodyguards. She had assumed that her staff would attend to whatever had caused the sudden noises, and went back to sleep.
The
next morning, arising at the crack of eleven, Keira decided that she wanted to visit Rrods & Phortnum, despite distant sounds of riot and mayhem. But if Keira Specklestone was unaware of the smell of burning and death, the rumours of murder and rape, the maid who brought her morning tea wasn’t. She had family in town, and one of them had only narrowly escaped a marauding mob.
“Miss,” she began fearfully, “maybe you shouldn’t…” but it was if Keira were deaf. “Tell… tell… ” Keira couldn’t remember any of her drivers’ names. “Tell them to get my steamer ready. The one with the zebra-skin seats. And run my shower.” The maid saw that Keira wasn’t going to listen to sense, went to the bathroom and ran the shower, then fled to the servants’ quarters and passed on the message. None of the chauffeurs wanted to drive the steamer out into the unknown dangers of The Smoke, but the Silencio newcomers were not so fearful. Violent by nature and training, they were also courageous in their own way, not ones to shrink from conflict. Besides, this might be an opportunity to further ingratiate themselves with Keira and rise up the ladder of her household.
Because Cranbury Court was situated on high ground on the outskirts of The Smoke, the fearful damage of the previous night was not obvious for the first few miles; though groups of UnderGrunts were assembled here and there, restless, like carnivores scenting blood but unsure which way the wind was blowing. The Silencios – a driver and three bodyguards – recognized the threat these groups represented, yet weren’t afraid. They were professionals; the street people were amateurs. They stoked the custom steamer’s boilers, deftly operated the speed levers and gripped their Ximans more tightly.
Keira was oblivious as she gazed through the armoured windows at the passing scene, which gradually became less leafy as they passed out of Cranbury into the city centre. The people didn’t register, not simply because they were UnderGrunts but because she didn’t recognize anyone as human unless they were either friends or celebrities. There was little animosity in her attitude, simply indifference. As to the damage to roads and buildings, the steamer bouncing uncomfortably through potholes and swerving violently around wreckage, she just wondered why, at the level of taxes Daddy paid, the Commission didn’t at least repair the roads.
Daddy. For a moment tears filled her eyes but truth to tell he was already fading fast into the past. Keira lived only in the present, her sole purpose the indulgence of every current whim, at least until it quickly passed.
The Silencios grew grimmer – silent – as the steamer closed on The Smoke’s centre. The worst of the rioting and looting had been concentrated here, where the pickings were the richest. The destruction was far more obvious than at the start of the shopping expedition. Even Rrods itself was severely damaged, its elegant window mannequins lying sprawled and headless, walls cracked and blackened from fire, iron and glass doors hanging. The Smoke’s most exclusive store had a beleaguered air to it, emphasized by a volatile mob of wannabe looters, gathering in dangerous numbers, but held at bay for the moment by Ximan-toting guards wearing Rrods’s plum-coloured livery.
The Silencios read the UnderGrunts’ hungry gazes and knew that sheer numbers – and the prizes within the store – would soon overcome the mob’s fear of the guards.
The driver made a decision. “Miss,” he said, turning to Keira and speaking through the vehicle’s internal AvCom. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“What isn’t a good idea?” asked Keira blandly.
“A shopping expedition? At this time? I mean, with the explosions and riots and all that.”
“Explosions? Riots? What are you talking about?” she asked. She was intent on the purchasing orgy to come and had already forgotten the blasts of the night before. The Silencio driver turned to the bodyguards and rolled his eyes. Could any human be this unaware? Nevertheless, he persisted: “I don’t like the look of some of the folk out there.” He was astonished to be interrupted by a high-pitched giggle. “Heeheeeheeee! No one likes the look of them. They’re UnderGrunts! Now, come on, slowpoke, park this baby and let’s buy!”
The driver and one bodyguard stayed to guard the vehicle from any UnderGrunts wanting to try their luck, and the two others accompanied Keira into the embattled store.
A few moments later Keira found herself in her favourite department, Bustiers, Blousons and Breeches. It seemed unscathed, thick carpets unruffled, mahogany counters extending into the distance, haughty-looking mannequins displaying the department’s eponymous clothing. However, it seemed that Keira was the only customer. Her Silencio bodyguards looked round, sharp eyes flickering, keeping their Ximans hidden but ready for instant use. They weren’t taking any chances.
“Good morning, Miss Pfarrer,” Petrina Butler Sheldrake greeted her. She was the assistant who usually served Keira when she was in the mood for a new bustier or blouson. She had recognized the heiress, but Keira did not recognize her. “Mmm,” she mumbled, barely noticing Petrina, eye already caught by some hand-embroidered purple breeches.
Petrina lived in the heart of The Smoke, in the crowded tenements that were home to much of the city’s population. Waking to the explosions and looking out at the mayhem the dawn revealed, she had thought about staying home but knew that if she didn’t go in she’d be sacked; and she was the only family member earning. She was a brave girl, and set out on her usual morning journey, horribly aware of the frisson of violence that filled the air. Now she was at work, she could barely stop herself bolting from what she suspected would become a lethal trap if looters broke in. She hoped fervently that Keira might be on one of her famous shopping binges. That would at least make the journey worthwhile, augmenting her wage with a little commission and, perhaps, a tip.
“Are you looking for anything in particular, Miss Pfarrer?” she asked brightly.
“Oh, everything and nothing,” replied Keira, “as if it’s any of your business.”
If it’s not my business, then whose is it? thought Petrina. I’m the shop assistant! The fucking retail adviser! But she said nothing and smiled sweetly. “Well, let me know.”
“Oh, I will,” said Keira. “Just follow me around.” She dug her hands into a display of silk bustiers, tossing them to the floor as she searched for the one that might spark her desire. Petrina scrambled to pick them up. The store deducted damage from her pay.
Suddenly bursts of gunfire echoed from the street, screams of agony, roars of fury, and Petrina glanced toward the sounds, terrified.
The two Silencio bodyguards looked at each other. One went to investigate, one stayed to keep an eye on Keira. It was a bad mistake on the part of the first Silencio. Several departments over, in Lawns and Gardens, he was waylaid, and although he got off a burst of Ximan fire, he was quickly overwhelmed by sheer numbers and beaten to death with a giant terra cotta planter.
Keira was oblivious to everything around her, including Petrina’s agitation. She held up a black and scarlet bustier against her torso, gazing at herself in the mirror. If there was only one thing that she was aware of, it was that she was good-looking, tall and willowy, angles softened voluptuously where they needed to be.
Her reflection pleased her.
Her eyes remained fixed on her own image even as a visceral roaring came from Lawns and Gardens and built in volume, overlaid with the sound of smashing glass, more gunfire.
Running feet.
Approaching.
The furious sounds of the mob came closer and even as Petrina Butler Sheldrake’s nerve failed and she retreated towards the darker recesses of the changing rooms, a gang of UnderGrunts broke into Bustiers, Blousons and Breeches. They were armed with sharp-edged and sharp-pointed gardening tools. Finally it percolated through to Keira that something was wrong, and she turned blankly toward the wild-eyed men.
Peeking out from behind a changing room curtain, Petrina gasped as she saw that one of the invaders was carrying a severed Silencio arm, blood dripping on Rrods’ luxurious carpet. That’ll never come out, she thought, despite her fear. T
hey’ll dock my pay!
A moment later the man dropped the bloody arm, looked straight at her as a hungry lion might look at a wildebeest, and leapt towards her. She screamed, shrank back into the changing room; but he grabbed her and dragged her out, ripping her dress from neck to waist and hurling her onto the floor.
Others seized Keira. They were shouting, growling, drooling, but Keira could not make out the words. Only when she felt the pain of their grip, of an open-handed slap in the face, a punch in the gut, did it dawn on her that she was in deep trouble. That and the sound of the assistant’s scream, the rasp of tearing bombazine. She whirled towards the source of the scream and glimpsed Petrina’s semi-naked body, a brute unbuckling his trousers while others held the girl down. Violent hands pulled her away from the sight, and her glance panned across scores of men racing through the store with armfuls of luxury goods – top hats, silk waistcoats, Malacca canes. Now women appeared in Bustiers, Blousons and Breeches, ignoring the rampant men and ransacking the shelves, stuffing satin and silk garments into Rrod’s famous plum-coloured bags.
Why do UnderGrunts need lingerie? Keira asked herself before she was thrown to the blood-stained carpet and pinned down. Eager hands tore her clothes from her. It wasn’t courage that prevented her from screaming, it was sheer incomprehension, an unwillingness to believe that these animals had the temerity to touch her.
To hurt her.
Only now did she see the man looming over her, his rigid cock in one hand - and only now did she scream. His only response was to grin: “C’mon, darlin’, get this up yer. Or down yer, for all I care.” He laughed. She screamed again. He knelt and tried to enter her – “Hold her still, willya, for fuck’s sake!” – while others held their hands over her mouth.
The Incorruptibles (Book One, Frankenstein Vigilante): Frankenstein Vigilante: The Steampunk Series (Frankenstein Vigilante. The Steampunk Series.) Page 22