Gears of a Mad God Omnibus

by Brent Nichols

  She had a niggling feeling, like an itch she couldn't scratch. She knew the feeling well. It usually came to her when she was struggling with a tricky bit of machinery. Some part of her mind had figured out a solution. She just had to listen to herself to figure out what it was.

  The feeling had come on her as she left the lobby. She had learned something, then, in her confrontation with Jimbo. She ran through every word he'd said. He was looking for someone named Tanathos. She explored that idea, and decided it was a dead end.

  Well, if it wasn't something she'd heard, perhaps it was something she'd seen. What did she know about Jimbo, or his accomplice? The feeling, the mental itch, told her it was something about Jimbo, not the Englishman.

  She ran through what she knew of him. An inch or two shorter than she was, maybe five foot seven. Not especially strong for a man. Greasy, unwashed hair, dark brown in color. Brown eyes, sallow complexion, perhaps Italian or mixed blood. Fleshy, unpleasant face. Not too meticulous about shaving or washing.

  Colleen frowned. None of that was useful. Well, what had he been wearing? A red jacket and dark pants. Cheap canvas shoes. Under the coat? She struggled to remember. There was a cloth of some sort around his neck, like a bandana. A fairly distinctive cloth, with burgundy and white stripes. In fact, now that she thought about it, the collar of his shirt had the same pattern.

  He was much too slovenly to choose matching clothing. Could it be some sort of uniform? It was, she realized. She knew it, because she'd seen it before.

  She looked at the men. Smith was reading Latin phrases from his notebook and Carter was transcribing them onto hotel stationery.

  "Never mind that," she said, and they looked up. "We have a lead." Carter quirked an eyebrow, and she continued. "One of the cultists is a sailor. Maybe a bunch of them are. He's wearing a ship's uniform. That could be where Jane is. On a ship."

  The men stared at her. Finally Carter said, "Which ship?"

  "I don't know. But we can find out. I saw more uniforms just like it, hanging on a line in Chinatown. We find the laundry, we'll find the ship. And then we'll find Jane."

  They just looked at her, and the silence stretched out. Then Carter said, "Look, Colleen, there's no guarantee that your friend is on a ship. We don't even know that she's still alive."

  "That's not the point!"

  Carter sighed. "What is the point, then?"

  Colleen ground her teeth, then made herself take a deep breath. "The point is, it's a chance, and Jane's life is on the line."

  Carter was already shaking his head. "No, it's too risky. We're exposed on the streets. The cult has us outnumbered, and-" He stopped as Colleen stood. "Where are you going?"

  "I'm going to find Jane," she snapped.

  "Now, hold on. Don't do anything hasty. We went to a lot of trouble to keep you alive, you know. Don't get yourself killed now."

  "You want me to stay alive? Then you'd better come with me."

  Carter glared at her. She glared back. Then she said, "If you won't do it for me, then do it because it's not what the cult wants. You're supposed to be fighting the cult, aren't you?"

  He stared, his mouth opening and closing, and Smith laughed. He had a disturbing, raspy laugh, and it never quite reached his dark, intense eyes. "She's got you there, Phil. Stay here if you like. I'm going with her."

  Carter turned his glare on Smith, then said "Hmph!" and took out a pocket watch. "Fine. We'll go to Chinatown. But we'll go by way of the waterfront. The ferry is coming in."

  Chapter 4 – Striking Back

  Colleen watched the rest of Carter's team disembark from the ferry and immediately felt better. There were four of them, three men and a woman, and they all exuded a tough, competent confidence. There was a brief flurry of handshaking. Then Carter said, "This is Colleen. We'll do introductions on the way. We're going to Chinatown."

  They filled the convertible with luggage, left it at the docks, and took a pair of taxi cabs through Victoria. Colleen found herself sandwiched between two of the new arrivals, a stern-faced woman in her fifties, and a broad-shouldered young man with a black mustache and a lantern jaw.

  Carter sat beside the driver and twisted around in his seat to make introductions. "Colleen Garman, this is Margaret Nelson and Richard Dalglish."

  The woman smiled and said, "You must call me Maggie." She had a distinct southern drawl.

  "And I'm Rick," the man said. "We've already heard about you."

  "Maggie is a professor of antiquities, now retired from active teaching so she can work with us," Carter said. "Rick is part of the Canadian team. He's been seconded from your Dominion Police."

  "It's the Royal Canadian Mounted Police now, actually," Rick said. "Pleased to meet you, ma'am."

  "Call me Colleen."

  "A few things have changed since our last telegram," Carter interjected. "The opposition has kidnapped a woman who may have vital information. We're looking for clues to her whereabouts." He nodded to Colleen and she described Jimbo's uniform, and the laundry she'd seen in Chinatown.

  "I'm not sure exactly where I saw it," she admitted. "I was pretty distracted at the time."

  Carter chuckled at the understatement.

  "But it's fairly distinctive, and it's somewhere in Chinatown, so it shouldn't be hard to spot. How big can Chinatown be?"

  "Second-largest Chinatown in North America," Rick said cheerfully. "Only San Francisco has a bigger one."

  "Show-off," Maggie said with a smile.

  Chinatown was less terrifying on this visit. Even with night falling everything seemed less strange, less foreboding. In part it was because she had seen it before, but the biggest reason was that she was back with friends, and with a purpose.

  They divided into two groups, agreeing to stay fairly close together. Colleen walked with Carter and Smith, while the new arrivals worked their way up a parallel street. She was torn between a desire to rush and a terror of going too fast and missing something. She racked her brain, trying to remember landmarks from her first visit, but it was all a kaleidoscope of fragmented images. Was the kitchen before the opium den, or after? Did she see the laundry hanging in a street, or an alley?

  She needn't have worried. Before they reached the end of the block, Rick and another man, David Parker of the Bureau of Investigation, came jogging around the corner. "We found it," Rick said.

  Maggie and the last team member, a fat, older man named Garson, were standing in front of a clapboard building with a sign that said "Londry." Maggie gestured at a gap between buildings. "Is that what you saw?"

  Colleen looked where she pointed. Laundry hung in three tiers on closely-spaced lines. The middle tier was full of dark trousers, neckerchiefs, and white shirts. The shirt collars and neckerchiefs all bore a distinctive pattern of white-and-burgundy stripes. Colleen nodded.

  "The proprietor," Maggie drawled, "tells me these belong to the SS Arcadia. They aren't picking up their laundry until tomorrow afternoon, so they're in port for at least that long." She turned to Carter. "What now, boss?"

  "Let's go take a look," he said.

  They walked to the waterfront. It was full dark, and they kept to the shadows, circling wide around the streetlights as they slunk down the aptly-named Wharf Street. Smith was in the lead, and everyone froze when he raised his arm.

  The Arcadia was a vast shape looming in the darkness. She had a single chimney stack, so she was steam-powered, but Colleen could make out several masts as well. She was rigged for sailing, then.

  She was moored at a wharf. The seven of them stood in the shadow of a warehouse and looked the ship over. No one was in sight, but lights burned on deck, and light gleamed from a few portholes. Colleen eyed the ship, trying to guess her size. Three hundred feet long? Four hundred? Maybe forty feet wide? It was a lot of ship to hide one woman in.

  "What's the plan, boss?"

  Colleen wasn't sure who asked the whispered question, but it was Carter who answered.

  "We watch. We
have no idea what we're dealing with, or how many there are. So we set up surveillance, keep track of who comes and goes. Tomorrow we'll find out how long she's in port, and set up some kind of schedule."

  Surveillance? Tomorrow? Colleen thought of Jimbo, his feverish eyes, his knife, and knew there was no time to spare. She thought about arguing with Carter, decided it would be pointless, and shrugged.

  So be it.

  "Hang on, Jane," she murmured. "I'm coming." And she stepped out of the shadows.

  Carter's voice was an urgent hiss. "Colleen! What are you doing?"

  She turned to him, her heart thumping in her chest, almost hoping he could persuade her to stay back. But her voice was level as she said, "You do all the surveillance you want. I'm going after Jane." And she turned her back on the group, ignored Carter's sputtering voice, and set off down the wharf.

  She reached the ship, moving to the edge of the wharf where the ship cast a long stripe of shadow. The hull was close enough to touch, a pitted surface of chipped white paint and flaking rust. There was no gangplank, and the side of the ship rose above her like a wall. Colleen kept walking, hoping to find a way up.

  In the middle of the ship the hull was lower, and Colleen stood looking up. The top of the hull here was even with her head. She had no idea what lay beyond it. She shrugged and crouched, preparing to jump.

  A rustle of feet made her turn her head. Carter, Smith, Rick, and David Parker were marching up the wharf. She raised an eyebrow when they reached her, and Carter shrugged.

  Smith waved Colleen back, then sprang nimbly, clinging to the top of the hull. He lifted himself up until he could peer over the top, then pulled himself up and over.

  Colleen went next. Smith was crouched below the gunwale, a pistol in his hand. Colleen dropped into a crouch beside him, and the others quickly joined them.

  They were in the shadow of the forecastle. Electric lights on the masts burned down, painting the deck in alternating stripes of light and shadow. The deck was an orderly clutter of ropes and davits, lifeboats and pipework. For a long moment nobody moved. When Colleen realized they were waiting for her, she rose and darted to the forecastle.

  She found a door, unlocked, and slipped through. There was a corridor ahead, and a ladder leading down. She took the ladder, guessing that Jane would be hidden deep in the ship, away from prying eyes. They arrived at a lower deck, she had a quick glimpse of another corridor, dimly lit, and she took another ladder deeper into the ship. She could hear the rustle of footsteps as the team followed her, and the hum of machinery in the bowels of the ship.

  The ladder ended and she stepped into a corridor. It was an oppressively big ship, and her heart sank as the immensity of it sank in. However, there was nothing to do but keep on.

  The corridor was too narrow for two people to walk side by side, but Smith was close behind her, pistol in hand. The others were not far behind, and she saw more handguns. She headed down the corridor, glancing at the closed hatches that they passed. She was betting that Jane would be guarded, that there would be people and noise wherever she was.

  The corridor ended at a hatch, a door with rounded corners and a circular handle in the middle. Colleen glanced at Smith. He nodded, hefting his pistol, and she gave the door a push. It opened a crack, and she pushed it farther until she could peer out.

  She saw another corridor, but more plush than the one she was in. The floor was carpeted, the light fixtures were fancy rather than strictly functional, and the walls were perforated by doors rather than hatches. She guessed she was seeing the passenger section of the ship. A man in a crisp white uniform crossed her field of vision, not glancing her way, and she eased the hatch shut.

  The others looked at her and she shook her head. She was guessing that the entire ship wasn't crewed by cultists. The man she'd seen had lacked the depraved, half-mad look of the cultists she'd seen so far. And the passenger section just felt wrong as a hiding place. If Colleen was right, Jane wouldn't be in the passenger section. She'd be tucked away in a boiler room or a corner of the hull, somewhere only a small part of the crew might go.

  They retraced their steps, took a perpendicular corridor, froze at the sound of echoing footsteps, then resumed moving as the footsteps faded.

  A left turn had them moving toward the stern. The corridor ended at an open hatch, and Smith peered in, then stepped through. Colleen followed, and smiled. They were in the boiler room. She felt immediately at home. It was one vast room, as wide as the ship, but crowded by vast steel shapes. She could see two boilers, with only a narrow space between them. Pipes ran in every direction, and valves and gauges sprouted everywhere.

  A man came walking from behind a maze of pipes and stopped, staring at them in astonishment. He was greasy and dirty, wearing stained coveralls and carrying a wrench. Smith pointed his pistol at the man, and Carter hustled forward, took the wrench from the man's hand, and said softly, "Keep quiet if you want to live."

  The team members spread through the boiler room and found two more sailors, dirty sullen men who might have been cultists or innocent bystanders. Carter herded them into an empty coal bunker and jammed the wrench through the wheel on the hatch, effectively locking it.

  It was David Parker, the burly Bureau of Investigations agent, who spotted the hatch in the back bulkhead of the boiler room. He cocked the snub-nosed revolver in his fist, glanced at the others, and pulled the hatch open.

  There was a gunshot and Parker fell back. Rick, the Mountie, dragged Parker back as Carter and Smith fired through the hatch. When the bulk of a boiler was between Parker and the hatch, Rick said to Colleen, "Do what you can for him." Then he ran to join Carter and Smith.

  Colleen stared down helplessly at the man. She knew how to fix machinery, not people. She shut her eyes for a moment, made herself breathe deeply, and murmured, "You can do this. You can."

  She opened her eyes. Parker was staring up at her, his face grey, his lips pressed tightly together. She looked him over. The damage was easy to spot. There was a hole in his left sleeve, just below the shoulder joint. There was no blood on the fabric, but blood was pooling on the floor beneath him. Well, that would be the first priority, then.

  In the corner of her eye she saw the others charge through the hatch, going deeper into the ship. She shrugged. She had her hands full for now.

  Her one attempt to get Parker's jacket off left him gasping and white-faced with pain. She balled her hands up, frustrated, looked around for something she could use to cut the fabric away from the wound, and finally asked him, "Do you have anything sharp?"

  He nodded, and pointed to his front pants pocket with a shaky right hand. Colleen dipped her hand in the pocket and came up with a folding razor. She cut apart the seam of his jacket where the sleeve met the shoulder, tugging to tear the threads in the places her razor wouldn't reach. Then she went to his wrist and drew the sleeve down and off.

  His shirt was a bloody mess. Colleen told herself that it was a repair job, nothing more. A mechanical malfunction that happened to involve blood and flesh. She sliced the shirt sleeve open, wielding the razor with delicate precision, and eventually slid the sleeve from his arm.

  She could see the bullet's entry hole, a small black circle oozing dark blood, but not the exit. "You'll have to roll onto your side," she told him. He nodded, used his right arm to stabilize his left wrist, and she slid her hands under his back, lifting, helping him roll. He grunted with pain but didn't cry out.

  The exit wound was a mess. A chunk of flesh was missing, leaving a gory, ragged hole two inches across. Colleen cut a section of his shirt sleeve, wadded it up, and pressed it into the hole. She wrapped the rest of the sleeve around his arm and got him to hold it in place with his free hand. She looked around for something to hold it all in place, and finally used Parker's shoelaces.

  By the time she was done blood was soaking through the makeshift bandage, but slowly. He wouldn't bleed to death, not soon. Now they just had to get him off of the
ship. She draped his jacket over him and got up to take a look around.

  There were four boilers in all, three of them cold. The fourth boiler was lit, a fair amount of pressure showing on the gauge, enough to run a few onboard systems, she supposed. She moved past the lit boiler to the hatch at the back of the room and peeked through the opening.

  Carter, Smith, and Rick hadn't advanced very far. Rick was no more than six feet past the hatch, pressed into a gap between thick pipes on the wall of the corridor. Carter was a few feet past him, on the other side of the corridor, flattened into a hatchway. Smith was a short distance beyond, crouching behind more pipe. Shadows moved deeper in the corridor, a shot rang out, and all three men flinched. They were pinned down.

  Colleen drew back. The longer they remained stuck, the longer the cultists had to circle around, or to get rid of Jane. Clearly something had to be done, but what?

  Her eyes drifted naturally to the lit boiler. They had the awesome power of steam at their fingertips, if they could figure out how to tap it. She examined the boiler and the surrounding equipment. The water level was decently high, so she could crank up the heat without too much danger. She examined the firebox. There was a coal hopper, almost full, and a grate to allow coal to tumble into the fire. She kicked the grate open, sent coal pouring into the firebox, and opened the air vent. The needle on the pressure gauge twitched, then crept upward.

  This was steam power on a larger scale than Colleen had ever worked with. She took her time examining the pipes, hoses, and gears around her. She found a pipe with a T-intersection on it, the base of the T ending after six inches as if the pipe had been cut off. Above the cut-off was mounted a red-painted handle. She tugged the handle gently, and steam came hissing out of the pipe end. She shoved the handle back and the steam stopped.

  Her eyes scanned the room and fell on coils of hose mounted in racks on one bulkhead. She pulled down a coil. The hose was thicker than her arm, stiff but moderately flexible. It felt like rubber wrapped in canvas. She dragged the end of the hose over to the T-intersection. There was a clamp on the hose end, and she found that the hose end fit neatly over the base of the T. She used the clamp to lock the end of the hose in place.