Thirty Days Later: Steaming Forward: 30 Adventures in Time

by Harry Turtledove

  What is that? How did I get here in this barn? My lunar friend, you are too impatient. A tale must not be rushed to be properly told. And I am hardly through my laundry duties, as you can see. You have never had to pump water quietly, have you? No, you slosh the oceans around without a care in the world. I have to rinse all the soap out of this shirt and that takes a lot of water and wringing. So allow me to continue both my labors and my narrative, please.

  The money came easily. I bought luxurious Italian clothes. Quite nice. Not like these filthy rags. I bought drinks and dinners for entire rooms of acquaintances. I stayed in the best rooms in the casino.

  But as the years went by, I started to get sloppy. I’d make foolish bets that I assumed I’d recover from. Fortunes were gained, but then lost. Not everyone was fooled. Dealers noticed, and had to get their cut of the winnings. I had to buy my way out of a potential scandal more than once. I reluctantly made friends with very unsavory characters.

  My glorious run came to an end three months ago; the mistress of fortune abandoned me. The Casino, where all the staff knew I was gaming their patrons, ejected me. I was down to the coins in my pockets and literally owed a crooked lender an arm and a leg. For my own safety, I had to leave the island of Castello. I caught a ride to the nearby town of Treviso, trying to get the means to move farther away. I started playing small card games in the taverns there, avoiding anyone that I had hoodwinked at Casino di Venetia.

  While there, I saw a broadsheet announcing a Twenty-and-One card game competition in Edinburgh, Scotland. Huzzah! A new location. No one would know me. The perfect game to get my fortune back. This was it! Back to my world of silks and brocade.

  It took three days of crafty card play, but I was able to afford the airship fare, two exceptional Italian suits for presenting myself properly as a gentleman of means, and a new steamer trunk. I caught the one-hop airship flight from Venice that took me straight to Scotland’s capitol. When I landed … well, that was when the tables turned.

  The competition sign-up booth was at the Edinburgh airship port. While waiting for my trunk, I queued up to register for the games. A friendly gent struck up a conversation, asking if I was excited to try my hand at the international event. I, of course, answered with an excited “yes,” given that I knew this would be my grandest opportunity to regain, and perhaps surpass, my previous fortunes.

  He introduced himself as Angus Sutherland, and asked if I had heard of a Gambler’s Friend. Without waiting for an answer, he quietly asked if I was interested in purchasing one. He surreptitiously pulled one out of an interior vest pocket, and gave me a quick peek at it. I proudly replied, perhaps bragged, that I wasn’t interested because I already had one. He retorted that the quality of the instrument declined precipitously after the first nine were made; he could sell me serial number nine, the last of the well-manufactured ones. “Not interested,” I responded with a smile, “I have serial number one!” With that, he grabbed me by the shoulder of my coat with one hand, and dragged me out of the line. “Unhand me this instant!” I shouted in my best English to gain favor with the crowd. Instead, three or four men stepped out of the line to help him drag me over to a constable’s stall.

  “We have found him! We have Venator!” Angus shouted. “Send a telegram to Drake and McTrowell! Tell them to get here as quickly as possible!”

  I writhed against his grasp, slipped out of my coat, and blindly ran. Of course, I initially headed straight for a dead-end hallway. As I skidded to a halt, I heard Angus shout behind me, “Get him! That’s Nunzio Venator!”

  Now, I am not known as a fast runner, but on that day, my patron god Mercury couldn’t have caught me. I sprinted through the terminal, knocking down a couple of people who got in my way as I made my way out of the front double doors. Once out in the evening dusk, I hopped upon the first unhitched horse I saw, kicked it into a gallop, and headed north out of town.

  That mount gave me a good ten-mile run before it flagged. With the cover of darkness, I slipped into an old barn that was much smellier and unkempt than this one, and pilfered water and grain for my ill-gotten steed. I assessed my situation. I only had the clothes on my back and a few coins in my pockets. And what useless bits of metal they were! My lire weren’t going to do me any good here in Scotland. I decided to sleep there despite the disgusting stench from the dairy cows crowding the place. I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of baying hounds and a man yelling that they had picked up my scent. I remounted my nag and was out in a flash, again heading north in the moonlight. The Grain Moon, I believe. And thank goodness for its light, as I was without a torch. Or any sense of self-preservation either. Careening over hills, fields, streams, and all of it uneven and rocky. The nag must have gotten another five miles before breaking her hind leg. I pressed on by foot without looking back. That was a month ago.

  And here I am today. After a month of skulking from barn to barn, moving only at night. What’s that, you say? They are still following me? Is that barking I hear? My clothes are soaking wet! I am dressing anyway. Oh! Oh! These clothes are painfully cold! Wake up you stupid horse. I need a fast escape.

  What’s wrong with you? Oh no, you’re a plow horse! You aren’t going to be fast enough! That box of matches, I’ll start a fire and burn this useless barn down! That will slow down those that hunt me! Burn! Burn!

  Outside I shout jests at my pursuers and their band of nimrods! I call them stupid and foolish, and head north, ever north, under you, my faithful Harvest Moon.

  The Fall of the Falcon

  by Anthony Francis

  Somewhere in Edinburgh was a rat, and Liberation Academy Cadet Jeremiah Willstone was determined to find it — even if it got her expelled. But as she flew crazily through the city, she was increasingly unsure whether she was more likely to be expelled — or killed.

  The tracker swung left, and Jeremiah followed suit, banking so hard with her “borrowed” Falconer’s wings that all of Edinburgh seemed to barrel-roll around her … then, as she feared, her ever-vivacious inner ear decided to get in on the spinning, too.

  Dizziness swept over her, followed by nausea. Her gorge rose, even as her body fell, and she barely avoided a church steeple. The maneuver hooked her into a narrow four-storey alley — but even as she lost her way, her tracker showed she was gaining ground.

  Earlier, the Lady Georgiana Westenhoq had dismissed her plan. “Its directionality won’t be the best,” the computer pronounced from her clockwork-and-vacuum-tube throne, inspecting the device Jeremiah had cobbled together to track the infectious Foreign gearwork which lurked in the streets of Edinburgh. “You’ve got the resonances right, but the antenna’s too small—”

  “Oi!” Jeremiah said, protectively taking the dish, no larger than a salad bowl, from her roommate. Georgiana might be the best computer at Liberation Academy, but she was no engineer. “You try fitting a larger detector within the weight limits of Falconer’s wings—”

  “I thought you grounded,” Georgiana said suspiciously. “Given your inner ear—”

  “The Dean told me ‘tracking those bloody gears is of highest importance,’” Jeremiah retorted, but Georgiana raised an arch eyebrow, and Jeremiah sighed. “Navid said he had it on good authority they could replicate, infest living tissue, even meddle with time—”

  “Navid also said ‘be effective, not reckless.’ You were grounded for a reason—”

  “Unless you’ve a better idea for tracking those clockwork parasites,” Jeremiah said, “this is our best option: a ranged detector, capable of scanning at Falcon-wing speed, so we can scan whole neighborhoods from the air — Georgiana? What have you thought of?”

  “A better idea,” Georgiana said, turning to the locator board opposite her throne. “Apply your approach to the city-wide network for tracking cadet locator brooches. Then we can scan the whole of Edinburgh at a single stroke — and find any trace of those monsters.”

  There! Her quarry wasn’t a rat, but a bat, a glitteri
ng of gears showing it had succumbed to the mechanical plague. Jeremiah grinned, even as her stomach churned. Dragonflies might be her favorite flying creatures, but she wore Falconer’s wings, and falcons ate bats, didn’t they?

  But the tiny bat, guided by a clockwork brain, darted quick and clever through stovepipe and antenna, and the indicator beads on Jeremiah’s propulsion canisters fell dangerously low. She found herself hard pressed to keep up with the creature — or to keep down her lunch.

  Her wings clipped a guy-wire, and she heard a scream behind as something toppled — but she opened the throttle on her wings to full power. She only had one tracking nodule left, and the dart gun was a projectile weapon; miss your target, and who knows what you might hit?

  With only a minute’s flight left, she had to close the gap!

  “Hacking the locator might get me expelled,” Georgiana said, slotting Jeremiah’s wax cylinder into a reader slot in the opened hood of the locator array. “But if I feed the resonance profile into the locator network, switch the network to active sensing, then … gotcha!”

  The spectroscope’s screen lit with the glowing green lines of the streets of Edinburgh — speckled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of red glowing dots, like a bird’s-eye view of an enormous swarm of luminous ants, all moving slowly with purpose.

  “Like a villainous Christmas,” Jeremiah said, stepping closer to the huge glass disc, looking at a dense concentration of dots northeast of campus, a curdling swarm in a riverfront warehouse on the Waters of Leith. “We should start our investigation … here—”

  But as her finger neared the dial, all the red dots fled outwards at once, like cockroaches fleeing a sparked kitchen gaslight. “Did I do that?” Jeremiah asked, whirling to Georgiana, who was plugging herself back into her computer throne. “The whole city’s on the move!”

  “Blood of the Queen!” Georgiana said. “They’ve detected the active scanning!”

  “Blast!” Jeremiah said. “We’ll head them off. Uh … where are they going to?”

  “I — I can’t tell,” Georgiana said. “There’s no pattern! They’re fleeing at random!”

  Jeremiah turned and stared at the dial. The fire ants were fleeing at random — that is, not just fleeing outward in an ever-expanding ring, but losing time by crossing back over themselves. But these gear-infested monsters weren’t stupid — it had to be deliberate randomness.

  “This isn’t random flight,” Jeremiah said. “We know where they’re coming from, but they know they’re being tracked. They’ll have to flee the city entirely, get out of range — but a caravan to a safe house is as useless to them as a big red arrow pointing straight at it!”

  “They can’t converge on a safe location,” Georgiana said, beginning to comprehend. “So they need to flee in a way that obscures their ultimate goal. But how does that help us? They’ve got us thoroughly baffled—”

  “Use those vacuum tubes embedded in your head,” Jeremiah said. “Run a, what was it you called it, a Pearson component analysis to see where the different masses of them are going. No — where they’re mostly not going. That will show what they’re trying to hide!”

  Georgiana sat bolt upright in her chair. “Signal and noise,” she said, and her crown of vacuum tubes crackled. “Factor apart the major movements, exclude random noise, map to the compass directions — and find the stragglers on routes deliberately not chosen by the mass!”

  She pointed. “There!” she said, and Jeremiah gasped as the map reformed itself into rainbow brigades as regimented and orderly as military maneuvers — with one big gap in the formation, with a red dot at its center. “That’s what they’re trying to hide—”

  “Like a general,” Jeremiah said. “Hiding in plain sight — in Holyrood Abbey!”

  Jeremiah swooped under crumbling buttresses, weaving in and out of the girderwork slowly transforming the ruins of Holyrood Abbey into the cathedral of the Church of Scotland. But the chaos of restoration made a perfect home for her hypothesized “clockwork general.”

  The bat threaded in and out of scaffolding ahead, but at full power, Jeremiah flitted like a dragonfly, barely a stone’s throw behind. Then the bat reached free space, devoid of cover, and Jeremiah squeezed out a bit more power, stabilizing herself just as she was ready to fire—

  Her left canister sputtered out. The Falconer’s wings faltered, dipped — and her wing clipped a gargoyle, decapitating it. With a nauseated groan, Jeremiah realized that destroying either her wings or a historic monument would wash her out of the Falconry program.

  Then whirling begat vertigo, her nausea overcame her — and she vomited.

  “Yes, Georgiana, sound the alarm, but we can’t let whatever it is they’re trying to hide just slip away,” Jeremiah said. “I know I’m grounded, at least until my inner ear surgery; but don’t be a mother hen. They may have taken my wings, but I’ll steal a pair—”

  “Jeremiah!” Georgiana hissed, seizing her hand. “What if this is just a sensor artifact? What if there is no ‘clockwork general’ running this army? Or what if there is, and he’s got human confederates at his disposal? Leave this to the faculty—”

  “When have we ever?” Jeremiah asked. “And — honestly — have we the time?”

  “At least leave your locator!” Georgiana said. “You’ll be tracked — caught — expelled!”

  Jeremiah’s free hand jerked towards her locator brooch — then froze, and clenched.

  “If something were to go wrong, wouldn’t I want to be found?” she asked. “I’ve nothing against skulking, I’ll have to do it to succeed. But I’m a grounded Falconer. Stealing wings violates the honor code. I’m not out for gallivanting. Does this need to be done or not?”

  Georgiana released her hand, and Jeremiah nodded curtly.

  “As I thought,” she said. “Keep an eye on the tracker — I’m off to the Aviary.”

  Grimacing, in tears, clenching her teeth, Jeremiah shot out of the buttresses in pursuit of the bat, her wings spiraling as her remaining canister rocketed her off balance. They’d grounded her for a reason; she knew that now. She couldn’t take the maneuvering demanded of a proper Falconer: otoliths in the ear, paroxysmal positional vertigo in a textbook; benign, they called it, until it made a dizzy, reckless cadet upchuck her innards midflight. Jeremiah would crash — but as her quarry fled into a canyon of five-story slum houses, she got it dead in her sights.

  “Gotcha,” Jeremiah said, and fired.

  Missing her target — and hitting godknowswhat.

  Jeremiah whirled after the bat into the rising canyon of crumbling buildings, in a full, uncontrolled barrel roll now. Nausea surged, her stomach clenched — then she sprayed her guts out as even her namesake will was no longer able to hold back the rising pressure of bile.

  As Jeremiah spiraled back to earth, vomit trailing around her in a corkscrew, she realized the only way she could make this cock-up more undignified would be to have forgotten her uniform and have crashed these wings wearing no more than a night-shirt.

  Jeremiah impacted, wings breaking with a vicious crack, then disintegrating around her in a spray of brasslite, balsa, gears and wires as she rebounded into the air. Tumbling, she got one last airborne glimpse of sky — before it was snatched away, as she definitively went down.

  Jeremiah slammed into the street face first, skidding to a painful almost-stop three meters later. At the last moment, a final bit of wing caught a drainage gutter and flipped her over, throwing her onto her back in a puddle of slime that was almost certainly not water.

  Lying in agony, Jeremiah stared up at her lost sky. Surprisingly, she was conscious, and miraculously, her body was a sparkle of blossoming bruises, not spreading numbness from that horrible wrench to her neck. But her dreams of falcons and dragonflies were dead.

  She heard a tread, swallowed thickly — and looked up.

  The figure that loomed over her was no savior. Tall as a man, its body was covered in a hooded duster of mismatched sc
raps of ballistic cloth and Faraday mesh. The coat disguised the figure’s outline — but beneath the hood was a near-featureless cylinder of steel.

  “The clockwork general,” Jeremiah whispered. “You’re real — and, sir, under arrest.”

  But the figure did not hear her. Jeremiah stared up in helpless horror at the single offset eye, glowing red, shielded with wire, that stared down pitilessly from within the hood. Beside the eye, the clockwork bat nestled — then the hooded figure raised an enormous shockgun.

  Jeremiah’s eyes went wide as the crackling vacuum tube charged — then she kept her face carefully frozen as a clockwork rat climbed up onto the figure’s shoulder, with Georgiana’s tracking nodule embedded deeply in its fur. Miss one target — you might hit another.

  In the instant before the figure fired, Jeremiah’s final thought was: gotcha.

  The Engraved Chest

  by Kirsten Weiss

  April, 1849

  San Francisco

  Ely:

  It’s the damndest story. I’m not sure what to make of it.

  There’s a pleasure in bringing a lady exactly the right gift, especially when the lady is a friend, like Miss Grey. She’d been holed up in her room at our boarding house for weeks. Since you and I share some responsibility for that, I decided to bring her what we’d found. Just to check on her, you understand. We’re responsible for delivering her to Washington, after all, and you were in Sacramento.

  I knocked on her door, parcel in hand. Another door down the hall opened. A man stuck his head out, stared at me, retreated.

  A bolt drew back, and Miss Grey opened her door. “Mr. Sterling. Good afternoon.” Her British accent was stiff and starched as ever. She wore her white blouse, chemical-stained at the cuffs, and that brown, leather waistcoat. Her copper watch chain dangled from one buttonhole. Strands of dark hair escaped her chignon.