series 01 04 Abattoir in the Aether

by L. Joseph Shosty

  Nathanial closed the book and stared at its cover. Professor Wren’s journal. The man had attended university with van den Bosch. Great friends, or so the stories always went. Professor Wren knew van den Bosch as well as any man in the world. He had to know, then, how the man conducted his business. Nathanial’s own journal came to mind. They had read his readily enough and been unapologetic about it. It was reasonable to assume, then, that if van den Bosch had grown suspicious of Professor Wren, he would have stolen the journal and read it to confirm or deny his theory. Such an admission as this was certainly worthy of causing the violence that had obviously occurred here.

  Professor Wren had meant van den Bosch to find this, then. He must have known, to some degree, what such an admission would do.

  Furthermore, the journal admitted Le Boeuf’s presence on Peregrine Station, something which would apparently cause a “cataclysm” that had been long in coming. So van den Bosch and Le Boeuf knew one another. The journal suggested some animosity between the two men. Their relationship must at least preclude civility, otherwise there would be no clear reason for Le Boeuf to conceal his arrival on Peregrine. Yet, if so, why was Le Boeuf here, building a device on this station, one that van den Bosch was both aware of and of which he might―no, would―take credit?

  Nathanial could not answer that part, not yet, but what he could reason was that Doctor van den Bosch was now aware of Le Boeuf’s presence, and if he hated him enough, or wanted to steal his work, he might want to eliminate him, as well. At the least, he might want to find and imprison him, hence the newly-christened security force.

  The wreckage here proved something, something that a part of Nathanial already knew, for it had been proven in other ways in the past.

  Doctor van den Bosch was capable of atrocity.

  Yet, the journal also mentioned that Le Boeuf was in hiding on the station. This meant if van den Bosch wished to destroy Le Boeuf, he had to find him first.

  Yes. What better way to find him?

  “I think I have our answer,” Nathanial said. He tucked the journal into the pocket of his coverall.

  Jasperse, who was perusing a shelf blackened books, looked up, curious. “Well, don’t just stand there, sir. Please indulge me.”

  “It’s the Juggernaut himself,” Nathanial said. “I do believe Doctor van den Bosch is responsible for sabotaging the stabilisers.”

  Nathanial returned to the broken machine. He knelt before it and ran his hands over its battered surface. The aether machine. Was this Torquilstone? It must be, but why would Professor Wren call it a lie?

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Pickled Eggs and Secret Doors”

  1.

  “BLOODY MUTCHERS, I tell ya. All of them.”

  Dolan was in a foul mood. Annabelle looked up from the cargo manifest, wondering if this was the beginning of another tirade. The Irishman, sweating from his exertions, climbed the ladder and peered over the top shelf. He slammed a foot down on every rung, and the ladder protested with every step. He held his tongue, however, and found what they were looking for.

  His finger danced on the air as he counted. “Ten,” he said.

  Annabelle checked the manifest again. The writing was sloppy, nearly illegible, especially in the dim light. Her eyes strained to discern what was written there. “Ten jars, pickled eggs. Large.” It didn’t say if it was the eggs that were large, or the containers which held them. Annabelle decided it was best not to ask.

  She was less than twelve hours from her ordeal with the bomber. With her arm injured and in a sling, it was impossible for her to wear a dress, and so she had asked Doctor Holmes to procure for her a coverall like the men wore and a pair of sturdy boots, which he had done. Hague came by later and whisked her off to join Dolan at the quartermaster, like a guard escorting a prisoner to his prison job. By the time she had arrived, the Irishman was roaring drunk, and surly. She ached everywhere, especially her arm, which she was forced to use as a brace for the cargo manifest, and could scarcely tolerate his presence.

  Apparently Dolan had not taken on this task of his own free will. The job of finding the ten missing crates, which had apparently been lost months ago and only recently reported by Griggs, the quartermaster, after falling under a threat of inspection by Hague, should also have been Hague’s responsibility. However, given Dolan’s lack of success in finding both the bomber and Annabelle’s attacker (it was still largely believed the two were separate entities) van den Bosch had tasked Dolan with finding the missing crates instead, while giving Hague command of security.

  “They’re all bedevilling bloody mutchers, I tell ya,” Dolan said, and climbed down.

  “So you keep saying,” Annabelle said with a sigh.

  “Your friend is going to get us killed, by the by. He’s useless as tits on a boar; everyone knows it.” Dolan had been attacking everyone at random since she had arrived, starting with van den Bosch and Hague. He had only just turned his attentions onto Nathanial, but him Dolan attacked with zeal.

  “Nathanial’s just being thorough, and anyway, what everyone really knows is that your Doctor van den Bosch is doing everything in his power to keep Nathanial from his goal.”

  “Thoroughly going to take us to a grave, you mean!”

  Just then, as if to punctuate Dolan’s thought, the station hull rumbled. It sounded like plainsong.

  “If you’re done with your bellyaching, I’d like for you to finish your ridiculous survey!” This was Griggs, hidden somewhere among the towers of shelves. He, too, was drunk, and of the opinion unruly station workers had made off with his supplies while his attentions were elsewhere.

  Annabelle had wanted someone far different as quartermaster. She had expected a small, neatly dressed, pernickety man who fussed over minutiae, another Hague, perhaps. The reality of Griggs was one of a squat man with a florid, seaman’s face, bald-headed, with thick, peppery whiskers. His voice was like gravel, too, every other word was a curse, and he smelled of canned sardines. He was an easily-agitated fellow, made all the more so by Dolan’s incessant complaints. Thus, the day had alternated between Dolan and Griggs occasionally taking up arms against one another, and poring through the mercilessly boring manifests, all in search of ten crates neither man believed they would ever find.

  “And I’ve told you it takes as long as it takes!” Dolan yelled back.

  “Ten crates, you bastard! Ten crates! Do you think you’re going to find ten bloody crates miscounted? Are you out of your bloody mind, then?”

  Spit erupted from Dolan’s lips as he howled in reply. “Well, perhaps you’d like to tell the Juggernaut how you lost them, then? We’ll see how properly you bluster, then, won’t we?”

  “Perhaps if ships weren’t allowed to come and go without so much as a by-your-leave, and I didn’t have men in and out of this place shift after bloody shift, I could exercise some sort of control over this warehouse!”

  “It was a clerical error, you bastard!”

  The argument continued. Annabelle listened a while before boredom overtook her. She put down the manifest then and wandered in the opposite direction of their voices until she could hear little of what was said.

  2.

  Along the floor, a few inches from the ground, was a large metal grate covering an air duct about twice as wide as she and tall enough you could stack three of her flat and still have room. The breeze from it was cool and dry. She luxuriated in the feel of it on her skin. She had not realised how much she missed the open air of Earth, having spent so much time recently in pressurized, artificial settings. When this adventure was done, and they had escaped this wretched place, she would return to Earth. Enough adventuring for a while, she decided. She wanted to rest and recuperate. She had no illusions about staying on Earth, though. Soon enough, after she had taken her first lazy nap beside a pond or spent the afternoon reading, she would start to feel the itch again. Until then, she promised to devote herself to leisure. After all, she had been pushing her luck
as of late. If she was not careful, something terrible would befall her, especially if she kept on as she had been.

  Just look at Loaves, she thought, with a sharp pang of regret. Her carelessness had gotten him killed. That would have been her if her luck had not held, and the men had come to investigate her cries. All that blood. The image van den Bosch had painted for her had a veritable sea of it, pooling on the floor and congealing in black lumps. It could have been hers.

  She knelt next to the grate and inspected it. Sure enough, here were the tell-tale signs of tampering. Something hard had gouged the metal on the inside of the grate. This gave her an idea. She fetched a pry-bar from where she and Dolan had been working. Dolan was elsewhere, now. The argument was still going, with slurred curses being hurled from each side. She returned and put the pry-bar to use.

  The grate popped out of the wall with ease, even with her working one-armed, and made little noise when it fell to the floor.

  “Yes,” she said to herself. This is perfect. A perfect way to move about undetected, and a perfect way to transport the missing goods to some new location without anyone being the wiser.

  The theory had been rattling about her head, but she had thus far been loathe to consider it, thinking she might be wrong. Yet, it made sense. It would do the bomber little good to move about undetected if he would take every meal in the galley, where he might be noticed. He must have come here, stolen what he needed a little at a time, and used the air ducts to transport his loot to another location, probably a lair of some kind.

  She crawled inside, wondering what other secrets these air ducts might hide.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “A Fine Vintage”

  1.

  “Do you take me for a fool, Stone?”

  Van den Bosch was having none of it. Nathanial had entered their evening insisting to see the inside of Professor Wren’s lab, claiming there might be a power drain somewhere within which could have rendered the stabilisers unable to function. Van den Bosch responded much in the way Nathanial thought he would, with outright refusal. They argued over it for several minutes, until Nathanial could see the administrator becoming frustrated, at which point he once again broached the subject of test firing the stabilisers.

  “No, I believe you are quite a capable man, but you must understand, I cannot know what is wrong with our patient without examining it myself.”

  “And so you construct this clever ruse. You do me a disservice.”

  “You are asking me to ignore method, Doctor!” Nathanial said. “I am asked to take the word of others rather than make direct observation. I get the impression you want me to fail.”

  Van den Bosch rumbled with laughter. “You’ve been listening to Miss Somerset, with her rumours of evil conspiracies. What would it benefit me to stifle your work? If Peregrine Station comes to grief, it is my reputation which will be ruined. If anything, I seek to maintain strict secrecy. If that interferes with your direct inquiry, so be it, but you must learn to approach the stabiliser problem from a different direction, one that doesn’t force my hand.”

  Nathanial found himself about to roll his eyes, as he often did as a child during one of his father’s interminable lectures. He kept calm, though, and stayed any unnecessary gestures. The ruse, of pretending to argue with van den Bosch, was necessary. The administrator had to believe Nathanial was oblivious to what was happening. To do this, he had to stall with useless conversation. He need only last until dinner, after which he could confer with Holmes and the others. They had to know what Nathanial had discovered. Van den Bosch as saboteur added a different light to the mystery. Nathanial could expect no help from him any longer, nor could he solve the stabiliser problem through official channels. Reluctantly, he would have to employ his new friends, which was likely to place them in both physical and professional danger.

  “What question, then, should I ask?”

  Van den Bosch spread his hands. “I cannot answer that, for I don’t know. I can tell you this: you are looking in the wrong place with your power depletion theory. Moreover, I think you know that. Your curiosity is getting the better of you, Mister Stone, or rather, you’re letting it drag you in the wrong direction. You want to know the secrets behind this place, as do the others. But you should not mistake that selfish desire for pure investigation.”

  “Play Devil’s Advocate a moment, Doctor. Say that I am working from pure motivations. What can you tell me that will allay my suspicions about the station’s power distribution?”

  Van den Bosch was pleased. “Ah. Now you are approaching the matter properly, Mister Stone. Professor Wren was performing experiments on Peregrine Station under my orders. When he died, all of his experiments were either destroyed in the fire or were disabled by my staff. Thus, it would be impossible for any of them to be a draw right now.”

  “What about an experiment you don’t know about?”

  Van den Bosch sneered. “Don’t be absurd. Peregrine is not so large a place as to hide something drawing the kind of power it would take to render the stabilisers inoperative.”

  Nathanial pretended to deflate in his chair, much to van den Bosch’s delight. “I don’t know how else to proceed,” he said. A dangerous idea struck him then, and before he could stop himself, Nathanial asked, “What about Professor Wren’s notes? Did he keep a journal? Perhaps a clue might be found there.”

  Van den Bosch’s delight vanished with a stiffening of his posture. He cleared his throat and spoke, but his voice was tight. “A journal was found, but it contained nothing pertinent to our current concerns.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Of course. I arrived at the same conclusion when the stabilisers first malfunctioned, but there was nothing to be found in the journal.”

  “What about his notes?”

  “Again, nothing.”

  “Could I see them?”

  “Ah. But here you are again, Stone. Surely you must know I can see what you’re doing. From the notes you can discern what experiments were being performed, and those experiments form the cornerstone of the secrets this station contains. Of course you must know that I cannot allow you to see them.”

  And so it went, for an hour or more. Nathanial feinted and lunged, while van den Bosch sidestepped or parried each assault. Finally their conversation was interrupted by a steward who entered carrying a bottle of wine. The tall man had a Prussian manner about him. He came to van den Bosch’s desk with the bottle cradled in his arm. He bowed, presented the wine for inspection, and set it on the desk once van den Bosch had approved of it.

  “Where’s Sarp?” van den Bosch asked the steward, meaning the fat Turk who normally brought his evening wine.

  “Busy at the moment,” the steward said. “Do you need anything else?”

  “No. When is dinner?”

  “We’ll dine within the hour, sir.”

  “Very good. Thank you.”

  The steward left as quietly as he had arrived.

  The arrival of the wine meant an end to all argument. The only truly civilised characteristic van den Bosch appeared to possess was that he did not like for a conversation to end with animosity. They would instead share a glass of wine and discuss other matters until dinner was served.

  The administrator heaved his bulk to his feet and went to rummage in a cabinet for his corkscrew.

  “You remind me of Thaddeus,” van den Bosch said, at that same moment finding the corkscrew and snatching it from the drawer, which he closed. “Always so mule-headed.”

  “I just wish you would be more forthcoming with what you know,” Nathanial said, half-believing that lie himself. “From my perspective, you’re playing games with other peoples’ lives, and I find it appalling.”

  “I hope you never find yourself in so similar a game, Mister Stone.”

  What? Nathanial almost leapt from his chair. Is this to be a confession?

  “Has it ever occurred to you, that by denying you access to certain knowledge,
I am in some way protecting you?” van den Bosch asked.

  “Yes, indeed it has, but what is one life, compared to the dozens who will lose theirs if we must evacuate? You’ve said as much yourself; we cannot take everyone.”

  Van den Bosch held up a hand. “This is a conversation for another time.”

  Nathanial nodded, eager to be done with the whole thing. What he had thought was to be a confession had turned into a cloying display of false affection. He thought of the rumours, of people whose lives had been destroyed because of this monster, of the wreckage in Wren’s lab, of Wren himself, and how he must have screamed as he burned to death. Nathanial had no illusions as to where he stood.

  “Good. Shall we drink then?”

  The wine bottle proved difficult to open. Van den Bosch, for all his size and obvious strength, strained with the cork. “Wretched thing,” he grunted.

  “There will be more wine at dinner tonight,” Nathanial said.

  “I’d like a glass now, beforehand.”

  “Why don’t they open it for you before bringing it? That way, it could breathe a bit.”

  “I like to do things myself.”

  “Ah.”

  A curious set of events occurred then. Van den Bosch, clearly frustrated with the wine bottle, began to jerk the corkscrew, wrapping a powerful bicep around the bottle to provide a strong grip. One pull proved too hard, and he lost control of the bottle. It slipped from the crook of his arm, and a hand shot out to grab it. The grab missed, and he bobbled the bottle three times before losing it completely. It tumbled upward in the air as van den Bosch gave a cry of alarm, and fell onto the hard deck floor. The bottle then exploded with the crack of a gunshot, as if its contents were under extreme pressure. Van den Bosch cursed mightily.