It was in that instant that the cavern high above the floor burst open, showering stones down on the confused and angry creatures. Through the huge hole above, there was a clear view all the way through the house and up into the sky, swirling with the blackest clouds that ever graced a skyline.
All this while, with the very floor under me rumbling and shaking, and my ears filled with screeches and explosions and screaming, my fingers worked as deftly as they could, attaching coloured wires tightly while a calm voice instructed me on what to do.
"The final connection must be made now. This hou-- I will lose my ability to speak for a few minutes while the connections take hold, I expect, so listen carefully," said Diana's voice, now only coming from the box on top of which the brain had rested. The box and the glass dome were now empty, the desk wet and covered in preservative fluid. Diana's brain lie partially-submerged in solution in the skull of the female automaton, wires running from it in all directions. Three main wires were left attached to the box.
"Red wire first. Then blue. Then wait for one minute exactly, and then white wire. Do not mistake the timing, please," she said calmly. If I were in her position, I would have been frantic-- one slip-up, and her entire existence shatters, and the whole brain would be scrambled. Diana would die.
The crew burst into the room. "Captain! Let's go, now!"
"Go on ahead!" I called back, motioning them toward the staircase.
"But captain, it's starting!" pleaded Victoria.
"I'm not finished! Go ahead, and I will be there as soon as I have finished! Take the ship and get her off the ground! Go!"
Victoria hesitated, but Martha did not give her the chance to say otherwise. She grabbed her around her waist, hoisted her up, and began running. Everyone else followed suit.
Hysterically, she screamed at the top of her lungs back to me. "Don't you fucking die, you madman!"
I continued on. The crew disappeared up the stairs, and I clenched my teeth. "Hold your breath, Diana."
"I cannot--" she began, but I pulled the connections free, and snapped them in place. Water began to rush down the staircase, a torrent that would soon be strong enough to sweep me off my feet.
"...twenty... twenty-one..."
Down below, the great iron door crashed open, and creatures, trying to avoid the torrent, began to rush up the stairs, a throng of fire and white-hot claws. I could hear them coming.
"...fourty-nine, fifty..."
I heard the Nephele's tanks begin to fill, so far away and yet so close. The ship must have been rising out of the tunnel by now.
The creatures began to pour into the room, where the water was already starting to cover the tables and lapping at the stairs, sweeping things into the torrent. Their searing claws steamed and sputtered in the cold water. One of them saw me, and began to thrash toward me in the torrent.
“…fifty-nine, sixty.” I snapped the white connector in.
*****
My crew, on the deck, watched with bated breath, even as the downpour soaked them to their bones. Their eyes were all glued to the entrance to the house, where the sheer amount of water falling from the sky rushed into the foyer like a torrent. Nobody wanted to say anything, to even breathe. Seconds passed, and the torrent grew ever stronger, thunder and lightning booming overhead.
One of the engineers finally cried, "The Eyes! They are aiming at us!"
It was true. The dirigibles that had accompanied us into this affair both had their heat cannons fully charged and aimed directly at the Nephele. My crew would have no chance of escaping, not from this range and not from two angles at once. If they fired, the Nephele would be incinerated, turned into ash, and everyone on board would die.
And there I was in the basement, with no options for escape. Diana's body shuddered, and her eyes opened.
"You... did it..." she said, not used to her new voice yet.
"A deal is a deal," I replied, and ducked under a fireball. Damn, if only I had wings!
...wings. Wings! Yes! That was it!
*****
I held on for dear life, Diana's body draped across my lap, as I flew through the hole in the house, the heavy buzzing of thin metal wings on either side of me thrumming in my head. The giant wasp's shining body cut through the frigid air, and as I manipulated the levers on its back, we burst through the torrent of water into the sky.
The thunder and rain were deafening, but even through all the din, I swear I heard my crew give a ragged cheer as I sped toward the Nephele. Behind me, the weight of the ice cracking and the water pressing downward finally took its toll, and the house began to collapse violently.
I swung past the Nephele and waved, leaning just enough to let Diana's body fall into the riggings, where she tangled her artificial body into the ropes and held fast. Like a lighting bolt, I sped straight for the closest dirigible, looking down the barrel of their heat cannon.
Longfellow stood by the weapon, his arms crossed, looking smug.
"What are you doing?" I cried, and pointed a pistol at him.
"Double crossing you," he said. "I remember you were looking forward to it." He jerked to one side as I fired the gun, the bullet missing him by a hair's breadth.
Back on the Nephele, Diana, wrapped up in the riggings, suddenly let out a high-pitched whine that cut through the sound of the storm like a white-hot claw through steel. I winced, but Longfellow positively screamed.
"What is that?" he cried, putting his hands to his head.
I reversed, and flew back a hundred meters from the floating craft, making a rude gesture. "An insurance policy," I said.
On the bottoms of both crafts, a small flying clockwork began to whine. Diana's newfound body was perhaps not yet under her complete control, but nonetheless she managed to laugh, loudly and heartily, as if she had just accomplished a great goal. For you see, that steam vent that had bored a tiny hole in the ice earlier was the perfect size for a nearly-invisible child's flying toy to exit. Such a toy might have been modified by some of the clockworks in the basement to hold a pressurised explosive canister and a high-flammability incendiary compound. Such an explosive might have been keyed to explode when a certain sound frequency triggered its activation.
With a resounding boom that caused a shockwave that nearly shook the Nephele from the air, the other craft went up in a huge explosion. The balloon body of the dirigible caught fire, and the flammable gases inside went up in an instant, rocking the very sky. I could make out Longfellow's horrified face smirk with one last defiant stand as I looked back, flying as fast as the wasp would take me.
The second dirigible followed suit from the first, and the Nephele rode the shock wave out, singing in the frigid and wet air like a knife thrown from one's sleeve. The thin metal on the wings of the wasp buckled under the shock, and I was thrown from the craft as it crumpled under me.
I could make it. I could just barely make it to the deck, catch a railing or a rope...maybe.
My fingers brushed the metal rail, but could not hold.
I was falling.
I shut my eyes.
And just then, I felt long, slender fingers tighten around my wrist, and my shoulder jerk. Victoria leaned far over the railing, her gloved hands locked around my arm. Martha's frame held her by the waist, and with a heave, Victoria pulled me up just enough to grab the rail with my other hand.
I pulled myself over the rail onto the deck, flopping onto my stomach, and sputtered, but Victoria was already dragging the injured Dale into the captain's quarters, out of the rain.
*****
The landscape for miles around the workshop from that point on was completely barren, lacking any water whatsoever. The ice had been drawn up into the atmosphere by the device's humongous power output. Apparently, the last time it had been used, it had not used up even a quarter of the power it had stored, and so it had left that energy stored in an almost perpetual stasis inside of its own working, Liza had explained. We all nodded like we had understood,
but were more than glad to have someone of Liza’s capabilities along with us.
Diana's act of shutting down the rest of the house and diverting all the power she had down into the sub-basement was exactly what the machine needed to kick that stored energy out of stasis. Liza guessed that the machine, and anything within fifty feet of it, would have melted into sludge when it finally finished its command, with no safeguards left inside it.
The water had gone into the sky, and funnelled into the house, drawn so strongly to the machine that it bored holes in the ground where the house stood, pouring into the tunnels and filling them up so far that all around the countryside there now exist huge pillars of ice, flash-frozen from where the tunnels had ended and the water had gushed out like geysers. That was the machine's last command: flash-freeze every last bit of liquid around it for miles.
What the thick expanding solid would have broken open and allowed to crumble, the water filled all the cracks and faults and froze so quickly that there was not enough time for anything to crack. The fault lines were solidified. No continental plates would collapse, and, added Liza, "we saved th'whole damn world."
Of course, the price was that the receding of the ice shelf that covered the continent was delayed again, and, what was worse, the ice seemed to spider outward even further. A premature winter fell over much of the non-frozen land, and the word that was spreading was something unbelievable.
"A sorcerer-ship and her crew of witches came from a land not of this world, bringing beasts that breathed fire, and used their dark magic to push the ice further into the world. They intend to freeze the whole world eventually, but they can only move once every hundred years. During the other time, they live just like you and I."
Magic, indeed. We used science.
In the aftermath of the whole ordeal, the Antimony Eyes were thrown into internal chaos as those in power vied for leadership since Longfellow was lost in action. The Nephele gained a crew member, a charming, pale girl named Diana who had an intimate knowledge of managing all the little things about a place. Dale was still getting used to his new hand, but the fact that he could switch it out at the wrist for all kinds of tools now made it seem better, and the ring on his other hand matched one on the hand of our engineer, Liza.
We all sat together in the Copper Cup a week later.
"You think we'd ought to tell anyone what really happened?" asked Dale, flexing his clockwork fingers.
Luke drank from his flagon, and set it down. "Who would believe us?"
"And if they did believe us," I added, "They would only believe the parts that incriminate us as being witches."
Diana drank from her cup, water that she would use in her boiler system. "I think we had ought to avoid letting too many people know that the world was in danger under their very feet, and none of them knew."
Perhaps she was right. And who knows? Maybe in a hundred years the ice would start to unfreeze again, and someone else would find out and have to do something about it. For the moment, I reasoned, and leaned back in the booth, we did what we set out to do. The world was safe from collapse, at least for a while, and that was good enough for me.
The barmaid came up, and set a note on the table under a mug of mead in front of me. She flashed a smile briefly, and nodded.
The paper was written in a sort of scrawling script, obviously by a very old hand. "My packrat," it said, "I think I have something that might interest you and me both. I've found a map."
I folded up the paper and slipped it into my pocket. "Ladies and gentlemen, I said, raising up my mug. "To the crew of the Nephele! May they never go hungry for adventure!"
The clank of the mugs resounded in the bar, and with a hearty laugh, my crew drained their flagons.
The End
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The Nephele Ship: The Trilogy Collection (A Steampunk Adventure) Page 11