I had been a fool to think that the fourth set of guns would be the only addition to Aaris’s defenses.
“Come no farther.” A serpent glided closer with the motion of a water-snake, and its rider turned in place to address us through a megaphone. “None may enter the Aaris Valley on pain of death.” Familiar words—the same that had been cut into the stone at the far end of the pass, to proclaim Aaris’ isolation to the world. The same that I had memorized as a Merged child. Here they were spoken, recited in a voice that bounced off the mountains.
“We are a peaceful mission!” Dieterich yelled back, then cursed and repeated his words into the captain’s annunciator.
The captain stalked past him to a locker by the helm. “You’d do better arguing with the graven warning,” she muttered.
And indeed, the response was much the same as the cliff face would give: silent, anticipatory, the perpetual knotwork of the serpents writing a sigil of forbidding in the air. “Turn back now, or you will die,” the spokesman finished. I focused, and focused again, trying to see his face.
Dieterich glanced at the captain. “If I tell you to turn back—”
“Can’t. Not without going straight through them. The Regina’s got a shitty turning radius.” The captain yanked her annunciator from his hands. “We demand safe passage!”
The rider did not answer, but raised one hand, and the pattern unraveled toward us. True to their nature, the serpents did not attack the dirigible sacs, but went for the shinier, more attractive target below: the ship itself. A gleaming gray ribbon spun past the remains of the observation deck, taking a substantial bite out of the woodwork and doing much greater damage with a last flail of its body in passing.
“Small arms! Small arms!” The captain produced a crank-gun from the locker and took aim at the closest serpent. She had tossed a second gun to Dieterich, who cursed the air blue but took it, leveling it at the rider instead. A second serpent undulated up to the very decks of the ship, knocking several ‘nauts aside in its wake. Those who could handle a weapon ran to the lockers; I lurched out of the way, landed heavily on my wounded side, and cried out.
At the rail, Dieterich turned—and the last flick of the serpent’s tail lashed out and knocked him over the railing.
There was no outcry; the chaos was too great, and Dieterich not the only one to go over the side. The snap of andropters opening added a new, percussive voice to the tumult.
I will not explain my actions then; certainly I knew that Dieterich’s andropter was in good condition, as I had tended to it only that morning. Nor did I have any fear for him in particular. Nor was I so foolish as to forget that my own andropter was back in the lab with Lundqvist, and so any slip on my part inevitably meant a fall that would not just kill me but reduce me to a splash on the rocks below. Still, some remnant of instinct propelled me forward despite better sense and burgeoning pain, and I ran to the railing.
The serpent whose rider Dieterich had pulverized writhed near the bow, devoid of instructions and therefore meaning. I leapt onto the railing, crouched briefly to secure my balance, and flung myself at the beast, trusting in my Merged brain to calculate the proper angle.
I caught the first set of fins and was dragged alongside the ship, long enough for me to force a hand into the soft tissue behind the fin and fumble about, searching for the controls that had to be there. Merged pack animals had always had secondary controls near their braincases; surely this part of the design would not have changed.
It had not. With one hand “plugged” into the serpent’s controls and one clinging to its fin, I wrenched the beast away from its attack on the Regina and followed the sound of Dieterich swearing at his andropter. It had opened enough to keep him from plummeting to his death but had the unfortunate side effect of wafting him directly toward the mouth of another serpent.
I wrenched my serpent into a helical dive, wrapped my legs around the closest fin, and stretched my arm out as we coasted past. My serpent smashed through the silk and framework of Dieterich’s andropter, and I caught Dieterich himself by the harness as the jolt briefly tossed him aside. My arm went numb with the shock, and the staples holding my wound shut tore apart, but it was enough: I used Dieterich’s momentum to swing him aboard, onto the serpent’s flat head and out of danger.
Dieterich stared blankly at the sky for a moment, apparently having difficulty understanding that he was still alive. “Good show, Charles!” he croaked after a moment. “Very good show. You’ve got a knack for this.”
I kept hold of his harness and didn’t answer. One slip, I thought, one simple yank on the harness and I’d have disposed of half of the people who knew my Aariscian nature. And the only other led a fragile existence in an easily broken tank...
It didn’t matter. Or it would have mattered, in another world, one where I was actually the spy I’d been built to be. I clung to the serpent’s head and whispered to it as I worked the controls, blood seeping through the bandage and slicking my side. “Forward. Take me to Aaris. Please.”
Pleading, as the captain had said, had no effect, but direction was easy enough to communicate and the serpent’s reflexes simple to control. We veered away from the knot of gunfire and scales and out of the smoke, toward the valley. None of the other serpents followed. Dieterich, still pinned in place by the remnants of his andropter, craned his neck around. “What is it? The battle’s over there—damn it, Charles, I did say I’d keep a secret. You know I’m a man of my word, now take me back!”
I barely heard him. Below me were the green fields of Aaris as I remembered them, the mesh of white roads stretching from the Mittelgeist hills into the fragments of arable land that were so assiduously tended, the clutter of houses, even the sheen of Lake Varno where I was born, where I was decanted, where I swore citizenship…
The serpent’s hide below me rippled, and I followed it with a shiver of my own. No. Not as I remembered. The roads, long irregular from necessity, had been smoothed out into a patterned web, and the hills and rivers that had blocked them smoothed away into similarly perfect shapes. I adjusted my eyes again and again, as if a more magnified landscape would show not just what had happened but why. Nothing but the same iterated regularity; nothing of what I remembered as home.
I shook my head and shifted my eyes back to their normal state, then leaned back, trying to take in the whole valley. My breath caught with a crackle.
It was as if I gazed upon a great green clock, a hybrid land that was not just land nor automata but both. Every part of the landscape bore a design I knew from study of my own inner workings. The slow motion of it—even the patterns of glaciers sliding down the mountains—communicated a vast unfathomable purpose. A purpose of which I was no longer a part.
And in the fields and villages and kennels and stalls, eyes all like mine, adjusting as they looked up, lenses shifting to see one of their own above them. No full automata. No full humans. Only the same Merged calm on every visage.
I shuddered, viscerally aware of the hole in my side, of the mess of blood and bandages so at odds with the careful, clean lines of this new Aaris. “Home,” I whispered. “Home. Please.”
The serpent, either wiser than I or interpreting the indecision of my hands, curved into a wide arc. I heard Dieterich gasp as we turned away, but I did not turn to see his reaction. Instead I gazed ahead, to where the Regina, spilling smoke and the telltale glitter of lost thaumic power, was limping away back down the pass. Its decks were a flutter of rescued andropters and wreckage, but though the mass of serpents parted to let their brother through, it did not fire upon us as I guided my serpent back to it.
For the first time in twenty years, I did not have to make the tea. Dieterich brought a tray down to the remains of the observation deck, where the Professora and I sat in silent contemplation of the receding Sterling Pass. Below us guns boomed, unaware that they had failed in their work of keeping us out but that their greater mission had succeeded. I got up from my place on the dec
k (the benches having been used for temporary hull patches), but Dieterich waved me back to my seat.
He poured two cups, then tipped the contents of a third into the Professora’s nutrient filter. She murmured thanks, and I took the offered cup gratefully.
“You needn’t worry,” Dieterich said after a moment, “about the, hmm, shrapnel I extracted. I disposed of it among the bits we took from that first dratted serpent’s carcass.”
One set of gears in among the other. Fitting. “Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome. Don’t let that sort of thing happen again, hm?” He gave me a searching look, but whatever doubts he’d harbored had been erased when I brought us both back to the Regina’s splintered decks. “Good man,” he said, drained his tea, and returned to the depths of the ship.
I took a sip of my tea. He’d made it well. “How much time do you think we have? “Lundqvist asked softly.
I attempted a shrug, winced, and settled for shaking my head. “There’s no indication that Aaris intends to undo their isolation. They may be content to stay in the valley.”
“You weren’t,” she pointed out.
“No.” I gazed back into the smoky pass, thinking of the great clockwork of the valley, the machine that it ran, of serpents on the wrong side of the mountains, and lensed eyes looking back at me. “Ten years, perhaps. Five if we’re unlucky.”
The Professora was silent, though the constant hiss from her phonograph resembled a slow exhalation. “Well. We’ll just have to hope we’re lucky.”
Five years. I’d been in service for twenty; perhaps a different service was needed for the coming five. I got to my feet, glanced behind me at the pass, and began setting the cups back on the tea-tray.
“Yes. We’ll hope,” I said. “More tea?”
The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday
G. D. Falksen
In addition to writing, G. D. FALKSEN studies history and blogs for Tor.com. His written work has appeared in Steampunk Tales, SteamPunk Magazine, Footprints, and Tor.com. He gives lectures on steampunk at various conventions, and has been interviewed on the subject by the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Hartford Courant, and MTV, among others. He is the lead writer for the video game project AIR: Steampunk. He resides in Connecticut. His website can be found at www.Gdfalksen.com. He writes that “the idea for ‘The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday’ came to me late one night when considering how various aspects of modern society that we take for granted could be translated into a steampunk context. I thought about blogging, and I came up with tit-tat. It seemed only natural to set tit-tat and Salad Monday in my Cities of Ether setting, in the city of Salmagundi specifically.”
INSPECTOR WILDE WAS in a fine mood when he arrived at the headquarters of Salmagundi’s Legion of Peace, carrying three paper-wrapped sandwiches and an armload of printed broadsheets. He had a spring in his step and walked in time to one of the latest music hall ditties, which he whistled cheerfully for the benefit of his coworkers. All along the gaslit passage, clerks and secretaries poked their heads out of their rooms and stared in wonder and admiration at his audacity. Most of them smiled as he passed, and a few of the braver ones tapped their feet along with the tune for a few moments before dashing back to their desks to avoid the ire of their supervisors. Wilde laughed as he passed a room full of secretaries who somehow managed to type in time with the music.
Midway down the hallway was the Chief Inspector’s office, which was fronted by a small antechamber in which her secretary, Marguerite, was busy making sense of several unsightly piles of documents. Her work table was a model of efficiency. Her pens and pencils were all neatly arranged to one side, along with writing paper and a three-section typewriter for preparing documents in triplicate. A rack of empty pneumatic capsules waited nearby to be filled and dispatched.
Marguerite smiled as Wilde approached, delighted by the cheerful whistling. Wilde leaned down, eyebrows arched, and tossed Marguerite the top sandwich in his stack.
“And a girl in uniform’s just the thing for me...” Wilde said playfully, completing the refrain of the tune in Marguerite’s ear.
“Max!” Marguerite exclaimed, her cheeks flushing. She pushed him away and made a show of reorganizing the papers on her desk. “You mustn’t say things like that to me. People will talk.”
“Well, if ‘people’ are going to talk, don’t you think we should give them something to talk about?” Wilde asked, flashing one of his trademark recruitment smiles.
Marguerite was trying to come up with a reply when a third voice interrupted. “Max, get in here!”
Marguerite jumped in shock and pulled a handful of papers between herself and Wilde, as if to deny that they had even been speaking. Wilde was also caught by surprise, but retained his composure. He looked over at the polished voicepipe mounted next to Marguerite’s table just in time to hear the Chief Inspector’s voice again.
“Now!”
Wilde kept his head high as he sauntered across Chief Inspector Cerys’s cluttered office. Behind him, a sheepish Marguerite closed the door as quietly as she could. What might normally have been a sizable, bland, and dutifully bureaucratic office had, since the Chief Inspector moved in, been transformed into a nest of filing cabinets, pigeonhole shelves, and chairs covered in files and loose papers.
The room was lit entirely by gaslamps, for both of its windows had been tightly shuttered. Located on the top layer of Salmagundi, Legion Headquarters was gifted and cursed with an overwhelming view of the vast horizonless sky that surrounded the city. The silver-gray expanse of ether was a sight of unparalleled majesty and terror. Though sky-borne steamships traveled freely from one floating city to another, urban dwellers could not help but fear the mysterious beasts and horrors that lurked in the great beyond, thanks to old sailors’ stories of unfathomable monstrosities. However, even fear could not defeat the human drive for commerce. For every cargo ship lost to the ether, five more were already being built in Salmagundi’s shipyards, like heads of a great industrial hydra.
The largest piece of furniture in the Chief Inspector’s office was her massive Legion-issue desk, which was covered in papers, pens, and miscellanea. However, it was a metal coffee percolator resting on a stand nearby that was the true focal point of the room. A set of insulated pipes extended from the wall and into the percolator’s base, keeping the coffee hot by pumping steam through it from the building’s main line.
Chief Inspector Cerys looked up from a collection of reports, coffee cup in hand, and gave Wilde a look. “Max, I’ll thank you to stop flirting with my secretary all the bloody time.”
“Why, Chief?” Wilde asked, setting one of the sandwiches down by Cerys and then pulling over a chair. “If you ask me, I think she rather likes it.”
Cerys gave him another look as she began to unwrap her meal. “She does, Max. She likes it too much.” Cerys waved a typewritten form in front of Wilde’s face. The document was so complex as to be less legible than a massive ink spot, but it would drive some anonymous bureaucrat into a frenzy if even a single T was left uncrossed before filing. “Marguerite’s the only person in this blasted place who can read these damn things, and she’s useless for half an hour after you bat your pretty little eyes at her.”
“‘Pretty little eyes,’ Chief?” Wilde asked. “Why, I didn’t know you cared.”
“Shut up, Max.”
“Yes, Chief.”
Cerys bit into her sandwich and let out a sigh; Wilde suspected it was her first real meal of the day. “Mmmm! Herr Grosse comes through again.”
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear it,” Wilde replied. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“We’re unusually light on terrorist attacks and serial murderers at the moment, so we’re ‘lending a hand’ with Surveillance.”
“Espionage and tailing suspects?” Wilde asked hopefully.
“Examining subversive propaganda for clues,” Cerys replied.
Wilde made
a face at the thought of such a boring activity. “Just so we’re clear, I’m not on duty for another five minutes.”
“You’re not on duty until I finish my sandwich,” Cerys countered.
“Deal.”
Leaning back in his chair, Wilde began to read one of the broadsheets he had brought with him. Within a minute, he was all but giggling like a schoolboy.
“What’re you so happy about?” Cerys asked, between mouthfuls of sandwich and mayonnaise.
Wilde quickly cleared his throat. “Er. . . . Nothing, Chief.” His eyes involuntarily read the next line of text and another fit of laughter took him.
“Nothing?”
“Eh...heh.... Um, yes, nothing.” Wilde held up the broadsheet for Cerys’s inspection. “It’s just Mr. Salad Monday. He’s giving Deacon Fortesque a roasting over his latest political tract.”
“What?” Cerys demanded, bewildered.
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