“Involved?”
“In the attack.”
“What?”
“I didn’t catch everything he said, but before he left, he told Calligaris to telephone if you turned up. Something about the bombings on the airfield. That’s all I know.”
Petra turned away, eyes searching blindly as her mind raced ahead of her. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not so soon. She pressed a hand to her brow, their plan to repair the quadruped suddenly narrowing to an impossibly fine line. A single misstep and they would fail. She glanced up and her eyes met Braith’s.
“We have to do it now,” she said. “Before it’s too late.”
“You can’t. If the minister thinks you’re involved in the attack—”
“Then this is the only chance we’ll get.”
Braith frowned. “Petra . . .”
“It’s over for me,” she said, shaking her head. “It was over the moment I stepped foot in the city. You know it as well as I do. But I still have a chance to make this right. I still have a chance to fix it. I have to try.”
He regarded her stonily. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she answered, not a hint of reservation in her voice. “And you?” she asked. “Are you still with me?”
“You know I am.”
“Then we need to hurry.” She turned toward Yancy, the frown on his face so like his father’s. “Yancy . . . I wouldn’t ask this of you if it wasn’t important, but I need your help with something.”
Yancy arched an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“There’s a repair that I need to make to the prototype,” she said, retrieving the quadruped designs from her pocket and offering him the pages. “An error I found checking over the schematics again. With production accelerated, it’s important we fix it as soon as possible.”
Yancy took the pages from her. “An error?”
She nodded, showing him the faulty axle plate. “If you look here, where the trains overlap through the regulator, the gears are connected to conflicting drive systems. If left intact, once the quadruped is fully operational, these will rotate in opposition. With enough pressure, the tension springs linked to the regulator will snap.” Causing the sabotaging clockwork system to set off, but she didn’t mention that. “Complete immobilization of the primary systems in a matter of minutes. It wouldn’t have shown up in the initial tests because—”
“Because the intersecting systems aren’t connected yet,” he finished for her, drawing his finger across the paper to the main transmission in the war machine’s base. “I see what you mean.” He glanced up from the schematics. “But why do you need my help?”
“I can repair the fault,” she said. “But with the council’s suspicions and Julian out for my blood . . . If the Guild arrests me before I can finish the repair and file the report myself, someone else will need to do it in my stead—someone I trust. Will you help me?”
Yancy regarded the schematics again. “Shouldn’t we go to my father with this? He could—”
“We don’t have time,” she said. “I’ve already wasted enough as it is.”
“Petra, if you return to the workshop now, with Calligaris waiting for you—”
“I know,” she said. “Trust me, Yancy. I wouldn’t risk it if I thought there was any other way. I can’t tell you why, but it’s imperative the repair is filed today, as soon as possible. Can I count on you?”
“Of course you can,” he said with a nod, giving the schematics back. “Just tell me what to do.”
Petra paused at the door to the workshop, her heart in her throat as Yancy slipped inside and disappeared over the edge of the catwalk, his footsteps loud on the rungs of the access ladder. She gripped the edge of the doorframe, the sounds of electric-power tools whirring beyond her sight—the hiss and flare of a lone blowlamp, the deep knell of a sledgehammer driving a peg—her quadruped coming together piece by piece. She inhaled a shaky breath.
Repair the prototype. File the report. Fix the army.
That was the plan. She just hoped it worked.
“Petra, are you sure about this?” asked Braith, standing at her elbow. “If the minister thinks you had a hand in the airfield attack—”
“What choice do I have?” she spat, more anger in her voice than she intended. She turned away from the workshop floor, her chest tight. “If I don’t fix the quadruped—”
“Then someone else will,” he said, taking her arm and pulling her away from the door. “Let someone else repair the fault. Let Yancy take care of it. Show him how to fix it, and we can get you out of here before—”
“No,” she said, pulling herself away. “I can’t leave this to someone else. I won’t. This is my mistake, my responsibility.”
“Petra—”
“I have to do this, Braith,” she whispered. “I have to make this right. Whatever the cost.”
He let out a heavy sigh. “Then do what you need to do and get out of there,” he said. “We may still have a chance to escape if you act quickly enough. Don’t give up yet.”
She glanced up at him, the urge to say something itching at her throat, but she didn’t have the words—only fear. And regret. She didn’t deserve such loyalty, not from him. “I’ll try,” she said quietly, and then she was through the door and over the catwalk, sliding down the ladder to the workshop floor.
Her feet hit the ground hard and she turned on her heel, holding her hat firmly to her head as she walked slowly toward the quadruped. It stood like a great metal spider in the center of the room, the harsh electric light glinting off its sharp, angled legs and smooth brass dome.
Yancy was already at the base of the machine, talking animatedly to one of the elder engineers, his welding goggles pushed above his brows as Yancy gestured toward the quadruped’s base. Another engineer lay underneath, busily welding sheets of plating to the underbelly while two others began mounting the left-hand Agar to the piloting cabin. It was terrifying really, the unfinished edges and fragmented construction almost grotesque compared to the neat rows of completed quadrupeds she had found in Rupert’s warship. Frankensteinian. Emmerich would have found some sort of ironic poetry in that.
Yancy caught her eye as she approached and joined her beside the machine, leaving the other engineer to his work. “Merle’s going to run the numbers again,” he said to her, “but it will take Calligaris’s approval before they can investigate the possibility of repair—if the fault does show up.”
Petra frowned. “We don’t have time for that.”
“Not likely.” Yancy gestured over her shoulder. “Looks like Calligaris knows you’re here.”
“Dammit.” She turned toward Calligaris’s desk. Already he had the telephone receiver to his ear, his eyes fixed on her like a hawk. She swallowed hard. “How much time do you think we have?”
“Ten minutes? Five?”
She grabbed a screwdriver from the nearest toolbox, curling her fingers around the heavy wooden handle. “Give me a hand with the ladder.”
Yancy helped move the ladder to the quadruped, and then she was up the rungs and inside the unfinished cabin, landing on the exposed floor beams with a clang. Her eyes swept the chamber, taking in the chaos of uncompleted mechanisms, the unmounted control panel leaning against the wall, the dashboard a tangle of wires and linkages. The pilot’s chair was absent, the floor nothing more than a frame of metal crossbeams, but the array of gears beneath the cramped dome had the look of a finished machine. The engine transmission and connecting drive systems had been completed nearly a month ago. Every single axle, linkage, and gear fitted together according to Petra’s flawed designs—down to the sabotaging axle plate.
“Yancy, you there?” she called.
Outside the dome, the ladder creaked under his weight, and a few seconds later, Yancy hung over the open hatch, blocking the overhe
ad light. He heaved himself over the edge and dropped into the cabin with a thud.
“Need some help?”
“Just pay attention,” she said. “I can only show you this once.”
She crouched over the exposed floor and pointed out the faulty axle plate with her screwdriver. “This is the axle plate here,” she said, reaching down into the machine’s base. “Removing it will prevent the mechanical failure, but it will also deactivate the regulator. Without it, the pilots will have to adjust power distribution manually, likely leading to a drop in mechanical efficiency, but the quadruped will function as intended.”
She pulled the first screw loose and passed it up to Yancy.
“Could we not reconfigure the axle plate to adjust for the rotational disparity?” he asked, watching as she removed the next couple of screws. “If we implemented a secondary transmission between the interconnecting mechanisms, or maybe added another gear train to redirect the load from the main drive, we could bypass the tension issue and still keep the regulator intact.”
“If we had more time, perhaps,” she said, passing him another screw. “But with the deadline moved up, this is the best fix we have.”
Even if they could reconfigure the drive trains, the repair would take days to complete on the prototype, possibly even weeks, and with the army of quadrupeds sitting in a hangar at Hasguard, they didn’t have the time or the manpower to implement such a complicated repair to over twelve hundred machines. Removing the axle plate was the simplest option. The only option.
She wiped a trickle of sweat from her brow, the cabin swelteringly hot this close to the freshly welded underbelly.
Three more screws.
And then maybe she and Braith could get out of here.
She hadn’t twisted the next screw more than a few turns when she heard a shout at the far side of the workshop, someone banging on the supply door, then footsteps treading nearer. The ladder beside the prototype creaked, rattling against the quadruped’s shell with each step, and Petra froze as she looked up at the open hatch door, wondering whose face she would see.
Braith appeared overhead. “He’s here,” he said with a frown, his voice tense. “I barred the supply door and cut the wires for the mechanical lock upstairs, but it’s only a matter of time before they break in. You need to hurry.”
Petra clenched her jaw and stared at the exposed floor. She had no time. “Yancy? I need you to do something else for me,” she said, leaning back into the machine’s base. She removed the final two screws and yanked the faulty axle plate free, tossing it to Yancy before wiping her greasy hands on her trousers. She fetched the schematics from her pocket and pressed the crumpled pages into his hands, hardly breathing as she heard the slam of the supply door banging against the wall and the sound of boot steps echoing off the workshop floor. “I need you to take these to your father,” she said. “Don’t wait. Go straight there. File an official repair order with his signature and have it delivered it to the Royal Forces at once.”
“What are you going to do?”
Braith dropped into the quadruped. “We’re going to run.”
“Wait,” she said, Braith already hauling her to her feet. “There’s something else . . . Yancy, there’s an army of faulty quadrupeds at the Hasguard Airfield, built according to the prototype’s flawed design,” she said, resisting Braith’s grasp. “Rupert knows where they are. If the report isn’t filed, they’ll fail—all of them. You have to tell your father. You have to make sure—”
“Damn it, Petra . . .” Braith shoved her to the ladder. “We have to go.”
“You have to fix them,” she said, stumbling up the ladder. “Yancy—”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, pocketing the schematics. “Just go.”
She nodded in gratitude and let Braith push her up the rest of the narrow access ladder, clambering out of the quadruped and down the other side.
The coppers were already on them.
She landed hard on the floor, barely evading the first copper as Braith landed next to her. He grappled with one of the black-uniformed men as she kicked another in the shin. Then she scrambled back and ducked beneath the machine’s massive frame, hoping to slip between the quadruped’s legs to escape, but there were too many of them.
Someone struck her in the back and drove her to her knees, twisting her arms behind her. She tried to jerk free, but then a pair of manacles bit hard into her wrists, and she was unceremoniously hauled to her feet, dragged away from the quadruped by two grim-faced coppers, their grip on her arms unbreakable.
“Bring her here.”
The tone of satisfaction in that familiar melodic voice set her teeth on edge, and she looked up to see Julian Goss standing among the black-uniformed officers, triumph in his eyes. Beside him stood Calligaris and the rest of her engineering team, not one of them stepping forward in her defense.
“I demand to know what this is about,” said Braith, struggling against two of Julian’s men. “You have no right to come in here and—”
“I have every right,” said Julian, stepping forward. “Miss Wade is under arrest by the authority of the Guild council.”
“On what charges?” he demanded.
Julian smiled handsomely. “For conspiring against the Guild and the Royal Forces. She is a prime suspect in the anti-imperialist attack on the Hasguard Airfield and accused of—”
“I had nothing to do with that attack on the airfield,” she spat, twisting in her captors’ grasp. “And you know it.”
“Unfortunately, Miss Wade, you have no one to corroborate such a claim. According to key witnesses, you were seen trespassing on military property just moments before the first explosion.”
She clenched her jaw, her heartbeat quickening. If that was true, if someone had seen her . . . “I didn’t do it.”
“I’m afraid the evidence suggests otherwise.”
“What evidence?” said Braith, coming to her defense. “You have no substantial proof, no grounds for this arrest. She didn’t conspire with the anti-imperialists. She wasn’t involved in the attack.”
Julian’s smile stretched thinly as he turned his gaze on Braith. “And would you be willing to testify to that, Officer Cartwright?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “I would.”
“Yet as I understand it, you were absent from your assigned post around the time of the attack, or is that not so? In fact, you were attending to other military duties with Lieutenant-General Stokes at the time.” The minister slipped a piece of paper from his pocket and held it up for all to see. “I have here the lieutenant-general’s signed statement that you were with him in the final moments before the attack occurred. Testifying to the contrary would be perjury.”
Braith twisted in his captors’ grasp. “You set this up,” he spat. “She was right all along about you.”
Petra faltered, mind racing with Braith’s accusation, realizing the truth of his words. Letting her visit the airfield, dragging Braith away from his duties, giving her the opportunity to incriminate herself by sneaking off with Rupert, the timing of the attack . . . every step of it planned, as if she was truly nothing more than a pawn in his plot for world domination.
Julian had manipulated everything.
“As for evidence,” he went on, “I have proof enough to see her hanged by the end of the week. And to find her here, attempting to sabotage the quadruped prototype mere hours after the attack on the airfield—”
“I wasn’t trying to sabotage your bloody machine,” she said through gritted teeth, hot rage welling up in her chest as she realized just how far he had gone to implicate her in all this. “I was trying to fix it. There’s a fault in the design, an error that—”
“Any error in the design is of your own making,” he hissed, drawing close. “Admit defeat, Miss Wade. Give up this pointless
effort.”
She glared back at him, breathing hard. He might have manipulated her every move, but there was one thing he hadn’t planned for. “I know about the quadrupeds at Hasguard,” she said, her voice low. “I know about your army. You want to know where I was when the attack occurred? I was sitting inside one of your machines.”
There was the briefest falter in his triumphant smile, but he soon recovered, leaning close enough that only she could hear him. “Then you see how futile your rebellion has been,” he said, his breath hot on her face. “Whatever sabotage you thought you could achieve, you were mistaken. Now that I have my army, there is nothing you can do to stop me.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, struggling against her captors. “They’re faulty. All of them. If the error is left unrepaired, every single one of your quadrupeds will fail.” She searched his dark copper eyes, pleading to his sense of humanity. “You have to fix them.”
He held her gaze a moment longer and then gestured to the two coppers holding her. “Take her to one of the third-level cells. I do not want any chance of her escaping.”
Petra’s captors jerked her forward, but she struggled against them. “You can’t do this,” she said, a vice tightening around her throat. “You can’t—”
“It has already been done.”
The finality in his voice struck her cold.
“He won’t get away with this, Petra,” said Braith. “I’ll speak on your behalf to the council, try to clear your name before the trial. I’ll testify to your innocence.”
“Oh, but I am afraid there will be no testimony, Officer Cartwright,” said Julian, folding his hands behind his back. “There will be no trial. The evidence against her is insurmountable.”
“What?”
“And because you failed to prevent Miss Wade from committing these crimes, you are hereby stripped of your rank and henceforth transferred to Hasguard for combat training under Lieutenant-General Stokes, effective immediately.”
The Guild Conspiracy Page 22