Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  “I believe you saw my Runabout last night, yes? My beautiful motorized transport?”

  “The one with the two wheels?”

  “I have a pair of them,” Favo nodded. “Molla had one, but she left it behind. It’s yours if you want it.”

  Cousins looked at the key, turning it over and over between his fingers. He’d kept the mask of indifference up; he didn’t want Favo to see that, as far as he was concerned, he’d just accepted his offer. He looked up to see Favo smiling broadly. So much for trying to hide it.

  Chapter 15: The Sleeping Giant

  The day ran on forever, it seemed, to Rom. Eventually, after the late supper they also had delivered to them, she curled up on two of the chairs and fell asleep to the sounds of the music being translated as accurately as possible from Kari’s memory.

  In her dreams, Memory appeared to her, inside a white marble throne room – she stepped down behind a brilliantly shining rostrum to one side of the ornate royal seat and descended the stairs to where Rom found herself.

  “Where am I?” Rom asked. “Am I back in the spirit world?” She gasped, grabbing her chest and feeling for the beating of her heart.

  Memory placed a calming hand upon her shoulder. “You are fine,” she said. “We are speaking through Mulligan – he serves as a concealing conduit between us; Artifice cannot hear us in this place.”

  Rom sighed. “This is beautiful,” she said. “What is this? It looks like the chapel in the orphanage, but cleaner and brighter.”

  Nodding softly, Memory gestured around the room at the delicate carvings that covered the circular wall and ceiling, extending far above the elegant columns which surrounded them. “It is the interior of a temple, built long ago – but this is how it looked back when it was first made. I hope someday you have a chance to see this building in the flesh, providing it still stands.”

  Memory paused in her reverie, but then blinked, seeming to return to herself. “I can hear the magic,” she said. “I see that your friends are endeavoring to restore the stones.”

  Rom nodded. “You recognize the music?”

  “Yes. It was an advanced skill,” she explained, “but sadly so few understood it that it was no surprise it has been lost to your world.”

  “They’ve been working at it all day but still can’t figure out what they’re missing. Can you help us?”

  Memory nodded. “I think so. I think that’s why I was drawn to your dream. Let me explain what you must tell them, and you must remember it word for word, even if it does not make sense to you.”

  Rom nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  She woke up a few moments later, with Ian looking at her strangely. The music had stopped, and Kari and the others were looking at her, too.

  “I had a dream,” she explained. “In the dream, I spoke with an old, old spirit who knew about the making of the stones, and she told me to tell you what you’re doing wrong.”

  Kari and Branthem walked over to her.

  “Please, child – tell us,” he said.

  Rom closed her eyes and recited the instructions word for word. “First, the stone is wrong; its harmonic signature is… incorrect for the key – key? Yeah, key – of your song. Find the correct signature of the stone and adjust your music to that key.” She opened her eyes to see Kari run at her and hug her.

  “That’s perfect!” her friend said.

  Kari ran over to the stone and picked it up in her hand, holding it close to her ear. She pointed at the musician playing the large pipeworks in the back and hummed a single note. He played a note near that note, but it ground itself against the note Kari hummed, being only a fraction off. Even to Rom’s unschooled ears, it sounded harsh and abrasively incorrect. Kari hummed her note even louder and more insistently.

  The musician reached beneath the tabletop and made a slight adjustment until the note he played matched the note Kari hummed – the stone reacted by flashing momentarily.

  “That’s it!” Kari yelled, putting the stone back and waving her arms. The musician at the back held the note longer while the other musicians adjusted their instruments to match his new tonality.

  Ian brought Rom back to her seat, placing one hand on her shoulder. “There was a reason I brought you along,” he whispered.

  The musicians played the arrangement again from the beginning in the new key Kari had given them – the stone reacted instantly with a burst of pale light. They continued to play the song, starting at first low and light, but gradually increasing in intensity and power. The Morrow stone changed with the music, until, ten minutes later, it glowed brilliantly in the great musical chamber. The musicians held the last note in a sustained fade, but even after they had stopped playing, the music continued.

  It rose of its own accord, and the music repeated for several minutes more, before the final echoes faded away; the glowing stone persisted, however, to emit its powerful shimmering light. Kari slowly walked towards the stone, tears streaming down her face.

  The person she looked at was Rom. Holding the stone up in one hand, she smiled broadly. “We did it!” she exclaimed.

  * * * * *

  It was well past evening when the three of them left the Conservatory and walked to Kari’s steam lab. It was a fairly significant honor that she – a mere first year apprentice – had a lab of her own. Divinations had been performed on her in coordination with the tests they had had her take when she first began here, designating her as one of a very small contingent of scholars and students permitted to spend their time in the study of the artifact sciences.

  As a result of this singular honor, Kari was given not only her own lab, but one of the larger labs themselves – laboratories designed for the precise study of the largest steam systems known: the ancient Machines themselves.

  Kari drew a simple brass key from one of her pockets and unlocked the key to her lab - - a room the size of the entire apothecary itself. More significant than the room, however, was the single device which rested on a series of small pylons.

  Although it was reclined upon its back, it was, Rom could see, one of the Admin Machines – the man-shaped devices created to maintain the ancient drone machines before most all of the machines had mysteriously vanished so many years ago. Unlike the two “dancing machines” she had found holding the Morrow Stone (which Molla had stolen) this machine was cleaned and shiny – and large plates at its chest were opened, exposing a long trail of cables and pipes that ended at a small worktable beside its elbow.

  “Wow,” Rom said. “This – all this…is what you work on all day?” She clapped her hands together. “Did you build this with all the bits and pieces we salvaged?”

  Kair shrugged, closing and locking the doors behind them. “Most of it is from the college, but I’ve picked up a lot of the special tools I need by selling the parts you helped me find. I also get individual tutoring from Professor Theremin – he’s here as my departmental counselor – but then I spend about three or four hours in here each day, trying to understand why this thing won’t work.”

  She walked the length of the machine, sliding her fingertips along the shell of its arm. “Previous scientists have made adjustments and replaced broken and worn down pieces - - we know it pretty much works now, but we couldn’t power it. We tried channeling raw power from steam engines, but all it did was allow us to manually move the machines. These were supposed to move all by themselves, but we couldn’t figure out how to get them to do that.”

  She led them to a large box on the table where all the pipes and cables from the machines’ chest cavity met, and pointed into a small gap in the center. “I got some tools from my parts dealer yesterday that let me do some fine tuning on this junction, here. I didn’t connect this to the stones at first - - I knew they operated on some kind of resonant harmonic – that’s the sounds that objects ‘feel’ when it’s played near them – but… well, it’s still a theory until we see if this works or not,” she admitted.

  Rom pointed
at the box on the table. It looked strangely familiar to her. Kari followed her gaze. “Remember the class Professor Theremin gave us right before we left the Orphanage? He brought this in to show us – well, not this one, but a smaller one, designed for one of the drone machines. There’re probably twenty or thirty other Smiths working to restore big machines like this one, but it always comes back to this final part being missing.”

  Ian handed her back the stone – he’d carried it with them from the Conservatory – and said “Let us find out if your theory is correct,” he said.

  She nodded, placing it on the table in front of her and reached below the table into an opened toolbox. She drew out a small pair of tools and stood back up in front of the stone. The first tool held the stone securely in a long pair of finger-like grips while the other Kari used to reach in and adjust the size of the connecting supports to snugly hold the stone.

  Once the stone was secured, she put the tools away and reached into her belt and pulled out the two gauntlets she had been told to choose by the Looking Glasses.

  “Nothing’s happening,” Rom said.

  “Not yet, no,” Kari agreed. “But I have to reconnect this power box into its chest.” She removed the connecting cables and lifted the large box with one hand.

  She grinned at Rom. “This box weighs about as much as you do,” she said. “These gloves are really amazing!”

  “They make you strong?” Rom said, impressed.

  “They do more than that. I’ll show you some of the other things some other time, though, I promise.” She climbed a ladder up to the chest of the machine and walked over, momentarily disappearing from view as she lowered the box into the chest and pulled the extraneous pipes and cables free, connecting the power box snugly into its housing.

  She dropped back down a few moments later, setting the extra cables and pipes aside. “Just in case this works, you should stand over there,” she said, pointing towards the far wall.

  Kari moved around the shoulder towards the neck of the machine, and opened a panel, exposing a set of small gears and a lever. Turning the lever out, she cranked it twice, engaging the gears. Instantly, the machine began to hum, a wave of vibrations continuing the entire length of it to its feet.

  The support pylons collapsed, sending the machine crashing the four feet to the floor. The impact sent powerful reverberations exploding off the flat and reflective surfaces of the large room. Kari jumped back, startled as much by the noise as by the reaction of the machine.

  To their combined amazement, the machine sat up, and seemed to look around the room. Finally, it lowered its head to Kari.

  “You are the Operator,” it said, in a deep voice they could all feel in their bones. “Please instruct me in my duties.”

  Kari looked at Ian, who only responded with a smile. “You have done it,” he said. “You have awakened the sleeping giant.”

  Chapter 16: A Wrong Turn

  News of Kari’s success with reactivating the Machine spread like wildfire through the Colleges. Though, there was some speculation as to which part of the news garnered more significance – that the first machine to recover full autonomous functionality had been reawakened, or that this miracle was brought to light through the efforts of a twelve-year-old girl who was only barely an apprentice.

  By the setting of the sun that following day, all the professors from the major colleges – of Arts as well as Sciences, as well as a majority of the town council members – had come by to meet Kari and be introduced to the awakened machine. The machine identified itself to them as Aleph-Five Olus-Four-Seven. One of the professors of ancient linguistics translated this as an old catalog system, used in centuries past to organize and categorize their machines, but Kari chose to think of this as his name.

  One of the strange aspects of Aleph-Five was that he would take no instructions nor even recognize questions asked of him by anyone but Kari. So all day and into the early evening, the professors required her to remain there and ‘translate’ their questions posed to him. Ian stayed with her; Rom returned to the shop and brought them back food and drinks to help keep her stamina up; Kari had barely slept in the past three days.

  The real problem became what to do with Aleph-Five. He seemed to grow tired of the questions as well, and began asking Kari about the other machines and what he could do to quickly return to his duties. But the professors of the school decided that he needed to remain for the time being, so that they could complete their examinations of him.

  Around the time Kari and Ian were planning on calling it a day, Branthem paid them a visit to see how the Morrow stone was proceeding; he also confessed that they had tried to recreate the stone without success, and hoped that Kari might be able to help them understand what they were doing wrong. Ian assured him that they would stop by another day to explore their failures and see what could be done to improve their processes.

  Kari asked Aleph-Five to rest – a concept, strangely enough, he understood – and that they would return in the morning to talk some more. Cousins was waiting for them all outside when they left the college. He was sitting on the back of the same contraption Molla had made her getaway the other night with Favo and Mulligan.

  Rom growled at the memory and doubled her fists. Cousins noticed this and raised his hands.

  “Whoa, now, wait a moment, this is not what you think,” he tried to assure them.

  “You’re working with Favo, now, is that it?” Rom asked.

  He paused. “Okay, perhaps it is what you think,” he conceded. “But it is not as bad as it sounds.”

  Kari paused to examine the device while Rom glared at him. “Fine. Explain it, then.”

  Cousins looked to Ian for some support, but, seeing none, tried his best to defend himself. “Look, Favo’s going to be spending his time trying to track down and deal out some retribution on Molla, and he wants me to start converting his enterprises towards more… legally centered ventures.”

  A small puff of air escaped Rom’s lips. “We’ll see how well that works out. Did he ever apologize for trying to steal Mully?”

  “He already did – the night he took him,” Cousins reminded her.

  “Doesn’t count. We’d beaten him; he would’ve said anything for us not to beat him up more.”

  Ian placed a hand on her shoulder. “Perhaps we should trust Cousin’s judgment. He does have a knack for understanding a person’s true nature. Mayhaps Favo is not entirely the ruthless criminal we took him to be?”

  Cousins shook his head. “Oh, no, he’s still scum. But he’s trying to avoid getting in trouble with the law, and so he wants to pay me to run his organization in a way that will let him sleep better at night – you know, the kind of sleep you can have when you aren’t afraid of people shooting you in the head while you’re sleeping.”

  Kari frowned at him. “I never worry about that kind of thing,” she said. “Well, I might now.” She patted the frame of the device. “This is pretty neat, though. Favo give it to you?”

  “Yes, this was a kind of reward for just considering his offer. He called it a Runabout, but I’m sure there’s a more technical term for it somewhere.”

  Kari shrugged. “It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen in my part of the college, but I definitely recognize the tech they used on it.” She pointed at the central motor, and said, “This is an inverse compression engine - - one fourth of the energy it creates is used to re-compress the steam back into the chambers. So it’s re-powering itself even while it’s moving the Runabout forward. There’s some similar stuff in the project I’ve been working on, only on a larger scale.”

  “Well, it’s fast, too,” Cousins said, clearly not having understood a fraction of what she had just said.

  Now that he mentioned it, Rom had thought his hair looked a bit more messed up than usual.

  Adjusting his goggles, he added, “I wear the looking glasses while I’m riding and I don’t have to worry about hitting anyone, either – they tell me
just where I need to go.”

  Ian smiled. “Probably not the use for which they had originally been designed, but that is the evidence of a quality tool.”

  A pair of men walked by while the four were speaking; Cousins noticed that they seemed to eye the group with an overly curious sentiment. One of them looked familiar to Cousins, but he couldn’t initially place him. Kari waved to them, and they smiled and waved back.

  At that moment, Rom’s gems glowed faintly in the darkness, and she and Mulligan looked towards the fields.

  “Something’s prowling around out there,” she said. “I’m going to go take care of it; we’ll come back to the shop when we’re done.” She tapped the black stone bracelet, summoning her shepherd’s crook, and bent her knees to give her a strong takeoff. Cousins frowned, and looked back down the street in the direction of the two strange men, but they were gone. Hopefully they hadn’t noticed Rom’s dramatic departure.

  When he looked back towards Ian and Kari, he noticed Ian was looking in that same direction.

  “Ian?” he asked.

  “Yes, I saw them.”

  “Do we know them?”

  Ian bit his lip. “I know one of them. Remember the two men who were searching for Rom several months ago?”

  “Those guys?” Kari said dubiously. “They run the parts store I trade to. They’re nice.”

  Cousins wheeled on her. “They know you?”