Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures

by Alex Acks

  “That? No, just a little gift from a friend. They sell them at the museum now for seventeen pence.”

  He was lying, Marta decided, looking at his eyes. And he wasn’t even trying to disguise it. How interesting. “I’m glad to know it isn’t at all valuable. You see, I saw one of those during the last robbery, and we just chucked it out the window to lighten the load.” And he saw, she thought, just as clearly that she was lying. What was this about?

  “You’ll be hanged tomorrow,” he informed her. “We’re not bothering with trials for your sort anymore.”

  “I’m terribly sorry. I can’t possibly fit you into my schedule until a week Wednesday at the earliest.” She tilted her head; she felt the shape of the problem, far larger than what she’d bargained for, though that only made it more interesting. Something still seemed to be missing, some piece misaligned. “I hadn’t realized you were in the habit of using the regular army to do your work these days. Short staffed?”

  Colonel Douglas smiled tightly. “Not at all. They were just lucky enough to be in the area.”

  “I expect a reprimand on the record of the captain in charge. Last I saw, even this duchy hadn’t descended so far into barbarism that we were quelling brawls with bullets.”

  “I heard.”

  She stared at him, the anger she’d swallowed down at the situation burning in her eyes for that moment. “You’ll look into it.”

  “There are some matters to investigate in regards to the unfortunate workers who were injured on your account.” There wasn’t an ounce of anything but unsympathetic righteousness in his expression. “But perhaps men that take to a life of piracy ought to consider the danger of the company they keep.” He made an abrupt gesture with one hand and the guards took her arms again, turning her.

  Marta turned her head to keep an eye on him even as they dragged her from the room. “See to it, Colonel, or I bloody well will!”

  The guards stuffed her back into the Maria and they rattled their way to the gaol, Marta caught between fuming anger and the whirling possibility of just what could be going on. It was all that damned little tin toy, but she’d looked it over before.

  Perhaps she hadn’t looked it over enough. Perhaps she should have taken the little thing to pieces.

  At the gaol, rather than taking her directly to the cell, they turned a corner and headed toward the front of the building. “Dinner time?” she asked with false cheer.

  “You’ve a visitor.” They deposited her in a small bare room, its single chair already occupied.

  Marta smiled at the sight of that visitor. Simms worked swiftly these days, it seemed. Deliah had dressed herself in an unflattering shade of puce, hair and makeup done so that she looked thirty years older than her own modest age. She rose to her feet, leaning heavily on an ivory-headed cane, and spoke with a well-done tremulous air. “Oh, my dear girl. I always told your father you’d come to a bad end.”

  “Yes, Auntie. Terribly sorry about that.” Marta suppressed a grin, clasping the hand Deliah held out to her. As expected, Deliah used that moment to slip a bit of metal into Marta’s sleeve, the sleight of hand delicate and subtle.

  “Your uncle’s urn would be spinning like a top just thinking of the hair-curling mischief you’ve been up to.”

  “I imagine so. I’m a very naughty girl, I know, and I’ve shamed the family name. If only poor Uncle Edgar hadn’t let me read so many books when I was young.” She did a terrible impression of contrite and was rewarded by seeing a sparkle of amusement in Deliah’s tawny eyes as she peered at her over the top of her spectacles.

  “If only your Uncle Edgar hadn’t read so many terrible books, he might have had a good clean life and would still be singing terribly in the church choir.”

  Somehow, she kept a straight face. “And how is your garden, dear Auntie? Does the hemlock grow?”

  “Cheeky girl! You’ll be the death of me. But the weather has been lovely, though as always we could use more rain…” They made polite conversation about the weather, and played a game where they made up horrendous fictitious relatives for the purpose of then making up even more horrendous gossip. Neither of them cracked a smile, which made this round a tie, though Marta thought there might have been a bit of cheating on Deliah’s part, concealing a snort behind a lace handkerchief when she feigned a coughing fit.

  After twenty minutes, one of the guards returned. “Visiting hours are over, ma’am,” he said, back stiff.

  “I’ll see you again tomorrow, my dear girl,” Deliah called, waving as the guards led Marta away. “And I’ll bring Father Crispin with me this time!”

  Marta caught the subtle movement of her fingers. Ten minutes, then.

  They hadn’t even gotten her back to her cell when the smell of smoke burst in through the windows, accompanied by shouts of “Fire!” While the guards were distracted, Marta took the chance to open the locks of her manacles, though she left them carefully in place. “Come on, look lively!” The guards chivvied her along and put her into the cell without any inspection at all before rushing off to help with the fire. Or perhaps gawk—that seemed nearly as possible.

  They didn’t notice that she’d put the bit of wire to good second use, jamming the mechanism of the door so it didn’t shut all the way. Two minutes later, she walked confidently through the temporarily emptied halls, into the kitchen, and climbed cheerfully out the garbage chute. She resisted the urge to hum a merry tune as she did so; they were old friends, she and the municipal jail, and it never ceased to amaze her how the most charming security holes never saw their way to getting patched up—or when they did, she made it her business to create new ones. Out in the street, she broke into a trot, moving away from the crowd to an alley.

  Rather than Simms waiting for her the normal three streets over, Marta was surprised to find Deliah leaning against a brick wall, idly turning her now-decorative cane in her hand. She was somewhat less surprised when the markedly shorter woman took her by the shoulders and shoved her against the wall.

  And by that point not surprised at all when Deliah pressed their lips together in a kiss that involved far more tongue than was strictly polite. Marta returned the favor with equal fervor and obligingly ruined the woman’s carefully crafted hairstyle by combing her fingers through it until Deliah took a step back.

  “Powder, really?” Marta held up her white-dusted hands. She might have been breathing a bit harder than when she started, but had no intention of admitting to any cause but her flight from the gaol.

  “Why bother with the effort when it isn’t needed?” Deliah smirked, pointedly licking her lips. “Your man Simms says you may have a word or two about my jewelry.”

  Well, that certainly explained Deliah’s surprisingly swift appearance. “I may have found one of the earrings.”

  “Just one? That’s not terribly useful. But I’ll expect it in the mail, nonetheless.” Deliah laughed. “You can’t hold that over my head forever, dearest Captain. I’ll tire of playing.”

  “Then one of us had better think of a new game.”

  Deliah leaned in for another much lighter kiss. Marta parted her lips invitingly, hand coming up to play with her hair again, but then Deliah took a careful step back. With a wicked smile, she opened her mouth to let out a blood-curdling scream, “Here! Escaped prisoner! Escaped prisoner! Oh help! Murder!”

  Marta laughed. “Oh, you wicked creature.” As Deliah started up another round of screaming, Marta turned on her heel and pelted down the street, sprinting for the nearest alley.

  “Here it is, Captain.” Simms offered the Captain the ugly little orrery, having bought it back from Dolly with a toy dog.

  She snatched it from his hand and turned it over and over, examining the mechanism with new enthusiasm. “Aha… Simms, trim me a strip of that newspaper there. A full line of text.”

  Bemused, he did as he was told, carefully cutting through an article in the Post and offering it to her.

  “How I missed this bef
ore… I must be going blind.” She took the newspaper and fed it into what had seemed to be a natural seam in the base of the orrery. But when she turned the mechanism to make the planets move, the paper disappeared inside and then fed back out. She held it up. “Ah, look…all those little pinpricks again.” Shake of the orrery and a powdering of off-white dust drifted from it. “So that answers that. But to what end?”

  Simms watched her cautiously as she froze a moment, and then let out a victorious cry. She shoved the device into his hands again and came up with the thin little book she’d also taken from the now-dead spy. “These aren’t codes listed here. These are configurations for the planets of the orrery, so it might decipher the codes in the newspapers.”

  “Awful lot of stuff in the newspaper. All the articles alone…”

  “But it wouldn’t be articles, you see, not unless every reporter in these rags is suspect. Possible, but better to have something they can control the text of start to finish, not something that would have to be built into an article about some high society fluff-brain’s dog vomiting on a general’s trousers—”

  “The advertisements!” Simms interrupted her. “Has to be all those advertisements, doesn’t it?” He scrabbled through one of the newspapers until he came to a page with the large ads again, butcher shop and astrology society once again paired side by side. “Oh, it’s got to be the astrology, right?” It was stupidly, glaringly obvious now.

  The Captain burst out laughing. “Clever boys. Certainly easy to work in patterns of planets there, to set the cipher. Start cutting, Simms.”

  He handed her the orrery again and took up a pair of shears. It took far more care than he liked to cut up the newspaper and not rip it, to keep the lines straight. Particularly when he was so infected with the Captain’s enthusiasm—he wanted to know just as much as she what this was about.

  It was a torturous hour of snipping from the shears and muffled plinking from the orrery, Captain Ramos laying out strips of newspaper in ordered care. Simms set the shears down eagerly when he finished, shaking out cramped fingers as he leaned over the strips of paper barely daring to breathe. What he saw spelled out didn’t make much more sense to him, seemingly random combinations of letters and numbers, nary a whole word in sight. “Think we might have done that wrong, Captain.”

  She shook her head, smiling wolfishly. “Oh, not in the slightest, Simms, not in the slightest. You took this one from the Post, correct?”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s have a look at one from the Tribune.”

  Simms was markedly less enthusiastic in the hand-cramping process, but complied nonetheless. Otherwise, she’d never tell him anything.

  Captain Ramos lined up the new set of strips and stared at them moodily. “Oh my,” she said after a moment, “they have been busy.”

  “With what?”

  She tapped one set of the strips with a finger. “These are troop movements, Simms. The advertisement in the Post is a record of the troop movements and map coordinates for the army of the Grand Duchy of Salt Lake. And the advertisement in the Tribune is instructions for the spies who have collected all of that glorious data. Spies of the Grand Duchy of Denver, no doubt.” She sat back, a wave of her hand scattering the papers. “We’re looking at a war, Simms. Or the lead-up for one, with the Grand Duchy of Denver readying to invade its neighbor. That certainly explains the sudden influx of green troops, the shifts in rank, the Duke’s building up his army, and working the smelters in Silverthorn and no doubt every other mining town over time to supply all these starry-eyed young warriors with pistols and sabers. No wonder our dear little ghost in Salt Lake paid for this with his life. Had he gotten this into the hands of his superiors, he would have scuttled the whole matter.”

  Simms let out a low whistle. “Explains why the Chief of Security was so eager to get it back.”

  “Does it now,” the Captain murmured, idly turning the little mechanism again. “Though it doesn’t explain at all why he wanted me to know that very fact.”

  She’d told him about the odd meeting. Simms still had no idea what to make of it himself. “Could have just made a mistake.”

  “Colonel Douglas does make mistakes on occasion, true. But none so blatant as that. No, he bloody well knew I’d have this knot unraveled sooner rather than later with the stink of his involvement all over it. But he not only wanted sooner, he wanted it to be understood from nearly the moment I escaped.”

  “Seems to me that if he wants anything in particular, best not to give it to him, right?” Simms still hadn’t forgiven the man for his prank with the jewelry upon his arrival in the duchy. “So what do we do about it?” This was too big, duchies and politics and war.

  “I’m inclined toward nothing,” Captain Ramos said. “Considering where Elijah’s blood sits, if I were inclined to help anyone at all it would be the Grand Duke of Salt Lake, and I’d rather eat nails than do anything to benefit that fatuous, god-bothering git. Now that I have the answer, I don’t really care if the two Grand Dukes want to annihilate each other.”

  “Well, I care.”

  Simms and Captain Ramos both turned toward the sound of the voice; it was Amelia. Her eyes were dark and hollow, nose red, hair uncombed.

  “Mister Cavendesh. You should have knocked.”

  “You seemed to be having a bit too much fun.” Amelia shrugged, the jerk of one shoulder. “Elijah is dead because of that thing.”

  “Amelia, I’m sorry—” Simms started. It was Captain Ramos that stopped him, one hand on his arm.

  “And what would you have us do about that, Mister Cavendesh?”

  “Every time the Grand Dukes play, people like Elijah end up dying for it. People like us. People better than us. I don’t want anything to do with territory and politics.” Amelia’s lips compressed in a thin, angry line. “That’s why I left the duchies. I want you to make them stop.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” the Captain said. “That’s quite the tall order.”

  “Maybe not always. But make them stop this time.”

  Her words felt like a punch in the gut to Simms. Looking at the Captain’s face, he wasn’t certain how she felt at all. Appeals to her humanity tended to fall flat, from what he’d seen in the past. She was rational before anything, always weighing risk and cost.

  “Well, the current arrangement is rather advantageous to us, and even if the ensuing chaos might be put to some use, I do not think the end result of one duchy expanding its borders so widely will be of much good.” She smiled sharply, the sort of smile Simms found himself very glad wasn’t directed at him. “Because you asked, Mister Cavendesh. I’ve a few ideas.”

  Colonel Geoffrey Douglas was a habitually early riser, and thus he was dressed and just in the process of knotting his tie when the knock came at his door. He glanced at the window—still determinately dark outside—and went to open the door himself.

  Outside waited a young man in blue and white uniform, wrists and collar edged with the red braid of the palace guard. Geoff’s eyebrows went up. “Something the matter?”

  “His Royal Highness wishes to see you,” the young soldier said. He didn’t sound particularly happy to be out in the city on the wrong side of dawn.

  “His Royal Highness is up a bit early, isn’t he?” Geoff commented dryly, even as his stomach seemed about to tie itself in knots.

  “You don’t know the half of it, sir.”

  Geoff stepped over the paper that had been delivered at his doorstep—the maid would pick it up shortly, he was certain—and followed the guard to the carriage. A silent, tense ride later, he was escorted to the private rooms of the Grand Duke, though mercifully he didn’t have to venture farther in than the outer parlor.

  Thus far in his career, he’d only once seen the Grand Duke in such a fury that he’d been brought to attend him in his bedroom. Geoff hoped to never experience that again. The outer parlor was more than grand enough, sumptuous furniture done in reds and golds, and
at this hour of the morning a rather shocking breakfast spread already laid out, including a silver coffee post etched with a design of elk.

  The Grand Duke of Denver was a surprisingly short man with square, broad shoulders that gave him a bullish appearance, imposing even in a dressing gown and slippers as he wore now. He’d served in the military at the behest of his father and had, to all reports, done well, though often such things had to be taken with a large grain of salt when people were afraid ill-considered words would reach the wrong ears. But the most intimidating part of the Grand Duke was not the carefully trimmed black goatee and neat hair that gave him a purposefully villainous air, but his dark eyes, sharp and sparking with intelligence.

  Geoff had learned this the moment he’d met the man: he may have inherited his throne, but he kept it through a mixture of cunning, sheer intellect, and intimidation that bordered on fear.

  And all of that was currently directed at him. Geoffrey Douglas had not blanched during his service on the Canadian Front when faced with the Infected hordes, and he certainly wasn’t the sort to be intimidated by his employer or turn so much as a hair when confronted with angry nobility. He also was not, as it happened, stupid. He kept a respectful distance, leaning on his cane perhaps a bit more than was necessary as he styled a bow. “You sent for me, Your Grace?”

  The Grand Duke wheeled to face him, one hand slapping down on the breakfast table and coming up with a newspaper—the Post. He sliced it through the air crisply, as if it were a blade. “Do you know what this is?” he demanded

  “Today’s paper?”

  The Grand Duke made a disgusted sound and threw it at Geoff, who caught it with one hand before the pages had begun to scatter too badly. “Something in it you don’t like?” With a sinking feeling, he contemplated arresting a reporter. They were rather scummy creatures, in his opinion, but that didn’t mean he quite had the stomach for throwing one into the gaol, or worse. And that, not even considering what sort of brightly yellow things his compatriots would end up writing about him in retaliation. Geoff greatly preferred to remain beneath the notice of the press.