Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures

by Alex Acks

  “Page thirteen.”

  He flipped through as instructed until he came upon a full-page advertisement for…

  For…

  For Professor Elijah Masterson’s Ciphering Solar System.

  Geoff pretended to look over the text and drawings, though he knew perfectly well already what they were: a precise description on the use and construction of their little enigma-making device. Oh, and how kind of Captain Ramos, an offer for copies of a “book of codes and ciphers, fun for all ages” if just five pence were sent to an address Geoff was willing to bet did not actually exist.

  “Well,” he said after a moment.

  The Grand Duke’s eyes blazed. “Well?”

  Geoff swallowed hard, raising his eyes carefully as he stood at attention. “Well, there’s no stopping it, sir. Papers have already been delivered.” He cleared his throat. “And I’d lay even money there’s a similar advertisement in today’s Tribune.”

  “And would you care to explain to me how this came to happen?”

  “It’s all in my report, sir. But…” He proceeded to explain the unfortunate events around the escape of Captain Ramos, the fact that she’d claimed to have thrown the orrery away, and certainly hadn’t had it with her. That it hadn’t seemed worth further action, since she was to be executed anyway.

  The Grand Duke was still for a moment after in a way that made Geoff’s mouth go dry and his stomach cramp. “And just like that,” he said quietly, “we’ve lost our advantage.”

  Geoff nodded. “Afraid so, sir. You’ll have to consult with the generals, but last I heard, we still weren’t in a good position to proceed…militarily.”

  “We shall see about that. General del Toro will arrive within the hour. I’m certain he’ll find this all very fascinating.”

  Geoff cleared his throat. “I’ll go make up another copy of my report for him now, then. With your permission, sir?”

  The Grand Duke waved a hand to dismiss him, though as Geoff turned to go he commented, voice soft and musing, “A relief to you though, isn’t it, Colonel Douglas? You were opposed to this plan from the start.”

  And for so many reasons, Geoff thought: the loss of life, the breaching of perimeters, the threat to the safety of a grand duchy that had enough problems without fighting a war to take territory that they only really wanted for a greater slice of the shipping pie, the young soldiers demanding something more glorious than campaigns against the Infected when they had no idea that in the end, blood was blood. Del Toro was a mad old fool who hated Salt Lake’s theocracy, and the Grand Duke was an ambitious man whose grasp sometimes exceeded even his formidable intellect.

  He choked out, “I am your Chief of Security, sir. I advise. I do not decide.”

  “Just so. I will send for you again when the general arrives.”

  Geoff took the dismissal and left the room, though he kept his pace unhurried, that of a man chastened rather than cowed. He limped up the two flights of stairs to his office, newly moved from the one the self-styled “Captain” Ramos had seen, and dropped into his chair as if his knees wouldn’t hold him up any longer.

  Not far from the truth, that.

  He fumbled for the bell to ring for the footman. Tea sounded like just the thing to steady his nerves. A scrap of paper fluttered out from under the bell to land on the floor next to his shoe.

  A new sort of dread settling on his shoulders, Geoff bent to pick it up. The spiky scrawl was unfamiliar to him, but the contents of the message made it clear enough who had sent it: Poor Colonel Douglas. It seems that you owe me a favor now. Don’t worry, I shan’t hold it over your head forever.

  And was it not favor enough to let that mad harridan play the hero and avert a war? He had a terrible feeling that argument would hold no water. Geoff twisted the note into a tiny screw, which he flung into the fireplace.

  Feeling a thousand years old, he rang for tea. Rather than cream, he doctored his first cup with a generous dollop of whiskey. It seemed just the right drink for celebrating a deal with the devil. Lives, he reminded himself. Blood. The security of a peaceful duchy was far easier to see to than that of one at war. Even if, he reflected grimly, it wasn’t anywhere as secure as it should be.

  And would, unfortunately, remain that way for the foreseeable future.

  The Flying Turk

  As announcements went, this one had been greeted with the level of enthusiasm one might expect from a cure for Infection or the discovery of a mystical golden fountain that produced endless quantities of hot chocolate: Her Grace’s Airship Titania’s gilded bridge was to be given completely over to the calculated and imperturbable precision of clockwork. It was an end of an era, the daily papers trumpeted—the end of human error!

  They would, Captain Ramos had noted dryly, indulge in such terrible puns, wouldn’t they? Such a possibility was enough to make even the only slightly mechanically inclined weak at the knees. The very thought caused many a dry mouth among the well-heeled hobbyists who seemed to populate the upper ranks of society, legions of would-be inventors and renaissance men created by a surfeit of money and leisure time.

  And tickets to this momentous event, if it was to be believed, were there for the taking if one was well-moneyed, well-connected, or at the very least well-liked by the Grand Duchess of New York. A brilliant move on her part, to auction off every bit of space not crammed with her friends and hangers-on.

  The tickets were, of course, sought-after by droves of the would-be engineers, all of them at least mentally clutching at their wrenches and spanners and more sophisticated tools that their dear wives insisted upon dismissing as “fiddly bits.” But the tickets were even more desired by those very same dear wives, saddled with marriageable daughters to distribute. This mechanical installation was cause for more plotting than went into most assassinations, a deadly combination of intricate diplomacy and vicious backstabbing. It promised to be the social event of the season—of a decade’s worth of seasons—a chance to rub elbows with the truly first-class royalty and then brag about it for years to come.

  Unsurprisingly the minor nobility, whether they had marriageable daughters or desperately craved bragging rights, were discretely clawing each other to ribbons over this chance. Metaphorical and, on at least one occasion gleefully recorded in the Tribune, literal blood was spilled in gouts that would draw the approval of even the most spoiled and battle thirsty Caesar of old from his opulent perch in the Coliseum.

  The tickets were like diamonds—no, that was too common—like golden eggs laid at random by scattered bad-tempered geese, mythical and sought after by those who were more interested in shiny things than their own self-preservation.

  Which perhaps offered an explanation as to why Captain Marta Ramos, pirate, inventor, and gleefully self-proclaimed thorn in the side of many a Grand Duke and Duchess, had against all odds contrived to receive two tickets for this most hallowed of voyages. It said absolutely nothing as to the how the feat had been accomplished.

  Meriwether Octavian Simms—known by preference as simply Simms for obvious reasons—had long since learned to never ask certain questions around Captain Ramos on the off chance that she might actually answer and thus place him at risk for spraining something deep and irreparable within the confines of his skull. But this was one of those moments he was sorely tempted, because the circumstances were such a tricky combination of ridiculous and impossible. And perhaps also because the stiff, overly starched collar the captain had insisted was a required part of his costume had partially cut off the blood flow to his brain.

  “You didn’t kill anyone, did you?” he muttered at her from the side of his mouth. He trusted his beloved and well-groomed muttonchops—normally a gingery color that served as sure a warning as the coloration of the Monarch butterfly but now colored a disturbing near black thanks to a bottle of evil-smelling dye—to hide both the sound of his voice and the movement of his lips and keep the inquiry confined to the captain.

  Captain Ramos tr
od very pointedly on his foot. Her hand, hidden in a delicate-looking glove of teal lace, maintained a vise-like grip on his arm and made escape impossible. With her other hand she pretended to fuss with one of her elaborately pinned scarves to hide her answer. “Do try to smile a bit more vacuously, Simms. We’re supposed to be royalty.”

  That, Simms thought, somehow made the entire situation worse. On any ordinary day, he was ferociously common, and in fact took great glee in relieving aristocrats and their devoted emulators of both wealth and dignity using hands scarred by many a fight and fingernails darkened with the dirt of honest—well, mostly dishonest, these days—work. Being in proximity with this high-class ostentation was bound to give him hives. And that wasn’t even touching on the issue of the array of expensive perfumes that made a nearly visible cloud at the bottom of the gangway they were fast approaching.

  “I don’t have to,” he muttered. “We’re not swimming in the piranha pool yet.”

  “You’d have an easier time if you didn’t keep breaking character, you know,” she pointed out.

  They reached the bottom of the gangway. It was constructed of dark wood—no doubt expensive—well-polished brass, and covered with a canopy of perfect and nearly air-tight glass squares. It was also very long and swaying faintly in a way that Simms would have once found incredibly disturbing as a man who had spent his entire life with his feet planted firmly on the ground. Since his association with Captain Ramos, however, he’d spent far more time aloft than was probably truly healthy for a fellow’s wits. He had little left to fear from airships like the Titania, which currently tugged gently against its mooring ropes thanks to the wind that howled just outside the glassed-in observation deck and airship port at the top of the Empire State Building.

  The bottom of the gangway was blocked off by a crimson velvet rope and more importantly, a pair of guardsmen. They wore the uniforms of the Grand Duchess of New York’s personal guard, the color of their jackets precisely matching the rope visible between them.

  “Tickets, madam, sir?” the more senior of the two—this presumed from the healthy smattering of white in his mustache and what hair was visible around his shako—asked in a mostly polite tone.

  Simms had a feeling the tone was only mostly polite because they’d likely already had to turn quite a few oh-I’m-so-clever-I’m-sure-I-can-bluff-the-rozzers desperate social climbers away.

  “Oh, yes, of course, a moment if you please.” Captain Ramos said, smiling up at the guard.

  She did not often have to look up at anyone, with the sole exception of Simms and people built to match his rather intimidating proportions. Her current position wasn’t due to unusual height on the part of the guard, but rather the appalling way she had contorted her own sturdy frame. She’d also wrapped herself in a volume of brocade normally reserved for upholstering large couches, but it had the artful effect of making her look like a rather plump dowager, quite unlike the tall and—by social standards—scandalously athletic figure she normally cut. A wig and the truly disturbing makeup that she had inflicted upon both of them completed the effect quite nicely.

  Simms directed a long-suffering look at the guard as Captain Ramos pretended to dig through her clutch purse. This was not a look he had to fake; he’d been practicing for years. “We’re not too late, are we?” he asked. For that, he did have to affect a more jolly—and fruity—tone than normally passed his lips.

  The younger of the guards took a gold watch from his pocket. “Twenty minutes before launch off, sir. Cutting it a bit close, you are. The Grand Duchess likes things to be prompt.”

  He nodded, and from some hollow depth in his soul managed to dredge up a conspiratorial wink. “Was ready to leave the house ages ago, but the missus… Well, you know how they can be.” Oh, but the ways in which that statement felt wrong were too numerous for someone of his education level to count.

  “Ah, here they are!” Captain Ramos pulled an envelope from her little purse and offered it to the senior of the guards. He took it delicately and extracted the tickets, his expression unchanging.

  Simms concentrated very hard on breathing normally.

  “Lord and Lady Parnell-Muttar. Welcome aboard. If you’ll turn left at the top of the gangway, there will be a man there to see to your wraps and escort you to the first class lounge.” Then the guard, of all strange things, smiled as he offered the captain her tickets back. And it wasn’t the polite smile of an underling, but something bizarrely genuine. “And may I say it’s a pleasure to have you both aboard. I was hoping I’d get to greet you personally.”

  Captain Ramos smiled and fluttered, even as she subtly tried to crush Simms’s foot under her heel. Hastily, he crafted his painted grimace into a broad grin. “Of course, of course. The pleasure is ours.”

  The younger of the guards hastened to unfasten the velvet rope and wave them up. As they started climbing the gangway, Simms desperately trying not to limp, the older guard called softly behind them, “We appreciate all you do for us, sir.”

  Simms waved a hand in what he hoped was a “no, think nothing of it, my pleasure” manner. As soon as they were nearly to the top of the gangway, indicated by the nose hair-charring concentrations of expensive perfume and the steadily growing volume of chattering voices, he hazarded whispering to the Captain, “What have I done for them?” It seemed the sort of thing he probably should know.

  “You’re a war hero,” Captain Ramos informed him in an undertone. “And you single-handedly saved the crew of the Venus Delphinia as she sank to her watery grave.”

  Simms came within a hair’s breadth of biting his tongue in half. He had personally been on the Venus Delphinia right beside Captain Ramos, and had in fact been a contributing factor to its sinking. “That’s a bit crass.”

  “That’s public relations, Simms.” Captain Ramos tugged him forward and onto the richly carpeted deck of the airship, overriding his natural feelings of dread. More uniformed men waited there, though they were in much less ornate and sober jackets of deep indigo. “Smile prettily now.”

  “Yes, dear, you’re quite right, quite right. The carpet is lovely.” Simms stretched his lips into a rictus that approximated a posh grin.

  “I don’t think you’re getting any better at this,” the captain muttered for his ears and poked at his hand with the envelope containing the tickets. He hastened to take it, the heavy paper feeling awkward to his hand. “I really can’t take you anywhere,” she added, a bit more loudly, slipping her fan out from her little purse.

  That, Simms thought, was really the opposite of the problem. In fact, she insisted on dragging him along like she was a kite and he her tail, whether he liked it or not. Only she never bothered to ask his opinion on the topic. This time she’d just shown up at his door while he was attempting to convince Dolly that his ties weren’t suitable wear for her toys and informed him that they were catching an airship in the Grand Duchy of New York two days whence, and he was to see to the luggage. A very specific sort of luggage, split into several large familiar crates, the sight of which had filled him with equal parts anticipation and dread.

  It was never a good sign for his blood pressure or potential lifespan when the captain thought they needed to pack their own glider.

  “Yes, pet. But you do know how I adore these ticky little machines and their tricks, as unreasoning as that might be. You’re quite an angel for putting up with all my little quirks,” he said woodenly.

  The disgusted look the captain directed at him from behind her ostentatiously lacy fan was reward enough. She tugged him left as the guardsman below had instructed and smiled sweetly at the steward who greeted them. Simms tried to smile sweetly too, into a very awkward pause that lasted until the captain poked at his hand again, this time with her fan.

  Right. The tickets. “Would forget my own head if it weren’t attached,” he said, all teeth and forced jollity as he handed the envelope over.

  The first class reception was a fluttering, chattering mas
s of ladies in their finest dresses, accented with frilly bits of pearl-encrusted jewelry—that was the fashion this season, thanks to Lady Margot Shellstin of the Grand Duchy of Topeka—and husbands who had been stuffed into suits, colors carefully coordinated to complement and at times out-shout each other. The noise, the light, the kaleidoscopic spectacle of it all was a little much for Simms, now far too used to life in the abandoned silver mine of Devil’s Roost. But any hesitation of his feet was overruled by Captain Ramos dragging him forward and into the hallucinatory heart of the colorful mass. It was follow or lose his arm, and he rather needed that arm for both punching and holding tea cups.

  This was the moment Simms always dreaded. It was one thing to bluff common security men or even guards about their native class, but he’d always felt like he must stand out somehow from the moneyed classes, whiffing of poverty and a native disbelief in their assumed superiority. And after an unfortunate experience he had in the recent past with one Deliah Nimowitz, he even knew just how being singled out in such a fashion would work, from the spreading wave of appalled silence to the muffled little screams of dismay from the melodramatic ladies. Oh, yes, and the sounds of swords being drawn—that was always his favorite.

  Much to Simms’s relief, thus far the nobility plainly assumed he and the captain were of their class, even if their faces were not known. There was a raised eyebrow here and there, to go with all the curtsying and bowing, a bit of whispering behind fans, but Simms was a keen eavesdropper—among his other less savory skills—and he quickly discerned that the topic of discussion was which lord and lady they happened to be, not who had shoved that gorilla of a commoner into a natty suit and thrust him onto their delicate sensibilities. With that he relaxed, smiled—with carefully simulated mental vacancy—and managed to locate the one waiter bobbing gently around the room who was serving cold tea rather than wine so he could help himself to a glass. He poked Captain Ramos with the envelope containing the tickets until she took it back, thus freeing his other hand for the acquisition of carefully sculpted wedges of soft white cheese and several lovely little sausages from a silver tray.