Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures

by Alex Acks

  “Clarkson! Is that utter bastard in his room?” the man demanded.

  Marta looked appropriately scandalized. “Sure I don’t know that, sir. The whereabouts of a gentleman is no business of mine. And such language!”

  At that rebuke, the man seemed to remember himself. He smoothed down his hair with one hand. “He’s no gentleman, but I wouldn’t expect you to know that.” He hesitated. “Will you let me into his room, then?”

  Marta compressed her lips in a thin line and crossed her arms over her chest, doing her best impression of an appalled schoolmarm. That seemed to be the tone this man would respond to. “I will do no such thing. The nerve of you to even ask! Sir.”

  “You have the key right there—”

  “Of course I’ve a key if I’m to be cleaning.” She turned on her heel to begin walking down the hall. “What do you take me for? I’ll be reporting this to the chief steward, you had best believe—”

  “No, no!” He took a couple of quick, unsteady steps toward her. “No. Please. Forget I asked. I shouldn’t have. I forgot myself. Even servants have honor.” His expression darkened for a moment. “Unlike Clarkson.”

  “It’s not for me to judge the likes of you nor him, sir.”

  The man patted around in his pockets until he came up with his wallet. He dug out a few bills and offered them. “Please. Take these as an apology. I meant no offense.”

  For a split second, Marta considered the options. Continuing to be shocked at the man’s nerve would be amusing, and would also be quite in character. But she didn’t want him peremptorily running to any of the stewards to defend himself from a report she had no intention of making, and neither did she want to risk him following her and begging further for her mercy. She plucked the bills out of his fingers, tucked them into her apron, and then bobbed a curtsy. The curtsy had the added benefit of briefly putting her at an angle to see into his billfold, where a business card—hopefully one of his—was visible: Gerhard Dominik Hartley, Inventor Of Clockwork Entertainments and Delights.

  “Thank you, kind sir. God save you.”

  And of all odd things, as if it was a spasm, he crossed himself. He opened his mouth to speak, and Marta hastily turned once again and retreated down the hall. To her relief, he didn’t follow.

  But to her annoyance, that also meant he was still in the hall with Clarkson’s cabin. Marta rounded the corner and cast around for the nearest door, a little storage cupboard that proved to have just enough space for her inside among the mops and dust-cloths if she was compelled to hide. There was only one exit from the hall of cabins, and she could see it from this position.

  Marta arranged herself next to the closet and began folding the already neatly folded dust-cloths, so she looked plausibly as if she ought to be there to the casual eye. From down the hallway she heard the sound of Hartley pounding on a door—presumably Clarkson’s—and drunkenly demanding to be let in. She allowed herself a little huff of annoyance. She might be here a while.

  Though perhaps Clarkson would show up and she’d have a lovely row to eavesdrop in on. She could only hope.

  Simms really should have known by now that any time he felt optimistic about a situation, it was bound to go vomitously sour, like mixing large quantities of curry and cheap red wine in an empty stomach. His normal mode was one of morose pessimism, and it had served him well in the past. But no, he’d had to go and think that he had a handle on this little cargo moving assignment.

  An interminable time passed, filled with swearing, splinters, and several skinned knuckles. Simms had begun to seriously question his own commitment to sobriety—really, what good would it do if that ended up being the thing that killed him?—by the time he lowered the final crate into place.

  It was with relief he headed to the far end of the hold once more to stow his borrowed equipment. As he rounded a corner, a flash of bottle green caught his eye, obviously out of place at the end of one row. Simms froze and then ducked back, cursing quietly into his mask. The bottle green was the back of a coat belonging to a man—why did it look so familiar?—who must have entered the cargo hold while Simms was busy at the back. Considering the general roar incongruously produced by the thin air coupled with the sound of his own breath echoing in the breathing mask, a hundred people could have slammed the door while he was bashing around crates and he never would have heard.

  Only what business would a hundred people have in the cargo hold? What business would even this one man have? He was obviously not part of the crew. They didn’t wear anything close to that color.

  That color. Where had he seen that color?

  The man stepped back and half-turned. Simms ducked behind a row of crates. He hastily patted down his pockets and came up with a little knife—more a general tool than a weapon of potential murder—and used that as a mirror to try to peer around the corner. Thankfully, the man was not coming his way.

  And really, had he thought of that? All on his own. He was rather pleased with himself. He’d have to tell Captain Ramos about this. He caught the impression of a pinched face and the line of a thin, ratty mustache—

  Oh. Him. Clarkson. The inventor. Who then turned and proceeded down one of the rows of crates.

  Well, this certainly crossed into the territory of Things Captain Ramos Would Want To Hear About and Pray Tell, Simms, Why Didn’t You Immediately Climb Into The Rafters So You Could Hang Upside Down Over Top Him And Observe His Every Move? Like hell he’d do that. But he would attempt to sneak a bit closer and see if he could catch a glimpse of what the man was up to. He was at least sufficiently changed in appearance from his time at the demonstration of the automaton, and the breathing mask was doing him the added service of hiding his muttonchops.

  Simms crept forward. He wasn’t by nature an overly stealthy person, but it also wasn’t a difficult task to keep even heavy boots quiet when the surrounding environment howled with sound. Carefully, he extended his pocket knife a bit past the next corner, around a crate that was marked as holding a piano. Clarkson stood at the very end of this row now, turned to the side. Only his shoulders and coattails were really visible. The way Clarkson leaned back and forth, shoulders tilting and hunching, Simms quickly realized he must be having some sort of animated conversation with a person just out of sight.

  Abruptly Clarkson froze, arms coming up—was he being threatened?—then lunged forward.

  The retort of a pistol echoed through the hold, sharp and unmistakable over the roar of the wind. Simms jerked back, flattening himself against the crates, breath suddenly coming quite faster. What sort of idiot fired a pistol on an airship? Simms wasn’t even certain what thought was more horrifying: a puncture or the sudden reminder that Captain Ramos had once informed him that the gas holding them aloft was quite flammable.

  And of course he hadn’t brought his own pistol—well, if he was going to trust anyone to carry an instrument of fiery, screaming death on an airship, who could he trust but himself?—or even the machete Captain Ramos normally forced him to carry. He hadn’t expected to come into armed conflict with a crate of crystal. He shifted his grip on the pocket knife and eased it around the corner again, but no one seemed to be coming.

  Better, more heroic men might have taken that as an invitation to charge in, intent on affecting a daring rescue or perhaps a glorious citizen’s arrest on a gun-wielding maniac. Slightly less gallant but infinitely more unhinged people—say, for example, Captain Ramos—might have gone running into the situation as well out of a desire to know what had happened because gosh, anything involving shooting was always so terribly interesting. Simms was not so burdened by any silly notions about himself or his goals in life. He had well-established allergies to being shot at, stabbed, and having crockery thrown at his head. He stayed put and counted to one hundred as measured a pace as he could manage.

  No other sounds manifested, and no one moved past his position or even skulked across the crates that he could view in the reflection on his knife blade. Th
ere were plenty of other ways out from among the crates, however.

  Simms, preceded by the laughable shield of his pocket knife, rounded the corner and headed toward the end of the row. Quietly cursing himself and then Captain Ramos for once again putting him in one of these situations, he peeked around the corner.

  Clarkson sprawled face down on the floor, a dark pool of blood spreading out from under him. A worn leather wallet sat discarded nearby, sadly flopped open, one corner of it being slowly engulfed by the advancing red puddle. A pistol, a very small one, lay on the deck a few feet away.

  The situation seemed clear enough. Simms took as deep of a breath as he could with the mask on and switched determinately into the mode of dry gallows humor that being around Captain Ramos had caused him to long since perfect. It was really the best way to deal with these situations. He could feel all funny about it later.

  Simms tapped the bottom of one of Clarkson’s feet with the toe of his boot. No reaction at all, no indication that the man was either alive or about to reawaken into non-life. That was a relief. The reason for this stillness became apparent once he took a better look at Clarkson’s face—or what remained of it. There was a terrible gash up the side of his neck, a hole in his chin, and the top of his head quite ruined. A stroke of luck, really, as Simms hadn’t fancied having to saw off a ravenous non-man’s head with the sharp but pathetically short blade of his pocket knife. He’d seen the rather horrifying process of reanimation before, and it involved a lot of twitching, as if nerves had gone raw in death and were curling up like snapped violin strings.

  He quickly rescued the wallet before it was completely soaked through with blood, gingerly holding it by one corner using only two of his fingers. He might as well not have bothered. There was no money in it at all—hmm, had the man been robbed?—and the few slips of paper proved to be markers for gambling debts. Which might have also have been the reason for the emptiness of the wallet. Simms carefully put the wallet back down, since the space it had left seemed glaringly obvious even to his eyes. From the corpse's pockets, he unearthed a very questionable handkerchief, which he chose not to examine more closely, a pencil stub, and the key to the man’s cabin. There didn’t seem a point in taking any of those things.

  He skirted the blood puddle, back pressed against a crate of custom crafted gears graced with the mark of T.G. Udole and Sons.

  The pistol on the other side of the red smear was not only very small, it was a custom derringer, the sort that only carried two or three bullets and was intended to be concealed in a lady’s handbag. The grip was even decorated with a pretty inlay of mother-of-pearl. Simms reached for the pistol, hesitated, and took a handkerchief with his pocket and picked it up with that. He took care to remove the remaining two rounds from the little pistol and pocketed them, and then tucked the pistol away in the recesses of his coat.

  There was nothing else he could see, no bloody footprints on the deck, no conveniently dropped business cards or notes declaring that Clarkson, the bastard, had deserved what came to him and this was why, signed and in triplicate.

  Damned cheeky of the murderer to be so unhelpful, in Simms's opinion.

  It took so long for Hartley to realize that no, hammering on Clarkson’s door and roaring his name like a Teutonic lion in the midst of a tantrum would not get him to appear that Marta had begun considering either fetching a guard herself or just bashing the German over the head with a broom. Thankfully, before her patience had entirely run out, he gave the door one last kick, and then made his unsteady way down the hall. Marta ducked into the closet and clearly heard him muttering to himself about honor and vengeance as he passed by.

  Well. That could provide an entertaining end to the evening.

  Now was not the time to follow the disaster in the making, however. Marta hurried down the hall and unlocked Clarkson’s door with her copy of the master key. She slipped inside and relocked it against the return of the determined Hartley.

  Clarkson had already struck Marta as the sort who was incredibly impressed by his own intelligence. His stilted vocabulary and grandiose pronouncements indicated that nicely, without even requiring a detailed analysis of his more unfortunate wardrobe choices. He’d also sounded more than a bit paranoid, with his talk of patents and intellectual theft.

  Thus, not knowing how much time she’d have to poke around in his cabin, Marta bypassed the safe and checked the supposedly more clever hiding places that people were wont to use, such as under the mattress and inside shoes. She found a pocket watch of iffy provenance that way and unearthed a set of ratty engineering plans rolled up and stuffed in the sleeve of a smoking jacket. The bottom and right hand margins of the plans were cut a bit unevenly, done by hand with a pair of scissors rather than a machine.

  The plans, once unrolled, yielded not the machinery of a difference engine, but rather a reasonably clever puppet that could be run off commands inscribed on a brass cylinder. From the perspective of engineering, it wasn’t a bad piece of design. It might even have a future in some sort of factory setting, she supposed. And Marta also did have to give Clarkson a bit of credit for producing a rather nice set of schematics, neatly drawn and so functionally clear that no additional written explanations were required.

  All credit given was of course then promptly lost because he’d covered those artful schematics with all sorts of slapdash notes about bypasses and work-arounds for hooking the automaton into the bridge systems of the Titania. All of the instrumentation would be of no account. The automaton—puppet, really—would run its predetermined program unchanged. Definitely nothing a captain worth his or her salt would trust to fly a ship unattended. Perhaps it had the potential as an automatic pilot of sorts, but similar, far less clunky systems already existed.

  While the evidence of pathetic fraud was quite satisfying, as she did so like to be right, there were still a great many questions that remained unanswered. Chief among them was the fact that the cabinet for the cylinder and systems in the plans was supposed to be a cube that measured two feet to the side, but the one on the bridge was considerably larger. What could be the reason behind that?

  “What are you up to?” Marta murmured as she carefully rolled the plans up and tucked them under her skirts.

  On the off chance she might find something interesting, she continued to riffle through Clarkson’s tatty belongings. The safe yielded markers for gambling debts, vouchers for loans, and a ledger book that a cursory glance showed was dipped deeply in metaphorical red. He was obviously having severe money problems, which provided the base reason for this scam, not that she’d ever had a doubt on that account. Through the rest of the room she found a few pornographic etchings, some rather shameful undergarments, and all the trappings of a poor man who wished to be thought of as rich but would never quite reach that goal. She paused, inspecting a set of gloves, noting the cheap quality of the cloth and the small puckers in the stitching.

  He might not even realize how far outside the rich classes he still was, treated like a fun pet who could do interesting tricks and play with fascinating toys.

  Captain Ramos shook her head, and then went quickly through the room to make certain everything had been returned to its original position. People could be shockingly observant of tiny details while missing out on the larger picture, and it always happened at the most inconvenient moments. This would not be one of those times.

  Captain Ramos wasn’t back in the cabin when Simms arrived. He probably should have expected that. No doubt she’d be puttering around Clarkson’s books and papers until she got a warning that he might be on his way back to his cabin—and as that quite literally could no longer happen, he might be in for an interminable wait indeed. Perhaps he ought to go looking for her.

  The captain had long since hammered into his mind, however, that his wandering about and looking for her—“deviating from the plan” was how she normally put it, in her most smarmy tone—only tended to draw attention. And drawing attention was al
ways a capital-letter-worthy Very Bad Thing.

  But that also meant it was back to just Simms and a room empty but for the liquor cabinet, which was a distressingly physical presence for all its inanimate state. And he had just seen a man get murdered. For all his tough demeanor, that was a thankfully uncommon occurrence in his life. He wasn’t terribly comfortable watching any human being get gunned down, no matter the state of their attitude or the grooming of their mustache.

  After a few minutes of aimless pacing, in sheer desperation Simms actually picked up one of the captain’s books, which was full of completely incomprehensible equations and diagrams. He tried to find comfort in the fact that had he even bothered to complete compulsory schooling, he still wouldn’t be able to read this with any sort of comprehension. Penny dreadfuls were really about his speed, and he hadn’t thought to bring any along since he hadn’t felt like being mocked over his reading material. He dropped the book on the captain’s pillow and returned to pacing. Little by little, his feet took him closer to the liquor cabinet as if the damned thing were exerting a magnetic force on him.

  Before a point of crisis could be reached, however, the door opened and in breezed the captain. He’d never been so happy to see her before, even if the sharp sound of the door unlocking in the otherwise silent room had left him feeling strangely faint.

  An un-servant-like grin lit the captain’s face the instant she crossed the threshold. She straightened, hands pressed briefly against her back as if to relieve some great pressure. “Oh, Simms, the dirty laundry I have unearthed—”

  He finally regained possession of his voice. Because yes, there was something very important he had to tell her. “—Captain, you really—”

  “—the papers—”

  “—this is important—”

  “—and he’s entirely a fraud, as I said—”