Clockwork Universe

by Seanen McGuire

  But something pricked her ears. She flung an orange at Turcotte—”Stow it!”—then called down to the engine room. “Trouble down there? No? Idle ‘em for a tick.”

  De Vries’s engineers disengaged the rotors. The chuff-chuff-chuff of the props faded away, as did the hum of machinery. Deck vibrations faded as the Shiva stopped fighting the wind. The world fell silent but for the creak of rigging, the susurration of wind, and the gurgle of a mountainside river.

  Yet still a faint grinding persisted; it sounded like a drunken nob trying to disentangle a pile of forks.

  Turcotte heard it, too. They looked at each other. The whites of his widened eyes glistened at the same moment the realization struck her. The mechanical noise wasn’t coming from the Shiva. It came from below. It was the sound of Jack Scaly’s tripods massaging each other, as they were oddly wont to do.

  “Well,” said Turcotte, “we’re buggered.”

  Thoughts racing, Sujata spoke into the tube again. “Deploy the guns! Phosphorus rounds only! Engineering, keep the boilers hot but do not engage the rotors!”

  A few seconds later the familiar but dreaded quadruple thump of unfolding gun emplacements rattled the deck. Sujata gritted her teeth, hoping the noise wouldn’t draw attention from the inhuman invaders massed somewhere in the darkness below. Hoping they wouldn’t need the guns at all. Hoping to all seven hells they could drift unnoticed past Jack Scaly and his incomprehensible diversions. Hoping the nest was small, and that none of the monsters looked up.

  The seconds scuttled past, single file, ushered by the jackrabbit thumping of her heart.

  The world contracted to a disjointed series of sensory impressions. The creak of the Shiva’s rigging and metallic grinding of the octos. The jitter of the wheel under her hands as the deployed guns changed the ship’s trim and snagged the wind. The sweet smell of a ruptured orange, the peppery scent of the unlit cheroot tucked behind her ear, the sour odor of the sweat trickling from her armpits. Turcotte eased to his feet as though the octos might hear the creaking of his chair. He exhaled, long and slow.

  They drifted with the wind, a silent shadow in a moonless sky. Part of her wondered how long they’d have to wait until they reengaged the engines, and whether the cyclone they’d fled would overcome them.

  No death beams lanced up from the jungle to cleave them in two. No tentacles enfolded the airship in a crushing embrace.

  After a handful of minutes that felt like decades, Turcotte whispered, “Whew. Thank God for small—”

  A thunderous crack interrupted him as an octo heat ray sliced through the jungle, and the air, and his relief. The overwhelming scent of ozone wafted through the cabin portholes. Moments later it mingled with smoke and the smell of a forest fire. Flames leapt from a hundred-meter swath of blazing bombax trees like candles on a giant birthday cake. Ruddy firelight illuminated a pair of alien tripods parked in a clearing. Most of their tentacles were knotted together in a writhing mass of limbs, like an orgy of chromium-plated asps. Sujata glimpsed their frantic struggle to break free of each other. The aliens tossed each other back and forth in the effort to unlimber themselves. No wonder Jack Scaly’s beam had swerved wide of its target: they’d been caught with their knickers down.

  But once they pulled apart they’d have the Shiva dead to rights, skewered between triangulated heat rays.

  “Weapons!” Sujata yelled. “Target the octos and fire! Set those bastards aflame before they pull apart!”

  The deck juddered underfoot and the ship slewed to starboard when Vi’s crew let loose. Phosphorus rounds etched incandescent streaks in the darkness. A rain of silvery-red meteors traced a line of perforations across the clearing and the thrashing octos. One beast took a rapid sequence of hits across the central pod; the phosphorus burned sun-bright, melting through the unearthly metal. Bluish sparks fountained from the ruptured tripod, a sign that the terrestrial oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere wreaked havoc upon mysterious alien chemistries. The air smelled like a thousand snuffed candles. The punctured tripod flailed twice, serpentine limbs spasming.

  Another volley tried to slew across the writhing mass to visit the same justice upon the other octo. But the hail of gunfire sheared through the tangled mass of limbs. The surviving tripod lurched free of its dying partner.

  Sujata bellowed, “Engines NOW!”

  The octo spun like a dervish to stalk the Shiva. A clank shook the airship, and then the deck lurched as the props reengaged. The air sizzled. Sujata slammed the attitude controls to rotate the gimbaled propellers and spun the wheel hard to starboard. Jack Scaly’s heat ray flashed so close to the bridge that she could have sworn she saw the heat ripple of scorched air flashing just beyond the portholes. The ray parried the gunners’ next volley, vaporizing the projectiles before they could find their target. Sujata jinked the controls again, trying to outmaneuver the alien’s invisible beam weapon. But even the fleetest airship was a ponderous thing compared to a tripod. The odor of scorched metal washed through the portholes as the heat beam again sizzled through the night. The airship flung itself upward. Sujata twisted the levers but the portside attitude controls wouldn’t budge. A tremendous crash echoed from the forest below at the same moment de Vries cried, “We’ve lost props one and three!”

  “All weapons fire on that bastard before it cuts us in half! All weapons FIRE!”

  An incandescent rain of falling stars converged upon the second tripod. The monster thrashed. It ignited another swath of jungle as it struggled to bring its beam to bear on the ship again. Then the phosphorus burned through its skin and the demon went up like a Roman candle.

  Damn you, Jack Scaly.

  * * *

  It was the closest shave in a career characterized by narrow strokes of luck. Less than a yard inward and the heat ray would have sliced through the Shiva’s canopy from stem to stern. Unlike a Navy ship, their hydrogen envelope lacked the benefit of mirrored armor. Jack Scaly’s beam would have filleted them like a trout.

  At sunrise, Sujata donned a harness and went out to inspect the damage with de Vries. She saw instantly there was no point in dropping anchor to recover the fallen rotor pods. The heat ray that sheared two props from the Shiva had melted straight through the fittings and vaporized inches of the best Yorkshire steel. Even if they did recover the lost props, and somehow found them miraculously undamaged by their fall, they had no hope of reattaching them to the ship without several weeks in dry dock. Their choices were to turn around and limp back through the gauntlet of octo nests, or limp the last few leagues toward their destination.

  They couldn’t afford the repairs, much less new engine pods, without a big payday. And with half their propulsion and maneuverability lost they’d be at the mercy of the weather, as the return course would put them straight at the remnants of the cyclone they’d fled for the past two days. They needed money and they needed to lighten their burden. They needed cavorite.

  So they pressed forward.

  Turcotte watched the burning jungle recede in the distance. He pointed to the plume of black smoke billowing into the morning sky. “I reckon Wellington’s chums know we’ve been here. As will every octo on the subcontinent.”

  He had a point. Sujata stationed crewmen from de Vries’s and Vi’s teams as extra eyes on the final leg of their journey to the warehouse. Vi herself stumbled onto the bridge a few hours later, looking as though she hadn’t slept since before the first octo landings in London, and smelling like she’d last bathed a year before that. Sujata took her aside while the lookouts murmured to each other and Turcotte, who had become a font of profanity as he wrestled with the half-crippled airship.

  “We spent a lot of phosphorus on Jack Scaly last night,” said the weaponeer.

  Sujata nodded. “We won’t have to do any more fighting. Wellington’s people are taking care of that. So open everything we have left.” She’d never seen Violet so exhausted; the captain wondered, briefly, whether it was a good idea to have her working with volatile
phosphorus in this state. But they’d arrive in a few hours, winds permitting, and what choice did she have?

  Vi nodded. “It’s done, captain. Just wanted to warn you that we might not have enough left for what you intend.”

  “One problem at a time, Vi. Now get some sleep.”

  The weaponeer nearly bumped into de Vries, who entered the bridge just as she departed.

  “Let me guess,” said Sujata. “Having recalculated the tolerances for our remaining engines, you’re worried we lack the lift and maneuverability to carry out my frankly ingenious plan.”

  The engineer sighed. “Yes. It was quite clever, captain. But we overlooked something. We were counting on the cavorite to augment our buoyancy. But in fact—” Here he rattled a sheaf of papers covered in his precise draftsman’s hand. There were equations, diagrams, arrows, and a rather detailed sketch of Turcotte crapping in Wellington’s hat. “—It will actually reduce the Shiva’s buoyancy.”

  “What the blue blazes are you prattling on about?” She studied his eyes, wondering if he was drunk.

  “The cavorite will reduce the weight of the air around us, along with the weight of our ship. By reducing that differential it reduces the buoyancy.”

  “You didn’t mention this before.”

  “Where the cavorite helps is with the thrust-to-weight ratio.” He rattled the papers again. “And until last night we had a comfortable margin of excess thrust.”

  “You mean back when we had four engines.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now?”

  “Now we don’t.”

  * * *

  Unmarked octo nests aside, Wellington’s map proved accurate. The Black Shiva drifted over the secret compound of T. David England & Sons around midafternoon. They found no sign of human activity in the camp, and no sign of tripods lurking in the surrounding forest. Perhaps Wellington had been true to his word and the Royal Navy had drawn their bug-eyed attention. Sujata gave the order to drop anchors and lower belaying lines. Soon the ship hovered over the steel hemisphere of the storehouse while the crew descended to swarm through the camp, only to find it abandoned.

  Vi led a team into the warehouse—they didn’t waste time being discreet about the break-in—while Sujata and de Vries supervised the men and women who welded a series of iron hooks to the roof of the warehouse. The captain kept one eye on the work and the other on the inky clouds massing in the southeastern sky. They’d limped away from their tussle with Jack Scaly, and now the cyclone was catching up.

  Vi emerged from the warehouse. Sujata, standing atop the shallow dome, cupped a hand around her mouth and called down, “Tell me you have good news.”

  “It’s full, captain. If the markings on the crates can be trusted, they support that weasely toff’s claims.”

  Sujata slapped her engineer on the back. “What’d I tell you? This is going to work.”

  But Vi lingered on the loamy soil below, shuffling her feet and looking uncomfortable. “Uh. There’s more.” At the captain’s exasperated nod, she continued: “They anticipated us. The foundation isn’t wood, it’s reinforced concrete. The piles are a foot thick and go down at least a yard. We don’t have the phosphorus to burn through them. The metal shell is sunk straight into the concrete, so we can’t pluck that free, either, without several days’ work with sledges and picks.”

  Sujata pushed her hat far back on her head. Beads clicked together when she ran a hand through her hair. “If we ever meet in the afterlife, Mr. T. David England,” she muttered, “you’ll know me because I’ll be the one stomping on your bollix with most singular dedication.”

  De Vries shrugged. “It was a good idea, captain.”

  Perhaps England and Sons had foreseen their strategy. Or perhaps they were more pragmatic, and had realized that storing vast amounts of cavorite in their warehouse would render the dome nearly weightless, thereby making it susceptible to storms and monsoon winds. Hence the reinforcements. This was probably the most solidly constructed building in all of the Raj. Trust a weasel who named himself “England” for business dealings with the Crown to be possessed of a particularly paranoid and devious mind. So they couldn’t cut the warehouse loose of its foundation. And even if they could, the concrete slab between the cavorite and the earth (where it wouldn’t benefit from the gravitational shielding) grossly outweighed the simple wooden floor they’d planned around. The Shiva would struggle to lift the damn thing even if they weren’t down two rotors.

  De Vries cleared his throat, as though hoping to nudge the captain from an angry reverie. “We have to change tack,” he said.

  “But stealing an entire warehouse, walls and all, it would have been … I mean, it would have looked …” The captain sighed. “They’d be telling the story in every pub and chophouse from Sumatra to São Paulo. We could have dined out on this one for the rest of our natural lives.”

  “Sometimes clever is the enemy of practical.”

  A gust of wind tugged at Sujata’s hat. She grabbed it before it went tumbling away. “If we use the cargo nets, we can sling them under the Shiva to compensate for the lost rotors. How quickly can you sketch out the rigging?”

  De Vries produced a length of paper from a trouser pocket. “Already done.”

  “I am pained by your utter lack of faith in my vision,” she said. “It borders on insubordination.”

  “I think of it as anticipating the ship’s needs.”

  Sujata called down to Vi, who still waited below. It took extra effort to make herself heard over the wind rustling through the surrounding forest. “Scratch it. We’ll use the cargo nets. Get those crates outside and empty them. We’re taking the cavorite, nothing else.” To the crewmen welding hooks atop the dome, she said, “Belay that welding. Get topside and lower the cargo nets. And dump the steel cable. All of it. Double time.” Then she turned back to de Vries. “Get your rigging in place.”

  The engineer craned his neck, taking in first the airship bobbing a dozen fathoms overhead, and then the wildly swaying trees in the surrounding forest. She imagined Turcotte on the bridge right now, cursing a blue streak while he fought the rising wind with a crippled airship. De Vries’ frown reflected her own misgivings. But they were here now and standing on a fortune.

  “We’ve come this far,” she said, as the first swollen raindrops pinged against the warehouse dome. “And we don’t have to worry about Jack Scaly, thanks to Wellington’s tars. Just wind and rain, and we’re no strangers to either.”

  The reassurances sounded slightly hollow to her own ears. But there was so much money in the warehouse.

  * * *

  So it wasn’t until a few hours later, when the octo tripod emerged from the mountainside forest just as the crew struggled to sling the last of the sodden cargo nets under the Shiva, that Captain Sujata finally accepted that she never, ever should have agreed to this job. Jack Scaly wielded its heat ray like a carving knife and set upon the Shiva without any hint of Royal Navy encumbrance. The first beam pierced the Shiva's lifting body to vent the central hydrogen bladder; the second severed the cargo nets and sent their hard-earned prize crashing into the clearing below.

  “Wellington!” she yelled, though the percussive tattoo of the guns drowned out her scream. “You thrice-damned scalawag! I’ll cut your—”

  But then she plummeted through the wind and rain like an anchor weight filled with piss and rage. Tumbling toward a rapidly approaching earth strobed by lightning and incandescent streaks from phosphorus rounds, she had just a few seconds to question her choices in life.

  The cargo nets hit the ground first. They burst open, spreading chunks of high-purity cavorite across the clearing. Including directly beneath Sujata. And the captain, now weighing a hundredth of what she did just seconds earlier, tumbled less like an anchor weight, less even than a wounded pigeon, and more like a feather caught in a gale.

  She had plenty of time during her long, slow, and thoroughly dizzying fall to watch Vi’s guns pierce t
he alien tripod and set its innards ablaze. The weaponeer had kept phosphorus rounds in reserve; Sujata wondered if she’d even bothered to open any of them. She also had an unobstructed view of how the two surviving rotors swiveled back and forth to keep the Shiva centered over the clearing, taking advantage of the cavorite to render the severely damaged ship airborne. Turcotte fought like hell to compensate for the lost buoyancy, the swirling gale, and the kick from Vi’s guns. It gave the captain another idea.

  Sujata had descended to within a few fathoms of the ground when the winds pushed her beyond the reach of the scattered cavorite. She tucked and rolled as her full weight reasserted itself, thereby softening her landing in the rain-sodden earth just enough to prevent broken bones.

  The crew lowered anchor lines. She didn’t dare climb back up until the weather subsided; she’d had enough of rain-slick rope. So she took shelter in the warehouse to wait out the wind and rain, wondering how much of the shattered cavorite she could stick in her pockets, wondering if octos would send another tripod in their direction, and wondering how they would make the rendezvous with Wellington’s people. The storm gave her hours alone with her thoughts. Near sundown she decided that, on balance, she hated Jack Scaly even more than Wellington. If it had to come to a choice between a magnificent payday and seeing the octo menace removed from earth once and for all, she’d opt for the latter. Best of all, she knew how to get the cavorite to Wellington’s people.

  Watching the gunners tear loose on Jack Scaly, and seeing how the Shiva bucked and kicked when they did, had given her the solution to their thrust problem.

  While the crew patched the hole Jack Scaly had burned through their lifting envelope, Captain Sujata explained her new plan to her lieutenants. She hardly needed to remind them that the trade winds blew generally from the northeast at these latitudes. So if they could but attain sufficient altitude to catch the fastest winds, they could drift back across the subcontinent toward the heart of the Raj. And unless Wellington’s people were asleep at the switch (admittedly there was some debate about this), they’d have an eye out for the Shiva.