Clockwork Universe

by Seanen McGuire

  I got better at using my new eye over the past few weeks and damned if Gabriel don’t look different than everybody else. Jonas is big bright red, while most folks is just dark orange, but Gabriel is purple-blue if anything and hard to see in the dark. It’s got me a touch worried. Still, I don’t reckon as Gabriel is after my gold, so I probably got to worry more about those what likely is.

  Edward

  * * *

  CRD Claim

  October 20 1898

  Dearest Sally,

  Winter settling in the Klondike. Has it been more than a month since I wrote? I can’t keep track of time no more and reckon you might not even read these here letters. But I promised I’d keep writing, so I will.

  We hauled gold out of this here claim, that’s for sure, but I can’t say as I’m all that proud of it now. Sad news to report, Sally, but I reckon you ought to hear it. We been working so hard and pushing Jonas so much, well, we lost him. Both him and the Doc. We fixed up Jonas real good last month in Dawson, put twice the horse power in his steam engine and built up his drill, so as to compete with the other tunnelers. But the image of Jonas’ face haunts me now, Sally. The face you painted up so nice changed over these months. Enamel chipped through, showing hard metal, rusting in most places. He’d grown wicked—or we had. We put him back in the mine and we was feeding his boiler constant. Running all day and all night. Just for a few nuggets of gold. Got so as I couldn’t swing the small lens over my eye since it showed nothing but bright red. Ain’t real sight in that eye, but some kind of heat sight. Shows hotter stuff brighter and redder. And it got real hot down there what with Jonas’ fire and all. Looked like the pit of Hell. Couldn’t breathe none for the smoke and steam, neither, but we just wouldn’t stop. And poor Doc Davies, he were just unlucky to be the deepest right then. We work that position in short shifts and there he were, no more sober than usual I reckon, so maybe he didn’t feel much. Could have been any of us.

  You’d think as we’d learn our lesson when Jonas’ boiler explodes, killing the Doc and sealing off our mine for good. But Radigan and me, we just fell to bickering about who were to blame. Radigan were middle in the tunnel, so I done accused him of causing the explosion, though I ain’t proud of that now. He got problems but he wouldn’t blow up the mine, nor kill Doc neither. He says there were lightning down there, electric sparks and the magnetics going crazy. Blames Gabriel, says he must have been up the mountain doing that drilling with light again. Gabriel did try to come round t’other day, but Radigan threatened him with that big old shotgun of his, so he left. We checked with the Northwest Mounted and they don’t know who this fella is. After apiece, I’m agreeing with Radigan. Gabriel ain’t no angel.

  Now we’re hunting us a lying Lawman.

  * * *

  October 23 1898

  Pray for me, Sally.

  Gabriel is dead.

  Me and Radigan found him all right, atop the mountain just as Radigan reckoned. And that mountain were going crazy, all blue and sparking like that night I done lost my eye. Metal ball were sticking out the mountain again and damned if Gabriel don’t have some sort of machine in his hand. Look like a gun bigger than Radigan’s, only it were dull black with glittering dots. There were a low humming noise all round, and this time every hair on my head is sticking up, near pushing my hat off. I get my extra lens down so as I can see better against the blue electric glow. Reds stand out from people. But not Gabriel. Not the ball neither.

  Radigan shouts at Gabriel and levels his shotgun. I got my rifle aimed in on him too. Not sure as he can hear us over the noise. He’s looking only at the ball, and it’s growing metal spikes off its surface as we watch. Other folks is climbing the mountain round us, noise and lightning sure bringing them from below.

  Radigan yells out again. This time Gabriel turns. Don’t know whether he were pointing his gun or not, but Radigan don’t waste no time. He pulls both barrels full into Gabriel’s chest. Rips a big hole right through that crisp white shirt. Throws his body against the metal ball and he staggers like a drunken Doc Davies. He ain’t wearing a hat, and none of his hair standing up neither. And his purple-blue is starting to fade even as glowing orange people surround him.

  He turns back to the ball and does something with his gun. A spark come off one of them spikes and hits a fella next to me. Damned if he don’t go all stiff and every bit of red go out of him. It’s like he turns to charcoal in an instant. I reach out for him and he crumbles, Sally. Crumbles into black dust in my hand.

  That’s when another fella shoots Gabriel full on.

  Radigan’s been getting everybody fired up about this Lawman what ain’t a Lawman, and I reckon seeing him next to something as can’t be explained, something that done killed a man, give them the notion to put more lead into him. I couldn’t as pull my trigger, though. He just weren’t threatening as far as I could see. He were doing something with the metal ball, and that may have been the cause of our troubles, but I don’t know as he were responsible for it. I think maybe he were trying to stop it.

  This time, the Lawman falls, his legs took out from beneath him. And that ball glows bright, right then, red coming in quick and the whole mountain rumbling. None of us can stay on our feet, and good thing too, as the sparks fly off them metal spikes like crazy and might have taken us all dead if we was standing. The ball come free from the mountain and shoots off to the stars.

  Radigan were first to get up. He puts another shell in his shotgun. But Gabriel ain’t moving. A hole ripped through him so big, nobody could survive. I go take the shotgun from Radigan. Terrible strange, looking at Gabriel. He ain’t got no blood. Shirt blackened from powder, but instead of guts, just glittering strings. Wires and bits of metal. And damned if most of it ain’t gold. Machine pieces the likes of which I ain’t never seen is in there, some glowing a little, dying hearts maybe. This here fella were some kind of Jonas—built up to look like a man but weren’t a man. Can’t prove it now, though, as there ain’t nothing left of poor Gabriel. ‘Stead of wondering how a fella could build a mechanical like this, Radigan and the other folks as were up there fell immediate to ripping out the wires when they seen they was gold. Bickering about who gets what. Nothing else matters round here.

  Well, I ain’t for it no more. I’m on the trail back home. Going overland to Edmonton as near as I can and I’ll be home soon. I’m terrible sorry I ain’t got us rich, Sally, but we got to forget about the gold. The price is just too damned high.

  Always Your Loving Brother,

  Edward

  * * *

  Historic records show that the addressee, Sally Chalmers, died of Typhoid Fever in early May, 1898, not long after losing her father. Of Edward himself, no further documentation exists.

  Heart of Clockwork

  S.C. Butler

  Like watermelon seeds from the mouths of spitting children, a hundred Jovian saucers burst from a hundred dimpling puckers across the dome of the African sky. The saucers paused, adjusting to the sudden change in pressure, then whirled down toward the dreadnoughts assembled to meet them a thousand meters above Stanley Pool.

  The helmsman of the Goshawk swung the wheel hard to port. Captain Jean Leguin grabbed a handful of rigging to brace himself. In perfect synchronicity, the Great Congo Air Fleet came about like a vast herd of elephants to meet the enemy head on.

  “Lieutenant!” As he spoke, Jean looked back at the great fans whirling high atop Leopoldville’s lofty towers.

  Crossthwaite snapped forward. “Sir!”

  “Check the droplines one last time, if you please. We want no misfires, today, not with the Queen in the gallery.”

  Grinning, Crossthwaite glanced back at the towers as well. His ginger mustache lifted, revealing the large gap in his front teeth. Pity, that. A sign of beauty among the natives, but not at all what a young European lady looked for in a husband.

  The crunch of the flagship’s first broadside signaled the start of the engagement. The fleets remained se
veral kilometers apart. A rolling barrage from the Aeolian’s sister ships followed. Alas, the Goshawk was only Devonshire class, not Antwerp, and her guns remained silent. Her mission was to maintain the outer edge of the formation. All the same, the beat of her engines and the thrum of the wind in her rigging disappeared beneath the capital ships’ massive roar, doubly loud as they fired from both port and starboard batteries to maintain stability. Billows of black smoke obscured the sun.

  The Jovians answered with a rattling volley of their own. But at that range their frozen sulfide bullets melted into drizzle far from their intended targets.

  “Bloody gasbags,” Crossthwaite cursed. “Take away their poison gas, and they turn toothless as old women. No European would ever fight like that.”

  “Steady, lieutenant.” Jean did not disagree with the man, but he did not want him anticipating an easy victory. “Paris and London are hollow shells because of those tactics. They fight well enough in their armored mansuits.”

  But not that well at a distance. Which was why the saucers closed on the GCAF as quickly as possible. The dreadnoughts’ cannons were most effective firing looping shots from a distance. Attempting to hit the flat saucers head-on was nearly impossible.

  The barrage had already knocked dozens of Jovians from the sky. They crashed into the pool with geysering splashes. The rest thrust forward on horizontal jets, unable to make as much speed as the GCAF because they needed to employ their vertical jets to maintain altitude.

  Midshipmen Garret-Swynge monkeyed over the side from his observation post beneath the gondola. “Captain” he declared, so excited he almost forgot to salute. “An enemy ship has broken free of their formation!”

  Jean followed the midshipman’s pointing finger. One of the Jovians was falling away from its fellows like a stone. At a height of perhaps a hundred meters it stopped its descent and arrowed for the riverbank.

  The Goshawk was the only ship close enough to catch her.

  “Corpsman!” Jean barked. “Bleed gas! Helmsman! Hard to starboard! Everyone else, batten down!”

  The helmsman’s brawny arms bulged beneath his matelot as he strained against the wheel. Slowly the deck canted as the propellers bit at the new vector. The ship’s nose nudged downward. Five degrees. Twenty. Beneath Jean’s feet, the deck shuddered. The rigging sang as the wind swung into their faces. With one hand on the for’ard tumpline, Jean grabbed the engine room speaking tube with the other. “Damn it, Sparks! We need every ounce of steam you have! Don’t let a little five knot breeze shut us down!”

  The roar of the engines was too loud to make out Sparks’ salty reply.

  The ship turned. Now the Goshawk was chasing the Jovian. Jean pulled out the heavy gold pocket watch his grandfather had given him before he died, and used the second hand to measure the ship’s speed against the landmarks below. Even with the wind mostly in the Goshawk’s face, her powerful steam engines had her closing the gap between the two craft at a rapid clip.

  The saucer headed toward a reed-filled lagoon. Crocodiles slithered off sandbars, ducking the spray kicked up by the Jovian’s jets. A small herd of hippopotami snorted, then vanished completely underwater when the Goshawk’s shadow crossed their broad backs.

  They caught the Jovian craft thirty meters from shore. Before that, however, Jean had already climbed into the for’ard rigging with four khat-chewing marines. Never make anyone do something you were unwilling to do yourself, was his firm belief, whether tapping rubber trees or leading an aerial boarding party. Natives or airmen, they were all human.

  Which the Jovians definitely were not.

  He clipped a line to his harness, climbed to the top of the port railing, and, brandishing his swagger stick, cried, “For Queen. And planet!”

  The marines answered with a lusty cheer, and followed him over the side. Jean felt a moment’s thrill as he fell free the first dozen feet before applying pressure to his descender. The safeties caught with a slight tug on the harness, then the winches freed and he dropped again.

  His boots hit the saucer’s deck with a metallic clang.

  “Hookup!” Jean commanded, unclipping his tether. “Now!”

  The Jovians were nothing if not predictable. Already the saucer had started to spin. Like clockwork, Jean and the rest of the squad roped themselves together in both pentagonal and star-shaped patterns, then braced themselves around the small bump that marked the center of the saucer’s gently sloping deck.

  The saucer accelerated. Jean felt the stress in his thighs. The craft accelerated more. A moment’s giddy dizziness threatened to overwhelm him, but he swallowed it manfully down. Focusing on the stable faces of the men around him, and not the whirling land and sky, he kept his nausea at bay.

  The saucer twirled madly for several minutes before the Jovians accepted the fact that their tactic had failed and allowed the ship to slow. Unsnapping the lines, Jean and his men readied themselves for the next act in the Jovians’ predictable strategy.

  “Nine o’clock!” shouted Beckwith.

  A hatch flipped open behind the marine between Beckwith and Jean, striking the marine just behind the knee. As Smythe-Smith toppled, Jean pulled out his revolver, and fired off a quick shot. The round pinged inside the opening, but the only thing that emerged was a thick black hose.

  “Masks!” Jean shouted. He slipped on his custom Hermes Icarus-13 just as the nozzle began to dance about the deck spraying its deadly gas. Like natives in ibogi ecstasy, the marines hopped back and forth trying to keep out of its way. Their gasmasks might keep the sulfuric acid out of their lungs and eyes, but, given more than a couple minutes’ exposure, it would start to eat through their clothing.

  The squad hustled downwind. At the same moment, a second hatch opened, and a Jovian in a heavily armored mansuit clambered out. Two more followed close behind. Jean’s first shot clattered off the lead creature’s breastplate, but Sergeant Manleywale’s was better placed, catching a jointed knee. The mansuit exploded in a burst of greaves and goo. The sticky spray temporarily hid the two Jovians behind it, but not the bullets hammering from their machine pistols. Manleywale went down as the squad dove for the deck. Jean rolled behind the slight protection of the open hatch, fearing the spray of sulfide bullets, deadly at such close range, much more than the spitting hose.

  Around him, the squad returned fire. Though the wind had dissipated the aspirated Jovian, the spray from the poison hose still provided the others with exceptional cover. The snipers in the Goshawk were unable to see them through the hissing fog.

  Jean seized the hose with both hands and wrestled it to the side. The cloud lifted off the Jovians. The sound of rifles popping from above followed swiftly.

  A cry from his left told Jean that a second marine had been hit. But the snipers on the Goshawk were making their mark. Another Jovian exploded, and a third. The deck was secure.

  With Beckwith’s help, Jean wrestled the hose back down the hatch. His hands dripped with acid; his leather gloves steamed. Quickly stripping them off, he tossed them over the side. There was no point trying to pursue the Jovians into their craft. Not when the pressure inside was worse than the bottom of the ocean, and poisonous to boot.

  Jean looked to his men. Smythe-Smith was down with what looked like a wound to the thigh. Manleywale, however, was not moving.

  The second squad joined them in a chorus of clangs. Sergeant Remi reported to Jean with a crisp salute, while his marines began unfurling the canvas wraps. “Carry on, Sergeant,” Jean ordered wearily. Then he and Beckwith strapped Manleywale and Smythe-Smith into the gurneys the Goshawk had lowered, and called for them to be lifted away.

  The second squad wrapped their sailcloth around a third of the saucer. Someday the Jovians would build aethercraft with thrusters on top and bottom, but, until they did, the saucers were at the mercy of any boarding party. Cover enough bottom thrusters, and the craft unbalanced immediately.

  In less than a minute, they had the wrap in position. Jean che
cked to make sure everyone was buckled to one of the dozen lines dangling from the Goshawk, then signaled for the men to cinch the great leather straps that pulled the canvas tight. As they did so, the craft instantly tilted sideways, and shot toward the great river below.

  Jean and the hippos watched it fall. Just before it hit the water, he thought he saw one of the hatches open and something slither out.

  “Did you see that?” he asked Beckwith, dangling on a line beside him, as the lagoon fountained.

  “See what, sir?”

  “Something fled the ship just before it struck.”

  “Sorry, sir. I was checking our harness and didn’t see a thing.”

  High above, the few surviving Jovian ships disappeared back up into the sky. Black smoke soiled the swirling wind, but the battle was a complete rout. Leopoldville, the last lonely citadel still standing against the Jovian invaders, had survived unscathed once more.

  * * *

  The Queen herself attended the victory ball three days later. And everyone else, including the American ambassador. The ambassador’s daughter, however, Jean did not see until he went into the gardens for a cigar.

  It was a lovely night. Several of the lower fans had been switched from aerial poison defense back to their original climate function, and the surrounding jungle’s heat and humidity were beaten back by their circling blades. The rooftop gardens blazed with light, every gas line in the city diverted to the entertainment. The breeze from the great fans hummed through the lush green of the rooftop plantings—date palms and bananas, lime and lemon trees, hibiscus and jasmine—and all the flowering riot of the tropics carefully tamed and tended by native gardeners disciplined to European techniques. On the roof of the Governor’s Palace, an orchestra played the latest waltzes.