Power Under Pressure (The Society of Steam)

by Andrew P. Mayer

  Jack found himself ignoring the speech, and instead trying to figure out what Anubis would do with his fate staring him straight in his unmasked face. Even before he knew his secret, Jack had always thought of Anubis as a man who played at being noble, far more than someone with actual nobility in him. But he still found himself impressed by the black man’s calm demeanor.

  He turned to peer past Clements, at the eager face of the Bomb Lance. Ever since Jack had first held a weapon, people had referred to him as a maniac, but it was a title that fit Murphy far better. The Bomb Lance had once been a family man: hardworking, married, with a brood of children. But rather than a single disaster, his world had been torn away from the Irishman one relative at a time. War, disease, and misfortune had slowly destroyed his world, leaving behind this angry, vengeful creature.

  Jack might smile when he killed a man, but he didn’t consider it to be an act of revenge against humanity as a whole.

  Jack hadn’t ever thought of his own misfortune as something to be thankful for, but looking at Murphy he saw the advantage of having been thrust into misery at an early age. Facing sudden tragedy was, he had to imagine, far better than having your life ripped away from you piece by piece.

  The Irishman was leaning forward. He was clearly looking forward to seeing Anubis thrown in the chamber. His eyes were wide, and a small stream of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth.

  It was clear why the Bomb Lance was Eschaton’s favorite. The Irishman didn’t just have a penchant for violence, he loved the madness of it as well—the gadgets, jim-crackery and ridiculous knickknacks that bored Jack half to tears. Even now, Jack could see the silver glint of some ridiculous machinery hidden under the Irishman’s coat.

  When he had first joined the Children, Eschaton had offered Jack some gadgets as well: folding blades, knife shooters, and other nonsense. He had tried a few to humor his new mentor, but in the end what he liked best was a large supply of well-balanced blades. A good, sharp knife was something a man could rely on in any circumstance, and Eschaton had given him his jacket in response.

  The crowd around them started to holler, pulling his attention back to the stage. Eschaton had come down from his pulpit, a golden vial in his hand, and Jack felt another wave of heat roll toward him. It now seemed obvious, to him at least, that Nathaniel was causing the temperature in the room to rise.

  For a moment he thought he might say something, but Eschaton shouted out “Quiet!” and the entire audience went silent.

  “You’re a monster!” Nathaniel shouted at Eschaton. “I want my life back!”

  The boy was becoming frantic, and sensing a rising moment of danger Jack slipped a finger into the buttons of his coat and let it drop open slightly, putting his knives in easy reach. He considered the idea of throwing a few blades at the boy simply to see if he might put an end to the danger early, but Eschaton still seemed unconcerned.

  The gray man had to realize that Nathaniel was becoming a genuine threat—didn’t he? After all, he had been the one responsible for creating him. Maybe he was curious, or perhaps this reaction was the one the gray man wanted. But if it was drama that Lord Eschaton intended, it could still quickly grow out of control.

  Either way Jack decided that a front-row seat might not be the best vantage point for a brawl involving purified humans.

  While he was perfectly willing to engage in hand-to-cane combat when the situation called for it, Jack was always at his best advantage with a little distance between himself and his target. Slipping out from his chair, he stepped quietly into the aisle and started to move toward the back of the room.

  He had only gotten halfway up the aisle before he felt a rough hand wrap around his wrist. “Going somewhere, son?”

  The voice was gruff and familiar, and Jack looked down into the shattered face of Doctor Dynamite. The man had been badly hurt in his fight against the Automaton, and while he had spent the last few weeks recuperating, he clearly wasn’t all the way there—and might never be.

  The cowboy still had one arm in a splint, but there was some strength left in the remaining limb. While most of the crowd was already on their feet, he remained seated. He could walk only with the use of a cane now, although Jack wondered if the Doctor’s aim was still able to rival his own.

  More than once, Jack had suppressed the urge to challenge the flamboyant cowboy to duel, to find out which one of them was the better marksman. If the gunslinger ever fully recovered from his injuries, Jack thought he still might.

  “I—” It was the only word Jack got out before a stronger wave of heat enveloped him. This time it was followed by an intense blast of light, and when he turned to look down at the stage he needed to shield his eyes. He could make out a figure on the stage, lit up like the sun. Eschaton’s purified human had, it seemed, come into his own.

  “Dammit,” Jack said, yanking his hand free from the surprised Texan. Reaching into his coat with both hands, he pulled out a pair of blades.

  Shielding his eyes, he could dimly make out Anubis on the stage, throwing some kind of liquid directly at Eschaton’s face.

  For the first time since he had met the man, he watched the gray giant stumble backwards, clearly affected by the concoction.

  Eschaton reached out his hand to stabilize himself and touched one of the thick, square windows that made up the Uplift Chamber. The instant his fingers brushed the frame there was a discharge of crackling electricity from his arm that shattered the glass. The smoke, now free from its cage, poured into the room.

  With all the experiments that had been going on inside the Hall, it was well-known that exposure to the smoke was very dangerous without proper preparation.

  A collective shout rose up from the audience, and the gathered Children of Eschaton seemed to react almost with a single mind. The combination of heat, light, smoke, and the collapse of their leader had sent them into a panic.

  Jack suddenly found himself swimming against the tide in a sea of desperate would-be heroes and villains, all of them rushing toward the door. Doc Dynamite was thrown to the floor, and Jack realized that if he didn’t do something, the man was going to be trampled to death.

  That wasn’t any of his business, really, and there was no way to know if Doc Dynamite would have done the same for him if their positions had been reversed. Given what he’d seen of the man’s attitude, he highly doubted it. But it was a trampling that had turned him into an orphan, and it was no fit way for a man to die—not to mention that his coat was probably full of explosives.

  Jack thrust his fist into the solar plexus of one of the men desperately rushing out of the pew. The man fell back with a shout, breaking the balance of the nearby crowd and slowing their momentum.

  He reached down for Doc Dynamite’s working arm and dragged him up to his feet. The cowboy looked shaken, but somehow, even in the confusion, the man had still managed to keep his ten-gallon hat on his head. “Thanks pardner, I owe you one.”

  Jack nodded. He knew that most men had a sense of pride, and they needed to be taken seriously. It wasn’t a condition he was personally afflicted with, and the last thing he really wanted was to be owed a favor by a man with a fetish for dynamite. “If you want to pay me back, you can hobble your broken arse out of here before the fighting starts.”

  He could see the cowboy’s hand twitch, considering, just for an instant, responding to him by reaching for his gun. Jack clutched the blade hidden in his palm. This wasn’t how he wanted to face the cowboy, but if push came to shove, he’d do his best to be the one who came out alive.

  The cowboy looked into his eye and winked. Relaxing his hand, he turned and walked away through the panicked crowd.

  No longer concerned with Doc Dynamite’s fate, Jack turned to face the stage and scowled at what he saw there. Nathaniel was still transformed from translucence into a silvery glow, although not as bright as before. Standing around the shining man were Eschaton, the White Knight, Murphy, and the Shell. They were ready to fi
ght, but clearly being held back by the heat the man was generating. A few of the braver Children—men he didn’t recognize—were standing a bit farther back.

  Anubis had used the confusion as an opportunity to grab his breastplate and begin strapping it on. The man was no fool—Jack had to give him credit for that. Although, had he been in the jackal’s position, he would have joined the other men in running out the door.

  By that measure, he should have been doing just that at this very moment, and for some reason he was being brave instead. Jack decided to chalk it up to morbid curiosity, and walked back down the ramp.

  The heat was intense, and if he didn’t know better he would think that he was about to be burned alive. Eschaton and the Shell had some immunity, no doubt, but he wondered if the Southerner and the Irishman might not regret standing so close.

  “Stay away from me, you monsters!” Nathaniel yelled at them, waving an arm around. Whether or not the boy fully understood his new powers, his time as a Paragon had clearly made him quickly adaptable to any situation where villains were involved. “I’ll burn all of you to death.”

  “Don’t be a foolish boy, Nathaniel,” Eschaton said in low tones, “I don’t want to have to destroy you, but I will.” Jack had been around the gray man long enough to know that the more threatening his tone, the more afraid he actually was. In this case, he must have been fairly terrified under all the bluster.

  As he neared the stage, Jack turned left and walked over to Anubis. The man was sweating profusely, and there was a desperate look in his eye. Jack wondered if his inability to hide his emotions was one of the reasons he liked to conceal his face. “It’s nice to see you back in costume . . . or at least a shred of it.”

  Abraham slipped his black hood over his face. It took him a moment to adjust it so that he could see out of the eyeholes, and Jack considered using his blindness as an opportunity to attack. He felt conflicted for a moment—the thought of attacking him seemed unfair.

  As Anubis finished adjusting his mask, Jack berated himself. He had never considered himself a sporting man, and the idea of fighting fairly was something that he considered to be a weakness in other men, and yet here he was.

  “You could have attacked me just then,” Anubis said, pulling on the outer mask that hid his eyes and gave him the visage of the Egyptian god. Still, the jackal was only half the hero he once had been, his leather leggings and cloth skirt nowhere to be seen.

  “And I didn’t.” Jack peered over his left shoulder. The standoff happening on the stage hadn’t erupted into fighting yet. “I’m not here to fight with you, unless you plan to take on all these men.”

  Anubis nodded. “Then why didn’t you run away with the rest of the Children?”

  “Why didn’t you escape in the confusion? That’s what I would have done if I were you.”

  “You’re not me,” he replied enigmatically. “So why are you here?”

  Jack smiled in response. “Let’s call it misplaced loyalty.”

  “To whom?” Anubis replied, his voice slipping even deeper into his enigmatic rumble. Jack had never seen a man who was more clearly comfortable in his secret identity. “Not to me . . .” he said with a note of surprise.

  “You have quite the opinion of yourself,” Jack said with a laugh. “I was thinking you might want to try and ‘judge’ Eschaton while his back is turned.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  There was another blistering wave of heat, and Jack turned just in time to see Murphy scream and stagger back, batting his arm against a smoking patch on his coat in the shape of a hand. Clearly he had been touched by the silver man.

  “I’m beginning to think I made a mistake when I gave you so much power,” Eschaton said. Jack could see that his face had turned from gray to yellow where the liquid had touched it. The white lines running through his gray skin stopped on the edges of the stained flesh, framing it with an electric glow. Its effect on him was not a good one.

  Nathaniel scowled at the gray man. “The mistake you made was killing my father.” The boy was angry, confused, and ready to die for his revenge.

  Jack clutched his hand tightly around the knife he held. He was ready to throw it, although he doubted he could use it to do any real damage.

  “You’re not an ordinary man anymore, Nathaniel. You’ve become the first truly purified human. Surely you can see that you’re beyond the need for petty acts, such as revenge.”

  Eschaton took a step toward the silver man, and Nathaniel lifted up his glowing arms in a threatening gesture. Silver flickered across his palms. “You’ve turned me into a monster! Now I want you to change me back!” The mercury under his skin flared white, and more heat poured out of him. It was blistering, but either the boy was weakening, or—more disturbingly—he was beginning to learn to control his newfound powers.

  “Let’s kill him,” the White Knight said, but Jack noticed that he wasn’t doing more than talking.

  “No, Jordan. This isn’t a fight . . . or at least it doesn’t have to be,” Eschaton turned slightly, giving the Southerner a stern glare.

  Anubis took a step forward. Jack slipped out the blade he’d kept hidden in his hand—just far enough that the metal edge was visible, and stretched his arm out, barring Anubis’s way. “Let’s you and I not get involved just yet. I want to give it a moment to see how it plays out.”

  Ever since Eschaton had started this experiment, a question had been running around in the back of Jack’s head: what if Eschaton’s process worked better than he expected and he managed to create a being more powerful than himself? Why was he so convinced that such a creature would have any interest in being his underling?

  The gray man did have genuine charisma, and an innate skill for manipulation. All it took was a look at the surprising number of men that he had managed to bring into the Children for Jack to appreciate those skills. The fact that he had managed to involve a man as cynical and obsessed with self-preservation as Jack himself was a testament to just how persuasive Lord Eschaton could be.

  “I just need you to relax, Nathaniel,” Eschaton said. “I know it’s hard for you to accept, but you’re one of us now. Perhaps the most powerful of us all.”

  The gray man held out his arm in a gesture of friendship. “Take my hand. If you come with me we’ll discover your true potential.” As he reached out to Nathaniel, the intense heat caused Eschaton’s skin to glow and crackle.

  For an instant it seemed as if he would accept, the glowing arm lifting tentatively. “No!” he shouted, “I won’t accept you! You’re the monster that destroyed everything I’ve ever loved.” Instead of taking the offered hand, Nathaniel grabbed Eschaton’s arm, and there was an explosion of dazzling white light that obliterated not only the already-harsh glare of the electric bulbs, but the rest of Jack’s vision as well. As he turned away to shield his eyes he could barely make out the other men doing the same. There was some heat as well, but not the skin-searing blast he had expected.

  It took Jack too long to blink away the blindness, and for an instant he began to panic, wondering whether his vision was permanently damaged.

  He stared at the men through squinting eyes, but what he saw as the initial flash faded was almost impossible to comprehend. Nathaniel and Eschaton were clasping each other’s hands, fingers intertwined as they wrestled in a fantastic tug of war. Eschaton’s electric white battled against the other man’s mercurial glow.

  If the battle was purely to determine who could martial more of the power within them, it seemed that Nathaniel was already winning. The silver inside him had filled his arms, stretching up past his shoulders and down into the flesh of his back. Eschaton’s silver had filled to just past his elbows.

  But the gray man clearly didn’t agree with Jack’s assessment. “You’ll never win this, Nathaniel! I gave you these powers, and I know how they work far better than you ever will.”

  Nathaniel let out a laugh that sounded halfway between mockery and a mad cackle.
“Who’s been the hero longer?” He heaved against Eschaton, and the gray man sank just a little bit. “I may be a drunkard and a fool, but I was Alexander Stanton’s son.” Heat flared off of Nathaniel, and this time it was clear that Eschaton felt it. “And I’m the last damn Paragon!”

  There was another blinding flash, not as bright as the first, but with his eyes already burning Jack couldn’t help but turn away once again. As he tried to blink his sight back he heard the growling voice of Anubis coming from the other side of him. The man had clearly gotten past his miserable defenses. “Lord Eschaton, you and your men have been judged and found wanting.”

  The shouts and grunts that came next were clearly from Murphy and Clements. He assumed that they had been similarly incapacitated by the light, perhaps even more than he had been, and when Jack finally was able to clear his vision he saw the Irishman slumped down against the side of the pews.

  “You killed my father, you killed Sir Dennis. Now it’s my turn.” Eschaton was down on his knees, his massive gray head held between Nathaniel’s glowing hands.

  As the glow became brighter it was clear what Nathaniel intended. For a moment he considered letting the boy carry out his plans. Eschaton was a madman, and Jack truly had no desire to become a purified anything. But despite his conflicted emotions, Eschaton had saved him—pulling him out of a life of violent poverty and giving him the chance to prove himself. He certainly couldn’t let that savior die in front of him without a fight.

  He prepared a handful of knives to release toward Nathaniel. Jack was hit hard, his entire body thrown sideways as Anubis crashed into him. But the jackal’s attack had come too late, and the daggers struck home.

  Pierced five times, Nathaniel screamed and let go of Eschaton. The gray man, no longer conscious (and quite possibly no longer alive) crumpled down to the floor like a sack of rocks.