Thugs? Ginny thought of Pat Kelly with his lively, green eyes. She thought of Lily Michaels with her sweet nature and her simple desire to live with the man she loved. She thought of her own steam units at home, loyal and harmless—a family—and how the loss of Floyd had hurt them.
Right and wrong were such simple concepts, far too simple for this situation.
She looked into the eyes of her captor and realized she couldn’t reason with him. A wide chasm of belief and understanding separated them. At this moment she didn’t think it could be crossed.
The man looked down at his companions and nudged the nearest with his foot. “You’ll pay for that. There’s going to be a tribunal for turncoats like you, who’ve sided with the machines. You’ll make a prime example—one people in this city will remember.”
Ginny swallowed convulsively. “The law—”
“The way I hear it, the law’s going to be suspended for a few days. Show these steamies who’s boss. Send ’em a message: we’re humans—we can do as we goddamn please.”
And there it was, Ginny thought, the nugget of belief—of entitlement—at the heart of the struggle. She would become a martyr to a cause that just a few weeks ago hadn’t even impacted her life.
But sometimes one had to make choices—the right choices. Her father had done that when he decided to treat the Sioux on the reservation in defiance of custom. Rose had done it when she married Pat. And Brendan…
Brendan Fagan, the finest man she’d ever known, made those choices unequivocally.
She thrust out her chin. “Do what you must. As will I.”
The man grunted. He shoved her cannon into his pocket and wrenched her arm behind her violently enough to wring a grunt of pain from between her lips.
“Bring him,” he ordered the man standing over Dennis, and she realized with relief Dennis must not be dead after all.
Thank God, she wasn’t completely alone.
Upon that thought her ears caught a slight snicker of sound, barely audible over the drumming of her heart. But it spun her head, and her eyes caught a wink of silver. The door of the nearest carriage house had opened; a steam unit stood there, just an ordinary unit with molded features and a dull, metal hide.
Her captor stared at it, as did the man who had now hauled Dennis up and held him on his feet, swaying.
Another small sound, and the door across the way opened. Another unit stood there, this one with a length of two-by-four in its metal hands.
The man holding Ginny swore. He jerked her around and pulled her hard against him, drew a knife, and pressed it to her throat.
“So,” she croaked out, “it’s wrong for a steam unit to commit murder, but you’re justified in killing me where I stand.”
“I’ll slaughter you, all right, if they take one step toward me.”
“You’re terrified of them.” She saw the truth of it in a blinding flash.
“Shut up, bitch.”
Her father had told her something like that once—hate was actually fear in disguise, a visceral reaction based on the desire for self-preservation.
Then what of sacrifice? What of the greater good?
Did moral conditions have anything to do with survival? And did she have the courage to find out?
All up and down the alley, doors opened and steam units trundled out—none new, none sophisticated or well maintained. These were the workhorses of Buffalo’s households, the units that tended the real horses, polished the wheels of the carriages, and hauled away manure. The lowest, so to speak, of the low—had they an opinion and a desire to express it?
The two-by-four argued maybe so. As the others rolled closer into the light, several leaking steam from badly sealed joints, Ginny saw they also carried makeshift weapons. Pitchforks, mostly, and shovels—the tools with which they labored every day.
“Let them go,” said the nearest in a monotone whine.
Ginny closed her eyes on a wisp of prayer, and all hell broke loose in the alley.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Stand firm, stand firm!” Brendan bellowed. All around him the sea of silver rippled. “We will occupy this place until we are granted our rights.”
“We?” Messenberg shouted at him. “Do you number yourself one among these machines, Fagan? Have you deserted your humanity?”
“Just the opposite, Commissioner. I embrace it! What can be more human than acknowledging the sameness of the spirit shared by all who think and feel?”
Messenberg sneered, “Would you drag the spiritual into this? Because, Sergeant Fagan, we may have been created in God’s image—these monstrosities were not. And now they want to claim an equal role, even though divinity played no part in their inception. And, if they decide to create a metal God? What will you do then?”
“Commissioner Messenberg, sir, I suspect God’s that part in all of us that’s alike—the desire to live and love and achieve. They don’t need to create that—it already exists,” Brendan retorted. The units around him stirred. “And God doesn’t hate. If you want to destroy us, go ahead. We’ll rise from the nuts and bolts and ruined boilers. We’ll live again.”
Overhead, thunder rumbled. Clouds streamed in from across the lake, contesting with the bleeding red sunrise. The first few drops of rain fell, pinged on hot metal, and vaporized.
Messenberg raised his arm and the human army tensed, readied their weapons—he lowered it and they charged.
****
Ginny opened her eyes and found herself staring into a face of dull silver with scratches across the forehead and eyes molded of metal, the one on the right chipped. She could see herself dimly reflected, a white oval of a face smeared with blood.
Blood.
“Miss, are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” Ginny answered honestly. “Where..?”
“We have neutralized the assailants.”
“Neutralized?” Ginny struggled to sit up; the steam unit assisted her with gentle courtesy.
The alley, now strewn with casualties, looked like the scene of a massacre. Human and silver bodies alike lay stretched or in heaps.
Ginny’s former captor sprawled just behind her with his own knife thrust into his heart.
“Oh.” She fought for breath. “How—?”
“My neighbors and I were watching. We saw there were two factions. All over the city there are now two factions. We chose one.”
“I’m very glad.”
“A call has been put out. All steam units are to go to Niagara Square and make a stand. We had just decided to comply. Will you accompany us there?”
Ginny scrambled to her feet, the courteous unit still assisting her. “Dennis—”
“Your companion is just here—unable to walk. My fellows will carry him.”
“Yes, all right. Thank you.” Maybe she’d find Brendan at Niagara Square.
She tried to step forward, and her legs went out from under her. A number of silver units rolled up and lifted her gently among them.
“It’s all right, miss. Leave yourself in our hands.”
****
The first of the silver ranks took the brunt of the attack. They bellied in and wavered just like a living creature, as dozens of units went down. Brendan, at his elevated position, both saw and heard it all, units at the front pierced by pikes, crushed and bowled over, and his stomach turned sick inside him. In his heart he’d been hoping the human army, beholding an unmovable force, would turn and leave. He didn’t like sacrifice, and he didn’t want to watch anyone get hurt.
Yet the assembled units before him acted, many for the first time, of their own free will. No one had forced them to come here; no one ordered them to stay.
And watching in agony, he saw a miraculous thing. As the human army attacked, the sea of silver—none among them fighting back—merely absorbed them. Pushing, yelling, flailing and violent, delivering all the destruction they could, the members of the human mob were gently separated, isolated, and surrounded.
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Silver units went down wherever the humans went, yes—a dozen more, though, moved into each one’s place. Precisely like water, the silver mass seethed and flowed. Weapons were wrested from the human attackers. Finding themselves among their opponents, even the humans’ yelling died.
Just when Brendan began hoping for a peaceful outcome after all, his ears caught the drone of engines competing with the crashing of the rain and the thunder that rumbled overhead.
Yet another member of the Irish Squad popped up beside him. “Police airship’s here, sir. No doubt they will fire on us.”
Brendan’s heart sank. He tried desperately to think who could be in control aboard the airship. The mayor? Addelforce? Certainly not Commissioner Messenberg, for he’d been robbed of his weapons and gently shuffled along through the silver sea. He now stood just below Brendan, wearing a look of angry consternation.
“Hear that, Fagan? Your damned rebellion’s over now. Do you want your mechanical traitors vaporized from above? No? Then call them off and order them back to where they belong.”
Brendan struggled for breath, his disappointment suffocating. They’d come so close to victory with this show of incredible strength. Even now the silver crowd continued to grow, units trickling in from the streets that spread out from the square like spokes in a wheel.
To Messenberg he replied, “I think it’s too late for that, Commissioner. The cat won’t go back in the sack. This lot have taken their last orders. If you want peace in this city, you’ll have to negotiate it.”
Messenberg narrowed his eyes, squinting against the rain. He cast a look at the airship steadily approaching from the hanger at the waterfront—his final weapon. A dangerous thing, putting an airship aloft in an electrical storm. But hate, like the desire for freedom, made an impetuous master.
“Tell your steel monstrosities to release my men,” Messenberg called, “or when that airship’s in position overhead I’ll order them to fire without mercy.”
“And without discrimination? No one’s holding anyone prisoner here, Commissioner. But if you burn the metal, the flesh will burn with it.”
Messenberg blinked but bellowed back, “As you’ve demonstrated, Fagan, sacrifices must be made.”
The shadow of the airship now loomed directly overhead. The drone of its engines seemed to drill right through Brendan’s skull into his brain.
What to do? Newly arrived units continued to swell the silver sea. He could only imagine the courage it must have taken for them to break the longstanding bonds of habit and obedience to come here. If they failed now, a like opportunity might not soon come again.
Still, he knew what the cannons aboard the airship could do. Wholesale death and destruction.
He raised the bullhorn to his lips and, still competing with the growl of the thunder, addressed the crowd.
“The police airship is about to fire upon you. Those of you who do not want to risk destruction—disperse!” Their choice, not his. Wasn’t that what all this was about? Giving them choices and a say in their own destiny?
They heard; the crowd rippled more strongly. None of them, however, fled. Many knocked down in the first assault had been helped up by their companions; some would never operate under their own power again. They all lifted silver faces to Brendan, and he felt their will come at him in a tide.
Free will. The most precious commodity in the world.
Except, maybe, for love.
He thought of Ginny again, sent her a fleeting hope of safety, even as someone leaned down from the airship, now directly above him. With a shock Brendan recognized him as Murphy, a member of the Irish Squad.
Straining down from the gondola so far only his hand remained on the guideline, Murphy called, “Sergeant Fagan? Sergeant, Captain Addelforce sent me to tell you—the madman got Pat up and running. He’s alive. Pat Kelly’s alive!”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“There! Please carry me over there.” Ginny had spied Brendan Fagan as soon as she and her companions exited Delaware Avenue and pushed their way into an overcrowded Niagara Square. Despite the lowering clouds, the flashes of lightning, the rain, and the solidly-packed bodies, he seemed to jump out at her as if outlined in golden light.
A fanciful thought, and her not a fanciful woman. She would once have declared herself utterly practical and levelheaded—at least when sober. But now her heart and all her being leaped toward the man poised on the lip of the fountain just beneath the hovering airship.
Reason had nothing to do with this. She squirmed in her bearers’ hands. “Set me down, please.”
When they did, she lost sight of everything but silver heads and the airship itself. She jumped back into her rescuers’ arms. “Can you get me through? To that man up on the fountain.”
Even as she spoke she saw Brendan wave both his fists in the air in a victory gesture. He hollered, the sound echoed by the figure she now saw dangling from the airship. Brendan called something she couldn’t hear at this distance, and a weird cry arose and spread, lifted by a thousand mechanical voices.
The airship began to bank and turn, heading back the way it had come. Ginny, now perched on the shoulders of her rescuer, entreated, “Take me to him, please.”
What she requested was no easy task. Metal bodies, with no space between them, barred the way and bumped against each other with soft clangs. The rain fell harder, and the crowd shifted like a living organism, willing if not able to let them through.
Ginny kept her eyes on her goal—the strong figure clad all in black with the silver tide lapping around his knees. If she could just reach him…well, she’d never ask for another thing. And she’d never again let him out of her sight.
So this was love—the real thing about which they wrote and sang. It had found her after all—grave, deep, and frightening. Now she wanted only a chance to tell him what she felt.
They struggled on step after step. At one point, Ginny leaned down and asked her bearer, “What is your name?”
“I don’t have one, miss.”
“None at all?”
“My owners call me Groom Unit Two.”
“Well, you’re a hero, do you hear me?”
“A hero.”
“And a hero deserves a name, a fine one. I shall give you a name—Arthur. It’s a valiant name, an honorable one. It once belonged to a noble king.”
“Thank you, miss.”
“When this is over, how would you like to come and work for me—at my house and for a fair wage? I can promise you good treatment. I was going to sell my house, but”—she fixed her gaze on Brendan, now appreciably closer—“I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere.”
“I will no longer have to shovel manure?”
“Never again, Arthur.”
“I would like that very much, miss.”
“Wonderful. We’ll negotiate the terms.”
“Miss, my owner…”
“I don’t suppose you have an owner, after this rebellion.”
“Holy boiler steam!”
Ginny laughed in delight, all the clouds clearing from her heart. She launched herself from Arthur’s shoulders into the crowd, struggling to keep her gaze fixed on the man who had stepped down from his elevated position.
“Brendan. Brendan!”
She shouldered a battered unit aside and slipped between two others, feeling the heat from their boilers. The rain sluiced down, evaporating when it hit hot metal. She saw a black sleeve just ahead, snaked out an arm, and snagged it. A steamie rolled aside, and she flung herself into Brendan Fagan’s arms.
“Ginny? Oh, Ginny—by God!” He strained her to him, tight, tighter, painfully so. She couldn’t breathe and didn’t care. A magnificent pain, transformative as if she might meld herself with him, become more than she’d ever been. “How did you find me? Are you all right? Are…”
“Never mind that now. Never mind anything. I love you. No doubts about it, no wondering. That’s all I’ve been longing to tell you. It’s all y
ou need to know. I love you, Brendan Fagan, love you, love—”
The rest of the words were lost as he kissed her fiercely and avidly there among the pulsing sea of silver. A kiss of claiming, of belonging and need answered so eloquently Ginny fought not to weep. Even the ability to think flew away then. When the kiss ended, they clung to each other, two souls among a throng.
At last someone jostled them. Brendan raised his head from where it had been pressed against Ginny’s neck, his breath coming hard. Tears filled his eyes.
“We need to finish here. Don’t you leave me—don’t stir a step.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She buried her fingers in the back of his shirt as he turned and hopped back up on the stonework. She, Ginny Landry—independent woman who’d once vowed to never again let herself get snared by any man—dared not let go of this one. But here amid this crowd of others risking it all for the chance to make something so simple as a choice, she thrilled at making this one.
Life was all about choices, made each moment of every day. And she chose committing to this man, just as to these others around her.
She reached back and touched Arthur on his scarred and battered arm. “Don’t lose sight of me now—you’re coming home with me.”
Above her head, Brendan used a bullhorn to address the crowd. He suggested a meeting later today with someone called Commissioner Messenberg and all the other concerned parties, including the mayor and other city officials, to hammer out a peace. Meanwhile all the bands of vigilante humans roaming the city should stand down. All steam units should report to their homes and wait for the terms of their liberation to be announced.
One of the men at the forefront of the crowd—Messenberg?—replied, sounding angry. The matter, he said, was not decided, but for the sake of the city they would withdraw and agree to meet later.
The rain abruptly slackened, clouds beginning to move off eastward. The crowd shifted; a fresh wind started up from the direction of the river. In her bones, Ginny felt the crisis pass, somewhat like a fit of madness—one that had birthed something important.
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