A Midsummer Night's Steampunk

by Scott E. Tarbet

  “Quince, grab the Maxim gun from the top of the tank, and all the ammunition boxes you can carry. Bottom, get back to Queen Lakshmi at the dirigible as fast as possible. Send Peaseblossom ahead to warn her of what has happened here. Malieux will be furious, and his counterattack will be overwhelming. Now, come on, lads—let’s get moving.”

  “What about the girls?” Alex protested.

  “They’re safest where they are,” Winston said. “They’ll follow orders and head out to the river, completely out of sight by Malieux or the Enforcers. We’ll meet them near the Lambeth Bridge. Now go!”

  ~*~*~*~*~

  Malieux, followed closely by Jack, stalked through the shattered remains of the workshop, splintered by his mortar bombardment, cursing at the strewn corpses of his Enforcers. “Where are they?” he demanded. “Where are Churchill and his men? Where is the girl?”

  “Nowhere to be found, Doctor,” reported one of his lieutenants. “Melted away down through the warehouse.”

  “No bodies?”

  “None, sir. Blood, but no bodies. They’re carrying their dead and wounded with them.”

  “Our losses?”

  “Thirty-five, sir, counting the ones who were on the dock when it blew up. No survivors there, sir.”

  “Over here! Over here!” cried voices from across the shop. “It’s Shaka! He’s alive!”

  Malieux strode quickly to where several Enforcers were gathered at the front of Churchill’s tank. Shaka lay pinned by the tread, which rested atop his tungsten carbide carapace. A mask of blood and rage contorted his features. “Get it off of me! Get it off!”

  A dozen Enforcers gathered along the side of the tank and, with the combined effort of all their hydraulics, were able to lift it enough for Shaka to roll free. He turned with a berserker yell and began tearing at the infernal machine, ripping it to pieces, sending slabs of boiler plate and tractor parts flying in all directions.

  Malieux and the Enforcers stood back and watched the angry spectacle with bemusement and awe.

  “Clumsy of you to get pinned like that. You should have brought back your scouting report before the battle, instead of jumping into the middle of the attack. If we had known about the defilade in advance, we’d have flanked it, and things would have gone very differently.”

  Shaka made no answer, but continued demolishing Winston’s invention with great, sweeping tearing of metal. “When you’re quite finished with your tantrum, we have to withdraw. Quickly,” Malieux ordered. “With all this noise, the civilian authorities are sure to have raised the alarm by now, and once they find out what has happened, they will bring the British Army and the Royal Navy down on our heads.”

  Shaka paused his destruction, breathing heavily.

  Malieux went on. “We need to cover our tracks as best we can—at least buy ourselves some time. Prepare to set the warehouse ablaze.”

  The remaining Enforcers scrambled through the wreckage of the shop, gathering their dead and wounded. Shaka stamped through the shop, kicking machine parts, ballast stone, and Enforcer corpse mechanisms out of his way. He strode out the door, and into the night.

  Malieux turned to the Ripper. “Do you still want her?” he asked.

  “Oh, aye, sir,” growled the Ripper. “I’ll follow her to hell for the chance to gut her like a fish.”

  “Then you stay behind. Follow Churchill and his trash through the warehouse. No one hides and hunts in the shadows as well as you do. Find them. Kill them all. Bring the girl to me at the dirigible. Then you may have her, just as I promised.”

  “I will find her, Doctor. I will smell her out, wherever she may hide. She and her rabble will pay. Oh, aye, sir. She will pay.”

  ~*~*~*~*~

  “Right, then,” said Snug, from his perch on the ladder. “It has been twenty minutes since the last of the firing died away, and the lieutenant has not come. That means they faced too many enemies to deal with, and had to retreat.”

  “Then we’re to follow the Tyburn downstream to the Thames, and meet the others there.” Pauline said.

  Snug stepped down the ladder and paused before taking the final step into the water.

  “It’s not deep,” Pauline assured him. “It barely comes to my knees.”

  Still he hesitated.

  “Is it the rats? The spiders? The snakes? There are some very big ones, to be sure, but they’re far more afraid of you than you are of them, I assure you. None of them should bother you, what with the metal legs and all.”

  “Surely the water doesn’t bother your metal legs?” Clemmie asked.

  “None of that scares me,” Snug mumbled. “Rust, though—that’s a different thing.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “Who knows when I’ll have a go with an oil can next. At home, we all take great care never to let no rust creep in, because rust means major maintenance. And major maintenance means Malieux.”

  “So I imagine you don’t stay wet for long. You dry off as soon as you can.”

  He nodded. “And now here I go wading through heaven knows what, and heaven only knows when I’ll get dry, or be able to oil back up.”

  “How far is it from here to the Lambeth Bridge?” Clemmie asked.

  “As the crow flies, not far at all,” Pauline assured her. “It shouldn’t take us long, even wading through the sewage like this.”

  “But the old tunnels twist and turn,” said Snug.

  “We’ll hurry and get you an oil can as soon as humanly possible.”

  They set out, following the flickering light of a firefly Friend. A few yards downstream, a side tunnel yawned to their right, and shortly afterward another branched to their left, nearly unseen except as gaping voids. It took very little imagination to populate them with creatures of nightmare, so they hurried past. Snug even whistled a jaunty marching tune as he waded.

  The main tunnel bent and twisted back on itself—much, Pauline supposed, as the original course of the small creek called the Tyburn River must have done—with its tributary streams flowing in at irregular intervals, and sewer pipes large and small coming in more and more frequently. “It would certainly be easy to take a wrong turn and get terribly lost if we had to go back to where we started, wouldn’t it?” she said aloud.

  “Good thing we just have to follow the flow on down to the Thames,” Clemmie agreed.

  When the sounds of their whistling, low conversation, and sloshing footsteps had faded almost beyond hearing, the manhole cover rose straight up from its iron ring with barely a sound. None of them heard.

  ToC

  Yes: in the sea of life enisled,

  With echoing straits between us thrown.

  Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

  We mortal millions live alone.

  —To Marguerite, by Matthew Arnold

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Enisled

  “Your Imperial Majesty, Doctor Oberon Malieux.” Von Lyncker, a dressing gown thrown hastily over his pajamas, showed Malieux into the Kaiser’s drawing room and took up a watchful station inside the door, anticipating his monarch’s further demands. He was accustomed to these calls in the dead of night, and demonstrated a Prussian stoicism made thorough by generations of training.

  The drawing room was pristine, renewed, and showed no sign of the tantrum of hours earlier. The debris had been whisked away and identical glass and crystal swiftly placed by a pair of silent, impeccably uniformed sailors whose immobility and fixed forward gaze made them virtually features of the bulkhead.

  “Majesty, at your command,” said Malieux, with a deep bow.

  Wilhelm, like his drawing room, was also pristine and renewed, his fresh uniform crisply starched and pressed, his upward-swept mustaches immaculate, his earlier ire seemingly past like a summer thunderstorm.

  But if Malieux was expecting an expression of gratitude for answering this summons to the Imperial yacht in the wee hours of the morning, even a pro forma expression, he was to be mistaken. Wilhe
lm was in no mood for small talk.

  “Ah, Malieux! It is our decision that our Imperial Majesty will prevail where you alone have failed.”

  “Majesty?”

  “Your wife. Bring her here. I will speak with her personally, and will prevail upon her.”

  “Majesty, she is most unreasonable, and in a very fragile mental and emotional state, practically catatonic since her exposure to the neuralizing rays of the automaton. I fear wasting Your Majesty’s valuable time.”

  “I’ll tell you what is a waste of my time,” said Wilhelm, his voice clipped and curt. “Waiting for you to coddle your wife while you chase the Spiegel girl around London. My people tell me that in the last several hours, you have demolished a Royal Navy warehouse and lost dozens of men, with absolutely nothing to show for it: no girl, no plans, no prisoners, not even a single enemy casualty! This dismal failure does not increase my confidence in your ability to give me the control I must have over the mechs.”

  “But Majesty . . .”

  “I warn you, Malieux, that when the repercussions of your monumental blunders tonight thunder down around your ears, you are on your own, without any connection whatsoever to the Reich—unless you produce immediate results that warrant the enormous international incident that would arise from having a German agent blow up a Royal Navy warehouse!”

  His voice rose nearly to a scream, and all pretense of summer calm evaporated. “Produce immediately . . . and I do mean immediately . . . or face the wrath of the British government alone. Do I make myself completely clear?”

  “Majesty, allow me to—”

  “Silence! Be back aboard within the hour, with your wife, the Spiegel girl, or the plans, or do not come back at all. If you fail me again, it will not just be the British government after your hide, it will be the full might of the German government after your head! Now, get out!”

  ~*~*~*~*~

  It took some minutes of struggling along in the dark through the labyrinthine warehouse before Churchill and his little band gradually became able to make out shapes ahead of them, and even longer to realize that there was light coming from behind them. The warehouse was burning.

  But the increasing light was lost on Starveling. “Remember when you were a little lad, and would find your way to the privy in the middle of the night with no candle?” he said to Flute. “This is like that. I might as well be rolling along with my eyes closed, for all the good they do me. I can’t see a blasted thing.”

  “No need to worry about that right now, mate,” Flute answered, looking back over his shoulder at the burning warehouse. “I can see just fine. Keep your hand on my shoulder. The lieutenant is picking up the pace a bit.”

  No sense adding to Starveling’s worries by letting on that, in addition to Malieux’s mechanized army, they were now being pursued by fire. For all they knew, the flames would soon find fuel and ammunition caches, which would wildly accelerate the conflagration. They could well burn alive before any pursuing Enforcers caught up with them.

  Until the fire began, progress through the massive warehouse had been slow, with several wrong turnings and dead ends. Robin, pulling the unconscious Snout on his brick wagon, followed close behind Flute, who in turn stayed in close contact with the redoubtable lieutenant.

  Winston, his fluorescent-needled compass ever-present in his hand, had been repeatedly frustrated by the blind alleys and switchbacks. “How the deuce do you suppose the warehousemen keep track of all this materiel?” he muttered to Flute. “There hasn’t been a single straight aisle for more than a hundred feet since we left the workshop!”

  “Aye!” said Flute. “They must leave themselves trails of breadcrumbs so they can find their way back out again.”

  “If they had mech warehousemen with wheels and carts,” Quince put in, “they’d have to have some straight aisles to speed things up.”

  “Hope I live to see the day,” said Starveling. “If you takes my meaning.”

  ~*~*~*~*~

  “Where is Bottom?” asked Lakshmi plaintively. “Where is my Nick?”

  “Remember, we left your pet ass back at your dirigible,” Malieux peevishly assured her, for the fifth time since he had removed her from the Ganesh. “Now stop asking. That automaton has damaged your brain more than I thought possible.”

  “Nick!” Lakshmi grieved, a tear coursing down her cheek. “My Nick!”

  “Tell the Kaiser what he needs to know, and you’ll be reunited with your Nick very quickly indeed.”

  Malieux’s coach drew up to the gangway of the Hohenzollern II, and he alighted without waiting for Shaka or the Enforcer who rode as footmen. “Come along quickly, my dear,” he said, extending his hand. Lakshmi sat staring straight ahead. “Come! Time is short!”

  She turned her face to him and closed her eyes as if falling asleep. He reached into the coach and yanked her hand. “Come!” Slowly, she rose to her feet, and he helped her down, then hustled her up the gangway.

  The Kaiser appeared not to have moved from his desk since the previous interview almost an hour before. He seemed engrossed in a portfolio of papers that von Lyncker removed one by one, explained briefly, and waited while the Kaiser read, occasionally annotated, and signed. He did not look up for several long minutes as Malieux and Lakshmi were shown into the drawing room and stood in front of the desk, awaiting his attention.

  Finally he rose, set aside his reading glasses, and dismissed von Lyncker. Wilhelm came around the desk and closely inspected Lakshmi, who stared into space, apparently unaware of her surroundings.

  “Come sit with me.” He led her to a small settee, seated her, and perched himself on the edge. “Frau Malieux . . . Frau Malieux . . .” He turned her chin to him with one finger. “I need to speak with you about the automaton, Diamond Jubal.”

  “Jubal!” For the first time since leaving the Ganesh, there was a spark of interest in her eyes. “Jubal?” She looked about the drawing room in confusion.

  “Your Jubal is very close,” he assured her, “and I will have him brought to you—a gift from a benevolent monarch.”

  Malieux stirred uncomfortably, but Wilhelm silenced him with a glance.

  “All I ask in return,” he continued, “is that you demonstrate him for me. Such a marvelous device you have created! Truly wondrous! Won’t you show me how to use him?”

  Lakshmi looked about, a puzzled frown creasing her smooth forehead. “Jubal? Nick? Where is my Nick? My Jubal?”

  “I will have your Nick brought to you as well. I am your friend. Won’t you show your friend how you operate your automaton?”

  Lakshmi smiled up into the Kaiser’s eyes, and slid off the edge of the settee into a lotus position on the Persian carpet. Her eyes closed peacefully, and a beatific smile caressed her delicate features. Wilhelm rose and stood looking down at her.

  “Will you show me? Please? It is very important to me. I need to know.”

  Lakshmi opened her eyes, smiled up at him, and nodded, then closed her eyes again.

  “Bring the automaton,” he ordered.

  The door opened and Shaka ducked into the room, carrying Jubal. Wilhelm beckoned him close. Shaka crossed to them and knelt smoothly in front of Lakshmi, holding Jubal just out of arm’s reach. The automaton rested inert, delicate metal eyelids shuttering his blue diamond eyes. Lamplight glittered through the huge diamond at his heart.

  Lakshmi again opened her eyes. “Jubal!” She looked up. “Shaka Dingiswayo. You are indeed the wanderer.”

  “Dingiswayo?” muttered Malieux. “What is that?”

  “It is my name,” rumbled Shaka, “taken from me years ago, with my refit. It means ‘The Wanderer.’ ” Malieux just shook his head.

  Lakshmi reached up, not toward the automaton, but toward Shaka, her eyes closing once more. “So much pain!”

  “Enough . . .” began Malieux, but Wilhelm put out a restraining hand.

  “Frau Malieux—Lakshmi—won’t you show me now how you operate your automaton? Tel
l Shaka Dingiswayo what to do.”

  Without opening her eyes, Lakshmi murmured, “Wind him tight.”

  Malieux removed the winding key from his waistcoat pocket, inserted it in the winding notch, and twisted, then twisted again. “It’s already wound tight.”

  “Shaka, wind him tight,” Lakshmi instructed.

  Shaka reached down with his human hand and twisted the key. “Already wound tight,” he confirmed.

  “Other hand,” Lakshmi said.

  Moving the automaton over to his human arm, which bore its weight and bulk only with an effort, Shaka grasped the key with his tungsten carbide, hydraulically actuated hand, and twisted gingerly. To Malieux and Wilhelm’s surprise, it seemed to twist easily . . . one, two, three, four full turns.

  “Tight,” said Lakshmi.

  Another half a turn before Shaka said, “I don’t want to break it.”

  “You can’t. Wind it tight.”

  Nearly another half turn before Shaka announced, “It is done.”

  Lakshmi held out her hands for the automaton, but Wilhelm shook his head. “No, just tell Shaka what to do.” Malieux moved up close behind the kneeling Shaka to peer over his shoulder, as did Wilhelm.

  Focusing her gaze on Jubal’s eyes, Lakshmi murmured, “Lotus position.”

  Shaka sank to the floor, mighty mechanical feet atop tungsten thighs, facing Lakshmi, and arranged Jubal into the prescribed position, facing the same direction.

  “Ah . . . Madonna and child,” breathed Wilhelm, almost reverently.

  The three of them—Lakshmi, Shaka, and Diamond Jubal—faced each other, seated on the floor, the automaton just out of Lakshmi’s reach. Slowly, she raised her hands and brought them together in front of her face, palm to palm, and closed her eyes. Shaka took Jubal’s metal hands in his, raised them in front of his face, and brought the palms together softly.

  No one moved for several long seconds.

  “What was supposed to happen?” asked Wilhelm.

  “I assume there should have been a bright flash,” answered Malieux. “Let me see that,” he instructed Shaka, leaning in over his shoulder. Wilhelm leaned in over the other.