Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine

by Anthony Francis

  “You didn’t fight her for ten minutes, sir,” Barrowman said to Lord Birmingham. “The second she figured out what was up, the woman became a demon.”

  “Medic!” Birmingham shouted into an aircall.

  “The Sergeant smashed it,” Barrowman said.

  “Bloody hell,” Lord Birmingham said. “Faulkner-Jain’s a fine soldier—”

  “Clearly, sir,” Barrowman said, feeling his arm, which he was holding a little stiffly. “But even briefed, she sided with the mutineers. It was her or the cause.”

  Lord Birmingham scowled and knelt over Natasha, his mechanical knee thudding to the deck. “This wasn’t the cause, this was rage off its leash,” he said, touching her forehead, her neck, squeezing her fingers. “Nearly beat you, did she?”

  “That she did, sir,” Barrowman said. “Sorry, sir.”

  “The mutiny’s been put down, so it’s safe for you to emerge from your hole and be useful. Fetch a medic for the Sergeant. Now, sir,” Lord Birmingham said, pressing his fingers to Natasha’s neck. “And tea. Fetch a serving of tea for me and our friends here.”

  Barrowman smiled thinly. “Of course, sir.”

  “Hang on, dear,” Lord Birmingham said, speaking to Natasha’s unconscious form. “We’ll get you patched up, and then I promise to explain everything.”

  “This isn’t happening,” Jeremiah said, realizing with a kind of detached surprise that she wasn’t using a figure of speech; she really meant it. But her words felt as unreal as everything else around her; it was as if she stood outside herself, looking down, seeing herself strapped into the chair with the thing on her back. “This isn’t happening. This is not real. This isn’t happening.”

  Lord Birmingham looked up abruptly, staring at Jeremiah.

  “Oh, Commander,” he said. “I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

  Jeremiah stared at him blankly. Then she couldn’t help herself.

  She snickered. Then she laughed.

  “You are so funny,” she said.

  Birmingham scowled, his face growing a comical mottled red. “Bloody hell,” he said, clenching his metal fist. “Queen’s-blooded hell! It’s acceleratating!”

  Jeremiah snorted. “Hilarious,” she said. “You should tour.”

  Medics came in, and Birmingham snarled and stomped away as they tended to Natasha. Jeremiah watched them all in detached fascination. Their antics were like something out of a Chaplin cylinder, how they lifted Natasha’s head, and blood spurted over their hands and Marcus’s face and even spattered the face of the ship’s clock next to the broken aircall. It was all so funny.

  Jeremiah looked around, as best she could with the straps over her forehead and under her chin pinioning her. She was in the cavernous space of the underhold, the bottom end of the ship between the two long nacelles. With the extra cladding stripped off, and two thermionic dynamos changed for rare earth cylinders, no one would come down here except Barrowman and his crew. That was a perfect place to make into a prison for the monster—if you wanted the prison secret.

  Experimentally she wriggled her fingers; the straps pinned her arms to the chair, but for good measure they’d enclosed her hands themselves in great iron balls that appeared to be welded shut. She couldn’t help giggling at that.

  “Whee!” she said, scraping the inside of the balls, wriggling her feet, twisting against the straps. The balls had some kind of handle on the inside that she could grip, as if it were a ride; though dimly she knew in the back of her mind it was to keep her from turning her hands, making it harder for her to slip free. “Like a rollercoaster sitting still!”

  They well and truly had her, but not just her; they had the Foreigner too. The iron chair she was strapped onto was built with its arms turned backwards, somehow, so she was pressed forwards against what should have been its back. She could feel the cold steel against the thin shift, which was all the clothes they’d left her, and behind her she could feel a multitude of straps pinning the great bug to her body. It was all so funny, and she giggled.

  “Can’t someone shut her up,” the medic growled, and she giggled harder.

  “Oh, God,” the other medic said, hands pressing down on Natasha, desperately trying to stop the bleeding. “Please, please, make her stop laughing—”

  Jeremiah suddenly felt her face sag. Nothing was funny anymore. In fact, things were awful. Simply awful—

  “Your prayers are answered,” the first medic said. “She has stopped—”

  “That,” Lord Birmingham said, pouring his tea, “is not a good sign.”

  “Oh, God,” Jeremiah said, crying. She couldn’t help it. Everything was so awful. She really began bawling . . . and then, like a light switch, started laughing, and again could see how absolutely hilarious it all was. “Heh, heh, ha hahaa—-wh, wh-hat’s happening to me?”

  “It’s progressing faster now, isn’t it, sir?” Barrowman said, returning. He’d cleaned himself up a bit, and in a violation of protocol, took the tea Lord Birmingham had been pouring for himself out of the black, steaming, oversized and inappropriate kettle Jeremiah had not noticed before.

  “It is indeed,” Lord Birmingham said, not seeming to notice when the engineer had taken his cup, nor caring when he drained it. Instead, Birmingham simply turned back to Jeremiah. “A million tiny threads, spreading out, tracing nerves, invading muscle, seeking fat. Horrible—”

  Suddenly Jeremiah was there again, present, not muzzy, not disconnected, not giddy or distraught or ethered insensate, but simply there, with her new beau and her old rival laid out bloody and bandaged on the floor, with herself strapped into a metal chair with a monster on her back and her superior before her acting in a completely baffling way.

  “Sir!” Jeremiah said. “Sir, it’s Commander Willstone.”

  “I can see that, Commander,” Lord Birmingham said quietly.

  “I found out why Lord Christopherson came here,” Jeremiah said, shifting in the straps. “To further his Incursion he required a containment laboratory, sir. I’m not sure of the specifics . . . but I thwarted him, sir. Thwarted, at some cost.”

  “Again, I can see that,” Lord Birmingham said, taking his cup of tea from Barrowman. “Still . . . good show.”

  The thing at her back twitched, and she struggled. “Did I become violent?”

  “What?” Birmingham said. “No. You’ve been out since we caught you.”

  “But why then . . .” Jeremiah said, staring down at the straps on her arms and knees, the balls on her hands, feeling the bars across her chest, the straps over her forehead. It was a restraint chair, but not cobbled together; the whole thing was finely machined, well-made . . . and too big for her. Much too big. Which meant . . .

  “This chair,” she said. “It’s too big. It wasn’t meant for me. It was meant for Lord Christopherson . . . Lord Christopherson and the Foreigner, together!”

  “Quite right, my dear,” Lord Birmingham said, raising his cup.

  “You meant to let him succeed in calling a Foreigner” . . . then catch him!” she said in horror. “Surely the Peerage doesn’t hope to seize the Foreigner as a weapon! That never works! We lost Iceland to that kind of mad scheme—”

  “Quite right again,” Lord Birmingham said, cup frozen midair.

  “So why would you even have such a thing?” she asked, looking down at the chair. “If you had this much intelligence about his plans, I could have used—hang on . . . how could you have known what he was . . . planning . . .”

  Jeremiah’s eyes widened. Through Georgiana, Birmingham had shared the darkest secrets of the Peerage with her—the atomic bomb. But he’d withheld the mission’s true goal. She twisted against the straps. Her hands scrabbled against the inside of the steel balls.

  “You wanted to seize the victory of his spoils for yourself,” she said
. “Blood of the Queen. You’re another madman from the Order of the Burning Scarab, trying to best my uncle at his own game. That’s why you didn’t give me enough resources in Newfoundland. That’s why you were late attacking the Conservatory. You knew his plans all along—and hoped to give him time to finish his performance, and then seize him after the show! You’re on the side of this bloody monster!”

  Birmingham paused; then he raised the cup to her in salute.

  ———

  “Not that monster, my dear,” he said, taking a sip. “Greetings from the Black Tea Society.”

  38.

  The Black Tea Society

  BIRMINGHAM SET THE cup back down on its saucer, then proffered it to her. Jeremiah’s left wrist twisted inside the straps, fingers scrabbling at the ball; then she turned her head away in revulsion, as far as the straps would let her.

  Whatever acrid concoction was in that cup . . . was not tea.

  “What is that foul brew?” she whispered. “How can you drink it—”

  “That’s you reacting with distaste, and not the thing, isn’t it?” Birmingham said, raising the cup to his lips with a smile. “That splash of its golden blood back at the Conservatory seems to have made you a right proper host. As we thought.”

  There was something a bit odd about that “we” that made her shudder even more, that made her left hand twist and struggle against the strap. “What are you talking about, sir?” she said, her gorge rising as he took another sip.

  “Ah, that’s right,” Lord Birmingham said, placing the cup down, “you do not have the benefit of our knowledge, Commander. Let me debrief you.”

  “Let me guess,” Jeremiah said, with sudden insight. “There’s more than one breed of Foreigner. You’re working for one, and Lord Christopherson is working for another. You’re competing, with the Earth as the prize!”

  “Why . . . yes,” Lord Birmingham said. “That was rather quick.”

  “She may be experiencing bleedthrough—” Barrowman said.

  “What? No. It’s not possible—and especially not after only two hours,” Birmingham said, taking another sip of the acrid brew. His movements were natural, but ritualized, like he couldn’t stop drinking the foul concoction that stung her nostrils and burned her face, even from this distance. “She’s just experienced fighting Foreigners—and quite smart, even though the thing’s neural tendrils have likely invaded half her brain by now.”

  “Oh, God,” Jeremiah swallowed. “It is eating me.”

  “That’s not quite how the process works; it’s not consuming your brain, but subsuming it. I’m . . . so sorry, Commander,” Birmingham said, with surprising tenderness. He touched her forehead with his good hand, then jerked it away, cursing. “Damn it! Bloody hell, I’ve spilled the tea!”

  “What . . . what just happened?” Jeremiah said, as his face twisted with uncharacteristic rage. In the brief instant of their touch, it was like he’d struck her with a live iron, searing through her forehead to her back all the way down her left side. “You burned me.”

  Birmingham scowled, wiping his hand with his handkerchief. “Just a brief skirmish in an ongoing battle that’s ranged across the stars for millennia. Black versus Gold, Rim versus Core . . . Tea versus Scarab. With the garden worlds of the galaxy’s habitable zone as the prize.”

  Scarab she knew. The Burning Scarab: that was the thing Christopherson had called down; that was the thing now eating her. And she already had a very good guess about what the Tea was, but she needed more intelligence.

  “And what precisely,” she said, “is the Black Tea?”

  “Sworn enemy of the Scarabs—those dreaded monsters from the dead center of the Milky Way,” Birmingham said—and she did not miss that he was subtly ducking her question. “Literally dead. In the far distant past, the Scarab walked upon a world much like our own, climbing over half a billion years to become paragons of scientific achievement united with their own technology. But as the core of the Milky Way heated up, they were driven underground, forced to become parasites feeding on the backs of the lumbering worms of the caverns of their world.”

  “They’re metal ticks,” Jeremiah said, eyes looking back as far as she could, and such a thing was in her! And now that the strange dulling anesthetic it had first applied had finally worn off, she found her gorge rising with a vengeance. “Oh . . . yuck! You have to get this off me—”

  “Disgusting indeed,” Barrowman continued, ignoring her request. “Even with their fantastic science, their time is running out, so they sent their eggs out across the galaxy, seeking new worlds. But they can no longer live on their own; they are obligatory parasites. They must find new hosts.”

  “But . . . Lord Christopherson wanted to do this to himself,” she said. The awful implications of the men in white suits while Christopherson wore nothing more than a surgical mask finally sank in: the thing’s blood established a rapport, and her uncle had wanted the containment of the BSL-4 laboratory to ensure no-one else had a chance to become a host . . . though she had not yet placed the role of the cow in the affair. “Why, why would he want to do that?”

  “The important thing,” Birmingham said, “is that you stopped him—”

  “But I didn’t stop him. I simply took his place!” Jeremiah said; they were still ducking her questions. She twisted against the straps, both hands now. “But why would he let himself be cored by a monster like the Scarab? And why would the Tea want to let him do it?”

  Birmingham raised the cup, considering; then there was a moan on the deck.

  “The American is coming round, sir,” the medic said. “The Sergeant is more badly injured. She’ll be out for a while—”

  “Take the Sergeant to infirmary and have her strapped to a bed,” Barrowman ordered, and then, as if continuing the same sentence, Lord Birmingham continued, “Under guard at all times by Engineers or Rangers, not her own Falconers. They’re too recently converted; if she comes to and starts pleading it could destabilize them.”

  “Oh, God,” Jeremiah said, realizing why Birmingham had gotten so angry at spilling his tea. “You no longer need to explain the Tea to me, sir, I’ve gotten it. The Tea’s another Foreigner, liquid somehow, but just as much a parasite. You ingest it . . . and slowly, it takes over your mind.”

  “Bloody hell,” Barrowman said. “Sure there’s no bleedthrough, sir?”

  “You can diagnose a problem in the engines from an odd hum, sir,” Birmingham said. “This is her bailiwick.” He raised his cup. “A continuous intelligence, with a single consciousness—and it isn’t really that slow a process. Rather Boolean, as the phrase goes: you drink enough to get the point . . . or you don’t.” He smiled, a bit sadly. “You’re about to get a chance to see.”

  “What the fuck is he talking about?” Marcus said, putting a hand to his head.

  “I’m so sorry Marcus,” Jeremiah said. “You’re not the only one with superiors who have been led astray, though mine—”

  “We have not been led astray,” Birmingham said forcefully. “This is a cause, a fight for the garden worlds of the Milky Way between creatures which eat people alive and allies whose means of communing with us is a civilized cup of tea. A so-called conversion process which, I note, has left me as concerned for your welfare, Commander, as I was the day I selected you for the mission.”

  “I—” Jeremiah said. “You call this concern for my welfare?”

  “Dame Alice was right about you, you know,” Birmingham said. “She was possessed even at the time, mind you, and still right: your boldness has saved the day but cost you your life, as she knew one day it would. None of us wanted this to happen to you—not even the Tea.”

  “The Black Tea doesn’t care about that, you fool,” she said, twisting at the straps. “Those demons from beyond the rim just want another host!”

  Bi
rmingham sighed. “That’s the Scarab talking; a . . . one-sided view,” he said, setting his teacup down and motioning to the Rangers, who seized Marcus and brought him before Birmingham as Barrowman poured another cup of the “tea.” “But true enough.”

  “No, wait!” Jeremiah said, but it was too late. The Rangers had her compatriot in hand and were tilting his head back; Lord Birmingham had already seized Marcus’s mouth with his metal hand and forced it open, pinching his nose with the other.

  Jeremiah’s left hand scrabbled at the inside of the ball. She had to help, but what could she do? She grabbed the pipe that ran through the right ball, shaking it; her body twisted against the straps . . . and, oddly, her left hand went limp.

  Barrowman stepped up to Marcus with a steaming cup of the acrid liquid. And then, without ceremony or speech or even the slightest human moment of hesitation, Barrowman poured the Black Tea down Marcus’s throat.

  Marcus twisted and gargled, trying to spit it up; then he began to choke. Barrowman reached out, took Lord Birmingham’s half-drained cup, and then poured it down as well. There was a horrible, horrible . . . swallowing sound.

  Marcus flopped in the arms of the Rangers, choking, gagging, struggling. Then he went limp, and Lord Birmingham nodded to the two Rangers, who stepped aside. Marcus’s hands went to his throat as he gagged and choked, but the gagging was subsiding now. Barrowman stepped forwards, opening Marcus’s eye, peering within, presumably to check the effect of the transfer.

  And then, even with his head still clamped in Lord Birmingham’s hands, Marcus headbutted Barrowman. Birmingham cursed, but like a snake, Marcus twisted free, shoving the larger man off with a limber twist of his shoulders. Jeremiah’s heart sang as Marcus planted one fist in Barrowman’s guts, doubling him over, then did a whirling kick that knocked the medics aside.

  ———

  And then, before anyone could move, Marcus took up the entire kettle of Black Tea and upended it into his face and open mouth.