Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine

by Anthony Francis

  “What have you done?” Jeremiah asked, raising her hands. The swelling of the puffy flesh was fading as she watched, leaving only her hands, thinned from starvation but otherwise whole. But just past her hands, another set of thin limbs mirrored their movements—long, jointed, covered in metal cuticle, visibly coursing with golden fire. Jeremiah reached out, the limbs moved with her—and then the metal wings creaked away from her back, their coppery leaves spreading for balance. She hadn’t imagined it—not one whit of it. “My God, what have you done?”

  “Saved your life,” Christopherson said, slamming the projector shut and powering down the beam. “Precisely as you asked.”

  Gingerly Jeremiah reached back over her shoulder, flinching as the spindly new pincer followed the movements of her hand, though not quite so closely this time. She grimaced as her fingers touched raw wounds, but she kept going. Oh, Lord, there was something wrong with her spine, knobbly projections, growing larger, and lower down—the roots of a limb.

  Jeremiah stared up at her upper wing for the very first time—multi-jointed like a dragon’s, covered with a metal carapace like a beetle’s, veined within like a dragonfly’s. She stared at the wing, marveled at it—then marveled that she had known it was there, even before she had seen it; known she had six new limbs and four—no, eight wings: four pairs of dragon limbs, the larger of each pair supporting an oval metallic shield that covered the hot gold of the delicate lifting member when not in flight. She knew it like a fact of nature, as natural as the five fingers she had on each hand.

  I have not left you, the Scarab whispered within her—in her voice; or she in its voice. There was no difference now. I will never leave you now.

  “So it’s done,” she whispered aloud. She’d known this was coming, but on some deep level had half-expected, half-hoped she would die—or prayed for some miracle to free them. But instead, the inevitable horror of merger had indeed come to pass. “You’ve bonded me to this thing—”

  But she stopped, confused, as she realized she didn’t know whether the “me” speaking was Jeremiah horrified to be bonded to the Scarab, or the Scarab horrified to be bonded to Jeremiah. But where was the horror? This body was as she wanted, a near perfect design.

  “No,” she said. “Made me one with . . . with myself?”

  “What is she talking about?” Jackson said. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s the Seal of the Scarab,” Christopherson said. “The ultimate stage of its life cycle: complete symbiosis with a native life form. And with it—”

  “Uncle,” Jeremiah began—and then stopped. As she’d stretched her hand out towards him, one of the hulking copper armored beasts arrayed around the platform creaked. Her wings flickered . . . the heart of the beast glowed . . . and then the whole ring of armored suits began to awake.

  “That’s it,” Christopherson said eagerly, as the Armor of the Scarab glowed to life, gold fire coursing through channels in their filigreed hulls. “This is exactly what we hoped to achieve! Now that it’s an adult and your minds are joined, Scarab technology will respond to you—”

  “Wait,” she asked. “You’ve given me the power you wanted?”

  “Of course I wanted the Scarab’s power—who wouldn’t want to become a god? But that was always a means to an end,” Lord Christopherson said, walking around the platform, shutting things down, motioning to his men to take equipment. “My ultimate goal is keeping mankind safe from the monsters, a task for which the Scarab’s power was an excellent tool, and a power for which I was a suitable vessel.” He pulled another tube, then gestured to her. “Well; so are you.”

  She was trembling. “But . . . but I don’t—”

  “But you don’t know what to do,” he said, turning to Ryder, who proffered a velvet-lined mahogany box into which Christopherson began to slowly sort the gleaming memory tubes. Jackson clucked and took them from him. He said, “You’ve thrown yourself bodily into my plan but can’t carry it out without my knowledge of how to make the Armor work—”

  “Don’t know your plan,” she snarled. “Don’t intend to carry it out—”

  “We have different plans, but one goal,” Christopherson said, turning a tube in his hand. “Protect humanity. You’ll pursue that as vigorously as I would . . . even more so. You’ve proven that. But giving you this power rather than me, I prevent one unnecessary death.”

  Jeremiah’s mouth fell open. Then she let her head hang.

  “Oh, God,” Jeremiah said. She saw the truth now: her uncle was back on the same crusade he’d been on ever since he lost his daughter. He’d move Heaven and Earth to save his last remaining “daughter”—her. “You gave up your plans to save the world just to save me—”

  “I never give up on a plan, not while there’s hope. And I’ll never give up on you. Jeremiah, listen to me,” Christopherson said, on one knee beside her. “Defend this world. The Black Tea Society is almost here, and we have to go. I can’t fight them. You have the power I needed to do that—”

  “But I don’t know how to use it,” Jeremiah said.

  “It does,” her uncle said. “And I’ll bet it, whole, will tell you far more than it will tell me—”

  “But it doesn’t know what you do about the Society!” Jeremiah said.

  “I’m . . . afraid I don’t have time for a briefing,” Christopherson said.

  “Oh, Uncle,” she said. “Between the two of us, we’ve made a wreck of things—”

  “I broke every rule and gave you no reason to trust me,” he said, patting her shoulder. “But you know my true aim now—and you have that power. You must stand for the people of Earth. You must be the one to stand up to the Foreigners. You must be the one to stop them and anything like them from taking a hold here and getting back to Victoriana—”

  “But they’ve already taken Victoriana,” she said. “They’ve got Dame Alice—”

  “And I’ve got you,” he said, kissing her forehead. “My firebreak, Jeremiah. You stop the fire, here, and I’ll go and get help. I’ll be back. I promise.”

  Her uncle stood, smiled, and turned back towards the Machine, where Jackson was already ascending the gangplank.

  “Sir,” Ryder asked. “Aren’t we going to take the Armor of the Scarab?”

  “Useless without the Seal,” Christopherson said, glancing around him one last time at the hulking half-insect, half-animal statues of brass. Briefly, his face filled with longing; then he briskly shook his head. “No. All this is hers now.”

  “Lord Christopherson,” Jackson said from the gangplank. “It’s time to go. We have to pick up our advance team from yesterday, and, if my calculations are right, I’ve left us just enough extra time to mail the letter before the post closes.”

  “Will that close the loop?”

  “Completely,” Jackson said. “We should go directly.”

  Jackson glanced at Jeremiah, then looked away. Jeremiah swallowed, then held up her hand and looked at it. It looked human, but it was smeared with blood and felt heavy. She knew her back was a thicket. She wondered what she looked like.

  “Prevail, Jeremiah,” Lord Christopherson said, and she looked up to see her uncle on the Machine’s gangplank. Behind him Ryder and Jackson were staring, and yet trying not to stare, but her uncle just smiled at her as the hatch closed.

  The Clockwork Time Machine’s gong sounded. Its engines crackled with power. The great diving bell shuddered. Jeremiah’s eyes widened as they saw, even through the Machine’s impractically thick hull, the tangled knot of churning energies at its core.

  Then the Machine twisted inside itself in a spray of light and disappeared.

  A cool wind swept out across the room, brushing against Jeremiah’s skin as she knelt there, in the center of the ring of alien suits, in only the fluttering remains of her shift . . . with the metal limbs of an ali
en monster weaving all about her and out of her. Jeremiah shivered, clutched the shift to her—and then her wings glowed, filling her with warmth.

  A deep droning filled the air, quickly growing closer, huge thermionic engines pushing vast fans to their limits. Jeremiah looked up, and through the eyes of . . . through her eyes, she could see through the roof a ghostly spiderwork of girders in the sky, a long slender shark shape with two long-slung nacelles and a wedge prow—the Prince Edward.

  Her eyes caught a sparking of energy in its cannons, and Jeremiah flinched away. Collimated lightning impacted the roof, blasting through it, sending drywall, concrete, and tarpaper raining down into the pit of the Accelerator.

  Through the hole in the roof, she now saw the huge rigid airship, its wedge prow turning away from her, its fans bringing it to a halt with its cannons pointed through the opening and the drop doors under its fins opening for assault.

  ———

  From them, Falconers dove . . . all possessed by the Black Tea.

  56.

  Alone Against the Darkness

  “THERE SHE IS,” said Natasha, stalking forwards towards Jeremiah. Natasha’s wooden butterfly wings were folded back, and she carried a strangely modified boltgun with an odd black canister. She flicked her free hand, directing her compatriots. “Spread out, look for the Baron.”

  “You’ve just missed him,” Jeremiah said, still sprawled out at the center of the deck in her bloody shift with metal wings creaking out of her back. Around her the metal armor loomed, now silent and dark. “He caught a ride on Jackson’s Clockwork Time Machine.”

  “That’s all right; it appears he was able to activate the armor before he left,” Natasha said, smiling at Jeremiah, then turning her attention to the huge, hulking suit of armor. Something dark pulsed within her veins as she said, “We’ve got what we came for.”

  “Wrong answer,” Jeremiah said and swept her hand aside.

  The arm of the Scarab suit knocked Natasha backwards off the deck and over the rail. Jeremiah cursed; she hadn’t meant to be so rough. But then the other possessed Falconers ran back, firing with their modified boltguns.

  Jeremiah fought back, by proxy, the Scarab suits eerily amplifying her slightest movements, a flick of her wrist sending two possessed Falconers flying with the swing of a Scarab suit’s arm, a thrust of her hand felling a half dozen more Falconers with a wave of muscle-spasming energy from a Scarab suit’s blaster.

  Then one of the Falconer’s bolts struck her in the chest—and Jeremiah screamed. Instead of green aetheric fire, the Falconers’ modified weapons fired a black bolt of energy that twisted like smoke on impact—dark, entangled matter of the Tea that burned her like ice.

  Jeremiah raised her hands, and the Scarab armor raised its arms with her, loosing a wave of golden energy that knocked the Falconers to the deck. But more Falconers ran up, firing, and one by one the Scarab suits collapsed around her, as vulnerable to the weapons as Jeremiah was.

  The Falconers advanced as the suits of Foreign armor fell, and Jeremiah tensed herself, her wings spreading as she gathered power, trying to force the Scarab suits to fire. But the energy blazed directly from her outstretched hands, and the next wave of Falconers fell.

  “Oh,” Jeremiah said, staring at her trembling hands, from which golden light still emanated. The Scarab suits were no longer responding to her, their circuits scrambled by Black Tea weapons, but power still flowed through her. Then she got it. “Oh! I was powering them. Which means . . .”

  She looked up to see a third wave of Falconers . . . then lifted her formerly useless leg and planted one foot upon the deck, gripping the grille with her toes.

  “Which means,” Jeremiah said, rising to her feet with her hands forwards and her wings spreading out, both crackling with power that she no longer needed to route through the Scarab suits, “you gentlemen and gentlewomen are in a great deal of trouble.”

  These Falconers were not content to wait for Jeremiah to pick them off; instead they rushed her, half-firing their weapons and half-swinging them in an eerily coordinated attack Jeremiah suspected was orchestrated by the Tea.

  The blasts staggered her, but she ducked under one Falconer and swung at another, her blows flailing wide as her wings threw her off balance. They seized those wings, foolishly, holding her as the others moved in, but she discharged the energy in her wings, then in her hands, knocking the four of them flat.

  As black vaporous steam lifted off them, she realized the Scarab was more than just the metaphorical enemy of the Tea: it was a physical enemy as well, an antidote, its technology tuned over the millennia to defeat the dark foe.

  Just as she was congratulating herself on this realization, the deck grille below her erupted in dark flashes and puffs of black smoke. Jeremiah danced back, bare feet stinging down to her metal skeleton—her skeleton was metal now? How did she know that?—and peered down through the grille to see Natasha and other Falconers firing.

  “You can’t escape us!” Natasha screamed, firing again and again.

  Jeremiah realized that the dark puffs rising wherever the bolts hit the grille were actually a threat to her; the miasmic haze was affecting her lungs and vision, and leaping down over the side would make her even more of a target.

  “Natasha!” Jeremiah said. “Can’t you fight the Tea? This is me!”

  “It isn’t you anymore,” Natasha screamed. “And even if you were, I never liked you! Always thought you were better than me even though you couldn’t fly! One way or another, Jeremiah or Scarab, I’ll beat you!”

  “You have something to say to me, Natasha?” Jeremiah screamed through the grille. Then she seized it with both hands, oblivious to the rivets popping out around her as the metal peeled back. “Say it to my face! I’ll be down directly!”

  And she dropped to the deck amidst the lot of them.

  The soles of her feet stung from the sudden pinch between metal grille and metal bone, and instinctively she put a tiny part of herself on the job of healing it. But the rest of her was there, in combat again, alive again, ducking under Natasha’s fired bolt, dodging a Dragoon’s mechanical fist, darting forwards, and clotheslining them both with a snap of her wings.

  Green energy and black blasts sparked around her, like lightning strikes alternating between dark and light. But she weathered the barrage, dissipating the energies with her wings and catching a swinging fist with unexpected strength.

  Her wings impacted two onrushing Rangers with the sound of bowing metal. Her fist contacted a Dragoon’s armored jaw and felled him like a ninepin. And just as Natasha staggered back to her feet, Jeremiah seized her head.

  Energy coursed through her hands, powerful and instinctive. Natasha’s body jerked in her hands, her mouth frothed—and then a dark vapor rose from her body as her eyes cleared. Jeremiah jerked back as Natasha’s eyes connected with her.

  “What I said . . . I didn’t mean it,” Natasha said, eyes filled with sudden desperation. “I—I’ve always admired you, Commander.”

  Then she fell to the deck.

  “Perhaps not,” Jeremiah said, staring down at her. “But you respected me enough to keep your thoughts to yourself, and for that, I salute you, ma’am. And for pulling it out of you to use as a weapon on me—I damn the Tea.”

  She glared up, through the grille, through the roof, into the Prince Edward overhead, lenses and energies shifting in her eyes, guided by a billion years of optics theory to focus in upon its bridge, upon Marcus, staring down in shock.

  He couldn’t see her, of course. But the Tea had to know it had just been routed. Marcus was gesticulating, shouting, prompting crewmen to movement. She couldn’t hear him, of course. But she knew he was ordering a retreat—and could see crew swapping the demagnetizer with the time gear.

  Jeremiah had full access to the knowledge of the Scarab
now. She knew Marcus was a full-fledged Carrier of the Tea now. He could synthesize enough dark matter to convert the entire world. And he stood on the Prince Edward, a ship the people of this world could not track.

  The Black Tea commanded an invisible airship . . . with a time gear.

  It had to be stopped.

  Jeremiah spread her wings, great copper leaves on spindly dragon arms, all coursing with pulsing gold veins of fire. But the four metal leaves were not wings, but wing covers, and for the first time she peeled back the gold membranes they protected.

  Her eyes widened as the dragon limbs split apart and her wings widened. At the back of her mind, she knew what was happening: each membrane was folded upon itself four times, and now all her flying wings were quadrupling in size, unfurling into a ten meter span of rainbow light.

  She knew what was happening . . . but it was entirely unexpected to see her dragonfly wings come to life. As a Scarab Expeditionary, she’d never expected her wings to fully manifest, much less to see use; as a human . . . she’d never expected herself to have wings at all.

  With some dizziness she realized there was no longer a distinction between the human and the Scarab. If she had to give herself a name, it was Jeremiah: but what mattered most was she was an enemy of the Tea and defender of humanity.

  ———

  Time to go to work.

  57.

  Back on the Job

  JEREMIAH STROKED her upper wings down, a slight gasp of joy escaping her lips as air rippled over them. Then her upper wings folded sideways and slid back as her lower wings executed their power stroke. Her wing covers positioned themselves as control surfaces. Her heart thudded in her chest as her wings proper beat faster and faster. They effortlessly churned the air into a whirlwind around her until she could barely follow the glowing blur . . . and then her feet left the ground.