by Kin S. Law
Alphonse moved stiffly, but there was still plenty of pressure in his boiler, and some scraps of coal to fuel his furnace. The indicators were intact, their glass tubing bubbling reassuringly. Just above the bank of gauges and toggles, the cockpit opened onto a thin slit between the chest plate and Alphonse’s chin. With both women inside, the slit was hard to see out of, but serviceable. Hargreaves reached out to manipulate the controls and winced.
“Ahhh…I may have pulled something during all that running around. We need to pick up the box.”
“I can do it, Maman,” Cezette said, and squirmed forward to take the controls. Hargreaves’ smell filled her nostrils, a clean scent of old sweat covering the traces of a nostalgic perfume like a rare bloom. Probably her maman was a little embarrassed in the tight spot, where she had been traveling for days, but Cezette found it comforting.
“All right. Gently does it, the seal is broken,” Hargreaves said. “The finger toggle is very sensitive.”
“I’ve done it before, Maman!”
By degrees, Cezette was able to stand Alphonse up. The Cook box was not far from them. She had not expected it to kill them outright, but there certainly wasn’t any regular corpse inside the box. Further, Cezette had a disturbing sensation the thing inside the box was not deceased, but very much alive. She could imagine the thing watching them through the lid of the coffin. Cezette cautiously guided the iron giant’s fingers nearly around the lip of the box.
WHAM.
Alphonse was suddenly thrown aside as if swatted. Cezette and Hargreaves screamed as they were tossed about inside the cockpit, suddenly both blind and deaf inside the close space.
“What the blazes was that?” Hargreaves hollered. Cezette, in control of the automata, found herself blinded. Alphonse’s viewing slit was pressed against a train car. Rotating the controls instinctively, she pushed off against it, whirling Alphonse’s hips round until the clearing came back into view. Amidst the gnarled tracks and cliffs, something crouched over the pass.
“I have seen it’s like before,” Cezette murmured.
“So have I,” said Hargreaves.
It was unlikely they would mistake it for anything else. Hovering on eight legs, albeit much smaller than the one that had devastated Frances Derry’s home town, the machine tarantula picking its way over the Cook box was built on much the same lines. Cylindrical abdomen, glass eyes, and wicked mandibles clicked at them across the box. It looked sleeker, more refined than its larger cousin. Behind it, Cezette could just make out a dark shape on the other side of the pass, a thing of riveted walls and great churning pistons. Some kind of train? Or a castle on wheels?
The Orb Weaver was climbing up one of the legs of the steel spider, a flurry of silks disappearing into one of the glass eyes. The eye closed with the Orb Weaver inside.
“Don’t let it get the box!” said Hargreaves.
Cezette did not need to be told twice. She launched Alphonse forward just as the spidery automata began to fire cables at the Cook box. Cezette recognized the spinner-like device, and the way the tips stuck to the box without damaging it: magnetic clamps.
A claw struck out of Alphonse’s blind spot. Cezette barely registered the offending appendage: green, with purple stripes, before the world shook. Everything loosened, raining lubricant and metal shavings. Fading twilight spilled into the cockpit. It was a savage hit, nearly taking Alphonse’s head with it, and now they were outnumbered by a second enemy.
Cezette flailed, knowing Alphonse’s arms were steel-plated truncheons. Any automata driver would be a fool to leap into that smashing hurricane. She wished to buy time, while she engaged the leg assembly into motion, and so she quailed when the next blow struck almost immediately, punching out a cone-shaped divot in the metal almost at Cezette’s wrist.
“Their legs are longer than Alphonse’s arms!” shouted the inspector. Cezette looked into a sighting mirror to see her maman peering out the rear slits in Alphonse’s armor.
Cezette was unprepared for this, fighting an unseen enemy from within the enclosure of a steel titan. She had to turn to look into her blind spots. It was hot, and sticky with sweat. The controls jammed with the moisture, and metal ground with ear-splitting shrieks. She felt like she was being cooked alive in a great kettle.
These foes were quick, and sprang like real spiders fore and aft. She grasped the arm off the other automata, the barrel-shaped one already fallen and pitted with steam, lashing out in wide arcs only to be thrown by a pair of red legs tangling Alphonse’s ankles. Alphonse’s armor crackled when the enemy’s sparkers struck. Cezette had to take her hands off the wildly flailing controls, gauges roiling in glass tubes, every needle swinging as if possessed. It hurt to touch the toggles. Sharp stabs rained on Alphonse then, and Cezette could only clutch her maman, screaming together while their loyal metal guardian fell to pieces around them.
As suddenly as the battle began, it was over. Every gauge had boiled over and shattered. Every control was jammed tight or twitching loose. Ragged holes cast a patchwork of flickering light over the women within. Through one of them, Cezette saw Alphonse’s arm tossed a yard away, amputated neatly and leaking dark fluids. The train or castle that had been in the pass had gone, also, leaving empty sky behind the cliff pass.
“Maman, they’ve gone,” Cezette said. She wanted to know what to do next, how to pursue the villains, how to exact justice on Orb Weaver. Above all, she wanted the nightmare to end. She wanted to be held, to be comforted. After all, it had been ages since Vanessa Hargreaves set out on her lone mission.
When Cezette reached for her maman and found her hand glistening red, she thought she had torn her machined leg again. It was only when she touched Hargreaves did she find the jagged hole in her side. Maman lay slack against the controls, her creamy skin frightfully pale.
Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves was dead.
Station 7
A Sundry Interlude
How Albion Clemens escaped the great sewer flood of New York amounted to following the trail of shit.
When the ’Berry took off over the opened lock, and a wash of water began to overcome the bedraggled Dragonwell, Albion washed out a side tunnel too small for his enemy to enter. The eight-legged monstrosity lunged anyway, its bulk practically squeezing Dragonwell through the tiny round hole and into the deluge. Albion’s battered Gear was barely able to float, much less fly. Albion flipped a couple of toggles, venting as much pressure as he could spare to flush the water from Dragonwell’s innards. Suddenly free of its burden, the pair shot out of the flow, crashing through a locked grate to arrive at one of the many large waste channels of the city.
“Note to self: invest in full-face wear, instead of only goggles,” Albion thought, spitting, and immediately regretted it. He had a canteen of clean water, which he used to clean off his face. A folded bandana made a thin defense against a true melting pot, the foul reek of a dozen different cultures’ refuse.
He shook a flameless lantern to life, a simple sealed jar of aeon water with a waxed paper packet of minerals taped to the lid. The smooth, bubbling glow showed up the worst parts of the tunnel. Vermin-covered walls came scurrying alive in the flaring light. Gingerly, the pirate captain climbed down Dragonwell’s leg, expecting a scaly jaw to reach out from the water at any time.
A spot check of Dragonwell confirmed he was relatively undamaged by the flood, though the battle with his strange assailant told a different story. Shavings came out of every joint, dents covered every panel, and the cape so vital for Albion’s pirate image was torn completely off. The proud helm was cleaved, but Albion thought it lent a swashbuckling tilt to Dragonwell’s face. Thankfully moisture coils mounted on either shoulder would provide clean, engine-ready water in time. Coal was a different story. Although the aeon shard needed very little fuel to function, it did need some. Albion had precious little remaining. He did not trust Dragonwell to fly, and in any case there was not enough room in the tunnel.
Knowing every was
te pipe fed into water, he set off on foot. The tunnel branched off into smaller passages, enough for a man, but Albion did not intend to leave his loyal steel companion behind. Besides, they led deeper underground and showed traces of habitation. Coded marks on the walls served as garish signposts for underground dwellers. Like heads on a post, warnings not to come further. He touched the space just under his rib where he had once been stabbed in Belfast. Gangs, they were the same everywhere.
Around a bend in the tunnel, he found a dog scavenging in a gory pile. It looked at him for a moment, and Albion kept his eyes on the haunches, not its eyes. He saw its swollen teats, clipped on to a scrawny rack of bones. An arclight, sudden and harsh, would have spooked the bitch, but his lamp, like a little jar of fireflies, merely perked up its ears. Albion held the pose, muscles relaxed, until the dog turned and padded down a side tunnel.
Downstream, the tunnel terminated in the solid foundations of a waste facility. It would have been little issue for Albion to tear the various filter gates asunder with Dragonwell’s cutlass, but he felt perhaps their pirate band had done quite enough damage to New York’s infrastructure already. He might be a pirate, but there were rules. Decency. Honor amongst thieves. Somewhere behind the cavernous walls, a train rumbled through with its characteristic swooshing vacuum sound.
When he returned to Dragonwell, the tunnel already felt hot and oppressive. Albion did not wish to strip in the dense stench. It was thick enough to cut with his hands, and maybe later he would toss his clothes into Dragonwell’s furnace. So he got into the Gear again, fired up the boiler and began to explore upstream in long plodding strides. The pipe was wide, but old, and there was a lot of erosion in the center. Albion was careful where he placed Dragonwell’s weight, distributing it against the walls with the Gear’s canvas-covered fingers.
As the pipe gradually narrowed, Albion grew worried. Suppose the passage dwindled away to nothing, or was blocked off by another wall? The darkness played tricks on him, spurred his fears, rusted the steel trap of his mind. His reasoning said the pipe must have been built with engines of considerable size, and likely to accommodate lorries or maintenance engines similar to Dragonwell in stature. There were ventilation gratings every few feet, so the gas wouldn’t build up. There must be tunnels like the one he came by to get out. There must be.
Reason was a double-edged sword, however, and Albion also knew there were things worse than human waste in the water. There were steamworks factories above this section of Manhattan regularly dumping vitriol, solvents, and other, nastier things into the sewers. Corrosives alone would strip Dragonwell’s feet of their paint and get to work on the delicate pistons in the ankles. The waste in the water might have built up toxic levels of methane, choking Albion to death or worse, blowing them to kingdom come. It had been sheer luck Dragonwell’s tiny furnace hadn’t set off a bubble already, roasting them alive.
Him alive. Albion was alone down here.
Eventually, his fears passed. By Dragonwell’s barometric instruments, they had been steadily ascending, and ought to have come out at street level some ways back. Albion’s lantern showed yard after yard of narrowing tunnel, until suddenly he realized his was not the only light.
Albion headed toward it, and when a fenced gate blocked his way, he shot the lock off its hinges with Victoria. It shook open what must have been years of caked filth. He wondered how his prodigious guns had made little difference against the tarantula contraption. They had gored the thing through, and it had kept moving, as if possessed by some malevolent spirit. If Dragonwell was a fraction slower…Only the slight delay of the tarantula’s gearing had saved them. Dragonwell had an almost preternaturally fast response. The crystal at its heart had once been inside of Albion’s shoulder, and he still felt connected to the Gear’s mercurial moods.
Though the air pirate yearned for blue daylight and white clouds, the light filtering down farther along the tunnel was cold arclight. Albion’s path emerged as one of seven runoff tunnels from a large cistern or reservoir. Water flowed placidly from a large tank, big enough to drop a skyscraper into. Catwalks and protective mesh crossed it. Machinery in a faraway corner blithely turned a large cog.
Not a soul was in sight, but there was a secondary engine lying dormant, and blessings of blessings, a large store of dry coal in wax paper.There was even a rudimentary workshop, full of tools necessary for the maintenance of the engines. Albion broke the lock with an iron bar from the railings, and helped himself in true pirate fashion.
It took an hour to wrench into Dragonwell and refuel, but when he was done Albion flew the trusty red Gear up along the pipe to emerge in another water treatment area, this time for the distribution of clean water. He could tell, from the clear fluid flowing through charcoal filters, that they were the same sort of filters in Dragonwell’s condensation coils. Odd. Why did a municipal facility require such high standards? The stuff he had briefly sampled from the taps above were potable, but not Gear-grade.
In one corner stood a high door. As Albion had guessed, an access route for large machinery. Beyond it, he could smell clean air, or as clean as New York could get. He thought of Rosa then. Had she found her way to the outside? What of Hargreaves? He grew anxious to get on and find them.
Albion was about to leave, but something inside told him to take a second look. Long halls stretched to his right and left, more sections of the plant unexplored. Workers in the distant high ceilings of the plant perched on the catwalks and operated the equipment. He didn’t believe they had spotted him yet. If Rosa or Cid were around he would have made a joke about ninjas and Oriental magic.
Albion hid Dragonwell under a thick overhang of large pipes. The automata’s occasional rumblings were easily masked amongst so many of its gargantuan cousins. He had been so thoroughly soiled by his explorations, there was no worry about being seen. At least the smell had desisted or he had gotten used to it by now. Thusly camouflaged, he was free to move about and satisfy his curiosity.
Like a ghost, he slipped through the pipes and the ducts, finding his way to a vantage point high in the plant’s left hall. There, he observed the workers as they hauled about pallets and adjusted machines. Between the antiseptic smell overlaying the bitter, sour odor of rotten meat, Albion’s impression of the facility was a mix of a cannery and hospital. The workforce seemed oddly mixed. Several of the workers wore faded boiler suits with secure caps and work gloves while others pinstriped suits. The suited men would not have been out of place at a cutthroat banking firm. Draftsmen, or more plausibly, overseers. The machinery was no less unusual.
Albion had gleaned enough knowledge of hydraulics and engineering from Cid to know there should be an exit near. He followed the pipes from the filter mechanisms, along the wall to a center distribution pipe back down to the labyrinth below. At the mouth of the tunnel, he found what he was looking for; a small divergent channel, leading through to a smaller doorway.
What he found beyond it defied description. It set him to retching, the scent from behind the door quite overpowering the scene before him and making him retch again. Albion wiped away the filth and backed away slowly, carefully pushing aside the cold slabs and trying not to slip onto a slick, rust-colored conveyor belt. There were high ceilings in the room, and blacked-over windows. A machine in the corner was busy stamping out a mark, with a shaped die. When he saw what the terrifying mark was inscribing in each piece of product, Albion knew what he had to do.
“I have to get to Vanessa Hargreaves,” he thought, and turned to run for Dragonwell. That was when he realized the daylight had blinded him. The door was mobbed with orange masked men. Wrenches and other thick weapons filled their hands.
Albion grinned, and showed them he was double-fisting Victoria and the Red Special. Then the screaming and the exploding began in earnest, and it was mostly not his.
Station 8
Live Fast, Die Young
Arturo C. Adler was still examining the green and red shards when th
e surgeon emerged from the operating theater. Hastily he swept the pieces off the table and into a satchel. When he stood up, the surgeon’s sanitary mask startled him. The doctor took it off. Beneath the chitinous mouth and bulbous eyes lay a weary, smiling face.
“Your friend was dead for a minute and forty-two seconds. If there wasn’t already a physician on site, and ready donors, we would have lost her for sure.”
Arturo had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, but he could still recall Doctor Price dashing towards Hargreaves’ prone body, and the volunteers trailing behind, most of whom Inspector Hargreaves had pulled from the wreckage of the train. With the gravitators ready for the train patients, the Doctor simply attached Hargreaves to a glass jar of blood, tightly bandaged her, and put her on one of the ambulatory engines arriving on the scene. The volunteers who were strong enough took turns with the needle while they waited for rescue, swapping fresh needles, veins, and whirring germ filters. Price tested them for compatibility with a tiny ampoule. The filters were oddly shaped, like small whiskey stills unpacked from sanitary suitcases. They spun the blood and separated the components, removing the bad humors before it sent the blood to Hargreaves. At least, that was how Arturo understood it.
“May we see her?” Cid’s usual grumble was subdued. Arturo recognized a sort of respectful gravitas in the old engineer’s voice. Jean and Arturo remained silent. The two of them had become trapped in their car for most of the calamity. When Arturo finally jimmied the door open, they ran toward the loudest commotion to find Alphonse and the two spider automata already up in arms.
“She is stable, but cannot speak to you yet. We’ve given her something to help her sleep.”
“May we see her?” Cid repeated.
The group filed into a side corridor, calm now compared to the hustle and bustle of the hospital. Arturo admired the efficiency with which the institution was run, but could not help noticing something subtly amiss about the staff. The nurses darted swiftly from room to room, but more often than not they were haggard, sometimes dropping things in haste. The doctors seemed learned and friendly, but their cheekbones stood out under red eyes. Arturo recognized the signs of substance abuse, and not the generally harmless hashish, but some far more abusive stimulant.