Clockwork Chaos (12 page)

Some part of her smells burning hair, and burning flesh, and idly wonders if it is hers. Most of her is otherwise occupied.

Her dictates to her victims are simple: Those who fly the same flag as yours are traitors, more dangerous even than your worst enemies, and waiting only for the fighting to start so that they can shoot you in the back. She plants the seed deep and wills it flower.

A British destroyer turns its guns away from the
Light Brigade
to fire on its own flagship, which responds in kind. Picking up speed, the
Light Brigade
slips past the embattled ships.

The violence spreads in the wake of the balloon’s passing, spilling far beyond Mary’s reach as those unaffected are drawn into the fire-fight. Yaqub steers the craft in a wide arc, circumnavigating the ring of ships that once threatened them. As they complete their circle, Yaqub cries out.

“They’re free!” He points at the clipper, sailing full speed away from the conflagration. Mary can’t turn her head to see, but she can see it in Yaqub’s mind. Smoke rises from the ship, but not enough to worry about. His ship is safe. And so are her people.

Yaqub kills power to the Influence Machine and increases power to the heating element, and they rise, up above the stench of burning ships and the cries of dying men, and drift away on an easterly wind.

The balloon starts to lose altitude shortly after they run out of fuel.

Though she was drained and ill after the battle, Mary didn’t rest, not until the machine had been fully dismantled and the pieces dropped, one by one, into the North Atlantic. It was near dusk when the last piece drowned, and Mary very nearly followed, her strength failing as she tried to clamber over the railing.

Yaqub caught her. He laid her head in his lap and gently applied a cooling salve to her burnt skin.

“I’m a monster,” Mary said. “I’m as bad as the Devil. Worse. I deserve to die.”

“You’re not. The Devil would take that as triumph, and then do the same all over the world. You could have been Empress. You could have had everything. You threw it all away. And that is why you are not the Devil.”

“I killed Julia. I cut off her face. I cut out her...” Like a dam breaking, it spills from her, the tears, the grief and the guilt. The terrible, impossible decision she’d forced on her lover, her desperate, broken lover, and Julia’s escape in a bottle of rat poison. The convulsions were just starting when Mary arrived home with their tickets to Amsterdam.

“I’ve seen a man die of arsenic poisoning,” Yaqub says. “What you did was a kindness.”

Julia had been beyond kindness. Had been for longer than Mary had ever imagined.

“Help me,” she’d begged. “Make it stop hurting.” She grabbed Mary and held her close enough to feel every convulsion. “Make it look like my father did it. Make it look like the Ripper.”

She did. And then she and her knife visited the home of one last gentleman before she set sail for Amsterdam. For Julia.

The gondola is the size of a lifeboat, perhaps a little smaller. It is hard to rate the speed of their decent, or what side of a wave they’ll strike on landing; the moon is near new, and useless tonight. Yaqub braces himself for impact, but it still knocks him on his ass.

He scrambles to his feet, slashing the ropes that hold them to the balloon. If he cannot free them in time, they will capsize, or be swamped and drowned in the thick sailcloth.

Of course, a quick death is preferable to a lingering death by starvation and thirst. But instincts die hard, and he gets the last of the ropes cut. Freed of their weight, the balloon rises up and out of sight.

“It’s okay,” he says, as much to the waves as to himself. “They’ll find us.”

“No.” Mary is sitting up, woken by the rough landing. “They won’t. I freed them. I freed you all. Even before we started... before the massacre.” She shrugs, the horror of the day before—the horror of her life—once again buried, and the world once again just another fact. “There’s no more compulsion on them to help. Tom Carrigan’s a smart man. He’ll be getting as far away from me as he can.”

Yaqub exhales, a long sigh punctuated with the slapping of wavelets against the gondola’s prow. "That's another thing the Devil would never think to do."

That night, they sit together under the stars, close enough to share each other’s warmth, and one by one, they redraw and rename the constellations—the Whore, the Zeppelin, The Devil’s Bowler, the Three Flacid Penises—names the world would embrace, should she ever become Empress.

Before they sleep, Yaqub kisses her softly, and says, “They will come for us. I can feel it in my bones. You will see.”

For once, dawn brings good news.

R
. Rozakis

––––––––

E
vangeline Bell woke in a strange bed. In the dim light behind the bedcurtains, it took her a moment to remember where she was. Then, her heart sank.

Yesterday had begun so promisingly. Lord Hilden’s house party had gathered the leading scientists working in airship design. She still could barely believe she had been invited. No degree, no retinue more than a farmhand assistant she had trained herself. But Lord Hilden had called her monograph on a proposed steam engine governor brilliant. And indeed, her lecture went over smashingly well.

It was at dinner that it all turned sour. Evangeline had never been terribly good at small talk, or fashionable dressing, or any of the other skills a young lady should possess. She might be able to lecture well, but as soon as the conversation turned to travel, she revealed herself to be a hopeless bumpkin. It wasn’t fair. If she could have afforded to go on a Grand Tour in the first place, she would never have yearned so hard for a spot on the airship-design team.

Professor von Karloff, the glowering aether dynamics specialist, had turned on her, grilling her on her lack of formal education. Sensing the blood in the water, the ladies across the table began a never-ending procession of subtle jabs at her hair and dress. Never mind that what they knew of science could fit in a thimble and they had only been invited to round out the party. Their hair had been expertly styled by their maids, and apparently that was what mattered. When the card tables began to appear for games of whist she could not afford, she pleaded a headache and fled.

It didn’t matter how brilliant a scientist she might be. Convention always tripped her up in the end.

She shook herself mentally. No self-pity. Instead, she needed to get up and make herself presentable. She would give her demonstration of her preliminary governor model, and then she would pack up her equipment and her assistant, Jeremy Wright, and she would go home before she could embarrass herself further.

She chose a dark green walking dress for the day. The bustle was small enough that she shouldn’t have too much trouble hitting things when she turned around in the lab. She fingered the material. It seemed a pity. She did really like this dress, and she knew that it would be forever linked in her head to a day she already dreaded. She sighed, reminded herself of her “no self-pity” rule, and dressed for the day. Her hair went up in a simple bun. She didn’t realize how angrily she was stabbing the pins in until she embedded one of them in her scalp. She grimaced, but took more care with the rest.

One of the twins greeted her heartily when she appeared in the breakfast room, as if nothing had happened the previous night. She did not know if this one was playing the gentleman, or he really had been too distracted to notice. Bertrand and Edmund Woosley had recently published a paper on the chemistry of balloon gases, and she still could not tell one from the other. But he did not seem put off by her subdued greeting. She went to the sideboard and chose a pastry, hoping to make it through the rest of breakfast without needing further social pleasantries.

She had no such luck. Dr. Abrams settled down next to her not five minutes later, with a cup of coffee.

“May I get you some, my dear?”

“Coffee?” She shook her head. “No, thank you.”

He did not leave, which had been her first wish. Nor did he spontaneously combust, which had been the second.

Instead, he offered her tea. She accepted, hoping that would drive him off, since denial had failed. He merely reappeared with the teacup and retook his seat.

“Where did you disappear off to, last night?” he asked, buttering a slice of toast.

“I was tired,” she answered, praying perhaps for a lab explosion to set the house on fire. The walls remained disappointingly solid. “It was a long day. I retired early.”

He looked at her sympathetically. “They aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, you know.”

“Who?” She knew who he meant. It was kind of him to try.

“The pretty airheads,” he replied. He leaned toward her earnestly. “You’ll notice that they’re not here today, and yet you are. I, for one, am very much looking forward to your demonstration. I hope you’ll be at mine later in the week.”

She felt touched, despite herself. And a bit dismayed at how transparent he found her. But perhaps she should stay the course. Letting a pack of airheads drive her from the field would be an admission of defeat.

“I should like that,” she replied, and forced a smile.

“Excellent, excellent,” he smiled back at her. Then he looked over her shoulder. “Ah, Professor. Good to see you this morning.”

MacTaggert came up behind her. The engineer had the fiery red hair that might have been expected, but also a twisted scar from temple to eyebrow and a glass eye that were less so. The iris was violet, which clashed rather badly with his remaining green eye. The glass eye had become turned around somehow, so only the rim of the iris peeked at the corner of his eye. The effect was alarming.

“Miss Bell, Dr. Abrams,” he acknowledged them in his thick brogue.

Dr. Abrams coughed, and attempted to discreetly point to his eye. MacTaggert stared at him for a moment, and then comprehended. He strode off toward the sideboard, spent an immense amount of time with his back to the room, and when he returned bearing a crumpet, his eye had resumed its normal position. As normal as it could be with that color, that was.

He started a conversation with Dr. Abrams regarding a monograph that she had fortunately read. The subject matter, regarding the biology of a new species of frog discovered, did not entrance her, but she knew enough to converse sensibly on the subject. She had begun to relax, and even enjoy the conversation, when Lord Hilden appeared at the doorway.

Their host looked pale. “If you please, gentlemen—madam—make your way to the library when you are finished with breakfast.”

He left as quickly as he had come.

The three glanced at each other. The stated plan the evening before had been to meet in the lab after breakfast. While Lord Hilden had phrased his request so as to lack urgency, his tone suggested otherwise. Evangeline drained her tea as MacTaggert finished his crumpet in two bites. Brushing off crumbs, they hurried to the library.

They arrived to find the rest of the company assembled already. Lord Flynne looked barely awake, and clung to a teacup as if his life depended on it. She wondered if he had been roused straight from bed. The assistants clumped in a knot at the back, but fanned out to find their respective masters as they arrived. Jeremy made his way to her elbow.

Lord Hilden cleared his throat. He held a letter, his fingers unconsciously curling up the corner. His wife stood off to the side, looking anxious. “I apologize for the disruption in the schedule, but I have news which affects us all.”

He glanced down at the letter, and his fingers stilled at once. “I suppose many of you are familiar with my long-running feud with Count Ravenswood. It started, of course, when the cad stole my design for a mobile static electricity generator—”

His wife cleared her throat.

“I suppose it’s not really important how it started,” he amended. “But the animosity has stood for some time. And I’m afraid that he’s taken advantage of this gathering. He’s challenged us to a scientist’s duel.”

“What’s a scientist’s duel?” Jeremy asked her urgently.

“How much do you know about the Artificers’ War?” she asked.

“It was another one of those War of the Roses, everyone fights everyone else and leaves all the farms a mess kinds of things, wasn’t it?”

“Pretty much,” she agreed. It had been far more complicated than that of course, with all the political factions and differing philosophies and such, but from Jeremy’s ancestors’ view, that summed it up. “Various artificers and alchemists, who were the forerunners of real scientists, began using their inventions to take over each others’ lands and to steal each others’ work. It got to the point that you could barely step outside without getting set on fire or transmuted to lead or something. The King at the time finally put an end to it all about a hundred years ago by instituting a dueling system. It’s tied to the patent office now. The only legal way to fight another scientist outside of the court system is a formal scientist’s duel.”

“It’s a way of formalizing conflicts between scientists and keeping the violence from laying waste to the countryside,” Dr. Abrams explained. “At the date specified in the letter, probably a few days hence, Ravenswood will descend on the estate with whatever technological forces he can muster.”

“Then we have to leave!” Jeremy said.

Evangeline shook her head. “He timed this well. Anyone working with the challenged scientist is subject to the duel. It allows lab teams to work together, and prevents retaliatory attacks later. Win or lose, the entire team’s fate is decided as a whole. And this—” she gestured at the crowd of arguing scientists “—counts as a unit, under the law.”

Dr. Abrams looked thoughtful. “Miss Bell, you may be able to escape. You haven’t worked with us before, and you haven’t published yourself. He may not even know you’re here. And if he does, the argument could still be made that you’re merely a visitor, like the young ladies last night.”

“I’ll pack at once,” Jeremy replied, making a move for the door.

“No.” Evangeline’s hand shot out and snagged his sleeve. She couldn’t believe she was doing this. “We would have to leave the governor. If they lost, I’d lose all rights to my own work.”