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  The lizards bounded over the ship rails. Their claws clattered against the deck and they at last faltered in their approach, unfamiliar with metal decking. I feared Cook and Plenty dead, for the beasts did not cease despite their faulty footing. They charged on. Cook pulled Plenty toward the rail, where they might press themselves and avoid the sudden invasion. The lizards leapt over them, and kept on. I turned, meaning to run the rest of the distance to the starboard rail, but that’s when Icebreaker’s own heart gave out. The straining engines snapped and exploded.

  J. J. was laughing, I was sure of it. Whether he looked down on us from Heaven Above, or up from Hell’s deepest crevasse, laughter was reddening his cheeks and making his belly tremble. Even with that laughter in mind, I cried out as the ship buckled and the sun-bright evening air suddenly became my home. Warm blood flecked my cheeks, splattered my coat, the stench of burning wool and hair clogged my nose, and then I knew only the cool air rushing past me, until the ground reached up to yank me back down.

  For a long while I couldn’t breathe. I rolled onto my bruised side and at last drew in a shaking breath as I found myself looking into Captain Brown’s sightless eyes. They were hazel, those eyes, now lashed with blood. I reached a hand out to close them, my own fingers covered in blood and God knew what else. From behind Captain Brown, a shadow descended and an immense maw closed over his head and shoulder to rip him away from my fingertips.

  “Now’s the time to go, Murrie.”

  I heard J. J.’s voice as clear as day, though my ears were ringing from the explosion. I pushed myself up off the ice and looked around, watching in disbelief as two of the lizards fought over Brown’s body. One glance behind me showed it was clear of any living lizards – body and ship parts strewed the ice, slick with blood and other fluids. I felt the bile rise in my throat and forced myself to move forward.

  It was then I realized the hem of my coat was in tatters. That my woolen trousers were the same, falling apart in bits of sooty ash as I stumbled across the field of debris. I clutched the ruined wool to me, but then – ah, God! The pockets of my trousers were likewise gone, and with them, J. J.’s heart.

  My boot slipped in a patch of blood, and I fell hard, gloved hands coming up at the last moment to save at least my face. The breath went out of me again and I looked up with a choked sob at the scene around me. Dead lizards, dead humans – living lizards fighting over the remains of people I’d stood with only moments before! – and the ruin of Icebreaker sinking into the icy waters, taking J. J.’s body with it. The metal angel reached up, but failed to grab anything that might save the vessel. I cried out at the utter injustice of it, but it was a small sound, lost amid the snarls of the beasts nearby.

  “Miss M-Muriel!”

  He must’ve shouted my name a few times; his little throat seemed strained by it when I finally heard him and turned to look. Conor Westerfield stood a ways off, torch burning in one hand, a long shard of metal held in the other. Half his hair was gone, burned clean to the scalp, and his left cheek trickled blood.

  Now’s the time to go, Murrie. J. J. said so. I nodded to Conor, but my head seemed heavy. Throbbing and full of tears. I pushed up from the ice and stood, and that’s when we heard the screaming. It was loud, coming to me as though my ears weren’t at all damaged from the explosion. Over and over, the same sound echoed against the ice and strangely, sent the quarreling lizards scattering.

  It was Plenty. When my vision cleared of tears, I saw him approaching from the wreck of the ship, carrying what looked like Captain Brown’s phonograph. His own trousers were in scraps, so too was his coat. Through the gaps in the fabric, I could see something gleaming. Something metallic. Covered in blood and soot, he staggered toward us, turning the handle on the phonograph. Whatever it was playing, it was not the machine’s original song. It was a shriek now, grating metal magnified and tossed out onto the icy plain.

  In silence, we three gathered what we could from the debris around us, wrapping ourselves in what fabric we could find so that we would not perish from the cold. I found a compass, its case cracked, but it still worked, the needle settling to tell me I was pointed west. I held the compass, much as I had J. J.’s heart, and searched on, finding sodden pages from Mr Herbert’s illustration book, a small battered stove and a sextant.

  Icebreaker sank as we searched. The ruined steamship vanished beneath the ice she’d broken with a gurgle and a groan; slowly, the fragments of ice closed over the site, looking like puzzle pieces atop a very blue table. I crouched for a long time at the edge of the ice, as if I could will the ship back to the surface. But J. J.’s body, like his heart, was now out of my reach. As much as I looked that evening, there was no sign of that clockwork heart. I think I was too numb to cry.

  Plenty and I took turns that night, sitting watch while Conor slept. Well away from the broken edge of ice, we made camp with a small fire fueled by debris, and kept watch for any more lizards. Only once did one get close to pick through the debris. Plenty scared it away with another turn of the phonograph crank.

  Plenty’s notebook was quite the ruin. He sat it on the ice between us at one point, amid the other collected items. Small cases of stove fuel, a crooked pan, a small pack and within it, oddly, one shoe. It was Plenty who interested me more than those items though, Plenty with his exposed mechanical bits.

  We shared part of a lizard leg, roasted in the campfire, while Plenty’s own injured leg stretched alongside. The mock-skin had been burned or torn, exposing a network of metal beneath. Long streams of blood-flecked copper and gold ran from his knee to ankle, the entire calf seeming clockwork. His knee, too, was made of gears and cogs; the tooth of one cog poked through the covering of mock-skin.

  His eyes, though, when he looked at me, were all human. Not clockwork. We watched each other a long time, and though we were both wearing goggles, one lens on each cracked, it seemed we saw each other for the first time there. He was not a reporter, I was not the story he pursued. We simply were. Plenty drew his coat around him, and gnawed on the lizard meat and eventually the bright bone he exposed.

  “When I was younger,” he said around a mouthful, “I was ill.” This revelation seemed to cause him distress, though he seemed resigned to it, and to explaining if only somewhat. “My leg …” He exhaled and tossed the bone into the fire where it sparked. “Wasted away. The doctors could do little. And then, Doctor Varley contacted me. He had an idea, a plan to put my leg back together.”

  I blinked. “Varley,” I said quietly. My throat tightened. Surely Plenty had known then, what the “golden egg” was. I leaned forward, dipping a cup into the ice we had melted in Cook’s fry pan to drink.

  “And he did.” He looked back at me, his gaze even. “Put me back together.” He laughed now, a hoarse sound that made him seem more human to me than he had at any time before in this journey. “Maybe he will once more.”

  “Provided we get back,” I muttered, and pulled some lizard meat from the bone, nibbling. Conor, bundled in blankets, his head wrapped in a stash of kitchen towels we’d found, snored, oblivious.

  Plenty smiled and it was surprisingly bright. “Missus Brennan, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you express doubt. About anything.”

  My cheeks flushed with warmth and I cleared my throat. “Blame J. J. for that,” I said and drew my legs closer against my body. Not a far distance, all things considered. “ ‘Never doubt, Murrie,’ he would tell me. Said it led to all manner of bad things.” I looked beyond our small camp, to the wreckage that still dotted the ice. Too many bad things. “… like plagues and hiccups.”

  Plenty made a low sound in the back of his throat, but didn’t press me further. It was then my numbness drained away and I cried. Cried so much my goggles fogged and my breath hitched. I lowered myself into the makeshift bed of singed rugs and blankets and cried until I fell asleep. I clutched the compass in my hand tight, the way I once would have J. J.’s heart, and just tried to breathe. If the col
d did not kill us, perhaps grief would.

  I woke sometime later to the sound of unfamiliar voices. I sat up slow, blinking my tear-crusted eyes behind my smudged goggles, to look at Conor across the fire, bookended by two strange figures. They were wrapped head to toe in hide coats, matted fur poking around the hoods and cuff edges. One of these coats draped me, I realized, another wrapped Conor and yet another the sleeping Plenty.

  “Miss Muriel,” Conor said, and nodded toward the figures. “This is Mr and Missus Underwood.”

  As if that explained it all. I noted the new bandages around Conor’s injured head, new goggles over his eyes, oversized gloves on his hands. The cold would not kill us, then, I thought, and stomped my feet against the ice. It would be grief.

  The figure to Conor’s right rose, enough to lean closer to me and extend a hand. “Missus Brennan.” The voice was that of a woman, a strange sound for my ears after so much time spent solely in the company of men. I uncurled my fingers from around the compass and shifted it to my left hand, so I might shake Mrs Underwood’s.

  They were hunting the lizards and saw the Icebreaker explode from a mile away, they told us, Plenty waking up midway through this tale, seeming as startled as I was to find ourselves with company. His hand slid down his leg, as if to be sure his clockwork was covered.

  “A fine price to be had for such carcasses,” Mr Underwood said, and pointed to their sled where two of the dead beasts were tied. “Bellingshausen is two days out,” he went on, tossing another bit of debris onto the fire. “We’ve tents, and more skins, and should make it clean through.”

  These words only registered with me faintly. My ears had stopped ringing, but it was memory that pulled my attention elsewhere. Looking still at the icy waters, thinking of J. J. beneath them, wrapped in pine and now ice. I prayed his heart was down there with him, in the cold dark.

  Two days later, we watched Bellingshausen cut through the ice much as Icebreaker once had. The way was easier going now, the ice not yet solid. Bellingshausen docked, such as it could, and we were warmly welcomed. Captain Dyakonov and his crew swarmed the ice for anything that might be salvaged from the crew that had been lost. What remains were found were carefully boxed and carried with reverence to the chaplain’s quarters.

  Plenty and I both seemed reluctant to leave our small camp. We lingered, he likely because of his leg, and me because J. J. at least felt close at hand here. But when Plenty extended a hand to me, unfolded his fingers and showed me the small clockwork heart there, I knew his true reason for staying behind.

  I stared at J. J.’s heart for a long while, its cogs still flecked with a little pine from the casket. When I looked up at Plenty, his face held a grim understanding. I carefully plucked the heart from his hand, drawing it against my own chest, and imagined I felt its gears moving.

  “I knew when I saw it on the casket,” he said. He bent slowly to the ice, to retrieve the pack and its one shoe. To add the last cans of stove fuel to it, and straighten again.

  Anger closed around me for only a moment. Anger that Plenty had poked and prodded when he knew better, when he knew what such exposure would mean. But then, he spoke again.

  “It was another way to hide, you see,” he said, “for if I could turn eyes elsewhere, they were not upon me. Missus Brennan, you have my deepest apology.”

  J. J. would have laughed. Would have clapped Plenty on the shoulder and sent him stumbling. I only nodded, thinking of all that had been lost here, but so too what had been gained. Plenty and I walked in silence toward the Bellingshausen, and once on board, did not speak again. I showed the clockwork heart to Conor in the privacy of my cabin, and he marveled that such a thing had been made by a man, to keep another alive. Ideas sparked in his green eyes.

  Home didn’t feel like home when we arrived, not with J. J. gone. So it was that I packed another bag and discovered the Underwoods upon the ship I meant to take south – not so far south as we’d been before. The Andes were beckoning, though, with their snowy peaks, others wholly bare and dry. And was that a familiar shaggy head I spied, sneaking into the cargo hold?

  It was Missus Underwood who pressed the newspaper into my hands on the deck of the aptly named HMS Adventure. Her finger that pointed to a short piece by one Mr Roosevelt Plenty. ADMIRED INVENTOR LAIN TO REST, the headline read, and beneath that: Brennan Goes Down With the Ship. The little details, Plenty said, were better left between the Brennans and God above, but in short, Brennan had gone out in the manner he had always lived: in a big way. My mouth quirked up and I folded the paper in two. Standing by the rail, I watched the old land fall away, and the ship point itself toward the new, as my hand closed around J. J.’s clockwork heart in my pocket.

  I have, I say, set out again.

  Tom Edison and His Amazing Telegraphic Harpoon

  Jay Lake

  Tom Edison stared out the viewport at the rolling hills of the Iowa territory, just within Missouri country. The horizon moved with a lurch-and-swoop not unlike the boats on the Great Lakes in choppy weather, though today’s brilliant sun and flawless sky belied the comparison.

  The steam ram City of Hoboken moved like a drunken bear in all weathers, pistons groaning with the pain of metal as the great machine walked the prairies.

  Behind him, his printing press chunked through another impression, Salmon Greenberry grunting with the effort. Salmon, Tom’s freedman friend and colleague in experimentation and business alike, though they were both barely sprouting beards yet.

  Boys in arms, adventuring together across the West. He resolved that he would someday write a book. If one could ever send communications across this benighted country.

  “The problem with the telegraph,” Tom said slowly, the idea unfolding even as he spoke, “is that one cannot run the lines west of the Mississippi. Those damnable Indians, or worse, Clark’s Army, just pull the copper down again.”

  There was a freshet of ink odor in his nostrils, and barely audible, the damp tear of a sheet from the stone. Tom’s ears were never the best.

  Salmon said something unintelligible, grunting with his labor, then the words segued into meaning: “… help what they are. It’s the West, Tom.” There was a familiar warmth in his friend’s voice, in which Tom sometimes to his secret shame found comfort amidst the clanking, heaving darkness of the steam ram during prairie nights.

  Tom snorted away the reverie and Salmon’s suggestion together. “People have been using that excuse since Jefferson’s day. Apologists for spiritualist madness, with no understanding of or interest in Progress. This is a better world than that, amenable to logic and sweet reason.”

  Another thunk of the press. Another grunt from Salmon. “As you’ll have it, Tom.”

  Though he still had not turned to face his friend, even with his failing ears Tom could hear the grin. He smiled back. Another secret shared.

  A shot echoed from above, in the watchman’s post, followed by the clang of valves as the captain shunted power to the turrets.

  “Attack,” shouted Salmon.

  Tom whirled to help his friend latch down the printing press, then they both grabbed the repeating rifles racked by the hatch of their little work-cabin, heading for battle stations. Tom thought he heard the crackle of distant gunfire, but it might have been his own pulse.

  The weather deck of the City of Hoboken was a good forty feet above the solid Iowa earth. “Deck” was perhaps too kind a word for what was really just the plank ceiling of the bridge deck below, surrounded by a low railing with built-up firing points for prone riflemen. It was perhaps nine feet wide and twenty feet long, and featured only the watchman’s post, like a preacher’s lectern set amidships with no congregation but the distant horizon and the wheeling sky.

  Tom and Salmon took up their firing points on the starboard rail, up top with the other useless supercargo and oddlot apprentices. Those with real worth in a battle manned the boilers, or the turrets, or worked the bridge deck. The City of Hoboken’s eight dragoons
, eternally dissolute masters of pasteboard wagering, were certainly down in their lower balcony, ready to leap, shoot, or toss grenadoes as circumstances dictated.

  The weather watch was for anyone with hands to shoot and nothing else to offer in defense.

  “Where?” shouted Salmon. Tom watched his friend, waiting for the other boy’s eyes or rifle barrel to move in response to whatever the deck watch advised.

  Then Salmon rolled onto his back, snappy as a scalded cat, and stared skyward.

  Oh, no, thought Tom, but he did the same.

  Something very big was silhouetted against that perfect prairie sky. It was shaped like a man, without the wings of one of the angels of the mountain West, and appeared to be carrying a cannon.

  “What … ?” he whispered aloud. Tom had read the dispatches, those that were made available in Port Huron and Chicago, to a fast-talking young man like himself. Not much was published about angels, but he’d even seen the Brady daguerreotypes from the Battle of St Louis the previous year.

  Angels had wings. Everything that flew had wings. Save one rumored monster out of the deepest Western mountains.

  Tom brought his rifle up to point skyward, stepping it against his body like a boat’s mast. He pulled the trigger, thinking, Nephilim. The great avengers. Nothing can kill a Nephil. And he’s above the elevation of any of our big guns. It was an offense against man and nature, this flying thing, and Tom swore out the measure of his fear. He had not come West to die at the hands of an impossibility.

  His shot was the harbinger of a hailstorm of firing, the weather watch loosing its useless bullets at a thing above which laughed in a voice made of thunder, earthquakes and simple, gut-jellying terror.