Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection (23 page)

"Other ship?"

"There are two. If we only disable one, I can't say we'll have accomplished much. The other one will come to investigate why this one's fallen still."

"You're bleeding," he pulled a clean kerchief from his jacket pocket, wiping some of the blood from Aldora's cheek. "Let's get you bandaged or your pretty little face is going to scar up."

"It's small. It'll heal fine."

"And your shoulder--"

"I'll heal. I've had worse. But I don't think I can crank the Galvanic Cannon's generator with the injury."

"Okay. Go on and wait in the ship's remaining airboat. There should be a medical kit there at any rate. After I take care of the other ship, I'll join you and we can get the hell out of here."

She paused for a second, looking down at her brother.

"Bastard caused a lot of trouble, didn't he?"

Her voice came quietly. "I believe he did, Mr. Fowler. I shall await you in the ship's airboat."

***

Fowler didn't have a long time to wait before the other ship arrived, its name visible on the hull,
La Justice
. "So it was the
Libertine
that you named after yourself, egotistical bastard."

He leaned forward and started turning the hand-crank that charged the
Stirner
's generators. He'd have to act fast;
La Justice
would notice his Cannons charging and certainly try to take him out first. As long as he had enough of a lead he'd be able to blow them up before they had a chance to finish charging their own. To his dismay, the crank moved easily, frictionlessly. He turned to the ship's tube that connected with the airboat bay.

"Uh, Miss Fiske? We got a problem."

"What is the nature of this problem, Mr. Fowler?"

"Well, I think that contact with Tesla's Ionic Shield shorted out Edison's Galvanic Cannons."

There was silence from the other side before Aldora responded. "Very well. Come to the airboat; we'll escape and alert the Home Office. We've still done the city a great service in cutting the pirates' firepower in half. Perhaps what remains of the Royal Armada can fight them off when it arrives from India."

"Like hell," Fowler muttered, turning the ship's wheel to orient towards
La Justice
. "Time for some of that American Know-How."

"Mr. Fowler, what are you doing?"

"Miss Fiske, I'm going to have to insist you take off without me."

"Mr. Fowler, you are not to attempt to ram the other ship! There's been too much loss today for your suicide to present an acceptable option, and--"

Fowler shut the cap on the ship's tube, cutting off Aldora's protests. "Good Lord, you do go on."

He tilted the
Stirner
, watching out a port window as the ship's airboat slid out the open bay. He then fixed his gaze ahead, watching as someone on
La Justice
sent a semaphore message.

"Even if I knew what them flags meant, I only got one thing to say to you," he said, pushing the airship's throttle as far as it'd go. "Geronimo."

***

"It's as if you were never wounded," Alton Bartleby said, tilting Aldora's face by the chin. "Completely healed."

"Fiske's heal quickly," she informed him, pulling away and refreshing her tea.

"Well, if you'd be more careful when riding you'd never have fallen to begin with. Aside from the tumble, how was Calais?"

"It was France. A decent holiday."

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

Aldora considered the question while stirring her tea. "Yes. I rather think I did. What happened with the blockade?"

"Well, word has it that an American pilot took it upon himself to storm the ships himself. He singlehandedly took one of the ships, then used it to ram into the other."

"That certainly sounds American."

"Oh, indeed. It rained flaming debris for the better part of an hour. Not very thought out, American Pilot."

"But he saved a goodly number of lives, Alton."

Alton sniffed. "Hardly in a proper way. But that's the American style, is it not? Anyway, the Home Office is going to build a statue to the brave Captain, possibly give him a posthumous knighthood, and all the broadsheets are running with it."

"I suppose it's what he would have wanted." Aldora sipped her tea. "Americans."

The Tower of Babbage

"We may never know precisely what brought Charles Babbage to the jungles of Mexico, why he chose to make the journey into the foreboding Lacandon, why he sought out the ruins of the ancient Mayan people. All we can definitively say is that he travelled from ruin to ruin with a retinue of engineers and craftsmen, examining the remains of ancient clockwork and taking measurements."

Carvel White looked out of place but at ease in his dark single-breasted morning coat, matching black waistcoat, and striped trousers against the backdrop of the tropical stone ruins. He may have been miserably hot in the heavy hanging tweed, but it had become a point of professional pride to the master thespian to avoid complaint. His voice projected the dignity of age but none of its frailties as it echoed across the ancient limestone.

"His last stop was here, at the ruins of Zipactonal, where he remained the longest. Babbage spent months here in the jungle, encamped before these very stone steps. When asked about his business here years later, Mr. Babbage merely smiled and said--"

"Cut!" The shout rang out across the ruins. "The girl's in the shot."

"Bloody hell!" Carvel pivoted in place, shading his eyes against the sun, peering up the ruined Mayan pyramid's slope at the young girl scrambling along its decrepit surface. He didn't know if it was typical for these 'film' projects or not, but this had to be, by far, the least professional production he'd ever had the displeasure of taking part in. "Robinson, control your wretched offspring!"

The film crew's overweight director lifted his glasses and wiped the sheen of sweat from his ruddy face. "Don't put yourself out, Mr. White. We'll take up again from the start of your anecdote."

The girl's father, the crew's guide, ran a hand through the back of his shaggy dark hair. Where the crew's jungle khakis were so new that they were practically still starched, his own outfit was faded and streaked with the mud of dozens of previous expeditions. "Sorry about that, Mr. Girnwood."

"Just keep her off the set, Henry," the director said.

"Penny!" The man cupped his hands, calling up the ruins to his daughter. "Get down here!"

The girl looked up from her explorations, the copper sheen of her hair's cascading curls catching the light of the setting sun. She gave a brief wave before starting down the pyramid's crumbling face, her feet easily and naturally finding secure footing despite the seeming careless rate of her descent. While not so crass as to wish a fall upon her, Carvel resolved that if she did take a tumble she'd have no one to blame but herself.

"Let's take a break," Girnwood said, turning to his young production assistant. "Fifteen minutes, Jerry. We'll shoot the scene, and that should be enough to justify our travel budget to the investors, and we can get the hell out of the jungle and spend the rest of the weekend on holiday in Mérida. Then it's back to Exeter to film the school scenes."

Penny jumped the last few feet to land near her father, a cloud of dust raising from her boots.

"Ladies do not jump, Penelope." Carvel sniffed disapprovingly. It wasn't proper for the young girl be along in the first place. The jungle was, as he understood it, a dangerous place.

"I'm not a lady," Penny said.

"I should say not!"

The little monster stuck out her tongue. "And my name is Penny!"

"Come along, you ragamuffin," her father said. "Apologise to Mr. White."

"I'm sorry, Mr. White." She even sounded sincere, the old actor was impressed.

"As well you should be!" Carvel unbuttoned his jacket -- a minor concession to the heat and humidity. "This wretched jungle is bad enough as is, with its monkeys and highwaymen. The sooner we move on, the better."

"I want to be a monkey. Can I be a monkey, father?"

"You're monkey enough as is, poppet. Let's have no more troubles, dear. The film people need to finish doing their jobs, and then we can leave."

Penny scowled. "Leave? We just got here. I want to explore the pyramid. They're not like the ones in Egypt -- you can get inside them and everything!"

"It's a difference in purpose. The ones here were temples, not tombs."

"Do they have magic powers?"

Her father laughed. "What?"

"Kalil said that the pyramids at Giza had magical powers. Because of their shapes. They could make razors sharper and magnets... magnetter!"

"I don't think that's quite true." He glanced back over his shoulder. "It looks like Mr. Girnwood is trapped in the ivy again. Stay away from the front of the pyramid where they're filming."

"Yes, father."

***

Technically Penny was very near the front of the Mayan pyramid, but there were several feet of stone between her and the cameras so she didn't think it counted. She'd never been to the Central American jungles before, and didn't want to waste an opportunity to do a little exploring before they left. She didn't much care for the film people and their movie, particularly the actor-man Mr. White. They were noisy, scaring all the animals away, prone to complaining, and had packed far too much for a simple expedition. Most disappointing was the limited duration of the trip they'd hired her father to guide -- a short walk into the rainforest, a few hours at the ruin, then a short hike back to civilisation.

It hardly seemed worth the trouble, but what could one expect? They weren't adventurers like she and father were.

The torch crackled and spat in her hand as she crept through the stone corridors under the ruin. This was more like it. This was the sort of thing she loved most about her life. Most girls her age would be enrolled in some stuffy private day school, or sent to a work house, but she got to travel the world, visiting exotic places, seeing amazing sights. When she grew up she wanted to be just like her father.

No, she'd never heard of a famous girl explorer, but there had to be a first one, right?

Her fingertips traced the ancient carvings set into the walls as she walked along. They didn't look like the ones she'd seen in Egypt, all painted on. These were carved into the stone, square, set in very precise columns.

She stopped, noticing that a section had a slightly different texture, a minor variation in the grain of the carved limestone. While in the same general style as the rest of the designs, there were subtle differences. Penny couldn't really put a name to it, but the figures seemed more... precise. Regular. The limestone was rough, less worn by the passage of millennium.

Penny very nearly gasped as one of the figures, that of a man sitting on a throne, shifted slightly under her fingertips. She touched it again, and found the figure to be on a pivot. The two figures alongside it -- a warrior with a spear, and a woman with a jug on her head -- proved likewise movable. She listened, ear to the stone, as she turned the central figures. Clicks. Clearly clicks -- they formed some kind of stone combination lock.

Her father would have been concerned to have known, but she'd learnt to crack safes from her friend Kalil in Istanbul. There was nothing improper or criminal about it -- they were just bored children, hiding in a safe-house while her father dealt with the assassins stalking them -- but it passed the time and was a pretty neat trick.

Images of lost Mayan gold filled Penny's head as she turned each of the three figures, an almost inaudible shift in the 'clicks' telling her when she had them in the right position. As the third figure settled into place a section of the wall pivoted inward, exposing a hidden package.

"That's prime," Penny said.

The girl glanced back down the way she'd come. Her father had given her standing orders to come fetch him whenever she'd discovered a secret anything, but for all she knew they were still in the middle of filming -- she felt bad enough about interrupting their work earlier, and had no great desire to do so again by popping out of the front entrance unexpectedly. Besides, there was no harm in taking a quick peek, was there?

***

"I've decided that we're not to have children," Aldora said.

Alton Bartleby, her fiancé, almost dropped his racket mid-serve.

"Fault," his business partner James said without looking up from his work. The engineer was sitting on the lawn alongside the court, jeweller's loupe in his eye, toolkit out, working on his tennis racket with a small screwdriver.

"That's hardly fair," Bartleby said, swinging his own racket aimlessly as he retrieved the ball. "Spouting nonsense to throw me off my game."

"It's not nonsense, it's a simple truth that I've come to understand. We will not be having children."