The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (8 page)

“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 cold 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 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.

The captain made a quick, hard turn, taking the
City of Hoboken
toward the dubious shelter of a tree-lined watercourse. After their initial orgy of firing, the weather watch calmed down a little as the Nephil banked above them.

It was definitely carrying a cannon, Tom realized. Something long and sleek, perhaps one of the new Parrott rifles. He couldn’t imagine what need a supernatural being would have for such a thing. Supposedly the Nephilim could call lightning from the summer sky and break the backs of angels.

Did he have anything below that would entice it, entrap it, somehow save this day from the bloodbath which was surely coming?

In addition to hosting his half-penny newspaper,
The Trans-Mississippi Monitor
, the
City of Hoboken
was also home to something of a laboratory which Tom had accumulated. The captain tolerated Tom and his equipment in exchange for mechanical services rendered and the cachet of having his own newspaper on board. The prestige of a working press allowed him to charge higher fares for passengers heading for Des Moines, Council Bluffs and other points on the
City of Hoboken
’s usual routes westward toward the distant riches of the Front Range in the Colorado country.

As part of his laboratory, Tom had on board a store of chemicals, machine tools and curious items of his own devising. But what could dispatch one of the Nephilim? Legendary as they were, there were no whispered tales of the mighty monsters’ defeat in battle.

The attacker circled lower, lazy and slow, following the
City of Hoboken
through the great steam ram’s course changes. At least it had not set to killing them yet.

What could he do? Tom ran through a rapid mental inventory of acids, caustic chemicals, electrical jars, sharp tools, mechanisms.

There was the harpoon, he realized. The watchman’s post had a pintle mount and a steam valve for that implement – designed originally for fighting off the mastodons, which sometimes crossed the Missouri River to range the Iowa prairies.

He could surely devise a suitable load to burst on impact with the attacker.

Tom handed Salmon his rifle and jumped to his feet. “Bannock,” he shouted to the day watch. “We need to unship the harpoon rig. I can fight this thing!”

“You’re buggered as a limehouse rat,” said the watchman, peering at the Nephilim through a telescope. But as Tom scrambled down the hatch, he saw Bannock whispering into the speaking tube.

Tom was trying to quickly, very quickly, assemble a caustic load fit to drive off something as great and terrible as a Nephil. Tom didn’t believe for a moment that God had sent the terrible creatures to the Mormons, but nonetheless they were here in the world. Even Nephilim had eyes. And he had a number of nasty acids fit to burn even the most resistant membrane. His science would defeat this treacherous superstition.

Then his gaze lit on the Planté-Fauré battery cell. It was a new device, recently shipped out at great cost from New Jersey. Tom had made some modifications to it by way of accumulating ever more electrical potential, hoping to produce a fearsome spark from the thing as part of his ongoing investigations into the practical applications of such energies.