The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (9 page)

What would a great electrical discharge do to the flying menace? It might be as good as a strike by lightning.

Tom abandoned his acids and grabbed the loose cable end off a spool of telegraph wire. It was four-stranded copper, coated in gutta-percha then wrapped in sealed hemp yarn – the best his limited money could buy, all the way from Buffalo. He dragged the end into the passage, letting the cable unspool, and shouting for Bannock or Salmon to come help as he worked to pass the copper cable up top.

Once the weather watch had hold of the cable, shouting and excited, Tom grabbed a ball-peen hammer and a set of staples, along with his tool bag. He nailed down the loose end off the spool center, allowing himself some slack, then scrambled up the ladder, past the writhing snake that was his cable.

On the weather deck the breeze was stiffer. Cottonwoods swayed around the steam ram as the captain took them further down into the creekbed. Tom knew their search for cover was in vain – the
City of Hoboken
was over four stories tall. Nothing could hide such a magnificent machine, such a stout work of Dame Progress. And certainly not out here on the Iowa prairie, where their pursuer circled high above, a vulture waiting to descend.

He set about lashing the free end of the cable to Bannock’s harpoon, again leaving himself slack. A copper point on the head would be perfect, but Tom figured he could make do with the steel.

When the line came up short and the nervous weather watch huddled around him, Tom pulled himself away from his work on the harpoon shaft.

“It’s like this, men,” he shouted. He hated speaking, hated rousing men like this – that was the job of officers and shop foremen, not a thinker like himself. Especially when he was the youngest man on the deck.

Salmon gave Tom a big wink.

“That up there’s one of the Nephilim!” Tom pointed at the sky. “Some folks say the Mormons raised ’em from a Bible. Some folks say they’re Chinee magic, brought across the sea by the Russians. Well, I don’t care!” His voice was a bellow now. “It’s here a-hunting us, and we’re fixing to drive it away. But you each have a part.”

Eight frightened men loomed in closer. A voice squawked from the cupola’s speaking tube, but even Bannock, the day watch, ignored the captain in favor of whatever spectacle Tom was about to put on in the face of life and death.

“Very shortly I’m going below,” Tom said in a normal voice. “I’m going to hook this harpoon up to a cell battery. Once I done that, don’t nobody but me or Bannock touch nothing here. When I give the word, you all each start shooting again for all you’re worth. We must draw that thing down close, so’s Bannock can shoot it with my wires. Then …” His hands slammed together. “Boom.”

There was a ragged cheer. Tom took a simple knife switch from his tool bag and hammered it into the deck next to the hatch coaming. He cut his cable at the taut end, and wired it into the switch, careful to leave the switch open.

“Don’t touch nothing,” he said, wagging his finger with a significant look at Bannock, then ducked below again.

The
City of Hoboken
continued to lurch over rougher terrain, swinging back and forth to avoid the Nephil. Tom’s footing was challenged in the little cabin, his glassware threatened even stowed within various leather-padded racks. He drew on his heaviest insulated gloves, and then with great care proceeded to wire the free end of the cable to the copper terminals of the Planté-Fauré cell.

He was just tightening down the second connection when the great steam ram shook with a noise that Tom felt within his bones. There was a grinding, and the deck canted off true five degrees, then ten.

Somehow the captain got the vessel back on balance, but the stride had changed – Tom could feel the difference. Where had the shot hit?

Only one shot in that Parrott rifle
, he thought.
Blast and damn that featherless bird, this wasn’t how men were meant to live!

He raced back up the ladder, afraid he might already be too late. Had the shot signaled the beginning of the Nephil’s attack?

The weather watch were already blazing away, their rifles and muskets wreathing the open deck with smoke as fast as the breeze could carry it off. The top of the steam ram already reeked of death, and there had not yet been blood spilled.

“Not yet!” Tom shouted, but his voice was lost in the violent noise. He looked up, around, scanning for the attacker, but between the gunpowder smoke and whatever revolutions it had made through the sky, he could not find the Nephil.

Tom slapped Bannock on the shoulder. The day watch had his harpoon loaded and tracking, swinging the gun on its pintle.

“Have sight of it?” Tom asked.

Bannock shook his head.

Then the Nephil rose above the
City of Hoboken
’s starboard flank. The muzzle of the Parrott rifle was huge in its arms, a vast, gaping pit of death sweeping the deck as the Nephil grinned. Despite his resolve, Tom screamed, as terrified as any child.

Imagine a man tall as a telegraph pole. His eyes glitter the same bottle-green as the insulators that carry the copper-cored cables with their burden of living thought and speech. His skin is fair as an Irishwoman’s, his hair black as the heart of a Georgia cracker. He is handsome in a way that would make a statue weep, and bring any blooded soldier to his knees. If this man was not terror incarnate, if he did not tower over everyone and everything in his path, he would be worthy of worship.

Instead, he is merely – and utterly – feared.

The Nephil’s smile drove the weather watch toward the hatch. Oakey Bill jumped off the port flank, arms flailing, screaming his way into the long, fatal fall in preference to being trapped amid the scrum on deck in view of the leering monster.

Tom shoved Bannock back into the scout’s cupola. “Fire it on my call!” he yelled. “Into the chest!”

“I …” Bannock was screaming, too.

Facing the Nephil was like facing a city on fire. The force of its will blazed across Tom, Bannock and the rest of the panicked weather watch. Though it was pale as any white man, the Nephil’s skin gleamed like moonlight in a graveyard. Tom felt as if he were falling forward into a city, a necropolis, a land peopled by the dying and the dead, an eternal, pallid landscape of lost memory and—

“No!” he shouted. “This is the Age of Reason.” Tom grabbed Barley by the shoulders and pulled him from the scout’s cupola. He would be damned before he would bow before the evil thing’s fearsome aspect. The harpoon could not be so difficult to fire!

“Me,” shouted Salmon in his ear.

Tom looked up to see his great, good friend shaking his head and pointing at the harpoon. “No time,” he said, then swung the shoulder brace toward the Nephil, which was already rising above the weather deck, cocking its arm to throw the Parrott rifle down upon the steam ram.

The lines were clipped into place, the pressure gauge showed a full head of steam. Tom flipped over the locking pin, aimed the steel head toward the Nephil’s vast chest, and pulled the trigger.

There was a horrendous shriek as the steam pressure discharged. The shoulder brace of the harpoon slammed into Tom harder than any punch he’d ever taken, while a burst of scalding steam enveloped him from the line which sprang free with the shock of the firing.

The Nephil took the harpoon point in its gut. Even through the swirl of steam, smoke and pain, Tom registered the expression of surprise on the monster’s face as it dropped the Parrott rifle and grabbed at the shaft which stuck. Somehow the electrical cable held.

But nothing happened.

The Nephil began to laugh, an enormous barking roar like a Missouri cyclone, dark vapors gusting from a mouth that seemed to open wide enough to swallow them all whole.

What had gone wrong? Even within the agony of his steam-scaled face and hands, Tom felt a cold stab of pain and fear in his heart.

Then he realized that he had not arranged to complete the circuit.

Salmon slapped his shoulder again and pointed down. Tom leaned over, blinking away the agony of the steam burns on his face and hands, to see his friend standing over the knife switch stapled to the weather deck.

Tom nodded.

Salmon leaned down, closed the copper blade, and held on even as sparks played through his hair.

The Nephil’s laughter changed to an eerie howl. Tom looked up again, his vision growing red –
why?
he wondered even in that moment – to see sparks pouring from the monster’s mouth, its hands, its hair. Far more electricity than could have come from Tom’s Planté-Fauré battery cell. The Nephil raged amid a storm of blue, yellow and green sparks, lightning snakes that writhed along its arms and legs, seared its eyes, set fire to its skin.

I have opened a circuit to Heaven
, Tom thought. He collapsed against the edge of the scout’s cupola, wracked with pain of his own, wishing he could pass out. That mercy was not offered him, though his sight dimmed to red mist. Even the arrival on the weather deck of the dragoons with their grenadoes and their clattering weapons was not enough to distract him from the pain.

Tom woke to a hand upon his shoulder. The steam ram was underway once more, he could tell by the gentle swaying in his body. He tried to blink, but his eyes were gummed tight.

A bandage, he prayed.

“Can you hear me, son?” It was the rumbling, patriarchal voice of Captain Brown, the
City of Hoboken
’s master.

“Yes, sir.” Tom paused, gathering his fears. “But I cannot see you, sir.”

The grip tightened. Brown smelled of whiskey and old leather – the cover of a Bible, Tom thought. “We’ll find you a doctor at Council Bluffs, Mr Edison. Cletis reckons you’ll have your sight back. As for the scars …”

Scars? “What?”

“You cannot feel them, son? Your face and hands is burned fierce by the steam.”

Tom felt very little other than the captain’s hand on his shoulder, and that scared him.

“Where’s Salmon?”

“Your Negro friend is dead. Kilt by your telegraph gun.”

Salmon had been holding the knife switch closed when the Nephil … exploded. The copper wire must have carried some of that extraordinary energy back onto the deck and into his friend. Tom felt his eyes finally, as they filled with tears so warm he thought he must be weeping blood.

“But you kilt one of them monsters, son. You’re a hero.”

Hero. Tom wanted to turn his face to the bulkhead and cry for Salmon. He would never hear that belovéd voice again.

But he could not. This was the century of science, and he would be damned and damned again before he would let some Biblical monsters drive America from her West. No other man would ever lose his particular friend this way again. “I will bind the West in chains of copper,” he whispered, “and make her monsters bow to Progress. I swear this.”

“That’s the spirit, son.”

Brown’s hand left Tom’s shoulder, then the captain stepped out through a hatch which clanged shut, already shouting orders.

He could not think on Salmon any further, so Tom set his mind instead to wondering how the so-called telegraph gun had been so deadly to one of the Nephilim. Could he arrange for bigger Planté-Fauré cells, perhaps mounted on aerostats, to bring the battle to the enemy? The West needed railroads and telegraph and civilization, not the wild anarchy of steam rams and Clark’s Army and avenging angels.

He would pluck the last of the Nephilim from the sky himself, and ground their cousin angels as well.

The balloon of a Phoenix-class airship is better than any view from its cabin windows; half a mile of silk pulled taut across three hundred metal ribs and a hundred gleaming spines is a beautiful thing. If your mask filter is dirty you get lightheaded and your sight goes reddish, so it looks as though the balloon is falling in love with you.

When that happens, though, you tap someone to let them know and you go to the back-cabin Underneath and fix your mask, if you’ve any brains at all. If you’re helium-drunk enough to see red, soon you’ll be hallucinating and too weak to move, and even if they get you out before you die you’ll still spend the rest of your life at a hospital with all the regulars staring at you. That’s no life for an airship man.

I remember back when the masks were metal and you’d freeze in the winter, end up with layers of skin that peeled off like wet socks when you went landside and took the mask off. The polymer rubbers are much cleverer.

I’ve been a conductor for ages; I was conducting on the
Majesty
in ’78 when it was still the biggest ship in the sky – you laugh, but back then people would show up by the hundreds just to watch it fly out of dock. She only had four gills, but she could cut through the air better than a lot of the six-fins, the
Laconia
too.

They put the
Majesty
in a museum already, I heard.

Strange to be so old and not feel it. At least the helium keeps us young, for all it turns us spindly and cold. God, when we realized what was happening to us! But they had warned us, I suppose, and it’s fathoms better now than it was. Back then the regulars called you a monster if they saw you on the street.

The coin’s not bad, either, compared to factory work. They say it’s terrible what you end up like, but if you work the air you get pulled like taffy, and if you work in the factory you go deaf as a post; it’s always something.

I’m saving a bit for myself for when I’m finished with this life, enough for a little house in the Alps. I need some altitude if I’m going to be landlocked; the air’s too heavy down here.

The very first ships were no better than hot-air balloons, and the conductors kept a tiny cabin and had to string themselves outside on cables if something happened. I can’t imagine it – useless.

I didn’t join up until after they moved conductors inside – it showed they had a lick of sense to put conductors where they could get to things that went wrong, and I’m not fond of looking down from heights.