Authors: Kin Law
“Is everyone all right?” Hargreaves yelled. A window shattered just before her, and the Inspector reacted by tumbling forward into a crouch, while Rosa Marija slid to the ground beside her in a flurry of
little bells and swashbuckling agility.
“We’re unhurt!” One of the men lying face-first on the pavement replied, gesturing towards everyone outside. “But Hassim and Swarney were closest. I saw Harrod take a rivet to the knee!”
“Where is he?” Hargreaves yelled back, and the man made a wild, panicked motion, indicating somewhere inside the building.
“You had best be careful!” A woman, staring up from a sensible sprawl well away from the door cautioned, but Hargreaves paid no mind. She dove through the door into a darkness spitting sparks and death.
As the warm black of the factory enveloped her, Hargreaves felt like she was tumbling into a steaming iron maw. She was immediately blind, and cursed herself for forgetting the shock of transitioning from daylight to an unlit interior.
If a shooter
was near, she would have been a sitting duck. Something hissed and crumpled to her right, and a tattoo of beats punctured a series of holes in the wall beside her.
The new
pencil of light streaming in was an inch from her thigh.
Something whistled past her shoulder and embedded with a solid ‘thunk.’ It ignited into a steady glow to reveal one of Rosa Marija’s slender throwing daggers. A fall of blue-white sparks fell from the handle, showing a boiler beneath it spilling water from half a
dozen holes. Beneath the rusted bulk, a work boot sat in a growing puddle of red.
“Hurry!” Rosa’s voice called from the opening. Hargreaves barely registered the horseshoe over the door- a charm, to ward off ill luck.
Hargreaves grabbed the man’s leg, and immediately dropped it- the other end wasn’t connected to anything.
A moment’s search later, and she found the rest of him a few feet away, and then it was a matter of firmly grasping him by the collar and manhandling the weight. As she got closer to the door, some of the workmen jumped in to help.
“Pressure, here… “
“Yes, right… no, you bloomin’ idiot, there’s no way we can get it back on.”
“Oh my god… oh my god…”
After Vanessa whipped the belt off the closest workman for a tourniquet, the panic seemed to die down somewhat. Hargreaves barely got the buckle cinched tight before Rosa pulled her away from the crowd, trailing vaguely away from the sound of constabulary whistles in the air. Hargreaves balked; in her rush to save the unfortunate Hassim, she had forgotten she was not the law here.
“There are still people who need help, Rosa!” Hargreaves protested even as she fell into rhythm behind Rosa’s brisk footfalls.
“We dragged the other man, Swarney, out while you were tying up the first one. Waste of time, in my opinion, he’d lost too much blood. Everyone else is accounted for,” Rosa said, as they reached the corner where Jonah Moore disappeared.
“A waste of time!” sputtered Hargreaves, unable to comprehend the singular callousness with which this cutthroat handled human life.
“Did you really want to meet the Clankers again?” Rosa reminded Hargreaves. She sputtered, seemed to grasp for something to convince the Inspector to go. “If they find out you work for the Queen…”
“Rosa!” Hargreaves protested, but nearly ran into Rosa’s ample bosom as she spun to a stop on her heel.
“Vanessa,” Rosa said, gently. She put a hand on the Inspector’s shoulder, arresting her forward momentum.
“Saving a man’s life is not a waste of time,” Hargreaves insisted, staring deep into Rosa’s tawny eyes.
“No, it is not,”
Rosa agreed, looking right back into hers. “If it can be saved. Everyone is all right. I made sure of it. The Clankers will deliver the injured to the nearest hospice, they’re strong enough with those piston arms. You bound the other man, Hassim, was it? You likely bought him time, but now there is nothing more we can do. The best thing for us, and for your mission, is to be on our way.”
The hardness in Rosa’s eyes scared Hargreaves, but it was the gentleness that made her back down.
For a moment, the Inspector was reminded of Albion Clemens, and the way he looked the first evening in Portsmouth when first he got the best of her: kind, but with an edge to cut diamond.
“Thankfully, it wasn’t a waste of time.
I am starting to have an idea of Jonah Moore’s purpose, why he was visiting the Leyland Cross and the engine factory,” Rosa said, resuming her stride. Their boots were well past the point where Moore had disappeared, but Rosa walked as if she knew where she was going. Surely Moore had left them behind? Rosa was walking so quickly, Hargreaves almost missed a large statue of a man whose features were cut out of knives; the Inspector realized from the beaker in the right hand and the wand in his left, this was no other than an incarnation of the infamous Valima Mordemere.
Hargreaves was a good inch taller than Rosa, and she kept up easily once they drew level.
“Right, you had better share what you’ve figured out, or we’re stopping right this second!”
There was no need to actually stop; both women were professionals in their own right, in fields where time meant the difference between a successful collar and a successful escape. Rosa Marija kept clicking her hard boots while she spoke.
“They are like urchins,” Rosa began absentmindedly. She reached an intersection, peering intently at a faded signpost. She made a decision as she came up to it, turning firmly down an enclosed shopping avenue instead of a block of cookie-cutter houses.
“What the devil are you on about?”
“Street urchins,” Rosa said, “Are dependent on the kindness of strangers. But not really, you see, they’re more at the mercy of strangers. You see them all the time, begging in the street, dying by the score and surfacing beneath the snow in the springtime.”
As they walked, Hargreaves couldn’t help but look into the dark corners of the alleys betw
een bright shop fronts.
Leyland,
seemed void of a single small, dirty boy or girl, waiting to perform some queer errand for the odd shilling.
“They are ubiquitous. They go everywhere, and I’d bet a Spanish galleon no organ grinder in London would recognize one from another, even if they’d been
his monkey all season.”
“Get to the point already,” Hargreaves said irritably.
“Sure, we will toss them the odd coin, put them to work, but there’s not a single parent to look after them, feed them, bathe them even when they caterwaul against it. And, just as surely, those workmen and women back there, not a soul’s looking after them either.”
Hargreaves was distracted. The shops they were passing sparkled with finery, filigree eggs, rare foodstuffs, clothing so fine they were tapestries.
Just a few streets back, the factories had been sitting in coal-black streets littered with garbage, choking the Cross with a foot of rot.
“I saw the state of their clothes, yes. Migrant Irish, some Indians and other foreign riff-raff.”
This time, it was Rosa Marija who whirled about, fury darkening her coffee brow.
“Those riff-raff,” Rosa hissed through gritted teeth, “Are making your guns, and your ships, and your Empire, but because he was born outside the Empire, that man you tied up can’t afford the bandages or the splints needed to treat his leg. Even if he were to get better, no factory will hire a man who can’t walk five paces to pick up a wrench. Don’t talk to me about saving people, you privileged, stupid Englishwoman.”
Rosa resumed walking, her legs churning the brilliantly polished cobbles to a frothing dust. Hargreaves opened her mouth to protest, but Rosa’s flushed, mocha skin choked her words, and only a garbled plea of nationalism emerged.
“But the Commonwealth-!”
“Rests on a great mountain of bodies just like Hassim, back there. Just like the bodies of the servant urchins, found dead under the snowmelt.” Rosa Marija spat. Though she had worked up a great head of steam, her eyes were constantly searching for the sharply tapping cane and gray mane of Jonah Moore.
“There, unfortunately, is also how I know what our Jonah Moore is up to,” Rosa Marija paused, evidently sighting something. Rosa had spotted Moore- the elderly gentleman was walking down a set of steps, his dark suit gradually disappearing into the subterranean dark. An underground? If Moore boarded a train, they would lose him for sure, but in an enclosed space, there was nowhere to run.
“Come on!” Rosa cried, and together they raced toward the opening. A mad dash down sheet metal steps, a moment of panic: what direction?
The tracks spread out beneath them, obscured by clouds of venting steam. They were suspended over a vaulted cavern with three platforms, two trains pulling into the station, one leaving. Had Moore boarded it?
Hargreaves made a decision, churning the stairs into flak beneath her. She vaulted across the platform, flinging a quid like an unerring pub dart into the collection tin, and skid to a halt inside the closest train. Rosa Marija’s boots beat staccato after her, just as the doors hissed to a close on smooth, pneumatic rails.
“Did we make it? Is he aboard?” Rosa asked, scanning the narrow train car. The brass handrails and standing passengers obscured their vision, and the helmswoman did a little dance, craning her neck up and down to look around them.
For a moment, it looked as if they had lost their man.
The Inspector even thought she saw a glimmer of gray hair on the opposite train, hea
ded towards the other direction. Then she let out a long-needed breath.
Moore was seated almost directly before them, smiling gently.
“Are you ladies all right? I had thought I lost you, a couple streets back. Glad you made it.”
“All right, my fault. I’m no Cid, you know, typewriters are more my speed,” Blair said sheepishly as he picked himself up off the floor. Clemens had thrown him into the closest vehicle from above, a comfortable convertible Bavarian, while sheltering behind the stepladder himself.
“I think even Cid would have trouble with this,” Clemens remarked, as he went up to the panel at the top of the ladder once again. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The Chapman Eight hadn’t actually exploded; what happened was, the little roadster shot straight up towards the roof so quickly, the gantry above crushed the delicate windscreen, spectacularly shattering the glass in all directions. What was more intriguing, as they peered out into the chamber, was how the carriage seemed to be floating in midair, with no helium or wires or anything. The platform it rested on, for the divots in the floor were the seams between plates of metal, was simply hanging in the middle of the chamber, dead still.
“I see… so the gantry lifts the plate, and moves it out of the rectangular hole there… this setting must be for the heavier vehicles,” Clemens mused, and reached out to fiddle with a dial.
The Chapman groaned as it left off snogging the gantry, and hung at a more reasonable height.
Clemens again moved some controls, and it came swinging across the room, stopping at the stepladder even as Blair halted in mid-cringe.
“What are you doing there? Come on, let’s go for a joyride,” Clemens said, gesturing towards the crumpled, sad-looking Chapman. Clemens swept the glass and metal fragments aside as he climbed into the cramped cabin.
“This is preposterous!” Blair said, but his limbs betrayed his voice. He was already halfway crammed into the back.
The Eight had no working doors. A passenger simply hopped over the low profile.
“I’d like to see why he’s built such an enormous underground tunnel- certainly not just for these toys. This is much more interesting than some dusty old records.”
Clemens started up the engine, which seemed unusually ready to turn over. A pressure connector detached smoothly from the carriage, folding away into the platform below. Steam hissed out of the pipes as if yearning for release. Somehow it reminded Blair of the
Huckleberry
, but for the life of him he couldn’t say why.
By leaning over, Clemens was able to slap at a brass button on the side of the step, and the little platform began to float through the rectangular hole. There was a bit of a turn, and then they were in the large tunnel again. The gantry lowered them all by itself, as if according to some clockwork sequence. The narrow track they observed earlier slotted into some spaces on the bottom of the platform, and Clemens was able to drive off it and onto the path next to the track. Concrete whizzed past as he put the Eight through its paces.
“So the track is for moving all those engines…” Blair murmured aloud. “I wonder what else it’s moving?”
As they drove along the underground tunnel, lit at intervals just enough to see the next turn or dribbling runoff, the answer was soon in coming. The path sloped gently downward, until the tunnel widened into a cavernous space large enough for several tracks to run parallel. However, tracks weren’t the only things in the cavern.
“Balaenopteron!” Clemens exclaimed, as the pillars parted and the bulk of a massive airship appeared beside them. The ship, like its namesake, squatted like a whale alongside the path, taking up three tracks on the floating platforms. Her gun emplacements were so many barnacles, huge and bristling. It wasn’t a British design- Blair could make out a moon and stars on a red background. What was the dreaded Ottoman Empire doing in Valima Mordemere’s basement?