Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Contracted out to the lowest bidder, I bet.
I fell three feet on the other side, because the floor was lower than the road. The Singer caught and balanced me, though the joists creaked and bowed under the impact. I realized I’d lost the garbage lids somewhere. For a moment, I thought I’d be plunging through to the ground floor, but despite protest the planks held. There was a dead Russian—all right, fair enough, I assumed he was a Russian—slumped in the corner beside the window, the walls around him streaked and daubed in red. Looking at that almost gave me a second view of my chicken buns, but I kept my head together and the Singer kept me on my feet.
The cells were probably on the ground floor, I reckoned. What would be the belowground floor now.
I was pounding down the stairs, rounding the first landing before I realized that I should have picked up the dead man’s gun. The banister tore off in the Singer’s gripper, but the gyros saved me, and it was too late to turn back now.
* * *
There was gunshots at the next landing. I just kept running, remembering something some war-veteran john had told me about crossing battlefields, and how it was better to be the first man running through a gap than the second. Move fast, and keep on moving.
I missed my garbage can lids then, but I plunged down the stairs with my arms raised in front of my face. I didn’t hear or feel anything ricochet off the Singer, and—even better—I didn’t feel anything slam into my flesh.
My foot went through a riser on the next flight. My left hand plunged into the plaster wall as I unbalanced, and it was sheerest luck that behind splintered lath and wads of horsehair, I found a stud. It cracked as the Singer’s gripper closed on it, but it didn’t shatter, and it gave me the leverage I needed to yank myself free. Then I rounded the final landing and knocked the door at the bottom right out of its hinges. It flew across the room and clanged into the bars of a cell, then tipped and fell to the floor with a crash.
For a moment, I stood panting, my ears full of the hiss of steam and the roar of the diesel engine, and had a look around the room. Madame stood inside the cell, back straight and shoulders back. No mere oaken door bouncing off the bars a foot from her face was going to draw a flinch from Madame Damnable.
Mayor Stone had flinched back onto the bench behind her. I didn’t spare him much of a look, however, because what drew my attention was the sound of a shotgun being racked.
I looked toward it and found myself face–to-face with Bruce Scarlet, or whatever his real name was. The Russian engineer stood two steps in front of Horaz Standish, alongside the left side of that cell where the constable’s desk was, and they both of ’em was heeled and standing over a pair of overturned chairs like they’d been taking their ease down here while the firefight raged out front.
They had me dead to rights.
It’s one thing to run through a storm of bullets in the dark or when you’re passing across a narrow passage and you know the bad guy’s ain’t got much time to aim. It’s another to charge right at two men with a bead on you already, one with a ten-gauge street sweeper and one with a Winchester cocked and aimed at your eye.
Slowly, with a creak of stressed metal and a shower of plaster dust, I raised the Singer’s scratched and dented arms.
The roar of a long arm beside and behind me near to deafened me, and I flinched from it so hard that if it weren’t for the Singer’s gyroscopes I would have pitched right over and sprawled. As it was, I staggered and twisted and danced drunkenly halfway across the room.
Buckshot pattered off the Singer’s frame and something smacked into my hip and thigh. Madame hollered a curse that was probably exceptional even by her standards, if I could have made it out—but it ended with, “Horaz Standish, you obtuse son of a syphilitic bitch.”
I also thought I heard Horaz yelp, but my ears was ringing so I couldn’t be sure.
When I managed to drag myself upright, the first thing I saw was Bruce Scarlet in a puddle of sticky, stinking red, the top of his head clean gone.
Reader, this time I didn’t manage to keep those chicken buns from revisiting daylight. When I straightened up inside the Singer—and discovered I couldn’t wipe my mouth on the back of my sleeve because of the mica visor and the armature—it was to see Marshal Reeves grinning at me from behind his black strip of mask as he twisted Standish’s arms behind his back and locked the shackles on. Horaz had a good big welt on his temple, and I noticed one of Madame’s hard-heeled borrowed purple velvet boots lying against the wall.
Merry Lee came out of the busted stairwell door behind me, crouched down by what was left of Scarlet, and pulled a ring of keys off his belt. She didn’t seem troubled by the mess. When she straightened up, I saw she was wearing a black strip across her eyes and the bridge of her nose, too, with a range hat pulled low to shade her features. If she’d had a bandanna tugged up to cover her face, she would have looked like a cow-boy kitted for a range war.
“Where’s Priya?” I asked.
“Covering the exit,” she answered.
Keys jingling, spattering drops of red (I looked at the wall), she jogged to the cell and fiddled with the locks until she opened it. Madame came out, hopping on her good foot and supported by Mayor Stone. At least he made a halfway decent walking cane.
Marshal Reeves strong-armed Standish toward the cell while Merry stood ready with the keys. That seemed like a fine idea to me, but I admit I was wondering where Peter Bantle and Captain Nemo was. I still made a point of looking Horaz in the face when they walked him past. “I hear hanging don’t hurt so much as flogging to death,” I told him when he curled his lip in a sneer. “It’s humane, like.”
He spat at the Singer’s feet. He missed.
“Careful,” I told Marshal Reeves. “He keeps a riding crop in his boot.”
Reeves flourished it in his free hand. I hadn’t even seen him relieve Standish of it, but I guess a U.S. Marshal gets pretty sharp at patting suspects down.
That door clanking shut was a very fine sound.
“Karen,” Merry Lee said when she’d turned the lock and checked the door, “I saw Bantle running on down toward the waterfront when I came in. He was too far away to me to catch him, but—”
She waved at the Singer.
But you could
.
The gesture drew Marshal Reeves’ attention, and I caught the flash of whites as his eyes widened behind the mask. His duster flared as he turned toward me.
But it was Madame who put her hand on the Singer’s elbow and said, “Karen, you’re bleeding.”
I looked down, spotted the blood soaking through the cloth at my hip, and quickly looked away again. The good news was I had no lunch left to lose. “He just winged me,” I said. “Don’t hurt yet.”
It would, I knew. But for now, I wasn’t lying; the crop cut across my cheek hurt more, and my lungs was on fire. This was going to be pneumonia before too much longer and no mistake.
But that was a problem for if I lived through today. And right now, I was going to go get Peter goddamned Bantle if it was the last goddamned thing I did.
* * *
I busted three more stairs on my way back up again and jumped back to the road through the hole I’d left coming in. The Singer was making some horrible grinding noises through that damaged knee and around the hip joint, but it still moved and balanced. My jump back across the sidewalk gap left me dizzy with pain from the impact on the other side, though. Especially where it jarred my hip, and sent a fresh slick of wet heat down my thigh.
I turned in the road. I didn’t see Priya or Tomoatooah, Miss Francina or Crispin anywhere. But I could see the waterfront from here, only a block downhill, and that was the direction Merry Lee had said Bantle had run.
I set off in pursuit.
Every step jarred my hip, and the hydraulics along that leg shrieked and smoked. I screamed through gritted teeth with every one of those first eight or ten strides as the armature dragged on my creased hip. Then my body seemed to resign itself to the abuse, and it started to hurt less. I picked up speed, running hard.
The sky, I realized a little dizzily, was turning gray. When I broke out onto Front Street I could see up and down the waterfront quite a ways in the gloaming, and out along the docks that floated in the quiet waters of the harbor.
And there was Peter Bantle—looking away from me, standing alongside a warehouse just this side of Commerce Pier, with Captain Nemo facing him—about two hundred yards away. Bantle waved his arms, and even over the clanking and growling of the Singer I heard his raised voice, if not his words.
Nemo wore a plain black suit rather than his uniform, but even at this distance I recognized him by that trim silver beard. He had a revolver in one hand, though that hand was down by his side, and I realized that
again
I’d forgotten to pick up a weapon. I was just an all-around terrible failure as a commando, and that was that.
“I found them!” I yelled, hoping somebody who liked me was close enough to hear. Then I lurched toward them at the Singer’s increasingly unsteady run.
It weren’t quiet.
Bantle paused in the middle of one of his better arm waves and turned toward me. “You son of a bitch!” he yelled—at Nemo, I guessed, rather than at me. “If you’d just agreed to take me with you we would have been gone by now!”
Bantle turned back toward me, pushing his coat back—to get at a revolver, I was guessing. I was gritting my teeth for another hail of bullets, too—
Then Nemo shot Peter Bantle in the back.
I almost tripped over the Singer’s feet.
Bantle went down on his knees like he was falling through molasses. Nemo didn’t seem concerned; he dropped the hot gun in his pocket, which didn’t seem like the best idea, and turned his attention to a little black box that appeared in his other hand.
Bantle finished toppling forward. He ended up on his face, and his hat couldn’t cover the stain spreading out underneath his head. I didn’t gag this time; maybe I was already as sick of gore as it was possible for me to get.
Nemo thumbed a toggle switch on his box, like a little silver chessman, and a red light started blinking. I recognized the kissing cousin of the little box that has been supposed to let us know that Miss Francina needed a rescue when she was sneaking into Bantle’s crib. The difference being, apparently this one was functional.
I had a real bad feeling I knew what happened next.
The dock beside me exploded into splinters as the
Octopus
lurched up through it, all its mechanical arms uncoiling explosively. I staggered sideways, but the Singer caught me. I most certainly did
not
scream. And even if I had, no one would have been able to hear me over the Pandemonium of shrieking metal and shattering wood. Writhing metal tentacles whipped overhead with a whistling screech, splinters scattering from their barbs, rattling off the metal cage that protected me. One whistled out toward Nemo—
He stood calmly, watching it come. I didn’t think it would hurt him, somehow. This was his escape. Then he could just come back later when the heat had died down, or head up to Seattle or down to San Francisco, and work his evil plan over from scratch again.
And there was nothing I could do about it. Where on earth had I ever gotten the idea that the Singer would be any use against something like this?
A racing blur of black and white peeled from behind the warehouse, trailing the hollow cannonade of unshod hooves. I had a confused glimpse of Tomoatooah leaning low over Scout’s neck, her streaked mane whipping back as she ran. I froze in terror as a barbed tentacle whipped down. Scout dodged to avoid it, back feet where her front feet had been, and the road shifted under my feet with the force of the blow.
Then Tomoatooah had Nemo by the collar and was dragging him beside Scout. They charged toward me and suddenly those tentacles was writhing helplessly on all sides, slapping, trying to startle and herd the horse. One slammed down right before her, denting itself and shattering stone. Scout jumped it like she was born to steeplechase and pelted toward me, stretching out to a hard straight run.
Tomoatooah had somehow dragged Nemo up over his saddle. He stretched out toward me, something in his hand. I reached toward him. He hurtled past, Scout so close her lather splattered the mica visor. I looked down.
Three sticks of dynamite wrapped with tape, burning an inch of fuse, hissed in the Singer’s claw.
“Holy Christ!” I shouted, and the
Octopus
wrapped a tentacle around my armature and whipped me into the air.
I slung hard against the straps, one direction and the other, and felt the thing’s battered hip joint give—and then my hip wrench, too, torn or separated as the weight of the Singer’s leg fell just on me. I think the force might have torn my leg off if the
Octopus’
tentacle hadn’t been wrapped all around me, holding me together.
The barbs scratched and bruised, and there was a sharp pop as the thing squeezed—but the Singer’s armature held. For now.
I screamed now, all right. And somehow, maybe just because the gripper locked until you intentionally released it, I held on to that dynamite. If nothing else, I figured, maybe if I was still holding on to it when it went off it might blow this thing’s tentacles back down its throat. I wouldn’t even have to be alive.
Which was just as well. I didn’t relish getting blown up none.
The
Octopus
was thrashing around, still, splintering ships and dock, but it didn’t seem able to drag itself out of the water. Maybe it was hoping if it broke enough things Tomoatooah would bring its master back.
I was just about to settle in for a nice refreshing faint, the world getting black and thick around the edges, when the
Octopus
whipped me around one more time and I caught sight of that big, snapping metal beak that the arms usually folded up to cover. And Reader, I had one of my very occasional good ideas.
I unlocked the Singer’s gripper and cocked my arm back, bided my time until I was dangling near the maw and there was only a whisper of slow match left, and hurled that dynamite inside.