Steemjammer: Through the Verltgaat (11 page)

“No, Dad vanished several days
earlier
,” Will said. “We destroyed it.”

“Wait.
Who
destroying?”

“We did.”

Alfonz’s mouth opened wide with shock. “But you’re just kinter!”
Children!

“Gus helped,” Will admitted. “A lot.”

“Gus?”

“The Guardian Gnome.”

“Ah.”

“Without him and Giselle, the Shadovecht would have gotten me. I mostly ran from it.”

“Goot, kint! Goot! From those verschreken, we all must run!”
Abominations
!

“Will couldn’t hurt it,” Giselle added. “So he tricked it into falling in a pit.”

“What?” Alfonz exclaimed. “You mean, you fought it?”

“With a voormaaker!” Angelica chimed in.

Alfonz considered them, wide-eyed. “You three, all this doing?”

Will nodded.

“We had to crush it with heavy logs until it stopped moving,” Angelica explained. “Later we covered it with dirt because it smelled so bad. Pee-ew!”

Again, the mailman regarded them with amazement.

“Well, very lucky the other was in half cut,” Alfonz assessed, not realizing how badly he was mixing up words, “but still, for such kinter and a little gnome to even one destroying! There are many adults who to do such a thing, could not.

“But then, Steemjammers you are, neh? Groes Vevardinker! Zoolk steem!”
Great Maker! Such steam!

He beamed proudly, and they weren’t sure what to say. Their parents had hinted that there was something special about their name, and once or twice they’d heard them say “zoolk steem” when something amazing had been done.

Will didn’t bask in his praise long. So much had happened so fast, and they hadn’t even had a moment to think what it meant. He wanted answers.

“Alfonz,” he said. “Why would this Marteenus kidnap Uncle Deet if they’re
cousins
? Wait, what are Shadovecht, and why did someone put them where Dad had recently opened a verltgaat?”

“What are Rasmussens?” Angelica added. “And why do they want to kill us?”

Overwhelmed, Alfonz held up his hands and said, “Wachten.”
Wait.
“A Shadovecht – in half slicing, ya?”

They nodded.

“The Incendium?” he pressed. “It’s out falling?”

Giselle looked confused. “Incendium?”

Alfonz leaped to his feet. “Where? Vershneelen!”
Hurry!
“Or Beverkenhaas, it’s down-burning!”

Chapter
11

the belly of the beast

From the sub-basement came a stench so foul that it forced them back upstairs to get handkerchiefs to breathe through. Upon returning they noticed a harsh red radiance near the world hold machine.

The front half of the Shadovecht had fallen face-first to the floor, and in the center of its chest was a heavily insulated metal box that had also been sliced open. Heat waves rippled up, because the box held a fiercely glowing, brick-sized piece of what looked like solid lava.

“Incendium,” said Alfonz, pointing. “So lucky. In the box is staying. If out-flying, poof! Groes voyr!”
Big fire!
“Then, through the floor melting!”

The kids stared with awe.

“Oh, that’s the power source,” Will said, grasping how it worked. “The tanks on its back hold water, which flows to the Incendium and is turned into steam.”

They studied the tangle of coiled springs, cylinders and metal rods that protruded from it like spaghetti.

“A double system,” he continued. “Steam makes it walk and fight – and winds up the springs for bursts of mechanical energy. That’s how it went so fast.”

Alfonz had brought down a pair of fireplace tongs. Reaching in, he found a piece of bluish-gray metal and placed it on top of the Incendium. In seconds it stopped glowing, turning into a cool brick of dull metal.

“Moderacium,” he said. “Near Incendium, it’s heat-stopping. Take away Moderacium, burning. We must this thing cool-keeping, for the safety, ya?”

“The Shadovecht,” Will asked with growing amazement, “is what? A steam robot? How’s it made?”

“Not knowing what is ‘robot.’ As to the making ….” He shrugged. “The Rasmussens got help, we’re thinking, because at the making, they not so goot, neh?”

Angelica wrinkled her face with disgust, pointing. “Ew! What is that?”

Now that the fierce glow was gone, they could see a sliced, heavy glass jar in the creature’s chest. It held a nasty, smoldering piece of blackened tissue. Whatever it was, it made the hideous smell.

“Come,” Alfonz said. “The other one. I show.”

***

“Verdoor!” Alfonz cried and froze with terror as they neared the pit.

Backing off until he no longer felt the fear, he explained in his butchered English that working Shadovecht gave off, through gas or perhaps some other means, an aura of fear. The Steemjammer kids thought it was much weaker than the night before and were hardly bothered by it.

Alfonz marveled that they could stand even this much. If they could capture a Shadovecht with its inner mechanisms intact, he told them, it might help the family discover a weakness. While Will cautiously approached the creature, Alfonz directed from afar.

After clearing away the dirt they’d used to cover up its hideous smell, he and the girls removed logs with a rope and pulley. Will grimaced. The ache his side had been getting worse, and straining caused white-hot pain to shoot across his ribcage. Still, he managed to keep working.

“Not too close,” Alfonz warned.

In the rubble, a glowing green eye snapped open. Angelica screamed as a damaged metal arm lunged out. They backed away in time, and the arm flailed about, blindly searching. The fear aura spiked with momentary intensity as the Shadovecht shoved at the logs, but it was so badly damaged it couldn’t get free.

“We thought we’d killed it,” Will marveled.

“Very tough,” Alfonz agreed.

“Now I get it. You got to smash their brains. Dad always said that.”

“What?” Giselle said with unease. “That jar of icky black nastiness was a
brain
?”

Grimly, Will smashed the monster’s face with a log until it couldn’t see. With another log, he pinned down its arm, and with Alfonz directing, he cautiously climbed down and pried open the heavy breastplate.

“Look,” he said.

In a glass jar filled with yellow-green liquid floated an unmistakable human brain. Instead of any healthy, living color, it was greenish gray with brown and mustard yellow streaks. The kids winced in horror.

“Schaaren!” Alfonz cried.
Snippers
!

Giselle handed them down, and Will cut a thick wire – really a conduit with hundreds of tiny brownish-gray strands inside - that went in the jar and into the brain itself. The slimy strands
writhed
like worms a moment before shriveling up and growing still.

“Now safe,” Alfonz said. “Still the fear, ya? But no more moving it is.”

Will made sure the Moderacium “shoe,” as Alfonz called it, was on the Incendium, keeping it cool.

“Alles zit goot!” the man said cheerfully. All is good!

“No,” Will said, climbing out and wincing from the pain in his side. “Not good. That thing has a
brain
!”

“A
human
brain,” Giselle clarified, unable to hide her horror. “How is that possible?”

“Can they really think?”

Alfonz made a face as if seven different answers were inside him, each one competing to come out first.

“Ya ent noyn,” he said.
Yes and no
.

He paused, trying to sort out what to say.

“Alfonz, what’s going on?” Will demanded.

“Please,” Angelica urged. “Tell us everything.”

“So much words,” Alfonz waffled. “So bad with the English.”

“No, you can’t do that to us,” Will insisted, frowning from the pain in his side. “All our lives we’ve been told fairy tales. Now our parents are gone, and monsters are coming into Beverkenhaas. Tell us. Beverkenverlt, Marteenus, the Rasmussen attack - all of it.”

Alfonz looked down, torn by conflicting emotions. Several times he started to speak but stopped.

“Ya,” he said with a puff of resignation. “It hurts, that awful day, just the thinking of it, but this you must know. What you are remembering?”

“What do I remember?” Will asked. “Me?”

“Ya, ganau.”
Exactly.
“You were there.”

***

The Steemjammer kids listened with rapt awe as Alfonz, in his jumbled English, tried to lay it all out. Will and Giselle were age four and Angelica was unborn. That day had started, he explained, like any other at Beverkenfort, but emergency bells rang out. People stared in confusion because most had never heard these bells before and didn’t know what they meant.

“Beverkenfort?” Will interrupted, remembering high mountains and buildings. “A castle?”

“Ya, and more,” Alfonz said. “Zo voornam ent voonderbar zit Beverkenfort!”
Beverkenfort is so grand and wonderful!

Overwhelmed by emotion, Alfonz had to pause. He then described a walled village on a flattened mountain ridge overlooking a plunging waterfall of great volume. It fell over 100 feet to turn the massive Groes Weel -
Great Wheel
- sending mechanical power to numerous workshops in the village and also to a network of caverns that had been cut from the living rock.

A huge boiler, largest in Beverkenverlt, supplied steam, and the Steemjammers, along with the extended family and allies, had lived and worked there for generations. They’d created many wonders, Alfonz told them, but the family’s main achievement was opening world holes, which no one else could do. They’d only used verltgaats to explore, to get around, and to keep the peace. Never had they used them to harm others.

Because of Beverkenfort’s remote location, no one feared attack. The only way an armed force could reach it was through narrow mountain passes, which were easily defended, or by a mass airship raid, which would have been shot out of the sky by steemvaapens.
Steam weapons
. What no one suspected was treachery.

“Marteenus?” Giselle guessed.

“Ya,” Alfonz said remorsefully, “Marteenus Steemjammer Skelthorpe. Short but always talking about big things. Only talking, neh? Laugh at him, we did. Pity also, because such bad steem he’s having, but with him, something is wrong-going, ya? In de kopf.”
In the head.
“You stand under?”

Alfonz told them that to this day no one knew how the Rasmussens got to Marteenus, but it may have been through his banker father. Somehow they poisoned him against his own family to agree to a sinister betrayal. He must have found one of the spare verltgaat machines, Alfonz supposed, that had been hidden, and with it, he caused great havoc.

On that horrible day at Beverkenfort, Alfonz continued, a world hole opened in the main courtyard. At first, people thought little of it, because such things happened often, but this time, something horrible came through: Shadovecht.

Alfonz recalled hearing shrieks of terror. He ran to help, but as he neared one of the monsters, a wave of raw fear struck him. He couldn’t help but flee. Those who cowered in place were cut down, massacred.

He described dozens of Shadovecht chasing terrified people, while some sprayed poison clouds into windows and air vents. The defenders were almost helpless because their steemvaapens were fixed and couldn’t be aimed into the courtyard. Even men driving steemtraps –
armored fighting cars
– fled in terror from the fear aura.

“Your groesvader, Ricardus,” Alfonz said with a tremble in his voice, “was the only thing us saving.”

He described how, in a steam powered, armored fighting suit, Ricardus had resisted the fear aura and taken on the Shadovecht, destroying one after the other with mighty blows from a great two handed sword. This bought the family time to get underground and plot an escape.

Ricardus ordered his son, Hendrelmus, to lead the family to safety, while he and some of the elders, who could also resist the fear, held off the next wave of Shadovecht. Against all odds, Ricardus fought his way through the traitor’s verltgaat, and there he must have seen Marteenus.

Alfonz wasn’t sure exactly what happened, except that Ricardus destroyed the verltgaat machine Marteenus used and returned to Beverkenfort before the world hole closed. This was a horrible set-back for the Rasmussens, he explained, because their main goal was to steal verltgaat technology, and in one quick move, their groesvader had taken this from them.

Marteenus must have escaped, which left him trapped somewhere on Old Earth. Verltgaats, Alfonz confirmed, could only be opened from Beverkenverlt to Old Earth or vice versa. Travel between two places in the same world was not possible, unless a third position in the other world was used as a transfer point.

Even with the traitor’s world hole gone, he explained, the battle was still lost. Airships were spraying poison and landing Rasmussen troops in armored fighting suits. And too many Shadovecht still remained.

The plan was for everyone to escape through another vertltgaat, which had been opened by a backup machine in a cavern. With Ricardus and his men bravely holding off the attackers above, the Steemjammers, their extended family members and allies fled to Old Earth. Waiting until the last moment, reluctantly obeying his father’s orders, Hendrelmus destroyed this machine and jumped through the world hole before it shut.

And that, Alfonz told them, was that. Most of the family escaped.

“What happened to my grandfather?” Angelica asked, unable to hide a quiver in her voice.

Alfonz found his throat was too tight to speak. A tear ran down his cheek, and he put his arm around her, hugging her tight.

“Ricardus Steemjammer, so much I loved him,” Alfonz managed. “A great hero he is. Never forget.”

He had to blow his nose into a handkerchief and wipe his eyes. For a moment none could speak. The pain in Will’s side increased, but he blocked it out. Something bothered him even more.

“If we escaped,” he asked, “why didn’t we open world holes and fight back?”

“On Old Earth,” Alfonz said, “none. Marteenus, all the hidden verltgaat machines here he’s breaking – except the one he was using, neh?”

“So when my grandfather destroyed it, there were no working machines left on this side, and we were trapped?”

“That thing, ya. None there. None here.”

Alfonz explained how their fathers, Henry and Deet, had moved broken pieces to Beverkenhaas in secret and worked tirelessly for years to rebuild one – plus the Variable Engine and other things needed.

His head full of questions, Will started to ask another but clutched his side. He could no longer ignore the pain. His wound seemed to burn with fire.

Alfonz looked worried. “You goot there, Will?”

He tried to nod but almost collapsed.

“Ganoof!” Alfonz said.
Enough
. “What is?”

“Just a cracked rib,” Will guessed.

He lifted his shirt, and they gasped. Not only did an awful looking bruise extend across his side, the cut was inflamed and swollen. It gave off a bad odor and was streaked with lines of yellow-green and gray.