The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (51 page)

“It's doing exactly that,” Burton confirmed. “The black diamonds are being destroyed in the inferno. Their destruction is resonating with the silicates in the machines' babbages. They are literally losing their minds.” He pulled his revolver from his belt and fired four shots over Trounce's shoulder. Behind the detective inspector, a brass figure staggered and fell to its knees. “No more Young England, William. It ends this night.”

“Thank the Lord. Back to good old British values, hey?”

A tremendous roar drowned further conversation as the remainder of Grindlays Warehouse collapsed, sending an avalanche of bricks, glass, and masonry into the street. Men and machines fell beneath it.

“Into the fray,” Burton announced, and led his companions into the brawling mass.

For the next few minutes, he was fully occupied. The crush was such that the
khopesh
was impossible to wield and the rifle too cumbersome to use, so he relied on his pistol despite, as he already knew, multiple bullets being required to fell the spring-driven foe.

He was battered by solid knuckles, bruised by truncheons—which, fortunately, like his blade, couldn't be swiped with any great force amid the tumult—and pricked by clumsily thrust rapiers, but, as his mental exhaustion eased, the strength of many Burtons started to flow into him, and he was overcome by a savage euphoria.

Covered from head to toe in blood, all pain forgotten and grinning ferociously, he drew on his knowledge of Thuggee wrestling techniques to snap piston-powered limbs and to forcibly twist canister heads from metal necks. He hammered the butt of his pistol into the sensory wires that projected from the base of blank expressionless faces. He pushed its barrel into the topmost of the machines' three facial openings and drilled hot lead into intricate, finely crafted brains.

He fought as if possessed and, at the back of his mind, it occurred to him that maybe he was, for there was a supernatural quality to the power that throbbed through his arteries, and he could sense that the Beetle was its source—and that strange rendition of a Burton was certainly something other than human, at least in the sense that humanity was currently understood.

At one point, he found himself fighting back-to-back with Gooch and drew the engineer's attention to a nearby wall against which the escapees from Grindlays were huddled. He hollered, “Get your people to safety, Daniel, or have them find some manner of weaponry and join the mêlée.”

“They'll bloody well fight, or I'll have their hides. The clockwork men made slaves of us in that damned factory. There's a reckoning to be had.”

“Then for pity's sake go to your colleagues and rouse their ire.”

Gooch nodded and made off.

Burton uttered an expletive as a truncheon smacked into his shoulder. His pistol fell from numbed fingers. He dropped to one knee. A Special Patrol Group machine loomed over him.

“In the name of the king,” it said, “I hereby sentence you to—”

With a loud clank, a bullet hole appeared in its face. It toppled sideways to reveal Swinburne standing behind it, his rifle raised, a whiff of smoke curling from its barrel.

Burton arched his eyebrows by way of thanks and clambered back to his feet. He saw that the crowd had somewhat thinned, so he drew his
khopesh
and tested its edge with the pad of his thumb.

Still sharp.

Swinburne grinned, reloaded, turned, took aim at another SPG unit, and sent a bullet at least a foot wide of his target. The projectile ricocheted from the back of a second clockwork man and went thudding into the head of a third. As the machine's babbage detonated, the poet lowered his weapon and shouted to Burton, “It's like billiards, Richard. The balls never go where I intend, but they somehow make good anyway.”

“We're playing a rather more deadly game,” Burton responded. “Don't pocket lead into one of our own.”

He decapitated a police unit as it lunged at him. His attention was then caught by the familiar coat of arms emblazoned on a nearby brass man. The contraption had just pushed its blade through a constable's thigh and was poised to make a more fatal strike when Burton jumped forward, slammed into it, and knocked it to the ground. He banged the heel of his hand down onto the machine's slim sword, snapping the blade in half.

“Great heavens!” the machine objected. “How dare you!”

“My leg!” the policeman groaned.

Burton crouched down, sheathed his
khopesh
, and held his pistol to the machine's head. “Stay there, please, Mr. Hope. I'd like to converse for a moment.” He looked up and called to Swinburne. “Algy, keep us covered, will you?”

“Rightio.” Swinburne strode over and stood guard, weapon poised.

The constable moaned, hopping on one leg, and blinked at Burton. “Hello, sir. It's me, Khapoor. The ornithopter incident, if you recall.”

“Hello there,” Burton said. “Is it bad?”

“Through to the bone. I'll be off the cricket team for a while. Will you excuse me?”

“Of course.”

Khapoor saluted and hobbled away.

“Why, you impertinent hound!” Thomas Henry Hope protested. “Who the devil do you think you are?”

Burton regarded the clockwork man. “I'm Sir Richard Francis Burton. We've met before, though at the time I was wearing a disguise and went by the name of Count Palladino.”

“Of Brindisi? I remember the chap. You look nothing like him. Let me up, curse you!”

“You'll stay where you are, else I'll put a bullet through your babbage. As I say, I was disguised. I might add that you, also, were less than truthful about your identity. You presented yourself to me as Flywheel.”

Hope held his hands in front of his face and appeared to examine them. “Babbage? By God, it's true, then? This isn't a nightmare?” He groaned. “You say your name is Burton? Tell me, man, why am I inside this machine? Why do my thoughts burn me so?”

“You've been under the sway of a powerful clairvoyant influence. It affected your judgement. I just removed it.”

“Influence? Whose influence? What are you talking about? Oh God! Oh God! The fire is inside me. Make the pain stop!”

Burton watched with pity as the automated aristocrat writhed and began to thrash its limbs, crying out in apparent agony.

“I'll kill you,” it howled. “I'll kill you all!”

Hope screamed. His fingers clamped around Burton's wrist.

Burton said, “Damn. I'm sorry,” and pulled the trigger.

He rose and stepped back as the brass head blew apart.

“What got into him?” Swinburne asked. “Aside from your bullet, I mean.”

“Orpheus did. Explanations later, Algy. I need to think it through. And right now we have more pressing matters to deal with.”

More masonry and glass clattered into the street as a second warehouse folded. Flames rolled across the struggling throng. Burton and Swinburne shielded their faces with their arms. A wooden beam bounced past them, showering sparks, and thudded into an SPG unit and constable, sending both sprawling.

William Trounce emerged again from the roiling smoke. His left trouser leg had been torn completely away and the exposed limb was glistening with blood. He was limping and in obvious pain. He pointed at the sky and yelled, “What are they doing?”

Burton peered up at the two circling rotorships. The smaller—Lawless's vessel—was listing to one side and looked as if it might plummet to the ground at any moment. For a second, he thought three huge vultures were circling it, as if eager for it to die, but then a fourth bird launched itself from the side of the ship, and he realised they weren't vultures at all but men wearing mechanically operated wings.

“Bismillah!” he whispered, recalling that Lawless and his crew had been commissioned to give a public demonstration of the wings but had disappeared before the event. Now, there they were, flapping away from their ailing vessel.

As he watched, more men abandoned the ship and came gliding down toward Tooley Street. He experienced a moment of utter confusion as one of them swooped low and landed on his shoulder. Immediately, he realised the heat-warped air had played tricks with his vision, and it was Pox that had chosen him as a perch.

“Message from Edward fat head Burton,” the bird squawked into his bleeding ear. “I'm sorry, Richard, I had to regain dribble-wit Disraeli's confidence. I'm afraid you bore the brunt of it, you nincompoop. At least it got you to where you needed to be. I knew something bigger than the scum-snorting prime minister was at work, and I had to follow his path to find out what. The stomach tumour was a cheap lie designed to hasten my transference into a babbage. It worked. The truth was revealed to me. I know what you faced, and I know, too, that you have won the day. Loathsome hugger-mugger! Moron! The diamonds will soon be gone from our world, and the empire will be secure. Unfortunately, with their destruction, my demise is assured. I shall make my departure a useful one. Rigby is holed up in the tower. Find him and kill him. Richard, whichever bum-clenching version of yourself you are, you are above all else my brother. Of that, I am extraordinarily proud. Message ends. Arse tickler.”

It was the longest message Burton had ever heard Pox deliver, and every single word of it, including the extraneous insults, he knew he would remember forever.

He swallowed and stared up as the
Eurypyle
's cannons continued to send barrage after barrage into the side of the other rotorship. He saw the observation deck, where he'd sat with Swinburne, Trounce, and the Beetle, explode into a cloud of powdered glass. He saw struts, panels, and pylons shattering and flying to pieces. He saw shredded material trailing from the sagging dirigible.

With smoke spewing out of it, the smaller ship suddenly turned and accelerated toward the other machine.

Unaware of his own actions, Burton reached out, dug his fingers into Swinburne's arm, and croaked, “Pox, message for Edward Burton. Don't do it. Don't be a bloody fool. Message ends.”

The parakeet clicked its beak. “Message undelivered.”

Edward isn't human. The bird doesn't know how to locate a machine, even if it was just sent here by it.

Lawless's vessel had been called
Orpheus
—it still bore the word upon its side—but Burton couldn't think of it as that any more, and he felt it somehow appropriate when, as he watched, a cannonade tore the letters from its hull.

Nameless, disintegrating, abandoned by its crew, and steered by a dying mechanism of brass, the rotorship buried itself into the side of the
Eurypyle
.

Debris erupted outward. A resounding boom echoed across the city.

Locked together, spinning slowly, the burning vessels arced down through the night sky, angled out over the river, and disappeared from Burton's line of sight.

“Edward,” he whispered.

Three gunshots sounded close to his ear. Pox screeched, “Cow dung!” bounded into the air, and flew off.

Burton twisted and saw Trounce kicking away an SPG unit. Its head was spitting flame. It detonated before it hit the ground.

The men with mechanical wings were now darting over the thoroughfare. One spotted Burton and his companions, made a tight turn, and flapped down, landing a few feet away. He ran to them, his wings automatically folding behind him.

It was the medic, McGarrigle. “I have my kit,” he panted. “Shall I tend to your wounds? You look a state. Actually, I've never seen you otherwise, if you'll pardon the observation.”

Burton flicked a hand dismissively. “It's accurate, unfortunately, and pardoned. I'm all right. You all got off the ship?”

“Poor old Pryce was killed. And Wenham, too. The minister—” He glanced up at the now empty sky. “I'm sorry. He remained aboard. Took control of her and—and—”

“We saw.”

Another birdman landed. Nathaniel Lawless. He snapped at McGarrigle, “Get out of that harness,” and began to unbuckle his own. He glanced up at Burton and Swinburne. “You two have to get into these.” His eyes were brimming with the pain of a captain who'd lost his ship, but his tone was that of a military man—snappy, no nonsense. “The minister's orders.”

“And do what with them?” Burton asked.

“Fly across to the tower. Kill that bastard Rigby.”

The explorer eyed the wings dubiously. “We'll take the tunnel.”

“Tunnel?”

“Near here. It runs under the bridge and connects with the chambers beneath the tower.”

“It will be defended. Take the wings.”

They were interrupted by a brass man, wearing a top hat and a purple cravat, who rushed at them brandishing the sheath of a swordstick in one hand and its blade in the other.

“Get me out!” it shouted. “I don't want to be in here. It hurts. It hurts. Give me my body back or, by God, I'll run you all through.”

Burton sighed, spun sideways to avoid the rapier while simultaneously drawing his
khopesh
, and, completing a full turn, sliced his weapon horizontally.

Headless, the clockwork man kept running, barged through the battling mob, crossed the pavement, and collapsed beside a blazing building.

Trounce said to Burton, “I think we're besting them, but the confounded fire is spreading fast. I'm of a mind to separate my forces and have them hold off the street at either end. We'll try to keep the enemy hemmed in while the London Fire Engine Establishment gets to work. Otherwise, I fear the whole of Southwark could ignite.” He gave Burton a sideways look. “My point is—humph!—no offence meant, but I can manage this without you. You have a score to settle. Attend to it.”

Lawless moved behind the explorer, divested him of his rifle and sword, and lowered the wings' shoulder hooks onto him. Burton hesitated for a second then took up the harness's belt, buckled it, and gave attention to the other straps and fastenings.