Captain Albion Clemens and The Future that Never Was: A Steampunk Novel! (Lands Beyond Book 1) (24 page)

“We will shoot to wound, and aim for any exposed mechanical components. I think I can put a leak in the tank from here, and Rosa can gum up any steamworks. I’ve seen her throw more than one propulsion screw out of alignment.”

Rosa Marija blew a silent raspberry.

“All right. I will endeavor to do the same,” the Inspector agreed, pulling her Trantor. The little gun was small caliber and very unlikely to penetrate armor.

“Wait, wait!” Blair whispered, just before the armed members of the party launched an all-out attack. “We might draw others. Just… just wait here!”

Before anyone could stop him, Blair had run around the corner. The Captain pointed at the ginger fellow, jogging up to the two Clankers huddled near the bonnet of the Fjord. There was a moment when everyone held their breath, except for Blair, who seemed to be gesticulating wildly and talking very quickly to the hooded peacekeepers. Then, miraculously, the two Clankers looked to one another and ran off away from the Fjord.

“What did you tell them?” Clemens asked as the group ran up to Blair.

“I said I saw Jonah Moore, running from pirates in the other direction. We should probably hurry, they won’t have to go far before they realize they’ve been bamboozled.”

“Flavoring a lie with the truth.
I like you more every day, gorgeous,” Rosa Marija said, and punched Blair in the arm before climbing into the driver’s seat.

“Aw, Rosa!”

“You had your fun with the Chapman, Alby, now I get to drive!”

Winking at Blair, Hargreaves also climbed aboard, helping Jonah Moore with his cane. He was perfectly able to ascend into the Fjord, moving smoothly and surely. It was something Vanessa had noticed since the Leyland Cross, and except for having oddly cool
hands, Moore seemed a hale old man.

The old Fjord had a few problems starting up, but Rosa Marija managed to stoke the boiler into life with only a few cranks of the embers.

“Change out the fuel! And start her in neutral, on the first compartment, you get better pressure that way,” Albion said, being a complete back seat driver.

In response, Rosa simply cracked him over the head with a
heel, before putting her bare foot down and easing the Fjord into motion. The Captain didn’t seem to mind, but Hargreaves felt a pang. Was she jealous? No, impossible! The very idea! Her, and Rosa? Or was it Albion?

There wasn’t time to think through the incomprehensible feelings rushing through her middle.

Rosa was putting the Fjord into a reasonable gear, and the three stuck together in the rear of the sedan would have to hide Jonah Moore in the center. In the street, the sedan would look like any other civilian steam engine, but once they got to the checkpoint, it would be a whole other can of worms.

Would the Clankers be busy dealing with the situation in the center of Leyland, and leave the checkpoint unattended?

A train had collided with an expensive automobile, and an agent of Mordemere’s had fallen to his death from one of the majestic aqueducts. Not to mention, who was dealing with the situation underground?

Everything was in flux, and Vanessa’s nerves were wound tighter than a broken heart spring. Even her braid had come all fuzzy as the strands of gold came out of their bonds.

“Moment of truth, everyone,” Rosa Marija announced, all too soon for the Inspector’s liking.

The Fjord pulled to a stop before the checkpoint. Hargreaves noticed were no Clankers. Instead, a Kobold loped over, shaking and thundering, to lean over the Fjord. To her horror, this one carried a massive, triple-barreled gun, belt-fed to a drum of ammunition on the horrible thing’s back.

“The city’s on lockdown. Turn around, civie,” a tinny, amplified voice thundered from above.

“He’s a contractor, he’s a civilian as well,” Vanessa heard Blair mutter.

To Vanessa’s further horror, she saw Rosa lean out of the Fjord, her creamy chocolate bosom clearly showing through one undone button.

“Hello gorgeous,” she said, and then she was leaning out too far for Hargreaves to catch what she was saying. There seemed to be a lot of wiggling about, but the gist of it was painfully clear.

“No. You’ll have to wait with the rest, there. I don’t much care how badly you need to get out of that bodice,” the tinny voice boomed.

“All right, don’t get snippy,” Rosa said, now perfectly audible. Smooth as silk, Rosa’s hand came up armed with three of her patented knives.

Vanessa recognized in a split second the dead useful sparkling fire variety, before the hand snaked out of sight.

There was a bit of clinking, and a stabbing motion to Rosa’s arm, and suddenly the window was full of multi-colored sparks. The ground shook as the Kobold pilot struggled to free his view of the festive inferno, stamping and scraping with one deadly claw.

“Go, go, go!” Rosa called, and suddenly Albion was there, in the driver’s seat with his helmswoman still hanging outside the window. His foot came down in a stomping motion, along with a nearly invisible series of hand motions. The Fjord felt like it reared up, and suddenly they were off, rocketing forward towards the woefully inadequate barrier ahead. As they splintered the wooden plank, the Fjord gave a little heave and Rosa tumbled back down into Albion’s lap.

“Hello gorgeous…” Rosa purred, index finger tracing here and there.

“Right! We’re running away from bloodthirsty mercenaries in steamwork giants, let’s at least die with decorum!” Hargreaves protested.

She yanked Rosa off, and pressed Albion’s gun into her hands, freshly appropriated from his hip. Not one to leave the fighting to others, Hargreaves whipped her Tranter out and leaned out the opposite passenger window as well, to behold a truly horrifying sight.

A Kobold, a different one, was joined in full pursuit of them, two lumbering giants. The first was open at the chest. It was burned all over, and the exposed pilot looked, in a word, pissed. Both of them were loping all out, weapons clutched in their claws already spinning up.

“Albion….” Vanessa said.

“DRIVE FASTER!” Rosa Marija finished for her.

Were there any denizens of Leyland, headed home work weary, or idly staring out of their window near the main thoroughfare southeast out of the city, they might have remarked a surprising amount of Clanker activity.

Tooling around in their specially lifted convoys and those terrifying Kobolds, they were the everyday bane of any Leylander foolish enough to question commands. This evening, the Wankers seemed to have run up against a challenge equal to them. The fact put a smile on one old man’s face as he witnessed the source of the Clankers’ troubles whisk past, hoot
ing and hollering. Despite the marks on their beater Fjord’s loose fender, despite the bullet holes punched into the metal in long riveting strings, the faces in the windows of the Fjord looked like jolly good
fun
.

If the everyday folk were ever urchins living in a dead-end, iron-cast world of labor and worthlessness, they forgot it that night, for a few hours, watching a chase where their oppressors were helpless to stop people who were ostensibly spitting in their faces.

10: Secret of Leviathan

The ominous cloud of Mordemere had last been spotted headed over Eastern Europe. Thanks to Jonah Moore’s information, the crew of the
Berry
now had a handle on possible locations Valima Mordemere might strike. A pool had been established, with Rosa Marija betting heavily on St. Petersburg’s historic churches, while the men of the ship were dead set on the Kremlin as the only possible target. Inspector Hargreaves kept a suspicious silence.

Rosa Marija had changed to a long turquoise dress, well ru
ffled, that hung off her crema espresso shoulders like a lover. Embroidered all over the dress and matching headscarf were moons and stars, and when she moved little bells jangled a bewitching tune. She looked like a monarch’s courtesan, Albion thought, which was often his reaction to her outfits. It would take a battalion of cavalry to drag it from him, though.

“The question I have for you is,” Rosa Marija wondered aloud, as they sailed towards the last known location of the cataclysm ravaging Europe. “Why would Captain Sam be involved in all of this?”

“Get your feet off the compass,” Albion whinged placidly. “I suspect we will have to inquire of the generous Jonah Moore. He seems frothing at the bit to stop Mordemere, possibly more than you, Inspector.”

Vanessa Hargreaves was sitting on a ledge on the bulkhead, following the conversation while looking out over the deck, where Elric Blair was busy vomiting over the edge.

Somehow, he had become extraordinarily sensitive to motion after the adventure in the Fjord.

“I can relate to his situation, Captain Clemens,” Hargreaves answered Albion without turning. “We’ve all done things we wish we could have taken back. Perhaps not something we’ve been holding on to for thirty or more years, though. He looked… mournful, crossing those old places.”

“That feeling is what gave Mordemere the aeon power to control Leyland,” Albion agreed. “It was a trap. Mordemere designed it that way, and it has worked perfectly until we came along and snipped at the springs- at least, where Moore is concerned.”

The skies were a solid gray ahead, but Albion thought there was a glimmer of flaming light far to the eastern horizon. That was impossible; the sun was nearing zenith. He shook it off.

“Let’s go talk to Moore,” he said, heading for the stair down to the rest of the ship.

By silent consensus, they agreed to leave Blair up top. The Huckleberry was quiet as the three made their way below. Auntie was where Auntie always was: in the galley, experimenting on a new culinary concoction. Cockney Alex was out in the longboat, shooting what game could be found further ahead. As for Cid Tanner, the sounds of his tinkering came shuddering through the ship every few hours. “So long as we hear those explosions,” Rosa explained, “we know he’s alive.”

As for the elderly chap himself, Jonah Moore had been surprisingly hale as he stepped out of the gunshot ruins of the Fjord and onto the rope ladder dropped from the
‘Berry
.

Still, when Albion offered quarters for Moore to rest, they had been accepted gratefully, with the request he not be disturbed for several hours. As it was well past this allotment, Albion felt it was high time to disturb him.

“Mister Moore?” Albion asked, rapping firmly on the ship’s dense cabin door.

Overhead, the various charms affixed to the lift lines jangled or shuffled according to their propensities. Little dolls and fetishes shook all over. Albion thought they were trying to tell him something, though he had never developed the capacity to understand them.

“Something’s wrong.” By contrast, Rosa Marija was remarkably astute. “Moore’s in trouble.”

“Daft old bugger-!” the Inspector cursed roundly. “He’s strained himself too much to get off the bunk. Move!”

“Hold on, don’t just go round kicking down my ship!” interrupted Albion, nearly clotheslining the insistent Inspector. He reached down, undid a panel beside the door lock, and slipped the tumblers open. “There we go.”

Inspector Hargreaves gave Clemens a long look, before grabbing the knob and shoving the wooden barrier aside.

“Mister Moore? Jonah Moore?” Hargreaves said. Abion knew it was no futile, emotive call- the Inspector was trained to stimulate a potential victim by sounds he might be used to, such as his own name. At least, he had read about it in one of Captain Sam’s books. 

The gray gentleman was not in his bunk- he was in the chair beside it, arms placed on the rests, feet flat on the deck.

He was immaculately dressed in what he arrived in, but his face was pale and the intelligent eyes were closed. The Inspector knelt, inadvertently giving Clemens a fine view of her posterior.

“There’s no pulse,” the Inspector said, as she backed off from Moore’s neck. “Help me get him on the floor.”

With Albion’s help, they wrangled the chap onto the bare boards.

Moore’s back was still warm, but his lower body and limbs seemed oddly cold. Albion shuddered at the fact he could even tell the difference. Air piracy did have a propensity to attract corpses. He wondered idly whether any of the crew aboard would succumb to this tendency.

Meanwhile, Hargreaves was pressing on Moore’s solar plexus, trying to coax life back into the dead. The sounds coming out of his mouth were oddly broken. Every so often she would pull back the man’s wrinkly eyelids, or feel his nostrils for any sign of breath. Eventually she leaned back, sighing.

“It’s no use,” the Inspector said. “He’s not responding at all. It couldn’t have been a few hours, but he feels days dead.”

“But he’s still warm!” Albion protested.

“Don’t just give up!” Rosa Marija cried. “We still need him to show us how to stop Mordemere! Let me at him!”

Before anyone could stop her, Rosa knelt, a long, thin stiletto clutched in her hand. Whatever she intended, nobody knew. Everybody recoiled in horror when slit open Moore’s starchy linen shirt.

“But that’s…” Albion utter
ed helplessly.

“Impossible…” gasped Hargreaves.

“Wicked cool,” Rosa Marija mentioned.

What lay before them were not the emaciated, gray ribs of a man aged into death. Everything below Jonah Moore’s sternum glittered a utilitarian bronze- where there should have been intestines, liver, kidneys and spleen, there were instead clicking gears, taut springs, and wetly gleaming India rubber, cleverly concealed beneath a translucent layer of woven metallic mesh.

The metalwork was so fine, it had deceived all of them into believing there was a living man flexing and breathing beneath the clothes.

“Has anyone seen this?” A weak voice announced from the doorway. The trio turned, and there was Elric Blair, as gray as Moore, holding up an unsealed envelope near the little writing desk by the door.

“My fine rescuers,” Albion read, after Blair had given up the honor to slouch weakly on the bunk.

‘My fine rescuers,

              By the time you find this letter, the heartspring placed in roughly the liver analogue of my assembly will have run down, and I will have, in effect, become bereft of this world. Please forgive what damage was done to your fine ship in your attempts to reach me. I feared some curious or caring soul might make the vain attempt to gain entry in my last moments.

             
Please do not try to resuscitate me. Your attempts will fail. Only Mordemere’s alchemic prowess supplied the necessary blend of aeon particulate and salts to keep me suspended between life and death.

He called it a life compound, after your pirates’ lift compound. What bitter irony it is. Once one is tied into it, one may never live on without it. It is how he kept me in his service.

              Valima Mordemere is insane. You recall we were the first to discover the legendary Laputian Leviathan, without which only the lift of natural gases is possible. I know not where aeon stones originally come, but I have since discovered, through careful analysis of my own photogram evidence, the Leviathan is a lie.

The Leviathan is no flying city left by the ancients. Rather, it is a mass of freed aeon particulate in the atmosphere, coalescing in a place of its own choosing.

It is like a storm: where the attentions of human beings collect, and the conditions are right, the aeon particulate will show you wonderful things. But those mystic towers and endless galleries are a lie. The power of dreams is not the power of reality, however uplifting. Valima Mordemere must know this somewhere in his brilliant mind, but my efforts to return him to sanity have failed.

What little Mordemere recognizes of the truth has become twisted. In the
abandoned mine craters of Leyland he has built essentially his own version of the Leviathan: the dread ship
Nidhogg,
a fortress city
.
He does not realize he is chasing a dream using the reality. The
Nidhogg
is deathly powerful, carrying with it a Core that must be destroyed at any cost. Not only can it lift the landmarks of Europe, it carries with it a secret that sickens me to my heartsprings. You will forgive me, but it is my hope the Core can be destroyed without revealing this dreadful secret.

Your Captain Samuel Clemens stole the
Nidhogg’s
guidance crystal, an artifact we collected from our first meeting with the Leviathan. Without this crystal, the Core is bereft of its true powers, and Mordemere cannot summon the Leviathan. Therein lies your one hope: you must find this crystal before Mordemere collects the landmarks he requires. Once Mordemere possesses five of the great focal points of the world, he will be able to track the crystal no matter where in the world it hides. Captain Samuel Clemens knows this, but he is unwilling to destroy the crystal. It holds the secret to aeon energy, and Clemens hopes to use it for the betterment of mankind. It is also this secret that Mordemere will kill to protect.

He intends to ravage the world with a contrived war, and remake the world in his image.
This, above all, must not happen.

              I leave you now with the necessary details to destroy Mordemere and his plans. Along with this letter, I have included schematics to both the
Nidhogg
and myself. Just above my heartspring, you will find three aeon crystal shards, much like the one Captain Clemens stole. These represent three chances: just one of these shards, bearing my will to destroy it, will cause the Core to collapse and self-destruct. The stolen landmarks of Europe will float to Earth harmlessly. Mordemere may be insane, but he has always appreciated fine architecture.

             
I thank you, my fine rescuers. You have given me a chance at redemption. Even if you simply ignore my pleas, I thank you for this last adventure. It has been the dream of my lifetime to sail aboard a true pirate dirigible.’

              “It’s signed ‘Jonah Moore, Repentant,’” Albion finished.

Without further ado, the Captain crossed to a speaking tube in the hallway and called for Cid Tanner. Everyone waited anxiously until the grizzled codger in the workman’s overalls came blustering into the room, crotchety and complaining of a disturbance in his work. The grumbling mechanic ceased when he saw the body on the deck.

              “Well?” Albion asked, while Cid read through the technical specifications. Albion himself couldn’t make much sense of it.

T
he
Nidhogg
was laid out like a top, with a long central shaft and a round disk section. Long gantries sprouted from the disk, reminding Albion of a giant squid. It looked like these long limbs wrapped around the landmarks stolen, incorporating them like pilot fish around the center of the ship.

             
“One shipwright for another, Mordemere was one crafty bugger,” Cid remarked once he had finished.

“We will need to detach the gantries one by one, and the Core is in the middle of the ship, in the lower part of the disk, there. But it’s not impossible.”

              “And the crystal shards?” Rosa Marija reminded.

             
“Take the Mickey out of the big reveal, why don’t you?” Cid griped, as was his wont. He crossed to Jonah Moore’s inert body.

Carefully, with some kind of multiple-pronged tool in his overalls, he separated the metallic mesh from the India rubber seal connecting it to Moore’s flesh.

Inside, there was the heartspring, coiled like a complex, resting cobra. There was a moment of fumbling with the delicate instruments, but soon Cid’s deft fingers were extracting a cone of devilishly entangled cogs, cams and tensile springs.

He chucked this aside, leaving a space in the abdomen. Cid consulted the schematic once more, roughly sketched in the charcoal from the writing desk. Then he ruffled his beard, and thumped Moore’s chest once, hard. Moore’s eyelids fluttered.

“Have you no respect for the dead?” protested Hargreaves.

“Give it a moment, whippersnappers,” Cid grumbled.

Deep in Moore’s chest, a whirring sound began, and then something rolled out into the strangely empty abdominal cavity. It looked like a little round ball of shiny metal, dripping with clear goop. Cid turned a screwdriver attachment into the side, and it suddenly sprung open, spitting something out as it did. Everyone took cover, except for Cid.