Captain Albion Clemens and The Future that Never Was: A Steampunk Novel! (Lands Beyond Book 1) (8 page)

Everyone groaned, but we marched our tingly feet over the deck and towards the forecastle. Even before we reached the bridge beneath it, the mists of the Channel parted to show a rather grumpy face staring out at us from the spacious windows.

              “Uh-oh,” Albion said plainly.

“Impressive…” Cid’s hoary voice rasped.

              “Your little Inspector got out,” I remarked. I fanned out a quartet of knives in one hand, good pretty little stilettos, but balked at Albion’s venomous glare.

Oh, all right, so I didn’t know the bodies of the Inspector or this Kitty Desperado well enough for pressure point needles. I put them away begrudgingly.

              We marched as a group, through the heavy bolted hatch and into the dry bridge, where we saw the darnedest thing.

             
“Scotland Yard will take just about anybody, eh?” Cockney Alex sniped heartily. “Even one with kinks like yours.”

             
The Inspector was sitting on what looked like a pile of rags, with all the sleeves and pants legs tied together. It was still struggling, but every so often the blonde law enforcer would reach into it and twist something, extracting a piercing scream from within.

             
“Ear,” The Inspector explained absentmindedly. “The Yard never taught us how to subdue a suspect who was double-jointed almost everywhere. I had to improvise. Oh bollocks, how am I supposed to run off with the ship now?” She added half-heartedly.

The Inspector hadn’t come out of it unscathed.

Her borrowed clothes were scuffed and torn, and she was sporting a rather beautiful black eye, clashing magnificently with her tussled gold hair.

“Oy! That was my second-favorite bodice!” I chastised.

              “Too bad it didn’t work. Good plan, very pirate of you,” Albion ignored me and praised Hargreaves, earning him a look full of vitriol . “Don’t knock it, you’ve already got the eye patch.”

Through a fit of giggles, I managed to step in with Auntie, and together, the three of us ladies undid the bonds. There were altogether too many people on the bridge now, and the girl we freed didn’t even try to escape.

She just tumbled out of the bundle, all dense jumpers, violently orange hair and a multitude of scarves. She sat there on the deck like a broken doll, with her enormous boots peeking out of a beribboned hem.

             
“Hello,” Albion said, kneeling in front of her. His smile was kind, though it was having trouble penetrating Kitty Desperado’s pout. “I’m not drunk now. How did you steal my ship?”

              While Albion was talking with Kitty, Blair and I turned towards the Inspector, who seemed out of sorts. She was dusting herself off, constantly stopping and picking at a rip here and there, as if she didn’t see the point. I sighed.

             
“There’s a pile of clothes in the hold nobody knows what to do with, and a cleaning steamer in the boiler room. You can take your pick from those,” I supplied. “Mind, it’s mostly men’s wear.”

             
“Those would be easier to move in,” She said appreciatively. She leaned on my steering wheel to pick at a rip near her knee. “I see you are expecting me to stay. I suppose it is inevitable, if we are to solve the mystery of Westminster and recover your Captain Samuel.”

             
“You certainly came in useful,” I agreed reluctantly. This Hargreaves was making herself far more at home than I was comfortable with. She also had the legs off a giraffe, something I was seriously uncomfortable with.

             
“We will discuss the matter at length with the Captain. I expect some sort of alliance can be reached?” she said.

The Inspector gave
me a once-over disturbingly like a frisking. A nerve in my forehead began to twitch unbecomingly.

             
At that point, Albion straightened up, with the orange girl clinging to his elbow.

His goggles were back up, and the girl was staring up at him with wide eyes.

              “Ladies? This is Kitty Desperado.”

              The story of Kitty Desperado was merely an exceptional one- meaning, it was one we had heard hundreds of times scouring the bars of the
Hook
. She was one of a faceless multitude orphaned during the last Great War. Then only a babe in arms, a Welsh relief corporal had nearly tripped over her, nestled in the debris of a bombed Glasgow hotel, clothed in a pile of evening gowns and hangers.

Dropped from one of the still new Eastern Conglomerate dirigibles, steamcraft bombs left flesh melted off bone, pillars warped and broken in its wake.

The closet and room had taken the brunt of the attack, but a mother’s careful wrapping had saved the child, wound in a dress meant to keep a lady protected near searing hot engines. These costly thermal materials were just then coming into fashion, driven by a fiercely progressive and practical new London femininity.

Near as the corporal could figure, the girl had been abandoned there not long before the bombing, along with several ready milk bottles and a bell looped round her wrist to attract attention.

It was a common enough tale. Like as not, the girl was the secret fruit of some society debutante and a handsome, transitory soldier, hidden away in the interests of the aristocracy hiding out in Scotland’s country manors.

The tenant of the room had used a false name, borrowed from a popular series of propaganda pictures playing at the time, about a Spanish thief turned spy for the Western Partnership.

              The name of the thief had been Kitty Desperado.

             
The Great War had left plenty of boys and girls in Kitty’s unenviable circumstance. The modestly retained corporal had been thoroughly moved, but in the end was forced to give up Kitty to the state’s care. Britain’s deficits during the war were well documented, and it had been a miracle the military even managed to build their flagship dirigible fleet, the
Knights of the Round, which won the Partnership the war.

Orphans who could contribute nothing were summarily shipped to the filing c
abinets of military orphanages.

A
s early as the age of six, were sent into the reserves as yeomen and engineering apprentices, where their deft fingers were made to mend the engines of war.

             
Kitty Desperado nearly never met with her gallant rescuer, not until she was well into her service as a knocker-up aboard the pressed-helium medical carrier
Lionheart
.

The job was simple: at the appropriate times, according to the shipboard clock, she had to run down to the appropriate officers or midshipmen and wake them at any cost. These hardened officers worked twenty-hour shifts, and were hard drinkers. Often she had to pick the locks, or wriggle in through the heating vents, to slap the man or woman awake with hands stinging from another officer’s stubble. She was so good at it, pretty soon the officers learned to wake at the sound of the bell on her wrist, lest Kitty give them a good licking.

              It was the sound of the bell that alerted Kitty’s corporal, then a major by the name of Topher Kien, to Kitty’s existence.

Fate was not kind. By the time Kitty received the major’s message, Kien had succumbed to bullet wounds in a quiet corner of the
Lionheart’
s patient quarters.

He had been shot in the head, and the bandages were so thick beneath the breathing apparatus, Kitty never saw what the man looked like. The only image she retained was the large, round lenses atop the breathing apparatus, sat there like a toad on his face.

              Kitty could not have known, but as she knelt at the feet of the rescuer she imagined day and night, the military was preparing to jettison its orphans out into the world.

The new Baleanopteron-class airships, spearheaded by the Knights, were large, well armored, and could punch holes the size of lakes in an aerial blockade.
By the time Major Kien passed, the peace was well under way, with the remnants of the Eastern forces driven back behind the riveted partitions of the Neo Ottoman Empire.

             
Standing in the busy dirigible port with her few belongings in a satchel on her back and the military’s meager pittance in an envelope in her pocket, Kitty found herself abandoned. She didn’t know the name of the port, even, or the city it was situated near. The shops sold unfamiliar goods, and the water tasted foul, slimy, compared with the clean precipitate of dirigible runoff.

Even at such a young age, she had some idea how a young girl could make a living in the world. She could see them flitting about in the shadows of the alleys and taverns, the hint of garters like frilled creatures peering out from the lager-scented undergrowth. The idea made her want to run to the bog and wretch.

              Her deliverance came in a most unprecedented form- in the conversation between two airmen, recently detached from a Salvation Army aid ship.

Kitty had sat herself at a table across them to figure herself out, in a cafe not far from the
Lionheart
. Funny- it had seemed something like a home yesterday. Today it was merely a ship, one of a thousand moored far overhead. The airmen took no notice of them, instead discussing something that seemed of all-encompassing import.

             
“I’m telling you, Eriksson, they’re all right. They never target our ships, only the stoolies.”

             
“Maybe not the ones you’ve heard about Bernard, but they’re pirates all the same. No two are alike. Make ‘em desperate and they’ll do anything.”

             
“You’re saying now the war’s over, they’ll start poaching civilian vessels,” deduced the one called Bernard.

             
“It’s easy, even if you haven’t got a ship,” replied the one called Eriksson. “You simply sneak aboard, hide in a smuggler’s nook or cold steam vent, and wait until everyone is asleep. Then you slit their throats, or take what you want and bugger off on a longboat. Not a soul to stop you in the open sky.” He seemed engrossed in the logistics, never mind who was listening. He was right- the coffee was good and the café was busy. Not many would have bothered to hear a hypothetical from a faceless airman. Not many, but a little girl with red, red hair.

             
“Pirates are a noble bunch, I say,” the one called Bernard insisted stubbornly. “Descended from ancient rebels, fallen kings. It’s like there’s something bigger behind them, telling them where to go, what ships are safe to plunder. I’ll just bet there’s a band waiting to take down the Turkish trader two towers over.”

             
If the table across from them were not then vacant save an empty coffee cup, the little girl might have devoted herself to the study of criminal psychology, from men who watched safe beside the front lines. But she had heard enough.

             
Kitty Desperado, having spent her time in the service of the state opening doors and delivering painful messages, was preparing to apply herself the only way she could conceive: as her namesake, a master thief.

              “You have no idea how attractive Captain Albion looked with his goggles, and his dashing coat, and those dimples…” Kitty was saying to me, later on the top deck of the
Berry
. I harrumphed, as if the idea of Albion’s dimples didn’t make me go a soft one inside.

             
Kitty was standing in the longboat, packages of supplies and basic tools at her feet. I suppose Albion felt somewhat responsible for the hiccup at the
Hook
, and some sympathy for her plight. He would not throw her to the winds, as she had been all her life. It might have explained what he did next, as well.

             
Albion grabbed both sides of Kitty’s face, and looking deep into her eyes, bent down to kiss her, eyes closed, drinking deep like he was going through a vintage Bordeaux. I looked away for a good twenty seconds, after which he let go with a slight pop.

             
“Kitty Desperado, you are a beautiful femme fatale, and a damn good thief. I am hopelessly infatuated with you, but I am afraid this would never work. You’re just too good for a dirty, deceptive pirate player like me. You should find someone better, someone with a lot more to give. Farewell, Kitty! Think fondly of me!”

             
He put a boot on the longboat and kicked, sending it drifting gently away, elephant bobbing overhead.

             
“I’ll always remember you!” Kitty called across the widening gulf.

“Oh, and another thing! That Captain Samuel you were looking for? I heard he was laying low in the Mediterranean! Look for him there!”

We stayed there a long time, until a drift of cloud covered Kitty’s pink, open features and muffled her voice.

             
“Well that’s that,” Alby remarked, turning to go back into the bridge.

             
“Just like that?” I protested. Sure, I had been a little jealous, and the sort of relationship the girl wanted was illegal in most of the civilized world, but Kitty had real feelings for Albion. It was just a little romantic, if I took myself out of the equation: a master thief with the heart of a nubile, falling in love with a hardened pirate, Albion wasn’t immune to such fanciful things, or we would be a very different crew.