Lazarus Machine, The (A Tweed & Nightingale Adventure): 1 (3 page)

London receded below him as the cage rose slowly upward. The airship started moving as well, heading up toward the lanes of airship traffic that ferried people across the city.

It was actually quite beautiful, thought Tweed distantly. He could see the soft glow of automata as they stalked their heavy way through the streets, the white light of their æther cages combating the orange glow of streetlights. It would actually be quite peaceful if it weren't for the loud thrum of the airship engines and the screech and rattle of the chain winching the container upward.

Tweed's hands started to ache. He was grasping the metal lip with nothing more than his fingertips, and he wasn't sure how long he'd be able to hold on.

As they rose higher the wind started to buffet him, swinging his legs back and forth. He could feel his fingers slipping. He looked down. The houses were tiny. If he fell now a red smear on the cobbles would be all that remained of Sebastian Tweed.

He needed to come up with a plan very quickly. Very quickly indeed.

His attention was distracted from the vast measure of distance between his feet and the ground by the sound of the chain slowing down. He arched back, peering upward. The container was sliding into the base of the airship. Tweed watched as the top of the cage fitted snugly inside the gap.

In fact…

He looked at his fingers gripping the edge of the container floor, then up at the airship. There was only the tiniest of gaps between the container and the hole.

So, next question: Fall to his death with his fingers attached, enjoying a very brief period of non-pain, or fall to his death with no fingers, screaming all the way?

Tweed frantically searched the underside of the airship for something he could use. A few feet away was the nearest of the connecting struts that circled the gas-filled balloon. Tweed curled upward and braced his legs against the bottom of the box. Just before it slid all the way into the dirigible he pushed off with his feet and sailed backward through the air. His arms flailed upward, connecting with the strut. But the weight of his body ripped one side of it free. He dropped, then jerked to a stop as the other end held firm. Tweed swung back and forth on the broken arm, buffeted by the wind.

The dirigible rose above the airship lanes. It entered a cloud bank, and heavy moisture clung to Tweed's hair. He reached up, slowly stretching his hand to see if he could grab one of the other struts. He was tall, but not quite tall enough. Typical. The one time when his height would have benefited him, and it did nothing but mock his efforts.

Then the strut he was holding snapped.

He plummeted through the clouds. Water and mist whipped
past his face, tickling his skin. The wind roared in his ears. He forced his eyes to stay open but all he could see was white and grey.

He burst out of the bottom of the clouds. Clear air was all around him. He could see London, the horizon. And—

Tweed had only a second of stunned surprise to see the huge transport dirigible rising rapidly toward him before he slammed into the balloon with enough force to burst the air from his lungs.

He bounced, then started to slide down the curve of the gas bag. He scrabbled frantically with his hands, grabbing hold of the thick wire that held the bag in shape, feeling it cut into his skin.

He slowed, then stopped moving. He waited to make sure nothing else was about to snap or break, then pulled himself back up to the very top of the cigar-shaped dirigible and flopped onto his back. He stared up at the moon as he struggled to regain his shaky breath.

Well.

That
just happened.

Tweed sat up. The balloon was huge, one of the massive transport dirigibles that Brunel & Company had recently started building. Huge steam engines at the rear acted as a backup for the Tesla power, pushing it ponderously through the sky, the turbines giving off a deep throbbing that vibrated through the whole airship.

Tweed cast his eyes upward, but Moriarty's zeppelin had vanished somewhere into the bank of clouds. Tweed had lost them.

But on the plus side, at least Barnaby was still alive.

Which meant Tweed still had time to find him.

As he absently drummed his fingers on the thick canvas, wondering exactly what his father had gotten himself mixed up in, a second dirigible rose into view alongside him, drifting into a higher lane of traffic. A small boy stared out of one of the portholes, clearly bored out of his mind.

When he saw Tweed lounging on the top of the airship, his mouth dropped open in shock.

Tweed raised a hand and waved at him. The boy hesitantly waved back, and a moment later his dirigible was swallowed up by the clouds.

Octavia Nightingale sat next to the fire in a large, wingback chair and attempted to focus on her stitching. Her father would approve. It was a lady-like pursuit, something he was always encouraging her to take more of an interest in.

It was also fiendishly difficult and
incredibly
boring. She squinted at the stitches, tilting the black cloth toward the fire so she could get a better look at her handiwork. She still couldn't see much. She clicked her tongue in irritation and glanced across at Manners, standing at attention next to the door.

“Manners, come here, please.”

The automaton moved smoothly toward her. It was the newest model, released only last month. Only the best for her father. She stared at it in distaste. The constructs seemed to be getting more human with every iteration. Octavia wasn't sure she approved. She liked her tools to look like tools. Manners even had articulating facial expressions. It could smile slightly and blink. Unfortunately, it didn't quite know when it was appropriate to use these newfound abilities. Having an automaton tell you it was time for bed with a frozen, creepy smile on its face was quite an alarming experience that had Octavia's fingers itching for her Tesla gun.

“Manners, stand there.” Octavia pointed to the carpet directly in front of her. When the automaton had done as instructed, Octavia lifted the protective cover that some of the newer models had over their æther cages. The white light of the soul that powered the construct shone through the thick glass, casting a clear, bright glow across her handiwork.

Octavia had always found it incredibly disturbing to think that
most of the automata in the city were powered by human souls. Many decades ago, some government department discovered that it was easier to use human souls extracted from the deceased and trapped inside special “æther cages” to power automata. The discovery was quickly embraced. Finally, an answer to the insolvable problem of delivering instructions to automata out in the street without them having to trail miles upon miles of wires behind them to receive their commands. And the supply of souls? No problem. The Crown offered to “rent” the souls of the deceased from their families, an offer that was enthusiastically embraced by the lower classes.

Of course, nowadays the Tesla Towers helped with all that, but the old-fashioned æther constructs were still the more popular (and affordable) models. Especially as the Crown liked to keep a tight grip on the secrets of Tesla power.

Unfortunately for Octavia, the light from Manners's æther cage only served to illuminate her own failings. Her stitches were large and unevenly spread. Not very nice. Not very nice at all.

Oh, well. At least the thread matched the material, so nobody was likely to notice.

Her father opened the door and peered into the room.

“Oh, hello, Octavia. Not at the paper today?”

Octavia repressed a sigh. It was already past eight in the evening. She had been home from her job at
The Times
for two hours already. Well, she
called
it a job, but she wasn't paid anything. It was more of a volunteer research position that she was allowed to keep because her mother used to work there as a journalist, something Octavia hoped to one day emulate. She forced a smile onto her face. “Finished up for the day, Father. I just wanted to practice my stitching.”

“Why don't you just use the Babbage?”

Octavia looked at the wall opposite where a huge, intricately decorated machine made from mahogany and brass stood. It looked more
like a church organ than what it was meant to be—a machine that would do your sewing for you. Octavia had tried to use it once, but it had taken her longer to program the stupid thing with the punchcards than it would to actually sew the material by hand.

But she didn't say that to her father. Ever since her mother's disappearance, her father had been getting more and more absentminded. More and more distant. She didn't want to do anything that would push him farther away.

Instead she smiled and said, “I wanted to do it myself. I'm afraid I need the practice.”

Her father smiled. “Good girl. Your mother would have approved.”

No she wouldn't, thought Octavia bitterly, glaring at the door as her father retreated from the room. Her mother would have thought Octavia was wasting her time.

It had been a year since her mother's disappearance. A year of watching her father grow more and more withdrawn, retreating into his work until it was all that kept him going.

He thought her mother was dead, but Octavia didn't believe it. Her mother had been researching a story, looking into rumors that Professor Moriarty had returned from the dead to claim his rightful place as the king of London's underworld. Octavia used to go into work with her mother, something she actively encouraged. Octavia would help with the filing, help with the research, make tea—anything, really, as long as she got to watch how the newspaper worked.

Then one day Octavia's mother was taken. Octavia had witnessed it, seen the strangely dressed gang who swept out of the sky in an unmarked zeppelin, whisking her kicking and screaming mother away into the night.

Ever since, she had done everything she could to try to track her mother down, following rumors, leads, anything to do with Moriarty.
Trying to find out what he was after, why he had returned after he and Sherlock Holmes supposedly perished at Reichenbach Falls.

But the answers had remained elusively out of reach. She was no closer to tracking down Moriarty
or
her mother.

Octavia broke the end of the thread with a vicious tug. She looked around for her needle but couldn't find it anywhere. She was always doing that. She would find it later. Probably when she sat on it.

Octavia climbed the thickly-carpeted stairs to her bedroom. As she opened the door, a small metallic dog bounded across the carpet and banged painfully into her ankle. Octavia winced, leaning down to rub the sore spot.

What had her father been thinking? Her pet dog Phileas had died and he'd actually gone out and paid someone to put the poor thing's spirit into this…this…
shell
. Octavia honestly didn't know what to do about it. The construct seemed to recognize her and act similarly to Phileas, but she didn't know if that was just the programming of the automaton or the essence of the dog coming through.

Octavia hesitated, then reached down and tentatively patted the thing's brass head. “Good…dog,” she said. This seemed to please the construct. It trotted over to its basket and lay down as if going to sleep.

Octavia's room was a fairly typical example of its kind: a large bed; a roll-top desk that she kept locked, with a few modifications of her own to make sure no one came snooping; and a dressing table.

However, she did have something that was
not
typical for a girl her age: shelves of books by the likes of Verne, Wells, Flammarion, and Lord Dunsany. Her father had once disapproved of her collection, but she had refused to back down on it, and her mother screamed at him when she found out he wanted to stop Octavia reading them. Octavia remembered feeling sorry for him at the time. You didn't want mother angry at you. She could make your life a living hell.

Octavia was about to ready herself for bed and a re-reading of
The King of Efland's Daughter
when she heard a tapping at the window.

Octavia's heart skipped a beat. She hurried over to the window and slid it open. It made no noise. Octavia made sure the wood was kept well-greased.

A tiny construct barely larger than her hand hopped onto the sill. It looked more like a skeleton than anything else, a brass framework topped with a featureless oval head.

It was one of four messengers Octavia used. The first one hid inside an abandoned building in Holywell Street. It was known to a select few that to contact her a message was to be dropped through the letterbox of that building. This first construct would take the message to the second, the second would take it to the third, and the third would scurry across the rooftops to hand the message to the fourth. Only the fourth knew how to get to the home of “Songbird,” the name Octavia had chosen for herself.

Octavia took the small piece of paper from inside the tiny automaton's rib cage and unfolded it. Her heart beat even more rapidly in her chest. It was from Jennings: a request for a meeting. He had information on Moriarty.

Octavia unlocked her desk. She rolled the lid up and quickly scribbled an address on the back of the paper, slipping it back into the construct's rib cage. Once she was finished, the messenger scrambled up the wall and onto the roof, disappearing into the night.

Octavia went to her bed and unfolded the black material she had been sewing. It looked like she would get to put it to use sooner than she'd thought.

It wasn't easy for an unaccompanied young lady to move about London in the middle of the night. Questions would be asked, even nowadays with all the progress being made for equal rights by the followers of the Lovelace Movement.

But an unidentifiable person dressed in old, dirty street clothes, on the other hand, could find it
very
easy to move about. As long as they didn't want to use any of the up market modes of transport. But that didn't matter. An omnibus was an omnibus, whether it had leather chairs, served drinks, and supplied copies of today's newspaper, or whether it was standing room only and stank of the tannery workers who used it last.

Octavia arrived at London Bridge about three hours after the tiny construct had crawled through her window. She leaned on the concrete balustrade, watching the black waters of the Thames rushing between the arches of the bridge. There weren't many people around at this time of night. Certainly nobody of good repute. Ever since they'd built the new, upper level of the bridge, and above that, the wire tracks that moved carriages back and forth across the river, the original level had become the haunt of vagabonds and villains. Up above were lights and patrols, even shops and pubs, mimicking the old bridge of the seventeenth century. But down here there was just darkness, litter, and the homeless trying to shelter from the cold and rain.

Jennings was late. This troubled Octavia. The note said eleven o'clock, and it was already twenty after. He'd never been late before.

Her mother always told Octavia to rely on her gut feelings. She said it was the one thing that would never let you down. And right now, Octavia's gut was telling her to go home.

She drummed her fingers on the balustrade in irritation. She'd been hoping for some new information. Something she could use to track down her mother. Jennings usually had good intelligence.

Octavia thrust her hands into her pockets and turned around.

“Evenin’,” said the figure standing before her.

Octavia froze. She narrowed her eyes and studied the man. It certainly wasn't Jennings. Jennings was five foot five with one leg shorter than the other, while the person standing before her now was well over six and a half feet tall.

Octavia carefully moved her hand inside her pocket, curling her fingers around the grip of the Tesla gun hidden deep inside. She usually carried two of the small devices, but the other was still attached to the wall socket in her room, drawing its charge from the Tesla Towers.

“Evening,” she said, disguising her already deep voice.

“My name's Colin,” said the figure.

“Jolly good for you,” said Octavia brightly. “Not that I asked.”

“What's your name?”

“Robert,” said Octavia promptly. “Robert Blackwood.”

“Robert Blackwood?” said Colin. “That's puzzlin’.”

“Why, pray tell, is it puzzling?”

“Because I was under the impression that your name was Songbird. At least that's what Jennings told me before I threw his body into the Thames.”

Octavia moved her thumb and flicked a small catch on the gun. She could just hear the tell-tale whine building up.

“Songbird? No I'm afraid you're mistaken. As I said, I'm Robert. Now if you'll excuse me—” Octavia took a step to the right, but it was mirrored by Colin the unfriendly giant.

“No need to rush off,” he said. “I just want a word, that's all. Just a little word in your ear—” he smiled—“before I rip it off.”