Secrets of the Fire Sea (19 page)

A rattle sounded from outside, the unmistakable noise of clearing a rubber tunnel valve, then they slowed to a complete halt. Commodore Black reached into his jacket and drew out a snub-nosed pistol. He broke it and slipped a crystal charge into its breech, then pushed back the clockwork hammer mechanism. Nandi looked at the old u-boatman, horrified.

‘You’ve a nose for history, lass. I’ve a nose for ensuring poor old Blacky’s bones aren’t added to the dirt you and your college friends like to trowel through.’ He pointed to the front of the windowless carriage. ‘Get down there, ladies, as fast as you like. Trigger the door when I give you the nod.’

Nandi shook her head and reluctantly pulled a small knife out of her boot. Used only for the purposes of excavation, until now.

‘I see the professor’s taught you a few of her other skills, then,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s fine. But if it cuts up rough, you leave the killing to me.’

Hannah saw the commodore’s signal, triggered the release handle and two iron levers pushed the door up and out with a squeal. It was dark outside; pitch black until Hannah switched on the carriage’s external lamps. Commodore Black moved through the door, Nandi following close on his heel. They were in a large echoing cavern, freezing air blowing in from above them. The carriage had been shunted next to a dark platform.

‘It’s an atmospheric platform,’ said Hannah from the doorway, her voice probably louder than she intended across the echoing space.

Nandi stooped down and ran her fingers along the concourse through a layer of dust. ‘It hasn’t been used in a long time.’

Hannah emerged tentatively from the capsule, glancing around. She walked to the concourse wall and rubbed off a layer of frost and grime from a stone mosaic bearing the name of the station.

‘Worleyn,’ said Hannah. ‘As in Worleyn steel. This was a mining centre for metal ores, the only town apart from the guild’s vaults sited away from the coastal ring. It was abandoned before I was born, though.’

Nandi looked up towards the ceiling of the station. Now she was getting used to the darkness she could see there was a dim light coming from above. Not a diode panel, though. A domed skylight partially covered over with snow above, cracks of daylight slanting through. They were close to the surface here.

‘Mining is a sight too much like hard work for me,’ said
the commodore. ‘Let’s be out of here on that broken carriage of yours and leave this empty ruin to its ghosts.’

‘It’s not broken,’ said Hannah. ‘There’s no guidance system in the carriage; it only goes where it’s sent. The fault that sent us here must lie in the line machinery. We need to find the controls for this station’s platform turntable, then use them to rotate us back for another run towards the capital.’

Nandi was moving towards the end of the station where Hannah was indicating the controls might be, when a fierce flash of light and intense heat hit her, smashing her off her feet. Her ears were ringing when she tried but failed to pull herself up into near darkness. The light from their carriage had gone – the carriage had gone! Replaced by shards of glowing metal littering the platform behind them, burning debris lying raked across the empty hall.

Commodore Black recovered first, and moved over to Nandi and Hannah, feeling their limbs for signs of shrapnel wounds. ‘That was no malfunction on the carriage, that was a blessed bomb!’

‘It was meant for me,’ coughed Hannah. Her heavy robes had been torn by the blast. ‘I think the guild have just found out what I’ve been doing with their transaction engines in my spare time – poking about in the details of the archbishop’s death to prove it was their own bloody high guild master who murdered her.’

‘They’re not subtle about it, then,’ said the commodore.

‘If we’d been in a tunnel when the bomb went off it would have looked like a cave-in,’ replied Hannah. ‘We’d have been buried under tonnes of rubble.’

‘Let’s be off before they find they’ve failed,’ said the commodore. ‘Can we call another carriage here, lass?’

‘We can try,’ said Hannah. ‘The station master’s bay should be close to the maintenance yard.’

Nandi bent down and picked up a burning piece of seat leather, wrapping it around one of the still-hot pieces of metal carriage rubble to form a make-shift torch for the three of them to navigate by.

They found the equipment where their young guide thought it would be, but it didn’t take long for them to discover that the machinery on the station was no longer powered. The rat-eaten schematics on the instrument board indicated that the connection to the energies of the guild’s turbines was on the surface, shared with the old opencast mine’s ore mill.

Hannah offered to go to the surface first, having – she claimed – ample experience of climbing the air vents back in the capital. But the commodore was having none of it, and the two young women followed him up the rusty ladder to the surface from inside the abandoned station. Nandi felt an inrush of freezing air and a scattering of snow as a hatch clanged open above them, bright white light flooding down their dark passage.

The station’s powerhouse had been built behind the dome of the atmospheric station’s roof. The three of them were surrounded by deserted snow-covered buildings at the foot of a series of hills that had been chewed into by drift mining. There was a rise of iron battlements on the other side of the hills – not much of a barrier against whatever might be outside now that the protective wall wasn’t charged.

When they got to the shadow of the powerhouse it wasn’t the drift of ice frozen around its foundations that nearly made Nandi scream before she caught herself – it was the figure captured within the ice.

Nandi peered closely. The corpse was doubled up on the ground; a single hand reaching claw-like towards the switching machinery boxed against the powerhouse’s stone walls. The floor of the ice block was crimson, as was the trail that led
to the powerhouse – he had been bleeding profusely as he had crawled towards his final resting place.

‘He was trying to summon a carriage,’ whispered Nandi. ‘The same as us.’

‘Not quite the same as us,’ said the commodore. ‘Someone’s put a wicked ball in his gut. Old Blacky they just tried to blow to bits like a firework.’

‘I know him,’ said Hannah touching the ice around the corpse. ‘I know him.’

‘I don’t think you can, he’s been here a long time,’ said Nandi. ‘The body is frozen desiccated under the ice.’

‘His face,’ said Hannah, trembling and not – Nandi suspected – from the biting wind. ‘I recognize his picture from Hermetica’s news sheets, from when my parent’s boat was lost in the Fire Sea. He was the captain of my parent’s boat. His name is Tomas Maggs.’

‘He looks good for it,’ said the commodore, tapping the ice around the corpse with the butt of his pistol. Nandi had to agree. Captured in the ice of this remote place when he should have been burnt to a cinder by an unpredicted closure of one of the boils’ channels by the shifting walls of magma.

And if the captain of the Conquests’ boat had been alive when the pair had both disappeared, then their deaths may not have been the result of any terrible accident at sea after all…

Boxiron risked a millisecond’s worth of processing time to cast his senses behind him again. He was losing ground to the pursuing valve-mind with every loop and twist through the guild’s transaction engines – having to keep away from the destination gate in case this twisting green monstrosity realized where he was heading and called in help to trap him inside the valves.

There was something about the valve-mind’s behaviour, too, something that Boxiron couldn’t quite put a finger on. It was trying to run him down to ground, but not engaging in any action more hostile than that – and hostility was something that the steamman suspected this thing was well capable of. And it was acting on its own, too. If this had been the great engine rooms of Greenhall, back in the Jackelian civil service’s vast palace of centralized power, then he would have had a whole pack of sentry routines baying on his trail by now. Whatever the valve-mind’s motives, Boxiron had to get back to his body before the thing captured him – it was always dangerous separating out your mentality for a visit to the artificial planes contained within a transaction engine. The dangers of the natives aside, too much time here and the systems of his clunking body might not even recognize Boxiron when he reinserted his id back inside his shell. His own body could reject him.

With the valve-mind nipping furiously at his mentality, Boxiron swerved across one of the main data channels and let loose with a trick that had been gifted to him by the same artful mechomancer who’d turned him into the steamman equivalent of a battering ram for the ignoble art of breaking and entering Jackals’ locks and engines. Boxiron slashed down with a piece of self-replicating code that scattered like hell’s own rainfall above the crowded channel of data handlers below. Without the reassurance of the comfortable system chatter nudging them along, pushing them towards their different destinations, they flew upwards, blindly groping for orders, for reassurance, for the familiar. More and more of them uplifted, shooting higher into the abstraction layers of their environment – and found the valve-mind.

They swamped it, desperately accreting around its skin like a swarm of bees. And as quickly as it could open up
communication with the corrupted traffic and command them away, more and more of the infected handlers pushed in – some re-infecting the cleared handlers that had just been ordered away. Like a battleship whose shell had been weighed down with limpets, the valve-mind sank lower into the data channels and Boxiron had the lead he needed.

The steamman’s mental projection had almost reached the destination gate when he felt a fierce bite of pain in his consciousness, an acid burning spreading out from the sting. Behind him, the valve-mind had extended a nest of tentacles whipping about its sinking form like a spastic octopus. Darting to the side, Boxiron slipped under the tendril that had pierced him, the valve-mind blindly grasping out, trying to relocate him. Ignoring the stinging irritation of the wound, Boxiron backed away at full speed, closing the gap to the exit.

As his consciousness picked up a message he could have sworn was projected out by the valve-mind.

Then he slapped into the black passage of the line back out to the capital’s battlements and the crippled iron shell of his body coalesced around him once more, clumsy limbs jerking into life, all of his imperfect feeling restored through the degraded connections soldered into his steamman skull. Back again. And there was the extra pain of the valve-mind’s wound on his mind, still smarting; something to dwell on beyond the accustomed sensations of decay his body was feeding him. His vision plate pulsed into life and he found himself resolving on the image of Jethro Daunt, with the furred visage of Chalph urs Chalph gazing anxiously at him from behind the ex-parson.

‘Jethro softbody,’ Boxiron’s voicebox crackled into operation. ‘Is this what I’m for?’

Jethro helped him break the connection to the battlement’s
control machinery and gently shook his head. ‘It’s only the smallest part, old steamer.’

The steamman allowed the two of them to help steady him until he found his sense of balance again. ‘Then by the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, why am I so good at it?’

Jethro and Boxiron had nearly reached their hotel in the central vaults of Hermetica City, when a group of large, black-leather-clad ursine soldiers stopped them. Jethro’s first thought was that their foray into the police militia’s records had been detected and tracked back to them, followed a second later by the realization this couldn’t be the case. Given the rivalry between the senate’s mercenary army and the police militia, the ursine thugs were the last people the police would turn to.

Jethro and his steamman friend found themselves politely – but firmly – being escorted back to the surface. Not through the air vents, but up into the Horn of Jago, then out along stone corridors that belonged to the fortifications and mortar positions at the foot of the mountain, past the green-tinged farm domes, and finally into a metal-walled guard complex that joined the battlements. There were plenty of free company fighters from Pericur inside the complex, but no sign of Chalph urs Chalph. If Jethro and his steamman friend were about to be punished for their break-in, surely they would have dragged the young ursine here to share their fate? The mercenaries stood back as first Jethro, then Boxiron were forced to enter a vertical passage and climb a ladder inside to the top of the wall.

Jethro drew a silent breath of relief as he saw First Senator Silvermain standing on the insulated walkway of the battlement’s parapet. He was gazing down the sloped iron walls, the smell of ozone strong from the deadly charge flowing
down the barrier. Little forks of electric energy rippled over the surface, angry green serpents where the steam mists rolling across the ground outside stimulated the killing charge into visibility.

‘Our friends,’ the First Senator called loudly, seeing Jethro emerging out onto the parapet. ‘Our clever Jackelian soul mate and his loyal servant.’

‘Your Excellency,’ acknowledged Jethro, giving a little bow.

‘Just the fellow,’ said the First Senator. ‘How is your search for the conspirators progressing? Has Jago’s evil cabal proved a match for your fierce intellect?’

‘It continues by-and-by. Early days, I fear,’ said Jethro. He reached into his pocket and drew a bag of boiled sweets out. ‘Can I offer you a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop?’

‘My food taster is not here. Do not underestimate those who would rob us of our bright, shining age,’ warned the First Senator, waving the proffered bag of sweets away. ‘Their minds are cunning and their hearts are riddled with the sickness of sedition.’ He leered at the steamman. ‘What of you, strange creature of the metal? Have you found the enemy yet?’

‘I have a simple attitude to such matters,’ replied Boxiron. ‘I wait for my enemy to reveal himself, then I strike him down.’

‘An admirably straightforward method, yes, but the enemy’s daggers will not bounce off our skin as well as they would off your hull plating,’ laughed the First Senator. ‘You will both benefit from seeing the foe at first hand, we believe.’ The First Senator signalled to his senatorial rod carrier and the elaborately liveried servant stepped forward and inserted the ruler’s staff of office into a control socket in the battlement’s floor. ‘Open the doors!’ commanded the First Senator, ‘and send out the prisoners.’