Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus (11 page)

As space, matter and time flew past in a billowing, almost shapeless, rush, I despaired that we should ever catch our quarry, nor even approach the airship nearly enough for me to get a decent shot at it; however, its steady course seemed to be affected by a change in the wind currents upon which it had apparently relied hitherto, for we presently found ourselves gaining rapidly on the massive sky-bound vehicle. By this time the Widow was hurtling through the silent streets of some factory town on the outskirts of the Metropolis, which enabled us to greatly increase our speed, but if we had left the dangers of the uneven Kentish countryside behind us, the greater peril yet preceded us in the sky, and every yard we advanced brought us closer within the range of the airship's guns.

An enormous moon broke through the clouds, and by its radiance I saw that the airship's deck was teeming with Rajput warriors, recognizable by their helmets, and armed with the fluted rifle peculiar to their order, which I knew to be capable of firing explosive bullets more than half an inch in diameter. Even now we were being made the targets of these deadly projectiles, and again and again I heard a high sizzling sound rush past my ears, followed by a dull explosion as the bullets made contact with solid resistance. Holmes swerved the Widow about with such animation and violence, I felt as though I were on a ship at high seas in the middle of a hurricane. Willing myself to keep my eyes off the buildings and curbs we skirted so narrowly in our dizzying dance all over the street, I attempted to target the airship with my rocket-launcher; twice my projectiles flew wide of their mark, and as I painstakingly took aim a third time, I heard Holmes' voice shout at me, though I could not hear his words above the wind rushing in my ears.

Holmes suddenly swung his long arm and whacked me soundly on the side of my head. I turned at once in surprised protest; though Holmes' eyes were turned to the road, his finger pointed fiercely at the hood of the sidecar. He shouted again, and this time I understood his words.

“Pull the lever, Watson! Now, now, now!”

I searched for a lever, and found an unfamiliar knob in the sidecar's paneling. I pulled it hard, and to my amazement, a huge Gatling gun emerged from the sidecar's hood. A pair of long-handled levers slid out of matching crannies on either side of my seat, and beckoned me by their very novelty to fondle their gleaming mechanisms. I had had some small experience upon the battlefield with weapons of this sort, but, knowing Holmes' penchant for tinkering with and remodeling the innards of all of his contraptions, I was unsure how the gun would react to my handling.

Fortunately, at speeds of more than 80 miles per hour, on the heels of armed criminals in a magnificent dirigible, I had not much time for hesitation. Twice I heard the
clink
of metal ricocheting off my mechanical arm, as their massive bullets sang perilously close to their marks, shattering on contact, spraying shrapnel every which way. Fixing my gaze carefully, and bringing the huge gun's firing range within my line of vision, I awaited Holmes cue, and when it came, I braced my fingers around the levers, and set the machinery in motion.

I became dimly conscious of two things as my destructive monster peppered the air before us and our wheels crunched over the irregular debris occasioned by our bullets, and those shot from the Rajput rifles; first, that for all the recoiling effects upon the Widowmak'r and its sidecar, I might have been firing a stationary revolver at 300 rounds a minute, for we lost not a moment of our speed, nor felt even the slightest tremor of whiplash. Secondly, I was aware that it was not by any effort of mine that the whirling gun continued its repeated firing. It fired away merrily by its own volition, until I ascertained that a simple command grip on the left lever served to both halt and commence the process of firing, while the action of the right lever adjusted the direction in which the nose of my weapon pointed

Can I describe the sensations which traversed my being at that moment? We had left the streets lined with darkling factories behind us, and, having strayed from the narrow road, found ourselves once more sailing over hilly pasture-land in pursuit of our target. The countryside, luminous now under the glowing moonlight and reflections of the vehicular lamps, afforded the Widow greater agility of movement. The dirigible before us disappeared briefly from sight behind a low ridge, as we traversed a depressed stretch of ground; Holmes turned the Widow abruptly northward, away from the dirigible's course, and traced a path up a knoll. I glanced around to locate the airship, but our progress took us around a hill which hid the ship completely from my view.

In our long years of association, I have come to trust Holmes' methods, though I admit that for the merest instant I feared that Holmes had finally doomed the chase to failure, and resigned himself to retreat. But my fears were unfounded, for as we reached the summit of the rise, there, hovering over the wide valley before us, was the airship. I saw my target as the Widow screeched to a stop.

Holmes' cry of “FIRE, WATSON!” was drowned as my enormous gun belched murderously from the depths of its revolutions; suddenly the skyline before us was gloriously illuminated with such a display of fireworks as my eyes had never seen.

The hydrogen-filled chambers of the airship's body exploded one by one with a fearsome roar that shook the very air, and then, fragment after fragment of burning material floated or fell to the earth below.

Amidst this glorious display, my heart was wrenched by the cries of the wretched fugitives, trapped in the inferno by the very element that had given them their wings. The screams of terror were indeed horrifying, and I saw more than one man leap to certain death on the uneven plain fifty feet beneath their burning ship. The aircraft, with its gas chambers rapidly consumed by the starving, passionate flames, drifted through the air in a lazy, unguided descent, and foundered at last on the slope of a knoll, a trail of burning debris scattered in its wake.

How long we sat there, watching the fires consume themselves to glowing embers, I cannot tell. By degrees, however, the panorama before us was overrun with the proper agents of law and order, our allies in the chase, who, guided by the sounds and sight of the airship's destruction, had caught up at last—too late—with the quarry we had come to seek.

There were no survivors found amid the debris of the terrible accident. Of the twenty-four bodies recovered from the scene, at least three unarmored corpses matched the given proportions of Pierre Nemo, although these were so scorched and charred they could not be definitely identified. Nothing remained of the magnificent dirigible but its badly mangled metal hull and fittings, and of its contents only a few articles of weaponry and other sundry articles escaped the searing heat of the exploding gases.

Holmes and I retired from the scene in the early hours of the morning, when dawn was just beginning to efface the darkness with its fingering tendrils. Mycroft Holmes, pale and weary from the long night's exertions, but ever possessed of her nobility and grace of carriage, met us on the skirt of the hillock. Holmes slowed the Widow and shook her hand warmly. Brother and sister conversed in hushed tones for a moment, and then, with a word and a courteous nod in my direction, Miss Holmes turned and headed back towards a cluster of uniformed men a few dozen yards distant. Holmes said not a word to me during the long ride back home. Even his habitual recklessness seemed to have been satiated for the time being, and we reached our flat in Baker Street without incident or ceremony.

When I awoke later that day, Holmes was nowhere to be found. Mrs Hudson, upon my inquiries, informed me that he had left Baker Street on his noisy motor-bicycle quite early that morning; shortly after we had arrived home, in fact. I wondered where he had gone, and half-expected to receive a message or note of summons. None came, however, and I remained all that day, alone with my thoughts, in our apartments.

The events of the previous night were blurred in my mind into a continuous scene of smoke-ravaged violence and devastation. Our failure to retrieve the fugitives alive—nay, the fact that I had been responsible for the deaths of so many—weighed very heavily upon my soul. The face of Pierre Nemo, when he looked up into my eyes from the body of his cherished lover, haunted my thoughts. Engaged with my morose pensiveness, I lounged indoors for several long, aimless days.

On Sunday evening a dreadful roar engulfed the air, followed by the familiar screeching and thumping sounds of the Widowmak'r's incarceration in the ground-floor garage. I smiled, despite myself. The door flew open, and Holmes came in—I should say he staggered in—and immediately collapsed into his favorite armchair.

“The old reaction is upon me, Watson,” said he in a weary voice, by way of greeting. “I shall be as limp as a dust-rag for weeks.”

“But Holmes,” said I, “what is the matter? Where have you been these past days?”

“Not now, Watson,” replied Holmes with a hearty yawn. “I can think of nothing I desire more than to put my feet up, except perhaps to consume something nourishing, for I am famished beyond belief. I have been rather hard on myself these last few days. Has Lestrade come yet?"

"No," I replied.

"Oh well, I'm expecting him here at around nine. I have a bit of news for him, and I thought I may as well tell it him in person as send him a wire. Mycroft ought to be here any minute now too. I arranged to meet both them here at nine o'clock, and it's ten minutes past already. But if my ears mistake not, there is the bell."

It was the Inspector. “Good evening, doctor Watson,” said he, shaking himself free of coat, hat and scarf. “Mr. Holmes in yet?”

Holmes himself affirmed his presence in a sleepy voice that issued weakly from the depths of his chair, whither he was curled up, invisible from the door. "Come in, Lestrade. Good of you to come. Pray take a cigar and a seat. Now we have only to await Mycroft's arrival. Oh, that sister of mine! If only she had deigned to accompany me on the Widowmak'r, I might be allowed to take to my bed in half-an-hour. But no, of all the motor-vehicles in London at her disposal, she must needs take the one most nearly related to the snail. Alas! You don't mind waiting, I hope, Lestrade?”

Lestrade's hand paused on its course toward the coal scuttle, where Holmes insisted on keeping his store of cigars, and he looked up with an almost apologetic air on his gloomy face. "Oh, I'm afraid Miss Holmes has had a contretemps of sorts, Mr Holmes; as I was coming here in person, she wished me to inform you that she received a rather urgent summons from somewhere up in the highest quarters, and that she will pop around sometime tomorrow."

“Well,” said Holmes, brightening noticeably, “that's something of a consolation all around, wouldn't you say, Lestrade? I think an early bed will do us all worlds of good. How have the investigations been coming along?"

"We've been busy at it, that's for sure," Lestrade said, vainly attempting to stifle a gaping yawn. "We've scoured London from rim to sole, end to end, and not a trace of that Nemo fellow. I'm beginning to wonder whether he isn't really dead after all. For all we know, his might be one of the bodies in stasis at the mortuary.”

"Perhaps so, and yet... and yet..." Holmes broke off, and lapsed into pensive silence. "Well, never mind that for now. It doesn't do to brood on matters which are beyond one's control. One can only do one's best, after all, eh Lestrade?"

The worthy fellow agreed with Holmes on that point.

"Oh, by the way, Lestrade,” said Holmes, “of course you know that Sir James' death was murder after all, and not suicide.”

“Hmm, I suspected as much. Can you prove it, Mr. Holmes?”

“The sleeve of the dressing gown I took away for testing contained definite traces of hydrogen cyanide, of a particularly concentrated solution,” Holmes said, rummaging in a stack of odd papers pinned by his pocketknife to the mantelpiece. “A handkerchief impregnated with the solution, held against the respiratory ducts for a very brief moment, would have accomplished the deed beautifully, and was undoubtedly the method employed by the killer in question. Naturally the handkerchief was destroyed almost beyond recognition as such, but I correctly imagined that a drop or two of the poison might have dripped from the handkerchief onto the sleeve. I may add that the empty bottle was found in one of the flowerbeds, complete with damning fingerprints—Where is that blasted paper? Ah!” Having located his objective among the sundry residents of the mantelpiece, Holmes handed a sheet of blotting paper to Lestrade, who read its contents and whistled.

“Well, that certainly backs up your theory, Mr Holmes, to a degree. Where, may I ask, did you get this?”

“Right where I imagined it would be. In the waste-paper basket,
chez
Sir James' private study. ”

Lestrade nodded appreciatively, and said that if there were no objections to his immediate departure, he would be glad for a quiet evening at his own hearth. Holmes agreed wholeheartedly. The inspector shook hands warmly all around, and made for the door.

When Inspector Lestrade had gone, I turned to Holmes, who lay nearly recumbent in his chair, his feet atop the mantelpiece, eyes peacefully closed.

“Who killed Sir James, and why?” I asked eagerly. Holmes half-opened his eyes, and glanced at me with a peevish expression.

“His sister, Victoria.” He answered simply.

“No!” I dropped back into my chair, eyes wide with horror and disbelief. “Surely you are mistaken there, Holmes.”