Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology (2 page)

“Devil crowns,” the Doctor liked to call them. Formed of the same metallic compound the Doctor had dubbed “Paxanium,” the halos could only be returned to Nidj’s mechanical hand, being indifferent to magnetization with any other metal on earth.

It had taken her two months to master their use, decapitating scarecrow after scarecrow on the farm surrounding the Doctor’s research facility outside Bucharest. For three weeks the straw effigies just laughed at her. And then for three weeks the Doctor’s servants and maids let the house fill with dust, spending most of their time collecting the heads that the Doctor’s eight greyhounds were only so happy to redistribute and hide all over the mansion.

The midge’s mechanical wings opened to four times their size.
Impressive
, thought Nidj, letting fly the first halo aimed straight for the midge’s wasp-like face. Despite its tendency to favor its prey’s annihilation over surveying the details of its environment first, the midge anticipated the girl’s oncoming attack. Joining its metal wings together like a tulip, it quickly barrel-rolled out of the path of the first halo. Before Nidj could adjust the windsuit for evasive maneuvers, the robot inverted its body once more, dive-bombing directly down on top of her.

The robot’s wings wrapped around her body like a metal cocoon, blotting out the world or any understanding of up or down, and Nidj cried out in pain as its drill mouth tore down into her arm—the human one. The robot’s buzzing, chattering voice now rose like a chorus inside its metal cocoon, amplifying and joining with her own screams.

But the midge’s whole obsession with the annihilation of its prey would also be its downfall:
did it see the other halos thrown behind me before it dive-bombed? It couldn’t have
, she thought, the assumption the entire reason why she had let it latch on so long.
Just long enough for
. . .

A wild rending sound erupted through the cocoon as the twin halos sliced unperturbed through the unnecessary metal, desirous to return to rest once again in their holster. In a few short seconds, the twin disks had unseamed the robot like one might dissect a worm or a snake—top to bottom, exposing all the essential parts in the process. The robot’s chattering voice went silent as it exploded in a tremor of electricity and smoke.

Dash-dot . . . dot-dot . . . dash-dot-dot . . . dot-dash-dash-dash! Nidj!
The Doctor tapped over and over, jumping madly from each of the ship’s seven periscopes rigged to provide the Bird with complete 360-degree vision.

But the girl, disappearing once more into the clouds, did not reply.

She was back in the bed, but the Doctor hadn’t come to wake her yet. The train had stopped to refuel just outside Moscow, unable to finish its thousand-mile journey from the Carpathians Mountains to the Slavic capital.

A Polish student had installed a hair-trigger bomb in the dining car, but it never went off. He had leapt from the train shortly afterwards, and the word circulating like a fever around the plush, cushioned cabins was that he was dead. Talk of the strange Turkish girl’s arm crushed by the train door quickly disappeared from the refined discourse of the train’s fifty passengers, most of them doctors and bankers, a few in the Czar’s own employ.

But the Doctor had not come back to wake her in the
couchette
yet. She floated above the cramped, five-by-three bed, drenched in the diethyl river, her mind coming in and out of consciousness,  drifting between the drugged numbness and blinding, searing pain.

She could see he had returned. He was standing at the glass mosaic window looking in at her. His face separated into a dozen pieces, the eyes and mouth magnified in unnatural proportion to the rest of the face, like a carnival house mirror.
He’s trying to tell me something
.

The weathered lips framed whispered cadences that came mysteriously through the glass window into her brain, into the implant installed in her left ear to keep her in close contact in the event of danger.
Danger . . . Dot-dash-dash . . . dot-dash . . . dash-dot-dash . . . dot . . . dot-dot-dash . . . dot-dash-dash-dot . . .

Wake up . . . Wake up . . . Wake up . . .

The endless ocean lay beneath her, one undulating plate of grey and blue rapidly approaching her plummeting body. The force of the downward rush was almost too much for her to contend with, the inevitable pull on all things that fell from the sky, or wingless from the tops of tall trees or buildings.

Nidj forced the bleeding arm up to her chest as the wind sucked a steady stream of crimson droplets up into her face. Her fingers were only an inch away from the knob . . . but the fall was fighting her. She closed her eyes and reached harder. Although the world beyond her eyes swirled into pure chaos, inside the forced darkness of her eyelids a stillness now came over her, a secret confidence hidden deep there in the closet of her soul.

The Doctor knew it, and somehow Nidj did, too, that she was not meant to die like this, like some wingless bird, but to fly like Icarus’ sister ever upwards towards the sun. But she wouldn’t melt—she was half-metal, half-human. And her modifications would redeem her—not doom her in the end.

The knob turned without a squeal twenty feet above the swelling waves that rose to almost brush her face. Like a great hand catching her, then launching her back up into the sky, she rose with the windsuit for a few seconds as the jets fired back on, then unexpectedly fired off. She had maxed out the experimental suit’s capabilities.

For a split second, she hung like a feather above the world, before a thousand grasping hands resumed their pull back down into the churning waters below. She hit the water a second later and sank like a stone. For a few choked moments, she floundered beneath the capsizing waves as the world fell away—one shimmering veil of white retreating above her head.

Fortunately for her, the mask hadn’t come off when she broke through the water. The Doctor had the foresight to make the mask waterproof, sealing the cracks and spiraling crevices of the shell with an impermeable gel. But the suit, designed for incredible lightness in the air, was now completely waterlogged. It felt like the shell of a great sea tortoise strapped to her back, working with the ocean to pull her under.

Nidj fought the pull with all the fury left in her, clawing and kicking her way back to the quicksilver surface while everything battled against her, insisting she give up and sink back into the nothingness the French called
les ténèbres
:
the black nothingness, the soul deprived of even the rumor of light
.

Clawing like a feral beast, she breached the silent, dark world, back into the sun and the waves. She didn’t know how much blood she had lost since the midge, only that her brain felt thin—like the high altitude feeling she felt crawling out on the wing of the ship.

She could see the log bobbing in the white caps about twenty feet off to her left . . . then it was gone. It was just her mind creating the illusion of hope before winking out forever. But there it was again, peeking above the waves, and beyond it, a long tan and green scar of land in the distance.
An island!

But near or far, it was a long shot however one looked at it. The blood was pouring from her arm, the sting of the salt adding to its unbearable hemorrhage. She would bleed out before she ever reached the island. Nidj gritted her teeth and prayed for the log.

Pulling herself along sidestroke with her bleeding arm, she slipped one of the razor halos from its holster with her mechanical hand. Holding fast to the sharp disk, she stabbed out with it like an ice pick at the log floating just a few feet beyond her reach. She overcompensated. She plunged back into the swirling darkness.

Cursing and screaming, she fought her way back up into the sun world, lashing out at the log, no longer an illusion, but more real than anything she had ever known. This time, the makeshift pick connected. Heaving until she saw stars, she pulled her trembling body up onto the log.

It was actually two logs, she discovered, staring out at the world horizontally on her side. They had been bound together in a loose tangle of vines. The binding wasn’t firm: it was a gift of pure chance, not the artwork of some fastidious human hand. There was no knowing how long the binding would hold; if it would last long enough to bear her to the shelter of the island that taunted her, still half a mile off.
And then what?
It was like commuting one swift death sentence for a longer one.

She screamed again, holding her bleeding arm up to her chest to stop the flow. The arm felt on fire, and the rest would follow soon if she couldn’t find some way of stopping the bleeding.

Panting, she rolled over, onto her back, and stared up at the sky. She prayed to whatever god still existed that she would see the dozen wings of the Bird hovering just beyond a whiff of cloud, nestled like a white egg in the azure sky. But there was just the sky. Perhaps the old man had already crashed into the ocean. Perhaps he was already dead.

Perhaps him saving her that day on the train, and her subsequent oath in the Moscow hotel to help him prove the genius of his pneumatic science by flying round the world in the Bird. Perhaps all of it was just stating the inevitable fact of our biology: that death comes for the quick and the lucky, the slow and the wicked, for those who resist
les ténèbres
, and for those who call out to it like a distant lover
.

The skyrates would have their victory over the aging Doctor, their theft of his great science forgotten in the success of their mission and subsequent incorporation into living myth as heroes of the New Age. It would come to pass. It was the whole fatalism pregnant in their dream of pure, autonomous flight above the nationalized earth.

The dead would only carry the dead down into the dark of nothingness—
le néant
—and she would be counted a friend and sister among them.

Suddenly, from beneath the makeshift raft, something shuddered.

Nidj didn’t know anything about sharks, having only seen one once as a girl outside the Greek ruins in Ephesus dragging some poor creature through the surf. The next shudder was unmistakable: her bleeding arm had opened the channel in front of the island like a buffet line to whatever scoured the surrounding reef in hope of an easy meal.

Jerking up onto her knees, she could make out the three sets of fins slicing through the swirling current. As the next wave rose before her, nearly flipping the makeshift raft and her along with it, Nidj came face to face with the grey ghost, as if the wave was another trick mirror in the deathly carnival of the ocean.

Although the line of communication to the ship had gone dead, she could still hear the Doctor’s voice inside her ear, as if he was standing on the other side of the raft spurring her on, his trademark scowl darkening beneath his plume of white hair:
We are frail things, Mein Liebling.We suffer and exhaust our bodies each day to know what we are made of in this impermanent prison that is our flesh.But you shall be something different, something far greater. Your fears shall not be our fears. You are not the same frightened girl covered in blood on that train, Mein kleine Mädchen. You are the beginnings of stars . . .

Nidj closed her eyes. She trained the three disks in her mechanical hand, turning them like giant coins that would either buy her fortune or her death. The wave rose again. As the grey shadow turned to face her, she told herself it was nothing more than a scarecrow, its grey, leathery face made of nothing but straw.

It was not her death. Not now, not here . . .

The jaws of the beast opened before her and stayed opened as the head ringed in a jet of crimson that burst all over her pale, shocked face.
Clink!

The severed head fell down between the two logs, jostling back and forth like a ball for a few seconds before lodging firmly in the tangled nest of vines. Even in death, the face of prehistoric hunter grinned at her. Screaming wildly, she kicked the beast’s face down into the water until her tan leather boots were smeared with its dark offal. She knew what she had to do next.

As the world above and below swam before her eyes, she lowered her body and began to paddle, digging both arms down into the surf, looking back every now and then to see if the other two had taken the bait. A frenzy of splashing answered her as the next wave picked her up in its reckless embrace.

Over the jagged reef it carried her, whether by luck or by fate, she would never know. She didn’t stop paddling until she could see the beach. And even as she ran through the surf, she held the three disks behind her, ready to strike the unseen hunters flitting beneath the translucent surface.

In the wet, warm sand she collapsed. The ocean and sky swirled all around her. Time fell away, dissolving into the ether of her adrenaline giving way to unbearable pain once more. Only then, at the edge of safety, did Nidj let herself go.