Iron and Blood (48 page)

“You won’t have to stay here by yourself much longer,” Rick said. “And look, we brought you a whole box of the equipment you wanted.”

Adam gave a long, dramatic sigh. “Thanks. But I really am going a little nuts down here. It’s not even that I miss people, most of the time. In fact, there’s a lot I don’t miss about being in the old lab. No one interrupts me. No one pulls me away to talk to people who think they’re even more important than they are. It’s just—”

“A little lonely?” Jake finished for him.

Adam nodded, and reached over to grab a half-empty coffee cup, downing the cold contents in a gulp. “Now and then.”

“Well, if it’s any help, you’ve also had a pass on having to deal with all the questions about how, exactly, the lab managed to blow up,” Rick said. “Local police, federal agents; from what I hear, the place has been crawling with cops since they got the fire out.”

Adam winced. “How badly was the building damaged?”

Jake gave him a sidelong glance. “Not as badly as the last time you burned it down. Doesn’t appear that the men who set the bombs really knew what they were doing.” He grinned. “Luckily, from what we’ve heard, the damage was mainly in the back and on the loading dock, so they don’t have to rebuild the upper floors—this time. I think they reinforced the walls after the last incident.”

“Yeah, yeah. Make one mistake and no one lets you live it down,” Adam replied. “I’d been working on the power source for one of my projects, and I got the pressure gauge wrong—”

“Speaking of power sources,” Rick said, “Have you had a chance to work on a smaller version of that weapon you used at the cemetery?”

Adam brightened. “You mean the energy ray?”

“Yep.”

Adam jumped up and began moving through the erstwhile lab excitedly, gathering up papers and various pieces of equipment, which he dumped on the table nearest to where Jake and Rick sat.

“I’ve been working on it a lot lately. Trying to stabilize the beam, get the energy levels more precise.”

“We could also use that force gun you showed me,” Rick added. “Maybe even the disruptor.”

“Really?” Adam said. “That would almost make up for being stuck down here. We don’t happen to be blowing up the people who blew up my lab, do we?”

“The man’s bright,” Rick said to Jake, raising an eyebrow. “That’s why they gave him a lab coat. Quick on the uptake.”

Adam gave Rick a withering look. “Jealous,” he sniffed, but the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. “So, fill me in.”

It took a while for them to bring Adam up to speed. When they finished, Adam sat back in his chair, tented his fingers, and closed his eyes, thinking.

“All right,” he said. “So Veles and Thwaites were after the tourmaquartz all along. The
gessyan
were an accident, but Veles used the confusion to keep people from looking too closely at what they were really doing at the mine. Jasinski got in their way and knew too much. And Jasinski’s involvement ended up getting your dad killed, and having Veles and Thwaites go after all of us—right?”

“That’s what we think,” Rick said.

Adam smiled, but this time, it was a cool, calculating expression. “And they’re the ones trying to hurt you and Rick? Well then. I guess I don’t have any qualms about blowing them up.”

Adam rocked his chair back and forth. “You know, for Veles and Thwaites it’s not just the money. Tourmaquartz is power. Right now, there are only a few handfuls of the crystals in circulation. But if someone found more of it—that could change the balance of power. Weapons, locomotion devices, all powered by tourmaquartz.” He glanced from Rick to Jake in utter seriousness. “Whoever controls the tourmaquartz controls the world.”

They sat in silence, thinking about that for a moment. “What have you been working on down here?” Jake finally asked.

“I thought you’d never ask. I told you I fine-tuned Mr. Tesla’s ray. Managed to get the source box smaller, more portable. The one we tried out in the cemetery needed to be hauled in a wagon. What I’ve got now is light enough to go up in an airship.”

“Have you tested it?” Jake said, and Adam fixed him with a withering look.

“Do you see scorch marks? No. But it should work. The calculations are right.”

Jake did not mention that, given the power he had seen in the cemetery, relying on calculations alone did not make him feel extremely confident, especially if he might be going up in an airship with the weapon. “That sounds perfect,” he said, although the sidelong glance he got from Rick told him his friend had the same reservations.

“Right,” Adam said. “Cullen loves it. He stops by to visit between runs. Been working on some new defenses for the
Allegheny Princess
; airship armor. Gonna need it, with the company you’ve been keeping. You know, Rick, you’d be up on all of this if you spent more time here.”

“Once we’re through this and no one is trying to kill me, I’d be happy to work on some of these with you,” Rick replied.

“I also improved the range on the wrist telegraph I gave Mitch and Jacob,” Adam said. “Used to only be good for about a mile between the sender and receiver. I managed to boost the signal, so it should go two miles at least. Jacob has a pair of my gadget glasses; I think it’s what he’s using to have Hans look around the deeper levels at the mine.”

Adam walked over to another table, with the look of a proud father. “And these are the next generation of my listening devices. The range on the one I gave you was only a few hundred feet. These will go between an airship and the ground—within limits.” He moved around the table to hold up a small box. “Know what this is?”

When Jake and Rick shook their heads, Adam grinned. “A camera. Easy to conceal. Nowhere near as big as those boxy monstrosities the photographers use. Think of what you could get with this on an airship! Or, for that matter, how easy it would be to conceal it if you had to get in and out of a place without being noticed.” His smile widened. “I think Mitch and Jacob will pay a premium for it, don’t you? Maybe even throw in some beer.”

“Make sure you keep some of the good stuff for us and I’ll buy you all the beer you can drink!” Rick said. “And speaking of Agents Storm and Drangosavich, do you really believe the story they gave Drostan, that they’ve been put on probation and they’re working rogue?”

Usually, Adam was circumspect about what he said. Jake was hoping that the time alone in a basement, on the heels of an attempt on his life, might make him a little more willing to share information.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Adam said. “Mitch blows stuff up almost as much as I do. He just blows up enough of the right stuff that they slap his wrist and then bring him back into the fold.” He downed another cup of coffee. “Those two men your private investigator saw, Tumblety and Brunrichter—they’re trouble. Mitch and Jacob tangled with them—and their clockwork corpses—before. So did Drostan. And when the mad doctors got away, I think it made Mitch angry.”

“So Mitch and Jacob intended to inflict some payback on the mad docs, and stumbled onto something bigger—and messier—than they bargained for?” Rick asked.

Adam nodded. “And that puts them in a tough place. In case you hadn’t noticed, Mitch Storm doesn’t play by anyone’s rules but his own. That keeps him and his partner alive, but if he and Jacob get caught by the Department compromising an investigation—”

“They’ll bust him down to private and send him out to clean the stables,” Rick finished.

“Bingo,” Adam replied. He paused, then forged ahead. “Mitch has been trying to protect you. He and Jacob have always played fair with me. I think you should trust him—cautiously.”

“Why cautiously?” Jake asked.

Adam grimaced. “Because you’re exactly the kind of people the Department wants to have up its sleeve. Think about it. You and Rick go in and out of different countries all the time. You bring big boxes of stuff with you. You work for wealthy, powerful people, some of whom might be a little shady. You acquire interesting objects, with questionable provenance. In other words, you’d be the perfect spies. And they would love to recruit you.”

“No,” Jake and Rick said in unison.

“We work for ourselves,” Jake added

“The Department’s been after both our fathers for a while,” Rick said. “They refused. Father told me that while he would assist them when he agreed with their cause, joining them ‘officially’ was a slippery slope and we wouldn’t like the outcome… or the rules.”

Adam held up a hand. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just telling you how Mitch Storm thinks. On the other hand,” he said, a crafty expression stealing across his face, “guys like Mitch and Jacob are good friends to have if you’re in a jam. So a few favors done and returned could be valuable—if you hear what I’m saying.”

“Just make sure you bring all your good ideas to the meeting tonight,” Rick said.

Adam looked from Rick to Jake and back again. “Given how many people are trying to kill us, should we really be going to the Desmet house?”

Jake shrugged. “Where would you feel safer? Andreas and Renate are going to reinforce the wardings, and I believe Father Matija has some precautions he intends to take as well. There isn’t anywhere that’s truly safe, and it allows Mother to keep to the polite fiction of remaining in mourning seclusion.”

“After everything that’s happened, she’s still concerned about etiquette?” Rick asked.

“Oh, hell no,” Jake replied. “But Henry’s obsessed with what the neighbors think. Someone sent him a wire after the last incident, and since he’s still miffed about being shot, he decided the whole thing must have been my fault.” He grimaced. “We just don’t want to annoy him enough that he decides he has to come home.”

“I
T’S DEFINITELY TOURMAQUARTZ
.” Jacob Drangosavich paced the floor of the Desmet home as he gave his report. He looked haggard and there was a spreading bruise on one side of his face.

“You’re sure?” Adam Farber said.

Mitch Storm nodded soberly. For once, he showed none of his usual cockiness. His eyes had the hard glint of a man who had seen more than his share of action. “We’d heard the Department was concerned that a tourmaquartz deposit had been found and not properly reported.”

“And you two really didn’t know that the tourmaquartz was in Vesta Nine before this?” Jake asked with suspicion.

Mitch shook his head. “Honest. We wanted to bring down Tumblety and Brunrichter. But the more we learned about how Veles and Thwaites were handling everything, the more our suspicions grew, because they’ve taken risks that don’t add up if all they’re getting is coal.”

“Hans and I got into the mine without a hitch,” Jacob said. “I stayed on the upper levels and kept an ear out for what the miners were saying—helps to speak their languages,” he added. “Hans went deeper. That’s how I got the rest of the information.” He glared at them. “At a cost, I’d add. Hans volunteered to stay behind, be our man on the inside. We have to get him out.”

“Here’s what we know, thanks to Hans,” Jacob continued. “There are hundreds of men on three shifts down in that mine, on the coal-only levels. Those miners don’t go to the deepest levels. They’re terrified of what goes on down there—with good reason. The deeper you go, the more likely you are to encounter the ‘monsters’—that’s where most of the ‘accidents’ have happened. But the talk is that the attacks have been happening closer and closer to the surface.

“As you descend, there are… what I’d call
secure
levels. The first level below the regular coal mining is pretty much slave labor. Shackles, manacles—it’s clear they plan to work the blighters to death before replacing them.” Jacob paused, as if the horror of what he had seen would not leave him.

“On the next level down, it’s the clockwork zombies,” he continued. “They’re more advanced than what Tumblety and Brunrichter came up with the last time. They can be set to perform specific tasks.

“The deepest levels are
werkmen
, not many of them but enough. I’m guessing that since they couldn’t recruit or kidnap Adam into working for them, Veles and Thwaites had their engineers take apart one of the
werkmen
who’d gone missing from the Department and figured out how it works.” He stopped to take a drink of water.

“They’re the ones who are pulling out most of the tourmaquartz. The workers on the other secure levels process it, and then send it up in sealed containers under guard. The guys on the upper levels don’t know what’s really going on, and they don’t want to know. They just move the boxes, and try to forget anything they see. When I asked, they clammed up tighter than a drum. They told me that if I wanted to see daylight again, I should stop asking questions and keep my nose out of it.”

“How much tourmaquartz are we talking about?” Adam asked, leaning forward. “Even the smallest shards of it are enough to run some of my most powerful designs.”

“That’s just it,” Mitch said. “We’re not sure. Since the tourmaquartz comes up in sealed containers, we aren’t sure how much of it there is. But there’s very little tourmaquartz to be had now, so it doesn’t take a lot to double, even triple the supply. And it would still be more valuable than diamonds.”