Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection (45 page)

While he was successful in his endeavour, Mr. Fowler did not survive the desperate assault. He managed to set the two blockading ships upon one another, causing a mid-air collision. No recognisable remains have been recovered; Fowler's involvement is known only through the wreckage of his craft and a handwritten note found in his apartment by his landlord.

Conflicting witness reports indicate that Fowler had a companion when he set off from the airfield where his craft was stored; no further evidence of a second person has been uncovered. The Home Office has declared Mr. Jack Fowler the Hero of London, and a statue has been commissioned in his honour.

Several small fires were caused by the flaming debris falling over the neighbourhood of Southampton. Nothing of value was lost.

Chapter 5

"I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone,"
Alton Bartleby sang, hands in his pockets, walking up the Fiske estate's long drive.
"A woman, of her gentle sex, the seeming paragon..."

"Something's not right, Mr. Bartleby," Constable Fuller gestured up towards where the garden party had been, now empty of guests.

Alton checked his pocket-watch. "I've got hours yet before the ceremony. Oh, Aldora will be ever so cross if they've had to move the reception inside." He glanced at the sky. "Weather seems fine, though."

"The pavilion tent's all asunder," Fuller said. "Perhaps it was a wind storm?"

Bartleby's eyes took in the details of the scene as they approached. Upturned tables. Parasol shafts snapped in half. A gaping hole in the solarium's glass wall. It looked as though a crowd had rioted. Or had been driven into a panic. "Something untoward has happened here."

"Do you fancy, Mr. London Detective?"

"A struggle. Someone. Someones. Fighting."

He crouched to the lawn as they reached the scene, running his fingers through it. "Blood. Judging by the spray I'd say it was someone with a blade, just ripping his way through the crowd. Towards the house."

"I'll go fetch the rifle from my office." Constable Fuller left at a jog.

"You go do that," Alton rose. His gaze flickered over the grass, noting its patterns, a mental map forming to indicate where those present had fled. Most of those present had run towards the estate chapel or garages, perhaps making their way to the gates and the safety of town.

A particular set of prints caught his attention. "Aldora."

She'd been there. Confronted the aggressor. He'd pursued her inside.

Alton made haste towards the shattered patio doors. Just beyond them one of the maids was sweeping up shards of broken glass.

"What's happened here?" he asked.

The maid stammered, fear in her eyes.

"Alton." Aldora emerged from the kitchen hall, wedding dress torn, makeup smeared. She approached him with quick steps, and the maid hastily backed away, out of the room.

"Aldora, sweetheart, are you--"

The slap across his face fairly knocked the taste of bourbon out of his mouth.

"I give you one task, Alton Bartleby," she spoke quickly, the words pouring out of her mouth in a torrent. "One simple task, to assist my mother in greeting the guests. The entire wedding, our wedding, this day that has been years in coming, and you have but one responsibility. And what do you do?"

"Aldora, I was--"

She slapped him again, harder, and Alton almost collapsed against the hallway's frame. "I don't care where you were or what you were doing, Alton. I don't care about your excuses. You weren't here, where I needed you to be. You were off on some distraction, being an irresponsible sot, while some mad combination of man and machine was trying to kill me, kill my family."

Bartleby stared at her wordlessly, eyes wide.

She raised her hand again and he flinched. "Were you here, Alton, you might have noticed something off about the man purporting to be my brother. Were you here, Alton, you might have been able to head him off before he attacked our guests. Were you
here
, Alton Bartleby, helping my mother with the guests, she might still be, might not be..."

"Mary?" Bartleby asked. "Aldora, is your mother alright?"

Adora grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head back against the wall with a sudden viciousness. He cried out and clutched his head, slumping to the floor.

"She is unwell, Alton, and I blame you for this in its entirety." She squatted next to him, hand iron around his throat. "If my mother dies because of your drunken irresponsibility, there will be nowhere you can run, nowhere you can hide, nowhere you can go to escape my wrath. Your brilliant mind will avail you not when it's scattered across the cobblestones of whatever hole you crawl away to. I am saying that if my mother dies, I will kill you. Do we have an understanding?"

Alton stared, wide-eyed, at his fiancée. "Y-yes!"

"Good." Aldora stood, wiping the dust from her hands. "Clean yourself up and join James in my father's workshop. Maybe he has some use for you. I do not."

***

James's hands twisted as he pulled Grayson Fiske's arm from its socket with a crisp meaty sound that reminded Alton of the lobster he'd had for dinner the night prior. Little of his fiancée's brother's body was yet flesh, but the connective tissue still had an unpleasant organic quality to it.

"You can hardly fault the woman for being cross, Bartleby." James peered at the ball-joint at the arm's end through a pair of multi-lensed articulated goggles. "Your absence nearly resulted in her and her parents' demise."

"This goes beyond cross." He sat on a stool well away from the table where his partner worked, far enough that he couldn't quite see the details of the investigation but near enough to hold a conversation. "She threatened my life. And I think she meant it this time."

Alton had joined his partner in the machinist shop near the centre of town, where James had taken Grayson's remains after dispatching him. It showed uncharacteristic social grace on the part of the engineer to have taken the fallen Fiske son from the estate and his distraught family. Alton was proud of him.

"It's only natural that she feels let down." James turned the arm over in his hand.

"But that's the key to my persona. Alton Bartleby, incorrigible rogue, dashing away from his responsibilities to pursue whatever's caught my eye. I cannot imagine that she'd have been surprised."

James paused and set the arm carefully alongside the rest of Grayson's carefully disassembled remains. The chest cavity had been pried open and its contents removed, organs of copper and brass. Some of it had been badly damaged in the melee that had ensued between the mechanical man and the furious engineer, but James had managed to disable it with minimal destruction. His hands, face, and arms bore small lacerations and bruising that spoke of the injuries he'd suffered in the process.

"Bartleby, I find it difficult to reconcile your general social aptitudes with the conclusions you're drawing in this matter."

"What do you mean?"

"This game of identity you play. With the perceptions of others. Making them see you as you wish to be seen. It doesn't usually extend to deceiving yourself as well."

"I'm afraid I've no idea--"

"Stop." The word came quietly. "Bartleby. Alton. Please. You know how I am. You know that even in the best of times I simply disregard the verbal games that you and Aldora delight in. These games of subtext and meaning and double-layered speech. I am but a simple engineer, and I don't have the time or patience to parse meanings coached within meanings."

"Your directness is one of the qualities I most value in you, James."

"Then listen now, and let me speak plain." He turned back to the half-corpse half-machine laid out before him. "You've told me, again and again, over the years of your engagement that it was a sham, a show played for the benefit of a society so that you and Aldora might live the lives you choose without need of further obligation."

"This is so."

"You've said it meaningless, unimportant, something lacking in emotional resonance for the pair of you. You know me, Bartleby. Emotion isn't something I particularly care for or understand." James held his hands up, their backs towards his partner. They were lacerated, but most of the blood caking his nails was not his own.

"I've let the girl, Xin Yan, into my heart in a way that I was ill prepared for, Bartleby. She makes me feel like the father I'd wished I had, and when she is threatened, this terrible rage settles upon me, coupled with a blood-lust I can scarcely comprehend. I do not like feeling its intensity. I don't like losing control over what I feel, or what it makes me do. It terrifies me, and this is the sum total of my emotional comprehension."

Alton remained silent.

James turned and leaned against the edge of the examination table. "I may not understand these feelings, but I acknowledge that they make me act irrationally. And I see you -- the drinking, the false flippancy, the self-deception, the protestations in word and deed regarding how little this marriage means to you--"

"James--"

"Bartleby, please. I see you act this way, and I cannot comprehend this level of self-deception. I don't know what you feel about Aldora and your marriage, but I know you feel it. I know you suffer, and I find myself wondering how many layers of personal obfuscation you've buried it under."

"It's complicated," Alton said.

"Of that I've no doubt. But think on this, Bartleby. Even I can tell. What does Aldora see, she who is as keen as you with her insights into the hearts of others?"

"I..."

James turned back to the body. "I might make the suggestion, dear friend, that you invest the time required to find out what it is that you do feel, lest you be the last to know."

They sat in silence for a small eternity, Alton's face burning. He kept trying to find the flaws in James's observations, but all he came up with were excuses. He brushed them aside, digging deeper into himself, into his reasoning. He typically avoided such reflections; what lay beneath was not to be taken lightly.

"I'm worried about her," he said.

"Aldora?"

"Yes. I overheard her and an old classmate in the hall earlier. The woman was baiting Aldora, clearly trying to get a rise out of her."

James chuckled. "How did she respond?"

Bartleby shrugged. "She... she didn't. Not substantially. She just took it, you know? Made pleasant conversation in the face of increasingly personal insults."

"That doesn't sound like her."

"No it does not." Alton stood and walked over to the table, gazing down at the dissected automaton without really seeing it. "It was so unlike her, James. The Aldora I know would have cocked an eyebrow, smiled a little, then proceeded to verbally tear the girl apart."

"Perhaps she's distracted," James suggested. "With the wedding and all. Or maybe she's simply become more patient."

"No," the bridegroom said. "It lies deeper than that. She's gone through a lot the last year, and I think she blames herself for a good deal of it. Penny's father was killed because she didn't reach him in time. She failed to recognise Cemal Bey for the monster he was in Istanbul. Having to... lose her brother. I think she let Regina get away with abusing her out of a masochistic need to punish herself."

James frowned. "A masochistic need to be punished does not bode well for our current circumstance, Bartleby."

"I am afraid that until she confronts and admits the pain's she suffered she will be missing that vital spark that makes her so beautifully formidable."

They fell silent again, James studying his partner's down-turned expression curiously.

Alton cleared his throat. "So. This. Ah. This impostor."

"It's an astounding simulacrum," James said. "A mending of dead flesh and clockwork the likes of which I've never before seen."

"You said it wasn't one of the resurrected. Is it a new sort of automaton?" Bartleby slid off of his stool and joined James by the table.

"It's a new sort of something." James lifted the thing's head, rotating it to show Alton the gap in the skull's crown. "The brain-case had been hollowed out and reinforced, replaced with a galvanic power cell. Nothing of the original man remains. Remember the Spider?"

"Human nervous system in a clockwork body?"

"This is the opposite. Sort of. Very little flesh remains. The organs have been scooped out, and the bones replaced with reinforced brass and copper, creating an exoskeleton covered with flesh. What remains of the man this once was is little more than a disguise."

"That's ghastly."

"What's even more interesting are the devices that its manufacturers replaced the organs with."

"Like this?" Bartleby indicated a cubic mass of gears and flanges.

"Yes. This, my friend, is the most sophisticated analytical engine I've ever come across. It fits, in its entirety, within the hollowed out chest cavity of our friend here, and controls its motor functions."

"How is that possible?"

James held up another device. "With this. It's a wireless telegraphy receiver. It translates the radiographic impulses that are sent to it into commands for the body to obey. Speakers in the body's throat translate text into speech using enough of the original corpse's physiology that it even sounded like Aldora's brother."