The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (19 page)

Grumbles remained frozen with one arm raised.

“Where's my libation?” Swinburne asked.

No reply.

“Hey! Bucket head!”

Nothing.

“He's wound down,” Burton observed.

“Thank goodness. What on earth was that about?”

Burton rapped his knuckles against the clockwork man's head. “Good question.”

A FURTHER INCIDENT IN WHICH CLOCKWORK MEN RUN AMOK

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

—Benjamin Disraeli

Having left the still-senseless Krishnamurthy with hotel staff, and after sending a message up to suite 5 to warn the minister that Grumbles had developed a fault and should not under any circumstances be rewound, Burton and Swinburne took to the air. They'd covered half the distance to Battersea before it occurred to them that neither knew how to fly a rotorchair. At almost exactly the same moment, they lost both confidence and control, and the two flying machines dipped nose first toward the ground.

Swinburne screeched.

Burton cursed.

Aptitude that wasn't their own took over, and, as they grappled with the control levers and sent the rotorchairs skimming low over rooftops, both men praised whatever it was that had bestowed upon them the knowledge and skills of the men they'd replaced.

Ahead, the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station emerged from the city's smoke and drizzle. The duo flew over the Thames and circled the edifice but could see no signs of conflict. They set down in front of the gate—where the
Orpheus
had previously landed—and were clambering out of their machines when Michael Faraday came stumbling from the building waving his arms and shouting incoherently. His white hair was sticking out in every direction.

“Aargh!” he told them. “Yaaah! Impossible! Good gosh! No!”

“Take it easy, man,” Burton said. “Speak slowly.”

“They took it! They went crazy and took the blessed thing!”

“Who took what?”

“The clockwork men! They attacked us! Overpowered us! Aargh!”

“We've just had a run-in with one of the brass men ourselves. What's got into them?”

“I haven't a clue! The whole lot of 'em have flown off!”

“Off the handle?” Swinburne asked.

“Off in the whatsit.”

“The whatsit? What's that?”

“The thing. Ship. The
Orpheus
.”

“They stole the—?” Burton looked back at the rotorchairs. He'd assumed the DOGS had moved the ship.

“How long ago?”

“Oof! What? Er. Maybe half an hour.”

“In which direction?”

Faraday gave a vague wave of his arm. “Over the thingamajig. Water. The river.”

“If you're in no further danger, Mr. Faraday, Algy and I will scout around. Maybe we'll spot it.”

“Yes! Go, please! Yaaah!”

Burton addressed Swinburne. “We'll circle the city in opposite directions and meet back here.”

Swinburne, with his teeth chattering as a result of his wet clothing, belted himself back into his rotorchair's seat and slid down over his eyes the flying goggles he'd found in its storage box.

The two rotorchairs shot upward and separated. Burton steered his northwestward, while Swinburne took a northeasterly course. There was an unbroken, flat, grey blanket of cloud overhead, but it occupied a much higher altitude than any ship could fly, so offered no opportunity for concealment to the missing vessel. The atmosphere was dirty and wet, and visibility was bad, but not to the point where a ship the size of the
Orpheus
would be hidden by it.

As he soared across the river, Burton muttered to himself, “Yesterday, Doctor Steinhaueser and I rescued a sparrow from the garden pond. Today, I'm in a flying armchair hunting for mechanical thieves.”

Something felt terribly amiss with the first part of that statement, but, recalling the pact he'd made with his fellow reborn, he refused to dwell on it.

Below, Knightsbridge slipped past, then Belgravia, Portman Square, and Oxford Street. There were other rotorchairs and ornithopters all around him and, ahead, a much bigger machine. He initially thought it might be the
Orpheus
but was disappointed when he drew alongside it and saw the name
Darling
Lucy May
.

Regent's Park, Camden Town, eastward over Holloway and Islington, and southward back toward the river, passing Finsbury and the hive of activity that was the half-rebuilt East End.

Burton flew westward along the course of the Thames until he arrived back at Battersea. He landed, ran into the station, and hailed a young woman who was monitoring flashing lights on an apparatus of spinning wheels, clacking valves, and wheezing bellows. “Ma'am! Mr. Faraday?”

She pointed.

Striding in the indicated direction, he saw Faraday at a workbench, applying a pair of pliers to an arrangement of wires and unfathomable parts. The man looked up at his approach, squinted, and with far greater self-control than he'd previously displayed, said, “Aargh!”

“No sign of it,” Burton announced.

“I simply cannot understand what happened,” Faraday said. “Every clockwork man in the—in the place—the station! Gosh! We've had them for years. They've never gone wrong before.”

“The timing appears significant, don't you think?”

“Very! Very significant indeed! Why so?”

“The ship returns after a thirteen-month absence and they suddenly go wild and make off with it?”

“Ah. I see what you mean. Yes. Significant is the word. And Fiddlesticks.”

“Fiddlesticks? What about him?”

“He took the diamonds out of Brunel's head.”

Burton's knees almost gave way. He grabbed at a workbench to steady himself. The future he'd visited must have already changed. If the Edward Oxford consciousness was no longer in the Brunel body, would it find another route through which to infiltrate the empire as the decades passed? Had his counterpart's self-sacrifice been in vain?

“By God!” he croaked. “Then Spring Heeled Jack is out of our hands!”

Pushing himself upright, he stood with the back of his right wrist pressed against his mouth and his eyes flicking from right to left, fighting the impression that everything around him was illusory and impossible.

“Are you quite all right?” Faraday asked.

“I should report back to the minister.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Faraday held up the thing of wires and parts. “There! Mended! Now then, what was it for? Do you recall?”

“I never knew in the first place.”

“Oh.”

“When Swinburne arrives, tell him to meet me at the hotel, will you?”

“Swinburne? The poet fellow? Very well.”

Burton's instruction proved needless. As he returned to his rotorchair, Swinburne's landed with a thud beside it.

“Nothing!” the poet announced. “Either it made off at top speed or it's landed somewhere in the city.”

“In which case it would have been seen,” Burton countered. “But by whom, and how do we find that witness?”

“Through Trounce and Scotland Yard, perhaps?”

“Good idea. Let's see what he can do. You're shivering.”

“I'm damp.”

“We'll return these chairs and get you into something dry.”

“And get something wet into me. Grumbles promised me a Cognac.”

They flew back to the Royal Venetia Hotel, landed beside its vehicle shed, and were immediately set upon by two very irate men.

“What the very deuce do you think you're playing at?” one demanded.

“I say! How dare you! Those are our rotorchairs!” the other complained.

Daniel Gooch, who was also present—he'd unscrewed the top of Grumbles' canister-like head and was using tools to poke about inside it—said, “This is Lord Chumleigh and the Right Honourable Percival Braithwaite. Those machines you borrowed belong to them.”

“Gentlemen, I apologise,” Burton said. “I am Sir Richard Burton, His Majesty's agent. As you can see, your machines are returned safely. My companion and I were forced to commandeer them. It was a matter of national security. If you visit my brother, the minister, in suite five, he'll arrange for you to be compensated.”

“But the club!” Chumleigh objected.

“Club?”

The aristocrat flapped a hand toward the shed, indicating the spot where a third rotorchair had stood. “Our friend had to leave without us. We'll be dreadfully late.”

“For what, sir?” Burton asked.

“Cocktails, you blithering idiot! Cocktails! What else do you think I might mean?”

“At this hour?”

“Great heavens! Do you now dictate to me when it's appropriate to partake?”

Swinburne nodded sagely. “An outrage, that's for sure. You should know better, Richard. One must never come between a gentleman and his cocktail. It could cause the collapse of civilisation.”

Braithwaite brushed his hand at the poet as if to sweep him aside. “We'll take this up with the minister chappy in due course, of that you can be certain, and I'll see to it that he has your confounded hides. Now shift out of the bally way. Let us get to our vehicles.”

Burton and Swinburne stood aside as the two aristocrats pushed past.

Chumleigh gasped when he saw the seat of his machine. “What the devil? It's covered in—in—”

“Machine oil,” Swinburne said. “My apologies. As you can see, I'm dripping with the blessed stuff.”

“Why?”

“It keeps me supple.”

“Damned fool!”

The aristocrat pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to wipe down the leather seat. Moments later, with a blast of air and steam, the rotorchairs rose and disappeared over the rooftops.

Burton turned to Daniel Gooch and indicated Grumbles' dismantled head. “Have you discovered anything?”

“There's no mechanical failure that I can see. Mind you, I can only probe so far. You know these things are booby-trapped? Tinker with them too much and they first burst into flames, then the heat sets off an explosive. Very unpleasant. Babbage is extremely secretive about certain aspects of his work. What happened, exactly?”

“Grumbles put Maneesh out for the count and tried to stop us from taking the rotorchairs. It appears he was working in concert with the clockwork men at the station. They overpowered your people and have made away with the
Orpheus
.”

Gooch uttered a gasp of amazement. “How in the name of God is that possible?”

“You tell me.”

“I'll have to take this thing to the station for proper examination. I can see already that someone—almost certainly Babbage, I should say—has made changes to its probability calculator. There's a component here I don't understand. Maybe I can make sense of it given the proper equipment and a little time.”

“Then cart it off and get to work. I'll inform Edward. How's Maneesh?”

“Conscious, but his jaw is badly broken. He'll be out of action for a fair while. Sadhvi has just set off with him for the Penfold hospital.”

Burton retrieved his cane from the ground and signalled Swinburne to follow him. They reentered the hotel and ascended to the fifth floor. Trounce answered their knock. “By Jove! I'm glad you're back. The minister is livid. What in blue thunder is happening?”

Burton gestured for him to follow and led the way into the parlour. Trounce glanced at Swinburne, who whispered, “We're not about to make the minister any happier. You might want to stand by the drinks cabinet, brother. Sedatives will be required.”

“Don't call me brother. It makes me feel odd. Why are your clothes glistening?”

“I dropped off a roof into an oily puddle.”

“Humph! I should have guessed it would be something like that.”

The trio passed into the library.

Lawless greeted them with obvious relief. It lasted but an instant.