Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Part 28

"I suggest, very firmly, that you start moving."

With her free hand, she shoved her goggles atop her head. Very few of the Collectors ever looked into Corentine Reilly's eyes and survived to resist. The Council cla.s.sified them the same shade as a variety of the mineral beryl (Be3Al2(SiO3)6), colored green by trace amounts of chromium and vanadium. Poets had called them emerald pools and other such nonsense. Corentine simply thought of them as a primary weapon against recalcitrant males, and though they were not physically equipped to shoot sparks, she nevertheless leveled a very narrow look at him.

Much like a stream suddenly branching in two directions, Read Needle 16c came to a fork in one of the grooves in his head. The counterbalance weight shifted it to the left side, and a long-abandoned stream of words floated up out of cold, metallic sleep: I shall remain, watching all earth and sky.

The house of my heart can be seen in your eye.

A bloodless heart you keep.

And emerald eyes shan't we-.

The needle skipped as it broadsided another information track, jumped into a reset groove, and finished. Peculiar, but it was a peculiar kind of day, and, he begrudgingly noted, quite possibly his last. The last time such a snippet had occurred was for a similar misread error; old information, improperly blanked and rewritten upon.

He could not shake the feeling this one's eyes had something to do with it. They were beautifully constructed, even when her micro-servos were held at a perfect position to project the possibility of imminent doom.

"Onward, then. In lieu of information, I would beg a boon of you, madam." He stepped toward the door, uncomfortably aware that she remained close enough to strike if he moved so much as a millimeter toward freedom. "It appears that I have always known that my time upon this, aha, mortal coil would be finite. My bra.s.s has been rewritten and blanked so many times that I no longer recall when I was born, nor my original mission."

They continued along the sidewalk, and each step lowered his odds of survival dramatically. The end was likely nigh by 48.2 percent and rising, plus or minus 0.002 of a percent.

He'd never calculated it as above 13.4 percent. Not even when a mad Cossack had smashed his skull with a rifle b.u.t.t.

"It has been ages since even a true and proper shop in the service of the Empire has seen my workings. Many of my replacements and internal repairs have been done myself. You can imagine my surprise," he said as they marched past rows of motor carriages (ugly plastic and vinyl, vinyl, of all the blasphemies mankind could dream up-slick and disgustingly malleable and incapable of storing a proper record for more than a day, but shreds of it remained and lingered for thousands of years in the soil as offal), "when a recent repair of my left temporal aft section, directly behind the ear, yielded a very small scroll wrapped in a scarlet ribbon. Very small writing, in my own hand it seems. I refrained from peeking, but, well...it seems to have been there for quite some time and the placement makes one think it was to be delivered in the event of my demise. Only barest scratches remain in my banks regarding the person it's addressed to; all I know is that we met in the Russian town of Dobryanka. Would you...could you please see that this final message is delivered?"

He paused, suddenly aware that they'd turned a corner. The back end of a Dillard's would be, it seemed, his final destination. He'd never understood the shop itself: ridiculous clothing for men and women, the kind that even wanton strumpets of the Bois de Boulogne would never have worn.

68.8 percent, and rising. It was time.

"Please? The scroll is addressed to someone named Annabelle."

She slammed him into the brick wall, ignoring the rubbish and noisome puddles that dotted the alleyway. Forearm braced against his windpipe, she leaned forward to hiss at him like a snake.

"And what do those barest scratches on your memory banks say, Angelus A. Morphew? Do you remember what this Annabelle looked like? Where she came from? What she was doing in a G.o.d-forsaken place like the Permsky Kray with someone like you?"

He didn't answer, and so Corentine shoved harder, pressing against the unyielding metal plates that covered the masculine-form of the Collector's body.

"Maybe if I open your panels and stir the metal mess you call a brain, those cylinders of yours will yield better answers. A judicious application of electrical current might also help loosen your tongue."

As she leaned in-a pa.s.serby might have mistaken the gesture as part of a romantic but ill-advised tryst in the dank and narrow corridor between buildings-her right hand slid behind his ear and she extracted the scroll.

Her clockwork heart seized, and for a moment Corentine thought she might remain frozen for all time, trapped in a suit of moldering flesh that would fall away from her, one rotten chunk at a time, until all that was left were upgrades of bra.s.s and copper.

She'd almost convinced herself she'd been mistaken, almost convinced herself that he was merely a ghost come to haunt her, to remonstrate, to torture, and condemn. She didn't know what was written on the scroll, but the blood-red ribbon that tied it had been hers, once upon another time, and the scent-memory attached to it was so strong that she wanted to stagger back, to be sick all over the already-filthy pavement.

Instead, she held fast to the steel in her spine and scanned his face, so different than the one she remembered, the eyes that had been extracted and replaced with gla.s.s...o...b.., the carefully blank expression.

"By all the h.e.l.ls, what did They do to you?"

The needles plucked away from the bra.s.s and, as one, they hovered on the outer edges of their respective cylinders. A visiting spider might have heard their ghostly ticks as they sought and found remnant lines outside of the main information tracks.

charlatans. One needn't visit a seance to find Some were only endings: once was a thriving port, but the advent of the locomotive has rendered it an abandoned sh.e.l.l.

Others only beginnings: Should you ever find yourself reading this information, then the game has finally run its course...

That one stopped his mechanisms. It appeared to be a full groove, complete and whole, but none of the mercury valves or cogs showed that he'd ever accessed it. The needle lowered again.

...run its course. As you well know, old chap, the ages have required rather many instances of blanking these copper plates and bra.s.s cylinders. Please do trust yourself. Nothing that has been written over was necessary information. On the contrary, it was extraneous and often worthless. Only on a few occasions have you erased anything you might have kept elsewhere, but due to immediate need you chose to heat the grooves and smooth them to nothingness. There is a message in your cranial cavities that will tie up the only loose thread, should you perish, and that one...that one was blanked to spare you a life of suffering and regret, of heartache and loss. You are better off not knowing. Whoever your attacker may be, do all within your power to encourage their hand. Tally ho, sire, and may a flight of angels sing thee to thy well-deserved rest. Vivat Regnum!

So.

The pressure on his throat lessened enough to work the vocal cables once more. There was no time for sadness. There never had been, not once that he was aware of. If this proved to be the final curtain, he would take a bow gracefully.

"I am a traitor to the Empire," he said. "I have abetted our enemies, and have betrayed you all." Deep in his chest, two gla.s.s beads fell into their holes.

Corentine thought she heard something, like two raindrops. .h.i.tting a tin roof, but the sound was as small as their chances of seeing the next dawn.

"I hate to remind you," she told him, "but you never could successfully lie to me. Traitor to the Empire, my a.r.s.e. You can't even remember your real name, so save the programmed message of humble servility for someone who'll buy it."

As much as she wanted to untie the scroll and read it this instant, she knew They'd be coming soon. The sensors would tell Them that she'd had the Collector in her possession and she'd made the decision not to deactivate, not to transport. Corentine cursed, fluently, in six languages, switching between them as needed to achieve maximum effect, and took a step back.

As she did so, her pocket fob whirred in protest. She reached for the Company-issued timepiece, a lovely thing of gold and glint, and opened it. How many times had she used it to summon a portal? How many times had she sent metal men and women back, their cylinders destined for harvest and the rest for the sc.r.a.p and smelting?

The inscription caught her eye: Commune bonum.

Corentine let the watch dangle by its chain. It caught the fading sunlight and reflected it onto the Collector until she dropped it into the muck and used the heel of her boot to break it to smithereens. She thought of just what they could do with their "common good" and exactly where they could stick it as she exhaled.

"We need to start moving. They're going to send someone else, and I'd rather not make the chase an easy one."

He didn't answer right away, didn't so much as twitch to indicate a hidden cylinder rotated slowly, committing her treason to bra.s.s memory.

d.a.m.nation. His ruse hadn't worked.

There was more than one method of beating the soot from a rug. His information banks were aware of thirty-nine-an even fifty if you counted the direction of each strike.

"It seenks," he said, then held up a hand to beg a pause. Using both thumbs, he popped the dent out of his windpipe. A noise like a fisherman's reel spinning out too fast came and went as he cleared the kinks from his throat cables, and then tried again.

Fifty-five percent and...falling? Several needles stopped, lifted, reversed their read direction and descended back to the copper.

"It seems that there is more to your life than mere collection, madam." He gestured toward a horseless carriage far to their right. Although very few in the mall would have identified it due to its perceived "old age," he still viewed it as a beautiful new form of transport: a black Rolls Royce V8. One of only three made in secret for members of the Fifth in 1906.

He'd never had the heart to abandon or modify it.

"I know not why you would shirk your duties, nor what could inspire you to halt a perfectly viable collection. Chance is an amusing mistress at times. My chariot awaits."

The thimble-sized sc.r.a.p of fatty tissue in his head, all that remained of his original "manufacture," as he sometimes considered it, did not understand the feeling whirring through his mind. None of his bra.s.s indices or vacuum-sealed quicksilver microtubes contained any relevant entries on it either. He cross-referenced, jimmied a cog or two, and spun some gears in puzzlement at the nearest description he could find, and finally made a new entry on platen 17a, line 34: Hope.

She appreciated the motor car, as much for the old leather and clean lines as the chance to rest her feet. Once inside, she felt the balance of power shift; his vehicle, his city, his hands at the wheel. She didn't know where he was headed or what awaited them upon arrival. Perhaps he only bided his time and still planned to make a run for it. Perhaps he'd serve her tea and cakes laced with cyanide; she was still human enough to succ.u.mb to poison, never mind suffocation, shooting, stabbing, and the like.

Corentine had survived such attacks before, but only with the aid of the Company's pocket watch. She'd shifted back to headquarters, bleeding and battered, more than a dozen times in her career. Attacks on her person accounted for several curious scars, a metal plate or two...

But the clockwork heart was my own fault.

Or his.

So if he chose to wrap those same, metal-reinforced hands about her neck and squeeze, there was no watch to whisk her back, no team of doctors that would safeguard her existence. She'd gone rogue, and she was as good as dead anyway. Appropriate that her life would be counted off in the number of seconds, minutes, hours, even though the pocket watch lay in a pile of broken bits of balance wheels and busted mainspring.

"It's very freeing," she told her reflection in the window, "to know that death is once again a possibility."

If she was going to die soon, she'd better hurry and read the contents of the mysterious scroll.

What will it be, do you think? A letter of farewell? And admission of guilt? An explanation as to why he didn't come for me as promised?

It didn't matter that he'd missed their rendezvous all those years ago, just as it didn't matter that she'd destroyed the watch; if it took Them seconds or minutes, hours or days, They would chase the missing Collector and the rogue Retriever until all that was metal on this earth rusted and crumbled. They were as good as dismantled.

The bit of silk that bound it was nearly threadbare, and yet the colour glowed against her skin like blood-on-snow.

"This ribbon was once mine. My guess is that you blanked your memory cylinders..."the ones I was sent to retrieve..."at some time long-past." She swallowed hard and tasted zinc and nickel at the back of her throat. "I'm sure you had something much more important to record."

A scarlet storm was rising. If he did not hurry to his abode, they would both perish under the grasping fingers of those who plucked the marionette strings of whatever new order had come.

"Madam...Mistress Corentine," he said, and reactive wires in his skull activated a sense of shame over his lack of formality. "I know not entirely of which you speak. There is a familiarity here. I will neither deny nor dodge it."

He smiled again, this time choosing an a.n.a.logue that reflected his own feelings (Dying infantryman, Armenia, 1917).

"My curiosity threatens to disobey its programming." He applied the brake at an oncoming traffic light (LANTERN, his mind insisted, but he'd learned to ignore such shallow grooves in his platens). "How did I acquire your ribbon? Have you and I danced together in the great courtyards of the Empire?"

"We did more than dance," she said as they idled at a stoplight. The area was secluded, the red light that halted them a feeble sentinel against the approaching dark. Corentine didn't need a useless lump of flesh in her chest to hate the personage sitting alongside her, so debonairly inquiring as to their shared history. "I was called Annabelle then."

The light turned green. Someone in a plastic automobile behind them honked impatiently. Angelus applied the accelerator, and they were off once again.

She unrolled the scroll and handed it to him, not caring that they were yet to a secured location and even less that it would mean nothing to him.

"Read that out loud, for the sake of edification, and don't mind if I bask in the knowledge that it will all be recorded on one of your d.a.m.ned bra.s.s cylinders again."

Reading paperwork while hurtling along at fifty-five miles per hour, no matter what, was not an acceptable situation. He came to a decision quickly and pulled the car over while gently depressing the brake. Rubber tires crunched into gravel, sending tiny stones up to nick the flawless paint of his vehicle. Once they'd come to a complete stop, he killed the engine and respectfully took the paper from her hand.

"Very well," he said, and gave her a patient smile (Ticket Clerk, Zeppelin Station, Gdansk, 1914). His first glance told him it was a tiny thing, this piece of paper. The color of old honey with ink faded to lavender over the ages. Each letter was miniscule-the size of a printed period, really-and no ordinary human being would have seen more than tiny cl.u.s.ters of dots.

His ocular focus sprockets ticked over with the sounds of gra.s.shoppers cracking their knuckles, and his field of vision narrowed. The letters leapt to life then, and flowed through his mind as linen would beneath a seamstress's machine, spilling from his tongue as faery gold spills from the hands of those who attempt to grasp it upon waking: My dearest Annabelle, While you sleep a mere ten meters away in the guest suite of Baron Krausmeyer's Haus, I write these things to you under mine own hand, one of the few parcels of flesh I can still claim are genuine.

A week ago I received new orders, and that is why tonight I shall embark upon a voyage to America. Along the way I shall be augmented in several new ways. You know too well the wound that has plagued me since the Russian incident. They shall remove my damaged caudate nucleus and replace it with another of Dr. G_________'s great works. I am a.s.sured that the replacement will allow greater function than the failing flesh G.o.d hath imbued us all with.

When my operation is complete, I shall never be able to love again. Norepinephrine and dopamine hath no purchase upon bra.s.s and copper. All I have felt for you, every moment I have gazed into your eyes and believed I found paradise, every sweet kiss or moment we stole behind our superiors' backs shall be for naught. Love shall die, for me.

I would not subject you to the same terrible future.

This morning, I was the last thing you gazed upon with human eyes. Would that I could have been brave enough to refuse your request, but you proved your valor, and the Empire's doctors conceded to your demands for the operation. I came and held your hand as they gave you the gases to lull you into the realm of Morpheus.

When you open your beautiful eyelids, those eyes will not be flesh, and I shall not remain.

Cowardly, indeed. Had I other recourse, please, I beg thee, know that I would have taken it.

Weep if you must and hate me if it will speed your recovery. I am quickly becoming more construct than corpus, more machine than man. You are still mostly flesh. Your eyes and left hand are your only augmentations. Your heart still beats blood, whereas I am quickly becoming a mere copper golem with oil in his veins. Annabelle deserves better. You will find it, I have no fear, for you are young, and I do believe they shall transfer you to another department soon. Your affinity for numbers makes you prime sergeant material. You will find another, a man who can love and cherish you as I will no longer be able. Perhaps, provided enough of your sweet body is allowed to remain intact, you shall bear many sons for the Empire.

I shall always strive to keep my heart, hands, and eyes as human as they are this very day. It is a silly belief, the pale hope of a doomed man facing his greatest storm, but perchance a tiny part of what I feel this night will live on in my heart. Perchance my fingertips will remember the softness of your skin, or my eyes will give dreams of the ghost of you in visions.

Live, love, heal, and be strong for the continuance of Man's Greatest Hope. If you read this, know I died having loved you. I could not have asked for more.

Forever yours, A. A. M.

The automobile's engine had stopped its tinny pings and ticks by the time the last word faded from his lips.

The Company's d.a.m.ned motto echoed in the silence that spiraled out between them as the voices of the past faded. Commune bonum. The Common Good. They used such words in their speeches, on their posters, in the printed material distributed in schools in conjunction with words like valor and honor and for the glory of the Empire!...words war-tattered about the edges and stained with tears. Vomit. Blood.

Such words lured children onto the battlefield and wrapped their battered, broken bodies in a winding-sheet for transport home to weeping families. Such words were thin consolation, rough with all the things left unsaid. Such words were diamonds dangled before starry-eyed girls, to whom honor and glory were jewels beyond compare, brighter than circlets of gold slipped upon a willing finger.

She'd been just such a girl.

She'd been just such a fool, thinking that they would work for the greater good and the glory of the Empire hand in mechanical hand.

"It reads like a note of farewell. But I-Annabelle-never got it. Mischance or misdeed, it doesn't really matter now."

Corentine twined the red ribbon through her fingers and remembered all the times she'd worn it: climbing the Pyrenees, subverting His Majesty's Bodyguard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms long enough to poison a monarch; walking along the rocky beaches of the Cherno More, whose waters were not exactly black, but still dark, with the floor unfathomable. Corentine knew, now, that the water's hydrogen sulfide layer supported a unique microbial population, producing black sediments most likely due to anaerobic methane oxidation, but she preferred to think of the darkness as secrets.

Though the muscle was gone, useless poetic longings lingered. The irony!

"When I realized you'd gone, I had Them take my heart. Cowardice for cowardice; the pain of you leaving was greater than anything They could have done to me." Not an accusation, not said to hurt, for she doubted there was enough of him left to wound with words. But the simple truth was a sword she used to remonstrate herself. "I tried...days, I think. Maybe months. But every second you were gone was like the second-hand on a clock ticking over, and it somehow consoled me to mark your absence by the seconds, by the hours."

She could have told him, only a few hours ago, just how many seconds had pa.s.sed since last she'd seen him. But Time had dilated the moment she'd spotted him in the crowd. Corentine recalled a wild-haired German that had shouted at her at length about relativity, but she'd never truly understood until her internal clockwork synched to the man of metal sitting so still alongside her.

His inner mechanisms whirred along, undeterred, while hers slowed almost to a standstill and then reset to mark their time together, however brief that might be.

One. Two. Three...

Corentine lifted the ribbon and tied it into her hair, where she knew the jaunty, incongruent bow would burn against the burgundy and black. Perhaps the next Agent of the Empire would train his weapon on the bright flower of color and put a bullet in her head.

But her heart would tick on, wouldn't it?

Fourteen...fifteen...sixteen...