The Calorium Wars Page 11

  “Dear Becky! Thank you, I see you’ve got the TeslaVox all ready for my call.”

  He gave her a slightly crooked little grin as he approached, and Becky suddenly felt a clutch of apprehension as she took in his odd expression and the strange, sweetish-medicinal odor he was giving off. Had he been drinking?

  “You really don’t have to help, Capt. Ubaldo,” she said uncertainly, “I remember quite clearly how to use the apparatus …”

  “Oh, but you must let me help,” he said with a falsely unctuous note as he bent forward over her, and a shiver ran up Becky’s spine and jarred her into rising, but too late. Ubaldo had already pulled a folded cloth out his pocket and the sickly smell suddenly got much stronger as he clapped it over her face. For a couple of seconds she struggled with all the force of a born fighter, but the drug was too strong for her and after another moment or two she slumped to the floor. Ubaldo picked her up gently and laid her down on a buttoned-leather sofa, then bent over to kiss her on the lips:

  “Rest peacefully, darling, I have some business I must take care of first.”

  And, sitting down in the chair Becky had just vacated, he jiggled the hooked handset holder up and down until a thin voice came from the handset:

  “Hello? Voicewire operator #81. Hello!”

  “Hello, Operator,” Ubaldo said into the transmitter in his most commanding tone, “please connect me with Secretary Stanton.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Stanton and his two satellites were standing at the window of Detective McPherson’s Union Square office staring down at the deserted gallows, which were being painted with alternating swaths of sunshine and shadow as the storm clouds broke up.

  “I’m sorry the storm has passed us by,” Stanton said in an irritable tone, “there’s something maddeningly impudent about the sun actually shining on the scene where that scum McCool escaped justice!”

  “Never ye mind, sorr,” McPherson piped up with a reassuring grin. “we’ll have that spalpeen back on the scaffold before ye can say Jack Robinson. And wearing a rope cravat into the bargain, I warrant ye!”

  “You may be a Great Detective,” Stanton said sourly, “but if I made book on your promises I’d end up in debtors’ prison.” He pulled out his pocket watch and brightened a little as he noticed the time. “There is, however, one advisor so far whose word I’ve been able to depend on and I believe he’s about to call on the voicewire.”

  Almost as if in answer, there was a timid knock at the door and a secretary opened it just a crack to say:

  “There’s a gentleman for you on the voicewire Mr. Secretary, sir, and he says he has an appointment to speak with you.”

  Stanton rubbed his hands gleefully and turned to the others:

  “You see? Dependable!” And, to the secretary: “Please have him switched over to the receiver in this office, Miss Wilkes.”

  As the voicewire receiver on McPherson’s desk rang, Stanton snatched it up eagerly:

  “This is Edwin Stanton—to whom am I speaking?”

  A reedy voice came through the earpiece of the receiver: “My apologies, sir, but I’d rather not identify myself until I’m quite sure we’ll be doing business with each other.”

  Stanton’s face darkened like a thundercloud: “Business? You speak of doing business, sir? This is a matter of doing your patriotic duty!”

  “Inarguably, Secretary Stanton, but at the same time I think it’s only fair to ask some recompense for the risks …”

  At this point Willie Pilkington stopped eavesdropping and pressed one ear tightly against the window.

  “D’you hear that?” he asked McPherson.

  McPherson pressed his own ear against the window, listening intently.

  “Sure, your honor, and I was by way of thinkin’ it was the wind in the eaves, but this is more like …”

  “… a swarm of bees.” said Pilkington.

  McPherson turned and pressed his nose against the window, staring back and forth into the sky as if he were trying to see beyond the limits of the glass.

  “Great ugly bees, they sound like,” McPherson answered with a quaver in his voice …

  On the Straight Up, Liam and his friends were also staring into the sky, but in a markedly more upbeat mood as they watched the setting sun tinting the scattered clouds with brilliant streaks of dark rose and orange:

  “Red sky at night,” said Captain Billy with a chuckle, “sure, ’tis this sailor’s delight—I was afraid we’d be scalin’ ten-foot waves by now. But instead the Straight Up’s steering itself on a governor and I’m out here takin’ the air like a gentleman!”

  Mike was peering narrowly at Chen and Crazy Horse: “Five’ll get you ten the storm’s turning east is on you two birds, am I right?”

  Chen returned Mike’s scrutiny with an irritable snort: “What on earth are you nattering on about, Vysotsky?”

  “I know just what he means, Ambrose,” said Liam, “and I was wondering that same thing. Tell me you two didn’t cook up some kind of magic trick to send the hurricane off to Bermuda instead of the city!”

  Chen and Crazy Horse exchanged an incredulous glance.

  “Mr. McCool,” the Chinese said sarcastically, “I cannot imagine why you insist on continuing your pretense of man-in-the-street idiocy, but I must say I find it deeply tiresome!”

  “Wait!” said Crazy Horse, holding up his hand to interrupt Chen. “You are speak Russian, yes?”

  “Of course,” Chen answered with an impatient shrug.

  “Splendid,” said Crazy Horse, whose stepfather—Commander of the Little Russian Secret Police—had sent the young Sioux warrior to the Imperial University in St. Petersburg “to acquire culture.” “In that case, let us speak Russian for a moment—trying to express myself in English is like running a race on one leg.”

  “Let’s pretend, my dear Lev Frentsisovich,” he said to Liam, “that you really don’t know how magic works—though Georgie did try to explain it to you back in New Petersburg, remember? In any event, adepts like Ambrose and myself, and …” he peered at Liam with an emphasis that Liam found irritatingly mysterious, “… some others as well, have been born with enough magical talent to do small things that seem huge and frightening to those who don’t understand them. Ambrose might be able to make one of those waves become twenty feet tall, for instance, or I might be able to turn Captain Billy into a dung beetle. But move a hurricane?” He smiled and shook his head. “That is for the Great Spirit (whatever anyone may call Him) and Him alone. When hundreds of the People gather together and make a Sun Dance to ask the Great Spirit to change the weather, then it may happen. For one person to try such a thing by himself …” he shrugged, “… is just stupid and arrogant.”

  “Zhenya! Bozhe!” Liam held up both hands as if to ward off more words. “Do all the magic tricks you like, just don’t try to turn me into a dung beetle, or I’ll run up your leg and bite you on the …”

  “HEY!” shouted Mike, waving his hands for attention, “Shut up a minute and listen!”

  He cocked his head with one hand up to his ear and turned back and forth, staring into the sky with such intensity that the others followed suit. This slightly comical search continued for another minute or two, until Captain Billy, who had been looking further out to sea than the others, broke the silence:

  “Aw, Jasus, Mary and Joseph! What’s that, then?”

  Manhattan lay directly ahead of them, but Captain Billy was pointing away from it to the northeast and as the others turned to look, first one, then another, then with increasing rapidity an entire fleet of airships began to fill the sky, descending from higher altitudes to no more than a couple of thousand feet. As they drew closer their origin became all too obvious: striped in horizontal bands of white, red and blue, they were patently war craft of the Imperial Russian Aerial Navy, though the design was one none of the men on the Straight Up had ever seen—torpedo-shaped, with stubby triangular wings and tail, ending in two gigantic air-screws, mo
unted side by side in graceful nacelles.

  Crazy Horse was shaking his head worriedly: “I had heard that Lukas’ Japanese advisors were working on radical new airship designs, but I never saw them before. What do you suppose they mean to do?”

  “Sure and it’s nothin’ good!” said Captain Billy. “You boys best hang onto your hats—I’m about to switch from the main engines to the turbines and that means blockade-runnin’ speed!”

  With that he took off towards the engine compartment, and Liam turned back to Crazy Horse: “Zhenya, old pal. I appreciate your little lecture and all, but do you really mean to tell me you two big shot magicians can’t do anything about that?” He pointed into the sky expectantly.

  At that moment the Straight Up surged forward with enormous acceleration, its bow lifting into the air as its turbines kicked up a rooster tail of water ten feet high. Everyone was thrown to the deck, Chen rolling towards the railing so sharply that he had to stop himself by plunging both hands into the scuppers to keep from going over the side. A moment later he was up on his knees, laughing a bit dementedly as he scooped up big handfuls of seawater and poured them over himself:

  “I certainly can’t make a skyful of airships go away,” he cried, “but I can ask the ocean to cloak us from them!” Closing his eyes and muttering feverishly in Chinese he held a cupped handful of water over his head, and then threw it so that the wind spattered the drops across the ship. An instant later the Straight Up vanished, leaving the sea as empty as if the vessel had never existed …

  In the Director’s Office of the Pilkington Agency’s Union Square headquarters, Stanton was deep into his negotiations with the anonymous caller, and McPherson’s and Pilkington’s moronic antics at the window were starting to wear mightily on his nerves.

  “What are you fools playing at?” he bellowed across the room. “Stop it at once!” On top of their distracting contortions, it sounded as though the workmen had finally begun cleaning up the Square outside, and the thudding noise of their steam equipment was almost more than he could bear, a kind of awful whirring thrum like a gargantuan sewing machine. Stanton swiveled sharply around in the desk chair, turning his back on his henchmen and Union Square alike, readying himself to come down hard on the informer at the other end of the line and cut off all this shilly-shallying.

  “My dear sir,” Stanton said with dripping sarcasm, “I assure you I am no less punctilious than Pontius Pilate—you shall have your thirty pieces of silver in any currency you may desire, whether it be Government employment, a pardon or a mattress full of banknotes. But first you must tell me your name, and then where it is that the members of the Freedom Party, including the blackguard Lincoln, have their hiding place!”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the wire while the wary traitor chewed on Stanton’s words and the sound of steam engines outside built to an excruciating pitch. Finally Stanton could stand it no more:

  “Well, dammit?” he barked into the transmitter.

  There was an exasperated sigh and the voice at the other end said: “Very well, then, I am a former Captain of the U.S. Aerial …”

  But before Stanton could hear the rest of it, there was a terrified screech from Pilkington:

  “Oh dear God! It’s the end!”

  At which Stanton spun around in the swivel chair to see Pilkington groveling on the floor with a sofa pillow clutched over his head and McPherson kneeling to one side of the window and peering out from behind the curtain as the sky filled inexorably with one Little Russian airship after another.

  “Lukas!” groaned Stanton. “That filthy Russian swine, I knew he was up to some underhanded trick!”

  He leapt up from behind the desk, his phone call forgotten as he sprinted to the window for a better view. But before he even reached it, the building shook repeatedly with the sounds of thunderous explosions and a moment later Stanton saw an oddly stately progression of explosions moving west across Union Square, the giant holes in the ground appearing successively like the footprints of some angry giant until at last they walked into the almost-rebuilt Department of National Security Headquarters and flattened it like a shoebox.

  “NOOOOOOO!” roared Stanton dementedly, shaking his fist at the Little Russian airships. “You devious, backstabbing sons of bitches, I will see every one of you hanging from St. Patrick’s steeple by your bollocks!”

  To which another Little Russian ship riposted by beginning a second “walk” of gigantic explosions across Union Square in the opposite direction, ending with a strike so close to the Pilkington Agency’s headquarters that the room shook like a baby’s rattle and Stanton threw himself to the floor with the others. After what seemed like several centuries, the appalling thunderclaps and seismic shocks of the falling bombs began moving northwards up the spine of Manhattan Island and as they receded, Stanton and his satraps stirred cautiously and sat up. The electric lights were no longer working, but the room was luridly lit by the flames of burning buildings in the Square, and one by one the three men pulled themselves to their feet and crossed to the window to inspect the damage.

  “Well,” Pilkington said in a quavery voice, “at least the gallows got cleared away—they didn’t leave so much as a stick of it.”

  “We’ll have our revenge on that Roosian sneak, bedad!” McPherson cried melodramatically. “Mark me words, yer Honor, if I have to lay me life down upon the …”

  But Stanton was nodding and smiling to himself, not hearing a word of the Great Detective’s oration: “Clearly Lukas, or Prince Yurevskii, or whatever he calls himself now maintains his own spies here in our midst, and some simpleton like you two dropped an unguarded word about our preparations for an invasion. But if he thinks he’s beaten us just by blowing up a few buildings in this cesspool of a city, he’ll have to think twice! We are about to sue for peace, gentlemen!”

  If Stanton had just delivered a homily in Tibetan, Pilkington and McPherson couldn’t have been more dumbstruck. As they stood staring at him with their jaws hanging open, Stanton grinned even more maliciously:

  “I take my cue from the learned Sun Tzu, who says in The Art of War that while we must keep our friends close, we must keep our enemies even closer. I am going to offer Prince Yurevskii an alliance, a pact which will make us equal partners in peace and war!”

  McPherson was shaking his head with dismay: “But sorr, he’s a Roosian!”

  “Tell me, McPherson,” Stanton answered, “if you were planning to cut a man’s heart out, would it be better to have him standing across the room, or by your side with your arm around him?”

  An appreciative smile spread across McPherson’s face: “I take yer point, sorr, and a nice sharp one it is!”

  “Right, then,” said Stanton, rubbing his hands cheerfully, “I want you two to get busy finding out how soon the electric will be up again, and how long it will take to re-establish communication with my informer. We need to be free of the Freedom Party and McCool and all the rest of that seditious rabble, and then we need to get in touch with the illustrious Prince Yurevskii and tell him that despite this little misunderstanding we want to be the very best of friends.”

  Liam was standing in the pilot house next to Captain Billy, almost deafened by the scream of the steam turbines belowdecks and the constant explosion of bombs not much more than a mile away.

  “That was a good call, Billy,” shouted Liam, “if we’d sailed up the East River instead of the Hudson we would probably have gone up with the Manhattan Gas Light Company, you can see it burning all the way over here.”

  The Captain grinned and tugged at his beard self-consciously: “Billy Grogan wasn’t born yesterday, Liam me lad, nor yet the day before! We’ll be as far as Bloomingdale in a few minutes, and that means there’s docks at 92nd Street where I can put yez ashore. I’d bet me bottom dollar the Roosians won’t be bombing anywhere near that far uptown, there’s nothin’ up there but the Park and shanties full of freed slaves and poor Micks like us. So if ye hoof i
t lively like, ye can get to where our Aerial Navy has their depot in ten minutes easy.”

  “Thanks, Billy. And don’t forget now—Becky and Gran will be calling for Mike in the next couple of days to get them off Shelter Island and into the tunnels.”

  “Aye,” the Captain said with a somber nod, “and that’ll be the best place to be for the next little while, it looks like.”

  Liam looked out the window at the burning city and nodded back with equal somberness, crossing his fingers for Gran and Becky and all the rest of his people. There were going to be a lot of accounts to settle before they were through and everybody he cared about would be a hostage to fortune until they were done …

  Mike and Chen and Crazy Horse were standing in the lee of the deckhouse, raising their voices over the bedlam of sounds as they argued:

  “Chort evo voz’mi!” Mike cursed in Russian, “You want me to believe my oldest pal in the world is some kind of witch? You two got bats in your belfry, Liam’s a magician when it comes to cracking cribs, but that’s it.”

  “Misha, dorogoi moi,” said Crazy Horse, “what did you think that was back at the fairy circle, when Liam bellowed like a bull and fell on the ground with his arms around his stomach? His grandmother is a witch, and a powerful one even if she’s a little out of practice.”

  “Quite,” Chen affirmed. “And when she spoke the name of McCool, the spirits of your old friend’s ancestors flowed out of their world and into him.”

  Mike was shaking his head dubiously: “And I’m here to bet that if you try that palaver on Lev Frentsisovich you’re gonna end up with a thick ear for your pains.” He grinned as the door of the pilot house and Liam came out to join them: “Here he comes now, and don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

  “OK, boys,” Liam shouted as he approached, “all ashore that’s going ashore!”