The Calorium Wars Read online

  The whine of the turbines dropped a moment later as Captain Billy slowed and turned the Straight Up in a gentle curve towards the docks, and a scattering of lights from the shanties of Bloomingdale’s settlers. From this far uptown, the sound of the bombs was a series of muffled crumps and the burning buildings an orange glow along the horizon.

  “According to Billy we shouldn’t be more than ten minutes from where the Aerial Navy depot is, but we don’t know what we’ll run into on the way. Billy gave me the shotgun and a Peacemaker if you’re interested, I’ve already got my sword stick and a Peacemaker Becky gave me …”

  Both Chen and Crazy Horse shook their heads, but Mike held out his hands: “Dai mne,” he said, “this time of night you can never have too many guns!”

  Liam handed them over and clapped Mike on the shoulder. “I don’t know how long it’s going to be before we can get in touch with you, but just remember—get Becky and Gran out of there as soon as you can. And make sure to get in touch with the two Dannys and the Whyos tonight, with them and the Butcher Boys pushing our plan, the rest of the gangs will fall into line fast.”

  Mike grinned and gave Liam a Russian embrace, kissing him on both cheeks. “Relax, golubchik, it’s as good as done!”

  A low whistle came to them from the pilot house and a moment later the Straight Up’s fenders kissed the pilings of the dock and Liam, Chen and Crazy Horse hopped ashore and melted into the darkness.

  The three men moved rapidly up Eleventh Avenue, keeping a sharp eye peeled for Johnnies, bluecoats and patrolling Acmes—fortunately for Liam and his companions the middle class hadn’t made it this far north yet, which meant that the streets were dark and regular patrols were few and far between.

  “How far from here to the depot?” Crazy Horse whispered.

  “As soon as we get to Eighth Avenue we’ll head up to 97th Street and turn into the Park—there’s a road there that crosses between the Reservoir and North Meadow, and once we’re that far we’ll just have to play it by ear. There are bound to be patrols if there’s an airship depot.”

  The reminder was enough to keep them all silent as they trotted along the empty streets, occasionally startling an owl into flight or a foraging raccoon into paroxysms of angry chattering. As they neared Eighth Avenue they finally saw the lights of the widely-separated gas lamps that served to announce Central Park’s northwestern boundary and that slowed them to a fast but stealthy walk, keeping to the shadows of the trees. Then, with heart-stopping abruptness, a loud voice rang out from the Park side of Eighth Avenue:

  “Halt! Who goes there?”

  “Blast!” Liam muttered, sinking into a duck walk and signaling to the others to do likewise as he tried to get close enough to the wall to make out his adversary.

  “I SAID HALT!! STOP WHERE YOU ARE OR I’LL SHOOT!”

  The nervous voice made Liam suspect that their challenger was alone, but he couldn’t take a chance, so he flattened out and rolled across the pavement till he was flush with the walls, followed closely by Chen and Crazy Horse. Picking up a piece of broken brick, he pitched it against the wall about ten feet beyond their position and waited while the concealed sentry thought about it, took the bait after a couple of moments and clambered over the wall. In an instant Liam was on him like a mountain lion, and before the man—a young bluecoat—could even grunt, he was lying on the pavement trussed up with his own belt and gagged with the sleeve of his tunic.

  “OK,” Liam called to the others, “the coast’s clear.” Unfortunately, the statement was only partly true—it was a fact that for the moment they had no other human adversaries, but the bluecoat must have been patrolling in tandem with an Acme, because at that moment the thing sprang out of the darkness behind the wall and landed in the middle of the pavement with a force that shattered the cement. This one had evidently not been provided with expensive speech machinery but it didn’t need it to raise an alarm, as it was equipped with a steam whistle that would put a locomotive to shame and it let loose with a nerve-shattering HOOOOOOT! which it followed with a salvo from its Gatling arm that narrowly missed Liam as he somersaulted towards the automaton, unsheathing his sword from its cane-scabbard as he rolled.

  The blade was a beautiful old katana that Harry the Jap had turned into a sword cane as a present for Liam, and Liam had cut all sorts of objects with it including a human or two, but never an Acme. Still, there wasn’t a lot of choice just now so Liam came out of his somersault into sword-fighting stance with the katana held firmly in a two-handed grip, and as the Acme swiveled towards Liam, lowering the Gatling arm to point at him, Liam sprang into the air and swept the blade downwards with all his might, severing the arm at the shoulder so that it fell to the pavement with a crash. Then, the moment his feet touched the ground, Liam whirled around in one unbroken movement and swept the blade towards the midsection of the huge automaton, mentally crossing his fingers that he wouldn’t end by snapping the blade off at the hilt.

  Astonishingly—to Liam, anyway—the blade sliced through the Acme’s midsection as if the steel colossus were a tender sapling. For a split second the two halves maintained an illusion of being still one piece, but then, slowly, the top half leaned to one side and crashed down to the pavement, hissing huge gouts of steam from its damaged boiler. Liam had seen something like this before, and he shouted to his two companions:

  “Get down! It’s going to blow!!”

  And sure enough, just as all three men succeeded in flattening themselves on the pavement, the thing blew up with a horrendous BLAM!, showering bits and pieces of its innards in every direction. For a moment, the survivors lay there, experiencing an almost overwhelming urge to stay stretched out and rest for a bit, but this fantasy was rudely interrupted by a familiar sound from not too far south of where they lay:

  To the unaccustomed ear, it would have been alarming enough: a weird galloping sound coming up Eighth Avenue towards them: THUMP thump, THUMP thump, THUMP thump, accompanied by a stentorian, twanging bellow: “HAHN, hoo hree, HAHN, hoo hree, HAHN hoo hree horr hahn hoo hree … HAHR LAYOO !”

  Unfortunately, Liam’s ears and the ears of his friends were only too accustomed to the sound and Liam sprang to his feet:

  “Time to sling our hooks, boys, it’s the Johnnies!”

  No more encouragement was needed—the three of them took off like gazelles towards the Transverse Road that cut the Park between the Reservoir and the North Meadow, making the turn just as the first shots began to whistle over their heads. For a moment they ran in silence until Liam saw the airship depot in the distance and beckoned to the others to follow, but Chen shook his head emphatically:

  “Forget the airships!”

  This was too much for Liam: “What the blazes d’you mean, Chen, are you going to fly us there by flapping your arms?”

  In answer, Chen simply grabbed Liam by the arm and pulled him over the low wall into the grassy area around the reservoir.

  “Are you crazy?” yelled Liam furiously. “The Johnnies are going to shoot us full of holes!”

  But Chen ignored him, kneeling on the turf and rubbing handfuls of soil between his fingers:

  “There’s a ley line here,” he said to Crazy Horse, “and I’m almost certain it’s the same one that brought you to Shelter Island from Santa Monica. If we can get McCool to open it up for us we should come out more or less where you started.”

  “Is there a vortex to draw us in?”

  “Mmm hm,” Chen muttered. “Right over there where that boulder is.”

  Liam was listening to them with growing impatience as the sound of the running Johnnies drew nearer. Finally he shouted at Chen: “You listen to me, you medicine-show highbinder, and this is a promise! When the Johnnies are through shooting us into Swiss cheese and we finally get to Hell, I am going to pound you to a pudding—the Devil’s just going to have to wait till I’m through with you!”

  “Do shut up,” snapped Chen, and grabbing Liam by the collar he half-dragged him
to the boulder he had pointed out a moment ago. By now the Johnnies’ bullets were starting to fly, and Chen pointed firmly at the boulder:

  “Do as I say, or by heaven I will turn you into a warthog! Strike that boulder with your sword! Do it NOW!”

  Liam rolled his eyes. “Sure, why not?” he yelled back furiously. “You want me to kick it, I can do that too! Look out, rock, here it comes!” And, raising his arms in the profound conviction that he was already a dead man, he swung the sword down with all his might just as the Johnnies came pouring over the wall firing their shiny chromed guns and yelling insanely.

  In the fraction of a second that it took for Liam’s sword to travel through the air it struck him vividly that he would miss all of it, bad parts and good parts alike, but the instant the blade struck the boulder the surrounding earth glowed with unbearable brilliance, swirled like a whirlpool of fiery lava, and in the blink of an eye swallowed up the three companions and winked out again like a blown candle as the Johnnies dropped to their knees in front of the boulder, babbling and weeping hysterically, begging forgiveness for their sins, terrified that it was the Devil who had snatched the seditionists and would be coming after them any minute. Was the boulder about to melt again and suck them down into the fires of Hell?

  Listening somewhere, the Devil smiled at the thought that he would ever need to go out of his way to gather fresh sinners. As for the boulder, it just sat there mute and massive as it had for aeons, guarding its gateway to the ley lines …

  Bear Flag Republic, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles/Edison City, and Santa Monica

  October 31, 1877

  Chapter Twelve

  Just north of the Santa Monica Pier and a few blocks west of the ley line vortex where Crazy Horse had begun his journey (ley lines, after all, being magical and nothing if not unpredictable), the main plunge at the North Beach Bath house was jammed with bathers, children and grownups alike happily taking advantage of the twenty-five cent admission to dunk their bodies in cold water on a day when the mid-afternoon temperatures had soared into the nineties. The sideline gallery was equally packed with fully-dressed Santa Monica and Edison City folk: watchful mothers, timid spectators considering a plunge and die-hard sex fiends who would have paid a lot more than a quarter for the chance of seeing a naked ankle peeping out from under the dark woolen skirts of a lady’s bathing costume.

  In fact, by early evening the attendants were already wondering if they ought to tell the Boss to stop selling tickets until some of the bathers went home, especially as the kids had started a splashing game that was soaking the spectators in the gallery and building a level of happy hysteria that might get out of hand any minute if something untoward happened. Like, for instance, an Indian in a monkey suit, a curly-haired Mick and a long, skinny Chinaman suddenly materializing in mid-air ten feet over the most boisterous scrum in the splashing game, hanging there with stunned expressions for what seemed like a half hour but was maybe three long seconds, and then dropping into the water with a cannonball splash accompanied by more screams than anybody had heard since the Chinatown War.

  “Help!” yelled Ambrose Chen, thrashing around frantically.

  “What the blazes do you mean, ‘help!’” Liam snapped irritably as he tried to fend off a screaming nine-year-old. “Swim down to the end and climb out, we have to get out of here before the coppers come!”

  “I CAN’T SWIM, IDIOT!” bellowed Chen, who was flailing his arms like a pelican caught in a net.

  “Big fancy-Dan sorcerer,” muttered Liam, grabbing Chen under the arms and dragging him away through the water towards the end of the pool.

  Crazy Horse, meanwhile, had been trying to free himself from a hysterical, blimp-shaped bather who had seized hold of his braid with fanatical determination and was tugging on it as if he meant to pull it loose.

  “Let go hair, svoloch!” Crazy Horse yelled in broken English, giving up at last as he saw Liam and Chen drawing away and punching his captor sharply in the nose.

  “Zhdite menia!” he yelled to Liam and Chen and took off after them like an otter.

  The enormous, vaulted ceiling amplified the bedlam in the baths to a point that made talking a waste of time, so as Crazy Horse pulled himself out of the pool, Liam just pointed towards a sign that said “Gentlemen’s Dressing Rooms” and beckoned to the others to follow as he took off at a trot.

  “Find something that fits and change fast,” Liam said as they closed the door after them, “any bluecoat that sees us the way we look now is going to collar us first and talk later.”

  Keeping an ear cocked for the sound of police whistles, the trio rummaged through every open locker until they had managed to dress themselves more or less presentably—Chen with his wrists and ankles sticking out of a yellow plaid suit, Crazy Horse swathed in a cowboy’s long canvas duster, and Liam spiffy but uneasy in the summer dress uniform of a Navy Commander.

  “Well, boys,” Liam said with a grin, “I don’t expect we’d be welcome at the Opera, but I don’t reckon we’ll get arrested on the beach either. Come on, let’s hook it!”

  Jumping up onto a bench under the room’s only window, Liam pushed at the wire-mesh screen until the frame came loose and fell out onto the sand. It was twilight, the sky a dark violet overhead and rimmed with orange along the horizon where it met the ocean, and the mob of terrified bathers and spectators was pouring out of the opposite side of the building. Liam beckoned to Chen and Crazy Horse:

  “Looks like the coast’s clear over here, let’s go!”

  Suiting the action to the words, he pulled himself up and out, dropping to the sand in a crouch and peering around warily as he fingered the handle of his sword stick and his companions dropped to the sand behind him. There were plenty of people walking on the sand and on a beachfront sidewalk that ran north and south as far as Liam could see, but no sign of the police or of anybody else who seemed the least bit interested in their presence. Liam stood up with a sigh of relief, and then wobbled as a wave of vertigo hit him and reached out to steady himself against the bathhouse wall:

  “Whoa!” he muttered. “I’m feeling weak as a kitten!”

  “You just did a major feat of magic,” Chen said in his most professorial manner. “Whatever religious enthusiasts may claim, magic is part of the natural world, not something apart from it, so your weakness is explained simply and elegantly by Newton’s Third Law: ‘To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.’”

  Liam glared at Chen and Crazy Horse, who were watching him with the eager attentiveness of proud parents witnessing baby’s first steps. It was true, dammit! It must have been from hitting the rock with his sword, and that meant that all that folderol of Gran’s was real and he was stuck with this. Whatever “this” was!

  Liam shook himself like a wet dog, and then gave his companions a smile of bland innocence:

  “Well, I don’t know about you fellows,” he said, “but I could do with a feed and a night’s rest in a decent hotel.”

  And, without waiting for comment, he turned and set off across the sand. Crazy Horse and Chen gave each other a look and then hurried after Liam.

  “You’d better think twice about the hotel,” Crazy Horse said in Russian as he caught up. “People in Edison City and Santa Monica aren’t too friendly towards anybody that isn’t white.”

  “Neither are most Americans,” Chen said, “but I had heard that the Bear Flag Republic was supposed to be the sort of wide-open place where they welcomed thieves and smugglers and every other species of lowlife with open arms—surely they have a place for the likes of us.”

  “The Bear Flag Republic is a sovereign state,” said Crazy Horse, “but only because Little Russia tolerates its independence the way Spain and France tolerate Andorra—for the simple reason that you can buy anything from anywhere here if you have the right price, which can be quite useful. However, real behind-the-scenes local power remains in the hands of the old white families who booted the Sp
aniards out when this was still called California.” He spread his hands with a wry smile: “And the good hotels still seem to prefer white low-lifes to colored low-lifes.”

  Chen grunted. “In any event, I’d just as soon stop at a department store first. No doubt large yellow checks are fashionable suiting in Edison City, but I’d rather find something a bit more …” he raised an eyebrow.

  “Right,” Liam teased, “what would they say back at New College?”

  Crazy Horse looked intrigued. “You were at Oxford?”

  “I read Greats at New College,” Chen said with a touch of well-bred smugness.

  “I was at the Imperial University in Petersburg,” Crazy Horse said, “I used to come over to Oxford every May for Eights Week!”

  “Well, I was at Columbia University once,” laughed Liam. “Matter of fact, I cracked the Provost’s crib while he was up in Saratoga playing the nags and pinched his diamond stickpin and a first edition of Great Expectations.” He winked at the others: “Let’s get a move on, boys. We can talk about school days at dinner.”

  Towering over the beach as far as the eye could see in either direction were palisades at least 100 feet high, and now that night was falling an aurora borealis of multicolored light was streaming into the sky from the city beyond. Liam shook his head wonderingly as they walked, thinking that the light was brighter than anything he’d ever seen in New York, even in the parts that Tesla had wired for electricity. He turned to Crazy Horse and pointed up towards the cliffs:

  “You were here before, Zhenya, is it always lit up like a Christmas tree?”

  Crazy Horse nodded: “P. T. Barnum came out to Los Angeles a few years ago with his traveling circus and he had Thomas Edison appearing as ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park,’ showing off his talking machine and light bulbs and all his other tricks. People out here had never seen anything like ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ and Barnum was already dreaming of sugar plums when a pistolero named Tiburcio Vasquez showed up and told him he couldn’t set up his tent unless he paid $10,000 in gold for a ‘license.’”