The Calorium Wars Read online

  “But don’t worry,” Crazy Horse added. “Even though we’re going to have to leave you now, I want to make sure you have some company. There!” he said, pointing to a hole in the baseboard, speaking as he did so, in Lakota Sioux. A moment later, a plump tarantula scuttled out and approached Crazy Horse, who picked it up gently and murmured to it as McCluskey backed away in horror.

  “Get that thing out of here,” he screamed, “I hate spiders!”

  “Tch, tch!” Crazy Horse said. “You need to learn to overcome your fears like a man!” He bent closer to the tarantula and whispered something to it, pointing to McCluskey with his free hand. Then he set the fuzzy creature down gently, and it immediately scurried across the carpet and took up station directly in front of McCluskey, simultaneously doubling in size and then doubling again till it was about the size of a snapping turtle. McCluskey started emitting a series of crazed little shrieks as the spider doubled in size again to about the size of a footstool.

  Chen spoke to his family quietly in Chinese and as they all started moving towards the door the walls of the room creaked and groaned ominously and then cracked from ceiling to floor as plaster spilled into the air.

  “Try to meditate,” Crazy Horse said to the terrified gangster, “it’s really the only thing to do in a situation like this.” He waved and turned for the door, as the spider doubled in size again to something about the size of a champion hog. McCluskey’s yelps started climbing the scale into the soprano range as Liam moved after Crazy Horse.

  “See you around, Fergie,” he said with a cheery grin. “Or maybe not. Anyway, thanks for your hospitality!”

  As he headed towards the door the tarantula doubled in size again to the size of the kidney-buttoned love seat and McCluskey started screaming rhythmically and insanely.

  “Some people just can’t take a joke,” Liam said with a shrug, stepping out into the vestibule and closing the door after him with a soft click.

  Chapter Twenty

  How long do you think we’ve got before Stanton’s people get here?” Crazy Horse was shivering constantly, despite the hotel blanket he had wrapped around his shoulders.

  Liam shook his head and pulled the mouton collar of his overcoat up around his neck—at six a.m. the sea fogs around Santa Catalina island were bone-chilling, and an unseasonable cold snap wasn’t helping.

  “All Governor Barnum said in the message he left at the desk was that he had just gotten a telegram from Prince Yurevskii’s HQ saying an airship would arrive from New Petersburg sometime this morning with a special emissary and a detachment of Little Russian aeronauts they were sending to collect me, you two birds, General Custer and everybody in Ambrose’s family, and that Yurevskii expected local authorities to give them every assistance in rounding us up. That was it. Period. Like Barnum said before, figuring out what to do about it is up to us.”

  Chen snorted irritably, doing his best not to shiver—he had decided that 40° Fahrenheit wasn’t cold and that carrying on about it was simply childish.

  “Then perhaps we’d better get busy and do something before they do arrive! We could study the place from a distance for another week and I doubt it would make the least bit of difference.”

  “All right, all right,” Liam said irritably, “I was just hoping we’d see something that would give us an idea of how people go and come—I’ve never done any kind of job where I hadn’t already picked out at least two escape routes, but that heap over there is buttoned up like an ironclad.”

  He made a frustrated gesture towards a colossal fortified keep whose spires and battlements were reminiscent of Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian castles. Like Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein, Serra Castle was built on a commanding height, in this case Mt. Orizaba, at 2,097 feet the highest point on Catalina Island.

  “Barnum didn’t tell me it was built on top of a mountain, for Pete’s sake!” Liam grumbled. “What do we do once we find Custer, grow wings and flap away like a herd of damned buzzards?”

  “I believe,” said Chen mildly, “that the proper collective noun for a group of buzzards is a ‘wake.’”

  Liam flushed with annoyance: “I’ll wake you, you New College teetotum! How about a pop on the snoot, will that do it?”

  Crazy Horse laid a soothing hand on Liam’s shoulder: “Lyovushka. Ambrose is trying to restrain himself from reminding you that you don’t have to count on jiu-jitsu to get Georgie out of there, you can use your really quite substantial powers as a sorcerer if you need them.”

  Liam glared at nothing in particular for a moment or two, then heaved a sigh and gestured to the others to follow as he set out across a sloping meadow that led to the main gate of Serra Castle:

  “OK, boys,” he said, “let’s go!”

  Hugging himself to stay warm despite the clinging fog, Capt. Ubaldo tromped back and forth in front of the aerial battleship, crossing his fingers that his dimwit Russians would return soon with some prisoners and glaring dyspeptically down the street towards the palm trees that lined the edge of the palisades. Very pretty, no doubt, but not enough to keep him from regretting this whole adventure—not just flying the aerial battleship to Little Russia in the first place, but everything: especially his disastrously ill-fated plan to play the Byronic hero and sweep Becky Fox off her feet. There had obviously been some key detail missing from his analysis of how to fan the banked embers of Becky’s esteem for Captain Ubaldo the Intrepid Aeronaut into a blaze of swooning passion for Ubaldo the Man. But what?

  Where had he gone wrong? He had been sure she would see the beauty of the plans he’d made for their life together, but instead she had met his magnanimity with treachery—drugged him and trussed him up like a hog for the slaughter. Which was very nearly what had happened when the Russian idiots who found him dragged him, still senseless and immobile, to the headquarters of the Secret Police!

  Finally, after hours of humiliating pleading with his captors, Ubaldo’s request for a royal audience had been granted. But when Prince Yurevskii had arrived at Okhrana HQ it was not to set Ubaldo free but to put him to the test: if he were to fly the aerial battleship to the Bear Flag Republic, place Liam McCool and his gang under arrest and bring them back to New Petersburg in chains, his earlier disgrace would be forgotten and he would be given a command in the Russian Aerial Navy. A simple task, surely! A snap for a veteran aeronaut like Ubaldo!

  What choice did he have? Plainly dubious about Ubaldo’s chances for success, an Okhrana Lieutenant had briefed him on everything the police had learned about McCool, the magician Chen and his family and the infamous Crazy Horse/General Custer duo. Then he had accompanied Ubaldo to the battleship and shaken his hand with a kind of lugubrious finality before wishing him good luck. It was all too plain that he was convinced the American would need it.

  Capt. Ubaldo sighed and pulled the collar of his overcoat further up around his neck. Here in “sunny” Santa Monica it was six-thirty in the morning, he’d had nothing for breakfast except some Navy-issue hardtack and a mug of cold coffee, and the weather in the supposedly balmy and benign Bear Flag Republic promised to go on being raw and wet and every bit as cold as New York. Madonna mia!

  He kicked an empty baked bean tin viciously, sending it flying towards the aerial battleship, which he had landed and moored in a vacant lot not far from the Santa Monica Government Building. This was the third time he had walked over to Barnum’s headquarters in the hope of finding Fergus McCluskey, the elusive Irish gangster with whom he’d agreed by voicewire to exchange the six members of Ambrose Chen’s family for $50,000 in gold. It didn’t make sense—what gangster would pass up that kind of money?

  Ubaldo had finally sent his detachment of Little Russian aeronauts into Los Angeles under orders to investigate the home address he had for McCluskey and find out what was going on. But there was still no word from any direction and he was going to have to speak to Prince Yurevskii soon, a thought that filled him with dread.

  “Sir! Sir! Hang on a minute!”
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  Ubaldo turned to see a Santa Monica policeman running towards him from the direction of the Government Building, waving his hands and shouting:

  “It’s about McCluskey!”

  Ubaldo stopped short and walked back to meet the man half-way.

  “Well, man, what is it? Speak up!”

  The policeman came to a halt and bent over with his hands on his knees, panting.

  “Sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’m not much of an athlete!”

  “For God’s sake, man!” Ubaldo was almost jumping up and down with the suspense.

  “It’s your squad of Rooskies, sir; we’ve had a voicewire message from the precinct house in Live Oaks Estates saying your lads couldn’t find any sign of McCluskey. Seems as how the lot where his house used to stand is just a swamp now and they couldn’t find hide or hair of him nor anyone from his gang.”

  Ubaldo clutched his forehead and groaned. “I hate this place!” he said feelingly, and then turned on his heel and trotted back towards the aerial battleship.

  In New Petersburg, Stanton was seated at the desk in his suite, jiggling the receiver of the voicewire instrument and trying to keep from screaming at it:

  “Hello?” he barked. “Hellohellohello? Speak to me, you blithering imbecile!”

  An offended female voice piped out of the receiver: “Really, sir!” And then, in an insufferably schoolmarmish tone: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me!”

  “Madam,” hissed Stanton, “either connect me immediately to the number I’m calling in the Bear Flag Republic, or I will move heaven and earth to find out your name and then we’ll see about the sticks and stones!”

  “Hmmph!” said the voice in the receiver, and a moment later the sound of ringing replaced it.

  “Pick it up, Ubaldo, damn you!” Stanton grated. At the same moment, there was an appalling BOOM! outside, and all of the windows came smashing into the room. Instinctively flattening himself on the floor, Stanton looked across the room towards the square outside the hotel, where a thick column of oily black smoke was rising towards the sky. Halfway across the room, unconscious on the floor and surrounded by a considerable pool of urine, Willie Pilkington lay sprawled where he had fainted.

  “Bah!” muttered Stanton. “Poltroon!”

  He got to his feet and scuttled across the room in a crouching run, stopping at the window and peering out at the square from behind the curtain. Below, clanking across the paving stones, came the forces of the anti-Yurevskii rebels: a couple of hundred of his “Brainy Acmes” throwing sticks of dynamite and firing a variety of weapons (one of the metal giants was even carrying an Armstrong rifled cannon with no carriage and firing it as another Acme walked behind and served as loader).

  Facing them in the foreground, and in total disarray, was a mixed force of defenders—Little Russian soldiers and Yurevskii’s Japanese technical advisers, most of them aeronauts from the Japanese Imperial Navy. For the moment they were firing an ineffectual assortment of small arms, but their resistance was wavering even as Stanton watched.

  “Damn it!” Stanton muttered. “And damn that insurrectionist swine Plekhanov!” Once again he scuttled across the room in a half-crouch and snatched the voicewire receiver up off the floor.

  “Hello?” he shouted. “Hellohellohello! Answer me, Ubaldo, you duplicitous dago!”

  At that very moment Ubaldo was starting up the flight of stairs that rose into the aerial battleship’s belly, and the moment the ringing began in the main cabin, he leapt up the last stairs and ran across the cabin to the voicewire console.

  Snatching up the receiver from the TeslaVox transmitter/receiver Ubaldo babbled breathlessly:

  “Yessir, Your Highness, sorry sir, unavoidably detained on the way to …”

  “SHUT UP!” Dear God! Was that Stanton? Where had he come from? The bellow from the tiny receiver was nearly ear-piercing. “WHAT ABOUT THE PRISONERS, DO YOU HAVE THEM IN YOUR BRIG? IN CHAINS?”

  Ubaldo’s face screwed up in agony. How was he supposed to deal with this? “Ah, sir …” he said, “I’ve been assigned to this mission by Prince Yurevskii and I’m afraid I can’t discuss it with anyone else.”

  There was a long silence at the other end, and for a brief moment Ubaldo hoped against hope that perhaps all the screaming had finally brought on an apoplectic seizure, that at this very moment Stanton was lying on the floor frothing at the mouth and clawing at his collar … but no such luck. After a moment, he resumed, his tone now simply brisk and businesslike:

  “Listen to me, Ubaldo. As it happens, I overheard Yurevskii telling that clot Boylan about your mission to arrest McCool and the rest of those miscreants, and I was shocked to hear how little he offered you. After all, you came to me first with your offer of service, isn’t that so? It’s not my fault those damned Russians interrupted with their treacherous aerial attack. So why don’t you just forget Yurevskii and consider the mission to be an assignment from me? If you land the prisoners at the Aerial Navy Base in Central Park I will make you an Admiral in the United States Aerial Navy on the spot! And I will give you $100,000 in gold into the bargain!”

  “But sir,” Ubaldo began, his voice quavering with stress, “what if Prince Yurevskii …”

  “Tut, tut, Ubaldo,” interrupted Stanton, “don’t you worry about a thing! I’ll take care of Prince Yurevskii, never you fear. Just get McCool and his gang of lowlifes back to New York and I’ll see to the rest. Now, according to what that blowhard Boylan told his master, he had word from a Santa Monica police informant that McCool and Crazy Horse and the Chinaman have gone to Catalina Island to set Custer free. So all you need to do is fly the aerial battleship to Catalina at once, arrest the lot of them and put them in chains. I’ll be back in New York in time to meet you in Central Park and pin your Admiral’s stars on your collar myself! Do I make myself clear?”

  “Oh, yessir, yessir, totally clear!”

  Ubaldo’s head was nearly spinning as he tried to re-orient himself, but he did his best to sound like the bold and intrepid Ubaldo he needed to be if he were going to come out of this insanity alive.

  “Good,” said Stanton. “Now do it, and be quick about it!”

  There was a sharp CLICK! from the receiver and Ubaldo sat there for a long moment, almost paralyzed with terror. Then at last he got to his feet and started frantically flicking switches and entering new settings on the battleship’s instruments. Thank God Catalina Island was only ten or fifteen minutes away and the ship had been designed to be flown by one crew member if an emergency dictated. Because this definitely qualified as an emergency.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Open that damned door now!” shouted Liam at the top of his lungs.

  He and his companions were standing outside the main entrance to Serra Castle, a ten-foot-tall oak door bound with iron straps, looking frustrated. The solitary keyhole was a good three inches high, suggesting a key of truly heroic proportions, and after trying to pick the lock for several minutes Liam had to admit defeat.

  “They probably don’t get up this early,” said Crazy Horse. “Why should they?”

  “OK then,” Liam said, “at least we ought to case the place a little better before we try busting down a door that size. Why don’t we go for a little stroll, walk around the thing and see if there are some doors or windows we can use without getting into a lot of magical hijinks.”

  “May I remind you,” Chen said with a touch of asperity, “that time is a luxury we don’t have. We need to stop Chiang Lee before he does something we shall all regret.”

  “How about this,” Crazy Horse offered. “Ambrose and I will split up and take a quick walk around the place while you have another go at the lock. We’ll meet back here in ten minutes or less and decide what we want to do.”

  “Let’s get started,” Liam said. He got out the Swiss folding tool that Harry the Jap had modified for him, flipped out a selection of picks and went to work on the lock, humming distractedly.
Just as he was starting to get totally frustrated for the second time, he heard a sharp little bark from behind him and turned with a start.

  Sitting on a boulder a few yards behind him was the smallest fox he’d ever seen, a pretty little creature about a foot high at the shoulder and a couple of feet long, its body furred in gray and red with a white throat and belly, and a black stripe along the back of its tail. It cocked its head inquiringly as Liam turned to look at it and growled as if to ask him what he was up to. Liam bowed politely:

  “I tried knocking,” he said, “but nobody answers. You have a better idea?”

  The fox barked again and took off loping across the meadow until it disappeared amongst the tall grass. Irritated with himself for wasting time, Liam turned back to attack the lock again and recoiled in shock as he realized that where the lock had been moments ago there was now literally nothing: no lock plate, no keyhole, nothing but a smooth plank of oak with no hint of a way in.

  Liam was just about ready to throw a fit. “That’s the damn limit,” he said out loud. “Now what?”

  “Perhaps I can help you, sir.” The voice came from behind him: a woman’s voice, sweet and strong and musical, like Becky’s, but even more … more … unable to resist, Liam turned to see what the speaker looked like.

  Standing behind him was a slender blonde woman with her long hair done up in a braid, carrying a wire basket filled with pint bottles of cream. She was wearing a blue gingham dress, the sort of thing Liam was used to seeing the working women of Five Points wear but not dowdy the way he was used to; instead, the commonplace look of the dress seemed to emphasize an unbelievably intense sensuality, as if the partly unbuttoned collar were inviting him to …

  The woman had the face of a Madonna, but when she laughed, the white flash of her teeth and the pink plumpness of her lips sent an involuntary shiver up Liam’s spine.

  “You seem a bit distracted,” she said with a merry giggle. “My name is Siobhan,” she said with a curtsy, “and if you’ll let me, I’m sure I can help you. I bring fresh cream every day for the men in the Castle and they’ve given me a key so I can take it straight through and put it in the pantry.” She took a huge brass key out of a pocket and held it up for Liam to see.