The Calorium Wars Read online

  Liam stepped forward and crowded into Ubaldo’s space, a move that made the sweat pop out all over the aeronaut’s face. “I tell you what, Arturo, I’ll consider coming with you if you answer my question: when did you start working for Stanton?”

  Sternly resisting the urge to wipe the sweat off his face, Ubaldo jutted his chin out at Liam and redoubled his sneer:

  “I’ve been onto you from the very beginning, you jumped-up little thief! It was me that gave you up to Stanton in the first place, it made me that sick to see you fawning all over that sweet noble creature Becky Fox!”

  Something like a black cloud began to sweep over Liam and he started forward with no clear thought in his mind except revenge, but Chen’s hand on his shoulder restrained him:

  “Mr. McCool,” Chen said quietly.

  Liam stopped and came slowly back to himself as a thoroughly frightened Ubaldo babbled on, making it worse:

  “That’s right! And I informed the authorities of the Freedom Party’s hiding place and then I left for Little Russia and took Becky with me so that she would not be tarred with the brush of your criminal machinations …”

  “You what?” shouted Liam, and this time it took both Crazy Horse and Chen to hold him back.

  Realizing dimly that he might have just signed his own death warrant, Ubaldo babbled in near hysteria:

  “Oh, never fear, she was far too corrupted by the time she had spent in your company to recognize the attractions of an honest, decent, manly sort of man. Instead, she treacherously drugged me and escaped into the slums of New Petersburg!”

  Liam clutched his forehead. “New Petersburg?” He started towards Ubaldo with such patently clear intent that Ubaldo backed away until the airship’s staircase hit him in the back and made him shriek.

  “Liam!” said Chen sharply, and the unfamiliar use of his first name made Liam freeze where he was and turn curiously towards Chen.

  “Add,” reminded Chen sternly, “not take away. Consider this your first real test.”

  Liam closed his eyes and knit his hands together, forcing himself to breathe slowly and evenly despite the crazy speed with which his thoughts were moving. Finally, after what seemed like ages, he blew out a long, slow breath and grinned broadly. He opened his eyes again as Chen watched him like a hawk.

  “My criminal machinations, eh?” he murmured.

  “That’s right,” Ubaldo said with all the firmness he could muster, which wasn’t quite enough to keep his voice from breaking and squeaking like an adolescent’s. “And as I have been deputized to arrest you by the properly constituted authorities of the United States of America, I will take you back in chains or my name’s not Arturo Ubaldo!”

  “It’s not,” Liam said.

  Ubaldo was sharply taken aback: “Eh?” he said.

  “Your name is not Arturo Ubaldo,” Liam said, and spreading his hands above his head he closed his eyes for several long moments and then clapped his hands. There was a blinding flash of light, and as everybody’s vision slowly returned, they saw—on the spot where Ubaldo had been standing—a dark-haired, cheerful-looking woman of about the same height as Ubaldo but at least three times his weight. She looked around uncertainly, clearly not at all sure where she was.

  “Artura?” Liam asked. “Artura Ubaldo?”

  “Why … why, yes,” she answered in a high but quite pleasant voice. “Pardon me for troubling you, but could you possibly tell me where I am?”

  “Certainly, madam,” Liam said, throwing a pointed look at Chen, “with the greatest pleasure. You are about to board this airship and be flown directly to meet someone who will be very pleased to meet you! In fact, I can safely say you are about to become a new source of happiness for a very large, lively family that has been coping for some time with a sad but unavoidable loss.”

  “I am?” she asked with a puzzled frown. “Are you sure?”

  “Never been surer of anything in my life,” Liam said with a smile. “Come along, boys, we’re heading back to Santa Monica.” He held out his hand to Artura: “Allow me, Miss Ubaldo …” and with an encouraging smile he led her up the stairs into the ship. For a moment Custer, Crazy Horse and Chen stood at the foot of the stairs, sunk in thought. Finally Custer nudged Chen with his elbow and grinned: “Bet you didn’t see that one coming, Professor!” Then, chuckling delightedly, he led the way back into the ship.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Governor Barnum, Mayor Edison and Charlie Stratton were standing in the vacant lot next to the Government Building, Barnum and Edison scanning the sky impatiently, Stratton strutting back and forth smoking a cigar and enjoying the morning sunshine. Barnum turned to Stratton looking a little on edge:

  “You sure that’s all he said, Charlie?”

  “Yup,” said Stratton, blowing a nice fat smoke ring. “Just that he had a present for Tom, and someone he wanted you to meet and they’d be here in about fifteen minutes.” He took a watch out of his waistcoat pocket and looked at it: “Which, I gotta remind you, Phin, was just about ten minutes ago.”

  Barnum pulled out a big calico handkerchief and mopped his brow. “Sorry, Charlie, I’m afraid McCool has got me a little on edge. I mean, I just got a call from the Avalon Chief of Police saying Serra Castle fell down this morning, not one stone left standing on another, and meanwhile all those hidebound villains Quantrill’s been collecting there since ’65 were sitting in the meadow nice as pie, holding hands and having a sing-song like kiddies on a school picnic.”

  Edison shrugged and smiled: “Something tells me Mr. McCool is a man of unplumbed depths.”

  “Hey!” piped Stratton. “There she is!”

  They turned to see the aerial battleship coming fast from the direction of Santa Monica Bay, descending as it approached, and in less time than it took for them to back away nervously and make sure they were leaving it enough landing room, it had already settled on the field and fired its mooring bolts into the ground. A moment later Chen and Crazy Horse and Custer came trotting down the steps from the ship’s interior and Barnum’s party hurried over to greet them.

  “By Gad, General,” enthused Barnum, “I never thought I’d see you again!” He and Custer exchanged a hearty handshake and then Custer bent over Stratton, sniffing the air with a passion that made the little man grin.

  “I don’t suppose you could use a see-gar, could you, General?” teased Stratton,

  “It’s a good thing my dear old sainted mother is already gone to a better world,” said Custer, “for if she weren’t I would gladly sell her lock, stock and barrel for one of your stogies.”

  “Always glad to honor a veteran,” chuckled Stratton, holding out his cigar case, “help yourself!”

  As Custer rapturously went through the ceremony of selecting, rolling, sniffing and snipping his Havana, Edison turned to Crazy Horse and Chen:

  “Say, fellows, you didn’t leave McCool back on Catalina, did you?”

  “No, sir,” said Crazy Horse, “but he has a surprise he wants to spring on Governor Barnum and he had a request: would you please blindfold him? As soon as you do he’ll come and join you.”

  Edison and Barnum exchanged a quizzical look and a shrug, and a moment later Barnum had knotted the big calico handkerchief over his eyes.

  “Bring ’er on!” he said with a smile, and Crazy Horse put thumb and forefinger into his mouth and gave a shrill whistle. No sooner had he done so than Liam came down the stairs, leading Miss Ubaldo gently by the hand till she was on terra firma.

  The minute Edison and Stratton saw her they gasped with astonishment:

  “Well, I’ll be switched,” murmured Stratton.

  “Incredible,” said Edison.

  “Say,” complained Barnum, “you fellows are kind of twisting the knife! How about letting me take off this hankie?”

  “In a minute, Governor,” Liam said, grinning with anticipation as he led a slightly nervous Artura over to a position right in front of Barnum.

  “Okay, Gov
ernor,” Liam said, “just imagine a fanfare from the band and the ringmaster saying ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen …’ and then you can take off your blindfold.”

  Overcome with suspense, Barnum whipped off the handkerchief, but the moment he took in the newcomer his jaw dropped and he shook his head in disbelief:

  “Young lady,” he said, “I don’t know where Mr. McCool met you, but you are the absolute spit and image of Billy Mae Sweetwater, and if you would do me the honor of accepting a long-term contract with P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth, you would make me the happiest man in the Bear Flag Republic!”

  “I would?” she asked, more than a little bowled over.

  “You certainly would, my dear,” said the obviously ecstatic Barnum. “And if you’ll come along with me I’ll sign you right now! Is there anything else I can do to make you happy?”

  Artura gave him a big smile: “Well, I am pretty hungry!”

  Barnum crooked his arm for her and she put her arm through it: “Dear lady,” he said, “before we fuss with contracts and such, I am going to take you over to Bob Burns’ steak house on Wilshire and 2nd and treat you to the finest sirloin in Santa Monica!” He turned back to the others. “Boys,” he said, “lunch is on me, will you join us?”

  “We’ve got to get going,” Liam said, “but thanks anyway.”

  “I owe you a very big one,” Barnum said, putting his hand over his heart.

  Liam grinned: “Bookstore,” he intoned pointedly, “just make sure to save me the best lot on Ocean Avenue, and I’ll be here inside six months!”

  As Barnum and his new Fat Lady and the quondam General Thumb strolled away towards the ocean, Liam turned to Edison:

  “Well, Mr. Mayor, I happen to have a surprise for you as well.”

  “For heaven’s sake, McCool,” Edison said, “I’m too old for the suspense—what is it?”

  Liam smiled and gestured to the aerial battleship:

  “It’s all yours, sir. I don’t know if it will square with your idea of not doing harm to anyone, but it’s certainly true that harmful people are likely to think twice about spoiling this paradise if they know it’s your first line of defense. Anyhow, there are a lot of interesting toys in there for you to play with, and at the very worst you may decide to beat a bunch of swords into a bunch of plowshares.”

  Edison took Liam’s hand and shook it warmly: “Like I said to Phin, you’re a man of unplumbed depths.”

  “Nah,” Liam grinned, “just your garden-variety Mick cracksman looking for a nice place to settle down.”

  He turned to Crazy Horse: “Now you can show us your surprise,” he said.

  “This way, gentlemen,” the Sioux war chief said with a grand gesture: “down past the Government Building to Ocean Avenue, and then left through that little park towards the stairs to the beach.”

  As the four companions strolled along towards the sparkling waters of Santa Monica Bay, Chen looked around appraisingly.

  “This really is a remarkably pleasant place,” he said, “are you thinking seriously of returning here to settle?”

  “Yup,” Liam said cheerfully, “unless somebody kills me along the way. I hope Becky can see setting up shop as a reporter here in California, and I don’t see why not if we succeed in getting rid of Stanton and Yurevskii. There’ll be railroads and airships going and coming nineteen to the dozen the minute those crooks are out of the way, and I hope you boys,” he turned to Custer and Crazy Horse, “have already got some ideas about tossing out the Little Russians and going into business with the U.S.”

  “You bet we have!” said Custer. “No reason to throw out any Russian that wants to be partners with The People and start something new out here, either!”

  “Nor any ‘brainy’ Acme, as far as that goes,” Crazy Horse said, “we can make them all citizens.”

  “Hmmm,” murmured Chen. “I wonder if this might not be a good place to start a North American College of Alchemy and the Magical Arts? After all, I have a baccalaureate from Oxford.”

  Liam smiled. “Like Governor Barnum said, it’s definitely a good place for big dreams.”

  Each of them happily absorbed in his own dreams, the Four Musketeers strolled westwards towards Ocean Avenue and then turned south through a pleasant, palm tree-lined esplanade that ran along the top of the cliffs fronting the Pacific Ocean. After a block or two, they came at last to a small, slate-roofed brick building entirely without windows which bore a brass-lettered sign reading: “Camera Obscura.”

  “Et voilà!” said Crazy Horse with a grin. “Nous sommes arrivés.”

  “I don’t want to be rude, Zhenya,” said Custer, “but this is it?”

  “I discovered this place the last time I was here,” Crazy Horse answered. “You know what a camera obscura is?”

  “Ahh … sort of,” Custer said, thoroughly baffled, “you have a dark room with a pinhole in the wall, right? And you see things that are outside the room inside the room, but upside down?”

  “‘Sort of’ is good in this case,” Crazy Horse said with a mysterious smile. “Come on!” He gestured for the others to follow and as he approached the door he added: “The thing is, this place is a bit like Ambrose’s ley lines, only it’s what a Sioux medicine man would call ‘spirit lines.’ I’ll show you.” And he disappeared through the door, followed—after a moment’s hesitation—by Liam, Chen and Custer.

  Inside, the darkness was startling, but after a moment the four friends realized that a ghostly mirror image of the esplanade and the building across Ocean Avenue was being projected upside down on the wall farthest from the street. As a fashionable—and upside down—young woman strolled by twirling her parasol, Custer muttered:

  “Tarnation! You’d think her skirt would fall down enough to show us her ankle, wouldn’t you?”

  “Ever the vulgarian,” said Crazy Horse with a grin.

  Then he walked over and leaned against the projected image with both palms, chanting something in melodic Lakota Sioux. For a moment or two the others just watched in some puzzlement, until abruptly the projected scene was replaced by another—this one as bright as day and showing a mountain landscape strewn with huge, cracked boulders and occasional sage and greasewood bushes.

  “Now wait a minute …” Liam said uneasily.

  As he spoke a big chuckwalla scuttled across one of the boulders in the foreground and stopped abruptly as it appeared to notice them. Immediately, it started doing pushups and puffing up its chest, an aggression display that said he was warning them away from his territory.

  “That’s crazy,” said Custer flatly.

  Crazy Horse turned and grinned at them: “Come on, fellas, we haven’t got all day!”

  With that, Crazy Horse walked through the wall, frightening away the chuckwalla.

  “Well,” Liam said, “here goes nothing.” With that he crossed himself and followed Crazy Horse, realizing as he did so that the Camera Obscura and Santa Monica itself had disappeared, leaving him standing somewhere in the mountains on a very hot afternoon.

  “Come on,” shouted Crazy Horse, waving towards something Liam couldn’t see, and a moment later Chen and Custer stepped into view, Custer with his jaw hanging and Chen muttering to himself in Chinese. Crazy Horse swept his arm in a grandiloquent gesture, taking in what looked like an endless expanse of tumbled boulders framed by a cloudless sky of brilliant, eye-watering blue.

  “Welcome to the Apacheria,” he said.

  And a moment later a deafening fusillade of rifle and Gatling-gunfire broke out from somewhere altogether too nearby, sending shrieking ricochets and sharp chips of stone flying in every direction.

  “Hell’s bells!” shouted Custer, flattening himself to the ground behind a boulder, where he was instantly followed by the other three.

  As they lay there gritting their teeth and grimacing in anticipation of connecting with a bullet or a flying rock chip, Custer shouted:

  “You can keep your damned Apacheria, Crazy H
orse, it reminds me of Gettysburg!”

  “Yeah,” Liam shouted, “me too! Only worse, they didn’t have this many rocks—and I was on Little Round Top, so I know from Gettysburg and rocks!”

  “Know from Gettysburg and rocks?” Chen queried, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

  “That’s New York talk,” Liam said grimly, “and I use it whenever I’m really terrified.”

  “Well,” Crazy Horse said, ducking as a ricochet whannnged overhead, “you just have to look on the sunny side! We seem to have arrived here in plenty of time to stop Stanton’s invasion of the calorium mines.”

  “That’s grand,” Liam said as a spent bullet tore past with a stomach-churning whup-whup-whup sound. “How about you go first?”

  Little Russia—New Petersburg & Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona Guberniia

  November 2, 1877

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Prince Yurevskii’s pioneering work on mating live human brains with brilliantly engineered metal androids had resulted in a small army of the most sophisticated automatons in the world. So sophisticated, in fact, that his metal men formed the backbone of his infantry’s shock troops, the most trusted of his Palace Guards and the most skilled and capable cadres among his factory workmen.

  For all of them to function at the peak of efficiency and reliability depended on the most spectacular of all Yurevskii’s technical innovations, the crown jewel of his budding empire: the Wireless Automaton Control Center housed in an imposing sandstone building across the Square from the Regent’s Palace. Once the administrative offices of Yurevskii’s ill-fated predecessor, his half-brother Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (blown up by Plekhanov’s revolutionaries), the building now housed guard barracks, offices for the technical staff and a giant, wire-festooned machine that hummed like a steamship’s turbine and broadcast commands to all the individual cells of Yurevskii’s giant automaton organism: in fact, a sort of huge and powerful central brain.