The Calorium Wars Read online

  But the worst part of the whole business, the most unforgivably stupid part, had been letting himself get suckered into discussing the job in front of a roomful of strangers, those nice square-John civilians from the Freedom Party who couldn’t possibly be nursing a secret viper in their bosom, oh no.

  He had tried to tell President Lincoln that the fewer people who knew, the better. But the President just swiveled that impassive automaton head back and forth in an unmistakable “no” and said that he’d spent too many years in back-room politicking when he was in Washington—now he wanted to be sure everything was done right out in the open so everyone had a chance to take part in making the decisions.

  And when Liam got stubborn about it, naturally Becky had had a conniption fit: how could Liam mistrust these splendid brave people who were risking everything to fight the evil ogre Stanton, etc., etc., indeed how could he even imagine that one of these citizen-heroes might be a secret turncoat?

  Liam winced, remembering. In spite of himself, he had raised his voice a bit at that. Well, maybe more than a bit. Splendid brave people or not, would she tell these nice citizens what she was writing in one of her exposés before it was safely published and on the news stands? Like fun she would, she knew as well as he did that nobody could beat a nice citizen for pure blabbermouth gossiping and he’d already had one go at sitting in the Tombs twiddling his thumbs, thank you!

  Then President Lincoln chimed in, in his gentle, chiding voice, and once Becky and the President had whittled Liam down to about an inch high and smarting all over, he had finally knuckled under and said OK, OK, he would sit there and keep his mouth shut while President Lincoln told the Party members what the plan was and wait for their decision …

  Liam shook his head and snorted derisively: as if he’d ever had a chance of saying no! So there he had found himself a few hours later, transported back to the City by Captain Billy and—God help him—about to crack a crib with the democratic blessings of the Freedom Party …

  The streets were quiet, way too quiet for the East Side on a stifling, airless July night when you’d expect people to be out on the stoops in their shirtsleeves sweating and drinking and gossiping, and Liam was already wishing he was back in the wheelhouse of the Straight Up listening to Captain Billy’s tales of life as a river pirate. And headed the other way, too—returning to Shelter Island with the job done and Becky waiting to welcome him.

  He stopped as he came to a densely shadowed space between two buildings and moved back into the narrow alley so he could inspect the street at his leisure. The East River did a little dog-leg right around the point where East 17th Street met Avenue B, and Captain Billy had been able to put him ashore in a totally dark area just five blocks from the warehouse he was headed for.

  Liam scanned the street again left to right, procrastinating. You really had to wonder about the way everybody and his brother was jammed in side by side in this city. From where he was standing right now it wasn’t more than ten minutes’ walk cross-town to the genteel purlieus of Washington Square Park, where all the swells lived and where Liam had discovered the pied-à-terre of Dr. Lukas, the criminal genius who had stolen Lincoln’s brain, imprisoned Liam’s Grandma and now ruled Little Russia as Prince Yurevskii, bastard son of Tsar Aleksandr II. Over there in the Village, a flash customer like Lukas didn’t even get a second glance.

  Here on the East River, on the other hand, the nearest park was in Tompkins Square, just two blocks south of tonight’s burglary target and the scene of endless tussles between mobs of angry workers and the coppers and soldiers sent to clear them out. In fact, this was all solid working-class territory, from here on south to Liam’s birthplace in Five Points, and the more he peered out into the streets where he’d spent so much of his life the more jarringly wrong the emptiness and silence seemed. Working-class people didn’t go to the Opera or Delmonico’s to entertain themselves, they went out into the streets. But the streets were empty. Ergo … Liam shook his head. Ergo mind your eye, Liam me son!

  A movement from across the street caught the corner of Liam’s eye and froze his blood momentarily. Then he relaxed, but only partly: it was one of those über-rats, a thing about the size of a small pig, with big yellow teeth like a beaver and glowing red eyes. It looked at Liam for a long moment, as if he might be dinner, but when Liam reached for the Colt Peacemaker in his waistband, the creature seemed to get the message and disappeared the way it had come, snorting and squeaking irritably.

  Liam shuddered. Now that he’d teamed up with Crazy Horse and Custer in Little Russia and learned what The People were up to with their Sun Dances and all the other medicine that had produced this plague of giant critters, he at least understood what was going on. The united native tribes of North America were upping the ante in their struggle to get President Jackson’s Indian Removal Act thrown out and their homelands restored, and their best weapon was their command of natural magic. But knowing all that only stretched so far—Liam was an old-fashioned city boy and rats of any size still gave him the willies.

  All right, then, McCool. No more dithering! Liam forced himself forward out of the shadows and crossed the street briskly, moving on a diagonal towards the warehouse’s alley entrance. According to the President, Stanton’s people had managed to dig through the wreckage of their Union Square HQ and exhume all the files that had been buried by the explosion the Butcher Boys had triggered. Then they had loaded them onto a caravan of steam wagons and moved them here for safekeeping till the new HQ was finished. Liam’s assignment was to find the files on the Freedom Party and either steal them if they weren’t too voluminous or destroy them on the spot. Liam rattled a box of Lucifers in his coat pocket and grinned sourly, thinking that lighting one or two of these and dropping them in a drawer full of paper would work a lot faster than reading a bunch of files. That was one problem solved, anyway.

  Once more, as he reached the side entrance on 12th and B, he paused for a moment and looked in every direction. Nothing. Even the rat had cleared off. Well, in for a penny in for a pound, right? He reached into the holster under his arm and pulled out the two-foot, hardened-steel jimmy which was going to make this a fast and dirty entrance. Wedging one end under the edge next to the lock plate he leaned on it and pushed with all his strength until the wood splintered with an appallingly loud crack …

  … And suddenly, disorientingly, the harsh radiance of a dozen carbon-arc searchlights sprang up from rooftops bracketing the warehouse, whistles and sirens screamed their obbligato and a threatening basso profundo bellowed out from a megaphone somewhere nearby:

  “Liam McCool! Throw down your weapons now! Assume a prone position and do not move until you are instructed to by an officer of the New York City Police Department! Do it now!!”

  Liam shook his head disgustedly, dropped the jimmy with a clang and set down the Colt Peacemaker next to it, and then lay down gingerly with his face to the cobblestones. There were definitely times, and this one went right to the head of the list, when being able to say “I told you so” just didn’t amount to a hill of beans.

  Mr. Lincoln he could understand, in many ways he was really just too credulous and trusting to have spent all those years in the White House. Probably his advisers had done their best to insulate him from daily reality and no doubt that took its toll. But Becky? Becky was a smart girl, as fly as any of the Butcher Boys, and they were the sharpest gang of thieves, forgers and burglars in New York City. She’d spent years now seeing the world as it actually was and reporting on it for big-city readers who knew which end was up. Maybe her insisting on the public discussion of the warehouse job was just the effects of hero worship, like Liam’s being willing to pull the job in the first place. Sure, she would probably go along with President Lincoln even if every alarm bell in her head were ringing to warn her against it …

  “HEY! WAKE UP!”

  Liam jumped as if a pistol had gone off next to his ear.

  “Chto ty, durak, glukh chto l
i?”

  Mike was bending close, making a megaphone of his hands and yelling as loud as he could. Liam stuck a finger in his ear and jiggled it:

  “I will be deaf if you keep hollering in my ear!”

  Mike gave Liam a knowing grin that was even more irritating than the yelling.

  “Aw, bednyi Liovushka, poor little Liam! Wuzzums dweamin’ about the pwetty lady?”

  Liam’s jaw set like granite and he drew back his fist warningly.

  “Edakii govniuk,” Mike snorted. “C’mon little fella, I need some help to take care of a sick Chinaman.”

  He started back towards the aft companionway and Liam saw that Captain Billy was supporting the erstwhile Man in the Iron Mask outside the open hatchway that led down to the cabin. He was heavily wrapped up in discarded pieces of nautical uniform including a long navy-blue woolen scarf probably knitted by Mrs. Captain Billy that was wrapped around his neck until he could barely move his head. Whatever his basic skin color might be, right now it was a disturbing mix of tea and milk and enough India ink to give it a sickly grayish look.

  “Nĭhăo,” Liam said with a polite little bow.

  The man examined Liam suspiciously, as if he were weighing the ulterior motives behind his “Hello.” Finally he returned a grudging little bow.

  “You’re looking a little better,” Liam said, “Irish whiskey must agree with you.”

  The man grimaced and glared at Liam without any sign of having understood. After a moment he spoke, in a sort of music-hall sing-song:

  “Chinese man very bad English, but hab fashion, no can help.”

  “Is that a fact?” Liam asked in a mildly derisive tone. “And here I was telling my friend how smart you were.” He looked towards Mike and gave him a broad wink, which seemed to make the man uneasy. He looked back and forth between Liam and Mike with his eyes narrowed to slits, plainly wishing he could peer into their heads. Finally he shrugged and gestured towards the deck:

  “Thisee chop boat, what name him sailing to?”

  Liam rolled his eyes and laughed. “Mister, I don’t know what you do for a living but unless you’re a daisy at singing and dancing, I reckon you wouldn’t last five minutes on the stage. Why don’t you just drop the Dumb Chinaman wheeze and tell us how you ended up in Stanton’s clink?”

  The man shook his head angrily and bared his teeth as if were about to bite someone.

  “OK,” Liam said flatly, “you want to talk pidgin I can humor you.”

  He reached out and tapped the man on the chest with his forefinger, not hard enough to hurt but deliberately enough to get his attention:

  “You wantchee catchee one piecee straight talk right now, you savvy?” He gave the man a hard little grin. “That’s if you want to stick with us and stay clear of the coppers and the Johnnies and Stanton’s Eyes. But I don’t want to hear any more phony blather, talk to us! Like we say back in Five Points, ‘no tickee no washee.’”

  The man glared at Liam for another moment or two, and then finally shrugged and smiled a little:

  “I suppose you must have been the prisoner with the black bag over his head? That would rather change things.”

  “Uh huh,” Liam said with a touch of irony, “it means I heard your little chat with dear old Reverend Beecher.” He turned to Mike: “Our friend here gave Henry the Rev a regular scorcher of a call-down, that whole Balliol College my-dear-sir turn. I was laughing so hard I almost tripped and hanged myself.”

  “New College, actually,” the man said, “but if I may ask again without seeming ungrateful for your help—where is your vessel bound for?”

  Liam shrugged. “How about a trade? You tell us who you are and what you were doing on the gallows with your head in a tin pot, then we tell you where we’re going.”

  The man hesitated for a long moment, looking back and forth between Liam and Mike as if he were weighing them on some invisible scale.

  “Hey!” Mike said indignantly, “Mr. McCool here just finished saving your dilapidated ass, so the least you can do is say thanks!”

  “Liam McCool? And you are his coadjutor Mike Vysotsky?” All the man’s indecision had vanished like smoke: “I have heard Stanton’s people cursing you. Thank you! Thank you both!” He held out his hand: “Ambrose Chen, gentlemen, at your service.”

  The three exchanged energetic handshakes, holding onto bits of rigging as the Straight Up wallowed and bucked in the heavy weather.

  Then Liam spoke again, “OK, then, Mr. Chen, time for question #2: why did Stanton’s ghouls work you over so hard? What were they trying to squeeze out of you?”

  Once again a kind of anxious evasiveness crept into Chen’s manner: “That’s a rather complicated, ah … you see, I had spent some time in Secretary Stanton’s employ, and he finally decided to give me the sack. But … ah … he couldn’t just let me go, the man’s an absolute paranoiac, he was convinced I had some secret knowledge that belonged to him, knowledge I must reveal before he could set me free.”

  Liam and Mike stared at Chen thoughtfully.

  “You’re leaving something out,” Liam said, “something big.”

  “Certainly not,” Chen insisted heatedly, “it was nothing more than one of Stanton’s delusions, a manifestation of his neuropsychopathy. The man is barking mad!”

  Mike wasn’t impressed. “What line are you in, Mr. Chen? What did Stanton hire you for?”

  “That’s a good question,” Liam agreed. “Stanton may be crazy, but never enough to interfere with business. Either tell us what you have that he wants, or get lost—go ashore where we’re headed and keep going, or let Cap’n Billy take you along when he goes back to the city. Maybe you’ll understand better if I tell you we’re square in the middle of a war, so we need to make sure rescuing you wasn’t a mistake.”

  Chen closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows, thinking something over. Finally he let out a heavy breath and opened his eyes again.

  “Very well, gentlemen. I am by profession an alchemist, and I have discovered a simple way to refine calorium.”

  Both Liam and Mike were so nonplussed that they simply stood there and stared at Chen.

  “Please believe that I am no charlatan. Chinese alchemy is an ancient body of knowledge, a science that had already achieved great sophistication when the highest achievement of Western science was striking pieces of flint with a hammer stone.”

  “I never even heard of calorium until they started using it to run Acmes,” Mike said with a dubious frown. “What’s the big deal?”

  “If you run a steam engine on coal,” Chen said in his most professorial tone, “you must pay constant attention to the replenishing of the coal—your machine is, in effect, tethered to its coal supply. Calorium, however, when properly refined (and this is the key, since it is a very dangerous substance to deal with) will produce the desired amount of heat for firing your boiler indefinitely, without being renewed. All you need worry about is replenishing the machine’s water supply, and water is both cheap and ubiquitous.”

  Liam shrugged, “OK, but why would Stanton torture you over that? It looks like they already know how to refine calorium—what do you know that they don’t know?”

  Chen smiled, and this time the hint of smugness was unmistakable: “At present Stanton can only get ready-made calorium-powered Acmes from the British manufacturer Royce, and their refining process is unnecessarily complex and expensive. It’s also proprietary and patented to the hilt. That’s one reason those nice shiny black Acmes cost fifty thousand dollars apiece. The process discovered by Dr. Lukas is simpler than the British one, but still expensive and inherently dangerous, and is in any event being used by him to create an army of calorium-powered Acmes for the Little Russian Army. My process is both cheap and safe, but by the time I had completed my research I realized that Stanton was going to use having my formula as a pretext for invading Little Russia …”

  Both Liam and Mike were nodding now and they finished Chen’s sentence simultaneously:
“… because that’s where the raw calorium ore is.”

  “Bravo, gentlemen. In the former territory of Arizona, in the mountains of the Apacheria. True, there’s some in Canada as well, but at this particular time it’s a smaller challenge to take on Lukas than the British Empire. In any event, I would sooner cut out my own heart than help that swine Stanton in his plan of conquest.”

  Liam held out his hand and he and Chen shook emphatically. “Welcome aboard,” Liam said, “it looks like you ended up in the right place. Now all we have to do is get everyone behind the idea of putting Stanton …”

  Before he could finish there was a wild shout from the pilot house behind them:

  “SHARK!” bellowed Captain Billy, “SHARK!!”

  They jerked around in the direction of Captain Billy’s shout, galvanized by an unfamiliar note of panic in the old sea-dog’s voice. Captain Billy himself was standing on the stern deck frantically shoving fresh shells into the magazine of a pump-action shotgun, while an appallingly tall and thick shark’s fin—its tip nearly as far above the surface of the ocean as the top of the pilot house—raced towards them through the waves leaving a wake like an ocean racer.

  In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the creature was nearly even with the stern of the boat, its huge mouth with its terrifying array of teeth open as if to swallow the boat. Immediately Captain Billy began firing the shotgun, holding the trigger down so that it fired every time he cycled the slide, the BOOM! of one shot segueing into the next so that it sounded like one interminable BOOOOOOM! as Liam and his companions rushed to Billy’s side, Liam and Mike with drawn pistols.

  The shark, meanwhile, flipped its tail derisively, splashing the humans with cold sea water before leaping into the air in a dolphin-like exhibition of acrobatics that was even more frightening than its teeth, considering that it was easily as long as the Straight Up and considerably bulkier.