The Calorium Wars Read online

  “Jehoshaphat, Billy,” yelled Liam, “what were you using in that blunderbuss, birdshot?”

  “Birdshot, Hell!” Captain Billy said grimly. “That was double-aught buck, enough to knock an elephant on its ass!” He fumbled more shells out of his oilskin pocket with shaking hands and as if at a signal the shark stopped showing off and headed directly for the boat, its wake higher than before.

  “SHOOT, DAMMIT, SHOOT!” howled Captain Billy, at which Mike and Liam joined him in unleashing a fusillade that would have stopped a bus. The shark, however, seemed not to notice, and in one huge, horrifying CHOMP! tore the lifeboat off the stern davits and swallowed it whole.

  “Jasus, Mary and Joseph!” wailed Captain Billy, crossing himself as the shark flipped away from the boat, putting on another display of gargantuan acrobatics.

  “BILLY!” Liam roared into his ear, loudly enough that the Captain shook himself like a wet dog and started loading the shotgun again.

  “Forget that,” Liam continued, “you have some dynamite below decks?”

  Captain Billy nodded emphatically and shoved the shotgun into Chen’s hands before running back into the pilot house.

  Mike was shaking his head somberly, looking as worried as Liam had ever seen him. “Neveroiatno uzh yobanaia ryba!” he muttered, stuffing fresh cartridges into his pistol.

  “You can forget the popgun.” Liam said, “If Billy’s dynamite doesn’t work we might as well call it a day.”

  Chen held out the shotgun, his forehead wrinkled with thought. “It can’t work,” he said, “it’s not that kind of problem.”

  Liam shot him a questioning look, but before he could speak, Captain Billy ran back up on deck with a double handful of bundled dynamite sticks and a glowing cigar clamped between his teeth. At almost the same moment, the shark pulled one more somersault and headed back towards the Straight Up at top speed.

  “Here!” yelled Mike. “Gimme one, I useta pitch for Cincinnati.”

  Liam nodded approvingly and lit a bundle before handing it over. Mike had, in fact, been with the Red Stockings for a season before he decided leading the Butcher Boys was more fun and came back to New York.

  “There it comes,” Billy sang out. The shark had closed to about fifty yards, its mouth open wide enough to swallow a hansom cab. At the same moment, Mike wound up as if he were on the mound and let fly with a perfect strike, which disappeared into the creature’s maw like a dainty snack into a sinkhole. For a moment the creature looked distracted and then a tremendous explosion echoed out of its gaping jaws and a hurricane of half-eaten fish and other disgusting rubbish spewed all over the four men on the open deck. At that, the shark abruptly dove, disappearing from sight in a flash.

  “I hope that thing is dead,” Mike said, trying to brush off the bits of stinking garbage, “getting clean’s going to take being towed behind the ship for an hour or two.”

  “I shouldn’t count on it if I were you,” said Chen with a morose shake of the head, at which the shark abruptly reappeared a couple of hundred yards ahead and turned grimly back towards the ship, gnashing its heart-stopping array of teeth with a grinding, screeching noise like a steam-powered tree shredder.

  “Akh, bozhe ty moi,” Mike said faintly, “it’s twice as big as it was!”

  “I’ve seen that growing trick before,” Liam said. “Back in Little Russia. Only back there I knew a geezer that knew what to do about it.”

  By now, Billy and Mike were both crossing themselves, Billy the Irish way and Mike the Russian way. Liam shook his head and turned to Chen:

  “Well, Ambrose,” he said as cheerfully as he could manage, “it looks like it’s up to you. Is Chinese alchemy any good on supernatural sharks?”

  Chen threw Liam an exasperated look and turned back to watch the shark, which was by now about twenty-five yards away and clearly mad as Hell.

  “If it is,” Liam added with a touch of stress in his voice, “now would probably be as good a time as any for you to do something.”

  Chapter Six

  She supposed all underground political parties had the same problem—cut off from the rough and tumble of daily life, the members ended up making war on each other, forming factions and delivering speeches and sneaking around behind each other’s backs as if they were living ordinary quarrelsome lives in some busy city, where they could speak freely and never have to think twice about informers and secret police. Becky had seen it all before with Mexican revolutionaries and Russian revolutionaries, and she certainly couldn’t blame her fellow Freedomists for blowing off a bit of steam.

  It was a gilded cage, to be sure, she thought as she strolled away from the main house. Banking mogul Abner Goodyear, a secret supporter of the Freedom Party, had been happy to offer them refuge in his family’s summer mansion on Shelter Island, and his elevated social status had protected them from Stanton’s snoopers ever since.

  The main building—a blend of stone and slate and whitewashed clapboard—had been begun in the late 1600s and added to and modernized steadily ever since. By the end of the Civil War it had grown to more than a hundred pleasant, airy rooms, and less than half of them were filled now by Freedom Party members. If you simply had to go underground, it would be hard to pick a more agreeable hideout and Becky had spent a few especially memorable days—and nights—here with Liam in the days after their escape from Little Russia.

  But, honestly—if she had to sit through one more Party conclave, endure one more maddeningly parliamentary, pernickety and oh-so-polite exercise in the democratic politics of Cloud Cuckoo Land, she would scream. And not just a single ladylike scream, either, but a whole uncorseted succession of them, piercing and soul-cleansing.

  Gathering up her skirts she settled herself on a boulder at the edge of the sea wall, feeling the warmth of the afternoon sun on her face and watching the whitecaps march briskly across the surface of Little Peconic Bay only to dash themselves into foam against the stones.

  Like this morning. A gentleman from Bridgeport had proposed that the Party approve a commendation of some sort for Liam in recognition of his brave attempt to retrieve the Party’s police files and the suffering he’d gone through in consequence, but almost immediately that maddening fussbudget Mrs. Redingote had taken up her cudgels and the proposal had detoured—ever so politely—into a maddening argument over whether it was really proper for the Party to commend a convicted felon, and one who was not, moreover, a member of the Party.

  As the barrage of polite barbs and empty phrases flew back and forth across the meeting room, Becky found herself thinking more and more forcefully of the trial of the Knave of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, and finding herself more and more tempted to follow Alice in crying “Stuff and nonsense!”, even if her fellow Freedomists were to rise up in the air and come flying down upon her like Alice’s deck of cards.

  “Stuff and nonsense indeed!” Becky muttered out loud, interrupting a sandpiper that had been pecking at a nearby patch of sand so that it cocked its head and peered at her inquisitively. “I hope you find more to sustain you here than I have,” she told the bird crisply and took off across the lawn in the direction of the woods that bordered it.

  The real trouble was, she admitted to herself, that what she had been doing with the Freedom broadsheet just didn’t feel like journalism to her. For her, journalism had always meant travel, investigation, conflict, and interviews with all sorts and conditions of people, most of whom had no intention whatever of being honest with her and were as hard to unlock as any Chinese puzzle box. She missed it. She missed the challenges. Without them she could feel herself beginning to stagnate and she was afraid she was going to turn into a crotchety old lady without having had a real go at anything between youth and decrepitude.

  Her work for Freedom really meant little beyond writing the occasional editorial based on someone else’s risks and exertions and organizing the bits and pieces of political information picked off their far-flung grapevine telegraph, and the tr
uth was almost any literate person could do as well as she’d been doing. After a career that had featured stories based on escapades like smuggling herself into Mecca during Ramadan masquerading as a deaf-mute beggar, riding with Mexican bandits trying to overthrow Porfirio Diaz and having herself thrown into New York’s hellhole women’s prison disguised as a drunken prostitute, letting other people sweat for her material was truly excruciating.

  And even if she’d been able to resign herself to the deadly boredom of her work, the thought of Liam and her questions about Liam and what kind of future the two of them could make together simply wouldn’t leave her in peace. She could scarcely claim to have led a sensible, circumspect life, but even for her the thought of linking her fortunes with those of a man who skated constantly along the thin edge between freedom and arrest seemed totally outlandish. On the other hand, she had to admit she hadn’t experienced a single moment of boredom during the time they’d been together, and that was a fact too singular to be ignored.

  One way or another, she’d simply had more of a rest than she could stand and she was beginning to feel a bit like the shrew she’d caught in a jam jar during a school picnic in Central Park. The poor little mite had almost gone mad jumping up the sheer glass walls and falling back to the bottom until she’d taken pity on it and set it free, and now at last she could truly appreciate what it had been going through.

  But what could she do? President Lincoln and Mr. Clemens had begged her to take over Freedom, and since she and Liam had been given refuge here on Shelter Island after their recent adventures in Little Russia and Freedom’s previous editor had just been swept up by Stanton’s myrmidons leaving the paper with nobody at the helm, it had been impossible to refuse.

  She stepped into the cool twilight of the woods with a sense of relief. Lovely silence. Birds singing. Little creatures rustling through the dried leaves. Becky sighed deeply, leaned her forehead against the cool moss on the side of a tree and wondered, finally, what it would be like to see Liam again. Mike had sent Captain Billy with a message three days ago, and she knew it was going to be soon … could it be today?

  It was hard to believe how short a time they’d actually known each other, since it felt as if they’d already lived a couple of lifetimes together. They’d only met this past June, and in the space of a few days they had raided the basement storehouses of the Smithsonian Institution on a mission for the Freedom Party, unexpectedly discovering and freeing President Lincoln from Stanton’s cells while retrieving Crazy Horse’s captured medicine bag, which they then took to Little Russia to return to him and his sidekick Laughing Wolf, né George Armstrong Custer, so they could resume their leadership of the Indian liberation struggle.

  Then (as if that hadn’t been enough already), after joining forces with Custer and Crazy Horse they’d destroyed the HQ of the Little Russian secret police in New Petersburg, stolen the prototype of Stanton’s new aerial battleship from the aerodrome of the Little Russian Aerial Navy and flown it back to New York just in time to liberate a concentration camp at Sing Sing, where they thwarted Dr. Lukas’ plans to transfer the prisoners’ brains to his growing army of human-brained automatons, and finally, almost as an afterthought, dynamited Stanton’s new million-dollar HQ in Union Square.

  Becky smiled, remembering the crazed, headlong pace of those days and then the sudden idyllic halt as she and Liam stole a long moment together in a peaceful Canadian meadow …

  Then she shook her head and sighed, remembering how abruptly they’d come down to earth again once they’d found themselves here on Shelter Island. Too many conflicting demands and too many competing loyalties. All unbidden, a sharp picture of Liam popped up in the midst of her musings—his curly auburn hair and clear hazel eyes, his strong jaw and the boyish half-smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth and made him look too young to be a veteran of Gettysburg and the leader of a New York gang. It wasn’t as if she’d never had a lover before, she thought with a flash of irritation, nor even as if she’d never had one she cared about deeply. It was just that she’d never before lost a piece of her independence, a big enough piece that she felt suddenly bereft.

  Just then a faint, sweet sound of singing came to her from somewhere deeper in the wood, sending a shiver up her spine. It was one of the local legends that Captain Kidd had buried his treasure here in these woods, leaving it to be guarded by the ghosts of his murdered crewmen. Becky shook herself and looked around, trying to guess where the sound was coming from; it was a woman’s voice, half-humming, half-singing, and it didn’t sound like any pirate Becky could imagine. After a moment of hesitation she set off through the wood in search of the singer.

  The sound of the woman’s voice grew stronger and clearer as Becky walked further into the wood, and before long she realized the singing was in Gaelic and the singer’s voice was familiar. There was really only one person it could be, and Becky smiled wider as she realized it was the one person among all the Goodyear mansion’s inhabitants she actually felt like talking to just now.

  Becky stood for a moment among the trees just beyond the edge of a small clearing, watching the woman who was singing as she worked, clearing all the underbrush and shrubs and thorny growths that clustered around the roots of a circle of tall, ancient white birch trees, a perfect circle formed of single trees, each as thick as a human body and smooth and white as an alabaster column. The woman herself was as slender as a sapling, small and rosy, not more than five feet high but strong as a man considering the ease with which she uprooted whole bushes and bound them up with vines. And her gray hair, knotted at the nape of her neck, didn’t signal any dimming of her senses, as it wasn’t a moment later that she stood up abruptly, looked towards Becky in her leafy hiding place and greeted her with a wide grin and a sparkle of green eyes:

  “Becky, acushla! Sure, I thought for a moment you were a tree nymph, come to pinch me nose for disturbin’ yer sleep!”

  Becky laughed and moved into the clearing to give Liam’s Gran a warm embrace. “What is this place, Gran? I’ve never seen such beautiful old birches. And why are you gathering up all the underbrush? Is there going to be a bonfire?”

  Gran cocked her head and gave Becky an appraising little smile.

  “What?” Becky asked, her curiosity piqued. “Did you find Captain Kidd’s treasure?”

  Gran laughed. “Don’t I wish it, though? No, darlin’, I’m getting ready for Samhain.”

  “The Irish Halloween?”

  “Halloween, pah!” Gran snorted. “Samhain was already old as the stones when St. Patrick came to Ireland to worrit the snakes. Samhain belongs to the old religion from the ages before the druids and its time has come round again—I can feel it in me bones sure as you’re a foot high.”

  She hugged herself as if she’d felt a sudden chill and cast a look at the darkness among the trees beyond the birch circle. Then she turned back to Becky and gave her a little smile:

  “Here in New York I’ve been called a witch more than once, and most of the people who said it didn’t know they were just speakin’ the plain truth.”

  Becky frowned and shook her head: “Witch?”

  The old lady answered with a wry smile and a shrug: “In Ireland it was just a part of life—in the countryside the old beliefs were always stronger than the new religions and the doubts that the English tried to teach us with their schoolbooks. The women of my clan bore cailleacha—witches—as often as they did ordinary lasses, and Liam’s people go all the way back to the grandest hero in our legends, Finn McCool. So you can take it as gospel, Becky dear: the old gods are stirrin’ in their sleep, and wakin’ again wherever enough believers call them back.”

  Becky was watching Gran with a dubious frown, looking uneasy enough to make Gran burst into merry laughter.

  “It’s not me mind that’s goin’, begorrah, it’s me back! Lend us a hand will you, darlin’? Help me pile all this rubbish in the middle of the circle.”

  For a couple of minutes the t
wo women worked in silence, gathering all the bundles of brush and windfallen branches, Becky darting the occasional glance towards Gran until she finally couldn’t contain herself any longer:

  “Tell me, Gran, do! Don’t be mysterious—by old religions do you mean things like all the oversized creatures and the odd weather? When we were in Little Russia Chief Crazy Horse told us that Indian medicine had caused those. Are you expecting something else?”

  Gram straightened up and stretched backwards until her spine popped, then wiped her forehead on her sleeve and grinned at Becky: “You’re children of your doubtin’ times, you and Liam, and him that ought to know better, descended direct from the great chieftan of the Fianna.” She gave Becky a wry look: “It’s been a long war, darlin’ girl, the war of steam and money against the forces of magic and faith, but the tide’s turnin’. It’s like the wise man in the Bible says: ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.’”

  “Come on, then,” she continued briskly, putting her arm through Becky’s, “I expect it won’t be long till Cap’n Billy’s boat brings Liam home to us, what do you say we take a little stroll down to the dock and make sure we’re there to welcome him in case today’s the day?”

  Becky laughed. “I say you may be mad as a March hare, but every so often you have a really good idea!”

  The two women strolled away out of the serene hush of the birch circle and back into the surrounding woods, and for a moment Becky had the oddest sensation of having crossed a threshold—as if she’d stepped from one world into another …

  Chapter Seven

  Well?” snapped Liam.

  The only thing that kept him from smacking Chen to get his attention was the thought that the man had already been hit enough for a lifetime by Stanton’s jailers. Still, he and Mike and Captain Billy didn’t seem to have a clue between them about stopping the shark, which left things up to Chen’s Chinese alchemy. Assuming there was anything more to that than ye olde Shanghai snake oil, that is.