The Calorium Wars Page 8

  The shark tore past them on the port side, its wake rocking the Straight Up as if the heavily-armored blockade runner were no more than a canoe, then paused for a moment a hundred yards aft of them to put on another stomach-churning display of gymnastics. Something told Liam that once it finished showing off, the creature’s next run at the boat would be all business.

  Chen was staring absently into the distance, for all the world as if he were trying to remember where he’d left his spectacles. Liam leaned closer, until he was a couple of inches away from Chen’s ear, and bellowed at the top of his lungs:

  “HEY!”

  Chen jumped as if he’d been stuck with a pin and Liam pointed towards the shark, taking pains to speak calmly:

  “Remember him? Ready to try some of that alchemy, or should I start saying my prayers?”

  Chen glared at him and answered with icy British composure: “My dear Mr. McCool, I’m afraid you’re labouring under a fundamental misunderstanding of …”

  Liam wasn’t listening. The shark had just performed what looked like a double somersault, raising a splash that would have swamped them if they’d been any closer, and now it was knifing towards them through the waves with terrifying speed.

  “Oh, oh,” Liam said in a hollow voice.

  “If we get out of this,” Mike said grimly, “I’m never eating another fish as long as I live!”

  The shark was so close now that when it opened its mouth it looked to Liam like the Warren Street end of the Beach Pneumatic Transit tunnel.

  “You got a hold of the wrong end of it,” Liam said, “the question is whether this one eats you.”

  “Here, dammit,” roared Captain Billy, “somebody give me a hand with this sea anchor!”

  He was wrestling with a peculiar contraption lying on the deck in the stern sheets, what looked like a pyramid of heavy cast-iron squares with a cast-iron rod skewered through their centers; a long coil of rope was attached to the narrow end by a ringbolt set in the rod. Liam leapt to help Billy and discovered that it was going to take the two of them just to pick it up, and that barely to chest level.

  “Heave it down that thing’s gullet!” shouted Billy, and a moment later he and Liam had pitched it over the side into the shark’s gaping jaws.

  For a brief moment, it seemed as if the shark had been stunned into immobility; then it snorted madly, thrashed around as if it were trying to cough the sea anchor up, and took off at top speed in the opposite direction. Liam watched as the coil of rope rapidly diminished and then shouted at the others:

  “HANG ON TIGHT!”

  No sooner had he said it than the rope went taut with a thrumming twanggg! and the entire vessel was jerked sideways so that the decks were instantly awash, Chen and Mike slipping in the water and crashing to the deck while Liam and Captain Billy had to fight to keep from going over the side. Then, before any of them could gather their wits, the monster shark changed course once more, now running ahead of the Straight Up and pulling it through the waves after it like a child’s toy boat on a string.

  “If we can’t stop that thing,” shouted Captain Billy, “we’re going to founder!”

  Liam shook his head grimly, pulled himself upright, snatched his Peacemaker out of its holster and fired at the swivel securing the end of the sea anchor’s rope. Two of the big slugs were enough to smash it loose and with a keening whistle the rope flailed away after the shark.

  For a moment all four men sat on the flooded deck in a sort of post-traumatic daze, and then Liam jumped to his feet and yelled furiously at Chen:

  “No wonder Stanton threw you in jail, you charlatan! That Chinese alchemy of yours isn’t worth a plugged nickel!” He bared his teeth in a furious sneer:

  “I should have figured it out sooner: what kind of tenth-rate dud ‘alchemist’ would let a bunch of thugs throw him in solitary and torture him without turning them to stone or walking through the wall or something? You’re about as … as alchemistical as a stuffed owl!”

  At that, Chen jumped up and wagged his finger at Liam so dementedly that Liam involuntarily backed away a step.

  “How dare you, you … you ruffian! Those filthy people kept me in a drugged stupor from the moment they arrested me until they sent me out to be hanged, apart from the occasional torture break! As for my alchemistic abilities, I’ll have you know that I am a fully qualified …”

  Liam interrupted with a disgusted snort: “A fully qualified bunco artist, and that’s the by-God goods, Mr. Chinese Charlie! I hope that damn fish eats you first, maybe he’ll choke on you and we’ll get a chance to clear out!”

  It had been a very long day for Ambrose Chen, which was probably the only reason his normal icy composure totally deserted him, leaving him red and sputtering and hopping up and down slightly with barely restrained rage:

  “You think so, eh? You think so, do you? Hah! Hah hah! By Jove, I’ll show you!”

  And with that, Chen bent over, took a double handful of the sea water which was sloshing back and forth through the scuppers, held it up to the sky while muttering furiously in Chinese, then doused the water over the top of his head, closed his eyes and stood immobile as a cigar store Indian while his lips continued to move soundlessly.

  Captain Billy picked up a belaying pin and smacked it on his palm, eyeing Chen reflectively.

  “What the divvil’s he up to now, then?” the Captain asked.

  “Beats me,” Liam said, “maybe he’s finally gone off his nut.”

  “For cryin’ out loud,” Mike said, pointing, “look!”

  An area of glassy calm with the Straight Up at its center was spreading rapidly in all directions, and in less than a minute it had caught up to the monster shark, which stopped abruptly and turned back to look at the ship. But before it could make another move a boiling turbulence sprang up around the giant fish, within which it leapt about madly as if it were trying to escape. Now Chen began to hum, louder and louder in a kind of keening melody that sent a prickle of apprehension up Liam’s back, and the turbulence around the shark grew more and more violent and chaotic until suddenly it began to rise from the surface of the calm sea, climbing higher and higher and spinning the colossal shark around faster and faster until it was so far from the watchers below that the shark finally looked no bigger than an ordinary fish.

  “Ah, begorrah,” cried Captain Billy in a quavering voice, “sure and we’ll all be ending up in Hell tonight and that’s the Divvil himself standin’ right there singin’ in Chinese!”

  “Get ahold of yourself, Billy,” Liam admonished, but at that moment the shark exploded with a thunderous roar and a flash like a lighting strike, and everyone but Chen threw himself flat on the deck and waited for the end.

  After a moment Liam heard a kind of disdainful sniff and Chen said:

  “If you’d had the elementary politeness to let me finish what I was saying …”

  Liam got up and eyed Chen disgustedly as he tried to brush himself off.

  “… I could have explained that Chinese Alchemy is a very specific set of scientific practices dealing with the five elements of wood, metal, fire, water and earth and not at all what was called for to rid us of the shark. As it happens, however, I am a Taoist sorcerer as well as an alchemist …”

  Chen spread his hands and gave Liam a superior little smile: “… and therefore quite competent to deal with ‘supernatural sharks,’ as you so quaintly put it. Contact with the seawater allows me to use my alchemy to control the waves, at least for as far as I can see them, and a bit of sorcery (which is, since you seem to require nursery-school definitions, a discipline quite separate from control of the five elements) allows me to put the shark in harm’s way.” He bowed: “Et voilà c’est tout: the shark is no more!”

  Liam blew out a huge sigh and spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. “Ambrose,” he said, “I’m not sure if I want to give you a medal or punch your head for you, but until I decide maybe I’ll just compromise and get us another bottle
of Old Bushmills.”

  Chen nodded judiciously. “I think you may be wiser than you look, Mr. McCool.”

  Mike headed for the hatch. “This one’s on me,” he said with a grin.

  “Sure and the Hell of it is,” lamented Captain Billy, “that everyone’s going to think this is just another one of my sea stories.”

  Chapter Eight

  Nu, Lyovushka,” Mike said, “what’s the plan?”

  Mike and Chen and Liam were sitting on the poop deck of the Straight Up as she cruised slowly across Little Peconic Bay towards the Goodyear mansion’s dock, soaking up the sun and enjoying the peace and quiet of the sheltered harbor after the bedlam on the Atlantic side.

  “Plan?” Liam said. He had been drowsing and daydreaming about Becky and he wasn’t happy about coming back.

  “Vstavai, durak,” Mike said with a touch of asperity. “Like, whadda we do next, you know?”

  Liam shrugged and yawned. “I have a couple of things to take care of here and then we can go home. Cap’n Billy says we should just about make it back to the city before the worst of the storm hits.”

  Mike folded his arms on his chest and gave Liam a look of heavy patience. “Go home and what, govniuk, play cribbage and take little naps till we get old?”

  Liam grinned. “I could use a nap. It’s hard work getting executed.” He held up his hand to keep Mike from blowing his top. “OK, OK. Did you and the boys finish moving all our stuff to the tunnels?”

  “There’s nothing important left where Stanton’s people can get at it. Every now and then I glue on a beard and walk past our old building on Bleecker and you can see they got Eyes coming out of the cracks in the walls.” He shook his head and snorted derisively: “Sometimes they even station Acmes across the street, like they expect us to drop in to change our underwear.”

  Liam nodded. “Good. I hope the boys are all ready to live underground for a while, because we’re going to have to stay invisible until Tsar Eddie and his gang are breathing dirt. That means we have to set up some kind of Crooks’ Congress to get together everybody that’s in the life and then sell them on fighting Stanton instead of each other. And by Congress I don’t mean a gabble-shop like this Freedom Party either. I mean organized, like an army headquarters.”

  He turned to Chen. “How about you, Ambrose? Do you want to stay here with the Freedom Party people or do you want to go back to the city with us?”

  Chen took a long pull at the bottle of Irish and then fell into a brown study, staring abstractedly at the label.

  “You’re not going to find the answer there,” Mike said.

  Chen nodded grudgingly and turned back to Liam: “Do you know anything at all about the properties of calorium?”

  Liam gave Chen a narrow look: was all the Bushmills finally getting to him? “We’re back to calorium?” he said.

  “I’m not intoxicated,” Chen said testily, “I need to know how much I have to explain.”

  Liam shrugged. “Well, if you took everything I know about calorium and stuffed it up a flea’s bum you’d have plenty of room left over.”

  Chen made a face. “I rather thought so. Very well, then: calorium must be refined from a mineral called pitchblende and that involves two awkward problems. First, there are only three people alive who understand the problem well enough to have refined calorium from pitchblende successfully: Prof. Faraday of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, who has formed a very profitable partnership with the English mechanician and Acme manufacturer Royce; Dr. Lukas, otherwise known as Prince Nikolai Aleksandrovich Yurevskii, Regent of Little Russia; and,” here Chen bowed solemnly, “your humble servant.”

  Mike made a face: “If this bird gets any humbler we’ll have to make a hole in his head to get the swelling down.”

  “You already told us all that,” Liam said, “what’s the second problem?”

  Chen nodded grimly: “Simply this: if anyone without the necessary training and experience tries to extract calorium from pitchblende, the odds in favor of a disastrous accident are huge. Unfortunately, once Stanton realized that I was adamant about keeping my process a secret he imprisoned me and contracted with a former student of mine, Chiang Lee, to discover how to replicate my work. Lee—though somewhat talented—is unscrupulous, slipshod and greedy, and I shudder to think what may happen at any moment now that he’s trying to reproduce my research. This is a problem that demands a solution without delay and I may need to turn to you for help.”

  “Just how dangerous is it?” Mike asked.

  “‘Dangerous’ scarcely begins to describe it, Mr. Vysotsky. In the wrong hands (and I find it hard to imagine the right ones) the misuse of calorium could destroy all life on the planet.”

  Chen’s tone was so flat and so final that both Liam and Mike were momentarily speechless. Chen mistook their silence for a criticism:

  “I know, I know,” he said grimly, “you’re doubtless asking yourselves how I could have agreed to work on calorium at all for a swine like Stanton, but the answer is painfully simple: he had imprisoned my entire family in a camp outside Sing Sing, and threatened to execute them one by one unless I should show him the secret of refining calorium.”

  Liam and Mike exchanged a knowing look: “We know that camp all right,” Liam said, “and I expect Stanton had you pretty well buffaloed. So why did you finally …?”

  “I was fortunate enough to have important friends in the New York tongs,” Chen said with a narrow smile, “and they managed to free my family and send them West in a stolen Navy flyer. To the best of my knowledge they are now safely in Los Angeles, the capital of the Bear Flag Republic, so in answer to your original question, I prefer to go with you to New York so that I may arrange to go West to make sure that my family are all well. As soon as that’s taken care of, I must return to the East to solve the Lee problem. For all our sakes.”

  “How the Sam Hill do you expect to get from New York to the Bear Flag Republic?” Liam asked.

  Mike was looking troubled. “Yeah, and what are you going to do about this other Chinaman? Sounds to me like we ought to put the business on him.”

  “Now that I’m free I’ll find a way to California,” said Chen, “and for that opportunity I thank both of you gentlemen with all my heart. As for Chiang Lee …”

  Before he could finish Captain Billy threw open the wheelhouse porthole and shouted to them:

  “Look lively, lads, there’s the pier dead ahead!”

  Liam froze, not quite ready to turn around and look. He felt a sudden pain behind his eyes as sharp as if someone had shoved an ice pick through his temple:

  What if she’s decided she won’t have me? What if now she’s had time to think it over she can’t think what in God’s name ever possessed her to take up with me?

  The walk from the woods to the waterfront was idyllic, a broad, sunny sweep of soft emerald grass dotted with wildflowers and accented by neat graveled paths with whitewashed stone borders, but both Becky and Gran were too preoccupied to notice it.

  For Gran, there was the persistent and disturbing thought that making a fairy circle on Samhain was no party game, not remotely like playing with a Ouija board or table-rapping “spirits.” It meant knocking at the door of the Land of Faёrie, and no mortal could ever be quite sure what might answer the summons, no matter how many times they had dared it before. Not to mention that it had been a long time (too long?) since she had done it last.

  For Becky, there was the painful litany of questions she’d been asking herself over and over again ever since Liam had set off on his mission for President Lincoln: What if he hates me for putting him on the spot, for insisting that he let President Lincoln talk over the plan in public? I still don’t know for sure that there was a traitor among us, but it can scarcely matter now to Liam whether it can be proved or not, the fact is he spent three months in Stanton’s clutches no matter how that monster learned about it. Dear God, what if Liam turns away from me, won’t even shake my hand?
…

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. McCool, Miss Fox …”

  Becky started as sharply as if the cordial greeting had been a bomb going off. Crossing their path on his way to the main house was a cheerful, rosy-cheeked young man with a tidy little waxed moustache and brown hair parted fastidiously in the middle, neatly turned out in a forest-green checked suit and tipping a matching cap towards Gran and Becky.

  “Goodness, Captain Ubaldo,” Becky said with a flush of embarrassment, “you startled me!”

  Ubaldo grinned at them. “You certainly seemed to be in something of a reverie, Miss Fox. You must forgive me for intruding. Are you ladies coming to the meeting?”

  Becky and Gran looked around, realizing belatedly that a stream of Freedom Party members was pouring towards the main house from various directions, talking and laughing and throwing curious glances towards the two women, who had been walking obliviously in the opposite direction.

  “What meeting?” Gran asked with a frown.

  “Why, to take a final vote on the question of whether or not the Party will approve a commendation for Mr. McCool’s brave attempt to break into the Stanton archives!” Ubaldo examined them curiously, as if he couldn’t imagine the two of them passing up a chance to cast their votes.

  But Gran just burst into a peal of merry laughter: “Sure, the lot of ye are bad as a roomful of drunken Fenians jawbonin’ about whether they should condemn the Queen’s latest outrage! Come on now, Captain: fess up, are ye all secret Irishmen?”

  Then, suddenly contrite when she saw Ubaldo’s shocked expression she gave him a placating pat on the arm:

  “There now, acushla, ye must forgive an old biddy blitherin’ on, I meant no harm!”

  “I’m afraid it’s my fault, Captain,” said Becky, “I’m a bit worn out from putting the new issue of Freedom to bed and Mrs. McCool kindly consented to keep me company while I get some fresh air.”