"Kill me and this train will go right back down this hill. Think you're sturdy enough to survive that crash?" She sneered, "Then go ahead and shoot."

  "Trains can only go uphill for so long." Rowan tightened her grip and managed another step forward to stand in the engine room.

  All of the gauges were in the red, alarms flashing and steam filling the air. "Surrender. There isn't a way out of this." Rowan held the gun steady.

  Ada smiled. "There's always a way out if you're smart enough." The train slowed and struggled to the peak of the hill. "The question left is, are you smart enough, Officer Rowan?" She let go of the engine and jumped backwards out of the train car.

  Rowan fired through the steam of fog. Blood, petticoat and pale blue fabric flew through the air before Ada was gone from sight.

  Rowan pushed her way to the edge, looking back and seeing pale blue and red disappearing into the forests of the area. As she was about to jump, the engine gave a final lurch, pushing the car up and over the hill and sending her speeding downwards as the engine sputtered. Something overhead snapped and scalding hot steam spewed into the out of control engine car. Rowan growled, glancing back to where Ada had disappeared before changing her arm back into the vice grip and searching for the brake lever. She pulled on the short black lever, feeling the engine try to slow, but then the lever gave. A pin snapped and fell to her feet, bent out of shape. "Dammit!" She kicked at the engine and growled when that did nothing. The train rocked unsteadily on the tracks and pushed toward a sharp bend.

  Reaching down and grabbing the bent pin, she focused on its shape in her hand before dropping it and forcing her arm to shift into its shape. She groaned at the snapping sounds as she concentrated on shifting it back into a proper, unbroken shape and when it was close enough she jammed her arm into the broken brake joint and pulled.

  She screamed along with the brakes at the crunching of metal and bone as the train stuttered over the tracks, slowing as it hit the curve, but not enough. Gravity faded away as the train flipped off the tracks and Rowan's feet left the ground, leaving her suspended by only her arm wedged into the brake.

  Dirt, trees and rocks exploded around her as the train skidded over the ground before slamming into something old and solid, falling still. Steam, oil, and pieces of metal rained down all around her as she dangled from the brake lever still holding her in place suspended above the ground.

  She tugged at her arm, groaning at the pain, then pushing past it. She braced her legs on the wall of the demolished train car and pulled until there was a snap and her arm came free. Collapsing to the ground, she pulled her limp, shattered arm to her chest and curled up tightly, taking several deep breaths to focus past the pain.

  She sat up and used her uninjured arm to start ripping at her trousers, pulling fabric from the fine linen pants and pulling her belt off. Blood dripped from a gash across her leg and her ears rung. Struggling with just one hand, she managed to force her limp arm into the fabric and belted it into a sling over her shoulder.

  Climbing back out of the crushed train car left her breathless. She leaned against the metal, gasping for air before making her way back to the tracks and stumbling along them toward the city. Blood dripped down her leg, splashing onto the metal under her feet; she swayed and fell to the ground.

  A sharp bark echoed in her ears and she shook her head, trying to get back to her feet but just falling again. The barking grew louder. Bee, still wrapped in the pink lace, came bounding toward her, a slow-moving train right behind the little robot. Its brakes squealed and it eased to a stop. Lila jumped up from the engine and ran towards Rowan.

  “You idiot! What do you think you’re doing running off like that?” She knelt down by Rowan, waving over a few medical personnel.

  “She got away,” Rowan muttered as Bee collapsed at her feet.

  “You got on a moving train with a murderer. What the hell are you doing? You’re a detective.” Lila said. “Don’t make me have to hire a replacement for you. I think that might upset your little partner there.”

  Rowan smiled and reached out to gently pat Bee’s head. “You couldn’t replace me if you tried.”

  Lila laughed and wrapped her arm around Rowan, pulling her to her feet and helping her back towards the train. Bee circled around her feet, still limping. Rowan fell into the train car and lay on the seat where medical crew tended her leg as the train started back for the city.

  “She’s out there somewhere. I shot her at least once,” Rowan muttered as Bee settled against her side.

  “I’ve got crews out searching for her, but my guess is she’s long gone.” Lila crossed her arms. “We’ve got a team searching her house; so far we can’t find anything at all.”

  “Like trying to catch steam.” Rowan rubbed Bee’s head. “Can we get Little Bit patched up?”

  “Yeah, R&D will get her back to new in no time. Don’t tell me you like the little thing.”

  “…it grows on you. Besides, she looks good in lace.”

  Lila laughed, “That’s one helluva way to decide on keeping a partner.”

  “Bee does good work,” she sighed, closing her eyes, “and I’m gonna need a good tracker to hunt this one down.”

  Lila shook her head. “Just get your arm patched up before you go off playing hero, alright?”

  Rowan nodded, gently petting Bee’s head, “You better get fixed up. We’ve got work to do.”

  Clockwork Demons

  Logan L. Masterson

  The explosion rocked my tenement rooms about two o’clock in the ante. All six of my books fell off the wall shelf. The shelf fell, too. As I rose to remount them, there was a warbly whistling noise. Drawing back the muslin drape, I saw a fire burning away down the high street, and the silhouette of something spinning afore it, bearing down on me.

  I dove aside and the thing slammed through, showering the room with glass and plaster. The upended springlamp shone its steady glow through a cloud of dust and a broken shade.

  “Well,” I remember saying, “that’s gone and done it.”

  I drug myself upright and looked out at the warrens of West Brighton’s tenements. The City beyond glowed a dull orange in the fog; a soup of Tungsten and arclights, all driven by powerful Hooke Engine generators.

  The thing which had crashed through my humble lodging was a four inch I-beam, three feet long. It had come to rest inside my cast iron stove, and inside a wall. I grabbed my home-built camera and ventured into the streets to see what had happened.

  In the middle of Brighton, in the wee hours of a chill September night, a rag-tag funeral procession bore body after body along the high street. The pallbearers shouldered their burdens on boards. Nobody in this neighborhood could afford a casket, and this was no ordinary funeral. Even here, among the dispossessed, funerals were not held in the middle of the night, and only rarely accompanied by a furious mob.

  As the procession roiled past, I counted fourteen deceased and took two dozen photographs. People of many nations and creeds chanted and cursed, waving knives, brooms, shovels and torches. Many were crippled, bearing their workhouse injuries with pride or fury. There were children among them, some dirty, all hungry.

  The warbling wail of sirens in the distance warned of an imminent confrontation. Without delay I made my way toward the bridge to the Bergen Neck and eventually into Manhattan.

  *****

  The next evening, when I followed Adam down marble stairs into the war room beneath Alton Abbey, there were strangers waiting.

  Dr. Adam Huntington—”the Doc” to me—took his seat at the head of the gleaming cherry table and got right down to business.

  “We have all at least corresponded about the need for a meeting like this. It’s good that we now agree. I’ll introduce myself, and allow you to do the same, but let’s be brief. The time is short.”

  He tugged the cuffs of his brown leather gloves and cracked his knuckles. “You can call me Adam in private. In public, I’m Liberator. I am a scientist, and have developed the hypernormal ability to contain and redirect energy.”

  Now, I knew he ‘developed’ the power purely by accident, in a failed attempt to recreate a Hooke Engine, like the one in my springlamp at home, but we kept that under wraps.

  The woman stood, pale and blonde with almond eyes. Her voice was even, clipped by a subtle Anglish accent. “Lysette Kensington-Smythe. Pleased to be here, and to get out there, as well.” She pulled at her epaulets, drawing down two bands which she snapped into her belt. With an audible rush of tiny Hooke Engines and compressed air, a pair of elegant wings sprang from a little pack.

  “I shoot, as well. The papers call me Lady Shrike.”

  The dark fellow, black hair and clothes, black eyes, wasted no words. “I am Magus.”

  The big guy stood slowly and coughed. “I am Dmitri Avar. In my country, they call me Anika.”

  Only me left. “I’m Jordan Lehrer.” I tipped my red cap. “Cinnabar. I’m quick.”

  Adam leaned over the table. “It’s been bad for some time, my friends, but it’s about to get much, much worse. We have operated individually, keeping the gangs weak and the police alive in hopes of making the ghettos more bearable. Each of us can agree that we have not managed to do enough. Law enforcement has retreated from many of the slums, and violence has increased in the last few weeks. There have been unaccountable murders and strange sightings. We finally know why.”

  Dmitri interrupted, “You mean the clockwork men. You know how they are made, where they come from?”

  “No,” my boss admitted. “But we have some leads, and now that we’re all together, the ability to investigate them. Cinnabar photographed a few of the demons this morning, for a start.”

  He spread the pictures out. There were only six shots, and I had been lucky to get them. They showed the spindly humanoid things, of sizes varying from three feet to six and change, darting about in the predawn streetlight glow of the Highroad Bridge. They were complex, and they moved with quick grace, but there was something sinister, unaccountable. They were thin, flexible; too small to be suits.

  “You call them demons. How do you mean?” Shrike asked.

  “From survivor accounts, they are intentionally cruel. There is no known chemical or mechanical technique that could account for their abilities, their autonomy. For all we know, they are possessed by malevolent spirits.”

  “Then how do we destroy them?” I asked.

  “Oh, they break very well,” Dmitri said. “Last night, I put three to the test. Very fast, but fragile also.”

  “Good to hear, Anika. Tell us about them.”

  He did, and we all shared what we little knew, poring over the photos and accounts, drinking too much coffee. By dawn we had a plan of investigation, and I counted myself lucky to be included in a surveillance mission with Lady Shrike.

  West Brighton in those days—which were in 1883—was an absolute hellhole. This was before the Second Revolution, when the tenements were so full and so foul that coppers, fire brigades and even the company men avoided them. But let me tell you, if a guy knew his way around, he could be a ghost. A gal, too, and Shrike had a lock on it. She wasn’t too maneuverable in the air, her lift being limited to about twenty feet, but in a tight-packed ghetto, it was plenty.

  As we hustled toward the naval yard, I tried not to notice the plight of the poor around me, the groups of punks we passed, looking for trouble. I kept my mind on the mission.

  The Doc figured from the photos and Dmitri’s info that the demons were composed in part of a remarkably strong wood called lignum vitae, probably from South America. We had sniffed about in the afternoon and loose lips sank a singular ship: The HMS Cadmus. Now in the late evening, some twenty sleepless hours since my tenement got pierced, we were perched atop the roof of a dockside warehouse, monitoring the craft. It was trimmed in black. The furled sails and Hooke housings were a deliberate gray.

  I whispered, “Strange-looking thing.”

  “Yes, it is, and look there at the captain’s cabin. The hatch looks like lignum vitae.”

  “It does. I think I’ll run and have a look at the harbormaster’s log.” She said something as I left, but it came too late. I dashed to the shadows across from the office, waiting only moments before the wide-shouldered nightmaster stepped away.

  I returned in minutes.

  “Diplomatic. No cargo listed.”

  She blinked. “That was fast. Yes, I expect that’s our objective.”

  We waited. We chatted. She was fawney for the Doc, plain as day, but I could wait the week it would take her to catch on: Adam didn’t dally.

  The moon shone high and round when the action started. Even in the dark, they seemed to explode off the ship. At least two dozen automata split off at the pier and danced away in every direction. We took the risk and followed one, large enough that we had a chance to catch it. It was going to be stronger too, so I dodged in at top speed, which I think is somewhere in the range of a hundred miles per hour. I shouldered into it, trying to unbalance it, and it worked. Lady Shrike hit just right from the rooftop, taking a hefty chunk out of its shoulder. The thing turned and she was already dropping in toward it, silvery wings swept back, a curved dagger in each hand. Me, I found a pipe. Her precision is what really did the trick, enabling us to salvage most of the torso for investigation.

  The following day I slept well into the afternoon and woke hungry and sore. After a light breakfast of two dozen pancakes, three glasses of milk and a coffee, I made my way down to the war room. The alloy and wood panel torso sat open on the table, with many parts already removed and arrayed around it.

  “How many Hooke Engines?”

  “Just three platters,” Dmitri grunted. “One eight inch and two fours. Considerable gearing, all remarkably simple, really, but elegant.”

  “There’s a lot of reinforcement, too.” Shrike’s hair was now pulled back and a pair of loupe goggles sat across her forehead. “This model would be hard to take out with bullets.”

  “Look here,” Adam held up an armor panel for my inspection. It was lined with copper mesh.

  “Or electric current,” I said. The Doc nodded.

  I scooped up the largest Hooke Engine. It was about four inches thick and weighed some twenty pounds. Within the hermetically sealed steel casing were two alchemical springs and a flywheel. A straight axle distributed the power.

  “No batteries?”

  “None,” Dmitri said.

  “No difference board?”

  “Nope,” reported Lysette.

  “So no control mechanism at all?”

  “None at all,” the Doc confirmed.

  “So they’re demons.”

  “Yes.” Lysette said it with authority.

  “That’s bloody terrific.”

  After photographing the thing for posterity, I took a nap, expecting to be on post again by nightfall. No one woke me until breakfast. I was properly rested to hear the exciting tale of Dmitri’s night mission. Adam had picked up a few more clues, and had sent Dmitri as Anika in full battle dress to follow up. The Russian and Magus awaited me in the war room as I arrived with a plate of sandwiches.

  “The sewers are deeper and more extensive than most know,” Anika began in his deep, thick voice. “The main tunnels that cross below, which run to the bay, they are sometimes twenty feet across and sometimes more. My armor is good there, I tested it there, and last night I returned.”

  I imagined the powered armor plowing through the sludge.

  “I found a pack of them. Three. Two were like the one you and Shrike brought in, but the third,” he stepped aside to reveal it, “is something much different.”

  A mostly complete automaton, head cleanly removed, rested on the table. It was somehow both arachnoid and serpentine, being a sleek torso ringed round with slashing arms and a long, bladed tail. The severed head bore iron mandibles. The entire thing must have been eight feet long.

  With panels removed, I could make out dozens of tiny Hooke Engines, some still spinning but disengaged.

  “No controls?”

  The big man nodded. “None, but look here.” He lifted a panel under the torso, exposing a needle, with pneumatic actuation and a collection tube.

  “It holds one ounce only,” he said.

  The war room door burst open as the Doc and Lady Shrike rushed in.

  “The Cadmus is moving.” Shrike breathed hard.

  The Doc stood beside her, unruffled, in full uniform. The reinforced leather was wound with copper, which focused his power. The goggled helmet covered most of his face.

  “Just as vitally,” he added, “there have been hundreds of civilian casualties overnight, not the mere dozens that were reported. The attacks may have radiated out from the harbor. Many of the victims were cut, brutally, by those.” He pointed at the murder machine on the table.

  “There are strange wounds to the foreheads.”

  “Like a spike, or needle?” Dmitri asked.

  He showed the Doc and we mobilized. It happened so fast that I barely had time to get into my reinforced speedsuit leathers and helmet with full-spectrum goggles, all in classic gray and crimson.

  Before I knew it we were headed through the city, making our cabbies’ best times to the mainland Aerodrome.

  *****

  The Asteria was a royal blue and burnished bronze marvel, a sleek dual-envelope affair with a set of powerful Hooke propellers and a comfortably-appointed gondola. Lightly-armored and armed with a few hunting rifles and a pair of pneumatic harpoons, she was one of my great joys. Her pilot was another of the Doc’s full-timers, and we were up and away in no time, swinging in a long arc north and east to strike out over the Atlantic in search of the Cadmus.