Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Read online

  CEASELESS STEAM:

  STEAMPUNK STORIES FROM BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES ONLINE MAGAZINE

  Edited by Scott H. Andrews

  Kindle Edition, 2012

  Compilation Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

  Individual Stories Copyright © by the individual authors

  Cover Artwork “The Harvest” Copyright © Myke Amend

  All other rights reserved.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

  For literary adventure fantasy short stories and audio fiction podcasts, visit our magazine’s website at

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  Find BCS on Facebook and Twitter (@BCSmagazine)

  Other Beneath Ceaseless Skies Anthologies on Kindle:

  The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year One

  The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Two

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Salvage· Margaret Ronald

  The Curse of Chimère· Tony Pi

  To the Gods of Time and Engines, a Gift· Dean Wells

  Clockwork Heart, Clockwork Soul· Kris Dikeman

  The Leafsmith in Love· K.J. Kabza

  Cold Iron and Green Vines· Wendy N. Wagner

  The Secret of Pogopolis· Matthew Bey

  Kreisler's Automata· Matthew David Surridge

  The God Thieves· Derek Künsken

  Playing for Amarante· A.B. Treadwell

  Six Seeds· Sara M. Harvey

  Waiting for Number Five· Tom Crosshill

  The Motor, the Mirror, the Mind· T.F. Davenport

  Memories in Bronze, Feathers, and Blood· Aliette de Bodard

  The Manufactory· Dru Pagliassotti

  Architectural Constants· Yoon Ha Lee

  Calibrated Allies· Marissa Lingen

  The Mathematics of Faith· Jonathan Wood

  Cover Art: The Harvest· Myke Amend

  INTRODUCTION

  WELCOME TO Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine.

  This anthology, our third collection of stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magzine, focuses on one of the most vibrant subgenres in fantasy fiction today: steampunk. Indeed, steampunk has become a movement, spawning not only short fiction and novels but also movies, comics, gaming, and even dedicated fan conventions.

  As BCS continues in our fourth year of showcasing great literary adventure fantasy online for free, some of the best stories we've published have been steampunk. Worlds flavored with this captivating blend of early industrial technology and pre-modern culture hold great opportunity for awe and wonder, and the struggles of characters moving through such worlds can offer profound comment on what it means to be human.

  If you enjoy this anthology, check out our annual Best of BCS ebook anthologies, containing great stories from each year of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. They are available from most ebook retailers, including wherever you bought this one. They include steampunk, such as several stories not in this collection, as well as stories set in many other types of equally awe-inspiring worlds.

  And watch beneath-ceaseless-skies.com for free new issues and podcasts of Beneath Ceaseless Skies every fortnight, featuring steampunk, epic fantasy, Weird West, swords & sorcery, and much more.

  Scott H. Andrews

  April 2012

  SALVAGE

  Margaret Ronald

  COLONEL DIETERICH CLOSED the maintenance panel below the airship’s secondary propeller, sending a puff of gray dust cascading over the mesa. “Well, it looks fine, despite the rough landing,” he said. “I should be able to fly us out of here.”

  I brushed dust from my trousers. “Not that I’m accusing you of hubris, sir, but I’m sure others have said the same thing, and, well—” I gestured to the shambles just beyond our little airship: the shattered undercarriage of a wrecked dirigible much larger than our own. The high, sagging dome scaled with thousands of bronze plates verdigrised by half a century’s disuse gave the derelict Chiaro the look of some great fish dragged from its home. Beside it, our little propeller-driven airship was no more than a sneeze.

  Dieterich’s heavy brows lowered in an irritated glare. “Yes, well, they weren’t flying a ship of my design, now were they? Nor were the other idiots who tried to land on the far side of the wreck, with their ridiculous ‘salvage blimp’—” He stopped as a ramp unfolded from the side of our ship. “Don’t tell the Professora I said so,” he added in an undertone.

  I nodded assent as Professora Lundqvist descended from our airship onto the mesa. Her tank sloshed gently as her wheels reached the uneven ground, and the sensor ring on top of her tank rotated one way, then the other. “Professora,” I ventured, “are you sure you ought to be out?”

  “Quite sure,” she responded, her phonograph translating not only her words but her air of dismissal. “Would you rather I stayed put, like some kind of potted plant?”

  “I’d rather you stayed back in town,” Dieterich grumbled, getting to his feet. “You have no business being along on this mission, Lundqvist; you’re too easily damaged.”

  “Phidias was my student. That makes it my business.” She pivoted back and rolled some distance away. “If one of your students decided to go off on some harebrained salvage mission that then crashed in hostile territory, I’m quite certain you’d do the same.”

  The Colonel sighed. “In that case, we’d best make our way around and examine where his blimp crashed. At the very least we can learn how they—damn it all, Lundqvist!”

  The Professora had already moved on, trundling across the mesa. Grumbling about damnably stubborn brains in damnably stubborn jars, Dieterich followed after her, tugging his greatcoat over his shoulders, then paused as he realized I wasn’t following. “Coming, Charles?”

  “In a moment, sir.”

  I’ve traveled with the Colonel too long to keep certain moods secret. He turned back to face me, arms folded. “You’ve been out of sorts since. . . well, since we got word about Phidias, at least. Mind telling me what’s wrong?”

  Since longer than that, to be truthful, but I didn’t blame the Colonel for looking to the proximate cause. “I don’t much like derelicts, sir.” Truth, if not the whole truth.

  Dieterich chuckled. “Me either, honestly. They’re too strong a reminder of mortality. But,” he added, stumping after the Professora, “as I said, our little ship should be just fine. Don’t worry so.”

  “If you say so, sir,” I murmured, gazing up at the plates that had once armored the Chiaro’s dirigible sac, now unhinged by time and age.

  It was not that I held the misunderstanding against the Colonel. He might see it as a theoretical memento mori, but the shattered metal and gears of the Chiaro were a little too similar to the mechanical augmentations that ran through my own flesh. It was understandable that he would forget, given that for a number of reasons I had to keep my nature a secret from all but him and the Professora, but I was never unaware of it. I had been designed and altered with as much care as the Chiaro had been, and though I might no longer use my Merged elements in their original cause, I could not so much as draw breath or even blink without remembering them.

  We left the sagging dome of the dirigible sac unexamined, since despite its awe-inspiring bulk it was no more than a shell. Instead we crept into what little of the undercarriage remained. According to the old broadsheets, when the pilot’s control over the mighty airship broke at last, giving way to the many wounds inflicted by
the automata of Parch, the undercarriage had dragged along the top of the mesa and left nothing behind.

  This proved only partly accurate; while the lower levels had been demolished entirely, a few of the higher ones remained. We wrangled the Professora over the shattered beams, ignoring her grumbling at having to be manhandled so, and I wrenched open a gap in what had once been the floor of the second-class compartments. “The gilding’s still in place,” I said as we clambered through. “It looks untouched.”

  “Of course it’s untouched,” the Professora muttered. “Only idiots come up here. And yes, I am including Phidias in that assessment.”

  She had a point. The Chiaro had remained undisturbed for two very good reasons: the bitter winds that wreathed the mesa and had given us such a rough landing, and the automaton town of Parch to the east. Automata, thinking machines, were not particularly bellicose, but they were fiercely protective of anything they considered their territory. The Chiaro itself had proved that by straying into Parch’s airspace, and that had been its downfall: the vaunted plating of the sac proved ineffective as armor but very effective as ballast. The wounded dirigible had limped away and crashed in disputed territory, so any official recovery attempts were scrapped.

  Which left the unofficial, the underfunded, and, inevitably, the disastrous attempts. And, sure as gravity, people like the Professora to clean up after those attempts, bringing along people like me in her wake, who were just as adrift as the damaged Chiaro had been.

  Behind me, Dieterich turned in a slow circle. “They still tell stories about the crash, you know.”

  Lundqvist made a sharp, chattering noise, something her phonograph could not quite interpret into speech. “I’m sure they do. Charles, could you move this beam? Dieterich, do give him a hand; your valet can’t do all the work.”

  “He already makes all the tea,” the Colonel said mildly, but winked at me. We heaved a large beam—glittering with fine strands of werglass—out of an arched doorway, now at a 30-degree angle. “Last time I was back home,” he went on, “they even made it part of the pantomime. Something about self-sacrifice, the men and women who’d signed on as thaumaturges giving their lives to keep the Chiaro aloft while the passengers evacuated. They’d even brought an actress from the Capitol to play Raisa the pilot, dying in her throne. . . .”

  I caught his eye, and he shrugged. “Melodrama, of course,” he added sheepishly.

  “Good lord,” the Professora said, and when we looked up from the beam, we understood why. Even the most luxurious airship I’d traveled in was still at heart a transport, and so every space had been used. Here, the makers of the Chiaro had flaunted their wealth through empty space. Even though the walls had been twisted by the crash, this was unmistakably a ballroom. Parquet floors sloped from a low angle at one end to the opposite angle at the far end, like an ocean wave, and each inlay gleamed with gold leaf.

  It was not the only mark of excess. “Look,” Dieterich said, pointing to the walls. High panels of molded werglass glowed weakly. “I haven’t seen this much waste since my brother’s wedding,” he added, but in a tone of wonder rather than condemnation as his reflection pointed back at him.

  “There’s werglass spun through the whole thing,” the Professora said, rolling with some difficulty toward a broken gap in the wall. Dust from the mesa had sifted inside, limning the long, broken strands of glass that ran through the wall like horsehair through plaster. A faint, greasy glow sparked as she drew back, a sign of thaumic distillation worked into the glass.

  “But that would make every wall worth a king’s ransom,” I said.

  “Several kings,” she acknowledged, using one of her two styli to pry aside a fragment of werglass. “The thaumaturges who managed it must have been able to perceive the entire structure.”

  I shivered, and not just because of the wind leaking through the broken walls. Airship thaumaturgy was based on the link between man and machine, a machine controlled directly by human concentration, by carefully trained experts whose mental discipline simultaneously kept them separate from the machine and cognizant of its flight. I was the opposite: my machinery was completely integrated, to the point where I no longer perceived it as something outside my self. My eyes itched from the pressure of multiple lenses behind them, and for a moment I was very aware of the thrum of the engines that passed for my heart.

  My reflection watched me from a cracked werglass panel, streaked down the middle with blackish-green where the ore had seeped out from the crack and solidified. From outside I looked human, but only the same way that from a distance the Chiaro looked intact. But the thaumaturges of the Chiaro had not considered their airship any more alive than their pocketwatches. I smiled nervously, and after a second, the reflection smiled too. Werglass reflections, and their delay, will never cease to unnerve me.

  “Halloo!” Dieterich yelled from the next room over, and I hurried over the warped parquet to reach him. Here, a small tea-salon had been turned on the opposite side from the second-class compartments, as if the whole undercarriage had been corkscrewed. A broad staircase had once been meant to sweep down into what I assumed had been passenger cabins; a smaller, less ornate one led to a more utilitarian door that still sported an embossed gold seal. “Halloo, anyone there?”

  No answer. The Professora’s springs sagged. “I can’t make it over those stairs,” she murmured. “Charles, Dieterich, let’s go back outside and around to the salvage mission wreck—”

  A tiny quad-bolt, no longer than the last joint on my little finger, dropped from the staircase above, coming to rest against the Colonel’s boot. Slowly, like a broken wind-up toy, a man’s face peered down from behind the little door with the gold seal. “Who,” he said, then blinked and donned a pair of cracked eyeglasses. “Professora? Is that you?”

  “Phidias.” Lundqvist rolled to the foot of the stairs. “You are a royal idiot, first-class, do you know that? Come down here this instant.”

  Her former student obeyed, still moving as if he was unsure how arms and legs worked. “Professora,” he said again, and smiled. Even with three weeks’ beard and a dry, unwashed aroma to him, his smile remained as brilliant as if we were at a Society function. “I’m so glad you came,” he added, resting his forehead against the top of her tank, sand-colored hair flopping lank over her sensor ring.

  “So am I, Fiddy. So am I.” She was silent a moment, then rolled back. “Where are the rest of your team? What happened?”

  “Windstorm?” the Colonel offered.

  “Not quite,” he said, walking past us to a breach in what had once been the floor but now made one of the walls of the tea-salon. “We’re near Parch, remember? One moment we were about to land, and then—” He shook his head. “I thought I’d seen something on the ground, but it was too late—the first shot knocked us out of the sky, and the second finished the job. I’m surprised you made it past them.” He drew a shaky breath. “As for your other question—” He opened the window, then turned away. “There.”

  I risked a glance over the Colonel’s shoulder. Six mounds of earth marked a line tucked against the side of the Chiaro. “Fiddy,” the Professora whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  He managed a shrug, but his eyes were red. “We knew it was a risk to come up here, but we thought those damned Parch clankers wouldn’t be guarding it. Most of my team died in the crash, and the ones that didn’t. . . I’m no doctor, Professora. I was never good at field medicine.”

  The Colonel bowed his head. “You’ve been here alone, then?” I said.

  Phidias started. I regretted speaking up; my status with the Colonel and Professora might be more informal, but to the Society at large I was still only the Colonel’s valet, no more than a fixture in the background. “It wasn’t so bad,” he said, turning to the Professora. “And we’d brought enough rations and water for seven. . . I haven’t even really put a dent in that.”

  “Yes, well, we’ve come to take you home, Fiddy. I can cover your debt
s, and then you and I are going to have a long talk—”

  “Home?” He looked up, alert for the first time. “No, no, I can’t go home yet. You don’t realize what they did when they made this ship.”

  “What, burned heaps of money in a furnace?” Dieterich muttered.

  Phidias shot him a glare. “No, you—no, nothing like that.” He held up a thin sliver of werglass so dark it practically stank of thaumic contamination, then fumbled in his coat and produced a folded blueprint. “Raisa, the pilot—you remember the stories? She wasn’t just the pilot; she designed the whole thaumaturgical linkup, and she was so ahead of her time I can barely decipher her work. But the linkup is entirely different—it’s based on parallel, rather than serial mode.”

  I glanced at the Colonel, since most of that had gone over my head. To my dismay, he looked thoughtful, and the Professora’s tank had begun to bubble. “You mean a multiply enhanced link,” he said, tugging at his mustache. “Compartmentalization.”

  “Exactly!” Phidias beamed at him. Myself, I was still lost. “Exactly. They haven’t tried to make anything on the scale of the Chiaro since the crash, but if a parallel link process could be developed, it would revolutionize airship design. I’m almost on the verge of deciphering it—please, just a little longer, and I’ll have it. You can even take the credit before the Society if you want, I don’t mind, it’s not as though they’ll have me back—”

  “Don’t talk like that, Fiddy,” the Professora said. “If you make a discovery, you claim credit. Simple as that.” She rotated to face Dieterich. “We’ve got the provisions. And don’t worry about me; I had my tank changed before we left.”

  “Then it’s settled!” Phidias clapped his hands. “I’ll bring down the unit log—”

  A thump and rattle sounded from the depths of the Chiaro, and Phidias froze. “Not another one!”