Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Amelia spoke with her own voice now, but she was talking for both of them. ‘You can’t build a new Camlantis on the foundations of mass murder.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ Quest yelled at her. ‘I tried to work by the rules, but you just kept on changing them.’

‹She’s right.›

‘You hypocrite,’ barked Quest. ‘You and your Camlantean rebels played by the numbers of your own calculations. A couple of million dead in this city to save how many more millions in the world outside? But preserve those lives for what kind of existence? For watching my sister cry herself to sleep every night in an alleyway because she didn’t have enough food to eat, starving while the gaslights of packed restaurants burned on the road opposite? For watching my older brother die of waterman’s sickness because the only water we had to drink was from the gutter? You saved us for this? You immortal halfwit. You could have erased the Black-oil Horde, you could have erased everything and started again with this as the seed. We could have enjoyed two thousand years of prosperity and peace, we could be living in the Camlantean age right now and have known nothing else for millennia.’

‹You can’t build paradise on a sea of blood. My people were wrong then, as you are wrong now. No one ever asked the rest of the world if they minded dying to make way for a greater Camlantean Commonwealth.›

‘I can forgive you for killing all your brothers and sisters in Camlantis. They were your kin to murder. But I can’t forgive you for all the generations of us that followed, scrabbling in the dirt and the mud of the misery you left us as your inheritance.’

‘There are other ways to change things,’ said Amelia.

‘You don’t think I haven’t bloody tried?’ Quest shouted back. ‘I could have rebuilt Jackals from the ground up on the principles of modern science and spread our democracy across the continent, used the RAN to overturn the killers sitting in the Commonshare, chased that fat fool of a caliph off into the desert. Jackals was mine. I owned everything and everyone in the land, but the old owners childishly decided they wouldn’t honour my deeds to the property.’

‹The world is changed by the one and one.›

‘Oh really , is it? Do you think my model manufactories with their sanitary plumbing, free suppers and open lending libraries actually made any difference? Or my poorhouses and academies? I funded the Levellers to power and even they were wading in parliament’s sewage, trying to pass the smallest reforms. Every one of my efforts to create the perfect society was a drop of clean water in a stagnant millpond. It’s time to drain all the filthy waters and start afresh.’

‘No,’ pleaded Amelia.

Quest looked over at Jules Robur and pointed at Ironflanks. ‘But we’re not clearing our acreages to allow the steammen to inherit the Earth. We will survive inside this chamber. The coffins below are built to shield those who sleep inside their confines, while my people moving around the tomb will be protected from the mist by their crowns. A year inside the tomb will be long enough to allow the mist of Camlantis to exterminate the nations of the surface, but I have no intention of waking up to find a second horde — this time one composed of angry steammen — ready to storm my paradise.’

Robur murmured into a speaking trumpet. ‘Introduce test subject twelve.’

A door opened in Ironflanks’ cell, a tracked steamman crunching across the threshold. Amelia could see that there was something wrong with the new addition, the steamman’s arms jerking in spastic movements, his head juddering while his vision plate danced with a peculiar pattern rather than pulsing with the calm, steady light of the life metal. Ironflanks sensed the wrongness too, backing away into the corner of his cell, but the newcomer tracked towards the scout, an iron hand rising up as if in greeting. A modem screech began to issue from the new arrival’s voicebox. Amelia was no expert on the machine language of the steammen, but she had heard enough of their hymns to the Steamo Loas to recognize that this was not one of them.

Ironflanks stumbled back, trying to cover his sound baffles and drown out the siren song but, he could not. Swaying, Ironflanks began to lose control of his body, his four arms shaking, his metal legs jerking in the same obscene, involuntary dance as the other steamman. The scout tried to say something, but his mind was no longer capable of teasing his thoughts into vocalizations through his voicebox. He turned pleadingly towards the window where Amelia was watching and his turn became an uncontrolled dervish spin. Where was Ironflanks’ softbody friend? He tried to focus on her, on the figures outside the room, but there were only random shapes floating through his vision. Ironflanks’ telescope eyes began to flex out, his head lolling to the side as he stumbled around the room.

‘Ironflanks,’ cried Amelia. ‘ Ironflanks .’

The two steammen started to circle each other inside the cell in an idiot’s waltz, poking each other with their manipulator arms.

‘You are wasting your breath, professor. Your scout now lacks the higher mental functions necessary to understand you,’ sneered Robur. ‘My ingenious little steamman disease is spread at the sonic level — it doesn’t even require a joining of cables between steammen to spread. A few infected specimens pushed up the stairs to Mechancia and within a week, the mountains of the Steamman Free State will be inhabited by nothing but oil-drooling imbeciles.’

‘You jigger!’ Amelia struggled in the grip of the guards. ‘You filthy shiftie jigger.’

Robur just smiled at her threats. ‘The Sun King had grown tired of the steammen knights defeating his regiments. He desired something to distract the people of the metal from the length of their border with Quatershift. Then the revolution got in the way of our project. Ironically, it was a lot easier to complete my work on the disease in a multiracial society such as Jackals, with its ready supply of steammen components and bodies.’

Quest addressed the passenger lurking inside Amelia’s mind. ‘It was the steammen grave robberies that first made you suspicious, wasn’t it?’

‹You shouldn’t have stolen such ancient parts.›

‘But it was ancient parts that I needed,’ said Robur. ‘Ancient components have their encryption patterns broken, their unravelled designs circulating as common currency among mechomancers. King Steam makes sure he advances each new generation of his people, always trying to frustrate the work of my noble trade. I needed to dig very deep into their filthy race’s nucleus to design such a potent steamman plague.’

‘Turnaround is fair play,’ added Quest. ‘I have seen enough of my cardsharps infected with transaction-engine sickness to realize that my colleague’s unfinished project had considerable merit.’

‘You’re the sickness, Quest,’ spat Amelia. ‘You and your pet shiftie.’

‘We are not monsters,’ protested Robur. ‘Do you not understand that I and my Jackelian friend have imagined countless times the terror the innocents below will feel as the Camlantean death mist seeps through their lodgings and starts to pull them to pieces? I see little else these days, but their myriad, murdered faces as I drift to sleep. But the body of the race of man is riddled with cancer and we must cut it out if we are to survive. You would understand better if you had seen what we did to each other in the organized communities of my nation. Such things cannot be allowed to continue. We must change.’

‘I’ll stop you!’ bellowed Amelia. ‘You’re not going to do this.’

‘Then you have made your choice,’ sighed Quest. ‘There is no room in our new world for division and opposition, professor. You of all people should know that if Camlantean society is to be reborn it will require harmony on the part of its citizens. But there is still one thing left to test …’ He took off his Camlantean crown and gave it to one of his airship sailors. ‘Put the crown and Professor Harsh in one of the cells, then throw him-’ he pointed at Bull Kammerlan,’-in after her. I am fairly confident the Camlanteans’ crowns still function after all these centuries, but I think a demonstration of their operation would be prudent first.’