Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

Thad gave a mental shrug. He could decide later. First, he’d have to kill Havoc.

As if on cue, a door in the lab below opened and a man emerged. He looked perfectly ordinary-nearing forty or so, a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, the long mustaches favored in this part of the world. His right arm was elaborately mechanical, though, and nearly twice as thick as his left. Steam even puffed from the joints. Thad wondered what surprises it contained. Havoc-Thad assumed the man was Havoc-was trailing a chain, and with it he towed into the laboratory another figure. Thad’s stomach went cold and his hand stole automatically up to his shoulder where it gripped Dante hard. The figure at the other end of the chain was a child, a boy from the look of it. He was wrapped in ragged clothing from head to foot, and a tattered scarf covered his face. Even his hands were wrapped in rags. He was shivering, and his size put him at the same age as David when he had died.

The gut-wrenching memories threatened to drag Thad back into the past, and he fought to stay in the present as Havoc dragged the boy onto the operating table. A bear made of rage roared to life inside Thad, and he trembled with the effort of holding himself in check. Nothing else mattered now, not the machine, not the money, not Sofiya, not even Vilma and her sister Olga. Havoc would be dead before the sun rose. He looked around for a staircase so he could slip down to the main floor. Havoc bent over the boy on the operating table.

“Bugger this,” Thad said, and leaped over the edge.

Thad landed on the foot of the operating table intending to deliver a solid kick to Havoc’s face. Unfortunately, he lost his balance. Fortunately, he fell straight into Mr. Havoc. The two of them went down in a struggling bundle of arms and legs, brass and iron. Too late, Thad remembered the pistols under his coat. His anger had gotten the better of him.

Havoc’s thick metal arm shoved hard, and Thad skidded halfway across the floor on his back. The clockworker sat up. Dante peered down at him from the operating table with his one good eye.

“Who the hell are you?” Havoc boomed in Lithuanian. It would have been more impressive if he hadn’t been sitting on the ground with his legs open. “Have you come to steal my work?”

In answer, Thad pulled the pistols from beneath his jacket and took aim. “Olga,” he said.

Havoc blinked at him. “What?”

“Olga. She was one of the women you took from the village.”

“Oh. I take a lot of women. Sometimes dogs, too. Dogs are nice. I don’t remember a woman named Olga but I do remember a dog named Sunis, but a dog wouldn’t steal my work like you are trying to do.”

Thad fired. Havoc’s metal arm moved so fast, it blurred, and the bullet ricocheted away. “It seems stupid to name a dog dog, but he wasn’t mine and he didn’t live very long. It looks like you’re trying to kill me, so it would be prudent to kill you straightaway, though I would like to know why you didn’t fall into my pit so I can fix the problem, and it would have been interesting to save your brain for my work, the work you want to steal, and I do not take kindly to thieves.”

With a series of clicks and whirrs, an enormous pistol emerged from Havoc’s forearm. Thad scrambled to his feet and dove behind the worktable with the ten-legged spider on it just as Havoc fired. A spray of bullets chittered across the floor right behind Thad and pinged off the equipment piled on and around the table. Thad glanced up. The ten-legged spider sat on its pyramid of junk, just another piece of paraphernalia. Thad could almost touch it. Glass shattered as bullets zipped around for several seconds like deadly hummingbirds. Then they stopped. Thad risked a peek around the table. The fluid jars near him had been shattered, the gory contents pulped. Thad smelled sharp formaldehyde. Havoc, still sitting on the ground, was feeding bullet cartridges into his arm. Thad whipped his pistol around, then realized that from this angle, the boy on the table was partly in line of fire.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

“I hate it when people make a mess in my laboratory,” Havoc said, the words rippling endlessly from his mouth. “Especially thieves like you. It will take hours to clean this up, though I can use automatons to help me, but lately some haven’t been so cooperative, which is why I had to put some of my work aside, though this new breakthrough is very promising and I don’t appreciate that you have interrupted me, little thief.”

He fired again, and Thad ducked back behind the table. Bullets pocked and pinged all around him. A red-hot line scored his forearm and he snatched himself farther back. Blood trickled down the inside of his sleeve.

“I hit you, little thief. I can smell the blood. It’s funny how these days I can sense so much more than I could before I contracted this wonderful disease-”

“Dante!” Thad shouted. “Shut it!”

“Applesauce!” Dante’s interjection was followed by a scream from Havoc. Thad shoved himself away from the equipment pile and slid sideways on the floor. Dante was at Havoc’s shoulder, his sharp beak piercing Havoc’s ear as his needle claws dug into Havoc’s neck. Blood flew in all directions. Havoc’s metal arm fired wildly into the ceiling. The boy huddled on the operating table, but Thad’s slide across the floor had changed the trajectory so that the child wasn’t in the line of fire. The pistol barked three times in Thad’s hand. All three shots went straight into Havoc’s upper body. His arm gun went silent, and the clockworker toppled backward with a burbling gasp. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

“Olga!” Thad shouted at him.

“Bless my soul,” Dante said, hopping free of Havoc. His claws were red. “Doom!”

Thad glanced over at the ten-legged spider crouched atop the pile of equipment across the room. What about that thing was worth so much? In any case, it would keep for now. He ran to the table. The boy lay huddled on his side, shivering in his rags. For a terrible moment Thad was back in Poland looking down at David. But this wasn’t Poland, and this boy wasn’t David. There was no sheet, no blood, and Thad had arrived in time.

“It’s all right,” Thad told him, then cursed himself for speaking English. He switched to his heavy Lithuanian. “I’ll get you out of here. The bad man is dead. He can’t hurt you.”

The boy didn’t respond. Dante hopped up to Thad’s shoulder, blood still staining his beak and claws. Thad touched the boy’s shoulder. It was warm. “My name is Mr. Sharpe,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home. Can you sit up?”

A soft sound from the rags, like the sound of someone trying not to cry. Thad’s heart half broke.

“I’m going to pick you up,” Thad said. “I won’t hurt you.”

“But I…will…little thief.”

Thad spun in time to see Havoc slap a button on the back of his mechanical hand. It pulsed red, and a high-pitched sound squealed through the room. Havoc was gasping, and blood gushed from his chest wounds.

“You will not…steal…my work,” he panted. “No one…will steal…work.”

Before Thad could react, rats poured into the room. Tens and dozens and hundreds of them. They poured in from the door Havoc had used. They swarmed down from the balcony. They scampered down the spiral stairs. Thad had seen them before, but hadn’t noticed that they were partly animal and partly mechanical. Metal claws scratched and sparked against the stones and their eyes pulsed a scarlet that matched the button on the back of Havoc’s heavy hand. The high-pitched squeal grew louder.