Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

No, Thad was a good man, despite his bloody past, and Sofiya felt a twinge of guilt when she thought of what she had done to him. Guilt was, in fact, the most familiar of all Sofiya’s emotions, and when that burden became too heavy, she did fantasize about letting go, becoming a complete madwoman, no matter what Thad said. It might be nice to remain utterly selfish, not caring about anyone or anything else.

Kalvis galloped onward, leaping and snorting steam as he went. Maddie hunkered down for the ride. A silly name for a spider, but Thad had allowed her to name Nikolai, so she supposed he must take a turn. The crowd at the Field of Mars had managed to flee, and the place was nearly empty but for the gallows and the grandstand. A scattering of havoc spiders scuttled toward the pontoon bridge at the far end, and Sofiya urged Kalvis to greater speed. She could catch them, find out where they had come from, but they had to hurry. Chilly autumn air rushed past her face, and Kalvis’s hooves thudded on hard earth.

At the pontoon bridge, the one that crossed the River Neva past the Peter and Paul Fortress to Petrogradsky Island, the trail of spiders turned left-west-and skittered downstream behind the Winter Palace to a different bridge seven or eight blocks away. That bridge, Sofiya recalled from Thad’s maps, crossed to Vasilyevsky Island, the other large island of Saint Petersburg. Thoroughly mystified now, Sofiya urged Kalvis to follow. The horde of havoc spiders, now in a variety of colors, but all with ten legs, crossed the bridge with a deafening click of metal claws on wood. Traffic had already fled the pontoon bridge. Sofiya let the last of them get halfway across before she herself set out.

Vasilyevsky Island was large enough that it didn’t feel like an island. The western half was taken up by shipping docks. The eastern tip, where Sofiya crossed, was buildings of brick and stone and a mix of paved streets and muddy byways. The northern side was still damp forest. The island was inhabited only by the wealthy, those who served them, and by people connected to the museum and the Academy of-

Sofiya bit her hand. Of course! Now she knew where the spiders had come from-and where they were going. The Russian Academy of Sciences was one of the few areas in Saint Petersburg with a network of tunnels and subcellars beneath it. That, and the resources of the Academy, made it the perfect place for a clockworker to hide. Thad had even circled it on the maps. They would have investigated it earlier if it had also included a railroad spur.

The havoc spiders continued on their way. The army would have been following them, except they were occupied in keeping order in the city and protecting the tsar. It seemed to be up to Sofiya. The spiders completely ignored everything around them now. Word seemed to have spread about the disaster, and the streets were empty. Every door was shut, every window shuttered. It felt eerie to ride her clockwork horse down silent, empty streets in broad daylight.

Around a corner, she came to the Academy, a series of buildings that bent together in a giant triangle around a courtyard. The Academy buildings were stony and colonnaded, just like the barrack at the Field of Mars, and four stories tall. The havoc spiders had found a downward staircase cut into one side of a wall. It ended in a heavy door that was propped open, and the spiders scuttled through. Did anyone else see this through shutter cracks and window curtains?

Heart pounding, Sofiya dismounted, told Kalvis to stay, and crept down the stony stairs to the door. It creaked open, and Maddie echoed the sound.

“Hush,” Sofiya told her, wondering if this was how Thad felt about Dante. That poor bird-forced to exist in a half-broken state. She could see in her head how to repair his gears properly, fit new feathers into place, perhaps even allow him to fly. She could-

Concentrate. She had to concentrate.

The hall beyond was dark and damp. Sofiya slipped inside, nervous but determined. Thad wasn’t the only one who could track down rogues. Ahead of her from around a corner came a blue luminescence that wobbled up and down. Sofiya peeped around the wall and saw the havoc spiders each exuding a tiny tendril with a glowing bit of phosphorescence at the end. Maddie squeaked excitedly in her ear. There was a pop, and the little spider showed a glowing tendril of her own.

“Thank you, little one,” Sofiya murmured.

The havoc spiders filled the tunnel ahead, on walls and floor and ceiling, all marching steadily toward a goal only they understood. They hadn’t hurt any humans back in the city and even now they seemed perfectly content to ignore Sofiya, but it seemed prudent to keep her distance anyway.

The tunnels beneath the Academy were labyrinthine. Sofiya followed spiders and wound her way under low ceilings and through grates and down staircases. The chill, damp air invaded her lungs, and the incessant skritching sound of the spiders’ claws on stone filled her head with sand. Sofiya’s treacherous brain automatically calculated how deep she had gone, how many tons of earth pressed down above her, how much weight the stones in the walls were bearing. Thad had said this sort of place should make her feel secure, but it only made her feel ill. To take her mind off it all, she took out her energy pistol and cranked the tiny generator to power it back up again.

At last she heard a different sound ahead, the sound of large machines whirring and clanking and thumping. The havoc spiders went down a final staircase and vanished, taking their glow with them and leaving Sofiya in a tiny pool of blue light surrounded by utter darkness. The machine sounds clanked up the stairs at her like an angry factory. Sofiya did not want to go down those stairs. Her heart beat hot in her chest, and every nerve in her body screamed at her to run. But she had to know what-who-was down there. Mouth dry, blood pounding in her ears, she forced herself down the spiral steps.

The angry machine sounds grew louder, and the blue glow became visible again from a space beyond the bottom. Maddie shivered. Her light went out. Sofiya pressed her back to the staircase stones and carefully peered around the final bend.

In the large room beyond stood an enormous machine, the like of which Sofiya had never dreamed. Conveyer belts and hoppers and metal arms and pistons and riveters and air hammers and objects Sofiya had no name for whirled and hissed and popped and hummed. Thousands of havoc spiders wandered about the room, covering every available surface. Attached in center of it all, much like Mr. Griffin’s glass jar, sat a larger version of the spiders, one with intricate etchings all over it. Incongruously, next to the spider sat a small silver chair.

Sofiya’s clockworker eye made quick connections in the machinery and she realized that everything was run by that single spider. Behind the spider’s body whirled a titanic bank of memory wheels that took up the entire rear wall of the room. This single spider was advanced enough to expand its own capabilities, which gave it the power to expand itself further, which let itself expand again and again. Even as she watched, a set of havoc spiders slotted another set of memory wheels into place, and they started to spin. Sofiya swallowed. The concept was brilliant-and frightening. If nothing stopped this thing, it might become powerful enough to take control of…well, anything. In just a few minutes of rampage, it had doubled the size of its army of havoc spiders. Had that been a test? Sofiya went cold at the thought. And who was in charge of this machine? Havoc had to be dead. Even a clockworker couldn’t have survived that explosion. Mr. Griffin had spiders of his own, and he was in an entirely different part of the city. So who?

A group of thirty spiders separated themselves from the others and leaped into a hopper. The hopper dumped the spiders without ceremony into another machine that made a terrible grinding noise. Maddie gave a tiny, almost inaudible squeak. The machine made more noise, and fully a third of the visible memory wheels paused, then spun in a new configuration. Sofiya surmised that a great deal of information had come to the machine. She should probably slip away, but she stayed rooted to her hiding place. She had to know what was going on.