Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

“It doesn’t sound like a plan,” Thad scoffed. “It sounds like you stole someone else’s work and took credit for it.”

“Havoc was a mere tinker,” Griffin snapped. “He didn’t see what our work could do. The idiot stole the machine one night to keep me from realizing its true potential, vanished right out of this very laboratory. It took some time to make arrangements to chase him, and that was when I learned of Miss Ekk. I hired her just for it, kept her ignorant-that was easy-and we went to Lithuania to hunt him down. Originally I had planned to use her to regain my machine, but you happened along instead, and that made everything easier.”

“Why didn’t you just rebuild the machine?” Thad asked. “Or use your wireless signals to call it back to you?”

“Havoc wasn’t stupid. He kept the spider in a box designed to keep my signals out until he reached a stone laboratory that they couldn’t touch, either. As for rebuilding it, I needed Havoc for that,” Griffin admitted grudgingly. “Just as I needed him for the other half.”

“Other half?” Thad echoed, as he knew Griffin wanted him to.

“The other half of the machine. You said our revolution isn’t armed, Mr. Sharpe, and that is not quite true. We are-I am-creating an army.”

“You’re going to make an army of spiders to fight a revolution?” Thad said. “That won’t begin to work. Spiders can kill a lot of people, true, but the tsar’s army will crush them in no time at all, once they recover.”

“And those new spiders are destroyed by water,” Sofiya pointed out. “This is a significant weakness.”

Griffin’s machines bubbled very like the sound of frustration. “We are making an army of human automatons.”

Thad felt sick. Sofiya gave a false laugh that didn’t touch her eyes. “Those twisted things? Don’t be silly. They couldn’t fight a fly.”

“And how would you control an entire army?” Thad said. “Radio signals? I’ve seen you and that machine give simple tasks through…wireless radio waves, is it? Your spiders require constant attention to deal with relatively simple tasks like keeping your equipment in good repair. Even a clockworker doesn’t have the brain-power to control an army of complicated human automatons with weapons, with strategy and tactics and adapting to situations in combat. Soldiers need both to follow orders and think for themselves.”

“Yes,” Griffin said.

This caught Thad completely out. The room rocked and he surreptitiously put out a hand to steady himself on the engine cover again. “Think…for themselves?” he said.

“We-I-need an army that can grow, reproduce, and think,” Griffin said. “The new spider can reproduce. The other half of Havoc’s machine can think and grow.”

“Nikolai,” Sofiya whispered.

“Indeed,” Griffin said. “As you said, Mr. Sharpe, I needed Nikolai in Saint Petersburg, and you very nicely rescued him from Havoc’s castle and brought him here for me.”

“Good God.” Thad spun to look up at the entrance tunnel, expecting Nikolai to be gone. But he was still there at the top of the rungs, sitting with his knees pulled up under his chin. Relieved but still unnerved, Thad edged toward the ladder.

“You ordered the new machine to flood the city with its spiders. It was supposed to find Nikolai and copy his design,” Sofiya was saying, “but it didn’t work.”

“It worked well enough. Once I combine Nikolai’s unique brain with the machine’s capabilities, it will spread and devour everything in its path. It will produce an army of free-thinking automatons who will fight for me like good sons obey their father. The machine and the automatons will grow and reproduce and grow and reproduce until we have spread over Saint Petersburg, and then Russia, and then the world.”

“The world?” Thad said.

“Doom!” Dante had clambered to the top of a cabinet with a bent spider leg in his beak and leaped to Thad’s shoulder.

“We will supplant all human life with automatons,” Mr. Griffin said reasonably. “Russia’s hatred for clockworkers will end.”

“Because there will be no humans to hate them,” Sofiya said.

“Not entirely. I do need a supply of cerebrospinal fluid.” Mr. Griffin’s speakers gave a little chuckle, and a few bubbles coruscated across his brain.

Thad was at the ladder now. “Zygmund and his friends over there haven’t figured out your plan, have they? They think you’re working on a real revolution. What’s to stop us from revealing your little plan and letting him and his friends destroy you now?”

“My spiders and the ninety-nine point four percent chance that you will flee this chamber within the next sixty seconds,” Mr. Griffin replied, unperturbed. “I have arranged another task for you. And if you want to survive my revolution, you will return to work for me afterward.”

“Why,” Thad said through clenched teeth, “would I return to-”

“Dante,” Nikolai grunted above him. “Thaddeus. Sofi-ya.”

Thad bolted up the ladder with Sofiya hot on his heels. His brass hand clanked on the rungs. Nikolai waited for them at the mouth of the tunnel at the top. Thad grabbed his shoulder.

“Thad,” the boy grunted. The voice was guttural, like something from the back of a cave. Unlike the Nikolai Thad knew, this version of him had dull, flat eyes. His clothes were ill-fitting, as if he had stolen them from a clothesline, and he jerked when he moved. “Sofi-ya.”

This time Thad did throw up. The acid burned all the way up and splattered across the stones. It felt like his entire body burned with bile.

“Help me,” whistled Dante.

“What did you do with him?” Sofiya shrieked at Griffin.

“He is fulfilling the purpose for which he was created,” Mr. Griffin said from below.

“How-?” Thad said.

“I did say that you arrived too early. I needed a moment to spirit him away to Vasilyevsky Island and ensure everything had time to move. Did you think you could trick me into revealing my plans so you could stop me? It’s far, far too late for that.”

Then Mr. Griffin laughed. It was a deep, rich sound, a completely artificial one made by a machine. Mr. Griffin claimed that the clockwork plague was no longer driving him mad, but living as a brain in a jar was doing an admirable job.

“Run!” Thad said, and the two of them fled up the tunnel, leaving the twisted Nikolai and Mr. Griffin’s laughter behind.

“Sofi-ya!” Nikolai called.

Outside, Kalvis was waiting for them. No longer worried about calling attention to themselves, they jumped aboard the clockwork horse, Sofiya in front, and galloped away. Thad’s entire body was tight with worry. Sofiya had described the machine on Vasilyevsky Island, and he imagined Nikolai shoved into that chair with a cord in his ear, all alone, with no one to help him. Rage gnawed at him, and…

He shoved the feelings aside. Nikolai wasn’t a little boy. He was a machine. He couldn’t get hurt. He couldn’t feel real pain.

Was he screaming when he sat in the chair?

“Is anyone chasing us?” Sofiya asked.

“I don’t think so.” Thad’s reply was breathless. It was difficult to ride behind the saddle of a brass horse, but he managed. The metal was uncomfortably warm. “But that worries me. Why didn’t Griffin simply kill us? We know where he is and we know his plan. We could bring the tsar’s entire army down on him.”

“He said we have another task to do. And he still…watches my sister. I can’t let the tsar know where Mr. Griffin is.”

They rode grimly through the darkening city. People were back in the streets now, mostly milling about and wondering what was going on. Many carried torches and lanterns, and a fog of tension filled the cold air. Soldiers marched in groups with their rifles over their shoulders through a pall of smoke. A hundred yards from the bridge, Sofiya halted Kalvis so quickly, Thad came up against her back.