Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

We find ourselves rather chagrined.

Once that most amazing of volumes The Dragon Men went to press, we were quite positive there were no more stories to tell about the Clockwork Empire. Our entire staff prepared to go on holiday, content in the knowledge of a job well done. However, just as our dear secretary Mrs. Wentworth was shutting off the gas and picking up her hatbox, a package arrived that proved our assessment was…erroneous. Fallacious. False. It seems that an entirely new set of thrilling adventures was happening right under our very noses during that time when Gavin Ennock and Alice, Lady Michaels were dealing with a giant squid in the Caspian Sea. Therefore, with a breathless excitement and a certain delighted embarrassment, we bring forth The Havoc Machine.

To our established readers, we offer a warm greeting and a joyful handshake at your return. If you feel quite comfortable with your memory of previous events, you are encouraged to thumb your way over to the first chapter, in which a beautiful woman makes one Thaddeus Sharpe a mysterious and intriguing offer. But if you need a refresher, or if the library in your cranial implant is still malfunctioning, you may find the following information of use.

To our new readers, we offer a hearty welcome. If you have not perused the previous astonishing volumes in the Clockwork Empire (specifically The Doomsday Vault, The Impossible Cube, and The Dragon Men ), fear not! This fourth volume provides the perfect entry portal. To be honest, readers hungry for adventure may skip over all the dry exposition that follows here and begin straightaway with chapter one (though we humbly point out that an even more fascinating method for acquainting oneself with the Clockwork Empire is to purchase copies of the three thrilling novels that make up the first part of the story, if one is so inclined, and we thank such readers for their kind patronage).

Finally, established readers may also note that Gavin and Alice, our protagonists from the first three books, seem to be entirely absent. We do hope that no one takes serious umbrage or fishes about for expired fruit to throw. Alice and Gavin’s story comes to a tidy, if suspenseful, close at the end of The Dragon Men, and it would hardly be fair to rake everything up again, though a tiny bit of paper clipped to the last page of this latest manuscript advises us that Alice and Gavin did not live out their final years in quiet desperation, so we may yet hear more of them. In any case, we daresay that our highly intelligent and discerning readers will find Thaddeus Sharpe and his strange companion Dante compelling in their own right. Additionally, Mr. Sharpe is quite handsome.

Perhaps that will make up for Mrs. Wentworth’s canceled holiday.

The year is 1860.

A little more than a hundred years ago, a dreadful plague swept across continents and entrenched itself on the planet. The plague causes rotting of the flesh, and also invades the host’s nervous system, creating motor dysfunction, dementia, and photosensitivity. Victims lurching through the late stages were inevitably dubbed plague zombies, and they spread the disease farther with every pitiful step. However, a handful of victims end up with neural synapses that, for a brief time, draw together instead of falling apart. Advanced mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry become simple playthings to them. But as they think and invent like mad, the virus slowly devours their brains, and they lose their grip on reality. Their attachment to mechanical inventions and their detachment from normal human emotion earned them the name clockwork geniuses or clockworkers, and the disease itself became the clockwork plague.

Different parts of the world react to clockworkers in different ways. China venerates clockworkers and grants them status nearly equal to the emperor himself. England fears them, and created a police force known as the Third Ward, which hunted clockworkers down, locked them in secret laboratories, and stashed a number of their more dangerous inventions in the Doomsday Vault. These two mighty nations-England and China-built opposing empires using fantastic inventions supplied by captive clockworkers, and only a delicate balance of power held the two empires in check.

Into the middle of all this came the Ukrainian Empire. In that thrilling adventure known as The Impossible Cube, readers learned that the clockwork plague actually originated in Ukraine in 1750, smack in the middle of a time when that country was occupied by both Poland and Russia.

It also created a number of Ukrainian clockworkers. Cossack clockworkers.

These mad geniuses swiftly created powerful engines of war that dispersed their Polish and Russian occupiers with all speed and greatly expanded the Ukrainian borders to boot. Unfortunately, these Cossack clockworkers turned out to be despots nearly as bad as the Poles and Russians, and they ruled their own people with a brass fist.

That is, until Gavin Ennock and Alice, Lady Michaels joined the circus.

Through a complicated and heart-stopping series of adventures also detailed in The Impossible Cube (a fascinating book that the editors highly recommend for all gift-giving occasions), Gavin and Alice arrived in Kiev with the Kalakos Circus of Automatons and Other Wonders. They were intending only to pass through on their way to Peking for reasons of their own, but the Gonta-Zalizniak “family” of clockworkers attempted to meddle in this couple’s affairs, and to their surprise, were thoroughly crushed for their efforts. They should have known better, of course-Alice had personally destroyed the British Empire by releasing a cure for the clockwork plague and ensuring that England would have no more clockworkers or clockwork inventions. Wiping out a few troublesome Cossacks barely gave her pause.

Unfortunately, during this process, the Gonta-Zalizniaks attacked the Kalakos Circus, and many of the performers were scattered. The dam that famously generated electricity for Kiev was also destroyed, threatening thousands of lives, and Gavin only barely managed to get everyone aboard the circus train and rush them to safety.

After that, Gavin and Alice went on their way. They were last seen heading off in their airship over the Caspian Sea, completely ignorant of the fact that the water is home to a giant squid. What happens to them is chronicled in that most breathtaking of books The Dragon Men, and we need not recount the events here.

But, as we said, we have learned there is more.

With the Cossacks recently crushed and Britain severely weakened, Russia finds herself wondering if she might once again take her place in this Great Game of clashing empires.

And the poor Kalakos Circus finds itself in dire straits.

Thaddeus Sharpe loosened his brown leather jacket and shoved his way into the low-beamed tavern. A fire glowed like a captured demon in the long ceramic stove, and the smoky air wrapped itself around him in a stifling blanket. At long tables, men in long shirts and blousy trousers clanked glasses of vodka and thumped mugs of gira, the fermented drink made from rye bread favored by Lithuanian peasants. A heavy smell of sweat mixed with the sharp tint of vodka and the earthy slop of gira. The autumn evening was already well under way, and the red-faced men shouted more than they talked. Candles stood upright on the tables in cracked saucers to provide light. Dante cocked his good eye at the room and clacked his brass beak from his perch on Thad’s shoulder. Several of the men turned to stare at Thad when he blew in. He tensed and automatically felt for the long knife in his sleeve.