Steven Harper - The Doomsday Vault

Gavin suppressed a groan as Alice completed her circuit of the airship. It wasn’t fair. Everything was supposed to be wonderful now that Alice had joined the Ward and admitted her feelings for him. Did life ever go smoothly?

“What do you think?” he said, and waited for the polite lie.

“I like it. It’s very sleek,” she said. “Very modern.”

“I see,” he said neutrally, though his heart was tearing inside. She had lied-again.

She twisted one hand in her skirt. “But,” she added slowly, “it’ll never fly, Gavin. The envelope is too small to lift a gondola that large.”

And Gavin felt abruptly light. “Really?” he said. “You think so?”

“Darling, it’s obvious. I don’t even have to work out the math. What were you thinking?”

In that moment he could have leapt to the faraway ceiling. “Help me anyway.”

Careful not to trip over the cord, he lifted the little generator with easy strength and hauled it up the short ramp onto the gondola’s main deck, which smelled of linseed oil and sawdust. Alice snatched up the tea tray and followed. Gavin lowered the generator in place on the deck and set to work with a wrench to bolt it down. Alice laid the tray on the deck next to him. Teapot, bread, butter, jam, sliced ham. Red rose in a vase. His stomach growled.

“When did you last eat?” she asked.

“I don’t remember. I’m almost done and I want to finish.” He grabbed a piece of bread and butter from the tray and wolfed it down. “What couldn’t you wait to tell me?”

“What?”

He reached for another bolt. “When you first came in, you said you couldn’t wait to tell me something.”

“Ah. I know what to do next.”

“About what?”

“Oh,” Alice said. “Oh dear.”

“What?”

“I was just noticing how handsome you look in the morning, Mr. Ennock, even when you’re all dirty and tousled. Or maybe it’s when you’re all dirty and tousled. I think you owe me a kiss for bringing you tea.”

Without a thought, he gave her one. It was distinctly odd, kissing Alice with a heavy wrench in one hand and rich bread in the other. It felt decadent, something a prince might do. When they parted, he held the bread up to her mouth, and she took a languorous bite. Her lips grazed across his fingers, and her soft tongue brushed his knuckle. A shudder coursed over Gavin, and he was suddenly very glad to be kneeling.

“I’m in a bachelor’s workshop without a chaperone,” Alice murmured. “How wicked am I?”

“Very wicked,” he said hoarsely.

Her hand ran up the length of his thigh. Blood sang in Gavin’s ears. He very nearly threw the wrench aside and snatched her to him. Instead, carefully setting tool and food down, he touched her face, then her hair, then her shoulders. He left a smear of grease on her cheek. She guided his hand lower until it was on her breast, and she gasped as he pressed its warmth beneath his palm.

The barn door snapped open. Gavin snatched his hand away. Kemp entered the barn and strode up the ramp to the gondola, a largish book bound in leather tucked under his arm. “Madam, I believe this is the volume you were looking for.”

Alice recovered quickly and accepted the book as if she and Gavin were sitting in a library. “Thank you, Kemp.”

“Shall I clear that tray away for you, Sir?” Kemp asked Gavin.

Gavin shot him a hard look. “I’m still eating, thanks.”

Kemp nodded with a faint creak and left. Gavin poured himself some tea to cover his consternation. “What is it you figured out?” he asked.

Alice was already paging through the book. “Just this. Phipps still won’t let me near Aunt Edwina, so I don’t know for sure how Aunt Edwina is doing at the moment, but she didn’t seem to be in the final stages of clockworker madness. That’s why it bothered me, the way she kept telling me to play ma que with the Queen. So I went down to the library. Mrs. Babbage was very helpful, actually.”

“And what did you find?”

“This.” She turned the book so he could see a color plate with a series of tiles made of what looked like ivory. Each had an Oriental character painted on it. “It’s a game.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“No one has, really. It comes from China. It has a lot of names: ma que, mu tsian, ma jiang, even mah jong. They all mean sparrow. ”

“China,” Gavin repeated. “Why would Edwina tell us to play a Chinese game with the Queen?”

“She knew the Third Ward was coming,” Alice said. “Those lights on her wall were a series of alarms. She knew you and I were coming, remember? At any rate, she couldn’t tell us what she meant outright with the Ward in the room. It’s a hint that no one else would get, just like the coordinates puzzle.”

“And what’s the hint?”

“Mrs. Babbage reads the Times every day; did you know that? Every word. She also reads the Gazette, Punch , the Examiner , the Graphic , the Atlantic , and, well, everything!” Alice’s eyes sparkled. “There’s a speaking tube in the library, and you can ask her a question and-”

“I know, I know,” Gavin interrupted. “I met Mrs. Babbage last year. What does this have to do with Chinese sparrows? What’s the hint?”

“According to three different articles in different periodicals, the Chinese ambassador and his son introduced the Queen and the Prince Consort to ma que, and the four of them play quite a lot.”

“All right. But how could Edwina expect us to play ma que with the Queen?”

“She doesn’t,” Alice said. “But who does play ma que with the Queen?”

“The Chinese ambassador.” Gavin fiddled with his teacup. “You think Edwina wants us to talk to him?”

“I do. I think Aunt Edwina knew she was going to be captured, so she’s sending us to talk to someone else about the cure. The Chinese ambassador must know something important.”

“And where do we find him? We’d never get into Buckingham Palace. Not even with Third Ward credentials.”

Alice clapped her hands. “Ambassadors don’t stay at Buckingham Palace. They stay at Claridge’s hotel. You’ll never guess where that is.”

Gavin didn’t even think. “Near Hyde Park.”

“Shall we take a cab or get horses from the stable?”

“Wait just a moment.” Gavin tightened the final bolt and tossed the wrench aside with a clatter. “Let’s see if this works first.”

“I’m telling you, it won’t fly,” Alice repeated.

Gavin spun a crank on the generator and pressed a switch. It coughed twice, then sputtered to life in a cloud of acrid paraffin-oil smoke. Indicator lights flickered. Gavin reached for a dial on the side.

“Let’s see what happens,” he said, and turned the dial.

At first nothing at all happened. Then a thin crackle snaked through the air. Soft blue energy threaded through the loops and spirals of the lattice under the skin of the envelope and lit them like threads of sky. A soft hum thrummed under Gavin’s feet. Ropes creaked, and the envelope rose, taking the gondola with it. A moment later, it gently bumped the ceiling, as if nosing for a way out.

“Oh my goodness!” Alice laughed. “Oh my goodness! Gavin! What did you do?”

Gavin couldn’t stop grinning. “I wasn’t sure it would work. That’s why I didn’t want anyone to come look. It uses wire made from the new alloy Doctor Clef created for his Impossible Cube. The alloy pushes against gravity when you pump electricity through it. The more electricity you use, the more it pushes. So you don’t need a big envelope to fly.”

Alice balked. “Electricity is running through an envelope filled with hydrogen ?”