Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

Phipps’s hands clutched the windowsill. Her right fingers turned white, and her left ones left dents in the wood. “I made a terrible mistake when I let them go, Glenda,” she said, “so it is my duty to set it right. Gavin and Alice unloosed several dangers into the world, and we must bring them into custody before they do further harm.”

Glenda gave her a long look, then rose. “I understand. If I may, Lieutenant?”

Phipps nodded a dismissal and continued to stare out the window. I’ll find them, Father. I’ll set the world aright for you. For us.

Alice glared down at the unyielding numbers. They glared stubbornly back, hard little loops and corners that wouldn’t move no matter how hard she tried. Twice she had rubbed them off the page and run through them again, but they always came out exactly the same. She resisted the urge to throw the book overboard. Instead she snapped it shut and slipped it into her trouser pocket so she could lean on the gunwale to think while cool morning air washed over her like water.

In the distance ahead, airships of all sizes and designs floated, cruised, and hovered above the sprawling city of Luxembourg like tame clouds. London controlled airship traffic, but Luxembourg apparently didn’t. Alice glanced over her shoulder at Gavin, lean and strong at the helm of their ship. The rising sun caught his pale blond hair and turned it nearly white, making a stark contrast with the torn black clothes he still wore from last night. His sharp features and long jaw made her hunger for a kiss. He caught her eye and grinned that grin that always sent a delicious shiver down her back. And she felt all that when he was silent. When he sang, his voice melted her soul. She’d follow him into a volcano if he only sang to her first, and a part of her was glad he didn’t seem to know that yet.

And there it was. In the end, she had betrayed her country for him. She had broken into the Doomsday Vault and released the clockwork cure, an act which would eventually destroy the British Empire as she knew it. And all for the simple reason that Alice, Lady Michaels, had fallen in love with Gavin Ennock. What would the history books say about that? The thought that schoolchildren might one day read about her both fascinated and frightened her. What gave her the right to change the course of mankind for the love of a man?

The book of figures sat heavy in her pocket. Alice leaned out into the fresh breeze, trying to feel the freedom she knew carried Gavin forward. All her life she had followed the rules of traditional society, done as her traditional father had told her. And then Gavin had innocently blasted her life to pieces. Now she was spending her days with not one, but three strange men, and no other woman around to chaperone. Frightening. Exhilarating. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff with one foot over.

Below the ship lay a rumpled checkerboard of fields and pastures bordered by hedgerows and stone walls that surrounded the city proper. Arteries of rail and cobblestone ran in and out of the place. Canals threaded through it, and church spires pointed at Alice like accusing fingers. Castles with rounded walls took up the hills, and square houses occupied the slopes. It looked both foreign and familiar at the same time.

Several miles from the city, the Lady of Liberty ’s blue glow dimmed, and the ship began to sink. Startled, Alice turned to Gavin, who was moving from the generator back to the helm. “Is something wrong with her?”

“We can’t dock at the shipyard,” he said. “Not if Phipps has gotten word out about us and what the Lady looks like. But I think I know a place.”

They came down in a weed-filled pasture surrounded by a scraggly hedge on three sides and a stand of trees on the fourth. Near the stand of trees were a small stone farmhouse and a large stable, both half in ruin. Kemp, Dr. Clef, and Feng emerged from below to see what was going on. Sunlight gleamed on Dr. Clef’s brass goggles, and he pushed them up on his forehead.

“Cut power to twenty percent, Alice,” Gavin ordered.

Alice leaned over the generator and restricted the flow of air and paraffin oil. The machine responded to her precise touch, and she thought about opening it up to poke around inside. Alice wasn’t a clockworker, but she was startlingly talented with the machines clockworkers created. Usually, only a clockworker could create and maintain the fantastic steam-driven inventions that let Britain and China dominate the world. In her short time with the Third Ward, Alice had encountered a number of mind-bending inventions that frightened her out of her wits. Weightless metal and walking trees were just the beginning.

Normal people were able to reproduce a few clockwork innovations-Babbage engines that allowed machines to retain information and appear to think. Tempered glass that let airmen create weapons that wouldn’t spark amid dangerous hydrogen. Designs for dirigibles. Electric light. But the vast majority of clockworker inventions were so complicated, so complex, that only clockworkers could create them, and their work seemed limited only by the materials they could afford. Normal humans couldn’t assemble the materials, even with careful diagrams or instructions. Even taking most inventions apart without breaking them was nearly impossible.

Alice, however, seemed to be unique in the clockwork world. She alone could understand, assemble, and repair clockwork inventions. She had, for example, assembled Click and Kemp with instructions from Aunt Edwina, along with over a dozen spiders and whirligigs, and could strip a clockwork machine to its component cogs in minutes, though this odd ability didn’t extend to the spider gauntlet currently gripping her left hand.

Alice had spent considerable time trying to pry it off, and with every tool at her disposal. It wouldn’t budge. She couldn’t even find a way to open it. It stoically wrapped her forearm and fingers, tipping her fingers with its claws and filling its tubules with her blood. It didn’t restrict her movements, and it left the underside of her hand uncovered, so she didn’t lose sensation, but she still found it… unsettling. It was always there, burbling to itself and dragging at her arm. The demon spider was a part of her now, and she a part of it. So far the demon did everything she required of it, except come off, but she wondered what would happen on the day her desires ran counter to its.

Under her ministrations, the generator’s power dropped and the envelope’s glow dimmed. The Lady descended toward the abandoned farm buildings and touched the ground in front of them with a delicate bump.

“Perfect landing,” Feng said. “You are quite skilled.”

Gavin flashed the heart-stopping grin, then cast lines over the sides. “Let’s get to work. That barn-stable-is big enough to hide the ship in.”

Once the passengers, including Kemp, dropped to the ground, the ship rose a few feet. Everyone took a line and towed the ship toward the two-story stable, which was really little more than an empty shell. The ship barely squeezed through the gaping space left by the missing main doors, and the group lashed her in place at Gavin’s direction, then edged around her to get outside into the late-summer sunlight. Click looked down at them smugly from the stern, clearly pleased that he didn’t have to do any of the work.

“How did you know about this place?” Alice asked.

Gavin shuffled a little, momentarily looking like the teenager he technically was. “Sometimes the Juniper carried cargo that Captain Naismith didn’t want the port authority in Luxembourg to see. We used to drop it off here and pick it up later.”