Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

“I’m not here to debate, Ennock. You’re under arrest.”

The lieutenant dipped into her pockets and came up with the tuning forks. Time slowed. Gavin saw the length of the metal forks, heard the creak of the mechanicals’ joints, felt the weight of the cathedral ceiling high above. His hand moved smoothly down-impulses contracted muscle, shortened tendons, curled fingers-and came up with the whip. He stepped forward and swung. The lash sliced through the air. He saw the individual currents split and eddy away as the braid hissed them to pieces. At precisely the right moment, Gavin flicked his arm and the lash changed direction. Air swirled like water, and the tip of the lash broke an invisible barrier. Sound cracked as the tip flicked across the fork in Phipps’s right hand. The fork shattered. Phipps cried out and jumped back.

“Get Alice out of here,” Gavin barked over his shoulder at Feng.

“What are you waiting for?” Phipps snarled at Simon and Glenda. “Grab them! Grab her !”

“No.” With one hand, Gavin drew his glass cutlass. With the other, he pressed the whip’s power switch. Blue energy flowed along the lash. He slashed the air, leaving a sizzling azure trail. “You won’t get past me.”

Glenda’s mechanical lunged for him, but Gavin heard the pistons hiss, saw the machine’s posture change, felt the tiny shift of air, and he was already moving. He whirled the lash and struck the mechanical’s arm. Sparks flew where the braided alloy touched brass, sending a small jolt up Gavin’s arm, but the cut was clean. The arm thudded to the stone floor. Before Glenda could react, Gavin swung again, catching the mechanical at the shin. The mechanical, caught in midstep, lurched forward, leaving the lower part of one leg behind. She stumbled, fell sideways, and crashed into a pillar. It cracked, and bits of it crumbled. Glenda crashed face-first to the ground. Her glass bubble shattered, and Gavin caught the tail end of her scream. The cold anger, however, let him feel no mercy or remorse. Behind Gavin, Feng was hauling Alice toward one of the side alcoves and an exit, the firefly jar still in her hands.

Simon raised his mechanical’s hand. The fingers clicked together into a gun barrel. He fired something over Gavin’s head with a whump that thudded hard against Gavin’s eardrums. The munition smashed into a pair of statues over the alcove and shattered them. Chunks of stone fell in front of the alcove entrance, throwing up a choking cloud of dust and blocking any exit. Alice cried out, and Feng pulled back.

“Don’t touch her, Simon!” Gavin snarled. A skin of black ice encased his heart, and he flicked the lash, but Simon’s mechanical was out of range.

Phipps pointed a metal finger at Gavin. He heard the tiny fft , and barely brought up the glass cutlass in time to catch the dart. It shattered on the tempered glass.

“You’ve lost your edge, Susan,” he said evenly. “I’m not a piece of street trash anymore. I’m a clockworker now, more dangerous than you can understand.”

“And more arrogant,” she said. “I’ve captured dozens of your kind, boy, some who wanted to destroy the world. Mere pirate toys don’t measure up.”

With that, she leaped at him, faster than a human should have moved. It caught Gavin by surprise, and then she was inside the circle of the lash, where the whip couldn’t touch her. Her metal arm batted aside Gavin’s glass cutlass and she gut-punched him with the other hand. The air burst from him, but he didn’t feel pain. Not yet. He grabbed her wrist ( ninety-seven pounds of pressure ), twisted upward ( joint bending at 110 degrees ), and planted his foot behind hers. To his left ( nine feet, five inches ), the cutlass clattered on the floor. With a flick, he brought his foot up to upset Phipps-

— but she was already gone, leaping backward and away. She snapped her metallic left hand open, and a lash of her own snaked out of the palm. Gavin slapped it aside with the lash, and only then-

“Gavin! Look out!”

— did he realize it was a diversion. Simon’s mechanical stepped forward and almost delicately grabbed Gavin’s backpack. With easy strength he hoisted Gavin aloft. Simon’s face looked pale through the glass. Gavin swung the lash as his feet dangled over empty air. The whip wrapped around Simon’s forearm, but the blue glow flickered and died, drained of power.

“No,” he whispered.

“You’re mine, Ennock,” Phipps said from below.

“Actually, he’s mine, Susan,” Alice called from beside the half-conscious Glenda amid the wreckage of the mechanical. With a deft motion, she spun a clockwork gear through the air at Simon. It trailed a pair of wires from Glenda’s machinery. Simon twisted in his chair in time to see, but not to react. The gear clanged against his mechanical’s shoulder. Electricity snapped and sparked. Ladders of it arced up and down the mechanical’s body, and inside it, Simon convulsed and shuddered. Gavin, who wasn’t touching metal, felt nothing. The mechanical’s fist opened, and Gavin dropped to the ground as Simon and his mechanical collapsed noisily to the cathedral floor. The backpack smashed Gavin flat, knocking the breath out of him just as Phipps’s punch had.

“You’ve lost your toys,” Alice panted, “and you’ve lost us. There’s no point in pursuing this, Susan.”

“You haven’t earned the right to call me by my Christian name, girl.” Phipps was standing upright a few paces from the wrecked machinery, cool and unruffled, and for a moment Gavin was getting another dressing-down in her office back at Third Ward headquarters in London. She leaned a little toward Gavin and inhaled deeply, then nodded to herself, as if confirming something. From the floor she plucked a bit of stone from the cracked column and with her metal hand threw it with quiet nonchalance. It shattered a single pane of stained glass above the altar at the other end of the cathedral.

“I wonder,” she said, and threw another piece. It broke the pane next to the first one. “I wonder who your ally is. That man who’s keeping to the shadows so I don’t see his face. It occurs to me that the son of the Chinese ambassador vanished from London at the same time you fled. Is that he? I like his infrared pattern.” She tapped her monocle. “He has a very interesting jar in one hand and a pistol in the other, but he won’t fire, either because he’s too cowardly or because I’m not attacking you right now. Which is it, boy?”

Feng, wherever he was, didn’t answer. Phipps threw two more pieces, shattering two more priceless panes.

“Stop it!” Alice said. “It’s senseless!”

“Let God stop me. If He cares.” She threw more and more pieces, and each one blacked out a piece of glass. “I could hit you easily enough, you know.”

“No,” Gavin said. He had dropped the backpack and snatched up the cutlass again. His hands were steady as icicles. “You couldn’t.”

“You’re probably right. Clockworker reflexes.” Toss. Smash. “Those reflexes and that strength come at a price, you know. The plague burning through your body’s resources.” Toss. Smash. “How does it feel, Ennock, knowing that the plague is devouring your brain from the inside out? How does it feel to know you won’t last the year with your lady love?” Toss, smash. “How does it feel to know that she’ll cry over your grave for a while and move on to someone else? She already left one man.”

Her words were light as pebbles, but they slammed Gavin with the force of cannonballs. His grip on the cutlass loosened, and he only just remembered to keep it ready. “You’re just… trying to make me feel bad.”

“Of course,” Phipps replied conversationally. Toss. Smash. “I want you to feel bad about what you’re doing, Gavin, because it is bad. You’ve done wrong. You are doing wrong.”