Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

The ruined building effectively blocked the street between Alice and the rest of the Cossacks and, incidentally, prevented both sides from firing at each other. Alice dropped the fat Gonta, who yelped and hobbled away on a sprained ankle.

“If you want us, come and get us,” Gavin’s voice taunted.

Alice took the cue. She and Gavin both turned their mechanicals and ran with the faint howls of Cossack outrage following behind.

“If you wanted to get them even angrier, you succeeded handily,” Alice called.

“At least they’ll be chasing us and not going after the circus,” Gavin called back. “We can’t- Shit!” He brought his mechanical up short, and Alice nearly crashed into him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s-?”

“Feng!”

A pang went through Alice. She spun her mechanical. Nearly half a block up the street, past where they had already run, stood Feng, exactly where she had left him. He was surrounded by her little mechanicals.

Feng, wait here with my spiders.

Idiot! She had ordered him to stay there, and now he couldn’t move. Even as she watched in horror, a Cossack projectile launched itself over the stony barrier blocking the street and described an arc that would carry it straight toward Feng. He looked up at it, his eyes wide despite the spider on his head.

Desperately, Alice looked at the controls of her mechanical. Her mind made quick connections, and she remembered something she had seen a mechanical guard do in the Gonta-Zalizniak house. Praying she had it right, Alice flipped two switches and yanked a lever. The projectile began to fall, whistling as it came down toward Feng. The right arm of Alice’s mechanical burst free of the main body and flew toward Feng, trailing a cable. The projectile dropped closer. Just as the mechanical’s hand hit Feng, Alice yanked back, killing the momentum and closing the fingers around Feng’s body. He made a hoik sound and Alice yanked. The spiders leaped aboard the fist right when it snatched Feng backward. The projectile hit the cobblestones and exploded, but Feng and the spiders were already well beyond its reach.

Alice held Feng up in front of her bubble. “Are you all right?”

“Do not put me through that again,” he said. “You-”

“-don’t need to save everyone. I know. Just… just shut it, Feng.” She dropped him into Gavin’s mechanical. “We have to find Dr. Clef.”

Alice ran with Gavin past the remains of the circus, hoping that the Cossacks would indeed follow them and leave the circus alone. There was nothing for it now if they didn’t-Alice and Gavin had to stop Dr. Clef. They had no time. Or, very soon, they would have an infinity of it.

The mechanical ran beside the gray water as fast as Alice could make it go. Half a mile upriver, the heavy dam seemed to glower down at the city. If Dr. Clef managed to stop time for the entire universe, would she even know? Would she and everyone else simply freeze like fireflies trapped in amber, aware but unable to act? Or would she simply cease to exist, along with everything else? Ice ran through her veins, and the Cossacks coming behind her suddenly didn’t seem like such a big problem.

They arrived at the bottom of the dam. It made a wall four or five stories tall. Angry water boiled and roared at the base, and a number of stone buildings huddled around it. A network of heavy cables led from the dam to a snarl of iron towers on the bank. Near the entrance to one of the buildings stood the half-wrecked elephant.

“He’s here!” Alice shouted to Gavin over the roaring water. “But where did he end up? I don’t know a thing about dams.”

“I don’t, either.” Gavin looked stricken. “I didn’t think of that.”

A faint vibration shivered up the mechanical though Alice’s body. More mechanical footsteps.

Gavin felt it, too. “Fourteen minutes,” he said. “At least they didn’t stop to destroy the circus.”

Alice cast about, looking for something, anything that might tell her where to-

“Click!” she exclaimed. The cat looked up at her quizzically from the padded bench. Alice made the mechanical kneel, popped the bubble, and climbed down. Click followed, as did the spiders and whirligigs.

“What are you doing?” Gavin called from his own mechanical. Feng sat pale next to him. Alice paused a moment to look at the elephant. Her practiced eye told her the pistons had seized and its memory wheels had frozen. The poor thing would never move again. She patted it once in sorrow. She didn’t believe that living animals, let alone mechanical ones, had souls, but she hoped that somehow, somewhere, some piece of this magnificent beast survived.

“Alice?” Gavin said.

Good heavens! This was no time for philosophical rumination. She turned to the mechanical cat. “Click!” she said. “Find Dr. Clef!”

The cat cocked his head, but didn’t move. Finally, he sat down.

“You’re asking the cat ?” Gavin said. “He won’t-”

Alice cut him off with a gesture. “Shush! Click, go!”

Click stood up again, stretched, and with studied nonchalance, wandered toward one of the buildings. It was just occurring to Alice that a power production factory must employ a large number of people, and they should be here somewhere, when the large doors that Click seemed to have chosen burst open and a horde of men in work clothes stampeded into the street. Click and Alice only barely dodged aside. The men looked wild-eyed and fearful as they ran for it, scattering in a dozen different directions. Gavin and Feng watched from the safety of the mechanical.

“What on earth?” Alice asked when they passed.

“I do not wish to know what frightened them so badly,” Feng said.

Alice ignored him. Click was already heading for the open doors. She followed him with her spiders and whirligigs.

“Come on, Feng.” Gavin clambered down from his mechanical with Feng as a reluctant shadow.

They found themselves in a wide, long room that seemed to be a receiving area. Alice sniffed the air. Ozone, hot steel, and… something else. A chemical smell she couldn’t identify, but one that made her heart beat unaccountably faster and brought a hint of fear to her chest. She glanced at Gavin and Feng. Were they feeling it too? Click seemed unbothered. He took them through another doorway and down a set of stairs. Their footsteps echoed off metal and stone. The spiders’ feet clicked across the floor, and the whirligigs’ propellers made a sound like hummingbird wings.

“Did you hear something?” Gavin said hoarsely. “I thought I heard something.”

“We’re just… nervous,” Alice replied. Her mouth was dry and her hands were shaking. “Good heavens, I’m so nervous. I don’t understand.”

“I am not,” Feng said.

The chemical smell was stronger down here. Alice sniffed again, and her heart lurched. “It’s that smell.”

“A gas,” Gavin said. “Some sort of airborne chemical that causes a fear reaction. Dr. Clef must have created it to frighten the workers away. It doesn’t bother Click or the little automatons because they’re mechanical.”

“And Feng is…” Alice trailed off.

Feng touched his own spider. “Yes.”

“At least the worst of it has cleared out,” Gavin continued quickly. “Or I think we’d be running, too. Where’s Click gotten to?”

They found him waiting at the bottom of the stairs. A whining, humming noise came from the other side of a heavy door, which was marked with Cyrillic writing.

“I believe it says Power Production ,” Feng translated.

“And that’s where we’ll find Dr. Clef.” Alice flung the door open with her iron hand.