Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

Gavin said in a heavy voice, “His remains went into the past, you know, to a time before the dam was built. Did you see the water boil?”

“Oh!” A shock of realization went through Alice and she put her metal hand to her mouth. The Dnepro River boiled in the center of Kiev and the plague rose up like a dragon and devoured the city. “Do you think… Did Dr. Clef start the clockwork plague?”

“I don’t know,” Gavin admitted. “Clockworkers don’t spread the plague, but Dr. Clef was pulverized and his blood was dragged into several places in the past. Maybe that did something to the disease.”

“Good heavens. Good heavens,” was all Alice could say. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief in her metal hand.

An alarm blared, and red lights flashed all over the room. Click jumped straight up. Alice started as well, and her automatons jerked.

“Oh no,” Gavin said.

“We need to leave,” Phipps said. “Now.”

“What-?” Glenda began.

Gavin was turning the Impossible Cube over and over in his hands so quickly it made Alice dizzy to look at it. “I think that last burst of energy from the Cube did something. Didn’t you feel it? The way it dragged over your bones.”

“I did feel it,” Phipps said. “Singularly unpleasant, too.”

“The Cube was connected to the dam, and it wrenched something inside. Deep down within the stones. At the level of… of the tiny things.” Alice could see Gavin was floundering for words. “The bits aren’t holding together anymore. Can you see the cracks?”

“No,” Glenda said nervously, glancing around.

“I can.” Gavin tapped his forehead. “They’re small, but spreading fast. The structure isn’t sound.”

Fear stabbed Alice as the implications hit her. “How much time before it fails?”

“Less than an hour, I think. It’ll destroy a good part of lower Kiev.”

“How do we stop it?” Glenda asked.

“We can’t. Not in an hour,” he said. “We have to evacuate everyone we can.”

They ran for the stairs-or tried to. Gavin and Alice could manage only a fast walk. Alice winced at the pain in her shoulders and her thighs, but she grimly kept going. It got better the more she moved. Gavin’s jaw was also set with pain. Alice thought about having her automatons carry her, but the thought of being lifted by her arms made her shudder, and in any case, most of her automatons were as bent as she was.

Somehow, they made it up the stairs and out the main doors, where they found the wrecked elephant still standing by the two mechanicals Alice and Gavin had stolen from the Gonta-Zalizniaks. Near them, however, also stood the Gonta-Zalizniaks themselves. Nearly forty of them. All in mechanicals.

“Good lord,” Phipps said.

A hundred weapons clacked, whined, and chattered as they trained on the little group.

“Give us sound generator,” boomed one of the Cossacks. “And then we kill you.”

“Shouldn’t that be or we kill you?” Glenda shouted back.

“No.”

The alarms continued to blare discordant notes in a mocking parody of the paradox generator’s siren song. It was a day for loss. Gavin had destroyed his own invention, his pinnacle of perfection, and then watched his mentor and his friend die painful deaths. He had lost a chance to find out what had happened to his father, and nearly died himself. He looked at the Cossack mechanicals, and a terrible calm came over him.

“I don’t have time for you,” he said. “The dam is failing. You need to save your people, the ones you took responsibility to rule. If you don’t, I will destroy you. This is your only warning.”

The Gonta-Zalizniaks laughed as one, and the sound echoed over the warning sirens. Then their voices merged into an eerie unity. “You think we are fools. Now you die.”

The weapons moved. Gavin placed one hand on top of the faintly glowing Impossible Cube. It looked heavy, but felt light and springy. Gavin opened his mouth and sang. A clear D-sharp reverberated in the air. The Cube glowed electric blue, and it amplified Gavin’s voice to a rumble, a boom, a half-tone detonation. The cone of sound flattened the mechanicals like tin soldiers. Several of them fell into the river with spectacular splashes and sank from sight. The sound poured from Gavin, shattering windows and smashing doors on both sides of the river. The mechanicals twitched and shuddered. Glass bubbles cracked and broke. The Cossack clockworkers within clapped hands to bleeding ears and screamed in pain. Alice finally jerked Gavin’s hand from the Cube, and the note died, leaving groaning, half-conscious Cossacks in its wake. The Cube darkened completely.

“Enough,” Alice said. “They’re down. The rest of their fate is up to them.”

“You’re more merciful than I,” Phipps observed. “They did experiment on children, after all.”

“And you sided with them,” Alice said.

“That was before I knew. Can you still drive that mechanical? We’re in a bit of a rush.”

“How are we going to evacuate everyone?” Glenda said. “There’s just the four of us.”

A booming crack thudded against Gavin’s ears. Gavin’s stomach tightened. The dam was failing faster than he had originally calculated. Once it gave, the river would smash through the lower city. Most of Kiev was built on hills, but the lower sector past the dam would be wiped out, including the square that housed the Kalakos Circus.

The circus.

“I have an idea,” Gavin said. “Lieutenant, can you drive a mechanical?”

Phipps gave him a withering stare.

“All right, good. You take this one. Alice, if you and Glenda can use the other one to run ahead and tell Dodd we’re coming, I think we can save the people. But you’ll have to hurry.”

“What do you intend to do?” Glenda asked.

“You’ll see. Just go!”

“You drive,” Alice said to Glenda. “I don’t think my arms are up to the task.”

In moments, Glenda and Alice had run off, picking their way through the tumbled army of Cossack mechanicals. Some of the Gonta-Zalizniaks were groaning softly in their shattered bubbles, but Gavin spared them little pity. He had given them every chance, and he had other worries.

“Let’s move, Lieutenant,” he said, and hoisted himself into the mechanical he had stolen from Danilo Zalizniak. Lieutenant Phipps followed, and took up a position next to him. It was distinctly odd sitting near Phipps on a padded bench instead of facing her across a desk-or the barrel of a gun. Inside the machine, Gavin pulled part of the control panel apart until he located a rubber-coated live wire. He yanked the wire loose and jammed the business end against the darkened Cube. Instantly, it glowed electric blow.

“Go!” he said. “Walking speed.”

Phipps put the mechanical into a stately march upriver, toward the circus. Gavin put his hand on the Impossible Cube and sang. This time, the note was a G, blue and pure and clean. The Cube glowed, and the note flowed out like liquid silver, washing over the streets and into the factories and houses and shops. The people, who had hidden inside the moment the mechanical army had marched past, emerged and blinked beneath sooty clouds. They listened to the wondrous sound and, unable to resist, followed it. On both sides of the river, people followed it. They poured out of the city and followed. Those who could walk helped those who couldn’t. And they were happy. They laughed and chattered among themselves and pointed at Gavin, pale blond and blue-eyed as he sang on the marching mechanical.

And then the plague zombies came. They slid out of the shadows and into the street by the river, unbothered by the dim sunlight. The people didn’t seem to notice or care. In the world’s strangest parade created by the world’s strangest music, everyone moved without panic, without fear, down the river toward the circus.