Captain Albion Clemens and The Future that Never Was: A Steampunk Novel! (Lands Beyond Book 1) (7 page)

              “What are you doing here?” Albion hollered.

             
“We? We went out to resupply, while you lot were cavorting!” Cid replied angrily. His gray beard bristled, all two weeks worth clinging to his face like a hedgehog.

             
“Investigating!” Albion replied as indignantly.

             
“Right, red-eyes,” Alex remarked. Albion’s goggles slammed back down over his face. We were left staring in turns at each other’s stunned faces, and at the little longboat innocently floating in the dock space.

             
“Well then,” I interjected. “Who’s left on the ship?”

              Some miles away, in the brig of the
Huckleberry
, Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves finished filing down the hinge on her prison, and with a well-placed kick, loosened it from its frame. She did this very quietly, in case whomever stole the ship heard.

It hadn’t been difficult to deduce the theft of the
Berry.

Firstly, her usual loud, obnoxious
crew was gone. The ship now was silent as the grave.

Second, whatever God-forsaken port they’d been docked at, she had seen its distinct brand of drunken villainy out of her tiny porthole. They were certainly capable of a ship jacking. Just like Albion Clemens to dock at such a place, she had thought.

In the passageway, she took the time to tuck the file back securely away in her utilitarian braid. It was a very large ship, but Hargreaves was well aware there were vacuum tubes and other machinery designed to transmit sounds.

She stepped out into the hall, pausing as her boot heel clicked once on the
scrubbed deck.

Rosa’s borrowed clothes fit well enough, but it was in a very flamboyant style, not at all in Hargreaves’ comfort zone. The
embroidered skirt and linen blouse were conservative enough, but the Inspector flat-out refused to wear Rosa’s shoes- much too high, and showed too much ankle. Hargreaves in disguise was not Hargreaves the Inspector.

             
No matter how she was dressed, the opportunity was too good to miss for the Queen’s agent- with a real pirate vessel at her disposal, how far could she go towards tracking a presumably airborne Westminster? Prospects were good she could simply overpower the current thief and take over the
Berry
herself. She took off her boots, setting her socks gingerly on the cold wood. Good, no sound. She tied the laces together and secured the footwear to her belt, then made her way wielding only her powers of detection.

             
Though Hargreaves’ intent was to simply arrive at the bridge, in practice the journey proved counter-intuitive and bemusing. She had assumed the brig was in the lower parts of the ship, like the familiar
Gwain
.

The logical thing was to proceed upward, but there wasn’t a single ladder or
ceiling hatch.

When Hargreaves opened a trap in the deck floor, she discovered a cavernous space several decks deep. There was no catwalk or other passage; the
trap simply dropped off into empty air, over hard shipping crates below. Mysterious apparatus also seemed to occupy this spacious hold, or what Hargreaves assumed was a hold, but befuddled and frustrated, she simply shut the portal and moved on.

             
Some wandering later, Hargreaves arrived at a conclusion: the brig was in the
middle
of the ship.

It made some odd sort of sense, now she thought about it. The
Gwain
and other ships in Her Majesty’s navy had holdover design cues from seafaring ships, but on a dirigible, the best place to hold a prisoner was dead center, away from anyplace one might jump overboard and onto a rescuing ship.

Her circuit of the deck also showed the
Berry
was built along the lines of a giant egg, with the cavernous hold like a yolk within.

Hargreaves had taken raiding training, and she recognized the narrow corridors and recessed panels of a pressed helium vessel: a ship with her lift contained within her very bones. What Hargreaves could not figure was the endless dead-ends, the locked doors, and the random nooks like empty bookshelves at all levels of the walls. Then there were the strings of objects, like fetishes or toys, running along every corridor. The empty doll smiles and brightly colored marbles shook her more than the fact she wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally, the Inspector had had enough.

“Damn it, ship, how the blazes do I get to your bridge?” Hargreaves gave in to the labyrinth, and abandoned stealth for release.

There was a rollicking click, as if the ship had actually heard her, and a panel Hargreaves hadn’t seen before swung open on invisible hinges.

“Doesn’t that just take the piss?” Hargreaves grumbled, but she shrugged and climbed through.

              “The
Berry
was triple-locked, in the engine room, the bridge, and in one of the capacitors randomly scattered through the ship!” Cid was protesting adamantly. “No simple hijacker could have stolen her!”

             
“Cid, when I say stay on the ship, I mean stay on the ship,” Albion sighed for the twentieth time. Matters were not helped by the close quarters- the longboat was not designed to hold seven people at once. We were packed like sardines. The thin plank hull shuddered and dipped despite Cid’s best efforts at the tiny steam engine in the rear. Her impromptu crew sniped and bickered despite my lowered neckline and liberally distributed headache specials.

             
“Why don’t we go over what happened, Captain Clemens? Maybe something might come in useful when we confront this Kitty Desperado person,” Elric attempted to smooth the situation over. Albion looked up from the engine sniffer Cid had cobbled together, from the parcels meant for the
Berry
. The wad of arc bulbs and coils of copper zapped Albion now and again, when it caught the taste of the
Berry’s
steam in the air. The closer we got, the more the little static sparks bit Albion, which didn’t help the mood any.

             
“Agreed,” Albion replied reluctantly. “You were there, Rosa, when it happened.”

For a moment, I was not quite sure how to shuffle through the deck of addled memories, but the
n I had it.

The whole affair
started when Albion chanced on the attentions of a persistent Scottish firecracker. The little redhead was all right, just immature for Albion, not to mention lacking in the bow and stern.

She was barely out of puberty, while the youngest person on the
Berry
was Prissy Jack, freshly eighteen last week. Both Albion and I were in our twenties, and Cid was a hale old man of sixty.

             
“All I saw,” I began, “Was how you practically fell on the little fireball, and apologized by buying her a pint. How ridiculous a line was that, Albion?”

             
“The girl is at least eight years my junior, Rosa, it was an honest mistake! We were all pretty wasted.”

             
Everyone was looking at the Captain with glares of suspicious disgust, although I would have been ready to bet it was more for comedic value. None of us actually believed Albion was a cradle burglar, though he had burgled plenty of other things.

             
“After that, I mentioned how no self-respecting pirate could keep their eyes off long enough to trip over her. As an apology.”

             
“You see how easily that can be misconstrued?”
J’accuse
!

             
“Yes,” Albion said morosely. “Yes, thank you for pointing out my drunken faux pas, I had no idea I did such things on my fifth whiskey sour.”

             
“Go on then,” Cid grumped from back near the hot engine. Everyone was crowding him in, trying to stay warm.

             
“After I complimented her, she started following me around. I told her off, I tried to lose her in the whiskey catwalks, I even ran into a men’s only bathhouse.”

             
“The one near the cocktail bar, healing baths, strategic location,” Cockney Alex recalled fondly. I could just see him, a huge blonde bear, majestically reclining in water gone white with minerals and mingled sweat.

             
“AND,” Albion barreled on, “she managed to sneak in and steal my clothes. Left me a note saying she’d distributed them in the eleven Hook crawl pubs. She’d paid the barkeeps to give them back to me a piece at a time once I’d drunk a whole pint each. Took me four pubs to get my trousers back.”

             
“So that was why you were doing the crawl. Why were you running from one to another like a bat out of hell?”

             
“For two reasons. One, I knew the longer I waited, the sooner the barkeeps would start selling off my things piece by piece. Two, Kitty was obviously playing for time. I just didn’t know what for. By the time I got the last piece back, I sort of collapsed. Luckily I knew the owner, so they didn’t let anyone take my things.”

             
The longboat shook once more, but this time, it was from the combined rocking of everyone aboard laughing.

              Hargreaves, having reached the bridge with little difficulty, was fiercely conflicted. She had expected a gang of toughs for her to take out, with a combination of hand-to-hand combat and a long wrench she had found. At the very least, she expected one determined, skilled individual, perhaps a deserted veteran of some defunct paramilitary institution, hardened and cynical with the deaths of hundreds on his hands. What she never expected to find was a child.

             
At least, the girl seemed a child. Her hair was a brilliant burning red, the sort of brightness inversely proportionate to one’s age.

She was short, wrapped in clothes several sizes too large and from the shape of her neck
, had all the figure of a plank. When the girl moved, she seemed too gangly and doe-like for anything but a teenager.

             
Hargreaves sighed, and set down her wrench. Then she walked into the middle of the bridge, where the girl literally jumped when she saw her. The girl swiped a ceramic figurine, a dog having a wee, off the console and pitched it at Hargreaves.

             
“Blimey!” Hargreaves yelled, dodging the missile.

             
“Blimey yourself! I thought the ship was deserted,” the girl yelped. She continued to throw items with startling accuracy: an ancient sugar skull, a stuffed owl, a cup of pens raining arrows tipped with sharp, inky nibs. For a pirate bridge, the place was littered with dangerous knickknacks, Hargreaves bemoaned. There were things hung all over the pipework, some with sharp corners.

             
Fortunately, the Inspector was well trained for action under fire. She dove behind a console, whacking aside tchotchkes with her recovered wrench.

             
“Hold it! What’s happened to Captain Clemens?” Hargreaves demanded. One of the projectiles, a round cork ball, ricocheted between some some touchy looking toggles. It settled on and tripped one, causing the whole ship to shudder.

“Hmmmm….” Hargreaves muttered. She reached up and flicked it with one neatly trimmed nail.

“Whoaaaa…!”

Instantly, the whole ship shook and tipped over like a platter from a tripped waiter. Hargreaves, having prepared herself for it, was instantly on her feet, marching towards the girl on the floor.

It was an ideal Yard submission situation: the mark, on her face, arms ready for a cuffing. All Hargreaves had to do was sit on the whelp and maybe tie her arms together with Miss Rosa’s belt.

Worse
came to worst, Hargreaves would simply have to hold on until the girl gained enough composure to work out an arrangement.

The
Inspector’s surprise was legendary when the girl twisted easily out of a hold that would break full-grown men’s arms, and socked her one in the face.

“It’s quiet…” I whispered. We were standing on the
Huckleberry’s
decks once more, all of us stretching or writhing numbly on the floor from sleeping limbs. For some odd reason, the ship had been floating dead still, some miles south of the
Hook
. Something must have happened fairly recently, because Cid’s wacky gizmo had zapped Albion all the way here. He had thrown it overboard the second we saw the
Berry,
still arcing an enthusiastically blue streak all the way down
.
The sudden absence of its popping noises contributed to a feeling of stillness not suitable for our merry ship.

“It’s quiet because you’re talking like a mouse,” replied, of all people, Elric. “Sorry. I have a problem with clichés.”

“Let’s just find this girl already,” Albion said in a regular voice. “Nobody steals from the Burglar of Beijing.”