Steampunk Voyages Read online

  STEAMPUNK VOYAGES

  Around the World in Six Gears

  Irene Radford

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  September 10, 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-280-8

  Copyright © 2013 Phyllis Irene Radford

  Table of Contents

  Why Steampunk? by Irene Radford

  Weapon of Mass Destruction by Irene Radford

  The White Swan by Irene Radford

  Shadow Dancer by Irene Radford

  Dancing In Cinders by Irene Radford

  Pirate Queen of French Prairie by Irene Radford

  Night Dancer by Julia Verne St. John (Sneak Peek)

  Copyright & Credits

  About the Author

  About the Cover Artist

  About Book View Café

  Why Steampunk?

  In the five Steampunk anthologies I have edited, I have tried to stretch beyond classic Steampunk in Victorian England or Western Europe. I have included tales from the weird west to China and Japan, to central Europe, and Africa. I’ve pushed the envelope of colonial attitudes and hopefully presented some sideways alternatives to make you think, make you laugh, and maybe inspire you to go out and make a costume. But don’t forget the goggles.

  Steampunk is a combination of adventure, Romance (in the classic literary sense), with marvelous toys and gadgets, and an attitude. Steampunk starts with real history we can tweak in ways that made sense and yet thumbs a nose at prejudices and haughty scholars.

  It starts with the premise that science happened much earlier than conventional history tells us. Automatons, weapons that shoot light instead of bullets, artificial lungs, and pollution, run rampant through the movement.

  Steampunk is more than just the things you can do with steam. It is a sensibility, an approach to life, and a new way of looking at issues—through goggles if you will.

  I have found Steampunk all around me. Not just in books, movies, and TV shows that shouted steam at every turn, but in subtle ways. The interior of the Tardis on Dr. Who looks and sounds as if it belongs in a Jules Verne tale. In watching the DVDs of the TV series Farscape, I find some of the same flowing elegance in the living ship Moya as I do in many a luxurious upscale steam train.

  The huge “What if” factor in both of those shows is similar to the Steampunk movement.

  At PDX Gearcon 2011, one of the topics tossed around frequently was that Steampunk allows us to explore the human relationship with technology. In our current reality we seem addicted to technology, almost the slave to the next upgrade rather than the master. We no longer have the knowledge or ability to understand the microscopic layers of silicon and circuitry. With steam, the inner workings are large enough that we can follow the hoses and coils, the pipes, and the fuel, visually discover the logic of the design and fix it if need be with “found” tools and material.

  Steampunk may have grown huge through the costume movement. It lingers for other reasons than just lace, velvet, goggles, and grease.

  Steam engines are not just practical; they are elegant, as elegant as an artfully draped skirt or beaver top hot. They come from an era when craftsmen designed beauty into their creations and took the time to make every seam align and flow into decoration. The gilding and flounces were as much a part of the function as the hoses and coils, the heat and the hiss.

  As we romp through the adventures, marveling at the possibilities of science and magic entwining, the mysterious flux and flow of the ephemeral steam, we also get a chance to tweak the laws and morality of the Victorian Age that have come to dominate modern life. In Steampunk, (this is Alternate History after all) women can stand beside the men as equals; they can tromp through jungles, climb mountains, and fix the bloody engine. All the while they will do it with grace and aplomb with an eye toward sensible fashion. After all, a corset is not just a symbol of sexual bondage; it contains useful raw materials and tools within the stays. It can become a woman’s barrier against unwanted advances. And when she chooses to take it off? Oh, the slow and wonderful possibilities that can follow.

  I invite you to explore the age of steam, the sensibilities, the marvelous “what if” factor, and the optimistic, or cautionary, energy of Steampunk.

  — Irene Radford

  Introduction: Weapon of Mass Destruction

  This story was hard for me to write. I grew up in Virginia at a time when the War Between the States still held a strangle-hold on the culture. The history taught in the schools took on a different slant from what I later learned in schools dominated by the Northern Aggressors. While nominally in the same world as the rest of this collection, this story is different, darker, and later chronologically. I learned some things about life and about the presentation of history while writing this. And so I present it first.

  Weapon of Mass Destruction

  Irene Radford

  “I am dying, General Pemberton,” Jules de Chingé choked around a cough. The cramping in his lungs and the pressure that filled his chest caused yet another spasm. It wracked his frame; his entire body tried to turn itself inside out. The blood on his handkerchief told him it partially succeeded.

  “So the doctors tell me,” the Confederate officer replied. He stood tall and erect. His spine, schooled by four years at West Point, would not bend in the strongest breeze, even if he had bent his loyalties from the Union to the Confederacy after marrying a Virginia woman.

  “Then the doctors must also tell you that I have not the weeks left to design and supervise the building of your magnificent gun.” The intellectual puzzle of working through the physics of such a marvelous cannon intrigued him though.

  He must not think of such things. He’d made his peace with God.

  De Chingé turned his gaze away from the white asylum walls to gaze out on the Mississippi as it chugged and churned its way south toward his beloved New Orleans. At least he would not live to see how the Union army and navy had besmirched his natal city when they invaded. Uncouth Union soldiers had no respect for grace and dignity personified in the loveliest city in the world. They hadn’t left it to recover either. For the Union would win this war. They rolled northward from New Orleans and southward along the Mississippi as relentless as the river.

  Only Vicksburg, the Gibraltar of the West, stood in their way.

  “I know that the Union offered you a great deal of money to design a weapon that would bring about a swifter end to the war,” Pemberton said, maintaining his unyielding pose.

  “Then you must also know that I turned them down. I have not the time left to live and enjoy their money. Nor have I heirs to provide for.” Although there was one quadroon demimondaine lady who deserved the price of her freedom. He would like to bequeath something to the lovely Mathilde.

  “I do not have money to offer you,” Pemberton said, almost apologetically. “What I can offer you is life.”

  De Chingé lifted an eyebrow, mocking the man’s audacity. “Sir, the best doctors in the world can’t cure my rotting lungs.”

  “No, sir. But we have purchased an automaton from Lovelace and Babbage. A very lifelike automaton with the face of one of our fallen enlisted men. It awaits only one procedure to activate it.”

  “Non, absolument, non,” de Chingé fell back on his native French. “C’est impossible. C’est le blasphème!”

  But there was the puzzle of perfecting the aim of a massive weapon, the calculations of recoil, the balance of trajectory and size of a shell . . .

  “It is possible. Lord Byron proved in the summer of ’16 that the soul is measurable, quantifiable, and transferable. Our scientists have built an electric modulated transference engine as outlined by Dr. John Polidari. We have the automaton buil
t to accommodate your genius. All we need is your consent.” Pemberton leaned forward, the light of fanatic zeal blazing in his eyes. “We can rid you forever of your consumption. Your genius can live forever.”

  “Lovelace and Babbage, eh? They do build magnificent machines. I have used their unique codex system in some of my designs.” De Chingé sighed and wished he hadn’t. His lungs immediately rebelled against the influx of too much air. He coughed long and hard, again and again, until he could not breathe. A sharp pain ripped through his torso. He’d cracked another rib with his spasm. Ah, well, he had not much longer to endure the indignity of dying.

  “And if I do not consent, General? I have seen my death in the sputum that stains my handkerchief. I have made my peace with God.” I have so many more puzzles to solve. How can I die now?

  “Have you truly accepted an end to your work, and of you? I know that the magnificence of a Lovelace and Babbage machine must tempt you. What man readily goes to his death when he has an opportunity to live? When there is so much more work to do?”

  “Lovelace and Babbage I trust. Polidari I do not. His machine worked once. He has never managed to repeat the experiment with success. What if your grand experiment fails?”

  “Then you die a few weeks earlier without the long, drawn-out pain of fighting for air while your lungs collapse inch by inch and your body leaks blood drop by drop.”

  <<>>

  “Steady, Sergeant. Keep the balloon steady,” Captain Thaddeus Hyatt-Forsythe whispered.

  “As steady as the wind allows. Can’t afford to light the engine or spread the aelerons,” the grizzled veteran replied, the best balloon pilot in Grant’s army.

  Tad dropped a magnifying lens over his night vision goggles. The ectomorphic gel in the frames cast a greenish glow to the cautious dance of human figures around the flare and hiss of a massive steam engine below him. Heat from the living bodies glowed brighter than the river and the inert barge. The firebox powering the boiler showed bright enough to block details without extreme magnification.

  “Lower, Sergeant Nichols. Take the balloon one hundred feet lower,” he ordered.

  “Aye, sir. But that’s as low as we dare go. That’s barely beyond rifle range.” Nichols adjusted the flaps on the black painted balloon envelope above them. They drifted lower and further east on the wind, prisoners of the wind’s whims, on this chill night in early April.

  “That’s a mighty big firebox,” Nichols said, leaning over the balloon’s basket. “What they need that much steam for?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.” Tad added another lens over his goggles.

  Details of men hauling ammunition toward the inferno on the Mississippi River’s surface jumped forward while darkness pressed against his peripheral vision. He hated the sense of viewing the world through a tunnel. That was the price of finding out what devilish plot the Rebs concocted aboard that bloody big barge.

  One hundred yards square if it were an inch. High gunnels kept the rain-swollen current from splashing their machinery. He’d been watching the barge’s construction and the machine atop it for months, sometimes from the hilltops around Vicksburg, as often as he could from the balloon’s heights . He liked this new design that allowed aelerons to spread out and guide them in wide tacks against the wind to return to their original position.

  Throughout the long winter, General Grant had launched seven separate attacks upon the fortified cliffs of Vicksburg and been repulsed each time. All the while, the enemy had constructed something in secret behind protective tarpaulin walls. Only the constant glow of a coal fire and the hiss of a steam engine leaked through. Tad had seen pipes taken on board to fill a boiler directly from the river. Shortly thereafter, on a calm day perfect for ballooning, he’d heard the hiss of steam.

  Last night the tents came down, revealing a swivel turret reminiscent of the ironclad Monitor and a cannon barrel nearly as long as the barge was square. Tonight the Rebs hoisted a dozen twenty-four-inch shells aboard the barge from smaller, ironclad gunships. Each shell strained the cargo net. Three men steadied each shell and carried it to the growing stack at the turret’s base.

  The craft was still moored on the river’s eastern bank. When deployed it would block the entire channel.

  And if the cannon hit where it was aimed, it would kill everything within a quarter mile and tear up the land to bedrock. Who could conceive of such a devilish weapon?

  Tad removed his goggles and handed them to his Sergeant. Nichols strapped the instrument on his head and peered at the scene below. “Holy Christ! Look at the size of that thing.”

  “I did,” Tad replied. He drew a small notebook and pencil stub from his kit, sketching the weapon’s shape and proportions. On a fresh page he began the calculations. “At a thirty-seven-degree elevation with a pound of gunpowder per shell, the gun can fire a shell three miles. At least.” Sweat broke out on his back and brow.

  He upped his damage estimate to a square mile. The crater alone would be almost half that.

  “Can’t aim anything that big,” Nichols grunted. “Can’t shoot at anything closer than half a mile. That’s why they’ve got all them little boats flitting around it, protection from attack closer in.”

  “And they are all blocking the river so Admiral Porter can’t get his flotilla down to the crossing. Without that flotilla Grant can’t cross the river and attack Vicksburg from the vulnerable south.”

  Tad took back his goggles to survey the monster again. He dropped a third lens over the previous two, further decreasing his peripheral in favor of picking out faces and uniforms. The glow from the firebox gave him plenty of light, overriding the ectomorphic gel. One man stood out from the others by his very stillness. An officer, by the cut of his gray uniform, bent over an opening in the turret. He straightened and turned to issue an order to the enlisted man beside him. The distance and engine noise stole his words. Tad had no device to magnify sounds as the goggles did sight.

  For five long heartbeats he gasped for breath, unable to believe the sight before him. The officer who controlled the delicate mechanism inside the gun was none other than Tad’s brother Nate. Eleven months younger than Tad and a near-mirror image.

  Corporal Nathanial Hyatt-Forsythe had been reported missing after the battle of Shiloh. The letter of condolence to Tad’s mother in Richmond said they thought Nate had been blown to bits by a Union mortar. There wasn’t enough of a body left to identify. Or bury.

  So how did his dismembered brother, the boy who couldn’t sit still for more than five seconds, hadn’t learned to read until he was nearly twelve, the young man who had never had an original thought but took orders well, doggedly completing each task before he could do anything else, become this officer in charge of an experimental weapon of mass destruction?

  “Take us up, Nichols. I’ve got to report to Colonel Leonidas Danforth.”

  <<>>

  Jules de Chingé heard the faint buzz of conversation above him. Crisp words without a southern lilt and drawl. He stepped over the rails that would guide and limit the recoil of his weapon and into the shadows outside the circle of heat and light blasting from the firebox. With hands cupped around his mechanical eyes he searched for the source.

  A three second flare from a burner revealed the outline of a black observation balloon and two figures inside the basket.

  “Corporal, your rifle, if you please.”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel Hyatt-Forsythe.”

  De Chingé cringed a little at the new name the Confederate Army had given him along with a new body. The General Staff did not want the world to know who truly designed and activated the weapon. He liked his old name. But he reveled in the strength, accuracy, and enhanced senses in this automatic body that now housed his mind.

  Such a relief to be free from the need to eat and sleep, or to cough. An immortal body that would allow him to design and build forever.

  He held out his hand and felt the reassuring slap of metal, the
n he brought the gun to bear, pleased that he knew his body would compensate for any imperfection in his training. One blink and the men in the balloon jumped into sharper focus. Two blinks and his mechanical eyes found details a normal eye could not discern. He saw sergeant’s chevrons on a sleeve and captain’s bars on a collar.

  His hearing sensors closed down a fraction of a second before he pulled the trigger. A muffled explosion and miniature cloud of acrid smoke. The rifle recoiled but he barely felt the slam of a wooden butt into his shoulder. He tossed the weapon aside. By then the smoke had cleared and he saw a dark stain blossom across a uniformed chest.

  “You will not interfere with my invention!” he snarled at his unknown enemies. “My creation must live! As I live. Corporal, another rifle. Now.”

  A second weapon snapped into his hand even as someone withdrew the spent rifle and began reloading. He didn’t care who saw to his needs, only that they were met. With the pilot out of the way, he aimed for the balloon envelope. A broader target, he didn’t need as careful aim. But he took the extra second to make sure the black silk had not drifted too far east. The upper winds must be stronger than those closer to the river. Coldly he calculated the new distance and fired. When his hearing returned five pulses later he heard the warning hiss of air leaking. He thought he saw a distinct sag in the envelope.

  “Another rifle.” His hand remained empty. “Now, Corporal.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  De Chingé snapped his fingers, activating a powerful magnet in his palm. The first rifle, now reloaded, returned to his hand without assistance. He did love the improvements that enhanced his work. A third shot and the observation balloon dropped rapidly; the envelope deflating at a dangerous rate.

  “Corporal, I suggest you alert Lieutenant Markham that he needs must capture our spy quickly. Before he has a chance to hide and escape. We cannot allow him to report news of our weapon to General Grant. And I want the man alive and able to talk. So if he is injured from the fall, get to him fast, before he dies.”