Steamrolled Read online

  For forty-five point three seconds no one spoke.

  “Don’t even try to stop me going in there.” Emily broke the silence with the warning.

  Before Ric could object, Robert held out a hand, indicating she could go first. It was the polite thing to do. And there was no good reason she shouldn’t see the inside of the machine, now that she’d seen the outside. The secrecy boat had sailed and sunk. Robert jumped in after her, ignoring the steps. He felt a half second moment of surprise that he made the jump to the bug so easily—he hadn’t been this physically adept before the psychotic break—before mentally moving on. She’d stopped a few steps inside. He didn’t blame her. Even knowing what to expect hadn’t prepared him. Just shy of full body contact, Robert waited for her to ask. Focusing on waiting for her to ask helped keep his thoughts off touching. It didn’t stop him from smelling her scent or feeling the warmth of her body seep into his, despite the metal chill of the interior.

  His team peered in, too, even Fyn showing actual signs of curiosity. Light edged in from outside, but it had some kind of internal lighting system, too, a glow that reminded him of the lights in Emily’s bowling alley.

  “It looks like a crypt,” Ric said.

  “That’s what I thought.” Carey leaned against the edge of the opening and pointed. “Try one of the levers.”

  Robert wasn’t here to explore the machine’s Victorian parlor, so he ignored the suggestion and moved around Emily, on course for the cockpit—or whatever it was called. What stopped him was the look on Emily’s face. Her smiles were heart stopping, but that look of wonder? It was mind numbing. In-your-tracks-heart-stopping, mind numbing. He suspected her impact was also intensified by his lack of non-family female interaction in his past or present, but he didn’t actually care.

  Emily reached for one lever and pulled. The action caused a breach in the wall that revealed itself as a small, antique table. She lowered it to the decking. On top of the table was a teapot and cups, fixed to a tray with clamps, but they appeared to be made of china. After a pause, possibly for shock, Emily tried them all, lowering wing back chairs, rolling out a rug, dropping a chandelier from the ceiling, and revealing a bed setup with an end table and an actual Tiffany lamp attached. Some of the levers she tried more than once, as if she didn’t quite believe what came out.

  “It’s a parlor,” she finally broke the silence. “A Victorian parlor.” Her voice changed. “And a bedroom.” A significant pause. “For two.”

  Her gaze stabbed toward Carey, who puffed up like a cat.

  “Two singles,” he shot back.

  She shrugged. “The kitchen’s cute.” She turned in a circle. “It’s like it’s the first RV, in a whacky, mad scientist kind of way. Clever and creepy.”

  The “kitchen” had a Victorian sink that put the punk in steampunk, a cooking setup and food storage that lowered and rose, as well. She studied a packet of something before replacing it in its spot on the shelf. She tried a faucet. Water spurted, stopped and spurted again. She shut it off, and looked first at the short passage barred by a hatch and then at the hatch-cum-door to her right. Beyond it was another passage to the engine room, Robert knew.

  “That door is the john,” Carey pointed out, still too helpful, but taking care to keep out of range of Ric’s elbow.

  If the look in her eyes was an indication, she wanted to ask and if she didn’t ask soon, she was going to explode. He felt the questions quivering inside her, even if none of them reached her tongue. Robert wondered if there was some kind of automatic vacuum setup that would clean up the pieces when she blew. This place begged for a whacky vacuum cleaner as much as her eyes begged for answers. And the fact that he thought about her exploding and a whacky vacuum made him wonder if he’d be the one to explode. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly, but that wasn’t possible when standing inside an impossible machine with Emily. The combo was…distracting. It helped when she vanished into the loo. And then Emily emerged, kicking distraction level to high again.

  “That’s…way cool. And a bit disturbing.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Carey said.

  Emily’s lips formed into a “how.” They closed again. “You’ve seen this before.”

  “I haven’t,” Robert said, too quickly.

  Emotions chased across her face and through her eyes. The only constant were the questions marks. But when she spoke, it still wasn’t a question.

  “Not as crazy as I thought.” She glanced around. “Or crazier than I thought.”

  “Who?” Ric asked, with understandable caution.

  “Uncle E. He sent this hunk of…stuff somewhere else. But he couldn’t get it back. Or himself. You found it somewhere but it did its thing and you lost it again until the Emergency Absquatulation Device brought it here.”

  He didn’t imagine her relish as she pronounced the words with an ease that was a taunt. Though the smile that followed made him not care about the taunt or much of anything.

  “You have a problem with questions, don’t you?” Robert said, because the truth was too impossible, too crazy, even though she appeared to be on speaking terms with crazy and impossible.

  Her gaze shifted his way, but before she could respond, Ric interrupted.

  “The time?”

  “Right.” He turned toward the hatchway to the bridge. Olivia and Carey had secured the device before leaving it, so he had to open the submarine-like hatch. He felt Emily at his six, felt her curiosity join forces with his. She felt it, but didn’t say it. It was a puzzle, a thought stream he worried on while others received data from the nanite drones and his hands spun the circular handle. The data was diverse, but he’d expected that, based on the debrief of Carey and Olivia. The problem now was what Olivia hadn’t known about her employer’s device. Those things baffled his nanites, too.

  According to Olivia, it had been damaged in the impact that brought her into the future and took Carey into the past. They would have been stuck in that future/past if not for the Kikk portal retrieval device embedded in Carey’s side—and a pair of handcuffs—that had yanked them both through the portal back to the present day. Olivia believed this malfunction was what had caused the machine to disappear, though no one knew when or where it went. Robert had hoped to find clues that would allow them to track its journey in the past and locate what remained. He hadn’t expected this. Had it come straight here, or had it gone somewhere else, before arriving here? It hadn’t been designed to traverse time, just Earth-based space—at least, that’s what Twitchet told Olivia, he reminded himself. Don’t believe what you’re told. He blinked. That was definitely a Delilah stricture. Robert shunted it to yet another thought track and refocused on what else he didn’t know.

  Until this moment, they’d all believed the device had only traveled into the future/past the first time because of the impact with Carey’s wormhole, but now it was here, even further in the future. He pondered the other dent. Could that have played a part in its arrival here? How likely was it that the device had sustained two impacts from two separate wormholes? Running those odds almost made his head hurt, so he shook that off, too. When it disappeared from the future/past, Olivia had expected it to go to Twitchet’s last known position, but without further time travel, stranding Twitchet in 1894 and the machine in 1944. She’d said it might also return to the warehouse, but still in 1944. Instead it had followed the homing beacon, not the laws of physics. It was impossible.

  The impossible was Delilah’s bailiwick, but she couldn’t go anywhere without her husband and the military wasn’t ready to let him out of his own galaxy—assuming he’d leave. So she’d downloaded her impossible skills into him through the nanites’ link, but what she did, it wasn’t just knowledge. It was about her, what had driven her during the years he’d been lost in crazy. They could fill him up with nanites and it wouldn’t make him Delilah. He was aware of the impossible, but not sure he could do the impossible.

  You can’t fix what you don’t k
now. Was this from the nanites? Delilah’s memories? Himself? Whoever it came from, it was good advice. He pulled open the hatch and stepped onto the heart of Twitchet’s transmogrification machine.

  * * * *

  Behind him, the almost dormant automatons awaited activation and a target. Smith envied them their lack of awareness, their inhumanity. The master had left him just enough memory to know what he’d lost, to ensure that he always felt some pain, even when the master wasn’t around to deliver it himself.

  He flexed his shoulders, resisting the urge to trace the scar just inside the hairline at the back of his head. If he touched and moved on, it was just quick stab of pain, but if he lingered, if he tried to remember, well, there was considerable incentive not to.

  That was lesson number one.

  Lesson number two? The timing of when the pain started changed, depending on the master’s mood. If there was a lesson three, he didn’t want to know.

  He did wish he knew why the master was so hot to get his hands on Twitchet’s transmogrification machine. For anyone else, knowing the damn thing was bouncing around Earth time and space was the obvious answer, but with the master, the answer was never obvious. The thing was an anachronism in its own time. While it might fit in this hell, this laboratory the master had crafted out of the fabric of time, what made it worth risking three of his precious soldier automatons? The increased cognitive function made them more difficult to manufacture and they still tended to become unstable when hit with energy weapons fire, despite repeated tinkering by the master’s mad scientist.

  No risk of that where they were headed. When last seen, the transmogrification machine had been lost in the 1940’s, North American continent, Earth, Milky Way. No energy weapons there. When it stopped again, they’d follow the energy trail and secure the device. He’d have to do some minor memory tampering, of course, or there’d be stranger tales than Roswell emerging from the post war era.

  Smith let his gaze shift toward the wide window to hell, careful that nothing but disinterest showed. Hell wasn’t doing well today, which meant the master would be pissed as well. Dark clouds filled the sky, grounding the airship patrols, meaning the drone automatons would have to do more patrols. The drones were more plentiful, but less skilled at anything but snatch and grab operations. Hopefully the master had fixed the grabbing problem. Made a hell of a mess when they grabbed too hard. He only sent them after specimens that didn’t matter to him, so maybe he hadn’t fixed it.

  “Tobias.” The master didn’t repeat the order not to fail him again. He knew he didn’t need to. He waited for Smith to look at him, let his gaze pin Smith in place, let it communicate, while Smith waited for the burn of pain, or the order to go. When the need to confess something, anything to break the silence was just shy of overwhelming, the master broke the link, his head turning to the left and down, as if he listened to something out of Smith’s site. “I am summoned.” His body shimmered within the field and then he faded from sight, leaving the lingering menace of what he had the power to do if Smith failed yet again.

  Released from the thrall of voice and gaze, Smith felt resistance return, like a headache waiting to explode, felt the master’s doubts about the last operation to secure the machine. Did some part of him sabotage the operations? In the master’s presence, he felt shame that it might be the case, but away? It gave him hope. If microscopic resistance was possible—

  The warning alert scattered his thoughts, but not the hope. There was relief in there, too. How much could he trust any feeling was his own? Moving was a relief. Moving, acting distracted him, even if he didn’t like what he had to do. At least this time it was just a machine he needed to collect. And if he ran into Olivia again? He suppressed that thought, though he couldn’t suppress the hope she was long gone.

  “Lock and load,” he ordered the automatons and the countdown to time transition began.

  He almost snorted. Time. It dogged him even when he pushed it away.

  He’d follow his orders. He had no choice, but somehow he’d find a way to break free.

  Or die trying.

  Like an evil echo, he heard his master’s voice inside his head, “You’ve died many times and I just harvest you again. You can’t, you won’t ever escape me, Tobias. I am so fond of you.” Was it truth or a lie sent by the device to keep him in line? He did have echoes of memories, of people he’d never met, places he’d never been—

  The alert sounded now. “Deploy. I say again, deploy.”

  SEVEN

  Emily hadn’t felt so full of questions since she was maybe six? By the time she turned ten her life had been a crash course in being careful what you ask—when she’d crashed head first into her family’s version of crazy. At this moment, standing in Uncle E’s machine, the past and her family seemed more like a stumble than a crash. This was the brick wall of crazy and she’d just slammed into it. This was beyond insanity. It couldn’t be, but it was.

  “He’s a great man,” her Grandma has stated more than once, “and one day everyone will know it. Life can be cut short, but greatness cannot.”

  Grandma was more right than she knew. Here in a world gone Jules Verne, Emily could believe Uncle E had been, not just eccentric, but something that might be great. She followed Robert into a cross between the bridge of a ship and the cockpit of a space ship. Or maybe it was Alice in Wonderland only she wasn’t Alice but the Mad Hatter, because she’d lived in a smaller version of this for all of her life. Machines and gears and steam were in her bloodstream. This was that, just in a scarier, crazier way. Nothing was neatly fitted together or showed signs of master planning, in stark contrast to the neatly laid out parlor/bedroom/kitchen/john areas. Those had to be Olivia’s work. This would be Uncle E’s domain, she decided. He’d stamped guy all over it, whether he meant to or not.

  Sharp corners jutted out in places they shouldn’t and it had a “just moved in” look that would have given OSHA fits if they’d existed back then. Everything did appear to be bolted firmly in place, despite the angles and odd corners. Though if this monster moved—and she’d seen proof it did—you’d want to be strapped down. Connecting with any of those corners could send you into the next life without passing Go or collecting anything but the fare across the river Styx.

  There was a mad scientist’s version of a captain’s chair dead center, with several…things…that could be pulled down and, she presumed, be used in as-yet-to-be determined ways. It looked like a cross between a submarine, a dentist’s chair and a torture rack. She tried one of the arms and found it to be a simple periscope—though it looked far from simple. One had to suspect that Uncle had a strong sense of drama mixed into his genius. It was beyond steampunk cool. If they could get it to some of the conventions even Ed would be an Uncle E believer.

  She pulled down the other arms, for want of a better description. One looked like it might be the bug’s main controls. The other one did, too. If one removed the retractable arm part, they almost looked like game controls, kind of early Nintendo. Really early Nintendo. Verging into Pong. Only with more Pong controls. Like a Nintendo. All of it more steampunk cool. She wanted to sit down and drive this bug but…

  Her gaze strayed to Robert, standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling panel. For a few seconds she wondered if she’d seen the firefly lights coming from him when he touched the bug, but even in her head that was a question better not answered. The bug probably shocked him or something. Even though it hadn’t shocked her—better to move on from that thought line entirely.

  Where had she been? Oh right, planning to drive the bug down the street and prove to everyone her family wasn’t totally crazy. She looked around. Okay, so maybe this wouldn’t exactly prove them not crazy. And not-Jones would probably stop her from doing any driving, she suspected, if she could figure how to get it outside—not that she’d let a wall stop her. Robert, maybe she’d let him stop her. After a pause to properly appreciate the view of Robert in pondering mode—which upped his g
eek vibes to huge sigh range—she let herself look at the stuff around the edge, where Uncle E’s drawings had come to vibrant, 3-D, full-sized life. Her eye picked out the altitudinal measurement scopes, and the telescoping magnifiers, the Gyroscope, and the Individual Discovery Velocipediator, from the tangle of gears, gauges and panels.

  Somewhere a steam engine hissed sullenly. Emily didn’t know a lot of stuff, but she did know steam engines. And she knew when one wasn’t happy. This one was pissed. It called her, but she resisted hunting it down as warning lights flashed on consoles and various panels. She wasn’t about to let Robert out of her sight—for reasons not as much about trust as they should be. He wasn’t here for her. He was here for this. Looking around, she couldn’t blame him. It was geek-guy nirvana. It was steampunk nirvana. Ed so picked the wrong morning to sleep in.

  “The GPS,” Robert murmured, stopped by the large box with a globe floating in it.

  Emily found she could grin, because in a whacky way he was right. It was a globe and a needle marked their position in her part of Wyoming. The hybrid typewriter next to it had to be the Mapulator Retrieval Apparatus. One identified coordinates on the globe, typed them into the Apparatus and it retrieved a more detailed map—if one could call a map from 1894 detailed. Like much of Uncle E’s stuff, the files had detailed what it was, but not how it was. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it did.

  She left Robert with his GPS and turned to the Individual Discovery Velocipediator. The file for this one had a picture and an old monograph about brain waves and memory, but no description of its purpose or how it worked. The panels reached the ceiling and it had a weird looking headset hanging on a hook next to some buttons and more lights.

  “Frankenstein.” Robert had come up behind her.

  Emily felt a question coming on, but if it animated the dead, then she didn’t want to know. He touched the headset with the tip of his finger, as if he were wary of it, too, and then turned to the next set of panels. They were shorter and set back from the Individual Discovery Velocipediator. The gauges, she realized, were telling the story of the grumbling steam engine. They couldn’t seem to get a consistent read on the various pressures. The gauge needles jumped like water on a hot skillet. One jerked to fifty percent, then dropped to near zero, then it went higher and lower, then lower and higher. Then low again. The transmogrification gauge seemed to be suffering from the same problem, but the levels appeared to be opposite of the steam levels. She studied the movement of both for several moments. In time, they might synch. Is that what Carey meant when he said the machine would leave on its own? Is that what it had done before? But if they knew it, why didn’t they stop it? The need for answers did a brief rally, but she beat it back. How could any answer about this be a good one?