The Iron Wyrm Affair

Chapter Thirty-Five Don’t Touch the Contacts

Sigmund swore, hit the mecha’s froglike head twice with the spanner. The resounding clashes filled the cavern. The glow-rocks were dimming. “There. Try now.”

Really? Banging it with a spanner? Sigmund, I am disappointed in you. Clare, strapped into the mecha’s chest, sighed and shook the jolting out of his bones. Each time Sig banged on something, he was half afraid he would end up skullsplit, sagging in the mecha’s straps and buckles.

He curled his fists around the handles, turning his wrists just slightly so the metal plating had full contact with his skin. “I don’t think it’s going to—”

Golden glow burst from the circle over his chest. The small logic engine sputtered, and Clare was so surprised he almost sent the mecha tumbling over backwards. Ratcheting echoed, capacitors hummed. Clare’s concentration narrowed. The equations ran smoothly, ticking below the surface of his conscious mind, as tingling ripples slid up his arms.

Ha!

He had solved the equations. It was now close to child’s play to bend the mecha to his will. It took two steps forward, obedient instead of fighting him, and one impossibility followed another.

Around the cavern, humming clangour rose. Golden discs, hanging slackly in the chests of the slumped mecha, flashed blue-white. Aha! The variance, that’s why they’re responding to this one. Must be a redundancy built into their capacitation metrics. There’s bound to be several that weren’t within the large engine’s tolerances but are within mine. Drop in the bucket, but still jolly good.

“Clare?” Valentinelli sounded nervous.

“It’s all right,” he called. The words echoed internally, feedback mounting, but he dumped the superfluous noise with a repeating equation. Once one had the trick of it, surprisingly easy. “Climb into a mecha, but don’t touch the contacts!”

Valentinelli’s reply was unrepeatable, and Clare laughed. The fierce white-hot joy of logic took him, a razor-edged glow. “Onward!” he yelled, as the mechanisterum homunculi began to stamp. “Onward to Londinium! But don’t touch the bloody contacts!”

To run with iron pistons for legs and a burning globe of logic for a pumping heart, faster than a thoroughbred or a sporty carriage, faster even than a railcar. To watch Londinium grow on the horizon, under a pall of smoke rising into the sky like a column of God’s guidance, while metal legs tirelessly carried one forward.

This was joy.

Sigmund whooped almost the entire way, drunk with the exhilaration of speed. Valentinelli, his pocked face set and alarmingly pale, hung in the straps, jounced about like a Red Indusan papoose. The assassin had spent the last hour desperately seeking to avoid touching anything, not just the contacts.

Clare, overjoyed by the wind in his face and the logic humming through his bones, found himself laughing again.

They were half a mile from Londinium when it suddenly became more difficult to move. The equations tangled, snarling against each other, and sweat sprang on Clare’s brow as he fought air gone suddenly glass-hard.

Oh no you don’t.

The will pressing down on them was immense, and backed by a much larger logic engine, one powered by a core far more powerful than the tiny one at Clare’s chest. But that much strength was clumsy, and created so much interference it was relatively easy to divert the force of its attack.

He had wondered if the mecha he had control of would respond to the larger logic engine’s soundless call once they were awake. It appeared they would not – unless the mentath controlling the spider solved the riddle of the variances.

Clare devoutly hoped he would not.

And now the other mentath knew he was here. Clare’s attention became fully occupied, his small band of a dozen mecha slowing, Sig finally catching the idea that something was amiss.

Carry that over, dump the quad, string those together, there’s the weakness, let it replicate, aha! Eat that fine dinner, sir!

Were Clare to explain this battle, he would liken it to a game of chess – except with a dozen boards, each board in five dimensions, and each player with as many pieces as he could mentally support without fusing his brain into a useless heap of porridge.

There was, unfortunately, no time for comparison or explanation. He pushed the dozen mecha forward, a tiny piece of grit edging under Londinium’s shell, metal creaking as he leaned forward, his body tensing inside the straps. Gears whined and ratcheted, fountains of sparks showering the paving of Kent Road.

Shimmering curtains of equations spun and parted, the world merely interlocking fields of force and reaction. For a moment the whole of the city spread below him, nodes and intersections, and he saw the thrust of the other mentath’s attack.

St Jemes’s Park lay littered with smoking mecha corpses. But there was an endless array of them, pressing north towards the Palace. Further clusters about Whithall and the Tower, and Clare had to decide which he was to strike for.

Save Victrix. Nothing else matters.

It was as if Miss Bannon stood at his ear, whispering. The pendant she had given him was quiescent, neither hot nor cold – of course, the field of an active logic engine would interfere with it somewhat. But ever afterwards, Clare thought it very likely that some quirk of Nature had spoken across time and space, telling him exactly what Emma Bannon would say. Perhaps it was only his deductive capability.

He did not think so.

The decision was already made. He quickly made the calculations, turning several of the necessary routines over to the logic engines and smaller subroutines to the glowing Prussian capacitors – their route was now fixed, pedestrians and carriages to be avoided if at all possible, the mecha not carrying himself and his companions striding ahead as pawns. Greenwitch Road, taking care to stay as far away from the edge of the Wark as was possible, then a cut through St Georgus Road; the Westminstre Bridge would be under attack but he would perhaps strike the invaders where they thought it least possible. If he could win the other side of the bridge, there was the battle at Whitehall to skirt and the park to traverse, then the Palace.

“Britannia!” he yelled, and the mecha screeched in reply, a hellish cacophony. “God and Her Majesty!” And the mecha leapt forward, just as the other mentath, its core-bloated intellect no longer resembling anything human, realised the small insect buzzing at the southeastron edge of Londinium was not smashed, and gathered itself to smite again.

“Use the cannon!” Clare bellowed, but Valentinelli had already – much to Clare’s relief – decided that such an operation would be advisable. In any case, the cry was lost in the hullabaloo. Metal shrieked, groaning, and the peculiar discharge of the mechas’ cannon – bolts of hot energy, crackling and spitting as they cleaved violated air – did not help matters. Valentinelli had torn the leather straps holding the contacts free of his mecha, as had Sigmund at some point in their wild career across Londinium. The risk of one of the metal discs inside the leather helmets touching their skin and inducing fatal feedback was too immense.

Especially as the mecha were jolting as they fired. Clare had eight remaining out of a dozen; four had been left at Westminstre – one a shattered hulk, the other three under the control of some doughty Coldwater Guards in their soot-stained, tattered crimson uniforms who had been sent to hold the Bridge against this menace. Good lads, they had ripped the contact helmets free and taken the controls of the mecha in stride.

The Bridge had been littered with bodies and the smoking remains of shattered mecha, some with intact golden cores glittering. Many of the bodies were sorcerers or witches and their Shields; since charm and spell would not work, their only alternative had been to stand and die.

The Park was a wasteland of scorch and metal, trees stripped of their leaves and blasted, the lake boiling from the weird crackling cannon bolts. Clare stopped, wheeling; his fellow mecha did the same.

Wait. They are attacking Buckingham, not St Jemes. That must be where the Queen is.

Which was a more defensible palace, to be sure, but it rather altered his plans. There was no time to explain; Clare urged the mecha forward, taking over subsidiary control from his companions. The earth quaked as their cuplike feet drummed, mud and metal shards flying. Smoke wrung tears from his stinging eyes, a minor irritant. The other mentath, behind his massive logic engine, had ceased seeking to swat at Clare as if he were a horsefly. Instead, the stirred-hive mass of mecha were running together like sharp metal raindrops on a window pane. Clare could feel them, a painful abscess beneath the skin of Londinium. The city quivered, a patient under the tooth-charmer’s touch.

Force of numbers would drown what a battering of logic could not. The other mentath’s intellect was a smeared explosion of living light, diseased and overgrown, swelling hot and painful in the mindscape of the glowing engines.

Mud sucked at the cuplike feet, the Park thrashed out of all recognition. The Palace lifted its brownstone shoulders, shattered windows gaping and bits of its masonry crumbling as the huge arachnoid mecha squatted, its spinneret cannon ready to fire. Squealing wraithlike howls, the ghost-snarled brains trapped in their sloshing jars atop the spider bubbling and struggling for release, their screams a chorus of the damned as the other mentath used them ruthlessly to amplify his own force.

“ONWARD!” Clare roared, releasing Sig and Valentinelli’s mecha. It wasn’t quite proper to force them into the charge, and in any case, he had more than enough to do with his remaining five passengerless mecha so near the immense core and engine burning in the arachnid’s abdomen. Capacitors glowing, its eight feet stamping in turn, the gigantic thing braced itself as the spinneret cannon began to glow. The Other – for so Clare had christened the opposing mentath – woke to the danger a fraction of a second too late, and Clare’s five mecha hurled themselves on the massive arachnid with futile, fiery abandon. Metal tore, screaming, Prussian capacitors shattering and overloaded cores howling at the abuse, and the Other engaged Clare with a burst of pure logic.