The Incorruptibles (Book One, Frankenstein Vigilante): Frankenstein Vigilante: The Steampunk Series (Frankenstein Vigilante. The Steampunk Series.) Read online

  FRANKENSTEIN VIGILANTE

  BOOK ONE

  THE INCORRUPTIBLES

  (SECOND EDITION JUNE 2014)

  Peter Lawrence & Chris Trengove

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form whatsoever, without written permission from the publishers, unless by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages.

  Copyright © 2014-06-23

  G. Peter Lawrence and Chris Trengove

  Cover design by Ian Granger

  FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

  One phenomenon of modern publishing is the demise of the publisher’s editor. Now, traditional print publishers often farm the work out to overworked or inexperienced freelances, and if you’re publishing on the internet, you’re on your own of course.

  When we began to write Frankenstein Vigilante Book Two: The Fear, nine months after publishing Book One: The Incorruptibles, we re-read Book One and found a number of literals that we’d missed first time round; and once we started to dig down, whole passages that needed to be cut, re-written or eliminated.

  All this despite the fact that we have edited a great number of books, TV shows and screenplays.

  A lesson here: editing one’s own work often seems to lead to a kind of literary ‘snow blindness’ in which you read what you meant to write rather than what’s actually on the page.

  We believe that this newly edited second edition of The Incorruptibles is a substantially better read than the first edition. But you, of course, will be the judges.

  GPL & CHT June 2014

  1

  OUTSIDE, IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT, but who would know, the way days were in The Smoke; the dirt, the smog, sulphurous vapour eternally swirling, daylight hours often as dark as night.

  That was one of the passions that drove Doctor Pedro Robledo Efrain’s furious efforts to find solutions; not so much the dark of the days but the filth, the mucous acid air that ate away soft membranes and turned eyes red as roosters. Tonight, he’d been working eighteen straight hours in his laboratory, the electro-acetylene arclights throwing pools so brilliant that individual molecules might almost have popped into view; but only Efrain’s rumbling hungry stomach marked the passage of time.

  Several years ago, he had brought electricidad to life, summoned it from the skies, harnessed it, certain that one day it would render coal and shale extinct, evolve The Smoke to a state of grace beyond steam. But, summoned, electricidad refused to capitulate, other than on a scale that could power Arielectros and other small two- and three-wheeled vehicles. These were being seen in gradually increasing numbers on The Smoke’s streets, humming along for the short distances they could achieve between battery changes.

  On the grand scale needed to light and power The Smoke, electricidad killed even while it promised a new life. Efrain had succeeded in storing the new force in accumulators; sidecar-sized for the Arielectros, and massive lead and glass structures for heavy duty usage. These batteries would hold their charge for a short while, but the real problem remained: how to transmit electricidad over distances longer than a city block without fatal side-effects. Efrain’s single-minded determination to solve this conundrum provided all the sustenance he needed to work days and nights at a time.

  With the kind of money they made, the danger pay, the pioneering electricista engineers might have leapfrogged into The Smoke’s affluenzos but for the extreme peril of their work, which had a fifty per cent mortality rate. Efrain had built diffusers to neutralize stray death waves, but so far they didn’t react fast enough to be much use.

  Now he bent over an aluminium chassis on which were mounted a series of ceramic coils, his focus so intense that he didn’t hear the laboratory door open. Didn’t see the killers who moved silently through the pools of blinding acetylene light. Didn’t sense the presence of death.

  To the assassins, focussed on Efrain’s laboratory-coated back, the man seemed more vigorous than expected. Leaner. More youthful. But it was just a sense. How could it be more, the Doctor hunched over his coils, his face hidden from the assassins?

  They glided across the laboratory in formation, an asymmetrical trident, the smallest and most lethal of the trio leading, blade glittering, held flat, parallel to the floor. The second assassin carried a spring-loaded cosh, and the third a short-barreled Smallwood shotgun, hammers cocked. The lead killer drew back for the attack, his plan to angle the blade in below the rib cage and then twist and sweep, so that the razor edge would slice organs, guts and blood vessels – not an immediate death but spectacular, and the Silencios loved spectacle. It kept the victim pool cowed.

  But even as the murderer reached for Efrain, planning to lock one arm around the Doctor’s neck while the other plunged the knife, the Doctor turned and stood tall, his lab coat hanging open to reveal not a middle-aged, frail academic but the young, powerful Cerval Franks, leader of the youthful vigilantes known throughout The Smoke as the Incorruptibles. No one knew their identities, but they were capturing the imagination of The Smoke’s UnderGrunts and, increasingly, its hard-pressed middle class. One thing was certain – they were hated equally by Silencio mobsters and the Commission. In The Smoke’s oligarchy, the Commission was the administration and the executive, the Silencios the executioners.

  The killer hesitated for a second then pressed ahead, knowing he was supported by bludgeon and shotgun; but the delay was enough. Cerval’s hand shot forward, holding the jagged end of a glass pipette. Its hollow tube pierced the assassin’s throat just below his Adam’s apple. Cerval withdrew the tube and stepped back, watching with an almost curious expression as the assassin’s hands went to the tiny round, red wound. He tried to speak, but air burst from the hole, diverted from his vocal cords, spraying pink foam. Nothing but a stunned, sibilant hiss – then the killer support crew burst into action, recovered from its moment of shocked paralysis.

  In these desperate fractions of seconds, which stretched out into long and easy moments of contemplation as lethal action slowed time, Cerval wondered what had happened to the journalist. Where was she? Had he chosen the wrong one, distracted by sexual desire, the gut kick he’d experienced when she’d interviewed him? Too late now. She’d miss the sting, a sensational exclusive that would surely have enabled her to break free from the smarmy platitudes of The News Of The Smoke’s society columns.

  During these contemplative fractions of time, it seemed that Cerval was a sitting target; for he took no notice of the two follow-up killers, the one raising his cosh and the other the sawn-off Smallwood. His focus remained on the standing knifeman who, though not yet dead, was immobilized by incomprehension and agonizing pain.

  Then – pandemonium. A giant of a man – young, but well over seven feet tall – erupted from beneath a massive copper and teak workbench, sending it flying as if it were a child’s school desk. The giant seized the Smallwood, wrenched it from the killer’s grip, reversed it and fired both barrels. The blast almost cut the gunman in two, throwing him back in a splatter of red and fatty tissue, a stench of gunpowder and shit.

  “Thorsten,” said Cerval reprovingly; ideally, his plan called for the assassins to be taken alive and made to reveal their employers. But even as he spoke Evangeline Evionne appeared, as if from nowhere, springing towards the third killer. Despite the shock of Efrain’s transformation into Cerval and the Smallwood’s deafening blast, his c
osh was already raised and swinging down in a short arc which would shatter Evangeline’s skull – except that she was now where the cosh was not, seizing the killer’s arm as it descended. He stumbled forward, and Evangeline whipped him in an almost complete circle, initiating a violent somersault which ended when his head struck the sharp brass corner of another lab bench. He slid to the floor, leaking blood and brains.

  It had all taken perhaps thirty seconds; and in the silence, shotgun blasts still echoing in their ears, Cerval stepped towards his still-standing assassin and gently shoved him backwards. The man sat heavily, the grunt coming not from his mouth but from the hole Cerval had opened in his throat. He tried to say something but only gurgled a bloody spray. From his sitting position he fell slowly sideways, to lie spreadeagled like a broken puppet.

  “Can’t speak?” asked Cerval. “Now you really are a Silencio.”

  A sudden explosion of sound and action and the three Incorruptibles whirled to see at least half a dozen more Silencio gunmen smashing into the lab. An ambush! A betrayal! The journalist? Or, Cerval wondered, at the moment he foresaw and accepted his own death, a set-up: the Silencio bosses were ruthless enough to sacrifice the first three assassins if it meant that they could kill or capture the young vigilantes.

  A gurgle. Cerval looked down and saw a half-smile flicker across the face of the stricken knifeman. In a spasm of fury he slammed his foot down on the man’s punctured throat and heard the hyoid break. The knifeman’s silence was now eternal. Cerval turned to join his partners. They would sell their lives at high cost.

  Cerval, Thorsten and Evangeline were hopelessly out-numbered and out-gunned. Cerval himself had no weapon – he hadn’t thought he would need one for this simple sting operation, designed simply to capture Silencio assassins and expose them. The sting was just part of Cerval’s longer term plan to sever the connection between the Commission and the Silencios, to empower The Smoke’s people to halt the city-state’s decline from democracy to autocracy.

  He had dedicated his young life to this idea, and believed, heart and soul, that the elimination of crime and corruption, the destruction of the Silencios, the Commission’s most effective enforcers, was the first step. That was the story the journalist was supposed to tell on the back of this sting. The plan had backfired.

  Off to one side, the giant Thorsten had picked up the lab table and, holding it before him like a huge shield, was driving a handful of shooters back. Some were armed with Smallwoods, latest model, their blasts deep, booming, regularly spaced because every two shots required reloading; some were armed with the new multi-barreled Ximan machine pistol, a weapon whose wild inaccuracy was counteracted by its terrifying fire power. As the slugs hit the two inch teak of the table top, splinters flew off the reverse side, slicing into Thorsten, but the giant youth continued to move forward, fearless, a force beyond nature.

  Evangeline was fighting her own battles, zigzagging with the unpredictable speed and the dance-like moves of karoeira, the martial art she had practised for twelve years. She hit one gunman so hard that his ribcage imploded and the Ximan flew from his hands. Evangeline snatched the weapon out of the air and tossed it to Cerval, who turned it on the attackers but was hamstrung by the weapon’s erratic pattern. In these close quarters, he might as easily kill or wound his friends as his enemies.

  On one level, Cerval fought for his life. On another, he continued to wonder: if this was a Silencio ambush, how had they known of his plan? Had he been betrayed by the beautiful journalist? Or by one of the Incorruptibles, unthinkable as that might be? Was there an unknown informer?

  He knew that he would never have the chance to figure it out, for he, Thorsten and Evangeline were going to die in this ambush. Already, Thorsten was weakening, lacerated horribly by the teak splinters and now under attack by two shotgunners who had outflanked him. Cerval lunged towards them, cranking the Ximan and seeing the heavy slugs stitch a blood-soaked path across one of the Silencio goons. The others were too close to Thorsten for Cerval to get a clean shot, so he dropped the weapon and sprang forward, knife in hand, accepting that he would die in the attempt to save his oldest friend.

  He found Evangeline at his side and couldn’t help himself.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Better sorry than safe,” she replied and the two of them moved to join their staggering, bleeding, dying friend, the mountainous Thorsten Laverack.

  oOo

  2

  SHELLEY MARY VENTURA, twenty-three years old, was beautiful but, more than that, sex crackled around her like the electricidad which Efrain captured in his giant accumulators. Her sensual magnetism attracted women as powerfully as it did men. She was one of those blessed, or perhaps cursed, beings for whom otherwise sane people destroyed their lives, their families, their fortunes. And yet here she was, stuck writing The News Of The Smoke’s society columns. All of them: Births and Deaths. Comings and Goings. Society Events. First Nights.

  Shelley Mary knew the effect she had on men and women and she was happy to exploit it to the full. She loved sex in all its forms. Almost all its forms. No severe pain. And if ambition and an attractive sexual partner happened to coincide, what bliss! That was the key. He or she had to have a strong attraction for Shelley Mary. Power alone was not enough.

  Sadly, the Managing Editor of The News Of The Smoke, Rupert Gilchrist Bass, the man whose sausage-like fingers were wrapped around this newspaper’s every journalistic promotion, was, in a word, repulsive. Curled, dyed but thinning hair wrapped around a constantly sweat-dampened skull. A mouth that contrived to be both meaty and mean, quivering above an underslung jaw and more jowls than the two-headed mutant turkey with which The Smoke’s people celebrated Dufus Day.

  His body was like a white, unctuous tick, all belly and scrawny appendages. He’d once shown Shelley Mary the main appendage, apparently under the impression that one glance would cause her to fall helpless on her back, legs akimbo. He was mistaken; Shelley Mary was ambitious but, in the absence of a good-looking patron – or patroness – determined to achieve her ambitions professionally. She dreamed of being a fearless investigative reporter, a breed she knew had once existed before the Commission had effectively taken control of The Smoke’s media, achieved through the Silencios’ irresistible combination of terror, bribery and blackmail.

  The News Of The Smoke was the one stand-out and Bass’s erratic attempts to maintain the paper’s editorial integrity were his only saving grace.

  Shelley Mary knew that the moment she had laughed out loud at R. G. Bass’s unappealing organ, she was condemned to the society columns until either he retired or exploded from over-indulgence. But she was young and, like an increasing number of The Smoke’s younger population, she felt change in the air. Or the possibility of change. If she could just manoeuvre herself into a better position at The News, she hoped that one day there might be a reckoning, and that she – Shelley Mary Ventura, fearless investigative journalist – could help to shatter The Smoke’s corrupt power systems. Until that dawn, she just had to grit her teeth and attend to the comings and goings of the rich, the powerful and the famous-for-being-famous.

  Now she shuffled the pictures and reports that The News Of The Smoke’s stringers had dumped in her in-tray, enough to give anyone a headache at the best of times and this wasn’t the best of times: Shelley Mary had a hangover, way too many cocktails with the ‘real’ journos last night. In her heart of hearts, she suspected they were hacks but at least they were out there, with their stringers and their informers, acting like journalists despite running scared of any real investigation which might invite a nocturnal visit from the Silencios.

  Just give her one shot, one break, and these salaried gofers would see what waves a real journalist could make in The Smoke!

  Despite her judgment of them, Shelley Mary liked liked some of her colleagues. Was even thinking about taking one of the sports reporters home, the cute redhead with tiny breasts and a hard, athletic ass. She kn
ew that they had all worked for their positions, needed the income, some of them with spouses and children. So, when they asked Shelley Mary to join them on their hard-drinking outings, she usually went along; and it had been a long time since any one of them had teased her about her celebrity columns. They knew that she, too, was just getting through the working hours.

  She sighed and grabbed another stack of pictures. Three or four in, a black-and-white of Rooseveldt Franklyn Pfarrer; a tiny man – and his image recalled one of those bits of useless information: that the venom of baby snakes was far more deadly than that of their bigger brethren. Pfarrer, known throughout The Smoke to be the Silencios’ king pin but lauded in Shelley Mary’s columns as ‘philanthropist-investor,’ ‘legendary entrepreneur,’ and ‘mysterious billionaire,’ was accompanied in these pictures by a pneumatic black-haired woman Shelley Mary had not seen before.

  She sat back and gazed at the image intently, wondering where this particular piece of arm-adornment had originated. And why did Pfarrer choose her – or even bother to be seen with this woman, a foot taller than him, when everyone knew that he was not attracted to women? Or to any other sex.

  Shelley Mary wondered if the woman might be connected in some way with Pfarrer’s daughter, Keira Specklestone, apparently the fruit of Franklyn Rooseveldt’s only – experimental – night with a woman. Pfarrer had the mother killed just after the birth but had been unable to kill the child, either pre- or post-partum. After all, she was his creation, a baby who had grown into a beautiful, spoiled girl and who, despite the best education that money could buy, had failed to pass a single school exam.