Trouble in Svardovia 1

 my first steampunk which is sort of Ruritanian as well, a bit of a parody of the spirit of Ruritanian romances, and possibly a little bit of film noir creeping in at times. Sophie, a schoolgirl with ambassadorial parents, who ought to be staring Girls Own Paper in a school story like 'Patrica Plays the Game', finds herself in a rather more deadly situation between protagonists of two warring Ruritanian states, Svardovia and Krasnytsya. Don't try to work out where they are on a map; the globe obligingly wriggled to permit them and Vandalia to exist. Just enjoy the anarchy.

 

 

Chapter 1

 

“Take care, my love,” said Mrs. Harmon. “Remember to clean your teeth, say your prayers, and keep regular habits.”

“Yes, Mama,” said Sofie. It was not the sort of admonition a young lady of almost seventeen should need, on her way to finishing school, but the surroundings were intimidating. Berlin airship port was the biggest airship port in Europe, on several levels, and was a confusing labyrinth of steel, brass, and glass. Each terminal had its own domed station, not unlike a railway station, but so much bigger, and if one ventured to the edge of the metal walkways, one could look down.

A long way down.

And from all around, the graceful teardrop-shapes of the commercial liners came closer and closer to the star-shaped terminal, skilled release of the gas bringing them to the point where they might be snagged on the docking hook, and gently winched under cover. Meanwhile, other liners left, a beautifully choreographed three-dimensional dance, since smaller ships came from and left for more local destinations at the lower levels.  And weaving throughout them, protectively, the Prussian pride, cigar-shaped zeppelins, the Imperial Navy’s warships, protecting civilian travel.

Her parents had ridden the elevator down to the ground level with her, its pierced metal folding doors beautiful things in their own right, in the shape of the imperial eagle of Brandenburg-Prussia. The walls within had windows to see out, and stained glass filled the rear wall. But it had been a long way down, and it would have been foolish to wonder what would happen if the cables holding it should break.

Her father smiled at her, divining her fears as she glanced up.

“It’s quite safe, my dear,” he said. “An American called Otis invented failsafes which are in the designs all modern elevators. There are teeth to lock the car in place if the cable breaks.”

“Oh, thank you, Papa,” said Sofie.

“It would be impossible to have transport hubs like this without such safety features and guarantees,” said Mr. Harmon.

“Really, Edward, does the child need to know about such things as engineering details?” said Mrs. Harmon.

“If it gives her peace of mind, yes,” said Edward Harmon. “I haven’t drawn diagrams.”

“Oh, but you could send them to me in a letter, Papa,” said Sofie. “I do like to understand how things work.”

Her father laughed, and her mother sighed.

 

At last they were on the ground, in the massive train-station part of the transport hub, and Sofie was about to board a carriage of a transcontinental express, a behemoth of the art of steam transport, to travel to school in Svardovia, whilst her father, a diplomat, and her mother, who acted as his secretary, took the elevator up to a lower level than the one on which they had arrived from England, to take the airship to Warsaw.

Warsaw! A city of romance, capital of the newly-rebuilt Poland-Sarmatia, formed as a buffer state against the oft-times aggressive Muscovy, so soundly beaten by the Royal Navy and their superior skyships, built on a keel of the artificial element Liftium. Numerous small states had sprung up as well, freed from the Muscovy yoke, of which Svardovia was one. But Sofie would not join her parents there until she had finished school; and a school run on English lines in Svardovia was the closest, taking advantage of healthy mountain air.

 

There were sounds of people’s voices, shouting, gabbling, raised in excitement. Sofie shrank back, not sure what to expect. She had not heard a train come in, nor was there another due to leave as soon as her Transcarpathian Express. She preferred not to get into the train until about five minutes before it was due to leave;  she had a sleeper cabin, and her father had reserved her a compartment to herself, knowing that she disliked being crowded, so she had no worries about finding a seat, but she quickly opened a door, and got onto the train, dropping the window in the door to see what was going on.

The noise appeared to be the cries of what her father called ‘newshounds in full view halloo.’ Members of the press roiled onto the platform, some with cameras, the loud popping as they flashed, and following them, their quarry.

Sofie gasped.

She would have to have been living under a rock not to recognise Princess Victorina Pyshkaya of Svardovia, said to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, and certainly the most stylish. The princess had featured on many a magazine cover during her recent sojourn in Paris. Sofie’s father had started to call her the ‘most expensive’... something, but Sofie’s mother had put her hand over his mouth, and said, ‘not with the child in the room.’

Sofie resented being called a child, but whilst she was still a schoolgirl, she could hardly complain. She had heard her father on the princess’s equerry, however, Baron Slabinysky, and thought that the weak-chinned, harried individual looked as if he deserved the title of the ‘louse fed on dried blood.’ The princess, however, was every bit as lovely as in her photographs, with a beautifully smooth oval face, big smoky eyes, and her Titian hair arranged so beautifully, with stars made of diamonds in it, reputedly every bit as fine as those belonging to the equally famously beautiful late Empress Elizabeth of Austria.

Sofie sighed.

The princess had hair almost the same shade as her own, but she managed to be beautiful, where Sofie was just a gawky, red-haired schoolgirl.

And then the princess looked across at the train as she posed in her beautiful Paris fashions, and she froze. And then she smiled at Sofie, a secret little smile.

Sofie gasped. Was the princess, then, as gawky at Sofie’s age, that she sympathised with a fellow red-head? She ducked back into the train, out of sight as some of the journalists started to turn to see at whom the princess might be smiling.  Sofie went in search of her compartment, wishing she had the boldness to flout convention like the princess, who wore flame coloured clothes to make her hair a feature, instead of sticking to insipid blues and greens. Her gown! It was a beautiful thing, terracotta at the hemline, sweeping up through orange and apricot to cream at the neckline, with thousands of straw-coloured glass beads in arabesques, and a terracotta three-quarter length, open coat over it, plainly cut, but a band up the front embroidered in dark brown, gold, and deep amber, all the way up the front to emphasise the height and slenderness of the princess’s lovely figure. The dark brown lapels really threw her auburn hair into relief, as did the nonsense of dark brown velvet she wore on her head, which was scarcely more than a crown of a hat with a big bow.

There was some ongoing kerfuffle up towards the front of the train as the princess and her entourage embarked on the special carriage. Sofie had wondered who would be using that palatially-accoutred carriage, which looked very opulent, what little she had been able to see through the windows.  Everyone got on, and judging by the press still hanging around, the princess was posing, and waving out of the window, as in other photos Sofie had seen. Sofie settled back, grateful that her father had bought six tickets, to enable him to reserve the compartment. She was learning not to be as painfully shy, but it was hard to be crammed for several days into a railway compartment with strangers, even if she spoke their language. She was fluent in French, of course, as it was the language of diplomacy, and she knew some German and Hungarian, for the need to understand those of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and she had been learning some Polish for when she joined her parents. She wished she could have joined them instead of having another year of schooling.  But there were ticklish negotiations to be made after the total breakup of the Russian empire, and the springing up of many small countries, some little more than brigand principalities. It was why she was to go to school on the Transcarpathian Express,  there had been some trouble with some of these brigand princes, and the rebellious Krasnytsyans, who wanted independence from Svardovia. The airships had been attacked by such people, and the service was temporarily suspended.

And then the train was on its way, a faint lurch, and the feeling of movement, scarcely perceptible at first, as the sleek engine picked up each carriage. Day was fading, and the train would roar through the night, and they would wake up in Vienna, seven hundred miles away, having stopped briefly in Prague, where the train would wait long enough for those who wanted to eat in a restaurant for dinner, or send out for meals to be brought to them, using menus and the train’s radio-telegraphy service.  Sofie was happy to go to the train’s own first class restaurant car, behind the carriage in which she rode, where her father had bespoken early dinner for her.

The dish was one she had encountered before in Germany, Rouladen, pickles and bacon tied in parcels of thinly cut beef, with gravy, potatoes, dumplings, and cabbage. An ambassador’s daughter was rarely able to be picky about her food, but this one was easy enough to eat. It did not owe its origins to any particular German region, and was served all over as a meal which was not unfamiliar. The native Germans on the train, who considered the midday to be the proper place for a main meal, were eating cold buffet food, but Sofie had been used to an evening meal in France. Doubtless the morrow would see a choice for breakfast of the European perennial favourite of rolls with cheese, or honey, perhaps French pain au chocolat, and Sofie’s own choice, a full German breakfast of the choice of Kartoffelpuffen, pancakes of potato, flour, and egg, or Bratkartoffeln, hashed potatoes with bits of bacon and onion, either one served with egg and bacon, and followed by warm white rolls with jam or honey. If she was lucky, there might be apple pancakes as well.

Sofie was a healthy eater, and did not have to watch her weight, being an active girl who was also growing more or less permanently still.

 

Sophie had returned to her cabin and was about to get undressed when there was a discreet knock on the door.

“Who is it, please?” she asked.

“I am an equerry of her Serene Highness, Princess Victorina,” said a soft voice in accented English.

“A moment,” said Sophie. She picked up the little pistol her father had taught her to shoot, and dropped it in her pocket; and after a moment’s thought, added the extra ammunition. The person might, after all, be lying. She opened the door. “I was about to go to bed,” she said.

“Her highness wishes to speak to you; it is imperative,” said the equerry.

“Very well,” said Sophie, trying to look as if princesses wanting to speak to her was an every day occurrence. The equerry looked on her with approval.

“If I may say so, you have a most excellent manner about you,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Sophie, inclining her head.

 

The princess’s carriage was every bit as opulent as it had seemed from Sophie’s glance through the window, with velvet, gilded wood, and an illusion of space in the first of the two special carriages. The Transcarpathian express ran on a track of some seven feet wide, like the old Great Western tracks of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, permitting wider carriages in any case, unlike the standard gauge in Western Europe of four feet eight and a half inches, which mimicked the average width of the tracks of horse-drawn carriages.  The princess sat on a love seat upholstered in soft blue velvet, as if it were a throne, a vivid, flame-like creature in a cocoon of gentle luxury. Sophie curtsied.

“Oh, good, you can curtsey like a lady, not a schoolgirl,” said Victorina. “Darling! Miss Harmon, or may I call you Sophie? I had Boris – Baron Slabynyski, you know – find out all about you, once I saw you, and now I see you close to, you are even more perfect.”

“I am?” asked Sophie. “Perfect for what?”

“For me,” said Victorina. “You are going to take my place.”

Sophie frowned.

“You seem to be assuming that I am prepared to do so,” she said, a touch of ice in her voice. Edward Harmon always maintained that his daughter, like his wife, could be led, but not driven.

Victorina looked taken aback.

“But do you not want to be me for a few days? Where is your English spirit sportive?”

“My sporting spirit has nothing to do with it, your highness,” said Sophie. “But where I come from, we have a habit of good manners, and asking someone to perform a favour, not presuming it.”

A brief, ugly look crossed Victorina’s face, but was controlled so fast, Sophie almost wondered if she had imagined it.

Then the princess gave a tinkling laugh.

“Oh, my enthusiasm carried me away; please say you will do it. I want a brief rest, and to be anonymous for a while. All you will have to do is to smile, and be photographed, and pose; you will do it, for me, won’t you? I am so tired of being stared at.”

“But you are beautiful; everyone will see it is not you.”

“Child, we could be twins. All you have to do is permit my maid to put on your makeup, and do your hair, and wear my clothes with confidence. Come! Will it not be exciting and an adventure? And in Svardovia, we can swap back again, and what a story you will have to tell at your English school!”

Sophie wavered.

And that was enough, and she was being ushered into the luxurious bed chamber, all in white and gold, with curtains on the bed, and being stripped into a nightgown her mother would have thought indecent, by the helpful maid, whose name was Magda.  Sophie firmly hung onto her own clothes.

“I will need them to change back into, later,” she said to Magda.

“I will fetch you fresh,” said Magda.

Sophie sighed, and slid her pistol and its box of ammunition from her pocket, holding a finger to her lips.

“My papa’s orders,” she said.

Magda nodded. A good girl always obeyed her papa’s orders.

Sophie climbed into the luxurious bed, slid her pistol and ammunition under her pillow, and fell asleep.

 

 

disorganised crime 3

 

Chapter 3

 

Jenni Devar was my hacker, and she was monitoring a number of public terminals between where we had had them taken and the city. It covered a couple of possible routes, and allowed for the subject to come up at a number of different points in the drive. After all, both were without their own boxes, supposedly locked up as ‘evidence.’ We listened to the conversation.

“Someone plans on springing a nasty surprise on Antti,” said Serenaa.

We’d all drawn the same conclusion, but did not mention this.

“Get our surprise in first and harder,” growled Kea.

I would not expect anything else from him, but honestly, it reflected my own feelings on the matter.

It was a suburban house. What can I say? Human suburban houses tend to comply to a pattern on any world, to some degree. Sure, here they are white, amorphous and with coloured tiles on the roof,  on Deneb they are square, utilitarian and made of grey stoncrete and only show individuality within; but a suburban house in the expensive end tends to have a garden out front with some kind of border or barrier against outsiders, whether an electrified barrier, a stone wall, iron railings or whatever. There’s usually a drive, with gates the plebs can peer enviously through, and the house is large enough for anyone to be certain that there are four or five more bedrooms than the occupant needs.

There was a butler when we rang the bell.

Of course there was a butler.

This one was flesh and blood, a conceit. Nobody had managed to make a true artificial intelligence, though there had been a few debacles on earth before interstellar traffic when the experiment had been attempted, including a seizure if the power supply of three continents by one supercomputer, and violent pro-computer rights groups, and equally violent anti-computer rights groups, all of which led to a refinement of the Turing test for the ability to learn and the needs of a sentient which were still in place to define a race as sentient today. Computers were ruled non-sentient in an inability to reproduce, if plans of computers made by humans were denied to them; and on their inability to be moved by any kind of artwork. Other species may have other forms of art, but they appreciate the skill of producing it in an emotive or visceral sense. It helped establish the Squidlies on the planet Nelson as sentient, watching them improvise water wave patterns which they could sense with their tentacles.  But there are what have come to be known as ‘sentience emulators’ which can mimic human behaviour, and in most cases perform adequately if not subject to malicious compliance to help them out. Some of them performed better than some individuals of supposedly sentient race; the bell curve covered by humanity is huge, and runs from high stable genius types like Dr. Feldmayer, who enabled access to jump-six, down to sundry low-level gophers in any bureaucracy. Some of whom might not personally pass the Turing test or sentient needs test; but they did, then, have the impenetrable armour of protective stupidity, which sentience emulators do not. They continue to attempt to make sense of what was being input, instead of just smiling vaguely and wafting off in a haze of uncaring incomprehension when informed that my identity was the yeggman, I was the walrus, after giving my age as blue, and my rank as forty-two.

Yes, I might have blown the circuits of an infernally smug sentience emulator used as a teacher at boot camp. It was finally defeated by me using ethics… I learned a lot more from destroying that thing than it ever taught me. Being given a conundrum of how human life must be preserved, especially innocents, and law must be upheld, but by arresting a man for stealing would cause his offspring to die of hunger, but not arresting him would lead to the sacking of the man not preventing the theft, whose children would then starve  caused it to start whirring in hopeless panic. Four or five similar examples were enough to burn it out.

It is against the law to have a sentience emulator which could be mistaken for a human… or indeed any sentient race, though it is the solcentric human who is most obsessed with them.

On the other hand, it is not illegal for a human to impersonate a sentience emulator.

You can learn a lot from tipsy aristocrats with a ’bot suit, a plastic mask on your face and the ability to act entirely logically.

Which is off the point, and you should have covered all this in your civics lessons. If you haven’t, go out and experiment.

You never know, you might just discover that one of the bots in your university is a security man in disguise.

The butler was human, and very surprised to see us.

He wasn’t surprised for long, as we stunned him, and stowed him in his quarters.

We went through the house with the eye to fine detail of a rampaging horde of insects which go after crops. Every world has them, and military slang for them – devised by the Scouts – is Sawrafe. Scavening Arthropods With Rapacious Appetites [Fouling] Everything. We Sawrafed ever corner of the house, and not one trace did we find of either Mr. Big, or files pertaining to illegal activities.

I was beginning to think that we had totally messed up big time, and got the wrong house when Eranuu Fłanaa started staring about the lounge. It was definitely more of a lounge than a sitting room. Almost a salon, but without the class.

“The proportions are wrong, Gunny,” she said.

Eranuu is what used to be called autistic, and now has some fancy handle called SIDS; Social Interaction Deficiency Syndrome. She is also remarkable at estimating distances, shapes, and so on. Her parents wisely turned down the chemical brain readjustment for her, and helped her work round the differences which make her unique, rather than have their adjusted daughter returned with a friendly personality and devoid of anything resembling imagination. No, I don’t approve of chemical tinkering; half humanity’s innovations good and bad came from people who can be shown to be SIDS people, and I am glad that it is not automatic or compulsory.  It does cut down the level of abuse some SIDS kids have from parents and teachers who can’t cope, but I cannot but wonder at the cost.  Just because you can do something, does not mean you should.  Anyway, Eranuu was cranky, solitary, downright homicidal for three days out of twenty-eight, cynical as hell for the other twenty-five, and capable of handing out pithy, if not always immediately obvious advice.  And her spacial awareness was awesome. “The proportions of this room are all wrong,” she said. “It’s a metre too long on one side, which is concealed somewhat by that bar.”

We found the mechanical opening to the hidden space, nothing electronic, so we could neither trace a circuit, nor could Mr. Big get trapped by the turning off of the power. It was a staircase down to an underground room, with its own generator, and enough on the computer to convict the owner three times over.

Then we waited.

The secret room was behind the bar, and most conveniently had one way mirror glass, where a couple of us could wait and watch; and the bar itself hid a couple more. Kea was too big, and Phwedulp declared that he was too cowardly, and went to make sure all our evidence was ready to send to the marines for mass overnight arrests. I lurked behind the curtains, just because it tickled my sense of the dramatic.

Oh, and I discharged the power in the laspistol which someone had thoughtfully left on the bar. It was now harmless.

 

Antti had managed to delay Kuraashi long enough that it was only now that the car was turning into the driveway. It is always a little unnerving to see cars throw themselves around in what appears to be pitch darkness, because of the light pollution laws on many worlds, which demand that car lights are in the ultra violet range, and visible to the driver because of the windshield’s composition. Where I grew up, light pollution was not an issue, and cars did not have built in braking for large bodies in the road. It was a little more exciting than more high-tech dwellers like, and yes, playing chicken with the traffic was a thing for youths.

Why do you think I joined the marines? I liked excitement.

Anyway, Kuraashi was muttering something about the door being left unlocked instead of the butler greeting them.

“Perhaps Mr. Big told him to get lost so we have no witnesses,” said Antti, innocently as he was ushered into the not-quite-a-salon.

“Preposterous!” said Kuraashi.

“He might have misunderstood what you meant,” said Antti.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you are Mr. Big, aren’t you?” said Antti. “I thought the inference was obvious, myself. And that you were asking for something like that laspistol to be available to shoot me.”

Kuraashi predictably picked it up, and shot Antti, who sat down on a spindly antique chair which looked must unsafe under his broad Nifleheimer backside.

“What?” yelped Kuraashi.

“The blue safety light is on, showing the power is low,” said Antti. “You like watching your dirty work done, but you don’t actually do it yourself.”

“Nice work,” I said, strolling out from behind the curtain. “You’re back under arrest, and so, by now, are most of the crime bosses and high ranking cops and judges in the city.”

“But… how?” Kuraashi’s eyes flicked to his bar.

Serenaa and Jenni opened the secret panel.

Kuraashi fell apart at this point.

 

We didn’t have much sleep for the five days it took to track down and arrest anyone involved in, or paid off by, Kuraashi’s organisation.  The trials gripped the populace for months, and my face became well-known on local trid shows.

Oh, well, as planetary count, it was more or less inevitable.

And it showed that I was not ready to just blink at crime.

So, now, I hoped Serenaa and I might just be able to get on with things.

For a while, anyway.

The next five days? None of your damn business.

 

Fin

 

 

Set in the same universe fifty years on; an essay by Duke Colonel Professor Emeritus of Civics, Henrik Kowalski.

 

The concept of using Imagaashuu technology to plug the consciousness so deeply into a machine as to become that machine seemed a good idea at first.

It was a boon to those people trapped in horribly damaged bodies, or born with degenerative diseases, who could live active, fulfilling lives.  And it made certain jobs more efficient.  A plug-jock, as they were known at first, could do any job needing a machine far more efficiently than any person driving a machine. It was discovered that the way to enable someone to survive long periods in space when plugged in did so better surrounded in a nutrient soup, much like an artificial womb, which was quickly called a ‘cocoon’ and those who inhabited it ‘butterflies.’ This was a rather jeering epithet at first, as long periods in their goo, even with electronic muscle stimulators, tended to leave these early plug-jocks physically weak. Once they had experienced it, however, there were few who would give the lifestyle up. Apparently, the feel of space on your skin, and the sensation of running between the stars was too intoxicating. And that problem was solved because, in doing jobs too dangerous for other people, the premiums earned were incalculable, and the butterflies could afford a team of trainers, sport equipment, muscle modifications, genetic tweaking and so on which made the term refer rather more to their perfect bodies and graceful movement than to being weak little bugs. Suddenly, there was a new elite, feted, celebrated, able to outbid almost anyone for anything. Able to fund research outside of the budget of anyone else.

Able to have clones of themselves grown, and their memories recorded and transferred to the new clones when their bodies started ageing, as anargathic drugs interfered with the chemical soup in which they spent much of their lives.

And now?

Now some moron has invented a way to project their personalities from the recorder on their jack-in point via those miniature  wormholes which were so new when I was Gunny Kowalski, digging up treason. So, even accident will not kill them, as long as they have at least one clone prepared. And most have several.

It’s going to have an impact on law and order.

There is the good news, however.

Only three in ten thousand solcentric humans can bear the solitude of being the ship; which is about one in ten of those who pass the psychological tests to be permitted to try. The other nine in ten die screaming.

And because the support system is now so complex, you have to be wealthy, very wealthy, to start off with, to set up the system. At least they let you take the tests first to see if you flunk out right away. It’s a mustering-out benefit of both the navy and the scouts to those they think will use it well, but for most people, it’s a pipe dream. And being so remote, of course, there are ruder terms about than ‘Butterflies.’  ‘Egglings’ is another, ‘Saccers’ and the truly offensive, ‘Wormers’ or ‘kennel-hounds,’ a Wargrin term of abuse.

Oh, I specified Solcentric humans, I think; there has never been a Wiłanu who could handle it, and I’m not sure about mixed blood. Probably depends more on the upbringing than the bloodline.

Wargrini are even rarer. Not only do they have to be alphas, they have to have the ‘lone wolf’ gene. However, at least for them, genetic testing shows amost 100% whether they can handle it. Babari take to it well enough, but mostly choose not to do so. They like their physical prowess to be physical. The only people I’ve ever known to give up being butterflies are Babari.

It goes against the religion of the Tsshst;  I don’t know exactly why, and I haven’t asked. I have, however, heard mutters about ‘corrupted pools’ referring to the cocoons. And the Imagaashuu, who started all this?  They refuse to work anywhere but on planetary or asteroid surfaces, and lock themselves up with tranquilisers when travelling in space vehicles. So, it’s a solcentric human thing.  Whether that is going to cause problems or not, I don’t know.

Watch this space.

Harry.