Secrets of the Fire Sea, page 14
‘This,’ Hannah tapped a lone stretch of code near the bottom of the image formed on the stone wall, ‘this isn’t anything to do with how my mother navigated to these files or her bookmark set – it’s a Joshua Egg.’
Nandi looked blankly at Hannah.
‘Ah now,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s a rare piece of cleverness.’
Hannah shot a glance towards the commodore, which seemed to be a mix of surprise and admiration at his knowledge. ‘You wouldn’t have much occasion to use a Joshua Egg on a u-boat.’
‘No lass, but if a lock’s secured by a transaction engine and it’s well-designed enough, the locksmith will usually throw one inside to encrypt their key for opening the bolts, and if there’s one thing old Blacky’s got, it’s an aversion to being locked up.’
‘This is a lock?’ Nandi asked their guide.
‘A Joshua Egg is transformative maths,’ said Hannah. ‘Highly recursive. When you solve it, you get another Joshua Egg and a piece of encoded information spat out. It’s like a game of pass the parcel – you rip a layer off the package and you find another smaller parcel and maybe a present waiting inside for you. This is about as long as I’ve seen one, though, so there must be quite a few iterations inside.’
Nandi’s eyes narrowed. The commodore was full of surprises, and so, it seemed, was the work of the doctors Conquest. ‘Can you solve it?’
‘It would take days by hand,’ said Hannah. ‘Maybe weeks if it’s particularly tricky, but—’ she waved towards the window and the wall of valves glowing on the other side of the artificial ravine, ‘—I don’t have to do it by hand. With enough raw power I bet I can crack the first iteration in a couple of minutes.’
‘Get to it,’ said Nandi, trying to keep the hunger – or was it desperation – out of her voice.
Hannah jumped back on the card writer and transcribed the Joshua Egg and her method for solving it, filling up at least twenty punch cards with a tattoo of holes; the injection tube to the massive transaction engines patiently carrying each card away until the suction tube seemed to be hissing angrily back at them like a maltreated cat. Her volley of instructions released, Hannah leant back from the counter and the three of them waited for the girl’s cards to find their mark.
The results came suddenly, and not in the form of a new display on the stone screen, but with an angry yelp of surprise from Commodore Black as a fork of static lightning flashed past the balcony behind him, searing the back of his neck. Hannah ran to the study cell’s balcony rail, followed by Nandi. Hooded figures were jutting out from balconies on either side of their study cell, staring in disbelief at the sight. Glass valves on both sides of the ravine were ablaze with light, a nimbus of static electricity cascading down to the forest of valves on the floor. Intense bolts of energy danced between the giant glass bulbs, ricocheting among the relays.
‘What mortal dark gale is this?’ shouted the commodore over the roar from outside.
‘I think it’s a switching storm,’ Hannah called back. ‘One of the oldest guildsmen described them to me once, but he said we’d never see their like again. The transaction engines are overloading, but we’re only handling the capital’s needs down here now. There’s enough spare processing capacity in the guild’s chambers to support eleven abandoned cities. This shouldn’t be happening!’
The clash and clack of the jumping lines of energy were joined by a rumbling noise from huge iron pipes running along the ravine’s walls, cold water from the frozen wastes above ground being pumped down to cool the overheating machinery.
‘This is our doing,’ whined the commodore. ‘Trying to prise open a nest of wicked secrets that were never intended to be known.’
Hannah shook her head vehemently. ‘It’s not us. It can’t be. It doesn’t take that much processing power to solve a Joshua Egg, however complex it is.’
Nandi stared out, fascinated and horrified by the leaping forks of energy. It was as though the valve-minds were gods whose rest had been disturbed, and this their rage. The study cell door flew open suddenly, diverting Nandi’s attention, and a male guild worker sprinted inside waving an ebony-coloured punch card. ‘Black card! Everything from vault nine to twenty-two.’
Hannah ran over and snatched the black card, feeding it into their injection tube.
‘Why is your hood down?’ demanded the guildsman from inside his own cowl. ‘In the presence of outsiders. You shame us.’
‘Shut up,’ replied Hannah, almost casually.
The punch card disappeared inside the wall, bouncing back seconds later, followed by the dimming of the valve-light immediately outside their window.
Grabbing his black punch card back, the guildsman ran frantically out of the room without another comment on Hannah’s state of undress.
Nandi saw that the image on the stone screen was freezing in place. ‘We’re finished for the day then, I take it?’
‘They’re freezing all non-critical processes in several transaction-engine vaults including this one,’ said Hannah. ‘They’ll have the guild’s senior card sharps and engine men down here all day and night, trying to work out why the chamber outside was overloading.’
Nandi looked at the stone screen, the image of a document half-formed on the rock surface. This was something new! The first layer of the Joshua Egg had been packed with a present after all! She ran her fingers across the archaic words on the document, translating them to the modern form. Could it be? Yes.
‘This is part of the church’s record of the trial of William of Flamewall,’ announced Nandi excitedly to Hannah and the commodore. ‘Look! It states that he poisoned Bel Bessant with metal oxides from the dyes he had access to. He was an illuminator of manuscripts and a stained-glass artist. That’s how the militia discovered he was the murderer – they traced the poison in Bel Bessant’s blood back to her lover’s own dye mix, but William of Flamewall had already fled the capital by then.’
There was nothing more; the document’s image had frozen mid-scroll on the cold stone. What else might they have found if Jago’s legendary transaction-engine rooms hadn’t failed them in quite so catastrophic and spectacular a fashion?
‘An ancient murder,’ said the commodore. ‘With a good many more in the centuries since to trouble the island’s police, no doubt. But it’s not the capital we need to flee, it’s these terrible guild vaults with their sick transfiguring energies and fearful storms of energy. If you’ve finished here, Nandi, let’s head back to the safety of our prison of a hotel.’
‘Finished for the day,’ said Nandi.
And the day only. There were still a good few questions Nandi had about the work of the two doctors Conquest.
Standing close to the cascade of water down the iron walls, a robed figure watched Hannah Conquest, the aging u-boat man and Nandi Tibar-Wellking board the transport capsule and waited for it to safely clear the rubber curtain, leaving the guild’s atmospheric station. The circuit of the bomb he had placed on board would have been completed now the carriage was under power.
He had followed his orders to the letter. The figure allowed himself a sliver of a smile – not that anyone could see it under his hood. He would be boarding a capsule with the other guild workers soon, but he wouldn’t be going where those three were heading.
Oblivion’s eternal embrace. In about ten minute’s time.
Given his two companions’ distant evolutionary origins as forest-dwelling primates, it was ironic, Boxiron considered, that it should be his inferior cobbled-together body that experienced the least trouble ascending the air vent to the surface of Hermetica City.
Chalph urs Chalph had the advantage of youth, though, the young ursine climbing the rungs ahead of Jethro without the sweat that was now soaking the ex-parson’s face. The three of them were getting near to the cliffs overlooking the Fire Sea, Boxiron steadily pulling his not inconsiderable metal weight up behind Chalph and Jethro. Then the ledge was in sight, giving onto a bare stone passage that led to a heavy steel door with a wheel-shaped handle to open it that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the commodore’s u-boat.
They exited via a concrete bunker topped with rusted iron ventilation grilles, to find themselves on top of a black cliff with a view down to the boiling waters lapping against the shores of Jago far below. Chalph raised a finger to his lips and pointed to the massive iron battlements to their right, then indicated that they should proceed through the plain of boulders and concrete air vents towards the garden domes nesting under the towering presence of the Horn of Jago. It wasn’t too hard for the three of them to stay hidden from the guard posts dotting the battlements – the ravages of a steam storm had recently passed, leaving behind a warm mist that cloaked them from the eyes of the Pericurian mercenaries – which should be focused on the monsters prowling outside the capital’s walls anyway.
Chalph took them to a concrete building standing a little taller than the steamman’s own height, wedged in between two air vents. There were three iron circles stamped into the wall around the back of the structure, each the size of a drain hole cover.
‘This is it?’ asked Jethro, his beak-nosed face swivelling about to make sure they hadn’t been spotted by any of the sentries.
Boxiron judged they were safe enough. The nearest of the geodesic domes was one of the abandoned overgrown parks that dotted the outskirts of the capital. There wasn’t likely to be anyone inside.
‘This is what you asked for,’ said Chalph. He lifted a steel tool out of his leather pocket and inserted it into a hole in the centre of one of the covers, levering the tool around until there was a muffled clunk – and then he heaved the cover out, pulling it away and resting it down on the stony ground.
Jethro looked meaningfully at Boxiron and the steamman lurched forward to check the machinery inside. It was a nest of cables, clicking mechanics and etched steel circuits lit by a bank of flickering valves hanging from the roof like lanterns. It appeared primitive to Boxiron, but no doubt it served its purpose, allowing the guild’s transaction engines to control this stretch of the battlement’s defences.
‘What do you think, old steamer?’ asked Jethro. ‘Can it be cracked?’
‘All in all, I prefer the locks and systems of a Jackelian transaction engine.’ But it would do. There was a connection from the guild’s vaults to the wall’s control system and what was sauce for the goose could easily become sauce for the gander.
There really hadn’t been many options open to a desecration like Boxiron after he had burnt down Aumerle House during his brief fit of madness. Shunned by his people, no longer a steamman knight, only a grave-robbed hybrid wandering the rookeries of Middlesteel begging for high-grade coke and water for his boiler heart. But desecration or no, Boxiron still had the mind of a steamman knight, a mind far superior to the Jackelians’ primitive transaction-engine locks. And after the flash mob had found him and enlisted him into their criminal ranks, they had outfitted Boxiron’s human-milled shell with many useful extras. There weren’t many locks, doors or transaction-engine safeguards – physical or artificial – that could stand up to his talents.
Boxiron sprung the concealed hatch on his chest and pulled out the highly illegal cables he would need for this piece of work, adjusting the variable heads to match the Jagonese non-standard sockets. Once he had patched in a workaround to bypass the machinery’s obviously hostile protective valves, he pushed the other jack into the transaction engine’s diagnostics system. Why, this old steamer, officer? He’s just checking the jeweller’s here for a malfunction on their doorway. Move along now. Nothing to see here.
Boxiron dialled back the power to his body, trying to limit the spasms of his twitching iron fingers. It was like holding his breath, painful and potentially dangerous if the retained smog from his boiler heart started contaminating the rest of his systems. There. The connection was made, and Boxiron smashed through the protocols limiting the battlement’s diagnostics to reporting only – establishing a two-way connection.
‘If you can’t find anything in ten minutes,’ said Jethro, ‘you need to return. This mist looks like it could burn off soon.’
‘You worry too much, Jethro softbody,’ said Boxiron. ‘This is what I’m for.’
The one function he could still perform with excellence. No more for him the honour of the battlefield, or whatever mundane tasks his body had performed for Damson Aumerle that had so endeared his frame to her. All that he had left to him was this.
Boxiron noted Jethro’s hand on his gear stick, a gentle yank and a squealing navigation though the rusty slots on his back, before he felt it reach the final groove with all the impact of running into a brick wall. Top gear.
The light flickering across Boxiron’s vision plate pulsed off as his consciousness entered the transaction engine like a bullet, hurtling towards the guild’s vaults at the speed of electricity.
He encountered a diagnostics handler at the guild’s destination gate, sleepy at first, then outraged that the battlements had malfunctioned so badly they had sent it this. And what was this? Boxiron sent the diagnostics handler insane while it was still wondering how it could possibly report this oddity, making the handler’s corruption look as if it had accidentally fallen into a recursive loop. The guildsman who had programmed the handler so many centuries before had templated portions of the diagnostics’ code from the main core, and the lights of shared developer tokens sparkled like open doorways throughout the system as Boxiron traced them across the guild’s transaction engines.
Boxiron squeezed himself through one of the more central tokens, just far enough to observe the hundreds of handler functions shuttling back and forth outside, some carrying pieces of data from the archives in response to guildsmen’s queries, far more shifting regular data streams between the capital’s many systems: air circulation, gas leakage, temperature, the mortars and gunnery telemetry from emplacements around the foot of the Horn of Jago, power fluctuations from the distant, deep turbine halls. Boxiron changed his appearance to mimic one of the handlers, and then carried himself – looking for all the world as if he completely belonged there – towards the goal of his little foray.
He didn’t even need to rip into one of the catalogues of port addresses to find the militia’s hub – squatting there so similar to Ham Yard back home, bristling with privacy guards and firewalls that spoke more of the self importance of the bureaucrats that maintained its routines than its effectiveness against a steamman mentality. Boxiron circled it. Oh yes, all of this would be fine for stopping a human card sharp bent on creating a little mischief, but how long could it stand against a mind such as his?
Well, longer than it would have if Boxiron didn’t need to be unobtrusive. A diagnostics handler bent out of shape would just be written off as one of those annoyances sent to plague the Guild of Valvemen’s coders. But the central store for the police militia smashed to pieces? That was quite another thing altogether. Boxiron presented himself to the police store like a good little handler, and while the archive was extending itself across to him, he isolated the handshake protocol and extended a virtual environment around it so realistic that the protocol never realized that what it was experiencing was a subsection of Boxiron’s own mentality. After it was safely cut off and isolated, it was a matter of simplicity to break the protocol apart and reverse engineer it, then push his own tame copy back towards the police archives. The next bit was where Boxiron was going to get clever – he had even agreed with Jethro exactly how it needed to be done. He wasn’t actually going to steal all the police records pertaining to the archbishop’s murder. He wasn’t even going to copy them and try to make off with them in his memory. This was going to be a clean job. So clean, in fact, that the Jagonese civil service were going to do the work for him.
Boxiron found the police militia’s case file for Alice Gray’s murder and, seizing control of the archiving function, reset the clock on its timing synchronization forward five hundred years of their present date – long enough for the facts of the archbishop’s murder to naturally declassify themselves. Then he sent a copy of the open files to the Jagonese public records office, along with instructions that they were to be immediately output onto paper, stamped and sealed inside an envelope as importation paperwork, then set aside for a certain Chalph urs Chalph of the Pericurian trade delegation to collect. Once Boxiron had reset the clock on the archive back to its original date, the record was automatically reclassified and all references to the copy automatically deleted as if they had never existed. Just to be on the safe side, Boxiron traced the physical bank of valves where the militia information had been stored in the guild’s transaction-engine vaults and rotated that wall of valves to the top of the physical cleaning rota. The valves would be decharged, cleaned, re-powered up and not even a residual imprint of his crime would be left.
Boxiron was on his way back to the destination gate when he saw it; a rotating green force, half cyclone and half frenzied spinning top. It was throwing itself down one of the major query channels; upending the clearly terrified data handlers and absorbing them into its gyrating mass before spitting them back out again to shakily resume their transit. By the Steamo Loas, this was something new – something sentient and dangerous scouring the transaction engines for an intruder. It could only be one of the valve-minds he had heard about. It must have discovered the breach and realized the collapsed diagnostics handler was not the result of a bug. Boxiron’s chameleon-like exterior couldn’t withstand the likes of that whirling monstrosity. If it got hold of him it would instantly realize he was an intruder and the chances of his mentality making its way back to his clunking, human-milled body would be minimal.
