The Flux Engine

Digital Edition – 2015

WordFire Press
wordfirepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-61475-334-6

An earlier version of this novel was published in 2013 by Dan Willis.
This version copyright © 2015 by Dan Willis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by Janet McDonald

Art Director Kevin J. Anderson

Cover artwork images by Jeff Brimley

Book Design by RuneWright, LLC
www.RuneWright.com

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

Published by
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Chapter 1

The Incident

There wasn’t anything John Porter wouldn’t risk to find his mother. Fixing that firmly in his mind, he took a deep breath and turned the stolen key. The lock in the door of the Thurger’s lab released and John pulled open the heavy door. He glanced up and down the dusty street but the dozen or so people going about their business took no notice of him. A steam cart rattled up the street, puffing and wheezing as its engine chugged rhythmically. Overhead a fat cargo airship hung in the air, one of its maneuvering propellers turning lazily in the perpetual winds of the Lorado Territory.

No one noticed him.

Mentally shaking himself, John entered the lab and pulled the door closed. It wasn’t that he didn’t belong here; he was Doctor Shultz’ apprentice after all. But with his master gone, John really had no business in the lab.

He crossed the familiar stones of the floor, passing the salt bins, the grow tanks, and workbenches full of alchemical gear. His goal was a large brass and steel box on the far side of the room. A hinged panel lifted up and away, revealing the hollow interior of the box. Three rows of Lantian crystals filled the space, gleaming in the light from the overhead windows.

It was a crystal machine.

Each row of crystals was attached to a small steam piston that would drive them forward and back as the machine operated. Beads of sweat broke out on John’s head as he reached in and removed the centermost crystal, the primary resonator. Handler Boxes like this one were designed to send mental instructions from a person to a small group of Tommys, ten foot tall metal men powered by steam engines in their chests. Tommys served as laborers for difficult or dangerous work; here in Sprocketville, they were primarily used at the coal mine.

With the master resonator removed, John took a small, reddish crystal from around his neck where it hung by a chain. The crystal was his only link to his mother. And his only memory of her was the day she gave it to him. Whenever he touched it, he could hear a beautiful melody resonating from it. Her song, calling him to find her.

Hands shaking, John kissed the red crystal tenderly, then fitted it carefully into the slot where the master resonator had been. The Handler Box was a complex device, second order at least, maybe third, but John had studied it. With his mother’s crystal in the center, he should be able to send his thoughts back, along whatever channel she was using to send the song to him, and communicate with her.

Not even daring to breathe, John connected the handler box to a steam line that emerged from the wall and turned the valve. Steam, generated in the town’s steamworks, flowed through the line, filling the pistons of the Handler Box’s crystal device, and slowly it began to turn.

The pistons chugged, picking up speed, and the crystals within began to pivot and whirl. A pulsing harmonic sound rose from the machine as the crystals became active.

He was ready.

Fitted to the box by a coil of copper wires was a brass crown studded with tiny crystals. John settled it over his head so that the copper contact plates on the inner edge were over his temples.

“Mother?” he whispered.

The crystal at the heart of the handler box suddenly blazed with light. Something was wrong. It couldn’t be the resonance; he’d triple-checked the alignment and placement of the crystals before he began. That only left the frequency. The drive gear was spinning too fast.

He reached for his mother’s crystal, intending to tear it free from the box before things went seriously bad. It was the right thought, but it came far too late. The copper contact plates inside the brass crown sparked as power rushed up to it through the lead lines. John’s hand spasmed, squeezing closed of its own volition, and the aroma of burning hair assaulted his nostrils. With a crack like a gunshot, torrents of electric current leapt from the crown, boring deep into his brain.

Screaming in agony, he fell backwards onto the stone floor of the Thurger’s lab. His back arched as the electricity tore through his body, seeking a place to ground. His heart raced, beating irregularly as the rogue current overwhelmed its normal rhythm.

The muscles of his chest contracted, attempting to crush the air from his lungs, and John gasped for breath. He had only seconds. If his heart didn’t fail, the current would cook the brain inside his skull. He had to get the control crown off.

Closing his eyes, John willed his hands to obey. They twitched and jerked, dancing to the music of the current, but making no response to his demands. A wave of nausea overtook him and he suddenly felt transported, as if he’d been lifted off the cold floor to another place. A pair of hands that were clearly not his own snapped into focus before him. They were long and thin, with slender fingers and bulbous, metal joints. Reacting to John’s will, the slender hands reached up, out of his view and tried to tear the crown off his head. The image flickered and died, as if the hands had simply torn off the head by which John saw them.

As abruptly as it came, the vision fled and John found himself lying on the lab floor again. He didn’t have time to be relieved as pain slammed into his body once more. John Porter had only lived fifteen short, bitter years and now he was going to die. If he hadn’t been busy with the actual dying, it would have made him angry.

In desperation, John forced his mind to try again. This time the vision came quicker, as if it were waiting for his attention. Dozens of hands, each like the ones before, flashed before his eyes, each one superimposed atop the others. Tommy hands, he thought, recognizing the mechanical fingers at last.

He pushed the vision away, sending the hands flailing wildly. As the images faded, he could feel himself coming back to his own body in the Thurger’s Lab. One more jolt from his experiment would kill him for sure. The last time, he had almost a full second before the current hit him. It wasn’t long, but it would be his only chance.

John could feel the chill of the stone under his back long before his vision cleared. Time seemed to be crawling as he became aware of his surroundings. He willed his arms to move, to lift his hands to his head and pull off the crown before it could deliver its pent-up death blow.

Slowly, as if moving through a tub of molasses, John’s arms finally obeyed. He watched from his strange, accelerated perspective as his callused hands rose, fingers spread wide to intercept the crown. At any moment, he expected the electricity to arc again and kill him, but he kept his hands moving until he could feel the smooth surface of the brass crown.

The moment he touched the crown, time leaped back to its normal rate. White-hot arcs of energy bored into John’s head for the third time. His body spasmed, but this time it worked for him, dragging the crown off his head as his arms flailed out. Heart beating wildly, but finally back in rhythm, John collapsed back onto the cold stones of the floor.

Aftershocks of energy ran along the surface of his skin, prickling as they went, and his breath steamed in the cool air of the lab. His entire body ached, muscles trembling violently. Waves of dizziness flowed over him and his mind drifted like a rudderless ship. He managed to roll onto his back, resolving to lie there and wait until the worst effects of his ordeal passed.

Above him, suspended from the ceiling, hung the lab’s flux tank, a glass cylinder filled with glowing, blue liquid. The flux tank was the heart of every Thurger’s lab. It was the fuel that made Lantian crystals work. Most of the blue goo in the glass tank had been cooked by John. As an apprentice Thurger, it was his job to make the flux and learn everything he could about the crystals. John didn’t need encouragement. Lantian crystals had been a huge part of his life for as long as he could remember.

John’s mother had put his feet on the Thurger’s path. In his memory, she seemed so young, with pale skin and hair the color of burnished copper, somewhere between red and gold. He couldn’t have been more than four or five at the time, but he remembered her face as if it were yesterday. She smiled at him but there were tears in her eyes as she put a small crystal on a chain around his neck. She kissed him on the cheek, and then she was gone.

His only memory of her.

She vanished that day, leaving John to be found and raised in the Saint Archimedes Orphan Asylum. He never knew why she had disappeared or what happened to her, but he always knew that she loved him. Her crystal told him that. Whenever he had been lonely or scared as a child, he only had to touch the crystal she’d left him, to hold it in his hands, and he could hear her singing to him.

When he got older, the sisters who ran the asylum told him that all crystals vibrate. Harmonics they called it, though you weren’t supposed to be able to hear it without a special machine. The sisters told him that it was just his mind playing tricks on him, but John knew better. Other crystals made flat, warbling tones when he touched them, nothing like the rich, beautiful music that issued from his mother’s stone.

Her crystal was special. It connected her to him from wherever she was. John didn’t know what force compelled her to leave him, but he was sure the crystal was her way of staying in his life. It was a lifeline between them, an ethereal thread that bound them together.

It might also be the key to finding her.

John didn’t remember when he first had the thought, but from that moment on, he spent every waking moment studying the crystals. Everything from airship lift engines to ice makers to flux pistols used them. They were the basis for most machinery.

When Sir Francis Drake set out to sink the Mayan armada, his steamer happened upon the ruins of Atlantis in the waters of the Caribbean. His discovery of Lantian crystals, and their scientific properties, propelled the Britannic Empire into ruling most of the world. At least until the Colonial Alliance rebelled against them.

John knew almost everything there was to know about Lantian crystals. He quickly outstripped the knowledge of the sisters of Saint Archimedes. That brought him to the attention of Doctor Peter Shultz, official Thurger of Sprocketville. Without family to sponsor them to apprenticeships, most of the boys who grew up in the orphan asylum ended up working in the coal mine. Doctor Shultz spent one hour talking to John and chose him for an apprentice before the day was done.

Doctor Shultz.

The thought brought John’s wandering mind back to the present. Doctor Shultz had gone to replace a pulse crystal in the clock-tower in Ironton, a small mining and ranching community fifty miles up the rail. John had taken advantage of his master’s absence to try his experiment. Doctor Shultz might not mind John trying to kill himself, but he’d be angry if any of the equipment were seriously damaged. The handler box had been brought in a few days ago to have a broken crystal repaired. John had no idea what his experiment might have done to it.

He rolled off his back and pushed himself up on still-trembling arms. The handler box sat on the floor a few feet away, an unremarkable cube of metal about three feet square. The side panel stood open, revealing the crystal machine within. The brass crown lay a few feet away, still attached to the box by its length of cable.

He tried to take a step and nearly fell as the lab seemed to lurch beneath his feet.

“Take it easy, John,” he told himself, grasping the side of the handler box for support.

Moving slowly, he leaned down and picked up the crown. It was a simple hoop of brass, designed to connect the handler’s mind with the Tommys. The copper plates were pitted and burned. One of them still had a hunk of John’s sand-colored hair clinging to it.

Reflexively, he touched his head and winced. The flesh on his temples had burned where the crown touched him.

Lucky.

Another few seconds and burns would have been the least of his worries. Setting the crown aside, John turned his attention to the handler box. His mother’s crystal sat at the center of the array. Crystal machines came in many varieties from simple First Order devices, using one or two static crystals, all the way up to Third Order machines where dozens of crystals moved in and around each other, multiplying their harmonies together. Normally the crystals were clear, with lattice patterns cascading inside them like tiny spider webs. As John surveyed the Handler Box, several of its crystals were dull and black with a greasy soot clinging to their polished surfaces.

Hands trembling, John reached out and touched his mother’s crystal. As if on cue, the familiar stone’s music burst into his mind, lifting his spirits instantly. It felt like somewhere his mother knew of this failure and comforted him. Somewhere she was out there, aware of him and caring for him. He closed his fingers around the crystal and pulled it free from the socket, scrubbing the soot from it with his thumb.

The experiment should have worked. But it hadn’t.

A ray of red evening sunlight struck the crystal and he winced as it flashed with reflected light.

Something was still wrong.

He’d started his experiment before noon. It wasn’t possible that evening could have come so quickly. He hadn’t passed out, he knew that, and it had only been a few minutes since he tore off the crown and shut down the experiment.

Determined to see the sun for himself, John moved stiffly across the room. His muscles ached from the strain of tensing under the influence of the current. He paused at the end of the crystal growing bench, dropping his mother’s crystal into a jar of cleaning solution before moving on.

Unlike most of the buildings in Sprocketville, Doctor Shultz’ lab was built primarily of stone, quarried from a mine in faraway Denver. It was round, with a twenty-foot ceiling and a ring of windows just below the roof. The door was sturdy oak with iron bolts to prevent unwanted guests. It was the kind of lab where a person could shut out the world and work.

When John pulled open the heavy door, the world came rushing back in.

The sun hung low in the west, a sullen shade of orange that stained the sky red. Dull clouds of black smoke hung against the painted sky, rising up from around the city and drifting away on a lazy wind. Confused noises rushed into John’s ears, the sounds of horses, wagons, alarm bells, and running men.