Gears: The Conspiracy - Chapter I, part I

[Check my page for part II]

 

The Wolfgang ploughed through the bitingly cold waters of Dorsen Bay. Wesley Zeddock clasped the helm of the 90-foot steam-driven ironclad in thickly-calloused hands as he stared blankly across the bay through the clouded glass of his slightly corroded brass goggles. His face, which was lashed by years of cold salt wind, covered in creases and easily the envy of every tanner in the city of Clampett (and indeed all of Clampett Prefecture), was adorned by a formerly jet-black beard that was now streaked through with grey and white. A cigarette hung lazily out of the right side of his mouth, occasionally dropping flecks of ash onto the shoulder of a tattered black wool pea coat.

Not at all the sort of person one would invite to anything involving hors d’oeuvres or multiple kinds of fork.

Of course, being a good dinner guest was not the reason why people liked Wesley. They liked him because he could ferry them anywhere from his self-proclaimed “base of operations” (i.e. Pier No. 5 at Clampett’s Kildare Docks) without asking any questions. He would also let them carry anything aboard the Wolfgang as long as they could fit it inside or fasten it to the deck.

“Pay the fare and I’ll get you there!” was his unceasing motto.

Zeddock had also gained a reputation as being one of the most tight-lipped men alive: as long as he got enough money to pay for the necessities (which for him consisted of coal for the Wolfgang, liquor, bread, unnaturally tough meat and the occasional lime), he would tell no-one anything of his passengers’ reasons for needing a covert means of sea travel. Nor indeed would he ask about such reasons: he was more likely than not to find them out for himself at some point, and if he didn’t, that was alright too.

Naturally, these lax business practises would bring Wesley into contact with some of Clampett’s more… colourful residents. He had taken to wearing a Colt revolver around his waist as a little bit of insurance for his passengers as well as himself. Insurance which he had needed to take advantage of on more than one occasion.

“I’ll hafta write a book about all this someday. Hafta change a lotta names, though.” he would muse and then inevitably run into a reason not to start.

These same secretive characteristics, however, could not be applied Joseph, the twenty-three-year-old workman-turned-engine tender who worked aboard the Wolfgang alongside Wesley. Being young and full of spirit, Joseph was naïve and wont to discuss absolutely anything at length. Wesley had seen Joseph performing various odd jobs on the docks, mostly loading and unloading cargo, and was familiar with his verbose habits. He was convinced that Joseph could at best be an extreme annoyance and at worst pose a major security risk to anyone who had a secret to keep. But he needed someone with a strong back to shovel coal for an admittedly low wage (he and his previous tender had a difference of opinion that had to be… addressed) and Joseph was more than eager to take the opportunity to work with the wizened sailor who was at the centre of a number of exaggerated and over-romanticised stories abound on the docks.

“At least he’s got the sense to keep himself away from my clients. Can’t wag his tongue if he’s got nothing to wag it about.” Wesley thought to himself. He was fairly certain that a fear of becoming involved in something more complicated than coal shovelling played a major role in Joseph’s motivation to make himself scarce during any business transactions.

His passenger today was a man who had called himself John Marsden. Mr. Marsden was a very odd man: he was well-dressed in a newish-looking trench coat, sharply creased cotton dress pants, hard-soled patent leather shoes of such high shine that they would blind anyone who looked at them for too long, and a pair of expensive-looking tinted circular glasses. His only cargo was an alligator skin briefcase. He had even readily handed over the twenty dollar fare (almost two weeks average wages, don’t you know). He was nothing at all like Wesley’s usual clients.

Wesley pondered the nature of the man’s work. A rich crime boss, perhaps? A crooked businessman? A crooked politician? A crooked businessman who was a politician? Come to think of it, was there really a difference between any of them?

“Damned if I know. But if he were that big of a deal, shouldn’t I have heard of him before now? Or at least seen a picture? Just who is this guy? Aw, hell. It’s none of my business anyhow.”

Marsden’s request had been simple enough: across the bay to the Janus River (the dredging of the river to accommodate larger ships had opened up an unexpected new source of income for Wesley), then up the river a few miles to the border of Clampett and Lakefield Prefectures. He was to be dropped at the soonest port. Wesley was to wait until Marsden returned to the pier, at which point they would depart for Clampett. After four days at the docks, they were on the final leg of that journey now.

Marsden struck Wesley as a nervous man: he glanced about the docks the entire time they were making arrangements as if he were expecting police or goons to accost him the moment he started speaking. In all fairness to Mr. Marsden, however, there were plenty of both in Clampett. A few were even the same people. Wesley swore that he saw Marsden’s hand trembling a little as he handed over his cash.

For almost the entirety of his time aboard the Wolfgang, Marsden kept himself sealed inside his cabin. Whenever Wesley passed the door of this cabin, all he would ever hear (by complete chance, of course) was the rustling of papers and the tell-tale scritching of a fountain pen.

“I wonder if his writing’s as pretty as his rags.”

Wesley could only recall actually seeing Marsden four times over the four-day trip: making his arrangements and boarding at Kildare Docks, disembarking at the port in Lakefield, re-boarding, and once more when asking him to use the on-board radio-telegraph to send a message to “a friend back in Clampett”.

Closing the throttle and sidling up alongside an unoccupied section of Pier No. 5, Wesley briefly shifted his gaze to the aeroplanes flying overhead, powered by those new, incessantly loud and unreasonably expensive gasoline engines. Going below decks, he rapped on Marsden’s cabin door.

“Mr. Marsden? We’re back at Kildare.”

He heard something that sounded like a man jumping out of his chair in surprise.

“Uh, yes, Mr. Zeddock sir.” came the nervous voice from the other side of the door. “I’ll be up in a bit. Just, uh, trying to get some of these papers together.”

Wesley shook his head in bewildered amusement and returned topside. He tied his ship to the mooring and stepped onto the pier with Marsden’s money in his pocket.

“Where’re ya off to, sir?” he heard Joseph call from behind him.

The boy must’ve come up for some air. No surprise either: Wesley had worked as a tender for one of those big liners when he was even younger than Joseph. He had been a smoker for forty-three of his fifty-six years on Earth and none of it compared to what he endured in the engine rooms of that soot-ridden hulk.

“Jus’ up the pier to Sammy’s for a nip. I’ll be back in a shake.”

Both he and Joseph knew, however, that when he went up to the head of the pier to Samuel’s Tavern, it was for far more than a “nip” and it would take him far longer than a “shake” to get back.

Wesley had walked less than half the distance between his ship and the tavern when an eardrum-rupturing roar overtook him and an orange glow illuminated the docks.

*    *    *

The streets surrounding Kildare Docks were filled with a wide assortment of rough people: sailors, workmen, and slightly less than reputable merchants. All were dressed in shabby clothes. Many possessed thick facial hair. Most were in varying states of inebriation.

Alexei Mirashenkov fit into none of these categories: he was a journalist from The Clampett Circulation dressed in the single well-worn suit that his salary allowed him to afford and easily the most sober individual on the block, if not the entirety of the shipping district. He was resting his wiry six-foot seven-inch tall form against a lamppost on the corner of Makinak Street and Port View Street, his eyes staring tiredly out of slightly sunken sockets in his hollow, clean-shaven face.

Alexei had arrived there earlier that day at the request of his colleague, John Marsden. Marsden had sent him a telegram urgently requesting that Alexei wait for him at the docks, for he was returning from his trip with “information of the utmost importance”. He’d said something about how meeting on the street would help him blend in with the crowd.

Alexei liked John in spite of his eccentricities. John was, after all, the man who had helped him secure a job at the Circulation after he fled from Russia (as it turns out, you can’t publish just anything about the Tsar’s brother without government mooks trashing your apartment and office) and vastly improve his tenuous grasp on the English language (a dreadful jumble of a tongue if there ever was one).

Even so, Alexei had always found reason to worry about John: he’d struck Alexei as a bit strange from the beginning; he would poring over papers, photographs and self-drawn charts and then suddenly cover them or sweep them off his desk whenever someone walked behind him. He would vanish without a word for days on end and then return to work as if nothing had ever happened, refusing to explain where he had been. Whenever Alexei inquired about his work, John would just say he was “into something big” that would “shake this country off its foundations”.

Alexei had come to two possible conclusions: one; Marsden was mentally unstable and would have to report or be reported for treatment at the Clampett Bureau of Mental Health (which was, if the rumours were true, a nightmarish experience in itself) or two; he was involved in something legitimately dangerous. Neither prospect made Alexei particularly confident in John’s safety and John’s insistence on this clandestine meeting did not help his worries.

John had, in his telegram, told Alexei to be on the lookout for a ship called the Wolfgang. Alexei could only imagine why John had decided to travel aboard that thing. Almost everyone in Clampett and absolutely everyone in the Kildare area knew of the Wolfgang and Captain Zeddock, including the police, who were all too eager to catch him in the act of ferrying some felon in or out of Dorsen Bay. He could only chalk up Zeddock’s failure to be arrested to bribery, the existence an inside man or pure ignorance on the part of the police. He would say that Zeddock’s purportedly expert concealment of evidence played a role, but lack of evidence never seemed to hamper police action on any other occasion.

Alexei waited, and waited and then waited some more. Finally, a smoke-belching ironclad with the word Wolfgang written on the side in fading yellow paint and a rumpled sailor at the helm, presumably Zeddock, glided across the bay and into port, docking at Pier No. 5. Zeddock briefly descended out of view before resurfacing, tying a rope to the dock mooring, disembarking and making a beeline for the tavern not far from where Alexei was standing.

“Is there anyone around here that isn’t a stinking drunk?” pondered Alexei.

A bright flash, a sudden blast of heat and the sound of an explosion rudely snapped Alexei out of his musing. Disoriented and shielding his eyes from the heat, Alexei stumbled back around the street corner, pressing himself against the right side of the nearest building. Removing his hand from his eyes, Alexei cautiously looked around the corner to see smoke and flames rising from what used to be the Wolfgang.

*    *    *

The Clampett half of the Janus River routinely ran a rainbow of colours that would be washed out and diluted by Dorsen Bay. The source of these colours was Kleineburg Textiles, a sprawling mill which piped unused dyes directly into the river and clouds of coal smoke into the air. The mill was surrounded by shacks constructed of a patchwork of boards, panelling and tar paper scrounged up from any number of places. The dirty, poorly-clothed people that dwelt within were sustained only by the fly-by-night merchants selling somewhat questionable goods to the workers, turning their desperation into a profit, not unlike Kleineburg itself. These people would rise daily at 3:00AM and walk past the towering statue of Karl Hahnemann Kleineburg to work on the steam-filled factory floor. The lucky ones minded the life-endangering steam-powered gins, looms, spoilers and dyeing apparatus. The rest shovelled coal into Kleineburg’s hellish furnaces, heating the enormous vats of water that provided steam for the whole mill.

Alice did not arrive at work today. The word around the plant was that her hand had been crushed between two gears of one of the looms. Sarah Marsden had gotten used to such incidents to the point that she found it almost humorous when the touring Unionists would balk at the clamorous, steam-choked hellhole that was Kleineburg Textiles, Clampett Branch. She looked over at her eleven-year-old son, Zacharias, tending the spooling machine.

She had kept the Marsden name and passed it on to her son in an attempt to suppress the memory of his odious father, who had developed a severe addiction to morphine and cocaine. He would spend his days languishing in the symptoms of withdrawal and his nights gallivanting about the city so high that he was almost perceptively levitating off the cobbled streets, returning to their cramped midcity apartment later and later each night in ever deepening states of intoxication and issuing slurred demands for either money or sex. It was only a matter of time before he failed to return entirely. Sarah hardly even noticed when it happened and she hadn’t seen him since. He could be rotting in a Chinese opium house for all she cared, supposing the Brits would even let him in.

Sarah had been working at Kleineburg for the past fourteen years. When Zacharias’ father vanished from their lives, they were already living in abject poverty: he took her earnings for himself in order to fund his habits. When she didn’t give her earnings willingly, he would beat her, sometimes with his belt and sometimes with his bare hands, until she did. He would then leave for another night of debauchery as if nothing had taken place. She had to resort to stealing on more than one occasion to feed Zacharias.

As soon as he turned eight, Sarah brought Zacharias to Kleineburg. As much as Sarah hated everything about the Kleinberg machine, she was continually aware of the fact that Zacharias had no future beyond this factory. The only valid way out of the bleak factory district was through school, and the politicians had seen to it that schools were either too expensive or required too many prerequisites for the poor of to gain access. Her brother, John, was convinced that this was part of a vaster plot to subjugate the population.

“They need workers in their factories.” he would say, “So they insinuated themselves into the poor community to take advantage of its needs and wants and then they get in the pockets of politicians and manipulate them to their favour.”

”He’d better keep that to himself.” thought Sarah. “Wouldn’t want him to lose his cushy job if his bosses got wind of his ravings.”

John had, in fact, offered to pay for Zacharias’ education. She shouted him out of the apartment, accusing him of walking there with his fresh clothes and clean face to flaunt his successful career. She knew in her heart that it wasn’t true and felt a deep sense of regret for her actions, but she could not surmount the crumbling wall of her pride and bring herself to apologise.

She did not hear the explosion that killed her brother, nor could she see its smoke trickling into the sky as Johann Lofgren did through his office window.