At the airfield, I checked my electronics into a security deposit box. I’d been concerned they were going to give me grief about the Glock. It was a polymer framed autoloader, after all, and I wasn’t sure if that would get it on the forbidden technologies list. But the customs agent handed it back to me without comment after he’d finished rifling through my bags.
“Enjoy your stay, miss,” he said, smiling politely. Maybe it was the Steamies’ weird accent — the bastard child of a Central Pennsylvanian dialect wrapped in a Victorian grammar obsession — but the way he said miss made it sound like he was dubious I’d actually qualify.
There was a small crowd of travelers moving through customs, mostly returning Steamies. Some of the men had worn more traditional western suits, as you might see on the streets of New York. Even so, the occasional pocket watch, handlebar mustache, or dueling scar betrayed their citizenship. The rest, however, hadn’t even bothered trying to mask their nationality while overseas. These men wore dark, three piece suits and derby hats, a look which, though slightly updated with deep blue or crimson shirts and gold cravats, had probably last been fashionable in America when Jack the Ripper was making a name for himself.
The women wore high-collared blouses and ankle-length skirts. Yet what could have been a stern style was mitigated by bright violets, yellows, and emeralds. Their hair, too, kept them from looking like daguerreotypes of Emily Dickinson. They wore it long, kept in place by jeweled hairbands. In addition to their bags, they collected their pets from the crates where they’d been stowed during the flight. Trained raccoons had first been used here to remove gear obstructions from heavy machinery, and had eventually been domesticated.
Making my way through stares and whispers from women who had raccoons peeking out from their purses, I eventually made it through customs. A tall man in a dark suit was waiting for me.
He was maybe 6’4”, with eyes as blue as frozen seawater. I figured he was in his late thirties — about 10 years my senior — but the mustache made him look older. His hands were hitched at his belt, on which hanged a holstered revolver, and sheathed dagger.
“Mackenzie Hoff, Federal Bureau of Investigations, I presume,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said brusquely, annoyed by the looks I’d been getting. Didn’t these people know it was wrong to judge others? To make them uncomfortable?
“Hiram Speer, Sensitive Inquiries Office, Boothcross branch,” the tall man announced. He held up his left hand to show me a ring inlaid with a red jewel and I saw that his knuckles were misshapen and swollen, as if repeatedly broken. It made me think he must have been a boxer.
It occurred to me that I should probably show him ID. “Please, don’t bother showing me your badge,” he said as I reached inside my jacket pocket. “One doesn’t have to be an Arthur Conan Doyle protagonist to recognize you as an American federal agent.”
“How so?” I asked, prepared to be flattered.
“The harsh coarseness of your pantsuit combined with an overly aggressive attitude, as if you’re an actress in a man’s role playing your part more for stereotype than for nuance. Also, I received your description over the telewrite, and knew you were a redhead.”
I was stunned by his rudeness, but all that came out was: “I’m strawberry blonde.”
“Of course you are,” he said evenly. “Shall we?” He turned on his heel and walked away without asking if he could help me with my bag. Back home I wouldn’t really have expected an offer. But it surprised me that a Steamie wouldn’t do so. The implication seemed to be that I wasn’t worthy of such consideration.
I’d imagined the streets would have been filled with carriages and hansoms, and while there were some of those, Speer showed me to his car. At least “car” was as good a word as any. Less of a mouthful than “ornate, rolling furnace.” I rode shotgun as Speer released some levers. The car whistled like a locomotive, and we chugged into traffic heading for downtown Boothcross.
“I received the primer regarding your errant terrorist,” Speer said. “We haven’t found Mr. Mohammad Talib as yet, unfortunately. But I had some of our men target likely information founts.”
“Have you increased security around here?” I asked. “Talib’s cell blew up three movie theaters before fleeing the States. He’s more than capable of doing the same thing to one of your opera houses, model zeppelin clubs, or whatever else you people have around here.”
“Talib was using electronic detonators — mighty difficult to requisition on Steam Pointe,” Speer replied.
“Our intel says he got here by stowing away on a cargo ship carrying helium. Would have been easy to smuggle some detonators too, huh?”
“Yes, I’m aware of how easily he escaped you all. But I expect he’ll be running to ground rather than leisurely seeding bombs around town. We have posters up. Given how visibly he stands out from most Pointers, he’d be a fool to show himself. Most of our citizens go around armed, after all.”
On the sidewalks, men walked confidently in their fine suits and canes, ladies in their elaborate dresses and gloves. However colorful their clothing, the people themselves were decidedly monochromatic.
“I guess he would stand out here,” I agreed. “A grain of brown rice in a sea of salt.”
“Best watch it. By that metaphor, yours is a rather salty complexion, too. Besides, if you have a grain of brown rice in a container of salt, or vice versa, then by definition you have an impurity. Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned if that impurity were removed?”
“The natural world is full of blending. It makes things better, stronger. Combine iron and carbon, you get steel.”
“Doesn’t that depend on your components?” Speer asked. “Gold, for instance, doesn’t react with most metals. When it is formed into an alloy, the more base metal that is included, the less valuable the whole. Other elements are quite dangerous when brought together. Take hydrogen and chlorine, combine with water, and you have hydrochloric acid. Carbon, hydrogen, chlorine, and sulfur can form mustard gas. Iron oxide and aluminum give you thermite. What kind of reaction do people like Mohammad Talib make when introduced to a civilized society?”
I ignored the disgusting racial jab. “With that kind of knowledge about chemistry, you’d be on a terrorist watch list back home.”
“Land of the Free, indeed,” Speer said with a smirk. “Look around you. Engineering and Chemistry are our gods, and Pointe Island is their temple. I’d say as between hard sciences, and Female-African-Sodomite Studies or whatever it is American universities teach these days, we made the correct choice.”
We passed the rest of the drive in silence. Given our countries’ bad blood, maybe it was inevitable we’d be at one another’s throats.
Steam Pointe’s seed had been the chemists, architects, mechanics, and engineers that Lincoln secretly turned loose on the South during the Civil War. The Experimental Munitions Regiment. Warrior scientists, they were good at killing Confederates. Horrifyingly so, as it turned out.
They offered a glimpse of 20th century warfare, and mid-19th century America recoiled.
Before Congress could have them hanged, the officers and enlisted men of the experimental unit collected what family they could and fled the country they’d fought for. They had settled here, making a nation in their own image. Isolated on this island, their descendants — along with what few immigrants they thought worthy — remained frozen in time, socially and morally Victorian, even as the industrial sciences they practiced continued evolving and mutating, like bacteria in a Petri dish. The whole thing was like a vast uncontrolled experiment in parallel social development. Men like Hiram Speer were one of that experiment’s results.