Free Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection by Michael Coorlim

you took the worst of it."
    The Captain looked up at me from the pallet he lay upon. "Get that man to sick-bay."
     
    ***
     
    I must have lost a great deal of blood, for my next remembrance is waking up some time later, bandaged and medicated. The drugs they'd given me were halfway effective – they dulled my senses, but didn't seem to moderate the painful throbbing I felt every place I'd been struck. A cloth bandage covered one of my eyes, and my left wrist was in a sling.
    "James! You're not dead. Splendid." Bartleby concealed his relief well.
    I cocked my head. "The tilt's worsened."
    "We've noticed. Listen, they tossed Johnson's room and found a bloodied kerchief and a set of ship's keys. They're fingering him for the murder, but though Ives has copped to the mutiny he maintains that he had no idea about the theft."
    "Do you believe him?"
    "Yes. I doubt he'd have instigated a mutiny if he knew what was really going on. Oh, and the RAF caught the Grande's distress beacon, and they've sent a ship to help with the evacuation."
    "Was Johnson the culprit, then?"
    Bartleby was silent, looking down at the knuckles of his hands as they gripped the footboard of my sickbed. He was quiet for a moment, before looking up at me, his jaw set grim.
    "No. It wasn't Johnson. It's all too just so, too tidy. He wouldn't have had the access an needed to get to the tools, and he wouldn't have stuck around long enough to risk a mutiny if he had the stabilizer. He wouldn't have dumped the laundry, and he wouldn't have left a bloody kerchief in his room. It most certainly wasn't Johnson." Bartleby took a sip of the glass of water at my bedside. "They haven't found the stabilizer, and while they're assuming Johnson hid it or had some confederate, the killer simply had to have been someone else."
    "Who?"
    "I don't know. An officer, likely. Dewit, or Miller or maybe even Nussbaum. Unless we catch the culprit with the stabilizer in-hand, there's no way to be sure."
    "Blast." I was disappointed and sore. Despite my best intentions I'd taken to this detective lark as a matter of sport, and didn't like the idea of losing a case. Or losing London, for that matter.
    "The Metropolitan police are waiting on the ground to search everyone as they are evacuated, in case Johnson had a confederate. We'll catch the culprit." Bartleby likewise sounded ill at ease to not be the one to solve the problem.
    "Catch him? We're dead, Bartleby. That's it. They'll never evacuate the ship in time, nor clear out wherever we happen to crash in London."
    "The ship's not listing that severely. The RAF plan to evacuate us, and then nudge the Rio Grande out to sea."
    "It's not going to matter." I evaluated the ship's tilt. "Listen, the makeshift stabilizer that I crafted isn't going to hold much longer. When it goes, the ship is going to flip, capsize, and crash. We've got an hour at best, and even with the RAF's high altitude craft it'll take twice that to evacuate everyone."
    "Bloody hell."
    "Indeed." There were worse ways to die, I supposed, though I'd always assumed that it would be an accident in my lab rather than riding a massive bomb down to eradicate the capital of an empire. I wasn't much into geopolitics.
    "I'll do my best to get us away with the first set of refugees." Bartleby said. "Do keep quiet about your failure to save us with your makeshift replacement parts."
    "Blaming everyone's doom on me, as per the usual," I said.
    My partner stifled a grin. "Does come up a bit often, doesn't it?"
    "Hardly warranted this time." I smiled back. Bartleby's humor always had a tinge of the gallows to it, but his chatter told me that he held some sort of hope. For what, I couldn't imagine, but I've learned to trust the man. God save me. He had a plan, perhaps, to ensure our survival at the least, and to catch the culprit at the most. Frankly I'd be satisfied with either outcome.
     
    ***
     
    "How's the wrist?"
    "Hurts." I blamed the cramped conditions. My wrist was pinned up