The Guild Conspiracy (4 page)

“Too bad you can't build a flying mech.”

“Not enough air clearance in the recreation hall.”

Petra laughed and turned back to Rupert's notes. The rest of the mech's systems were mostly sound, with a few mistakes buried here and there. Nothing to cause the machine to malfunction outright, but enough to make it operate at suboptimal efficiency. She paused. That gave her an idea. A possible way to delay Julian's war. But the war machine would have to wait.

She looked over the designs more closely. With a few adjustments to the engine chambers and connecting gear trains, rerouting many of the linkage paths to provide optimal power distribution, she could easily bring it to full capacity. Calligaris's combustion-­enginery lecture wasn't a
total
waste, after all.

She marked a few pages of draft notes for further study and then glanced up from the smudged sketches. “Did you bring the tools I asked for?”

Rupert nodded, dropping his bag on the table with a clatter of metal. Riffling through the main compartment, he dragged out a collection of welding supplies—­a portable blowlamp, multiple spanners, two kinds of pliers, a pair of bolt cutters, several clamps, and a manual hand drill.

Petra brushed her fingers across the smooth handle of an adjustable spanner and picked it up, the solid metal weight familiar to her hand. It was like coming back to a place she had almost forgotten, reminding her of days spent turning bolts and fitting linkages in a brightly lit office, Emmerich at her side and not a care in the world beyond the grease under her nails and the touch of metal beneath her fingers. She had missed it.

“Let's get started.”

They spent the next ­couple of hours deconstructing what was left of Rupert's mech, inspecting each piece of the machine for damage before sorting the parts into what could be reused and what couldn't. Petra kept a detailed inventory, recording the measurements and dimensions of each piece before moving on to what was in the crates. When they had finished with that, she surveyed the list of parts, flipping through Rupert's notes as she considered possible designs for the repaired mech. After watching the mech battle with Selby, she knew she needed a machine that was both fast and destructive, but also hardy enough to withstand a brutal amount of damage.

There were several options for construction depending on how she wanted to focus her mech's functions—­speed over hardiness, brute strength instead of agility, or resilience in sacrifice of an aggressive offense. Ideally, the machine would accomplish all of those things, but with a limited number of parts and the short amount of time before the first fight, she had to pick her battles.

Of course, there was nothing in the rules that said she couldn't alter her machine between fights. That ought to keep the other engineers on their toes.

She drummed her fingers against her knee, chewing her lip as she considered the baseline construction of the new mech. Knowing Selby, he would make sure to pit her against the most difficult opponent first, get her out of the tournament as quickly as possible. Likely someone with a strong offense, a mech heavy on weapons, quick and dangerous.

She glanced at Rupert. “You said anything goes once we're in the ring, right? Everything but projectiles.”

He nodded. “That's right.”

“What have you seen so far?” she asked. “I know you said Darrow had a supercharged blowlamp, but what else am I up against?”

Rupert seemed to think about it for a minute. “Well . . . Darrow's sure to equip his mech with as many rules-­legal weapons as he can squeeze into it, so I would expect a barrage of assault weapons from him. You saw Selby's mech—­sturdy build, relied on precision attacks, getting behind his opponent's defenses and wrecking them from the inside. Fletcher—­the engineer Selby beat in that last round—­he relied on brute force, modeled his mech after the failed automaton project. It packed a hell of a punch. Beat all of his opponents to a pulp until Selby.”

“What else?”

“Let's see . . . Lambert's had hacksaws for arms; Salamanca tried some kind of protracted saber, but Greer damaged it when he rammed the thing. Most of the engineers went for sheer power over specialized weapons—­though I don't expect many of them to use the same strategy again.”

Petra chewed on the end of her pencil, thinking through defensive measures. Without knowing her opponents' weapon choices, her best strategy was to equip her mech to survive anything—­double-­plated, reinforced frame, inner workings well protected. It would be slow, and she would need to maximize the engine efficiency just to get the mech in motion, but her first priority was survivability. She'd worry about the rest later.

But that still left the matter of an offense.

The goal of the fights was to incapacitate the other mech as quickly as possible—­disabling movement, gutting systems, or deactivating its power source. With a heavier machine, her strength was in her resilience, but she wasn't really winning if all she did was outlast her opponent.

She scowled at the dismantled mech, examining her half-­sketched designs for potential weapons, anything to add to the mech without jeopardizing the integrity of its defenses. The mech had two bulky arms she could fit with weapons, something to sabotage her opponent's systems quickly and efficiently. A pneumatic fist, perhaps? She could overcome her mech's lack of speed with a pressure-­charged punch. That could work; though she would need to calculate the recharge time between each punch. Perhaps one at the end of each arm?

She pulled her drafting paper into her lap and scribbled a few notes, writing down a few other ideas—­electrified prongs, protractible saw-­blades, Darrow's supercharged blowlamp. As much as she hated to take inspiration from her competition, she had no qualms against playing dirty, not when she had a score to settle with the other students.

Rupert leaned close and looked over her shoulder as she sketched. He let out a low whistle. “Selby is going to regret letting you fight.”

Petra set the designs on the desk. “What do you think?” she asked, pointing to the list of potential weapons. “Could we put this together?”

“If anyone could, you can,” he said with a grin.

“Then let's see what we can do.”

By the end of the night, she had a rough draft sketched out for the new design—­mostly true to Rupert's original design, with a few improvements and adjustments of her own. There were a few extra supplies she needed before she would be able to complete construction of some of the more complicated weaponry she had devised, but all things considered, she could build a workable, battle-­ready mech in time for the first fight, hopefully one sturdy enough to survive first contact with the enemy. It would be difficult, but with Rupert's help, she was confident they could get it done.

Once Rupert left the office for the evening, Petra remained behind, returning her attention to the war machine. She pulled her chair up to the desk and grabbed a fresh stack of drafting paper, her mind whirring with ideas now that she had a plan. She had been approaching the war machine all wrong, trying to create the best possible machine for the job, when what she really needed to do was create a machine with the greatest potential for error and most likely to cause delays.

She had gotten the idea from the small errors riddled throughout Rupert's original mech design. If enough errors found their way into the war machine, she could delay the approval of the schematics and ultimately, the production of the prototype. By inserting simple malfunctions, so infinitesimally small that they could be considered honest mistakes, perhaps she might buy herself the time she needed to find a way to end Julian's schemes once and for all.

If
she could get the faulty design past the Guild council.

That was her first hurdle, but if she could earn their approval—­mistakes intact—­once the production team began construction of the prototype, those small mistakes would lead to delays, necessitating parts reorders, reconstruction of faulty systems, further trials and tests to confirm the mistakes were corrected. She could delay the completion of the prototype almost indefinitely.

Without a war machine, Julian could not have his war.

She put pencil to paper and sketched out a new design, adopting the four-­legged construction with the swiveling control cabin. The more systems involved, the more parts needed, the more connective transmissions and gear arrays embroiled in the design, the higher the likelihood of error and number of delays. No automatic systems. All manual control. A combustion engine to power the beast, a combination of hydraulic and pneumatic power in the legs, mechanical input controls, electric gauges, and telegraphic readouts.

But she couldn't rely on her mistakes alone. Mistakes could be fixed. She needed a contingency plan, something to prevent the prototype from reaching completion, even after all the other mistakes had been found and corrected.

She drummed her fingers against the desk.

The sabotage would have to be expertly hidden, with no possible chance of anyone finding it before the Guild finished the prototype . . . something to cause the prototype to fail, but not until after the construction phase, lest her sabotage be discovered too soon. And she would have to find a way to integrate the sabotaging device into every system within the war machine, triggered only when the finished prototype was activated. Something that would lead to complete and utter failure. Movement, weapons, gauges—­everything. But how?

She leaned back in her chair and tapped the end of her pencil against her bottom lip, staring at the sketches in front of her.

A jamming device.

Just as Rupert's mech had failed to launch the hidden blade from its arm, she could fashion a clockwork mechanism to sabotage the war machine from within. The right assemblage of gears and springs, designed to incapacitate the machine at the base level . . . it would require a staggeringly complex design in order to go unnoticed, but she was up to the task.

She had to stop this war. One way or another.

 

CHAPTER 4

T
he next week passed too quickly. Petra scrambled to finish her war machine design before her scheduled proposal, spending every moment of her spare time in her hidden office drafting the complicated schematics, her production notes vague and equations convoluted, with slight enough error that her intentional mistakes might go unnoticed—­or so she hoped.

And then there was her sabotage.

After several nights of sketching out complex designs for disabling the prototype, she settled on a mechanism that tied into the regulator, a device that measured the synchronicity of the connected machineries and adjusted power distribution as needed. The mechanism could be disabled, if necessary, with the removal of a single axle plate and attached gear system, but to do so would render system inert. Intact, the device would trigger the sabotaging clockwork mechanism once all primary systems were activated, initiating a slow, systematic malfunction that would disable the entire machine within a matter of minutes. It was a complicated bit of clockwork design, a network of tension springs and ratchet wheels designed to activate only when all systems were operating in unison, but she was confident it would work.

Now the day of her proposal meeting, Petra stood once more before the council chamber doors, her designs clutched tightly to her chest. She exhaled a shaky breath, her nerves betraying her. If Julian suspected her treachery, if anyone discovered the sabotaging mechanism, she had no fallback plan, no genius excuse to escape Julian's threat.

Everything hinged on their ignorance of her true intent.

And if she failed, it would be the end of her.

“Miss Wade?” said a smooth voice. “They are ready for you.”

Petra glanced up from her silent vigil, expecting to see the usual thin-­lipped clerk waiting for her in the doorway. Instead, she spotted the bright red uniform of a Royal Forces officer, the same junior officer who had been at her last meeting. He regarded her expectantly, but she only nodded wordlessly in reply, her voice stuck somewhere in the pit of her throat.

He stepped aside and gestured through the door. “After you.”

Swallowing thickly, she held the war machine schematics close to her chest and stared into the dark recesses of the council chambers, her heartbeat quickening. She could do this. Julian
needed
this war machine. All she had to do was convince the council to accept it, that it was the war machine they needed, and everything would be fine.

With a deep, steadying breath, she left her doubts behind and strode into the council chambers.

The men's conversation ceased when she entered, and she tried not to drown in the silence. All eyes fixed on her as she walked across the hard floor, her shoes clicking loudly with each slow step. Officer Cartwright led her to the center of the room and nodded politely in farewell before joining the other red uniforms to the side of the bench.

Vice-­Chancellor Lyndon acknowledged her with a nod. “Miss Wade, if you would give your designs to the clerk, we will start the official proceedings.”

The entire council was in attendance, glaring down at her from their high seats, and at least a half-­dozen soldiers stood to the side of the bench. Ignoring the weight of their unrelenting gazes, she opened her folder of project notes and handed the necessary papers to the clerk, who distributed the designs to the council members and attending officers of rank. She waited as they flipped through her designs, watching their reactions change from habitual indifference to mild surprise. Some nodded appreciatively; others remained skeptical.

Lyndon peered intently over the designs, adjusting his glasses as he read her carefully worded notes, his face steadily declining into a mask of disappointment. One of the council engineers threw the pages down in disgust, and a tiny seed of shame rose up in Petra's throat, warming her cheeks. He was one of the only men on the council still staunchly against the war. If only she could tell him the truth, assure him that she would give almost anything to not be here right now presenting a war machine to the council. But she had run out of options. She had been offered no other choice.

Only Julian seemed unsurprised by the proposal, a satisfied smirk plastered on his face. The war machine he so desperately wanted was finally in his grasp. All he needed now was the council's endorsement, and he would be one step closer to securing his war.

“Miss Wade,” said Lyndon, his gravelly voice low and quiet. “If you would please explain your project to the council.”

Petra cleared her throat and stood a little straighter, determined to succeed where she had failed so many times before. She could do this, she reminded herself. This meeting was no different than her first five proposals to the Guild. She only had to convince them to accept the project and distract them from discovering her sabotage. No problem.

“Thank you, Vice-­Chancellor,” she said, her voice quaking slightly as she turned to the first page of her project proposal, her finished war machine design neatly sketched and labeled. She exhaled a trembling breath, trying not to think of what dire consequences awaited her should she fail.

Another deep breath.
Here goes nothing.

“For the Guild's consideration, I wish to propose a design for a piece of technology compatible with the Guild's current contract with Her Imperial Majesty's Royal Forces. In preparation for the inevitable war against the rising anti-­imperialists, the British Empire is in need of a machine capable of securing victory against our enemies.” She swallowed the hard lump in her throat and continued with the rehearsed speech, fighting the urge to grit her teeth as she spoke. “I believe the quadruped is that machine, as I hope you will agree.”

Ignoring the weighty silence pressing down on the room, Petra consulted her notes, flipping to the next page. “If you turn to the interior design on the second page of my proposal, you will see that the quadruped is operated from within an armored control cabin, protecting the soldier piloting the machine with a double layer of reinforced steel plating and hermetically fortified glass.

“I have named the machine ‘quadruped' for the four supports that provide its primary mobility. These walking apparatuses will be able to travel over a wide variety of terrain, and the base of the machine will be equipped with gyroscopic sensors that can alert the quadruped's pilot to subtle gradient changes in the machine's immediate path so that the pilot can adjust his motion accordingly. The legs are equipped to handle the stress of both the full weight of the machine and its pilot, as well as the potential recoil force of any weapons that might be affixed to the device—­within a set of conditional parameters.

“The control cabin itself can rotate two hundred and seventy degrees, providing a wide range of visibility for the pilot, as well as multidirectional aiming capabilities for whatever weapons might be mounted to the exterior of the control cabin. As you may have noted, I have not drawn any weapons into the design, but I have indicated the best possible locations for potential weapon placement, based on the structural integrity of the frame and multiple calculations for compensating against potential recoiling force.”

She continued by explaining the various systems involved in the war machine's construction—­the internal combustion engine and backup fuel reserves, the specialized chamber she proposed to prevent ignition of the gas tank from outside forces, detailed explanations of the hydraulic system, gyroscopic sensors, and proposed operational controls.

At the end of her proposal, Petra surveyed the council bench. “If anyone has questions, I would be happy to address any concerns.”

Vice-­Chancellor Lyndon cleared his throat and pushed his glasses further up his nose. “I think that will suffice, Miss Wade. Now, if you will wait outside, we will consider your proposal and come to a decision shortly.”

Petra bowed respectfully to the council. “Thank you, Vice-­Chancellor.”

She turned and left the council chambers, her stomach twisting in knots as the heavy doors closed behind her. Immediately, she began pacing up and down the hall, wringing her hands as the council deliberated over her designs. If anyone found her mistakes or suspected her of sabotage, at best, Julian would have her locked up and shipped off to work under the thumb of the Royal Forces. At worst . . . she didn't want to think about that.

After a few fretful minutes, she neared the door again and slowed her pace, hearing the council's muffled voices on the other side. They were arguing now. She inched closer and pressed her ear to the wood. The door shifted at her touch, opening just enough that she could make out voices on the other side.

Mr. Fowler spoke heatedly. “I do not believe the girl can be trusted, no matter her skill. Lest you all forget, she was convicted of treason and espionage, among other things, only last summer.”

“Those charges were dropped,” said Vice-­Chancellor Lyndon.

“Against the majority vote of the Guild council!” said Fowler, slamming his hand on the desk. “It is my vote that we reject this project and the girl's application, as well as revoke her studentship. She never should have been allowed one in the first place.”

“Miss Wade's status as a student is not in question here.”

“It should be,” replied Mr. Fowler.

There was a murmur of agreement from the other council members.

Lyndon cleared his throat. “I should remind you, Mr. Fowler, the current vote concerns only the quadruped project, not any previous crime Miss Wade might have been falsely accused of.”

“Falsely?”
repeated Mr. Fowler. “That bloody machine broke two of my ribs, and then she had the gall to destroy it! Months of effort wasted. You were
there
, Lyndon! You—­”

“That is enough.” Julian's voice cut through the argument, and Fowler fell silent. “Give your vote on the project at hand and say nothing else of Miss Wade's previous misconducts. That is not why we are here.”

There was a pause.

“Fine,” said Fowler. “I vote to reject the project.”

“Are you certain?” asked Julian, a hint of warning in his tone.

“She does not belong here,” he hissed. “Mark my words, Julian. Your obsession with this girl is going to ruin you. A dozen engineers have brought forward suitable enough designs, with the potential for mass production. Why not use one of theirs instead?”

There was another long pause.

“It is a fair question,” said one of the other councilors. “You have asked us to be patient, to withhold funding until Miss Wade provided us with a war machine, but six months have passed since you promised us a project from her. We could have built any number of other designs by now. Why must we use hers?”

“Because not one of our engineers has her skill. Not one of them can think their way around a machine like she does,” he replied. “Regardless of her loyalties or inexperience, her innate talent cannot be ignored. Her design meets our every requirement. How many times have I delivered the Royal Forces' parameters to applying engineers, only to have them come back with a mediocre design unworthy of the Guild—­or worse, tell me it isn't possible to create a war machine of that caliber? We are not in the business of ‘suitable enough,' gentlemen. We are at the front lines of modern science. We should want
innovation
, not a rehash of decades-­old technology. And we will never have progress if we don't push ourselves toward higher standards.” He paused, a thick silence descending on the hall. “The Royal Forces has asked us for a war machine to end all wars, greater than anything that has come before. I believe that machine is sitting before you now.”

A heavy silence followed his words.

“Even so, I stand by my vote,” said Mr. Fowler. “Miss Wade is a traitor, and I will have no hand in her treachery. If you allow her to work on this project, the anti-­imperialists will win.”

“Your opinion has been noted,” said Julian, his voice sharp. “Vice-­Chancellor, I believe Mr. Fowler has had his say. Do continue with the deliberations. I believe it is Dr. Reid's vote next.”

“Very well. Mr. Fowler's vote has been recorded,” said Lyndon. “Dr. Reid?”

The engineer cleared his throat. “I have no reservations toward Miss Wade's acceptance into the Guild. As I have said before, she would be a valuable asset for the Guild to acquire. I vote to accept.”

“Duly noted,” said Lyndon. “Now, Mr. Goss, if you would share your vote.”

Petra held her breath and pressed closer to the door to hear the result, when she felt the wooden surface shift beneath her touch. She jumped back, but too late. The door swung open, revealing a familiar face in a scarlet uniform.

“Officer Cartwright,” she said airily, her heartbeat thundering in her ears. She swallowed against the sudden tightness in her throat and tried to make out Julian's decision as he delivered his vote on the project. “I was just—­”

“Eavesdropping?” Officer Cartwright carefully closed the door behind him, shutting the rest of Julian's words inside the council chambers. There was a slight tilt to his lips, the barest hint of a smile.

“And if I was?” she asked.

“I wouldn't worry,” he said lightly, stepping away from the doors to stand against the wall. He fished a battered cigarette case from inside his coat. “The council is going to accept the project.”

“What makes you say that?”

He shrugged, lifting a hand-­rolled cigarette from its case. “The Guild needs this design of yours. My superiors have made that fact very clear to the council.” He dragged a match across the inside of the case and quickly lit the end of his cigarette as the match flared, then took a long drag before continuing. “But I thought you said you didn't want to be a part of this war,” he said, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. “What changed?”