The Impossible Cube Read online

  The Impossible Cube

  Steven Harper

  Praise for

  The Doomsday Vault

  “Harper creates a fascinating world of devices, conspiracies, and personalities. . . . Alice and Gavin fight to survive and to find love in this steampunk coming-of-age story. Harper’s world building is well developed and offers an interesting combination of science and steam.”

  —SFRevu

  “You’ll have great fun exploring the Third Ward, and the author created such a rich and lavish world for his characters. . . . Twists and turns abound, and the author managed to lob some shockers at me that I’ll admit I didn’t see coming. . . . If you love your Victorian adventures filled with zombies, amazing automatons, steampunk flare, and an impeccable eye for detail, you’ll love the fascinating (and fantastical) Doomsday Vault.”

  —My Bookish Ways

  “The Doomsday Vault is a good way to start off a new series in a highly specialized genre. Its combination of science and fantasy and good versus evil work well . . . a clever and worthwhile take on the steampunk universe.”

  —That’s What I’m Talking About

  “A fun and thrilling fast-paced adventure full of engaging characters and plenty of surprises. . . . I particularly enjoyed all the interesting and unexpected twists that kept popping up just when I thought I had the story figured out.”

  —SFF Chat

  “The great thing about having all these awesome characters is that [they’re] all snuggled up against a really great plot, several intermingling subplots, and pretty dang great steampunk world building. And excellent writing. . . . [The Doomsday Vault is] fun, funny, and a damn fine romp of a read. So much goodness packed into this book! Highly recommended.”

  —Lurv a la Mode

  “A goofy excursion in a style reminiscent of Foglios’s Girl Genius graphic series. . . . A highly entertaining romp.”

  —Locus

  “Paying homage to the likes of Skybreaker, 2D Goggles, and Girl Genius, The Doomsday Vault is awesome. One of my favorite steampunk-zombie novels. Abso-freaking-lutely recommended.”

  —The Book Smugglers

  Also by Steven Harper

  The Clockwork Empire

  The Doomsday Vault

  The Impossible Cube

  THE

  IMPOSSIBLE

  CUBE

  A NOVEL OF THE

  CLOCKWORK EMPIRE

  STEVEN HARPER

  A ROC BOOK

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, May 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Steven Piziks, 2012

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58540-5

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To my son, Aran, who always manages the most amazing

  surprises. Every day with you is a wonder.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I need to thank Tim Smith, PhD, of the University of Michigan, for information about the workings of electrical turbines. Thanks also go to the Untitled Writers Group (Christian, Cindy, David, Diana, Erica, Jonathan, Mary Beth, and Sarah) for pounding through so many drafts.

  THE STORY SO FAR

  We include this section as a courtesy for new readers who did not have the opportunity to peruse The Doomsday Vault, the most excellent first volume in this series. The information may also prove useful to experienced readers who require a bit of a refresher, or who lack a mechanized cranial implant with fully realized library. Thoroughly experienced readers are encouraged to leaf their way over to Chapter One, where they will find Gavin Ennock in awkward and perilous circumstances.

  The year is 1857.

  Nearly one hundred years earlier, a new disease ravaged the world. The plague causes rotting of flesh, and also invades the host’s nervous system, causing motor dysfunction, dementia, and photosensitivity. Victims lurching through the late stages inevitably became known as plague zombies. However, a handful of victims end up with neural synapses that, for a brief time, fall together instead of apart. Advanced mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry become as toys to them. But as the virus slowly destroys their brains, they eventually lose their grip on reality. Their attachment to mechanical inventions and their detachment from normal human emotion earned them the name clockwork geniuses or clockworkers, and the disease itself became the clockwork plague.

  Two nations—England and China—built opposing empires using the fantastic inventions supplied by captive clockworkers, and only the delicate balance of power holds the two empires in check.

  In The Doomsday Vault, we encountered Alice Michaels, an impoverished woman of quality who had finally caught the eye of wealthy industrialist Norbert Williamson. Norbert promised to pay Alice’s family’s debts if she married him and provided their eventual child with a title. Alice reluctantly agreed. Mere hours later, she rescued from great danger a handsome young street musician named Gavin Ennock.

  Before Gavin met Alice, he served aboard the American airship Juniper. An unfortunate encounter with pirates left him stranded in London wit
h no means of employment save playing the fiddle on street corners. After Alice’s dramatic rescue, Gavin found himself attracted to her, and she to him, but her circumstances and his social standing didn’t allow for a romance.

  A great many adventures followed. Alice’s aunt Edwina turned out to be a clockworker. Plague zombies attacked London. A great mechanical beast kidnapped Alice, and Gavin rescued her with the help of a mutated walking tree designed by another clockworker. Gavin and Alice learned of a shadowy organization called the Third Ward. The Ward, led by Lieutenant Susan Phipps, has been charged by Queen Victoria herself to scour the world for clockworkers and bring them back to London, where they build inventions for the good of the Crown—and the detriment of the Orient.

  Aunt Edwina’s diseased mind created a pair of cures for the clockwork plague, but such cures would upset the careful balance of power between the British and the Chinese, so the Third Ward locked Edwina’s work in the Doomsday Vault, which houses only the most dangerous of inventions. Infuriated, Edwina infected Gavin with the plague in hopes of forcing Alice to retrieve the cure and, in the process, kill everyone in the Third Ward. Edwina’s plan worked—almost. Alice and Gavin stole the cures, but stopped short of murder.

  Aunt Edwina did not survive the release of her own airborne cure, and Alice found herself the disconcerted owner of a mechanical gauntlet that can cure the clockwork plague with a scratch. Unfortunately, neither of Edwina’s cures helps clockwork geniuses; they only cure people in danger of becoming ordinary plague zombies.

  Alice left her betrothed and declared her love for Gavin. She attempted to cure Gavin of the plague and failed; Gavin was becoming a clockworker.

  Alice and Gavin fled London in a small airship, with Lieutenant Phipps hot on their heels. Joining them are Gabriel Stark (a clockworker who calls himself “Dr. Clef”), Feng Lung (the son of China’s ambassador to England), Kemp (Alice’s mechanical valet), and Click (Alice’s windup clockwork cat). They are heading for China, which has its own supply of clockworkers, and may have a more powerful cure that can restore Gavin’s fading sanity and save his life.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Interlude

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Interlude

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Interlude

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Gavin Ennock snapped awake. His temples pounded, his feet ached, and his arms flopped uselessly above his head. Far above him lay green grass strewn with twigs. It took him several moments to understand he was hanging upside down by his ankles. At least he wasn’t naked this time.

  “Hello?” he called.

  Below him, nothing moved. He shifted in confusion, and the iron shackles around his ankles clinked like little ghosts. How the hell—? The last thing he remembered was walking back to the inn from a much-needed trip to the bathhouse and someone had called his name. Now he was hanging head-down amid a bunch of trees. Most were little more than saplings, but a few were full-sized. Gavin didn’t know trees, but these certainly didn’t seem… normal. Their branches twisted as if with arthritis, and the leaves looked papery. Two or three bloomed with bright blue flowers, and bees bumbled among them.

  The forest itself was contained within a domed greenhouse, three or four stories tall. Gavin’s head hung fully two of those stories above the ground. Glass walls broken into geometric designs magnified and heated angry summer sunlight. The whole place smelled green. Water trickled somewhere, and humidity made the air heavy. Breathing felt almost the same as drinking.

  Poison ivy vines of fear took root and grew in Gavin’s stomach. “Hey!” Blood throbbed in his head, and his voice shook more than a little. “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?”

  From around one of the trees limped a man. His back was twisted, and his sparse brown hair clumped unevenly against his skull. This and his scarred, gnarled hands gave the initial impression that he was old, but Gavin, who wasn’t yet twenty, quickly realized the man was barely older than he was himself. The man was a clockworker, and the plague had left him with physical and mental scars both.

  “Shit,” Gavin muttered.

  “Is he awake?” The man had a French accent. “Yes, he is awake.”

  “I’m an agent of the Third Ward,” Gavin called down to him, lying. “When I don’t report in, they’ll send a team to see what happened to me. You don’t want that. Let me go, and—”

  The twisted man threw a lever Gavin hadn’t noticed before, and Gavin dropped. The ground rushed up at him. His stomach lurched, and Gavin yelled. At the last moment, the twisted man threw the lever again and Gavin jerked to a stop five feet above the ground. His ankles burned with pain, and the headache sloshed hot lead inside his skull.

  “I think he has no idea who I am.” The twisted clockworker pressed a scarred hand to Gavin’s upturned cheek in a strangely tender caress. The gesture created an odd convergence of opposites. Gavin’s captor stood firmly on the ground. His body was as twisted and warped as his trees, his face was scarred beneath greasy, sparse hair, and he wore a filthy robe that looked like it had once belonged to a monk. Muddy hazel eyes peered at his captive. Gavin had even features, white-blond hair, and blue eyes. His black shirt and trousers contrasted sharply with his fair skin and hair, and his fingers were straight and strong.

  The clockworker cocked his head, as if hearing a voice—or voices. “Then maybe he should look around and try to remember who I am. Maybe he should.”

  Gavin considered socking the clockworker, but discarded the idea—bad leverage, and even if he managed to knock the other man unconscious, he would still be trapped in the shackles. His earlier fear gnawed at him again, mingling with the pain.

  Now that he was lower, he could see nearby a large stone worktable littered with wicked-looking gardening tools, a large control panel bristling with levers, dials, and lights, and, incongruously, a brass-and-glass pistol. A power cable trailed from the stock and ended in a large battery pack.

  “Listen,” Gavin said with growing desperation, “I can help you. I can—”

  The man turned Gavin, forcing him to look at the trees. “I don’t know if he remembers. Maybe he will if I point out that the forest is old but the greenhouse is new. What do you all think?”

  “What are you talking about?” It was useless to argue with clockworkers—the disease that stoked their brains also lubricated their grip on reality—but Gavin couldn’t help himself. “You aren’t making—”

  One of the trees moved. It actually leaned down and in, as if to get a closer look at Gavin. The blue blossoms shifted, and a glint of brass caught the light. Long wires and strips of metal ran up the bark. Gavin’s breath caught in his throat. For a moment, time flipped backward, and he was fleeing through a blur of leaves and branches that were actively trying to kill him. A tall, bearded clockworker in an opera cloak rode one of the walking trees, steering it by yanking levers and pressing pedals. His partner, Simon, shouted something as Gavin spun and fired the electric rifle attached to the battery pack on his back.

  “L’Arbre Magnifique,” Gavin whispered. “This is his forest. But the greenhouse wasn’t here before, and you aren’t him.”

  “I heard him mention my father, L’Arbre Magnifique,” the clockworker said. “But I don’t believe he asked my name.” He paused again. “Yes, that was indeed rude of him. He should know my name is Antoine.”

  Gavin’s mouth went dry. Fantastic. What were the odds of two clockworkers showing up in the same family, or that Gavin would run into both of them
in one lifetime? The shackles continued to bite into his ankles with iron teeth.

  “Look, Antoine, your father is alive and well,” Gavin said, hoping he was telling the truth. “In London. We gave him a huge laboratory and he invents great… uh, inventions all day long. I can take you to him, if you want.”

  Antoine spun Gavin back around and slugged him high in the stomach. The air burst from Gavin’s lungs. Pain sank into him, and he couldn’t speak.

  “Ah,” Antoine said. “Do you think I hurt him? I do.” Another pause, with a glance at the trees. “No, it was not as painful as watching him kidnap my father.” He turned his back to Gavin and gestured at one of the towering trees. “That is true. My father only taught me to work with plants. I will teach myself how to work with meat. Slowly.”

  An object flashed past Gavin’s face and landed soundlessly on the grass where Antoine couldn’t see. It was a perfect saucer of glass, perhaps two feet in diameter. Startled, Gavin looked up toward the faraway ceiling in time to see a brass cat, claws extended, leap through a new hole in the roof. The cat fell straight down and crashed into some bushes a few feet away. Antoine spun.

  “What was that?”

  It took Gavin a moment to realize Antoine was talking to him and not the trees. “It was my stomach growling,” he gasped through the pain. “Don’t you feed your prisoners?”

  A string of saliva hung from Antoine’s lower lip. “Yes. I feed them to my forest.”

  The leaves on the lower bushes parted, and the brass cat slipped under the worktable, out of Antoine’s field of view. It gave Gavin a phosphorescent green stare from the shadows. A ray of hope touched Gavin.

  “Your father is a genius, Antoine,” he said earnestly. “A true artist. Queen Victoria herself said so.”

  The trees whispered among themselves, and a storm crossed Antoine’s face. “You are right! He should never mention that horrible woman’s name, not when her Third Ward agents took my father away from me!”

  “Simon and I captured a tree with him, remember? The tree turned out to be really useful,” Gavin continued, a little too loudly. The pain from the punch was fading a little, but his ankles still burned. “It helped us track down a clockworker who hurt a lot of people.”