The Steam Mole Read online

  Tim had been rather looking forward to the experience then. The recruiter painted a glowing picture, too: free food, bunk-space, and a short contract. And for those crew members the captain had especially commended, jobs in the toughest and best paid service in Westralia: the steam moles.

  “They’re like land submarines,” said the recruiter. “You’d be at home in one, young man. And your captain has given you a glowing testimonial. Good experience for you.”

  “What’s a steam mole?” asked Tim.

  The recruiter grinned. “Something like a cross between a tunneling machine on rails and a termite.”

  The joke fell flat to a boy from the tunnels of a drowned London. “What’s a termite?”

  “My word! You really don’t know?”

  Tim shook his head.

  “Well, they’re like ants—white ants, people call them. They eat wood, but the sun will kill them, so they make mud tunnels up trees and poles so that they can get to the wood while staying out of the sun. We have to do the same north of the Tropic of Capricorn. It’s so hot in the sun in summer, you can’t sweat fast enough to cool down. So the tracks to the mines up there are covered over. Shallow tunnels, if you like. The steam moles make them. They’re busy with a big push to get a whole new network going, especially to the north.”

  Tim liked being in a submarine, and he was used to tunnels. He’d spent his whole life in them, up to the last year. The one rub had been Clara. He wasn’t even sure where she’d gone, or how to contact her. One moment she’d been there, and the next whisked away by the Westralians. She’d promised to come back and see him just as soon as she could.

  “Of course you get a week off after every month, back here in Ceduna if you like, if you take a steam-mole job. Most of the mining jobs you’d get a day off a week, and you can’t get away from the mine for that day. It’s too far to travel to anywhere. You’d get a month after twelve months from them, but you blokes aren’t planning to stay that long. Mind you, when you get among that kind of money…”

  No kind of money was enough to keep Tim from the Cuttlefish. But the figure the recruiter talked about was very tempting indeed to a poor boy from the tunnels. He could do a lot with that money. Maybe even think about a snippy girl who took going to university as inevitable.

  But all that was before he got to the steam mole, and before he found out he was the only one from the Cuttlefish on this machine.

  And before he’d found out that they hated him for the color of his skin. He was the youngest and smallest person on the steam mole, and he really didn’t know how he was going to survive for a month, let alone three.

  The steam mole was one of two pushing south from the Sheba mine to meet the northbound rail. She’d work for two days then, as the new-cast tunnel needed to set for eight hours, go back along her tracks to the last station. There was a station like this every twenty miles, and a big one every sixty. When the line was complete they’d provide the power station for that section of track. The trains running on the tracks down here wouldn’t have locomotives, but would be towed along in the dark by a long, endless steel cable. All the coal smoke and steam could be vented from the power station, leaving the air in the termite tunnel cool and breathable. But the steam moles had to have their own power. While they were building, the air out in the tunnel was full of coal smoke. A long, floppy air hose made of leather stretched back to the power stations, and one of Tim’s jobs was to attach new sections to the air pump then wind them in and detach them as the steam mole backed up.

  It was hot, hard work, and you risked losing your fingers with every unhook, but it meant he was away from the steam-biscuit line and Shift-captain Vister, so Tim preferred it. It was that or being a greaser on the brass piston fingers of the drill head, and that was noisier and even more dangerous. It was also where the news from outside first came to the steam mole.

  “Hear they’re upping the contract period from three months to six,” said one of the other hose-men to one of his companions. “You’re stuck for another four months, Fred.”

  “Bunch of Welshing b—” swore the other hose-man. “They promised they wouldn’t do that. They’re tryin’ to push to Sheba before the Ogg-Nullabor line. I was lookin’ forward to gettin’ out of here.”

  Tim felt as if he’d been dunked in ice water. “But…but surely they can’t just change our contracts without—?”

  “Oh, yes they can, boong-boy,” said Fred. “Do anything they please. Only that means they battle to get men to work…so they makes it worse for the men who are working. Makes perfect blooming sense, really, to some feller in a cool office in Augusta or Ceduna. And it’s not worth breakin’ the contract, see. They’ll put you in stir.”

  Tim had been in Westralia long enough to know what “stir” was. Jail. He swallowed, unable to speak.

  “Someone gunna have to rein these blooming companies in. Bunch of Ned Kellys,” said Fred’s mate, angrily tossing down the brass connector. “S’oright for your kind, boong. You can always go bush and they can’t find yer.”

  Tim just stared helplessly at him. Six months? The Cuttlefish would be gone by then. And as for “go bush,” well, he might just have to. He didn’t really know what it meant, but he’d lived out in the wild pipes under flooded London for a day or two.

  If he could get back to the submarine in time, he was sure Captain Malkis would hide him and take him away when they left. The awkward part might be ever coming back to Westralia, and he wanted to, as Clara would be here. He’d have to check out the practicalities of it all when he got his time back in Ceduna. Mind you, it had taken two whole days and nights of traveling along the termite track in a jostling, clacking carriage with one dim Bakelite fitting to get here. His week off in Ceduna was going to amount to three days there, and four days traveling.

  She was worth it, though, thought Tim. He’d get to see Clara somehow, and talk it over with her.

  Jack Calland was dying. He knew this because he’d just seen his wife and daughter. And that, some small, rational part of his mind said, was impossible. He was in Australia, transported in a rusty iron hulk into this hell, and they were in Ireland.

  He said so.

  “They’re in the rebel-held part of Australia,” said the tall, slim man in tropical dress whites, who had been holding the picture.

  Jack laughed.

  That was a bad idea, or so said the excruciating pain that followed.

  “Stop that,” said another man, in a cool, dispassionate voice. “You’ll kill him and that would be of no value to us, and I am not going to tell Duke Malcolm that we killed his pawn early. You…Martins, take him to the doctor. Tell McLennan I said to fix him up. I need the next letter.”

  Jack was vaguely aware of being dragged out into the heat and then back into the shade. And that was all he knew for some time, as he wandered in troubled dreams, looking for, and never quite finding, his beloved Mary and little Clara, catching glimpses of them under the gaslights and in the narrow, sooty streets of Fermoy. Calling to them…

  When he finally awoke, weak and exhausted but in his right mind again, it was in the palm-thatched “hospital” of Denong prison camp. He was somewhat cloudy as to how he’d got there, but he remembered some things very clearly. He remembered the part about Duke Malcolm and being a pawn not to be killed early.

  It had to be true. The hospital, such as it was, and the medical help, such as that was, were for the warders only, not for the prisoners. The prisoners had even fewer facilities, and mostly just died where they fell.

  Jack Calland, the Irish rebel, didn’t know what his ex-wife Mary had done to make Duke Malcolm, the feared head of British Imperial Intelligence take a personal interest in her. They’d divorced on anything but amicable terms when he’d been arrested. As far as the Imperial Intelligence Service knew it had been very ugly, and Jack’s value as a pawn there was nonexistent. Of course, he and Mary knew differently. Or at least, Jack hoped and believed that she did. They had a d
aughter to care for, and if the Imperials had thought his wife might be involved, or might even be sympathetic…well, Clara would have been left alone.

  For Clara they would both have done anything. And she was their jewel.

  Jack was terribly afraid that Duke Malcolm had worked that part out—terribly afraid he might have betrayed something in his delirium. He remembered they’d brought him paper. Made him write. That was all right, Mary knew their code. She’d know that it wasn’t something he’d write of his own free will. But the fact that Duke Malcolm wanted him as a lever…that was worrying.

  It meant he had to do one of two things: He either had to escape, or he had to die.

  Only…here in the deserts and steaming jungles of Northern Queensland, to escape was to die.

  Being Jack Calland, he decided he might as well do that, then.

  “Mrs. Darlington, can’t I at least talk to my mother?” asked Clara, doing her best to be polite and not sound desperate.

  “But my dear, you spoke with her only two hours ago. She was delirious and confused. The hospital says she’s asleep now. What do you need to talk to her about, my dear?”

  The question flatfooted Clara. She couldn’t tell this woman—who was the wife of someone important in the Westralian government—the truth. “Um. I’m just terribly worried about her.”

  The truth she couldn’t tell took her straight to the gas-lit halls of Hansmeyers Emporium, the finest department store in Ceduna, and possibly all of Westralia, exclusive suppliers of all the finest drapery, haberdashery, ladies footwear, fabrics, and fine linens, as well as things of lesser importance. Clara had been relieved to be spared the ironmongery and other departments Mrs. Darlington considered barely worth noticing. One could get anything in Westralia, Imperial embargo or not. The prices could make a girl’s eyes water, though. Either everyone was rich or no one bought anything. Mrs. Darlington plainly did, though, and she thought it a high treat bound to distract Clara.

  It might have done so, too, on another day, when Clara didn’t have such worries on her mind. Mrs. Darlington had been distracted by various shades of pale lilac cotton chiffon, and Clara had wandered off a little, lost in thought, among the roof-high towers of rolls of fabric. A rat-faced little man stood just at the end of the stack. He beckoned to her, looking about as if afraid a cat might suddenly arrive. Clara backed off.

  “I have a message for you,” he whispered. “Come over here.”

  Everything about him made her hackles rise. “From whom?” she asked.

  “Jack Calland,” he replied, holding up a small envelope.

  She couldn’t help herself. She reached forward and grabbed it. As she opened it, the furtive little man said, “If you want to see him alive, you’ll meet me here tomorrow at nine. We can make arrangements. He’s in Queensland.”

  Clara was too busy staring at the grubby piece of paper to answer him…or notice that he’d disappeared. She was torn from rereading the letter from her father for a third time when she was forced to shove it hastily into her reticule by Mrs. Darlington’s summons.

  He was alive. And in a prison in Queensland. And if she cooperated, she could see him again.

  Clara knew the rat-faced man with the ginger whiskers must be a spy. An Imperial agent. She knew it was a trap. She also desperately wanted to see her father. She wanted him so badly, now, with mother sick. And she had not been able to get to the rendezvous with the spy. Rat-face probably didn’t know that had been her only chance to see her mother, and that she’d been with Mrs. Darlington the entire time.

  He probably thought she didn’t believe the letter.

  She did.

  She knew Daddy’s writing better than she knew anyone’s. She’d read his few letters to her to pieces. This letter…it was his writing, just not his normal way of saying things.

  The other letter made it clear that they were offering her father’s freedom in return for her cooperation. In other words, in exchange for her mother’s secret method of making ammonia from the air…something that Clara couldn’t tell them how to do, even if she were willing to.

  Mrs. Darlington sighed. “Clara, my dear, I don’t quite know how to put this to you, except quite bluntly, but you’re quite a big girl now.”

  Clara gritted her teeth, determined not to say anything. If she were a boy, like Tim, she’d have been out and working by now. The plump, elegant, perfumed, terribly kind Mrs. Darlington continued, not noticing the effect her choice of words had on her young guest, “There is, sadly, a real chance your mother won’t get better, dear. The doctors and the hospital are doing their best, giving her the best care possible. And you will be looked after. I promise.”

  Clara ought to have been upset and shocked. Instead she looked stonily at the ground, refusing to let herself cry, because it was no surprise, and she’d cried herself dry last night. And as if she cared about being “looked after…”

  She wanted them looked after. And while Mother had half the doctors in Westralia fussing about her, her father had nothing. She needed help. Someone she could rely on, someone she could trust. “Mrs. Darlington, can I…can I get hold of Captain Malkis? Or Lieutenant Willis?” She didn’t say “or Tim Barnabas,” because this woman would never understand.

  “Who…? Oh, the captain of your submarine! I’m afraid they’re out in the desert right now, Clara. You could write to them, I suppose. But really dear, you’ll be well looked after, I promise.” Her tone said what she thought of nasty, rough submariners.

  I will not scream at her. She thinks she’s being kind. “How could I obtain their addresses, Mrs. Darlington?”

  It had all happened so quickly after the Cuttlefish had been towed into the quayside. The Westralian officers might have been wearing strange, broad hats and uniforms the color of sand, but they looked like officers and they had gold braid on their shoulders. Mother still hadn’t been ready to trust them, but Captain Malkis had vouched for the Westralian major, and before Clara had been able to say “Jack Robinson,” let alone her proper farewells to the crew and to Tim, they’d been whisked away, promising to come and see them all soon.

  After all, the submarine wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry. Clara knew the boat would have to have major repairs before she could leave.

  Clara hadn’t guessed then that her mother would fall sick and be put in quarantine. She’d assumed they could come back tomorrow, and the next day…and, well, until the submarine left, which was somewhere in a future she hadn’t thought of.

  Clara found she’d been right about the submarine not going anywhere for months, but by the time she’d been able to get Mrs. Darlington to take her down to the quays, she found that the Cuttlefish had been moved, and that although the submarine might not be going anywhere for months, her crew were already scattered, working, while their boat was repaired and refitted. Westralia had no place for people who didn’t work…except for her, it seemed.

  “My dear, you’re looking a little pale. Are you feeling all right? I know you’ve had a terrible shock, and I know dear Dr. Leaming examined you, but are you feeling quite all right? Health-wise, I mean.”

  Clara could almost see the perfumed and powdered lady lean away from her. No one yet knew quite what disease Mother had picked up, or how infectious it might be.

  “I’m feeling fine,” Clara said. “Just worried. And a little hot. Can’t we go outside for a little?”

  Like most of the houses in Ceduna, this one was made of corrugated iron, with wide verandahs. During the day it was shut up to keep the heat out, and they only opened the big sliding windows and drapes at night. Clara was used to the enclosed air of the submarine, but when they’d got out onto the deck the air off the sea had at least been cool. Not so here. The town and port, and most of all the desalination plant, had huge sand walls to stop the Royal Navy from shelling them—thus keeping the sea breeze out and only letting in the hot wind from the interior.

  “It’s nearly a quarter past ten in the morning, dear,
” said Mrs. Darlington. “We don’t want to go out now. You’ll get heatstroke, and the sun is so bad for your complexion, even with a parasol.”

  Clara gritted her teeth again. Welcome to Australia, where people sleep in the daytime and work at night. The “day” started in what her body clock said was the middle of the night, when it was cool enough. It was spring now. Clara didn’t even want to think about summer. In Ceduna the people lived on the surface. In the interior of Australia, far from the cooling influence of the sea, it got even hotter, and anyone who lived there, lived underground, like moles. She was feeling like a mole herself, blind and digging. “Can you please ask someone for the addresses for the Cuttlefish crew, ma’am? It would only be polite if I wrote to them to thank them.”

  This obviously impressed Mrs. Darlington. “Of course. So good that you’ve been a well-brought-up little girl. I wish you’d learn from her, Linda. ‘Bread-and-butter’ letters are so often neglected. I’ll call Maxie, and he can have them dispatch one of the black boys to run over with a list.”

  Maxie—Mr. Darlington—seemed to work as many hours as he possibly could. And the black boys…well, she’d seen them. They were aboriginals, and it seemed it was all right to ask them to run in the heat.

  Across the world, in London, Duke Malcolm looked at the report in his hands, looked out at Pall Mall Canal outside his widow, pursed his lips, and looked back to the medical man in front of his desk. “Dr. Weltztraimer, just what is the prognosis?”

  The doctor looked uncomfortable. He always did, but the duke had him fast in his web. Weltztraimer had already killed before Duke Malcolm caught him and made him provide poisons for Imperial Security instead. “She should be dead, Your Grace. That amount of aconite should have killed her. I can only assume that somehow she did not get the full dose.”

  The duke sighed. “I know Dr. Calland should be dead, Adolphus. The point is, she isn’t. So what are her chances of recovery?”