The Flux Engine Read Online Free PDF

her.
    Every minute he lay there she got farther away with his mother’s crystal. He had to find her. He had to get up, he just couldn’t remember how.
    O O O
    He was aware of being carried, then of lying on a bed with a thick blanket over him. There were people too, like ethereal ghosts, drifting in and out of his consciousness. Mustache and the stranger were there, along with other voices he didn’t know. Sometimes he would hear the voice of the woman with the gun and see her beautiful features twisted into a satisfied smile as she shot him. In the end, John couldn’t be sure what was dream and what was real.
    When he finally managed to force his eyes open, he found himself in a snug room with well-worn furniture and yellow-and-white striped wallpaper. Muffled and incoherent sounds of music and conversation seeped up through the floor, accompanied by the fragrant aroma of pipe tobacco.
    A soft ticking noise drew John’s eye to the wall near the bed. A large glimmering bug sat there, as big around as a silver dollar. Beneath its colorful carapace of brass washers, a watch gear clicked as it turned above black legs made of wire.
    John hated scraproaches. The little insect-like creatures originally came from the blasted lands of Maryland and Pennsylvania, out of the destruction wrought by Franklin’s Doomsday device. Ten thousand Britannic dreadnoughts set to march on the beleaguered Colonials were obliterated in a single instant of unimaginable devastation. The energies released by Franklin’s device imbued the dreadnought fragments with a crude kind of life. Everywhere in the Alliance one could find washers, gears, escapements, springs, and bits of random metal and wire scrabbling along walls or baseboards looking for new parts to add to themselves.
    They gave John the creeps.
    He tried to smash the metal insect back into its component parts, but his body wouldn’t obey his commands. He tried to sit up, but that didn’t work either. A cold fear crept into his brain. He’d been shot in the chest. He should be dead. What if he’d been saved but left a cripple?
    John pushed away the rogue thought as soon as it came. There simply wasn’t time for him to be crippled. He had to get his crystal back. Every moment he lay here in bed the beautiful woman with the homicidal tendencies got farther away. If John didn’t get on her trail soon he might lose his only connection to his mother forever.
    Gritting his teeth, he focused all his will on moving his arm. Slowly, almost grudgingly, his hand rose up and pulled the bedcovers down. His chest beneath was bare and John stared in wonder at the criss-crossing lines of stitches forming an X in the center of his chest. It seemed insufficient to close such a terrible wound; yet even now he could see the edges turning pink, fresh with healed skin.
    The rattling of a doorknob drew John’s attention to the room’s single door and he looked up just in time to see it open. Framed in the space beyond stood a broad, blocky man with square shoulders and a chiseled jaw. The man’s eyes were pale blue, like ice on fire, and John had the uncomfortable feeling that they could see right through him.
    “Oh, good,” the man said, stepping into the room. “You’re awake.”
    As he turned and shut the door behind him, John could see the polished hilt of a flux pistol jutting out from under the long, leather duster he wore. The man fastened the door and turned back to John. His bushy salt-and-pepper mustache turned up in a smile. John remembered the mustache.
    “How do you feel?” he asked.
    “Weak,” John said, his throat rasping.
    The man took off his fancy coat and hung it on a peg in the wall. The coat was dyed purple and embellished with an elaborate, embroidered symbol in the center of the back, a sword pointing upward over a gear. Decorative brass plates were attached on the shoulders and forearms of the coat. The brass was dull and the embroidery faded with wear, but the coat was