Jennifer raised an eyebrow. In his fright, Rad had pulled the gun from his pocket and was pointing it right at her. Jennifer moved the barrel to one side with a finger, then raised her other hand. In it she held a gun, something large and silver that shone in the night, looking more like a hair dryer than a weapon.
Jennifer smiled. “Your little pea-shooter isn’t going to be much good around here, detective.”
Rad sighed and hunched his shoulders, allowing the upturned collar of his trench coat to touch the rim of his hat. His breath plumed in front of him as he spoke. “You been following me too?”
“All the way from your office,” said Jennifer. Then she laughed. “Don’t look so surprised, Mr Bradley. You’re not the only detective in the city.”
Rad looked Jennifer up and down. She was wearing the heavy overcoat, this time topped with the fur-trimmed hat.
“You’re not made of metal too, are you?” asked Rad, not sure if he was serious or not.
Jennifer smiled again. “I’m as real as you are.”
Rad opened his mouth in surprise, but Jennifer looked up sharply, her free hand waving Rad to keep quiet.
She leaned across Rad to see out into the street. Rad raised himself up to see over her hat.
The black buildings around them looked like theater flats, the streetlight casting a circular pool of dull yellow light.
Something appeared in that light. Rad held his breath and shrank back, but Jennifer edged forward.
It was a man, a big man, walking with a limp so bad he was dragging his left leg behind him. In fact his whole body was stiff, the arms locked straight, the man’s back so rigid it was like he was made of…
Rad ground his molars together. The man’s torso was flat and shone in the streetlight, a seamless, rounded thing of metal. His arms were metal too, but the boxy forearms ended in human hands. The bad leg was human, except for the foot, which was nothing more than a rectangular shape from which rigid pipes sprang, traveling up the entire limb in parallel before turning at a right angle and connecting to the man’s pelvis. The other leg was entirely mechanical, as artificial as the arms and torso.
The man didn’t have a head. There was a short metal stem, a neck, with thinner pipes waving about six inches out from the end of it as the creature moved.
Rad recognized enough of the creature to feel the adrenaline pump through his body, making him dizzy and nauseous.
It was a robot sailor, one of the human-machine hybrids manufactured from the citizens of the Empire State to crew the Ironclads that sailed off to war. The thing was incomplete, the human and mechanical parts badly mixed, the whole thing fragile and broken and twisted.
Rad felt his mouth fill with a sour taste. He glanced down at Jennifer, but before he could speak she pulled back into the alley and raised her hand for silence. Rad gulped and risked another look out to the street.
The broken machine was just the first. As it limped forward, others followed, each a twisted mix of human and robot, none complete, all moving with difficultly and perhaps, Rad thought with a growing sense of unease, pain. They were silent, the only sound the shambling, shuffling of their problematic movement.
Rad counted an even dozen, exactly the crew complement of one of the great Ironclad warships. The last Fleet Day had been two years ago, six months before everything changed. Rad knew the naval shipyards down near the Battery were still in existence, but he also knew that they were empty, abandoned by the navy once Wartime ended. They didn’t make Ironclads anymore, nor did they make any more crews.
The group on the street was not an ordered rank of robots. They looked like a collection of spare parts, both mechanical and human. Rad suddenly wondered what had happened to all of the crews that must have been prepared for the last great sailing, the one that had been close to happening before Wartime ended.
He had a feeling he was looking at it, and his stomach churned.
“What are they?” he asked. He knew the answer but he wanted to hear it from someone else. The robot gang had stopped under the streetlight, and a couple of them – one with a big square metal box for a head, attached to a very human neck and chest, and another that was the