The pressure gauge was cracked.
The glass had shattered two hours ago when the needle buried itself past the red zone. Now, the needle was just vibrating against the stop pin.
120 PSI. Maybe 130.
The boiler was screaming. A high-pitched keen that vibrated in my teeth.
"More coal!" I yelled.
I was stripped to the waist. My skin was blackened with soot. Sweat cut rivers through the grime.
Jean Chouan looked at me with wide, terrified eyes. He was a smuggler. He knew how to handle a ship in a storm. But this wasn't a storm. This was a bomb.
"She's gonna blow, Charles!" Chouan screamed over the roar of the furnace. "The rivets are popping! Look at the seams!"
He pointed to the boiler plating. Steam hissed from a hairline fracture.
"The hull is steel-reinforced!" I shouted back. "The river water is cooling the external plates! We can hold it!"
I was lying.
I knew the metallurgy of 18th-century iron. It was brittle. It had impurities. At this temperature, the crystal structure was degrading.
We were riding an explosion.
"Shovel!" I ordered.
I threw another scoop of British anthracite into the firebox. The flames roared, white-hot.
The ship surged forward. We were doing 18 knots against the current. The paddle wheels churned the Rhone into foam.
The door to the engine room opened. Marshal Ney climbed down the ladder.
He carried a bucket of river water. He splashed it over my head.
The water hissed as it hit my skin. It felt like heaven.
Ney looked at the gauge. Then at me.
"You drive this ship like you hate it," Ney said. His voice was calm, contrasting with the mechanical violence around us.
"I don't hate it," I panted, wiping soot from my eyes. "I'm extracting maximum value."
Ney leaned against the bulkhead. He watched me work. The rhythmic swing of the shovel. The firelight dancing on my scarred back.
"You sound just like him," Ney said softly. "Your father."
I stopped. The shovel hung in the air.
"He taught me," I said. "Everything is a resource. Time. Money. People. Even a ship."
"And love?" Ney asked. "Is that a resource?"
I looked at the fire. At the consuming hunger of it.
"Love is a liability," I said. "It makes you irrational. It makes you drive a bomb up a river because you can't accept the math of death."
"Is that why you're doing this?" Ney asked. "Because you love him?"
"Because he is the Administrator," I said, forcing my voice to be cold. "And the world needs management."
CLANG.
A massive shudder went through the ship. We were thrown against the wall.
The engine screamed. The RPMs spiked, then dropped to zero.
The paddle wheels stopped turning.
"We hit something!" Chouan yelled.
I scrambled up the ladder to the deck.
It was dark. The river was black oil.
We were drifting sideways. The current caught us, spinning the Dauphin toward the bank.
"Port wheel is jammed!" Ney shouted from the rail.
I looked over.
A massive log, debris from the broken chain barrier we had smashed through earlier, was wedged in the paddle blades. It had locked the wheel solid.
The engine was still trying to turn it. The drive shaft groaned.
"Disengage the transmission!" I screamed down the hatch to Chouan.
If the shaft broke, we were dead in the water.
Chouan pulled the lever. The engine freewheeled, howling like a banshee.
"We have to clear it!" I yelled.
"I'll go," Chouan said. He was already climbing over the rail. "I'm a pirate. I know ropes."
He tied a line around his waist. He lowered himself onto the paddle housing.
The ship bucked in the current. Water crashed over Chouan. It was freezing cold meltwater from the Alps.
He hacked at the log with a fire axe.
Whack. Whack.
The wood splintered. But it was jammed deep.
"Hurry!" I shouted. "We're drifting into the shallows!"
If we grounded, the hull would crack.
Chouan swung again. The axe bit deep.
CRACK.
The log snapped.
The tension released instantly. The paddle wheel, freed from the obstruction, spun violently from the residual momentum.
One of the blades caught Chouan's coat.
"Jean!" I lunged for the rope.
He was pulled toward the churning water. Toward the blades that would chop him into chum.
Ney grabbed the rope with me. We hauled.
Chouan screamed as his coat tore. He dangled inches from the spinning wheel.
We heaved him up. He collapsed on the deck, shivering, coughing water.
"Clear!" Chouan gasped. "It's clear!"
I didn't check if he was okay. I ran back to the engine room.
I engaged the transmission.
CLUNK.
The gears bit. The ship shuddered, then straightened out. We fought the current again.
"Efficiency restored," I muttered.
My hands were shaking. Not from cold. From fear.
I had almost lost a resource. An asset.
Love is a liability, I repeated to myself. Focus on the math.
Morning came.
The fog lifted off the river.
In the distance, through the mist, I saw spires. A town.
"Macon," Ney said, peering through the spyglass. "We are halfway to Paris."
Halfway.
I checked the coal bunker. Empty.
We had burned it all. Every sack. Every scrap of wood we could find.
The pressure gauge was falling. 80 PSI. 60. 40.
The engine was dying.
And then, it happened.
PING.
A sound like a rifle shot inside the engine block.
The governor gear—the brass cog from the Babbage Engine I had jammed into the valve—finally snapped.
The safety valve blew.
HISS.
A cloud of scalding steam filled the room.
"Vent!" I shouted. "Vent everything!"
I grabbed the manual release wheel. The metal was white-hot.
I turned it. My skin sizzled. I ignored the pain.
If I didn't vent it, the boiler would explode and take us with it.
WHOOSH.
Steam roared out of the stack. The pressure dropped to zero.
The paddle wheels stopped.
The ship drifted. Silent. Dead.
We bumped gently against the riverbank.
I climbed out of the hatch. I collapsed on the deck. My hands were blistered raw.
"She's done," I whispered.
Ney looked at the dead ship.
"200 miles to go," he said. "We have no horses."
I looked at the riverbank.
A team of tow-horses was pulling a slow barge upstream. Heavy draft horses. Slow. plodding.
"We can't steal them," Chouan said. "They are too slow."
I looked at the sun. It was high in the sky.
Father had hours left. Maybe minutes.
I felt the flask in my pocket. The Golden Ichor. The diluted mixture.
I pulled it out.
It glowed in the morning light.
"We don't need horses," I said.
I uncorked the flask.
"What are you doing?" Ney asked.
"We run," I said.
"Run?" Chouan laughed bitterly. "200 miles? We haven't slept in two days. We can barely stand."
I took a sip.
Just a drop.
It tasted like copper and lightning.
It hit my stomach.
Heat exploded outward. My fatigue vanished. My blisters stopped hurting. My vision sharpened until I could see the individual leaves on a tree a mile away.
My heart hammered. Thump-thump-thump. Fast. Too fast.
But strong.
"Drink," I ordered, passing the flask to Ney.
"Charles, this is dangerous," Ney warned. "You said it accelerates aging."
"We spend life to buy speed," I said. "That's the exchange rate."
Ney looked at me. He saw the gold flecks in my eyes.
He drank.
He gasped. He stood up straighter. His old war wounds stopped aching. He flexed his hands.
"My God," Ney whispered. "I feel twenty again."
Chouan drank next. He laughed, a manic, high-pitched sound.
"Let's go," I said.
We jumped off the ship onto the muddy bank.
We started to run.
Not a jog. A sprint.
We moved faster than horses. Faster than men should move.
My legs pumped like pistons. My lungs pulled in air like a bellows.
I didn't feel tired. I felt like I was burning.
I looked at the road ahead.
Hold on, Father, I thought. The engine is coming.
We blurred into motion, leaving a trail of dust and impossible footprints in the mud.
North. To Paris. To the end of the line.