Boneshaker

by Cherie Priest

This one’s for Team Seattle — Mark Henry, Caitlin Kittredge, Richelle Mead, and Kat Richardson — for they are the heart and soul of this place.

Acknowledgments

This one requires many rounds of thanks, so please allow me to make a list.

Thanks to my editor, Liz Gorinsky, for her superlative skills, astonishing patience, and unparalleled determination; thanks to the publicity team at Tor, specifically Dot Lin and Patty Garcia, both of whom rock quite thoroughly; thanks to my ever-encouraging and unrelenting agent, Jennifer Jackson.

And thanks to the home team, too — in particular, my husband, Aric Annear, who is subjected to most of these stories in excruciating detail and for dissection before they’re ever finished; to my sister Becky Priest, for helping to scan all my proofs and passes; to Jerry and Donna Priest, for being my number-one cheerleaders; and to my mother, Sharon Priest, for keeping me humble.

Thanks go out to the aforementioned Team Seattle, and to our friends Duane Wilkins at the University of Washington bookstore and the incomparable Synde Korman at the downtown Barnes Noble. Speaking of Barnes Noble, I also send love and thanks to Paul Goat Allen. He knows why.

Yet further thanks must be showered upon my favorite lycanthrope, Amanda Gannon, for letting me use her Livejournal handle as the name of a dirigible (she’s the original Naamah Darling ); to the guides of the Seattle Underground tour, who keep offering me a job because I’ve taken the tour so many times; and to my old friend Andrea Jones and her Usual Suspects, because she’s always got my historical back — and she provides me with the best lead-in quotes. Thanks also to Talia Kaye, the amazingly helpful speculative-fiction-loving librarian at the Seattle Public Library’s Seattle Room; to Greg Wild-Smith, my intrepid webmaster; to Warren Ellis and everyone in the clubhouse; and to Ellen Milne, for all the cookies.

In this age of invention the science of arms has made great progress. In fact, the most remarkable inventions have been made since the prolonged wars of Europe in the early part of the century, and the short Italian campaign of France in 1859 served to illustrate how great a power the engines of destruction can exert.

—THOMAS P. KETTELL, History of the Great Rebellion. From its commencement to its close, giving an account of its origin, The Secession of the Southern States, and the Formation of the Confederate Government, the concentration of the Military and Financial resources of the federal government, the development of its vast power, the raising, organizing, and equipping of the contending armies and navies; lucid, vivid, and accurate descriptions of battles and bombardments, sieges and surrender of forts, captured batteries, etc., etc.; the immense financial resources and comprehensive measures of the government, the enthusiasm and patriotic contributions of the people, together with sketches of the lives of all the eminent statesmen and military and naval commanders, with a full and complete index. From Official Sources (1862)

From Unlikely Episodes in Western History

CHAPTER 7: Seattle’s Walled and Peculiar State

Work in progress, by Hale Quarter (1880)

Unpaved, uneven trails pretended to be roads; they tied the nation’s coasts together like laces holding a boot, binding it with crossed strings and crossed fingers. And over the great river, across the plains, between the mountain passes, the settlers pushed from east to west. They trickled over the Rockies in dribs and drabs, in wagons and coaches.

Or this is how it began.

In California there were nuggets the size of walnuts lying on the ground — or so it was said, and truth travels slowly when rumors have wings of gold. The trickle of humanity became a magnificent flow. The glittering western shores swarmed with prospectors, pushing their luck and pushing their pans into the gravelly streams, praying for fortunes.

In time, the earth grew crowded, and claims became more tenuous. Gold came out of the ground in dust so fine that the men who mined it could’ve inhaled it.

In 1850 another rumor, winged and sparkling, came swiftly from the north.

The Klondike, it said. Come and cut your way through the ice you find there. A fortune in gold awaits a determined enough man.

The tide shifted, and looked to the northern latitudes. This meant very, very good things for the last frontier stop before the Canadian border — a backwater mill town on Puget Sound called Seattle after the native chief of the local tribes. The muddy village became a tiny empire nearly overnight as explorers and prospectors paused to trade and stock up on supplies.

While American legislators argued over whether or not to buy the Alaska territory, Russia hedged its bets and considered its asking price. If the land really was pocked with gold deposits, the game would absolutely change; but even if a steady supply of gold could be located, could it be retrieved? A potential vein, spotted intermittently but mostly buried beneath a hundred feet of permanent ice, would make for an ideal testing ground.

In 1860, the Russians announced a contest, offering a 100,000 ruble prize to the inventor who could produce or propose a machine that could mine through ice in search of gold. And in this way, a scientific arms race began despite a budding civil war.

Across the Pacific Northwest, big machines and small machines were tinkered into existence. They were tricky affairs designed to withstand bitter cold and tear through turf that was frozen diamond-hard. They were powered by steam and coal, and lubricated with special solutions that protected their mechanisms from the elements. These machines were made for men to drive like stagecoaches, or designed to dig on their own, controlled by clockwork and ingenious guiding devices.

But none of them were rugged enough to tackle the buried vein, and the Russians were on the verge of selling the land to America for a relative pittance… when a Seattle inventor approached them with plans for an amazing machine. It would be the greatest mining vehicle ever constructed: fifty feet long and fully mechanized, powered by compressed steam. It would boast three primary drilling and cutting heads, positioned at the front of the craft; and a system of spiral shoveling devices mounted along the back and sides would scoop the bored-through ice, rocks, or earth back out of the drilling path. Carefully weighted and meticulously reinforced, this machine could drill in an almost perfect vertical or horizontal path, depending on the whims of the man in the driver’s seat. Its precision would be unprecedented, and its power would set the standard for all such devices to come.

But it had not yet been built.

The inventor, a man named Leviticus Blue, convinced the Russians to advance him a sum great enough to gather the parts and fund the labor on Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine. He asked for six months, and promised a public test display.

Leviticus Blue took his funding, returned to his home in Seattle, and began to build the remarkable machine in his basement. Piece by piece he assembled his contraption out of sight of his fellow townsmen; and night by night the sounds of mysterious tools and instruments startled the neighbors. But eventually, and well before the six-month deadline, the inventor declared his masterpiece “complete.”