DISCLAIMER: I am not Scott Westerfield, and I do not own any rights to his work. I know it goes without saying, but it's better safe than sorry.
Anyhow, enjoy the story! I'll most likely update it in the future, so keep an eye out for it.
The Bristol demonstration of His Majesty's Royal Air Service had been cancelled. Officially, it was the weather that had done it in – lightning showers typically didn't bode well with flying beasties – but unofficially, it was the last stop of the tour, and everyone was getting bloody tired of being drug around with what essentially amounted to a circus in a poor man's imitation of a proper Darwinist airship. Deryn Sharp least of all – never when she had enlisted herself into the Service did she think that her job would entail stuffing snot-nosed kiddies into Huxley harnesses and gently raising them up and back down again like a bloody balloonist (sorry, Da, mayyourestinpeace).
It wasn't as though she disliked the peace – God knows that it was needed after the war – but with Alek constantly flying hither and thither wherever the Zoological Society pointed him, things had become a right total bore.
Which was why when a messenger tern came to the ship from Dr. Barlow, the mad boffin descended from Darwin himself, Deryn had all but flown into the next elephantine train bound for London. It was a wee disappointment when she found that the doctor wasn't at her office at the London Zoo, but a young Australian apprentice – what was his name? Dart? – told her to check at a local music hall in a balcony seat, where she was apparently fond of going. And with some questioning and haggling around…
"Good evening, Dr. Barlow!"
The boffin looked up, seeming somewhat startled. "Mis – that is, is it Mister Sharp?"
Deryn nodded as she lowered herself into a seat. "Aye, Mister Sharp will do for now. Officially, I'm still on duty."
Dr. Barlow nodded. "Of course. I hadn't expected you back from your tour so quickly."
"The Bristol demonstration was cancelled," Deryn explained. "Barking weather – had the Huxleys up and scrambled. So I hopped an elephantine back to London when I got your message."
"Well done – terribly sorry about the show. Speaking of, have you ever been here in Queen's Hall?"
"Can't say I have, ma'am," she replied. The balcony seat certainly allowed for an excellent view of the hall, however; oh, she could've murdered to have brought her sketchbook with her, this would've been a brilliant addition. "It's very lovely, though."
"It opened up over twenty years ago; while I can't speak much for the décor, the architecture is quite wonderful, they say it'll stand forever."
Deryn frowned, a wee thought tickling the back of her mind. "Ma'am, are you stalling for something?"
Barlow nodded. "You caught me at a rather inconvenient time, Mister Sharp. I just need to wait until the next show – ah!" She sat back in her seat. "Perfect. Marie."
A somewhat round-faced woman had taken centre stage to roaring applause. She laughed and waved jollily at the crowd, her other hand clutching a birdcage with a small linnet inside.
"Who's she?" Deryn asked.
The boffin smiled. "Marie Lloyd. Marvellous woman – of course, I haven't heard much of her, but from what I have…"
The rest of her praise was drowned out by a swell from the orchestra; and the strikingly loud, bawdy and distinctly cockney voice of the woman managed to rise above and cut clean through the general buzz of chatter in the room.
"We had to move away," Marie sang,
'cause the rent we couldn't pay,
the moving van came just after dark."
Deryn stared at the spectacle with surprise; after Barlow's words of praise, she had been expecting something refined, something formal. Not barking cockney. "Barking spiders," she said as Marie described, "There was me and my old man/shovin' things inside the van/as we've often done before, let me remark!"
There was a bout of laughter at the verse, and Deryn frowned, feeling that there was some innuendo that she was missing.
"Mad, all of it," she whispered at Dr. Barlow.
The boffin only shrugged. "If you truly want to see madness, Mister Sharp," she whispered back, "I suggest that you look below us."
Pausing for only a moment, Deryn gave a small glance over the rail of the balcony. Down on the first floor was a large collection of grey parrots – hardly a surprising sight, recording parrots had always been seen at music halls to memorize and replay the songs of the evening, with the added bonus of being clever enough to only memorize the song rather than the noises surrounding it. But what was odd was what looked like a great scorpion nested in with the lot of them – a great, metal scorpion with a driver sitting on top of it and a strange device attached to its tail…
She goggled. "Barking spiders!" she said perhaps a little too loudly. "Is that a Clanker walker?"
Dr. Barlow seemed oddly nonchalant. "A modified Hearst-Pathé, if I'm correct. The Clankers are finally looking to us for decent culture."
Deryn paused at this remark. If the Clankers considered a cockney woman singing, "My old man/said, 'Foller the van/and don't dilly dally on the way!' Off went the cart wiv me 'ome packed in it/I walked behind wiv me ol' cock linnet!" to be decent culture…well, they weren't entirely wrong, the song was starting to warm up to her, but it certainly wouldn't've been her first choice.
"It's a new age," Dr. Barlow continued. "Change is coming everywhere; England, Austria-Hungary, Germany…and Canada."
Deryn nodded. Austria-Hungary was where change had hit the hardest; now it was dashed into a half-dozen wee little nations. There were Clanker walkers in England, and Darwinist beasties in Germany. And in Canada…
In Canada, she was drawing a blank.
"What's happening in Canada?" she asked. Dr. Barlow winced and looked around if anyone had overheard Deryn's blurt; thankfully, most everyone was laughing too hardly at Marie's, "I stopped on me way to have me ol' half-quarten/now I can't find my way 'ome!" to have heard anything.
The boffin levelled Deryn an icy glare nonetheless. "The reason you haven't heard what's happening…there is because we haven't let any information out yet."
Now Deryn was completely baffled. "Information about what?"
"Not another word," Dr. Barlow hissed. She reached into her bag and pulled out a folder neatly filled with paper. "For heaven's sake, don't open that until you get somewhere private, understand?"
Deryn nodded, dutifully tucking the folder into her jacket. "Sorry, ma'am."
The boffin's face softened, and she smiled wryly. "Not at all," she said. "Just understand, Mister Sharp – just because the world is changing doesn't mean that it's becoming a safer place to be."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
But Dr. Barlow only put a finger to her smiling lips and gestured to the stage. Knowing full well that that was the limit of knowledge she was going to get from this exchange, Deryn sat back and listened to Marie Lloyd sing some more. It really was an excellent song; there was something in the way that Marie sounded genuinely jolly while singing it that gave it a strange sort of character. And when Marie had yelled, "All together now!" Deryn was singing just as loudly as every other man or woman in the audience.
"My old man
said, 'Foller the van
and don't dilly dally on the way!'
Off went the cart wiv me 'ome packed in it,
I walked behind wiv me ol' cock linnet!
"But I dillied and dallied,
dallied and dillied,
lost me way and don't know where to roam!
I stopped on me way to have me ol' half-quarten,
now I can't find my way 'ome!"
Yeah – that was going to be stuck in her head for days. Barking spiders.