The Bobbies of Bailiwick

By Christopher Blankley

Are you ready to join your fellow Bobbies? There's Jack, the boy with a sixth sense for machines; Red Ruby, the fiery pirate princess from the golden age of sail; and LOF-t, the sixty-sixth century cyborg. Together with Murray, the hyper-intelligent lemur, you are the new generation of Constables; sworn to protect the topsy-turvy world from the ever encroaching shadows of the evil Zed.
Even as we speak, they drill through the crust of the Bailiwick, down towards the city within...
So, climb aboard your sky cycle, young Constable, and fly! There's not a moment to lose!

Bobbies of Bailiwick is a Steampunk Adventure Fantasy filled with Dyson's Spheres, pirates, cyborgs, lemurs, giant robots and steam-powered sky cycles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Blankley
• Release date: Mar 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466065598

Christopher Blankley

Seattle is my home and the backdrop of many of my books. I am not a detective, or a zombie, or living in an alternate version of the 21st Century, so my life and my books pretty much just overlap with the Seattle thing. If you like detectives, zombies, alternate histories, even Seattle, you might like my books. I do. I like you. There, I said it. I’ve written over a dozen books, including the aforementioned ones about detectives and zombies and alternate histories. Did I mention Seattle? Seattle's in some of them, too.

Book preview

by

Christopher Blankley

Illustrated by

Kelly McClellan

Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Blankley

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1

Jack understood machines, though he knew very little about them. It was more that Jack could see how machines worked – how the parts inside interacted – than that he had any serious understanding of their functioning. Jack could fix anything. Jack did fix most anything: computers, cars, televisions, lawn mowers. If it was broken, Jack could fix it. He could figure out what was wrong – why a machine had stopped working – and put it right.

At twelve years old, it was quite a sight to see. The adults in the neighborhood would bring broken things to Jack and ask him to repair them. They would marvel as he turned a gadget over in his hands, studying it intently until pausing to make some small, apparently random adjustment. Then bingo! The radio, or alarm clock, or portable music player would begin to work. They’d laugh and clap Jack on his back, and remark on what a special child Jack was.

But Jack didn’t feel special; it all made sense to him. Jack understood machines. What he did not understand was why no one else bothered to fix things themselves. It was so obvious. All they had to do was look, but nobody except Jack ever bothered. It mystified him.

But Jack didn’t complain. It was what made him special; it was his own unique sixth sense.

His parents and teachers saw Jack’s gift as a sign of untapped intelligence – underdeveloped genius in need of nurturing. They attempted to encourage him with technical manuals and advanced placement classes. But Jack quickly became bored with reading dry, complicated texts; and he could never manage more than a B average at school. The truth was Jack didn’t need books or classes to nourish his sixth sense. Books and classes were full of facts. Jack didn’t need to know how machines worked; he could see them. All of them. Electrical, mechanical, computerized or clockwork – it didn’t matter. Jack could see them, inside. Well, not exactly see, but see. It was hard to explain.

Whenever anyone asked Jack about his gift, he would say, "Imagine a flock of birds in flight. You know it’s a group of birds; but what you see is the flock, not the birds. I mean, if you stop and really look, you can see the individual birds flapping away; but most of the time, all you’re aware of is the flock … its shape, its path through the air.

"Now, of course, if one of those birds suddenly decided to fly backwards, you couldn’t help but see that bird. In fact, all of a sudden, you wouldn’t be able to see anything but that bird. You’d forget about the flock. When a machine doesn’t work, the part that doesn’t work is like that: the bird flying backwards."

It was the best explanation Jack had, but it seldom seemed to satisfy anyone.

In all other regards, other than his sixth sense for machines, Jack was a normal boy. He had his friends, and went to school, and did his homework, and liked to watch cartoons on television with his little sister, Abby.

His parents were mostly normal, too. His father was a professor of something that ended in ology at the local university; and his mother, a tax attorney, said her job was exactly as boring as it sounded. They all lived in a small house in a small town a few hundred miles away from a bigger town that they seldom had any reason to visit.

Jack’s school was at the end of his block, and the distance between it and his house was the full length of Jack’s daily life. Three hundred yards, Jack had estimated, from the large oak tree that sat at the rear of the backyard of Jack’s house (the southern boundary) to the chain-link fence that faced the teacher’s parking lot at school (the northernmost extent of Jack’s domain). Three hundred yards from tip to toe, Jack figured, was the size of his world.

He would sit all day in Ms. McInski’s class and stare at the globe she kept by the window. All that space – all those oceans. He would daydream about flying over the world, diving down through layers of clouds, running his fingertips along its surface as he jetted by. All that space … seas, deserts, prairies … and only three hundred yards of it set aside for him.

Since the beginning of the school year, Jack’s mother had allowed Jack and Abby to walk the block to school by themselves. There were no roads to cross, and their mother, if she stood at the front gate of the house, could watch them walk the whole way. It was, after all, a very busy street they lived on, with cars rushing by the house all day and all night, some at alarming speeds.

His mother’s doting always embarrassed Jack. Many of his friends were allowed to walk to school alone, for many blocks, crossing many roads, and had been since they were eight or nine. Not Jack. Until this year, his mother had walked him right up to the school door each day, humiliating him each time in front of all his friends with kisses on the cheek and large hugs.

At least now, walking the block with just his sister, he was spared that daily indignity. His mother still made him walk the whole way holding his sister’s hand, and that was bad enough. Abby was only five and just starting Kindergarten, and was very excited to walk to school with her big brother.

She had, for many weeks, needed to clutch her brown bear in her arms for comfort; but lately, the habit had subsided. Now, Jack and Abby were able to walk the whole distance between home and school with no company at all except each other. They talked about television or their day. Sometimes, Jack would get distracted by the inner workings of a car parked beside the road, but mostly their trip each day was uneventful.

That is, until the day the two cars crashed, halfway between school and Jack’s house.

How the accident began, Jack hadn’t really seen. He was talking to his sister and watching his mother at the end of the block, as she, in turn, was watching them make their way home from school. But at the first sound of the squealing of brakes, Jack whipped his head around.

One car, traveling very fast, was swerving to avoid another car that seemed to be turning. Where the second car was turning to was hard to say, for there was no side road or driveway where its blinker was indicating it wanted to go. Nevertheless, the turning car crossed the yellow line, and the speeding car slammed hard on its brakes. The air was filled with the painful clamor of metal upon metal.

Jack opened his mouth to scream out a warning, but nothing emerged before the two cars collided. To Jack, it all happened in slow motion: as the left side of the speeding car came in contact with the nose of the turning car, Jack could feel the collision all the way down in his stomach. He was only remotely aware of his sister’s scream. He was spellbound.

Jack had a unique view of the whole event, what with his sixth sense. Where anyone else watching the accident would have seen only two cars colliding, Jack was aware of a whole other truth: that two highly complex machines were attempting to occupy the same space at the same time.

His sense allowed him to see the extent of the collision’s destruction. Under the buckling steel skins of the two cars, Jack could see the gears and wires and cams and shafts of the engines breaking. To him, it was more like the two cars were unraveling than crashing.

Two large flocks of birds had collided in midair, but somehow had seemed to pass through each other with no two individual birds touching. Instead, all of a sudden, each and every bird in both flocks had spontaneously started flying in random directions. Jack’s mind jumped. They were no longer flocks of birds at all, but a sky full of flapping wings. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as he watched the whole spectacle in wide-eyed amazement.

Then something in the back of his mind popped.

Something inside his own head came unstuck, like a strut or a shock absorber on an axle. Watching the two cars come to rest (time had again restored itself to normal), Jack was aware of something underneath what he was normally been able to see. As the two drivers of the two cars climbed groggily out of their automobiles, knocked silly by their airbags – and as Jack’s mother came running up the sidewalk to wrap her arms protectively around Jack and Abby – Jack was aware of a whole new layer of detail to the machines that lay destroyed in the center of the street.

The whole world was made up of cogs and gears.

Sure, under the buckled, metal bodies of the cars were pistons and generators, and fuel injectors and serpentine belts. But for the first time in Jack’s young life, he was also aware of a new layer of tiny, little machines that made up the larger machines that made the automobiles function. He suddenly had a new perspective on the world around him. It was as if shades had been pulled up on a darkened room. How wrong he had always been, Jack realized, as his mother fussed over him and his sister.

No one had been injured. Even the drivers of the two destroyed cars seemed unhurt. But, the accident had put a shock into Jack’s mom, and she held tightly onto her children’s hands as she led them away from the scene of the accident. Jack had to look back, back at the twisted metal and the two destroyed engines now lying motionless, crushed together, and marvel at what he could now see.

Jack could see that everything around him, everything in the whole world, was powered by cogs and gears.

Jack’s mom hustled them home, through the front gate and through the front door. By the time they had reached the main hall, Abby had started to weep from the shock. But as soon as she had her coat off and was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a snack, she returned to her old, happy self. Mom, on the other hand, seemed