EX MACHINA

Chapter One: The White Goddess

by Tonzura123

Rating: T for violence

Summary: Lucille Pevensie shows off her new air-ship and ends up pulling her family in the middle of an ancient war.

Author's Notes: Big THANK YOU to all the mods and to Autumnia, because I've always wanted an excuse to write steampunk. I hope you won't mind that the first thing that came into mind was "steampunk air battle." Originally published for the 2013 Narnia Fanfiction Exchange.

In other news, the story is definitely AU, set somewhere in the late 1800's. The Great War is a couple decades early, and is mostly fought in the grungy European skies. The Pevensies have been aged up- Peter has already seen battle, Susan is the family matriarch, and Edmund actively protests the war with Germany while Lucy is left to her own devices. They are twenty-two, twenty-one, nineteen, and seventeen, respectively.

Original Prompt that we sent you: Steampunk! Narnia

england, 1890

Lucille Pevensie punched the throttle on the dashboard and swung the wheel to a harsh left, bracing her legs as the entirety of the H.M.S War Drone pitched sideways. Cloudy steam billowed from the hull vents and curled up over the starboard side, smoking the splintering deck and hiding their boots from sight.

Her family wasn't as prepared for the gravitational pull. Edmund was bent over the rail and moaning. Peter was at the bow, knuckles white. And Susan was wrapped around Lucille's waist like a second corset.

"Come on, come on, COME ON."

The engines gunned and rumbled under them. Lucille felt the kick of the larger gears activating, their speed increasing as the warship shot up into the cloudy sky. Steam was screaming out. Lucille gritted her teeth and grinned at the crush of the atmosphere flattening them against the deck.

Then-

--CLICK.

Lucille disengaged the engines.

Suddenly weightless, the four youths let out varying screams of distress and surprise. The ship continued up for only a moment, and then, just as their feet left the deck and the mammoth ship began sinking into the ocean of clouds, Lucille released the wings.

Great leather and steel wings, like dull circus tents, snapped down from the mast and caught on the sky. The jerk had the four Pevensies crashing back down. Edmund vomited loudly over the edge and Peter, poor war-addled Peter, let out a whoop.

Lucille laughed. "I told you I could make this thing fly."

Susan shakily released her younger sister and wobbled to the mast, sliding down to sit with her back against it. "Excellent, Lu. Now take us back home?"

Lucille's heart dropped. "But we just got into the air!"

"Lucy. We stole a war ship. I think this adventure has gone on for long enough!"

"A war ship that I fixed!"

"That doesn't matter!"

Lucille tried to glare her sister down, but for all her full lips and smooth skin and tumbling black hair, Susan's blue eyes were more relentless than her younger sister's could ever be. Lucille turned away from her with a stinging in her nose and eyes. She fiddled with the gauges so that Susan wouldn't notice.

"Her Majesty didn't seem to miss this ship very much before," Edmund muttered. He was wiping his mouth and shakily glaring at the wheel in Lucille's hands. "And I doubt she'd miss it much now."

Peter beamed, trailing his fingers through the clouds as he hummed tunelessly. He wasn't wearing a coat, Lucille realized with a pang of regret. They would probably have to go home before long if the cold and the altitude began working its old tricks on his mind. And Susan obviously agreed.

"Look at us," the young woman said. "No coats, no food, no sense of where we're going... Lucille, if we don't turn this around right now, we'll end up being shot out of the-"

"-DOWN!" barked Edmund. Peter immediately fell to the deck, covering his hand in both hands. Lucille thought Edmund was playing an unusually cruel trick on their brother, until Edmund threw himself over both of his sisters and hissed a warning over their shrill protests.

In breathless silence, they followed Edmund's sharp gaze to another ship off of their starboard side.

She was massive. And pure white. Like a goddess hovering in the clouds just above their vessel, she could have easily swallowed a thousand ships just like the War Drone and still made room for more. Twenty boilers covered the sky in steam. Two steel wings the size of ocean liners guarded her flanks with mounted machines and the tiny black specks of automatons running circuits as they checked her over and searched for intruders.

"Easy," Edmund whispered. She felt him shift and saw the glint of his pistol's gold-plated barrel. He slowly pulled back the hammer and drew bead on the leviathan ship, then ceased all movements. To the side, she sensed Peter do the same with the emergency musket.

Desperately, she thought of the control panel and the canon blasters hanging (busted during some ancient fire-fight) from the rusted hull. If only she had fixed them, too! "The engines are still cut. They won't read any heat while we're riding on thermals."

Edmund hushed her but nodded. He caught Peter's eye and Peter powered-down the bulky musket, sliding carefully over to them.

Alarms pierced the air.

Peter froze. His eyes rolled a little in their sockets and his body began to tremble.

"No, Peter, no," Susan whispered urgently. She threw out a hand towards him, but did not move from her spot beside Lucille. "It's all right. We're all right here."

Edmund swiped Peter's musket and let Lucille up. "Hold onto him, Lu."

"Got it." She crawled to Peter, pulling him down and away, closer to the others with a gentle touch. She stroked at the hair by his temples and tried to block his eyes and ears from the constant screech of air-raid sirens.

"They're not- they haven't spotted us? Have they?" Susan whispered. Lucille knew she was thinking of the same thing Edmund was- arrest and imprisonment for being found in a condemned ship, loss of the house and loss of Peter, who would be sent to a Home. And the loss of Lucille, too, she realized with some surprise. She would be considered an orphan, if Susan and Edmund were taken away.

A large BANG struck their ears, and they all screamed, ducking in expectation of sharded metal and fire to break their tiny craft into smithereens. An echoing bang came from the distance. Lucille craned her neck and shouted, "They've just shot another airship!"

It was almost a league away- just a tiny toy on the vast grey sky. Whether it was another pirated ship, or a German Supermarine, Lucille couldn't tell. But the explosion of it's body rocked her, even at this distance. A flurry of debris went up as the missile struck the second ship, and an answering report came in a panicked series of pop-pop-pop's.

The white goddess fired again. Two swift explosions.

Something crashed into their deck- it was half of a large brass cog. They jumped and Edmund pushed Susan towards the wheel. "Get us out of here!"

"But- the engines!" Lucille cried. Peter was sobbing in her arms like a child. If they fired up the engines now, their heat signature would give them away and they'd be killed for sure.

"GO!" Edmund bellowed. He seemed to have forgotten all about shooting anything. While he tugged the other two towards the steps that led below deck, Susan began turning the wheel hand-over-fist, rocking the ship harshly to one side. Debris rattled and crash around them. Something hit Lucille over the head and she shrieked, then she fell, and tripped over Peter down the tilting stairs. She heard the door slam shut behind them, and then Edmund yelling and the sharp sssing of his pistol.

Lucille and Peter crumpled together at the base, shivering and pulling on each others arms. The reports of guns were hollowed and muffled below deck. She could feel the ship gliding steadily to the right until the battle was directly behind them. And then, as Peter stilled in her arms over the long minutes, she could imagine she heard nothing of that horrible, monstrous ship.

"Is the war over?" Peter murmured after an hour of silence in the darkness of the War Drone's belly.

She rubbed his head and laughed nervously.

There was a rap above them and the door swung open, revealing rosy twilight. Edmund leaned over the stairs, his face scratched and his new brown vest covered in grease. "All right, everyone?"

"Fine." Lucille rubbed her eyes. Looking around in the sudden light, she realized they sat on a large pile of moth-eaten fur coats. "Susan?"

"Like a true sky-pirate," Edmund grinned. "We're well out of harm's way by now. Somewhere over the Atlantic, I'd expect."

"Help me?" she asked. Her brother came down the steps and lifted Peter to his feet. Together they made it back on deck to survey the damage:

The mast was, amazingly, intact. The wings were spotted with holes that would take hours to patch and days to mend. The back rudder hung crookedly. The creaky old lifeboat was missing. The entire deck was scored with dents and the half-cog was still lodged by the stern.

"It seems a lot worse that it is," said Susan. She was bleeding.

"Susan!" Lucille exclaimed. She rushed forward, hands hovering. "Let someone else take the wheel."

Edmund took it, and Peter and Lucille tore up their own clothes to tie up Susan's arm, which was only scratched by some metal and bled faster due to the great excitement of escape.

"Now can we go home?" Susan complained.

"That might be a problem."

They looked to Edmund. He looked at the dashboard.

"Need more fuel," he explained, and pointed at a brass needle that was weakly tipping below "EMPTY."

"Perfect," said Susan. "Wonderful. What a way to end the day."

"I'm sorry," Lucille said in a small voice. "If I hadn't made you all come with me..."

"I'd be getting arrested at an anti-war rally," Edmund snorted. "This is probably the best day of my life."

Susan glared at him. "While I can't agree with either of you on your choices, I don't think Lucille could have known a giant warship would try to blast us out of the sky."

"Jadis," Peter said. "Her name was Jadis."

"An ugly name for an ugly ship," Edmund agreed. "Now, if I had designed her, you would be never more excited to be blown up. Her Majesty, Queen Victoria would knight me."

"Wasn't Her Majesty's," Peter insisted. He wiped blood from Susan's neck with a ripped-up part of his sleeve. "It was just Jadis."

"An enemy ship? But they've never been that big before!"

"Wasn't Her Majesty's," Peter repeated. He seemed offended.

"Then whose?" Lucille wondered.

PING.

They jerked. A small radio-ship floated off the port. Shaped like bell, the top had a single tiny radio antennae and a little red bulb that pulsed with its signal. Puffs of steam billowed out of the bottom of the bell.

"Um," said Edmund.

"Did that craft just PING us?" Susan demanded.

PING.

"Um. Susan," Edmund said a little more insistently. "You know geography."

Disconcerted, both girls turned to look at him. He was gripping the wheel rather tightly, black hair mussed, dark eyes round.

"Yes?"

"Er- Do you know of any islands five hundred miles south-east of England?"

"No?"

Edmund nodded. "Right. So I have gone bonkers and we are not about to crash into that island up there."

Lucille whirled. Ahead of them, floating- actually floating- above the blue Atlantic was a large green landmass, miles and miles across. There was a dense section that looked like forest, and a paler slope like fields, and all around it were the whirling figures of autophons: mechanical gryphons made specifically to guard against invaders. Lucy had never seen so many in one place. Actually, she had never seen on in-person in her life; the closest she had come was when she checked out a book of ancient mechanics to help her fix the War Drone.

"Pull up!" Susan yelled.

"I can't," Edmund said, warily watching the autophons as he white-knuckled the wheel. "Out of fuel, remember? If we don't land soon, the engines will cut and we don't have strong enough thermals to stay aloft. We'll crash."

PING.

The radio-ship floated down onto the deck, pinging insistently at Peter, who sat on his crossed legs and frowned.

"We're friends," he said. "You don't have to be so rude about it."

"That's it, Pete," Edmund encouraged from the wheel. "Tell the nice little radio that we're nice, good English men and women who come in peace."

"All right," Peter said. "But I don't think he cares who we are, as long as we park along the river."

"There's no-"

"-River." Lucy pointed at the blue stream flowing off the side of the floating island and into the ocean.

"Ah." Edmund made a minute correction with the wheel and laughed exasperatedly. "Anything else your little friend can tell us, Peter?"

Peter looked up at them and grinned widely. He settled the musket back across his back and rolled onto his stomach, watching the natural clouds beyond the floating island.

"He says, 'welcome to Narnia.'"