Ministry Protocol: Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences

by Tee Morris

  *****

  The treacherous ice surface threatened to upturn him countless times, but Kuro managed to hold his balance and cover a sizable distance across the lake. The morning sun had finally begun to stir, adding grey and hue to the shadows, but still withholding its warmth. Soon, the boat was close enough for him to read the name, Sheila, stencilled across the rear hull, just above where the icy crust had frozen to its iron and timber.

  A half-hearted volley traded between the Usher lackeys on the ice and a trio of shipboard riflemen at the stern railing. Two henchmen lay prone, bleeding on the ice, but the exchange was otherwise mostly ineffectual.

  Fortunately for Kuro and the Usher men, the boat’s bow and its large primary cannon were safely frozen forward, away from the advance on foot across the water. Kuro could see a flurry of activity on-board, with clusters of men working near the four round barrel-like protuberances spaced around the hull. A thick flag of white smoke billowed skyward from the lone stack. A shot caromed off of his brass forearm, sparking away to chew a hole in the ice at his feet. He felt nothing from the hit, but still startled and fell, sliding forward. He heard Beverly shout his name from the beach. Once he’d slid to a halt, he looked back to see her running across the icy lake top for him, leaving the two henchmen behind to finish assembling the Gatling on its stand. He waved to show he was unhurt, but still she pressed forward.

  Kuro was momentarily overcome with humility, watching her display of selfless concern. “No, Beverly,” he murmured, far too softly for her to hear.

  A great staccato of machinery came to life from the Sheila. Kuro looked back to see compartments unlocking and sliding open in the four round barrels on the gunwales. Long, jointed limbs of wood and iron unfolded from within, touched down roughly on the ice coat that had ensnared the craft. Kuro then realised what the protruding barrels truly were: shoulders for legs that Amboy had appended onto his gunboat. The crew could be seen working intently; the boat’s four limbs began to stamp with alarming strength upon the frozen lake. He spotted young Percy Amboy, their former captive, among the three crewmen working the rear portside leg from the safety of the deck.

  First one, then another, then another of the Sheila’s legs broke through, scattering massive, misshapen plates of ice across the black water around it.

  “Shit.” He’d heard the word countless times from the labourers at the Scharnusser camp. Common as the word was, it seemed appropriate here. In less than a minute, the gunship had sprouted four limbs, transforming to a great, walking beast. Its squat stance reminded him slightly of the komodo dragons his former lord had kept as pets in his homeland. The Japanese man watched wide-eyed as the massive, mecha-creature struggled to rise out of the water.

  The Gatling gun awoke from the shore, its circle of barrels spinning, adding its red-hot fire to the discourse. The intensity of its attack was a stark contrast to the riflemen’s scattered exchange. Sheila’s crew hunched low to avoid the lead storm. Kuro watched a heavyset man move faster than his girth should have allowed to shield Amboy’s junior, watched him cut down in front of the child.

  More Ushers fell from return fire, even as a few managed to scramble from the ice up onto the deck. Kuro pressed on, drawing nearer to the boat, watching now as the integrity of the ground at his feet began to compromise and crack. He was aware of Beverly rushing behind him, catching up. Young Amboy pried his horrified stare from the bloodstained corpse of his saviour, locked eyes momentarily with Kuro.

  The boat was using its limbs and internal steering to affect a slow revolution, turning around, cracking the ice that had held it. The ice squeaked and fell apart beneath his feet; jagged fissures spread outward from the Sheila’s heavy footfalls on and through the surface. Five feet of water rippled now between the nearest rim of ice and the corner of hull behind the rear port leg. Kuro drew his wakazashi short sword in his left hand, hit the last piece of solid footing, and leapt from the edge of the world, hitting the gunship’s hull, landing in the numbing embrace of the cold water. His short sword blade stuck and held true in the wood between the slats of the ship’s iron plating. Two short meters up, a rifleman stuck his head out over the rail, grinned down at the Samurai. That common word came again to Kuro’s lips.

  The Gatling’s deadly scrawl travelled the gunwale with a thunder of sparks and noise; its trajectory passing just over Kuro’s head, sending the rifleman back to the deck. Using the wakazashi and the grip of his brass hand, Kuro began to ascend the outer hull the short distance to its deck railing. He chanced a look back, spotted Beverly on a small island of broken-away ice just behind him, her dozener pistol firing up into the Sheila.

  “Go, Samurai! I’m right behind you!” she shouted. One of the embattled Ushers already on-board tossed a rope over the low sides for them, then turned and locked arms with one of the Amboy crew. Beverly leapt from her frozen plate just as it split and sank, catching the dangling rope. “Go!” she shouted, and the two of them climbed up to scale the railing at the same time.

  Once on deck, chaos embraced them.

  Beverly pointed to a man mostly obscured by his trenchcoat, goggles, and hat, holding the wheel steadily, positioned just behind the bulky cannon platform. Crewmen swirled around him, either fighting invaders or working to keep the ship moving. The boy they’d come for cowered wide-eyed around the man’s feet, watching the carnage on the level below.

  “Amboy,” Kuro said.

  “Father and son,” she replied.

  The Sheila’s legs pulled the massive body upright, back out of the water, taking steps on top of the sturdy ice shelf, edging its nose toward the shore. The deck lurched with each stride, as if they were daring the frigid bay underneath to take them to its murky depths. Kuro could hear the Gatling still rattle its deadly report, but now Amboy had rotated his vessel nearly enough that his gunners were excitedly prepping their own weapons.

  A number of Ushers had gained access to the deck by now, evening up the numbers against Amboy’s Spartan crew. Not far from where Kuro and Beverly had boarded, Bruce Campbell was squared off against three henchmen, clearly enjoying the crackle of Tesla knuckles on his hand. A similarly-dressed man stood next to him, not quite as tall, twirling knives dexterously in both of his hands. He kicked his nearest foe overboard and looked up to see them.

  “Bruce?” the bladed warrior said, his mouth a deep frown.

  “What is it?” Campbell growled. “I’ve got three tasks to—hold on— Yah!—two tasks to dispatch here, mate. Is it urgent?”

  “Possibly.”

  “A pleasure to see you again, Agent Hill,” Beverly said.

  The man answering to “Hill” cocked his head to one side, his eyes blank. “Have we met?”

  “Oh, her. You’ve met her before, Brandon. I said the same thing. I’ll explain later. Watch out for the Chinaman.”

  “Samurai are Japanese, Bruce,” Hill quipped.

  Kuro liked Hill already.

  The two Ministry Agents charged them. A flurry of steel and sparks ensued. One of Agent Hill’s knives glanced off of the Samurai shoulder plate; Campbell grabbed Kuro’s right forearm with the Tesla knuckles, coursing painful voltage through his body. “I know you feel that!” the big Australian shouted, before he had to duck Beverly’s steamsword.

  Kuro was vaguely aware of Captain Amboy shouting from the bow, his voice cracking as he hollered at the shore, “You want to play with cycle guns? Try a Gatling cannon!” Two of his men, with Amboy stooping to lend his own strength to theirs, worked a massive crank on the cannon apparatus.

  The ensuing booms were unsettling, each cannon blast coming less than a second apart. The deck shuddered with each shot. Kuro’s attention was focused on the Tesla knuckles and spinning knives before him. It was difficult not to marvel at the gunship’s main cannon retrofitted with a cycle of barrels, which spun and fired with precise, high-speed timing. Amidst the fray and the lingering burn of the Tesla jolt, he revelled of the battle thrill in his
chest.

  Meanwhile, the ship continued its odd, four-legged crawl across the lake ice, getting closer to the lakeshore, while continuing to discharge eight-pounder shots. Dawn’s clouds glowed enough now to light the whole scene clearly. The Usher Gatling men fled their post, just seconds before their weapon was blown to fragments. The Sheila cannonmen then rotated the gun platform just slightly to focus their destructive fire on the staked zeppelins. Cannonballs spit from the barrels at high velocity, pelting the narrow beach. Amboy’s son jumped up and down with each hydrogen explosion, cheering as each blimp collapsed in a heap of smouldering aluminium, hemp, and wood. Violent eruptions of sand and splintered wood burst all across the shoreline. He and his father seemed oblivious to the battle raging on the deck. Usher henchmen versus Amboy crewmen, Ministry Agents versus Samurai and Scharnusser.

  “Bloody crazy Yanks,” Campbell muttered through gritted teeth, his electric fists clamped around Kuro’s blade. “Hey Zack, you want to—” But his shouted request would never finish. The ship’s rear leg suddenly stumbled and broke through a weakness in the ice; the craft tipped abruptly backward, turning the deck into a slide. The combatants staggered, fell, and slid into each other, changing the game like the tipping of a chessboard. Kuro caught Brandon Hill in an awkward embrace. Campbell fell into a risqué position on top of Beverly, but she flung him away.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Amboy’s voice could be heard over the commotion. Battle roars turned to shouts of alarm. The boy’s high voice rang out clearly over the rest. Ice around the boat shattered and flaked. Sheila’s other three legs continued to pump, but only squeaked and slid, alternately finding thin ice and water, their multiple joints struggling to adjust to the slippery, unsure surface.

  Kuro momentarily lost his opponents, his balance, and his focus, sliding and slamming hard into the stern railing, only vaguely aware of Brandon Hill climbing free. He shook his head, trying to clear the daze, struggling to track the Ministry agents, distantly expecting to feel the burning dig of a bullet or blade into his flesh at any moment. The ticking of his arm sounded thunderous in his head. There was a new timbre to the shouts that cut through his haze, the foreign words making sense again as clarity returned.

  “Don’t hurt him!” Was that Hill’s voice?

  “Hold on, hold on!” Campbell’s voice. No doubt.

  Kuro looked up to his left. Beverly held Amboy’s son in her arms, her pistol against the boy’s temple as her steamsword lay hissing with heat next to her leg. The boy’s face looked just as frightened as on the evening when Kuro and Hideo had stolen him from his father’s island.

  “Beverly,” Kuro said softly.

  The Ministry agents stood silently nearby, holding their empty hands out to plead calm. The Ushers and Amboy crew around the deck were stock still in place, not daring to move. Ice sculptures for this moment in time.

  It was the laughter—the wild cackle of a madman—that grabbed Kuro’s attention away from the tableau.

  Zachary Amboy, holding tight to the wheel during the slide, chortled and guffawed at the grey sky above him, then retrained his gaze upon Beverly holding his son. The vacant anger in his grin set a profound disquiet upon Kuro’s soul.

  “You will let him go, you know,” Amboy said, laughing.

  “Does he deserve more mercy than my uncle?” Beverly shouted, pulling back the hammer on her dozener pistol. “Mikael Scharnusser sends his regards from hell!”

  Percy—held tightly against her—sobbed, calling out for his father.

  “He’s only seven,” Kuro pleaded.

  “Quiet, Samurai,” she hissed, her anger feral.

  He swore silently in Japanese, his affections for her reeling amidst the peril and horror of her threat to the child. Campbell and Hill had both inched almost imperceptibly closer. Zachary Amboy was still chuckling quietly, madly, coming down the slight companionway from the bow.

  “Beverly, we’ll die here if you do this,” Kuro said. “There will be no honour in these deaths.”

  “We have as many men as they do. Don’t be a coward. My family will be avenged…” and Beverly said more, but he’d stopped listening. He allowed a momentary sigh, squeezing his eyes together wearily, then reopening them.

  It was a precision strike that he’d have performed in younger days with unthinking, easy confidence, when his sword hand was still flesh and bone. Yet, even with the clockwork uncertainty of his artificial forearm, Kuro moved quickly, flicking his katana tip in close, inches from the boy’s face, nicking Beverly’s fingers and knocking the pistol from her grasp. It fired once over Percy’s head, eliciting a scream from the boy. Shouts sounded out from all around the deck. Beverly clutched her bloody fingers, her expression plummeting from surprise to pain to anger.

  Percy wriggled free, sprang toward the security of Bruce Campbell’s knee. Beverly scooped up the steamsword and lunged, but Kuro stepped in the way, easily parrying her strike with his katana. She roared frustration and rounded on him.

  The swords locked in an aggressive kiss, her strength and push driving him back; he locked in a stance, rounded his blade free, stepped back toward her. The two exchanged heated blows, sparks and heat flying from each parry. Each knew the other's moves intimately from their monastery courtyard practices, although neither had ever seen such ferocity and strength from the other. Beverly’s sword had always been cool; Kuro’s had always been made of wood.

  The boat lurched as it found its footing and clambered up to walk the ice again, its systems running automatically, a crewman on the wheel deck now, driving them toward the shore. The Ushers and Amboy crew had not returned to their own skirmish, still entranced by the duel, but had backed away to give the swordfighters berth. The boat’s rocking was gentler this time; everyone managed to remain upright.

  “Anyone else feel like we’re eavesdropping on a lovers’ spat?” Campbell asked no one in particular. One of Amboy’s crewmen tried to push past Campbell, who shoved him roughly back into the crowd. Someone responded with a punch, and the temporary calm was utterly shattered. Shouts of surprise and alarm swelled around the decks like turbulent waters preluding a storm.

  Kuro and Beverly continued to circle, strike, and counter, unheeding of their surroundings. Their swords drew them in close again, their faces close, their eyes locked, their feet fixed firmly near the railing, neither saying a word. Beverly’s hair whipped forward, brushing the Samurai’s face through his helmet.

  Kuro felt a warrior’s instinct to turn around and face a new danger, but dared not take his focus from Beverly’s smouldering blade. “Here goes nothing,” he heard from behind, the Australian drawl unmistakable.

  Something large, hard and muscular slammed into him, thrusting him up against Beverly, taking them hard into the railing, momentum spinning them up and overboard. All three of them—as Kuro realised Campbell was with them—hit the ice hard. Beverly skidded a few meters away. Kuro’s heavy armour shattered the ice, plunging him into the frigid waters below. He did not have long to react to the needles of pain surrounding him as a large hand grabbed the Samurai by his arm, and pulled him up to the surface. He lay on his back next to Campbell for two quick breaths, knowing that anything longer would be fatal.

  Beverly’s steamsword arced down from above, missing by less than a second as the men rolled apart, carving a channel into the ice where they’d just been. Kuro was soon on his feet, sliding, leaping at her with an off-balance katana counterattack. Bruce scrambled on all fours until he was a safe distance from the combatants, the treacherous surface refusing the purchase of his numb fingers. The Sheila continued its fast-paced tread across the thawing ice surface, moving away from them where they’d fallen, bearing quickly down on the shore. More and more Usher henchmen were pitched over the rails as it stepped onto the narrow beachhead, reflecting the turn of the deck battle in Amboy’s favour.

  Kuro breathed heavily, watching Beverly for some sign of emotion, but her face was void of all bu
t anger. Her eyes saw him, but were as lifeless and mechanical as his ticking arm, as if she’d retreated somewhere deep inside, leaving her body to function as a remorseless war automaton. Her breathing was coming as heavy as his, the vapour mingling with the rising mist from her steamsword. Hideo had been right. He knew the path they had chosen led to dishonour and darkness. Kuro understood now, but refused to die by his own hand. He would die for what was right.

  End of pause. They fought across the lake’s slippery surfaces, leaping from broken ice plates to sturdy shelves to half-submerged sheets, each as watchful of the treacherous, brittle footing as they were of their opponent. The sulphuric scent of her sword pommel’s boiler was strong in the air; it hissed with each steel touch of blades. Three grunts of effort from Beverly, three strikes, eliciting three parries and three steps back from Kuro. She chewed her lower lip, immersed in focus, again reminding him of their morning practices.

  It was a crack in the ice that finally betrayed him.

  She grunted with three forceful high strikes, driving Kuro back. His foot broke through a weak patch in the ice, plunging his backward step into the frozen watery void. He flung his arms up, off-balance, his left boot submerged. His brass arm flung in front his chest, just in time to shield the piercing thrust of her steamsword. The blade tip drove easily through, skewering gears and cords, protruding far out through the other side of his forearm. Kuro pulled his right foot free, adjusted his footing, and fell forward into his arm with a deep-throated cry, the super-heated swordpoint driving unchallenged through his armoured breastplate. Steel dug through cold steel and leather, then flesh and bone beneath.

  Beverly gasped, her cold resolve dropping away to panic, awareness dawning of what had just happened.

  Kuro had taken numerous glancing sword blows and cuts in battle before, had even lost his arm and endured the surgical attachment of a brass prosthetic; but nothing had been like this. The scalding pain was unlike anything he’d ever experienced, radiating from a core deep inside his breast. Smoke rising, the pungent scent of scorched flesh assailed his nostrils. His right arm remained stuck before him, unable to move, unable to pry the smouldering steamsword from its lodging inside his ribcage. Beverly’s hands let go of the pommel, went to her face in horror, her mouth open in a silent scream, tears falling freely to the surface of the ice. Before her, the Samurai fell to his knees, the sword still lodged in his arm and his torso. Blood flowed freely beneath the cloth and steel of his armour, running crimson rivulets into the ice.

  “What have I done, Kuro?”

  She fell to her knees to meet him, touched his skewered brass forearm, gently pulling to unsheathe the hot blade from his chest. The katana remained fixed in his grip, but both swords fell uselessly away as the dead arm slumped to his side. She pulled the helmet from his head and touched his face, already gone as pale as the frozen surface below. She leaned her forehead into his.

  “What have I done?”

  He dropped the gauntlet from his left hand, weakly touched her hand on his cheek. “I have been felled by the most worthy of opponents,” he wheezed, pulling his head back to look at her, to truly see her one final time, her face haloed against the rising sun. “This…is…an honourable death. Arigato, Miss Beverly.”

  He struggled to forge a bloody smile, grateful for the compassion returned to her eyes.

  A good memory to take with him to the other side.