Fall

by Rod Rees

  Twenty yards.

  ‘We haven’t got time for this nonsense. My men are wet, tired and hungry, now stop buggering around or I’ll have you on a charge.’

  ‘Halt or I fire!’

  They got to within ten yards of the SS camp before the first shot was fired, and even then it was aimed over the heads of the attackers. Only when the WFA fighters charged inside and began blasting the baffled SS sentries did things start getting nasty. Belatedly, one of the SS’s Gatlings rat-tat-tatted bullets into the ranks of Trixie’s fighters. Men and women began to fall, their screams meshing with those of SS sergeants and officers as they urged their soldiers awake and into the fight.

  *

  It took a real effort for Algernon Dashwood to follow Trixie’s orders and keep his Royalists back from the fighting. He knew the assault on the SS encampment was going to be a brutal affair and that the chances of Trixie surviving were slim, but she had brushed his advice that she was too valuable to risk in a firefight angrily aside, so he had bitten his tongue and concentrated on carrying out his orders. His mission was to seize the pontoon, get it down to the river and then to scuttle it, and to do that he and his men had to commandeer a steamer. Easily enough said but a devil, he suspected, to do, his major concern being that the steamers would have gone cold boilers – it was the middle of the night, after all – and hence would be inoperable.

  The taking of the steamers was accomplished more easily than Dashwood had believed possible. The surprise of their attack was total and such was Crockett’s efficiency in dealing with the platoon of SS guarding the steamers that they weren’t given a chance to utter a peep before they were dead. Once the guards were settled, Sergeant Butch Cassidy swung himself up into the cabin of the first steamer and gave the thumbs up.

  ‘Lady Luck’s with us, Major,’ Cassidy shouted down from his perch. ‘The boiler’s as hot as Hel and then some. The SS must have been aiming to work through the night.’

  ‘Get the steamer over to the pontoon and hitched up to the sledge,’ Dashwood ordered and immediately Cassidy began to throw the levers controlling the steamer’s tracks, swinging it around in the direction of the sledge used to drag the pontoon up from the beach. It took only a couple of minutes to hitch the steamer to the sledge and then Cassidy poured on the power, the steamer bellowing as it took the strain.

  By Dashwood’s reckoning, with the ground sloping down to the beach bordering the Wheel River it should have been a simple operation to move the Column to the river, but the rain had been heavy and the ground was soft. The result was that the steamer struggled to get the sledge and its three-hundred-ton load moving, and the more Cassidy tried to force the steamer forward, the more its tracks tore up the forest floor. There was a real danger of the steamer digging itself in.

  ‘Hold hard, Cassidy!’ Dashwood shouted over the noise of pummelling pistons. ‘Captain Crockett, bring up the second steamer.’

  It took ten minutes of agonising delay before the boiler of the second steamer reached operating pressure, but when it was finally hitched to the sledge it did the trick. The two steamers working in tandem had enough grunt to move the load and slowly, inch by inch, they edged it towards the river.

  Too slowly.

  With every second that passed it seemed to Dashwood that the noise of the fighting behind them became worryingly closer. The SS had obviously recovered from the shock of Trixie’s attack and were now fighting back with a vengeance. He checked his revolver. He’d a feeling he’d be needing it.

  *

  The firefight in the SS camp was confused and vicious. Trixie knew it was vital that her fighters hit the SS hard and fast, denying them the chance to get organised and to use their superior numbers and firepower to repel their attack. For a moment she actually thought they might do the impossible and defeat the SS, the WFA moving through the camp with deadly efficiency, shooting the enemy dead as they emerged, sleep-confused, from their tents. But these were battle-hardened StormTroopers they were up against, veterans who knew that if they panicked they would die. Instead they fell back, regrouping as they went, clustering in twos and threes behind cover and picking off Trixie’s fighters as they advanced.

  The battle hung in the balance, but then the SS managed to bring a second Gatling gun to bear. That was when the tide turned and the slaughter began in earnest.

  Standing behind a wide oak tree, blasting away at the SS, Trixie could feel the momentum draining out of the attack. Even as she shouted out fresh orders, a hail of bullets smashed into the tree, snapping bark away, ripping off branches and forcing her to flinch back.

  ‘Your father’s got the Column,’ Wysochi bellowed in her ear. ‘It’s time to retreat to the river.’

  This, she knew, was good advice, but retreating under fire was a difficult manoeuvre for any army, more so for a ragtag one like hers, when a retreat could easily turn into a rout. Praying hard that her fighters’ nerve would hold, she gave three shrill blasts on her whistle, signalling the fighters to pull back.

  ‘Keep firing!’ she screamed at the top of her voice. ‘Keep your heads down!’

  Then disaster struck. A couple of the younger fighters – sailors, unused to battle – ran out of ammunition. Their reaction was as predictable as it was catastrophic: they threw down their rifles and began to run. The panic was contagious and in an instant her army became a rabble.

  ‘Stand, stand!’ Trixie yelled but it did no good.

  ‘We’ve had it, Trixie,’ snarled Wysochi as he grabbed her shoulder in his great paw. ‘It’s every man for himself.’ And with that he dragged her deeper into the woods and away from the fighting.

  *

  Dashwood could tell from the sound of the gunfire that the game was up. One moment it was the low, ominous crack of Martini-Henry rifles that drifted to him through the trees and then suddenly it was the chatter-chatter of the automatic weapons used by the SS that predominated. His surmise was confirmed when fighters came dashing towards them, their eyes stark with fear, and their desperation to escape the SS chasing them making them deaf to the shouted orders to stop and stand.

  ‘I think it’s gone bad for the WFA!’ shouted Crockett as he urged the stoker to shovel yet more coal into the steamer’s firebox. ‘By my reckoning, Major, it’s gonna get hot and heavy around here mighty quick.’

  Dashwood nodded. ‘I think you’re right, Captain. Get the men to form a cordon between us and any SS who might come visiting.’

  ‘What about the Column, Major? We’re movin’ slower than molasses in Winter. We ain’t gonna get it to the river before the SS come calling.’

  Crockett was right. With the SS advancing towards them there was no chance of their being able to sink the pontoon. Dashwood looked around and his eye fell on Sergeant Cassidy. ‘Sergeant, do you have any blasting gelatin left from the time you blew up that train back in the ForthRight?’

  ‘Sure have, Major. ’Bout ten pounds or so. Whaddaya want blowing up?’

  Dashwood signalled to Captain Crockett to halt the steamers. ‘I want the steamers and the sledge under the Column blown to buggery and beyond.’

  Butch Cassidy gave a laugh. ‘Consider it done, Major.’

  *

  Wysochi hauled a protesting Trixie to the safety of the clump of massive oak trees they’d designated as the rallying point. He could hear the shouts of the SS close behind them but he knew that if he kept his head then the darkness and the trees would make it impossible for anybody to track them. All he had to do was find somewhere to hide and do it quickly. Dawn was only an hour away and once it was daylight the hunt for them would begin in earnest.

  ‘I can’t do this, Wysochi. I can’t desert my men.’

  Wysochi’s grip on Trixie’s arm tightened. ‘You’re not deserting them, Trixie: the chances are that most of them have already been rounded up by the SS. If you want to have any chance of stopping Crowley putting the Column on top of the Pyramid then the first thing you need to do is keep from standing in f
ront of a firing squad.’

  It was an argument that had some resonance, especially when her father – with Cassidy and Crockett on his heels – came to join them.

  ‘We failed, Trixie,’ he announced in a breathless voice. ‘The SS came at us before we’d got the Column down to the river.’

  ‘Damn … so what do we do now?’

  ‘My first inclination is to head back to our camp, but that, I think, will give only temporary refuge: the camp’s location will be one of the first pieces of information the SS interrogators extract from their prisoners. No, we need a place to hide, and, in my opinion, the best place to hide a tree – or even five of them – is in a wood.’

  *

  All of the army heard the dressing-down that His Holiness Aleister Crowley gave General Clement – his voice was that loud – when he had accused the general, as a consequence of his incompetence in not adequately protecting the Column, of putting the triumph of UnFunDaMentalism at risk. The dressing-down lasted almost an hour, and when a red-faced Crowley finally swept out of the general’s tent there had been a distinct lack of enthusiasm amongst the officers corps to attend their commander.

  ‘Fucking Rebs,’ snarled Clement when they were all gathered. ‘Fucking sneaky, underhand sons of bitches.’

  Captain Andrew Roberts edged back behind the more senior officers. He was only an engineer so it wasn’t his fault that the enemy had been able to penetrate the camp so easily. In fact, it wasn’t really the fault of any of the officers in the tent: the officer responsible for the defence of the camp couldn’t be with them, finding himself swinging by his neck from the branch of a tree.

  After downing a rather too large glass of Solution, the general seemed to get control of himself. ‘Okay, Roberts, what’s the damage?’

  ‘Both steamers and the sledge are u/s, Comrade General, and we lost two hundred StormTroopers and fifty-seven Polish workers who tried to join the—’

  ‘Fuck the Poles,’ sneered Clement. ‘What’s this done to our schedule?’

  ‘The destruction of the two steamers is a setback, General, but I have been advised by telegram that we will be receiving ten new steamer-tractors and two thousand more navvies by the end of the week. Once they’re here I am confident that any time lost can be quickly recouped … except, that is, if there is further interference by the Rebel forces.’

  Clement turned his attention to Colonel Sergei Trubetskoy, who was now – following the rather abrupt demise of the previous incumbent – officer commanding the SS regiments on Terror Incognita. ‘How many Rebs are still free, Comrade Colonel?’ Clement asked as he cut himself a chunk of chewing tobacco and popped it into his mouth.

  The Colonel fidgeted under Clement’s cold gaze. It never ceased to amaze Roberts how such a small and slight man – boy, really – as Clement could cow such big and brutal soldiers as Trubetskoy, but he did. ‘Interrogation of the prisoners tells us that the rebel Trixie Dashwood landed with two hundred fighters, and once in Terror Incognita she teamed up with a regiment of Royalists under the command of her father, Algernon Dashwood—’

  ‘That Royalist bastard. Ah thought we’d done for him in Warsaw.’

  ‘Apparently not, Comrade General.’

  ‘So, what’s happened to Trixie Dashwood?’

  ‘She escaped, Comrade General, along with her father. I already have one of my regiments – two hundred men – combing Terror Incognita for her.’

  ‘You using Blood Hounders in your search, Colonel?’

  ‘Yes, Comrade General.’

  Clement spent a reflective couple of seconds silently masticating his tobacco. ‘Okey-dokey, this is what we’re a-gonna be doing, Colonel,’ he said finally. ‘Ah want another two regiments out there a-searching for Trixie Dashwood. Ah want every stone looked under and every tree looked up. Ah want Trixie Dashwood found pronto. You hearing what ah’m saying, Colonel?’

  ‘Yes, Comrade General, but with all due respect, isn’t the use of six hundred StormTroopers a little excessive? After all, Trixie Dashwood is only a girl.’

  Clement gave a mirthless little laugh. ‘This is the same girl who played pirate and stole the rifles that enabled them damn-blasted Poles to kill so many of our boys during the Battle of Warsaw. This is the same girl who organised them Polak bastards so they kicked the shit outta some of the best the SS could throw at them. This is the same girl who held Rangoon against odds of ten to one. This is the same girl who came within an ace of bringing the Column of Loci to Terror Incognita. This is the same girl who put a bullet in my ABBA-damned shoulder. So the answer to your question, Colonel, is nah, six hundred StormTroopers ain’t excessive, ’specially as if you ain’t found her by the fiftieth day of Fall, she’s the girl that’s gonna be putting a noose around your neck.’

  1:14

  London, the Rookeries

  The Demi-Monde: 4th Day of Fall, 1005

  In an impassioned speech yesterday the Great Leader, Reinhard Heydrich, pledged the ForthRight’s support to the people of NoirVille in their struggle against the insidious creed of nuJuism. Speaking at the opening of the inaugural ForthRight/NoirVille Festival of Friendship, the Great Leader said: ‘The time has come for the leaders of NoirVille to understand the evil they have allowed to flourish in their midst. The nuJus are the enemy of all who would call themselves civilised, they seek only the destruction and enslavement of the rest of humanity, this foul ambition recorded by their own hand in The Protocols of the Sages of nuJuism and of the Most Ancient and All-Seeing Order of Kohanim. I call on HimPeror Xolandi to expunge the JAD from the face of the Demi-Monde and to exterminate the vermin skulking there.’

  Editorial carried in The Stormer, 6th day of Fall, 1005

  After a lifetime spent in public relations, assessing the reactions of Demi-Mondians to various events and pieces of propaganda and then working to manipulate those reactions, Ivy Lee had learnt a lot about human behaviour, becoming expert on all the numerous ‘tells’ his clients used. He had studied the incorrigible paperclip unravellers, the dedicated doodlers, the habitual earlobe-tweakers, the compulsive chin-scratchers and the inveterate desk-tidiers, and understood the motivations behind these unconscious tics. Everyone had them … everyone except Reinhard Heydrich. The Great Leader’s self-control was such that even now, when he was beset by so many shocks and alarums, he sat still and preternaturally calm behind his huge desk.

  Perhaps this chilled aloofness was itself a tell? Ivy Lee thought perhaps it was, and what it told him was that he should be very, very careful. He sensed that it wouldn’t take much to provoke the Great Leader into doing something truly despicable.

  Lee hadn’t met with the Great Leader since the debacle of the Awful Tower and he was aghast at the change the intervening weeks had wrought on the man. His superhuman sangfroid was as impregnable as ever, allowing him to mask his inner turmoil, but, to a trained observer such as Lee, there were signs aplenty that he was a man under enormous pressure. The tremor under his right eye and the tremble of the hand holding his cigarette signalled that Heydrich had a maggot in his mind.

  Lee waited for the Great Leader to speak. He had been waiting for over a minute, the dreadful silence almost as unsettling as the cold, blank eyes with which Heydrich was studying him. He was afraid of Heydrich and what his reaction would be to the unpalatable news he would be obliged to convey: men under pressure tended to react unpredictably to bad news.

  Worse, it wasn’t just Heydrich’s baleful presence that was discomforting Lee. Disturbing though it was to have been summoned to a meeting with the Great Leader, it was a disturbing situation made worse by the sinister man standing silently in the corner of the Leader’s private study. This, if he wasn’t mistaken, was the mysterious Septimus Bole, the fabled éminence grise – more accurately, the éminence noire – behind the Party. Mysterious because very few people had actually met the man: he was the veritable ghost in the well-oiled machine that was the ForthRight.

  But if Septimus Bole wa
s the ghost in the machine, then Aaliz Heydrich was playing the grain of sand.

  The Great Leader spoke. ‘You have made an assessment of the impact Aaliz Heydrich’s unscheduled appearance at the Victory in the Coven jamboree has had on public opinion?’

  Lee found it odd that the Great Leader should refer to his daughter in the third person, but then, he supposed, relationships between the members of the dysfunctional Heydrich family were probably best not dwelt on. The important thing was that since the girl had gatecrashed the celebrations marking the ForthRight’s conquest of the Coven and delivered her speech condemning her father and all his works, Lee’s tracking figures had gone all to Hel. Suddenly UnFunDaMentalism was most certainly not the flavour of the month even amongst the most diehard of ForthRightists. He just wondered how best to sugar-coat this particularly foul-tasting pill.

  ‘Yes, Comrade Leader. At the behest of the Ministry of Propaganda, my firm has been conducting weekly surveys of public opinion within the ForthRight in order to gauge how the directives of the Party might be finessed to make them more … palatable to the population. Each week one thousand citizens, representing a demographic cross-section of the ForthRight as a whole, are interviewed. These interviews are conducted in informal settings by physically attractive interviewers and are designed to elicit truthful responses to the pressing questions of the hour.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know all this. Just get on with it.’

  The tone that had inflected the Leader’s voice was all the persuasion Lee needed to get on with it.

  ‘In the most recent of these interviews we began by asking, “What does Aaliz Heydrich stand for?” This question was designed to establish the scale of the impact she has made on the consciousness of the ForthRight’s population post her appearance at the Crystal Palace. Although the Ministry of Propaganda has made strenuous efforts to suppress knowledge of and debate regarding what Lady Aaliz said, with there being over two hundred thousand people in attendance it has proved impossible to prevent gossip. This question was intended to establish the extent of the dissemination of the knowledge relating to the events of that night.’