Hometaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Action Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 6)

by Dean F. Wilson

   “You always were resilient,” Hamhart said, “but this'll put you out of business.”

   He cocked the rifle, but fell to a bullet from another: a golden bullet.

   Gus sat up to find the Baroness standing there in the haze, her night gown blowing, her golden musket smoking. She bit open a new paper cartridge and started to load the next bullet as the others regrouped to take on several more guards coming down the stairs.

   “Come along then!” Ebronah said sharply, as she entered the building without a hint of hesitation. She fired swiftly at the first guard she saw racing down, and he tumbled the rest of the way. Then she ducked under the stairs while she reloaded, giving the others a chance to kill the next two men.

   “Come!” she shouted at them, stepping over—and sometimes on—the bodies littering the stairway. “We have to stop them breaching the comms room.”

   They followed, exchanging fire with people above, until Porridge yelped and stumbled towards the wall. He held his hand to his side, where the blood leaked through his fingers.

   “I've been shot!” he bellowed, and he half-fainted.

   Gus gave him a light slap on the cheek and pulled him back to his feet.

   “Oh God,” Porridge cried, “I knew I should've worn red.”

   “You'll be fine,” Gus told him.

   “I'm seeing stars, Gus! Stars!”

   “You'll be fine!”

   They continued up, without any time to halt or tend their wounds, with Porridge vengefully launching several more rounds at the men above. Chunks of the stairway broke apart from the blasts, and left gaping holes for them to traverse when they climbed a little further.

   Then they came to a landing about halfway up, where the Regime were waiting in force. There were many familiar faces there, people you would see running grocers, lighting lamps—people you trusted. The Resistance troops barely got a good look at them before the bullets came.

   Ebronah ducked down to avoid some, one slicing through the bundle of her hair, freeing strands that fell down to her face. The others trundled back down too, except for Gus, who was most in the line of fire. He was struck in the stomach and chest and shoulder, each forcing him back a little towards the stairs. Yet he stood strong and roared out his pain, and blasted the man on his right—that overly polite florist—and blasted the man on his left—that chimney sweeper who always left soot on the furniture, and turned his gun on the two others in the centre.

   They fired at him. He took another hit, and this was one too many. He grunted and coughed, then slipped on the step, and went crashing down the spiral stairs, tumbling past the others, who clung to the wall and the railings, and leaving a trail of blood behind him.

   Porridge charged up, screaming, and took down the remaining two soldiers, and even took out a mouse scurrying in the corner, only stopping when he was out of ammunition and out of breath.

   The others came up slowly, maybe a little frightened of him as well. Tardo put his hand on Porridge's shoulder in consolement, as if he thought he had known Gus well.

   Then, as they prepared to tackle the next flight of stairs up to where Codex Carter worked, and the Regime rammed the door, they heard something strike the stairs, and saw a grenade bounce down the steps toward them.

   They dived, and the explosion ripped a hole in the landing, through which Tardo fell. He reached out for something, but the planks gave with him, and he would have fallen down to his death were it not for the hand of Gregan.

   The others helped him up, and he dusted himself off, and thanked Gregan, and might have spoken a thousand words of praise were he not pressed on by the Baroness, who barked orders as if they were by royal decree.

   They crept up the remaining flight, and gunned down the soldiers there, including the baker Erswell and the logger Camholt, whose improvised ram had left a huge dent in the final door.

   The battle was over, and there were bodies everywhere, but Gregan beckoned them to the nearby window, where they could see another group of Regime soldiers coming their way. Another battle would soon begin.

   “Everything all right up there?” one of the newly-arrived soldiers shouted up.

   It could not have looked alright. None of the Resistance team knew what to say, but they wanted to say it with their guns. Yet they were low on ammunition.

   Then suddenly they heard another voice downstairs.

   “Everything is all right,” it said, with a slight crackle. “This is Iron Command. Code 58766. Stay calm. Rest assured, we have everything under full control. Do not panic. Pursue your duties in the name of the Iron Emperor.”

   There was a shuffle of Regime salutes outside in response, and the soldiers departed, heading to their post guarding one of the city's gates.

   “What was that?” Ebronah asked.

   Porridge, still clutching his soiled blouse (and the wound beneath it), hung over the bannisters, where he could see Bitnickle peeping out from under the stairs far below. It was a Regime broadcast she sent, one of many being sent out on what they thought were secure channels.

   “Everything is all right,” she repeated the snippet, adding a word from a different broadcast: “now.”

   “Better than a gun,” Gus admitted.

   “Never mind that,” Ebronah interrupted. “We need to secure this place. Who knows how many more of them are out there.”

   “I'll see if I can board up the door downstairs,” Tardo volunteered.

   “Shouldn't you be in there?” Ebronah replied,pointing with her sharp finger to the comms room.

   “Me? I think I'm barred.”

   “I rule this city, young man. You're not barred if you can do some good in there.”

   She banged her fist on the door. It was almost as good as a battering ram. There was no response, but they could hear Codex Carter dragging furniture to reinforce the door.

   “I'm the Grand Treasurer! Open up this instant!”

   Her shrill, sharp voice could not be mimicked, and Codex Carter was reasonable reassured enough to push the furniture away and open the many locks on the door.

   The room was littered with equipment, even more than Tardo had last seen it, and some of it was in piles on the floor where Codex had emptied a table to block the entrance.

   “What have you done with this?” Tardo cried.

   “What do you mean?” Codex responded. “I've been setting it up.”

   “It's a mess.”

   “It was a mess when I was assigned here.”

   “This is in the wrong plug for a start,” Tardo said, sifting through the wires. “Ugh! This is going to take forever.”

   “We haven't got forever,” Ebronah warned.

   “How long do we have?”

   “For all we know,” she said, “we might already be too late.”

  38 – IRON INIQUITY

  Jacob and Whistler set out again, their teeth chattering, their legs rattling. The cold seeped into the core of them, and there it seemed to make a home. No amount of rigorous rubbing of hands or jogging on the spot could get it to leave.

   The snow was similar to the sand in that it had different textures in different areas, some soft, which their feet slipped through, and others hard, packed together tight enough that it was almost solid. All of it, however, took the boot prints of the Iron Emperor, creating a trail for them to follow.

   The wind picked up, and it was not the humid wind of Altadas, but an icy breeze, which swiftly turned into a snowstorm. Whistler found a pair of goggles in his borrowed coat, and he offered them to Jacob, but he refused, using his arm to guard his eyes.

   At one point it seemed like they had suddenly caught up with the Iron Emperor, for there was a black silhouette ahead, barely visible in the hail. Whistler made a dash for it, and Jacob could not grab him in time. Then, as sudden as they saw the figure entered their vision, Whistler disappeared from Jacob's. He h
eard the boy's yelp, and then a thud, and ran to find the snow had given way into a chasm.

  * * *

  Whistler groaned as he sat up, shaking the snow from his hair. He found himself in a dark chamber, still cold, but away from the deathly chill of the wind. The rocks beneath him were rough, all different shapes, knobbly even. It was only then, as his hands felt them, that his eyes caught up. They were not rocks at all. They were bodies.

   He let out the most blood-curdling shriek, which echoed in the chamber, and he recoiled from the frozen faces he had touched, only to find another body beneath him, another icy hand resting on his shoulder, another arm, another leg. No matter where he moved, he stood or kneeled or crawled upon a lifeless body, perfectly preserved in the ice.

   “Are you okay?” Jacob shouted down.

   “No!” Whistler shouted back up at a higher pitch.

   He heard a cry, then a thump, and Jacob came rolling down the slope into the chamber, landing on the corpses below. He made a disgusted, creeped-out noise, casting an arm away from him, and glancing around until he found Whistler standing in the corner hugging the wall. He still stood on someone's torso, but only his feet touched it now.

   Whistler watched as Jacob looked down at the floor with a grimace, then hopped along the bodies gingerly, trying to skip as many as possible. He reached the same wall as Whistler and placed a hand on his shoulder.

   “You okay?”

   Whistler shook his head. He could feel how wide his eyes were, even though he would rather not see anything in here at all. The darkness disguised nothing. If anything, it made his eyes work harder to see staring, frozen eyeballs of the dead.

   “It's pretty grim,” Jacob said.

   “It's horrible!”

   “Try not to panic, kid. We'll get out of here.”

   He looked around the entire room, while Whistler looked at the wall, resting his forehead upon it. He could still see bodies from the corners of his eyes, but did not want to close them, in case suddenly Jacob would disappear or the dead would come to life.

   “Looks like the only way out of here is back where we came from,” Jacob said after his brief survey. “It's steep, but I think we can climb it.”

   “Right,” Whistler said.

   “We're going to have to go back that way.”

   “Right.”

   “Over the … you know.”

   Whistler took a deep breath. “I don't like this.”

   “I don't like it either,” Jacob said, grabbing his arm. “The sooner we get it done, the sooner it's over with. Are you ready?”

   “Not really.”

   “Let's go.”

   Jacob leapt out, dragging Whistler with him. As Jacob sprang, Whistler stumbled. The icy bodies made them slip. Some of them crunched. Every one of them seemed to move just a little, as if they were not quite fully dead.

   To any onlooker, it was a short dash, but it felt like forever to Whistler. On reaching the entrance, he jumped eagerly onto the slope, sliding back down a little, and scampering up again so he would not feel a corpse beneath him again. Jacob pushed him up, then pulled as he got a better foothold, and the two of them scrambled out of cavern and back into empty whiteness, where the blizzard had died down a little.

   Whistler shuddered. “I want to go home.”

   “Yeah, remind me never to jump through portals to other worlds again.”

   Whistler felt the blood drain from his face, and he thought he must have looked as pale as the men and women below. He pointed ahead to where he had seen the silhouette through the snowstorm, and saw it now much more clearly. It was a mountain of bodies, at least a hundred feet high, topped with snow, but the arms and legs still stuck out, and here and there a head, some with their eyes closed, some ever watchful.

   Jacob turned to see it. “Hell,” he said. “This place is a graveyard.”

   “Can we go back to the battle?” Whistler asked, as if it would be any different back there.

   “I don't know how to get back. We have to find the Hometaker.”

   “Are those landship tracks?” Whistler asked, pointing to the snow to their left.

   “Yeah, kid. Good eyes. Looks like they're fresh too, or this storm would have covered them good.”

   Whistler nodded.

   “What, not dashing ahead again?”

   Whistler shook his head.

   Jacob smiled. “I know it's creepy, but the dead can't hurt you.”

   “They kind of seem like they're still alive.”

   “That's the cold preserving them. I imagine the Iron Emperor made sure they were dead.”

   “He did all this?”

   “Looks like it. Trokus said the dissidents disappeared in their thousands. Now we know where they went.”

   They continued on, following the trail left by the Hometaker, finding another mound of bodies ahead, and then another, until they passed half a dozen of varying sizes, and realised that this was but a fraction of the evil deeds the Iron Emperor hid from his people.

  39 – THE ALTAR OF WAR

  The Hometaker was perched on a snow-capped plateau, and close by there was a partially broken stone altar. The Iron Emperor stood before it. There was an axe at his feet, which he might have used to cleave the stone. There was no sight of his men, or of the open-top warwagon he came in, but the clue to their whereabouts could be found in the tracks that lead off the cliff, and the dent in the front of the Hometaker's hull. Lorelai stood beside the missile launcher, gun in hand. Even from a distance, she looked confused and angry.

   When Jacob and Whistler spotted them, the Iron Emperor already laid his penetrating eyes upon them in return. There was no cover to be found on this blank canvas. Everything was yet to be painted, and something told them that it might be painted red.

   Jacob strolled up, and Whistler hung back a little. Neither had really prepared for this. It did not look like Lorelai had either. There was an odd feeling in the air, a kind of concentration of energy at that location. Even the Iron Emperor seemed a little overcome by it, and Jacob wondered if that was why he had tried to break the altar. There were faint whispers.

   “Jacob,” the Iron Emperor said, stressing the name, letting the syllables slither out and trapping them between his teeth, like a snake beneath his boot, wriggling and writhing, but unable to escape.

   Jacob felt seized by the word, by his name, by the power of the voice that spoke it. Yet he fought it, and tried to hide it, and felt he had to challenge back. “What do we call you?” he asked. “Doesn't even look like you have a name.”

   The Iron Emperor smiled. “I have a name. I have many names. But here I have a title. None of you here are worthy of calling me anything else.”

   Jacob ignored him, directing his attention to Lorelai. She had turned on them all, but he felt personally betrayed. He was not sure who she was now, or who she worked for. It seemed even she did not know. Yet to Jacob, all he could think was that she was a Regime spy all this time, that it had all been a lie. “Family reunion, huh?” he asked her.

   She ignored him in turn. It was almost like he was not there. It was just her and the Iron Emperor. She was fully in his iron gaze.

   “You never answered me,” Lorelai spoke to her leader.

   “You never answered me either,” Jacob interjected, and she never would.

   “I saw the mounds,” she said.

   “You saw nothing,” the Iron Emperor responded.

   “So many bodies.”

   “So much nothing.”

   “There were thousands of them.”

   “A thousand nothings.”

   “Will you not acknowledge it?”

   “I acknowledge nothing.”

   There was a pause, and the whispers increased. The more the Iron Emperor spoke, the more they rebuked him. The louder they became.

   “I need to know,” she said
. “Is there a cure? Were you ever looking?”

   The Iron Emperor was clearly offended by the question. No one had asked him it before. He glanced at the altar in consternation, then turned back to Lorelai. “You doubt me?”

   “It's not that I doubt you … I just … I need to know.”

   “So, you doubt me.”

   Lorelai's face was ashen. “It's been a long time. We still haven't found it.”

   Even Jacob felt the oddness now, and heard the whispers.

   “And we never will,” the Iron Emperor said, and it seemed like he was not quite sure why he said it. The whispers increased, until they were given a voice, and they spoke through him.

   Lorelai had no words to give, and little colour in her face left to vanish.

   “I made you sick, Lorelai. I made you all sick.”

   Still she could not respond. Her mouth and eyes were wide with horror at the thought.

   “Hope is the sickness,” the Iron Emperor revealed, and seemed caught by frustration in revealing it. There was a fight happening that they could not see. He was strong, but they were many. “When you first take it, thinking you are ill, it gives you the Iron Plague. From then on, you need it, like you need me. I am your Hope.”

   Now Lorelai had some words: “Then you're also my sickness.”

   “You can't cure it, and you can't cure me.”

   “They just have to stop giving it to their young,” Jacob said, “and it'll fade out in time.”

   “They never will. The fear is too great.”

   “Until they know the truth,” Jacob replied.

   The Iron Emperor scoffed. “There are as many truths as there are worlds, and I'll conquer every one of them. We'll mine Altadas until there is nothing left, and then we'll move on to the next one, and the next, until the very Universe bows down to me, until the stars bend in worship of the only god that ever was, and always will be. For I am War. You think you can end me, but you'll start another, and you'll find me there again, ruling you. The glory is all mine. Mine alone.”