by Ewing, Al
“Jacob!” Maya screamed, and he looked up – to see the missiles roaring straight towards him, a payload of death for him and everyone he loved! “Take off the ring!” she screamed, and despite all his instincts, he found himself reaching to –
Don’t let go.
– he jerked the wheel to the side, and the missiles missed them by inches. “Now!” he shouted, and Arcturus opened up with the mass driver, spitting great balls of lead into the void as the rockets blazed past his position. A moment later, the massive bullets did their work, and the missiles exploded, buffeting the Jonah II in a torrent of fire and flame!
“Sir!” Rousseau-5 cried, “We’ve got a rupture in the main boiler! We’re going down!”
The Jonah II, spewing smoke, began to spiral away from the welcoming stars, towards the green planet below. As Steele fought to level out the ship, he imagined he could hear Lomax cursing under his breath – but the radio was dead.
“THE WEDDING WILL be held in one hour, my dear Jacob.” Lomax sneered, fingers toying with his elegant moustache. “It promises to be the event of the season at the Royal Palaces. And you will be the guest of honour – or should I say – your severed head!” The Space Satan threw back his head and cackled, a diabolical laugh that echoed around the arena and drew cheers from the crowd of red-skinned, reptilian clones who’d been assembled to watch this cruel gladiatorial combat.
Beside him – on her own golden throne – Maya struggled in her bonds, her dark skin glistening in the Venusian sun as she gazed helplessly at the terrifying spectacle.
Steele rubbed his temples with his right hand, frowning. Hadn’t he been on board some kind of spacecraft a moment ago? How had he ended up here? Some sort of crash...
...no, of course not. He’d been here for years.
He felt a familiar weight in his left hand, and looked down to see the blue blade, Souldrinker, forged by the dwarves of Venus from the Stone he had brought with him on his trip through time... which had, of course, been revealed as a fragment of the mysterious Sword of Ancients, as wielded by the Gods of Venus in the time before time. Legend had it that the great Sword could drain the life from a world, and the dagger the dwarves had forged from a single chunk of it had the uncanny power to drink the life-force of any enemy and imprison it forever. A formidable weapon indeed, and Jacob’s skill with it, through the long years of his exile here, had earned him the title of Warlord of Venus, and the undying love of the Queen of Southern Venus, Maya Br’tana.
Northern Venus, however, had long been ruled by the clone-hordes of Lomax, the enigmatic Space Satan, who would never rest until the entire planet squirmed in his iron grip. Steele gritted his teeth, readying himself for the combat to come.
“You should have stayed in your own forgotten age, my prehistoric friend!” Lomax sneered, running a serpentine tongue over his fangs. “Your soul-sucking blade will prove of little worth against – the Derleth!”
“No!” Maya cried out, squirming helplessly as the iron gate of the arena lifted slowly, revealing a squamous horror, a shambling mass of half-fused tentacles dripping with foul, black ichor. In the centre of the obscenely waving flesh was a single vast, unblinking eye, that looked upon Steele with an infinite hunger. Slowly, the Derleth slithered forwards, leaving a trail of noxious slime.
“Yes!” Lomax smirked, as the crowd bayed for blood. “I have woken the Derleth – the great Soulless One – from his aeon-long slumber beneath the deepest trenches of the Venusian sea. He shall be my weapon against all who dare to defy my rule! In particular, your so-called ‘Warlord’ – for how can the blue blade drink the soul of a creature that has none – that eats souls itself? No, my dear, your consort is doomed, quite doomed. And soon you shall have a new husband, and all of Venus shall have a new King!”
“Oh, you fiend!” she sobbed, “You unspeakable fiend!”
The deadly Derleth slithered closer, slowly feeling its way across the arena floor. Suddenly, one of the tentacles shot out with the speed of a moray eel, a plethora of fanged mouths at the tip opening wide to drink Steele’s blood and absorb his very spirit. He dodged to the side just in time, then lashed out with the glowing dagger, slicing away the beast’s tentacle before it could close about him. The severed chunk of slime-coated flesh dropped to the arena floor – then melted, leaving a puddle of bubbling goo behind.
With any other foe, the first blood drawn by Souldrinker would mean the end of the combat; but the Derleth had no soul to steal, and it pressed the attack harder than ever.
“It’s after the dagger, my love!” Maya screamed, and at that Lomax showed the first sign of anger.
“Shut up, you little fool –”
“Don’t you see? It’s an eater of souls – it wants the souls captured inside the blade! Hurl it away from you!”
“No!” Lomax roared, shrinking back. “If he throws that blade at me, the Derleth will devour my soul with the rest! You can’t! You mustn’t! Oh, demons of the afterworld, have pity upon me –”
Jacob Steele grinned mercilessly, dodging another flurry of tentacles as he drew his arm back to –
Don’t let go.
– he leapt forward, driving the point of the blade deep into the grotesque creature’s single eye, bursting it like a balloon. Unmentionable jelly squirted out of the ruptured mass, stinking of ancient rot, corruption unknown since the first days of the universe. Still, Steele drove the blade deeper, working it into the creature’s brain as the tentacles thrashed madly for a moment, before going limp at last.
Perhaps the Derleth had no soul for the blue blade to absorb. But a dagger was still a dagger, and a monster from beyond the dawn of time still had a weak point.
Lomax stood to his full height, pointed one trembling red finger at the Warlord of Venus, and screamed –
“– OKAY, THIS ISN’T working.”
Maya raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps it’s your scenario. The ‘Venusian sun’? Why not just ‘the sun’? And you really oversold it on the last run-through...”
“What, the stab-me-in-the-chest thing? That’s called incentive.” Lomax scowled, scratching the back of his head. “Anyway, look who’s talking. ‘Oh, you fiend, you unspeakable fiend!’ Really? And what’s with all the helplessness? You’re the least helpless person I know.”
“Well, it’s fun to pretend occasionally.” She smiled, enjoying his irritation. “You lived with the Doctor for years, don’t tell me you never did anything like that with him.”
“I lived with a depressed bald man,” Lomax sighed, “who was terrified of touching people or even talking to them. The whole experience was about as sexy as haemorrhoids. Poor bastard.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “One of these days you’ll have to let me in on how exactly you got him to destabilise France on your orders...”
“I just told him to take a vacation,” Maya smiled, innocently. “Anyway, digressions aside, what do we do now?”
She looked over to the flickering column of blue light on the dais – interweaved copper, zinc and cavorite, supplied with crackling Omega energy and supervised by the mental power of a Commodore-class thinking robot.
It was fortunate that Pluto had arranged for his blueprints for the VIC series to be kept safe from any eventuality; her agent, Prometheus Quicksilver – bastard heir of the Quicksilver line – had retrieved them, along with notes from various other projects, during the chaos of the volcanic eruption. As a result – and with Lomax’s help – the twin kingdoms of Britannia and Zor-Ek-Narr were once again at the forefront of modern technology, their incredible advancements making them the rulers of the world almost by default. From the philosopher-plutocrats of China to the warring isolationists of the American continent, there was no civilisation on Earth that dared to disobey an edict from the Immortal Queen.
Britannia was certainly, at this point, the only country capable of reaching into the timestream for an audience with the Keeper of the Stone.
While computing power had increased in leaps and b
ounds over the centuries, thanks largely to Pluto and the new generation of machine consciousness, the basic method by which the Lonesome Rider was retrieved from his lonely vigil had changed little since its invention by the renegade S.T.E.A.M. agent, Philip Hawthorne, in the early twenty-first century; a gateway would be created, the Rider would appear from exile, and there would be a brief attempt, before the portal collapsed, to kill him and take the Stone from his corpse.
These attempts would, without exception, end with the deaths of anyone who tried. Even when the would-be assassin fired from inside a concrete bunker, or a tank, the result was the same. Jacob Steele would have been deadly enough, if you made the mistake of drawing down on him; the Keeper of the Stone was death personified.
After the Doctor’s disappearance, Lars Lomax had flown to Britannia to join Maya as a scientific adviser; his already vast intelligence had only grown more subtle and devious over the years, and this seemed like the right strategic move. “I’m sure you’ll betray me eventually,” she’d smiled, shaking his hand on his arrival, “but you’ve got all the time in the world for that.” He’d laughed at that, happy to be understood, and that night they’d played chess for the first time in years. The morning after, he started working on a means of bringing the Stone back inside current time, and keeping it there.
The solution was simple and elegant; force was never going to work against the Lonesome Rider, and – immortal or no – Lars Lomax had no desire to get shot through the head. So how to get the Stone out of his grip? “Simple,” Lars smiled, in that way he had. “We ask.”
Maya had leant back on her chair, studying him carefully. “Just ask him to hand it over?”
“Sure. Checkmate, by the way.” Lars’ smile widened as he theatrically knocked over her King. “The thing is – it’s all about how we ask.”
Maya had to admit, it was inspired. First, build your Omega platform; no change there. Her people could make one of those in their sleep. The hard part was building the Phantasmagorical Projection system over the top of it.
They’d been semi-popular attractions in Britannia towards the end of the twentieth century – bizarre brass coffins that promised to plunge the entertainment-hungry visitor into the virtual world of their choice; the default setting was Alice in Wonderland. Most found the notion of being submerged in a fictional reality oddly disquieting rather than enticing; had the punters known that the booths were fully capable of killing in the right circumstances, they would have been even less likely to volunteer themselves for the experience. Lomax’s idea was to materialise the Lonesome Rider inside a Projector, and – while he was still reeling from the novel experience of not having anyone try to kill him – run him through various fictional sequences designed to make him reject the Stone.
It was difficult – obviously there could be no margin for error – but eventually they had a projector guaranteed to start working on Steele the moment he materialised in their timeframe.
After that, it was just a matter of writing the correct story...
LOMAX FROWNED. “ALL right. We have less than an hour before the cavorite reserves are drained, and we’ve used about forty minutes of it. Once our hour is up, Jacob Steele vanishes from the timestream, and if we ever want him back we’re going to need to find our own weight in industrial cavorite from somewhere. Do we have that?”
Maya shook her head. “It was hard enough finding the latest batch. Cavorite’s a lot scarcer than it used to be.”
“Not to mention the fact that there’s barely any coal or oil or even wood left, and the entire planet is a smog-filled ruin, thanks to our wonderful ancestors and their enlightened approach to the problems of pollution.”
Maya chuckled. “Lars, we’ve both been around since at least the twentieth century. That was us.”
“Well, remind me to think ahead in future. The point is, this may be our last shot.” He sighed, scratching the base of one horn. “All right, all right... something in our scenarios isn’t working. We’re providing a world of adventure for him, so he’s got something exciting to latch onto from the off. Then we’re putting him, and those around him, in physical jeopardy – a jeopardy that he can only get out of by abandoning the Stone. If he won’t abandon the stone, he’ll...” – Lomax glanced towards the brass coffin on top of the dais, and lowered his voice – “...he’ll die, and once again the Stone will be ours. Except we have a problem there, because he’s not rejecting the Stone and he’s not dying. He’s winning.”
“He’s the Lonesome Rider, Lars,” Maya said, frowning. “What did you expect?”
“Honestly? I expected he’d enjoy some thrilling action on beautiful, scenic Venus.”
Maya shook her head, a half-smile playing on her lips. “You and your Venus. I know it was very disappointing that the terraforming experiments didn’t work out, Lars, but it’s time to let it go. Your little paradise can only exist over there now, in that brass box...”
Lars nodded, staring into space for a moment. “We’ve been fools,” he said suddenly, and walked over to the mobile brain feeding the Projector, checking the hands of the clock built into the robot’s chest. Fifteen minutes maximum before the cavorite exhausted itself. He’d have to work fast.
He smiled reassuringly at the brain, then flipped open its cranial hatch, fingers flicking over the gears and switches inside, conversing with it through mathematics. “You said it yourself; he’s the Lonesome Rider. We’ve both read the histories – Jacob Steele was renowned for staying on the job until the end. He’s not going to abandon his task because we threaten him.” He snapped the hatch closed, and the robot nodded in silent understanding. Lars took a step back.
Maya cocked her head, watching closely. “What did you program in, Lars?”
“The end.” He grinned. “Paradise in a box.”
“STEELE?”
Jacob Steele blinked, dazzled by the setting sun.
Reed was in the middle of boiling water for coffee; he started at Steele’s sudden arrival, then stared at him for a long moment, shaking his head. “Good God, man,” he said, in a dry whisper, “I thought you were dead. Where did you go?”
Steele looked around. He was still on the mesa, but the floating orrery of rocks and stones had crashed to Earth, forming a ring of concentric circles around the twisted body of the madman Edison. Nearby, the Locomotive Man was a smoking heap of wreckage, steam still rising from the twisted metal.
“I wish to hell I knew,” he breathed. He tried to remember the hallucinations; that strange spaceship, the arena, the blue void, the Stone whispering in his mind.
He looked down at his left hand. He was still carrying the damned thing.
Reed’s look of astonishment cracked into a broad smile. “You vanished during the fight. Just... popped out of existence with that stone of Edison’s. If I were you, I’d put the damn thing down now –”
Don’t let go.
“Best to hang onto it, I reckon,” Steele muttered, without thinking about it. With his right hand, he slipped his iron back in its holster, then fumbled in the pocket of his coat for a cigar. Lord knew he needed one.
Reed raised an eyebrow. “Well, if you insist... You know, I honestly through you’d been wiped out – disintegrated utterly. Stranger things, as they say, have happened.” He laughed shakily. “Isn’t that right, Mister Owl?”
Steele’s eyes widened.
Grey Owl stepped out from behind the wagon, as hale and hearty as he’d ever been.
“By God,” Steele laughed, shaking his head. “What the hell happened?”
Grey Owl shrugged. “One minute I was deciding not to shoot you, the next I was waking up in the back of that snake oil salesman’s wagon.”
Reed grinned. “Coffee,” he said, pressing a mug into Steele’s free hand. “As I understand it, prolonged use of that stone seems to disrupt time – you were transported an hour or so into the future, while Grey Owl’s personal timeline was reversed into the past, to... well, to before he died.
” He shook his head. “I have to tell you, an event like this is completely unprecedented –”
Steele laughed, then sipped the coffee. It was the best thing he’d tasted in a hell of a long time, and he couldn’t help but noting there was a mess of bacon sizzling over that fire as well, but that could wait a spell. He turned to Grey Owl, smiling broadly. “It’s called a gift horse, Reed. Don’t go looking it in the mouth. How are you feeling, Grey Owl?”
Grey Owl smiled back, a little cagily, as if sizing Steele up – then, on impulse, he stuck out his left hand. “That’s up to you. Are we friends?”
Steele looked down at the stone in his hand.
Don’t let go.
“Hang on a second, I got my hands full here,” he joked, but he could see Grey Owl looked angry at that, the old fire of enmity flickering in his eyes. Steele looked around for a place to put his coffee, feeling like a damn fool while Grey Owl was standing there with his hand out –
Don’t let –
– and he could see in the other man a kind of pained realisation developing, that all the talk back at Devil’s Gulch had been just that, just talk, and there was to be no peace between these men unless it came out of the barrel of a gun –
Don’t –
– and then Grey Owl’s hand was slowly drawing back, and the hurt in his eyes was too much for Jacob to stand, and he put the damn stone down to shake hands like a man.
Except when he lifted his hand again, he was alone on the mesa, and when he looked down at his open hand it was a skeleton’s, grey as ash and crumbling like wet sand...
