Gears of a Mad God Omnibus

by Brent Nichols

  She turned, panting, curling her hands into fists, determined to sell her life dearly.

  Five men crowded the mouth of the alley, spreading out to block her escape. She heard the clink of the chain hanging from one man's fist. A man with a knife stepped to the front of the group and said, "You give up now, Missy. You come quietly. We don't hurt you."

  She knew how much that promise was worth. "You want me?" she said. "Come and get me."

  His face clouded, he raised the knife in his right hand, and three men came barrelling into the alley. The tattooed man was in the lead, barefoot and shirtless, wearing only the pants she had tripped over when she ran through his room. The black man with the hoop earrings was beside him, and a fat white man with a thicket of red-brown beard. They crashed into the Javanese from behind, bowling a man over, and the tattooed man used his fist to knock a machete-wielding man sprawling.

  In an instant all was chaos, bodies reeling back and forth. Colleen stood frozen with indecision. She wanted to wade in and join the fight, but it could only end one way. She and her unexpected rescuers were outnumbered, and the Javanese had all the weapons. These brave men were going to die trying to save her, and there was only one way she could protect them.

  She raced down the alley, dodging past brawling men, jumping over a fallen man's outstretched legs. She burst into the street, and glanced back.

  Her plan was working. Several men were chasing her.

  She ran, then slowed as she saw a gleaming black sedan racing up the street. She turned her back on the car, faced the men behind her, and dropped her arms, trying to look exhausted and defeated.

  Two men had chased her out of the alley. The nearest man, a broad-shouldered thug with a crowbar in his fist, grinned and reached out for her with his free hand.

  Colleen, doing her best to gauge the progress of the car by sound, waited until the last possible moment. Then, when she judged the car was about to pass behind her, she grabbed the man's reaching arm with both of her hands.

  She pulled, catching him by surprise, and brought him stumbling toward her. She stepped aside and he went reeling past her. For a moment she thought she'd moved too soon, and her heart sank as he stumbled to a halt and turned to face her. Then the car swept in, tires squealing as the driver tried to stop. The front fender hit the Javanese and sent him sprawling across the hood, his head going through the windshield.

  There was no time to assess the damage. Colleen snatched up the dropped crowbar and turned to face the remaining man.

  He had a knife, but the crowbar gave her a reach advantage. She charged him, gripping the crowbar in both hands, and swung for the side of his head. She put all of her terror and rage into the swing, and his arm came up instinctively to block the blow. The crowbar slammed into his arm, she heard bones break, and his knife clattered onto the sidewalk.

  She darted past him, running back to the alley, terrified of what she would find.

  One Javanese man was sprawled unmoving on the ground. A man with a machete stood glowering, the man beside him holding a chain in one hand and a pistol in the other. Her three would-be rescuers were lined up, kneeling, heads bowed.

  Colleen sprang at the man with the gun, bellowing. She saw the pistol begin to swing toward her, knew that she would be shot before she could reach him. She threw the crowbar and the gunman ducked. The crowbar sailed over his head, and the tattooed man lunged at the gunman, bringing him crashing to the ground.

  The man with the machete snarled at Colleen, brought his arm back to swing at her, then grunted in pain as the black man with the earrings and the white man with the beard tackled him at waist and knees. They went down in a tangle, and Colleen darted in to kick the machete away.

  A shot rang out, then another. She whirled to see the tattooed man climbing slowly to his feet, tucking the pistol into his pocket. The man at his feet didn't get up.

  Fists smacked into flesh behind her. She turned to see the tattooed man's companions getting to their feet, leaving an inert Javanese man sprawled in the dirt.

  The tattooed man planted his hands on his hips. With his dark wavy hair, brown eyes, and deeply tanned skin he could have been almost any ethnicity. He spoke with an accent Colleen couldn't place, almost a drawling lilt. "Thank you, girl," he said to Colleen. "I'm obliged. Now, I have to go back to the cathouse for my clothes. Jake, you get the rest of the crew." The white man nodded. "Sol, run ahead to the ship. Tell Mick we're leaving, chop chop."

  Sol nodded, the rings in his earlobes swinging, and set off at a trot.

  The man looked Colleen up and down. He stood half-naked in a filthy alley, blood trickling from a nick in one shoulder, but he had the air of a duke receiving visitors in a palace. "You'd best come with us, girl. We'll see you safe to a better neighborhood."

  The three of them left the alley, skirting by a crowd that was gathering around the black sedan. The man whose arm she'd broken was nowhere in sight.

  "Thank you for helping me," she said as they walked.

  "It was our pleasure, girl."

  "Colleen. My name's Colleen."

  He sketched a short bow without breaking his stride. "Captain Hayzoos Libertad, at your service. This is Mr. Keefe, my majordomo."

  Keefe nodded affably.

  Hayzoos. It took her a moment to realize he meant "Jesus." It seemed sacrilegious somehow, but she supposed the name wasn't his idea.

  "I fear I've left the lovely Lotus Blossom unsatisfied," Libertad continued sadly. "I hope she won't be too angry with me. But I make it a strict rule never to tarry in a port where I've killed a man." He frowned. "I don't like to pry, but I can't help wondering what it's all about."

  Well, the truth would hardly serve. Colleen searched her mind for a lie, and a sort of giddiness overtook her, fueled by relief over her narrow escape from death. "You remember the man with the chain? He and I were arm-wrestling down by the docks. I beat him, and he was so embarrassed, he gathered up his friends and decided to kill me."

  Libertad gave her a hard look. "Well, that'll teach me to ask nosy questions."

  They walked another half block before the pieces clicked into place. "You have a ship," Colleen said.

  Libertad's chest puffed out. "The Persephone. She's not the fastest ship in the Java Sea, but she's the loveliest by far." Keefe grinned and nodded his agreement.

  "Are you available for charter?"

  Libertad rubbed the stubble on his chin and regarded her thoughtfully. "Well, now, you have me at a disadvantage there. I'm about to leave without time to buy a cargo. A charter might just suit me very well, if we can come to terms. Where are you headed?"

  "Christmas Island."

  His eyebrows rose. "Why on Earth do you want to go there?" Then he raised his hands in mock surrender. "No, never mind. No more nosy questions from me. You're going there to do more arm wrestling, I'm sure. Let me just fetch my clothes and we'll talk terms."

  Chapter 3 – The Foundation

  The Indian Ocean rose and fell in long, gentle swells as Sumatra slowly vanished over the horizon. Maggie and Colleen sat in wicker chairs on the deck of the Persephone, watching the last trace of land disappear.

  The ship, while hardly the gem of the South Seas that Libertad seemed to think she was, was nevertheless a big improvement over the Angel's Luck. Persephone was no bigger, but much cleaner, and if she showed her considerable age, she was lovingly well-maintained.

  There were eight men in the crew, from eight different countries, and if she went by appearance she wouldn't have trusted any of them an inch. They were, as the saying went, the kind of men you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. Except that she HAD met three of them in a dark alley, where they'd saved her life.

  Raised voices came from the bow of the ship. Maggie chuckled and said, "I guess Phillip has told the captain about our change of destination."

  Colleen gazed out across the water, wondering what was in store for them. She ran through what little she knew of Suderland. It was likel
y the top of an ancient volcano, with only half the crater showing above water. The island was crescent-shaped, with a rocky spine that reached a thousand feet above sea level. A dozen miles from tip to tip, it was no more than two or three miles across at its widest point. There was thick jungle and a small population, mostly the descendants of indentured laborers.

  The island was under Dutch administration, with a local governor and a handful of European managers. There was a phosphate mine in the middle of the crescent, the only thing keeping humanity there.

  She thought of the scrap of map that had been salvaged from her uncle Rod's stove. It featured a triangle drawn near the northern tip of the crescent. It could mean anything. On that tiny scrap of evidence they had travelled around the world, with no idea what they were looking for, but determined to find it.

  It was two more days before Suderland began to rise over the horizon. A dark blur in the distance gradually resolved itself into a mat of dark jungle with a ridge of naked rock above it. There was no protective reef around the island. The sides of the submerged mountain fell away too quickly.

  Sol loitered at the railing and chatted with Colleen as they steamed closer. The sun gleamed on his earrings, making them stand out in stark contrast to the inky darkness of his skin. He often sought out her company, but at first had maintained a tongue-tied silence. When Colleen had finally broken through his shyness she'd found him to be articulate and intelligent, with an astonishing store of information on every topic imaginable.

  "Very deep water here," he said. "Everywhere but the crater."

  Her eyebrows rose. "Have you been here before?"

  "No." He avoided her eyes self-consciously. "I looked at the chart. The middle of the crater is very deep, over a thousand feet. The rest of the crater rim drops off really quickly to a hundred feet or so. It's very safe water for sailing."

  He stared out at the sea for a while. Then he said, "Do you know how long it will take, this archaeological dig you're doing?" That was the story they had selected. It even had some truth.

  "We won't know until we have a look around," she told him. "It's all based on an old map. We don't really know what we're going to find."

  He nodded. "I wish I could go with you. I thought life on a ship was what I wanted, but we keep going to the same places, over and over. I would like to be an archaeologist, or some kind of scientist."

  "You would be good at it," she told him. She looked up as the deck tilted slightly beneath her. "We're turning."

  The ship moved around the northern tip of the island in a long, graceful curve. At the center of the crescent they saw their first sign of human habitation, a cluster of weather-beaten buildings huddled on a narrow strip of land between jungle and sea.

  The settlement looked less and less impressive the closer they came. A two-story structure, off-white in color, stood at the heart of the little village. On one side were lines of grey, sagging shacks, small and poor, with thatch roofs and unglazed windows. On the other side were warehouses and sheds roofed in tin.

  The arrival of a ship was clearly quite an event. Dozens of people were lined up along the beach by the time the Persephone pulled up to a short wharf jutting out from the shore. Mostly they were a scruffy-looking bunch, the men in shorts and sandals, some with shirts and some not, the women in sarongs of blue or green. They all had black skin and dark, wavy hair.

  Colleen saw what might have been a policeman, a black man in his middle years with a blue uniform shirt and an officious-looking cap. The businesslike impression was spoiled, though, by the absence of pants. He wore scruffy brown shorts and sandals. He wasn't armed, but there was a whistle on a lanyard around his neck.

  Three European men came through the line of spectators and marched up the wharf. The man in the lead wore a pith helmet and a white suit, and strutted as he walked, his chest pushed out with self-importance. Two more men trailed behind him, in suits much too warm for the climate, hats shading their faces.

  Libertad hopped down to the wharf to greet them. Colleen watched from the railing as the four of them talked. One European handed Libertad a clipboard and waited while he scanned a document and signed in several places. Then the delegation marched back down the wharf while Libertad returned to the ship.

  "Good news," he told Colleen, Maggie, and Carter when he was back on board. "There isn't really a hotel to speak of on the island, but the honorable Van Ostend has guest rooms for you in Government House." He gestured at the white-painted building that dominated the village. "He would like you to join him for dinner this evening at six."

  Dinner with the governor seemed almost bizarre after the casual informality of life on the Persephone. Colleen, honoring her vow to not wear a dress again on this trip, scandalized Maggie by putting on her best trousers and a cotton blouse. Carter didn't say anything, just raised an eyebrow as he escorted them down the stairs to the dining room.

  Government House was as elegant as the governor could make it on what was clearly a limited budget. There was a portrait of Queen Wilhelmina, and a Dutch flag. European-made rugs decorated floors marred by gaps between the boards. A small handful of servants sweated in matching blue livery.

  Governor Van Der Pot, heavy-set and red-faced, greeted them effusively as they came into the little dining room. There were eight other guests, the four men who comprised his entire European staff, and their wives. All of them were hungry for news of Europe, and seemed disappointed to learn that the new arrivals had come from Canada.

  Van Der Pot dominated the conversation. He was the only European with strong English skills, and the others soon lapsed into silence. The governor, Colleen quickly realized, was a chauvinist, automatically cutting her and Maggie out of the conversation. The table was quickly dominated by a conversation between Carter and Van Der Pot, with the Dutchman doing most of the talking.

  "I'm telling you, the South Pacific is an untapped treasure trove of natural resources! The United States is passing up a golden investment opportunity. Why, you're the first American we've seen on this island in ten years. And what brings you here? Archaeology? Bah! It should be industry that draws people here. The islands of the South Pacific could be the world's next great power!"

  He paused to drink deeply from his wine glass. After a reflective silence he said, "I don’t mean to denigrate your mission, of course. There would be no industry without men of science to blaze the way. I want to help you in any way I can. You will bring Suderland to the attention of the world. Where is it that you wish to dig? Show me the map again."

  Carter obligingly produced a modern map of Suderland, with the location of Tanathos marked as a rectangle in pencil. Van Der Pot peered at it and nodded.

  "Ah, yes. If there is anything to be found on this island, you will find it there. The land is high enough to have a breeze, there's a wide, flat area suitable for building, and it's close to the west shore, where the crater forms a natural harbour. We only built our town where we did because it's close to the phosphate."

  He handed the map back to Carter. "We almost disrupted your archaeological site, you know."

  "Oh?" Carter raised his eyebrows politely.

  "Yes. We had a tropical storm rip through here in 1914. The village is only a dozen feet above sea level at high tide. Nearly washed the whole damn town into the Pacific. So we decided to rebuild, up on that hilltop." He tapped the rectangle on the map. "Sent away to the homeland for a steam-powered hauling machine to help us move the ore. It's still up there, slowly rusting away."

  "What happened?" Carter asked.

  "Bloody wogs," Van Der Pot snapped. "You'll find our local workforce is not quite up to the standards you'd get back home. Bloody superstitious heathens. Three days on the worksite and they started talking about bad omens." He waggled his fingers in the air, sneering. "Evil spirits, they said. The hill's haunted." He snorted. "You'll have some trouble hiring diggers, let me tell you."

  Carter cocked an eyebrow. "Is there a labor force available?"<
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  "Oh, yes." Van Der Pot waved an expansive hand. "We've had to cut back operations this past year. You'll find plenty of people ready to work. Getting them to go to the haunted hill, that'll be your challenge."

  The site marked on the map was about four and a half miles from town. The three of them headed out in the early morning, trailed by a dozen or so curious locals. There was a wide, rocky beach that made for easy walking. It was fairly cool, hiking in the shadow of the island's central ridge. The ocean, calm and placid, stretched away on their right, the Persephone bobbing at the wharf behind them. On their right the jungle rustled in the morning breeze.

  The air was growing warm by the time they reached their destination. A hill rose before them, thirty or more feet high, much of it covered in jungle. One shoulder of the hill, though, was rocky and free of vegetation. They climbed, and after a few minutes their little entourage of locals followed.

  The top of the hill was a broad, flat expanse, about half of it stony and mostly bare of vegetation. The other half was covered in low jungle. One side of the hill faded into the rocky ridge that formed the spine of the island.

  Carter put his hands on his hips and surveyed the low, stunted trees that covered half the hilltop. "If we're going to find anything," he said, "it'll be under that. I wonder why the trees aren't any bigger."

  "Wind," said a voice. One of the locals, a broad-shouldered man of fifty or so, had stepped to the front of the group. He had an amiable, weathered face and a cap of salt-and-pepper curls. He smiled, showing an expanse of dazzling white teeth, and made a gesture with his hand. "Tropical storm. Very exposed up here. Knock everything down."