The Demi-Monde: Summer

by Rod Rees

  A Children’s Pictorial Guide to Heroes and Heroines of the Demi-Monde: Venetian Books

  A thunderclap crashed and rain lashed down on the three hundred fighters who comprised Attack Group One as they bustled through the backstreets of Rangoon. But despite the rain Trixie felt she had been twice lucky in picking tonight of all nights to take – to try to take – the WarJunk CSS Wu that was anchored in the Kaliningrad docks on the St Petersburg side of the Volga. Lucky that the rain seemed to be even heavier than usual, which dissuaded even the most fervent of StormTroopers from venturing out, and lucky again in that the surrender of the Coven meant that the ForthRight army had suspended its artillery bombardment of Rangoon.

  And with the ceasefire announced the ForthRight army had relaxed and its soldiers had turned their attention to converting the local Femmes into dutiful – and heterosexual – UnFun-DaMentalists and liberating any supplies of Sake Solution they found, neither activity doing much to improve their vigilance.

  But never one to push her luck further than was absolutely necessary, Trixie was anxious to cross the Volga before either the monsoon eased or Heydrich changed his mind and recommenced pounding the shit out of the city. Yet despite these somewhat morbid imaginings, she felt full of bounce and was actually looking forward to tonight’s adventure. For the first time in months she was taking the fight to Heydrich. Now she had the chance to hurt Heydrich and his foul creed of UnFunDaMentalism … to avenge all the poor people he’d slaughtered in Warsaw and Rangoon.

  The first stage of the operation was quickly accomplished. To have her little army cross the Volga, she simply commandeered three Whitehall gigs moored near the Anichkov Bridge. The SS StormTrooper who was guarding the gigs would presumably have objected, but the first warning he had about what was happening was when Wysochi slit his throat. His interest in proceedings nosedived after that.

  It took only twenty tense minutes to cross the river and to creep along the docks to where the Wu was berthed. As Trixie had been advised by LieutenantFemme Lai Choi San – the Femme in charge of all things nautical – four things needed to be done to successfully steal a WarJunk: take control of it from the UnFunnies, fill its coal bunkers, get its boilers up to a working pressure, and run the Volga without being blown to bits by the ForthRight artillery lining the river. Above all, they had to be lucky.

  Lucky: that word again.

  In fact, taking control of the Wu was accomplished relatively painlessly … painlessly for Trixie’s fighters, that is. The sentries guarding the WarJunk were dead before they even realised they were being stalked, and once they were disposed of, Wysochi and five fighters oozed down into the bowels of the Wu. Despite herself, Trixie felt a moment’s sympathy for the poor unsuspecting sailors who were on watch. Her moment of tenderness lasted around two minutes, which was how long it was before a grinning Wysochi re-emerged and gave her the thumbs-up.

  Without waiting for an order, LieutenantFemme Lai Choi San was across the boarding ramp and down the hatch to inspect the engine room, Trixie following hard on her heels.

  ‘Okay, first the good news, ColonelFemme,’ the Lieutenant began after a cursory inspection. ‘The boilers are hot. They must have been running a pressure check not more than an hour ago. It’ll only take us thirty minutes to get steam up.’

  ‘And the bad news?’

  ‘We’re low on coal. We’ve enough to get to the Wheel River, but no further. But it seems ABBA has smiled on us: according to Su Xiaoxiao’s agents, there’s a fully laden coal barge berthed just along the docks from where the Wu’s moored.’

  ‘Then we better start shovelling.’

  It had been Trixie’s intention to load coal for three hours, then, bunkers full or not, to sail before dawn and run the Volga in darkness. But Fate decided not to cooperate. It was inevitable, really: it was one thing to put two of her fighters – dressed in SS uniforms – on point duty to deter nosy parkers, but when her entire army began shovelling coal from the nearby coal barge, the noise was too much for even the most dilatory of watch commanders to ignore. Less than thirty minutes after the coaling of the Wu had begun, a bleary-eyed, wet and evil-tempered SS captain, trailed by six burly StormTroopers, arrived at the dock and, brushing aside the objections of the faux-sentries, stormed towards the WarJunk.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ he demanded loudly. ‘This ship isn’t due to sail for two days. Who’s in command?’

  For a moment Trixie considered trying to bluff her way out of the situation, but as the captain and his men seemed to know their business – their locked and loaded M4s attested to that – she decided on more direct action.

  ‘I am, Comrade Major,’ she said as she stepped out from behind the WarJunk’s casement.

  ‘And just who the fuck are you?’

  ‘Colonel Trixie Dashwood,’ she answered and then shot the captain through the head.

  There was a brief flurry of shooting, during which the StormTroopers were dispatched with commendable efficiency, and then Trixie started to bark her orders. ‘Prepare to sail. Cast off all mooring ropes. Close all hatches.’

  Wysochi, black from head to toe in coal dust, materialised from the direction of the coal barge. ‘We’ve only got about half the coal we need, Colonel.’

  ‘Send two men and attach a hawser to that coal barge. We’ll take the coal with us.’

  And that was how, ten minutes later, the CSS Empress Wu, with the coal barge London in tow, edged her way out of St Petersburg dock en route to Venice.

  ‘Comrade Lieutenant, there’s a message coming through over the wire.’

  SS Gunnery Lieutenant Burns, twenty-three years old and a ninety-day veteran commanding Gun Emplacement Fourteen, drained his mug of café au gore, eased his gangly body up out of his chair and sauntered – carefully – over to where the signal sergeant had set up that miracle of ForthRight ingenuity, the galvanicEnergy-powered telegraph station. Burns had to be careful how he went and not for the first time he cursed being too tall for the artillery. The ceiling of the concrete bunker where his Krupp mortar was housed had a clearance of six feet, which was exactly three inches too low to accommodate a vertical Lieutenant Burns. After a Season commanding the gun emplacement he suspected his back would never be straight again.

  ‘What’s the message say, Signal Sergeant?’

  The sergeant finished deciphering the message and handed the Lieutenant the piece of paper. ‘Says, “CODE X472: ALL UNITS TO REFER TO SEALED ORDERS”.’

  Lieutenant Burns studied the message with some curiosity. ‘You’re sure it was prefaced by “CODE X472”?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Burns pulled the envelope containing his secret orders from his jacket pocket, ran a nail under the seal and quickly read the contents. Then he read them again … and again. They didn’t make sense, but then, he supposed, any orders bearing the signature of His Holiness Aleister Crowley – as these did – didn’t have to make sense, they just had to be obeyed.

  Still …

  As he had been instructed, he burnt the orders and then turned to look at the huge thirty-six-inch Krupp mortar he’d been using to reduce Rangoon to brick dust. His brow furrowed as he wondered how in the world he was to use a siege mortar against a fast-moving steamship. But it wouldn’t do his ambitions of enjoying a long and comfortable old age running his family’s haberdashery empire much good if he was to refuse – on the ridiculous and indefensible grounds that what he was being asked to do was fucking stupid – to obey an order.

  ‘Get the men up, Bombardier. I want the mortar loaded and set at maximum elevation in five minutes.’

  In the end it took them seven minutes. After fighting nonstop for most of the Summer, the four men who made up Burns’s gunnery crew were tired, disheartened and just a little hungover from celebrating the armistice. Ninety days of hauling the shells – which weighed just over a ton – into the bunker, of using the hoist to load them into the stubby barrel of the mortar, of dragging back the bunk
er’s steel roof and then having to endure the shock of firing the bastard thing in such a confined space had taken its toll. Everyone in Gun Emplacement Fourteen was exhausted, deaf and heartily sick of the war … just as the rest of the army was.

  Of course, Burns would keep his observations regarding the parlous state of the army’s morale to himself. Senior officers in the SS did not appreciate being told that their men were fed up fighting and that the grumbles of discontent in the army were growing louder by the day. The Great Leader, in Burns’s humble opinion, was pushing his people too hard and one day – one day soon – they would snap. There was a strong whiff of rebellion in the air: the people wanted rid of Heydrich and his cronies.

  ‘Gun ready for firing, sir.’

  ‘Is it set at its maximum elevation, Bombardier?’

  ‘Yus, sir. Any higher and the bloody thing will go straight up and straight back down. We’ll blow ourselves to kingdom-fucking-come.’

  Burns eyed the elevation indicator, which read eighty-seven degrees: the Bombardier was right, it was nigh on vertical. He did a swift calculation and estimated that the shell would fall only three hundred yards from the emplacement. He just hoped his target would have the courtesy to steer that close into the shore.

  ‘Very good. Pull back the roof and prepare to fire.’

  Lieutenant Stepan Makarov, officer commanding the FSS Molnya, the GunBoat charged with patrolling the Volga that night, spotted the Wu just as she was approaching the Anichkov Bridge. But spotting the WarJunk was one thing, sinking the bastard was quite another. Obeying the order to ‘ENGAGE AND DESTROY ENEMY WARJUNK’ would require the use of the brand-new and ultra-secret, galvanicEnergy-powered Whitehead torpedoes – the V4s – with which the Molnya was equipped.

  ‘Signal Command: “REQUEST PERMISSION TO ENGAGE USING V4 WEAPONS”.’

  Makarov had to ask permission: SS Colonel Clement was anxious that none of the ForthRight’s enemies be given the merest inkling that he had such a powerful weapon at his command. And it was an indication of how seriously Naval High Command took the destruction of this WarJunk that the response was almost immediate: ‘PERMISSION GRANTED’.

  Grinning from ear to ear, Makarov issued his orders that the torpedoes be prepared for launch. He could barely contain himself: he was going to make history, he was going to be the first naval commander to destroy an enemy vessel using a torpedo.

  ‘Enemy vessel to port, Colonel.’

  Trixie swung her telescope to where the seaFemme was pointing. She had known their luck couldn’t hold for ever, and luck – and the time it took for the enemy to get themselves organised – meant they’d reached the Anichkov Bridge without facing serious opposition. They’d been shot at, of course, but most of it had been small-calibre stuff that had bounced harmlessly off the Wu’s thick steel hide and anything big enough to do damage had been fired in such a wayward manner that the shells had screamed harmlessly overhead. It had been as though the UnFunnies weren’t even trying to sink the Wu, but now, she suspected, things were going to get a whole lot more dangerous.

  In the darkness it was difficult to make out the type of ship that was closing on them but what she could see confirmed it to be small, fast and, if the way it carved so easily through the water was any indication, very agile. Trixie frowned; it looked much too small to be seriously intent on taking on the Wu. Certainly the WarJunk – especially with the coal barge in tow – was ponderous and making heavy going against the monsoon-fuelled ebb tide, but it was a powerful warship and packed a massive punch.

  ‘It’s a GunBoat,’ announced LieutenantFemme Lai Choi San.

  ‘What does it carry?’

  ‘Twin four-inch guns; nothing to worry us. It could pound away all day and we’d barely feel it. The Captain must be suicidal.’

  Trixie eyed the sleek GunBoat suspiciously. There was something almost arrogant about how it was being handled and she certainly didn’t like the way it was manoeuvring for a beam attack. Although she was no sailor, she understood enough to know that a lightly gunned ship like the GunBoat would usually content itself with snapping at the heels of a more powerful adversary, hoping to score a lucky hit on the rudder. It wouldn’t come within striking distance of a broadside. There was something not quite right here.

  ‘Steer closer to the shore and prepare starboard batteries to engage.’

  ‘Set mortar bomb fuses for thirty seconds. Prepare to fire.’

  Gunnery Lieutenant Burns decided that tonight was his lucky night. The target had cleared the Anichkov Bridge and was now steaming directly towards him. He made a quick calculation using his slide rule, a calculation involving the ship’s speed and the time of flight of the mortar shell, and then picked his spot. As soon as the ship reached that, he would fire. He wouldn’t even have to hit the bloody thing; the force of the explosion would swamp any ship within fifty metres.

  Hardly able to breathe for excitement, he waited impatiently for the ship to come into range.

  Then …

  ‘Fire!’

  ‘Full steam ahead!’ yelled Makarov. ‘Torpedo crew, prepare to fire. Set run-depth at five feet. We’re going to have to do this quick, lads, before that bastard has a chance to lay her guns on us, so all of you look sharp.’

  The deck under Makarov’s feet began to vibrate as the engine room poured on the power and the boat sliced through the water. He loved these moments, loved the feeling of speed, the feeling of power. Riding aboard the Molnya was akin to riding a thoroughbred racehorse. It was exhilarating. The Molnya had never gone this fast … nothing had ever gone this fast! With the tide behind him – he was making the attack with the Hub at his stern – and the steam engines wide open he guessed that he was doing more than 20 m.p.h. He was travelling faster than anything had ever gone in the Demi-Monde.

  He watched through eyes half-closed against the river spray slashing into his face as the dark, brooding bulk of the WarJunk came across his water-streaked windscreen. Hardly daring to breathe, he waited until it filled his sights.

  Now!

  ‘Fire torpedo!’ he screamed.

  Horrified, Trixie watched the white wake of the torpedo streak towards the Wu. She knew what it was. Her father had been involved in the river trials of the Whitehead torpedo and he had described its destructive power to her.

  ‘Torpedo attack!’ she screamed. ‘Prepare for impact.’

  For seemingly endless seconds she waited for the explosion, but none came, just a dull thud as the torpedo smacked into the side of the WarJunk.

  It was a dud!

  Lieutenant Makarov watched as … nothing happened. The torpedo was a dud.

  ‘Yo moyo!’

  They were the last words he ever uttered. The mortar shell fired from Gun Emplacement Fourteen exploded directly over the GunBoat Molnya. Such was the force of the explosion that the GunBoat was lifted twenty-five metres into the air and thrown fifty metres in the direction of Rangoon. Makarov and his crew were dead long before the charred remnants of the Molnya smashed back down onto the river.

  Immensely satisfied that he had so efficiently carried out his strange orders, Burns was just supervising Bombardier Danny Smith as he painted a white ring around the barrel of the mortar to signify the destruction of the enemy GunBoat – well, if he’d been ordered to destroy it, it had to have been an ‘enemy’, now didn’t it? – when three SS StormTroopers barged their way into the gun emplacement and arrested him and his crew for treason and acts of sabotage against the ForthRight.

  As he was handcuffed, Burns realised two things: that Crowley was a vicious, evil, manipulative bastard and that the family’s haberdashery business would now be passing to his younger brother.

  Trixie watched stupefied as the GunBoat exploded in a huge, night-searing fireball. But even though she was shaken by what had happened, her instincts as a commander still kicked in.

  ‘Batten down all hatches. Close all watertight doors.’

  The tsunami that followed the detonat
ion of the mortar bomb would have swamped most other ships, but the Wu was so big and so heavy that she rode out the huge waves. They cleared St Petersburg with no further mishaps, and as she set course for Venice, Trixie decided that this had been the luckiest night of her life.

  Aleister Crowley sat at his desk writing his report by candlelight. He could have waited until the morning – Heydrich, to whom the report was addressed, would be asleep now – but he was gripped by such a feeling of elation that he had been unable to resist recording his triumph. The whole pantomime of the stealing of the WarJunk had gone wonderfully well. There had been just the right amount of opposition to convince Trixie Dashwood that she had stolen the Wu in the face of fierce resistance but not enough to ever endanger the vessel. Of course, the pièce de résistance had been the sacrifice of the GunBoat but that he judged was a small price to pay to secure the Column.

  The Column … that was the prize.

  And it was so great a prize that he had decided to overcome his distaste for ships and to personally supervise the taking of it from Trixie Dashwood.

  He sealed the report and placed it in his out tray. Then he rang for his steward. It was time for him to take his berth aboard the FSS Heydrich.

  43

  Venice

  The Demi-Monde: 89th Day of Summer, 1005

  Copy of PigeonGram message sent by Su Xiaoxiao on 89th day of Summer, 1005

  ‘Hello Nikolai.’

  Kondratieff started so suddenly that he spilt Solution from the glass he was holding. After his meeting with Grand Vizier Selim the Grim, his nerves were shot and the last thing he needed was dead men coming at him from out of the shadows.

  ‘Vanka Maykov! I heard you were dead.’

  That, at least, was what had been reported in the newspapers: that Vanka Maykov, enemy of Venice, had been killed by a HimPeril agent in the JAD. But he had to admit that Vanka didn’t look the least bit dead, that is unless corpses had taken to walking around with a very cocksure smile on their face and a very mischievous twinkle in their eyes.