by S. D. Stuart
As the carriage shot forward, the flickering orange glow resolved into roaring flames.
The platform at the other end of this line was on fire.
The carriage blasted through the flames and exited the tunnel. He wasn’t going slow enough to stop at the platform. Instead, he was going to collide with the wall on the other side.
Caleb curled into a ball and braced for impact.
The carriage slammed into the opposite wall, glass breaking and metal twisting under the force of the impact. Caleb was thrown to the front of the carriage, but fortunately, if you could still call it fortunate, he crashed into the overstuffed velvet bench seat on the other side. He was stunned, but otherwise unharmed. One of the benefits of having animal DNA was the ability to withstand a greater beating before being broken.
An explosion boomed near the platform and brought Caleb back to reality. He extricated himself from the twisted wreckage and limped onto the platform. Another explosion, this one much closer, knocked him off his feet.
Hands grabbed him and pulled him across the floor to behind a piece of fallen ceiling as bullets chipped off fragments of stone all around the room. The Southern Marshal yelled something in his face, but he could barely hear her over the ringing in his ears. She shoved a repeating carbine rifle into his hands and pointed it in the direction of the door that led out of the carriage platform room. He didn’t need to hear what she had said, his eyes told him everything he needed to know. Everything except who was shooting back.
He shook his head to reset his equilibrium and spotted a gun barrel poking its way into the room through the door. He aimed his carbine and fired off a round, driving back the gun barrel.
His hearing slowly returned as he looked around the room. Several of the Southern Marshal’s soldiers lay strewn about the room, dead or dying. The Southern Marshal popped up from behind the chunk of ceiling and fired another shot at the door.
She ducked back down and chambered her next round.
Caleb grabbed her shoulder. “What happened?”
“The men sent to replace Nero managed to break out of my jail and secure weapons.”
“What about Dorothy?”
“She was back in my castle before any of this started. I’m sure she’s fine.”
A new sound echoed from beyond the doorway. It sounded like thirty men all firing their carbines in rapid succession. The Southern Marshal laughed and pumped her fist in the air. “Yes!”
Armed soldiers streamed in through the doorway and the Southern Marshal shot at them as they ran in. She ducked as they returned fire but then the same rapid fire that drove the soldiers into the room in the first place echoed again from just outside the door and they all fell down; dead.
The Southern Marshal stood up, a massive grin on her face. She reached down and helped Caleb stand up. “This was not the form of introduction I had expected, but what better way to show you who will be joining you and Dorothy on your quest than a demonstration of what he can do against real opponents?”
Caleb followed her gaze to the door where a large automaton stood, smoke still curling out of the front of the machine gun mounted on the underside of one of his arms.
The Southern Marshal’s face beamed with pride. “Caleb, I’d like to introduce you to the only working prototype from the Tin Man project.”
She glanced around at the enemy soldiers who had been cut down most expeditiously. “I can see already he will be a welcome addition to your team.”
Caleb gawked at the massive automaton. It looked more like an atmospheric diving suit, with every joint a big round ball that made it look like it was built to take abuse and keep on going. The ball jointed arms terminated in large metallic three clawed hands. As menacing as they were, it paled in comparison to the machine gun mounted underneath the right arm. He’d already seen the destructive force of this automated machine gun.
Who, in their right mind, would mount something like that on an independently operating machine?
Maybe humans deserved all the problems they brought down on themselves?
Chapter 12
Caleb flinched as the medic plucked a piece of twisted brass from the wound in his forearm, taking some fur with it. The medic looked over his monocle at Caleb. “If you let me shave it, this would go a lot easier.”
“Just do your best.”
“The fur’s all matted…” He gripped another piece of shrapnel with his pliers and Caleb grimaced through the pain. The medic dropped this new piece on the metal tray to join the others he had already fished out of Caleb’s skin. Bits of fur and blood clung to the jagged metal.
“Don’t come crying to me when it becomes infected.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The Southern Marshal stood nearby, conferring with one of her guards. She nodded from what he just told her and approached Caleb. She cleared her throat and startled the medic. He bandaged Caleb’s arm quickly and excused himself. She waited until the medic was out of earshot, but still spoke quietly.
“It seems we have seriously underestimated the Directors’ true power. My General informs me that, while we have eliminated several small squads of soldiers like the ones in this room, they were all calculated diversions to spread my security forces too thin to prevent the majority of the enemy force from achieving their true objective. Based on the number dead here, and in the other locations, they succeeded in escaping with seventy-five soldiers in their airship.”
Caleb reflected on the news that meant he would have some competition in obtaining the weapon. But what stuck out most in his mind was the first thing she had said.
“What do you mean by the Directors’ true power?”
“Despite what people on the outside might think, the Southern Territories is a relatively peaceful place. My jail cells were not designed for a large number of prisoners at the same time. I had to divide the captured soldiers among the two cells. That still put about fifty men in each cell designed to hold no more than twenty.
“There are fifteen of their soldiers dead in the jail cell area. They were the ones up against the bars while all fifty men, literally, pushed as one until the doors gave way. The rest, those that we killed in staged battles throughout the castle, also knew they were going to die. They were the distraction while the remainder, the majority, escaped. And that’s not the bad news.”
“There’s bad news?”
“They took Nero.”
Caleb’s heart sunk.
The Southern Marshal continued. “Nero is the only one who can lead them to the weapon. But he and I already talked about this possible situation. He promised to do his best to delay them, giving us a chance to get to it first. But it gets worse.”
Caleb couldn’t believe his ears. How could it get any worse than what she had already told him? She didn’t leave him wondering as she answered his unspoken question right away.
“Nero still has the key to the box with him. Fortunately, that is only half of the puzzle. They don’t know about Dorothy, or that the key won’t work without her.”
There was a silver lining to this dark cloud after all. Despite everything, Caleb felt the release of tension wash over him. “We don’t have to go after the box. It doesn’t matter if they get it or not, they still can’t open it.”
The Southern Marshal shook her head. “They still have an army ten thousand strong coming to OZ in a few days. Nero admitted to me that if he were captured, he could only hold out for so long. Eventually, he will tell them the secret of the key. And then that army will come looking for Dorothy. Without the means to stop them, they will get her, and probably kill all of us in the process.”
A new sense of dread completely eradicated the relief he had felt moments before. The Southern Marshal could read the hopelessness in his eyes.
“Don’t think like that, Caleb. We still have a chance.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I have the most powerful weapon of all. Knowledge. Follow me.�
��
She led him through the castle to a steel door at the end of a long hallway. Both walls of the hallway were lined with armed guards for its entire length. She paused with her hand on the door latch.
“What I’m about to show you is known only by the people behind this door. Even the guards out here do not know what it is they protect.”
As she engaged the latch, he noticed the guards turn away so as not to accidentally catch a glimpse behind the door. Forget about the kind of power the Directors held over their soldiers. He was witnessing the kind of power the Southern Marshal held over hers.
She pushed him ahead of her through the threshold and closed the door behind them. They were in a tiny room, no bigger than a closet, with another door on the other side. There was a steady, rhythmic hum coming from behind the closed door, it sounded like a swarm of bees inside a hive.
She swept past him and opened the door, the low hum rising in pitch as she opened it all the way. Through the open door he saw rows of long tables with people sitting all along the edges staring into boxes that sat on the table in front of them. There must’ve been over a hundred people in this massive room, each staring into their own illuminated box.
“Two hundred and thirty-five, to be exact.”
He snapped out of his reverie and looked at her. “Huh?”
“I have two hundred and thirty-five people here keeping an eye on OZ.”
She stepped into the room, lifting her arms to the ceiling and taking in the whole room with her gesture. “Welcome to the Eye of Horus.”
“The eye of what?”
“Horus. I named it after an Egyptian goddess whose job it was to watch over and protect her people. Since this room was designed to keep an eye on the hybrids until I could call them home, I felt it was the best name for it.”
He looked at one of the boxes. On the face of the box was a small window. The window was illuminated from inside the box and showed people walking back and forth on some crowded street. He had never seen anything like it.
The Southern Marshal beamed with pride. “What you’re watching is happening right now on a street in the Western Territories.”
He stared at the image in the tiny window. This was not possible. Even if they used thousands of adjustable mirrors and telescopic lenses, there was no way this box could show what was happening hundreds of kilometers away with such definition and clarity. That left only one option. Dark magic. He wasn’t one to be taken in by mysticism and the supernatural, but this room was about to make a believer out of him.
The Southern Marshal was at his side. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re not even close as to how these work. Professor Gale is a wizard when it comes to the mechanical and electrical sciences. He has drawn up plans for hundreds of amazing things never before seen in all of human, or even hybrid, history. We haven’t begun to develop a tenth of what he has already designed. But I must say, out of all the inventions we have attempted to build, this room is part of one of his most impressive systems to date.”
“What does it do?”
“Rather than tell you, why don’t I show you?”
She whistled, and a small black terrier dog came bounding into the room. It ignored Caleb and stopped right in front of the Southern Marshal, its tail wagging excitedly. She bent down, parted the fur along the back of his neck, and inspected the exposed section of skin. “Jack, switch your display to Toto 819-7532.”
“Yes ma’am,” Jack replied as he flipped several switches in front of him.
Caleb’s jaw dropped as the window showed himself standing in this very room. But it was not like when he looked in a mirror. The view on the window was of him, but from a different angle. He pointed a finger in the air and watched himself in the window as he slowly moved his hand around. He stopped his hand when he noticed he was pointing at himself from the window. He looked to where his hand was pointing, and his hair rose up along his back as he realized he was pointing right at the dog.
She smiled and placed the dog back on the floor. “Go on now. Shoo.”
The tiny dog skittered off and Caleb watched as the window on the table showed the room from the dog’s perspective as he ran out.
“Professor Gale called them tactical observers. Fully electric automatons that transmit everything they see back to these monitors. It was my idea to build them to look like household pets so they could blend in unnoticed all around OZ.
“Some of them were so indistinguishable from the real thing, using the name tactical observer just seemed so impersonal. The original builders start calling them Totos, and the name stuck.”
An unnerving thought suddenly struck Caleb.
“Did you get one of these into the casino?”
“You tell me?”
He thought back to a dog in particular who showed up one day when he was young. When he wasn’t looking directly at it, he always got the sense that it was watching him. He hadn’t really given it much thought at the time, but that dog outlived all the rest.
He glared at the Southern Marshal, the edge of his lip curling up in anger. “You spied on us? You spied on the hybrids?”
“Only to keep you safe until I could bring you home.”
“You snuck into our homes. Into our lives. You violated our privacy.”
“I was watching over you.”
“That makes it okay?!”
“Of course it was okay. I’m a hybrid, just like you.”
“You’re not like us!”
“Said the assassin who killed because his human master told him too.”
Caleb snapped his mouth shut and his temper boiled just below the surface. The Southern Marshal took a deep breath.
“I fear our conversation is getting off track. I did not show you this room to make you upset. I showed you so, when you leave here to collect the Brahmastra, you know you will not be alone. Even though I will not be with you physically, I will still be watching over you. I will keep you safe. I will keep Dorothy safe. And when the threat is over, I will keep my promise.”
He looked deep into her eyes and saw nothing but sincerity. His temper cooled to a low simmer. He didn’t dare let it dissipate completely or he might let his guard down. And if growing up in the hardest place in the world had taught him anything, it was to never let your guard down.
She turned back to the monitor station. “Show me Alpha Watch.”
“Yes ma’am.”
The monitor window shifted to show a dog’s point of view of a crowded marketplace. At the center of the view was a boy talking to a shop owner. When the boy finished talking to the owner, he moved on through the crowd and the dog followed him.
There was something very familiar about the boy, but so far Caleb had only seen the back of him. The boy pushed through the crowd without looking around, or glancing behind him. He acted as if he wasn’t worried about being followed, or most likely had no idea he was being followed. He stopped occasionally to talk with various shop owners as he made his way through the street market.
She tapped on the glass, indicating the boy. “Nero told us this is the boy who took the Brahmastra. I’ve had a Toto on him ever since we located him. We haven’t seen him with anything remotely like the large chest Nero described, but he’s pretty sure the boy knows where it is.”
The boy turned around and Caleb’s jaw slackened in recognition. He knew this kid, and his name escaped his lips before he could bite his tongue.
“Jasper.”
She tilted her head. “You know him?”
“More than I’d like to.”
“This will be even easier since you know him. Does he trust you?”
“To be honest, the last time we worked together, he had a hard time figuring out which side I was on. But in the end… Yes, I think he trusts me.”
“Excellent. We actually have the edge. Even though they took Nero, and given time, he will lead them to the boy, we don’t have to waste precious time looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack
. We know exactly where the boy is right now. And we will know exactly where he is when you get there.”
“But they have a head start and will get there sooner. What if they find Jasper before we do?”
She indicated the hallway the little dog had run down.
“If you follow me, I can show you why that won’t matter.”
He let her lead him into another room where the Tin Man and Toto both stood against one wall. The Southern Marshall stopped in front of them.
“You’ve already seen what the Tin Man and Toto can do. Now let me show you what you can do.”
She opened a wardrobe and pointed to several pieces of an armored suit that hung from hooks inside the wardrobe.
“Another one of the Professor’s marvelous inventions. We currently have the two prototypes, but we should be able to iron out the final kinks and start ramping up for mass production within a year.”
Caleb stared at the two suits of armor in the wardrobe. Rather than being complete suits of armor, they were in individual pieces, designed to be strapped on to various parts of the body separately. A direct hit on the armor might provide some protection, but every joint would still be exposed. And he certainly didn’t like hearing that they might not have worked out all the problems yet.
“Is everything we’re using a prototype?”
She smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry. The Professor’s designs rarely fail.”
She grabbed the chest piece off of its hook and spun it around to show Caleb the back. Excitement gleamed in the corner of her eye as she pointed out the two vents on the bottom of the cylinders mounted to the back of the armor.
“This right here is the most amazing bit on this armor. These are jump assist jets. I don’t profess to understand what makes them work, but these will help you jump a good eighty to a hundred meters in a single bound. While that’s not quite flying, it’s pretty damn close.”
