Sired by Stone

by Andrew Post

  And together, almost looking like father and son, Dreck and Höwerglaz laughed.

  “Next thing,” Dreck said, “you’ll be whining, ‘Why can’t we all get along?’ I swear, apple didn’t roll far. You sound just like your old man.”

  Stern-faced, Höwerglaz regarded Clyde. “Really does.”

  The pirate captain waved a hand to the craft hovering above, and a rope came spiraling down. Dreck, busy feeding the rope through his harness, didn’t see Clyde’s hand move to his side, taking Commencement’s hilt in his grasp.

  While Dreck snapped a clip onto Höwerglaz’s belt to fasten them together, Höwerglaz undid the top button of his shirt, then the next down, and let his shirt fall open. His gaze drifted to Commencement, then back to Clyde’s eyes.

  His lips moved. “Without me, they have nothing.”

  Clyde, understanding, drew up Commencement an inch, then another . . .

  The rope snapped taut, and Dreck and Höwerglaz were reeled inside the Magic Carpet. Clyde rushed forward, swung, managed to only graze Dreck’s boot heel. Too late.

  The others rushed up next to him, Flam raising his rifle but hesitating. He couldn’t risk hitting the missile. Nevele lashed, smashing out one of the Magic Carpet’s landing gear lights, nothing more.

  Höwerglaz appeared at the bomb bay doors. Peering down at Clyde, lips tightly pursed, he put out balled fists and gave a hearty shake. Act. He shook again. Act.

  The missile next to him angled around on the inverted gimbal. Dreck, from somewhere within, screamed, “Fire Bessie.”

  Flam yanked Clyde aside as the missile made the short journey from the Magic Carpet to pound into the town square, scattering cobblestones.

  It remained wedged upright for a moment, looking like a butted cigar.

  Clyde rushed forward, with every intention of slicing into its side, to strike whatever explosives it held within its metal skin, killing himself but saving the city—but when the missile’s rockets fired, he was propelled back, Commencement clattering aside.

  His face singed, Clyde lay sprawled out, watching helplessly as the missile burrowed into the ground, the propulsion rockets’ flames shooting twenty feet high.

  Struggling away from helping hands, Clyde sprinted to the hole’s edge as the missile plunged in eagerly. He hoped beyond hope it’d get stuck and he could climb down and find some way to disarm it. But as he stared inside, all he could do was watch the white fireball descend, effortlessly piercing through layer after layer of sediment.

  It grew dimmer and dimmer, and with one final flash, way down, the ground began to shake.

  The Magic Carpet lifted to a safe distance.

  A street lamp tipped, its glass bulb shattering in a bright flash. Distantly, an auto alarm whooped.

  A second and third rumble struck Clyde’s feet, each more powerful in succession.

  A manhole clanged and shot heavenward like a coin flipped by a white finger of steam. Just as the Odium ships spiraled around the geyser, it let off one long blast, bigger than any Clyde had ever seen, raining down hunks of rock and snapped metal, the shattered steam works, instead of the typical innocuous mist.

  “They actually did it,” Clyde said absently, the steam and the fog mixing into a humid, choking fog around them, a sulfuric tinge to it, like eggs.

  The library’s columns broke free, rumbling away like giant rolling pins. The building where the Gazette was written and printed tipped, becoming a cloud of smoke as cinder blocks and glass shards splashed into the street.

  “We’ve got to get off the platter,” Nevele shouted. Clyde had heard her scared before, but not like this.

  A black lightning bolt jumped up the palace’s blond sediment stone and spread fingers up its towers. The entirety of the illustrious, asymmetrical castle split in two with a terrific snap as loud as cannon fire as the sparkly stone gave. In the rush of dust, Clyde raised his arm, momentarily losing the others.

  Through the murk, he could see darting paths of cracks forming. Immediately they’d begin to spread as the weight of the platter pulled itself apart. Each widening mouth seemed to want to swallow him and everyone associated with the man who’d failed the city so completely.

  “Clyde!” Miss Selby shouted.

  He turned just as a split in the ground opened between them. “Jump,” he yelled. A curtain of steam pushed up, obscuring her. “Ms. Selby, jump!” He screamed it again and again, reaching, even after the section of the town square fell away, into oblivion, steam consuming her.

  She dropped, never making a peep.

  Clyde stared, squinting into the hot air into which she’d vanished.

  No.

  Flam grabbed him. “She’s gone.”

  Clyde couldn’t move.

  The Mouflon picked him up. As they charged off, Clyde watched the ground behind them give way. Flam jumped again, and the next piece fell out, and again.

  “The station house,” Flam choked out. “The elevator, we can get down to the island.”

  “But it won’t be much safer down there. We need off the island,” Nevele screamed back.

  Aksel pulled her aside.

  Below, a crack formed and more earth fell away.

  Nevele followed Flam as he charged ahead, probably not making the best guess how to get away with their lives, but at least taking the lead.

  Flam dropped Clyde back onto his feet. This next gap was bigger than the others, and Flam wouldn’t make it across while carrying him. When the wall of steam dissipated, they jumped, then moved on to the next, less-turbulent segment.

  A particularly violent quake came, and they all stumbled. Pausing, dumbfounded, they watched the geyser, the symbol of the city, and what it was named after and built around, blow apart. Each segment shot in a different direction, the whole of the mile-high stone tower erupting. Beneath, one detonation after another.

  “Go,” Aksel shouted.

  The Mouflon took a running start to cross a gap. Nevele jumped next, then Clyde. The entire time Rohm, in Nevele’s pocket, emitted one long peal.

  Reaching the station house, they rushed up the front stairs.

  Clyde wished the city’s destruction could be like rain, avoided by merely going inside, but the Patrol station house interior wasn’t a bit safer. The desks were sliding all over the place. The world tipped and shifted like a fun-house tunnel. Ahead was the basement where Flam said the emergency elevator was. A wall broke apart, the floor above it coming down.

  “Move,” Flam cried.

  None of this was real. It couldn’t be real. Charging down the stairs, Clyde felt as if he were in someone else’s body. For Höwerglaz to deceive them like that, to lose Miss Selby . . . And now the city, his home, was coming down under their feet.

  Clyde felt Flam drag him into the elevator car. The gate skidded closed. Flam mashed the down button. The five of them packed in.

  The elevator began its jerking, slow descent. They passed through the platter. Outside the elevator, the underside of the city was an inverted mountain range of stalactites.

  The elevator suddenly swung, all of its occupants pitching to one side, the cable twanging. Just outside the car the geyser below the platter, the trunk-like stem, was spreading with cracks. From each small fissure, a new geyser sprayed. Flam rushed in, spinning the elevator car, and took the brunt across his broad back before it could boil all of them alive. He snarled but held the position, fingers pressing either elevator wall, shaking, until they’d lowered through the worst of it.

  When he stepped away, collapsing to one knee, Clyde saw a majority of the fur on his back had been sloughed off, the skin beneath already gathering colonies of bright blisters. He tried to help him to his hooves.

  “I’m okay, Pasty,” the Mouflon said, sounding anything but. “Really.”

  The cracks were increasing, allowing more places for the steam to escape. Aksel began hammering the down button, but their descent continued at a stubborn snail’s pace.

  A neighborhood
-sized section of the platter broke off above. Whooshing past, it crashed to the island below. It continued to sink, pushing soft earth and trees down until its impetus finally bled dry and came to a stop.

  Above, stalactites loosened, popping free of their millennia-old moorings to stake the island, making new, unnatural steppes.

  The five remained suspended in the elevator, only halfway to the island. The stem began to fragmenting at the base, like an enormous tree chopped most of the way through, leaving gravity to do the rest.

  Clyde felt like they were being lifted all of a sudden, as if the crank above had decided to bring them back up. Geyser was beginning to tip, falling away to the south, levering on the island.

  “Not good, not good,” Aksel shouted and closed his eye.

  Nevele grabbed Clyde’s hand.

  Rohm vibrated in Clyde’s pocket.

  Flam stared out as Geyser leaned and leaned . . .

  The elevator swung in toward the stem as it continued to buckle, the car bashing into the sediment stone. The occupants crashed to one side, and the angle of the tipping geyser became more and more severe, the elevator now nearly horizontal.

  Flam aimed at the bolts holding the cable to the car. No one had time to argue about what he was doing. He fired. The cable snapped, and the car began to skid down the inclined geyser stem, gaining momentum down the side of the smooth surface. A spray of sparks came into the car and shot out behind.

  For four breathless seconds, the car turned and spun and careened.

  Clyde attempted to steer it by leaning, but it was no use.

  Nor was there any way to brake.

  When they reached the end, the car was driven right to the ground. Not pointy enough to spear the soil, it bounced, spun into the air, everyone inside tumbling weightlessly against one another, and then another bounce, each giving them less airtime—thankfully. Finally they came to a stop on the damp, debris-strewn beach.

  Clyde sat up amongst the heap of his groaning friends and looked back from where they’d slid.

  Beside him, Nevele pulled up onto her hands and knees and went pale.

  Rohm peeked from his pocket. A tiny gasp.

  Aksel got up, and a tear rolled down his face.

  Flam, forgetting his burns, put a hand over his chest.

  The geyser lay in pieces.

  Cut off less than two stories high.

  It continued to blow, rushing a ceaseless blast of steam into the air as if crying in its defeat.

  Amongst the pieces: buildings and homes, schools and churches, street signs, mailboxes, autos, clothes, furniture, and people.

  Fires burned, sirens wailed from somewhere, possibly the coast guard sent by Adeshka, but right now it didn’t matter. Clyde looked at the city, his home. Most of his memories of it had already been gone, and the ones he still had were crushed. The platter lay half-submerged in the bay, looking like a tombstone.

  They’d lost.

  And before the city’s corpse could even cool, the carrion birds came. The Odium ships hovered down around the column of steam pouring up out of the earth. In coordination, they fired drill heads into the new, gaping hole. Behind each, cables and a complicated series of pulleys and tension lines trailed.

  Clyde kicked open the elevator car, stumbled out through the wet sand, and ran up the hill toward the city, dodging crumpled buildings and homes and smashed, burning autos. The others followed, limping and favoring hurts.

  The ground shook again, the stump of the geyser splitting wide.

  The starships screamed as their engines flared bright, struggling to hoist aloft the buried treasure.

  The deposit slid up foot by foot until it finally came free, soil and rock splintering off around it. Gleaming in the residual sunlight in the atmosphere, the wendal stone winked down at them. It shined blue, green, purple, black as the ships ascended.

  Clyde spotted the Magic Carpet, which was not going to be one of the load-bearing crafts, it seemed, but merely an overseer of the process. The eight other ships began turning, the deposit suspended between them by thick cables. When the Magic Carpet crossed over Jagged Bay, the other ships and their retrieved burden tailed behind.

  They didn’t use their faster-than-light drives. Didn’t need to. They’d fought Adeshka’s air force on the way here, bested them, and with Geyser in no shape to put up a fight anymore, the Odium had no predators. They had clawed and kicked and shot their way to the top. They had everything now. Everything. Clyde dropped to his knees. “Everything.”

  “Look. Someone’s on that thing,” Aksel said.

  Clyde peered, seeing a tiny speck on the massive deposit’s flank. Hanging on precariously from a small ledge. It was a man, a bulky man with something tucked under one arm, like a small bundle of clothes or . . . a baby.

  “Uncle,” Flam said, rushing forward to the water’s edge. “Greenspire’s on that thing! What the hell is he doing? Uncle! Oh, you stupid old . . .”

  Somehow Clyde knew that was precisely where Greenspire wanted to be.

  They watched Greenspire Flam and the pirates until they couldn’t be seen anymore, weren’t even dots on the horizon or glowing specks in the distance. They turned around, toward their city, their home, but it was just more hopelessness. How many had survived? It was so quiet. It seemed the five of them were alone on the island.

  While in the Lakebed, Clyde had always kept Geyser, almost as much as Nevele, close to his heart. Something to keep his chin up.

  And now, sitting among its rubble, Clyde felt as if a still-living part of him had been carved free. An oasis for him and many others, who’d depended on him to protect it, was in ruins.

  From over the Jagged Bay, a starship limped along, trailing smoke, bobbing as crookedly as a starving fly. Sparks crackled from an engine, and the starboard wing appeared partly bitten off.

  “I’m sorry, lad,” came Nigel’s voice on Flam’s radio. “I’m sorry.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The Numbers

  In the back of Nigel’s wheezing, smoking starship, Flam, Aksel, Nevele, and Clyde sat cramped in among the few surviving Lulomba and their saddled Blatta, whose compound eyes surveyed the new passengers with detached interest. Unaware of the destruction of their home or simply disinterested—Flam couldn’t determine which.

  They crossed over Jagged Bay, engines crying out painfully, control panel flashing red, red, red. The landing gear dragged the water.

  Aksel moved forward, ducking into the cockpit. “Is this thing gonna make it?”

  “I’m putting her down in Scoona Port on the beach,” Nigel said, struggling with the trembling joysticks. “We’ll be lucky to even get that far. Hope ye all know how to swim, if it comes to that.” He seemed to hesitate, studying Aksel over his shoulder. “Ye got old.”

  “And you got younger?” Aksel said—tried to smile but failed.

  Smushed in between two Blatta, Flam recalled they’d been compatriots in the Fifty-Eighth, perhaps even friends. Some bad blood had passed between them, apparently, since they’d seen each other. The exchange was not unkindly but certainly uncomfortable.

  Nigel settled the struggling starship down.

  The beach was littered with charred pieces of what were once people’s homes—and of some occupants as well, Flam couldn’t help but notice. He turned away from the window.

  Nigel unbuckled his wheels from the floor and turned his chair around, passing through the crowded holds. “We’ll give chase, soon as we’re able,” he said to no one in particular, his voice arid. He threw a switch and lowered the rear ramp, rubber wheels rolling down to the moonlit sand below.

  The port town of Scoona lay along the curving shoreline, a collection of ramshackle houses on a long boardwalk. Dockworkers, fishermen, and even the port saloon’s wait staff were at the wharf railing, gazing toward Geyser. No one said anything. Hands were to mouths, clutched over chests; tears shined on cheeks. Flam looked the same, even though he’d been present for its destruction.
>
  A column of smoke at the edge of the bay. That’s all she was now.

  Nigel pried open the flank of the starship. The engine sparked and hissed, blades grating broken and bent as it persistently tried to spin its turbines. Nigel shook his head, slumped in his wheelchair, and stared in at the ship’s broken guts.

  Flam didn’t need to ask if it’d be a tough job to get them in the air again.

  White light poured over them. Everyone with weapons drew, but after the other starship wheeled about overhead, making an elegant turnaround, it was clear to see it was an Adeshkan ship by its angular silhouette against the night sky. It began to ascend, harrier engines stirring the beach, making Scoona’s windsocks snap and coil.

  “Flam,” Nevele tried. The rest of the group remained back while Flam marched forward, hooves crunching through the cold mainland sand. He waited at their hatch for the Adeshkan guardsmen to exit clad in thick armor of maroon, the city’s color.

  “Please step back, sir. We have evacuation teams coming shortly.”

  “I don’t give a toss about evacuation teams. I want to know why the plummets you didn’t do anything to help us.” Flam poked the soldier’s breastplate.

  The few others that’d dropped out of the ship readied their weapons, safeties clicking off.

  Flam stood his ground.

  “We did what we could. We confirmed ten Odium ships neutralized, about half their fleet.”

  “Oh? Well, then, commendations all around! Good work, boys! Way to half-arse a job.” Flam scoffed. “That’s shite. Chidester was going to send everything after them. And I didn’t see more than a handful of Adeshkan birds in the air in our neck of the woods—when we needed help most.”

  The guardsman pilot’s boyish face, framed in the wraparound helmet bristling with antennae and various swivel-in eyepieces, held Flam’s gaze, squinting. “Are you . . . head of Geyser’s Patrol—?”

  “Damn right I am. Sir Flam. So don’t even bother with the need-to-know rigmarole. I spoke to that old cuss directly. And I thought maybe he was just trying to play the tough guy, saying he wouldn’t do anything to help us. But lo and behold, just like he said, we were all on our own.” Flam flung his arm toward Geyser, which was smoking on the horizon. “Even though you had more than enough firepower to take the lot of them on, without difficulty. Well? Say something. Explain yourself.”