by Mick Farren
Argo was suddenly very angry. “You know what I am, Bonnie. My daddy died at Richmond. You knew me in Thakenham before the Mosul even came. Tell them. I’m not working for the Zhaithan. I hate them.”
Slide pushed up his hat. “Do like Bonnie says and shut up, boy. You could be a Zhaithan asset and never even know it. You could hate them like poison and still be a pawn in their mission.”
“I don’t even know if I’m good or bad?”
Bonnie sighed. “We assume you’re one of the good guys. But it’s something else we don’t know for sure.”
An ice-cold claw gripped Argo’s chest, and for a moment breathing was difficult. He wasn’t trusted by anyone in the cave and would never be trusted until he could prove himself. As though echoing his shock, a mournful rattling wail that was the sound of trees being stirred by a gusting wind penetrated the blackout. It sounded as though a storm of some power was brewing. This was confirmed a few moments later when Conrad pushed his way into the rear part of the cave. His overalls were wet, and now the sound of drumming rain could be heard. “There’s one hell of storm getting up outside, Captain. You want me and Billy to stay out there?”
Hooker shook his head. “No, stay here; dry out and get some food.” He looked round the cave. “Steuben, you’ve been having a good time tonight. Get a slicker and relieve Billy.”
Steuben protested. “Why me, Captain?”
“Some poor son of a bitch has to keep watch, and I couldn’t see anyone more deserving.”
When Steuben left and Billy returned, the raising of the blackout let in the roar of torrential rain and trees in violent motion, punctuated by claps of thunder. Bonnie turned to Slide. “Conrad was right. That is one hell of a storm.”
Slide did not answer. He sat with his fingers pressed to his temples and seemingly lost in thought. After a minute or so, he spoke to no one in particular. “One of our airships is in trouble.”
CORDELIA
The storm hit the NU98 like a giant fist coming out of the darkness. The gondola lurched, and Cordelia thought for a moment that it had become detached from the main fuselage and the supporting gasbags. She believed that she had screamed, but with the combined howling of the wind and the engines, and the pounding of the rain, it was impossible even for her to tell. At the front of the gondola, both the steersman and Phelan fought with the wheel and the trim levers, trying desperately to keep the wallowing dirigible on a level course. Phelan had already ordered Cordelia and the crew to strap in, and they sat secured in their seats by canvas restraints with leather and brass fastenings. The feeling was one of complete helplessness in the face of the raging elements. Aside from the efforts of Phelan and the steersman, only the engineer had a function, jockeying the throttles of the two racing engines. The wireless was broadcasting nothing but grating static, and the navigator had no function except to hope, although all his calculations seemed to be that they were well into enemy airspace already. The airship yawed and wallowed sideways like a small boat riding a raging sea. Lightning flashed in stroboscopic shudders of blinding white that seemed to be all around them, just beyond the mica windows, and the windows themselves threatened to burst inwards as they were pounded by wind and rain.
Phelan yelled to the steersman. “Try to bring her round into the wind. We’ll be blown backwards, but we’ll be taking the brunt of it head-on, and there’ll be less chance of her breaking in half.”
Phelan and the steersman were supported by individual harnesses attached to solid steel rings in the gondola’s ceiling. Without them, they would have been thrown all over the cabin, and the NU98 would have floundered out of control. Not that they exactly had the dirigible reined in even though the two of them clung to the fighting wheel. “That’s the problem, Skipper. I can’t feel the wind coming from the same direction for two straight minutes.”
The navigator had turned in his harness and was looking out of the nearest window, twisting his neck and craning down, trying his best to see what was below them. “I got to tell you, Skipper, it looks like we’re running out of altitude. I think I see treetops. Try to ride the gusts to get some height. We may only be a hundred or so feet up.”
Phelan yelled something back, but it was lost in a deafening roll of thunder. The NU98 seemed to be spinning, and a terrible ripping noise came from above them that sounded as if the fuselage was coming apart. The steersman shouted a warning. “I think we’re losing the skin, Skipper.”
“I can hear it.”
The engineer joined in with more bad news. “I’ve got a fuel warning light on the port engine, and the starboard can’t have much longer to go.”
“I hear you.”
“You’re going to have to put her down, Skipper. That’s all we’ll have power for.”
“Can you think of any other options?”
“Nary a one, Skipper.”
“Then we’re going in. Relax your bodies as much as you can. Try to stay loose.”
Cordelia decided that was the most absurd advice she had ever heard. She braced herself as best she could. The NU98 again spun horizontally, and at the same time rolled from side to side. At the apex of one of these semi-barrel rolls, she also found herself looking at the ground beneath them, and, in a lightning flash, she saw the tops of trees creating the illusion of an uneven meadow that was uncomfortably close. Almost immediately, something scraped along the floor of the gondola. They could only have lost more height and brushed the treetops. Then the whole gondola was tilted violently sideways, and Cordelia was thrown against the safety straps. If she was going to die in the airship, she did not want to watch. Neither did she want her entire life to flash before her.
RAPHAEL
They were riding towards the strangest storm that Raphael had ever seen. They had spotted the sinister tower of clouds about an hour before sunset, way to the north, and, since then, it had borne down on them like a vast threat all through the fading of the light. Underofficer Melchior had watched its approach with an increasing resignation. “It looks like we’re going to be treated to a wet night, lads.”
Prior to seeing the storm, Melchior had been congratulating the company on their good luck at having been assigned a truck to carry them up the Continental Highway from Savannah. “You lads are having it easy. In the old days, the Provincial Levies ran all the way to the fight, whipped along with horsehide flails. It was supposed to toughen them up. Now you get to ride in the lap of luxury.”
Raphael did not exactly consider the thirty-six hours he and his comrades had spent in the open back of the lurching, vibrating truck to be the lap of luxury. The soldiers in the back were at the mercy of the elements and shaken and bounced until they feared that their kidneys were ruptured. The engine had overheated in the middle of the second day, and the squad had been ordered out to squat or lounge at the side of the road while the driver and his relief frowned into the smoking petrol engine and scratched their heads, and Melchior debated with another underofficer, who was also riding up front, whether they should stay with the truck or continue in the direction of the front on foot, in a forced march. All along the long road from Savannah, they had passed other vehicles similarly broken down, and they had laughed at their stranded passengers as they chugged by, leaving a choking cloud of dust and exhaust. Now it was their turn to wait and to be mocked and eat the dust of the constant traffic rolling to the Potomac. Most of the others in Melchior’s squad, working on the comfort principle that it was better to ride than to walk, were hoping that the truck would be fixed so they would spared a long, footsore march. Raphael was the exception in that he figured that he would prefer to walk. They were en route to the front, where only combat and a quite probable early death awaited them. Raphael was in no hurry to arrive at such a grimly terminal destination. Indeed, for the duration of the breakdown, Raphael had simply relaxed and put his mind in the neutral moment, so he could enjoy lying on a dusty grass bank and not being expected to do anything at all. He might have stayed that way until either
the truck was restarted or the decision to march was taken had not Pascal, who was lying beside him, rolled over and whispered urgently to Raphael after making sure that no one was paying any attention to them.
“I’m going to desert.”
Raphael sat up and looked around. “What? Now? You’d be spotted. It’s broad daylight, and there are too many people milling about. Don’t forget there’s a reward for singing out when you see someone trying to sneak away.”
“I don’t mean now.”
“So when?”
Pascal shrugged. “I don’t know. After dark. When a chance presents itself. You want to come with me?”
“You’re crazy. You won’t get more than a couple of miles. You think the MPs and the Ministry of Virtue don’t have patrols all the way up and down the highway? And even if you did get away, you’d be totally on your own. To the natives, we’re all Mosul, and they hate us.”
“I don’t want to die at the front.”
“You’ll die worse if the Zhaithan take you as a deserter. Better a clean bullet than torture and then the flames.”
“Who’s to say it’ll be a clean bullet? You’ve heard Melchior’s stories about guys laying wounded in shell holes for days, all alone and dying by inches.”
Raphael did not have time for this. He had been through all the same horrors in his own mind, and would, without a doubt, go through them again, but he did not need to take on Pascal’s panic. “Get a grip, man. You’re going to spook yourself.”
“So you wouldn’t come with me if I went?”
Raphael shook his head. “Not a chance.” Pascal looked so worried that Raphael quickly put his mind to rest. “But I won’t rat you out if you try it. You have my word on that.”
Right then the truck’s engine had coughed a number of times and ground back into life. The driver seemed to have found a formula for reanimating the machinery, but it came to Raphael as a very mixed signal. It signified the end of this short respite from traveling, but it got him off the hook of having to listen to Pascal’s plans to go on the run. Then Melchior was shouting for them all to get back on the truck, and both Raphael and Pascal rose wearily to their feet.
With the rain about to start at any minute, the traffic grew more dense, with more vehicles joining the flow. More delays were encountered, and more cursing and arguing ensued. The acetylene lamps used by the Mosul vehicles after dark were not noted for either their brightness or efficiency, and although the military police struggled to keep the highway moving, they struggled in a chaotic gloom. Conditions were not made any easier for those caught in the snarling jams of traffic by the fact that different squads of MPs, distinguished by their orange helmets, had very different sets of priorities on different sections of highway. They had passed one checkpoint where the officers were screaming at drivers to keep the traffic flowing at all costs, but, just three or four miles up the road, they encountered another checkpoint at which the MPs were ordering all cars and trucks to pull to the side of the road. Something was coming that took overriding precedence, and all other travelers had to wait at the side for it to pass. Melchior had immediately recognized that a holdup of this kind would only happen if someone or something of great importance was traveling on their road. “Keep your eyes peeled, boys. You might be about to see something right here that will rock you in your boots.”
All through basic training, Raphael had tried to figure out how rumors in armies were started, and how they traveled so far and so amazingly fast. The first scuttlebutt explanations of why they were stalled at the side of this stretch of the Continental Highway came after only a couple of minutes as they sat in the dark amid the throb of idling motors and billows of exhaust fumes created because most drivers were reluctant to cut their engines out of fear they would never get them started again.
“Hassan IX. It’s him. Hassan IX himself will pass right by us.”
The first rumor, however, did not take and had a very short vogue. The majority refused to believe that the emperor was coming, and that story was quickly replaced by one more lurid and frightening. An overheard conclusion that better suited the mood of the majority was swiftly passed along by each company’s regular sayer of doom. “I swear, I heard two officers talking. It’s Dark Things; they’re saying Dark Things are coming. Dark Things with their Mothmen are going to be passing right by us.”
The tale ran down the line like a shudder, and even Melchior seemed to buy it. “If it’s Dark Things we got, then you callow youth are in for a very irregular experience.”
Some in the squad seemed a little too eager for the irregular, like the four from the Lowlands who would have been offering odds on the arrival of actual Dark Things had not Melchior held up a warning hand. “Don’t wish for what you later won’t want.”
Speculation and quasi-facts ran riot as raw replacements asked hardened veterans to tell all they knew about the Dark Things and of what they might be capable.
“Don’t ever look directly at them.”
“They can permanently blind you if they catch you staring.”
“They can fry your brain if they catch you staring.”
“They have this flash that burns clear through your eyes.”
“They can swallow a man whole in one gulp.”
“When they get worked up, they give off this poison gas.”
“Don’t look directly at them.”
Starting with the trucks back down the road some way to the south, a hush fell on the line of vehicles, an eerie dwindling of conversation followed by silence that moved quickly up the highway like an advance warning. The hush was trailed by the glow, an unhealthy orange aura in the night, that appeared way down in the distance but moved up faster than any human formation of marching men. Despite all the warnings, and without exception, everyone in the waiting vehicles looked. At the same time, the first drops of rain fell, splashing on the surface of the road, the warm hoods of trucks, and the helmets of young soldiers. No one in Raphael’s outfit had been issued with special rainwear, no slickers, ponchos, or ground sheets, even though autumn was coming on. Right at that moment, though, no one in the truck would have bothered reaching for a slicker if they had one. All were transfixed, unable to look away. Even Melchior sounded awed. “I don’t know what they do to the enemy, but they scare the shit out of me.”
Where the rain hit the radiance, it instantly boiled, shrouding the Dark Thing formation in its own unearthly cloud of steam, but it wasn’t enough totally to conceal the bouncing geometric lines of the Dark Things themselves. It just made them, and the Mothmen that fluttered above them, even more indistinct than they were already. As they came closer, Raphael could see that they were outwardly nothing more than pitch-black gelatinous blobs with a smooth and shapeless, sacklike exterior that sweated beads of dark red liquid like very old blood. They moved with a bizarre bouncing motion that was ungraceful, uncanny, and unpleasantly comedic. An overcharged young soldier must have seen the same funny side of the Dark Things, because, a few trucks down from that of Melchior’s company, someone started laughing, normally at first, but then rapidly rising in pitch as hysteria clawed its way loose, and only stopping when someone slugged the laugher. Or so it sounded to Raphael, and it must have sounded the same to Melchior, because he spoke quickly and softly to calm the men under him, knowing full well that hysteria was dangerously contagious. “Easy now, lads. Let’s not be getting away from ourselves.”
Once he felt he had them under control, he screwed home his advantage. “Just think yourself lucky you won’t see one burst tonight.”
“Burst?”
“In battle, sometimes, when they take a hit, they burst. Things come out of them, and it’s very nasty.”
The Mothmen were harder to describe. If any human equivalent could be used, the Dark Things were supervised by and apparently under the command of hovering Mothmen. As their name indicated, they were winged beings, with spindly humanoid bodies supported by two pairs of huge, mothlike wings, but their
form seemed to shimmer and shift as though they were a great deal less in this dimension than the shapeless blobs. As Raphael watched, one of then detached itself from the main mass and rose into the air on fast-beating wings, carrying its own orange aura with it. Even with one of the flying things out on its own, he could not make out many additional details. It glittered and sparkled, and it didn’t help that the glow around the single Mothman looked brighter than the more generalized illumination around the Dark Things. The Mothman rose to around thirty feet in the air, hovered for a few moments, and then sank back to the main formation. To Raphael, that action resembled nothing more than the Mothman acting as a lookout, rising in the air to see what was ahead.
Raphael’s attention was suddenly wrenched away from speculation on the nature of the Mothmen when one of the gelatinous Dark Things, with no prior warning, sickeningly confirmed an earlier rumor. A shapeless black blob suddenly broke formation and bounced to one side, at a full right angle to its original direction, and landed on a unfortunate soldier, completely enveloping the man before he even had the chance to cry out or scream. The Dark thing appeared to eat and wholly digest him in little more than the blink of an eye. It bounced again and was right back in the line as though nothing had happened. Now everyone watching knew how the Dark Things supposedly fed, and how they really could swallow an entire man whole, and in one gulp, but Raphael had more to think about than just the Dark Things’ eating habits. In a split second, during the moment of the attack, he had been subjected to a brief vision in which even more unnameably impossible entities, with angular, disgusting limbs, slime-coated and seemingly without bones, and huge, vulture heads that pulsed with dimly obscene energy, marched in ranks against an unintelligible landscape of rods and cones. Raphael knew by some weird instinct that what he was seeing was a fourth-dimensional being translated for a three-dimensional world, and, with his vision, he had taken a step closer to the untranslatable. What he failed to fathom was why he should have had the vision, what it meant, and why it had been his at all. The experience left Raphael feeling shaken and strange, and the same seemed to apply to all those in the truck with him. After the Dark Things had passed them, Melchior moved down the lines of men seated on either side of the truck, looking each in the face. “Anyone here having an adverse reaction to our allies from the Other Side? No? Anyone not feeling himself?” He stopped in front of Raphael. “What about you, boy? You look like you were just butt-fucked by a drunken Mamaluke.”
