by Kin Law
Jameson’s breasts were out. Van Houten noted it with as much enthusiasm as he could muster; it wouldn’t do for the rest of the squad to know he was getting some out of turn. She had been no innocent red riding hood, Van Houten remembered. She was more like the wolf, preying on the pigs around her and shitting out the bones.
Apparently, it was Schwartz tonight. The big Austrian began to shed the thick layers of his suit.
“What the devil?” Jameson’s squeal vaguely penetrated Van Houten’s reverie. He was busy looking away from the arclights, in case an ambush decided to appear from the dark. It was what he would have done, and what the Red Indians back home liked to do: take advantage of man’s dependency on candles, gas and Nicola Tesla to strike from the unseen. Dimly, Van Houten began to notice the disturbance was now not from the deserted Berlin streets, but lit by the remains of their own bonfire.
“What’s the matter now, Jameson?”
“It’s this codpiece, Jimmy, it won’t come off and Schwartrz won’t stop grabbing my fanny to help.”
“All right, let me see,” answered Van Houten.
Jameson was a hot mess. The Clanker suit was made of three parts, the outer armor, an inner sleeve and a back-mounted ‘pack’ of machinery plugged into the sockets of the plates with mesh cable. The armor connected in chevron shapes over the joints, which was where Jameson had unwisely started to undo the sockets. She had done it lustily, yes, but forced all the pressure away from her chest. Now it was holding her codpiece flush to her hip plates.
“I don’t know what the boss was thinking when he designed these,” Jameson complained.
Van Houten worked at the chrome nuts to release the pressure.
“Just keep still,” he said, trying to ignore Jameson’s suggestive movements and Schwartz’s impatient glare.
They had been trained in how to use the suits, but it was true none of them had ever seen the insides of the Clanker ‘packs.’ It was to their credit none of the packs were easily damaged, but then Berlin had been the first true combat situation, with a discernible enemy. Van Houten’s usual targets were working stiffs, after all, and could harm a Clanker no more than a dead man.
“Have you got it yet?” Jameson whined, her seduction turned to frustration.
“Yes, I think I have. Here…” And Van Houten undid the last nut, loosening the codpiece from the hips. He backed away quickly, letting Schwartz back into the fray.
“That’s more like it…” Jameson resumed her striptease, pulling off the offending garments once more. She couldn’t do it quickly, but she could do it with gusto, flinging the plates off their chests in turn. It was when she stopped and a plate clattered to the ground that Van Houten realized something was wrong.
“Jameson? Jameson! Bridgette!” Van Houten hollered, but it was too late to stop Bridgette Jameson’s knees falling inert to the ground with a clang. Schwartz caught her head in his big hand, sort of detachedly, like he was wondering if he was still getting some. He was no medic.
“Move!” Georges cut in, still in full hood and cloak. He was.
“Defensive positions,” Van Houten ordered in the meanwhile. If Jameson had been shot, the shooter would likely be… curses! There was no cover anywhere near the Gate!
Why hadn’t they shot out Schwartz or Schmidt first?
The big guns would have been Van Houten’s target, or the Captain himself, if the enemy didn’t have anti-tank bullets.
“Hold,” Georges was saying. There was an apparatus of lenses over the blankness of his faceplate- a medical scope. “There’s no wound.”
“What do you mean?” Van Houten replied. He was still considering shooting a flare at the dark cloud slowly moving over Brandenburg Gate, so two gnashing Kobolds could be air-dropped into the promenade. Those metal giants would make short work of any interloper, but it would weaken Van Houten’s command. Nobody wanted a leader who would call for backup at the drop of one Irish bird.
“I mean, she hasn’t been shot,” Georges continued. He showed them Jameson’s exposed stomach, where a bluish-grey discoloring stained her from ribs down. It looked like someone had painted her abdomen to crotch while she was drunk. “This is organ failure. Looks like liver, maybe kidneys, spleen, it’s systemic.”
“Blast Zahavi,” Van Houten cursed. General Zahavi wasn’t a great theater commander, he was a pen pusher; for that matter, it wasn’t a war. Van Houten looked around; every one of them was an employee, killing for a profit. There was no contingency to cover a medical emergency- it was simply assumed the soldier would die. Hence, there was no separately colored flare or signaling method to call for medical assistance. None of them would be satisfied if Van Houten simply left Jameson to die, not like this. He made a command decision.
“Listen up,” Van Houten said loudly. “I hit the flare for a Kobold drop. Schmidt, wait here for the drop in case we have an ambush. Don’t give me that, the position needs defending.”
Georges seemed to be supportive.
“When you see them, haul out and regroup. The rest of us will take Jameson to forward command, where Zahavi has a drop ship.” He said drop ship, but it was more like a gondola, with just enough room for three. It had been intended as a relay to their employer.
His squad clanked their greaves against their helmets. They weren’t army, true, but they were professionals.
Forward Command was in spitting distance, just below the Brandenburg Gate. They could see the drop ship once they got past the first line of trees, a squat lump. From there it was a straight shot over the promenade, which was why Van Houten barked in surprise when Schwartz crumpled over, tumbling Jameson all over the stone as he fell. His ammunition canister rolled away like a barrel of hard little pickles.
“Schwartz! Achtung!” Van Houten tried, but the big man wouldn’t move. They took up positions round him, but when it was clear there weren’t any attackers, Van Houten motioned Georges to take a look.
“He’s heavy!” He said, struggling with the dense armor around Schwartz. Van Houten grunted in frustration, but seeing no other recourse, bent to help undo the clasps and pressure nuts.
“You great big heavy sod!” Georges cursed, when he saw Schmidt’s chest. He had the same discoloration as Jameson.
“Aerosolized vitriol? Some kind of new weapon?” Van Houten guessed.
“No, it would have hurt us faster than Schwartz in his thicker suit,” Georges said. “This is something else, this is…” He looked down, likely thinking what Van Houten himself was thinking.
“The suit itself,” he finished.
There was nothing for it. Georges hefted Jameson, while Van Houten stripped the pack and plates off Schwartz, carrying him in his black Clanker longjohns. The suit could lift that much, at least.
Halfway between where Schmidt collapsed and the drop ship, Van Houten felt a shooting pain in his stomach. He bit his lip, feeling the salt of blood on the tongue. Was it the exertion of moving the heavy Schmidt? Was the suit eating him alive faster, because of the strain? Van Houten was commanding officer, and so had fewer recourse to use the suit’s capabilities. Perhaps it was why his people were dropping around him like flies while he seemed able to weather the effects.
Van Houten bit down harder, and pulled with all his might. He felt the pain spreading, but the drop ship was right in front of him. It would be yellow, and worse, unprofessional to give in.
Suddenly a thunderous sound tore the sky, and a bright lance of light lit up the Brandenburg Gate’s surroundings like a beacon across the sea.
“He’s early,” Van Houten said, watching the pillar of fire strike into the ground. Schmidt was there, Van Houten recalled dimly, right near the cutting beam. He wondered if Schmidt had collapsed by now.
“Georges, did you hear me? The boss is early.”
Georges was laid out on the ground, and did not move.
“Oh hell no,” Van Houten cursed. He hadn’t even heard Georges fall.
That tore it- Van Houten had to
get out of the suit. Any longer and he wouldn’t be able to help anyone. Quickly, his gloved fingers undid the clasps, spinning the pressure nuts as quickly as he could. Careful- do it in the correct order, or you’ll be trapped in the suit just like Jameson.
He contemplated deserting- it was common. He was essentially a freelance soldier. Leaving would simply mean sacrificing wages unpaid. He contemplated the German whores, the good beer and the Grimm stories he had read as a child. He could rent a carriage, maybe a nice Bavarian engine with all the creature comforts, and go to the Black Forests. It was funny, now he thought about it. Working for the wine lords of frontier California with a ragged copy of fairy tales in his grubby overalls, he had vaguely known those dark, monster-filled woods existed somewhere. Now he was a Clanker, with access to a vast fleet of battle-ready dirigibles, and could have visited them or any other fairy home in the world whenever he liked. What irony- he had to become a monster himself to do it.
His elephant gun was giving him trouble, so he did what any mercenary worth his keep would never do. He threw it aside, slapping at clasps and cables as he did so. The plates fell to his left and right, making a racket to wake the dead. It was no surprise when he ripped the inner sleeve open and found the black and blue bruises staining his abdomen.
What surprised him was the sudden blooming of red in the middle, like a dot of crimson in snow. Snow White…. The thought wandered from one ear to the other.
Van Houten groaned, turning. He saw the uniform, all jack boots and precision, before he toppled to the ground. From there, it was hard to miss the GSG dirigible hanging high above, a pressed-helium Lupine-class, and kept seeing it as a bolt of his employer’s wrath tore through its high-speed cowling.
The GSG man who had shot him turned, running from the flaming wreck, but Van Houten couldn’t, of course.
He was resigned even, bleeding a warm pool from his gut. Damn scummy place to shoot a man, Van Houten thought. It would take him forever to die, were it not for the tons and tons of dirigible wreckage about to crush him.
The witch was always baked in Hansel and Gretel. It was the fate of monsters to be slain.
9: The Urchins of Deadcast
“I still don’t understand,” Elric Blair spoke up nearly two hours into the drive. “Why aren’t we taking the Huckleberry to Leyland? What in the bloody blazes are we doing up here in the first place when your Captain Samuel was last seen in the Mediterranean?”
Green English countryside was rolling past at a breakneck clip, but the familiar scenery did nothing to still the rollicking feeling welling up from somewhere in Blair’s midsection. Between the lumpy buckwheat cushions and the rusty suspension on the old commandeered Fjord, Blair’s delicate constitution was staging a coup d’etat, likely to end in smelly revolution. To his admonishment, none of the others seemed to be having a hard time of the bumpy back roads.
“I’ve explained it to you four times,” Clemens said cheerfully from the driver’s seat. At least, his voice was cheerful; behind the dark-tinted driving goggles and the stonewall face, it was hard even for Blair’s investigative noggin to wrap itself around the pirate Captain. The best that could be said, Blair felt, was Clemens seemed to possess no small amount of honor behind his blank façade. He had proved as good as his word, thus far.
“What you’ve done is repeat to me Nessie Drake’s last message to us,” Blair stated accurately. “which means piss-all, frankly.”
He vaguely noticed the dark edge every word seemed to take. The motion sickness was making him cynical, and he hated himself for it.
He was beginning to find writing the adventure very different from living the adventure. For every story he wrangled out of Clemens’ mouth, there were engine mounts to be cleaned, masts to be strung, potatoes to be peeled.
“I would have expected you of all people to have guessed at the meaning of the words,” Inspector Hargreaves quipped casually from her perch at Blair’s right. Her crossed legs, the way her knee-length pea coat betrayed no trace of her firearms, it all rubbed Blair the wrong way. He had known far too many dust-ups at the hands of plainclothes Inspectors. Consciously, he was in awe of Vanessa Hargreaves’ efforts, yet the old instincts cried out for him to run whenever he saw her reach through the slits in her coat.
“Look, it’s not so difficult,” Rosa Marija, seated next to Clemens, spoke up. The carriage wheels struck a small stone, pitching her assets ever so pleasantly. “Nessie Drake gave us everything.”
What was it she had shouted when they jumped into the steam carriage? Shotgun, yes, that was right. Blair suspected the scandalous mocha maiden had spent no insubstantial time in the Americas, perhaps even the Lands Beyond. Her habits and mannerisms exuded a breed of confidence utterly out of his scope. It made him think of the older boys at primary who would, in all earnestness, invite him on their outings, not giving a thought to his patched trousers or rail-thin physique. It made him feel inferior, and he had spent a lifetime trying not to be such.
“I am expected to know the relevance of those terms? It sounds somewhat Hobbesian… are we to track down a socialist coven?” Blair asked somewhat bitterly.
But Rosa Marija and her bombastic attitude brooked no reflection. She was turned completely round in her seat, peering back at the two in the back of the Fjord. She was leaning forward a bit, and Blair felt a blush warm his pasty face at the sight of two celestial bodies spilling out of a very tastefully embroidered bodice.
“Ah, so you don’t know the legend,” Clemens said, as if he were Aristotle in the bath. “Sorry. My fault, most airmen know the what and who of it.”
“Even I am aware of the Leviathan,” Hargreaves mentioned, “though I am at a lost regarding the rest of the message. An old friend once spoke of it, Captain Leeds of the Gwain. He seemed to think it some unrealistic romance.”
“Now there’s a gorgeous ship,” Miss Marija said with stars in her eyes. “I’d love to pilot a Balaenopteron some day.”
“The Laputian Leviathan,” Clemens continued, ignoring his star-struck helmswoman, “is straight out of Gulliver’s Travels. Although, where Gulliver reported a floating isle full of egg-headed plutocrats, the Leviathan is purportedly uninhabited. It’s an abandoned fortress in the sky, full of extraordinary steamworks. It might be the remnant of some ancient civilization, perhaps drifted in from the Lands Beyond. Some aeronauts say it’s the summer palace of visitors from beyond the stars.”
“It’s also supposed to contain the secret of lift compound,” Rosa Marija mentioned. “Without which, no dirigible could fly. They say the first balloon jockeys found the Leviathan, and from it plucked the first aeon stones.”
“And others say the Leviathan is hogwash,” Hargreaves said. “Aeon stones are mined all around the world, there could hardly be one almighty source of them.”
“But they’re all found in lakes and circular valleys, as if they were dropped from on high,” Clemens argued. Sensing a bloodbath, Elric Blair hastily changed the subject.
“Right. Well, what does it have to do with a steam worker town in the middle of bloody England?” Blair said.
It was not difficult to say, as the bile had already reached his gullet. As if to spite him, the landscape lurched as they passed some rocky outcroppings. “And why can’t we bloody fly in?”
Albion Clemens harrumphed, returning to his driving, while Hargreaves, robbed of her sparring partner, turned to answer.
“In recent years, the search for the Leviathan has stalled due to a healthy skepticism, and lack of empirical evidence,” Hargreaves explained. “But one eccentric has maintained a personal fleet of ships diligently combing the skies for it. Your field is more… serious… in nature, but if you paid attention to the high society periodicals or dockside classifieds, you would notice the name of Valima Mordemere occurring more often than not.”
“The steamwork magnate?”
“And a damned cheat,” Clemens mumbled audibly. “You’d think a man wealthy enough to own a pers
onal fleet of treasure hunters could compensate us the winnings.”
“He once hired us to run the Monte Carlo race… at least, one of his agents did,” Rosa Marija explained. “We won, but we were disqualified for using Mordemere’s special fuel. I think he was trying to secure some government contract, you know how the Royal Navy has been gearing up for the Ottoman invasion.”
“Any day now,” Blair agreed between lurches. He was all but holding the bile in with his hands, but his fingers scrabbled at pen and paper all the same. He would have to ask Clemens for the details to this race later, if it would ever become a printable story.
“Sounds like he didn’t care whether you won or not,” said Hargreaves with no small amount of snip.
She looked a little taken aback at such a connection between the respectable alchemist and her pirate cohorts. For Blair, such underhanded relations were par the course. It fit his view of the world to a tee.
“Sounded like he was sure of his victory,” Clemens corrected. “Bastard, yes, but the man has an alchemic genius, on top of a shrewd business sense. Look sharp, we’ll be able to see his atelier in a moment.”
Blair was not in any condition to examine anything, but as he had once heard looking into the far distance could alleviate nausea, he did as bid.
Thankfully, the land had flattened into a level grade, and the road seemed in better repair closer to the industrial center of Leyland.
The scattered clusters of village homes were transformed into an unbroken cliff of warehouses while Blair was out of commission. Stables bristled with chimneys for all the lorries needing water and hot coals. Blair knew Leyland was the beating industrial heart of Britain, but the meaning of those words seemed to hit him anew as he realized not a single flesh and blood horse could be seen amidst the afternoon activity.
Characteristically, the sky was an unbroken chalk mass, yet it lent an appropriate air to the regular slate surface of the city. At Leyland’s perimeter, the only color to be seen was the varied festival of livery where various airships were docked.
