by John Mierau
And now she has a bite, Marcus thought, patting the long shape under the cloth.
Hobe’s smile showed teeth. “Just let those pirates try us.”
Marcus still hoped they wouldn’t. “All right, then. Who’s turn is it to weigh anchor?”
Hobe opened his mouth to answer, but the twinkle in his eyes died before the first sound made it out.
When it came, that sound was: “Shit.”
“Pegasus!” boomed a deep voice. “In the name of Queen Victoria, you are commanded to welcome her officers aboard!”
Marcus turned slowly, hands open and at his sides. Black men had been shot on the docks since this all started. It wouldn’t do to be shot on your own boat, he thought, as he took in the five men standing at the far end of the gangplank up to his boat.
The big voice began to a burly young officer carrying a Royal Navy standard. Four riflemen were lined up on the dock behind him, their weapons shouldered, but their looks hard. The entire complement wore white pith-helmets, instead of the green and brown ones preferred by those who’d fought the Invaders, and learned the hard way.
“Great. White-hats,” Hobe whispered. “No good’s comin’ of this.” The engineer skirted around the device he’d just bolted onto the Pegasus’ deck and bodily blocked it from the view of eyes on the navy boat. “Think they know we’ve got…?”
Marcus shrugged. “Let’s find out.”
#
Marcus was surprised when Officer Owen Burns - a burley man in his mid-twenties and the owner of the booming voice - leaped across to Pegasus on his own, opting to leave his guardsmen on the dock. Hobe couldn’t stop stealing glances at the cloth-covered device they had just bolted to the deck, so Marcus led the man into the wheelhouse and offered him tea.
“Terribly sorry about this, Captain Riggs. Mister Martin.”
And he was: a blush covered the young man’s face from his button-down collar clear up to his curly, over-long brown hair. Even Hobe relaxed enough to lean against a bulkhead with a cup and temporarily bench his scowl.
That the man had accepted a ‘cuppa’ put Marcus somewhat at ease, but he knew he’d be a damn sight more at ease once Pegasus cleared the mouth of the harbor and Hobe fired up the boilers for home.
“I’ve been assigned to the harbor since my arrival, but have been given a brief on the goings-on in the, ah, Mouse-hole, and of your contributions, sirs.” Officer Owen looked up from his teacup guiltily. “I understand you’ve been given leave to return to the Americas, however Lieutenant-Colonel Merrie insists you ship be searched.”
Marcus kept quiet. He didn’t know the name, but noted Barton outranked him. Maybe he could stall this, get Colonel Barton to step in.
“Why us? We done everything you asked,” Hobe stormed, “right ‘'til you kicked us off your pretty secret base, and now you got no right to--”
Marcus held up a hand. Hobe growled but snapped his jaws shut.
“Lieutenant, Washington dug up their own bits and bobs. They confirmed that on cross-Atlantic ether-calls before the Pirates blocked them. Our holds are clear, save for fuel and provisions, go and look. It’s been a year away from home, Lieutenant: all I want is to-”
“Lieutenant Burns!”
Hobe craned his head around Burns. Something out the window turned his face ugly, and he shot out of the wheel room. “Get your hands off that, you’ve no right!”
The sound of several rifles being chilled Marcus’s blood.
He and Officer Burns stared at each other, each wanting to follow but Marcus knew they were both taking care not to be rash, not to pour kerosene on the fire.
Eyes locked on each other, Marcus saw a surprising amount of steel in the young man’s gaze. Not just young and bluster, he thought, ignoring the powder keg in his guts as his friend continue to shout to the other soldiers.
“You men,” Owen barked over his shoulder, “lower your guns!”
The officer held a hand out towards the doorway. “After you, Captain…”
Marcus felt the blood pounding in his ears as he edged by the soldier and through the door. Hobe was standing against the steam funnel, arms raised above his head. The rifles of two soldiers were still trained on him, while two more had pulled the cloth off of the new addition to the Pegasus’s deck.
Eerie purple boxes, dark green metal tubes and wiring made up the bulk of the weapon. Upon its back, the smooth original lines of the device were marred by a box of cogs and a trigger made - by Hobe and himself — for human hands.
“Well, what have we here!” drawled a tall, thin soldier with a rotten-toothed smile. He ripped the cloth away and patted the Invader weapon like a hunter pats the carcass of his kill. Then, Marcus watched in horror as he drew his sidearm. “Thieving Invader guns is a capital crime!” He said, and pointed the barrel at Hobe’s forehead.
Hobe’s fingers splayed as he pushed his hands higher into the air. “I ain’t got no gun!” he yelled at the soldier.
“Stop!” Marcus shouted. His eyes darted between each of the Lieutenant’s men. Each set of eyes angrily dared him to act. If he moved, he was sure they’d cut him down, too.
He turned back to Burns, eyes pleading. “Burns, please!”
“Say hello to the angels, mate,” the soldier shouted over him. His jagged yellow smile widened as he took careful aim, and cocked the hammer.
#
“Hold your fire, all of you!” The lieutenant barked. Marcus heard an edge of panic in his voice. “No one
“Right enough, the fuzzy and his man were making off with arms, sir!” ground out the thin soldier whose pistol was trained at Hobe’s head. “Law’s clear!”
“That’s quite enough, Brimley!”
Marcus saw Officer Burns’ blushing face turn furious. All four of the officers stood ramrod straight at the reprimand.
“By what right did you board this ship?” Marcus looked back to Hobe, who’s face seemed to be stuck between a boiling anger and magnetic attraction to the sharp bayonets only feet from his head. He caught the engineer’s eyes and made a ‘calm down’ gestured with both hands.
“They got no rights if they’re guilty-“
“Hold your tongue, private!” Burns turned on his heels to Marcus. “Captain Riggs, I hold myself responsible for this soldier’s ignorance. Please accept my apology. He’ll be properly disciplined for drawing arms and for his words, I assure you.” He gestured to the alien weapon. “But I must take this.”
Marcus shook his head. “Held against our will for more than a year! We didn’t argue! We done our part! Now we’re off to swim with the sharks, and you want us toothless!”
He saw a flicker in the officer’s eyes. Burns had some idea what was happening out there.
Good.
“Lieutenant,” Marcus reasoned with the man. “We’re taking nothing that wasn’t dropped to rust in hundreds of cities. We need the weapon to make it across.”
Officer Burns opened his mouth to speak again, but did not. He looked stricken, now things were calmer again, but his words were firm. “My predecessor spoke very highly of both you and Mister Martin, but… I’m sorry, my hands are tied. I must confiscate the weapon.”
Halifax. Samantha. Robert.
Marcus fought not to lash out. He didn’t want to do hurt the officer, but he needed that weapon!
“Which is it, Burns?” Hobe finally roared. “Your fancy-pants Majesty wants us gone, or she wants us dead!”
One of Hobe’s guards snarled and raised the butt of his rifle towards Hobe.
“Cowardly, sir!” Burns roared, surprising Marcus again. Burns stomped forward, out of position to cover Marcus, and pulled the gun out of the offending soldier’s grasp. “The man is unarmed!”
Marcus tensed. If he could get Burns’ pistol…. Only his respect for the young officer had kept him from acting, but it had to be now. He took two quick steps forward, one hand flattened to push the officer forward, the other reaching out for the open leather cover to the officer
’s holster.
Before either hand committed him to action, a shadow raced across the deck of the Pegasus. A torrent of wind bobbed the ship, and Marcus looked up to see an iridescent winged shape in the sky shoot overhead. He felt the strange buzzing of its engines, and watched with growing dread as it banked back around towards the harbor.
“To arms!” Burns bellowed, quickly pulling the loaded rifle from the second soldier and aiming it skyward.
Marcus watched, skin crawling. He remembered a sky clogged with dark shapes, as the alien sky-ship approached with a building whine. It closed again on the harbor, and lightning crackled from barrels beneath the wings. There was a flash and a roar, and balls of white crackling energy hammered the wood and iron-clad ships in the harbor.
Ships rocked from the impact. One vessel exploded with a roar, sending up a geyser of water and metal shrapnel that set off the steam heart of a neighbor.
The pilot of the alien ship was taking his time, traveling at only ten or twelve knots, the better to ensure the destruction of as many vessels as possible.
In slow motion, Marcus saw one of the soldiers fall to the deck - his legs going one way, his torso the other. He saw Hobe run past the dying man towards the rail cannon they had just fastened down just before Burns had arrived. He saw Burns stand, steady as a rock, and fire his single shot rifle into the sky.
His aim was true, flaring through the force wall defending the alien craft and impacting the nose of the ship, just below the canopy window. Marcus was impressed to see a spark on the nose of the ship. Alas, to little effect, save for scratching the black paint covering the nose with a crude skull and crossbones.
They were too late to make good their escape. The pirates were attacking Folkstone Harbor.
#
Marcus shook free of his paralysis, and rushed to the port-side gunwale. “Today, Hobe!” he roared. He caught a glimpse of his engineer coming to life, before he fell to his knees and felt for the edge of a particular wooden plank.
“I’m going!” his engineer shrieked. The hair on the back of Marcus’s neck stood on end as the hum of the cannon began to build.
“Lieutenant!” Marcus hauled out a canvas sack and upended its contents onto the deck.
One of several blue-silver double-barrelled rifles with Y-shaped stocks at the back end skittered across the deck to Lieutenant Burns’ side. He cocked an eyebrow at Marcus, even as he dropped to one knee to recover the weapon.
Marcus held another in front of his body and gestured to the bottom of the rifle, where the copper wiring and cogs he and Dr. Grace had installed led to a trigger shaped for human hands.
The weapon hummed to life in his hands, and he heard Burns turn his on as well. “Victoria!” shouted Burns and fired stream of crackling white energy at the sky-ship’s side. The air around the ship sparkled, and the beams stopped a few feet away from the ship’s skin. The scientists called it an ‘force wall’.
Marcus had taken one of those down before. He kept firing, as did Burns.
In response, the ship slowed, and through the front canopy window Marcus could make out a bald-headed man, working his hands furiously over controls just out of sight... to turn the gun pods on either wing down towards Pegasus.
“Keep firing!” Marcus shouted. Both streams of white lightning plastered the air around the ship, and the air glowed white all around the nose cone. Then tentacles of light arced inside the energy wall to the skin of the ship.
The invisible eggshell of the force wall melted away, and gunfire from Pegasus’s deck landed on the sky-ship itself. A crack appeared in the windshield. The face inside snarled, and its hands continued their work.
Marcus heard the ‘ka-chunk’ as the sky-ship’s gun pods swivelled their way.
“Hobe, fire, damn all!”
“Charging,” Hobe’s voice came out pinched. “...charging....”
The sky-ship fired. The gun pod beneath one wing boiled water to steam in the waves beside Pegasus. The other tore a chunk off her bow. A soldier gurgled and stopped firing.
“Firing!” Hobe screamed, before his voice was lost in the fury of the cannon.
Marcus watched a solid beam of light, as thick around as his head cut a swatch through the air. It slid across the sky-ship, from stem to stern. Marcus could make out the surprised ‘o’ on the face of the pirate in the over-sized alien chair, and see his severed legs fall through the air towards the bottom half of the ship. It slid apart. Both halves slammed into the water, setting up a geyser of steam and water.
Across the deck, one of Burns’s soldier cheered, but his words were cut short, just as he was, as another ray of white light sliced through him, and more of Pegasus’s deck.
He heard Hobe’s grunt of horror. Heard Pegasus groan and water splash her side. And some other water-sound puzzled his senses, too. Hw crouched lower on the deck, his head circling for signs of another sky-ship. There was none. But there had to be, he knew, or else—
His brain suddenly assigned meaning to a strange crashing of waves, coming from out past the harbor wall. He turned that way and froze at the site of a spar, stretching out of the water to some point above his head.
He didn’t want to look. He had to.
He saw the second spar, and the third. Smooth, impossibly thin, without seams or steam to power them. And yet they moved powerfully through the water.
The waterfall still crashed down from something above the three spars, and Marcus let his eyes go where they must.
Like always, the sight of the gleaming metallic form severed his emotions. He felt as if scissors had cut the strings on so many balloons filled with fear, anger, terror.
A clam-shell of glowing greens, reds, blues: the cockpit. A black sheet of glass across the front, where alien eyes had once piloted. Long, segmented tentacles of metal hung below the giant shell of a cockpit, like a soup-strainer moustache.
As it neared the harbor, the metal thing rose higher still, stories into the air. The tentacles twitched, and one of the tall spars, it’s legs, churned the sea into a froth.
Then it screamed, and every man on Pegasus jumped in fright.
Ulllaaa.
Ulllaaa.
It had been so long, but Marcus’s body remembered the perfect terror of facing such machines.
Once again, a Tripod marched to Folkestone.
#
The tripod marched towards Pegasus, screamed its challenge…and Marcus trembled. His body reacted with fear, but his mind was clear. He stared up at the creation of beauty: no crude welds, no hammered imperfections, no patch-work marred its smooth surface. Other protrusions, cylindrical barrels, extruded below and to either side of the shell.
The barrels blazed brightern than the sun, with a cold silver glow. A glow that was building in strength. A glow that cast eerie shadows across the skull and crossbones decorating the cockpit of the tripod.
The tripod that was now almost to the harbor wall.
“Run for it!” Marcus shouted, scooping up the third and last rifle and leaping over the side. He hit the deck hard, and heard other bodies hitting and rolling near him.
Something exploded on deck. Marcus grimaced. His Pegasus was burning.
Burns yanked him to his feet. “I’m glad you laid in supplies, Captain Briggs,” the officer panted.
Marcus looked around. “Hobe!” More rifle fire came from land now, and the rattling of the alarm bell. Fat lot of good bullets will do, he thought.
“Hobe,” he shouted again, “where are--” Two hands were holding onto the far end of the dock. The fingers of one lifted and wiggled, then slammed down, nails scratching through the wood then holding fast.
Burns was there a second before Marcus. The two men each took an arm and hoisted the white-faced engineer up onto the wooden dock.
Hobe was stuttering his thanks when another steam ship exploded, shattering its neighbors and sending flaming beams through the air. All three men were blown flat.
“Bloody merciful
Christ!” Hobe screamed, pulling Marcus roughly to his feet. “Let’s go already!”
They were scrambling back to their feet now. A second sky-ship buzzed above them like an angry hornet, banking around over the open water for another pass. And cutting through it all, the tripod called out it’s inhuman cry again.
Ulllaaa!
“We need shelter!” Burns shouted.
Hobe nodded and started towards dry land. “You don’t have to tell me twi-”
Marcus grabbed him by the wrist. The engineer turned, confusion written on his face.
Marcus shook his head. “They’ll pick us off before we get off the dock.”
“Then where?” Burns panted. In his hands were his rifle and the third he’d brought for Hobe. “Mr. Martin,” Burns panted again, and tossed one to the engineer.
Marcus spun in a slow circle, his serene mind effortlessly ignoring his body’s urgings to run like hell. He was operating almost like a different man, now, as he planned his next move.
“The harbor defences!” He pointed to the farthest part of the circular harbor’s rock wall. “They’ve got another cannon mounted there.”
Burns nodded, and set off with Marcus.
“Sure an’ they won’t pick us off standing on a bunch of rocks,” Hobe groaned, but fell in step.
Marcus ran for all he was worth along the wooden dock. A few stragglers surrounded them, either too afraid to move or injured from their flight off the crafts the Pirates had already set fire to.
As they ran down the wide deck towards the far side of the harbor, an impossibly thin metal tentacle whipped past them. The tentacle circled the neck and body of another sailor. He was a neighbor for long months, a man Marcus had talked to and laughed with… and now cursed himself for not learning his name. The man gave one short cry of surprise before he was flying backwards in the air. Marcus heard the sound of bones breaking but he couldn’t waste a fraction of a second to look back. His lungs burned. Sweat burned his eyes even worse, but still he ran.
When he reached its end he jumped onto a sailboat moored there and hopped up onto the cabin. More boats were nestled close together, all the way to the rock wall that encircled the protected harbor. All three men leaped and climbed their way across the tight, bobbing mass of wood and metal, as explosions and the drone of the second sky-ship chased them.
