by John Mierau
“More than that, ain’t it?” Hobe interjected. “Looks like you’ve got no boats moving at all.”
“ The ‘phones aren’t working. Happens sometimes. Don’t like to stuff the tunnel up with ships, so we’re waiting to hear.”
Marcus didn’t like that. “Even underground? Anything the pirates were doing shouldn’t reach that far-“
“Just watching the door, me,” the Sentry said bluntly. “The Lieutenant ‘ere has rank enough to risk hisself goin’ down the tunnel. All’s I need to know.”
Hobe snorted. Marcus barely held his back. Far too many soldiers displayed less wherewithal than Lieutenant Burns or the Colonel did, these days. The walked in silence, the rest of the way to the line of long-boats nested in wooden scaffolding. After conferring with the soldier guarding the stairs into the longboat, the sentry turned on his heels and headed wordlessly back towards the surface, slowing only to whip off a sharp salute to Burns.
Marcus watched the Lieutenant’s back go ramrod stiff as they approached the wooden stairs up to the longboat. Hobe paid the Lieutenant no mind and hopped on up. Marcus waited, though, an eyebrow cocked as Burns tested the stairs before following Hobe.
Marcus and Hobe followed Burns up the ramp beside the longboat, and all hopped inside. The longboat, as always, looked strange out of water. Where once eight oarsmen, two by two, would power the craft, the space was largely empty.
“Boats ought to be in water,” Hobe grumbled, moving to the back of the boat to lift the lid on the supply trunk there. He drew brown, heavy-weight leather jackets from the trunk for all the men and passed them out.
“Oh, don’t know about that,” Marcus teased. “You wouldn’t want to fly one of those sky-ships?” He knew that Hobe did, but couldn’t admit he was as fascinated by the alien technology as he dreaded it.
“Not likely they’ll let us, now is it,” Hobe sniffed, reaching back in the trunk for a handful of leather-strapped, clear-lensed goggles.
Marcus held out a pair to Burns, then tugged his own over his forehead. Burns watched him do so, then doffed his pith helmet and placed it beneath the first row of wooden benches running parallel in the middle of the boat.
By this time, Hobe had closed the trunk and leaned one hip against it, gentle humor painting his face as he watched Burns awkwardly pull the goggles over his face.
Marcus remembered the soldier’s surprise when he’d first seen the automatic light panels incandesce, and how leery he’d been climbing into the longboat. “You haven’t been down the Mouse-hole before, have you Lieutenant?”
Burns colored, and cleared his throat before answering. “Ah, no Captain Riggs, I have not.”
“What’s this!” crowed Hobe. “The man they sent to fetch our guns ain’t been under yet?”
Burns glared at the engineer. “No, Mister Hobe, I have not. For the same reason you two were relieved of your duties!”
This earned a glare in return from Hobe. Marcus, however, fought a grin, perversely appreciating the two men’s bickering.
The exchange was short-lived, however, followed by another outburst of civility from the soldier. “Dash it all. Please take my apologies, Mister Martin. I merely meant to say, better men have arrived to lead the fight. I have it on authority of my predecessor, and the witness of my own eyes, how capable you both are.”
Hobe chewed his lip. “‘Course we are!” he muttered petulantly, before allowing: “So were you, with them guns. How’s it you can shoot their firecrackers but ain’t been down the hole yet?”
Burns’ smiled gently. “I dare say I have an affinity with light arms, sir. That earned me my station in the harbor to train the soldiers on Invader weapons. I only we’d had more on hand…”
Hobe’s mood darkened again, and Marcus punched his first mate’s shoulder lightly. “Let’s get this boat moving Hobe. Make a good show of it for our friend the Lieutenant, why don’t you?”
Hobe brightened up immediately, and sprang from his perch on the trunk. “I’ll do just that, Guv'nor!” He said, and weaved around the rows of benches towards the bow.
Burns was fiddling with his goggles again. There was a slapping sound, and Marcus stifled a laugh as the goggles smacked into the bridge of the Lieutenant’s nose.
“Here, let me show you,” he said, and demonstrated with his own pair how to properly seat the goggles.
“What’s the point of these damned things?” The soldier asked, as he practiced.
“Ever stick your head out of a train,” Marcus asked, “only to get a mouthful of grit in the wind?”
Burns nodded, as he finally slid the goggles snugly in place.
“This is the fastest longboat you’ve ever traveled in, Lieutenant. It makes a train at full steam look like your great-grand strolling home from Sunday service.”
Burns’ face paled, but he said nothing.
“It’s true,” Hobe called back to them from the bow, and the wooden panel festooned with wires and knobs installed there. “I hear it told one of the Frenchies took off his goggles on the way down the hole.” Hobe cackled with ill humor. “A baker’s dozen of stitches he took, and a broken nose where the bat smacked him. Now check the lines,” he called out, and flipped a switch on the console. “Soldier boys never get ‘em to lay right!”
Marcus shared a look with Burns, and the two men moved to the port side of the boat and leaned out to trace the lines with their eyes. Behind them, Hobe flicked more switches. At the far end of the ropes tied to the longboat, a squat machine resembling a flat, legless beetle glowed and hummed to life.
“All clear,” Marcus called out.
“I-I don’t see any tangling,” Marcus said nervously.
“Will wonders never cease,” Hobe mock-gasped. “A soldier-boy got it right.” He flipped another switch on the console, and the Invader machine on the other end of the ropes began to glow. A purple halo surrounded it, and the machine lifted slowly off the ground, angling up and over the longboat. The ropes fastening the flying machines to the longboat grew taut, and its wood frame creaked. Hobe twisted a dial, and the boat lifted off its blocks into the air.
Burns gave a little shout, and crouched to keep his balance. Marcus stifled a laugh and walked forward, drawing the leather jacket around himself and sighing at the heat it offered. The Mouse-hole offered biting cold no matter the time of day.
That was the price of a secret base under the English Channel.
The boat wobbled again, and he slapped Hobe on the shoulder once he reached the bow. “Give it a rest!”
Burns shouted again. A laugh this time. “Marvelous!” They looked back to see the soldier holding onto the port-side middle rope and grinning.
Hobe nodded. “Guess he’s okay, for a brit.”
“As are you, Mister Martin,” Burns said, walking forward with exaggerated caution, his knees bent. “For a colonial,” he joked.
Marcus didn’t share in the humor. The definitions of colony and empire had changed for him in the past year. “Not sure who’s Empire it is right now, Lieutenant.”
“The Commonwealth will soon be ours, sir, by the grace of Queen Victoria’s continued health! Those cowardly creatures,” Burns growled. “Not their blasted walking machines, nor their metals and their weapons could save them.”
Marcus nodded. “Only for the sniffles that done ‘em in!”
Burns shrugged. “I’ll leave it to the scientists to say what killed them.”
“Why are all the big brains up in Folkestone?” Hobe asked. “They getting proper beds and meals now, instead of a bunk in the Hole?”
Burns allowed a small smile. “Once their numbers were enough to make the Doctors and scientists bold, they made it clear to Colonel Barton they expect… finer things.”
Hobe slapped the wooden console in good humor. “Course! You need your fancy crackers, cognacs and hot baths to suss out what made them buggers keel over and die, now don’t you!”
Burns smiled thinly, but was too much of a gentleman
to voice his opinion. For Marcus’s part, he didn’t care if something here had poisoned them, like the Typhus white men had brought to America had done to the Indians, or if the Invaders had somehow brought it upon themselves. He was just glad to have them gone.
Now if only the Project could do something about those damned rocks!
“Leaves more room down below to tackle the nuts and bolts of running what they left behind,” Marcus said. Wind battered their ears when the talk petered out.
“How far are we going, really?” the Lieutenant asked aloud, some time later.
“Fifteen mile, down and ahead to the Midway.”
Burns whistled. “Half a day on a horse, on rough ground.” He craned his neck up to the purple-shrouded shadow above. “And how long will it-“
“Not a quarter hour,” Hobe cut in.
The wind whistled past over Burns’ stunned silence for a minute or more. “The Devils bore great gifts,” he finally managed, before lapsing into silence again.
Marcus hated the silence. It left him alone with his thoughts. Word from the Americas was scattershot. The rituals the Pegasus demanded before being set to sail, and absconding from the Hole with the cannon before that, had kept his fears for Samantha and Robert buried. He’d had no work what had befell them. Had they survived the Invasion? Their farm on the outskirts of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia was across the water from the town proper, and the boatyards which he feared might have drawn the Invaders’ eye.
You should have been there, Marcus thought to himself. You were gone when they needed you to keep them safe! Have you… have you killed them, Marcus?
The silence pressed against him, with only the wind and his guilt whipping at him, as the boat sailed on, deeper down the Mouse-hole.
#
Marcus Riggs had been born a slave, by a handful of days, on April 4th, 1865. Treatment of colored’s didn’t get much better after General Lee surrendered, but his father, Avery, had learned a trade in the bowels of a steam-powered ironclad. Money trumped skin, and Avery had returned home with cash money, and enough sense to follow that money to a job with a shipyard in Boston, eventually becoming an important man in the land reclamation projects in Boston. “Cutting down the hills to fill the coves,” Avery had called it.
A mechanical genius, Marcus’s father, but he hadn’t had enough sense to avoid being lynched on Marcus’ twentieth birthday. His mother passed soon after, and with nothing holding Marcus to the great city, he travelled the world on the back of his inherited ability as an engineer and sailor before settling in Dartmouth for a job with a shipyard there.
The job paid well, and had led Marcus to Hobe, and together they had found Pegasus, and somehow kept her afload She was a small and fast ship, and had been Marcus and Hobe’s for the last six years. She had crossed the atlantic carrying expensive cargos, and brought them to private ports. Some less charitable men may have called them smugglers, but Marcus kept to peaceful items desired by rich folk, nothing violent or nasty.
It had been a good life. One that was now settling onto the bottom of Folkestone harbor.
His thoughts were pulled back to home. To Halifax. Samantha. Robert. His loved ones, the ones he left alone to roam on Pegasus so much of every year.
Marcus whispered the words. “Have I killed them?”
He pushed the longing for home down deep. Stop it! Nothing you can do but stay alive long enough to get home to them!
“Tell me again,” Burns said from beside him. Marcus was glad for his words, and knew exactly what he meant.
“When I got around the harbor wall, there was no hum. The cannon wasn’t turned on. At first I thought the watch-stander only drunk or sick, but his throat was cut. So were the wires from the triggers into the cannon.”
“Brazen bast… sorry,” he barked. The soldier seemed to have a nervous tick about apologizing. Marcus nodded in agreement. “There’s a traitor. Someone’s been planning this for a time.”
They both stumbled as the boat picked up speed. “Hobe!” Lieutenant Burns shouted, and Marcus’s engineer chuckled, ignoring him. “Somebody tricked finer altitude and speed control out of our beast of burden,” he said, and thumped the wooden console fixed to the bow. “I like you fine, in harness!” he shouted, staring up to the bug-shaped machine keeping them aloft.
“They didn’t risk our fury just to attack ships in the harbor,” Burns said, a cold tinging his voice.
Marcus shook his head. “No. They came for a prize.”
“What prize, though?”
Marcus looked at Burns. “You really don’t know!”
The soldier shook his head. “I know of the university they’re planning in the town, and I know of the weapons collected, the walking machines. I’ve not been made privy to more.”
“Surely you’ve heard the rumors,” Hobe said.
“A gentleman does not listen to rumor!”
Hobe scratched at his chin and shot Marcus a look.
Marcus hid his smile. Burns was proving quite the proper English gentleman.
There was no shortage of stories, Marcus knew. Some said the Mouse-hole a jail for Invaders that still lived, or else Queen Vicky’s new seat of power. He’d even heard it said a New London was being fashioned deep underground. None were the truth. “Fair enough,” he said, and looked forward again.
Marcus was impressed. Burns lasted a good two minutes before bursting out: “Well, what is down here, man?”
Marcus looked back at Burns and smiled. “Oh, Lieutenant, you are in for a surprise.”
#
The Mouse-hole went on for miles. Marcus had once feared all that water over his head, but just like with Invaders from another world, it was amazing what a body could get used to, in time.
His stomach chose that moment to gurgle. There were other things one could not get used to. He’d skipped breakfast, being rather busy procuring the Invader cannon from a friend. He winced, realizing he’d have to tell that friend the cannon was on the bottom of the harbor.
Marcus drew the great-coat tighter around himself, watching a massive light panel above his head flick on. The Mouse-hole was a misnomer: the tunnel was at least sixty feet across, an impossible feat of engineering to even imagine before the Invaders and their tools.
Energy weapons, drilling tools fit to the legs of walking machines, and little flying barges such as the one holding the longboat aloft had taken only a week to dig through to France.
As they flew through the air, light panel continued to wink out behind them, wink on ahead. A spot of light in the distance marked the Midway, the base of operations for the Project.
Burns walked back to his side, settling his elbows on the side of boat. “I’ll ask the Colonel to see us straight away, Captain Riggs,” he said.
“Marcus.”
“Sir?” Burns asked.
Marcus smiled. “You stood on deck with me and helped bring that ship down. You can call me Marcus.”
The Lieutenant’s face brightened. “And a jolly good race you set us on, across that harbor, Marcus.” He straightened and held out a hand. “Owen Burns, when not on duty. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Marcus took the offered hand and pumped it, sharing a smile with the Lieutenant.
“Trouble, gents!” Hobe called.
Marcus and Burns made their way forward. “What sort?” Marcus asked, peering ahead to where a light panel flickered on and off, dizzyingly.
Hobe pointed at small shapes moving around the lighted compound ahead. A complement of pith-helmeted soldiers - white helmets again, not the darker colored ones the veterans guarding the Project had come to favor - jogging back and forth, carrying sandbags to aid in the assembly of a wall in front of… Marcus gasped.
There were too few boats lined up behind the soldiers. Where once a dozen wood frames stood, now there were only half that number. The others were charred, some still smoldering… and where one had been, there was a flaming crater.
Thin sounds were
reaching the longboat now: alarm bells and the shouts of the soldiers. And Marcus could smell the smoke.
“I’ll wager they’re in the shoot-first mood, gents,” Hobe murmured hoarsely.
Lieutenant Burns jogged back to the trunk, removing the leather jacket and stuffing it inside. He returned a moment later with his own white pith-helmet over his head, waving it to and fro.
“All white hats?” Burns asked. “But I was told only the old guard defended the Hole!”
“They did,” Marcus whispered. His stomach soured with fear for the lives of the men he’d worked alongside for months, and fear of what welcome was in store for them.
#
Hobe landed the longboat with barely a bump. An admirable job, Marcus thought, considering the welcoming party had been yelling at them to show their hands and make no sudden moves all the while.
A landing party bounded up the stairs, screaming and pointing their rifles. Mostly young faces, some scared, some watering in the smoke collecting in Midway. All of them red with fury.
They were escorted off the boat and brought to one of the few soldiers wearing a helmet with the white covered up: a scowling bear of a man sporting a handlebar mustache. The soldiers called him Captain Geary.
Geary was unknown to Marcus, and he had a feeling it was mutual as the Captain’s eyes slid past him, and past Hobe. They settled on Burns, though, and relaxed slightly.
“Lieutenant Burns, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Owen said, and saluted crisply.
“I take it you didn’t know our situation,” Geary said sharply. “Or else God knows why you would bring citizenry down here.”
“Until recently, Captain Riggs and his first mate worked on the Project, sir. There was an attack on the harbor and we thought it prudent to report in person.”
“I see,” Geary sighed. “At ease, back to your posts!” he barked to the guards, waving them off. They all turned and fled. The Captain rubbed at his face. Soot stained the right hand side, and a few bloody scratches. “It was a two-pronged attack, as you can see,” Geary murmured. “Well executed too.”
“The pirates used the attack on the bay to distract the commanders here at Midway,” Marcus thought aloud. “That left soldiers’ backs turned and…”
