The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  She reaches for the killbook, turns its pages with reverence. Places: Stalingrad, Kursk, Smolensk. Dates: last in December, 1943. Ranks: Scharführer SS, Feldwebel, Hauptmann. And on the last page, a stick figure of a dog, and writing in neither Cyrillic nor Arabic nor Latin. She looks up for a moment, then turns to the soldier sharply.

  “Korean?” she says.

  The soldier nods.

  “Passing for . . .” she hesitates. “Kazakh?”

  “Uzbek,” the soldier says quietly.

  “Nineteen thirty-seven?” the doctor asks. Matching the soldier’s tone comes naturally; suppressing the urge to look behind her for eavesdroppers does not.

  The soldier looks up. “Not many people know about that.”

  The doctor says nothing.

  “My grandfather was selling lamb samsa at a train station,” the soldier says. “A train carrying deportees stopped there one day. It had been traveling from Vladivostok for a month.”

  The doctor’s fingers scramble in her pocket. She bites her lip.

  “They stopped to bury the dead in the desert. Her mother was one of them. She was thirteen, and an orphan. Grandfather brought her back to our qishlaq. She became one of the family.”

  Selim comes out of the recruiting office, a happy grin on his face.

  “I did it!” he says. “They are sending me to sniper school. And I have you to thank.”

  She draws a breath. “Did you tell them—”

  He shakes his head. “I’m not that stupid. Can you imagine? ‘Oh yes, Comrade Captain, a little girl taught me everything I know about hunting.’ They would call a neuropathologist next, to have my head examined.”

  “I am not little, Selim,” she says firmly. “I’ll be eighteen come spring, and I’ll enlist, too. I’ll ask to join your unit, and we’ll be together again.”

  His face grows somber. “They won’t take you. I’m sorry.”

  “What are you talking about?” She puts her hand on her hips. “They take girls!”

  “They don’t take Koreans,” he whispers. “They have a list of undesirables, only assigned to labor battalions: Tatars, Volga Germans, Chechens . . .” He looks down, spurns a clod of dirt with the toe of his boot, then looks at her again. “Koreans, too. I’m sorry.”

  She does not answer, except for a glint in her eyes: exactly, he thinks, like a reflection off the barrel of Grandfather’s old Mosin Nagant .300.

  Exactly like the glint she had on the first anniversary of her joining the clan when, returning to the qishlaq with an antelope and two hares in the back of their donkey-drawn arba, she turned to him and said, in too-precise Karakalpak Uzbek: “When I am old enough, Selim, we will be married.”

  The doctor is used to silences; the soldier is not.

  “You might not believe this, but she taught me to shoot,” the soldier says.

  The doctor says nothing. She reaches for the killbook, turns its pages with reverence.

  “What am I saying?” the soldier says. “Of course you believe it, Colonel. Most people—”

  “Most people don’t command a military hospital,” the doctor says. “Most people haven’t seen what soldiers are made of.”

  “You must have, as a surgeon,” the soldier says.

  “That, too,” she whispers.

  The train approaches, the smoke from its engine thinning, the chuffing slowing down.

  “This makes no sense,” says Uncle Tsoi. “First of all, there is no war now; the Japanese were beaten at Halhin-Gol, and they are not coming back. Secondly, even if they were, why would we help them? We left Korea to get away from the Japanese. And thirdly, why resettle all of us? They could just arrest the richer peasants, like the Pak family.” He sighs. “No, I think it’s a mistake. I think someone misunderstood what Comrade Stalin said, and when that becomes clear the train will turn around and bring us back here. I just hope it won’t be too late for the apple harvest.”

  He looks up to find that his niece isn’t looking at him. She is staring at the train in the distance.

  “This isn’t polite,” Uncle Tsoi says. “You should pay attention when your elders are talking.”

  She nods absent-mindedly.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a train before?” Uncle Tsoi says, and follows her gaze.

  His face drops. “This isn’t a passenger train,” he whispers. “We are going to travel ten thousand kilometers in cattle cars.”

  They wait for the train in silence.

  A man approaches, a Great Russian by his appearance.

  “Comrade Tsoi?” he calls. “Which of you is Comrade Tsoi?”

  Uncle Tsoi stands up straighter. “See,” he says. “Someone realized it’s a mistake.” He turns to the man and raises his hand. “I’m Tsoi,” he says loudly.

  “Please come with us,” the man says softly.

  Uncle Tsoi turns to her. “Go get your mother.”

  “Just you,” the man says.

  The train stops. The gates slide open with a clatter.

  “All aboard!” a man shouts from the locomotive.

  She watches Uncle Tsoi escorted away from the train, past a line of armed soldiers, until she feels her mother tug at her hand.

  She turns. There are tears in her mother’s coal-black eyes, rolling down her face that is the palest she had ever seen.

  “Come. Have to go,” her mother says. A cough escapes before she can cover her mouth.

  They board the train in silence, find a spot to sit. More people come until there is no more room. Then some more. Then more.

  Then, finally, there is a whistle, the gates clang shut, and the train departs.

  “My brother,” her mother whispers.

  She leans closer to her mother. They are both too old to believe in little dog Ohori; but she decides she’ll never be too old to hope.

  “Do you see your target?” Uncle Tsoi says.

  Her head tilted over the stock of Uncle Tsoi’s Berdan rifle, she gives a tiny nod.

  “What are you aiming at?” Uncle Tsoi asks.

  “The big pine cone,” she says.

  “That is wrong,” says Uncle Tsoi. “Pick a scale. One scale on the whole pine cone. Aim at that. Have you got that?”

  She nods again.

  “Now, breathe in, then out, and on the out, close your whole hand on the trigger.”

  She presses on the trigger, flinching just a bit before the rifle bucks and the shot explodes. The pine cone dances but does not fall.

  “Two more things,” says Uncle Tsoi. “First, squeeze the trigger slowly enough that the shot comes as a surprise to you. Understand?”

  She nods. “And the second?” she says.

  “Connect with your target,” says Uncle Tsoi. “Some people imagine reaching out and touching it; some talk to the target in their minds. Some apologize in advance for hitting it. You have to care, in some way, about the target, to shoot true.”

  She aims again, breathes in and out, imagines the little dog Ohori running to the pine tree, leaping to sniff the pine cone, leave a wet print of its nose on one particular scale.

  The shot rings out, startling her. The pine cone disintegrates into a cloud of chaff.

  “She talked about her uncle so much, I felt like I knew him,” the soldier says. “Sometimes I could almost hear his voice come out of her mouth. ‘When Brother Moon and Sister Sun lived together on Mount Baekdu, they had a little dog named Ohori who loved them both. And when the supreme god Cheonjiwang sent each of them to a different part of the sky, Ohori ran from one to the other until he brought them together, but when they met, they shone light only on each other, leaving the Earth in pitch darkness, so Queen Baji petitioned Cheonjiwang to allow them only one meeting a month. So each new Moon, Ohori is free to roam the Earth, and when you hear barking on a moonless night it just might be Ohori searching for you, to bring you back to someone you miss very much.’”

  The soldier’s voice wavers on the last words. The doctor reaches to touch the soldier’s
shoulder. Her hand trembles an inch above his shoulder board, then pulls back to wipe her tears. She blinks, and hopes her eyes have time to dry before he sees them.

  Colonels don’t cry. Not with a corporal present.

  Is it a starshell, or dawn already? It is light: light enough to see green grass, birch trees in leaf – it can’t be spring – or does it matter? The rhythmic footfalls she hears – pulsing blood, or boots measuring time? And – faces, smiling faces she never thought she’d see again, and voices she never hoped to hear cry, once more, just one more time: “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

  And, nipping at their feet, the little dog Ohori, his barking mixing with laughter and with the shouts of welcome.

  The hand gives one more twitch; the chest rises, falls, never to rise again. The soldier frees his hand from the lifeless grasp, smooths the dead woman’s hair, stands up, face to face with the doctor.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “For what?” the doctor says.

  “We got to see each other, she and I,” the soldier says.

  “It’s worth so much to you?” the doctor says.

  “To me?” the soldier raises his eyebrows. “It does not matter what it’s worth to me. It’s what she wanted. She was worth a million of me, you know.” He pats his pockets, takes out his cap, places on his head, draws to attention and salutes. “Goodbye . . .” he begins, but then his voice gives out.

  The doctor reaches for a carafe on a bedside table, looks for a glass, finds none, and hands the carafe to the soldier.

  “Here. Drink from that. Go ahead, drink.”

  The soldier brings the carafe to his mouth, takes a long swallow.

  “Thank you,” he says. “And thank you for bringing her here. I know you bent the rules—”

  “We take care of our own,” the doctor interrupts. “Which includes you. Go get some sleep. Stop by my office in the morning, I’ll have my clerk process a leave extension.”

  The soldier shakes his head. He steps past the doctor through the door, takes another step in the corridor, stops, turns around and faces the dead woman again.

  “Goodbye, Grandmother,” he says. “Give my regards to Grandpa Selim. And to all of your old comrades.” He takes a breath. “And a few of mine.”

  He turns to the doctor. “Please, Comrade Colonel, don’t order me to stay. We, too, take care of our own. My unit is short a man till I come back, and . . .” he checks his watch “. . . an Antonov-24 is scheduled to lift off for Kandahar in an hour.” He draws to attention and salutes again. “I beg the Colonel’s permission to be dismissed,” he says, in crisp militarese.

  “Granted,” the doctor says, and watches him march away. It isn’t lost on her that his cadence is the same as for the change-of-watch before the Monument to the Unknown Soldier.

  The doctor waits until she hears his footfalls no more before she covers the dead woman’s face.

  Vast Wings Across Felonious Skies

  E. Catherine Tobler

  “Sakura?”

  “I see . . . it.”

  A mile out, the void coalescing within a burgeoning bank of storm clouds above the Nevada desert resembled a tornado tipped on its side. Dorothy Sakata plotted a route for the XD-2 Black Dragon she was piloting for delivery, taking them away from the storm, but she couldn’t drag her gaze away. It was unlike anything she’d seen before, enormous and unknown. Her mother would have loved the barely contained energy of it, her father not so much.

  The void’s whirling length vanished into the growing thunderhead while lightning crackled tendrils across a widening, cavernous mouth. The energy did not dissipate or reach for the ground; the lightning circled the entry, a wreath hung upon a door no one wanted to enter. It did nothing to brighten the fathomless darkness within.

  A brief glance at the desert floor showed no rain, the dry storm kicking up swirls of dirt and tumbleweed, but then Dorothy’s eyes came back to the disruption; in that brief span, it had moved, grown. Rain started to spackle the Black Dragon’s windshield, but the experimental plane wasn’t buffeted by turbulence. The air was smooth, untroubled, despite the storm vomiting itself into life.

  “You have radar on that thing, Avery?”

  “It’s not showing anything. Not a goddamn thing.” Stress didn’t enter the woman’s voice, it rarely did. Dorothy heard only confusion from the radar operator over the radio.

  From the gunner’s seat behind Dorothy came a third voice, carrying a little more stress, a little more depth of feeling. “What in the holy—”

  “Zip it, Bochanek.”

  Dorothy bit the inside of her cheek, willing herself to calm even as the hair on her arms stood up. Surely it was just a storm. It was not an ōkubi prophesying doom, nor any other mythological creature come to warn them. It was surely nothing like the thing that swallowed a plane from Mines Field a month prior. Nothing like the thing the other pilots had claimed to see from here to the Mexico border. No way in hell.

  Dorothy banked the XD-2 toward the ever-growing storm, feeling the first jolt of turbulence as she did. The twin engines remained steady, growling a warning to the skies at large. Closing in, near enough that the rain splatter-hammered the windows in a steady rhythm, the drone of the engines was eclipsed by another sound, an eerie moan that called to mind the buckling of metal. Dorothy raised a hand, pressing fingers to the thunder-rattled windows that arced over her.

  “Hold together, baby,” she whispered.

  “Sakura—”

  “I see that, too.”

  A tendril of lightning-encased cloud crept from the void’s outermost edge, reaching not toward the plane, but skimming across the horizon. Another joined it, dipping for the first time toward the ground. It didn’t get far before the lightning sparked an explosion; the cloud, as if a living thing, drew back into the swirling mass, stung and swallowed.

  “That ain’t normal.”

  Dorothy’s mouth lifted in a smile at the assessment from Avery at radar. She couldn’t argue the point.

  “You think the Germans . . .” Bochanek trailed off.

  Dorothy didn’t know the answer to that, either. The storm looked natural, even as it didn’t. No tornado tipped itself on its side high in the desert skies. On either side of the storm, more clouds pulled in close, as if the entire thing meant to double or triple in size before it was done. As fresh arms of lightning emerged, sparking from end to end, Dorothy shook her head.

  “Whatever it is, we are not this thing’s lunch,” she muttered.

  But before she could prove the storm entirely wrong and break off, the tendrils of crackling energy whipped chaotically and snagged the plane within its sparking grasp. Dorothy’s grip tightened on the stick, trying to turn the plane out of the energy’s hold, but the void pulled the tendrils back inward, bringing the Black Dragon with them. Dorothy only became aware of the amount of struggle between plane and storm when the muscles in her arms snapped, elbows locking as she fought to keep the plane in the air. She leaned into the tension, trying to angle the plane any way she might; not even the back and forth rocking motion of a Dutch roll loosened the plane from the storm’s influence.

  “You want guns on this thing, Sakata?”

  Dorothy very much wanted Bochanek to empty her guns on it, but what could bullets do against clouds and rain? “Hold, Bochanek.”

  Rain sheeted off the windows, the daylight evaporating as the plane was drawn deeper into the storm. Dorothy refused to ease her hold on the stick, trying again and again to pull the plane out of the roiling clouds, but when she glimpsed the crescent of distant sky above them, she realized exactly how far down they had already been drawn. Would there be any getting out? She hadn’t made a lick of difference yet.

  She was never clear on how much time passed, or when exactly her hands came off of the stick; there was the sensation of weightlessness, coupled with a bone-deep nausea, and then there was simply nothing. Dorothy was not aware of the plane or the storm, nor of colors or scents. She w
as not even aware of a darkness, only of a general lack. There was nothing, though she breathed and felt her hair had come loose from its knot, brushing against her cheeks as she floated. Floated?

  Dorothy opened her eyes to find herself where she had always been, the Black Dragon’s cockpit, buckled into her chair. Her hands rested palm up on her thighs, the ache in her arms giving proof to the fight against the storm. One palm was reddened, the struggle burned into her very skin. She lifted her head, heavy and aching, and began the seemingly impossible work of unbuckling her belt.

  “Ruth? Ina?”

  She called to her crew, but there was no reply. Cold air flooded down on her, her flight suit overly thin in the chill, and her eyes snapped to the canopy above; the paned glass was unbroken, showing walls arcing beyond, all traced in metal scaffolding. No clouds, no sky. The plane itself sat motionless, no longer in flight, and Dorothy slid out of her chair. She dropped to the floor, but the hatch was already open, the ladder down. Had Ina left this way after being unable to wake her?

  Dorothy dropped from the ladder, trusting the ground would hold her if it held the plane. The floor beneath her boots was solid and, judging from the sound, just as metallic as it appeared. She gave it another kick and it rang hollow, a taut drum. It was no material she knew, though; when she pressed a hand to the floor, it nearly writhed under her touch, the way a dog might. She drew her hand back and shuddered.

  Beyond the familiar shape of the Black Dragon, the air remained clouded, but the space in which she found herself could be nothing other than a hangar, designed to hold more aircraft than only her own. The walls were bare metal, stained and streaked with rust, rising above her in a bulging A-frame arc. Shape and function were vaguely familiar, but Dorothy climbed back into the plane to grab a wrench from the toolkit. She wanted a proper weapon, something of use from a distance, but America hadn’t been invaded and how many times had she been told that they weren’t military pilots, no matter that they delivered military aircraft. The military was desperate for their skills, but wouldn’t make women part of their core, and while the world was going to war, it was a distant thing, not on these shores.