The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  “Never on these shores,” Dorothy whispered, fingers tight around the wrench’s comforting weight.

  “Ruth Avery?”

  She tried again, but there was no response to the name. Her voice didn’t so much as echo within the hangar. Dorothy turned a slow circle, lifting a hand to stroke the only familiar thing in the room, the solid metal of the Black Dragon.

  She walked a slow, assessing circle around the plane, to ensure the craft was whole. However the plane had come to be here, its nose pointed toward the far, clouded end of the hangar, not so much as a dent or scratch upon it. The brass at Mines didn’t need a damaged plane delivered, and Dorothy was sure of one thing: she was going to deliver this plane, come hell or—

  “High damn water,” she said, ducking under the second wing. The plane showed no signs of weapon fire – receiving or delivering. The only thing she noted was the dropped rear entry hatch, proving a clue as to how Ruth had exited. Normally. That made no damn sense.

  Dorothy rounded the Black Dragon’s twin-boom tail and moved toward the nose. Beyond, the room dropped abruptly away and she walked to the very edge, waving a hand to dispel the fog. The clouds curled apart and across a wide metallic chasm, a space that could have held a dozen aircraft carriers, she saw more hangars lining the walls, each home to what appeared aircraft, though none of the designs were familiar to Dorothy.

  Above the hangars, the walls swept up and away in dramatic geometric forms; other shapes descended from an unseen ceiling, hollow tubes and cubes, as if conduits leading deeper into the vessel. One glance down had Dorothy gasping; she could see forever, a world stretching into an endless vessel of metal and light. She picked out doorways and balconies, windows and narrow catwalks; some of the metal featured markings in bright colors, but if the marks were letters or numbers, they were neither English nor Japanese. Even German might have made more sense than what she saw.

  From the ledge on which she stood, there seemed no climbing down; the walls were smooth metal, without hand or footholds. Three amber lights glowed up at her, but they were so far down, she didn’t dare jump to the platform that supported them. Dorothy backtracked along the length of the Black Dragon, discovering that the back wall of the hangar curved into a hallway. Her wrench lifted, Dorothy continued along its gray length, jumping twice at her own shadow before she calmed. Only the sound of her footsteps accompanied her, until the small hall widened into another space of vast metal; there, she heard the low rumble of well-working machinery and in the near distance, voices.

  She opened her mouth, to call to Ruth and Ina again, but abruptly realized the voices had something in common with the markings on the metal. If it was conversation – and there were two differently pitched voices – they were not speaking English. Nor was it any other language Dorothy recognized, not even Ina Bochanek’s beloved Czech. This stopped her in her tracks, wondering where the hell she was, where the hell her crew had gone – or had been taken.

  Her skin pricked with a new awareness, the second hallway warmer than the hangar had been. From this space, the hallway stretched in either direction, coiling around what might have been the central core of the – vessel? It was the only appropriate word, but Dorothy couldn’t say who owned the craft. The idea that it was German was staggering and terrifying; she couldn’t allow herself to believe that, but who else might be capturing and cataloging aircraft? But how in the hell were they doing it – how was it that no one had noticed them? Hiding inside storms?

  Nothing made any sense, so Dorothy kept on, creeping closer to the sound of voices. Down the hallway and around another curving wall of metal, the floor vibrated. It did nothing to set Dorothy at ease even if it reminded her of the way a plane’s floorboards would rattle on takeoff. The walls here were etched, emblazoned with time-dark lines and sweeping arcs that looked like charts, but if they showed night skies, they were like none Dorothy had seen before. She reached out to touch the coal and silver lines, but drew her hand back before she actually could. Something about the wall repelled her, perhaps the memory of the way the floor had moved when she had touched it.

  Her grip had grown slick around the wrench she carried, and she switched hands long enough to drag her palm down her pant leg. She was shifting the wrench back into her right hand as she came around another corner and discovered the two figures at the end of the corridor. She drew herself up short, unseen. She expected German officers in uniform, but what she saw was not that.

  The two figures called to mind a painted landscape scroll in her grandmother’s house, black figures drawn as if with a careless brush barely guided down the browned paper. They were unnaturally thin and bent, as if barren trees under snow. Hairless, oblong heads tapered into bone and branch shoulders without so much as a neck, their arms as long as their torsos. The figures were impossibly thin through their bodies, more lines on paper without specific curves signifying or refuting sex. They were barely there trees, no buds, no leaves, and while she saw fingers she could not discern toes, and wanted to turn away but for the play of color and light, silhouetted as they were against the chiaroscuro wall. She stared, much the way she had the first time she’d seen her grandmother’s art. The figures were the ancient inked trees brought to life, but they moved without so much as a sound, their eyes burning as suns before going nova. Gaseous clouds of hydrogen and oxygen were ready to ignite as they spiraled outward from a central burning pinprick.

  Suns about to—

  Their eyes.

  With a jolt, Dorothy realized they were watching her as much as she watched them. The figures moved as if under the guidance of a wind she could not feel. Their bodies bowed and unbowed with a slow fluidity as though they did not contain a single bone, as though they were made of only hard muscle bound beneath a skin that resembled—

  Ink.

  Oil slicks.

  Molasses.

  They moved like water in that moment, supernova eyes expanding to encompass everything Dorothy was, everything she knew. Instantly, she felt their black, watery hands inside her chest, scrabbling between her ribs, holding and weighing the most intimate parts of her anatomy, and on one level, this made perfect sense to her, given their own sleek bodies, their decided lack of everything she contained, but on another level, her mind screamed in terror, begging her to run, to get out before she vanished like Ruth and Ina, to swing her wrench and flee.

  She swung. The wrench connected with the chin of one body, impossibly hard and solid, and promptly ricocheted into the temple of other. Both figures dropped to the floor as if felled with an axe and Dorothy ran, arms ringing from the blow. She sought solace in the part of her mind that wanted to flee, screaming for Ruth and Ina as she traced her way back to the Black Dragon, to the hangar where she would . . .

  Would what? Her mind raced and came up empty, hands clutching fistfuls of her flight suit. She expected to find it ripped, her body bloodied, but she was whole and unbroken and couldn’t logically sort what had just happened.

  With a cry, Dorothy ran for the engines, stuffing her wrench into a pocket before she pulled each of the engine’s propellers. She hated that the moment called for her to be careless – not ensuring the props had turned as far as they needed to turn, but she could almost feel time running out, as if it were a concrete substance leaking through her fingers.

  She was vaguely aware of the way her legs shook as she pushed herself up the ladder and back into the pilot’s compartment. There was no time for it, she told herself, pushing the panic to the side as she hauled the ladder back in, secured the hatch, and stumbled into her chair. She had to get out, and she worked automatically through the procedures she knew so well: throttle, flaps, oil pressure, mix controls, ignition.

  She became aware of movement beyond the cockpit, the tree-bark figures moving without sound, like smoke or water, something not easily grasped. Dorothy stared longer than she should have, watching as they coiled in serpentine patterns around the plane, until one slithered into the propeller
. The spinning metal was invisible at that speed – could they not hear the engine’s roar in the hangar? – and the body fragmented under its violent force. Streaming, steaming black muck splattered the walls, the windshield, and Dorothy stared in wonder and horror both. The other figure had ceased its approach, casting wary eyes upon the plane now.

  “That’s right,” Dorothy whispered. “I will take you apart.”

  She had no idea what she meant to do other than to get away. She’d be damned if she would stay, if she would let these . . . Her mind stuttered again at the thought of their hands inside her ribs. The hangar contained no proper runway, but Dorothy made use of the space as best she could. The remaining figure backed away from the Black Dragon as Dorothy released the brakes and loosed the plane into motion.

  That she would never get the plane to speed was foremost in her mind. The faster she went, the quicker the hangar seemed to run out, the yawning mouth growing ever close. Beyond the room there was only a massive hangar-lined corridor, but there was nowhere else to go. With a shout, Dorothy did what she did best: she trusted the metal and the engines and engineering that made it all possible.

  The plane dropped off the edge of the hangar. Dorothy was keenly aware of the weight of the plane around her, and she held her breath, expecting to plummet uncontrollably into the metallic chasm where she and the Black Dragon would erupt into a fireball. She tasted blood, cheek clenched between her teeth as the plane dropped, but the engines were strong, propelling the Black Dragon down the chasm with ease. Dorothy guided the plane into a roll, marveling at the effortless movement. For an experimental aircraft, it was a thing of beauty, hopefully something they would build for years and years to come, war or no.

  Dorothy turned her attention to the landscape of the strange vessel around her: walkway tubes and over-arching structures she took for bridges, endless walls filled with more wide hangars. She saw no other flying craft within these other hangars, though.

  Where was Ina . . . where was Ruth . . .

  “Guns full, Bochanek,” she whispered, and then, “There!” The sound of her own voice in the close cockpit was somehow reassuring, kept her from shaking out of her flight suit.

  She saw the sliver of sky at the end of the chasm, much the way she had when they’d been sucked down. It was not the clouded sky she remembered, but a sliver of night, stars vomiting light against an endless black canvas. The stars recalled the eyes – eyes like supernova – and that twist of revulsion moved inside of her again. Where was Ina? Where was Ruth?

  “Goddamn it, Sakata.”

  She spat the words, every part of her shaking as she guided the plane ever onwards. It was flying an obstacle course, up and down, over metal hurdles and between towering structures she could not properly name. Leaving her crew behind went against everything she knew and yet to stay was death, she felt certain of it. The scrabble of those hands in her ribs. The endless firelight inside their eyes.

  Dorothy couldn’t vomit and pilot at the same time, so chose the latter, taking comfort in the feel of the stick under her hands and the sure weight of the plane around her. As much as that weight had worried her coming off the edge of the hangar platform, it was a known element, nothing that would drag her to the ground. She knew this plane, she knew these skies, and it was with a triumphant shout that she burst out of the metal chasm, propelling the plane into a wide night sky.

  But like fog in sunshine, the night evaporated around her. The darkness shredded away, consumed and replaced by the clouds she had known before; the clouds that had curled unnaturally on their side, sucking her in. She glanced back and up, but there was no tornado, no looming thunderhead. The blue sky was clear, but for the four fighters rising in formation behind her. Her radio burst to life with static and panicked, demanding voices.

  “—agon, you will comply—”

  Dorothy turned her attention ahead, wide open skies and Mines Field sudden and stark beneath the Black Dragon’s wings, when it should have been Nevada desert. These pilots didn’t know her, weren’t expecting her, and she couldn’t get the tremor out of her voice, couldn’t make herself understood beyond the hammer of her heart.

  When they touched down, the ground was blessedly firm and whole, and Dorothy exhaled, pressing her hands to the canopy above her. The glass was cold, almost frosted as if she’d flown much higher than she actually had.

  “Good job, baby,” she whispered.

  But her hands wouldn’t stop shaking as she taxied off the runway, applied the brakes and worked through post-flight procedures. She couldn’t pull her eyes from the military police officers that had begun to circle the plane or the rifles they carried, and couldn’t dismiss the idea that something had gone horribly wrong.

  She unlatched the hatch in the floor and eased it open slowly, not surprised to find herself looking down a rifle barrel. “I’m going – I’m going to pop the l-ladder,” she said, not wanting to alarm anyone with the ladder’s sudden appearance. He gave her a sharp up-nod of understanding and took a single step backward.

  “Ladder down, come out slow, hands on the rungs!”

  Dorothy moved slow, certain she couldn’t have done differently. Her legs felt like water and every rung down the short ladder like a lifetime. She glanced at the police officer and his eyes widened.

  “I’m Dorothy Sakata,” she said, “and there’s—”

  The rifle lifted again, trained now on her face. “On the ground, Jap! Hands behind your head!”

  She froze half way off the final rung, his words registering like an unexpected fist to the face. The word was worse than the rifle, akin to those strange hands inside her ribs, prying her bones apart. For a long while, she could only stare at the man, wanting to ask what had happened, why they were treating her like an enemy agent. But the look in his eyes brooked no reply; he was in no mood for a question and answer session, this confirmed by the way he struck the back of her knee with the butt of his rifle to take her off the ladder.

  Dorothy spilled to the ground, lifting her hands in surrender as more police officers closed in around her, rifles trained at her head. But one of the officers was studying the plane with keen eyes.

  “Sir, this plane is . . . it’s . . .”

  Dorothy watched a broad hand press against the Black Dragon’s black metal hull and she flinched at the sight of someone else touching what she’d come to think of as her plane.

  “Spit it out.”

  “. . . eight months overdue.”

  The MPs hauled Dorothy from the asphalt and given the threat of the rifles pointed at her, she stopped trying to explain herself or her appearance as they cuffed her and hauled her toward a waiting jeep. Inside, she was pressed between two MPs, their guns pointed at the roof, their eyes heavy on her.

  This wasn’t the world it had been only an hour before and Dorothy didn’t know what had happened. Everything looked ordinary – the men in uniforms, the airfield, the sunshine spilling to the streets as they headed toward the brig. She had never spent time within a brig, but as they walked her toward a small cell with two thinly-padded narrow cots, it all looked normal. Nothing was as strange as the other vessel she had encountered, not even the sparkling Christmas garland spread over the desks. A small decorated tree sat on the floor, oversized glass lights of all colors blinking in a mindless rhythm against the drying, tinsel-draped branches.

  The MPs didn’t remove her cuffs before locking the cell and Dorothy opened her mouth to protest, but seeing the look on the officer’s face, she swallowed the complaint whole. She sank onto the cot and waited, arms beginning to ache, but rather from swinging the wrench at the tree-like figures, not yet because of the cuffs confining her.

  “Figures” was an imprecise word when it came to thinking of the beings on that vessel. Neither did “people” seem appropriate, but . . . gremlins? Dorothy shivered despite the close air of the cell. She didn’t like that word, either, because it implied entirely too much.

  “Sakata, is it? D
orothy?”

  She looked up sharply at the man beyond the cell’s bars. He was tall, and tall enough that it gave Dorothy a jolt because it reminded her of the . . . figures . . . on the strange vessel. His hair was dark and closely cropped against his head, doing nothing to conceal the scar that traced a path down his temple and cheek. She wondered at it, even as part of her mind whispered wrench, but he hadn’t been there; she hadn’t hit him because he was . . . human. Her throat tightened, but she stood and nodded.

  “Yes, Ser— Master Sergeant.”

  A cigar would have looked right at home wedged in the corner of his broad mouth, but it was a pen he drew out, its length long since broken in two. He made a short note in the file he carried, blue eyes flicking back to Dorothy a second later. They were calm eyes, not hostile or narrowed, and she wondered what he saw, if he had taken the time to read her file, if he knew anything about her. The name patch on his chest read “Minsky”.

  “They call you Sakura in the skies?”

  She flinched at her call sign, wondering if her fellow pilots would ever call her that again. Ruth and Ina were foremost in her mind, even given her current surroundings. Even so, she nodded.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve been flying for us how long?”

  “Not even a year, but—” The question hovered in her mind, but remained unspoken. She had the feeling Minsky would have let her ask it, given the patience within his eyes, but she shook her head. She took a step back from the cell door and sank onto the cot once more. “It wasn’t like this.”

  Keys rattled in the well-worn lock and Minsky stepped into the cell. The door closed behind him and the space seemed impossibly small with him a part of it. He sat on the cot opposite her own, her file spread open on his thighs. He smelled like a smokehouse and looked like he should have been bench-pressing tanks rather than questioning pilots. He tucked the pen back into the corner of his mouth and regarded her for a long while before he spoke again.