The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  We hadn’t spoken much since leaving the interrogation room. She and several broad, featureless men with meaty hands had escorted me from my apartment to the aerodrome, but the men had stayed behind when we boarded the plane, which was now empty except for the unseen flight crew.

  Song nodded at the book I had stuffed away. “A present from your lover?”

  There had been a time when I’d looked at that book and thought only of how much she had once loved me. “A reminder that not everything stays the same.”

  I could feel Song’s gaze boring into me. “She might not be how you remember her,” the agent said. “It’s been a long time.” She brushed invisible lint from her skirt. “You really haven’t seen her since the riots?”

  I shot a glare over at the agent. “No,” I said. “And what does it matter anyway?”

  Song was shaking her head. “I got to know Attia over the last few years. We worked together a lot. She – I think of her as a friend.” She dropped her gaze. “I don’t understand why she didn’t show up to the meeting. It’s not like her.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” I muttered, thinking again of the empty kaffahouse.

  “I don’t understand why she wouldn’t meet me. I don’t understand why she sent for you.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Song sighed. “It’s possible that she has been burned,” she said. “It’s possible that Mandate intelligence is pulling the strings here.”

  I shrugged. “So I stay here and get killed by the Commissariat or go there and get killed by the Mandate. Does it matter? I’m dead either way.” I smiled a bit. “It’s only you that has to worry.”

  She looked at me. “And what about Attia? What about your former lover? Are you worried about her?”

  “No,” I said, but even as I did I knew it was a lie. If she’s dead then I’ll never know why she left me, I told myself, but knew that wasn’t quite the truth either. I cared for the same reason I’d brought that copy of the little book. “She’s always managed to take care of herself,” I said.

  “She saved your life,” Song said. “That has to be worth something.”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say to that? It was true, even if I tried not to think of it. I saw her there again, in the smoke and the haze of Aelia Capitolina, rifle clutched firmly in hand. Saving my life, only hours before she would leave me forever. Why, Attia?

  Song reached down and pulled a hemp envelope out of the folio that rested now at her feet. She passed it over. “Take a look,” she said.

  I unwound the red string that sealed it and looked inside.

  It contained: a handful of creased Mandate bank notes pressed into a soft leather billfold, a cheap nickel-plated watch, a passport with a foto and another name, and several typescript pages detailing my new identity.

  Yet another new identity. What fork had my life taken to lead me to this?

  “You’ll need to memorize that if we have any hope of getting through the border,” Song said.

  I nodded. The border between People’s Mandate and the New Commonwealth stretched across the center of the continent, through deserts and steppes and heaving mountain ranges. Countless wars had been fought over that massive frontier, but the unforgiving terrain and sprawling distances reduced battlefields to charnelhouses where hundreds of thousands of men were minced for the gain of a few spare miles. Every decade or so since the revolution another war would spark, and millions would be bundled onto trains for the front line, to be cut down by machine-gun fire, or pressed into the earth by an artillery shell. Economies would teeter, food would become sparse, and then an armistice would be signed, giving each state enough time to recover before the cycle would repeat.

  It had been nearly a decade since the last war had ended, but by all signs another would start soon. Maybe within weeks.

  “You’ll probably pass.”

  I looked up from the folio open on my lap. Song was eyeing me.

  “For what?”

  “You look like a mongrel,” she said seriously. “You can pass for a local in any number of cities. How much Türkik do you remember?”

  I had taken several classes at the university. When I wasn’t writing slogans and hosting counter-revolutionary meetings, I had actually been studying linguistics. Of course the Commissariat knew that. “A little.”

  Song nodded. “Try to stick to what you know. It will be slightly less obvious than Gothic.” She twisted her mouth a little. “Or Latin.”

  We refueled at the old capital in Eikstown (once Byzantium) where the Plaza of Heroes could be seen easily from the air, a long concrete slab that had been built over the ruins of the Hippodrome and now seemed to blend with the lead sky and gray seas.

  “We’re operational now,” Song said as we lifted off once again. “From now until we’re back, you are Unal.” It was the name on the passport that I now held in my hand. He was a man who had been born in Kyiv, lived now in Persia – a client state of the Mandate – and sold petroleum drill bits. “The Mandate have spies everywhere, so don’t feel safe because we’re still in the Commonwealth. The hardest part will be getting through the border without raising any eyes.”

  “What do I call you,” I asked. “What’s your alias?”

  She cocked her head quizzically and then laughed. “Song,” she said.

  We flew east again, closer and closer to the Mandate border. Out the window, the mountains crawled by. I pictured a dragon soaring somewhere below, its feathered wings stretched out in full flight, the small figure of a man strapped to its arched back with ropes and leather harnesses. Ptolomey had flown this way, I remembered suddenly, while mapping the East for his Geographica. I thought of Attia, who must have also traveled this way before defecting. What had she been thinking?

  “Why is this egg so important?”

  Song’s eyes were closed and her thin long fingers were clasped lightly in her lap. “Because the dragons are all dead. You know that.” She didn’t open her eyes.

  “A dragon isn’t going to win any battles. Not anymore.”

  She opened her eyes. “The shooting with the Mandate has stopped for now, but the war still continues underground. A living dragon would be a rallying-point. An important victory in the psychological struggle.”

  “I thought the Central Committee said that dragons were a tool of oppression?”

  “Anything can be politically rehabilitated, Unal. Even you.”

  I ignored that. “And so what about Attia,” I pressed. “What does a metallurgist have to do with dragon’s eggs?”

  Song shrugged. “I’m no magistra.”

  I stared out the small porthole in the transport, at the desolation crawling by beneath. “Attia hated dragons. Her grandmother had served in a patrician household, had watched her sons and husbands fed alive to the family draco because they’d offended their master. She was as opposed to their existence as anyone I’ve known in my life.” I shook my head. “As much as anything has changed, I can’t imagine her working to bring them back. I can’t understand why she would help you do that. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  When I looked back to Song she seemed pensive. Then with a bare shrug she closed her eyes again and leaned back. “You’d be surprised, Unal. Not everyone who works for the Central Committee is as sinister as you’d believe. Some people end up in places they’d never expect, for reasons they never dreamed of. Anyways, like I said. There’s no more true power in dragons. They’re symbols. Nothing more.”

  Who was this woman, this Han, a native of the People’s Mandate who now worked for her nation’s enemy? Lies and mysteries, layers and layers that I couldn’t even begin to penetrate.

  EXCERPT FROM ON “DRACI AND REVOLUTION”

  (CENSOR’S COPY, REDACTED)

  The causes of the First Mandate War (as we call it here in the West) were varied and complex. Treaties, alliances, wars between client states: all these things contributed. But the most widely believed cause is this: some strange
ailment was afflicting the Himalayan Draci within the Mandate of Heaven, and for decades they had been dying. The Mandate was, the patricians of the Empire thought, defenseless. A fruit ripe for plucking. And yet why did they strike when they did? The truth was, they were afraid. Afraid of the growing strength and wealth of the Mandate, the political reforms that had ended the monarchy there and transferred power to the proletariat (though in truth it was the burgeoning merchant class who held the true power, then as now). And so it was fear that led the children of the Great Patrician Families to gather their ancient draci and strike in a writhing, flame-wreathed fist at the Mandate capital.

  4

  The Mandate border crossing was crammed into a narrow point between weathered granite cliffs, and everywhere I could see barbed wire and concrete. Bundled soldiers squinted down from metal watchtowers, their faces wrapped tight against the cold.

  We had landed in Marakanda and then taken a train up into the mountains, traveling through the night in a freezing sleeper car with windows that rattled like loose change. Song had made me go over border procedure again and again, memorizing each typescript that had been inside the hemp folder. After hours wending up into Tiān Shān Mountains we had finally pulled to a stop at a depot several hundred feet from the border. The Mandate used a different gauge of rail, and so we would transfer to another train once through the border.

  If we got through the border.

  It was nearly evening when we poured off the train, and gray clouds had drawn in around us like a heavy wool blanket, threatening snow. The wind was cold and ferocious, pushing through the pass like air through the lips of a dying man. It even smelled cold up here. Commonwealth guards peered closely into our faces and escorted us from the train to a concrete building where they would process our exit papers.

  I shivered, from nerves or cold I wasn’t sure.

  We were ushered through the document check and then out of the cold concrete building where found ourselves outside once more, on a flat band of freshly plowed cement that stretched for three hundred feet between the New Commonwealth and the Mandate, an empty kill zone overwatched by searchlights, guard-towers, and machine-gun nests. On the far side sat another barbed wire fence and a brick building to counterpart the one we’d just exited. Above the brick building the red-and-blue flag of the People’s Mandate snapped in the wind. We walked out and into the kill zone.

  It was the longest three hundred foot walk of my life. With every step I expected to hear alarms or sirens, the chatter of machine guns, or the bright flare of a searchlight. But the only sound was the wind and the clapping of our boots against cement ground. The low brick building across from us gradually grew larger.

  “Are you ready?” Song asked.

  “No.”

  “Remember, they’re going to separate us to be processed, so stick to the prepared notes in case they cross-reference our stories.” She smiled at me then, and I was so shocked that for a moment I forgot all about Attia and defection. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will go fine.”

  I could only nod.

  The inside of the Mandate Custom House was heated and lined in eggshell-painted plaster. Soldiers separated us into lines that wove through cordoned pathways toward a row of polished wood kiosks.

  Even through the freezing cold I could feel sweat in my arm pits and on my palms.

  A Mandate Border Officer waved me forward. He did not look up when I approached. Instead, he held out his hand expectantly. I froze. What was I supposed to do?

  The man raised his head and frowned at me. “Papers?” he said in a slightly pitched and strange sounding Germanic dialect.

  I hastily handed over the passport clutched in my sweaty hand. Gods! I could almost feel the fear seeping from my pores.

  “I see those Commissariat officers really scared you,” the guard said with a smile.

  I opened my mouth to respond, and then snapped it close with a click.

  I could defect.

  I could tell him that I was being forced against my will to engage in espionage and that the woman now in line with the pleated dark coat was a New Commonwealth spy. I could start another new life for myself, somewhere near the coast. Sháng hǎi or Guǎngzhōu, maybe. I’d heard they were nice cities.

  I shot a glance over at Song, who was talking to another guard not twenty paces away. A word and I could be free. A word and she was most likely dead.

  The guard seemed amused as he flipped through the pages of my passport. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you say anything you’re not supposed to. What is your destination in the People’s Mandate?”

  “Korla,” I croaked.

  The guard nodded. “Purpose?”

  Espionage. “Petroleum drill bits.” If I was going to say something I should say it now. This was the moment where I got to choose. Until now I’d been pulled along by a rope, tugged by the whims of Song and the Commissariat and Attia. If I wanted to take my own route, this was my chance.

  But what would happen to Attia? By necessity defecting meant revealing who and where she was. One way or another, it meant her death.

  “Born in Kyiv, were you? I visited there once after the war. Those bridges over the Danapris!” The guard shook his head as though they were the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen. “What is the name of that tower bridge again? With the big red cables?” The guard looked up at me, mouth smiling but eyes dead behind big round glasses.

  A test. The names of the bridges hadn’t been in the typescript.

  The guard’s smile was frozen. His eyes bored into me. Gods! I should tell him everything now!

  And then I felt Attia’s fingers walking up my back and I wasn’t Artur, or Unal, but Gaius again, lying in bed with her, sweaty and happy after having made love. “When I was young we lived in Kyiv,” she whispered in my memory, “my grandmother used to take me down to the river and tell me stories of Kyi and his sister Lybid, who founded a city to keep their people safe from dragons.”

  I had turned over and smiled. “Was that true love, then?”

  She shook her head. “True love is something else. Brighter even that dragonfire.”

  “The Lybid,” I whispered now to the guard. Damn you, Attia. I thought.

  “What?”

  “The Lybid. They call that bridge the Lybid.” I said again, louder. Even now I couldn’t betray her. I wondered if she’d known that.

  EXCERPT FROM “ON WINGS OF VICTORY” (TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANDARIN)

  The Battle of the Bautai plateau is considered to have been the death knell of the Roman Empire. It had been so many centuries since the Imperial Air Command had used the dragons in battle that they made no attempt to adapt their strategy to fit the changing reality of war. The Mandate, on the other hand, had been desperately devising a way to meet the dragons that they knew were coming. Their draci had been dying slowly for decades, and unlike the Patricians, they had few qualms about developing new technologies. And so four hundred Mandate warplanes intercepted the Imperial flight on its way to strike Cháng’ān, and with carbines roaring brought down an entire generation of riders in a fusillade of tracer fire. Two hundred and thirty dead draci. In all the years since Actium, the Empire had never been defeated in battle. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Revolution followed so soon after.

  5

  The Korla safehouse was squared into the second floor of a three-story tenement that sat on the outskirts of town. Out the window I could see a brightly lit filling station with a name written on it in characters that I couldn’t read. It must have been the tenth such station I’d seen already. As far as I could tell, everybody in the Mandate had their own damn autocar.

  Everything in the safehouse felt like it had been produced in a factory somewhere. The paintings were all prints that felt vaguely familiar, and the plastic-and-stainless-steel kitchen furniture looked utterly alien. The walls were papered in deep mustard yellow (printed with geometric designs that didn’t line up along the rolled sh
eet’s prominent seams) and plastic, lotus flower curtains covered the windows. Everything smelled like the chemical mothballs that were stuffed into the cabinets and between sofa cushions. A transistor radio sat on a sideboard in the living room, along with a pack of cigarettes. They tasted weaker than Great Northern Canal, and had little foam filters built into the butts. I sat at the plastic table in the kitchen and smoked them, trying to wrap my head around the strange world I now found myself in. After turning over the entire flat to make sure it hadn’t been bugged, Song had gone out into the city, to speak with her local contacts and leave a message at the hidden dead-drop for Attia.

  The Mandate felt like an entirely different world. I’d noticed the difference as soon as we boarded the new train on the other side of the border. The seats were woven fabric and leather, and the private compartment even had a tiny little desk lamp bolted into the tinier side table. The glass on the window did not rattle.

  “I think I was flagged at the border,” Song had said as soon as we were settled into our sleeper car.

  “So what happens now?” I had asked.

  “We stay alert.”

  We had descended from the mountains at night and passed into the desert. I had quickly fallen asleep.

  That first night my dreams were fractured and nonlinear. Perhaps a residual effect of the drugs they had given me. I would be at work, shoveling coal, and then falling through foggy skies, sinuous dragons winging around me as I fell, breathing fire in bright flashes that lit up the white fog like signal flares. They would emerge briefly from the thick atmosphere and snap at my ankles with rows of jagged teeth. I would kick at them and then try to fly away but my legs transformed into fused blocks of granite. Legs that dragged me down to the surface, into murky dark, that weighed me down, down, down.

  I had woken sweaty and restless to find we had stopped. Outside it was still night, the sky stretching endlessly over cold empty desert. Canopied trucks were parked alongside the train, and shadowed figures moved between them. Army men in olive coats and polished jackboots were on the train, checking passports and shining heavy electric torches in the faces of passengers. I felt my throat closing.