by Kin S. Law
“Oh, I think you’ve been very silly yourself. Haven’t you heard?” asked Vera Jasper. “There’s naught in hell like a woman scorned. Burn, you cur. Burn!”
She raised her hand from Cezette’s nested fingers, already unfolding as she teetered away from the weapon. The iced-cream gleam of the sparker she had picked up from the floor was already glowing and sending out little tendrils of energy, something inside developing a fault.
And when she squeezed the trigger, Hallow’s look of horror was priceless.
Station 19
Conqueror Worm
Maddening shapes peeled back like a rabbit being skinned, revealing the non-Euclidian clockwork of the horrors driving the Conqueror Worm’s movements. Hargreaves believed enough in the aeons to know this wasn’t some fever dream or madness. Her eyes felt as if they had been turned to ice. A surety came over her that if she’d glimpsed the vision for more than a moment she would have gone mad. Then the airships ruined the perspective, and the illusion dispersed.
Years later, when asked about the events of that night she would only recall an impression of suffering, of many hands holding up a throne reeking of wet shit and sour meat.
“What is it doing?” Cezette’s voice shook Hargreaves out of her torpor. She stood on the bridge of the ’Berry, with her hands in the gloves that controlled the ship’s manipulator arms. As the Worm came around close enough to snap at the pirate airship with its terrible jaws, she threw open the throttle. The ship lunged away, as a deep sea diver might from an incoming horror of the deep. The Worm howled, a caterwaul of rage.
When Vera Jasper launched her frenzied sparker assault at the foot of the Ubique Tower, the court immediately filled with a branching, frenzied lightning. Arturo’s sparker bolt had been loaded with his complex of feelings for Hallow, like a champagne cork giving way. Vera’s was ten years of rage and unrequited love that had burst in a torrent that filled the court like a searing acid bath. She fell, her hands terribly burned. A fragment of the sparker had cut her deeply. Now both she and Arturo were unconscious. Hargreaves would later find a keraunographic pattern etched red into her skin, which would not fade. For some days afterward people complimented her on the tattoo of a tree she had gotten on her arm, so much that Hargreaves got fed up and had an oak detailed over the scarring.
When they managed to see again the Grimaldi was gone, and the Conqueror Worm that had once been the Ghost Train was slowly rearing up into the sky, uncoiling length by length from the Ubique Tower. At its head was something truly terrible; the Grimaldi, its white frame fused into the substance of the Worm. Its collar was unfurled into something like a lizard’s intimidating flaps, and its chest opened to reveal a terrible mouth, with a single wet eye staring out of its center.
“Don’t just stand there like a lump, go in closer,” Rosa said. She ran toward Vera, ripping a cloth from her blouse to staunch a brilliant flow of red blood at the prone girl’s side. Rosa spared a glance for Albion, who looked actually kind of okay. He was breathing, and there was no sign of blood save for his poor arm.
“Distract it!” cried Rosa to Hargreaves. She jerked her chin upward, and the Worm was so big there could have been nothing else she was indicating.
“We’ll distract…that?” gaped Hargreaves. But as she asked the ’Berry appeared in the sky, no mirage but real and solid, and ready to pick up her crew. Ceazette was at the helm, threading skillfully through the few buildings that remained standing, getting close enough for people aboard to throw lines.
“There’s our girl,” Rosa had said, smiling.
“Oh, ’Zette, bloody good timing!” Hargreaves had cried.
“Oui, madame!” answered Cezette, her high voice tinny over the speaking horns.
Vanessa Hargreaves, not satisfied to lay low while others went to fight, had been the one to drive the ’Berry’s fists against the Worm, leaping into the controls with abandon. She could not allow the Worm to reach the survivors below, some of whom were too injured to move.
Now Hargreaves braced her hips to deliver a huge, pugilistic blow. Her stitched abdomen hurt abominably, and the scale of the fight was unbelievable to someone accustomed to a tussle in Whitechapel’s narrow alleys. Each arm rushed past the bridge’s windows like a freight train, and when they connected it was to the cacophony of a million plates falling.
Hargreaves might have kept up the fight indefinitely, save for two things. The ’Berry hadn’t fully recovered from her ordeal in New York. The left manipulator arm was already severely damaged, moving sluggishly even at high pressure. Worse still, the blows seemed only to make the Worm angrier. One terrible eye spun wildly, and its teeth chewed at the ’Berry’s fingers. When the left arm ripped off in a spray of splinters and steam, Hargreaves lunged for the wheel, with Cezette at her side. They put all their weight upon it, and the ’Berry surged forward, her screws up to ramming speed. Hargreaves whooped a terrible war-cry, quite out of character, before flipping all the throttles to maximum.
“Ahhhh!” cried Cezette.
“Ahhhh!” cried Hargreaves.
“Squee!” came Blair’s voice over the horns, choked by the weight of the turn.
By sheer chance, or through damage as the left arm was ripped off, Hargreaves had left the right arm in a straight-out position. Now that arm locked in place, flying out ahead of the ship like the fist of God. Fist-first, the ship dove into the Worm’s mouth, breaking off teeth and wedging inside the creature. With a tortured groan of supports, the ’Berry’s last arm sheared off at the elbow, and the ship broke free.
“Ah. The captain won’t like that,” said Hargreaves from the floor. But at least she had bought them a moment’s reprieve, as the Worm writhed in the sky, its treacherous eye blinded by wreckage.
Speaking of captains and eyes, at that very moment Albion woke up in the courtyard below the fight. Somehow the falling debris managed to miss falling upon the pirates, though it did crush a nearby telegraph booth in spectacular fashion.
Rosa Marija heard Albion groan, and she rushed over from where she had finished binding Vera’s side.
“How in the blazes…ahhh,” wheezed Albion painfully. “Watch my eye.”
“Why, where is it?” said Rosa, but her gallows humor felt forced, painful. “Oh just look at your arm…how will you hold our child now?”
“Ch…child!” Albion cried, and nearly swooned again.
“You’re just shipshape,” said Rosa, pulling him up in a sitting position.
“Are you…did we?”
“You idiot. There’s plenty of time for that later.” She began binding his arm to a straight piece of railing she had found, but her touch was gentle, her ministrations effective. His blood stained her ruffles and tight bodice—she had dressed expecting to see him.
Just when she was done, another groan came from the figure besides Vera. Rosa had dragged Arturo C. Adler closer, and he hadn’t seemed to need any medical attention. But now he struggled awake, and didn’t try to sit up. He was trying to say something.
“What is it?” said Rosa, annoyed she had to leave her captain.
Arturo hacked, and tried to spit out something that sounded like “... marshmallow bread.”
“Do you need some water?”
“No….Is Hallow dead?” Arturo finally said, fighting through his cough.
“No,” said Albion grimly. He was hurt worse, but he could talk just fine. “It was the girl, Vera. The Orb Weaver. She hurt him, but she didn’t kill him. He disappeared inside the Grimaldi thing again.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Arturo, finally clearing his throat “He’s spent too long inside it. Nobody should dwell too long in the seat of the Grimaldi’s soul. Do you have any idea how much aeon energy is stored aboard? He’s going to lose control and destroy everything for a hundred miles.”
“Oh bollocks,” said Albion. He looked up at his ship, valiantly battling the writhing Worm. It seemed to close in a vice grip around the ’Berry, but at the last moment the
ship gave a spurt of bluish steam and jetted from its grasp. “We have to get the survivors out. While Hargreaves has Hallow distracted.”
“But the ’Berry’s hurt,” said Rosa. “What will happen to her? She’s our home!”
Albion softened for a moment, but his eyes stayed hard.
“We’ll call Gunsmoke Gilly, Alice Hanson and the others. They can help evacuate everyone before the ’Berry gives out,” said Albion. “Even if she does, we can get out with the Gears and the longboats.”
“I have a better plan,” said Rosa. She leaned forward from her kneeling position by Albion. “We’re pirates! We take what’s ours and get the hell out!”
“Rosa,” said Albion gently, wincing through the pain. “There are children down here.”
Rosa sat back onto her calves, defeated. Then she pulled from the depths of her bodice a short, thin ether dague—the one from Keemun Cassis.
“I’ll tell Hargreaves,” she said, and stabbed the dague into the ground. It quivered, ready to receive Rosa’s voice.
“I can’t hold her!” Elric Blair’s voice trumpeted throughout the bridge of the ’Berry a few minutes later. He needn’t have said it—everyone aboard could see the gauges trembling like wheat before a storm. The whole ship shook with the effort, straining to shift the struggling weight of the Worm. It was still blinded, and Hallow’s voice streamed out of the thing in a continuous high-pitched din.
Outside, one of the bundle of anchor cables linking the airship with the terrible Worm snapped. It twanged like a broken guitar string, lashing wildly through the sky. It slapped against several other lines, anchors fired from the ’Berry to secure this dread thing from destroying the rest of the city. It joined others that were linked to other straining airships, and together they held the Worm immobile. Rosa’s warning had been taken to heart, and many of the airship crews here had family in San Francisco. The Conqueror Worm looked like a snake that had been tangled in a child’s balloons.
The cut steel rope slashed down, digging a huge furrow out of a nearby barbecue restaurant that had, until then, somehow escaped the fray. In that instant the Worm whirled, pointing its great mouth full of wetly churning gears, and engulfed one of the airships nearby with a flaming plume of sick greenish smoke. Its breath was an unnatural marriage of the Tennessee Jack’s ammunition: steamthrower acid and something else that seemed more evil than alchemical. The wood of the airship’s hull shriveled away from ribbing turned red with rust. As the airship rotted away, its cables snapped as well, freeing the Worm further.
Someone aboard the ’Berry unhitched the loosed cable and fired another, which looped over the Worm’s form until it was lashed securely, pinning the dread mouth closed. Inside the ’Berry, her crew scurried through her bulkheads, patching the shuddering pipes as best they could. A scream echoed as Cockney Alex became the victim of a bolt shot from a ruptured capacitor. It was only a flesh wound, but that meant Auntie was out of commission caring for the big lug.
In the cargo bay, the crew had set up an impromptu telegraph junction. The voices of Gunsmoke Gilly, Alice Hanson and Prissy Jack amongst many others echoed from a grove of ether dagues stabbed into the bulkhead. A wild wind whipped through, kissing the crew with a salt mist. It whistled through the places where ’Berry’s hull had been breached. The cargo bay was just as good as a viewing deck now, peppered as it was with bullet holes. As they watched, one of the anchors ripped free of the Worm, pieces of carapace raining down onto the fleeing people below.
“What the hell are Gunsmoke and the others doing?” cried Hargreaves, her fingers dancing over the panel of ether dagues. When flicked with a thumbnail, there was a brief moment when she could speak directly to a certain ship. The others kept up a constant susurrus of voices that Blair and Cid complained was confusing, but Hargreaves took it as a means to run the helter-skelter mix of airships still in the Bay area. She had immediately begun coordinating the efforts far better than Gunsmoke Gilly himself.
“You uppity child,” Gunsmoke’s voice grumbled through a dague. “I was commanding troops when your mother was trying on her first garters. I’ll respect you for one thing, though. You’ve a sound head for deployment.”
“Oh, I never!” said Hargreaves. To Cid, she said, “Who is this Gunsmoke anyway?”
Even so, it was soon abundantly clear the plan had come too little, too late. The shadow of the Worm was escaping their steel net, and far too quickly for everyone on the ground to leave.
“We’ll never keep it up long enough to clear the city!” shouted Rosa, her voice echoing through the cargo bay. “The ’Berry will fall apart before we do!” She was right. Another pipe burst, and Hargreaves momentarily suspended in the air, dropped two feet as the ’Berry lost her grip on the ether. There was a clatter of dropped tools, and a chorus of curses from all over the ship.
“She’ll never hold. Isn’t there anything we can do?” said Hargreaves. “The anchor mountings are about to rip apart!” Her voice came accompanied by a tortured, crunchy wailing of timber from somewhere in the ship.
“What about Dragonwell’s engine?” Blair’s voice echoed from the engine room.
“Dragonwell is down in the streets. Besides, that aeon crystal’s the size of an ether dague,” protested Hargreaves. She’d seen it when they pulled it out of Albion’s shoulder, way back when the pirates fought Mordemere. “It’s never going to produce that much—”
“That might work!” interrupted Cid. “The energy in the crystal is very dense. As long as you believe in it strongly enough, it will bear the strain. If we use the Queen’s sword as well…it just might be able to stop this beastie from killing us all.”
“That last shot…” said Hargreaves, thinking of Vera Jasper. If they wanted it strongly enough, then maybe...
“At least it will gum up the works,” said Blair. Turning, Hargreaves was shocked to see the lean Briton’s sweating, half-naked body leaning full-tilt on an enormous lever. With a click, something gave inside of the ship and they surged forward. Outside, the cables drew tight, and there was another horrible scream from the entangled Worm.
“I could feel something down there, with all the monsters,” came a voice weakly over the ether. It was Arturo, using Rosa’s dague. “They craved the life above their heads. All those tortured souls wanted to live again, to be free of their iron maidens. The blood in the Worm yearns to be in the world once more.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in this aeon stuff?” said Hargreaves.
“Seeing is believing,” said Arturo simply. “Whatever remains, no matter how impossible it may seem!”
“I won’t be responsible for what happens with Dragonwell,” added Cid. “There’s never been a collision of so much crystal amplification and so much raw…” He stumbled on the word. “Humanity. It might detonate the whole affair, or it might rip a hole in the world. It might make a nice cuppa. We just don’t know!”
“Cid!” cried Elric Blair, who was trying to reach another lever while holding down the first. Cid did not hesitate, leaping to the lever indicated with his old, rambling gait. When they had locked it down, the old engineer turned to another part of the ship, moving unhurriedly but efficiently.
“All right. Undo all the limiter bolts on the undercarriage of the cockpit, and open the auxiliary steam lines, numbers four through six. Then you need to—”
“We can’t expect Albion to pilot in his condition,” said Hargreaves. Into an ether dague, she said, “Morcego, your anchors aren’t holding up the east side! Papillon, start grabbing everyone under Nessie’s ship!”
“But who else can go?” said Rosa through the dague, breathing hard. There was a regular groaning, squeaking, rattling noise. It sounded like Rosa had found a wheelbarrow or something, and was pushing violently. “I should go in Dragonwell.”
“I’ll take the Gear and endeavor to stop the Worm,” said Hargreaves. “I can get to it on the ’Berry.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll do it. The ship
needs to keep the Worm held. The Cassis was built from Dragonwell’s spares, I can ride it just as well,” said Rosa.
“You can’t leave them down there!”
“Albion and Arturo are awake. Arturo is starting to get up.”
“I brought the Cook box to America, I will take responsibility. You must—”
“Oh that is just like you, Hargreaves, it’s all about you and your fucking guilt!”
“Excuse me?” screeched Hargreaves, immediately hating herself for doing it. “You just want to keep your precious hubby out of danger. What will you do when he loses his Randy Rosy?”
“You! How the hell do you know that name? That is a private name! If you’ve been at my closet!”
“Oh it’s not like you two keep the blasted door closed! The whole deck can hear you!”
“Look, it’s not weird, it’s a souvenir from the Monte Carlo flying circuit!”
“I’ve never seen leather cut that thin, that’s just stupefying.”
“So you have been in my closet! Wait, something’s happening.”
“Don’t you dare change the subject!” cried Hargreaves.
“No, wait. Albion isn’t there,” said Rosa, and from her tone of voice, something else was definitely happening.
Rosa Marija turned her head for one second and Albion was standing in the middle of the Ubique courtyard, his intact hand stretched to the sky. Far above him, the clouds had turned an unnatural red color, lit by the Conqueror Worm that was its source. The serpent wound through the sky,
“Alby!” Rosa cried, but she had both hands full moving Vera’s unconscious form across the court in a beer barrow. Vera’s hands were terribly burned, and Rosa had to lift her by her armpits. Beside her, Arturo lay groaning. But her own Albion Clemens stood a ways from the wagon. He seemed to be transfixed by the sight of the Worm in the sky, and the wind brought his words to Rosa’s ears.
