by Kin S. Law
Albion groaned as nausea hit him suddenly. He began to heave, but nothing came up. Judging from the smell around him and the stains on his body he must have vomited sometime before, but could not recall when. Desperate for relief, he crumpled back into a pile and banged his head on something hard and cold.
Cursing, he felt around to discover what he’d hit and realized he was locked inside some kind of large cage. The floor and walls were large metal bars that felt gritty, pitted, as if soaked in the sweat and piss of the condemned for generations. The cage itself was claustrophobically cramped; there wasn’t even room to lie down. The best Albion could manage was to pull himself into a fetal position. His back protested, hurting nearly as much as his head. At least the cold, moist bars soothed the pain in his skull. After a time Albion was able to take his attention away from the pain long enough to take stock of his surroundings.
His guns were gone. He idly wondered if someone would accidentally pull the trigger on the Red Special and blow out a piece of wall, facilitating his escape. It would be a good distraction. Had he reloaded it? With which ammunition? Depending on the color of the round the gun might burn the shooter to death along with whatever structure he was in, or jam harmlessly. Exotic herbs, aeon dust, grave dirt, those bullets were closer to witchcraft than guncraft. He wasn’t actually sure what some of them would do.
The high pitched squeal of metal rubbing against metal dragged him back to reality. Albion realized his cage had been gently rocking back and forth. Looking upwards he saw the bars of his cage came together in a dome. From the dome’s apex, a large chain trailed off to some unseen ceiling. Looking below, he strained to detect a floor, but there was only a black abyss. He nearly panicked. He had never done well with abstract distances and darkness. Clinging to rigging, no problem. Staring into a well? No thanks. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Albion realized he was not alone in this place.
The dim light and his busted eye made it hard to see, but he was able to discern a vaguely human shape floating nearby. His addled mind thought at first that it must be some dread spectre, a drowned ghost. The distended, bloated figure appeared to be levitating, naked, swaying gently back and forth. Pale flesh bulged out between flat bars. Sickeningly Albion realized that a morbidly obese person had been stuffed inside the gibbet next door. Their flesh pressed out on all sides of the cage. The figure’s hair had been chopped off haphazardly, its head covered in large uneven patches. Though he couldn’t be certain, Albion tenuously concluded she was a woman, based on the shape of the hips.
“Hey! Hey you,” Albion called out.
The woman did not respond, but continued drifting back and forth languidly.
The sight of her filled him with mortal terror. Though mostly a relic of the past, some obscure colonies still used gibbets to punish pirates. The victims often took days to die. Mostly people weren’t too original, and if the punishment ain’t broke, the harbormasters weren’t about to fix it. If Albion had been wearing pants he might have pissed them.
But there was no rain, no birds, and beside the discomfort, nobody was abusing him at all. His nose was stuffy from the swelling, but he caught the distinct odor of old piss and defecation, under some sort of humid, coppery taste. Curious. It looked like he had been left there to quietly rot.
There was a stout ring at the top of the bars, and a tightness to the metal that said this was where he was hanging from. Retreating from this exploration, Albion’s foot slipped on the slick bottom of the cage, and he reamed his hand against the bar. He cursed a blue streak.
From somewhere in the darkness, a string of moans and epithets echoed him. When he looked, there was only darkness, but listening carefully, he thought there must be a line of cages, whining and creaking as the people in them moved. A man at the end was accusing him of extramarital relations with a donkey. The gibbets were probably clinging to an overhead bar, or trolley track of some kind, slowly trucking along. A terrible thought tried to surface, but Albion quashed it ruthlessly. Not what he needed right now.
After the first hour, his back could no longer be ignored. Fresh blood coated the sharp edges of the flat bars where he cut his hand. He could no longer stand the pain and the silence.
“OY!” He yelled, experimentally.
There was no reply, save the requisite cursing. He hawked up a wad of phlegm, that being the only missile available, and launched it at the pudgy woman in the next cage. She jerked reflexively, but that only set her cage swinging a little quicker before she settled. That gave Albion an idea.
“I wouldn’t do it,” a voice spoke up behind Albion.
“Do what?” Albion answered.
He pressed on the flat of the bars. He had to squirm, pushing his cramped, numb muscles into action, but eventually he discovered the wee old man crammed into the cage behind his. Stringy, but quite hale, with a trimmed beard, Albion might have placed him in a county fair selling fairy floss to children.
“Try to swing until something overhead gives,” said the gentleman. Albion stopped immediately. The cage rocked to a standstill.
“Why not?”
“Judging from the screaming from the other fellow who tried it, the ground is at least a hundred feet away,” answered the gentleman.
Like Albion the older man was naked, but his ebony skin was clean. As far as Albion could tell with his nose, anyway—the bugger was hard to see. “If you had woken in the previous room, you might have made it. The floor was only thirty feet there, but the sharp cans might have bled you dry before you made it to the door.”
“This is some sort of factory?” Albion said. The black thought he had earlier now embraced him like a lover. “...a canning factory?”
“Mayhap the next room will prove more opportune,” the gentleman added. “They can’t keep us here forever. It’s unsanitary.” The gentleman was off putting. His cavalier detachment was completely incompatible with his dire surroundings. Albion wondered how long he would have to spend in the cage to turn into that fellow.
“How many—” Albion started to say, but was interrupted by sudden spark of light from down the line of cages, growing from a point to a line to a square. Albion blinked in the sudden brightness, the shadows of cages before him strange fruit in the gardens of Hyperion. It was a door, a vast door, and beyond it, the flames and the smell were almost too much to bear.
Not for nothing, knowing what everything did made the scene more bearable. Still, a little bit of wee did come out before he focused on the vast domed forges, crucibles pouring molten substances into molds, bubbling red tanks backlit through some viscous substance. Everything looked like it had been hastily unloaded and set up. The equipment was on rolling casters, and the space was something like a butcher’s work floor, with train tracks through the middle for loading and unloading cattle.
Clear rubber lines ran from the tanks onto a couple of boxcars. The roof of one had been peeled back with the walls, like a fancy chocolate box. Instead of delicious truffles, the inside was lined with ranks upon ranks of sharp metal creatures. Their grubby carapaces sucked at the lines, gaping open and waiting. Tarantulas, yes, but also centipedes, and scorpions, hollow metal husks awaiting the gift of life. Albion suddenly thought he knew what Jean Hallow was doing with the contents of the Cook box.
The light came from a blazing fire at the far end of the room. A red glow lit upon a vast, bullish block of rust-red iron, shot through with square grilles and vented grates. Albion watched as from the other side of the room, a line of cages rocked back and forth on hooks over to the block. Each cage trundled over, catching some sort of mechanism in a track above. A brisk click sounded, then the bottom of the cage dropped open, and something scrabbling fell out of it, its screams cut short by the greedy gobbling of the machine as it burped and chewed and crunched. A thick red liquid bled from a grille below, swiftly swept down a line and into a ready tank, while at the other end the machine belched a dry mash into a trough that swept out to another room.
&nbs
p; Albion looked back to the tanks, which were receiving the most attention. Each tank was far too large for a man to move, and they had domed tops ending in mismatched, asymmetrical ports. Dozens of them lined the walls, like sentries. They were plugged into a device with a seamless, egg-shaped orb attached to it on a plinth. Albion knew it instantly for the Cook box, even though he hadn’t seen the contents.
In horror, the black thought fully descended upon him, shaking his limbs, chattering his teeth. He should have known. The trains free of hobos, the streets clean, the prosperous citizenry with the hunted expressions on their faces. That coppery smell had been human blood. He felt the punch of the aeon power in his gut, filling the room as people died and their intense, last moments of suffering were piped into the monsters on the boxcars. Liquid nourishment.
This was a killing floor that processed the poor, the addled and the destitute into canned meats. Now it had been transformed into a manufactory for feeding Hallow’s machine horrors. There must be hundreds, thousands of these manufactories across the country, and Ubique had allowed Hallow’s Ghost Train to use them to fuel his monsters. Albion’s gorge rose as a fresh person dropped into the block.
They were going to make him into food.
And suddenly he was thrown against the bars once more as his cage lurched forward along the assembly line. As he approached, the top of the gore-streaked block came into view, revealing a set of gnashing metal jaws, row upon row of them roiling like a shark’s maw. Below those, a churning puzzle box of razor-sharp gears indifferently turned, thrashing people into mince.
“Aye. I suppose there’s nothing for it now,” said the gentleman behind Albion, getting to his feet with an easy rocking motion. “But it was nice to meet you.”
The gentleman gave a sort of twisting hop, and just like that the cage’s ring jumped off its hook, plummeting some sixty or seventy feet. It seemed like an interminable plunge, a drop completely silent and free of screams, at least until the iron hit the first piece of machinery. There was a horrid squeal and crash of metal.
The workers were quick to respond, arriving with rakes and shovels and a barrow to move the remains into the grinder. And the assembly line moved on, taking Albion closer across the killing floor.
Back in Vanessa Hargreaves’ room, she had come to certain conclusions.
One: Jean Hallow had business with her, otherwise she’d have been killed.
Two: If so, someone was coming for her sooner or later.
She wasn’t quite so flexible as the Orb Weaver, but lying prone on top of a rafter with a length of bedsheet wasn’t difficult to do. At least, it wasn’t for the first thirty minutes. After that the wood began to grow uncomfortable and she started to feel very silly. With so many incidentals in the room, her captors clearly thought her worth the time to speak to. What if they had simply left her there for the morning? What if? Maybe she ought to try a little diplomacy.
When the first whisper-soft scuffle came from outside the door, Hargreaves was ready. As the door opened, she dropped a loop of cloth around the first head she saw and let the counterweight go, by putting her foot into the other end and jumping to the floor. She wasn’t the equal of a whole man, but more than the equal of a man’s neck, which snapped without fuss. She winced, watching the guard twitch on the floor.
He had a gun on him, a beautifully well-oiled, faithful Collier that made her think the man had been poorly assigned to room patrol when he ought to have been a fast draw at Hallow’s side. Ornate without being obstinate, the handgun was almost a third the length of a rifle, with a heavy octagonal barrel and an eight-round levered cylinder that spun like it had been spoken by a politician. It took .357 ammo, and was a hell of a thing.
Outside, the air of the deserted hall chuckled with something perfumed and mildly celebratory. Hargreaves knew this hubbub, she had felt it before at Burgess’ Luminescent Cabaret. It was the simmer of things proceeding as planned, the quiet of soothed consciences and dirty deeds done dirt cheap.
Then, quite abruptly she came upon the party; people everywhere in shocking finery. Perfume hung heavy in the air, libations flowed from fountains, and naked men and women in gold collars were openly being enjoyed by a variety of persons. Music flowed as easily as the drink and the flesh, but it was sickeningly sweet. Hargreaves caught something about good times and no worries, slapped on over a freeman water song rhythm probably intended as a liberating march from slavery. Some kind of sick abomination of sound, not music.
A man in an expensive suit reached out and draped an arm over her shoulders. He didn’t bother with pleasantries, just started shoving her toward the back rooms where she had come from. He stank of cheap champagne and bordello funk. But Hargreaves knew how to fit into a society party. She let him get as far as the inside of a private room before she put the butt of the Collier into the man’s left temple. The pig crumpled to the floor. She hastily closed the door.
When she attempted to hide the unconscious fellow in the wardrobe, she discovered a few of the burlesque’s bordello costumes hanging there. They were clearly meant to be fetishist, but if she combined a few pieces, she had the makings of an outfit: black garters, leggings, a too-fluffy, diamond-patterned harlequin skirt and a fine brocade bodice. She added French maid heels, stuffed the Collier in the small of her back, and just for effect, threw on a black feather boa.
She breathed, looked in the mirror and took a step, nearly losing her balance as she wobbled on the unfamiliar heels. She was packed in like tuna up top and checkered like a picnic below, but looked like she had lost her proper clothes to an enthusiastic party guest. Good. Sex as a weapon; just her game.
If she was going to get out of this alive, Hargreaves would have to blend in, look the part. Somewhere, here, there would be an exit, and Captain Clemens, too.
To reach them, she was going to have to go undercover. That was something she could do very well indeed.
Having been under the engineer Cid’s wing for most of his life, the young Albion had been subjected to grueling lectures in metallurgy, physics and mechanics as only an Oxfordian could deliver. Some of it, thankfully, had lodged in his head.
When his cage came to dangle over the churning maw of steely death, Albion had been ready with his fingers between the bars. As soon as the floor fell out from under his feet, Albion’s body slipped out with it—but not his hands. Those he had placed just over the hinge of the floor panel, the place where the bars had been shaped to hold the drop mechanism. Its rounded form offered the only possible purchase. Simple physics; instead of falling, his body swung forward, painfully on his fingers. There was a terrifying moment as his toes dipped close to the chewing teeth. His fingers burned with the strain, his cramped muscles screamed, but the grime on his hands offered traction, and then he was dangling from the cage like a naked monkey. The lip of the block came within reach, and he balanced his toes upon it, letting go with a terrifying back-and-forth wobble before the workers could scrape him into the meat grinder.
Albion’s foot slipped, and, with no small measure of guilt, he wished the woman in the cage before his hadn’t been quite so corpulent. Vile stuff squished between his toes, and the air shivered with the gnashing of metal teeth. Then he fell the rest of the way off the side of the block, his poor abused face knocking the wits out of one of the masked, slick workmen.
But he was alive.
He did not have time to be politically correct, or mourn, or be sympathetic to anybody’s cause. A thick crowbar lay nearby, and he took this up, smashing in every mask and lever he saw. Soon he was matted in foul-smelling ick, but the machine ground to a halt even as three more captives succumbed to a gruesome fate.
The smell, he found, was truly horrendous on the killing floor itself, sour and pervasive.
Thankfully, the fires now lapping at the machinery set off some kind of extinguishing system. Water began to spray from nozzles hidden in the ceiling. It was salt water, ocean water. They must be quite near the sea, still at
the cabaret, perhaps. Albion let the grime sluice off of him, running into the drains, hoping it would befoul these monsters’ disgusting product. The salt stung painfully, gratifyingly in his many cuts, as only life does.
One of the workmen came near, and Albion kicked him hard, the sort of kick intended to tip someone over the edge of an airship deck. The figure lurched backward, over a rail, and his foot caught in a floor trap. Much screaming and flailing followed as the blades in the trap chewed the man to pieces.
The workmen seemed intent on fleeing, which suited Albion just fine. He strolled along, naked as the day he was born, lashing out at the machines as he went and savoring the orchestra of gears grinding to dust. It was only a matter of time before armed guards arrived, but by then he had found the cage release, cheekily masked with tape and marked “free range.”
A mob of subjugated outcasts tumbled off a receiving platform, cage after cage releasing a torrent of begrimed, naked people to be washed clean by the water to reveal black, brown and yellow skin beneath. They overwhelmed the guards who were unprepared for the naked abyss of teeth, nails, and rage.
Following the overhead gibbet track backward, Albion led his ragged band surging through the factory floor, brandishing the rifles and shock batons of the guards. These were cumbersome, with a backpack of coils to hold their incapacitating charge, but the batons’ victims’ uncontrollable waltz and voiding of bowels scared the piss out of the incoming guards. It made for easy pickings.
At one end of the machines stood a sorting facility with cans upon cans of vile product lying on pallets. They looked like graves, markers lying dusty and forgotten for months at least. It was a massive supply. In the next room, they came upon a mountain of grimy effects, which were being unceremoniously moved by steam loader into an incinerator. A collective moan emerged from the freed men and women, seeing the last vestige of their lives being shoveled into the ovens. Albion shocked the load engine’s driver with a stun baton and ran the ugly loader into the flaming mouth of the incinerator, which drew a chorus of cheers. The blocked furnace began to smoke ominously.