by Kin S. Law
“And the black boxes?” Hargreaves asked, trepidation writ large. She remembered the arm they had recovered when Alphonse was destroyed. The writhing appendage had been branded with the Ubique logo. She looked down on the swarm that was chewing through the remaining mercenaries on the ground. “Will Alphonse get all…tentacles…once I have him walking?”
“Your blood is with him now,” said Cid. “Like Dragonwell and Albion. I’d bet my wrinkled hide he’s your man.”
“Think of it this way,” Rosa said, coming up and draping an arm possessively over Hargreaves. “We can use all the help we can get. Alphonse here might be the only muscle we have that has a hope of reaching Hallow. And if you had to be tentacle groped, there are far less savory choices.” They both stole a glance at Cockney Alex, whose hairy maw was working diligently at a sandwich he’d gotten from somewhere. His hands looked like bear paws.
Hargreaves had to take a deep breath to stifle the giggle, but it was one of those rare times when Rosa was the most sensible person aboard. Hargreaves felt that undeniable connection to her big steel friend. Perhaps Hallow hadn’t understood the forces he was tampering with when he laid them into Alphonse’s bones, but Hargreaves thought she might. She’d traveled with the galoot across the rugged bluffs and wild plains, and now she’d bled into his veins. Alphonse’s father might be a Machiavellian puppeteer, but his family had been MAD.
“Right. Carry on then,” said Hargreaves, and the passages of the ’Berry echoed with cheers.
Station 18
Haven’t You Heard? We’re Getting the Band Back Together Again
In retrospect, the battle outside had been chaos for a long time, but now there seemed to be some kind of reckoning. Hallow’s creations simply swarmed over the streets, overrunning gun emplacements and penetrating their sandbagged batteries like wildfires consuming dry brush. Routed in the open, the scattered mercenaries took refuge in the thick buildings and hills surrounding the city. From the decks of an airship, it was easy to see the squadrons’ frenzied darting from building to building as they beat a hasty retreat from the black swarm.
But as the crew of the ’Berry observed, the mercenaries slowed, surging into homes and public spaces to bring the fleeing city with them to safety. From cowardly guns for hire to chivalrous knights, in the blink of an eye, it was a capacity Hargreaves admired in the American people, and had admired since Appleton. Many of the mercenaries had been in military service, that was clear from their movements, and it seemed they had taken an oath no amount of money could erase.
Gunsmoke Gilly, who was likely exactly this breed, ordered the pirates who were left to herd the swarm of horrors away from the fleeing citizens. The Ghost Train had slowed, joining the swarm’s rout of San Francisco. It wove through the black swarm as a silver worm, consuming anything in its path and occasionally birthing new waves of monsters to swell the ranks.
Unaccountably nightmarish, the Host of Hallow was no longer composed merely of the arachnid. There were ten-legged things in there, swirling like millipedes. There were steaming things with far too many eyes, wriggling limbs jointed the wrong direction. Grinding metal maws tore into the men wrong-jawed, dribbling bits all over the streets. The abominations were countless in their variety, impossible to pigeonhole into a coherent design. It was as if whatever infernal engine Hallow was using to assemble his creatures had mixed up the plans, punched the wrong card, shuffling teeth, eyes and legs willy-nilly. Strange, because those who knew Hallow knew him as a fastidious architect. This host was not of Hallow’s design, not completely.
In all the ruckus, it would have been hard to notice the trio of specks being dropped into the devastation that was downtown San Francisco. Hallow’s creatures had long since passed the playpark that had held Dragonwell, raging their way out from disused buildings and tunnels in the hillside. But soon, those specks were impossible to ignore, and the rear guard of Hallow’s host found themselves defending against something routing their ranks without mercy.
A pinkish shadow swooped down, quickly striking at legs and vulnerable thorax joints, before ascending into the heavens. Great streaks of the host began to disappear in the explosions that followed. In the east flank, a blue shadow dipped in and out of the tide of monsters like a hunting seabird, with similar results. And in the west, a vast swathe was consumed in a harvest of flame.
High above the fray, Hallow gaped at this sudden turn of events. The auction was not yet done, and already the might of his host was being challenged. That would never do. No nation on Earth should have been capable of withstanding his mechanical army. Yet, inconceivably, their horde was being struck down. His plan depended on the host being invincible to close the deal.
It was a disaster, and Hallow said so, only to find himself alone with the cannery princes and land baronets. Where was Vera? Where was his Orb Weaver? Frustrated, he climbed into the Grimaldi amidst the scattered hoots of his guests.
Once inside, he felt the Cook engine embrace him with a wet pop. Hallow didn’t need to fly to be able to see the battle. He focused upon the left flank, borrowing from his host’s many-faceted eyes, but the vision cleaved suddenly, unceremoniously, split by some vast, tremendous weight. There seemed to be a certain arrogance in the blow, a certain “Fuck You” in the poetry of a strike.
In a fury, Hallow flew high up, high enough to aim the Grimaldi’s wand down to incinerate the whole block in a blaze of aeon power. He looked upon the ruin he had wrought, an ocean of fire, but the speck survived, darting back and forth through the wrecks. Surely nothing on the ground had such power!
“An automata, clearly. But how?” Hallow said to himself.
He did not understand why, and so when his own craft came under blows, it was as startling as a needle to the eye. He lifted away from the ground, from a wasteland of blows in mushroom puffs of dust and rubble. A portion of the airships had trained their fire upon Hallow and his engorged ship.
“ENOUGH!” said Hallow, and swept one of the craft’s hands in a terrible arc. The attacking airships blew apart in a conflagration of orange flame. Flaming wood and molten gears rained down. His missing arm trembled, pain surging through as the Grimaldi’s power moved through him. Hallow drew the weapon across the earth as a hot finger, sending waves of thermals rising to upend the remainder of the airships. It formed a wall of rippling heat between the Grimaldi and the pirates, a shield of sorts.
There. Let the moneyed princelings marvel at that. But from the inside of his throne of steel and flesh, he could not help but wonder:
Who dared to oppose him in his moment of glory?
And where, oh where, was his most trusted right hand, Vera Jasper, his Orb Weaver?
At some point near twilight, a mysterious squadron of kites descended over the hills. A boy of nine or ten, whose name was Paul, sighted them from his family’s home at the foothills. They had stayed despite the burning and the looting because Paul’s aged grandfather was confined to a wheeled chair, and it was damned difficult to move down the warped wooden stairs of their San Francisco home. Paul’s father wrestled the heavy chair, while Paul’s mother and sisters helped the old man climb wearily, step by step. His youngest sister, Anna, huffed while the others moved stiffly. She had the whooping cough, and the smoke was not helping.
They’d all seen the swarm of black things from their windows, and later from the roof of their home. Paul was a scrawny lad, so they sent him running for this and that, putting him to use so he would not be afraid. He hadn’t seen much, but he heard the older girls gasp. He had been upset- the ruckus had begun just as he heard the ice cart come jingling down the street. It was bad for Anna, but she and Paul both adored the frozen slushes with their fruit syrup drizzled on top. They hadn’t had any since last summer, and their Christmas had been disappointing, with only a hard fruitcake to whet the pair’s insatiable sugar craving. He had wanted to go get Anna a tall lemon ice, but that had been when Paul’s mother raised the alarm.
Paul had al
ways been protective of his youngest sister. He had sheltered her in his arms, carried her across the country on the woolly bears when his family moved from the East.
Anna was too young to have known the tribulations of crossing, though the cough had given her an unequal share of troubles from the start. Still, she was a cheerful child. Her lungs were full of ilk but her head was full of the latest hat ornaments and the young florist’s boy from down the street. When Paul’s father reached the bottom of the steps, he reached for Paul’s grandfather, and the family let out a little chorus of relief. The street looked clear, and the hill free of hansoms and rickshaws. The family’s cabriolet would hold them all. Maybe Paul’s sisters would have to cling to the outside, but they could rest their feet on the running boards. His father would drive slow, at half steam. When Paul’s grandfather set his foot on the last step, the family cheered.
Paul looked, forlorn, across the street. The ice cart was just there, not even upset like some of the sedans further in the distance, but just sitting there, abandoned. He looked at Anna, who chirped, not alarmingly but expressively. Was there time? Paul looked meaningfully at his father, busy ordering everyone to fit in the cab. There was smoke in the sky, Paul remembered later, and it matched the exasperated cast to his father’s face. Twilight lit both of them orange.
When the grizzled patriarch nodded, Paul ran to the other side of the street followed by. Anna. The ice was still cold. There was his favorite strawberry, and enough for everyone, stacked two-deep in huge beige cartons. Anna dug deep while Paul held her waist, past the pasteboard cylinders of rainbow, pistachio and vanilla. She was almost waist deep in it, and his hands were cold holding on to her. When he looked back he could see his family lined up like one of those fanciful portraits at the barber’s parlor down the street. They were grinning, waving for him to join them.
That was how he would always remember them before the fire rained down from above, consuming the little knot of people and making orphans of the two children at the ice cart.
The kites cared little for the people below. Each had two men aboard, a pilot and a bombardier, encased in a thin coppery frame suspended between the gliding wings. A tank of steam sat near the back, which the pilot used sparingly to ascend higher. Swooping low, the kites began to pelt the pale host below with firebombs, heedless of the dribbling flames slipping onto the heads of those hiding from the conflict. When there was a chance, the bombardiers dropped from them on lines to notch mining charges in devastating places. But their aim was not to slow the host, or to wound the Conqueror Worm. No, their aim was Jean Hallow, and their bombs were only to carve a route toward the pale automata in the midst of the host, behind the rippling wall of heat from the fires at its feet.
Meanwhile, hidden beneath the rubble and unnoticed by the host, survivors poured out of rat holes as the straggling mercenaries drummed Gatling bullets over their heads. Many of the people on the ground were injured or burned by the firebombs. The smell of spilled blood and the cries of dying monsters drew the scattered swarm back from the front lines, eager to feast upon the dead and the screaming. So the mercenaries kept up the barrage, sending those marauders back whence they came.
The kites harried Hallow’s great white machine, using the heat of the bombs to climb high on rising thermals before lobbing their deadly arsenal once more. It looked as if they could be winning. In fact, the Grimaldi screamed as the firebombs dribbled glowing orange pitch over its form. Its weapon wavered wildly, ripping into the buildings and the clouds overhead. At least, it looked like the kites were winning, until the whirring host underfoot finally took flight. The lightest of them shivered, shedding bits of armor to unfurl iridescent wings, before chittering up to the kites to chew on their riders. The grounded swarm climbed up the Ubique tower, the Golden Gate Bridge and the high dragon’s head of Chinatown to pounce on to the closest of the kites. Kite riders fell with muffled screams, faceless in goggles and leather masks.
Vanessa Hargreaves, swinging the sword A Contrario with Alphonse’s truncheon arms far below, knew the gliders for what they were. The cross-shaped wings and liquid flames were unmistakable. Her Majesty’s Lillenthal Dragoons were here, the stuff of schoolboys’ fantasies, legendary in the savage Indian subcontinent. Originally assembled to combat Portuguese gun platforms on the high seas, the kites were flown by hardened daredevils and designed to glide into enemy territory to set their enemies alight. In the chaos, the bombardier would go through the flying gun platform, garrote the crew and blow the gas reserves, tipping the bloated hulk into the ocean. Why were they here? Who had ordered them deployed? Regardless, seeing them fall brought her heart into her throat.
Hargreaves tried to tell the rest of the ’Berry’s crew all this through the ether dague stabbed into Alphonse’s controls. She tried to relay the locations of the survivors she saw. Her damned sword was a handful and a half—her hands were full just clinging to the controls before her. It was a bastard length in Alphonse’s hands, and couldn’t make up its mind if it was a claymore or a poleaxe. In the end she simply grasped it a third of the way up and started bludgeoning the hordes, driving the sharp edge in as if she were bunting at cricket. Unwieldy, yes, but the edge seemed almost like the mystical Excalibur, cutting through armor with a single touch. Thank you, ma’am, Hargreaves quietly genuflected.
The snicker-snack of Hargreaves’ sword traveled across the battlefield, where the Keemun Cassis and Dragonwell fought, blades shivering. Rosa grappled for the few pirate vessels overhead, swinging through the air upon twanging cable. She fired bolt after bolt from the sprung bow in Cassis’ arm, their detonations flinging hot flechettes every which way. Then Rosa dove down to sink the tip of her stiletto into the nearest abomination, kicking out Cassis’ needle-sharp heels into the nearby creatures.
As she dealt with the swarm on the ground, Albion gave her cover from the largest of the clockwork horrors. His cutlass laid low the creatures’ limbs, and when a monster was simply too big, Albion seized whatever projectiles he could lay Dragonwell’s hands on, be it a sharp bit of airship ribbing or a heavy anchor hurled through the streets. The pair of them cut a swathe through the enemy, a corridor where the survivors could flow back toward waiting aid.
But the fight was far from won. While the pirates could retreat and resupply at the ’Berry, their stamina was not unlimited. Soon the blades in their steel hands were no better than clubs, save the A Contrario, which was not dulled at all by its use. But Alphonse was showing wear and tear, his sturdy train parts covered in deep, feral scratches. Soon even Albion resorted to Dragonwell’s fists and feet, and the Red Special, unloading bursts into the eyes and mouths of the abominations from his open cockpit. Under fire from the Red Special’s strange shots, the host’s inner bits variously melted, froze, and blew out of the contraptions’ skulls in fans of wet, glittering clockwork. Still they swarmed and seethed, uncountable.
When even the Red Special lay smoking at the bottom of the cockpit, Albion loosed his ace in the hole, the triple-barreled Gatling cannon hidden behind Dragonwell’s eyepatch. The rounds were a much larger caliber than the mercenary’s pitiful wagon-mounted peashooters, and they punched deep. But they were costly, burning Dragonwell’s noggin red-hot. Soon the mechanism jammed, and the endless beasts began to close upon them.
The sun was a sliver on the horizon when they regrouped with Hargreaves, standing back to back.
“There’s no end to them!” screeched Rosa over their ether dagues. The devices rang in their cockpits, shivering with voices where they were stabbed into various instrument panels or framework.
“I’m sure Hallow did not intend this. This an unmitigated disaster!” said Hargreaves, perhaps a bit optimistic about her former friend’s intentions.
She decked the closest arachnid, shoving Alphonse’s high hussar’s shield into a thing of pocked faces and slapped-together limbs. It leaped back, its broken machinery screeching steam from all its seams, as if possessed of nothing but the faculty
of hate. As she watched, the downed beast was summarily torn apart by its fellows, its bits ripped apart and stuck on wherever they happened to fit. Black slime coursed through the seams, animating the new limb until a new mass of horrors stood before them.
“They’re cannibalizing their dead,” said Albion, finally catching on to the host’s ghoulish recovery. “This is not Hallow’s doing. This reeks of Mordemere’s madness. I doubt even Jean Hallow understood the thing he loosed from the Cook box.”
“What use is that now?” yelled Hargreaves to the glowing dague in her instrument panel. “We are surrounded. Watch them! Try to find a weakness!”
“What weakness?” Rosa cursed, thrusting Cassis’ spindly arm into a creature’s maw. She let fly two bolts, killing the creature, before the arm was ripped off and swallowed in its death throes. Grease and steam sprayed a brackish cloud, and the Cassis fell to one knee, unable to recover its lost pressure without an engine.
“Climb to me!” said Albion. On a wing and a prayer he thumbed the trigger to Dragonwell’s gun, which sputtered into life enough to spray the nightmarish wall with hot metal. The creatures fell back, holed through, but the gun guttered and caught. There was a final death knell of delicate machinery grinding to paste, and the scrabbling wave washed over the Cassis- but Rosa was safe, having climbed over to Dragonwell’s cockpit.
“And now we are two,” said Hargreaves grimly.
“And they are legion,” finished Rosa, gasping for breath.