The prey faltered in its motion, dipped, lurched, groaned as it tried to go in several directions at once. It surged forward, then banked too sharply and almost rolled.
The creature advanced, implacable.
The prey steadied. It came on, menacing, to threaten, to fight.
Projectiles pattered on the creature’s chitinous carapace…annoyances. A down-curl, a tuck, shielded the eye. Waves of sound shrilled and vibrated, irritations, quivering the gelatinous inner tissues.
As the prey sought collision, the creature reared up, exposing not a vulnerable underbelly but multitudes of legs, a synchronous flex-rippling of them, and a line of puckered, pincered orifices.
The creature latched onto the prey, onto the spherical clear part of the shell where so many of the beings tempted with their helpless tender flesh. The legs clasped. The orifices extruded their stomach-sac polyps, questing, probing for weaknesses through which it they could slip and ooze to engulf the tiny morsels.
The prey surged forward again, but the creature held on, letting itself be moved, letting itself be carried along.
It would not be shaken loose. The prey would not escape. Soon, the polyps would find their entrance. Or the burning nodules would melt through the shell and make entrances.
The water changed. A chasm gaped below, cold and dark.
Sudden crackling energy lashed through the creature, sensations of pain and convulsive shock exploding along the ridges of its own biogalvanic organs.
It recoiled by instinct, legs releasing in a violent spasm, body snap-curling shut into a protective ball.
***
“I say! Reggie Wilmott saves the day! Whoever would have thought?” His previously pomade-sleek hair stuck up in hectic whorls, his face shined with sweat, and his eyes were very bright.
Arthur gave him a hearty clap on the back. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You still need to pilot us home.”
“Right-oh!” Grinning, he took hold of the levers again. “Shall we see what the old girl can do, hey-what?”
As the others busied themselves about the bridge – it was spacious but hardly seemed so, packed as it was with a conglomeration of instruments and equipment – Chantal moved beside Arthur and rested her hand on his arm.
“Aren’t you glad you came along?” she asked, smiling.
He covered her hand with his and smiled back. “As I said, I wouldn’t have missed it.”
The great nautilus turned, turbines whirring. Her prow angled toward the surface far above.
Behind the Thetis, tumbling slow and silent, the thing from out of space vanished into the trench’s unfathomable black depths.
Perhaps forever.
The Flower
By Christopher M. Geeson
The ground erupted beside Stahl, splattering him with the fetid remains of one of his regiment. Gripping his six-barreled bayonet repeater-rifle with one hand, he used the other to wipe some of the gore from his face. Stumbling as fast as he could in the near-darkness, he ran through a cascade of bombs from the bulbous Confederate flying machines. The air tingled his sweat-soaked head and he realized he’d lost his blue cap. It would be madness to go back for it. He had to keep on retreating, jumping over torn corpses in the gloom, many concealed in the thick gray ash. The rows of the fallen seemed to go on forever, their twisted limbs and crooked backs forming grotesque parodies of the landscapes he used to paint. It turned his stomach like never before – as if he was truly seeing the war for the first time.
The multiple propellers of a flying machine whirred overhead; the shadow of its vast inflated bulk eclipsed the dim light. Another shell exploded indiscriminately, flattening more of the men and women in Stahl’s regiment – women had been fighting on both sides for the past two decades. As the flying machine continued on its course, Stahl risked a glance back. In the swirling dust beyond, the relentless mechanical men of the South’s Iron Brigade marched, pistons thumping, the rattle of their Gatling attachments cutting down Stahl’s comrades at the rear of the rout. At this rate, there would be no survivors—except the general in his towering steam-powered tripod, of course. Where had he gone?
Stahl forced himself to keep running, his breath coming in wheezing gasps. He tried to find something to focus on in the dust-enshrouded distance, somewhere to run to. But there wasn’t anything, just the gray wasteland of the battlefield scorched of color, stretching as far north and as far south as he could ever hope to venture. Only a new-found anger kept him going. He’d never really thought about it before, but it now it enraged him to think that the generals were safer than anyone else, enclosed in the ironclad hides of their tripods – and yet, his general had still disappeared, leaving them to die on the battlefield.
Ahead, he could make out a figure in the omnipresent dust.
“Retreat to fight another day for the glory of the Union!” the figure beckoned to the routed men. “Retreat!”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Stahl muttered to himself.
A shell exploded in front of him, eliciting the scarlet splash of another trooper’s demise. Stahl ran towards the beckoning figure, grateful to finally see an officer in Union blue, even faded as it was. But Stahl’s hearing, dulled by the repetition of explosions, had not accurately relayed the sergeant’s voice. Too late, he realized he was running towards one of his own army’s mechanical men.
The hulking sergeant’s brass face swiveled to follow Stahl as he passed without a pause. “Where’s your cap, soldier?” the sergeant’s voice grated. “Call that a uniform?”
Stahl glanced back and saw – creeping up behind the mechanical sergeant – the gigantic tripod of the general, its great iron legs hissing and groaning with each crashing step. The bulbous metal body atop it swayed like the eggs carried on a spider’s back. A blistered Union flag was emblazoned on the metal plates of its hide. The general was with them after all! Stahl glanced up at the tripod’s view slit and just for a moment he caught a glimpse of a face inside, but it wasn’t—No, he told himself, it’s just your eyes playing tricks. Look again! But as he looked up, fire and smoke erupted from the tripod’s twin cannons as they spat their deadly shells right into the general’s own soldiers. Stahl hit the ground with the force of the explosions. Quickly, he stood, his hearing muffled to the point of silence now. Miraculously, he was alive while all around him lay soldiers in blue, torn apart by the shells. My God! he thought, The general is firing on us! Stahl looked back; the tripod was now distracted, fighting a duo of Confederate flying machines. Seeing the tripod again filled Stahl with panic and he ran, terrified, not daring to look back lest the face inside the metallic monstrosity was still there.
Time seemed vague as the gray wasteland passed beneath Stahl, the monotony broken only at fleeting intervals by the movement of a rattlesnake – the damned things seemed to be the only life that could flourish these days.
Finally, gasping and coughing, he stopped, alone. All his comrades were dead – and of the general’s tripod there was no sign. Stahl didn’t know how far he’d fled but the moldering stench of the bodies around him suggested they were from an older carnage. The battle was far off behind him; the Confederate Iron Brigade must have regrouped, leaving their flying machines to pick off the survivors in their newly-gained territory. Or was it regained territory? The zone that had once been North Carolina had changed hands so often in the last forty years he couldn’t be sure. Though if he was honest with himself, he couldn’t be certain this part of the ashen wasteland even was North Carolina.
Now was his chance: the opportunity to disappear and escape the war forever. Go back home and paint; maybe get some of his pictures in a gallery, if galleries still existed in the blitzed cities of the north. He’d never really thought of escaping before, but it gripped him now with an intensity he hadn’t felt in the four years since his conscription. Sure, they shot deserters, but that didn’t matter anymore, now he’d seen the general massacre his own troops.
He set off, caref
ul in the ever-present gloom to step around the crumbling corpse-filled trenches of an older battle. The lush green world of his fanciful paintings had been leveled in the first two decades of the War Between the States, before he’d even been born. Only gray desolation remained: dry, brittle trees; ash-filled riverbeds crawling with snakes; soil fertilized in blood; a war that his generation had inherited as its birthright.
His reverie was interrupted by a shell from a flying machine soaring overhead. Throwing himself to the ground, he raised a cloud of ash around him that soon had his body wracked with coughing. Another explosion followed, closer this time. Spitting gray phlegm, he scurried from the spot, keeping low to the ground, terrified to look up. The whine of another flying machine’s propellers joined the first; two more shells exploded on the ground, as the flying machines groaned above. He waited for them to pass, knowing it would take them some time to make another bombing run.
He charged forward again, as the flying machines began their laborious 180-degree turns in the sky. And as he made progress, he began to make out the jagged shapes of ruins in the thick swirling ash: the gray walls of what had once been a plantation house with the stone stumps of columns that had held up a portico at some distant time. Beyond that was a sagging barn-like building that could’ve been a slave bunkhouse before all the slaves were conscripted.
Crossing the twisted skeletal remains of a railroad track, he rushed towards the ruined house, hoping there might be a cellar or even an intact ground-floor chamber he could hide in. The flying machines were still in the process of turning and he felt sure he could reach the ruin before they saw him again. He leaped over a fallen column and clambered through the lower half of a smashed window.
His feet had barely touched the floor inside when powerful hands seized him from behind and pushed him downwards. He lost his footing on the steep slope of a pit that now encompassed the hallway and tumbled to the bottom, gaining another mouthful of dust. The body of his assailant landed on top of him, crushing the air from his lungs.
“Stay down!” a voice grated in his ear as the whizzing of a flying machine’s propellers passed over.
As soon as the sound of the machine faded, Stahl writhed beneath the bulk of his attacker, finally managing to roll free. Scrambling in the splintered planks in the bottom of the pit, he spun round, reaching for his bayonet repeater-rifle.
“Hold your fire.” It was a mechanical sergeant – a Union one, Stahl noted with relief. Tarnished brass showed beneath the rips in its blue uniform. The left side of its skull was dented with a three-inch crater and its moustache had been bent so that it pointed outwards from the metal face. Creaking, it stood up, looming over Stahl. “Sergeant Beshett of the 575th Mechanicals.” It patted its broad chest with the pride its kind was pre-set with; it rang hollowly. The gears inside its head whirred as it selected its next piece of speech. “It’s a good thing I found you, soldier.”
Stahl slumped against the side of the pit and sank slowly to the debris-strewn ground, overcome with weariness. The flying machines sounded distant, the explosions of shells few and irregular. He was safe for the moment – even in this pit which must have once been a cellar – but his chance to escape was gone, if there’d ever been a chance, now that he was under the watch of the sergeant. The mechanical man might be unarmed and damaged, but Stahl had seen the hulking machines rip men to pieces before.
He hacked up some more dust. Sweat still soaked his hair where his cap had been. He wiped his hand across his forehead, leaving a dark smear on his pale knuckles.
“We lost a lot of good men up there,” the mechanical said in its grating voice.
“You got any more clichés like that?” Stahl asked.
“War sure is hell,” Beshett responded, oblivious to Stahl’s comment.
Stahl let go of his six-barreled rifle and fumbled with the shoulder strap of his canteen until he managed to raise it to his lips. Two gulps from the bottle were all he could spare, but they brought relief to his parched throat.
“Where’s your cap, soldier?” the sergeant asked. “C’mon, let’s find you a new one.” The sergeant beckoned Stahl to follow him.
The bottom of the pit was strewn with corpses from both armies, mingled with an occasional limb from a mechanical man. Blue and gray had fallen together, mid-battle, sometimes grasping each other’s necks or ripping at each other’s faces. Unseeing eyes stared out of pallid portraits, as if transfixed by the arcs of blood across the sides of the pit. Friend and foe were decaying together, their mingling remains finding more in common with each other than they’d believed when they were alive. The rank stench caught in Stahl’s throat. But it wasn’t just the smell which bothered him, for here and there were dead Union soldiers, stilled forever mid-skirmish with other dead Union soldiers, who had quite obviously died fighting each other. Had a hysteria seized them? Stahl wondered. What terror had unleashed such a madness that soldiers would attack their own comrades?
“War sure is hell,” Beshett said, detaching a blue cap from a dead Union soldier. “You’re lucky to make it this far.”
“Lucky?” Stahl felt sick.
Beshett grasped his shoulder. “One day we’ll win this war, lad. Now, put your new cap on and you’ll look like a proper soldier again.”
Stahl gasped – a multitude of wires protruded from inside the cap. Beshett gripped him tighter, bringing the cap up to his face. Lumps of gray tissue hung off the ends of the wires.
“What are you doing?” Stahl cried, twisting in Beshett’s immovable grip.
“We’ll soon have you back to normal,” the mechanical man said, “and you’ll forget all about this.”
“No!” Stahl screamed.
Gunfire erupted above and behind them, a spread of bullets clanking on metal. Beshett twitched but continued to press the cap down on Stahl’s head. The needle-sharp ends of wires pierced the skin on his scalp and darkness descended on him.
Stahl shook his head. It felt heavy, like he’d been drinking for two solid days, but he was right where he had been just moments before. Only now Sergeant Beshett was twitching on the floor, the blue cap still in its hand. The sergeant’s brass head had been hacked off.
A woman was there, holding an axe; beyond, at the top of the pit, was a man, thin and haggard, clutching a six-barreled repeater pistol. Their gray Confederate jackets were tattered; ash and dust was caked to the sweat on their faces and they were not wearing caps.
Slowly, fighting off a dizzy spell, Stahl put his hands up.
“Relax,” the woman said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“Huh?”
“You’re free now,” she said, letting the axe drop to the ground next to Beshett’s head.
“Course I’m free. It ain’t the North that keeps slaves, is it?”
The southern man let out a laugh, one with an edge of hysteria to it. “He ain’t got it yet, LaSarre,” the man said, sliding down the sides of the pit to join them.
“Your metal friend was about to enslave you again,” LaSarre told Stahl.
“I told you: I’m not a slave,” Stahl said, rubbing the blurriness from his eyes, “you Johnny Rebs are the ones who keep slaves.”
“We’re all slaves – Union or Confederate – when their caps are on our heads. Don’t you understand?” LaSarre said. “The generals are controlling everyone-”
Stahl slumped against the side of the pit, his body shaking.
“You need to rest,” LaSarre said. Stahl’s vision lost focus again. He closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands. “What’s your name?” LaSarre asked.
“Stahl,” he managed to mumble.
“He’s lost it,” Stahl heard the Confederate man say. “Brain melt. Might as well put him outta his misery.”
“Point your rifle somewhere else, Tyrell!” LaSarre snapped. “We need all the free soldiers we can get.”
Stahl heard the words, but he sank helplessly to the floor of the trench, his head still thick and heavy. All
he wanted was to sit in his old studio and paint pictures of the beautiful world in his imagination – a world that was now tainted with bloodshed.
LaSarre grasped Stahl’s shoulders, gently shaking him. “Come back, Billy Yank, come back.”
There was a sudden burst of gunfire; Stahl cringed into himself, clutching at his own arms until he heard Tyrell’s high-pitched giggle.
“Just shootin’ a rattler, that’s all,” Tyrell said. “Darn things get everywhere. It ain’t natural, you ask me.”
Stahl shook his head as LaSarre dragged him to his feet; she guided him towards the putrefying corpses in the pit. Leaning over, she pointed at two dead Union soldiers: one wearing a cap, the other bare-headed. It looked like the one in the cap had been killed by a flying machine shell whilst he slit the throat of the other.
“Nothing makes sense anymore,” Stahl said. “Soldiers fighting their comrades, generals slaughtering their own regiments.”
“It will,” LaSarre said, “but you’re seeing the truth for the first time and it takes a while to adjust.”
“They must’ve gone insane,” Stahl said, “killing soldiers on their own side.”
LaSarre began tugging at the dead soldier’s cap. “They weren’t on the same side,” she said. With a fleshy tearing sound, the cap came away in her hand, exposing the flattened hair on the soldier’s scalp. Beneath the tangled locks of greasy hair were swollen holes going into the skull, ready for the forest of wires that were now evident inside the cap – just like the one Beshett had been holding. Stahl ran his fingers through his own sweat-soaked hair and froze when he felt the calloused nodules where the wires had gone inside his own head.
“You could check every one of them that’s wearing a cap,” LaSarre said, “but they’ll all be the same. The generals have made slaves of just about everyone, on both sides, turning them into killing machines with no more soul than the metal sergeant over there.”
Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam Page 20