Worldwaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Action Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 5)

by Dean F. Wilson

   As the soldier collapsed, all hell broke loose in the club. Guns rattled, glasses smashed, and tables were overturned. People ran to and fro, the soldiers shouting, the dancers screaming. In the flurry, Jacob could barely make out who was who. He tried to spot Whistler, but he was distracted by the hail of bullets flying in all directions.

   He ducked behind a table, which broke into a thousand splinters as several soldiers took aim. He dived low and crawled across the floor towards the bar, where—not all that surprisingly—Armax holed up. The manic fighter popped his hands up now and then to shoot, and his head up to shout a variety of insults.

   Across the other side of the room, far from where Jacob had last seen him, Rommond fired several trademark trick shots, which took out the gaslights dotted around the room. The veil drew again, but this time the Regime soldiers were the ones who trembled.

   “Did you see Whistler?” Jacob whispered to Armax.

   “Sorry, son,” Armax said, a little too loudly. “Have you seen my lighter?”

   Jacob shook his head.

   Gunfire periodically illuminated the room, giving auras to silhouettes, and life to shadows. It was difficult to tell who was who, and impossible to tell what side they were on. Jacob usually liked the darkness, but that was to hide in, not fight in.

   Another round of gunfire revealed a figure crouched down behind a room separator across the way. The light was not there for long, but Jacob thought he saw the outline of Whistler's messy hair. Soldiers tended to have tighter cuts than that.

   Jacob darted out, crawling across the room between each brief flash of ignited gunpowder, keeping as low as possible, and trying his best to scramble behind something solid before the light betrayed him. He had spent too long in the shadows for the light to do anything else.

   He paused near the staircase, bumping into Nissi, who raised her eyebrows at him, as if she was enjoying the show. She did not speak, but her face said enough: Now this is entertainment. It was little surprise that she and Armax volunteered on this mission. Jacob just wondered why he was also one of them.

   Eventually he made it over to Whistler, startling the boy when he grabbed his arm. Whistler had his hands over his ears, and his eyes were squinted shut. Half his cover was blown apart by bullets, and there were holes in the wall nearby. No one in the room left standing could really attribute that to luck; it was just that the furniture had a lot less of it than them.

   Jacob ushered Whistler out into the open after another round of gunfire. Whistler was not as good at being quiet as Jacob was, which resulted in a few bullets fired their way. Eventually they made it back to the bunker of the bar, where Armax had lined up a series of half-full whiskey bottles, stuffed with old handkerchiefs. He grinned at them and flicked on his rediscovered lighter.

   “Hell,” Jacob said.

   “Sorry, did you want to do the honour?” Armax asked him.

   “Eh, no.”

   The gunfire continued in the darkness for a moment, then died down as everyone checked to see if the other side was dead. One of the Regime soldiers lit a gas lamp on the wall, and Jacob saw Rommond standing behind the soldiers near the back door. They barely had time to express shock before he shot them all and quickly reloaded.

   “Damn!” Armax said, holding up the lit bottle. “What am I to do with this then?”

   “Leave it,” Rommond replied.

   Armax dropped the bottle, and the flames engulfed the bar, growing as they encountered more bottles and kegs. Armax snuck away, as if he had nothing to do with it. Jacob and Whistler swiftly followed.

   They hurried out the back door, and halted when they found Trokus alone there.

   “Quick!” he said. “Follow me.”

   Rommond aimed his gun. “I'd rather not.”

   “Look, the Iron Emperor gave his orders,” Trokus said. “I'm defying them. If you want to get those planes we have, then follow me. I know the fastest route.”

   There was little time to debate, and no time to gain trust. Necessity urged them on, and Rommond reluctantly holstered his weapon.

   They followed Trokus through a series of rooms and corridors, and down into a dimly-lit basement, which led to a series of tunnels beneath the town. Trokus stopped suddenly at the end of the last tunnel, with one foot on the ladder leading up into a storehouse.

   “When we enter here,” he said, “we won't have long before guards across Rustport are alerted. They'll start shutting down the aerodrome and runway immediately. Even your Landquaker won't be much use then. I've sent men loyal to me to cause a distraction, but we'll only have a few minutes to get from this storehouse to the main hanger, and we'll have a hard time getting there unseen.”

   “Why are you helping us?” Jacob asked.

   “I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing this for my family. It's like Rommond says. None of this war will matter if that bomb goes off.”

   Armax placed his hand on Trokus' shoulder. “I might have burnt down your club.”

   Trokus did not know what to say, and Armax did not stay around to hear it. He joined Rommond and the others as they clambered up the ladder. The storehouse was full of giant crates and barrels, the kind they had seen hauled by even larger cranes at the docks.

   They opened the door and looked outside. There was no one there, but it was a long stretch of land between them and the hanger, and it was broad daylight. It would be easy to spot them racing across. Everything depended on speed, and Trokus' loyal supporters.

   Let's hope it's some distraction, Jacob thought.

   “You can't get us any closer?” Rommond asked the commander.

   “This is as close as the tunnels get. Everything else is overground.”

   “Well, I guess we make a run for it then,” Jacob said.

   They looked again at their destination, and prepared to make the sprint.

   A sudden alarm rang out, long and droning.

   “Damn it, we've been outed!” Armax cried.

   “That's not an intruder alarm,” Rommond said.

   “No,” Trokus said. “That's an air raid siren.”

  11 – PAPER ORDNANCE

  “We don't have time for this!” Rommond growled. “We'll have to make a dash for it.”

   “With bombs falling?” Jacob asked.

   “Then we better run quick.”

   The general charged out, and after a moment of hesitation the others followed. All round, the bomb sirens blared, rising and falling, and setting all minds on edge.

   They raced across the open ground, keenly aware that they stood out like targets to the bombers above. They had to hope that speed would save them. They had to hope the bombs would not fall along their path.

   Further afield, soldiers dived into bunkers, and sailors cast out in dinghies on the docks, leaving behind their larger ships, which were most likely to be hit. There was a clamour of screams and shouts, competing with the clangour of the alarm.

   Any who dared look up saw the hot air balloons floating overhead, unloading their payload, which from this vantage point looked like little black specks, before spreading into a multitude of black specks that seemed to span the entire sky.

   “Cluster bombs!” Nissi shouted.

   Rommond ran faster, and his frenzy spurred them all on. He knew war better than all of them combined. He knew when to fight, and when to hide—and when to run as if fear itself lashed at his heels.

   Jacob kept his eyes on the hangar across the way. No matter how fast he fled, it still seemed very far away. And then, to his horror, the hangar doors started to close slowly. The soldiers inside must have spotted them. Or if they were loyal to Trokus, they were loyal to their own lives first, and tried to seal themselves inside from the blast.

   As the arsenal of the air came ever closer, and they raced faster, and the doors ahead seemed to taunt them, Jacob glanced back and noticed that Whistler was fa
lling behind. Without a hint of hesitation, despite the imminence of death, the smuggler slowed and stopped, and ran back towards the boy, pulling and ushering him on.

   Then they heard a sharp whistle, which almost rent their ears, and they were startled by the sudden crash of a metal bomb casing less than a metre to their left. It cracked the ground, but to their surprise and gratitude, it did not explode.

   They charged forward, painfully aware of the gap between them and the others as much as the gap between them and the closing hangar doors. Jacob dared not look, but he could see the impending shapes in his peripheral vision, the dark blotches coming into view, coming into land.

   He saw Rommond approaching the hangar door, and reaching for his pistol. A guard inside threw himself to the floor, but that's where the general sent the bullet. Another fled, and the door was left ajar, just in time for some of them to race inside.

   But Rommond halted, stopping out in the open, just inches from the safety of the hangar. He looked up, shaking his head, as if it was all futile, as if there were no bunkers strong enough to withstand what came for them—as if it were the Worldwaker itself.

   Yet what came down upon them did not rock the bunkers or pierce the roofs. It did not topple walls or take lives. The balloon bombers dropped no explosives. They sent down leaflet bombs, shells containing paper instead of gunpowder. They opened mid-air, releasing their ink-filled ordnance, which fell down gently, a light rain instead of hail, the wind catching them and cradling them, and sending them down like parachutes.

   Jacob shielded his face from the flutter of the flyers, and when he and Whistler caught up with the general, he saw him clutching one of the pamphlets, on the cover of which read in bold writing: WAKE UP! Rommond rolled his eyes as he flicked through the booklet, with its stark warnings and exaggerated images, telling the people that they were sleeping, that they must join “the cause of the waking,” and rise up against those would keep them in slumber. The problem was that the Armageddon Brigade planned to achieve their aim by murder and suicide. Life is a dream, they claimed. A bad dream they make you keep on dreaming.

   “I suppose it's not so bad,” Armax said, holding up one of the leaflets.

   “It's worse,” the general replied. “We can't have people believing this nonsense. It endangers everything.”

   “But it's just paper—”

   “Just words,” Rommond said. “People die for words, for concepts, for ideas. We've been dying for ours. There's a reason the Iron Emperor outlawed literature. It educates. It inspires. Those are dangerous things. And the problem is, in the absence of real information, it is nonsense like this that people start believing in. And that is even more dangerous.” He slapped the pamphlet into Armax's chest.

   “Look at this one,” Armax said, snatching a leaflet from the wind. He held it up to Rommond, where it showed the general's own likeness, albeit with horns, red eyes, and a halo of fire. The caption read: HIS TRUE FORM.

   “They can't be serious,” Rommond said.

   Jacob could not help but notice a glimmer of smugness on Trokus' face. Your turn to be demonised, he imagined him thinking.

   “Kind of hard to believe they're serious about any of this,” Jacob said.

   “They really think I'm a demon.”

   “Says here,” Armax added, reading from the back, “that you orchestrated this whole thing, that you're the Dreamkeeper.”

   “No,” Rommond said, scrunching the leaflet up into a tiny ball. “I'm the Dreamdestroyer.”

  12 – FLIGHT

  They entered the hanger, which had been partly evacuated due to the air raid, and the rest from Rommond's gunfire. The handful of soldiers who remained were those loyal to Trokus, and with them was the commander's son, Markus. His wife and daughter were not there to wish him a safe journey. There were no safe journeys to be had.

   “Right,” Armax said, clapping his hands together loudly, “which wingship's mine?”

   Rommond did not bother asking. He charged over to one of the monoplanes, inspected its number, grimaced at the sight of the Regime emblem on the side, and then hopped inside. By the time the others chose their aircraft, or were assigned them, the general was already firing his up.

   “Mind if I take this one?” Whistler asked, just as Jacob was about to climb into one of the few remaining monoplanes. Everyone was in a hurry to get one of the newer models, even though they all knew very little about them.

   “Sure, but why?” Jacob said.

   “The number.” Whistler pointed to the tail fin, which had the number fourteen painted on it in large red letters.

   “Pity there's no thirty-six.”

   Whistler gestured to the last remaining aircraft, a rather rusty-looking biplane, which looked less like one of Brooklyn's designs and more like one of his ancestors. It bore the number eleven, chipped and faded, on its hull.

   “You can be a kid again,” Whistler said with a smile.

  * * *

  Jacob climbed up to the cockpit of his biplane, cringing at the sound of the metal and wood creaking from his weight. Every noise was like the voice of his doubt and regret.

   Well, he thought, you did volunteer.

   He sat down in the leather seat, feeling around for the seat belt. There were a lot of them, which was not reassuring. He supposed it was better than falling out. A pair of dust-covered goggles stared at him from the dashboard.

   He jumped when the radio clicked on. He heard Trokus' voice crackle through.

   “This is a secure channel. Only open to us.”

   “Good,” Rommond replied.

   “A few things before we take off,” Trokus said. “You'll notice a lever beneath your seat.”

   “Pull it?” Armax asked.

   “No! Don't pull it!”

   “I'm just messing with you.”

   Trokus was clearly not amused. “That's the ejection mechanism. If you pull that, it will dislodge the pilot seat, and pressurised cylinders will fire it up into the air, before triggering a parachute sixty seconds later.”

   “Well, that's good to have,” Jacob said.

   “The problem,” Trokus continued, “is that it'll break your back in the process, but at least it's better than dying.”

   “Less keen on it now.”

   “What about a more conventional exit?” Rommond asked. “A standard parachute.”

   “You should have one of those as well, near your feet.”

   “I don't,” the general said.

   “Right. We'll get you one now. In the meantime, our pilots will quickly go over the controls.”

  The Regime's crash course was very basic, just enough to stop them from plotting a crash course of their own.

   “What are all these?” Jacob asked, gesturing to numerous dials on the dashboard.

   “Don't worry about them,” Trokus said.

   “Just for show?”

   “No, but best to keep things simple.”

   I just hope they're not what I need for landing, Jacob thought.

   “You all set?” Trokus asked him, checking that he had a parachute.

   “Not really, but it's too late to back out now, right?”

   Trokus forced a smile and slammed the canopy down.

  * * *

  Trokus returned to his own vessel, a much larger biplane with room for a separate gunner as well as a pilot. From the looks of it, there was space for a few more as well. He was the first to leave the hangar and take flight, followed by Rommond and Cantro. Then it was Jacob's turn.

   Jacob turned on the engine and fed the furnace behind him. He could already feel the heat building inside. Steam funnelled out of a small chimney towards the rear of the vessel. For every exhalation from the aircraft, Jacob had an apprehensive one of his own.

   “Good luck,” Whistler spoke through the radio. Jacob saw the kid giving a thumbs up from his own plane.
“I'm sure you won't need it,” he added.

   “I don't know about that,” Jacob replied.

   The smuggler pushed on the accelerator, and the vessel rolled forward towards the now open hangar doors.

   “Use the full length of the runway,” Trokus said. “Don't try to take off too early.”

   Not sure I want to take off at all, Jacob thought. He wondered if taxiing around the runway throughout the battle counted as sufficient contribution to the war effort. Probably not.

   He drove onto the runway, slow at first, then started to pick up speed. It was a long stretch, and he had to fight the urge to pull up early. He felt the wind waft beneath the wings, and the rocking of the vessel beneath him on the stone path.

   Rommond's voice came over the radio. “There's an old saying for times like this. Fear is leaden. Courage is golden. Let go of the weight of the world, and you will fly.”

   The end of the runway approached, and though Jacob had prepared for it, it seemed to come quicker than he expected. He had to pull up soon or he would career off the road into the dunes that lined the aerodrome like a wall.

   “Keep it steady,” Cantro urged, but it was anything but steady.

   The moment came, and Jacob pulled back on the steering stick. He felt the nose of the plane rise, and the wind swept beneath him. The rocking of the road changed to a gentle glide as he ascended into the sky.

   He heard Whistler cheering through the radio, and glanced back to see that the boy was already taxiing up to the runway. Everyone still grounded seemed eager to get airborne, but now that Jacob was in the air, the mission came clearly into view, and it was a daunting one.

   “So,” Jacob spoke into the radio, “not to sound pessimistic or anything, but even if we do catch up, how do we get on board?”

   “Simple,” Rommond replied. “We jump.”

   “And … that's what I was afraid you were going to say.”

   “You have your parachute, but you shouldn't engage it unless you miss the mark.”