Gears of a Mad God Omnibus

by Brent Nichols

  A stone lay on the ground near her foot, and a skinny white hand groped blindly toward it. Colleen brought her foot down on the child's wrist, and raised the club over her head. And Abigail, her best friend for years, looked up at her with a face spattered with blood.

  Colleen stared down at her, the club raised high, the urge to kill warring inside her with a rising revulsion. In a corner of her brain she knew she was being manipulated. The rage inside of her was more than she could stifle, so she redirected it. "Katharis!" she screamed. "I won't be your tool! You can go to hell." And she flung the club away from her.

  She woke, heart racing and muscles clenched. She sat up, staring around in the darkness, trying to figure out what was real.

  She was in her room in the blue hut. Maggie snored gently beside her on a pallet of blankets just like Colleen's.

  Colleen rose and crossed to the small window in the corner of the room. She stared out at the hilltop, waiting for her pulse to return to normal. The moon shone brightly, spreading a pale glow on the distant ocean, and she started to relax.

  Something moved in the darkness.

  At first she wasn't alarmed. It could have been the shadows of clouds in the moonlight. It might have been birds, or wildlife. But it wasn't.

  Men were creeping onto the hilltop. The furtive, darting shapes of half a dozen men came over the crest of the hill and vanished into deeper shadow.

  Colleen stepped back from the window and shook Maggie awake. She put a hand over the older woman's mouth and whispered, "Men. Outside."

  It could be nothing, she told herself. Diggers, coming back from a night in town. Sneaking, because they don't want us to know they were out drinking. She didn't believe it, though.

  Carter was asleep in the next room. She shook him awake, then went to the doorway.

  The dark figures were approaching the tin-roofed buildings. She saw shapes in their hands, long objects that might have been guns or clubs. Or walking sticks, she told herself. It could still be drunks returning from town.

  Then a stray moonbeam shone on a man's face and the round lenses of spectacles gleamed in the darkness. None of the diggers wore spectacles.

  Colleen shouted, "Danger! Wake up! Danger!" She spotted Carter's boots beside the door and snatched them up, throwing them one at a time onto the roof of the red hut. The tin roof boomed like thunder, and she shouted the alarm once again.

  A dark shape came toward her, a man with a club raised high over his head. Colleen stood frozen, and Maggie stepped into the doorway behind her, a bullseye lantern in her hand. Maggie flipped the lantern shutter open and a shaft of yellow light spilled out.

  Colleen caught a quick glimpse of a local man, not one of the diggers, throwing an arm up to cover his eyes. She darted forward and grabbed at the club in his hands. It was a thick length of wood, and she twisted it out of his grasp and threw it behind her into the darkness.

  He snarled and swung a fist at her. She ducked, then darted away from him, running for the door of the second building. Diggers poured through the doorway, and she joined them, feeling immediately safer with their brawny forms all around her.

  The invaders formed a group, standing shoulder to shoulder, pushing back the diggers who crowded around them. Diggers shouted and shook their fists, the new arrivals made threatening gestures with their clubs, but so far the violence was limited to pushing and shoving. The knot of men slowly retreated, letting the diggers drive them back across the hilltop, and Colleen stood still, letting the crowd move past her.

  Something was wrong, she could sense it, but what? Then it came to her that the man in spectacles wasn't with the cluster of men being harried across the hilltop. She turned, looking around in all directions, and a moving shadow caught her eye.

  Someone stood among the artifacts laid out on the ground beside the dig site. She broke into a run, realizing too late that she should have called for help. No one would hear her now over the shouting of the diggers. She shrugged mentally and kept running.

  A man was shuffling away into the darkness, his shoulders hunched forward as if he held something heavy. Colleen raced toward him, and when she was a dozen feet from him he heard her, and turned.

  She gasped and stumbled to a halt. It was the Englishman, the one she'd encountered in Victoria, and in her nightmares. His spectacles turned his eyes into two gleaming, opaque circles. She couldn't see his little mustache in the darkness, but she knew it was him.

  He held the carved stone tablet clutched to his chest, and she saw the gleam of his teeth in the darkness as he snarled. "I have a gun," he said. "Don't come any cl-"

  Colleen sprang to her right. She couldn't see the stone club in the darkness, but it was as if she could sense it. Her hand closed around the handle. She already knew the heft of it, the balance, the way it would feel in her hand. She raised the club high and leaped at him.

  The tablet spilled from his arms, his hand plunged under his jacket, and she slashed at his shoulder with the club. He tried to twist back, but the club slammed into him and knocked him sprawling. She rushed after him, and he scrambled away, dragging a pistol out of a shoulder holster.

  Colleen backpedalled, then dove over the closest line of twine and into the shallow excavation. The Englishman was a dozen feet away, and she caught the gleam on his spectacles as his head turned back and forth, searching for her. She could sense his indecision. He needed both hands for the tablet. If he put his gun away, she'd be on him in an instant. If he started shooting, he'd draw the attention of the whole camp.

  Footsteps scuffled through the grass to her left, and she heard Bill's voice call out. "Miss Colleen? You all right?"

  "Get back, Bill," she shouted. "He has a gun!"

  Bill went silent, and she saw the Englishman step toward her. Her shout had given away her position. Her coveralls were fairly dark, but her pale skin and blonde hair would be easy to spot. Colleen tensed, tightened her grip on the club, and readied herself for a desperate, doomed lunge.

  A rock came sailing out of the darkness, grazed the Englishman's shoulder, and bounced across the grass. He spun, pointing his pistol into the shadows, and Colleen used the opportunity to draw her legs up under her.

  He heard the rustle of movement and turned back toward her, just as another rock came flying. This one flew past his cheek, close enough to make him flinch, and he swore. "I'll be back to deal with you," he snapped. Then he turned and fled into the night.

  Chapter 4 – The Metal Man

  Carter, Maggie, and Colleen held a council of war in their hut the next morning. It seemed clear that the cult wanted the stone tablet for some reason. Their priority, then, was to get the stone off the island as soon as possible. That meant waiting for Libertad and the Persephone to return.

  In the meantime, Maggie wanted to continue the dig. Who knew what they might uncover? Abandoning the site meant leaving it all to the cult.

  Carter nodded. "I agree. We need to carry on if we can. The question is, will we still have any diggers, now that things have turned dangerous?"

  They walked out the front of the building and found the diggers gathered in a ring around the front door. Carter stood on the step, put his hands on his hips, and spoke to the group.

  "You all know what happened here last night. Well, those men didn't get what they wanted, so they will most likely be back. I realize that this isn't what any of you signed up for. If anyone wants to leave, step up and I'll pay you your wages. I'd like to continue the dig, so there's a job for anyone who wants to stay. I have to tell you, though, you're probably better off leaving."

  Carter fell silent. Nobody moved.

  Carter scratched his head. "Do you understand what I'm saying? They have at least one gun. That's one more gun than we have. Are you sure you want to stay?"

  Someone at the back said, "We gonna work today, Boss, or we gonna stand around talking?"

  Others chuckled, and Bill said, "That was Reggie Bones with them last night. He's been trying to
push me around for twenty years now. I never let him do it yet. I'm not gonna start now."

  Several people nodded in agreement. Then a small, wiry man piped up. "Those guys last night was scary, but let me tell you, my wife is worse. You think I wanna go home and tell her I quit my job?" He shuddered theatrically. "Give me a man with a gun any day, Boss."

  The others laughed and clapped him on the back, and the meeting broke up, men drifting over to the dig site and picking up tools. Colleen, Maggie, and Carter looked at each other, bemused. Maggie shrugged and said, "I guess I better start supervising. They're clearly going to dig."

  Carter and Colleen watched them walk away, and then Carter said softly, "I think you and I have a little job to do this morning."

  In a back corner of the blue hut they found some crates that had once held food supplies. They brought a crate outside and, in plain sight of anyone who cared to look, lined the crate with fronds, put the stone tablet inside, added more fronds for padding, and nailed the crate shut. They lugged the crate back into the blue hut.

  Once inside, safe from prying eyes, they pried the lid off of the crate, took out the tablet, threw in some rocks for weight, and re-sealed it. "We'll sneak out tonight, under cover of darkness," he said, "and bury it where it won't be found."

  Colleen's work crew continued to make small discoveries, mostly pottery shards and little bits of metal rusted beyond identification. Then, in mid-afternoon, Bill came to find Colleen and Carter where they were working on the steam donkey. "Come quick," he said, "we found something really interesting."

  They followed Bill to the dig site. Maggie had unearthed the foundations of an odd building. She claimed she'd never encountered anything quite like it in all her studies of ancient civilizations. The foundation was in the shape of an asymmetrical triangle. Most of the artifacts unearthed so far had been scattered outside the triangular walls.

  Bill, however, led them to the center of the building. Maggie looked up, a brush in her hand, and said, "What do you make of this?"

  The shape of a man, or at least the top half of one, was etched in the soil as if drawn in rusted iron. Colleen could clearly make out the outline of a head, a chest, and one arm. It was as if a suit of armor, or a robot straight out of a dime novel, had been buried in the earth and left to rust.

  "Interesting," Maggie said. "Some of the metal is practically gone." She poked at a rust-colored line in the dirt with the handle of her brush, and bits of metal flaked away into dust. "But there are other parts, like this..."

  She prodded at the outline of the head, and a perfectly-formed gear rose from the dirt. It was dingy grey in color, hardly thicker than a sheet of paper, and perfectly preserved with every tooth intact. Maggie lifted the gear, turning it in her hands and holding it up in the sunlight. "Extraordinary," she said. "You wouldn't think this had been buried more than a week."

  She made sketches and took notes as she went, so that hours passed without much apparent progress. The metal man was a strange mix of parts. There were gears and springs, rods and sprockets, made of the remarkable corrosion-resistant substance. Most of the machine, however, was made from a metal much more ordinary, so that the preserved components seemed to be embedded in a mass of rusty dirt.

  Carter eventually drifted away, but Colleen watched every step of the excavation, fascinated. When Maggie cocked her head to the side, Colleen knew she'd found something even more odd than the rest.

  "What is it, Maggie?"

  The other woman looked back over her shoulder. "The ground here is warm." She rested her hand on the soil in the middle of the metal man's torso. "Almost hot, even. But just in this one spot." She scraped delicately with a trowel, brushed the soil back, and touched the ground again. This time she drew her hand back quickly. "Ouch. That's hot."

  The soil was darker in the middle of the chest area, and gave off a burned odor. Maggie scraped and brushed while Colleen fidgeted with impatience. Then Maggie leaned in close and said, "Ah, what's this, then?"

  An object was buried in the center of the metal man's chest. By the outline it was about the size of a large apple. It seemed to be made from white ceramic.

  Maggie resumed scraping and brushing, then licked a fingertip, reached out, and carefully touched the ceramic surface. She pulled her finger back quickly, then hesitated and touched the ceramic again. Finally she laid the pad of her fingertip on the ceramic and kept it there.

  "Fascinating," she said. "It's not hot at all. I can feel the heat radiating from the soil all around it, but this white part is perfectly cool."

  More scraping and brushing followed, until at last she lifted out the strange object. She held it up while she brushed at it. Then she shifted it in her grasp, gave a cry, and dropped it. She stuck her thumb in her mouth, made a face, and pulled it back out.

  "Yuck. Remind me to wash my hands before I do that again. I burned myself." She prodded the ceramic object with her trowel. "Looks like I didn't break it, thank God."

  As she brushed more dirt away, the structure of the object was revealed. It was a black ovoid, maybe five inches long and three or four inches wide, like a slightly elongated sphere. It was partially covered in a white ceramic shell. The shell, which was strangely immune to heat, covered both ends. Connecting bars of ceramic covered parts of the middle but left much of the black metal exposed.

  "Pass me that canteen, would you?" Maggie asked. Colleen uncapped the canteen and passed it over. Maggie poured some water into the palm of her hand and dribbled it over the artifact.

  Where the water touched the white ceramic it beaded or trickled away. Whenever the water touched the black metal, though, it flashed instantly into steam.

  Maggie scratched her head. "I excavated this myself," she said. "That – thing, whatever it is – has been buried for a long time. Years, if not centuries. I'd bet my reputation on it." She looked up, and her eyes met Colleen's. "What stays hot for years? It's a physical impossibility. For that matter, what's this white coating?" She prodded it with her finger. "What could possibly be completely immune to heat?"

  She turned to look past Colleen and said, "Phil! You have to see this."

  Colleen turned to see Carter striding toward them, his face grim. "You'll have to show me later," he said. "We've got visitors."

  A handful of people were rising over the curve of the hill behind him. A heavyset man in a white suit was in the lead, mopping his red face with a handkerchief, and Colleen blinked in surprise. "Is that Van Der Pot?"

  The governor was flanked by two more men in suits, one of his Dutch assistants and another man, obscured by Van Der Pot's shoulder. Then Van Der Pot moved to one side, the sun glinted on round spectacles, and Colleen drew her breath in with a hiss. It was the Englishman who'd tried to shoot her the night before.

  More men crested the hill behind them, ten in all, local men from the village. But instead of the casual, heat-friendly clothing Colleen had always seen in the past, they wore trousers and long-sleeved shirts. Several men wore neckties, and a few even had suit jackets. All of them were grim-faced and solemn.

  "They look like they're dressed to go to church," Colleen murmured.

  "Or a hanging," said Maggie.

  "Whatever you were going to show me," Carter said, "let's not show it to them."

  Maggie nodded and, moving casually, brushed dirt over the hot rock and the outline of the metal man. Then she stood and the three of them walked across the hilltop to meet the advancing party. Diggers started laying down their tools and walking over to join them. A few men kept hold of their shovels and mattocks.

  Van Der Pot was clearly unused to so much exercise. He stopped in front of them, panting and sweating, waiting to catch his breath. His assistant stood on one side of him, the Englishman on the other, and Colleen found herself almost face to face with her nemesis. She was struck by how ordinary he looked. She thought she could see tension in the set of his mouth, but his stance was relaxed, his expression bland.

  She eye
d him with a mix of fascination and revulsion. She could feel rage just below the surface of her thoughts, too. A corner of her mind was measuring how many steps it would take her to reach the green stone club.

  Finally Van Der Pot recovered enough breath to be able to speak. "Look here, Carter," he said, "I'm sorry to barge in on you like this, but there's been an incident."

  "There certainly has," Carter said coldly. He gestured at the Englishman. "This man came here in the dead of night, threatened my people with a gun, and tried to rob us."

  The Englishman raised his eyebrows as if surprised. Van Der Pot just waved a pudgy hand dismissively. "Yes, yes, Mr. Falconer has already told me about last night's misunderstanding. You blew it all out of proportion. No, I'm here about something else."

  Colleen, outraged, opened her mouth, but closed it again at a small gesture from Carter. "Something else?" Carter said.

  "Yes." Van Der Pot looked embarrassed. "You remember what I told you, about the people here thinking the hilltop is haunted?" He gestured at the townspeople behind him. "I've been approached by a deputation of concerned citizens. They feel you're stirring up an unsavory element on the island with your activities up here. They have asked me to discuss it with you."

  Colleen ran her eyes over the crowd behind Van Der Pot. She couldn't be certain, but she thought she recognized the man she'd wrestled the club from last night, the one who'd taken a swing at her. She curled her lip. Concerned citizens, indeed!

  She saw the muscles in Carter's face move as he clenched his teeth, but he took a deep breath and paused before he spoke. His voice was flat and calm as he said, "My dear Mr. Van Der Pot, are you suggesting that we abandon a scientific inquiry because people who live several miles away are superstitious?"