Ghosts of War: A Tale of the Ghost

by George Mann

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Gabriel looked up at the sound of a car engine purring to a stop just outside the hangar. He felt a sudden rush of fear. Was it Donovan? If so, he hoped he'd been able to acquire some assistance, otherwise the raptors would make short work of him. Either that, or Donovan and Ginny would find themselves chained up alongside Gabriel and the others, ready to be fed to the monster.

  A few minutes passed, and Gabriel began to think that perhaps the vehicle had moved on again, or that the occupant had left the car and moved on to a different destination.

  The mechanical man seemed not to have noticed the arrival, or if he did, he paid it no heed. He was busy now in his workshop, tinkering with some device or other, a component he had earlier removed from his upper arm. He looked up, however, at the sound of footsteps coming through the doorway behind him.

  The newcomer wasn't Donovan, as Gabriel had hoped, but rather a tall, portly man in a thick woolen overcoat and porkpie hat. Gabriel recognized him almost immediately from the photographs he had seen at the apartment of the British spy. This was Senator Isambard Banks.

  “Hello, Abraham,” said Banks, sauntering over to where Abraham remained hunched over his workbench. The senator seemed not to notice the dangling human corpse, just a few feet away from where he was standing. If he did, he appeared not at all disturbed by its presence. “Enjoying your little games?”

  So, that was the name of his mechanical captor: Abraham. Gabriel watched Abraham's reaction to the other man, noting with interest the sudden change that seemed to come over him. Where earlier he had been energetic and arrogant, almost hyperactive, even, now he appeared meek and afraid in the shadow of the other man. He was utterly in Banks's thrall.

  “Senator Banks,” Abraham replied quietly, so that Gabriel had to strain to hear. “I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow.”

  Banks grinned. “Ah, well, we like to keep you on your…toes, Abraham,” he said, glancing down at the man's mechanical feet. “After all, you do hold all of our futures in your hands. And besides, need I remind you that you're being very well compensated for your haste?” He smiled again, but it was sinister, almost threatening.

  Abraham laughed nervously. The raptors twittered overhead, scuttling around on the iron beams. Something about the presence of the senator set them on edge, too, it seemed.

  Banks reached up, retrieved his hat from his head, and placed it pointedly on the workbench over the component that Abraham was working on. Abraham frowned, and looked as if he was about to say something, and then clearly thought better of it, instead rising to his feet to face the senator.

  “Is it ready?” asked Banks.

  Abraham frowned again. He gave the slightest of nods. “The device is ready. I've fitted it into the loading bay of Goliath as agreed. But there's still no solution. The search for an appropriate donor is proving…taxing.”

  Banks shrugged. “Very well,” he said.

  “The raptors are still out. I'm expecting them to return with more subjects shortly. I'll keep testing them through the night.”

  Banks shook his head. “No. The time for that is over, Abraham. Goliath leaves tonight.”

  “Tonight! No! You said tomorrow!” Abraham sounded desperate, panicked by this new development. He stood wringing his strange, mechanical hands before the senator. “Senator Banks, you must listen to me.” His voice had now taken on a pleading tone. “We need that solution.”

  Banks laughed. “Things are moving, Abraham. We've run out of time. There's a British spy running around Manhattan. He knows much of our plans. We can't risk him warning anyone in London.”

  “But without the solution we can't control those things. You've no idea!” Abraham was nearly hysterical now. “They're monsters, Senator. Deadly monsters. If you give birth to an entire army of them without a means to control them, you're damning us all.”

  Banks reached out as if to put a reassuring hand on Abraham's shoulder, but then thought twice, grimacing at the sight of the man's bloated, necrotic flesh. When he spoke his tone was conciliatory, condescending. “I'm sure that's entirely the point of the weapon, Abraham. We want to unleash those monsters on the British, don't we? If these things were easy to contain, they would be of no use to us.”

  Abraham was literally pulling at his hair in frustration. “But you're missing the point!”

  Gabriel took a deep breath and then let it out again, trying to remain calm. So, that was their plan. They intended to unleash an army of those things—those alien monsters—on the British. That, too, was the reason for the abductions. Abraham was searching for the right blood type to be able to control the beasts. Clearly he had intended to somehow synthesize it, or otherwise use the blood to develop a solution that could be used to immobilize the monsters once they had done their work. Without it, they wouldn't be able to stop them once they'd set them free. They would devastate the British and then, when they had exhausted the food supply of those tiny islands, they would turn their attention to the rest of the world.

  Abraham was right: Banks really didn't know what he was dealing with.

  Gabriel wished Donovan were there, hearing this. Clearly this was the business the commissioner was mixed up in, too. That's what had gotten them so worked up about the man known as Jerry Robertson, the British spy. In posing as a political activist he'd been able to get close to Banks and had probably been privy to things Banks would now rather he hadn't heard. They were trying to stop him getting word to London or otherwise interfering with their plans. In trying to locate the spy, Donovan wasn't working for the good of the nation, as Montague and Banks had so succinctly put it. Rather, he was unknowingly aiding and abetting them in the execution of their scheme. Gabriel knew that if Donovan were fully aware of the facts, he'd be the one handing the spy the holotube receiver.

  A preemptive attack on London would be all that was needed to incite a full-blown conflict with the British Empire. With weapons such as the alien beasts at their disposal, the senator and his friends had every reason to believe they'd be victorious. It would bring an end to the cold war, certainly, but it would also bring an end to the British. It would leave America dominant, the ultimate power on the world stage.

  Banks was playing a dangerous game. Gabriel knew firsthand how dangerous just one of those creatures could be. Unleashing an army of thousands of them on the world would amount to Armageddon, whether Abraham had a few vials of solution or not. Even if they could work out how to control them, the loss of human life would be monumental. The British Isles would be reduced to a wasteland. The empire would crumble, and millions of people would be left dead. It wasn't so much a military strike as an attempted genocide, all for the glorification of one man and his power-hungry friends. Banks and his cronies had to be stopped. Gabriel had seen enough death for ten lifetimes. He couldn't allow these men to continue with their plans.

  Abraham was growing more and more agitated, and Banks was beginning to lose patience with the mechanical man. “Just one more day, Senator. One more day!” Abraham pleaded. “I understand that you're anxious for Goliath to be under way, but I really think it's for the best.”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Abraham,” Banks snapped, clearly close to the end of his tether. “I'm growing tired of your prattling. The decision has been made. Goliath is already being prepared for launch.”

  Abraham took a step back toward his workbench, fearful of the senator's tone. “I'll…Call it off or I'll set the raptors on you!”

  Banks's shrewd smile turned at once to a taut mask of fury. “Are you threatening me now, Abraham? Well that's a very stupid thing to do. I'm most disappointed. I had thought there would be a role for you in the new world order. But perhaps not. Perhaps your usefulness has already come to an end.”

  Abraham stared at the senator, wide-eyed, as if he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. He looked up, beckoning to the five raptors still clinging to the rafters above. “Kill him!” he screamed in desperation, pointing at the se
nator. “Kill him!”

  But the raptors did not respond, other than to flutter their wings nervously and hop from foot to foot, mewling like frustrated kittens. The senator laughed. “Don't you remember, Abraham? The raptors were keyed to obey me, too. That was one of my stipulations when I built you this place.”

  Abraham stared at the senator with barely concealed panic as Banks waved both of his arms above his head and shooed the raptors away. They started like a flock of birds at the sight of a predator, buzzing into the air with the groan of rotors and the flapping of wings. Within seconds they had chattered off through the hole in the roof, every single one of them disappearing into the night.

  Banks was still laughing, evidently pleased with himself.

  “Senator,” Abraham warned, his tone now resigned, serious, “you're going to destroy us all.”

  “Don't be so damned melodramatic, Abraham. I'll do no such thing. Those creatures will be no match for the might of the American military machine. Unlike the British we'll be prepared for them, we'll know what we're facing. The British will be caught by surprise, and once the creatures have consumed their capital our armed forces will move in. The creatures will be dealt with swiftly and efficiently, and we shall lay claim to the territory of our former masters.” Banks sounded as if he were giving a speech to the Senate. He clearly believed in this madness, in the inherent superiority of his people.

  “The creatures are impervious to anything the armed forces could throw at them!” Abraham stressed. “They simply cannot be harmed, not without the poison, without the solution. It weakens them, Senator, makes them susceptible to our weapons.”

  Banks was having none of it, however, and Gabriel could see from the look in Abraham's eyes that he knew what was coming next.

  The senator reached forward and grasped the squirming Abraham by the throat. All of Abraham's posturing, all of his confidence had gone along with the raptors, and now he gasped and begged for his life. The senator, however, showed him no mercy. Lifting Abraham from the floor, ignoring the ferocious scrabbling of his artificial limbs, Banks carried him toward the pit by his throat.

  The diminutive scientist was struggling for breath, trying to call out, to appeal to the senator to set him down, to show him mercy, but Banks had made up his mind, and a moment later he pitched the part-mechanical man over the side of the pit toward the waiting monster below.

  Abraham managed to catch hold of the lip of the pit with one arm, scrabbling frantically at the concrete, but within seconds the creature had buried a proboscis in his back and he was dragged down, screaming, toward the hungry mouths.

  Gabriel heard the creature shriek in pleasure at the unexpected treat and tried to block out the sounds of its multiple, dripping jaws as they found purchase in Abraham's remaining flesh, rending it from the brass and bones that now comprised his skeleton, lapping at the warm blood beneath.

  Abraham emitted one final, shrill cry before whatever served as his heart gave out and he sputtered and choked on his own spilled bodily fluids. The mechanical parts of his body continued to pop and jerk at the bottom of the pit as the monster drained the remains of his torso of blood.

  Banks stood back, dusting his hands, a grim expression on his face. He did not even look over at the three remaining captives chained to the wall, but promptly turned, strolled back toward Abraham's workbench, retrieved his hat, and left.

  Gabriel didn't even wait for the sound of the senator's car engine firing up before he began trying to extricate himself from the iron cuffs. They were roughly hewn, and the rusting edges bit painfully into his flesh as he tugged and wrenched, bashing them against the wall to attempt to shatter the latch.

  With Abraham and the raptors gone, the only thing he had to worry about—for the time being, at least—was the creature in the pit, and he'd hoped its two recent meals had been enough to sate it for a short while. But no matter how hard he fought against his bonds, he couldn't figure out how to break himself free.

  He tried getting the woman to reach over and snap the catch free, straining against the chain to get himself as close to her as possible, but Abraham had not been an unintelligent man and had evidently considered that possibility, spacing the chains just far enough apart so that the prisoners couldn't help each other to escape.

  Just as he was about to resign himself to the fact that he wasn't going anywhere, he heard the scuff of a booted foot by the doorway and looked up, panting with exertion. His first thought was that the senator had returned, his second that Donovan had finally arrived. But neither of these two eventualities was true.

  The man who stood in the doorway was perhaps the last person Gabriel had expected to see. He was lean and wiry, evident even beneath the wintry overcoat he was wearing. His hair was blond and well groomed, and he was handsome, around forty years of age. He was standing beneath the harsh electric light and staring in horror at the grisly scene before him, at the swinging corpse on the rope and the heaps of discarded bones: a rib cage, a femur, a handful of skulls.

  “My God…” he said, and his British accent confirmed what Gabriel had already suspected. He looked a little older than he had in the photographs Donovan had shown him, but he was, without doubt, the missing British spy.

  “You're Jerry Robertson,” Gabriel called out to him, and the man looked up, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. When he saw the three of them straining against the iron cuffs—Gabriel, the woman, and the boy—he started over toward them. He stopped short when he caught sight of the tendrils creeping slyly around the lip of the inspection pit.

  “That's their weapon,” Gabriel said. “The weapon they're planning to unleash on London.”

  The spy stepped closer, staring down into the hole in the ground. His eyes widened at the sight of the writhing beast, and it lashed out at him, three of its proboscises snapping out, their slavering jaws gnashing at the air.

  “What is it?” the spy asked, incredulous. Gabriel could see he was an intelligent man, but he was struggling to come to terms with what he was seeing. “Some sort of sea creature? The result of a eugenics program?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “No. It's one of a race of creatures that live in a dimensional space that exists alongside our own. There are thousands of them, all around us, all of the time, but we cannot see them, or interact with them, because they are spatially out of phase with us.” He sighed, trying to figure out how to explain it to this man in a way that didn't make him sound utterly crazy. “Look, I know it's hard to swallow, but the evidence is there, right before your eyes. The people who did this are planning to set thousands of these things free over London. It'll be a massacre. They're almost impossible to stop.”

  Robertson was still staring at the thing in the pit. “Who are you?” he said.

  “I'm…my name is Gabriel Cross,” Gabriel responded, determinedly. “You might know me better as the Ghost.”

  Robertson turned to look at him. “From the newspapers? The vigilante?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Yes. If you let me out of here I'll help you to stop them.”

  Robertson looked uneasy. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “You don't,” Gabriel said drily. “But I'd imagine the fact I've been chained up by the bad guys gives you an idea of where my allegiances lie.”

  Hesitantly, Robertson edged around the pit to stand before him. “With the British?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “No. I wouldn't go that far. But certainly not with Senator Banks. I don't believe in this war he's trying to start, and I won't allow him to unleash those things on the world. Not while I still have a breath in my body.”

  Robertson smiled. “All right. I'll let you out. But no funny business.”

  Gabriel laughed at the man's accent, his plum-in-the-mouth Britishness. “Free the others first,” he said, and Robertson nodded, setting about unlatching the woman's cuffs.

  “My name's not Robertson,” the spy said as he worked. “It's Rutherford. Peter Rutherford.” He turne
d to console the woman, who was now weeping openly with relief. She was barely responsive. “She's in shock. She's going to need help.”

  “She can find help,” Gabriel said, firmly. “Her and the boy. We have to stop that weapon leaving for London.”

  Robertson—or rather Rutherford, Gabriel corrected himself—gave a brisk nod of agreement and started work on the boy's cuffs. A moment later he had popped the child free, and he put a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Take this woman and find a police officer,” he said. “Get away from here as quickly as possible. You'll be able to find help at the fairground. Tell them everything.”

  The boy looked terrified and didn't say a word, but he reached out and took the woman's hand in his own. She allowed herself to be led quickly toward the door.

  Gabriel watched them go while Rutherford set about freeing his cuffs. “I promised I'd save her,” he said. “I promised to get her out of here alive.”

  “And you did,” Rutherford replied, dropping the cuffs to the floor with a clang.

  Gabriel rubbed at his sore wrists. “No, I didn't. You did.” He met the other man's gaze. “That was a timely arrival.”

  Rutherford smiled. “I followed Banks here. I've been trying to work out where they'd housed the airship. I've been piecing together their plans for weeks.”

  Gabriel nodded. “I know, I saw the wall at your apartment before it was burned to the ground.”

  “Montague,” Rutherford replied, and he almost spat the name of the commissioner in distaste. “I'm sure he's responsible for that.”

  “It seems he has a lot to answer for,” said Gabriel. He liked the British man, and he could tell from the haunted look in Rutherford's eyes—the same look he saw in the mirror when he cared to bother with it—that the man knew pain and suffering. Gabriel guessed he'd been a soldier too, during the war, like so many men of their generation, and like Gabriel he would stop at nothing to prevent it from happening all over again.