“Romulus!”
“I was compelled.”
Analytical mechanisms implanted in my brain clacked defense scenarios while I forced my flesh-and-blood half to stave off blind panic. With mechanical strength, I ripped my restraints loose and climbed the pipes and ventilation ducts to the cabin’s aft bulkhead, which was effectively now its ceiling. I grabbed the reinforced hatch and forced it open to access the air-lock, arguably the strongest part of the vessel.
“Get the constable, brother!”
Without a word Plio became elastic, stretching out of his clothes and restraining belts like red putty. He reformed naked beside Gilhooley—having no time for niceties or modesty—and began untangling her from her station.
With a final lurch, we dropped below the bauble periphery at last, but we were still falling freely. My augmented hearing picked up the hiss of pressurized air venting.
The hull had breached.
“Plio, on me! Now!”
He heaved himself upward, half his morphic body anchoring around my outstretched arm, the other half lifting Gilhooley. I hauled them both into the air-lock and sealed the hatch beneath us.
Gilhooley’s annunciator chimed. “—teen! Two-Nineteen! Glencolumbkille here. We’ve got you on the beam, Liza. Ambulances are at the ready—”
The rest was a blur of rapid-fire cause and effect: the final Engine collapsing, hull and flight deck tearing away from the air-lock in the furious blast of the wind. Emergency lift-sails deploying, slowing our descent just enough to prevent our splattering on Gamhanrhide’s surface.
“Hang on, brother!” I shouted, with Gilhooley cradled firmly between us.
We hit the ground in a fast tumble and rolled to a stop, plowing a soggy gouge through a bean field in the new and unearthly World about us.
Silence.
Gilhooley’s eyelids forced open, a trail of blood bubbling at her lips. “Please maintain a constant velocity,” she sputtered, “beyond the warning banners....”
She was a fighter, with an admirable gallows wit despite her pain. I liked that.
Medical aid was seen to once the authorities and ambulance had arrived. Inquiries, debriefings, and analyses quickly ensued, occupying every moment of our ride into town, all focused on what in blazes had happened inside the buckler field.
Glencolumbkille-in-the-Spheres was the only city of any size to speak of on Gamhanrhide, built on and into the eastern slope of the Kilclooney Highlands. The Home Office was a two-story block of native graystone in the heart of the Government District, commanding an impressive view of the city and multi-hued woodlands below, with the crescents of Boru and its moons up above.
Executive Chief Constable Neville Carmody and his staff of tuppence rats greeted us with the static I’ve come to expect whenever Special Branch sticks its collective nose into local affairs. I had to point out that Kavita Patel was in service to Her Eternal Majesty Gloriana the Everlasting, Empress-Queen of Great Albion and the Totality of Its Aetheric Possessions, and not part of Gamhanrhide’s population. That made her my affair.
Hindering our investigation, of course, was the buckler event, which had proved to be much more widespread than first surmised. Reports were coming in via ansible from settlements all over Gamhanrhide. As nearly as could be ascertained, the aetheric forces that comprised the buckler field had surged beyond measure and decreased again just as rapidly, as if a colossal switch had been thrown. Vessels from every corner of the Aspect had been caught in-transit. My companions and I had been luckier than most. The bulk freighter Princess Maud—a crew of thirty and 365,000 tons of grain, stripped down to their base elements, trapped forever in orbital Hell. All in all, one hundred and twenty-six souls had perished. The search for Kavita Patel became little more than an inconvenience.
“The female is not here,” said Deputy Kuhl g’Gompta, an indentured native Gamhanid taurg. A hulking blue-and-green reptile with a slicked-back crest of feathers and razor-filled mouth; quick-tempered and mean as sin, as were the bulk of his race, but good to have on your side in a fight, or so I was told.
I shook my head. “There’s no certainty of that, Deputy.”
“Where is she, then?”
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to discern,” said Plio, sporting a new suit of clothes and none the worse for wear. “Perhaps if you were to focus that displeasure on the matter at hand instead of sparring with us, Special Agent Caul and I wouldn’t need to be here at all.”
“Enough! Prepare to be eaten.”
“And if you ever threaten to eat anyone again,” said Chief Carmody, “I’ll personally hoist you back to Albion in chains.” He was a seasoned veteran of the Second Umbran War; Acadia born, with a deep scar where Proletariat weaponry had cut to the bone.
Alongside him was the Most Reverend Brogan Thackerley, the Archbishop of Gamhanrhide and chief representative of the Earther Brethren—a rigid glacier of a man in an unadorned hat and stiff black frock.
G’Gompta stood there like a massive slab of scaly muscle, then muttered under his breath and retreated to a neutral corner.
Kavita Patel’s flivver was parked in an examination bay illuminated in bright electricks, ringed by forensic automata. Thaumic light coruscated over the surface of the vehicle while its interior was probed with x-ray and alchemic glass.
Plio joined me at the watch commander’s station. Upon the main wall hung a map of Gamhanrhide’s surface (which the locals had come to call “Harvest Home”), overlaid with a grid of the ansible network and Kavita’s itinerary. Her confirmed stops were marked with red pins, only four out of her planned dozen stops: Fortingall, Watling, Crannog Green (where her flivver had been found), and Maeve. The next closest was in Ogham’s Wood, but she’d never arrived.
I looked from the map to the flivver and back. Kavita’s final journal entry wouldn’t stop vexing me. Lord of the Worlds Above, it’s beautiful, she’d written, in a hand surprisingly bold. What was beautiful?
“What do you make of this, brother?” I asked. “Her route couldn’t have been any more random if she’d tried.”
“Indeed. Not the regimented approach one would expect from an engineer.” Plio’s race had a natural affinity with the recognition of patterns, a handy talent for shape-shifters. “Perhaps ‘random’ isn’t the correct word, Romulus. Try ‘spontaneous’.”
“As in...?”
“Consider what we know thus far.” He counted off points one finger at a time, sprouting additional digits as needed. “Kavita was born in IndiraProvince, the second most densely mechanized conurbation on Albion. At the age of ten her family immigrates to Whitehall, the most mechanized. She’s never seen an environment as lush as Gamhanrhide, never been anywhere that was not irreparably blackened by industrial waste. She gads about the Aspect the moment she arrives—one day here, two days there....”
Realization hit me like a steel-toed boot to the head. “She was sightseeing.” I jumped into the examination bay. “Forget the map, people. Our girl could have gone anywhere, red pins or not.”
“That doesn’t follow,” said Carmody. He pointed from various lenses and phosphor screens to the wall map. “She couldn’t have travelled any further than Crannog. Her route was confirmed site by site in the fliv’s hodometron.”
“Instrumentation can be compromised, Chief,” said Plio.
Eliza Gilhooley studied the map, bandaged and bruised from our ordeal aboard the Cloudshaker but still alert. “Who would have the means to accomplish that?” she asked. “The Brethren aren’t rightly adept at such things. No offense, Archbishop.”
Thackerley nodded, though the effort seemed profoundly foreign to him. “Wisdom does not rebuke honest inquiry, child. Indeed, Agent Caul, whom amongst the faithful could possess such knowledge or skill?”
I had no answer for that, none at least that fit the parameters of a moon full of technological ascetics. I climbed into the flivver, an Empire Steamer with storage boxes strapped in back.
“She
met a fine young lad on August Eve.” G’Gompta again, sliding his tongue over his teeth. “Likely servicing her tasty quim right now. Haw!”
Gilhooley glared at him. “Stick a sock in it, Kuhl.”
Plio glanced at me through the flivver’s windscreen. “With a fine young lad? Not bloody likely.”
Kavita’s Sapphic inclinations notwithstanding, I kept to the matter at hand. Gilhooley’s prior claim that there was no evidence of a struggle appeared to be true. I could find no sign of foul play, my eyes sweeping from one end of the magneto-electrick spectrum to the other, until I spied miscellaneous particulates beneath the dash. I focused my variable-loupe lenses into finer magnification and beheld botanical fibers and loose grains of soil. The constables’ analytical mechanisms had already concluded that none of the particles were remarkable. I looked back at the young fellow manning Deep Augury. “Break this down for me, son. What am I looking at?”
A kinetoscopic rendering of the plant fibers appeared in one of the phosphor screens. In flickering detail, it expanded to reveal tissues of unearthly origin, each with accompanying text in a variety of languages, human and otherwise.
“Tang’hng k’gud’ra,” the constable said in the guttural croaks and hiccups that Gamhanids referred to as speech. “Still fresh, these. The essential oils have not yet begun to degrade.”
“And for those of us who don’t speak Taurg?” I asked.
Plio raised a red finger. “I speak Taurg.”
“Great thundering gear-trains, boy.” Carmody ushered the constable aside and took control of the kinetoscope. Animation multiplied the tissues at highly accelerated speed. Tinted blue-green vines lanced and coiled across the screen, violet blossoms bursting opening at the end of each quickened stem.
“Once again, people,” I snapped. “I’m looking at what?”
“Twilight-fire,” grumbled Deputy g’Gompta. The mature plant spun slowly with the illusion of movement in the eldritch display, flowers bunched in clusters of deep luminescent purple radiating from cores of bright red.
“Twilight what?”
Gilhooley stepped between us. “The flowers, Agent Caul. They’re twilight-fire.”
“Tis a resinous vine native to Gamhanrhide.” Archbishop Thackerley again. “They spring up most everywhere this time of year. The tenant farmers find them quite the nuisance.”
“The early expeditionists weren’t too thorough when they cleared this Aspect for settlement,” agreed Carmody. “The orb’s covered in the dratted things. Hardly warrant a second glance at all.”
“You’re only saying that because you see them everyday.” I commandeered the machine and projected the floral display to every screen, scrying-lens, and exhibition device in the laboratory. The room was suddenly alive with twilight-fire, enveloping the space in bright constellations of purple and red. “What if you’d never seen them before?”
And suddenly Kavita’s words made an intuitive sense.
Lord of the Worlds Above, it’s beautiful.
The archbishop raised a bushy brow. “Why were none found in storage if the girl was collecting specimens?”
“Blessed be. She wasn’t collecting specimens,” Gilhooley answered.
“You’ve got something to say, Constable?” asked Carmody.
“Just that I like the agent’s sensibilities. Sir.”
“As do I.” Thackerley narrowed his eyes. “Within reason.”
I looked up at the big map of Harvest Home.
Plio leaned in. “You’re thinking again, aren’t you?”
“Humor me.”
“I always do.”
“Neville,” I said to the Chief. “I’d like a vehicle and the names of the officers you have in the field, please. Let them know my partner and I are coming.”
“Why?”
“We’re going sightseeing.”
* * *
Chapter 3
O Brave New World, That Has Such Bastards In’t
Chief Carmody, after several creative bouts of expletives and finger gestures, finally gave us his personal gyrodyne, a Peerless two-seat Speedtwin. We rose above Glencolumbkille on the pillar of dust kicked up by our rotors and circled the mountains in an ever-widening spiral. Our course would take us south and east through the Highlands, then north and west to the shore of the GreatOssianSea and south again along the River Callanish. Since I was fabricating this plan from one moment to the next, Ogham’s Wood was as good a place as any to begin.
“I’m still humoring you,” said Plio.
“I appreciate that.”
“Aside from the missing woman, we’re looking for...?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll know when I see it.”
“This is that ‘gut’ thing again.”
“Afraid so, brother.”
“Ah. The cognitive power of human entrails. How is your headache?”
“Firmly entrenched between dull throb and Merciful Engines of Heaven there’s an ice pick in my eye, thanks for asking.”
Plio nodded. “I took the liberty of testing the air this morning on your behalf. The allergen-count is off the rails. You’re not acclimating as well as the doctors had anticipated.”
“Tell me about it. When we get home, somebody at the Medic-Elect’s office is going to pop his clogs.”
Despite the assurances of the Corps’ Most Learned and Distinguished Physicians, Plio and I both knew that I was still harboring aftereffects of the rust. The mechanical pathogen inflicted upon me by the mad alchemist Dr. Malign had taken a heavy toll, attacking the grafts and boundaries where my flesh and metallic augmentations joined together. Fighting the rust had so taxed my natural defenses that I’d since become vulnerable to the most common of secondary infections and allergies, maladies that able-bodied persons shrugged off with ease. And yet here I sat, returned to duty before I was ready and, worse still, fussed over by my partner like a mother hen.
I caught Plio staring at the immensity of forest and cropland below, the panorama broken only by steep hills and chains of lochs; native basilisks and other flying reptiles took to the sky as we passed, sunlight glinting off iridescent wings. The Symb’ral race had even less experience with this type of environment than I, having come from an Aspect that was covered in swamps and steaming shallow seas.
Harvester mechanisms the size of houses criss-crossed the farms beneath us like great robotic armies. Every year the Instrumentality annexed more and more land from the Gamhanids, who, along with their great lizardy beasts of the field, had been nomadic herdsmen for untold millennia. Virtually all crop automation on this moon was now tended by disenfranchised taurgs and their clockwork overseers in a myriad of ever-deepening tunnels, while the Brethren of the Abiding Earth were granted use of select tracts on the surface.
We arrived in Ogham’s Wood and examined the ansible site, not finding what I’d hoped. Back again to Rannoch Mills and the Marches, then southeast following the forest roads to Senorach and Henge. It was the end of our first full day on Gamhanrhide, with false-night rapidly approaching—that period when the orb crept along its orbital rails into its companion Boru’s great shadow, eclipsing the Sun from view. Plio was reading from the memory-glass when he cocked an ear to the ansible speaker-horn and adjusted the volume.
“—until first light tomorrow. Repeating: by order of the Home Office in Glencolumbkille, a wyvern advisory has been issued to all provinces and municipalities bordering the River Callanish. All aerocraft are ordered to land or secure safe mooring effective immediately until first light tomorrow. Repeating: by order of—”
“A wyvern advisory?! What in Hell does that mean?”
Plio shrugged. “Here there be dragons?”
“This is bullshit. We’re not stopping.”
“I respectfully point out that we don’t know where we’re headed.”
“Special Branch has—”
“—the authority to supersede colonial laws, mandates, and customs. I’m aware. But consider, Romulus....”
“Perhaps, in the spirit of inter-departmental courtesy, it’s best we not alienate the locals any more than we already have.”
“They said ‘wyvern’, Plio. There’s a big difference between confronting giant flying reptiles and playing nice with the hayseeds.”
“Exactly. And in that regard, perhaps it’s best we defer to both and not ignore the ban.”
“Perhaps.” I exhaled loudly with a few choice interjections, then pulled back on the throttle and banked us into a descending turn.
“Where are we going?” Plio asked.
“I’m deferring to your illimitable logic before I seize up from exasperation.”
“Ah. Very good, then. Perhap—”
“Don’t push it, brother.”
We stopped at the river town of Dun Aenghus to wait out the flight advisory, setting down on a landing pad already filled with craft and moored airships. Gaslamps lit one by one as the luminous qualities of the Aspect’s native flora awakened, having long since adapted to frequent night and the shimmering aurora of Gamhanrhide’s buckler field.
We introduced ourselves to the local authorities with the intention of meeting their CO, one Chief Constable Marsallay Brome, but the constables-on-duty informed us that she’d been called to head off a possible situation, at a pub on the town’s main thoroughfare. I decided to seek her out, to use our forced downtime to glean anything, even if ancillary, that might aid our investigation. Plio opted not to join me, choosing instead to access the great analytical engine on Albion known as the Seeing Stone.
The night air carried the smells of wood-smoke rising from countless chimneys and the discordant hum of luminous motes the size of my thumb flitting about streetlamps and above the cold waters of the river. I kept thinking about the petals of twilight-fire we’d brought with us from Glencolumbkille. Kavita had touched petals just like them; she’d picked them, held them in her hands. Those flowers were the key. I just couldn’t recognize the lock.
Dun Aenghus after dark was full of farmhands and laborers from the granary docks intent upon getting drunk, rowdy, and rude. (Considering that most of them claimed to be ascetic renunciates, I was hard pressed to identify what exactly they’d renounced.) A public house named Hundred-Hand Harry’s sat at the end of its block on High Street. Shouts and laughter pealed through the windows as I crossed the cobbled lane, weaving between heavily laden wagons and men on the backs of exotic riding-beasts.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #142, Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2 Page 8