Conflagration

by Mick Farren

  Windermere nodded. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Raphael agreed. “The rest of us will consult, but Major Weaver will command the expedition.”

  Steuben nodded. “However you want to work it.” He grinned at Argo. “Don’t you worry, Major. We’ll all be taking real good care of you.”

  CORDELIA

  “Tell me more about this supposed breeding program. The one you mentioned in the car and then again on the barge while we were coming here.”

  Cordelia had been relieved to learn that nothing was expected of her, until the others showed up, and her only responsibility was to wait in comparative comfort with Sera Falconetti and Harriet Lime. This afforded her time to bring herself up to speed with all the ramifications of the game being played in Europe and especially the moves that Jeakqual-Ahrach appeared to be making in the Frankish territories. It also offered a pause in which she could make a further assessment of both Lime and Sera. The word was that the others would arrive sometime in the night, definitely before the dawn. When they did, matters could hardly avoid going into a higher gear, and the more she knew of those who would be around her, the better armed she felt. Harriet Lime seemed happy to confirm Cordelia’s initial impression, from all the way back to Deerpark, that the woman liked to listen to herself talk and also show off how much she knew. Cordelia had gleaned all the distressing details that she had needed to hear about the murder of Jack Kennedy, and now she wanted to follow up on the remark that Sera had made, back on the water, just before Jesamine had contacted her.

  “It’s not all that ‘supposed.’ There’s quite a solid body of information. The reports were coming in well before Hassan invaded the Americas. Just a piece here and another piece there, you understand?”

  Cordelia nodded. “I understand.”

  “Just enough so those in charge back then recognized there was a puzzle. The young women of a entire Mamaluke village would be rounded up and marched away to an unknown destination. Then the same thing would happen in Hispania. A squad of Zhaithan would turn up at an infantry barracks and remove a number of healthy young men. That, too, would be repeated all over the Empire. The evidence started to mount.”

  At that point, Sera chipped in. “It was perhaps about a year or so ago that the stories changed. Rumors started to circulate about an ultra-secret facility on one of the Hellenic islands. Initially it was described as a prison, where maybe a hundred or more young women were confined. There was talk of strange fires in the night, and bodies floating in the sea, and of even stranger children.”

  Which, in turn, spurred Lime on to even more revelations. “Other odd characters were supposedly coming in from the East, seemingly as consultants, and also Teutons from the Knights of the Rhine. A volunteer actually went inside the place, but she only managed to get one incomplete message out before she was either turned or tortured. It was cryptic stuff: strange things growing in chemical vats. All over, the Zhaithan were suddenly very interested in the work that Dr. Mengele had done on the subject of twins, and even the experiments of the insane Moreau.”

  Cordelia frowned. She had heard of Moreau and his experiments. “I thought he had died years ago.”

  “He did, but the Zhaithan went to a lot of trouble to gain possession of his notes and records.”

  Cordelia did not quite understand. “I thought that Moreau did all his work on animals. Twisting their genetic makeup, making them more dexterous, giving them the power of speech and improved, long-term memory.”

  Sera nodded. “Moreau’s aim was to create a subhuman superspecies that could take the place of human industrial workers.”

  “And what would happen to the human workers?”

  Sera shrugged. “Moreau didn’t seem to worry much about them.”

  Cordelia continued to question the Moreau connection. “But what would the Zhaithan want with a subhuman superspecies? The Empire has an exhaustible pool of slave labor.”

  “The thinking was that, if Moreau was could improve on animals, maybe his techniques could be used to somehow enhance human beings.”

  Lime added, “The Zhaithan wanted a superhuman species. Or, at least, a couple of superhumans they could bend to their will.”

  “You’re saying that the White Twins are the product of Zhaithan genetic experiments and magick breeding?”

  “That hasn’t been discussed in Albany?”

  “Of course, but only as wild speculation.”

  “After all the stories about a possible breeding program, a lot of people, especially adepts, Morgana operatives, and others, started to dream about the White Twins. The connection begged to be made.”

  Cordelia was not about to reveal that she was one of the “others” who had dreamed of the White Twins, or had a personal windwalking visitation from them, with Jeakqual-Ahrach acting like their damned mother. As she remembered the incident on the stern of the Ragnar, a brief image of the Twins appeared in her mind’s eye. She would have considered it merely a memory, except that the White Twins were looking at Harriet Lime, and not at Cordelia, and directing their customary hostility at her. A thought suddenly struck Cordelia. “It would seem stupidly overconfident to create beings who were superior to you, without any real way of knowing how to control them. Isn’t that what’s known as hubris?”

  Both Sera and Lime looked at Cordelia in surprise. The idea had clearly never occurred to them. Sera nodded. “She has a point.”

  Lime just looked uncomfortable and Cordelia wasn’t sure why.

  JESAMINE

  Jesamine was not ashamed to admit she was frightened. It might be ignorance and superstition, but she did not care, and, as the Black Airship lifted from the ground, she had gripped the arms of her seat so tightly she feared she might bend the frame. When Cordelia had flown on the NU98, it had crashed on her companion’s very first voyage. Of course, Jesamine had seen both airships and biplanes, either overhead or buzzing around, landing and taking off, but they were manned by fully fledged airmen who, by definition, had to be a little crazy, and even they mainly flew in daylight. Jesamine’s first flight would be by night, and she was totally convinced that she was going to die. The seats in the long narrow gondola were arranged in pairs, and she found herself assigned next to Madden, who, now in his kit and fully armed, looked like a destructive force all by himself. He held a shotgun upright between his knees, and his broad military belt supported a sheathed, saw-edged Jones knife, and a small cache of Mills’ bombs. A heavy revolver hung in a shoulder holster, while a bandolier of blue and copper shotgun shells were draped across his chest. The hilt of a second, smaller knife protruded from the top of one of his high hunter’s boots, and his face was daubed with bootblack to stop his pale skin reflecting moonlight or skyshine. The pilot had told them that the sky would overcast, but Madden was taking no chances.

  The pilot had also said that the cloud cover would help them drift across the Mosul defenses on the Frankish coast without incident. Although the Mosul had few actual antiaircraft units, some of their shore batteries could be elevated to shoot at anything in the air, and some even came equipped with searchlights that, if they fixed on the dirigible, could make it a sitting duck. It was important they cross the coast with the engines cut, running silent and invisible. To be even safer, a plan had been evolved whereby the airships would, after taking off from the base at Shoreham, first fly west and slightly north, staying over the English countryside. The first advantage of such a move was that it would confuse any possible Mosul agents who might be keeping a watch on the airfield. It would appear that their destination was somewhere in England. Once they had reached a suitable altitude, they would find a prevailing wind that would carry them back south and west. The crew would be using the airship’s engines only to adjust course, and, according to the pilot’s preflight briefing, they would drift over the Frankish coastline, unseen and undetected. It had all sounded incredibly complicated to Jesamine, but the airman claimed to have done the same thing any number of times b
efore, and impressed on their passengers that they had no need to worry.

  For Jesamine that was easier said than done, and when, after sunset, the Black Airship had been rolled out of its hangar, and freed from all but its fore and aft restraints by a large NAF ground crew, she had watched with something close to horror. Then they had all been expected to board the monster, and only massive pride stopped her from turning and running in panic, and she was extremely envious of de Wynter, and the boy called Spinrad, who were able to stay behind. Jesamine did not consider herself a coward, and she felt that, on numerous occasions, she had more than proved her courage. She was not afraid to face danger, and even the unknowns of the Other Place did not terrorize her like the thought of being helpless over thousands of feet of empty air, with nothing but a few bags of helium to hold her up. She knew she was probably being irrational, and revealing that, deep down, she was nothing more than a primitive peasant from the deserts of North Africa, but there was not a damned thing she could do about it.

  She had started to feel a little foolish when the takeoff had not proved to be as traumatic as she had expected. The creakings and other noises from the airframe when the dirigible had been loosed from its moorings had not made her comfortable, and noise and vibration when the engines started had been worryingly ominous, but, after that, the craft had risen so effortlessly that Jesamine had assumed they were still on the ground. Without turning her head, and doing her utmost to keep a dry rasp of desperation out of her voice, she had asked Madden what the problem was. “I mean, how long does it take them to get this damned thing started?”

  Madden allowed himself a slight smile. “Started, Major? We’ve been started for a good few minutes now. We gotta be a few thousand feet in the air.”

  Jesamine swallowed hard. “We’re in the air?”

  “Flying like a big fat blackbird.”

  “Oh.”

  “First time you ever did this?”

  Jesamine nodded, knowing she had already given herself away. “Yes, first time.”

  “Me, too.”

  “What?”

  “Never been in one of these contraptions before. Us Rangers usually walk where we’re going.”

  He winked. “Gotta say, though, the whole thing does seem a bit unnatural.” Madden patted the Jones knife and the grenades on his belt. “Even brought all my lucky charms along.”

  Jesamine was confused. “But how do you know so much about it.”

  Madden pointed to the tiny plastic window on his other side. “It’s all going on out there. You can see the lights of tiny towns and everything. You want to change places with me and take a look?”

  Jesamine quickly declined. “Not right now.”

  Madden had reassured her sufficiently that she felt it was safe to turn her head. She looked around the interior of the Black Airship’s gondola to see if anyone else was suffering from maiden-flight jitters. Argo certainly was not. He was up beside the pilot and, along with Windermere, was poring over a map, the three men standing as dark silhouettes against the glow of the ship’s instruments. Argo seemed to be taking his new leadership duties very seriously, and Jesamine had no problem with that. She had no desire to lead a team of Rangers on a mission into enemy territory. Cordelia might have taken exception, perhaps suggesting that the Rangers had only selected Argo to be their officer because he was a boy, and it was a boy’s world, but Jesamine saw the sense in the decision. Argo had marched with these men, and they knew him. He was the only logical choice. She assumed that Raphael felt the same, although there was, at times, no telling what resentments the Hispanian might harbor. The other Rangers, who were also on their first flight, sat quietly with the infinite patience of really dangerous men. They were all loaded down with their personal weaponry, although none were quite as lethally equipped as Madden. She was familiar with the faces of four of them. They were the ones who, along with Argo and Yancey Slide, had pulled her, Jesamine, and Raphael out of the Zhaithan headquarters on the Potomac in the nick of time, and away from the clutches of Jeakqual-Ahrach. The other two were strangers named Graham and Peak, replacements who had transferred in from another unit after Newbury Vale.

  In the front of the gondola, Argo, Windermere, and the pilot had concluded their business. The pilot raised his voice slightly to inform everyone else of their progress. “You’ll all be pleased to hear that we now have a favorable wind, and in about a minute we’ll be making a turn to get ourselves on our proper heading. After that, I’ll be cutting the engines, and letting the wind carry us. By our best calculations, we should reach the Frankish coast in approximately twenty minutes.”

  The silence after the engines shut down was both overwhelming and eerie, and Steuben clearly felt the need to fill it with some kind of remark. “This fucking mission is already one to tell your grandchildren about, and we haven’t even made the target yet.”

  Madden sighed. “This is how the next generation will go to war.”

  Graham looked round dourly. He nursed a telescope-sight long rifle, which denoted him as the marksman of the team. “It beats marching, don’t it?”

  Penhaligon frowned. “You may have to get back to me on that.”

  Cartwright nodded in agreement. “That’s right. We ain’t there yet.”

  Madden realized that this talk was hardly having a positive effect on Jesamine, and spoke quickly to distract her. “You really ought to take a look outside, Major.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’ll slide out and you can change seats with me.”

  Madden moved, but Jesamine hesitated, and he laughed. “The whole bag of tricks isn’t going to tip over if you stand up. It isn’t a row boat.”

  She managed a smile. “Right.”

  The exchange was made and Jesamine peered cautiously through the porthole. It was only seven or eight inches across, but what she saw beyond it took her breath away. They were above the clouds and, that high, the moon shone bright and pure white from a clear sky, illuminating a cloudscape of unparalleled majesty. Jesamine realized that only a handful of humanity had ever seen what she was now seeing, and, as she stared at the rolling vistas, like insubstantial mountains, or towering vaporous battlements, she imagined what it must look like from the outside, as the great black cigar-shape of the dirigible drifted silently among the clouds. She found that her attitude to flying had radically changed. She continued to stare and imagine until the pilot’s voice broke in on her.

  “This is the warning, people. Enemy coast ahead.”

  RAPHAEL

  After so much quiet, the Black Airship was suddenly alive with frantic activity. Seats were folded and stowed, and, on the order of the pilot, and under the direction of the airship’s gunner, two wide sections of interior wall in the side of the gondola were slid back. The night air swirled in, and they saw that they were low over the ruins of Paris. The gunner hooked a lightweight .50 caliber to a mount beside what had now become an open door. The Black Airship was not a fighting vessel, but it carried enough firepower to deter marauders on the ground. The pilot was at the helm, calling off the altitude as they dropped into the city.

  “Two hundred feet, dead slow, and coming in on the LZ.”

  From the air, it was easy to see how, years ago, the Mosul had hammered at Paris with their giant, long-range gun until there was next to nothing left of the city. The shapes of ugly shell craters were still visible. The blackened relics of once proud landmarks still reared as reminders of previous glory, surrounded by the heat-twisted frames, and skeletal remains, of dead and gutted buildings. The airship passed the misshapen supports of what had once been a stately dome, and then crossed the pitted expanse of a wide thoroughfare that was now choked with rank undergrowth. Peering into the gloom as the gunner and the Rangers prepared for the drop-off, Raphael could see big areas of black, featureless darkness that he was at a loss to explain. Then he realized that he was looking at water. The Mosul bombardment had smashed the banks of the River Seine, drowning areas of
the city, and, in the long term, turning them into tracts of fetid swamp.

  “One hundred and fifty feet, dead slow, and the LZ coming up.”

  It would have been easy to dismiss Paris as a dead city, a place of devastation and destruction, but there was evidence of humanity reestablishing itself. Burning fires showed themselves as multiple orange points of light under a pall of dirty smoke, and some sections even had crude electric lighting. Clearly a lot of outlaw ingenuity went into the survival of this vagabond community of rebels, criminals, and fugitives, but Raphael was still at a loss to understand how so much crime and dissent could persist right under the noses of the Mosul. He found it hard to buy Windermere’s explanation that it was a combination of corruption, and a reluctance to take the kind of casualties involved in a full-scale clearing of the ruins. Okay, so the Mosul would have to fight their way into the very sewers, and from cellar to cellar, but he had never known the Mosul unwilling to waste the lives of the rank and file. As the airship continued its descent, he even saw small figures in the shadows. People looking up, grabbing hold of each other, and pointing. He could now see why the gunners first move was to mount the .50 caliber for full operation. In a city of thieves, someone might have the idea of taking the Black Airship for themselves.

  “One hundred feet, and engines reversing. Ready yourselves for the drop.”

  Under the direction of the gunner, the Rangers deployed a folding winch and crane, and attached their packs to the hook. These would go down first, before the passengers themselves. With the crane in place, they opened up a section of the gondola’s floor, lifted out the rope climbing net that was stored there, and rolled it to the door. The plan was that the airship should finally check its descent fifteen or twenty feet from the ground. The net would be dropped and the Rangers would climb down, followed by Argo, Jesamine, Raphael, and Windermere. This was the most dangerous part of the whole trip. The airship could all too easily be moved by any shifting ground-eddy, and the climbers on the net bounced around, clinging on for dear life. The worst case scenario was a sudden downdraft that could first crush those on the ropes and then wreck the ship itself. Raphael was not, however, unduly worried. With the possible exception of Windermere, they were all young and healthy, and even Windermere was taking his chances.