The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  * * *

  Alisha could not get comfortable with this, but she relayed the intelligence to Major Haskins and Professor Stone and, after a very short discussion—because really, what alternative was there?—they committed to do what little they could. ‘There comes a point where you can charge around all you like, but there’s nothing to be done about it. It’s the nature of war,’ said the major, shrewd though disconsolate. ‘We shall call it in and wait.’

  Alisha paced around. She had called herself a ‘spy’, but this had only been marginally true. She had been mainly involved as an agent of sabotage and assassination during her eventful time with Prussian military intelligence, but she wasn’t about to communicate that willy-nilly. The whole ‘blowing things up and doing people in’ milieu would only upset people. Thus, patience in the face of the enemy was not one of her fortes. She would much rather have been off putting silver rifle rounds through lycanthropic heads and putting enough gelignite in the cellars of the Red Queen’s castle to put the whole sorry bunch of them beyond the orbit of the moon. You knew where you were with gelignite; ideally, running away from it while the fuse burned down. All this not-blowing-things-up-or-shooting-people palaver, however, was wearing thin for her. ‘And what if we’re needed?’

  ‘They also serve,’ said the professor, ‘who only stand and wait. I’m afraid the major is right, Alisha. We can do more good relaying what we know and awaiting the call to action that will surely follow.’

  * * *

  The train reached its destination in the early hours. Everybody but Becky on the footplate and Horst, who went to assist her, were sleeping as they approached an unassuming little conglomeration of clapboard buildings in the middle of a broad river valley, situated by a broad and shallow river that ran over a rocky bed. There were no curious onlookers, and the only greeting they received was from an official at the wooden box of a station, who wandered out in his nightshirt, made a note of the locomotive’s number, was singularly uninterested to see that one of the crew was a woman, and told them to put the train ‘over there’ while indicating a field into which ran five sidings, all overgrown. It was clear that the settlement must have seen a lot of rail traffic at some time to make such a facility necessary, and now it was equally clear that those days were long since gone.

  His duty discharged, the stationmaster turned his back on them and shuffled back across rough boards in slippered feet to return to his rest. The impression received was that he got a lot of that.

  The train’s stopping and starting, and its slow entry onto one of the sidings accompanied by the unavoidable clanks and bangs of a train manoeuvring without benefit of somebody in the guard’s van helping with the brakes awoke some aboard, and they woke the others. By the time the train was fully off the through line and the points closed behind it, Miss Montgomery and the rest of her party were up, dressed, and ready to work.

  Horst, who had previously travelled up and down the train by corridor where possible and across rooves where it was not, was still vague about the nature of Miss Montgomery’s circus, beyond the fact that there was sufficient machinery involved for them to include a dedicated mechanic among their number and a small workshop in the guard’s van. Nor had the subject really had a chance to come up in conversation, what with all the chat about Forces of Darkness and the End of Civilisation having taken up so much time.

  Now he had the luxury of jumping down from the locomotive and walking back to take in the hoardings mounted on the sides of the two mysterious freight carriages.

  MISS VIRGINIA MONTGOMERY’S

  FLYING CIRCUS

  … he read there. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, my.’

  The troupe had lost almost eight hours with their unexpected layover at the forgotten mine workings, and were eager to make up time. The hoardings were taken down, Horst good-naturedly lending a hand where he was able and permitted in an effort to recompense them for the inconvenience, revealing one car to be bearing three entomopter fuselages in cargo frames and its neighbour one larger fuselage, several crates of spares, and a substantial fuel reservoir.

  Horst had never seen an entomopter close to, and had to be shooed away from them as a hand-cranked crane mounted at the end of the car bearing three close by its neighbour was brought into play. Here, at least, his help was welcomed, and he enthusiastically wound the first of the aircraft up, across, and thence down onto the loading track that ran alongside the spur.

  As the machine’s carrying frame was unlocked and removed, Becky joined Horst. He had seen photographs and drawings of the small, agile aircraft, usually illustrating exciting tales of firm-chinned pilots who flew their dragonfly-like steeds into tricky situations on a weekly basis. Seeing one close up—all rivets and sheet steel and linkages—was so much more … mechanical. ‘I thought they had bigger wings than that,’ he said, trying to make an intelligent comment.

  Becky laughed, indicating that it wasn’t so intelligent after all. ‘Those are just the wing stems. The wings are dismounted for travel. We have to put them on.’ She checked her wristwatch, a sturdy man’s model that she wore face turned inwards. ‘And you’ve got to do it properly. Don’t want to lose one in flight.’ She looked seriously at him. ‘That would be bad.’ And she smiled.

  As each entomopter was disembarked from the train and its frame removed, it was manually rolled out of the way on its landing gear so the next could follow. Each was painted differently, each customised to its pilot’s show persona. Horst attempted to match them to what he knew of the women with moderate success. He had a free start with Miss Virginia Montgomery’s aircraft—he had learned not to call her ‘Ginny’ already—as hers was the first off the train and the first he examined closely, so noting her name painted in flowing copperplate by the cockpit edge. Miss Mink Choi’s was easy; the world over, there is nothing more guaranteed to appeal to the common man than to accentuate the uncommon and the exotic. In that bucolic European setting where most had never even seen a face that wasn’t Caucasian, it was a sure bet that her Eastern roots would be played up to the hilt. Thus, her entomopter was as generically Oriental as could be managed, with Chinese dragons running along each side, crossed Japanese swords upon the rudder, and an exhortation in what, to Horst’s limited linguistic skills, looked to be Siamese running in a vertical column down the upper surface of the nose. Beneath each dragon was written in faux–Chinese style Striking Dragon.

  As he helped hold up a wing while it was slotted, locked, and bolted into position by Mink, he asked her, ‘Might I ask where you’re from, originally?’

  ‘New York,’ she said, not looking up from her work.

  ‘No, I more sort of meant your ancestry.’

  ‘Korea. Why the interest?’ She noticed his line of sight to the entomopter’s fuselage. ‘Oh, that. Ignore that. That’s just for the rubes.’

  Horst smiled. Rubes. ‘Haven’t heard that word for a while,’ he said, skipping over the period of that time when he’d been very dead even by undead standards. ‘I helped run a carnival for a while.’

  She looked up again. ‘It’s a pretty American word,’ she said. ‘Where was the carnival?’

  ‘England, but on the strength we had an…’ He paused while he considered how to explain that the ‘American’ from whom he’d learned the word was actually a demonic construct raised from the blood of Lucifer. It seemed like a lot of work and would likely cause whatever goodwill he was earning with Mink and her comrades to evaporate. He contented himself with saying, ‘an American,’ and left it at that.

  By a trifling coincidence, trifling due to the clear national majority within the women, the next machine he looked at was clearly an American’s aircraft, judging from the screaming bald eagles on either side, the red, the white, the blue, the stars, and the stripes that occupied every square inch of the fuselage. Beneath the eagles was the aircraft’s name rendered in urgent, forward-leaning capitals: Spirit of ’76. This had been the first aircraft Horst had seen unloaded, and he k
new it to be Miss Virginia Montgomery’s.

  The next machine also used an American theme, equally dramatic but more sober; on a field of blue skies, white clouds, and tan desert sands, the profile of an American Indian chief of indeterminate nation, arrayed in full headdress, looked forward on either side of the entomopter’s nose above the legend Queen of the Desert. The tail sported crossed six-shooters, and they reminded him of the Colt he’d seen Miss Daisy Hewlett firing with evident satisfaction into the face of a zombie on the night of their first acquaintance. She was, on reflection, almost the archetypal cowgirl: tall, rangy, with sandy blond hair and what he now took to be the verbal drawl he had read about in so many cheap Western novels he had read in his youth, much to the exasperation of his father and disdain of his brother. Perhaps, he mused, she really was an actual cowgirl. She certainly looked very at home in her jeans. He mused on this for some further moments until belatedly recalling that he was dead these days and really shouldn’t think along those sorts of lines anymore.

  He did not have such an easy time with the next entomopter he examined, however. This one was decorated with sparse harshly angular patterns of long lines in different colours against a white background. The only part of its paintwork that was at all figurative was a curious logotype painted on either side of the rudder: an image of a falling bomb of the modern type, cylindrical and finned. Riding it in its descent, however, with an expression of great determination, was another bomb, this time of the old spherical grenade form, much beloved of anarchists if one is to believe the cartoonists. This bomb was anthropomorphised to the extent of having stubby arms and legs, like a character from a comic strip, the former gripping the bomb with its little gloved hands, the latter straddling it. The anarchist bomb’s round eyes were squinted in concentration. The entomopter’s name was written at the usual location in a very modernistic, brutalist style: Buzzbomb.

  By a process of elimination, this must belong to the engagingly named Dutch woman, Dea Boom. He had already inquired as to why, of her four companions, Miss Virginia Montgomery only ever referred to Dea Boom by her surname. This, Becky informed him, was because the alternative made it sound as if Miss Virginia Montgomery was using an affectionate term usually associated with married couples, and Miss Virginia Montgomery did not care for such familiarity. When time was not pressing, she might refer to Dea Boom as ‘Miss Boom’, but time always seemed to be pressing.

  * * *

  Though Daisy might have fancied herself the ‘Queen of the Desert’, Becky was undeniably ‘Queen of the Entomopters’. No major process in their reassembly and preparation went without her close attention and, even when everything was in place, she still went over each with a clipboard in one hand and a stoic determination that there would be no mechanical failures on her watch written upon her countenance. She was also drinking a vast amount of black coffee, and Horst calculated that she must be running on nigh a full twenty-four hours of demanding activity without even a nap. His sole attempt to get her to rest ran onto the rocks immediately when she snapped, ‘We’re running late. No time for rest,’ and gulped down a large mug of glutinous coffee, one bright and feverish eye resting askance in his direction like that of a peevish wolverine that just wants you to take one step closer.

  Horst was wise enough not to take that step, but instead induced short, covert periods of rest upon her utilising the ancient and honoured technique of gossip. Specifically, he brokered his real interest in entomopters and his equally real ignorance of their finer points into opportunities for her to stop what she was doing and lecture him briefly.

  All the entomopters were, with one exception, surplus Senzan Royal Aeroforce CI-650 Giaguaro interceptors, long since superseded by the CI-880 Ghepardo.

  ‘The Eight-Eighty’s a nice bird,’ she confided, ‘but the Six-Fifty was no slouch in her day, either.’ Apparently the CI-650 had greater pretensions towards being a strike aircraft than its successor and allowed more of its weight towards payload. This turned out to be unnecessary as militarily it was more used in controlling its own national airspace, so the CI-880 was made faster. ‘That worked out well for us, though. We don’t just fly displays—there isn’t enough loose money floating around in this part of the world for that. We do a lot of general flying work, too. Pleasure jaunts, light cargo, surveying, crop-dusting, that sort of thing.’

  Horst looked at the proudly painted former war machines with raised eyebrows. ‘Crop-dusting?’

  ‘It pays the bills,’ Becky said a little shortly, so he changed the subject.

  ‘So three are Six-Fifties? What kind is that, then?’ He nodded at Spirit of ’76. It was not as lean a machine as its fellows, but sleek for all that, with fairings that seemed perhaps a little larger than they needed to be if only to project a sense of power. It was also the only one to have two seats, arranged one aft of the other.

  Becky shot the entomopter a cynical look, her lips slightly pursed. ‘More trouble than she’s worth. Yankee machine, J-55 Copperhead. Can’t get spares for her, so I spend half my waking hours bent over a lathe making ’em myself.’

  Horst nodded sympathetically. ‘Looks good, though.’

  Indeed it did, the artful exaggerations in the design making the entomopter look muscular and purposeful.

  ‘Flies like a ’bus,’ said Becky unsympathetically. ‘Lousy engine in her, underpowered. Put a Rolls-Royce Hyperion in her, like the USAAF eventually did after all their pilots told ’em she flew like a ’bus, and she’s a decent bird. Can’t afford one, though, so we’re left with the lowest-bidder piece of rubbish that she came with. Fly better if I put in a sewing-machine motor.’ She looked gloomily at it. ‘Or a piece of wound-up elastic. Anything.’

  ‘But … I don’t understand this. Isn’t Miss Montgomery the star of the show? Shouldn’t she have the best ’mopter?’

  Becky shook her head as she took up her spanner once more. ‘Nah. It’s a circus and she’s the ringmistress. She just has to look flash and stand out from the others. Don’t get me wrong—she’s a decent flyer. But she’s no barnstormer. She keeps this show on the road, and that is plenty, believe you me.’

  Horst had no experience of keeping a show on the road; he had avoided the bookkeeping end of things in the Cabal Bros. Carnival, leaving that in the capable hands of his terribly detail-orientated brother. Horst had been more than content to simply swan around in a variety of expensive suits, safe in the knowledge that a carnival that operates with next to no overheads and is underwritten by the Devil himself is never going to run into financial problems. At some level he had blithely assumed that this was only a small advantage and that normal carnivals made only slightly less money. Looking at the state of affairs with Miss Montgomery’s Flying Circus, however—the battered rolling stock that probably would not pass muster for moving condemned cows, the way everyone did what needed to be done regardless of their usual roles, the constant battle to keep the entomopters airworthy and the smiles bright—he could see that he had been naive.

  Changing the subject slightly, he asked, ‘What happened to the military gear that was on the ’mopters when you bought them?’

  Becky didn’t look up from the engine mounting she was checking. ‘You mean the guns? Stripped out before we ever saw them. Had to plate over where the barrel louvres were. You can see the patches under the paintwork. They left the mounting hardpoints on, though. We use them to mount the spraying gear and I knocked together some external cargo pods that can sit on them. There were a bunch of specialist tools for the weapons these birds used to carry, too, and we’ve got those. Priming levers, tensioning grips, that kind of thing. No use to us, but they were in the kits.’

  ‘Do you fly?’

  ‘I can, but I don’t very much. Fuel’s too expensive for pleasure jaunts. I used…’ She stopped her work and glanced at him, looking for a reaction. ‘I used to be in the Royal Aeroforce, you know?’

  She was rewarded with raised eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know the RAF took f
emale pilots.’

  She grinned, pleased, and returned to disciplining an awkward bolt. ‘They won’t let women fight, but ’mopters have to be ferried around, so that was my job.’

  ‘Fun?’

  She rocked her head to indicate it had its moments. ‘Got a lot of air hours. Not fancy flying, but good bread-and-butter stuff. Certified for night flying, which puts me one up on a couple of the girls. They might be able to barrel roll a ’mopter under a bridge, but they can’t navigate to save their lives once the sun goes down.’

  Horst smiled. ‘I’m sure you don’t remind them about that much.’

  ‘No, that’d be rude,’ she agreed. ‘I keep it down to no more than a couple of times a day.’

  * * *

  The hours wound on until Horst felt the turn of the Earth bring the killing sun around again. He made his apologies and headed for his locker, telling them he’d be fine, no need to tuck him in. No need to padlock the lid, either. In the carriage, he found Alisha, Major Haskins, and Professor Stone, all clearly recently awakened.

  ‘This is nice,’ said Horst on seeing them. ‘Is somebody going to read me a bedtime story?’

  ‘Mr Cabal,’ said the major. ‘We need to know where you stand.’

  ‘Mr Cabal,’ Horst echoed. He went to the locker, opened the lid, and started rearranging the dusty old blanket he had been given as an afterthought the night before. He would have preferred to have stripped before getting in to avoid creasing the clothes Miss Virginia had found (which is to say stolen, although she characterised it as ‘commandeering’) among the belongings of the errant train crew. It seemed unlikely that they would have got far with a tide of zombies and frustrated werecreatures stalking the area after the train’s escape, she had explained. Horst found her logic irrefutable, if ethically questionable. Still, as his clothes had been torn, soaked, muddied, burnt, and corroded to a state where it took a brave man to call them clothes at all, he had decided that practicality and modesty were of greater moment than the property rights of the two men, missing, presumed eaten.