Shadows Against the Empire (Folkestone & Hand Interplanetary Steampunk Adventures Book 1)

by Ralph Vaughan

  Folkestone sought shelter behind a huge statue with features, though deeply eroded, unlike those of any living Martian race. It was, he realised, a representation of the unknown Elder Race.

  “The Great Enemy,” Daraph-Kor called from hiding. “Fools they were, calling us from the soundless and lightless dimension in which we were a dying race. We had devoured all the worlds and the life thereon, all the suns, and likely we would have devoured each other had not these self-styled lords of Mars reached into our realm in ignorance and arrogance.”

  “They did not understand the evil they were releasing into the Solar System,” Folkestone said, peeping around the edge of the statue, trying to suss out Daraph-Kor’s hiding place. “Their science outpaced their wisdom.”

  “Indeed, they were very much like the base creatures of your own Empire, Captain Folkestone,” Daraph-Kor said.

  “You know who I am?”

  “As your saying goes, you are my side’s thorn,” the Martian said. “Many have worked to wreck my plans, but you were first, the thorn that dug the deepest. The emotions of this body are difficult to grasp, but I think I shall enjoy…no, savour…your death. To rip the life from you before I depart shall be…most gratifying.”

  “Depart?” Folkestone said in a taunting tone.

  “I have accomplished my goal in coming to this place.”

  “And what was that?” Folkestone demanded, seeking to hone in on the Martian’s location. “Why did you come here?”

  “You are a clever creature, for an upstart monkey,” Daraph-Kor remarked. “You cost us our worshippers, our cattle, but we will return to this material realm despite all your efforts. Our usurpation of your worlds will be slower than planned, but once the foothold is established our eventual suzerainty is inevitable.”

  “Using the Black Mirror?”

  “Clever little monkey,” Daraph-Kor mused.

  “Are you afraid to face me?” Folkestone called.

  “Were you to look into my eyes, you would be incinerated,” the Dark God replied. “Your tiny simian mind would not endure the shock of the encounter.”

  “Perhaps you would like to step out of hiding,” Folkestone offered. “I have never shied from meeting death openly. Do you?”

  “I think not,” Daraph-Kor answered. “You have certainly by now guessed this flesh I must wear is as mortal as your own.”

  “It crossed my mind,” Folkestone admitted. “Coward.”

  “I am not a fool,” Daraph-Kor said. “ I have decided to take advantage of your close proximity in this fashion…”

  Folkestone started to speak, but no words emerged from his mouth. No breath passed into his lungs. It felt as he were gripped by an unseen python, squeezing the life from him. A fire seemed to burn within his mind even as frigid tendrils slowly invaded him.

  “This crude body has been slow to adapt to the capabilities of my kind,” Daraph-Kor said. “My reach is not what it will be once I have regained my true form, but here, in this enclosed space…”

  Folkestone raised his weapon, though it seemed incredibly heavy in a senseless hand. He aimed it in the general direction of the taunting voice, then inclined the barrel upward and fired.

  The heavy projectile did not pass anywhere near the hidden Martian. Instead, it struck high, near the roof of the chamber where a cracked and fissured mass of masonry projected. The crevasse split wide. Stones and tiles cascaded downward.

  Uttering a cry of surprise and alarm, Daraph-Kor leaped from hiding, avoiding the downfall of rocks, sprawling across the floor and scrabbling toward cover. Instantly, the grip on Folkestone was loosed. He fired again, but the shock of being released made him stagger, spoiling his aim. Still, he was gratified to see the bullet strike Daraph-Kor in the fleshy part of his leg; a scarlet stain spread across the fabric of his trousers.

  “Surrender now, and you will not die,” Folkestone said.

  Laughter filled the grotto, but it was mirthless and mocking.

  “A god surrender to a being of coarse flesh?”

  “It is your only chance to live.”

  “Live as an object of curiosity and contempt?” the Martian queried. “Abused and kept drugged while your superstition-riddled scientists try to find a way to separate my consciousness from this worthless form?”

  “So, there is a way?” Folkestone demanded.

  Daraph-Kor did not reply. As Folkestone edged from hiding and made his way cautiously toward the enemy, he felt twinges of pain and ice and fire. Daraph-Kor was obviously trying to once again mount a psychic attack, but could not concentrate through the waves of pain undoubtedly coursing through the physical body.

  “You seem to have me at a disadvantage, having wounded me so grievously, so unfairly,” Daraph-Kor said. “Perhaps I have misjudged you…”

  The voice was growing dim, as if the Martian were moving from where he had taken cover. At the same time, Folkestone heard desperate flight across rock-strewn tiles, pounding footfalls and the scraping of a dragged limb. Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, he ran at full tilt to cut off Daraph-Kor’s escape. Running beneath the gaze of sightless stone gods, Folkestone left the grotto of the sea-kings and caught sight of Daraph-Kor entering an arched passage lined with black portals. The Martian cradled in his arms a gleaming instrumentality of brass and cut gems.

  He heard voices calling his name behind him, but he dared not slow his pursuit. The Black Mirror was of paramount import in assuring the advent of the Dark Gods, so whatever Daraph-Kor had salvaged from this city of the dead had to be prevented from ever reaching Black Mirror, wherever it was.

  The tone of the voices broke through the concentration of his pursuit, not urging him on or calling him back, but filled with dire warning. He saw Daraph-Kor glance back, saw the Martian stagger and stumble with shock, then run with a renewed vigour. Folkestone looked behind him as he heard the rapid blasts of his companions’ weapons. When he saw what had shambled out of the darkness of side tunnels he ran faster.

  Monsters, the only survivor of the Schliemann Expedition had gasped before the release of death. When the end had come for the masters of the City of the Maze, others rose to supplant them, desperate creatures from a dying sea, perhaps the blind and brutish children of their own biological experiments. Long aeons had they wandered the labythrine passages of this lost and forgotten city, unknown and unsuspected, battening upon the things that scurried in the darkness or wandered in from the outer world, as men from another world had done one day, as others had this day.

  Vast tentacles quested for tender flesh, teeth snapped the air, and yellow eyes peered hungrily. It was as if the sculptures from the grotto had sprung to terrible life, joined by monstrous travesties of the Elder Race itself.

  “Good God, Captain!” gasped Hand, catching up as he fired his steam-repeater.

  “Keeping all the fun to yourself?” Lady Cynthia quipped. “I should have known you would give up both passages to nowhere.”

  “Those things have cut off escape,” Hand noted. “There a way out ahead?”

  “Daraph-Kor is ahead,” Folkestone informed them.

  “Then it does not matter what’s behind us,” Hand said.

  “Down that passage,” Folkestone said, pointing.

  “Where is the Black Mirror?” Lady Cynthia demanded. “Does he have it with him?”

  “It is not here,” the Captain said. “He suggested he’s leaving the city. Wherever he is going, that is where the Black Mirror is.”

  “We must stop him!” Lady Cynthia declared.

  The shambling monsters, though not killed by their weapon fire, were slowed and warned away. They fell behind, then returned to the darkness from which they had come to feed.

  They caught a distant glimpse of Daraph-Kor ducking into a far azure-lit chamber. Minutes later, weapons ready to fire upon the Martian, they rushed into the same chamber, but it was untenanted, with no place Daraph-Kor could hide or escape.

  “Where is he?” Lady Cynthia d
emanded.

  In the centre of the room was a metallic pool, the source of the azure light, a shimmering scintilla little more than four feet across. They approached the aperture.

  “It is the only possibility,” Folkestone said, peering into the depths. “A portal to…somewhere else.”

  “Gods of air and light, sir?”

  Folkestone nodded.

  “But where, Robert?”

  Folkestone shook his head. “To wherever Daraph-Kor went, to wherever he has the Black Mirror waiting. The two of you get back to the ship, tell the Admiralty what has happened, have Krios take you back to Syrtis Major.”

  “Robert…” Lady Cynthia began.

  “I am going through,” Folkestone said, moving to the edge.

  “Not without me, sir!” Hand protested.

  “Nor I!” Lady Cynthia chimed in.

  “Go to Syrtis Major, that is an order!” Folkestone snapped, paused upon the brink of the unknown. “We have no time to argue!”

  “Then you had better not waste time,” Lady Cynthia said.

  “Should we survive, you can court martial me, sir.”

  Folkestone stepped into the shimmering pool and vanished. Tucking his steam-repeater close to his body and making sure he had both his side-arms securely holstered, Hand dropped into the pool of light, forcing himself to keep his eyes open and hope for the best. Without any hesitation, Lady Cynthia followed the two men into the unknown.

  Aboard the Agamemnon, Lieutenant Krios gaped as all four signals vanished from his scope, one after the other. He looked closely. They had completely vanished, but something remained, very faint, but quickly fading. He flushed the boilers with super-heated steam and set the repulsors to full power. While just several inches off the ground, he engaged the engines and shot southward faster than the eye could follow.

  Except for when Folkestone first stepped into the pool, there was no sensation of falling, no sense of any motion at all. Realising he had closed his eyes at what he thought would be immersion in a liquid medium of some kind, he opened them. He was surrounded by a silvery radiance, a nebulous effluence of light in which stars swirled like dust. A timeless moment later he tumbled out of the light and into cold darkness.

  He picked himself up from a floor of cracked tile, looked back and saw a silver-edged portal seemingly filled with mist. As he watched, Hand emerged, landing on his knees, followed by Lady Cynthia. Folkestone helped them both up.

  “Where are we?” Lady Cynthia asked softly.

  “Bleeding frigid it is,” Hand muttered, sweeping the dark with his steam-repeater, ready to engage any enemy.

  “Certainly not where we were,” Folkestone remarked. The air he breathed was cold enough to burn his lungs and tainted with a foetid dampness.

  Folkestone took the lead, heading for a black doorway, the only egress from the chamber. He motioned for Lady Cynthia and Hand to flank him left and right. As they neared the portal, they heard a solid thud followed by a clatter of metal. They quickened their pace through the door and into a wide passage open on one side. They saw a vista of snow-covered peaks, precipitous vales shrouded in ebony shadows, and the shattered lines of a dead city.

  “Misr,” Hand breathed, half in disbelief, half in fear.

  More sounds came to them, obviously the injured Daraph-Kor trying to carry whatever he had taken from the City of the Maze. The trio chased after him, straining for a glimpse. From the darkness ahead a bolt of energy lashed toward them, but it was ill aimed and did not seem nearly as strong as the strikes he had sent against them earlier.

  “Doesn’t seem to have quite the punch as what it was, sir,” Hand said with an anxious grin.

  “Perhaps so, Sergeant, but it still seems potent enough to blister even your thick hide,” Folkestone cautioned.

  Another bolt shot toward them, weaker than the first, but able to knock Lady Cynthia to the ground and badly scorch her forearm. Using the wall for support, she pulled herself up, caught her breath and started forward.

  Folkestone restrained her gently. “You had better stay back, Cynthia. Let Sergeant Hand and myself deal with Daraph-Kor.”

  “Don’t be bloody ridiculous, Robert!” she snapped, slipping free of his grip.

  Folkestone looked at Hand accusingly, as he were somehow responsible for her ladyship’s recent lapses of lady-like language. Hand shrugged his shoulders, Folkestone rolled his eyes, and they both hurried to catch up with the running woman.

  “He’s gone through that passage,” Lady Cynthia said when they rejoined her. “I had an aim on him, but he was too quick.”

  Cautiously they approached the opening into which Daraph-Kor had vanished. The passageway beyond was short and ended in a stone door, partially opened. Bright light seeped between door and wall, obviously an exit from the city.

  The door opened into a plaza of sorts, surrounded on all sides by lofty snow-layered peaks, the sides of which were covered with the remnants of battlements and bartizans, verandas and vaults, and soaring citadels that even in their shattered state seemed to defy gravity. The floor of the plaza was littered with the detritus and debris of a thousand millennia, ranging from small boulders to massive blocks of worked stone. Rising from the clutter was a farrago of statuary, a forest of lithic monsters.

  In the midst of the chaos, mostly hidden by stone and rubble, Daraph-Kor worked on the Black Mirror, a rectangle of seething darkness surrounded by a silvery array of monsters and nightmares, a dire warning from the Elder Race of the terrors within.

  Daraph-Kor turned, saw the interlopers, and raised his hand. A bullet struck Folkestone in the shoulder a moment before they heard the sharp crack of the shot. Folkestone fell, and the others took cover.

  “Robert!”

  “Captain!”

  “It is nothing,” Folkestone assured them, pressing his hand to the wound to staunch the flow of blood staining his uniform tunic. He sought to suppress the pain, but was not successful. “Just a flesh wound, hit nothing vital. But, notice, he used a gun.”

  “He’s too weak for his hoodoo hocus-pocus,” Hand said.

  “Exactly,” Folkestone agreed with a forced grin. “We have to stop him before he finishes whatever he is doing, and this may be our best chance of it, while his mortal body is weak.”

  “I’ll set out to the right,” Hand said. “If I can get a clear shot at him, I think I can hit him, but the trick will be getting close enough with all this rubble around him.”

  “Be careful, Sergeant Hand,” Lady Cynthia cautioned. “Just because he fired a gun does not mean that that Martian electric-eel is out of juice, so to speak.”

  Hand nodded and set off.

  “Do your best,” Folkestone said. He turned to Lady Cynthia. “If you can keep his attention focussed here, send some shots in his direction now and then without breaking from cover, that would be immeasurably helpful to us.”

  Lady Cynthia scowled. “You mean, here, where I’m safe?”

  “It never crossed my mind,” he told her as he started off to the left flank. He paused and looked back. “Though, of course, I would be very annoyed were you to come to any harm.”

  He vanished among the fallen masonry and stones.

  “And I you,” she whispered.

  She fired twice and was pleased to see one of the shots hit a nearby column, sending fragments flying into the sheltered place where Daraph-Kor worked.

  “Hope that hurt!” she muttered. “Blighter!”

  Folkestone’s wound had started seeping blood again, but there was nothing he could do about that. If they did not prevent the Martian from carrying out his plan to free the Dark Gods from their aeons of imprisonment nothing else would matter. He had lost track of Hand’s progress among the debris field, but felt the lithe and muscular Martian had probably outpaced him. He started moving inward, closing in on Daraph-Kor. He heard the distinctive sound of a steam-repeater, which was followed by a burst of fire from the midst of the ruins. His lips tightened in white g
rimness as he heard what could only be Hand’s steam-repeater exploding, a sound like no other.

  “Damn!” Folkestone muttered. He had hoped the wounds sustained by Daraph-Kor meant an end to his godlike abilities, but he apparently was still all too potent at close quarters. It was up to him now, Folkestone realised.

  He moved along as fast as he could with a minimum of sound, even though he knew there was no hope of taking Daraph-Kor by surprise. He edged around a corner and saw the Martian at the Black Mirror. Before he could raise his weapon, Daraph-Kor whipped about and sent a sheet of blue fire hurtling at him. He flung himself back just in time and sent an ill-aimed shot at Daraph-Kor.

  “You haven’t a chance of stopping me, Captain,” the enemy called. “The rational thing would be to help me.”

  “Help you?”

  “Do not sound so surprised.” Daraph-Kor replied. “Your kind has a strong streak of self-destruction deep in your nature, one which I made good use of in recruiting followers to participate in the downfall of their own civilisation.”

  “You offered dream-spice to those already sick and weak of will,” Folkestone accused as he looked for an opening to attack. “You poisoned their minds!”

  “The dream-spice enhanced their psychic powers to break down the barriers between dimensions, but did nothing to change their nature, their desire to commit racial suicide,” Daraph-Kor said. “Your endless wars and feuds, your atrocities against each other, your bellicose ways – all point to your eventual and inevitable destruction by one means or another. All I did was channel those urges into something greater than yourselves.”

  “We are better than what you think of us,” Folkestone said. “Else you would not be facing me alone now in this dead place, on the brink of failure.”

  “Failure? I think you do not…”

  Folkestone leaped from cover, catching the boastful Daraph-Kor unawares, firing his weapon in rapid shots, aiming as best he could with both his wounds trying to overwhelm him with pain. The Captain saw a wall of fire surging toward him. He hit the ground, stabbed and razored by stone shards. The fire curled around the fallen columns and blocks like a living force, licking at him with tongues of agony. He thought he had hit Daraph-Kor, but was not sure. When the Martian came around the block he saw scarlet blood oozing from several new wounds.