The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  Flinder choked back a sob, her hands poised between the control stick and the trigger. So easily, they could both slip through her fingers.

  The thunder of artillery jolted her to action. A plume of smoke spooled from the dreadnought in the harbor. A bright flash and a cloud of debris erupted from the hillside.

  Betray those who had rescued her and chosen to trust her, despite her antipathy toward them? Or fly on, and return to the Empire which had led so many thousands to their bloody ends?

  She’d run out of time to choose.

  Flinder squeezed the trigger. The hammering report rose above the noise of the engine, the flare dazzling. Below her, the stationary aircraft shuddered under the rain of strafing lead, until the deadly line of fire hit the fuel truck. In a blinding eruption, the truck became a fireball, consuming the planes and men arrayed to either side of it. Flinder held her line until she had peppered the last plane on the right-hand side with shot, then banked away, hard. The cold morning sky swam in her vision, her goggles misted by tears she hadn’t known she was crying.

  A shockwave rocked the Razor as incendiary shells exploded around her. Flinder hauled back, gaining altitude, yawing side-on to the city to give the gunners a smaller target, and rolled the stick sideways to throw the plane into an arc. More explosions shattered the sky, and she cut the throttle. For a few seconds she hung, momentum and gravity bleeding together. Then the plane dropped, nose-first, howling.

  More shells erupted above her, but she was falling fast. Gunning the prop again, she pulled back and drew the plane into a low, tight arc over the scrubland outside the city. With any luck, with the sun still below the horizon, she would be invisible to the anti-aircraft crews as she raced along, rushing like water over the ground.

  More flashes from the warship, more bursts of burning dust from the hillside. Flinder arced about, lining up for a second sweep over the airfield, to cripple the planes on the other side. For a moment the Mediterranean stretched underneath her, and then she was over the lake.

  Pale, round shapes beneath the water.

  Like fingertips, reaching for her.

  Something pushing through those shapes, black and sharp.

  Like fingernails, scraping her skin.

  Flinder closed her eyes and gripped the trigger tight, losing herself in the clamor, no longer wanting to hear the voices she had left behind that day on the Blackmore River.

  Matthew.

  The girl . . . Kirra.

  Her machine guns shredded wings and wheels and fuel lines. As she pulled up, choking back bile, smoke and flames boiled into the sky.

  And still, explosions tore through the seawall.

  A shape moved down there, a serpentine hump, a half-seen fluke dripping seawater as it rolled up and over, the beast moving toward the smoking hole in the seawall where the rising tide rushed in, like floodwaters.

  Flinder could barely draw her eyes from the sight, until an anti-aircraft shell exploded yards off her port side, raining the monoplane with shrapnel and shredding that wing, sending her into a sudden spin. Pain. A warm slick of blood. The Razor twisted and dipped, the engine belching smoke. She hauled on the stick, knowing she wouldn’t be lucky enough to survive two crash landings. The plane rolled and bucked, fighting her.

  Like a horse in a raging flood.

  In her periphery, five dark fingers slipped between the rubble, the tide drawing them away.

  It’s easier than Elizabeth had imagined.

  So light, this slip of a girl, her bones delicate thin, like a bird’s.

  Flinder yanked the stick back, hammered the throttle, forcing the Razor to climb, the weight of the sky pressing against her as the lake fell away. More explosions, more machine-gun chatter. Everything becoming faint, a blur. She levelled off and brought the plane around, finally looping the camera over her neck and juggling it to point back at the city.

  Overhead, the rain thrashes down, and the clouds crash as if in adulation.

  Through the barrage of shellfire, Flinder had eyes only for what she saw down the camera lens; the shape surging through the seaway and into the northern lake, massive and gleaming with scales, teeth. The sea boiling around it as it slammed into the side of the German warship.

  The dreadnought rocked, and Flinder snapped the shutter.

  Harawera had only asked two things of her. To do what she could to disable the Fliegertruppe before they could get airborne, and to get photographs of the taniwha. Not for him, because Flinder was fairly certain Harawera had little hope of making it away from Carthage alive, but for the wider world. She had to prove why Māori Battalion Company E had deserted their Command, and crossed the Sahara to converge on Tunis. She didn’t want to think of it as his dying wish, more as his reason for throwing himself and his men into the teeth of the German war machine, with no hope of return.

  The girl’s dark fingers graze Elizabeth’s as the rage takes over, and she tumbles from the horse into the flood.

  Another shell erupted several yards from the Razor, hot shrapnel ripping through metal, wood, and flesh. Flinder cried out. The motor shuddered and died.

  Gripping the camera tighter, she snapped the shutter again as the creature rose up, wrapping around the warship, and plunged back into the lake. Mooring lines snapped free and several thousand tons of German steel rolled like a child’s plaything, its spine broken, its guns silenced.

  She snapped the shutter again as the taniwha snaked clear of the smashed ship and slid under the water.

  Smoke poured from the Razor. Wind whistled over tattered wings, audible in the silent void left by the dead engine. Below, the barrage from the hill continued.

  Flinder snapped the shutter a final time, capturing the great dark shape making for the sea where the other, smaller creatures looped and dived, awaiting their mother. Then they were gone, disappearing into the cobalt waves like they had never been.

  A hand lifts above the water, for a second, dark fingers grasping for the sky, and then gone.

  Hands trembling, dripping blood, Flinder unclipped her restraints. Clutching the camera, she pulled herself from the seat, tottering on the edge of the cockpit above the Tunisian coast before dropping free, letting everything else fall away as she tugged on the parachute ripcord.

  Dragonfire is Brighter than the Ten Thousand Stars

  Mark Robert Philps

  NEWSREEL (i)

  SPY-RING SENTENCED

  Today, in an Eikstown courtroom, the Commissariat showed how the people of the Commonwealth meet threats to their freedom: with the cold machinery of Justice! In the gallery, members of the accused watched with the hooded and reptilian eyes of a Draco as their sentence was meted out. The tribunal deliberated, and swiftly their verdict came down: It was to be Death. Let the jackals of the Mandate be warned: the Commissariat stands ready, the sword of the party! But the sword must have its shield – the watchful citizen! Report any Suspicious Activity to your local Commissariat for State Security office. Be Aware! Be Vigilant!

  1

  City of Whitebottom, one mile south of Green Banner Electrical Station No. 45. A cold evening in winter.

  I ducked beneath the fire-cracked lintel of a gutted patrician mansion, reached into the mended-and-remended pocket of my woolen overcoat and once again pulled out her letter. The thick paper card was sooted by the same coal dust that coated my aching hands. The words on it I had already committed to memory.

  Kaffa Brewcourt. 22:00 tonight. res mutatae non sunt. The note wasn’t signed, but that last phrase was written in blotted black ink, and it was all the signature I needed.

  Attia.

  Years ago, amid the bright-eyed passion and the party slogans and the thinly veiled tension of the university annex in Ravenna, we had together composed those words, a political slogan as true of revolution as it was of love and war. But in the twenty years since the bloodshed at Aelia Capitolina, since I’d last seen her, I’d barely thought of it. I’d been too busy running, keeping low and quiet i
n backwater cities, stewing on old betrayals. Hiding from the Commissariat. That was until today. Until this yellowed slip of paper had appeared in my pigeonhole at the electrical station. Attia. Twenty years since that night in a rundown kaffahouse, stinking of sweat and sulfur, waiting for a woman who had never arrived. Twenty years since she’d broken my heart. So why now, after so much time?

  I stuffed the letter back into my coat and stepped onto the rain-slicked streets of city I still thought of as Vindobona. The air tasted wet, bitter, as thick as the heavy fog. She was out there. Somewhere in that gray atmosphere. I moved from beneath the shadow of the abandoned mansion. On the stonework above me dragons and dragonriders were trapped in time on a blackened frieze.

  “Cacō,” a shrill voice exclaimed. “Dulcis cacō!” agreed another. Kids, running ahead through the white haze like wraiths, cackling to each other in high voices. Latin was still outlawed, so naturally the child-gangs that overran the New Commonwealth had adopted it as their native tongue. I hesitated, waiting until their voices receded further into the fog. Then I folded my shoulders and splashed hurriedly down the street. I slipped past an idling diesel truck, turned a sharp corner plastered on both sides with Party recruitment posters, and stopped at the glass door of a soot-stained kaffahouse.

  Kaffa Brewcourt. I stepped up to the glass and peered inside, my heart thudding. The inside was lit with low hanging lights; the high ceilings and peeling plaster walls fell away into shadow. Marble tables stood in a ragged line and a piano with keys like yellowed teeth squatted in one corner. A pale, ox-boned proprietor slouched behind the dimly lit bar, polishing chipped porcelain cups with a discolored rag. No sign of Attia. I glanced at my timepiece. Still early.

  The door squealed as I pushed it open. Hot air and the smell of roasting beans and stale cigarettes buffeted me as I stepped cautiously up to the bar. The proprietor did not look up as I sat, just thudded over to a brass machine that groaned and spat steaming kaffa into a small white cup. I spared a glance around the room. Empty but for a large man in the back corner, sweeping again and again the same bit of floor. The proprietor turned back to me, rattled a cup and saucer onto the bar.

  “Thank you,” I muttered. 22:01. No Attia. I fought off a shiver. I thought of the last time I was supposed to have met her in a kaffahouse. She hadn’t arrived then either.

  I took a shaking sip of kaffa and spun a ring-stained newspaper that had been left on the counter toward me, attempting vainly to seem casual. Bold black headlines proclaimed heightened tensions along the New Commonwealth’s continent-spanning border with the People’s Mandate, the state of arms purchases from the long broken away colonies across the ocean in Nova Roma, and the newest ever increasing production quotas. It didn’t take much subtlety to read the subtext: yet another war with the Mandate was looming.

  Someone stepped into my field of vision. “More kaffa?”

  A shadow fell over me: a thickset man with deep-set eyes. The one from the back corner. I hadn’t heard him move. I flicked my gaze down to my cup of thick kaffa, which was still more than half full; along the bar, where the proprietor was now nowhere to be seen.

  It all slotted into place with brilliant and icy clarity: the typed letter, the too-empty public house, the proprietor’s strange attitude, the truck idling outside . . . That letter wasn’t from Attia. She wasn’t coming.

  After all these years hiding, the Commissariat had found me.

  “No,” I managed. I snaked a hand across the table toward the small porcelain cup – the closest thing I could see to a weapon.

  “I insist,” he said.

  My hand found the saucer. I didn’t plan my next move. I lurched back on my stool and with a flick flung the cup of steaming kaffa at his face. The thickset man swore and stumbled back, steaming black kaffa running down his cheeks. The cup bounced off his head and then exploded on the tiled floor. Still holding the saucer I smashed it against the counter and grabbed hold of the largest piece: a jagged half-crescent which I swung at him like a blade.

  His meaty palm caught my wrist with a wet slap.

  And then from behind, unseen hands snatching me roughly by the shoulders.

  “Easy,” said a high quiet voice behind. “We just want to tal—”

  Gloved hands were holding my shoulders. I twisted my wrist half-free and then cranked my neck. I bit down.

  “Shit!” said a not-so-quiet voice behind me.

  “Put him out,” the thickset man growled.

  Barely a moment to cry out before being shoved to the ground. In the gap between that first push and the moment when my face hit the ground, my mind raced through the twenty-some years that I’d spent on the run – the failed relationships, the arms-length friendships (my landlord Viktor, with whom I shared a single nod once every day, as close a friend as anybody) and the days and days spent with my head down at the electrical station, trying hard to not to be noticed, shoveling coal into a high pressure boiler that roared hot and burned nearly as bright as dragonfire.

  A wet boot pinning my cheek to the sticky, sweet-smelling floor; a black burlap hood that reeked of stale sweat. And then a needle lancing my arm, pain more bludgeon than prick, and lightness spreading through my body, blooming behind my nose and eyes and mouth.

  “Time to go, Artur.”

  EXCERPT FROM “ON DRACI AND REVOLUTION” (CENSOR’S COPY, REDACTED)

  Self-satisfied Imperial historians called the two millennia of uneasy peace that existed between Roma and Cháng’ān the Pax Draci. We accept now that these two words are a lie, do nothing to convey the suffering that the two imperial powers wrought upon their own people. And yet in the bloody lie there is some gleaming black bone of truth.

  2

  Attia. So much of my life had revolved about her. Since those days when we’d first met, young students at the university with not much in common but a hatred for the Commonwealth, and the Party, and every apparatus that had risen up to replace the Emperor, and the patricians, and their dragons. Not uncommon sentiments in universities during those days, which was how we’d found ourselves at a protest that became a riot that now stood like a firewall between the two halves of my life.

  Even now, all these years later, I found myself trapped in her gravity. Even now I dreamed of her. Of course I did. We were at a party I was hosting with my roommate Sina, and she was perched on a wing-backed chair. In this dream she seemed luminescent against the shadowed walls of my squalid walkup. She was scrawling left-handed notes in a ubiquitous copy of Wagner’s Green Book, the book that held the living word of the Party. But the notes she crammed into the margins of revolution were not words but tightly packed equations – numbers I recognized dancing with strange ideograms I didn’t.

  Was this even sleep? Or did I lurch through some soporific induced hallucination? It was a dream and it was a memory. Or it was the liminal area between. When I looked up the weeping walls of the garret seemed to fall away vertiginously, though the other students who crammed the party and chattered in some lost Vandalic dialect that I couldn’t quite decode didn’t seem to notice. This was still the early days of the revolution, some part of me realized, long before the chaos in Aelia Capitolina, those first years after the Emperor had been shot in the crypts beneath the Palatium Magnum and the last dragons had been sieved with hot bullets by squads of Revolutionary Guard. This was the first night I’d met her. Or some version of it.

  And then I was looking her in the eyes, mismatched eyes, one a murky sort of green, the other dark and completely dilated (she was nearly blind on that side, I would learn later). She appeared in my dream as I remembered first seeing her: small and fairly bony, her body disappearing into the over-large tunic suit that hung about her shoulders. I realized with a start that I looked as I do now, and laughed.

  Hot wind on my back. I turned. The wall behind me had fallen away completely, and thrusting a feathered, prehistoric head from the fog that grew beyond was a dragon. It opened its mouth, revealing triple-rows of
jagged teeth. A smell like kerosene and spider webs and old book glue. Its plumage glimmered red and gold and green. All the party guests continued their discussions, ignoring the massive, autocar-sized head that heaved into the cramped garret. They had all, I noticed suddenly, been burnt black, charred meat sticks oozing blood and pus from their seared flesh. Their eyelids had been scorched away, so they looked at each other with bulbous eyes and expressions of constant surprise.

  “They dragons are dead, Gaius,” Attia said. “We killed them all.”

  The dragon pushed its head through the living room until it was so close I could feel heat radiating from emerald and sapphire down that covered its snout and glinted in the bronzed light. This was a Nile Dragon, and it looked nothing like the creatures of string and wire that jerked across the screen in those Committee sanctioned historicals that featured Otto Marx as the heroic Octavian, making his doomed stand against the black powers of Antonius and his mount Apophis. This felt real, as real as the dragons who had been shot to death in the air above the Bautai plateau, in pens beneath patrician mansions. Who died roaring at the chattering of machine guns, the buzzing of warplanes, the winking lights of tracer fire.

  The jaw of the beast yawned wide and hot fire spewed forth, so bright that everything became white light and heat

  Then Attia was gone and I spoke words I couldn’t fathom into a black room. I couldn’t even hear what I was saying. My mouth was dry and my words sounded like drunken mumblings in my own ears. I stopped speaking abruptly, aware suddenly of how much my entire body hurt. My arm throbbed. I turned my head, and realized that it wasn’t the room that was black, but rather the hood draped over my head.

  It all flooded back. I cried out involuntarily.

  I sat in a hard wood chair, hands bound tight behind my back. I could hear an electrical hum and the occasional soft thud of heeled boots. Light spots danced in the hooded darkness. But beyond the dull pain lancing through my head, all I felt was numb surprise.