Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  “What do you think they are up to?” asked Jing, terrified.

  “Whatever it is,” Han answered, stoking up his engine, “I pity whomever chooses to stand against them.”

  Hovering at the city limits, the bulbous, scarred prow of the Huckleberry broke the foam of sea-fog for just an instant, before ducking back inside, a furtive animal testing the ocean surface.

  “Let’s keep it tight,” a speaking horn thundered at Rosa Marija’s elbow. She hissed, like a cat. An ether channel had been appropriated for communicating from ship to ship, and crystals distributed to fit in each ship’s ether array. These were simple sugar crystals grown on a string, with water laced in aeon dust. They were easy to make, easy to get rid of if boarded, and impossible to duplicate. One had to have a piece broken off the same string to listen on the channel. It was simple expediency to swallow them or dissolve them in the sea if discovered, to keep the enemy from hearing their plans.

  But nothing could stop the people on the other end from being utter twats.

  “You there! Is a warm meal worth becoming crow food? Put out that galley fire before the smoke gives us away!”

  “You idiot, we’re in a real pea souper. Nobody’s going to see.”

  The second voice propagating from the blade-like ether array was Gunsmoke Gilly, who seemed to have taken impromptu command. Rosa had found, soon enough, that no such thing as command hierarchy existed in the Incognito. Their very adherence to a group seemed anathema to them. Despite this, they all followed Gray Gunsmoke’s lead, if not out of respect, then perhaps out of fear. He had other names: Old Ironclad, Skipper, and as the Viscountess Valentina insisted on using; the Stuck Pig.

  Gilly continued. “Our men in the city tell us the enemy have mortar cannon, and a railway gun parked on the high hill. Stay behind the shield ships!”

  “And my clairvoyants tell you the mist will hide us all the way there,” answered a husky female voice on the line. The Viscountess Valentina was particularly touchy when she felt the women of Incognito were not being respected. She had a reputation of augury, promiscuity, and stringing men up by their delicates on her masts. “We know such things.”

  “I still do not believe there are real American guns on the hills,” said another voice, gruff and cigar-scarred. Dante “Powder Monkey” Montalban was well known in the last war as one of the urchins who reloaded the British Navy’s cannon, climbing the huge smoking guns with packets of powder. This was before steam-fed cannon were common, and often the monkeys would be burned, hit by the blowback or die of misfire. His survival was remarkable enough to earn him a medal, and a reputation for reasonable caution, nourished all the more during his illustrious pirating career. Life expectancy on Montalban’s galleon, the Loose Lady, was reputedly eight times that of any other. Not that pirates kept decent records. Montalban himself strutted around decks like a cock, with his feathered hat.

  “There aren’t American guns,” answered Gunsmoke. “The Americans would never openly support Ubique or their shadow auction. These are contractors. Mercenary companies. Guns for hire.”

  “I say we outbid them,” said Montalban. “And not lose a single man.”

  “Are your pockets so deep they can hold your enormous ego?” said Valentina. “These mercenaries will never deal with us. They are legitimate! Respected. Businessmen! We are merely disruptive innovators at best, criminals at most.”

  “Bah! They deal with us when they need to throw a wrench into a competitor’s trade! Mercenaries only ever follow the letter of the law.”

  “Enough! They’ve brought the Tennessee Jack up from Monterey. And if it’s in the station when the fighting begins, you can count on the Ubiques to call for support. I need your heads in the game and your people at the cannons!” bellowed Gunsmoke.

  The mention of the Tennessee Jack seemed to quiet even Valentina. Rosa knew the rumors. The all-too European Balaenopteron-class ships had been designed to travel with a retinue of smaller supply ships and escorts. For the vast stretches of wilderness that was America, that type of air superiority was unwieldy and impractical. Much of it was tornado and hurricane country. Unlike plains crawlers, large ships did not have water condensers big enough to cross large, dry distances. If a ship the size of Liberty Island was downed in Death Valley, nothing would bring it up again.

  Instead, the railway gun slowly came to fore as the best way to bolster the Union’s forces during its long territorial expansion. Each one had an enormous barrel like a chimney, hitched to a train of engines, boilers, and capacitors. The cannons rained down death and misery. They could be pulled west by conventional locomotive, by the Squamosa and the Maxima with their high wheels. More likely than not they were hitched to supply wagons and carried their own escort of troops and ironclads. When one pulled in over a hill, the barrel of the gun could clearly be seen hanging over the locomotive, sometimes eclipsing the sun.

  During the Union’s long Civil War, the guns laid waste to whole cities and stretches of battlefields, often with little to no warning. Their range was ludicrous, and battle commanders would often stage their camps twenty miles from the nearest rail, lest the death-knell of a whistling bomb come amongst them like the wrath of God. Only a few guns had been made, but exactly how many, nobody knew.

  Each gun had been produced seemingly with no consistent plan, rolling out of the Union’s manufactories in Detroit, Pittsburg and Tera Haute. The first and smallest was a nasty piece of work called the Little Dickel, and it had routed the southern batteries at Sewell’s Point. The biggest of the rail guns was the Kentucky Mark (both Kentucky and Tennessee having declared for the Union after Sewell’s Point). At Gettysburg, the Confederacy’s forces half dead already, the Mark had been fired only once. Some argued the experimental incendiary shell did not need to be fired, since the war was reaching a turning point. Whatever the case, that shot left the ground of Gettysburg fallow for five years.

  Rosa Marija had heard the stories from when she piloted dirigibles for a living. But the Tennesee Jack frightened her for a very unique reason, though the rail guns saw little use in times of peace. During the battles of Dragoon Springs, it had sown chaos on the battlefield for both Apaches and Confederates alike. Rumors could not be trusted, but the old colonel spoke of wights surfacing on the battlefield, of insects the size of dogs bursting in waves from the Jack’s rounds, of weir clouds drifting out and seizing men, stripping the flesh from their bones.

  “These pirates, they are mostly cowards, non?”

  Rosa Marija sighed. Ever since she had taken Cid and the girl Cezette aboard, the girl had been excitable, belligerent, and overly familiar with the ’Berry. After they picked the pair up, the Incognito man had given her a rendezvous location, and somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, they’d met with a ragtag army of air pirates. It was a formidable gathering, certainly, but not an army, and Rosa did not have the heart to tell Cezette this sobering fact.

  Only some of the pirates, Gunsmoke and Monkey and the Viscountess, knew the stakes at hand. And they were all thinking the same thing: Ubique supplied America’s already isolationist borders with arms. What might become of air piracy in the west if they had the contents of the Cook box as well? What might become of the trade out of the Lands Beyond? Whatever the box truly held, the pirates had come together to nip the thing in the bud, choke it off before it could be born, out of mutual self-interest.

  Rosa was once more bringing the ’Berry into the breach. What the hell was wrong with Albion, that he could so easily shoulder the weight of a world? Wasn’t he happy with the home she had built for him? Did he have to cast it into danger? And worse still, they had brought children aboard. Rosa keened away from Cezette’s exuberance, not trusting herself to it yet. But Cezette trusted this ship; it had saved her life after all. That had to mean something.

  What might Albion say if he saw his ship held together by gaffer tape and aeon dust? Rosa gave a grunt of pain as she felt surface and pushed it down, into the furnace that pow
ered her every move. Albion was strong. He would be drawn to where shit went down, and being here was the strongest chance of seeing him.

  The Incognito, though anarchistic and disorganized, once summoned seemed quite adept at formations and strategy. By hovering at a distance from the city, they appeared either as distant travelers, high in the sky, or invisible against the horizon. This seemed a doubtful strategy to Rosa, until a squad of the Viscountess’s scouts flew point and zapped the clouds with arc energy, drawing a thick mantle of fog around them.

  “The traffic from the Lands Beyond being as chaotic as it is, the western shore is accustomed to strange airships,” Gunsmoke Gilly explained over lunch later in the day. “More Incognito ships arrive each day. I hear your old mate Nessie Drake is coming with a new ship. It is best to wait and hide until our strength reaches its zenith.”

  Rosa shoved his feet down from where he put them on her dining table and set down Auntie’s sandwiches. Gunsmoke grinned. His smile was without mirth, like a wolf baring its teeth.

  Amongst the proud pirate captains, Gunsmoke was the one keenest to deal fairly, which might explain why he had emerged as leader. Unlike the others, his reputation was of being a gun for hire, or a bodyguard for merchant ships. It reminded Rosa that pirate in the functional sense was a loose definition, meaning only a person who had taken a vessel out to international waters without permission. Their ships flew no port of call but not all of them were brigands or thieves. In fact, several of the captains gathered here had tasted Gunsmoke’s guns before—it was part and parcel of his command over them.

  Rosa entertained the man in the ’Berry’s galley, and she could not deny his tight fitting breeches held some appeal. Gunsmoke was gray at the temples, with the sort of callous attractiveness a girl might identify as a persistent father-complex.

  “A shame. That Clemens is a lucky old dog,” said Gunsmoke.

  “Sorry,” said Rosa, grinning. She hadn’t even put on her best for dinner, choosing instead a hip-length one-piece that tightened around her thighs. If it were on a man they would be called overalls, but the material was perfect: soft to the touch, but difficult to remove. Since no Ubique fleet was coming to annihilate them, Rosa wasn’t averse to Gunsmoke’s lunch parley. His stories were good. Exciting ones, like the time he raided the Portuguese Navy’s armory, or when he loosed a pack of wolves onto a rival ship. Tall ones too, like the ghost ship of La Noria, or the sirens of Dublin. He spoke at length about how he sacked the port of Santo Sangre for forty days and forty nights. At the end of it there was noone but women and children left.

  “The children I put on the road with half a wheel of cheese and a jug of cider each.”

  “And the women?”

  “We had been at it for forty days and forty nights, child. I could not withhold my men fair recompense. But the women had few places to go. The ones who got a bad deal took it out of my men’s hides.”

  “And your fair recompense? You likely took it out of their backs.”

  “Only as indentured crew. My garden is lush, I have little need to pluck.”

  The man was Damascus steel, an edge colored by whorls of experience, shamelessness and manners. His tone cut at a moment’s distraction. By and by Gunsmoke finished spinning his tales and came round to why he was there.

  “The Incognito don’t tell us why we are gathered,” said Gunsmoke Gilly, like he was off on another story. “Why, the rascals haven’t called a meeting more ’an once or twice in living memory. The first was to the defense of the Straight Hook, at the battle of Oslo against the Ottoman incursion. The second was at Revenge, with the contra-apartheid separatists. Now I hear there was some shindig over Moscow, but I wasn’t invited to the ball, so to speak.”

  “Must have been lost in the post,” said Rosa, suddenly overcome by an odd feeling. The way he was sitting, Gunsmoke blocked out the porthole so the room was enveloped in darkness.

  “Now what strikes me as passing strange, so to speak, neither time did the Incognito uppity-ups see fit to inform us as to what we were fighting.” Gunsmoke leaned forward, and Rosa’s blood ran cold. She could see the porthole now, and Gunsmoke’s ship, the Remington, behind it. It was a beautiful ship, she had to admit, all flying buttresses and ribbing. Rumor had it Gunsmoke’s aeon lines were hung with dog tags and last words from the people who had died in his command. She saw all of the airship through the porthole, even the conservatory glittering with roses in the stern, but under the roses rode sixteen gun ports.

  Gunsmoke continued.

  “There’s something they’re not telling us. And make no mistake, child, the Incognito do not gather for anything but blood. Now seeing as we found your ship just drifting out in the middle of nowhere, as if you knew where we would be…well, I can’t help but get the feeling you know whose throat we’re all gathered here to cut.”

  “Hmph,” said Rosa. At a signal, Gunsmoke could tear the ship to shreds. Not that he would, with him on it. The threat was empty, but present. She was glad she was resistant to his advances. There were advantages to monogamy after all…but Rosa would have to tell him something. So she walked over to the door and opened it, spilling the eavesdropping French girl onto the floor. Cezette looked up at them and grinned, her legs akimbo, and Gunsmoke out and out laughed at her, in big, throaty guffaws.

  It took most of the afternoon to tell Gunsmoke everything. When they emerged from the galley it was to Cezette’s disparaging glare. Gunsmoke merely winked, and blew Cezette a kiss. He briefly spoke with Cid Tanner, who had also arrived.

  “I do not like him,” said Cezette when Gunsmoke was safely off the ship.

  “To Gunsmoke Gilly, that is a compliment,” answered Cid. He started to light a small cigarillo, only to have Rosa slap it out of his hands, vanished with a little wiggle of her fingers.

  “Old man, there have been some changes since you’ve been gone,” said Rosa. “No smoking.”

  “Aye. And I see you went ahead and finished the Dragonwell, despite my warnings,” said Cid. “And I hear you’re acquiring Alphonse too, after all’s said and done? What are you two planning after all this silliness, the rout of Buckingham Palace?”

  Rosa tried to find something interesting about the deck to stare at, but for once the ’Berry failed her. Length upon length of charms hung on her pipes and there was never a distracting bauble when one needed one.

  “Always contrary, Cid,” said Rosa, and grinned. It was a pleasant mask. The airship force they had assembled was relatively small, disorganized, and as a rule quick to temper. The Incognito had been slow to act against Mordemere, who had left Europe pocked and scarred. One madman was dangerous enough. Now they had a madman with corporate backing. Ortega had been very clear about that with Cid and Cezette. There was every reason to think there wouldn’t be anything left after.

  Perhaps sensing Rosa’s unrest, Cid’s wrinkles loosened the tiniest iota. He grumbled uncomfortably.

  “Not to say the idea of having automata isn’t a good one. Come with me.”

  In the ’Berry’s patched and creaking hull, the draft had been held back from Elric Blair’s workspace with sheets of sailcloth. Cid ducked under the first one, holding it up for Rosa and Cezette to pass through. Both women being of mechanical bent, the sight awaiting them drew a whistle from the helmswoman and a proud “Alors! Le chevalier revenant!” from Cezette.

  Alphonse’s knightly silhouette had grown wild and twisted. The only pieces they had been able to recover from the original machine was its sizable engine, and his frame with its accompanying black boxes. Those sat in sealed, bolted casings, squatting in Alphonse’s guts like malign tumors. Their very indestructibility seemed to have protected the machine from further damage. His handsome chromed armor was gone, hopelessly twisted. Lesser parts like arms and legs had been found utterly mauled or inseparable from the melted locomotive parts.

  From those dragon’s teeth they had regrown Alphonse into something jagged and square, a monstrous hulk that would
tower over the battlefield. His helm now sported a large under-bite, lending the automata an orc-like savageness. Cid had added a big, thick shield composed mostly of the dead locomotive’s cow-catcher.

  Hargreaves’ steel fellow was imposing enough, but it was the shadowed figure behind him that made Rosa turn and slap Cid amiably on the back. A second Gear.

  “There were enough parts left over. We’ll need all of these we can get,” answered Cid, shrugging. Grinning her inscrutable grin, Rosa turned to Cezette, who was running her hands over Alphonse’s new shield.

  “Do you know how to pilot an airship?”

  The young girl’s grin grew wider than the Seine.

  Station 15

  The Factory Floor

  Hargreaves had a faint recollection of an echoing tunnel, her wrists bound with rope, and the brisk clip of a hand cart or barrow. Soot on the air, metal pinging cool like a stopped locomotive. The Ghost Train was here, Hallow was here! Something rough banged up her knees. Blast! Batty-fanged and bound. That was the last clear thought before the veil of sleep fell over her again.

  When the drug haze finally wore off, Hargreaves found she had been lain out on a bed. The linens smelled clean. Also there actually were linens, so she wasn’t in a cell, or, thank God, one of the cages in their infernal manufactories. In fact the pillows had apparently been fluffed recently. Carefully, the inspector rose from the bed to give herself and the room a thorough search.

  The first thing she realized was that most of her weapons were gone. Whoever disarmed her had not found the knife tucked in the lining of her left boot, though they had taken it off and set the pair at the foot of the bed. She was fully clothed. Evidently her captors had some decency after all.