by Kin S. Law
“Blasted pirates!” Gunsmoke Gilly’s voice drifted through the ether. “Get back here and finish the job!” The Remington had taken a blow to the screw, and limped along at the fringes of the chaos.
“Maybe those cowering bastards have bit off more than they could chew,” Rosa muttered through gritted teeth, though Gilly could not hear her. But the questionable morals of the Incognito could be called into doubt later. Something was happening.
As the Worm drew close to the shore, a shimmering flower bloomed from its flanks. One of their airships had plummeted into the Worm’s side, and its flaming death dealt a blow to the thing’s armor, ripping up the tracks underneath. When the smoke cleared, the Worm was motionless, just a train blasted off its rails once more: no chitinous surface, no warbling, sinuous movement. No cannon thunder. Just a big hole and boxcars lying on their sides.
“Magnifique! It is stuck! Derailed!” cried Cezette in the ’Berry.
The shock arrived a moment later, a thunderclap that shook the knick-knacks from the shelves. They were close, too close. It knocked Cezette Louissaint to the ground, despite her firmly braced legs. Dazed, the girl struggled to clear her head. She braced herself on a control panel, barely aware of the tempestuous chaos outside. Meanwhile the chatter of the ether was returning, this time filled with shouts of triumph.
“Cormorant! Wesson! Shelby! What? Shelby’s dead? Smith, take over!” Gunsmoke’s orders came fast and furious. “I want a tight banana on the rail gun!”
Cezette struggled to the viewport, the ship’s scopes shivering with Rosa’s violent piloting. It didn’t take long to sight Gunsmoke’s hastily assembled group of airships. They were aligned broadsides, the dull muzzles of steam cannon points that formed a flat crescent. Of course, with the Worm out of commission, the rail gun was the biggest threat. As one, the airships fired, briefly engulfing themselves in a cloud of white steam.
In true pirate fashion, the Incognito ships had little enough regard for human life. Their staccato of steam eruptions left the ears ringing and a score of rooftops on the ground gored through. Cezette covered her ears at the cacophonous whine of dozens of missiles soaring across the sky, leaving long trails of white steam.
Seconds later, ammunition exploded into orange and black plumes of incendiary bombs, engulfing the Tennessee Jack. The missiles were stuffed with cheap fuel packed into munitions canisters and lit with lucifer match heads crammed into the ends. They burned notoriously hot, and could melt chrome steel. The glimmering lines of Gatling fire immediately halted as groups of mercenaries burned to death.
Cheers went up over the ether dague until the leftmost point of Gunsmith’s crescent detonated in a purple fireball.
“Regroup! Regroup!” came the call of Gunsmith Gilly over the ether. But it was perhaps too late, as most of the Incognito forces were either destroyed or run away. The ether was strangely quiet when moments before it was full of people running about, crying out when the ships were hit; the sounds of war.
Then, suddenly, there was an altogether different sound over the ether dague and Cezette, at least, knew it wasn’t just war any more.
“They’re coming out of the breach!”
“What are they doing? That one, it’s picking somebody up!”
“Oh god, its eating them!”
At first Cezette could not believe her eyes, let alone the horrified voices at her ear. She dashed forward, leaning against the deck, her fingers gripped white at the knuckles. A corsair streaked past, crumbling into a meteor shower of smoke and flame.
“Oh move! Please move!” she cried. But when the ship fell away so did Cezette, horrified. On the ground, the Worm had been derailed about a mile from the Tennessee Jack. Where once the silver length of the train had lain, crippled, now the ground was alive with moving, terrible things. Cezette did not want to look, but she knew, somehow that she must, and when she did, she saw an army of clockwork spiders, of scorpions, of things that had no natural analogue that swept across the city. It was as if the Worm had been disgustingly pregnant, and now it was birthing these clacking, scrabbling things from its side in a swarming wave.
And yes, they were eating people.
“They are…indiscriminate,” whispered Cezette. She almost wished the ’Berry’s scopes functioned less admirably, her windows less clean. Young or old, suits or rags, women and children…the army’s appetite could not be satiated. It was even eating the men paid to defend it, as it reached the rear car of the Tennessee Jack.
The recovering mercenaries turned their guns on the wave of death swarming up their hill, and the barrel of the Jack itself turned too, far too slowly to be of any use. The city slowly succumbed to the army of horrors, its picturesque houses crumpling before the wave of metal. Horror of horrors, the creatures were even righting the Worm itself, and soon there was a terrible whistling that could be heard throughout the bay. All aboard! This train was headed to hell.
“Cezette.” Rosa’s voice cut through the fugue as if it were a church bell.
“Oui! I am…all right,” answered the girl. Her hands shook at the controls, but she could still grip them.
“Good. I’ll need you to take the ship now,” said Rosa, placing Cezette into the helmsman’s chair. She buckled the girl in.
“Now?” protested Cezette.
“It is wrecking the city…and Albion and I need this city,” said Rosa. Cezette looked at her quizzically, but Rosa merely smiled. “Now take his ship, and I’ll see about carving Hallow a new privy hole. He’s wrecking that chocolate factory down there. Where else will Albion take me once all this is over?”
And before Cezette could protest, the helmswoman was gone, leaving the bridge empty save for Cezette and the screaming in the ether.
At the edge of the city, Albion was finally getting the hang of the trolley.
“And on your right, behold San Francisco’s iconic Chinatown, currently full of fleeing locals. Hello locals!” he said over the miraculously functioning speaker horn. For good measure, he gave the bell a couple of rings. Then the tracks veered violently, and everyone in the car clung to the rails. If they didn’t, they’d be thrown through the trolley’s open entryways. Mostly the tourists aboard had come to terms with the hijacking, as it seemed like they were avoiding the worst of the burning things falling out of the sky.
“Good God!” one clearly devout old woman cried. “You’re leading us back towards the fire!”
“I left something back there!” answered Albion.
“There! The dragon arch! I see its tail!” said Vanessa Hargreaves, just a hair’s breadth beside him.
Albion saw it too, the commemorative dragon that had been built to honor the Chinese rail workers. It meant Dragonwell was close. With his free hand, he slipped Victoria out of her belt, tumbling the pistol to cock the hammer. A snap and a bang later, the trolley rolled on a new track.
“But that’s impossible…” said Hargreaves, gaping at the hole resting dead center in the switch. Albion knew it, too, in an uncanny way. That tiny piece of lead could not have shifted the heavy switch. Perhaps, if it had been teetering on the brink, or rusted through in a particular component…but Albion knew it wasn’t so.
Just like the bus that had broken down conveniently by the road so they could get to the city, and the trolley sitting abandoned on its ring, ripe for the taking. Maybe those things had been someone behind the scenes, helping them along. But maybe that was one too many coincidences for any secret society. More likely it was the aeons, those mysterious particles that suffused their world like particles of sun-bright dust filtering through a window.
Albion himself, having briefly been enveloped in the cloud of aeons known as the Laputian Leviathan, and he knew the aeon effects better than most. He had had an aeon crystal embedded inside his shoulder. Even now the particles seemed to gather about him like a cloud of peevish, fickle fairies. Aeons were useful, certainly, but they made Albion nervous sometimes. If a few pebbles of aeon stone could lift an
airship, what could lots of them do?
But perhaps it was already a moot point. The aeons had been behaving strangely ever since Mordemere’s false Leviathan exploded in the night sky over Europe. Pirates had been eking out more and more from their lift compounds, flying higher, steaming harder. Arc energies whirled through cities. The steam age was pulsing with aeons like blood in the veins.
Following the scales of the dragon, it was easy to get to San Francisco’s Chinatown. They put the trolley in the hands of a freeman old woman, who was a surprisingly adept driver. .
Albion and Hargreaves set off through the streets, the rolling thunder of destruction a quaking backdrop behind them. The peaked roofs glowed orange with firelight. Albion wondered if Hargreaves found the city alien, its colorful streets inhospitable. Labyrinthine. The word’s rounded syllables seemed appropriate, calling up the rusty, dripping corners of Kowloon. That had been a true warren, its passages warped and narrowed, its turns sharp enough to cut. In places the feng shui of the place demanded a narrowing of the walls, funneling one into a space not large enough for a dog to pass. It was not uncommon to find a corpse trapped in those crevices, let alone a monster. San Francisco’s Chinatown was just like a labyrinth flattened and poured over the hills, but within these hills there were real monsters. Albion felt it in his bones.
Once in those narrow, deserted market streets, it was easy to trace the scent back to the park where they had left Dragonwell. But nothing could prepare them as they rounded a corner and found themselves in a hail of crossfire, dust rising in lines that nearly cut Albion’s toes off.
“Down, blast it, down!” Of course, it was Hargreaves and her police training that saved the day. She pushed Albion roughly against a hawker’s stall. Dry almond biscuits rained on them in a crumbly deluge, but they were safe from bullets behind the solid cinder blocks someone had appropriated to build the damn thing.
“What is it?” Albion asked, as Hargreaves peeked over the top of a block. He listened to the regular chatter of the weapons, the heavy thud of the bullets tearing up the street. “Hell. Mercenaries.”
“Oh bollocks, what’s got them so jumpy?” cried Hargreaves. Even for paid guns, they were hot on the trigger. Something had them spooked.
A deafening boom sounded. The sudden clap clipped the steady sound of bullets neatly in half. Opaque clouds of cinder dust drifted through like wandering ghosts. Then the gunfire began anew, only not at them. Albion crawled to the edge of their little pocket of safety, and poked his head above the stall. He could just see through his goggles and the dusty air a suggestion of thick, chitinous legs.
Mercenaries were shooting at the legs, picked out in unadorned dark uniforms. Albion began to count the number of the chitinous legs before realizing there were lots of them, too many to count. Red splotches stained their various limbs, tinged here and there horribly with scraps of cloth. It was easy in that changed, misty street, to think them something fallen out of a rip in the world.
“We have to go. We have to go now!” hissed Albion.
“Where?” asked Hargreaves.
“Dragonwell! Where else? There seems to be something very appropriate in which to sheathe your Majesty’s royal pricker.”
“You insufferable! Oh, you mean the sword.”
They picked their way through the street from cover to cover. The troops seemed to have weaned off their attack, occasionally taking potshots answered by the walloping boom and sizzle of steamthrowers. Ghastly, and all too familiar.
As they ran, Albion couldn’t help but wonder. Where had the monsters come from? What did they want? The Ghost Train was here, he could feel it. Aeons? Something much darker. Something old, and rotten, like a bitter, festering cesspool.
They reached the play park, tripping over the merry-go-round as they went. Albion turned to shoo a wayward child away from the oncoming storm and missed Hargreaves clambering up Dragonwell’s knee and into his cockpit. Before he knew it, the lumbering bulk of canvas and enameled steel was nearly atop him, dragging the sword A Contrario out of its canvas wrapping. In the dust, it was like watching a highland warrior emerge out of the mist, claymore in hand- especially because the blasted blade couldn’t get more than a foot off the ground.
“It’s too heavy!” Albion was more worried for Hargreaves than for Dragonwell. If Hallow’s host saw her!
The first of them appeared almost right at the entrance to the playpark. Up close, Albion saw thick mandibles, and the long, tapered limbs ending in neat pads. It was built on the lines of a hunter-killer, a species of spider that regularly killed birds or small mammals- Albion had nearly had his nose chewed off by one in Brazil. It would lay in wait, and when the prey of choice appeared, it would propel itself in any direction on its spring-like legs and crush its prey with powerful jaws. He had a terrible, sinking feeling that whoever designed it had a similar plan for this metal beastie.
Before Albion could do anything, the hunter-killer leaped for Dragonwell, its splayed legs snapping it forward in a violent arc. It launched itself like a very ugly trebuchet, dripping mandibles snapping together as if magnetized. For a moment it hung there, motionless, ready to sink its fangs into Dragonwell’s neck and the vulnerable Vanessa Hargreaves inside. And then it stopped, as if it had hit an invisible wall surrounding the play park. Its legs scrabbled for purchase, its eyes swirling madly.
By chance, the sword A Contrario was in an upswing, Hargreaves bringing the heavy length of steel out in an underhanded arc. At the peak of its parabola, the sword seemed to weigh no more than a tree branch. Its point caught the hunter-killer, and cut through like the creature’s armor was butter, straight into what would have been the abdomen of a real spider. Then Dragonwell fell back, the hilt bracing against the ground, and the sword slipped through the back of the monster with no more difficulty than poking a piece of paper.
Something screamed, and Albion could not see what it was. There was only the flailing arms of the wretched thing, stuck like a pig, Thick limbs banged on Dragonwell’s tricorn head, scratching the paint, but doing no real damage. Albion dove, rolling under a leg that reduced a set of swings to rubble. Ichor washed out of it, a black filth rupturing from the hunter killer’s abdomen. A rank smell filled the air, both metallic and rotten, like sour cheese and old pennies.
Then the creature went still, the tips of its legs folding quietly to its thorax, dying without any more fuss. The thing had barely given up the ghost before the sound of many feet drummed from around the corner. Albion began to run toward Dragonwell, which now knelt motionless on the ground.
“Hargreaves! Hargreaves! Wake up, damn it! There’s more of them coming!” But there was only the thrum of feet that left no tracks, in that ruined children’s playpen.
The ’Berry was still far too injured to participate in the battle, but Cezette kept her close enough to watch San Francisco unfold into crimson flowers. Whole neighborhoods folded away as the Worm crawled its way forward, flattening the buildings, plucking up the fleeing personages and feeding them into its star-shaped mouth. It had long since left the tracks, traveling instead on the backs of its clattering brood.
A quiet burst of orange fire interrupted the eternal blue sky of the California morning, a sun being born five-hundred yards off their port bow. The corpse of a downed ship spun into view, gored through by the Grimaldi high in the air. Death was a beautiful thing, slow red lilies against a lapis backdrop, but the voices sounding through the ether underscored the confusion and pain aboard the Incognito’s ships.
“What hit us?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“Get to the bloody launches!”
“The launches are on fire!”
The vibrating ether dague nearly plucked itself from its mount in the compass deck with the urgency of its keen. Soon enough those frantic voices gave way to true screams as the fired hulk dropped out of the sky. Cezette watched the ship dip below the waves, vanishing into the San Francisco Bay. Sapphire fla
shes lit the water, dying breaths of the ship’s engines, lighting the salt water beneath.
The other ships took up the position, maintaining a more or less constant barrage against the Grimaldi, and the Worm, and the host below when given a chance. Having run out of proper shells years ago, the pirates’ ammunition consisted mainly of unpleasant things packed in ham-cans. Their impromptu shells traced a parabola arc to shatter in clouds of flammable tar, glass, rusted tea-tins, anything that would leave a mark.
The Grimaldi raised its eldritch limbs occasionally to deal devastating retribution. Only the thick shieldships at the fore offered some protection, but those oases of sky was taken up by injured dirigibles. Once a ship left the safety of the thick shield, they fell from the sky as easily as kites in a crosswind. The shieldships lit up in flares of blue, rivers of molten steel running from their prow as the hands gestured at them like a magician’s flourish. Cezette took the ’Berry low, and the crew tossed knotted lines overboard for floundering aeronauts to climb. It was more prudent to keep moving, but Cezette knew every moment counted—there were many taken to the sky who had never learned to swim. She took up the speaking horn, directing Cockney Alex, Elric Blair and Cid Tanner to the worst cases.
“There, that man! He is going to be dragged under!” She pointed the airship’s prow toward the keel of a downed corsair beginning to sink below the waves. There was an aeronaut heroically battling the drag of the sinking ship, but already his limbs had stopped making a difference before physics. Cezette had nearly given up hope when the ether dirk trembled a reassuring cry—Rosa’s voice!
“Don’t worry your pretty little head,” Rosa’s voice tittered. “I’ve got him.”