Beneath Ceaseless Skies #123 Read online

  Issue #123 • Jun. 13, 2013

  “Cold, Cold War,” by Ian McHugh

  “A Sixpenny Crossing,” by Don Allmon

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  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  COLD, COLD WAR

  by Ian McHugh

  Russia, 1921

  There was a tower at Petrovsk. A monstrous, broken-topped spike like the one the Allied forces had found at Astrakhan. Having to look up, even flying at two thousand feet, past the upper wing of his Avro biplane to see its top made Masaru dizzy. He groped for the small lump of the embroidered omamori amulet hanging from a cord around his neck. The other Avro, painted blue like his, followed as he banked into a wide downward loop, the Australian woman for once holding her proper station off his right wingtip.

  Masaru peered past the struts and wires between his biplane’s wings, trying to take the sight in. The tower’s proportions were such that it upset the perceptions and seemed to distort the flat landscape around it. Its base was a madman’s helter-skelter ziggurat, made of impossible stone blocks the size of townhouses, that cut a swathe across the city’s snow-covered grid of tenement blocks and terraces between the Caspian shore and the abrupt incline of the escarpment to the west. From the ziggurat’s peak, the ragged-toothed tower reached up to a dark stain of cloud fixed in the sky directly above.

  Just like at Astrakhan.

  Impossibly huge though it was, this tower was barely half the height of the one there. The realization brought Masaru back to his proper senses. Why the difference?

  He turned his attention to the city below. There was smoke coming from the ruined medieval fortress on the escarpment. There were more fires in the town itself. As at Astrakhan, stones from the tower lay scattered among the buildings, with ruin all about them as if they had fallen from its peak. The dome of the mosque, miniscule in the shadow of the impossible edifice, was cracked open like an egg.

  Red Bolshevik flags flew above the fortress. As Masaru and Edie swung low overhead, smoke puffed from the mouths of artillery pieces along the wall. Dirt and snow burst amidst a swarm of figures laboring up the slope. A pair of tanks crawled alongside the troops. White banners bearing the two-headed Imperial Russian eagle identified the attacking force.

  Masaru shook his head. Even with that tower in their midst, which made the rival Russian forces looked like ants warring in a man’s shadow, and even with shape-changing monsters running loose in their country—hordes of them, like those the Allied forces had driven at such cost from Astrakhan—still the Reds and Whites would rather fight each other.

  There were red Bolshevik and white Imperialist flags scattered too, among the roofs of the city’s buildings. There were many more in different shades of blue, with the common populace aping the color chosen by the Allies to declare their newfound neutrality in the war of Red and White. As the biplanes circled, bright blue banners unfurled from the twin minarets of the shattered mosque.

  Masaru’s loop took him away from the tower and the battle at the fortress towards the port and the Allied airfield. There was no sign of conflict on that side of the town. Indeed, both the port and the airfield seemed deserted. Masaru was disturbed to see that there were no vessels at the wharf, no planes parked at the airfield. He saw no movement near either. The queasiness returned to his stomach. Petrovsk airfield was base for two R.A.F. fighter squadrons and a large Allied garrison. Where were they?

  For the umpteenth time since they had flown out of Astrakhan, he scanned the sea to the east, hoping to see the ships of the Allied fleet already on their way north from Baku, bringing reinforcements for the next big push, inland along the Volga. The water was clear of anything but patches of floating ice, all the way to the horizon. He could feel the bulge of the dispatch wallet inside his jacket, with the urgent demands from the field commanders at Astrakhan for those extra divisions. Edie carried an identical set of papers—the normal contingency. One plane, at least, usually got through.

  He checked his rear left quarter, where her Avro was wobbling from side to side, out and back again, rather than holding a steady line at his wing. Masaru felt a surge of irritation. The woman flew like an undisciplined child kicking its heels. He still couldn’t believe they had given him a woman for a wingman. And an uncouth, irreverent, barely-civilized Australian adventurer woman at that!

  Abruptly, it occurred to him that she wasn’t waggling her wings idly. He realized his fist was bunched, about to punch the cockpit wall. Masaru took a slow breath, then throttled back to let her come alongside.

  She flew in close enough that he could see her shivering. Her scarf only covered her neck, and her cheeks were chapped raw, her lips a pale purple-blue.

  She pointed down at the airfield, then raised both palms. Should they land? Masaru chewed his lip in indecision. His eyes were drawn back to the tower, as by a magnet. He did not want to land anywhere near that monstrosity.

  They had no choice in the matter, regardless of his fears. Even with its added fuel tank where the trainee’s forward cockpit normally was, the Avro’s range was barely three hundred miles. Astrakhan to Petrovsk was over two-thirty, and it was another two hundred or so from Petrovsk to Baku. The dispatches had to get through to Baku.

  Finally, Masaru nodded. It seemed a forlorn hope that the Allied garrison wouldn’t have taken all the fuel stores with them when they abandoned their base. If they hadn’t, it meant they must have left in haste, perhaps even under attack, and then who knew what might be lurking down there. Swearing softly to himself, he pushed the Avro’s stick forward to begin his descent.

  * * *

  No-one emerged to meet them as Masaru taxied across to the airfield’s fuel shed. Leaving the engine running, he lifted himself up to perch on the back lip of the cockpit and looked around. The maintenance hangar stood open, the shadows within cavernously empty. Beyond the hangar, the door of the dispatch office was propped open against the wall. Nothing moved inside.

  There were footprints and tire marks all over. The snow was thin enough that the matted, frozen grass underneath showed through in the tracks. A refueling car was parked nearby.

  His eyes were drawn once again, unwillingly, to the tower, and up higher to the dark stain of cloud above it. Never had he imagined that such things could exist in the world. It reached up higher than any structure built by man. Impossibly high. The ragged tops of both towers and the scattered stones at their feet made it appear that they had been broken off, somehow. But by what means had either of them been built at all? Where had the stones come from, and how?

  And what was the link between these towers and the monsters—Changelings, as the Russian peasants called them—that had been emerging from Bolshevik territory for the past year?

  Once again, his hand was drawn to the omamori at his chest. His sister had given him one for protection against injury the first time he went away to war as a young man. She had sent him a new one every year since. He had always kept his promise to wear them, but mainly as a reminder of her. The tower’s baleful presence prompted him to wonder if he should write to ask her for an amulet to protect against supernatural harm, instead.

  Edie’s biplane taxied up beside his, the throttle cut and the propeller winding down. She was already out of the cockpit, hopping nimbly down onto the wing and hanging one-handed from a convenient strut, one foot swinging carelessly. Before the plane had stopped rolling, she jumped lightly down, her boots crunching on the snow.

  Masaru ground his teeth in exasperation. Circus pilot, he thought. He had heard she had been a wing walker in an American flying show before she’d come to Russia. He reached down to close his Avro’s t
hrottle. His ears rang as the roar of the engine wound down.

  “It’s quiet,” Edie said, sauntering over. “Where is everyone?” She took off her flying cap. Blonde curls spilled around her face, caught by the wind.

  Arrogant. Like most Allied personnel, Masaru kept his own head shaved to avoid lice and the threat of typhus they carried. He said, “What use are you if you break your leg performing childish stunts? We have a mission.”

  Her face registered surprise, then she put her fists on her hips, ready to argue.

  “We will not dally here,” Masaru continued. He jumped down on the opposite side of his plane. “You stand guard.”

  He paused before walking over to the refueling car and stooped to examine the tracks in the snow more closely. The uppermost prints were still crisp around the edges. Perhaps as recent as the day before. He stamped across to the refueling car, trying to work some feeling back into his legs. The stillness of the buildings—that should have been bustling with pilots and ground crew—was oppressive, the quiet broken only by the distant thud of artillery fire from the fort. Masaru undid the button of the holster at his hip, trying to ignore the nervous crawling sensation at the back of his neck.

  The drum on the tray of the refueling car sounded full when he knocked it and, for a miracle, the car’s engine turned over on the third attempt. Masaru gave it a bare handful of seconds to warm, then drove over to park between the biplanes.

  Edie had wandered off a short distance. She was at least treating the situation seriously enough to have her revolver in hand. But when Masaru turned around again after filling her Avro’s tanks, she had her jacket off and overalls down around her calves, squatting bare-arsed in the snow to piss.

  He averted his eyes quickly, his face heating. He cocked his fist at the fuel car door, stopped himself. Then, ever so carefully, he pressed his knuckles into the cold metal.

  Small arms crackled somewhere in the city, not far away. Masaru drummed his fingers impatiently as the fuel poured into his auxiliary tank. Two fighter squadrons and a garrison of British and American infantry had been based here. Where had they gone?

  Done at last, he drove the refueling car clear of the planes and tramped back across the snow.

  “Edie!” he called.

  She looked his way, shrugging herself back into her jacket, and raised an arm to point. “There’s someone over there, outside the fence.”

  “More reason for us to leave now,” Masaru said, not bothering to hide his impatience.

  “He’s wearing flying clothes.”

  “What?” Masaru looked.

  Sure enough, there was a lone figure outside the wire mesh of the airfield’s perimeter fence, facing them. Even at a distance, it was clear he was dressed as a flyer—leather cap, high boots, wool-collared leather jacket over padded flying overalls.

  There was something odd about the way the stranger stood, though—his shoulders hunched unnaturally, as if pulling too-long arms up into his jacket sleeves. His legs seemed strangely bent above his boots. Masaru squinted at the stranger’s grinning face.

  “Changeling!”

  The monster sprang forward. Inhumanly long forelimbs thrust from its sleeves. It bounded, ape-fashion, towards the fence, cackling like a hyena.

  Masaru scrabbled for his sidearm.

  The Changeling leapt at the fence, bouncing off the top of the wire and landing with an explosion of powdered snow. It charged, mouth split open from ear-to-ear to show needle teeth and a lolling black tongue.

  Edie raised her pistol two-handed and fired. The monster yelped, rolling. Masaru was amazed. A hit! Then it was up again, whooping and giggling, skittering side to side as it continued its charge. Edie fired again and missed. She held her ground, tracking its approach with her revolver.

  Masaru dashed forward, raising his own weapon as the monster sprang. He shoved in front of Edie and fired into its chest. The impact of the bullet sounded like a hammer striking wood. The Changeling was flung squealing backwards. Masaru was aware of Edie swearing. The Changeling thrashed its limbs to right itself and leapt at him again. Masaru aimed his pistol, too slow. A cloven-hoofed forelimb knocked it aside. He threw up his arms to protect himself, and the monster sank its teeth into his hand.

  For a moment they braced, arms and forelimbs locked. Masaru stared into its eyes, pinprick black pupils ringed by red and orange bands. Its breath on his face smelled of hot metal. There was nothing left of the man it might once have been. Edie stepped around him, put her pistol to the monster’s temple and pulled the trigger.

  The blast was deafening. The Changeling’s head snapped to the side, and stayed there. Its eyes glazed, and it slithered limply to the ground.

  Masaru’s ears felt stuffed with cotton wool. He stared in horror at his lacerated hand. The Russian peasants had named them Changlings after the hideous fairy children of their folk tales. The Reds’ Plague, the Whites called the affliction, the result of some germ or chemical cooked up in the Bolsheviks’ vile scientific experiments. Contagious, virulent as rabies, they said.

  Edie called something, but he couldn’t make out the words. He cast about for his pistol, spied it in the snow a few yards away, and staggered over to scoop it up.

  “Stop!” Edie cried as he began to lift the gun to his head. She smacked his wrist with the barrel of her pistol, sending shooting pain up his arm. His gun tumbled from his grasp once more.

  He stared at her in shock. How could she think of stopping him?

  “You won’t become one of them,” she said. “It’s not contagious.”

  He raised his injured hand for her to see, then waved it at the dead Changeling. “That was a man once!” He saw himself turning into another leering monstrosity, shook his head violently. “I will not—”

  “It was never a man!”

  “Then where do they come from?” he demanded.

  Her mouth opened, shut; answers started and discarded.

  The tower, Masaru thought. From that mad tower. But how? And where had the towers come from? His gaze was drawn up to the immobile patch of darker cloud above it.

  “I don’t know,” Edie said, at last. “But I’ve seen men bitten and they have not changed.”

  Masaru had, too—men injured in the bloodbath outside Astrakhan. Days later, still strapped to their hospital beds, they remained men, begging to be released from their bonds. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t change. Who knew how long it took? Most soldiers who were bitten killed themselves or were shot by their comrades. He imagined his body corrupting, his mind falling into madness.

  He lunged for his pistol. Edie kicked his knee, knocking his leg out from under him. Masaru went down with a yell. Edie scooped up the gun and backpedaled clear of him.

  “Enough,” she said.

  “Then you do it,” he spat, getting to his feet.

  “Who’s waiting for you?” she asked, abruptly.

  He scowled at her, confused by the question.

  “Who have you got at home?” she said. “A wife? Children?”

  Affronted by her presumption, he drew himself up. “I have a sister. She has children.”

  “You provide for them?”

  “Their father was a soldier,” he said, stiffly. “He died in Manchuria.”

  “And what will happen to them if you shoot yourself?”

  Masaru remained silent.

  There was a rolling boom from the escarpment—another salvo of artillery fire.

  Edie held up his gun. “Can I give this back to you, now?”

  Sullenly, he nodded. She tossed it onto the snow in front of him.

  “Stay out of my way next time. I don’t need you to save me,” she said. “Come on. There’ll be more of them, and we’re stuffed if they turn up in numbers before we get airborne.”

  * * *

  The wind at five thousand feet was burning cold. Masaru pulled his scarf up closer to his goggles. His legs were going stiff, his backside already numb from the cold and sitting in
the cramped cockpit.

  With a grimace, he forced the fingers of his injured hand to flex. Edie had doused the wound with gin from the bottle she kept in the cockpit of her plane, before binding it with a strip of cloth torn from Masaru’s shirttail. It throbbed abominably, the fingers stiff with cold and swelling.

  The injury to his pride from being saved by a woman—a gaijin woman—felt almost as painful as the injury to his hand.

  The fingers of his good hand twitched towards his neck. He hesitated, then grabbed at his scarf and pulled it loose. He opened the collars of his jacket and flight suit to get at the cord around his neck. Holding the flying stick between his knees, he wrapped the cord around his injured hand and gripped the omamori in his palm, clenching his fingers painfully around the little embroidered parcel. Through the swelling and his fleece-lined glove he could not even feel the wooden tokens inside, written with the prayers his sister had bought for his well-being.

  Was Edie right? Or was it just his own cowardice that had allowed her to convince him? The thought of becoming one of those... demons was just too much to bear. Why would the Changelings’ affliction be known as the Reds’ Plague, if it was not a contagion?

  He pushed down his doubts.

  Even if Edie was wrong, he told himself, he had time to complete the mission before the Plague took him.

  Their flight ceiling had lowered even further, the clouds darkening overhead. Lightning flashed from time to time deep within, although the thunder was lost in the engine’s roar. Just an ordinary storm. He hoped it wouldn’t break before they reached Baku.

  The peninsula should soon be in view, where stood the ancient Azeri capital, surrounded by its sprawling acres of oil wells, their pumpjacks nodding like a thousand iron birds dipping their beaks for water. Masaru squinted into the distance The clouds seemed to deepen and darken even further, funneling closer to the ground. Lightning stabbed earthward. One hell of a storm, Masaru corrected himself.

  There seemed to be a steep-sided silhouette, like a child’s drawing of a mountain, rising up to meet the descending storm. Masaru felt a deeper chill than the frigid air. He tried vainly to peer harder, uncertain if it was a trick of the gloom. Was their heading too far west, flying into the foothills of the Caucasus rather than skirting their eastern fringe?