Beneath Ceaseless Skies #143, Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2 Read online

  “The Goddess brigade is going to shoot the works, Pop, and they’re willing to sacrifice the arsenal to do it. I hope to Heaven you hate those rebel bastards as much as you say you do.”

  I handed him the railgun. A leap of faith? What the Hell, we were dead men anyway.

  He looked at me, then checked to see if the gun was charged. It was. “I already fired on you twice, son. How do you know I won’t try again?”

  “I don’t.”

  Something twinkled in his eye. He took the gun. I knelt and gathered our field gear.

  Shouts and the characteristic belches of taurgs in the grip of battle-frenzy rose outside. An incendiary charge ignited the barn’s eastern wall, followed by another from the south. That was it, then.

  The New Earth Alliance had sentenced us to death.

  Linus ran to the nearest door and swung it open, railgun up. Two of the contingent from Dun Aenghus were running in, too close, no more than twenty-five yards away.

  “Highwaymen!” The rebels flew backward in the railgun’s blast, all gore and shredded pulp from the necks up. “This is my home, damn you! I’ll see you in Hell afore I let you take it!”

  Return shots echoed from the wheat field. Hollis Foley cried out, unable to do a thing.

  A side door swung open. Two men and a Gamhanid rushed in through the transition, a woman close behind. The taurg was Deputy g’Gompta from Glencolumbkille. We fired simultaneously. I picked off the first two rebels, but g’Gompta shot the Peacemaker from my hand before I could re-aim.

  “Step away from the fire, Regulator,” he said, his keg-sized sidearm pointing at my face. “I prefer meat that’s raw.”

  Another shot cracked. Blood and vivid blue scales sprayed from g’Gompta’s chest. He spun, and the woman behind him fired again.

  “Stick a sock in it, Kuhl.” She stood there panting for breath, then whipped off her hat and cloak.

  It was Constable Eliza Gilhooley.

  “Mother have mercy, I hated that toady son of a bitch,” she said, wiping perspiration from her eyes.

  I retrieved the Remington and pulled her inside the door, ready to crush the gun in her hand if need be. “Turning your coat, young lady?”

  “We’ve been watching Brome for more than a month now. I think the Archbishop is up to his todger in this as well. Chief Carmody didn’t know who to trust.”

  “You trust me?”

  “I like your sensibilities.”

  Damnation, girl, I thought. Yours aren’t so bad either.

  More gunfire popped alongside the scream of sound-cannons. Then realization hit me. “You were the voice in Dun Aenghus. The one who ansibled into my head.”

  Eliza reloaded her sidearm with impressive speed. “I could only send the one burst before you pan-fried all communications with those fancy rounds. You’ve been on your own since then.”

  Big surprise there. “You do know you’ve walked into a deathtrap.”

  “Not that I reckon.” Her eyes sparkled in the firelight. “You’re the Hero of New Philadelphia.”

  The flames rose faster now, lapping at the rafters, ready to drop down through the slate tiles and into the loft. Linus’s thunderbacks were panicking, slamming the stalls with their mighty hooves, the galumphers and Foley’s lizard Dejah along with them.

  “We have to get the animals out of here,” Eliza said.

  “No. Just keep them away from the walls.”

  “What—”

  “Do it, girl.”

  “Caul, you bastard!” Foley cried. “Let me go!”

  Something caught his eye. I couldn’t discern what it was from my position and didn’t have time to focus telescopically. He pulled the razor wire taught and slid out on the barn floor, reaching desperately through dirt and straw.

  Alarms should have been sounding in Myddleham by now, but help wouldn’t arrive in time. I met Plio as he climbed the cellar stairs and almost stepped on the Edison-field projector he’d set there. Cloth-insulated cables were spliced into the exposed wardstone in its core, coiling down into the secret room beneath us.

  He’d stripped off his ruined shirt and waistcoat to accommodate a second pair of arms that sprouted beneath the first. Each carried a heavy crate retrieved from the rebels’ stash, and a grenade launcher was slung over one of his four shoulders. His movement was sluggish, labored.

  “Where’ve you been?” he huffed. He set the crates down and absorbed the new arms back into his torso.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Rallying the troops.”

  I grabbed the launcher, a sawed-off monster of a contraption reinforced with magnetick accelerators that could hurl a projectile to Hell and back. The first crate held the launcher’s power supply and feeder cables. The other crate held the bombs.

  Tesla-bombs, configured for use with the grenade launcher. Just looking at them made the biological half of my brain ache.

  Plio connected the launcher’s power couplings to the battery core. I snapped open the breechblock, fumbling one-handed; slid a bomb inside and locked down the impellor coils. Calculating the trajectory arc was simple. There wasn’t any. A clean ninety degrees off the horizon, straight up. I snapped the breech closed.

  Done.

  Timbers groaned above us. This was going to be too damned close. A two-inch Tesla had an annihilation radius of three hundred yards, plus or minus.

  I set this one to blow at one-twelve.

  Gilhooley threw blankets over the animals’ eyes and pulled them away from the burning walls. Plio saw her for the first time.

  “She’s the cavalry,” I said.

  “Of course she is. I can barely contain my glee.”

  “Pop!” I called. “Front and center! Plio, go unlock the deputy.”

  Only then was it apparent what Foley had done.

  He’d retrieved Linus’s shackles, the pair I’d tossed aside. He sat hunched over the heavy bands, their casings jimmied open, flipping toggles and switches in the exposed electricks with the pin of his badge.

  “Hollis!”

  A sharp metallic click. The lock to his own restraints snapped open. He untangled himself from the razor wire, grabbed Plio’s unattended Emancipator, and ran before I could stop him.

  Rebel fire had Linus trapped under the loft, pinning him there between two widening rifts in the wall. Foley shouted and knocked him out of the way. He rose to one knee and raked the fields with the luminiferous carbine again and again, tears streaming down his dirty face.

  More railgun blasts, whines from heat-rays and Gatling Torches, chunks of the rafters vaporizing above our heads. Caines staggered in, turning to pump iron rounds through gaps in the spreading flames.

  “Plio, take over,” I said. “Hollis! With me!”

  Foley appeared a moment later, racing around the wheels of Caines’s buckboard, Emancipator in hand.

  “They’ve got more Immolators out there! Agent Caul, what do we do?” Foley saw the open case of Tesla-bombs and skidded to a stop. “Oh, shit.”

  Gilhooley appeared behind him, pressing her gun to his back, but she didn’t fire. If Foley was going to act against us, he’d have done so by now.

  Then I heard it, a deep and distant bellow that only I could detect.

  “Into the cellar, people,” I said, the steady tone of my words edged with as much urgency as I dared without inciting panic. “Drop everything. Hurry.”

  “Dammit, son!” said Caines, hacking smoke and black soot. “I ain’t clearin’ off now.”

  “We’re saving your life, Pop! Do it!”

  The bellow returned, loudly now, the sound and the thing that created it, straight out of any rational being’s nightmare.

  “Romulus—”

  The silhouettes rose with purpose beyond the flames and above the valley’s opposite ridge—one at first, then followed closely by two more in regimented formation. War-Machines.

  Umbran War-Machines.

  “Sweet Mother Earth...” Eliza said.

  The machines lurc
hed forward with great herculean strides down the hilly slope and onto Linus’s fields, the land rumbling with each step. Most of the rebels pulled back and established themselves in new positions, though a great many dropped their weapons in abject terror and fled altogether.

  I shouted above the clamor. “Kind of hard to hide one of those monsters in that secret lair of yours, eh, Deputy?”

  “I didn’t know! I swear Agent Caul, I didn’t know.”

  As so many of Mankind’s automatons had been constructed to mimic the human form, so too did Umbra’s conveyances bear a singular resemblance to its own native physiology: the pivoting hood-like head, writhing tentacles, the five towering legs. Mortars of various weights were slung within the leviathans’ coiled appendages, as was an Immolator cannon (one for each) of truly disquieting proportions.

  The lead War-Machine fired one of its mortars, twice, in loud concussive pulses of smoke and chemical flame. Two drums came whining in and popped open when they hit the ground next to barn; one in front, the second along the western wall.

  Immediately upon exposure to the damp soil and light, vines of crimson-strangler grew and spread, entwining the barn walls, snapping boards in their coils.

  “The cellar, now!”

  The barn’s nearest wall ripped open in the grip and weight of the Umbran vines. Bullets streaked through the debris, vectoring wildly. Four rounds struck me sidelong and shredded my garments, then two more, ricocheting off my armored mass.

  One of them nailed Caines.

  He spun and fell, the railgun thrown from his hands.

  “Linus!” screamed Foley.

  Gilhooley dove and crawled to Caines’s aid.

  I hugged the dirt floor, Peacemaker drawn, bright azure bursts flashing through gaps in the thickening vines. I couldn’t see worth shit because of the blood flowing into my eyes. X-ray alchemics would have been nice.

  Another drum crashed through the wall and fell into the animal stalls, releasing its payload of crimson-strangler. The vines quickly engulfed the stalls from the inside, twining up support columns and over bales of hay.

  Plio lurched forward, trying to get to Foley. “Deputy! Get down!”

  But the boy held his position, backlit by the flames, red fire lancing from the Emancipator in his bleeding hands.

  “It isn’t every day a man finds out he’s been living a lie,” he shouted. “Don’t worry, sir! Do what you have to while you still can.” He stepped up the firepower, determination burning in his eyes like windows into the great lamp of the Sun.

  “Hollis, get down!” Eliza yelled. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t argue with him!” I told her. “Plio, move!”

  Between us, Foley and I cleared a path through the mass of stranglers to the trap door. Plio leapt, stretching out of the way as the beam from a Gatling Torch tore through the space where his chest had been. He hit the floor rolling into a red-and-black ball and dove head first into the hole.

  “I’m sorry about the girl, Agent Caul,” Foley said over the roaring weapons. “I swear I am.”

  I squeezed off two final bursts and grabbed the grenade launcher with my good hand.

  “Plio! Let’s go, brother!”

  The War-Machines ceased their forward movement and fired their Immolator cannons in unison. The barn roof blew off its rafters.

  A sickening groan rumbled above us as the roof deck fell. Burning wood and red-hot chunks of slate crashed down one by one. Floorboards buckled and snapped.

  “Plio!”

  “NOW!” he shouted.

  This is for Kavita, you shitheaded bastards.

  I raised the launcher straight up and fired.

  The Edison-field snapped into place, drowning out three final gunshots, three rocketing pieces of high-density death.

  Hollis Foley shouted and leapt between me and the breach in the wall.

  The Tesla-bomb hurtled upward at nine hundred and ninety yards per second.

  Three bullets hit Foley square in the chest.

  Eliza covered Linus with her body and shielded his eyes.

  The air above us shimmered gray-on-gray.

  The bomb soared upward as the Edison-field solidified into an impenetrable dome.

  Up through the collapsing foldbox into the clear Gamhanid sky.

  Foley crashed into me, blood spraying behind him.

  One hundred and twelve yards above the ravaged countryside, the Tesla-bomb detonated.

  Whitehole.

  The fury of Creation flashed through the zero-point in the heart of the device. The farmhouse and everything around it burned in one incandescent stroke. Metals boiled away. Rebel flesh and machinery vanished in the blast of unchecked aetheric might.

  The shock wave slammed downward like a divine hammer smiting the sins of the World. The ground dropped out beneath us and rebounded back again, throwing us so hard we sailed off the floor.

  Something smashed into the back of my head, and infinite darkness, the Deep between Worlds, swallowed me whole....

  * * *

  Chapter 7

  The End of Things, the Beginning of Others

  We shut off the Edison-field once the temperature outside had cooled to a tolerable level. The barn was gone, as were Linus’s cottage and fields. Molten ribs of steel marked where the grain transports had been, and misshapen skeletons were all that remained of the War-Machines. Hot ash smoldered for hundreds of yards in every direction.

  Government aerocraft and an ambulance were waiting for us, some parked upon the gray gouge that was the road to Myddleham, others circling about in tight orbits overhead. Johanna and the Victory’s physicians were present coordinating the mop-up with Executive Chief Carmody, though, as expected, Johanna was more than mildly annoyed that I still remembered her private command code.

  Kavita Patel’s body was easily found once the glamour was no longer operational. It was taken back to Whitehall for autopsy and closure with the grieving family.

  Royal Marines from Albion stormed onto Gamhanrhide en masse and rooted out the remaining New Earth cells. There were actually very few. The Goddess rebellion turned out to be a fanatic but small percentage of the orb’s population. And true to form, the Umbrans had vanished without a trace, which came as a surprise to no one.

  The real surprise came from Great Albion with the arrests of Parliament’s third- and fourth-ranking delegates representing the Earther Brethren, who were in fact the first- and second-ranking masterminds who’d conspired with Umbra-Nine.

  Linus Caines was admitted to hospital in Glencolumbkille, more from emotional trauma than the gunshot that had clipped his shoulder blade. The doctors determined that he’d been drugged repeatedly to forget any rebel goings-on he might have witnessed on or about his property. He wept over the loss of his beloved home, then vowed to build another once he’d recovered.

  Hollis Foley held on for twelve days. The bullets that were meant for me hit high in his chest, bounced off the collar bone and grazed his heart. Unlike mine, his body would not accept mechanical replacements. Even medical thaumaturges from Morcades were unable to intercede in any lasting capacity. He died this morning.

  Everything has gone back to normal, although “normal” in the Aspects is a highly subjective conceit.

  And Special Agent Plio Plio Ah is still plucking buckshot from his metamorphic ass.

  Myself, I’ve a lot of thinking to do.

  It’s easy to footnote Kavita’s death as simply a cruel act of fate. But the chain of events that came to pass after she’d died led to the prevention of even more death on a horrific scale, untold thousands who would have been lost if the Goddess movement had gone to war. All because she’d stopped to pick a handful of flowers. Is that a sacrifice she would have made willingly? Damned if I know.

  I’d told Foley not to sacrifice himself for an ideal. But what does that say about the generations of men and women, human and not, who’d lifted the Instrumentality up into the Heavens and set out to conquer
the whole of Creation?

  Perhaps Linus Caines is such a man. Never in my life have I cared for anything as much as he treasured his home. And to protect it he was more than willing to die, an ideal shared body and soul by a believer named Hollis Foley, Junior.

  Earthers.

  I still can’t fathom it. Hell, maybe I’m the exotic and Plio the true human. Then again, having a clockwork soul is better than wondering whether or not you’ve got a soul at all. I think I’ll get my immunities shored up again, for good this time, and spend the rest of my leave on Gamhanrhide—wyverns notwithstanding. There’s an old man I need to see about rebuilding a farmhouse.

  They say home is a spiritual place. They may be right, at that.

  Copyright © 2014 Dean Wells

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Dean Wells’s short fiction has appeared in Ideomancer, Eldritch Tales, ShadowKeep Magazine, 10Flash Quarterly, and The Nocturnal Lyric, as well as multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and he is a member of SFWA. Visit him online at www.darkapostle.net.

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  COVER ART

  “Sojourn,” by Ferdinand Dumago Ladera

  Ferdinand Dumago Ladera is an acclaimed artist born in Iligan, the city of waterfalls, situated in the southeastern part of the Philippines. He was trained and received a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at FEATIUniversity in Manila, Philippines. He has a diverse background as a fine artist, graphic designer, and photographer. He specializes in fantasy and science-fiction illustration. View more of his work at his website, ferdinandladera.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press

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