Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

From back inside the city came a jarring screech. Daunt turned to see a pair of gigantic cannons being pulled down the translucent streets, a caterwauling rising from their steel wheels, eight on either side of their recoil carriages. Articulated barrels stretched over ninety feet, with each of the red-tipped shells following in a long ammunition train standing taller than Daunt. These two giant artillery pieces were clearly of the city rather than the Court, the barrels raised on hydraulic struts with carriages constructed to be anchored on steel turntables waiting either side of the gates. Shrine keepers walked backwards in front of the rumbling monstrosities, swinging globes of scented oil and tossing holy liquid and blessings over the advancing gunnery. The antique artillery pieces were every bit a match for the ornamentation crafted into the Advocacy war cruisers halted outside the thermal barrier. Both barrels gleamed evilly as dragonhead jaws, angelic-winged women coiled around each piece, while their wheels turned as gargoyles with grinning, leering metal teeth as spokes.

Morris cursed and one of the Nuyokian soldiers on the line clapped Morris’s back between the shoulder blades. ‘Is Santo Ruidoso and Santa Bocainfierno, yes? They speak for the city today.’

‘It’s not those two howitzers that worry me, it’s the automatics you got manning them.’ He pointed to the chains being used to haul the pair, each the weight of anchor chains and borne by thirty to forty metal forms lugging the tonnage forward. It was more of the same automatics the Court set to work in their volcano’s gas mine, the hulking machine-men — as large as they were — clearly straining against the mass of the town’s artillery.

‘Who better to pull those two brutes?’ said Daunt.

‘The cardinal rule of soldiering,’ said Morris. ‘You never bring automatics within a mile of real battle. They haven’t got the brains for it, see.’

Daunt frowned. ‘I believe you’ll find the steamman knights would beg to differ on that point.’

‘I’m not talking about King Steam’s lads,’ said Morris. ‘I’m talking about the kind of automatic that clank fresh out of a Kingdom mill with the badge of one of our industrial lords stamped across its shiny bum-cheeks. You can train their kind to simple tasks with enough repetition, but stick them in a fighting regiment and as strong and as armoured as they be, you’ll end up with as many casualties on your own side as the enemy’s.’ He pointed to the creations setting up the cannon. ‘Rely on them as loaders and they’ll be fine for a few shots, until one of ’em has a funny turn. Before you know it, a shell will be slotted in nose facing down-ways rather than up-ways, followed by an explosion that’ll tear the gates off the town walls. Every few years you get some green-arsed colonel that sets up a battalion of automatics, promising a revolution in warfare. They’re usually cashiered out after the steamers have bayoneted a few too many of our own side’s redcoats, that’s if the officer’s pretty head hasn’t been sabred off by one of his automatics.’

The Nuyokians had obviously reached the same conclusion as Morris. As soon as the two cannons were nestling behind the walls, their barrels raised over the battlement like metal giraffe necks, the automatics lined up and marched back down the streets towards the volcano. Human artillery crews swarmed over to crew the weapons. Daunt looked up at the volcanic slopes of the Isla Furia. Somewhere up there, Boxiron was recovering in the Court’s healing tank. Still oblivious to the world and the turn of events that had brought the forces of an entire nation hammering on the walls the steamman and Daunt had taken refuge behind.

It didn’t take long for the city’s two cannons to add their fury to the fusillade from the Court’s volcano launchers, the length of the barrels recoiling back along their pneumatic segments, shortening as the great guns rocked on their carriages. They sucked in the air after each ear-splitting shot, dozens of the gunnery crew mounting the ramparts’ steps with hand pumped water hoses and spraying down water that sizzled and turned to steam along the length of the pieces. Nuyok’s long-guns sounded more like instruments of war than the mock eruption from the volcano, but the flowers of destruction that blossomed among the distant fleet was distinctly less impressive than the savage impact of the Court’s hidden launchers. Still, the artillery crews cheered wildly, while all along the ramparts the armed citizenry joined in, hollering and waving their rifles in the air.

Hovering above the volcano’s slopes, the squadron of aerospheres turned as if tracking something. The reverberation of a darkship clapped above their ears in the sky while the weapon assemblies beneath the Court’s airships traded electrical lightning between their dishes, a web of burning energy traced in the air above the city. The darkship passed through the lattice, a second later shattering into an explosion of waxy fronds, leaving the air above the lake filled with smoking, drifting strips of an oily dark substance. Boxiron created a similar effect when he held his monthly bonfire of all the newssheets and periodicals which Daunt subscribed to.

There was a second clap, another darkship operating in the air, this one flying underneath the web of deadly energies cast by the Court’s globular airships. At first Daunt thought the darkship had been affected by its proximity to the energy web, its mantaray shape diving into the lake’s waters. But it regained a semblance of control and skimmed out towards the distant harbour gate, bouncing like a tossed stone and clearing the inlet before ricocheting off the sea and back into the sky. In its wake, Daunt saw the evidence of the curious cargo it had deposited before fleeing. A slick of pollution bubbling to the lake’s surface, followed by a bobbing school of egg-shaped objects, each constructed of the same inky substance as the darkship.

‘That thing’s laid some spawn,’ said Morris.

‘Bob my soul, but I believe you are right,’ noted Daunt.

The slick crawled up towards the shore of the basin, forming an unctuous crescent in the corner of the lake. The eggs appeared to be rolling towards land. As they touched down on solid ground, they each sprouted six pincering legs and the rise of the volcano turned dark at the foot of the shore. The Isla Furia’s queer invaders were moving up through the beard of tropical woodland and into the crevices of the mountain. Swooping downwards, the Court’s squadron of aerospheres came in to investigate, their weapon assemblies rotating as they dived, preparing to lash this peculiar black army of fist-sized marching spheres with the energies stored in the airships’ capacitors. A hideous screeching sounded from the little eggs as the airships plunged to fifty feet above the shoreline.

Where have I heard that infernal sound before? Then it came to Daunt. Inside the crystal machine of the sea-bishops when they were attempting to plunder his memories. It was a hideous murdered baby noise, far worse than fox baying. With a sudden flurry of explosions, the eggs that were still bobbing in the inky pool on the lake rocketed upward, breaching the fuselage of the Court’s squadron of aerial vessels. The aerospheres began to twist and judder, a flight of birds that had ingested a swarm of wasps and were now dancing with the pain of stings in their gullet. Then the spherical hulls of the Court’s airships started to buckle and warp, the weapon dishes underneath discharging at random before each of the craft detonated. Showers of burning metals and hull plates glanced off the lake, hissing and burning, floating briefly before sinking.

‘There goes the bloody RAN,’ said Morris in mocking reference to the Kingdom’s force of airships.