Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘Boxiron?’

The steamman’s head slanted down, taking in his shining polished brutal new body, as if he was seeing it for the first time. ‘Yes-’ he raised his fist and behind him a legion of miners raised theirs in a mirror reflection of the steamman, ‘-I think I am upgraded. By the will of King Steam.’

Daunt gawked. A slipthinker. Boxiron was now a slipthinker, able to inhabit multiple drone bodies and make their will his. The highest caste of steamman society. Unlike the empty shells back in Tock House, so many suits of armour without their controlling presence in residence. But Boxiron didn’t have an army of inactive drones. He had an army of hulking mining mechanicals, their fists spinning as drill-bits and shovels and pickaxes. Able to carve caverns out of solid rock, or chunks out of an invading army.

‘Mechanicals,’ groaned Morris. The dying adventurer’s words came out through gritted teeth. ‘Mechanicals can’t fight.’

Boxiron stepped down into the trench, the metal legion to his rear following a second later. He scooped up the gas-rifle in front of Morris. It looked like a stick in the hulking brute’s hand. ‘Perhaps, but a steamman knight knows little else. They are not your mechanicals anymore. They are mine.’ Boxiron’s proud head swept the sight of the trench, the surviving militia scrambling out of the way of the metal titans landing among them, then Boxiron took in the ruins of the city below. ‘A defensive funnel to concentrate the enemy’s formations. A variation of the Battle of the Gauge Heights.’ He looked at Daunt, the light of his vision plate skipping slightly in surprise. ‘You are in command here?’

‘I believe I was.’

Boxiron pulled back the firing bolt on the gas rifle. ‘Interesting. You would have done better to build a series of redoubts rather than a continuous trench, that would have concentrated your enfilading fire. But this is no longer a defensive action.’ The words from his voicebox were nearly overwhelmed by a fierce roar from hundreds of drill-bits spinning into action, tool arms testing the air in unison. ‘Do you mind, Jethro softbody?’

Daunt lifted his hand weakly over the top of the trench. ‘That was never what I was for.’ He tried to sit up and watch the charging waves of mining mechanicals, but it was so much easier just to prop his back up against the trench walls, holding Morris’s still, cold hand. Daunt’s head nodded, little waves of dreamless sleep, sheer exhaustion overtaking him. Sounds and screams and explosions from below punctuated each wave of blackness. Loud at first, then increasingly distant as Boxiron’s forces pushed back to the distant margins of the city. It was dark now, twilight passed into night. He was so tired, beyond what he should be.

Shaken awake by a Notifier, Daunt blinked sleep out of his eyes.

‘How do you vote?’ demanded the man. ‘Do you vote to advance towards the shore?’

Daunt lifted his hand, still holding Morris’s cold finger into the air. ‘We vote to sleep.’

‘He cannot vote. He is dead.’

‘No, I don’t think he is.’

‘Are you voting to stay here in a defensive posture?’ asked the Notifier, indicating the distant clash of fighting.

‘I know when it’s time to stop.’ Daunt shut his eyes. For the first time in ages he allowed the dreams in.

Charlotte nearly slipped on the underwater city’s oily floor as a familiar figure emerged out of a side turning ahead of them. Gemma Dark. She had her sabre in her hand, and her appearance was answered by a hiss of steel as the commodore drew his blade.

‘I knew it,’ called the commodore’s sister. ‘They’re all at the other end of the city, sweeping the engine levels for intruders, and here you are, heading in the opposite direction. Whenever my brother is up to mischief, just head for where you’re not expecting him, and there he’ll be.’

Charlotte let go of the image of the sea-bishop with relief; the strains of keeping up the illusion dropping away like a lead weight. ‘The sea-bishops have a very low opinion of their cattle’s intelligence. I suppose it helps to loathe what you must consume.’

‘The lifeboats are back that way,’ said Gemma.

‘Oh, I don’t need a darkship,’ said Charlotte. ‘Not after you were so kind as to pilot me to where I needed to go. I don’t suppose your stock is very high with Walsingham now, or he’d be standing here beside you.’

‘We don’t have time to dally,’ hissed Elizica inside her mind. ‘When the enemy realize we’re not hiding from them in the engine levels, they’ll reach the same conclusion as this filthy collaborator.’

‘Can you keep this witch engaged for a while?’ Charlotte asked the commodore, sotto voce.

‘We shared the same fencing masters growing up,’ said the commodore. ‘But I’ve had a few hard lessons since. Let’s see what a dying man’s old bones are good for.’

Charlotte squeezed his shoulder. ‘End of this passage, second corridor on the left. Be lucky.’ She didn’t add the unspoken: If you live long enough.

‘There’s a first time for everything, lass.’ The commodore slashed his blade left and right, testing the air, even as Gemma Dark sprinted forward, roaring in rage.

Charlotte and Sadly slipped past against the wall as the brother and sister’s razor-edged steel sprung off each other, sparking in the gloom.

‘I think she hates him a lot more than she wants to be queen of the realm, says I,’ observed Sadly as they moved rapidly down the passage.

Charlotte glanced back at the furious duel behind them. Almost as unwholesome as my feelings towards my mother.

‘You’re not doing what the enemy expect you to, are you?’ noted Sadly, his tone complimentary.

‘Actually, I’m going to do the sea-bishops something of a favour,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m going to give the bloody monsters exactly what they want.’

Commodore Black deflected his sister’s thrust with an angry scraping of rasping metal. ‘Our age has passed. The trail of our comet has faded into the night, lass. We’re the last of them. All that is brilliant has waned and it’s time for us to go too.’

‘Never!’ yelled Gemma, drawing back, panting. ‘It is my right to rule and I shall!’ She feinted left, then thrust to the right, the commodore only just parrying her blow in time. Jared was getting tired, his arm as heavy as if his flesh was formed from concrete. She was younger than him, and her muscles not addled with a wicked black rot eating her body away from within.

‘You wouldn’t be ruling, Gemma. You’d just be warming a hard lifeless slab of stone cut to resemble a throne. We only ever ruled with the people, not over them. When our ancestors forgot that, we lost all the rights we ever had.’

‘You lying, cowardly, useless jigger,’ Gemma sneered, the sabre raised over her head and turning in her hand. Jared would take his eyes off that hypnotic windmill of hers at his peril. ‘How dare you stand there and spout base parliamentary propaganda at me. You betrayed our family, our line, the bloody cause. You left me to shoulder the legacy that should have been yours. All the times you ran away and here you are, choosing to stand for this? After all these years, have you found something you’d die for at last?’

‘I’m already dead, lass.’

Her sabre lashed out, nearly skewering his forehead as he stepped aside. ‘On that much, we agree.’

‘I promised our father that I would look after you, Gemma.’

‘A promise broken along with the fleet-in-exile,’ spat his sister.

He stumbled back as Gemma Dark showed him how fit she still was, her blade dancing from side to side, shifting with a fierce energy. Hate could do that, so it could. All their years together. Did she still remember the first lesson their mortal fencing master had taught them? A brief one, words only, rather than the long tiring drills that followed, high outside, low inside, thrust, parry, administered in the cramped confines of their u-boat and the royalists’ clandestine underwater harbour?