Authors: Kin Law
“Well, Countess, you’ve done well for yourself, considering you’ve been warring with Lovelace for half a decade,” Albion commented.
“Thank you, Captain,” answered Nessie gracefully.
She gestured with fingers tipped in viciously sharp, silver talons.
Crow-like, real silver, Albion noted, from the shine. In a moment, the stovepipe gentleman reappeared with a tray of crystal goblets, filled with some crimson liquid.
“Wine,” Nessie explained, and everybody but Albion breathed a sigh of relief.
“Nessie, what the blazing fuck?” Rosa Marija interrupted, finally exhausting her store of patience. “Picking a fight with someone who regularly takes down terrorists for the German GSG?”
“I am perfectly safe in this underground lair. Lovelace is used to aerial raids, not a prolonged subterranean siege.”
“Your back is to the wall and you know it.”
“Rose Cottage, please,” Nessie scoffed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know I hate that name.”
“You’ve killed enough people to deserve it.”
There was silence as the two women fumed at each other, one regal and dark, the other a simmering pot of coffee curves. Drake’s crew, if those were the sharp-suited trio of men in the room with them, seemed ill at ease.
Then, Rosa stalked forward, up to the throne, in even, brisk steps. Nessie drew back, stiffening further.
“Nessie,” Rosa said with tenderness. “I’m not that person anymore.”
Then she reared back and slapped Nessie Drake across her bony mouth, cursing as the sharp chin cut across her palm.
“Hey!”
“Just a minute!”
“Countess!”
Practically everyone in the room was shouting, but Rosa had struck too fast and without warning. The situation was suddenly dire.
Nessie’s crew began to converge, Albion’s misfits were drawing on them, somewhere a naked man ran across the cavern in wet slaps of bare feet.
“Stop!” Nessie Drake commanded, cutting everyone off. Her eyes were bared large, and her mouth sensually glittered with a single drop of blood, but Albion could see plainly the emotion hidden behind all the makeup. The face tilting up at Rosa certainly bore a dram of hatred, yes, but also guilt, and warmth. At that moment, for the two very different women on the dais were mirrors of each other.
Suddenly Nessie and Rosa were embracing, the years visibly melting off until the tension was nonexistent.
“I’ve missed you, you gorgeous girl,” Rosa Marija replied. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
“I told you, sister, never,” Nessie answered.
Rosa sighed, seeming to deflate.
Everybody stood around, looking at anything but the dais, except for some reason Hargreaves, who was hiding her face.
Later, Nessie Drake arranged for rooms in her subterranean kingdom for the whole crew, and for the
Huckleberry
to park below the winged bulk of
La Maere
. There were plenty of Nessie’s crew to help. Some sharp-suited crewman was always nearby lugging around heavy gun barrels to mount in the abandoned buildings. Rosa Marija disappeared into Nessie’s quarters for two hours, during which a lovely dinner of whole roast suckling pig, borscht and potatoes was served to go with everyone’s wine.
In the evening, everyone convened in the throne room again, though of course it was impossible to tell meal times underground.
Someone even retrieved the naked man, who turned out to have brilliantly blue weepy eyes and was called Steve.
“Basically,” Nessie Drake explained from her throne once everyone was perched somewhere around her. The mass of beams turned out to be a very practical conference location, featuring comfortable seats all around Drake. “The Lovelorn shot us down a little while ago, and we were able to limp our way to my lair here in the Romanian forest.
La Maere’s
fangs are clipped, and it will take more than a tub full of blood from the Countess Bathory’s own stock to revive her.”
“The primary screw assembly is melted to slag,” Rosa translated for everyone.
“So my only option is to bed down and wait for Ada to arrive, whereupon I will put down the
Lovelorn
like a rabid wolf,” Nessie concluded with a straight face.
“Am I missing something here?” Blair asked. “You’re all standing around looking suave, but I know for sodding sure Inspector Hargreaves at least has no idea why we’re all sitting around waiting for an aerial bombardment to arrive.”
Hargreaves scratched her chin, looking anywhere but at him or the naked Steve. Rosa shot him a dark look, but Nessie Drake herself peered between them, like a porcelain caricature of a young girl caught between feuding parents. It was Albion Clemens who stepped into the breach.
“Ada Lovelace is the Captain of the Lovelorn.
” Albion said. “She was the one who betrayed Nessie, and the two of them have traded blows ever since.”
“
It would be easier if they just sat down and hashed it out, instead of sacrificing good pirates as cannon fodder. Then again, their crews are drawn to the dramatic…” Rosa said flatly.
Nessie whipped around, her face as smooth and varnished as usual, but the eyes were raging like hellfire. She gestured her long, chrome fingernails at the stovepipe men, as if to say they were her willing martyrs, and her servants bowed agreement.
“You can’t expect us to stay for the carnage,” Rosa Marija said, colder than ice. She looked towards Albion. Nessie raised an eyebrow. “We have a mission of our own.”
Nessie
nodded, suddenly amiable. “My drones inform me we will come under attack some time tomorrow evening. The
Lovelorn
is accustomed to tracking hidden prey. You may stay as long as you like.”
“Drones?” Blair inquired, but understood as he caught the amorous glance of Steve. He could certainly appreciate places where young men of the type could be useful in reconnaissance.
“I’m sorry, Miss Drake,” Inspector Hargreaves interjected.
“Countess!” Steve corrected. In the face of his intense nudity, Hargreaves could only back down.
“Countess. We cannot wait for this… personal matter… to be over, and permit me to say this: no conflict was won from a defensive position. In case something unfortunate were to happen, I would like to get to the point of our visit.” Hargreaves explained about Captain Sam, and about how someone had begun to steal the landmarks of Europe. She finished with an appeal to the Countess Drake’s fondness for a morbid Gothic flair. Apparently, there was a bloody history about to be lost with every landmark, and Hargreaves knew every purple spot.
Blair occasionally agreed, supplying a juicy tidbit such as the exact number of falling deaths involved with building the Eiffel Tower.
“You are extraordinarily gracious, Inspector Hargreaves, and a credit to your nation,” Nessie said, breathing a little harder.
Rosa was rolling her eyes.
“It is unfortunate. Your Captain Sam did visit me not too long ago, just before our last date with Ada Lovelace over the Mediterranean. He seemed intent on continuing to move, as if something were chasing him. He was also guarding a parcel quite intently, and I doubt he noticed I saw it.” She held up her talons, to indicate a package about two and a half feet long and quite narrow. “He also mentioned something very interesting, as he was sleeping. It was difficult to hear. He was quite troubled, but I made out some very distinct words.”
Albion’s eyes shot a mile into the air, but he let the implication hang in favor of the lead.
“He said: The Leviathan won’t come just because you’re looking for a way back.”
“Shit,” Clemens cursed. At once, the pirate Captain spun on his heel and made for the exit, not towards Nessie’s residential quarters but towards the tunnel to take him back to the street, and thence to the
Huckleberry
.
“We have everything we need. We take off in twenty minutes.”
Rosa Marija arrived on the bridge of the
‘Berry
just in time to hear Albion ordering Prissy Jack about. The helmsman owned vintage copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and had been dying to meet Nessie. Now the news of takeoff seemed to take him by surprise. He was scurrying about, harried and unsure.
Albion was being unusually harsh, snapping down the speaker tubes for everyone to come aboard, and taking some of the controls himself.
“Hey! Albion! Stop! What do you think you’re doing?” Rosa yelled, slamming one booted heel on top of a panel in front of Albion. To her amazement, the Captain simply brushed her foot off and continued to work.
“Why you little-!” Rosa cried, and reached out to touch him. Albion whirled about and glared, freezing her in her tracks.
“You heard. Th
e Lovelorn
intends to be here tomorrow evening. I bet you anything they are actually only twenty minutes away. Lovelace is a mistress of misinformation.”
“I thought…”
“I know. I’m worried about Nessie too, but I had to get the information first. Unless we are in the air when the
Lovelorn
gets here, we’re sitting ducks.”
“Does Nessie know?”
“Of course. She wanted us to stay so we would be involved. You ought to know better, but you love the little Lolita too much to notice.”
Rosa waited one moment, looking at the busily flitting Albion with naked admiration. He had even taken off the ridiculous coat, exposing the cutlass and Colt, and his sleeves were rolled back. Then she jumped in, tackling the nitty gritty of preparing for battle.
When Rosa Marija actually thought about it, later, Nessie Drake hadn’t wished the crew of the
‘Berry
harm. It was simply the pirate way. Nessie knew the Manchu Marauder was a capable Captain. Rosa had chosen to crew with Clemens, not Drake.
Though Nessie had an understanding about it, it was difficult for her to say aloud, and so this was the way she had chosen.
She had offered Albion a choice clothed in a betrayal: stay and help, or abandon Nessie for a reason anybody would understand.
Nessie had even volunteered the information about Captain Sam without asking for anything in return: something Rosa had never seen any pirate do, let alone one of Countess Drake’s influence.
For the moment, though, Rosa was bloody pissed. Here she was, worried sick about Nessie, and she had thought of everything. Nessie was lucky Rosa was too busy to take the piss out of her.
“Right, I want to keep
La Maere
over us as long as possible. Let’s take off,” Albion was saying over Rosa’s shoulder now. Rosa nodded emphatically, and nudged the lever nearby.
The bulbous form of the
‘Berry
lifted off the blasted wasteland of the Romanian mining town. In the darkness, it was nearly invisible, a darker shadow hidden between the concrete cliffs- exactly what her Captain wanted.
She nearly didn’t make it. Almost as soon as the keel cleared the neatly ordered streets, the first cannons tore their way through the canvas envelopes of
La Maere
. It was almost beautiful. Iron shot punched holes where starlight filtered through in columns of brilliance. A second later the illusion was broken by the shock and clouds of debris. The cannon was just as destructive after punching through the ship above, pulverizing gothic decks as easily as the wrecked buildings below.
“What the blazes are we doing?” Hargreaves yelled, appearing from the hatch.
“I think I screwed up,” Albion noted. “
La Maere
can’t shield us, and under her, we can’t see where the
Lovelorn
is.”
“Out from under!” Rosa agreed, pushing the
Berry
towards the edge at full steam.
Rumbling architecture fell to the left and right, and a cannonball managed to wing the starboard lateral mast, but the edge came like a slow-moving horizon.
For a second, everybody held on to the fixtures, white-knuckled, expecting a lump of iron to come tearing out of the sky and crush their little ship into ‘
Berry
jam.