Authors: Kin Law
In other words, he was feeling a little reckless and pissed off.
Van Houten motioned the lunatic over and kicked his knees out from under him. A couple of gestures later and he had the man’s wrists together over his head, hot muzzles threatening at every turn.
“You’re not a soldier, are you?” His prisoner asked, after the first minute of kneeling there with a gun pointed at his scalp. “Soldiers aren’t creative. They listen to orders. A soldier would have shot me on the spot.”
Close up, the ginger stopped an inch from the roots. Van Houten was not without compassion- he was not fighting a soldier, but a civilian, much like the German he had kicked back in Berlin. Besides, the fewer rounds Van Houten fired, the less his employer’s acquisition would be damaged.
“Mercenary,” Van Houten replied gruffly. If his prisoner was interested, Van Houten might have mentioned his thoughts were firing faster than the cylinders on his weapons. Even a minute of waiting seemed far too long. He supposed it was a side effect of the body conversion. He might also have mentioned there really wasn’t very long to wait. Valima Mordemere’s ship was moving into position. In another few minutes it would burst through the few Balaenopterons in its way and be in place to collect its prize.
“Mercenary… but you shot down the Balaenopteron over the Kremlin,” the ginger-tip said aloud. “And you are shooting indiscriminately between Muscovite soldiers and us civilians.”
Van Houten figured the little man was babbling in an attempt to distract him, or was reduced to gibberish by fear.
“I take it Valima Mordemere intends to take Red Square, and he doesn’t want a soul to be on it when he does,” the ginger concluded.
“Very clever,” Van Houten replied. He nudged the still scalding barrel against his enemy’s hands. “But it won’t help you.”
“Sure it will,” the ginger said.
The Square was still quiet, and Van Houten was beginning to lose patience. Conversation was beginning to grow dull. He considered pulling the trigger and walking about, expending the ammunition packs riveted to his hips. Besides, his head was starting to ache, a continuing pain traveling downwards along his spine. He did not want to think of the wet red shards he had glimpsed in Mordemere’s tongs, or the shining pins to replace them.
That was when the Oriental appeared from a barricade in front of the Tsar’s city palace.
He was far enough away for Van Houten not to risk firing as yet, but even from across the Square in front of the Cathedral of Vasilly the Blessed, the Oriental cut a strange figure. Bandana, goggles cracked across the lenses, gloves raised high into the air, these details jumped out at the mercenary, but Van Houten was mostly interested in the shin-length greatcoat. There were a good many firearms one could hide in a coat of that size. Surely the ridiculous cutlass at the hip was a red herring, no challenge to Van Houten’s mighty repeaters.
“Take off your coat,” Van Houten called.
“And freeze in this weather?” The Oriental showed his cheek. Van Houten nudged his hostage once again, and the Oriental hastened to comply. A vest, starchy linen beneath, boots that could be hiding knives. Better, Van Houten thought.
“Come slowly towards me,” the mercenary demanded. He did not bother to ask the Oriental to drop his weapons. At the first sign of a draw, Van Houten would simply fire. His new arms could hold the heavy repeaters up indefinitely.
“How many of you are there?” He added towards his hostage, who maintained a stoic silence even after a vicious kick to the kidneys.
Van Houten kept an eye out for the Stetson, who had to be here in the Square somewhere.
“Did you know?” the ginger said conversationally. The Oriental was halfway, in the middle of the intersection, taking his damnably good time shuffling across.
The Kremlin was at his back, smoking behind the gate from the wreckage of the
Vasillisa
.
“This square was named for its incredible beauty, not for the color of the Kremlin behind me. It’s actually a linguistic faux pas, the word also means ‘beautiful.’”
Van Houten estimated there were five more steps before the Oriental stepped out into the open, close enough to be shot. The Oriental was motioning towards the bonfire of the vodka kiosk
The mercenary reflected. He must cut a strange figure, standing there in front of the carnival colors of the cathedral behind him. The tatters of his hooded cloak hid all but the large silvery repeaters at the end of his arms. They were steamed clean and shiny, like the blade of a scythe.
Death before the house of god.
“The Cathedral behind you was made to resemble fire. I hear Mo
rdemere likes his architecture. He might not want you firing on his prizes before he’s laid a hand on them.”
. The Oriental
was also about a step or two farther than Van Houten would have liked.
“You got that right, buddy,” Van Houten agreed. “But that won’t keep you safe. I’ll just shoot around the statues. Now where’s the other one?” He spoke to the Oriental. “The Stetson? I could riddle you with holes right this minute. Hear that? I’m going to shoot him in the liver, a long, slow death, if you don’t come out right now!” It was a bluff. Van Houten was nowhere near that accurate at this range. His arms rattled and shook metallically.
To his surprise, the threat drew a response. The Stetson appeared, out of a ditch beside the kiosk where he must have rolled to a stop, hidden from Van Houten.
Damned Clanker mask, he thought, I’ve got no peripherals with these.
Van Houten trained his right repeater on the Stetson. His left stayed pointed at the hostage. Predictably, the Oriental drew on the Clanker, a heavy black Colt. The Stetson was holding a similar piece on Van Houten. Mexican standoff.
“Now you just drop them fancy gats, boy,” the Stetson announced. This close, Van Houten could see the ruddy face with a magnificent mustache beneath. He was wearing an unimaginably white suit under a thick Russian fur coat. “That there Irishman got nothing on me. You kill him proper if you like, but I’ll shoot you the second you look to pull the trigger.”
To Van Houten’s surprise, the Oriental pulled another gun, a red one, on the Stetson.
“We got our beef, boy, but we’ll settle this later,” The Stetson said to the Oriental. He seemed nervous, twitching at the mustache. It took a moment for Van Houten to figure out it was the strange red gun itself, not staring down a muzzle, that frightened him.
“I ain’t your boy!” The Oriental hollered. The sudden Southern accent surprised Van Houten; you could spoon the creamed corn out of their matching drawls.
“This ain’t the time, Al!”
“When is the time?” And back to his indiscriminate accent once more. The Oriental pointed both his guns at the Stetson, their barrels shaking from fury.
Van Houten was getting the feeling he was being totally ignored.
“Fellas, please,” Van Houten said. “You know what? If you’ll look over here, you’ll notice I am essentially bulletproof.”
And he pulled the trigger.
It didn’t exactly hurt, having his arm blown off in the resulting explosion. The arm wasn’t his own flesh and blood, even though he could move it as if it were.
He wanted to curse Mordemere, at first, for an inferior firearm, but Van Houten had inspected the repeater himself.
There could have been no mistakes. It shouldn’t have exploded so dramatically, even with an ammunition jam, and the gas lines were secured. It definitely should not have showered his cloak with black ink.
He only figured it out when he noticed his hostage making a break for it, under cover fire from the Oriental. The ginger seemed unharmed, apparently anticipating the explosion.
“Oh,” said Van Houten. Bullets winged off his suit, but he had bigger problems. He couldn’t raise the other repeater. He couldn’t even stay standing. The steam was venting from his body through the ruptured elbow joint. He was bleeding internally from the shock, Jimmy could tell. The squishy, weak feeling was a familiar one. His vision was going, but even so he could see the smooth enamel and shining tip of a fountain pen jammed in the cogs jutting out of his ruined repeater, like an arrow tipped in centaur blood.
“A pen. Heh. That’s pretty funny.”
The last thing Jimmy Van Houten saw was the Oriental raising his red weapon, and then an endless blue, filling up his peripheral vision.
11.5 Reunion
Rosa Marija found Inspector Hargreaves first, sitting on the pavement of the steel bridge some ways down the river.
The darkness under the Nidhogg was nearly complete, but the gas lamps lining the bridge hadn’t been ignited. With the burning sky overhead, even the army’s municipal workers had been evacuated. There were very few arclights in Moscow.
Smoking, steaming wrecks were coming down all around them now, somehow not directly overhead, but terrifying nonetheless.
They were smaller ships, corsairs or junks, some no more than lifted gliders burning like flies caught in a lit wick. Ranged around them were burning points of fires burning on the enormous Balaenopterons. In the dark of evening and cataclysm, it seemed they stood on the bottom of some abyssal plain, watching the titans of the deep circle in combat overhead.
At first, she thought the Inspector had been crushed underneath the bulk of Mordemere’s monster, there in the middle of the bridge. Matte copper plates hid much of her body. Her legs were splayed out to one side.
When she got closer, Rosa could see the flames overhead glinting off Hargreaves’ golden hair. One arm hung loose at her side. She was bent over a pale form, too small to be a soldier. It lay in a mass of India rubber cables and metal mesh lines, as if Mordemere’s abomination had disgorged a morsel of unpalatable innocence. Like a monster under the bed, finding it had no taste for children, Rosa thought.
“Anubis and Isis, is that a child?” said Rosa Marija.
“Yes. She’s very weak, but I can feel a pulse. What do I do, Rosa?”
Rosa did not know. She skid to a halt, her abused body almost betraying her into sprawling all over the bridge herself.
The child was small, and nude under the impotent warmth of Hargreaves’ coat. Her raven hair was matted to her cheeks and shoulders. Every surface of her steamed with some inner heat.
Rosa Marija gasped when Hargreaves lifted the coat, to show the girl’s legs gone below the thigh. Each knee was capped neatly with porcelain. A line of little brassy nubs protruded in a progression up every
vertebrae of Cezette’s spine.
“If I pull her out, she might die,” Hargreaves said, whimpering slightly. Cables led from the girl’s ports into Mordemere’s monstrosity, tentacles of India rubber and chevron-plated lines.
A rapid tattoo of gunfire interrupted their shock. It was coming from the Red Square end of the bridge, hidden behind the ornate buildings.
Rosa Marija looked around. With the
Nidhogg
so close, she didn’t like being at the edge of anything. With the right sort of dumb luck, the cutting beam they had heard so much about would lance through this very bridge.
“If we don’t, she will surely die. We can’t stay here any longer, we have to get to Red Square,” Rosa said.
“But Mordemere intends-“
“Exactly. At this point getting her back aboard his mad ship might be the only way to save her,” Rosa reminded gently.
“Gorgeous. Either we do this now or we could die out here. Who knows how long this thing can hold out, she might freeze once the machine stops keeping her warm.”
She thumped the abomination for emphasis. It gave a slight groan, settling on its hips, and Rosa fell on her bottom. Hargreaves laughed, a nervous, jerky giggle.
They both whirled round as a little tinkle of laughter came from below. The girl was awake, looking at both of them like a kitten unsure of its new owners.
“Hello,” Hargreaves said kindly. “I’m Vanessa. Who are you?”
“
Je m’appele…”
she started. “My name… is Cezette. Cezette Louissaint.”
“It’s a beautiful name, gorgeous,” Rosa said, smiling. “Did you hear?”