He looked from the door that led out to the electrified room and back to the hallway where everyone else had gone down. He, literally, was at a juncture with only two options. Should he press forward and see where life takes him with Dorothy? Or should he turn his back on everything, and everyone, he ever cared about?
The road ahead was guaranteed to be fraught with peril. But would the road back be any less dangerous?
One thing was certain, the road back did not include Dorothy. Whether or not this threat was real, or a play by Nero or the Southern Marshal to get their hands on a powerful weapon, Caleb could not turn his back on Dorothy. He had spent too much of his life playing both sides of the fence. He had done it so effortlessly, it was to the point that people rarely knew what side he was on.
No longer!
If this threat was real, everyone needed his full support; without question.
Filled with a new sense of purpose, and pride, Caleb raced down the hallway to catch up with Dorothy.
The hallway took multiple turns and was longer than Caleb had anticipated. He had been walking for several minutes without seeing a single door or intersecting hallway. He thought maybe he had missed something and decided to turn around after the next corner and go back to see if there were any secret entrances in the walls closer to where he started. He rounded the corner and the hallway terminated at a door up ahead.
Finally.
He jogged up to the door and opened it a crack to peek into the room beyond. The room was empty, so he opened the door all the way and stepped inside.
It wasn’t a very large room, probably only about twenty feet by twenty feet with the ceiling rising just above his head. At the other end of the room was a tunnel entrance similar to the one he and Nero had used to come here. But this time there was no carriage.
He stepped on the platform and looked down the tunnel. It was pitch black after only a few feet.
As he stared down into the inky black hole, the edges of his fur started to waft with a light breeze coming from inside the tunnel.
The light breeze quickly became a torrent of air that rushed at him from the tunnel. He took a step back just as a carriage popped out of the hole and stopped on the platform.
The carriage was empty, but he knew they had sent it back for him.
He climbed in the carriage and settled in to the red velvet seat, with his head resting comfortably against the back. He pushed the single button on the control panel and braced himself for the wild ride.
The carriage slowly rolled forward toward the tunnel opening and, as soon as the front of the carriage passed the rim of the tunnel, it shot forward and pressed him into his seat.
This time, there were fewer twists and turns, and the ride was less nerve-racking than the one Nero had taken him on earlier. He peered forward through the front window of the carriage and could see the faint outline of the tunnel stretching straight ahead and terminating in a flickering orange glow.
As the carriage shot forward, the flickering orange glow resolved into roaring flames.
The platform at the other end of this line was on fire.
The carriage blasted through the flames and exited the tunnel. He wasn’t going slow enough to stop at the platform. Instead, he was going to collide with the wall on the other side.
Caleb curled into a ball and braced for impact.
The carriage slammed into the opposite wall, glass breaking and metal twisting under the force of the impact. Caleb was thrown to the front of the carriage, but fortunately, if you could still call it fortunate, he crashed into the overstuffed velvet bench seat on the other side. He was stunned, but otherwise unharmed. One of the benefits of having animal DNA was the ability to withstand a greater beating before being broken.
An explosion boomed near the platform and brought Caleb back to reality. He extricated himself from the twisted wreckage and limped onto the platform. Another explosion, this one much closer, knocked him off his feet.
Hands grabbed him and pulled him across the floor to behind a piece of fallen ceiling as bullets chipped off fragments of stone all around the room. The Southern Marshal yelled something in his face, but he could barely hear her over the ringing in his ears. She shoved a repeating carbine rifle into his hands and pointed it in the direction of the door that led out of the carriage platform room. He didn’t need to hear what she had said, his eyes told him everything he needed to know. Everything except who was shooting back.
He shook his head to reset his equilibrium and spotted a gun barrel poking its way into the room through the door. He aimed his carbine and fired off a round, driving back the gun barrel.
His hearing slowly returned as he looked around the room. Several of the Southern Marshal’s soldiers lay strewn about the room, dead or dying. The Southern Marshal popped up from behind the chunk of ceiling and fired another shot at the door.
She ducked back down and chambered her next round.
Caleb grabbed her shoulder. “What happened?”
“The men sent to replace Nero managed to break out of my jail and secure weapons.”
“What about Dorothy?”
“She was back in my castle before any of this started. I’m sure she’s fine.”
A new sound echoed from beyond the doorway. It sounded like thirty men all firing their carbines in rapid succession. The Southern Marshal laughed and pumped her fist in the air. “Yes!”
Armed soldiers streamed in through the doorway and the Southern Marshal shot at them as they ran in. She ducked as they returned fire but then the same rapid fire that drove the soldiers into the room in the first place echoed again from just outside the door and they all fell down; dead.
The Southern Marshal stood up, a massive grin on her face. She reached down and helped Caleb stand up. “This was not the form of introduction I had expected, but what better way to show you who will be joining you and Dorothy on your quest than a demonstration of what he can do against real opponents?”
Caleb followed her gaze to the door where a large automaton stood, smoke still curling out of the front of the machine gun mounted on the underside of one of his arms.
The Southern Marshal’s face beamed with pride. “Caleb, I’d like to introduce you to the only working prototype from the Tin Man project.”
She glanced around at the enemy soldiers who had been cut down most expeditiously. “I can see already he will be a welcome addition to your team.”
Caleb gawked at the massive automaton. It looked more like an atmospheric diving suit, with every joint a big round ball that made it look like it was built to take abuse and keep on going. The ball jointed arms terminated in large metallic three clawed hands. As menacing as they were, it paled in comparison to the machine gun mounted underneath the right arm. He’d already seen the destructive force of this automated machine gun.
Who, in their right mind, would mount something like that on an independently operating machine?
Maybe humans deserved all the problems they brought down on themselves?
Caleb flinched as the medic plucked a piece of twisted brass from the wound in his forearm, taking some fur with it. The medic looked over his monocle at Caleb. “If you let me shave it, this would go a lot easier.”
“Just do your best.”
“The fur’s all matted…” He gripped another piece of shrapnel with his pliers and Caleb grimaced through the pain. The medic dropped this new piece on the metal tray to join the others he had already fished out of Caleb’s skin. Bits of fur and blood clung to the jagged metal.
“Don’t come crying to me when it becomes infected.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The Southern Marshal stood nearby, conferring with one of her guards. She nodded from what he just told her and approached Caleb. She cleared her throat and startled the medic. He bandaged Caleb’s arm quickly and excused himself. She waited until the medic was out of earshot, but still spoke quietly.
“It seems we have seriously underestimated the Directors’ true power. My General informs me that, while we have eliminated several small squads of soldiers like the ones in this room, they were all calculated diversions to spread my security forces too thin to prevent the majority of the enemy force from achieving their true objective. Based on the number dead here, and in the other locations, they succeeded in escaping with seventy-five soldiers in their airship.”
Caleb reflected on the news that meant he would have some competition in obtaining the weapon. But what stuck out most in his mind was the first thing she had said.
“What do you mean by the Directors’ true power?”
“Despite what people on the outside might think, the Southern Territories is a relatively peaceful place. My jail cells were not designed for a large number of prisoners at the same time. I had to divide the captured soldiers among the two cells. That still put about fifty men in each cell designed to hold no more than twenty.
“There are fifteen of their soldiers dead in the jail cell area. They were the ones up against the bars while all fifty men, literally, pushed as one until the doors gave way. The rest, those that we killed in staged battles throughout the castle, also knew they were going to die. They were the distraction while the remainder, the majority, escaped. And that’s not the bad news.”
“There’s bad news?”
“They took Nero.”
Caleb’s heart sunk.
The Southern Marshal continued. “Nero is the only one who can lead them to the weapon. But he and I already talked about this possible situation. He promised to do his best to delay them, giving us a chance to get to it first. But it gets worse.”
Caleb couldn’t believe his ears. How could it get any worse than what she had already told him? She didn’t leave him wondering as she answered his unspoken question right away.
“Nero still has the key to the box with him. Fortunately, that is only half of the puzzle. They don’t know about Dorothy, or that the key won’t work without her.”
There was a silver lining to this dark cloud after all. Despite everything, Caleb felt the release of tension wash over him. “We don’t have to go after the box. It doesn’t matter if they get it or not, they still can’t open it.”
The Southern Marshal shook her head. “They still have an army ten thousand strong coming to OZ in a few days. Nero admitted to me that if he were captured, he could only hold out for so long. Eventually, he will tell them the secret of the key. And then that army will come looking for Dorothy. Without the means to stop them, they will get her, and probably kill all of us in the process.”
A new sense of dread completely eradicated the relief he had felt moments before. The Southern Marshal could read the hopelessness in his eyes.
“Don’t think like that, Caleb. We still have a chance.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I have the most powerful weapon of all. Knowledge. Follow me.”
She led him through the castle to a steel door at the end of a long hallway. Both walls of the hallway were lined with armed guards for its entire length. She paused with her hand on the door latch.
“What I’m about to show you is known only by the people behind this door. Even the guards out here do not know what it is they protect.”
As she engaged the latch, he noticed the guards turn away so as not to accidentally catch a glimpse behind the door. Forget about the kind of power the Directors held over their soldiers. He was witnessing the kind of power the Southern Marshal held over hers.
She pushed him ahead of her through the threshold and closed the door behind them. They were in a tiny room, no bigger than a closet, with another door on the other side. There was a steady, rhythmic hum coming from behind the closed door, it sounded like a swarm of bees inside a hive.
She swept past him and opened the door, the low hum rising in pitch as she opened it all the way. Through the open door he saw rows of long tables with people sitting all along the edges staring into boxes that sat on the table in front of them. There must’ve been over a hundred people in this massive room, each staring into their own illuminated box.
“Two hundred and thirty-five, to be exact.”
He snapped out of his reverie and looked at her. “Huh?”
“I have two hundred and thirty-five people here keeping an eye on OZ.”
She stepped into the room, lifting her arms to the ceiling and taking in the whole room with her gesture. “Welcome to the Eye of Horus.”
“The eye of what?”
“Horus. I named it after an Egyptian goddess whose job it was to watch over and protect her people. Since this room was designed to keep an eye on the hybrids until I could call them home, I felt it was the best name for it.”
He looked at one of the boxes. On the face of the box was a small window. The window was illuminated from inside the box and showed people walking back and forth on some crowded street. He had never seen anything like it.
The Southern Marshal beamed with pride. “What you’re watching is happening right now on a street in the Western Territories.”
He stared at the image in the tiny window. This was not possible. Even if they used thousands of adjustable mirrors and telescopic lenses, there was no way this box could show what was happening hundreds of kilometers away with such definition and clarity. That left only one option. Dark magic. He wasn’t one to be taken in by mysticism and the supernatural, but this room was about to make a believer out of him.
The Southern Marshal was at his side. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re not even close as to how these work. Professor Gale is a wizard when it comes to the mechanical and electrical sciences. He has drawn up plans for hundreds of amazing things never before seen in all of human, or even hybrid, history. We haven’t begun to develop a tenth of what he has already designed. But I must say, out of all the inventions we have attempted to build, this room is part of one of his most impressive systems to date.”
“What does it do?”
“Rather than tell you, why don’t I show you?”