The Aerial Inferno (Part 2)

At the last possible moment, they leapt into the side passageway, slamming hard against the deck, as the gorilla chieftain opened fire with the M-80 machine gun clutched expertly in his massive, calloused paws. A cloud of firefly sparks erupted in the corridor where Nora and Sully had once stood, high-caliber bullets spitting and chewing and denting the walls and floor.

“Please tell me your grandmother said something about this!” Sully demanded, as she and Nora huddled against the deck. A dogfight’s worth of ricochets spanged and pinged above them.

“She said something about gorillas as pilots,” Nora shouted back, “but I sure as hell didn’t hear anything about them knowin’ how to shoot!”

The gunfire died away, replaced by the scramble of triumphant, predatory hands and feet against the metal of the corridor. The apes were coming. Sully and Nora rose and ran, ducking trembling pipes hissing treacherous needles of steam from every joint.

The lead ape, his back a broad stripe of silver, had by far the largest weapon — some things, evolution just sorts out for itself — but not the only one. And as the mass of apes lumbered into the corridor in hot pursuit of Nora and Sully, the jostling rear echelon of females and young males pointed submachine guns and pistols from thick, hairy paws, and pulled a multitude of triggers.

Sparks and steam exploded behind the women, bullets rupturing pipes and sizzling wildly into the walls and floors. The thick, white, searing cloud held the apes back for a moment, and Sully slid into cover behind a thick bulkhead, Nora doing likewise opposite her, and drew a bead on the roaring, hairy shapes flailing about in the steam.

Her hand shook. She could see the apes right there, teeth bared, waving their instruments of death…

“God damn it!” Sully roared, furious with herself, and yanked her trembling hand away.

“What?” Nora asked her, baffled.

“I watch a lot of nature specials, OK?” Sully spat. “And… and those World Wildlife Fund mailers! I can’t do it!”

“Hate to break it to you,” Nora replied darkly, as the first of the apes stumbled blindly out of the steam, pawing at its eyes. “But up here? I’m pretty sure we’re the endangered species.”

She took careful aim, and the revolver barked in her hands; blood flew out the back of the ape’s meaty shoulder, and it spun around shrieking and fell back to the deck.

Hoots of rage reverberated in the narrow passageway. Nora shrank back in terror as the apes’ guns responded, spattering the bulkhead that sheltered her with a punishing barrage of hot lead.

“Them or us, Sully!” she shouted, desperate, as Sully willed her shaking hands to still themselves. “And I really, really want it to be them!”

Sully did not so much hear her great-grandfather’s voice in that instant as feel it — the merciless scrape of it, passing through her bones, stiffening her spine. She thought of those two empty shoes, and the pair of earrings, and the open window. And how no one, whatever their past deeds, deserved so lonely and desolate a fate.

Her eyes narrowed. Sully Wells stepped full into the corridor with both guns raised, her midnight garments billowing in the steam like some terrible banner, and spat fire from each fist.

The apes fell back anew as Sully’s rounds cut into them, heavy primate bodies falling lifeless to the deck. Sully stood there fearless, exposed, aiming and firing and aiming and firing until her pistols clicked empty.

“Easy, easy!” Nora shouted, wrestling Sully back into cover. “I didn’t say forget about the nature specials altogether!”

“What?” Sully asked at last, shaking her head. “I didn’t — I’m sorry…”

“Are you kidding?” Nora asked, suddenly a little afraid of the strange, confused look in Sully’s eyes. As if she’d just awakened from some glorious, terrible dream. “You kicked their hairy asses! But they’re gonna be back, and I really don’t want to wait.”

Reloading on the run, they emerged from the access passage to the port-side main corridor. Behind them, Nora could already hear grunting and scrabbling as the pursuing gorilla forces regrouped.

“Which way?” Sully asked, jamming home a fresh magazine in one of her pistols.

“Just ahead!” Nora said, heading off to her right. “Can’t be too much—”

A thousand screeching, scraping tongues of metal sang, discordant. The gondola shuddered in its steel skin, as the corridor ahead tore itself open in a storm of metal and noise. Bright and fearsome, the sky came spilling in.

In happier, bloodier days, Wicked West still had a crew to amuse, and doomed male prisoners with which to amuse them. Those relatively fortunate souls not allotted to sharpen the skills of the elite Five Knives Brigade of Truth Extraction, or dragged screaming away to Rena Grimm’s lab as raw materials, would be marched at gunpoint into the engine room, to the cheers of the crew.

The Faithless drew propulsion from two vast turbines in the aft engine room, their diameters easily measured in elephants. The prisoners — grizzled cargo haulers, unwary fighter or bomber pilots, the occasional deluded explorer —
were stationed at a yellow line specially painted on the engine room floor, pointed toward the turbines’ intake valves, and made to walk forward.

Bets regularly arose over how far any given captive would travel under his own power, before the turbines’ ravenous suction did its terrible work. However far they got, the ultimate result never changed: long, ominious tracks of fine reddish mist, trailing in the Faithless’s wake.

When the initial dynamite bombs rocked the engine room, Turbine Two had been impaled by a flying pylon, consuming itself in fire. Turbine One had soldiered on bravely among the escalating flames and catastrophe until, at last, the inferno melted through the reinforced deck plates and found the fuel tanks beneath.

The blast lifted the entire turbine into the air with incredible force, the casing around its spinning, eleven-foot titanium blades shearing off like dried newspaper. The blades bored upward through the steel skin of the craft, shredded one of the remaining aft compartments of the Zeppelin’s immense balloon in a rush of escaping helium, and for a single, graceful microsecond, hung at the apex of their parabola directly above the dark expanse of the Faithless’s gasbag.

Then, succumbing to gravity, they fell. Before tumbling headlong into the lake far below, the smoking cluster of still-whirling blades plunged through a forward section of the balloon, shredded a gash through three decks and one wall of the gondola, and nearly tumbled Nora and Sully out to their deaths.

When her mind cleared, Sully found herself clinging to a ladder protruding from the craft’s inner wall with one hand, and clutching the wrist of Nora, precariously balanced at the jagged edge where deck gave way to empty air, with the other. The clouds outside had burned away in the late morning sun, and after growing accustomed to the dim reddish glow of the Faithless, the light seemed cruel and blinding.

Nora was a hazy shape against that light, and between the sudden blast of wind and the ringing only just subsiding in her ears, it took Sully precious, long seconds to realize that her companion was shouting something at her. A warning.

Down the corridor behind them, at the intersection from which they’d emerged, the gorilla gang had materialized, hooting and shrieking, brandishing their guns. They, too, seemed blinded by the sudden light — but recovering quickly.

Nora couldn’t even hear her own words as she shouted to Sully, stumbling forward to regain her balance against the howl of rushing air at her back. She raised her own pistol and fired into the mass of apes, but the shot went wild, over their heads. And it made the gorillas only angrier.

“What do we do?” Sully shouted, audible at last to Nora’s recovering ears. Nora glanced at the apes, then up the ladder to which Sully clung — to the portal in the ceiling through which it passed. She remembered the blueprints she’d glimpsed.

“We climb!” she hollered back.

Up the ladder they raced, hot lead spitting into the walls and rungs just beneath them. The fissure torn by the errant turbine greeted them again on the level above, and once more on the third tier; and all around them, on every level, the air rang with the panicked hoots of terrified, furious apes.

At the top of the ladder, Sully found a hatch, sealed tight by a rusted metal wheel. To one side, the gap torn in the Faithless’s side yawned, too far to jump; on the other, far down the corridor but steadily approaching, a wall of flames surged and boiled like a thing alive.

“I can’t — dammit —” Sully hissed, guns tucked in her sash, straining to turn the wheel and open the hatch above.

“Here, switch!” Nora called from just below her. “Just keep those apes off our asses!” She looked back, vertiginously, down the ladder, where heavy simian forms clambered in swift, syncopated pursuit.

Sully hopped sideways off the ladder, landing in a crouch on the deck, as Nora ascended. Peering down through the hole in the floor to the level below, Sully drew one pistol, all thoughts of endangered species and maudlin appeals banished. She could make out the face of the first ape up the ladder, pocked with tooth marks from long-ago fights; it bared its teeth at her.

“Hello,” Sully said quietly, and put a bullet between its eyes. It tumbled back down the ladder, taking a second ape with it. But more followed, and more still behind them…

At the top of the ladder, Nora clung to the rungs and stared up at the wheel, thinking hard. She flipped her pistol in her hand, grasping it by the barrel, and dug the butt into one of the four wedge-shaped opening in the wheel.

“Give me a place to stand,” Nora murmured, distantly recalling high school physics. She tugged against the barrel, using it like a wrench. And with a powdery shower of rust and a protesting groan, the wheel began to turn.

“I got it!” Nora whooped, to more gunfire just below her.

“Well, get it a little faster!” Sully shouted back, firing down the hole with one pistol while thumbing bullets into the a clip for the other. “I’m not sure I’ve got as many rounds as these shaggy bastards have reinforcements!”

Straining against years of neglect, Nora turned the wheel. The butt of the pistol scraped against the flaking paint of the valve; she spat and blinked as rust danced down into her eyes and mouth. Then the valve clicked, the lock unsealed, and with a determined shove from Nora, the hatch flopped open into clear air above.

“Come on!” Nora shouted. Below, Sully slammed a boot into the looming face of one last gorilla, leapt upward, and scrambled up the ladder behind her.

They emerged to the whistling wind, a black sky of reinforced tarp stretching away above their heads, and the smell of smoke and flame. A crisscrossing forest of thick, twining steel anchor cables sprouted at angles from fat rings sunken into the top of the armored main gondola, connecting it to the primary gasbag that held the Faithless aloft.

Nora slammed the hatch shut, and looked for some way to seal it from without; but it vanished into the hull nearly without a seam. The apes would follow, and there was no way to stop them.

“The other balloons,” Sully asked, scanning her eyes from side to side. The hull of the ship yawned wide on either side of them, and in the low, close shadow of the balloon above, their view of anything beyond was limited to washed-out white slices of sky. Far at the aft of the gondola, wild sheets of yellow-orange flame roiled away from the shattered remains of the engine room, lapping at what portions of the balloon hadn’t already succumbed to flying shrapnel. “If we can get to those catwalks…”

“Catwalk,” Nora said, feeling her heart deflate and collapse upon itself as she said it. “Singular.” She pointed to the port side of the gondola. Through the narrow gap between balloon and hull, they could see one of the two auxilliary pods once connected to the Faithless receding into a speck against the sky, light glinting off the ragged, shattered catwalk that dragged like a broken arm from its side.

“Must’ve been severed when the hull tore open,” Nora spat, strangely furious. “Dammit! How do we get off this nightmare?”

“One down, one to go, right?” Sully offered, hastily reloading her pistols. “Let’s check starboard.”

“And if that’s not an option?” Nora asked.

“This thing’s coming down one way or another,” Sully shrugged. “How well can you swim?”

“Let’s not find out,” Nora muttered, and swung herself under a anchor cable, headed starboard.

They picked their way through the maze of arm-thick steel cords, Sully’s cloak fluttering like a living thing in the ceaseless wind. Nora kept a keen eye back on the hatch they’d arrived from, expecting primate pursuers at any moment.

“Oh, thank you, good luck,” Sully breathed, then grabbed Nora’s arm and pointed. There, over the rise of the far side of the gondola, they could see the swelling top of a smaller black balloon — the starboard pod, still attached.

“Now we just have to figure out how to get down,” Nora sighed.

“I’m sure we’ll think of—” Sully began, but the jagged clang of an opening hatch swallowed the rest of her words.

Not the port-side hatch through which they’d emerged, but a starboard-side portal just ahead, between them and the sloping edge of the gondola. Long, hairy arms emerged, powerful muscles working beneath, and in a cloud of pure simian stink, a pair of gorillas emerged. Long machetes gleamed, clutched in their thick, gnarled hands.

“I swear,” Nora groaned, as the apes shuffled forward, grunting. “There needs to be, like a qualifying test for having opposable thumbs.”

“That’d make Arkansas a hell of a lot more interesting,” Sully replied, drawing a bead with her pistols.

“Hey, I’ve got cousins in Arkansas,” Nora protested, and the gorillas charged. Their machetes swung in sloppy, gleaming arcs.

Sully squeezed off a shot from each of her pistols, and the gorillas spun and died. “Stupid apes,” she sighed. Something inside her exulted in ways she found quietly frightening. “Bringing knives to a gunfight.”

Machine guns rattled, and bullets sparked and chattered off the crisscrossed steel cords behind them. Sully and Nora hit the deck as the port hatch overflowed with pursuing apes, the silverback they’d seen earlier leading the charge. More and more poured forth, crowding the top of the balloon, howling and shaking their guns in the air.

“You’ve just gotta gloat, don’t you?” Nora scowled at Sully, whose eyes narrowed above her makeshift mask. From within the starboard hatch just a few feet ahead, beyond the bodies of the dead apes, more hoots and growls echoed, and a second pack of gorillas began to emerge, teeth bared, hefting rifles and pistols and lengths of pipe.

Nora heard hissing, and looked up. Helium gas rushed in invisible jets from a scattering of ragged, fluttering bulletholes in the gasbag above. Her keen eyes flashed upon the machetes lying on the deck, just a few feet away, as the apes advanced with guns ready.

“If I had time to explain what I’m about to do,” she told Nora, reaching out to slide a machete scraping across the hull to her companion, “I’d want you to talk me out of it.”

“Good to know,” Sully said, holstering one pistol and gripping the machete, as Nora grabbed the other blade.

“On three,” Nora said, “we run for the other side. Start slashing the gasbag when we get there.”

“I’m not getting this plan,” Sully replied, “But it’s better than ‘get shot by gorillas,’ so…”

“One,” Nora said. The port-side crowd of apes sent a fusilade singing through the air above them. “Two.” The starboard troop drew close enough for her to smell their rotted-meat breath, to see the flies rising from their pelts. “Three!”

The women rose. The air erupted in roars and gunfire, sparks exploding from the steel cables all around them, as they ducked and leapt their way aft and toward the port side, away from the pursuing primate hordes.

“Slash the gasbags!” Nora roared, and punched the tip of her machete through the reinforced fabric above her. Gas rushed out, and she ran on, pushing the blade through the surface of the balloon, widening the fissure.

Sully reached the seam where one sealed compartment met the next and swung, her blade traversing a high, powerful arc; it sank through the bag above, rending open two compartments at once. And they ran on.

A chorus of bullets singing at their heels, the copse of anchor cables around them alive with firefly glimmers of ricochet sparks, Sully and Nora made ever-expanding V’s in the black, rustling surface of the balloon. Ahead of them, the fires still feeding on the engine room flared like blazing banners; behind them, the twin squads of apes had merged into a single charging crowd, firing wildly, rifle barrels glowing and sizzling as they began to overheat. In the rush of escaping helium, their hoots and shrieks became shrill, cartoonish.

Slowly, so slowly, the world began to shift beneath the women’s feet. Like a dying whale, the Faithless listed over further to port, as Nora and Sully robbed it of any buoyance on that side.

“It’s going over!” Sully shouted, as the balance of momentum finally tipped, and the deck on which they stood shifted irrevocably from horizontal to vertical. “Now what?”

“Climb!” Nora replied, scrambling toward the rising swell of the starboard side.

Machetes discarded to slide and skitter down to the deck and plunge off, they used the cables for leverage, climbing hand over hand up the steepening grade of the hull. Nora’s chest burned; the wind had blown most of the helium away from them, but what little had seeped into her lungs did her no favors now. Her foot slipped on the hull, and she nearly tumbled, clawing at the nearest cable for balance; Sully shot out a hand and held her fast until she found her footing again.

Behind them, gorillas clung to cables for dear life, or tumbled in hairy cannonballs screaming down the sloping black hull. Those with bullets remaining fired their guns wildly as they plunged, caroming off cables, to a last swim in the blue-green water far below. Seen from above, their impacts with the water bloomed like tiny pale wildflowers on the surface of the lake; and then a small churning; and then nothing.

Gasping for breath, Sully and Nora swung themselves past one last set of cables and threw their bodies full against the leveled-out hull, once the sheer starboard wall of the Faithless. Below, they could see the water, distant, but rising too quickly to meet them. Ahead, across a football field or more of riveted black metal, the starboard auxiliary pod — warehouse-sized itself — hung serenely from its own midnight balloon. The rusted metal walkway connecting it to the main gondola, and the snarled web of cables, were oddly angled against the hull by the Faithless’s lopsided lean, but they held true.

Strange weapons sprouted like gnarled trees from hinged ports along the side of the gondola. Sully saw serrated, multi-barbed harpoon guns, and thought of summers fishing with her father, the horrible ease with which the hook slid from the unprotesting meat of a captured fish’s mouth. Nora watched a blue ball of electricity coruscate at the tip of another cannon, feeling the faint prickle of current against her skin, even at several feet’s distance.

The wind blew harder now, here on the exposed flat of the hull, snatching at their clothing, leaning with a large dog’s mindless insistence against their chests. The women wound their way carefully between the jagged protrusions of weaponry, eyes always on the walkway. Seagulls had begun to dip and whirl around them, and dimly from below, they could hear the churn and slap of waves on the lake. Behind them, flames still consumed the flaccid, ruined compartments of the great black balloon. The Faithless was falling, and quickly.

Nora set one foot on the walkway and paused. She sucked fresh lake air deep into her lungs and exhaled.

“What?” Sully barked from behind her, over the wind. “What are you waiting for?”

“Apes!” Nora shouted back, prompting Sully to whirl around and check behind them. Nothing. “Apes, or more of those damn cables, or that lousy old scarface. I can’t believe we’re actually gonna get off this thing.”

Beneath her boots, Sully felt the hull begin to hum. Gears ground, motors whirred. With rising dread, she slowly turned again, to see the harpoons and electrical cannons and all of the Faithless’s terrible weaponry steadily grinding around to center on them.

“That,” Nora sighed, from some exhausted place far beyond terror. “I was waiting for that.”

Sully threw herself forward, smashing Nora to the clattering plates of the walkway, as a harpoon big as a dolphin whistled its way through the air where they had once been standing.

“Go!” Sully shouted, as she and Nora scrabbled for traction on the walkway. They lunged forward, racing across the fragile metal platform, as Hell itself filled the perilous air around them.

A ball of lightning burst forth from one of the Tesla cannons, scorching the trailing hem of Sully’s cloak as it tumbleweeded through the air. Chain-fed rivet guns chattered, chewing termite holes in the structure of the walkway. And all around them, harpoons sang deadly falsettos, plunging past to splash in the fast-approaching lake, or slamming point-first through the steel hull of the auxiliary pod ahead.

Sully should have been afraid. She wanted to be afraid. Next to this, being locked in a box would seem a blessing. And yet, pyrotechnics erupting all around her, she felt like she was on stage at last. Not watching from the cool shadow of the wings, but right there under the proscenium, at the center of all the energy, surrounded by miraculous danger. She was staring death right in its bleached, grinning visage, and beneath the sash across her face, the smile she turned back against it was its own.

The door was so close now, Nora could see the latch. She had raced and stumbled and shouted her way to a territory long beyond fear, and now everything around her took on the flat, cool, rational dimensions of the reports she had read every day. Terror and disaster stripped of their looming power, squeezed down genielike to alphanumeric codes. She watched a harpoon sail toward and just above her, the wind of it parting her hair, and marveled at how straight and keen it flew.

Then she turned back toward the door, and the world exploded bright blue in her face.

Eyes full of supernovas, she felt the ground fall away from her feet. Her blinded world pivoted, sharply, sickeningly, felt the meat of her side crash and swivel against the cold metal tube of the railing. She plunged, and something chill and elastic wrapped itself around her, twanged her to a stop.

Her vision returned, fighting away the moth-holes eaten in it, and she found herself staring up at the bottom of the walkway, Sully a shadow crouching down stretching out a hand. Her face stung, sunburnt. She tried to move her arms, and look, and saw them tangled in loops of coiled black tendrils.

And in a single instant, all her fear hit her full at the base of her brain.

She roared in terror, thrashing, and the cables grip seemed to give — and drop her inch by terrifying inch toward the water looming below!

A slim hand thrust itself full in her face. Sully, stretched out full on the walkway above, straining down to reach her.

“They’re dead, Nora!” she said, snatching the sash away so Nora could see her face. “They don’t move! Just relax. They only broke your fall.”

Heart hammering, Nora forced herself to be still, to spread her weight across the fragile web of cables that held her up.

“Good,” Sully called down to her. “Now, slow, easy. Just reach up to me.”

A harpoon slammed into the catwalk not ten feet behind her, severing nearly half its width. The whole thing shook, and Sully clung tight, bones rattling. Metal groaned as the auxiliary pod tried to pull itself up and away from the dying hulk of the Faithless. Bolts began to bend where the harpoon had struck, peeling up from its moorings the single slim plating that held the walkway together.

“Reach, dammit!” Sully cried. Their hands connected, slipped, grasped tight at last. Sully hauled, coronas of white-hot sparks bursting forth around her as vollies from rivet guns shredded the railings of the walkway. Nora gripped the walkway and dragged herself up. Beneath her, it twisted like a hangnail as the pull between the Faithless and the auxilliary pod inexorably tore it apart.

They crawled the remaining few feet to the door of the pod in a last, bitter storm of red-hot rivets from the Faithless’s cannons. Sully risked reaching up, sparks and shrapnel stinging through her gloves, as opened the door to chill, dim mustiness. They tumbled through and slammed the hatch tight; the point of a harpoon screeched through the door just above their heads and stopped, vibrating in some private key of mayhem.

Nora looked up, to the side of the hatch, and saw the lever, large and boldly marked: CATWALK RELEASE. She lunged up and pulled, with all her strength.

Outside, explosive bolts blew the walkway loose from the auxiliary pods; it twisted and tumbled away, dangled for a moment from the limping side of the Faithless, and then broke off, belly-flopping toward the lake below. The cables, now all that remained to link the ship and its offspring, stretched and writhed, and a dark shape seemed to ripple among them, pouring itself out from the belly of the Faithless. Then the tendrils snapped like piano strings, one by one, and the auxilliary pod lurched up into the sky, climbing back to the altitude for which it longed.

Farther below by the second, the Faithless bulged, then broke apart in clouds of fire. The few chambers of its gasbag still filled with helium burst. It fell, slapping against the green, murky depths of Lake Michigan in a mad froth of white foam and steam. And whatever dark secrets it still held sank with it to the silt and mud on the wide, lightless plain of the lakefloor, for the fish to ponder.

Sully and Nora sat for a while, backs to the cool metal of the door, thin light and bracing air dancing in their hair around the edges of the harpoon point above. They grinned like survivors.

The room was echoing and dim, lit by a few shabby pools of light — one above the door against which the women sat, another barely visible on the opposite side of the pod — and by needles of sunlight cast in from the fissures in hull where other harpoons had burst through. On the opposite side of the door from the catwalk release, Sully found a junction box, and ground the protesting switch upward into life.

Generators hummed, old flourescent lights buzzed and tank-tank-tanked themselves grudgingly on, and Nora let out a low whistle. It was a hangar. A smallish one, but still, there like silent stormtroopers in formation were row upon row of knife-sharp black-hulled fighter jets, the skull and crossbones painted across their tailfins. To their left, stretching across the front of the pod, a broad, segmented door waited; Nora could see tracks encasing it, running up to the ceiling.

“I think we found our way out,” Nora smiled, getting to her feet. Then she threw up her arms and whooped with delight. A week ago, the thought of getting into the cockpit of anything would have jellied her knees. Now it felt like a challenge.

“Not to be little miss killjoy,” Sully interrupted, tracing a streak in the dust across the nose of one fighter, “but, uh… you sure these things are still even working? Much less fueled?”

“What do you say we find out?” Nora asked, as they wandered into the center of the hangar. The pointed noses of the jets bristled out at them, expectant. Nora followed the shape of them with her eyes, imagining air currents flowing over their surfaces. They wanted the sky.

A dull scraping reverberated through the empty chamber, the sound clattering itself down off the ceiling above.

“See?” Sully grumbled, drawing her guns, looking around for the source of the noise. “Who's the gloater now, huh?”

“Easy, now,” Nora shot back, as her hand strayed inside her own jacket to rest on the grip of the pistol. “This thing’s old. Could’ve just been working the kinks out.” But she wondered: Had she had time to reload? How many shots remained? She patted one pocket and felt her spare bullets gone — fallen out, perhaps, when she nearly tumbled off the walkway.

“I really don’t think that’s it,” Sully cautioned, nodding back toward the door through which they’d entered.

Slowly, the harpoon head embedded in it had begun to turn. It rattled, lightly at first, then with sudden violence. Then it stopped, slid down limply against the door.

“Tell me that’s not who I think it is,” Sully growled, and Nora’s mouth went dry.

With a sudden shriek, the door tore off its hinges to flutter away. For a moment, empty sky blasted into the hangar — and then a creeping, many-fingered current of darkness rose and bubbled and seeped in around the edges.

As Sully and Nora backed away, the writhing mass of tendrils poured itself into the hangar, tiny metal teeth sinking themselves into the metal flooring, itsy-bitsy-spidering its way forward. And from the bulging, slithering mass of it, a face emerged, and the frail husk of a body.

Framed by the topography of scars upon her countenance, Wicked West’s eyes did not blaze with hatred, nor madness, nor fury. They were calm, and cold, and certain. They were absolutely terrifying.

“Now it ends, little ones,” she said to Nora and Sully, and the tendrils sprang forth to consume them both.

The Aerial Inferno (Part 1)

It had survived bitter, freezing wind, and the relentless assault of equatorial sun. It had turned away bullets, rockets, harpoons, and bombs, and even, once, the envious talons of something far older than man.

But now, far above the churning waters of Lake Michigan, the Faithless, night-sweat terror of the skies, burned and slowly died.

Had the great and terrible craft retained any crew members, they might have forestalled its end — quelled the fires that boiled in ravenous billowing gouts from the jagged fissures blown in the aft hull, patched the ship up, limped it home to pillage another day. But it no longer had a crew. It no longer had a home. And the majority of its inhabitants knew only of the terrible noise, and the frightening heat, and were moved to blind, savage destruction.

In the black heart of the main armored gondola, Wicked West screamed bitter hate through ancient lungs, the countless black cables that knitted her body and being to the ship itself writhing and lashing in the Faithless’s dying agonies.

Sully Wells’ vicious grin of triumph died on her lips as the tendrils encircling her rib cage began to squeeze. Fighting for breath, she flicked a wrist, disgorging a curving knife from up one sleeve, and began to desperately hack at the cables that held her. But their casings were hardened, resilient, and already black spots began to dance at the borders of Sully’s vision…

So, too, did the cables tighten around Nora Swift’s throat as she hung in the air, danging almost face-to-face with the withered, revenge-mad pirate empress. Nora’s fingers scrabbed for purchase against the cables, pulling them away from her neck with all her strength, desperate for a few centimeters’ room. The heavy iron shackles clamped around her ankles dragged her down, down, to certain strangulation.

Wicked West shuddered and screamed anew as a fresh round of explosions rocked the ship, turbines just on the opposite side of the bulkhead exploding in flaming hails of shrapnel. And as the pirate queen’s scar-scratched visage contorted in fury and pain, Nora saw her chance.

Grabbing hold of the cables that entwined her neck with both hands, summoning the memory of every hateful sit-up she’d ever done in her life, Nora lifted her iron-bound feet and smashed them hard into Wicked West’s face.

The cables dissolved into slack as the pain and shock jolted through the old woman’s body, dropping Nora and Sully to land hard on the metal plating of the deck. Still shrieking, Wicked West spooled herself and all her flailing cables back up through the portal in the apex of the chamber’s ceiling, and vanished.

Ribs burning, Sully dragged herself into a sitting position, only to see Nora sprawled across the deck.

“Nora!” she shouted; the death throes of the engine room thundered in the air, blotting out whole spectrums of sound. Sully crawled across the deck, already feeling the heat from the fire in the next chamber beginning to spread through the flooring, and found Nora gasping and coughing, rubbing her bruised throat.

“Ow,” Nora rasped, strength returning to her voice. “Sully? The hell you wearing there?”

“Long story,” Sully sighed, flooded with sudden gratitude at the simple fact that she was no longer alone in all this madness. “You all right?”

“I’ll be a lot better if you can get these damn things off me,” Nora coughed, rattling the chains around her ankles.

Sully dug in her sash and producing a lockpick kit. “I went shoplifting,” she explained. “They had all kinds of really great, dangerous stuff lying around.” She tried not to think about all the things she hadn’t found in the ship’s armory — the racks of heavy arms sitting empty and dust-choked, the boxes of high-caliber ammunition hastily smashed open by inhuman hands, stinking of the same reek that pervaded the rest of the ship.

“Just a sec,” Sully said, digging in the shackles’ latch with a precisely twisted point of wire. “I think I recognize this design…” With a last twist of Sully’s wrist and a heavy clack, the shackles fell open, and Nora sighed in relief.

“Thank you, Eisenheim’s Second Revised Guide to Shackles and Restraints,” Sully said, prompting a very strange look from Nora. “For work! I read it for work! Can you walk?” Sully asked, helping Nora to her feet. “We’ve got to get off this thing. I may have done some damage to the engine room.”

“You think?” Nora snorted, as a fresh round of explosions rattled the steam seams of the chamber. One wall was slowly beginning to glow red, the rivets pinning together its steel plates popping and pinging loose. “Door’s locked,” Nora said, nodding toward the lone hatch she’d tried earlier. “Unless you’ve got some more of that dynamite?”

“Yeah, because I really want to be carrying that stuff around,” Sully replied. “Wait, I’ve got some blueprints here — maybe there’s another way out.” She unfolded the diagram and began to trace lines with her fingers. Nora peered over her shoulder and frowned.

“Wait,” Nora said. “Wait, wait, wait. Give me that. You see these lines here, running under the chamber? I think…” Nora eyed the deck plates, bent down, tugged at the corner of one. It lifted slightly, and Nora broke into a smile. “Come on, help me with this.”

Sully, confused, shifted aching muscles to help Nora lift the deck plate away, revealing a thick tangle of pipes, hoses and conduits running beneath the deck of the ship. Nora wiped a growing layer of sweat from her brow and shook it against the deck. In a few seconds, it began to dance and sizzle; the air in the chamber had begun to shimmer.

“What are we looking for?” Sully asked, as the two peered into the knotty mass of utility lines, and Nora pointed.

“There!” The rubberized skin of the thick cable was beaded with drops of moisture. Condensation. And when Nora reached down to tug the line free and lift it out of the hole in the plating, it was blessedly cool to the touch.

“If there’s one thing I understand,” she told Sully, “it’s ways you can stress metal. It’s getting hot in here, right? Well, this is a coolant line. And if we hit that door—” pointing at the hatch a few feet away — “with what’s in this, the sudden change in temperature—”

“Say no more,” Sully nodded, producing her silver knife with a flourish. “You wanna do the honors?”

“Hold up,” Nora said. “That’s not gonna do it. You’d have to hack through the line slowly, and the stuff inside might make the blade too brittle.” Her eyes roved the display cases dotting the room, resting at last on the jeweled scimitar near the bed where she’d awakened. “Oh, much better.”

Picking up the iron shackles from where they’d fallen on the deck, Nora dragged them over to the case in which the scimitar gleamed, pristine and lovely. Up close, Nora saw fine traces of long-dried blood along the edge of it, and shivered a bit despite the rising heat.

She stepped back, whirled the shackles with her right hand, building up momentum, and them flung them at the glass case. It dissolved into bits and shards, and Nora reached forward and picked up the sword. Heavier than it looked.

Nora was halfway back to where Sully waited with the cable when she stopped. The leather jacket she’d seen earlier, and the old revolver, hung suspended in light in the case to her left. Nora drew close, peering through the glass. The faded letters painted in flaking golden script on the breast of the jacket just barely read Gale.

With the butt of the jeweled sword, she smashed the case open. The jacket, once she’d shaken the bits of glass off, felt surprisingly sturdy in her hands; age had made the leather soft to the touch, the sheepskin collar pillowy and pilled. She slipped it on — a little small for her, perhaps, but it still felt right.

And when she picked up the revolver, it felt curiously familiar in her hand. It was older, more battered — yet somehow, the same pistol her grandmother had given her, the one she’d lost as the tendrils dragged her away. She checked the cylinders — empty, but somehow, she didn’t mind. The gun slipped into the inside pocket of the jacket as if the two were made for one another.

For the first time in hours, for reasons she couldn’t even begin to explain, Nora felt safe again.

“You about done accessorizing?” Sully griped as Nora drew near with the scimitar. Nora cast a critical eye on Sully’s own outfit, then hefted the sword.

“You just watch yourself,” Nora said. “This is gonna be cold.” She brought the sword down through the cable, striking sparks on the deck.

The coolant hose writhed and jerked in Sully’s hands, blue-white fluid jetting forth to splash against the metal of the locked hatch. Nora tossed the sword aside and helped her steady the cable, training the torrent of supercold liquid against the door. Frost began to crack and crawl across its surface, fingers of sudden steam curling off and away from it, and Nora and Sully could hear the metal groan under the sudden shift in temperature.

Another roar from the engine room, and suddenly the entire ship lurched, sliding several degrees left of horizontal. Large spots on the back wall of the chamber now glowed yellow-orange, and fiery red rivets pinged and sizzled like burning acorns from the creaking walls. Nora felt the heat like a hand laid heavily across the back of her neck.

“That’s gonna have to do it!” Nora shouted, and Sully cast the coolant hose aside to fizz and sputter against the deck. They approached the door warily, its cool breath to their faces, the searing escalation of fiery heat at their backs.

“On three?” Sully asked, and Nora nodded. She held up one finger, two fingers, three, and they reared back and kicked in unison. The door shuddered, a large crack spidering out from their point of impact, but it did not give.

“Okay, okay,” Nora nodded, “we just try again. Ready? One—”

The whole room shook, and with a ear-scraping screech, bicycle-sized shards of turbine casing plunged themsleves through the back wall and into the room, tips glowing and molten and beginning to drop. The gondola began to list even further, the door before Nora and Sully growing increasingly uphill.

“Again!” Sully shouted, and without waiting for a count, they rammed their feet against the door. The cracks widened, deepened; red light began to show through in gaps.

“One more time!” Nora cried, and took a few steps back. She and Sully squared their shoulders, got a running start, and hit the door with a pair of graceless but effective flying kicks.

The door gave, exploding off its hinges in fat, jagged shards, and Sully and Nora tumbled backward and fell to the deck.

“Gah!” Nora recoiled, as the stench from the corridor invaded her nose. “What the hell is that?”

Sully grabbed her arm and helped drag her to her feet as the back wall of the chamber groaned ominously. “Don’t ask!” she shouted, amid the rising chords of rending metal. “Just go!”

They threw themselves out the hatch and into the hall as the back wall of Wicked West’s private refuge collapsed. A wall of flame rolled across the room, consuming the silk-laden beddings, devouring the accumulated spoils under glass. And whatever Wicked West preserved in that black laquered box, it would whisper to her no more.

Sully and Nora scrambled to safety up the canted corridor as a fat, whirling tumbleweed of fire belched itself out of the hatch. They watched it recede into genteel cat’s tongues of flames, then turned to one another.

“So,” Nora asked, as her lungs’ need for oxygen battled her sinuses’ urgent demand to breathe in as little of the funk as possible. “How do we not go down with the ship?”

Sully once more unfolded the blueprints. “Apparently, your crazy friend in there wasn’t a big believer in escape pods,” she shouted above the groans and shudders of the dying craft. “But there are walkways, here and here, port and starboard, leading to smaller blimps. If we can get to one of those, well, at least we won’t be on anything that’s currently exploding.”

“Think maybe you overdid it?” Nora grinned grimly, nodding her head in the direction of the engine room.

“Business instincts,” Sully sighed. “Last time I blew up a whole building. You’ve always gotta make the encore bigger.”

They wobbled, arms flailing, as the craft listed even further to the left. The walls were now perilously close to becoming floor and ceiling. Sully folded up the map, dug around in the sash at her hip, and handed Nora a small, dust-coated paper box emblazoned in colorful foreign script.

“Bullets,” Sully explained. “For that piece of yours. I took a few different kinds, just to be safe.”

“Wait, why do we need guns?” Nora asked, the revolver feeling suddenly heavy against her ribs.

Sully shook her wrists, and twin automatic pistols slid out of her sleeves. One fell neatly into her grip, but she nearly fumbled the other, catching it before it could clatter to the deck.

“I’m, uh, still getting the hang of this,” she said hastily. “Pretend that was a lot more badass, okay?”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Nora replied, thumbing shells into the open chambers of her grandmother’s gun. The spare rounds clinked and jangled in her jacket pocket.

“I’m not sure I know the answer,” Sully said darkly, cocking one silver pistol, then the other. “And I’m not sure I want to. Come on.”

The infernal heat grew with every step they took through the flickering red lights of the corridors, even as they put greater distance between themselves and the engine room. Several times, Sully thought she could hear other, pursuing sounds just below the groaning, roaring din. But the corridors betrayed no shadow, no flicker of motion save their own.

“It’s not far now!” Sully shouted to Nora as they reached a t-junction in the halls. To their left, a tangled, narrow passage festooned with pipes led to the opposite side of the ship. But ahead, the steepening grade of the corridor revealed the hatch she’d left ajar upon first entering the craft. Now all they had to do was find a ladder up to the next level...

A dark, broad, form loped out of the doorway ahead and stopped. Sully froze, flinging back an arm to restrain Nora. The shadow was joined by another, and then more and more, spilling out of the hatch in shambling, pendulous motion. As a mass, they shuffled forward, into the flat red glare of an emergency beacon.

The troop of gorillas, skinny and scarred from countless inter-tribal skirmishes, regarded them in hooting, nervous uncertainty for several long moments. Then the leader raised something cradled in his thick, powerful arms, a long, tapered tube of metal that gleamed dully in the crimson lights. Even with her ears ringing from the constant noise, Sully could make out the unmistakable sound of a bolt sliding into place.

She swore, inventively, and with great enthusiasm.

“What you said,” Nora seconded.

To be continued...

In the Crimson Jungle of the Clouds

She dreamed of drowning, tangled in the rigging of some sunken galleon. And when Sully Wells at last awoke, sodden and shaking and faintly blue, she looked up and saw the ground.

It took her a few seconds to realize that yes, that was the Sears Tower pointing back at her, so far below. Then it vanished behind a curl of cloud, and all was gray mist once more.

She had gone so far past cold that she nearly felt warm again, soaked to the bone by the previous night’s storm and the pervasive, clinging mist of the cloud that surrounded her. She tried to move, and something caught at her, snagged her. Sully craned her neck and looked back and up and saw the tendrils, and nearly screamed.

They were still now, inert, and she had somehow gotten twined within them. She didn’t remember how; just a long, rushing flight up toward darkness, Nora clinging to her hand. And then…

She tried to move again, and the cables started to loosen their hold — and she began to fall. Panic stabbed at her gut, fear shot a torrent of heat through her limbs, and she grabbed the black cables to steady herself. She lifted her neck to look ahead. The cables stretched over her, taut, to some sort of gondola a good distance ahead, hanging suspended in the air by a great black patchwork balloon.

It took her some terrifying minutes, working numb hands and stiff limbs, to push herself up carefully through the tangle of black cables, slip from where they’d looped and knotted around her limbs, and lie with her weight carefully distributed across the slithering net of tendrils as they bounced and swayed in the air. Her teeth chattered like a wind-up toy, until she thought her jaw would rattle itself off her face.

When she could finally tear her eyes away from the dizzying depths below her, she slowly turned her head to the left. There was a walkway, dull rusted iron, stretching across the cables, extending to the gondola. Only after she had crawled, inch by shaking inch, and sprawled full on its freezing, rain-spotted plates, did she bother to wonder where it originated.

She looked back over her shoulder and saw it — armored hull battleship-huge, bristling with pikes and harpoons and colonized in fractals of rust and wear. Bulging steel cables, thick as a clenched fist, stretched up from the top of the massive gondola to a mammoth, sun-blotting oblong of thick, black-painted fabric. The weathered outlines of a skull and crossbones leered out from the side of the balloon, big as a house.

There was a door in the side of the massive gondola, connected to the walkway, and Sully rose on muffled, unsteady limbs and lurched her way toward it — only to find no outward latch. She banged on it with icy white fists, kicked it and shouted, and heard nothing.

At last, her legs gave out. She dropped to her knees, muscles jumping like bugs beneath her skin, trying to shake out the cold.

There, on the plates of the catwalk, she looked down through the tangle of black cables sprouting through ports on the side of the gondola, and saw an open porthole below.

She nearly fell sliding herself off the catwalk, and again lowering herself through the cables to kick her feet at the circular open window. Slowly, numb hands gripping the slippery black tendrils for dear life, she managed to work one leg, and then the other, into the hole — and with one last, sickening lurch, and a number of bruises she barely felt, she slipped and bumped and fell into the gondola.

It was warmer here, even with the chill coming in through the open window. Warm air rose through gaps in the deck plates, and Sully spread herself flat on the floor and passed out for several minutes, exhausted and shivering.

Distant footfalls, vibrating all through the metal of the ship, woke her. Slowly, aching, she pushed herself up from the floor. The heat only served to make her realize how cold she really was, under layers of freezing, moisture-sodden clothes.

She was in some kind of crew quarters; rows of spacious, comfortable-looking bunks and heavy metal lockers lined the walls on either side. At the far end, she saw a door, pressure-sealed with a circular valve from the inside. Dents from outside bulged in the metal of the door, and a pile of chairs and a metal table had been haphazardly stacked against it.

Behind her, the porthole yawned open, cold air whistling in. She stood gingerly, stumbled forward, and shut it, hearing it latch tight. Then she looked down at the low ledge beneath the window, where the massive outer plates of the hull had been welded together, and something gleamed back at her.

Earrings. They were a pair of gold and pearl earrings, simple but lovely. They had been placed neatly and precisely, one beside the other, on the metal. On the floor beneath them, a pair of worn black silk slippers, set down with the same solemn care.

Sully thought about this, and about the open window. She looked back at the makeshift barricade barring the door, and when she shivered, it was not entirely from the cold.

The air grew steadily warmer in the narrow room, now that the window was shut. Sully rummaged the bunks and found blankets, dust-choked and moth-worn but still thick and warm. Clumsily, she stripped out of her soaking clothes, the leather jacket, the thick boots and fishnet stockings, and huddled in a mound of blankets at the center of the floor until her shaking subsided and she felt fully alive again.

The lockers had no locks, and inside them, Sully found more of the neat black slippers, and black silken pants, tunics, and cloaks — the Stevie Nicks ninja brigade, Sully wondered? Jean-Paul Gaultier designing for the Nazi Women’s Auxiliary? But at the moment, staying warm — and not running around a strange and possibly dangerous death ship in mismatched, several-days-old underwear — trumped the possibility of looking stupid.

After a few tries, she found a set of clothes that fit — a loose long-sleeved shirt, baggy harem-like pants with a sash for a belt, and a hooded cloak that draped across her shoulders. The dark fabric was lightweight, comfortably warm, and nearly soundless when she moved. She didn’t want to think about how much a getup like this would have run her back in L.A.

She rummaged through her thoroughly ruined jacket and found, at last, her silver Zippo and Mister Gaunt’s box of cigarettes — a bit damp around the edges, but miraculously undamaged. None of the slippers she could find fit, and something made her leery of touching the pair by the porthole. So she sighed, gritted her teeth, and squished her feet back into her boots.

Wherever she was, the tendrils had taken her. Which meant Nora was here. Sully didn’t really know her — they’d talked some at the Lookout — but in all likelihood, Trip and the British guy were somewhere far, far below. Which made Nora the closest thing Sully had to a friend, literally.

And wherever the tendrils had taken her was probably nowhere that anyone wanted to be.

She moved the furniture away from the door, slowly, carefully. From the dust piled in the corners of the room, and the mothholes in the blankets, whatever had happened here happened long ago. That didn’t make Sully feel any more comfortable.

A turn of the wheel, a few sturdy tugs on the hatch, and the door screeched open, terrifyingly loud. Sully froze, listening to the shriek of rusty metal echo through distant corridors. Then the smell hit her.

A butcher shop. Hell, an entire meat department. In the middle of a monkey house — scratch that, ten monkey houses — in the dead of summer. Sully stumbled back, the sheer stink of it hitting her like a shove to the chest. One hand pinching her nose shut, she rummaged through the lockers again until she found a spare sash, which she wrapped around her nose and mouth until the sheer stench was cut to tolerable limits. She caught a glimpse of herself in a cracked, spotted-over patch of mirror inside one of the locker doors; a strange-eyed bandit stared back at her, and for a moment, she felt her lips twist into a grin beneath the sash, and wasn’t sure why.

The smell didn’t get any better outside. The hallway was empty, lit an eerie, eye-burning red by emergency bulbs sprouting from the bulkheads. Dried black piles of something Sully didn’t even want to contemplate soiled the edges of the corridor, and as she crept along the corridor toward what she vaguely remembered as the front of the gondola, she saw entire lunar fields of tiny craters and dents pocking the thick steel walls. Bullet marks.

Something howled, indeterminately far away, the sound ramming itself madly off the corridor walls, sending a flock of centipedes clamoring down Sully’s spine. Okay, guns, she thought. Guns had just become a priority.

She passed many doors; most were locked, while some yawned open into kitchens or bunk rooms preserved in some hurricane state of disarray. Sully kept moving.

At last, she found a ladder, which she climbed to a closed hatch, white light leaking in around its edges. Sully waited, listening. No voices. No sound at all. She pushed, arms still aching from that manhole cover yesterday, and the hatch creaked open into light and cold air. Sully had found the bridge.

Cold, wet wind blew in through the smashed-open windows that ringed the fore of the room, bits of jagged glass clinging like barnacles at their edges. Steering, throttle, communications — the stations sat empty and unmanned. A captain’s chair, all smooth curving metal and rotting leather, bloomed roselike in the center of the room.

No one was piloting the ship.

Sully fought down an initial wave of panic and shut the hatch behind her. Something had to be controlling this ship; it had grabbed her and Nora, hadn’t it? And she saw lights glowing softly on the control panels — those not smashed, melted and blackened by fire, or chewed up by what looked like gunfire.

She had a sudden urge to sit down, legs tired and aching. She was still getting warm from her time tangled outside. She moved toward the captain’s chair and stopped. Even empty, it had some sinister presence about it — a sense of being occupied, even when it wasn’t. Sully thought better and retreated to one of the stations around the rear periphery of the oblong chamber.

She sat for a while, watching clouds and the occasional bird pass outside the gaping front windows, her brain trying to catch up with the rest of her. Something fluttered at the periphery of her vision, and she turned to look at the console before her, where a slim curl of tattered yellow paper peeked out from one of several slender, vertical drawers mounted into the wall. She pulled out the nearest drawer, and found a map — topography of some strange island, with runways and flight vectors marked by hand in red pencil. The other drawers held more maps, and blueprints — science-fiction aircraft like Sully had never seen, sprouting strange multitudes of wings and engines. Here, too, careful handwritten annotations had been made — circles and x’s noting what appeared to be weak spots and points of entry.

The last map was different. Sully recognized the shape of it — the very gondola she occupied. She found the bridge, traced the corridor back to the room from which she’d entered. The diagram was rougher than the others, sketched by a shaky but trained hand. In sharp, slashing letters at one corner, it had been labeled: FAITHLESS.

She pulled the diagram as far as it would go from the wall, and stood, fingers pressed to the yellow, gummy celluloid that sheathed it, searching. Looking for points of interest. The ARMORY, there, on the opposite end of the ship. ENGINE ROOM, not far away. And right at the heart of the ship, a vast empty space, pointedly unlabeled…

The gentle slithering sound crept slowly around the edges of Sully’s consciousness, and at first, when something brushed lightly against her shoulder, she nearly reached up and swatted it away. Then she saw movement in the corners of her eyes.

The black tendrils were spooling from ports in the ceiling, twisting and twining and searching their way across the bridge.
Sully froze, her heart jackrabbiting against her rib cage. She started to move, and five or six individual cables stopped with a jerk, and turned their pincer ends in her direction. The cables began to diverge, slowly, winding themselves into a cord thick as a man’s arm, oozing like oil across the open air of the room toward Sully’s face.

She shifted her weight to one side, ready to dive, and in a blink, the tendril had closed its distance, sharp metal pincers on the ends of the dozens of cables jawing in predatory leisure.

And then it split, and slid around her head, and neatly shut all the map drawers she’d left open.

Across the bridge, Sully saw the cables flipping switches. Strands wound around the rudder controls, making careful adjustments to the ship’s course. Even at the broken, burnt-out consoles, the tendrils continued to adjust switches that no longer worked, and grope for dials and levers smashed and blackened beyond recognition.

After a minute or two, the tendrils retreated, reeling back up into the ceiling. The bridge was empty. Sully was alone.

She looked down and saw her own knuckles white against the edge of the console.

Sully pulled the map drawer back open and yanked the blueprint of the Faithless out of its frame. She clenched it in her fist until she felt the shaking go from her hands.

A quick scouring of the bridge turned up nothing else — no weapons, just a frustratingly empty cabinet that looked like it might once have held rifles. Sully found a second hatch, on the opposite side of the gondola from where she’d entered. Fastest way to the armory, the map said. She opened it carefully, listening again for any sound or motion below. And when she heard nothing, she climbed down carefully.

She got one final glimpse of the strange, unsettling captain’s chair before the hatch swung shut above her.

The corridors on this side smelled no better, nor were they any less strewn with debris and the marks of battle. Sully followed the blueprints as best she could, but it wasn’t easy; the corridors all looked the same, save for their various desecrations, and the eerie red light made the diagrams hard to read.

She had paused at an intersection to check her progress when she heard it. Shuffling, scraping sounds. Grunting. She turned to check the corridor behind her. Strange shapes flitted and bulged on distant walls.

The inhuman howl rose again, reverberating off the surrounding metal. Closer. Too much closer.

Sully turned and ran, stuffing the map back into the sash around her waist. Every footfall of her boots on the deck plates seemed to ring out like a hammer blow. Behind her, the grunts grew louder, more aggressive. She didn’t dare look back.

She started testing doors, looking for any shelter she could find. Locked. Locked. Locked again. The latch on one seemed to give, only to snap off in her hand.

Shadows, cast from behind her, began to flicker and dance along the walls. She heard shuffling, the tread of heavy bare feet on the metal. Ragged, aggressive machete-blows of breath. And the stink in the air, choking, thickening.

Her hands fumbled. A latch gave, a door swung wide, and she tumbled inside and slammed it shut behind her.
It wouldn’t lock. She looked at the door and saw that something, long ago, had smashed and twisted the handle. Sully turned and saw a lab table, large, heavy, and pushed it shrieking across the metal floor to block the door. No sooner had she slammed it home across the hatchway than the door boomed with a sudden, heavy blow from outside. Another. The table rattled, and the door shook. Dents began to appear in the metal. It’d hold, but only so long.

Immediate danger faded, Sully drank in her surroundings. The stink was somehow even worse in here. Some kind of lab, it looked like. Rusted metal cages lined the walls, big ones, stacked atop each other four high to the ceiling. The doors of most had been torn off, bent, dangling limply from their hinges.

Beyond where the table had been, Sully found the floor painted in red-brown dried blood. Bits of thick white fabric, liberally stained, were scattered about. Surgical tools, scalpels and chisels and saws, lay scattered and rusting on the metal plating, where they’d fallen from an overturned cart.

On shelves on the walls, past the cages, row after row of elongated simian skulls stared out at her. The skulls had been cut open, and mechanical components, of differing design, placed inside. Sully shuddered.

A thunderous blow shook the door, and the heavy table screeched inward a half-inch. The hatch cracked open, and Sully heard angry hoots and shrieks from without. There was another door at the far end of the room, and Sully opened it hastily, finding herself in an office blanketed in cobwebs.

There were a desk and chair here, and more shelves, with jars; strange, blind things floated preserved in formaldehyde. Some had more than the usual number of limbs. Or heads. Sully didn’t care to look too closely.

Another boom from the chamber without; another screech of the table. Whatever was outside, it was quickly getting in. Sully looked up and saw a ventilation grate in the wall, up near the ceiling. Rusted and treacherous, but big enough for her to fit.
She pushed the desk over to the wall, shedding papers snowdrifted on top of it. A framed picture on the desk toppled and fell, and Sully, curious, picked it up and shook the glass free. It was a young woman, hair tightly pinned back, neat lab coat perfectly fitted, strange piercing eyes boring through the camera. She stood behind a table, on which a young chimpanzee sat, staring ahead at the photographer. It took Sully a moment to realize that the top of the chimp’s skull was missing, its brain showing beneath. She dropped the picture back on the desk as if it had suddenly squirmed in her hand.

There was another loud crash from the door outside, and the sound of the lab table clattering on its side. She had no time. Sully grabbed the grating and tugged, flinging it to one corner of the room. She planted her hands inside the duct and hauled, wriggling up and into the narrow tunnel.

The duct seemed to contract around her, squeezing the breath from her lungs in a single gasp. She was back in the attic, locked in the box, blind and helpless and terrified.

Sully squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated. Remember the diagram. The false panel. The hidden latch, just underneath the back of the lock…

A thick, powerful hand seized her by the ankle and yanked her backward.

The skin of her palms squealed and stung against the metal of the duct as she slid, clawing frantically for traction. She looked back — a shadow blocked the light at the entrance of the grate, one thick, impossibly long arm winding its way inside, clamped around her boot. Waves of stench rolled off the thing, and Sully heard grunting, and saw a flash of teeth.

She kicked out hard with her free foot. Her heel smashed against skin and bone, and she heard something cracked. A howl erupted into the duct, rattling her eardrums, and the hand let go of her ankles. She crawled forward into the dark, desperate, awkward, fast as she could. The light blotted out behind her, and she heard the dark shape swatting and pawing around, just out of reach of her feet. Sully looked back at saw the thing smashing itself again and again at the entrance to the vent, trying to get in. Too large to fit.

The thing roared at her, and Sully, triumphant, blew a raspberry back at it. Then she turned and wriggled onward into the dark. At a safe distance, she fished out the blueprints and flicked on her lighter, tracing ventilation ducts. This might work.
Some minutes later, she battered open one last grating, reached out to grip a particularly sturdy-looking pipe bolted to the ceiling, and dragged herself out to dangle and drop into the heart of the ship’s armory.

It was a long, narrow room, one wall all panels of glass, the others rows and rows of lockers, interrupted at one end by a thick, securely fastened door. A steady, constant thrumming, louder here than elsewhere in the ship, filled her ears. That was the first thing Sully noted.

The second: She wasn’t alone.

The body, dessicated by the passing of unknown decades, wore robes like the ones she sported. It slumped against the wall of windows, legs splayed out across the floor, undignified. In the bony claw of its right hand, it held a revolver loosely. It was largely missing one side of its head.

Sully’s gorge rose, and she fought it down. It wasn’t a person, she lied to herself. Never had been. Just some elaborate prop. She could deal with props.

She busied herself checking the lockers. OMG had done tricks with guns — impossible shots, death-defying exploits — and she’d had to learn them herself, to make sure the tricks were safe. She never liked the way the guns felt in her hands. Largely because she liked them too much. The concentrated power of God, a fingertip away. All you had to do was point, exhale, and squeeze. If she held a gun for long enough, and stayed quiet and listened, she could begin to hear her brain making quiet, awful suggestions, in honeyed tones.

But she knew enough to find the most reliable models among the racks of weaponry that awaited her behind the locker doors; to check that the automatics were clean, to know where to find the safeties, to find the right caliber of extra bullets. She found all sorts of useful things.

And only when she was fully stocked, and nearly adjusted to moving around with a bit of extra weight, did she bother looking through the wall of windows into the dim, red-lit gloom beyond. Vast turbines hummed and crackled, and person-sized pistons turned at dizzying speeds. The engine room.

Almost without her knowledge, Sully found her fingers digging out the box of cigarettes, her hands moving to flick open the lighter. She stopped, and turned, and looked at the heavy wooden crate she’d very carefully pulled out from one of the farthest lockers. Better safe than sorry, she thought, and gingerly closed the lighter.

Then her eyes fixed on the cigarettes in one hand, and the lighter in the other, and then back on the wooden crate, sitting there in ominous innocence on the steel floor.

She had an idea.

Sully pushed at one of the windows, scrabbled her fingers around its edges until she found a latch. It clicked, and the window swung open, and Sully stepped out to a platform behind, and a narrow, steep staircase leading down into the pit.
Beneath the sash, she smiled.


The noise in the engine room was nearly deafening; as she climbing the ladder up from the pit to the catwalks high above, quickly but deliberately, Sully could feel the inside of her skull reverberate. Reaching the top, she risked a quick look back down, but it was more instinct than anything else. It was too far, and too dark, to see anyway. She headed onward along the catwalk, feeling more than hearing the clang of her footsteps against the metal, tracing the pathways of the blueprints in her mind.

The vast, unmarked chamber she’d seen on those plans cradled itself like an egg at the heart of the ship, nestled against the engine room as if seeking some adjacent warmth. At the end of the catwalk, Sully found what she’d been looking for — the hatch to the maintenance tunnels surrounding the central chamber. Whatever it was, it still needed water and light and air. And whenever you had systems like those, you needed ways to go in and fix them when they broke.

It was pitch dark inside, save for a distant well of soft light ahead, and once she’d shut the hatch, the noise of the engine room dropped to a dull thrum again. After nearly banging her head on a low-hanging pipe, she dropped into a crouch and inched forward along an even narrower platform. Thin railings denominated its sides, and reaching her hands beyond them, Sully felt only empty space.

Something moved in the darkness beneath her, once, quietly. Then the stale, close air filled with a familiar slithering sound, and Sully flicked on her lighter to see, several feet below the catwalk on which she knelt, the entire floor of the chamber alive with writhing black tendrils. They seemed to be pouring forward into the central well at the heart of the chamber.

Sully heard a voice, low and musical, faintly over the sound of the rustling tendrils, and then a panicked shout. It sounded like Nora.

Sully scrambled forward to the edge of the well, where the catwalk swelled into a ring surrounding the opening. Peering down through the marionette tangle of undulating tendrils, she saw a figure, almost human, suspended in its midst.
“… could have killed you in your sleep, I suppose,” the low, horrible, weathered voice was saying, each word drifting up to Sully like a puff from a hookah. “But I made myself wait. I wanted to see the fear in your eyes. I wanted you to know.”

Sully clenched both fists around the railing, felt her stomach double-knot itself, and took a deep breath.

The voice at the bottom of the pit said something else, quick and low, but Sully didn’t hear it. She had swung herself beneath the railing, off the edge of the catwalk, into the vortex of cables below.

She hit one side of the mass of cables and slid, picking up speed, the fabric of her cloak and trousers zipping and humming against the wriggling tendrils. Down and down she funneled, feet braced to land hard on the figure that dangled at the very heart of the obscene nest—

The wall of tendrils against which she slid gave way, and with a yelp she tumbled out into empty space. Black lines arced and darted at the corners of her vision, and she stopped with a sudden jerk, her arms and legs wrenching painfully, to dangle several feet above the metal-plated floor.

With a rough, nauseating motion, the cables snaring her limbs wrenched her up and around and face to face with the figure at the center of the tendrils — a woman, Sully saw, uncountably old, her face criscrossed with a fierce topography of scars. Beyond her, pressed against the wall, Nora struggled to pry loose the cables squeezing around her throat.

“I was not to be disturbed!” the old woman roared in a sandstorm voice, eyes blazing with hate. “I made that specifically—” Then she stopped; her eyes narrowed, her mouth pursed. Sully risked a glance at Nora and saw, to some relief, that the cables seemed to have loosened around her neck.

“Oh,” she said, as a tiger might say to a lamb. “You’re not one of mine, are you? That’s right… I haven’t had…” Her eyes clouded for a moment, and then snapped back to knife-edge keenness. “Another False Sister, are you? Another deceiver?”

“And you must be the captain,” Sully said, trying to keep the shaking out of her voice. She remembered what her grandfather’s books had taught her, all those long summers ago: A magician must be smooth and practiced in his patter, must weave a comforting hammock of words in which the audience may rest…

“I’m nobody,” Sully told her. “Just one of the many, many enemies you must have bested in your life. And I accept that. There’s clearly no hope left for me.”

“Sensible,” the old woman sniffed, as if slightly pleased.

Funny thing about patter. It could sound a lot like contract negotiations, if you listened to it right.

“And seeing how we’re all women here, the three of us,” Sully continued, “I wondered if, if your triumph, you might grant me one small boon before you do me in. A last cigarette.”

“Tobacco,” the woman exhaled, slowly, longingly. “I can’t even remember how long it’s been.” Sully nodded to herself. A fellow addict always knows.

“It’s just in my belt here, with my lighter,” Sully said, jerking her hands against the restraining tendrils. “If I could…?” She managed to meet Nora’s baffled, somewhat indignant eyes, and tried to project as much reassurance back as she could.

The old woman’s eyes narrowed again for a moment. “Young lady, I’ll have no trickery from you. Unless you prefer to be picked apart very deliberately, over several hours’ time.” The pincers on the end of each tendril opened and shut, meaningfully, and Sully’s stomach churned again. She tried to count minutes and seconds in her head, thinking back.

The cables slackened enough for Sully to reach slowly to the sash at her waist, and to draw from it her lighter and the box of cigarettes. She flicked the lighter open and shut, stalling for as much time as she could, and then opened the box of cigarettes and peered inside.

“Huh,” she said, and turned to show it to the old woman. “Empty.” Sully took some small satisfaction in the shadow of disappointment that flitted across her scar-scorned face. “That’s right, that’s right,” Sully continued. “I used them all up. Earlier. Funny thing about being a magician. You can turn women into tigers, playing cards into doves…”

She paused, and flicked the lighter open for effect, and watched the flame dance reflected in the old woman’s black, confused eyes.

“Or old dynamite and cigarettes into time bombs,” Sully said.

The entire ship shook and boomed in terrible sequence, the blasts as much felt as heard. The old woman screamed, long and horrid, her face contorted in real pain.

“Abracadabra, bitch,” Sully grinned, and just beyond the steel walls, the engine room of the Faithless burned.

The Spider Queen Spins a Story

Engine oil and jasmine.

Nora Swift awoke to engine oil and jasmine, mingled in the warm, close air. Eyes still shut, half-dreaming, she rolled sideways — and found herself tangled, limbs swathed.

Nora lurched to full consciousness in a panic, arms and legs flailing, anything to escape the horrible, choking helplessness of the dark tendrils—

But these were sheets. Silk. The tendrils were gone, and Nora was alone, and indoors, and quietly afraid.

The room was dim and golden-hued, illuminated by paper lanterns strung from the walls. Thick steel girders ribbed the walls, studded with bolts as hefty as a fat man’s knuckles, stretching up beyond the pools of lantern-light into shadows that softly shaded into absolute darkness, some unknown distance above. The steady thrum of immense, constant machinery pulsed through the walls and floor, almost more felt than heard.

Nora threw off the sheets and sat up, slowly. She tried to remember. The tendrils had pulled her out of the window, Sully clinging to her hand; they’d been hauled up into the mist, dizzyingly high, momentarily breaks in the clouds showing glimpses of light shimmering on rain-drenched streets sickeningly far below. And then…

She couldn’t recall. Nora checked her watch; a smashed, ugly crystal and horribly blank display looked back at her. She had to get up from this strange bed, get out, find Sully, escape from wherever this was. She tried to stand up.

Heavy iron shackles, cuffed around the hems of her jeans, clanked and rattled, and she nearly fell over.

Nora stared at the shackles, not knowing whether to burst out laughing or get really, really pissed off.

She tested them. Thick, sturdy, peppered with rust and age, but they offered no easy escape. The damn things weighed a ton, and had just enough chain between them to allow Nora a convict’s sort of half-shuffle. Enough to move, but not enough to run.

Nora briefly considered that, not four days ago, she had been worried about processing the report on the near-collision between two small planes over Waukegan. Given that, wherever this place was, it didn’t seem to have a dress code, she wasn’t entirely sure whether this was worse.

“Hello?” she called out to the darkness. “Someone wanna let me out of these damn things? I mean, this is, like, five kinds of wrong.” No one responded, save Nora’s own faint echo. “Fine,” she grumbled. “See if I don’t sue your ass.”

The room was vast, and at a shuffle, it took several minutes to circle completely. It was mostly empty space, populated here and there with tables and glass cases containing strange, carefully lit and displayed relics. At the far end of the chamber from the low, mosquito-netted bed where she’d awakened, Nora found a thick hatch, but it, too, was sealed tight, and five minutes of irrationally optimistic tugging at it only made her arms tired.

So back at a clanking shuffle she went, legs already getting sore, to inspect each of the cases in turn. The significance of the objects inside largely escaped her: a gorgeous, jewelled scimitar in one, a golden statue of a falcon in another. Only the case closest to the bed gave her pause; a leather aviator’s jacket, and a six-shot pistol, slightly worried by age, and uncomfortably familiar.

And then there was the box.

It had no case; only a pedestal, lit with a single flickering spot. It was built from black lacquered wood, inlaid with mother of pearl, and Nora could not even hope to guess at its age. Nora stretched out a hand to touch the box; it felt strangely warm. The patterns etched in its surface curved and swirled hypnotically, labyrinths for the eyes. There was no latch.

Nora opened the lid, just a crack. From the darkness within, a sickly-sweet smell slid out, mingling with the jasmine and the engine oil. She started to lift the lid further.

And let it drop shut, with a snap, as a voice coiled down out of the darkness above her.

“Hello, sister,” it said.

It was a woman’s voice, made of smoke and sand; audibly ancient, yet somehow still musical, dipping and swaying with the ghost of some unfixable accent. Nora looked up, but saw nothing but shadow. She shivered and backed away from the box, suddenly feeling very small, and very alone.

“At last,” the woman’s voice said. “You’ve come home, sister.”

“Where am I?” Nora called out, with all the courage she could muster. “And what’s with these damn shackles?”

“Not to your comfort?” the voice chuckled, affecting a treacly, mothering voice, shot through with a curl of poison. “I can sympathize. They were mine, once. After the first three months, your ankles stop bleeding. By six, the calluses have formed. And within a year, your legs forget that you could ever run, that you ever did without them. And you carry your cage with you.”

“Are you — are you with the Needlemen?” Nora asked, eyes raised, slowly shuffling backward toward the nearest wall. Right now, she wanted her back against something firm, impermeable; maybe them, the voice wouldn’t sound like it was always just over her shoulder.

“The Needlemen? The Needlemen are a myth, sister,” the voice laughed, dry and mirthless. “Of course, so am I. Your spook-stories don’t trade here.”

“They’re real as a heart attack,” Nora risked, “and — and if they know where I am, and they probably do, you better believe there’s a whole bunch of ‘em on their way to pay you a visit.” Maybe this woman, whoever she was, was as scared of the Needlemen as Nora. Then again… Nora remembered the black tendrils, and shuddered. Maybe not.

“These Needlemen…” the voice began. “Do they have wings, perhaps?”

“They’ve got helicopters,” Nora answered. “Close enough?”

The voice sighed, almost wistfully. “Helicopters. Haven’t eaten any of those in, oh, I can’t remember. I can’t wait.”

Nora risked a glance over her shoulder; the wall was maybe fifteen feet away, agonizingly close. But with every step, the heavy shackles bit into her legs, dragging at her, scraping noisily along the metal-plated floor.

“Who are you? Why did you bring me here?” Nora asked, trying to control the quaver in her voice. It suddenly occurred to her that if she died, no one would ever feed her cat again. If it hadn’t gone feral already.

“Would you like to hear a story?” the voice asked. “Stories are — forgive me, stories were my trade, long before blood and steel. Shall I tell you a story, sister?”

“Is it a story about getting these damn shackles off me?” Nora said, anger flaring in her.

“In a manner of speaking, perhaps,” the voice responded. “Once upon a time — that, you see, is how all good stories should begin — there was a princess in a distant kingdom. The details no longer matter; how wise was her father, how brave her mother, how numerous her courtiers … how she bathed in perfume and danced on pearls … how very happy she was. All irrelevant. All dust and ash.

“They say seven is a lucky number, but not for this princess. She had seven years, seven years of goodness and happiness. And then, because the world hates nothing so much as imbalance, she received all those years’ allotment of misery in a single night. The Enemy came, ten foot tall to the last of them, swarming over the walls. The princess watched her garden burn, her horses and camels and dogs and cats punctured and bled to lifelessness. They painted her mother across the walls of the dancing-chamber, and hung bits of her father in the rafters.

“And what of the child, you ask? Oh, they saved something very special for her. When she thought she had lost everything there was to lose, they proved her wrong. They brought out a steel box, not much bigger than the princess herself, and they locked her inside. And for seven years, she lost the light of the sun.

“Imagine. Seven years of noises in the dark, of sudden thumps and blows. Seven years of having food, such as it was, pass in through one slot, and passing its remains out through another. Seven years in a world of arbitrary gravity, where up could just as easily become down. You can understand, can’t you? How it would drive anyone, even a princess, utterly mad?

“And then, after seven years, after the dark had even become her friend, the light, the terrible light. And the pain. And the men, endless men, with stinking breath and rough, cruel hands. And the princess discovered yet more things that could be taken from her, and knew she must be mad. In her youth, you see, every face had been different, unique. Now every man wore one face, cruel and hateful. And the princess, mad though she was, had wits enough to know this, know the wrongness of her perceptions, and despair in her madness.

“Sometimes, the princess found, she could spin a story to her visitors, and delay the pain they visited upon her. Some were amused. Some not. But she became known as a storyteller, and the visitors began to insist upon it, and the stories became just another shackle, in the end.

“They say a single bite of food can be crueler to a starving man than continued hunger. So it was for the princess, to know tiny islands of kindness in her ocean of pain. To share the company of women, other women like her; to hear them, at night, whisper bits and baubles of their former happiness, like treasures shown and shared only in secret, only for moments. To learn from them of art and science and mathematics, things to focus the mind during those moments when the princess had to sever it from her body, make a dead object of herself, or else go madder still from the purposes to which she was put.

“They kept her chained when the men came to her, of course; it was assumed that long years of captivity had broken her spirit, but no one wished to risk her fingernails across their tender eyes all the same. But they unshackled her feet, for reasons I shall spare you, however obvious they may prove upon careful thought. And the body, oh, the body is a wonder. Infinitely adaptable, infinitely resourceful. And so it was that on the day a careless man at last forgot to leave behind the knife at the back of his belt, the princess gripped it fast in her her toes, and with her legs and feet drove it deep into his back, again and again, until at last he died. And when his death-cries brought the guard, the foolish guard with the keys on his belt, who came too close, who did not see the knife in her toes until it had lodged in his belly… she was free.

“Freedom. After fourteen years without it, it seems huge and abstract, less real even than death. It is shameful to relate, now, that at first the princess feared to even leave her cell, though the door swung wide. But leave she did, her hard-won knife in one hand, and the keys in the other. She freed the other women, her friends. And together they swarmed as one over the guards, devouring them with blows and curses, and regained the air and the sun. Long years of shackles had, perversely, made them strong.

“And when the princess looked over the faces of her dead tormentors, she still saw one and the same face. And she knew she had passed beyond madness, and reached real sanity, real truth. That the world had held but one good man, her father; and that with his passing he had left behind an ocean of vermin, demanding extermination.

“So she took one of their heads. And she kept it, preserved it, as a reminder. And it served her well.

“Like a hot wind the princess and her new army swept across the distant kingdom upon whose shores time and confinement had washed them. Their feet grew stained with shed blood, their hands leathered from the grip of swords and guns. They were a tide of liberation, and wherever women suffered, their ranks only grew.

“And at last they reached a palace, not that of the princess’s youth, but similar in its way, and yes, haunting for that similarity. And they stormed over the walls, and burned the gardens, and put every last man to the sword. Not the girls, no, not the women, even the poor sad beasts so blinded by their slavery as to fight them. No, they were turned aside with care and kindness, for they knew not what they did. And when they died, as they sometimes insisted, they died with the invaders’ apologies, and with their love and respect.

“They came to the throne room, and found the king there, waiting, fat and stupid and terrified. Livestock. And as the princess stepped forward to dash off his head, a young girl stepped forth to block her path. The king’s daughter.

“She spun the most outrageous lies, of course. That her father was a new ruler, fresh to power following the death of his wicked, greedy brother. That he had not known of the women’s confinement until he took the throne, and indeed, had moved to abolish it in the country’s laws. As if laws were more than breath and air. But her blindness stirred pity in the princess’s heart, and moved by her courage, the princess agreed to make the one and only exception of all her remaining days, and spare the stupid king’s life.

“And as her price for this generosity, the princess took her lash, the one she had hand-braided from leather and bits of broken glass, and struck the girl’s arm in a spiral, nearly down to the bone. To remind her of her simpleton’s loyalty, of her tragic error, evermore.

“And then, ripe with rightful spoils, the princess and her army left the soiled, blood-soaked earth behind, and took to their rightful place in the skies. And the princess became a Queen.

“For a decade, and more, the Queen and her army of sisters roamed the blue kingdom of the skies as they pleased, and took what they wished, and devoured whom they would. And even the low animals bowed to her, and learned to fly at her merest whim, and became her dutiful army, as well they should.

“And then came the betrayer. The False Sister. Swaggering and deceitful, she won the Queen’s trust, then tore out her heart. For the second time, the Queen saw all she loved, all she had amassed, burnt to nothingness. And from that time forth, the Queen breathed hate, ate fury, drank rancor, all to destroy the False Sister who mocked her with every heartbeat more.

“Again and again they would clash, and the False Sister was bold and cruel and clever. Again and again she took more from the Queen, and redoubled her fury. But the Queen remained strong in her anger, and the False Sister at last grew weak, and tired, and conspired to deny the Queen one last victory. She hid, you see. The False Sister fled forever from the skies, and scattered her craft upon the surface of the sea, and left behind her jacket and her gun in the wreckage, to make the Queen think her dead. But the Queen knew better — knew that she must yet live, and be laughing at the Queen, laughing and laughing.

“So the Queen persisted, down through the years, even as her army withered and her own body failed. She learned to replace the parts of herself that betrayed her, surrendered herself piece by piece. And yet her hate grew steadily brighter, and hotter, and in the end, it glowed like a star, and became larger and more glorious and more true than the Queen herself.

“And still she draws breath, such as it is. And still she clings to life by her nails and her teeth. She waits for her deliverance.

“And you, Ruby Gale … you have brought me that deliverance at last.”

Ice formed in the pit of Nora’s stomach as she shuffled the last steps back to rest against the wall.

“I’m not her,” Nora said, quickly, desperately. “My name’s Nora Swift — I — I work in an office. I’m not her!”

And then she realized the wall was moving. She turned and saw a curtain of the black coils covering the wall, wriggling against her back, curling around her arms and legs. Before she could scream, the tendrils had seized her and held her fast.

She heard the coils buzzling and rustling above, and then something lowered itself down out of the shadows that cloaked the ceiling. A woman, unguessably old, her face lined with bright white lines of uncountable scars. At first, Nora thought her frail husk of a body was merely cocooned in the slithering coils. But they shifted, and Nora realized that the coils, dozens of them, led directly into her, and seemed to pulse in some obscene, circulatory rhythm.

Wicked West’s eyes slowly opened, and fixed on Nora, blazing with fierce hatred. “You were so very clever, sister. You even changed your face, changed your voice, shed your years. But I can smell the truth in your blood. I could have killed you in your sleep, I suppose. But I made myself wait. I wanted to see the fear in your eyes. I wanted you to know.”

The coils snaked around Nora’s throat, tightening slowly, as she struggled in the grip of a waking nightmare. The coils lowered Wicked West, or what remained of her, inch by gradual inch until her face was level with Nora’s. And then the pirate queen smiled, slow and terrible, and spoke two last words:

“I win.”

Next: Trip and Rafe partner with an unlikely ally, breach the ruins of an underground empire, and discover the difference between bad and worse.

The Gathering Storm

Valencia Stitch had a headache. An old, familiar throb just behind her left eye. It brought back decades-old memories, and a slow, curdling dread in the pit of her stomach. The headache, she had learned, meant her employer was displeased.

“Pull yourself together, Sharp,” she said. “Are you certain they were Operators?”

“They ate Jenkins,” the man with the eyepatch said quietly. He wasn’t looking at her, or her finely appointed wooden desk. By now, he would have ceased to find it even remotely remarkable that this room, like the many that surrounded it, had no windows. He seemed to be tracing the loops and whorls of Mrs. Stitch’s entirely tasteful wallpaper with his remaining eye. The cup of tea he had drunk nearly down to its dregs rattled gently on its saucer, owing to the shaking of his hand. “They ate Hollowell. And McMartin. And... I can’t remember her name, the new girl. Ate them.”

This was decidedly not good. Not the sudden deficit of manpower; Mrs. Stitch was nothing if not thorough in her staffing, and blessed with abundant Needlemen to replace those fallen. But the presence of actual, confirmed Operators -- for the first time since the Burning Night of Cardefax in 1919 -- was the last thing Mrs. Stitch needed to hear. For one thing, it meant that the dimensional gaps were widening -- that, despite the best efforts of her dedicated agents to keep things sewn up, time itself was continuing to unravel. And letting things in through the gaps that most assuredly should not be there.

For another, it meant that with all likelihood, Mrs. Stitch’s manpower deficits would likely accelerate, and soon.

“Do you think they’re in concert with the Morrow or Gaunt Heirs?” Mrs. Stitch asked Sharp, snapping her fingers to divert his attention from her wallpaper. He was terribly distracted, but then, he’d been smashed by his own automobile only a few days back, and perhaps he hadn’t been entirely put back together properly.

Sharp shook his head slowly. “They seemed as surprised as we were.”

“Then perhaps,” Mrs. Stitch offered, allowing herself a brief and luxuriant morsel of hope, “they’ve solved our problem for us? They do have... appetites, these Operators.”

“I don’t think so,” Sharp said quietly. “I think they’re here to speed things along.”

These were the times, Mrs. Stitch thought as the pain behind her left eye momentarily spiked, that liquor on the premises might, in fact, be entirely desirable.

The door to Mrs. Stitch’s office opened, accompanied by a heavy aroma of jet fuel and burnt rubber. Maximillian strode in; from the wisps of smoke still trailing from the edges of his long black coat, Mrs. Stitch judged that he had been on fire in the not-too-distant past.

“Give me good news,” she said.

Maximillian merely narrowed his cold gray eyes.

Mrs. Stitch sighed. Preventing the end of all life on Earth was an even more thankless task than she had imagined.

---

Thunder struck the anvil of the lake, and rolled across in reverberating booms toward the skyscrapers. The wind picked up, urgent, accelerating, and the sky began to shade itself to gray. Above the water, the thick line of clouds slowly congealed from gray to nearly black, illuminated from within by sporadic flashes of burgeoning lightning.

And inside the roiling mass of growing storm clouds, the fabric of reality hummed, then sizzled. A blinding blue-white line wrote itself sideways across the turbulent air. And something came through.

Time had weathered the Jolly Roger emblems painted on the towering sides of the Zeppelin, and frayed the nest of cables connecting its gondola-slung underbelly. No light or movement could be seen within the great airship’s compartments. But the bristling thickets of electromagnetic harpoons and crackling Tesla guns showed no sign of disrepair.

The Faithless broke through the storm clouds just head of the first heavy barrages of machine-gun rain, accompanied by another echoing growl of thunder, and made for the buildings ahead.

And deep within the heart of the terrible craft, in a room cobwebbed with cables and hoses and tubes through which strange fluids pulsed, a dry chuckle of satisfaction could be heard above the rising thrum of engines. Electric lights along the skin of the blimp flared to life, and the great ship’s hangar bay doors, sprinkling showers of rust, slowly ground open.

In response, the apes began to screech their song of war.

---

“I really can’t apologize enough,” Rafe said, nervously toying with the stone knives in his hands -- and then noticing, and ceasing, rather pointedly.

Trip fingered the thin stinging line on the skin of his neck and shrugged. “It’s okay. Understandable.”

“No, no, really,” Rafe insisted. “I feel terrible.”

“Is he always like this?” Sully asked Nora. The two of them had camped out by one wall of the empty room on the top floor of 919 North Michigan. Nora just sighed.

Sully wanted a cigarette. Desperately. She flicked the cap of her lighter off, and on, and off again, to quiet her fingers.

“What were you going to be doing today?” Sully asked Nora, staring out through the wide windows at the storm clouds rolling in toward the city. Thunder had begun to peal distantly.

“What day is it again?” Nora asked. Sully opened her mouth, realized she didn’t know herself, and laughed dryly.

“Guess I’d be doing laundry,” Nora sighed. “Got quarters and everything.”

“I’d be, I dunno, making money,” Sully said. “You see the papers or anything? OMG’s vanishing skyscraper stunt. What’s the reaction on that?”

“Do I look like I’ve had time to read the papers?” Nora smirked. “Hell. I’ve barely had time to eat.”

“Shit,” Sully said. “I bet we killed. I bet we absolutely killed. Probably got agents on the phone right now, leaving messages, and Sally’s gonna try to answer them, and Sally’s a sweet girl, but she couldn’t negotiate free cheese from the government.”

“Not to interrupt,” Trip called from across the room, where he’d been knocking randomly against the walls, “but does anyone else want to go exploring?” There were several frosted-glass doors leading off the main chamber the four now occupied, and a narrow, dim hallway.

“All in favor of sitting down for fifteen minutes in celebration of the fact that no one’s trying to kill us for reasons we barely understand, raise your hand,” Sully called out.

Nora immediately put her hand up. Rafe, somewhat sheepishly, followed suit.

Sully raised one hand with a flick of her wrist. “Democracy sucks, chief.” Trip rolled his eyes at her and started trying each of the doors.

They were locked, and peering through the rippling surface of the frosted glass yielded only frustratingly tantalizing outlines of forms within. Trip tried the hallway, switching on his keychain light as the gloom deepened.

There was another door here, different from the rest -- solid steel, cold and thick as the circular vault door that had led into the main chamber. It had no latch, no knob, no lock -- just a finger-sized indentation at roughly eye level. Trip stuck his finger in it, warily, but nothing happened. He shrugged and continued around the corner, particles of dust dancing in the beam of his light.

The hallway widened into a room -- some kind of workshop. Unlike the main chamber, this room was not empty; coils of wire and strange, half-assembled gadgets, coated in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs, sat on the various workbenches, casting strange, dancing shadows under Trip’s light. There was an old-fashioned phone mounted on the wall -- Trip tried it, and heard only a great gulf of silence in the receiver -- and row after row of tiny bins mounted high up on the walls, accessible by a sliding ladder on rails.

And, in the corner, something about the size and shape of a door, covered in a while sheet.

Trip unveiled it with a single tug, sneezing amid the fog of dust that arose. It was a rectangle of upright metal, tall and wide enough for a person to pass through, its frame coiled and strung with great tangled nests of wires. Protruding from one side of the frame, there was a sort of shelf, with a semispherical cradle -- waiting, it seemed, for some control device or key.

At first, Trip thought it was the ringing in his ears amid the thick, enclosing silence. But no -- when he leaned his head closer to the device, slowly, he heard it. A low, steady, electrical buzz. He reached out cautiously, expecting a shock, and touched the device. It hummed beneath his fingertips. Trip played the beam of his light across the floor at the base of the device, and saw electrical cables, python-thick, uncoiling from the base of the device into large circular sockets in the wall.

Within his backpack, something rattled and shook.

Trip took a moment to very deliberately not jump out of his skin. Then, once he had convinced his heart that it did not, in fact, want to claw itself free from his rib cage, he unslung the pack, gingerly set it down, and opened it.

Something was moving and clattering inside the cigar box.

Trip set the box down on the floor and opened the lid. The gyroscope he’d seen earlier wobbled, lurched itself upright, and began to spin.

Trip picked it up carefully, the arrested spin of the scope stinging his fingers, and felt the gyroscope humming in his hand. The closer he brought it to the metal archway, the more strongly it began to resonate. He looked again at the cradle extending from the device. It was just the right size and shape.

He placed the gyroscope in the cradle, and it began to spin, slowly at first, then faster, until it was only a blur. Sparks erupted in cascades from the coils on the side of the device, and Trip stepped back as blue veins of electricity began to dance around it.

“Guys?” Trip shouted. “Sully?”

The electricity turned inward, congregating at a central point within the empty metal frame, and began to stitch itself into a web. The web widened, and shimmered. And then the edges of space itself seemed to peel back, like a blossoming flower, and the metal frame was completely filled with a coruscating wall of remarkable blue-white light.

“I think you need to see this!” Trip called out.

He stepped forward, slowly, stretching one hand toward the wall of light. He felt neither heat nor cold, nor the prickling of electrical current. One finger brushed the surface of the undulating light, and Trip reflexively jerked his hand back. But it hadn’t hurt; it had felt like water.

Trip put his hand forward again, up to the light, and then through it. He could feel the odd, liquid sensation shimmering around his wrist and hand, but the tips of his fingers felt normal -- touching nothing but air.

“Holy shit,” he heard Sully say, and turned to find her, Nora, and Rafe in the doorway, gaping at the light from the portal.

“I know,” Trip said, turning to her, grinning with the thrill of discovery. “Isn’t it amazing?”

And then something on the other side of the portal seized his hand tightly, and yanked, and before he could say another word, Trip was pulled bodily into the web of light.