“There’s more of them this time,” Luca said. “I suppose we could roll the rails up again.”
“That monstrosity isn’t built for reversing,” Marcella said grimly. “You have to turn the minds around, their tails will follow.”
“Between their legs.”
“You got it.”
“Ten minutes till they get here. We’d better get people into position and dream up a strategy.” He’d brought nearly seventy estate workers with him from Cricklade. The announcement by Colsterworth Council had resulted in over five hundred townsfolk volunteering to fight off the marauders.
Another thirty or so had gathered from outlying farms, determined to protect the food they’d worked hard to gather. All of them had brought shotguns or hunting rifles from their adopted homes.
Luca and Marcella organized them into four groups. The largest, three hundred strong, were formed up in a horseshoe formation surrounding Colsterworth station. Two outlying parties were hanging back from the cusps, ready to swarm across the rail and encircle the marauders. The remainder, three dozen on horseback, made up a cavalry force ready to chase down anyone who escaped from the attack.
They spent the last few minutes walking along the ranks, getting them into order and making sure they had all hardened their clothes into bullet-proof armour. Real gunshots were harder to ward off in this realm.
Carbosilicon-reinforced flak-jackets were the popular solution, making the front line take on the appearance of a police riot brigade from the mid-Twenty-first Century.
“It’s our right to exist as we choose that we’re standing for,” Luca told them repeatedly as he walked along, inspecting his troops. “We’re the ones who’ve made something of these circumstances, built a decent life for ourselves. I’ll be buggered if I’m going to let this rabble wreck that. They cannot be allowed to live off us, that makes us nothing more than chattel.”
Everywhere he went, he received murmurs and nods of agreement. The defenders’ resolution and confidence expanded, building into a physical aura which began to tint the air with a hearty red translucence. When he took up position with Marcella they simply grinned at each other, relishing the fight. The train was only a mile out of town now, coming round the last bend onto the straight leading to the station. It tooted its whistle in an angry defiant blast. The red haze over the station glowed brighter. A crack split open along the middle of the wooden sleepers, starting five yards from Luca’s feet and extending out past the end of the platforms. It opened barely six inches, and halted, quivering in anticipation. Granite chippings trickled over the edges, to be swallowed silently by the abyssal darkness which had been uncovered.
Luca stared directly at the front of the train, facing down its protruding cannon barrels. “Just keep coming, arsehole,” he said quietly.
Subtlety simply wasn’t an option. Both sides knew the rough strengths and position of the other. It could never be anything other than a direct head-to-head confrontation. A contest of energistic strength and imagination, with the real guns an unwelcome sideshow.
Half a mile from the station, and the train slowed slightly. The rear two carriages detached and braked to a halt amid fantails of orange sparks from their locked wheels. Their sides hinged down to form ramps, and jeeps raced down onto the ground. They’d been configured into armour-plated dune buggies with thick roll bars; huge deep-tread tyres were powered from four-litre petrol engines that spurted filthy exhaust fumes out into the air with a brazen roar. Each one had a machine gun mounted above the driver, operated by a gunner dressed in leather jacket with flying goggles and helmet.
They sped away from the carriages in an attempt to outflank the townie defenders. Luca gave a signal to his own cavalry. They charged out into the fields, heading to intercept the jeeps. The train kept thundering onwards.
“Get ready,” Marcella shouted.
Puffs of white smoke shot out from the train’s cannon. Luca ducked down in reflex, hardening the air around himself. Shells started to explode at the end of the station, thick plumes of earth smearing the blank skyline amid bursts of orange light. Two struck the fringe of red air, detonating harmlessly twenty yards above the ground. Shrapnel flew away from the protective boundary. A cheer rang out from the defenders.
“We got ’em,” Luca growled triumphantly.
Machine gun fire rattled across the fields as the jeeps raced round in tight curves, churning up furrows of mud. They drove straight through gates, bursting the timber bars apart with a flash of white light. Horses cantered after them, jumping the hedges and walls effortlessly. Their riders were shooting from the saddle, as well as flinging bolts of white fire. The jeep engines started to cough and stutter as fluxes of energistic power played hell with the power cells encased deep within the semisolid illusion.
The train was only a quarter of a mile away now. Its cannon were still firing continuously. The land beyond the end of the station was taking the full brunt of the impact: craters erupted continuously, sending soil, grass, trees, and stone walls ploughing though the air. Luca was surprised at the diminutive size of the craters, he’d expected the shells to be more powerful. They did produce a lot of smoke, though; thick grey-blue clouds churning frenetically against the sheltering bubble of redness. They almost obscured the train from view.
Luca frowned suspiciously at that. “They could be a cover,” he shouted at Marcella above the bass thunder of exploding shells.
“No way,” she yelled back. “We can sense them, remember. Smoke screens don’t work here.”
Something was wrong, and Luca knew it. When he switched his attention back to the train, he could sense the note of triumph emanating from it, just as strong as his own. Yet nothing the marauders had done assured them of victory. Nothing he could perceive.
Layers of smoke from the shells were creeping sluggishly towards the station. As they slithered through the edge of the red light they gleamed with a dark claret phosphorescence. People in the reserve groups clustered outside the platforms were reacting strangely as the first wisps curled and flexed around them. Waving their hands in front of their faces as if warding off a mulish wasp, they began to stagger around.
Ripples of panic raced out from their minds, impinging against those close by.
“What’s happening to them?” Marcella demanded.
“Not sure.” Luca watched the slow spread of the crimson smoke. Its behaviour was perfectly natural, fronds undulating and twisting about on the currents of air. Nothing directed it, no malicious energistic pressure, yet wherever it spread chaos ensued. He took time to make the appalling connection; even telling himself Spanton would delve as low as it was possible to go, he found it hard to credit such depravity.
“Gas,” he said, dumbfounded. “That’s not smoke. The bastard’s using gas!”
Machine guns and rifles opened fire from every slot cut into the train’s armoured sides. With the defenders distracted, bullets were able to slice nonchalantly through the rosy air. The front rank of townsfolk were punched backwards as bullets hammered into their flak jackets. Abruptly, there was no more pink air. The human survival instinct was too strong, everyone concentrated on saving themselves.
“Blow it back at them!” Luca bellowed across the commotion. The train was only a few hundred yards away now, pistons growling furiously as it slid remorselessly along the track towards him. He flung his hands out and shoved at the air.
Marcella followed suit. “Do it,” she shouted at the closest townsfolk.
“Push!”
They began to imitate her, sending out a stream of energistic power to repel the air and with it the deadly gas. The idea spread fast among the defenders, becoming real as soon as it was thought of. They didn’t need to act, only to think.
Air began to move, groaning over the station walls as it sped above the rails, its speed increasing steadily. The pillars of smoke began to bend away from their craters, breaking into tufts which slid away towards the approaching train. Leaves and
twigs from the macerated hedges were picked up and carried along by the wind. They broke harmlessly against the black iron prow of the train, fluffing round it in an agitated slipstream.
Luca yelled in wordless exultation, adding the air from his lungs to the torrent surging past his body. It had risen to gale force, pushing at him. He linked arms with his neighbours, and together they rooted themselves in the ground. Unity of purpose had returned, bringing them an unchallenged mastery of the air. Now the flow had begun, they started to shape it, narrowing its force to howl vengefully against the train.
Hanging baskets along the platforms swung up parallel to the ground, tugging frantically at their brackets.
The train slowed, braked by the awesome force of the horizontal tornado hurled against it. Steam from its stack and leaky junctions was ripped away to join the hurtling streamers of lethal gas. The marauders couldn’t keep their rifles steady; the wind tore at them, twisting and shaking until they threatened to wrench free. Cannon barrels were pushed out of alignment. They’d already stopped firing.
All of the defenders were contributing their will to the raging wind now; directing it square against the train and bringing it to a shuddering halt a hundred yards from the station. Then they upped the force; adrenaline glee providing further inspiration. The iron beast rocked, the weight of its thick cladding counting for nothing.
“We can do it,” Luca cried, his words ripped away by the supernatural wind. “Keep going.” It was a prospect shared by all, encouraged by the first creaking motion of the great engine’s frame.
The marauders inside turned their own energistic power to anchoring themselves. They didn’t have the numbers to win any trial of strength.
Lumps of granite from the rail track collided against the train. The rails themselves were torn up to smash against the engine, wrapping themselves around the boiler.
One set of wheels along the side of the engine left the ground. For a moment the machine hung poised on the remaining wheels as those inside strove to counter the toppling motion. But the defending townsfolk refused to release the maelstrom they’d created, and the metal bogies buckled. The engine crashed onto its side, twisting the carriage directly behind it through ninety degrees.
If it had been a natural derailment, that would have been the end of it.
In this case, the townsfolk kept on pushing. The engine flipped again, pointing its crushed bogies directly into the sky. Vicious jets of steam poured out of the broken pistons, only to be dissolved by the gale. Again the engine turned as the hurricane clawed at its black flanks, trawling the remaining carriages along. Its momentum was picking up now, turning the motion into a continuous roll. The links between the carriages snapped apart. They scattered across the fields, bulldozing through any trees that got in their way and skidding down into ditches where they came to a jarring halt.
The engine just kept on rolling, impelled by the wind and thoughts of its intended victims. Eventually the boiler broke open, severing the big machine’s spine. A cloud of steam exploded out from the huge rent, vanishing quickly into the caterwauling sky to be replaced by an avalanche of debris. Fragments of very modern-looking machinery tumbled down over the ruined land. All illusion of the steam-powered colossi had expired, leaving one of the Norfolk Railway Company’s ordinary eight-wheel tractor units buried in the soil.
With the wind stilled, Luca left Marcella to organize medic parties for the defenders who’d succumbed to the gas. Even now, a dangerous chemical stink prowled around the shell craters. Those who claimed knowledge of such matters said it could be a type of phosphor, or possibly chlorine, maybe something even worse. The names they gave it didn’t bother Luca, only the intent behind it. He’d walked along the row of casualties, grimacing at the protruding eyes that wept tears of salty water and blood in equal quantities; tried to speak reassuring words over the terrible hacking coughs.
After that, there could be no doubt what had to be done.
He’d gathered a small band of estate workers to accompany him.
Remembering his first encounter with Spanton, he headed over the fields to the wrecked engine.
Metal sheets of some kind had indeed been welded over the tractor unit’s body. Not iron after all, just some lightweight construction material; a framework easily moulded into thick armour in the mind of the beholder.
They’d suffered considerably from the sheer brutality of the wind. Some of the cannon barrels had broken off, while the remainder were mangled.
The main body of the unit had bent itself into a lazy V, with the forward end wedged down into the ground.
Luca walked round to the cab. It had crumpled badly, sides bowing inwards and roof concave, reducing the space inside to less than that of a wardrobe. He crouched down and peered through the crooked window slit.
Bruce Spanton stared back at him. His body was trapped between various chunks of metal and warped piping that had sprung from the walls. Blood from his crushed legs and arm mingled with oil and muddy soil. His face was the pale grey of shock victims, with different features than before.
The wraparound sunglasses had been discarded along with the swept-back hair; no illusion remained.
“Thank Christ,” he gasped. “Get me outta here, man. It’s all I can do to stop my fucking legs from dropping off.”
“I thought I’d find you in here,” Luca replied equitably.
“So you found me. So I’ll give you a fucking medal. Just get me out. These walls all got smashed to shit in the rumble. It hurts so bad I can’t even switch off the pain like usual.”
“A rumble? Is that what this was?”
“What are you trying to pull!” Spanton screamed. He stopped, grimacing wildly from the pain which his outburst triggered. “All right, okay. You won. You’re the king of the hill. Now bend some of this metal away.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s what?”
“We won, you lose. It’s over?”
“What do you fucking think, dickhead?”
“Ah. I get it. You walk off into the sunset and never come back. That’s it. The end. No hard feelings. Everything turned out okay, and you’ll just slaughter some other bunch of people with poison gas. Maybe a smaller town, who won’t be able to fight back. Well great. Absolutely fabulous. That’s why I came out to help this town. So you could have your rumble and turn your back on us.”
“What do you fucking want?”
“I want to live. I want to be able to look out at the end of the day and see what I’ve accomplished. I want my family to benefit from that. I want them to be safe. I don’t want to have them worry about insane megalomaniacs who think being tough entitles them to live off the backs of ordinary decent working people.” He smiled down at Spanton’s stricken face. “Am I ringing any bells here? Do you see yourself in any of that?”
“I’ll go. Okay? We’ll get off this island. You can put us on a ship, make sure we really leave.”
“It’s not where you are that’s the problem. It’s what you are.” Luca straightened up.
“What? That’s it? Get me out of here, you shit.” He started thumping the walls with a fist.
“I don’t think so.”
“You think I’m a problem now, you don’t even know what a problem is, asshole. I’ll show you what a real goddamn motherfucking problem is.”
“That’s what I thought.” Luca swung his pump action shotgun round until the muzzle was six inches from Spanton’s forehead. He kept firing until the man’s head was blown off.
Bruce Spanton’s soul slithered up out of his bloody corpse along with the body’s true soul; an insubstantial wraith rising like lethargic smoke out of the train’s wreckage. Luca looked straight into translucent eyes that suddenly realized actual death was occurring after centuries of wasted half-existence. He held that gaze, acknowledging his own guilt as the writhing spectre slowly faded from sight and being. It took mere seconds, a period which compressed a lifetime of bitter fear and aching rese
ntment into its length.
Luca stood shivering from the profound impact of knowledge and emotion. I did what I had to do, he told himself. Spanton had to be stopped. To do nothing would be to destroy myself.
The estate workers were watching him cautiously, their thoughts subdued as they waited to see what he did next.
“Let’s go round up the rest of them,” Luca said. “Especially that bastard chemist.” He started walking towards the nearest carriage, thumbing new cartridges into the pump action’s empty chamber.
The others began to trail after him, holding their weapons tighter than before.
Cricklade hadn’t known screams like it since the day Quinn Dexter arrived. A high-pitched note of uniquely female agony coming from an open window overlooking the courtyard. The becalmed air of a bright early-autumn day helped carry the sound a long way over the manor’s steep rooftops, agitating the stabled horses and causing men to flinch guiltily.
Véronique’s waters had broken in the early hours the day after Luca had led his band of estate workers away to help fight the marauders. Carmitha had been with her since daybreak, closeted away in one of the West Wing’s fancy bedroom suites. She suspected the room might even have belonged to Louise; it was grand enough, with a large bed as the central feature (though not big enough to qualify as a double; that would never do for a single landowner girl). Not that Louise would want it now.
Véronique was propped up on the middle of the mattress, with Cook dabbing away at her straining face with a small towel. Other than that, it was all down to Véronique and Carmitha. And the baby, who was reluctant to put in a fast appearance.