Chapter Two of a continuing serial pulp tale
Click here to read Chapter One
There is a period, of indeterminate length, of which I was completely unaware, having been rendered unconscious somehow. My dreaming mind ran through recent events in a jumbled, confused fashion. I remembered my chase across the dusty plain, but the men I unhorsed were now both my brother, and the Great Khan spoke with the voice of Father Anjou, the town priest, reciting canticles in latin as his horde bore down on me.
When I finally regained consciousness, I found myself in a room, small and windowless, like some form of dungeon, though the walls were made of smooth steel, with no joins or rivets, and no door presented itself. The ceiling hung low, so that I could sit up from my prone position, but had no chance of standing upright. I was still wearing my armour and surcoat, and my wargear was on my person, though the shield I had flung away in the chase was presumably lost. Finnegan was not with me.
I began to bang on the walls, searching for an exit, or hoping to attract attention from outside. Before long I was pounding with all my might, and shrieking myself hoarse, crying to be let free, for my gaolers to advance and be recognized. But there was no sign of life, no sounds beyond those I made.
I did discover however, that one of the walls was not truly made of steel as it had appeared. When I struck it with my gauntlet, instead of the ringing clang of the other, metal, walls, there was only a dull thud. Upon removing my helm and inspecting more closely I saw there appeared to be a sheet of glass directly in front of the wall. At least, glass I assumed it must be, but more perfect and precise than anything I had seen a glazier make back home by several orders of magnitude.
What follows here is the telling of my first experiences as what you might call a ‘chrononaut,’ or ‘time traveler’. If you are reading this then you will know the significance of events heretofore described in ways which I did not understand as they occurred to me. This will continue to be the case. As our tale progresses I will behold many objects, events and locations which will seem commonplace to you future dwellers, but to a French Knight Errant plucked from his time these things are not just unknown, but so far beyond my ken as to be totally unfathomable and indescribable. For the sake of expedience I may furnish my descriptions of characters, objects and events with more detail and background knowledge than I possessed at the time.
For example, the metal prison I found myself in was one of seventy five Reclamation Capsules, used for storing valuable cargo either recovered from space or salvaged from wrecked starships and space stations. These capsules were contained in the hold of Harvester 110010110010001111, a vessel belonging to The Machine Imperium. Harvester 110010110010001111 was currently entering orbit around Meat, a planet covered by a vast, densely populated jungle, and the centre of bushmeat hunting and export through this corner of the galaxy as well as the home of a number of rich, but dangerous to exploit, mineral reserves. When a stable orbit was achieved, the Harvester released the seventy five capsules from its armoured belly, like a shark, birthing live young into a cruel, cold ocean. The metal boxes drifted downwards in formation, friction with the atmosphere of the planet causing their undersides to glow red, then orange, and finally blinding white with the heat of re-entry.
I, contained within one of these boxes and perfectly safe in the computer controlled descent, cowered in the corner, as terrified as a base creature caught out in a thunderstorm. The metal wall behind the glass was of course, the interior of the spaceship, and had seemed to lift away as my capsule was dropped, revealing the emptiness of the void and the sight of a planet from orbit to my unprepared mind.
So then, that was my first experience of the new world I found myself in, the far future, more than 1000 years hence from my own time, and for some while yet in our tale, set to be a total mystery to me in all but it’s most basic aspects. Though at least my arrival on the planet Meat would put me in a situation that had an equivalent in the past and a dynamic I could comprehend.
Slavery.
Upon landing, coming to rest relatively gently on a cushion of air, my capsule sat for a moment, before opening outwards in sections, much like the petals of a flower. Leaving me sat, to my shame, in soiled armour, upon a flat surface of metal.
The area around me had once been dense forest, but the trees had been felled at some point over an area of around a square mile, their trunks stacked in great heaps here and there, and the stumps ripped up, leaving potholes filled in with fresh earth. It gave the appearance of an area beset with monstrous moles digging as they pleased. What it was, of course was a landing zone for the capsules, which delivered supplies to forces on the ground. Those supplies, for the most part, were slaves.
There were fifty of us, or thereabouts, scattered about the clearing, along with two dozen stacks of metal boxes and devices, the purpose of which were unknown to me and remain so. We began to rise uncertainly, me most of all, staggering drunkenly, foul liquid leaking from beneath my plates.
No sooner had I gained my feet than I had the first glimpse of my captors, a wonder it is that my mind did not break once and for all at their arrival. They were all of a height, and as they emerged from the trees my first thought, on seeing the gleaming metal and uniform step as they marched forward, waswhat a finely drilled company of men that is, but as they advanced on us and I saw them more clearly and registered their oddity. They were, to a man, seven feet tall, with limbs of freakish slimness, so it appeared they should not be able to support their bodies, or hold their weapons, arrangements of long metal tubes which they held as I might have wielded a crossbow. One of my fellows ran at the sight of them and was met with a bright, concentrated beam of lightning, which seemed to emit from the ‘crossbow’ of one of the armoured warriors, and envelop the fleeing person, a woman I believe, who felt dead and burned to a cinder no less than twenty paces from me.
I started at this immense display of power but before I had time to fully react, a great, booming voice filled the clearing. I didn’t understand the language, but it seemed to me that the voice was saying the same phrase, over and over in many different tongues. As the monstrous company approached, I saw more of them coming from the trees behind and to either side of me, no hope of escape. Then suddenly I could understand the voice.
“Puny humans. You are now the property of the Machine Imperium. Do not resist. Non-compliant humans will be obliterated. Assemble now for decontamination. Obey without question.” The voice was speaking French, many of the words were strange to me, but I could understand the greater part.
We were herded into a huddled mass, shivering despite the intense humidity and commanded to remove our clothes. I looked up at the ironclad beings surrounding us and knew at last these were no men. Their metal skins were seamless with no sign of how they could be removed. The head of each one was occupied with one great eye, which glowed with a deep red light and as they moved they all emitted strange rapid clicking ticking sounds constantly, later I learned that this was their own language. They communicated extensively to such an extent that they appeared to act and think as one. The words ‘machine imperium’ repeated themselves in my head, was it possible these were some sort of manufactured man? Mechanical constructs of gears and levers contained in a shell so much like my suit of armour.
I could not remove my armour unaided, normally a squire would assist me, so I struggled uselessly with it as the other captives stood, trying in vain to cover their nakedness as one of the machines waved a device like an incense thurible over their bodies, the decontaminator. When that was finished another machine threw each captive a plain grey garment, much like a shift or tunic which hung down to the knees and a pair of pair of box-like shoes of the same colour, which shrank to fit the wearer’s feet. One of the machines stepped up to me, barking a phrase in several tongues until he came to that odd French,
“Remove you coverings and prepare for decontamination. Do not resist.”
“I cannot!” I cried desperately “I cannot remove my armour alone.” The machine looked me up and down before speaking again,
“Scanning…This human’s covering contains low-background steel. Radioisotopes nonexistent. This material will be of use to the Imperium. This human will be decontaminated unaltered.”
The machine man with the decontaminator waved it over me. I felt nothing, but afterwards when I examined myself I saw that all the dirt and grime accrued during my journey and subsequent ordeals was gone.
Threatening constantly with their weapons, the machines directed us lift the crates, boxes and other items that had come down in the unoccupied capsules. I took one end of a long, wooden crate over my shoulder, the other end was carried by a woman with short black hair, I was too wrapped up in my own fear and misery to notice much else about her. She said something to me as she took the weight but I didn’t understand, I tried to say so in french but I think my meaning was also lost on her. In time, when we were all assembled and carrying our loads, the machines lead us away from the clearing and into the jungle.
The march progressed for at least 60 days, though I lost the exact count somewhere along the way. The jungle, as I learned later, covered almost the entire world, from dense bushland, thick with undergrowth and ten thousand different creatures which crawled and hopped and flew, to the vast mangrove glades which encroached on the many rivers, to the mighty floating jungles of kelp and seaweed which dominated the entire expanse of Meat’s single ocean. The land was intensely uneven, and sloped up and down madly, as the ground underfoot alternated between sharp rocks with a thin carpet of rotten leaves and great, sucking bogs and quagmires that sucked hungrily at our woefully inadequate footwear. Animal life was rampant everywhere, though the larger animals were often heard but rarely seen, smaller creatures always scurried about us, as if curious. Particularly persistent were a flock of small lizards, much like the kind to be found basking on rocks in the Mediterranean. These however, ran on two legs, in a similar stance to a chicken, and were often to be found scurrying under my feet, chattering and squawking to each other, and seemingly to me. In time I came to ignore them as they blended into the routine of the day.
Each day on the march progressed according to a set routine. We slept where we had dropped after the previous day, on the bare floor with the mud and countless crawling, scurrying creatures of the jungle. We were woken by the bellowing of one of the machines, exhorting us ‘puny humans’ to our labours, with the constant threat of violent, fiery death for those who failed in their task or tried to escape. As we prepared to set out we were issued with a cube of some foul tasting black jelly substance to eat. It made me sick to my stomach at first, but kept me and the others alive, just. Then there remained 12 hours or so of daylight, during which we marched, carrying our loads with a torturous, shuffling step, before stopping to eat another block of gelatinous horror. It rained almost hourly, and this we drank, tipping our heads back with mouths agape.
My world reduced to the area just in front of my feet, as I focused the sum total of my will on simply placing one boot in front of the other. Within a few hours on the first day a man had fallen, and when he could not rise after three attempts, the machines executed him, leaving the body where it lay. By the time I passed his corpse it was already thick with a covering of flies and beetles, feasting. I kept that image in my mind whenever I considered stopping.
Nor did I think to try and fight my way out, as much as it stuck in my craw. The machines had left me, alone amongst the captives, with my clothes, and with it my sword. It in no way resembled their weapons, and so perhaps they did not recognize it as such, but neither did I see how I could hope to harm the metal men with such a weapon, nor how I could hope to even get close enough to try, lest I be cooked alive by one of their lightning guns.
A knight must be brave, and defiant to the last, giving his all to protect the innocent, but in those black days I was no knight, merely an armoured, craven boy, concerned only with my own survival while all around me, folk died of exhaustion, or were callously slain.
I did form one alliance on the march, the woman who shared my load. Though I had studiously avoided her gaze at first, I came to realise it was in my interest to help her through the ordeal along with me, lest I should have twice the load to carry if she fell, I wagered that she saw things similarly and so, on the third day, as we trudged down a gentle slope and the going was slightly easier, I began my attempts to communicate. Our captors seemed not to care if we spoke to each other, as long as we continued to make progress, so I tried simply speaking at first in my own tongue. This she did not understand, so I tried the two other tongues I had any knowledge of, English (what you would call Middle English) and lastly, the few words I had of latin, which I had learned from the monastic scribes who lived near to father’s castle. At this her head whirled around, an expression of surprise and some delight spread broadly across her face and she responded in the same tongue. At last!
It took hours, days even, of pointing at things and repeating the woman’s name for them, but I set myself to learning, so I might have some hope of understanding where I was, what was happening to me, and what we could do next. The first thing I discovered was my ally’s name, Charon, Captain Mira Charon.
She was a woman of some fierce intelligence, I recognized that in her eyes at once. Her features and build did not ascribe to the conventional standards of beauty as I knew them, yet the confidence and wit within her was magnetic, her wry, knowing smile infectious, even in the fix we found ourselves in. It felt good to be doing something positive finally, though we never dared to speak openly of escape, she managed to hint to me that she had a plan, that I must be patient.
New York City – 1929
The man opened the window of his office on the twentieth floor and stepped out onto the thin, brick ledge outside, which ran the circumference of the building. As he did he felt the panic and stress that had gripped his heart in a vice for the last week release him and a kind of serenity descend. Everything was so simple now, no more checking the paper for share prices, or raging on the telephone at brokers. No more migraines or palpitations, just a brief sensation of floating, then nothing. His only regret was not spending more time with his family, instead of chasing those dollar bills all these years, but it was too late to change that now, and he could barely look at his wife and daughter now, knowing he had impoverished them with his avarice. No, better to go now and free those poor angels of the wretched millstone they called husband and father.
He had one foot off the balcony and was just at the very edge of letting go when a series of crashes, like a silver service dropped down an elevator shaft, followed by coarse, Texan, cursing.
“Do you mind pal?!” he roared into the open window, some of his trading floor pluck returning for a moment, “I am trying to have a moment here!”
“Well shitfire!” replied the Texan, from around the corridor outside the office, “Ah have not the faintest clue where’n the Sam Hill Ah have ended up, but the décor sure is fancy! Hey, what in tarnation are ya doin’ out there?”
A horse had walked into the office. Light brown in colour, with a saddle on his back and reins hanging down from his bridle, and one of those all-round skirt things knights put on their horses in olden day, the man didn’t know the name for it. It seemed to be the one doing the talking.
“Woah! Yer not thinkin’ of tossin’ yerself off that are ya?” the horse said, taking a few steps back in astonishment. He gathered himself, as if trying to remember a phrase he’d once heard. “Think of all that you have got to live for.” He said, looking proud.
The man slowly climbed back into the room, as he got down from the window the couple of bystanders who had gathered on the street below dispersed, disappointed.
“Thas the spirit!” said the horse, “what’s yer name boss?”
“What?…er…Bailey, Mick Bailey,” the man said distractedly, approaching the horse. “My cousin owns a circus you know?”
“Bully for you! Ah heard the circus is a hog-killin’ time and no mistake, but Ah need yer help, boss. Ah got myself in a fine situation and Ah’m a little at sea as to where Ah am now.”
“Sure…sure thing boy,” said the man, edging as close as he dared thinking the horse might bolt or something. He had no idea how this trick was achieved, but there was money to be made here, maybe enough to resurrect his sunken fiscal fortunes. He reached for the bridle.
Finnegan saw the sudden movement and, on instinct, reared up as much as the low ceiling would allow. He kicked out with both his front hooves and struck Mick Bailey squarely on the chest. The force of the blow broke three ribs and collapsed a lung, and flung the destitute banker backwards out of his open office window.
“That’ll learn ya, tryin’ to apprehend a fella going about his honest business.” Finnegan yelled out the window, sticking his head right out to look at the street below. People on the sidewalk pointed with equal parts amazement and horror at the corpse on the ground and the animal twenty floors up.
When police officers finally broke into the locked office, with bailiffs dispatched by Bailey’s creditors crowding behind, they found nothing untoward and no sign of a horse, as if such a thing was possible! How would it have even got into the elevator?
One officer thought he had seen an odd blue light beaming from under the door before they had entered, but he was a known alcoholic and was ignored.
Spike Direction Should Write More 