Mad War - Chapter 1
“Jefferson, adjust tiller to fifteen!” the pilot shouted over the deafening beat of wind and hammering rain.
“Yaw is already in the skulls! What do you think this is, a hamster ball?!”
“Damn the skulls, Jeff, I’m joking here! Those teeth cleaners are getting away!” the pilot shouted back.
“Teeth are in skull,” a new voice said, its piano treble voice undamped by the hard rain outside, “So I think they would be close-“
“Jam your gears!” The pilot spat, “Jeff, give me more damn tiller!”
Teeth gritting, Jefferson leaned into the lever taller than himself, counting the clicks up to eleven, the danger zone, then twelve, bringing the airship into a steep incline, thirteen, his feet started sliding on the floor, fourteen, and he had to stop himself from clinging to the tiller for support as the floor slid out from under his big red boots. Now, as they slipped down through the air and the rain slammed into them side-on, their target loomed large ahead. Cheerio gave a predatory snarl as he fought the wheel to keep his controls under control.
“Back in sights!” he called from the driving ring. Jefferson didn’t hear, he was sliding out of control, the comms cluster rushing up to meet him-
“Or is the jaw not part of the skull?” the piano voice continued, as the speaker casually closed a gripper around Jefferson’s suspenders just before he slammed bodily into the cluster, “So it may be no matter to the teeth how the skull fairs?”
“Shut it Pretty, I’m trying to concentrate!” Cheerio barked as he slammed his bright red, massive boot repeatedly into the valve pedal, “Pies and Whoopies! Did we lose hydro?!” He shouted as the pedal gave a pathetic squeak.
Just then, a speaking tube in the coms cluster whistled, followed by a tiny, tinny voice from the chemistry room, “Hydro is down! Primary vat spilled when someone threw us into a turn! Just how far into skulls are we?!”
“Vlat!” Cheerio shouted into another tube as Jefferson scrambled up beside him.
“Vat!” he added.
“Spill!” Cheerio added.
“Fill?” The response came, through the deck, too big to fit through the tube.
“Fast!” Jefferson shouted.
“Blast!” Cheerio shouted as their target disappeared into the storm.
“Mop?” the big voice said, now in the Hydro’s tube.
“Stop!” the tiny voice screamed, upside-down.
“Quick!” Jefferson shouted into a tube as the ground appeared.
“Fix.” Vlat said,
“Git!” the little one shouted.
“Crank’er!” Cheerio told Jefferson.
“Wanker!” The small voice told Vlat
And she was about to say something certainly unfunny, but Jefferson had built enough head of Hydro and Cheerio saw the other ship again, just before a huge stormhead, and just before he stomped on thrust, and the chemistry in the vat boiled to fruition.
Ignition!
- - -
“How is it that they follow us, my child?” Coth hissed in his pilot’s ear.
“My lord, they are defying all proper decorum, as their kind is want to do.” The Sly One replied.
“Curse the light of day!” Coth hissed, sweeping around to face his right hand, “Have we any more power?”
Thumb and pointer finger flapping in arcane gestures of obscene origin, it said “No, thrust is at its limit, and they have not been swayed by our greatest maneuver techniques nor our penultimate power.”
“A new burst of speed, my owner.” The Sly One growled.
“Bright thing!” Gertrude grumbled, pointing three times at the black clouds ahead.
“Curses” He said again, then recoiled instinctively from the sight that appeared through the sheets of rain on the viewing portal.
Light. Curses on curses, their fortunes were turning to daylight at every turn!
Or was it? Through the glare of the light, Coth sensed a bone-chilling and welcome feeling. Recovering his composure, his smile broke as wide as the crescent moon. And he knew in his senses that his children felt it as well.
“Take us there, my child! We shall show those clowns our true conviction!” he cried.
- - -
“Cheerio, why aren’t we shooting the hooks?!” Jefferson called as he kept up the crank on Hydro next to the captain’s chair.
“Those blood sucking bastards are falling like rocks, I can’t trust the shot!” came the reply, “Where are these gnawers taking us anyway? Lay off the thrust, get us some direction.”
They had leveled out, in the nastiest strata of storm, where any more speed as as likely to dash them into the wind as cacth their prey.
Jefferson clambered across the cabin, tripping just right on the steps and brasswork, then all wrong on a little person dropped in from the dorsal corridor.
“Tiny!” He spat as he pinwheeled into the navigator’s table.
“Nah, I’m big. Uh. Vlat.” Vlat said, lowering himself on one arm.
“Talking to me Toss-For-Brains!” someone said from below his huge zebra-print buttons.
“Help with nav.” Jefferson said, grabbing her by the conveniently placed handle sewn into the back of her jumper and lifting her onto the table.
Tiny glared at the maps underboot, “You haven’t touched this mess in two days, how are we-”
The world pitched as they hit a roll of wind, and would have rolled themselves, except for Vlat’s hands. And the hit pulled their eyes as six to the windshield.
Through the viewing glass, they could see their mark; a deeper black against the black clouds, highlighted by lightning arcs between thunderheads. But also lit by a new heavenly beam. The eye of the storm.
“What’r they thinking?!” Tiny said, “We got ‘em on the ropes so they’re gonna suicide?”
“No chance. They’ve got a trick! Pretty, Jefferson, someone tell me where this damn balloon is floating?!” Cheerio shouted over his shoulder.
“Hmmmmmmmm” The robot buzzed, daintily placing a gripper to its chin in thought, “Inertial measures have failed. Visual tracking has failed. The balloons have not been sighted for two dozen and-“
“You don’t know?!”
“How precisely do you want to know? Though not a null response, it is valid to all queries.” Pretty saw, in the way his gold curls were whipping with dismantling intent that it should compose its insufficient data into a meaningful response, “It is unlikely that we have left the country of Gruber-Kach, given the maximum airspeed of this vessel.” It replied, with a staccato sarcasm in its voice.
Jefferson was strapped into the navigation desk. He grabbed a map, some scrap paper, a blue crayon and started drawing.
“Pretty, what’s this boat’s max airspeed?” he asked as he squinted at his own thumbs up, and at a course map that hadn’t been updated in two days.
The glowing green and blue eyes turned on him, “Given loading profile, and Mister Cheerio’s treatment, approximately one hundred kilometers per hour.”
“We caught a blast in the tail over Yestetownellow.” Tiny added.
Jefferson had a chart in each hand, storm profiles and troop movements along the Gruber-Kach/Hectare border, looking back and forth and at the map, doing the figures in his head now. They had been using hydro liberally, so increase airspeed, storm above the equator, so counterclockwise. He traced their path with his eye. Pretty’s guess may have been less than useless. And if the frontline had lost anymore ground in Hectare since the last report…
“Dammit, Cheerio, pull us around!”
But it was too late, they crossed into the eye of the storm. Directly above the enemy artillery battery a mile below.
- - -
With storm shutters sealed tight on all viewing windows, turning every window into deadly gold rectangles as light tried to barge in, they were flying blind now. But they were not deaf. As soon as the rain stopped hammering on their airframe, Coth’s daughter launched signal flairs. Scarlett, Red, then Blood Red.
A responding Maroon flair went unseen on the distant ground.
Then smoke. Then the sound of artillery.
- - -
“Pull around, Pull around!” Jefferson cried as flak rushed up to meet them.
Deep thumps on all sides as the explosive munitions tried to pluck them out of the sky. Cheerio screamed orders, whipping the crew into a circus of action. Vlat wrenched control levers, venting the gas, and opening up hydro as Tiny sat on his shoulders, adjusting trim on the overhead valves to make sure nothing melted or failed as they converted into gliding mode. And Jefferson was elbow deep in powder sacks and ignition charges, deftly tying wires to every trigger pin. He wrenched open a floor hatch and dropped the first charge as the ship keeled forward on skeletal wings. The dropwire trigger snapped taught, and it erupted below them as Cheerio pulled the ship into a tight turn, just before a new flak cannon joined the salvo with a shot where they would have been, shrapnel rattling the airframe. The new-slack bladder meerly coughed, instead of tearing. But the airframe quaked in the blast. Tiny took over smoke charges as Jefferson sprang to the trigger board and began launching more charges with drumroll succession.
Finally, with a gut-drop fall, the balloon lost buoyancy and Vlat span up a hand-crank to finish their transformation.
- - -
“My lord! They have transfigured!” Sheltho cried from the divining circle in the middle of their guiding circle, eyes squeezed tight shut, fingers digging into her temples.
“How is that possible?!” He replied.
“Where before the image was a great balloon, I now see the image of a stork, they have changed their form.”
‘Curses’ was too fine a word for this, and Coth spat such vulgarities that Sheltho’s divining magic nearly sputtered and failed. The damn rednoses were as tricky as racoons! Even with their devil’s luck, stumbling right onto the front line of the ground-war, finding the eye of the storm directly over a working artillery line, even making it this far at all, they were about to fail in their unholy mission!
It was time to change the plan.
“Bring me the child!” Coth shouted.
- - -
Cheerio’s tendons were sticking out like steel cable as he wrestled with the glide controls, barely manageable even now as they converted from balloon to glider mid-free-fall. The whoopie-damn machine was never meant for this!
“Vlat! Take it!” He barked.
With acrobat precision, Vlat jumped over the back of the pilot’s chair as Cheerio slid out the bottom of it, and grabbed the controls with hardly a shudder. He had almost no room for leveraging the rebellious levers, but he didn’t need leverage when he had power. Tiny and Jefferson were still coating the airspace with smokescreen, throwing off plumes to feint movements for the cannons below, but they were running on borrowed time. If they didn’t get back into the cover of the storm before Tiny used up all the charges, they would have more bullet holes than polka dots.
“Lay double smoke and join me in the car!” Cheerio called to them as he went to car controls, “Pretty, dial us in to go over them, then back into the storm. In that order, dammit! Vlat, join us on the car once we’re on course. ”
“With pleasure, sir.” Pretty said.
Vlat gave a thumbs up as he began locking control levers down for the move.
With one more drumroll of smoke charges being fired into the blazing clear sky, Tiny and Jeff followed Cheerio down into the corridor, then into the car compartment. Tiny went in first, almost too big for it. Jefferson and Cheerio went next, at once or they wouldn’t have fit. Then Vlat barreled in.
- - -
In the blackest depths of his ship, surrounded by ancient runes drawn in dried blood now ebbing with scarlet magic, Coth chanted the spell of displacement. In his arms, the child squirmed and squealed, knowing with child instinct that all was not right. But in this grip, as cold and stiff as rigor mortis, the babe had no power to escape.
Thump.
An impact; the rednoses’ grapples. They must have gotten lucky for only one to hit, but the clowns would leverage even this tiny toehold if it gave them a chance to ruin his plan. He clamped his eyes shut in concentration on the displacement spell; this couldn’t fail!
He muttered the next stanza, then hard to grumble to a stop as shouting broke his concentration.
Shouting. Shouting? But how?!
Sheltho’s eyes flew open. The image of the Christmas box!
“Brethren! They are coming!” She cried, just before the thump of impact.
Sly One was already moving, slithering in his way towards the sound. Gertrude was moving too, like a spider crawling along ceilings and walls toward the fly causing vibrations in its web. Sheltho had no power to fight the way they could, but she was not powerless. As sweat rolled down dead skin, she put her fingers back to her temples.
Sly found them first. Careful to avoid the blinding beam shining through the hole in the ship’s carapace, he circled the tiny shape that was buried, nose deep, in the floor.
It looked, for all the world, like a Parade Day Firework, but almost big enough to contain a delicious toddler instead of an explosive charge. A big logo for the Robot Company was painted along the rocket in cheerful reds and blues.
Sly One was out of sight when Getrude arrived, her pounding feet awakening the red, white and blue cylinder in the floor. With a soda-can pop, a door in the side flew open and a clown burst out, springing and flipping, guns blazing. Cheerio, silver magnums akimbo, lit up the creature of the night with gusto as he bounced a spinning flip over her head.
Sly slithered along the ceiling over the rednose, let go to fall on the busy shooter, then screamed in pain as another clown popped out, holding a mirror to reflect cursed light up into the falling vampire. Sly fell in a heap, caught two rounds from Cheerio’s left gun, but managed to roll himself to the far side of the rocket, just beyond the burning light and stinging gunfire. Gertrude was roaring with power as she swiped with four arms to knock Cheerio through the hole the rocket had punched in the hull, but he had already somersaulted between her legs. Before she could turn to dash him to pieces, Jefferson had his mirror on her, stunning her with the light of day. Tiny appeared behind him, shouldering a bazooka half the size of their vehicle, leveraged over Jeff’s shoulder, aiming squarely into Getrude’s face.
“Say Cheese!” She cried.
Click.
In the cockpit, Sheltho grinned. Holding the image of the unfired bazooka in her mind, showing it to reality, and claiming its truth. No toys for the clowns!
“Shit!” Tiny cried, just before Sly appeared behind her, wrenched the tube out of her hands and brought it down on her skull. The thump was almost as loud as their landing. Tiny went stiff as a board and fell face-first to the boards. Then a massive arm reached out of the rocket and grabbed the other end of the unfired bazooka before he could use it to bash her head in.
Cheerio’s guns clicked empty, but he lost no time pulling two more out, still dodging Gertrude’s jabs and swipes, one arm for each gun, as they danced a death tango around the rocket, as he juggled four guns, reloading a pair one motion at a time on the catch, and firing the others on the other catch. Under this impossible hail of motion desperate shots, the vampire was sagging and slow, spending too much energy patching the bullet holes as they opened up all over her body and deluge of arms.
Vlat squirmed out of the rocket, wrestling the launcher out of Sly’s grasp, squeezing himself through the rocket’s door, but he couldn’t get his other arm free. Sly had leverage, but Vlat still had power. He jerked the tube in, rocked his head forward into Sly’s own, with a crack like an egg on face. Sly reeled back screaming and clutching his face, now marred with white make-up that had smeared off of Vlat’s forehead.
Gertrude screamed as she abandoned the healing, swallowed three shots with no effort to patch the bloodless holes, and doubled her attach. But Cheerio was still one big red step ahead, now reloaded on two steps, and chucked a freshly spent revolver into her face on the three steps, eliciting a new scream as the silver platting hit her sunburned skin, then, catching his fresh guns on the four steps, kicked the third under her legs back to Jefferson on the four and a half steps, who leapt into the fight swinging it like a club into Gertrude’s back. As she cried out, Cheerio kicked the first gun on the rebound off her face and kept blasting with the other two to draw her attention, but she was so enraged she span to face Jefferson, arms flailing wildly at the clown beating her with the silver gun, but Jefferson was quick, managing to dodge her mad, half-blind flailing and beating back her blunt strikes with his silver club. Gertrude was failing fast.
Sly was back in the fight again, ducked a swing from Vlat and lunged forward, teeth bared, eyes blazing an angry red, spit flying that could tranquilize a rhino. The clown barely caught the vampire with his free hand, stopping the fangs an inch from his throat.
“What’s the rush?” Tiny said groggily from the floor, then “oof!” As Jefferson was thrown against her.
Gertrude cackled with glee as she finally landed a hit on one of the clowns, then whirled to finish off the juggler. Two barrels jutted forward, she invited the lead slugs to strike her, knowing that as soon as he fired, she would survive and kill him, then she would- pain erupted in her scalp as the fourth gun fell from the air on her head. Then, with a two-handed strike, Cheerio clapped her head between the other two, crushing her skull between silver barrels, striking hot.
Sly screamed with carnal rage as Cheerio put a bead on him, flinching and jerking as rounds tore into him. Vlat used the shift in power to throw the vampire off his body, then popped back into the rocket as Sly jumped back up to bit him again. Teeth clacked on open air, Sly ignoring the sizzling and popping as sunlight hit his skin as he threw himself into the rocket after Vlat.
Damn! No shot! Cheerio couldn’t shoot into the rocket; he’d kill Vlat! Jefferson was swaying drunkenly from Gertrude’s strike and-
Great! Tiny was conscious! Damn! Tiny was climbing back into the rocket!
“Tiny, No!” Cheerio shouted.
“You wanna ssssmell my flower?” She said with the slur of the barely conscious.
The rocket was bouncing and rocking as Vlat and the blood-lusted vampire fought madly in the tight space, then an ear shattering scream rose as Tiny squeezed the bulb in her jumpsuit, squirting silver nitrate into the mix. Sly tore out the other side, scrambling madly to get away from the poison, flinging himself thirty feet out of the rocket, out of the airship, into the open air and sunlight beyond.
The screaming vampire fell away like a nightmare at dawn.
Jefferson finally got his head on straight, figuratively, “We get them?”
Sheltho changed her mind about the bazooka and reality finally got the memo.
That massive missile would emaciate the meddlesome morons.
FWOOM!
With perfect comic luck, the projectile fired harmlessly though their entry hole.
“Nice shot, Tiny.” Cheerio said.
Then there was a deep boom as the rocket hit their airship.
“Nah, it ain’t.” She said as crawled out of the rocket.
Cheerio ran up to the hole to see the damage; they had lost a glider wing, and Pretty was doing his best to recover control as he shifted back into balloon mode, but it couldn’t keep the airship out of sight in the clouds.
“Pies and pants!” He spat, “Vlat, send Jefferson back; Pretty’s gonna need some help!”
Vlat finally, slowly, extricated himself from the rocket, with a hand from Tiny, then fell unconscious at her feet. His arm was covered in bite marks.
“Break my skull!” Cheerio spat, “Tiny, help me out; they’re both going back now.”
Together, they pulled Vlat the rest of the way out of the rocket, then grabbed the nearly invisibly thin steel cables that were clipped onto it. Two for Vlat, Jefferson was already clipped in, and then, with a short electric bursts down the cables to start the winches, the two of then were yanked off their feet back to the airship.
Cheerio looked Tiny down and more down. Besides the bump poking through her frizzy blue hair, she was unscathed.
“Squeaky?” He asked.
She rubbed the huge bump with one hand and squeaked her nose with the other.
“Let’s get us a kid.”
- - -
Two words, all that was left in the displacement spell.
“ALKTHENAKTHANAKTHAKNA!” Coth hissed, “ QUAUAQUTTASUATI-“
“Oi!” Someone cried as the sting of silver filled the air.
Coth’s gold eye flew open, seeing the pair with his vampire vision in a single heartbeat. In that blood pulse; foresight.
Two clowns, one lanky and yellow rank, the other tiny and blue rank. The yellow one had three guns, one supposedly hidden in his jumpsuit, the other was armed with a squirting flower with the silver nitrate that now ruined the air itself. Both were true red noses with proper bulbous spheres.
The yellow would open with bluff gunfire, two shots, not daring to endanger the child. The small one would make a blitz, taking approximately a quarter of a second, and would feign a leaping attack, but would go for a close slide so she could use her flower while the yellow one deployed a trick… a pie? No, he would use a bandana weave for sure. Next, Coth saw that Sheltho, through the bowels of the ship, was now preparing the next image in her mind. Perfect, she was as tricky as himself. And he needed seventeen tenths of a second for her to do that, so he needed to evade the short one and a bandanna for that long.
His gold eye saw this, in the time measure of the blood.
Tiny dashed forward, fearless of the master vampire clutching their mark, as Cheerio laid suppressing fire over her head. Coth dodged both shots and span across the floor like a top as Tiny made to leap. But instead she stayed low, sliding on the polished heels of her boots even as she began to squeeze the bulb on her flow. But the vamp was over her, flying towards Cheerio!
He barely had time to pull the bandana from his sleeve and sling it at the monster on batwings rushing up to meet him. But Coth dodged this too, narrowly keeping the screaming child from the bandana sling, and crashing bodily into the clown. Silver heat rose through his jumpsuit, but then Coth had him held up with one hand while his other held the child secure.
Kill the clown. Teeth bared, vamcisors gleaming with toxin-
GACK!
The small one had thrown a pie right into his mouth!
Coth wretched and spasmed as the cream froze every nerve it hit, turning his flesh into sweet froth from the nose down.
Cheerio was thrown aside, and barely turned his impact into a comically flat splat, but the child stayed in the vampire’s hand even as he used his other to tear the pie out of his face.
Sheltho finally had her image, no visual image, a sound image. And so she reminded reality that Coth had said QUAUAQUTTASUATICHUHUHUHUHUHUHAHAHAGUARPRA!
The universe agreed, the spell was complete, and the vampire was gone with no trace except the spilled pie filling.
“Damn the ringmaster!” Cheerio screamed.
