Asunder (War Between Worlds Book 1) Read online

  ASUNDER,

  War Between Worlds, Book 1

  Copyright © October 2011

  ASUNDER by John Mierau

  Copyright 2011 by John Mierau

  All rights reserved.

  ServingWorlds.com

  ISBN 978-0-9866396-7-8

  Illustration: ‘The War of the Worlds’

  By Adam Blakemore

  http://blakey00.deviantart.com/

  April 4th, 1896

  Folkestone Harbor, Great Britain

  Marcus Riggs was no soldier. A black man living just two decades past the Civil War stayed away from anything with too many rules. And Marcus was happy bending the ones that went out of their way to follow him.

  That was why Marcus had moved north and made a home for himself in the wilds of Nova Scotia, and why he and his first mate were outfitting their ship, trapped in a British harbor, with something that definitely bent the rules.

  He watched that first mate fasten down something borrowed from their hosts. Something covered in sail cloth to avoid prying eyes on the neighboring ships they’d spent months moored alongside.

  No one did take an interest, Marcus’s furtive glances told him, and he gave silent thanks. They can see my boxers when they’re hanging from the deck to dry, he thought, but they sure as shooting better not see this.

  It was a pleasant, lazy afternoon-despite the journey the two men were about to make. It felt more like late May than early April, Marcus thought. That was down to all the rocks falling from the sky, stirring up dust and temperature.

  Marcus pushed the brim of his black fisherman’s cap far back on his head, closed his eyes and savored the salty breeze from offshore. It was a rare, mostly clear day. Not many of those since the Blitz started, Marcus thought as he took another bite of his apple. An Allington Pippin, it was. He was always amazed by its pineapple-like flavor, and he’d laid in a few bushels of them for the crossing.

  His best friend and Pegasus first mate, Hobe Martin, roared at the spanner, eking an extra quarter turn of the bolt, then rocked back on his knees. “Phew! You want a turn?”

  Marcus shook his head and took another big bite, wiping at the juice running down his chin.

  Hobe glared up at him, but his face quickly turned thoughtful. “D’you think they’ll be able to do it? You know, actually…” He whistled and made a corkscrew motion with his hand, raising it skyward.

  “No talking about that,” Marcus said, and whipped his apple core out into the harbor. “Or did you already forget the ‘on pain of death’ bit of the speech?”

  Hobe lifted one end of the sail cloth and pointed at the three thin tubes of the business end. “You’re okay swiping this, but can’t talk about the other?”

  “About the size of it,” Marcus said, and tugged the cloth back over the iridescent green and purple metal of the barrels.

  Hobe shrugged. “Guess the whole world will know if it’s a success, soon enough.”

  “Or we’ll raise a glass to our friends from Folkestone,” Marcus said quietly, “and hope they went easy.”

  Thy were quiet after that. It had been a year of hard things, though, and it had taught them not to hold on to gloom. The sun warmed Marcus’s back, the sky had shed most of its usual grey-brown for something close to blue, and he was that very day sailing for home.

  He let himself hope.

  “Ah, never mind. We’re going back!” Hobe said, echoing his thoughts, and turned the heavy spanner on the last bolt of the tripod mount stretching below the cloth-covered apparatus. Marcus watched his wiry-some would say skinny-engineer put his back into the work. Hobe may have been small, but he was stronger than he looked. Pushing around sails and steam-turbines did that to a man.

  As he held the ‘something borrowed’ in place for his engineer to finish up, Marcus wondered, again, why the Blitz had slowed in recent days. Had Dr. Grace been right about the fate of the monstrous creatures behind the shower of rock from the sky?

  Hobe grunted as he turned the bolt. “Damn navy rats, clipping the wings of our Pegasus! Damn Colonel ‘Whatsisname’ keeping us in-harbor!--”

  “Barton’s not such a bad sort,” Marcus said. “He saw us for the dashing scientists we are and put us right to work, didn’t he?”

  After the invasion, and finding himself trapped in port, Marcus had little expectation of hospitality. Even in a Britain working to break the back of the slave trade, day-to-day living still saw most black men shining shoes and shovelling coal in the mighty British Empire.

  Still, finding Pegasus the unwilling guest of Her Majesty Victoria also hadn’t been as hard of a shock as it might have been. Everyone had been otherwise occupied fighting giant metal machines to worry much in the way of civil liberties.

  Marcus and Hobe had taken it upon themselves to pitch in, and forage for supplies even before the last telegraphs to arrive told of the destruction being wrought on the Cities. It was the end of the world, as far as anyone knew. The end of the Empire and the reign of man, at the very least.

  Marcus and Hobe were survivors, though. They worked hard, and soon found themselves promoted by dint of surviving attacks by walking machines and those impossible flying ships.

  “My work got me three squares, Cap, it didn’t get me any invite to dinner with the officers!” Hobe said as he sunk another bolt into the deck.

  Marcus made a face. Of course, he hadn’t been invited to any dinners either. Not even after he’d improvised a bomb out of Folkestone’s kerosene reserves and brought down one of the walking machines. Colonel Barton had requested his talents taking apart more and more of the captured machines, and on defending the town even, before army reinforcements began to rally at Folkestone, and as often as not put Marcus’s ideas into action.

  Soon after the first ships from India arrived with soldiers, Marcus and Hobe were promoted to work in the Mouse-hole.

  That was all past now, Marcus sighed. He closed his eyes to feel the sway of the Pegasus. He loved having her under him again.

  Pegasus was a small ship for an ocean-goer, barely kept sea-worthy with spit, baling wire, and two sharp men’s know-how and prayer. But it was their home away, and both men loved her.

  Working in the Mouse-hole, for all its wonders, had made them nervous to be so far away from their boat. Hobe wasn’t the only one who’d gotten his blood up when the Admiralty had closed the ports and seized all ships in name of the newly formed Allies’ war efforts, but Marcus understood it. He’d have done the same, most like.

  And he had been enthralled by the work, no lie. Especially when the turn came, and flyers and walkers started crashing down in streets and fields, the creatures inside dead or dying. He remembered the first time he saw the strange armored form of an Invader…

  Soon after, masses of Invaders began dying in the streets, the survivors pulling back to London. The tatters of Queen Victoria’s Army followed.

  Victoria’s army collected what they could in Folkestone-or rather, deep under Folkestone- and put every hand to work reclaiming strange devices and puzzling loose the secrets of how they worked. That mean another promotion for Marcus, to full-time assistant to Dr. Grace, as the army gathered for a siege of London.

  If only they’d been successful in taking the city, once the Invaders had left.

  “It’s done!” Hobe declared, drawing Marcus back to the here and now to see his engineer put his weight against the mount, and to watch it stand fast.

  “First rate, Engineer!” Marcus teased, and ruffled Hobe’s scruffy blonde locks.

  Hobe grinned and slapped the hand away. “Then give me a raise!”

  Marcus waved around at the Pegasus. “You already own half!”

/>   Across the harbor, to the wooden blocks and half-complete skeletons of ships on the shore. Marcus’s smile died when he say them. He loved the sea, and the ships that sailed her. He wondered when boatbuilding would begin again, here. At least here, women and children had worked hard to keep the place up. It was still a beautiful town, despite more than a year of occupation and resistance.

  He wondered how Dr. Grace would get on without him. It had not been so bad. Marcus liked Dr. Grace, and knew Hobe did too, despite his protests. The good and strange Doctor had puzzled out how the Invaders communicated through the ether, and mastered many of their tools. Even before Colonel Barton made a bizarre Easter present of one of the last breathing Invaders.

  Marcus shivered, remembering the sounds the thing had made as it succumbed to whatever had taken all of its kind. Marcus and Hobe had worked as puppeteers, lifting and positioning the Invader’s hands, even as it shuddered and groaned like a whale inside its strange armor.

  They used the tentacles sprouting from their wrists like dew-claws to twist the two and sometimes three rings inset in handles of weapons and tools. Damned awkward for the most nimble human with two-hands to duplicate.

  Dr. Grace had smushed Hobe’s cheeks together and kissed him full on the mouth when the engineer strung together that first set of cogs to do the twisting for him. Marcus stifled a laugh, recalling Hobe’s stunned expression.

  Wondrous, amazing times.

  Hobe wiped his hands and the back of his neck and tossed the rag into the metal toolkit on the ground at his feet. “I’ll be glad to shake loose of this place!”

  Marcus heard Hobe’s fear, closer to the surface than either man had let it come in some time. What had happened to their home town of Dartmouth and their friends in Nova Scotia? What had happened to Marcus’s family, of which Hobe was an unofficial member?

  What had happened to Marcus’s wife Samantha, and his son, Robert?

  Marcus wasn’t quite ready to open the box where he kept his own fears. Instead he looked back on how he would miss the daily miracles here. Although he’d been kept away from them, too, in recent days. About that sudden, sharp betrayal, Marcus was angriest with himself: a black man had no cause to be surprised when the looks cast his way reverted from respect to disdain, and that had happened again, here.

  New arrivals took the meaningful work of tearing apart the alien machines and weapons. Marcus and Hobe were reduced again to foraging. Their quarters were moved outside of the military compound, then back aboard Pegasus. Finally, Barton had sent the note: Pegasus was free to leave. There were some vague apologies for the growing rudeness among the swelling staff of Folkestone and the project, and the Colonel’s thanks for their good work and his honest well wishes.

  “It’s clear sailing, Cap,” Hobe said, then tossed the spanner into the tool kit and hefted it off the deck. “Let’s haul anchor. I’ve laid up a few cases of the local brew, and that’s all I care to remember of our stuffy hosts and Queen Vicky!”

  Marcus did hear regret in Hobe’s voice, beneath the bluster. Hobe had found something here that only Marcus and Pegasus had offered him before: a place to belong.

  Well, that’s gone too, Marcus thought, now better men had arrived.

  Marcus snorted. Better men. Scots were known as the best naval engineers in all the world, but he’d take Hobe over any of them, all day long and any day. Any day, save when the Canadian was cursing the Queen aloud on the deck.

  “You’re a poor excuse for a Canadian. She’s your Queen, too! Besides, we needed to pitch in. It’s a war, and we could help. It was our duty to.”

  Hobe stood and scowled, but didn’t directly deny the charge. “T’ain’t a war exactly, Marcus. A war’s when one country wants what their neighbor’s got tucked away tight. Fighting these buggers, don’t know why you’d rightly call it your ‘duty’...”

  Marcus forced a smile. Amazing what you could get used to, he thought. The alien Invaders had appeared to rain fire upon the cities of the word just a year ago, and despite all that, enough to use them to push Hobe’s buttons.

  “They’re killing all of us, aren’t they?” Marcus continued. “We’re lucky we were in this Harbor, not on open water when the rocks started down. They held up Pegasus because supplies are tight and seagoing ships are rare. Sure’n you see why the navy might be a bit heavy-handed about it?”

  Hobe shrugged and drained the jar. He set it down and pulled a rag from the back pocket of his sailcloth pants and rubbed at an oil smear on his cheek. “At least they brew a good beer. For Europeans,” he muttered. “Nice and hoppy.”

  Marcus grinned, enjoying the familiar sparring match-especially once talk turned to brew. As an engineer and as a Canadian, Hobe could drink any of his Scottish opposites under the table. Many had fallen before Hobe, trying to save their national pride.

  “Gall-darned cowards,” Hobe growled, swerving the subject in another direction. “Sittin’ up there and taking pot shots.”

  The invasion from the stars had begun at the end of February. Metal giants had poured forth, first from cylinders and then floating cities, and roamed the countryside spreading devastation. They strode high above the world like the conquerors they were, but their reign did not last three weeks before they began their retreat. Their flying cities crashed to the earth. Their machines were left where they fell, full of strange rotting bodies. Barely a month of that reign had gone by before they retreated on giant cannon balls riding pillars of light began climbing back into the heavens.

  Dr. Grace had called them ‘rocket ships’.

  Marcus had dared hope the world would go all the way back to normal, with their would-be overlords on the run.

  You’d think a man born a slave would know better.

  News soon came of bands of brigands with alien gadgets fighting the army for control of London. Soon the battle for London was on again, between the flags of Britain and skull and crossbones, or the flags of self-made rulers, and the pirates and brigands where making their own foraging runs out farther and farther into the countryside.

  A more familiar villain feasted on the bones of the alien Invaders, quickly growing fat and powerful. Only now, after months fearing attack from the marauders, were Her Majesty’s forces making strides to reclaim London, and the Commonwealth.

  But the seas and foreign lands were lost to Victoria. The Empire, above which the sun never set, was dead and gone.

  The Queen was in hiding, her army scattered. The larger Empire’s back was broken, and only now was rule of law returning to Scotland, Ireland and Britain, thanks largely to gadgets Dr. Grace had rebuilt to carry the voice and commands of Her Majesty and her generals throughout the Isles.

  Marcus had fought the marauders away fro Folkestone a couple of times, sweating buckets as he tried to sweet-talk battered alien tools back to life to fend off the killers and the thieves. Then the rocks began to fall, and the villains went to ground.

  ‘Meteors’ Dr. Grace called them. Bloody great rocks that turned the sea to steam, or shattered the land worse than the greatest explosions made had ever made.

  Now in April, the ninth month of the Blitz, as one of the German professors had named it, there was still no end in sight.

  Unless the ‘chaps’ in the tunnel really were ready, this time.

  A part of him would be sorry to miss that show, after all his work.

  Hobe stared hard at him. “I think you liked it,” he said.

  Hobe took another long gulp of beer from a mason jar. Marcus frowned, but it was after noon and his engineer was a big boy. And Hobe was right: he missed what was going on far beneath his feet in that tunnel, dug with the large metal arms of the walking machines.

  Sure, the allies were on a fool’s errand, with their ever-so-secret ‘Project’. It was suicide, he had no doubt—but just walking around was that, these days.

  Marcus snorted. So was sailing for home, but he didn’t care.

  Halifax. Samantha. Robert.

 
Marcus slipped his cap back on his head. Tugging it down over his eyes with a firmness that mirrored his commitment to leaving, come hell or high water, or both.

  “I’d like to get us back home, that’s what I’d like.”

  “I got no doubt,” Hobe said, changing his tune abruptly, “but leastways, we helped get the prigs up to speed before a rock stomped them flat!”

  Marcus didn’t argue the point. It had been a good feeling, finding himself stranded with one of the few army forces left on the planet, and finding his ability to tinker useful in reverse engineering the Invader’s weapons and ships and suits, instead of eking another ten knots or ten months of life out of the steam engines on the Pegasus.

  But that was over now. The world may well have been turned upside down, by grisly beings from another planet, but a black man was still a black man. The British had been serious about killing the slave trade, before the invasion, but when it came to their lofty works, ‘black man’ meant low man on the totem pole. Two decades and some, he’d been a free man now, but Marcus still felt his face harden as he considered the speed and callousness of his dismissal. The last note from Barton releasing Pegasus had fallen on him as rough as the word ‘slave’ had, back in the bad days. It had come just the night before, on the heels of the surprise arrival of another team of soldiers and their precious cargo: refugee scientists from mainland Europe.

  Well, they ought to enjoy Doctor Grace’s company, he thought, imagining their faces when the newly arrived great men were introduced to the genius running the show.

  He’d miss the strange, bent and brilliant Doctor, but…

  Halifax. Samantha. Robert.

  “Been good, but time to go,” Hobe said, seeming to echo his thoughts.

  Marcus agreed with a nod, and a bump his fist atop the cloth-covered souvenir of his time working with the Allied scientists. Taking payment for their work from the skeletons of uncrewed ships in dry dock here at Folkestone, Pegasus was now in better shape than she’d been in since they’d bought her.