Shadows Against the Empire (Folkestone & Hand Interplanetary Steampunk Adventures Book 1) Page 13

  Upon their return to Port Victoria, leaving the routing out of stragglers and resisters, to the British and Venusian Regulars, he had found himself at loose ends. Captain Folkestone had been summoned to a high-level meeting that was likely to go on till dawn or later, and Hand’s involvement ended, at least for the moment, after he delivered the body and effects.

  No one seemed to think his attendance at the top secret conference would serve the Empire in any way, and Sergeant Felix Hand was not about to argue. He delivered the body and everything that had had been found, including the remains of the disc and some puzzling coded documents, as well as the statement he had written up after their return from the jungle, then was free to continue his search for the source of segir.

  Even to the casual observer, the contrast between the British port and the older Venusian city is startling, something akin to the difference between the Mercurian Brightside and Nightside, one half of the planet perpetually exposed to the Sun, while the other half knows only starlight. But the effect here, thought Hand, who had once served on the precarious boundary of Mercury’s Twilight Zone, was even more startling. Port Victoria could have passed for Brighton or Cardiff, if one ignored the roiling sky and had one’s back to the Old City. But bound for Yzankranda, as was Hand, with his back turned to Port Victoria, it was almost impossible to think the British had ever been here at all.

  Of the two halves, Yzankranda was the smaller, but seemed to loom over the British port. Where much of Port Victoria was given over to river docks, airship terminals and the huge aetherport, the largest and oldest constructions in Yzankranda were temples, shrines and monasteries, all built of basaltic stone quarried from the planet’s dark heart, raised on a scale that could only be termed cyclopean. Amongst those eldritch institutions of worship and learning were houses, blocks of flats, and businesses that mostly catered to a limited trade. Most of the Venusians who called the Old City home kept themselves to themselves, though many did trade with the newcomers. Over the past decade, however, there had been an exodus of younger Venusians from Yzankranda to Port Victoria, lured by the prospect of jobs and the riches said to abound in the outer worlds. It was along the waterfront that Hand hoped to suss out that drink of original and authentic segir, for it had been his experience that in every town built upon the trade of sea or river there were certain constants, no matter the country, no matter the planet.

  For his excursion into the dark world of Old Venus, Hand had gone mufti. He had pride of uniform, like any British soldier, and would have knocked down anyone who even hinted he was a poodle-faker, but this mission demanded discretion.

  He would just have to do his best, he decided.

  While he had not fooled himself into thinking that a Martian strolling the cobbled streets of Yzankranda would go unnoticed, he had not counted on the glares and stares, the window shades that fluttered as furtive watchers peered from buildings that were unlit and apparently uninhabited, the shuffling pedestrians who suddenly remembered they had intended to go the opposite direction or who abruptly darted up narrow alleys to peer from out purple shadows where the glimmer of the gaslamps did not reach.

  With only a vague idea of direction, Hand eventually wound his way down labythrine streets and covered passages until he heard the murmur of the river and saw the rising masts of Venusian ships, most built along classical lines, with high sterns and graceful arrow-like bows, with sleek lines between, and almost none of them were steamers – an expression of the Venusian mindset that tended to ignore anything they did not want to accept.

  Though Hand was a soldier, the Space Service had more in common with the Royal Navy, so drinking elbow to elbow with a tar was not an unpleasant prospect. Being out of uniform, he would not have to endure the usual landlubber jibes, but, on the other hand, he was still a child of the Martian highlands in an ancient stone city that was thoroughly and obstinately Venusian. Knowing all that, and expecting both the best and the worst, Sergeant Felix Hand of Her Majesty’s Martian Rifles walked into a Venusian pub marked by a weathered sign bearing a creature that looked very much like a kraken attacking a Venusian schooner.

  There were no humans in the pub, not a single one, Hand noted right away when he opened the diamond-paned door and stepped in from the night. The music died and the chatter ebbed to silence as the patrons regarded the outworlder with smoke-stung rheumy eyes.

  Without taking his gaze from any of them, Hand eased the door closed behind him. Presently, the wheezing and whining music droned once more and the patrons again resumed conversation, but their tones were more hushed, furtive, as if speaking about topics and plans of no concern to outsiders, which was likely true.

  Hand made his way to the bar, threading his way between a few towering Venusians. Although Humans and Venusians were very much alike, there was no mistaking one for the other. As a rule the humanoids of Venus were a thin reedy lot, with a pallor not out of place in a funeral home, the expected outcome of living on a world where daytime was just a lighter shade of night and the Sun only a vague patch of brightness in the cloud-filled sky.

  And yet these blokes know about my Mars, Hand thought as he drew near the crowded bar. How is that possible? Do I even want to know? No, probably not.

  The place was filled with bluish smoke, Hand recognising the scents of tobacco, hashish, bog weed and Martian thag. At this last familiar scent he smiled faintly and wished he had brought along his pipe and pouch. Hand eased between two robed Venusians and tapped on the polished bar top to attract the barkeep’s attention.

  “Well, you’re far from home, aren’t you, little fellow?” The barkeep grinned down at him like a bleached skeleton. “Are you lost? Should we call your mammy?”

  “Stow it, you albino slug!” Hand snapped, plinking a shilling of the Empire against the hardwood. “Serve up a shot of segir!”

  “Sure you can handle that, little Martian?” the barkeep taunted even as he uncorked an irregular bottle of greenish glass and poured a familiar liquid into a shot-tumbler.

  “Oh, I can handle it all right,” Hand boasted, downing the segir in a single gulp.

  “I guess you can,” the Venusian admitted with a grudging smile. He poured the Martian another. “On the house – welcome to Yzankranda.”

  “Thanks.” Hand downed this drink as nonchalantly as he had the first, even though he felt his head might explode at any moment. He was pretty sure he had discovered the difference between the segir the Venusians kept for themselves, and the watered-down shandy they exported off-world. “Smooth.”

  “Ain’t it though,” the barkeep agreed. “Another?”

  “Sure, hit it,” Hand said, but he vowed to nurse this one a bit. If he hammered these back as he did on other planets, someone would have to carry him home in a basket. “It’s better segir than I’ve had before.”

  “Sure is,” the barkeep agreed. “That intestine-corrosion they ship off-world ain’t been aged even a craddot’s time.”

  “Craddot?”

  “It’s a dim-witted but lecherous swamp-bird,” the barkeep explained. “It hatches from an egg laid only a half-hour earlier, then dies twelve hours later. It has that little time to tatok as many mates as it can.”

  “A short life,” Hand agreed. “But at least the flipping bird dies with a smile on its beak.”

  At first, the barkeep and all the curious hangers-on on the fringes looked blank, then burst into uproarious laughter that shook the pub’s ancient timbers. Mirth spread quickly as everyone had a good haw-haw at what “the little Martian bloke said.” From that moment, Hand knew he had been accepted by the others, to a degree at least, outsider or not.

  “Anyway, now consider this bottle of segir I tossed for you,” the barkeep continued. “ I tied a cord ‘round its neck and lowered it to the bottom of Scale-Eye Bog five, no, six years ago, and there it lay in the heated muck and slime till I pulled it up all of two days back. That is the secret of good segir – letting it age properly down in the hot filth.�
��

  Hand nodded, feeling a little green under his ochre skin. He added segir to the list of things in life you might like but did not want to know at all how they came to be made, joining sausages, laws and religion.

  “So, what brings a Martian over to the dark side of the city?” the barkeep asked. “Not just a shot of segir, I think.”

  “Couldn’t find a decent thing to drink in all Port Victoria,” Hand replied. “A man could die of thirst there – tea, bog ale and French wines.”

  “French?” The barkeep squinted in confusion.

  “French, you know, from France on Earth,” Hand explained. “Nothing but tart wines and frilly champagne – that’s all those frogs ever drink.”

  “A country of frogs,” the barkeep said. “Sounds tasty.”

  Other patrons nodded.

  “Naw, they’re people,” Hand admitted, “Sort of.”

  “So, the only reason you chose to grace us with your wit was to get a drink of segir?” the barkeep continued.

  “A drink of genuine segir,” Hand clarified.

  “Well you can’t fault the Martian for that,” said a Venusian oldster by the bar, leaning on a carved ashen cane. “As a youth, I worked a bit at the out-worlder aetherport, loading the ships that go through the roof of the world. Pinched me a bottle of that which they label segir, I did, thinking I would pull a nip and see what was being given out as the fruits of Venus.”

  The others leaned forward.

  “Well, Anjius?” prompted a fellow eldster. “What was it that happened?”

  “What do ye think, ye bog-devil?” Anjius demanded. “I spat the baby-pee on the ground and walked off the job. Wanted no part of that scurrilous trade, I didn’t.”

  “Well, that’s what you get, working with off-worlders,” the barkeep pointed out. He cocked an eye toward Hand. “No offence intended, little Martian.”

  “None taken,” Hand replied. “Especially now that I know what real segir tastes like.”

  “The Martian with good taste rates another,” the barkeep said, refilling the shot-tumbler Hand had sworn to nurse. “Not on the house, of course.”

  Hand took a shilling from his waistcoat and plinked it down.

  Though Felix Hand was on the planet he hated most of all the worlds in the Solar System – excepting France, of course, which hardly rated as a planet, though you could hardly tell from the way the French acted – and among people who would never see him as anything but an interloper, no matter how many drinks he pulled with them or bawdy songs he taught them, he could have stayed where he was, content, wreathed about with blue smoke and listening to music that sounded like two sand-cats wrestling over a bagpipe until the incendiary segir overcame what was left of his brain cells and somebody did have to carry him home in a basket. But he was a soldier, a non-commissioned officer at that, so he had a sense of responsibility lacking in civilians, and most British tars for that matter, he thought impudently, so there came a time in the deepness of the night, when heads started to loll and eyelids droop and conversations descend into mutters, that he plopped his cap on his head and looked for the door.

  “Ach, you’ll not be leaving now, little Martian, not in the darkest before the dawning, be you?” the barkeep cried, or words to that effect, the pale reedy Venusian having packed away even more segir than had Hand. “We should at least drink one last toast to the bravest Martian to ever crawl out of that sterile hellhole, Port Victoria.”

  Hand nodded, and the barkeep poured out. Only two shot-tumblers were necessary, as all the other patrons were insensible, or seemed to be.

  “To the wise little Martian,” the barkeep said.

  They drank, and the barkeep refilled them.

  Hand hoisted his drink into the air. “To Her Majesty Queen Victoria! God save the Queen!”

  The barkeep raised his shot-tumbler enthusiastically.

  “To Her Maj…what?” The barkeep lowered his raised drink a bit as he looked at Hand’s foolishly grinning face. Then he laughed hard enough to crack a spar. “God save the Queen!”

  When Hand departed the Kraken Pub, as he thought of it, he did so with a full bottle of genuine segir tucked under his arm.

  Moments later, an old Venusian, white face seamed with age, who had sat alone at an alcoved table drinking slowly rose and quietly exited the pub, keeping a discreet distance behind the Martian who now walked with a somewhat liquid gait.

  The hot and humid Venusian night smacked Hand across the face like a broiled fish, and he was suddenly sober, more or less. For all that, though, there was also a chill to the air, but he suspected it was more mental than physical, brought on by the intensely dark streets, lit by very few gaslamps now, and the thick mist rising from the black river. And he thought he heard the soft tap of footfalls matching his in the gloom behind him.

  Though he had abandoned his uniform before his nocturnal excursion into the warren of Yzankranda’s streets, that did not include his service weapon, now tucked in a holster strapped to his left calf. When he was certain of a stalker, he ducked from the black street into an even blacker alley, crouched down, pulled his weapon from its holster, and waited.

  Less than two minutes passed before furtive footfalls drew close to the mouth of the alley and paused. He held his breath and raised his weapon. After the briefest of moments, the footfalls resumed, then vanished from his hearing without him having once glimpsed his tracker. Rather than follow his intended path toward the bridge and perhaps chance a meeting he wanted to avoid, he veered deeper into the Old City, adopting a circuitous path to his goal. There were possible dangers in his choice, but the possibility of peril was preferable to a certainty. Besides, he told himself, all he faced on his new course were cutpurses and footpads, which were much less dangerous, he felt, than whatever sought him.

  Hand had not gone more than a few hundred yards before he spied the girl in the soft golden glow of a mist-shrouded gaslamp. She was under its illumination for the briefest of moments before she moved on down the narrow street on her unknown errand, but in that moment Sergeant Felix Hand of Her Majesty’s Martian Rifles, known for looking for love in all the wrong places, and finding it ever elusive, was suddenly and thoroughly smitten.

  He almost dropped the bottle of segir, so startled was he.

  Venusian males were a common sight in Port Victoria and on the dark streets of Yzankranda, as were older females, but young maidens of Venus were so very rarely seen that they seemed almost like mythical creatures. Visitors from Earth, Mars and the various inhabited Moons speculated wildly about the nature of these elusive maidens, some suggesting seraglios or nunneries, but Venusians were, of course, naturally secretive, and, with the passage of time, outsiders eventually accepted the young girls of Venus as just one more unknowable secret, talked about but never seen.

  And yet Hand had seen one.

  He felt as if he had just spied a unicorn or a space-angel.

  Even under the unflattering light of the gaslamp, her skin was the colour of new ivory, her face a perfect oval, her mouth an even more perfect bow. Her eyes were wide, like those of a doe, and her brows were thin arches of the finest down. Her hair, what he could see of it spilling from under her jewelled mantilla, was the colour of starlight. Slender of form and so graceful as to seem part of the drifting mist, she was not as tall as a male Venusian, about Hand’s height. Her robes shimmered as if spun from pure platinum and gold.

  Then she was swallowed by mist and darkness.

  Hand heard her moving ahead of him, her footfalls neither slow nor hurried. He followed after, though he suspected she would very soon go her way and he his since his path lay ultimately toward the river-bridge and hers obviously deeper into Yzankranda. But, at least for the moment, he could imagine he walked the same street as she, which was all a mortal could hope for when suddenly in the numinous realm of a goddess.

  His senses still adrenaline-heightened from his own brush with deviltry, Hand was perhaps more attuned to his surround
ings than he would have been otherwise, so he heard the furtive sounds ahead of the girl before she did herself. Even before her measured pace stuttered, before her first intake of startled breath, Hand was on the move. By the time she uttered a small scream of fright, he saw her and her attackers through the mist in the dim light spilling from a window; not breaking his stride, he placed his segir bottle on a crate against the nearby wall and rushed into the fray like an avenging demon.

  There were three footpads, but the odds suited him.

  Two of the ruffians were human, the third a young Venusian who had obviously been off-world long enough to gain some colour, develop some bulk, and pick up some very bad human habits. The humans held the writhing girl, while their cohort tried to pluck the jewels and filigree from her mantilla and robes. None were being very successful, so violent were the girl’s motions, so active were her tugging arms and kicking feet.

  Hand slammed into the Venusian first, sending him reeling into the darkness and mist. From the points of view of the two humans, their partner in crime had been suddenly replaced by a violently snarling Martian. The man on the left got Hand’s right first hard in his face, while the other received an ever harder jab in his solar plexus; the first fell back, the other doubled over. Released by her captors, the girl flattened against a nearby wall, but she did not run away.

  Hand helped the doubled-over robber straighten up with a swift uppercut under his chin. His spine gave a very audible crack, as did his neck when his head snapped back.

  The other fellow, back on his feet as his compatriot slowly slid down the wall, came at Hand with both fists churning the air. He flew back without landing a punch, his face once again receiving the brunt of Hand’s attention. He fell over his moaning friend.

  Hand heard pounding footfalls and reached up his pant leg.

  The Venusian rushed back out of the darkness into which he had vanished, thirsting for bloody revenge. He stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes fearfully wide and the business-end of Hand’s gun less than an inch from the tip of his nose.