The Brothers Cabal (25 page)

‘I would guess so. It's the usual formula for them.'

Alisha's mood was not improving. ‘But we've
fought
the Templars. How can we work with them?'

‘“My enemy's enemy”, Alisha,' replied the major. ‘Approaching apocalypses make for strange bedfellows. We may have had our disagreements in the past, but they're a very moral bunch and very committed to their principles. One of those principles is the hunting and killing of monsters, although they have a rather more biblical way of saying it.'

‘Quite,' agreed the professor. ‘Given the choice of continuing the silly feud between us or joining us to prevent the creation of a teratarchy, they will and, by the sound of it,
have
opted for the latter.'

‘What's a teratarchy?' asked Major Haskins.

‘Government by monsters,' said the professor complacently. ‘A neologism, freshly minted. I think the Greek works.'

‘We've been given a rendezvous point,' said the major, reading further down the decoded message. ‘We're to make best time there and join the rest of our people from the initial attack.'

‘What,' said Alisha slowly, ‘what if this attack fails, too?'

‘Then it's out of our hands altogether. Sympathetic contacts within local states have been briefed and, I hope and pray, are already mobilising. If we can't nip the
Ministerium
's grand scheme in the bud, it will turn into a war. Our strength is we respond a great deal faster than any army can hope to. The business with those flying monstrosities the other night proves they have their “Lord of Powers” already. They miscalculated with our Mr Cabal, but he was only ever intended to provide small numbers of specialised troops anyway. Between the shapechangers, the mindless undead, and whatever party tricks the new recruit brings with him- or herself, no neighbouring country is safe. Even with their armies standing ready, they have never trained to deal with this manner of threat.'

It was a view he'd aired before, but previously without the possibility of them re-entering the fray. Then it had been about hopes that the conventional would be ready and capable of defeating the unconventional, with an underlying fear that it would not. Now they were in the unenviable position of being the first line of defence, civilians who would face death in an unusually literal sense so that soldiers might be spared the horrors of this new war. It was ironic, certainly, but not in any pleasurable way.

There was no point in staying with Miss Virginia and her crew; they would be travelling in the wrong direction for the needs of the three Dee Society agents. One of the market trains, however, would take them back to the city from which they had so recently fled, and so they made arrangements to bed down amid fruit barrels in one of its freight cars.

In the meantime, however, they would sample whatever delights market day had to offer, and enjoy the show.

*   *   *

At ten minutes past two—the carefully calculated tardiness being both to allow some anticipation to rise and also to give the slow crowd from the tavern time to show up—the aeroshow began. Unlike the
in medias res
openings of the previous two, this began with a single entomopter sitting in the middle of the field, Miss Virginia's very own
Spirit of '76
. It had been the object of intense observation for the forty minutes the crowd had been building, it being the closest almost all had ever been to such a machine. They admired its striking paintwork, commented upon the four thin wings, and speculated on the function of assorted struts, intakes, and flanges.

The many conversations gave way to applause as Miss Virginia Montgomery walked onto the field and, with practised insouciance, stood by the nose of her aircraft. Here the mechanic, Becky Whitten, arrayed in her cleanest, least-frayed overalls, awaited her with an electric megaphone. Virginia took it with a polite nod, and addressed the crowd in good German, made exotic to the listeners by a discernible American accent beneath it that hinted at the moon in June and mint juleps. She thanked them for their presence, she thanked them for their patience, she told them a little of her circus's history, and she promised them a show they would never forget.

In the light of subsequent events, it was an unfortunate promise; not because it was unfulfilled, but because it was fulfilled all too well.

At the conclusion of the little speech, timed to a nicety based on past experiences of slightly inebriated farmers, Miss Virginia returned the megaphone to Becky, exchanging it for a British Army surplus Very pistol. This she made a show of loading with a flare cartridge before raising it high and firing the white star shell into the heavens. Even as the parachute flare was still rising, she'd handed the pistol back and was climbing into the cockpit of the big American two-seater. The canopy slammed shut and Miss Virginia fired the engine before even strapping herself in, the pre-flight checks having been completed by Becky just before Miss Virginia made her grand entrance. Strictly, this was against protocol; the pilot should make their own pre-flight checks as it's their life on the line and ultimately their responsibility. That, however, would have undermined the drama of the moment, and in the open spaces travelled by a wandering circus, protocols are sometimes revised. Besides, Miss Virginia and the rest of the Flying Circus routinely put their lives in Becky's hands, and she had proved time and again that their faith was well founded.

As the engine, still warm from a short readying session earlier, wound up, the entomopter's four insectile wings started to sweep in their complex figure-of-eight patterns, slowly as the clutch was only in its initiator setting. Miss Virginia finished strapping herself in, pulled the cinches until they were just the right side of comfortable, and gave Becky a thumbs-up signal. Becky quickly returned the signal before raising the reloaded pistol and firing a second flare. This one exploded into a flickering green light in the clear sky, floating away on its parachute borne by a light breeze. The sense of growing immediacy conveyed to the crowd by these actions was no mere stagecraft; two miles away in either direction, entomopters waited in distant fields. On sighting the first flare, they fired their engines and stood by to lift. On the second, they rose vertically, their wings whirling. Up to a height of fifty feet they climbed, nosed down to allow the wings to provide more forward motion, and accelerated hard towards the showground. As their airspeed increased, they started to develop transitional lift, allowing them to bring the nose down still further, turning more and more of the wings' blur into a headlong hurtle.

In their wakes, grass bowed and boughs shook violently. On and on they came, Mink and Daisy from the northwest, Dea Boom from the southeast, flying hard and sharp, the nap of the earth flashing below them reflected in the gleaming gloss finishes of their fuselages, smooth now the landing gears had all been retracted within seconds of launch. Ahead of them they could see the showground growing so large, so quickly, the green flare still falling off to the west beyond the crowd's left flank. There would be no place for any ‘seat of the pants' flying here; their lives depended on everyone staying exactly to the plan. No extemporisation and no showboating while a sister pilot was in the same arena.

Every entomopter had its reflector sight up and active, all the better to focus the pilot on their craft's heading. The sights—angled panes of glass onto which a targeting reticle was projected via the offices of an optical collimator, beam splitter, and a little engineering ingenuity, thereby allowing a true sighting without parallax problems—were artefacts of the CI-650's operational past but, being slightly superseded by the CI-880's model, they had not been stripped out when the entomopters were decommissioned. It almost felt like a kindness for the old warhorses.

Now, where once bandit entomopters would have filled the sights' graticulated fields, now they centred on an ally, in this case Miss Virginia, that they might better avoid her at the last moment.

Avoid her they did, to screams of shock and horror from the crowd who only saw the closing aircraft at the last moment and barely had time to fear a four-way collision before the moment had passed and the fright was washed away by relief and laughter and applause.

The three members of the Dee Society had some of the best seats in the house, having climbed onto the roof of the train's sleeper carriage to watch. The rhythmic tightening of fearful anticipation followed by the release of the tension as stunt after stunt was performed with the almost supernatural panache of the highly practised professional also served to take some of the Society members' own tensions, and they found themselves able to forget the
Ministerium Tenebrae
for a little while at least.

‘Just as well they started when they did,' noted the major. ‘The weather's closing in. Probably start raining in an hour or two.'

‘Is it?' said Professor Stone. He looked into the slight breeze, but all he could see were a few high clouds. ‘Looks clear to me.'

‘You're looking the wrong way, professor,' laughed the major. ‘Over there.' And he pointed to the west.

The professor looked, and then climbed to his feet. ‘How extraordinary,' he said under his breath.

There did seem to be a storm coming after all. An angry thunderhead, so dense it appeared almost black, was rolling in from the west. It was vast, yet still seemed dwarfed by the even greater extent of clear sky around it. As they watched, a curious effect could be discerned around its edges; a violet miasma seemed to follow the cloud yet not necessarily be part of it, as if there was an afterimage around it, or the cloud was overlaid upon a slightly larger coloured version of itself.

‘That,' said Professor Stone with certainty, ‘is not natural.'

‘Good Lord,' said Major Haskins as he and Alisha joined the professor on their feet, ‘it's moving against the wind. Look at the other clouds.' He was right; the other strands of cumulus, too reedy to suggest rain, were at a similar altitude to the storm head, yet they were running dead against its direction of travel. Indeed, the storm head seemed to be bringing its own winds with it; they watched as one of the pale natural clouds ran close by the dark mass and was progressively torn into nothing by violent yet thoroughly localised turbulence.

Over the showground, Dea and Mink were engaged in a mock dogfight while their two comrades flew in a wide circle around the conflict. Dea had just performed a textbook rolling-scissors manoeuvre to come in on Mink's tail while Becky bellowed out a commentary through the megaphone for the benefit of anyone who wasn't just staring, eyes wide and jaw loose, at the display. Dea was intended to trigger a pyrotechnic roughly equivalent to a string of very large firecrackers in a trick box attached to her fuselage at this point to suggest the rattle of mini-cannon, to which Mink would respond by firing a smoke cartridge clipped to the tail boom to represent damage, after which she would limp pathetically from the field
hors de combat
before setting up her approach for the next set piece.

Instead, Dea Boom performed a split-S manoeuvre to disengage. Unable to hear if the firecrackers had gone off or not over the roar of her engine, Mink triggered her smoke cartridge anyway, and performed her aerial version of ‘The Dying Swan' despite her attacker having passed up the chance to fire. Instead, Dea headed west. Becky paused her narration of the life-and-death struggle in mid-sentence. Dropping the megaphone, she took up the Very pistol at her feet, shoved in a new flare, and fired it into the sky. This one was red, indicating the display had gone awry and all pilots were to scramble for clear air before regrouping. As the other aircraft separated and staged north of the showground, Becky took up the megaphone and said, with not a sign that this was all anything but planned, ‘And there we see Miss Dea Boom in
Buzzbomb
perform a perfect split-S disengagement, allowing Miss Mink to escape with her dignity intact.' She added in an electrically boosted
sotto voce
, ‘Although perhaps not her tail plane.' She pointed at the smoke trail, and the crowd laughed, even while they tried to figure out the joke.

In the air, Miss Virginia was furious. The show had gone beautifully so far, and to have one of the real crowd-pleasers fall apart like that was madly frustrating. She did not, however, hold Dea Boom responsible, at least not without proof of wrongdoing. Her first thought was a mechanical failure, and Dea had broken off from the staged combat for safety's sake. That still didn't explain what was so fascinating about the western horizon, though. In any case, they couldn't progress without
Buzzbomb
rejoining the formation, so Miss Virginia testily signalled to Daisy to form up into a staggered V and to pass the message. It was hardly necessary; they had flown so long together that they could almost foretell one another's thoughts. As soon as the
Queen of the Desert
was in position on the
Spirit of '76
's starboard aft quarter,
Striking Dragon
was taking position in the port aft, still trailing the last of the smoke from its canister.

Dea Boom was behaving oddly, simply flying back and forth, northeast to southwest and back again as they approached. Perhaps a mile beyond, the landscape grew dark under the shadow of the thunderhead. They had all noticed it in the air, but had all discounted it as being too far to be a problem during the display. It seemed to have come on towards the town with strange rapidity, they now realised.

Miss Virginia signalled to her wingwomen to fall back as she flew on alone to parallel Dea. At a range of perhaps ten feet between their respective wingtips, a short conversation in mime took place.

Miss Virginia pulled an exaggeratedly mystified face and mouthed,
What?

Dea pointed down and replied,
Look!