The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk Read online

  Li Yan, brigade commander of the National Revolutionary Army and secret lieutenant of the Luminous Sky, spat into his goggles, wiped the lenses, and refitted them over his eyes to watch the qilin galloping up from the beach toward Qiantang River Bridge. Its red eyes burned holes in the choking smoke, and more red lay behind it: the crackling sampan villages and embers of Hangzhou Bay were like fireflies in the air.

  The American pilot, Eva Eagels, tracked the galloping shape with her pistol. “I see it,” she muttered. “That one of ours, Li?”

  Li winced as another Japanese shell exploded overhead. “It’s Chinese,” he answered evasively.

  “Well I hope it swallowed something useful,” Eva said, lowering her weapon. “Otherwise we’re in shit creek without a paddle.”

  He regarded the chestnut-haired aviatrix beside him, her face streaked in soot, her knuckles white around her trusty M1911, and her alert gaze studying the hellfire rolling up from the beach. “That passes for proverbs in the West?” he asked.

  She opened her mouth to reply when another explosion rocked the darkness, showering them with sand. Against the red fires, the giant robots were descending like old gods returned. They resembled samurai. Blue-hot plumes of flame fanned from their boots, controlling their terrible descent toward the beach. Li supposed their construction had as much to do with Japanese tradition as with psychological warfare. Even as murky silhouettes they cut a nightmarish sight – twenty-foot-tall machines in the shape of men, overlapping steel scales cladding their frames, and the decorative kabuto they had for heads displaying curling horns like prehistoric monsters. Their appearance conjured not-quite-vestigial memories, too, of wood-block paintings Li had seen showing past invasions of China . . . the ruthless hordes of Genghis pouring through the Great Wall.

  In the predawn gloom the Japanese navy had arrived and quickly reduced the defenders’ junks to smoldering flotsam on the bay. Next the turrets had turned their attention on the beach defenses themselves. Only then had the actual invasion begun, not as troops from the sea or battalions from the land, but as machines dropping down from the sky . . .

  Li craned his neck to the heavens. Stars and moon were lost behind the pall of diesel fires and gunpowder, but he wasn’t interested in such lofty things. His eyes scanned for the ominous shadow of Tengu Castle, floating high and terrible above Shanghai.

  “Li!” Eva tugged at him. “Here it comes!”

  He glanced back to the beach. The qilin was nearly at Qiantang River Bridge, weaving around what remained of the barbed wire and Cointets. Its movements were gyroscopic, hips snapping fast adjustments as it avoided debris, bodies and descending robots. Those flaring eyes spotted him where he crouched on the hilltop, and then the qilin leapt full onto the ancient bridge.

  One of the hovering robots shot a spotlight onto the fleeing creature.

  “Run, boy!” the American cried.

  The stuttering muzzle flash of Gatling guns illuminated the miasma.

  Qiantang River Bridge had spanned the river for a hundred years; now it shredded into sawdust around the weaving, galloping qilin.

  For an instant, Li thought the machine had been obliterated. Then his heart lifted as it darted out of the sawdust-haze and scrambled up the hill toward him. The hilltop was thumped by shrieking 50-caliber rounds, forcing Li and Eva to duck. The qilin leaped the hillcrest, soaring over Li’s head; he had a view of its smooth steel chassis, the actuators and steel coils throbbing wildly. Then it landed nimbly in the reedy wetland below them, turning its vaguely lion-like head to regard Li expectantly.

  Li tugged at the American. “We can leave now!”

  She scrambled up and ran toward her Fiat CR.32, which waited where she’d landed hours ago like a patient bird on the high banks opposite them.

  “Eva, no! Not that way!”

  The pilot had taken two steps toward the embankment when suddenly a shell screamed past them and struck the plane. The detonation of fuel tanks blew her, Li, and the qilin backward, and all went dark.

  When Li came to, he was being dragged by the boot through the muddy banks of the bay. Flies swarmed around him, attracted by his sweat. The qilin, dutifully pulling him out of harm’s way, left him by the water’s edge and then eagerly sprinted back to fetch Eva; a moment later she came jogging alongside it, a dark expression on her face. The qilin’s leonine countenance remained fixed in a serrated grin, its scarlet eyes swiveling in their rubber sockets to regard the Japanese navy filling the bay.

  “Eva, you’re alive!” Li said stupidly, and for a moment his eyes moistened. He thought he’d spent all tears at the loss of Shanghai’s beach perimeter. The surge of emotion made him appreciate that the war wasn’t over yet, even if Shanghai had fallen.

  Don’t let the war deaden you.

  The words from his eldest brother Qimei came back to him. Growing up in a small household, Li had always idolized his brother, seeing in Qimei everything he wanted to be: Handsome, confident, courageous. It was hero worship as well as brotherly adoration, and Li’s enlistment had as much to do with his brother’s short-lived military career as with the need to defend China herself.

  The night Li was to ship out to Shanghai, his brother embraced him on their bamboo porch and whispered the hard-earned advice: I’ve seen how war can deaden a person, little brother. I’ve seen men transformed into shambling husks, as if the horrors of battle had killed their spirit. Promise me that won’t happen to you, Li. Don’t lose your smile, even if you must hide it at times.

  “You’re alive,” Li told Eva again, and he nodded. “I thought . . .”

  If Eva noticed his tears, she was pretending not to so he could save face. Against the clouds and fiery bay, she was as wild-eyed as the demon empress herself, black hair a tangled mass about her face. Another woodblock flashed into Li’s mind: a female hungry ghost, escaped from one of the Eight Hells to feast on the living of zhonguo.

  “They blew up my Damsel!” the American raged. “Just get me some replacement wings, Li, and I’ll take back the skies, gun chattering like the doomed brothers in Hell’s Angels.” She glared and jabbed a finger toward the qilin. “I hope this thing was worth it, goddamn it all!”

  Li squatted in the mud. “Qilin, what did you find?”

  The machine sat back on its haunches with a wheezing squeal like rusted door hinges. It bowed its head, jaws swiveling open, like a dog bringing back a bone. It disgorged something from its throat and then looked at them expectantly.

  The qilin were designed for battlefield reconnaissance and delivery of supplies. While not combatants, they were designed to do whatever was necessary to obtain things their sensors deemed worthwhile.

  Li blinked.

  The thing the machine had disgorged was a young Chinese woman.

  For perhaps half a minute, Li stared, trying to accept what he was seeing on its own terms. He wondered if the qilin had gone berserk, abducting some poor peasant from the rice paddies.

  Eva peered over his shoulder. “Who the hell is she?”

  The woman was unconscious. She looked young, slender, almost frail, with delicate bone structure suggesting noble stock. She also wore a peculiar amulet tightly around her neck.

  “Assist me, please,” Li said, taking the sleeping woman by the arms.

  “Why?”

  “If we leave her here, she’ll be taken as a comfort woman for the Japanese.”

  Together, they bore the mystery woman toward the water. “But why did the qilin grab her?”

  It was a good question. Li mulled over the last orders he’d been given from his superiors: Find the qilin and recover its catch. It has something from the Luminous Sky for the war effort.

  At the water’s edge, Li fidgeted with his ring.

  Something from the Luminous Sky for the war effort . . .

  He checked his ring, made sure the jade dragon sigil was facing east. Then he held it over the girl’s face and squeezed the ring.

  Pale, fuzzy light sprang from t
he dragon and rippled over her face.

  “It’s a girl, Li,” Eva chided. “You really need a flashlight to tell?”

  Ignoring this, he directed the light to the unconscious woman’s forehead. Golden calligraphy materialized under the beam, and Li gasped.

  Luminous Sky!

  She was Luminous Sky, just as he was!

  For a moment he forgot about the invading robots and the loss of Shanghai’s defenses along beach and bay.The Luminous Sky was not destroyed! There were others! Others besides him . . .

  A top-secret agency formed after the First Sino-Japanese War, the Luminous Sky was tasked with defending the Middle Kingdom. Even in a country torn apart by tribal loyalties – local warlords tangling with Nationalists, Communists, dieselmages and Manchus – the Luminous Sky represented something all could agree on: the nation must be defended against the rising specter of the Rising Sun. Its top agents were known as “steel dragons”.

  Li scooped the girl back into his arms and waded out into the bay, keeping her head safely above the debris-strewn water. Eva splashed in behind him.

  “Where the hell are we going, Li? Gonna walk to Sidney?”

  He halted at an unsightly pile of flotsam. Tangled beams, netting, and planks of ruined sampans floated unceremoniously on the water.

  With his free hand, Li reached under one of the lacquered beams and found the secret knob. He twisted it.

  Unseen pneumatic levers hissed. The water began to froth. The wreckage lifted up, like a weary animal, exposing a deep, dry gullet.

  “Inside!” he said. “Quickly, Eva!”

  Once within the secret, water-tight compartment, Li flicked the propeller switch, and the flotsam began drifting through the sizzling, fiery bay.

  Leaving China in flames behind us, he thought.

  Pushing out into the Sea of Japan.

  “I’ve heard of junks before,” Eva said, hunkered down in the depths of the secret watercraft. “But this is ridiculous, Li.”

  The interior of the vessel was little better than a cramped, damp closet. Li hunched over the mystery woman, emptying some his canteen onto a cloth and rubbing it over her lips. She came awake slowly. Li helped her drink, squeezing the cloth into her mouth. She sat up, wary of the low ceiling, and blinked dazedly in the gloom of the single wall-lantern.

  “You are safe for now,” he told her, speaking in Mandarin.

  She nodded dreamily.

  “I am Li Yan, Brigade Commander of the National Revolutionary Army,” he said, and then, quieter even though the American couldn’t speak a word of Chinese, he said, “I am also a Steel Dragon lieutenant of the Luminous Sky.”

  There. Her eyes glimmered in reaction to this. She glanced to the qilin which sat obediently beside them, its red eyes attentive.

  “My name is Xin,” she said at last.

  She had a soft accent, vaguely Northern. Her skin, too, was ruddy, red-tinged; product of that cold country where even rice refused to grow and life was hard.

  “Say,” Eva interrupted, “You got a drink in this tub, Li? Hell, I’ll even settle for some of that cheap local beer.”

  Ignoring this, Li helped Xin drink more from the canteen. The woman was fully awake now, and she drew herself into one cramped corner beside the qilin.

  “ I was sent to recover you,” Li explained, hoping she could shed some light on the next stage of the mission. “ The Luminous Sky also provided this craft . . .”

  The woman seemed to be studying Li’s face. She turned next to Eva. Now that she was awake, there was something almost harsh about her gaze – something dangerous and bright, like tempered steel in the gloom.

  Finally, she said, “ The steel dragons were being sent to the front. Our cars were converging well out of range of the Japanese naval guns . . .” Her eyes narrowed. “Or so we thought. As the last car came around the bend there was an explosion. We had been fired on from above – those robots were already coming down from Tengu Castle. I pulled myself out of the flaming wreck, and the next thing I remember was the screeching whine of their .50-caliber bullets all around me, and then . . .” She patted the qilin’s metallic paw appreciatively.

  “Glad to see we’re all friends,” Eva observed, pulling off her leather flying cap. She shook free her chestnut curls. “Li, you know I don’t speak a lick of Chinese. Care to fill me in on what’s going on?”

  “She is Luminous Sky.”

  “Great! Except that you’re Luminous Sky, too, and you didn’t exactly save the day out there, you know?”

  In perfect English, Xin added her voice to the conversation. “The Japanese invasion is being controlled by Tengu Castle,” she said.

  Eva sighed. “Not exactly news, sister.”

  “The Luminous Sky was sending its steel dragons – its highest agents – to infiltrate the castle and end the invasion.”

  “What?”

  But Li felt a smile twitch at his lips, a smile born of desperate hope. The mysterious Luminous Sky, always inventive, always operating in the shadows. He believed in them. While the in-fighting of China’s political factions had left the land vulnerable to attack, the Luminous Sky always operated in the service of the Mandate of Heaven.

  After all, what was the mantra of the Luminous Sky?

  All Under Heaven.

  It was the ancient dream of a unified world. A world in which peace was not a dream of poets but a daily, irrevocable reality. A world without borders. A world of one government, one law, one purpose.

  Eva scoffed. “Tengu Castle is thousands of feet above us! Li, what’s going on here? People say the Luminous Sky is crazy, and I’m starting to believe—”

  Xin stood so swiftly, so suddenly that Eva reached for her Colt. The Luminous Sky agent strode to a section of the wall and pried open a hatch Li hadn’t known was there.

  “The Luminous Sky wishes to reach Tengu Castle,” Xin said. She reached into the hatch and suddenly the junk began to rumble, exactly as if hidden engines were whirring to life. “Therefore, we shall reach Tengu Castle.”

  Li felt the junk lift up from the water. He and Eva exchanged an astonished look.

  Outside, a black balloon had snapped open from hidden compartments. The core of the junk was listing into the air like a newborn cicada crawling out of its terrestrial shell and climbing into the night sky.

  Xin smiled, and switching back to her vaguely accented Mandarin, said, “All Under Heaven, Li.”

  It was called the Lantern, Xin told them.

  Eva grumbled. She drew open the junk’s door, revealing a sea of clouds around them and the fires of China glowing far, far below. The wind immediately leapt in through the opening, biting them all with icy fangs.

  They had ascended above the fog of war into the clouds themselves, until it seemed they were skating along on a wispy sea. The starry firmament turned this dreamlike horizon into quicksilver, and the Lantern – born aloft by its ebony-colored balloon – glistened like a sea creature peeking up from the depths to consider the wonder of the firmament.

  Eva pointed across the sea of clouds to a distant black shape floating perhaps ten thousand yards off. It looked like the tip of an island jutting up from a misty sea.

  “Is that the castle?” she asked.

  Xin nodded.

  Eva gave a savage grin. “Know what a balloon buster is, sister? Every flying ace worth her salt knows how to look for observation balloons and shoot them out of the sky. Its standard protocol: knock out the enemy’s eyes. You think the Japs are any different? If we don’t reach the castle before the sun comes up, we’ll be a big black target hanging against the dawn sky.”

  “We will reach the castle,” Xin said simply.

  “By being at the mercy of the wind?”

  “Are we?”

  Li closed his eyes in the silence that followed and listened. Then he smiled for the second time that day. The Lantern was not beholden to the wind. He could hear the whir of propellers beneath them, pushing them straight toward the flyi
ng castle of their enemy.

  But Eva slammed the hatch door shut and said, “Li, get that idiotic grin off your face! Have you ever met this dame before? How do you know she’s not a spy for the enemy? Maybe this is their plan: scoop up the last Luminous Sky – you – and bring him to the castle on a silver platter?”

  His smile slipped a little. “She has the Luminous Sky mark . . .”

  “I have a skull tattoo on my arm. That doesn’t make me a bone doctor. You’re betting our lives on blind faith!”

  The blind faith of his brother, Li thought. Qimei had spoken with unflinching worship of the Luminous Sky. He was a true believer, and therefore Li had been one too . . . enough of a believer to seek the group out and pledge himself to their cause.

  Still, some of what the American was saying snuck through Li’s certainty, and he gazed at Xin with a sudden flash of paranoia.

  Come to think of it, she didn’t look especially Chinese. Not a Han, at any rate . . .

  “You are from the American regiment,” Xin said to Eva.

  “That’s right,” the aviatrix replied, not appreciating the subject change. “The Flying Tigers. We’re not here in an official capacity, but our President knows it’s only a matter of time before we get drawn into the war. Besides, can’t have our Chinese brothers and sisters falling before the Jap war machine. So we get a paycheck and open license to fight.”

  “So you’re mercenaries?”

  Eva stiffened. “We get paid, sure, but that don’t mean we don’t believe in this. And no salad would make me work for the enemy.”

  Li sighed and, switching to Chinese, said to Xin, “Salad, an American euphemism for—”

  “Greenbacks,” Xin answered swiftly in English. “I spent a year studying in Chicago.”

  He was startled. “The Luminous Sky sent you to America?”

  “And to Paris the year before. And Berlin in ’thirty-four.”

  “You speak all those languages?”

  Xin smiled politely. “My mother called me ‘Bird of a Thousand Songs’.”

  Eva said scornfully, “That’s terrific, sister. But let’s keep on target here: How does reaching Tengu Castle end the invasion? Is your intention to somehow take control of the robots by using the Jap transmission tower? That’s crap. You’d need the security codes!”