Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (37 page)

He laughed lightly. “You are a pill, no doubt about that. Well, anyway.” He opened the book.
“The Hobbit, or There and Back Again.”
He cleared his throat. “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit—”

“A hole? Who wants to live in a hole?” She remembered hiding in holes back home that most times had water in them, and sometimes big bugs or other icky, crawly things, or even snakes. And the holes always stank.

“Well, now, I'm sure”—Grandpa flipped the pages back—“Mr. Tolkien will explain why this particular character likes to live in a hole. That is, of course, if certain of us can set aside our impetuousness for a moment to hear what he has to say.”

Petra shifted, frowned. “All right, Grandpa, I'll be patient.”

“Good.” He shifted the book in his lap, then resumed.

The hole, the story went, was snug and comfortable because the individual who lived there wouldn't have it any other way, and as Grandpa's voice rumbled into Petra's thoughts, she discovered that there were also dwarves who danced and sang and ate a prodigious amount of food, a wizard who made secret plans, and possibly a dragon, a creature she'd only heard about but she knew to be dangerous and powerful, who had stolen a vast treasure. At some point, all those things became part of a dream, though if asked she couldn't say exactly when that had happened, just as she was unaware exactly when Grandpa had stopped reading, tucked her in, kissed her on her forehead and said, “Sweet dreams” softly into her ear. And if she had stopped to think about it, she would recognize that these new dreams contained things she'd never seen before, places she'd never been before, with adventures she never could have imagined otherwise, because there, in the safety and warmth of Grandpa's house, it was possible to have such dreams.

by
John Birmingham

John Birmingham is the author of the Axis of Time series,
Weapons of Choice
,
Designated Targets
,
Final Impact
, and the
Stalin's Hammer
e-book spin-offs. Because you always wanted to see a time-traveling rainbow alliance kick Hitler's ass.

In “Fortune and Glory,” he revisits some of his favorite characters from
Without Warning
and the Disappearance series. Cap'n Pete Holder, Fifi Lamont, and Lady Julianne Balwyn of the good ship
Diamantina
. In this alternate-alternative history they take on a direct commission from the King of Darwin to track down a vital document lost somewhere within the great crypt city of Sydney. But being ambitious, self-starting pirates they also find time for a little side project and a running battle with the city's ferocious cannibal horde, the Biters.

T
he
old sailboat was a twin-masted forty-footer carved out of thousand-year-old Huon pine from the Tasmanian Highlands, a beautifully preserved museum piece. She placed third on corrected time in a Sydney–Hobart race way back in 1953, and in the decades since had logged enough miles to make it to the moon and back. In that time she had been the plaything of a builder, a manufacturing tycoon, one dot-com millionaire, and a pirate by the name of Pete Holder.

He was a nice pirate, though, if you asked him. Quite handsome in a derelict-surfer-bum sort of way, in spite of, or maybe because of, the scars. Damsels dig scars, after all. And he only ever stole from the other pirates, and when he wasn't doing that, he was busy rescuing said damsels and hunting hidden treasures, as the better sort of pirate is wont to do. Commendable pursuits that had furnished him fortune and glory and Jules and Fifi: a dark-haired, deadly English rose and her messy blond bestie, redneck princess to Lady Julianne's bona fide if distant claim to the blood royal.

The fortune he'd salted about here and there. A little in the Royal Vault at Darwin. A little more on his account at the Townsville Arsenal. At least half in the First Republican Bank of Tasmania. And a few little trinkets and baubles buried in watertight capsules on lonely, unpeopled islands up and down the Great Barrier Reef.

The glory, of course, he carried with him everywhere. Sometimes it even got a little ahead of him and it wasn't unknown to hear tales of Cap'n Pete that had escaped and run wild and were enjoying themselves hugely at the dockside taverns of Hobart or Fort Lyttelton well before the man himself turned up to help them along with a few more drinks and a little adventurer's license with the literal truth of things.

Jules and Fifi meanwhile were crouched below the armored gunwales fore and aft as Pete steered the
Diamantina
up the harbor through the dark hour before dawn. Water as black as oil hissed by as he spun the wheel a quarter turn starboard to take them around the rusted hulk of an old guided-missile destroyer. The warship had sunk close to shore and her bow knifed into the night sky, silhouetted by fading stars and a quarter moon. The dead city of Sydney held itself closely around them. No campfires burned where he could see them, which might be a good sign, or very bad news indeed.

On the final approach they had slipped past three large encampments on the northern beaches, spaced at least ten miles apart, and before they'd weighed anchor in Townsville, Shoeless Dan had warned him of a large tribe of Biters living in the cliffs around Bondi.

“Took down a whole salvage company out of Hobart, was what I heard, Pete,” he warned over mugs of Old Scrumpy.

“Yeah, but we're not softcocks out of Hobart,” Fifi had scoffed.

She wasn't scoffing now. As the first birdsong reached them from the overgrown slopes of the inner harbor, Fifi swept the shoreline and the waters behind them with the
Diamantina
's swivel-mounted harpoon launcher. The antique whale killer took all three of them more than a minute to load and prime and they couldn't leave it primed to fire for too long, lest the thick rubber slings that would send the heavy javelin shrieking away, became stretched and lost some of their snap. He'd intended to fit a spring-loaded launch mechanism at the Arsenal.

Only half a minute to load, and by just two crew members at that, and another two hundred meters effective killing range, but it was a new technology and the price was too steep, even for the legendarily fat purse of Cap'n Pete Holder. Indeed, the legend of his fat purse may have worked against him there. Sometimes, it turned out, having a reputation as a very well-to-do pirate wasn't altogether helpful. For instance, when negotiating terms with the Colonel's First Armorer.

Fifi crouched over the harpoon gun. At the bow, Jules used a standard pair of old binoculars to sweep the ridgelines of the north shore, home of the three Biter Clans whose fires they'd seen as they ghosted past, a few miles out. She scoped up and down the shoreline, lowered the glasses, and took in the landscape as a whole. Nothing. The northern side of the harbor had gone back to brute nature harder and faster than the south. All those garden suburbs. And the Zoo of course. The Zoo had been over there too.

Jules crab-walked over to the port side gunwale and recommenced her surveillance. The haunted towers of Potts Point were visible as negative space where they blocked out the still bright constellations of the southern sky. The greater density of cement and steel and glass on the southern shore held back the wild with more success, but Pete's shoulder blades twitched anyway as he followed her sweep of the wasteland. He knew from long, hard-earned experience how many more hiding places, and hazards and unpleasant surprises were to be had in a concrete jungle than any other kind.

Ah, but more rewards too. More fortune and glory.

The gentle nor'easter carried them past the listing hulk of a passenger liner that had run aground on Cremorne Point. The breeze moaned a little through the bones of the rusting ghost ship, which was still festooned here and there with rat lines that hung like a few, drab strands of dead man's hair. Pete heard a deep, arrhythmic thumping that set his heart to beating faster until he realized it was just a lifeboat, still hanging from a steel cable halfway down the side of the liner, swaying in the wind, bumping up against the flanks of the ship.

“Clear south, clear north,” came Julianne's voice from the prow.

Years from a home now lost forever, she still spoke in the sort of cultured English accent that would announce the discovery of a cannibal horde rowing madly toward them in the same tone as she might declare morning tea ready to be served. Pete smiled at the thought of similar voices echoing across these waters for the first time some two centuries earlier, as Cook nosed the
Endeavour
up the harbor to drop anchor at the very edge of the dark unknown. Although, he had to admit, there probably weren't many genuine aristocrats among Cap'n James Cook's crew. Not like Lady Julianne Balwyn. They were all hardworking mariners.

“Clear on the six,” Fifi reported quietly, her voice an heirloom of the vanished American South.

To the casual observer, the waters appeared to be free of obstruction, with nine years of tide and storm having cleared away much of the free-floating wrack and debris and the hulls of derelict ferries and powered pleasure craft, some of which they'd passed washed up on harbor beaches. Others had foundered on rocky points or been carried out to sea, probably with all those passengers unable or unwilling to abandon the presumed safety of the vessels when the Blackout hit them. But they were in more danger astern than ahead. This was not the
Diamantina
's first visit to the vast tomb of Sydney, and Pete Holder threaded them through the hazards he knew of, and those he could guess at. The unknown and uncharted they would just trust to the famous luck of Cap'n Pete.

As they passed Garden Island Point and the junkyard of giant, gray naval ships at Woolloomooloo Bay, the first sails of the Opera House loomed skyward, framed by the great arch of the Harbour Bridge. He forced himself to concentrate on their passage, steering around the sunken wreck of a submarine he had missed on his previous trip, but which Shoeless Dan had been kind enough to mark on his maps—in return for one percent of any salvage taken in the voyage.

“Aye, Pete, don't quibble about pennies,” Dan had cackled. “Conning tower of that bitch'd rip the keel right off your pretty wooden fancy. Try your luck if you doubt me.”

But he didn't doubt Shoeless Dan, not when Dan had a payday in the offing, and he didn't try his luck.

Luck was a finite commodity, in Pete Holder's experience. Finite and scarce. It ran out quickly.

The sandstone stronghold of Fort Denison loomed off the starboard bow and both girls swung their weapons around to take it under fire if needed. Avoiding Dan's unseen sub took them a little ways closer to the fortress than Pete would have liked, but he spent a few coins from the purse of his good fortune and it paid off. Denison was a Martello Tower, an old nineteenth-century redoubt built to secure the colonial township from the predations of the Spanish, or French, or even the American navies, but they were all gone now, like the millions of souls who once lived here. Only bones and crumbling brick remained.

And Biters of course. Plenty of them.

But the Biters weren't much for the study of naval tactics in the age of sail and it had obviously never occurred to any of them to occupy the fort and thus take control of all the harbor and back up river.

*   *   *

Jules didn't realize she was holding her breath until she let it go with a gasp. She didn't take her aim off the squat, crenellated battlements of the fort, however. Not until they were well past and out of bowshot.

The Biters weren't much of a threat at a distance. Such ranged weapons as they had tended to be of the crudest design and limited effect. Sticks and stones, quite literally, for the most part. They were also, it was generally agreed, barking mad. The perils of down-breeding and a diet heavy in man-meat. But you couldn't deny them a suggestion of animal cunning. They were, after all, fast devolving into animals.

With the threat of a surprise attack from Denison receding she lowered the bow and turned her attention back to the course Pete was steering. Fifi would scan the waters behind them for trouble until they had tied up and disembarked. Gooseflesh came up on her arms as the shrieks of some large animal drifted across from the forests of the north shore. She did her best to ignore it, concentrating on the more immediate threat of the green chaos off to port. They had no reports of any Biters in the dense, overgrown tangle of mismatched scrub, forest, and jungle that grew wild in the old Botanical Gardens. Shoeless Dan, who would surely have shaken them down for another point on the back end if he had more information, was adamant the Gardens remained empty.

“Biters aren't for growing and tending much, missy,” he'd cackled when she pressed him on it. “Less'n it's their unrivaled collection of shrunken heads.”

Shoeless Dan's shrunken head had fairly tipped back and near fell off as he roared at his own wit, at least until Fifi had kicked his chair over and sent him tumbling to the floor of the tavern amid the appreciative uproar of a hundred plus drinkers.

Still, who was the stupid one now, eh? Dan was safely abed in Townsville, protected by the massed pikes and swords of the Colonel's First Regiment, while she was inching her way into a city of the dead and undead. Pete steered them carefully through the sunken and half-sunken vessels that still lay about Farm Cove. The largest was a paddle steamer, a floating restaurant she supposed, that had gone down in front of the old governor's residence. Tiny waves lapped at the paddles halfway up the giant wooden wheel and slowly poured through the broken windows on the second deck. Only the third was completely free of inundation and she watched it closely for signs of movement. As they wove around the abandoned hulls of smaller power craft, their course took them close enough to the flat bottomed steamer to make of them a perfect target, even for rock throwers. The old hulks clinked and creaked in the nor'easter. Magpies and crows cawed and cackled at one another, and somewhere nearby a kookaburra began to laugh. She startled at an enormous black bat that flapped close overhead, its leathery wings sounding just like the whuffling snap of sails in a moderate breeze.

“Bugger me,” she breathed. “This is less fun than the brochure promised.”

“Too late for a refund,” came Pete's voice softly. “See to the sails, Julesy.”

She reduced the canvas bellying in the breeze and they bled off speed as Pete brought them up on their mooring point, an old floating dock at the Man o' War Steps. Moving quickly now, wanting to be done with her work so she could get back to keeping an eye out for Biters or scavengers or any of the myriad types of ne'er-do-well you tended to meet in a necropolis, Jules shimmied up the mainmast carrying a length of torn and wretched looking sail. The sun was just peeking over the hills of the eastern suburbs then, revealing the
Diamantina
to be a wreck every bit as dilapidated and woebegone as any she had passed on her passage up the harbor.

Or at least that's how it would appear to an observer. The rust streaks were lovingly painted on, as were the gaping holes on both port and starboard flanks, just above the waterline. The torn rags she fixed to the mast were held in place with industrial strength Velcro, but ready to be ripped down with one strong tug. The decks did not gleam, hiding under a fresh coat of coal dust, applied thinly to create a patina of age and neglect.

Pete maneuvered them around to point the bow back out toward their escape route, at which moment Fifi at last gave up her vigil on the whale gun and relaxed the firing bands with a mechanical crank. The skipper dropped anchor and tied them up while Jules went below and hurried back with their equipment. Each of them carried a mix of essentials: rope, ChemLights, copies of the maps they would use, a little food and water, some very basic emergency medical supplies. These went into small backpacks, which in turn were stowed in slightly larger ones. Each crew member carried their own weapons load out, and one piece of unique equipment: lightweight binoculars for Julianne, a small grappling hook for Pete, a couple of smoke bombs in Fifi's kit.

They were dressed lightly, for fast movement. No chain mail, no steel plate, nothing that would weigh them down, sap their energy, or drag them to the bottom of the harbor if they ended up in the drink. Knee and elbow pads, sunglasses, and bandannas seemed to be their only common items. Pete clipped on his boiled leather breast-and-back plate, the heaviest armor any of them would wear. Jules snapped the fasteners of her old SWAT team tac-vest. Fifi wore Ray-Bans and attitude.

“We cool?” she asked.

“We're cool,” Pete said.