The Wonder - Blood Red

Prologue-2

“Don’t you people salute a senior officer?”

Tork blinked himself back into the room. He glanced over at the rest of the squad. None of them saluted. Tork turned to Spicer.

“Shall I show him the device now?” he asked.

“I don’t want to see the damned device!” the major snapped, pushing himself back from his tiny desk. The major was a short man, shorter than most, which was unfortunate for him as it meant more people saw his bald spot, a palm-sized area on his head that he was desperately trying to conceal with a comb-over. It was a constant battle, exacerbated, he thought, by this pathetic back of beyond posting manned by a sorry bunch of ignorant provincials and visited by violent thugs, such as these disgusting Reclaimers. The only thing worse than them, their attitude and their stench was the ungodly device they had “reclaimed” and brought into his office.

The Gargoyle Key. An ancient artefact made of pure Blue Wonder by God knew who, God knew how.

Normally, as Regional Enchantment Auditor, Major Rupert Franks had to check the safety of industrial manufacturing centres that used Red Wonder, the source of energy for the Empire’s lighting, the slideways, weaponry, normal stuff. Very occasionally he had come into contact with Green Wonder, very rare in most parts of the Empire. It was rumoured that the Ditch had mastered Green Wonder, using it to lengthen their lives and raise entire armies from the dead. Only a few specialist hyperphysicists in the Empire were able to use it, including Doctor Axelrod, whose office was a few doors down the hall. Too few doors down the hall, in Franks’ opinion.

Franks didn’t like Green Wonder and he didn’t like Doctor Axelrod.

But the Gargoyle Key. That was different. That was Blue Wonder, the real scary stuff. Banned around the world, hardly anyone knew how to use it, although there was evidence it was used in the past. Blue Wonder was the miraculous stuff, turning water into wine, letting people swim on the land, transforming music into monsters.

Everybody was scared of Blue Wonder. And there was a lot of the deep Blue found in The Gramarye.

“Go on, have a quick look,” Tork smirked, opening the sack to let the pale blue glow leak into the room.

“No!” Franks squealed.

“It can’t hurt you,” reasoned Conway.

“How do you know? Nobody knows,” Franks demanded of the hyperphysicist.

“He has a point,” nodded Bunce.

“Look,” grumbled Tork, losing interest and pulling the sack closed, “I haven’t been in a city with a bawdy house for six whole weeks and my rifle needs oiling. Can you sign for this or whatever it is you have to do so we can get out of here?”

Franks was in full agreement with the large man with the big arms who seemed to be the custodian of the Gargoyle Key, but there was nothing he could do. He felt himself stutter as he replied.

“We have to wait for the Echo.”

“Wossat?”

“The E.C.O.,” Spicer said, resting his hand on Franks’ desk, “Enchantment and Chicanery Operative. The man who needs to check our prize and make sure it’s the real thing.”

“That’s why I hate dealing with the blue dabble. Half the people are scared of it; the other half don’t even believe in it,” Tork huffed, putting the sack on the table. Franks’ face registered alarm and he physically jumped at the rap at the door. Pendle’s head poked in.

“Colonel Quine and his guests would like to see the Reclaimers, Major.”

Franks bit his lip, attempting to withhold his unbridled joy at being able to relieve himself of these terrible people and their terrifying cargo.

“The colonel has requested your presence too, Major.”

Franks felt his face twitch.

Lieutenant Spicer followed the rest of his squad up the corridor towards the colonel’s office. He was tired. He knew that he’d let Tork get away with too much cheek. Normally he would slam the big man down, but there was something bothering Spicer. He felt like he’d forgotten to do something important. Or that something was on the tip of his tongue. Or he’d just woken from a deep sleep but couldn’t discern the reason. He got this feeling occasionally and it never led to anything positive. He tried to put it down to his tiredness. He also had a creeping suspicion it was the Blue Wonder getting to him. His parents had warned him about the Deep Blue. Don’t get too close to it. It’s dangerous. For everything good it seems to do for you, it will always make you pay twofold. Perhaps they were fairy tales they’d heard. Spicer had been brought up near a fairy colony and the little people certainly did like to talk and tell tales. Some people called it the dabble babble. At first, when he’d been very young, he’d been happy to listen, although nobody else seemed to take any heed except his parents. His few childhood friends had always scorned the fairies and Spicer didn’t want to be any more different than he already was – his burns were the result of an accident when he was a baby – he couldn’t remember a time without them. So Spicer turned his back on the fairies, just like everybody else.

As Pendle held the door open into Colonel Quine’s office, Spicer’s unease grew with an oppressive sense of déjà-vu. One hand was already resting on his sword, and his other moved towards his Twirler pistol. As the Red Wonder of his gun tickled his fingertips, he entered the room.

“Major Franks, how good of you to join us. Which one of you is Lieutenant Spicer?”

Colonel Quine sat behind a desk the size of Franks’ office in front of an expansive window, Doctor Axelrod at his side. Seated on a couch by the wall reclined an old man clinging to a walking stick, a gnarly individual Spicer recognised as Ambrose Willis, the Viceroy of The Gramarye.

“I’m Spicer.”

He looked at the pot-bellied Quine crammed into his chair, his oiled hair glistening and his moustache sharpened to points, and at the ECO, Axelrod, a stick insect of a man, almost as tall as Tork but stooped, with a natural sneer beneath his hook nose. They looked like a natural double act, especially framed as they were by the broad window. The Viceroy was a different kettle of fish, lurking in the shadows, his eyes glinting with belligerence. He was no behind-the-scenes bureaucrat. This old man looked like he did nothing through the books. He regarded Bunce’s feminine form and licked his thin lips through his yellowing teeth.

Beyond the glass, Chinsey, Grand Quillia’s regional capital in The Gramarye, lay below them. On the outskirts, a few small factories and a mill, belching out red smoke as the Wonder kept things churning on into the evening. Many of the houses around the factories were tenements with small shared yards backing onto dark alleyways. Slicing through the middle from beyond the city, a slideway, the ice glistening, leading all the way into Chinsey’s central station, close to where they were now, the Regional Headquarters. Also discernible, the Trade barracks and the Viceroy’s palace, imposing themselves over the rest of the provincial colonial town. In the palace’s gardens, Spicer could make out a few ruins, from whatever town stood here before the Trade took over The Gramarye for the Empire forty years previously.

“May we see the Gargoyle Key, Lieutenant?” asked Axelrod, already drooling over the prospect of getting his hyperphysicist’s hands on some real Blue Wonder.

“Of course.”

Tork stepped forward, opening the sack.

“Perhaps Major Franks would pass it to us,” Quine suggested.

Tork glanced at Spicer, unwilling to get involved in one senior officer bullying another, but Spicer’s mind was elsewhere. Spicer felt like someone had just called to him from far away, and he had no idea who it was or what they had said. His hand tightened on his pistol.

“Here you go, Major,” grinned Tork, removing the key from the sack and ramming it into Franks’ quaking hand.

Franks walked towards the desk, holding the sack at arm’s length, his face twitching, the auditor desperately attempting to retain some dignity in front of the Viceroy.

Spicer’s gaze out of the window sharpened and he found himself focussing on a wallet-sized patch attached to the outside of the glass. Then he realised what he had been feeling all day. Impending doom. And at that exact moment, Spicer felt his ears pop.

He pulled the Twirler pistol from its holster and span the chamber to charge the Red Wonder’s projectile force.

“Lieutenant?” Axelrod said.

Tork reached for the blat gun hanging from his shoulder.

“Explos...” Spicer heard himself begin before the window blew in at them, glass peppering them all. Spicer’s ringing ears managed to pick out the whirring of other Twirler pistols as the glass showered onto the floor. Two figures in goggles and earmuffs, wearing lumberjack harnesses clipped to ropes swung in through the open window from the room above, red flashes thumping from their guns. One threw a long dark tube, like a documents holder, and as it span through the air, Spicer heard Conway shout two words.

“White out!”

As Spicer pulled his Twirler’s trigger, everything flashed to pure matt white, as though a sudden snowstorm had buried them all at once, and then he couldn’t make out a thing, like he had been struck by an avalanche. For a second he could feel the kick in his hand as the Twirler fired, then that feeling faded and there was no sound. He lowered the gun, worried he would hit the colonel or the ECO who had been caught in the crossfire. His brain told his mouth to order Conway to bring up counter measures but he couldn’t feel his jaw or tongue move. He’d been the victim of white out attacks before. It was Green Wonder, affecting the brain. There was no snow, it was not deathly quiet but he had lost all sensation. None of his senses were functioning. The tube grenade had unleashed Green Wonder treated to enter through the eyes and ears, hence the goggles and earmuffs on their attackers. He had known people who had suffered a fatal white out, unable to swallow food, imbibe water, or say goodbye to their loved ones. But this was already fading. Whoever had used the grenade didn’t have the money for the good stuff so they obviously weren’t military. These were freelancers, like Spicer’s own Reclaimers.

The lieutenant slowly lowered himself to the floor, deciding to sit down and wait it out. With the combination of the white out and his uniform, he couldn’t feel any of the glass he was undoubtedly sitting on.

When they’d first started looking for the Gargoyle Key, Spicer had heard there were others after it. He went down the list in his mind. Harcourt’s group had been decimated by a Hump attack in the Glasslands. Goring’s team had drowned when their chartered vessel went down off the coast of Livesey Island. The Albrecht gang had turned on each other in the dungeons of Kahleel, with no survivors. That left one crew with the audacity to embark on a raid in the Trade’s own regional headquarters.

The wall of white clouding Spicer’s vision retreated suddenly, as if someone had pulled a plug in the far wall and the pure white milky blanket had been sucked away. His hearing came back as though somebody had opened a heavy door to a loud party.

“...od’s sake, Major. All you had to do was keep hold of it,” Quine was snarling.

Spicer saw Tork shake his head clear, as though he was discouraging a bee from flying in his ear, while Bunce stared irritably at her boots as her sight returned. She rounded on Conway.

“What the Hell happened to you? I thought you knew how to deal with this sort of thing,” she hissed, leaving Conway to shrug in reply.

Suddenly the door was kicked open and Pendle stood at the door, his shoulders draped with ammo and a blat gun in each hand. Quine didn’t even look at him as he waved him away.

“I’ll get the caretaker, Sir,” Pendle said as he closed the door behind him.

Tork helped Spicer to his feet and the two of them moved to look out of the shattered window, the glass crunching under their boots. They looked at the hooks above where the ropes had been attached and down into the streets below.

Axelrod and Quine joined Spicer and Tork at the window, Axelrod with a pair of binoculars, which he used to scour the streets below.

“I take it this doesn’t affect our fee, Colonel,” Spicer said, not bothering to look him in the eye.

“Of course not, Lieutenant Spicer. You will receive your fee as promised,” Quine licked his lips, savouring the moment, “once the Gargoyle Key is safely in my possession.”

Spicer rolled his eyes in Tork’s direction.

“Anything, Axelrod?”

Axelrod shook his head.

“The perpetrators would need to know exactly where the key would be taken, on this occasion, to you, Colonel. They would need to know how to gain access to a Trade building. And they would also need to be able to get their hands on weapon grade Green Wonder and know what to do with it once they had it,” Axelrod surmised.

“It can only be Rickenbacker,” Quine spat, “Rickenbacker and that gaggle of fools led by Sir Evan Mandell. But why would they want the Gargoyle Key? They would never work for the People of The Ditch. Why would they steal it from us?”

“To stop us having it,” said the Viceroy, picking glass from his lap as he remained in his spot on the couch, “You know how difficult Rickenbacker likes to be.”

“We should have killed him all those years ago,” said Quine, “when he was still working with us.”

“Colonel,” said the Viceroy, tapping his stick on the floor, “Send the lieutenant and his Reclaimers with an Immolator Squad to get the key back. They found it once and they will find it again.”

He raised his stick and pointed it directly at Spicer. “Rickenbacker cannot be allowed to use that key.”

“Rick who?” Tork asked, surprised he was interested.

Axelrod answered, “Professor Hilary Rickenbacker, once one of our own but his hyperphysical studies sent him crazy. Too much Wonder, Green or Blue, who knows? Now he can only be described as...”

“...a terrorist,” Quine interrupted, “A terrorist, Mr... whoever you are,” looking Tork up and down.

“Where is he heading with the key? What does the key open?” Spicer asked.

Axelrod moved to a large, newly torn map of The Gramarye across the wall, “The Cathedral of Tales”,” he said, his thin finger tapping at the location, in the middle of the Glasslands”

“An extra twenty per cent if you bring the terrorist back with the key,” the Viceroy offered.

“Dead?” Tork asked.

“I don’t care in the slightest.”

Spicer had something on Rickenbacker and Mandell’s crew. Something that would prove to be very useful.

“Fine. Let’s go,” Spicer shrugged and headed for the door.

“One last thing before your bring Rickenbacker to us on his knees, Lieutenant,” Quine said, looking up at Tork.

“Sir?”

“Make the big one salute me before you leave,” said Quine with a coy smile.