The Forever Engine by Frank Chadwick

Author:Frank Chadwick [Chadwick, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Steampunk, Time Travel, Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9781451639407
Google: mQ6imQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1451639406
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Uvats was a sprawling, motionless, nearly colorless town of gray stone and stucco buildings with brown tile and gray slate roofs, spilling down a low ridge to the harbor. The waterfront was abandoned aside from a couple small boats swamped in the shallows and scores of large blue-black crows, fat and unalarmed by our arrival. They studied us not so much with hunger as speculation.

The fire didn’t look as bad up close; the heavy rains last night must have drowned most of the blaze. Several buildings in the town still smoldered, and the fires might grow and spread, but for now all they produced were dirty coils of smoke that formed a veil of mourning over the dead town. At least it looked dead.

As soon as the launch bumped against the dock, the Marines scrambled over the gunwale and spread out into a skirmish line followed by the Bavarians.

The air was tinged with the smell of wood smoke, but something else as well, a sour, oily smell that tickled my gag reflex. It made my heart rate climb and sweat break out on my forehead. As soon as I was on the dock, I unfastened the leather cover on my holster, pulled out the Webley, and kept it pointed at the sky, finger out of the trigger guard but ready to go.

“Bloody hell this place stinks of garbage,” Gordon cursed, and von Schtecker nodded his agreement.

I looked at the Marines, the Bavarians, and saw some noses wrinkled in disgust, but nothing more. That told me something about them: they’d never been to war, at least not a long, nasty one.

“That’s not garbage,” I said. “It’s decomp.”

Gordon turned to look at me.

“Decomp?”

“Decomposing human bodies, lots of them.”

Gordon’s look of mild curiosity changed to disbelief and then horror, quickly concealed behind a mask of nervous indifference. A murmur ran through the Marines and Bavarians, a ripple of movement as men became alert and scanned the buildings near the waterfront. I heard a zipping sound behind me, turned, and saw Gabrielle kneeling on the dock, uncasing her Winchester shotgun.

“If something happened here long enough ago for the bodies to start to rot,” Gordon asked, “why hadn’t the Turks heard of it?”

“Weather’s been warm and damp, so I’d say this could have happened within the last three days. Why no news of it back in Visegard? Telegraph was out. You heard Cevik Bey. Happens all the time, so no one thought anything of it.”

“Good Lord, what happened here?” Gordon asked.

Something bad, that was sure. As if to emphasize the point, a wolf appeared from an alley and stood sizing us up. A rifle cracked from the crowd of men on the dock, a slug knocked a chip from the corner of a building a few feet from the animal, and the wolf streaked back down the alleyway.

Gordon looked around uncertainly. One of the Marines opened the bolt on his rifle, and a spent brass cartridge case clinked musically on the dock.

“You call that shooting, Private Kane?” Corporal O’Mara demanded.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.