The Last Page

Caliph gazed at the twenty alien bullets with a sinking feeling. He wasn’t counting on one hundred sixty Pplarian shells winning this war.

The Byun-Ghala slid west, following the Trill Hills that separated the mud pots to the north from the village of Burt. A thousand feet below and receding fast, brown lanes chugged with gray shapes. Steam engines, horses and carriages. Small platoons of local men stood in formation in the village square.

Caliph aimed one of the railing-mounted spyglasses and discovered they were armed with swords, pitchforks and probably a handful of chemical grenades. They were local militia lacking uniforms or armor. Some of their fellows loped along trails presumably hidden at ground level, darting under leafless trees that hardly camouflaged them from the sky.

They were getting ready.

But Brt cowered in the folded hills eight miles west of Isca. And if Saergaeth made it to Burt, Caliph knew nothing else would stop him.

In the cold air over Glmwood, Caliph squinted, checked charts and finally made out at nearly twenty-five miles just exactly what he was up against. Tiny flecks of red had begun to resolve against the hazy western chalkboard of the sky. Saergaeth’s zeppelin fleet numbered one hundred thirty-four according to the latest intelligence.

As the intervening miles shortened, the young soldiers on the deck looked solemnly west. Saergaeth’s cloud of measles swelled to the size of ruby-bellied reed flies, then cherries and, finally, they looked like great crimson balloons filled with blood.

Saergaeth had dyed his entire fleet red.

The crew began to take turns looking through the spyglass. They smoked nervously and peered into the lens.

One of the men cursed and grinned. He read the numbers painted on the taut skins and started calling them out. Caliph was looking too. He could see the enemy airmen walk across somehow hostile decks, smoke and look east through similar spyglasses. Caliph felt awed by the resolve. All around him, his men were ready to die and Saergaeth’s aeronauts were strange mirrors or doppelgangers.

The landscape below drifted in pastel grays, surreal and quiet except for five choratium horrors plowing through the snow. The Iscan heavies were heading west, ordered to provide ground support for the High King’s tiny fleet.

The Byun-Ghala had caught up with the rest of the airships. It slid between a pair of leviathans, a spiny minnow between goliath pike. Airmen on the other ships flashed signal lights in salute as the High King’s tiny dirigible sped past.

A condensation trail arced suddenly into the sky, launched from one of the Iscan heavies. Like a crayfish darting in clear water, it left an organic muddy-looking trail. The projectile reached its zenith over a cavalry of light Iscan engines and plummeted past them into Saergaeth’s ranks of heavy foot. It detonated remote catastrophe. Orange smoke surged like a sudden mushroom. An exclamation point above imperceptible carnage that served to mark the beginning.

Saergaeth’s array was highly visible now. Floating from the Greencap Mountains with a kind of fatuous malignancy. Perhaps Miskatoll had built more. By Caliph’s estimate, nearly two hundred zeppelins darkened the sky, many nearly half a mile long.

They bristled with weapons and spines.

Faint concussions echoed across the plains as the first artillery burst from flight decks and engines on the ground. Legions of infantry and horse marched in eccentric, primitive formations between the lumbering machines. They made easy targets against the white fields.

From launch decks and skyhooks, one-man gliders slipped into the air. They leapt from massive leviathans like a swarm of papery bees. Powered by a single cell and one propeller that its pilot engaged only occasionally to gain speed, the agile gliders dominated the sky around their hives.

They wheeled and banked in helical twists, swooped and darted, serving up high-velocity dismemberment with trundle guns. A frenzy of sawtoothed blades crisscrossed the sky and unfurled bloody, seemingly random paths.

The Iscan zeppelins scattered as Saergaeth’s massive fleet pounded east.

Caliph’s legs felt numb as he watched. It was a dreadful, graceful and utterly ferocious aerial ballet. Steel balls hissed past the observation deck, fired from a host of giant tubes.

Caught in the sights of an oncoming sky shark, the Byun-Ghala pitched suddenly, evasive maneuvers executed without warning from the pilot.

Bottles of single malt slid from a buffet in one of the staterooms and shattered on the floor. One man, not hooked to his tether, fell, slid across the deck and slipped through the railing.

Caliph looked to where he had vanished with a horrified expression.

There wasn’t time to scream.

Caliph turned away mechanically. He helped his men reload the Pplarian gun. He checked his tether, tugged it several times just to be sure and donned a pair of leather-clad earmuffs that would help muffle the sound.

The gunner made hand signals, scrutinized his sights and then pulled an enormous floor lever. Pumps began repressurizing the tanks even as the cannon fired.

The gas that propelled the bullet produced enough recoil to rock the entire airship hard to port. A faint purple glow traced the shell’s wake as if some kind of plating on the bullet was burning off from friction with the barrel or the air.

Caliph coughed on a dozen odious chemicals.

A rolling boom filled the sky as the Pplarian shell went supersonic seemingly after the fact. Caliph watched the purple trail until the bullet found its mark. As designed, it broke in two releasing its unique orgonomic power. Charged ions and orgone manipulated through holomorphy filled the air.

A sudden electrical impulse found its way over one hundred fifty footsteps toward the fields below. It traveled at thirty-eight miles per second.

From the ground a streamer rose to meet it.

Purple lightning stuttered. One hundred sixty thousand amperes channeled into the zeppelin Caliph’s men had fired on. The airship’s chemiostatic batteries exploded with an impressive green pyrotechnic display.

Billowing black smoke, the stricken ship folded like wax paper, metal ribs tearing through its crimson skin, and plunged, irrevocable calamity waiting below.

Still, another sky shark was coming.

Caliph braced himself as the Byun-Ghala continued its precipitous dive. He imagined the pilot pulling certain knobs, telescoping long metal shafts from his control panel. Caliph felt the airship bank as tightly as it could to port. Overhead, a flock of white balloons lifted from compartments along the Byun-Ghala’s dorsum. They floated swiftly up into the face of the oncoming sky shark, each one encumbered with a miniature chemical grenade.

The sky shark wrenched its engines but the wall of white balloons enveloped it. They bounced along its skin. Popped as tiny detonator spines collided with the body of the ship. Several airmen in gliders were similarly overwhelmed. Acid-based fires engulfed them and sent them on a mile-long funerary procession toward the ground.

It was spare joy. Caliph’s men reloaded the Pplarian gun and waited stonily for another target to enter medium range.

All around, bizarre colors and fires arced and streaked and burned. Radio-active orange and red and green. Hot purples and blues and saffron yellows. Spreading oily smoke and sporadic showers of blood added horrific authenticity to an otherwise shockingly beautiful display.

The blue lions of the High King were on the run, harried and dogged by Saergaeth’s scarlet ships.

Then, disaster.

One of the Iscan leviathans exploded. Two thousand seven hundred feet of airframe twisted, melted and mushroomed: black and searing. Orange butterfly tints melted inside a mephitic and enormous cloud. Some chemical shell capable of reacting with the denatured gas in the airbags had produced unthinkable results, uncasing holocaust.

The inferno ballooned in every direction, engulfing scores of gliders on both sides of the conflict. They