“So existence has been split into two by your act.”
“Apparently.”
“How godlike, the chronic argonaut,” Wells mused.
“The what?”
“Hum. Just thinking out loud.”
They joined a small group of officers who'd gathered at the top of the ridge. Wells indicated one of them and whispered, “That's General Aitken. He's in charge of this whole operation.”
Burton tugged at his khaki uniform jacket, which he considered far too heavy for the climate. He felt smothered and uncomfortable. Perspiration was running into his eyes. He rubbed them. As they readjusted, the vista that sprawled beneath him swam into focus, and all his irritations were instantly forgotten.
Seen through the distorting lens of Africa's blistering heat, Dar es Salaam appeared to undulate and quiver like a mirage. It was a small white city, clinging to the shore of a natural harbour. Grand colonial buildings humped up from its centre and were clustered around the port—in which a German light cruiser was docked—while a tall metal structure towered above the western neighbourhoods. Otherwise, the settlement was very flat, with single-storey dwellings strung along tree-lined dirt roads and around the borders of small outlying farms.
A strip of tangled greenery surrounded the municipality—“They look small from here, but those are the artillery plants,” Wells observed—and beyond them, the German trenches crisscrossed the terrain up to a second band of foliage: the red weed. The British trenches occupied the space between the weed and the ridge.
Like a punch to the head, Burton suddenly recalled the Crimea, for, as in that terrible conflict, the earth here had been torn, gouged, and overturned by shells. Flooded by heavy rains some weeks ago, the horrible landscape before him had since been baked into distorted shapes by the relentless sunshine. It was also saturated with blood and peppered with chunks of rotting human and animal flesh, and the stench assailed Burton's nostrils from even this distance. Bits of smashed machinery rose from the churned ground like disinterred bones. It was unnatural. It was hideous. It was sickening.
He unhooked his canteen from his belt, took a swig of water, and spat dust from his mouth.
“That's our target,” said Wells, pointing at the metal tower. “If we can bring it down, we'll destroy their radio communications.”
“Radio?” Burton asked.
Wells smiled. “Well I never! How queer to meet a man who isn't familiar with something that everyone else takes for granted! But, of course, it was after your time, wasn't it!”
Burton glanced uneasily at the nearby officers, who were peering at the sea through binoculars.
“Keep your voice down, please, Bertie,” he said. “And what was after my time?”
“The discovery of radio waves. The technique by which we transmit spoken words and other sounds through the atmosphere to literally anywhere in the world.”
“A mediumistic procedure?”
“Not at all. It's similar to the telegraph but without the wires. It involves the modulation of oscillating electromagnetic fields.”
“That's all mumbo jumbo to me. What are they looking at?”
Wells turned to observe the officers, then raised his binoculars and followed the men's gaze.
“Ah ha!” he said. “The rotorships! Have a squint.”
He passed the binoculars to Burton, who put them to his eyes and scanned the eastern sky, near the horizon, until two dark dots came into view. As they approached, he saw they were big rotorships, each with twelve flight pylons, wings spinning at the top of the tall shafts. The black flat-bottomed vessels were rather more domed in shape than those from his own time, and he could see guns poking out of portholes along their sides.
“Astraea and Pegasus,” Wells said. “Cruiser class. The Pegasus is the one on the right.”
“They're fast. What are those little things flying around them?”
“Hornets. One-man fighters. They'll swoop in to shoot at the ground defences.”
“Actual insects?”
“Yes. The usual routine. Breed 'em big, kill 'em, scrape 'em out, shove steam engines into the carapaces. The method hasn't changed since your day. Look out! The Königsberg is bringing her cannon to bear!”
Burton directed the glasses to the city's harbour and saw that the decks of the seagoing vessel were swarming with men. A gun turret, positioned in front of its three funnels, was turning to face the oncoming rotorships. A few moments later, orange light blazed from the muzzle. Repetitive booms, lagging a few seconds behind the discharges, rippled out over the landscape, becoming thin and echoey as they faded away.
He looked back at the rotorships, both almost upon the city now. Puffs of black smoke were exploding around them.
Hornets dived down at the light cruiser and raked her decks with their machine guns.
“Come on, lads!” Wells cheered.
Burton watched men ripped into tatters and knocked overboard as bullets tore into them. A loud report sounded. He lowered the binoculars and saw that metal and smoke had erupted from the side of the Pegasus.
“She's hit!” Wells cried.
The rotorship listed to her left. As her shadow passed over the Königsberg, small objects spilled from beneath her. They were bombs. With an ear-splitting roar, the German vessel disappeared into a ball of fire and smoke. Fragments of hull plating went spinning skyward. Another huge detonation sounded as the ship's munitions went up.
The Pegasus, rocked by the shock wave, keeled completely over onto her side and arced toward the ground. She hit the southern neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam and ploughed through them, disintegrating, until, when she finally came to rest, she was nothing but an unrecognisable knot of twisted and tattered metal slumped at the end of a long burning furrow. Hundreds of buildings had been destroyed, maybe thousands of lives lost.
Wells opened his mouth to say something but his words were drowned by thunder as the Astraea started to dump her payload onto the middle of the city. The noise slapped again and again at Burton's ears as the colonial district was pummelled and decimated. Soon, all he could see was a blanket of black smoke through which the red lights of Hades flickered, and gliding along above it, silhouetted against the glaring white sky, the menacing rotorship, drawing closer and closer to where the tip of the radio tower emerged from the expanding inferno.
Wells stood on tiptoe and put his mouth to Burton's ear, which was ringing with such intensity that the explorer could barely hear the correspondent's soprano voice: “We had no choice but to do it. I wonder, though—will the human race ever transcend the animalistic impulses that lead to such behaviour?”
Burton yelled back: “I suspect animals would be most offended to be associated with an atrocity like this! What of the people down there? What of the Africans?”
“Casualties of war. As I said, we had no choice!”
“But this isn't their bloody conflict! It isn't their bloody conflict, damn it!”
A quick succession of blasts marked the end of the radio tower. The Astraea slid over the belt of red weed and sailed northward with hornets buzzing around her.
The attack was already over.
Silence rolled back in from the surrounding countryside, broken only by occasional small explosions.
“She's probably on her way to give Tanga some of the same treatment,” Wells said, watching the rotorship receding into the distance.
Burton stood silently, struggling to stay on his feet. His legs were trembling violently, and his heart hammered in his chest.
“Bismillah!” he muttered. “Bismillah!”
THE BAKER STREET DETECTIVE
Macallister Fogg's Own Paper! Issue 908.
Every Thursday. Consolidated Press.