“We’ve landed in a madhouse!” Jack roared. “I’ll handle the landings! Secure this area, otherwise, we’ll all be slaughtered.”
Letting go of Hans he came to his feet, ignoring the debris still tumbling from the heavens, and raced out into the field, waving his arms, trying to flag the other airships off from their landing approaches. Hans saw two machines banking hard to the north, turning away, but another one came straight in through the spreading plumes of smoke, clearing the confusion, touching down, men from the cargo hold tumbling out before the ship had even stopped.
Numbed, Hans slowly came to his feet, his mind a mad jumble of confusion. A squad of troops, Chin dressed in uniform, sprinted past, their lieutenant shouting for them to press into the first factory. He fell out, coming up to Hans.
“Sit down, sir.”
Hans looked at him, confused.
The Chin officer gently helped Hans down to the grass, undoing a red bandanna tied around his throat and started to wipe Hans’s face. Hans flinched. Shards of glass from the exploding window, he vaguely realized. The officer talked softly, as if soothing a child, falling into the dialect of the camps, the strange combination of Chin, Rus, Zulu, a polyglot language of the slaves.
“We’re back now, now we’re back with guns. Listen, listen.”
The blood cleared from his eyes, Hans looked up to the smoke-shrouded gate. Ketswana stood silhouetted in the gateway into the factory where they had once been slaves, carbine held overhead, his battle chant serving as a rally cry. There was something else as well, though, a loud roaring cry, the screams of thousands of men and women.
Legs shaky, Hans got to his feet, the Chin lieutenant, who was nearly his own age, helping him along.
“We free our brothers here, then we rest, old friend. We drink cha, and then we watch the Bantag slave.” He chuckled.
He stepped around the bodies of two of the men caught when the warehouse blew, both of them torn and horribly burned. On the main rail line the wreckage of the aero-steamer destroyed in the explosion was a piled-up ruin, burning fiercely. Miraculously, most of the men in the cargo compartment apparently had survived, though badly shaken, and were huddled to the side, staring blankly at the inferno.
“Get in, get in!” the lieutenant cried, pointing toward the gate. Several still had their carbines; the others drew pistols and woodenly shuffled off.
As Hans reached the gate he recoiled in horror. First there was the stench, the sickening cloying stench of the camps, the unwashed bodies, the steamy heat of the foundry, the musky smell of Bantag, and the deeper underlayer of rotting food, human waste, death, and a strange surreal sense that one could also smell terror.
The camp inside the compound was a scene of murderous chaos. Ketswana had wisely stopped his men just inside the barrier, drawing them up into a volley line. Occasionally one of the men raised a carbine to fire, but it was the thousands of slaves inside the compound who were doing the job. The prisoners were in full riot, swarming like a writhing host of maddened insects, tearing apart the remaining Bantag in the main courtyard. They had charged across the dead space that separated the perimeter wall from the barracks and were now up on the battlements. Frantic Bantag backed up along the upper walkway, furiously trying to keep the enraged host back. From down inside the camp, prisoners were pelting the trapped Bantag with lumps of coal and hunks of twisted rocks from the slag heaps until their comrades moving along the battlement walkways closed in. Four, six, sometimes a dozen died, until finally one overpowered a Bantag and knocked him off his perch to fall screaming into the waiting grasp of the mob below.
Hans spotted a knot of several dozen Bantag cutting their way through the compound, fighting to gain the doorway into the vast cavernous foundry building that dominated the center of the compound. Hans shouted for Ketswana to cut them off. Together Hans, Ketswana, and several squads of his troops pushed their way through the surging crowd.
The Bantag gained the door just ahead of them, his own men unable to fire owing to the press of Chin slaves between the two groups. The first couple of men to gain the entryway were dropped by fire from within the building. Hans pressed against the warm brick wall of the building, edged up to the huge open doors, which were wide enough that a railroad boxcar could be rolled in, and peeked around the corner. The Bantag were inside, deploying into a line not a dozen feet away. One raised a rifle, and Hans jerked his head back, a spray of brick fragment snapping out as the Bantag fired.
The Chin swarming around the door backed away as a concentrated volley tore into them. Hans looked over at Ketswana, who nodded without having to be told. A second volley slashed out; more Chin dropped. Ketswana seemed to be counting, he held his carbine up. Another volley flared.
“Charge!”
Ketswana leapt from the side of the building, carbine leveled, firing from the waist. Others charged after him, firing as they came around the side of the building. Hans tried to follow, but the Chin lieutenant pushed him back, stepped around the corner, fired, and was knocked backwards by a ball that caught him squarely in the face.
Hans stepped over the body, firing blindly, and caught a glimpse of a Bantag crumpling only feet away. The Chin mob, which had been recoiling from the hammerblows, now turned in a mad frenzy and charged into the warehouse, knocking Hans up against the wall, Ketswana and the men who had followed him disappearing in the crush.
The thin Bantag line collapsed, the warriors breaking, running in panic, some turning to go up the north wing of the foundry, others running to the south. Hundreds of Chin pushed in. Hans dodged around the side of the first furnace just inside the door. Looking up at the wall he saw that the damnable treadmills were still there, their human occupants still locked inside, bony hands clutching the side, all of them shrieking in rage.
A Bantag dodged past Hans, running blindly, stumbling straight into a stoking crew. Long iron stoking rods were now weapons. The Chin slaves fell upon the Bantag, the first one dying from the Bantag’s bayonet thrust. One of the Chin, grasping the rod like a club, caught the Bantag across the knee, breaking his leg. The Bantag went down like a felled tree, then tried to scramble back up on his one good leg. Another one caught him across the back, and he collapsed, rolling over. Screaming with insane rage, one of the Chin straddled the Bantag, held his iron rod up like a spear, and drove it down straight into the Bantag’s face. Then all of them started to beat the still-trembling corpse.
It was madness, and in that place, with all that he remembered, he felt the madness take hold of his own soul as well. Ignoring the pain of the splinters in his hand, he cocked open his carbine, chambered another round, and pushed forward, moving along the wall, dodging around the backs of the furnaces.
It was all so chillingly familiar, furnace number eleven. He wondered if it still drew poorly. He stepped wide of a fresh pour from number eight, several tons of molten iron still boiling hot, slowly congealing in the channels cut into the floor, a dead Chin lying half in the pour, clothes and hair smoldering. As always the windowless foundry was a stygian realm, illuminated only by the flare from the open hearths and the glow of hot iron, echoing with screams, gunshots, the hissing of hot metal, cloaked in a dark gloom so that all seemed ghostlike in the shadows.
He pushed down toward the end of the corridor, stepping out from behind a furnace, dropping a Bantag in the back as the warrior was backing up. Chin ran past, eyes wide with terror and rage, screaming incoherently.
He caught a glimpse of a ragged Chin, a skeletal form, naked except for a filthy rag tied around his waist, pointing. Hans spun around and catlike jumped backwards just as a heavy cauldron of molten iron upended, the glowing silvery cascade exploding into steam as it vomited out onto the pouring floor. Half a dozen Chin who had been next to Hans were caught in the boiling river, the men stumbling, falling, flames exploding as the liquid splashed onto their clothes, hair, and skin.