"Warriors of Mars! Warriors of Mars! Listen to me!
The pistol shots dwindled and heads turned.
"Warriors of Mars! Listen to me! When did you become the slayers of the defenseless?"
Consternation broke out around the Queen. General Cairngorm was demanding to know why the infantry had not commenced firing, but, down on the bridge, an eerie silence had fallen.
"Warriors of Mars! We are the workers! We are just like you. We labor in the foundries and the mills just as you serve in the ranks. Will you shoot us out of hand? Are we not tied by blood? The very blood that you are about to spill?"
An injured and bleeding cavalryman got painfully to his feet, started limping back towards where the infantry stood ready. The woman's voice gained strength. "Warriors of Mars, when did you murder your own people at the command of humans? When did you slay your own for no good reason? Are you no better than the calot that kills at the word of its master? Have you forgotten that your ancestors and our ancestors were the Great Jeddaks?"
An infantry sergeant-major attempted to drown out the woman by yelling at his troops in heavily accented Martian-English. Already the native redcoats were starting to look confused.
"Kill the loudmouth bitch, lads! Kill them all!"
No one fired. Lupo again glanced at Slide. "A moment of truth, I think?"
"Any second now."
But the infantry failed to open fire, and the woman made a final plea. "Warriors of Mars, don't do this thing!"
As far as Slide could see from a distance, the sergeant major flew into a sudden rage. He turned and shot the woman. This was too much for three of his men in the front rank, who immediately aimed their radium rifles at him. Slide could only credit the sergeant major with having more courage than common sense. He rounded on the men and screamed at them. "You bastards all know the penalty for mutiny!"
Lupo sighed. "Now?"
But, instead of being resolved, the conflict for the loyalty of the native troops was interrupted by a series of explosions that came from behind Slide and Lupo, from the other side of the city. The two turned and looked. Lupo sadly shook his head. "I fear the Martian revolution has come too late."
Four of the tall, tripod fighting machines of the Slimy Things were attacking the walls of the city with the scarlet wash of heat rays and the poisonous green pulse of particle beams. Maybe a dozen or more were striding over the Grand Canal, smashing the complex pipework in the process, causing jets of water to fountain high into the Martian morning. Air support came with the fighting machines in the form of streamlined metal ovoids flashing with electrical charges that, when they had risen to a sufficient intensity, arced jaggedly to the ground to cause fires and more explosions each time they struck. Once a section of the city wall was burned and bombarded to rubble and ash, the breach was filled with battalion formations of metalmen, the human-simulacra ground troops of the Slimy Things, who were far too wet and vulnerable to do any of their own fighting. With more courage than common sense, a crisp detachment of Martian cavalry attempted to confront a fighting machine, and was burned to a crisp in an X-ray moment for its bravado.
That was sufficient for Lupo. "I don't know about you, Slide, but I have seen enough cities fall in my time. I could miss the rest of this drama."
Slide glanced up. "I tend to agree with you."
High in the sky huge flying discs were converging to form a geometric hovering pattern.
"It looks as though the Slimy Things have acquired telezero technology from the Treens. Unless of course the Treens acquired it from them. It can get hard to figure who's doing what for whom, when time's up its own ass. "
As Slide had feared, a bolt of heliotrope energy flashed up from somewhere beyond the horizon and struck the discs. They in turn translated the dazzling light into a single, narrow-beam projection, directed down at the city. Where the beam touched, all was dematerialized, and it slashed the metropolis leaving scars of nothing over a hundred yards wide.
"Let's go while there's still some of this place left to leave." Slide avoided Lupo's eyes. "I hate to tell you this. Seeing as you're a vampire, and can't be too happy about all this exotic light radiation…"
"Tell me what, Slide."
"Getting out of here may not be exactly what you'd call simple without a howdy hole, which I don't think even existed this long ago."
Lupo looked old and dangerous. "So what are you telling saying, demon? That we're stuck here?"
"Unless we find ourselves a Carter machine or some good facsimile thereof."
Lupo blinked. "Well that's no problem."
Slide was surprised. It hadn't occurred to him that the Victorians had their own Carter machines, although it did make some sense. "It isn't?"
"There's the big one that brought me here. It's in a cental vault, deep under the tower, close to the stasis generator."
Slide blinked. "A Carter machine and a stasis generator in the same place? That's a wigged-out concept."
"Shall we go there instead of standing around discussing it?"
Slide nodded, and while Mina and her courtiers stood transfixed, watching the destruction of the city in horror, the demon and the vampire headed back inside the tower. Just as they were about to pass through the arch that led to the interior, Slide turned and gestured to the bridge on which the interrupted Martian revolution had been about to start. "You don't happen to know the name of that do you?"
"The Beckham Bridge."
Slide shrugged. He didn't understand the reference.
Lupo led Slide quickly along corridors and down flights of curved, Turquoise Tower steps, with what appeared to be an unerring sense of direction. Slide could only wonder how the nosferatu, who claimed to have been on Mars only slightly longer than Slide, could know his way around the labyrinthine layout of the place. He certainly proved that he did when they quickly arrived at the brass and steel gates of a multi-shaft, high-speed pneumatic elevator. Lupo dialed for an down-designated car, and one arrived in a matter of second. This was in no way too soon for Slide, who could feel the very structure of the tower trembling from what could only be the Slimy Things' assault on the city. They stepped into the car, and, no sooner had the lift gates hissed and clanged closed, it dropped like a stone, obviously descending to the deep bowels beneath Queen Mina's tower. As the elevator's free fall mitigated, and the two regained the floor under their feet, Lupo handed Slide the radium revolver that he had taken from him during the carriage ride to the tower. "You may find a need for this."
"Do you have a weapon?"
Lupo glanced at Slide with a noticeable disdain. "I am nosferatu, Yancey Slide. Among humans, I have no need of weapons."
The elevator's stop was abrupt enough to cause Slide to bend at the knees, although Lupo didn't waver. The gates of the car slid back to reveal that had descended to a vault of energy. The air smelled of ozone, positrons, and charged dark matter, and a high pitched hum rose and fell but never dropped out of the dogs-only audio range. Lupo hadn't exaggerated when he'd said that the place was deep under the tower. Slide felt as though they could not be that far from the Martian planetary core, and at least a part of the cavernous interior was only a faux-reality, kept in place by a stasis generator. Slide didn't like to be anywhere near a stasis generator. He's seen too may of them in his time with Billy Oblivion, and he didn't like the way their center never held.
Lupo again seemed to be reading Slide's reactions. "Let's just concentrate on the Carter machine, shall we?"
Slide put aside his dislike of stasis generators, and turned and looked the thing up and down. "That is one big motherfucker."
And indeed it was. No simple chair, lever, and revolving power canopy like the one he'd ridden from Doc Zen's place what now seemed like an age ago. A towering Faraday cage, awaited them, topped by multiple spinning blades; a huge brass and steel construction that was a undeniable peak in the massive Victorian super-technology of time machines. For a moment, Slide stood and stared with undisguised admiration. Who had put Queen Mina up to all of this? She was so tenuously connected with even her own reality, he found it hard to believe she had devised all this on her own, and the set-up was way past the capabilities of Sir Richard Barton or any of the other self-important courtiers. Dracula? He doubted it. The cavern had nothing of the Tepes stamp to it. When Slide had last seen the Count, he hadn't even liked steam trains. Of course, there was no accounting for radical change in this cosmos, but he still wondered who the hell had Her Majesty been hanging with?