Post by spanishspy on Sept 17, 2020 22:36:33 GMT
Preface: This story is the result of a discussion I had with a friend of mine who is on AH.com but not here. It feeds into my interest in the Boer War as well as old SF.
The smoke hovered over the veld like a swarm of obsidian locusts. Even from such a distance, it seemed to Frederik that the haze was intent on destroying every last bit of life in this slice of Transvaal.
Granted, that seemed like what the British wanted to do anyway.
Bit by bit, the droning pump of the steam engine came ever closer to the railway bridge.
The commando had camped out at the base of the bridge, with Frederik taking watch to make sure that the train was still coming. “Be ready to blow within two or three minutes! It’s coming along fast!”
They had stolen dynamite from one of the diamond mines in the Witwatersrand. Given how much money there was in diamonds, dynamite wasn’t hard to find.
The steel beast continued to barrel towards them, towards the conquered city of Pretoria. If the commando got its way, it would never reach there.
The train continued to torpedo towards the occupied city. “Wait for it... Wait for it...” he muttered to himself. The train’s front fender went over the bridge.
“Now!” he screamed.
Piet, one of the other members of the commando, slammed down the shot exploder.
The world seemed to go up in flames. The wooden bridge fell apart like it was made of paper, and the train came careening down into the valley. The ground shook like an earthquake as the boxcars pummeled into the stone with a noise like artillery. It wasn’t an alien sound to any of them; they had fought at Colenso or Mafeking or Ladysmith and had become intimately familiar with that particular sound.
They coughed as the dust formed a haze around them, and as it settled they made their way towards the wreckage. “Open the engine door! There might be survivors!”
Piet and Frederik pried open the door and smelled the smoke, feeling the warmth encircle them as the fuel still burned.
“There’s something missing here. I’ve done this a couple of times and something is off,” remarked Piet.
“There’s no smell of decay. No people at all, so far as I can tell.”
“You’re right. But how could a train run without a crew?”
They continued the search of the wrecked engine. As Frederik pawed the ruins he found something he hadn’t seen before: a large box, about the size of a carriage, dominated by several large columns of gears stacked on top of each other. Around the gearbox, to describe it inelegantly, were a plethora of pieces of paper, about the size of playing cards, studded with small, rectangular holes.
“Piet!” he cried out, “What do you think this thing is?”
Piet scrambled up to him. “Looks like some general’s playing card collection.”
“But why so many holes?”
“I don’t know. The British are a peculiar people.”
They both left, and told the rest of the commando of their finding. As they commiserated, they heard a pounding from one of the wrecked cars. They followed the noise, and found what appeared to be a hinge on the roof, enabling a door to open upwards that was at this point locked.
“Survivors! Open it up” ordered Lodewijk, their informal commander. They carefully opened the door on the roof, and as they did so they were flung to the sides as some sort of contraption leapt out of the car and jolted into the air. It was some sort of metallic box that sprouted felt wings and a hot air balloon. It shot towards Pretoria, following the rough path of the railroad.
“What in hell is that thing?” asked Frederik.
“More British charlatanry,” responded Piet, with a tinge of incredulity in his voice.
“We’ve scouted the entire wreck. There isn’t much we can use. Destroying a British train will have to satisfy us” Lodewijk ordered. “Let’s return home. We have to replenish our supplies anyway. We most likely wouldn’t survive a direct fight with British regulars.”
They all assented, and began the long trek back to Dekeysersdorp, their hometown. These men were all from there and, after the fall of Pretoria, they all went back to the war in the veld. They gloried in the appellation “bittereinder.”
It was several days’ march. They were fine with that. They had gotten used to the hardship of wandering the veld, scavenging and foraging for survival.
They did this for a few days, and crossed a river that signified that they were close to home.
“Do you smell something odd?” asked Fredrik. “It’s this ashy smell, like burning grass maybe.”
“I smell it too,” replied Piet. The rest of them assented.
In the distance they could see smoke, although fortunately not quite in the direction of Dekeysersdorp. They heard the sound of distant blasts, and saw the ground erupt with fire.
They continued on.
Overhead they eventually parsed what was causing the blasts: falling bombs pelting the veld, destroying its capacity to feed and to nourish, to shelter and to protect.
They fell from a floating leviathan, a small gondola hanging from a bloated case of metal, shaped like a bullet shot right out of a Martini-Henry at a Boer child.
“We need to warn home!” cried out Frederik, already beginning to make a run for it.
They all murmured assent, too terrified to say anything of substance beyond that of immediate empathy. They scampered up hill and down dale through the veld, and eventually found Dekeysersdorp.
What they found was hulking modernity, belching and gurgling smoke, crawling like some sort of grotesque caterpillar around the village.
It was a brass-colored rectangular hulk as its base, propped up by scores of small single-jointed legs that moved in rows for locomotion. Near the top of the rectangular hulk, about the size of a two-story house, was a window that covered the entire front portion of the base and some parts of the sides, providing vision for the people running it.
This … thing would bend its legs to crouch, and then would push itself forward as from the back of the vehicle emerged a new piece of wall, added to the wall that was already there. Judging by the noise, this was not the only insectoid bricklayer that was operating around Dekeysersdorp.
“Is there a hole in the wall?” asked Piet. He was shaking just a tad, but it was clear even so he wasn’t taking this well.
“Scan the perimeter and see if there’s any part that hasn’t been secured already. Piet, Frederik, go around to the right. Tell the people inside what’s going on.” He pointed there, to emphasize the point.
The two immediately began running in front of the bricklayer, Frederik leading and Piet following. As soon as they got within visible range of the steel beast, portholes on its sides opened up, and they were pelted in a hail of bullets from Maxim guns within the frame.
As Frederik skidded on the ground, he found himself on one of the streets of Dekeysersdorp, while Piet was still in the last reaches of the veld. Frederik began to cry out for his friend, but it was in vain. He was mowed down by the hail of bullets.
There was nothing else to do than to report to van Doorn, the commander of the bittereinders in the vicinity of Dekeysersdorp.
The town was dark and dreary, with the feeling of being surrounded being all the more stark given that there was now a wall, several meters high, starkly visible from everywhere: from streets, from public squares, from every point in that little town in the veld.
British modernity once more found a way to encroach on them.
He descended the stairway behind the large wooden slabs that led to the basement under a bar. It was where this particular sect of bittereinders met whenever something needed to be discussed. If there was anything happening they knew to meet here, and he found that he was not the only one of them to have made that particular judgement tonight. It was quite crowded, and abuzz with anxious talk about the British machines.
“Frederik! How did the expedition go? And where are the others!” asked Van Doorn, sitting on a chair at the head of the table.
“We blew up a railway bridge and wrecked a train. It was a strange train, though. There was nobody on it, only some sort of machine surrounded by cards with holes in them. It launched some sort of flying machine towards Pretoria, too. I don’t know where the others are, but I saw Piet shot to death by one of the bricklaying machines.”
It was curt and somewhat blunt, but those were virtues in war. “I see,” remarked Van Doorn, “we must have a vigil for Piet. But now, we must talk about this development.” He turned from Frederik to the group at large, and said, “this aligns very well with what my friends from other villages have been saying. There’s talk of automated vehicles being used to burn the veld and to lock up the villages. It’s a more cost-effective way of doing it than having to send so many men to do it.”
He paused, as to let the bittereinders know that this was grave. “And, if our spies are correct, this is all being coordinated by a central logistical engine in occupied Pretoria, which devours numbers on punch cards and spits out burned villages. There is one in Cape Town, but we are told that its data are not as up to date as the one in Pretoria, due to the latter’s proximity to the conflict. We are close enough to Pretoria to possibly strike there.”
He paused again. “I am looking for volunteers to find and destroy it. We’ve been drawing up a plan to put an end to this, but we need men.”
“I volunteer!” proclaimed Frederik. “I’ve seen what it’s done, and it’s literally locking my hometown inside walls. The choice is obvious.”
His fellow insurgents cheered him.
. . .
Pretoria was an occupied city, and to Frederik it felt like one. The British would never allow you to forget that, with either soldiers or armored walkers or cavalry in the streets, and airships staring down upon the city like a panopticon.
The most fortified place in the city was the Palace of Justice, the crowning glory of Pretoria under the Transvaal Republic. It pained Frederik, and all the other bittereinders deployed to the city, to see a Union Jack flying over the building.
It also pained them to be wearing British uniforms. It was easy enough for them to kill a small patrol outside the city and put on their clothes. They wanted to look inconspicuous, and some of them spoke English well enough to not arouse suspicion.
He walked into the building. He did his best to remain inconspicuous and to look like he was doing something; that worked better than it had any right to work.
This was an educated guess, but it only made sense that the nexus of the British war machine would be in the most guarded place in Pretoria. They wandered the marble halls and, reasoning that the brain of the whole enterprise would be in a safe place, they checked the basement.
Eventually they found one room, seemingly large from outside its doors, defended by two soldiers with scarily large guns.
“It must be in there. It makes too much sense for it to be otherwise,” remarked Frederik.
“If it isn’t, we’ll have blown our cover for nothing,” replied Christiaan, another member of the commando, and the de facto ringleader.
Frederik put his ear to the wall. He could hear the slightest noise of ticking, of a mechanical buzzing that had no end. “I can hear something in there. It certainly sounds like an engine.”
“Do we have the dynamite?”
“Yes, I do!” replied Frederik. He had them in a satchel.
“Then on my command, focus all fire on the guards, then storm the engine room.”
The wait was interminable. It felt like all South Africa had been colonized in that span of time.
Then one of the British soldiers exclaimed, “what are you lot doing?”
“Now!” ordered Christiaan, who raised his rifle and fired. A fusillade from the bittereinder rifles followed. The British guns responded. Bullets whirred past Frederik, and he had to duck, but he survived.
He looked about him, and the rest of the commando was dead. Seeing what he had to do, he burst into the room. It was full of spindly, notched modernity, creaking and grinding, shunting punch cards from place to place.
It felt almost like gazing into a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
“There he is! Restrain him!” ordered a cockney-accented voice. They came in with guns blazing, occasionally hitting a gear.
Frederik took out the dynamite, and lit them.
He prayed for deliverance.
One of the things I was going heavily for in this peace was an emulation of a lot of SF written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a grotesque, all-consuming modernity threatening to destroy everything that is good in the world. I thought that meshed well in a Boer War setting, where 19th century warfare was slowly transforming itself into 20th century warfare.
Without Further Ado:
THE BITTEREINDER AND THE BABBAGE ENGINE
By Alexander Wallace
THE BITTEREINDER AND THE BABBAGE ENGINE
By Alexander Wallace
The smoke hovered over the veld like a swarm of obsidian locusts. Even from such a distance, it seemed to Frederik that the haze was intent on destroying every last bit of life in this slice of Transvaal.
Granted, that seemed like what the British wanted to do anyway.
Bit by bit, the droning pump of the steam engine came ever closer to the railway bridge.
The commando had camped out at the base of the bridge, with Frederik taking watch to make sure that the train was still coming. “Be ready to blow within two or three minutes! It’s coming along fast!”
They had stolen dynamite from one of the diamond mines in the Witwatersrand. Given how much money there was in diamonds, dynamite wasn’t hard to find.
The steel beast continued to barrel towards them, towards the conquered city of Pretoria. If the commando got its way, it would never reach there.
The train continued to torpedo towards the occupied city. “Wait for it... Wait for it...” he muttered to himself. The train’s front fender went over the bridge.
“Now!” he screamed.
Piet, one of the other members of the commando, slammed down the shot exploder.
The world seemed to go up in flames. The wooden bridge fell apart like it was made of paper, and the train came careening down into the valley. The ground shook like an earthquake as the boxcars pummeled into the stone with a noise like artillery. It wasn’t an alien sound to any of them; they had fought at Colenso or Mafeking or Ladysmith and had become intimately familiar with that particular sound.
They coughed as the dust formed a haze around them, and as it settled they made their way towards the wreckage. “Open the engine door! There might be survivors!”
Piet and Frederik pried open the door and smelled the smoke, feeling the warmth encircle them as the fuel still burned.
“There’s something missing here. I’ve done this a couple of times and something is off,” remarked Piet.
“There’s no smell of decay. No people at all, so far as I can tell.”
“You’re right. But how could a train run without a crew?”
They continued the search of the wrecked engine. As Frederik pawed the ruins he found something he hadn’t seen before: a large box, about the size of a carriage, dominated by several large columns of gears stacked on top of each other. Around the gearbox, to describe it inelegantly, were a plethora of pieces of paper, about the size of playing cards, studded with small, rectangular holes.
“Piet!” he cried out, “What do you think this thing is?”
Piet scrambled up to him. “Looks like some general’s playing card collection.”
“But why so many holes?”
“I don’t know. The British are a peculiar people.”
They both left, and told the rest of the commando of their finding. As they commiserated, they heard a pounding from one of the wrecked cars. They followed the noise, and found what appeared to be a hinge on the roof, enabling a door to open upwards that was at this point locked.
“Survivors! Open it up” ordered Lodewijk, their informal commander. They carefully opened the door on the roof, and as they did so they were flung to the sides as some sort of contraption leapt out of the car and jolted into the air. It was some sort of metallic box that sprouted felt wings and a hot air balloon. It shot towards Pretoria, following the rough path of the railroad.
“What in hell is that thing?” asked Frederik.
“More British charlatanry,” responded Piet, with a tinge of incredulity in his voice.
“We’ve scouted the entire wreck. There isn’t much we can use. Destroying a British train will have to satisfy us” Lodewijk ordered. “Let’s return home. We have to replenish our supplies anyway. We most likely wouldn’t survive a direct fight with British regulars.”
They all assented, and began the long trek back to Dekeysersdorp, their hometown. These men were all from there and, after the fall of Pretoria, they all went back to the war in the veld. They gloried in the appellation “bittereinder.”
It was several days’ march. They were fine with that. They had gotten used to the hardship of wandering the veld, scavenging and foraging for survival.
They did this for a few days, and crossed a river that signified that they were close to home.
“Do you smell something odd?” asked Fredrik. “It’s this ashy smell, like burning grass maybe.”
“I smell it too,” replied Piet. The rest of them assented.
In the distance they could see smoke, although fortunately not quite in the direction of Dekeysersdorp. They heard the sound of distant blasts, and saw the ground erupt with fire.
They continued on.
Overhead they eventually parsed what was causing the blasts: falling bombs pelting the veld, destroying its capacity to feed and to nourish, to shelter and to protect.
They fell from a floating leviathan, a small gondola hanging from a bloated case of metal, shaped like a bullet shot right out of a Martini-Henry at a Boer child.
“We need to warn home!” cried out Frederik, already beginning to make a run for it.
They all murmured assent, too terrified to say anything of substance beyond that of immediate empathy. They scampered up hill and down dale through the veld, and eventually found Dekeysersdorp.
What they found was hulking modernity, belching and gurgling smoke, crawling like some sort of grotesque caterpillar around the village.
It was a brass-colored rectangular hulk as its base, propped up by scores of small single-jointed legs that moved in rows for locomotion. Near the top of the rectangular hulk, about the size of a two-story house, was a window that covered the entire front portion of the base and some parts of the sides, providing vision for the people running it.
This … thing would bend its legs to crouch, and then would push itself forward as from the back of the vehicle emerged a new piece of wall, added to the wall that was already there. Judging by the noise, this was not the only insectoid bricklayer that was operating around Dekeysersdorp.
“Is there a hole in the wall?” asked Piet. He was shaking just a tad, but it was clear even so he wasn’t taking this well.
“Scan the perimeter and see if there’s any part that hasn’t been secured already. Piet, Frederik, go around to the right. Tell the people inside what’s going on.” He pointed there, to emphasize the point.
The two immediately began running in front of the bricklayer, Frederik leading and Piet following. As soon as they got within visible range of the steel beast, portholes on its sides opened up, and they were pelted in a hail of bullets from Maxim guns within the frame.
As Frederik skidded on the ground, he found himself on one of the streets of Dekeysersdorp, while Piet was still in the last reaches of the veld. Frederik began to cry out for his friend, but it was in vain. He was mowed down by the hail of bullets.
There was nothing else to do than to report to van Doorn, the commander of the bittereinders in the vicinity of Dekeysersdorp.
The town was dark and dreary, with the feeling of being surrounded being all the more stark given that there was now a wall, several meters high, starkly visible from everywhere: from streets, from public squares, from every point in that little town in the veld.
British modernity once more found a way to encroach on them.
He descended the stairway behind the large wooden slabs that led to the basement under a bar. It was where this particular sect of bittereinders met whenever something needed to be discussed. If there was anything happening they knew to meet here, and he found that he was not the only one of them to have made that particular judgement tonight. It was quite crowded, and abuzz with anxious talk about the British machines.
“Frederik! How did the expedition go? And where are the others!” asked Van Doorn, sitting on a chair at the head of the table.
“We blew up a railway bridge and wrecked a train. It was a strange train, though. There was nobody on it, only some sort of machine surrounded by cards with holes in them. It launched some sort of flying machine towards Pretoria, too. I don’t know where the others are, but I saw Piet shot to death by one of the bricklaying machines.”
It was curt and somewhat blunt, but those were virtues in war. “I see,” remarked Van Doorn, “we must have a vigil for Piet. But now, we must talk about this development.” He turned from Frederik to the group at large, and said, “this aligns very well with what my friends from other villages have been saying. There’s talk of automated vehicles being used to burn the veld and to lock up the villages. It’s a more cost-effective way of doing it than having to send so many men to do it.”
He paused, as to let the bittereinders know that this was grave. “And, if our spies are correct, this is all being coordinated by a central logistical engine in occupied Pretoria, which devours numbers on punch cards and spits out burned villages. There is one in Cape Town, but we are told that its data are not as up to date as the one in Pretoria, due to the latter’s proximity to the conflict. We are close enough to Pretoria to possibly strike there.”
He paused again. “I am looking for volunteers to find and destroy it. We’ve been drawing up a plan to put an end to this, but we need men.”
“I volunteer!” proclaimed Frederik. “I’ve seen what it’s done, and it’s literally locking my hometown inside walls. The choice is obvious.”
His fellow insurgents cheered him.
. . .
Pretoria was an occupied city, and to Frederik it felt like one. The British would never allow you to forget that, with either soldiers or armored walkers or cavalry in the streets, and airships staring down upon the city like a panopticon.
The most fortified place in the city was the Palace of Justice, the crowning glory of Pretoria under the Transvaal Republic. It pained Frederik, and all the other bittereinders deployed to the city, to see a Union Jack flying over the building.
It also pained them to be wearing British uniforms. It was easy enough for them to kill a small patrol outside the city and put on their clothes. They wanted to look inconspicuous, and some of them spoke English well enough to not arouse suspicion.
He walked into the building. He did his best to remain inconspicuous and to look like he was doing something; that worked better than it had any right to work.
This was an educated guess, but it only made sense that the nexus of the British war machine would be in the most guarded place in Pretoria. They wandered the marble halls and, reasoning that the brain of the whole enterprise would be in a safe place, they checked the basement.
Eventually they found one room, seemingly large from outside its doors, defended by two soldiers with scarily large guns.
“It must be in there. It makes too much sense for it to be otherwise,” remarked Frederik.
“If it isn’t, we’ll have blown our cover for nothing,” replied Christiaan, another member of the commando, and the de facto ringleader.
Frederik put his ear to the wall. He could hear the slightest noise of ticking, of a mechanical buzzing that had no end. “I can hear something in there. It certainly sounds like an engine.”
“Do we have the dynamite?”
“Yes, I do!” replied Frederik. He had them in a satchel.
“Then on my command, focus all fire on the guards, then storm the engine room.”
The wait was interminable. It felt like all South Africa had been colonized in that span of time.
Then one of the British soldiers exclaimed, “what are you lot doing?”
“Now!” ordered Christiaan, who raised his rifle and fired. A fusillade from the bittereinder rifles followed. The British guns responded. Bullets whirred past Frederik, and he had to duck, but he survived.
He looked about him, and the rest of the commando was dead. Seeing what he had to do, he burst into the room. It was full of spindly, notched modernity, creaking and grinding, shunting punch cards from place to place.
It felt almost like gazing into a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
“There he is! Restrain him!” ordered a cockney-accented voice. They came in with guns blazing, occasionally hitting a gear.
Frederik took out the dynamite, and lit them.
He prayed for deliverance.
Afterword:
One of the things I was going heavily for in this peace was an emulation of a lot of SF written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a grotesque, all-consuming modernity threatening to destroy everything that is good in the world. I thought that meshed well in a Boer War setting, where 19th century warfare was slowly transforming itself into 20th century warfare.
