The Game Called Revolution, - [ebook reader 8 inch .txt] 📗

de la Tradition as the knights, and they knew the risks when they signed up. Moreover, the knights didn’t have time to be worrying about them; they had a job to do (just as the Celeste and the others had done theirs when they set up the decoy smoke tubes to draw the Austrians’ fire) and they were going to do it.

The only thing she said was, “Now!”

The three of them charged out of the forest, and through the orange smoke, toward Mt. Erfunden. This wasn’t the ideal plan (certainly Jeanne wouldn’t have chosen a strategy that involved the destruction of her airship and most of its crew if she had a choice), but this would have to do. Hopefully by the time the Austrians and their steam cannon spotted them, they would be far enough away to avoid an attack.

The smoke masked their presence for a few yards, and then they were out in the open, the base of Mt. Erfunden ahead of them.

Someone shouted to their left. The enemy steam cannon rested on a steam carriage a third of a kilometer away on the edge of the forest. It was gradually shifting position to target them.

“Keep running!” Jeanne shouted. “As fast as you can!” If they could just make it to Mt. Erfunden, there were any number of crags and fissures which could conceal them from the steam cannon’s view.

Suddenly the ground exploded behind them. The force of the blast knocked them to the ground. Fortunately, the shot had been off; it hadn’t really hit anywhere close to them.

They got back up and kept running. Based on what Jeanne knew about steam cannons, she estimated it would take at least a minute for the Austrians to fire again. The knights had bought themselves a little time, at least.

However, Jeanne stole another look at the enemy and immediately regretted it. The carriage was now driving towards them. Although it was slow starting up, it would soon reach top speed, and at thirty miles an hour, it wouldn’t take long to catch up to them.

The knights continued running at full speed, Jeanne’s body protesting wildly. It repeatedly shouted at her to stop this madness and let it rest. Nevertheless, she managed to put it out of her mind and kept running.

Now in the shadow of Mt. Erfunden, they were completely dwarfed by its massive round form. It was maybe another thirty seconds to its base. It was beginning to look like they would make it through this.

As if to drag her back to reality, there was another explosion behind them—this time much closer. The three knights went sailing forwards and crashed upon the hard soil of the Austrian Netherlands.

In the following moments, Jeanne’s head was like the hazy broth she had sometimes eaten as a child: hot and soupy. She was vaguely aware of trying to move her limbs, but couldn’t feel them; she wasn’t even sure if they were still attached to her body.

There was a low rumble followed by the hiss of a release of gas. Someone said, “So much for the great Ordre de la Tradition.”

“Can you imagine the reward we’ll get for capturing them?” Someone else said.

A third voice: “Are these the only survivors of the crash?”

“Who cares? These are the knights. They’re the only ones we need.”

There was laughter all around.

 

***

 

Mt. Erfunden, September 24, 1789 (Infini Calendar), 3:30 p.m.

The Austrians tied their arms behind their backs with a thick rope, and marched them through the cavernous tunnels of Mt. Erfunden. These narrow corridors were obviously man-made; Jeanne kept seeing cuts, chips and other evidence of excavation along the walls.

Eventually they arrived in the volcano’s cone. It was a massive circular area with open sky one hundred feet above, and an uneven floor. This central chamber had been carved out by lava flows who knew how many years ago. The Austrians had clearly done some more smoothing out of the area, though, judging by how well all the airships fit in here.

The airships. There were a dozen of them in two rows of six on either side of the chamber. Each one appeared to be the same model as the Blitzkrieg Rache. Were these airships also capable of harnessing lightning as a weapon? Jeanne wondered.

In addition, each of the airships had what appeared to be a wooden frame built around it to keep it upright. Did that mean they weren’t operational yet?

Jeanne didn’t have much time to wonder about that, as a burly man with a thick beard and hair as black as midnight strode up to them. He was at least two feet taller than Jeanne and physically comparable to Pierre.

He spoke with a booming voice. “Finally caught the troublemakers, eh?”

One of the Austrians behind Jeanne replied, “Yes, sir. There may be more of them in the forest outside, but we’ve brought you the high-value targets.”

The burly man bellowed, “Good!” He looked down at Jeanne. “Not so tough now without your one airship, are you? Ho-ho!”

“Care to find out?” Jeanne retorted.

“Oh, a feisty chicklet!” He motioned to the twelve airships behind him. “But as you can see, we have a dozen ships primed to invade France. You, on the other hand, no longer have any. This is a war of technology, and you have just lost.”

Pierre said, “Isn’t it customary to introduce yourself before you declare victory in a war?”

“Ho-ho? I suppose you’re expecting the clichéd ‘Where are my manners?’ line. Very well; my name is Commander Danse Thornwood.”

“I am also a Commander,” Jeanne said.

Thornwood waved off any more exposition from her. “I know exactly who you are, Jeanne de Fleur. You lead the elite branch of the French military called the Ordre de la Tradition—or what’s left of it. My spies have enlightened me on your more interesting qualities, such as,” he pointed at her eye patch, “your peculiar left eye.”

“What about it?”

He gave a big grin. “I hear it is most uncomfortable when opened. Why don’t we find out, hmmm?”

Jeanne tensed as she realized what he was planning. Two guards held her tight as Commander Thornwood reached in and ripped the eye patch off her. She struggled fiercely as they pried her left eye open, but couldn’t win against their strength. Pierre and Victor yelled at them to release her, but they too were similarly held in place by guards.

Once again, an overwhelming flood of information assaulted her. Only this time, she couldn’t stop it by closing her eye or putting the patch back on. She could only stand there helpless as fact after fact pounded her mind into submission.

Focus! Concentrate on one specific thing, she told herself.

There were so many different things in front of her—radiating so much information—that she ended up staring at the floor. But even that was throwing a barrage of data at her.

Focus on one thing!

She looked for a specific aspect of the floor to home in on. But which one?

Wait…

She caught hold of a strange set of facts rising out of the floor, something that didn’t make sense to her: the temperature of the rock underneath them had been gradually rising for weeks. It was so slight that most people wouldn’t have noticed, but the rate of temperature increase was steadily rising. Did that mean…?

Suddenly Thornwood put the eye patch back on her, and the relief was immediate. “Ho-ho! That’s enough for now. That glowing yellow eye really puts the pressure on, doesn’t it? I think that’s going to be very useful for interrogation purposes.”

“Bastard!” Pierre raged.

“Ho? Do you have feelings for your commander? I should warn you: These military romances never work out.”

“I think we’ve put up with this long enough,” Victor said.

“Agreed,” Jeanne said.

“Ho? You think your stay here is voluntary? You think we’re just going to let you waltz on out?” Thornwood gave another hearty laugh.

“Well,” Jeanne said, “we don’t plan on leaving just yet. But you are going to take your hands off us.”

Thornwood laughed again. “I think you hit your head in the crash of your airship. My men have you bound quite thoroughly. Do you fancy yourself some kind of magician that can escape any situation?”

Jeanne shrugged. “Something like that. Your men should have examined our armored gauntlets more thoroughly. If they did, they would have noticed the sharp edges.”

Suddenly she tore free of the ropes she had been working over for several minutes. She then thrust her head backwards into the head of the guard immediately behind her. She followed this by swinging her arm so that the sharp edge of her gauntlet sliced the throat of the other guard behind her. Blood sprayed her face and armor, reminding her why she didn’t like to carry out such crude attacks. Still, she could not afford to be choosy in situations like this.

Pierre and Victor similarly broke free of their restraints. While Victor attacked the guards who had been holding them, Pierre lunged straight for Thornwood. Both men went crashing to the ground and proceeded to rain fists upon each other. It was a titanic clash Jeanne would have enjoyed watching in its entirety, but she had enemies of her own to fight.

The man she had driven her head into swung at her with her own rapier, taken from her when she was captured. He clearly had no rapier training, or else he would know the weapon was for thrusting and not swinging. Jeanne simply ducked underneath it and used her armored palm to smash him in the nose. He howled in pain and dropped the rapier, which she picked up and then ran him through.

She turned around to see that Victor had disposed of the guards he was fighting, but a dozen more assorted personnel were running towards them from the other side of the circular chamber. Not all of them were soldiers—some wore jumpsuits similar to Celeste and the other engineers aboard the Minuit Solaire—but all of them were armed.

They raised their rifles to fire at the knights, but Thornwood yelled, “Don’t shoot! You’ll cause an explosion!”

Jeanne, wondering what he meant by that, looked around the chamber. There were numerous large pieces of equipment and barrels stationed between them and the armed personnel.

Pierre took advantage of Thornwood’s momentary lack of concentration to pick up the other big man and hurl him into a large table with multiple sharp instruments on top. Jeanne was amazed; she had seen demonstrations of Pierre’s strength before, but they had never been as impressive as this. She secretly hoped one of those instruments was now going through Thornwood’s vitals.

“Come on; we need to move quickly,” she said.

She hurried past the equipment and the shattered table towards the nearest airship. It was about fifty feet in front of her in front of the left wall of the chamber.

The personnel who had previously been pointing weapons at them were now—perhaps because they had witnessed the dismantling of their leader—running away in the opposite direction, possibly to another exit on the other side of the chamber.

“Looks like the decoys did their work,” Pierre said while running behind Jeanne.

Victor—who was running beside him—replied, “Damn right. Most of the enemy soldiers must have left to go fight them, just as we planned.”

“But we were going to use the Solaire’s weapons to take out these airships,” Pierre said. “Now how are we going to do it?”

Jeanne reached the airship she had been running toward and began climbing the wooden frame surrounding it. “We have all the weaponry we need right here.”

Pierre began climbing right behind her. “Looks like these are all