The Log of the HMAS Marigold: Parts I-V

[Stella Gaslight]

Starling blushed and smiled like the cat that got the cream.  Partly because Redburn was rather a charmer and partly because if she could make a cure then whom ever was behind that big door could hold no power over them.  The idea of their power crumbling has they tried hard to grasp it pleased her.  "Yes Sir, Sorry." As soon as Rourke was looking the other way she smiled flirtatiously at Redburn. The guards apparently thought this was rather funny there was a bit of quiet muttering and what sounded like a chuckle.  Starling could hear someone moving behind the doors.  "I believe we have company."  She was rather bothered that Old Betsy had to stay pointed at the ceiling as to not offend the heavily armed men around them.

[Evelyn Adler]

Mary liked to observe. Another thing, her father had taught her. "All people see, but most people do not observe what they see." he had told her. And Mary learned how to do both.

So, while seemingly watching impassively while they waited, she observed.

In the eyes of the guards, Handthorpe had clearly marked Hawthorne as the most dangerous man in the group. And Hawthorne played along with that, she saw.
"He does it on purpose!" she thought, but what exact purpose, she couldn't tell. And that was, why the guards and Handthorpe were probably right. Hawthorne was dangerous. Not in a martial sense, though he did hold his own in a fight, but the real strenght lay in his mind.
Most people were... simple. Like an open book. But Hawthorne - he was unreadable! Whenever she thought, she had finally figured him out, he did something completly unexpected.

Nothing could have peaked her interest more.

And maybe, he knew.

If her own involuntary reaction at his confrontation with Handthorpe told her one thing, she was dangerously close to disaster. There was this tiny little voice in the back of her head. "Wouldn't it be wonderful, if it were real and you could just trust him?"
But Mary knew better than to listen to little voices. No, Hawthorne wouldn't fool her.

Pity though. She couldn't remember, ever meeting someone who had interested her more. He was in quite another league, than her usual dull suitors.
Oh, that was that darned little voice again, trying to distract her!

Mary rolled her eyes in exasperation; fortunately perfectly in synch with Starlings and Redburns little exchange with Rourke. Inside she was livid. She started to lose her professionalism and making little mistakes. That had to stop!

[Private Weasel]

A bemused smile playing across his lips Hawthorne considered the room.

Of course, he mused as he nonchalantly unfastening his bow tie letting it hang from his collar,if this does turn into an altercation, I'm going to be attacked by at least six heavily armed fanatics.

Absent mindedly he checked the dirt under his finger nails and noticing an offending shoe lace, knelt down to fasten his now gore splattered shoes.

That's it then he surmised, glancing casually down at his shoes the homing beacon is activated, if I don't call in during the next twenty four hours, the location of the shoes will be considered a major threat to the Empire.

He glanced over at Miss Kruger, his smile for a second losing all of it's faux emotion and for a second he forgot where he was.

You can only but admire a woman like that, he reflected as he admired her Beautiful as she is brilliant and deadly as is alluring. Life after Milan could be very interesting, short yes, but certainly very interesting.

He allows himself a wink as their eyes meet.

"Do you think we could hurry this up?" he announce to the world in general, "I have a call to make!"

[Evelyn Adler]

Mary had watched the little staged banter between Rourke, Redburn and Starling. Apparently  Redburn had managed to pickpocket something interesting off Handthorpe, when they collided. She wondered what it was and if it could be helpful.

She had observed the guards too. She was fairly sure, she could take out the two next to her, should it become necessary. That left four guards for the rest. Fairly manageable.

Hawthorne gave them the "bored aristocratic" routine. He even knelt down to fasten his shoe lace, taking his sweet time doing so. Then he turned his head, looking in her direction. Mary kept a straight face, looking desinterested at a spot half a metre over Hawthorne's head. But she could not help noticing, how he looked at her.
When their eyes met, he winked.

She managed to mask her blush with a staged sneeze. At the same time, she felt the idiotic urge, to giggle hysterically.
What would you like today, Fräulein von Rabenstein? An affair? Love maybe? With a little treason on the side?
She was on an airship in the middle of a storm, surrounded by cannibalistic monsters, probably in the hands of a madman - and even if they made it out of here alive, then the real trouble would just begin!

She looked at Hawthorne and a tiny smile played around her lips. She felt just as light-headed as that day, when she had stepped out of the estate and into the carriage, that brought her away.
"I hope you are worth it!" she thought, smiling.

[walkthebassline]

Redburn lit his pipe and stepped to the front of the group. He pulled out his pocketwatch, checked the time, paused for a moment to puff on his pipe, and then addressed the guards.

"Might we go in? It is getting terribly late and I fear his highness here must have his tea."

[The Corsair]

Though he was well removed from the remainder of the group by this point, Joe was well aware of the effects of the enormous bolt that slammed into the ship must have had on them all. He himself was hammered sideways just as the bridge doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss while a far away outlet vented steam straight out in to the storm. The ship seemed about to right itself when it dashed back sideways and settled on about a 60 degree angle. His guess was the half-deflated airbags must've slipped sideways over the top edge of the ship when it was kicked across and got stuck there, suspending the ship lopsidedly.

Once recollected and thankfully largely undamaged, Joe ventured out in to the main corridor of the ship where an odd upside to the ship's retardation revealed itself. The Greenies were useless at balancing on anything other than a flat surface. They still moved as madly as before but were now frequently falling sideways, snapping flimsy bones and in some rare cases damaging themselves until they could not move at all. Clearing the hallway in front of him was made an easy task now despite the veritable horde of infected waiting there. After that, clearing the road ahead was no massive task and Greenies could be picked off comfortably while on the move. He guessed, though, that the main corridor was likely one of the least populated areas of the ship. If there were bulkheads sealing the bridge off then other key areas may too be sealed off. He resolved to check first the medical bay then the docking bay where he could also hopefully find a craft to help him back to the Marigold. He could only hope the others were still well and, perhaps more importantly, together. For once, he felt remorse for having left them so abruptly. He hardly knew them but he hardly had the chance to get to know anyone at all and the fact that he'd squandered this opportunity frustrated him.

[MWBailey]

The sudden upset caused the company to lurch against the doorguards, the  doorguards to fall backwards against the doors, and thus the doors to splinter open, dropping them into the mahogany-trimmed golden thronehall (for that was what it was, obviously, even though it was tilted at a weird angle) and to slide uncontrollably to the far end, ending up in a heap of guards, the Marigold's team, crimson carpet runner, the Lord President -- and a ledger-sized gold tablet, whch somehow had remained ensconced in its stands, but was threatening to tip forward onto the pile of people below the altar.

"Balthasar?! BALTHASAR!" a stentorian basso voice pealed out over the hall.

"M-Milord President?" A comparatively querrellous, though still authoritative, voice answered, preseumably that of the luckless 'Balthasar.'

"GET TO THE REMOTE PANEL AND PULL THE AUTO  ATTITUDE OVDERRIDE! NOW!!!"

"Y-YES M-Milord!"

A skinny man in a rather stereotypical governmental tuxedo with black frock coat, striped trousers-and-spats, and a broad red sash scrambled crablike across the weirdly-tilted floor, to a panel that he snatched open and on which he pressed several buttons, and then pulled a large mechanically-ratchetted lever down until it stopped with a loud SNAP!

By short stops, jerks, and finally a long descent back to the relatively-horizontal, the ship righted itself and the people began to sort themselves out...and stare in shock and indignation at the sight of Sergeant Hannibal Rourke holding the tablet on its stand, and the sound of his voice reciting an arcane series of couplets in a decidedly eldritch-sounding tongue -- and then turning, drawing his pistol, and setting it to the head of Lord President Harcerius Bey, who had just begun a seriously megalomaniacal harangue about having Rourke ripped to shreds for daring to 'desecrate one of the Tablets of Destiny'.

He stopped short as Rourke said, "I think not, your 'worship'," cocked the pistol,  and ordered the guards and the crowd to "BACK OFF! Or I'll spread 'is brains on the carpet! Let my companions be, or the same result!" He then waited for the others to right themselves as the guards and the population scrambled to obey. "Let's set about findin' the dagger, shall we? You got it on you, Bey old boy?" he glanced around, seeing the Dagger's  people staring fixedly and dismayedly upward. "Why's everybody lookin' at the ceilin'?"

[Evelyn Adler]

Two of the guards didn't get up from the heap on the floor; coincidentally the ones that Mary had bumped into when the ship lurched.

When Rourke made his move, Mary was with a few quick strides over at the control panel, where the faithful Balthasar's hand just hovered over some ominous button.

"I really don't think you should do that!" she said softly, pointing the revolver at him.

[The Corsair]

The medical bay presented a neat challenge for him. Wherever the override controls for the bulkheads were, it wasn't on the hallside. Neither, he guessed, would they be on the inside of the bay. If something had to be contained it would be stupid giving it a way out, a problem it seemed the bridge didn't expect to run in to, as it had internal controls.

By the looks of them, they weren't blastproof entirely. A hefty enough bang at the base would free it from the locking mechanism it connected to on the ground. To create this bang, he'd have to get creative. He drew out his pistol and emptied the explosive rounds from it, which he tied into a bundle with a piece of thread from his jacket. He then emptied a conventional bullet and pooled the gunpowder in the piece of cloth that came off when the thread was removed. To protect himself from the blast he took off his wings, extended them and held them vertically with his left arm while he lit the gunpowder with his right. Once the edge of the cloth was alight he'd have milliseconds to get his hand clear. Game on. He lit a match...

[walkthebassline]

The other two door guards found themselves a bit occupied; one had the tip of Redburn's sword resting under his chin, while the other had Redburn's LeMat pointing at his forehead. His attention firmly fixed on his captives, Redburn nevertheless spoke to Rourke without turning his head.

"That was a lovely bit of poetry sir, quite eloquent. The strains there in the middle were particularly moving. But do you figure the message got through? And is there going to be any more unpleasantness of the people-trying-to-kill-us variety? And should someone perhaps look up and tell us what has everyone transfixed? I want to shoot something."

[MWBailey]

"How very Ironic, sergeant," Bey said in his educated permutation of a maddeningly-unplaceable  middle-eastern accent, grinning a particularly smug, evil grin. "now that you save the drop upon us, as you would no doubt say, what do you do? You cannot mean to shoot me, surely. I know where the dagger is, and without it you cannot control the hordes." There was something off about that argument, but for the life of him, Rourke couldn't figure out what it might be. "So very talented you are, sergeant, yet so very unobservant."

There was in Rourke a slight inconsistency, or perhaps a lack of connection, between his common sense and his native intelligence. He thought, like most people, on several levels at once, concurrently -- but the individual connections between levels did not always fire as perhaps would have been most beneficial. Fior example, he knew, on one level, that he had said all of teh necessary words; the Service's memorization and recital drills ha dmade sure of that. On another level, he knew that the words were supposed to have an effect, and on still another level, the general feeling in the air, as well as his senses of smell and hearing told him that the incantation had been wildly successful. But the problem of the dagger, the fact that everyone was looking up at something that he dared not drag his attention from Bey to see, and his orders impaired his immediate realization of those facts.

Until a corporal in teh Uniform of Treadstone's private security army skidded to a stop a few yards away after dashing in through teh shattered doorway, and panted, "Beg...Pardon... Lord Presi *cough* President, but the-the-the Hordes, they have...they have... well, the oldest have crumbled, and the newly turned have reverted to their humanity... uh, sir." Bey turned away from Rourke, and Rourle rolled his eyes in utter frustration -- and his eyes froze upion the sight of the very dagger he sought, embedded in the ceiling twenty or so feet directly overhead.

SEIZE THEM! Bey thundered, ever one to do the unexpected, THEY HAVE NOT THE DAGGER! SEIZE THEM!!!

AS the guards began to close in, Rourke cursed sulphurously yet again, and planted two slugs in Bey's head.

"You wanna kill something, Mister Redburn? well, HAVE AT IT!"

[Stella Gaslight]

The room they had fallen in to was lavish with thick wooden carvings on the wall that gave starling an idea.  When the ship shifted Starling very dearly wished she had her climbing cleats on but settled for grabbing a hold of the door frame and trying to not be pulled down by one of the guards who tried to grab her foot.  Swinging sideways gave her an excellent view of the sealing and the dagger above them. As soon as she had time for her feet to touch the floor She scrambled for her tree climbing gear and moved closer to Hawthorne and Redburn.  "Alright gents I see our prize and have a means to get it if you can keep them from shooting me full of holes."  She looked at Redburn with a devilish grin and pressed Old Betsy in to his hand as carefully as she could with the metal climbing claws strapped to her hand.  "I imagine you know how to take care of a lady of her caliber.  There are four rounds in the leather pouch. and now I am off." She loaded her dart gun with golden darts and specked the guards near the wall that had been trying to advance on them.  They fell as she ran forward and up the wall just like the trees she had climbed as a child.  Starling had to stop herself from crowing like Peter Pan as she got closer and closer to the dagger.

[walkthebassline]

With Starling's rifle safely on his back, Redburn smoothly slid his blade through the throat of one guard, while shooting the other full in the face with his revolver. In one motion he stowed both weapons, and grabbed the large rifle from his shoulder. He dropped to one knee and took aim slowly at the farthest guard. The shot hit the unfortunate man in the chest, slightly to the left. It spun the man around, and opened a fist-sized hole clean through him. Having seen Starling operate the gun, Redburn had a good idea how to reload; his second shot went off within seconds. It also had a pronounced effect, removing most of another guard's head.

Not wanting to use all of Starling's ammunition, Redburn jumped up, slung the rifle over his shoulder again, and waded into the conflict with sword in hand.

Now where is his Lordship and Ms. Kruger?

[Evelyn Adler]

Mary stood, rifle ready, with her back against the wall and that control panel, after she had, without further ado, knocked Balthasar unconcious. Now she tried to get an overview over the situation in the room.

Some of the guards tried to carry out the last order of their late dictator. Others simply abandoned their post and tried to flee. Redburn seemed quite happily settled into his slaughtering trance again. Starling was climbing the wall, trying to get at that dagger. The civilians did, what they always do in a situation like this and panicked, screaming and running, most of them for the big doors. She couldn't see Hawthorne anywhere, but with the room in such chaos, she could only hope he was ok.

A guard across the room tried to aim at Starling, but before he had the chance to shoot, Mary took him out with a single shot. Waste not.
There was still another problem to be solved, before they were safe. She just wished, they would get the tablet and dagger as quickly as possible and then the hell out of there.

Also she needed to figure out how to break the news of more trouble to her new friends, without them just throwing her overboard...

[Private Weasel]

Hawthorne extracted himself from underneath the body of the strangled guard and retrieved his bowtie, the shift in the room had thrown the guards into disarray and for that allowed himself a thin smile. Pulling the pistol from the hands of his asphyxiate assailant he calmly fired at the rallying guards at the door felling half a dozen before the clip was empty.

Realising that is was only a matter of time before the were overrun by the President's men he removed his pocket watch from it's pocket and attached one of his cuff-links to the end of the chain. Both accessories clicked together like the had been designed that way and satisfied with the results Hawthorne clicked the winder twice.

"Ironically," he quipped to nobody in particular and he began to spin watch on it's chain like a bolas, "this might give us a bit of time."

The watch was launched, the chain trailing behind, the time piece skimming like a stone as it skittered across the floor and through the doorway towards the oncoming mass of guards.

"3..2..1" 

[walkthebassline]

The explosion roused Redburn from his haze, and as he looked around he realized how few men were left standing. Sheathing his blade, he pulled out his repeating pistol and slowly fired as he looked around for any other doors in the room. The wreckage outside the main door was truly spectacular, especially considering that the explosive appeared to have been a pocket watch.

"Looks like things are winding down a bit, ladies and gents."

He spared a glance to check on Starling's progress.

Almost there, my dear. Almost there.

But just he thought the room was clear, he felt a hand grab his ankle and yank him off his feet.

Oh crap here we go again.

[MWBailey]

Handthorpe had gotten exactly one corridor's length away when his aerial world suddenly tipped sideways. He had scrambled, crawled and dragged himnself into the thronehall the back way this time, passing guards thrown about like ragdolls and killed from falling the lenth of the Grand Section's long, ornate stairways. Crumbled Old Dead were being trampled by the Newly-Turned, who had reverted suddenly back to full humanity. He pushed and shoved through more than a few of those, and shot three or four who remembered him and tried to detain him. About the time that he made it to the trapdoor above the Altar, the ship righted itself just violently enough to toss him through the open trap door to land behind the Marigold's team like a sack of badly-bruised potatoes. Just as the ranks of the Dagger's guardsmen were being thinned dangerously close to the point of nonexistence, Handthorpe re-awoke, grabbed out his toothpick knife, and grabbed Redburn's ankle.

"Not so fast, cous," he rasped, and lunged up from the prone position at Redburn, knife in a stabbing position...

[Private Weasel]

Hawthorne reached down to his oversized revolver and pulled the weighty firearm from it's holster.  The grip felt comforting in his hands as he swung it out and locked his arm straight ready for the almighty kick. This other arm came up for stability and he brought the mighty canon to bear on Handthorpe. A second to readjust and the aim was true, Hawthorne squeezed the trigger.

Click

"Typical, you're on you're own Redburn old chap" he sighed as he launched the empty revolver at an oncoming guard giving him enough time to retrieve the second pistol and unload it at point blank into the chest of the unfortunate attacker.

"Does anybody want to surrender yet?"

[Stella Gaslight]

Climbing the ceiling was far harder than the walls and caused her to move slowly or risk falling.  Finally after what felt like forever she reached the dagger and carefully tugged at it. It was held fast in the tile surrounding it.  Angrily she pulled with both hands trying not to look at the floor below.  The explosion of the pocket watch was just enough to shake her climbing cleats loose.  Suddenly she was hanging from the dagger as the tile creaked ominously.  "I have it!" Starling shouted as the tile gave loose and she fell taking with a large hunk of the ceiling with her.

[Evelyn Adler]

Handthorpe! No idea how he got back into the room, but there he was - and about to attack Redburn! Mary aimed carefully, pulled the trigger almost lovingly... *click*

"Dieses verdammte..." she spat, not finishing the sentence. Grabbing the Winchester by the barrel and swinging it like a club, she charged...

[walkthebassline]

Redburn was flat on his face and running out of options. His sword was out of reach, his pistols holstered, Starling's rifle strapped to his back; he heard pistols click and his comrades groan. He knew the voice behind him though; no one else here had that twang. And the hand holding his ankle would be attached to a face. He kicked backwards and was rewarded with a pained grunt from Handthorpe. The knife bit into his leg just as a Winchester rifle smacked Handthorpe's head. Hard. There was a wet crunching sound and the hand on his leg went limp.

"I appear to have been stabbed; would you kindly help me up Madam?"

[MWBailey]

Handthorpe nearly crowed with triumph when his dagger sank into Redburn's leg. Maybe, he thought, even as he heard the sounds of someone female running and grunting with effort, I'll live through this after al--! A pain like a thunderbolt jagged through his brian and head, followed by the kind of red-and-gold mists of pain that accompanied severe head wounds... and then nothingness, as he somehow heard the voice of his mother scolding him, "You keep on like this, Han boy, and you'll have a bad end..."

"Mama...!"

[Stella Gaslight]

Starling tried to land on her feet but ended up on her hands and knees with the dagger sheltered under her body and a rain of plaster and splinters of wood on her back.  The dust rose in clouds sweeping across the floor.  She coughed and stumbled to her feet glad for the padded leather.  Starling realized why it had been so hard to remove when she looked at the back of the tile.  "The bastard bound it in with iron." If she hadn't had her whole body weight on it they most likely would of had to attack it with a ladder and a hacksaw as it was she shook it loose with both hands and got a slice in the palm of the glove. Starling removed her glove and bound the wound before looking at what she had climbed like a monkey for.  It was a beautiful blade engraved and inland with precious metal.  The gem in the handle was red as blood and it glimmered in the sunlight.  Outside the ship the storm was gone as if it had never been.  Inside the ship Starling walked with a wobble as her knees protested over to Redburn and Mary.  "Let me clean and bind that.  I don't trust that old cuss not to have something nasty smeared on his blade."

[The Corsair]

The force of the explosion was by no means massive. It buckled the door as necessary and knocked him back a step, leaving a few scorch marks on his wings. Not that they were distinguishable from those left by the lightning bolt during his flight from the Marigold.

The medical bay by the door was abandoned. Moving down the lopsided hallway he found a few shambling Greenies in medical uniforms but otherwise the only infected were tied down to medical tables, many already dead. It was perhaps the most disturbing thing he'd seen since one of his earlier missions. The few beds that hadn't been converted into tables for experiments were inhabited by infected who must have previously been soldiers rendered immobile by wounds.

In one particular section of converted beds he found a most intriguing experiment. The infected lying on the floor beside the table had the tell-tale sores about its face and mouth but they seemed to be in only the earlier stages of growth, before the green tinge had set in. Whatever had been done to him, it had halted the advance of the disease.
Or, he suddenly thought, began to reverse it...
He checked the clipboard at the end of the bed. In place of the regular medical sheet was a simple piece of paper with 'GARRET SMALLS. AN7G12' written across it. His guess was 'AN7G12' was the designation code for whatever had been administered to Mr Smalls. If he were to find the location of the substance now he figured he'd have to check the main office or wherever the experimenting teams reported their findings to.

* * *

A little more hunting and more Greeny deaths found him at a room labelled 'Jonathan Firth. Greenmouth Studies'. The lock was picked in moments and within he found a most striking wall shrouded in rudimentary refrigeration units. They all lay ajar, some with spilled contents, but a quick search of door labels led him to discover the one holding the mysterious AN7G12 serum. Only one bag of it had been concocted. It was perhaps the only chemical in the world that came close to being a cure for Greenmouth. Suddenly, Joseph Rooney found himself to be a very important man.

He hadn't a hope of carrying the whole cooling unit on his person but he did have a way of cooling the bag he realised. His wings were again going to suffer for their owner. He removed them both and moved their various joints until they formed a sphere-like structure before forcing whatever pieces of metal he could find into the joints to lock them. The backpack unit was then deconstructed and the cooling system was twisted, compressed and shifted until it fit into the sphere. The bag was then placed in after it and the final join of the wings was swung closed and locked. The whole contraption was switched on and placed back inside the pack.

He left at that point. There were a few rooms he took a look inside on the way back but by the look of the infected inside them whatever experiments had been undertaken had only been successful in worsening their condition. The landing bay was about 50 metres away and the bulkheads this time held the possibility of being opened with the help of some brute force. Once inside, he selected a small craft he hoped would have the integrity to make the short hop through the storm to wherever the Marigold was docked. It would be at most a 500 metre journey, or so he hoped.

[MWBailey]

At that moment,. in the upper air above the Dagger, there slid into view a long, cigar-shaped craft, its wing turrets carrying double-barrelled 2-inch guns. Hotchkiss repeaters (a type of rotary repeater similar to the Gatling) emplacememnts dotted its hull in several places, and on her four diagonally-opposed tailfins were emblazoned the Iron Cross and the insignia of the House of  Hohenzollern.

A Zeppelin. Not a mere generic copy, but an actual LZ ship, LZ-7 to be exact. A tool of The Prussian rulers of Germany -- and it was not there by happenstance. Nor were the stormtroops who, wearing the fixed-wing Descent Arrestors and bearing the devastatingly-effective weaponry they were infamous for, dropped like a swarm of four-limbed wasps to the hull and airfield  of the Nirgalian Dagger, and began to literally cut their way in, indiscriminately excising anyone who put up any resistance.