The years prior to the Reconquest of London were hard and brutal ones. Everything was bent toward stemming the tide of death and losses to the Æster. When the Æster finally stabilized into the bands we know today, things began to turn around. People had something to fight for. Not just survival, but creating a new world by retaking that which had been lost. Suddenly, there was a surge in activity throughout the Empire and the world. Industry began to flex its muscles in preparation for the task ahead.  Hope resurfaced when firebrands across the globe rekindled the spark of Mankind’s greatness. The ideals of these gloriously mad, optimistic individuals became the obsession of the world. Retaking the abandoned cities and making them flourish once again was ambitious beyond reason. To attempt to do so in the dimness of the Argentum and the darkness of the Nyx was insane by anyone’s measure. But this concept fanned the flames of forgotten dreams into the greatest endeavor in the history of man; the City of Light movement.

LONDON-

I was sickened by the echoes of history that swirled around us the day our airships landed in London to begin the campaign to retake the city. Military necessity mandated that we land on the same high ground where we had abandoned our soldiers and the people of London 14 years earlier. Military necessity also mandated that we suffocate our own sense of guilt and betrayal as we worked to create that first beachhead. I felt as if we were the villains reentering the stage of so many of our nightmares.

I and many of the senior officers stood with jaws clenched as we looked down over the ships railings at the bleached bones of soldiers and citizens that littered the landing site. As the heavy sealed-beam Fresnel lamps reflected off the bleached white and Æster yellow fields of the dead, the terrible images of those hours rose up to clothe the bones in the flesh they had once worn.

Common wisdom said that you could not take more than three steps anywhere in London without treading on the dead. This situation brought me into contact with the first Magpies I had ever met. These former knackers, grave diggers and chimney sweeps allowed the campaign to move forward by disposing of the dead. This guild had been established years earlier to deal with the problem of unburied corpses and other sanitation issues. Out of necessity they had become capable fighters in their own right. Not one of us envied the hazards of their day in, day out work.

Many would disagree with the official term, the “Reconquest” of London. Those people weren’t there. It was a fight, and we bled for every square yard of ground we took. Men and women who had been reduced to a state of barbaric feudalism battled us to hold onto whatever it was they thought was theirs. People who were little more than animals attacked us out of fear and rage, their minds having been forever destroyed by the Æster or the horrors that it wrought.

And then there were the animals. Things that we could not have imagined. Enormous packs of dogs, giant boars and feral pigs that saw us as little more than a food source. The common English badger grown to the size of a mastiff with a wicked temperament and an arsenal of claws and teeth that could take a man apart in seconds.

We had heard reports of the rats, but were unprepared for a five foot high wall of vermin flowing out of the sewers as we tried to clear the subterranean passages of the Parliament building. I still bear the scars of that encounter. Even the most experienced soldier feels fear, even terror. That feeling ran like wildfire through us all as we were engulfed by the rising, flowing wave of filthy creatures. All of us were disciplined and inured to the horrors of death served in its myriad ways. But being shot, stabbed or blown to pieces is very different than being torn apart by a swarm of ravening creatures. The fecal stench of the sewers that emanated from these living nightmares suffocated us as they tried to consume us.

Mara Jones, a corporal who had been with me for over two years was pulled down by these things. I still wake bathed in sweat when her screams come back to me in my dreams. We fought the tide of rats and fought our own fear. We tried to get to Corporal Jones but the onslaught was simply too much to hold out against. We could hear her screams become strangled and bloody as more of us were pulled down by the weight of numbers. Her screams were quickly joined by those of others, men and women alike. There were hundreds of the hellish things. Rats the size of small dogs possessed of terrifying cunning would latch onto the victim like a terrier. Others would then swarm onto the man or woman and begin to feast. It was one of the most horrifying spectacles I have ever witnessed in a life filled with violence. Holding onto our senses by a thread, we fell back shooting, beating, and slashing at the mass of vermin in an attempt to keep from being fully surrounded. I watched as many of the hardened men and women under my command were consumed alive by this seething wall of teeth, fur, and claws. It was impossible to fight them individually. Our military discipline disintegrated in favor of the discipline of survival. No one broke ranks or tried to run. We all knew that our only chance was to remain a cohesive whole.

We watched helplessly as our fellows were pulled down to die screaming. Private Cooper was dragged to the ground right in front of me. As I reached for him, one of the rodents latched onto my ankle. I was on my face before I even registered the pain of those giant teeth scraping on the bones of my leg. I was immediately fighting with all my might to keep the horde off me. I may as well have been flailing at the stars. They were all around me, on me, even under me. I managed to pull my knife free and a lucky thrust found the eye of the rat holding my leg. It let go. I kicked and flailed wildly in panic and horror trying to get some room to move. Suddenly, a searing pain shocked me as my left arm literally burst into flames. I heard gunshots and saw a ball of fire erupt next to me. Men and women were kicking and punching, striking and shooting all around me as another fiery burst went off close enough to me to burn my moustache and most of my eyebrows off. I was dragged back into the safety of the group as fires blossomed around us. As those who were left fell back in a tight knot, I was hauled to my feet. There is no way to describe the shrieking of burning vermin, screams of our fellows being eaten by these beasts, and the cacophony of gunfire that crashed around us as we desperately fought and fell back. As often as those sounds invade my dreams, I should be able to describe them in the most vivid detail. But they flee description as quickly as the come to haunt me.

Those of us who survived only did so because of desperate actions taken by our tunnel engineers as we fell back toward them and our support camp. They threw lit cans of kerosene into the fray and dumped burning fuel into ragged lines. These flaming barriers gave us a protected line of retreat and allowed us to escape. Calling it a true retreat would be a complete fiction. There was no military order in our flight. Just men and women desperate to survive, holding onto one another to keep from being dragged off and torn apart. This “glorious” battle typified the Reconquest of London. Nothing the papers wanted to hear about. We fought street to street, block to block, sometimes doorway to doorway pushing back the masses of vermin, barely human savages, the Æster Mad, and armed feudal soldiers.

Many things cross people’s minds when they think of the campaigns to build the Cities of Light. Water is not among them. One of many changes wrought by the Aester was rising sea levels across the globe. Whole cities and their most important resources were completely submerged. The heart of the Empire was the heart of London. To reclaim that spirit, we must reclaim not only the land but the cultural and architectural treasures that lay beneath the waves. Salvage divers, called Bellers, became an important part of the campaign. They made the initial stages of retaking these flooded cities possible. However, to succeed we needed access to resources on a larger scale than they could provide.

On paper, the reclaiming of London was to be nothing more than the repetition of a simple plan. Bellers and Royal Navy engineers would use cofferdams to create dry areas. They built these structures below the surface of the water forming a contiguous enclosure that stretched from the muddy bottom of the flooded areas to the surface. These completed enclosures were then pumped dry. As time went on, the cofferdams would be linked, expanding the dry areas. This was to be the foundation upon which we would rebuild. The orders we were given made this sound like a pleasant routine of labor. Which apparently the politicians in Darwin thought it would be for the “Stout Hearted Working Men and Women” of America. This pleasant routine was made up of back breaking work, flooding, collapses, and a tempest of other ills.

The policy makers didn’t account for the character of the current denizens of London. As each new area was exposed, the fighting would start. Before the areas inside the cofferdams were anything more than a stinking morass, Nightmen and other savages would start trying to seize territory and resources buried in the muck. It was amazing to see the people who had lived on floating mats of debris, makeshift piers and docks, scrambling around in the mud trying to lay claim to things that had been over ten fathoms below their feet a few weeks earlier. We spent most of our time early on fighting in knee deep mud. Entire troops of men and women would often disappear as some unseen structure beneath the surface collapsed, plunging them into the filthy water. Sometimes, these subterranean structures had moving water flowing beneath them. By the time anyone could reach the foundering troops, many had been swept away to their deaths. It took months of this kind of work pushing the water steadily back out of London before we could do much more that defend the workmen and the sites.

It was during the first spring after the pump-out that we began to feel we were accomplishing something of value. For nine months, we had been slogging upstream against a flowing river of mud, remains of the dead, and raw sewage. During that eerie spring filled with death rather than birth, madness in place of joy, not a single bird did we see or hear.

That muddy March, the Tower of London was being held by a mad former Londoner who called himself “The Tower King.” Along with his army of vassals, he resisted our assaults for two weeks. Not an hour after we had wrested it from his control, a Sergeant sent word that I was needed outside immediately. Expecting trouble, I checked my pistol as we stepped out of the building. A sound that hadn’t greeted me since boyhood stopped me in my tracks. The cacophony of ravens outside was deafening after weeks of not hearing the sound of a single bird. Hundreds of ravens had suddenly reappeared and lighted all around the Tower. Hardened soldiers, filthy workers and stalking Nightmen turned wondering eyes at the black shapes as they passed through the Tower’s Fresnel beams. Sparkling black eyes reflected in the harsh lights as they watched us. Some were so bold as to land only a few feet away to steal a scrap before lifting away on black wings again. As if in answer to some primal call, the ravens had returned to the Tower, welcoming its rightful owners home.

There were victories and setbacks during the Reconquest. The battle for the Thames was long and cost me more men and women than any other series of engagements in my career. Many areas had degraded to filthy, disease ridden swamps. In the lowlands, Æster and other chemicals seeped from the flooded ground, poisoning the water or changing them to seething acidic pools.

I clearly recall the first report I got of this. It was early on a quiet Sunday morning. I was in my office having my second cup of coffee and enjoying what promised to be one of the rare uneventful days. But my adjutant stormed into my office with a look that told me everything I needed to know. It was a look I had come to recognize. More good men and women had died over a patch of filthy mud. He reported that ten men, including one of the Sergeants I had learned to count on, had been crippled as they waded into one of these poisonous swamp.

The Æster and chemical laden water didn’t begin to burn away their skin until several minutes after it touched them. The delay in effect allowed the entire squad to wade in chest deep before the first man showed signs of distress. By then it was too late for all of them. The filth didn’t kill immediately, but once it took root, gangrene quickly began to rot their flesh. However, their deaths were anything but quick. It was slow and agonizing. All the physicians could do for them was to keep them drugged with Opium to dull the pain. I read Sergeant Lorne’s final letter dictated to the Chaplain for his wife. It was gibberish. The pain and Opium did not allow the man to coherently say what he wanted with his final words. When I wrote the letter to his wife, I told her he had been killed instantly when a Nightman’s knife had found its mark and stopped his heart. It was a lie. One of many I wrote to grieving families over a long career. There was no reason to describe the slow and obscene way a good man died to someone who loved him. I live with the images of those lingering soldiers who simply were too strong to die quickly. Why should their loved ones? Poor bastards, brave and dedicated and killed by stinking water.

We found that some of what we later understood to be called “Thames Lords” had discovered ancient sewers and tunnels beneath the city, some of which they expanded under the Thames itself. This explained why some areas took excessively long to pump out. It also revealed what the traps that swallowed some of my troops were actually connected to. These tunnels and catacombs were not level so water would flow from other areas into them creating rapidly flowing rivers in their narrow confines. How anyone could live in the damp and partly flooded catacombs makes me wonder to this day. But they had to be cleared or collapsed.

Once the campaign to retake London really got underway, orders were sent down that we should attempt to recover every citizen we found, regardless of situation, only killing in self defense. The idea that brought about these orders might have been one of compassion or repentance. But even then it was an asinine proposal given the situation we were in. The politicians in Darwin wanted to make an effort to recover Londoners left behind when the capital was abandoned. The thing that stuck in my throat was the certain knowledge that it was another farce of someone’s political career. That always translated to death among my troops. There were no “Londoners” left in London. There were barbarians, feudal soldiers, near bestial savages and survivors, but no “Londoners”. Another bucket of sewage passed down from on high to make them look good.

So, my troops bled and died to bring out those who would, in most cases, never be anything more than inmates of prisons or institutions. The orders were idiotic and I said as much in my response to them. When I was overridden I was given the pat answer that inevitably comes when field officers contend wastefully stupid orders. I was told “they were not mine to question”. So I ordered my men and women not to kill unless they were in mortal danger. What a goddamn farce. This policy prevented us from using the most efficient method of dealing with the Thames Lords; collapsing the tunnels with charges and entombing the bastards like rats in their holes. This was not an option for us. But it did not stop me from losing hundreds of troops when they did the same to us. Knowing the back way out, they waited for us to get into the deep tunnels and then collapsed them above our men and women. The Thames campaign was a meat grinder that I repeatedly ordered troops into.

Repeated and disastrous run-ins with rats and other vermin in the tunnels and warrens beneath the city forced a new policy to be established. Any underground patrol now included Ratcatchers in addition to the regular army troops to prevent them from being overrun by these horrors. Ratcatchers were a new breed that had grown out of the terrible years of death before the bands stabilized when entire towns were consumed alive by rats, feral dogs and other vermin. They were tough, resourceful, and single-minded. These fanatics seemed to exist only to slaughter vermin. For their single minded devotion, they were very well paid. They wielded flamethrowers and all bore the scars of their trade. These burned, bite-scarred and fearless men and women waded into the warrens, tunnels and underground areas to eradicate the creatures they were named for. They saved as many lives as we lost battling the Thames Lords.

Continued in Section 2