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= META 4 CITY =

a DarkSF Novel

by John Argo

Page 6.

Chapter 3

Major Walther Tonsonby had a pit of foreboding in his stomach as he speeded through rainy, nighttime city streets in a staff car. The unexpected summons to see Leader Moss had come in the middle of the night, ordering Tonsonby to appear before the fatherland's leader by dawn. Tonsonby had an inkling it was about the doomsday rocket, and it couldn't be good.

As he stepped from the car, while an aide held the rear door open, Tonsonby put on his gold-trimmed, peaked General Staff officer’s cap. He wore a gray uniform with gleaming black boots and blue-edged riding trousers. Aides hovered about him, silently opening doors, holding umbrellas, and shielding him with their bodies. Tonsonby was oblivious to all of it, concerned only for his precarious staff position.

Tonsonby ran from the car up the steps to the cathedral vastness of the West Gotha State Chancellery. He was a big man, but fast, and two aides hurried to catch up with him.

It was so early in the morning that night still gripped the city with its rain, its sirens, and its search lights while enemy bombers probed and growled in the clouds far above. Tonsonby glanced up, with raindrops on his troubled expression, and guessed that the enemy in East Gotha were unaware of the horrific weapon being readied across town to destroy them.

Tonsonby entered the building, dripping rain water, and stopped to let his aides catch up. His chauffeur (a fat man in charcoal Uniformed Civil Service uniform) took his dripping coat, while his secretary (a slim woman with mousy hair and steely eyes) handed him his briefcase. Nodding curtly, Major Tonsonby left the two at the service entrances and hurried into the main hall. He tucked his peaked cap under one arm, and carried the briefcase by its handle.

Tonsonby had been summoned by none other than Leader Moss—top man in the rulership of wartime West Gotha. It was only Tonsonby's fourth or fifth visit to the headquarters of fifty million patriotic West Gothans. Tonsonby, like all West Gothans, had pilgrimaged through these halls as a school child and considered it a sort of national cathedral.

The summons had come tinged with ominous hints, Tonsonby thought as he clattered across the vast marble floor where the paths of hundreds of central government functionaries crossed his own.

The main hall was a basilica, with ornately scrolled ceilings edged in gold. Buttresses and heavy square pillars framed high, narrow stained glass windows. The windows glowed in the endlessly rainy ambient gray light from outside. Night and day, kaleidoscope fragments of weak, cool color spattered across the porphyry-tomato floor expanse. The windows revealed patriotic themes, built from disciplined quadrilles of red, blue, yellow, and green glass. Silvered scrolls etched into the glass bore black words in Gothic alphabet. The scenes were sentimental: Victory waving aloft a sword, standing knee-deep in naked corpses on a battlefield, looking back with urgent eyes to send more troops against the enemy; Motherhood, pinching a full, stiff breast to nurture wounded men with agonized expressions, who crawl to her on their knees as one of them continues to hold aloft the West Gotha battle flag; Fatherhood, in the form of a huge grim figure handing a sword to one son and a rifle to the other, while they bow their heads and the enemy sends in yet another violent light-show barrage; and so on, sixteen windows in all in this cathedral of state and duty; each scene much like the others with a huge central figure holding some object while being served by multitudes of tiny men suffering for their nation.

Going up the central staircase, itself a marvel of grandeur, Tonsonby barely noticed the crowning image: Nation, consisting of a huge father image whose face is characteristically of the Moss clan: round, with fierce little black eyes that inspire men and women to sacrifice themselves for the Nation and the Leader; against a huge tapestry of war and sacrifice, filled with little scenarios populated by gigantic, muscular men and women. The muscled giants of West Gotha lift hammers over anvils, raise torches to light beacons, bear children, send children to war, received the glorious dead back from battle, and on and on.

Tonsonby's path took him briefly outside on a passageway that wrapped like a slender concrete thread around the skin of the administrative headquarters. Like shadows in a hurry, couriers and secretaries and military officers hurried back and forth this windy deck, with only a glass wall to keep one from falling off. As preoccupied as he was, Tonsonby couldn't help but gaze across the magnificent vista.

Anti-aircraft lights, sweeping their cones back and forth under mottled rain clouds, illuminated the night sky above West Gotha. Sirens wailed in a slowly rising and falling chorus.

On the city's outer defensive perimeters, particularly facing the enemy city of East Gotha, force curtains rippled in the air like artificial green auroras. Sometimes, East Gotha bombers made it through to the innermost defenses, and ak-ak would begin pounding the skies until one or two burning bombers would slowly keel over and disappear to crash in the far countryside.

The city looked lovely from a distance: mountains of hazy light from thousands of windows piled into skyscrapers, one behind the other, in a soft, huge pyramid of buildings rising toward the center. Here, where Tonsonby walked, the central administration building rose like a magnificent basilica of stained glass windows and creamy Deco towers.

Closer up, the city had that wartime shabbiness characteristic of the grinding nightmare of wars seeming to go on forever. A sign atop a high-rise might be missing a letter. A wall might be peeling and long overdue for a paint job. A street might be potholed. Despite a million such inconveniences, the patriotic and dutiful people of West Gotha put on a brave face and soldiered on. The survival of the fatherland depended on their support of the Leader, and Tonsonby was heading to that Leader's office at this very moment with fear lining his stomach.

Tonsonby was unaware of a small but important drama that had played out only hours ago, yesterday evening, elsewhere in the city, between a baroness and a spy. The union of those two was about to start having a frightening impact on Tonsonby's career and in fact on his very life.

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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.