The Test Firing 1/4: Do you have 500 pound balls?

Outlaw Journalist Namond Lick sweltered in his PRESS vest and bucket hat and scribbled in his notepad as the Redcoat told him the score. He was wired for sound and everything was recorded anyway, but people liked the notepad. They wanted to be remembered.

The guy who wanted to be remembered was Colonel Ravinder Bhoja of the 333rd Regiment of Foote. His living history troop was out in the Wyoming backcountry for a little demonstration of a project they’d been working on. Men (and, Namond noted, one woman) in red jackets fussed over bags and boxes, showed off their kit and practiced their musketry in front of a crowd of onlookers (mostly family and friends), firing live buck and ball loads from their land pattern muskets at improvised targets of stacked stone. Unusually for a reenactment group, especially from this period, there wasn’t a single White face among them, and it was that topic that the Colonel had chosen to expound upon.

“...the 333rd was one of several regiments raised from former slaves but, to my knowledge, the only one to enlist Chinese, Malays, Hindoos, Indians…”

Behind the supply tent, Edith Falling Drum, in character (and drag) as Sergeant Eaton, shouted at her children using the same timbre she used to bawl out disorderly recruits. Lick nodded.

“Yeah, it’s a hot topic in the living history world.”

He licked his pen and flipped to the next page of his notebook.

“Like what if a Black dude wanted to be a Confederate reenactor. Hell, what if a Chinese guy wants to join one of those Colored regiments?”

The Colonel puffed himself up, incensed at the implied critique of his recruiting practices.

“Are you suggesting British empire practiced arbitrary distinctions of class and race, and that these distinctions were reflected in its military formations? By Gawd, Sir!”

Namond grinned. He ostentatiously circled and underlined a word to show he was listening. In truth the whole racial politics angle was a diversion. The readers at CHEAPMEAT didn’t care about culture war hobby drama (outside of their insane individual obsessions). They’d be more interested in the real reason for this little wilderness gathering, the one the Regiment towed a sizeable distance from the improvised carpark at the end of the dirt road, and from anything flammable. The 333rd were more than just reenactors. That much was clear to anyone with an eye for the weird, whether or not the tip about their pre-Y2K days as a militia formed to counter the old patriot movement was true. And his instincts said something very bad was about to happen to them.

Or if not, he could arrange it. If it bled it led.

Private Danny Obierika squatted in the shadow of the cannon and fussed over the floor crane. He was a tall man but the gun came up to his chin. It weighed ten tons and it took a bare minimum of 800 pounds black powder to force an enormous ball out the unrifled barrel. The iron for the balls was harvested illegally by salvagers from the wrecks of Japanese warships in the Pacific. The body of the cannon itself was forged steel, made from melted swords expectorated over a period of several months by the man standing over him.

The King of Swords wore the blue jacket of a Hessian mercenary over his usual ratty wop top and jeans. He tried not to be annoyed at how long this was all taking. He was immune to edged weapons and could vomit swords on command, neither of which were any help with the loading process. He was unused to manual labor but offered to help several times, all of which Danny rebuffed. He felt naked without his everyday carry, a fat-bladed mortuary sword which he left in his car along with any other metal object that could cause a spark. There was nothing to do but wait.

Danny got the first bundled charge of powder secured in the basket of the crane and slowly lifted it to the barrel. He liked the King, even though his constant pacing made him nervous. There was already enough to be nervous about. The project had gone well up until now but in an underworld filled with psychics and oracles it was guaranteed that word had already gotten out. People already knew that Ultima Ratio Regum was not, in fact, a hobbyist project. It was not forged with steel from the throat of a King merely to break the record for the world’s most powerful smoothbore cannon. The balls were not salvaged from the Emperor’s warships, whose cannons once belched imperial daggers at the flabby heart of American democracy, just because someone thought it would be fun. Although it was fun, he couldn’t deny that. Enough fun that he would have carried out the whole project even if he wasn’t ardently committed to the cause.

No, there was a real possibility of attack. The muskets weren’t loaded with live ammunition just to show off for the cameras. They’d be useless in a straight fight versus modern firearms, but every man in the Regiment (all twelve of them) carried a handful of “special” charges, prewrapped for use in a no-shit occult underworld shootout.

But not him. Danny was unarmed, carrying nothing that could ignite the eight hundred pounds of death bagged at his feet. If something happened it would be up to the King to quickly vomit a pair of blades, one for the Redcoat and one for himself. To fill their hands.

The King coughed politely as Danny rolled the second charge into the sling.

Amid the crowd of family and friends and well wishers and the little camera crew from Wyoming News Now, a pair of gunslingers fondled their weapons and watched the festivities. Like the 333rd Regiment of Foot pretended to be a living history troop, so too did Angela Hindoubil and Santiago “Animal” Gutierrez pretend to be black powder enthusiasts. Their outfits didn’t exactly fit, mixing authentic vaquero duds with neon tie dyed cosmic cowboy attire. Their weapons, however, were genuine. Angela carried a two barreled twelve gauge and a Peacemaker in .45 long Colt. Animal convinced a couple redcoats to break character by offering them trigger time behind his Henry levergun and his Smith Wesson double action, a little lemon squeezer of a wheelgun which under a strong trigger finger could spit five bullets as fast as a semi-automatic. In turn he got to test fire a Brown Bess, stuffed with a .75 caliber ball and a fistful of lead pellets that turned it into a shotgun. He noted the hang-time between squeezing the trigger and the gunflint igniting the charge. He studied the group size attentively. Disadvantages he could exploit if and when the shooting started.

Angela and Animal knew the score. The Regiment were up to something. This was a test firing in preparation for a sinister plan, one involving their in-development supergun and a cherished national monument. A 500 pound steel ball, sailing through the air like a miniature sun to smash George Washington’s visage off Mt Rushmore. To topple Thomas Jefferson’s villa at Monticello. Bouncing up the stairs of the Lincoln memorial to knock the president’s head off like a pistol ball fired by a giant John Wilkes Booth. Sure, they had private reasons for their little rivalry. The spirits talked to Angela. Animal wanted the King of Swords’ crown. But at the end of the day it was a battle between monarchism and American democracy, and they were going to win it on the side of democracy.

Animal handed the musket back to its owner. Angela looked out at the big gun and fondled the scapular of holepunched cigarette cards around her neck. Wyatt Earp and Jesse James and Red Cloud. Without thinking about it, Animal did the same with the metal plate around his neck. It was an old tintype of the famous Tombstone Thunderbird, a pterodactyl shot and staked to the side of a barn by a posse of hunters. It lacked the religious significance of Angela’s bizarre wild west Mambo act, but even she admitted it was a lot cooler.

The Redcoats of the 333rd herded the crowd to the minimum safe distance. The firing range was a blackened swathe of prairie burnt in a previous wildfire, minimizing the risk of a fresh blaze. The Colonel explained the firing procedure in his usual patter, brim of his tricorne unbuttoned and flopping with every gesticulation. The gunslingers and the swordsman and the Redcoats and Edith’s kids and Danny’s church group and the camera crew from WNN watched the gunner play out a very long lanyard. Namond felt something move up his spine, then down again. An effect preceding its cause.

 

The report from the cannon washed over them a second or two after the ball exited the barrel, carried by a pillowy cushion of black powder smoke. The quarter ton steel orb seemed to hang motionless in the air, high enough that it didn’t appear to move relative to the backdrop of the sky and the plane of burned grass. The gunslingers were forced to revise their earlier assessment. It didn’t resemble the sun at all.

The target was a glacial erratic boulder, brilliant white against the black plain like a sole surviving tooth sticking out of a rotten mouth. The cannonball converted it to a plume of debris, symmetrical with the white cloud still hanging in front of the gun. The crash of pulverized stone echoed a second later. Amid the haze of debris, everyone saw it. The camera crew caught it on film. A few clued-in onlookers even recognized it for what it was.

Then the storm swallowed them.