Eric Flint's Blog, page 320

The Forever Engine – Snippet 39

The Forever Engine – Snippet 39

 

“So, you will not go from here by land? A pity. I know a man who has mules for sale. Very good price.”

There was enough regret in Cevik’s expression that I suspected he would have gotten a piece of the “very good price.”

“Ask him if we can get enough boats to move all his troops upriver,” Gordon ordered.

“No, not on such short notice,” he answered after I translated the question. “I doubt we can find enough to move over fifty men by tomorrow, and that may cost you a pretty penny. You have silver?”

The fact that Cevik Bey had, in an offhanded and conversational tone, let me know the Turks would not be underwriting the expedition was not lost on me. As to money, Gordon had over five hundred pounds’ worth of British, Turkish, German, and Serbian currency in his “war chest,” but there was no point in advertising the fact.

“We have silver, Cevik Bey, although our pockets are not bottomless.”

“Ah, whose are?” he asked with a shrug.

“Ask him if he will support the mission as he was ordered to,” Gordon said.

I did, but with a bit more diplomacy.

“Yes, of course we will help. These Serbs, they make nothing but trouble. They deserve to be punished, and will be. But my orders are we cannot cross in force without provocation. You understand?”

I translated for Gordon and then translated his reply back, but without the insult and profanity.

“The threat posed by the Old Man of the Mountain is as great to Turkey as it is to Britain,” I said. “Surely the Sublime Porte intends more vigorous Turkish action.”

“Ah, but the Sublime Porte also knows that the world judges the vigor of Turkish actions differently than it does those of others,” Cevik Bey answered. “Less than two years ago the Bulgarians raided across the Danube on a regular basis, intent on provoking war. The world paid little attention to the vigor of their actions. But when Turkey responded with force, the world noticed. Great Britain itself noticed, and joined the world in condemning the vigor of Turkey’s response. ‘Outrage’ was the word the British prime minister used, I believe, and the British newspapers used stronger words, ugly words.

“So now Britain remembers its friend Turkey. This makes us happy. It makes me happy, Mr. Fargo. I have always admired the British.”

To prove the point he flashed Gordon an enormous smile. Not knowing the gist of the exchange, Gordon returned the smile, if with less enthusiasm.

“However, our other neighbors are not so friendly as Britain,” Cevik Bey continued. “When you are gone, we will still live next to them. So it must be clear to the world that Serbia is the more . . . vigorous participant in this incident, and that Turkey acts only in response to their crimes.”

“How do you plan to arrange that?” I asked.

Cevik Bey took another sip of champagne and considered his answer.

“I have a battalion of Bosnian riflemen and two mountain guns. I will march them overland to Uvats and wait there. We will cross the border when and if it is necessary to prevent harm to you, our friends.”

“How will you know when we are in difficulty?”

“Signal rockets,” he answered, and waved his hand as if in imitation of a rocket spiraling up into the sky. “We will send a dozen with you. Send them up if you need help.”

“And how will we stay alive while we’re waiting for you to march a battalion and drag two guns up those mountain valleys?”

“Ah, I send soldiers with you as well, just not so many as to be a provocation, you see? I sent a platoon of good riflemen ahead to Uvats under a sergeant I trust very much. Also, he speaks English. He was American once, but converted to Islam. He is . . . scouting into Serbia, actually. But I sent no Turkish officer, so no provocation. You see?”

Not entirely, but it sounded as if the patrol he had out, if it was lost, was expendable. We probably were as well, in his mind. I translated for Gordon to give myself time to think it over.

“It’s important you not react with surprise or anger to this,” I said to Gordon as a preface. His frown grew deeper, eyes darker.

“Just tell me what the bloody Wog said.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cevik stiffen. He may not have spoken English, but he knew the word “wog.”

“Look at me, not him when I tell you this. He understands the word you just used. Are you trying to blow this mission up?” I asked calmly, as if discussing the weather. “Are you trying to get the Turks so pissed off they’ll send us away and you won’t have to go through with it? Because that’s how it looks to me, and it’s probably how it will look to General Buller as well.”

He didn’t say anything in reply, but his face began getting red — whether with anger or shame I couldn’t say. Probably both — they usually keep company.

“Cevik Bey will back us up with a battalion once we’re in trouble,” I said. “But for now we get just a rifle platoon he sent to scout ahead into Serbia.”

Gordon sat quietly for a moment, lips compressed in a hard thin line.

“One platoon?” he said finally.

“Here’s a better question: all the local officers along the border were alerted and told to cooperate. How did he know we’d come here and send someone ahead?”

His anger disappeared, replaced by confusion and then curiosity.

“A spy?” he asked.

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. Too complicated, too many spies. Maybe he was just being proactive, but I bet he already had his guys out there and is using our appearance as an excuse. We’re his fig leaf for maybe going over the line in poking the Serbs.”

He thought about it for a moment and then nodded.

“Very well. Tell him we appreciate his help and foresight.”

Not bad. I passed the sentiment along, and Cevik Bey smiled again.

“Will you cable ahead to Uvats and have your men waiting?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, the telegraph to the frontier is out of service. It happens fairly often. I have written a dispatch to the commander of the Jandarma in Uvats and another to Sergeant Durson, when you find him.” He held up the two sealed letters. “Sergeant Durson reads, by the way. Quite admirable for a sergeant. He may not be in Uvats but he was to keep the Uvats Jandarma informed of his activity. Finding him should not be a problem.”

I translated for Gordon, who took the news without visible reaction aside from a small nod. He was getting better at this.

“You understand,” I said to Cevik Bey, “that even with this platoon of riflemen, who I am sure are among your very best, our party may suffer casualties before you can come to our assistance?”

His face became serious, with a trace of sadness in his eyes. “Ah, let us hope not. If so, it would cause me great distress.”

“Because of how much you admire the British,” I offered.

He smiled, bowed his head slightly, and spread his hands. “We understand each other perfectly. But let us pray it does not come to that. Ibrahim Durson is an excellent sergeant. His men are always under control, and he follows orders exactly. He also never makes annoying suggestions. It is bad for a sergeant to have ideas of his own. Does Captain Gordon not agree with this?”

“He says he likes it when sergeants know their place and keep their opinions to themselves,” I translated for Gordon.

“I don’t know about sergeants, but I certainly agree with respect to translators.”

 

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 38

The Forever Engine – Snippet 38

 

“Perhaps, although against the bandits there were two of us, and Jeanne had both the revolver and carbine, so really we were quite adequately armed.”

“Your friend Jeanne sounds like . . .” I started but then I stopped, remembering a famous engraving of a woman with a revolver and carbine facing eight Persian bandits. A surge of excitement went through me.

“I have fourteen balls at your disposal; go find six more friends,” I said.

Gabrielle laughed and shook her head.

“Jeanne never said that, but they put it on the picture anyway. They did not put me in the picture, I suppose because I was simply a helpless woman.”

“But Jeanne Dieulafoy was — is a woman as well. My God, Gabi, you were on the Dieulafoy expedition to Susiana?”

I sat down on the chair next to her, partly because I felt a bit light-headed.

“Yes, it was my first real adventure. And yes, Jeanne is a woman, but no one would consider her helpless or defenseless. You have heard of the expedition?”

“Heard of it? I’m an ancient historian. My specialty, other than Roman coinage, is Achaemenid Persia. Jeanne Dieulafoy’s photographs of the inscriptions and architecture at Susa are still one of our key resources. Hell, half the books on the Persian Army have her photograph of the Frieze of the Immortals on the cover. Most of those buildings and artifacts were gone by my time, either destroyed or badly degraded by the elements, so all we have is her photographs. Anyone serious about Achaemenid Persia owns a portfolio of her work.”

“It would please her very much to hear that. You should meet her when . . .” She stopped, and the excitement left her face. “Oh, you cannot. After this, you will be gone.”

***

We unloaded at the waterfront in lashing rain and then trudged the two hundred yards through scattered warehouses and sheds to the city gates, which were closed and secured. It took another fifteen minutes of shouting and finally a couple shots from my Webley to rouse someone, then another ten minutes before they got someone who spoke Turkish. The garrison was nominally Turkish, but this was Bosnia. Bosnian, along with all the other Slavic languages, was not part of my repertoire.

We got an angry Turkish officer next, shouting at us through the postern window to go away and come back in the morning. It was well after midnight, and he’d probably been sound asleep.

“Tell this scoundrel to open the gate at once, unless he wants my fist in his nose,” Gordon ordered.

“Captain Gordon of the British Army sends his respects to the garrison commander,” I translated. “The commandant has been told of our coming and will be anxious to see us. We are on an important mission for the Sublime Porte.”

The Sublime Porte, the grand gate at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul where the sultan’s vizier traditionally greeted representatives of foreign governments, had come to mean the Turkish foreign ministry. The Turkish officer hesitated.

“Look for yourself,” I added. “Do we look like a band of wandering gypsies? These are soldiers on a secret mission. We are going to fight the Serbs, with Allah’s blessing and your commander’s help.”

I took a chance mentioning the Serbs, but it sealed the deal. The officer stuck his head out a bit and looked the company over, then nodded and withdrew. We heard a barked order and in a few seconds heard the heavy beam withdrawn from the gate. Then it opened onto a courtyard.

My first view of Višegràd was not very impressive, but it’s hard for any town to wow you in the middle of a thunderstorm. The courtyard was no more than thirty yards square, lined with a couple small one-story brick buildings. Lightning flashed, and I saw the suggestion of taller buildings beyond them.

“We need accommodations for our party for the night, somewhere out of the weather,” I told the officer.

“My commander will decide that.”

“What is your name, Effendi?” I asked.

“Lieutenant Kadir Malak.”

“Lieutenant Malak, I ask you to think for a moment. Your commandant is asleep. He will wish to rouse himself and prepare a reception for us, but will be embarrassed to make us wait while he does so. May I suggest you send a runner to him now, and that you see to our billeting, giving him time to prepare for us without embarrassment?”

Malak nodded thoughtfully, even as I was speaking, then sent one of the small group of soldiers milling around running into the heart of the town.

“I know of a stable near here where you may stay. You have silver to pay the proprietor?”

* * *

An hour later, Gordon and I entered the office of the commandant, a middle-aged officer, slender in the face and limbs but large in the belly. He rose and smiled in greeting as Lieutenant Malak escorted us in. I saw a clutter of telegrams on his desk and suspected he had been catching up on his orders as to how to handle us. There was also a pen and ink, writing paper, sealing wax, and two folded and sealed letters, the wax seals on them probably still warm.

“Gentlemen, peace be upon you,” he said in Turkish.

“And upon you,” I answered in Turkmen. “May I present Captain Gordon of Her Most Britannic Majesty’s Service.”

“Staff Major Cevik, at your disposal. Please be seated. I have ordered refreshments. Please.”

I translated the introduction, and we all sat in straight-backed chairs, Gordon and I in front of his desk, Malak against the wall.

“Forgive me,” I said, “if my Turkish is poor. I speak Turkmen.”

“Ah, yes, it sounded unusual. Your accent, it is up-country, we would say, but understandable.”

“Your rank — Erkan-ı Harb Binbaşısı — it caused me a moment’s pause. Do I address you as pasha or bey?”

A major was normally addressed as Effendi, the lowest of the three forms of respectful address, but I wasn’t sure for a “staff major.” Throwing in the possibility of pasha was pure flattery. I can kiss ass when the situation calls for it.

Cevik chuckled.

“Bey. Only very exalted men — generals and governors, are pashas.”

One servant brought in a silver ice bucket with a bottle of champagne and another brought a tray with three glasses. I had expected coffee, not alcohol. The servant popped the cork and began pouring. Cevik Bey must have seen my look and laughed again.

“You are surprised to see me serve champagne? I am a good Moslem, I assure you. I follow all the teachings of the prophet. But also I love champagne. So I thought long about it. I prayed for guidance, and this is the thought Allah sent to me: champagne did not exist in Mohammed’s time, so he cannot have said it was a sin to drink it. You agree?”

In answer I raised my glass in a toast.

“To our joint endeavor,” I said, first in Turkmen then English.

Then we got down to business. Gordon laid out our plan: hire boats and travel twenty-five miles up the Lim River to the border village of Uvats. The Lim flowed into the Drina about seven miles upstream from Višegràd. Depending on the speed of the boats, and how fast the rivers were flowing after all this rain, we could make the trip in a long day or a long morning. From Uvats we would have to travel overland. The large Serbian town of Priboj straddled the Lim River just across the border, and Gabrielle had told us Serbian batteries commanded the river, so we’d have to go overland from there. Kokin Brod was only a dozen miles southeast of Priboj, but it was through mountainous countryside.

Cevik Bey frowned through the description, but more in thought than irritation, I thought.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 37

The Forever Engine – Snippet 37

 

TWENTY-THREE

October 8/9, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Aloft over Turkish Bosnia

Harding might have been an asshole, but he was a righteous navigator. He dropped us right down through the storm into the valley of the Drina River. The river’s surface, visible in the glare of the bow searchlight, danced in angry whitecaps. Wind gusts made Intrepid shudder and sideslip, and sheets of rain slammed into the glass windows of the bridge.

As bad as it was down here, it was certainly worse aloft, which is why Harding brought Intrepid down as soon as he did. Another reason was the lightning, crackling and exploding all along the banks to either side, as ferocious a display as I’d ever seen in my life. Intrepid was struck three times, but as soon as Harding had seen the water, he had dropped the ship’s ground cable and raised its lightning masts. All three strikes had grounded into the river below us.

Gordon and I declared an uneasy truce and returned to the wheelhouse as we approached our landing area. It looked like hell out there.

“How are you going to return in all this?” Gordon asked. “You can’t go up into those thunderheads, surely.”

“We’ll follow the river back north,” Harding answered. “It flows into the Sava near the Austrian frontier. With luck we will have a break in the weather and can make the run to Ujvidék from there. It’s only fifty miles. If the weather doesn’t break, we’ll have to follow the Sava west to Zagreb.”

That would mean not being back at Ujvidék by morning, possibly alerting Tesla’s informants to the threat, but there was no point in belaboring the obvious.

“We’re going to have to change the plan anyway,” I said. “We were going to camp in a meadow down there while Gordon and I contact the Turks in Višegràd. That won’t work in this weather.”

“What’s wrong, Fargo. Don’t fancy getting your dainty feet wet?” Harding asked.

“The plan made sense because there are no villages down there in the meadows. They’re all up in the foothills, so not much chance of anyone stumbling across us at night.”

“And?” he demanded.

“And there’s a reason there are no villages on the meadows. It’s the same reason they call those meadows ‘flood plains.’ With this rain, by morning there’s going to be a couple feet of water over all that ground and anything not tied down is going to be twenty miles downriver. And no, I don’t fancy getting that wet.”

Harding scanned the riverbank for a while and scowled, trying to come up, I imagined, with a good reason not to agree with me. But facts were facts.

“Very well. If we are going to drop you closer, we may as well take you to the bloody city gates. Mr. Jenkins, take us down to wave-top level, if you please.”

“Wave-top level, aye, aye, sir.” Jenkins replied. “Trimsman, one per cent negative buoyancy.”

“In this weather any sensible person will be indoors, and the lunatics may think we’re a riverboat,” Harding added and glared at me, daring me to disagree. I returned his look until he turned away.

“Captain Gordon, I’ll let the others know about the change in plans,” I said.

“Very well. I will join you when we arrive.”

I left the bridge into the driving rain, slid down the ladder to the superstructure level and then down the adjoining ladder to the main deck. One of the naval ratings had shown me how, feet on the outside of the handrail using friction to slow me, and I was getting pretty good at it. I opened the hatch into the superstructure just abeam of the midship port gun mount and ducked out of the rain.

The group was assembled in the crew’s mess, with the tables pushed against the walls to make room. I looked them over and shook my head. They were probably all in civilian clothes, but nobody seemed to think about their overcoats. All twenty Bavarians wore identical field gray greatcoats while the twelve Marines wore identical blue-gray coats. Von Schtecker was chatting with Gabrielle, but he bowed to her and crossed the room to meet me.

“We are ready,” he announced. “We should be nearing the landing ground, ja?”

“Yeah. Slight change of plans: Intrepid is taking us right into Višegràd.”

“Sehr gut. Bad weather for marching, even though the men are well-equipped.”

“Yeah, pretty snappy greatcoats.”

“Ja. All insignia removed, as you said. You see?”

“That’ll fool everyone, no doubt.”

He looked at me and smiled condescendingly.

“I see, Herr Professor. You believe our party of thirty-four men, all of military age and bearing, who speak only English and German and who carry the latest military rifles, would fool everyone if only we had thought to wear different colored coats. I think not, and I must tell you, speaking as a military man, that there are advantages to the peasants knowing we are capable of taking care of ourselves. Bandits infest these hills, but they attack only the weak.”

He was right. The lack of insignia wasn’t so much intended to fool people as to give the two governments what in my time we called “plausible deniability.”

I left von Schtecker and joined Gabrielle. Her gear was again at her feet, but I took a closer look this time. A rucksack that looked about three-quarters full. A long blanket roll wrapped in a rubberized canvas ground cloth, with the two ends of the roll tied together. She’d wear that over one shoulder and across her body. She had a canvas haversack for over the other shoulder, a good-sized canteen also on a long shoulder strap, a brown leather gun case, and a leather bandolier with big, thick ammunition pouches on it. Her headgear was a grayish-white cloth-covered cork sun helmet, stained and worn. None of her gear looked new except for the leather gun case.

“You’ve done this before,” I said. “What are you packin’?”

“Many things. Spare stockings and underwear, one clean blouse, some concentrated –”

“No, I meant what’s in the gun case?”

“Ah. It is the shotgun. I find that more useful than the rifle in most cases. I used to carry the twenty-gauge with two barrels, but this is a new gun from your country, designed by Monsieur John Browning. Have you heard of him in your time?”

“Now and then. May I?”

She nodded, and I unzipped the case and carefully slipped the shotgun out.

“Oh, baby!”

She had a Winchester Model 1887 twelve-gauge lever action, and it was like new. What was I thinking? It was new. They’d only been making them for about a year.

“You like?” she asked.

“Shit, yeah. Only thing is, I’m beginning to feel undergunned with just a Webley. The magazine holds five and one in the action?”

“I do not carry it with a round in the chamber. I do not think that safe, but yes, five cartridges in the magazine. The twenty-gauge was adequate for most purposes, but ammunition was sometimes difficult to find. Also the number five buckshot is too light, I think, if the target is a man. The double-zero shot of the twelve gauge is better.”

That was certainly true, if a little cold-blooded. Hard to beat double-ought buck for taking down a person.

“You ever shoot a man?”

“Non, but nearly so. I have had to threaten to do this thing.”

“Think you could put the trigger if you had to?”

“Oui,” she answered simply, and I believed her.

“So what made you point a shotgun at someone?”

“Bandits threatened to steal the supplies of our expedition. There were eight of them, très féroce.”

“Eight of them, and you with only two rounds. That why you decided to go with a lever action?”

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 36

The Forever Engine – Snippet 36

 

“No, Gabi. He’s crazy because he sends clockwork mechanical spiders and assassins high on hashish to kill people who disagree with him. I’ve met him. Odd guy.”

“I have only seen photographs of him. Do you think he misses his sisters?”

I blinked at the conversational sharp right turn, but before I could answer there was a loud pounding on the door.

“Fargo, are you in there?” Gordon shouted from the corridor.

“There’s trouble,” I told Gabrielle and then raised my voice to answer him. “Yeah, I’m in here. Come on in.”

“Is Mademoiselle Courbiere with you?” he shouted.

“Oui, I am here,” she answered.

“May I come in?” he shouted.

I couldn’t help but smile. There he was, steaming mad out in the corridor, and still impeccably polite, asking permission from the lady to enter her quarters, and asking it at the top of his lungs.

“Oui, you may enter.”

“Are you decent?” he shouted.

My grin got bigger as Gabrielle frowned in confusion.

“I believe so, but sometimes I do not think everyone agrees,” she called back.

“He means are we dressed,” I explained.

“Ah! We have on the clothes,” she called out.

There was a moment of silence, and then Gordon opened the door and stepped in, red-faced with anger or embarrassment or both. He made a little bow to Gabrielle before turning on me.

“Thank you, Mademoiselle. You are most kind. Fargo, what the bloody hell were you thinking, insulting Harding like that on the bridge? Don’t you know we need his help to carry this off?”

“Relax, Gordon. Have a seat.”

“I will not relax, and I prefer to stand when dressing someone down.”

Gabrielle turned to me, confused again.

“This ‘dressing down,’ it has again to do with the decency? And why did you insult Captain Harding?”

“Yes, we’d both like to know that,” Gordon said.

“So sit down and I’ll tell you.”

He stood fuming for a few more seconds, but when I showed no sign of budging he looked around the tiny cabin, pulled the single straight-backed chair out from the writing desk, and sat facing us. I turned to Gabrielle first.

“Harding insulted you. I didn’t like it, but that’s not the reason I insulted him.”

I turned to Gordon.

“I insulted him because we need his support and cooperation, and we were not going to get it any other way.”

“Just how, in that twisted, convoluted brain of yours, did you imagine this would increase his chances of helping us?”

“He insulted me?” Gabrielle said, curious rather than angered. “What did he say?”

“He called you a trollop. You aren’t a trollop.”

“Non, certainly not. A trollop is a woman promiscuous, or who exchanges sexual favors for money, neither of which am I. You were right to disagree with him. And how did you insult him?”

I told her.

She started laughing, harder than I’d ever seen her laugh. She covered her mouth with her hands and leaned back against the wall behind the bunk, laughing so hard tears came to her eyes. Lightning flashed outside the cabin and thunder shook Intrepid, and for a moment she froze, eyes wider, and then she started laughing again, even harder than before, laughing at the lightning too, or her fear of it. I laughed as well, and after a moment Gordon’s anger melted away and he joined us.

“Oh God!” he said as our laughter began to subside. “Rum, sodomy, and the lash? I don’t believe I’ll ever forget that.”

“I can’t claim it. A young British Army officer, alive right now, so I won’t tell you his name, will go on to become First Lord of the Admiralty and eventually Prime Minister, at least in my world. He’ll say it. He had a way with words.”

“I dare say. But really, Fargo, what were you thinking?”

“Yes, Jack,” Gabrielle said. “Harding is not a very interesting man, but his good feelings are important to us, oui?”

“Non, cheri. His good feelings are meaningless. What is important is his cooperation. Gordon, I as much as threatened to kill him if I got back from this, and I did it in such a way that everyone on the ship is going to hear about it.”

“Precisely, old man. That’s rather the point.”

“Yeah. So what happens if we don’t come back? People will say Harding sabotaged the mission to keep me from making good on my threat. They will whisper that, whether it’s true or not, and Chillingham will hear the whispers. That’s what I meant when I asked him who he was more afraid of, me or Chillingham. Trust me, Harding’s not afraid of me.”

Gordon rubbed his chin and scowled.

“Still too damned much of a gamble. More flies with honey than vinegar, that sort of thing. You need to look before you leap, Fargo, or better yet leave all this sort of thing to me. You’re just the translator. It would be best if you remembered that.”

“This Lord Chillingham, he is a very bad man,” Gabrielle said, reasserting her right to change the subject.

“You’ve met him?” I asked.

“No, but Renfrew has told me enough.”

“Interesting,” I said. “So we’re all in agreement on that point, including the royal family.”

“Not so much the queen, from what I understand,” Gordon said. “Not that she likes him — too aristocratic for her tastes, I would imagine. But she’s not willing to move against him.”

“He’s too aristocratic for my tastes,” I said, “but a queen’s? That’s a little hard to get my head around.”

Gordon leaned forward, and for the first time I saw a hint of fire in him, other than just anger.

“You have to understand, Fargo, the old aristocracy, people like Chillingham who own probably four-fifths of the land in England, look down on the royal family. Really they do. They see them as a pack of nouveaux-riches German bog-runners, Johnny-come-latelys the lot of them. To Chillingham’s way of thinking, when his family won its coat of arms, the queen’s family was still cutting peat on Luneburg Heath, and they have no business telling proper Englishmen how to run their country. But for all that, the queen won’t stand up to him.”

“What can she do, anyway?” I asked.

“The one real power the monarchy retains: create lords. She could flood the House of Lords with her own people, but she won’t. God knows how the old aristocracy would react, and she’s not willing to chance it.”

“Her son will,” Gabrielle said.

Gordon nodded but seemed to grow angrier as he did so.

“Yes, the Prince of Wales will, once he’s king and assuming he lives that long. Fargo, he’s the one man in Europe with the guts and brains to stand up to Chillingham and perhaps come out on top, and you’ve decided to roger his mistress! What in God’s name were you thinking?”

“I am not Renfrew’s mistress!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “We are friends, sometimes we are allies, but not lovers. He is currently enamored of the Countess Warwick, n’est pas? And who is this Roger?”

Hearing those words from Gabrielle made me feel light in the chest, but that made no sense. Our relationship was based on mutual physical attraction without promise, or even prospect, of a deeper emotional commitment from either of us. Friends with benefits, we’d say in my time. Gabrielle couldn’t understand falling in love, let alone do it, and as for me, I didn’t want to even think about that, or where this entire quest was inevitably headed. So her words shouldn’t have mattered.

But they did.

When I told her people were strange, I meant it, present company included.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 35

The Forever Engine – Snippet 35

 

“Four eighty by the glass,” Jenkins announced, and Harding shook himself as if waking from an unpleasant dream.

“I had better see to my vessel,” Harding said. “You gentlemen may be more comfortable belowdecks. If I were you I’d make sure those Bavarians and Mr. Fargo’s French trollop are ready to disembark. I believe we are running a bit ahead of schedule.”

Gordon shot me an angry look, as if I were to blame for Harding’s attitude and manners, but I didn’t much care what Gordon thought. There were only two people in this particular world I gave a damn about — Gabrielle and Thomson — and Harding was about to write them both off because it was more convenient to do that than to do his job. Never mind what I might have to do to them later to save my own world, this moment was real, they were still alive, and this spiteful little shit wasn’t just going to turn his back on them.

“I guess it makes you feel big to insult a woman who isn’t here to defend herself,” I said. “Especially since if she were here, she’d make you look like a monkey — again.”

“I won’t –” he started, but I cut him off.

“Fuck you, Harding. Fuck you up the ass. That’s how it’s usually done in the Royal Navy, isn’t it? What are the three enduring traditions of the service again? Oh, yeah, I remember: rum, sodomy, and the lash. Which one’s your favorite?”

There was a moment of stunned silence on the bridge. Harding stood with his mouth open, face turning red, and then I heard a nervous snicker from one of the trimsmen behind me.

“You’re in a bad spot, Harding,” I said. “If we come back, you and I might have to have a real serious conversation you won’t like. If we don’t come back, then no matter how good an excuse you come up with, Lord Chillingham is going to flay the skin from your bones. I guess you’re going to have to decide which one of us you’re more afraid of.”

There I was, using Chillingham as a boogey man again. He was becoming so useful in the role I was starting to feel gratitude toward him for being such an over-the-top son of a bitch. I left the bridge while Gordon wasted his time sputtering an apology to Harding.

***

I found Gabrielle in her cabin. She sat on her bunk, dressed in a green-grey riding habit, with her gear packed and piled neatly at her feet. I noticed her hands clasped tightly in her lap and her face paler than usual.

“What’s wrong, Gabi?”

“I am frightened. The weather . . . it is not good for the flyer, is it? For the trim? If the ship tilts too far to one side, the lifting panels cannot compensate, because they will line up with each other and then they lose all their lift and we fall.”

I couldn’t exactly reassure her on that point. Flying by jet was safer than driving a car, but they didn’t have either of those here. I didn’t know much about the safety record of liftwood flyers. I felt a shudder of anxiety myself, but it was submerged in the wave of surprise I felt at Gabrielle’s fear. She showed so few emotions it was easy to fall into thinking she was immune to them, but fear was a basic animal instinct.

She cried out as the porthole flashed white, flooding the room with light. She clamped her hands over her ears with the crack of thunder immediately following it, her face wrinkled up and tears streaming from her eyes.

One long step took me across the little cabin. I sat down next to her and put my arms around her, and she clung to me as if to a life preserver at sea.

“I do not like the lightning,” she explained in a small voice, trying to choke back the panic. “Or the thunder. It hurts my ears.”

“Yeah, it sucks.”

“It sucks?”

“That means it’s bad.”

She nodded her agreement against my chest.

“Did my pistol shooting hurt your ears yesterday?” I asked, just to make conversation and divert her mind.

“Oui. All my life the loud noises bother me, more so than others. So I could not sleep while you shoot. But it was good watching you. You are funny the way you shoot.”

“I’m here all week.”

She lifted her head and looked at me, confusion momentarily replacing the fear.

“Sometimes the things you say — I understand the words but not the sentences.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot, mostly from my students. Listen, I kind of kicked a hornet’s nest up on the bridge a little while ago. Gordon’s going to be pissed — angry — at me and he may try to take it out on you, maybe try to leave you behind.”

“We have the agreement. He is not an honorable man?”

“He’s a frightened man. To be honest, I don’t know what sort of guy he is under all the fear.”

“You need to find this thing out, Jack,” she said, concern for me momentarily trumping her own fear. “So much for you now depends on him. For me as well, but I still have information he needs which I have not shared.”

“Good girl. I figured, but it’s good to be sure. He needs me as a translator with the Turks and maybe as bait. Our plan doesn’t use me for that, but it’s always there as a back-up.”

She was right about Gordon. What did I really know about him? He was angry a lot, probably as a cover for his fear. He drank for the same reason, but he’d stopped, and that showed something. What sort of man was he underneath?

Lighting flashed outside the porthole, and Gabrielle jumped again.

“Tell me something about this Tesla guy I don’t already know,” I said, just to get her talking and take her mind off the storm. “Tell me about his folks, his family.”

“He . . . his father was an orthodox priest, well-educated and très charismatique. It is said he had many affairs of the heart outside of his marriage.”

“No vows of celibacy in the orthodox church, huh?”

“Non. Priests marry and raise families, the same as the Protestants. His wife, Tesla’s mother, was the daughter of a priest herself, but she was uneducated, unable to read. She memorized many of the Serbian epic poems and recited them to Nikola as he grew.”

“Are they still alive?”

“Non, both dead. His father died eight years ago. His mother died six years ago, when he lived in France. He was grief-stricken at her loss, so much he suffered the physical collapse. Strange. He broke the ties with his family ten years ago, and yet he was so upset at the deaths of his parents. This is odd, don’t you think?”

“People are strange, Gabi, no getting around it. Is there a woman in his life?”

“He had three sisters, all married, but they died in an outbreak of typhus not long after his mother died.”

She started telling me where they had lived, what their husbands had done for a living, how many kids they had had, but I shook my head.

“Oh, a woman. You mean the romance? Non, he is — what is the word you used? — celibate. He says the celibacy keeps his head clear.”

“A lot of nutcases think that.”

“Nut case?” she asked and then nodded. “Ah, you mean the crazy person. But is he crazy because he has the different ideas?”

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 34

The Forever Engine – Snippet 34

TWENTY-TWO

October 8/9, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Aloft over Turkish Bosnia

Intrepid shuddered and side-slipped as she pushed through the darkness, rain lashing her deck and superstructure. The weather front which pursued us the previous day overtook us not long after we began our night run into Bosnia. It could hardly have missed us once we’d started heading southwest instead of southeast.

Two trimsmen wrestled with the forest of levers at the back of Intrepid‘s wheelhouse, fighting the turbulence which rocked the flyer, each change in deck angle altering the power and balance of the liftwood louvers deep in the hull. I had thought this massive steel flyer would be immune to the effects of weather, at least compared to a hydrogen-filled dirigible. I was wrong.

“Try to hold her steady, Wickers, there’s a good fellow,” Captain Harding ordered.

“Aye, aye, sir,” the senior trimsman answered, strain apparent in his voice.

“Wouldn’t do to come this far just to fly into a mountain,” the captain added.

For a moment the bridge was as bright as noon, the sky to starboard filed with a dozen branching, broken lances of raw electricity, and I jumped despite myself. The sizzling crack and rolling roar of thunder came immediately afterwards.

“Damn me!” Gordon said beside me.

Captain Harding smiled, but it was a calculated, tightly controlled smile.

“Compass house reports two degree drift to starboard,” Lieutenant Jenkins reported from the bank of speaking tubes connecting the bridge to the rest of the ship.

“Helm, come two degrees to port and steady back on one seven zero,” Harding ordered.

“Two degrees to port. Waiting to steady on one seven zero,” the helmsman answered.

“With a sluggish bridge compass and all this gusting wind, our analytic engine isn’t much good to us,” Harding told Gordon and me. “Just the night for some good old-fashioned navigation, wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Jenkins?”

“As you say, sir,” the lieutenant answered absentmindedly, his attention on the speaking tubes and the bridge compass.

Beside me Gordon tried to look nonchalant, but I could smell the fear on him through his own rain gear. He clasped his hands behind his back, I figured to keep from fidgeting, but the desire to do something — pace, drum his fingers, tap his foot — was so powerful I could almost feel it, as if he were an overwound clock ready to fly apart.

“How close would you say we were to our course, Mr. Jenkins?” Captain Harding asked. Jenkins licked his lips and thought for a moment before answering.

“I’d say we’re a good twenty cables downwind of our course.”

“Twenty cables? Really? Well, that would put us into a mountainside if we try to come down. I don’t think we’ve surrendered that much ground, though. Let’s drop down and see if we can find this river.”

“Sir, we’re still well short of Višegràd. No need to –”

“Take us down, Mr. Jenkins. Light the bow searchlight. May as well see what we’re flying into.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Trimsman, two percent negative buoyancy. Bosun, bow light on, twenty degree down angle.”

A petty officer closed the collar of his oilskin slicker and ducked out into the rain, then slid down the companionway to the main deck.

“How long is a cable? Do you know?” I asked Gordon, more to make conversation than because I really wanted to know.

He looked at me, eyes moving quickly from side to side like a cornered animal. Confusion, irritation, panic, all played across his face in less than a second, and then he took a breath and was under control.

“Two hundred yards.”

Twenty cables times two hundred yards — Jenkins was saying we were more than two miles off our projected course. That was more than enough to put us out of the river valley and over the mountains.

“How does the glass read, Mr. Jenkins?” the captain asked.

“Five hundred fifty fathoms and dropping, sir. Now five forty.”

“The tallest mountain peaks around here are twenty-seven hundred feet. Close enough to five hundred fathoms. We’ll know soon enough which of us is the better navigator, eh, Jenkins?”

“As you say, sir.”

“Of course with this storm the glass is running low anyway, so we’re a few fathoms above the read. Nothing to worry about for a few more minutes, anyway. Who’s for a nip?”

He took a flask out of his coat pocket and held it out toward Gordon and myself.

“I’m not too proud,” Gordon said and took the flask.

“I’ve noticed that about you,” Captain Harding said.

Gordon paused for a moment, the flask in his hand, and as he did the bridge exploded in light around us and another latticework of lightning filled the window behind Harding, backlighting him. This time I didn’t jump.

Gordon handed him back the flask.

“Changed my mind.”

“Particular about your whiskey, are you?” Harding asked.

“Just who I drink it with.”

Harding laughed, then offered the flask to me. I took it and sipped — Irish, like Reggie Llewellyn always carried. I thought about Reggie, what he’d make of all this, but the truth was I never really knew what was going on inside his head. Still, he’d been a friend, whatever that had meant to him, and it had meant something. I remembered his regiment’s motto and lifted the flask as a toast.

“Who dares, wins.”

I drank again.

“If so, we’re on the road to glory tonight,” Harding answered as he took back the flask. “Bad as this weather is, I wouldn’t count on much support from us once we drop you off. Barring mishap we’ll make the run back to Ujvidék by morning, but I think it better we sit out any more of this weather. No point in tempting fate too often.”

In other words, once he landed us we were on our own and good riddance. Ever since the dinner that first night out of Munich, Harding’s attitude had soured. There had been traces of his contempt for Gordon earlier, but now it had deepened and broadened, including Gabrielle and myself as well. Mostly I’d tried to just stay out of his way.

“Corporal O’Mara has been singing your praises to anyone willing to listen, Fargo,” Harding went on. “I’ve decided to send his section along with you, if there are no objections.”

“Ask Captain Gordon. He’s in command.”

“Of course he is. Captain Gordon, will that be acceptable to you, sir?” he asked with mocking courtesy.

“Yes,” Gordon answered.

O’Mara had been “singing my praises,” but he didn’t have much good to say about Gordon, so that could be a problem for him, and I was sure Harding knew that when he made the call.

Harding was navy, Gordon army. Harding’s naval rank of captain was the equivalent of an army colonel, so he outranked Gordon by three pay grades, but Gordon was in charge of the expedition. Maybe that wasn’t sitting well. Corporal O’Mara was in Harding’s crew, but now the Marine couldn’t stop talking about the American with the pipe. On this ship I had the feeling there was room for only one hero, and Gabrielle’s humiliation of him at dinner that first night had been the last straw.

So Harding would take care of his ship and get some payback for what happened to his men and maybe rid himself of a “disloyal” Marine, but as far as our mission went, we could pound sand for all he cared — inter-service rivalry and personal jealousy trumping everything else. I’d come back over a hundred years and to a different world or reality or whatever the hell it was just to find the same old bullshit.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 33

The Forever Engine – Snippet 33

Without lowering the Webley, I scanned the target for signs of light.

“Not very good shooting, I’m afraid,” Gordon said. “Only one shot even on the paper.”

I fired three more rounds, took another step to the left, and then immediately broke open the revolver. A release wheel popped all six empty casings out.

“Better,” Gordon said. “At least you’re on the paper and one round is in the black. There probably wasn’t much call for a translator to actually fire his weapon.”

“You wouldn’t think so,” I answered.

I dug six more rounds out of my pocket, but without a speed loader it took way too long to get all of them in. As soon as I did, I clicked the Webley shut and raised it back into my tactical stance, fired three rounds, and took two steps to the right.

“You might try firing just one round until you’ve got the hang of it,” Gordon said, but then frowned when he looked at the target. “That’s actually a rather good grouping. Still low and to the right.”

Three more rounds, step to the right, revolver open, spent brass tinkling on the deck.

“Still low and right, not quite as tight as last time, but respectable. Keep at it. You may end up able to hit something after all.”

“Thanks. Say, do me a favor, would you? At least keep an open mind about the plan?”

He turned and walked away without answering me. He’d fired a total of one round. For what? Was it even worth cleaning his pistol for one round? Well, that was his business, not mine. I had thirty-eight rounds out of the box still to fire.

Twenty-four rounds later, as I broke open the revolver and ejected the spent brass, Gabi spoke from behind me.

“You have many strange habits while you shoot,” she said.

I turned to her and pulled the cotton out of my left ear. She sat on an equipment locker, had on riding breeches and a lacy blouse with big sleeves, open at the throat as if she’d dressed hurriedly. Her loose hair floated around her face in the wind.

“Hey, I thought you were going to sleep in.”

I clicked the revolver closed. I had started experimenting with holding pairs of rounds between my fingers, like a speed strip, and I was getting faster at reloading.

“Who can sleep with all this bang-bang-bang? Why do you step to the side after you shoot, as if you are dancing?”

“People under stress lose their peripheral vision. They see the world as if through a tunnel. If you step to the side, you step out of their tunnel, and it confuses them. They have to take a moment and look for you.”

“Surely not! This is a joke, oui?”

“Not a joke, cheri. Have you ever fainted?”

She nodded.

“Before you faint, first you lose your peripheral vision, then your central vision loses fine resolution and color. Remember? It is because certain parts of your brain become starved for oxygen. People under stress have similar experiences.”

She frowned and thought about that for a moment. Finally she nodded.

“Bien. But the target, it does not shoot back. Why make the mincing step now?”

I hadn’t thought of it as mincing, and I didn’t much care for the image that brought to mind.

“If someone does shoot at me, I will be under stress as well. I may forget to step sideways up here.” I tapped my head with my fingertips. “I have to remember it down here,” and I tapped my leg, “so I do it over and over again. It’s like whistling. You have to think about how to do it at first, but after you whistle enough you don’t think about how to make your lips form a certain shape to make a certain sound. You only think the sound, and your lips remember how to do the rest.”

“Really? I cannot whistle,” she said. “Can you teach me?”

That was something I was learning about Gabi: if you weren’t careful, you could get whiplash from the sudden changes of direction in the conversation.

“Sure. I taught Sarah.”

“The Terminator,” Gabi said, and then looked out past the target outrigger at the clouds floating near the rusty-gold horizon. “If possible you will leave us to return to her, your daughter.” She made it a statement, not a question. “Our time has not been kind to you so far. But if it were, you would still leave, yes?”

“Of course.”

She turned and looked me in the eyes.

“It is not because she needs you. This you have told me already. It must be because you need her. But why?”

And that was Gabi, too. Maybe everyone who knew my real story wondered that, but none asked it. It was personal, and of course they all knew the answer, or at least knew how they would answer the question, which to them was the same thing because they believed that everyone was pretty much the same inside as they were. But Gabi had no such illusions.

“Don’t you feel that way about someone in your family?” I asked.

“There is no family. I was my mother’s only child. She was not married, so she lived in the convent for a while, and then she left and now she is dead. I was raised by the nuns. I never met my father.” She shrugged as if to say this was no tragedy, it was simply what was.

“So tell me why,” she repeated. “Please.”

I almost didn’t answer, but there was an aching need in her question — not a need for me, but rather a need to understand the world around her. It was the first evidence of emotional vulnerability I had seen in her, and it opened my eyes. I understood her. For a moment, just a moment, I saw the world through her head, and none of the people in it made any sense. They argued, laughed, loved, raged, wept, and all for reasons which defied her understanding, all seemingly at random.

A wave of melancholy swept over me as I realized the extent to which she was alone in the world, and probably always would be, standing on the outside of a house watching the party inside through a window, smiling at the jokes she couldn’t quite make out, wondering at the cascades of inexplicable emotions, separated from all of it by a single pane of glass which she had no means of breaking.

She at least deserved an honest answer, even if she wouldn’t understand that, either.

“It’s the only relationship in my life I haven’t fucked up.”

She looked at the clouds and thought about that for a while.

“It must be good to have such a relationship,” she said at last.

I sat down on the locker next to her and put my arm around her, and she rested her head on my shoulder.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 32

The Forever Engine – Snippet 32

TWENTY-ONE

October 8, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Aloft over Austria

The next morning I woke in the darkness and felt the rhythmic vibration of Intrepid’s engines through the bunk, felt the warmth and slower rhythm of Gabrielle’s engine beside me. Her back rested against my chest in the narrow bunk, her bare shoulder rising and falling as she snored softly. For an instant, it was the best morning I’d had since coming here, perhaps the best morning in years. Then a wave of panic swept over me. What the hell was I doing?

I pulled away and sat up on the edge of her bunk, sat there shivering, appalled at what I’d done.

When Sarah was just six or seven, my wife and I had taken her to a seafood restaurant. We had to wait before being seated, and Sarah spent the time studying the tank of lobsters which stood beside the hostess station like an aquarium in the doctor’s office. After a while, she began naming the lobsters, and I knew: no lobster tonight, maybe never again.

I had called Gabrielle Gabi last night, over and over in our mutual passion, our entwined dance of life as we hurtled toward a rendezvous which would enable me, if all went well, to snuff out this time and everyone in it to save my own.

Gabi — naming the lobsters.

Behind me she stirred, then stretched a little, and yawned.

“Ah,” she said. “You are awake.”

“Yeah.” I got up and started to dress. For a moment she rested on her stomach, chin propped on folded arms, face obscured by a soft tangle of golden curls. Then, nude and unselfconscious, she sat up on the bed, crossed her legs, and pushed her hair away from her face. I had never imagined a Victorian woman remotely like her.

“Gabi — mon surnom. You would say nickname? Do you have the nickname for your daughter?”

“The Terminator.”

Like an incantation, her name summoned her, and, for a moment, if only in my mind, Sarah was there, about twelve or thirteen years old. I guess we always think of our kids as younger than they really are, just as we think of ourselves that way. Sarah looked at me with her knowing smirk, one eyebrow raised when she looked at Gabrielle, torn between approval of “Daddy’s hottie” and vague distaste at the idea of “old people sex.”

Then she was gone, and my cheeks were wet and my lungs empty of air.

Gabrielle studied me, frowning slightly in concentration.

“You fear for your daughter, she will be impoverished if you do not return?”

I caught my breath and wiped my eyes.

“I fear she no longer exists. But if she does, I had good life insurance. Plus she’ll get my IRA and the condo on Lake Shore Drive.”

Gabrielle had that look that said she had no idea what I’d just said.

“Trust me, financially she’ll be fine.”

“What of her mother and siblings?”

“There’s only her — her mother died when she was eight.”

“Ah, so you are her only family. You fear she will be alone.”

“No, she’s still got two grandparents alive, plus a bunch of uncles, aunts, and cousins, mostly on my late wife’s side of the family. We’ve stayed close to them.”

She looked more confused than before. I was, too. I’d spoken about Sarah as if I would never see her again, as if she would go on but without me. I would save her, somehow. But would I be able to face her afterwards, knowing what I had had to do to accomplish that?

***

The duty officer had rigged a set of pistol targets to a long outrigger off the port side near the stern, where the Marines normally took rifle drill. I’d already stashed my new revolver, fresh from Intrepid’s arms locker, there along with my towel and a box of cartridges. Gordon showed up with his own revolver about when I finished my run. Gordon being up and moving shortly after dawn, and not visibly hung over, was a good sign.

“I see they gave you one of the new Webleys,” Gordon said, looking it over. “Do you need help with this? I imagine it’s different than the weapons you are used to.”

“Thanks. Let me see if I can figure it out first.”

With a six-inch barrel, the Webley had a nice heft to it, about two and a half pounds. It smelled of gun oil, and, if it had ever been fired, it had been carefully cleaned afterwards. It was the break-open kind, the frame hinged forward and below the cylinder. I found the release catch and opened it, checked the cylinder to make sure it was empty, then clicked it shut. I cocked it and dry fired it, then dry fired it a couple more times from the hammer-down position. The action was stiff, but the trigger pull was even, if a bit long.

I dug a handful of cartridges out of the box of fifty, slipped all but six of them in my trouser pocket, and loaded. They were nice big cartridges, about the size of a .45.

Gordon had his revolver out as well now. It was different looking, slightly smaller and more complicated in design, with what looked like a hinged lever below the barrel in front of the cylinder.

“It’s an Enfield,” he explained. “Slightly larger bore, a four-seven-six as opposed to your four-fifty-five, but with a shorter cartridge. I think it makes it more controllable when firing.”

I didn’t say anything, as part of my new policy to avoid irritating Gordon any more than necessary, but I couldn’t help remembering how the “more controllable” low-powered bullet had bounced right off the hashshashin’s body armor in London.

“You a pretty good pistol shot?” I asked him.

Instead of answering, he raised the Enfield, took careful aim, and fired at the target on the outrigger. His pistol made a healthy bang and left my ears ringing.

“Jesus, do you guys do anything to protect your ears when you’re shooting? It’s a wonder you aren’t all deaf as posts.”

Gordon looked at me as if good hearing was for sissies.

The target was about twenty yards out, so I could see the hole, one ring out from the center. This wasn’t competition shooting, so in the black was good enough as far as I was concerned, especially since the target frame was shaking a bit from the wind and engine vibration. The shooting was fine, but his stance was terrible, sideways with his right shoulder forward, right arm straight out, left arm at his side. It was the classic dueling pose, probably good for standing inside a red-coated square and picking off Fuzzy-Wuzzies, but worthless in the sort of combat we were likely to see.

I dug some cotton out of my kit, chewed on it to get it wet, and packed it in my ears, then took my stance — left shoulder forward, both arms slightly bent, left hand supporting and steadying the pistol hand. I raised the pistol but ignored the sights and just focused my eyes on the target. I fired three shots in as quick a succession as I could manage, given the stiff action, and then took a step to the left. The recoil had been strong but controllable. That’s the beauty of a heavy pistol like the Webley or the Colt .45 automatic: it can handle a powerful round and not jump all over the place. It felt good to shoot.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 31

The Forever Engine – Snippet 31

TWENTY

October 7, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Aloft over Bavaria and Austria

The rest of the morning and early afternoon we saw to fitting everyone into the confines of Intrepid. The dent in her crew made it a little easier, but there was still a lot of disruption. Officers doubled up to accommodate Gordon, von Schtecker, and myself, and Gabrielle got Lieutenant Jenkins’ cabin all to herself. The Bavarians got their own section of the crew common quarters, but there were only fourteen berths for twenty men, and, like the rest of the crew, they’d have to hot-bunk it.

We reprovisioned as well, and the Bavarians brought tents and wooden boxes of spare rifle ammunition aboard.

“What you ought to have along is one of those new Maxim guns,” Lieutenant Jenkins said as we watched the deck hands carry the supplies below deck. “We’re due to get Maxims next refit, but that’s not until this winter. We could let you have one of our 8-barrel Nordenfelts, but they’re too heavy to haul up and down mountains.”

I had some experience humping things through mountains, and I wasn’t looking forward to that part of the trip. We’d have to carry probably eight days of food with us, ammunition, at least some climbing gear, and either blankets or greatcoats. It was going to get cold up there and probably wet, if the thickening clouds and rising wind were any indication. We could go part of the way by river, but at some point we were going to have to carry stuff over some crappy-looking mountain roads.

No, we wouldn’t be taking along an 8-barrel Nordenfelt, whatever that was.

We lifted off about mid-afternoon and headed north. Once we were out of sight of curious eyes in Munich, we made a wide turn to starboard and ended up heading southeast toward Austria and the Balkans. Visibility closed down to a mile or two and the white wooden deck planks started darkening with a light rain. Massive grumbling thunderheads, flickering deep inside with lightning, pursued us from the west, but we seemed to be keeping our lead for the moment.

The sun disappeared behind the storm front, and we lost whatever remaining light was left within an hour. About six o’clock I saw the lights of a large city off our starboard beam — Salzburg. A signal light blinked cheerfully from the ground, and a signalman clacked back an answer from the Aldis lamp above the bridge. From here on we would be in Austrian air space.

Dinner in the officer’s mess that evening turned out to be far more interesting than I had expected. Conroy and Thomson were missing, but Gabrielle and von Schtecker had taken their place, so the number at table ended up the same — ten, since two of the ship’s officers were on rotating duty at all times.

Gordon was quiet and withdrawn throughout the meal, glancing at the decanter of red wine on the table once in a while but staying with hot tea. Von Schtecker was also quiet, perhaps because his English was good enough for a professional meeting but not really up to witty repartee. Or possibly he simply didn’t care much for British officers, or sailors of any nationality, or people sent by Berlin who had brought a truckload of trouble with them.

Gabrielle, not surprisingly, quickly became the center of attention. For Intrepid‘s young officers, her presence was a form of sublime torture. On the one hand, she was a strikingly good-looking woman of open and friendly disposition. On the other hand, she was French, a Communard, and an agent of Le Garde Rouge to boot. How were they, as officers, to react to that? For guidance they looked to their captain, who seemed in a friendly enough mood.

“Tell me, Mademoiselle, how long before you make General Secretary Renault emperor?” he asked as the cook ladled out the steaming potato soup. The officers laughed politely at the captain’s joke.

“Me?” she asked. “It is not for me to make the emperors.”

“Your people, I meant. It’s rather a tradition, isn’t it? First Consul Bonaparte became Emperor Napoleon I. President Louis-Napoleon became Emperor Napoleon III. You seem to have skipped Napoleon II, but the pattern seems clear enough.”

Although it was phrased as good-natured banter, I didn’t like what Harding was doing. He was showing off, trying to embarrass Gabrielle for the amusement of his officers. That’s not how I was raised to treat dinner guests.

Gabrielle frowned for a moment in thought, as if actually taking the question seriously. Perhaps she was.

“Well, those were mistakes, you see. I believe most French people understand that. Do the English not?”

I saw a couple faces cloud over then, but one officer covered his smile with his napkin, and another nodded in agreement, pleased at how adroitly Gabrielle had turned the question around on his captain. I wasn’t so sure.

Harding looked around, his smile even broader than before.

“Well, I dare say we do, Mademoiselle. I dare say we do. It is most agreeable to hear that sentiment shared on your side of the Channel. Now if only you had a proper royal family, things might start looking up over there.”

“Ah, but we do, Capitaine. In fact, we have three: the Bonapartés, the Orléans, and the Bourbons. The politicians pay no attention to any of them, but that is like your own country, oui?”

Harding’s smile disappeared, and he put down his spoon before answering.

“I wouldn’t say that, Ma’am.”

“Really? My friend Baron Renfrew says it all the time,” she answered, and then she sipped her soup. “Oh, this is quite good!”

She looked up at the momentarily frozen faces around the table. “What is wrong? Is the soup not good?”

“I think it’s great,” I answered.

“Yes, it’s capital, I’d say,” an earnest young midshipman to my right added, followed by a half-dozen other hurried expressions of agreement, to which Gabrielle smiled happily.

Through the fish and then the main course of roast beef, Harding launched repeated argumentative storming parties against Fortress France, all of them disguised as amusing jokes, all of them taken as neither jokes nor insults by Gabrielle, and all of them ending in Harding’s red-faced retreat in the face of a defense as impervious to the attack as it was apparently oblivious to it. Watching this was the most fun I’d had since showing up here.

By the dessert, a plum pudding, Harding had lapsed into defeated silence, but the conversation went on without him. His officers’ fascination with and admiration for Gabrielle had only grown with her repeated brilliant escapes from Harding’s cunningly-constructed traps.

Was I the only person here who got it? Was I the only one who saw all she was doing was taking the questions literally and then answering them? Apparently so. Maybe this was how most beautiful women got a reputation for brilliant conversation: just about anything coming out of their mouths sounded pretty good. It wasn’t that Gabrielle Courbiere was dumb; she was well-read and obviously intelligent. She just seemed oblivious to the most basic social cues.

Over glasses of port the younger officers drew her into a conversation about the ethics of spying, which she naturally answered with the argument that patriotism required service to one’s country in whatever capacity a person had.

“But Mademoiselle, to what lengths can one take that?” the young gunnery lieutenant, whose name I’d forgotten, asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Mademoiselle Courbiere,” he said, and then he paused to let the drama build, as if he were the prosecutor and she the defendant in the dock, “would you cut a throat for France?”

“It depends upon the throat,” she answered, and then she looked around the table as if the answer were obvious.

And it was, but that did not stop Intrepid‘s officers from regarding her with a mix of fear and fascination, as if she were a beautiful yet deadly creature from another world. More than either beautiful or deadly, though, they saw her as exotic, enigmatic.

Who could believe she was simply an open book? None of these guys, that was for sure.

When we finished, half the men offered her their arm to escort her safely to her cabin, as if it were ten miles up the Rio Orinoco instead of twenty steps down the hall. I couldn’t blame them. The memory of my erotic dream of her two nights before had returned, and my imagination had tacked on a few new embellishments.

She smiled politely to the officers but turned to me.

“Mr. Fargo has promised to tell me his life story and tonight may be our last opportunity for some time. Will you join me in my cabin?”

Sure.

***

If I’d imagined her sitting languidly, elbow on table and chin resting on her hand, eyes locked on mine in rapt attention as I told the remarkable tale of how I came to this time — and maybe I had imagined that just a little bit — I was completely wrong. Gabrielle’s cabin was as small as the one I shared with two other officers, and the ventilation was not as good, so it felt warm and stuffy as soon as we got there. She gave me the only chair and sat in her bunk cross-legged, another advantage of a riding habit instead of a conventional dress. She took a journal and a pencil from the table by her bed, opened it to a blank page, rested it on the desk made by her crossed knees, and nodded for me to begin.

The deal had been to tell her everything about how I came here, and a deal’s a deal. I started with what I knew about the research project in Wessex, then my background as a historian, then the world I came from in more and more detail, but steering clear of the subject of aeronautics and the space program. She asked probing questions, particularly about my kendo training and before that my military experience. She took pages of notes in a small, careful handwriting which looked almost machinelike in its regularity.

The room grew warmer as I talked, and I began to perspire. I noticed that she did as well, her skin glistening in the gaslight. After about an hour, she puffed out a breath and stood up from the bunk. She unbuttoned the jacket of her riding habit and took it off, then unfastened her skirt and slipped it down and off, leaving her in blouse and riding breeches. She unbuttoned the collar and cuffs of her blouse and rolled the sleeves up almost to her elbows. Then she sat back on the bunk and picked up her journal.

“Better,” she announced.

“Do you mind if I take off my jacket?”

I felt foolish asking, but it seemed the thing to do here.

“No, why would I?” she asked, looking up from her notes. I had already learned none of her questions were rhetorical; when she asked a question she expected an answer.

“Well, some ladies might consider it a sexual advance.”

“You do not make the sexual advance?”

I almost said no, but then I thought better of it.

“I do not mean the removal my coat as a sexual advance. I may make a sexual advance later, if I feel it would be appropriate.”

She thought for a moment.

“What would determine whether or not it was appropriate?”

“I would only consider it appropriate if I felt you would welcome it.”

“I see. You have the eyes which are kind, sad, and hard, all at the same time. But when you laugh, your eyes laugh first. Yes, I think I would welcome such an advance, but first I would like to know more about a thing — what did you call it? — the Tesla effect.”

I told her everything I knew about the Tesla Effect, which took all of about fifteen seconds.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 30

The Forever Engine – Snippet 30

“This changes things, I suppose,” Gordon said, “although I am not sure exactly how. Can we still count on your cooperation, Inspector Wolfenbach?”

The corpulent policeman bobbed his head, making his jowls quiver.

“Berlin says help, so ja, I assign three of my policemen to help. But after the attack yesterday I receive new instructions — from the Prinz-regent himself. Now we are joined by Leutnant von Schtecker and twenty volunteers from the Bayerisch Garde Schützenkorps, all gut soldaten, excellent shots, and all with some English.”

The Bavarian army officer clicked his heels and did a little bow in Gabrielle’s direction.

“We travel in civilian clothes, of course,” the young lieutenant explained. “We say it is a hunting trip to Macedonia. Our rifles will be in the baggage until we need them.”

“This attack stirred things up?” I asked.

“They ruin Oktoberfest,” the lieutenant answered, the outrage plain in his voice. “Since the first festival was held we have only interrupted it twice, both times for war. Now a third time? Very well, war it shall be.”

Something to remember if I ever wanted to conquer the world: don’t get between the Bavarians and a good party.

Gordon unrolled Intrepid‘s chart of Serbia and pointed to the mountains along its southwest frontier with Turkish Bosnia and Montenegro.

“We are happy to have you, Leftenant. The plan was to have Inspector Wolfenbach direct the Hochflieger Ost to make an unscheduled landing somewhere south of Belgrade and drop us off. Now the attack here has caused the zeppelin line to postpone the departure of the Hochflieger from Berlin for several days. Perhaps that is to our advantage.”

“With Thomson in his hands, how can a delay be good?” Harding asked.

“If Tesla knows all the rest, he may know of the arrangements with the zeppelin line as well,” Gordon said. “If he already expects the attack to come from the Hochflieger, its delay gives us the ability to attack by a different route, by surprise. We’ll have to move quickly, though. The potential for surprise will last only until the next actual passage of the Hochflieger.

“Inspector Wolfenbach, if you would post armed guards on the hotel where we were staying, it will help convince any prying eyes that Mr. Fargo and I are still there, waiting for the arrival of the Hochflieger.”

“Ja, sehr gut,” Wolfenbach answered.

“Captain Harding, I’d like Intrepid to take the entire party to the Austrian military base at Ujvidék, south of Budapest on the Serbian frontier. From there we will take off after dusk and make a high-speed run to the southwest, follow the Turkish side of the frontier all the way down to” — he leaned over the map to read the name — “Višegràd. That’s approximately one hundred miles, so we should be able to make it there in four hours from Ujvidék. Does that sound correct?”

Harding leaned over and studied the map, did a quick measurement using map calipers.

“Now that we’ve got the portside drive shaft straightened and two airscrews mounted, we can make twenty knots again. If we stay well above the mountains, yes, we can make it in four hours. Landing would be tricky except we should be able to descend into the valley of the Drina River here. Let me think. We can make Ujvidék from here in a little under a day. If we leave this afternoon and run through the night, we arrive tomorrow afternoon. That means making the approach run tomorrow night. It’s a new moon, so the only light we’ll have coming down will be starlight. If this overcast continues we’ll have to use floodlights for landing, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Yes, four hours there and perhaps half an hour to find your village and land you.”

“Good. You drop us off along with Leftenant von Schtecker’s men and as many Marines as you can spare. You make full speed back to Ujvidék. I’d like you back on your tie-down pad by dawn,” Gordon finished.

Harding straightened up and nodded again.

“Yes, with no one the wiser as to where we’ve been. Confusion to the enemy. Good show. And you?”

“The armed party will remain hidden,” Gordon said, “and we’ll need supplies and field gear — tents, rations for a week, that sort of thing. Leftenant von Schtecker, can you arrange for that?”

“Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann,” the Bavarian officer answered.

“Good. While you establish our camp in the hills, Fargo and I will contact the Turkish authorities. Mr. Fargo will serve as my translator.”

“You speak Turkish?” Harding asked.

“Turkmen,” I answered. “Close enough.”

It wasn’t all that close in my own time because in the early twentieth century the Turks had reformed their language, gotten rid of all the Farsi and Arabic borrow words which Turkmen still had. The two languages were actually closer in this world, at least in theory. I figured I could get by.

“After we determine what assistance the Turks will render,” Gordon continued, “we will conduct a reconnaissance of the border, determine the best route of advance, and make our way east to Kokin Brod. Given the information Captain Harding has supplied, and the instructions Dr. Thomson was given, I expect at least a battalion of Turkish infantry, and likely a full brigade. Of course, we can’t count on Turks for anything lively, but our Marines and Leftenant von Schtecker’s men should serve for that.

“From what Mademoiselle Courbiere tells us, there are no regular Serbian troops at Kokin Brod — if the Serbs can be said to have regulars at all. Tesla’s followers are fanatics, their courage fortified by narcotics, but it is the sort of courage best applied to raids and surprise descents. I find it highly unlikely they will stand for more than a volley or two against well-armed infantry.

“Are there any questions?”

I waited, looked around the table, hoping someone would speak up. Gordon might listen to Harding or either of the Bavarians, but he still wasn’t likely to pay any attention to what I had to say. Unfortunately, the three other military types stood there nodding like bobble-heads.

“Just a thought,” I said. “Why don’t we try sneaking in, keeping the element of surprise?”

“Sneak in with five hundred or a thousand men?” Lieutenant von Schtecker asked. “How?”

“No. I’m thinking a small group to go in, probably the Marines and your riflemen, Herr Leutnant. The Turks would follow up and cover the withdrawal. I guess what I’m saying is, why shoot our way in and out, when maybe we can sneak in?”

Von Schtecker looked like he was thinking it over, when Gordon stepped in.

“Mr. Fargo is a professor of history in America. He has an academic’s approach to problems — too complicated by half. Simple is better; hit them hard and fast.”

“Hard I understand,” I said. “It’s the fast I’m foggy about. How are you –”

“That’s enough, Fargo. We’ll work out the details when we can see the lay of the land. But in outline I think we are in agreement, yes?”

All the bobble-heads nodded. It wouldn’t do for a serving officer to take sides with some icky academic guy.

“Actually, this use of stealth, it seems sensible,” Gabrielle said.

“While I appreciate the intelligence you have shared with us, Mademoiselle, I insist that you allow the military men to deal with military matters,” Gordon answered. “Now, one more thing. It will be a difficult trek, across very mountainous terrain. I hope you will not take offense, Inspector, but I believe Bavaria’s contribution to the expedition will be more than satisfied by the information you can give us and Leftenant von Schtecker’s riflemen. I see no need for you to personally accompany us.”

“Natürlich,” Wolfenbach answered. “You are not Hannibal, after all.”

Wolfenbach wasn’t quite as big as an elephant, but close enough. They all laughed except for Gabrielle, who seemed confused by the reference.