Eric Flint's Blog, page 321

The Forever Engine – Snippet 29

The Forever Engine – Snippet 29

NINETEEN

October 7, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

I’d taken a real beating in front of the hotel, and I didn’t understand how much until the next morning. We’d moved back over to Intrepid for security, and I shared a stateroom with Gordon. Fortunately he took the upper bunk. When I woke, I couldn’t sit up in bed. I had to roll over onto my stomach, flop my legs off the bed onto the deck, push myself upright on my knees, and then stand up using the headboard for support. I felt as if I wore weights on my arms and legs, every joint was full of acid, and a couple key muscles just weren’t present for duty. Unfortunately, calling in sick wasn’t an option. My head was clear, so at least there was probably no brain damage.

My morning run was out, and I’d have liked another hour of sleep, but Harding had planned a service for the crew members of Intrepid who had been killed the previous day and in the first fight with the zeppelin. I wanted to attend. Gordon and I walked over together in silence, each with our own thoughts, under steel-gray skies that smelled of rain.

Gordon had come up with a plan yesterday which had the virtue of simplicity and directness but took those qualities to a dangerous extreme, in my opinion. Maybe he was trying to prove he wasn’t the coward so many people thought he was. Fine, but he could do that on his own time. This put the whole mission at risk. More to the point for me, if Tesla was the key to getting me back to my own world, I didn’t think shooting our way into his stronghold with a thousand Turkish infantry was the approach most likely to gain his cooperation. What would work with a megalomaniac who sent drugged-up fanatics and wind-up spiders across Europe to murder people who pissed him off was another question.

My problems weren’t Gordon’s, of course, nor were they Lord Chillingham’s or the British crown’s. As far as they were concerned, I was baggage and bait — annoying baggage and bait in Gordon’s view. Any suggestions I made to him were likely to send him in the opposite direction, but we would meet with the Bavarians again after the funeral service. Hopefully somebody at the meeting would do my dirty work for me.

I’d been to two British military funerals in Afghanistan. This one was the largest, at least in terms of casualties: eighteen of them. That was a big hole knocked in a crew of only two hundred.

The bodies were sewn into white sacks made of sail canvas. They must have carried the canvas just for that purpose — Intrepid didn’t mount sails. There weren’t enough Union Jacks to cover all the bodies, so some were covered with white naval ensigns and some by simple bedsheets. All the covers — flags and sheets alike — were wrapped around the body bags and tucked under them to keep them from blowing off in the damp breeze. The bags were lined up in two rows of eight and then two others out front. That would be Lieutenant Longchamps and Ensign Conroy, the two officer casualties, leading the formation.

A company of Bavarian soldiers stood to one side of the arrayed bodies, the crew of Intrepid to the other, and an assortment of civilian workers from the Fliegerplatz made a ragged crescent between them, forming the bottom of a box protecting the silent dead. A line of Bavarian horse-drawn artillery caissons waited behind them to take the bodies to the military cemetery. Three Bavarian drummers, their drums muffled, provided the only music. An enclosed carriage arrived, and two passengers joined the officers of Intrepid: Gabrielle Courbiere and a tall, stout man dressed in black, complete with a black silk scarf over his face.

Harding stood before the company and began with the opening prayer.

“Loving God, you alone are the source of life. May your life-giving Spirit flow through us, and fill us with compassion, one for another. In our sorrow give us the calm of your peace. Kindle our hope, and let our grief give way to joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

The incongruity, the palpable unreality of the moment, washed over me like a cold wave. The South had won the Civil War, the Royal Navy had flying ironclads, there were colonies on Mars, but the Book of Common Prayer hadn’t changed. What were the odds? But there was nothing unreal about the eighteen silent white sausages lying on the dark green grass of the landing ground.

***

We again met in Intrepid’s chart room, a more somber group this time, the cause made obvious by Thomson’s absence. His place was taken by a young officer in the light blue uniform of the Bavarian Army, complete with dueling scar on his cheek and spiked helmet held under his arm.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Too many damned meetings. It was time to get on with it, to just saddle up and go after these guys. That’s not how it worked here. That’s not how it worked anywhere except the movies. If it wasn’t a meeting with the Bavarian police and army, it was tea with the Afghan village elders to see what they thought we should do next, not because we gave a shit what they thought, but because it made them feel better, for a while, to think we might.

“Captain Harding, what is Intrepid‘s status?” Gordon asked.

“Short-handed but ready for action. Those blasted clockwork spiders killed one of my officers — young Conroy — and fourteen crewmen. I have six more still incapacitated, but there’s no additional damage to her machinery.

“My position has been rendered somewhat complicated by other developments, however. As I am sure you all understand, the safety of the Royal Family is our paramount consideration. It should be obvious we have taken on board a special passenger. This afternoon we will lift off with a heading toward the British Isles.”

“You will be returning to England?” Gordon asked.

“I did not say that,” Harding answered. “What is important is that we be seen to leave with a heading toward England.”

“Elvis has left the building,” I said.

Everyone looked at me blankly.

“Renfrew has already left Munich,” I explained. “This is a diversion. Who was that dressed up like him at the funeral?”

“Very good, Mr. Fargo,” Harding said. “It was one of our black gang. He was the only one in the crew large enough to be convincing. A closed car was added to the morning train to Frankfurt.”

“He was on that?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” Harding said. “I don’t know, to be honest. What I do know is that I also received coded orders this morning via cable through our consulate here, instructing me, once our diversionary demonstration is complete, to support your mission, which of course we will. The entire crew is anxious to strike back at those villains — cowardly bastards, leaving their dirty business to machines.”

“What are your rules of engagement?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“What limits are placed on your actions?”

“Ah, yes. I am not to hazard my vessel beyond what I believe necessary to support the mission, a pretty way of saying if things go wrong it’s my head on the chopping block. Well, so be it. More importantly I am under no circumstances to provoke hostilities with a foreign power. In this case that means I cannot enter Serbia, Rumania, or Bulgaria. I can send a small Marine landing party with you, but not in uniform. We do have permission to enter Austro-Hungarian and Turkish territory, however, and have promises of cooperation from those governments.”

I had mixed feelings about that. Clearing things with the Austrians and Turks was probably necessary, but a lot of people knew a lot of stuff about this “secret” mission.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 28

The Forever Engine – Snippet 28

Gordon stood there for a while, his anger running out of fire, and then he looked out into the street at the line of bodies.

“The Marines said you . . . who are you, Fargo?”

That was a pretty good question.

“I’m exactly what I told you. I’m a history professor from the University of Chicago. I specialize in the ancient world. When I was younger, I was a soldier, like you.”

“Not like me,” he said.

“Okay, not exactly like you. I was a warrant officer, not a commissioned officer. I was a translator, Middle-Eastern languages — Arabic, Pashto, Turkmen, and Daric Farsi. I’m not sure how useful that’s going to be.”

“We usually hire a local Johnny to do the translating.”

“Yeah, how’d that work out for you in Afghanistan?”

His face clouded with anger again, and I could have kicked myself. He hadn’t been to Afghanistan, he was ashamed of it, and I’d just rubbed his nose in it. If he froze up, either with anger or shame, this was the end of the road. Thomson was gone. Without Gordon there was no expedition, and then how would I save my world? How would I save Sarah from oblivion?

“You speak German as well,” he said after a moment.

“Spanish and French, too. I’ve got an ear for languages.”

He gestured out toward the bodies.

“And that? You didn’t learn that as a translator, I’ll warrant.”

“I got carried away.”

“Bloody hell, I should say so! Like some sort of whirling dervish, to hear those Marines tell it.”

“Yeah, I know what it looks like, but I’m no super-warrior from the future. I’m a guy pushing middle age who did three tours in Afghanistan, went to school on army money, and made a pretty good life for myself. My passion is history, not homicide, and all I really want is to go back home.”

He looked at me and he wasn’t buying it, but it was the truth, sort of the truth — a simplified, sanitized version of the truth, but that was good enough for me right then.

“How did I learn to swing a pipe like that? It had nothing to do with the army. As an historian, I got interested in ancient fighting techniques, and I studied kendo. You’ve heard of it?”

He shook his head. He’d probably never heard of karate or kung fu, either.

“It’s Japanese fencing with long two-handed swords, although we use a shinai — a bamboo stick — and practice in padded armor. I just went on autopilot and started cracking people’s skulls.”

“Autopilot,” he repeated. I started to explain, but he waved me to silence.

“Very well, I suppose you may be useful for something. I’ll at least need a German translator I can rely on. Right now I have to sort through Thomson’s papers, see if there’s any hint of a detailed plan there. You’d better come along in case any of them are in German.”

I got painfully to my feet and started to follow him back into the hotel.

How much faith did I have in Gordon to pull this off? Absolutely none. Hopefully he could get me close enough that I could accomplish . . . what? What did I expect to find at the end of this road? A doorway back to my own time? That for starters, but it wasn’t enough. Tesla might be the only guy who could figure this out, but how inclined to help was he going to be? I’d have to come up with some leverage, a bargaining position, some way to make him willing to help me or a way to force his hand.

That might mean preventing this expedition from killing or capturing him, which could be interesting.

And Thomson — somehow I had to get him out of this in one piece. I owed him too much to just walk away, although . . . if I was going to have to scrub this whole world anyway to save my own — this was getting very complicated.

“I suppose,” Gordon said almost to himself, “the first thing we need is some tea.”

***

Two hours later, Gordon and I had Thomson’s papers and maps spread all over the table in his room, trying to figure out what resources we had and whether he’d actually come up with any sort of plan.

“What I don’t understand is how they knew where we were staying. For that matter, how did they know we were even in Munich?” Gordon asked.

“Lousy security in London is my bet.” I could have mentioned that Thomson had let slip to Tesla that Munich was our destination, but figured the old Scotsman had enough troubles right now.

Gordon tossed aside the folder of news clippings he had been looking through and shook his head.

“I’m more inclined to think that French tart had something to do with it.”

“The charming Mademoiselle Courbiere? It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. This was a very elaborate operation, with people in place on the ground and the zeppelin in position to extract them. I don’t think it was thrown together in a day. They knew we were coming in advance and had at least a couple days to get ready.”

“And how did they know where we were staying?”

“That’s the easy part: a guy on the ground watching to see where we went from the Fliegerplatz.”

Gordon thought it through for a while, frowning the whole time, but he ended up nodding reluctantly.

“Very well, the information probably came from London, not Mademoiselle Courbiere.”

“I am grateful for your confidence, Capitaine Gordon,” Gabrielle said from the wardroom’s doorway, and Gordon jumped in surprise. The events of the morning had pushed last night’s dream out of my mind, but seeing her standing there brought it all flooding back.

“How long have you been here?” he demanded

“I arrived just this moment. The concierge showed me the way. You are injured, Monsieur Fargo. How serious it is?”

“I’ll be okay. Tesla has Professor Thomson.”

“Oui. This I hear. The expedition, it is done?”

“Is that all you care about?” Gordon asked, anger in his voice.

“Non,” she answered. “But about that, it is my duty to care. Yours as well, oui?” She spoke without resentment, as if answering a question about the weather.

“The expedition is not done,” I said. “Captain Gordon is now in command.”

Her eyebrows rose slightly in reaction, but then she nodded.

“Of course. Our agreement, it is still good?”

“I’ll have to think about that,” Gordon answered.

Gabrielle shrugged and started to leave.

“Wait,” I said hastily. She stopped, and both of them turned to look at me.

“It’s your call, Gordon, but you can see what we have here to work with. Unless the Bavarians can loan us a battalion of flying monkeys with death rays, we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

Despite the tension of the moment, Gordon smiled.

“Flying monkeys with death rays? I don’t think that very likely, so under the circumstances — yes, Mademoiselle Courbiere, I will be pleased to honor the agreement made between you and Dr. Thomson. We will be most grateful for any assistance you can provide in finding and apprehending Tesla.”

He even made a little bow.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 27

The Forever Engine – Snippet 27

EIGHTEEN

October 6, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

“Well, you’ve got guts, Yank, I’ll give you that,” O’Mara, the Royal Marine corporal from Intrepid, said, shaking his head and looking around. A half dozen of the men from his section along with two Bavarian policemen examined the bodies in the street while several more Marines checked out the hotel behind us room by room. A crowd of over a hundred curious locals clustered around, looking at the visible evidence of violence with the same mix of horror and fascination as motorists driving past a bad wreck.

“Thanks. You want to hold this for me?”

I was trying to bandage my left arm and it was hard to manage it with one trembling hand, especially since both of my arms felt as if they were filled with sand — really hot sand. Every muscle in my body seemed on fire.

He tied the bandage for me as Jenkins, a naval lieutenant from Intrepid, came out of the hotel and looked around.

“You did this by yourself? Unarmed?”

“I had a pipe.”

“Remarkable,” he said, shaking his head. “The Marines shot four of them when they opened fire, but you killed three men yourself. Injured more than that, I daresay, but they got them away.”

“They got away with Thomson, too,” I said. “That’s what matters. Son of a bitch.”

I’d gotten tangled up with the mob from the hotel, and the dirigible had dropped a sling and hoisted Thomson up. It dropped a whole bunch of lines with slings at the end. The thugs had overcome me by the time the Marines showed up, were dragging me toward the slings, but they got sloppy in their haste. They had sheathed their knives to use both hands, and I got hold of a nice heavy-bladed one, pulled it out of its sheath, and cut up two of the thugs pretty badly before they dropped me. With a dozen Marines pounding up the street and firing rifle shots, there wasn’t enough time to deal with me again, so they grabbed the slings and called it a day. The dirigible had let loose a cascade of ballast water and shot up into the sky, gone just like that.

The water had washed most of the blood off the street.

Now what the hell was I going to do? Thomson was the closest thing I had to a friend here, my guide, the honcho of the expedition. Gordon was probably dead, or Tesla’s men would have hauled him out as well.

“Better let our surgeon have a look at that later,” Jenkins said, nodding to my arm. “Right now he’s busy with casualties from the diversionary attack. Some sort of metal globes that unfolded into mechanical spiders after they landed. Devilish machines, and quite deadly.”

“Yeah, I saw some in London. Not that hard to avoid once you get over the surprise, but pretty scary the first time.”

He looked at me and frowned, clearly unsure what to make of me, a history professor who ran the decks of his ship every morning and who had done . . . this.

“You may have a broken bone or two as well. You do look frightful, I must say.”

“I’m still a little groggy so I think I’ll just sit here on the grass for a while, if that’s okay.”

I probably had a cracked rib or two and probably a mild concussion. Once I went down, they were pissed enough that, orders or no, they might have kicked and beaten me to death if the Marines hadn’t shown up. My vision was blurry, and I was sure my nose was broken, but I still had all my teeth. That was good; the thought of having to visit whatever passed for a dentist here was pretty high up on my creepy nightmare list.

Gordon came out of the hotel with the last couple Marines. I experienced a flash of an unfamiliar emotion — pleasure at seeing him. He saw me and walked over, clearly still excited from his narrow escape.

“You’re alive! Good Lord, what happened to you?”

“There was a fight. They captured Thomson and got him away. Where were you?”

“Thomson? Gone? I . . . I woke up and had to visit the water closet. I saw them on my way back, and when they tried to overpower me I broke away and made it to my room.”

“Barricaded in right proper, ‘e was,” one of the Marines volunteered.

“You barricaded yourself in?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he answered and looked around at the others. O’Mara stood and walked toward his men in the street, suddenly interested in what they were up to, and Jenkins and the other Marine followed him.

“I’m just one man,” Gordon said. “What the devil did you expect me to do against that mob?”

“Your revolver was in your room. Shoot the first six of them and then beat the rest of them to death with your empty pistol. Or die trying.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but no words came, perhaps because there was no anger or accusation in my voice. I simply said what I honestly expected of him. It’s what everyone had expected of him, and, as he stood there, I think he knew it was what he ought to have expected of himself.

He looked away and frowned.

“Go to blazes, Fargo. I don’t answer to you.”

“No, you answer to Lord Chillingham. If we go back empty-handed, General Buller might be willing to give you a revolver and some privacy, but Chillingham won’t. Have you met him? I have.”

He looked back at me, anger and resentment mixed up with desperation and the hint of panic.

“Of course I’ve met him. He’s my department head. It doesn’t matter what you think,” he said in a low voice. “Hate me if you like. You’re nothing here.”

I didn’t hate him. I wasn’t all that crazy about myself right then.

Not because I’d failed. Success and failure are often beyond our control. But I had killed three men, probably crippled as many more, and after all these years, it had been so fucking easy! Every day here took me further from the life I had built for myself, took me further from my daughter, Sarah, until even if I returned she might not recognize me.

Sarah found an old picture of me once, a picture I’d forgotten. For a while she kept it in a frame on the desk in her room. I never spoke to her about it, but after a while she put it in a drawer. She noticed I stopped coming into her room when it was out. She was always very sensitive that way.

The picture was taken in Afghanistan, at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul. There’s an MH-60L Black Hawk helicopter from the 160th Aviation in the background on the tarmac, with me and the other eleven guys in my chalk in the foreground, six kneeling and six standing. I’m standing second from the left. We’re not combat-loaded; we’re just in desert camo pants and tee-shirts. I remember it was a hot day, but we don’t look uncomfortable. We look as if all our lives up until that day had prepared us for that place, that moment, and nothing else. That’s not true, but that’s how we look.

I’m grinning, squinting in the sun, mouth wide and showing bared teeth, white against the brown of my tanned face. I look like a cheerful Doberman, well-adjusted and happy and dangerous. I look like Reggie Llewellyn, but I’m not. I’m not like Reggie Llewellyn.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 26

The Forever Engine – Snippet 26

SEVENTEEN

October 6, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

I rose early, my head throbbing from too much beer the night before and too much bizarre science. I left the hotel in my improvised running clothes and began jogging under a pale pinkie-gray sky that promised another glorious autumn day. Only a few clouds drifted overhead, and the heavy dew would vanish like magic as soon as the sun showed itself.

I had the streets almost to myself. Down the block a solitary milk wagon made its way, four young boys running back and forth from the open sides to front steps, delivering tin jugs of milk and boxes of butter, panting to keep up as the wagon made steady progress down the street. Another block away I saw a carnival wagon, maybe an early departure from the fair. Other than that, everyone was sleeping it off.

I ran it off instead. I had things to do, a body that wasn’t ready to do them, and not enough time, so I ran even though I would rather have rolled over and drifted back into my erotic dream of Gabrielle Courbiere. I might have done so anyway if I hadn’t had to pee.

Besides, the dream had become disturbing. She had undressed, and under the black riding habit she was a robot — a shapely robot, like out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but a robot nonetheless — and it hadn’t bothered dream-me. In fact, dream-me was part robot, too. What the hell did that mean?

So I ran. I ran to purge my body of toxins, to harden it for the coming trials, and to scourge it for my sins. I ran to forget unbidden dreams, and I ran to think, to make sense of the inexplicable — trips to Mars on gossamer wings!

Our hotel was a couple blocks south of the Fliegerplatz. Despite the cool morning I’d worked up a good sweat by the time I rounded the corner onto Landsberger Strasse and the Fliegerplatz came into view. I jogged east now, toward the red pre-dawn, with the Fliegerplatz to my left. Not much stirred except for a smallish dirigible ahead of me, descending for a landing from the east. I watched it glide almost silently across the Landsberger Strasse, nearly brushing the uplifted branches of the chestnuts and oaks and I felt the adrenaline surge as I saw its unmarked black sides. I watched helplessly as it passed directly over the bulk of Intrepid, dark and silent on its tie-down pad, and as it passed over I saw a shower of small objects cascade from the dirigible onto the British cruiser. The explosions were small, but there were many of them, crackling like fireworks, all mixed up with the shouts of alarm from the sailors on early watch and the chiming of action stations, all of the sounds soft and distant, not at all like genuine danger.

The dirigible did not land; its engines increased in volume as it climbed and turned to port, toward me, and it began making smoke — thick, oily black smoke, escaping in almost solid coils from the back of its enclosed cabin. I knew instantly it wasn’t turning toward me; it was turning toward the hotel.

I sprinted back south across the broad boulevard and into an alleyway. The hotel was three blocks south and four west. My lungs burned for air by the time I reached the end of the alley, but I didn’t let up. As I raced across the street, I glanced left. The dirigible cleared the roofs, coming diagonally toward me, no more than a hundred meters away. They’d see me, but from up there I’d just look like some local yokel running in panic.

That wasn’t far wrong. I upped the speed, put everything I had into it, legs pounding like pistons, my heart feeling as if it were about to explode, and with no idea what I’d do when I got there. Warn them! my brain screamed.

The dirigible was going to get there before me. A warning was going to be too late, unless the dirigible had to mess around for a while trying to land. Think!

The hotel was on another broad east-west boulevard, Agnes-Bernauer Strasse. They’d have plenty of room to land the dirigible there, but they’d also see me coming from a long way if I went there and turned right.

At the next corner, a block short of Agnes-Bernauer, I turned right. My breath came in ragged gasps, the shadow of the dirigible passed over me, I felt a tingle in my scalp and up my spine, and then suddenly I had my second wind. Adrenaline is a marvelous thing. Behind me I heard the report of a large naval gun. Somebody on Intrepid had found a better way to sound the alarm than ringing a bell.

By the time I’d run the four short blocks west and turned into the alleyway, the dirigible had disappeared below the roof line ahead of me and its engines softened to idle. Smoke smelling of fuel oil settled into the streets and alleyways around me. Through the drifting smoke I saw the zeppelin now, or at least a very short segment of it between the buildings at the end of the alley, hovering twenty or more feet above the pavement. A rusty one-meter length of inch-and-a-half iron pipe lay against a trash can, and I picked it up as I jogged down the alley.

I paused at the end to catch my breath and get my heart rate under control. As I did so, I felt the familiar darkness tease at the edges of my vision. I did not fight it this time. I surrendered to it.

I looked cautiously around the corner, across and slightly down the street toward the hotel. Half a dozen ropes hung down from the dirigible, and several men on the ground held on to them, holding the airship in place against a soft breeze from the west, my right. None of them looked armed, and their attention was directed upward. The engine noise was louder out in the street. The carnival wagon I’d seen earlier was parked in front of the hotel, and as I watched, four men hustled Thomson, still in his nightshirt, down the front steps.

I took four or five long, fast strides out into the street and swung the pipe with both hands. The first man holding the rope never saw or heard me coming, and when the pipe cracked the back of his skull he went down like two hundred pounds of dead weight. The man beside him holding the same line started to turn toward me, his face distorted in horror, and the pipe crushed his left elbow, then his ribs, then his hip in three quick blows, and he was down.

The pipe felt good in my hands, balanced and lethal, as I ran toward the second group of linemen.

One of them saw the scuffle and alerted his partner. They let the rope go, and the first one drew a sheath knife from his belt. He held it up, as if to guard against me. I swung the pipe, and he made to duck it, stepping sideways. He ran into the other lineman, stumbled, and the pipe hit, driving the two of them to the pavement in a shower of the first one’s blood and teeth.

The buoyancy of the dirigible changed and tugged the remaining linemen up, pulling their feet off the ground for a moment before they came back down. They literally had their hands full, so I ignored them and ran toward the men holding Thomson. The linemen were in dark uniforms, but these four were dressed in bright colors. Of course — the circus wagon — a pretty good cover for guys moving around early in the morning.

I heard a gunshot from above and behind me, felt a momentary burning sensation in my left shoulder, but the pain went as quickly as it had come. I was running fast, and the dirigible was bobbing. I’d have to be damned unlucky to get hit by another aimed shot before I got to the kidnappers.

Thomson’s face lit up when he saw me. One man held the old Scotsman’s arms behind his back, and the other three stepped forward to meet me, knives drawn. Fortunately none of them were packing pistols or this might have been a short fight. I shifted my grip on the pipe, held it like a short quarterstaff.

The first man lunged for me. I broke his wrist with a downward chop of the left end of the pipe and then took him down with a sharp right cross to the head. The other two went wide to either side of me. The quarterstaff grip was a mistake, wouldn’t let me keep these two at a distance, and now I needed to fight for time. Police, the army, somebody had to be on their way to find out what the ruckus was all about.

I let the pipe slide back into a kendo grip. I launched an overhead swing at one attacker, followed him and swung again as he gave ground. Then I spun and swung from the shoulder at the other attacker, who I sensed, who I knew, was closing in on me from behind. He raised his arm to block the blow, and it made a sound like a stick of celery snapping when the pipe hit it. The man, face distorted in pain and broken left arm dangling limp at his side, started to back up, but not quickly enough. I swung again and he went down forever.

I turned back to the remaining thug, but he backed quickly down the sidewalk away from me. I looked to Thomson, but more men now crowded out of the hotel, some in the dark dirigible uniforms, some dressed like carnies—too many of them, and a couple had revolvers.

“Kein Schiessen!” I yelled at them. “Ich bin Fargo. Der Alte Mann wunscht mich lebendig.”

Don’t shoot. I’m Fargo. The Old Man wants me alive.

They hesitated; the barrels of the pistols dropped.

I raised the pipe above my head and charged.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 25

The Forever Engine – Snippet 25

SIXTEEN

October 5, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

I had no idea what a Forever Engine was, but something in those words, or perhaps in the way Thomson said them, sent a surge of adrenaline through me.

“If word of this leaks out. . .” Gordon said, and he leaned back against the wall as if exhausted, his words trailing off for a moment. Then he shook his head, his expression grim. “The colonies on Mars will go up in flames. It’s just the sort of excuse the local troublemakers have been looking for. Once that starts, heaven knows where it will all end.”

Then he stood forward again, and his eyes turned to Gabrielle.

“Mademoiselle Courbiere, you must give us your word that you will not share this information with your government.”

“You are wrong, Capitaine Gordon. No part of our agreement obligates me to withhold information from my own government.”

“This goes beyond our agreement. This is a matter of the lives of thousands of innocent people on Mars.”

“Will you keep the information from your own government, Capitaine? Non? Why can your government be trusted with this information and mine not?”

Gordon was getting his steam up, so I broke in.

“Would you two just take a break for a minute? All of you seem to know what this Forever Engine thing is. I haven’t got a clue, so first somebody fill me in, and then you guys can get back to refighting the Napoleonic Wars.”

“Ja, I am wondering the same thing,” Wolfenbach said.

Gordon glared at Gabrielle for a moment longer, and then nodded. Gabrielle shrugged.

“Yes, of course, laddie, you’ve no way of knowing, nor is it widely known in general,” Thomson said. “It’s not a secret, of course, just rather arcane. Forever Engine is the translation of an old Martian term — Makach Khadeek in Son-Gaaryani, although there are similar versions in all the Martian tongues. Martians agree on very little, Jack, but they are unanimous in their belief that the Makach Khadeek, the Forever Engine, is a device of unspeakable blasphemy.”

“You mean this is a religious thing?” I asked.

“Not precisely. Or rather, many religious prohibitions in all cultures have a survivalist foundation. In the case of the Makach Khadeek, the prohibition is no doubt based on the distorted remnants of earlier scientific understanding, from before Martian civilization went into decline.

“I should start by explaining the device itself. Depending on the orientation of its grain, which appears to follow an internal energetic field in the wood we do not yet understand — depending on the orientation of that grain from tangent, a length of liftwood provides either greater or lesser repulsion from a gravitational mass. This much you already know.

“Now imagine a waterwheel, but with liftwood planks in place of the paddles.”

“Like blades,” I said, “with one edge facing in and one out.”

“Good lad. Now suppose you add something to your wheel. Suppose you add a clever but mathematically very simple system of gears to the attachment points of the liftwood panels, gears which control the orientation of those panels, and tie that orientation to the position of the panels on the wheel. This orients them so that all of the panels on one side generate a repulsive force but those on the other side are neutral. The repulsive force ‘lifts’ one side of the wheel but not the other. This makes the wheel turn. As the panels come around, the gear mechanism keeps them turned in such a way that they always are neutral on one side of the wheel and repulsive on the other.”

“Okay, I get it,” I said. “The wheel goes round and round forever. A Forever Engine. Good name.”

No, wait . . .

“Tesla has made a perpetual motion machine? That’s crazy. There’s no such thing, can’t be, even in a place as screwy as this. I took high school physics. The universe is the universe. There’s only so much stuff in it, whatever that stuff is and however it interacts. You still have conservation of matter and energy.”

“And momentum,” Thomson added. “Do not forget momentum, Jack. You are perfectly correct. A perpetual motion machine is impossible, in the sense it is normally understood, for the very reason you set forth: conservation of matter, energy, and momentum. But a Forever Engine is not a true perpetual motion machine for two reasons.

“First, liftwood simply does not remain active forever. It deteriorates over time, not only in a physical sense, like ordinary wood, but also in terms of its repulsive properties. So a Forever Engine will eventually run down simply from exhaustion of the field characteristics of its lifters.

“But more importantly, the Forever Engine does not create energy from nothing. I now believe, based on what you told me in London, that liftwood redistributes momentum in a system. Normally the gross momentum in the system would remain constant overall. A flier takes off, but later it lands. Even while aloft, the center of mass of the planet and the flyer moves infinitesimally, but their combined momentum within the solar system remains unchanged. You see?”

“I think so.”

“Good. But this device actually allows its maker to convert momentum to work energy. In this case, Tesla is charging his giant Leyden jar with electricity generated from that momentum. He gains his energy at the price of momentum.”

“What momentum?” I asked.

“The Earth’s orbital momentum. We believe Mars was originally farther from the sun than its current orbit. The use of Forever Engines as power-generating devices slowed its orbit and caused it to move closer to the sun, began its warming and the subsequent decline of its civilization. That much, I believe, is now clear. And the Martians must have eventually understood it as well.”

There was a moment of silence around the chart table as everyone thought that over. Well, everyone but me. How restless the natives were on Mars wasn’t my problem.

“That still leaves us with the question of what we plan to do once we get there,” I said. Thomson looked up at me and then over to Captain Gordon. Gordon looked around the circle of faces a moment before realizing the call was his.

“Well — I should think that much was clear. Learn what we can about his operation.”

Wolfenbach shifted his weight and nearly knocked an inkwell from a side table behind him. Thomson scratched his beard and then shook his head.

“Daunting as I find the prospect, I am afraid our charge is rather more than simply gathering facts. General Buller expects us to deal with the problem, and it becomes clear Tesla has potentially enormous power at his disposal. Whether these incidents which brought us Professor Fargo were entirely Tesla’s doing or not, he clearly has some scheme in train. I cannot think it anything but reckless to let him play out that scheme uninterrupted. No, I fear our mission must now be to penetrate his lair and either capture or kill the villain.”

Well, that was their plan. Mine was going to have to have some embellishments.

***

Eat, drink, and be merry, or so Ecclesiastes recommends. That night it seemed like pretty good advice, at least the heavy drinking part.

Gabrielle left us to rejoin “Renfrew,” and within minutes Gordon left as well, his sullen glare keeping the revelers at arms’ length, which that evening spoke volumes about the broadcast power of his personality. Every time Thomson or I turned around, someone offered, “ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit!” — a toast to good fellowship — and they meant it. Hard not to drink to that.

So we ate Thüringer brats and Steckerlfisch — really delicious little fish grilled on a stick — washed down with too many steins of Märzenbier. The Märzenbier packed a punch, more like malt liquor, and, before we saw it coming, Thomson and I were both arm in arm, one stumble away from knee-crawling drunk.

In a more lucid moment, I noticed the normally cheerful Thomson increasingly drifting into melancholy. We sat on a low stone wall slightly out of the main traffic pattern and nursed our beer for a while.

“What’s eating you, Professor?”

“Tyndall haunts me. We were friends, you know, before all this Darwin business. As God’s my witness, I wish I’d never heard Darwin’s name!”

I remembered something from back in London, maybe from Buller’s office, something about disproving Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The details were fuzzy.

“Gotta stick by your guns,” I said, but just to make him feel better.

“Magnetism is an interest of mine, you know that. But temperature is my true passion. Heating, cooling, that’s the history of the cosmos, laddie. Everything else is . . . side effects. No one knows heating and cooling as I do. Not half a dozen men can even understand the equations I’ve derived to model the cooling of the Earth.”

“Well, there you go,” I said, but he shook his head.

“You don’t understand. Temperature — it’s all I’ve got. It’s my legacy, and . . . I made an error.”

“An error?”

“Aye, an error in computation. The Earth is older than my calculations, old enough . . . perhaps . . . I don’t know. But no one’s noticed the mistake yet, even though it’s been published for over a decade. Who would think to double-check Billie Thomson’s sums on something that important, on something about temperature? No one but me.”

He stared down at his beer stein. No wonder he felt haunted by Tyndall’s ghost.

“Well, your secret’s safe with me, pal,” I said, and patted his back.

He turned and looked at me, eyes empty and hopeless.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 24

The Forever Engine – Snippet 24

FIFTEEN

October 5, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

Intrepid limped back to Munich well after dark. We met the next morning in the chart room on Intrepid’s bridge. Gabrielle joined us and I expected an argument from Captain Harding about a “Frog” coming into his inner sanctum, but I was mistaken. His still-bloody head bandage was reminder enough that, for the moment at least, the French were not the enemy.

The chart room wasn’t all that big, and the six of us crowded around the map table: Gabrielle, myself, Gordon, Thomson, Harding, and Inspector Wolfenbach of the Bavarian Stadtpolizei. Inspector Wolfenbach’s considerable girth contributed to the close quarters; I pegged him at between two-fifty and three hundred pounds. Gabrielle stood to my left, pressed against my arm by necessity, and I enjoyed the sensation.

Thanks to her I knew almost as much about Tesla’s location and setup as did French intelligence, which was quite a lot, although much of it was pretty boring, mundane stuff. Gabrielle had recited all of it the previous evening, warming to the subject as she went, becoming more interested as the information became more arcane and obscure. She went on long after Thomson, Gordon, and I started listening out of a sense of duty rather than genuine interest, and then after we began just pretending to pay attention, and she never seemed to notice. In a sense it was a replay of her long lecture about anarcho-syndicalism in the mess hall of Intrepid earlier. Coming from anyone else it would have been annoying, but from her it was strangely endearing. We are all suspicious of perfection, and rightly so. Perfection is an illusion; this flaw made her real.

Or maybe that was why Gabrielle Courbiere could be a successful spy; guys got stupid around her, knew they were being stupid, and didn’t care. Part of it was because of her looks, no doubt about it. But part of it was her disarming directness and absence of guile. She might lie about facts — provided it was a carefully constructed lie, rich in nuance and detail, and painstakingly internally consistent — but she did not seem capable of deceiving as to her feelings.

“Can we still count on your cooperation, Inspector Wolfenbach?” Thomson asked.

The corpulent policeman bobbed his head, making his jowls quiver. “Natürlich.”

Thomson unrolled Intrepid‘s chart of Serbia and pointed to the mountains along its southwest frontier with Turkish Bosnia and Montenegro. That had surprised me the first time I saw it — Turkey still holding a bunch of the Balkans. I was pretty sure in my time-line Austria had them by now, but wasn’t certain.

“Mademoiselle Courbiere tells us that Tesla’s base is here in Serbia, specifically in the valley of the Uvac River, between Zlatar Mountain and Mutenice Mountains, near the village of Kokin Brod. Two years ago the Serbs built an earthen dam near the village, used explosives to bring down some of the rock cliffs. Since then the valley to the southeast has filled with water. Mademoiselle Courbiere also tells me you have been gathering information on this installation, Inspector?”

Wolfenbach nodded and then pointed to the valley, using a finger like a small bratwurst. “Ja. Berlin does not, but down here we still remember our friends in Vienna and help them out now and then. If a hound in Serbia has fleas, soon there will be scratching in Budapest, nicht wahr? So this is the lair of Der Alte Gebirgsmann. Bad country. There are many rumors about horrible things in the hills, we think started to discourage the curious. Also maybe three, four earthquakes, but not large. We know about the dam, but why build it? This we do not know.” Wolfenbach shrugged, which threatened to knock a lamp off the wall behind him.

“When he was working for Edison, Tesla did a lot of work with large electrical turbines,” I said. “I wonder if he’s playing around with hydroelectric power generation.”

I looked around but realized the word didn’t connect with anyone. “Have there been any unusual shipments of equipment into there?”

“Nine heavy naval guns,” Wolfenbach answered, “and glass.”

“Glass? As in window panes?”

“Ja, window panes. Large sheets of window glass, hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They have been buying as far north as Dresden.”

“Armor plate as well?” Harding asked, but Wolfenbach shook his head.

I looked at Thomson, figuring glass might mean something to him, but he simply chewed on the stem of his new pipe, lost in thought.

Gordon tapped the map to bring us back in focus.

“The question remains how we are to reach this base deep inside Serbia.”

“That I can arrange, Herr Hauptmann,” Wolfenbach said,

Thomson’s head came up and he took the pipe from his mouth.

“Please elaborate, Inspector.”

“Die Hochflieger Ost, the express zeppelin from Berlin to Turkey, stops here in Munich, then Vienna, and finally Sofia before arriving in Istanbul. It makes no scheduled stops in Serbia. However, Deutsche Luftschiffahrts AG, the concern which owns the Hochflieger Ost, is willing to do occasional . . . favors for the imperial authorities, und now it seems for us as well. I believe Fraulein Courbiere has a particularly persuasive friend.”

Yeah, I’d met him two nights before. Wolfenbach looked at Gabrielle with a smile and raised eyebrow, but if he was trying to make a veiled salacious hint, it was lost on her. Veiled hints didn’t seem to penetrate her consciousness; if you wanted her to know something, I suspected you needed to just tell her.

“Zo,” he said, “your party travels as civilians on Die Hochflieger Ost with passage to Istanbul, but when it passes over southern Serbia, it will land in the countryside, secretly disembark your party, und then continue on with its voyage. The other passengers will be told a story of some sort. We leave that up to the zeppelin line.”

“I’m unclear as to exactly what our plan is once we get there,” I said. “But more importantly, how do we get out when we’re done?”

“Walk west,” Thomson said. We all looked at him, and he tapped the chart with his pipe stem. “It is only a few miles to the Bosnian frontier. The Foreign Office has said we can expect cooperation from the Turks in this. I imagine that extends at the very least to allowing us to flee across their frontier.”

“And if they follow us with that damned black zeppelin?” Gordon demanded.

“Leave that to Intrepid,” Captain Harding said, “providing Johnny Turk lets us use his air space. If we sight that black zeppelin again, we’ll see what a salvo of Hale rockets does to its hydrogen cells. Why he’s still using a dirigible is a puzzle, though.”

“Why?” I asked.

Harding looked around the chart table and colored slightly, as if he had said too much.

“I . . . well, this fellow’s an inventor, ain’t he? I just –”

“Capitaine Harding is perhaps concerned with the stolen Royal Navy liftwood,” Gabrielle said.

We all looked at Harding, whose face turned a deeper red.

“How do you know about that?” he snapped.

“I am a spy,” she answered, and gave a wonderfully Gallic shrug.

“He stole a shipment of liftwood?” Gordon asked. “And we weren’t told of it?”

“We don’t know who stole it,” Harding answered. “We just know that a White Star aether flyer under Royal Navy charter was seized by its crew during a return flight from Syrtis Major. The passengers and ship’s officers were put down on the Azores, and there’s been no sign of it since.”

“Yes, I remember,” Gordon said. “That business with RMF Prolific last year. I read of it.”

“What was kept from the papers,” Harding continued, “was her cargo: the finished lifting vanes for another cruiser of this class, along with refitting vanes for two of our older gunboats.”

“He has it,” Gabrielle said.

No one seemed inclined to argue the point with her.

“This changes things,” Thomson said. He leaned back against the bulkhead and studied the lamp hanging from the ceiling of the chart room, chewing thoughtfully on his pipe. After a few minutes of increasingly awkward silence, his face soured and he shook his head.

“Are you stumped, or have you figured it out?” I asked.

“I believe I understand the business, although it gives me little enough satisfaction. Remember, Tesla has not imported any heavy machinery, at least that we know of. Therefore everything he needs, aside from the items we know he brought in, must have been on RMF Prolific, the pirated White Star aether flyer.

“The first critical component, of course, is the vessel’s aether propeller. It is useless in the Earth’s dense atmosphere as a means of propulsion, but at its simplest it is nothing but a very large, although specialized, electromagnetic field generator, exactly the device Tesla has spent much of his life working on and perfecting. I think it clear he has discovered uses for it beyond simple propulsion in the vacuum of space. He has found a way to concentrate its field, and heighten its power, to the extent that it can tear open a hole between our time and others, such as yours, Jack. As I recall you told us, your Wessex apparatus required enormous electricity.”

“Enough to power a good-sized town when they really had it cranking.”

“Tesla cannot generate that much power all at once,” Thomson continued, “nor is there a central power grid such as in your world from which he can simply draw it. I believe he must generate it gradually and store it, then discharge it quickly through his field generator — the modified aether propeller — to open his portal to other times.

“So, the next question is how can he store that much power? Well, this is where I believe it gets truly remarkable, and I’ll say this much for Tesla — the villain thinks large.

“Are any of you familiar with a scientific device called a Leyden jar? No? It is a device for storing electrical charges and then discharging them on demand. It consists of a conductive medium on either side of a nonconductive barrier, a dielectric, in which the actual charge is stored. Its most primitive version is a handheld beaker of water, where the water inside and the hand outside serve as conductors and the glass is the dielectric.”

“The window glass!” I said.

“Very good, laddie. Yes, the window glass, enough glass to make hundreds, even thousands of cells. And where does he keep this latticework of glass?”

He looked around the circle of faces. Gabrielle was the one who answered.

“The lake, obviously. The lake he has made. It is his giant Leyden jar.”

“The largest Leyden jar ever conceived,” Thomson said. “I cannot begin to fathom how much energy it could store. He could accumulate energy slowly, I suppose, were he a patient man. He could run a waterwheel or two, as Jack suggested, or use the steam engine from RMF Prolific.

“But the numerous stories of small earthquakes, which I take to be the thunderous reports of his time-rending machine, these point to more frequent uses.”

“As I understand what you’ve told us,” Gordon said, “this Leyden jar thing does not generate power. It merely stores it. So where is he getting all this power?”

“Ah, the missing component from RMF Prolific, and I do not mean its steam power plant. I mean its cargo of liftwood, along with the vessel’s own lifting vanes. Here is a man who has more liftwood than any private citizen, and most governments, on Earth, and yet he still makes use of hydrogen-filled airships. Why?

“He does so because he has better uses for his liftwood. The damned fool has built himself a Forever Engine, and God help us all.”

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 23

The Forever Engine – Snippet 23

“It’s a Schützenpanzer Puma, the standard infantry fighting vehicle of the Bundeswehr — the German army in my time,” I explained to Thomson, Gordon, Gabrielle, and Inspector Wolfenbach of the Bavarian Stadtpolizei, who stood with them. Gabrielle crouched, an open pad on her knees as she sketched the vehicle and made notes in the margins. Inspector Wolfenbach had already been told, in confidence, of my origins. He clearly hadn’t believed any of it but now seemed to be having second thoughts. Thirty-five tons of squat, angular armored vehicle, obviously not from this time and place, possessed a quiet but persuasive eloquence.

Five graves. A Puma could carry nine men — a crew of three and six infantry dismounts. Squads were usually understrength in the field, and there was no telling if all the passengers had even made it through the transition to this time, given that hole ripped in the back end. Somebody had survived, though. No matter how smart the guys in the black zeppelin were, it would take weeks to figure out how to remove that remote turret without damaging it, remove the engine, and install them in an airship so they would actually work — not to mention figure out how they worked. Somebody from my time had to have helped them, which was not to say the assistance was rendered voluntarily.

Gordon drifted over and touched the beads of melted steel along the open rear, then peered into the alien interior of the vehicle. He still wore that same blank expression he’d had since the zeppelin attack, which made it tough to figure what he was thinking. After a moment, he looked at me, and his expression was altered. He believed this thing was from a different time, and now he also believed, not just in his head but down in his gut, that I was from a different time as well. Fear had replaced contempt.

I climbed up onto the deck and looked into the now-open turret ring. When I glanced over, I saw Gabrielle studying me with curiosity. She didn’t look away at first, but then went back at her work and continued sketching.

“There are brackets for Spike missile reloads, thirty-millimeter ammunition boxes, and seven-six-two belted — what you’d call thirty caliber. All the brackets are empty. I’d guess they have four missiles — three now, since they took out a turret on Intrepid with one of them — plus 400 rounds of thirty millimeter, and about 2,000 machine-gun rounds, give or take. That can make a lot of trouble for one or two of your warships, but it’s not exactly a conquer-the-world ordnance load.”

Thomson scratched his beard and squinted at the broken vehicle. “There’s something bothering me. You mentioned the laboratory you worked at was not in Somerton, but rather the countryside, and this vehicle does not seem to have come out at ground level. But your facility was in Wessex, and this vehicle was at least in Germany, and quite possibly southern Germany, so in both cases the transition point was close to its origin. You mentioned the date of the incident in your time was early August, but it took place a month later here. Do you suppose the difference in where the Earth was in its orbit around the sun could account for that shift?”

That had been bothering me as well. “I wish it could, but I don’t see how. The difference in orbital position is much more than this little shift in location, but it’s insignificant compared to the distance the sun has moved in relation to the rest of the galaxy in over a century. By my time we’d been able to measure that speed. The sun’s moving through the galaxy at about 40,000 miles an hour, and pulling the Earth and the other planets along with it. That means that in the century between my time and yours, the sun and earth have moved” — I paused and did some quick calculations in my head — “about three and a half billion miles. Being a couple dozen kilometers off in terms of where I came out doesn’t seem like that big a deal when you look at it in those terms.”

What I left unsaid was that if I’d been a couple dozen kilometers — or even meters — off in altitude, I wouldn’t have survived the experience. These guys had come out a few meters high. What if they — or I — had come out a few meters low? For a moment I felt sick to my stomach.

“Well, how can you account for this difference, then?” Thomson said.

I looked at him. “You’re the scientist. You tell me.”

Three and a half billion miles. As I thought about it, I realized this was an aspect of time travel I’d never heard addressed in any of the science fiction I’d read as a youngster. For that matter, the physicists at WHECOL hadn’t questioned it, either. Why not? They were just swept up in the excitement of the possibility of time travel, I supposed. And for all I knew, maybe some of them had wondered about it — I never spoke with any of them directly, only with Reggie. But I think the first question I’d ask if I had a machine bringing things back from the past is why it wasn’t just bringing back big scoops of vacuum, because that’s about all there would have been hundreds or even thousands of years earlier in the spot we occupied when the time machine was running. How would the machine search out where Earth was back then and bring samples back from it? Something didn’t add up, but the answer wasn’t in the burnt-out Puma.

“I think we’re done here,” I said. I’d sure as hell seen all I cared to.

***

Intrepid had finished its jury-rigged repairs and was already airborne and coming to find us when we were an hour from the crash site. I was happy to switch from the German landship to Intrepid. The landships were big on the outside but amazingly cramped on the inside, not to mention hot, steamy, and filthy with coal dust and lubricating grease and oil. Dante would have taken one look around and nodded.

But aside from the comparative comfort of Intrepid as a means of transportation, we didn’t have a lot to celebrate. We were too late getting to the incident site, and the pride of the Royal Navy had had its ass handed to it by a balloon. The three-hour flight from Munich was looking like a six or seven-hour return flight on one propeller. Gabrielle was no longer confined to the crew’s mess, as the room periodically filled with steam from a leaking boiler line — that and the fact that Harding had a lot more on his mind than the danger posed by one unarmed French woman. She joined Thomson and me at the bow railing, but none of us had much to say.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 22

The Forever Engine – Snippet 22

 

FOURTEEN

October 4, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Landed Near Kempten, Bavaria

We hadn’t tipped over. We were grounded in a meadow while damage-control parties swarmed over the ship. I sat with my back to the wall and watched the activity in the wheelhouse. They had at least swept up the broken glass but several broad smears of blood, red turning to brown, told the story of our brief, disastrous encounter. I didn’t help the naval ratings clear away the debris. My knees felt too weak to support me, although I knew from experience that if they had to, they would. Captain Harding, head swathed in a bloody bandage, sat in a chair pulled into the wheelhouse from the chart room, while an officer reported on the damage.

“Both boilers punctured, but Mr. Clyde says he has number one patched with steam up and can have pressure in number two inside of an hour. Starboard airscrew lost, and the port airscrew shaft is bent. Mr. Clyde recommends remounting the port screw on the starboard shaft and says he can give you twelve knots once the work is done. Rudder is jammed amidships, but he doesn’t expect a problem freeing it. He can jury-rig the screw in three hours and perhaps make temporary repairs on the boilers, but he would rather spend the night doing the job right.”

“Casualties?” Harding asked.

“Lieutenant Longchamps and two ratings dead, yourself and six ratings injured. Dr. Bay says Leading Trimsman O’Donnell will lose the arm, sir.”

“What about Mademoiselle Courbiere?” I asked. The officer looked to me.

“Uninjured, sir. The attack distressed her, but she seems quite calm now, all things considered. I was afraid she might become hysterical.”

“Never mind that,” Harding snapped. “What about our armament?”

“Starboard sponson frozen in place with the gun locked at maximum depression. Z turret totally destroyed. We’ll need major dry-dock work to replace it. All secondary armament serviceable, sir.”

“They spiked your aft turret,” I said.

“I am quite aware of that, Mr. Fargo,” Harding said, turning his sour gaze on me. “The question is how they did it, and why.”

“No, when I said spiked, I meant it. That was a Spike antitank missile they fired at you, built either by Raphael or EuroSpike. What the hell it was doing here is a different matter.”

“And that damned gun?” he asked. “It fired faster than a Hotchkiss one-pounder revolver but cut through our armor as if it were mere sheet metal.”

“I’m pretty sure it was a Rhinemetal thirty-millimeter Maschinenkanone, probably firing sabot rounds.”

Harding looked from me to Thomson, who leaned against the wall of the wheelhouse and mopped the perspiration from his flushed face. “Thomson, do you have any idea what this fellow is talking about?”

“Yes, I do. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I cannot explain further at the moment. All I can say is you should listen carefully to whatever he can tell you about the capabilities of these weapons.”

Gordon entered the wheelhouse, looking around at the damage. I wondered where he’d been through all of this and spotted the blood dried on his hands.

“You hurt, Gordon?” I asked.

He looked at me wordlessly, as if unsure what I meant, and then raised his hands slowly and examined therm. That slow-motion movement was a pretty good sign of someone coming out of shock.

“No. I’m all right. Someone else’s.”

My own right hand was bandaged. I’d cut it scooping up glass to throw at Conroy, but I hadn’t felt the cut at the time. It hadn’t even started bleeding until after things settled down. That was typical, too.

“Why didn’t they finish us off when they had the chance?” Thomson asked.

“Turning radius,” Harding answered. “They couldn’t fire directly astern because of their own airscrews and would have to swing wide to turn back on us, which would give either our broadside mounts or the port sponson a clear shot. Too dangerous with that great hydrogen bag as a target. They couldn’t know we weren’t at action stations. What I want to know is why the damned Germans are shooting at us.”

“It’s not the Germans,” I said. “At least I don’t think so. There were no markings on the zeppelin. This smells of an ambush, maybe by the fellow we’re looking for.”

“Well, we’ll make repairs here overnight and then try to make Munich in the morning. I hope to God you’re right about the Germans, Fargo. We’re damned near helpless with one screw, a leaky boiler, and half our main guns out of battery.”

“There’s still the matter of our mission,” I said. “We have to examine the incident site.”

“Out of the question,” Harding said, shaking his head vigorously. “My first responsibility is my vessel.”

I looked to Thomson, but he just shrugged helplessly. Gordon had a thousand-yard stare that said his mind was still half an hour back in time.

“If we can get to the incident site on our own, will you wait for us?” I asked.

Harding frowned. “Can’t imagine how you’ll manage that, but if there’s no sign of hostility from the Germans, I’ll wait the night and the day tomorrow.”

“Smoke on the horizon,” the lookout above the wheelhouse called, “nor’ by nor’-west, three smudges.”

“Those German landships we passed yesterday,” Harding said. “If you’re wrong, Fargo, they’ll shoot us to scrap metal here on the ground.”

“Yeah, but if I’m right, they’re our ride.”

***

“What do you make of it, lad?” Thomson asked.

I walked around the vehicle, assessing the damage and trying to envision what that fiery moment of transition from my time back to this one had been like. No fun, that’s for sure; five fresh graves in the meadow forty yards away bore mute testimony to that.

In some ways it reminded me of the Somerton site we’d looked at earlier, although the impact area was much smaller here. It had that same look of part of one world exchanged with another, and the topography didn’t quite line up. WHECOL hadn’t been at Somerton, so the shift in time had brought a slight shift in location as well. Here it looked as though the vehicle and a chunk of the surrounding ground had appeared above the surface of the meadow and just fallen onto it. A lot of the surrounding grass was burnt but I wasn’t sure if that was from the event itself or a secondary fire afterwards. One side of the vehicle was blackened, and the rear fuel cell had been compromised.

Compromised. Boy, that was a polite word for what had happened. The back two or three feet of the vehicle just weren’t there any more, leaving the interior open to the morning sunlight. The edges weren’t cleanly cut, as I’d expected them to be, but looked as if they had been melted by a broad-flamed cutting torch. Hard threads of steel hung like shining silver spittle from the yawning improvised mouth, and severed caterpillar tracks lay in twisted heaps around the broken vehicle like spilled entrails.

The circular hole in the top, letting more sunlight in, showed no evidence of violence. The entire remote turret assembly had been carefully removed. That much I’d suspected, as I’d seen it yesterday on the black zeppelin. I wondered how they powered it. My curiosity piqued, I walked around front, lifted the engine access hatch, and looked into an empty engine compartment. Whoever they were, these guys hadn’t missed a trick.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 21

The Forever Engine – Snippet 21

“Non, perhaps not,” Gabrielle said. “But it raises the interesting questions. It was your James Madison who said government is formulated to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority, n’est-cepas? The question is whether the state, if denied that ability to protect the wealthy few from the many, then has a remaining useful function.”

“It’s hardly as simple as that, lass,” Thomson protested.

“I should say not!” Gordon echoed in rare agreement with the Scotsman. And they were off and running.

I’d said my piece, and I had no dog in this fight, so I mostly listened. Thomson and Gordon argued with passion and enthusiasm; Gabrielle spoke in a simple tone which never seemed to vary in intensity. Her grasp of detail was incredible. The logic and consistency of her arguments were unassailable, provided you accepted the premises upon which they were based. But most importantly, she was tireless. She simply wore Thomson and Gordon down, without appearing to realize that’s what she was doing. When an hour into the argument Intrepid‘s captain sent word requesting Thomson’s presence on the bridge, I think it came as a relief to all of us except Gabrielle. Gordon and I bid her farewell at the same time and accompanied Thomson, although Gordon left us as soon as we were away from her.

* * *

“Ah, hello, sir,” young Ensign Conroy greeted Thomson as we entered the wheelhouse, and then he nodded to me as well. “Captain’s compliments and he’s occupied at the moment, but we’re getting close to the destination and he thought you might like to see the approach.”

Conroy handed Thomson a pair of binoculars, but space was at a premium along the broad window at the front of the wheelhouse. I pointed to the portside hatchway, and Thomson nodded. We made our way out onto the open railed platform they called the bridge wing.

“Quite a formidable young lady,” Thomson said once we were under open sky. “Badly misinformed, of course, but that’s hardly her fault. I think it would take weeks to untangle all of her misconceptions, and who has the time for that now?”

“Or the energy,” I added, and he nodded. Even if he could muster the necessary stamina, I wondered who would end up tangled at the end of those weeks, and who untangled, but I kept that to myself.

“Craft ahead,” the lookout above the wheelhouse called out. “Bearing green zero-one-five, climbing from twenty degrees down-angle. Range four thousand and closing.”

Ensign Conroy and another officer I didn’t know came out onto the bridge wing to have a better look. Thomson offered me the loaned binoculars, and I took them gratefully. It took a few seconds to find it. It looked like a zeppelin to me — black gas bag with some sort of structure slung underneath. As it was climbing and pointed almost directly at us, it was hard to see much else about it. The lookout had a good pair of eyes; the black gasbag was almost invisible against the dark backdrop of the Alps behind it.

“One of the old L Zed Fives,” Ensign Conroy said.

“Bavaria flies one or two of them, as I recall,” the other officer answered. “Probably an escort. Afraid we won’t be able to find Kempten on our own, I imagine. Better call the captain, Mr. Conroy. He may want to exchange honors.”

“Action stations, sir?” Conroy asked. The other officer hesitated and then shook his head.

“Captain’s prerogative.”

Conroy disappeared into the wheelhouse.

The zeppelin was already noticeably closer. Four thousand yards was only a little over two miles. We were cruising at about twenty knots, and if he was coming on at the same speed, we were closing the distance at almost a mile a minute. Captain Harding emerged from the wheelhouse. He must have been in the chart room right behind it to get here this quickly.

“I have the bridge, Mr. Longchamps,” he said.

“Aye, aye, sir. Our course is one six five magnetic, altitude four thirty, speed nineteen knots. L Zed Five-class zeppelin approaching, climbing to meet us. Range about two thousand and closing. Shall we go to action stations, sir?”

“Not enough time to get everyone assembled at the rate he’s coming. Why show our German hosts a crowded, confused deck? No, we’ll dip the colors as a salute. Have the signaler stand by.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Longchamps went back into the wheelhouse. Harding followed him and left Thomson and me alone for the moment. The zeppelin was down to perhaps half a mile now. It would pass us to starboard, and Thomson and I stood on the portside flying bridge, so I could see a little of its profile. The gas bag was more pointed than the big German zeppelins of the 1930s, and the crew compartment hung a few meters below the bag instead of being tucked right up against it. I studied it through the binoculars, never having seen a real one before. Its tail planes were visible then, but were the same featureless black as the gas bag.

“Germans don’t mark their zeps?” I asked.

“Yes,” Thomson answered. “Usually a large Maltese cross on the side of the balloon and a smaller one on the tail.”

I felt my heart accelerate, felt the first fingers of dopey excitement claw at my brain, and then I saw the gun mount swiveling toward us, a vaguely familiar gun mount which had no business being here in this time.

I dropped the binoculars and grabbed Thomson by the lapels, pushed his back against the outside steel wall of the wheelhouse, and then kicked his feet out from under him. He crashed to the deck with a startled grunt. I ducked down beside him.

“What in blazes –” he started, but then was drown out by the sound of metal impacting metal, exploding glass, and screaming men. Some of the glass from the wheelhouse windows blew out on us, along with tiny beads of molten steel, one of which smoldered on the sleeve of my coat and burned my arm underneath before I could shake it off.

The zeppelin was already past the wheelhouse. I heard its gun fire again — POW, POW, POW — but the rounds hit farther aft.

“Stay down,” I ordered and Thomson nodded wordlessly, face as white as the clouds.

I ran through the smoky chaos of the wheelhouse, seeing nothing clearly but an oval-shaped panel of blue sky — the hatch to the starboard bridge wing. In clean air I came up hard against the brass railing and looked at the enormous black giver of death slipping past. A small streak of fire shot out from the zeppelin’s gondola and hit somewhere behind the superstructure, causing an explosion which shook the deck under my feet. Then the gun started again: POW, POW, POW. One of the aft propellers flew to pieces, the rudder jumped and twisted at the wrong angle, the other prop shuddered and came to a halt amid the screech of tortured metal. Then the zeppelin was past us. I watched for a moment, but it showed no sign of turning back on us.

Beneath me I could feel Intrepid begin to list slightly to starboard as her speed fell away. I turned back into the wheelhouse. Broken glass covered everything, and all of the bridge crew was down except for Ensign Conroy, who knelt beside the unconscious Captain Harding and pressed his hand over the captain’s bloody forehead. The other officer, Longchamps, had lost the back half of his head.

“Captain, wake up!” Conroy shouted over and over.

My head spun, for a moment nothing, made sense. Then I remembered the red lever by the engine telegraph from our earlier encounter with the French, and I pulled it. Five quick bells, a pause, five more quick bells: action stations — as if anyone onboard didn’t already know we were in a world of trouble. This would at least bring more people up here, people who knew what they were doing. I held on to the helm for balance and realized the list was getting worse. The petty officer they called the trimsman had nearly lost his right arm above the elbow, and the mangled flesh and bone lay beside him on the deck at an awkward angle. I crunched through broken glass to get to him, pulled him away from the hedge of trim levers, and applied pressure on his inside upper arm to stop the arterial bleeding. Christ, there was a lot of blood!

“Captain, wake up!” Conroy pleaded.

“Conroy, you’re in command!” I shouted at him. He didn’t seem to hear me, so I picked up a handful of broken glass and threw it at his back. That got his attention.

“What?”

“You’re in command. The ship’s listing and the trimsman’s down. Fucking do something!”

He looked around helplessly at the blood-spattered ruin of the wheelhouse, the shattered controls and broken bodies, and then back down.

“Captain, wake up!”

Feet pounded on the steel stairs to the port flying bridge. A naval rating appeared in the hatchway and froze for a moment, taking in the scene.

“Bloody ‘ell!” he said. An officer pushed past him and made a quick survey of the damage.

“Better get someone on these trim controls,” I told him, “or we’re going to tip right over.” I didn’t know what would happen then, but I couldn’t imagine it would be good.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 20

The Forever Engine – Snippet 20

THIRTEEN

October 4, 1888, Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

Aloft over Bavaria

When we reboarded Intrepid the next morning and Captain Harding learned our party now included a representative of the DCRG, he did not react well. After a number of loud and intemperate words, Gabrielle Courbiere, looking every bit as lovely as I remembered from the previous evening, but that day wearing a dark purple riding habit, found herself installed in the crew’s mess hall with an armed Marine guard at the door for company. She was not a prisoner, certainly not, not by any means. She was simply under no circumstances to leave the mess hall. About an hour after we were airborne, Thomson and I looked in on her. Gordon sniffed at the idea but came along anyway.

We found her enjoying tea served in a white porcelain navy mug. When we sat at her table, she raised her hand and called the mess steward.

“Jerome, would it be a trouble to bring my friends some tea? Ah, bien. Merci, Jerome.” She smiled at him as he brought our mugs, and he floated back to the galley, soaring on the thermals of that smile. Give her a week and she’d be running the ship.

“Lass, I appreciate your assistance in this,” Thomson said once we’d sipped our tea and settled back. “But I have to wonder why. What is your official charge with respect to our mission?”

“None,” she said. “Officially I am not here. There would be much discord in the Chamber of Deputies were it known the DCRG was cooperating with British military intelligence. The same with the House of Commons, n’est-cepas? But my immediate superiors ask me to do this thing, and I say oui.”

“Just out of the goodness of their hearts?” Gordon demanded. “I’ve followed the Old Man’s campaign of assassinations and terror, and I’ve never heard of any of his attacks being directed at France.”

“That is true,” Gabrielle answered. “The majority of them have been in Great Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. There have also been four assassinations in Turkey, two each in Italy and Bulgaria, and single assassinations in five other European countries. Those are Greece, Wallachia –”

“Yes, yes.” Gordon cut her off. “I know all that. The point is, none in France. So what interest does your agency have in this matter?”

“Your country and Germany attempt to isolate us,” she said. “Well, not the entire countries. We have many friends in both places, but Lord Salisbury’s government in your country and Chancellor Bismarck’s in Germany oppose us. Very well. So now we reach out to Austria-Hungary and Turkey as friends. The attacks against them, while we remain unattacked, complicate this friendship. I am to help uncomplicated it.”

Well, that was clear enough. Apparently the Commune was as capable of realpolitik as the next guy.

“You might have uncomplicated it sooner if you’d thought to tell us Tesla was behind all this,” Gordon said. “He was just in England a week past. We could have arrested him and been done with it.”

“I would have been very surprised,” Gabrielle answered. “For all your enthusiasm, your department is not very successful at making the arrest.”

“What are you talking about?” Gordon demanded.

“Two years ago, through private channels, we tell your department we know who killed Sir Henry Bessemer. Do you make the arrest? Non. You tell this English gentleman the French are attempting to slander him and he should retain the solicitor. Instead he disappears. Ah! Now we are more careful what we tell you.”

“A different matter altogether. Tesla is hardly a gentleman,” Gordon said.

“It is hard to know who is, n’est-cepas? Tell me, Capitaine Gordon, why would Lord Chillingham, the man who amassed his second fortune by purchasing the patents to the Bessemer process from the heirs of the murdered inventor, have cause to allow the murderer to disappear? Hmm? Can you think of a reason?”

“I won’t dignify that with an answer,” he said and turned away.

Gabrielle shrugged and sipped her tea.

“I have a question that’s been bothering me, Mademoiselle,” I said. “Maybe you can help. This Old Man of the Mountain apparently has an extensive network of agents and sympathizers and has been assassinating people all over Europe. Why? What does he want?”

“What difference does it make what he wants?” Gordon demanded. “He’s a madman.”

Gabrielle frowned at that, but I answered before she could. “It matters for two reasons. First, knowing what he’s after may help us anticipate his next moves. Second, I talked to one of his guys. You did, too, Gordon. That fellow Grover was someone who believed in something. Understand the beliefs, or goals, which Tesla shares with his followers and we have an insight into his operation.” Gabrielle nodded in agreement.

“Oui, this is so. He adheres to the revolutionary syndicalist movement, although his methods are so violent he is no longer embraced by the former leaders of that movement.”

“Former leaders?” I asked.

“Since the Association Internationale des Travailleurs disbanded in 1871, following the success of the Commune in France, there has been no one centrally organized international movement. Some syndicalists centered their efforts in France and the surrounding countries. I know many of those organizers, of course. But those who reject the state as the inevitable enemy of workers followed Mikhail Bakunin.”

“Yeah, I know something about Bakunin,” I said. “Not exactly a happy guy, as I recall.”

She looked puzzled, as if wondering what his happiness had to do with anything.

“I never met him,” she said, “but he does not smile in his photographs. Since his death twelve years ago, there can hardly be named a single dominant leader of the movement. Le Vieil Homme de Montagne emerges as perhaps the most influential of those who see violence as a necessary tactic to achieve their ends. He perhaps has the ties to the German labor movement through Wilhelm Liebknecht. Liebknecht denies this, of course.”

She paused to sip her tea and frowned in thought. I had the impression she was assessing the likelihood of Liebknecht’s denial being truthful, and that she had made a similar assessment many times and had never been completely satisfied with the result. Absorbed as she was by her thoughts, I sensed she had, for the moment, become oblivious to the world around her, unaware we were even there, and it made me feel like a voyeur looking at her, as if I spied on her through a bedroom window. She looked up at me, and I felt my ears flush, but how much from embarrassment and how much from arousal I couldn’t say.

“He also has contacts to the more radical elements of the British trade unionist movement,” she continued, “through Johann Eccarius, who also broke with the Commune.”

“Eccarius?” Gordon put in. “You’re sure of that?”

“Oui, but I must tell you we have no proof that Monsieur Eccarius is an active part of his network of agents. I am sorry. I know how enamored you are of arrests.”

I saw a sparkle of humor in her eyes then, and Gordon sat back with a scowl.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “But what are their ends?”

“Oh. An end to state and private ownership of the means of production. Its replacement with syndicats, unions of workers who produce goods to meet needs, not to enrich owners. Trade negotiation directly between syndicats rather than between states.” She shrugged.

“So,” I said, “a seeker after utopia.”

“Oui, I believe so. His methods are objectionable but his ends well-intentioned, n’est-cepas?”

“Non, ce n’est pas ainsi,” I answered, and her eyebrows rose slightly in surprise. “L’idée là sont des forces naturelles qui animent le monde –” I began but glanced at Thomson and Gordon and saw their faces blank with incomprehension.

“The idea there are natural forces,” I began again in English, “which drive the world toward peace and harmony and plenty, and the only things standing in the way of that perfect world are wrongheaded obstructionists — that thinking always ends in blood, and not much else.”

“You do not believe the world can be improved?” Gabrielle asked.

“Sure I do. I just don’t think it can be perfected. I think the world gets better by affirmative works. It doesn’t get better on its own by just killing bad people, but that’s what utopianists always come down to. Like most extreme religious movements end up in crusades or jihads or witch burnings. Just kill enough heretics or infidels and God’s plan will succeed.”

Gabrielle shook her head. “Le Vieil Homme de Montagne is not a man religious.”

“No, but all those guys have blind faith in something — an unshakable belief in whatever magic mechanism they think drives the world, whether it’s God’s will, dialectical materialism, racial superiority, or the free market. This Tesla guy’s no different. What’s his plan? Murder obstructionists. If he just kills enough Tyndalls and Rossbanks, he figures the syndicalist worker’s paradise will burst into glorious bloom on its own. It’s bullshit.”

“I have to agree with the lad,” Thomson said, “if not his choice of language. It doesn’t seem like a very constructive program by itself.”