Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (87 page)

"Well," Stasi said. "Maybe he'll get out. Maybe he'll get better and he'll be well again."

Mitch looked at her evenly. "You know there some kinds of wounds that never heal."

"I know that," Stasi said.

The melancholy strains of Goodnight, Sweetheart floated up from beneath the trees, the band starting their last number, sweet and sharp as knives.

"Dance with me," she said, and turned toward him. "Dance with me, darling. I haven't had a dance all night."

"If you like." He looked bemused, but he did it anyway, damp tuxedo and all, one hand at her waist and the other clasping her hand, and she rested her head on his shoulder. He moved well, slow steps that were easy to follow.

"You're a good dancer," she said.

"I used to like to dance," Mitch said.

Stasi smiled. "Then dance with me until the music stops."

SILVER BULLET

For Kathryn McCulley

Student, daughter, and friend

For my brothers,

Don Sakers and

Thomas G. Atkinson

Prologue

Colorado Springs,

1901

N
ikola Tesla picked his way down the steep hillside under a sky washed clean by the previous night's thunderstorms. The grass was still damp, and slick enough to make him watch his footing with even more care than usual, so that he was well into the clearing where he had left the receiver before he realized that someone was there before him. He stiffened, ready to shout, and in the same instant saw that it was a child. A girl, actually, a girl in dungarees and a faded blouse with a long blonde braid falling forward over her shoulder. She had a walking stick in one hand, a heavy branch scavenged somewhere on the mountain, and Tesla braced himself to shout again, for fear she'd touch the device and hurt herself. But, no, she was keeping well clear of it, just squatted beside it, staring at the blackened casing and the wires that trailed out of it. Tesla caught his breath, relieved that she had at least that much sense.

"Young lady. What are you doing here?"

She looked up, not startled but a little wary. "Oh. Am I on your land?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry." She came to her feet, a tall girl, blue-eyed, maybe eleven or twelve years old. Or perhaps younger: usually girls lost that direct gaze by the time they were ten, and he was no real judge of such matters. "I didn't see it posted."

Tesla couldn't remember if the property was marked on this side, and looked down at the damaged device instead. It was blackened and broken, a few wires melted to bright puddles, and the girl cleared her throat.

"I think it got hit by lightning," she said. "I'm pretty sure one of the bolts hit around here last night."

Tesla blinked. "You were watching the storm?"

She nodded.

"And you weren't afraid." He made it a statement, not a question, seeing the answer in her eyes, but she responded anyway.

"Not particularly. It was mostly up here, and we have a lightning rod, all the base houses do. So I figured I was safe as long as I didn't go out."

An Army brat, Tesla thought. That explained why she seemed older than her years, though not what she was doing this high on his mountain on what was surely a school day. "And why are you here now?"

"I'm looking for thunderstones," she said.

Tesla blinked. "There's no such thing."

"Are you sure?" she asked. "I mean, yes, I know that's what the books say, but Maria Consuela has one, and she swears on all the saints that her Aunt Pilar found it in the pit where the lightning struck. So after last night, I thought — I'd never have a better chance to find out for myself."

"Which is why you're not in school," Tesla said.

She looked contrite. "We already did this reader at Papa's last posting, I'm not missing anything important." She scuffed one toe in the grass beside the device, clearly searching for a change of subject. "Was this — did you put this out to catch the lightning?"

Tesla blinked again, unable to suppress a smile. It wasn't often that someone guessed correctly about his work. "Very good," he said. "Though attracting it to the receiver wasn't the intent of the experiment."

"It really burned it up," she said.

"Yes." Tesla knelt on the damp grass, carefully parting the broken casing. "A small problem I'll have to solve, if there's to be any serious transmission of electricity over long distances."

"Papa says — and Miss Hoffmann, too, she says that electricity attracts lightning," the girl said. "Because it is lightning, or maybe because lightning is electricity…." Her voice trailed off doubtfully, and Tesla gave her an encouraging nod.

"Yes, she's quite right, they're the same thing. It's merely that one has been harnessed for use and the other hasn't."

"Like a mustang and a saddle horse."

Tesla couldn't help smiling at the very western metaphor, imagining himself putting saddle and bridle on the streamers of electricity produced in his lab. "A bit, yes. May I borrow your stick?"

She handed it over without question, and Tesla used it to lever the remains of the device out of the rain-softened ground. There was more damage than he had expected, and he couldn't control a sigh as he tucked it into the pack he had carried down from the lab.

"Maria Consuela says that ghosts are electricity, too," the girl said, frowning. "That's why they glow."

Tesla considered. "Human beings certainly have an electrical charge, but once they're dead — though I suppose the soul could be electrical in nature." He smiled again, amused by the notion, but the girl's expression remained serious.

"Ghost lights could be electricity. At least that's what Papa says."

"They could." St. Elmo's fire was certainly electricity.

"I bet that's what's up at the Silver Bullet."

Tesla turned sharply. "And what do you know about that?"

She hunched her shoulders just a little, but managed to meet his eyes. "Just what people say. There are lights at the minehead, when there haven't been miners there for ten years. They're supposed to be the lights of miners killed in cave-ins, or something. Papa says that's not true, though."

"There are… things in the Silver Bullet," Tesla said. "I've done some work there myself, and it's a haunted place." He paused, seeing the flash of fear cross her face, and gave an apologetic shrug. "Look, since you're here, how about you make yourself useful? There are three more of these. Help me collect them, and I'll show you how the experiment was supposed to work."

The girl grinned, all fear forgotten. "Really?"

Tesla nodded. "Really."

"And can we look for thunderstones on the way?"

"You can keep any thunderstones you find," Tesla said.

Chapter One

Los Angeles,

November 11, 1932

L
ewis crouched by the Terrier's open door, the thick harness cinched tight around his torso. Below him the chaparral was faded and dry, the end of autumn in the hills outside Los Angeles, a faint puff of cloud of smoke on the horizon. They'd been talking about fires in the hangar before they took the Terrier up for this latest test, the mechanics muttering in Spanish by the back door, the engineers talking quietly in English as they waited for the inventor to explain the mail hook, and Lewis hoped it was just cloud. The last thing they needed was a wildfire up in the hills, tightening nerves already stretched to the breaking point.

Not that the first few days' testing hadn't gone well. This new version of the Terrier was a honey, and Henry was showing them all sorts of new equipment that they could backfit onto the older Terrier they had at home — the Terrier that Henry Kershaw was still showing in his advertisements, the one that had won the Great Passenger Derby only eight months before — and if part of their job was to talk nicely to reporters and Henry's potential investors, well, they'd known that going in. It was just that today's job was going less well.

Lewis glanced at the winch bolted to the cabin floor behind him, the rubber-lined maw of the catch bin open above it, heavy-duty springs holding it in place. They were supposed to absorb the shock of the mail bag as it was catapulted up the wire, but neither he nor Mitch were convinced they were going to work as advertised. So far, however, they hadn't managed to get the wire onto the target at all.

The Terrier banked lazily back toward the field, and Lewis looked toward the cockpit. "Going in this time?" he shouted.

Mitch waved a hand. "Let's do it again."

Lewis waved back, and took a tighter grip on the straps beside the door. He had had his doubts about the device from the beginning. It was supposed to streamline mail delivery in small, out-of-the-way stations by making it possible for a plane to drop off and pick up the mail on the same pass. Instead of dropping the mailbag, though, you had to steer it into a special box; once the mailbag hit, it would trigger a catapult that would fling the outgoing mailbag up and theoretically into the departing plane. He could see the field ahead of them, the target painted in bright black and white chevrons, swelling larger now as Mitch dropped lower, lining up on the mail device. The trick was to plant the heavy hook in the vee of those chevrons, where it would snap into a guide slot and be pulled forward to trigger the catapult that would fling the mailbag back into the air and hopefully keep the bag from snapping the cable. Or at least that was the theory. So far on three passes he hadn't managed to get the hook positioned correctly. This time, they were trying it with a half-weight mailbag, in the hope that the extra weight would make it easier to steer, but he wasn't particularly hopeful.

They were at a hundred feet and not much above stalling, Mitch holding the big plane steady as though it was the easiest thing in the world. Lewis pulled the winch lever and kicked the mailbag out the door.

"Bag's away!"

The plane lurched a little as the drag hit, and then they were dropping lower still, the mailbag riding at the end of seventy feet of cable. Mitch had them lined up perfectly, Lewis thought, holding his breath. Just keep her steady… The target flashed beneath them, and the winch squealed as the mailbag went into the opening at last. The Terrier rocked as the cable caught, and the mailbag tore loose; a second later, there was a bang and a puff of smoke below, and Lewis hastily reversed the winch. He could see the mailbag flying up at them as Mitch increased power, pulled up in a gentle climb, and then the bag reached the apogee of its flight ten feet below the plane and started to fall back.

"We missed it!" Lewis yelled, and tightened his grip on the straps. The Terrier rocked wildly for a moment, and then Mitch had it under control. Lewis increased the winch's speed again, but he could see the end flapping wildly, hook and bag torn away. "Hold her steady! We've lost the bag, there's twenty feet of cable loose out there —"

"Got it!" Mitch held the Terrier solid as a rock, her wings never wavering, and Lewis worked the winch controls. All they needed was for some of that cable to fly forward, foul any one of the three engines, and they'd be just one more crumpled wreck among the sagebrush. But, no, there it was, the broken end reeled safely aboard, and Lewis locked the winch again.

"All aboard!"

"Great!" Mitch showed thumbs-up from the cockpit. "Shut her down, we're taking her home."

"Might as well," Lewis answered. He wrestled the cabin door closed again, then released his harness and came forward to take the co-pilot's seat.

"We lose it all?" Mitch hung up the radio, banked the Terrier back toward the field.

"Just the bag and the hook. Probably some line, but I can't tell how much."

"Well, we can't do anything more without the hook," Mitch answered, and brought the Terrier around again, lining up for the landing.

Mitch brought the Terrier into the hangar without stopping on the tarmac, and Lewis gave him a sidelong glance as they shut down the big engines.

"I've had enough for today," Mitch said, with a crooked smile. "I didn't think this was a smart idea to start with, and I haven't changed my mind."

Lewis nodded, and hauled himself out of the cabin. He clambered around the winch array and opened the cabin door, letting in a swirl of warm, dry air — nothing like Colorado Springs, smelling instead of his childhood, dry brush and dust and resin from the stunted pines behind the hangar. Sunlight was pouring in the big main door, and Henry's shadow stretched across the concrete as he hurried toward them.

"What's the problem? I thought you were going to make a couple more passes."

"Like I told your radio guy," Mitch said, over Lewis's shoulder. "We broke the hook. And we weren't having much luck anyway. I'd like to give it a little more thought before we try it again."