The Forever Engine (15 page)

TWENTY-TWO

October 8/9, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship
Intrepid
,

Aloft over Turkish Bosnia

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Damn me!” Gordon said beside me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two hundred yards.”

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

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

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

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

“As you say, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

Gordon handed him back the flask.

“Changed my mind.”

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

“Just who I drink it with.”

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

“Who dares, wins.”

I drank again.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Gordon answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s wrong, Gabi?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, it sucks.”

“It sucks?”

“That means it’s bad.”

She nodded her agreement against my chest.

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

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

“I’m here all week.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lighting flashed outside the porthole, and Gabrielle jumped again.

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

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

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

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

“Are they still alive?”

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

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

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

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

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