Through Glass Darkly Episode 1 (8 page)

I’d almost forgotten about the strange way they’d fallen away from the buildings they were moored to, so accompanied both Hughes and his engineer to inspect the various mooring lines.

Several of the lines looked perfectly normal, and had their mooring loops or hooks still attached, but as we continued our inspection we found several others that appeared to have been cut so cleanly the end of the cable had a perfect mirror finish.

‘If I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes sir, I would’ve said such a cut wasn’t possible,’ commented the engineer, clearly perplexed.

‘Because it’s such a clean cut you mean?’ asked the other Hughes.

‘Well, that’s to put it mildly Mr Hughes. I’d say it wasn’t possible because I have no idea how a person would go about creating this kind of finish on a steel wound hawser, let alone one hanging from an airship. It would be hard enough to obtain such a perfect finish with a piece of solid steel, but even then you’d have to spend hours, possibly days smoothing and polishing the surface.

‘For a cable like this that’s made from hundreds of tightly wound wires, the polishing process would immediately cause the individual wires to separate, shredding whatever you were trying to polish it with.’

As though to illustrate his point he brushed the edges of the cable with his thumb, and while the majority of the wires remained unmoved, there were clearly a few around the edges that flexed just a little and then didn’t quite spring back.

‘You only need to touch it,’ he said extending the cable end toward us. ‘This wasn’t cut in any normal way.’

As soon as I brushed my finger over that mirrored surface I knew what he meant. It was impossibly smooth, almost frictionless to the touch, like the surface of a fine diamond or gem stone.

‘Truly intriguing,’ responded Hughes. ‘Thank you Mr Bradbury for your insight, it has been very helpful.’

There was nothing more to be learned there, so after making a mental note to mention it to the Captain I decided to catch up with the FBI agents to see if I could help out with the search for the miasmic creature or creatures that had destroyed the morgue.

The cables seemed to have piqued Hughes curiosity though, and when I suggested he come along to find the agents also, he hesitated and then declined with the excuse of having something else he needed to catch up on.

CHAPTER 11 – KUBLA KHAN

While I was sure several meetings were continuing behind closed doors about what to do with our ship and crew, I discovered Fraser and Jenkins setting up a new base of operations in one of the larger rooms of the boathouse that looked out straight over the lake. It was a beautiful scene with the lake and the rolling landscape of the park, with the trees in the foreground framing the towering buildings of the city in the distance. Our ship, the Kubla Khan as she was officially known, or the Golden Goose as she’d been informally christened by the worlds press, was moored with its less damaged side facing the boathouse, and for a moment as I stared out of the large windows upon the ship sitting so placidly above the water in which its reflection shimmered, I was transported back to my first view of her hanging over the waters of Los Angeles bay.

Hughes by this point was renowned the world over not only for his delivery of the ‘The First Fifty.’ But also in the ensuing three years for having become one of the most capable and admired airship captains in the world. He’d asked for and expected no quarter or additional privilege because of his position and wealth, and had had to prove himself time and again in order to get away from his former billionaire playboy reputation. But along the way he’d begun to thrive upon the challenge, and while all the captains were also researchers and explorers as well as military leaders, Hughes had somehow managed the twin feat of pushing his ship to its very limits while at the same time nurturing and developing his crew to become one of the most highly performing units in the fleet.

He’d made no secret of the fact that the current fleet, in his view, was only enough to quell the increasing encroachments of the miasmic invaders for a few years, and that something else would be needed within that time before our enemy would once again start to overwhelm us, but he’d steadfastly kept his views on what that might be to himself.

Whether it had been his plan all along he never said, but as the majority of the world’s leaders slipped back into the complacency of just building ever more ships, Hughes somehow obtained the support to once again follow his own plan, and now as the mammoth craft that we would come to know as the Golden Goose travelled down the coast past Malibu, across the calm water of the bay toward the second Howard Hughes world broadcast.

This time though instead of a thousand identical cine recordings of his address, he stood before the world in person, upon a low stage on Cabrillo Beach with the giant aircraft hanging in the air behind him.

Around him on all sides were members of the worlds press corp, hundreds in number, some with simple notepads or voice recorders, others with enormous television cameras that were connected via long cables to radio vans that would relay the signal live around the world for the first time in history.

‘Ladies and gentlemen of the world.’ He began simply.

‘Thank you once again for your attention.

‘As many of you will hopefully recall, three years ago to this day I revealed a fleet of fifty airships to the world that I had created. Ships I had manufactured to address a growing threat, the first wave of an invasion by creatures coming to our world from what we have since come to call the Miasmic Expanse.

‘But even at that time, as powerful as those vessels were, I knew and I warned the world that they could not repel those invaders permanently, they could only hold the line against our enemy for a while.

‘A great deal of work, and a great many sacrifices have been made by a great many people since that time, and in some ways we have been even more successful than I could’ve hoped. The world has recognised the threat and built hundreds of additional ships to defend against our enemy, and with those ships we have combated the enemy more effectively than I could possibly have hoped. But our success has lead to complacency.

‘Well intentioned complacency in some cases I am sure, but complacency all the same.

‘This in turn has resulted in our advantage so hard won over our enemy beginning to reduce, and I fear before long it will result in that advantage being lost, and ultimately our enemy once more gaining the upper hand.

‘I cannot and will not allow that to happen while I have the strength and will to intervene, and to that end I have instructed the Hughes Avionics division to design and construct a new type of ship, the ship which you now see behind me. A vessel that will take the fight back to our enemy, that will go into the Expanse and hunt these creatures down where they live, where they sleep and where they think themselves safe.

‘But let me be clear,’ Hughes continued after the briefest of pauses. ‘I do not intend to sail this ship into the Expanse for but a short while. This vessel has been designed to travel deep into the Expanse, if necessary spending months there in order to track down our prey and learn as much as we can about their weaknesses.

‘This will be a hazardous and gruelling mission, involving risks and dangers we cannot anticipate or prepare for, and while the ship is insulated against the sickening effects of the Expanse to a degree, every soul aboard will none-the-less be exposed to its effects for far longer than any human being has to date.

‘My intention is to return, but this mission more than any that have been flown before comes with no guarantees, and as such over the next month I will be receiving applications from volunteers only to crew and man this vessel.’

‘Thank you for listening. Are there any questions?’

There was a momentary shocked silence from the crowd assembled. Even the mass of press men and women seemed to hesitate.

Finally one of the pressmen or women asked what the ship would be called.

‘This ship will be called the Kubla Khan.’

It was an unusual name, which rang a bell for me, but I was busy wracking my brains when a crystal clear female voice almost beside called out her question?

‘From the poem of the same name Mr Hughes?

‘And all should cry, Beware! Beware!’

‘His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’

‘Weave a circle round him thrice,’

‘And close your eyes with holy dread’

‘For he on honey-dew hath fed,’

‘And drunk the milk of Paradise.’

‘Very eloquent Ms …?’ The Captain asked.

‘Shilling.’ She replied simply. ‘Ariel Shilling, Lensman First Class on the Manhattan, currently in dock for repair and upgrade. And I’d like to be the first volunteer to join the crew of Kubla Khan.’

‘Thank you Ms Shilling, the ship will be happy to have you.’

And then having overcome their shock at Hughes revelation the crowd of press exploded, but not before Ariel Shilling had become the first volunteer to be accepted onto the crew.

CHAPTER 12 – THE SEARCH

I was still lost in my own memories when I realised someone was speaking to me.

‘Mr Hall . . .’

‘Mr Hall,’ repeated Jenkins, from a few steps away where he was talking with a couple of senior looking officials from the Police and Fire departments.

‘This is Chief Wright from the Fire Department, and Captain Platt from the NYPD.

‘We’ve been discussing how to go about tracking down this creature. Is there anything else you can tell us about them, where they might hide during the day, or what motivates them to attack people and destroy buildings and furniture in the way they do?’

‘Or even what they’ll look like through these strange telescopes you’ve made for us,’ chipped in the Fire Service Chief. ‘We’ve seen a couple of the dead ones that fell from your ship when you arrived, but Mr Jenkins here tells us they can turn as see-through as a sheet of glass when alive.’

‘I’m afraid that’s correct Chief Wright, but I don’t think there’s much I can tell you that might be of help,’ I had to reply earnestly. ‘Up until now the only creatures that haven’t fled straight back to the Expanse after attacking have been the dead and dying.

‘And yes, when they want to they can make themselves completely invisible to the human eye, and when they’re healthy they can do it with almost no effort.

‘But we also know they don’t see us or our world particularly well either, which some theorists in my own world have speculated may be why they’re so destructive of buildings and property. In fact while they’ll rip wood and plaster to pieces they’ll often ignore glass, stone and ceramics or things hidden behind them. Metal they sometimes destroy, especially if there’s any kind of electrical energy running through it. Fabrics seem to barely register with them also, so they’re no respecters of uniform I’m afraid.’

‘In contrast,’ I continued. ‘Sound and smell they seem acutely aware of. In the early days of the incursions this lead us to believe that explosive charges were far more effective against them than they actually are, until we twigged that it was the sound of the detonations that seemed to literally stun them, while the explosion itself did little more than propel them away until they recovered.’

‘Are you saying this thing will probably choose to hole up somewhere quiet?’ Asked the Fire Chief again.

‘Actually, yes that would make sense.’ I conceded, though it hadn’t occurred to me until he’d suggested it. ‘We have no idea how much rest they need, either in the Expanse or in our world, but I can tell you that on one occasion in the Expanse we did discover an entire shoal of Lamphrey and another creature we named a Leviathan apparently asleep or unconscious, and by killing our engines and slowly gliding into them we were able to completely surprise them.’

‘Were they visible to the naked eye while they were asleep?’ Asked the police captain.

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ I replied. ‘In fact that was one the things that tipped us off about their ability to be invisible without really exerting themselves.

‘We knew before we went into the Expanse that they could make themselves entirely transparent by changing the way their skin or shell reflected light, so that rather than just bouncing off, the light was broken up and reflected back into a part of the spectrum that we couldn’t see. But it was only when we stumbled across this sleeping group in the Expanse that we realised this must be a general defence mechanism they employ all the time to avoid being spotted by their natural rivals or enemies in the Expanse.

‘Naturally if they can manage to remain this way even when sleeping or unconscious, we reasoned it must be fairly easy for them to maintain.’

We talked some more about the creatures, how fast they could move, whether they could climb or swim or fly, and any number of other things, all the while trying to plot areas on a map of the city that could be likely hideout areas or hunting grounds.

‘As for what you’ll see through the scopes,’ I explained. ‘It will take a bit of getting used to. The scopes will allow you to see partially into both the infrared and ultraviolet bands of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which is going to make the ordinary world look rather bright and unnaturally colourful. You’ll be able to see the body heat of colleagues, or even just a hot cup of coffee. In winter this would make the scopes a lot more effective because the ground and buildings would be so cold in contrast, but now in July, the background heat will create a lot of confusion, which we’re sure the creature will be aware of and deliberately choose to reflect light into that bit of the spectrum.

‘Similarly with the ultraviolet, even on a cloudy day the UV levels at this time of year will be quite high during the day, and again the creature is likely to adapt to this added camouflage.