Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)

by Tom DeMarco

  “Of course.”

  “Mr. Tomkis. Albert…”

  “Yes. Whatever.”

  “Would you begin thinking about how Victoria is to relate to the rest of the world? If we are to be strong…” She paused and reconsidered. “We must be strong, because we are, after all, the protector of the peace. If we allow ourselves to be crushed, the world goes back to where it was when Dr. Layton first turned on the Effector. It is our role to protect the world from its own terrible passions. If we are to remain strong enough to carry out that role, we need to grow. That means an increasing population for Victoria, enough to maintain our borders. We need to trade with the rest of the world. We have to think about how to do that without sacrificing our present advantage. How can we share our technology, to help the world rebuild and still fulfill our role? Will you think about those things for me, please?”

  “I will…Princess.”

  “Oh please!” Kelly looked dismayed.

  “I will, Kelly. You can count on me.”

  “Thank you, Albert. Thank you.”

  Loren felt suddenly eager to be outside spreading the good news. He thought the others might be thinking of that too. He waited for Kelly to end the meeting. But as she was about to, Chandler Hopkins held his hand up again. Kelly nodded his way.

  “As a last item of business for this already very full and exciting day, I have another symbol for you to consider. ‘Everything is a symbol,’ as our leader has often said. Think for a moment of how this would all seem to you if you were one of Victoria’s school children, say a child of, fourteen.” He was thinking of one particular fourteen year old. “Our island nation now has the identity we have all felt the need for, Victoria. It has a flag and a lovely princess. But now, just suppose, that that princess were to be married, and married to someone who was Victoria’s great hero, a handsome young man who has led us to victory and been twice wounded in doing so…”

  “Chandler!” Ed Barodin threw his hands up. “You have got your balls.”

  Chandler forged on, “…a man who, unless my tired old eyes deceive me, is in love with our princess and who is loved by him…Think what a symbol that would be for us all.”

  Loren stood at his place, grinning and shaking his head. “You have got balls, Chandler. Edward’s right on that. But your eyes haven’t deceived you at all.” He stepped around to Kelly’s side, sure of himself now and feeling good. He put his right knee down on the ground beside her chair and his hand on her arm. A pause long enough for her to know what was coming. He could feel the others rising uncertainly around him. “Will you marry me, my Princess? Will you, Kelly? Will you give me your hand?”

  Of the several responses he might have expected Kelly to make, she chose none. Instead she looked down at the table, smiling shyly. When she spoke, it was not to Loren, but to the whole group.

  “It might be a nice solution to a little problem we have,” she said.

  “What’s the little problem we have?” Chandler asked after a moment.

  She cast her eyes downward again. “Your Victorian princess is pregnant.”

  PART II

  THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

  8

  ST. JAMES

  For Gordon Buxtehude, General U.S. Army (retired), three and half years on the farm had been all to the good. He felt younger than he had at any time in the past decade. He was fit again. Of course, he had never been far from in trim, but now he could do 100 push-ups in more or less the time he had done them at West Point more than four decades before. He had rigged up a climbing rope in the barn, a regulation thirty-two foot climb. He could go up it hand over hand in less than eleven seconds. He was running eight minute miles. Not bad for a sixty one year old man.

  Being outdoors all day had made him tan and healthy looking. And he smiled more than he had for years. He would smile whenever his wife came near or his son or daughter in law. Most of all, he would start looking foolishly happy at the approach of either of his two granddaughters. The lines of smiling were etched into his face.

  The farm had prospered. Well, there was a bit of luck involved in that. He had begun raising quarter-horses years before. When the Effector was turned on, the world had a sudden great need for quarter horses, and a great respect for anyone who could breed them. So, while the authorities came by on occasion to “requisition” some of his stock, they were careful to keep him happy. More than half of what he raised was his own to keep or trade. Because there was an active market for horses, he did well.

  At the front door of the farm on a chill November night, the General was ushering out two officers in uniform and a portly man in business garb, carrying a briefcase. The latter stopped in the courtyard, and looked back at Buxtehude, whose face was lit up by the lantern in his hand.

  “You will think about it, though, won’t you Gordon?”

  “Sure, why not? Thinking about what I might be doing uses up a great deal of my time. I often apply my mind to it. It’s just doing those things that seems to get shortchanged. Except farm and family things, of course.”

  “We need you. Not just me saying that. It comes from the Man himself.”

  “Very flattering.”

  “And satisfying. Particularly for a fellow like yourself. To get back in harness again, Gordon…I should think you’d be jumping at the chance. We’ve got some big things happening. Of course I can’t go into it, but I think we’re drawing close to fruition.”

  “Fruition. Is that like the Light at the End of the Tunnel?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Mm.”

  “Well you think about it.”

  The three stepped up into a waiting coach. The driver touched the end of his long stick lightly to the horse’s rump, and the vehicle lurched forward with a creak. The General watched them make their way down the drive toward the road. He waited to be sure he heard the gate put back in place before they carried on. Then he turned into the house, locking the door behind him. As he climbed back up the stairs to his study, he noticed a small red light on the front of a metal box at the end of the corridor. It was one of only half a dozen electric items in the house, run along with a few lamps by a 12 volt windmill and batteries. He felt a moment of annoyance over the little light, annoyance which was then gradually overcome by curiosity. He stepped into the study, turned his back on the dimly lit interior of the room to shut the oak paneled doors. There was someone behind him in the room. A lifetime of military training gives you a sense for such things. Deliberately ignoring whoever it was, he stepped over to the sideboard and poured himself two fingers of brandy from the bottle his recent visitors has brought as a gift. He sipped, and pondered a moment over the taste. Where did Paule come by this fine stuff? One would have thought it would all have been drunk up in the first months after May 16, and there certainly had been no possibility of new supply. He set his glass down and poured two fingers into a second glass. Then he turned with the two glasses to confront the visitor.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” he said. “Or at least I assume you are whom I’ve been expecting.”

  “I imagine so,” said a male voice, slightly accented. A figure was seated in the General’s reading chair. The brass lamp by his side cast its light down into the lap where a book might have been. It did not light up the man’s face at all. He was dressed in a natty, well tailored uniform, light blue in color. It looked like the dress blues of the air force summer uniform, but it wasn’t. There were captain’s bars on the shoulders.

  The General held out the glass of brandy. “Un vaso de coñac?”

  “Gracias.”

  General Buxtehude continued in almost perfect Spanish: “It is a long time since we first met, Dr. Loren Martine. Or is it now Captain Loren Martine?”

  “Either one,” said the young man. “I am surprised you recognize me, sir. We only met one time, and that rather briefly.”

  “But you were on my budget, you see. I knew a great deal about you before we ever met. And we hear things from tim
e to time about our neighbors to the south, news from what my friends in Washington call the Kingdom of Satan. The news is often about a rather brilliant young captain and scientist. I guessed it might have been you.”

  “The Kingdom of Satan? Do they really call us that?” He laughed at the thought. “We prefer to think of ourselves as the Victoria Island.”

  “To Victoria then. To the Princess of Victoria.” The General held out his glass. The officer leaned forward to clink.

  “To the Princess of Victoria.” They both drank. Young Martine held the glass up to the light to see the color of its liquid. “You’re a man of many surprises, General: Elegant Spanish, a fine French brandy, a memory for voices and accents. And you even seem to guess why I have come.”

  “Not exactly. But I’ve been thinking you might come. Or that someone from Victoria would seek me out. I don’t know why. It’s just that so much history is being made in Victoria in these times. And history has always had a way of involving me. Did you come here to involve me, Captain Martine? It won’t be easy; I’m terribly content with my retirement.”

  “I think that mine will be the second offer of the evening, too. I hope to receive with a better response than the one you gave to Mr. Tolliver. But tell me what it is about living in Virginia and raising quarter horses that you find so satisfying?”

  “Two little girls with eyes as big as saucers, my grandchildren. An almost-elderly woman, my wife, whom I have loved for more than half my life, but I have only recently gotten any good at it. A fine son and his funny, sexy wife. And, I have to say it, the horses too. The local authorities and the military keep taking away my best breeding stock. They seem to think of me as a factory for draft animals. The idiots don’t realize that I am a hobbyist. I’m not out to give them capacity to haul freight, but to win ribbons at the county fair. We have a wonderful fair in Scott County. And, of course, my horses win all the ribbons. Yes ribbons…they’re nice. But it’s most of all my family, those two little girls.”

  “I have a little girl of my own.”

  “Then you understand, I guess. I hope you do. It took me so long. I was obsessed with things that weren’t worth being obsessed with, and I lost so much time. What happened three years ago in May, changed everything for me. Well, you can guess.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was I doing before that? I don’t know. None of it makes any sense to me now. When I think what I almost did, what I lent myself to.” He suppressed a shudder. “I thought I was fighting against the problem, but I had really become a part of it.”

  The young man kept silent, waiting for him to go on.

  The General switched to a different subject. “I have been following the progress of your fledgling nation, Captain Martine. Of course, they don’t let much news in about Victoria. It’s strictly prohibited even to mention the name. But we hear things. And what we don’t hear, one can guess. I amuse myself by working out what you were probably up to, as you would try out moves on a checkerboard, guessing what the opponent would be likely to do.”

  “Chess. We think of it as chess.”

  “Yes. I knew exactly where you were. Nolan Gallant came here to ask me, but I didn’t let on. He had already guessed Cuba, but he couldn’t figure it from there. But I had. It was Baracoa, wasn’t it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. As soon as it was clear that hydropower was still feasible, it was obvious. I went to the library in Kingsport and looked into a CIA Atlas of Cuba. Did you know that the CIA published atlases?”

  Martine shook his head.

  “They should have stuck to that. Anyway, the atlas showed only two hydro-power stations of any consequence, one in the middle of Cuba and one toward the east, the Martyrs of Giron, it was called. I knew you would pick the east because of the trade winds. And you would be on the north coast to control the end of the Bahama Channel. It was obvious.”

  “It was certainly obvious to us,” he nodded.

  “Yes. But now, of course, with the invention of the flying ships, things might have changed.”

  “They have.”

  “It’s not so important to be in any one place because you are mobile. I might think you would opt for someplace more developed, particularly as your population is increasing. It is increasing, isn’t it.”

  “Oh yes. We have a flood of immigrants. People like to be part of a winning team. We worried at first about being infiltrated, but now we’re more casual. We take steps to keep our technology protected. But those who come to spy, more often stay to join us. Victoria is seductively vital.”

  “Ah. I can imagine.”

  Captain Martine sipped his brandy again. Now the General was waiting him out, hoping to learn more than he gave away. “Baracoa will always be a village, of course,” Captain Martine picked up. “It couldn’t really grow. The problem was electricity. We strung lines over the mountains to the Matires de Giron, but the lines themselves were limiting. They were nothing compared to the industrial conduits that had been laid from the power station to the south. Even though the station wasn’t too far away from Baracoa, it had never been intended to serve the north coast. All the conduits went south. We thought of digging them up and transferring them to serve our coast, but it was finally just easier to move ourselves…”

  “To Santiago de Cuba.” As he said it, it didn’t seem like a guess, but a fact.

  “Yes. St. James, as we call it.”

  “A lovely city. A perfect capital for your new nation.”

  His visitor showed surprise. “You know it?”

  “Oh yes. I spent four months there in my late twenties.”

  “There must be a story to tell there.”

  “Yes, I guess. My people were telling me that the Cubans were discontented, that they would rise at any occasion. I thought I would go there and find out for myself. I had myself spirited in, lived as a worker in Santiago de Cuba for most of one summer. I talked to people, asked them what they thought, how they felt about their new government. I had learned Spanish to be able to do that. What I heard wasn’t enough to change anybody’s mind except my own, but it did change me.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why Chandler Hopkins thought of you for the job we have in mind.”

  “Dear old Chandler. He was always a sucker for tales of adventure. His life, I’m afraid, was far too sedate. What’s the job, Captain Martine? Let’s hear it. I need to be awake with the sun.”

  “Proctor. It’s what we call our Secretary of Defense. The former Proctor, a man whom I respected and came to care deeply for, has passed away. He was something of a buffoon, Proctor Pinkham. We always thought of him as a fussy little man, more of a liability than an asset, though it didn’t matter because we were so fond of him. And then, when he died, everything just fell apart. He was a wonderful organizer; we only know that now that he is gone. Chandler said that you would be the ideal person to become our new Proctor. Will you come, General, and direct our defense and strategic planning? It is probably one of the half dozen most exciting jobs in the world today. We are a power that all the rest of civilization has got to reckon with.”

  Not much of a pause before the General answered. “No, I don’t think I would leave my family even for that job. Though I am tempted.”

  “We’ll bring them all. We have a lovely compound picked out for you on the beach near St. James. It has a house for you and Eveline, and another house for your son Tom and Dolly and their girls, Virginia and Sissy. We have a two hundred foot pavilion on station at this moment just over your roof.” A pointed finger directly upward. “It has a dozen pleasant staterooms, you can take your pick. There is even an electric lift to fetch us once the pavilion is brought down a bit. I think we could have your granddaughters in their new beds without even waking them. They could take their breakfast tomorrow morning skimming along a hundred feet over the Gulf of Mexico, spotting dolphins through the observation port.”

  The General stared at him, at a loss for the moment
for words. What he was thinking of, foolishly, was the pleasure of riding in one of the huge battle pavilions himself. He was fascinated by the idea of gliding on the wind. He wanted to have his breakfast over the Gulf of Mexico too. He shook himself. “I suppose you would find a place for my farm hand, Mr. Compton, and his wife. Once you knew that I had become rather attached to them.”

  “Of course. If they’d come.”

  “Oh, they would come in an instant. They’re forever complaining about the way things are here, not to mention the weather. They’d love to go south. And my own family would be thrilled, I think. They’d be thrilled by the adventure of it. No, I’m your problem, Captain Martine. I’m the only problem: Too old for change, that’s all. I’d hate to leave my horses behind.”

  “How many are there?”

  The question startled him. “Maybe a few hundred…”

  “We’ll bring them all. I’ll have to send for a freighter. It may take a day. We’ll build a corral on the deck of the freighter. All we’ll need to do is drive the horses up a hill, the one on the back of your south field will be fine, and then onto the pavilion. We can do it tomorrow evening. We’ll have Chet Compton and his wife Suzanne all set up with the horses on a ranch to the east of St. James. You can inspect the results by, let’s say, Friday morning. If you’re not completely happy, we’ll put the whole operation in reverse and have all of you back here by next week. In that worst case, you will have had a little vacation in the sun. It was something that people used to do at this time of year.”

  The General sat back shaking his head. He was thinking of a modest little campaign he’d run himself years ago to lure a young Major away from a rival command. Lt. Col. Gordon Buxtehude had done his homework on that one. The Major had actually stopped to consider whether he really wanted to make the change, never realizing that the lead-pipe rush being run around him was unstoppable. Getting the people that he wanted had always been Buxtehude’s strong suit. Now he was beginning to suspect that he wouldn’t have much to teach Captain Martine about the art of the lead-pipe rush.