Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)

by Tom DeMarco

  “Deploy,” the young officer ordered.

  The airman at her side, keyed in the command and Loren saw its effect on the screen: The tubes began systematically discharging their spring-loaded packages, each one a tiny pavilion with separate Effectors and remote controlled computer for aiming. Each of the little pavilions was a pair of lenses, one mounted over the other. Each had motors on board to alter the focus of the lens pair and its angle.

  Midshipman Surceuil spoke to Loren quietly without taking her eyes off the screen. “On station at 4800 meters, just above the docks. Our line of fire from there is acceptable for the other targets as well, I checked. Sir.”

  Loren nodded. “Carry on, Captain.”

  Her expression was half charmed and half embarrassed to be called Captain. The Proctor’s protocol officer had been adamant on the subject: the honorific went with independent command for the midshipman, so she would be called Captain, just as Myer was while Loren was serving as Commodore. When the independent commands were terminated, everyone would be back to normal. On this trip, Loren was the only captain, but he had to be called Commodore; Myer and Surceuil were called Captain even though they weren’t. The protocol officer insisted there was a reason for it, beyond, one supposed, the simple amusement value of trying out new titles. It reminded Loren of an old college game where students rotate their numbers around the table and have to drink if they forget their current number.

  “We could proceed, sir. I haven’t tested the focus yet, but we could test it on a target, I guess.”

  Loren picked up the light wave radio microphone to issue orders to Superb and Dreadnought. “Pavilions take up position. Maintain station until further orders.” He nodded toward Myer, who had heard. The Ardent moved forward slightly. Myer had already placed her close to station. He spoke to the coxswain after a moment, and Loren could feel Ardent’s nose rise slightly to kill her remaining way. He felt the locking Effectors come on when the ship was nearly stationary.

  Myer looked back at him. “On position, Commodore.” Superb and Dreadnought radioed the same information back.

  Loren looked down through the observation well. The day had cleared fine and brilliant. He could see people on the docks staring up at them. They were too far below to make out their expressions, but he had no trouble imagining them. There were more tiny human figures pouring out of the buildings to look. Just as well. Loren waited until the flow had slowed.

  “Enable the lens array, Captain Surceuil.”

  “Yes, sir.” She instructed her airman to allow the firing stations on the three pavilions to control their designated sectors of the array.

  “All pavilions commence firing on allocated targets.” The confirmations came back from the other two pavilions and from Lt. Bentenyev at the console of Ardent’s weaponry computer.

  Loren stepped over to Rita’s side to watch what happened next. Her monitor showed the green warehouses on the docks, Ardent’s first assigned target. The view angle was from almost directly above. Superimposed on the televised image were the cross-hairs of her lens array. She had picked the end building, the one furthest from the access road. That would give survivors a safe escape route, if they were fast enough to use it. She moved the cursor control slightly to adjust the cross-hairs, and then typed in the focus command at her keyboard. A bright white spot appeared immediately on the roof of the building, exactly where the cross-hairs met. There was a plume of smoke. Loren stepped away from the monitor to watch the same sight through the observation well.

  The lens weapons were not as dramatic as SHIELA’s lasers. There was no blue bolt, no crackling sound, just focused heat from hundreds of powerful magnifiers. But the effect on the target was dramatic enough. The metal roof caved in immediately as thought made of chocolate. When the heat got into the interior and went to work on the napalm cylinders, there was suddenly a plume of flame rising out of the site (it was already impossible to think of it any longer as a “building”). The little figures on the docks were scurrying now, most of them headed up the access road on a run, and safely away from the fire. Some of those on the adjacent docks had opted for the river. Loren tried not to think of those in the buildings and on the grounds who had made it neither to the river nor to the road.

  He was back at Rita’s side. She looked up for instruction. Loren stared back at her, refusing to help. She turned again to her screen. When there were no more signs of life flowing out of the other buildings, she began to sweep her focus point along the peaks of the still unburning warehouses. When the whole complex was aflame, she burned the docks and the fleet of empty barges. Through the side windows, Loren could see the similar effects of firing by the other two pavilions on their portions of the target. He looked at his watch when the destruction of the Redstone Arsenal and the Wheeler Naval Weapons Center was complete. It had taken less than an hour.

  The squadron was circling in the lazy breezes over the target, gaining altitude slowly. They would need to stay close to the drone until it had recovered all its lenses and itself been recovered and stowed on the Ardent’s stern. Loren had a sudden need for solitude. He walked up the stairs to the second deck, almost entirely living quarters and offices. At the end of the long central corridor was a circular stairway up to the outer decks. There would be no one there until the drone was in sight, probably another hour or more. He let himself out into the open air. There was a rail around the outside.

  He walked forward along the railing to get a better view of the test range. The captured officer had said it was along Rideout, the main north south road through the facility. It was no trouble picking out the road, at least its beginning. The rest was all smoke.

  When he came to the forward most accessible point, he found Claymore Layton there, staring off into the sky. Staring off into the sky was such a normal thing for Clay, that Loren thought nothing of it, never thought to ask whether he might be looking at something. But Claymore put his hand on Loren’s sleeve now, and pointed off toward a vertical mass of thunderheads.

  “Something up there,” he said. “Someone.” There was sudden urgency in his voice. “There. There. Do you see?”

  Loren looked where the pointing hand guided him. There did seem to be a speck, high above them against the blackish cylinder of cloud. It might have been a huge bird, only it didn’t move at all. There was only one thing he could think of that could stay so still in the air.

  Loren raced back to the circular stairs and down them two at a time, sliding his weight along the spiral rail. He ran at full tilt along the corridor and down the central stairway, through the main saloon, into the control room, leaving a wake of staring officers and airmen.

  There was no one at the radar. The control room crew, all except the coxswain, were chatting around the observation well, looking down at the results of their attack. They seemed elated at what they had done. Their good cheer filled him with sudden fury.

  “Radar station, immediately,” he barked. “Every one to station. Silence. This is a battle, not a party.”

  The radar operator came hurrying up, red faced.

  “Display the northeast quadrant. Be quick about it.”

  The screen over the console went blank and then showed the tracing of the newly oriented radar sweep, white on green. Near the middle of the sweep, it showed a small white spot, which faded slowly after the sweep passed. On the next sweep the spot was there again. Loren stabbed at it with his finger. “Enlarge on that sector. Give me its bearing and coordinates. Lock onto it. If you lose it, you’ll hear from me.”

  “Yes sir,” said the airman. Myer had come up behind him, looking worried.

  Loren turned to the Ardent’s commanding officer, and said bitterly, “An enemy airship, Captain. Watching us. Our enemy is gratified to note that we have not even been looking out for its presence. It shows that we are not so much a military force as an over cocky bunch of amateurs.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You will pursue and either capture or dest
roy that pavilion.”

  “Yes sir. Understood.”

  There was no idle chatter in the control room now. Myer gave the instructions for the Ardent to proceed west at maximum speed. Loren got on the light-wave radio and instructed the other two pavilions to recover the drone and proceed on their own back to Victoria.

  With nothing more to do on the bridge, Loren pulled down a telescope and tripod from a cabinet and headed back up to the outer deck. He set it up on the bow. What it displayed dimly for him was a small wooden pavilion with black sails. It appeared to have no enclosed quarters. He could see its crew along the flat decks, dressed in bulky clothes. The pavilion looked much like the ones he had first commissioned more than three years ago.

  As soon as it was clear the Ardent was in pursuit, the black pavilion shot down on a long dive, exchanging altitude for speed. It leveled out just over the hills and was lost to sight. Loren went below. There was still a trace on the radar screen. They followed the trace for the rest of the day and part of the night, finally losing it among the mountains of western North Carolina.

  13

  THE LADY

  “If Paule could build one airship, he could build hundreds.” Loren waved his hands to indicate a great fleet. They were in the small library of the top floor apartments at Monterreal, an after-dinner party of four including Edward and Maria del Sol. “All it takes is manpower. He’s got all the materials. And, if he had airships, he wouldn’t be thinking of transporting armaments down the Tennessee River by barge. Think what’s involved in moving a barge all the way to New Orleans: There are dozens of locks on the Tennessee, and you have to go all the way north to intersect the Ohio. It would take months to move a distance that a pavilion could cover in a day.”

  He and Edward had been through this logic on their way back from their morning chat from Claymore. They were repeating it now for Kelly and Maria del Sol. He turned to Edward, who dutifully fitted in his piece of the puzzle: “Paule would not be using up his resources building steam-powered warships either. The steamship becomes a dinosaur the instant you can fly. He would stop as soon as he had a prototype flyer. But we know he hasn’t stopped. Loren has had scouts on the ground in New Orleans and Annapolis, and we know they’re still building and testing steam vessels — huge, costly efforts.”

  It was important to Loren that Kelly understand, essential even, for what was to come. He avoided looking directly at her; she hated to be manipulated, and hated for him to guess what she was thinking.

  “Plus, the black pavilion had no flags. At least, no one ever said it did.” Edward looked to Loren for confirmation. Loren nodded. Edward went on, “It was unmarked. That wouldn’t be at all like Paule. He’d have it all decked out in red white and blue.”

  Loren hadn’t thought of that, but it fit. It all fit. There was only one possibility that he could see. He was hoping Kelly would say it, but she remained silent. “So it’s got to be Sonia,” he said.

  Kelly looked dubious. “It’s true that she wouldn’t have needed to steal the Effector technology; she could have worked it out herself. She had enough clues. I suspect it would have been trivial for her. Only I still wonder.”

  Edward again: “I don’t doubt at all that it was Sonia, but what could she be up to? She’s acted against us before, and with devastating effect. But why? She seemed ready to turn the laser weapons against us. For what?”

  “Why does she hate us?” Maria del Sol asked. Her forehead was wrinkled in obvious dismay, her accent thicker than normal. “What did we ever do to her? I don’t understand.”

  Kelly shook her head, “Nor do the rest of us.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t hate us at all,” Loren said. “Maybe she only hates me.” He looked away from his sister and Edward in some embarrassment. They probably knew anyway. “We were lovers,” he said at last, glancing at Kelly.

  She smiled at him gently. “Of course you were,” she said. And to the others: “Sonia was in some distress when she left here. Because she spoke to no one, we are still guessing what the nature of her distress was. It might have had something to do with her relationship with Loren.”

  That was part of what they had learned from Claymore in the morning. Edward filled the others in: “She went to see Clay a few days before she left, to unburden herself. He mentioned it to Loren on the return trip. So Loren and I went this morning to ask him to tell us again exactly what she had said.”

  “She told him,” Loren took over, “that she was filled with blackness inside. He believed there was actual black ink inside her, or some such thing, that she was suffering from that, almost as an illness, and that it gave her terrible pain. He said pain was pouring out of her, visible pain. Only when it poured out, there was just more and more built up inside.” This was a straightforward repetition of what Claymore had reported. It seemed like so much gibberish to Loren, but he hoped it might give a glimmer of understanding to one of the others. From the silence, it clearly hadn’t.

  “Centuries ago,” Kelly said finally, “we would have found this easy enough to understand. We would think she was agonizing because her own humanity had put her outside of god’s grace. Some sin had made her anathema, an on-going sin that she could not shake herself of. That’s what we would have thought. Only this is the twenty-first century. In this century that sounds crazy. Still I believe she may be feeling something like that.”

  Edward was shaking his head. “We all have some guilt to worry about from time to time. We might not associate it with ‘sin,’ at least not with the word, but we are moral people; we have to consider our behavior and its effect on others. We do wrong sometimes. And it bothers us. Only we don’t run away and declare war on the people we sinned against or with. We make amends, we try to rectify the wrong. What she’s doing makes no sense at all.”

  A long pause. Finally Kelly shrugged, “Maybe it’s not Sonia after all. Maybe even the destruction of SHIELA was not really Sonia, but one of Paule’s people who had hacked into the system and taken over Sonia’s ID. And maybe it was Rupert Paule’s black pavilion you spotted. It might be a first prototype, just out on a test.”

  “It was Sonia,” Loren said. “I know it was Sonia. The blackness that’s inside her is hatred for us, for something that we stand for. For something that I stand for, and all of Victoria with me. It is so loathsome to her, whatever it is, she will go to war to destroy it. I know that as positively as I know anything. And to understand just what it is, to defuse the threat, we have one simple course of action.”

  “Which is?” Kelly already knew what he was about to say.

  “We have to ask her.”

  “Loren, you can’t be serious. She may be quite mad.”

  “I don’t think so. I think I have to go to her and ask her point blank what must be done to right the wrong. And then we will do it, if we can. Because she can be such a powerful enemy if we let her, we must make her our friend again. If we can.”

  As they undressed that night for bed, Kelly tried again to dissuade him. “I don’t want you to go, Loren. I am frightened of her.”

  “Remember, she was your friend, Kelly. She loved you, and you loved her.”

  “Yes. But that was a different Sonia. This Sonia frightens me. Our old Sonia was reasonable, or at least seemed to be, and this one is not. There are no limits to unreasonableness — if a person once allows herself to do things that are not subject to good sense, then anything can be excused, anything allowed. There is no excess that unreason can’t lead her to. It can lead her to Evil: isn’t that what Evil is?” She turned to him, urgently. “An absence of reason? Isn’t that what the Problem of Evil is all about?”

  Loren chose a small pavilion, the Canandaigua, with a crew of four for the trip north. Danny McCree was given the command. The rest of the ship’s company were a lieutenant, an airman and a steward. They retraced the path of the Ardent’s return over the flatlands of eastern Georgia, and then northeast along the ridge of the Adirondack range to the point where t
hey had lost contact with the black pavilion.

  The Canandaigua was equipped with electronics that were normally reserved to the battle pavilions. In particular, she had a long-range radar and a radar pulse sensor that would alert them if their own presence were detected. They traveled at an altitude of more than a mile, nearly invisible from the ground.

  Over the Great Smoky Mountains, the airman on duty at the radar spoke up. “I have some moving traces to the east,” he said.

  Loren stepped over to the monitor where the radar signal had been superimposed on the colored map of the region. The white spots, were over and to the south of the city of Asheville. As he watched they moved slowly, along independent paths.

  “Seven of them,” said the airman. “And there, an eighth, arriving from the northeast.”

  At the second console, Danny McCree had called up a display of detailed maps of the region below them. They were currently over a portion of the Pisgah National Forest. He drew Loren’s attention to a long narrow lake surrounded by woods. “That might be our spot, Loren. There’s high ground to the north where we can drop you. And we get a clear run back over the lake to build up enough speed to climb out. With any luck there will be no one there to see us coming or going.”

  Loren nodded. He could walk from wherever. The important thing was the security of the pavilion. As the Canandaigua banked in and backwinded, he strapped on his battered backpack. Inside were a light-wave radio, and an AM beacon to summon Danny back for the pickup. He also had some food and a change of clothes. Nothing in the pack would give away his origins except for the two radios, and these he intended to conceal someplace within a mile of his drop spot.