Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)

by Tom DeMarco

  Ardent’s nose dropped abruptly, and she slid away on an almost vertical plane. Loren had to drag himself back to the rear ports to see if the black flyers had followed. They both had. They still seemed to be gaining. Wreckage went tumbling past him, floating in the free fall of their dive. The wind was roaring through the Ardent’s open ports.

  “Altitude?” The coxswain shouted out.

  “I’ve got no instrument left,” the airman behind him at the console replied, raising his voice above the screaming wind “You’re on your own.”

  “Hold your angle,” Loren called. He looked back again. The two flyers behind them were gaining more slowly, and then, after another few seconds, not at all. The Ardent and her two pursuers had all reached a velocity limited by air resistance. “Now ease up, slowly, or she’ll rip apart.” He felt the increased weight as the deck beneath him began to press upward. There was a thunder of debris and wreckage crashing down onto the floor of the control room. “Keep coming.” There was still nothing visible through the forward ports but blue water, no sign of the horizon. Loren held his breath, willing it to appear at the top of their field of vision. “A little more.” The sound was deafening.

  “There,” the coxswain said, as a strip of horizon hove into view. “Come up baby. Lift your nose.”

  Loren looked back. The Ardent would pull out. Now he looked for the two black flyers. One of them, he saw, had lost her rigging, it had simply blown away with all its sail in the dive. The other was leaving some pieces behind as well. Both flyers were trying to lift out of their dives. One of them made it and the other did not. As he watched, the little black pavilion simply burst apart. One second there was a coherent machine, a system of wood and metal and rope and sail and circuitry; the next second there was just a jumble of components rushing along on the same course, but no longer connected. Among the flying components he could see flailing human bodies. The tumbling mess fell away behind them as the Ardent leveled out. A moment later he saw it crash into the sea.

  “We’ll climb, coxswain, and let the remaining flyer pass underneath us. She has no sail left, so she won’t be giving us much trouble. There. Level out and hold that altitude. Lieutenant, I’ll want a party of armed airmen to board the enemy vessel. We’ll stay right over it until it slows to a stop. Then you’ll bring its captain to me under guard. I have a message for him.

  Commander Myer was gone. The instant before impact, he had been at Loren’s side. And the instant after impact he was gone. No one had seen what had happened. There were no other casualties on the Ardent. Jared and the Superb had escaped with at least part of the Swiftsure’s crew, clinging to the outer decks as she dove. Of the ten attackers, nine had been destroyed. The enemy had lost nine small pavilions and perhaps twenty men. Victoria had lost the Swiftsure and most of her forty in crew and Oliver Myer. A clear victory for the Dragon Lady.

  Loren was in a foul mood when an angular young man in black pea jacket and black overalls was dragged in front of him. He was annoyed to be conducting this interview in the wreckage of Ardent’s control room. The man was treated roughly by the airmen, who felt much the same as Loren. They shoved him into a seat at the console. Loren stood over him.

  “I won’t tell you a thing,” the man spat out.

  “But you’ll listen, and that’s what we require.”

  The man stared.

  “You know where the Lady is, I believe.”

  “But I won’t tell.”

  “And you’ll go back to her, won’t you?”

  “It’s your guess.”

  “That’s what I’m guessing. You’ll give her this. A message from the Princess of Victoria.” Loren shoved the envelope at him.

  The man took it. And then, insolently, opened it up and drew out its contents. He looked at it, stupidly. “What’s this?”

  “The Lady will understand.”

  The man looked back again at the enclosure, uncomprehending. It was a photo of a little dark-eyed girl. Underneath the picture was the inscription:

  Miss Laura Martine-Duryea, Jansenist Ambassador and Guarantor of Victoria’s Security, sends her warm regards.

  The captive shrugged, then stuffed the photo into his shirt.

  Loren turned to the airmen who had dragged the man in. “Drop a bolt of sail cloth and whatever else they need onto the deck of the flyer. And drop this fellow too. Make sure the fall doesn’t kill him.”

  “Twenty feet,” said one of the airmen. “I think he could survive that. Just barely.”

  Loren sent them on their way with a disgusted wave.

  17

  JUBILEE

  Proctor Buxtehude came into Loren’s office in the castle, waving a sheaf of papers. “Know thine enemy,” he said, tossing the sheets down onto the desk. “The latest scouting reports.”

  Loren looked up. “Tell me what they say, Gordon. I’m up to here with reading.”

  “Oh, the usual. Rupert Paule is holed up at Camp David, surrounded by armed guards, issuing proclamations and declaring states of emergency as ever. Near where I used to live, only a hundred miles away, he might as well not exist for all the heed people pay to him. The Jansenists are quiet in their own lair in the Big Sur. The sovereign state of Maine has seceded. Paule would be furious if he knew, but he doesn’t. The French are trading a bit in the heart-land, cheating on the embargo. They come in through Canada, expecting that we won’t notice. They buy wheat and sell wine and spirits. There are some more spies headed our way out of Cape Canaveral, the regular lot. We’ll pick them up before they get here. It’s all so petty and ineffective. Makes me sick. These people don’t even make decent enemies.”

  “Decent enough,” Loren said, remembering. “Nothing of Sonia?”

  “No sign of her. One supposes she is in the headquarters house. Imagine her rattling around in there, in another, even more fantastic mansion. What delusions of grandeur.”

  “Look at us in our own castle. We’d be as laughable as the Jansenists if there were anyone more powerful than us to laugh.”

  “Anyway, she hasn’t been seen outside the estate house. She doesn’t preach, she doesn’t go on the radio. There are still the Saturday programs, but its her deacon who gives them. Maybe she’s dead.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “There’s no sign of building in their yards, no military craft anyway. It would take them years to put together a real fleet.”

  “Maybe they’re building someplace else, in a hidden base we don’t know about. I still expect them to turn up on our horizon one day, coming east, right down on the deck with the setting sun behind them. Coming for us with some new weapon that we haven’t even conceived of.”

  “If they come, it will be with sticks and stones, I suspect. And we’ll be waiting for them with some new tricks of our own. But I don’t think they’ll come at all. I think she’s simply forgotten about us.”

  “Not Sonia. Her kind of obsession doesn’t just go away.”

  “The logic of the mad knows no rules. She may be obsessed with something entirely different now, the occult or pyramids or needlepoint.”

  Loren wasn’t convinced, but it was a comforting thought, and one that played occasionally in his own mind. He had visions of one day meeting Sonia again, when they were both old and gray, and asking her, Whatever happened to your plan for war? And she would look at him blankly and say, War? Loren shook his head. “I still worry.”

  “It’s been six years,” Gordon said gently.

  A high-pitched squeal from the corridor. Two little girls in party dresses came rushing in. The Proctor bent and scooped them both up, one under each arm, then turned to Loren with a straight face. “Excuse the interruption, Excellency. A pair of street urchins, evidently sneaked in past the guard. I shall toss them personally from the highest parapet.”

  “No no no no no!” from the girls together, and then, when the sound of their cries had died down, Shimna asked Veronica across the Proctor’s jacket front, “What’s a para
pet?”

  “Like a parrot but smaller.”

  “Let’s have a look at these two rascals,” Loren said, standing. Buxtehude placed the two children on their feet for inspection. “My, such pretty dresses.”

  “Shimna’s got mine on for a while, and this is hers. We’ve been changing and changing.”

  “What do you say to the Proctor, girls?”

  They straightened themselves and spoke in unison. “Good Morning, Mister Proctor, Sir!” And a curtsy.

  “Well, Good Morning, girls. And these are very pretty dresses. I don’t know which one is the prettier. We shall have to have a contest. Only there will be no losers, of course. We’ll have a big contest and it will be a tie.”

  Veronica was dancing with excitement. “We’re having oodles of people for the party. And every single one will see our dresses. Kelly’s made us tiaras too, made out of flowers. Shimmy’s got one with yellow flowers and mine are white. Kelly made them with her own fingers!”

  “My, her fingers, you say?”

  “Yes!”

  “And there’s cake.” Shimna added. “Cake and pudding and chocolates and jugglers and horn-blowers and skits and roast pig and dancing with music and everybody’s got to dress fancy and act grown up and drink punch.”

  “Even punch.”

  “Uh huh. It’s a Joo-bil-eeee.”

  The Proctor picked Shimna up by the waist and sat her on the front of Loren’s desk, and then the same for Veronica. “Now, tell me Shimna, what exactly is a jubilee?”

  “A celebration for a princess who’s been princess for ever such a long time.”

  “Do we have such a princess around here? Let me think.”

  “It’s Kelly!” They shouted it out in exasperation.

  “Oh, yes. Now I remember. Princess Kelly.”

  “She’s got the prettiest dress that you’ve ever seen,” Veronica said, eyes wide. “It’s all white that shines…”

  “Satin,” Shimna supplied the word.

  “And there’s gold on the edges of everything.”

  “And a satin slip and white satin panties with lace.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “She’s the prettiest princess, prettier even than the ones in the fairy tales.”

  “She is indeed. Aren’t we lucky, we Victorians?”

  “Victoria has got the prettiest princess and the strongest navy and the biggest castle and…”

  “And the tallest Proctor!” Veronica added.

  Shimna nodded, very serious. “Victoria is the capital of the whole world,” she said.

  Sometimes a physicist, sometimes a warrior: a man of the twentieth century for a while, and then, a man of the Dark Ages. But in his heart Loren was ‘None of the Above.’ Kelly had flattered his ego one day long ago by comparing him to the Wright Brothers. Only he wasn’t so much an inventor as an investigator. The inventions had been a by-product of curiosity, of his search for answers to the wonderful question How do things work? These last few years he had taken to disassembling gadgets and devices to see how they functioned inside. Often they were things he had used and taken for granted for most of a lifetime. Now he needed to understand how they functioned. He was becoming adroit at simple mechanical matters: Mending Shimmy’s bike or her trains gave him a sense of peace and accomplishment. What need did he have for more than that?

  He watched the parade in the afternoon, thinking only of the mechanical details. There were floats, but floats that actually floated in the air, an easy application of Effector technology. The bodies of the floating platforms were made up of a technology of their own: a very old one, sculpted chicken wire, stuffed with colored tissue paper. And that technology he found every bit as charming as the Effectors. He wondered idly how the marching bands coordinated themselves. Since all the musicians were staring intently at the music cards mounted on their instruments, who had an eye free for the conductor’s baton? He would have rigged something, he thought, that broadcast transmission of the beat, perceived by the band perhaps as a tapping or a regular buzzing in a receiver they would wear strapped to a leg. But they seemed to get along fine without such contrivances. He looked around for more to wonder at. What trick of training or instruction had been used to keep all the cub scouts and brownies (his own two daughters among them) lined up in such an orderly fashion?

  At the dinner, later that evening, he spent a long moment contemplating the seating arrangements. It was a non-trivial matter with more than one hundred and fifty guests. There were so many constraints to respect: protocol, nearness to the Princess, alternation by sex, particular friendships and even a few enmities, places for the children, ease of access for those who had difficulties moving about, placement of the left-handed where their elbows would not bump. He could have written a linear program with each constraint expressed as an equation, and asked it to print out an ideal seating plan. Only someone had figured out the seating without going to all that bother, and done it pretty well. He noticed that Homer, who was nodding off over the final courses, had been given a special chair that had a padded headrest, so that his head did not drop forward alarmingly toward his salad. Shimna and Veronica had Nino between them, assuring their very best behavior and keeping them merry with whispered comments. All three of their chairs had elevated seats. Chandler Hopkins, now President-Emeritus, was at the far end of the table, opposite Kelly, in the position of father of the family.

  The clink of a fork on the side of a drinking glass. Chancellor Jouvet was on his feet. He waited for the silence to become total. Then, holding his glass in the air: “Ladies and Gentlemen, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of her rule…to the Princess of Victoria.” The assemblage stood, all except Kelly in her white satin gown. She smiled slightly and looked down.

  “To the Princess.”

  “Hear Hear!”

  “To the Princess.”

  When they sat, Chandler remained standing. “With so much fuss over our Princess, and all that title implies, I worry that someone far more important to us is not receiving her due. Ladies and gentlemen, to the person who guided us so gently and so industriously through our first year on Victoria and through all the years since. To Kelly Corsayer.” This time the group rose to its feet more noisily. In the complication of this modern world, there is little one can cheer for whole-heartedly. Kelly came close enough.

  By the time the diners were in their seats again, the entire kitchen staff had filed out to offer the Princess their own round of applause. The guests stood again at their places, this time applauding the cooks and waiters and stewards for their scrumptious meal.

  Quiet for a moment and then it was Loren on his feet. “Now, really, the rest are going to be sitting toasts. What with all the popping up and down we’re using up valuable toasting time.” He turned to Kelly and raised his glass. “To my Love.”

  The last toast was by Shimna, who first climbed up to stand in her seat. She held up her crystal glass in both hands and said, “To Mommy.” Everyone clapped.

  “Well, my dear friends,” Kelly intervened. She spoke without standing, her voice clear and audible, unstrained. “These four toasts have turned my heart in four different kinds of somersault. But I fear that four more will turn my head as well, and worse, leave me surrounded by a table of none too steady revelers. So I say, let us begin the entertainment.

  “Tonight we have some wonderful pleasures planned for you. The very first is a song by the Victoria Boys Choir.” As she spoke, an orderly line of youngsters was entering from the door by her side. Curtis stood up from his place and ran to join the choir. One of his friends helped him into his gold robe so he would be garbed as the others.

  “The song they have planned for us,” Kelly went on, “is in Latin. But I looked up the words, and I will share them with you. It begins, ‘Let us therefore give praise, As we are young…’

  “The words make me think this: To whom shall we give our praise, as we are young, except to those who are not so young? Looking a
round this table at all my good friends, I see a happy sprinkling of white hair. And under each bit of that white hair sits someone who has given more to Victoria than I ever have or shall. It has been our great fortune as a society to be guided by our elders. I won’t single you out specially, my dears, you know who you are. But for the rest of us, the not-white-hairs, I ask you to join with me during this song in giving praise. For each of us, there is one or more of the elders in this room today, who has merited it, and more.” She nodded to the choir. Forty voices, high and sweet, sang out:

  Gaudeamus igitur,

  Juvenes dum sumus…

  The final scene of that evening is burned, I know forever, into my memory. It hangs about me like a thick sweet odor, seemingly pleasant at first, then cloying, and finally sick-making, but always there.

  I preceded the other guests into the grand ballroom for the rest of the night’s entertainment with my love, Kelly, as always, on my arm. We took our seats at the front of the hall on a wide double chair that had been erected on a kind of dais. Behind us there were two long Victorian banners spilling down the wall fully thirty feet from the rafters above. A server placed on a low table beside us a tray of candies and two little cups of strong Cuban coffee, thick and sweet for my Princess and black for me. While the guests were still filing in, there was a pair of jugglers, beginning their act. They were young, female and very funny. People were tiptoeing to their places in the long rows of seats along the sides of the room, tiptoeing so as not to miss the banter. When the jugglers were done, Danny McCree came on as the second act. He sang Galloway Bay in a voice that always astounded me for its range and lovely tone. Then he sang a kind of jig, accompanied by his daughter, Stephanie. Then a barbershop quartet came on to sing, I can’t remember what.

  The audience was moving around a bit between and during the acts. We had a casual attitude about our entertainment; no one was hurt if you conversed quietly with friends in a corner during a song or clinked glasses in the middle of an act. There were servers too, moving among the guests.