Through Glass Darkly Episode 1

by Peter Knyte

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Knyte was born and grew up in North Staffordshire, England, but now lives in West Yorkshire, where by day he passes himself off as a mild-mannered office worker, while by night he explores whole worlds of imagination as an intrepid writer.

  When not tapping away at his computer he spends his time slowly transforming his garden into a Japanese style tea garden, rock climbing, snowboarding and cooking.

  Through Glass Darkly is his second novel.

  For more information about Peter and the worlds that he is exploring please visit:

  www.knytewrytng.com

  OTHER TITLES

  Other titles by Peter Knyte

  The Flames of Time

  Forthcoming titles by Peter Knyte

  The Embers of Time

  The Ashes of Time

  Through Glass Darkly – Episode 2

  TITLE PAGE

  Through Glass Darkly

  Episode One

  Peter Knyte

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2016 Peter Knyte.

  Peter Knyte asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved.

  First paperback edition printed 2016 in the United States and United Kingdom

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9930874-2-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9930874-3-1

  No part of this book shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval

  system without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Clandestine Books Limited

  For more copies of this book, please contact:

  info@clandestine-books.co.uk

  If you find any errors in this book please let us know so we can correct them for other readers.

  To report an error, please email: info@clandestine-books.co.uk

  Interior designed and set by Clandestine Books

  www.clandestine-books.co.uk

  Cover art and typesetting by Mina Morcos

  Aka ‘ex nilo’ at 99Designs.com

  Through Glass Darkly – Episode One

  Clandestine Books Limited

  Peter Knyte

  DEDICATION

  For H.G. Wells, Alexander Dumas, Jules Verne, Bram Stoker, Nikolai Tolstoy, A.A. Milne, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, John Buchan, John Wyndham and Anthony Hope for the years of entertainment and inspiration.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1 - Arrival

  Chapter 2 - Awakening

  Chapter 3 - Beginnings

  Chapter 4 - Reflection

  Chapter 5 - Revival

  Chapter 6 - Violation

  Chapter 7 - Return

  Chapter 8 - Reunion

  Chapter 9 - Resurrection

  Chapter 10 - Explanation

  Chapter 11 - Kubla Khan

  Chapter 12 - The Search

  Chapter 13 - Prometheus

  Chapter 14 - Reprise

  Chapter 15 - Hunt

  Chapter 16 - Revelation

  Thank you

  Sample

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With thanks to John and Tasha Williamson, Lisa Bath, Philip Hall, Claire Thompson, Jeanette Clewes, Timothy Payne, R.J. Barker, Matt Broom and Helen Marsden for providing the invaluable feedback and proofreading of this and other titles, which has enabled me to improve them in countless ways.

  I hope I can return the favour sometime.

  DISCLAIMER

  This book is entirely a work of fiction, and while it plays fast and loose the names of historic figures, places and events, no part of this book should be viewed or understood to be factual, or attempting to be factual in any way. This story is set on other worlds of imagination, which at best may bear a coincidental similarity to our own, and in all probability will be wholly different and bear no resemblance to any actual people, personalities, locations, circumstances or events whatsoever.

  CHAPTER 1 – ARRIVAL

  A storm plays over New York, the booming rolls of thunder echoing off the tall buildings before escaping out past Liberty Island to the Atlantic. Strangely coloured flashes of lightening streak across the night sky in well-choreographed time with the thunder, striking first one building then another on their way to earth.

  Between these flashes a great airship suddenly appears. Its nose tilted at a crazed angle toward the ground as though in some steep dive. But the craft simply hangs in the air, poised like a great dagger above the city’s heart. Only the countless cables and wires which hang down from its sides seem to move as they are pushed and pulled by the gusting wind.

  The rain washes down the length of this wallowing hulk before cascading from its sides and back into the night air. But the city is looking down, the faces of its citizens buried beneath umbrellas, hats and high collars, as everyone thinks only of sanctuary from the storm.

  And then a body is falling along with the rain. A sodden rag doll, dressed in a strange uniform that nobody would recognise and with a strangely ornate set of lenses and other mechanical devices partly obscuring her attractive but lifeless face.

  Nobody sees the silent descent. The graceful tumble of elegant limbs that almost gives the fragile form the illusion of flight, until it crashes into the road between the gleaming rows of water bejewelled cars. The young woman’s body cracking the road where it impacts, then bounces to the height of a man before landing a second and final time as a broken and battered shell of a person.

  In a world where airships have not been seen in the skies for decades it is difficult to imagine what the members of that unsuspecting public may have thought when they finally turned their eyes toward the skies, and saw the six hundred tonnes of steel, bronze and glass hanging above their heads, itself a broken and battered shell lying against the cracked night sky.

  Perhaps more difficult still though, for those countless crowds of tiny figures which now gathered beneath that great floating wreck, was the idea that this massive and unexpected hulk might still contain some flickering traces of life. Of people like themselves, but different. From a world so very like their own, yet so distinctly not their own.

  ————————

  How we survived to appear above that tallest of cities I cannot begin to imagine but somehow we did. And somehow as those countless wonder and horror filled eyes gazed upward, some of us still clung to life, a faint and faltering pulse within so giant a craft.

  But just as there could be no mistaking the ruined and distressed nature of the Kubla Khan, our ship, there could also be no mistaking the weapons and armour which clearly adorned her elegant bronze frame. Strange arcane designs unlike any they could’ve seen before, yet unmistakably deadly none the less.

  I’d been aware of the rolling thunder and drumming rain for what could’ve been an age before I realised it was also tinged with the distant wail of sirens, a sound that was so uniquely mundane it helped to bring my mind back through the toxic fog in which it was surrounded, until I was again aware of the room around me. I thought I was still confused for another minute or two before I realised the shadows and angles within the room which seemed wrong, were wrong and that the ship was actually tilted at a dangerous angle. All the while the sirens grew louder, until, as I dragged myself up what had been the floor of my cabin, to the door, and the port hole window set within it. I could hear them clearly, with their familiar welcoming wail. It was dark outside, but at least it wasn’t the sickening darkness of the Expanse, it was the welcoming half-darkness of a city, beneath a storm-cloud filled nigh
t sky.

  We were back, I’d no idea how we’d made it, I was just glad we had. Feeling around my neck for my lenses so that I could see through the darkness I was shocked not to find them, and then remembered them being taken from me before I was locked in my cabin. Without them it was too dark for me to figure out where we might be at first, and then the lightning came to my aid and revealed the startlingly close skyscrapers of what could only be New York.

  There were cables and ropes trailing all over the place, some of which were clearly snagged around one of the nearby buildings, and along it, the unmistakable shape of a man climbing hand over hand toward us. It was a fleeting glimpse that also highlighted the sheets of pouring rain which were cascading off the ship all around.

  The cabin door was still locked from the outside, and I knew if I tried to force it, I’d only speed the work of the poison in my system, so I waited and watched. The darkness punctuated by the occasional flash of light, in which I saw the figure moving closer and closer. I willed him on, willed strength into what must’ve been tired and frozen, rain slicked hands. Whether he had some kind of safety line I couldn’t tell, only that with each flash he moved further along that wind-blown hawser, until eventually with noticeably tired movements he made it over the railings to safety, just a few yards away from my door. Now was my moment, I hammered on the door, until I saw him start and look over, and then move toward me.

  I don’t know what I was expecting when he unlocked the door and I saw his rain sodden face, perhaps joy or sorrow at our return, obviously some kind of concern at the state of the ship, in fact almost anything except fear, mistrust and incomprehension. He was shorter than I’d thought but clearly muscular, and immediately reminded me of an acrobat.

  It was only after explaining to him who we were for the third time, with the last of my life ebbing from my body, that he managed to understand we needed help urgently, or many of those aboard would die, and he agreed to help me toward one of the cradles.

  I could feel the toxins clawing at my brain again as we moved. I didn’t even dare to stop along the way to see to anyone else in any of the other cabins, I just forced my legs to move, then showed him how to operate the cradle in case I lost consciousness on the way down and we ended up crashing into the ground.

  And then we were down and someone who must’ve been a doctor was asking me questions, and I was trying to explain what little I knew of how we’d been poisoned, and how the force generator had been activated before the ship or crew were ready, and the Expanse, and the betrayal. I realised I was trying to tell him too much, but by then the poison had me, and the fog descended upon my mind once again.

  CHAPTER 2 - AWAKENING

  It seemed like it had all been a nightmare when I woke up. We were out of the lightless Expanse and I could feel the sun on my face again. It was shining brightly and spilling in through vertical blinds at the window. Leaving long warm stripes across the bed I was lying in, and making me feel almost well again. There was still a cold, hollowness deep down in my bones to remind me of our exposure to the leaching sickness of that place, or perhaps it was an after effect of the toxin. But the sunlight helped.

  I was obviously in a private room in some kind of hospital. It was quiet and smelled clean, so for a minute or two I just let the golden warmth sink into me, and enjoyed the simple pleasure of the fresh bedding against my skin instead waking up in my flight clothes, with lenses and weapons constantly within reach. Sleeping but never so deeply that I couldn’t be up and out of the door in a heartbeat if needed.

  I could’ve just stayed lying there, but I wanted to know how the rest of the crew were, and knew there must be people with questions waiting to find out what had gone wrong, so with a sigh I found the switch beside the bed to call the nurses’ station.

  Everything ached as I attempted to sit up in bed, and just as I got myself upright the nurse appeared at the door closely followed by two stern looking men who could only be the police. Both were plainly but formally dressed in dark suits, the elder of the two stood close to the bed, carefully watching both me and the nurse, while his more junior companion stopped just inside the door, looking over occasionally, while at the same time watching what was happening in the corridor. To her credit the nurse didn’t let them intimidate her, she just carried on, checking both my pulse and temperature, before leaving us to it. Meanwhile the two men just waited patiently until she was done, and had left the room.

  ‘Well, you’re looking much better, when the doctors first saw you they thought you’d be out of it for a few days.’ The elder of the two informed me with just a hint of humour in his voice that didn’t quite make it to his eyes. ‘But I suppose we should start with the usual formalities. I’m Special Agent Jenkins with the FBI, this is Special Agent Fraser. And you my mysterious friend appear to be someone by the name of Hall, one Mr Ashton Philip Hall, of Manchester in England?’

  ‘Yes, yes that’s right,’ I replied, Slightly taken aback by them being from the FBI. ‘But I’d hardly describe myself as mysterious Agent Jenkins, in fact if anything far from it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t describe yourself as mysterious!’ His assistant piped up with a tone of genuine astonishment in his voice. ‘An impossibly large and obviously heavily armed zeppelin suddenly appears over our city in the middle of a thunderstorm, closely followed by a dozen people in uniforms nobody has ever seen before, and some creatures nobody has ever even imagined all falling from the sky to smash into our streets. And you wouldn’t describe yourself as mysterious?’

  Jenkins the senior agent, held out a hand to quiet his colleague without even looking at him. ‘What my colleague is trying to explain here Mr Hall, is that we’d like some answers, and we’d like them quickly, before that ship of yours does any more damage to our city.’

  The surprise must’ve shown on my face at the younger man’s outburst, as of all the things I was expecting hostility was definitely not it.

  ‘Mr Jenkins, I’m more than happy to answer any and all questions you might have, especially if it’s going to help my ship mates, or their families now that we’re back, I must’ve just got the wrong end of the stick here. Please let’s just start again and I’ll do my best to tell you everything you want to know.’

  ‘Ok,’ he began, with a sigh. ‘So from the top then Mr Hall, we know your name from the wallet you had on you, how about we move on and talk about where you’re from, and how your ship appeared over our heads last night.’

  I knew I had to be missing something, but thinking my head may still be a bit mixed up I decided to play along until things worked themselves out. Starting with the basics so we were all on the same page, and hoping that the confusion would reveal itself when I got to the bit that they didn’t understand or didn’t agree with.

  ‘Well, alright from the top then.’ I began, determined to be thorough. ’You’ve had a look through my wallet, so you know the first bit, I’m English, from Manchester to be specific. Prior to joining Mr Hughes’ fleet, I tried my hand at a handful of different things in different parts of the world, including a couple of years right here in New York. But that all changed four years ago obviously with his famous broadcast and the overnight appearance of his first fifty airships. Like a lot. . . ‘

  ‘Are you telling us there are another fifty of these ships hanging around out there?’ Fraser broke in again, a look of horror on his face.

  I was expecting them to interrupt me, I just didn’t think it was possible that it could’ve been so soon. It was impossible for anyone not to know about the first fifty airships which Hughes had revealed overnight above the world’s major cities, so I just presumed Fraser mustn’t have heard me properly.

  ‘No, I’m talking about the first fifty ships,‘ I explained, to their blank faces. ‘The ones which the Captain revealed with his famous television address. . . Obviously there’s still only one Golden Goose, sorry Kubla Khan, though I don’t know what state she’s in now, or what it’ll take to make her airwor
thy again. . .’

  I was tempted to just plough on, but could see none of it was registering with them, so broke off. And then they dropped the bombshell.

  ‘What broadcast are you talking about?’ Jenkins asked me, a genuine look of confusion on his face. ‘What first fifty airships? Mr Hall, this is New York City, and I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  I felt like I’d lost my balance for a second, and had to close my eyes just to try and get my wits back, before I continued.

  ‘Neither of you have ever seen or heard the Howard Hughes global broadcast?’ I asked very slowly and very deliberately. ‘The one which was played over every television and radio channel in almost every country in the world on the same day four years ago.

  ‘The one in which he launched a fleet of fifty armed airships to help protect the world from the increasing number of miasmic incursions which had been happening.

  ‘Which he’d developed and built in secret, and which he then gave to the world to crew and use in any way they saw fit. The same ships which have since become our only line of defence against everything that tries to get through from the Expanse.’

  I could see it on their faces then. They had no idea what I was talking about. And if it hadn’t been for the giant bronze ship hanging above their city they’d have thought me a lunatic. The older one of the two got it first. Perhaps he saw something in my own expression which made him realise.

  This wasn’t our home, we’d come out of the Expanse somewhere else entirely.