Washington's Dirigible (The Timeline Wars, 2)

by John Barnes

  “Our best bet,” Sheridan said, “is to get the King out of there, into the hands of the Royal Navy, and thence to America. From there he can rally support and bring down the false regime. I’d suggest Ireland, but the Irish hate us; the French would be happy to lock up the King forever … and the false King undoubtedly has already extended his influence back into his ancestral domain of Hanover. Indeed that explains why, after so ‘British’ a start, the monarchy has become so suddenly ‘German’ again. No, it’s America, the Navy, and then the Army that can save the King and kingdom.”

  “Agreed,” Hollis said. “Once he’s aboard ship somewhere we will be in far better stead, but how to get him to a ship?”

  Priestley had been staring off into space, and now he smiled. “And the problem would seem worse than that, would it not, gentlemen? London is a port on a river, and the larger warships cannot get past London Bridge. We would not only have to free the King from St. James—a very heavily guarded place indeed—but we would also have to get him down to the river, and then downstream to a large enough warship to get him to America, with a real possibility of being killed or captured the whole way, and with the whole city in an uproar after shooting starts at St. James.” His smile got bigger and wider, and he stared farther off into space; he looked like a grinning idiot.

  “Dr. Priestley, if I didn’t know by your manner that you had some idea in mind for resolving the whole matter, I’d punch you in the eye,” Caleb Fleming said, firmly.

  “And we’d hold you down so he could do it without interference,” Sheridan added. “What in the sweet name of god do you have in mind?”

  “Well,” Priestley said, “how many shots are left in that remarkable gun of yours, Strang?” Sheridan and I had retrieved my bag from the checkroom at the coffeehouse and found that it was intact; one test shot had brought down a seagull three miles away, convincing everyone that it would do what I said it would.

  “If I’m reading the Closer hieroglyphs right—and maybe I am and maybe I’m not—I’d figure it at 331,” I said. “That’s enough to kill every guard around St. James and blow the doors down, if you just want to go in by brute force.”

  “And its range?”

  “Around six, seven miles, about the same as the SHAKK I’m used to,” I said. “I wish I knew exactly.”

  “No problem at all. I was merely wondering if you could hit Buckingham House from St. James Palace.”

  “Ah …” I thought for a moment and then recalled from trips to London that, at least in my timeline, St. James and Buckingham Palace were not at all far apart. And this would be much easier, because the Buckingham house wasn’t nearly so built up yet—not yet a “palace,” at all. “There should be no problem at all,” I said.

  “Well, then,” Priestley said, “if you’ll permit me to be more overoptimistic than my position as a scientist would warrant, strictly, then I do think we can manage the whole matter pretty handily. It will merely be extremely dangerous and difficult.”

  “What isn’t?” I said.

  I noticed Sheridan scribbling frantically when I said that, but since Priestley was then launching into explaining his plan—something that turned out to take a couple of hours—it was not until later, at dinner, that I found myself with time enough to say to my host, “Er, by the way, Mr. Sheridan—”

  “Do call me Dick,” he said. “And may I call you Mark?”

  “Er, sure, no problem,” I said, “I’m from a very informal time myself, but what I meant to ask—”

  “It must be delightful to be from an informal time. More of the goose, sir? I think this is quite the tenderest we’ve had.”

  It was very good goose, in fact, so I took some more before trying to press the subject any farther. “Now, anyway, Dick—”

  “Oh, yes, the informality definitely makes a difference. I feel much more closely the sentiments of true friendship with you, sir.”

  It didn’t surprise me to remember that in my timeline this guy had been a member of Parliament, and a prominent public speaker, for more than thirty years … or that he’d had a relatively successful business career as well.

  “Now, Dick,” I said, “one way in which we are extremely informal is that we quite often use an expression that I’m sure you’ll understand.” I helped myself to a bit more mustard and spread it on a terrific piece of steak, figuring that if I was going to offend my host, I might as well do it while fully appreciating his food.

  “And that expression would be?” he asked, looking mildly amused.

  “The expression would be ‘cut the crap,’” I said, “which means—”

  “Oh, I know what it means, it’s current in my stables,” Sheridan said. “I suppose, Mark, you intend to ask me just why I have been taking notes on what you’ve been saying. And you don’t think it’s because I’m a spy, because others with a like chance to see me have plainly seen me doing it and not asked me.”

  “Uh, yep, that was the question.” I smiled as nicely as I could manage; I really didn’t want to offend him, but I really did want to know just what the hell he was up to.

  He snorted and shook his head. “Well, you know, this house and a good part of what else I own is all a matter of The Rivals having succeeded. Now, it so happens that I’ve another comedy I shall be presenting soon … a splendid little thing called The School for Scandal, which is even more a work of genius than the previous—”

  I nodded. “In my timeline it was thought to be so.” And then, smiling broadly, I added, “And your modesty is very becoming.”

  “Modesty, sir, is for men who cannot assess themselves accurately. Or perhaps for those who assess themselves too accurately. In any case, it has no place in the temperament of the artist, who needs to see clearly. At any rate, it is good to know that my School will, as it were, bring in some handsome tuition. But that can only be the start, you see … there’s also the matter of becoming wealthy enough to buy myself election to the Commons in an appropriate district. That is going to take money, for all that it will make a great deal once I am in.”

  It occurred to me that in my own century when artists lived on grants and Congressmen on graft, I’d never seen anyone combine the operation, but there was no logical reason not to. I nodded approvingly, figuring it was the best way to get him to tell me the rest.

  The gaslights flickered, and his smile deepened into a smirk; I had a vision of looking at—for lack of a better expression—a handsome devil.

  “Well, then, has it not occurred to you that your life is the stuff of which melodrama might be made? And that once victory is won we are going to be public with what has happened, no doubt you recall that since you explained it to us? Well, sir, I do believe that with the right actor to play the role of yourself—-and with a Bibiena or two, which I think I can command the price of, to paint the scenes of the time you come from and the wonders of twenty-ninth-century Athens—that you will do very nicely. I should be happy to cut you in for a share of the profits except that the thought did occur to me …”

  “That I’m on duty, and, besides, you’d have no way of getting them to me,” I said. “Oh, well, it’s an entertaining thought, I guess. And if I do happen to make it back here, I’m expecting to be shown the town,” I added.

  “Nothing would give me greater pleasure. Well, we’d best get on to coffee and the trifle; they will be here soon enough.”

  And that was the nearest thing to business we discussed during that last dinner. There really was nothing else to talk about anyway. Priestley’s plan would work or it wouldn’t, and the preparations were already made and things set in motion. We might as well enjoy the pleasures of a sweet dessert over coffee and a good, comfortable stretch by the fire before we started off on what might be our last night alive.

  So we had our coffee and dessert, and we talked about comedy and Molière, and about Hogarth and Rowlandson, and why some centuries have better cartoons than others, and if it wasn’t what I had come to this time to do, it
was certainly the kind of thing that the century delighted in, and it was what I needed to do.

  We had just let it get comfortably quiet, and I was letting myself daydream a little about Chrysamen and the letter I would write to her when I got back, when the delicate little clock on the mantel chimed quarter of eight with its brass bells. The two of us stood and picked up our small kit bags—very small considering how much traveling we had ahead of us—and started for the door. At that moment the whistle on Priestley’s steam-engine coach sounded outside the door.

  “‘Harper calls, ’tis time, ’tis time,’” Sheridan said. “And ‘When shall we three meet again?’”

  I followed along after him, muttering, “‘I coulda been a contender.’”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A line from another sort of play … one your timeline hasn’t come up with.”

  “Ah.”

  Priestley and two others were waiting in that coach; others were to arrive out at St. James by trolley or on foot. We had forty-five minutes to get there, which in the crowded streets of London was not as much as it seemed.

  The whole way there, Sheridan kept muttering, “‘I coulda been a contender.’ Fascinating sort of rhythm it has. ‘I coulda been a contender.’”

  I had a feeling I had intervened more than I intended in these people’s culture. And since in this timeline Marlon Brando would probably never get born, the chances of having him play me seemed pitifully slim.

  The coach jounced and thumped its way across Blackfriars Bridge and through Southwark, its carbide-gas headlamps stabbing into the darkness ahead of us. It was an experimental model that Priestley was hand-building for some nobleman—he and Watt had some kind of rivalry going for who could most revolutionize industry, I gathered, and this gadget was part of it. It was probably one of the most recognizable moving objects in London, and we were counting on that fact.

  The two men Priestley had brought were strong and burly, and they had something you didn’t see much in that century—deep suntans. Chances were they were officers of some regiment. They were being kept in the dark about all of this. If things went wrong, they couldn’t turn us in, and if they had an alibi of ignorance, it might save them from the firing squad. So we didn’t speak to them.

  After a long interval one of them raised a window, leaned out, and asked something of the engine tender. When he came back, he said, “As you had guessed, sir, there are now three coaches following us with their lights out.”

  “Steam, Luke’s Patent, or horse-drawn?” I asked.

  “Luke’s Patent, all three, sir.”

  That was a nuisance. Steam carts could have been put out of action with a hole in the boiler, horse-drawn by killing the horses. Now I would need to fire enough shots, and make them go into the right places, to put that very simple and clever steam engine out of action.

  We wound deeper into the tangle of streets that was South-wark; the area was in fact one of the older parts of the city, Shakespeare’s theater had stood there, and it had been old then, and so there were plenty of alleys and niches. We wanted somewhere truly narrow. Priestley’s coachman had grown up down here.

  We hoped his memory was accurate.

  Finally, as we wound down a narrow, dark alley that we were assured had an opening on the other end, pursued by all three carts, I opened the bag, got out the Closer weapon, and then opened the window. I climbed carefully through the window, grasping the little ladder that was supposed to let you get to the roof, and climbed up, hoping all the while that the little brazier that heated our Sterling engine wouldn’t tip on me.

  Crawling past the coachman, I sat down on the tail. The coach bounced horribly in the rutted streets, and I really needed both hands for the weapon, but eventually I got the sight folded and pulled out to a comfortable height, and the rest of it unlimbered so that it rested in my forearm. I was ready to shoot.

  Some twiggling at the scope control let me find the setting for infrared, and now I could plainly see the rims of the cylinder assemblies on the three coaches following us, since those rims were heated in the braziers.

  Moreover, by a little fine adjustment I discovered that I could see the wheel hubs, for the friction produced just enough heat to illuminate parts of the axle and wheel assemblies to the weapon. That finally gave me a thought.

  There had been a lot of stories back at COTA about the fact that the number displayed did not seem to correspond accurately to the number of shots a Closer weapon would still fire. This probably meant that we didn’t actually understand how the weapons did what they did. You could use them like a SHARK for a while; then they would begin to whoop, and you had to throw them away or they would go off like grenades. Their power source was clearly not the little baby nuke that a SHARK carried—Closers didn’t even want to share a timeline with nuclear power, let alone carry around a little direct-power reactor with them—but just what it was was another good question. Possibly an antimatter device of some kind, but those were at least as radiation-prone as the nukes; was it only fission and fusion the Closers were afraid of? Or maybe somehow they were making atom-sized black holes and drawing power by throwing matter into them; according to that theory, the “whoop whoop whoop” noise was triggered when the Hawking radiation got too intense, indicating that the black hole was about to blow apart. It seemed quite impossible to say, anyway; all we knew was you could shoot for a while, then it would begin to malfunction unpredictably, and then finally it would start whooping and blow up.

  Anyway, it wasn’t whooping yet, and it had not yet malfunctioned in any other way. I thought for a long instant about just how long and dark and winding this alley was, and then waited until I got a clear view of the last coach pursuing us.

  This wasn’t exactly The French Connection—none of these buggies could do any better than about twenty-five miles per hour and all of them were bouncing around in the muddy London alley as if they’d been Jeeps racing through Baja. I was going to have to count very heavily on the homing properties of Closer ammunition.

  I finally had a long breath of clear view of the last carriage. The rim of the cylinder assembly on top glowed where the brazier heated it. The brazier itself was one bright mass of light in the infrared scope; the occasional glimpses of the bearings were like fireflies.

  I sighted on the rim and squeezed off one shot. There was not the slightest recoil against my forearm—even the SHARK has a tiny kick—and god knew how the ammo was doing what it was doing, but it hit that whirling iron rim and apparently steered right around through it, peeling it off like the skin off an apple.

  I saw that in my peripheral vision as I aimed and fired at a wheel bearing; an instant later the coach slumped sideways as its wheel came off, and it plowed into the side of a building. Then I turned my attention to the coach nearest us, from which two pistol shots had just roared in quick succession—the boom you get from a .45 is unmistakable, so I knew my counterpart was in there—and gave it three quick shots, one each for the rim of the cylinder assembly, the bearings on one wheel, and the bearing on the main drive wheel. The coach fell into pieces and slammed another wall.

  We were gone before I got a shot at the middle coach.

  It was as if I had felt a silent hug from Chrys—they were jammed in the alley, immovable coaches in front and behind, with a very real risk of fire that they would have to fight (not because they were nice guys but to avoid losing their whole party and baggage)—and I had not fired a shot at one of them. So far as I knew, though they might be shaken up, they were all still alive.

  It was a strange feeling, though; a few days ago I’d just have shot all the coachmen and enjoyed every moment. I wondered what kind of fighter I would make without a love for the taste of blood … and wondered what I had ever seen in the taste of blood.

  It was a fine night, and I wasn’t needed back inside the coach, so I sat up with the engine tender, a dour and silent Scot who was supposed to be highly reliable but about whom I also kn
ew nothing. After a while we rolled across Westminster Bridge.

  In my timeline, that’s an impressive experience—everything is lit up, and Westminster itself is a grand sight, especially at night with the light coming from underneath. But in this timeline there were just a few crude arc lights that were used for special occasions, and this wasn’t one of the special occasions. We rolled over the dark Thames, the engine chuffing away beside me; it was heavier than a Sterling and a little bigger, but it was whirring along at a much higher rate of speed and as a result the transmission was just that much more effective and modern; the driver was constantly yanking the clutch in and out and trying to find a better top gear. Priestley claimed to have had it all the way up to thirty miles per hour twice, though never while being officially timed.

  We rumbled and thudded over the cobblestone pavement of the bridge, and now we were well on our way. We could assume that warnings had been radioed or sent by runner all over the city, and that we were being treated as the main body of the approach. With luck, the body of men moving silently down Swallow Street would attract much less attention; the group that had gathered by St. George’s Hospital and was now coming quietly up Piccadilly would likewise gather no close inspection.

  We hoped, thanks to the attention we had gained with the shooting we had done and the ruckus in Southwark—tied to such a conspicuous vehicle—to find them ready, waiting, and excited to see us. And since there was no official business tonight, and the King had become so secluded, whatever force there was, hidden or visible, would move to get between us and Buckingham.

  They would probably not worry much about St. James Palace, though undoubtedly some would be left on guard there. None of the royal family except the rightful King was there, and after all if he started to escape, there would be time to move forces back into place. It was only a matter of a few hundred yards, and St. James Palace, in those days, was surrounded by open ground. The King could not possibly get away.