series 01 04 Abattoir in the Aether

by L. Joseph Shosty

  Little could be said after that. All eyes were on the bomb, which was three sticks of red dynamite lashed together with twine. That much explosive would have blown a hole in the outer hull, as well, and the catastrophic damage would have done more than kill one scientist. It would probably kill most of the men on the station.

  Nathanial looked at Annabelle, who was still staring at her friend. Fear danced behind his eyes. She wanted to hold his hand and tell him he would be all right, but just then, she could hardly suppress the excitement and a certain smugness entering into her overall demeanour.

  Overactive imagination indeed.

  Chapter Six

  “Pickwick’s Inheritors”

  1.

  Mad bomber. Anarchist. Saboteur. Assassin.

  The glass of brandy pushed into Nathanial’s hands helped somewhat, but the words continued to loom over him like shadows. He looked at the brown liquid, swishing in the glass, and wished for Arnaud’s company.

  “For your nerves,” Fullbright said, indicating the liquor. Holmes raised his glass in salute.

  “Difficult thing, indeed,” Holmes added. He filled a snifter for himself from the decanter on the table before him.

  Holmes’ quarters lay at one end of sickbay, with his private office at the other end. The quarters looked more like a sitting room in a middle class London home, with several overstuffed chairs and a settee pulled into a circle around the table. Two oak bookshelves protected its volumes behind glass cabinet doors that slid down when the books were not being perused. A small bed was all that told a visitor this was a private quarters. Indeed, Holmes’ intent surely had been to make this place welcome to visitors, and visitors he had.

  Provost and Fullbright took their seats nearby, concern on their faces. Each sipped from a glass of brandy and regarded their new visitor with grave faces. Nathanial appreciated their concern, but he was uncomfortable under such scrutiny.

  “I had a patient attack me with a knife,” Holmes said. “Came right at me. He was down from Winlaton. Turned over a new leaf, he’d said. He had taken up with his brother-in-law a bit late in life, or so he said, and was learning the pawnbroker business. Spent most of his life working the coal mines. The diagnosis I gave him, black lung, should not have come as a surprise to him, then, but I suppose he felt he had escaped that fate. It was too much for him to take, and he tried to kill me.”

  “Sad thing, that,” Fullbright said, clearly lacking empathy, but trying nonetheless.

  “Mmmm. Indeed it was. I still have the scar to remind me. Taught me something about mortality.”

  “What did it teach you?” Nathanial asked.

  “Nothing I can say to you, lad,” Holmes said. “Put any man in the same situation, and he would learn an entirely different lesson, each personal to he who learns it.” Momentarily the doctor’s eyes became lucid, and he squinted at Nathanial. “But I think you know that, or are becoming aware of it, at any rate.”

  “How could someone have laid a trap for me so quickly?” Nathanial asked. The question had been rolling around in his head since dinner. He had scarcely heard van den Bosch’s roars of outrage and dire threats toward Dolan and the others to find the responsible party and bring him to justice. He had only nodded, numb, when Holmes had suggested he repair to quarters with the rest of them for a nip of “the creature”. Nathanial could not even remember if he had finished his dinner or not, knowing only that his appetite was gone, and that his hands had not stopped shaking. Now the question came tumbling out, and he was sure it sounded desperate.

  Fullbright was quick to put him at ease. “We’ve known about you for several days. We keep observers at their posts on the telescopes at all times, every cycle. Your flyer was seen three days ago. I recommended caution even though the Juggernaut was ready to hit you with broadsides as soon as you were spotted. You were given the opportunity to change course away from Peregrine, but you instead altered course directly for us.”

  “I corrected course for Mars,” Nathanial protested.

  “I’m sure that’s so, but we couldn’t know that at the time. So, we prepared to intercept you. Word of your existence must have trickled down to the workers from that moment. So you see, there was more time to prepare a trap for you than you think. This surely can’t comfort you, of course, but there you have it.”

  “And who’s to say it was directed at you, anyway,” Provost said.

  “Oh, yes. There is that,” Holmes said, finishing his brandy. He sat forward and poured another, and when he reclined again, he looked none too likely to continue his narrative.

  “What?” Nathanial asked.

  “Oh, the usual,” Provost said. “At least, we believed it was nothing. Every project, even the most secret ones, get found out.”

  “There are anarchists everywhere,” Fullbright added, “enemies of the Crown, even in the highest levels of Parliament. Rumour is passed around, and our enemies become aware of our activities.”

  “Same thing happened on Harbinger,” Holmes said.

  “Someone tried to blow it up?” Nathanial asked.

  “Oh, no,” Holmes said. “You misunderstand.”

  “Threats,” Provost said. “Written threats. Notes slipped under doors, stuck to doors back on Earth with knives, pinned to dead animals left on ministry doorsteps. Frightful stuff, meant to scare us away from progress.”

  “I wasn’t aware of this,” Nathanial said.

  “Of course not,” said Provost. “This is not the first heliograph station I’ve helped hurl into the sky, you see. Holmes and I were on Harbinger when we began receiving threats. And really, Stone, that was all they ever were, was threats. So you see, we had no reason to believe any different this time around. Empty threats to destabilise this co-venture between the United Kingdom and Austria.”

  Nathanial shook his head. He was by no means a drinker of spirits, and already the brandy was muddying his senses. “Just a moment, gentlemen, please. Let me see if I understand you. You’ve been receiving death threats prior to my arrival.”

  “That is correct,” Fullbright said. “We were scarcely up a week. The shell was together, and we had just begun pressurising the interior.”

  “Yes,” Provost said. “I was overseeing the greenhouses. My crew and I were the only ones on Peregrine at that point.”

  “Oh, yes,” added Fullbright. “Living out of the cutters and tugs we’d brought with us. The last ship had come to resupply us before we moved to our new accommodations, and the first note arrived. Slipped under the Juggernaut’s door of an evening.”

  “Full of the usual monstrosities, of course,” Provost said, hints of a smile reminding Nathanial of the man’s wit. “Entrails, brutality, entrails, heads on pikes, a world without sin, entrails, etcetera. Really frightful stuff. We all had a good laugh over it, in fact.”

  “Well, as you can see, there’s no reason to laugh over it anymore,” Nathanial said, a trifle angry at the flippancy that had gone on prior to his arrival. But of course, they could not have known something like this would happen. He had no reason to be angry, really, at least not at them. Now, the one who had tried to kill him, oh, there was plenty of anger for him, and it was just starting to bubble to the surface. Nathanial downed the rest of his brandy, felt it burn his throat and trace the shape of his stomach.

  He held out the snifter, and Holmes refilled it.

  “Then again,” Provost said, “it may not be an anarchist at all, just some fellow gone off his chump.”

  That wasn’t a wholly reassuring notion, but Nathanial understood its intent. “So, our objective, then, is to get drunk and forget about it?” he asked.

  “Oh, good heavens, no!” Holmes cried. “Your intention should be to repair our broken stabilisers before the vortex devours us whole, and our intent is to make sure such a thing happens.”

  “Hear hear!” Fullbright and Provost said in unison, and there was a particularly vigorous toast at this pronouncement.

  Nathanial c
ould not help but smile. Truly, he had been thrilled at the antics of these men from the moment he had met them, and now he was sure his instincts had been true. Surely, they looked a mess, but they were good chaps, all of them, drunkenness aside.

  “Well, thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I’m glad for your help.”

  Fullbright laughed. “You’re going to need it, believe me.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Provost.

  “I think you’re going to find Doctor van den Bosch quite difficult,” Holmes said.

  Nathanial chuckled into his snifter. “Oh, I’ve already learned that first hand. Does anyone know a good drinking song?”

  They knew several, in fact.

  Chapter Seven

  “A Tour”

  1.

  “Thank you for escorting me to my quarters, Mister Dolan.”

  “Not at all, Miss Somerset. I feel I should make up for our first meeting.”

  Dolan was charming enough, if a bit rough around the edges. He had a strong, kind face, even if he smiled far too much for her liking. Though she was reserving judgment for later, Annabelle felt here was a man with whom she could help pass the time on Peregrine. Nathanial, after all, would plunge himself into his work soon, and he would be unavailable to fill those hours of boredom. She needed some kind of distraction. Dolan, as security chief and a man with access to these mad bomber investigations, was just that man.

  Branching from the basilica in the middle of Heaven were two wings, one called British, the other, Austrian. British contained Starward Observation, sickbay, administration, two laboratories, the Greenhouse One lift, the galley and the quarters for all the department heads. Annabelle and Nathanial had been installed in Austrian, where station operations, the lifts for Greenhouses Two and Three, the quartermaster and the remainder of the labs resided. Annabelle and Dolan had left Starward and were making for the basilica. As security chief, Dolan wanted to personally assure Loaves and Jasperse, who had been attached as guards to protect Annabelle and Nathanial’s quarters, were in place. Jasperse, he said, did not worry him; Loaves, on the other hand, had to be seen to.

  “Dim-witted,” he said.

  “That doesn’t inspire my confidence.”

  “Oh, he’s a loyal fellow, and true. Once he’s had his orders explained to him, you’ll find no one more steadfast. But if you’ve got a complex task, Loaves is not your man. I just want him to know exactly what I expect.”

  “Very well. Doctor van den Bosch doesn’t think too highly of your men, does he? What did he call them?”

  “‘Cockney guttersnipes’. And no, I can’t imagine he does, but it’s not like him to ever honour a man for his good works. He only berates a person on his failures. He had nothing good at all to say about any of us, did he, only that he wanted me on the job personally where it came to finding the bomber, not one of the infamous cockneys on me staff. That’s about as close to a compliment as you’ll find falling from his tongue. You should bear that in mind, seeing as he dislikes women more than he does guttersnipes.”

  “Really? I thought I had simply made a bad impression on him with all of my questions.”

  Dolan favoured her with a wise look. “Spoke roughly with you, did he?”

  “No, just dismissive, is all. I think I would have preferred evoking his ire.”

  “Only because you haven’t seen it yet. Your friend Stone has, I’ll wager. Timid as a mouse, he is.”

  “Well.” Annabelle let that trail off. She hadn’t approved of Dolan being so rough with Nathanial earlier, and would give the man no ammunition to damn her friend further.

  “So I guess you’ll be working with him, then? Stone?”

  “Actually, I’m not certain. I think I’m expected to sit patiently in my quarters and wait for the men to tell me what to do.” Her tone explained how she felt about that, and Dolan smiled yet again in response.

  “Not your cuppa, then?”

  “Reading dusty books Mister Hague brings me while there is a man out there, right now, planning how best to kill me and everyone else aboard this station? Perish the thought. That’s hardly fit for someone with my energies.”

  “Are you a woman of action, then, miss?”

  “I am, at that.”

  Dolan knuckled his moustache. “And such modesty, too.”

  “Modesty is not my strong suit, nor is subtlety. This, despite my mother’s best attempts to soften me into something more approaching a lady.”

  Two workmen passed, struggling to walk, and seemingly carrying nothing until Annabelle realised it was a large pane of glass, so pristine it was nearly invisible.

  “What is that about?” Dolan asked the men.

  “Is goin’ into the big room on the end there,” one of the workmen said. His accent was one of those barely comprehensible British varieties that seemed to rely heavily on a listener’s skill with context rather than the speaker’s enunciation.

  The second worker’s brows knitted, no doubt noticing Dolan’s reddened cheeks. “Are you drunk?”

  “I am, at that,” Dolan said proudly.

  “’Ow’d you come by it, then?”

  “Privileges of rank.”

  The men roared with laughter. “You’re about as high up as worm’s shite, Dolan,” the first worker said, and the men engaged in further rough camaraderie before remembering a lady was present. Following some mumbled apologies, the workers lit out with their burden.

  “No telling what it’s for,” Dolan said when they were moving again. “This place is fat with extravagance.”

  “I’ve noticed that’s a mainstay of your empire,” Annabelle replied.

  Dolan threw a look over his shoulder. “Not my empire, I can assure you. Unless you’re to mean that it’s built with blood and tears of men such as myself, and our bodies are its foundation.”

  “My, but you have a touch of rebellion in you!”

  Dolan shrugged. “Ah, it’s the wine speaking to you, just now. But yes. I suppose I do, to some extent. Spent a good deal of my youth abroad, doing odd jobs in your neck of the woods, in fact. Maybe I got me some of that rebellious fire while I visited.”

  “You’ve lived in the States? Which part?”

  “Both. Wherever the job took me. I didn’t like the Confederates so much. Lots of places with signs that read, ‘No Indians, no Irish’. Slept in more than me fair share of barns, there.”

  2.

  Before reaching the basilica, Dolan stopped and pointed down a hall to his left. At the end, in one of the only well-lit places Annabelle had seen thus far, was a fountain, sparkling in the bright light, partially tiled in turquoise. “Built that meself, when I first come came here,” he said. “Next to it is Professor Wren’s old laboratory. I was working the day of the accident. They keep the place locked up tight, these days. I wonder sometimes about it.”

  “About what?”

  Dolan shook his head. “I just wonder, is all.”

  They crossed the basilica and soon found Nathanial’s quarters. There were no proper doors on Peregrine Station, or so Loaves had told them in their short walk to dinner earlier that evening. Professor Wren had not wanted the artistic flow to be interrupted for any reason, and had instead installed secret doors to every room. The trick in learning each door was in finding its locking mechanism, which was usually hidden somewhere in the artwork. In a cold shot of irony, a bas relief menagerie of grinning human skulls lined the wall. Dolan said it was Wren’s memory of the catacombs he had seen while in Paris. Annabelle suppressed a shudder to look at it. The skulls seemed to be mocking her. Dolan stuck fingers into the eye sockets of one, and the loud clacking noise could be heard as the door unlocked. The panel slid aside, and inside the room was one of Dolan’s men, sitting at a table, carbine across his lap. He nodded at them.

  “Jasperse here will stand watch for Stone. You’ll be under guard until we find this bomber fellow. Jasperse, has Loaves been by recent?”

  “He has,” said Jasperse. “Said he was
off to grab a spot to eat from the galley, and that he would be along to Miss Somerset’s room as presently as could be expected.” Jasperse was a stocky man, solidly built, with greying chestnut hair and sea green eyes that seemed to stare into the netherworld. The man was as still and cold as stone.

  “’Bout what we can expect, I guess,” Dolan replied.

  “Yes, sir, but Loaves is all right.”

  “As I was just telling Miss Somerset, here. Well, good evening to you, Jasperse.”

  Dolan slid closed the panel, and they continued on their way.

  3.

  “So, about your man, Stone. Not much to him, is there?” Dolan asked when they were out of Jasperse’s earshot.

  “Still waters run deep,” Annabelle replied.

  Dolan shrugged. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  “I’m sure you can make a case for your own worthiness without having to tear down another man, Mister Dolan.”

  Again came the smile that always seemed to last a second or two too long. “Of that, I’m sure. Known him long, have you?”

  “Some eighteen months or so, but we’ve seen a good deal together since April. One gets the full measure of a fellow when bullets are whizzing past your head.”

  “Never took him for a bullets whizzing by your head kind of fellow.”

  “Not by choice, I can assure you. He’s come a long way, though. I’ll make an adventurer out of him yet.” She cut her eyes sideways and peered at Dolan. “What about you, Mister Dolan? Are you that kind of man? You must be, if you’ve taken on the job of finding this bomber so readily.”

  “Oh, I do all right.”

  “But you want the job, correct?”

  “Of course! I mean, that is to say, I don’t fancy facing down any sort of danger, especially since I was brought up here to do the sweeping up and all. But really, you’ve seen the rest. Do any of them seem like candidates for clamping shackles on a madman?”

  Annabelle stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Mister Dolan,” she said, “I would love it ever so much if you would let me assist you in your investigation.”