by Michael Rigg
Vernon's grappling arms and hands moved around me as I threw myself into him. He clawed for something to hang onto as he stumbled backward, but I kept pushing. I dove, with his 250-pound body in front of me, until I felt him impact with the rusty release lever behind him. The lever gave way and we both toppled to the deck, rolling toward the open hatch through coils of rope and over chains that dug into my ribs.
Kevin and Maggie's wagon snapped loose as the lever triggered the pulleys holding it in place. The heavy wagon swung wide, held now by only two lines, and swiveled toward Wiley. Wiley saw it coming and turned to defend himself, but the wagon was too heavy, swung too fast, and all he could do was grab hold of a spiked wheel and ride it down as the lines snapped and the entire thing crunched down thunderously on the edge of the open bomb bay before it toppled out the hatch with Wiley under it. Chains, cables and ropes followed the wagon out like the skinny tentacles of a deep see squid, zipping and swishing against the medal edge of the open doors.
Vernon and I stopped rolling, but he ended up on top of me. His hands clutched my throat and squeezed. My head felt like it was going to pop as he moved his thumbs over my trachea. I tried to get my hands in his face, to dig my fingers in his eyes, but his arms were above my shoulders, and thick, so all I could do was slam at his ribs as hard as I could. From the corner of my eye, I saw Kevin stand and swing around with the pistol. There was a fifty-fifty chance he would finish Vernon's job for him, the other fifty percent would be a complete miss. I gagged and sputtered as Vernon leaned on me, my vision tunneling and turning black, then a strange thing happened.
I heard the booming report of the pistol, then Vernon was gone. Vanished. In a blink I felt his weight slide off me, his fierce eyes suddenly wide with fright. Then he was gone. Holding my throat and gasping, I scrambled to my feet and scooted away from the open bay. I looked to Kevin who stared at the place where I was on the deck with Vernon just a moment ago.
"I missed," he said weakly.
Maggie pointed toward the open bay. "A rope," was all she could manage. Then I realized Vernon must have had a guide rope or something caught around his leg. The wagon and Wiley took him down with them. That couldn't have been more of a lucky break considering the pirate captain and I had both rolled along the deck through the cables. I quickly glanced down to make sure I didn't have anything snagged around me.
I looked up and saw Kevin turn the pistol on Leslie. The kid, who had been staring at us dumbfounded, dropped the soup can gun and let it clatter and roll out the open hatch. Then he raised his hands high above his head. "Please! Don' shoot!"
"Kevin, no!" I shouted. Maggie stood up and moved behind her husband as I approached them.
"Kevin, put the gun down. He's just a kid, and he's unarmed."
"He's a pirate," Kevin breathed. "I don't care how old he is, he's just like them."
I moved closer and spoke in a low voice, still almost shouting above the roar of the engines. "Kevin... please... He's just a boy."
Maggie looked at me. Her blue eyes wide. I could tell she was seeing me as an angel again—or whatever it was they believed I was—and turned to her husband in a pleading voice. "Do as she says, Kevin. Ya don't want t' be hurtin' a young lad whose only crime was tryin' to keep alive amongst these rogues."
Kevin licked his lips and nodded once sharply, but kept the gun pointed at the kid.
"Good," I said. "Maggie, why don't you tie up Leslie good and tight while Kevin keeps you covered. I'm going to see what else I can find around here that we might use."
"What about the others?" Maggie said, glancing toward the hatch leading into the airship.
"I'm sure they would have come running by now, so chances are they haven't heard us. Still, hurry up with the kid."
She nodded and carefully made her way around the hatch to tie up Leslie while Kevin kept an eye on him. I located two of the weapons, including the stun gun Fats used on me. By the time I'd finished looking around for anything else we could possibly use, I was near my two friends and our little pirate captive.
"Did he say anything?" I asked.
Maggie cinched a rope tighter. The boy winced. She shook her head. "Quiet as a mouse, love."
Kevin, who had tucked the pistol into his trousers, folded his arms and said, "He just keeps sayin' sorry over and over."
"Well, I am," Leslie whined. To me he said, “Sorry, mum.”
I stepped up to the boy, who Maggie had tied into a chair, and the chair to a solid pipe far back from the hatch, and knelt down in front of him. "We weren't properly introduced, Leslie. Your name is Leslie, isn't it?"
He nodded slightly and a strand of greasy hair fell across one wide gray eye. He shook his head to put it back. "Leslie Walter Southby, mum."
"You don't want to be a pirate, do you, Mr. Southby?" I tried.
He looked at Kevin, then Maggie, before turning back to me and smirking. "I am a pirate. It's how I was raised."
Kevin looked at me. "Who would raise a boy like this?"
Ignoring him, I pressed on. "Leslie, we're not going to hurt you, but we need to know how many men are aboard this ship."
The young Brit scowled. "Why should I tell you?"
"Because," Kevin jumped in, "If you say there's ten men here, and we get killed by them, you'll be set free by your compatriots... and probably punished for having failed to defend your captain. If there's only you and a couple others, and we kill them, we'll kill you for not telling."
I saw where the doctor was going with this, and knew it was a bluff. Still, young Leslie saw my performance in combat with his captain. He was more likely to believe a bluff from me. I nodded slowly, glanced over my shoulder, and said, "Yeah. I've never seen a hatching before either."
The kid looked between us. He seemed to weigh his options before blurting, "It's just me. You killed 'em all—all the rest."
"Is that the truth?" Maggie asked softly, playing good cop and resting her hand on the boy's shoulder.
Leslie nodded. I handed the stun pistol to Maggie and nodded to the one in Kevin's trousers. I told Kevin to follow me.
"Where you goin'?" Maggie called out.
"Just keep your eye on Leslie. Zap him if he gives you any trouble. Kevin and I will see if he's telling the truth."
"And if 'e ain't?"
"If he ain't, we may not make it back." I nodded to the boy. "If anyone comes in here who's not us, just put the barrel of that thing in his mouth and pull the trigger. That should kill him." I knew by the calm look on Leslie's face, after my threat, that we'd find the rest of the ship empty.
True to the young Brit's word, the Mystic Lady was empty. It made sense to me now why Captain Vernon was so grimy and looked to be such a hands-on leader. It was only he and his crew of four keeping this thing in the air. The question now was how Maggie, Kevin and I could keep it in the air, and where we could take it. The rest of the ship was built off a long central catwalk far above the rolling countryside below with doors to tight cabins on either side. The doors opened to a grimy kitchen reeking of unclean utensils and greasy pots, a bathroom reeking of other things, and a few compartments with bunks in them. The sleeping quarters were dirty and strewn with clothes and tools and stacks of magazines and newspapers. Playing cards with nude women on the facing side were strewn about two of the rooms. A woman's stockings were wadded on the floor of another. The cleanest of the rooms was decorated with a flag: a red field with a Union Jack in the upper left corner. "Mr. Southby's room, I presume."
"Makes sense," Kevin muttered, distracted by our mounting predicament.
The last two rooms before the bridge were packed with stolen goods, canned food, tools, boxes, gizmos I couldn't identify, and piles of junk. I nodded to a particularly strange pile of brass gauges, rubb
er hoses, metal pipes and glass tubes and said, "You can re-build your brain-mend thing with this stuff, I'd imagine."
He didn't reply, but nodded slightly before touching my arm. "Alice?" I looked at him. His face was long and grim, his eyes growing darker as the skin beneath them appeared to sag like wet cloth. His voice was nearly a whisper. "I'm... I'm sorry I got us into that mess."
I offered a half smile and touched his shoulder. "It wasn't your fault, Kevin. You tried to get us away from them. You did the best you could."
His chin puckered as he fought back his emotions. Regret and anger flashed through his dark eyes. "But I wasn't fast enough, and... when they had us..."
He looked down, glanced away. I knew he was feeling the sting to his masculinity having just been saved by a woman. In another time or place it might not have been a big deal, but I gathered it was a different story here, and now. I had almost forgotten the time and place in which I had awoken, some bizarre twist on the Victorian Age where men were expected to be more and ladies less. My 'bravado' was, I'm sure, something of a surprise, but now that we were out of danger, it was reflecting poorly on Kevin who did nothing—in his mind—to protect he and his wife.
"Dr. Tarnish." I faced him directly and met his eyes. "I wanted to thank you." His eyebrows came together in a frown of confusion. "I saw that you were ready to spring at Captain Vernon, so I took a chance at distracting him so you could get the upper hand." Kevin's face relaxed slightly as he clung to my words. "I saw that look in your eyes, sir. I knew you were going to get the jump on him. I just did what I had to do to help." I pouted my lip slightly. "I was a fool. I could have gotten us all killed. If not for you, I... we wouldn't be here."
He blinked. "Alice, you—"
"I was careless, Kevin. I'm sorry." He stopped, his eyes searching mine. I tried to convey an innocence, a timidness that obviously wasn't around back in the hangar. I looked into his eyes and saw the transformation take place. He believed me, or at least took the lead and ran with it, though one eyebrow raised, a gesture I felt certain said, 'yeah, ok, sure, we'll play it your way.' He said, "Alice, my dear, you are something special. There is more to you than meets the eye, I think, and Maggs and I owe you our lives."
I nodded slightly. "I don't know what or who I am, but I know we all need each other."
Kevin smiled and gently squeezed my arm, then he took a deep breath through his nose and said, "I think I'll be able to pilot this thing. If we stay below the border and raise the national flag, we should be safe. There should also be a wireless." He nodded toward the last door along the grated walkway. "In there."
I smiled and gently touched his cheek before gesturing for him to lead the way to the bridge. He carefully opened the door, swinging it wide slowly with the pistol held in front of him. The bridge was a wide compartment lined with enormous windows looking out on the sea of foggy clouds through which we sailed. Below the front window were rows of gauges, dials and levers that all connected to brass boxes and tubes, pipes that curled between the panes and traveled back to other parts of the ship. An old ship wheel stood in the middle of the bridge next to an enormous compass in a brass stand. On the other side of the wheel stood a wide map table with a map of the Confederate states spread out on top of it. A small lamp lit the table which also contained a half-empty bottle of bourbon, a sextant and a slide rule. The wheel was held straight by a rope looped around one of its handles.
"I'll need to get our bearings," Kevin said. He moved quickly to the compass and the wheel and set the pistol on the map table. He glanced back at me. "Perhaps you should go get Maggs and our guest." I nodded obediently and rushed back through the ship after checking to make sure the wireless room was empty. I hoped Maggie would know how to use the radio.
I returned to where Maggie was standing over the boy, nervously holding the stun pistol in both hands. She flinched when she saw me, but then breathed a sigh. “Is it safe? We okay?”
"The ship is clean. Mr. Southby is a man of his word," I smiled.
"Told ya," the boy said bitterly.
I helped Maggie untie him and escort him up to the bridge. Maggie brought the rope. On the way I asked him what we could expect if we took the airship into Philadelphia.
"Mystic Lady is a phantom of the clouds," he said admiringly in his thick cockney. "We only pirated out in the countryside. No one lived to tell the tale, so was safe in any port."
Kevin glared at the boy over his shoulder as we brought him in. "You say that as if you're proud of it."
"I am, sir."
There was an innocence to Leslie's face that gave me an understanding. He had never known anything but piracy. If he hadn't been kidnapped into the life at a young age, he was probably born into it. Judging by his accent, though, and the flag, I presumed he was a transplant from the British Isles and fell in with the band. He was a runaway looking to make a life for himself. They probably treated him like a mascot if not a servant. I felt sorry for the boy but didn't let him see it. "Sit there," I pointed to a chair in a corner far from us, then I moved to the map table and took Kevin's gun. I watched Leslie as Maggie took the rope over and tied him to the chair.
Kevin moved to the angled front windows and leaned far over the dashboard of gauges, squinting toward the ground. He found what he was looking for and made a "Hmph" noise in his throat, then he moved back to the map table, made a mark, turned the wheel slightly, looped it, then went back to the window. He repeated the process over the next few minutes while I watched him, trying to learn something of blimp flight.
Maggie came to stand next to me. "You 'kay, love?" she asked, rubbing my back gently. I smiled and nodded as I watched Kevin for a minute more.
I lifted my chin toward the Mystic Lady's new captain. "Any idea where we are?"
He nodded and returned to the wheel. He unhooked it, and steered to the right, then slightly to the left. He checked the compass. I could feel the vibration of the airship in my legs, the gentle sway as the high altitude winds nudged us one way, then the other, the loud humming drone of the engines rising and falling as they kept us on course. "I think we're coming up on Knoxville. I'm going to follow Route 81 up toward Richmond, then we'll have to stop."
"Stop?" Maggie asked.
Kevin pointed up to one of the gauges. "They had enough coal and water to get them to Springfield, maybe Indianapolis. But this bubble will never make it straight to Philadelphia."
I chewed my lower lip as I stepped up to the map table and studied it. Maggie stood next to me. She touched Richmond, then ran her finger northeast two inches and stopped at Philly. "It doesn't seem too far, Kevin."
He looked at her and tried to suppress a smile as he glanced at me. "It's about 240 miles as the crow flies, Maggs." He shook his head. "She won't make it there."
"What's it like?" I asked, "Richmond, I mean."
Kevin turned toward the windows. "Huge. She's a central SkyTrain port city, sprawling, a retail capital for the Confeds. Maggs and I made a mint there last summer. Trains and boats travel the James River all the way out to Norfolk." I thought about Lydia McFerran's threatened APB and wondered how easily I could be lost in the city, then how hard it would be for me to cross northward into the Imperial United States without a passport, escort or that tattoo-thing that Bryce had on his arm. I chewed my lip in thought again.
Maggie leaned in close to me and ran her hand up my arm to my shoulder as she angled her head to peer into my eyes. "Whatcha thinkin' love?"
I glanced at Maggie as I remembered the radio. "Can you work the wireless?"
She nodded, glanced to Kevin. He nodded back.
"Is it possible to call a specific individual—I mean like a telephone or something?"
"Telly?" She smiled. "Sure, if it's an aeroship or boat you'd be reachin
'."
I scratched at the bandage on my head. "Not sure. I'm looking for a pilot, I know that."
"If you know the name, love, we can look 'im up in the direct'ry." Maggie leaned to look past me to Leslie. "Mr. Southby, ya do have a direct'ry aboard, haven't ya?"
Leslie nodded toward the hallway and the wireless room before tossing his loose hair back again. "In there." Maggie headed toward the room and I followed, but only after putting Kevin's gun back on the map table and asking if he'd be okay. Kevin nodded, then flashed a smile to Leslie and said, "I think me and Master Southby will be just fine together." I could tell by the look on Kevin's face that he would keep his silent word, that no harm would come to the boy.
When I stepped into the small wireless room, Maggie was already seated at the boxy radio with a huge pair of headphones pulled over her ears. She nodded with her head to a large black book with thin pages. It was dogeared and wrinkled from water damage. "This the directory?"
She nodded before turning her attention back to the dials and tilted her head to listen.
I opened the book to the front and read CONTEXT GUIDE. That served as a sort of table of contents. It was no different than a phone directory, but broken into the following categories. VESSEL NAME, LAND STATION, PORT, WEIGH STATION, TESLA BRIDGE, CHRISTIAN NAME, with several sub-categories beneath each.
I turned to page 1203, the start of the Christian Name section, then flipped to the R's. "What am I looking at, Maggie? I'm not even sure how to read this thing."
She pointed to the three rows of numbers after the names. "These are the proper numbers, registry code, license number, frequency. You'll be wantin' the frequency number, the last column. I'll need the first column to find 'im."
I nodded as I traced my finger down the Rs to the Rinks. The bad news was there were about 100 or so Rinks listed. The worse news was there were no first names, only initials. I blew out a puff of air and cringed. "I'd hate to have to go through all these to find her."
"Oh," Maggie giggled. "You'll not be findin' a lady listed in there, love. Does she have an 'usband? A da', a poppa?"
