Harry in the Wild: Astounding Stories of Adventure (Iron Pegasus Book 2)

by Steve Turnbull

  He nodded and gestured with his hand towards their camp. “Come, we will sit and ask questions.”

  He backed away, then turned and retreated.

  “What are you saying?” hissed Harry. “This is really hard, you know?”

  Khuwelsa rolled her eyes. One short conversation Harry wasn’t involved in and she was already climbing the walls. “I said we have questions, he said he has some too, and now we’re going to sit down and exchange information.”

  “All right.” Harry started off after the warriors and then remembered herself. She stopped and gestured for Khuwelsa to go first. “Sorry.”

  Khuwelsa smiled as she passed Harry. “Don’t sit down when I do. You should stand behind me a couple of paces away.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  Khuwelsa did not respond but traced her way through the long grass with Harry behind. She could get used to this.

  The warrior sat on a boulder and she had the trunk of a fallen tree. Between them the remains of a small fire were burning out. Harry had taken up her prescribed position and the four other warriors, all looking younger than the one who was in charge, stood a short distance away, leaning on their spears.

  Khuwelsa waited for him to speak first.

  “You travel in the sky,” he said after an uncomfortable silence.

  “Yes.”

  “You fly across the mountains like a bird.”

  “Higher than birds.”

  “You look down upon the ground and see all.”

  Khuwelsa hesitated. “Only what a bird sees.”

  “I understand,” he said and nodded. “Ask.”

  “Warriors of the white man kill many … hippopotamus.” She was not sure if na kiboko was the right word. But the more she listened and spoke, the easier the words came and this one seemed right.

  He nodded. “The white warriors with their guns. They are — .” Another word that meant nothing.

  “We seek them. Have you seen them?”

  “Three days ago. The bag of white warriors passed over us.”

  Khuwelsa barely suppressed a laugh. Of course he did not have a word for balloon so he called it a bag, which it was.

  “Which way?”

  “Over the mountains.” He pointed north.

  Khuwelsa sighed. They already knew that; their valley was to the north of the place the hippos had been slaughtered.

  “Do you go to kill them with your metal bird?”

  She did not know the answer. What did Harry really want? The killing of the hippos was upsetting, but there were a million hippos in Africa; what did it matter that fifty or even five hundred had been killed?

  “We want to know what they are doing.”

  He nodded, then looked up at her. “We seek one of our people. A bad man. Have you seen him from your iron bird?”

  “We fly like the fastest wind,” she said. “I have not seen a man of your people. I will ask my sister.”

  She could not bring herself to say servant and although he stiffened at the word, he said nothing. Khuwelsa craned her head round and switched to English. “He’s after some criminal from his tribe; did you see anyone last night?”

  “What did he say about the Zeppelin?” Harry demanded. “I saw him pointing.”

  “They saw the ship but that was a couple of days ago,” said Khuwelsa. “So did you see anyone?”

  “No, but it was night,” said Harry. “We could offer to take him and his men up to could scout around; they know what they’re looking for better than we do.”

  Khuwelsa liked that idea and passed it on to Bakari. Thoughtfully, he glanced at the Pegasus nestled in the long grass. Then he nodded.

  ix

  Harry climbed into the pilot’s chair. Khuwelsa had rigged a rope across the width of the cabin for the warriors to hold on to, then put her apron on over her clothes rather than stripping off, which meant they were going to get filthy.

  The men climbed aboard with much bravado. They tried not to show their fear but their eyes were wide as they tried to take in everything. Far from being ignorant savages—the term their governess liked to use, regardless of the insult to Khuwelsa—they were simply encountering something almost entirely outside their experience. Seeing such a wonder from a distance was one thing, but this?

  Now five Bantu warriors stood behind her, which made Harry feel odd and self-conscious though the rope also helped as a barrier so they would not crowd her. Khuwelsa had tried to explain what would happen when Harry engaged the Faraday, but the closest she could come was to describe it like swimming. Their response had been blank stares.

  The girls had agreed they would take things slowly. Khuwelsa stoked up the furnace, and they waited a few minutes for the pressure to build. The first thing Harry did was engage the turbine that drove the generator. Its whine caused some jitters but no panic.

  Harry wondered again whether this really was a good idea. Except it had been hers. If the warriors panicked mid-flight, they could all die. She calmed herself. These were grown men. The important part of that statement was “men”: It would be a competition between them not to show any fear. Hopefully that would work in the Pegasus’s favour. Two short whistles from Khuwelsa broke into her thoughts. The signal meant steam pressure was high enough to “go light”.

  She reached for the Faraday switch and gave a long whistle, pausing afterwards to give Khuwelsa the chance to shout a warning to the warriors. Then she flicked the switch.

  Harry did not embarrass them by turning to watch, but she heard quite clearly. The lightness was accompanied first by gasps of amazement and fear. Then she heard one of them being sick. A couple of the others laughed, and finally she heard their leader bark an order which brought silence.

  It wasn’t the first time someone had been sick in the Pegasus.

  Harry took a deep breath; the sooner they were on their way, the sooner the air flow would clear out the smell and whoever had lost his breakfast could damn well clean it up.

  She engaged the propeller, which started with a roar that rose in pitch as she increased the power. If she had been able to lift off without it, she would have. She did not run it up to maximum revolutions, because that would probably be terrifying for her passengers.

  She took hold of the wing controls and spread them out. There were more gasps as the warriors watched the wings moving through the portholes. At least they should be able to understand that part, Harry thought. She gave a couple of experimental beats. The port wing was a sluggish again; it had not been right since Zanzibar. It felt a little heavy which probably meant one of its feathers had lost power so its individual Faraday grid was not operating. Not enough to worry about.

  The Pegasus gave two strong down-strokes and hopped forward a yard. Harry smiled. She loved this part. Two long whistles and another pause while Khuwelsa shouted to the men. This was the reason they used whistles; it made communication much simpler.

  Harry made the decision to lift and gave full power to the wing beats. The Pegasus lifted smoothly. Even at half power the propeller pushed them forward. There was a clatter from the back; one of them probably had not been holding on.

  With stroke after stroke the ship lifted. Harry applied full power and the rotor screamed in response. The Pegasus ploughed upwards through the air.

  Once they had reached a safe airspeed she throttled back, and the whine decreased. Since their velocity alone was now sufficient to maintain their altitude, she locked off the wings.

  With everything under control, Harry sat back and relaxed. The savannah rolled beneath them at a sedate seventy miles per hour. She closed her eyes.

  There was movement behind her as Khuwelsa came up beside her on the left. The one Khuwelsa said was called Bakari appeared on her right. His hand clamped the arm-rest of her chair like an eagle’s talon.

  She gave him a sidelong glance. He was fixated on the rolling landscape beneath them. They were at about five hundred feet so every tree, stream, rock outcropping, and an
imal was perfectly clear below. They passed over a small herd of gazelles that took fright at the huge avian predator and bounded off into a stand of trees.

  Bakari said something.

  “He is very impressed,” said Khuwelsa as she put her hand on Harry’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  “Now who’s got a pash?” said Harry.

  “Shut up.”

  Harry took the controls. “Tell him I’m going to circle back to the camp, and then ask him where he wants to go.”

  Khuwelsa passed on the message as Harry brought the Pegasus round and increased power to bring them back quicker.

  After some to-ing and fro-ing with Bakari, Khuwelsa told her that the warriors had been pursuing the fugitive east but had, not to put too fine a point on it, lost his trail. They had been on the verge of going home even though they would be in trouble.

  “So I’ll spiral out from that centre point,” said Harry. “But we can’t spend too much time on this. We have our own mission.”

  “I know, Harry, but you suggested it.”

  Harry chafed at so much time, especially as they had got nothing useful from the warriors. Then she chastised herself for being so uncharitable.

  “Well give them until midday.”

  She settled down for a boring morning.

  x

  The sun was high and it was hot in the cabin. It was probably just her imagination, but Harry felt as if there were no air, with seven people where usually there were only two. The warriors had become used to the strangeness of the vessel and called to one another, even cracking jokes she did not understand and laughing.

  It was unnerving, as if her bedroom had been invaded. She was grumpy; she knew perfectly well it was because Khuwelsa could talk to them and she herself could not. Knowing did nothing to alleviate the effect.

  She had chosen a spiral search pattern. Starting at the camp, she made larger and larger circles. The turn she was making now was about eight miles out, which meant the total distance covered on this circle would be about sixty miles. She had upped the speed to about one hundred miles per hour, which struck a reasonable balance between speed and noise.

  About forty minutes to go round, then move out another mile and do it all again.

  The savannah was a beautiful place, but this was tedious. They were not going anywhere. The warriors peered out, one on each side of her and the others at the portholes. They were fascinated. Every now and then one of them would spot something of interest—to them—and comment on it to the others.

  Perhaps they were places they had remembered from their journey. She had no idea. She tried to distract herself from the tedium. What did the renegade Zeppelin want with hippo teeth? Yes, they were ivory and would fetch a price, but were they really worth anything uncarved?

  How long did it take to carve a hippo tooth, and how much money would it bring? She was sure it would not be significant to a bunch of Germans in an airship. It seemed pointless.

  And if you dumped two or three hundred ivory teeth into the market all at one time, wouldn’t that bring the price down? Economics was not a subject she studied, but it stood to reason. When things were scarce their price went up, that was easy to understand; so logically, if there was a lot of something, the price would come down.

  And the Germans had a lot of hippo teeth.

  A strong gust of wind buffeted the Pegasus she adjusted without even thinking about it. The sun had gone behind a bank of cumulonimbus clouds building in the south. Storm coming, but it might miss them.

  “Khuwelsa?” she called above the noise of the engine.

  Her sister turned up a few moments later, squeezing between the chair and Bakari. “Problem?”

  “If you call intense boredom a problem,” Harry said. “No, not that. What else can you use hippo teeth for?”

  “As opposed to … ?”

  “Carving and selling. It doesn’t make sense they would want it for that.”

  At that moment the little weight they had vanished completely as the Pegasus dropped for a few seconds. Reacting instinctively, Harry put the nose down and shoved the throttle to maximum. The propeller roared and shot them forwards into solid air.

  Khuwelsa explained to Bakari in halting Bantu that sometimes there were pockets of bad air. They had been driving towards the ground at increasing speed until Harry felt lift under her wings again and she pulled up, letting the power off the propeller at the same time. The ship tilted nose up and she regained altitude.

  There were a few anxious faces as Bakari communicated his limited understanding to the rest of his men. One of them forced a laugh and the others joined in. Harry was not impressed by their posturing.

  “We’re going to have to put down,” Harry said to Khuwelsa. “That storm is going to be bad enough on the plain, but that’s the Usambaras ahead. The air’s just going to be too messy and we daren’t take a lightning strike so far from the ground.”

  Bakari gave a cry and pointed down. Following his pointing finger, the sisters recognised the hippo killing ground they had landed at before.

  “Tell them we’re going down,” said Harry.

  Khuwelsa passed it on and asked them to get on the line again. Harry was grateful, as she felt crowded with the two so close beside her. She had enjoyed going to dances with Johannes, but not when they became too crowded. She preferred open sky where you could see the horizon fifty miles away at any given moment.

  Unlike this moment, when the horizon was rapidly disappearing in the grey mist of the approaching storm. Flashes of lightning zipped across the surfaces and the inner parts of the cloud lit up again and again. This was a bad one.

  There was no time to be delicate. She glanced back to make sure the passengers were holding on tight, then put the Pegasus into a powered dive at a high angle. The nature of the Faraday device was that it only reduced gravity directly above it, in relation to the source of gravity. The grid of the Pegasus ran along the bottom of its fuselage and into the individual feathers. So if it tilted off being completely flat, parts of the ship extended beyond the field and increased in weight.

  It was a problem with all flyers; tilting too far meant you no longer had lift, and that could be fatal. On this occasion she was using it to increase her fall towards the ground. It was coming up fast. She flipped the wings out to act as brakes, killed the power to the propeller, then beat hard and fast to arrest their speed.

  A moment before they touched down, lightning pierced the increasing gloom and touched her starboard wingtip. The Faraday cut out and they hit the ground with a crash.

  xi

  The sky was thick with clouds, and rain lashed down. Gusts of wind made the hull shudder; lightning gave tantalising glimpses of the interior. The thunder boomed. An acrid smell meant the batteries had spilt their acid on to the deck. Hopefully not too much.

  Harry flicked the switch to bring up the interior lights. Nothing happened.

  “Power’s completely out, Sellie,” she shouted and climbed out of her chair.

  The warriors still stood, resembling shadows clinging to the rope. Harry couldn’t see their expressions but supposed they were probably not very happy. She made her way towards the hatch, ducked under the rope, and unlatched it. Flinging it open, she let in the gale and the rain. It cleansed the air in seconds.

  Harry was soaked to the skin immediately but she was more concerned with checking the sky. The clouds were moving fast; the storm would probably blow itself off to the north within the hour. As the wind chilled her wet clothes, she shivered.

  A gleam of light illuminated the interior. She turned to see Khuwelsa with one of the oil lamps they kept for this contingency. Electrics could be unreliable. And if one part burnt out, chances were they all would.

  “The fuses have blown,” said Khuwelsa.

  It was just as well they had been about to land. A fall from twenty feet could have made the Pegasus unflyable, while one from fifty feet or higher might have killed them. Any vessel that u
sed a Faraday device had the same problem, even the Zeppelins, though they were less attractive to lightning than a vessel composed entirely of iron like the Pegasus.

  “I’ll get the lightning rod up,” shouted Harry as another crash of thunder exploded around them. She headed into the space beside the coal bunker—which was looking a bit empty—and rummaged around for the gauntlets, then turned to the warriors.

  “Bakari!” she shouted. He turned at his name though she couldn’t see the expression on his face. “Here!” She threw the two pairs of leather gloves in his direction and untied a long metal pole from the wall.

  There was still chance they might get hit, and while lightning might not wipe them out it was very hot and could possibly melt something important. As she pulled the pole from the wall she heard Khuwelsa saying something behind her. Moments later two of the warriors were helping.

  She let them do it but as they headed outside she stopped them. Bakari was examining the gauntlets. She took one pair from him and handed it to one of the men. She mimed putting them on. Bakari put on the remaining pair and took the poles from the man who did not have gloves.

  Harry grabbed the guy ropes and the mallet, then led the way outside into the deluge. It would take no time for the warriors to dry, since they were wearing almost nothing in the way of clothes. She, on the other hand, would be condemned to steaming beside the furnace for several hours.

  She hooked each guy rope to a collar mounted on the pole and stretched them out, then drove the pins into the ground. The cords were adjustable. One by one she tightened them until the pole stood on its own.

  They went back inside just as the electric lights went on. So far so good, but Khuwelsa would have to check all power lines in the Faraday grid.

  Harry sat in the corner next to the furnace, and allowed the heat to seep through her sodden clothes. It increased her resolve to get some attire that was more suitable to flying. Men had it easy.

  Khuwelsa had shut the hatch to prevent any more water entering that might get into the electrics. The battery spillage had been small; there was no risk of it happening again. Harry continued to huddle beside the fire. Her outer clothes were drying well, but she was wet to the skin.