Agatha H. and the Airship City

by Phil Foglio; Kaja Foglio

  A pair of booted feet sticking out from a shadowed chair uncrossed themselves and Bangladesh DuPree leaned forward. “Well of course. They’re kids. They want to fight! It’s fun!”

  Von Pinn swiveled and glared at the seated woman. “I teach restraint.”

  DuPree eyed the leather-clad form and grinned. “So your dressmaker’s an ‘A’ student then?”

  Von Pinn hissed and DuPree slowly began to rise from her chair, her grin even wider. “You’re losing air, sweetheart,” she crooned.

  The two jerked upright as Klaus’ voice snapped out. “Enough!” Crisply Klaus gave orders and assigned positions. With a rush, the soldiers left to implement his orders. Klaus turned to an airman who had been patiently waiting off to the side.

  “Present Captain Patel with my compliments and tell him to continue the evacuation. If he does not hear from myself or my son in two hours, or if the wheelhouse is about to fall, he is to scuttle the Castle.” The airman looked nervous, but his voice was steady as he repeated back the orders, saluted and left.

  Klaus turned back. His group consisted of General Goomblast, Bangladesh, Boris, and a squad equally composed of Jägers, Lackya and Castle Wulfenbach’s own marines. He patted his greatsword and for the first time, grinned. “Let us take some exercise.”

  Agatha was running flat out down the hallway. She was glancing behind her when she took a corner and smacked into Gilgamesh Wulfenbach. “Miss Clay! Are you all right? Ow.”

  Gil was the first one to move, but it was Agatha who hauled him to his feet. “No! Slaver wasps! Coming fast!”

  A look of loathing crossed Gil’s face. “That cursed Hive Engine! What was Beetle thinking?”

  Unsteadily, they broke into a trot towards the exit. “What were you thinking?” snapped Agatha. “How did you get in here?”

  They turned the corner and skidded to a stop. Before them a tide of small machines ran to meet them, swarming around Agatha’s feet, producing a noise that sounded suspiciously like small, tinny cheers. “Your little clanks,” Gil explained. “They opened the door. They’re amazing.”

  Agatha felt a surge of hope. “That’s great! Then we can leave!”

  She turned to run, but Gil grabbed her arm and hauled her in a different direction. “No,” he explained, “I had them seal the door behind us. I didn’t know what was in here.”

  “Then… then we’re trapped!” She glanced back and slowed at what she saw. “Wait—my little clanks can’t keep up.”

  Again Gil jerked her forward. “They’ll catch up, and they’re in no danger. It’s us the wasps want. Now hurry! My main lab is just ahead. If I can seal it off, we can wait for my father.”

  They turned another corner, but outside the lab doors, they saw several of the insect creatures freeze briefly, and then scuttle rapidly towards them.

  With an oath, Gilgamesh steered them into the first room they found and slammed the door behind them. They looked around, panting. The room was bare of furniture, but was lined with shelves, cabinets and bins filled with racks of various devices.

  “This is your electrical parts storage locker,” Agatha noted.

  Gil finished securing the door to a sturdy rack of shelves with a coil of heavy-duty cable. As he stepped back, the door shuddered as something slammed into it from the other side. “That might do,” he muttered. “But we’ve no time to waste.”

  “But we should be okay now, right?” Agatha looked around with interest. “Once we equip ourselves from your arsenal, those things shouldn’t stand a chance.”

  Gil looked blank. “My what?”

  “Your weapons. The stuff you’ve built.” Agatha rubbed her hands together in gleeful anticipation. “I wondered where they were. So any chance of a good Death Ray? That’d be perfect!”

  Gil looked appalled. “I don’t have a Death Ray!”

  Agatha blinked. “What, it’s an early prototype or something?”

  “I don’t have a Death Ray.”

  A sudden realization filled Agatha. She blushed in sympathy and with a gentle smile she placed a hand on his arm. “I’m sure that next time you’ll build a much bigger one, but trust me, right now any Death Ray, will do, no matter how—”

  “I. DO. NOT. HAVE. A. DEATH. RAY!” Gil shouted.

  Agatha stared at him in disbelief, and with an exasperated puff blew a lock of hair out of her face. “Don’t be ridiculous. Dr. Beetle had stuff like that all over the place. You must have something.” She scratched her nose. “Sonic Cannon?”

  “No.”

  “Disintegration Beam?”

  “No.”

  “You must have some sort of Doomsday Device. We can modify it. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

  “I don’t have anything like that!”

  They stared at each other.

  “Fine. So what you’re telling me is that you—Gilgamesh Wulfenbach—the person next in line to the despotic, iron-fisted rule of the Wulfenbach Empire—have no deadly, powerful weapons lying around whatsoever! That’s just great! What kind of an Evil Overlord are you going to be, anyway?”

  “Apparently a better one than I’d thought,” Gil said, suddenly thoughtful.

  Suddenly, with a series of sharp thuds, a swordlike arm punched its way through the door. It was joined by several others, and using the opening, rapidly expanded it.

  A canister of old fencing swords was next to a cupboard. Gil grabbed two and faced off against the wasps struggling to get at them. “Build something!” he ordered Agatha.

  “What?”

  “I’ll hold them off, you build your own damn Death Ray!”

  “But I don’t know how! You should—”

  “You can’t fight—but you’re a Spark!”

  “But—”

  “Or we’ll die—or worse!” With that he turned away from her and sliced away at a wasp that had managed to cram itself through the door.

  Agatha backed into a corner. “Got to think.” She gasped as a razor-edged claw sliced through Gil’s boot. Deliberately she turned away. “Got to think!” The noise was becoming overwhelming. It sounded like dozens of creatures hammering and tearing away at the metal door. Sounds became magnified. The sound of sword striking chitin, the smashing of equipment, the slow rending of the metal door, even the slow steady breathing of Gil as he wove a curtain of death before him.

  “Too much noise,” Agatha whispered. “I have to think.” And softly at first, then quickly gaining strength, a complicated atonal humming filled the room. Agatha stood stock still for several seconds, and then her head snapped forward, her eyes filled with a furious purpose.

  Meanwhile Gil found himself being slowly pushed back by the sheer weight of numbers. It didn’t help that the wasps seemed capable of taking an extraordinary amount of damage before their brain admitted that they were dead, and even in death, they tended to lash out, as the numerous tears ands gashes covering his arms and legs attested to. “I’d better be right about you,” he muttered. One of the swords bent as it hit an internal structure. He was only barely able to wrench it out in time to parry a darting bladelike arm. A wrenching groan was his only warning, but he was able to leap backwards as a section of the ceiling collapsed, raining a fresh wave of Slaver wasps across the floor. Another step backwards and he found himself surrounded by empty canisters, which were just tall enough to hamper his movement. Suddenly his swords were occupied and another bug flashed towards him, its saberlike arms upraised.

  A pair of copper rods drove into the wasp’s eye. And a cascade of sparks erupted. The creature jerked frantically and then collapsed. The other wasps froze in surprise. Gil looked behind him.

  There stood Agatha, a fierce grin on her face. In one hand she had the mysterious Heterodyne sphere. Connected to it was a supple cable, which ended at a bizarre-looking swordlike object, which crackled and continually threw off great arcing Jacobs ladders. “HA!” she cried. “It works!”

  Gilgamesh scrambled to his feet. “You did it!”

  �
�Sure did.” Agatha tossed him a large rubberized gauntlet, identical to the one she was wearing on her right hand. He quickly slid it on as she tossed him another sword, which was also attached to the glowing blue orb. “Here. You’re the fencer.”

  Together they returned their attention to the again advancing bugs. Whenever they touched the wasps, the insects jerked and died instantly. “You used part of my lightning generator,” Gil observed.

  “Yes, the Heterodyne device can recharge it instantly.”

  “Good job. I never thought to test it as a power source, but I’d really thought there was more to it.” As he said this, both he and Agatha smacked the same bug at the same time. It jerked once, crackling, and when they swung their swords away, it clattered to the ground like a collection of scrap iron.

  They pushed out into the hallway, effortlessly scything down wasps. Gil nodded approvingly as Agatha swept her sword in an arc that took out three wasps at one swipe. “I thought you didn’t fence,” he remarked.

  “This isn’t fencing!” she retorted. “This is swinging wildly!” A frantic series of such swings on both of their parts brought them almost face to face, slightly tangled in the cords. Gil’s face was glistening with sweat and a small cut oozed on his cheek. Agatha was breathing heavily and grimly determined. Their eyes locked. They froze and swayed fractionally closer—and then whirled away as an attacking arm slashed through the place they’d been.

  “Couldn’t you have used a longer cable?” Gil groused.

  “It’s what was there,” Agatha snarled.

  Gil shrugged. “Okay. So now what do we do?”

  Agatha looked at him askance as she fried an unwary wasp. “Um… we should try to get out of here?”

  “We could head for the exit,” Gil conceded, “but that won’t solve the problem.”

  “You’re saying we have to stop them at the source. We’ve got to destroy the Hive Engine.”

  “As long as we’re here.”

  Agatha drove her sword up into a wasp’s mouth causing its head to explode. “Then we’d better get going.”

  Around Castle Wulfenbach, the ever-present cloud of attendant airships began to shift. Ships carrying emergency crew and marines began to head towards loading docks, while shuttle and passenger ships removed non-essential personnel.

  One such ship was carrying away the students and other children. On one of the observation decks, Theo had commandeered the largest of the great brass telescopes and was training it upon the laboratory decks. “Well,” he reported to the others, “there’s wasps all over the place. But I still don’t see any resistance.”

  “Let me look,” said Sleipnir. Theo yielded the telescope.

  “At least I couldn’t see any outside the lab area,” he said, “so I guess the doors—”

  “Omigosh!” Sleipnir yelled. “It’s Gil and Agatha! They’re in the labs! They’re fighting wasps!”

  “Let me see!”

  Sleipnir defended her position with a deft kick to Theo’s knee. “They’re using swords and—wait. They just vanished!”

  “What?”

  “No—There they are. I must’ve—no, they’re gone—they’re back—” Sleipnir furiously knuckled her eyes. “What the heck is wrong with my eyes?”

  Sun Ming pushed her aside and peered through the eyepiece. “No, I see it too. They’re vanishing,” she announced. “I wonder how they’re doing that?”

  Theo scribbled a quick note and handed it to Von Tock, the boy with the clock in his head. “Have the message light send this to the Baron right away. He’s got to know.” The boy nodded and dashed off. “I hope the Baron can get to them in time.”

  Sleipnir grinned. “Why wait?”

  Theo’s eyebrows perked upwards. “Go rescue them ourselves? Intriguing…” His eyes slid over towards Zulenna. “But the life gliders will be guarded.”

  Zulenna tossed her head. “Probably by a man.” With that she gave her torso a supple little twitch that caused Theo to blink and swallow. “And there’s no male guard on this ship that can resist a beautiful and oh-so-lonely princess.”

  Theo nodded as he picked up a large spanner and cheerfully smacked it into his palm. “That’s the truth.”

  Behind them Sleipnir rolled her eyes. “I cannot believe that works every time.”

  Hezekiah shrugged. “It always works on me.”

  Leaving the younger children in the care of the governesses, the students slipped out into the main hallway. Moving through the ship proved to be almost disappointingly easy, as things were so confused that their passage went unnoticed. The bay they had chosen for their departure was indeed guarded by a lone soldier. He was young and good looking, and was lounging against the entrance, quietly eating an apple while gazing at the panorama of ships spread out before him.

  Zulenna looked him over, gave Theo a silent thumbs up, and then wandered into the bay.

  Instantly the apple disappeared and the soldier snapped to attention. “This area is off limits, Miss.”

  Zulenna appeared startled. “Oh, I’m sorry, I was just…” She shuddered. “It’s all so horrible. I was just looking for something… someone to take my mind off what’s happening.” She looked up at him with large luminous eyes, which blinked in surprise as she saw the guard’s weapon pointing at her chest.

  “It is very horrible, Miss. I remember when wasps wiped out my village. It started with people acting all odd.”

  Zulenna faltered, then gamely rallied with a shy smile. “Really?”

  The guard’s weapon didn’t move a millimeter. “Oh yes. For instance, if a snooty little princess who had, just last week, upbraided a hard-working member of the ship’s guard because he’d neglected to do up a collar button even though he was off duty, suddenly came slinking in like a Parisian streetwalker, just waiting for the proper moment to burst into soppy crocodile tears—why that’d be suspicious enough that any experienced soldier’d haul her off to the brig.” He prodded the now scarlet-faced Zulenna in the stomach with the end of his rifle. “Now let’s move along, eh?”

  Mechanically Zulenna wheeled about and strode off, causing her captor to hurry after her, which helped explain why he didn’t see Theo step out from behind a duct and smack him smartly across the back of the head. He collapsed forward onto the deck.

  Zulenna saw Sleipnir valiantly trying to keep from laughing. “Very well, I will concede that there’s one who can resist.”

  Sleipnir shrugged. “Personally, I’m rather glad the Baron’s troops are so well trained. I feel so much safer, don’t you?” Zulenna deigned to reply, but carefully placed the soldier comfortably against a bulkhead, and then delicately arranged his arms so that one thumb was in his mouth while the forefinger of the other hand was lodged deeply within his nose.

  “Now you’re just being petty,” Sleipnir observed.

  Zulenna rose and dusted her hands together before smiling beatifically. “Quite.”

  Meanwhile the others had found the personal flyers. These were small dirigible shaped balloons attached to harnesses, fitted with large bat-like wings, which the user could control with long rods. For emergency use only, the flyers were capable of slowing a person’s fall enough that they would have an excellent chance of surviving should they have to abandon one of the great airships in mid-flight. The students had long ago discovered that the flyers also be used to glide from ship to ship, providing that the ship you started from was sufficiently higher than your destination. This was, of course, strictly forbidden, and it had been weeks since they’d done it last.

  Zulenna and Sleipnir entered just as Theo finished circumventing the tripwire alarm. Nicodeamus was using the gas tanks to inflate a pair of flyers for the girls. “You know, this is really stupid,” he cheerfully informed them.

  Sleipnir buckled herself into her rig while Zulenna checked her connections. “Oh. You just noticed?”

  Zulenna patted his shoulder, then began to pull her own flyer on. “You can stay here.”

&n
bsp; Nicodeamus waved. “Nah. Just making conversation.” He snuck a quick look at Zulenna, who pretended not to notice, but once Sleipnir had patted her shoulder and turned away, she leaned in and placed a quick kiss on his cheek.

  They joined the others lined up at the opening. Before them was the crenellated wall that was Castle Wulfenbach, stretching away in all directions. Scale was provided by the support ships that were moving to and fro between them. Theo pointed out the nearest windsock, and then to a landing deck several hundred feet below them on the Castle. “We’ll aim for Docking Bay 451. That’s closest to an armory.” Nicodeamus tossed out a scrap of paper. With an aeronaut’s experienced eye, they all watched it flutter away in the wind and plotted their trajectories accordingly.

  Theo moved up to the lip and grinned. “Okay, you brats, let’s go!” Without pause, he launched himself over the edge, and with a whoop, the others followed.

  A troop of Jägers sloped down the hallway, looking like a parade sergeant’s personal vision of Hell. Sloping was a combination of loping and slouching developed by the Jägerkin. To the untrained eye, it looked like they were ambling along in a disorganized fashion. A closer look and you saw that they were traveling at a respectable clip, and prolonged observation revealed that they could do it for a very long time over a wide variety of terrain. As with many Jäger practices, it had been developed to annoy other people. Particularly Boris.

  Despite the haste, great care was taken to keep their uniforms straight, and several were brushing their hats and buffing their braid even as they moved forward. There was a palatable excitement amongst them, and much boasting and declarations regarding the number of wasps that were about to be killed, stomped, and (possibly) eaten.

  The other Castle personnel hastily hugged the side of the corridor as they approached, and only dared to breathe again when they had passed. With each yard they covered, they became more and more excited, until they poured around a corner into a large intersection and stopped dead, the ones in the back flowing forward until the entire corridor was a solid sea of Jägerkin.

  Before them, in the center of the intersection, stood Von Pinn. Still as a statue. As soon as they stopped moving, she slowly moved with a leathery creak. Wordlessly she approached them and glided from one end of the crowd to the other. As her gaze swept them, each Jägermonster felt themselves snapping to attention, some of them for the first time in years. Without a word she spun away and headed off down the hallway ahead of them. Three meters away, she stopped, twisting about, gave them a toothy come-hither look over her shoulder, and whispered, “Well? What are you waiting for? Let’s go squash some bugs.”