by Kin Law
“The question I have for you is,” Rosa Marija wondered aloud, as they sailed towards the last known location of the cataclysm ravaging Europe. “Why would Captain Sam be involved in all of this?”
“Get your feet off the compass,” Albion whinged placidly. “I suspect we will have to inquire of the generous Jonah Moore. He seems frothing at the bit to stop Mordemere, possibly more than you, Inspector.”
Vanessa Hargreaves was sitting on a ledge on the bulkhead, following the conversation while looking out over the deck, where Elric Blair was busy vomiting over the edge.
Somehow, he had become extraordinarily sensitive to motion after the adventure in the Fjord.
“I can relate to his situation, Captain Clemens,” Hargreaves answered Albion without turning. “We’ve all done things we wish we could have taken back. Perhaps not something we’ve been holding on to for thirty or more years, though. He looked… mournful, crossing those old places.”
“That feeling is what gave Mordemere the aeon power to control Leyland,” Albion agreed. “It was a trap. Mordemere designed it that way, and it has worked perfectly until we came along and snipped at the springs- at least, where Moore is concerned.”
The skies were a solid gray ahead, but Albion thought there was a glimmer of flaming light far to the eastern horizon. That was impossible; the sun was nearing zenith. He shook it off.
“Let’s go talk to Moore,” he said, heading for the stair down to the rest of the ship.
By silent consensus, they agreed to leave Blair up top. The Huckleberry was quiet as the three made their way below. Auntie was where Auntie always was: in the galley, experimenting on a new culinary concoction. Cockney Alex was out in the longboat, shooting what game could be found further ahead. As for Cid Tanner, the sounds of his tinkering came shuddering through the ship every few hours. “So long as we hear those explosions,” Rosa explained, “we know he’s alive.”
As for the elderly chap himself, Jonah Moore had been surprisingly hale as he stepped out of the gunshot ruins of the Fjord and onto the rope ladder dropped from the ‘Berry.
Still, when Albion offered quarters for Moore to rest, they had been accepted gratefully, with the request he not be disturbed for several hours. As it was well past this allotment, Albion felt it was high time to disturb him.
“Mister Moore?” Albion asked, rapping firmly on the ship’s dense cabin door.
Overhead, the various charms affixed to the lift lines jangled or shuffled according to their propensities. Little dolls and fetishes shook all over. Albion thought they were trying to tell him something, though he had never developed the capacity to understand them.
“Something’s wrong.” By contrast, Rosa Marija was remarkably astute. “Moore’s in trouble.”
“Daft old bugger-!” the Inspector cursed roundly. “He’s strained himself too much to get off the bunk. Move!”
“Hold on, don’t just go round kicking down my ship!” interrupted Albion, nearly clotheslining the insistent Inspector. He reached down, undid a panel beside the door lock, and slipped the tumblers open. “There we go.”
Inspector Hargreaves gave Clemens a long look, before grabbing the knob and shoving the wooden barrier aside.
“Mister Moore? Jonah Moore?” Hargreaves said. Abion knew it was no futile, emotive call- the Inspector was trained to stimulate a potential victim by sounds he might be used to, such as his own name. At least, he had read about it in one of Captain Sam’s books.
The gray gentleman was not in his bunk- he was in the chair beside it, arms placed on the rests, feet flat on the deck.
He was immaculately dressed in what he arrived in, but his face was pale and the intelligent eyes were closed. The Inspector knelt, inadvertently giving Clemens a fine view of her posterior.
“There’s no pulse,” the Inspector said, as she backed off from Moore’s neck. “Help me get him on the floor.”
With Albion’s help, they wrangled the chap onto the bare boards.
Moore’s back was still warm, but his lower body and limbs seemed oddly cold. Albion shuddered at the fact he could even tell the difference. Air piracy did have a propensity to attract corpses. He wondered idly whether any of the crew aboard would succumb to this tendency.
Meanwhile, Hargreaves was pressing on Moore’s solar plexus, trying to coax life back into the dead. The sounds coming out of his mouth were oddly broken. Every so often she would pull back the man’s wrinkly eyelids, or feel his nostrils for any sign of breath. Eventually she leaned back, sighing.
“It’s no use,” the Inspector said. “He’s not responding at all. It couldn’t have been a few hours, but he feels days dead.”
“But he’s still warm!” Albion protested.
“Don’t just give up!” Rosa Marija cried. “We still need him to show us how to stop Mordemere! Let me at him!”
Before anyone could stop her, Rosa knelt, a long, thin stiletto clutched in her hand. Whatever she intended, nobody knew. Everybody recoiled in horror when slit open Moore’s starchy linen shirt.
“But that’s…” Albion uttered helplessly.
“Impossible…” gasped Hargreaves.
“Wicked cool,” Rosa Marija mentioned.
What lay before them were not the emaciated, gray ribs of a man aged into death. Everything below Jonah Moore’s sternum glittered a utilitarian bronze- where there should have been intestines, liver, kidneys and spleen, there were instead clicking gears, taut springs, and wetly gleaming India rubber, cleverly concealed beneath a translucent layer of woven metallic mesh.
The metalwork was so fine, it had deceived all of them into believing there was a living man flexing and breathing beneath the clothes.
“Has anyone seen this?” A weak voice announced from the doorway. The trio turned, and there was Elric Blair, as gray as Moore, holding up an unsealed envelope near the little writing desk by the door.
“My fine rescuers,” Albion read, after Blair had given up the honor to slouch weakly on the bunk.
‘My fine rescuers,
By the time you find this letter, the heartspring placed in roughly the liver analogue of my assembly will have run down, and I will have, in effect, become bereft of this world. Please forgive what damage was done to your fine ship in your attempts to reach me. I feared some curious or caring soul might make the vain attempt to gain entry in my last moments.
Please do not try to resuscitate me. Your attempts will fail. Only Mordemere’s alchemic prowess supplied the necessary blend of aeon particulate and salts to keep me suspended between life and death.
He called it a life compound, after your pirates’ lift compound. What bitter irony it is. Once one is tied into it, one may never live on without it. It is how he kept me in his service.
Valima Mordemere is insane. You recall we were the first to discover the legendary Laputian Leviathan, without which only the lift of natural gases is possible. I know not where aeon stones originally come, but I have since discovered, through careful analysis of my own photogram evidence, the Leviathan is a lie.
The Leviathan is no flying city left by the ancients. Rather, it is a mass of freed aeon particulate in the atmosphere, coalescing in a place of its own choosing.
It is like a storm: where the attentions of human beings collect, and the conditions are right, the aeon particulate will show you wonderful things. But those mystic towers and endless galleries are a lie. The power of dreams is not the power of reality, however uplifting. Valima Mordemere must know this somewhere in his brilliant mind, but my efforts to return him to sanity have failed.
What little Mordemere recognizes of the truth has become twisted. In the abandoned mine craters of Leyland he has built essentially his own version of the Leviathan: the dread ship Nidhogg, a fortress city. He does not realize he is chasing a dream using the reality. The Nidhogg is deathly powerful, carrying with it a Core that must be destroyed at any cost. Not only can it lift the landmarks of Europe, it carries with it a secret t
hat sickens me to my heartsprings. You will forgive me, but it is my hope the Core can be destroyed without revealing this dreadful secret.
Your Captain Samuel Clemens stole the Nidhogg’s guidance crystal, an artifact we collected from our first meeting with the Leviathan. Without this crystal, the Core is bereft of its true powers, and Mordemere cannot summon the Leviathan. Therein lies your one hope: you must find this crystal before Mordemere collects the landmarks he requires. Once Mordemere possesses five of the great focal points of the world, he will be able to track the crystal no matter where in the world it hides. Captain Samuel Clemens knows this, but he is unwilling to destroy the crystal. It holds the secret to aeon energy, and Clemens hopes to use it for the betterment of mankind. It is also this secret that Mordemere will kill to protect.
He intends to ravage the world with a contrived war, and remake the world in his image. This, above all, must not happen.
I leave you now with the necessary details to destroy Mordemere and his plans. Along with this letter, I have included schematics to both the Nidhogg and myself. Just above my heartspring, you will find three aeon crystal shards, much like the one Captain Clemens stole. These represent three chances: just one of these shards, bearing my will to destroy it, will cause the Core to collapse and self-destruct. The stolen landmarks of Europe will float to Earth harmlessly. Mordemere may be insane, but he has always appreciated fine architecture.
I thank you, my fine rescuers. You have given me a chance at redemption. Even if you simply ignore my pleas, I thank you for this last adventure. It has been the dream of my lifetime to sail aboard a true pirate dirigible.’
“It’s signed ‘Jonah Moore, Repentant,’” Albion finished.
Without further ado, the Captain crossed to a speaking tube in the hallway and called for Cid Tanner. Everyone waited anxiously until the grizzled codger in the workman’s overalls came blustering into the room, crotchety and complaining of a disturbance in his work. The grumbling mechanic ceased when he saw the body on the deck.
“Well?” Albion asked, while Cid read through the technical specifications. Albion himself couldn’t make much sense of it.
The Nidhogg was laid out like a top, with a long central shaft and a round disk section. Long gantries sprouted from the disk, reminding Albion of a giant squid. It looked like these long limbs wrapped around the landmarks stolen, incorporating them like pilot fish around the center of the ship.
“One shipwright for another, Mordemere was one crafty bugger,” Cid remarked once he had finished.
“We will need to detach the gantries one by one, and the Core is in the middle of the ship, in the lower part of the disk, there. But it’s not impossible.”
“And the crystal shards?” Rosa Marija reminded.
“Take the Mickey out of the big reveal, why don’t you?” Cid griped, as was his wont. He crossed to Jonah Moore’s inert body.
Carefully, with some kind of multiple-pronged tool in his overalls, he separated the metallic mesh from the India rubber seal connecting it to Moore’s flesh.
Inside, there was the heartspring, coiled like a complex, resting cobra. There was a moment of fumbling with the delicate instruments, but soon Cid’s deft fingers were extracting a cone of devilishly entangled cogs, cams and tensile springs.
He chucked this aside, leaving a space in the abdomen. Cid consulted the schematic once more, roughly sketched in the charcoal from the writing desk. Then he ruffled his beard, and thumped Moore’s chest once, hard. Moore’s eyelids fluttered.
“Have you no respect for the dead?” protested Hargreaves.
“Give it a moment, whippersnappers,” Cid grumbled.
Deep in Moore’s chest, a whirring sound began, and then something rolled out into the strangely empty abdominal cavity. It looked like a little round ball of shiny metal, dripping with clear goop. Cid turned a screwdriver attachment into the side, and it suddenly sprung open, spitting something out as it did. Everyone took cover, except for Cid.
“Would you look at that? Bloody brilliant, this Mordemere is,” Cid gaped, awestruck. Albion and everyone else managed to emerge from behind desks and under bunks.
Floating just above the open ball, overflowing with clear goop, were three tiny gems, like purest sapphires. Albion could not stop staring at them. They hung just above the goop, in perfect synchronization with each other like they were set into the firmament of the world by a cosmic jeweler. Each one was a long diamond shape, and the color of twilight.
“They’re gorgeous…” Rosa emitted. Suddenly, the gems spun in midair, orienting on Rosa.
“Careful. They’re rife with aeon, which means they react to emotions,” Cid reminded. “I’m surprised they’re not reacting more, with the ‘Berry’s pipes so close. Best let me have them, I’ll stabilize them for you to use.”
Cid Tanner collected them into the ball again, using a cloth from the bunk to wrap it. Albion gave him a long, meaningful look. Cid gave the barest nod, and then he was gone, leaving everyone else in the room with the hollowed-out Jonah Moore once more.
“Here we consign the esteemed Jonah Moore to the flame. May he find peace in the skies,” Albion finished. Cockney Alex and Elric Blair grabbed the handles of the metal cot as respectfully as they could, and slid Moore’s covered body into the enormous maw. Moore’s pallbearers backed away, the grate was closed, and Cid turned up the furnace, spreading Moore’s ashes across Eastern Europe.
They did not worry about any of the strange components Mordemere placed into Moore’s body. Cid had carefully removed them beforehand, and they sat hidden somewhere in his crowded, well-organized engine room.
“Now is as good a time as any to have a caucus,” Albion said to the gathered crew aboard. “Please, any of you who would like to have a say in this, join me on the bridge.”
As it turned out, everyone had a say, and they trooped through the guts of the Berry like a particularly good chili.
“All right, all right. Let’s not all jabber at once, let me have it,” Albion said, once they were comfortably seated all about the bridge. The Berry hadn’t been built for so many pilots, so the menfolk leaned on the bulkheads. “Auntie, you’re the senior member of Captain Sam’s crew, you first.”
“I ain’t a spring chicken, but the ‘s’ word could have you eating stale grits for a month, young man,” Auntie answered in her patented Jersey color.
Almost everyone was in favor of going. Captain Samuel’s old crew wanted to help him, out of loyalty, or a sense of missing out on the action. Albion wasn’t quite sure how to take this sudden display of affection. For one, they had known the Captain longer than Albion himself. For another…
“I am against it,” Inspector Hargreaves spoke up, in the middle of one of Cid’s recollections. This one was about how he and Captain Sam had evaded the Imperial Canton, smuggling half a ton of Dragonwell tea out of their military-controlled ports.
“Why?” Rosa Marija asked, bluntly. “It is in your interests to see this madman stopped. Mordemere did sell arms to the Ottomans.”
“Yes, of course,” Vanessa acknowledged. “But we could turn towards finding Captain Samuel, instead of diving into danger like buffoons.”
“And retrieve the guidance crystal for Queen and Country in the process,” Albion pointed out astutely.
“I make no claims to the contrary,” Hargreaves answered. Her lips were pressed into a line. “But I also believe it to be in the best interest of this crew. Reports of the Nidhogg show an incredible amount of firepower. Anything less than the Knights of the Round would stand little chance.”
“We’re not Balaenopteron-class, but that fact might give us an advantage,” Cid cut in. “The specs show the Nidhogg prepared for large-scale assault, and not a small raiding party. We could land on one of the captured landmarks, say, Westminster, and infiltrate through the supporting gantries.”
“It would be good to see Big Ben again,” Hargreaves admitted. “But my feelings do not factor in here.
Please do not appeal to them again.”
“Good old Yard training,” Albion said now, turning everyone in his direction. “Listen, Hargreaves, we’re pirates. Feeling is most of who we are. We do what we think is right.”
“Be that as it may-!”
“Besides,” the Captain spoke over her. He waited a moment, until the Inspector gave a little nod of assent. “Besides, going after the crystal won’t stop Mordemere’s ship or return Westminster. It might take too long to capture Captain Sam. He’s hidden from us for long enough. Here we know where he’s going to be. Mordemere is hot for his hindquarters. Now, if I were the Captain, I wouldn’t be happy sitting around, waiting for the gator to bite off my legs. No, I would go on the offensive. I bet you anything the Captain will want to sneak on the Nidhogg somewhere, waiting with a bullet for Mordemere’s back.”
“The best chance is to wait on the last landmark, and ride it aboard when Mordemere steals it,” Rosa agreed.
“So that is what we should do. We take the crystal shards and as much hardware as we can bring, and ride the landmark aboard. The Berry can keep close, as backup and escape plan. So long as we don’t fire at the Nidhogg, she should escape notice,” Albion finished. He looked towards the Inspector. “That sound like a plan to you?”
“If only we knew where he was off to…” Blair mumbled.
“We have a direction. It’s good enough,” Auntie said, to Albion’s slightly stunned expression. Her gray locks crowned a smooth, confident face that cowed the little journalist’s qualms.
Vanessa Hargreaves had a mixture of feelings on her own visage, primarily frustration. It was a shaky plan at best, nothing like the Yard’s meticulous raids. Yet, it was better than what she, a lone agent cut off from England by a continent, could do on her own. How could they know where to strike? Was she expected to rely on an old man’s intuition alone? Then again, her assignment was to investigate and act on the landmark burglar, not Captain Samuel himself. In the end, she gave a little harrumph, and nodded.
