Assassins of the Lost Kingdom (Airship Daedalus Book 1)

by E. J. Blaine

  He filled the syringe from a glass jar of a clear liquid and rolled up his sleeve. He tapped the needle to clear air and was clenching his arm to bring up a vein when he realized he wasn’t alone.

  “We need to talk, Christopher,” said Dorothy.

  He looked up and saw her standing in the rough doorway.

  “Whatever’s happening, we can help, but you have to tell me the truth. What is this?”

  He sighed. He had no choice, really. If anyone could help him, it would be Dorothy Starr.

  “I can’t leave with you,” he said. “I’d be dead within a couple of days.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The Silver Star already had the Death Lace extract when they took me, and they’d already refined it. They didn’t need my help for that. They wanted my help to make it more controllable.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Science Leader of their expedition is a Dr. Mencken. There’s a military commander too, Captain Ardinger, though they have a difference of opinion over who’s actually in charge. Mencken’s a madman. A sadist. Ardinger tries to keep him in check, but their leaders place a high value on Mencken’s work.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then he plunged ahead.

  “They’d figured out the civets are immune. They didn’t want an antidote, but they wanted to slow the poison down so it wouldn’t kill the victim outright. They wanted a serum that would keep a poisoned victim alive as long as they kept taking it.”

  “My god,” Dorothy whispered. “That’s horrible. They’d be dependent on the Silver Star for their lives.”

  He nodded.

  “By then I’d already tried to escape once. Dr. Mencken was furious.”

  Realization broke across Dorothy’s face. “Oh no, Christopher!”

  “He used me as a test subject. They injected me, used me to test the dosage of their control serum. Mencken figured that would keep me from trying to escape again.”

  “But you…”

  “I’ve got a trick or two up my sleeve still. The serum’s an extract from the livers of the civets. I figured out how to make my own. But if I’m away from the civets…”

  “There’s got to be a way to stop it!”

  “I’m trying. I’ve found some promising avenues. But I live in a cave!” He felt the frustration boiling up inside him and forced it back down. “It’s not the best laboratory, to be honest.”

  Dorothy stepped forward and placed a hand on his forearm. “We’ll find an answer, Christopher. We won’t just abandon you here.”

  But after she returned to the main chamber and left him alone, he realized that eventually she would do exactly that. She wouldn’t want to. But he was one man, and the Silver Star threatened the whole world. The way to stop this was to escape, to warn the world, and then to come back with a fleet of airships from their secret army and burn this valley until not a twig remained. No, they’d leave, and if he wasn’t able to leave with them, he’d be trapped here until his luck ran out.

  Fate had nothing good in store for him. Unless he made his own fate. Rhys flipped through the notebook, then closed it. What he was considering now was less science than raw superstition. There was a formula in ancient books, passed down from healer to healer for centuries. Many alchemists had tried to recreate it and failed. They didn’t have the right ingredients; they weren’t here. They’d corrupted the formula by trying to substitute what was available to them. But here, seeing the plants, watching the behavior of the animals, it was obvious to him what the original had been.

  He took another small case from deep within a box. Inside was another hypodermic and a small glass vial sealed with wax. It held a pale yellow substance. Rhys stared at the vial for a long time. If he was wrong, this would kill him. The records of failed experiments suggested it wouldn’t be an easy death.

  But what choice did he have now?

  Rhys glanced at the opening to the main chamber. Then he filled the syringe and stopped thinking. Conscious thought had taken him as far as it could. What was called for was raw instinct.

  He slid the needle into his arm and slid the plunger home.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Rhys withdrew the syringe and placed it on the table. Then he felt it hit, and the pain was intense, like his skull being torn open. He fell to the floor and writhed in silent agony, unable to cry out.

  There was a great rushing sound and a pale glow that seemed to emanate from everywhere. Then, even though he could still see the stars through the windows and feel the cold stone at his back, he felt himself falling. The stars were different somehow. Everything was different. He felt energy coursing through him and it terrified him because he knew it could tear him apart.

  The energy was everywhere. In the rock as a stolid, heavy force. He could see it in the sky, burning in the stars. He saw the spiraling forms of Dorothy and Jack, side by side in the next room. He saw everything. And still he fell.

  Dr. Christopher Rhys lay on the stone floor, twitching and shaking. Around him, the universe opened up, and he fell all the way to its very center. And the heart of the universe received him and took him in.

  Chapter 17

  The next morning dawned clear and bright, and Jack awoke to the sound of Dr. Rhys softly whistling a tune as he prepared breakfast for them in the back of the cave.

  “Sorry I kept my situation from you,” he said as they ate. “It seemed the thing to do at the time. Now I’m not sure why, really.”

  The man’s mood had changed from yesterday, Jack noted. There was still a cheery friendliness about him, but now it felt more natural, less forced. It made sense that the secret he’d kept had weighed on him. With that out in the open, he could be himself, and he seemed a truly open and likable person. He’d been through a lot, Jack knew. But he seemed to be dealing with it well. Jack found himself gaining a new respect for the doctor’s resiliency. Escaping from the Silver Star, especially under the circumstances, and achieving what he had here in the wilderness was truly impressive.

  Over breakfast, they discussed the situation they faced. The Silver Star now had two poisons to work with. One they’d already seen. The other came with a serum that inhibited its action, but only as long as the victim kept taking it. Once it was withdrawn, the victim would die as horribly as Cobb, Ponderby, and the others. Jack wasn’t sure how that was possible. Doc was the poison expert, and she was amazed as well.

  But that didn’t really matter. Their job was to stop it. Rhys had done some of the work for them. He could produce the serum, though whether it could be synthesized in a lab outside this valley remained to be seen. But what they really needed was a true antidote, something that would free a victim from the need for a serum entirely, as well as protect against the original, immediately fatal poison.

  Rhys was convinced the civets held the key. So after breakfast, they decided to go hunting.

  “We don’t want to go wading into fields of Death Lace for them,” Rhys said. “But there’s a watering hole upriver. They’ll show up there when the sun’s high. We can get there before them and prepare if we don’t dally.”

  He brought out several crude nets he’d woven from dried vines and they helped him pack them into a canvas backpack. “Tried this when I first got out here,” he explained. “But it was like trying to herd cats. By myself, best I could manage was trapping them one at a time with the snares. I’ve been catching maybe a couple a day if I’m lucky. Barely enough to keep myself going. But with the three of us working together, I think we might have better luck.”

  They left the cave and walked carefully along the ledge until it widened out. Then they once more crossed the gorge on the fallen tree trunk. The waterfall roared behind them and threw off small rainbows in the bright morning sun.

  They made their way back upstream, past the rock overhang where they’d built their first camp. Rhys stopped from time to time to check his traps, and found that one had caught a civet. He stuffed it into a sack he slung
over his shoulder.

  “Shame to kill them,” he said as he reset the snare. “They’re harmless creatures. Charming to watch them play without a care in a meadow full of Death Lace. But we all have to eat. And without the extract from their livers, well, one does what one must.”

  Jack understood. They couldn’t afford sentimentality. The Silver Star certainly had no time for it. They would wipe out their enemies efficiently and ruthlessly unless he and Doc and Rhys could find a way to stop it. If they failed here, if they were captured by the Silver Star, many people would die.

  When they reached the watering hole, Rhys walked carefully around the bank, studying tracks in the soft earth. Then he stood on a rock near the shore and surveyed the area.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing across the river. There was a line of bushes and undergrowth a few yards from the river’s edge. “When we flush them, they’ll run for the nearest ground cover.”

  They waded through the shallow water to the far bank, carefully unfurled Rhys’ nets, and laid them out along the brush. Rhys had a few stakes in his pack, and Jack gathered branches from the woods nearby to make more. They hammered them into the earth and hung the nets. The dried vines were roughly the same dull color as the brush. When they were done, Jack could barely make them out from twenty feet away. He decided it would do.

  “They come here to drink every day?” Doc asked.

  “As far as I can tell,” Rhys answered. “The predators mostly hunt by night, so they give the morning some time to get going right and proper. Then they’ll show up. We just need to move away and let our scent clear.”

  Rhys led them up into the higher ground and onto a small promontory that offered a clear view along both banks of the river as well as the approaches to the watering hole and the line of nets they’d strung against the brush. There, they sat down on the grassy shelf, and Rhys stretched in the sun. “Time to relax,” he said. “Can’t get over how warm it is here. Volcanic steam vents, you know. Outside this valley it’s freezing. In here, practically tropical. You have to tell me how you two met, by the way.”

  Rhys lay back on the grass, and Jack and Doc sat down to wait with him. Rhys chatted with Doc mainly, as she told him about how she and Jack had met and the odd paths their lives had taken before they found each other again. Jack contributed to the conversation from time to time, but mostly he scanned the land and the air with the binoculars in his kit bag. This was a place where it didn’t pay to drop your guard. Once, he spotted two black spots in the air in the distance. At first he took them for birds, but his binoculars revealed the shapes of the two Silver Star fighters. Their enemies were still searching for them. He was about to point them out to Doc and Rhys when he thought better of it. They were far off, so far that he couldn’t hear their engines. He decided to let Doc and Rhys enjoy a moment of peace.

  “Well of course you have a little girl,” Rhys was saying. “Look at the two of you! It’s obvious! You’re meant to be happy together.”

  The phrasing was odd, Jack thought, but he certainly appreciated the sentiment. He smiled and met Rhys’ eyes. His happiness for them was clear.

  “The people here,” said Rhys, then he laughed, “well, not exactly here, but, well you know, they say nothing’s all good or all bad. Nothing’s that simple. All things contain their opposites. They present different facets to the light. Even the war. How many people found each other in the middle of that hell who otherwise never would have met? Or perhaps met but never found the courage to reach out to one another?”

  He glanced away for a moment, suddenly wistful. “The war stripped away our armor, and we stood naked before each other. We could no longer hide who we truly were.”

  And just as suddenly he was back. “You two found each other, and you truly saw each other. You can run from that if it frightens you, but you can’t deny it.”

  Doc was embarrassed, Jack realized. “What’s gotten into you today, Christopher?” she said a bit suddenly. “You’re coming down with philosophy!”

  Rhys just smiled and placed a hand on hers. “It’s okay,” was all he said.

  Doc didn’t seem to know how to respond. There was an uncomfortable feeling now, not because Rhys was hostile, or evasive as he’d been the previous day. Just the opposite, in fact. Jack still wasn’t sure what to make of the man. But a change of subject might be wise at the moment.

  “What about yourself, Doctor Rhys?” he asked. “Did you find someone?”

  Jack realized immediately it had been a mistake. He was never good at this social stuff. That was Doc’s strength. Rhys sat up and was suddenly distant again. “I did, in fact,” he said. “But you know. The war.”

  They fell silent as the cries of birds drifted over the jungle. Jack decided to call it a draw. They sat for a time, feeling the warmth of the sun and the gentle breeze and listening to the sounds of the water. Rhys sat with his arms around his knees and his eyes closed. His spear lay on the ground beside him. He was breathing slowly and regularly and seemed to be looking around despite his closed eyes.

  “Hear that?” he said quietly. “They’re coming.”

  Jack didn’t hear anything, but he scanned the edge of the jungle with his binoculars and soon spotted a small troupe of animals edging out of cover. They cautiously sniffed the air and looked around. Then the bravest of them hurried down to the water’s edge. Soon more and more emerged, singly or in small groups, and scuttled down to the water.

  “What do we do?” Doc whispered.

  “Let’s give them a few minutes,” Rhys whispered back. “Then we go down the other side of the promontory here, approach from upstream. We charge them in a line, through the water. If we’re lucky, they’ll head out the other side and into the nets.”

  They waited perhaps another ten minutes. No more civets had appeared, and the ones here were drinking and playing in the water. Then they crept down off the promontory and slowly made their way toward the water.

  When they were in position, they waited for Rhys to give the signal. Jack felt his heart racing. In this primitive place, he realized, the civilized world might as well not exist. They’d been returned to the world of their uncivilized ancestors. Then Rhys waved his arm and they did what those early ancestors had done to survive for thousands of years. They roared, and they charged.

  ###

  The sun was still high as Jack, Doc, and Rhys walked back down the game trail along the river. Rhys carried his spear in one hand, and a sack over his shoulder with nearly two dozen civets inside. By Rhys’ estimate, it would have taken him nearly two weeks to trap that many in his snares or by taking them one at a time with his spear. With this many livers to process, they would be able to isolate a significant amount of the fluid that seemed to give the civets their immunity to the poison. Perhaps if they got this much of it to a real laboratory in the outside world, they might even be able to synthesize more. That would give them a serum that would counter the slower version of the poison. From there, it would hopefully be a short step to a full antidote that would render the poison useless.

  Jack didn’t really know that, of course. The chemistry and biology he left to Doc and Doctor Rhys, and even they were working blind at the moment. But he hoped so. With an antidote they could stop the Silver Star in their tracks, and save who knew how many lives in the process.

  They’d find out when they got to the cave. Rhys and Doc would run their experiments. They’d know if they had enough civet livers, or if they needed more. If this was enough, then it would be time to go. From Rhys’ description, he had an idea how much cargo space was available in the fuselage of the single seat Silver Star fighters. It wasn’t much. He wasn't sure the plane could carry both Rhys and Doc. Even if it could, they'd be able to bring very little with them.

  They passed the overhang where they’d sheltered when they first arrived and headed downstream toward the waterfall. Rhys was in the lead with Doc in the middle and Jack bringing up the rear. Rhys was the first to realize s
omething was wrong. He stopped and listened to the sounds of the jungle. Then he dropped the sack and clutched his spear with both hands.

  “Run!” he shouted, but it was too late. A shape exploded out of the trees, bounding across the narrow strip of open space that separated them. It was an animal—a huge quadruped. It charged with a snarl. Jack caught a glimpse of gray fur and a long, muscled tail.

  Rhys sprang away from the sack of dead civets and the creature ran between the group and the sack. Then, with amazing agility, it whirled on them with the sack at its back.

  Jack was drawing his .45s but never managed to fire. The creature swatted him with a paw the size of a dinner plate and sent him flying a good ten feet into a tree. Jack lost both his guns and slumped to the ground, dazed.

  He heard Doc scream as the creature charged after him. It scrabbled for traction on the ground with long claws adapted for digging. They were like a badger’s claws if a badger was the size of a grizzly bear. The head was vaguely canine, but stretched out of proportion for a dog’s head. It moved on thickly muscled legs, and it displayed dagger-sized fangs as it came at him. This had to be one of the creatures Rhys had warned them about, the ones that tore open the earth and scattered boulders like toys.

  Jack reached for the nearer of his guns, but his vision was doubled. His fingers scratched against bare earth. Too late. It was going to kill him, Jack realized with a strange certainty. There was nothing he could do. This was how he died. Here, with Doc watching.

  Then Rhys gave a feral roar, and Jack saw him plunge his spear into the creature’s flank. It wheeled and reared, and Rhys stabbed it again. Then he fell back to the sack, thick with the smell of blood and prey. That was what had drawn it, Jack realized. Rhys kept his eyes on the creature and the spear pointed at its chest as he bent down to grab the sack.

  “Hah!” he yelled. “Come get it!” Then he turned and sprinted away down the trail. The creature roared and gave chase.

  Jack was trying to struggle to his feet when Doc reached him.