Cogs in Time 2 (The Steamworks Series)

by SJ Davis

  A light flashed in the sky between them and the British airship. The glow expanded into a circle. A blunt prow squeezed through, elongating into the cigar shape of another airship, its brass encased hull snapping with sparks. As it pushed its way through the hole in the sky, the portal opening contracted, and vanished once the aft eased through.

  The black cross painted over the hull was not completely obscured by the brass Faraday coils.

  “Germans!” Shepherd shouted.

  “They stole your design,” Pierce said to Liz.

  “Only a matter of time before they’d come up with something,” she said, frowning, “after they saw the Independence. That’s one big ship.”

  The German airship was twice the size of the British craft that drifted toward it.

  “This is awful!” Shepherd cried. “They haven’t been this brazen before. We need to warn someone.”

  “I think they know.” Pierce could hear the air raid sirens echoing through the streets below. Soon came pops, with corresponding puffs of explosions in the air near the enemy airship.

  Blue lightning crackled along the length of the German craft. A bolt shot out toward the British ship, flashing over its bow. Half of the ship vanished.

  Hydrogen in the remaining gas bags exploded. What was left of the airship became a blazing fireball hurtling down onto the streets of London.

  The German ship turned in the direction of the Independence.

  “Bring us head on, Mister Gridley,” Liz said.

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Ahm,” Pierce said, stepping closer to Liz, “you do realize they are going to fire on us. With a Tesla weapon. A weapon that disintegrates things.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “We can’t use the three dimensional projection,” he said. “That would ruin everything. They can’t know we have that.”

  “Yes, I know that too. Now be quiet, Harrison.”

  “Blast those devils out of the sky,” Shepherd said, his voice cracking. His face burned with rage. “Teach them they can’t kill Britons and get away with it.”

  “That’s not really an option,” Pierce said.

  “Why? What armament does this ship carry?”

  “Oh, a few rifles and some handguns. Not much.”

  Shepherd clutched at one of the ceiling struts for support. “What? They’re going to fire on us.”

  “They’re charging their weapon,” Gridley said.

  The two airships drifted to face each other, a kilometer away, bow to bow. The morning sun shown against the brass coils twisted over the German’s superstructure. Sparks flashed and a blinding light lashed out from its prow.

  “Brace!” Liz cried and grabbed hold of the handles beside her console.

  Pierce didn’t have time to reach for support. He flew onto the vibrating deck as tiny blue streaks of lightening coursed over the plating, tingling his hands, legs, and backside. Murunga, gripping one of the struts, reached down and helped Pierce up.

  “What happened?” Shepherd said. “I expected us to blow apart like that other airship.”

  “First of all,” Liz said as she looked over Gridley’s shoulder and checked gauges and dials, “we don’t use hydrogen. We use helium. You probably noticed that hydrogen is highly combustible. Helium is inert. Second, the extra Faraday coils on our superstructure dissipated the energy from their Tesla cannon.”

  “And that’s another thing you never tested,” Pierce said. “You weren’t certain it would work.”

  Liz shrugged one shoulder and shot him a quick grin. “It worked in theory, we just had to put it to practical use.”

  “Yeah, well, the projection is supposed to work in practice, but it didn’t,” Pierce said.

  “That’s because one of the lenses slid out of alignment. Won’t happen again.”

  “Ah,” Shepherd interrupted, pointing out the forward window. “They are going to shoot again.”

  “Damn!” Liz snapped. “I’ve had enough of them.”

  She reached to the right of her pilot, to a panel that had more recently been welded in place next to the portal controls. She threw up a lever, and a hum pierced their ears.

  Pierce nearly fell over again from a wave of dizziness. Liz fell into him and he wrapped his arm around her while he grabbed a strut to prevent them both from crashing to the deck. Through a haze, he tried to focus on the enemy airship. As his vision cleared, he saw it drifting to the left. Its engines still ran, the propellers still turning, but it seemed to lack control. It no longer glowed with an energy build-up. No blast came from its Tesla cannon.

  The cannon on the ground below, in bunkers surrounding the Palace of Westminster, began to bark again. Holes ripped through the gondola of the German ship. Flames burst through the hydrogen compartments. Burning fabric and melting framework rained down on the city streets and rooftops.

  “What the devil happened?” Shepherd asked. He squeezed his eyes with his finger, then blinked at the devastation. “They were about to hit us again.”

  “Which wouldn’t have worked,” Liz said. “And then they would have turned their weapons on London. I’m sorry. I just got tired of it all.”

  “But what happened?”

  “The thing in front of our gondola. You might have seen it.” She leaned over the pilot’s station and pointed out the window. “It’s a projector. But instead of light, it projects electromagnetic energy in a sort of pulse. It’s something my father and Nikola Tesla have been working on. It shuts off electrical power, at least for a short time. The Tesla portal and their cannon work on electricity. We disrupted them. Some of their flight controls were probably electrical, too. Anyway, it gave your artillery enough time to target the ship.”

  “I don’t think anyone survived that,” Pierce said. “That’s a shame.”

  “After what those brigands did to our people?” Shepherd snapped. “I hope each one is burning in hell right now.”

  “A fitting sentiment, Reggie,” Pierce said, “but I was thinking more in the lines of having someone to interrogate. You seemed to enjoy our little chat when I was manacled to a table not too long ago. I thought you might like to do the same with one of those Germans. Not much chance of that now, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh. Right. That might have been useful, but what could we have learned from some lowly airman. We need an officer at the very least. Besides, what is there to learn from interrogating any of them. We know they intend to wipe England off the map. We’ll do the same to them first. That’s the only way to win this. So, what other weapons do you have to offer us?”

  “That wasn’t exactly a weapon,” Liz said.

  “What if I offer a solution that could end this war without any more deaths,” Pierce said, grinning.

  “I will not go back to the PM with that story of time travelling. He’ll have me reduced to private, if I’m lucky to be kept in the military.”

  Liz reached over and laid a hand on Pierce’s arm before he could speak. “Harry, I don’t like this lying. It’s … not right.”

  Shepherd glared at him. “What does she mean?” he demanded.

  “Oh, that’s my plan. Didn’t I tell you? You weren’t very receptive to my explaining about the future influencing the past. Since we couldn’t convince you, how would we ever convince the rest of the world.”

  “Exactly,” Shepherd said.

  “Not exactly,” Liz began.

  Pierce interrupted anything else she might have said, ignoring her scowl. “We intend to use the projection, the giant triangle, to scare the Germans. Imagine, our ship appearing over Berlin. It will strike fear in their hearts. We give them an ultimatum. Stop the war or be destroyed.”

  “And that’s supposed to fill them with fear?” asked Shepherd, doubtfully.

  “It will if they believe our ship is from a race of aliens from another planet.”

  Liz rolled her eyes.

  Shepherd frowned. “That’s your plan?”

  Pierce tapped his templ
e. “To be honest, it sounded better in here. But you don’t understand the nuances of it all. Reggie, when I rescued you from those cannibals in the Congo about fifteen years ago, what did I do? I made them believe I had supernatural powers. A few well-placed homemade fireworks, and they were bowing down and worshipping us.”

  “As I recall, they came after us again, chased us until we fell off a precipice and into a river.”

  “Yes, but we did fool them. We just didn’t have enough dry powder to make more fireworks. This time, we have something better.” He patted one of the struts.

  “This time,” Shepherd said, “we aren’t up against two dozen ignorant savages,” Shepherd said.

  * * * *

  The French countryside rolled beneath them. They had flown across the channel rather than using their Tesla portal. Over the time they had been away, Liz and her crew had discovered a number of ways to conserve the energy used up by producing a portal and ways to build up depleted power in their batteries after slipping through the portal. They still had not discovered the secret energy source used by the builders of the outposts they had found, but their generators were now more efficient. The image projector ran on a separate set of batteries than the portal and the electromagnetic projector, so once they made their appearance, they could immediately form the projected triangle ship. Provided the lenses didn’t slip again.

  Shepherd hovered over Gridley’s shoulder, watching the scene unfolding in front of them. So far, they had gone unchallenged across the channel and into France. Soon, they would slip through a portal to Berlin itself.

  Liz pulled Pierce to the rear of the compartment with the ploy of having him help her secure the gangway, which was already clamped tight into its dogs.

  “I don’t like lying to him,” she whispered. “Tell him the truth.”

  “He lied to me, Liz.”

  “That was a year ago.”

  He grinned at her. “Or five, depending on your outlook.”

  She hit him in the shoulder. “Stop that! It’s not funny.”

  “It wasn’t very amusing to find that my country had lied. Reggie manipulated me. He knew I didn’t like the spread of colonialism. The British, the Germans, the Russian, even the Americans. They were all trying to expand their own nations, take over less advanced countries. The portals just made that easier. I knew that the British Empire couldn’t resist expanding once it found out there were other planets out there. Reggie had insisted we were only there to explore. We were actually there to spread of the empire beyond our own planet. If not the British, then one of the other countries. We have to stop it.”

  “Tell Shepherd the truth,” Liz said, “and maybe he’ll help us.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  She shrugged as she turned away. “You can always have Murunga throw him off the ship.”

  “That has always been plan B,” he mumbled as he followed her.

  “All systems ready, ma’am,” Gridley said. “The crew’s ready.”

  Liz nodded and moved a dial on the station next to the pilot. A counter in the brass panel spun to read a series of numbers. They were not longitude and latitude but corresponded to a geographical location in three dimensional space, a frequency point to which the Tesla portal projected. Liz pulled down a lever and the airship vibrated violently.

  On the other side of the pilot’s station, Pierce flipped switches to active the image projectors. Below them, the rolling French landscape vanished, replaced in a blink with the brick and stone of Berlin, the Spree river, and the dome of Berliner Stadtschloss, the Royal Palace.

  When Pierce pushed the lever on his panel, the glass plate flickered with an image of the giant triangle. From their vantage point on the airship, all they could see were the sprawling city streets below them. The image was only visible from outside and on the glass plate.

  Pierce began breathing again.

  “That’s very nice,” Shepherd said, pointing at the plate, “but we are still vulnerable. The Germans will be attacking any second. How do you intend to make an impression on them?”

  “You didn’t have to come along,” Pierce said.

  “That was the minister’s idea, not mine. Left to me, I would have let you go on this fool mission. Now I’m in the middle, I’d prefer to see it succeed.”

  “We have enemy airships approaching,” Gridley called out.

  “How substantial does this image appear in the daylight?” Shepherd asked. “I’ve only seen it at night.”

  “It looks solid,” Liz said. “If you had seen that mountain on the other planet, you would have sworn that you could climb it. It effectively hides us. Nothing can be seen through it unless they happen to rise above us. That’s why we need to keep a high altitude.”

  Two German airships closed in from port and starboard, firing conventional guns. They were well out of range to be of any danger to the Independence. Their shots would appear to be absorbed by the black hull of the giant craft.

  “They’re charging their Tesla cannon,” Gridley said.

  The craft to port flashed with blue lightening.

  “Brace yourself,” Liz said.

  Shepherd took hold of a strut. “I know your Faraday coils can absorb the energy from their blast, but will that interfere with your projection?”

  “Good question,” Pierce said. He hadn’t thought of that. They hadn’t run enough tests on this thing. Even if the shot was deflected, could it shut down the projector or even throw the lenses out of alignment?

  “The Faraday coils will insulate our systems,” Liz said. “Trust me.”

  The beam from the cannon never touched the Independence. It passed through the image and missed the airship by thirty meters.

  Under Liz’s instructions, Gridley spun the wheel and turned the ship and corresponding image toward the nearer airship to port. Liz turned dials and threw levers on the panel for the electromagnetic projector. The indicator lights remained dark.

  “We haven’t had enough time to recharge,” she said.

  “Time for Murunga?” Pierce asked.

  “Please,” Liz said.

  Murunga stepped up and Pierce unhooked the microphone for the wireless and handed it to the Maasai.

  “Ready to transmit over the radio and loudspeakers,” Liz said.

  Murunga pushed the button on the side of the microphone and said, “Achtung, achtung!”

  The sound reverberated outside the airship.

  Murunga began speaking, his voice going out over the airwaves and across half of Berlin.

  “What’s going on?” Shepherd demanded.

  Pierce hushed him. “Murunga is the only one of us who speaks German,” he whispered. “He’s announcing an ultimatum to the German people, to the whole of Earth. He is a representative of a coalition of planets beyond our solar system and they are demanding that we stop our war.”

  “Electromagnetic projector charged,” Gridley said in a low tone.

  Murunga released the microphone button. “I have delivered the ultimatum, Miss Fletcher. You may fire.”

  Liz threw the lever and nausea overwhelmed them. The German airship began drifting. “Bring us about to face the other one,” she said.

  The second airship fired its Tesla cannon before they could turn. This time the energy blasted over them. The deck shook under them. Sparks flew from the control panels.

  “More airships on approach,” Gridley said.

  Flames leaped out of the plating over the portal controls. Liz pulled a cloth from the back pocket of her coveralls and began batting at the fire. Pierce ripped off his coat, pulled her back, and beat the flames down.

  “Well, that shouldn’t have happened,” she said, frowning at the ruined panel.

  “Ma’am,” Gridley said, “I think that ship might try to ram us.”

  “And go right through our image,” she said. She worked the dials for the electromagnetic projector.

  “Can we stop it?” Shepherd asked.

  “Ou
r batteries overloaded,” Liz said. “The portal and the pulse projector are both fried.”

  Murunga pointed to the glass plate on his side of the ship. “Is the image still visible?”

  Liz gave a quick look, checked some dials, then nodded. “It works on a different circuit. It’s still functioning.”

  She went back to the portal control panel and pulled a spanner from her pocket. She opened the plating and attacked the collection of burnt wires, all the time mumbling about bypassing the portal circuits.

  “Three more airships approaching, charging their Tesla cannon,” Gridley said.

  “I don’t think the Germans took your threat seriously,” Shepherd said.

  “Thank you Reggie for pointing out the bloody obvious. We just need to stall them a few more minutes.”

  The nearest ship fired again, this time only grazing the Independence, the Faraday coils on her hull dissipating the energy flow. Once the other ships drew within range, they would coordinate their attack, and the Independence would be at their mercy.

  “If they are not impressed by the image we have created,” Murunga said, “perhaps we should give them another.”

  He began twisting dials on the image projection panel.

  “Murunga,” Pierce said, “I don’t think you should fool with that. If we loose the image, the Germans will be able to pinpoint us.”

  “Let him alone, Harry!” Liz said, her head almost inside the other console. “He helped me build that thing. Give me about two minutes, Murunga. That should do it.”

  “Very well, Miss Fletcher.”

  Murunga leaned his face close to the brass panel, over a series of small lenses. In his right hand he held the microphone. He left hand worked the projector controls. In a moment, what Pierce fear happened. The glass plate showing the triangle image went black. They had lost their disguise.

  Then he looked closer at the plate. It wasn’t blank. It was showing the dark face of the Maasai, ritual scars and all. It appeared distorted, inhuman.