Dawn's Early Light

by Pip Ballantine

  It was a storm of mayhem she scrambled into with Bill wrestling a pistol from his captor, Pearson closing on Wellington, and Edison pushing Gantry into the Maestro.

  The Maestro brought his massive Gatling arm upwards, swatting Gantry away from him as if he were an annoying housefly. The cannon connected with the man’s jaw, and struck with such force that the Usher man’s neck snapped. The Gatling arm now came around to bear on Bill.

  Eliza reached under her coat for the holster at the small of her back, pointing at the Maestro the only gun she had handy.

  The Brouhaha was set for “Pub Brawl,” which felt more than appropriate for the current scuffle. She fought to keep the gun steady, and when it fired, Parker exploded into a multitude of white and red shards while the Maestro toppled out of his grand wheelchair. Edison was lifted off his feet and tossed against the wall of the control room, his body landing hard and limp across the floor.

  Pearson, caught in the peripheral of the blast, shook his head as if to clear it, then returned his attention to Wellington, also stunned by the exciter.

  “Nowhere to go to, I’m afraid, sir,” the valet said, flipping from his sleeve the facón he had used earlier.

  Eliza saw the shadow move in the corner of her eyes, and she dove, screaming, “Get down!”

  The Gatling’s first round tore away at the glass window and wall behind where they once stood. There was a break in the gunfire, and that was when Bill took his three shots on the Maestro, all three deflected as he used his massive metal arm as a shield.

  When the madman lowered his Gatling to turn and face Bill, Eliza saw that her sonic attack had done more than just stun him. The blast had also partially removed his mask. She got a good look at his profile, and blinked hard to make sure that good look was better than good.

  The fine-chiselled jaw.

  The intimidating hawk-like nose.

  The cold gaze of a man she had met once before in the office of the Ministry.

  “Lord Sussex?” she heard Wellington call behind her.

  The one eye that was exposed went wide in a fury and madness that made Eliza think of Harrison Thorne when she had seen him at Bedlam. The scream tearing from his throat, however, was something from a nightmare. It was so loud, so powerful, that she could still hear it over the Gatling gun.

  Eliza crawled over to Wellington, who said, “Saw him speak at Parliament. Quite a charismatic individual.”

  “A recommendation, love,” Eliza said. “Don’t call the Maestro by his proper name. It seems to rather annoy him.”

  Before Wellington could reply, Bill appeared around the control panels, shouting, “All right, explain to me why we’re still here exactly?”

  Above them, chunks of the wall tore apart as the Maestro’s Gatling opened fire.

  “Oh yeah, that,” Bill said with a nod.

  The Maestro—Peter Lawson, the Duke of Sussex—was now gasping for breath, his voice vacillating between a whimper and a scream. Eliza, Wellington, and Bill peered out from their hiding places to see Pearson pull himself up and grab the Duke of Sussex’s face in his hands to force his eyes on the valet’s own.

  “Sir, look at me!” he snapped. “You are ill! You need your doctor!”

  “Yes,” Sussex, the Maestro, whispered drily. “Fetch my doctor.”

  “Shall we?” Wellington asked.

  “Let’s,” Eliza and Bill returned.

  The three leapt from their hiding place, and passed by Eliza’s pistols which she quickly snatched up and laid down suppressing fire as the three of them ran for the access door. They had almost made it out of the control room when she bumped into Wellington. He was staring at one of the control panels.

  Eliza followed his stare to the control panel where the Jack Frost had dealt its gruesome death to the guard, Parker. She noticed two vertical rows of six lights switching from green to yellow. In a third row were another six lights. They were red, and the top two were blinking.

  “We have to go, Welly.” And on catching Pearson’s gaze, she shouted, “Now!”

  They didn’t dare to look over their shoulder to see if Pearson were on their trail. It was eyes ahead in a mad dash for the cargo bay.

  They had reached the landing featuring the “train simulation” when Klaxons sounded all around them.

  “Eyes peeled, everyone,” Bill shouted as they opened the door to engineering. “We’re going to have varmints making things real uncomfortable.”

  “Halt!” the voice rang out.

  “Told you,” Bill said to Eliza, turning to the sound of feet pounding against metal.

  Two guards appeared from an adjoining stairwell under them. Bill grabbed both railings and kicked, sending them both back down to the platform below. With a quick glance around them, they continued their sprint through engineering. On reaching the hatch, Eliza unlocked the door, pulled hard, and was about to step through . . .

  . . . when she felt a hand yank her back into engineering. A moment later, a heavy pipe cut through the air.

  “Felicity, it’s us!” Bill shouted over the alarm.

  The librarian, wide-eyed and trembling, appeared in the open hatchway, a long, heavy pipe now held aloft in her grasp as if it were the very sword of Joan of Arc herself.

  “Alarms are going off!” she shouted. “They’re loud! Especially in this cargo bay!”

  “Not as loud as a tank firing at you,” Eliza offered.

  “Now, Eliza, don’t tease her,” Wellington scolded gently in her ear.

  “Why not?” she muttered back. “I like it.”

  “Can we go now?” the librarian implored.

  “Are the boilers at full?” Wellington asked.

  “Yes,” she said as they entered the cargo bay. “I even took the liberty of starting the car and letting it idle so the boilers would be at full pressure.”

  “Bon!” Wellington exclaimed as he locked the access door and sprinted for his motorcar. He yanked open the car door and began checking gauges by his steering wheel. “Eliza,” he shouted over his shoulder, “reset the tumble seat, if you please.”

  As she rotated the back passenger seat to its original position, Eliza could see Wellington now checking pressure indicators and various lights. Whatever they told him, it appeared to be good news. “Ready to go?” he asked everyone.

  Eliza did not get a chance to ask what he meant by that, because Felicity was asking what she was thinking. “Go? Go where? We’re in an airship.” Her arms spread wide. “In the air!”

  Bill guffawed. “And they call me crazy?”

  The motorcar revved and rumbled to life as Bill and Felicity settled in the tumble seat while Eliza settled into her own. Wellington launched them forwards, turned the car around, and paused on arriving at where the ramp would begin.

  “Eliza,” he began, lowering his goggles, “follow my sequence to the letter.”

  “Sequence?”

  “Yes, sequence!” He flipped a switch on his dash, and from a panel in front of her appeared a new series of buttons and switches, ones she had never seen before since riding in this motorcar of his. “Just follow my commands.”

  “Left to right?” she asked, her breath catching in her throat.

  “And timing.” He unfurled a belt before slipping out of the motorcar. “You all should find these belts between your cushions,” he announced to everyone. “If you want to stay in the car, strap in. Firmly.”

  As Eliza tightened her own belt to the tightest notch, Wellington took a deep breath and professed, “Know this—just in case we blow up—I love you, Eliza.”

  Hardly the most opportune of settings she expected to hear his heart; but at this point, Eliza understood that Wellington would never stop catching her off guard. Somehow, this suited her.

  “I love you too,” she returned.

  He took a
quick kiss from her before crossing over to the ramp release switch, and threw it down. Quick as a flash, he sprinted back to the motorcar as the airship’s aft ramp unlocked and started to lower . . .

  . . . into open space.

  She lowered her goggles and set her eyes forwards. Eliza was in love with a madman, and she trusted him implicitly. “On your word, Welly.”

  “All set?” Wellington asked over his shoulder.

  Felicity and Bill, their eyes much like wide saucers at present, silently nodded.

  Once his own belt was secured tight across his lap, he wrung his hands against the steering wheel and looked over to Eliza. He held his gaze with hers, then turned his eyes back to the now-open bay door.

  The motorcar rumbled forwards, and in Eliza’s field of vision, the turbulent Pacific Ocean grew wider, and then drew closer as they began to fall. Just over the howling wind, Eliza could hear a single scream. It was hard to ascertain if it was Felicity or Bill.

  “Red buttons, together,” he called to her, his voice just audible over the rush of air.

  She pressed the two red buttons before her. Each side of the car’s hood retracted, and both Gatlings ejected, launched free of the car to tumble uselessly to either side of them. She felt the urge to watch them plummet into the ocean but she waited for the next command.

  “Yellow,” Wellington shouted.

  Eliza pressed the yellow button. She felt, with a slight lurch, something launch from behind the car.

  “Switches.” Wellington glanced at the three sets of lights under each gauge in his own dash. Eliza could see one of the lights turn green. “Blue switch. Now.”

  She hooked her finger underneath it and saw a puff of thick smoke rise from underneath them. She could hear a whine emitting over the engine, but their speed remained constant.

  From Wellington’s dash, another light went green.

  “Yellow switches! Not together!” he insisted over the building whine from the engine. “Five seconds apart.”

  Eliza nodded, flipped the first switch, waited, and then flipped the second yellow switch. A moment later, she felt herself thrown back in her seat, as the whine now became a banshee’s wail.

  “The red button?” she called, the distance between them and the ocean rapidly disappearing.

  Wellington shook his head. The indicators—all but one—were green.

  Eliza could see whitecaps and ripples of the sea in detail. They had to be only several hundred feet in the air now.

  “Wellington!”

  The final light turned green.

  “Now, Eli—”

  He never got the opportunity to finish her name or give the command a second time. She threw herself forwards and pressed the red button with two fingers. The banshee’s wail now roared as if it were every typhoon from her childhood in New Zealand, and this time Eliza felt as if she were being thrown back from her front passenger seat into the tumble seat. The last time she felt this sort of acceleration, it was in her mad escape from the pirate airship off the Carolinas. Something moved off to her right. She looked over her side of the car and saw fabric extending across the fixed, taut metal skeleton of a wing. Her stomach lurched as the car’s hood slowly lifted upwards. The roar increased as Wellington pulled the steering wheel towards him, and the turbulent blue ocean before her disappeared. Now her stomach slipped into her throat as she felt rapid ascension. She wanted to call out to Wellington but fought to keep her mouth shut, in case anything were to come out of it against her—or her stomach’s—will.

  Then the horizon levelled out before her. They were in the air, and they were now flying high over the Northern California shoreline.

  Eliza took a deep breath and then looked over at him. “You could have told me, you know?”

  “What? That I had built a flying car in my spare time?” Wellington gave a hearty laugh. “You would have thought me daft.”

  “No, you twit!” she snapped. “You could have told me that you loved me. Back in England.”

  Wellington looked at her sideways. “Some of us have to work ourselves up to spilling our feelings into the world. I’m not quite as used to it as you are.”

  She opened her mouth, thought better of it, and shrugged. “Fair point, Welly! Fair point!”

  Eliza looked over her shoulder to Bill and Felicity. The two of them were holding on to their respective hats with one hand. Their other hand grasped the back of the driver and passenger seats. They were catatonic.

  “Hang on,” Wellington shouted over to her, pointing to the compass. “Hopefully, I can get us in some kind of northerly direction, but first we need to get over the coast, over land.”

  Whatever he was about to do, Eliza knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, she looked straight down at the blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

  “Just give me a tick,” he said cheerily, flipping a small red switch on his dash. Eliza felt something kick in the stern of their car and they approached the coastline. They still had altitude, but Eliza could feel a sinking feeling of descent.

  “Not yet,” Wellington growled through clenched teeth. “Not yet.”

  The sensation of thrust ceased, and one of the green lights on Wellington’s dash switched to red.

  “Bugger!” Wellington spat. “That is not good.”

  The car swooped downwards again, but Wellington countered the sudden drop easier this time and guided their car closer and closer to the California cliffside. Eliza could no longer feel her stomach summersaulting, only the tightness in her chest as she was holding her breath. They caught another gust, then another, and Wellington was chuckling happily as if he were on a delightful ride across the country.

  Finally, Eliza took a breath as their car passed over the coastline and underneath them was solid ground.

  “Now comes the tricky bit,” Wellington said, angling the car in a descent.

  The motorcar seemed to enjoy losing altitude as it did so quickly and deftly. Wellington on their controlled descent did bank, following the compass heading to a northerly heading. He continued to dip then climb, slowing his descent with each action until their motorcar reached what Eliza guessed would be fifty feet above terra firma.

  “Red switch, Eliza!” he called to her.

  Eliza flipped the red switch, and the sensation of thrust ceased. Wellington yanked at a handle by his right foot, and a series of parachutes unfurled.

  Twenty feet . . . ten feet . . .

  Wellington pushed the accelerator forwards, and their motorcar hopped forwards a few feet, hopped a second time, and then they were rolling forwards as the chutes broke free from the retracting wings and stabilizers. The car finally came to a stop.

  “Congratulations, Welly,” Eliza said.

  The flash came from behind them.

  She had nearly forgotten about the death ray, and when the four of them turned in the direction of the burst, a brilliant silver beam stretched northerly, stretching through the dusk sky to reach out into the Pacific Ocean. The blast struck the ocean so hard that seconds later they heard a sharp crack followed by a great plume of steam and vapour reaching into the night. Eliza scrambled out of the motorcar and ran across the earth, the earth that was vibrating and rippling underneath her until she could see the impact point. She would not dare the cliff’s edge as the tremours were growing in intensity while the steam, flame, and vapour billowed into the growing night.

  Her eyes now looked everywhere in the sky above them. The titanic airship was nowhere to be found.

  Perhaps San Francisco was saved from destruction; but now she sprinted back for the motorcar. She knew this kind of earthquake, knew the force they could hold; but they had been acts of God and nature. Even the way the ground shook and trembled underneath didn’t feel right. This was something unknown, something terrifying. Eliza knew nothing would stop the earthquake that would fo
llow in the wake of Thomas Edison’s latest scientific breakthrough.

  INTERLUDE

  In Which Sophia del Morte Peers into the Tortured Souls of Men

  After her dance lesson with Miss Harris, Sophia del Morte knew that she would have to be more careful. She hated being proven wrong in her assessment of the American agent, but it did happen from time to time. On those occasions, when one plan did not work, it simply meant that there had to be another way.

  Miss Harris’ increase in security was evident to Sophia. There were eyes on the doors and windows, both inside and outside the Palace Hotel, and she was more than certain the prince had earned a few extra shadows as well. All this, Sophia had observed with keen interest earlier that day from a delightful coffee house across from the hotel.

  Patience was the discipline of her craft, and that patience had proven its worth with the arrival of a brightly painted caravan with a bold promise emblazoned on its side:

  MADAME ZAMORA

  PEERS INTO YOUR FUTURE

  As she watched the caravan disappear in the alleyway leading to the service entrance, Sophia began preparations for her return to the Palace.

  When the sun had reached high noon, Sophia returned to the streets, a simple cloak keeping the unseasonal chill at bay. Her outward fashion attracted no attention, but the one she wore underneath would have. Under the cowl, she began weighing breaching options for the hotel. Guards would still be at the doors and at events that piqued the prince’s interest, but the second floor ballroom, where McTighe had crushed her feet for a number of days, had, she observed, a narrow marble lip running along just under the window.

  Sophia ducked into the alleyway behind the Palace; and when certain she was out of plain view of San Francisco’s afternoon pedestrians, she removed the cloak. Dressed in her preferred fashion for infiltration, her dark hair up and tucked under a knitted cap, Sophia gave a quick cursory glance at the bandolier that fit across her shoulders and down her torso buckled about herself. Each pouch held darts of various potency for the small pistol attached at the waist belt. Considering Agent Harris’ abilities, it was not wrong to plan for the worst.