by Guy d'Armen
“We are not landing.”
“And we are not going to any downed comet are we?” Ardan slammed his palm into the instruments. “When were you going to tell me what this is about?”
Ardan then realized he had to keep both hands on the stick, which occupied him physically and kept him from leaping at Yarteb. Yarteb looked at his compass once again.
“Yes, we are close. Ardan, you see what the compass is doing?”
The rain battered the tiny plane, clattering the windows. Ardan, through the mechanisms of the throttle, could feel the machine struggling. When the plane dipped and pitched, when the weight of the ice on the floats tugged downward at what seemed now like a ridged contraption, his hands sensed the smallest sensations, the subtlest tendencies of the ice box suspended by, and Ardan could now see this, two pounding engines each cranking a propeller.
“My compass, I said. Look at it.” Ardan took his eyes from the sheet of gray icy mist and saw in Yarteb’s palm one side of the needle starting to point vertically, off the plane of the rose imprint. “Yes, you see that? The needle is pointing not north or south, but upward toward pure magnetic south and the other side downward to magnetic north.”
“What does that matter?” Ardan said, the muscles of his arms on fire from the strain of the throttle. “And Rodrigo was right. We have to land this plane. We can’t take any more of this. We have to ground it.”
“Oh, we aren’t going to land this plane on the ground.”
“What?”
Looking at his compass even closer now, “Yes, we are almost there.”
“Where, Yarteb? Look outside. What can you see? There is nothing there.”
“No, not below. Look here.”
Yarteb thrust his compass forward where Ardan could see the reading. The needle at the southern marking was pointing nearly straight up, almost against the glass casing.
“Magnetic south. So what,” Ardan yelled.
“True magnetic south, indeed. A little farther.”
The frozen rain continued to slam against the windscreen as the plane pushed on through the gray mist, and despite wrestling with the throttle, the engines were holding. Ardan’s shoulders were lodged against the wall of the cockpit. He shrugged to find some space to reach beneath his left arm to tap his pistol in its holster.
“Save it,” Yarteb said. “There will be time later.”
“No, the pistol is not for you. I was going to fire at the floats below, hit the welding, and release the weight. The ice there is pulling us down.”
“Ah, Ardan. We need those, for they are filled with hydrochloric acid.”
“Acid?”
“Yes, each contained in plastic-coated glass containers.”
“If they puncture or leak….”
“Yes, yes, gas.”
“And we will be engulfed in a fireball.”
These precautions, addressing them, were irritating Yarteb.
“I weighed the risk!”
Ardan found this perplexing.
“What kind of madman weighs risk?”
“Madman?”
“A madman who throws men from planes.”
“Rodrigo was an unfortunate expense. But he was the only man with an aluminum plane.”
“What does aluminum have to do with anything?”
“It’s not magnetic.”
Just then the plane jolted back from the impact of the something hitting the nose just in front of the cockpit. Ardan instinctively tugged left on the stick and angled the plane away from the barrage, for another object slid off the right wing and corkscrewed into the downpour behind the plane.
“What are those?” Ardan called out, as what looked like a flying animal was chopped by one of the propellers, which chugged and then regained its pace.
“Yes, the propellers are holding,” Yarteb proclaimed. “I reinforced them and strengthened the engines before we left.
“But what is attacking us?”
“Unfortunately, my creations: zombie bats.”
“Zombie bats?”
“Yes, I created them all: zombie rats, spiders, and other animals of infestation.”
A bat crashed into the windscreen, and Ardan could see, as the plane’s speed held it pinned against the glass, its distended fangs, its red eyes, how it mindlessly struggled to regain its bearings.
“Yes, I made them, bred them,” Yarteb said, and in his voice Ardan detected both pride and regret. “I bred them at the Saint Ambrose.”
“And now…”
“Ah, the purest devotees always become the most vehement heretics. I know my standing.”
“A change of heart?” Ardan added, and pulled hard on the stick to right the plane. Another bat flew by, missing the fuselage.
“But these bats are merely a nuisance. If we destroy Saint Ambrose, the bats will go with it.”
“What is Saint Ambrose?”
“That, there.”
In front of the trembling seaplane, above the storm, was what appeared to be a suspended disk hovering in mid air. Only, the disk was the size of several, perhaps a dozen city blocks, and on top were what seemed to resemble buildings, certainly structures, structures that could be inhabited, though the approach angle obscured more details. But it was certain that lights atop the disk gave the surface a glow.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Yarteb murmured to himself, “But as Bacon said, there is no excellent beauty that does not have some strangeness in proportion.”
“How does it float? What suspends it?” Ardan eked out slowly, as the bats fluttered about.
“It is above true magnetic south, and as it is made of treated iron and other magnetized metals, the fundamental principles of magnetism keep it aloft.” Yarteb spoke as if to himself: “And they want merely to colonize the region, to set up their own city.”
“Who does?”
Yarteb barked out, “Who, yes! Who are they, my former employers? Tinkering with this and that is what they are doing. Such small dreams, and me with such abilities. To keep me in the lab, they fail at all aspects of grandeur. They fail to see in the world what even Kant knew. Man is an animal that needs a master!”
“And so you will destroy it?”
“Ah, a wrong step but in the right direction, or is it a right step in the wrong direction? Either way, this is a failure, and as Nietzsche knew, if you are going to fall, learn to fall faster. And I will help them fall faster.”
The seaplane, splitting the contours of opposing clouds, rose above the rain, or rather the rain seemed to move past the plane, and the ice shelf below became obscured by the trailing mists. Saint Ambrose sat balanced in the palest blue air there at the bottom of the world. And the plane was ascending now with ease because of how the ice on the floats pitched the nose up. But in the clear air, the two men could no longer hide. The zombie bats swarmed and battered the plane, rattling the door, shredding through the propellers.
“The propellers will sustain, I think,” Ardan yelled, “but they’ll clog the engines.”
“Yes, I am prepared for this.”
Yarteb went to the back of the cabin, stumbling as the plane jerked and swayed. He threw off the tarp and unlocked a wooden crate, went to the door, elbowed open the flap, tucked the crate opening into the breach, and slowly released what Ardan determined were finches, birds. Another crate was readied, opened, and more finches fluttered and spun out into the pale blue air. Ardan turned, and in quick motion, surveyed the situation. One crate was left, and Yarteb had refastened the door and returned to the seat just behind and diagonal from Ardan. The swarm of zombie bats flooded the cluster of finches as they scattered in shock and paranoia.
“Zombie vampire bats?” Ardan asked, recalling the fangs on the bat that had stuck to the windscreen.
“Almost. Not zombie vampire bats; vampire zombie bats,” Yarteb said with a shrug. For Ardan, that distinction, to be intentional like that, made the whole enterprise even more devious. “Look,” Yarteb continued, as he kicked ope
n the door, reached out, caught the wing of a bat with his hands, and yanked it into the cabin before closing the door. He then pinned the bat down with one boot on each wing, and then, oddly, but to Ardan this was becoming increasingly understandable, however horrific, he stood over it like a proud parent. “You see the vacant look in its eye? You see how the saliva suspended between its teeth seems more viscous? And I was able to engineer it to stave off lactic acid build-up, thereby allowing it to maintain its strength, its endurance.” Yarteb lorded over his beast, proud, yes, but also in a way that Ardan saw reveled in a monstrous domination. Then, Yarteb, with a tinge of remorse, took out his knife and dragged it across the floor of the fuselage, severing the bat’s head from its body. And then in one motion, he flung open the door and kicked the lifeless carcass out.
“The hydrochloric acid is to dissolve Saint Ambrose, I understand now,” Ardan began. “And our plane is aluminum, because it won’t be subject to magnetic influences.” When Yarteb nodded, he asked his next question. “What’s in that last crate?”
Yarteb went over, unlatched the clasp, and the wooden sides fell away, revealing a Gatling gun.
“What’s that for?” Ardan asked, already accepting whatever the answer might be, as it seemed he had no choice.
“For them,” Yarteb said, pointing toward the hovering city.
Two specks in the sky fell away from the disk and were on the approach. Yarteb set the tripod in front of the side door and then boosted the Gatling up to latch it into position.
“Aluminum planes also?”
“Yes.”
“We’re are going to fire at them from the side of our plane and somehow not hit our engine and wing on that side?”
“Not quite.” Yarteb continued to ready the gun. “I am going to fire these rounds—they are capsules of hydrogen, and the propulsion, when it fires, works to dissolve the casing, releasing the hydrogen gas. So, we will be creating pockets of hydrogen, hydrogen clouds, that, and with some other accelerants, will lead to the corrosion cracking of their planes.”
“But not our plane? And why not use regular rounds?”
“No,” Yarteb said without looking over. “We must erase the trace. Put your goggles down; put them on. I treated your lenses so you’d see the hydrogen clouds as purple. Just don’t run into them.”
Ardan pulled his goggles down, trying to remember when they were out of his possession. Yarteb, meanwhile, ran the hand crank to rotate the barrels, and once he saw the mechanism was working, fed the cartridge belt through the intake. Ardan, though, began to struggle with the plane’s controls even more than before. Though they were out of the rain, the ice on the floats had solidified to the point where the plane’s equilibrium was compromised. And, in this thin air, the higher they went, the less responsive the rudder and flaps were.
“The ice on the floats, it’s making us unstable.”
“Then climb out and chip it off. We have a few minutes until they intercept us.”
“You want me to chip it off of those acid missiles?”
“If you can’t control the plane…”
Ardan wasn’t going anywhere. The Gatling was ready, and Yarteb was eyeing the line of sight. The seaplane was still climbing, and Saint Ambrose was well within view. Ardan slammed hard on the throttle and maneuvered the little plane to an angle that would bring the two approaching aircraft into the Gatling’s view. Ardan’s goggles were pulled down over his eyes. He was ready for the purple clouds. But still, the seaplane was slow to adjust. When Ardan expected to make a sharp turn, the plane merely started to affect a rounded loop, and when he yanked hard to the left, the plane could only make a subtle bank. Surely, in the open blue sky, these maneuvers seemed amateurish, and without any cloud cover, or even the frozen rain for which Ardan was feeling some slight nostalgia, he felt like a sitting duck for his adversaries. And what if their rounds pierced the, what did Yarteb say the acid containers where made of, glass? The whole plane would be engulfed in a flash of fire that would incinerate the two of them before they had to worry about choking on their own vomit from the escaping gas.
This is not what Ardan signed on for. And he was not about to climb out onto the frozen rigging that held up the acid floats. Then he saw a peculiar switch on the controls, one that seemed to have been added recently, for it was clean, without scrapes or gouges.
“What’s this switch do?”
Yarteb leaned around him to see.
“No, not that one. That releases the acid tanks, and we need to be on top of Saint Ambrose. There is no propulsion system. They just fall and explode on contact.”
“You mean we could have shed this dead weight long ago?” When Ardan saw his passenger, the look startled him. Yarteb was now wearing a gas mask, fully enclosed around a helmet and attached to thin brown fabric that extended to beneath the collar of his coat.
“Where’s mine?” Ardan shouted.
“I had to make sure you did as you were told.”
Ardan straightened up.
“Fine. Then we’re doing this my way.”
He adjusted course directly for Saint Ambrose. The two planes pursuing them had turned to chase at an oblique angle, but now that the course had been reset, their pursuit was established. The seaplane was arcing to the top of the city, with the two planes gaining behind. Ardan yanked the stick to the left, and once the plane had fixed to that direction, he pulled back to bring the Gatling around to face the planes. Yarteb fired. Purple clouds burst into the blue behind them, in front of their pursuers. Ardan swerved again, set the tack, and then brought the Gatling around. More volleys were launched. The spent casings pinged off the back wall of the fuselage and rolled around under the seats. Behind the plane a sharper purple, as seen through Ardan’s goggles in the mirrors, bloomed in the foreground. The enemy pierced the clouds without deterring. And again the serpentine maneuver, and again purple sunbursts exploded in the sky, forming an expanding chain of hydrogen gas.
“Any time now, their planes should start to corrode and fall back. Once more, and I’ll set a wall of clouds that will do them in.”
The seaplane, high above Saint Ambrose, was over the lip of the disk, and Ardan could make out what looked like factories with funnels puffing smoke higher into the atmosphere, in fact so high that the smoke had not time to dissipate before it hit the ceiling of the atmosphere and billowed out in an umbrella. Below, he saw roads and cars, or vehicles of some kind, gliding along. There was even some greenery, maybe a park, and he thought he saw, and perhaps he was right, people who stopped to look upward at this ridiculous plane climbing toward the blackening atmosphere. And Ardan started to breath more heavily. The air was thinning? He looked back at Yarteb, straddling the Gatling’s tripod, firing out with a ferocious energy. The man was laughing. Yarteb, in his mask and suit, could breath all he wanted, while Ardan started to labor, as he did all he could to keep the plane on course, bracing with his legs as if he were going to push his boots through the floor of the cabin. When he brought the plane around, he tucked his shoulder into the controls to leverage his weight behind the maneuver. Still, he puffed and mixed short and long breaths.
“We’re over the city! When do we drop?”
“Higher!”
“The engines, their combustion will give out!”
“Forced induction. They’re fine.”
In the diminishing air, the plane began to steady itself, though Ardan was uncertain how his speed was being affected. And Yarteb, anchored by his grip on the Gatling, stood, laughing, sending purple clouds back down in the seaplane’s wake. Ardan wrenched himself between his seat and the sidewall to see that the two planes had fallen away. And what a feeble attempt it was. The zombie bats had been repelled with an ease that made this whole adventure somewhat ridiculous. And only two planes for the defense of a floating city? Perhaps they had thought no one would ever advance on them, not at the bottom of the word and not at this altitude. Ardan could see the curvature of the Earth. He could see the
black heavens above. He tugged on his dangling seat belt to find the latch, only to see where the cord had been sliced earlier by Yarteb’s knife. Ardan looked back over his shoulder and then, with one hand, unclasped the belt to his pants, removed it, threaded it through the seat supports, wrapped it around his right thigh, yanked it tight, and then buckled it. He was secure.
“Now!” Yarteb yelled. “Release the floats! Flip the switch!”
Ardan, seeing Yarteb bracing for the weight shift and jolt, knocked his hand against the panel below the switch.
“It’s jammed!”
“What! Flip the switch!”
Yarteb turned and pumped his fists. Ardan quickly released the floats. Yarteb couldn’t see this with his head turned. And once the floats were gone, the plane’s maneuverability was regained, and Ardan jerked the plane hard right, toward the open door. First went the Gatling gun. Then, with Yarteb’s hands in the air, he too fell toward the door, and through it, only to hold onto the outer rigging that once suspended the floats.
“Ardan, you fool, the mission is over!”
Even in the proper revenge there is no redemption, for Yarteb’s larger ambitions were a fantasy that persisted, that lived on successfully and dangerously, parallel to this momentary setback.
Ardan, held well enough in place by his belt, reached inside his coat for his pistol, thought better of it, and then tipped the plane even more until Doctor Yarteb’s cries fell away.
The first bomb detonated atop one of the structures, then the other a short ways away on some low-rise barracks. The flashes were too distant to notice, though Ardan would not have seen them, for he had long since turned the plane back around.
This series of interlinked stories by Win Eckert first appeared in the earlier volumes of Tales of the Shadowmen—this one, in TOTS 2. For the uninitiated, the character of “Shrinking” Violet Holmes, who stars in this tale, was created by Matthew Baugh and Win Scott Eckert in order to explain Clive Reston’s genealogy. Reston was featured in Marvel Comics’ The Hands of Shang Chi: Master of Kung Fu series. Violet helps connect the Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu novels. Baugh established her as Mycroft’s daughter, while Eckert provided her name. Violet’s aunt is Sherlock Holmes’ wife, Mary Russell, from the novels by Laurie King. Philip José Farmer’s Tarzan Alive identified Sir Denis Nayland Smith as a nephew of both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, thus making him Violet’s cousin.
