“Not precisely,” Georgiana said. “The pressure will create a . . . call it a channel from here to the destination, almost like a tunnel in the air. If I understand Einstein’s model aright, it will begin to collapse almost the moment that it opens, just from the weight of the air flooding into it—”
“The weight of the air,” Lord Birmingham muttered. His eyes widened. “Meaning the tunnel starts empty? Lady Westenhoq, flying the ship into a vacuum would be like flying her past her pressure limit! We’d either blow apart or need to vent so much gas we’d fall like a stone on the other side—”
“I believe,” Lady Westenhoq said, with only the slightest touch of nervousness, “the device will hold the tunnel open while it pressurizes, though the influx would create a prodigious vortex. Even with that tailwind, we’ll need to push the Edward’s engines to full to make it through.”
“Barrowman, what’s your take on that?” Birmingham said. “The frame—”
“The frame should take it, as long as we give the tunnel time to fill with air first,” said Cameron Santiago Barrowman, their Chief Engineer. The Californian finished his final adjustments to the device, then stood. “But Lady Westenhoq tells me we won’t be able to see the exit of the tunnel, and the very air we need to fly will make it collapse behind us as the device gains distance from the entry point. So we’ll be flying blind as a post without even a Mormon brake.”
Lord Birmingham looked over at Jeremiah.
“He means, once we start, we’re committed,” she translated.
“Are you ready?” Lord Birmingham said.
“Always,” Jeremiah responded.
Birmingham nodded. “Lady Westenhoq, what can our Expeditionaries expect?”
“First things first,” Georgiana said. “Eighteen aught eight in the Southern Colonies is not the Victoriana you are accustomed to—nor is it yet the Confederacy you’re familiar with, Patrick. The War of Realignment is sixty years off; Liberation itself has not yet happened—”
“Neither has Emancipation,” Patrick said, scowling. “A freeman of color would be a rare bird in this region and era, and I’ve neither the training, nor, frankly, the inclination to play a slave.” He frowned, glancing at Jeremiah, then Birmingham. “Should . . . I even be going?”
“Commander?” Birmingham asked. “Ground forces are your bailiwick.”
“Thank you sir,” Jeremiah said. “It’s not just where we’re going, it’s where he’s been.”
“It’s not like I was raised there,” Patrick said. “I was just an exchange student—”
“You’ve bragged of touring every historic site in the Confederacy,” Jeremiah said. “I need a second who knows the period and region as well as I. My family first emigrated to Georgia, and if our family lore is true, British speaking women in the South had a difficult time—”
“The Southern Colonies had just been flooded by women who fled the European Purges,” Patrick said. “Many of them were no better off than they were in Europe, because the Colonies were just coming off the Saint Simons Revolt and the Chatham Massacre and the—”
“So the Colonies were in a state of unrest,” Jeremiah said. “Hence, alert. Unless we’re lucky enough to come across Lord Christopherson’s purloined airship right away, we’re better off avoiding large scale encounters and staging small reconnaissance missions.”
“Isn’t this before the advent of powered air flight?” Natasha asked. “Before ranged thermionic weapons? I can’t see a . . . a boat taking on the Prince Edward—”
“But artillery can take it down,” Lord Birmingham said, “because while eighteen aught eight is before the thermionic discharge cylinder, it is not before the invention of the gun.”
The nasty implications of that sank in.
“So they can definitely poke holes in our sides,” Jeremiah said, “be it the sides of the Edward or the sides of your Falconers. We avoid head to head confrontation if at all possible.”
“The gentlemen and gentlewomen under my command,” Natasha said, “know how to handle blackguards with guns.”
“Any action we take here will have ripples,” Georgiana said. “As careful as they are, Natasha, your Falconers’ blasters might give a heart attack to one of their own grandparents—and that would be an unmitigated disaster, a contradiction, worse than what Lord Christopherson has planned.”
“Won’t this, by the very nature of what he’s doing, cause a contradiction?” Natasha asked. “At least in his own memories?”
“Perhaps,” Georgiana said, “but time is fluid. There’s some room for events to adapt, and Lord Christopherson is no doubt trying some clever change to history that will leave him the Fifth Baron Abinger. Something he’s planned carefully, something self-consistent. If, on the other hand, we blunder about without his knowledge and make some more blatant, more inconsistent change—well,” she said darkly, “a world in contradiction cannot survive.”
“The Commander has proposed protocols, which I expect you all to follow,” Birmingham said. “We will minimize initial exposure to protect our history but must stand ready to act decisively to save it—or, in the Commander’s words, ‘skulk first, strike later, if needed.’ Commander?”
“We recce first with a small force,” Jeremiah said, “of Expeditionaries with experience as matahari or svengali. Patrick, Wilbur, Ann-Marie—and you, Natasha; I know you have little field experience, but given your expertise I’d be willing to extend you the credit.”
“No, thank you,” Natasha said. “And it’s not just my wagging lips I’m worried about—this is the Southern Colonies. We need skins pale or black and American or English accents, not an East Indian girl. Besides, someone needs to hang back and be ready to swoop in to save your arse.”
“Fair enough,” Jeremiah said, giving Natasha a half-friendly wink. “I’ll take Klotho then. The first sortie will be led by me, with a second team ready to deploy upon command. The rest of our forces will be held in reserve until—as Natasha said, the moment is perfect for arse saving.”
“Expeditionaries,” Lord Birmingham boomed. “You all now know where we’re going. You know our strategy for attack. Execute your orders with skill and discretion. But be on your guard: we’re facing the Baron Abinger, who handed us our hats on his last encounter. Commander?”
“I may have gotten close enough to grab Lord Christopherson’s lapels,” Jeremiah said, hand gripping her own lapel so his time clockwork pin glinted, “but working together, I’m confident we can bring home the blackguard himself. Remember: I have faith in you all. Prevail, Victoriana!”
“Prevail, Victoriana!” Patrick shouted, raising his fist.
“Prevail, Victoriana!” the rest of the crew replied.
Jeremiah nodded. “Capital. Take us away, sir, and Godspeed.”
“Well said, Commander,” Lord Birmingham said, eyes glinting at her. “Expeditionaries, prepare yourselves—but trust that the Lady Westenhoq shall guide us safely to the dark heart of Georgia, and trust that the Commander shall bring the blackguard home. Engineering?”
“Battening the last hatches, sir,” Barrowman said, checking two final gauges before clamping the frame home around Christopherson’s brass-geared, spherical navigation device. “Sealed tight as a drum—but storm’s a comin’, and the horses are ready to bolt, sir.”
“Engage,” Lord Birmingham said.
Barrowman threw the tripole switch to a shower of sparks. Lights dimmed, the deckplates shuddered, and far behind them the Prince Edward’s six thermionic engines engaged with a rising whine. Then the gears of the navigation device began to turn.
Ticking resounded through the bridge.
Jeremiah stared with fascination as the device spun up. The similarity to Christopherson’s machine was obvious now; the largest difference was not its size, but the absence of the four engines from
its frame, the power of which the Prince Edward instead supplied. With that subtraction, all else was the same: gears and wheels, turning over and through themselves in a way which wasn’t natural.
The lights flickered again, and the device began to shimmer; a foxfire crept out of it and along the Hertzian guides that connected the demagnetizer to the airframe. The ship squealed and crackled around them . . . and then came a whistling of wind. The Prince Edward shuddered and began to surge forwards, as if the great airshark wanted to take a bite out of its prey.
“One quarter reverse,” Georgiana said. “It’s not ready!”
As Birmingham echoed the order, Jeremiah whirled, staring forwards. At first she could see nothing but cotton clouds strewn over blue skies; then the air shimmered and the horizon rippled, but unlike heat waves rising, all these distortions were drawing in towards a single center—and from that knot of curdled miasma loomed distorted images of airships and clouds and lightning.
The ticking increased, followed by squeals and sparks, but Jeremiah kept her eyes forwards, as fog and mist began to appear at the edge of the shimmer. The phenomenon grew and grew, turning into a vast vortex in the air—then its heart ripped open into blackness, and the screaming sound of hurricane winds tore at the Prince Edward as the time tunnel opened its maw.
“Now!” Georgiana said.
“Full ahead!” Birmingham said. “Full ahead!”
The rail jerked forwards beneath Jeremiah’s knotted fingers, and the prow of the Prince Edward surged into the roaring dark. But the time tunnel was not pure blackness; as they dove inside, crackling sparks in the clouds illuminated the Prince Edward in flashes, and in the intervening darkness ghostly rushing shapes swirled through the spaces beyond.
The ship accelerated. Full ahead, full astern; it didn’t matter now. The wind of the time tunnel drew the Prince Edward forwards like a toboggan, and only the shouts of Georgiana to Barrowman to “tack the machine” affected their progress.
Faster, faster; the whole ship began to shudder so violently Jeremiah feared it would fly apart. Brass rattled; glass cracked, and an enamel Art Nouveau panel popped loose, fell across the Chartographer’s table, and shattered. Georgiana squealed and hopped up the rails after Jeremiah, blood on her sleeve, but before Jeremiah could tend to her, a light shone forwards.
Sunlight streamed in through the tunnel before them, and the rushing hurricane winds dissipated into billowing clouds, boiling up around them in a sudden thunderhead. A wave of hot, muggy air struck the front of the Prince Edward with an almost palpable blow, misting the glass.
Then the winds subsided. The lightning faded. The clouds parted. The windows cleared. And looming before them, rising from the ground to the sky in massive columns as wide as city blocks, was a canyon made entirely of sheets of glass.
———
Jeremiah turned to Georgiana. “Not the eighteen hundreds I imagined.”
13.
Cliffs of Glass
“ALL STOP!” BIRMINGHAM shouted, as the building loomed. “All stop!”
The rail shot towards Jeremiah, caught her in the midriff, and knocked the wind from her lungs. She nearly pitched through the forward glass as the engines groaned, the reverse blowers roared, and the whole airframe shuddered. With difficulty Jeremiah righted herself, leaning back up just in time to catch the eye of an astonished young man standing before a mahogany conference table, all sliding towards her behind an approaching sheet of plate glass.
The crowd behind the man scattered, as did the crew behind Jeremiah, but she stood frozen, staring into the dark eyes of the man behind the glass. Then the Prince Edward slowed to a stop, the prow touched the pane, and a spiderweb of cracks rippled out, obscuring his face.
Jeremiah fell back to the catwalk next to Georgiana, who had hooked both her arms into the back railing and spared herself an unintentional tumble. “The sign,” Georgiana breathed, holding her hand to her head. “I got the sign wrong. We’ve gone forwards.”
“Forwards?” Jeremiah said, her voice rising slightly higher in pitch; it was one thing to speculate about the possibilities of time travel, and another to, well, actually do it. “Forwards in time? We’re not in the eighteen hundreds, but the two thousands?”
Georgiana nodded. “Nine thousand and two . . . no . . . two thousand and nine . . . Blood of the Queen, what’s wrong with my head . . .”
“Does this account for the extra term?” Jeremiah asked.
Georgiana shook her head, grimacing. “No, it’s—a—”
A spark escaped her upswept hair, and Jeremiah caught a whiff of ozone. “You’re damaged,” Jeremiah said, reaching to part the dark curls of her coiffure and examine the machinery within. “Queen’s blood, half your tubes are cracked. We’ve got to get you to infirmary—”
But Georgiana’s aghast forwards stare stopped her. Jeremiah followed her glance and saw movement behind the cracked glass. In rooms to either side of the obscured impact point, men in strange spare suits and women in oddly revealing garb were gathering to the glass, pointing, looking at them through small boxes, talking in a quite peculiar way—into their hands.
“All sections, damage report,” Birmingham was barking into the intertubes, even as he coolly surveyed the ship’s status board. “Check for structural damage, gas leaks—”
“Lord Birmingham, sir,” Jeremiah shouted. “We’re attracting too much attention!”
His eyes flicked forwards. “Quite right,” he said calmly, leaning over the rail of the helm to order Barrowman, “Demagnetize! Demagnetize!”
“Like switching horses after crossing a ford,” Barrowman said with a grimace, throwing a tripole to switch the engines back to powering the demagnetizer. The Prince Edward shuddered again as the engines revved up, and Barrowman ran to the crank that would lift the temporal device out of the demagnetizer socket. “Ladies and gentlemen, a hand here!”
Quickly, Barrowman turned the crank, Patrick pulled the alien gearbox out of the circuit, and Birmingham pulled the chain, lowering the demagnetizer back down into the socket. Barrowman slammed the crank back home, and immediately caged lightning began coursing through it. After a moment, ghostly foxfire began rippling out over the railings, the catwalks, and then the frame, and slowly, the walls of the Prince Edward became shimmering and transparent.
“Blast,” Patrick said, tossing the spherical gear from hand to hand like a hot potato as crackling foxfire rippled off it. Sonia fetched the time gear’s velvet-lined traveling box and, wincing, Patrick deposited the device in it. “I think we pulled this little cookpot too soon; it’s still hot enough to boil—”
“And the ship’s bucking the cloak,” Barrowman said, adjusting the crank, then checking the demagnetizer in its socket. He jerked his hand away from a sudden spark. “That time gear might need to run a discharge cycle after use, just like a demagnetizer. How are we faring?”
“Slow but steady,” Birmingham said, checking the gauges. “Drawing a bit much power, but we’re now transparent to an increasing spectrum of Hertzian rays . . . long waves, heat waves, now visible light waves. Good. We should be completely shrouded, unless they can see beyond violet.”
“Which . . . might be possible,” Georgiana said, still dazed, “a century on.”
“She’s right,” Jeremiah said. “Lord Birmingham, we should withdraw.”
“Back us off,” Birmingham said. “Back us off, nice and slow, sir—”
The building began to recede, slowly, and Jeremiah took stock around her. Now she could see that not every building was made of glass; some were accented with stone, some with concrete, some with steel. Some were cylinders, some were rectangles, some were agglomerations of blocks. But at least in the city center where they stood, there was barely a one of them shy of fifty stories tall.
“Is something wrong with the engines?” Natasha
asked.
“I hear it too,” Jeremiah said: an odd, choppy sound that was echoing through the hull. “Like they’re resonating—”
“There’s nothing wrong with my engines,” Barrowman said.
“There,” Georgiana said. “Outside.”
Jeremiah followed her finger. Moving through the air towards them was . . . no, not a bird; she could never have mistaken it for a bird for more than a fraction of a second. It was like a squat white kettle with something whirling atop; in a few more moments it resolved into a propeller, and the kettle, no longer seen straight on, elongated into a long, fishlike body with a raised tailfin.
Jeremiah’s jaw dropped. No overhanging balloon; no enclosed airframe; not even a glider’s wings. She couldn’t see how it was possible, but it was a heavier than air flying machine. And the chopping noise, it made, as it barreled straight towards them.
“Sir, they can’t see us,” Jeremiah said suddenly.
“Full astern,” Birmingham said, checking the telescope of the rear view. “Full astern, and vent gas!”
The Prince Edward shot back and sank, and the tremendous din of the flying propeller screamed right over them. Jeremiah caught a glimpse of sun off a painted body and two landing skis, a flash of numbers—and it was gone.
Off in the distance, more of the flying whirligigs were visible, most white and numbered like the first one, but one, shooting towards them, was black and determined, narrow yet ridged with dozens of evil-looking tubes. Jeremiah realized, instinctively, it was a warship of the air.
“We need to get out of here, sir,” Jeremiah said. “Urgently—”
“I concur, but to where?” Birmingham scowled, rotating his telescope. “Lady Westenhoq, was this not the precise point that you believed Lord Christopherson was aiming for?”
“Well,” Georgiana said, “give or take a few kilometers—”
“Then is where we should be,” Birmingham said, “which presents a quandary, as we may need to pull off quite some distance to find shelter. And no matter how big she is I wouldn’t want to face the Prince Edward off with those nimble little flitters till we know more about them.”
Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine Page 12
