“Not if the cancer is to be burned out completely,” said Korzeniowski. “I realise that now.”
“Aha,” said Shaw, looking towards the hills. “Here comes the Fei-chi....”
“The what?”
“The flying machine.”
“I can’t see it,” said Korzeniowski.
I, too, could see no sign of the Loch Etive, though I heard a drone like that of a mosquito.
“Look,” said Shaw grinning, “there!”
A speck appeared on the horizon and the droning became a shrill whine.
“There!” He giggled in excitement. “I don’t mean an airship—I mean the Fei-chi—the little hornet—here she comes!”
Instinctively I ducked as something whizzed over my head. I looked up. I had an impression of several windmill sails spinning at fantastic speed, of long, bird-like wings, and then it was disappearing in the distance, still voicing the same angry whine.
“My God!” said Korzeniowski, removing the pipe from his mouth and registering his amazement for the first time since I had met him. “It’s a heavier than air flying machine. I was sure—I was always told—such a thing was impossible.”
Shaw grinned, almost breaking into a dance in his delight. “And I have fifty of them, captain! Fifty little hornets with very bad stings. Now you see why I feel up to defending Dawn City against anything the Great Powers send!”
“They seem a bit fragile to me,” I said.
“They are a bit,” Shaw admitted, “but they can travel at speeds of nearly five hundred miles an hour. And that is their strength. Who would have time to train a gun on one of those before a Fei-chi had been able to burst the hull of a flying ironclad with its special explosive bullets?”
“Who—how did you come by this invention?” Dutchke wanted to know.
“Oh, one of my American outlaws had the idea,” Shaw returned airily. “And some of my French engineers made it practicable. We built and flew the first machine in less than a week. Within a month we had developed it into what you have just seen.”
“I admire the man who would go up in one of those,” said Dutchke. “Aren’t they crushed by such speeds?”
“They have to wear special padded clothing, certainly. And, of course, their reactions must be as fast as their machines if they are to control them properly.”
Korzeniowski shook his head. “Well,” he said, “I think I’ll stick to airships. They’re altogether more credible than those contraptions. I’ve seen it—but I still can’t believe in heavier than air machines.”
Shaw looked almost cunningly at me. “Well, Mr Bastable? Are you still convinced I am mad?”
I continued to stare into the sky where the Fei-chi had disappeared. “You are not mad in the way I first thought,” I admitted. A sense of terrible foreboding seized me. I wished with all my heart that I was back in my own time where heavier than air flying machines and wireless telephones and coloured, talking kinemas which came to life in one’s room were the fantasies of children and lunatics. I thought of Mr H. G. Wells and I turned, looking towards the building which housed Project NFB. “I suppose you haven’t invented a Time Machine, by any chance?”
The Warlord grinned. “Not yet, Mr. Bastable. But we are thinking about it. Why do you ask?”
I shook my head and did not reply.
Dutchke clapped me on the back. “You want to know where all this leads, don’t you? You want to travel into the future and see General Shaw’s Utopia!” He had been quite won over to Shaw’s side now.
I shrugged. “I think I’ve had my fill of Utopias,” I murmured.
Chapter V
The Coming of the Air Fleets
THROUGHOUT THE DAYS which followed I made no attempt to escape Dawn City. The whole idea would have been pointless anyway. General O. T. Shaw’s men controlled all roads and guarded both the airships and the sheds where the new Fei-chi ‘hornets’ were stored. Sometimes I would watch as the Fei-chi were tested by their tall, Chinese pilots—healthy, confident young men completely dedicated to Shaw’s cause, able to accept the heavier than air machines as I could not.
Early on I assured myself that the Loch Etive hostages were safe and well and I chatted with one or two fellows I had known on board her, learning that Captain Harding had indeed died not long after being sent home to that little house in Balham where he had lodged during his leaves. Another acquaintance had died, too. In an out-of-date newspaper I read that Cornelius Dempsey had been shot in a street battle with armed policemen. Dempsey had been part of a gang of anarchists trapped in a house in East London. So far his body had not been found, but several witnesses confirmed that he had been dead when his friends carried him away. I felt sadness overwhelming me and adding to that mood of bitterness and depression which had come while I watched those terrible kinema films. More recent newspapers brought in by Shaw’s men were full of reports of Shuo Ho Ti’s daring raids, his acts of piracy and murder. One or two of the papers saw him as ‘the first modern bandit’ and it was they, I think, who dubbed him “Warlord of the Air’. Certainly, while England strove to halt Russian and Japanese military airships from taking instant vengeance and the Chinese Central Government vainly attempted to stop any aerial warships entering their territory, Shaw pulled off a series of amazing raids, descending from the sky on trains, motor convoys, ships and military and scientific establishments to get what he needed. What he did not need he distributed to the Chinese population—his repainted ‘flagship’, now no longer the Loch Etive but the Shan-tien (Lightning) and flying his familiar crimson flags, appearing in the skies over an impoverished village or town and showering money, goods and food—as well as pamphlets telling the people to join Shuo Ho Ti, the Peacemaker, in the freeing of China from foreign oppression. Thousands came to swell the ranks of his army at the far end of the Valley of the Morning. And Shaw added more ships to his fleet, bringing merchant vessels to land at gunpoint, releasing crews and passengers, flying the captured craft back to Dawn City and there refitting them with his new cannon. The only problem was a shortage among his own followers of men trained to fly the craft. Inexperienced commanders had put their ships into danger more than once and two had been lost through incompetence. A couple of times Shaw proposed that I should become his ally and help fly a ship of my choice, but I refused, for the only reason I would board an airship would be to escape and I did not wish to indulge in piracy just so that I might find a chance of gaining my freedom.
Nonetheless there were conversations with the Warlord in which he described his past to me as he continued to try to win me over.
His was an interesting story. He had been the son of an English missionary and his Chinese wife who had worked in a remote Shantung village for years until they came to the attention of the old Warlord—‘a traditional bandit’ Shaw called him—of their part of the world. The Warlord, Lao-Shu, had killed his father and taken his mother as a concubine. He had been brought up as one of Lao-Shu’s many children and eventually ran away to Peking where his father’s brother taught. He had been sent to school in England where he had been very unhappy and learned to hate what he considered the English superiority towards other races, classes and creeds. Later he went to Oxford where he did well and began to ‘realise’, as he put it, that imperialism was a disease which robbed the majority of the world’s population of its dignity and the right to order its own affairs. These were English conceptions, he was the first to admit, but what he resented was that they were reserved for the English alone. “The conqueror always assumes that his moral superiority—rather than his ferocious greed—is what has allowed him to triumph.” Leaving Oxford, he had entered the army and done well, learning all he could of English military matters, then getting transferred to the Crown Colony of Hong Kong to serve in the police—for, of course, he spoke fluent Mandarin and Cantonese. He had soon deserted the police, taking with him his whole detachment of native soldiers, two steamcarts and a considerable amount of artillery. Then he had gone b
ack to Shantung where the Warlord still ruled and—
“There I killed my father’s murderer and took his place,” he said baldly.
His mother had died in the meantime. With his connections with revolutionists throughout the world he had conceived the idea of Dawn City. He would take from Europe what, in its pride, it rejected—its brilliant scientists, engineers, politicians and writers who were too clever to be tolerated by their own governments—and he would use it to the benefit of his China.
“It is part of what Europe owes us,” he pointed out. “And soon we shall be able to claim the rest of the debt. Do you know how they first began the ruin of China, Mr Bastable? It was the English, mainly, but also the Americans. They grew opium in India—vast fields of it—and secretly shipped it into China where, officially, it was banned. This created such inflation (for those who smuggled it in were paid in Chinese silver) that the whole economy was ruined. When the Chinese government objected to this, the foreigners sent in armies to teach the Chinese a lesson for their arrogance in complaining. Those armies found a country in economic ruin and huge sections of the population smoking opium. Naturally, the only thing which could have brought this about was an innate decadence, a moral inferiority....” Shaw laughed. “The opium clippers were specially designed for the China trade, to run swiftly from India with their cargoes, and often they carried Bibles as well as opium, for the missionaries would insist that if they, who could speak pidgin Chinese, were to translate for the smugglers, they must be allowed to distribute Bibles as well. After that, there was no looking hack. And Europeans think Chinese hatred of them unreasonable!”
Shaw would become serious at times like these and would say to me: “Foreign devils? You think ‘devils’ is a strong enough word, Mr Bastable?”
Now his ambitions extended to the taking back of the whole of China:
“And soon the great grey factories of Shanghai will be ours. The laboratories and schools and museums of Peking will be ours. The trading and manufacturing centres of Canton will be ours. The rich rice fields—all will be ours!” His eyes gleamed. “China will be united. The foreigners will be driven out and all will be equal. We shall set an example to the world.”
“If you are successful,” I said quietly, “let the world also see that you are human. People are impressed by kindness as well as by factories and military strength.”
Shaw gave me a peculiar stare.
There were now some fifteen airships tied up to the mooring masts on the field beyond Dawn City and there were nearly a hundred Fei-chi in the hangars. The whole valley was defended with artillery and infantry and could withstand an attack from any quarter when it came; and we knew it would come.
We? I don’t know how I had come to identify myself with bandits and revolutionists—and yet there was no mistaking the fact that I had. I refused to join them, but I hoped that they might win. Win against the ships of my own nation which would come against them and which, doubtless, would be destroyed by them. How I had changed in the past couple of weeks! I could contemplate, without horror, the bloody deaths of British servicemen. Comrades.
But I had to face the fact that the people of Dawn City were my comrades now—even though I would not commit myself to their cause. I did not want Dawn City and all it represented to be destroyed. I wanted General O. T. Shaw—the Warlord of the Air—to drive the foreigners from his nation and make it strong again.
I waited in trepidation for the ‘enemy’—my countrymen—to come.
I was lying in my bed asleep when the news came through on the tien-ying (‘electric shadow’) machine. The milky-blue oval became General Shaw’s face. He looked grim and he looked excited.
“They are on their way, Mr Bastable. I thought you might like to be awake for the show.”
“Who...” I murmured blearily. “What...?”
“The air fleets—American, British, Russian, Japanese and some French, I believe—they are coming to the Valley of the Morning—coming to punish John Chinaman....”
I saw his head move and he spoke more rapidly.
“I must go now. Shall we see you at the ringside—the main headquarters building?”
“I’ll be there.” As the picture faded I sprang out of bed and washed and dressed; then hurried through the quiet streets of Dawn City until I reached the circular tower which was the city’s chief administrative building. There was, of course, furious activity. A wireless telephone message had been received from the British flagship Victoria Imperatrix saying that if the Loch Etive hostages were freed Shaw might send out with them his people’s women and children who would not be harmed. Shaw replied bluntly. The hostages were already being taken to the far end of the valley where they would be released. The people of Dawn City would fight together and, if necessary, die together. The Victoria Imperatrix offered the information that there were a hundred airships on their way to Dawn City and that therefore Dawn City could not possibly hope to last more than an hour against such a fleet. Shaw replied that he felt Dawn City might last a little longer and he looked forward to the arrival of the battle-fleet. In the meantime, he said, he had recently received the interesting news that two Japanese flying gunboats had devastated a village which had received help from Shaw. The British, doubtless, would be making similar reprisals? At this, H.M.A.S. Victoria Imperatrix cut off communication with Dawn City. Shaw smiled bleakly.
He saw me standing in the room. “Hello, Bastable. By God! The Japanese have got a lot to answer for where China’s concerned. I’d like to…. What’s this?” An assistant handed him a sheet of paper. “Good. Good. Project NFB is proceeding apace.”
“Where is Captain Korzeniowski?” I saw Count Rudolph and Una Persson on the other side of the room talking to one of Shaw’s cotton-clad ‘majors’, but I could not see Mrs Persson’s father.
“Korzeniowski is back in command of The Rover,” said Shaw, pointing towards the airpark, plainly visible from this tower. I saw tiny figures running back and forth as their ships prepared to take the air. So far there was no sign of the Fei-chi flying machines. “And look,” added Shaw, “here comes the battle-fleet.”
I thought at first that I saw a massive bank of black cloud moving over the horizon of the hills and blotting out the pale sunshine. With the cloud came a great thrumming sound, like many deep-voiced gongs being beaten rapidly in unison. The sound grew louder as the cloud began to fill the whole sky, casting a dark and ominous shadow over the Valley of the Morning. It was the allied Air Fleet of five nations. Each ship was a thousand feet long. Each had a hull as strong as steel. Each bristled with artillery and great grenades which could be dropped upon their enemies. Each ship moved implacably through the sky, keeping pace with its mighty fellows. Each was dedicated to exacting fierce vengeance upon the upstarts who had sought to question the power of those it served. A shoal of monstrous flying sharks, confident that they controlled the skies and, from the skies, the land.
Ships of Japan, with the Imperial crimson sun emblazoned on their white and gleaming hulls.
Ships of Russia, with great black double-headed eagles glaring from hulls of deepest scarlet, claws spread as if to strike.
Ships of France, on which the tricolour flag spread on the backgrounds of blue was a piece of blatant hypocrisy; a sham of republicanism and an affront to the ideals of the French Revolution.
Ships of America, bearing the Stars and Stripes, no longer the banner of Liberty. Ships of Britain. Ships with cannon and bombs and crews who, in their pride, thought it was to be a simple matter to raze Dawn City and what it stood for.
Shark-ships, rapacious and cruel and arrogant, their booming engines like triumphant anticipatory laughter.
Could we withstand them, even for an instant? I doubted it.
Now our ground defences had opened up. Shells sped into the sky and exploded around the ships of the mighty Air Fleet but on they came, through the smoke and flame, careless and haughty, closer and closer to Dawn City itself. And now our o
wn tiny fleet began to rise from the airpark to meet the invaders—fifteen modified merchantmen against a hundred specially designed men-o’-war. They had the advantage of the recoilless guns and could ‘stand’ in the air and shoot much longer and more accurately than the larger vessels but there were few weak points on those flying ironclads and most of the explosive shells at worst only blackened the paint of the hulls or cracked the windows in the gondolas.
There was a bellow and fire sprouted from the leading British airship, H.M.A.S. Edwardus Rex, as its guns answered ours. I saw the hull of one of our ships crumple and the whole vessel plunge towards the rocky ground of the foothills, little figures leaping overboard in the hope of somehow escaping the worst of the impact. Black smoke curled everywhere over the scene. There came an explosion and a blaze of flame as our ship struck the ground and its engines blew up, the fuel oil igniting instantly.
Shaw was staring grimly through the window, controlling the formation of our ships through a wireless telephone. How hard it had been to make an impact on the enemy fleet—and how easily they had destroyed our ship!
Boom! Boom!
Again the great guns roared. Again an adapted merchantman buckled in the air and sank to the earth.
Only now did I wish that I had accepted a commission on one of the ships. Only now did I feel the urge to join the fight, to retaliate, as much as anything, out of a spirit of fair play.
Boom!
It was The Rover, spiralling down with two engines on fire and its hull buckling in half as the helium rushed into the atmosphere. I watched tensely as it fell, praying there would be enough gas left in the hull to let the ship come down relatively lightly. But that was a hundred tons of metal and plastic and guns and men falling through the sky. I closed my eyes and winced as I thought I felt the tremor of its impact with the ground.
I was in no doubt of Korzeniowski’s fate.
But then, as if inspired by the old captain’s heroic death, the Shan-tien (the old Loch Etive) offered a broadside to the Japanese flagship, the Yokomoto, and must have struck right through to her ammunition store for she exploded in a thousand fiery fragments and there was scarcely a recognizable scrap of her left when the explosion had died.
The Warlord of the Air Page 15