Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)

by Tom DeMarco

  Sonia leaned down over the girl from behind to speak into her ear. “He shall see it all, Anya, everything. That shall be your punishment and your atonement. Were you proud? Now you shall be laid low. Was there pleasure? It shall be replaced by humiliation and dismay.” Loren could barely hear the words over the sound of sobbing. Sonia straighted up. She took the shoulders of the girl’s dress in her two hands and ripped it neatly down the back. The other angels clawed away her underwear, leaving her naked. Loren turned his face to one side, his jaw stiff and his eyes clamped shut. ‘There is no excess that unreason cannot…’ His presence was part of the girl’s degradation and that he could not help. But he could refuse to watch, refuse to be himself degraded. Only he could not close his ears to the sound of the shrieking Anya and her gleeful punishers as they slapped at her backside.

  When it was over, Sonia spoke sharply to the three young women who had assisted. “There will be no supper for you this evening. You know why that is. And no further speaking among yourselves. Each of you will go up to her room now, alone with her thoughts. I will come to see you before you sleep. Now, away.”

  Still the sound of blubbering from in front of him. Loren remained turned away. When at last he looked up, Anya had been wrapped in a white cotton robe. She was crying in the love seat, now back in its normal position. Sonia was in the seat beside her with her arms around the child’s heaving shoulders. She was kissing Anya’s tears away. “There now,” she murmured, “It’s all over. And it does feel better, doesn’t it?” She had one hand inside Anya’s terry-cloth robe, fondling. “Doesn’t it? To be free again of sin. Doesn’t it feel better?”

  Anya nodded, still shaking. She looked up shyly at Loren. “Did he see everything?” she asked Sonia.

  “Everything. Absolutely everything.”

  “Why was I punished and not the others, Milady? It wasn’t fair.”

  “No, it wasn’t. But they shall each have their turn. And their waiting is part of it.”

  “I want to whip Lisa. I do. May I Milady?”

  “To your heart’s content, my dear.”

  When they were gone, Loren lay back on the padded rest. This part too of the sickness he put out of his mind. He would return one day to have his vengeance, return with a fleet of pavilions and the lens array. There would be no need to remember the details then. All he would need to think of at that moment was the necessity to burn this place to the ground and to destroy everyone inside it.

  He was aroused in the middle of the night by the floor lamp at his side being switched on. “You remember,” she said, “that we spoke one time about the value of the second stable state of t-prime.”

  “What…?”

  “The second stable state.”

  He was still half asleep. “Yes, we spoke,” he said at last. “Or I tried to get you to consider it. But you were…”

  “Yes.” An impatient gesture. “But now I’m thinking of it. The second state is not where we expected it to be. The value is very much larger.”

  “Yes.”

  “The explanation is that there are quanta of time, indivisible units. But, of course, you already know this. You had to stumble on the fact before constructing the t-prime two Effector.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I had to stumble on it to build my own first flyer. So time too is a quantum phenomenon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like light or matter or gravity.”

  “Yes.” Where could this be leading? He was baffled.

  “The duality of light and matter and gravity is that they exhibit both particle and wave behavior. The quantum of time is its particle. But what would be its wave?”

  He considered abstractly. “I don’t know. I never thought of it that way.”

  “I have.”

  It wouldn’t make much sense, he thought. “A light wave is a construct in two dimensions, space and time. If there were waves of time, what would be the second dimension they were constructed in?”

  “The wrong question.” Her eyes were glittering with the pleasure of being a step ahead of him. “Put it out of your mind that the wave quantity and one of the dimensions the wave occupies are the same. Let us represent the wave variable as an abstract. We shall call it Lambda.” She sat down beside him on the padded table. She had a clipboard which she now arranged in her lap where he could see. With the tail end of a pencil, she wrote down a tensor equation with Lambda varying in time and space. “Forget for the moment that Lambda is time. And by the way, to do this, I must use a mathematics without commutation: so A times B is not necessarily equal to B times A.”

  Loren shrugged, staring at the equation.

  “Now let’s follow the logic through, remembering that Lambda is a quantum variable.” She wrote swiftly on the clipboard page. Loren watched over her shoulder, involved in spite of himself. As so many times in the past, he marveled now at how her mind worked. The math for Sonia was a warm and fluid thing. She was limited only by the speed of her pencil. As he looked on, he was like a student working with a master, an apprentice and his tutor. Only the odd fact that the apprentice was shackled and chained made this scene at all different.

  “Look,” she said, “it’s coming out. Like a game of solitaire. Now we replace Lamdba with t throughout, and resolve, remembering no commutation. And there! A beautiful standing wave of time in time.” She turned to him, triumphant. “You see? It has to be. We were naive not to see it from the beginning. It’s the only way it could be.”

  “But what does it mean?“

  “Mean?” She furrowed her brow. “What does it mean? Does it have to mean something? Isn’t the elegance of the construct enough?” She looked down again at the clipboard, and then up with her eyes unfocused. “A wave of time in time…”

  She clicked off the light and was gone.

  The girl Giselle was alone in the anteroom. When he called she would come in. She had the key on a string dropped into the front of her blouse. When he needed to use the bathroom, she would fetch a guard to accompany him. It had been so all morning. He had seen no sign of Sonia.

  It would be easy enough, Loren thought, to lure the simple-minded child close enough to club her into unconsciousness, but he had no stomach for it. She had been the victim already of a more terrible violence. Besides, he knew a better way. The chain that bound him was beyond breaking, a tempered and case hardened steel product from the old era. But the links that connected it to his wrist shackles looked soft. The eyes of the shackles themselves might be broken. They looked to have been made up by a blacksmith. He didn’t have the strength to break or bend the metal, that he had already tried. But if he had a heavy enough weight in his hands, he might swing them out from the ring with sufficient inertia to do the trick.

  In the bookshelves at his side were two carved stone bookends, each one weighing twenty pounds or more. The one that he could reach easily was alone not quite enough weight for his needs, but if he could get to the second one and hold them both in his hands as he swung…. Straining against the chain, he began to pull down the books that lay between him and the second bookend. When the shelf was empty all the way over to it, he levered his hips and lower body onto the shelf to reach outward with a foot. He could just stretch far enough to touch the carved figure and to get his toes behind it. Little by little, he prodded it back along the shelf toward himself. Finally it was in reach. He took it in his hand. The thing weighed even more than he had expected. He lifted the other weight in his other hand. Something would give, he knew, when he swung them together out from the connecting ring. The ring would come out of the wall, or the links would separate or his wrist would break. He gritted his teeth and swung with all his force.

  The weak link was the eye of the left wrist shackle. It snapped, propelling a shard of metal across the room and down onto the oak floor with a sharp ping. It was enough of an alarm, he suspected, to bring the girl in to investigate, and he tensed to intercept her. But there was nothing. She had left her pos
t or was asleep. It took a moment to dawn on him that he was free. The heavy chain was still attached to his right wrist, but he was free of the ring.

  Before leaving, he placed the bookends and all the books back onto the shelves. Let her think he had split the steel link with nothing but the force of his muscles. When he was done, he stepped quietly into the bedroom and closed its door behind him. From there he could go out into the corridor, bypassing the anteroom entirely, just in case Sonia’s angel was still there.

  He opened the outer door a crack. The guard was alone at the end of the corridor, facing away from him. A long look at the broad back and what it represented. This man stood between Loren and his escape. A growing rage began to seize him, a willingness to do any injury to his captors. In three quick steps he was behind the guard and had the chain on his throat. He squeezed, pulling backward so hard that no sound escaped the man’s lips. When Loren lowered him to the floor he was dead. He dragged the body back into the bedroom and placed it in an empty closet. He had never acted so violently before in his life, but he felt nothing, no remorse, not even an accelerated pulse. Only the continuing anger and determination.

  It would have been the matter of only a few minutes to strip off the guard’s clothes and shoes and dress himself in something more secure than the stupid black tunic, but now he felt the need to flee. The shoes, in any case, would have been far too large, he couldn’t have run in them. He slipped out the door, down the length of the corridor and to a window in the connecting hall. There was no one about on this the third floor. Through the window he noted the configuration of the roof, his immediate goal. He seemed to be at the point where one wing joined the main house. The wing had a sharply peaked slate roof, not at all what he was looking for. But in the middle of the main section, there was a flat roof with an iron rail around it. It was impossible to see from this angle what might be on it, but he had his hopes.

  To get under the flat roof, he would need to follow this hall to its end, down the half staircase to wherever it led. He ran quietly on bare feet. The stair led down into another hall. He heard someone approaching from the far end, and ducked into an open door. The room was dark, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. When he saw what was there, he sucked in his breath. The entire room was filled with instruments of torture. The sound of steps close behind him in the hall. Loren pressed himself into the space behind the door until the sounds had passed. As he stared outward into the room, his eyes adjusting further, he saw that what had seemed to be racks and torture devices were nothing more than Nautilus machines. He was in some kind of a gym, like the weight room of an expensive city club. There was light coming through the far door. He passed through the weight room and into what at first appeared to be a walk-through closet. Only it wasn’t a closet. There was a bed there under the window, a simple cot with a woolen blanket spread neatly over it. At the head of the bed was a wooden table with a framed photo. The picture was of himself. He picked it up, remembering. It showed him in Claymore’s kitchen back in Ithica, adjusting a frame on the wall beside the french window, glancing back over his shoulder with a smile for the photographer. Sonia had taken that shot during their last winter in the pre-Effector world.

  He lowered the frame to the table. The tiny room had another open door at its far end. It was dark beyond the door, as dark as it had been in the weight room. He passed through to see what might be there. As soon as he stepped in, he knew there was someone else in the room. It the dim light he could see a white lacquer dresser and table and chairs. The furniture was all on a reduced scale, the chairs quite tiny. It took him a moment to imagine why that might be. In the corner opposite him was a crib, and standing in it, a little girl with black hair and dark eyes, looking at him gravely over the rail. She was Shimna’s age or a little older. For a long moment, he stood stock still, staring back at her.

  Finally he stepped across the room to her side. She showed no fear at his approach, just looked up at him confidently. “What is your name, child?”

  “Laura,” she said.

  She reached up her arms trustingly toward him. He lifted her into his arms. He stared into her eyes. “Laura.”

  “I know who you are,” she offered. “From pictures.”

  “Yes. I’ve come to take you off on a trip, Laura. An adventure. We’re going to fly through the sky. Would you like that?”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  “Hold on, then. Hold tight.” Loren snatched up a white blanket that was folded over the end of the crib and transferred the little girl into his left arm to free up the hand with the chain. His sense of direction told him that the far door would lead back into the hall from which he had taken cover. He opened the door and, finding no one there, stepped outside.

  There was a double door at the end of the hall. He let himself into the largest room he had seen yet in the mansion. It stretched the whole width of the house with mullioned windows and doors on both sides. At the end of the room was a fireplace, tall enough to step into upright. There were open arched doors on either side of the hearth.

  Again the room was furnished on a splendid scale. The floor was marble tiles, a rich red in color. The walls were hung with tapestries and paintings. There was a life-size statue of an American Indian at his side, lifelike enough to make him start. Loren was still taking stock of the room when he heard footsteps approaching hurriedly from behind him. He ran toward the far doors, but suddenly there were black-suits pouring through each of them. Within a few seconds there were dozens. He was surrounded.

  An odd silence as the men sized him up. They were all armed, some with billy clubs and others with spear-like weapons. An older man, the one Sonia had referred to as Deacon, was evidently in charge. The men looked to him for direction. Not taking his eyes off Loren, he said, his lip curling, “Take him.”

  But the men didn’t move toward him. Loren had the child in his arm, and he had the chain, which he now set in motion, whirling it about his head. It made a gratifyingly wicked sound as it passed through the air. He wouldn’t have liked to be the one who stopped its motion with his body, and the black suited men were all thinking the same. It was a standoff for the moment. Loren turned himself around, still whirling the chain, so that no one was for long at his back. As he turned toward the wall from which he entered, he saw the tapestry there quiver and then it was thrust aside by a hand. There was a dark opening behind it. In the opening was an ancient face on a truncated body, a little man, grinning and waving at him. He wasn’t sure what the wave meant, but it was the only game in town. He opened his mouth and screamed the loudest most blood-curdling scream he could and charged with the chain singing through the air toward the black-suits that stood between him and the opening. They tumbled over each over, diving to get out of his way. He blundered through them, on into the opening and found himself suddenly in darkness as some kind of a door was slammed shut and barred behind him. The thump of heavy bodies crashing against the door from outside.

  There was a thin sliver of light coming in through a kind of observation slit back into the room. Loren thrust his eye up to it. What he saw was Sonia, standing in the arched door on the far side of the room. Her mouth was open, deformed. Through the thick wall he could hear her scream. It was a sound empty of malice or fury, empty of everything except anguish.

  “Come along now, Mister. Come along.” There were hands pulling at the skirt of his tunic, dragging him down the length of the narrow passage. “We can’t be staying here forever. No, we must be on our way. It’s going to be hot here in not too long a time. Oh, very hot.” A high, cackling laugh. “Too hot for us.”

  Loren followed through the blackness, conscious of the little girl’s hands gripped firmly in his hair. So far she had not uttered a sound. He felt himself guided from below around a jog in the passage and down a stair so narrow he had to turn sideways to fit. When they began down a second stair, he stopped and spoke into the darkness.

  “But where are we going?”


  “Down,” said the voice. “There is a tunnel that runs all the way down to the river. We come out there by the water in a secret place. They won’t have any idea where to expect us.” As the little man spoke, he turned on a little flashlight, dimly revealing his features. The head that Loren saw was full sized, it was only the body under it that was so small. “Down, down to the river.”

  “And what then?”

  “Then we escape. We make our way overland, lying low.”

  “Sure. Not as though we’d stand out at all: a barefoot man in black shortie nightgown, carrying a child, accompanied by a dwarf. We’ll just pass for ordinary folk.”

  “I am not a dwarf.”

  “Sorry. But not inconspicuous either.”

  The wrinkled face smiled ruefully. “No. So, what then?”

  “Can we get up to the roof?”

  “Sure. And from there?”

  There might be a flyer there. It’s just a hunch.”

  “The air boats. Oh, not me, Mister. Not in the air boats. I am too fond of my unbroken bones.”

  “Lot’s of luck then, my friend. Lot’s of luck when the black-suits get you.”

  The light flickered and then went out.

  “Let’s go then,” said the voice after a pause. They made an about face to retrace their steps part way along the passage, and then headed off to the right. There were observation slits into some of the rooms they passed, letting tiny shafts of light into the passage. Loren was completely turned around. Up one flight and then back in the direction they had come from, headed again toward the center of the house, he guessed. He put his eye to the next slit. What he saw was the library where he had been chained. He could see the alcove with its padded table.

  “Have you watched through here?” he asked.

  “Quite a show, quite a show. More amusing than the tube from the old days. Sure I watch when there’s nothing better on. Here, hurry along now. No time to chat like old friends.”