Bettina glanced right, but couldn’t see Arjuna. He had already slipped around the next row of shelves, out of her line of sight.
Please Arry, remember the plan. Quiet and careful.
She moved forward to the next row as well, peering through the gaps in the shelves and crates, straining to see who or what was in the open workspace in the center of the room. She could see shapes and shadows, and movement, but nothing clear or certain. A moment later she heard liquid sounds of sloshing and pouring, and muttered words that she couldn’t interpret. She was about to move up to the third and last row of shelves when she heard a sharp gasp and choking sound on her right, and she turned to see Arjuna’s legs kicking out from behind the next shelf at an awkward angle.
Bettina rushed down the row and spun around the corner, pointing her coilgun, but all she found was Arjuna lying on his back and tugging a thin cord off his neck. “Where is—?”
A hand closed around her neck from behind and instantly she was choking, unable to swallow, unable to breathe. The hand was small but as strong as iron, and Bettina could feel the sharp little fingers digging into her skin like a vulture’s talons.
Her first reaction was to snap her head back, but this only offered her a view of the ceiling and did not help her to breathe or allow her to strike her attacker in the face as hoped. Then she raised her left hand to jab her coilgun into the iron hand itself, but a second hand grabbed her wrist and wrenched it to the side, smashing the gun from her fingers against the edge of the shelf beside her.
As Arjuna scrambled to his feet in front of her, Bettina felt her own fingers and toes going numb and cold as her vision began to blur and fade into a haze of white. With a last, wild burst of energy, she used her right hand to set her cane on her shoulder and slide it swiftly back behind her. She was rewarded with a hard thump and a grunt of surprise and pain, a grunt with a distinctively female flavor.
The hand on Bettina’s throat loosened just as Arjuna rose to his full height, placed one hand on the side of his wife’s head, partly to shield her and partly to tilt her head to the side, and with the other hand he drove a calloused fist into the face of her attacker.
The hand let go and Bettina stumbled forward into Arjuna’s arms, but she pushed him away and gasped, “Get her!”
Arjuna bolted away, leaving her to massage her neck, relearn how to breathe, and blink the sparkling white lights out of her vision. She was still recovering from the assault when she bent down to pick up her coilgun and then pushed away from the wall to limp out into the open workspace away from the shelves where several long white electric lights hummed on the ceiling. And there she saw a machine she only barely recognized.
The famous autogyro, I presume.
It had a slender, rounded hull resting on four little wheels, and her first thought was that it resembled a cross between an autocarriage and a rowboat with a small steam engine mounted on the back side. But this vehicle also had a long tail with several flat wings on the end, and above the engine stood a steel shaft that blossomed outward into a circular fan of many long, slender rotor blades.
All of this she noted in an instant because the second thing that she saw was the thin middle-aged man leaning over the back side of the engine, pouring something black and foul-smelling into the boiler. His thin gray hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and oil, and his bright blue eyes shone behind his large circular glasses.
“Ranulf Kaiser, you are under arrest.” She leveled her coilgun at him, intending to shoot him whether he surrendered or not, but his body was almost entirely hidden by the autogyro’s engine and she didn’t dare to miss and have to wait for the three-second recharging delay that would inevitably follow, during which time she would be nearly defenseless.
Behind her there came a dull crash from the shelves of spare parts and tools. Bettina called out, never taking her eyes off the man before her, “Arjuna? Is everything all right?”
A second crash answered her, followed by her husband’s strained voice, “Everything’s fine, dear!”
And then there came a series of painful-sounding thuds and grunts and bangs and groans. The fight behind the shelves carried on without a sign of slowing, but Bettina remained focused on the man in the well-tailored gray suit. “Mister Kaiser, please step away from the machine with your hands raised where I can see them, and kneel on the floor.”
“No, thank you,” the gentleman said with a nervous, twitchy smile. “I haven’t the time just now.”
“Yes, I understand you’re quite impatient to set foot on the drifting isle,” she said. “Although I can’t imagine why. The odds of finding anything more than a pitch of grass and a handful of trees are remote. You can’t possibly think there’s anything worth stealing up there, do you?”
“That would be my business, miss, not yours,” he said, his voice wavering as though he was out of breath. “And as soon as my associate is finished killing your friend, I assure you that she’ll make short work of you, so I highly recommend you leave, now. Please.”
“Murder, Mister Kaiser?” Bettina edged forward. “We’ve seen your private collection in the basement of your home. We know how much you relish the challenge of your trade, if it can be called a trade. And I suspect you value those stolen objects almost as much as you value your triumphs over the police and the Ministry of Justice. And over your sister.”
“Ah, my dear Gisele.” Ranulf smiled sadly and shook his head. “So she sent you herself, did she? I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect, well, any of this.”
“We’re very good at what we do, Mister Kaiser.”
“And so I am, my dear. So am I.” Ranulf sighed. “Miss Strauss! We have a schedule to keep.”
Crates continued fall to the floor, and small metal things crashed onto the hard concrete, filling the shop with strident clangs and eye-watering screeches.
Bettina winced. “Arjuna?”
Neither of the pugilists answered, except with more grunting and straining noises.
“How fortuitous that we each brought someone who specializes in violence,” Ranulf said as he set aside the empty bucket of black slime and closed up the small boiler. There was no mocking smile on his lip, no clever glint in his eyes. Everything about the thin man sagged and shuddered. His hands shook, his eyes darted, his breathing was ragged, and each shuffle of his scuffed shoes looked awkward and off balance.
“Step away from the machine, now!” Bettina tried to target the man’s hand or shoulder or even his ear, but he was never entirely visible for more than a moment as he puttered about on the far side of the autogyro.
“No, no. I’m afraid I’ll be leaving now, miss.” Ranulf reached back swiftly to spin the propeller on the back of the engine and then he reached down to flick a switch inside the small cockpit. The engine coughed, sputtered, and then began to put-put-put as the propeller continued to spin and the motor began to shake and belch out a thin but steady stream of black smoke from the back side.
Bettina glanced over at the closed doors on the far wall, the only entrance and exit for the machine. “You’ll never get out,” she said. “As soon as you go near those doors to open them, I’ll fire.”
“I believe you, I truly do,” he said softly. And then he reached up to grasp a small gray box hanging by a thick cable from the ceiling.
Bettina saw several switches on the box and her eye quickly traced the path of the box’s cable across the ceiling to the corner of the doors.
Damn.
The doors clanged and began to slowly rise on their own as a small electric motor in the corner hauled them upwards on a pair of chains.
“Miss Strauss?” Ranulf said loudly over the puttering of the autogyro’s engine. “Last call!”
The fight behind the shelves reached a new fevered pitch, and Bettina heard a flurry of expletives as the combatants fell into one of the shelves and sent yet another ill-fortuned crate smashing into the floor.
“As you wish,” Ranulf said, mostly t
o himself. He grasped the edge of the cockpit and back of the engine’s housing and began to push the autogyro, rolling it across the floor and out into the dark yard.
Bettina followed him, still keeping her gun raised though the effort was beginning to hurt her shoulder. She tried to circle around the back of the machine to get a clear shot, but Mister Kaiser leapt lightly over the cockpit and simply carried on from the opposite side.
“Arjuna! He’s trying to leave!” She marched across the workspace and out into the starlight. The noise from the engine began to rise as the propeller spun a bit faster.
She shook her head.
We’re out of time.
She squinted through the shadows and fired, her needle whistling out into the darkness to clatter on the ground in the distance. She grimaced as her gun’s capacitor whined, and she saw Ranulf take the opportunity to slip into the front of the cockpit, and the autogyro’s engine roared louder.
“Arjuna! Now!”
It took another second for her gun to finish recharging, and she fired again at the mottled shadows, only to hear the tiny needle ping harmlessly off the side of the machine. It was rolling along steadily on its own power now and she could feel the wind from the propeller rising as it accelerated down the concrete strip between the warehouses and sheds. And the faster the little craft moved, the faster its huge top rotor began to turn.
“No you don’t, Kaiser!” a woman yelled.
Bettina turned to look just as the small blonde figure of Magdalena Strauss collided with her, nearly hurling her to the ground. She caught herself with her cane and raised her coilgun with a clear shot at the woman’s fleeing backside when a heavy mass of dark feathers and claws slammed into her arm, knocking the gun from her hand.
The two birds crashed to the ground, screeching and clawing and pecking at each other in a dark cloud of dust, but the fight quickly become very one-sided. The large raven thrust his talons and beak into the chest and neck of the small crow, and suddenly the duel was over. Scratch kicked free of Ripper’s bloody body, and the raven flapped his dark wings in triumph.
“You imbecile!” Bettina swung her cane at the bird, who merely flapped out of reach and laughed at her.
“I killed him!” Scratch cawed and danced. “So much for the mighty crows!”
Bettina looked up and saw Strauss catch up to the autogyro at the end of the concrete strip and she dove into the open cockpit behind Kaiser just as the spinning rotor caught hold of the night air and the strange machine lifted up and over the fence, over the next factory’s roof, and on up into the black sky until it was beyond Bettina’s sight and all she could hear was the soft drone of its engine fading into the distance.
Arjuna shuffled up beside her in a half-hearted jog, one hand clutching his ribs. His hair stood out at all angles, blood trickled from his nose and lip and ear, and yet he greeted her with a grin. “I think I broke her nose and some of her fingers.”
“They escaped!” She pointed at the sky, though there was no longer anything to see.
“Yes, I know.” He spat on the ground. “Don’t worry. We’ll catch them.”
“How, Arjuna?” She frowned at him. “How exactly do you plan to catch them now?”
He looked down at the raven still hopping in jubilant circles around his dead foe. “Hey Scratch, you still in one piece?”
“Of course!” the bird answered. “A lone crow is no match for a raven.”
“Good. Then get out there and follow Kaiser.” He pointed upward.
“You mean the island, don’t you? Ravens never go there, never!” the raven squawked. “There’s rules about the island. We don’t go, we don’t look, we don’t touch, and we don’t talk. Never!”
“You will tonight,” Betty said quietly.
“Why should I?” Scratch asked, hopping back from them.
“Because we just helped you play out your little revenge fetish,” Bettina answered, “And because of your clumsiness, we lost our man. So unless you want the Ministry of Justice to declare ravens to be a hostile species within the city limits, you’ll do as I saw. Now!”
“You wouldn’t,” the raven croaked. “The apes would hunt us. The crows would slaughter us!”
“Then you need to give me a damn good reason not to.” Bettina stared at him coldly.
Scratch hopped nervously, and then flapped into the air, yelling, “I’ll do it, you ugly ape, I’ll do it!” He went on cawing and croaking until he vanished into the darkness.
Arjuna sniffed and wiped at the blood around his nose. “There, you see? Problem solved.”
To their left a door banged open, and husband and wife turned to see a rectangle of harsh white light spilling from a large tool shed across the lane from the warehouse they had just exited, and standing in that light was a tall woman with long gray hair framing her face and a long-barreled coilgun in her hands. “Who the hell are you and what have you done with my autogyro?!”
Chapter 9. A Hasty Bargain
Bettina peered at the woman holding the rifle for a moment, and quickly decided that whoever she was, the woman was not actually going to shoot them. There was genuine anger in the woman’s eyes, but no blind rage, and the rifle never rose to actually point at them.
So it was her autogyro? That will make this simpler. Not easier, but simpler.
“Miss Goldstein, I presume?” Bettina called out. “Hildegard Goldstein?”
“That’s right,” the woman replied, still clutching her rifle. “And you are?”
“My name is Bettina Rothschild, and this is Arjuna Rana,” the detective said. “We were pursuing an escaped criminal, but failed to stop him before he absconded with your most remarkable invention. And now he and his accomplice appear to be well on their way to… places unknown. Fortunately, we have a feathered associate who is currently tracking them, so we can continue our pursuit.”
“You’re the police?” Hildegard lowered her rifle.
Bettina slipped her coilgun into her black bag and began walking slowly toward her. The pain in her right foot spiked sharply, and she winced as she folded back the lapel of her violet jacket to reveal her badge. “Yes, we are.”
“So who locked me in my own shed? And why didn’t my alarms go off?” Hildegard asked, peering around the dark yard. “That whole building was covered in tripwires and sirens and lights.”
“I can’t say,” Bettina said with a grimace as her foot twisted under her weight. “Perhaps the thieves found and disabled your alarms.”
Arjuna glided gracefully up to her side to help her. “Miss Goldstein, I don’t mean to be abrupt but we need to know everything about that machine of yours, right now.”
“The autogyro?” Hildegard shrugged. “It’s been around for years.”
“But no one’s ever flown one for more than a few minutes, or very high above the ground,” Arjuna said. “How did you do it? How did you fly all the way to Inselmond yesterday?”
Bettina sighed.
Hildegard looked at her sharply. “What was that for? You don’t believe me? Well, it’s true. It’s all true. I flew all the way up there and set all four wheels down as pretty as you please on a nice strip of green grass. The wind was as sharp as my father’s tongue and snatched the hat right off my head. I got out and looked over the edge, straight down over a mile to the farms and the river, and I threw up right there. Almost fell over the edge too. I took a quick look around, and then I got back in the cockpit and flew home again.”
Arjuna grinned. “You threw up? Over the edge? I’d hate to be the farmer out in the field that day.”
Hildegard grinned back. “I never thought about that. Poor chap.”
Bettina rubbed her eyes. “Yes, I see, thank you.”
“But none of that matters,” Hildegard said with a wave of her hand. “The gyro can only fly that far and that high with the right fuel in the boiler, and I left it empty. I imagine your thief filled the boiler with water, so he will have run out of steam by now. He’s probabl
y crashed in Lake Sherrat already. I suppose we should go down there and look for them?”
“Wait, what fuel?” Bettina asked.
Hildegard smiled politely. “I’m afraid that’s a trade secret.”
“Is it a dark, syrupy fluid?”
The inventor’s smile vanished. “How do you know that?”
Bettina frowned and led the way back into the makeshift hangar, past the dead crow in the path, and inside to the vacant space where the autogyro had been parked. She pointed at the bucket with the dark stains on its sides. “There. He poured that into the boiler.”
Hildegard dropped to one knee, staring into the bucket. “No! How did he know about it? That’s impossible! No one knew.”
“Someone knew,” Arjuna said. “If not the Shadows, then the sparrows probably saw it. Or the pigeons. Sparrows see everything, and they tell everyone, including the crows. So what exactly is this fuel?”
The older woman shook her head. “Nothing. Just the biggest secret in the whole city, and now it’s gone. Damn!” She kicked the bucket and sent it flying against the back wall of the warehouse. “If only Til had been here! He’d have sorted them out with one good swing of his wrench. Damn!”
Bettina considered the bucket rolling across the floor, drizzling a thin trail of the black fuel from its lip. It rolled over to the side of the room and banged against a wheel. The wheel was attached to something under a grease-stained tarp. She said, “Am I to understand that the reason you were able to accomplish your historic flight yesterday was your fuel, and not your vehicle?”
“Yes. What of it?”
“So then, if we assume that our fleeing prisoner has properly fueled his autogyro, he is probably well on his way to Inselmond as we speak, and not floundering about in the lake,” Bettina said. “But at the same time, there is no reason why we cannot pursue him. There are other autogyros, yes? Then we’ll simply put your fuel into one of them and continue our pursuit.”
The Kaiser Affair (The Drifting Isle Chronicles) Page 8