“Other gyros?” Hildegard stared at her. “I just lost my pride and joy, and you want me to give what’s left of my fuel to someone else? Just hand my work over to one of my competitors? What is this? Did Breckenridge send you? Or was it Kleinfelder? Because whatever they told you was a lie. Even without my fuel, their gyros are worthless. Their gears are all wrong.”
“It doesn’t have to be someone else’s autogyro,” Bettina said calmly. “It looks to me that you have a second one right there in the corner, under that tarpaulin.”
The inventor glanced over at the covered machine. “That? That’s the old bird, the one I built years ago. It was just a prototype, and it’s in pieces.”
“I see.” Bettina nodded. “Well then, Miss Goldstein, I will give you a choice. Give us the fuel to take to another autogyro pilot, or provide us with another autogyro yourself. This is a matter of public security. Lives may be at risk. We need your decision now.”
“Another gyro?” Hildegard pushed her wiry fingers back through her long gray hair. “So if I’m to be permitted to keep my secrets, I need to get that old boy flying again, eh? How soon?”
Bettina produced her pocket watch. “You have two hours. I believe that is roughly how much time it would take us to find another gyro pilot and commandeer his machine, particularly at this hour of the evening. If Arjuna and Oster help you, can you make that gyro of yours flight-worthy in two hours?”
“It’d be easier with Til and Clarry here to help me, but I’ve no idea where they could be at this hour.” Hildegard frowned. “It seems I have little choice.”
“There’s more,” Bettina said. “This investigation is classified. You cannot, for any reason, tell anyone that we were here, or even that someone stole your gyro.”
“Quite a list of demands,” the inventor said. “Why should I agree?”
“You won’t go to jail, for one,” Bettina said lightly. “More importantly, we’ll see that both autogyros are returned to you as soon as we’re able, and intact if possible. And lastly, we won’t ask any questions about this very powerful and potentially dangerous fuel of yours, such as what’s in it and where it came from.”
“Ah.” Hildegard raised her brows. “I see. So I get my machines back, and no one knows they were gone? It’s only been a day since the flight and I’ve already got two dozen buyers lined up for my gyros, including the government. But if it gets out that I’ve lost my machine, a lot of those offers might disappear.”
“We don’t want that any more than you do,” Arjuna said.
“Then we are agreed.” Hildegard glanced at him. “Do you know anything about machines?”
Arjuna nodded. “Absolutely.”
“Then you’ll help me. Come along.”
Bettina limped back out into the yard and found Oster puttering with the engine of the Ministry’s autocarriage. But as soon as she explained the project unfolding in the hangar, he took off with a boyish smile to join the others and help with the work.
“And Oster,” she called after him. “Please take some time to clean up the shelves. I’m afraid Mister Rana may have made a bit of mess back there. We don’t want to inconvenience Miss Goldstein any more than we already have, nor do we want to arouse any suspicion when her employees arrive to work in the morning.”
She walked back slowly, glancing up at the stars and the bright lights of the skyscrapers in the distance. The lights of the ferries twinkled on the water and the lights of the trains raced through the city, darting in and out of sight between the buildings. Whistles blew and bells rang, horns honked and brakes squealed.
Just another night for everyone else, as always.
She paused at the door of the hangar and knocked the body of the dead crow away from the light, letting it roll into the black shadows around the corner.
No need to antagonize the crows, or their friends, the Shadows.
To her right, she saw the inventor and the two young men wheeling the old gyro out and fetching tools and supplies from the shelves, but Bettina remained outside to gaze up at the night sky and the inky blot high to the east.
Inselmond. The drifting isle. The last great mystery of our age. Of any age. An ancient frontier floating in the sky in defiance of all logic, all reason, all science.
What will we find there? Will there be engines and propellers holding it up there? Is it all one enormous autogyro?
Somehow, I doubt it.
She paced across the concrete slab between the two rows of sheds and warehouses to escape the sudden banging and screeching of metallic tools at work. Hildegard barked orders, Arjuna asked questions, and Oster seemed to make a long-winded suggestion or observation every two minutes.
Bettina produced her bottle of pills from her black bag and swallowed two of the little white tablets. The pain in her foot was creeping up her ankle, and a selfish voice inside her began to complain that she should be home in bed instead of out in the streets chasing thieves. At the very least, she should be sitting behind a desk or a lab bench, somewhere quiet and civilized.
No, there’s no help for it. I’d go mad behind a desk, day after day, staring at papers and listening to fools like Peter Finkel prattle on about their sorry little lives.
I need this… this chaos, this madness, out here in the streets. Besides, I can’t imagine waiting at home while Arry was out here, doing this alone, without me to watch his back. I really would go mad then.
She paced by the hangar door to check on the gyro’s progress and saw a fascinating corpse of pipes, valves, brackets, screws, and panels lying all over the floor with three whispering conspirators picking over the body, handling its organs and pointing at the aluminum skeleton in the center of the carnage. She smiled a little.
At least Arry and Oster are enjoying themselves.
She sauntered back toward the little shed from which Miss Goldstein had emerged and she sat down on a creaky wooden bench at the edge of the light spilling from the hangar doors.
We’re falling behind. Even if Arry and the others finish on time, which I doubt, Kaiser will still have a long head start on us. A long head start to find whatever he’s looking for, and then to escape, and with that flying machine, in the dark, there’ll be no way to find him. I trust that raven as much as I trust the Shadows.
She frowned.
The Shadows. The most expensive contract killers in the city. Plus Magdalena Strauss, plus her thugs, plus the crow. Plus food, clothes, and other incidentals. Where is Kaiser getting the money for all of this? These are serious players. They’ll want payment up front, not promises of a cut of Kaiser’s score, if there even is a score. He could get up to Inselmond and find nothing but a pile of dirt with a huge pocket of helium at its center.
She smiled.
Chemistry is so delightful.
Her gaze strayed down to the thin layer of dust on the concrete slab and a dark snaking line caught her eye.
A wire? Must be one of those alarms Hildegard mentioned. If these crows can find a hidden autogyro and get past a state-of-the-art alarm system, maybe we should have them working for us instead of for the thieves and killers.
I can’t believe how smoothly Kaiser’s plan has worked out, and he’s only been out of prison for a single day!
An hour passed, and then a second. It was approaching ten o’clock when the clangor of tools and parts, and the curses and hissing from injured workers all fell quiet. Bettina looked up and saw the threesome wheeling the new autogyro out of the hangar and onto the long concrete lane in the center of Hildegard’s compound.
The new machine looked identical to the old machine, as far as Bettina could tell, and that was all she cared about. She stood up and felt her pills at work, easing the pain in her foot. Her cane helped her over to the machine and she asked, “Is it ready? Will it fly?”
“It should,” Hildegard said. “No hiccups, no problems. It went together nicely, smooth as silk. Your chaps were a great help, as soon as they stopped asking questions and started d
oing what they were told.”
Bettina smiled. “Good. And the fuel?”
“All set,” Oster said, patting the boiler. “Disgusting stuff, but the doc here says that’s what it’s supposed to be like.”
“Doc?” Bettina asked.
“Doctor Hildegard Goldstein,” the inventor said. “I have a doctorate in mechanical engineering.”
“Lovely,” Bettina said. “Mine is in chemistry.”
Arjuna clearly his throat loudly. “Right, well, let’s get this thing in the air.”
The detectives converged on the two seats in the tiny open cockpit.
“Wait a moment. You’re both going?” Hildegard asked. “I ought to be flying this for you. Have you ever even seen one of these machines in operation before?”
“Sure,” Arjuna said. “I saw how all the parts went together, and the controls are simple. Throttle, stick, pedals. How hard can it be?”
Hildegard grimaced. “I predict a crash and a horrible death for you both.”
“If that happens, Oster will tell everyone that it wasn’t your fault.” Arjuna winked and hopped into the pilot’s seat and pulled a large pair of goggles down over his eyes.
Bettina sank more gracefully into the navigator’s seat and tucked her skirts around her legs and stowed her bag under her feet. With a bit of jostling, she slid her cane down beside her leg, and she too set a pair of goggles over her eyes, gently adjusting the straps around her tightly set bun.
“This is a terrible idea,” the inventor said. She grimaced, and then leaned forward over Arjuna. “All right, listen. You need to get up to forty to get the rotor spinning. When you lift off, you’ll want to reduce power. Don’t. Keep it up. And start angling up right away. Don’t fly over the ground and then try to go up to the isle later. You won’t have enough fuel. I barely had enough to leave the isle myself.”
“What?” Bettina asked. “You mean, you ran out of fuel right after you launched from up there?”
“Yes, but that isn’t a problem in an autogyro,” Hildegard explained. “The top rotor isn’t powered, remember? So if the engine dies, the rotor keeps spinning and the whole thing will come down nice and gentle, just like a parachute. That is, as long as you don’t flip over.”
“What happens if we flip over?” Bettina asked.
“Remember what I said about a horrible death? That’s what happens.” Hildegard reached back and spun the little propeller behind the cockpit and the engine roared to life. As she and Oster stepped away, the inventor shouted, “I’d hang on. That fuel has just a bit of a kick to it!”
“What?” Arjuna yelled.
“I said—”
Arjuna turned to flash a quick grin at Bettina, and he opened the throttle. She had half a heartbeat to grab hold of the little metal handles in front of her before the gyro burst into motion, racing down the concrete track toward the tall metal fence at the end of the compound. Overhead she could already see and hear the huge rotor beginning to turn. But in front of them, the fence was getting closer at an alarming rate.
Don’t say anything about the fence. Arry can see the fence. He knows. He can do this. Just don’t say anything about the fence.
The rotors whirled into a pale gray blur and the autogyro hopped once, bounced off the ground, and then hopped again. The landing wheels cleared the fence, but by how much Bettina did not know, and she did not care to ask.
As they puttered up into the air with the propeller droning behind them and the rotor whizzing above them, the entire autogyro bounced under their seats with a steady, vibrating pulse. Arjuna pushed the throttle up and as the engine roared a little louder, the vibrations faded away. Bettina loosened her death grip on the sides of her seat and clamped one gloved hand over her hair and goggles in futile defiance of the wind.
The air whipped and howled across the open cockpit, and soon her cheeks were freezing cold and she had to struggle to breathe evenly through her nose, as opening her mouth was no longer an option unless she wanted to transform her cheeks into tiny balloons.
Turning her head ever so gently to the side to avoid letting the wind slam her skull back into the engine housing, Bettina looked out over her city. Eisenstadt gleamed in the moonlight and sparkled with electric currents dancing through streetlamps and windows, from ships and trains, and blinking on the corners of the mighty iron skyscrapers towering over the city center.
As they flew ever higher, the shapes of the buildings faded into the darkness and all the tiny lights dissolved down into fine glowing wires of fairy dust and shining gold. The sounds of traffic and machines and people faded as well, swallowed by the wind and the gyro. And even though the wind went on gusting and battering at her chest and face, Bettina felt herself leaving the real world behind as she traveled ever upward and away from everything she had ever known.
The city sparkled around the shores of Lake Sherrat like a crown of fireflies, and then contracted to a mere flutter of tiny candle flames shuddering in the wind.
Bettina gave up looking down at the city or at the farmland, which revealed nothing but pale silvery patches that might have been hillsides, and she faced forward to study their destination, the looming island in the sky called Inselmond.
Chapter 10. A Little Swim
The gyro’s engine growled and smoked, the propeller droned, and the chill night air blasted the two detectives relentlessly. The minutes stretched on and on as they flew high above the earth without speaking a word.
As the golden haze of electric light and candlelit smog fell farther behind and below the autogyro, the night sky grew sharper and brighter, and thousands of tiny hidden stars emerged from the darkness in sweeping arcs and swirls across the heavens. In the eastern hills bordering the Rhendal Plains, Bettina could see nothing but a ragged black line around the edge of the world, but above those hills hung the impossible drifting isle, orbiting the city of Eisenstadt like a tiny black moon.
The bottom edge of the island in the sky was a broken mass of earth and stone worn somewhat smooth by a thousand years of wind and rain, but whatever conspiracy of forces, either natural or unnatural, that kept the island in the air seemed to also hold the island together so that it did not wear away or break apart, even during the cruelest storms.
Now, as the gyro rose higher still into the thinning air where the shrieking wind began to weaken, Bettina’s perspective shifted above the surface of Inselmond and she caught her first glimpse of the legendary land by the silvery starlight. She saw grassy hills and leafy forests shivering softly in the wind, dark lakes glittering in the moonlight, the wide open fields of carefully tilled farmland, and the pale walls of tiny houses huddled under darkly thatched roofs. Pale yellow lights shivered in glassy windows and marked the snaking lines of the roads.
People!
Bettina leaned forward, squinting through her goggles.
There are people living on the drifting isle! Hundreds of them, maybe thousands!
She wanted to reach forward and shake Arjuna’s shoulder, and point to the distant signs of civilization, but she knew he had seen them already, and besides, he would need to focus on flying the gyro.
But where could Ranulf Kaiser be?
She scanned the dark landscape in the sky for something, anything, that might be another autogyro or a pair of invading criminals. But there was no strange glint of steel in the air or on the ground, and she could only spy a few short stretches of a few tiny lanes, and upon them she saw no one traveling.
Not that I could tell Magdalena Strauss from a flying islander up here.
She exhaled slowly against the unflagging wind in her face and began scanning the length of the drifting isle for the third time.
If I were Ranulf Kaiser, where would I go? What would catch my eye? Perhaps something large, something with signs of wealth. A palace or tower, a grand hall of some sort. There!
In the center of Inselmond, half-hidden in shadow and half-painted silver by the moonlight she saw a huddle of houses and hal
ls, with small towers and many glass windows reflecting the stars.
A town! Surely the most valuable and unique objects will be there. Art, jewels, maybe even machines. Perhaps even relics from a thousand years ago when the isle first rose into the air, tearing that hole in the earth that became Lake Sherrat.
“Arry!” She patted her husband’s shoulder and pointed past his face. “The town!”
Arjuna twisted back just a bit to squint at her. “What?”
“The town!”
He looked forward, then back at her, then forward again and nodded. “I’ll try to…”
The autogyro’s engine coughed, and growled on. And then it coughed again, sputtered, choked, and died. The aircraft hurtled on across the sky, whistling along in an airy silence. Bettina clutched the edge of her seat, as though she could hold the tiny metal contraption in the sky if only she tried hard enough.
Behind her the propeller clicked to a full stop, but above her head the huge rotor spun on and on. The wind in her face faded dramatically, and as it fell away she felt their forward momentum fade with it. Looking down she saw that they were only just now approaching the rocky edge of the drifting isle as it eclipsed her view of the Rhendal Plains a mile below.
“Arry?”
“Yes, darling?”
“You can land us safely on the isle, can’t you?”
“I don’t see why not.” He glanced back at her and flashed a dazzling white smile at her. “How hard can it be?”
“Can you reach that town?”
“Oh… I rather doubt it.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because we’re being blown away from it.”
The wind was indeed rising, and while it carried the gyro farther inland across the dark hills and fields of Inselmond, it was also carrying them off to their right side and away from the pale walls of the town.
It was also carrying them toward a wide black expanse of rippling water.
The Kaiser Affair (The Drifting Isle Chronicles) Page 9