Washington's Dirigible (The Timeline Wars, 2)

by John Barnes

  Besides myself, Priestley, Sheridan, the surgeon, and Morgan and Marion, there were eighty-three living men on the roof. Rifle bullets were pocking the surface of the roof as sharpshooters tried to kill our men up there, but a shot across a burning roof is extraordinarily tough from below—the smoke and flames are in the way of your aim and the strong, unpredictable drafts will distort your shots. It was frightening, but most of them were not even managing to hit the roof.

  The noise between the shooting, the burning, and the screams of the wounded and the dying, was completely deafening, and that was why we didn’t hear the Great George at once. It was only when she turned on her spotlights that we actually realized that rescue was at hand.

  The Great George was a dirigible, but if you start picturing the kind that were around in our timeline from about 1890-1940, you won’t imagine anything like it really was.

  To begin with, it was right at the edge of what was feasible for its day; it had an amazing all-aluminum keel with good pine ribs, but it couldn’t have fully round ribs the way a full-blown dirigible does, so it was flat on top where spacers were put in to keep the ribs in the right position. So it had a strange “flattop” look, which was exacerbated because for fire safety the six big gas-fired Sterling engines were put on top of the ship. So start by imagining a dirigible with the top half cut away and with wooden propellers up on trusses, so that it looked like there were six old-fashioned farm windmills sticking out of the top.

  Then, too, there wasn’t anything they could use cheaply to make that much hydrogen, and though they had vulcanized rubber and latex, they didn’t have enough to cover the gas cells inside the ship—so they compromised by using producer gas, the stuff you get by passing steam through a bed of glowing coal. It’s a fifty-fifty mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, both of which are lighter than air, and both of which will burn.

  Besides, keeping the gas in the cells warm greatly increased its lifting power, and the ballast of water and coal underneath helped keep it upright and on course. And finally, since to make producer gas you burn the coal in a sealed vessel, there was less risk of sparks—the engines simply burned the same producer gas.

  So in addition to all that other stuff, imagine the same object with a big, heavy aluminum vessel, the coal burner, the size and shape of a large apartment building Dumpster, hung under it, and two tanks of water attached to the sides of that.

  It was a dreadfully silly-looking gadget, even before they painted a big Union Jack on each side and an image of George III on the prow, and even before they put the little hanging pilothouse with all its Georgian gingerbread and columns up under the prow, with what looked like a steamboat cabin hanging behind that, where the troops and passengers went.

  And just to top it off, there were the half dozen machine guns (big crank jobs like the early Gading guns) and tiny cannon that studded the catwalks around the outer edge.

  It looked, in short, like what an airship would have looked like in a science-fiction movie of 1875, if there had been any such thing.

  It had to be just about the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I was yelling and hurraying like everyone else. It made a big, graceful turn, and as the people inside realized which side it was on, a fusillade of shots screamed out toward it.

  Gravity is not on the side of an upward-bound bullet, but it is on the side of a cannonball moving downward. The cannon on the Great George’s starboard side boomed and roared, one after another, and the other wings of St. James’s, already in flames, flew to pieces, taking the sharpshooters posted there with them. The cannon boomed again, dirt roared up from one clump of bushes, and bodies lay there like broken dolls. We saw dozens of men flee from their spots on the lawn and grounds; the thought of becoming a choice target was simply too much for them.

  Give everyone involved credit for guts; the airship had to sit there for several minutes while just about its maximum possible load of people walked across narrow gangplanks to the entrances on the top, sometimes carrying other wounded people. Getting the King across made him good and furious, for he fully intended to be the last off the roof and had to be swayed by arguments that if we lost him, we lost everything. And the last few of us running across the gangplanks had an experience that I’d just as soon have missed—fleeing across something twenty inches across, rocking up and down, bridging the gap between a burning tower and the rocking airship. There were hand lines about ten inches above the gangplank, and believe me, I held on to them.

  I was only stupid enough to look down once, and notice how much my gangplank was dancing around above the blazing wreckage below. Then a stray bullet, from somewhere far off (they were too afraid to get close) burst through the gangplank less than four feet in front of me; had I been there, I’d have been injured or killed. I looked at the bobbing airship, her underpowered engines desperately trying to keep her in position, and at the burning tower that was now shedding blazing pieces into the court and open yards below, and at that bullet hole, and thought, Boy, am I lucky.

  The laughter from that thought carried me right on across the gangplank, scuttling like a monkey climbing a shaking stick, clinging to the ropes for dear life, bent over and coughing.

  They just cut the gangplanks free—they had spares and there was no way that anyone was going to untie them at the other end—and we started to rise into the night sky. Producer gas is flammable—it’s a fuel, after all, and it’s what the engines were burning—but it doesn’t blow up quite so easily as hydrogen. Even so, the crew had been climbing around madly, with all the healthy Rangers pressed into service along with them, getting sparks put out before they could burn through the heavy canvas fabric.

  The heat from the fire had warmed the ship steadily, making it tough to keep Great George level as the gas cells on the side nearer the fire warmed more; the moment they cut loose, the captain dropped a load of ballast, perhaps in the hopes of nailing some of the people running in under to shoot at us, but mostly just to get us up above the flames and the sparks.

  It was a strange sensation; there was almost no forward motion, and the starboard side, which had been nearest the flames, distinctly rolled upward as the whole great airship tilted on its side. The propellers were fighting to catch the air, and all of those of us who hadn’t yet gone down the tunnels through the inside to the gondola or the pilothouse found that we had to grab whatever was handy and cling to it.

  The black smoke was all around us, so at first there was just a sensation of rising through the choking cloud, and only my own grip on a line in front of me and a peg beside me seemed real.

  Then we broke from the smoke, and sweet, clean air filled my lungs. I sucked in a few wonderful breaths, coughing and hacking the dirty taste of smoke off my tongue and lips, and then began to breathe more deeply. It was a cool night, and our ship was warmer than usual; we had a lot of lift, and the ship climbed swiftly into the icy, clear night sky.

  It felt wonderful to be alive.

  The men around me, most of whom had never flown before, were exclaiming and pointing. I sat up on the little platform that surrounded the main hatch, my bottom on the tiny wooden deck so that I was looking through the railing, and got a good look around.

  The Moon and stars were far brighter than they ever are above a modern city, but there were odd palls and wisps against them, and as I got to my feet, I saw why. The city had caught fire at four points—besides the blaze at St. James Palace, which would probably burn itself out, there was a fire in Southwark (guiltily I thought about my wrecking of the Sterling-engine coaches, and how proud I had been not to have killed anyone in stopping them; just possibly I would have made hundreds of families homeless before dawn, despite my being so carefully humane. It seemed like intentions ought to count for something, dammit).

  The other blazes were on Piccadilly, about halfway from the hospital to the Palace, and on Swallow Street, clear up by Hanover Square. They were clearly getting out of hand already; this was going to be one o
f those truly bad fires in the city’s history, maybe as bad as the one in the 1660s. London would be a different place in this timeline because of what had happened tonight, and that, too, made me sad.

  And yet the rightful King was now at large. Moreover, word would be out in the city right now, and the rumors would have the city ready to rise on our behalf when we needed it to.

  If it hadn’t all burned to cinders, of course.

  I stood for a long time and watched the silvery Moon shine off the dark Thames, and the streaks of smoke from the great, leaping fires. Airships are too quiet and fly too low; every so often I could hear the shrieks of those fleeing the fires or the crash of houses coming down. It was going to be very bad, I figured.

  The Rangers were slowly filing down the hatchway behind me, a little sheepishly because they weren’t the sort of men to get lost in the scenery quite so easily as all that.

  The airship came about and began to work its way southward; to fly into any sort of head wind would have been very difficult and slow with her enormous cross section and relatively weak engines, but she did well enough at heading south into Kent to get herself over open water. I looked around once more, at the Moon and stars, at the dark land below unmarked by any farmyard lights as yet, and then again at the distant, burning city, and shivered with the cold of the early-spring night so high up.

  When I finally descended through the long tube that wound between the gas cells—the big, spherical balloons that held the lifting gas—to the outside catwalk, and then walked along it to the gondola, I was chilled to the bone, and bothered, too, by the strange new sensations I was feeling about having been in a fight. I wasn’t just tired and sore, as usual, but there was also a feeling of sadness at the lives cut off. It was hard for me to shake the feeling that someone might have loved someone I killed, or that someone might have treasured a house I had accidentally set fire to. And the Palace of St. James was absolutely irreplaceable; they’d lost some of the finest art their timeline had, and a library of rare books besides.

  I wasn’t sure, just then, that Chrysamen’s improvements in my character were actually doing me all that much good. There was still a long fight ahead of me, and feeling bad after the last one is not a positive sign. I would have to talk with her about this.

  Or about anything else in the world. Hell, as long as it was with Chrysamen, we could talk about raising parakeets, recipes for stewed bananas, or common indoor houseplants, and I’d love it.

  As I came into the gondola, the King turned to me and smiled. “Oh, there you are, Mr. Strang. Please join us—we’re having a sort of a council of war.”

  “Sure.” I discovered there were a bunch of people around a tiny desk with a map, and an empty chair, but no one was sitting on it—probably because the King wouldn’t sit when so many others were standing, and no one else would sit in the presence of the King.

  The captain, a quiet, polite man named Richard Pearson, was showing us all how it looked on the map. “Now, we can set down several places in Kent,” he began. “There we can unload the Virginia Rangers, at least their wounded, but I would think the whole lot of them if possible—they’re extra burden and there isn’t much we can do for them aboard, nor anything much they can do for us while we are airborne.

  “Now, after that the matter begins to get genuinely complicated. As pure theory we are carrying enough coal and water to get us across the Atlantic, but of course we cannot take that chance with the King in so dangerous a situation—the first crossing of the ocean by dirigible, and not even in the easy direction, with the west-to-east winds, as we had intended. When Admiral Howe first informed me of the situation and our mission, he stressed to me that he would have some ship or other meet me in the Channel, but as yet I’ve neither the name of a ship nor a position for one; our man on the radio is trying to raise the Admiral in order to get some orders on the subject.

  “Once I’ve deposited His Majesty with whatever vessel will take him across the sea to New York, then I would say … I beg your pardon?”

  The King had turned to whisper something to a young officer.

  “Ah, no, Captain Pearson, excuse me, please,” King George said. “I was indulging in some calculations of my own. I am told it will be more than an hour before we touch down in Kent?”

  “It will indeed.”

  “Then if I can get pen and paper, I can send off a load of letters with the Rangers—each of the letters containing some little thing that only I might remember about some lord or politician, plus the vital information that it is indeed I who am at large. That should fix that usurper on my throne.”

  “It should indeed, Your Majesty,” Sheridan said, grinning. “And it might well allay some of the worrying of your family—”

  “Or delight William, the young scamp,” the King muttered, but he was obviously pleased to have everyone think his idea was a good one. We found him a surface to write on, a pen, and paper, and he set to work.

  The empty field in Kent where we set down was broad and dark, but Captain Pearson had seen the highway from above, not far from there, so that the Rangers would be able to move quickly once they disembarked. The King had managed, writing as quickly as he could, to come up with fifty-nine messages, plus a short open letter to his subjects, and these were divided among the Rangers, who undertook to see that the mail got through. Priestley elected to go back with the Virginia Rangers, to use his political influence to help make sure people believed the truth.

  We had carefully hauled ourselves down on our anchor lines and banked the fires, and that had taken the better part of an hour in its own right; now Sheridan and I stood on the catwalk and waved good-bye to the forces we’d fought beside. There was a long moment of a kind of salute, as the assembled Rangers waved back; then we cast off our lines, the stokers began to pile coal into the gas-making vessel beneath the ship, and we were off into the night sky again, climbing after the now-sinking Moon. It would be daylight soon. It had been a very long night, and though it hadn’t gone as planned, it was going pretty well.

  When we returned to the pilothouse, Captain Pearson was muttering under his breath and appeared angry. “What on Earth is the matter?” Sheridan asked.

  “Oh, it’s just the vessel we’re to meet,” Pearson said, glaring around him. “That man irritates me. He’s annoyed me since the day I met him, and so of course it would be to his ship—well, his boat, really—that I’m transferring our King. I understand Howe’s thinking perfectly, and I wouldn’t dream of arguing. But how annoying, how absolutely annoying—”

  “What’s the vessel?” I asked, hoping to divert his attention.

  “HMS Nautilus, also known as Bushnell’s Folly,” Pearson said, “the only ship on Earth where men above a certain height are not welcome, which is why the best-qualified man in the fleet is that annoying, scrappy, quarrelsome, bowlegged little Welshman—”

  At that moment there was a shout from the forward lookout. I ran out onto the catwalk and looked where the lookout was pointing.

  All around me people were muttering in wonderment, not knowing what that could be or what it could mean. But though I didn’t move, it wasn’t because I didn’t know what it was. Quite the contrary.

  I didn’t move because for a few long moments I was frozen in shock. What was coming at us was one of those Closer flying machines like the one that had attacked Chrysamen ja N’wook and me not that long ago (subjective time, anyway) in the Himalayas. It was a little smaller, but it had a cabin that stood on legs that rested on four spinning disks, and it was closing in rapidly.

  I pulled the Closer weapon onto my forearm and took several shots at the oncoming craft. Nothing at all happened. I had just time enough to figure out what that might mean before the weapon in my hands began to make whooping noises, and I hurriedly pitched it over the side. It vanished into the night, and the airship lurched upward several feet; Pearson was going to be mad at me for dumping weight without warning.

  Down below the cal
m sea lit up as the device flared into brilliant light; long moments later a deep boom came up to us. But I had no eyes or ears for that—I had grabbed my Colt .45 Model 1911A1 and was standing on the catwalk in the standard police academy firing position. The first time I shot down one of these things, it had been on sheer dumb luck; I hoped the luck of the Strangs was continuing.

  Or, considering who was almost certainly at the controls of that gadget, I hoped the luck of owe of the Strangs was continuing. And I hoped it was the right one.

  The craft whirred closer, and I could see that it had just one person aboard. I leveled my pistol, calmed myself, and waited.

  -15-

  The thought of Chrys wouldn’t leave me alone in that long few seconds, and then I realized why. There was something she always did that I always forgot. My hand leaped into my pocket for a moment, and I turned on the help button. If this wasn’t Closers turning up with a major technical advantage, I didn’t know what was. And if nothing else, maybe an ATN team could get the King off this airship before we all demonstrated that you can cook anything better with gas.

  The enemy ship was very close now, closing to within pistol range, and I realized the craft itself must be unarmed, or we would already be on fire and dying. It veered to the side, and I saw the other Strang—it had to be him, of course—pull down a window and draw his own pistol.

  We shot at each other several times on that pass. As soon as I fired I became his chief target. But his aircraft was so little—that cabin was smaller than a Volkswagen Bug and the whole assembly not much larger than a big pickup truck—and bouncing around the sky like a crazed bat, and I don’t think I came close to a hit.

  If he’d had tracers in that pistol, he’d have finished us for sure—all he needed to do was to set one gas cell on fire, and we were all dead—but he didn’t. The bullets were the special hollow point that deforms into a star shape that rips flesh into hamburger—I should know, it was my gun and ammo he was using—but nothing in their path was even giving them enough resistance to make them do that; his shots cut through the thick canvas into the inside, but even when they pierced a gasbag, all they did was make a tiny hole. And at the low pressures this thing operated at, it would take a long time for the gas to leak out.