by J M Bannon
Dolly took a gulp of his pint, “Ah. I did.” Then sucked the beer foam from his mustache.
“You believe that hokum," asked Cullam Keane.
“When I was ten, it was fantasy that a man could fly. Now there are flying ships full of men, so I reserve my judgment on the fantastic and unimaginable. As far as Rose Caldwell is concerned, she was not excommunicated for evil works. She left the church because of what she was prepared to do to stop evil.” Dolly finished his egg and washed it down with the last of his pint and sauntered out of the tavern.
It would be a matter of time once he was at the works that he would be identified. Any of the Marxists knew of him from him questioning them after an arrest; others would recognize him from his appearance in the tabloids.
Dolly walked the perimeter of the plant to see if there was any additional access to the plant and to confirm Keane’s count of protesters.
The site was enveloped by a formidable stone wall. He could only see in to the works at street grade when the iron gates broke the wall at the midpoint of each side. The protesters were in several clusters: a main group with signs picketing the main gate, then more along the road that wrapped around the perimeter of the wall. There were crowds milling about at all the other gates.
As he made his way around, he came to the same conclusion as Keane; about eighty protesters, with roughly twenty at each gate. The street that circled the plant wall had three perpendicular roads that connected directly to the south, east and west gates. As he approached the east gate, he heard his name yelled.
“Williamson, you come to support the common man?”
He had been recognized, but could not make out who it was yet, so he kept walking.
“Brothers, here comes Detective Sergeant Frederick Williamson.” It was Nelson Bruce, a union activist that had worked to get better conditions in the dye mills. A true believer.
Dolly walked up to the communist. “Mr. Bruce, we will not have any trouble here, will we?”
“Sergeant, we need to make sure the grievances of the workers are heard by the foreign task masters.” Nelson was making sure that the others heard his propaganda.
“These Hun alchemists need to have proper oversight. Look, if British boiler men were running the works, you wouldn’t see smokestacks spouting that shit into the sky. How do we know this plant isn’t put here to poison us all?” The last comment of Nelson elicited some grumbling from the men.
Dolly, keeping pace with Nelson, took out his pipe and packed it with tobacco, then lit it. “Now Nelson,” Dolly spoke between puffing his pipe to a bright glow. “I will leave you in charge here,” another puff, “so if things go awry, I’ll make sure you're the first one hauled in and the last to go home.”
“I cannot be held responsible for the actions of our countrymen when faced with injustice,” replied Nelson.
“Nelson, let your fellas know that the Home Secretary has asked me to keep an eye out for seditious rabble rousers. Now you and I both know that all you want is to get each of your comrades work at a fair wage. But if you were to fall under the influence of foreign powers with plans to sabotage works vital to the crown and cause mayhem to disrupt those works, I would have to bring in my boys to crack all your fucking heads open to get those radical thoughts out of your brain. It would be the right thing to do to get the foreign poison out of your skulls.”
Nelson and Dolly just stared at each other. Dolly puffed on his pipe.
Nelson broke the silence. “Wire-type received, Sergeant.”
Dolly took out his watch to check the time. Everything was on schedule. He had just enough time to walk over to the aerodrome gate and check in for his appointment with the commander.
* * *
11:10 AM, Lloyd & Sons Aerodrome
Commander Penfold was at the gate waiting for the detective. “Let me welcome you to Lloyd’s Mechwerks and Aerodrome, the home of the most technologically advanced airship in the world,” said the sandy haired airman. Dolly estimated him to be eight to ten years older than him, yet young to be a commander. “Thank you, Commander. I wanted to discuss the security of the facility with you, and if possible, get a tour.”
“Well, Detective, let me ask you a question. Do you have a fear of heights?” asked the jovial British officer.
“I would have to say I have not had an issue to date, but I surmise you’re asking me before we go up there” said Dolly as he craned his neck to look up at the behemoth ship.
“Spot on, Detective. If you are amenable to great heights, I will show you Her Majesty’s greatest achievement to date, and it is quite a good vantage point to reconnoiter this plant and even peak into the neighbor’s yard,” Penfold said with a wink and a click of his tongue.
“Well, let’s give it a go,” replied the detective, with a mix of excitement to get the tour and mild apprehension as to what he would be like at those heights.
“That’s the spirit. Follow me.” The two men made their way into the plant and to a verticulator. “Detective Williamson, today you will be exposed to many ‘first of its kinds.’ I hope you will not be jaded by the end of the tour. Here is the first of our wonders, the world’s longest continuous verticulator.”
The man inside the verticulator car opened the accordion door to give the two men access. “Cecil, please take us up to the engineering deck,” said Penfold.
“Step on in, gents,” said Cecil, a young boy who sat on a stool next to the controls for the verticulator.
The gate crashed closed. Cecil pushed a button, then threw a lever. Dolly could hear the dynamo whir under the car then the cables jerk up. The verticulator shaft for the first fifty feet had a wood casing that blocked the view. Once they cleared the casing, the car was completely exposed to the elements, except for the wire cage that made it structure. Dolly was in awe of the panorama of London the lift provided.
“Detective, the HMS Victoria will be the First Ship of the Line for the European fleet, with over two hundred guns and a crew of six hundred sixty airmen. Where the HMS Warrior had a length of five hundred and eighty feet, the structure of the Victoria would be eleven hundred feet bow to stern.
“To make this project possible, we are working closely in conjunction with the mechanists and have been commissioning mechanist engineers into the Air Service. I am an example. Before my coming into the Air Service I trained as an engineer in Birmingham, then chartered as a guild member after my apprenticeship. My specialty is pumping and compression, but here I am, more of a project manager than a tinkerer.”
Soon, the view was obstructed again as the verticulator entered the scaffolding sections, and they whizzed by floor after floor of workers that were crawling all over the ship. The elevator stopped hard, and Cecil opened the cage. “Hard to imagine you are one hundred and eighty feet in the air,” said Cecil.
Penfold continued his tour. “This is the heart of the ship, the compression room, and why we were able to leapfrog the Prussian zeppelin design. Rather than having gasbags housed within a cloth and metal frame, the HMS Victoria, like its smaller sister ship, the HMS Warrior, has pressurized spherical gas cells and the ship uses Mechanist Envenrude L. Pruflek’s vapor compression ballast system. This innovation allows the ship to store a supply of LQ gas in a compressed state to function as ballast. Then the gas is pumped and put to a vapor state in the cells to cause flotation. The process makes the airship far more agile. Coal-powered steam-driven propellers provide propulsion, but the gas can be rebalanced between cells and ballast tanks to change pitch yaw and altitude. Follow me this way.”
Penfold took Dolly up a set of stairs to the midline of the ship where he felt more like he was in a large production brewery than a ship. As far as he could see were giant brass domes. “Detective, here you see thirty-two brass cells. Each is twenty-two feet in diameter, distributed on a horizontal iron superstructure. With separate cells, the loss of integrity on up to ten cells would not ground the ship.”
The two men walked along the
midline gangways. Dozens of workers moved about on them, welding, riveting and sawing.
Now Dolly was feeling a little squeamish with the heights. He was the highest he had ever been, with only the rail of the midline walkways to stop him from falling hundreds of feet to his death. He could see the whole city, and more importantly, he could see the layout of the Baden works and the groupings of protesters clustered around the four gates.
“Commander, would it be possible for us to put some officers up here to watch those gates?” asked Dolly.
“That, Detective, is an interesting question. You see, I am here as the Air Service Liaison, a guest on the Lloyds property, while they build the ship. While they need to make me and my inspectors happy for us to accept the ship, this is their property, so you would need to ask the owners or do whatever you gents do through the court.”
This would be an excellent place to watch from, but he would have to have Commissioner Mayne pursue the matter. At the very least, he needed to get Sargeant Aekins up here for the bird’s eye view, and to assess how he saw the situation on the ground.
Penfold went back to his tour. “Now, armor runs from the top decks to the midline walkways. Then the lower armor runs from the bottom of the catwalk to the lower decks, creating a true ironclad airship. While upper and lower decks are traditional one-inch cold-rolled iron plate, the armor that spans the cells is Professor Honeysuckle’s iron webbing. Touch it, Detective.”
“It’s flexible, not rigid,” said Dolly.
“Exactly, Honeysuckle, an American inventor migrated to England by invitation of the guild, he has advanced a mechanical process to generate huge sheets of chain mail coated in hemp and vulcanized rubber to give added protection. Very light, and the flexibility dissipates impact,” Penfold added.
“Of course, the discovery of Luminiferous Quintessence, the lightest of the eldritch elements, changed airship design and eliminates the risk of explosion that came with using earthly elements like hydrogen, and that plant is our only source. I have been up here watching the Huns, and it’s clear as day to me that, just as I am spying on them, they are looking up at me.”
“There will be no ship with more or superior ordnance. Holding over two hundred guns and thirty-two tubes for drop bombs, she can outmaneuver smaller ships and outgun any airship, but without that gas, this is just a junk pile on stilts.” said the Commander. “Let me show you the wheelhouse and navigation.” Dolly followed the Commander through bulkheads, hallways stairwells and gangways, a complex maze to the destination of the bridge of the ship.
“So here is another first. This ship has the latest version of the Trigonometric Solution Register, a mechanical calculator that develops firing solutions for the gun batteries, and this is mechanically linked to the Astronomical and Solar Gyrosynchronous Navigator. Two amazing mechanist inventions that facilitate the navigation of the airship and automatic resolution of gun targeting,” explained Penfold.
Dolly looked about, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of all the gauges and registers that made up the bridge.
Penfold now began to paint a picture as they looked out the large forward-facing window of the bridge with Dolly standing behind the ship’s wheel. “Think about this, Detective Williamson. From a distance, her rifled top deck gun turrets hold steady on a target as the TrigSol adjusts the guns in synchrony with the rapid moves you make at this wheel. GyroNav and the gas compression flotation system allow you to outmaneuver, and the TrigSol to outgun, your enemies. After destroying an enemy air fleet, you then could rise high over a metropolis and annihilate the populace with drop bombs and mortars, while ground-based guns would never achieve the altitude she could obtain.” There was a perverse pride in the commander’s eyes as he painted the picture of the havoc the ship would wreak.
“Very impressive, Commander. I can see now the importance of your work, and the amazing job you’re all doing. While I will talk with my superiors about the protesting at the works across the road, might I suggest that you reach out to your superiors to see about a detachment of Royal Marines to be quartered here or at a bare minimum to come up here and provide a tactical assessment for you?” suggested Dolly.
“Good idea, man! You know I am no warrior. I came into this service as an engineer, but I do know a good plan and smart execution will win the day.”
Dolly thought how he would love to get shifts of constables up here with telescopes to watch the crowd for trouble.
* * *
2:00 PM, Gilchrist Manor
The steam coupe Sister Rose drove belonged to Weng Lo. It was the latest model fabricated by Swift Carriage Company, capable of a top speed of forty miles per hour. There were only a few places where you could let the carriage out at full throttle in the city, but there were many places on these country roads where Rose could let the red and electro-chrome speedster show its paces.
Rose needed Preston Gilchrist’s guidance and the poet rarely left his home. When he did it was to go to the asylum. Rose was one of the few people Preston enjoyed seeing or at least let in the mansion. The manor house also contained the largest library of arcana in England, maybe even in the world. It contained shelves of texts that had not been together since the grand library of Alexandria and many more composed since then by eastern and western scholars, dissecting ancient works or striking out into other fields of study. She could access the millions of pages written in hundreds of tongues, some not utilized in millennia. The library’s proprietor had dedicated his existence to exploring and interpreting what the tomes held.
The county road to the mansion was long and straight. Rose opened her up whilst keeping an eye on the boiler temperature and the water level, along with the speedometer. The first two held steady as the last one climbed. She rolled along at thirty-two miles per hour.
As she reached the manor, she engaged the clutch, throttled the steam exhaust, and administered the brake, bringing the car to a moderate speed and making the corner into the drive. She suddenly threw the throttle and let off the clutch. Gears engaged, and the coupe shot down the gravel drive, spitting a wake of gravel. The trees that flanked the driveway whizzed by as the cool air rushed over the windscreen and through her hair. Going this fast, Rose had no occasion to contemplate anything but driving the car—freedom.
As she neared the residence and the parkway in front, the clutch was pushed to the floor, the steam throttle released, and she dampered the burners. Once stopped, she flung open the door and skipped out. The scene was sight to see. The raven-haired lass in brown calf-high boots and airmen pants standing next to the sleek two-seater. She wore a sapphire-hued and brown brocade waistcoat over a navy silk and baleen bustier. Rose pulled her wind goggles down around her neck, then tussled the road dust out of her hair.
A harried footman jogged to greet her, falling tardy of his duty of opening the coupe door for the driver.
“M’lady, do you have any bags?” he asked.
“Just the one. Could you also fill the bin with pulverized coal and keep an eye on her while the boiler cools? Thank you,” Her athletic strides took her across the parkway as she removed her driving gloves, tucking them in her belt.
The chief butler was at the front step. “Ms. Caldwell, it is a pleasure to have you back at Gilchrist. How long will you be staying?”
“Just today, William. Let me guess. Preston is in the library?” inquired Rose as she looked up at the large elderly man.
Willian Brentwood stepped sideways and signaled with his hand for Rose to enter. Once in the vestibule, she strolled past the stoic-looking footman waiting at attention, with his white-gloved hands remaining at his sides. She glanced at him and guessed he might be new at the house and unfamiliar with her demeanor at Gilchrist manor. This was one of the few places where the landowner was perhaps weirder than her.
Walking down the hall, past the drawing room and turning left to enter the library, Rose noted how spotless and desolate the chambers looked. Nothing out of place. When she reache
d the door, she twisted the handle, hoping it would be unlocked, but the door was latched. “Preston, it is Rose and we have work to do.” She turned and leaned her back against the door, waiting.
Brentwood was standing at attention. “He has been in there for over a week.”
“Have a hearty lunch prepared with some fresh orange juice and his laudanum. I will bring him back. Promise," She gave him a smile as she unbuttoned her tunic.
“Thank you, m’lady.” Brentwood turned to leave as the library door unlatched. He proceeded downstairs to the kitchen.
She turned and slowly opened the door to the library. It was dark. Preston had blacked out all the windows with draperies and sat naked on the oriental carpet with an oil lamp, books, and papers surrounding him.
“Doesn’t the wool of the rug make your bum itch?” Rose asked as she closed the door behind her, latching it. Rose looked around the chamber to get her bearings. She stepped closer into the aura of the oil lamp. Preston had the Tome of Daemonology, Jaharudin's Verses of Other Domains, and the Third Grimoire of Ashrok open along with undecipherable scrolls he was feverishly reading and cross-referencing from book to book. In the eyes of her beloved church, there were multiple acts of heresy and blasphemy occurring in front of her. She could not fathom how he could read so many languages, some being forgotten or other worldly.
“Preston, Preston,” she called.
No response.
“Azul Hassan,” Rose yelled.
Preston turned and peered at her. “Ah, how splendid to see you again, Sister,” answered Preston in English with a heavy Arabic accent.
“Azul, you need to take a rest. You are wearing out this body," said Rose.
Preston stared at his hands then noticed he was naked in the presence of a lady. “Sister, my sincerest apologies. My condition is improper.” He stood, covering his privates and made his way to an armchair, where he had dropped his dressing gown. Preston donned the robe then turned to greet Rose. “My dear Sister, you see how I get engrossed in my research.”