Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3

by Melissa Scott

  "Stasi should ride in the cab with you," Mitch said to Alma, looking dubiously at Stasi's coat. "Lewis and I will ride in the back."

  "It's what I have," Stasi said sharply. Her long black wool overcoat wasn't as warm as the heavy parkas Alma and Lewis wore, or the battered leather flight jacket Mitch wore over layered sweaters. And no, her black wool slacks weren't as warm as flannel-lined jeans over long johns, but she certainly didn't own any. This was her only winter coat, and perfectly suitable to city streets. Her life didn't usually involve tramping around a wilderness.

  "We can all fit in the cab," Lewis said.

  "Four of us?" Alma said.

  "We'll ride in the back," Mitch said. There was no way three were fitting in the cab if one of them was Mitch, much less four. "Unless you want me to drive."

  "I'm driving," Alma said.

  "We know." Lewis grinned. "Ok. Mitch and I will be gentlemen and freeze in the bed of the truck."

  Stasi felt she needed to make a point. "I would…."

  "Don't be silly," Alma said briskly, getting in on the driver's side. "You were kind enough to say you'd come along on this expedition, and you're not a flyer so of course you don't have heavy clothes. You'll ride in the front with me and these two excuses can sit in the back."

  "Then we get the thermos," Mitch said, claiming the pack with the coffee and snacks.

  The sun made patterns through the leafless trees, the sky a clear winter blue. The storm had blown itself out to the east, and the roads weren't too bad. Alma was a very careful driver and the pickup had chains that crunched on the occasional patch of snow on the road. Through town the main roads were completely plowed, but as they got up into the mountains there were still patches of ice in the lee of outcroppings where the sun rarely touched the road in winter. Above, ponderosa pines carried the snow load on their broad branches between high peaks.

  "What desolate country," Stasi said at last.

  Alma didn't look away from the road, but she smiled. "I was just thinking how beautiful it is. To each their own."

  "I didn't mean to be insulting," Stasi said.

  "You weren't." Alma downshifted, going up the grade. "Different people love different things. Me, I can't stand cities. I'm a country girl at heart."

  "Were you born here?" Stasi asked.

  "I was born in Kansas," Alma said. Her blond hair had escaped from her hat, curling behind her ears. "My dad was a cavalry trooper and my mom died when I was born. I grew up in forts all over the west." She gave Stasi a sideways smile. "You know that little kid in Westerns who always runs in yelling that there's a stampede or an Indian attack or something? That's me. We were here in Colorado for almost six years when I was a kid and I loved it. So when Gil and I came back to the States after the war, he wanted a good place to start a business, and I wanted to come home. It worked out real well for both of us."

  "He wanted to make you happy," Stasi said.

  "And it made him happy too. Gil liked it here." Alma's voice was even. "But it's not for everybody. And that's ok. I'm glad Jerry's had this job in New York for the fall. Colorado Springs was my dream, not his. It's good for him to get out in his world again. If it's not your world either, that's ok too."

  "Darling, I have no idea," Stasi said. It had been so long since she'd even considered what she might want as opposed to the merely possible. Choosing was a luxury she'd left behind a long time ago. But it had been months since anything terrible happened. That did tend to give one perspective. Though one could hardly count on a streak like that to hold. "So if you grew up here," she said, "You know all about the haunted mine."

  Alma shrugged. "A little bit about it. It wasn't famous or anything. There are a lot of abandoned mines around here."

  "Why?"

  "They found gold and silver in Colorado about a hundred years ago. You can guess there was a big rush and boom, but a lot of the deposits were shallow and small and the mines petered out pretty quickly. The Silver Bullet mine was one of those. It was only open about twenty years and was played out by the time I moved here in '97. I'd guess it closed down in '92 or '93? Anyway, back in the eighties there was a cave-in and a couple of men were killed. When I was a kid the whole place was deserted. The mining company still owned it, but it wasn't worth anything. About ten years ago the State of Colorado seized it for back taxes — the mining company hadn't paid anything in decades, so it's state land now."

  "Killed in a cave in," Stasi mused. "I suppose. But you'd think the miners would haunt the owners or something if they wanted revenge. In my experience ghosts rarely sit around deserted buildings out in the middle of nowhere. They want to haunt people. It's fairly pointless to haunt somewhere no one ever goes. It's like picketing."

  "Picketing?" Alma looked confused.

  "Darling, when you plan a demonstration you want the people you're demonstrating against to see it. There's not much point in marching around a field somewhere with signs!"

  "I suppose not," Alma said. "I guess I didn't think ghosts had much choice."

  "Oh they do," Stasi said. "Most ghosts haunt the place they used to live, either because they like it or because that's where their family is. Sometimes they haunt the place they died if it's a good way to get back at the ones who killed them — battlefields and prisons and dungeons and the like. But who in the world haunts a Woolworth's, even if they did drop dead there? If this place is as deserted as you say, I can't imagine why any self-respecting ghost would be there. Did you actually see a ghost?"

  "I didn't," Alma said. She shrugged. "It was one of those things. Older kids at school dared each other to go up there. They said there were mysterious lights at the minehead."

  "Ghost lights," Stasi said. "Or maybe just lights?"

  "It could be," Alma allowed. "They might have seen a night watchman with a lantern."

  "But why would there be a night watchman on an abandoned building?"

  "And then there's Rayburn's story about lightning flashes out of a clear sky," Alma said. "Which may be connected or maybe not."

  Stasi shook her head. "I don't claim that I know everything there is to know about the Dead, but I have never seen a ghost be able to affect things more than a few feet away. If Mr. Rayburn was flying over in an airplane five thousand feet up…." She broke off. "I can't imagine what could do that."

  "Neither can I," Alma said. "But we'd better find out."

  The last few miles the road was bad, snow sixteen inches deep crushed by the National Guard trucks that had gotten the passengers and crew from the plane crash, with another couple of inches on top. Mitch and Lewis hung onto the sides as Alma rattled along in the tread marks, doing a cautious fifteen miles an hour which was probably the best speed possible considering.

  The Guard had branched off the road at the bottom of the box canyon, the tread marks turning off toward the downed plane which still lay at the end of the long slope. Unplowed and smooth, the snow lay unbroken over the road another mile and a half to the Silver Bullet mine. Mitch felt Alma downshifting, the truck nosing forward, and then she stopped.

  "End of the line," Lewis said. He tilted his head back, looking up at the sky, and Mitch put on his sunglasses against the snow glare. "We're not going any further in the truck."

  "I see that," Mitch said. He climbed over the tailgate and went around to help Stasi out. Her boots were perfectly fine for city streets, but not for walking a mile and a half uphill in unbroken snow. "We're going to have to get you some workboots," he said.

  She gave him a sideways look. "And since when do you buy me shoes, darling?"

  Lewis pulled the two packs out of the back and gave Mitch one. He glanced up at the ridgeline. "I bet he came right over there," Lewis said. "If he was approaching from behind the minehead…"

  "…and then he lost control and had to put her down, he'd have belly-slid down that slope." Mitch nodded. "Yeah, I see it."

  Alma shook her head, putting on her gloves which she'd left off driving, the red pompom on the
top of her hat bobbing. "So he must have been pretty close when he lost the instruments. How low were you?"

  "About 2,000 feet," Mitch said. "We were following the canyon up, and I'd gotten low because the visibility was poor." And that was about what he needed to say about that. Al could fill in the rest of how it had happened. No need to make a drama out of it.

  "Let's go have a look," Alma said.

  There were four or five buildings at the minehead, the roofs red where the corrugated steel had rusted, the largest with four tiers of windows propped against the mountainside. As they got closer Mitch could see that half the windows were broken. Which made the padlock on the door superfluous. Anybody could go three feet to the side and just climb in the window.

  One of the smaller buildings had a broken in door, and Lewis went and looked in. He shrugged. "Junk," he said. "Some paint cans. A broken chair. Some rotten timber."

  "Why would you just leave buildings like this?" Stasi asked.

  "It's too far out from town for anybody to want to use them for anything," Mitch said. "We've got plenty of land and not many people. No reason for anybody to want them."

  Alma looked at Stasi. "Do you feel anything?"

  She shook her head. "Not a thing," Stasi said.

  "No ghosts?" Mitch asked.

  "No," Stasi said. "Ghosts would be a thing. Which I do not feel."

  "Ok." No need for her to get snappy about it. Mitch figured he'd let Al handle this. He walked over to the main building and cupped his hand to look through the dirty glass of the window. There were the big wheels for ore trolleys, their belts broken. A bunch of heavy equipment lay deserted, parts of what looked like a generator. Mitch frowned. He was no expert on mining, but what had they needed some of this stuff for? It looked like the rundown set of a Frankenstein movie. That big tower thing with the coils… He glanced back at Alma, who was walking with Stasi around the rusted iron rails beside a low, one story building with windows boarded up. Stasi had her head bent like she was listening. Best to just let her do her thing.

  Lewis was clearing away a pile of trash under the rusted roof of a porch in front, trying to get to one of the broken windows. Broken glass glittered among a few drifts of snow.

  "Need a hand?" Mitch helped him move a fallen section of rusted metal, not that heavy but bulky.

  "Yeah. I was thinking I'd have a look inside." Lewis shoved another section to the side, carefully stepping over the big pieces of glass. "Looks like somebody busted this out on purpose."

  "Kids, maybe," Mitch said.

  "Yeah." Lewis grinned. "Not ghosts."

  "And not anybody who cared about being sneaky," Mitch said. The window looked like someone had thrown rocks at it. A lot of rocks.

  "Al said kids used to come up here," Lewis said. "This looks like the kind of thing you'd do on a dare."

  Mitch nodded. They could see inside pretty well. Long tables empty except for bird droppings and the leftovers of summer nests up above in the rafters. More broken glass where upper windows had fallen in. He stopped. There was a faint sound, like a distant engine running. "You hear that?"

  "Yeah." Lewis stopped, his hand on the window frame. It was very quiet. There was the wind on the ridge above, Alma and Stasi's footsteps. And the distant sound of an electric motor.

  "That's not supposed to be here," Mitch said.

  "No kidding." Lewis turned around. "Hey Al! Come over here."

  Alma's stride lengthened, Stasi behind her. "What's up?"

  "Any ghosts?" Lewis asked.

  "Nothing," Stasi said. "I just told Alma. I don't sense anything or feel anything. I don't hear anything out of the ordinary."

  "We do," Mitch said. "Listen."

  For a long moment everyone was quiet.

  "That's something electric," Alma said.

  "Yeah." Mitch frowned. "Any reason you know of why something electric would be running in an abandoned mine?"

  "A pump?" Alma put her hands on the window frame and climbed through, careful of the glass. "You might have an automatic pump that was supposed to keep the water out. It could be running off a lead-acid battery."

  "A what?" Stasi asked.

  "Like a car battery," Mitch supplied. "A big one to handle what's basically the mine's sump pump. I guess that would make sense. But this is an awfully long time for it to last."

  Lewis climbed through the broken window. "It can't have been running full time."

  Mitch gave Stasi a hand getting over the sill. "Maybe it only turns on when the water reaches a certain level. You wouldn't want it to run all the time." He climbed in after her. The middle of the huge room was a tangle of struts and old wires, the framework for what must have been some kind of hoist in the center. Loading ore cars, Mitch thought. They pulled the ore out of the mine on the light gauge rail in carts. They must have had a tall hoist. He glanced up.

  Above, at the pinnacle of the four stories was a huge metal sphere, the tower structure holding it up like a ball on the end of a scepter. Enormous wires and cables wound their way around the tower's legs, snaking back across the floor toward the entrance to the mine itself. Beneath the thing's enormous head, a pair of long coils extended upward inside the structure, each of them pulsing faintly with bluish-lavender light.

  "What the hell is that?" Mitch said.

  The others followed his gaze, looking up at the thing which hovered like an enormous spider, the metal sphere humming softly.

  "It looks like it came from outer space," Lewis said.

  "Darling, you never told me you lived in Weird Tales," Stasi said. For once she looked duly impressed.

  "It's…um," Mitch said. "Big? Strange? Pulsing with nacreous and unearthly light? Not built by ghosts?"

  "I have no idea what it is," Alma said at last. "But I know who it belongs to." She put her hands on her hips as they all looked at her. "Nikola Tesla."

  "The man who invented radio?" Stasi said.

  "I thought that was Marconi," Lewis said.

  "You would think that," Stasi said. "But it's not true."

  "That's not a radio," Mitch said. "And what's it doing here?"

  Alma grinned, walking around beneath it cautiously, looking up. "Tesla lived here for a while at the turn of the century. He had a lab in town when I was a kid. It was pretty super. He had some amazing experiments and I got to see a bunch of them. He was always really nice to kids." Her smile grew. "Especially kids who loved dynamic motors."

  "That would be you," Lewis said.

  "I'd bet you a buck that he built this," Alma said. "It looks like the stuff he used to have in his lab, except bigger."

  Mitch could see a problem with that. "But didn't Tesla leave a long time ago? He didn't live here when I moved here, and that was what, thirteen years ago?"

  "He left more like thirty years ago," Alma said. "I don't think I was quite in my teens."

  "Surely it hasn't been doing this all that time," Mitch said. "A lead-acid battery isn't going to last that long even if it recharges. It has to be drawing power from something."

  "Unless it just turned on," Lewis said. "Or somebody turned it on."

  "What does it do?" Stasi asked. She was staying well back from it.

  "I don't know," Alma said. "Those look like magnetic coils. And those are definitely active power cables. But I have no idea what it's supposed to do or if it's doing it."

  "Then we'd better not start messing with it," Mitch said. "It's a bad idea to start flipping switches on some mad science device when we have no idea how it works."

  "I agree with that," Alma said. She looked at Lewis. "And I think you're right that it must have been activated recently, whether on purpose or by accident."

  Stasi's face was keen. "And could that have caused the crashes?"

  "It might," Mitch said, looking up at the magnetic coils thoughtfully. "Some kind of electro-magnetic pulse would have fried our instruments."

  "Like a death ray," Stasi said.

  Lewis looked at her incredulous
ly. "That's science fiction."

  "So were airplanes forty years ago," Stasi said, tossing her head. "This would have been built before the Wright Brothers flew."

  Alma nodded slowly. "This couldn't have been built to bring down aircraft. There weren't any then. I don't know what it's supposed to do, but that must be some kind of side effect. Some kind of unintended consequence. Besides, Dr. Tesla would never have created something that he thought would harm people. He was a very nice person."

  "That's what they said about Alfred Nobel, darling," Stasi said. "And he invented explosives."

  "He couldn't have intended it to cause plane crashes," Alma said hotly.

  "It doesn't matter what he intended," Mitch interposed. "It's likely that it's causing the crashes and that's a bad thing. We need to figure out how to turn it off. Without blowing up the side of the mountain," he added swiftly.

  "You want to start taking apart one of Tesla's devices with no idea how it works?" Alma asked. "Because I sure don't, buster. No, I think the best thing is to ask him."

  "Ok, that makes sense," Lewis said. "If he's still alive?"

  "I think so," Alma said. "I think I read an article by him in Popular Mechanics not very long ago. He lives in New York."

  "Hey, I read that too," Mitch said.

  "I guess we could wire him," Lewis said.

  "Dr. Tesla stop have death ray stop tell us how to turn it off stop?" Stasi said.

  "Ok, maybe it's better to phone." Lewis looked abashed.

  "We should call Jerry," Alma said. "And get Jerry to track him down. He can tell Jerry what to do."

  "Ok, that makes sense," Mitch said. "Let's get back to the house and give Jerry a ring."

  "That begs the question of how it got turned on," Lewis said.

  "Yes," Stasi said. "It does." She looked worried, but she didn't say another word all the way back to the truck.

  The Club was crowded, the larger private dining room taken up by some businessmen's club from Long Island, the main dining room full of families dining in style at the end of a day's shopping or the start of a few weeks' holiday, and as a result the club steward had asked politely if Ras Iskinder and his guest would object to being served in the Minuit Room. It was usually open only at lunch, a room of dark paneling and leather banquettes and booths for the convenience of businessmen — certainly pleasant, Jerry thought, but he resented what he suspected was the steward's real motive. It would be awkward for all concerned if the waiters kept having to explain to disapproving strangers that the gentleman of color was in fact an Ethiopian prince. Iskinder accepted without a blink, however, and soon they were settled in one of the corner tables, drinks in hand and the heavy menus open in front of them. There were two other parties in the room, a trio of old men who looked like professors, waving soup spoons at each other as they argued some point, and a younger man dining with a woman with overemphatic upswept hair and a miniature trilby perched over one eye. Tucked away with the mistresses and the cranks, Jerry thought, and slanted a glance at Iskinder, who smiled.