Assassins of the Lost Kingdom (Airship Daedalus Book 1)

by E. J. Blaine

  “Cable with his orders,” said Rivets. “Looked like that code thingy you found on that diner menu back in New York, Jack. So I figured I’d try and decode it the way Duke did with that.”

  Duke’s brow furrowed. “What? That was a top secret German High Command code! I only know it because—”

  Rivets waved him down. “Yeah, yeah, I watched you do it. Not that hard. Just because I’m good with an engine, people think I’m some kind of yokel right off the turnip truck.”

  “What does it say, Rivets?” Doc reminded him gently.

  Rivets cast one last irritated glance at Duke, then he read from the page. “To number 713, from…M. Blutig.”

  A quick wave of consternation swept through the group. Jack sighed. “Makes sense Maria would be tied up in this.”

  Maria Blutig was a high ranking commander in the Silver Star who ran her operations from the bridge of her personal airship, the Luftpanzer. They’d crossed paths many times in the past, and she held a particular hatred for Jack ever since he shot down her fiancée during the war. That hatred extended to the rest of the crew, and AEGIS as a whole. In a plot to undermine AEGIS, it wasn’t much of a surprise that Maria Blutig would turn up sooner or later. Jack would have preferred later. She was a relentless and dangerous enemy.

  "So Maria's still with us," Deadeye said at last, expressing what they were all thinking.

  "Looks that way," said Jack. "And it makes sense she'd be tied up in this."

  “Find crew AEGIS airship Daedalus in Almora,” Rivets went on. “Secure cooperation of local disposable assets. Kill all members of Daedalus crew. Secure airship Daedalus only if crew already neutralized. Destroy airship if necessary to achieve primary goal. If possible, determine source of Daedalus crew’s apparent knowledge of Shambala. Transmission ends.”

  There was another silence while they all looked at each other, searching for some sign of recognition.

  “Shambala?” Duke said at last. “Maria’s barking up the wrong tree this time. We don’t know anything about a ‘Shambala.’ Do we?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Doc said quietly. “It shows up in various occult sources, mostly derived from Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists.”

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  Doc gave him a smile. “You’ll like this. It’s a secret kingdom, deep in the Himalayas, run by a group of immortal wise men called the Masters of the Hidden Brotherhood. Blavatsky claimed she was in contact with them. They guard secret knowledge and pass it on to select people they find worthy.”

  “That sounds a lot like the old King’s nine unknown men,” Jack observed.

  Doc agreed. “It does, doesn’t it? If you want another connection, Crowley’s claimed he’s been contacted by them as well.”

  “And supposedly they live in this place in the mountains called Shambala,” said Duke, “full of ancient secret wisdom. That sounds like just the thing the Silver Star would go looking for.”

  “Sounds like they found it,” Deadeye added.

  “They found something anyway,” said Jack.

  Duke stood up and stretched his bandaged arm with a grimace. “So what do we do about it?”

  “We know we’re on the right track,” said Doc. “Everything lines up. The poison sample in New York. The Long Walker, and now Maria being worried enough to send people after us. Jack, you have to see this all adds up to something at least.”

  Jack smiled. “Calm down, Doc,” he said. “I’m convinced. I don’t know what this Shambala really is, but I’m convinced the Silver Star found something back in the mountains, and that’s where they came up with their poison. So that’s where we’re going.”

  ###

  The next morning, they flew the Daedalus back up to Almora. The hospital had reported that Padger was still unconscious after coming out of surgery shortly after dawn. He was getting the best care possible. There was nothing more they could do for him in Delhi.

  The storm had cleared, and the flight back to Almora was considerably calmer than the previous night’s frantic journey. They made Almora in a bit less than two hours, then headed higher and deeper into the mountains.

  The air grew even thinner as they climbed up through the lower peaks, and cold winds whipped the ship. The cabin was heated so the cold wasn’t an issue. But Jack noticed his breaths were coming short and shallow. He glanced over and saw that Doc was experiencing the same thing. At the comms station, Duke was listening to the tones of the radio detector through headphones, but Jack saw that his breathing was shallow and rapid as well. They were approaching the limits of altitude. If they went too high, the air would be too thin to sustain them. Worse, even with her new lighter frame, the ship would eventually reach its flight ceiling. The Daedalus flew because the gas in her cells made her lighter than the air. As the air grew thinner, the ship’s density would eventually match that of the surrounding atmosphere. Then she would go no higher, no matter what they tried.

  Jack wasn’t sure which limit they would reach first, the ship’s or their own. Both offered serious danger, and flying through the treacherous air currents around the high peaks was dangerous enough to begin with. Late in the war, he knew, the Germans had flown their airships much higher, and they’d had to give the crews oxygen tanks to breathe from. If they planned to keep operating this far back in the mountains, they’d need something similar.

  Duke coughed and rubbed his temples.

  “You okay?” Jack asked.

  Duke nodded. “Just a headache,” he said. “This air.”

  “Me too. Anything on the radio detector?”

  “Who knows?” Duke answered in frustration. “So many echoes off all these mountains, I can’t make out a thing.”

  For the rest of the day, they flew around the high peaks, but found nothing. For Jack, it was at least useful practice in controlling the Daedalus in the unusual conditions. The controls were sluggish this high. The engines ran perfectly, but the propellers generated less thrust and the rudders and control planes seemed muted as well. She was slow to steer.

  Eventually, Jack turned and took the ship back down toward Almora before they lost the light. If nothing else, they had been able to map a section of the mountains that was simply a blank space on the official charts they carried.

  The next day, they went searching again, and again found nothing but snow-covered mountain peaks and dangerous flying conditions. At least they seemed to be getting better acclimated to the low air pressure. Duke reported that he was getting better at interpreting the chaos of echoes the mountains generated on the radio detector as well. And Rivets spent the day climbing around inside the Daedalus’ hull, making adjustments to the controls and the engines to try and improve her performance at the very top of her flight envelope.

  Even with Rivets’ adjustments, though, Jack found it difficult to control the ship with any precision. Even when he released the ship’s full capacity of lifting gas into the envelope, she climbed with a sluggishness that worried him. Lateral turns were more responsive, but only slightly, and so close to neutral buoyancy, the ship tended to be tossed off course by every gust of wind. And the wind conditions were like nothing Jack had ever flown in before. He felt as if the Daedalus was as short of breath as he was, simply wallowing in the air, carried around on the currents.

  Before taking off on the third day, they removed some gear from the ship and stowed it in Almora to reduce her weight. They weren’t going to be using the ship’s life raft or electric motorcycle deep in the mountains. Rivets broached the idea of removing the guns. The two forward-facing Lewis guns and the two Hotchkiss guns mounted in the top turret, along with their combined ammo load, accounted for a lot of extra weight. But Rivets seemed relieved when Jack rejected the idea. Jack was nervous enough about the handling of the ship at altitude. He wasn’t going to make the Daedalus an unarmed sitting duck when he knew the Silver Star was around.

  The third and fourth days were as unproductive as the first two. They mapped m
ore of the range but saw nothing that suggested the “twin pillars” the Long Walker had spoken of.

  By the fifth day, Jack was becoming disenchanted with the whole operation. The weather was even more turbulent than usual, and the ship fought him as he tried to steer around sheer mountain faces. The Daedalus bobbed like a cork in a storm, with barely any buoyancy to work with.

  Perhaps Padger was right, Jack thought, adjusting the ship’s forward trim for the hundredth time to adjust for a new air current coming off the mountains to his right. They’d covered hundreds of square miles of untracked, mountainous terrain and they’d seen nothing that suggested a place that could sustain human life, much less rare poisonous plants or a spot where someone might land to collect them. He had no idea where the Silver Star was finding its poison, but he didn’t see how it could be here.

  They passed through a small band of cloud and the sun glittered off the canopy as they rounded a mountain spire on their right. Before them were two long, nearly parallel ranges of peaks stretching away to the east. Jack aimed the Daedalus down the gap between them to give Doc a clear view. She sat behind him, sketching the mountains and recording their altitude to help fill in the blank spaces in their charts.

  At the radio console Duke suddenly started. Then he turned back to the controls and listened closely.

  “Got something?” Jack asked.

  Duke held up a hand for quiet. Then a moment later he shouted, “Contact! Something moving. Dead ahead and below us! It’s big.”

  Jack scanned the sky ahead of them but saw nothing. Long walls of sheer stone and ice flanked them, and a rolling deck of gray cloud formed the floor of the corridor they flew down.

  Then something roiled the top of the cloud before breaking through into the sun. A long, dark shape emerged from the cloud bank like a U-boat surfacing from dark water. It broke through into the bright sun and angled upward to climb. There was no mistaking it. It was the Luftpanzer.

  “Deadeye!” Jack shouted, “Man the guns!”

  “Aye, aye,” Deadeye shouted from behind him, and Jack heard him clambering up the ladder to the top gunnery position.

  “Guns hot!” Deadeye shouted down from the turret.

  Jack flipped the cover off the switch that activated the forward-facing Lewis guns and pressed it. “Forward guns hot,” he called back.

  “How many times do we have to do this?” Doc asked, and Jack could hear her worry beneath the irritation in her voice.

  It was a fair question. They’d already destroyed the Luftpanzer once. A year ago, they’d caught the ship on the ground in the Amazon jungle and had blown it to pieces. They knew Maria Blutig had survived that encounter. But Jack had hoped they’d dealt Silver Star a more serious blow. He’d hoped they didn’t have the resources to simply build another Luftpanzer and carry on with their plans. But apparently they did.

  But if their luck held, perhaps they could take out the second Luftpanzer much more easily than the first. The Luftpanzer was much larger than the Daedalus, she was better armed, and she carried deployable fighter biplanes that multiplied the damage she could inflict. But on the other hand, they were positioned almost ideally, above and behind the larger ship. With a quick run at them from behind, they might be able to take down the enormous Silver Star airship before she could deploy the fighters or bring most of her heavy guns to bear.

  Jack throttled the engines to full and tried to estimate the Luftpanzer’s rate of climb. A long strafing pass straight down her back was the goal, unloading all the guns as they passed.

  “Ready?” he called to Deadeye.

  “On your mark!” Deadeye shouted back. Jack knew he would have the twin Hotchkiss guns aimed where they would do the most damage. They closed the gap. Jack watched the Lewis guns’ aiming point slide closer and closer to the Luftpanzer’s stern.

  “Fire!” Jack shouted, and he jammed his thumbs down on the twin triggers. The forward guns opened up with a chatter, and he heard the roar of Deadeye’s twin Hotchkiss guns join in an instant later. Machine gun rounds began chewing up the Silver Star ship’s stern, shredding rudder panels and puncturing the rear gas cells.

  Then the wind changed, and Jack felt the ship fall away to the left and the forward trim go out again. The nose pitched up and the ship came almost to a dead stop, then was carried off to the left, toward the mountains. Jack’s line of fire whipped up, and the rest of his bullets streaked harmlessly over the top of the enemy ship.

  Jack swore loudly and released the triggers to save his ammunition. With the swivel mount in the top gunner’s position, Deadeye was able to keep his guns trained on the Luftpanzer for a few more seconds, but then the Hotchkiss guns fell silent as well.

  “Starboard, Jack! Starboard!” Deadeye shouted down from above. “And bring the damn nose down!”

  “I know that,” Jack muttered to himself. He adjusted the trim to drop the nose and threw the rudders hard over to slew the ship back out toward the center of the corridor.

  But the element of surprise was obviously lost. The Luftpanzer was climbing fast now, and turning toward them. Jack saw the other ship’s forward gondola swing into view and knew that Maria Blutig was standing on that deck, preparing to take her turn.

  The corridor narrowed ahead of them. The Luftpanzer had little clearance to do a full turn. That was something. But her port side guns began to fire and Jack saw tracers sweeping the air in front of them.

  “Incoming!” he shouted, and dove the ship downward. The sound of bullets slamming into the ship’s skin echoed across the deck. Then Deadeye’s Hotchkiss guns opened up again.

  “Cells one and three,” Rivets shouted from the rear intercom. “Losing pressure, but I can keep her steady if you can.”

  That was easier said than done. Jack wasn’t sure if he could regain the lost altitude, especially with the ship leaking gas. She was fighting his efforts to steer too. The winds wanted to carry her closer to the mountainside, and the nose kept trying to pitch to port so that he had to steer starboard just to keep her even. It wasn’t worth trying to aim the fixed Lewis guns like this. Deadeye seemed to be having better luck with his swivel mounted guns, so Jack decided to dive beneath the Luftpanzer. That would give Deadeye a chance to do what damage he could, and at the moment Jack was willing to trade altitude for speed and control.

  The Luftpanzer kept raking Daedalus with fire as they passed beneath her, but Deadeye was returning fire. Jack heard him whoop in triumph and knew what that meant—he’d hit something important on the Silver Star ship.

  They passed beneath the Luftpanzer and both ships’ guns went silent for a moment. Jack turned again, trying to get farther from the mountains and give Deadeye a firing angle. The Hotchkiss guns chattered again. Then they slid out from beneath the ship, and the Luftpanzer’s starboard machine guns came to bear. More bullets slashed through the gas cells.

  Instead of falling, however, the ship began to swiftly rise. They’d hit an updraft, Jack realized. He slowed the engines and let it carry them higher, even as it pulled them relentlessly closer to the mountains.

  “Getting a little tight out there,” Doc observed nervously.

  “I know that,” Jack replied. “She’ll hold.”

  “Contact!” Duke announced. “One, no two. Small planes! I’ve got radio chatter.”

  Jack scanned the sky for what could only be a pair of Luftpanzer’s biplanes, but he saw nothing.

  He had lost sight of the Luftpanzer herself, but neither her guns or Deadeye’s were firing at the moment. Rivets made a report about patching cell three, which Jack took to be good news, but he had other things to worry about now.

  “It’s Luftpanzer’s planes all right,” said Duke. “She wants them to attack us, but they say they don’t have fuel. They need to dock immediately.”

  “Oh, my god,” said Doc, “Look!”

  She pointed out the main canopy, and Jack followed her direction. On the other side of the corridor, just visible through the cloud cover
below, he saw a pair of enormous rock spires at the top of a mountain. They reached up into the sky like talons ready to grab them out of the air.

  “The twin pillars,” Jack said in amazement. He couldn’t believe it. But there they were, just as the Long Walker had promised.

  “Lock down our position!” he snapped. “Mark that spot!”

  “Already on it!” Doc said behind him.

  “Got them!” Duke added, pointing out the canopy himself.

  Jack saw the small black shapes of two biplanes emerge from the cloud deck below the twin stone spires and break away down the corridor to his right. He turned the ship to follow them and caught sight of the Luftpanzer herself once more. She’d aborted her turn after Daedalus passed beneath her and was now turning back. She was flying a steady course down the corridor so her airplanes could dock with the landing hooks that were even now extending down from their hangar.

  “Have you got our position fixed?” he asked.

  “Got it,” said Doc. She stepped around him and leaned close to the canopy with the Leica camera she’d picked up on their last mission and snapped several shots of the spires jutting out through the clouds.

  Jack thumbed the intercom so everyone could hear him. “We’re breaking off,” he announced. “Deadeye, Doc, go aft and help Rivets patch the ship. We need all the gas pressure we can get.”

  Then he hit the throttles to break the ship out of the updraft and took her down and away from the Luftpanzer. This wasn’t a fight they could win. They’d take on Maria Blutig’s new toy another day.

  Besides, he thought as he rounded the end of the corridor and the giant Silver Star airship disappeared around the mountain face, they’d found what they were looking for.

  Chapter 12

  They landed at the airfield in Almora and inspected the ship to assess the battle damage. Thankfully it was minor. There were punctures in several gas cells, and patching them and checking for hull integrity took the rest of the available daylight and then lasted well into the night. But the mechanical systems—controls, power, the steering gear and engine housings—were mostly undamaged. There was nothing that called for replacement parts they didn’t have on hand. By morning, the ship was in prime flying condition once more.