Dawn's Early Light

by Pip Ballantine

  “You weren’t there, Welly,” Eliza stated.

  “No, Eliza, I wasn’t,” and then he paused, wringing a hand lightly on his steering wheel, “on that particular battlefield.” He was pleased to see her gaze soften slightly. “What I’m saying is that battlefield trauma can affect one’s perception of the world. Introduce a liberal amount of alcohol into said perception—”

  The rhythmic hoofbeats of Wheatley’s horse interrupted his thoughts, and soon enough the chestnut mare appeared alongside the motorcar.

  Wellington shook his head at the state of the American. While Bill was slightly better presented than he had been the previous night, he still looked as if he had been on the wrong side of an argument with a cricket bat.

  Deciding not to comment, Wellington reached out, opened his door, and offered a hand to Felicity. As he assisted her down, he looked back to Eliza.

  “As I was saying, add libation to someone as unstable as this Merle, and you—”

  “Actually, it’s Major Brantfield,” Bill slurred.

  “Merlin Brantfield?” Felicity asked, her hand going to her chest.

  Eliza turned towards the librarian, her eyebrow crooking slightly. “You know Merle?”

  “CSA Major Merlin Brantfield is known on both sides as the Magician from Manassas,” Felicity said. “He was promoted to the rank of major shortly after the second battle there. It was thought he’d be the next General Jackson or Lee.”

  “That shell of a man . . .” Eliza blinked. “So what happened to him?”

  Felicity became sombre, casting a quick glance to Bill, who was also slightly ashen. “Sherman’s Carolina Campaign.”

  Wellington understood then. He had studied the controversial “scorched earth” strategy of Union Major General William Sherman. Somehow, this man with whom Eliza shared drinks had survived it all. That must have left deep scars indeed.

  “Very well,” the archivist said, tugging the lapels of his coat. “I believe then that just past these dunes is the beach?”

  “Yep,” Bill said, slapping saddlebags over his shoulder. “And somewhere out there is a wreckage, or evidence of such.”

  “Bill,” Eliza said, “Merle told me the bodies were gone by morning.”

  “And if Merle isn’t seeing things, those corpses didn’t just get up and excuse themselves. If they did”—Bill paused, taking stock of his pistols and how many bullets he had—“we got bigger problems than disappearing ships.”

  “Let’s go about it then,” Wellington replied.

  Once clear of the dune, the four agents stood with the open expanse of the Atlantic stretching off to the east, the deep violet of night slowly receding. Even with the promise of a dreary day, their view was stunning as the sea crashed against the shore, the tendrils of its foam stretching deep up the sand.

  “So,” Wellington said, placing his hands on his hips. “Which way?”

  “Just give us a minute, Johnny Shakespeare,” Bill insisted as he removed the bags from his shoulder.

  At first, Wellington thought the objects Bill removed were large books—about the size of the registers one would find in a town hall. The American passed one to Felicity while he took the other. From their spines, the agents extended antennae, then unclasped the cover to reveal a collection of gauges and buttons rather than text. Bill spun a small hand wheel a quarter turn then hefted the book in front of him, while Felicity mirrored his actions.

  “Airship and sailing vessels all carry onboard small wireless beacons. During normal travel they serve as handy ways to keep track of a ship’s bearings,” Bill said, checking the gauges as he began walking along shore in the direction of their resort. Felicity was walking in the exact opposite direction. “In case of a catastrophe, there should be enough water in the boiler to keep the beacon active for four days.”

  “So if what Merle saw was real,” Eliza concluded, “then there should be a signal.”

  “Unless,” Felicity said over her shoulder, “the boiler suffered a breach. It is hard to—” Her words cut short as she looked up from the gauges. “Bill!”

  Her partner closed his own book and shoved the device into Wellington’s arms as he passed. Wellington glanced over at the Americans before daring to open the book. Dials and needles stared back at him, all unmoving until he turned in the direction of Felicity and Bill. He only managed a few steps until one of the lights at the top flickered with the tiniest of sparks. He turned the hand crank to the left and the casing grew warmer in his touch. That was when the needle in the gauge marked “Signal Strength” bounced lightly.

  “Oh, this is ingenious,” Wellington whispered as the needle moved again, then once more, clearly in some semblance of rhythm.

  “How strong?” Bill asked.

  “Faint from here, but we’re definitely getting a signal,” Felicity replied. “Maybe a mile in this direction?”

  “Right then, back to the motorcar?” Wellington offered, closing the tracking device.

  “Afraid not,” Bill said, casting his glance down shore. “The mechanics of your fancy ride will gum up the works of our trackers. We are gonna have to hoof it.”

  Bill took the tracker out of Wellington’s arms, much to the archivist’s dismay. He would have liked more time with this OSM innovation. While their own ETS worked on a private network of wireless transmissions, this device apparently was able to tap into all manner of æthercommunications and focus on a specific signal. He wondered how it was doing that . . .

  His question, it seemed, would go unanswered as Bill took the devices and slipped them back into the saddlebags.

  “After you and Bill returned last night from Quagmire’s,” Felicity spoke up, “I took the liberty of accessing recent traffic, both air and sea, so if this ship that Major Brantfield claims was taken down exists, we should be able to see if it is listed as late or missing.”

  “Had any vessels disappeared before our arrival in Norfolk?” Eliza asked.

  “Two,” Felicity said, “the Cherie and the Alexandria. Both airships.”

  Wellington turned to look out to sea. “It’s possible then, if Brantfield saw either ship that night, the wreckage out there awaits us?”

  “Possible.” Felicity shrugged. “But considering the lead . . .”

  “Better get walkin’,” he said, then tossed his duster to Eliza. “Just in case it gets a bit too chilly. Carolina winds tend to fool you into thinking you’ll be fine, right before they start bitin’ to the bone.”

  Wellington straightened up at Eliza’s grin as she slipped on the long coat. He did not care for that particular look on her.

  In silence, the four continued down the shore, the sky above now decorated with bands of clouds slowly forming a featureless sheet of steel grey. The temperature sank lower and lower with each step. Eliza was probably particularly cosy in Bill’s jacket, Wellington found himself thinking.

  He frowned. Why could she not see right through the American? She was usually much more savvy than this. The wind pushed back a few locks of her hair, and Wellington couldn’t help a slight smile. Something about being by the ocean made her even more beautiful.

  Thinking on that made him almost run into her when she stopped suddenly. Wellington’s gaze followed where she was looking.

  “Miss Braun, I stand corrected,” he said as they all took in the dramatic wreckage in the distance.

  Fluttering in the breeze was the remains of a half-inflated balloon. There were mizzenmasts and yardarms, snapped as if they were kindling meant for a fire. Scorch marks pitted and marred the hull of the long gondola that would have hung underneath the envelope. Wellington looked around them, and sure enough what appeared at first to be merely driftwood half-buried in the sand was actually a body. He soon enough found more.

  “Why haven’t the authorities been here?” he said sternly.

  “We�
��re in a pretty remote area,” Bill said, apparently taking count of how many bodies had washed onshore, “and this didn’t happen two nights ago.”

  “When do you think?” Eliza asked

  “Last night.” Bill dropped to one knee for a closer look at the nearest dead body. “After Lizzie and I were at Quagmire’s.”

  “That certain, are you?” Wellington asked, looking around at the wreckage.

  No reply came. He turned to Bill, who was now holding his Stetson over his heart, looking up at Eliza. “Yeah. I am.”

  The three of them drew closer, and Eliza gave a quick gasp of recognition. “Enoch?”

  The man was massive, his jaw quite swollen and nose slightly crooked as if struck with something hard. From their early morning’s repast, he did recall Eliza regaling him with stories of a rather large man who Bill had attempted to fend off with a bottle of alcohol.

  As they drew closer to the derelict, Wellington surveyed the area to see if they were alone, but no ships, air or otherwise, hovered over the choppy waters. The dunes reached higher than he liked, towering over them by at least two stories. He paused, tapping his fingers against his hips as he surveyed the terrain.

  “Something amiss, Welly?” Eliza asked, motioning to his less-than-elegant stance. “Ready for trouble?”

  “Just . . . just . . .” he stammered, suddenly feeling the stress of her regard,” . . . getting a lay of the land is all.”

  To his surprise, she nodded in approval. “I don’t like the dunes either. There’s just too much opportunity to pin someone down from there.” She playfully rapped him on the arm. “Excellent instincts.”

  Suddenly, the cold seemed less bothersome. He smiled back at her. “Shall we get a closer look at your lead?”

  “Oh,” she said, slipping her arm into his, “a walk along the beach to the site of a shipwreck. You really know the way to a girl’s heart, don’t you?”

  They drew closer to the major damage that must have brought down the vessel. Much of the hull had been blasted away, one hole in the keel and a larger breach where an engine and propeller array would have been. Wellington gave a gentle pat of her arm before slipping away to get a closer look at the smaller damage point.

  Felicity, returning from the bow, gestured along the hull as she said, “She’s christened as the Delilah. There’s no record of this ship either coming or going in the past week.”

  “Really?” Eliza asked. “Not even for a moonlight cruise?”

  “I would have seen it,” she stated. “The beacon we heard could be a standard distress signal. Even the illegal ones carry those.”

  “A ship not registered in any logs, incoming or outgoing.” Bill followed the ship from stern to bow. “Smugglers?”

  “That stands to reason,” Eliza concurred. She turned back to Felicity. “Maybe you can run down any previous history this ship has with the local law?” Felicity nodded, produced a pad from inside her coat and quickly jotted down a note. “Bill, when you and Felicity looked at the recent disappearances, did you notice if any of them were unregistered like the Delilah here?”

  “No, but I guess Felicity has something else to add to that list once we get back to the Retreat. Don’t ya?”

  Felicity glanced up from her pad. “It wouldn’t kill you to make an aether transmission, or maybe crack open a ledger now and then.”

  Bill rolled his eyes. “Darlin’, that is exactly what your job is—cracking open them books.”

  His partner shook her pretty head. “If this particular vessel is a pirate ship, that would explain the lack of action from local and state government,” Felicity said. “But this still does not explain what Major Brantfield claims to have seen.”

  Wellington continued to stare at the hole in Delilah’s keel. “But Brantfield saw something. We’re staring at what we’ve never had until now—evidence.” There was something about the keel damage that he was missing. “Still no closer as to why it’s happening.”

  “Could dimensional travel cause damage like this, Agent Braun?” Felicity asked.

  “In my experiences utilising æthergate travel, if something like this happened as a result, it has never been reported.” Eliza came from around the remains of the stern. “But we have seen plenty of damage done when something similar to æthergate science goes horribly wrong.”

  Wellington smiled wryly. “In that case you call the Janus Affair, a reverse of polarity caused catastrophic failure. Failure far worse than what we’re seeing here.”

  “Æthergate science is still a science,” Bill offered. “This could just be a bad day at the lab.”

  “But there are two problems to this deduction,” Wellington said. “If pirates are making their ships disappear completely, never to be seen again, these must be the best-equipped but thick-as-clotted-cream pirates.”

  Felicity crinkled her nose as she looked up from her memo pad. “How so?”

  “If a pirate is burying their treasure, presumably they will want to be able to get it back. Why hide something forever?”

  “Fair enough point, Johnny Shakespeare,” Bill said, “so what’s the second problem?”

  “Not all the disappearances have been unregistered ships, have they?”

  Felicity clicked her tongue. “He’s got a point, Bill.”

  “I know,” Bill grumbled. “I know.”

  Regardless of the overcast morning, Wellington felt quite warm, as if the sun were shining directly on him, just for him.

  But then the chill of the day returned. “Since we’re all kickin’ around ideas, how about this: pirates aren’t making their own ships disappear, but can you think of a better way to pillage a ship? Just take the whole damn thing.”

  Git, Wellington seethed. “Quite a good deduction.” He waited as Bill walked around to the opposite side of the wreckage before continuing. “So let’s expand on this theory—the disappearances are pirates, plucking ships from the sea and sky. The Delilah, an unregistered airship . . .” He pointed in the direction from where Eliza appeared. “Now there’s a notion.”

  “What?” Eliza asked.

  “Extrapolate, Miss Braun. What if dimensional forces are indeed at play and the Delilah blew their engines trying to combat it?”

  “I think I see where you are going with this.” Eliza walked down to Felicity and pointed to her legal pad. “We will need to contact Ministry headquarters and have them pull Case #18940912SWFA. It involves a device called the Frankenstein Array.”

  “All right,” she began, writing feverishly. “And what does it do?”

  “The array theoretically collects and regulates electric surges created during thunderstorms.”

  Felicity paused in her note taking. “Theoretically?”

  Eliza nodded. “The design implies it can do that, but if your calculations are off, even in the slightest, you don’t have a power collector so much as you have an amplifier.”

  “If memory serves,” Wellington said, “the laboratory where you found the Frankenstein Array is located where the hamlet of Lugano is.”

  “Was.” Eliza raised her hand at Wellington, keeping him silent. “It wasn’t me. The House of Usher had started a sequence with it when a thunderstorm happened in the valley. I think they wanted to vaporise Geneva.”

  Felicity shrugged. “The last I heard, Geneva was still standing.”

  “Remember that part I said about calculations being off?” Eliza asked. “The north wing of Frankenstein’s stronghold was vaporised . . . along with Lugano.”

  “The problem with the Frankenstein Array,” Wellington interjected, “is that you need incredibly bad weather to use it. Why would anyone dare such conditions?”

  “If they were mad enough and knew the potential of something like the Frankenstein Array, they might. We never concluded if the schematics were destroyed in that blast. Usher could have s
old them through underground circles.” Eliza walked over to the hole Wellington had earlier been studying intently and shouted, “Bill?” From the other end of the wreckage, the silhouette of the American agent appeared. “Think you can make it to the wheelhouse?”

  “The gondola’s listing pretty hard,” his voice echoed through the hull, “but I think I can, yeah.”

  “See if there’s anything you can find up there that can give us a clue as to their heading or destination, and weather reports. If they were using a Frankenstein Array, then they’re waiting for storm fronts to come rolling in.”

  Wellington’s eyes darted between the hole in the keel and the spot where they had just seen Bill pop up. “Just a moment,” he muttered, standing where Eliza had called out to Bill.

  “What is it?” his partner asked, her brow furrowing.

  “In Major Brantfield’s account, how did he describe the catastrophe again?”

  “A sword of fire, I think he said.”

  He looked back at the damage to the keel, and Wellington silently chided himself for not noticing it sooner.

  Eliza looked at the hole. “What am I missing?”

  “The hull,” Felicity said with a gasp. “Observe its decided curvature.”

  Wellington had seen the keel damage as merely part of the engine room’s, but now when he looked again, he noticed large chunks of its metallic hull were bent inward, as if something had punched through the gondola.

  “The engine didn’t fail on account of a power overload, nor did it fail during dimensional travel. This,” Wellington said, tracing the metal’s bend with his finger, “was the entry wound, and that,” he said, pointing to the hole where an engine had once been, “is the exit wound. This ship was run through by something hot enough to melt metal on contact.” Wellington stepped back to examine the damage from a new perspective. “A sword from hell itself, he had said?”

  Gunshots, in a sudden burst, tore away at the metal scraps at the ship’s entry wound. Wellington grabbed the screaming Felicity as Eliza drew her pistols and started firing back in quick succession, providing cover for the moment.