Glory

by Alfred Coppel

  18. STORM

  It was late afternoon when Luftkapitan Klemmer gave up the attempt to guide Volkenreiter around the now fully developed line of thundersqualls. The sun had vanished behind a low bank of clouds over the western horizon; lightning flashed angrily within the thunder cells ahead. At this stage, even without considering the risk to the Voertrekkersdatter, it was impossible to overfly the cold front. The anvilheads topping the cumulonimbus clouds reached high into the tropopause, well above Volkenreiter’s service ceiling.

  Klemmer cursed himself for allowing pride of airmanship to overbear his natural caution. Behind the turbulence-buffeted dirigible, a fast-moving occlusion had formed still another rank of thunderheads. It was on to Einsamberg or nothing; a return was no longer possible.

  The dappled afternoon sunlight through which the airship had been flying was swiftly squeezed into a narrow avenue pointed straight at the only gap Klemmer could see in the line of squalls ahead. The air darkened, the temperature dropped a dozen degrees and the slowly rising ground of the Grirnsers foothills vanished. Volkenreiter flew through a turbid sea of gray and black, her frames groaning complaints each time she struck turbulence.

  Klemmer reached for a speaking tube and shouted to the passengers in the salon to be seated and strap down. He gave his command in the confident manner expected of a servant of the Voertrekker-Praesident’s family, informing the passengers that Volkenreiter’s passage through “some rain showers” would be “bumpy, but quite safe and speedy.”

  With these assurances, he steered Volkenreiter into the now all-but-nonexistent gap between two thunderhead clouds. Ten minutes later, inside a fast-moving squall, Otto Klemmer grew genuinely concerned. A severe encounter with a vertical gust within the storm tore a long strip of fabric from the ventral surface of the lifting body, and it snapped and writhed in the relative wind like a giant’s pennant. Hail battered the ship. The resulting noise made it sound as though Volkenreiter were being pelted with rocks.

  Small hailstones were caught in the violent updrafts and lifted into freezing air where they accumulated layers of ice. By the time they fell and struck Volkenreiter’s fabric skin they had grown as large as a man’s clenched fist, and they made the airship reverberate like a drum.

  Volkenreiter’s altitude varied with the turbulence. Klemmer could not leave the helm and Blier, on the elevator control, was sweating heavily with the exertion of holding altitude. Hidden below the undercast lay the rising terrain of the Grimsel Mountains. Within minutes the dirigible was flying blindly over the unseen first range of crags, sharp as cheet’s teeth.

  Luftkapitan Klemmer felt the undignified sweat of apprehension soaking through the serge of his best uniform. The cabin temperatures hovered near to eleven degrees Celsius, only a degree or two warmer than the outside air. Klemmer followed the feeble light, knowing that to allow Volkenreiter to penetrate to the heart of a thunderhead was to risk destruction. Klemmer had never lost a ship and he had no intention of losing this one, not ever, and most particularly while The Voerster’s wife and only child were aboard.

  The suggestion of an opening in the squall line showed ahead through the rime-coated glass of the control deck. But the turbulence refused to abate. Blier was swearing at the effort needed to do his job. He was glaring at Buele, who had not returned to the salon, and sat braced between the navigation table and a bulkhead. Klemmer saw, to his annoyance, that the half-wit was grinning, actually enjoying the tumult and uproar of the storm. He probably never once imagined that his worthless lumpe life might be in danger.

  “Here, boy, Bol damn you,” Blier shouted. “Come help me with this elevator wheel.”

  For a moment, the Luftkapitan was tempted to countermand Blier’s order. It was not fitting that a child, and a halfwitted one at that, be pressed into service to help fly the pride of the airship fleet. But when Klemmer measured Blier’s condition, he decided against intervening. Buele might be simpleminded, but he seemed to have a knack for the way things worked, and he was certainly strong enough to help Blier, who was tiring fast.

  Buele leaped to the elevator wheel, grinning like a kaffir mask. Klemmer shuddered. At home, atop the clavichord (which no one in the household could play) there stood a toothy hornhead bone carving of Oya, the kaffir god of death. Mynheera Klemmer collected kaffir art, cluttering the house with ugly, primitive images. There was the Earth Mother Mandela, a female with upraised clenched fist and enormous breasts; Nampa, Tutu, and Chaka, the warriors of Angatch, the god of all gods; and there were other, unidentifiable images as old as the colony and perhaps older. Their antiquity should have made them pricey, but Voertrekkers assigned little value to such kaffir things. Helga Klemmer was an exception. She was devoted to her hobby. The captain hated it. The figure of Oya was forever surfacing in his nightmares. Was it, he often wondered, his drop of kaffir blood that made him prey to such superstitious nonsense?

  He snapped at Buele to stop his grinning. “This is serious business, boy.”

  Matters grew more serious by the minute. The patch of lightness ahead had vanished in the murk. It was replaced suddenly and violently by repeated blue flashes of lightning. The air became pungent with ozone. The lightning bolts, made brilliant by Voerster’s oxygen-rich air, had passed perilously close to Volkenreiter. Blier stared at the captain in terror. Lightning was the airship killer. A strike on an aircraft carrying tanks of compressed hydrogen fuel could explode it into flaming rags and plunging bodies.

  “Turn back, Luftkapitan,” Blier shouted hoarsely. “We will never get through. “

  “Get hold of yourself, man. And watch our altitude,” Klemmer said severely.

  Volkenreiter droned deeper into the line of storm. They were staggered, like soldiers in an armored phalanx arrayed for battle. Hail clattered against the gondola windows, then strange flashes of brilliant light from the setting sun struck the cloud banks, turning them to amber. The amber alternated with periods of murky darkness.

  For an instant the airship emerged into clear air in a deep ravine between two boiling, silver-white cumulus clouds rising up, up, until their tops were shredded and frozen by the five-hundred-kilometer-per-hour jetstream at the edge of the stratosphere.

  It was a scene of unreal and dreadful beauty, but Otto Klemmer was aware only of the need to find a safe path between the two silver-white cliffs. His wet shirt felt cold and clammy against his chin under the heavy Luftschifflot uniform. Buele still had that foolish, skullish grin. He had remained constant while Blier had not. Otto Klemmer shivered, gripped the helm more tightly, and flew on.

  In the salon below, Broni spread her hands on the glass and looked with awe at the vast canyon of cloud and sky through which Cloud Rider flew. She shivered with delight as repeated bolts of electric blue lightning flashed in the cloud-cliffs on either side of the dirigible.

  The clouds looked as solid as the Northern Ice. It seemed to the girl that if she could reach so far, she might take a handful of silvery white light from the cliffside and hold it in her fingers.

  Black Clavius, standing near her still, watched her joy with a deep pleasure of his own. Somehow he had been certain that Broni Ehrengraf Voerster would not be afraid. He knew the dirigible was in difficulty. It was such a primitive machine. But it achieved a kind of gallant grace with its soft, whirring flight through these high regions.

  ‘“We set mountains on the earth lest it should move... and we made the heaven a roof strongly upholden...’“

  “Is that from the Christian Bible, Clavius?” Broni asked.

  “The Q’ran, child. It, too, is a holy book.”

  “This is rather frightening, you know--” Broni said.

  “Yes?”

  “But it is so beautiful that it is hard to be afraid.”

  He could feel the emotions in her. What a strong empath she was. What a wild talent she had. What a waste to give such a spirit a damaged heart. Lord, you should have done better by her. I am sorry to criticize, but you know it is so
. Ah, Clavius, he thought. You quote Allah’s holy book, yet in the same breath you criticize Him. You like to live dangerously, old kaffir.

  He glanced at the altimeter on the wall. Volkenreiter was flying at two thousand nine hundred meters. High, but still below the mean altitude of the Planetia. One was tempted to say something more to the Lord about poor planning and allocation of resources, but perhaps he had better choose another time to tempt Destiny.

  The Wired Man turned to look back at the others in the salon. The Healer looked frightened and slightly airsick. Mynheer the Astronomer-Select simply looked exhausted. Fear did that sometimes. Instead of draining a man’s courage, it drained his strength and energy. The fact was that Voertrekkers were not enthusiastic fliers. They had the Rebellion to blame for the state of Voertrekker aviation. But another society would have recovered its aerial skills much more swiftly. Without aviation as a baseline, how would the people of Voerster ever rediscover the arts of space travel? The answer, plain enough, was that they never would.

  It seemed to the Starman that Eliana, who sat calmly looking out at the storm, was deriving much of the same fearful pleasure from the excesses of nature as Broni.

  Volkenreiter, still struggling to keep above a rising floor of mist, rounded into an eastward-running cloud canyon. Luyten had nearly set, but at this height, there was still light in the sky. The interior of the gondola glowed golden. Ahead and to the left, where the mists were solid, Volkenreiter’s “glory”--the airship’s shadow surrounded by the prismatic rainbow of Luyten’s light broken into the spectrum by the moisture in the air--fled along the insubstantial cliff face. Even as they, Clavius and the two women, watched it, the glory vanished as the sun set

  As the golden light disappeared, Eliana was struck by the odd notion that the airship and its passengers were making a mortal passage. After this flight nothing would ever be quite the same again. On pure instinct she glanced at Black Clavius. You know what I am thinking, Wired One.

  He smiled at her. Like daughter, like mother. If only a syndicate had found you years ago, mynheera The Voerster’s consort. What a Starman you would have made.

  Otto Klemmer studied the banked instruments before him. Volkenreiter was at three thousand meters. Pressure altitude. More height would expand the gas in the lifting cells, making it necessary to valve off helium. And when it came time to descend, the smaller volume of lifting gas combined with the weight of the ice the envelope had accumulated would cause the airship to plummet, and he would have to rely on the release of ballast to stop the fall. It was the eternal airshipman’s dilemma. Except that on this flight, Volkenreiter carried no ballast.

  “Blier,” he commanded. “Give me ten degrees nose down.”

  “Luftkapitan--I don’t think we should--”

  “Damn you, man. Don’t argue with me. We have to descend. We are at pressure altitude.”

  “We are near Einsamberg,” Buele declared abruptly, his mouth still set in its foolish grin.

  “How the hell would you know where we are?” Blier said angrily.

  The boy tapped his head with a nail-bitten finger. “It is all in here, Brother.”

  “Don’t call me ’brother,’ you little lumpensckeiss!” Blier yelled fearfully.

  “Pay attention to duty!” Otto Klemmer snapped. “Ten degrees down. Now.” He retarded the throttles to reduce body lift, and Volkenreiter settled, almost wistfully, into the world of darkness under her keel.

  Light diminished on the flight deck as the outside world disappeared. Rain streaked the gondola windows and froze there in spiky white shafts. The turbulence began again, more strongly than before. Volkenreiter seemed to be striking a series of invisible waves, each of which made the structure creak and groan as the strain was distributed through the dirigible’s light frame.

  The altimeter unwound slowly back two thousand eight hundred meters. Klemmer estimated that the ship’s keel was now probably a thousand meters above the level of the ground below. But there were uncharted peaks in the Grimsels well over two thousand five hundred meters above sea level. Tension gripped Klemmer’s stomach.

  The flight deck was illuminated by an intense electric blue flash as a lightning bolt crackled down nearby. Blier moaned and released the elevator wheel. But the lumpe Buele remained at his post, rock steady on the fore-and-aft helm. In spite of himself, Klemmer was impressed.

  Volkenreiter penetrated a storm cell and paid an immediate penalty. She was buffeted, bombarded with hailstones, and almost rolled on her beam-ends before Klemmer could restore level flight. He spoke into the tube: “Is everyone all right down there?”

  “Can’t you find a less athletic path, Luftkapitan?” The thin voice of the Astronomer-Select trembled, but remained controlled.

  “Stay belted down, please,” Klemmer said. He was amazed at the calmness of his own voice. An old senior captain had long ago said to him that flying airships was hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. It occurred to Klemmer that fliers had probably been saying that for tens of thousands of years in tens of hundreds of places.

  The turbulence eased and Klemmer caught a glimpse of what might have been snow-clad rocks below. In Einsamtal, the valley of Einsamberg Kraal, there was snow on the ground for ten months of the year. He glanced at Buele. He had done no more than glance at the navigational charts. Was he some sort of navigational genius? There was a name for people like that. Idiot savant? One look and something in that elongated, ugly head--some cellular calculating machine kept track forever? Well, the world was filled with wonders.

  But at the moment, the only wonder of interest to Otto Klemmer was the wonder of how to get his ship safely through the storm and moored in the valley of Einsamtal.

  The dirigible flew through a sheeting rain mixed with large hailstones. Klemmer felt the impacts on the rudder through the helm in his hands. Gusts of wind yawed Volkenreiter from side to side. That meant the ground was very near. Downdrafts from thunderstorms often struck the ground and boiled away in windshears that could destroy an airframe.

  Lightning illuminated the ground ahead. Patches of snow reflected the flash and burned afterimages into the eyes. There! Klemmer leaned forward and tried to wipe away the rime on the windscreens. Ahead lay a mountain valley, and at the head of the valley, nested against granite cliffs-- Einsamberg Kraal. A vast, ancient stone keep. Powerful, yet strangely inviting even in these circumstances. Klemmer turned on the landing light. The facades were still alive with the glowing pastels favored by the first Kraalheer, Elias Ehrengraf, whose name Eliana was given at her christening.

  The valley was called Einsamtal--Lonely Valley, a lush mountain meadowland where once great herds of hornhead had grazed. In the flash of light, Otto Klemmer saw the mooring mast in its leveled circle at the foot of the valley. Klemmer shouted to Blier to get himself under control, that landing was near.

  The technique for a short-handed mooring of a lifting body airship was to approach the mast from downwind. Then at fifty meters distance one discharged the anchor mortar, firing the hook into the ground and engaging the automatic reel under the steering surfaces, so that the ship behaved like a fish hooked by the tail. A skillful pilot was then expected to strike the mooring cup precisely so that the nose latches closed while the reel took the strain on the anchor rode and brought the ship to ground.

  In calm weather it was a test of skill. In these conditions it was a test of survival.

  Klemmer reduced throttle and rotated the engines so that the propellers were parallel to the ground. He used them to draw the airship down while the wind carried it toward the mast.

  Another lightning flash blinded Klemmer as it struck the well-grounded manor house and coruscated into the ground.

  Blier shouted suddenly, “Too fast, Kapitan! Too fast! We are going to crash into the mast!” Without orders, he fired the stern mortar. Klemmer felt the anchor leave the ship, and the familiar shudder as the rode played from the reel. The anchor would strike the ground t
oo far from the mast. The rode would run out to its limit and either snap or smash Volkenreiter into the ground before she could reach the mast.

  “Cut the anchor line!” Klemmer shouted into the speaking tube. “Somebody down there get aft and cut the stern anchor line! “

  Klemmer tilted the engines through a complete reversal and slammed the throttles hard against the stops. Volkenreiter shuddered and bridled at the rough handling. A flurry of icy rain swept across the beam of the landing light and froze on the windscreen, blinding Klemmer. Buele ran to the glass, slid it open. Freezing rain slashed into the flight deck, but Klemmer could see the mast ahead. He could feel the shock of the stern line going taut. No one had succeeded in cutting it.

  It was, in fact, Tiegen Roark who found himself incomprehensibly in the stern lazaret between the mortar breach and the reel. He was sawing desperately at the hemp rode with a dinner knife.

  The Volkenreiter slammed to a stop at the end of its misplaced stern tether. Blier was thrown forward over the guardrail and through the open windscreen. His startled shriek faded as he fell fifty feet to the ground.

  The airship dropped like a stone, struck the ground on its single pneumatic wheel under the gondola. There was a crack like a pistol shot as a main longeron broke. Then Volkenreiter rebounded back into the air and forward again as Tiegen’s efforts aft were rewarded with the separation of the stem line.

  Otto Klemmer, in what was the finest bit of airmanship of his career, steered the Volkenreiter directly onto the cup at the tip of the mast The mast itself was nearly uprooted, but it remained upright as the latches slammed closed, capturing the airship, which immediately castered around the mast-circle to come to a stop three feet from the ground with her nose into the wind.

  Klemmer shut down the magnetos, raced down the ladder and through the salon to the lazaret. Shoving Tiegen Roark aside unceremoniously, he fired the two outward-facing small mortars. The kedge anchors struck and buried flukes in the soft ground of the Einsamtal meadow. Klemmer engaged the winches and snugged the airship down until its single wheel rested firmly on the ground. Then he helped Healer Roark to his feet with thanks and apologies for his rudeness.