Terrible Swift Sword

by William R. Forstchen

  "All out!" Chuck announced, standing up and banging his head on the low ceiling. With an embarrassed curse he got out of the car and extended a hand to Olivia. She took it and held on for several seconds after alighting.

  A track followed off from the switching into the woods, weaving its way around trees too large to be dropped, while the engine and its five cars were poised to continue straight ahead once the passengers were off.

  "No engines up to where we're going today—too dangerous what with the sparks," Chuck announced.

  "But the powder mill. It goes up to there, why not to the sheds?" Julius asked, pointing straight up the line.

  "The powder mills are safe. We're just being cautious today since the wind is up slightly from where the track runs straight into the shed," Chuck replied, surprised for a second that Julius knew about the other secret hidden up here.

  After the Merki air attack of the previous summer, Mina had pointed out that to rebuild anywhere in Rus would have been to reinvite attack on one of their most crucial and vulnerable industries. There was another logic as well, since the sulphur and, far more importantly, the saltpeter resources of Roum were virgin territory. So the mill had quietly been constructed out here, while a fake plant, which had been repeatedly attacked, had been constructed near Novrod.

  Leading the way, Chuck moved alongside the track. Olivia let her hand slip away, but kept by his side. The track made a sharp turn to the left after a hundred yards through the heavy forest, and coming around the bend Chuck came up short, a childlike grin of delight brightening his features.

  The balloon shed, constructed of rough-cut boards and nearly forty feet high and over a hundred and fifty in length, stood before him in the clearing. A second and third one stood behind it, with a fourth already under construction on the far side of the stump-littered field beyond. Floating in the middle of the first shed his latest weapon hovered, as if ready to take wing at any moment.

  Jack looked over at him and smiled.

  "We finished the inflation two days ago. So far there don't seem to be any major leaks. It's just a question of waiting for the engine to be mounted, and we're ready to fly."

  "The engine?"

  "We were waiting for you to start the test run."

  Chuck nodded absently as he walked forward, all else forgotten. The doors of the hanger were wide open, the louvers above the shed also propped open to allow any errant wisps of the dangerously explosive gas a way out.

  "And this will fly?" Olivia asked.

  "Of course. If those damn beasts can do it, so can we. Just give us a little time, and we'll push them out of the air."

  As if approaching an altar, Chuck walked into the rough-board hanger, the long, sausage-shaped balloon hovering above him.

  "Any problems with inflation?"

  "One of the wooden interior support struts in the aft part of the rear bag shifted, cutting through the fabric, but we got it fixed," Jack replied.

  Chuck nodded. He had argued that rather than simply be a loose bag of gas, the aerosteamer—as he was already calling it—should have a rigid interior structure onto which the double layer of silk would be stitched. The Merki balloons lacked this feature, relying on internal pressure to stay rigid, and he had noticed their tendency to wobble and bulge in flight.

  The frame was of nothing more than thin strips of a bamboo-like wood, lashed together into a long, basketlike frame, but it thus required a lot more lift. Still, the balloon looked far more solid. Walking down the length of the shed, Chuck stopped in the middle of the balloon and peered up into a round hole cut directly above him. The inside of the balloon was lost in darkness, but he could imagine the vast frame rising above him. All that was needed now was to install the engine underneath the hole. The exhaust heat would go straight up. providing the necessary lift and the control for maneuvering. The gas bags of hydrogen fore and aft would provide the rest of the buoyancy. It still made him extremely nervous to be hooking a steam engine to a hydrogen balloon, but there was no other alternative. He had heard about helium gas, but how in the world it was to be found, captured, and processed was totally beyond him. If it hadn't been for Jack's past experiences with the circus, and his knowledge of how to bathe zinc shavings with sulfuric acid to make hydrogen, no one on this world would now be Hying. He could remember Hinsen's hanging around while Jack had been working on the project, and could only surmise that the traitor had given the secret to the Merki. The hatred that thought triggered disturbed him, and he pushed it aside. For him this war was not about hatred. It was a question of outthinking a foe.

  Walking down the rest of the length of the shed, he pointed out the details of the balloon to Julius, knowing that Olivia was soaking it all in.

  "The engine is the final stage," Chuck said, and leaving the rear of the hanger he led the group across the stump-littered field. In the distance a busy crew of workers was swarming over the latest hanger going up. Trees dropped in the clearing were going straight into the steam-powered sawmill, which was safely operating downwind from the field.

  In the center of the clearing half a dozen four-pounders were set, the barrels now mounted on yokes that would allow the weapons to be swung up to a vertical position, their crews coming to their feet as the group passed. Similar emplacements were going up around all the key industrial sites in Rus and Roum. A number of hits had been scored on the Merki ships, but except for the one crash they had yet to bring the enemy down. He paused for a moment to look up at the high watchtower. On a clear day they could see all the way to Roum, seventy miles away. Only the week before a Merki ship had hit the city and then ventured northward, as if to scout, but had then turned back just south of Hispa-nia. It had been a near thing. One firebomb on the hangers would have destroyed an entire winter's work.

  The doors of the log cabin work shed were open, revealing an interior lit by kerosene lamps, and Chuck led the group in. A team of Rus mechanics gave him a cheery greeting as he went through the crowd, patting men on the back, firing off questions and quips. With obvious pride he walked up to the small engine resting on a workbench in the middle of the room. The air was heavy with a thick, oily smell, which Chuck seemed to breathe in with relish.

  "It's powered by coal oil," he announced, looking over at Julius, who shook his head in confusion.

  "From the oil that bubbles out of the ground at Caprium and Brundisia. We boil the oil, and get a fluid out of it that burns hotly." He nodded to a barrel off to one side of the shed, and to the lamps hanging overhead.

  "Weight is everything for the aerosteamer. The oil holds a lot more energy than coal, and more importantly, it burns clean. We don't have to worry about any sparks. The exhaust from the engine will fill the middle portion of the bag. When we want to go up we close the top vent, when we want to drop we simply open it up. Now the engine was the tough part. . . ." He went into his subject with relish, not even realizing that Julius and Olivia were smiling politely, barely able to understand his Latin and totally lost as to the subject.

  "A regular steam engine just weighs too much, and beyond that it needs water, lots of it. So I figured we'd go with a caloric engine. John Ericsson back home built the first one about thirty years ago."

  He looked at Julius closely.

  "John Ericsson?" Chuck asked. He said the name as if invoking the name of Cincinnatus. "He was the fellow who built ironclad ships."

  Julius nodded politely, and Chuck smiled.

  "Well anyhow, rather than using steam for power, he used superheated hot air to drive the pistons."

  Chuck went over to the engine on the table and lightly patted the boiler, which was already heated up.

  "Hot air rushes into the pistons, and as it expands it cools, with a jet of hot air coming in on the other side to drive them back. The pistons start cranking the drive shaft, which then turns this."

  He stepped behind the machine and pointed to a wooden blade propeller, nearly a dozen feet across with four vanes.

  Ch
uck looked over at Jack, and his smile did little to ease a growing tension.

  "Ready for another try?"

  Jack nodded.

  "Feyodor, the fit on pistons?"

  "Rebored to a thousandth-of-an-inch tolerance. Overall weight for the machine is down to just under five hundred pounds," the young machinist, several years Chuck's junior, replied in a voice of authority. Chuck patted him on the back. The boy first had been trained as a toolmaker, when they had begun the mass production of muskets. But Chuck soon realized he had that rare innate ability of the born craftsman, and he raised him to be the chief mechanic for this most demanding project so far. His only problem was that Feyodor had an identical twin, Theodor, blessed with the same skills, and it was ofttimes impossible to tell the two apart.

  "Then let's start her up."

  Going over to the throttle he tentatively grabbed hold, hesitated for a second, and then nodded over to Feyodor.

  "It's your toy," Chuck announced, after what was obviously a bit of an inner struggle.

  Grinning, Feyodor stepped forward and grabbed hold of the throttle, then opened it up a notch.

  Nothing happened.

  Puzzled, Chuck opened the boiler, peered through the glass door, and reached over to open up the fuel supply. The small smokestack shimmered with heat.

  With a gentle sigh the twin cylinders moved ever so imperceptibly.

  Feyodor looked over at Chuck, who nodded in agreement as the young mechanic clicked the throttle back another notch. The stroke of one of the pistons reached out to its maximum as the other pulled in, and the machine seemed to hang there.

  Chuck reached out to grab hold of the small flywheel attached to the drive shaft and spin it. With a hissing chug the cylinder went through the rest of its stroke, returned, extended, and returned, the propeller cranking over slowly on the end of the shaft with a soft, whistling sigh.

  Smiling, Feyodor clicked the throttle back further, and the machine set into a slow, steady, hissing hum.

  "Let's move it to the measuring table!" Chuck shouted.

  Assistants rushed up, grabbing hold of the corners of the iron sheet that the machine was bolted down on. Picking it up and holding it high overhead so that the propeller wouldn't strike the ground while it was still slowly cranking, they carried it farther back into the shed, placing it down on another table that was covered with grease.

  Chuck went around to the end of the table closest to the whirling propeller. Ducking low, he hooked a restraining cable to the side of the engine and another to a spring-driven scale.

  "Everyone else out of the building!"

  Jack came up to Chuck's side and grabbed hold of him by the arm. "Then you're going out, too. Keane gave explicit orders that you were never to be in any dangerous position."

  Chuck shook his head.

  "God damn it," he laughed, "I outrank everyone in this room! Now get out!"

  "I'm staying," Jack announced, and the other assistants and workers nodded in agreement.

  "All right then, we all stay!" Chuck shouted, nodding for Feyodor to open the throttle up.

  The propeller, which had been windmilling over with a soft steady thump, started to shift into a blur, Feyodor's clothing whipping out around him. The hissing of the hot-air engine rose in tone to a demonic shriek, shimmers of heat rising off it, the forced-air exhaust puffing and filling the room with the oily smell of burned kerosene.

  The hum of the propeller rose to a trembling roar, and with a shout of exaltation Chuck pointed to the engine as it started to slide forward, restrained only by the cable attached to the scale.

  "Over a hundred pounds of push, and climbing! Give it all she's got, Feyodor!"

  The Russian pushed the throttle full over, and the workshop was filled with the howl of the engine and propeller.

  "Over three hundred and going up! By damn, we've got it!"

  Chuck stepped back from his position between the propeller and the engine and started over to where Julius and Olivia stood wide-eyed, backed up against the wall.

  "It's loose!"

  Chuck turned and stood in numbed astonishment as the engine seemed to leap free from the workbench, driven forward by the thrust of the whirling propeller. It all happened far too fast for him to react, as the propeller hit the edge of the workbench and disintegrated, filling the room with a howling tornado of splinters. Something knocked him behind the knees and he was down on the ground.

  Shouts of panic echoed, and a coal oil lamp, hit by part of a propeller, smashed, exploding in flames.

  The mad cacophony of noise gradually died away, to be replaced by the shouts of workers rushing in from the outside carrying buckets of sand. The engine, now over on its side, was still chugging away, a machine gone berserk that simply refused to quit. A river of flame poured out from its upended fuel tank.

  Chuck felt light-headed. A warm trickle was running down into his eyes, and he was unsure of how he had wound up on the ground.

  "You're bleeding!"

  He looked down to his legs and saw Olivia clinging to his knees, realizing that it was the girl who had reacted while he had stood dumbstruck, knocking him down just as the propeller had exploded.

  She crawled up beside him, wiping the blood from his eyes. He started to sit up, but she forced him back down with a strength he found surprising. An excited crowd was gathering around him, while the engine continued to howl away and others fought to put out the flames. Feyodor, coming back to his feet, snapped the throttle down and the machine wheezed to a halt, the hot metal ticking.

  "It works, damn me, it really works!" Jack shouted, kneeling down by Chuck's side.

  Grinning, Chuck looked up at him.

  "That was a three-hundred-pound spring scale!" Chuck replied excitedly. "It just snapped the damn thing and took off, pushing the whole contraption right off the table!"

  "It's enough. We'll be flying with that thing," Jack announced.

  "We've got extra propellers. Let's rig a new one on, and see how long the darn thing can run."

  "It almost killed you, and you want to start it up again!" Olivia said angrily, a flash of anger showing at this boyish enthusiasm. It was a miracle no one had been killed.

  He looked up into her eyes and suddenly felt rather weak, after all.

  The gaze held for a long moment until, from the corner of his eye, he saw a young boy from the telegraph office standing in the smoke-filled room, breathing hard, a scrap of paper in his hand. The boy's features were pale, his lip trembling.

  Somehow there was no need to be told what the message said.

  "We better get back to work," Chuck said quietly, the childlike joy of the moment before, the lingering look of Olivia, now forgotten.

  "No, damn it! You've got to come in high, you bloody idiot!"

  Vincent Hawthorne turned as the sergeant's voice boomed across the drill field. The words were in a barely understandable Latin, but he had come to learn that, no matter what era it was, or upon whatever world, a sergeant enraged at a bumbling recruit would always sound the same.

  The Rus sergeant snatched the musket away from the trembling recruit, snapping the weapon down so that the blade was poised at his stomach.

  "Have you ever seen a Tugar?" the sergeant roared.

  "On the crosses."

  Vincent winced inwardly. After the long winter and early spring the Merki corpses were now nothing more than raven-pecked remnants of sinew and bone, though still wafting with the faint odor of death. The skull of one showed the cracked holes of the six rounds he had pumped into it. Marcus had left them there as a reminder, though in his heart Vincent felt that the gaping white jaws were still echoing with a taunt, reminding him of what he had become.

  "Well, damn my bloody eyes!" the sergeant snarled. "I've seen them alive"—he started to lapse back into Rus—"coming at us in the thousands, bellowing their war cries."

  He paused for a moment to point dramatically to the ugly scar that had turned his features into a pe
rpetual grimace, mouth split open far too wide, half a dozen teeth missing.

  "I was with the bloody damned 5th Suzdal, got this at the Battle of the Pass I did, so, damn my eyes, I know what I'm talkin' about!"

  He turned a malevolent gaze on the company.

  "They'll come at you like a wall, a mountain, unstoppable except for this!" he cried, and he held the bayonet point up.

  The recruits had not understood a word he'd said, but none dared to challenge him.

  "Come in too low," he shouted, thrusting the bayonet in toward a recruit, who jumped back, "and you'll go right under their balls.

  "Remember, they're eight, nine feet high. Look out for the downward strike of their sword. But they're a bit slower than us, so wait for that stroke. Dodge the strike, and before he can recover come in low and then thrust upwards, up high. Stab high"—he shifted back into a thick Latin—"up into their belly, which will be staring you in the face!"

  "Then twist,"—he rotated the bayonet—"and withdraw!"—he yanked the gun back.

  "Now again!"

  He threw the musket back at the recruit, who looked humiliated and red-faced, as if ready to burst into tears.

  "Perm and Kesus help him," Dimitri said softly.

  "The weak ones will die," Vincent replied coldly.

  "I just hope they don't drag us all down in their dying."

  Somewhat startled, Dimitri looked over at Vincent as he nudged his mount into a slow canter, continuing across the drill field, moving in the direction of an entire brigade that was lined up practicing. Vincent sat erect in the saddle. He had finally learned to keep a good seat on the huge horse, though he still looked almost childlike from behind: narrow shoulders, five and a half feet in height, and not much above a hundred pounds.

  It was a fair, cool morning, with a promise of true warmth by afternoon, a faint breeze picking up out of the west, rolling in from the open steppe. A whistle cut through the air, causing Vincent to turn in his saddle and look back over his shoulder to watch another train, pulling up out of the siding located just south of the city walls.

  At the sight of his drawn features, Dimitri realized there was nothing childlike about the twenty-two-year-old general anymore, or if there was, it was deeply hidden. His once gentle face was cold, set with a hard stare, his gray-blue eyes distant, as if chiseled from ice. He had allowed a thin narrow beard to grow (more of a goatee that was trimmed to a point), matched by the tracing of a mustache. He no longer wore the old regulation kepi of the 35th, having replaced it with what he called a "hardee hat": wide brimmed and black, with a high crown. The hat shaded his features, giving him a distant air. Affixed to its center were two gold stars, matching the stars on the shoulder of his dark blue officer's jacket, trimmed with a double row of gold buttons. After taking command of the 5th, he had switched to the loose high-collared white tunic and canvas trousers of the Rus infantry. But that was gone now. He was the general of two corps in training, and he had the look of a professional killer in his eyes. He had changed.