The Forever Engine - eARC

by Frank Chadwick

  “I see they gave you one of the new Webleys,” Gordon said, looking it over. “Do you need help with this? I imagine it’s different than the weapons you are used to.”

  “Thanks. Let me see if I can figure it out first.”

  With a six-inch barrel, the Webley had a nice heft to it, about two and a half pounds. It smelled of gun oil, and, if it had ever been fired, it had been carefully cleaned afterwards. It was the break-open kind, the frame hinged forward and below the cylinder. I found the release catch and opened it, checked the cylinder to make sure it was empty, then clicked it shut. I cocked it and dry fired it, then dry fired it a couple more times from the hammer-down position. The action was stiff, but the trigger pull was even, if a bit long.

  I dug a handful of cartridges out of the box of fifty, slipped all but six of them in my trouser pocket, and loaded. They were nice big cartridges, about the size of a .45.

  Gordon had his revolver out as well now. It was different looking, slightly smaller and more complicated in design, with what looked like a hinged lever below the barrel in front of the cylinder.

  “It’s an Enfield,” he explained. “Slightly larger bore, a four-seven-six as opposed to your four-fifty-five, but with a shorter cartridge. I think it makes it more controllable when firing.”

  I didn’t say anything, as part of my new policy to avoid irritating Gordon any more than necessary, but I couldn’t help remembering how the “more controllable” low-powered bullet had bounced right off the hashshashin’s body armor in London.

  “You a pretty good pistol shot?” I asked him.

  Instead of answering, he raised the Enfield, took careful aim, and fired at the target on the outrigger. His pistol made a healthy bang and left my ears ringing.

  “Jesus, do you guys do anything to protect your ears when you’re shooting? It’s a wonder you aren’t all deaf as posts.”

  Gordon looked at me as if good hearing was for sissies.

  The target was about twenty yards out, so I could see the hole, one ring out from the center. This wasn’t competition shooting, so in the black was good enough as far as I was concerned, especially since the target frame was shaking a bit from the wind and engine vibration. The shooting was fine, but his stance was terrible, sideways with his right shoulder forward, right arm straight out, left arm at his side. It was the classic dueling pose, probably good for standing inside a red-coated square and picking off Fuzzy-Wuzzies, but worthless in the sort of combat we were likely to see.

  I dug some cotton out of my kit, chewed on it to get it wet, and packed it in my ears, then took my stance—left shoulder forward, both arms slightly bent, left hand supporting and steadying the pistol hand. I raised the pistol but ignored the sights and just focused my eyes on the target. I fired three shots in as quick a succession as I could manage, given the stiff action, and then took a step to the left. The recoil had been strong but controllable. That’s the beauty of a heavy pistol like the Webley or the Colt .45 automatic: it can handle a powerful round and not jump all over the place. It felt good to shoot.

  Without lowering the Webley, I scanned the target for signs of light.

  “Not very good shooting, I’m afraid,” Gordon said. “Only one shot even on the paper.”

  I fired three more rounds, took another step to the left, and then immediately broke open the revolver. A release wheel popped all six empty casings out.

  “Better,” Gordon said. “At least you’re on the paper and one round is in the black. There probably wasn’t much call for a translator to actually fire his weapon.”

  “You wouldn’t think so,” I answered.

  I dug six more rounds out of my pocket, but without a speed loader it took way too long to get all of them in. As soon as I did, I clicked the Webley shut and raised it back into my tactical stance, fired three rounds, and took two steps to the right.

  “You might try firing just one round until you’ve got the hang of it,” Gordon said, but then frowned when he looked at the target. “That’s actually a rather good grouping. Still low and to the right.”

  Three more rounds, step to the right, revolver open, spent brass tinkling on the deck.

  “Still low and right, not quite as tight as last time, but respectable. Keep at it. You may end up able to hit something after all.”

  “Thanks. Say, do me a favor, would you? At least keep an open mind about the plan?”

  He turned and walked away without answering me. He’d fired a total of one round. For what? Was it even worth cleaning his pistol for one round? Well, that was his business, not mine. I had thirty-eight rounds out of the box still to fire.

  Twenty-four rounds later, as I broke open the revolver and ejected the spent brass, Gabi spoke from behind me.

  “You have many strange habits while you shoot,” she said.

  I turned to her and pulled the cotton out of my left ear. She sat on an equipment locker, had on riding breeches and a lacy blouse with big sleeves, open at the throat as if she’d dressed hurriedly. Her loose hair floated around her face in the wind

  “Hey, I thought you were going to sleep in.”

  I clicked the revolver closed. I had started experimenting with holding pairs of rounds between my fingers, like a speed strip, and I was getting faster at reloading.

  “Who can sleep with all this bang-bang-bang? Why do you step to the side after you shoot, as if you are dancing?”

  “People under stress lose their peripheral vision. They see the world as if through a tunnel. If you step to the side, you step out of their tunnel, and it confuses them. They have to take a moment and look for you.”

  “Surely not! This is a joke, oui?”

  “Not a joke, cheri. Have you ever fainted?”

  She nodded.

  “Before you faint, first you lose your peripheral vision, then your central vision loses fine resolution and color. Remember? It is because certain parts of your brain become starved for oxygen. People under stress have similar experiences.”

  She frowned and thought about that for a moment. Finally she nodded.

  “Bien. But the target, it does not shoot back. Why make the mincing step now?”

  I hadn’t thought of it as mincing, and I didn’t much care for the image that brought to mind.

  “If someone does shoot at me, I will be under stress as well. I may forget to step sideways up here.” I tapped my head with my fingertips. “I have to remember it down here,” and I tapped my leg, “so I do it over and over again. It’s like whistling. You have to think about how to do it at first, but after you whistle enough you don’t think about how to make your lips form a certain shape to make a certain sound. You only think the sound, and your lips remember how to do the rest.”

  “Really? I cannot whistle,” she said. “Can you teach me?”

  That was something I was learning about Gabi: if you weren’t careful, you could get whiplash from the sudden changes of direction in the conversation.

  “Sure. I taught Sarah.”

  “The Terminator,” Gabi said, and then looked out past the target outrigger at the clouds floating near the rusty-gold horizon. “If possible you will leave us to return to her, your daughter.” She made it a statement, not a question. “Our time has not been kind to you so far. But if it were, you would still leave, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  She turned and looked me in the eyes.

  “It is not because she needs you. This you have told me already. It must be because you need her. But why?”

  And that was Gabi, too. Maybe everyone who knew my real story wondered that, but none asked it. It was personal, and of course they all knew the answer, or at least knew how they would answer the question, which to them was the same thing because they believed that everyone was pretty much the same inside as they were. But Gabi had no such illusions.

  “Don’t you feel that way about someone in your family?” I asked.

  “There is no family. I was my mother’s only child. S
he was not married, so she lived in the convent for a while, and then she left and now she is dead. I was raised by the nuns. I never met my father.” She shrugged as if to say this was no tragedy, it was simply what was.

  “So tell me why,” she repeated. “Please.”

  I almost didn’t answer, but there was an aching need in her question—not a need for me, but rather a need to understand the world around her. It was the first evidence of emotional vulnerability I had seen in her, and it opened my eyes. I understood her. For a moment, just a moment, I saw the world through her head, and none of the people in it made any sense. They argued, laughed, loved, raged, wept, and all for reasons which defied her understanding, all seemingly at random.

  A wave of melancholy swept over me as I realized the extent to which she was alone in the world, and probably always would be, standing on the outside of a house watching the party inside through a window, smiling at the jokes she couldn’t quite make out, wondering at the cascades of inexplicable emotions, separated from all of it by a single pane of glass which she had no means of breaking.

  She at least deserved an honest answer, even if she wouldn’t understand that, either.

  “It’s the only relationship in my life I haven’t fucked up.”

  She looked at the clouds and thought about that for a while.

  “It must be good to have such a relationship,” she said at last.

  I sat down on the locker next to her and put my arm around her, and she rested her head on my shoulder.

  TWENTY-TWO

  October 8/9, 1888,

  Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

  Aloft over Turkish Bosnia

  Intrepid shuddered and side-slipped as she pushed through the darkness, rain lashing her deck and superstructure. The weather front which pursued us the previous day overtook us not long after we began our night run into Bosnia. It could hardly have missed us once we’d started heading southwest instead of southeast.

  Two trimsmen wrestled with the forest of levers at the back of Intrepid’s wheelhouse, fighting the turbulence which rocked the flyer, each change in deck angle altering the power and balance of the liftwood louvers deep in the hull. I had thought this massive steel flyer would be immune to the effects of weather, at least compared to a hydrogen-filled dirigible. I was wrong.

  “Try to hold her steady, Wickers, there’s a good fellow,” Captain Harding ordered.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the senior trimsman answered, strain apparent in his voice.

  “Wouldn’t do to come this far just to fly into a mountain,” the captain added.

  For a moment the bridge was as bright as noon, the sky to starboard filed with a dozen branching, broken lances of raw electricity, and I jumped despite myself. The sizzling crack and rolling roar of thunder came immediately afterwards.

  “Damn me!” Gordon said beside me.

  Captain Harding smiled, but it was a calculated, tightly controlled smile.

  “Compass house reports two degree drift to starboard,” Lieutenant Jenkins reported from the bank of speaking tubes connecting the bridge to the rest of the ship.

  “Helm, come two degrees to port and steady back on one seven zero,” Harding ordered.

  “Two degrees to port. Waiting to steady on one seven zero,” the helmsman answered.

  “With a sluggish bridge compass and all this gusting wind, our analytic engine isn’t much good to us,” Harding told Gordon and me. “Just the night for some good old-fashioned navigation, wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Jenkins?”

  “As you say, sir,” the lieutenant answered absentmindedly, his attention on the speaking tubes and the bridge compass.

  Beside me Gordon tried to look nonchalant, but I could smell the fear on him through his own rain gear. He clasped his hands behind his back, I figured to keep from fidgeting, but the desire to do something—pace, drum his fingers, tap his foot—was so powerful I could almost feel it, as if he were an overwound clock ready to fly apart.

  “How close would you say we were to our course, Mr. Jenkins?” Captain Harding asked. Jenkins licked his lips and thought for a moment before answering.

  “I’d say we’re a good twenty cables downwind of our course.”

  “Twenty cables? Really? Well, that would put us into a mountainside if we try to come down. I don’t think we’ve surrendered that much ground, though. Let’s drop down and see if we can find this river.”

  “Sir, we’re still well short of Višegràd. No need to—”

  “Take us down, Mr. Jenkins. Light the bow searchlight. May as well see what we’re flying into.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Trimsman, two percent negative buoyancy. Bosun, bow light on, twenty degree down angle.”

  A petty officer closed the collar of his oilskin slicker and ducked out into the rain, then slid down the companionway to the main deck.

  “How long is a cable? Do you know?” I asked Gordon, more to make conversation than because I really wanted to know.

  He looked at me, eyes moving quickly from side to side like a cornered animal. Confusion, irritation, panic, all played across his face in less than a second, and then he took a breath and was under control.

  “Two hundred yards.”

  Twenty cables times two hundred yards—Jenkins was saying we were more than two miles off our projected course. That was more than enough to put us out of the river valley and over the mountains.

  “How does the glass read, Mr. Jenkins?” the captain asked.

  “Five hundred fifty fathoms and dropping, sir. Now five forty.”

  “The tallest mountain peaks around here are twenty-seven hundred feet. Close enough to five hundred fathoms. We’ll know soon enough which of us is the better navigator, eh, Jenkins?”

  “As you say, sir.”

  “Of course with this storm the glass is running low anyway, so we’re a few fathoms above the read. Nothing to worry about for a few more minutes, anyway. Who’s for a nip?”

  He took a flask out of his coat pocket and held it out toward Gordon and myself.

  “I’m not too proud,” Gordon said and took the flask.

  “I’ve noticed that about you,” Captain Harding said.

  Gordon paused for a moment, the flask in his hand, and as he did the bridge exploded in light around us and another latticework of lightning filled the window behind Harding, backlighting him. This time I didn’t jump.

  Gordon handed him back the flask.

  “Changed my mind.”

  “Particular about your whiskey, are you?” Harding asked.

  “Just who I drink it with.”

  Harding laughed, then offered the flask to me. I took it and sipped—Irish, like Reggie Llewellyn always carried. I thought about Reggie, what he’d make of all this, but the truth was I never really knew what was going on inside his head. Still, he’d been a friend, whatever that had meant to him, and it had meant something. I remembered his regiment’s motto and lifted the flask as a toast.

  “Who dares, wins.”

  I drank again.

  “If so, we’re on the road to glory tonight,” Harding answered as he took back the flask. “Bad as this weather is, I wouldn’t count on much support from us once we drop you off. Barring mishap we’ll make the run back to Ujvidék by morning, but I think it better we sit out any more of this weather. No point in tempting fate too often.”

  In other words, once he landed us we were on our own and good riddance. Ever since the dinner that first night out of Munich, Harding’s attitude had soured. There had been traces of his contempt for Gordon earlier, but now it had deepened and broadened, including Gabrielle and myself as well. Mostly I’d tried to just stay out of his way.

  “Corporal O’Mara has been singing your praises to anyone willing to listen, Fargo,” Harding went on. “I’ve decided to send his section along with you, if there are no objections.”

  “Ask Captain Gordon. He’s in command.”

  “Of course he is. Captain Gordon, will th
at be acceptable to you, sir?” he asked with mocking courtesy.

  “Yes,” Gordon answered.

  O’Mara had been “singing my praises,” but he didn’t have much good to say about Gordon, so that could be a problem for him, and I was sure Harding knew that when he made the call.

  Harding was navy, Gordon army. Harding’s naval rank of captain was the equivalent of an army colonel, so he outranked Gordon by three pay grades, but Gordon was in charge of the expedition. Maybe that wasn’t sitting well. Corporal O’Mara was in Harding’s crew, but now the Marine couldn’t stop talking about the American with the pipe. On this ship I had the feeling there was room for only one hero, and Gabrielle’s humiliation of him at dinner that first night had been the last straw.

  So Harding would take care of his ship and get some payback for what happened to his men and maybe rid himself of a “disloyal” Marine, but as far as our mission went, we could pound sand for all he cared—inter-service rivalry and personal jealousy trumping everything else. I’d come back over a hundred years and to a different world or reality or whatever the hell it was just to find the same old bullshit.

  “Four eighty by the glass,” Jenkins announced, and Harding shook himself as if waking from an unpleasant dream.

  “I had better see to my vessel,” Harding said. “You gentlemen may be more comfortable belowdecks. If I were you I’d make sure those Bavarians and Mr. Fargo’s French trollop are ready to disembark. I believe we are running a bit ahead of schedule.”

  Gordon shot me an angry look, as if I were to blame for Harding’s attitude and manners, but I didn’t much care what Gordon thought. There were only two people in this particular world I gave a damn about—Gabrielle and Thomson—and Harding was about to write them both off because it was more convenient to do that than to do his job. Never mind what I might have to do to them later to save my own world, this moment was real, they were still alive, and this spiteful little shit wasn’t just going to turn his back on them.