The Forever Engine - eARC

by Frank Chadwick

  Then I had to tell her what bingo meant.

  We made it about two hundred yards up the stream bank when I heard the engines of the zeppelin heading down the valley toward us from Brezna. We found a place in the brush where the branches were high enough we could wriggle under them. Since the blanket was a dark earth tone, I unrolled it. We crawled under the overhanging brush next to each other, Gabielle’s head on my arm, and I pulled the blanket over us to break up our shape from the air. Once we got in position there wasn’t much to do but listen to the sound of the zeppelin and wait.

  “I was very frightened when the dragons attacked,” Gabrielle said, “but the fight, it was quite exhilarating.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “You do, don’t you? You have been through this before. The fear—but then the excitement, and I do not know where the one stopped and the other began. Do you know?”

  She was chattering, pretty standard stress-release motor mouth, but that was okay.

  “I could never tell, either,” I said. “They’re too mixed up together.”

  “Yes, those feelings, and others as well, all together.”

  She turned under the blanket and looked me in the eye.

  “Do you know what I wanted to do immediately afterwards?”

  I looked back at her and smiled.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  I’d never heard her giggle before, but she giggled then, lying under a blanket in a thorn thicket as Tesla’s black zeppelin droned overhead, its searchlight sweeping back and forth across the streambed and the surrounding meadows. The zeppelin passed us by, its attention downstream, and under our blanket I gave in to the moment and did so knowing what would come at the end of the road. As I did, I also knew that whatever came, I would share it with Gabi at the end. If I had to choose one world or the other to save, I would save my daughter but share whatever fate came to this place. That didn’t make it right, but it was all I had left to give.

  Nature took its course, although not without a few false starts. The ground was hard on the back, had a lot of broken shale and gravel, so, gentleman that I am, we started with Gabrielle on top. That put too much pressure on her injured thigh, threatened to tear the stitches. We tried it with me on top but my knees were so torn up I couldn’t manage it. Beat up as we were, we kept at it until our efforts were rewarded, which says a lot for our commitment and perseverance. But they say where there’s a will, there’s a way, and right then our wills burned so brightly, so intensely, it’s a wonder Tesla’s balloon boys didn’t see them scorching away the darkness.

  Later, after our celebration of glorious survival, we rested, all tangled up in each others’ arms and clothes and the blanket.

  “Do you know what my friend Renfrew said about you?” Gabrielle said sleepily. “He said I would find you interesting. He said, ‘Three remarkable men are going on a desperate mission.’ He often speaks like that. He described the three of you as, ‘The most intelligent and practical-minded scientist of our time, one of the most courageous young officers in our service, and this strange fellow from another time. You will fit right in, Gabi,’ he told me. I think he meant because I am odd.”

  “No. He meant because you are exceptional.”

  She made a contented sound and gently caressed my chest with her hand.

  “I believe he was mistaken about Capitaine Gordon,” she said after a moment. “That is odd. Renfrew is seldom wrong about these things.”

  Yeah, why would Renfrew describe Gordon as courageous? Was he just hyping the team to get Gabrielle to agree to help? Maybe. Gordon had never been in combat before. How would Renfrew know anything, one way or another, about his courage? In fact, Gordon had gone out of his way to exchange duty assignments with other officers to avoid overseas service and stay assigned to the intelligence branch in England.

  The zeppelin’s engine had faded to a distant murmur earlier but in the last few minutes had grown louder and now grew louder still. I leaned out from under our bushes and looked downstream. I could see the location of the airship by its spotlight, which was very close, no more than two hundred yards east. The light was stationary, pointing down into the streambed, and as I watched it settled lower, landing.

  “Trouble. They found the azhdaja we killed.”

  “You thought they would,” Gabrielle said. “Now they look downstream, oui?”

  “I think they already did. We need to move while they are still occupied down there.”

  We rolled up the blanket and started upstream. I put my arm around Gabrielle and supported part of her weight until we found a break in the brush to our right. I climbed the stream bank and pulled her up behind me, but by then could hear voices, some coming up the stream, some in the meadow to either side, calling to each other to keep station.

  We had to move fast. Gabrielle didn’t protest when I picked her up in a fireman’s carry and started trotting up the gentle slope. There had to be woods up here somewhere.

  But the long flight down the valley and the fight with the azhdaja had taken more of my reserves than I’d realized. Carrying Gabrielle up the ridge, trying to stay silent, covering as much ground as I could, left my knees trembling and buckling within a minute. We needed to get to cover. The voices grew closer, but I slowed to a staggering walk. My legs just wouldn’t move any faster.

  “Leave me,” she whispered.

  No, I thought, without the breath to say it.

  I slipped on a loose rock and fell to my knees, pain lancing up my thighs. A voice sounded an alarm behind us. I tried to get up but couldn’t at first. I waited for ten or twelve heartbeats, gathered my strength, and rose. I staggered on toward trees I couldn’t see but which had to be there. Had to be.

  A shot rang out behind us, close, but I heard no bullet passage. Just someone sounding an alarm. Not much time left. Had to get to the trees.

  Feet running in the grass behind us.

  The slope grew suddenly steep. I went down on my knees again and my one free hand. I groped for a handhold, something to pull us up the slope, and felt the root of a tree.

  A tree.

  We’d made it. I gathered all my remaining strength and pulled us up the slope. I grasped the trunk of the young tree and pulled us farther, pulled us through the sharp scent of pine needles and into the dark shadowed safety of the woods.

  That’s where Tesla’s men found us a few minutes later, exhausted, lying against the trunk of a pine tree.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  October 12, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

  I’d seen plenty of dungeons in movies. The real thing was nothing like either Hollywood or I imagined. Nothing.

  The dungeon was small, a single chamber undivided into individual cells. The irregular floor, a slab of unworked bedrock, sloped toward the back wall. The walls themselves were crooked, uneven, some the same natural stone as the floor, some limestone blocks and boulders of uneven size and shape.

  Iron rings hung from hooks hammered into the back wall, and they trailed heavy, rusted chains ending in shackles. The wall and floor below it were stained dark brown and black—from rust, I hoped, but I suspected otherwise.

  The guards did not speak. They took our shoes, my jacket and shirt, but perhaps in a nod to Victorian modesty left Gabrielle the rags of her blouse. I shouted in surprise and pain when one of them took a small, sharp knife and cut a thin slice of flesh from my left shoulder, put it in a glass tube, and sealed it. Hot blood ran down my arm, dripped from my fingers onto the floor. They attached one shackle to my right wrist and another to my left ankle, then did the same to Gabrielle.

  I saw no sign of sleeping pallets, no remnants of food, no provision for human waste, and their absence was a whispered, chilling threat—you will not need these things.

  Of elaborate and imaginative machines of torture there were none. That surprised me. After the clockwork spiders, I expected some baroque, complicated torture contraptions. Their presence would have been comforting, in
a macabre way, evidence of imagination and sophistication, no matter how twisted. But this . . .

  There was nothing sophisticated about this dark, cramped, low-ceilinged hole. Everything about it was crude, primitive, and hard. This was not where they broke someone’s will, made them reveal, confess, or inform. This was where they chained them to a wall and beat them to death with iron rods.

  After they chained us, the guards departed, climbing the steep, winding stone stairway, taking the one lantern with them. They left us shivering in darkness so absolute it made the dungeon the smallest place in the world, and the largest.

  “I’m sorry, Gabi,” I croaked.

  “You should have left me.”

  “Not an option,” I answered.

  “You should have left me,” she repeated. “They would have stopped looking when they found me, and you would have escaped.”

  “And then what happens to you?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said, “I would have been all right.”

  Sure. Tesla doesn’t harm women. Gabrielle was chained in the same shitty hellhole I was, which I thought brought that proposition into some doubt, but I didn’t say so. What was the point? To scare her more than she already was?

  For a long time we did not speak. The only sounds were the occasional rattle of our chains when we shifted position, and the slow, steady drip of water in a far corner of the dungeon.

  Plop . . . plop . . . plop.

  Deep underground, and with the doorway at the top of the stairs closed, there was no ambient light, nothing for my eyes to adjust to, so we both remained blind, isolated. Minutes passed, or an hour, or longer. It was hard to tell.

  “Which is the real man?” she said, her voice strangely disembodied in the impenetrable darkness, and loud after so much silence.

  “What?”

  “You know what I ask. You were the warrior, then suddenly you became the scholar. Why?”

  I shivered, perhaps from the cold and damp.

  “My wife died. Someone needed to raise our daughter.”

  “Why did your wife kill herself?”

  I took a deep breath. The dungeon smelled of mildew and stone and air no one else had breathed for a long time. It smelled like a tomb—our tomb. Gabrielle was right; I owed her this answer.

  “We had a second child, a little boy. Jack Junior. I spent time at home, was there for the baby’s delivery. Joanne had trouble with Sarah’s delivery, but Jack Junior’s went fine. My guys back in Afghanistan needed me, too. I thought she was okay, so I went back to my unit.

  “We exchanged some words over that, harsh words. There had been a lot of harsh words. You get used to that after a while, if you aren’t careful. Suck it up and do your job.”

  “There’s this thing called post-partum depression. I guess I’d heard of it, but it was something other people suffer from, people you read about. One night, when I was halfway around the world, Joanne sent Sarah to stay with her cousins. Then she took a whole bottle of pills, went to sleep and never woke up.”

  I paused, and I heard her chains clatter softly as she changed position.

  “There is more,” she said after a moment.

  Yes.

  “I remember my commanding officer calling me into his tent, sitting me down, telling me. I remember that instant as if it were ten minutes ago, not ten years. There was this second, just a second, when way down inside of me, in a deep, deep corner of my soul . . . I was relieved. All the arguments, the recriminations, the long silences that measured her growing frustration and disappointment—all that was over, and I was glad. I was glad she was dead.

  “Then my commander told me . . . before Joanne killed herself, she’d smothered little Jack.”

  I remembered that moment again, as if it had just happened, remembered the bright morning sunlight through the partly open tent flap, how it had fallen on my hand but strangely had not warmed it. I remembered the sound of someone working the bolt on a fifty-caliber machine gun, cycling it twice, getting ready for the morning supply run over to Zareh Sharan as if nothing had changed. I felt the crushing certainty that this additional death was the inevitable punishment for my moment of terrible, unforgivable gladness.

  We didn’t say anything for a long time, just listened to the sound of the water dripping.

  “So your daughter is all the family you have left, oui?” she said eventually. “Still, it is strange you change your life so completely for your daughter alone. Do not the other people in the army raise children?”

  She said it thoughtfully, intrigued by the mental problem this presented but untouched by the enormous tragedy I had just revealed, unaffected by the admission of my terrible sin. Something about her detachment made it easier for me to talk about it as well, as if she saw the event from a different angle, a different dimension, and hearing her voice let me step, just for a moment, into that dimension where the death of my wife and child was just a thing, a thing different from other things, but still just a thing.

  “Yes,” I said. “People in the army raised children. Some were single parents. It was hard for them.”

  “I do not think hard things frighten you. Ah!” she said, as if she finally understood a great mystery. “You believe in ghosts.”

  “No. I don’t believe in ghosts. What are you talking about?”

  “You believe you killed your wife by your actions, and so you killed yourself, your old self, the self which made these actions, to make it up to her. But unless she is a ghost, she cannot see this thing, cannot accept your act of atonement. So you must believe in ghosts.

  “And the old Jack Fargo, the one you killed, he does not remain dead, does he? Another ghost.”

  Ghosts! What did she know? She had Asperger’s. She had a giant hole in her mind where other people had empathy, where other people understood what went on in the heads of the people around them. What did she know about me or about ghosts?

  “Family,” she said at last, and there was a distant, thoughtful sound to her voice, as if she talked to herself. “Always it comes back to family.”

  An hour, or two, or five later, the door at the head of the stairs creaked and scraped open. Light flooded down the stairs and illuminated every corner of our tiny world, or at least it seemed so, as dilated as my pupils were. Men clumped down the steps and brought lanterns of blinding brilliance with them, forcing my eyes closed until they adjusted to this new reality.

  “So, again I meet the man from the future,” a familiar voice with an Eastern European accent said in English.

  “So, again I meet the king of the shitheads,” I answered.

  He didn’t say anything right away, but then responded, “Can we dispense with verbal sparring? There is a great deal I would like to discuss with you about your time.”

  “My time? How about yours? You know, Thomson thinks you’re going to destroy the world with your gizmo, which will have some pretty serious ramifications on my own time, don’t you think? We’re all pretty attached to having a world to live on.”

  “Of course he thinks that,” he answered, and I heard laughter in his voice. “The Earth will fall closer to the sun, temperatures will skyrocket—am I right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Despite your words, you do not seem overly concerned, Professor Fargo. Tell me, do you believe I am going to destroy the Earth by melting its icecaps?”

  I opened my eyelids a slit. The light burned, but I could see.

  “No, you’re too smart for that. You’re going to destroy it by altering its magnetic field.”

  I could see him well enough to know that took him by surprise. He leaned back, and his eyes widened for an instant, then narrowed in suspicion.

  “Thomson says this? Thomson thinks he understands magnetic fields, but no one alive understands them as I do.”

  “Except for me,” I said.

  “You? You teach history. What do you know of electromagnetism?”

  “Not much by
the standards of my day, but I took high school physics in 1998, so at least I know what makes the Earth’s magnetic field work, which is more than either you or Thomson do.”

  Anger struggled with curiosity for control of his face. Curiosity won.

  “Tell me your theory,” he said.

  “Well, it’s been a while, but as I remember, an astrophysical body generates a magnetic field with kinetic energy from planetary rotation acting on an electrically conductive fluid, in our case molten iron in the Earth’s core. What you end up with is a gigantic electromagnetic dynamo. And you’re slowing it, aren’t you?”

  He paced slowly back and forth in the confines of the dungeon, frowning in thought and occasionally glancing at me, as if gauging my honesty.

  “Did Thomson fill you up with this story?”

  “No. I didn’t figure it all out myself until today. I had a lot of time to think about stuff down here. But Thomson may put it together himself. He’s a pretty smart cookie.”

  Tesla shrugged at that, dismissing it.

  “He was, until my men shot him down, along with that Captain Gordon and the others. Jovo Radojica, the voivoda, as well. Ah, I see that surprises you. Yes, all of them, gone, hunted down on the slopes of the mountain and shot like dogs. But what does it matter? Even alive, Thomson posed no real threat to me. Most of the men who might have are already dead.”

  Thomson dead? Gordon dead? Maybe Durson and the others as well, or at best scattered fugitives, hiding in the rocks and brush of the mountains. I never really thought Tesla would deliberately kill them. That came from being too many years away from the life of violence, from getting used to the idea that a unique personality could somehow protect you from the worst of life’s reversals. It came from the notion that if you had an interesting enough story to tell, you would get to finish telling it. But you don’t always.

  My stomach twisted, and suddenly I vomited. There wasn’t much to come up, other than stomach acid, but I brought it up and then gagged again. Gabrielle and I were alone, chained in a dungeon, with no one left to rely on but each other.