The Forever Engine - eARC

by Frank Chadwick

  Rapid steps thudded down the narrow stairs to the attic. I pushed another round into the magazine, but that was all the time I had before the first man scrambled out of the narrow doorway to the stairs. He looked around, not sure what was going on, and I caught him with a quick shot to the hip which spun him around and dropped him. He crawled away into an open room, but he left his rifle behind, so he was out of the fight. Another man stuck his head around the corner of the doorway, and I drove large splinters of wood from the door frame but missed him.

  I put two more rounds into the magazine and moved to my left, toward a doorway, when a rifle cracked from behind me and I felt as if someone had hit my right leg with a baseball bat. I went down and rolled onto my left side. Ahead of me someone looked out the doorway. I fired, and the shot went high but drove him back.

  I wriggled a little closer to the stairway, raised my head and looked down. The first guard I’d shot down there, now almost covered with his own blood, struggled to work the bolt on one of the rifles I’d just kicked down to him.

  Son of a bitch. Talk about no good deed going unpunished.

  I crawled away from the stairway. At least that guy wasn’t coming up after me.

  A hand holding a revolver appeared at the doorway to the attic stairs. It fired once in my general direction, disappeared, appeared and fired again. The shots went high, but sooner or later he might get lucky. I fired and knocked a lot of plaster dust away but wasn’t accomplishing much.

  I crawled to a doorway, pushed open the door with my shoulder, fired another round at the stairway, and rolled in. I did a quick scan of the room—an empty bedroom with four thin blanket-covered mattresses on the floor. Servants’ quarters.

  I worked the lever, ejected the spent casing, but saw the empty loading slide in the receiver. I was dry. I fed in three buckshot rounds, then felt higher on the bandolier and pushed two deer slug cartridges in behind them. I chambered a round and waited.

  I leaned away from the doorway and checked my leg. It hurt like hell, but the wound was a simple in-and-out, two-thirds of the way down the thigh and behind the femur. No broken bone and no compromised artery. I was a lucky guy.

  I coughed, realized the corridor had filled with black powder smoke. My eyes burned and my mouth was dry. I was out of practice with a shotgun, and I hadn’t held it tight enough against my shoulder, so my whole upper right arm and shoulder felt on fire.

  The revolver appeared at the doorway and fired a round, withdrew, then came back to fire again. It must have been a single-action revolver and the guy had to cock it by hand each shot. Before he could fire again, I aimed at the wall just beside the splintered door jam, about where I figured his center of gravity would be, and fired a deer slug. It punched through the lathe and plaster wall and I heard a scream of pain from the other side. It wasn’t a short scream of alarm; it was a cry of genuine agony, and it went on and on, rising and falling, pausing for ragged gasps of air.

  Across the hallway the guy locked into the bedroom started banging on the door and calling to his pals. I put a round through the door deliberately high, just to scare him, and the pounding stopped.

  This was getting me nowhere. I had to get up to Tesla, and I couldn’t see any good way to do it except over the bodies of all these guys. The pistolero in the attic stairway still screamed, but the sound grew distant. They must be pulling him up the stairs. I pushed a buckshot round in and then a deer slug and chambered it. I used the shotgun as a prop to get to my feet and then limped down the corridor, the shotgun trained on the opening. Ten feet from the stairs someone looked around the corner, saw me, and ducked back in alarm. I corrected for where I figured he’d pull back to and fired a slug through the wall. I heard him hit the stairs and then he slid down and out the door into the corridor, arms and legs awry like a discarded rag doll.

  I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, reversed the shotgun so I held it left-handed, leaned it around the corner and fired it at a forty-five-degree angle upward. Men cried out in pain and fear. I worked the lever and repeated, and again, and again.

  I loaded five more rounds of buckshot. There were only three more buckshot rounds left in the bandolier. That was okay; I was just about there. Once I cleared the attic I’d gather up a couple loose revolvers for the fight on the roof.

  I chanced a peek around what was left of the door frame, just a quick out and back. Someone up there was waiting for me and fired a pistol shot, but I was too quick for him. I immediately stepped out and fired two quick rounds up the stairway. I saw a flicker of motion as the man up there scrambled back to safety. The stairs seemed covered with twitching, bloody bodies. One of the men coughed, then raised a rifle toward me. I shot him, driving him back against the stairs, and he slid two or three stairs down until he got tangled up with another body.

  I counted five guys on the stairs, four of them in black. It seemed like more, but that was it, and two or three of them were still moving, were probably more stunned than really hurt. I had to get past them quickly, before they regained their senses—either that or stand here and execute all of them, and I didn’t feel like doing that. I climbed carefully, trying not to step on them, because I didn’t want to lose my footing.

  I loaded three deer slugs as I climbed. I figured I’d find out where the last guy up there was, get him to move, and try to put rounds through the floor into him. I heard boots scrape against coarse wooden planks ahead of me and slightly to the left. I made a guess and fired at an angle to put the slug through the floor. As soon as I did, the guy stood up and fired his revolver into the stairway. It knocked plaster dust from the wall into my face. I closed my eyes, chambered a second slug, and fired blind, levered another round in and fired again.

  I took two steps up as I worked the lever and opened my eyes. He was a black-clad zeppelin crewman, and I’d caught a piece of him, taken a chunk out of his left shoulder. He’d fallen back to the floor, sitting with his back to the ladder up to the roof. He cocked the revolver and fired. I felt the round graze my left side. I raised the Winchester and fired into his center of mass. It killed him, but he didn’t know it right away. He cocked the revolver and fired again. Missed. I took another step up and fired, finishing him.

  Then the world exploded in white stars and went black.

  FORTY-THREE

  October 15, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

  I could hardly climb the stairs to the roof. The guy I hadn’t seen, the guy hiding on the other side of the stairway, had hit me in the back of my head, probably with the butt of his rifle. I was lucky to still be alive. I’d regained consciousness as I’d started vomiting, a sure sign of a concussion. The back of my head felt twice its normal size, and every inch of it hurt. Only his prodding with a revolver, and the wild, terrified, hateful look in his eye, made me climb. It wasn’t hard to figure why he looked that way. How many of his friends had I just killed or crippled?

  At the top I crawled onto the metal observation platform. Still too dizzy to stand, I sat, waiting for whatever came next. My wounded leg hardly bothered me anymore. Want something to stop hurting? Make something else hurt worse.

  I looked around. The observation platform was all but empty. One man tended a Gatling gun on the west breastwork, although he had no targets at the moment and his attention was locked on the aerial scene above the valley. Other than the gunner, only Tesla and Gabrielle occupied the platform as my captor climbed up behind me. Gabrielle held a revolver in both hands and stood between Tesla and me, her expression guarded, protective. She looked at the blood stain on my leg with concern for a moment, but then must have decided it was a minor wound. She looked me squarely in the eye, and I read her expression at once.

  Nothing has changed. I stand with my brother—my family.

  I looked away, followed the gunner’s gaze and saw the most remarkable battle I’d ever seen. A mile away, Intrepid cruised down the valley at no more than a thousand feet of altitude, trailing its wake of coal smoke, battle ensigns snapping
in the wind. Much closer, only a few hundred yards away, Tesla’s zeppelin finished a turn and began its run back toward the lake. Intrepid’s appearance must have caught it by surprise as it worked over the Bosnian rifles from the air. It had no chance against an armored cruiser.

  “I am happy you joined us, Dr. Fargo,” Tesla said, then looked at the black-uniformed crewman guarding me. He asked a question in Serbian, the crewman answered in a voice heavy with anger, and Tesla’s expression darkened, astonishment mixed with rage.

  “All of them? You killed all of the men I sent for you?”

  “Not all. I locked two of them in a bedroom, and a couple of the wounded will live,” I said.

  “How?” he demanded, his voice rising.

  “Give me a gun and I’ll fucking show you.”

  Whatever he would have answered was preempted by the roar of two heavy guns discharging in quick succession. Intrepid’s main batteries had fired, and I saw the zeppelin shudder, shock waves rippling through the canvas skin of the gasbag. The rounds must not have hit anything substantial, though; they passed through the bag without exploding.

  The ground battery on the opposite side of the lake fired its two guns which bore on Intrepid. One round hit, exploded against the cruiser’s lower port-side hull. The flyer shuddered and rocked for a few seconds, but pressed on through the smoke of the explosion. Good armor, probably more than a three-inch gun could penetrate unless it found a vital spot.

  Tesla barked an order to the gunner, who ran across the platform and slid down the ladder.

  “He will free the men you imprisoned,” Tesla said, his voice still heavy with anger.

  “I killed all those guys and here you are, same as always. There’s a lesson in that, Tesla. You can’t fix the world by just killing people.”

  “How do you know unless you try?” he asked.

  “Try? Jesus Christ! If killing bad people could make a place better, then once Reggie Llewellyn and I and a few thousand of our closest personal friends got done with it, Afghanistan would have been a fucking paradise! I got out of the fixing-the-world-through-firepower business because it doesn’t work, and you can look it up.”

  Tesla’s zeppelin passed the house, only about fifty yards north of us and shedding altitude as it went. I heard a sizzling roar from Intrepid and saw a dozen or more fire trails shoot away toward the zeppelin. Harding had said something about firing incendiary rockets at the zeppelin the next time he saw it. These streaked out, some of them veering to the sides or up and down, the pattern spreading and losing coherence as the rockets closed on the zeppelin. I braced myself for a hell of an explosion.

  Nothing. Harding should have waited until he was closer. Every rocket streaked harmlessly past the zeppelin, or corkscrewed away from it. One rocket slammed into a lower floor of the house, but I didn’t even feel a tremor in the observation platform. Tesla ran back to his command bunker, lifted one of the phones, and barked Serbian orders into the mouthpiece.

  A bugle call, faint in the distance. I heard small arms fire as well, and across the lake I saw men scramble up the bare hillside toward the gun emplacements. Closer still I heard a cheer. I pulled myself up by the east iron breastwork and saw infantry swarming up and over the earthen parapets of the closer gun position. That would be Gordon down below and Durson across the lake, storming the gun redoubts. Their timing couldn’t have been better.

  “Give them all the orders you want, Tesla,” I yelled to him. “I think your gunners have other things on their mind.”

  Tesla and Gabrielle both came to the east breastwork and looked down. Even from here I could see the fight was savage and violent, and was going to end quickly. Tesla being shorthanded meant all the men in the gun position manned the two cannon facing west. Gordon and his men had swarmed over the east parapet and were in amongst the gunners almost before they knew they were under attack. I saw black-clad gunners and white-smocked militiamen going down, others raising their hands, and in moments it was over. Someone stood on the parapet and waved a rifle pressed into duty as a flagstaff, with the red, blue, and white Union Jack fluttering from it.

  Tesla’s crippled zeppelin, still making at least twenty knots, collided with the ground, dragging its control gondola across the rocky slope of the hill. The airship listed to starboard, dragged its two starboard engine mounts along the ground. Spinning propellers broke free and pinwheeled away, slicing another long, ragged gash in the gasbag. To the west, Intrepid had closed the distance sufficiently that I could hear its deep rhythmic machinery. Across the valley a Turkish flag went up over the northern gun position—Durson’s men danced in triumph on the parapets.

  I started wondering how Intrepid would know not to come in and blow apart the building, with me and Gabrielle in it. I didn’t have a flag handy but . . .

  Huh!

  The guy who caught me hadn’t checked the back of my waistband. The floppy peasant smock Tesla had given me to wear covered the flare pistol, so he hadn’t seen it, either. I could still signal Intrepid and the others that I had control of the house.

  Now all I had to do was get control of the house.

  “You’re finished, Tesla,” I called out. I used the breastwork for support and pushed myself to my feet. “It’s time to throw in the towel.”

  Gabrielle looked from me to Tesla with growing alarm.

  “They have the gun positions, Nikola. Is there anyone left but us?” she said.

  Tesla’s surprise and alarm changed to grim determination.

  “They have not won, nor will they. All they have accomplished is death and more death—and for nothing. I will not forget your part in this, Fargo. Gabrielle, stand away from the north parapet. It is in the line of fire.”

  Line of fire?

  He walked quickly back to his command bunker, picked up a phone, and gave an order.

  I saw movement in the building compound, light reflected from moving metal. A section of the roof of the domed building, the one holding the Forever Engines, slid back. A platform rose in its place, a platform carrying the aether propeller apparatus and three technicians. Heavy cables snaked away from it into the building interior. The mount pivoted, elevated, aimed at Intrepid.

  Tesla raised the telephone receiver again and gave an order, a single word. It must have meant Fire.

  The apparatus cracked when it fired, but not with the detonation of an explosive charge. My scalp tingled, and I saw Gabrielle’s long hair stand out from her head in every direction. The air itself seemed to crackle with static electricity as an intense white beam flickered for an instant, touched Intrepid, and—changed it.

  Intrepid seemed to waver, slip out of focus, and then it returned to crystal clarity but altered. Parts of the superstructure and hull were gone, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of another world, an orange-painted bridge lit by bright sunlight under blue cloudless skies unlike the overcast gray heavens here. Volcanic jets of live steam erupted from Intrepid’s interior, and debris from the ship and that other world, all mixed together, hurtled through the air. Among it, incongruously, I saw a green station wagon tumbling end over end until it crumpled into the ground and exploded.

  A spiderweb pattern of sparks played across the surface of the flyer, like St. Elmo’s Fire. Half of the cruiser’s metal fittings glowed cherry red with heat, and the wooden deck planks burst into flame. Intrepid continued at its same speed but began listing and falling away to port. In moments it listed farther, nosed down, gained speed, and then slammed into the ground three hundred yards from the house.

  The structure of the flyer’s hull buckled, collapsed. Shell lockers started to explode, one after another, lifting whole sections of hull or superstructure, twisting it into an unrecognizable pile of blackened, burning wreckage.

  We all stood for perhaps a minute, watching the ruin Tesla’s weapon had made of the pride of the Aerial Squadron of the Royal Navy. Tesla stepped out of his command bunker to watch as well. The beam had also passed over the north end of
the platform and the metal breastwork there and on the east side glowed and had twisted slightly, the plates thicker, puffed out like cookies baked in an oven. For a while the only sound on the roof was the ticking noise of cooling metal.

  “That was from your world, Fargo,” Tesla said after a moment. “A small sample of what is to come. I was certain the projector would serve as a satisfactory weapon, but it is nevertheless gratifying to see it perform in action, as opposed to a laboratory test.”

  “Two hundred men dead, and you find that gratifying?” I said.

  “What of the men you so casually killed fighting your way to this roof?” Tesla asked.

  “There was nothing casual about what I did, and you’ll never see me gloat about it.”

  Tesla shrugged and stepped back inside the bunker. He picked up the telephone, then turned back to me.

  “The projector will now destroy—or rather displace—the men who captured the two gun positions. Which one shall it eradicate first? Would you care to decide?”

  He waited for a moment, as if he thought I might actually answer, and then spoke into the receiver.

  No.

  Tesla wasn’t going to just zap them like a bunch of ants under a magnifying glass, not after all those men had gone through. I couldn’t let that happen.

  My guard’s attention remained on the burning wreck of Intrepid. My leg still wasn’t working right, my left arm had stiffened at the shoulder, and I was dizzy from the blow on the head. I doubted I could disarm him in a fair fight, but this wasn’t going to be fair.

  Gabrielle’s eyes were on me, but for some reason she did not call out to the guard until it was too late. He turned to face me just as my left shoulder slammed into him and drove him backwards. He backpedaled to regain his balance and suddenly found himself backpedaling in the air. He’d have fallen straight down the opening into the attic except his momentum carried him back and he hit the edge of the opening in the platform, tumbled down flailing the air, bounced off the railing of the spiral staircase, and slammed into the slate roof with the wet crunch of breaking bones.