The silver haired Professor Arron Alters turned from the wide window to look at the lanky criminologist. “You are a hard man to surprise, Lash. You see, Fraulein Daniels, I told you his brain was too valuable to ignore.”
“His brain is too dangerous to be allowed free reign,” the woman said with an edge to her tone. It was very clear that she was ready to rectify the ‘mistake’ of Lynn’s survival any time.
“How could you do this, Arron?” Lash asked. “You are a brilliant, moral man.”
“Moral?” The silver haired scientist said. “Don’t talk to me about morals! Science has no morals. It only searches and learns.”
“But people do have morals, Arron; your Hannah was the most moral woman I knew. If you truly loved her you’d honor her memory by-.”
“Don’t you dare invoke her name,” the scientist spat. “Her morals did not help her when the disease struck her. Do you know when the pain became extreme she chose to take her own life? Yes, she committed suicide instead of trusting me to find a cure for her, I was powerless.” He raised a clenched fist and shook it at the panorama of New York that was becoming visible in the dawning light behind him. “I will never be that powerless again. The Prometheus Effect was one of the results of my research to find a way to kill the tumor that was killing Hannah, but those fools Hulse and Johnson kept delaying me with their stupid opinions and stopping my funding from the government.”
“You can’t cause misery for the rest of the world just because you failed.”
“But I didn’t fail,” Alters insisted. “I perfected my work last year. I found a radio frequency that can excite tissue. Used in direct concentration it could kill tumors or in broad spectrum it created a faux fire, if you will, within the body.”
“But not to the point of damage,” Lash said. “Which you knew when you had the ferry attacked. And obviously your bandaged man had some protection against the direct rays to allow him to ‘kidnap’ you. But why risk all those lives? You could just have slipped away.”
“No!” Alters raged. “The Secret Service agents have never left my side for weeks and I had to be free today. We have been working on this day for a year.”
“We?” the criminologist asked. “You mean the lovely southern belle here and her country?”
“How could you-“
“Don’t be a fool, Alters,” the girl said. “He is guessing.”
“Really?” Lash said. “Faint as it is your accent is quite specific, Fraulein Daniels; and the technology to build this dirigible is only at this level in one European country.”
“They came to me,” Alters offered. “They gave me all the financing and equipment I needed at the farm- which those fools in Washington thought was my ‘weekend’ getaway. And they built the Prometheus-which we hid in the silo in plain sight stored vertically- because the size of the power source and equipment make it impossible to transport the device by land. The machinery of my device is integral to the airship; that high pitched whine are the dynamos powering up to deliver our statement to the world.”
“And you hide it in an artificial cloud you generated to keep your ship secret.”
“Yes,” the girl now said proudly. “Another invention of the Fatherland’s scientists.”
“But why, Arron?” Lash asked again. “You were always devoted to changing the world for the better.”
“And I still am,” Alters said. “I was too late for Hannah but I will not be for many others.”
“Then give it to the world, Arron,” Lash said. “There are other Hannahs to save.”
“No,” Alters screamed. “There will never be another Hannah. Those narrow minded fools in Washington are the ones that could have saved her. They are the ones to blame for what comes. Once we have taken control of the world, we will make it available to all those who are under our care.”
“You actually think this woman’s people care about your agenda?” Lash said. “They have their own- to get back at the Allies for the armistice.”
“And why shouldn’t we get justice for what has been done to us?” The blonde hissed. “When the world kneels before us, however, we can afford to be magnanimous to the lesser people.” She smiled. “The conquered people.”
Beyond the scientist the whole of New York was now lit by the golden light of the morning with the spires of the concrete canyons gleaming. It was a cloudless sky seen through the haze of vapor that surrounded the airship Prometheus.
The streets were coming to life with the teeming thousands, one of the Staten Island ferries already crossing the harbor. The waterfront was alive with a flotilla of ships including one that Lynn Lash recognized.
“That’s the President’s yacht!” He said. “That’s why you were so obsessed with the timing of your ‘escape’ from government control.”
“When the professor has used his Prometheus ray on your president the country will know there is no defense,” the blonde boasted. “We will have a fleet of craft equipped with smaller versions of the device and no nation in the world will be able to stand against us.”
“Now you understand,” Alters said. “Now you know, Lash.” The silver haired man’s features softened. “Lash… you have intellect; you can see that this is the only way. Science will rule. It will be a better world. Join me and we can bring mankind into a golden age!”
Lash stared at the scientist for a long moment, then started to laugh so hard he was almost doubled over.
This infuriated Alters and he screamed, “Stop that!” He stepped forward to strike at the criminologist. In doing so he crossed in front of one of the gunmen that had bracketed Lash. Lynn reacted with the speed of thought and seized the scientist in a strangling jujutsu hold that placed Alters between him and the gunmen.
“Shoot him!” Alters yelled.
“No, you idiots,” the girl ordered. “You’ll hit the professor.”
It seemed a standoff until suddenly there was an explosion somewhere above them in the dirigible and the sound of gunfire echoed through the gondola.
The ship was under attack!
Chapter Six
Airquake!
The great airship rocked as the men at the controls fought to keep the ship steady.
“What is happening?” Alters yelled.
“We are under attack,” Fraulein Daniels screamed. “Those American fools have somehow discovered where we are!”
“Not so foolish Americans,” Lash permitted himself to boast. “I suspected there was something strange with a cloud that moved against the prevailing wind and I told Agent Bennet as much.”
“How could you know?” Alters gasped as he was half dragged, half carried toward the door of the rocking control room.
“I didn’t, Arron,” he said. “But I suspected. I knew that whatever had been done to those people on the ferry was a weapon that would require some sort of delivery system; a ship or submarine… an aircraft. I’m sure Bennet came to the same conclusion. He is not a very foolish American at all.”
The gunfire outside the ship continued and increased in intensity with answering salvos from the dirigible gun ports. In the control room, the blonde frantically issued orders to her men at the controls. “Dispense with the cloud apparatus and turn all power to the Prometheus cannon!”
Lash made the doorway of the control room now, still conscious of the two gunmen aiming their special rifles at him and so keeping Alters between them and himself.
The hatchway was too narrow to pass without twisting and ducking. Lash propelled Alters forward into the gunmen. He slammed the hatch closed and jammed the lock though he knew it would not hold long.
The criminologist then took off at a run down the narrow hallway guided by the whining sound of the dynamos powering up, knowing he had only minutes to destroy or disable them.
Outside the rat-tat-tat of gunfire was constant now with return blasts from the armament on the Prometheus. From the sound of that return fire Lash concluded they were using not just conventional wea
pons but the electrical discharge devices.
At a ladder that went up into the bowels of the craft, Lash encountered a crewmember racing downward on his way to some station. Lash made quick work of the startled man and removed his tool belt and headed up the ladder.
The interior of the flying ship was not dissimilar to many Lash had been in though he could see at a glance it was an exceptional one; the struts were reinforced and made of the most sophisticated materials.
“This is state of the art,” Lash thought. “And if it is the flagship of a fleet we have nothing that can match them; not with the Prometheus weapon.” With that grim thought he left the ladder and moved off onto a narrow catwalk that ran through the center of the ship. Behind him he could hear the gunmen from the control room pursuing him, hampered by the narrowness of the companionway.
Lash could barely pass his shoulders through the cramped corridor but moved swiftly toward the dynamos. The vibrations in the floor and through the walls were clear and constant. So were the sounds of the aerial assault occurring just outside the canvas walls of the flying warship.
Lash gave only a brief thought to how he might escape the craft after he had sabotaged the device. He would still be trapped among a group of blood thirsty killers looking for his head if he succeeded.
The criminologist reached the door to the machinery room and barely paused, ducking through the hatch and closing the door behind him. He grabbed an emergency axe off the wall and used it to create an improvised bar across the portal.
One of the four crewmen working in the cavernous space saw Lash, cried a warning to the others and charged him. The criminologist had no time to be delicate. As the burly worker lunged at him Lash sidestepped and snapped out two quick and accurate punches that felled the crewman.
Lash met the next two men with flying fists. Despite the tight quarters on the platform, he managed to stay clear of their blows long enough to take both men down with powerful punches that belied his lanky build.
The last worker in the machine room saw how Lash had finished his fellows and took off into another compartment. Lash was alone now in the canvas cathedral of the engine room. The gasbags were visible up above in the gloom of the ship’s interior, as were the spider web of catwalks and struts.
“No time for sightseeing,” Lash said aloud. “I’ll have guests any minute.” Indeed the gunmen from the control room were pounding on the door.
The criminologist turned his full attention to the massive dynamos before him. The complex machinery linked to the aluminum dynamos was a rabbit warren of tubes and wires the size of a small truck.
His course of action was easy; he tore off a section of railing from one of the walkways and prepared to set about smashing every tube he could reach. But he knew it would not be enough. The charging of the Prometheus cannon could be stopped but a mass effort by the crew might be able to reinstall the tubes. He had to make sure there could be no quick fix.
To that end he took several of the railing sections and dropped them between several leads of the dynamo. He jumped back quickly as the power from the massive battery arced through them and fused them to the machine.
The frustrated crew stopped beating on the door and took to using an axe against it. Lash knew he had mere moments before he would be under direct fire. He smashed any tube he could reach in the smoking machine and ran for a vertical ladder just as the gunmen crashed through the door.
“There he is!” One screamed and sent a fusillade of low caliber machine gunfire his way.
“Stop, you idiot!” Fraulein Daniels screamed. “He is up near the gas bags! Get to the cannon.”
Lash climbed as quickly as he could, following the path of the fourth crewman, and came to a catwalk barely a foot wide and hemmed in with support wires. It moved off through the large helium gasbag back toward the stern of the ship.
Now the criminologist made use of the tool belt, taking a wrench to the support struts of the walkway itself. This would destabilize the whole internal structure of the craft. Outside the sound of the battle was louder and more violent.
Lash ran along the catwalk stopping frequently to loosen struts. He was careful not to disconnect them completely because the wires, under such tension, would separate from the walkway with the force of a bullwhip and could cut a man in half.
The pursuers were quick on Lash’s heels and he was not able to work on more than a half dozen wires before he was compelled to race up a secondary ladder.
Lash found himself moving toward the tail section of the Prometheus with several side walkways moving off to small ‘blisters’ to the side of the craft where gunners were engaged in battle. He took off toward the gunner’s bubble on the left. The gunner was taken completely by surprise when the lanky Lash showed up, knocked him out with a single punch and moved him away from the gun.
The heavy caliber machinegun in the gun turret was on a swivel and the criminologist wasted no time in using the tool belt again to unhook the gun from its base. He swung it around, set it on the hatchway and faced it into the ship, yelling at the charging crewmen who were racing at him along the catwalk.
“Surrender now or-“ It was too late. The lead man opened fire, leaving Lash no choice. He blasted a hailstorm of lead into the interior of the ship, cutting down the crewmen and slashing great gashes in the gasbags.
The helium gas erupted out of the ruptured bags and the entire ship lurched violently. The lurch tore all the struts that Lash had loosened and the strain, in turn, caused others to tear loose. The Prometheus was mortally wounded and keeled over to the right with a hideous shudder.
In the gun turret Lash set the smoking machine gun down and backed away from it.
“Not much else to do,” he thought, “except to ride this whale to the ground.”
He thought it with no fear or apprehension, just an adventurer’s acceptance of the inevitable. He had fought for good long enough and beat the odds so many times that he had lived with the possibility of ‘losing the big one’ eventually.
He glanced out the window of the turret to see the panorama of the New York waterfront below. There were a dozen biplanes soaring around the ship, their twin Vickers guns stitching tracer fire through the air.
The Prometheus lurched again, shuddering like a great beast, and started to spiral downward.
“I guess my number is finally up!” He said aloud as he grabbed a support beam to keep from falling. “It was bound to happen.”
Epilogue
Fireworks for the Fourth!
Lash’s hand brushed against something soft when he grabbed the beam. He looked over and realized what it was.
“A parachute!” He yelled as he snatched it up.
Out the window New York Harbor was rapidly approaching. The criminologist had no time to waste. He turned the machine gun around again and fired it into the side of the airship, concentrating on slashing a wide hole.
Lash knew he was too low for the chute to function as it was intended, so he opened it before donning it. He took out the guide chute that was intended to draw the full parachute out and held it in his hand.
Then Lash smashed his way through the gap in the airship’s skin and was out and away from the Prometheus.
The rush of air that hit him was like being struck by a football lineman. It pulled the criminologist up and away from the spiraling airship and allowed him to toss the guide chute out from him. The snap of the full chute opening was so violent that Lash blacked out for a moment.
When he came to he witnessed the final moments of the dirigible Prometheus as it spiraled into the harbor. There were great rents in the fabric of its outer skin and flames trailing upward from it. The biplanes continued to swarm around it, following the massive craft down like sharks chasing a whale.
One of the planes looped back toward Lash and for a moment he thought they were going to machinegun him out of the air. Instead the plane circled him and stayed above him till he hit the water, marking the spot.
The criminologist slipped out of his harness and tread water until a Coast Guard boat picked him up. He was handcuffed and brought ashore despite identifying himself.
It was not, in fact, until several hours later when the chaos of the rescue operation had settled down and some two dozen survivors had been gathered from the wrecked ship that Rex Bennet surveyed the prisoners and released Lash.
“I can understand their caution,” Lynn Lash said as he sipped some warm tea. “These were not people to take lightly; we were lucky on this one.” He hung his head and shook it. “At least some of us were; your man Gibson and Al Cord weren’t so lucky.”
“I wouldn’t say that, you long tall bag of bones!” Al Cord said. The reporter, his arm in a cast and looking exhausted, limped across the room to accept a hearty embrace by Lash.
“But how?” Lash asked. “They said-“
“And you believed those loonies?” Cord said. “The truth is, Gibson was a bloody mess and I was out for the count partly under a bush after the crash so they didn’t think we were worth finishing off. When I came to I was able to hike back to their own farm headquarters after they all left on the airship. I called Mister Bennet and warned him about the ship. Aerial spotters took care of the rest. I took one of their cars and drove to a hospital where Gibson is now.”
Lynn Lash was beside himself with joy but quickly sobered. “Arron?” He asked Bennet.
“We found his body and that of the girl as well,” the Federal man said. “I’m afraid these monsters killed them both.”
“About those monsters, Mister Bennet,” Lash said. “I have a little tale to tell you and it might help if you were sitting down when I do.”
END
About the Author
Pulp Factory Award winner, Ellis and multiple Pulp Ark and Pulp Factory Awards nominee ANDREW SALMON lives and writes in Vancouver, BC. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Pro Se Presents, Masked Gun Mystery, Storyteller, Parsec, TBT and Thirteen Stories.
The New Adventures of Lynn Lash Page 21