Airship Hunters (4 page)

“You... he spoke to you about them, too?”

“Hell, yes, he did.”

Valiantine’s head swam. “And... do you believe him?”

“Of course, friend,” the man said, smiling. “Everything he said is true. I’ve seen them myself.”

Words escaped the lieutenant as he stared into the dark brown eyes of Awanai and silently questioned what he was hearing. Still at a loss to comprehend the validity of anything at all, he sat there silently with his jumbled thoughts. Looking up at the sky, he discovered that it wasn’t morning at all, but more like noon.

They drank a little more, saying nothing all the while. Valiantine found the liquor eased his aches and pain, but produced a drowsy feeling in him. Before he knew what was happening, he desired nothing more but to lay down upon the ground and sleep. And, with no warning to his host, he did so.

When he awoke, it was night and Awanai was nowhere to be seen.

Standing, he made his way past the lean-to and toward the lake, looking for the path he could take back to Perklee’s cabin. As he searched, it suddenly struck him that something was very wrong.

As if by instinct, he looked up. A yawning pit of utter blackness hung over him.

There were no stars.

So far as Valiantine could tell, it was not cloudy nor was there anything else that should have obscured the stars. Perhaps because of the stupor he still felt from the moonshine, he couldn’t understand it.

He looked all around, not only at the sky, but also at the trees and the lake and the ground. Everything was still and quiet—unnaturally quiet, he realized. There was no sound of insects or birds to be heard at all.

This confounded Valiantine. He’d been in many other countries and on different points on the globe, but nothing in his experience gave him a foundation from which to build a hypothesis. It was as if everything in the world surrounding him had come to a complete stop. And because of it, the stars had presumably disappeared. That made no sense whatsoever to his understanding of science and the physical world.

He paused from his visual observation to listen intently for sounds. One came to him, slight and scant. At first he couldn’t identify it, but then made it out as the creaking of wood. And nearby.

The lieutenant walked a few paces down the path, straining his ears for the source of the faint sound. All of a sudden, the sharp report of a tree branch snapping sounded overhead, then another.

There were trees all around him; he could not determine which one had produced the sound. Strangely enough, there was not the accompanying noise of a branch falling to the ground. This disquieted him even more.

In a great rush of near-overwhelming awareness, Valiantine felt a great presence above him.

He was not observing the absence of stars, he realized with sickening dread, but the bottom of some impossibly immense
thing
directly overhead.

The lieutenant’s first, immediate inclination was to remove himself far from its presence, but in a remarkable feat of self-control he remained where he was and craned his neck to absolutely confirm his impressions of the phenomenon. When the black ceiling over his head proved as inscrutable as when he first divined it, Valiantine made up his mind to find its beginning... or its end.

He began to sprint down the path in the direction of the cabin with one cognizant thought running through his brain:
It was right over him!
Later, he would not be proud of the arc of panic and awe he allowed to suffuse his thoughts, but would acknowledge it as a singular event in his life.

Some several yards ahead of him, he saw stars. The thing was truly immense, whatever it might be. And as silent as the grave.

Valiantine came to a stop and wheeled about, trying to comprehend what he was seeing. Here, to one side, was the total black of the thing; there, alongside it, were stars.

He realized he was looking at the edge of the thing. He could just barely make it out, forcing his still-addled brain to comply with the rules of reality he knew for certain still existed when he was secure in mind and body.
Or did they?

Oh, how he wished he had his pistol on him at that moment.
But why?
What would he do with it? Fire it at the thing? Hoping to accomplish what?

To confirm it was real
, he told himself.

A queer mirth overtook him: Valiantine wondered with a dry chuckle why he wasn’t hearing music, like Perklee. In a strange way he was almost envious of the odd man.

He needed light. He needed to brighten the sky so as to illuminate the thing. Was it a ship? No, he refused to call it that. For now it was simply a
thing
, until he knew more.

Valiantine fumbled in his pocket and brought out a box of matches. He smiled to himself momentarily, remembering the loving teasing of Eileen in Virginia Beach over his particular ways. “Always be prepared,” he’d told her on numerous occasions.

A thought struck him. Casting aside the matches and, without any qualms in doing so, yelled up at the thing.

“Hello! Hello the ship!”

It was a leap of faith, labeling it as such, but he reasoned it made little difference at that moment. He cared only to know more of it—to determine if it were real or simply some trick of the atmosphere on his senses.

He found himself running, though he hadn’t intended to. He fell, having caught his foot on a rock or a root. Crashing to the ground, Valiantine brought his hands up just at the last moment before his face smashed into a small knot of wiry, thorny brush.

Pulling himself to his feet, he looked up and cursed again and again and again.

He saw only stars, as far as the eye could see, and wondered if he had truly seen anything more.

To pass the time while waiting for the major, Valiantine picked out objects in the man’s office and made mental notes as to how he might rearrange them. With a full thirty minutes having passed after being shown into Wellington’s office, Valiantine was on edge.

Then, blessedly, the door behind the desk opened and the major appeared. He was still talking with someone—unseen to Valiantine—in the other room, as if the lieutenant wasn’t even there. The gist of it seemed to be assuring the other person that “things would be seen to.”

Standing up to salute, Valiantine just wanted the interview to be over with, whatever its outcome.

One eyebrow on Wellington’s face rose as he glanced at the lieutenant, standing there saluting. With a practically non-existent nod, the major motioned for him to sit down again.

“Read your report,” Wellington said, staring at what Valiantine assumed was the file in question. “You’ve nothing more to say than that?”

He’d stayed in Manitou a full week after the events of the strange encounter at the lakeside, watching and waiting for signs he hadn’t suffered some sort of loss of his faculties from the beating. Perklee never returned to his cabin, nor did Awanai the bandit show his face again, at least not in and around Manitou. There had been a newspaper report of a bank robbery in Fort Wayne, but Valiantine didn’t follow up on it. If the criminal had any real connection with the airship, he sensed it to be so minute as to not be worth the trouble of tracking him down.

Later, he regretted not putting the effort into it and wondered at what had become of his normal resolve. The encounter outside the town had apparently shaken him more then he’d realized.

As for Perklee, Valiantine resisted the track on which his thoughts desired to travel, that the man vanished not by the machinations of the citizens of Manitou, but by other, darker forces. It felt too easy an explanation, one which he was not prepared to embrace. Not yet.

From the little town he had made his way to Rochester and then on to Gary, all the way looking for anything odd, any reports of strange occurrences of any stripe, but there were none to be found. Indiana in the spring was much like any other place; there was more to concern people than floating question marks in the skies above them.

He had spent a few days in Chicago, then returned to Washington. With no real parameters to his orders, Valiantine felt he’d the latitude to move at his own pace, but the tiny voice of compulsion in his head urged him to return to his superiors and make his report in person.

The report came out lacking certain details of his travels, perhaps most importantly the strange phenomenon of the absence of stars. Thinking back over that evening, of Awanai’s “hospitality,” he could only conclude that he’d been drugged by the bandit. The later situation with the night sky was inconclusive and potentially embarrassing to reveal to his superior. Valiantine had no real proof of what he thought he had seen. None whatsoever.

He countered his own fears of disobeying orders by reminding himself, again, he’d been given little in the way of a finite end-game to the mission. Thus, the lieutenant decided to hold back on describing much of his encounter until he was more certain of what it had actually entailed. Or if it even happened at all.

“No, sir, nothing else,” he told Wellington, staring the man down, almost daring him to call him a liar. With his almost spotless service record, it was tantamount to treason to his mind.

The major did stare back, and for several moments. Valiantine detected no malice in it, only some sort of scrutiny that defied categorization.

“Think you’ll ever make captain, Valiantine?”

The question took him by surprise. He couldn’t begin to imagine what was meant by it.

“With all due respect, sir,” he replied, keeping his voice level, “I’ve no desire to hurry that along. I’m content where I’m at.”

“One of the oldest lieutenants we have right now,” Wellington noted, unblinking. “Ah, well, that’s not my concern, is it?”

The major stood up. “Come with me, Lieutenant.”

He arose, tucking his cap under his arm and, brushing off his uniform and straightening out any wrinkles, followed his superior out the door and into the hallway. From Wellington’s office they made their way to a staircase and up a flight to the next floor.

“Things are changing, Valiantine,” the major said as they walked. “President’s got much on his mind now, but he wants to foster a spirit of cooperation between departments.
All
departments.”

The major waved him over to an unmarked door, but paused before opening it.

“There’s to be a new venture in town,” Wellington said in low tones. “We’ll be working with the Treasury boys on a few things.”

Valiantine didn’t precisely know who “we” were supposed to be, but he let that lie as he pondered the significance of the United States Army working with the Treasury Department. So far as he knew, the Service went after counterfeiters and the like; in fact, they may be interested in his notes on the infamous Indiana Bandit.
Could that be it?
he asked himself. Would he be sent back to the state to run around after Awanai? He could think of much better uses for his abilities...

“With that in mind,” the major continued, “I have someone for you to meet.”

He opened the door onto a plush office, with dark carpets and paintings of sea vessels on the walls. On a small red leather couch off to one side of an immense desk sat a young man, a redhead of medium height and build and of neat appearance. The stranger rose from the couch when Wellington and Valiantine stepped into the room.

“Lieutenant Michael Valiantine, this is Agent Cabot, Treasury Department. Cabot, Valiantine.”

The two men shook hands. Valiantine felt the strength in Cabot’s grip; firm yet not aggressive. Confused, the lieutenant looked to his superior with a questioning eye.

“Get to know each other,” Wellington said. “You’ll be working together.”

Valiantine frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.”

The major produced an odd smile.

“Agent Cabot is your new partner, Lieutenant.”

BROKEN

Duane Spurlock

June 1897

R
ash Howard’s only impulsive moment was when he proposed marriage. In all other matters, he was careful and methodical, patient and slow. In this way he faced nature’s deviltries and worked a farm outside the community of Broken Toe, Kansas.

Today he drove a wagon pulled by a spotted mule to the home of Mrs. Brecker and her son, Sam. The widow and boy kept a small farm with a few pigs and chickens and a garden big enough to provide for their needs plus excess for selling to neighbors and bartering for goods in Broken Toe.

Five days ago Rash had looked up from sawing a log to see Sam Brecker facing him. The Breckers lived about five miles from the Howards. The ten-year-old had come to tell him his mother had a new milk cow that produced more than the two could use, and the Howards and other neighbors were invited to purchase the overflow.

“Mr. Howard, you never saw such a cow for making milk,” Sam gushed. “Ma could probably make enough butter for the whole county if she had the time.”

Sam had chattered about the cow. A man had arrived at the Brecker farm with the cow, had convinced Mrs. Brecker to trade her old cow in exchange for the new cow.