The Forever Engine (14 page)

Von Schtecker looked like he was thinking it over, when Gordon stepped in.

“Mr. Fargo is a professor of history in America. He has an academic’s approach to problems—too complicated by half. Simple is better; hit them hard and fast.”

“Hard I understand,” I said. “It’s the fast I’m foggy about. How are you—”

“That’s enough, Fargo. We’ll work out the details when we can see the lay of the land. But in outline I think we are in agreement, yes?”

All the bobble-heads nodded. It wouldn’t do for a serving officer to take sides with some icky academic guy.

“Actually, this use of stealth, it seems sensible,” Gabrielle said.

“While I appreciate the intelligence you have shared with us,
Mademoiselle
, I insist that you allow the military men to deal with military matters,” Gordon answered. “Now, one more thing. It will be a difficult trek, across very mountainous terrain. I hope you will not take offense, Inspector, but I believe Bavaria’s contribution to the expedition will be more than satisfied by the information you can give us and Leftenant von Schtecker’s riflemen. I see no need for you to personally accompany us.”

“
Natürlich
,” Wolfenbach answered. “You are not Hannibal, after all.”

Wolfenbach wasn’t quite as big as an elephant, but close enough. They all laughed except for Gabrielle, who seemed confused by the reference.

TWENTY

October 7, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship
Intrepid
,

Aloft over Bavaria and Austria

The rest of the morning and early afternoon we saw to fitting everyone into the confines of
Intrepid
. The dent in her crew made it a little easier, but there was still a lot of disruption. Officers doubled up to accommodate Gordon, von Schtecker, and myself, and Gabrielle got Lieutenant Jenkins’ cabin all to herself. The Bavarians got their own section of the crew common quarters, but there were only fourteen berths for twenty men, and, like the rest of the crew, they’d have to hot-bunk it.

We reprovisioned as well, and the Bavarians brought tents and wooden boxes of spare rifle ammunition aboard.

“What you ought to have along is one of those new Maxim guns,” Lieutenant Jenkins said as we watched the deck hands carry the supplies below deck. “We’re due to get Maxims next refit, but that’s not until this winter. We could let you have one of our 8-barrel Nordenfelts, but they’re too heavy to haul up and down mountains.”

I had some experience humping things through mountains, and I wasn’t looking forward to that part of the trip. We’d have to carry probably eight days of food with us, ammunition, at least some climbing gear, and either blankets or greatcoats. It was going to get cold up there and probably wet, if the thickening clouds and rising wind were any indication. We could go part of the way by river, but at some point we were going to have to carry stuff over some crappy-looking mountain roads.

No, we wouldn’t be taking along an 8-barrel Nordenfelt, whatever that was.

We lifted off about mid-afternoon and headed north. Once we were out of sight of curious eyes in Munich, we made a wide turn to starboard and ended up heading southeast toward Austria and the Balkans. Visibility closed down to a mile or two and the white wooden deck planks started darkening with a light rain. Massive grumbling thunderheads, flickering deep inside with lightning, pursued us from the west, but we seemed to be keeping our lead for the moment.

The sun disappeared behind the storm front, and we lost whatever remaining light was left within an hour. About six o’clock I saw the lights of a large city off our starboard beam—Salzburg. A signal light blinked cheerfully from the ground, and a signalman clacked back an answer from the Aldis lamp above the bridge. From here on we would be in Austrian air space.

Dinner in the officer’s mess that evening turned out to be far more interesting than I had expected. Conroy and Thomson were missing, but Gabrielle and von Schtecker had taken their place, so the number at table ended up the same—ten, since two of the ship’s officers were on rotating duty at all times.

Gordon was quiet and withdrawn throughout the meal, glancing at the decanter of red wine on the table once in a while but staying with hot tea. Von Schtecker was also quiet, perhaps because his English was good enough for a professional meeting but not really up to witty repartee. Or possibly he simply didn’t care much for British officers, or sailors of any nationality, or people sent by Berlin who had brought a truckload of trouble with them.

Gabrielle, not surprisingly, quickly became the center of attention. For
Intrepid
’s young officers, her presence was a form of sublime torture. On the one hand, she was a strikingly good-looking woman of open and friendly disposition. On the other hand, she was French, a Communard, and an agent of
Le Garde Rouge
to boot. How were they, as officers, to react to that? For guidance they looked to their captain, who seemed in a friendly enough mood.

“Tell me,
Mademoiselle
, how long before you make General Secretary Renault emperor?” he asked as the cook ladled out the steaming potato soup. The officers laughed politely at the captain’s joke.

“Me?” she asked. “It is not for me to make the emperors.”

“Your people, I meant. It’s rather a tradition, isn’t it? First Consul Bonaparte became Emperor Napoleon I. President Louis-Napoleon became Emperor Napoleon III. You seem to have skipped Napoleon II, but the pattern seems clear enough.”

Although it was phrased as good-natured banter, I didn’t like what Harding was doing. He was showing off, trying to embarrass Gabrielle for the amusement of his officers. That’s not how I was raised to treat dinner guests.

Gabrielle frowned for a moment in thought, as if actually taking the question seriously. Perhaps she was.

“Well, those were mistakes, you see. I believe most French people understand that. Do the English not?”

I saw a couple faces cloud over then, but one officer covered his smile with his napkin, and another nodded in agreement, pleased at how adroitly Gabrielle had turned the question around on his captain. I wasn’t so sure.

Harding looked around, his smile even broader than before.

“Well, I dare say we do,
Mademoiselle
. I dare say we do. It is most agreeable to hear that sentiment shared on your side of the Channel. Now if only you had a proper royal family, things might start looking up over there.”

“Ah, but we do,
Capitaine
. In fact, we have three: the Bonapartés, the Orléans, and the Bourbons. The politicians pay no attention to any of them, but that is like your own country,
oui?”

Harding’s smile disappeared, and he put down his spoon before answering.

“I wouldn’t say that, Ma’am.”

“Really? My friend Baron Renfrew says it all the time,” she answered, and then she sipped her soup. “Oh, this is quite good!”

She looked up at the momentarily frozen faces around the table. “What is wrong? Is the soup not good?”

“I think it’s great,” I answered.

“Yes, it’s capital, I’d say,” an earnest young midshipman to my right added, followed by a half-dozen other hurried expressions of agreement, to which Gabrielle smiled happily.

Through the fish and then the main course of roast beef, Harding launched repeated argumentative storming parties against Fortress France, all of them disguised as amusing jokes, all of them taken as neither jokes nor insults by Gabrielle, and all of them ending in Harding’s red-faced retreat in the face of a defense as impervious to the attack as it was apparently oblivious to it. Watching this was the most fun I’d had since showing up here.

By the dessert, a plum pudding, Harding had lapsed into defeated silence, but the conversation went on without him. His officers’ fascination with and admiration for Gabrielle had only grown with her repeated brilliant escapes from Harding’s cunningly-constructed traps.

Was I the only person here who got it? Was I the only one who saw all she was doing was taking the questions literally and then answering them? Apparently so. Maybe this was how most beautiful women got a reputation for brilliant conversation: just about anything coming out of their mouths sounded pretty good. It wasn’t that Gabrielle Courbiere was dumb; she was well-read and obviously intelligent. She just seemed oblivious to the most basic social cues.

Over glasses of port the younger officers drew her into a conversation about the ethics of spying, which she naturally answered with the argument that patriotism required service to one’s country in whatever capacity a person had.

“But
Mademoiselle
, to what lengths can one take that?” the young gunnery lieutenant, whose name I’d forgotten, asked.

“How do you mean?”

“
Mademoiselle
Courbiere,” he said, and then he paused to let the drama build, as if he were the prosecutor and she the defendant in the dock, “would you cut a throat for France?”

“It depends upon the throat,” she answered, and then she looked around the table as if the answer were obvious.

And it was, but that did not stop
Intrepid
’s officers from regarding her with a mix of fear and fascination, as if she were a beautiful yet deadly creature from another world. More than either beautiful or deadly, though, they saw her as exotic, enigmatic.

Who could believe she was simply an open book? None of these guys, that was for sure.

When we finished, half the men offered her their arm to escort her safely to her cabin, as if it were ten miles up the Rio Orinoco instead of twenty steps down the hall. I couldn’t blame them. The memory of my erotic dream of her two nights before had returned, and my imagination had tacked on a few new embellishments.

She smiled politely to the officers but turned to me.

“Mr. Fargo has promised to tell me his life story and tonight may be our last opportunity for some time. Will you join me in my cabin?”

Sure.

If I’d imagined her sitting languidly, elbow on table and chin resting on her hand, eyes locked on mine in rapt attention as I told the remarkable tale of how I came to this time—and maybe I had imagined that just a little bit—I was completely wrong. Gabrielle’s cabin was as small as the one I shared with two other officers, and the ventilation was not as good, so it felt warm and stuffy as soon as we got there. She gave me the only chair and sat in her bunk cross-legged, another advantage of a riding habit instead of a conventional dress. She took a journal and a pencil from the table by her bed, opened it to a blank page, rested it on the desk made by her crossed knees, and nodded for me to begin.

The deal had been to tell her everything about how I came here, and a deal’s a deal. I started with what I knew about the research project in Wessex, then my background as a historian, then the world I came from in more and more detail, but steering clear of the subject of aeronautics and the space program. She asked probing questions, particularly about my kendo training and before that my military experience. She took pages of notes in a small, careful handwriting which looked almost machinelike in its regularity.

The room grew warmer as I talked, and I began to perspire. I noticed that she did as well, her skin glistening in the gaslight. After about an hour, she puffed out a breath and stood up from the bunk. She unbuttoned the jacket of her riding habit and took it off, then unfastened her skirt and slipped it down and off, leaving her in blouse and riding breeches. She unbuttoned the collar and cuffs of her blouse and rolled the sleeves up almost to her elbows. Then she sat back on the bunk and picked up her journal.

“Better,” she announced.

“Do you mind if I take off my jacket?”

I felt foolish asking, but it seemed the thing to do here.

“No, why would I?” she asked, looking up from her notes. I had already learned none of her questions were rhetorical; when she asked a question she expected an answer.

“Well, some ladies might consider it a sexual advance.”

“You do not make the sexual advance?”

I almost said no, but then I thought better of it.

“I do not mean the removal my coat as a sexual advance. I may make a sexual advance later, if I feel it would be appropriate.”

She thought for a moment.

“What would determine whether or not it was appropriate?”

“I would only consider it appropriate if I felt you would welcome it.”

“I see. You have the eyes which are kind, sad, and hard, all at the same time. But when you laugh, your eyes laugh first. Yes, I think I would welcome such an advance, but first I would like to know more about a thing—what did you call it?—the Tesla effect.”

I told her everything I knew about the Tesla Effect, which took all of about fifteen seconds.

TWENTY-ONE

October 8, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship
Intrepid
,

Aloft over Austria

The next morning I woke in the darkness and felt the rhythmic vibration of
Intrepid’
s engines through the bunk, felt the warmth and slower rhythm of Gabrielle’s engine beside me. Her back rested against my chest in the narrow bunk, her bare shoulder rising and falling as she snored softly. For an instant, it was the best morning I’d had since coming here, perhaps the best morning in years. Then a wave of panic swept over me.
What the hell was I doing?

I pulled away and sat up on the edge of her bunk, sat there shivering, appalled at what I’d done.

When Sarah was just six or seven, my wife and I had taken her to a seafood restaurant. We had to wait before being seated, and Sarah spent the time studying the tank of lobsters which stood beside the hostess station like an aquarium in the doctor’s office. After a while, she began naming the lobsters, and I knew: no lobster tonight, maybe never again.

I had called Gabrielle
Gabi
last night, over and over in our mutual passion, our entwined dance of life as we hurtled toward a rendezvous which would enable me, if all went well, to snuff out this time and everyone in it to save my own.

Gabi
—naming the lobsters.

Behind me she stirred, then stretched a little, and yawned.

“Ah,” she said. “You are awake.”

“Yeah.” I got up and started to dress. For a moment she rested on her stomach, chin propped on folded arms, face obscured by a soft tangle of golden curls. Then, nude and unselfconscious, she sat up on the bed, crossed her legs, and pushed her hair away from her face. I had never imagined a Victorian woman remotely like her.

“Gabi—
mon surnom
. You would say nickname? Do you have the nickname for your daughter?”

“The Terminator.”

Like an incantation, her name summoned her, and, for a moment, if only in my mind, Sarah was there, about twelve or thirteen years old. I guess we always think of our kids as younger than they really are, just as we think of ourselves that way. Sarah looked at me with her knowing smirk, one eyebrow raised when she looked at Gabrielle, torn between approval of “Daddy’s hottie” and vague distaste at the idea of “old people sex.”

Then she was gone, and my cheeks were wet and my lungs empty of air.

Gabrielle studied me, frowning slightly in concentration.

“You fear for your daughter, she will be impoverished if you do not return?”

I caught my breath and wiped my eyes.

“I fear she no longer exists. But if she does, I had good life insurance. Plus she’ll get my IRA and the condo on Lake Shore Drive.”

Gabrielle had that look that said she had no idea what I’d just said.

“Trust me, financially she’ll be fine.”

“What of her mother and siblings?”

“There’s only her—her mother died when she was eight.”

“Ah, so you are her only family. You fear she will be alone.”

“No, she’s still got two grandparents alive, plus a bunch of uncles, aunts, and cousins, mostly on my late wife’s side of the family. We’ve stayed close to them.”

She looked more confused than before. I was, too. I’d spoken about Sarah as if I would never see her again, as if she would go on but without me. I would save her, somehow. But would I be able to face her afterwards, knowing what I had had to do to accomplish that?

The duty officer had rigged a set of pistol targets to a long outrigger off the port side near the stern, where the Marines normally took rifle drill. I’d already stashed my new revolver, fresh from
Intrepid’
s arms locker, there along with my towel and a box of cartridges. Gordon showed up with his own revolver about when I finished my run. Gordon being up and moving shortly after dawn, and not visibly hung over, was a good sign.

“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. She 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.