The Forever Engine (33 page)

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.

My left shoulder bled more than before, aggravated by the impact, but for now I just ignored it. I lifted the metal trapdoor with my right hand, let it drop shut over the opening, and bolted it, just in case the gunner came back.

I turned to Gabrielle.

“I’m going to stop him,” I said.

“I will not let you harm him,” she answered and cocked back the hammer on her revolver.

“You going to kill me?”

She raised the revolver, aimed, and fired. I collapsed to the iron platform, my left foot a fiery white-hot nova of pain.

“Non,”
she answered. “I will not kill you.”

I expected the first flash of pain to subside, but it didn’t, not right away. The pain came in waves, almost paralyzing me, shutting down my brain. I caught my breath and then concentrated on the pain, willed it down, forced it into a corner of my mind. It still left me gasping, but after a few seconds I could at least think.

I crawled to the east side of the platform, pulled myself up to my knees using the iron breastwork, although the metal had become brittle and powdery, like old plaster, and part of it crumbled under my weight. I looked over the edge. The zeppelin had come to rest right on the shore of the lake. Its gasbag settled and lost shape even as I watched, the hydrogen escaping out and carried over the lake by a faint westerly breeze. Tesla’s technicians were turning the projector toward the gun position held by Gordon and his men. That made sense; they were closer to the house, more of an immediate threat. Once they were gone, the gun would “displace” Durson and his men, and then it would work over the woods up the west valley, scouring out Cevik Bey’s Bosnian riflemen.

We had all come so far together. It couldn’t end this way.

I reached into the back of my pants and pulled out the flare pistol. Gabrielle raised her revolver and cocked it again.

“I will not let you harm him. Please, Jack, do not make me shoot you again.”