The Forever Engine (8 page)

TEN

October 3, 1888,

Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship
Intrepid
,

Aloft Over the Franco-Belgian Border

“We cruise at twenty knots,” Captain Harding,
Intrepid’s
skipper, told me the next morning. We stood together in the wheelhouse and shaded our eyes from the glare of the sun rising almost directly ahead of us. Twenty knots, at two thousand yards to the nautical mile, put our speed at about twenty-two or twenty-three miles an hour. It felt as if we were hardly moving at all.

“We can keep this speed up day in, day out, for a week,” Harding went on. “There is very little vibration from her machinery. My first aerial command was
Uxbridge
, a
Macefield
-class gunboat based out of Alexandria. She’d do thirty-three knots, if you coaxed her and had the engineer sit on her safety valve, but she’d vibrate and shake to beat the devil. Bucked like a whore.”

The petty officer helmsman beside us grinned at that.

“It’s true,” Harding insisted. “Ride her too hard and she’d start leaking steam everywhere. Not the whore, mind you.”

“Smoke off the starboard quarter,” one of the lookouts called from the masthead above us. “Twenty degrees high.”

Harding raised his binoculars and scanned the sky.

“Mr. Conroy, what do you make of her?”

Ensign Conroy, the young officer of the watch, raised his own glasses.

“Converging course, sir, making . . . I’d say fifteen knots. Three stacks, turrets fore, aft, and ventral—I make her
Invincible
, sir.”

He pronounced it as a French name, however, not English.
On-ven-SEEB-luh.

“Close,” Harding agreed, “But
Invincible’
s been shifted to the Pacific. That’s her sister,
Gloire,
as sure as there’s a hole in your backside. We’ll pass close enough to exchange honors. I believe we’ll go to action stations, Mr. Conroy.”

“Action stations, sir,” Conroy repeated. He pressed a red-painted lever near the engine telegraph and five bells sounded in rapid succession, followed by several seconds of silence, then five bells again.

Crew members boiled from hatches and scrambled to man the open gun mounts. The twenty red-coated marines formed in two ranks on the superstructure, and another officer climbed the steps to the wheelhouse. After a few minutes, Thomson joined us as well.

“Well, this is exciting!” he said, still puffing from the climb up the companionway to the bridge. “Another flyer, I see. We aren’t expecting trouble, are we?”

“No trouble,” Captain Harding answered. “Just a French cruiser, and we’ll pass close enough to smell the garlic. Trimsman.”

“Aye, sir?” a petty officer at the rear of the wheelhouse answered.

“Let’s bring her up even with the Frog. Ten percent positive buoyancy.”

“Ten percent positive buoyancy, aye, aye, Captain.” The petty officer stood before a double bank of tall levers, about twenty of them in each row. He released the hand brakes on two of the levers and pulled them back slightly, then locked them, waited, and adjusted two more. I felt the deck tilt very slightly up toward the bow then level again and for a moment I felt slightly heavier.

“Holding at ten percent positive buoyancy, sir,” he reported after a few seconds.

“What’s the glass read, Mr. Conroy?” Harding asked.

“Four-twenty, Captain.”

“Very well. We’ll come up to five hundred fathoms and level there,” Harding said.

“Aye, sir. Level at five hundred fathoms.”

At six feet to the fathom, that would put us at three thousand feet, about a kilometer—not very high for a jumbo jet, but plenty high for a thousand-ton ironclad.

I could pick out more detail on the French flyer now, even without binoculars. It had a different look from
Intrepid
. Its turrets sat higher in front, and it didn’t seem to have much deck forward. With an under-slung gun turret aft, like a bomber’s belly turret, its profile looked a little more like an aircraft than a flying ship, but only a little. I never saw an airplane with three smokestacks.

“Coming up on five hundred fathoms, Captain,” Ensign Conroy reported.

“Very well. Trimsman, neutral buoyancy.”

The petty officer made more adjustments to the forest of levers, studied his spirit levels and plum line, and then adjusted one more.

“Ship neutral, Captain.”

We had drawn closer to the French ship, and it slowly changed course to parallel ours. As we were moving faster, we would overtake the other aerial cruiser and pass it in a few minutes. I could make out her flags; a large tricolor flew from the mainmast amidships, and a blood-red ensign fluttered from the stern.

“She’ll follow us for a while, but we’re coming up on Saarbrüchen in a quarter hour. She’ll turn back for home rather than go deep into German air space,” Harding declared.

“Is that red flag some sort of naval ensign?” I asked.

Harding snorted.

“Not by a long shot. She’s flown by
La Garde Rouge,
the Commune’s pet bully boys.”

“The Commune?” I repeated.

“Mr. Fargo is not conversant with recent European political history,” Thomson explained. “He’s from . . . the west.” He turned to me. “The Commune took control of the French government in 1871, during the war with Germany.”

“You’re a cowboy, Mr. Fargo?” Harding asked. “You must be a cowboy who lives in a bloody cave if you’ve never heard of the Commune.”

Right, the Paris Commune. But in my world it had lasted—what?—a couple weeks?

La Garde Rouge—
the Red Guard. I wondered how “red” those French really were. Wasn’t Karl Marx still wandering around somewhere?

“No shooting today, though, right?” I asked.

Harding turned and looked at me for a moment before answering.

“No, Mr. Fargo, not since ’85. The politicians will yammer a while longer before we start shooting at them again. Soon enough, though, I’ll wager.”

He turned back ahead, and in a couple minutes we passed abeam of the French cruiser, close enough that I could see the expressions on the French officers as they returned the salutes of our officers—proper but unsmiling. There was as much recognition over there as there was here that the next time they saw each other it might be through powder smoke and across a bloodstained deck.

That might explain why we were getting so much help from the Germans—nothing like a common enemy to make the children play well together.

I looked around the wheelhouse.

“Where’s Gordon?”

Conroy exchanged a look with the other officers and Thomson cleared his throat before he spoke.

“I imagine Captain Gordon is still abed. He had quite an evening.”

The three of us had eaten in the small officers’ mess, but I’d left right after dinner and turned in early. In the week we’d spent in England getting ready to leave, I’d gotten back in the habit of rising before dawn and running. This morning I’d taken my run on
Intrepid
’s deck, round and round the superstructure. Two miles before breakfast had done wonders for my attitude. But by the time I’d left the officers’ mess the night before Gordon had been tipsy, and was still going strong.

“Well he’s got ten hours to sleep it off before we land in Munich and find out what the Bavarians know,” Harding said. “Do you suppose the young gentleman can be persuaded to rise before sunset?”

Damn. Munich in ten hours? The stately progress of the flyer had lulled me into a false sense of complacency. There would be things I would have to do, things I never thought I’d do again, things I dreaded doing, but would have to do. I needed to get my head squared away about that, and time was running out.

I had a mental checklist I’d been making. Gordon wasn’t on it. If Gordon couldn’t make the world safe for Bonseller and Lord Chillingham’s England, it was no skin off my ass. If I managed to do what needed doing, that England wasn’t going to be around much longer anyway.

It wasn’t my world. It would sure as hell take more than one pretty sunset to make it so.

Nine hours later we dropped down through the scattered clouds to find the Bavarian countryside below us, afternoon sunlight sparkling off the rivers and making the wooded hills and fields spreading out to either side seem to glow with life. The snow-peaked Alps rose to our right above nearly invisible clouds on the horizon and, like
Intrepid
, seemed to float impossibly in the air. The ground was higher and wilder looking to the south, and the rivers, a series of them perpendicular to our path like successive finish lines, flowed north to feed the Danube for its long journey east.

Thomson and I stood on the open flying bridge beside the wheelhouse. He pointed out three moving shapes far below us and handed me a pair of binoculars. The objects were some sort of powered land vehicles, with caterpillar tracks as near as I could tell, and enclosed. Big, too, about the size of locomotives, but they moved across open ground, not on railroad tracks. They each sported a few gun mounts.

“What the hell?”

“Imperial German land ships,” Thomson answered, “moving south. Quite formidable. Odd to see them on Bavarian soil—although Bavaria is part of the empire, of course, especially since the old king was deposed.”

“The Kaiser?”

“Good heavens, no! The Kaiser is secure, but Bavaria—its place in the German empire is ambiguous. It is a kingdom within the empire, more than a province but not exactly sovereign. Its foreign policy is directed from Prussia, but its heart, I think, is still with Austria. The old king, Ludwig, was mad and his brother Otto, the new one, is worse, but this Luitpold fellow, the prince regent, actually runs things now. He seems levelheaded enough. I don’t envy him his job.”

“So we’re getting help from whom? Germans? Prussians? Bavarians?”

“Yes,” Thomson answered and laughed. “General Buller’s contacts were through the German General Staff in Berlin, but the Bavarian
Stadtpolizei
have jurisdiction over the incident site. They’ll assist us, under instruction from Berlin.”

“How happy are they going to be about that?”

“We’ll see soon enough,” he answered.

Maybe the maneuvering Prussian land ships were meant as a reminder to the locals of who was in charge. Maybe not. I gestured down toward them, now well astern.

“Reinforcements?” I asked. Thomson’s eyebrows went up in surprise at that but then settled back as he thought it over. He was a scientist and viewed this as a fact-finding mission. I don’t think it had occurred to him until then that we might have to fight for information, or that the Germans might have anticipated something like that and were getting ready to back us up.
Intrepid
might be useful to us for something other than its speed.

Ahead of us I saw the dark mass of a city—Munich. While smoke rose from countless chimneys, it was nothing like the oppressive industrial smog of London. Dozens of multicolored balloons, some spherical, some sausage-shaped, floated above and near the city. As the clouds drifted and the sun setting behind us touched the distant city, a thousand windows reflected the light and sparkled like diamonds.

“I hear it has come back to life since the old king was deposed,” Thomson said from beside me. “Like a fairy city, isn’t it?”

It was. In the distance I saw a light on the outskirts of the city flickering with particular brilliance and regularity. When it paused, I heard a loud clacking from above us, on the catwalk above the flyer’s bridge. A crewman manned a large searchlight with louvered metal shutters, and as he worked the lever controls the shutters opened and closed, flashing light back to the city.

“Aldis lamp,” Thomson explained. After several more exchanges, the signalman slid down the ladder and disappeared into the bridge. Ten minutes later Captain Harding joined us and handed Thomson a message form.

“It came in my personal code,” Harding said.

Thomson read the note, and his eyebrows went up a bit.

“I didn’t know he was in Bavaria,” he said.

“He was supposed to be in Italy, last I heard,” Harding replied.

“Who?” I asked.

Thomson folded the message and put it in his coat pocket before answering me.

“We will see the Bavarian police tomorrow, but tonight we are to meet with Baron Renfrew in Munich. Baron Renfrew is—”

“Yeah,” I interrupted. “I know who Baron Renfrew is.”

“You
do?”
Thomson said.
“
Extraordinary.”

“I’m just full of surprises.”

Baron Renfrew! Now, this was an interesting development, but not a very cheery one. I’d never even heard of Lord Chillingham, and my brief meeting with him had left a bad taste in my mouth.
Renfrew . . .

ELEVEN

October 3, 1888, Munich, Bavaria

Baron Renfrew summoned us to a private home in Ludvigsvorstadt, a suburb between the landing ground—the
Fliegerplatz
, they called it—and the city center. We climbed aboard a carriage and set out to meet him.

Large balloons still floated aloft in the early evening, and a small cigar-shaped one passed overhead no more than fifty feet up. Instead of a basket, the gas bag supported a contraption like a tandem bicycle without the wheels, the chain drive turning a whirring propeller in back. A young couple pedaled vigorously, and the woman waved to us as they passed over. I waved back. That looked like fun.

At first our carriage made good progress down the broad, tree-lined Landsberger
Strasse
, with a sprawling rail marshalling yard to our left and a mix of small parks and suburban townhouses with steeply peaked gabled roofs and brightly painted wood shutters and flower boxes framing the windows. After ten minutes we came to a stretch filled with people, and the carriage slowed to a crawl.

The good news was the crowd was in a festive mood. I had grown used to the somber clothing of London and the surrounding countryside. Bright colors dominated the crowd here, with a lot of men in
lederhosen
and jaunty alpine hats and women in elaborately embroidered aprons over flaring skirts worn just short enough to show the layers of ruffled petticoats underneath. Wealthy women in expensive gowns wore their hair up in elaborate twisting towers, and even their austerely dressed consorts sported green sashes around their ample middles and green scarves wound about their tall silk top hats. What I found particularly interesting, though, was the extent to which the wealthy and common seemed all mixed up together, and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

The sun touched the horizon behind us and promised a beautiful, warm autumn evening. I heard distant music from ahead of us and to the right, a dozen oompah bands battling for supremacy and cheered on by well-lubricated vocal sections a thousand or more strong.

“Somebody’s having a hell of a party,” I observed unnecessarily. “
Was ist das?”
I asked the driver.

“
Der Wies’n
,” he answered with a broad grin.

Wies’n?
My German was rusty, and Bavarian was slangy, but that sounded like
The Meadow
.

“What’s The Meadow? A festival?” I asked in German.

“
Ja.
The October festival.”

Of course:
Oktoberfest
. That explained the music and crowds of amiable drunks dressed in colorful local costumes.

“People come from all over for the fest?”

“
Ja.
Most from the south and Austria, but some from farther. Not many Prussians,” he said and laughed. “Carnivals, too, come from all over, but more from the east. Damned gypsies steal everything.”

“What’s he saying?” Gordon asked. I remembered he didn’t speak German but Thomson did and provided him a translation. Gordon looked bored and annoyed while Thomson remained distracted, preoccupied with our impending meeting. I couldn’t blame him for being nervous.

So far I liked Munich better than London. Folks at least had a sense of fun. Maybe Bavaria was an international backwater, but there might be some advantages to that. Now we’d see what Baron Renfrew could do to screw things up.

We met in the parlor of a small but tastefully decorated private home, nothing like Dorset House. The furniture was lighter in design and color, the walls papered with pastel stripes and adorned with a few inviting landscapes—apparently the Bavarian countryside we’d just overflown. Large windows would have let in sunlight during the day, but it was early evening by the time we arrived and the curtains were drawn for privacy. Renfrew waited for us seated on a loveseat beside a strikingly attractive woman.

Portraits of important people are idealized representations. Even though I’d seen dozens of portraits and photographs of Renfrew, I was prepared for something less impressive. Actually, the portraits didn’t do him justice. He stood taller than I did, which put him over six feet, and he had a good fifty pounds on me, maybe more. Some of that was fat, but not all of it. I thought of Thomson as bearlike, but Renfrew physically dominated the room.

He rose to meet us, which is more than Lord Chillingham had done in our brief meeting. Renfrew wore his dark hair cut close to his head and his beard trimmed in the tight pointed style so familiar in all the paintings and photographs. The pictures failed to capture the animation in his face, or the intelligence and humor in his eyes. He looked deadly serious in all the pictures and sort of distracted, looking up and away as if his mind was somewhere else. Today his mind was right here.

Thomson made the introductions and “Baron Renfrew” shook our hands, shook mine particularly vigorously.

“I’ve heard a good deal about you, Professor Fargo. You have had an adventurous few weeks since appearing so explosively in our midst. I assume Dr. Thomson has told you who I am.”

“It wasn’t necessary, Your Highness,” Thomson put in. “He already knew.”

“Really? How is that?”

“I’m from Illinois, Your Highness. I have relatives from a little town southwest of Chicago called Dwight.”

He face broke into a wider smile, and he nodded.

“Yes, I remember that village quite well. I hunted there—oh, it must have been twenty years ago now. Stayed with a local gentleman named Spencer. Quite good shooting. Lovely countryside. They don’t still talk about my visit in your day, though, surely. It was just a hunting trip.”

“No, Your Highness, they don’t talk about it, but your stay made such an impression in the town, they named the local park after you.”

“What? Albert Edward Park?”

“No, sir. Renfrew Park.”

“
Renfrew
Park?” He laughed. “Oh, that’s quite good! Yes, very gratifying. Thank you for telling me.”

Baron Renfrew was the title Prince Albert Edward, son of Queen Victoria, Prince of Wales and heir apparent to the British throne, and who at least in my timeline would later become King Edward VII, used when he wished to travel informally and without a lot of fuss. It was the most modest of his many titles, and its use told everyone involved he was not visiting officially or on state business; he was there purely for pleasure.

I again glanced at his female companion, still seated on the loveseat, and tried not to stare. She wore her shining blond hair swept up in what I thought of as Gibson Girl style, with a few soft curling strands framing a heart-shaped face, clear skin, and broad, inquisitive blue eyes. Her riding habit, jet black except for white ruffles at her throat and wrists, flattered her figure. I saw no rings on her fingers, no ear rings, brooches, or any other jewelry except for a small silver locket suspended from a chain around her neck. Smoke curled from the slender cheroot she held in her hand.

The Prince of Wales followed my glance.

“Allow me to introduce my friend,
Mademoiselle
Gabrielle Courbiere. Gabrielle, this is Dr. Thomson, Captain Gordon, and Professor Fargo.”

I followed their example and bowed. Thomson murmured
enchanté,
but Gordon remained tight-lipped.

Prince Albert Edward—affectionately called “Bertie”—gained fame for his love of the good life, particularly his liaisons with some of the most beautiful women in Europe. The basis for his attraction to
Mademoiselle
Courbiere was obvious, but why the British crown prince was playing footsy with a French woman when Britain and France seemed ready to start shooting at each other any minute, and why he had brought her to this meeting, were, well—interesting questions.

“Have you been riding,
Mademoiselle
?” Thomson inquired politely.

“Non,
I prefer the riding
habite
. It is how I wear the trousers without scandalizing the small minds.” To illustrate her point, she flipped back the slit skirt to show the tightly fitted black trousers underneath, tucked into gleaming riding boots. She crossed her legs and drew on her cheroot, then blew a smoke ring. Thomson colored, and Gordon turned away with a disapproving scowl.

What was interesting, at least to me, was how devoid her gestures seemed of artifice. Her words and the uncovering of her legs could easily have been an act either of provocative challenge or playful flirtation, but instead they were surprisingly matter-of-fact. If she was a steamy seductress, she wasn’t working it very hard—at least not for us.

The prince took a large cigar from his inner coat pocket and trimmed the tip off with a pocket knife, talking as he did so.

“Professor Thomson, I understand that you are in authority over this expedition.”

“Yes, Your Highness, I am.”

“Splendid. I wonder, then, if you would do me a little favor. A personal favor, you understand—entirely unofficial.”

Thomson shifted uncomfortably.

“Well—of course, your Highness, if it is within my power and does not jeopardize our expedition.”

“Be so good, then, to take
Mademoiselle
Courbiere along, would you?”

Gordon snorted in derision, and the prince’s face immediately lost its easy charm and casual humor, as if a massive thundercloud had blotted out the sun, and I was again aware of how physically imposing he was. Gordon’s face reddened, and Thomson seemed nearly beside himself, shifting from one foot to the other as if he had to go to the bathroom.

“But Your Highness, a lady . . . do you know where we’re going?” he asked.

The prince struck a match and then carefully lit his cigar, the silence stretching out as he puffed, puffed again, turned the cigar, examined the coal, and then blew out the match.

“Do
you
?” he finally asked.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

“Well. . . in a general sense. That is, there are . . . some specifics still to work out. We were hoping the Bavarians—”

“The Bavarians know a little,” the prince cut in. “
Mademoiselle
Courbiere, on the other hand, knows a great deal. So were I you, I would add her to your party. Now, if you will all excuse me, I have an appointment with a baccarat table.”

He kissed Gabrielle’s hand, and he was gone.

“Highly irregular,” Gordon said once the prince’s footsteps faded.

“Oh shut up,” I said.

He turned and glared at me, opened his mouth as if to speak, but then scowled and turned away.

“He has a point, Fargo,” Thomson said. “This is a highly sensitive mission, and the young lady is . . . well—”

“What?” I demanded. “A French
spy?
Is that what you think? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well . . .”

I turned to Gabrielle.

“
Mademoiselle
Courbiere, are you a spy for the French Commune? Are you an agent of the dreaded
Garde Rouge
?”

She shrugged.

“Oui.”

I stared at her, and she returned my gaze without blinking. She was absolutely serious.