The Witches of Ne'arth (The Star Wizards Trilogy Book 2) (29 page)

Why did I allow this?

Prin hesitantly said, “If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the extreme cold has affected the engines.  What does Ivan say, Matt?”

Matt inquired and relayed Ivan's response:  “He says the current outside temperature is below the freezing point of the engine lubrication oil.  In other words, the engine may have seized up because the oil is frozen solid.”

“Does he know what to do?”

“There is no applicable procedure in my archive of airship manuals,” Ivan replied, anticipating Matt's request. 

“Ivan,” Matt said, “is there any chance that the wind will blow us out of the storm?”

“My meteorological analysis indicates that the storm pattern is a typical vortex.”

“Which means?”

“The most probable answer is that the wind will not blow us out of the storm.” 

Matt struggled to keep from speaking out loud.  “Well, do you have any ideas about what to do?”

“Yes, Matt.  I suggest that you create a procedure to warm the engines.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“I do not know, Matt.” 

The subtext was,
Humans are supposed to be creative, do something creative.

Matt became aware that the others were staring at him. 
Warm the engines
, he thought. 

Create a procedure that an artificial intelligence would not think of.  Because it was too risky, too outlandish, too crazy.  After a moment's thought – if you could call having something flash into your mind 'thinking' – he had such an idea.   

“Andra, Prin,” Matt said resolutely.  “Get ready to start the engines when I say go.  Starboard first, then I'll call for port.”

He went into the aft cabin and opened a supply cabinet and extracted an empty jug.  He opened a ceiling panel near the rear door and held the jug underneath the fuel tank drain line outlet.  He removed the plug, twisted the valve and listened to the trickle of Britanian-made naval rum into the jug.

Savora, who had entered the aft cabin after him, watched and frowned.  “What are you doing, Matt?”

“I'm going to warm the engines by pouring rum on them, then setting the rum on fire.”

“Matt, you cannot do that.  That will cause the hydrogen gas in the balloon to ignite.”  

“The hydrogen is insulated behind two layers of Sarkassian silk, Savora.  The burning point of Sarkassian silk is well above that of rum, so we'll be all right.  Now let me do this.”

Matt flung open the starboard engine hatch.  The air blast hit and he gasped as Ivan compensated for the temperature drop.  Health indicators flashed yellow and red at the bottom of his field of vision.

“Matt,” Ivan said.  “The frigid temperature you are currently experiencing is life threatening.”

So, Matt thought, was the wind that was trying to blow him off the engine strut and into the sea as he sidestepped with one hand clutching the jug, the other the lantern.  Snowflakes whisked by his face, the wind howled, the cold metal of the strut tried to peel the skin off his fingers.  And the worst, he knew, was yet to come.

“Quick question, Ivan,” he said.  “Is the burning point of Sarkassian silk above that of rum?”

“I have no data on the burning point of Sarkassian silk.”

We'll find out
, Matt thought. 

Because the alternative was to swirl around in the vortex of the storm until the ship was battered enough to leak enough gas to sink into the sea. 

He reached the cowling, pried and shoved it open.  Upending the jug, he splashed rum on the engine, then backed away, shielded his face, and touched a finger to the wetted casing.

“Ignite,” he said.

Foof!
The glare of the fire was visible around his arm and through his eyelids.  As it faded, he opened his eyes.  The trickles of flame died as the last of the rum was consumed.

“Go!” he shouted.

His voice would not have carried above the wind, but from the hatch Savora relayed:  “Go!”

The propeller windmilled and the engine clicked, coughed, and chugged to life. 

Matt closed the cowling, crept back along the strut, shut the hatch, wordlessly passed Savora in the cabin, and repeated the procedure on the port engine.  The ship turned into the wind and surged westward once more.

“I understand, Matt,” Ivan said.  “Your procedure is similar to how Russian soldiers started their vehicle engines in subzero weather during the Great Patriotic War.”

“You mean, you
knew
this was a way to start the engines?”

“I did not know, Matt.  I merely have anecdoctal information in my archives.”

Nonetheless, when Matt returned to the forward cabin, Prin gushed, “Your Ivan has come through again, Matt!”

“Yeah,” Matt mumbled, realizing there was no way to correct Prin's perception without sounding petty. 

Andra glanced at his hands.  “Matt, you're badly hurt!”

“Ivan's taking care of it,” Matt said. 

As he inspected his burned and frostbitten yet pain-free hands in the restored cabin light, he realized again how much he relied on Ivan.  Losing a bit of credit now and then was a small price to pay. 

The engines hummed and the ship coursed through the storm.  The buffeting lessened, and Ivan confirmed that they had entered the center.  Snow turned to rain, then the rain stopped.  Sunlight streamed through the thinning clouds. 

Matt's hands were by then almost restored, but the memory of the experience still had in him shock. 
Just to get halfway,
he thought.  He hoped there would be no more surprises, but he'd been on Ne'arth long enough to know that was not how the planet worked. 

Several minutes later, Andra cried:

“
What is that?
”

She was pointing through a cloud break, to a distance of several kilometers.  Matt whirled in time to see only the shadow cast upon the clouds.  He pressed to the window and said, “Cut the cabin lights.” 

He surveyed the cloudscape intently for about a minute, then glimpsed what must have provoked Andra's cry:  a long, sinewy outline weaving between the cloud banks.  It was no tiny bug this time.  To be seen at that distance, the thing was
huge
. 

With Ivan's magnified, computer-processed vision, Matt gaped in awe.   

It was tubular, about fifty meters wide and five hundred long, the dimensions of a skyscraper.  It flew as fast as an airplane.  The sides were armored in overlapping plates each the size of a man and on top were a series of jagged, vertical fins that stretched the length of the body like the masts of a row of sailboats.  From the front trailed long ropes – cables? antennae? – that whipped pulsatingly.  Overall the skin was colored a dark, metallic green that shimmered with sunlight and flashes of static electricity as it scraped through the turbulent air. 

Matt thought the apparition might be another airship, until he saw the head.

The doors of his mouth, the lamps of his eyes
were understatements.  The golden irises of the eyes were like search lights.  The nostrils were geysers of vapor.  Framed by stalagmite and stalactite teeth, the cavernous mouth could have swallowed a barn.      

The creature turned toward the ship, open jaws revealing a void that threatened to engulf the gondola.  With the sinuous, side-winding movements of an aerial eel, it approached, features rapidly expanding beyond Matt's magnified field of view.  Ivan's imaging zoomed back, but not fast enough. 

“Go to Mag One,” Matt said.

“Magnification is already at One,” Ivan replied.

This cannot be
, Matt told himself in detachment from what seemed to be his imminent death. 

Eyes had no reason to be that big.  What were the teeth for?  Why did it have ears? 
Were
those ears – or a type of radar?  How did it get here?  What did it eat?  It couldn't eat airships, they were not nourishing.  So why was it attacking them?

Andra steered hard, but the creature was already veering from collision.  It streaked alongside, a massive train of the sky that rumbled like thunder and shuddered the ship with its wake.  The windows on one side of the gondola were blotted by a wall of scales.  And then the impossible creature passed behind them and was gone.

The churning air violently jostled the ship.  Andra struggled with the controls and Prin aided and they stabilized.  For a moment, no one said anything.  Catching their breath, they absorbed the relief of an empty panorama of clouds.  The sky was clearing, but Matt would have welcomed another blast of storm rather than a return of
that
. 

“What the blazes was that thing?” Prin said.  He was shouting.

Matt opened parched lips.  “Some . . . some . . . some kind of genetically engineered lifeform.”

“
It's alive? 
How can a living thing be so huge?”

Concentrating on objective facts helped Matt regain his composure.  “It's huge in volume, not weight.  It's mainly just a balloon, like an airship.  I'll bet it masses less than a blue whale.”

“I assume that a 'blue' whale is a very large kind of whale.”

“Yeah.”

“Will it return?” Andra said.  “Will it attack?”

“I . . . I don't know.  Be ready to take evasive action, I guess.”

“What kind of evasion is possible?  It moves faster than we do at full speed.”

Matt had no idea how to answer, but an answer wasn't needed.  The creature never appeared again. 

The trip through the other half of the storm front was uneventful.  Savora kept the filter screens clean and the engines kept humming.  The rain faded to a drizzle and the lightning ceased, and the sky brightened.  Buffeting subsided and the gondola steadied.  There were no more spiders. 

Visibility expanded to kilometers and the blanket of clouds thinned and broke to reveal the surface of the sea once more.       

Slumping, Prin wiped the perspiration from his face.  “Well, if crossing from one side of the world to the other means having to contend with
that much
excitement
, no wonder it's done so rarely!” 

“A wall of storm,” Andra said.  “I wonder if it truly is intended as a wall.  Matt, what do you think?  Is such a thing possible for the Lords of Aereoth?”

“I suppose it is,” Matt replied.  He was somewhat hazy, for the picture of the creature charging at the ship still had claim on his thoughts.  “Don't ask me how or why.”

“I can see the 'why' plainly enough,” Prin said.  “They made a wall of storm to prevent passage from one side of the world to the other.  I would also venture that they created those sky monsters as a kind of guard dog, also to prevent passage.”

“But why prevent passage?” Andra said.  “And if they went to such efforts to prevent passage, how did our little ship pass through so easily?”

“You call what we just went through easy?”

“A few meters closer, those teeth could have shredded the skin of our envelope.  So yes.”

Why did it spare us?
Matt asked himself.  It had come so close, it seemed it must have had intent to attack them.  Yet at the last instant, it had seemingly changed its mind.  Why?  

Savora asked, “Down there.  What kind of ship is that?  Is it on fire?”

She pointed to a speck on the waves several kilometers to the south.  It was trailing a column of smoke.  The ship was not on fire, it was belching the smoke out of a smokestack.  Though it had masts, the sails were tied down.  The vessel was plowing through the sea solely by the power of side-mounted paddle wheels.

“Someone has taken our design for an airship engine,” Prin said, “and adapted it for the propulsion of a watership.  I wonder if they too use rum for fuel.  People already say the Roman Navy runs on rum, but someday it could be meant literally.”

Matt reviewed Ivan's spectral analysis of the smokestack emissions.  “It's not internal combustion.  It's a steam ship.”

“Meaning?” Prin asked.

“Steam pushes the pistons.  According to Ivan, the steam on that ship is heated by coal.”

“What is coal?”

“Something your world isn't supposed to have,” Matt replied.  “Not according to planetologists.”

Savora lightly coughed.  She was standing at the starboard forward window, spyglass in hand, pointing south.  “There is land in that direction.”

Matt went to the window and stared.  All he saw was a horizon of haze, even at Ivan's maximum magnification.  “Are you sure?”

“I am certain.  It was an island with trees, and I think I also saw an airship above it.”

“I don't see anything.” Matt frowned.  “It's not on satellite view, either.”  Which he admitted to himself didn't mean anything under the current circumstances.   

“The break in the clouds was only for a moment,” Savora said.  “But I am certain I saw land.”

“Matt,” Andra said.  “During training and test flights, Savora has always been able to spot details in the distance before I can.  If she says she saw something, I believe it.”