Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  The surprise about the town was how normal it looked. Stores were open, people were about, children were playing in the school yard. There were no cars or trucks at all on the streets. They must all have been towed away by teams of people with or without horses to help. Loren stepped into a small grocery. He looked at the somewhat sparse array of foods on the gray metal shelving.

  “A stranger in town, aren’t you, son?” It was the shopkeeper, a gaunt sixtyish man in dirty white apron.

  “Yes. Well, no, not actually. I was born here,” Loren lied easily. “Just coming back for a look.”

  “Funny accent.”

  “Yes. I’m Spanish. My father was a diplomat.”

  “Funny reason to come back. Most folks don’t have much time for nostalgia, these days.”

  “Well, I was passing through.”

  “On the way to?”

  “Going up to Washington. For my work.”

  “Uh huh. I don’t suppose you have any work papers.”

  “No. That is, I do, but not right on me.”

  “Uh huh. A deserter, I reckon.”

  The man didn’t seem threatening. Loren kept his silence, hoping to learn something more.

  “They come through here every morning looking for deserters. It’s the morning you have to look out for in this town, son. I wouldn’t be here in the morning if I were you.”

  “No sir.”

  “Nope. I think I would be considerably west of these parts by then. That is if I didn’t want to get picked up and sent back to the road squads.”

  “Thank you sir.”

  “Are you hungry, young fellow?”

  “No. Thank you, I’m fine. I have some food with me.”

  The man appeared thoughtful, passed a hand over the gray stubble on his chin. “Just suppose, now, just suppose that you were looking for a place to put up semi-permanent, a place where you could help out with chores, mostly cutting and hauling wood, in exchange for food and maybe eventually some fairly official looking work papers.”

  “Just suppose that.”

  “Well, then, you might want to come back and talk to me about that. I might be able to help.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You do that.”

  A pause. Loren steered the conversation: “Of course it wouldn’t help if I got picked up before I came back for our talk.”

  “No, it wouldn’t help.”

  “So just to keep our options open for that semi-permanent arrangement you mentioned, it might be useful for me to know exactly where would be safe to put up during the day tomorrow. Someplace to the west, you say?”

  “Uh huh. Well you know enough to stay off the Interstates, I guess. So you would want to go north and west from here along highway 228. Pay sharp mind for when it begins to angle back to the south. There’s where you want to strike off overland, keeping toward the west. There’s some scrub woods there just above Accokeek. They go on for a long way. I’ve heard tell that they don’t get searched very much because they’re a bit swampy. Of course that’s just a rumor. What would I know about such things?”

  “Thank you though for your thoughts, sir.”

  “Good luck, young man. Remember that this is America. You’re still free, even if they’re trying to beat that notion out of you. You keep it firmly in your head. If I were thirty years younger, I’d be right out there with you, wearing my freedom in my hip pocket and staying out of the squads. There’s plenty of opportunity for drifters who are independent but willing to work.”

  “Thank you again.”

  Loren headed back out of town. It was a clear Indian Summer day. The trees were all turned, but still holding on to most of their leaves. It reminded him of the early fall back at Cornell. The little city of Ithaca would now be on the verge of winter, the first difficult winter of the new age. He thought suddenly of Sonia’s parents, Matthew and Margaret Duryea, wondering how they would have prospered since the world went dark. They both had their health, at least. It was going to take more than an Ithaca winter to do them in. But what arrangements had they been able to make for essential needs? Tompkins County, he knew, had a good crop each year of hard corn, perhaps even some wheat. If they had gotten it in as industriously as the crops were being harvested here, they would be OK. On either side of the road there were workers in the fields, scything hay and tying it into loose bundles for livestock. Loren had passed several wagons already, filled with stainless steel canisters of milk. The wagons had been pulled along by slow, docile looking bulls. The people who passed him along the road smiled pleasantly enough, though they seemed guarded. It was disturbing to think of what they might have learned to worry about from strangers over the past months, since Homer had so changed the world. Loren turned into the little copse of woods he had chosen for their layover. He found D.D. Pease heating some coffee over a small camping stove.

  They camped the second day in the swampy woods that the old man had suggested. During the next night they stole a skiff from the edge of the Potomac. There were no oars. They had to paddle it across with pieces of planking from an abandoned construction site. The river was surprisingly swift where they crossed. They had set out from opposite shore at a point about four miles upriver from the fort, and by the time they pulled up to the Virginia side, Loren figured their destination might be as little as a mile further down-river. They poled along the banks cautiously. It wouldn’t do at all to allow themselves to be swept along in the current past the fort, which was bound to be guarded. Loren stepped out of the boat to scout ahead at one wide turn in the river. He caught sight of electric lights on a dock, perhaps a thousand meters beyond the turning. There was no moon, but he thought he could make out a dark line stretching into the river from just above the dock, perhaps a set of flow turbine generators to supply some electricity. In any event, they seemed to have some source of electric power. The opposite shore of the river and indeed virtually everything they had passed till now had been unlit.

  Mr. Pease pushed the boat with its plank oars into the rushes where it might hope to escape detection. Then they cut into the woods, moving perpendicular to the river bank. Each of them had a flashlight, but they dared not use them. After half an hour’s hike they came up to the Memorial Parkway. There was nothing in sight there. They crept along the grassy verge of the highway, staying low.

  Their objective was not the fort itself, but the docks that lay just below it. These had been used in normal times by the Navy for vessels of fairly shallow draft that needed to be brought close to Washington D.C. They could accommodate even a destroyer or two. The few electric lights by the dock gave no hint of what might be lying there now. That was why they would need to reconnoiter their targets in the daylight. Pease pointed toward a wide row of cedars that stood above the docks. There was a narrow parade ground that ran down between the cedars and dockside road. The two made their way cautiously toward the trees. They could see sailors in uniform walking under the lights. They seemed to be marching, on patrol.

  Twenty minutes later, Loren and D.D. Pease were established just inside the heavy ornamental trees. They were protected from behind by a woods that ran all the way down to the water. In the morning they would be able to observe whatever there was at the dock from the thick cover of the cedars. Nothing to do now but lie back and wait for light.

  All through the following day they watched activity in the yards through their binoculars. They knew enough in the first few hours to understand what had to be done. But since they had decided not to act until dusk, they carried on watching.

  The wide brick building just beyond the docks housed the gas. Actually it had only one of the two components of the binary nerve gas, according to David Lee. The other was stored in underground vaults, accessed through doors in the hillside behind the chain link fence. The powers that be had decided to keep the two ingredients of the nerve gas separate in case of fire or accidental breakage of any of the cylinders. David said that the gas now stored at Fort Be
lvoir represented the entire stock of the lethal product, moved for convenience from the Aberdeen Arsenal. The only other gas weapons he knew of were stored at Redstone or on the west coast, all of it a thousand miles away or more. Loren intended to destroy the gas in the brick building, but leave the hillside vaults alone. The remaining product would be useless without the other half of its binary mix. What they needed to be most careful about was not to free even one cylinder of the second gas. The gentle northwest wind would blow any mixed gas away from them, but Loren didn’t fancy having the lives of those downwind added to the already heavy load on his conscience.

  The second target was a pair of destroyers at the dock. There were clear signs that these had been fitted with steam engines, a technology that functioned perfectly well even in the presence of the Layton Effect. There was a plume of black smoke at each of the two stacks. From their hiding place, Loren and Pease could hear the whine of power tools on board the ships, almost certainly run off generators attached to the steam turbine, rather than the weak little flow generators strung out into the river. It wasn’t clear yet how much motive power the steam engines would give to the ponderous metal ships; he hadn’t seen them move yet. But Loren had no doubts they could be made into a potent force. He could have done it himself.

  In place of the armaments that had been stripped off the destroyers decks, there were now two unorthodox new weapons in place. Neither one seemed to function too well. But again, it might only be a matter of time before they did. It was worth eliminating the threat of these weapons now, before they came steaming south in fine working order. The long pipe jutting out from the deck appeared to be a steam cannon. It belched white clouds at intervals. In the tests that went on during the day, the pipe would go through cycles of building up pressure, then releasing it suddenly to propel small projectiles out into the river. There were sailors in punts stationed out on the water to measure the distance of each essay. So far, the best they had done was less than a hundred meters.

  The second contraption was a long linear motor, a kind of electromagnetic launching track. A wicked looking steel dart was placed inside the track at the back. There was a sailor at the track, talking to someone over a wire intercom; Loren could see the cables running down into the hold of the ship. Once the dart was in place, the steam turbines would speed up to generate a burst of electric power. When the sailor threw a knife switch beside the weapon there was a crackling of electricity, audible even from the cedars. An electric pulse would pass along the linear motor, drawing the dart along with it. So far the thing didn’t work at all; it could not accelerate the dart even enough to get it off the end of the track. But the principle of the linear electric gun was a good one. It could be made into a real weapon. Through the otherwise idle afternoon, Loren did some mental calculations for how much propulsion they might get out of such a device. There was no reason why a good burst of electric power such as they might be able to generate on board the ship could not hurl a one kilogram projectile for a distance of five kilometers or more. If the dart were replaced with a gas releasing capsule, it would be possible to approach from down wind and still blanket your enemy with deadly gas. The range of the weapon would make it superior to SHIELA in a pitched battle.

  Use of the SHIELA telescopes to triangulate required that they separate themselves by at least twenty feet. Pease took his position all the way down the end of the cedar hedge, while Loren stayed put at the high point where they had first set up. They led a DC intercom line between them. Edward had made that up so they could communicate while targeting. There was a headphone for each of them, equipped with a tiny microphone that snaked down from the headpiece to a position immediately in front of the mouth. All the components had been scrounged from the control room of the base at Guantanamo. Loren spoke into his mouthpiece in a low voice:

  “Can you hear me D.D.?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Likewise.”

  It was dark enough. More important, the work crews had all quit for the night. There was no one in evidence except the few patrolling soldiers they had seen the night before. It wouldn’t be hard to avoid hitting them. They would be bound to run anyway as soon as the beams started coming down.

  “We’ll begin with the brick building,” Loren said. “Focus on the near left-hand corner, and sweep toward the right. We’ll keep shifting by about ten meters at a time, that’s more or less the width of each set of windows. I’ll call the shots.”

  “I’m focused,” said Pease.

  Loren picked his spot slightly to the right of where he had directed Pease to aim, so as to bring the beam into the interior of the building. “Firing now.” He pressed the little button on the side of the unit. There was a sharp crackling sound as the beam tore down into the roof of the building. He could hear shouts down on the dock. “Right ten…firing now.” He worked his way methodically across the target, then redirected Pease to begin a second sweep, this time further into the interior. There was a simple rhythm to the thing. As he continued firing, the image of sewing crossed his mind. The beam was like the needle of a giant sewing machine, penetrating the fabric at regular intervals. They stitched along the building, from left to right, reset and stitched again the whole length of it, five or six feet further in. The front and left walls were crumbling. Still they continue to stitch. There was no hurry. They were invisible where they were; no one was looking for them anyway. The soldiers had retreated to the hill over the docks to watch the spectacle.

  There had been some conjecture at the planning meeting in Baracoa that the gas might be flammable. During the first two sweeps there had been clear signs of yellow gas escaping, but no fire. But by the middle of the third sweep, they could see dark orange flames in the interior of the building. There were retorts now from time to time, out of synch with their firing, undoubtedly the result of canisters bursting from the heat. By the time they were ready to consider their next target, the ruins of the brick building were burning cherry red, fueled by the flaming gas. Through the SHIELA scope, Loren could see steel beams of the wrecked building, glowing from their elevated temperature. It was unlikely that any cylinders had remained intact.

  Next they focused on the bow of the first destroyer. Loren brought a crackling beam down onto its foredeck. He then focused on the foredeck of the second ship. If any guard had remained on station inside the ship, this was to be a warning. He paused to see if anyone else came up out of the ships. No one did. Now they began stitching beams down the center of the first destroyer. Before they were even half way along its length, the ship was beginning to sink. It’s bow settled in until there was no more than six feet of freeboard above the water. Then it stopped, evidently come to rest in the mud. With the beams on the mid-section of the ship, they heard a low rumble as the boilers burst open. Loren stitched all the way back to the stern. The near part of the stern was completely separated from its other half. It leaned slowly out into the water, the ship was split almost entirely in two. Loren began stitching along the second ship. His thumb was starting to hurt from pressing the sharp edge of the button switch on the side of the telescope.

  After the second ship was destroyed, Loren turned his attention to the crowd of uniformed onlookers, now gathered on the hill to his right. He aimed a beam just in front of them. The crowd broke into disarray. He stitched beams down in a line in front of them to direct them away. Within minutes, they had all disappeared back into the fort.

  The final target was the long row of flow turbines in the river. They had left this till last to keep the dockside lights on while they were useful to illuminate the targets. Now they turned off the lights with three quick beams along the line of generators. They had to be particularly careful about this, since there was a small dock that ran just inside the generator line where some sailing dinghies were pulled up to the dock. One of these would serve them well to make their escape down river. Loren fired a last few beams into the front walls of the fort to keep the soldiers pinned down.


  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Right.”

  He tore off his headset. He felt a rustle in the grass at his side as Pease pulled the unit in by its cord. Loren had a sudden urge to leave everything and run for the boats. But Pease was calmly stowing gear away in his pack, the intercom with its two headsets along with everything else. At last they began picking their way down to the river’s edge. It was nearly pitch black, the only light was the glowing remains of the brick building. As they approached the water, Loren could see the white hulls of the little dinghies, and at their side, a narrow white guardhouse, not much bigger than a telephone booth. They passed close by the guardhouse.

  “Halt! Who goes there?”

  There was a sailor in white uniform. His voice was quaking with fear. Incredible that anyone could have remained at his post while the blue beams wreaked havoc about him. But here was this boy, too stubborn to run and now too frightened to think what to do. He had a white rifle in his hands with a glittering bayonet blade attached to it. The rifle was shaking. It was still a menace for all that.

  “Who are you? Identify yourselves!” The voice was a screech.

  “Captain Connell,” Pease said calmly. “Stand easy sailor.”

  “Yes, this is Captain Connell,” Loren spoke dumbly. “And I am…I am his aide.” Loren couldn’t think of what rank a captain’s aide might have.

  “My aide, Lieutenant Smith,” Pease filled in. “We’re here to assess the damage.”

  The boy wanted so desperately to believe. But it was too far-fetched. The two un-uniformed men, the backpacks, the Spanish accent of the one: These were precisely the kind of intruders his orders had instructed him to look for. He was not going to back down now after shivering in fear beside the blue beams for those endless minutes.

  “The password! Quick!” he screamed.

  “Yes the password,” Pease’s voice was reassuring. It implied he would need only a moment’s reflection to remember the password. It had just slipped his mind for a moment. He held both hand up and open in a gesture of conciliation. “Tell him the password, Lieutenant Smith.” He moved slowly to right, his hands still visible, clearly unarmed.