The Forever Engine Read online

  “I have the bridge, Mr. Longchamps,” he said.

  “Aye, aye, sir. Our course is one six five magnetic, altitude four thirty, speed nineteen knots. L Zed Five-class zeppelin approaching, climbing to meet us. Range about two thousand and closing. Shall we go to action stations, sir?”

  “Not enough time to get everyone assembled at the rate he’s coming. Why show our German hosts a crowded, confused deck? No, we’ll dip the colors as a salute. Have the signaler stand by.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Longchamps went back into the wheelhouse. Harding followed him and left Thomson and me alone for the moment. The zeppelin was down to perhaps half a mile now. It would pass us to starboard, and Thomson and I stood on the portside flying bridge, so I could see a little of its profile. The gas bag was more pointed than the big German zeppelins of the 1930s, and the crew compartment hung a few meters below the bag instead of being tucked right up against it. I studied it through the binoculars, never having seen a real one before. Its tail planes were visible then, but were the same featureless black as the gas bag.

  “Germans don’t mark their zeps?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Thomson answered. “Usually a large Maltese cross on the side of the balloon and a smaller one on the tail.”

  I felt my heart accelerate, felt the first fingers of dopey excitement claw at my brain, and then I saw the gun mount swiveling toward us, a vaguely familiar gun mount which had no business being here in this time.

  I dropped the binoculars and grabbed Thomson by the lapels, pushed his back against the outside steel wall of the wheelhouse, and then kicked his feet out from under him. He crashed to the deck with a startled grunt. I ducked down beside him.

  “What in blazes—” he started, but then was drown out by the sound of metal impacting metal, exploding glass, and screaming men. Some of the glass from the wheelhouse windows blew out on us, along with tiny beads of molten steel, one of which smoldered on the sleeve of my coat and burned my arm underneath before I could shake it off.

  The zeppelin was already past the wheelhouse. I heard its gun fire again—POW, POW, POW—but the rounds hit farther aft.

  “Stay down,” I ordered and Thomson nodded wordlessly, face as white as the clouds.

  I ran through the smoky chaos of the wheelhouse, seeing nothing clearly but an oval-shaped panel of blue sky—the hatch to the starboard bridge wing. In clean air I came up hard against the brass railing and looked at the enormous black giver of death slipping past. A small streak of fire shot out from the zeppelin’s gondola and hit somewhere behind the superstructure, causing an explosion which shook the deck under my feet. Then the gun started again: POW, POW, POW. One of the aft propellers flew to pieces, the rudder jumped and twisted at the wrong angle, the other prop shuddered and came to a halt amid the screech of tortured metal. Then the zeppelin was past us. I watched for a moment, but it showed no sign of turning back on us.

  Beneath me I could feel Intrepid begin to list slightly to starboard as her speed fell away. I turned back into the wheelhouse. Broken glass covered everything, and all of the bridge crew was down except for Ensign Conroy, who knelt beside the unconscious Captain Harding and pressed his hand over the captain’s bloody forehead. The other officer, Longchamps, had lost the back half of his head.

  “Captain, wake up!” Conroy shouted over and over.

  My head spun, for a moment nothing, made sense. Then I remembered the red lever by the engine telegraph from our earlier encounter with the French, and I pulled it. Five quick bells, a pause, five more quick bells: action stations—as if anyone onboard didn’t already know we were in a world of trouble. This would at least bring more people up here, people who knew what they were doing. I held on to the helm for balance and realized the list was getting worse. The petty officer they called the trimsman had nearly lost his right arm above the elbow, and the mangled flesh and bone lay beside him on the deck at an awkward angle. I crunched through broken glass to get to him, pulled him away from the hedge of trim levers, and applied pressure on his inside upper arm to stop the arterial bleeding. Christ, there was a lot of blood!

  “Captain, wake up!” Conroy pleaded.

  “Conroy, you’re in command!” I shouted at him. He didn’t seem to hear me, so I picked up a handful of broken glass and threw it at his back. That got his attention.

  “What?”

  “You’re in command. The ship’s listing and the trimsman’s down. Fucking do something!”

  He looked around helplessly at the blood-spattered ruin of the wheelhouse, the shattered controls and broken bodies, and then back down.

  “Captain, wake up!”

  Feet pounded on the steel stairs to the port flying bridge. A naval rating appeared in the hatchway and froze for a moment, taking in the scene.

  “Bloody ’ell!” he said. An officer pushed past him and made a quick survey of the damage.

  “Better get someone on these trim controls,” I told him, “or we’re going to tip right over.” I didn’t know what would happen then, but I couldn’t imagine it would be good.

  FOURTEEN

  October 4, 1888,

  Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,

  Landed Near Kempten, Bavaria

  We hadn’t tipped over. We were grounded in a meadow while damage-control parties swarmed over the ship. I sat with my back to the wall and watched the activity in the wheelhouse. They had at least swept up the broken glass but several broad smears of blood, red turning to brown, told the story of our brief, disastrous encounter. I didn’t help the naval ratings clear away the debris. My knees felt too weak to support me, although I knew from experience that if they had to, they would. Captain Harding, head swathed in a bloody bandage, sat in a chair pulled into the wheelhouse from the chart room, while an officer reported on the damage.

  “Both boilers punctured, but Mr. Clyde says he has number one patched with steam up and can have pressure in number two inside of an hour. Starboard airscrew lost, and the port airscrew shaft is bent. Mr. Clyde recommends remounting the port screw on the starboard shaft and says he can give you twelve knots once the work is done. Rudder is jammed amidships, but he doesn’t expect a problem freeing it. He can jury-rig the screw in three hours and perhaps make temporary repairs on the boilers, but he would rather spend the night doing the job right.”

  “Casualties?” Harding asked.

  “Lieutenant Longchamp and two ratings dead, yourself and six ratings injured. Dr. Bay says Leading Trimsman O’Donnell will lose the arm, sir.”

  “What about Mademoiselle Courbiere?” I asked. The officer looked to me.

  “Uninjured, sir. The attack distressed her, but she seems quite calm now, all things considered. I was afraid she might become hysterical.”

  “Never mind that,” Harding snapped. “What about our armament?”

  “Starboard sponson frozen in place with the gun locked at maximum depression. Z turret totally destroyed. We’ll need major dry-dock work to replace it. All secondary armament serviceable, sir.”

  “They spiked your aft turret,” I said.

  “I am quite aware of that, Mr. Fargo,” Harding said, turning his sour gaze on me. “The question is how they did it, and why.”

  “No, when I said spiked, I meant it. That was a Spike antitank missile they fired at you, built either by Raphael or EuroSpike. What the hell it was doing here is a different matter.”

  “And that damned gun?” he asked. “It fired faster than a Hotchkiss one-pounder revolver but cut through our armor as if it were mere sheet metal.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was a Rhinemetal thirty-millimeter Maschinenkanone, probably firing sabot rounds.”

  Harding looked from me to Thomson, who leaned against the wall of the wheelhouse and mopped the perspiration from his flushed face. “Thomson, do you have any idea what this fellow is talking about?”

  “Yes, I do. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I cannot explain further at the moment. All I can say is you should listen
carefully to whatever he can tell you about the capabilities of these weapons.”

  Gordon entered the wheelhouse, looking around at the damage. I wondered where he’d been through all of this and spotted the blood dried on his hands.

  “You hurt, Gordon?” I asked.

  He looked at me wordlessly, as if unsure what I meant, and then raised his hands slowly and examined therm. That slow-motion movement was a pretty good sign of someone coming out of shock.

  “No. I’m all right. Someone else’s.”

  My own right hand was bandaged. I’d cut it scooping up glass to throw at Conroy, but I hadn’t felt the cut at the time. It hadn’t even started bleeding until after things settled down. That was typical, too.

  “Why didn’t they finish us off when they had the chance?” Thomson asked.

  “Turning radius,” Harding answered. “They couldn’t fire directly astern because of their own airscrews and would have to swing wide to turn back on us, which would give either our broadside mounts or the port sponson a clear shot. Too dangerous with that great hydrogen bag as a target. They couldn’t know we weren’t at action stations. What I want to know is why the damned Germans are shooting at us.”

  “It’s not the Germans,” I said. “At least I don’t think so. There were no markings on the zeppelin. This smells of an ambush, maybe by the fellow we’re looking for.”

  “Well, we’ll make repairs here overnight and then try to make Munich in the morning. I hope to God you’re right about the Germans, Fargo. We’re damned near helpless with one screw, a leaky boiler, and half our main guns out of battery.”

  “There’s still the matter of our mission,” I said. “We have to examine the incident site.”

  “Out of the question,” Harding said, shaking his head vigorously. “My first responsibility is my vessel.”

  I looked to Thomson, but he just shrugged helplessly. Gordon had a thousand-yard stare that said his mind was still half an hour back in time.

  “If we can get to the incident site on our own, will you wait for us?” I asked.

  Harding frowned. “Can’t imagine how you’ll manage that, but if there’s no sign of hostility from the Germans, I’ll wait the night and the day tomorrow.”

  “Smoke on the horizon,” the lookout above the wheelhouse called, “nor’ by nor’-west, three smudges.”

  “Those German landships we passed yesterday,” Harding said. “If you’re wrong, Fargo, they’ll shoot us to scrap metal here on the ground.”

  “Yeah, but if I’m right, they’re our ride.”

  “What do you make of it, lad?” Thomson asked.

  I walked around the vehicle, assessing the damage and trying to envision what that fiery moment of transition from my time back to this one had been like. No fun, that’s for sure; five fresh graves in the meadow forty yards away bore mute testimony to that.

  In some ways it reminded me of the Somerton site we’d looked at earlier, although the impact area was much smaller here. It had that same look of part of one world exchanged with another, and the topography didn’t quite line up. WHECOL hadn’t been at Somerton, so the shift in time had brought a slight shift in location as well. Here it looked as though the vehicle and a chunk of the surrounding ground had appeared above the surface of the meadow and just fallen onto it. A lot of the surrounding grass was burnt but I wasn’t sure if that was from the event itself or a secondary fire afterwards. One side of the vehicle was blackened, and the rear fuel cell had been compromised.

  Compromised. Boy, that was a polite word for what had happened. The back two or three feet of the vehicle just weren’t there any more, leaving the interior open to the morning sunlight. The edges weren’t cleanly cut, as I’d expected them to be, but looked as if they had been melted by a broad-flamed cutting torch. Hard threads of steel hung like shining silver spittle from the yawning improvised mouth, and severed caterpillar tracks lay in twisted heaps around the broken vehicle like spilled entrails.

  The circular hole in the top, letting more sunlight in, showed no evidence of violence. The entire remote turret assembly had been carefully removed. That much I’d suspected, as I’d seen it yesterday on the black zeppelin. I wondered how they powered it. My curiosity piqued, I walked around front, lifted the engine access hatch, and looked into an empty engine compartment. Whoever they were, these guys hadn’t missed a trick.

  “It’s a Schützenpanzer Puma, the standard infantry fighting vehicle of the Bundeswehr—the German army in my time,” I explained to Thomson, Gordon, Gabrielle, and Inspector Wolfenbach of the Bavarian Stadtpolizei, who stood with them. Gabrielle crouched, an open pad on her knees as she sketched the vehicle and made notes in the margins. Inspector Wolfenbach had already been told, in confidence, of my origins. He clearly hadn’t believed any of it but now seemed to be having second thoughts. Thirty-five tons of squat, angular armored vehicle, obviously not from this time and place, possessed a quiet but persuasive eloquence.

  Five graves. A Puma could carry nine men —a crew of three and six infantry dismounts. Squads were usually understrength in the field, and there was no telling if all the passengers had even made it through the transition to this time, given that hole ripped in the back end. Somebody had survived, though. No matter how smart the guys in the black zeppelin were, it would take weeks to figure out how to remove that remote turret without damaging it, remove the engine, and install them in an airship so they would actually work—not to mention figure out how they worked. Somebody from my time had to have helped them, which was not to say the assistance was rendered voluntarily.

  Gordon drifted over and touched the beads of melted steel along the open rear, then peered into the alien interior of the vehicle. He still wore that same blank expression he’d had since the zeppelin attack, which made it tough to figure what he was thinking. After a moment, he looked at me, and his expression was altered. He believed this thing was from a different time, and now he also believed, not just in his head but down in his gut, that I was from a different time as well. Fear had replaced contempt.

  I climbed up onto the deck and looked into the now-open turret ring. When I glanced over, I saw Gabrielle studying me with curiosity. She didn’t look away at first, but then went back at her work and continued sketching.

  “There are brackets for Spike missile reloads, thirty-millimeter ammunition boxes, and seven-six-two belted—what you’d call thirty caliber. All the brackets are empty. I’d guess they have four missiles—three now, since they took out a turret on Intrepid with one of them—plus 400 rounds of thirty millimeter, and about 2,000 machine-gun rounds, give or take. That can make a lot of trouble for one or two of your warships, but it’s not exactly a conquer-the-world ordnance load.”

  Thomson scratched his beard and squinted at the broken vehicle. “There’s something bothering me. You mentioned the laboratory you worked at was not in Somerton, but rather the countryside, and this vehicle does not seem to have come out at ground level. But your facility was in Wessex, and this vehicle was at least in Germany, and quite possibly southern Germany, so in both cases the transition point was close to its origin. You mentioned the date of the incident in your time was early August, but it took place a month later here. Do you suppose the difference in where the Earth was in its orbit around the sun could account for that shift?”

  That had been bothering me as well. “I wish it could, but I don’t see how. The difference in orbital position is much more than this little shift in location, but it’s insignificant compared to the distance the sun has moved in relation to the rest of the galaxy in over a century. By my time we’d been able to measure that speed. The sun’s moving through the galaxy at about 40,000 miles an hour, and pulling the Earth and the other planets along with it. That means that in the century between my time and yours, the sun and earth have moved”—I paused and did some quick calculations in my head—“about three and a half billion miles. Being a couple dozen kilometers off in terms of where I came out doe
sn’t seem like that big a deal when you look at it in those terms.”

  What I left unsaid was that if I’d been a couple dozen kilometers—or even meters—off in altitude, I wouldn’t have survived the experience. These guys had come out a few meters high. What if they—or I—had come out a few meters low? For a moment I felt sick to my stomach.

  “Well, how can you account for this difference, then?” Thomson said.

  I looked at him. “You’re the scientist. You tell me.”

  Three and a half billion miles. As I thought about it, I realized this was an aspect of time travel I’d never heard addressed in any of the science fiction I’d read as a youngster. For that matter, the physicists at WHECOL hadn’t questioned it, either. Why not? They were just swept up in the excitement of the possibility of time travel, I supposed. And for all I knew, maybe some of them had wondered about it—I never spoke with any of them directly, only with Reggie. But I think the first question I’d ask if I had a machine bringing things back from the past is why it wasn’t just bringing back big scoops of vacuum, because that’s about all there would have been hundreds or even thousands of years earlier in the spot we occupied when the time machine was running. How would the machine search out where Earth was back then and bring samples back from it? Something didn’t add up, but the answer wasn’t in the burnt-out Puma.

  “I think we’re done here,” I said. I’d sure as hell seen all I cared to.

  Intrepid had finished its jury-rigged repairs and was already airborne and coming to find us when we were an hour from the crash site. I was happy to switch from the German landship to Intrepid. The landships were big on the outside but amazingly cramped on the inside, not to mention hot, steamy, and filthy with coal dust and lubricating grease and oil. Dante would have taken one look around and nodded.

  But aside from the comparative comfort of Intrepid as a means of transportation, we didn’t have a lot to celebrate. We were too late getting to the incident site, and the pride of the Royal Navy had had its ass handed to it by a balloon. The three-hour flight from Munich was looking like a six or seven-hour return flight on one propeller. Gabrielle was no longer confined to the crew’s mess, as the room periodically filled with steam from a leaking boiler line—that and the fact that Harding had a lot more on his mind than the danger posed by one unarmed French woman. She joined Thomson and me at the bow railing, but none of us had much to say.