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 . . .