Abney Park's The Wrath Of Fate (18 page)

We talked all night about these things. Eventually he got tired, and excused himself. I slept that night by the campfire, but before falling asleep I sketched these lyrics in my notebook:

The End Of Days

After our days and the fall of man

One day this will heal again.

Beasts crawl forth over desert clay

and mankind will be nature’s prey.

Ruined towns spring forth in vines

trees … leaves … flotsam combines.

Human kind will have lost its sway,

the world again will be theirs one day.

Skeletons of rust reach for the sky

ruined empires of days gone by.

Dreams and lives buried in the sand.

The end of days will have been long planned.

Our children’s children have passed away

their auspicious lives lost in the fray.

Carrion birds are all at play,

the world again will be theirs one day.

Nomadic tribes of the last of man

pull their caravans cross the sand.

Gypsy wives hold their children tight

As the new superpower howls through the night.

Gods watch from above and wonder what went wrong;

the entropy of what once was strong.

Now survivors of man stay up late to pray,

That the world again will be theirs one day
.

AIRSHIP PIRATES

As we woke the next morning on our woolen sleeping mats around the smoldering fire, there was a great commotion. The Neobedouins were running around, yelling to each other through what I mistook for smoke. It was actually heavy fog, and I began to understand what they were all riled about. I saw the wheels and axles of one of their massive hauls disappearing into the low–lying clouds above us.

Leaping up, I grabbed the arm of a teenaged boy, and asked, “What’s happening?”

“Pirates! Sky Pirates are stealing our food stores!” He was panicked, watching a three storied haul disappearing into the fog.

Daniel stepped to my side as the boy quickly told us that some of the “Skyborn” (as he called them) would descend in thick early morning fog, hook the tribe’s storage trucks, and just lift them away. If the pirates caught the tribe off guard, there wasn’t anything the Neobedouins could do to stop them.

“Dammit, I thought we were the
only
airship pirates!” I joked to Daniel.

“Its not good to make assumptions, Captain,” Daniel said with a slight grin.

“There is nothing to be done! We are lost!” said the young man. “With out our stores…”

“Maybe not completely. Daniel, don’t
we
have an airship somewhere?” I asked.

“Why yes, Robert, I think we do. Shall we see if there’s something that can be done about this?” he said.

“Oh yes, lets,” I replied with mock mildness.

We ran for the ladders that hung under the
Ophelia
when we were moored to the ground, and we roused the crew as we ran. In a few minutes we were all on deck, and our ship hung in fog so thick we could barely see the airbag above us. Looking around, the crew appeared hungover, and in some cases still noticeably drunk. Nobody expected an early morning, and I had the feeling some of the crew had only just passed out from drink when this latest adventure began. My own head was still spinning a bit, I will admit.

“Lets get some altitude, and figure out where they’ve gone! Mongrel? Get the engines up to power!” I commanded.

“Aye, Cap’n!” he replied, and stomped below deck.

I strode up to the front helm, not in too much of a hurry as it would be a few minutes before the engines could supply me with enough power to get the ship in motion. As I walked, the wet fog clung heavily to my clothes and hair. I took my place at the wheel, and tried to peer through the murk. When the ropes had been pulled up, and the pressure gauges showed sufficient pressure, I pulled the Elevator Wheel. The ship slowly began to respond, sluggishly, as if I could feel a million dewdrops weighing her down.

Up we climbed, and further still. The clouds were much deeper then I originally assumed, and we were losing time. Soon our prey would be far away, and when we did get free of this cloud cover we’d have to find what direction to pursue them. When we finally broke free of the clouds and into early morning sunlight, we saw a grand spectacle of silver-pink sky above a sea of fluffy white. Here and there mesas poked up through the clouds, like islands, with little towns perched on top of them. Deep blue in the far distance to the west was a massive mountain range, and some of its peaks were also dotted with towns.

I scanned the sky around us for a sign of the other airship, and was confounded in a way I hadn’t expected. There were at least twenty airships visible. Two near enough to see the color of their balloons, another half dozen scattered here and there at a distance that made them just pale blue silhouettes, and the remaining were specks on the horizon, flying into or out of the little mountain-top cities. Some were coming, some were going, some climbing, some descending to the little island mesa towns, each minding their own business on a typical morning for them. This was a new world, one in which we were no longer an amazing spectacle. We were now just part of the throng.

Off to our port side there was one massive and battered airship. It consisted of two huge cigar shaped balloons, under which hung the hull-equivalent of a nineteenth Century workhouse. This was four floors, square and unadorned, with broken windows and shutters. It was built of weather-stained wood that was once painted blue and white – but a couple of decades of poverty left more bare wood then paint. It was as shabby and depressing a construction as Dickens himself could have dreamed up, and it hung forlorn in the sky. Below the base of this sad structure were four or five massive ropes, tightly holding something large below and out of sight. This must be the pirate vessel, hiding the stolen haul in the clouds as they tried to escape unnoticed.

“Clever of them to try to sneak off low like that, hoping we’ll take pursuit of someone else. You’ll notice they aren’t even at half speed. They are putting on quite an act!” I said to the crew around me. I pulled the yellyphone up to my mouth, adjusted a ring on it that allowed it to address the whole ship, and I spoke, “Load the cannons, and prepare for battle! We are going after that behemoth to port. Daniel, prepare a boarding party!”

I gave the wheel a spin, and the ship swung around. Below deck I could hear boots running, and men barking instructions and confirmations at each other. They would be loading powder, stacking shot, and rolling the huge guns into open hatches. The routine of combat was old hat to us now, and cockiness once again swam through our heads.

“Cannons to port, men. We’ll be passing on her starboard side,” I said. I throttled up the props, and our engines raised pitch. Soon we were closing on the ship like a shark confidently closing on a swimmer, the clouds breaking on our bow like waves in the sea. Soon our bow was even with her stern. We were fifty yards to starboard, and we watched her shutters closing in preparation for battle. When we were even, I gave the command, “Give her a volley! Half-guns warning, we don’t want her to burn and fall.” A few of our cannons blazed, and the shot found its mark. One entered a window in an unsatisfyingly easy manner. Another hit the balloon, and literally bounced off. They weren’t exploding shot, just heavy balls, that balloon must be made of some impressively thick canvas! Another two shots found wood, and left gaping holes. Through the holes, I could see small figures running further into the ship.
That’s odd,
I thought.
Little pirates? Does that make it easier to fly or something?

“Reload, and hold!” I commanded. They weren’t returning fire. Perhaps they were thieves, but not pirates? They steal, but aren’t equipped for aerial combat? It was as likely as anything else, this
was
a foreign world to us.

Daniel walked up to me. “Let’s tie her up, and go aboard. I don’t think they’ve got much on us.”

“I agree,” I said, turned and yelled, “Fire grappling!” There were a dozen whistling sounds, as our huge steel darts, attached to heavy lanyards, flew the distance between our ships and found easy purchase in the increasingly frail sides of our prey. After the grappling fire, the next sound was the
ching, ching, ching
of huge shipboard ratchets being wound, pulling us closer to our prey.

When we were close enough that our airbags touched, our hulls were still a good thirty feet away from each other. A boarding party of about ten of our crew, armed with both swords pistols, single or double shot types, from the various eras we’ve been spending our time in and swords.

I know the swords must seem ridiculously romantic, like a caricature of movie pirates, but the truth was much more practical. Whenever we changed times it became very difficult to find ammunition to fit our pistols. The old-style pistols could use hand-forged bullets, but that was difficult and those guns were horribly inaccurate. For a while we got used to throwing away guns as soon as they ran out of ammo, since we rarely got the chance to acquire the correct bullets again.

However, as primitive as it might sound to you reading this, three-feet of sharpened steel is always effective. They never run out of bullets. These swords were not like the replicas you’ve handled in mall smoke shops, clumsy, rattling, duller than butter knives. Imagine the best chef’s knife, able to slice paper without ripping it. Able to make a two millimeter, transparent slice of an over-ripe tomato (or the same from an incautious finger holding that tomato). Able to cleave a heavy ham-bone with one hard swing. Now imagine that razor sharp blade is three feet long. Better then a one shot pistol, and three bullets in your pocket, right?

So with swords drawn in one hand, and the other wrists wrapped in the long leather straps we keep tied to the furthest edge of our airbag, we leaped.

Through the air we swung, thousands of unknown feet between us and the ground. Down to the bottom of our arc, then back up,until a sudden release, and our boots hit deck! There we all stood on the other ship’s deck, while I tried not to let show the pride I felt at not having fallen to my death, or worse, bounced and swung back. (This hadn’t happened to me, but I’ve seen sailors swing back and forth, and ultimately end up dangling in the middle, lacking the momentum to reach either ship. If they lived through the battle, they had an even harder time living with the embarrassment.)