Beyond the Rails 3: Slayer of Darkness

Chapter 1

DEDICATION

          This book is dedicated to the old Scribblers’ Den writing group, an imaginative pack of swashbuckling steampunks who had each other’s backs, rain or shine, thick or thin, come what may until the day the admin woke up in a snit and deleted the site. Thanks for your invaluable support, boys and girls; I couldn’t have done it without you!

CHAPTER 1

Mombasa Thursday morning

          The captain was ordinary, patched together, nearly invisible in a group of people. He was a perfect reflection of his ship. Spare parts, better days, every cliché in the book. He signed his name, Clinton Monroe, on the manifest, and nodded to the dock master as the man picked up the papers and slipped them into the canvas bag he wore at his side.
          “Pleasant trip, Captain,” he said, returning Monroe’s nod as he turned away to leave the dock. A pair of line handlers stood ready at the bollards, and Monroe stepped aboard, turning to attach the safety chain across the gangway opening in the starboard rail.
          “Are we ready, David?” he asked his deckhand, a weathered man in jeans and a plaid American-style shirt.
          “Aye, Cap’n,” the man replied. “Everything’s tied down and tested, ready to fly.”
          “Patience,” he called, turning toward the pilot house, “ready for launch?”
          A fit young woman, her pretty face surrounded by a mop of unruly blonde hair, stepped out onto the wing platform. She was in her mid-twenties, wearing khaki cargo pants and a sage green shirt with close to a dozen pockets, looking every inch the tomboy that she was.
          “Hardly,” she snapped.
          There was none of her usual playfulness, no wisecracks, no hint that her challenging banter was about to break through.
          “Is something the matter?”
          “You can’t feel it, then?”
          “Feel what?”
          “The ship, Captain. She’s ill. Afraid.”
          “Don’t go getting all mystical on me, Patience. She’s an inanimate object.”
          “To you, perhaps.”
          “All right, I’ll humor you. What do you feel?”
          “We’re logy, Captain. You’ve loaded her up until she’s wallowing like a waterlogged turd. I doubt we have twenty pounds of positive buoyancy, and as far as a safety margin, that’s right over the side. One good downdraft, and we’ll be making our last delivery out along the tracks somewhere, and the bards will be writing songs about the idiots who took an overloaded balloon up into the Highlands. She’s scared, Captain. If she were still a boat, I’d not untie her from the dock.”
          “Keep your voice down, Patty, you’ll frighten the children.”
          “What children are you talking about?”
          “We’ve a rookie engineer aboard, and we don’t need him panicking on us.”
          “Never mind him. You need to worry about me panicking.”
          “That will be the day!”
          “Look at the mooring lines, Captain.”
          He did so. The two hawsers hung in slight arcs between ship and dock instead of being stretched straight, keeping an eager airship from taking flight.
          “Have you ever seen them do that before?”
          “Certainly.”
          “Then you know what it means. We’re at neutral buoyancy right now. When I light the burner, we’ll get a few pounds positive, no more. That will work here over the coastal plain, but when we cross into the highlands, and the ground comes up underneath us, it will be a struggle just to maintain altitude. You know how the wind gets to howling up those canyons. All it’s going to take is one good swirl to hit us on top and start us going down, and we’re going to keep going down for quite a way. Should that downdraft be sustained, we won’t be able to fight it with the motors alone. Do you understand what that means?”
          “Oh, I think the motors will handle it.”
          “Captain, you commanded frigates. Military vessels built for speed. They have enough power to pull a train. Kestrel’s built for economy. We have enough power to get from A to B, and not a speck more. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how Darweshi’s storm pushed us backward for a hundred-odd miles.”
          “Hardly. How much buoyancy would you feel comfortable with, then?”
          “The more, the better, of course, but I wouldn’t like an ounce less than five hundred pounds.”
          “All right, you’re the wizard pilot. Get us to Nairobi, and we offload that harvester. That’s a good sixteen hundred pounds right there.”
          “Sure, and then your good friend the Major will have that weight in bodies wanting to get to Kisumu to work in the mines.”
          “You don’t worry about the Major. He’s my problem. You get us to Nairobi, and I’ll get you your five hundred pounds.”
          “You've not heard a word I’ve said, have you? If we get up there in this condition, and the wind decides to drive us into the mountainside, all the pilots’ tricks in the world aren’t going to create any buoyancy.”
          “Patience, all those repairs we had to make after the storm cost money. We’re hundreds in the red, and this is a chance for us to pay off a few creditors. We need this job. Are you saying you can’t do it?”
          “Oh, I can do it, Captain. So could a one-eyed Italian who can’t find his butt with a piece of toilet paper, so long as nothing goes wrong. What matters is what happens when it does.”
          “Exactly, and that’s why you’re my pilot instead of that one-eyed Italian. You get us to Nairobi, and I’ll lighten her up for you.”
          “All right, Captain, but if we all die going on the rocks up there, I don’t want you saying I didn’t warn you.”
          “You have my word on it.”
          “God, you’re impossible!” she huffed, disappearing back into the pilot house.
          “Guess we’re ready, then,” he said flippantly to his deck hand, and started forward to the forward mooring line.
          “Burner up,” he said to Patience Hobbs as he passed the pilot house door.
          “Burner up,” she repeated.
          “Cast off!”
          “Casting off, Nahodha!” one of the line handlers repeated, and the pair began unwinding the figure-eights wrapped around the dock bollards. Lines released, Monroe and David Smith, his deck hand, rapidly began pulling them in.
          “She’s free, Patience,” he said through the front window. “You have the conn.”
          “Aye, Captain.”
          As Monroe began to retract the mooring line onto the reel at the front of the pilot house, he heard the dry riffling sound as the propellers came up to speed, and absorbed the shift in his weight as the nose lifted. The Motor Airship Kestrel began to climb into the morning sky over the port of Mombasa, jewel of the Colony of Kenya.

Nairobi 6:10 PM

          The prevailing wind in eastern Africa blows from south to north, and every chart so indicates, but that's just the big picture. Every point on the ground has its complications, Nairobi not least among them. The wind gathers momentum crossing the plains of Mombasa before being thrust into the first roiling swirls by the sharp foothills of the Central Highlands and bounced from the shoulders of various crags and peaks to come blasting up the Thika Valley, as confined and focused as any river of water. The wind on a blustery day can arrive at Nairobi in twin streams from south and east, with vertical components that defy prediction. It was this that had worried even so gifted a pilot as Hobbs, and the Spirits of the Highlands did not disappoint.
          “Jesus Christ!” she blasphemed as the bow swung toward the dock, using the motors to drive the stern dangerously close to the ground in order to lift the bow above the scattering longshoremen.
          “This one’s botched, Captain! I’m going around again.”
          “You’ve been around three times already, Patience!”
          “Would you like to drive? This is exactly what I told you would happen. You weren’t worried then, so don’t worry now!”
          She already had Kestrel climbing out over the aerodrome, wallowing like a scow, beginning a broad circle back for another run at the dock.
          “Do you have any other ideas?” Monroe asked, holding onto the pilot house door frame.
          “It isn’t up to us, I’m afraid. The line crew has to get both lines at once. If they hook up one up and not the other, we’ll weathercock over the dock, and the Stokes Derrick will come right through the side. We’ll all be picking out new careers then!”
          “All right, whatever you need to do, then, just get us landed!”
          It took three more tries, but eventually Kestrel was safely snuggled up to the dock, spring lines made fast, with an anti-roll line to the ground bollard opposite. When Monroe came into the pilot house, Hobbs was leaning back against the engineering console, rolling her shoulders to work out the tension. Monroe turned her away from him, and started to massage her shoulders.
          “Another great job, Patience,” he said.
          She shrugged his hands off, and took a step away from him.
          “Now, you see,” she said, rounding on him, pointing an ominous finger at his face, “that’s your problem, right there!”
          “What problem?” he asked, holding his hands up disarmingly.
          “What problem? Are you serious? You constantly put us into situations that by rights ought to kill us, then I spend the whole trip fighting with the helm and making up circus tricks, and when we finally survive by getting luckier than any group of humans has any right to expect, it’s, ‘Great job, Patience!’ Then you turn around and put us into a worse spot! It's no damned wonder they drummed you out, if this is way you run an airship!”
          “Take a deep breath, Patience,” he said evenly. “You’re just feeling the stress.”
          “You’re damned right, I’m feeling the stress! My shoulders feel like I’ve been flogged, and I can’t open my hands for squeezing the controls all the way up here!” She held up two shaking claws, then took the recommended deep breath. “Captain, luck runs out, and with God as my witness, I thought this was going to be our time. I can’t do this anymore. I can fly like a bird, but not if you insist on tying an anvil around my neck!”
          “You just need to unwind, Patience. How about a nice dinner at Shanee’s? My treat.”
          “Is that how you see me now? The woman’s upset, buy her a hat?”
          “Patience, no! I— What is it you want from me?”
          “Right now, I want enough buoyancy to climb out of a downdraft. We’re taking the harvester off, and that’s nearly a ton. Well and good, but look over there.” She pointed to a spot near one of the storehouses where a group of men in tattered clothing, mostly Africans, stood with kitbags containing everything they owned. “There's a group of laborers eyeing us right now. They obviously want a ride to somewhere, and I promise you, if you weigh us down again, I’m going to give you a hundred and twenty pounds of buoyancy that you didn’t plan on.”
          “Now, don’t be rash.”
          “You take me for granted, Captain.”
          “I don’t, Patience, honestly. I trust you. I’ve never seen a more intuitive pilot. That’s why I go to great pains to keep you on my crew. You’ve never let me down, and I suppose I’ve gotten into the habit of assuming that there is nothing you can’t handle.”
          “Flattery, Captain?”
          “Truth. Let me buy you dinner. Your favorite, and it has nothing to do with bribing the little woman with a gift.”
          “I’m too sore to enjoy it Captain. Can we do it another time?”
          “Of course.”
          “I’m going to go walk this off. I have a knot between my shoulders that feels like a hot iron is being held there.”
          “You be careful, young lady. Nairobi’s gotten to be a dangerous place.”
          “Africa’s a dangerous place, Captain. I’ll be fine. I might drop in on young Doctor Ellsworth.”
          “Ah, Nicholas. How’s he doing, anyway?”
          “Couldn’t say, Captain, I just got here. I’ll be out for a couple of hours. Don’t forget what I said.”
          “I wouldn’t dream of it! Give Nicholas our best.”
          “Of course.”
          She went forward to the bow, down the nearly vertical ladder, and along the narrow passage to her quarters amidships on the port side. Her ten-by-twelve all-purpose stateroom was sumptuous by the standards of the passenger cabins, and only the Captain had a larger one, if only by a few inches, just aft of hers. They nominally shared the washroom between, but Monroe, always the gentleman, had given that over to her, and used the smaller one forward along with everyone else aboard.
          Pulling a fresh blouse and trousers from her built-in wardrobe, she carried them into the washroom and hung them on a hook. Half the size of her cabin, it was luxury unimagined by most airship and small craft crew members. She glanced at herself in the stained, aged mirror and offered the reflection her cute little smile.
          What would Uncle Jeffrey think, she wondered. Owner of the estate where she had grown up an adopted child of the aristocracy, Jeffrey had provided her a bath chamber nearly the size of the Kestrel itself. He had also provided her a life as a privileged prisoner of society's many rigid constraints, sent her to a finishing school to learn the myriad rules of those restraints, and because of that, she had found her way here.
          Life was demanding here, but she could go out alone if she wished, and if she met a man she wanted to talk to, she didn’t have to wait for him to tip his hat with the hand furthest from her before she could speak. She didn’t own a bustle, and had one corset and one formal dress, just in case the need should arise. She removed her short-sleeved canvas shirt, washed the dust from her face at the basin, and slipped into a long-sleeved soft blouse, demure, feminine, and in no way restrictive. Likewise, the trousers. Ladies in England didn’t wear trousers; ladies wearing formal dresses in Kenya were prey. The canvas working trousers came off, replaced by calf-length, comfortable riding trousers, the legs full and open, resembling a long skirt when she stood still. Brushing back her loose blonde curls, she confined them with her soft, flat-topped engineer’s cap, climbed back to the deck, and stepped off onto the loading dock.
          “You be careful, Patience,” Monroe admonished her from where he and a dock foreman were examining the heavy harvester. “We aren’t finished with you yet.”
          “Don’t worry, Captain, neither am I!”
          And she was off down the dock with her confident, shoulders-back stride.

Nairobi 7:05 PM

          Patience slowed her pace as her anger subsided. Captain Monroe’s complete faith in her ability to fly any machine under any conditions was a vote of confidence that many men would kill for, and she wasn’t unappreciative. It was simply so exhausting that she sometimes wavered under the burden; that, and the distinct possibility that his overconfidence could get them all killed.
          Nairobi was growing by leaps and bounds. Twice the size it was less than a year ago, it was noticeably larger each time they docked. The aerodrome that used to be southeast of town was now in the southern outskirts. The walk to the apothecary that their erstwhile crewmember, Doctor Ellsworth, had established with the young Shaman, Darweshi, was the same mile and a fraction north from the aerodrome, but the walk was stretched to two miles by the intervening buildings that had grown up between, and the resulting streets and alleys that had to be navigated. She skirted a market square, winding down in reddening rays of the setting sun, not consciously aware of her aversion to being trussed up a in burlap sack as had happened to her in a market not so many months before, walked a block between two shops that hadn’t been here when she visited two weeks ago, and there, finally, to her right stood the simple board building with the Natural Healing sign above the door. She skipped up onto the portico and pushed the door open.
          Her first impression was that a bomb had gone off. Shelves, racks, and cabinets had been overturned and their contents, mostly small sample bottles and cans, lay scattered everywhere, many open, leaves and roots trampled into the plank floor. Hearing soft movement in the back room, she steeled herself, drew her utility knife, and stepped quietly to the door. The back room had been given similar treatment, file cabinets and their two desks ransacked, the doctor's small test bench torn apart, all the contents scattered haphazardly about. There on her knees, back to her, crouched Darweshi, a pile of colorful clothes making furtive sounds with listless motions of her hand broom as she attacked the chaos with her hopelessly inadequate tool.
          “Darweshi?” Patience asked unnecessarily, sheathing her knife. “What’s happened here?”
          The girl started violently, having heard nothing of Patience’s entry, then turned her head and regarded her with huge, sad eyes.
          “Miss Patty,” she stated. “Why? Why does someone do this thing?”
          She rose, the small, powerful mage reduced to a tiny girl in a colorful dress, terribly out of place among the destruction.
          “I would offer you a seat,” she said quietly, “but they have all been broken.”
          “Are you all right?”
          “I am not injured.” Her chin quivered for a moment, then the tears came.
          “Why? Is this what it means to be civilized? I left my people to get away from such things. You told me I was safe with you.”
          Patience stepped forward and gathered her into her arms, letting her cry for a few moments while she organized the roiling questions in her mind. Finally, the sobs gave way to labored breathing, and Patience led her to an overturned filing cabinet and sat them down side by side.
          “Darweshi,” Patience said, looking into the girl’s eyes, “where is Nicholas?”
          “Gone. He is gone.”
          Patience’s heart leaped into her throat, but she fought it down and asked the question she could hardly get out.
          “Gone where?”
          “Mombasa. The soldiers came and sent him to their hospital.”
          “Did he say what happened?”
          “He said nothing. I came yesterday in the morning. I found the shop like this. Nicholas was unconscious in this room. He had been beaten. I did what I could, but he would not wake up.”
          “But he was breathing?”
          “Yes.”
          Patience knew his injuries must be severe if the gifted healer couldn’t rouse him.
          “What then?”
          “I went and got the soldiers. Their healer put him on a carry bed and took him to the iron wagons. He said they were taking him to the hospital in Mombasa, and they would get word to me when something happened.”
          “So you know nothing?”
          “Only that.”
          “Unfortunate. Will you be all right here?”
          “There is much to do, and I must do it. I will be fine.”
          “All right. You wait here. I’m going to tell the crew.”
          And with a pat on the young woman’s shoulder, she was up and out the door, anger forgotten in her haste to gather the men.

Mombasa 7:10 PM

          The young woman followed the African bell boy to the third-floor landing, her voluminous skirts rustling against the stairs, and down the hall to the room, #312 of the Queen’s Royal Hotel. She carried a small suitcase while he wrestled her steamer trunk, strapped to a flat luggage cart, to the landing. She was average, average height, average build, attractive without being memorable, her shoulder length brown hair worn in a downward sweep; it didn’t pay to be memorable in her line of work. She had been here before, albeit briefly, less than a year ago, but so far, no one had remembered her. That was good.
          The wiry African opened the door to her room, rolled her trunk in, and slid it off the cart, centering it precisely at the foot of the bed.
          “Do you require anything further, young miss?” he asked in a rolling baritone.
          “No, that will do nicely. You’ve been most helpful,” she replied, and held out a ten-shilling coin in her gloved hand. Her accent was almost English, but not quite, as if another language came more naturally to her.
          “Thank you, miss, you’re most kind. Should you need anything further, you need only inquire at the front desk.”
          “Thank you. Do you have a restaurant on the premises?”
          “Two actually. There is a formal dining room next to the lobby, and we also have an open-air concession off the street that has more of a tavern atmosphere.” He took in her clothing and general appearance. “You may find the restaurant more to your liking.”
          “Thank you, I’m sure I will.”
          The man handed her the key, took the coin and his leave, and closed the door behind him.
         She looked around, nodded approvingly, and stepped to the window, though not directly, and peeked around the edge of the curtain. Mombasa sprawled to the north in the fading light, a city of low buildings and haphazard architecture, that had been more collected by accident than built on purpose. Chaos.
          She laid her one-feathered hat and light jacket on the bed and stepped around to open her trunk. She took out two ornate dresses, hanging them in the wardrobe, where they were soon joined by a pair of riding outfits with their culottes and high-necked blouses, and a particularly mannish outfit, simple trousers and a work shirt. Her corset, undergarments, and wide-brimmed riding hat found a home in the chest of drawers provided.
          Trunk emptied of clothes, she lifted the bottom panel and contemplated the contents. A sawed-off Winchester carbine in its holster dominated the display, along with a tiny .25 caliber revolver, and a .41 caliber two-shot derringer. An Indonesian kris, the wavy-bladed fighting knife lay in its compartment next to her black-handled balisong, the Filipino butterfly knife, and a simple small Bowie with a five-inch blade. Boxed bullets for the firearms filled the intervening spaces.
          She took out the Derringer, loaded two rounds in its twin chambers, and tucked it into a hidden pocket in the folds of her red satin skirt. Replacing the panel, she put her extra shoes and boots back into the trunk and locked it.
          The ride on the packet from Calcutta had been brutal, the small ship rising on the crests of the huge swells, then dropping precipitously into each succeeding trough, the hull booming on impact until everyone aboard was in fear for their lives. Her bones ached, it was late, she hadn’t eaten. She was miserable. Deciding she could do nothing productive this evening, she began to unbutton her blouse preparatory to cleaning up for supper in the restaurant. She could well imagine Lord Weaver’s exasperation, were he here.
          A day wasted can never be made up, Miss Jenkins. You need to begin your operation at once!
          Too bad. Lord Weaver wasn’t here. Jinx Jenkins was. He had sent her against her wishes. Now he could deal with the consequences.