“I... I’m at a loss,” Wesley Smythe muttered, shaking his head.
He was seated behind the small desk in the captain’s sea cabin aboard Katzbalger, a thick pile of manifests, bills of lading, and sundry other papers spread out before him.
“Quiet,” Av scolded. “I’m tryna concentrate here, and my ears ain’t what they once was.”
He was crouched low to the floor in the room’s corner, his ear pressed to an empty glass, which was in turn pressed to the door of an ornate safe. There was a pencil clamped in his teeth, and a series of numbers scrawled on the door before him, most of them crossed off. He’d been at it for nearly an hour now, and was pretty sure he had the first two numbers correct.
The tour of the ship had been quite traumatic for the commodore, whose borrowed dungarees and boots bore the stains of extensive exploration. They’d been through her stem to stern, deck houses to bilge, or at least those compartments they’d been able to access. Somewhere, there were keys for those mysterious compartments, but they’d yet to find any, and neither man was eager to attempt forced entry without more knowledge of what they were letting themselves in for. Particularly with the lower decks aft awash.
The ship had, indeed, been laid out in the manner of some of the more modern RN vessels, but with an almost American flavor. As though the designers had taken the best features of both and combined them with no sop to cultural norms.
She most certainly did not resemble anything he’d seen come out of Dresden or Friedrichshafen. The Germans tended to stress different traits than their American or British counterparts. Almost, he’d expected to find Admiralty inspection cartouches on the structural members, so familiar was her design.
For one thing, she was heavily automated, geared toward radar guided fire control, where the Germans —and presumably their Hyperborean kinsmen— tended more toward precise manual gunnery.
Her contents, both the cargo in her hold and her general stores and fitment were as alarming. While the food, uniforms, and small arms fell in line with what one would expect of a German aligned ship, almost nothing else did. Her main guns looked American, while her secondaries and defensive armament were certainly so. Her huge generators and the gigantic diesel engines that powered them looked to have been ripped from a surface navy destroyer.
Her propulsion engines, from what he could ascertain without climbing out onto them, were British, or at the very least, near exact copies. Her aircraft bays and launch facilities so closely mimicked their RN counterparts that he felt they’d be able to launch or retrieve RN aircraft without modification.
Their tour complete and more confused than ever, they’d retired to the captain’s sea cabin, which would seem to have doubled as his office. Wesley Smythe had settled behind the late Fregattenkapitän’s desk while the mysterious Mr. Tall Pines had tackled the safe.
The desk’s lock hadn’t really been meant to keep anyone out, and cost barely a moment’s attention. It was here that the true scope of the betrayal began to come to light. Heinemann had kept meticulous records, from watch schedules, to stores usage, to fuel consumption. His logbook pursued equally meticulous detail.
There had been numerous VIP tours of the less classified areas of the ship prior to its most recent voyage. Some of the names of those VIPs sent streamers of ice down Wesley Smythe’s back.
It was in this log that he learned of the ship’s disposition. She’d been undergoing shakedown and air trials. While that fit perfectly with the fact of the majority of her secondary weaponry remaining crated in the hold, it introduced new mysteries.
“Gotcha!” Tall Pines crowed happily, swinging the heavy door open.
Wesley Smythe looked over as the hunched figure leaned in and started rifling its contents.
* * *
Although the door to Rolly’s room remained open, the light had been extinguished, which caused Lizbet Palin to frown. A few days ago and she’d not have felt the slightest worry. With the newly escalated level of affection the children would seem to have embarked upon, however, such things bore looking after with much more scrutiny.
Pausing in the doorway, she prepared herself to issue appropriate scoldings. She needn’t have bothered. Darnan had slid aside, allowing room for his companion to lie beside him, his arm around her waist. Mailyn lay curled against him, fully dressed and still atop the blanket, her head cradled in the nook of his shoulder. Both were sound asleep.
After a bit of thought, Lizbet sighed and retrieved the empty dinner tray from the dresser upon which Mailyn had placed it. She paused at the doorway, a faint smile on her lips. How long had she seen this coming, she wondered. Five years? More, perhaps? Still, it would require a deal of getting used to.
* * *
Henry groaned softly as he shifted his injured leg to a slightly less uncomfortable position. The past two days’ events had taken their toll, both mentally and physically, and his body was feeling every bump and scrape as though it had been applied with a jackhammer dipped in acid.
The baijiu bottle seemed to weigh a hundred tons as he held it as steadily as he might over the small ceramic cup. He’d picked up the habit back in the bad old days, as he had so many of the others he’d begun to reacquire in the hectic hours since his daughter’s panicked phone call.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
This particular bottle had lived in a cubby behind the desk in his office for nearly fifteen years, its white ceramic surface gradually thickening and shading to island brown as the days and years deposited their allotments a few particles at a time, borne on vagrant zephyrs.
He held the cup to his chest for a few moments as he observed the stark white fingerprints etched into the thick layer of dust, trying to order his wandering thoughts for the tasks to come.
Who was he to start this, he wondered, leaving off his perusal of the bottle to cast his gaze around his dingy office in Plubbetton’s town square. An old man with a dodgy past and bad knees. The mayor of a tiny little village at the far reaches of nowhere, the entire population of which could well be seated comfortably in many a big city movie theater.
Moreover, he feared he’d be doing it largely on his own. The governor hadn’t yet responded to his wire, and without him, there’d be no governmental authority or protection. Not this time. No intelligence community from which to gather information. No sure way to finance operations. No promise of resources, no backup, no reinforcements. Hell, if they were caught by either side, the lot of them were liable to be hanged as pirates themselves.
What had happened, he wondered. They’d fought a war. They’d won, by all accounts. Marty’s flight, and later Avery’s had been predicated on that victory. The very organization they’d all fought under together had been disbanded based on it.
That had to mean something, right? Surely they’d never have dissolved the army were the war still underway. And yet, here he sat, in the dark, half drunk, with the evidence of the lie scattered in the grass before his widowed daughter’s home.
Where had Plubbet been in all of this? That damned old fossil must have known! He couldn’t have helped but to know. But if so, why keep it a secret?
Particularly from Hendrel— Henry—”
He paused in his musings, brow furrowing. Who the hell was he anymore anyway? Which of the many guises he’d donned over the years was he wearing now?
He brought the ceramic cup to his lips and tilted it, feeling the hot wash of the alcohol run down his throat. Why bother even asking himself, he asked himself, chuckling dryly, his expression relaxing. It was a stupid question. He looked over to the coat rack where his dusty jacket shared space with the pistol belts and their heavy Dante & Coburns. There lay the answer, he knew, clear as fresh tracks in the snow.
He’d resurrected more than Marty Palin yesterday morning, hadn’t he, when he’d sought out the man to rescue his daughter. He knew that now. For twenty-five years, he’d been proceeding along the path of his life assuming that Henry Entmann was an old suit hanging in the back closet where the old rifle leaned, and that Hendrel Entigh was who he was.
That coat rack and its contents told the real truth, though. Entigh was the suit, and when he’d opened it to beg for help, it had fallen clear without his notice.
In his mind, he understood it now. From that moment, he’d begun to be Henry Entmann again. Or had it even waited that long, he mused. Hadn’t he shed poor old Hendrel the moment his daughter’s panicked voice had blared into his ear over the phone?
He looked toward the ceramic bottle and contemplated whether he should pour himself a cup to celebrate his rebirth. He wondered with another part of his mind if Wei had noticed. What she’d thought of it if she had. She’d seemed pretty happy to be Wei Entigh all these years. Had settled in more readily than he had, truth be told. Was she ready or willing to go back? He struggled to remember her as she’d been on Earth. Had she been happy back then? Not that he’d been around much to notice.
He shook his head clear. There was nothing for it — the deed was done, and he supposed he’d better start getting used to it. Even could he squeeze back into Hendrel’s persona, the future showed much more likelihood to be suited to Henry than Hendrel.
Maybe someday in the future he’d be able to mend and don that garment again and have peace once more. He ignored the ghost of Heinrich laughing at him from the back of his mind.
“Now, where was I,” he muttered to himself as he rolled the cup between thumb and forefinger. “Ah, Plubbet.”
Admiral Sir Evelyn Plubbet (ret.). Owner and governor of the island of Plubenda, along with —it was rumored— a score or more of other similar holdings.
Majority stockholder and executive board member, if not sole owner of a host of large concerns ranging from shipping to manufacturing, scattered all around the globe. One of the wealthiest citizens of Victoriana, it was said, and very possibly one of the ten richest men on New Victoria as a whole.
He was a man with fingers in nearly every notable pie to be found, and one of the movers and shakers in colonial politics.
Conversely, and surprisingly, considering his great notoriety, an intensely private man about whom much was speculated, but very little was known. Great pains had been taken to assure this to be so, Henry had reason to know.
In point of fact, Henry both knew and understood a great deal about the man and the secrets he’d gone so far to conceal. More so than probably anyone outside of Plubbet’s inner circle. And that was the puzzle.
Given what Henry knew of the man, there should be no Black Sun blithely wandering the skies of New Victoria attacking innocent civilians, let alone doing so in secret. Because, if there were, Henry would have been made aware of it. He’d have been made ready for it.
Still gripping the small cup between thumb and forefinger, he slid the remaining three fingers of that hand between the buttons of his shirt, rubbing at the puckered burn scar where the hated symbol had once been laid upon his skin. He’d have been warned.
He started to reach once more for the baijiu bottle, but paused, his hand hovering within a finger’s reach. Whatever was going on or not going on with Plubbet, it remained that Black Sun were indeed wandering the skies of New Victoria murdering her citizens.
And given that, who was he to sit idly by? Who was he to allow those animals to run free? Who was he to ignore the things he’d learned through that long war? The skills he’d acquired? The contacts he’d made? With or without the governor’s aid, he had a responsibility.
Setting the small cup aside, he opened the desk’s central drawer and withdrew a pencil, along with a well worn memorandum book, its cover cracked with age. Bending stiffly, he withdrew a lined tablet from one of the lower drawers.
The formerly white baijiu bottle, he slid aside. This would be a very long night, and his wits were already more than dull enough.
RN would be monitoring all transmissions from the island by this point, both incoming and outgoing. He’d need to be excruciatingly circumspect. Far more than his freedom was at stake here, and the slightest misstep would have him and all those around him before an unfriendly High Court judge. Nor was there the time to use the post. Nor, come to that, any real expectation that postal delivery might be any more secure than a carefully worded wireless.
Sighing deeply, he hesitated once more. He would be pulling everyone he knew into this. Unilaterally, whether they were willing or no. Another, sidelong glance he gave the bottle. People were going to die of his actions. Possibly quite a number of them.
Squaring his shoulders and hardening his heart, he leaned forward and opened the dog-eared old book, turning its faded pages carefully. There. Propping the book open to the appropriate page, he began copying the contact information to the lined paper, already wondering how he’d conceal the true message from prying eyes.