The Gilded Scarab (2 page)

My senior lieutenant, Ingram, brought his aeroship alongside mine. He was gesturing wildly through the clear canopy, but I sent him back with a sharp order to take command. Really, what was the boy thinking? He should be looking after my aeronauts, not flying alongside me waving like a coy village maiden spotting her errant lover. It wasn’t as if he could actually do anything, anyway, but watch me go down. He grimaced, waggled his wings, and curved away into a sky of the clearest, purest blue. Not a cloud in it but the man-made ones of smoke and electrified aether, shot through with dark actinic rays.

The aerofighter leaked aether like a sieve. She was as unsteady as a man after a night on the town, needing constant correction in her unstable flight. It was hard work. Damn close to holding the little fighter up by willpower alone. I’m not a nervous man as a rule, but I held the rudder wheel so tightly my fingers were white and aching. Every now and again I had to loosen my grip, flexing my hands to get the sting of the tension out of them, and rolling shoulders that insisted on hunching over.

Control on the
Ark Royal
, personified in the Comms officer, was squawking over the wireless Marconi communicator, demanding to know what was going on. I told him, although with less profanity than a moment or two earlier, because the way the Lancaster luck was going, the commander would listen in, and the commander didn’t hold with strong language. I was in enough trouble without adding him to the mix.

“You’ve tried bleeding through more phlogiston?” inquired Control. “Switch to circuit omega-delta-two.”

The only explanation for such inanity was that in times of crisis Control panicked, reached for a script, and stuck to it. Of all the stupid questions! Of course I’d tried trickling through more phlogiston, and I’d tried every circuit on the control board. But I needed to reserve some of the remaining phlogiston for a controlled landing, and the omega-delta-two circuit might as well have been on another ship for all the good it was doing on mine.

There was, of course, no point in losing my temper, but I was sorely tempted. Sorely.

“Tried it. No response.” Damnation. My voice shook. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t the Lancaster way. So I swallowed hard to get it under control and made myself slow down, not letting the words tumble out over each other the way they wanted. “The aether superheated and mostly vented. There isn’t enough to keep generating steam for the engines, and I’m running on fumes here. I have enough distillate for a controlled landing if I preserve the phlogiston to help it along. Altitude five hundred feet, but I’m continuing to lose height.”

“We’re tracking you. Options?”

I laughed aloud. I couldn’t help it. What options? There was no point in trying to land back on the
Ark Royal
. Hovering several miles away, she was close enough for me to reach, but her flight deck and landing bays were as narrow and confined as the mind of a maiden aunt. One mistake there, and I would have the dubious honor of taking Her Majesty’s foremost aero-dreadnought out of the sky with me. That wouldn’t look good on the record. I had no options at all.

“I’m heading for the base at Koffiefontein. More room there.” My hands were sweaty. I took the right off the rudder wheel, rubbing it dry on the leg of my flying suit. It stained the leather. I had a reputation to maintain—best aeronaut, luckiest aeronaut, nonchalant and devil-may-care aeronaut. This had to sound insouciant. “I’ll have the whole veldt to play in.”

The wireless communicator spat a burst of static at me. Whoever it was on the communications desk took a moment before answering. “Acknowledged, Captain Lancaster. We’ve advised Koffiefontein. They’ll be ready for you. We’ll continue tracking. Good luck.”

“Acknowledged.”

I was on my own. Koffiefontein being “ready” translated to two men pushing a water cart to deal with the aftermath. Getting the fighter there and getting her down in one piece… that was up to me. And as if to make the point sharper, my fighter took another downward plunge. By the time I corrected it and leveled her out, we were at two hundred feet.

Nothing to do but press on. The engines sputtered and popped every inch of the way, chuffing out clouds of steam and smoke and trailing bright sapphire sparks of escaping aether. It probably looked quite pretty from the ground.

The veldt is very different from England, home and beauty. No little fields and woods here, but vast flat grasslands spreading clear to the horizon. I passed over a stand of acacia trees, all sharp shadows thrown over the plain by the setting sun to my right. The aerofighter’s shadow slithered over grasses and trees and a herd of antelope bounding through the scrubby bushes.

Down to one hundred feet. The ship was on a long glide now, with barely any power at all. I nursed her along, preserving what little phlogiston was left in the tubes to give the engines a boost of power on landing.

Finally!

Rows of grubby white tents showed against the yellowy-green of the veldt grasses, and beyond them, the narrow strip where the ground had been leveled to make a landing area. One of the Koffiefontein squadron’s aerofighters was parked to one side. With luck, I’d miss it. Small figures ran toward the spot where I’d likely come down. This was going to be close. But I could do it. I’d do it, and regale the officers’ mess with yet one more story of the legendary Lancaster luck.

I had too much petroleum distillate in the tanks for a safe landing. I needed to vent it as I approached, but not so much the engines would stop. A very fine line to tread, there.

I used the ailerons to roll her to the right, turning her into the wind to land. She shuddered and flexed. A dull, booming crack from behind was all the warning I got, and an instant later the aether chamber blew out completely. She went down like the proverbial stone, pitching and yawing like a boat in high seas. I yelled and pulled on the controls with every ounce of strength I had, turning the wheel sharply to starboard to bring her around again, because if I let her get away from me, it would be the end. I would get no second chances.

She bucketed and bucked. It’s odd what a man’s mind does in the face of terrible danger. I wasn’t thinking about flying, I know. Hands and feet, heart and soul did it all by instinct, as if the little fighter were a part of me. No thought needed. I simply did it. And no, my whole life did not flash before my eyes—thank goodness!—but for one brief, vivid memory of hunting in Leicestershire, with the Quorn in full-throated chase after a fox, hounds and horses streaming out over the December fields, and me taking a hedge on my brother’s big, rawboned chestnut. My stomach had flipped over then too. I much prefer betting on horses to riding the brutes.

Level again.

Get the wheels down. Get them down now. Get them down!

Metal ground and groaned as the mechanism lowered the wheels into position and locked them in place. I leaned back in the seat, bracing myself, pulling back on the rudder wheel as if my weight would help bring the nose up, help slow her. The body of the fighter twisted. The canopy windscreen cracked, then shattered, showering me with shards of aluminum. I couldn’t see the ground for thick white steam and dust. I couldn’t see it.

I couldn’t—

I don’t remember the actual impact. I can recall an explosive bang, loud enough to make my ears bleed, and then silence. I was on my back, somehow—I don’t know how I got there—with ash and dust floating past me. The sky… so blue and far away that my heart ached. Everything ached. Damn and blast. Everything ached.

So I closed my eyes to shut it all out.

Chapter 2

T
HE
SHIP
was in splinters of polished wood and shards of bent metal, and not even I could walk away undamaged. I was lucky, but not so lucky as that.

The troopers at the base pulled me free of the wreck before the ship could catch fire, but still my tally was a broken arm, several ribs ditto, a twisted knee, and a bang on the head that left me lying in a darkened room for five utterly miserable days, sick and dizzy while the concussion worked itself out and the doctors dealt with the dent in my skull.

“Mercifully, it’s a very thick skull,” muttered the attending surgeon a week later, poking stubby fingers at the healing wound and asking if it hurt.

I forswore sarcasm while my health was in his hands. “I was lucky. I’m always lucky.”

The surgeon didn’t argue. Instead he had me tilting my head at all angles, looking up at the ceiling or to one side, or down at the floor, while he shone a bright light into my eyes. Then he had me tracking that damnable light from one side to the other and back again.

He hmphed to himself and went away, leaving me lying on my back in a narrow and hard hospital bed. I still ached badly everywhere, especially the broken arm. Moving in bed had my knee reminding me that it, too, was no longer top-notch. Breathing was an exercise in caution—not too deeply as to get the ribs complaining, and not so shallow that I’d end up with pneumonia. Miserable, miserable time.

I could live with the aches in arm, leg, and chest. I could live with the bruises in places I didn’t know I possessed until they hurt. I could live with the buzzing in my ears as my punctured eardrums healed. But….

But.

But my eyes were no longer perfect. The hospital tent was fuzzy, and the nurses were indistinct shapes until I blinked and squinted and brought them into focus. My eyes stung and hurt in the light. They were, to put no finer point on it, ruined.

I still can’t talk very much about what it meant to me. My injuries cut my life in two, neatly bisecting it into one compartment marked “flying” and the other “not flying.” But I didn’t try to hide from the consequences. I was never any good at fooling myself. Much better to fool other people.

The eyes weren’t something I could walk away from.

The Lancaster luck had deserted me.

A
COUPLE
of weeks after I saw the surgeon, I was sent back to the
Ark Royal
. James Beckett, the ship’s doctor, was waiting for me when the aeroshuttle from Koffiefontein set me down. He’s a runty, pugnacious little Scot is Beckett, not overly given to sympathy. He always said a sympathetic doctor lost more patients to fatal indulgence than to fatal illness and no one would hurl that accusation at him. There was little likelihood of it. We trusted Beckett absolutely, but we looked to his nurses for sympathy and soft hands to smooth our fevered brows. A Beckett who greeted me by taking both my hands in his and looking solemn was not a hopeful sign. He whisked me straight to the sick bay for an examination. Another not-so-hopeful sign.

“Headaches?” Beckett shone bright lights into my eyes and stared into them like some demented lover trying to see the soul of his beloved. It was disconcerting. I liked the man, you understand, but not that much. My taste ran to men I wouldn’t get a crick in the neck kissing.

“Better. The dizziness is better too.”

“Good. That’s good progress.” Beckett moved to my left. He vanished into a sort of empty gray space that had replaced the peripheral vision on that side. I had to turn my head to keep him in view.

My stomach clenched. Well, that was that. I was going to lose the very fast aerofighters. If I couldn’t see to land on the deck of the carrier, if part of my vision had gone, the chances were Her Britannic Majesty, through the agency of the commander, would give me a perfunctory pat on the shoulder, hand me a gratuity, and put me on a ship back to Londinium, mouthing some platitude about
Your country appreciates your service and sacrifice, Captain
.

Beckett patted my arm. “First, Rafe, let me assure you that you will not go blind. I believe the headaches will wear off in time as your head heals from the injuries inflicted on it. It’s quite likely, too, once you’ve seen an oculist and had him prescribe you the correct spectacles for your current condition, that your eyesight will be adequate for all normal activity. Reading, writing, card sharping… that sort of thing should not cause you undue difficulty. Until you can consult a specialist, though, you had better keep your eyes shaded from bright light and guard against straining them. Did the base give you some lenses?”

I pulled a pair of spectacles from my breast pocket and flourished them.

“Well, put them on, man! They’re no damn use in your pocket.”

“They don’t help much.” It was hard to hook the wire frames over my ears with one hand out of commission. Huffing with impatience, Beckett did it for me. Another battery of tests followed.

At the end of them, Beckett
tutted
and removed the spectacles. “You’d think the base could do better than this. These aren’t helping much because they’re not suited to your eyes.” He went to a cabinet at the far side of the room and rooted through it. “Ah, these are better. Not perfect, but better.”

He returned with another pair of spectacles, these with thin gold rims, and fitted them into place. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the lenses, but when they did, the room sprang into sharper focus. Well, they worked, at least, and much better than the pair the base surgeon had provided. Something else must have had my eyes burning and stinging.