Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
“If the Nash-drives are still intact, fuck, even if two of them are intact, and we can spin them up, I can attach them to your airship. They should be able to lift it…adjust the grav-projection and we can fall towards Tes as fast as the aerodynamics will allow.”
She didn’t say anything, but breathed a sigh of relief. Just having her less agitated settled Luc and allowed him to focus.
Touching her shoulder instead–he could feel the warmth of her skin beneath the silk–he said, “You check on Attila. Nila will survive at it stands now. Pool…I don’t know what to make of that.”
The crinkle returned to her chin. Luc raised his eyebrows in admonishment.
Another sigh, “Oh, alright, Mr Maron, I will send Beatrix to help you after she does a walk through of the engineroom and the outside.”
“Will Ms Tagore awake, or does that insect keep her in a torpor?”
“She is sedated if that is what you mean,” he responded.
Etelka thanked him, more with her eyes than with words, before turning towards the foreship. She dreaded returning to the cockpit, but that was a necessity.
She was surprised to find Pool there, with a bucket and a shovel.
“I’ve dug a grave outside at the height of the beach for Captain Gordon, Baroness. It won’t be fancy, but he deserves the honor of a decent burial. I doubt we could find enough dry wood for a pyre, and something seems off about a seaburial, when the remains will be in the form of chum.” Then after a though, “sorry. I know you favored him. I wish to give him the utmost respect…”
They could not imagine Pool digging with one hand.
“I appreciate that Constable. It sounds like Nila will be saved by 23rd century magic if we can get the Hut airborne, which Mr Maron is attending to. I dearly appreciate this.” She nodded toward the remains without looking at them, but still viscerally conscious of the dried blood on her hand.
“Have you seen Beatrix?”
“She attended Attila, then went outside.”
“Excellent,” said Etelka as she stepped around Pool and the bucket.
Pool turned, pivoting around the shovel that he propped himself on.
“Mr Pool, I haven’t asked. Are you alright? I mean, given the shock of …all that’s happened and your personal …discovery.”
I am still weighing the implications, Baroness. Otherwise, I am concerned for Ms Tagore, and mourning the loss of the Captain, although I feel strangely aloof. I am accustomed to both loss and the scenes of grissly crimes.”
“Good,” it came out wrong. It was the wrong thing to say entirely, but she nothing else came to mind.
She turned from him to the time mechanism. The dials showed 11 am, 17th September, 1866. That IS curious.
We cannot stay too long in this place. The cold will get us. The ship will leak like a sieve, she thought.
Etelka could hear the hatch to the gondola, opening in the engine room further aft, its low groan upon opening and then the metallic clank and click of it being shut. Beatrix was back.
Etelka stepped around Pool again as he was lifting out one of the metal floor grates to clean the offal from beneath.
She found Beatrix coming to find her in the lounge, between the engine room and the cockpit.
“What news?”
“Well, ma’am, aside from the holes in the bits we aren’t too concerned with, I counted 14 holes…” Holding up both her natural hand and her bronze and brass prosthetic with an unrelated number of fingers raised “…that were big enough to push my hand through, as well as hundreds of small holes from the blasted bits of our ship going every which way. The starboard drive shaft just aft the universal where it splits is shattered and the port is bent and part way cut through. The upper vertical stabilizer his punctured and will probably need to be recabled. And the porthole in my closet is shattered.”
“On a somewhat positive note, Attila is awake and hungry so I made him some boiler water chicken broth from that dried stuff in the pantry.”
“Thank you, dear Beatrix. I know you have things to attend to, but when you get a chance, can you assist Mr Maron in his project. We may have a way to get around our lack of envelope and gas.”
“Oh, your right, too. I forgot to mention, that mearly patching the large holes will take most of our supply of canvas and almost all of our glue.”
Etelka found Luc bringing a large machine to the engine room. He had removed his bloody shirt and washed his hands. It did not look that heavy heavy but it was definitely bulky and awkward and his muscles bulged from having to carry it extended out from his body.
It was about 75 centimeters long and a half meter in diameter and roughly a cylinder, and consited of six alternating metal and ceramic (?) rings around a central axis, along with what looked like a form of an electric motor on one end and bunch of cables coming from the ends of rods on the other, rods which extended the perpendicular to the tubular rings. The cables hung loose from the juncture on the one end with what looked like plugs on their ends. It had brackets along the bottom and the side facing her, showing the points where it had been bolted down.
He laid it down on the workbench, scattering the wrenches, pliers and mallet that Beatrix had left there. It sounded heavier than Luc’s carrying had made it seem.
Ever curious about mechanical engineering, Etelka hurried over and peered at it. Poking at it’s workings gingerly with her clean hand.
“It is the generator that runs the Nas drives. The motor turns the turbine which provides the other kind of power that the drives use to repel gravity.”
“It turns out, Mr Maron, that the date we arrived, the year rather, is the exact year the Yvgeny Naskadev constructed his first model, but without the boost that this would give it. Isn’t that strange?”
Luc nodded.
“Constable Pool has taken upon himself to clean the cockpit. I should clean my hand.” She looked down, curiousity disipating. “When he has assembled our Captain we shall gather on the beach to bid him farewell.”
She washed her hand in the lavatory, poured a cup of tea from the boiler spout and then retired to her tiny cabin for a while.
Ion Fyr 