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
“I don’t really know,” Luc said, brushing his hair back, yet again, from his eyes. “I am not an engineer.”
Etelka knew that much. She could smell him, and it was a welcome distraction from Nila’s incapacity.
“They don’t teach you any mechanics or physics in your time? I thought you were more advanced…Progress, they call it.” Etelka wanted to taunt him more, but kept thinking of Nila.
“What do we need from your car?” She continued, holding up one of the cylindrical spools. The heft of it was light, almost nothing, a series of coils of translucent tubes, with who-knows-what flowing through them, wrapped around a central axis, meant to spin or rotate on the axle…the barings were smooth, smoother than anything Etelka had worked with.
“Like I said, not my shit.” Luc didn’t know. “I, Ms Kekszemu, do not know.”
He almost got my name right, she thought. “I don’t know your time, sir, but if nature has been the consistent bitch she alwasy is, the rotation causes an effect. Baba Yaga (refering to the deflated dirigible) eleveates herself with boyant hydrangeum gas, but the time mechanism… that operates by a spinning spool.”
“These ‘antigravitational’ spools that you have been handing me, appear to work on a similar principle. Spinning affects the material of the universe…”
“Yeah?” Luc swept his hair back yet again. A mist of sweat drifted to Etelka, who shut her eyes and embraced the intimacy. “We cable them together. Patch in the battery and it will lift your blimp.”
Etelka glanced down at the three ‘antigravity’ spools at her feet. Luc was ripping another one out. She looked at his back. Tan, defined musculature….
“We need to attach them equiistant from the center of gravity…the center of gravity in flight.”
Etelka took another look at Luc’s sweaty…back and took two of the antigravity spools, one in each hand, to the base of the fore-ladder, leading up through the envelopes, into the structure.
By the time she got back to the wrecked cargo hold, Luc had the other two laid out by the aft ladder. At his feet were two packed cases, bundles, of battery packs. Black on black, glossy black tubes bound together with wires protruding from each of their ends. The ends waved and frolicked, moving on their own, animated. Little worms, snakes, ribbed insulation undulating.
Etelka did not like the batteries.
“Beatrix!” Called Etelka, then to Luc: “I think we should involve Miss Bea in our efforts, Mr Maron. She is more of a physical engineer than I am and is intimately familiar with Baba Yaga’s Hut.”
“Actually, I was thinking of that too. We need to attach the engines to the structure. Because of the gernerated lift, placement counts. I’d probably just send them shooting off into the sky. I can wire the electrics and the fiberops to the controls. I assume we’ll want them up front in the cabin?”
Etelka agreed with her eyes before turning to Beatrix who had appeared in the doorway.
With the requirements explained, they set to work. Luc pulled what seemed like kilometers of fiberoptics from the car’s interior along with the primary control panel from the dash. The batteries were moved to the machineshop/boilerroom and clamped down.
Elsewhere, up in the access conduit between the inner envelops, which had no lost half their boyant hydrangeum gas–beyond the capacity of the backup cylinders to replace–Etelka and Beatrix bolted the four antigrav engines to the core structure of the airship. Metal straps had to be improvised because the aiship was considerably more massive than Luc’s car by orders of magnitude. While the engines had the capacity to lift the airship, in theory, the mounts were in no way suitable. Beatrix ended up having to weld steel plates to the engines and then weld those to the bulkheads, two on each side and above the gondola.
Once everything was in place and wires and fiberoptic cables were bundled along the interior ceiling (spliced together multiple times), they were ready for a test.
The strain of lift was voiced in unusual creaks and groans from an airship used to being suspended by bags of gas, no forced to be lifted by a frame barely intended for such a purpose.
They were all anxious to get the Hut aloft and get going. Nila was stable but she needed proper (illicit) medical treatment. After finishing with the wiring and testing the connections, while Etelka and Beatrix were finishing up, he paused over Nila.
She was sedated, but looked like shit as she had lost a lot of blood not to mention her arm. Still, though, her eyes were moving beneath her lids. Her lips twitched as if she was trying to say something.
Etelka had come up behind him. He had been so focused on Nila, that he hadn’t linked the sound of her boots on the floor grates. She touched his back with her finger tips. Her scent wafted over him.
“After we to the test to see if we can actually leave, pray the gods it all works, I want to look over Captain Gordon’s grave one more. I will be quick.” Etelka, now next to him, eyed him with out moving her head much. “Assuming this all works, what do you estimate the time to Tesifon? Is there no place closer?”
“That’s the place I know. Londbridge is too hot right now, and my connections in …other places…can’t be trusted. Besides, the doctors that worked on her before are in Tesifon.”
Etelka had questions but didn’t voice them. Luc didn’t share much in the way of personal details. Nila had rarely said anything about him either.
Luc looked around and seeing no sign of the similacrum, he asked in a hushed tone, “what of the android?”
She looked around as well. “That question has been dogging me since the events and subsequent discovery. How do we know that…he… was not always thus?” She avoided his name as if trying to avoid the piercing scrutiny of a daemon, to speak it would draw his malign attention.
“He seemed genuinely surprised to find out that he was…not quite human.”
“Yes, he did that.”
“We could leave him here. Search for the real Pool later after getting her fixed.”
Etelka was almost shocked at Luc’s shallow regard for Nila’s dire circumstances. The future holds the lives of dear friends as inconveniences…, she thought, then told herself that the advances of the the field of medicine over the forthcoming three centuries would be substantial. Stick her in a vat of healing goo and Ms Tagore woudl pop out refreshed as if awakened fresh from a nap.
“So you don’t think our Pool was a mechanical man all along?”
“No,” Luc turned to her, leaning against the table in the lounge on which Nila was splayed out, her blood dried in the etched world map. “He’s always annoyed me, but my sense of whether or not I can trust someone never really spiked with him. Maybe he was one all along, but as you said–I can’t remember exactly what you were talking about…androids ?–if you can’t tell it doesn’t matter. I like that. Maybe this Pool was one all along, the same one that went to Siberia with Nila, the same one you rescued from a vat. Who knows. The thing is, if this is the same one we shouldn’t abandon him; if it is not the same one, if the really fleshy Pool is missing and has been replaced with this one, then we gain nothing by dumping this one. He at least might be able to provide us with a clue as to what happened to the original.”
Etelka looked at what was left of Nila’s arm. The rings! “The rings. They are missing. One of them would allow her to find Pool. Locate him. Anywhere. We have to find them.”
Luc could see that Etelka was overcome with a sudden panic. He put his hands on her arms, carressing her below the shoulders, his fingers on her silk. He could feel her beneath the fabric. “They probably fell below the grates. I’ll look later. I’ll check the beach after that before we go.”
Luc didn’t think the rings survived any more than Nila’s handbones did, but he would look, if only to reassure Etelka.
“Thank you, Luc.”
He forced himself to give her a smile.
Ion Fyr 