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
Luc set off, first north across the river. Baba Yaga’s Hut shifted back to their temporally removed hideout.
He had said that he would return on the following day with a transport.
Etelka didn’t need to wait. If she had thought it through before hand, she simply would have set the time device for the next day, rather than jumping to the 19th century then back to the 23rd.
Luc was waiting in the shadow of the tel when BYH returned. The truck he brought was to her eyes nondescript–beat up cargo vehicles always looked the same. dings and scrapes and mismatched pieces. That this one hovered half a meter above the ground was a minor point. With wagon wheels it would have fit in by the docks in Londbridge.
There were three men with snubbed rifles. They were not at all uniformed, but deferrred to Luc, as if they were his troops. The truck’s cab, if it could be called that, was open behind, with shelter from sun and rain for the driver and other would be workers, Three meters of very angular cover, nearly squared off on the nose-end, were a contrast to the flatbed portion that extended rearward (she wondered if it could be easily driven in reverse) for another 6 meters.
Two of the men at Luc’s direction brought out a [litter] which they brought into BYH via the port side door.
Etelka smiled, noticed Luc had bathed and smelled of clean sweat and musk, as he directed his men to carry the stretcher to the lounge.
He brushed past her in the doorway, excusing himself, before pausing for a moment to think of how to get Nila onto the stretcher. Etelka kept reminding herself that Nila was the focus of the attention at the moment and willed her flush to disappear.
She wasn’t the only one to wince when Nila was slid onto the stretcher, held level with the table. Luc and Pool and Attila slid her body off the table, careful not to jostle the emergency medical attatchments. The bed of the stretcher sagged a little with the added weight, but the men kept it firm.
Without delay she was moved to truck.
Beatrix and Attila would stay behind, shift BYH back to the past, with instructions to check in once a week. Finding no one they would return, but only for a month. If Etelka failed to return, they were to get to a place and time of their choosing and scuttle the airship in the sea, so the time-device would not fall into enemy hands.
***
Though it was not Etelka’s first time in such a vehicle, she was mesmerized by the speed the ground was covered. The truck stayed roughly the same half meter above the surface, but zipped along at what seemed like hundreds of kilometers per hour.
Within minutes, the sand and water and marsh grasses gave way to urban trunk-streets, feeding into broad avenues between glass and steel canyon walls.
They weren’t going to Luc’s nightclub–this shouldn’t have surprised her–instead, they stayed close to the ground and wound into darker back alleys, coming at last to a filthy loading dock.
***
Luc had handed out breathers to those that didn’t have them from the emergency supply of the truck. While the wastes outside of the city were fairly clear–Etelka hadn’t noticed anything different from her era–the airless alleyways through which Luc took them now, kept in a cloistered stench, not as bad as a megalopolis like 23rd century Londbridge, but one that nonetheless made breathing difficult, like standing downwind of a heap of burning plastic–an experience Etelka had only heard about.
She fitted the mask to her face, knowing that it would leave indentations in her flesh, as she had seen often in Nila’s face after removing one. Somewhere in Baba Yaga’s Hut, she had her own, comfortable mask, one that she had made for herself at the beginning of their collective travels, but that was their, or perhaps blown out into the north Atlantic–there were holes everywhere.
As the rigid rubber edge of the mask pressed into her, she thought of Captain Gordon. She couldn’t remember the last time he had set foot on the ground. The gentle man, the kind man, a good soul. He should have been laid to rest in the sky, she thought, as Luc and the truck’s earstwhile driver piloted the thing through the narrow back alleys, into and through tunnels grey with smoke and mist. The captain lay in an almost unmarked grave on a barren tiny island. She resolved to one day go back and move him, whatever remained of him, to at least some mountain top, or barring that, to spread his ashes from the highest her airship could go.
At the moment it couldn’t very much go anywhere.
Ion Fyr 