The broad sweep of the Atlantic now swelled far below, the Carolina Outer Banks to the west back-lit by the lowering sun, a curvature of seeming infinitude to the east.
The bar keep and Mister Pete served coffee and tea at the table.
LaFano and a burly Russian Airman stood guard, where they could be seen through the porthole, at the exterior of the door, in the chill breezeway above the catwalk.
Color Sergeant Major and Gunnery Sergeant Suvarov, of The Czarina, stood guard within.
Captain Jones stood by the captain’s wheel with a pair of binoculars at his eyes, speaking in low tones to the airman who held the wheel. Before him was a telephone by which he could issue commands to the main deck and communicate with the Honorable Optical Officer. Communication with the Fore, Main, Aft, Officers and Ether Deck were all denominated by switches. Richard now recalled the phone at the center of each deck, a mounted horn to speak into and a horn attached to a wire to listen through.
The table was set with snow goose, cheese and cherries.
Those in attendance were Pullman, Zephyr, Bing-Ham, Richard, Commander Levsky and a smartly uniformed woman of uncommon beauty. Her form was athletic and not much obscured by her Air Service Suit Skirt. Her hair was thick, red and lustrous, platted in what seemed a regulation coif, as this tail of hair was confined by a five star hairpin at the neck. Richard doffed his cap and bowed, “Czarina, I do apologize for the poor manners of my footman.”
Her eyes were a piercing green and her smile too knowing to engage half-heartedly. Her English was slightly accented in the most pleasing way, “Compliments and apologies accepted, Captain. And,” as she fixed him with a piercing gaze, “there is no need for you to fret over my condition. Three elder brothers and two sisters are ahead of me in line of succession. I am, sir, a member of Saint Peter’s Theosophy Society, and a Captain in the Woman’s Air Reserve, also a remote viewer, on this Joint Expedition after direct audience with your Queen—and not her Prime Sinister; for the politicians as well as the bankers are all in league with the Enemy of Mankind.”
Richard sat and looked over at Levsky, who grinned under his steel wool mustache, “Yes, Captain, this ship was built in secret by order of the Czar, for his daughter, his agent, a personal ally to your Queen Gloria. Pullman recommended you, and you alone, once the Czarina’s expeditionary stipulations were made known.”
*****
The discussion had at that table in the stateroom/bridge of the most advanced air ship in the Russian Navy ran for many hours under lamp light, heat pumped in from the main deck. And ran many more hours for a week to come as the air ship made its way over the Atlantic and South Atlantic. The particulars were not, to young Captain Barrett, acutely conscious of his missing left arm, nearly as daunting as the fact that the Czarina could read his thoughts, and must therefore know his suppressed desires concerning her, which had budded on the instant of his encountering her inscrutable, yet beautiful, person.
The points of discovery where:
All of the greatest inventors of petroleum-fuelled technology were not simply bought off by steam-liner and railroad concerns to maintain economic primacy, but were, many of them slain, vanished or gone mad.
Powered flight inventors and test pilots had likewise been subject to numerous acts of conspiracy.
Mister Kalishnakov, claimed to his daughter to have invented an automatic rifle, but was visited by angelic or demonic agents who warned him against this, lest he suffer the fate of a man named Maxim who had blown himself up in his own workshop in the time of Bismark. So, Kalishnakov had settled on the recoilless rifles for air ship usage and his infamous telescopic dueling pistol which had decimated the Russian officer corps.
All across the world scientific innovation had stagnated at heavy steam power, rifled bolt action firearms and canon, and fragile and low speed airship technology. Dozens of examples of sudden madness, suicide, murder and disappearance of technological innovators were presented by Pullman: to include the strange homosexual murder suicide of Tesla and Edison, the bizarre decent into cultic cannibalism and child sacrifices by a half dozen noted physicists, hung in mass after a much ballyhooed trial in 1941, pointed to a from of predatory psychiatry. The Czarina Svetlana, as well as Pullman were convinced that a form of wireless communication technology was in use, and that the repeated cutting of the 3,000 foot deep transatlantic telegraph cable by unknown forces was related to this crypto-comunications monopoly.
Zephyr put forth evidence that functional submarine vessels had many times been fielded by German, Royal, French, American and Russian navies and that maiden voyages of such craft had all ended disastrously, preventing the development of this entire dimension of naval operation. This, he put forth, along with the fact that every Arctic expedition of exploration had ended with the loss of the expeditions, to include Shackleton, Admunsen, Fagan and a dozen others, indicated that this secret power behind technological retardation through conspiracy was:
-1. ancient
-2. involved in finance
-3. and based in Antarctica, the only unexplored continent, with a power center only accessible through aviation or underwater navigation, probably about an inland glacier lake
Bing-Ham seconded Zephyr on these points and added that their unknown foes were likely:
-4. aquatic, and distinctly NOT human
-5. avian, with flight capacity in excess of air ship limits
-6. telepathic
-7. and that these cryptic monsters most certainly farmed humanity as men farmed poultry, probably dining on thought and sorrow as well as the meat, bones and organs of people. Hints to this hideous ancient race, that for some reason retreated from open sight in ancient times, may be found in the many myths of dragons, of the aquatic nature of Leviathan, of Jonah’s abducting whale, of Grendel’s terrible acquatic mother, of Tiamat, Kismet and Echidna…
Bing-Ham’s biological approach garnered much favor with the telepathic Czarina, who claimed dream and trance revelations substantiating these frightening claims, even naming American predecessors by the names of Edgar Casey and Ingo Swan as having been, along with numerous Russian colleagues, vanished or murdered on the brink of great revelations.
Pullman, the newsman, was furiously writing and contributed little except to opine, “So, if the assertions tendered are proven to be true by this expedition, this very effort will resemble something like the dogs in a kennel conspiring to overthrow their human keepers?”
“Yes,” blurted Richard, “what greater adventure could there be.”
He knew then that she favored him, with her thin whimsy of a grin.
‘Oh well, with a face like Candide what better aim for my heart than an Artemis of far-darting thought.’
