Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles - eARC

  “I’ll have you know these working conditions are completely unsafe. I am dealing with potentially dangerous magic combined with lethal chemical mixtures in a laboratory the size of a closet, all of fifteen feet away from a bag filled with explosive hydrogen! My quarters are totally unsuitable for regenerative occupancy! My roommate is a pirate! A pirate! But that is not the worst. Oh no. The worst is that this is no scientific expedition. You have turned this vessel into a veritable warship! A device designed in the pursuit of killingry!”

  “Killingry?” Jake Sullivan cocked his head to the side. “Is that a real word?”

  “Of course it is! Killingry. Meaning such as weapons and implements which are in opposition to livingry, or that which is in support of spaceship Earth life! And do not try to obfuscate the subject, Mr. Sullivan.”

  “I’d never dream of . . . obfuscating stuff . . . Ain’t Francis paying you a whole lot of money to come along?”

  “I need the funding to maximize my life’s work, but please recall you promised me this trip would provide incredible opportunities to look into new forms of magical research.”

  “Yep.”

  “This is an engine of destruction, filled with violent, coarse, barbaric men!”

  “Yep.”

  Fuller was fuming. “I will have no part in any endeavor which intends to deprive life from—”

  Sullivan held up one big hand to stop him. “Okay. Look. I’ll keep my word. You’re going to see magic that no westerner has ever seen before, and if we get . . . lucky, you’ll probably get to see magic that nobody has seen ever. We need you. We need your big old brain and your ability to see magic, or else maybe all the livingry or whatever the hell you call it on Spaceship Earth is gonna get eaten. Got it?”

  The Cog nodded thoughtfully. “I can comprehend the necessity to protect a biological continuation of intelligent life, but I must demand to know where we’re—”

  “Nope. Secret. You’ll hear it in the briefing, same as everybody else.” Sullivan patted Buckminster Fuller on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. All the famous scientific expeditions had lots of men with guns on board. Lewis and Clark had guns. Magellan had guns. Hell, Charles Darwin carried himself a Walker Colt on the Beagle.”

  “He did?”

  Sullivan had no idea. He’d just made that up. “Sure. You’re in good company. I’ve got to go talk to the captain.” And then Sullivan hurried down the ladder before Fuller had a chance to respond. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that their resident genius didn’t attempt to follow.

  The Traveler was the most advanced airship to ever come out of Detroit. Originally designed as a new technology test bed and UBF’s attempt at breaking the world altitude record, its speed and maneuverability were shocking, and it was capable of ridiculously long voyages. The Traveler was the smoothest meshing of mechanical engineering and magical know-how in history. Their dirigible was a prototype, and according to United Blimp & Freight CEO Francis Stuyvesant, the future of air travel.

  However, Fuller was right, the Traveler had not originally been intended to be a warship. John Browning and a crew of creatively malicious pirates had been given three months to turn the Traveler into a fighting vessel. Browning knew more about weapons than any man who had ever lived, so for its relatively small size, the Traveler now packed one hell of a punch. Fuller had been adamant against using his Power to create anything offensive, but he was a Cog genius when it came to designing defensive or life-saving magic systems. In theory, the Traveler could now go higher, faster, and farther in worse weather than any other airship in history.

  Bob Southunder and his pirate crew had managed to harass the greatest navy in the world using nothing but a Great War-era zeppelin cobbled together out of spare parts and creativity. Given access to the actual UBF plant, Southunder had forced through a lot of changes on the Traveler, some of which the engineers had disagreed with. It was a case of craft theory versus real-world experience, but since Pirate Bob was the one who would be in charge should it go down in flames, Francis had backed the captain’s ideas more often than not.

  One of Southunder’s demands had been to use hydrogen instead of helium, Imperium style. Helium was safer, but it provided less lift and it was a scarce commodity in most of the places their mission might take them. He’d argued that the crew’s Cracklers could use their magic to power machinery capable of processing water into hydrogen to fill the bags and for fuel. Worst case scenario, in case of a catastrophic failure, that’s what their Torches were for.

  It took a while to maneuver through the narrow corridors. The Traveler had two separate, lightly armored, compartmentalized bags, each one nearly three hundred feet long, with a superstructure that filled the space between them and an armored command deck at the very front. To Sullivan’s untrained eye the Traveler looked like a bigger version of the Tempest, which had struck him as a mighty fine dirigible for the few brief moments he had been able to ride on it before it had corkscrewed into the ground in central California. It reminded him of two footballs, side by side, only with wings, and several great big engines on the back.

  And the engines . . . They were like something out of the science-fiction magazines; their engines were awe-inspiring and completely terrifying at the same time. Sullivan had never seen, or more importantly, heard anything like them before. The roar was incredible. Francis called the new designs turbo-jets. They were an invention of one of the Cogs, a Brit by the name of Whittle, from the R&D department at UBF. Sullivan had never known that the British called their Cogs Boffins before. It was a pretty innocuous name for a wizard who could come up with an engine that could suck a man in and spit out confetti, an unfortunate event which had happened to one poor UBF engineer during initial testing. Captain Southunder had called the Boffin-designed turbo-jets a tool of the devil, at least until he’d taken the Traveler out for its first test flight, and then he’d done nothing but sing their praises ever since. The Traveler was just that damn fast. During the test run from Michigan to California they had broken the world airship speed record by going just over a hundred miles per hour. The UBF Cogs estimated that the Traveler was capable of a hundred and twenty. Since Southunder’s magical power was manipulating the weather, up to and including hurricane-force winds, he was already betting on a hundred and fifty with the right tail wind.

  Sure, there were airplanes that could easily do three times that, but none of them had the range or could carry the amount of men and cargo Sullivan thought they might need. With the Traveler, Sullivan had a hybrid airship with firepower just shy of a Great War heavy cruiser, which could fly most of the way around the world without stopping, and was loaded with every nifty device UBF could stuff onboard, including a teleradar powerful enough to let them detect aircraft miles away. Cog superscience sure was something. Popular Mechanics could get a year’s worth of articles just out of one ride on the Traveler.

  Francis had made him promise to bring the Traveler back in one piece. The young head of UBF had fought an uphill battle against his board of directors in order to fund the Pathfinder expedition. As far as the board was concerned, the name Pathfinder was because this was a scientific expedition to test the boundaries of what an airship was capable of. They were unaware that the Pathfinder was simply the name the Chairman had assigned to an outer-space monster. That might have caused a few problems for the shareholders. If they’d known that their multi-million dollar experiment was being crewed by a gang of pirates and a magical secret society, they’d probably have tossed Francis out on his ear.

  Well, they could certainly try, but the last few years had changed Francis Stuyvesant. He was no longer just the mouthy young punk Sullivan had kneecapped with a .32 the first time they’d met. Francis was proving to be as ruthless and capable at running a business as his grandfather had been. Their recent hardships had molded Francis into an actual leader of men. Sullivan approved. So Francis had put his foot down and gotten Sullivan a fancy airship.

  It sure
was nice having rich friends.

  Sullivan found Captain Southunder on the bridge, readying the Traveler to leave the airfield. Before meeting Southunder, he had sort of assumed that a pirate captain would have been loud, barking orders, wrangling a group of rowdy privateers, that sort of thing, but Pirate Bob, as he was affectionately known by his crew, was a quiet and understated man. There was no drama with Pirate Bob, he simply had no tolerance for the stupid or lazy, so every man on his crew learned his job and how to do it without him having to babysit them, or they got tossed over the side.

  Southunder had been easy enough to convince about the threat of the Enemy. This was a man who had spent a big chunk of his life protecting part of the Geo-Tel from the Imperium, so the concept of a world-ending event wasn’t that farfetched for the good captain. “Welcome back, Sullivan,” Southunder said without turning away from the window. “We lift off in thirty minutes.”

  “How’s it shaking out?”

  “It? Ships are she. Not it. Don’t hurt her feelings, Mr. Sullivan.”

  Sullivan chuckled. “Aye aye, Captain.”

  “Any problem picking up your psychopath?”

  “Sociopath,” he corrected.

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Well . . .” Despite his addiction to reading scholarly texts, psychology wasn’t one of the fields Sullivan had ever bothered to study. If it hadn’t been for Bradford Carr’s morbid fascination over Wells’ supposed effectiveness, he wouldn’t have bothered with an alienist at all. “I actually don’t know.”

  Southunder turned from the window. “With the bunch you’ve put together, one more crazy shouldn’t hurt.”

  The captain’s tone suggested that there had been trouble. “Toru again?”

  “Your Jap is a popular fella, but no. He’s been quiet, probably trying to avoid ticking my men off enough so that they won’t put a knife in his back.”

  “Good luck,” Sullivan said. “Stabbing Toru’s likely to upset him some.”

  “I’ve warned them . . . Still can’t believe I’m on a ship with an Imperium Iron Guard.” Southunder moved closer to Sullivan and pretended to check the navigation chart. Some other members of the crew were coming up the ladder, so the captain lowered his voice so only Sullivan would hear. “You’d be hard pressed to find one of my marauders that hasn’t lost family to those cold-blooded bastards. If somebody doesn’t try to do him in by the time we get to Canada, I’ll have vastly underestimated their restraint. ”

  Having a former Iron Guard on the crew wasn’t good for morale, but Toru Tokugawa was the expert on the Pathfinder, and for that fight at least, he was theoretically on their side. “Keep them focused, Captain. That’s all I ask.”

  “I’ll do my best, Sullivan, but I’d recommend you learn everything you can from that Imperial sooner rather than later . . . You know, just in case he has an accident. The sky is a dangerous place.”

  “More dangerous with us in it, I imagine,” Sullivan said. “You get us there in one piece. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Speaking of there. Most of these men don’t know your plan. They know bits and pieces, so they’re filling in the blanks with bad guesses and rumors, even your fellow knights. They need to know. This one ship is going to declare war on the entire Imperium soon. Once we cross that line, there’s no going back.”

  “They’ll be all in. There’s too much at stake not to be.”

  “When are you planning on briefing the whole crew?”

  “Right after dinner. It’s harder to mutiny on a full stomach.”

  Southunder smiled. “I’ll have the cook prepare something hearty.”

  The Traveler’s crew was made up of one hundred men. Correction, men and one woman. It might be offensive to some or scandalous to others, but Sullivan was too pragmatic to dwell on it. The idea of having women in what was fundamentally a military unit was completely foreign to him. Sullivan was of the mindset that the fairer sex should be protected, kept from harm whenever possible, but the lone woman aboard the Traveler was here for a damn good reason. Hell, Francis had even named the ship in honor of one of the most dangerous Actives anyone had ever known, and she’d been a girl. Not to mention Sullivan’s last girlfriend could pick up and toss an automobile, so he wasn’t one to underestimate the fairer sex.

  Nonetheless, having men and women serving on the same boat was an odd concept to somebody old-fashioned, but Pirate Bob’s marauders had a woman onboard for years without any problems. Though, it probably helped that Lady Origami had been their only Torch and had kept the Bulldog Marauder from being engulfed in flames and crashing into the ocean on several occasions. Plus, nobody was going to get fresh with a girl who could set you on fire with her mind.

  There were a few women he knew who he would’ve loved to have along on the expedition. Jane was about the best damn Healer there was, but was one of the backbone members of the American knights, and she and her husband Dan were now stuck serving as something akin to ambassadors for their kind, dealing with all of the liars and rats in Washington. Sullivan didn’t envy them and would much rather go battle Iron Guard any day.

  The other woman he’d thought about asking had been Pemberly Hammer. As a Justice, her magic was rare and powerful, but she was a BI agent now, and answered to J. Edgar Hoover. Even though Hoover was technically almost an ally, maybe on a good day, all the Grimnoir knew he’d turn on them the instant the winds blew wrong . . . Or maybe that was just what Sullivan had told himself, so as to justify not dragging Hammer along on a mission this dangerous. He knew damn good and well that if he’d asked her, she would’ve volunteered. Hammer was as tough as anyone, had a Power that was half polygraph and half perfect compass, yet he hadn’t asked for her help. That said a lot more about what he thought their odds of surviving were than any commentary on Hammer’s abilities. It was difficult for a man like him to admit that he might be soft on someone.

  Sullivan leaned against the wall and took the opportunity to enjoy a cigarette while he waited for the crew to finish their chow. Because of the fire danger on board the Traveler, and considering that their Torches were still only human, smoking was only allowed in certain areas, the galley being one of them. Because of that, the air was thick with smoke.

  One of the reasons the whole damn hydrogen-filled ship wasn’t a complete death trap walked past him carrying a tray of food. He could tell that the diminutive Japanese girl had to resist the urge to bow when she saw him. Old habits die hard, but Pirate Bob’s Marauders weren’t big on any habits born in the Imperium. “Hello, Mr. Sullivan.”

  Sullivan tipped his fedora. “Lady Origami.” He didn’t know her real name, doubted anybody did actually. “Good to see you.”

  “And good to see you, Mr. Sullivan,” she answered. “Captain speaks highly of you. Our journey is very important. I look forward to this journey.”

  Either she was lying, or she was a lot harder than she looked, which would be easy, since she looked like a porcelain doll. But rumor was she’d escaped an Imperium school, and she’d certainly spent the last few years keeping a gang of rowdy pirates alive, so looks could be deceiving. “Your English has gotten a lot better.”

  “Thank you. I have been practicing a lot.” The marauders didn’t have any sort of official uniform, though most of them wound up wearing coveralls and tough work clothes. Lady Origami was the same, grease-stained and with her hair covered in a bandana, only she’d decorated her uniform with bits of silk, surely looted from Imperium vessels. She reached into a sash and pulled something out. “I made this for you for our journey. It is for good fortune.”

  “For me?” He held out one hand and she placed the tiny object in the center of his palm. It was made out of paper, but the paper had been folded hundreds and hundreds of times, until it had been perfectly and intricately shaped into a tiny three-dimensional animal. “That sure is something.”

  “It is a frog.”

  “Yeah. I can tell. It even has toes. You’re really
good.”

  “Paper burns the fastest of all. That is why I like it most. The frog means we will return. I do not know how to say this correctly.” She looked down, embarrassed by the gift. “I must go.”

  “It’s okay. I understand. And thank you.”

  And then she hurried off. It was a little awkward, but that was to be expected, since the first time they’d met she’d tried to seduce him for some unfathomable reason. Except that had been right after Delilah . . . Never mind. He needed to focus on the present, not live in the past. Sullivan carefully placed the paper frog into his shirt pocket. Their female crew member was an odd one.

  The floor rocked beneath his feet, a reminder that they were actually moving. The Traveler was so smooth that sometimes it was easy to forget they were in the air, and after a time you even began to tune out the unearthly howl of the engines. Heinrich Koenig walked through the wall and appeared next to him. Sullivan was now used to the Fade doing that, so it didn’t startle him nearly as much as it used to. “Heinrich,” Sullivan greeted.

  “Everything is ready,” Heinrich said, keeping his voice low.

  “Good.” The young German was one of the most paranoid of the Grimnoir, and that was saying something. Heinrich had a Fade’s natural mistrust but his upbringing in the treacherous environment of Dead City had taken it to new heights. Regardless Sullivan was glad to have Heinrich onboard. “Let me know what you find out.”

  “This should prove enlightening.”

  “Try not to kill anybody until after we interrogate them.”

  Heinrich grinned. “I cannot promise this, my friend.” He clapped Sullivan on the shoulder, and then went to join the other Grimnoir.

  Word had spread through the ship that Sullivan was going to brief them on their next move. Since they were still in the US, and the winds were mild, only a handful of the crew weren’t in the galley. Normally they would have eaten in shifts, so the narrow room was far too crowded, almost standing room only. Captain Southunder had the bridge. Sullivan suspected it was because he wanted to see how Sullivan would handle the marauders without Southunder’s calming influence present.