Chapter 9
Yaromar Zbignevosky had not blown himself up.
He was the chief of the Svardovian secret police, and next in line to the throne after Dmitry, now that Victorina was dead. He had come to as the ship fell, after Sophie and Dmitry had jumped over to their haven, and had found a sharp edge of glass from the shattered windows on which to cut himself loose. Escaping from the cabin from the inside posed no problems, and he met up with Irina, the maid, who was his creature.
“I don’t know what happened to the princess,” he said.
“She came into the cabin with him,” said Irina. “And she threw me out, and she jammed up my keyhole so I couldn’t watch, the mean bitch.”
“She locked and blocked off every door. Why would she do that?” asked Zbignevosky. “She brought him in here… did the sailor help?”
“I don’t know; I did not see him,” said Irina.
Zbignevosky went in search of the hapless sailor, who was busy, with the others, in the dirigible, trying to find out why the gas bags had failed.
“Sir, I did what I was told, sir,” he said. “I don’t know what’s been going on, but the cook’s on the rampage for the mess in the galley and stolen food, and someone’s tied down the vents so the hydrogen is all gone, and broken the tubing from the top-up tanks, and two of them have been leaking. We’ll be lucky to fill one gas bag. It isn’t lucky having women aboard, sir, having three was just too many.”
“Three? Oh yes, that English schoolgirl. I imagine she’s tucked away in her bunk scared out of her mind,” said Zbignevosky.
He thought he might just check this, however; Dmitry had vanished and he would move heaven and earth to rescue a woman under his protection.
The door to the cabin was still locked, however; Dmitry had not rescued her. Zbignevosky unlocked it, prepared to sneer at a frightened little schoolgirl, and found the cabin empty.
He found the missing panel in the toilet, into the next cabin. Was the girl really skinny enough to get through there?
He climbed to the upper bunk.
There were footprints on it. The ceiling panel was slightly off true.
She had tied down the valves? Could some wretched schoolgirl really know enough? He knew she was only a schoolgirl, when she had first broadcast with Dmitry, he had gone to the school she was supposed to have attended, and questioned the principal; and he had gone through the girl’s trunk. Nothing suggested anything but a naïve child on her way to finishing school.
And where in hell was Victorina?
Zbignevosky was nothing if not methodical.
He decided to walk Victorina’s footsteps from where he had last seen her, tying up Dmitry to torture him.
He went into Victorina’s personal torture chamber. There was an anomalous patch of blood on the floor, not much, but anomalous. He looked all around… and saw Victorina, hung on a hook behind the door like an old coat.
He ran to her; and saw that she was a waxen corpse, her eyes staring at nothing. He stripped what was left of her clothing, and found not a mark. Her hair, however was matted.
It took him some ten minutes to find where the small, but rifled bullet had entered the base of Victorina’s skull, passing the trachea and nicking the carotid artery before its energy was spent just under the skin at the front.
It was not Victorina who had taken Dmitry to her bedroom, and who had told both him and the maid to leave her alone; it was the English girl.
He wished she was one of his agents; but now, she would have to die. He searched more thoroughly, and discovered the drawers displaced as steps.
He went back to his own room, and discovered that his service revolver was missing. So was a fur coat and two fur lined cloaks.
He had to give King Edward of England credit; he had a most enterprising agent in the girl. The English were plainly intending to support Dmitri all along, and sent the girl, doubtless subject to surgery and hair dye to make her look like Victorina, to catch Victorina’s glance for long enough to intrigue her. It was all planned.
He found his own, personal radio, luckily undamaged, and uncoiled its arial to hang out of the window. He sent a burst of coded morse to the fleet. They were to engage and burn the old and ponderous British war ship if it came anywhere near this place. Then he dressed warmly, went to the galley to help himself to a number of tinned items of food, and wine, went up into the dirigible to leave a small clockwork device, and then took an escape ladder to climb to the valley floor. He walked briskly and purposefully until he found a rocky outcrop behind which he might shelter, and waited out the completion of the clockwork device.
The violence of the explosion almost shocked him. Well, it got rid of a lot of evidence of his less than stellar work in underestimating the English girl. Victorina was dead, so blowing her up did not matter, and nor did any of the crew, including his own agent, Irina.
It was now up to the navy to deal with the British; he would meet up with the contingent of men who had been able to get Dmitry captured. And how smug would the young prince be, to be picked up by the ‘Thunderchild’ which would doubtless claim to be answering a mayday call, only for him and the English spy to be obliterated by the Svardovian sky-navy.
oOoOo
“I expect if they signalled, ‘Thunderchild’ will come to lend assistance,” said Sophie. “We might be more sensible to stay here and signal if they do come, rather than try to travel further, and perhaps miss them.”
“We have food if we are frugal for a week,” said Dmitry. “There is fluid in the pineapple, and we have several bottles of water, but not for more than a couple of days. Let us scout in daylight for a spring, and if we find one, we wait three days. If we do not, we move before nightfall tomorrow. They may have blown up the hydrogen to allay our fears, having vacated the ship, and have people out looking for us.”
“Yes, we have to assume we are hunted, and not have any more fires,” said Sophie. “But you were shivering so.”
They had curled up on the springy branches, one cloak under them, and one over them, taking advantage of each other’s body heat, and Dmitry trying to ignore the burning of his wounds. Sophie had carried hot rocks using leather gloves, to help heat them, and they both fell into a fitful sleep in each other’s arms. They were nowhere near as cold as Yaromar Zbignevosky, who, finding it difficult to move on in the dark, collected a few bits of burning debris to make himself a fire, and spend several fruitless minutes trying to open tins of food with his pocket knife, since he had neglected to provide himself with a tin opener; he broke the corkscrew on his pocket knife trying to get into the tin with that; and was burned quite nastily when he threw the tin, somewhat bent, into the fire, and one corner of it exploded under the pressure and hit him in the face with boiling brawn from the ham. Having blown a hole, however, to reduce its pressure, when he pulled it out of the fire with a stick, he could not get a large enough hole to retrieve any meat at all. Then, he was reduced to breaking the tops of the wine bottles and drinking cautiously for not having a cork remover any more[1]. He had not put anything but his coat between himself and the ground, and in consequence shivered hungrily all night, cursing Victorina for getting herself killed, Dmitry for getting away, and that damned English spy for all his ills.
He hoped she had failed to provide herself with a tin opener and was hungry too.
oOoOo
The ‘Thunderchild’ could see the glow of the burning wreckage from afar.
“Dear God,” said Edward, shaken.
“We will see what we can find, and if anyone knows anything,” said Thorndyke. They hastened in, only the odd singing in the shrouds or flap of the rigging as they changed course to be heard. Sophie and Dmitry, deep in the arms of Morpheus, heard nothing. Their Swedish candle had been knocked apart and stamped out by Sophie, to hide where they were. The ship’s boats made a low droning noise, but not enough to awaken either of the exhausted young people, as Thorndyke sent out rescue craft, in the unlikely event of any crew surviving.
Thorndyke was to be surprised; the occupants of the gondola were alive, the force of the explosion having been directed upwards, but they were trapped within it by the debris from the dirigible. Irina, too, was alive, having been blown clear through the window in her mistress’s suite, and had been lucky enough to miss a spur of rock by inches, and bounce into some precariously- situated spruce trees, which broke up the greater part of the energy of her involuntary flight, and deposited her onto the ground with little more than burst eardrums and concussion.
As she had been holding the discarded fur coat at the time of the explosion, trying to put the bedroom to rights, and had clung to it for dear life, she had the sense to put it on, and make a nest inside the spruces blown down by the force of the explosion. She was happy to call for help when the Royal Navy arrived with powerful arc lights, run from the boats’ engines.
The navy set to with a will to free those trapped in the gondola, whilst another team searched all the remains for any sign of Dmitry or Sophie. Victorina’s body was found, where it had been blown out of the ship relatively undamaged; but no sign of the young prince and his beloved.
Zbignevosky made himself scarce; he had no desire to be picked up by the ‘Thunderchild,’ destined to be crushed for border violations. A sailor found his camp fire, and having a better pocketknife than the gentlemanly one affected by Zbignevosky, made short work of the rest of the tin, and the ham inside it. No sailor ever turns down a free meal. Zbignevosky, on his way back to the capital, had no idea, but would have added it to the list of grudges he had against England.
The Svardovian navy arrived as the last of the survivors were being taken on board.
“British Warship, you are on Svardovan sovereign territory! Back off, back off!” demanded the largest Zeppelin’s captain over the radio.
“Svardovian Warship, I am answering a mayday call to aid another vessel in peril, a duty which knows no boundaries. I have come to the aid of the ‘Cherny Vilk,’ which you can see is badly damaged,” replied Thorndyke.
“We heard no mayday call; you are pirates who have destroyed our flagship on our own territory,” said the Svardovian. “You killed everyone aboard!”
“I have the captain of the ‘Cherny Vilk’ who can tell you otherwise,” said Thorndyke, coldly.
“You lie! Attack the British pirates!” screamed the acting admiral.
Thorndyke shrugged.
He had tried to get them to back off peacefully. Now the fools would find out that when Britain sent a gunboat, she meant business.
“Turn off the liftium suppression,” he said. “Let’s get some height.”
oOoOo
Sophie woke to the first loud Crack! as the ‘Thunderchild’ returned fire, once the Svardovian navy opened fire on her. Thorndyke had moved back beyond the ridge, and Sophie cowered as the shell roared over her and Dmitry with the sound like an express train roaring by. She did not know that the Svardovian zeppelins had opened up with their six-pounders before they were even in range, never having fought a sky battle before. The first shell from ‘Thunderchild’ was rapidly followed by two others, and three of the Svardovian zeppelins were spiraling out of control, one of them on fire where the sheer heat of the passage of a shell through the gas bag had set the hydrogen aflame.
The others quickly closed, pouring fire towards the ‘Thunderchild’ with a degree of accuracy which put Sophie and Dmitry in more danger than the British warship.
“Dmitry! Wake up!” screamed Sophie. Dmitry, however, tossed, fitfully. Sophie did the only thing she could do; she dragged her delirious love on the cloak behind the larger outcrop of rock. Whether it was large enough to dissipate the energy of a six pound shell, or whether it would shower them with shards from the back side, as happened to the wooden walls of the navy, she did not know. She could only hope that it would protect them, and held Dmitry to her, shivering more in terror than from cold and hoping that he was not aware of how she quaked.
She was glad she had pulled him out of the slight hollow in which they had slept, however, when a six-pound shell screamed into the cliff face, and it fell, covering their erstwhile bed with rocks and debris. She could not follow the fight; for one thing, she was too afraid to look out, and for another, she was busy holding Dmitry to her.
It seemed to take many hours for the noise to diminish; perhaps it was in reality an hour. But gradually, the sound of firing decreased, and the sky was no longer lit up by the lurid glow of burning hydrogen. Sophie herself fell into a fitful doze, and when she awoke, the birds were singing, and all was otherwise quite silent. She peered out from behind their sheltering rock at a pasture which had suffered from some shells tearing up its green covering; but as she ventured out, she could see no ships at all in the sky.
Thunderchild had either been shot down, or had withdrawn.
Bitter were Sophie’s tears at this point.
She could not know that her father wept tears as bitter, convinced that his daughter and her fiancé must be dead.
[1] Anyone who recognises Zbiggy’s misadventures as a tribute to the ‘Three Men in a boat’ and the can of pineapple can award themselves a pat on the back.
Thank you for the bonus.
ReplyDeletewelcome! another cliffie, I fear....
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