1889: Journey To The Moon (The Far Journey Chronicles) (28 page)

He gave the second diamond a once over, felt better about it than he had the first, and moved it under the three placement pins. The damned thing fit!

“Tesla’s monocle,” he remembered, and found it odd he should be stating his thoughts aloud.

He opened one of the fingers of his left hand and peered.
Nothing.

The monocle was gone.

[ 107 ]

Ekka Gagarin managed to secure the cargo bay hatch before passing out. She dreamed that she was floating on a strange sea. There were no waves, no tides.

Is this the Black Sea?
she asked herself.

No. It’s not the Black. Is it Lake Chapala? The Sea of Cortez?
No answer came here in the blackness of night with no stars. Something didn’t feel right about this sea. Still, she was so tired, and the invitation to do nothing other than float was inviting.

If Ekka had been able to see her body from an exterior viewpoint, she would have seen it floating free of the corridor that lead to the cargo area.  It was entering the main chamber near the engine room.  Her body spun about in the air and her delicate head nearly impacted the railing around the engine room’s entry hatch. Instead, she passed by it and drifted toward the central shaft and the Tesla coil, with its billions of volts of electricity.

[ 108 ]

Tesla stopped his long plunge toward the bridge by grabbing one of the railings that ran along the vast central chamber of the
Arcadia.
He was almost to the bridge.

“My work is here, not the bridge,” he said to himself. He turned in time to see Ekka Gagarin’s inert body emerge from the passageway four decks below him. He gazed down at her for a moment, judging whether or not he should do something, when he saw the sparks from the central shaft.

Tesla squinted. The shaft appeared to be scored, as if...

He recalled the alien with its sword advancing upon Merkam and himself.

The creature had slashed at the coil during its long flight to the bridge. It did what damage it could before Billy killed it.

If Ekka made contact with the central shaft anywhere within a few feet of the damaged section, there would be nothing left of her. Not even a cinder.

Tesla rotated his body and pressed his feet against the inner hull. Then he sprang.

[ 109 ]

It was time to stop the long, slow spin—not that there was ever an absence of the sensation of spinning while in space. There was no possibility of searching while spinning. Billy decided to remedy that situation.

He kicked out his legs and made contact with the roof of the cargo bay. This propelled him back towards the floor. He held the robot head in front of him so it made contact with the floor first.  The impact ignited a dull pain in his wounded shoulder, but he ignored it.

The robot head suddenly turned on—he’d hit the switch at the back of the head with the floor. The light behind the diamond moved back and forth. Billy ducked. The thing cut a swath through the cargo bay and a section of the aft bulkhead was vaporized.

Billy felt behind it with his free left hand, found the switch, and flipped it. The light died.

Billy felt something soft caress his upper leg and looked down. The body of Denys Jay-Patten was curled around him, reminiscent of a lover. Billy laughed.

“Thanks, Denys,” he said. “But not right now. Maybe later.” He gave Jay-Patten a gentle shove and the body sailed slowly into the darkness, following the curve of the ship to disappear from view.

“Monocle,” Billy said.

He began looking. Nothing.

He glanced toward the blackness and saw the three ships. They were far larger.  And then, in his mid-vision, in the center of the three ships, Billy saw the circular edge of something.  Tesla’s monocle. It floated in space mere feet outside the ship.

Looking around the room, he spotted the wrench and the screwdriver and retrieved them. There was no going back, only forward.

“I love you, Ekka Gagarin,” he said. “It would have been nice to make you my wife.  But The Kid has to go into battle one last time.”

Billy The Kid pushed off the deck and sailed outward beyond the wreckage of the former airlock, and into the black.

[ 110 ]

Ekka came to with a start. She was drifting, spinning slowly. She turned her head and saw the blue sparks from the central shaft and knew. This was the end. Within seconds she would be no more. The central shaft carried two parallel conduits embedded beneath thousands of turns of copper wiring. They ran beneath the ship’s bridge and down the lateral center to enter the engine room adjacent to the hatchway.  Along its length, it was coated with nonconductive varnish. She had overseen the ship’s construction in Colorado Springs and monitored the workers as they applied coat after coat of varnish.  But, somehow the central shaft had been punctured, and tiny webbed tendrils of blue lightning played out of the cut.

Ekka held her breath. Her body turned and she looked away from it. One more tumble and she would make contact.

She vaguely detected the shadow an instant before impact. The wind was knocked from her and for a moment her body was draped around the dapper Nikola Tesla, who bore her slowly away from her date with death.

The air knifed into her lungs. “Nikola!”

“If I have to save you one more time, I may have to steal you from Billy Gostman, darling Ekka.”

Ekka was at a loss for words, and then she realized the man was attempting levity. Ekka laughed. She turned her face to Tesla and the thin lips below his equally thin mustache twisted into a suppressed smile.

The two came into contact with the railing around the inner hull, and there Tesla placed her hand on the railing and patted it. “There,” he said. “Be safe.”

“What now?”

“Why, my dear, I am about to turn the
Arcadia
into a Faraday Cage.”

“A what?”

“Never you mind. There is a sword from one of the aliens on the bridge. Apparently it is non-conductive, wouldn’t you say?” Tesla gestured toward the central shaft and the cut.

“Ah. Yes,” Ekka agreed. “Otherwise, he would have been turned to so much ash.”

“My thought exactly. I’ll need that sword.”

“What else will you need?” she asked.

“A beam. A metal beam perhaps twenty feet in length. Or two ten-foot beams tied together such that they make contact.”

“We’ll have to wait until Billy returns,” she said. Then she put her hand to her mouth, remembering. “Billy!”

She turned and launched herself aft.

“Just when I thought I was doing so well with her,” Tesla chuckled.

[ 111 ]

Billy Gostman attempted to ignore the oncoming space ships and focus on the job at hand. He was aft of the entire
Arcadia
. The ship was not otherwise accelerating, so he should not drift far from her. He did realize he had to work...
fast.

He fit Tesla’s monocle over Jay-Patten’s diamond and slid the faceplate into place. With Jack Ross’s oversized wrench, he tightened first one bolt, then the other.

Billy glanced at the oncoming ships and saw three tiny winks of light, one from each craft. The three lights separated from the craft and began to converge on him and the
Arcadia
behind him.

“Oh shit,” Billy stated. “Torpedo!”

The three lights accelerated. They came on with all the inexorable mindlessness of a school of sharks.

He rapidly tapped the faceplate to see that it was secure, turned the robot head away from his body and toggled the switch.

A cone of light leapt from Cyclops’s head. Billy moved the head, guiding the beam to the first torpedo.  It disappeared in a brilliant, silent flash. He felt the head of the robot grow hot through his alien suit. He flipped the switch and the beam of light died. There were spots before his eyes. It took a moment for the spots to fade, but then the remaining two torpedoes loomed large before him. They were cylindrical and silvery, both beautiful and ugly at the same time.

Billy marked where they were in the blackness, deciding to do what he had done half a dozen times before when in a firefight, which was to lead them.

He flipped the toggle switch and wiped the dark sky where he suspected the deadly shafts to be. Two balls of flame appeared where they had been, and Billy knew they were gone. He turned the robot head to the lead ship and let the beam of light bathe it for a moment. He averted his eyes, but could tell the first ship was gone in a great gout of flame. His fingers began to burn and the robot’s head glowed with heat.  Ignoring the pain, he pointed it at the second ship and turned his eyes away again. A second, far brighter explosion followed.

Gritting his teeth and wincing, he turned to point the robot head at the final ship.

The shaft of light from Cyclops’s head sputtered intermittently, then ceased.

Billy watched as the final ship made its way toward the
Arcadia
.

He craned his neck and saw that the
Arcadia
was some forty feet behind him.
How did I get so far away?
he thought.

But Billy knew. If it had been four feet instead of forty, there was still no going back.

[ 112 ]

“We cannot commence the Faraday maneuver without a metal conduit,” Tesla told Ekka, who floated in front of the cargo bay window.

“But Billy is the only one who can help us, and I think...I think...” her voice began to break.

“I see him,” Tesla said, and placed his arm around her. Ekka patted his arm, thankful for the kind man’s presence.

Even with the extra set of arms and legs of the insect-like alien space suit, they knew it was Billy out there, floating in space.

“Do not write him off yet, my dear,” Tesla said. “Your Billy is a marvel.”

[ 113 ]

In a final act of defiance, Billy Gostman lobbed the great head of the robot Cyclops at the oncoming dragonfly craft, and with that gesture saved his own life.

The robot’s head out-massed Billy Gostman by a factor of four to one. An onlooker seeing the scene from a distance would have detected the lumbering slow motion of the metallic robot head as it moved away from the overall bulk of the
Arcadia
. At the same time, the onlooker would have seen Billy Gostman fly back toward the exposed cargo hold of the
Arcadia
much the way a circus acrobat is catapulted into the air by his safety net.

Billy entered the outer airlock backward. His helmet grazed the girder he had turned to slag minutes before, and that corrected his fall so that his feet entered the main cargo hold first. The wall rushed up to meet him and Billy bent his knees to absorb the impact. His helmet struck the wall and spider web cracks blossomed and grew across his vision.

He turned to see Ekka and Tesla looking at him in wonder. Billy raised his right hand and gave a thumbs up.

Ekka began gesturing and pointing. Billy turned and looked, but couldn’t see what she was gesturing about. The cracks on his faceplate were everywhere. It could shatter from the inner pressure at any moment. A cough, a sneeze, a too-hard breath could be his undoing.

Tesla made a gesture by making inverted vees with his hands and drawing them apart.

“A beam,” Billy whispered to himself. He pointed at one of the spare beams close by and shrugged.

Tesla shook his head and pointed again.

“A longer beam or a rod,” Billy whispered again. He pointed at a stack of metal poles tethered to the wall. Originally, the rods were meant for the erection of temporary structures on the Moon’s surface.

Tesla nodded.

Billy held up one finger.

Ekka held up two.

Billy nodded.

He floated to the rack and carefully removed two of the metal poles. After a minute, he stood before the doorway, poles in hand.

Behind him Tesla and Ekka could see the alien craft slowing to pull alongside the
Arcadia
.

[ 114 ]

The moment the hatch opened and the whirlwind began, Billy’s faceplate erupted in a spray of glass.

The poles came first. Tesla stood in front of Billy, and Ekka held Tesla from the side. Tesla grasped at Billy and pulled him and his load of metal poles in against the terrific wind.

As the poles cleared the hatch, Ekka slammed her fist into the switch and the doorway came down.

Billy pushed with his legs against the doorway and he and Tesla drifted back down the corridor. The whirlwind ceased.

Billy expelled air from his lungs.