“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.