Sky Pirates of the Rio Grande - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Captain Gray pointed his pistol at LaMort, coolly measuring the distance with his steel-colored eyes.  The villainous smuggler and bandit opened his hands and smiled nastily.  "You can see, Mr. Gray, that I have no weapon, thus it would be unthinkable to shoot me, an unarmed man."  The airship behind him began to move, and Gray watched his quarry closely for any sign that he intended to skedaddle.

"I've got you dead to rights, you old so-and-so.  Now hand over them jewels you stole from the museum!"  Gray kept his pistol ready as LaMort stepped back closer to the edge of the platform.  "I'm warning you, don't try any funny business this time!"

LaMort laughed.  "Why Captain Gray, we both know that I will escape you, and you will be unable to stop me because of my superior brain.  I am always one step ahead of your plans.  As well, you are feeble-minded with a crippling sense of fair play, and that makes you inferior to me."

Gray's hand tightened on his gun as he thought of every person this dastard had injured or slain.  "You may be right, LaMort.  But then again, perhaps I shall indeed send a bullet right through you, and thus straight into Hell."  His finger pressed the trigger.

"Noooooo!" screamed Ellie Parsons as she flung herself against his arm, causing the shot to discharge wildly overhead.  "Though he is a villain and a fiend, I love him with all my weak and sentimental woman's heart!"

Eden sat up and threw the dime novel aside with a grunt of disgust.  Another one.  Every time she tried to enjoy one of these, they had to go and ruin it.  She knew for a fact that there were woman agents every bit as capable as the famous Agent Gray, but did they ever get the proper credit?  It was enough to make her ill.

She heard footsteps in the hallway and quickly snatched the book from the floor and stuffed it under a pile of papers on her desk.  It wouldn't do to be seen wasting time at work, not when today was such an important day.

The footsteps receded and she sighed, looking around at her cramped, cluttered office - more of a cubby-hole really.  She had a battered old desk that probably dated from before she was born and a single electric lamp that often flickered just as if it were actually a lamp rather than the latest thing.  They liked to boast that here in the Smithsonian they had the most up-to-date equipment, but that was for field agents and Experimentals, not lowly clerks in the Department of Hazardous Artifacts.

The walls of her doorless room were dark, dirty wood panels buckled and cracked by age and mostly obscured by stacks of documents and battered old file boxes.  On the floor beside her sat a partitioned wooden crate with a dozen small bottles in it, half of them tagged.  She was sorting through Professor Dunn's old things from before the War, and it was dreadfully boring work.

More footsteps, and then the steady squeak, squeak, squeak of the mail cart.  She made herself look busy as the sound came closer, then stopped outside her cell.  Gavin poked his head inside and smiled blearily at her.  He was older, with bad eyesight and a limp from a war wound.  She could smell that he'd been drinking a bit already.

"Hello, Miss Kane, how are you today?"

She smiled.  "I'm well, Mister Gibbs, and you?"

He took his spectacles off and rubbed at them with the dirty tail of his jacket.  She didn't know how he could wear that in here – even six levels down it was hot in summer – but it never seemed to bother him.  Eden always sweated under her layers of clothing and was happy to keep her dark hair piled up messily on her head, off her neck.

"Can't complain, can't complain," he said.  It was what he always said.  He turned to the heavy, aged wooden library cart behind him.  "I've got some things for you." He flipped through the piles of letters, papers, and packages heaped on the cart.  "Let's see, yes.  Here's some memoranda," he handed her several notes.  "Some documents for filing," he used both hands to hoist a pile of paperwork onto the corner of her desk and she sighed.  It never stopped.

"And this," he said.  He fished out a package with a tag on it and handed it to her.

She squinted through her glasses at the tag.  "Mummified rats?"

"I believe so," he said.  "They dance sometimes, so it says."

"Lovely."  She set it down.  She flipped through the memos.  "Nothing from Mister Henry?"

"Hmm?  Oh no dear.  Nothing from him."  Gavin slipped his hip flask out and took a little sip.  She pretended not to notice.

"Are - are you sure?  I had asked to see him, and I was hoping... oh, never mind."  She sat back in her chair and it creaked alarmingly.

"What're you going to see old fuss and feathers about?  You moving up and out of this rat-hole?"  He sipped again.  "You're too young to be down here all day among these papers and bottled-up whatsits, dear.  You're so pretty, you should be some nice fellow's wife by now.  Almost twenty and still a spinster.  It's a shame it is.  That old turkey should at least give you a promotion."

"Well, that is something like what I was hoping for."  She looked at the walls, which seemed to be closing in on her, the stacked papers looming over like leaning buildings on a narrow street.  She thought about years more down here, getting paler and paler, seeing hardly anyone but Gavin all day, for all that he was better than her secretive, scuttling fellow clerks.  The idea made her want to scream.

Instead she picked up a box and held it out to him.  "You wouldn't be going down to storage would you?"

"Aw, now, love, you know I'm not supposed to take stuff like that down m'self."  He looked at it unhappily.

"I know, but it's not dangerous.  It just goes in QR storage.  It doesn't need to be signed in."  She smiled at him, trying to look pretty and not feeling it at all.  "Please?"

He sniffed suspiciously.  "What is it?"

"Just a skull," she said.

"What's it do?"

"It lies about your weight," she said.  "I strapped its jaw shut.  It won't make a peep."

He grunted and took it from her.  "All right, I suppose."

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Just after luncheon Eden left her cubby with a pack of papers under her arm and the firmest set to her jaw she could summon.  A week since she sent Mr. Henry her request and still no response.  If she wanted this opportunity, she was going to have to be like Agent Gray and take a chance, seize the initiative.

The trip up from the lower levels was one she made every day, taking the clacking, lurching elevator up six floors to the ground level, where she had to switch to the other lift.  This was the nice lift, with the red flocked paper on the walls and the polished brass plate around the heavy buttons.  Her heart thumped when she pushed the one for the fourth floor.  The lift ascended smoothly, lifting her out of her usual haunts.

Eden had done her best to look presentable, with her hair brushed and as carefully coifed as she could manage without a mirror.  There was nothing to be done about her shabby dress and worn shoes, so she would just have to brazen it out – even if brazening was not her strong suit.

Other people got on the lift, and she half-expected someone to ask what she was doing here; but aside from a few disdainful glances, no one said a thing.  Riders got on, more got off again, and then she was alone in the lift when it chimed at the top floor.

She had only been up here once before, when Mr. Henry first approved her employment, and she had never been in his office, but she knew where it was – she knew where everything in the building was.  The heavily carpeted hallway muffled her footsteps until she came to the heavy, polished door with the shiny nameplate.  She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and went in.

The outer office was huge, with rich wood furniture and a polished marble floor she could actually see herself in.  To her right was the secretary's desk set on a beautiful rug, but the chair was empty, and Mr. Henry's secretary was nowhere to be seen.  The inner double doors were mahogany inlaid with brass and they stood just slightly ajar.  Eden heard voices.

Unable to believe her luck, and almost shaking for fear of being discovered, Eden slipped across the room.  Now she was glad her shoes were worn, as the only sound was the slow ticking of the tall-case clock beside the window to her left.  She crept across the room and peered through the crack in the door, telling herself she would just see who Mr. Henry was with.

The Director's office was large, well-lit, and opulently furnished, with built-in bookshelves lined with neatly organized volumes framing a wide window that looked out over the Mall towards the Capitol Building.  Mr. Henry was a heavy, elderly man with silver hair swept back on his head.  As always, he looked tightly bound up in the fancy dress suit he wore and wielded an immense personal dignity.

"I know you want to continue with the Experimental retrievals, but this, you understand, is far too important to entrust to just anyone," he said.

A sigh came from the right, out of her line of vision.  Even if she shifted to the side she couldn't see who it was.

"A mission to round up a bunch of cutthroats with delusions of grandeur is hardly what I would choose to do with my time, Joseph."  The voice was deep and resonant, with just a hint of an upstate accent.  Who was it?

Henry sighed and sat down at his desk.  "It's more complicated than that, I'm afraid.  We're not concerned with these sky pirates' numbers so much as we are their methods."  The Director fussed with his inkwell.  "The Aerial Naval Detachment can handle those brigands, but it has to find them first."

"So you said in your cable," the other man said.  "Something about a code machine?"

Eden's heart raced and she clutched her papers tighter in her hand.  This, this was the very thing she wanted to speak to the Director about.  But to whom was he speaking?

"Yes, yes," Mr. Henry said.  "They transmit their communications to one another, even as our ships do.  We encode our messages so the enemy cannot understand them, but of late they seem all too able to understand them.  Even worse, their own messages have also been coded, a code that's baffled everyone in Department L."

A snort of laughter.  "Have you asked Department M?"

Henry looked annoyed.  "There is no such thing," he said tiredly, "as Department M."

"So," the unseen man said.  "You want me to go and find this... coding machine?"

"Yes, and either bring it back, or destroy it and make sure they cannot build another."  Henry plucked nervously at his watch-chain.  "Retrieval would be better."

"And I assume you have a notion of where this device is to be found?" the unseen man said.

"It could be aboard an airship, but it is more likely to be centrally located.  We think it may be in El Dorado."  Henry looked annoyed by the chuckle that followed that.

"El Dorado?" the voice said.  "Ah, so not only am I to track down an unknown device which may or may not really exist, I am to do so by locating the legendary sky pirate city which no one has ever been able to find."  Another laugh.  "Delightful."

"No one ever said your job would be simple, Ulysses."  Mr. Henry looked distinctly irritated.

"Isn't there someone more suited to this kind of work?  Antonina perhaps?"

"Pursuing ape-monsters in the arctic, I'm afraid," Henry said.

"Kharis?"

"Busy with that thing in the jar overseas, he won't be back for months.  You know full well why this has to be done as soon as possible."  Henry drummed his fingers on the desk-top.

A sigh.  "Yes, yes.  All right, I suppose."

Hands seized Eden from behind and she jumped like a startled goose.  She turned and saw that it was Mr. Henry's secretary, Wilson.  His bland face was alight with outrage.  "What on Earth do you think you are doing here?  Spying on the Director?"

"No, I wasn't," she hissed, trying to be quiet despite that it was plainly pointless now.  "I just--"

"A spy, A spy!"  He grabbed her papers and tried to wrench them away from her.  "What is this here?  Stolen documents?"

"No!  No, those are mine!"  She held on and struggled with him.  The papers started to come loose and spill down onto the floor.  Eden gave an especially hard pull and the whole stack flew apart into a cascade of leaflets.  Eden went reeling backwards and sent the doors swinging wide open when she fell into them.

The scream she made was as loud as it was undignified.  She careened into the Director's office in a cloud of scattering paper and fell flat on her face smack in the middle of the room.

The Director leaped to his feet so quickly his glasses almost came off.  "What in God's name is the meaning of this?"  He tried to back away and fell back into his heavy chair with a grunt, struggled to his feet again.

Eden scrambled up, slipping on papers and batting them out of her way.  "Sir!  Sir I am so sorry, this was just an accide--"

"Spy!"  Wilson stood in the doorway, jabbed an accusing finger at her.  "I caught this spy outside the door, eavesdropping!"

"No sir, no!  I was just coming to see if you were in, sir, and I just looked in to see--"

Mr. Henry drew himself up with all of his considerable gravity, glared at her with his face turning red, and she realized with a sinking feeling that he had no idea who she was.  "Girl, you will explain who you are and what you are doing in here."

"Er, Eden – Eden Kane sir.  Archivist from the Department of Hazardous Artifacts.  You hired me sir.  Just over a year ago?"  She smiled apologetically.  "I sent you a memorandum, asking to see you.  I was hoping--"

"She was spying," Wilson said angrily.  "I caught her--"

"Now, now," said that powerful, commanding voice.  "Let's not be hasty."

Eden looked over and finally got a look at the Director's mysterious visitor.  He was tall and broadly built, dressed stylishly and expensively.  He had the chiseled handsomeness of a Greek statue, blonde hair just long enough to touch his collar, and short, carefully trimmed sideburns.  He stood up, and she saw that his right hand was a complex and highly polished metal prosthetic, the joints clicking as he extended it to help her the rest of the way up.

She took the proffered hand and a little spark jumped between their fingers, making her twitch.  He smiled winningly and she gulped as she put it all together.  "Agent... Agent Gray?"

"Charmed," he said, kissing her fingers.  "Now, why don't we hear what the young lady has to say?"

Continued in Chapter 2...

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