Tag Archives: Pax Victoriana

Cheése Stands Alone XV

July 8, 2024Crime Fiction, Crimefighter, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk FictionAirship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Dirigibles, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phyllis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Captain Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”), Airship Commander for Aerosud, a luxury liner airship company based out of São Paulo in the Empire of Brazil, who is searching for her father, Commodore Jack Cheése, an outlaw and antigovernmental rabble rouser.

Professor Doctor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, who has abducted Lydia to get her to pilot an illegal unregistered airship to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republic) on a mission of mercy in exchange for helping her find her father.

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Pyare, a young man with dreams of being an airship pilot, and member of LBFDS (the League Bousculier Francaise Du Sud) helping Lydia and Serpina rendezvous with Serre-Pain and Vlady at an illegal airship.

Emile Etugouda, poet, philosopher, world traveler, raconteur, and general all around know-it-all whose memory of an ancient epic poem helped Lydia, Serpina, and Pyare cross the Massif and on to their rendezvous in Autre Lyons.

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Pax Victoriana, a period of peace imposed by the Clockwork Commonwealth and its enforcement arm, The Admiralty, dating from the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign to the present for a total of 180 years which includes the TSR (Temporal Shift Realignment) of 56 PV (1893 AD) after which Commonwealth calendars where recalibrated to reflect Her Royal Majesty’s peaceful rule (following the devastation of the first Pandem and its resurgence 30 years later as Pandem II).

Chapter XXII

The liftoff was sublime. Lydia, back in her element, felt the same way. At quarter speed, the repro drives murmuring, turbine fans whirring, the dirigible edged away from the hillside enclosure and out over the valley casting a shadow on the rolling farmlands and villages three hundred feet below. She brought the wheel around in alignment with the compass heading and nodded in satisfaction as the large airship responded. “Steady as she goes,” she said, and had Pyare take the helm. She went back to her calculation, noting the chronometer and notching the chart with calipers. Glancing out of the wide windows of the gondola at the receding bulk of the Massif to starboard and then back at the map, “Half speed,” she commanded. Pyare adjust the antiquated lever up another notch. The thrum of engines deepened.

Binoculars to her eyes she scanned the horizon to the south, the direction they were heading. As they approached Autre Lyons, the air traffic would increase and they would have to blend in with the other rigs and semirigs, avoid the recreational solid shell low altitude maneuverable dirigibles known as flitters and keep an eye out for the air patrol silrigs (self-inflatable long range gliders).

They were flying under a commercial freight banner until such time as they reached the point in the flight path where they would switch their identification flags to those of the Russair cargo rig. The valley floor drifted below, a patchwork of farms and forests intersected by the dull gray curves and straightaways of roads. The increase in surface traffic was noticeable as they drew closer to the urban industrial cluster that was Autre Lyons. Various modes of land transportation including antique steam beetles, tea kettles, bug buggies, whistlers, dreadnaughts, and land arks created a vapor haze with the lumbering properties of ground fog.

Lydia, in command, took a breath. How did she, a well-respected airship commander, not to mention someone married to a member of the court in Novo Sao Paulo, end up breaking the law by illegally piloting an unauthorized airship in restricted airspace. It should not have felt right, but it did. What she had experienced since that fateful day several weeks past in her meeting with Professor Doctor Serre-Pain in Old London began to make sense of her current predicament in an odd sort of way. She had gone to the underground in order to contact her father, Commodore Jack Cheése, the notorious anti-Clockwork Commonwealth critic, labeled “traitor” and rabble rouser. That in itself was a marginally illegal act under Admiralty law to begin with, and now she was in the middle of committing a full blown criminal act.

A mission of mercy, as the old Professor had explained to her several times. He had to get to a remote village in the Goda Mountains northwest of Djibouti in the Horn Of Africa Republic where there was an epidemic of poisonous snake bites due to an unusual explosion in the birthrate of that particular species. They were in dire need of an anti-venom that only Serre-Pain could provide. Unfortunately the Horn Of Africa Republics were nonaligned states embargoed by the Clockwork Commonwealth and its allies and trading partners. Consequently commerce, whether it be industrial, chemical, or medical was prohibited from being transacted with the rebellious ICER infested anti-Commonwealth member states, a confederation of piratical enclaves and republics scribing an oblique triangle from the Red Sea to the southern tip of Madagascar to Bombay and back to Djibouti, known also as the Arabian Triangle, a vast body of water as mysterious as the equatorial night sky. From the archipelagos of minute islands, some only large enough to house an air strip and hangers for the winged internal combustion heavier-than-air craft outlawed in most of the Commonwealth controlled treaty zones, the ICER pirates plied the trans Arabian shipping lanes looting unguarded commercial rigs of their cargo.

Serre-Pain, Lydia reminded herself, was an enigma. He was a Black man with a wooly white iron jaw beard, who had the aura of an ancient being or of belonging to an ancient order of beings possessed of a primal knowledge. When she inquired about his supply of antivenom, he smiled enigmatically and held up a scarred ebony arm and replied, “In my blood.” Lydia was even more surprised to learn that when they reached their destination, the locals would supply him with a fresh specimen of the poisonous snake which the good Doctor would then allow to bite him. He would feel the full effect of the venom as it coursed through his blood stream seeking to shut down his functioning muscles until he asphyxiated. His immune system would then respond and transform the poison into the serum for an anti-venom. His blood would then be cloned into an effective anti-venom specific to that particular species of serpent. From the scarification on his arms, it was obvious that Serre-Pain had done this procedure numerous times before.

Now she was doing what she knew how to do best, pilot an airship, thanks to the snake doctor, in a way that was as exhilarating as when she first sought to become an airship pilot, the sense of adventure and competence. Her promotion in rank to commander had taken her away from the day to day working of piloting a dirigible. And her becoming an airship commander in the Aero Sud luxury fleet at a young age was probably as much of an acknowledgement that she was married to a member of the court as it was of her administrative skills. It was her skills as a pilot and as a leader that were being called upon. Turning toward the comms cabin where the others were seated, speaking among themselves, she was confident that she could get Serre-Pain to his destination and complete the mission. The fact of her father, Commodore Jack, and the promise of contacting him remained as the goal, yet it was the completion of the current task that spurred her on.

Cheése Stands Alone XIV

May 10, 2024Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionAirship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Dirigibles, Frida the Fearless, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pulp Fiction, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phyllis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Chapter XX

Lydia stood in the wheelhouse of the airship like she was visiting an old friend, a very old friend. It was a text book reconstruction of the control panel, down to the mahogany framing, analog instruments, chrome highlights and gleaming brass, the outsized rudder wheel, elevator wheel and panel, altimeter, gas board, and engine telegraph dating back almost a hundred years. Pyare could barely constrain himself, a child in a museum, wanting to touch everything and make equivalences to what he knew of current airship dashboards with their plasma displays and their analogous functions. She was relieved by his apparent familiarity with procedures and that it wasn’t all braggadocio. She was going to require a second if they were to accomplish their mission. Pyare, who had accompanied them across the Massif, had decided to continue with them to North Africa. He had no reason to return to Old Orleans now that the gendarmes were after him. Apparently Leon had confessed to everything and exposed the organization’s network, naming names, his among them.

She shouldn’t have been surprised that Serre-Pain and Etugouda were acquainted. They were of a second Pandem generation and wore similar world weary expressions around their eyes. It was during their exchanges of when they had last crossed paths that her real identity was revealed. Not Odette Oday as her identity papers claimed, but Lydia Cheése, airship commander, who was to pilot their mission to Djibouti.

Etigouda had cocked an appraising eye at her and asked, “You’re not related to Nye Cheese, are you? The Queen’s Chancellor for a brief period during the period following 1906 current era, Pax Victoriana Year 69 or some such, and just ahead of the first BMI Pandemic. An obtuse character if there ever was one. He considered himself quite the philosopher but was actually completely mad. The Admiralty Board put an end to his conciliatory concessions with the powerful Romanovs over the administration of Eurasia and its contiguous states, especially in its rivalry with the Empire of China for the Independent Republic of North Pacific Archipelagos, or Manchatka, as it is commonly known.”

Of course she wasn’t. Her family name was pronounced “chase.” And she wasn’t going to get a word in edgewise. The old poet’s idea of a conversation was a monologue, preferably his.

Once they’d gained the sanctuary of the remote farmhouse with its massive stone barn carved into the hillside where the dirigible was penned, Lydia had set about the inspection of the airship, a medium sized transport. She had trained on similar rigs but none quite as old. The principles were the same.

Serre-Pain outlined the plan over the large chart table before their departure. They would be flying unauthorized through the commercial airspace and subject to interception by the customs authorities. It all depended on timing. A Russair cargo dirigible of similar vintage was making its way down on the opposite side of the Massif. He pointed to the map and where the monitoring stations were along their flight path. The one to the south of Autre Lyons was the one they would have to deceive. All cargo transports were required to keep to a strictly enforced schedule as well as elevation. If the Russair transport could be delayed at their last cargo stop, they would have a narrow window to impersonate its flight signature and fool the monitors. That would take some calculation.

Lydia had quickly worked it out, estimating the airspeed of that class of dirigible, especially laden, taking into consideration the time of day, and what upswells of wind current could be expected descending into the littoral plain. It had been a while since she had actually had to work out a flight plan—her staff on the Orinoco II had usually taken care of the navigation requirements, but it was something she felt perfectly confident doing.

“Once we get underway, we’ll have to average 50 knots to meet the point where the airship can intercept the flight path undetected,” she pointed to the spot on the map. “Our cruising altitude will be 200 meters unless we encounter cloud cover. Once we make it past the last monitoring station we will be into the autonomous zone of the Ligurian League, and by then, out of IOTA’s effective jurisdiction.”

The grizzled old snake doctor nodded his head with approval. “But their agents are everywhere and we must remain discrete. Once we determine that the delay has been effected, we can untether.” At Lydia’s questioning look, he added, “We will depend on Serpina for that confirmation.”

Orphaned, a refugee, Serpina had joined them when she was very young, and she had immediately bonded with the mute bear.

And it was true, the young woman had been unusually pensive in the preparation for boarding and getting underway. She had never been on an airship she had confessed to Lydia once the reality of the prospect had been confirmed. And Lydia, too, had sensed the rivalry for Vlady’s attention. The old strongman had once been her hero, and now it was obvious from their affection for each other, that he was Serpina’s as well.

Her reunion with Vlady had been a little awkward because he had been Samson Trismegistus when she knew him as a child, the strongman in the circus in which her ballerina mother had performed as a tightrope walker. Now he was pleased that she had finally realized his identity. He was still a bear of a man, mute as he had not been before. She had remembered his voice as a rough growl. But he had acknowledge with a sage expression that he knew who she was. And he admitted with a nod when she recalled that he had saved her mother and her from the fire in the arena tent set by vindictive clowns and carnies. Serpina had finally spoken up. “He is very happy to be reunited with you.” To which the large man assented.

Lydia understood then the bond between the two of them. Those thousand unasked questions, the ones she wanted to pose, were answered in the conversations during the ride up to the estate of a local landlord and the location of the clandestine dirigible. The six legged steam beetle was a farm tractor used for hauling hay wagons. Serre-Pain had switched carts when he suspected that Leon might be induced to reveal their plan.

From what she could gather from her inquiries of Serre-Pain, and somewhat reluctantly, Serpina, Vlady had been tortured by the Tsar’s secret police, the Oprichniki, for being an enemy of the Russian Empire. After the fire in the big top, he had returned to his hometown in the trans-Caucasus where his mother lay dying. Because he had lived outside the Empire during his travels with the circus, he was accused of being a spy and had had his tongue cauterized with a hot iron. He escaped from the prison camp where he had been left for dead, and made his way across the Carpathians with a group of refugees from Kazakhstan. He chanced upon Dr. Serre-Pain and the Original Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium with the original Madame Ophelia, on the outskirts of Sarajevo. They were being set upon by a gang of Ottoman thugs, and he had intervened. Serre-Pain had been on a mission to provide antivenom to save the life of a young man who had been bitten by a horned viper, the deadliest in the region. From then on, he had accompanied the snake doctor across vast stretches of the post pandemic continent, skirting the BMI devastations and avoiding the authorities. Orphaned, a refugee, Serpina had joined them when she was very young, and she had immediately bonded with the mute bear. It was only later that they had discovered her receptivity as what is commonly called a “vessel.” And that she was implicitly sensitive to Vlady’s frequencies and could read him like a mood ring. In many ways, he was a beacon onto which she could home.

Lydia understood also that she would not be the one to get between Serpina and Vlady, and that Pyare didn’t realize that he might. And considering their latest trek, she was beginning to wonder who was leading whom.

Chapter XXI

Lydia gladly shed the rough cloth of the burnoose when she was given the uniform of a Russair airship captain with the gold and red piping, the square billed cap and its glossy green visor. At least she no longer looked like a refugee, although the uniform was decidedly out of date, like much of the Russair operation. Out of his country togs and in his own Russair uniform, Pyare presented an impressive figure and looked the part of an airship pilot. She had given Vlady a quick lesson on the engine telegraph in the engine room. With Pyare at the helm, she would be free to respond as navigator, rigger, comm operator, and engineer if the need arose. Her crew on her Aerosud luxair, Oricono II, consisted of a minimum of fifty specialists, not counting the passenger attendants, and kitchen staff, but a small transport such as this usually operated with a dozen airshipmen. Serpin, the Doctor, and the poet would stay out of sight in the comm room in the keel until they had made it past the final monitoring station.

Until then they would have to wait for the acknowledgement from Serpina that the Russair ship had been delayed. And Etugouda had not stopped talking, jumping from topic to topic, like a flat stone skipping across a still pond. How he had landed in the Massif, escaping from the displeasure of the Spanish King’s family for a poem he had delivered to the Court. He had found himself penniless and at the mercy of the clans. They were descendants of Fourierists and fugitive Communards who mingled with the locals who were themselves much later descendants of persecuted Huguenots. It was a world outside the law of the Clockwork Commonwealth. They were missing a fool in their midst, he explained, someone who could utter the forbidden of what they all thought. As a poet, he was perfectly suited for the job. He had survived for the last five years on scraps and the generosity of the frequenters of the Lion & Bear, taking up residence in an abandoned shepherd’s stone shelter. His life at the Spanish court was another story. And he thought that he might never return to the normal world of hubris and ambition that his profession required.

“And when you three showed up, I understood that you were an omen, more than met the eye, and the passport out of my exile. But if you must know, it was fated that my friend Jean-Pierre and I should be reunited. It seems like a thousand seasons have passed since we were face to face, and the world has changed since then, drastically. Before I landed in the Spanish Court, I was travelling in the Americas with a group of aristo vagabonds from Greater London when we just barely missed the resumption of the Pan-Am war. The United Slave State Republics led by the Republic of Texas were making claims on Ultra Mezzistotec territory south of the Rio Grande, again, and of course the Bush Whacker Rebellion within their own member states. It wasn’t the only upheaval in the former United States and Territories. And now there is more trouble brewing, this time from the tribes of the Dakota Prairie Republic, if what Jean-Pierre is telling me is true, and I have no reason to doubt him. They’re claiming that since the central government in the District of Columbia is no longer a government entity, that the treaties they signed with the then United States almost two hundred years ago were no longer binding. It is understandable that they might want to leave territory devastated by black mold and the attendant anomalous weather for what they claim as their homeland. They are seeking the return of their lands from the southern Appalachians to the Mississippi. Needless to say the Republic of Tennessee Georgia, known to everyone as ROTNG, and its citizens have rejected the idea. I remember when this claim was first broached in their pleas for support from the Admiralty right after Pandem II and during a meeting of the newly formed Conglomeration Of Affiliated Nations of which the USSR was not a part”

The snake doctor looked directly at her and nodded gravely. It was time to spark up.

Lydia had had it with the self-inflated gasbag. She was in no mood to listen to prattle about current affairs or world history, especially when it was beginning to veer into speculation and conspiracy theories. She stared at the ceiling of the observation room at the rear of the gondola. Above her in their rigid shell were the gas bags she was concerned about. Unlike the older models that used hydrogen, this airship had been retrofitted with the less volatile biogen gas cells, standard for at least the last half century, if she remembered her history correctly. Biogen pellets were mixed with water at the base of the cells which caused the release of the biogas that inflated the biosilk envelopes. They had taken on enough ballast to mimic a laden transport, and the bug drives were primed to bring the H2O solution to a boil, and off-gassing the steam to spin the two outboard turbines that would propel the airship. The bug drives, as the engines were called, operated on Euler’s theoretical equation of a relation between the velocity, pressure and density of a moving fluid using a system based on the Rayleigh-Benard convection dynamic. Or so she remembered from Basic Aeronautics, a class that was guaranteed to put her to sleep, the drone of the lecturer’s voice that stupefying.

Etugouda’s voice was having a similar effect and she snapped her eyes open and shook her head. Now he was going on about the reason behind the first Black Mold Infestation, often referred to as BMI One or Pandem I, that had killed millions of people and devastated vast tract of the Northern Hemisphere.

“Many would like to place the blame on the Admiralty for the epidemic, the first one. I don’t directly believe that they were behind it, but they did capitalize on it to consolidate their power into the Clockwork Commonwealth. What was the cause of this poison that was sown into our soil, killing the plant life and its attendant biosystem? Historically we know that in the current era 1906 or Pax Victoriana Year 69, if you wish, the earth’s orbit passed through the tail of a gigantic comet, a flaming planetoid. The resultant diffusion of the meteoric matter through the aether sheathed the northern part of the globe with its alien presence, effacing the existing flora and fauna. Many believe that it was an invasion from another world that sought to extinguish us. Scientists, in what was then known as the Prussian Alliance, before it became a part of Greater London, developed a biocide that neutralized the black mold and stopped it’s advance. Unfortunately the solution had the unexpected side effect of being a petrophage, and before. . . .”

Now Lydia was in her history class at the Air Academy, another lecture course that had bored her to tears. She was about to counter what, to her, sounded like ICER propaganda when she noticed that Serpina had crossed the room to say something to Serre-Pain. The snake doctor looked directly at her and nodded gravely. It was time to spark up.

Next Time: Citily and the Republic of Corsardinia

Cheése Stands Alone XIII

March 24, 2024Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionAirship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Dirigibles, Frida the Fearless, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pulp Fiction, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phylis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Chapter XVIII

Lydia had had enough. The old man, the poet Emile Etugouda was trying her patience. Not that she wasn’t thankful that he was helping them evade the clan militias by offering a shortcut to their destination, but he wouldn’t shut up. He talked about himself endlessly, the famous authors he knew, as well as his friends in high places. Lydia recognized some of the names he’d mentioned from the Emperor’s court in Rio Rio, but they were mostly from another era, her grandfather’s generation. She had never heard of the poets he mentioned, but that was no surprise. Even in her schooling, she had never been interested in the sentimental and fantastical, the frivolous. And for all she knew, what he was claiming could be a complete fiction.

The first instance that warned her of things to come was his forgetfulness. And since the trail they were following to get to Autre Lyons depended on his remembering of the epic poem, La Reccourci, a good memory was essential. They had traveled a couple of miles before Etugouda realized that they had taken a wrong turn because he had conflated “hair” with “lair of the Maiden” which was actually a detail from a completely different epic altogether. And from there they had veered off in another direction only to be confronted by a sheer wall of water at the top of the winding stream along whose banks they had trudged with increasing difficulty.

That was frustrating enough, but combined with his insistence on reading their auras and relating what the colors said about their personalities, it was grating on her nerves. Here they were desperate to reconnect with Professor Serre-Pain, and their guide, such as he was, wanted to play parlor games. He’d first fixed on Pyare as it was his suspicion he wished to allay, and because a male, make an ally.

“But enough about myself. How about you, my boy, what is your name? You seem to be the least out of place of your trio. Are you from these parts?”

“Pyare,” the young man spoke cautiously, “Pyare Aucarray. I grew up in the suburbs of Old Orleans. I worked in the fields in the valley, summers when I was going to school. We would often venture into the Massif to go hunting or swim in the streams.”

“Yes, yes, I sense that about you. Rugged orange, adventurous, with a hint of yellow to underscore your easygoing nature but also energetic red highlights. You are at peak spectrum. You have great potential and I would assume that you have many talents that are just waiting to be put to the test. Have you ever considered flying?”

Pyare looked askance as if he’d been asked a trick question. “How do you mean?”

“As an airship pilot, of course, you are just the caliber of man that would do well in the Navair trade.”

Pyare threw Lydia a triumphant look. “Exactly.”

Lydia suppressed her guffaw. “An airship pilot, imagine that,” she said at Serpina’s snigger. “Had we known, we could have flown to Autre Lyons instead of bumping into dead ends and following false nonexistent trails.”

Etugouda ignored her sarcasm and turned his attention to Serpina. “And what did you say your name was again?”

Serpina threw a glance at Lydia before answering. “I didn’t say, but it is Addy.”

“Yes, yes, Addy, there is something about you I can’t quite place.” The old poet ran a hand over his large mustache. “ There is a bit of the blue about you, a mysteriousness, a depth unfathomable, a spirituality. And a green that speaks of a garrulous nature. Also an underlying yellow, much like our young man here.” He smiled as Serpina’s cheeks pinked, and nodded, “As I suspected.”

When he looked at Lydia his eyebrows drew together and shaded his fierce discerning eyes. “But you, I cannot fathom. Your papers say your name is Odette Oday, if I heard correctly, and yet somehow that does not fit. And your credentials say you are a third class worker, but that is belied by your appearance and demeanor. As Conan at the Lion & Bear said, you are too shiny, and indeed you are. You radiate a dark red, almost purple, which mean you are not only determined but spontaneous, grounded but not easily cowed by convention. There are undulations of orange which I take to be of a cautious nature. As well some green around the edges that would indicate someone who is comfortable commanding others.”

Lydia returned the old poet’s gaze. There was a smugness about his pronouncements that galled her, something that she encountered mostly from men who were always in a hierarchal mode, like somehow they knew better or were better. Her boss and nemesis, Commodore Crenshaw, at Aerosud Headquarters, held a similar attitude toward her and the other female airship pilots. Airship commander was still a very much male dominated occupation. There was also something decidedly archaic about the old man, as if he belonged to another era. His clothing was a patchwork of styles, the tilted hat, the bulky scarf draped around his shoulders like a mantle of office, and the rough canvas jacket of many pockets, a faded blue. His trousers, patched at the knees, were cinched at the waist by a wide purple sash. The cuffs, turned up at the ankles, offered a glimpse of dark gnarled toes shod in sandals. A sturdy staff in one hand and the dark satchel slung over the other shoulder marked someone long experienced in travelling afoot.

“Your assessments of our personalities are entertaining and diverting, Monsieur Etugouda, but so far we seem to be taking one step forward and two steps back, and you have not brought us any closer to Autre Lyons. As for the palette of colors you ascribed to me, their combination would not be the most complimentary. Are you saying my aura is muddy?”

“Again, your wit distinguishes you from who you appear to be,” the old poet chortled, “And you are right to be skeptical. Your impatience is understandable but not entirely correct.” He pointed to the water cascading down the side of the gorge. “This waterfall is the Maiden’s hair of the poem. The next verse instructs us to push the hair aside to speak into her ear and ask for her protection and guidance.”

Lydia glanced up at the roaring falls and then at Etugouda as if to say, “and just how are we going to do that?”

Serpina had gone ahead. “I think I see a path up to the ledge above.” She was pointing up the sheer incline. “There, up there to the left, there seems to be a gap!” she insisted.

“A gap,” the poet smiled mischievously, “Something like an ear, perhaps? An orifice?”

Lydia followed where Serpina’s finger was pointing. “How are we going to get up there? We’re not mountain goats.”

Pyare proved that that he was true to his colors, energetic and adventuresome, by ducking through the underbrush to the base of the escarpment. The others, followed with Lydia bringing up the rear.

As if a natural feature of the landscape, a faintly discernable narrow track ran up the face of the cliff at an oblique angle. “Ah,” Etigouda exclaimed, “the nape of her neck will lead you to the lobe of her ear, as the poems says!”

Pyare had already started climbing cautiously, placing a tenuous hold on the craggy face of the sheer cliff and a careful foot on the narrow jutting edge. Once around a slight bend, the path appeared less treacherous although the roaring fall of water and the mist it raised was daunting enough. Wrapped in a cloak, Serpina’s lithe young frame seemed not to be troubled by the narrowness of the path. Etugouda glanced over his shoulder at Lydia before starting up. Lydia’s eyes traveled the path mapping its contours to the shaded terminus near the top of the falls. She looked at her feet as if willing them to begin their ascent. I’m an airship commander, she thought to herself, why am I spending so much time on the ground. She was out of her element. She needed to be in the air.

Chapter XIX

Lydia stood alone, off to one side of her companions, and gazed across the valley and at the air traffic in the sky above it. She was looking at the north south commercial air corridor up from Autre Lyons. Dirigibles, rigs and semi rigs, private silrigs as the Self-Inflatable Long Range Gliders were known, and even a few solid shell low altitude maneuverable dirigibles called flitters, usually in the service of the authorities, flecked the horizon like so many large dark birds. Lydia felt pangs of longing at the sight of them. She had not been at the helm of an airship in almost a month. A strong wind pushed the tall grass of the hillside where she was standing and tugged at the edges of her burnoose. South, she assumed was the direction of Autre Lyons.

The epic poem had been right she had to grudgingly admit. And she’d been prepared to give Etugouda his due but for the fact that he was too busy expounding on facets of the poem and how it reflected the geography far more ancient than the poem itself. And that this path had been used by humans and animals for tens of thousands of years to travel across the Massif to the valley below which was why water nymphs figure so prominently in the ancient local folklore because they were recognized as the source of life and regeneration. And on and on like a man in love with what he was saying, he kept up his chatter even in the roar of the waterfall as they passed under it and on up a narrow cleft to the crest of the ridge and the grassy rolling hills below. Or maybe their guide had known of the shortcut all along and the epic poem was merely a fanciful charade. That had yet to be determined.

At the forefront of Lydia’s thinking was how to make their way to the urban center and what to do once they got there. They were all in the same mess, it was no longer just about her flight from the scrutiny of IOTA to a safe refuge in Rio Rio and the court of the Empire of Brazil. She would honor her agreement with the snake doctor and pilot his clandestine airship to Djibouti and the capitol of ICER conspiracists. The other pressing concern was her hunger. That was proving to be a big distraction. And did nothing to improve her humor.

In the distance among a cluster of trees at the edge of the grass fields, the angled arrangement of earthen roof tiles was discernable. A dwelling would indicate that some kind of road or thoroughfare might be nearby. Serpina was already making her way down the slope in that direction and Lydia naturally fell in behind her. The grass slapped against her thighs and she stumbled over the loose uneven ground. She glanced back at Pyare whose strides soon overtook her and brought him up beside Serpina. Etugouda struggled with the descent, one hand holding his hat in place, his satchel slung over his shoulder bouncing on his hip, staff a third leg.

Lydia scramble up a little rise in the hillside at the top of which Pyare and Serpina had stopped. Below them was a double rut leading down. In the distance she heard faintly what sounded like a steam engine accompanied by the sound of machinery. Etugouda’s labored breathing made her turn and extend her hand to grasped his and pull him up. His moustache widened in a smile reflected in the twinkle of his eyes. “Not so muddy,” he rasped as he reached the top.

Already Serpina was following the dusty rut, moving determinedly, almost possessed, Pyare on her heels with a concerned frown. Lydia had little choice but to chase after them, leaving the old man to make his own way down. At one point beneath an arc of oaks, the road opened into a wide obviously well-traveled stretch. Serpina increased her pace to a steady jog, her mouth set in grim determination, eyes intent on the road ahead, a hound on a scent. She was oblivious to Etugouda’s entreaties to wait or Pyare’s alarmed appeals that she tell him why or what she was doing. At the sight of a bend in the road ahead, the young girl started a sprint, the flounce of her long skirt held high so as to not impede her speed.

Lydia picked up her pace to a run, matching her stride to Pyare’s. She rounded the bend at his shoulder. Ahead she could see Serpina racing toward an antique six legged steam beetle attached to a large wagon. Two figures were standing next to the multilegged contraption from the pre-Pandem II years, the exhaust stack sending up little gray puffs of smoke. Serpina extended her arms as she reached them.

And Lydia laughed, stopping in her tracks to catch her breath. She recognized the two men, one tall and lanky, and the other, bear-like, stocky and wide. It was Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain and Vlady. And as she followed Serpina up to them, she caught Vlady’s wide grin. She had so much to talk to him about, so many questions. If only he could talk. The Professor’s kind eyes smiled at her, at her relief and exhilaration.

She turned as the old poet, gasping and wheezing, came up behind her. The look on his face was one of complete astonishment, an expression she would have never expected from the old claven, as know-it-alls are often called. She heard Serre-Pain announce his own surprise, “Emile Etugouda?” To which their guide replied, “Serre-Pain, I should have known.”

Next Time: Flight Of The Long Bird

Cheése Stands Alone XII

January 30, 2024Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionAirship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Dirigibles, Frida the Fearless, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pulp Fiction, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phylis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Chapter XVII

The stone threshold led to the open door and the darkened interior of the public house. The air was close and smoky as Lydia Cheése stepped onto the roughhewn floor. The amber glow of lights, plasma based or bacterry powered, even some organic bougies illuminated wide tables and the chatter of voices of those around them. Delectable odors made her mouth water.

A large broad shouldered woman, fists to hips, blocked any further progress. Pyare spoke to her a few words in a local dialect. The woman’s eyes narrowed and reconsidered what Pyare had told her and what she was seeing, Lydia and Serpina looking very rough. She inclined her head in the direction of the kitchen and had them follow to an alcove nearby. There was a bench and a stool. From a doorway opposite, the large kitchen fireplace exuded heat. She addressed Pyare with a hand held out.

Pyare turned to Lydia, the hood of her burnoose still drawn close around her face, “She will feed us but we must pay. You have Victorines. Or better, the local currency. They are very suspicious of Victorians.”

Serpina stepped forward. “I have a few old francs.” She retrieved the bills from her wallet, handing them to the woman, and smiled. The woman’s severe demeanor softened and she smiled back as if entranced. She was older, with a pushed in face and large eyes, greying dark hair pulled together under a scarf. “Yes, I speak standard little. I was maid many years in Nouveau Old Orleans. I am Mira. Please sit. I will be back.”

Lydia’s eyes questioned Pyare. He seemed nervous. The murmur of voices from the main room of the Bear & Lion had quieted as the newcomers were silently scrutinized. Serpina sensed Pyare’s anxiety and stood close to him, in his shadow.

“Do you trust her?” Lydia had quickly scanned their environment. A large room occupied by a dozen or more people, eating, drinking, talking. It all seemed very congenial. Until they arrived. A few, men, were on their feet and moving around, some to an adjacent room that also appeared to be occupied.

“Of course. Once we crossed the threshold, the rules of the clan do not allow any harm to come to us. The food will be simple but good. It is once we leave here that I’m worried about. I see some very unfriendly faces at those tables.”

“I’d rather not worry about that on an empty stomach. They can’t all be hostile to us, can they?”

“They will be if they think we are police spies. Or worse, refugees.”

The woman named Mira returned with a large pot and three bowls which she set on a barrelhead nearby. Ladling out portions of murky stew she passed the bowls around. Lydia looked at the congealed brown and orange mass with certain revulsion. She was hungry, the smell was savory but unfamiliar. The thought of it passing through her mouth made her gag involuntarily. Pyare looked at her in surprise as both he and Serpina were already swallowing their first bites. Mira looked at her askance as if it were a comment on the dish.

Pyare nodded vigorously and pointed at the bowl so that the woman would understand that he thought it delectable. Serpina, as well, nodded her appreciations. “Mushrooms,” she said, her eyes widening. “Sausage!” Pyare chimed in.

Each word was like a stab in the gut, but after such reviews, how could she refuse, especially under the returned suspicious gaze of their hostess. She nudged a small portion from the bowl to her lips and past her teeth. A warm sensation flooded her mouth from the surprisingly rich texture of the morsel. It did not taste as unpleasant as it looked. There was a complexity to the flavors that she had sampled only in the most expensive restaurants in Rio Rio. This was not the same old remolded morselized biotein fare that was common throughout the Commonwealth, fauxfillets of fizsh and strings of rehydrated chibz, or ubiquitous biotein patty pazetree puffs sold in take outlets and automats everywhere. Except in the Massif, apparently. The first bite was followed by a second bite although she was uncertain what to do with the first bit of sausage. She closed her eyes and swallowed so that she could tell herself she had done so without looking.

It wasn’t long before Lydia was running a finger along the insides of the bowl to get every bit of the stew and unhesitatingly accepted the large stein of fermented broth proffered by an approving Mira. Lydia felt full as she had never felt before. And drowsy. If it hadn’t been for the commotion in the main room of the house, she would have drifted off to catch up on much needed sleep.

A man in a tilted hat repeated what he had just proclaimed. “It smells like destruction, I tell you!” He was a round man, tall, with shockingly blazing eyes and a large unruly white moustache overhanging his mouth. Another man seated near him took offense. “No, friend, it smells like good food and warm bodies, especially those of women!” His assertion was met with a few guffaws and a comradely “Hear, hear.”

Lydia stepped between them. “Let me show you mine.” She proffered the identification card with one hand and with the other placed the twin tips of the viper blade under his chin.

“It smells like an evil wind that bodes no good!” the round man continued.

“Maybe it’s a broken wind,” someone else offered to a chorus of laughter.

“He should know” offered another, “He’s a bag of wind. Blow back to your mountain hut, old man, and take your bitter nuts with you!”

“Yar, that he is! And always with the same complaint!” The tone was a little more aggressive. “You don’t belong here. Go back to your wallow!” The accusation had come from a man who had entered from the adjacent room. He was large with a shaggy head of mouse brown hair.

“Ruin! I can smell it in the air. The foul stench of annihilation!”

“Blame it on the wind. It’s blowing your stinking breath back in your face!” Another man in a great coat had stood up menacingly. “We don’t need your kind around here! You are stirring your disturbance in the wrong place!”

Lydia looked puzzled. She wasn’t certain what was happening. What had started as banter had turned abusive. She could tell by Pyare’s posture that he was on the brink of fight or flight. Only Serpina seemed unconcerned, a slight smile turning up the edges of her mouth.

“It is us, all of us, who bring this doom to ourselves. Not the Clockwork Commonwealth or its client states, or the sanctioned republics, but we, the humans who comprise these states of mind, the squirming grubs, the microbic slime of this planet. We are bent on destruction, on self-destruction!” The round man in the tilted hat held a finger up in testament. “And why? Because of time! We have too much of it. Like misers we want to acquire it all, all the time. And what do we do with all this time? We claim that it is necessary for our own self-improvement and satisfaction! Yet look at us, do we look satisfied? If this is improvement, it is only preparation for the grave! The entire mammal world, with one exception, has never once given time to consider how to improve themselves. What can we say about their lack of discontent?”

“Get out with you words,” another man spoke up, “they’re spoiling the taste of my food.”

A few of the men at another table pushed back their bench and stood. The mouse haired man advanced toward the tilted hat who stood defiant in his righteousness. “I’ll teach you to curdle the cream!” he said threateningly.

“Stop!” It was Serpina. She had stepped out of the shadows. She was still smiling, and the men were diverted. “This man has freedom to speak his discontent. It is the winter of his days, one that we will all face, yet you want to deny him this fundamental right to speak the fruits of his experience. Why reject what he is saying when you could engage and glean the substance of his meaning?”

Mira had come to stand by Serpina, Lydia and Pyare cautiously following. “Yes, leave the old man alone, he has a right to his demons.”

The tilted hat bowed to the hostess. “I am only old because I have run out of time, but in my heart burns the eternal flame of love.”

Mouse hair glared at them and then glanced at the standing men around him. “Who are these intruders? Spies, refugees? I’ll want to see you papers!”

“Conan, you haven’t the authority. These are guests under my roof.”

“We’ll see about that.” He approached Serpina, his hand out demanding. “Your papers.”

Lydia stepped between them. “Let me show you mine.” She proffered the identification card with one hand and with the other placed the twin tips of the viper blade under his chin.

“Odette Oday?” Conan gulped and swallowed his insistence. He blinked at the passport. “Third Class Worker?” Stepping back, he shook his head. “Maybe those two.” He pointed with his chin at Serpina and Pyare. “But you, you’re too shiny. Except for the mud on your face, you could be a Victorian, an IOTA spy, for all I know.”

Serpina laughed. “What could IOTA possibly want with a congregation of unwashed farmers and trappers smelling of the field and the wood? Are you plotting a revolution, listening to Commodore Jack and his ICER propaganda over unsanctioned broadcast frequencies on illegally modified boxes? Here in your sylvan redout, you are the powerless of the powerless. The only thing that protects you is your ignorance. Perhaps that is the stench of ruin to which this fellow is referring. Furthermore, we are travelers, not displaced persons. Our path was not chosen for us thus we must follow the one we can find. What is our goal I cannot say only that it is not found here.” With that she bowed to Mira and clasped the woman’s hands in hers. “Thank you for your hospitality, sister.”

Once outside, Lydia caught up with Serpina who seemed propelled by a determination to get away as quickly as possible. “What was all that in there?” What were you doing?”

Serpina shook her head. “Not now. We are still in danger. We have to get out of sight.”

A shout was raised from the house. Pyare on Lydia’s heels, they turned as one expecting the worst. It was the man in the tilted hat hurrying toward them.

Slightly out of breath, he wagged a finger at Serpina. “A foolish thing to do. Stir up a hornet’s nest. They are used to my disputations. They insult me and then forget that I am about. Or should I say they think they can forget what I’ve said, yet I’ve lodged a bug in their berets. Over time their objections are less vociferous although they enjoy the wit of their insults too much to ever stop.” He smiled under the wide brush of his moustache. “Thank you for coming to my defense.” His brow creased, “But your unfortunate disclosure of their anti-government activities has put you in grave danger.”

Pyare confronted the tilted hat. “Who are you?”

Bushy eyebrows raised in surprise, “Of course, how rude of me. Allow me to introduce myself,” hat doffed, “Abraham Etugouda, poet, world traveler, originally from Iberia, citizen in the Republic of Letters.”

Serpina spoke up. “Mr. Etugouda, perhaps you can help us. We are trying to reach. . . .”

“Wait,” Pyare stepped in, “How do we know we can trust him with where we’re going?”

Etugouda gave a body shaking laugh. “I’m an old man everyone thinks is crazy. And who would believe me? And why would I betray you? I’m a stranger here myself. Let me repay your kindness. Tell me your destination, perhaps I can offer some assistance.”

“Autre Lyons,” Lydia replied, “It is imperative that we reach it within the next twenty four hours. Unfortunately following the regular route through the Massif will not allow that.”

Tilted hat nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, yes, I think it can be done. But we must move quickly.” He herded them across the stone bridge and up the hillside to a copse of oaks. “The men at the Bear & Lion have a transmitter in the storeroom. They will have alerted the militia by now. The roads will be watched.”

“What can we do? If you know the path, tell us!” Lydia insisted.

“I will recite a poem.”

“How will a poem ever get us to Autre Lyons?”

“It is an epic poem of local provenance called La Reccourci. It tells the story of a brave young woman who follows an ancient hunter’s path over the Massif to the valley beyond in order to save her father’s life.”

“I don’t see how that is helpful? ”

“As I said, I am a world traveler and a poet. I travel the world collecting the epic poems of various regions, especially epics that describe the topography of the locale. This particular epic contains a map, you might say, landmarks, and directions. It is of the genre known as GPS, Grandes Poemes Secour.”

“Your reciting the poem will require you to accompany us,” Pyare stated suspiciously, “Don’t you have it written down?”

The poet’s moustache raised in a grin and he pointed above his ear. “It’s all up here! I’ve memorized hundreds of epics.” He gazed at their incredulous expressions. “Now if I can just remember how it begins.”

Next Time: The Tides Of History

Cheése Stands Alone XI

November 8, 2023Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionAirship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Clockwork Commenwealth, Crime Fiction, IOTA, Jean-Pierre Serre Pain, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Pulp Fiction, Pyare, Serpina, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phylis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Chapter XXV

Lydia felt dirty. She hadn’t washed in days, really washed bio clean in weeks. Her pores were caked. And a hard rain was falling, chilling the air and blocking the light. They had made it to the chapel just as the rain began. The primary reason the chapel was abandoned was that it did not have a roof. A stone archway and overgrown trellis provided a refuge of sorts out of the rain from the downpour. Pyare had removed the slot velo’s bioweave tarpaulin from the boot and they clustered under it as large drops splashed in the pooling rain at their feet.

Serpina had withdrawn into herself, huddled, arms folded acrost her chest. Pyare was agitated, scowling and fidgeting. They had hidden their vehicles in the underbrush overtaking the crumbling stone walls at the edge of a deep darker wood. Now they awaited a let up in the weather. They could travel cross country following the occasional stream or animal track and the contours of the landscape keeping to a southwest direction. They would undoubtedly run into clansmen. Everything depended on which of the clans they encountered. If they were Fourierists or Communards, there could be a problem. Briefly that was Pyare’s plan and he assured Lydia that he had an acutely sensitive sense of direction.

Lydia had not been impressed. With the best of luck it would take them at least two days to reach Autre Lyons. The biobars were not enough to sustain them over that time.

“We’ll have to go raw,” he’d offered cavalierly, “We’ll forage, berries, wild fruit, gardens, maybe even fish.”

The thought still alarmed her. Organic material. Lydia shuddered.

Why am I here? She stared at her hands clasped before her around her knees. It was simple enough, or started out that way. She remembered her father as the most reasonable of men, except. There was a flash point. She’d heard stories, and witnessed once while her grandmother, Brie, was dying, the incredible energy of his anger. The last time she saw him was when he wished her good luck as she left to train at the Admiralty Air Academy. Brie had passed the year before and left her son a small fortune, large even by Commonwealth standards. He was never around much, traveling. She never really knew him as an adult. And now ten years later she was a hunted fugitive because she was looking for him.

Jack Cheése had retired as a ranking officer in the Admiralty Medical Corps, a top bio research clinician with the rank of Commodore, as had been his father, Harvey T., and the aged patriarch, great grandfather Bart who had been in the forefront in the fight against the global black mold infestation and variant spoors which some had claimed was an invasion from a hostile planet, disproved by great grandfather and his formulated bacterial strain that neutralized the spread of the invasive rapidly reproducing mold. Bart was one of the heroes of Pandem One, as they called it, a team of men in white lab coats conducting tests, analyzing, experimenting, failing, succeeding, and finally producing a strain that would stop the replication. From that work a number of novel bacterial strains were developed and later refined to serve industry and society. A second outbreak, long after the great Bart had retired, of a mutating fractal variant that further devastated large regions of the globe, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, wiping out vast tracts of forests and grass lands down to mineral soil. Grandfather, Harvey T, was involved in what was dubbed Pandem Two, but primarily in research on the campus of the Mendel Institute for Biological Research which had developed the reproductive drive, the technology that revolutionized modern airship transportation. She had never learned what her father’s work involved only that it was top secret. His retirement from the Corps was unexpected, hardly anyone retired from the Admiralty, but was attributed to his mother’s death.

When she returned at holiday break after her first semester she found him gone, He had disappeared, leaving not a word. His friends in Rio Paulo were mystified. Everyone feared the worst, an accident. Polite inquiries were made with the police, hospitals, a missing person’s report filed. IOTA was notified as he was a retired Admiralty officer. The men in the black hats had interviewed her, asking their probing insinuating questions. She was put off by their arrogant demeanor.

And then it was time to return to the Academy overlooking the dunes of Gdansk. She’d considered dropping out when she received a message in the most unlikely place. She had wandered into a bookstore in a plaza near the family home in Rio Rio which everyone pronounced Rio-io. She was browsing for something to keep her mind off the worry for her missing father and resigning her dream of becoming an airship captain.

She’d picked up a book titled Don’t Tell Anyone, the story of an illicit affair late in the reign of the Queen, around the time of her rapprochement with her nephew, Wilhelm. It was by the bestselling Commonwealth author Anthony Blair, also available on voice box. It was on a table display of a new memoir of a Panam War veteran titled, I Am Alive. She was also attracted by a rather bold spine that read Have Faith in large gilt letters.

Lydia had returned to the Triple A, as the cadets called it, and resumed her studies and training under the sponsorship of the Brazilian airship behemoth, Aerosud Luxury Air Ships. Friends in Rio Rio kept her apprised of any news of which there was none. Jack Cheése had disappeared without a trace. The Emperor’s secret service had closed its investigation. She had friends and in-laws at the Court in Nova Brasilia because of her Guzman connection, her husband being one of that royal clan. No one knew anything or was saying anything if they knew. He was missing and presumed dead.

She had graduated at the top of her class with distinction as well as a gold medal in combat arts in her final year, defeating the reigning champion, her Russair rival, Karla Kola. Her compulsory two year service in the Admiralty Air Corps was spent in an intelligence brigade stationed at the Clockwork Commonwealth’s embassy compound in Greater Houllas in the Slave State Republic of Texas in charge of the lighter than air transport pens, an assignment certainly well below her abilities. She did distinguish herself during the Bushwhacker Rebellion, ferrying hostages to safety after the ceasefire. She should have been stationed at the Admiralty Headquarters in Greater London, but that post went to Karla Kola, her raven haired nemesis. The feeling that she had been singled out, sidelined, isolated from the real intelligence action stayed with her through her service. Upon discharge she began her career as an airship pilot, rising in rank to Captain with the honorific of Commander when she was put in charge of the large luxury dirigibles.

It was while she was stationed in Greater Houllas that she’d first heard the rumors of an anti-government agitator known as Commodore Jack. She had gone to the favelas that had grown up around Greater Houllas and found herself in an early American artifact shop. The shopkeeper, obviously a native with long white hair and a scar on his forehead, had eyed her suspiciously. She browsed among the artifacts of the old West, native bead work and antique weapons, arrowheads and real skin moccasins. On the door to the shop was an announcement for a boxcast titled The Queen Is Light, The Victorian Mirage, one whose subject would be banned in the CC, by an underground boxcaster who went by the name of Commodore Jack. She noted that the broadcast was on a prohibited band, one most certainly monitored by IOTA as not only was it illegal to tune in to the frequency but it required some illegal modifications to the box receiver filter. In the lawless USSR, those prohibitions were regularly ignored, despite the treaty with the Crown.

The modifications were easy enough to make on an unsanctioned box she bought on the black market. She recognized the voice of the boxcast immediately and it shock her so that she had to power down the device. Once the spinning of her thoughts subsided and the realization that it was her father’s voice, she tuned back in to the banned frequency. Yes, it was her father spewing toxic chemtrails, a soup of gibberish antigovernment conspiracy theories and ICER propaganda, and invective against the royal family, especially the crown prince, Victor, whom Commodore Jack claimed was a hologram. It was trash and she was mortified that it was in her father’s voice. She soon learned, after discrete inquiries, that Commodore Jack’s boxcasts were immensely popular in the unaffiliated states of North America and on the African and Indian subcontinents. She couldn’t comprehend that her father would subscribe to such sloppy thinking and base idiocy. It disgusted her.

Nonetheless, she was determined to find him. Perhaps he had been kidnapped by anti-monarchists and rebel environmentalists who were predicting a climate change that would cover the earth in glaciers. She felt that she had to talk to him, convince him of his error, and if all else failed, commit him to a care facility in Rio Rio. Her first inquiries resulted in visits from the men in the black hats with more of their insinuations. She realized then that she was under surveillance by IOTA.

She had hit upon a solution. She remembered that her father read the London Tines, a micro-macro manufactured food gastro culture magazine, religiously. He read every word even the classified ads at the back of the magazine. She had placed her notice asking for information to his whereabouts using her father’s childhood nickname of “Pepper” along with a tidy reward to be paid in Victorines.

The answer had come in the person of Jean-Pierre Sere Pain and his itinerant medicine snake show at which point she was effectively kidnapped to pilot an unregistered airship from the vicinity of Autre Lyons to Djibouti in the Horn Of Africa Republic, a rat’s nest of air pirates, Icers, and anti-Commonwealth discontents, on a mission of mercy. In return for her assistance, she would be reunited with her father or at least receive assurances of his proof of life.

Which was how she found herself listening to the rain beat on the tarp covering her and her two companions and watching pearls of light form along its frayed edge.

Chapter XXVI

A house stood attended by large oaks and surrounded by a gaggle of geese, picking and rooting and disputing loudly suddenly alert to their presence. The house was quiet in itself and a lazy canopy of smoke hovered about the chimney and indicated that it was inhabited. The road leading up to it appeared well traveled and as Lydia and her companions drew closer they could make out a faded signboard hanging over the entrance. It depicted a lion and a bear in an embrace, either dancing or fighting. The geese raised a ruckus and reared back with their wings flapping in challenge to the intruders.

The trio had spent the previous day slogging through the underbrush. Once the rain had let up, they had left the soggy shelter of the abandoned chapel, their destination, the vague misty shape of the steep sided razorback ridge of the upper Massif. They made their way slowly, laboriously, climbing higher, scurrying across the barren fields from copse to copse of trees and in the shadows of large boulders. They’d watched the air activity taking place below, close to where they had just left, from their vantage point on the steep hillside. The gendarmes had deployed observation blimps and light gliders that circled over the tree tops like birds of prey.

Once the sun went down, they had had to take shelter under a rock outcropping on the upside of the slope. The bio energy bars had long been devoured and their trek having itself devoured the consumed energy, they ended up hungrier than ever. Fortunately Pyare had had the presence of mind to roll up the tarp, slinging it over his shoulder, and they huddled under it, keeping close to each other and sharing their exhaustion and sweaty body heat.

The earthy scents assailed Lydia’s nostrils. It reminded her of bivouacking with the other cadets in her squad at the Air Academy. It had been pleasant because of the camaraderie of her peers. And she didn’t dream that years later she’d ever be called to experience exposure to the elements again. She didn’t feel like making small talk, numb as she was from the encroaching cold. And Pyare’s enthused optimism had retreated to dour brooding. Yet Serpina’s physical closeness to the young man had turned her cheeks rosy, eyes half closed as if she were seeing something at a distance.

The discomfort of the makeshift shelter had caused them to continuously shift position and displace previously advantageous perches in trying to seek some comfort on the rough rocky ground. Finally, Pyare rolled himself up into a ball and Serpina spooned him, Lydia having no other choice but to wrap her arms and the trap around both of them.

First light found them cresting a ridge and staring down into a rough rock strewn valley coursed with ravines and fissures. Conifers and oak groves dotted the rolling expanse as clumps of bright greenery.

Serpina had pointed down to a layer of smoke hovering above a row of oaks. There was a small settlement in the crook of a paved road. They knew that they could get food in the village but also ran the risk of being detained by the local militia. They’d agreed to keep to the fields and the hillside, avoiding the inhabitants if at all possible. They could easily be mistaken for refugees and turned over to the authorities.

Pyare had gone ahead of them to reconnoiter, looking for a farm or an orchard where food might be found. He’d returned shortly grinning, a smear of purple around his mouth. He had found an abandoned vineyard and had retrieved a few clusters of grapes the birds and animals had missed.

Serpina had plucked the fruit eagerly. Lydia was a little more cautious. Ingesting unprocessed organic matter was something she was not wild about. She had brought the deep purple pearl to her nose to gauge its scent, but that told her nothing. She put it in her mouth and rolled it around her taste buds. Earthy, but then she was covered in dirt so why should it matter. She bit down. The liquid that filled her mouth shocked her and she’d almost spit it out. A sweet sourish taste that wasn’t entirely unpleasant led her to sample a few more until she was no longer concerned that the fruit was not factory grown.

Somewhat refreshed they’d followed a stream from which Lydia had wet a handkerchief to wipe some of the dirt from her face but according to Serpina’s comments, now her face was streaked with mud and she looked like a wild savage.

It was about then that they crossed a little stone bridge to find themselves before the public house at the sign of the bear and the lion guarded by a flock of geese. Accompanying the honking fowl was the aroma of cooking food which hasten their advance at the behest of their stomachs.

Lydia in the lead paid no heed to Pyare’s comment that they were about to encounter one of the clans, the most dreaded of them all, the Ancient Order of the Phalange, if the sign board said what he thought it meant.

Next Time: The Ancient Order Has An Odor

Cheése Stands Alone X

September 26, 2023Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionAirship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Clockwork Commenwealth, Crime Fiction, IOTA, Jean-Pierre Serre Pain, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Pulp Fiction, Pyare, Serpina, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phylis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Chapter XXII

Lydia Cheése, Airship Commander, cast an eye across the small fenced courtyard cluttered with an array of rusted hulks and parts to land conveyances. The chaos was reflective of the way she saw her own predicament, also chaotic. She had been abducted into this other world less than two weeks earlier. She had been grasping at straws in finding ways to reach her father. She was desperate, and that straw had floated her up the Loire to Oldest Orleans, from whose ramshackle suburbs she was trying to flee. Now she was looking at sorry excuses for transportation. That wasn’t the only thing that made her heart race. There was no telling how soon the two policemen they had overcome and trussed up would be discovered and raise the alarm.

Serpina stood off to one side as Pyare pushed open the iron door to the large rusted metal shed with broken windows replaced by the thick webs of the gallows spiders and a faded sign that read “Steam Is Clean. There was the stink of lubricant and bio sludge among the innards of bio drives tinged with surviving colonies, some as large as a hand, iridescent, and imploded bio batteries leaking a pale florescent coral ready to burst at a touch like giant puff ball mushrooms.

The door to the shop groaned open. In the dark unlit space, Lydia recognized the shiny bulk of the heavy transport SLOT, the Spring Loaded Overland Transport. The spring turbine took up two thirds of the triple track axles giving the vehicle its wedge shape. They were notoriously slow and she couldn’t imagine outrunning police flitters or even their bio boosted velos in one of them.

Pyare must have read her thoughts, or perhaps Serpina had read them and transmitted them to him. He yanked at a tarp to uncover the double wheeled SLOT V model. It was an updated version of the ones she remembered from the SLOT V races she attended when she was enrolled at the Admiralty Air Academy. Often her fellow cadets would compete on the tarmac in the shadows of the large dirigible pens. That had been long ago, forever, it seemed. This particular SLOT with the magnetic torque rewinder could be quite fast. It still looked like a segmented bug with the seat and wide handlebars in front of its oversized turbine.

“There’s only one problem.” Pyare made a face. “It can only carry two.”

“Yes, Serpina and myself.”

“You won’t be able to traverse the Massif without my help. And there are the Clans.” At Lydia’s frown, he added, “And have you ever driven a SLOT V? It can be pretty tricky.”

Something had caught her eye otherwise she would have made a point of decisively correcting his assumptions with a litany of her accomplishments on spring loaded velos. She had made out the shape of the hoop behind a stack of boxes and shelving. It had been a while since she’d seen one or even thought of them, an item from her youth in São Paulo, competing in the Junior Brazilian Monoroda League tournaments, a monowheel. She strode closer to get a better look. The gilded letters of its manufacturer said it was a Hemming. She glanced over her shoulder at Pyare, “Does the monowheel still run?”

Pyare laughed, “It does if you want a broken arm. Or head.” When Lydia continued to move the large wheel out from behind the clutter, “Only maniacs can ride that thing. And Doyle, the guy who owns this shop, is the only maniac I know who’s been able to stay in the saddle for more than a kilometer!”

“Too bad I can’t show you my first place trophy from the LBJM, Liga Brasileira Júnior de Monoroda. My ability to steer one of these was one of the factors that qualified me for the Air Academy. An Airship is a snap compared to these contraptions.” All of a sudden she felt elated, here was something she could control and it solved their problem. “Serpina can ride with you and I will follow on the mono.”

Lydia rolled the wheel out into the courtyard. The seat had collected dust and some harmless mold, the kickstand resisted at first but finally sprung loose to prop the monowheel up so that she could examine it more closely. The gyro gear was stiff and she had to give it a few turns before it responded. The traction hub looked well lubricated. And the ratchet lever on the spring mount took a few kicks before the key began to wind. She straddled the seat within the hoop of the wheel, gripped the handlebars and released the clutch. The monowheel leapt forward like an eager colt.

Chapter XXIII

There had to be a plan. Lydia insisted. Mere setting out across open country in the belief that they would arrive in Autre Lyons without a map or a guide was folly. What were the expectations of success without proper planning? Her Academy training was showing. First, how many klicks would they have to cover?

Pyare said he had heard of a man who had traveled the distance in two days, dawn to dusk. The man had been shown the secret path by an old clansman, an ancient track traveled by the local inhabitants for hundreds, even thousands, of years.

The Massif had been spared the infestations that had devastated the countryside to the Northwest, a vast area now under the governance of the Clockwork Commonwealth since the very first viral bio infestation, more than a hundred years ago, and administered from Greater London, the seat of the Crown and the Admiralty. Every country that had been afflicted was in some way indebted to the Commonwealth for its quick work in staunching and containing the spread of the toxic bacteria. Large tracts of land around the world, some the size of small countries, bore the scars of these vast deserts. Some blamed the weather patterns and, of course, bio pollution. It was learned only too late that the biologic solution to stopping the spread of the plague on photosynthetic life acted as well as a petro-phage, reducing much of the world’s underground oil wealth to mere brackish water, coal veins collapsing to dust, mountains crumbling, sink holes undermining, entire villages swallowed up by the earth.

The great devastation occurred worldwide leaving large swaths unlivable and even contaminated. The countryside suffered the most and then the urban centers suffered from the influx of refugees. There were food shortages as once arable land had been rendered barren. And riots. It was brutal. Many many people lost their lives to the “human epidemic” as it was sometimes called. What humans did to each other was madness in the service of survival.

The Clockwork Commonwealth under the direction of the Queen and the Admiralty had signed an agreement with most of the world’s countries and independent states, including the Empire of Brazil and its subsidiary clients on the African continent, but particularly those of the Northern Hemisphere affected by the worst loss of territory—the snow dunes of Siberia, the dead lands of subarctic Canada, the wastelands of St. Louis, the Missouri breaks, and the Mississippi trickle—that they would work together to never allow a situation like that to develop again. But all that was ancient history.

“But of course, some areas like the Massif have survived.” It was almost like Serpina was reading her mind. “And because it has survived, it has become a special property, frozen in time by governmental edict, penetrable but impenetrable. People have been known to disappear travelling through the Massif, never to be seen again. Nothing has changed there in over a hundred years, probably even longer, eons perhaps. It is populated with robbers and thieves, poachers, secret blood thirsty cults, and peasants.”

“Don’t believe what you’ve heard about the Massif. Most of the horror stories are put out by those who live there. They don’t want people nosing about, especially refugees.” Pyare shrugged, “And they don’t like strangers—can’t say I blame them.”

“Then how do you propose to cross this so-called hostile terrain. We can’t very well fly over it.” Although at that very moment, Lydia wished that she could. She was a sky pilot, her feet did not belong on the ground.

“There’s something else. I need to find something else to wear. This makeshift skirt will not last long on the monowheel. I need trousers!”

Serpina giggled.

Pyare quipped, “Yes, I was wondering about your Frida the Fearless outfit. Is it some kind of costume?”

“Your trousers!”

Serpina laughed out loud.

Pyare smiled at Serpina and Lydia, and then stopped. “You’re serious.”

Chapter XXIV

Lydia slipped into Pyare’s trousers. The urgency of their plight didn’t leave any room for argument thought that certainly was the young man’s intent, Serpina had laid a hand on his arm at his first objection. The legs were long and required a few upward turns to clear the ankles of her heavy real leather boots. The belt with the large brass clasp depicting Frida the Fearless cinched her waist waspishly. “This is real wool? Not lab manufactured?” She ran her hands over her hips. “Rough but with. . .substance. I will return them when I can find suitable exchange, perhaps when we arrive in Autre Lyons.” She folded the hood of the burnoose back keeping it fastened at the neck and over the shoulders of her snakeskin jacket. She fit the bullet shaped helmet she had found under the seat compartment, along with the gauntleted gloves, on her head.

Pyare had to be satisfied with the saggy stained coveralls that belonged to the mechanic who was shorter and not as slim. He glared at Lydia as he seated himself on the SLOT V with Serpina mounting behind him. “You look formidable.”

Lydia touched two fingers to her temple in salute and bade him to go ahead with a wide but grim smile. “You don’t look so bad yourself.” She was referring to the dark purple tugglemus he’d wrapped around his head. A large shop smock engulfed his makeshift outfit making him seem larger, intimidating. The turbine whined straining against the clutch before the SLOT V shot out onto the road

She eased the monowheel forward to follow them. It was going to be a bumpy challenge considering the road’s patchwork of pavements and pot holes. The monowheel was designed for the smooth surface of the racing tracks in the velodromes. She had rarely taken one out of the stadium, and then only her great skill had averted any spills, the centers of gravity so unpredictable but she finally got the wobbles under control. She raced to catch up with Pyare and Serpina who had disappeared around a curve on the road ahead. Leaning into the turn, she felt it. What it was like to be in full control as a singular force of being and machine returning as a visceral memory. How old had she been then? That ambition and that drive, a certain recklessness. It had been tucked away, a memento of a transition into life as a cadet in the air academy, graduating as a lighter than air pilot with a gold medal in the close combat competition, and her term of service as an ensign with the Admiralty at the embassy in Greater Houllas, the capitol of the United Slave State Republics, during the Bushwacker’s Insurrection. Her installation as a pilot with the Aero Sud fleet upon her release from service. And soon, as had been planned by her mother and aunts, she wed.

In no time, Lydia had sight of Pyare and Serpina as they were emerging out into the countryside, leaving behind the sparsely populated edges of Outer Orleans. Now the roads followed the contours of the terrain. Terraced knolls and fields were covered with bio tents where workers tended the rows in wide straw hats. The original plan had been to join one of these labor gangs as a way out of Oldest Orleans. Until Chief Inspector Karla Kola, her nemesis from their Air Academy days, and whose Russair team she had helped defeat in the close combat competitions, showed up at the checkpoint with a squad of her IOTA agents. At least now they were well away from the city. But by now the police were likely on the alert, and they had become fugitives and refugees. The road sped past tangles of growth reclaiming the ground where houses sat abandoned. The few heavy transports, steamers or the lumbering cargo SLOTS, were easily overtaken and passed without peril. She was feeling comfortable in her monowheel, still alert to any quirks, like the gyro ratio always needed adjustment, especially after navigating curves. But it had the requisite power. At one point in the road, a stretch that ran like a straight line to the horizon, she sped up and passed Pyare with the wave of her gloved hand. He glared back at her grimly, Serpina, a beatific smile on her lips, her head pressed against the young man’s back, arms secured around his waist, and holding on like she was riding on a cloud.

Lydia’s sense of triumph didn’t last. The wheel was losing speed, the rotations slowing like the spring had come unwound. A peculiar odor said the power pack under the seat had overheated. She should have checked the coolant before they set off. But this model usually had an auxiliary. Unless it had been cannibalized. She hated dealing with chemistry. She came from a family of scientists and doctors. A lot of her Academy mates had gone into industrial bioengineering when they couldn’t pass the flight requirements but elected to stay in the Navair sector. She would have just as soon joined the circus, like her mother, than become an airship drive chemists. They all had God complexes.

Pyare screeched to a stop. He wasn’t gloating. “A good thing you stopped.” He pointed further down the road. “Serpina says we’ve gone too far. Something’s there, beyond those trees. Something lurking.”

“Lurking?”

Serpina nodded solemnly. “Yes, I feel it. Anxiety. Elation. Fear. Rage.”

“Possibly police, a checkpoint?”

Pyare nodded. “Possibly. Or a farmer’s market. Either way we don’t want to take any chances.” He pointed behind them, “There’s a road a few klicks back. It leads to an old abandoned chapel. We can hide the slot and the wheel there. Then we walk.”

Lydia nodded in agreement, staring at the open drive compartment. The odor of the power pack spelled trouble. “The pack is baked. I have to change it out. If there is an auxiliary.”

Pyare dismounted, the spring of his velo whining at the restraint. “Doyle always kept one.” He opened a compartment on the inside rim of the wheel behind the seat. He reached in and held up a charged power pack wrapped in a coolant net. He pulled back when Lydia reached for it. “Let me do it.” He yanked the pungent spent pack out with the thongs set in the compartment door. It crackled when it hit the ground. The auxiliary unit fit snuggly and engaged immediately, the wheel chain spinning with new energy.

Reversing course, Lydia followed close behind the slot velo and considered their future prospects. Walking would require energy and unlike the monowheel they didn’t have auxiliary packs for themselves. How were they going to cross the Massif on foot without food or drink? Pyare had liberated a few bio power bars from the mechanic’s pantry that smelled as unappetizing as they looked. Still, the future looked bleak as if they were staring into an abyss of uncertainty. The path she was on had started out of concern for her fugitive antigovernment father, Commodore Jack Cheése, and now she had become a fugitive as well, pursued by agents of IOTA. Soon enough, they arrived at the turn off and the rugged road to the abandoned chapel. There was something else she didn’t care for and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Dark ominous clouds had rushed across the sky and blocked the light of the already hazy sun. It was going to rain.

Next Time: The Clans of the Massif

Cheése Stands Alone IX

June 6, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk FictionCheese Stands Alone, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pulp Fiction, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phyllis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Captain Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”), Airship Commander for Aerosud, a luxury liner airship company based out of Sao Paulo in the Empire of Brazil, who is searching for her father, Commodore Jack Cheése, an outlaw and anti-government rabble rouser.
Professor Doctor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, who has abducted Lydia to get her to pilot an illegal unregistered airship to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republic) on a mission of mercy in exchange for helping her find her father.
Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler who is also a psychic Vessel.
Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and some one that Lydia recognizes from her past.
Commodore Jack Cheése, Lydia’s father, a former officer in the Admiralty’s Medical Corp and outspoken critic of the Clockwork Commonwealth, hunted by agents of IOTA (Investigative Office of The Admiralty).
Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA team charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.
Pyare, a young man with dreams of being an airship pilot, and member of LBFDS (the League Bousculier Francaise Du Sud) helping Lydia and Serpina rendezvous with Serre-Pain and Vlady at an illegal airship.
Pax Victoriana, a period of peace imposed by the Clockwork Commonwealth and its enforcement arm, The Admiralty, dating from the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign to the present for a total of 180 years which includes the TSR (Temporal Shift Realignment) of 56 PV (1893 AD) after which Commonwealth calendars where recalibrated to reflect Her Royal Majesty’s peaceful rule (following the devastation of the first Pandem and its resurgence 30 years later as Pandem II).

Chapter XX

Impatient, the phony Pyare urged them to hurry. “Why are you taking so long?”

Lydia handed Serpina her trousers ripped at the seam with a shrug. “Maybe we can repair them when they’re dry. In the meantime, I’ll wear your burnoose.”

Serpina gladly shed the bulky cloak. There was a gleam in her eye as she passed the sopping clothes to the man waiting outside the door. It was fear or desperation or both. Her lithe body still garbed in wide pleated trousers and a rough pullover blocked Pyare from closing the door completely.

“Someone might see you,” he protested, “think that you are burglars. Or worse, refugees!”

“We’ll stay out of sight,” Lydia spoke over Serpina’s shoulder.

Faux Pyare stepped back to gain a new appraisal of the two women he was aiding. A smile seemed to dissipate his sullen mood. ”Yes, yes. Remain inside. I will return shortly.”

Lydia watched imposter Pyare leg it across the overgrown courtyard toward the main house. She didn’t have to say it, the look Serpina gave her said she didn’t trust him either. Something had to be done. “Can you remember anything that he said that would give us an idea of what his plans were? He had a friend. He would take us overland. Something about the clans. What else did he say?”

“He likes to talk about himself. He feels he has to prove himself. An idealist besides. And handsome. Handsome idealists are rare in real life. I remember when he spoke of his friend and I pictured them sitting at a table plotting a revolution.” Serpina gave a bemused smile. “They were in a café. The Clumsy Rabbit on rue Gilles Lapin.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

Serpina hesitated. “I don’t think it’s a memory.”

Lydia stared at the young woman. “Pyare?”

“I think so. . . .”

“How did. . . ? Did you two entangle?”

“He is very receptive for the brave front he puts up.” She smiled to herself.

“You’re communicating with him?”

“I sense an impression.”

“In real time?”

“That’s entanglement.”

“I know that! Are you entangled with me?” Lydia asked suspiciously.

“No. You’re not receptive. Your guard is up. Like someone with something to hide or repressing a terrible emotion.”

Lydia glanced around, desperate. She and Serpina were synced in their anxiety, it was written in their expressions. “We can’t stay here.” Lydia paced the small room examining the corners, the one window from which the red door of the outbuilding could be seen.

Serpina had pulled open the top drawer to the dresser. “Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like anyone has lived here in a while. Otherwise we would have noticed their scent.” Lydia stood in front of the wardrobe. A small waistcoat with a hole in the elbow and white padding extruded. A frock hanging limply from a peg.

“I don’t think our new friend lived here. These are woman’s things, scarves, stockings.” Serpina said looking up from the second drawer.

Lydia had moved aside the frock. “What’s this?” Hidden behind the garment was a wide belt with a large ornate buckle. “It’s real leather.” She examined it taking it down from the peg. “What do think this represents?”

Serpina looked closely at the heavy round metal clasp depicting in profile a woman with flowing curls underneath a Phrygian cap and a bird’s wing at the temple.

“This could be precious metal,” Lydia suggested.

Serpina shook her head. “No, it’s cheap cast ore. They’re very popular at fairs and markets. That’s Frida the Fearless. That’s why the buckle has an ‘F’ on either side of the figure. Surely you know of her, the popular storybox heroine from the early years of the first Pandem. I’ve even seen old pulps of her adventures in some antiquarian stalls. People collect them.”

“I don’t pay any attention to any of that trash.” Lydia kept the belt in her hand as she cast her glance back to the small room and its furnishings. At the foot of the narrow cot was a gray overstuffed chair that was coming apart at the seams. A colorful banded blanket was folded over its back. She lifted an edge to her nose and it made her sneeze. Unfolded she held it out at arm’s length. “This will have to do,” speaking to no one in particular and wrapped it around her waist so that the hem fell just above her tall boots. She cinched the belt tight around the top of the blanket to hold it in place. “Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter XXI

Lydia led Serpina briskly down the cobbled lane of the old neighborhood in the opposite direction from where they had come with the false Pyare. They had to locate the real Pyare. Lydia kept the hood of her cloak close around her face. They’d met an elderly man pushing a velo and Serpina had asked directions to the café, The Clumsy Rabbit. He’d frowned at them suspiciously, especially at the taller Lydia and her unusual outfit. It was in a bad part of town he’d advised as he pointed the way.

The district they found themselves in was one of small tradesmen and yeoman mechanics. The streets were not paved but graded earth and gravel. The clangor of building and construction echoed in the square white washed walls of the warehouses and wide doored stalls. The scent of grime and smoke emanated from them and filled the air.

They were overtaken and passed by a few young men and boys hurrying in the direction they were headed. Soon they were joined by others hurrying toward some kind of excitement.

Where the crowd of mostly men, workers from the nearby business and factories, had congregated was a small nondescript two story building with a wide wood awning over the entrance and a handful of simple mis-matched chairs and tables announced by a sign depicting a rabbit with a crutch and a bandaged head hanging from the eaves, They had found the Clumsy Rabbit. So had the gendarmes.

Lydia kept to the fringe and peered in the direction of the activity. The police had detained four men lined up facing the side wall of the café. They were guarded by two officers while a third was shouting commands at the gathering crowd to stay back.

Serpina snaked her way through the jostling bodies and murmurs of speculation taking her to the front of the raucous crowd.

The men being detained were partially obscured in the shadow of the overhang as lengthening day worked to erase them. None of the men were Pyare. In the ever growing assembly Lydia was beginning to feel conspicuous. She and Serpina were the only women apart for an older matron talking loudly, gesticulating wildly, pointing agitatedly at the café where apparently she was the proprietress. Another officer, chevrons on his sleeves, stepped to the doorway of The Clumsy Rabbit and frowning, gazed out over the growing throng of onlookers. She noticed the two official magnovels parked to one side and a squat six seater squad halftrack blocking the roadway past the cafe into the warren of neighborhood homes and shops. The policeman at the door stepped aside as another officer pushed a man out into the light of late morning. It was Pyare.

Serpina returned with what she’s overheard. “They’re waiting for some higher official to arrive. They’re rounding up members of the League. This is one of their suspected meeting places.”

“And there is Pyare. From the frying pan into the fire.”

“That’s an odd thing to say,” Serpina commented.

“It’s an old folk saying where I come from. It makes more sense in Esporto.”

Pyare had joined the men in the shadows facing the wall. And another man was taken into the dark doorway of the café by the chevroned official.

“A prisoner transport has been dispatched to take them to the main prison in Oldest Orleans I heard someone else say. You can tell by the grumbling that these workmen are angry. They don’t like the police because it is an enforcement arm of IOTA, that the local officials do its bidding.”

“Pyare said that Leon had been arrested,” Lydia remembered. “But what is he doing here? He was supposed to take us to his friend who would help us get to Autre Lyon and Dr. Serre-Pain and Vlady.” At the mention of the man bear Serpina’s expression clouded and Lydia felt a pang of regret. Her actions had caused the change of plans for their journey to rendezvous with the illegal airship she was to pilot to the Horn of Africa. Her attempt to escape her captors had put her in danger of being apprehended by the agents of The Admiralty. If she had any doubts, the appearance of Karla Kola at the check point in Oldest Orleans earlier that morning had rendered them moot. She was now in alliance with those who had abducted her in the guise of helping her find her father, the elusive anti-Commonwealth provocateur, Commadore Jack Cheése.

Serpina spoke into the ear of a man in a welder’s hat who had come to stand in the crowd around them. The ruddy faced man looked alarmed and then nodded his head before he said something to a large coverall clad man who repeated it to the man next to him who passed it on to another man until the message made its way through those gathered to witness the police action and caused them to surge forward in anger. The gendarme charged with holding them back raised his white baton, but it was too late. A brick was lobbed at the officers guarding the detainees. They raised their pistols and fired over the heads of the seething mass.

Lydia and Serpina were carried forward by the press of bodies and had to push against the current to extricate themselves to the fringe. But it was over quickly. No one wanted to get shot. When Lydia searched the shadows where the suspected Leaguers had been detained, there were only three and none of them was Pyare.

In that instant of confusion, Pyare had disappeared and Lydia was not the only one who had noticed. The chevroned officer barked orders and two gendarmes set off down the narrow cluttered gap between the café and the adjacent building in pursuit.

“Come,” Lydia urged and Serpina followed quickly behind. Once at a distance from the police activity, they stepped up their pace. “This street parallels the alleyway. We might be able to head them off. Hurry!”

“But the police. . . .”

“We’ll deal with them if we have to.” Lydia was tired of passively waiting for an avenue of escape. She decided that she would make happen what needed to happen. It was crucial that Pyare get them to their guide who would take them across the Massif and to the hidden airship.

They reached a corner and strolled casually across the deserted intersection. A shout and the sound of something falling or breaking alerted them to look in the direction where two gendarmes exited the alley onto the street. The policemen circled each other confused as if they had had their expectations deflated.

Lydia and Serpina continued their casual stroll as if they hadn’t noticed them hoping for reciprocal invisibility.

“Stop! You Two!” The gendarmes trotted over to confront the two women. “Did you see anyone run past here in the last minute or so? A man, shaggy hair, a maroon topcoat?”

Lydia shook her head mutely and Serpina answered in the local dialect, “No, we have seen no one.”

“Your papers,” the one who was doing the talking demanded.

Lydia glanced at Serpina and gave a slight nod. Serpina reached into her shoulder satchel as Lydia considered how she would overpower them. They were suspicious but because they were dealing with women their guard was relaxed. Two moves, maybe three, and she would incapacitate the one demanding their papers. The element of surprise would give her the advantage for the other one as well.

“No, no, this can wait till later,” the second officer insisted. “We have to find the runner. The sergeant will skin us alive if we don’t bring him back!”

The officer who had demanded their papers looked annoyed but relented, taking in Lydia’s unconventional gear, pointing a finger at her, a broken finger if she’d have her way, and commanded, “Do not leave the area. I will return to confirm you identification!”

Lydia watched them scurry into the alley across from the one they had just exited. She held up her hand and motioned to Serpina. “Wait till they’ve committed themselves to the chase.” She hurried to the entrance of the narrow alley. “Since they didn’t find him when they came through here and we didn’t see him exit, Pyare must still be in there.”

Serpina picked her way through the clutter behind Lydia. “Yes, he is here, I can sense him.”

Lydia tried a door on one side and it was locked. She glanced around a rank of blue bio barrels. Pyare had eluded the police but where had he gone? Lydia and Serpina looked at each other and then up into the rafters of the roof overhang.

Pyare dropped to the ground between them. “How did you find me? I thought I had lost you for good.”

“No time for that now. We need to leave immediately!” Lydia pointed in the direction they had come, herding Pyare and Serpina ahead of her.

As they turned the corner out of the alley, the gendarmes were waiting for them, pistols trained on them.

“Well, well,” said the one as he moved to secure Pyare, “You were. . . .” He didn’t finish what he was going to say. Lydia sprang off the ground and launched a perfectly aimed kick at the tip of his chin, toppling him like a bag of wet sand. The other policeman turned his focus on Lydia and was about to shoot when Serpina’s satchel caught him a round house blow from behind the head. Lydia jammed the heel of her palm against his nose and levered his arm until the pistol dropped from his grip and clattered to the ground.

Pyare stooped to pick up the fallen weapons.

“Leave them!” Lydia warned, “If they catch us in possession of firearms we’ll spend the rest of our lives in the labor camps!”

“You’re right, but we have to disappear. Leon has obviously said too much. My contact, the guide who would take you through clan territory was one of those being held by the police!”

“We have no choice now but to run!” Lydia had no objection to running. She just wanted to be certain of the direction.

“We’ll have to cross the mountains on our own. I will accompany you to your destination.” He smiled at Serpina and she smiled back. “But first we have to locate my friend’s SLOTS.”

“You mean well be traveling by SLOT?” Lydia didn’t hid her displeasure. “Walking would be faster.”

“These are V models with magnetic torque. Very fast. Like a torpedo.”

Lydia was relieved. “Why didn’t you say so?”

Next Time: The Clans of the Massif

Cheése Stands Alone VIII

April 10, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk FictionAdventure, Airship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Clockwork Commenwealth, IOTA, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pulp Fiction, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phyllis Haldursdottir

Chapter XVII

Lydia watched from the shadows of a river willow above the expanse of the Loire marshes as Pyare negotiated with the stooped dark shrouded figure. He shook his head and waved his hands, showing fingers. The shrouded figure turned and walked away. Pyare held up his arms in surrender, shouting something, and the booter stopped. Further negotiations ensued. Then he raised an arm to summon them.

Lydia followed as Serpina hurried down from the copse where they had been hidden. Lydia was surprised to find that the booter Pyare had engaged as their guide was an old woman with lively dark eyes, her nose and mouth hidden behind the scarf that also enveloped her head. The dark eyes took the trio in with little curiosity and then turned immediately to disappear into the tall tangle of reeds and shrubs. Pyare signaled them to follow. Lydia exchanged glances with Serpina and scrambled after the guide through the low brush.

A stench of death and decay accompanied them along the barely visible track. The expanse of marsh was not uniformly flat. Small mounds and sandbars alternated with patches and bands of oozing oleaginous mire. Some stretches of the bog were safe enough to trod through although the wet clay clung to their feet and threatened to cement them in place. They had to move quickly and lightly, the sound of the suctioning mud reminding them of the fate that awaited them if they lingered. The old woman outpaced them, seeming to skim over the surface of the marsh, not waiting on them.

Lydia glanced back over her shoulder. Pyare was nowhere in sight.

Lydia caught a movement in the reeds out of the corner of her eye. Serpina had seen it, too. “Rats,” she breathed in Lydia’s ear, “Big rats.” They quickened their steps to reach a mound that rose out of the muck. Once over the top, the populated far bank their destination was now in view. Their mud clotted feet descended onto a broad marshy plain dotted with little islands of vegetation. Here the water visibly flowed and the guide stopped to examine the water’s edge until she found a number of partially submerged rocks which she lithely stepped across to firmer ground. They were to follow. Serpina went first, splashing quickly across, a look of satisfaction brightening her worried countenance. Pyare indicated that he would bring up the rear and had Lydia proceed ahead of him.

Scrambling across Lydia caught the shadow of something flitting over the surface of the water. she looked up, distracted, thinking that it was a large bird and missed her step, a foot plunging deep into the icy flow, soaking her thoroughly. She felt strong hands grasp her arm to help her onto the bank and met the determined look of the old woman and then past her at the object set against the lightening sky.

It was na SOB, a Single Operator Biowing. She had flown them herself when she had been stationed in the transport pool at the Commonwealth embassy in Greater Houllas, the capitol of the United Slave State Republics. They were used by IOTA for surveillance. She could tell by the SOB’s altitude that it was surveying a large area near the bridge crossings. And she knew enough about its telemetry that there was a certainty that their variances had been registered. The scanners would indicate their heat signatures as data sets, executing alignment searches for anomalies in the performing patterns, and relay the biofo to an entangled platform monitor, sometimes half a planet away.

The old woman was making urgent noises and pointing to the underbrush prompting them to take cover. Lydia glanced back over her shoulder. Pyare was nowhere in sight.

Chapter XVIII

Could it get any worse? Lydia glanced around, wet but alert. It was just Serpina and her and the old woman to guide them to the far bank. They had to keep going. But once they got there, without Pyare, they would have no idea how to continue. The look on Serpina’s face saying she understood their predicament, they hurried behind the old booter who did not once look back, lithely skipping from the marshy island to the wider rubble strewn shore and then up stone steps to the settlement that crowded the river’s edge.

Lydia paused at the top of the stone embankment to look back. There was no sign of the brash young man who said he had a plan. The old woman pointed down a long street crowded with homes and shops and set off in the opposite direction. They were on their own.

The sun had risen above the morning haze and sounds of doors slamming and feet thumping and scurrying as daily activity came into the light. Their rough work cloaks were not out of place among the passing populace, many riding or pushing velos, opening shops, setting up tables in the crowded narrow lanes. There was a queue for the java bar with its large copper kettles. And they were lost. Pyare was to meet up with someone who would then take them overland through the Massif. But who was he, and how could they find him?

“You are not the Pyare we are looking for,” Lydia spoke frostily. “We’ll just wait here until the Pyare we want meets with us.”

Serpina touched Lydia’s sleeve and nodded in the direction of the java bar where a man had detached himself from the throng of java juicers and was coming their way.

Lydia perceived the threat. He was of average height, perhaps a little shorter than her, a muscled dark face with a wispy chin beard, wiry in a cocksure manner. If she had to, she could subdue him, and as a reminder, the stiletto in the sheath of her snake skin jacket nudging a rib beneath the soaked burnoose. She kept him in focus as he walked past them and met his sideways glance. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him pause a few paces past them and then turn. Serpina stepped into the shadows of the nearby doorway.

“Hey, you two look lost,” he said approaching and eyeing them curiously. His knit faux-laine hat had earflaps and he was trying on a smile. “Maybe I can help you,” her leered on the word “help”.

“Do you know Pyare?” Serpina asked emerging from the shadows.

The man looked startled and then laughed. “I am Pyare! Why do you ask?”

“She means a different Pyare,” Lydia replied, suspicious of the man’s intent and his addressing them in standard rather than in the local patois. “A taller man, younger.” Their disguise as laborers was thin at best.

The man sighed, “Yes, that’s the way it always is, isn’t it? Always taller and younger.”

“Do you know another young man names Pyare?” Serpina tried.

“Ah, a love interest, perhaps? I wish I were that lucky Pyare.”

Serpina blushed. “You are not the Pyare we are looking for,” Lydia spoke frostily. “We’ll just wait here until the Pyare we want meets with us.”

“You are all wet!” dark Pyare said, pointing at her and shaking his head. “You are not from around here that is easy to tell. If you stand around too long, you will be reported for soliciting. Then what will you tell your tall young Pyare?” He laughed to show his big teeth.

“What would you suggest we do?” asked Serpina sweetly.

The man’s face brightened. “Ladies, please, let me assist you. I have a domicile close by, and a high speed heat extractor which belongs to my landlady but she will let me use it and we can dry your wet clothing.”

Lydia thought to refuse but it occurred to her that they had nowhere else to go and the man’s offer would allow them time to reconsider and reconnoiter how to proceed. Serpina had apparently come to the same conclusion. “So kind of you, and you are right, we are strangers here. Lead the way.”

Chapter XIX

Following the man who called himself Pyare down the narrow lane between the backs of houses and vacant lots, barking dogs and scrambling cats, feral or illegally kept as pets in violation of the Pax Victoriana Proclamation On The Interaction Protocols With Nonhuman Sentient Beings, Lydia spoke in a bare whisper her caution. “I don’t trust him but we have no choice. To remain in public will only expose us to discovery. Be alert to his actions and stay close to me. I can deal with him if he tries anything.” She set her lips resolute with what she was capable of as an assertion to Serpina.

The man in the knit hat and floppy flaps glanced over his shoulder at the sound of her voice and grinned. “Just a little further,” he indicated with an arm outstretched in the direction they were heading. Faces appeared in windows as they paraded by, a woman scrubbing a stairwell entrance to a doorway looked up briefly to pass a wrist across her brow and glance at them with questioning eyes. They halted abruptly in front of a square structure with white plaster walls and a red faux coral tile roof. A low barrier wall enclosed the dirt and weeds of the unattended yard. They followed him to the blue door where he stopped and rapped on it sharply three times.

“I live around the back.” He pointed to the moss covered flagstones making a path leading around the corner of the house. “Madame will likely let you use the expeller to dry your cloak and trousers.” A look of confusion flashed across his face. “I’m sorry. I do not know your names.” And he shrugged at the afterthought, “in case Madame asks.”

Lydia was about to speak her name when she remembered the false papers Leon had provided her. “My name is Odette and this is. . . .” She indicated Serpina as she realized that she didn’t know the name the young girl was using.

“Addie!” Serpina spoke up, smiling at her secret joke.

“Very well, Addie and Odette, Madame may require a small consideration for the use of her machine,” he said as the door creaked partially open and in the narrow shadow of the darkened room behind her, a woman in a bright headscarf frowned at them. The man talked rapidly in the local patois, gesticulating dramatically, pointing to the house and then to the two women in the rough brown worker’s cloaks, all the while smiling and bowing in abject supplication.

The woman in the doorway was not amused or convinced by the obsequious display and looked them over suspiciously. She spoke forcefully, pointing to the palm of her hand, and with a final word slammed the door.

A hookah on the self above the headboard dangled its ebony tipped hose over the side, a shapeless blanket crumpled beneath it.

The man who called himself Pyare tried to hide his disappointment by laughing. “Madame is a busy woman but she will allow the use of the extractor if you are kind to her. She is in a bad mood because people take advantage of her generous nature. You must be generous in return.”

He led them around the corner of the larger dwelling to a smaller square structure with similar white plaster walls and a dingy yellow door. An orange cat scampered away at their approach. He fumbled with the latch and then shouldered the door open. He laughed as he led them inside. “The door always sticks. I should complain to the landlord but then she’d ask for the rent.”

They were standing in a small square room with a barred casement window on one wall, an alcove with a mottled and stained uni, a large scorch mark on the wall behind it. A stale scent assaulted their noses, an air that had not been disturbed in a while with hints of burnt wood and charred organic matter over the pungency of sour mold. A mattress on a low frame was pushed against the windowless wall. A hookah on the self above the headboard dangled its ebony tipped hose over the side, a shapeless blanket crumpled beneath it. A large wardrobe stood against the wall next to the alcove. The stone paved floor revealed its previous purpose as a garden shed.

“If you will remove your wet clothing, I will stand outside and Addie can hand them to me. And if you have an appreciation for Madame’s generosity, now would be most useful.” He stepped outside and pulled the door closed.

“I think this is called getting in on the ground floor,” Lydia said shucking the wet burnoose. The extent of the soaking the mired pants had taken was obvious. She felt along the seam at the back. “And my rear has come apart.”

Next Time: Escape To The Country

Cheése Stands Alone VII

February 19, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk FictionAir Ships Dirigibles, Airship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pulp Fiction, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phyllis Huldarsdottir

Chapter XV

Lydia stiffened. The men in the black hats had her worried. Then she saw the woman in the long black coat, blonde, taller than most men. Karla Kola. She felt a jolt of genuine fear. Serpina had noticed her alarm. She glanced to the rear of the old trolly and the back exit, the way out. She stood and inclined her head toward the gathering of black hatted agents and their blonde superintendent out the window. Serpina recognized the chief inspector and followed Lydia exiting the tram.

In their hooded work parkas they mingled with the merchants setting up their market stalls, keeping away from the officials yet uncertain in which direction to head. Lydia felt a presence behind her but before she could turn to look, a voice said, “Turn at the second arch by the vegetable stall.” It was Pyare.

He caught up with them in the shadows beyond the arch. “Quick, follow me,” and led them away from Place D’Arc toward the riverfront and the granite edifice of an old church. Once inside, they hurried toward the vestibule. Pyare led them behind the tall ornate altar with its oversized crucified figure. Pulling aside a large sideboard in an anteroom revealed an opening in the wall and plank steps leading down. Pyare handed Lydia his bacso torch as he dragged the big piece of furniture back over the hole in the wall. Once at the bottom of the stairs, Lydia could hear water dripping and the musty earthiness of what appeared to be the beginning of a tunnel assaulted her nostrils with caustic ferocity. Serpina sneezed, and Pyare led the way. After not a considerable distance, slogging and splashing through rivulets of dank water and ducking under creeping roots and vines dripping with moss, they were met with a clear bright light to assail their dim unaccustomed eyes. Steps had been carved into the earth on the incline up and at the top a screen of river willows gave out to a slight rise overlooking the wide mudflats of the Loire.

“Quite a few temporal hiccups happened in this period globally which why it is referred to by some researchers as the Doppelganger Era.”

Pyare addressed their perplexity. “The local superintendent of the police arrested Leon at AOTA’s request shortly after we had all met with him and agreed to the plan. He will tell them everything he knows in the guise of knowing all along that you were a fugitive and that he was planning to turn you in himself. He is the mayor after all.”

“Thank you. I think.” Lydia offered, still a little skeptical. “What of the original plan? Obviously that is no longer an option.”

Pyare grinned. “There is no plan except to get you out of the old city. And with AOTA this close you will have to find a refuge where you won’t be looked for. I have friends who will take you and Serpina up into the hills, and from there you will need a guide to cross the Massif Central and to the outskirts of Autre Lyons. But in doing so we must be aware of the Clans.”

“The Clans, what are the Clans?” She didn’t hide her agitation with Pyare’s nonchalance.

“You know, the people in the white robes, the Fourierists, the phalanges.”

“The only Fourier I know is the man whose heat theories from pre-Victorian times are instrumental to the development of the bug drive. We had a whole quarter on Joseph Fourier’s laws of energy conduction at the Academy.”

Pyare laughed. “No, this Fourier is the social philosopher. The clans are descendant from the phalanges of long ago, back, as you say, in pre-Victorian times but around here known as the Old Empire. Much of that history has been censored by decree of the Lord High Admiral and the Privy Council. Charles Fourier’s teachings have been suppressed and his followers arrested, You can imagine how they feel about strangers and interlopers into their redoubts in the mountains.”

“I have never heard of him. It is his relative who has world renown in the field of bioenergy.”

A strange look came over Pyare’s face and he shook his head as if to clear it. “It doesn’t matter, really, they are the same entity. A temporal slippage occurred in the mid-18^th century when, as the result of a Little Bang event that had taken billions of years to reach this region of the universe, the Kandinsky bubble, named after the famed physicist who postulated the event, caused a temporal retardation that lasted almost a decade but meaningless in cosmic terms, and certain anomalies were essentially repeated. Charles and Joseph Fourier are the same person. The same essence merely entered the time stream further down the bank so to speak and kept the same surname but was realized as distinct entities in historical time, each with their own particular genius. Quite a few temporal hiccups happened in this period globally which why it is referred to by some researchers as the Doppelganger Era.”

Lydia blinked. “That’s the most outlandish story I’ve ever heard! Do you expect me to believe that. Here we are in this dire situation and you are spouting folk tales.”

Pyare blinked back and twisted his neck as if trying to straighten out a crick. “Yeah, I dunno. I guess I just knew it. Except I didn’t know that I knew it.”

Serpina sniggered and caught their attention. Pyare nodded his head in affirmation. “Of course! She’s a vessel!”

Chapter XVI

A Vessel? Lydia knew about vessels or had viewed a plasmavid documentary on one of her flights from Rio to Greater London. PVs were reserved for luxury class, all other passengers were afforded the standard public docubox broadcasts. What she could remember of the rather fantastic claims of the feature was that vessels were people with a quantum sensitivity

“You can read my thoughts?”

Serpina glared at her.

Pyare shook his head. “I don’t think she can read them. She can only send them to another. Also she can probably pick up frequencies of people she has synced with. She entangles with them. She feels what they feel at the same moment as they feel it.”

“How do you know this?”

Pyare shrugged. “I don’t know, I just do. She’s a vessel. They can do that kind of thing.”

“How do I know she’s not transmitting those thoughts to you?” Lydia looked at Serpina, her hands folded in her lap, eyes lowered.

“They can’t be her own thoughts. She’s a vessel. Besides we haven’t been in proximity long enough to be entangled.” He glanced at Serpina. “Have we?”

Serpina blushed, but Lydia wanted to know, “Then whose thoughts are they?”

“What does it matter. The Clans aren’t the only thing we have to deal with. There’s also the Boo.” Pyare pointed to the gray brown expanse of the mud flats dotted with clumps of dense vegetation. “They are treacherous to navigate. Full of sink holes and sand pits. There is no distinct path across. We will have to wait for the booters.”

“Booters? What are booters?”

“They are the people who live along the East Bank of the river in shanties in the shadow of the workers quarters of Old Orleans . They are scavengers and smugglers. Their nights are spent picking through the tourist trash in Oldest Orleans, especially after festivals and carnivals like the Victorianaisance. Some are musicians and perform in all night cabarets. What they do is not sanctioned and they can be arrested for not passing through the official checkpoints and showing the proper papers.” He pointed at the dark figures in the distance. “There are two of them now.”

“Let’s follow them!” Lydia leapt to her feet.

Pyare pulled her back. “If they see us they’ll hide, or worse, lead astray us into the deeper mud and we’d never get out. In the meantime we wait for the solitaries, the ones who travel alone. It will cost us, but there is no other choice.”

“Can we trust them? What if they betray us to the police?”

“They dislike the police more than you can imagine. They think of themselves as a free people, outside the laws of the regime. Among themselves, they are known as freebooters.”

Lydia stared out through the scrim of trees at the opposite shore and Old Orleans. She was somewhat familiar with the area from the tourist pamphlets that proliferated in kiosks at the airship ports, and had overheard airship staff chatting about their vacations in the region. The biowines were exceptional and the accommodations were extravagant yet very affordable. Oldest Orleans, the old city was the main attraction, and there was Old Orleans for the more adventuresome, all contained within the prefecture of Orleans which was the hub of international biologic industry hosting such large pharmacorps as Freud Werke and Jung Industries. And not to be confused with the Orleans of North America, Old New Orleans and the city state of Newest Orleans, an independent entity in the heart of the USSR and on the border of the backward swamp republic of Floruisabama.

Her gaze returned to Pyare and Serpina. They were not the companions she would have chosen for this misadventure, or any sort of adventure for that matter. She hadn’t in her wildest dreams imagined that she would find herself on the run from IOTA in the company of a double jointed mind reading teenage girl and an unsophisticated country boy with airship pilot ambitions. She as Doña Lydia de Belize Gutman-Cheése should have been attending galas, soirees, and salons at the Brazilian Court with her husband, Seignior Professario Cornado de Belize Gutman, on one of his infrequent visits to the Pan Rio enclaves from his research station at the headwaters of the Orinoco. But the infrequency of their time together could also be blamed on her very busy, until late, flight schedules as an airship commander.

Aerosud was one of the most fashionable and popular transport companies and consequently much in demand. She held her high status not only to her connections to the Emperor’s inner circle through her sister-in-law, but also as a competent no nonsense captain in Aerosud’s fleet of luxury liners. She’d become accustomed to the privileges that accrued in such positions despite her rather stormy pedigree. The Cheéses were renowned in the field of microbiology and medicine as well as for their outspokenness.

“To deal with this uncertainty principle I need to be predisposed. I am not particularly predisposed to you.”

She disliked tilling the soil of her past. It seemed to hold too many surprises. She had turned away in her thoughts and now considering the two of them, Pyare on his haunches peering out over the mudflats, and Serpina watching him with equal parts of fascination and infatuation.

“Serpina, I have a question.”

The young girl looked up hesitantly at Lydia who had taken her commander stance of fists on hips and imperious authoritative demeanor. “If you have to get to know someone before you can transmit to and from their. . . ,” she wanted to say “minds” but that didn’t seem precise enough, “their mental processes, why have you not used your skills on me?”

Serpina tried to hide her mischievous smirk. “The Doctor asked me not to,” and then with a frown, “And you have a challenging spin.”

“A spin?”

“Yes, some people have an up spin which is easy to tune in to. They operate on pleasant frequencies. Others have a down spin and are not always open to reception or transmission which makes their frequencies difficult to untangle. And others have strange erratic spins that are very unpredictable. You are a down spin with a bit of strange.”

“I assure you I can be very charming under the right circumstances. I belong to the Court of Brazil!”

Serpina laughed aloud. “You don’t want to be a charm spin. They are very unstable and subject to self-destruction.”

“But you could still transmit mental states to and from me?”

Serpina shrugged. “Yes, it can be done but it would be tiresome. It is not like tuning in to a music box broadcast of popular compositions by Gell-Mann. To navigate the various frequency fields takes skill, like a pilot, but unlike a pilot, it is a skill that cannot learned. It is intuitive. These frequencies reside in the subtle body. And there are other spins that interact with the ones I’ve already explained. There is the top spin which is a dominant mode but would not exist if it were not for the bottom spin. The bottom spin maintains a drone for the various spins to harmonize with while the top spin, because of its speed, is prone to wobble and must constantly readjust its orientation to maintain a balanced harmony. These anomalies are what is transmitted and received as cogent mental matter. The top and bottom spins can also reverse themselves which makes synchronization difficult and entanglement haphazard. To deal with this uncertainty principle I need to be predisposed. I am not particularly predisposed to you. Beside the fact that Serre-Pain, who overlooks most of my antics, said not to, and I do as he asks.”

Lydia was near speechless. First Pyare, and now Serpina, expounding from depths their surfaces couldn’t possibly mask. And for once she was intrigued. There was something reassuring about the words spoken by the two however unlikely their own, and she was gaining an insight into a self that she didn’t know existed. She had to know more.

“You are loyal to Serre-Pain, I understand. Is he a relative of yours? A guardian?”

Serpina raised her chin proudly. “Obviously the Doctor is not a relative. He is African. But he is my guardian. I was very young when he found me. I was lost. I had been with a group of refugees. They were sick and dying. They did not do so quietly and their agony was felt across all frequencies. I can’t recall my mother, only a unique tone I associate with her. When I hear that tone again, we will be reunited. The refugees I was with were all grouped together in a single house in what were called special lots. We had to flee because the house was set on fire and burned to the ground. Doctor Serre-Pain found me in a barrel in the rubble on the streets of Dusseldorf where I had gone to get out of the cold. He was passing by with Madame Ophelia and his Ophidiarium wagons. Vladimir was with them, too. Vlady is a transomatic. He sensed my presence and signed the Doctor to look for me. Vlady knew right away that I was a vessel.”

Lydia had been holding her breath. Vlady again. She softened her curious gaze at Serpina. “I too was a young girl when Vlady protected me and my mother from the clowns and the carnies. Although his name was not Vladimir then, and he still had a tongue to speak.”

Serpina’s face grew red, eyes narrowed. “Vlady is mine! You can’t come back and take him away. Look at what you’ve done. Now we’re forced to hide and run without them. And Vlady is not here to protect us!”

Pyare glance over his shoulder at the commotion. “Hey, quiet down, you two. Get ready to leave. I think I see a prospect.”

Next Time: Lydia’s Change Of Heart

Cheése Stands Alone VI

January 7, 2023Crime Fiction, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk FictionAir Ships Dirigibles, Clockwork Commenwealth, Crime Fiction, IOTA, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pulp Fiction, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phyllis Huldarsdottir

Chapter XIII

Lydia set the near empty flagon on the roughhewn table between them and gave Peyare the benefit of her frown. Was he just stupid or willfully ignorant? His knowledge of current affairs was largely rumor, Icer propaganda, and conspiracy theories. She’d heard it before, that the Admiralty controlled the box broadcasts and the plasmovid media so they were unreliable as sources of the truth. It was not so much the outright lies but the half-truths. Truth had a relative value. When something could be ascertained as true, or at least partially so, it gave weight to the lies that accompanied it and downgraded the veracity of anything claimed to be true. The world is out of balance, he claimed, a popular catch phrase broadcast daily from the antiroyalist underground.

She gave his expectant expression a slight shake of her head. He was pitiful, and pitifully unaware of it. Naïve, and he did not care about anything that had not occurred during his life time, and hardly anything remarkable prior to adolescence. He’d received just enough education to make him arrogant, adopting the swagger of an air ship pilot, or what he believed was litherian swagger as depicted in lurid biopulp story boards. He was full of himself and youthful ambition. He was not uncomely, she had to admit, with a rugged virility that might serve him well if he could constrain his impulsiveness.

Yet he dismissed the entire extinction event of 77 PV, a bacterial explosion that ravaged large parts of the Northern Hemisphere and, to a lesser extent, the Southern, leaving behind bare mineral dead zones, barren frozen wastelands. As for the Queen’s Jubilee Proclamation that bound the industrial nations to a concerted effort in battling the plague that threatened humanity and ushered in an era of peace and prosperity under Victorian guidance, he rejected that as ancient history and suspect, especially after the forced Reconciliation and Alignment Act of 101 PV which he claimed, as preaxial shift adherents, so-called preaxers, did, that history had been revised and adjusted to suit the overall fiction of Pax Victoriana. And the idea that the Queen in her eightieth year of reign had become alarmed by the increased pace of life and declared that the brakes must be applied because, along with peace, she wanted quiet was a fairy tale told to children and which Lydia had to agree was a much simplified version of the actual Imperial motivation.

“Listen, this may be news to you, but I was at the siege of the Bushwhackers at the conclusion of the PanAm War!”

The Queen’s peace had been in jeopardy due to her belligerent nephew Willy’s threatening to go to war with Nicky, their Muscovite relations to the east, and with the regicide republic to the south. And her quiet, the story went, was threatened by the racket created by the development of the internal combustion engine to say nothing of its abhorrent stink. The greed and pretentiousness of the social climbing industrialist, biochem barons, and bankers whose titular aspirations were beneath dignity also was a factor. And those were the reasons given for why the Queen had formed a royal commission to look into these matters, known thenceforth as The Queen’s Royal Commission To Ensure The Queen’s Wishes, known to most as The Queen’s Wishes which he found both humorous and absurd.

Lydia wanted to slap that smug expression off his face. For someone who was so uninformed, he certainly rose on the heat of his own hot air. It was almost like he was chuckling to himself, amused by his own self-satisfaction. “What do you find so amusing? Do you find it funny that I am stuck with you in this fetid wine cave? Held prisoner by your underground group at the behest of a carnival snake doctor? I have been kidnapped and made to perform with snakes! And you are an accomplice to my captivity!”

Peyare didn’t restrain his guffaw. “I was just thinking of the expression you made when Leon told the gendarmes that you were a famous porn box courtesan. Shock would be an understatement.” He slapped the table for emphasis.

“How could you have possibly witnessed my reaction?”

“I was hiding in the shadows. I was the one who alerted Leon. I followed you to the café. I knew who you were when you bought those fancy boots. A good choice for where you’re going, I might add. I know the bootmaker. They’ll last a good long time.”

Maybe it was the wine, but she felt the lines of her otherwise staid Victorian demeanor blurring. She raised her voice. “You know where we’re going?”

Peyare was surprised by her question. “You don’t know where you’re going?” He shrugged matter of factly. “All I know is that Leon will arrange transport to Autre Lyons and pass you along to those who have the lighter-than-air.”

“A dirigible.”

“I don’t think it’s a balloon. An airship, but of an older generation.”

A derelict, no doubt, Lydia thought to herself. Anytime anyone referred to an airship as ‘older generation’ it inevitably meant something from the Zeppelin era.

“I would be honored to accompany you but my role is to keep you safe until you can leave Oldest Orleans without attracting attention. IOTA has their spies everywhere. Leon will provide you with new papers. You don’t need to be frightened.” He said it condescendingly.

“Do I look frightened to you?” She stood up in the low ceilinged wine cellar to make her point, a tall redheaded woman, blue scarf over the shoulder of her snakeskin jacket, pleated, pocketed trousers bloused over her new boots. “Listen, this may be news to you, but I was at the siege of the Bushwhackers at the conclusion of the PanAm War!”

Lydia could still picture the flaming wreckage falling onto the crowded tenements of the Outer Houllas slums and catching the tinder dry dwellings on fire.

That did the trick. Peyare, suddenly dead serious, sat up interested. Be it fighting and killing but deemed heroic and valiant, boys, men, have a precise affinity for legendary exploits. “PanAm One or Two?”

“Do I look old enough to have been in One?”

The young man grinned sheepishly, “No, I guess not. And besides the Siege of the Bushwhackers happened at the end of PAW II. You weren’t with the Royal Marines who rescued the hostages and broke the siege in the Greater Houllas Megalopolis, were you?” His eyes widened with disbelief on the verge of fawning respect.

Lydia managed a smile. “No, nothing so heroic. I was a young ensign assigned to the dirigible fleet at the Crown’s Embassy in the Slave State Republics confederation capital. I helped extract some of the hostages once a ceasefire was negotiated with the Counterforce Bushwhackers aligned with the rebellious slave republics.”

“You flew the rescue operation? That was heroic. I heard you lost some HV Airships.”

Lydia could still picture the flaming wreckage falling onto the crowded tenements of the Outer Houllas slums and catching the tinder dry dwellings on fire. The greatest loss of life was on the ground not the few hostages and embassy personnel killed by the rebels. The fire had practically razed the entirety of the makeshift sub-metropolis, the pall of smoke wreathing the tall buildings of the ruling elite in Greater Central Houllas for weeks. And she had known the pilots of the two HV Lighters that had been shot down, or had at least seen them in the Embassy cafeteria. She had flown high velocity lighters when she had trained at the Academy and realized that she was too sane to be a lighter pilot. Lighter pilots were a breed of their own.

“Yes, the negotiated truce was to allow for safe passage of the hostages as well as the obviously outnumbered Bushwhackers back to their home territories. But some in their ranks preferred death with honor over retreat and disgrace and began firing on the rescue airships as soon as we lifted off. The highvel escorts took fire to protect the dirigibles. But as soon as the shooting started, the Royal Marine Bionic Brigade aboard my airship deployed their glide platforms and neutralized the threat with only a few further casualties.”

“Bionics? You worked with Bionics? The indestructible air marines?”

Lydia could tell by his expression that she had made an impressionable fan. “Well, yes, as much as you can work with a bionic.”

“Really, what are they like?”

She thought that the name alone should have made it obvious. “They’re machines.”

A noise at the door drew her attention. Someone had lifted the bar and the heavy door creaked slowly open. There were two of them, revealed in the orange glow of their bacsodium torches. Behind them was pitch black. Then another figure moved in the shadow of the reflected light.

Leon strode in, raising a questioning eyebrow to Peyare, followed by Serre-Pain, grim jowled to a slow simmer, dark eyes flashing darkly. Then Serpina appeared at his side, her eyes shooting daggers.

Impulsively Lydia blurted. “Where’s Vlady?”

“Vlad had to prepare the wagons for transport.” The snake doctor’s tone was flat, impersonal. “I had hope to have more time to make preparations. But because of your foolishness we must now separate. Vlad and I will take the wagons on the main road to the northeast to throw IOTA off the scent. Leon has arranged for you and Serpina to leave from the south gate and travel with a group of agricultural workers. We must depart immediately. You will not see Vlady or I until we rendezvous at our destination.”

“But I know him, I know Vlady from my childhood. He knew my mother. We traveled with a circus!”

Serre-Pain threw her a concerned look and then glanced at the flagon at her elbow. “How much wine have you had to drink?”

Chapter XIV

At the break of dawn when they arrived at the transport, an ancient repurposed streetcar easily a century old. A cold gray brume had settled over the open air market and on the crowds of laborers in their brown canvas overcoats, hoods or scarves hiding all but a sliver of visage, a beard, made-up eyes, and jostling against each other to achieve their conveyances at the start of the work day.

Lydia and Serpina were attired similarly and mingled with the crowd of women before boarding the transit car to the work destination. According to Leon’s instruction, they were to travel to the fields several leagues south of the ancient city. Peyare would make sure they boarded the right transport but from then on they would have to be on their guard. Once passed the exit inspection to verify identities and head count, they would be met at the work site by someone who would take them up into the hills to a lumber mill where the operator of the mill would secret them in a special compartment of the lumber wagon and take them the rest of the way to Autre Lyons to meet with another agent of the League who would then take them to the rendezvous with the airship.

In return she would be led to the illusive Commodore Jack Cheése, her father.

Leon had provided her with a set of false papers. Lydia was now Odette O’Day, a Class III worker, one class above Class IV transient, but still at the bottom. Serpina had an assortment of identity papers and chose the one that would attract the least attention. He had warned her to keep her face covered and make sure no one looked at her too closely. He delicate features could easily be identified as a Victorian. And he had rounded up the rough working togs including a pair of gloves. “Wear these. If anyone sees your hands they might become suspicious. They’ve obviously never done any labor.”

To make matters worse, Serpina’s hostility toward her was undisguised and intense. Once aboard the ancient tram hitched to an equally ancient steam mule belching puffs of acrid smoke from its fore stack, the young woman had chosen to sit apart from her. Instead Lydia found herself next to a short round woman who smelled of cooking oil and who could not help staring at her all the while babbling in some argot that was barely comprehensible. She realized also that if she tried to engage in conversation, she would be quickly identified as a Victorian. Her Standard was just too proper and uninflected.

She caught Serpina giving her a smug smirk at her predicament over her shoulder. Fortunately she had the window seat and feigned that she was going to take a nap by placing her palms together and leaning her cheek against them. Then she rested her head on the discolored real glass of the window and watched the bustle of the marketplace through half closed eyes.

She understood that the further away from any large population centers she traveled, especially outside of the influence of the Clockwork Commonwealth, her obvious non-Class III mannerisms would give her away, that she was a World Citizen, t’zen as they were commonly called, and not just a Class I, but legacy ranked. Yet she found herself a prisoner of the Doctor’s manipulations and as much she chaffed at her constraints, she accepted that she had to play along until the circumstances turned in her favor. Serre-Pain had once again emphasized the importance of their mission and her role in bringing about its success. But even his persuasion had seemed muted when he had remonstrated with her in the wine cave, his dark skin ashen, a weariness around his eyes. She did not doubt that the intention of his mission was reasonable and dire. She wasn’t being given a choice in the matter.

In return she would be led to the illusive Commodore Jack Cheése, her father. She did want that, not having seen him in over a decade. He had mysteriously disappeared soon after she had entered the Air Academy. And the chance to reason with him, convince him, as only a daughter can, to reconsider his opposition to the hologram succession, the legitimacy of the Commonwealth, the Admiralty Court and the Lord High Inquisitor. She thought his hostility to the Crown foolish. After all had he not once been a loyal subject, rising through the ranks of the Admiralty Medical Corps, to become a Commodore in the Advanced Research Division? What had turned him. She’d heard it said that after her mother’s passing that he had gone rogue, publishing secret documents that pointed to the Commonwealth’s complicity in covering up the cause of the vast defoliation that ensued after the battle against the BMI, and aligning himself with Icers and anti-royalist factions. She believed in the benevolence of the State toward its t’zens, which was perhaps a little naïve considering her life of privilege growing up in the exclusive enclave in the Empire of Brazil’s vast Sao Rio mega province, attending the best schools in Lisbon, and obtaining a legacy appointment to the Admiralty Air Academy. She could conceive of no reason not to support the Crown and Pax Victoriana. She considered herself to be a Victorian and proud of it. The Queen had set the example long ago. As long as nations kept talking when they could go to war, a modicum of peace could be insured. It was the model of consensus. Although opponents to the Pax Commonwealth called it coercion. Her father being one of them. But she was following the Queen’s example. She just wanted a chance to talk to him. In person.

She sighed and let her eyes wander across the plaza beyond the pocked glass of the tram wagon. A considerable confusion of conveyances, some steam, some spring driven mechanicals, and even a few with live drayage teams sought purchase through the maze of merchants setting up their stalls.. The street carriage lurched forward with a sudden jolt and she realized that they were underway, pulled by the large wheeled steam tractor. They made their way through the packed market place and she got a better view of the streams of transports arriving, some of more recent vintages powered by the latest bacteria drives, known to all as bacteries, obvious from the pale breath of water vapors emitted by their exhaust stacks.

At the gate to the old city, their transport idled in line with others while teams of gendarmes worked their way through the vehicles checking identifications. A pair clambered onto her carriage and marched up and down the aisle looking bored and acting agressive.

Lydia averted her eyes and pretended to be sleeping. She felt the presence of one of the policemen hovering near her. He was demanding to see her papers, or so she assumed. The woman seated next to her was saying something to the official, imploring and repeating what sounded like the word “dorm.” Finally the gendarmes disembarked and Lydia cocked a cautious eye and saw her companion give a reassuring nod and smile. She was about to express her gratitude when out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the square black chassis of an armored carrier and watched as the men in the black hats, agents of IOTA, took up positions at the periphery of the waiting traffic.

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Chapter XXII

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Next Time: Citily and the Republic of Corsardinia

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Next Time: Flight Of The Long Bird

Chapter XVII

Next Time: The Tides Of History

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Next Time: The Ancient Order Has An Odor

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Next Time: The Clans of the Massif

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Next Time: The Clans of the Massif

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Next Time: Escape To The Country

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Next Time: Lydia’s Change Of Heart

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Next Time: Flight From IOTA