by Phylis 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.
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).
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Serpina had withdrawn into herself, huddled, arms folded acrost her chest.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.
Dime Pulp is please to introduce a new seral fiction titled Carriers by Mark DuCharme (yes, that’s his real name). Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mark earned a BA from the University of Michigan and moved to Colorado in 1990 to attend the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where he earned an MFA. A widely published author, Mark lives in Boulder where he works as an English instructor. Carriers is a vampire novella with touches of black comedy and satirical bite, and is told from the perspective of its unreliable narrator and protagonist, Johnny. It takes place during a “plague” that has been going on for two years in an unnamed city. Dead bodies litter the streets, hallways, and homes. A corpse disposal company hires people like Johnny to transport them to a facility at the edge of town with the very important stipulation that the bodies be delivered there before sundown. No one ever says why. Read Carriers, 
Phylis Huldarsdottir returns after a one issue hiatus with the continuing adventures of Airship Commander Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) searching for her anti-Commonwealth renegade father, Commodore Jack, with the help Doctor Professor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor the Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, and his associates, former circus strongman, Vlady, and Serpina, the snake girl. On the run from IOTA (the Investigative Office of The Admiralty), she has narrowly escapes capture by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Karla Kola, in Oldest Orleans, and now with the help of a young wannabe airship pilot, Pyare, must traverse the Central Massif to rendezvous with Serre-Pain and the dirigible that will take them on a mercy mission to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republics), base for the anti-Commonwealth ICERS. Read more in 
Also returning after a one issue absence is Pierre Anton Taylor’s dark crimefighting serial, Just Coincidence. A privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father. In this new episode, the young crimefighter continues to investigate the unexplained death of his father, and the robbery murder of old Rick, the candy store owner, as well as the strange new street drug, Wacky Waxx. Read more in
Last but certainly not least, Colin Deerwood’s long running serial, Better Than Dead, A Detective Story, continues its unpredictable peregrinations featuring private detective Lackland Ask, aka Stan Gardner, aka Sam Carter, on the run again when he learns that his bucolic hideaway in the Three Lakes area is also where his nemesis, mob boss Yan Kovic, aka Mr. K, is ducking the feds. Now it is even more imperative that he make himself scarce, especially after a crooked local constable in league with Mr. K’s hoods try to finish him off. In the meantime, thanks to the moonshiner’s daughter and a lusty cousin, he learns a surprising revelation about his paternity. After a fatal gun battle with Kovic’s hoods, he and the moonshiner’s daughter must now dispose of the bodies. This episode features a very rare occurrence of Ursus Ex Machina and the obligatory pulp sex scene. Read more in 
The inspection official and two sinister looking men in black hats had roamed over the barge examining the cargo, and when they came into the cabin, stared wide eyed at her propped up in one of the bunks with the python wrapped over shoulders. Her terrified look might have suggested an otherwise haughty imperious annoyance at the intrusion. The station inspector apologized profusely, and the IOTA agents, not in the habit of showing deference to the general public, dropped their gazes awkwardly.
The yoke fit comfortably across her shoulders as she shrugged into the coat, the sleeves extending a little ways past her wrists, the hem, past her knees. She was surprised, expecting it to be heavier. Her hand in the right pocket extracted a heavy dark blue cotton scarf. The left pocket was empty although it was shaped as if some object had had a permanent residence there. Lydia pulled on the lapels pleased by the way the coat fit. She felt something hard nudge under her left breast. Inside she found the pocket and the narrow object protruding from it. Throwing open the coat she extracted a long ornate double blade stiletto.
At the cheers from the crowd Lydia made her way out from behind the large ophidiarium on wheels that attested to Serre-Pain’s claim of herpetology and proof of his knowledge, like an old library full of old books. The crowds had thinned out further under the arcade where merchants had set up their wares, most everyone wearing a face covering, and some, goggles, against the silicate laden air. Serre-Pain had asked her not to go out in public unaccompanied by one of them. She would appear out of place and thereby attract attention. She was willing to chance it. She had friends who might be able to help her slip back to Sao Paulo. Even though The Empire of Brazil had an extradition treaty with the Clockwork Commonwealth, she doubted that the Emperor’s court would allow it over such a trivial matter as a Citizen of the World Order searching for her paternity. She would have to stay out of IOTA’s jurisdiction which would make her an exile from the world hub of Greater London. She would certainly not be allowed to pilot airships outside of the Empire’s zone of influence which spanned the southern hemisphere and the Atlantic to the inter desert zone of New Mali and Congola further south. She would no longer be an airship commander in the glamourous passenger fleets like Aerosud or Canamair. Most of the navair traffic in the Free Corridor of Cancer was freight and third class which meant much of the world’s poor and retched, refugees from the camps adjacent the dead regions and the encroaching tundra.
The woman nodded her head and spoke a single word in dialect, “O.” And again pointed at Lydia’s slippers seeming to infer how puny they were when compared to the rugged specimen Lydia was holding in her hand.
Having spent time in an Admiralty intelligence unit when she was stationed at the Commonwealth embassy in Houllas in the Republic of Texas, she knew that she would have to secure new papers if she were going to cross physical borders. And that she would have to avoid travelling by air. It would have to overland until she was safely out of the reach of IOTA. The Capricorn Free Corridor was her best bet. Surely there was someone in Older Orleans who could provide her with a passport that would escape detection, especially if she stayed off the main routes and avoided the busy checkpoints. The strains of the violin concerto had a soothing effect on her although at times she knew that it could also be quite stimulating. She closed her eyes for a moment, amusing herself with the fact that the President of the ISR, the Invincible Swiss Republic, was Albert III, the great grandson of the world famous musician. Unexpectedly her mental image changed, as often happens in reverie, to that of Vlady fitting the bear head onto his own and she realized then why he seemed so familiar to her. How could she had forgotten?
Lydia crouched in a defensive stance, the training she had received as a young officer in the Admiralty’s Aerocorps returning to her tensed body like a remembered presence. She faced the bear, turning warily, sensing others in the shadows of the oil lamp’s mute orange glow. The flower girl sat on a very large ornately decorated trunk, feet dangling in picturesque innocence. She was the one Lydia wanted. About to demand her wallet back, she caught a third figure at the periphery, moving toward her. Tall, muscular, a dark skinned man with a crop of white hair and narrow, also white, iron jaw whiskers held his hand palm up in the universal gesture of no harm. On her guard, she turned to keep all three of them in her field of vision.
Lydia was immobile, paralyzed, her entire body coursed with a fiery itch yet conscious of being lowered into a musty smelling box and a mesh cloth placed over her. Then snakes, a tangle of slithering vipers, were dumped on top of her prostrate form. She tried to scream but her vocal cords were affected as well. She heard Serre-Pain’s voice, a soft soothing whisper, “Please forgive me, Lydia, but it was necessary to prick you with a small dose of octopus venom. You will be immobilized for about twelve hours. You will remain conscious but unable to speak though you will be able to move your eyes. Don’t fret about the snakes. Since you can’t move, they won’t bother you though they will be attracted to your body heat. The mesh will protect you. Now I must deal with our visitors.”
Chief Inspector? Lydia’s eyes snapped open. IOTA! IOTA was out there beyond the glass. Bright biotorches cast large shadows flickering at her peripheral vision. She could hear the scrapping and shuffling of large objects being moved around accompanied by Serre-Pain’s pleas for caution.
“Interesting. I see by your papers you are proprietor of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and Traveling Medicine Show.”
What she saw did not please her, a fringe of auburn hair, brow knit into a frown, grey eyes staring back in anger. Not again, she thought. Two groundings in as many weeks, and her suspension only just overturned. Tossing her tunic onto her grandfather’s vraisther smoking chair, she glanced at the stack of documents on the side table. In particular, she eyed the communication she had set aside the day before when she had been too preoccupied with preparing for her flight out of Lesser London to give it much more than a cursory glance. Addressed to her, handwritten in green ink, that in itself unusual, on what felt like a slip of parchment. “Parchment, really?” she said aloud. It was just one of the many come-ons and false leads she had received since she advertised a reward for information as to proof of life of Commander Jack Cheése, her father and the brilliant airship engineer who had disappeared many years ago, around the time she had entered the Air Academy for the freshman term.
Baker’s Square was hemmed in by blocks of apartment dwellings designed to look like rowhouses, stacked one atop the other. They were all the same whichever way you looked. Their sameness caused her a momentary claustrophobia.
The pickpocket veered into the alley between two buildings with Lydia still in the tangle of panicked underdwellers. She kept her gaze fixed on the hobbling figure and once free of the mob ran swiftly to the entrance of the alleyway. The already inefficient bacso street lamps hardly penetrated the deep darkness of the cleft between buildings. Indignation overrode her sense of caution and she strode into the shadows. Slowly her eyes gathered the available light and sharpened to the dark. An oversplash of orange from the city above allowed her to discern edges and contours. The young purse snatch bobbed hurriedly toward the light of a parallel street at the other end.
Dime Pulp 