Airship Hunters Read Online Free PDF Page A

side, was the total black of the thing; there, alongside it, were stars.
    He realized he was looking at the edge of the thing. He could just barely make it out, forcing his still-addled brain to comply with the rules of reality he knew for certain still existed when he was secure in mind and body. Or did they?
    Oh, how he wished he had his pistol on him at that moment. But why? What would he do with it? Fire it at the thing? Hoping to accomplish what?
    To confirm it was real , he told himself.
    A queer mirth overtook him: Valiantine wondered with a dry chuckle why he wasn’t hearing music, like Perklee. In a strange way he was almost envious of the odd man.
    He needed light. He needed to brighten the sky so as to illuminate the thing. Was it a ship? No, he refused to call it that. For now it was simply a thing , until he knew more.
    Valiantine fumbled in his pocket and brought out a box of matches. He smiled to himself momentarily, remembering the loving teasing of Eileen in Virginia Beach over his particular ways. “Always be prepared,” he’d told her on numerous occasions.
    A thought struck him. Casting aside the matches and, without any qualms in doing so, yelled up at the thing.
    “Hello! Hello the ship!”
    It was a leap of faith, labeling it as such, but he reasoned it made little difference at that moment. He cared only to know more of it—to determine if it were real or simply some trick of the atmosphere on his senses.
    He found himself running, though he hadn’t intended to. He fell, having caught his foot on a rock or a root. Crashing to the ground, Valiantine brought his hands up just at the last moment before his face smashed into a small knot of wiry, thorny brush.
    Pulling himself to his feet, he looked up and cursed again and again and again.
    He saw only stars, as far as the eye could see, and wondered if he had truly seen anything more.
     
    To pass the time while waiting for the major, Valiantine picked out objects in the man’s office and made mental notes as to how he might rearrange them. With a full thirty minutes having passed after being shown into Wellington’s office, Valiantine was on edge.
    Then, blessedly, the door behind the desk opened and the major appeared. He was still talking with someone—unseen to Valiantine—in the other room, as if the lieutenant wasn’t even there. The gist of it seemed to be assuring the other person that “things would be seen to.”
    Standing up to salute, Valiantine just wanted the interview to be over with, whatever its outcome.
    One eyebrow on Wellington’s face rose as he glanced at the lieutenant, standing there saluting. With a practically non-existent nod, the major motioned for him to sit down again.
    “Read your report,” Wellington said, staring at what Valiantine assumed was the file in question. “You’ve nothing more to say than that?”
    He’d stayed in Manitou a full week after the events of the strange encounter at the lakeside, watching and waiting for signs he hadn’t suffered some sort of loss of his faculties from the beating. Perklee never returned to his cabin, nor did Awanai the bandit show his face again, at least not in and around Manitou. There had been a newspaper report of a bank robbery in Fort Wayne, but Valiantine didn’t follow up on it. If the criminal had any real connection with the airship, he sensed it to be so minute as to not be worth the trouble of tracking him down.
    Later, he regretted not putting the effort into it and wondered at what had become of his normal resolve. The encounter outside the town had apparently shaken him more then he’d realized.
    As for Perklee, Valiantine resisted the track on which his thoughts desired to travel, that the man vanished not by the machinations of the citizens of Manitou, but by other, darker forces. It felt too easy an explanation, one which he was not prepared to embrace. Not yet.
    From the little town he had made his way to Rochester and then on to Gary, all the