Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

THE AFTERNOON FLIGHT was riskier because of the sun’s relative position in the sky, and Charlotte felt the tautness of her nerves as a vague discomfort in the harness, an overawareness of her movements as she controlled the Gossamer Wing . She usually did it all without thinking, as though the airship were an extension of her body.

This is when mistakes happen , she told herself, and wished she could turn around instead of continuing to waft along an updraft leading north and east to the coast. But she had a job to do, so she focused her helmet optics on the now-familiar window below.

Her heart began to thump when she saw the profile and realized who was in that office, meeting with the philandering industrialist. It was indeed Maurice Gendreau. Murcheson’s suspicions were confirmed.

Charlotte tweaked the little knob that fine-tuned her sonic amplificator, and nudged the direction indicator slightly to focus in on the window.

She heard a snatch of French, a wave of interference from the glass, and then a clear stream of words as the onetime spy approached the window.

“Mother of—” A sudden gust stole the words from Charlotte’s lips and she struggled to level the Gossamer Wing against the buffeting. The sound connection cut in and out, and she nudged her jaw to the right to zoom the ocular device in on the window. It was too far for her to even attempt lip-reading, however.

Determined to gather as much information as possible, Charlotte curled her fingers around the altitude control, pondering whether to risk getting closer. She knew the Gossamer Wing might be seen if she ventured too low, but the urge to learn more was nearly overwhelming. A catch like this would secure a future for the dirigible, and Charlotte, in the Agency.

Just as she began to pull the handle she caught a glimpse of something, a flash of light, on the rooftop of the office building. Jerking her hand away from the controls, she refocused from the window to the area the flash had come from.

Another flash hit her directly in the eyes. Banking sharply to change her angle, she thanked the heavens for Dexter’s foresight in supplying the oculars with special photoreactive shielding against glare. Even with the shielding, she was all but blinded for a few moments.

Was it a piece of broken glass, or perhaps a skylight catching a stray sunbeam? When her dazzled eyes began to clear she wiggled her chin and perused the area once more, in time to see a tall, thin figure disappear behind the roof access door. He had something in his hand, a slender brass tube with a horribly familiar look to it.

“YOU DON’T KNOW for certain it was a spyglass,” Dexter reasoned for perhaps the third time since they had turned the boat back toward Honfleur.

“But we have to assume it was,” she explained, also for the third time, “because that’s the worst-case scenario. And before you start in again, we cannot assume he was up there spying on a pretty clerk one block over. Or the handsome butcher’s boy, or a rival shipping agent. The glass reflected off the sun that was roughly behind me . We have to assume he was looking for me . And that he found me.”

“Fine,” he capitulated. “What do we do next, if that’s the case? Do you resign from the mission? Get on the next ship back to New York?”

Charlotte pressed her hands over her eyes, still suffering a headache from the harsh sunlight and harsher reflection. The glare off the water didn’t help. “We tell Murcheson, and probably proceed as though nothing had happened until we know more. We’ll also need to search the room thoroughly and if we find nothing, we assume the bugs are there but we simply haven’t found them. And we remain alert.”

“Are you all right, Charlotte?”

“Are you mad? Of course I’m not all right. Murcheson is sure to scratch my real mission now, if he doesn’t send me home outright. Three days into my first real assignment and I’ve already been—”

“I meant your eyes. You look as though you have a headache.” His voice was a little too level, too placid. Charlotte did not especially want to be appeased or pacified. She hated the idea that he was humoring her.

“I do, but I’ll survive it.”

“When we get back to Atlantis I’ll ask Smith-Grenville to hunt down some headache powder.”

“Dexter, the headache is the least of my worries. It should be the least of yours.”

He frowned, flexing his fingers over the rudder of the little craft then gripping tightly enough for a moment that the wood creaked ominously. Then he relaxed and shrugged. “It’s the only worry I can do anything about.”

THEIR MEETING WITH Murcheson ran longer than usual that afternoon. They relayed the limited intelligence Charlotte had gathered—the fact of the meeting with Gendreau if not its substance—and Charlotte reluctantly added her concerns about the dark figure on the rooftop. Despite the furor over her possibly being spotted, Murcheson and the station head, Admiral Neeley, asked her to remain and discuss the prospect of a recruiting push for other female pilots, while Dexter joined his team in the bowels of the station.

When Charlotte finally left her meeting and found Dexter, he was embroiled in some fierce physics argument that couldn’t be stopped midstream. She wandered back down to the submersible laboratory to wait for him, and spent a troubled hour attempting to convince herself that the minuscule craft wasn’t really that small after all.

It was nearly sunset when they reemerged from the inconspicuous side door in the nondescript factory building. When Charlotte lifted a gloved hand to shield her eyes from the sudden unexpected glare, she realized the white kid was ruined with dark smudges of lubricant and inexplicable black scuff marks from handling the newly built equipment in the sub. She made a mental note to ask for some coveralls next time, and to remove her gloves before entering the vessel. She might as well outfit herself properly for the sub, since it seemed her tenure as an aerial surveillance expert was due to end abruptly; if she didn’t quickly make herself indispensable in some alternative way she’d be shipped back to the Dominions before she knew it. Not that the submersible would have been her choice if she had any other alternative at all.

Coming out again into daylight was disorienting, like leaving a matinee and being startled to find it still light outside. When Dexter offered his arm she took it, stepping briskly to keep up with the men. Mr. Murcheson was back in his jovial factory-owner mode, and spouted a vast number of sales statistics that Charlotte ignored as they returned to the steam car.

“And finally, my dear Baroness, a gift. Something to charm you and perhaps inspire your husband to broaden the scope of his own work.”

Through the open window of the car he handed her a curio box, an oddly heavy cube of carved teak with a delicate marquetry pattern of shaded woods and mother-of-pearl on each side. Brass gleamed at the corners, but there was no other hardware in evidence. Charlotte turned the box over and over, finally looking back up at Murcheson with a skeptically arched eyebrow.

“I thank you, sir.” She wondered if the present was meant to soften a parting blow. Murcheson had declined to give her a definite yes or no on whether she would still be sent on her mission to retrieve the weapon plans.

“I’ll be interested to learn how long it takes you to open it, my lady. And Hardison, I look forward to hearing what devious new uses you think up for it. We’re already planning to outfit our surveillance teams with your modified cable crawlers.”