Mark Hodder - Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

“A mediumistic procedure?”

“Not at all. It's similar to the telegraph but without the wires. It involves the modulation of oscillating electromagnetic fields.”

“That's all mumbo jumbo to me. What are they looking at?”

Wells turned to observe the officers, then raised his binoculars and followed the men's gaze.

“Ah ha!” he said. “The rotorships! Have a squint.”

He passed the binoculars to Burton, who put them to his eyes and scanned the eastern sky, near the horizon, until two dark dots came into view. As they approached, he saw they were big rotorships, each with twelve flight pylons, wings spinning at the top of the tall shafts. The black flat-bottomed vessels were rather more domed in shape than those from his own time, and he could see guns poking out of portholes along their sides.

“Astraea and Pegasus,” Wells said. “Cruiser class. The Pegasus is the one on the right.”

“They're fast. What are those little things flying around them?”

“Hornets. One-man fighters. They'll swoop in to shoot at the ground defences.”

“Actual insects?”

“Yes. The usual routine. Breed 'em big, kill 'em, scrape 'em out, shove steam engines into the carapaces. The method hasn't changed since your day. Look out! The Konigsberg is bringing her cannon to bear!”

Burton directed the glasses to the city's harbour and saw that the decks of the seagoing vessel were swarming with men. A gun turret, positioned in front of its three funnels, was turning to face the oncoming rotorships. A few moments later, orange light blazed from the muzzle. Repetitive booms, lagging a few seconds behind the discharges, rippled out over the landscape, becoming thin and echoey as they faded away.

He looked back at the rotorships, both almost upon the city now. Puffs of black smoke were exploding around them.

Hornets dived down at the light cruiser and raked her decks with their machine guns.

“Come on, lads!” Wells cheered.

Burton watched men ripped into tatters and knocked overboard as bullets tore into them. A loud report sounded. He lowered the binoculars and saw that metal and smoke had erupted from the side of the Pegasus.

“She's hit!” Wells cried.

The rotorship listed to her left. As her shadow passed over the Konigsberg , small objects spilled from beneath her. They were bombs. With an ear-splitting roar, the German vessel disappeared into a ball of fire and smoke. Fragments of hull plating went spinning skyward. Another huge detonation sounded as the ship's munitions went up.

The Pegasus , rocked by the shock wave, keeled completely over onto her side and arced toward the ground. She hit the southern neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam and ploughed through them, disintegrating, until, when she finally came to rest, she was nothing but an unrecognisable knot of twisted and tattered metal slumped at the end of a long burning furrow. Hundreds of buildings had been destroyed, maybe thousands of lives lost.

Wells opened his mouth to say something but his words were drowned by thunder as the Astraea started to dump her payload onto the middle of the city. The noise slapped again and again at Burton's ears as the colonial district was pummelled and decimated. Soon, all he could see was a blanket of black smoke through which the red lights of Hades flickered, and gliding along above it, silhouetted against the glaring white sky, the menacing rotorship, drawing closer and closer to where the tip of the radio tower emerged from the expanding inferno.

Wells stood on tiptoe and put his mouth to Burton's ear, which was ringing with such intensity that the explorer could barely hear the correspondent's soprano voice: “We had no choice but to do it. I wonder, though-will the human race ever transcend the animalistic impulses that lead to such behaviour?”

Burton yelled back: “I suspect animals would be most offended to be associated with an atrocity like this! What of the people down there? What of the Africans?”

“Casualties of war. As I said, we had no choice!”

“But this isn't their bloody conflict! It isn't their bloody conflict, damn it!”

A quick succession of blasts marked the end of the radio tower. The Astraea slid over the belt of red weed and sailed northward with hornets buzzing around her.

The attack was already over.

Silence rolled back in from the surrounding countryside, broken only by occasional small explosions.

“She's probably on her way to give Tanga some of the same treatment,” Wells said, watching the rotorship receding into the distance.

Burton stood silently, struggling to stay on his feet. His legs were trembling violently, and his heart hammered in his chest.

“Bismillah!” he muttered. “Bismillah!”

“Take us up, Mr. Wenham, no higher than seven thousand feet, if you please.” The order came from William Henson, the rotorship's first officer. He was a slender man, about fifty years old, with an extravagant moustache that curved around his cheeks to blend into bushy muttonchop whiskers. He wore tiny wire-framed spectacles that magnified his eyes while also accentuating his precise and somewhat stern manner.

He turned to Burton and Swinburne, who were standing next to Captain Lawless, having been invited up to the conning tower to witness the takeoff. “We have to keep her low, gentlemen, on account of our ventilation problems. Until we get the heating pipes fixed, flying at any greater altitude will have us all shivering in our socks.”

A vibration ran through the deck as the engines roared. There was no sensation of movement, but through the windows curving around the front and sides of the tower, Burton saw the horizon slip downward.

“Here we go,” declared Francis Wenham, the helmsman. He was at a control console at the front of the cabin, manipulating three big levers and a number of wheels; a beefily built man with pale blond, rather untidy hair, and a wispy goatee beard.

“One thousand five hundred feet,” murmured the man at the station beside him. “Swing her forty degrees to starboard, please.”

“Forty degrees to starboard, aye, Mr. Playfair.”

The horizon revolved around the ship.

Playfair turned to Henson and said, “Course set, sir.”

“Thank you. Ahead, Mr. Wenham. Get her up to forty knots.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Flight time to London, three and a half hours,” Playfair noted.

Swinburne eyed the sharp-faced, dark-eyed navigator. “I didn't see him consult his instruments,” he muttered to Lawless. “Did he just do that calculation in his head?”

“Yes,” the captain answered quietly. “He's a wizard with mathematics, that one.”

The meteorologist-short, very stout, very hairy, and wearing his bulging uniform jacket tightly buttoned-announced: “Clear going until we reach the capital, sir. Fog there.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bingham.”

The captain turned to a tall, heavily bearded man who'd just entered the cabin and said, “Ah, there you are. Sir Richard, Mr. Swinburne, this is Doctor Barnaby Quaint, our steward and surgeon. He'll give you a tour of the ship, see that you're settled into your quarters, and will make sure that you have whatever you require.”