Iron Shark
A Saboteur's fall from grace.
Fritz opened his eyes forcing the heady mixture of dream and memory to recede and for that he was rewarded with the numbing ache that racked his body. All things considered he was lucky to be alive, good or bad luck had yet to be determined. Bright light accosted him as he attempted to move his body with all the grace of a newborn calf blessed with four left hooves.
He had survived the fall into the bay avoiding both the deadly crags of the shallows and the burning wreckage of the zeppelin crashing down. His last fragmented memories were crawling through a rocky inlet and then passing out. His neck protested his orders to move to observe his surroundings, but he gave it the same regard as he did most safety precautions.
A shallow cave, hollowed out by the elements and carefully tucked away in a regress formed by the surrounding cliffs. The moon over the bay provided the spotlight for his one-man agony show. Slowly, and by degrees he stretched out his limbs and they echoed his neck’s protests having been subjected to the physical abuse of plummeting into cold water followed by the laborious swim and then finally made to rest on a bed only slightly less comfortable than the berthing arrangements he had been privy to the last couple of months.
The aches subsided, slightly, but the cold remained. Through his vast knowledge of medical science, which was nonexistent, he determined that nothing was broken. He decided to stand, and maybe if Mercury was in retrograde, he might decide to walk. He managed to stand and take a few stiff steps.
“Just need a little oil in those joints, Tinman,” he told himself.
He would have chuckled remembering his grandfather’s words, but it hurt too much. As he recalled, he had just fallen out of tree when his grandfather had first said that to him. Of course, grandfather would fixate on the metal man character.
Fritz stumbled to the mouth of the cave and as was predetermined by the climax of his story. To raise his arms in triumph in the celestial spotlight and scream silently his victorious defiance against his foes. But as was in line with his life story, an overeager understudy with a penchant for ad-libbing, decided to upstage the hero and hog the spotlight for himself.
The bulbous form of an airship cast a shadow onto the bay. Unlike the gas bag zeppelin that had been Fritz’s previous mode of transportation this one had rigid hull. It was newer but maintained hallmarks of the previous generations including a hanging gondola. An unholy abomination brought forth by a mind that could only comprehend half of what it observed and no innovation of its own.
Fritz didn’t need to guess who was responsible for bastardizing his grandfather’s work, “Hanz,” he practically spat.
“Now Fritz, don’t be upset with your brother. You don’t know he’s guilty,”
Fritz hated remembering his mother’s chiding words. She always spoiled him and took his side. Grandfather was disappointed in his son’s lack of ability and just as much Fritz was disappointed in Hanz’s fecklessness. Whether he was forced into it or not Hanz was perverting their grandfather’s life work, removing all semblance of original intent to create weapons of war, an iron shark that patrolled the skies.
And here come the remoras. The muted roar of engines coming to life brought to Fritz’s attention of how blissfully unaware he had been of the tranquil silence that had now been murdered in a cacophony of grinding gears and backfires. Fritz watched the skeletal frames of the ornithopters fall away from bulk of the airship before puttering away on their own course. He counted eight in total, but it was only from one side. Undoubtedly there was another eight on the other side because Hanz couldn’t understand asymmetry. Assuming of course they hadn’t already been deployed earlier.
They must be looking for the wreck, and presumably any survivors. Fritz was in no hurry to be discovered. They were from the east; he was from the west. Outsiders couldn’t tell the difference between the two peoples of the split empire, but ladies and gentlemen, rest assured that the citizens can tell.
Fritz had some problems. He didn’t know if there were any other survivors, which was a double-sided problem because with the civil war going on being a West-Back and the only survivor of a crashed East-Back zeppelin would be highly suspicious. Both sides held the other in contempt and suspicion, but the East-Backs were particularly persecutorial. Fritz would undoubtedly be blamed for the fate of the Toller Fisch.
They would be right, but that doesn’t mean it was any less prejudiced to think that way. If there were other survivors, they would quickly identify Fritz as the cause of the crash seeing he had been the main suspect of a five-minute inquiry after he had been caught setting up the last of the makeshift explosives he had been hiding in the infrastructure for a month.
A month spent infiltrating as a crewmember, a month spent planning it out, and a month carefully hiding the incendiary devices. It all went kaput when Arnold, who for the record was lollygagging at the time, a direct dereliction of duty, decided to poke his head out of his hidey hole and watch him place the last device. Arnold, being useful for little else than making noise, did what he did best and screamed his little lungs out, “SABOTAGE.”
Five minutes later after an unsuccessful attempt by Fritz to defend himself saw him dragged before the Skipper for a formal inquiry. Of course, Fritz denied the spurious allegations pointing out that Arnold had just woken up and had bad eyesight to compound that fact. At this point the Skipper asked for Arnold to produce the proof of Fritz’s misdeed. Arnold of course, could not do this because he was an idiot. He pointed out that he had left the evidence in place because tampering with evidence might compromise the scene of the crime. The Skipper, like any seasoned skipper, whether on water or in the air, fixed Arnold with a harrowing gaze that emulated a toxic combination of horror, bewilderment, and disdain.
Anything the Skipper may have said was drowned out by the first booming explosion that rocked the gondola. They were designed to go off in sequence and Fritz, as part of his original plan, had no intention of being around for that. In fact, his original intention was to be somewhere else when the first went off and was quite upset that the inquiry had put him behind schedule. He scrambled for across the shaking metal floor grabbed ahold of a stowed mooring line and slammed into the side hatch. He threw his weight onto the quick-dog lever and the hatch flew out taking Fritz with it.
The second explosion went off and the zeppelin pitched to the side threatening Fritz’s already tenuous relationship with the mooring line that he clung to as if his life depended on it, which as it so happened, was in fact the case.
An insane number of mathematical factors were in play as Fritz slid down the two-hundred feet of mooring line, but he honestly didn’t have the state of mind to calculate them and simply slid until his gloves tore and were ripped away and when his impaired judgement deemed it safe enough he let go of the rope.
Fritz glared angrily at the obscenity polluting the night sky with its presence. It is in this moment that Fritz’s cause celebre became nakedly apparent to himself. He never cared about the war, one tyrant ruling over them was just the same as any other, whether it was an individual or a committee. It was not loyalty to King or country that spurned him to fight and play the part of saboteur. His motivation was of a higher calling, a noble and holy crusade to wipe out all that didn’t meet his aesthetic of a beautiful sky.
It also occurred to him that he was just one man. Each month more of Hanz’s abominations sailed out of their hangars and took the sky while it took him no less than three months to drop one. Would more people help? Probably not, more people meant more planning and more complications and a level of faith in fellow human beings that Fritz was inclined to.
What if the production hangars were destroyed. That would certainly slow down the creation of these monstrosities, maybe even pause them. No, it would take extreme military measures to pull that off and Fritz was neither soldier nor fighter as the bruises not caused by his fall clearly stated. Everything would be so much easier, in fact all his problems and plans and even his current circumstances would be resolved if he just had his own airship...
Almost every assembly line in the country was dedicated to making aircraft for the military. Only the wealthiest of private companies and individuals had their own production source. What if he skipped all of that and simply took one that already existed?
Fritz eyes narrowed at the bulbous shadow against the moon like a predator that finally decided something it had been observing curiously was in fact food, or at least close enough to warrant a taste test. It was an obnoxiously phallic object floating in the sky, like a pilot whale that head grown tired of the monotony of the sea and decided to fly instead. The gondola dangled at the end of an extended framework like a man’s pair in a tubular shaft.
The extensive metaphor in Fritz mind was not without cause, for it had been an early design of his grandfather’s and had also been part of a perverse running joke amongst his peers. The fact Hanz could not understand this and actually built the damn thing was of no surprise to Fritz. But of more interest to him was the bare bones nature of the design meant for utilitarian purpose originally.
A plan was gestating in Fritz mind. An absolutely insane and diabolical one. It culminated in an image him sitting at the helm of a majestic airship, one that hunted down lesser pretenders to the name, an iron shark that patrolled the skies and culled the weak, the impure, and the unsightly.
The unfortunate snag in his delusion of grandeur was that despite everyone’s great efforts including his grandfather’s, no airship was self-sufficient and would need a home base, the question was where. Immediately Fritz decided on Hannibal’s Rest.
High in the mountains that split the empire, Hannibal’s Rest was the single greatest strategic import in almost every war that occurred, and the current one was no exception, in fact it was emphasized by the nature of the war. Because of this both sides were in constant conflict over its possession.
It had switched sides so many times that it became a joke that one determined who was in control by asking which day of the week it was. There was even an unconfirmed story of a Western general that was in control of it for a record one month only to discover that all the soldiers he commanded were easterners.
Both sides eventually gave up. Or rather waited for the other side to take control so they could counterattack. Over a few months an unofficial cold war took hold as each side waited for the other. Hiding right under the elephant’s belly Fritz thought.
Fritz tried to solidify the idea in his head but failed to focus on a cohesive plot. The problem was the incessant droning of engines that prevented him from focusing on any single idea. He decided to yell at the perpetrators for interrupting his train of thought and looked up to see three ornithopters mounted by three of the sternest pilots Fritz had ever met. That may have been an exaggeration, to Fritz, all pilots were stone faced, and his judgement of things was a little off due to a traumatic fall he experienced a while back.
Whatever fate held for Fritz he was unsure, but if he was not going into the river of destiny without a boat nor a paddle. Let’s be clear on one thing, he was putting his hands up in frustration, not surrender. He was granting these pilots the opportunity to escort him to his new airship.