Solomon's Compass (Steam & Aether Book 3), page 1
Solomon’s Compass
Jaxon Reed
Copyright
Solomon’s Compass
Steam & Aether Book III
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Copyright © 2023 Jaxon Reed
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Historical figures are used in fictional settings and dialogues, within fictitious alternate universes. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Cover by Jacqueline Sweet Design
Editing and formatting by edbok.com
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Other books by Jaxon Reed
Prologue
“Sergeant Maloney, do you have visual?”
“Affirmative, Lieutenant. We have eyes on the bogey. It appears to be . . . a man falling?”
“That’s correct, Sarge,” Martin Prentice said. His skimmer flew slightly ahead of Maloney’s. “It’s some dude wearing a white lab coat. He’s just falling through the air.”
The com went silent for a moment as the four skimmers raced toward the intrusion. Moments ago, the four were on a routine patrol northwest of Online New York in NeuralNet. Then suddenly, sensors indicated an unidentified flying object and they altered course. Now as they neared the intrusion, it appeared the object was not flying at all.
“I’m going to approach it as slow as possible,” Maloney said. “The rest of you fall back.”
She heard a chorus of men saying, “Yes, Sergeant.”
Joel Farmington spoke up.
“Be careful, Sarge. This is around the place Coulter bought it.”
Maloney grimaced in her skimmer. She knew this was indeed the area where her sergeant’s body mysteriously disappeared following an explosion in an online firefight with a mysterious bogie.
“Thanks for reminding me, Farmington. That was a disaster.”
The investigation lasted six months, during which time nobody was allowed back online.
“They ever find his body?”
“Shut up, Patel.”
Ernst Patel was the newest specialist on the team.
He has a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, Maloney thought. On the other hand, he never knew Coulter.
Out loud she said, “Cover me. I’m on approach.”
It’s just a falling body, but who knows if it’s some sort of elaborate booby trap or something?
“Speaking of bodies,” Prentice said, “how did one just start falling out here in the middle of nowhere? A teleport gone bad, you think?”
All four skimmers slowed down, the other three more so. Maloney sped away and approached the falling man at an angle, matching his descent rate.
The man noticed her, of course, and for a moment they locked eyes, at a distance of about three meters.
He looked older, short and paunchy. Miraculously, thick round glasses covering his eyes somehow remained on his face despite the velocity of his fall. A white lab coat flapped furiously in the virtual wind.
Maloney squinted, perplexed.
“Lieutenant Jackson, are you seeing this, sir?”
“I see it, Sergeant. Maintain your proximity.”
The voice came back over the com in a south Alabama drawl. Lt. Harry Jackson remained in meatspace while E-squad patrolled. He would monitor everything from the control booth at Ft. Meade, near their actual bodies in the control room.
“Dude’s gonna die if he goes splat on the ground.”
Maloney said, “Shut it, Patel.”
He was not wrong, of course. Thanks to the implants’ immersive powers, if one died in the game, one’s body treated it as trauma in real life. But this was so close to the area they lost Coulter, no one wanted to think about that right now.
Maloney locked eyes with the man falling. His appeared magnified behind the bottle lenses.
As if reading her thoughts, the man shouted something, lost in the wind.
“What was that? What did he say? Lieutenant, did you get that, sir?”
“We got something, Sergeant. We’re going to have to enhance the audio to make it out, though.”
The man yelled again, his words whipping away in the wind.
“Uh, Sarge, you’re getting close to the ground,” Farmington said. “Might be time to pull up.”
Maloney glanced down and saw the rapidly approaching landscape.
“I wish I could save this guy, and bring him in for questioning.”
Prentice said, “We don’t know where his body is, Sarge. His real body.”
“Whatever. We could question him here if . . . I gotta pull up.”
She pulled back on the stick and her skimmer slowed, letting the strange looking lab coat man fall away. She angled her nose down to get a good look at the remainder of his descent . . . and imminent demise.
Twenty meters above the ground, his body disappeared.
“Where’d he go? What happened?”
The other three skimmers whooshed above, then circled back to slow down and join Maloney’s.
“Anybody got a visual?”
“That’s a negative, Sarge,” Prentice said.
Farmington said, “I got nothing.”
“Lieutenant? Do you see him, sir?”
“I do not. Return to base and unplug for debriefing.”
Minutes later, Maloney opened her eyes in the real world. She sat on her cot as the other members of E-squad woke up nearby. Patel stretched and yawned while the other two specialists stood.
Maloney headed straight for the room’s exit. The others followed. They gathered in a debriefing room and took a seat.
“Dude, I was so looking forward to seeing that guy go splat!”
“Shut it, Patel.”
What is he, 18? Honestly, if he wasn’t one of the best tournament players in high school, he wouldn’t even be here right now, Maloney thought.
The door slid open and Lt. Jackson walked in, a tall thin black man.
“We got a clear voice isolated from the wind distortion. You all gotta hear this.”
He touched the implant under his right ear and a holoscreen appeared in the middle of the table, showing the lab coat man falling at terminal velocity.
This time, Maloney and everyone else in the room heard his words clearly.
“Sergeant Coulter is safe! He’s with us!”
The man fell a while longer, then locked eyes with Maloney, off screen.
“Don’t worry about him!”
A few seconds passed . . . and the man disappeared.
Maloney felt stunned.
“What . . . what was that about? Who was that? And where did he go?”
Jackson shrugged and sighed.
“I dunno. But everyone is gonna want to see this. CID, Counterintelligence. Everyone. I’m sure they’re already looking at it, I’ve sent this up the chain of command.”
Jackson touched his implant again and the hologram disappeared.
“There’s been a number of odd occurrences in various game worlds lately. Maybe y’all have seen the news. Foreign intrusions and such by unknown outside entities have occurred repeatedly. Now, if someone can appear in Continent, anywhere in North American Online Alliance territory, but specifically at the exact same spot where we lost Sergeant Coulter last year . . . If this fella can appear and deliver a message like that, then leave without a trace . . . Well, I think it’s fair to say all of NeuralNet has been compromised.”
Jackson paused for a moment as a priority call came through on his implant, his eyes focusing inward.
“Yes sir. Yes sir, I understand. Yes sir, will do.”
When he looked back at the soldiers in the room, he said, “NorAm Online has just
1
“It simply can’t be done, Sir Coulter. Heavier than air machines cannot fly on their own volition, without a gas or hot air envelope to lift them. It’s been tried numerous times.”
“You have gliders, don’t you?”
“Respectfully, that’s not the same thing. And yes, many gliders have been developed, and many people have died. Otto Lilienthal is perhaps the most famous, and his life tragically ended in an Alpine glider accident not long ago.”
Rip looked around at the engineers in the room. He had gathered the best men from Brooke & Company’s bicycle factory to work on a new project. Specifically, a flying machine.
His audience appeared highly skeptical, including the man addressing him.
He glanced at Blair, sitting in a chair at the table, her baby bump making her look larger and rather uncomfortable. She shifted in her seat, trying to find a better position.
Rip turned back to the engineers.
“Gentlemen, let me show you something.”
He took a sheet of typing paper from a briefcase on the table and folded it from the top by a third. Then he folded it in half lengthwise, tapered down the folding and made some wings.
He held it up for the men, pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
“This will demonstrate a certain property of aerodynamics for us today.”
“An aeroplane?” someone said.
“No, a paper airplane.”
He walked over to an open space in the large room and threw it toward the floor at an angle. It swooped, caught the air and floated up several feet before gliding to the far wall.
“You all saw how it went up, right? It should have crashed into the floor. But, when air goes faster over a fixed wing, it creates lift. This is the most important principle in aerodynamics. It creates lighter air pressure and pulls the wings up.”
The men looked less dubious now. Some of them scratched their chins in thought.
“The key is to provide our own wind. We do that with a propeller attached to a motor mounted on the front.”
“And they have done this on your world, Sir Coulter?” someone asked.
“Absolutely. The first time was in my home state of Texas. A German immigrant by the name of Jacob Brodbeck sold shares in a pending patent for a flying machine by advertising in a San Antonio newspaper. When he built his prototype, he flew it in a field near the town of Luckenbach, which later got famous for being in a country song.”
Blair piped up, despite her discomfort.
“Just ignore the parts that don’t make any sense.”
“Anyway, Brodbeck was into clocks, so he designed the propeller’s engine to be a windup affair complete with springs. It worked, and he flew, but the prototype crashed and was destroyed. Somebody took a picture of the wreckage, but no serious documentation of Brodbeck’s effort was made. It wasn’t until 1903 that the Wright brothers launched the first gasoline-powered airplane. They made sure and took pictures of the flight, to prove it happened. The rest, as they say, is history.”
He opened up the briefcase again and pulled out a wooden glider.
“This is a balsa wood airplane, made with flat pieces. Some of the design guys at Wayne Enterprises cut this out for me. Attached to it is a tiny wooden propeller, and connected to that is the ‘engine,’ a rubber band. So, this is essentially operating on Brodbeck’s idea of a wind-up propeller. On my world we sold millions of these. Our toy division will start cranking them out later this year.”
He turned the little propeller several times, the rubber band tightening in response. Finally he let go, tossing the contraption in the air at the same time. The propeller spun, and the little wooden plane floated across the room on its own. Several people gasped.
It slammed into the far wall and dropped to the floor, broken.
“And just like Brodbeck’s prototype, it crashed,” Rip said with a smile.
He turned to the men, most of whom continued staring at the little pile of wood.
“Gentlemen, your job is to develop a much bigger airplane. One that has a gasoline engine and is large enough to safely fly at least one person. Start with two wings, that will simplify your initial designs. Stick with wood and canvas for now. Later we’ll use some of what you’ve learned about bicycle manufacturing, mainly lighter metals, cogs, gears and cables. Figure out how to steer the thing in the air by using flaps on the wings and tail.”
He smiled at the men. They no longer seemed so skeptical. A handful busily scribbled in notebooks.
“You can reach me at the main office. Just leave a message if you have any questions.”
He turned to Blair and offered a hand. She stood up and together they walked toward the door.
When he opened it, she stopped suddenly. He noticed her face turning green.
“I’ve got to puke.”
She ran down the hall, hand over her mouth.
2
The next morning Blair looked better. She managed to keep down the supper Nancy had prepared, a very bland beef soup with carrots and onions mixed in, but she would not touch the salad her former nanny made despite all Nancy’s encouragement.
She went to bed early, and Rip let her rest. The baby was now large enough to cause her frequent uncomfortable nights, and solid sleep became much more important, in his mind.
They walked down the sidewalk after breakfast, carefully. Blair looked annoyed that this additional little person growing inside her slowed them down, but she said nothing. Rip held an umbrella above them both, fending off a slight rain.
A hansom cab appeared out of the mist, the driver wearing rain gear and looking miserable in the cold. Rip flagged him down and they got in, continuing toward Doctors’ Commons.
A block later, they heard the distinctive ting-ting of a bicycle bell. Rip watched through the window as one passed them, a rooster tail of water sluicing up behind the rider. The man wore an oilskin poncho, fanning out behind him like a superhero’s cape. Rip watched him weave in and out of traffic, quickly zipping between carriages and the occasional steam truck.
“If I ever find the maker of those infernal bicycle bells, I will personally wring his neck,” Blair grumbled.
“You’re back to normal, I see.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, dear.”
At the next intersection, Rip bought a copy of the Standard Trumpet from his favorite newsstand, and they continued the ride in silence.
He took this opportunity to review his stats, checking the readout from his implant.
[You are a Tier 3.09 Battle Rogue Technologist.]
[Nobility Achieved. Level: Knight]
[Skill: Detect Traps, 1.30]
[Skill: Unbreakable Will, 1.32]
[Skill: Transporter (Combo), 1.46]
[Skill: Vampiric Speed (Boon), 1.50]
[Skill: Night Vision (Boon), 1.60]
[Skill: Disarm Traps, 1.62]
[Skill: Mechanical Discernment, 1.74]
[Skill: Stealth, 1.76]
[Skill: Lock Picking, 1.79]
[Skill: Weaponry, 2.55]
[Skill: General Combat, 2.72]
He grimaced in mild disappointment.
Their exploits had made them rich. They had retrieved stolen gold from the Bank of Umbria, and stopped a plot down in the Calais steam vault that helped the British at Mons back on his world at the very start of World War I. He and Blair had pumped their earnings back into Brooke & Co., and profits from products based on Rip’s ideas steadily rolled in.
