Maiden Voyage of the Rio Grande: 2nd Bartleby and James Steampunk Mystery

[Mcoorlim]

Murder is afoot aboard the magnificent airship Rio Grande, and James is the prime suspect! He and his partner Bartleby must use all their wits to find the true culprit before his sabotage causes the massive vessel to crash into London below!


"Maiden Voyage of the Rio Grande" is the second story in the Adventures of Bartleby and James series.

[Ann in Arlington]

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[Mcoorlim]

Excerpt:

The whining seemed to be coming from the turbines themselves – they were labouring harder and harder to function, but the slapping sound was coming from behind a two by two panel set into a bulkhead. It was slightly ajar, tool-marks evident near its popped lock. I opened it, and found behind it a fist-sized fat-diamond shaped cavity in which a series of pistons spun freely. Leather connective straps attached to the pistons flailed uselessly against the steel casing, whatever they had secured now missing.

I took a quick look around the immediate area, but couldn't find anything that looked like it might fit in the gap. Unfortunately I'm unschooled in the mechanics of areoengineering and had no idea what might have been removed from the ship's workings. I returned to the control room to put the question to the Chief Engineer.

I described the empty panel to him the best I could, and his face paled. I followed Miller as he raced, without a word to me, into the engine room, stopping in front of the open hatch over the empty cavity. He gave out a frustrated and terrified groan, grabbing handfuls of his own hair and stumbling back a little in horror.

“We're so very very dead,” he said.

“Bad then, is it?”

“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to keep a ship this size right side up?” he asked, pulling a small level out of his breast pocket and laying it on the floor. He dropped prone next to it, eyeing it carefully. I crouched for a look myself, and saw that we were listing a few tenths of a degree. The Chief sprang to his feet with another hopeless moan.

“The pounding of the turbines, the shape of the air bags, the balance of the ballast – it's all precisely calibrated to keep the Rio Grande from listing,” he explained, “and it's the gyroscopic stabilizer that controls the analytical engine that calibrates it. Without it those oscillations you've been hearing are going to increase at a geometric rate, the ship is going to flip over, and we're going to crash into the city below.”

[Mcoorlim]

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[Mcoorlim]

Accused of a murder he did not commit, an inventive genius detective must track down the true killer before his sabotage wrecks the largest airship ever commissioned on its maiden voyage.

[Mcoorlim]

Steampunk gadgeteer James Wainwright has been accused of a murder he did not commit, and only his savvy partner Alton Bartleby can clear his name. The clock is ticking, though, as the true murderer's sabotage threatens to crash the largest airship in the world onto the teaming streets of Victorian London below. Many of those aboard the Rio Grande's maiden voyage would love to see its plutocrat American owner ruined, but how many would kill to see it happen?