He leveled the glass at the shape. Finding it was harder than he’d expected, partly because the shape was so small, but also because he was unaccustomed to looking up through a telescope at such an acute angle. The motion of the deck under his feet didn’t help, but Vadgaard had first gone to sea over twenty years before. He’d looked through a lot of telescopes in the course of that career, and eventually he managed to find what he was trying to examine through this one.
His jaw clenched as he examined the bizarre sight. It was a machine of some sort, he realized. It was too unlike anything he’d ever seen before for him to fit all the details together into a coherent mind picture, but as he stared at it he remembered the spy reports. He’d dismissed them as the sort of wild, fantastic exaggerations Gustavus Adolphus’ “American” allies seemed to generate so effortlessly. Winged machines? Machines that could fly? Ridiculous! Exactly the sort of fables someone trying to impress credulous fools might spin.
But it seemed he owed the spies an apology, and he wracked his brain in an effort to dredge up the details he had dismissed so cavalierly. There was supposed to be something on the front of the machine, the . . . “airplane,” they’d called it. Something like the sails of a windmill, but smaller, and with only two arms. He didn’t see anything like that through the telescope, but perhaps it was still too far away.
He lowered the telescope and blinked his eye against the muscle strain of his intense scrutiny. He could sense the shock coursing through his officers and men, not least because the same shock still echoed inside him, as well. If the Americans could truly fly like the birds of the heavens themselves, then perhaps they actually were the witches or wizards wild-eyed rumor had initially insisted they were. And if they could fly, who knew what else they might accomplish?
No, he told himself firmly. Whatever they may be, they aren’t witches. For all of his faults, no honest man would ever accuse Gustavus of Sweden of consorting with servants of Satan. It’s just one more of their wondrous machines, and surely it can do us no harm from so high above! Not even if whoever is controlling it has one of the long-ranged American muskets we’ve heard so much about. But if it can’t harm us, then why is it headed so unerringly in our direction?
Then he heard the lookout’s fresh cry of astonishment. The man was pointing to port once again, but not at the sky this time, and Vadgaard felt his mouth tighten as he raised the telescope once more.
So, he thought, studying the strange white shapes coming out of the vanishing fog in a rolling pile of even whiter bow waves. Perhaps it can’t harm us, but it would seem it can lead toward us those who can.