Lucifugous by Elizabeth Bear Guten Abend meinen Damen under Herren You are this chilly March evening aboard thezeppelin Hans Glücker departing old Calais for the city of New Amsterdam jewel of BritishNorth America. Among you is a celebrity: the famed Don Sebastien de Ulloa known to theContinent as the Great Detective along with his assistant Jack Priest. Ah I see your concern. Clearly you know of Don de Ulloa’s reputation. Allow me to assure youthey are only passengers on this voyage just part of our small and cozy coterie as we sailacross the Atlantic. So relax ladies and gentlemen. After all this is 1899 and this is a zeppelin . What could possibly go wrong The long novella Lucifugous chronicles this trip and the mysterious disappearance within andopens Campbell award-winning writer Elizabeth Bear’s hardcover debut the mosaic novel NewAmsterdam due out from Subterranean Press in May. Chapter One 1 The zeppelin Hans Glücker left Calais at 9:15 in the evening on a cold night in March 1899bound for New Amsterdam the jewel of British North America. Don Sebastien de Ulloa known tothe Continent as the great detective passed his departure on the promenade watching the citylights recede through blurring isinglass. He amused himself by taking inventory of his fellowpassengers while enjoying the aroma of a fairly good cognac. The Hans Glücker was nearly empty aside from cargo. So empty in fact that Sebastienwondered if she would not have delayed her Atlantic voyage for want of passengers if she werenot also a mail dispatch and carrying diplomatic papers. Her capacity was over sixty but thistrip she bore only fourteen. The longest-term travelers were a couple who had been with the airship since Shanghai Mr. CuiJioahua and his wife Zhang Xiaoming. They had passage as far as the Spanish settlement of SanDiego on the west coast of North America where they intended to join family–if theintersection of their limited Arabic and German and Sebastien’s equally flawed Cantonese couldbe trusted. It seemed a tremendous journey but the trans-Siberian and then trans-Atlanticroute by airship was actually faster and more secure than the month one might expect to spendon a steamer east across the Pacific. Mr. Cui was willing to risk his household furnishings tothe pirates infesting the Windward Isles but being of a practical bent he was not willing torisk his own life or that of his lovely wife. Another six comprised a touring group of fiveColonials and one European that had been with the Hans Glücker since Ukraine. The touringgroup which had boarded in Kyiv after traveling by rail from