by Scott McKay
“The same architect,” said Samuel. “Victor Jenson out of Stableford. His designs are revolutionary.”
Upon entering, they were greeted by Thorne Tech’s chief engineer Denfield Atkins, a fifty-year-old mountain of a man who walked with a limp courtesy of a childhood equestrian accident. Atkins looked to be about six-foot-five and easily twenty-five stone; he had a sparse head of graying dark hair and an impressive salt-and-pepper beard.
“Good morning, Denny,” said Samuel.
Atkins sized Mark up. “He’s the canary for our coal mine, is he?” he asked Samuel.
“I suppose I am,” Mark said, extending his hand. “Mark Bradbury, at your service.”
Mark immediately regretted the greeting, as Atkins all but crushed his hand in a vise-grip handshake.
“Well, come on then,” Atkins said. “We’ll teach you how to drive this contraption and see if you can survive the experience.”
A few minutes later Mark found himself sitting in a rather tight padded-leather chair inside a mock-up of the biplane prototype, with the vehicle’s controls and gauges in front of him. He was getting a full tutorial on all the different elements he’d have to master. There were the pedals, the control stick, the rudder, the instrument panel displaying six measurements: an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, an attitude indicator, a turn coordinator, a compass and something called a variometer, which Mark was told measured the plane’s vertical speed. It was all a bit more complicated than a Crossland Type 2, and Mark’s head was spinning.
After three hours of time in the fake cockpit, and some classroom time governing the basic physics of heavier-than-air flight, Mark took lunch with Samuel and Atkins.
“Who’s been flying your prototype so far?” Mark asked. “I guess my question is, do you need me for this job?”
“You’ll meet the current test pilot this afternoon,” Samuel told him. “His name is Miles Graham, and he helped design this thing.”
After a quick lunch in the company cafeteria, the three of them took a ride to a flat grassy area east of town where Mark saw a large metal building in a half-cylindrical shape. They drove straight up to it, and Atkins led them in through one end.
That’s when Mark saw the biplane. He was surprised that it was considerably smaller than he thought.
“Can I fit in that cockpit?” he asked.
“Sure, you can,” came a voice from behind him.
“Miles Graham, meet Mark Bradbury,” said Samuel. “Mark, Miles is one of the inventors of this monstrosity.”
Mark turned and saw a pear-shaped man with spectacles, wearing a wool-lined leather jacket over a pair of overalls. He wore a starched-collared shirt and a bowtie, to go with a pair of work boots. A leather helmet and a pair of goggles adorned his head.
If that’s what you’re supposed to wear to go flying I might just have to be underdressed, Mark thought.
“Good to meet you, Mark,” said Graham. “How about a ride?”
After fitting him with a helmet and goggles like the ones Graham had on, they helped Mark into the second seat of the plane. The vehicle was made of plywood and had a wingspan of maybe thirty-five feet and a fuselage about twenty-two feet long. It stood about twelve feet high, with a top wing separated from the bottom wing by six-foot-high stilts and held together by cables stretched diagonally between the two. A pair of wheels, held together by a wood panel, protruded three feet below the fuselage. And a five-foot propeller made of mahogany sat majestically on the nose of the vehicle.
Graham climbed into the front seat and turned a knob, and Samuel grabbed one end of the propeller and yanked it down. The engine sprang to life with a loud roar, and the propeller began spinning so rapidly that Mark thought he could see it spinning the opposite way. Graham pulled back on a brake, and the plane began moving forward.
He was communicating with Mark through a speaking tube plugged into his helmet, but Mark had to strain to hear him over the roar of the engine. What he could make out was that Graham was telling him what he was doing with the controls as he was doing it--working the pedals, controlling the rudder, moving the stick forward and back.
And Mark could tell what he was doing, because the second cockpit had a duplicate set of controls, and he could see the pedals depressing and the stick moving, et cetera, as Graham worked the controls.
The plane taxied out onto the grass field, and then Graham goosed the engine forward. It roared ever louder, and Mark felt himself pressed tightly into the back of his seat. He couldn’t see much of anything in front of him, as the raised nose of the plane blocked his and Graham’s view. This didn’t seem to bother Graham, but Mark was terrified.
As it gained speed, Mark could feel the tail of the plane rise, and the horizon in front of the propeller finally came into view. Then they were off the ground, and Mark felt a sudden blast of fear in his belly.
“How do you like it!?” Graham shouted. Still, Mark could barely hear him.
“Exhilarating!” he shouted back. “I think I’m going to be sick!”
Graham laughed. “You’ll get over that eventually!”
They gained altitude rapidly, and the features along the ground began shrinking.
“How high are we!?” asked Mark.
“Three hundred feet!” Graham yelled back. “This is nothing!”
I think I’m afraid of heights, Mark thought to himself as the plane screamed toward the hills to the north. That might not be a good trait in a pilot.
It occurred to him that the lucrative offer the Thornes had made wasn't exactly free money. This job was a whole lot scarier and less safe than racing cars was.
But after a few minutes of flying around, his stomach began to settle, and his head stopped spinning. At that point, Mark started getting comfortable with the experience of airplane travel and his confidence that perhaps he could learn to fly the plane returned.
That’s when he heard Graham yell over the speaking tube, “Go ahead and take over!”
“You’ll have to talk me through it!” Mark protested.
“No problem!” Graham said. “Move the throttle forward, gently!”
Mark did, and the plane descended.
“Now pull it back. Again, gently!”
The plane gained altitude.
Graham then talked Mark through how to control the ailerons and the rudder, before taking over in time to land the plane on the grass field.
Over the next two weeks, Mark spent each day with Graham learning to fly the plane, which the two agreed would be named Abigail after Mark’s mother, and after a cousin Graham was quite fond of back home in Brenwick. Along the way they made notes on its performance, and what improvements could be made in the next design.
Finally, Mark felt ready to fly the plane on his own, something Graham said was his cue for retirement from flying.
“I’ve always hated that shit. Made me lose my hair flying that machine,” he said, and Mark knew he was lying. Graham’s hairline had receded long before he started flying the plane.
“My job is to design these things, not get myself killed in them,” Graham continued. “That is now your job.”
“You’re a lousy pilot anyway, Miles,” Mark cracked. “Let the professionals take it from here.”
Graham’s job would be to conduct classroom and simulator training for the new pilot hires, and then Mark would take over in the air. They were beginning to recruit others for what Graham called the Silly Squadron, in hopes of having a dozen capable pilots within the next six months as the laboratory and factory could make hardware for them to fly.
Mark’s first solo flight that day was, he thought, the greatest moment of his life. His first date that night with Veronica’s sister Agatha, who was only one year older than Mark and almost as beautiful as her older sister, was the second.
He’d gotten along awfully well with the Thornes, he thought, and boarding that train in Willow Falls had been the smartest thing he’d ever done.
…
TWO
/> Fort Walder, Ninthmonth Twenty-First, 1843rd Year Supernal
His real name was Gregory Dervell Henry, but for as long as he could remember everybody in his life had called him Butch. And growing up in the Sunset Sea coast resort town of Azuria, he’d spent his seventeen years in or near the ocean. At least, until six months ago, and he hadn’t seen any water of note since.
It was six months ago, on his birthday, that Butch had enlisted in the Ardenian Second Cavalry, something his parents had insisted on, given his seeming lack of direction. “You’re nothing but a beach bum,” his father would say. “All you do is bodysurf half-naked on that seacoast and dive for anemone. You’ll be forty years old renting beach canoes to tourists and puffing on a cannabis pipe all night.”
To Butch that sounded like a close-to-perfect future, but his mother was more persuasive. “You’re our only child,” she noted. “If you’re not able to take care of us when we grow old, we don’t know what’s going to become of us. It would be different if you had brothers and sisters, but the Lord of All didn’t have that in his plan for our family.”
She was right, he knew, though he cursed the fact that he’d had an older brother and a younger sister who had both died as infants. He also cursed the fact that his father, who was less than the friendliest or most kindly man Butch had met, hadn’t done well enough to provide for his own elder years. Maynard Henry drove a horse-drawn trolley through Azuria’s downtown and resort district, earning a pittance in tips. The family subsisted on that wage, plus what his mother could earn taking in laundry, and made its home in a ramshackle hovel on the southeast side of Azuria, in the large shantytown known as Bottoming. It was far away, both geographically and in every other way, from the gorgeous beaches and the gaze of the wealthy vacationers arriving by train and ship from the east and north..
They’d put Butch to work as an errand boy for the Deargain Hotel, a sprawling resort just near the main pier, when he was eleven. He was dutiful and efficient, and after a couple of years he was matching his father’s earnings. But each week the collection of coins Butch poured into the family jar was gathered up by Maynard, without much remuneration to the son who earned them. And when he’d asked for various little luxuries he might have as a reward for his labors, a negative response was all he’d get.
“You have a roof over your head, don’t you?” his father’s berating response commonly went. “Are you not filling your belly each night?”
By fourteen Butch had lost the joy of employment, and his supervisor at the Deargain called him into the office to complain about his frequent absences and suspect devotion to assigned tasks.
“What’s gotten into you?” his boss, Mr. Adderly, hectored. “You had so much promise. Now you’re a mess.”
“I don’t know,” Butch told him. “Maybe it’s the fact that whatever I earn gets carted away the second I take it home and I don’t see anything from it. I’m no better off from a day of work than I am if I hang around down at the beach.”
Adderly had sought to fix that by holding back some of Butch’s wages on paydays and letting him have the rest in small coin he could use as disposable income, figuring if that idea would re-engage the boy in his duties, he’d soon be able to give him a promotion and a raise, which might more permanently solve his problem. And it had worked on Butch, for a while.
But six weeks later Butch skipped three whole days of work, and when he finally reported to his boss, he told the story of how his father had blown a gasket over the drop in his contribution to the family’s income. Maynard had then found the stash of currency Butch had hidden under the floorboards of his tiny bedroom while saving up for a surfboard, the new craze among the youth in Azuria. When that money was confiscated, a disgusted Butch had lit out for the sand and surf for three days, braving the frightening, massive tides to dive in the Sunset Sea and hanging around with the juvenile delinquents he knew among his fellow beachcombers.
He said he’d had enough with his current circumstances, and Adderly knew there was no keeping Butch on with the hotel staff. He had an idea, though. He wrote down an address at the marina on the northwest side of town and told Butch to see the man in the slip it designated, to tell him Adderly had sent him to ask for a job.
The man was Captain Roy Galbreath, Adderly’s uncle. He had a fishing steamer, and he was always looking for crewmembers. Butch had a job with Galbreath that day, making almost double what his father was earning.
And for the next two years Butch’s problem was solved. Galbreath introduced him to the magical thing known as a bank account, and he deposited half his earnings in one every week; the rest, he brought home to his father. Butch spent more nights aboard Galbreath’s fishing boat than he did in that shack his family lived in, partially because of its frequent multi-day trips chasing schools of tuna and kingfish, and partially because the accommodations were nicer on the boat. Butch loved being on the water and didn’t mind the physical labor working on a fishing trawler; in fact, he thought it was giving him a physique the girls on the beach seemed to pay attention to.
And he got to buy that surfboard.
But six months before his seventeenth birthday, Galbreath suffered a stroke while hauling in a full net, and Butch’s career on a fishing crew came to a screeching halt. The old man’s son, who had struck out on his own as a restaurateur with an establishment on the water called the Happy Marlin, had little use for the boat and sold it to pay for Captain Roy’s live-in nurse, and the crew were all out of a job.
Which meant Butch was back on the beach with his surfboard every day. He even entered a few competitions and won one of them, catching a prize of a hundred decirans--more money than he’d ever seen in his life. He’d brought that home to his father, beaming with pride and letting Maynard know that his son was now a professional athlete.
The accomplishment did not, however, receive his father’s approval. Maynard harangued him, demanding to know when Butch was going to get himself a real job and a future. It led to a furious verbal altercation between the two and a rift that never really mended.
It was about a month later that his parents talked him into enlisting, which didn’t take too much convincing. Butch loved Azuria and had every expectation of spending his life there, but for now he couldn’t stand living in that shitty house with his shitty father for one more day.
That was six months ago, and after having been transported by locomotive and lorry to the military base at Elnora, to the east over the West Peaks from home, for five weeks of basic training, Butch had joined a platoon of other new recruits who rode the train back to Azuria and then boarded a ship for the military base at Fort Murtaugh, along the Sunset Sea coast at Ardenia’s southern border. From there it was a four-week-long march through narrow mountain passes to Fort Walder, one of three military outposts in The Throat, which was the narrow mountain-bracketed isthmus at the frontier between Ardenia and Uris Udar.
Butch was both enthralled and terrified by the adventure. The terrain was nothing like he’d ever seen before, being a seasider all his life; this was rocky cliffs and scrub-desert, with extreme heat by day and surprising cold by night. So close to the border he expected to encounter Udar savages on a constant basis, but so far, he hadn’t seen a soul other than his new Army brothers. And Army life, which worked along the relatively unfamiliar lines of being rewarded and encouraged for doing well, agreed with him.
That said, Butch did find Fort Walder more than a little disappointing when he and his platoon finally arrived.
The enlistment brochures he’d seen had drawings of the fort which advertised it as a hilltop stone holdfast under construction and soon to be completed. That, Butch saw when the troop approached, was a lie. Instead, Fort Walder was little more than a collection of log cabins and mud-huts surrounded by a picket fence and dotted with trenches and gun emplacements, on a small rise in the foothills of the West Peaks. The only feature the fort offered which was correctly depicted in the brochure was the 100-foot tall ob
servation tower made of wooden planks.
It was a camp, not a fort. And it didn’t make Butch feel very safe.
Shortly after his arrival, Butch and three of his platoon-mates, Private Ted Shaffer, Private Bill Crain and Corporal Milton Blue, were put together as a patrol squad. They were issued practically-worthless Benchford sniper rifles and bulky backpacks full of field gear, and told to make a ten-mile circuit marked on a map every other day which involved a lot of scrambling up and down hills and cliffs while looking out for any Udar who might be lurking to the south. If they happened upon any, they were to fire a rocket emitting red smoke, which would be seen by lookouts on the observation tower, and then hightail it back to the fort to make a report.
Butch thought that was an abjectly idiotic set of orders, seeing as though he’d heard the heroic stories of General Dees and his snipers knocking out Udar headmen from long distances and putting their war-parties out of commission, and he wondered why that wasn’t what he and his pals would be doing. But Milton, who was their leader only because his father was a sergeant back at the training center at Elnora and had pulled strings to get his son a promotion, assured the other three that they’d be heroes too.
So for a month Butch’s life was spent climbing around on cliffs and hills, looking stupidly for savages who were nowhere around, and then returning to Fort Walder for lousy stew from some indeterminate meat source, and even worse home-brewed beer while sleeping in a stinking mud-hut for a couple of nights with a couple of hundred other miserable members of the garrison, before repeating the same shitty mission again and again. While Buch kept telling himself it was part of the adventure, there was no doubt this was drudgery.
Until yesterday, that is. Yesterday, drudgery turned to terror.
They were making their usual circuit, having traveled south along a narrow ridge leading to the checkpoint on Deadline Hill four miles from Fort Walder and taking a short break in the shade of a rock outcropping, when they heard a very loud thump-thump-thump coming from above. As they peered out from the overhang, the foursome saw a sky covered with large black flapping wings.
