“Brace yourself!”
Whatever The Kreft had launched hit home, and the yoke almost spun out of Reece's hands as Aurelia bucked and rumbled in agony. The pressurized pipes overhead roared like they were channeling a waterfall, yet the warning peels sounding from the flightpanel sliced easily through the noise. It seemed he'd been a little premature in calling The Kreft's bluff.
“Po!” Reece shouted into his mouthpiece. “Po, how are we?”
No answer. Aurelia continued to labor towards the Euclid, but something was off with the Afterquin. Reece could feel it in the hesitant controls of the flightpanel; it was like they were flying with a limp. The Kreft were going to overtake them if they didn't just settle for blowing them into flotsam.
One thing at a time. The projectile must have hit something on Aurelia's port side, because she seemed to want to spin over her left wing. There. He had it.
“You might want to close your eyes,” Reece warned Nivy through his teeth. Then he let go of the yoke.
Aurelia spun, wing over wing, down and to the left, and Reece thanked his good luck he didn't get queasy easily. Outside the canopy window, the stars were a kaleidoscopic blur, white and faintly-colored specks that turned into streaks the faster they spun. The yoke, idle in front of Reece's vacant hands, leaned almost vertically on its side. The tired whine of the Afterquin morphed into a protesting screech.
Suddenly, Aurelia wrenched to an ungainly stop, snapping Reece sideways. He was slow to regain his bearings—it kind of felt like they'd been flung pell-mell in every direction—and for a second, he couldn't make sense of what he was seeing. An oily white vapor was rolling back over the fore of the ship. As far as he could see forward, there was only streaming, glittery white that wavered slightly as he stared at it, like heat over a hot horizon. It was as though Aurelia had been seized by the galaxy's longest, straightest river. Her speed, her strokes, meant nothing here; there was only the steady pace of the current as it swept between stars like rocks on a riverbank.
Reece sank back into his leather seat with a sigh that was almost a moan. They'd made it into the Euclid Stream. Even if The Kreft followed them in, the Streams bore all ships at the same rate, and that meant no catching up.
Of course, The Kreft did make the Streams…so if any ship was the exception to the rule, it would be theirs. Time would tell. There was nothing for it now but for Reece to power down the aft thrusters and make sure he hadn't accidentally killed anybody. Starting with Nivy, who was slouched so low in her seat, he could only make out her shoulders and head. She looked over at him, and seemed to have trouble focusing.
“Cap'n?” Po's voice timidly ventured from Reece's headset, startling him.
His relief wrestling his agitation, Reece testily replied into his mouthpiece, “Po, where have you been?”
“I'm sorry, Cap'n, it's just, Mordecai and Gideon—”
“Are they alright?”
“Oh, yeah, we're all fine. But they…I mean, they meant well…they just didn't want me in with the Afterquin with all the turbulence, and then there was a fire we had to put out, and then we started spinnin'—” Po paused, and then said again, “I'm really sorry, Cap'n.”
“Listen, it's fine,” Reece assured her, irritably batting a hand at Nivy, who was trying to show him the read that had popped up on the flightpanel datascreen. “Just tell me what's going on. The helm's pulling a little slow, and there's a lot of resistance in the port rudders.” He spared the datascreen a squinted glance just to get Nivy off his case. “And I'm getting a warning about a…sudden temperature drop?”
Po was quiet for a long moment before asking carefully, “Describe the slowness in the helm. Is there a delayed response, or—”
“No,” Reece pushed the yoke forward just slightly and met a sluggish weight. He unpoetically described the sensation. “It's like trying to wade through pudding.”
“Puddin'? Really? Are you sure it's not maybe more like pushin' a pin through a marshmallow?”
“I—maybe. Does it matter?”
“Well, if it's puddin', you're probably about to lose all manual control, in which case we'll spin outta the Euclid and get ripped apart by the deceleration. If it's a marshmallow, then that's the thermal turbine burnin' out.”
“Then it's that.”
“That's not good either, Cap'n,” Po insisted. The speaker in Reece's ear crackled she pushed away her mouthpiece to say something that sounded grave and then returned it to her mouth. “The thermal turbine is one'a the pieces we substituted because we didn't have Aurelia's original. We just now got the fire under control, and it didn't mar up the Afterquin too bad, but that one nasty shot The Kreft sent at our hull scrambled her pretty good all the same.”
“And the turbine?”
“Source'a the fire, looks like. Overheated when it tried to compensate for the BC Sim…um, the Bio-Conditions Simulator…which shorted when the volleys started. I can fix what you're feelin' in the rudders, but without the turbine and the BC Sim, Aurelia's gonna start shuttin' down around us. And the systems that are gonna go first are gonna be the one's nonessential to her runnin'. Environmental controls. Life support.”
“The sudden temperature drop,” Reece realized. He leaned over the flightpanel, craning his neck, and read with a nervous dip in his stomach that the temperature had already gone down two degrees. A two degree temperature drop wasn't much—unless it happened in under fifteen minutes. Going strong at this rate, Aurelia would be supporting arctic temperatures before midnight.
“Can you fix them? Or at least the Sim?”
“I'll try my best. But I'll need another set of hands.”
“You can keep Mordecai. Send Gideon up. We need to talk.”
Po's voice was small. “Okay.”
Gid showed up a few minutes later. His face was covered in grease and oil, his clothes were stained in patches of black, and he had a swelling burn on one side of his neck. Reece would've gone easy on him for that alone, only Gid's expression was…well, if Reece didn't know better, he'd say his friend had mutiny on the mind.
“Po said you and Mordecai wouldn't let her go to the Afterquin,” Reece began levelly. As he watched over his shoulder, Gideon glared out the canopy window and clenched his jaw.
“She could'a run into that bleedin' engine room on your order and gotten herself killed. Don't that bother you?”
Reece's fingers tightened around the yoke. “You know it does.”
After a beat, Gideon jerkily nodded and dropped his eyes.
Suppressing a sigh, Reece shook his head and made his shoulders loosen. “Don't stop my mechanic from doing her job again, Gid. Tell Mordecai the same. I need her on the Afterquin.”
“Fine. That it?” Gideon grunted.
“Almost. Nivy?” At Reece's gesture, Nivy obediently took up the secondary yoke, steering so he could turn his seat and face Gideon in full. “Now, second question. Where the bleeding bogrosh is Hayden?”
The good news was, since they were on an airship, there were only so many places Hayden could have gotten lost. The bad news—along with the fact he was lost at all—was that the auxiliary lighting in the port wing of the ship had been knocked out, which meant Gideon and Reece had to conduct their search by photon wand. Mordecai might've just tripped and smacked his head on a railing, but Gid didn't think so, and Reece had had too many bad experiences not heeding one of Gideon's telltale feelings to ignore one now. They crept down the ship's tunnel-like corridors with hob and revolver in hand. Reece knew he shouldn't be able to feel the difference in temperature yet, but he could've sworn the old corridors had gotten chillier.
“Cap'n,” Gid suddenly hissed.
Reece turned, caught Gideon's scowling expression with the beam of his photon wand, and immediately clicked it off. “What?”
“I heard voices. And look. Down there.”
Creeping warily past his friend, Reece found the corner of the corridor with his hands and peered around it. On the wall about twenty
feet away, one lone, dully blue photon globe flickered behind a cobwebbed shade, scattering shadows on the wooden floor. Its buzz sounded as loud as a kinetic motorsaw's in the quiet.
“Someone must have turned it on manually,” he realized, frowning to himself.
“Not Aitch,” Gideon added. “If he knew how to rig these lights, he would'a turned them all on before ever comin' down this way.”
“Right, but—” Pausing, Reece tipped his head to the side and listened closely. He could hear the voices now, a quiet murmur of laughter. “See, that's weird. That actually does sound like Hayden's laugh.”
Gideon's revolver went click-click in the dark. “Maybe he ain't laughin'.”
Reece doubtfully arched an eyebrow even as he cocked his hob and skirted the corner on his tiptoes. The oval door beneath the photon globe was slightly ajar, its edges traced in dim light. He sidled along the wall until his shoulder pressed against the steel door, then held up a fist to stop Gideon, turned the fist into three fingers, and counted down. Three, two, one…
With his hob in one hand and his photon wand held like a club in the other, Reece shouldered open the door and shouted, “Hold it!”
He tripped to a graceless stop. He'd leaped into someone's clean, furnished, definitely lived-in quarters. The bed built into the wall was made up with a red blanket and different colored pillows with dangling tassels, and shaded photon stands stood in each of the four corners of the room, bouncing warm colors off the dust-free floors. The wardrobe, also built into the wall, was open, and what was more, stuffed to bursting with dresses, petticoats, and blouses.
And there in the middle of it all, smiling to herself as she sifted through the contents of a three-foot tall steamer trunk, was Scarlet Ashdown.
“Is the captain above knocking, now?” she teased as she added to the pile of clothes by her feet.
Reece heard a shocked Pantedan curse and a barked laugh, followed by hurried footsteps, and ascertained Gideon had stuck his head into the room, identified their stowaway, and decided that he'd seen enough explosions for one day. This one was likely to take the bird-in-a-cake.
“Reece,” Hayden's voice cracked. Reece swiveled till he found him sitting on a cushioned loveseat suspended from the ceiling by thin brass poles, like a fixed porch swing. Hayden spread his hands helplessly. “I didn't know, I promise. I was on my way to find you and—”
“Harry didn't know,” Scarlet verified, still unfolding clothes.
“Well, that's great,” Reece snapped. He fumblingly started unloading his hob and pocketing the bullets, just to be on the safe side. “But did Hayden know?”
“Who's Hayden?”
After gaping wordlessly for a moment, Reece marched over to the loveseat and pointed in Hayden's pink face. “That's Hayden! Hayden bleeding Rice! You've known him for nine bleeding years! Get it right! Bogrosh! Bleeding—what are you doing here, Scarlet?”
Scarlet calmly picked up a bundle of her clothes and walked them to her bed. “Don't be crass, Reece. I'm on board, and it's too late for that to be changed. I'm coming with you to The Ice Ring.”
“The—” Reece faltered. He looked at Hayden, who shrugged, pulled off his glasses, and started tiredly rubbing his eyes. “How do you know about that?”
“I slipped a broadcaster link into your pocket at Emathia.”
Reece started methodically checking his jacket with a clenched jaw. Sure enough, a tiny silver button, no bigger than a coin, was nestled in the corner of his inside left pocket.
“So you heard everything.”
“Enough to know you'd be leaving with Aurelia soon. It was lucky I came aboard this morning to begin unpacking. Oh,” Scarlet suddenly spun about, holding up a triumphant finger, “and I knew that Orpha girl from the masquerade was in on the whole affair. You'll have to explain all that to me later.” She took one look at his stubborn expression, and her green eyes flashed in warning. “I'm here to help you, Captain. You've acquired yourself quite the crew, but there's still one thing you're lacking.”
Reece knew where this was headed, but he still couldn't help but hopefully toss out, “A cook?”
“A people person,” Scarlet corrected distastefully. “I'm a highly-capable diplomat and a learned anthropologist; I've studied the governments of more than three dozen Epimetheus planets. Admit it, Reece, you need me to speak the language of the people. You may be charming, but you're more or less a social cripple.”
“Thanks for that,” Reece said with a wince. Letting out a long breath, he collapsed onto the seat next to Hayden, who gave his shoulder a pat. As if he minded having Scarlet along. He'd had a crush on her since they were Twelves. Her not knowing his name was apparently neither here nor there. “So you weren’t the one who clubbed Mordecai on the head?”
Scarlet straightened from wheeling her now empty trunk into the bottom of her wardrobe and faced him with a bemused expression. “Mordecai—you mean Gideon's grandfather? Why would I do that?”
“Someone clubbed Mordecai on the head?” Hayden inserted, startled. “Is he alright?”
“I haven’t seen him yet.” Reece stood, dusted his hands, and pointed at Scarlet. “Alright, look. You're here, so you might as well make yourself useful. You can start by dividing up the rations and organizing our cargo.”
“Yes, sir,” she said meekly.
Giving her a flat look, Reece shook his head and stalked towards the door. “Hayden,” he said over his shoulder, “set yourself up an infirmary somewhere so you can check on Mordecai and make sure he's not acting any loopier than usual. Then help Scarlet find everybody their coats and gloves and earmuffs. Get the luggage distributed.”
“Earmuffs?” Hayden asked as he hurriedly joined Reece at the door, throwing a fleeting look back at Scarlet, who was watching them while thoughtfully tapping her lips with a finger. “Why?”
“Trouble with the Afterquin. It's going to get cold in here.”
“How cold?”
Hesitating, Reece slammed Scarlet's door behind them, shutting her probing green eyes away, but also sealing out the light. He clicked on his photon wand. “Cold enough. Po's trying to do something, but…” With a sigh, he nodded for Hayden to follow him towards the cargo bay. “Just keep an eye on everybody, alright? And be in the cargo bay at eighteen hundred hours for a crew debriefing.”
Hayden split off from him in the cargo bay, crossing to the lit starboard corridors while Reece rattled down a set of winding stairs and veered towards the engine room. The corridors down here were Aurelia's tightest—Gid would probably have to tilt his shoulders sideways to walk them comfortably—and warm, dewy and almost foggy with steam. They ran in all directions like arteries trailing away from the beating heart of the Afterquin, which by itself took up a room half the size of the cargo bay. Reece could hear it thrumming from here. The thrumming sounded sick, off, with an extra whine lying beneath it.
He followed the sound to the foot of an iron ladder by itself at the end of a dimly-lit hall, and climbed up through an open hatch. The ladder didn't stop where the new room—the Afterquin's room—began, but kept going up two more stories, spanning the height of the engine. Other ladders branched off it in all directions at all levels, weaving an elaborate network around the room that made Reece think of the blueprints of the unrealistic play fort he'd drawn up as a kid.
The Afterquin itself was a tall cylinder, a tower of gears and fans and pipes. Most engines Reece had seen were compact, squeezed for space. Not the Afterquin. And it might look disjointed, even messy, but it had its own perfect order. If he could compare the design to one thing, it would be a tree. A brass tree with tubes for roots, pipes for branches, and countless mechanical gadgets, whatsits, and doodads for leaves.
Po, sitting cross-legged on a horizontal-running ladder two-thirds of the way up to the ceiling, spotted him, stood, and started walking to meet him, placing her feet carefully but quickly on the rungs, as if they were stepping stones. He slipped off the mainline ladder onto a gra
ted platform and watched her with interest.
“That height doesn't bother you at all?” he asked as she came closer.
Po shrugged, dropping the short distance from her ladder to his platform and quickly brushing her blonde bangs back from her face. “Nope. You gotta be used to bein' up high, if you wanna be an airship mechanic.”
Reece nodded, giving her a troubled onceover. Like Gideon's, her face was smudged with oil, and there was soot on the knees of her jumpsuit, which was unzipped and tied off at her waist with her sleeves. Her white, long-sleeved undershirt looked like it had been washed in engine grease.
“So,” Po prompted, expectant.
“So,” Reece repeatedly dryly. “The Sim and the turbine?”
She made a face and gestured for him to follow her as she hopped back onto the mainline ladder and descended to the ground level. “I think I might be able to do somethin' about the Sim, but the turbine…even if I get it back to how it was, the Afterquin is just too powerful for a Jax I86 turbine, Cap'n. She needs her own, especially now that she's breathin' so heavy.”
“We don't have her own, Po.” Reece grunted as he skipped the last few rungs and landed beside her. “We've got to make due somehow.”
“I'm tryin',” Po said quietly, not meeting his eyes.
With an internal sigh, Reece took her arms and turned her to face him. “I know,” he reassured her. “Trust me, I know. But we only have a few hours until things get bad. You'll figure something out. You're too good at what you do not to.”
Po beamingly ducked her head till he could barely see her face, blushing crimson. “You're really good too. At what you do, I mean, not just in general. I mean, you are, though. Good. I—”
“Hello, down there.”
Po and Reece looked up together to put a face to Mordecai's gruff tenor voice. The old man was smoking a cigar and dangling his legs off a ladder some twenty feet above them, Gideon standing beside him, head and shoulders deep in a funnel contraption fanning away from the Afterquin.
The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) Page 8
