The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  “It's like I always said,” the crazy old Pan said cheerfully as he caught up to Reece and Gideon, hiking his knees high as he ran. “Sometimes problems are best solved from the inside out.”

  Reece barked a hysterical laugh but saved the rest of his breath for running. He'd yell at Mordecai for scaring the wits out of him later. Handlers.

  They were so intent on running, they nearly missed the hatch: a waist-high, rusted thing that looked like it belonged in a fortress. Half a dozen cloaked figures stood in a loose circle around it with stocky rifles, wearing goggles beneath wide, flat hats that tied under their chins. When the colored lightning flashed, the lenses of their goggles gleamed opaquely.

  “In!” one of them snapped, pointing his gun at the open hatch.

  “The others?” Reece demanded as he skidded to a stop. He nodded for Gid to go on down the ladder peeking out the hatch, but the big Pan hung back. Mordecai waited with a foot propped on the pipe, watching interestedly.

  “They're safe. Now get in, boy! You've made enough of a mess of things already!”

  Exchanging a wondering look with Gideon, Reece hurried to the open hatch, waited for Gid and Mordecai to get in first, and then none-too-slowly swung himself onto the ladder descending into darkness. Surprisingly, the instant the rim of the hatch rose up over his head, the cloaked men outside slammed the manhole cover home, sealing out the meager green half-light of the sickly sky. There was nothing for it but for Reece to feel out one rung at a time and follow the murmurs of the others beneath his feet.

  X

  Welcome to Leto City, Now Go Away

  Reece climbed until sweat pasted his bangs to his forehead, now and again catching snatches of echoed words, thinking he heard his name among them. It was hard to tell. With the vague hum of unseen crowds, grumbling machinery, and running water growing ever louder as he climbed, he could hardly hear himself panting anymore.

  Blinking, he realized he could make out his hands gripping the rung level with his chin, and looked down. The tunnel ended in another dozen paces while the ladder continued down to a floor of water-slicked rock. He took the last few rungs two at a time and dropped to the ground with a breath of relief over the gust of not-quite-cool air that ruffled his hair.

  When Reece straightened, it was to go cross-eyed staring down the barrels of the rifle pointed at his nose. The figure behind it—he couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, the photon globe mounted on the lid of its cap hid its face—asked in a grainy voice, “Is this him?”

  “That's our cap'n,” Po's voice answered, and Reece glanced cautiously over his shoulder at his crew, lined up against the rock wall with their hands raised. Three more cloaked figures had those hefty-looking rifles trained on them, and one, with his rifle strapped over his back instead, was holding in an armful the stockpile of their weapons, Gid and Mordecai's revolvers, Nivy's ALP, and a few knives, two of which were as sleek as letter openers and had a distinctly Scarlet look about them.

  The room was a bubble of stone with a bolted door, a porthole window, and nothing else save for the overhead tunnel and the lantern hanging from a hook on the ceiling. As Reece let one of the cloaked strangers pat him down and confiscate his hob, he raised his eyebrows at Gid. Gideon shrugged a big shoulder with a grimace. If the Letoians (if these were the Letoians) wanted to take them prisoner, acting out wouldn't be in their best interest. Not with those rifles aimed at their heads.

  As Reece was herded against the wall, the man with his rifle across his back raised a flat, palm-sized box to his mouth and muttered something in code.

  “Everyone alright?” Reece asked under his breath as he squeezed between Hayden and Nivy. On the other side of Hayden, Po was clutching Mordecai's arm and half supporting Scarlet as the latter panted raggedly and fanned herself with a limp hand. Owon stood a full two steps apart, eyeing the cloaked Letoians with a cold smile that was doing nothing to ease the tension in the room.

  Hayden nodded, wiping down his fogged lenses. “Yes, but I think there's been a misunderstanding. Something about those…those animals…”

  “You mean the Rippers,” a woman's voice, deep and stern, said in a clipped accent. Reece had to squint to make her out; she was standing in the now open doorway with rifled guards wearing blinding head lanterns at either of her arms, which she folded behind her back, like an officer surveying troops.

  “The Rippers,” Reece repeated slowly, with a glance for Scarlet, who was quickly straightening and smoothing down her skirts. Somehow, he didn't think looking presentable would make much of a difference with these people. Every last one of their nubby brown cloaks had patched shoulders, fraying seams, and muddy hems. “Aptly named, I guess.”

  The officer paused. “Indeed.” She took a slow, calculating step forward and waved at her guards with a snappish hand. They reached and turned off their lanterns so Reece could finally make out her features, her square-jawed face and salt and pepper braid. Unlike the others, she wore no cloak, just an olive-colored uniform with tall black boots. She was also the only one without goggles. Those sharp but nonetheless pretty eyes studied Reece completely unimpeded. “You are the ones who broke atmosphere not long ago, then? And proceeded to land in the Rippers' Quarter?”

  “We sent a log,” Reece said curtly, and paused when Scarlet very quietly cleared her throat. What? The woman was talking to him like he was a bleeding criminal. “We tried to make contact. But our ship is in bad need of repairs, and I couldn't afford to wait on a response I couldn't be sure was coming.”

  After a moment, the woman stiffly nodded and said, “Forgive us. We are not in the habit of housing guests, but neither do we turn aside those in need. But you do not realize what you have done, intruding on the Rippers' Quarter as you did. We have a tenuous truce with the Rippers, one balanced on a knife's edge.”

  “A truce?” Scarlet repeated incredulously, drawing the attention of the rifle-bearers and woman. “With those creatures? Surely they aren't—”

  “They are semi-intelligent,” the woman said sharply, “and terrible enemies. You, however, are Honoran. And you travel with two Pantedans and that one,” she nodded at Owon, “who I cannot be sure of at all. Leto was a close ally with Panteda in the war,” she added as if answering a question Reece hadn't heard. “We never forget an ally's face.”

  Mordecai, twirling a mustache around his gnarled finger, said in a voice Reece had heard him use around young and white-haired women alike, “Well, I'll be the first to say yours is a face I'm not keen on forgetting either.”

  Reece half-expected her to call for the firing squad then and there, so he was pleasantly surprised when she cracked a small smile and simply shook her head. “I am Mayor Ingrid Petric of Leto City. We will put you up for the night, but no work can be done on your ship until morning, when the Rippers sleep and there is less risk of desert outlaws laying an ambush.”

  “Reece Sheppard.” Reece extended his hand and tried to keep his face neutral as Ingrid gave it a squeeze that ground his knuckles together. “What's with the goggles?” He thought he heard Scarlet groan quietly, so tagged a charming smile onto the end of the question. Strangely, she groaned again.

  Eyeing him, Petric pointed at one of her guards without looking at him, and the man lowered his rifle and with his free hand, tipped his goggles onto the back of his head. Reece didn't at first see the grey film glazing his irises, because the rough-faced man kept squinting and scrubbing at tears that welled up when he went too long without blinking.

  “You know about the lightning?” Reece nodded uneasily as Petric barked the order for the crew's weapons to be returned. “It is our only true natural resource. We mine it to power our city. Unfortunately, a year or two of working the lightning mines at Karadur can cause irreversible blindness. The goggles protect the retinas of the eye. For a while, at least. Now come.” Turning sharply on her heel, she took long, quick strides out the open door, leaving Reece to hurry after her as he slid his returned hob behind his belt.
He only made it as far as the threshold before stopping to gape like a numpty.

  He was a yard away from a drop that made his head spin, even though it was hedged by a handrail that sloped to the right, down the steep, snaking trail Petric was marching down with straight-backed confidence. Wary of his footing on the rocky ground, Reece stepped up to the rail, which was little more than a skinny pipe, and stared down at the underground canyon, a good half mile deep, that tapered off into shadow. Thousands of strange, bulbous house fronts climbed the walls of the canyon like a fungus, flickering white lights mounted between them. On the floor of the canyon, riven by a black, spindly river, was a cramped village dominated by a factory of brass pipes and rusty silos that seemed to have grown like a weed, its wings springing up through the town wherever there was room. All in all, the factory could have swallowed The Guild House whole and eaten the mansion at Emathia for dessert.

  “Captain Sheppard.”

  Reece pulled himself away from the overlook, joining Mayor Petric on the zigzagging trail that was easily as treacherous as the restricted mountain pass he and Gid had found on their last academy field trip. Thankfully, the trail soon evened out and ended at a cage dangling from a chain as thick around as Gideon. Reece thought it was the Letoians' version of a vertical translocator; a gear the size of a waterwheel rolled the excess chain up into a shaft in the dark ceiling.

  Pausing before the cage, Petric turned and frowned at something over Reece's head. He half-skidded to a nerve-wracking stop.

  “The up-down only allows for three at a time,” she said, and Reece realized she was looking at his crew, lining up behind him in the narrow pass. “I will have your companions sent to a boarding house for the night, and fed. But I wish to speak to you in private about the state of your vessel before you join them.”

  His brow furrowed, Reece glanced back at the others, who were fidgetingly watching the exchange. Except for Owon. Owon was staring right at Reece with eyes that stabbed like pins and needles, grimly expectant of what he knew was coming.

  “The bald one is a prisoner,” Reece told Petric, and her thin eyebrows shot up her forehead. “I had hoped we might convince you to take him off our hands. I can pay you for the inconvenience.”

  Pursing her lips, Petric said thoughtfully, “That will not be necessary. We are always in need of more prisoners to work the mines.”

  Before she'd even finished snapping her fingers, one of her rifled guards squeezed between Po and Gideon and took Owon by the elbow. Surprisingly, the Vee went compliantly, allowing the guard to place his wrists in a single square manacle that locked them tightly together. As the guard led him towards a forking trail dipping down into darkness, Owon turned his chin just enough to eye Reece sideways. Reece thought he was smiling.

  “You put your prisoners to work in the mines?” Scarlet spoke up from near the back of the line as Reece uneasily stared after Owon and the guard. Her voice was sharp with disapproval.

  “Who is that one?” Petric asked, scowling as she strode into the cage.

  After staring intently at the now-distant Owon for a moment longer, Reece turned to answer her. An unceremonious goodbye, but he preferred not to give Owon the chance to bait him with more honey about Liem and the Veritas. He'd had his chance to be forthcoming. Now he could practice being open with his fellow inmates, provided he didn't scare them all away.

  “That would be my self-appointed people person. She's mostly harmless. Just curious.”

  “She asks a lot of questions,” Petric muttered, standing aside so he could step into the cage, which rocked dizzyingly as his weight shifted it. The wooden floor groaned beneath him; in places, the boards had been nailed with inches between them to spare, so he could see down into the canyon town, no bigger than a toy between his feet. “But if you wish her to come and see the village, one of your crew may accompany us down. It is a long descent. Shorter, for those who will be taken to the boarding house on the North Sheet.” At Reece's puzzled look, the mayor explained, “The nearest wall of the canyon.”

  Looking out at his waiting crew, who were whispering among themselves, Reece scratched his chin. Scarlet’s knowhow would be handy, and she'd never forgive him for leaving her behind. She might not speak to him for days. That settled him.

  “Nivy,” he called.

  After Nivy had joined them, looking curious, Petric slammed the door and latched it, then leaned her weight against a crank rising out of a gap in the floorboards. With a jolt, the cage started sliding down the canyon.

  “How did your ship sustain damage, if I may ask?” Petric asked, standing with her hands folded at the small of her back, her feet spread and braced against the sway of the cage. It made Reece feel slightly better to see Nivy struggling with her footing. For his part, if he hadn't grabbed hold of the barred cage wall, he would've fallen on his backside three times over already.

  “She’s an old ship,” he said with a shrug. No need to spring the truth about The Kreft on her, not yet. As far as the duke's research had told, Leto was one of the few planets the marauders had either avoided or ignored. “She had old battle damage that fired up when we took her into the Streams.”

  “You are very young to be a captain, let alone licensed for Stream flight.”

  “They were…atypical circumstances.”

  After a moment, Petric made a noise that might have been amused. “I have a daughter at home who would love to hear your stories. She fancies herself quite the adventurer. Tell me what your ship requires.”

  “Er. About that, Mayor Petric—” Tilting his head to one side, Reece glanced at Nivy, who behind Petric, was gesturing for him to come to a full stop, her blue eyes sharp.

  “Yes?” Petric prompted. She peered over her shoulder at Nivy, but the girl had returned to innocently peering between bars, seemingly absorbed in watching Leto City swell to size.

  “Uh, that factory,” Reece pointed at the monster building, narrowing his eyes at Nivy when Petric looked away, “is that your lightning…mine?”

  After a long pause—Reece could feel the woman's eyes weighing him to the very last ounce—Petric answered, “No. The mines at Karadur are above. The Plant is merely a hub for the distribution of power throughout the city. There the people can resupply their leeks and—”

  “Their what?”

  Sighing, the mayor gazed down at the city with a frown that brought out well-used lines around her mouth. “This is what we pay, for not being open with our allies. Our culture lost to others, our economy slowed to a trickle where it was once a spring. Our borders breeched by the Raiders daily, and us unable to find a way to keep them out.”

  “Raiders?”

  “Desert brigands. Thieves and wild men. Cannibals, some will tell you.” Her eyes returned to his, dark. “That is why I brought you in, when mayors before me might have left you for the Rippers. I want my daughter to have choices. Something our people have been without for far too long.”

  Taking a clumsy step to look down at the city, Reece tried to imagine this place as a spring. The further the up-down descended, the smoggier and wetter the air became and the more it smelled of hot, ground metal and stale dirt. People in earth-colored clothes and flat-brimmed hats stroked slender boats between leaning apothecaries and scrap shops on the oily black river disappearing into a jagged rift in the South Sheet.

  Suddenly, Mayor Petric pointed off to the left at the North Sheet and its lattice of growth-like houses. From here Reece could see that the lights on the rock face he’d taken for photon globes were actually large jars screwed into metal supports. The jarred lights flickered frantically and sizzled like grease on a thermal burner.

  “That is a leek,” Petric informed him. “Lightning, broken down into a light source. Just one of the many uses we've found for it.”

  “Don't you worry someone will try to oust your city and mine the lightning for themselves?”

  Petric actually smiled, if wistfully. “We are a hardened people, Captain Sheppard. A
nyone who thought they could survive Leto's conditions, the Rippers and the Raiders, and still harness enough lightning for a spark would be sadly disappointed. Besides, the lightning is hardly worth the effort. It serves us because we live here. Anywhere else, we might have the means to develop photon technology, as your planet has.”

  The up-downs clanked to an ungainly stop at the bottom of the canyon, swinging a foot above the ground. Two burly guards standing by held the cage steady so Petric, Reece, and Nivy could exit. It was cold down here at the bottom of the middle of nowhere; Reece could understand the need for those woolly cloaks everyone except for Petric seemed to be wearing.

  He had just stepped down onto mercifully steady ground and started to look around at where they were in the city—somewhere off the beaten path, if the emptiness of the nearby streets meant anything—when he noticed a balding man in a uniform much like Petric's scurrying towards them with his head wagging.

  “Brace yourselves,” Petric warned as she saw him coming, “this will not be pleasant.”

  “Ingrid!” the man cried, stopping and leaning across the iron fence penning in the up-downs. He was a small fellow; standing straight, he would only have come up to Reece's shoulder. With his smallness and his fast, whiny voice, he reminded Reece of a wind-up toy. “Have you completely lost your mind? You know what happened the last time you went on one of your charity crusades and took interlopers under your roof! Is it true they landed in the Ripper's quarter? Someone said they were near the Pool—tell me they weren't near the Pool!”