The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  Reece and Nivy stared together at Owon so long, the Vee pressed, “Well, Reece Sheppard? Is escape so unappealing to you?”

  “You said me.”

  Owon's face spasmed before he schooled it to cool blankness. He had! Reece hadn't been hallucinating—he'd said me!

  “Make your choice now, Reece Sheppard,” Owon threatened, and his deadpan voice was markedly intentional. “We will only make you this offer once.”

  Dying though he was to attack Owon's lapse in Vee-ness while he had an opening, Reece thought of Gideon, sitting outside with a hole in his shoulder, and the others, all counting on him to get them off Leto, and with a grimace, suppressed his questions. Even then, his and Owon's conversation about Liem kept trying to edge to the front of his brain.

  Could you go back to how you were, now? Could Liem have gone back?

  It is inconceivable…but not impossible.

  “Alright, Owon. What's your offer?”

  With a graceful hand, Owon reached and unwound the lantern's wick, feeding the light. He took his time answering as he stared coldly at the sputtering flame. “Safe passage to the next inhabited planet for your escape route. That is our offer.”

  “Forget it.”

  “We will. Quickly, once we've escaped this place without you. You would have been our quickest path from Leto, but we have no qualms about leaving you to watch your crew die, one by one, while we walk free.”

  Breathing out slowly through his nose, Reece looked at Nivy. She made an unhappy face and held out her hands helplessly, but he could tell she knew what she would say, if their places were swapped…what he had to say, for his crew's sake. Owon's pale face was getting that infuriatingly smug set again.

  He was just going to have to hope the bleeding Vee got struck by lightning crossing the desert.

  XIV

  The Battle of Red Pool, L.F. 1296

  “I don't like it,” Gideon said instantly. Reece wasn’t altogether surprised.

  As soon as Reece and Nivy had emerged from the cave with the Vee, the foot of the gorge had cleared out, its prisoners conspicuously leaving to find work someplace else. Gid had taken their vacated spot on the rock island and was leaning on his good elbow, looking tired.

  “Neither do I,” Scarlet added, uneasily watching Owon pace troughs in the mud as he searched for something.

  Reece made an exasperated noise as Nivy folded her arms and shook her head. “Neither do I, while we’re on the subject, but we don’t exactly have a choice. We’re lucky Petric hasn’t already sent us to the Rippers. Her attention must still be on the others.”

  “Here,” Owon announced suddenly. He stopped and knelt against the opposite wall, feeling around beneath the safety ledge. With a little effort—not nearly enough—the Vee unearthed a solid rock hatch that bubbled in the mud and leaned it against wall. “An underwater tunnel. This would have been impossible to find, were it not for us.”

  “Yeah,” Gid muttered, and with a grunt, leaned upright, “I'll remember that next time your bleedin' birthday comes around. It'll make a nice card.”

  Reece eyed him doubtfully. “Can you swim?” he asked as he gave him a hand up.

  Hesitating, Gideon felt at his shoulder. “The blood's clotted. I can swim one-armed.”

  Nodding at that completely unsatisfactory answer but knowing better than to push it, Reece waded to where Owon was impossibly hip-deep in the mud that barely reached the others’ knees.

  “It will be difficult for your inferior eyes to see through the mud,” the Vee said. “You shall have to feel your way to the top. There.” He gestured, his hand dripping mud, at the top of the canyon far above. “We shall emerge in the desert. Perhaps—”

  “Nivy goes first,” Reece interrupted dryly. “Then Scarlet, Owon, Gideon, and me.”

  He kept an eye open for witnesses as Nivy felt her way to the tunnel’s edge and dropped in up to her waist. If there was one good thing that could be said about Owon—and there was only one—it was that his presence produced results; everyone was pointedly avoiding looking their way.

  After drawing a few deep breaths, Nivy clenched her eyes shut and flipped upside-down in the mud, her boots disappearing with a kick.

  Reece glanced at Scarlet as she pulled off her Letoian cloak and tossed it aside. “Are you going to be alright?”

  “Please, Reece,” she chided, smiling at him in her old feminine-wiles sort of way. “You are looking at The Aurelian Academy's five time blue ribbon winner of The Young Lady's Division for Aquatic Precision. Although your concern is very flattering.” She folded her hands and gracefully dove into the tunnel, and Reece was sincerely glad she'd aimed for the right spot.

  Owon went under without any fanfare, and Gideon after him, until it was just Reece left in the gorge. Stepping into the tunnel—and yelping, because the drop-off was steeper than he'd expected—he gathered his breath and flipped under. There wasn’t much room to kick, but he tried, using his hands to guide him along, feeling the tunnel's rough, rocky edges. All too soon, his lungs started to burn and his head ache with the need to breathe. He thrust down the walls of the tunnel with his hands more insistently, feeling mud swirl around his face, stirred by Gideon's feet.

  He broke surface with a wild gasp that broke down into hacking coughs. Stroking blindly, he swam after the sounds of someone else coughing and spitting and hoped they'd found the shore. In a few strokes, he could feel the bottom of the pond with his feet. Giving his arms a rest, he stumbled till he had firm footing and crumpled to his hands and knees in warm, soft sand.

  When he'd gotten his breath back, he shook out his head and tried to open his eyes. The mud he'd just come through was thinner than the stuff down in Karadur, and had helped to wash his face…though he almost wished it hadn't, once he got a horror-struck look around.

  They had just swum up through the bottom of the Pool.

  Owon was already on his feet, collected and not even breathless, though the greenish dark hid his expression—it might've been terrified, for all Reece could tell. The supine shapes of Scarlet, Nivy, and Gideon were spread out along the ring of the Pool's gently lapping tide.

  “Up! Everybody up!” Reece barked. Gideon cursed as he realized where they were. “Don't think, just run! Run!”

  They dashed in a loose cluster up the sloping sand, Owon leading the charge, maybe even seeing where they were headed. Not that Reece trusted him to not lead them right into the jaws of a patiently-waiting Ripper.

  Scarlet suddenly screamed, and Reece saw her shadow drop to the sand beside another shadow, an unmoving one that was wet when he knelt and touched it.

  “It's the girl,” Scarlet said, her voice hitching as she used Reece's arm to claw her way to her feet again, “it's the Raider girl.”

  “She's over here, too,” Gideon said from up ahead, and Reece's stomach tried to roll over.

  “Just keep running!” he growled, roughly towing Scarlet over the top of the dune. “Don't look—”

  He had to throw his forearm over his eyes to keep from being blinded by the powerful search beam of white hot light sweeping across the desert.

  “Stop there, Captain Sheppard,” Mayor Petric's slightly distorted voice ordered through a sonic transducer.

  Arrayed in a neat formation, Letoian soldiers with their rifles raised and aimed walled off the three forward sides of the dune, leaving the Ripper's Pool to pen in the crew. The Letoian version of a photon generator, manned by three men, shot the search beam at them through a lens the size of a window. Using his hand as a visor against the light, Reece glared at the ranks of men, trying to pick out the mayor. Petric obligingly stepped out from behind the generator and strode forward, just a silhouette in uniform with her hands behind her back.

  “Very clever, Captain,” Petric complimented in her hard, clipped accent. “No one has discovered that egress—or dared to use it, for that matter—in years. Did you use the bald one as a plant, to spring you in the case your little ruse was caught on
to?”

  “My little…ruse,” Reece repeated slowly, stalling, watching the dark horizon for signs of his ship. Except for the occasional flash of muted lightning, the sky was dark and empty. “Which one would that be, again?”

  Petric stopped a few yards from him, where her face finally materialized, wearing a humorless smile. “Your plot to steal our generator. Did you think I wouldn't suspect?” She held up a small silver stick about as wide and long as Reece's thumb with a rounded red button on top, almost like a spark-starter. “We have proof, Captain.”

  As she pressed the button, Reece's muffled voice claimed, “The Letoians know we know our only way out is to steal the turbine. They've brought this on themselves; we don't have a choice. We're taking it.”

  Tsking, the mayor tossed him the stick; he clumsily caught it, confused.

  “Keep it. We have the same recorded in several dozen locations. Coercion, theft, escape from a government prison…I'm afraid this time, you will not be afforded the time to contemplate what you have done in the mines. This time, it will have to be the firing squad.”

  “Reece…” Scarlet murmured under her breath, her hand clammy in his. “The plan?”

  He nodded, eyes still skimming the desert. He hadn't the heart to tell her that without Aurelia, the plan was just words. He could spin those words around Petric, but she would still give the order for them to be riddled with holes.

  “Have you nothing to say for yourself? No final words?”

  There. An engine, faint and soft in the distance, a bare rumble, but to him, instantly familiar. He gave Scarlet's hand a reassuring squeeze before letting it go. It was time to have those choice words.

  “Yes,” Reece decided. “You're a liar.”

  Mayor Petric flashed him a wintry smile. “I'm sorry?”

  “You will be,” he promised dryly. The soldiers shifted uneasily behind Petric, maybe picking up on the gentle thrumming vibrations in the air.

  Scarlet took a step forward and drew herself up to her full height. “You've been spinning quite the web around us, Mayor Petric. And by us, I of course mean the crew of The Aurelia and probably the larger half of your cabinet, which I'm sure will be duly noted of these accusations by the authorities here present.”

  “I…I'm sure I don't know what you mean,” Petric replied, her voice distracted. Her eyes stared uncertainly past the dune. The rumble of engines grew louder still.

  Even with her dress appearing to be made of solid mud and her hair sticking out in tufts where it wasn't slicked to her skin, Scarlet looked totally in her element. “So you deny this is all a part of your elaborate plan to appropriate our ship for yourself, so that you and your chosen few could break Leto's tentative truce with the Rippers by flying it to safety?”

  Shaking herself—her eyes kept locking on something in the distance, growing wider and wider—Petric spat, “How dare you! You would suggest that I, the Mayor of Leto City…that I would break the truce? I helped write the truce!”

  “And you paid for it, didn't you, when you had a daughter.” Scarlet took another challenging step forward. “You never realized the cost, until then. Your little daughter, who so wanted to be an adventurer herself one day, bound by the oppressive law you helped pass. Did you become mayor just so you could find a way out, when the time was right?”

  Aurelia was close, now; Scarlet kept raising her voice to be heard over the swelling sounds of the Afterquin. Petric looked stunned.

  “Your mayor,” Scarlet addressed the soldiers, “plotted to steal your city's generator as a means for her own escape from this planet, and in so doing, would have left Leto City defenseless against the Rippers after shamelessly breaking the truce that protects you from them!”

  “Firing squad!” Petric screamed furiously, her eyes bulging. “Take aim! I order you to take aim now!”

  Half the soldiers hefted their guns, but the other half hesitated, exchanging glances and shooting dark scowls at the mayor.

  “And as for proof,” Scarlet cried, and pointed over the dune. Grinning, Reece looked back at Aurelia as she settled into a low hover over the Pool. Her cargo bay ramp hung open, and light—not leek light, but warm, common photon light—cast a square of orange onto the sand. “That ship has your generator in it as we speak! The generator she ordered removed from The Plant and carried here to be installed, using the plans she overheard and stole from us!”

  Petric yowled like an angry cat and spun to face her uneasy soldiers. “What are you doing? I told you to TAKE AIM!”

  “Now, there’s no need to shout,” a new voice declared. Mordecai's, projected over the ship's sonic transducer so it echoed over the sounds of the purring Afterquin. His gangly silhouette stepped up to the cargo bay ramp, the snouted shape of a rifle nestled into his shoulder. “As I have my sights set on your dear mayor, what say you boys lower your weapons? Don't matter if you like her or wanna see her stand trial, you all need her alive.”

  Plan or no plan, Reece was shamelessly relieved when in a wave of movement, the soldiers pointed the noses of their guns at the ground.

  “Wisely done,” Mordecai said approvingly, a smile in his booming voice, “now how's about returnin' any weapons that don't belong to you? I'm lookin' for one in particular. Stands out, some. Double barreled, spins on its—ah.”

  A soldier that had planted the butt of his gun deep in the sand awkwardly came forward, Gideon's revolver held flat on his palms. Gideon went, jerked it out of his hands, and walked back up the slope with a wide, wolfish grin.

  “Now, there's another dozen'a you boys bein' escorted this way by the Rippers, who'll be wantin' to reaffirm the truce post haste. It'd do you well not to open up fire…they're none too pleased with the mayor here, and I think they'd like an excuse to turn a parlay into a dinner party. So remember…manners is everythin’!”

  Reece approached Petric, who had gone down to her knees in the sand and was gazing up into the light of Aurelia with her hair blowing back from her face. Her eyes twitched to Reece and burned with hate. “When you go back to your home tonight,” he told her quietly, “you're going to be replaying this over and over in your head, wondering what went wrong. But before you take the time to feel sorry for yourself, or to conjure up more lies to feed your council members, do this much.” Holding out the silver broadcaster receiver, Reece rolled back on its tiny thumb pad dial, scanning back through Petric's recorded material. Then he stopped and let it play at random.

  “—and once you attach the applicators to the rotational fastening pin…that's on this blue panel, here—”

  Po's voice cut out with a chirp as he stopped the receiver playing.

  “Everything you need to take my mechanic's new generator and set it up in The Plant is right here.” He popped the silver stick into the air, and the mayor wisely scrambled to catch it. “Take it. Get the generator installed before anyone gets hurt. And then, when you go back to that wondering went wrong part, remember. You tried to take my ship. You tried to hurt my crew. And that's all.”

  Aurelia set down in the sand with a soft rush of wind, tossing Reece's hair. With a last frown for Petric, who was beginning to look appropriately frightened as she glanced up and down the glowering ranks of her men, he turned for the cargo bay. Scarlet and Owon were nearly there already, and Gideon was standing with his grandfather, but Nivy had waited for him. She gave him a congratulatory dig in the ribs as they started for home together.

  He heard a dull thud, that was all. But when she fell sideways into him, there was an arrow stuck in her side. Time slowed down; Reece's mind sped up, frantic, jumbled, as he caught her under the arms.

  “Raiders!” one of the soldiers cried, raising the alarm. The Letoians raised their rifles in a chorus of snaps just as the grey-skinned desert people poured over the surrounding dunes like ants kicked out of their hill, hefting bows, spears, and slingshots, or firing with stolen Letoian firearms. The desert was suddenly a battlefield, noisy with shouts and gunfire and stampeding feet
. The white search spotlight rolled, unmanned, across patches of fighting as its soldiers joined the clash.

  Reece tried picking Nivy up, but she grit her teeth and arched away from him, clutching the shaft of the arrow.

  “Reece!” Hayden, his medical bag slung over his shoulder, splashed up sand with his knees as he landed beside them. “One of us under each of her arms—we'll drag her!”

  Together, they folded Nivy's arms around their necks, and with their backs bent, started pulling her towards the cargo bay ramp. Reece could feel the electric jitters of the Band shorting out her voice before she could even cry out. It made him angry enough to wish he could put her down and start shooting things.

  At some point before they reached the cargo bay, the Rippers joined the battle, snatching up Raider and Letoian alike, beating men aside like dolls, sending them flying over the dunes. Once, a cloaked Raider with a spear came at them, howling, only to be jumped by a Ripper. The rusty smell of blood soon draped the thick air.

  At the bottom of the ramp, Mordecai and Gideon were standing back to back, whipping their barrels into blurs, the sound of their firing revolvers rolling into one long peal of thunder.

  Hayden and Reece dragged Nivy up the ramp and behind the cover of a crate, laying her out gently on her back.

  “Who's flying?” Reece demanded.

  Hayden answered as he brought his satchel around to his lap and dug out a pair of scissors, “Po.”

  “Gideon! Mordecai! On board!” Lurching to the log interface in its barred steel box, Reece ripped the speaker com up to his mouth and shouted, “Po, take us up!”