The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  On his way to the door, Nimrod cranked a great rusted lever on the control console. In the distance, a generator started up with a metallic groan.

  “What is this?” Nivy muttered to Illie as her mother approached to draw Reece towards the door Nimrod had left open at his back. They edged out into the cavern just as a photon globe over the control room powered up with a buzz of complaint, as bright as a beacon in the damp sea of black. More were fluttering in the distance, like sleepy, blinking eyes.

  “Stay calm, Nivy,” was all Illie said as she led them to the rail of the observation deck, where Nimrod was waiting, looking satisfied.

  “I give you,” he said, proud, triumphant, his hand on another switch hanging by a fat chain from the invisible ceiling, “the future of The Heron.”

  He threw the switch with a click and a clank.

  From right to left, one after the other, the photon lights came fully on, burning through shadows and streams of dust motes. Each popping photon revealed thirty more yards of bunker; each thirty new yards of bunker revealed another ship with a wooden hull and patinaed gold airlocks, long-snouted, sleek, and winged.

  When the last photon globe popped, Reece was staring down two neat rows of sleeping ships facing each other across the long airstrip, which tapered into the distance, a tunnel drilled through the roots of the mountains. He was radioactive with adrenaline and panic, his mind painfully awake and yet blank, like someone had thrown the lights in his head and shocked everything that had been creeping around in it into going perfectly still.

  To his left, Aurelia. To his right, Aurelia. Five of her, ten of her, twenty of her. He almost believed someone had set up the bunker with carnival mirrors and created an optical illusion. Only…

  These ships weren’t Aurelia. Someone who hadn’t studied her at length might have been fooled, but it only took Reece a second glance to realize that the ships were too long, their wings just a bit too sharp, more like The Aurelius’s had been. And they were mounted with canons the size of bimotors.

  He caught himself on the rail, mouth hanging open. Aurelia was a survey ship, an explorer. Aurelius had been a passenger vessel. This third breed…it was a warship. He squinted at the nearest ship, its name emblazoned on its side in red script, as if in bloody imitation of Aurelia’s.

  The Aureliod.

  “Our armada,” Nimrod said, pulling his gesturing hand into a fist.

  A steel door at the head of the airstrip—the very door Reece must have been escorted through earlier—opened, and Canter rushed in, pausing only for a second to stare down the length of the bunker before homing in on the small company on the observation deck.

  “They’re landing,” she shouted breathlessly. “Nimrod, they’re landing! And they’re asking for him!”

  Reece’s mind chugged as it tried to kick back into gear. He understood, somehow, that Canter was talking about him, but it was like a film had been laid over the bunker, and the only thing that stood out with clarity were those ships that just couldn’t exist.

  “How did they get through?” Nimrod demanded, ignoring Reece in his dazed stupor as he swung towards the stairs with Illie.

  “Most of the ships led The Kreft away, back out into the Voice. One slid through our defenses while their back was turned. It was too fast. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like a ghost, on the radar. There, and then…”

  A ghost on the radar. It was painful, but Reece dragged himself back to the present, and turned towards Nivy, still feeling a little slack-jawed. “What are they talking about?”

  Nivy hesitated, then, after glancing uncertainly at the fleet of warships one last time, nodded for Reece to come with her. He didn’t want to. He wanted to stand here and keep staring out over the bunker and its alarming cargo, but his feet had a different idea. He pattered clumsily down the stairs, belatedly noticing how quickly Nimrod had dismissed their fight in light of this mysterious new development, and realizing how worried that should probably make him.

  “Remember how I mentioned that The Kreft were moving strangely?” Nivy said quietly as Illie, Nimrod, and Canter conversed in low, urgent voices. “It was because there were other ships in The Ice Ring. They just appeared, a small fleet, no more than a dozen. Even The Kreft were caught off guard. They regrouped to round them up and gave chase.”

  “What kind of ships?”

  “No one knows. They couldn’t get a straight read—the ships put off some kind of intentional interference, to make the radars glitch. And they’re faster than anything we’ve got.” Nivy stopped at the bottom of the stairs, turned, and held Reece back with a hand on his chest. “Reece. They said they were from Honora.”

  “What?” Had the duke sent someone looking for him? Was he really that stupid?

  Reece turned to demand Canter tell him everything and found himself face to face with Nimrod, who managed to loom quite impressively, considering his stocky height. The man grabbed his manacles and cranked them to a hard, awkward angle, so Reece went up to his toes as Nivy hissed something surprisingly ugly that didn’t bear repeating.

  “Never forget that I’m not doing this because I trust you,” Nimrod growled. “While you are here, you are Nivy’s responsibility. I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to hear you. We shall be the victors of this war. We have a mighty burden to prove ourselves. I expect you to understand that.” Before Reece could comprehend what was happening, Nimrod had deftly unhooked his cuffs and tossed them to Canter, who looked disappointed. “Now, come with me. I’m having the stragglers of your crew gathered. If these visitors are here for you, they can do with you as they please, but not without explaining how in the ancestors’ name they got this far without attracting The Kreft.”

  Nekoda met them in the corridor outside the bunker with a dozen armed soldiers, a tight-lipped Scarlet, and Gideon, whose snow-crusted clothes were still thawing.

  After Nimrod had passed with a baleful glance in their direction, Reece bent his mouth to Scarlet’s ear. “Hayden?”

  “Still in surgery,” she whispered, looking around at the soldiers worriedly. “Reece, what’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted, quietly repeating what Nivy had told him. Her face whitened with every word, and there was no small means of hand-wringing involved. Gid just looked angry; apparently, he had gone from being the hunter to the hunted, and hadn’t taken the interruption very well. The rest of the search party was still looking for Po, but from Gid’s scary expression, that wasn’t good enough.

  Reece blinked as Nekoda fell back from where three of The Six were marching together, sliding into step between Gideon and a guard, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Here,” Nekoda said, and from the holster under his arm, pulled out Gideon’s revolver. He produced Mordecai’s from his hip a second later, handing over the gun by its barrel. “I expect The Six won’t approve, but seein’ as even they don’t know what we’re walkin’ into, I don’t see how they can complain about an extra precaution or two. You wield both’a those at once?”

  Gid was obviously suspicious, but he nonetheless accepted the revolvers and sheathed them with a short nod. Reece would have been relieved, but he couldn’t help thinking it might be better for all of them if Gid wasn’t armed while Po was missing and The Heron were one loud noise away from jumping and taking all of their heads off.

  They made for quite a sight, a long column of tense soldiers, angry Pans, and edgy captives with Nimrod, Illie, and Canter forming their menacing spear point. They passed narrow corridors that emptied almost instantly, and through two busy hubs, where small packs of Heron bunched under the screens, reading with wide eyes. Finally, at the end of a corridor with vented floors, they stopped before a set of house-sized sliding doors painted with yellow warning signs. They were about to enter the emergency landing bay. Reece rubbed his raw wrists, his stomach in nauseous knots.

  Nimrod held up a fist. “Form ranks,” he bellowed, and his soldiers fanned out, leaving Nivy, Reece, Scarlet
, and Gideon on their own in front of the tall black seam of the doors.

  Reece looked slowly left, then right, at his friends. Even though Ismara had always been their destination, he couldn’t help feeling like everything he had done had brought them to this point, where their feet were straddling a crack that would either divide them or pull them into darkness. Whatever was waiting on the other side of the doors would determine the fate of the airship Aurelia’s crew. As her captain…that was on his shoulders. It always would be.

  The doors began to slide apart with a screech. Exhaust and steam poured out, hot, moist, metallic. Reece was the first to move forward into the fog, his black boots making the grated floor shiver. A series of telling clicks said Gideon and Nekoda both had their revolvers pointed into the white. Nivy joined him, met his eye, and gave a nod.

  As the doors locked in place, the steam thinned out, trickling over a needle-nosed, flat black ship. Reece had never seen its kind in person before, but he still instantly knew what it was, and he knew it had been in Neserus, the murky stalker that had followed him and Scarlet in their race down the windowed tunnel. He’d all but forgotten about it. That was the goal. It was a ship meant to slink in where it was least expected, impossibly fast and next to invisible in the night sky, like a ghost. Like a specter.

  The pointed front of the ship opened like a mouth, its lower jaw a ramp. A small figure descended, hugging her arms around herself and looking exhausted.

  Po waved miserably. “Hey, Cap’n.”

  Someone was emerging from the open bay behind her. He slid partway into the light, an eclipse, tall and pale and looking for all the world like he expected a king’s reception, and Reece’s mind stalled, the silence of an engine before a crash.

  “Reece Sheppard,” Owon greeted with a wicked smirk. “It is long past time we had a talk.”

  Epilogue

  Hayden’s pulse was a slow line punctuated with even spikes. It rolled endlessly across the green screen of the datascope on a stand at his bedside. His eyes were dry from counting spikes and calculating how many beeps his pulse would amount to at the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of his life.

  The numbers were a comfort to him. They were in everything. Four wheels on his rickety cot bed, two bare bulbs in the shade on the ceiling, five medics who had put him to sleep and worked on his ankle and been there with bad news when he had woken up three hours later. One ankle they’d been too late to fully fix. He’d walk with a limp forever.

  Hayden’s pulse hiccupped on the screen, and he quickly put the thought of forever away, because that was something that couldn’t be quantified with numbers.

  Scarlet had been there before his surgery. Thankful as he always was for her company, he’d been relieved when he’d woken and found himself in an empty room. Alone, he could let himself peek under the scratchy wool blankets confining him to his bed and stare at the cockeyed tilt of his foot, openly angry.

  On Oceanus, he’d been horrified at his anger, but if he had just let himself be properly angry, maybe Hannick wouldn’t have gotten the best of him. Maybe Talfryn wouldn’t have been left behind, and his foot would still be whole. The truth was…it felt good to be angry. But it felt awful too. He wasn’t letting the anger propel him to some greater deed. He was just…lying here. An invalid drowning in a pool of self-pity. Part of him thought if he could just snap out of this dense, lazy haze, he could prove something to himself. Part of him said that wanting to prove something was what had gotten him here in the first place. If he could just accept what he was, turn his self-doubt off like a piece of automata, he’d be perfectly content.

  Which was a realization made all the crueler by the fact that right now, he’d give anything to go back to being the Hayden Rice who fumbled a bit with his identity aboard The Aurelia but at least had two good feet.

  Sighing miserably, Hayden rolled onto his back, looking away from the datascope monitoring his pulse via the tiny implant in the fold of his arm. The room was sparse and dim, a hollowed-out square of concrete with a wooden door. Everything beyond the foot of the bed looked blurry without his bifocals, but Scarlet had left a bag of his things along with a handwritten note. On the low dresser against the wall, he could just barely make out his splintered spectacles, his pocket-sized medical kit, and, sneakily tucked between a change of trousers and a spare shirt, the mysterious manuscript he’d been trying to translate for months.

  It had been hours since he’d seen anyone, including The Heron medics who should have been regularly checking in on their patient, but then, if his internal clock was to be believed, it was the middle of the night. Maybe they had counted on him sleeping off his medicine and exhaustion, not staring into space and solving impossible equations to distract himself from thinking too hard.

  Taking care not to shift his foot, he propped himself up on his elbows and squinted at the door. The shadows of rushing feet flashed back and forth beneath it. Hushed voices made a soft, constant static in the background of his datascope’s beeping.

  “H-hello?” Hayden called rustily. He cleared his throat and rubbed a fist in his eye before trying a little louder, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  If the shadows heard him, they were too busy to let him know. As his arms started shaking, he collapsed back into his pillows and sighed again. It was strange, knowing he was deep in the heart of the underground base but not having a clue what it looked like save for this tiny room. He’d seen some of the equipment used in his surgery before it had been wheeled out; it’d been the thing to convince him the doctors were telling the truth about his ankle being too far gone to fully mend. Medical automata that clean and precise could practically perform a surgery by itself, and it couldn’t lie no matter how much Hayden wished it would. From people with tools like that at their disposal, Hayden half expected a city in the sky.

  But that was just silly. The Heron were at war. And the kind of people who built cities in the sky was the same sort who built them under oceans.

  And now he was back to Oceanus. He focused on his breathing, one deep breath to every two beeps of his bedside datascope.

  Beyond the door, raised voices bounced back and forth and then faded into the distance with another wave of footsteps. Something was definitely going on. Hayden hoped the others were alright. Scarlet’s note had caught him up on what had happened while he’d been out, and thinking about poor Po and where she might be right now was one of the three things that could make him completely forget about his foot. Po, wandering alone in the blustery mountains, Talfryn, trying to escape a slowly-flooding city, and Sophie, huddling in a basement as The Kreft tried to blow the town around her into space dust.

  Thinking about how he’d failed them probably should have made him feel worse, but it didn’t. At some point, a person couldn’t feel any worse, and so they had to choose to feel something else, or nothing at all. Hayden chose to feel determined. He was angry, and he was determined. He dared someone to come in that door and try to stump him at electrochemistry! He’d determine the amount of silver deposited by an electric current to the fourth digit before someone could say—

  One photon stand in the corner of the room. Two glasses of water on the stool beside his cot. Four bruises yellowing on his arms, and two more he could feel on his back when he shifted. He closed his eyes wearily.

  Sometimes, looking at his problems, he felt like he was trying to crack an impossible language. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except no one had told him the language was numerical. He couldn’t solve a problem if he didn’t understand why it was a problem anymore than he could translate a language by substituting letters for numbers. Letters had patterns, sequences, limitations. Numbers were…

  Hayden’s eyes slowly opened to stare up at the buzzing photon globes. For three deep breaths, his mind was blank. Then the datascope began beeping rapidly as the spikes on the screen doubled.

  Struggling with his clumsy weight, he leaned up and braced a pale hand against the bar at the head o
f his cot, holding himself half out of bed.

  “Nurse!” he cried. “Hello? Anyone! Please!”

  Shaking, he used his hands and good leg to push his pile of blankets to the side, unveiling his ankle in its stiff wrap of bandages. The thought of moving it, let alone walking on it, was enough to make him feel nauseated. With another longing look at the door, which still hadn’t opened, he steeled himself and carefully eased it over the side of the bed.

  With a few deep breaths, he doggedly threw himself across the room.

  He reached the dresser with a couple inches to spare. Really, he collided with it. His hands grabbed for The Heron tome and his broken bifocals and yanked them out so violently, his spare clothes went flying. Unfortunately, between the collision and the yank, his strength was pretty well spent. He slumped down to his knees and let the book fall open on its back in front of him, his hands hovering indecisively over the pages.

  At first, he wasn’t sure. But the more he skimmed, the more he saw connections, patterns in places that alphabetically, made no sense. But numerically…a whole new set of laws was opening up to him. The text started to take a blocky shape. His fingertip underlined a long strand of figures. Suddenly he was certain. This was why he’d never been able to translate the manuscript.

  It wasn’t a manuscript at all.

  With fumbling hands, he gripped the book by either cover, and—asking silent forgiveness from his librarian father—ripped its spine. Wedging a couple fingers under the remaining scraps of binding, he tore out the pages in one chunk, and then went at the soft rope hinging them into their neat, folded, rectangular shape. That done, he paused, and carefully set the pages down on the floor. He couldn’t even hear the faithful beep of his datascope anymore. For all he knew, his heart had altogether stopped.