Copyright © 2013 by Courtney Grace Powers
2nd Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
PUBLISHED BY
Courtney Grace Powers
For Sharayah
big sister, faithful reader, and
geek extraordinaire
Table of Contents
Ch. I - That’s One Way to Make Friends
Ch. II - (Almost) Plummeting to a Fiery Death
Ch. III - Gideon Makes Guns, Reece Makes Trouble
Ch. IV- All Manner of Creepy
Ch. V- Scandal!
Ch. VI - Do You Prefer Water, or Engine Grease?
Ch. VII - Glances
Ch. VIII - The Merits of Minding
Your Own Business
Ch. IX - Babysitter for Hire,
Must Be Good with Guns
Ch. X - N…I…V…Y
Ch. XI - Round One, Eldritch Trumps Reece
Ch. XII - It Only Gets Deeper From Here
Ch. XIII - Pour the Burnthroat
Ch. XIV - A Deal, a Caper, and…Oops
Ch. XV - The Longest Day in the History
of Longest Days
Ch. XVI - 1,201 Confessions
Ch. XVII - Up In Flames
Ch. XVIII - Captain Pleasant’s Hairstuffs
for Gents and Other Dangerous Things
Ch. XIX - Brainstormin’
Ch. XX - The Gala of the Solar Cycle
Ch. XXI - Gid Makes a Promise
Ch. XXII - One, Two, Three, Traitor
Ch. XXIII - Well Met, Mr. Sheppard
Ch. XXIV - The Kreft
Ch. XXV - Welcome Home, Son
The Aurelian Archives: Airship Aurelia
About the Author
I
That’s One Way to Make Friends
The planet Honora had three moons: two small ones, green and red, and one bulbous white one, called Atlas. They hovered like balloons against the pink dawn sky. Silhouettes of ships in route for Atlas and its esteemed Aurelian Academy were like odd, far-away birds flying without wings. Oldest to youngest, the students of the academy were being shipped off to another year of study, another year of Airship Architecture and Alien Linguistics and Industrial Maintenance, all the sorts of things a bright young citizen of the Epimetheus Galaxy ought to know.
Reece just wanted to be a pilot. Most ten-year-olds waiting with their parents to board their bus-ship for the first time stood on the docks and stared up at Atlas as if trying to make out The Owl—what all the older kids called the Aurelian Academy. Reece watched the ships.
Now and again he looked at other things too, when he could sneak a glance and get away with it. His mum and stepbrother were standing on either side of him, and, being Easterners, neither liked the west end of the capital city very much. The three had physical similarities—ashy-brown hair, dark eyes, straight-nosed faces. The difference was in their expressions. Abigail and Liem sneered. Reece grinned.
“Bogrosh,” Abigail muttered. “Absolute bogrosh.”
“I think it’s great,” Reece announced, and started to say more, but stopped to stare at a Dryad-class ship whistling by overhead, sleek and pointed like a hornet.
Without looking at him, Abigail sniffed. “Bad taste, child.”
That’s how it was with Reece’s mum. “Child” this, “Child” that. Sometimes, when Mum was feeling particularly stern, he got, “You Incorrigible Child.”
Craning his neck, Reece watched till the Dryad turned into a fleck in the eastern sky. It was with his head turned that way that he saw them—a knot of people, pale with black hair and standing as far back from the hubbub of milling parents and students as possible. He’d never seen more than one or two Honorans with hair that color. And he’d never seen Honorans that looked so dangerous, so hard-faced and tense. Even the child with them had a posture like a cat faced with a whole world of dogs.
“Who are those people, Mum?”
Abigail glanced sideways at the huddle of strangers and pursed her lips. “Those aren’t people, child, they’re Pans. And if they or those filthy Westerners give you any trouble at all you are to go straight to the headmaster, understand? You are the Palatine Second. Remember your place. Honor, superiority.”
Nodding absently, Reece stared at the Pans in their funny clothing, all dark woolens and leather waistcoats. He should’ve guessed. He’d heard loads about them, or at least enough to know that they weren’t actually called Pans. They were Pantedans, refugees from the planet Panteda. People said Panteda was all green fog now, all acid that would choke you quicker than you could swallow, and that the thousands of Pantedans that hadn’t escaped the war there were ghosts that climbed up and grabbed ships right out of the thermosphere.
No one liked the Pans. From what Reece understood, Honora had been rooting for the other guys in that war—the Glaucans. The only reason Honora had taken the Pantedan survivors was because Glaucus had used forbidden chemical weapons. They’d ruined a whole planet. That kind of thing was frowned upon.
Suddenly, the young Pan looked over at Reece, face blank, eyes dark. Reece waved without thinking.
“Plumb-headed child.” Abigail slapped his hand down. “You would, wouldn’t you? Liem, you will keep him out of trouble? As much as is possible?”
Liem was polishing his bronze class ring on his jacket. He was a Fifteen now, and that made him an upperclassman. “If I have time. With all my new courses, I—” He cut off, noticing Abigail’s glare, and nodded. “As much as is possible.” As soon as Abigail turned away, he made a face at Reece. Reece ignored him.
“Honestly,” Abigail muttered as she knelt before Reece and began pressing wrinkles from his overcoat that weren’t there. “You’d think they were letting any sort of dimridge into The Academy these days. I should put in a word with Thaddy.”
By Thaddy, she meant Thaddeus X. Sheppard, Grand Duke over Honora, her husband and the boys’ father. She only called him Thaddy when she wanted something very badly, or else did not want it at all.
“The Pans are dimridge for sure.” Liem began digging through his shoulder bag, double-checking his supplies as if this wasn’t his fifth year returning to The Owl. He shot the Pans a baleful glare and shrugged. “But Headmaster Eldritch wouldn’t let them in if they weren’t exceptional. He screens the students very closely.”
Abigail sniffed again. “I believe Bus-ship Fifteen is boarding now, Liem. Have a productive term.” Liem was only her stepson, after all.
Liem swaggered off to join a handful of older students, boys and girls already in their crisp black uniforms with the patch of Atlas on their sleeves. One or two of them saluted, then laughed at themselves, though Liem didn’t laugh at all. He liked it when people remembered he was the Palatine First, heir to Honora’s dukeship.
Reece snorted. “Liem’s such a sisquick.”
“I clearly remember forbidding you to use that filthy term, Reece Benjamin. Look at me.” Abigail used two fingers to jerk Reece’s face so that his brown eyes locked with hers. “The duke has high hopes for you. Silly though it may seem, you are inexplicably dear to him. Your stepbrother understands. Honor. Superiority. Hold these in high regard, and you just might grow out of being a walking catastrophe.” She almost smiled. “We can only hope as much.”
“Transit-ship Ten, now boarding,” a voice echoed through the large brass windpipe that was the megaphone of the Boarding Director, a paunchy fellow wearing a golden sash across his peculiar olive suit.
“That’s you,”
Abigail said without warmth. “I’ll see you come holiday. Go.”
Scooping up his things—a small trunk and a lumpy leather satchel—Reece nodded goodbye, pushed back his shoulders, and marched towards the rectangular bus-ship marked with the numeral ten on its aft motor frame. Circular windows lined her sides like the portholes on a sea ship, and the air around her aft rippled and wavered with steam. Her engines whined loudly. She was not a young ship.
There were already twenty, maybe thirty Tens in line to board, hefting their luggage and fidgeting as the Boarding Director’s student assistants walked up and down the line and pinned identification tags to their sleeves. A pretty blonde assistant who looked about Liem’s age stooped beside Reece, punched a few keys on a handheld datascope that spat out a line of serial numbers, and then stuck those numbers to a badge. Without ever once looking Reece in the eyes—though likely, if she’d known he was Liem’s half-brother she would’ve been fluttering to get in his good graces, because girls did that for some reason—the assistant stamped the badge onto his sleeve and ducked on to the next Ten in line.
“I’m gonna be an Airship Mechanic,” the Ten, a little girl with her hair in blonde braids, said proudly. She had the Westerners’ twang in her voice.”Do ya need to put that on there?”
The older girl rolled her eyes. “No.”
“Why not? It’s important, ain’t it?”
“No, it isn’t.” The assistant forcefully tacked the little girl’s number to her arm and moved on. She reminded Reece of Abigail.
The line slowly, so slowly, inched forward, till Reece’s toes brushed over the threshold of Bus-ship Ten. It had three aisles of leather-padded seats draped with straps to hold students safely in their arms. Though, out of the dozen Tens who had already been seated, only three actually paid any attention to the safety gear, two of them because they were seated by the portholes where their parents could see them, and one because he seemed the type to actually worry about an old lugger like this crashing. His face was a little green behind his overlarge bifocals.
Reece was jostled to a seat near the back by the other Tens crowding in. He shot a look at the filled window seats, envious. This was his first time off-planet, and he had wanted to watch the sky as they broke atmosphere.
It was very loud in the bus-ship. There was tittering and shouting and obnoxious jokes being made in those drawling Westerner accents, not to mention the constant squeal of the ship’s engines underlying everything, comforting and somehow warm. So when the coach suddenly went as quiet as a classroom, Reece craned his neck to see why.
It was the Pan boy, stepping on-board with just one bag strapped over his back. He was tall for a Ten—taller than Reece, and Reece liked to think of himself as kind-of tall. And frightening, though not in a bullying kind of way. Intimidating…that was the word that came to mind.
There were three seats left: two snuggled up near the exit hatch and the line of hanging canvas bags containing compressed life rafts, and one next to Reece.
“Hey!” Reece hailed. He felt the girl on his left jump. The little one that didn’t look old enough to be a Ten. “Back here!”
The Pan looked up in interest, frowned, and turned to sit by the hatch with his thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets. He had disconcerting blue eyes that were the light color of the sky, the same eye-color of the royal wolfdogs, and black hair that was close-cropped but messy. There was a small green ribbon pinned to his jacket, not so different from all the ribbons and honors the duke wore on his.
“Well, you tried,” said the little pig-tailed girl, patting Reece’s arm. “It was a nice thing to do, anyhow.”
The bus-ship took off in a tumble of noisy cheers from the students and screaming steam from the engines. As the coach rattled into a blur, the little girl on Reece’s left began muttering to herself (“Betchya I could make it rattle less with a couple’a rotational rings and an undulator! These downtown mechanics sure do botchy work, huh?”), and the boy with the bifocals vomited into a pail. It wasn’t the best first take-off.
The noise died down after an hour of flight, once the windows had all grown dark with that inky blackness that was the void between stars, The Voice of Space. The boy up front stopped being sick, though he almost had a relapse when he had to carry his pail to the head to dump it.
For five or so minutes during the second hour, Reece, leaning around the chirpy blonde girl, could actually see the Euclid Stream glittering out in The Voice. A real Stream. A current in space, like a throughway for captains and their ships. A ship caught in a Stream jetted forward at up to twenty times its normal velocity; that’s how captains could explore the galaxy without being gone for years and years. You had to have a special liscence to pilot in the Streams, but that was alright. If Reece worked hard enough, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t have one by the time he was twelve, maybe thirteen.
By the third hour, the Tens were all bouncing in their seats again, chattering about housing assignments and aptitude tests, about who was most likely to become a law enforcer as opposed to a botanist and what handcraft elective was the best, sculpting, carpentry, or painting. Atlas loomed beyond the starboard windows, its landscape milky with the fog that gave it its white glow. Barely discernable through the fog was a great grey ocean, and a smallish continent hiding in its forests the sprawling brick city that was The Aurelian Academy. Aesthetic pride of Honora. Or something like that.
The bus-ship suddenly shivered hard enough to rattle Reece’s teeth. Everyone else felt it too; a few hands flew to the safety contraptions on their seats, buckling them as the photon dome lighting the cabin flickered as if a pair of great clumsy hands was trying to cover it. Someone in the cockpit gave a muffled shout, and the ship shivered again, this time to a few startled screams from the students. Then everything went silent.
Even the engines.
“What’s going on?”
“Are we crashing?”
Reece could hear the engines sputtering in attempt to kick back on. The backup levelers hummed in exertion as they struggled to maintain the gravity barrier on their own. A man in an olive jumpsuit broke out of the captain’s cabin and came running down the aisle, barking orders to remain seated as he lowered himself through a hatch that he pulled open on the floor.
“Wonder if I should go help,” the little girl next to Reece muttered.
Blinking over at her—the photon dome had just winked out for good, and it was now too dark to see much more than outlines—Reece shook his head. “Probably not. I’m sure it’s just a hiccup.”
Even though he couldn’t see her face, Reece was sure the girl was giving him a look. “Let’s just hope it ain’t the right galving link….elsewise we’ll prolly burn up in the atmosphere.”
Bus-ship Ten gave its biggest tremble yet, so that Reece lifted out of his seat and then slammed back into it. It felt like a giant wolfdog had grabbed the bus-ship up in its jaws and started shaking it like a toy.
He wasn’t sure why, but right then, it occurred to him. Bifocal Boy and his pail were still in the head. Twisting in his seat, Reece squinted against the dark and was sure he heard even over the frightened cries of the other Tens a tiny voice calling for help.
He fiddled with his safety gear, hesitating. This was exactly the sort of behavior Mum wasn’t likely to forgive. Luckily, with no Liem on board, there was little chance she’d ever hear tell of it.
“What are you doin’?” gasped the little girl as the ship popped Reece up out of his seat and pitched him down the aisle. He tipped left and right, went down to his knees once, and nearly had a disastrous collision with the open hatch before he reached the sliding screen door hiding the ship’s facilities. The tiny voice was that much louder back here, chanting, “It’s just turbulence, it’s just turbulence…”
Planting his legs firmly apart, Reece grabbed the handle to the sliding door with both hands and waited for the ship to shudder. When it did, he used its momentum to throw the door to the left.
Bifocal Boy flew out at him with a garbled shout, and together, they smashed to the floor.
An alarm went off, shrill and wailing, just as a red auxiliary light came on and painted the cabin with eerie color. Bifocal Boy jerked on the floor next to Reece, covering his ears with his hands.
“Come on!” Reece shouted. “We’ve got to get to our seats!”
“We can’t!” the boy shouted back and made a grab for his spectacles as they flew from his face. “We’re…we’re starting to turn!” Craning his neck, Reece saw with a pinched stomach that he was right. It almost looked as if the moon Atlas was circling the ship…when really, he knew that the ship was going into a slow, flat spin. “If we tried to get back to our seats, the centrifugal force—”
Reece could already feel it. In his balance as he started leaning backward, in his knees as they began to slide over the polished wooden floors. He threw out a hand and tried to catch the leg of the nearest seat and missed it by a hair as his body rebelliously rolled back into the wall, where he felt pinned by an invisible weight. In a second, the other Ten joined him with a yelp.
Even shutting his eyes required effort—not because of the pressure, but because the white, cycling blur of Atlas was hypnotizing even while it was dizzying. He wished he wasn’t pinned quite so close to the airsick kid.
Then there came a scream even louder than the students’—the engines! With a pop, the white dome light came back on, and cool, fresh air erupted out of the air vents under the students’ seats, replenishing the oxygen supply. As the horrible shaking stopped, the ship’s spin slowed, slowed till Reece and his companion slid down the wall and landed in a dazed heap.
“At…at least you didn’t get sick…” Reece panted, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve.
“I don’t get airsick,” the other boy gasped. “I have…food poisoning.”
A snort burst out of Reece before he could stop it. “Right. And I’m—”
Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) Page 1
