Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  “Probably hoping my engines catch fire and I plummet to a fiery death,” Reece muttered dryly as he nodded a last goodbye to Hayden and started for the airstrip.

  At last, the crowd was realizing that he was the captain-to-be they had come to watch, marching out in his black uniform, his shoulders hunched. His mood had been spoiled. He couldn’t help thinking as he passed beneath the shadow of the spidery tin flight tower that the crowd was probably hoping he’d crash too, because that would be more exciting for the lot of them, wouldn’t it? They were all a bunch of stuffed, morbid pigeons.

  The engineers rushed out from under the wings of the Nyad, branded Felicity on her right flank, and started shoving his gear at him. A headset that he’d wear on his free ear, a pair of black leather gloves, breathing apparatus to be kept under his seat in case of emergency. He nodded and grunted at their rambled instructions. He knew how to fly a Nyad. He’d known since he was a Fourteen. If the crowd and the headmaster and Liem wanted to see some flying, then they would see some flying. Let them get a good look at his aft burners.

  He entered Felicity through a squat door under her left wing and then locked the sealants on the hatch. With a hiss, he was closed in. Just him and the helm. He breathed a sigh of relief and tossed the apparatus and the gloves carelessly aside.

  He ran through the standard checklist, reading it off over his headset for the judges in the tower to hear. He took care to use the formal names of all the parts, rather than the slang he’d picked up from outside of class. Applicators, not greasers, joint coils, not springs.

  Taking off was a simple matter of pumping the pedal that determined the level of intensity the gravitational levelers would work at, then taking hold of the yoke, a wide, two-handed wheel, and pulling it up towards himself. Liftoff was immediate and smooth, and with the levelers doing their job, his ears didn’t even pop.

  Felicity climbed up and up, her engines humming their low melody, till a voice came over the headset asking Reece to hold his altitude and perform a standard series of maneuvers. Reece flipped a collection of switches, and the Nyad trembled as her propellers shifted position to his specifications.

  The test couldn’t have been easier if Reece had written it himself. And Felicity handled like a well-oiled dream. Gradually, Reece’s anger ebbed away to nothing, till he was grinning as he wound Felicity down in an impressive corkscrew, then rolling her up to starboard without ever losing speed. Not quite what the judges had asked for, but better. He saw high marks in his very near future, celebrated with Gideon, Hayden, Sophie, and Hugh over a dinner of clam chowder and rice.

  “Felicity, you are cleared to return to Airstrip 12 for landing. You’ve performed wonderfully,” the calm voice on the other end of the headset, quite familiar at this point, announced.

  “Yes, she has.” Reece patted the console in front of him. “We’ll be there in a wink.” In response, there was only a pause, then static. He tapped the headset with a finger. “Hello? Friendly intercom person?”

  Nothing. But Felicity was high enough that the sky was a deep blue, so it was hard not to notice when the photon globe over his head flickered and then went out. Only the green radar panel on the console lit the cockpit, and that light was dull and ghostly.

  Frowning, Reece switched the radar to a heat-sense view of the engines. They looked to be in good order, though there was a strange flickering in the connectors, which was troubling. Maybe a loose wire? Could the engineers really have missed that? Maybe it was sabotage. For a second, Liem’s face flashed through his head, but he pushed the thought away. For the most part, he’d been kidding about the plummeting to a fiery death thing.

  Touching the brass com link over his left ear, Reece cleared his throat and said, “Hayden?”

  “Reece...tsshhht…broadcasting your communication over the sonic transducer…tsshhht…you cut out!” Static interrupted whatever it was Hayden was trying to say, but at least he was there.

  “I’m getting some kind of interference. Hold on.” Reece leaned forward in his seat, straining against his safety harness, and switched the radar to standard view, which showed the wide open space around the ship. A pulse passed over the radar, reading for foreign objects. Reece felt his chest constrict as the radar gave a little bleep, showed a glowing dot growing closer and closer to Felicity, approaching from space. There was something disturbingly familiar about the readings.

  “Hayden, you there?”

  “…tsshht…Go ahead…”

  “You remember our first day at The Owl, on the bus-ship? What they told us about how we nearly crashed?”

  “…tsshhhhh…”

  “They said it was caused by a meteorite breaking atmosphere close to our ship and jamming the controls with an electromagnetic wave.”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s happening again! I’m losing my controls, and I’m picking up—”

  Felicity jerked, shivered, and then went silent. Her controls darkened, and both com links whispered static into Reece’s ears. For a horrible second, she didn’t move at all. Then she started to fall.

  III

  Gideon Makes Guns, Reece Makes Trouble

  The Owl’s medical facilities were some of Honora’s finest. To Reece, that just meant they were twice as uncomfortable as a normal hospital’s would have been. Everything was white and sterile, his crisp bed sheets were about as comfortable as newspapers, and then there was the horrible robe he must have been slid into when he’d been brought in from the crash…because if he had been any kind of conscious, he would have fought hard against that.

  His bed was alone in a wide chamber with wooden floors that bounced light in every direction. A grandfather clock in the corner tick, tick, ticked, its gears in constant rotation, like the sun arching beyond the windows behind Reece’s headboard. Reece started counting ticks. To keep himself sane.

  Finally, after nearly fifteen hundred ticks, one of the double doors opened soundlessly. Hayden peeked his head in, and seeing Reece, heaved a sigh of relief.

  Reece sat up—his head swam for a minute, making him all the more irritable—grabbed a pillow, and hurled it at him. “Where the bleeding bogrosh have you been?”

  Hayden pulled the door shut behind him and skipped to dodge the pillow. He was out of uniform, wearing trousers with their suspenders caught up on the shoulders of his white shirt. That’s right. For everyone else at The Owl, school holiday had started this morning, when Reece woke to find himself with a plasma bag hanging at his bedside, his only friend.

  “Trying to find out what happened,” Hayden said, resting his hip on the windowsill. “I knew you would want answers when you woke up.”

  “And?”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Before or after I received a very nice log telling me I’d failed my test?”

  Hayden almost slipped off the windowsill in his surprise. Reece felt a pang of guilt. So Hayden hadn’t known. He had almost worked himself up to believing that everyone knew and hadn’t come to visit him because they didn’t know how to deal with the subject of his humiliating failure.

  “They failed you? On what grounds?”

  Reece slouched against his headboard. “I didn’t communicate with the tower when I experienced the power flux. I crashed my Nyad into the lake. And then I didn’t have my breathing apparatus handy, so I nearly drowned. Pretty good grounds, I’d say.”

  “But they’d announced the test over before the power flux!” Hayden looking so horrified made Reece feel a hair better. Hayden didn’t question judges, tests, and rules, not without good reason. “And what happened—Reece, that wasn’t your fault. You’re right. I looked at the datagraph they were able to salvage from Felicity’s console. The readings were identical to the ones Bus-ship Ten took eight years ago.”

  “A meteorite.” Reece pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers, sighing. “I failed because of a bleeding…Hayden?” Hayden was staring out the window thoughtfully, his forehead scr
unched into a mass of wrinkles. “What’s wrong?”

  “It wasn’t a meteorite, Reece. It couldn’t have been. Everyone saw it. For a second, we thought it was your ship crashing. But it wasn’t. It was too small, almost like an escape capsule. I know what a meteorite looks like coming through the atmosphere, and this was nothing like it. It was generating some serious heat, but it was stable. It didn’t leave a tail. It just…landed.” As Hayden spoke, he tapped his fingertips together and started pacing. “Some of the others in the crowd might not have recognized the signs, but surely those in the flight tower…but why would they fail you, if they knew?”

  To keep his poor concussioned head from combusting, Reece held up a hand to stop Hayden’s tirade. “Wait, wait, wait. You think they knew it wasn’t my fault, and still failed me?”

  Hayden waved a hand as if that was trivial and kept pacing, clicking his fingers and muttering.

  “Why?” Reece persisted. He could feel his hands forming into fists around handfuls of his sheets. “Why would they do that?”

  “Maybe so they wouldn’t have to provide proof of why it wasn’t your fault. Maybe they don’t want attention drawn to the supposed meteorite.” As if annoyed, though he rarely got annoyed except with Gideon, Hayden threw out his hands and made a growling noise. “This is going to drive me insane. What could it be?”

  “Maybe it is an escape capsule. It’s not the first time aliens have come to Honora. Look at the Pantedans.”

  “But don’t you see the connection? If this isn’t a meteorite, and its readings are identical to the supposed meteorite of eight years ago…then that wasn’t a meteorite either. And it couldn’t have been an escape capsule either time or they would’ve had a broadcast about it. We would have heard about the survivor, I’m sure of it. So it stands to reason that cover stories were fabricated for both events. Maybe—”

  “Here’s a thought,” said Reece, sitting up slowly to keep his headache in check. “Will getting that answer for you get me proof that the crash wasn’t my fault?”

  Thereby getting him his promotion. That was all he wanted, all he had ever wanted; a ship, a crew, and the right to fly them. It was just a pair of wings. What right did a panel of judges who probably hadn’t flown in thirty years have to tell him he couldn’t have that much?

  Looking suddenly uncomfortable, Hayden plunged his hands into his trouser pockets and ducked his head. Reece could tell he likened the mystery to an equation in his mind, something to be solved. Just not at the risk of…risk.

  Before either of them could say more, the doors opened inward, and a stream of visitors trickled into the hospital chamber. Tutor Clauson was at the head of the line, a small man that hunched like a vulture and had the nose to match. He gave Reece a limp handshake, offered his regrets at the outcome of the test, and said in his dry, wheezy voice, “There’s as much important work to be done on the ground as in the air, my boy. You’ll get the sky out of your system in time. I did.”

  A few of Reece’s fellow aspiring pilots came and had the decency to not mention the test. Then there was Scarlet, in her peacock blue dress and silvery hairnet, bending over to whisper that she was seeing if there was anything to be done about rescheduling the test under fairer conditions. Sophie and Hugh were the most welcome of all, dear Sophie with a tin full of his favorite biscuits. Liem, Abigail, and the duke didn’t show. His accident likely would’ve merited a visit from them only if it had been fatal.

  Reece polished off his third biscuit, and as he reached for a fourth under Sophie’s delighted eye, asked carefully, “No Gideon?” The other visitors were all gone, but there was a male nurse standing at the door in a white jumpsuit.

  Leaning back into one of the mechanical spring chairs the nurse had helpfully cranked up out of the floor, Hugh shook his head. “He and Mordecai are back at the shop. They came to see you this morning, but you weren’t awake yet, and Mordecai was…Mordecai.”

  That sentence made perfect sense to anyone who’d ever carried on a three-minute conversation with the man. Among his numerous quirks, Mordecai had an acute case of paranoia when it came to Parliament-run facilities. He had once faked leperhives just to get out of renewing his citizenship in The Guild House.

  Chewing on his fourth biscuit and deciding against a fifth even though Sophie was holding the tin practically under his nose, Reece had a thought. Smiling slyly at Hayden, he asked Hugh, “Did you see the…meteorite?”

  Hayden choked on his biscuit, and behind his father’s back, shook his head pleadingly. Sophie saw it all, but she was Reece’s through and through, no need to worry about her allegiance. She gave the tin a little shake so that the biscuits rattled.

  “I did, if that’s what it was,” Hugh sighed. “It’s a bad bit of timing. I truly am sorry, Reece. But they’ll test you again after the standard year is over. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding employment until then.”

  Reece opened his mouth very slowly, making Hayden first roll his eyes, then hesitantly nod his consent. He was in, so long as Reece didn’t mention his sleuthing to his father. Triumphant, Reece grinned.

  “No, no trouble,” he said, and indulged himself with another biscuit.

  There was one small town on Atlas, a half hour’s drive by bimobile from The Owl. It wasn’t much as far as towns went, not after you’d lived on Honora, but it had plenty of storefronts to peruse, huge glass windows with advertisements projected onto them, black and white moving pictures of ladies modeling dresses or gentlemen examining their shiny new pocket watches. And for those unfortunate students who were still riding the public locomotive to get to and from Praxis, there were even bimobiles (bims for short) for rent, though the models the shops carried were not nearly as nice as the ones Reece and Hayden rode.

  Technically, both bims were Reece’s, since Hayden had humbly refused to accept one for a birthday present (Gideon had had no such qualms accepting his). They were motorized pushbikes, really, chunky two-wheeled mobiles with low, flat handles. Huge funnels coughed steam from either side of the rear tires. The oily steam was a smell Reece had come to love.

  After rolling his bim up to the pedestrian walkway and propping its hulk against a lamppost, Reece tipped his goggles onto the back of his head and squinted into the sunlight. Praxis was as busy as an anthill. The brick-laid Main Street was split down the middle by tracks for The Iron Horse, the public locomotive, but people crossed it freely, lugging brown paper shopping bags or licking cones of frozen dairy. Main Street’s buildings were all double stacked and identical, with colorful fronts, bright, coordinating shutters, and spinning glass doors in constant rotation. Well, nearly identical. The one Reece and Hayden had come to find was the exception.

  It had a bland olive paintjob and a congested window display filled with springs, cables, shockgun shells, ammunition trays, macro-plasma candles, and little curving pieces that Reece knew by now to be triggers. It was dark beyond the window, but that didn’t mean anything. Someone looking to buy spare parts could get them at any old junker’s on the next lane over. No, if you came to this shop, you wanted the second floor.

  Reece and Hayden exchanged a look—Reece thought Hayden might be steeling himself—and went in through the dilapidated door, which groaned on its rotator. The shelves on the walls were nearly bare. Chances were, anything laid out didn’t work anyways and was just sitting there to keep up the appearance of this being a shop at all.

  There was a mechanical whine coming from the swinging door behind the counter where an old cash register sat gathering cobwebs. Reece hopped over the counter, making a path through the dust for Hayden, who was having a sneezing fit into his handkerchief, and hurried through the door and up the winding staircase it concealed.

  At the top of the stairs they came to the real shop, where there were no shelves, just countless pegs on the walls holding guns of every kind by their trigger guards, shockguns, revolvers, hobs, repeaters, ALPs and all the rest. Hayden gulped loudly behind Reece, as if scared the
guns might spring to life and open up fire on each other.

  Thud, thud, thud. The footsteps preceded the shirtless bear of a man that had to duck to get through the curtained door to the left of the staircase. He was as carved as a statue, as white as one too, with long black hair stuck to his back by sweat and grease. He lifted the visor of his welder’s helmet and glared at Reece and Hayden, hard faced and solemn.

  “Peh,” he rumbled. “Couple’a clean ones.”

  Hayden abruptly stopped trying to wipe his hands clean on the lap of his pants.

  “Gideon here?” Reece asked Varque.

  With most of the Gideon’s Pan friends, even the ones Reece liked, it was best to just stick to the point and avoid any chance of there being a misunderstanding. Reece had never met a Pan who wasn’t a Handler. They made art out of gunplay, Handlers did, trained with guns like the ancient Honorans had trained with swords—except guns killed a lot faster than swords, usually, and every Handler forged his own. There were forms, stances, styles… according to Gid, you could tell a person was a Handler just by looking at how they stood, the way they held their shoulders, where they kept their hands. He could pick Handlers out of a crowd like they were waving banners.

  Varque turned his big square back to Reece and Hayden and disappeared through the door. He had a hob stuck through the back of his belt.

  “What happens if it accidently goes off?” Hayden wondered in a whisper, and Reece glanced sideways at him, trying not to smile.

  Varque returned not with Gideon, but with Kayl, a least favorite among Reece’s least favorites. Kayl was twice again as thin as Varque and a head shorter, but he had a presence of character that made him somehow loom. His black hair was shorn to a bristle except for the skinny braid behind his left ear.

  Kayl rubbed his thin nose with a thumb. Like Varque, his torso glimmered with sweat and oil, and there were fresh burns on his hands. “You really crash into a lake, Sheppard?”