The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

“You got a picture of her in your wallet?”

  “I’ve got one on my phone.” Jeremy pats his pants pockets, says, “My phone’s at the house.”

  Red huffs at the sky, wipes his eyes with the relatively clean fingertips of a bloody hand.

  “The time to be sure about it is now,” he says.

  “About what?” Jeremy asks.

  Red shakes his head and takes a handful of their homemade Goldshot shells, a half dozen that he slips into his front vest pocket. Jeremy takes the other six and they walk up through the woods, Camo bleating mournfully behind.

  Jeremy turns from watching all but the last of the air candles rising into the predawn darkness and finds his father whispering into the newspaper skin of the sixth. The paper lantern tugs from his fingertips gently, politely. Red’s eyes are closed, his nose to the paper, lips brushing it with each prayer.

  Jeremy turns away, looks back at the rising lanterns. The stock of his shotgun is cold; he can smell gun oil and morning and the green of the trees. His lungs hold more air on the mountain.

  When he looks again, his father has released the lantern. Jeremy runs past him, hitting him in the shoulder and dragging him along. The two men flee grinning into the brush with their guns.

  Red and Jeremy break their shotguns. Jeremy fishes two shells from his vest and slides them home, folds the barrel back into its place against the stock. Red folds his own shotgun whole, the click somehow incomplete.

  Jeremy looks at the handful of shells in his father’s vest.

  “How many shells did you bring up?”

  “More than I’ll need. Let me shoot first. I remember your pace of shooting being a little more amenable to conception than killing.”

  Red starts whispering again before Jeremy gets a chance to untangle the last thing he said.

  “I guess you see your mother more often than you see me.”

  “Not by much. But yeah. She’s met Gillian.”

  “They get along?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oof.”

  “Gillian gets along with everybody.”

  “Just be sure.”

  “About her? I am.”

  “Don’t make a child with a woman you don’t love. Won’t love until you die.”

  “Jesus, Dad.”

  “I don’t mean you’re a mistake. I’m not saying that. You’re the best of whatever I am, for whatever that’s worth. But don’t make a child with a woman you can hate. Just be sure, is all I’m saying.”

  There is the sound of a multitude of wings.

  “They’re coming,” his dad says, “try not to think of anything.”

  Angel Season. Copyright © 2013 by J.T. Petty.

  Art Copyright © Jon Foster

  All rights reserved.

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  eISBN 9781466838123

  First eBook Edition: January 2013

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  Cloudmining is a rough business at the best of times, mostly because everyone on the ground wants to kill you, but I had more particular problems. The day my past caught up with me, I was working for cloudboat captain Clandestine Ham—such a pompous name, everyone knew it must be an alias—as a refueller, the fourth-worst job in any cloudboat crew. We came cruising along at a middlish altitude, just beneath the lowest cloud level, over a pleasant little farming community called Crater Rim. Despite the name there was no actual crater in sight, which was something to be thankful for, at least.

  The cloudboat—named the Corpulent Whale—had four big tight-woven gasbags packed with buoyant cloudstuff, and I was in charge of keeping #3 topped off. Not that it mattered much now, as we’d dropped our load of silver at one of the less reputable trading posts along Precipitous Bay, and the cloudboat was riding empty and high and light. Cloud silver is exactly the same as silver pulled out of the ground, but so much easier to mine; digging in fluffy floating cloudstuff is far easier than cracking open mountains, but there was the little matter of cloudmining being banned under sixteen different treaties, so it wasn’t precisely honest work. It required middlemen of optional morality to get the silver to market, and a desperate crew to mine it, of which I was technically more desperate than most.

  “Nice bank there,” my co-refueller, a pink-faced man named Salmon, said, leaning way out against his harness line, gasbag squeaking under his feet. “Must be ten, fifteen tons right here in those cumulus humilis.”

  I nodded, but I was leaning out and looking more at the farms below, neat squares of more or less dark earth. The cloud cover here was patchy, allowing lots of good sunlight in but also promising ample rain in season, making it a prime area for agriculture, one of the region’s many little breadbaskets. It was autumn, harvest time, so the people down below wouldn’t starve this winter at least, and maybe they’d have time to move on before Crater Rim became a bowl of dust, its clouds gone forever and all hope of future rain stolen away.

  Of course, Captain Ham hadn’t chosen this season to strike out of kindness—mining the clouds during spring rains and summer thunderstorms and winter snow is much harder, so inert autumn clouds were easiest. And cloudminers, like most kinds of pirates and poachers, tend toward the lazy.

  I wasn’t lazy, but my past made me unfit for most kinds of work, and clinging to a wooden vessel tied to a bunch of inflatable gasbags several thousand feet in the air was among the least dangerous of my available options.

  “That bag’s sagging, Jokum!” Captain Ham shouted through his conical speaking-tube. I snapped out of my dazy musings and picked up my suckhose while Salmon unhooked his. We opened up the nozzles and heard the whine of the suck-engines start up belowdecks. Then we jumped, our harnesses tethering us to safety as we swung down, landing with the soles of our feet pressed against the yielding side of the gasbag. We bent our knees and jumped out and up in wide arcs, extending our suckhoses into the nearest cloudbank and slurping up great fluffy white blobs of cloudstuff, just the loose bits around the edges. The #3 gasbag filled, the Corpulent Whale surged up a few yards, and Captain Ham shouted “Enough,” not that he needed to, as Salmon and I were good at our jobs. We both let ourselves bounce to a stop, stowed our suckhoses, and clambered back up the side of the now drum-tight gasbag, using looped canvas handholds and footholds to get back to the broad top.

  Down below the mining crew—who have the third-worst job on a cloudboat, as swinging a pick over a void with cloudstuff in your eyes is tricky business—extended their wooden planks out into the nearest clouds, and sent the ordinary crewmen out with their handheld fans. The crewmen have the second-worst job on the boat, as no one bothers to give them safety harnesses and they sometimes tumble from the planks, with long seconds of knowing they’ll die before they hit the ground.

  The fans did their work, blowing away just enough cloudstuff from the sides to reveal the gleaming smooth face of the cloud’s silver lining, beautiful pure ore there for the taking. They hammered in a couple of pitons and tethered the cloudboat to the ore, then hurried back to deck; no casualties yet today. A few hands heaved on the mooring ropes to make sure they were solid, and the ore didn’t budge an inch. Meant it was a big seam—smaller ones will give and drift a little when you pull, though as a rule clouds don’t ever move much apart from some eddying at the edges, being so freighted down with silver.

  The mining crew went out on the planks, strung nets between the boards to ca
tch any falling ore, and set to work with their picks, knocking off hunks of silver for busy crewmen to collect and carry belowdecks. This was a dull downtime for refuellers, so Salmon and I sprawled out to nap on the gasbag, flat on our backs on the cushiest mattress imaginable: triple-thick canvas crammed with cloudstuff. I gazed up at the higher layer of clouds, which were a thin streaky whitish gray with the occasional glint of silver when the wind parted the cloudstuff enough to reveal the lining inside. Nobody knew how much silver there was up in the sky, but it wasn’t infinite. Every cloud has a silver lining, and when you take away the silver, you no longer have a cloud—without the ballast of precious metal holding the cloudstuff down, it just flies up into the atmosphere and disappears. And after that, it’s just merciless sun and no shade or rain for the unfortunates who live below.

  Back in the unregulated days, when the Gracious Trading Company mined in full force, whole small countries were turned into deserts by the strip-mining of the clouds overhead. These days there were only a few outlaw cloud miners, since existing cloudboats were damned hard to acquire and new ones nearly impossible to fuel—there were only a few places where mountains touched the sky, allowing cloudstuff to be gathered from solid ground. The small number of outlaw miners weren’t enough to do much harm in the aggregate, but in the specific… Well. It was dry days ahead for the good people of Crater Rim.

  I first knew something was amiss when the shouting started, though I just thought someone had just fallen. Then there was a sudden lurch as the mooring lines were cut free. I grabbed a hand-hold and kept my grip, but Salmon, fast asleep, rolled right off the gasbag, and I heard him curse and bounce on the side. I made my way along the curve of the gasbag so I could get a look around.

  There was another cloudboat coming toward us from the west, its gasbags black, its deck polished and gleaming, utterly unlike the patched and ragged mien of the Corpulent Whale. Captain Ham was shouting about pirates, which wasn’t strictly accurate. There aren’t enough cloudboats plying the skies to support full-fledged pirates, but occasionally two outlaw ships will happen upon the same seam of silver, in which case the better-armed bunch generally gets all the spoils. And the losing boat gets its gasbags popped for a swift midair scuttle, if they’re lucky. Crueler foes will just poke slow leaks so the cloudboat drifts to the ground gradually, providing ample time for the people on the ground to set up a proper welcome, the kind with tar and torches and hanging ropes.

  But this black ship was no mining vessel. It was a warship, the only one of its kind in all the world.

  And it was coming for me.

  Captain Ham called all crew to man battlestations, such as they were, and Salmon and I dropped to the deck and unfastened our harnesses (I left my little pack strapped on my back, of course, as always). We picked up the rusty pikes used, in theory, to repel boarders. The crewmen realigned the fans to provide us with some thrust, but it was clear the approaching cloudboat—named the Avenging Crow, I knew—had some more complex and efficient propulsion system, as it closed on us rapidly. A bolder captain (myself, say) might have tried to rise up through the nearest layer of cloudstuff, dodging the seams of silver by intuition and luck and getting above the clouds where a more expensive cloudboat might fear to follow, lest they crash against hanging ore. But Captain Ham was a plodder, and such strategic thinking was beyond him, so the Avenging Crow inevitably closed in. Our archers sent a few feeble arrows at the Crow, but their gasbags were made of sterner stuff than our own, and the projectiles bounced off harmlessly.

  “Oh, bugger,” Captain Ham said. He had the worst job on the cloudboat, because he was the one who’d get tossed over the side first if we were boarded.

  A black-haired dark-skinned giant of a man stood in the bow, holding a golden shouting-tube to his lips. He looked enough like me that he could have been my brother, but he was only a distant cousin. “Your Majesty!” he shouted, voice whipped, but audible, in the wind. “You must return with us!”

  “Majesty?” Ham sputtered, approaching me and awkwardly drawing his sword. “You’re… That’s… You’re him? You’re worth a king’s ransom!” He paused. “Literally.”

  While he was looking pleased with his own witticism, I brought my pike down hard, probably breaking his wrist but at the very least making him drop his sword. I sprang for the nearest gasbag, clambering up the handholds with practiced ease. Once on top, I knew I had only moments before my fellow crewmen came after me. I pulled my goggles over my eyes, gauged the distance to the nearest cloud, bounced a few times, and then leaped out into the void.

  I fell through cloudstuff and thought I’d misjudged, but I reached out wildly and caught a lip of hard silver with both hands. The ore didn’t even move when my weight hit it, which meant it was a big seam, so I pulled myself up to the only semblance of solid ground in the sky, standing in spongy cloudstuff almost up to my waist. Running through cloudstuff was like running through feathers: theoretically yielding but practically rather hard going, though it was no more substantial than seafoam when you scooped it up in your hands.

  In my younger days I’d engaged in more than a few chases across rooftops, but this was my first chase across the clouds.

  And chase it was. My cousin had brought the Avenging Crow, with its superior maneuverability, close to my cloudbank, and Feydor had personally leapt out after me. Idiot. If he missed his footing he would plunge to his death; the Crow couldn’t descend fast enough to catch him. I’d feel guilty if he died, but then, I hadn’t asked him to pursue me.

  Suddenly a wind blew, stirring aside cloudstuff and revealing a hole just a dozen feet ahead. The silver was still firm beneath me, but a few more steps and I would have fallen, and the nearest cloud was too far away to reach. Maybe if I’d had a grappling hook with me, but I hadn’t planned for such a contingency. I turned, standing on the edge, and there was Feydor, approaching me with his hands spread in a harmless way, giving me the horrible pained expression that was his attempt at a reassuring smile. “Please, Majesty. Come back with us. Your country needs you.”

  I snorted. “I left things organized to my liking. I see no need to return. But it’s good you’re here. You can let everyone know I’m still alive.” A more reasonable country could have appointed or elected or acclaimed a new king in my absence, but my homeland has certain quaint and ancient customs, notably a belief in divinely-appointed rulers. I am the earthly minister of the gods, after all, and while I am absent, nothing in my country can change—no new laws can be enacted without my seal, no new taxes levied, no appointments filled, no executions committed without my signature. And, most importantly, no new wars can be declared. Everything must remain as I left it, static and unchanging.

  “Majesty. Iorek ordered me to kill you.”

  I laughed. My younger brother. Successor to the throne. All he needed was confirmation of my death, and he could run things as he saw fit.

  “Would you try?” I said.

  He sighed. Seeing such a man, such a titan of the battlefield, sigh, was enough to soften my heart, but not to change my mind.

  “I’ll keep an eye out for assassins as well as more benign pursuers in my future travels, then.”

  “Majesty, you are in the clouds. There is nowhere for you to go.”

  “You know the improvements I made to the Crow, cousin? My many inventions?”

  “Yes, Majesty, all ingenious designs.”

  “I invented some other things, too,” I said, and jumped off the cloud.

  * * *

  I called my device a break-fall, and I’d only tested it once before, and that from the top of a tower while my valet looked on, barely holding together his practiced air of disinterested boredom. The break-fall was an arrangement of ropes and silk cloth, now folded away in my backpack. I had never attempted to deploy it from such altitude, and indeed, the earlier model had involved a more complicated arrangement of stiff struts and wires. I thought there was a good chance the stresses of deploying my break-fall while
plunging through the sky would dislocate my shoulders, but it was a better option than landing on the town of Crater Rim.

  Still, the experience of falling, wind rushing in my ears, without the definite prospect of death at the end, was almost unimaginably invigorating, something I could imagine doing again for pleasure, assuming it worked this first time.

  I pulled a rope, which tore loose several buckles on my pack, and released the great expanse of silk cloth from its confines. I closed my eyes, unwilling to watch the bare earth rushing up at me, and prayed to the gods who had supposedly invested me with their power and privileges.

  The jerk of straps against my shoulder and waist was sudden and hard, and I would be sore, but no bones broken and no joints dislocated. When I opened my eyes, I was floating down through the sky like a bit of dandelion fluff on a breeze. The ground was by then only a few hundred feet below, and I looked up, but all I could see was the off-white cone of silk cloth above me, catching the air and easing my fall. I had some rudimentary directional controls, ropes I could tug to shift the break-fall’s angle, and I aimed for what I took to be an abandoned farmhouse, next to the burned remains of a barn—perhaps there would be water there, and food. I had a great deal of gold (not silver, never silver) sewn into my clothing, which would help when I reached more populated areas, but in the meantime: I couldn’t eat or drink gold.

  I landed in a dead field with a harder impact than I’d anticipated, and winced when my ankle turned. That meant adding the task of finding a horse to my list of more or less immediate needs, since I would not be walking far on an injured ankle. I limped around, gathered up the silk, and shoved it back into my pack, though it would take many hours of checking for tears and careful refolding before I could use it again. I looked up, and the cloudboats were distant dots against the sky. I hoped I’d been too small a target for them to track my descent, but even if they decided to come down—a one-way trip since they couldn’t acquire more cloudstuff here—getting a cloudboat to the ground was a slow process that usually ended in a landing zone filled with an angry mob, so I had time.