Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles)

by J. S. Morin

  “Madlin?” Erefan’s voice called through the hole from Korr. “What in the rusty scrap heap are you doing there? If you’re awake, who’s commanding that vacu-dirge?”

  Madlin peeked out from under the arms she’d flung over her head for protection. The rifles had been lowered. Letting out a shuddering breath she’d been holding, Madlin pushed herself to her feet.

  “Sosha’s liftwing went down. We needed to get you a message and start a search.”

  “She still alive?” Erefan asked. Jamile hesitated for a heartbeat, but nodded. “Well, the Grangians had some engine trouble and went down themselves. You can take that vacu-dirge low and look for her.”

  “I was thinking we could use the world-ripper to look,” said Jamile.

  “She thinks she activated her float vest,” Madlin added. “Runes are on the front, so if she’s in the water unconscious, she ought to be flat on her back, floating like a leaf.”

  Erefan beckoned. “Get through here, both of you. Let’s get a course figured for her and find a place to start.”

  Rynn stood at the helm and yawned. It was the middle of the day, with no excuse for fatigue. Sure, her leg was burning from all the standing and walking she’d been doing of late, but even physical exhaustion shouldn’t have played so heavily on her alertness. The intruding voice in her head had stopped, but daydreams plagued her instead. She wanted a world-ripper of her own, and imagined herself at the controls, flitting around the world with the ease her father displayed when he was the one working the machine. She wondered what intersecting two world holes would do, could do: could a straight bar pushed through two worlds come back and touch itself?

  She saw an army betray her. Errol Company soldiers knelt with rifles aimed, ready to tear her full of holes, and not the wondrous sort that the world-ripper made, but the red, leaking holes that looked better in kuduks. She fled from them and was saved.

  She saw a speck in the sky, floating upward, a trick no bird could manage. It looked human as she drew closer to it, but it was a trick no human could manage, either. Rynn blinked. It wasn’t a daydream. She pulled her coil gun and used the sight as a spyglass.

  “Shit!” she whispered.

  Rynn turned and shouted down the stairs. “MORE VACUUM!” The floating figure was approaching too quickly. Hauling back on the throttle lever, Rynn threw the engines into reverse briefly to slow them, then let them drift forward. The vacuum pumps thumped somewhere below decks, sucking at the dregs of air remaining in the tanks. She hoped it would be enough.

  “All hands to the windows. Open the cargo doors. Watch for Sosha. Someone grab her!”

  The body in the sky was limp, head lolling back, arms and legs dangling. Sosha looked like a drunk held up by the shirt collar, ready to be tossed into the street. The Kelleb’s controls were new to Rynn, but made some intuitive sense. She eased the wheel around, feeling the change in course as much as watching it. They could miss Sosha on a pass and try coming around for her, but if they slammed the ship into her it might turn into a recovery rather than a rescue. There was a chance it already had.

  The world-ripper’s view streaked over the water, backtracking the flight path of the seven liftwings that had escaped Glenwood Sky Aerodrome. Soldiers stared at Madlin, having seen Rynn disappear through the other machine not so long ago, and looking rather less whole than the girl whose eyes fixed on the view frame. Jamile was the same woman they were looking for, but with longer hair. There was nothing to be done about the discomfort of those one-worlders’ eyes and the ache it must have caused in their brains.

  The Sea of Kerum glittered in the sun, catching the light off every swell and roll. There was always the chance that they’d miss her, sweep right by at breakneck speed without ever realizing. “Eyes sharp, everyone,” said Madlin to the crowd of soldiers. She hooked a thumb in Jamile’s direction. “We’re looking for one of these.”

  They passed a rocky isle here and there, and to the right, on the horizon, the Grangian coast loomed. The liftwings had trailed alongside it for part of their escape. If Sosha had been over land when her liftwing failed her, the search might well come to an unpleasant end.

  While the view skimmed along above the water some twenty or so feet up, the watchers were accorded an expansive view of the sky as well. High above the sea and climbing, they spotted the Kelleb. Madlin’s gut twisted at the weirdness of knowing that she was aboard it, in the same world. She wondered if Rynn was looking for Sosha as well. If so, the path before them had likely already been covered in the search. They must have missed seeing her.

  Unless she floated up.

  The thought hit Madlin like a thunderail. Of course Sosha had floated up. She’d seen it with her own eyes. Or with Rynn’s. At some level the point was academic, because she had a clear recollection of Sosha’s body hanging in midair, drawn skyward as if the sun had hooked her like a fish.

  “Bring the view up,” said Madlin, her hard tone marking it clearly as an order. “Check by the airship.”

  “You’re not thinking that—” Erefan began.

  “She misjudged the runes on her vest. She’s lighter than air and going higher.”

  Erefan swore something beneath his breath and made the adjustments on the control panel. The view angled without warning, drawing an eye-sick groan from the soldiers who hadn’t the sense to look away as the world lurched in front of them. Closer and closer, the Grangian airship grew large in the view frame.

  “I see me!” Jamile shouted.

  Madlin squinted through her spectacles, envying Jamile’s eyesight. There it was, growing dangerously close to the stolen Grangian vacu-dirge. Erefan swooped upward and brought them all closer. Having just meat-fingered her way around the Tinker’s Island machine, Madlin marveled at his mastery of the dials.

  “That’s not a good sign,” said Jamile, clutching her hands. “My neck shouldn’t be at an angle like that.”

  As they drew close enough to see the runed plate riveted to the front of Sosha’s vest, they saw a rescue attempt in progress. The side cargo door of the airship was open and a score of soldiers crowded the gate. One with a rope around his waist edged his way down the loading ramp; he had a second rope in his hand, tied with a loop at the end. With a flick of the wrist, he launched the loop of rope and landed it around Sosha.

  “Thank Eziel we took on some ranch hands,” said Madlin.

  Jamile lunged and threw the switch to open a hole to the scene in front of them. Erefan reached to stop her, but pulled his hand away at the last second. He let her activate the machine.

  “STOP!” Jamile shouted through the world hole, rushing right up to the aperture with a thousand foot drop a half step away. “LET GO THE ROPE!”

  The startled soldier with the rancher’s knack for rope froze in place. He stared with wide eyes at the scene floating in the air not ten paces distant.

  Madlin stepped up beside Jamile “Do it!” she ordered.

  The soldier dropped his end of the rope and it fell away. The other end hung around Sosha’s neck.

  “Damned fool,” Jamile muttered, backing away from the machine’s frame. “If I’m not dead already, that would have killed me.”

  “We’re here, we might as well get her through,” Madlin said to her father. “She’s still rising. Just bring us around above her and look down. Ropes for anyone who gets near that thing.”

  Madlin and three of the solders roped themselves in and stood ready at the aperture as Erefan looped around Sosha’s limp form to bring the world hole above her. Madlin felt her knees go weak. Just inches away was a shift in gravity that would pull her down to the Sea of Kerum, spread out below them and in front of their faces at the same time.

  After chasing airships, Erefan had no difficulty lining up to intercept a young woman floating on the wind and drifting up like a puff of smoke. First through the hole was Sosha’s head, which one of the soldiers cradled as the other two gathered in her body. Madlin stayed at the opening, waiting to make s
ure she was through.

  “Cut it!” she ordered.

  Erefan switched the machine off and Madlin kept her eyes on the trailing end of the rope as it fell away, snipped cleanly by the closing of the hole. She’s suspected it would happen, but it was good to know without anyone getting caught in the middle of it to prove the point.

  Jamile was upon her twin the moment Sosha was laid on the floor of the hold. She checked her own breathing and pulse. “Alive.” There were gasps of relief from all sides. Madlin watched with a weird detachment. There were differences, but only subtle ones. The hair was obvious, with Sosha shaved bald as recently as two months ago, but there were other changes as well. Jamile was better fed and it showed in the hollows of Sosha’s face. As Jamile pulled off the vest while two soldiers held Sosha’s body down, Madlin saw the calluses around Sosha’s neck and collarbone from years wearing a collar. The vest floated to the ceiling and clung there.

  Jamile pushed Sosha’s eyelids open and blocked and unblocked the overhead lights. She felt along arms and legs for broken bones, and finally under the neck. Madlin noticed water dripping from the vest down onto the floor near Sosha.

  “She must have hit the water and got knocked out,” Madlin said. “She’s wet.”

  “But she was falling up,” said Jamile.

  “Momentum.” Everyone turned to hear Erefan weigh in. He had that effect on rooms full of people. “Activated the runes too late, and it took them time to overcome her downward momentum. She probably waited to the last moment to abandon her craft.”

  “I kept trying to pull up,” Jamile said, not looking up from her work. “I thought I could save it, not have to jump out. Maybe land it on the water and swim free.”

  “You know this now?” Madlin asked. “Cuz before you sure didn’t seem to know what went on.”

  “I do. The memory is clearing up. She probably shouldn’t get up for a while, but this is no place to rest. Her neck isn’t broken, but she’s had a concussion, and most likely whiplash. I’m going to stay here and tend to her.”

  “Isn’t that a little ... awkward?” Madlin asked.

  “It’s her decision,” said Erefan. “She’s better suited to it than anyone else.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to meet me,” Madlin muttered.

  “Someone get a stretcher and carry Sosha to her quarters,” Jamile ordered. Lieutenant Jamile? Maybe doctor could be an honorary rank, strictly for medical orders.

  “I can bring some of your clothes in the morning,” Madlin offered, feeling like she had nothing else to offer. A whole army at her command, and all she could think to do for an injured soldier was bring a clean dress for her nurse.

  Jamile looked up, an impish smile conveying her relief that Sosha’s injuries weren’t severe. “Thank you, but I should be fine. I think her clothes ought to fit me.”

  With excitement fading and the rime melting from her face and hair, exhaustion caught up with Madlin as she returned to her own room. How long had she been away? An hour? Two? She hadn’t thought to look at a clock the whole while. Pawing around the darkened room, she found the lamp and flicked it on. She tossed her coat on the floor by the coal stove, followed by hat and gloves, then changed into the thickest nightclothes in her wardrobe and threw a cloak over her shoulders.

  The room was tepid, not the least unpleasant by any objective account, but Madlin wasn’t feeling objective. She was cold and wanted the cold driven from her with a ferocity that would warn it never to return. There were times for being out of doors, and an autumn night on Tinker’s Island was not one of them. She pulled open the stove door and dumped half the coal bucket inside. A mechanical sparker rested on top of the stove, with a little pull chain that was sure to get a fire going by the third pull at the worst.

  Madlin wasn’t having it. She didn’t dare try to warm herself with aether, but she wasn’t afraid of a blackened lump of inert fire. The refreshing rush of aether spread through her—cold, but an altogether different sort of cold than the one that kept her shivering. One by one each lump caught fire. One would have been enough to set the whole batch burning, but she wanted heat now, not when the coals felt like giving it. Besides, the aether needed to go somewhere.

  Madlin huddled herself in a chair and waited for the room to warm. That was when she noticed it—a letter by the door, where it looked to have been slipped beneath the crack. It might have been there when she left, unnoticed in the gloom and rush of her departure. She might even have kicked it aside without realizing.

  Bunching the cloak tight around her, Madlin bent to scoop it up. It was a simple sheet of paper, folded this way and that such that a single wax seal could keep it closed against snooping. The impression in the wax was crude, not a seal at all. Someone had taken a quill and used the tip to press tiny letters into it, spacing them well apart to make clear that they weren’t meant to form magical runes. They spelled out her name in Korrish phonics: Ma-da-li-n. Close enough.

  A few wiggles back and forth and the wax snapped. Madlin unfolded the paper and read:

  Miss Madlin Errol,

  I believe that our continued presence on Tinker’s Island is a risk we can no longer afford. All that I have said remains true. All the offers I have made still stand. I still carry the hope that you will see the warlock for what he is before he becomes your doom. Should you wish to contact me, you have the means. Find Anzik, my son’s twin in Veydrus. Look for him in the palace in Ghelk, where the Kheshi city of Mabliss lies.

  Keep well,

  D.Z.

  Madlin read it twice, trying to decide if there was a layer beneath the one spelled plainly on the page. It occurred to her to keep it, but she shook the thought aside. Dire havoc would come, should the wrong person read that message.

  Before she could second guess herself, Madlin opened the stove and fed the message to the coals.

  She set the lamp on the bedside table and climbed beneath the covers. As she blew out the flame, leaving herself in cozy darkness, she had only two words to remember: Anzik and Mabliss. The rest the flames could keep.

  Chapter 22

  “Friends have always bored me. Enemies are the spice of life.” –Rashan Solaran

  Powlo had seen steam wagons before, both through the eyes of Chapun and one that Cadmus had built on a lark. There were no proper roads for one on Tinker’s Island—little of it was level or smooth—and bumps and rattles were no friends to the delicate interlacing of machinery that ran one.

  The versions Kezudkan and Draksgollow had bought with their ill-gotten gold were a different sort of animal. They still ran on steam, but runes heated the tanks. They weren’t open at the top like the front seat of every steam wagon he’d ever seen before, but had a steel canopy and glass windows as thick as the palm of his hand. They rolled on two sets of wide, flat steel belts, each the full length of the vehicle, and seemed not the least bit concerned with the grade or smoothness they traversed.

  That all would have been impressive enough, but despite just a two-man crew, the little military steam wagon carried a pair of wide-barreled rotoguns on swivels. One driver, one gunner, and the rust-hearted little monsters fit through the world-holes.

  Powlo was part of a crew of sixteen slaves following in the wake of the small squadron of metal beasts. He couldn’t say for certain where they were, but it was Khesh by his guess, some noble estate. Repeater gunfire sounded in the distance, down the echoing corridors to meet Powlo and his comrades as they carried plunder back through the hole to Kezudkan’s lair. It was his fourth trip, and this latest venture had him carrying off an armload of antique vases, probably getting all scratched up and less valuable by the step.

  “Good, good. Excellent,” Kezudkan greeted them at the hole from the Korr side. The old daruu glanced at each slave’s take as they passed, murmuring little encouragements or comments about the strange wonders that humans of this other world coveted. When Powlo’s turn came to pass by, the daruu barred the way with his cane. “Hold there. What
’s this?” A finger like a sausage carved in stone jabbed at the base of one of Powlo’s vases.

  Powlo twisted around, careful not to drop anything as he looked under his own loot. “It’s blood, sir. The place is swimming in it, some rooms. I doubt there’s a rug in the place that will be worth saving.”

  “We’re not here for rugs,” Draksgollow said, stomping over with his irregular gait, every other step punctuated by hisses of steam and a metallic thunk against the floor. “And I don’t give a glass hammer about flower pots.” Draksgollow slapped his mechanical hand at the vases and knocked them from Powlo’s grasp. They smashed to the ground and became worthless shards of porcelain. Each had likely been worth more than a slave’s freedom price. “Sweep that up before someone gets damaged.”

  Draksgollow stomped off in pursuit of more slaves to bully, leaving Powlo alone with Kezudkan, the mess, and occasional slaves making the passage through the hole in one direction or the other.

  “Don’t worry, Chapun,” Kezudkan said a conspiratorial undertone, holding the back of his hand to the side of his mouth. “We won’t have you much longer. Draksgollow doesn’t much care for you, but you’re worth more alive than dead.”

  Powlo was taking off his shirt to use as a broom and stopped with it around his armpits. “You’re selling me back home?”

  “Indeed. Just got the cable this morning. It’s a done deal. It’s not your freedom, but at least it will be an owner you’ve grown accustomed to.”

  Powlo pulled his shirt back on. “What should I—when should—where—”

  Kezudkan patted a hand in the air. “No no, just go ahead and finish that up. I won’t let you get left behind. Money is money, even if we can take whatever we want and more. It’s principle, you know. Businessmen must maintain a certain sense of themselves. Mustn’t be wasteful of coin or goods, just because we’re rich as kings.”

  That evening, Powlo found himself chained in the slave car of a thunderail, heading home. Well, he was heading to the home Chapun had left, but since he had convinced everyone that he was Chapun, it was much the same. The accommodations were sparse, to say the least: a double-aisle ran the length of the car, with a pair of steel benches flanking each. The benches were packed with slaves sitting shoulder to shoulder, chains snaking through loops at their collars and loops behind the benches, keeping them all seated for the duration of their trip. There was no meal service in the slave car, no chamber pot to pass around. The doors wouldn’t open until the trip was ended, when some poor bastard would have to clean it out with a pump and hose before the next batch were loaded. Powlo’s seat was still damp from the last washing.