Salvage

by R J Theodore

  Talis was dressing in her cabin when the hull shuddered again. The gate had reopened. Roughly twenty minutes between passes, she figured. She was relieved by its regularity. She did fully intend to leave again as soon as Amos had his samples.

  In a fresh change of clothes, and with her towel-dried hair under a hood, she climbed the companionway to midship to seek out her boots where she’d tossed them aside. She carried them to helm as the gate closed again.

  “Twenty-five minutes between, twenty-five minutes open,” Tisker told her by way of greeting. “Now what? Pump hotter breath into the lift envelope?”

  Five by five. A holy number. It figured. She nodded, glancing at the compass. Its Nexus needle spun wild, too close to its target to make sense of direction.

  “Let’s hope that trick works on the inside too.”

  Tisker shot her a look, his eyebrows lifted. He hadn’t had the notion to worry it might not.

  She patted him on the shoulder and moved below to where Sophie was prepping the engines. A panel was open in front of her. With thick leather gloves, she twisted valve shut-offs. Talis nodded in approval and gave her room to work. Sophie choked the engine’s vents, ready to release it all in a single blast of steam that would rock the lift balloons in a sudden buoyant leap.

  If that didn’t get them out of the water, Talis didn’t know what would. She leaned back against the engine house, happy to absorb the extra heat through her clothing, and pulled her boots on over the thick socks she’d dug out of her drawers.

  As Talis stomped to settle her heels into place, Sophie gave a small sigh, then looked at her. Her mouth was a thin line.

  “On your mark, Captain.”

  Talis listened to the ship. A rippling sound was audible even below decks; the lift balloon was already starting to slack. “Go on then,” she said. “Fill her up.”

  Sophie didn’t nod, just slammed open the master vent lever and shut her eyes, tugging her prayerlocks with her other hand.

  WHUMPH.

  A moment later, the canvas of the envelope cracked the air with a loud SNAP, and the deck jumped beneath their feet, following the lift balloon in natural order.

  Talis could feel the ocean sucking at the hull, trying to maintain its grip. The wood around them vibrated, and lines sang in protest again.

  But Fortune’s Storm was an airship, and she knew what she wanted.

  Talis almost stumbled as the world spun around her again. Gravity demanded she right herself, but for a moment, she couldn’t have guessed which way was up. She grabbed at Sophie’s shoulder for balance while Sophie clung to the edges of the control panel’s compartment and braced herself.

  Talis’s stomach was last to sort up from down, but she survived the reorientation again, still master of her most recent meal.

  They raced to the deck and found the sky was where it ought to be again, the ocean curving up and over their heads from starboard, with Nexus beyond the port railing. Onaya flew circles around the lift balloon, a dark blur against the overwhelming illumination behind, and landed aloft in the rigging.

  Tisker gave them a crooked grin. His eyes were obscured beneath the goggles, but the skin to either side wrinkled as he pushed a lever on the console. The engines surged, free of the water’s resistance. He flinched in surprise and leapt to adjust before they ran back into the wall of water and began the whole mess over again.

  Cruising on the proper medium again, they came about and faced the fiery green sphere of Nexus.

  Talis gave in to the involuntary muscle twitches and let a foolish grin possess her face. Dug came back to midship from the forward lines, his broad smile wrinkling the scar over his left eye. Sophie leaned her elbow against one support of the wheelhouse, put her forehead against her arm, and let out a small burst of laughter.

  Talis let them have a few moments. She needed a few herself.

  “All right, you lot. Someone go tell the professor it’s his turn to do something reckless.”

  Chapter 41

  Zeela wore her simplest robes, minimal layers. Her hair under a scarf lying flat against her head. She was at home in Subrosa, but that didn’t mean she needed to tempt anyone with her more elaborate adornment.

  There was a scent in the air, a vibration in the floorboards, a hum of terror.

  The Tempest had pushed back against the Rosan forces that patrolled the alleys and narrows. The nervous truce in Subrosa shattered with the first body that hit the ground, though now no one could remember if it had been a Tempest follower or Rosan agent. The tension that had built over two years had finally overtaken the subcity’s population. A paternus declared for one side or the other, and his allies and competition declared accordingly. A ripple of reaction to fears that ran deep. Battles raged in the street between rats that fought for motivations they didn’t understand, driven to release the valve on all the tension they sensed. Gangs killed each other in the street. For nothing.

  It was worse for those who tried to stay out of it.

  Reian had disappeared. Zeela caught herself with a hand clutched over the knot of worry in her stomach. Reian was her most responsible. Zeela couldn’t blame her if she wanted to leave the city to escape the dangerous toxicity that flowed through the markets, but she knew the young attendant would not have abandoned her duties without explanation or farewell. Or without begging Zeela to come with her.

  Since Zeela had sent Lilac and the others away, tucked safely into Captain Vitnir’s care, Subrosa had seemed to devolve into chaos. The Tempest revolutionaries had taken to the streets and infected Subrosa with their blood thirst, igniting panic, before they boarded their ships and set their course for Diadem. Reian was not the only person who had disappeared, but most were turning up in pools of cooling blood.

  Reian’s body had not turned up, and so Zeela continued to look for her.

  Her guiding sensors gave her incomplete signals outside her shop. She wore her thinnest soles and most close-fitting clothes. She navigated with a telescoping cane, feeling for the treacherous variations in the surface of Subrosa’s streets and alleys. Alert as she could be, it was not enough.

  Someone had followed her. It had been hard to be sure until she dipped into a narrow running behind a smokehouse. In the scents wafting from the back door, pooling along the overhead, she had no insight on her stalker aside from the weight of their feet in the soft polyboards rotting beneath them. Big, capable, but cautious.

  “Paternus Broste wants an answer.” A male voice, just past puberty, still strained by uncontrolled muscle growth poorly supported by the nutrition.

  Ah. She had once respected Broste. But Broste took exception to Paternus Grimm’s wife, Faelyn, frequenting her shop. Took it as a personal offense, interpreting it that Zeela had aligned herself with the Grimm side. As if there was a schism that couldn’t be spanned by any application of common sense. Zeela would have given her help, and the information from across the border, if Broste had only asked.

  That particular moment, Zeela wished she had chosen, instead of running her shop of rare imports in Cutter skies, to become a tearoom hostess back in Velhan, as her career advisor had recommended. She’d had too much pride then. She had too much pride now.

  “I have given her my answer. I will take no side in this. Subrosa needs to come to its senses. That we keep fighting each other is madness.”

  “Then the paternus sends her apologies.”

  The stranger took a step forward into the dead-end narrow. The space gave Zeela the advantage. Echoes of movement bounced off the tight walls and helped her sense his motions. The smoke was too strong for her to detect his mood, but the intent had been announced. It would be violence, then.

  She felt for the trigger on her cane and bared the short blade at its tip as she backed up against the corrugated metal opposite the smoke shop’s alley wall. Placed a heel against the corner and shifte
d her weight to push forward.

  Her would-be assassin took a second step. From his mass, even with the awkward height of a teen, her long secondary arms would have the reach on him. Her muscles began to tremble, and the knot of worry that had come to reside in her stomach tightened more than ever.

  “Does Paternus Broste have my attendant, Reian?”

  The lad paused, a moment of hesitation over the unexpected question. “No.”

  “But you know where she is.”

  “Was. They found her in The Tempest warehouse.”

  “Reian . . .” The world tipped around her. Zeela had stalwartly refused to consider the possibility that Reian had been among the unfortunates, stripped of their souls by the alien solution at the hands of the so-called resistance and corralled like livestock in the Tempest’s otherwise empty warehouse. The agonized and vicious former Subrosan citizens had been the first wave sent against the Rosan guards. An overwhelming landslide of anger and pain and terror, its only release in violence.

  Many Rosan guards, and innocent bystanders, had died before the wild-eyed mob was overpowered. They were contained at first, corralled in the Tempest’s abandoned headquarters. Healers were sent to help. Then someone assembled a posse and took matters into their own hands in the middle of the night.

  “Ready to choose the right side?”

  Zeela’s throat was tight, her breath collapsed in a sob. “There is no right side. I hope you survive to realize it.”

  He stepped forward again, intent clear in the confidence of the movement.

  Zeela pushed away from the wall. If she could surprise him into dodging her hidden blade, she could perhaps get past him. He was tall, but she was taller. She might make it back to her shop before he could catch up, or the crowds outside the alley might dissuade him from attacking openly.

  She angled for the space between his body and the wall of the alley, the narrow escape. She slashed wildly with the full range of her arms just to keep him back.

  His lifelong encounters with pain in the streets of the undercity should have trained him to move away from a threat. They did not. He stepped into the attack, without time for her to adjust her angle. Her steel cut through the flesh of his stomach. She smelled his exhalation of surprise, felt his hands grip her cane as his legs crumpled, and he landed on his knees in front of her, sputtering.

  Zeela stumbled back, folding her cane up as though she could undo the action. She’d only wanted to save Reian, but it was too late. And now there would be more death on her account. She stumbled past him, retreating to the wider streets. She could smell the fragrant smoke and metallic blood staining her clothes.

  There were shouts. Someone following her, more than one. She traced the route she’d taken, focused on each turn she’d memorized during that morning’s search for Reian.

  Reian.

  She reached the platform district. Felt the wind bite her face and was startled by the icy streaks of moisture along her jaw and down her neck.

  She reached her shop. The beaded door rattled and clacked, caught in her scarf as she pushed through. Her empty shopfront echoed. The most valuable wares had been stored safely within her inner apartments. Everything else had been stolen while she abandoned her shop in her daily search.

  Zeela heard footsteps behind her, small particles of dirt and gravel trapped in boot soles scratched the parquet floor. She slipped through the steel door, biting her lip as it closed behind her.

  The silence wrapped around her. She folded her primary hands into her elbows and trembled.

  She placed a secondary hand against the door. Jumped, as someone’s fist struck the other side, slamming the metal barrier in frustration. After a few moments, the feet moved away again.

  Zeela exhaled a breath that had begun to burn in her chest, then turned to face her prison, and the time pieces, expensive oils, and antique furniture that crowded the space around her.

  She had lost Reian. Everything that tied her to Subrosa was gone. There was no more good she could do here, but there was no escape either. She had no captain. She had nothing but a steel room in the heart of a deadly city.

  Chapter 42

  The patterned layers of Nexus spun, overlapping as they moved against and around each other. The outermost was a spiral of organic flowing shapes, like vines flattened into a single surface. Beneath it, geometric patterns flared across the surface of the next layer. Beneath, more layers spun, more patterns. They moved all at once and at different speeds and angles, and Talis couldn’t see the details clearly.

  Tisker at the helm and Sophie minding the engines, Fortune’s Storm ascended to the equator of Nexus where the lift system and sails wouldn’t prevent them from getting right up alongside of it.

  Even so, Tisker kept a respectable distance. No one wanted to find out if the ship’s hull would snap to the same orientation with Nexus that it had with the ocean. Amos had fashioned a collection rod to attract and absorb the pure, green Nexus energy, the soul substance. It was made from a borrowed boat hook, a pole with a multi-pronged tip meant for snagging dock and mooring lines, to the end of which was lashed a wide glass jar containing one of the crystal shards from the Yu’Nyun wreck. He was tethered to the railing, and Dug stood by ready to grab him.

  But Amos adjusted his grip on the tool several times, fingers obsessively checking the already secure fasteners, all while he blinked through his goggles at Nexus and made half-hearted attempts to explain various phenomena visible along its surface.

  After her mentor had muttered ‘remarkable’ for the fifth time, Kirna volunteered to lean over the railing and collect the Nexus sample instead.

  “Ah, yes. Hmm. Well, it would be excellent experience for you. Yes, I think that would be best.” Amos had the harness off before he finished the statement and took five paces toward the centerline of the ship as though he was throwing the deck off balance.

  Kirna shrugged into the abandoned harness and accepted the scepter-like collection tool. Beneath her goggles, her hair was coming loose from its barrettes again. She stood at the rail, poised and ready, as Tisker eased the ship near to Nexus for another attempt. Kirna’s stance—bent knees, forward lean, loose lower back—had Talis expecting the younger alchemist to launch herself at Nexus without waiting for the ship to deliver her. She stood ready to grab the line of her tether, whether Kirna lost her balance or lost her good senses.

  Even with the goggles, Talis had to squint against the Nexuslight. Still they watered, and the whole shape wobbled in her field of view like candlelight in a breeze. Up close, the green sphere had a shimmer beneath its surface that gave the impression of many thin layers of glass and filament as though it were spun candy floss. It appeared delicate, almost cloud-like.

  Kirna must have thought so, too, because she thrust the collection rod and its glass jar straight toward the center of Nexus.

  And it shattered against the surface.

  “Oh!” Kirna stumbled back in surprise, though the glass adhered to Nexus and not so much as a sliver rained back down on them. The crystal turned from light lavender to pink, to magenta, to black and then it burst into fine granules, which looked like pepper shaken over the surface.

  “Fascinating.” And it must have been, for Amos stepped forward again, momentarily forgetting his vertigo.

  Sure, it was fascinating. “But what’s it mean for the plan, Professor?”

  “To begin with, we will need to make a new collection jar and try again.”

  They were spending a lot more time at Nexus than Talis was comfortable with. She had no idea which of the Gods-That-Remained, or Meran, were still alive in there, but she felt the anxious guilt of a trespasser and did not want to be there if any of them should peer outward.

  The alchemists returned in less than an hour with a new crystal and jar secured to the end of the boat hook. Kirna leaned over the railing again
while Amos stood by her side. Instead of thrusting the jar at Nexus, she held it steady as close as she could without it touching. A fingerspan away from the surface, tendrils of that green spun sugar snaked toward the jar.

  “It’s working!” Kirna beamed at her mentor.

  The crystal inside quickly shifted from translucent purple to the opaque of dried blood. Kirna yanked it back with a worried exclamation, but too late. It shattered inside the glass.

  “Save that.” Amos placed a lid over the mouth of the jar. “Reset the tool while I think, please, Kirna.”

  Tisker eased away from Nexus while the alchemists returned to their cabin. There was nothing to do but keep the ship steady. Tisker idled the ship with the lightest touch on the controls while Sophie modulated the power from below so that the engines didn’t seize or stall.

  Scrimshaw sat by Tisker at the helm, out of the way on the bench under the shelter deck. Si kept back but was clearly as ensorcelled by the power of Nexus as the rest of them. A Yu’Nyun tablet was in sist hands, held up as if to ward off the massive sphere, though si was focused on its display, touching and tapping both sides in a furious sequence.

  Talis crossed to sin, feeling as though standing still would be the death of her. “Can we get a read on it, like we could the Yu ships?”

  Scrimshaw was not wearing goggles, but sist inner lids protected the sparkling blue eyes under a thin gray sheath. “There is the energy signature of Nexus itself. And there are four other signatures within, at its heart.”

  Talis flinched, unsettled to have it confirmed that the Alchemists and Meran were just on the other side of the curving surface.

  “So Meran hasn’t overtaken any of the others, yet.”

  “It would seem not, Captain.”

  “No wonder she was cranky.”