Wreck of the Frost Finch (Aetherium, Book 0 of 7)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Chapter 4

  Omar arrived in the hangar entrance just as the morning sun was about to break above the eastern ridges of the Atlas Mountains. Dressed in all of his heavy new clothes and his blue-tinted glasses, he strode toward the Frost Finch prepared to offer whatever assistance the crew required. But Captain Ngozi merely waved him into the cabin, directed him to sit in the back, and told him not to touch anything. And so he sat and waited.

  From his seat, he could see the outline of the steam engine housed behind him and the shape of the flight controls in the cockpit in front of him. Along the walls to either side and lashed to the bars and shelves overhead he saw countless packages wrapped in leather and canvas, bound in twine, or covered in wooden panels. The equipment and provisions crowded in the space in teetering piles and bulbous lumps, making it more like a wildman’s cave than a civilized room.

  Over the next half hour, the engineer Morayo and the two southern scholars arrived, inspected the trunks and sacks carefully stowed inside the Finch’s cabin, and the two men sat down beside Omar with only the briefest of greetings between yawns. The cartographer Kosoko regarded him with an unpleasant frown, but kept whatever he was thinking to himself.

  Morayo came back and held out a folded brown paper in her hand, on which rested a small pile of gnarled brown and white roots. She grinned at Omar. “All right landlubber, time for your medicine.”

  Garai grabbed a root and popped it into his mouth. Kosoko selected one carefully and sat back with the morsel still in his hand. Omar peered at the offering. “What is it?”

  “Ginger. It helps with motion sickness.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” He took one of the roots and glanced at Garai, who nodded confidently between chews, so Omar put the ginger in his mouth and began chewing.

  Suddenly there was a flurry of activity outside as the ground crew cranked the huge doors of the hangar open. Riuza settled into the pilot’s seat and the engine rumbled to life. Morayo sealed the cabin hatch and took her seat beside the captain. Through the small armored windows, Omar could see the Finch’s propellers whirling just outside the gondola, their monotonous droning echoing inside the hangar.

  The airship shuddered and glided forward, slowly moving out into the morning light. Omar sat patiently with his hands on his lap. He turned to Kosoko and said, “So how many times exactly have you done this?”

  The cartographer pressed his lips tightly together, narrowed his eyes in a pained expression, and shook his head.

  Garai, the naturalist, leaned forward and raised his voice above the noise of the engine to say, “You’ll have to excuse him. He gets more than a little motion sick, every time. It’s so bad he won’t even be able to put the ginger in his mouth for a while. But he’ll be able to talk in half an hour or so.”

  “I see. And what should we do in the mean time while we’re en route?”

  “Do?” The professor leaned back in his seat wedged between a small water reservoir and a cargo net full of salted fish wrapped in brown paper. “Take a nap. There’s nothing to do until we reach the glacier.”

  “And how long will that take?” Omar asked.

  “About two days, depending on the weather.”

  The Frost Finch rose gently into the cool morning air and Omar gripped his seat as the floor vibrated and shuddered beneath him. Through the small window on his right, he saw the edge of the hangar shrinking until it fell out of sight, and then the entire city contracted into a collection of toy houses and toy shops and even toy boats on a brightly painted sea. In a matter of seconds the entire world had fallen out from under him and all he could see were surreal replicas in miniature. Roofs, walls, roads, and trees lost all meaning to him from the sky, and people vanished entirely.

  I wonder if this is how God sees us. As ants. Or not at all.

  Omar glanced at the professor.

  Two days to the glacier. In two days, I’ll be beyond the northern edge of all civilization. At last!

  From the port city of Tingis they crossed the Strait of Tarifa in half an hour and began the first leg of their journey across the Espani sky to the Pyrenees Mountains. The engines droned, the little professor snored, and the tall cartographer breathed through his open mouth looking somewhat greener than he had on the ground. The ginger root remained tightly gripped in his white-knuckled hand, but eventually he managed to place a small sliver of it in the corner of his mouth.

  For two days, Omar sat in the back of the cabin. He made small talk with his fellow passengers, and occasionally he stood up to pace the narrow floor and to look out the other windows, and even to peer into the cockpit at the arcane assortment of levers and dials and gauges around the pilot and the engineer’s console. But there was never more than two minutes’ diversion anywhere in the cramped and crowded cabin. So he sat in his seat and closed his eyes and rested his hand on the pommel of his seireiken, and for hour after hour he listened to the sweet voices of Numidian songstresses, Hellan poets, and Persian courtesans who had all lived and died centuries ago.

  When the cartographer was looking less likely to vomit, Omar offered him a look at the old Rus map. Kosoko took it grudgingly and then passed the rest of the afternoon comparing it to his own hand-drawn maps from their earlier expeditions. Omar watched the man’s face for some reaction, some sign to confirm that the Rus map was accurate, but the cartographer merely looked grave and thoughtful and returned the leather map without comment when he was finished.

  Omar offered to cook when he guessed the lunch hour to be upon them, but he was casually dismissed by Morayo, who said they wouldn’t be cooking in the air and he would have to wait for their first landing for a warm meal. So they ate dried meat and fruit and seeds, and drank lukewarm water that tasted of copper from an overhead reservoir.

  Late in the afternoon of the first day, Omar had the professor show him how to use the small metal toilet in the corner, a facility with no illusion of privacy that did however provide a terrifically cold shock to one’s bare bottom. Omar tried not to think about where the waste might fall. Nor did he look forward to witnessing either of his female companions use the device. When Morayo headed back to the round seat, Omar quickly headed forward to linger by the cockpit until she was done. Garai chuckled at him when he returned.

  The nights were worse than the days. There was still nothing to do and no comfort in which to rest, but in the darkness the world outside faded into a ghost landscape of moonlight on shapeless white snowfields. The vast wilderness of España stretched on and on below them, a featureless winter world punctuated by the rare stone cities that huddled like gray mountains in the day and glowed like colonies of fireflies in the night. Kosoko began to describe what they were seeing below, naming cities and landmarks, especially the famous Espani cathedrals, but the man soon grew queasy and fell silent again. He chewed his ginger sparingly.

  It was late during the second night, as Omar leaned shivering against a canvas sack of apples trying to sleep, when lightning flashed across the cockpit windows. A moment later a deep growling thunder rolled through the cabin, and then the soft patter of rain began to fall on the great padded gas envelope of the airship above them.

  After a few minutes of listening to the storm, Omar shuffled forward into the cabin where Riuza sat tall in her seat peering into the darkness ahead. Morayo slumped in her engineer’s station, snoring.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Right as rain,” the captain said softly. “Are you all right?”

  “Quite all right, dear lady. Just bored and a bit cramped.”

  “That will happen. But the good news is that we are now over the Pyrenees and as soon as we reach the lee of the mountains we will be setting down, just after dawn.”

  “You have an airfield up here?”

  “We do.” Riuza tapped one of her indicators, and was rewarded with a little wave of a needle. “It’s called the Bayonne Glacier.”

  He nodded. “Ah. I see.”

  Why
do I sense that she doesn’t like me very much? Such a pity. She has such a nicely shaped head. I’ll bet she has a beautiful smile as well.

  “You should try to get some sleep,” she said. “We’ll probably need your help in the morning to secure the ship when we land.”

  “All right then. Good night.” Omar shuffled back to his seat between the apples and the toilet, wrapped his new wool coat tightly around himself, and closed his eyes.

  He awoke to the hideous noise of metal vibrating against metal. Sitting up, he saw the naked fear in Garai’s unblinking eyes and the breathless panic in Kosoko’s pale face. Both of them were gripping the seats and bags beside them, and all around the men their stores and supplies were shaking against the cabin walls.

  “What’s happening?” he shouted over the rattling noise, but the two men only stared back at him in silence.

  Omar lurched to his feet, clutching the shaking rails overhead for balance. Through the windows he could see the thick stormheads of the gray clouds all across the horizon with their edges set ablaze by the rising sun. Heavy rain drops pelted the windows of the gondola and the heavens thundered without pause as the clouds flashed with lightning again and again.

  He stumbled to the front of the cabin and leaned into the cockpit. “What’s going on?”

  Riuza clutched the controls tightly with both hands and Morayo lay on the floor, a wrench in her teeth and both hands thrust into an open panel by Riuza’s feet.

  “Just some weather, Mister Bakhoum,” the captain said. “Best if you sit back down.”

  Omar didn’t move. Through the forward windscreen, he could see a great plain of black and white ice shining across the ground. And the ground was growing closer. “What can I do to help?”

  “Just sit down.”

  “But look how fast we’re coming down! Are we going to crash?”

  “Sit down!”

  The Finch shook violently and leaned over on its port side, and Omar could feel the freezing wind whistling through some unseen crack in the walls. Behind them, the engine sputtered and the droning of the propellers began to skip and stutter and choke on the winter air. The cabin shook harder.

  Morayo slammed her panel closed and scrambled back up into her seat as she shoved her tools into her pockets. “We’re screwed until I can get outside, captain!”

  Omar glared at the two women, and opened his mouth to demand more information about what was happening when he caught sight of the ground out of the port side windows. The frozen tips of ice spires whipped by the glass, clattering on the hull. And ahead of them, tilted at a drunken angle, he saw the face of the glacier about to strike the gondola. The world that had once looked so distant and smooth now appeared terribly close and riddled with jagged outcroppings of ice. “We’re going to crash! Do something!”

  “Morayo!” the captain shouted, “The anchor! Now!”

  The engineer leapt from her seat, shoved Omar out of her way, and dashed to the thick brass gunstock welded into the inner panel of the starboard wall. Omar fell to the floor, cracking his head on a railing. Squinting and fumbling for a handhold, he watched Morayo jerk the gunstock up and left and then she pulled the heavy iron trigger. A sudden shock ran through the cabin floor and Omar heard a sharp whistling rip through walls. Briefly he glimpsed the wire cable zipping down from the ceiling above the gunstock and vanishing through a brass eyelet into the world outside.

  The Finch jerked to starboard and Omar stumbled as he rose to his feet. Through the window he saw the jagged spears of ice so close that he could almost reach out and touch them, but no nearer, and no longer coming any closer.

  The Finch had become stuck in midair.

  He turned to ask what had happened, but just then Morayo grabbed a winch handle beside the gunstock and began cranking it around. Omar climbed the uneven deck to her side and lent a hand, forcing the winch over and under, and with each turn he felt the Finch lurch a short distance to starboard. Then the engineer shoved a lockbar into place beside it and waved him back. “We’re good. Thanks.”

  He followed her back to the cockpit and watched as the glacier rose in short hops and slips up toward their feet, until at last the Finch banged down against the hard ground.

  Morayo squeezed past him again, this time to unlock the hatch and let a torrent of freezing air into the cabin. She jogged outside and Omar followed, and he saw that she meant to lash a pair of ropes from the gondola to the nearby columns of ice. The spires had been thrust up from a crack in the glacier, each one stabbing the heavens at a different angle, and half of them had been sheared off by the screaming wind.

  He worked quickly with her, squinting into the howling winds that sprayed his face with needling ice crystals. Snow dust swirled across the ground and the blasted spires shuddered like prisoners in fear for their lives. Overhead he saw an angry maelstrom of white mists and gray clouds colliding and warring for mastery of the skies, and bolts of lightning danced from one thunderhead to another, rumbling like the bellies of hungry gods.

  With the lines secured, Omar climbed back into the cabin behind Morayo and slammed the hatch shut. He blinked. The sudden transition from the freezing noise of the outside world to the warm stillness of the airship was like stepping into a stolen corner of paradise.

  He took a moment to catch his breath while watching the women slump in their seats to glance at their dials and flick their little switches. The Finch’s engine chugged on, its propellers still spinning swiftly but not powerfully outside, only fast enough to fend off the elements.

  “Now,” he said, “would you please tell me what’s happened? What’s gone wrong?”

  Riuza sighed. Morayo laughed. “Nothing’s wrong,” the engineer said. “We just hit a little weather. Just a little squall over the mountains. It’s nothing, really, it happens all the time. Welcome to Europa, Mister Bakhoum.”

  He exhaled slowly and glanced back at other men, who nodded at him sheepishly.

  “So this is normal?”

  They nodded again.

  “And will probably happen again?”

  They nodded again.

  “Ah.” Omar swallowed and straightened up. “All right then. Good. Then I can make us a nice hot breakfast now. Where’s the stove?”

  He made them a heavy Espani breakfast of sausages and red potatoes while Morayo explained that the gunstock in the cabin wall connected to a harpoon gun outside that they had modified to fire their emergency anchor down into the ice or rocks to stop the Finch from blowing about in a storm, which happened rather often near the Pyrenees.

  After they finished eating, everyone trooped outside into the freezing ice wind to inspect the Finch’s hull and check the lines. Omar followed Morayo, marveling at the young woman’s ability to notice tiny dings and scrapes in the outer walls of the gondola through the blinding snow gusts. She shouted over the wind to tell him that the ice did this or a rock did that, and which were superficial, and which she would spend the day hammering out or welding over. With the lines secure and the engineer’s repair plan ready, their last task was to follow the steel cable from the harpoon gun across an uneven sheet of ice to find the emergency anchor.

  Peering through his blue-tinted glasses, Omar spotted the anchor hooked under a block of ice that rested on the glacier like a boulder. Staring down at the device, he despaired at the thought of having to chip the anchor free of the ice using hammers and shovels, and he wondered if he might convince the others to leave the task to him alone so that he might make short work of it with his blazing seireiken.

  But Morayo slipped around him, yanked a pin from the anchor’s base, and the long jagged arms of the anchor slid neatly back into its central shaft. The engineer stood up and shoved the cold anchor into his arms. “Here. Thanks.”

  Omar trekked back to the ship and reloaded the anchor into the harpoon gun, and then went inside to winch the entire steel cable back onto its spool, a job that took nearly half an hour of continuous winching. But when that w
as done, he was free to flop back down into his narrow crevice between the apples and the toilet, and for the first time in two days he couldn’t imagine a more restful place to be.

  After a short break, he turned to Kosoko, whose mood had improved considerably since the landing and was now reading a small leather-bound book, and Omar said, “If the weather is this rough in the winter, why don’t you make your expeditions in the summer?”

  The cartographer snorted. “In the summer, the warm air off the sea mixes with the cold of the glaciers to make storms so violent that they would shatter this ship like kindling before we got anywhere near the Pyrenees. In the winter, all of the air is cold and thus more predictable. This isn’t rough weather, Mister Bakhoum. This is the calm season in this part of the world.”

  Omar nodded slowly. “I see.”

  “We learned that the hard way three summers back.” Kosoko returned to his book. “Don’t worry. If anyone is going to get us all home safely, it’ll be Captain Ngozi. You can trust in that.”