Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (3 page)

As Reece and Hayden maneuvered between desks and air officers talking into headsets and making notations on maps of the disc-shaped Epimetheus Galaxy, a deep, feminine voice declared, “Reece Sheppard. There you are.”

Cringing before he could help himself, Reece looked up. Scarlet Ashdown was a nice enough girl. And not exactly an eyesore either, with her slender height, golden hair, and probing hazel eyes. But the fact of the matter remained: if the duke’s grandfather hadn’t abolished arranged marriages a century ago, Abigail would have tied Reece up in a ribbon and handed him over to the Ashdowns as soon as he came of age. Sooner, likely.

Dressed not in uniform, but in a high-necked brown dress that made her olive skin glow, Scarlet glided across the foyer, twirling a white parasol over her shoulder with hands gloved in lace. Hayden slid behind Reece and was instantly engrossed in the buttons of his jacket. Girls could make him sweat where Yules’s Theory of Unstable Molecular Conjunction could not.

“Tutor Clauson is looking for you,” Scarlet said, looking up at him from under long yellow eyelashes. “Everyone was wondering whether or not you would show. I told them you had probably overslept again. No one seemed surprised.”

“Thanks for that. Where’s Clauson?”

“In the flight tower, about to tell the engineers to power down your Nyad.”

“They have me flying a Nyad?” Reece exclaimed. That part of the test had so far been kept a secret; he hadn’t known if he would be flying a heliocraft or an outmoded bus-ship. A Nyad was better than he could have hoped for. Small cockpit, sharp wings that could pull tight turns, and an Axil 59-Eight engine with a purr to put a baby to sleep. Nyads were all from the Aurelius line, which meant that each one had inherited some small clockwork piece of
The Aurelius
, one of the two original airships. The other was
The Aurelia
. She sat in The Owl’s museum, one of Honora’s most venerated historical artifacts.

Scarlet smiled. Her parents had both been wealthy ambassadors before her father had passed away, so she’d grown up having her future in Intraplanetary Politics picked out in advance, but she was sharp all on her own. She probably even knew about the Axil 59-Eight.

“I’ll go tell Tutor Clauson you’ve arrived,” she offered smoothly, then leaned in to kiss him on either cheek. When she was near enough, she whispered so only he and Hayden could hear, “There’s been some trouble with your Pantedan friend. I’ll do my best to keep Clauson busy for a few minutes, but you’d better hurry, Reece.”

It was hard not to consider Scarlet a friend when she did things like this, and she did them often. Reece was inclined to believe it was because they’d practically grown up together, but then, who knew? He gave her a grateful grin before hurrying for the open archway leading to the observation platform. Gid now, Scarlet later.

“Good morning, Scarlet,” he heard Hayden stammer behind him.

“Good morning, Harold,” Scarlet replied politely.

It turned out the crowd in the meadow was actually overflow from the observation platform, which was jammed with chattering students and tutors, most of them unfamiliar faces. Beyond the white platform with its columned rail stretched a strip of smooth grey land framed by blinking towers. Usually there were bus-ships parked on the airstrip, but today it was empty except for Reece’s Nyad, a sleek rust-colored ship with propellers on the undersides of its wings.

Hugh and Sophie Rice stood out like geese in a flock of swans. They had the same habitually-haggard look as Hayden. Mr. Rice’s grey suit looked like it’d been pulled out of the dusty recesses of his closet while his bow tie drooped tiredly. The red lion head pin he wore on the breast of his jacket clashed wildly with the rest of him, so colorless. Hayden said Sophie looked just like their mother had before she’d died in the Five Year Pandemic. Straight, faded yellow hair and eyes that shone like a pair of polished blue marbles.

“Reece!” Sophie half laughed, half screamed when she saw him, throwing her arms around his waist. “I knew Hayden could get you out of bed!”

Reece ruffled her hair and threw Hayden a look. “Everyone has such faith in me. It’s moving, really.”

“What’s this about Gideon?” Hayden asked worriedly as he took his turn hugging Sophie, whose sparkling smile wilted a little.

“They wouldn’t let him in,” she explained, shaking her head. Attending a planetside school as she did, she got to witness the prejudice against the Pans every single day. Reece was sure she’d been hoping to outrun it, here.

Reece and Hugh locked eyes, and Reece tried to keep his voice light as he joked, “He didn’t try to bring in a gun, did he?” It had happened before. In fact, it happened all the time.

The joke was for Sophie’s sake, so Reece wasn’t bothered when Hugh didn’t smile. “He tried to bring Mordecai. There were some remarks made by the aerodome sentries, and…well. That’s not important. Miss Ashdown was of some help, but—”

“Gid has to be here,” Reece said firmly. He hadn’t been nervous up till the moment he’d heard Gideon was in trouble. That in itself was nothing new, but trying to fly while worrying whether or not one of his best friends was going to be spending the night in The Owl’s detention facility with his madcap pirate grandfather was going to take effort.

Hugh nodded. “We’ll try to get him in. But you’d better hurry. Rumor has it Headmaster Eldritch has come to personally observe the test, and it’s a sorry soul that makes that man wait for anything.”

Reece made a face, not disagreeing. Headmaster Eldritch made the duke look cute and cuddly, and Hugh probably knew as well as Reece how troubling
that
thought was, being the duke’s chief librarian.

As Hugh and Sophie melted into the crowd with a round of good lucks, Hayden grabbed Reece’s elbow and pressed something small and metallic into his palm. “Here. Keep in touch.”

Unrolling his fingers, Reece arched an eyebrow. The bit of brass was shaped like a flattened U, with one of its tails holding a microscopic speaker mouth. “Isn’t that cheating?” he whispered even as he reached up and slid the com link over his ear so that it hugged his temple.

It was hard to tell in the sunlight, but Hayden might have actually paled a bit. “Of course not. I mean, not if I don’t tell you anything helpful. And I won’t.”

“Why, that’s completely unhelpful.”

“It’s for moral support.”

“Thanks.” Reece paused, deliberating, and then added quietly, “You know if anyone finds out about Mordecai’s…pastimes…”

Hayden had already started nodding. “I know. We’ll take care of it. Oh, and Reece…” He looked around, wary of who in the crowd could be listening. “Liem’s here.”

“What?”

“I saw him climbing the flight tower with Headmaster Eldritch.”

This, of all things, turned Reece’s nervousness into a ball of hard anger sitting in the pit of his stomach. Reece’s association with Pans and bottom-class librarian’s sons had been a black spot on the thin imitation of friendship the stepbrothers had had since Reece had been a Thirteen. Five years later, Liem wouldn’t touch Reece with a stick if he needed pulling out of a Freherian marshbed.

“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.