The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (11 page)

             
He kicked down on the leveler rod at the same time he jerked the yoke up to his chest, and Aurelia exploded forward, right at The Kreft ship. The com cut out with a sharp
pop
, but not before it relayed one last satisfyingly surprised crackle, and something like a growled shout. Reece wasn't much of a tactical flyer…he flew by instinct, followed what felt right. But there was one good old-fashioned tactic he'd be loath to ignore, and that was the element of surprise.

             
Aurelia was barreling towards The Kreft so fast the black ship had already doubled in size in the canopy window. The Kreft started to turn to avoid the collision, but Reece kept bearing down on their position, coaxing more and more speed out of the reluctant Afterquin.

             
It was close, and Reece would never have tried it if he wasn't sure The Kreft were desperate to salvage Aurelia. But as the spiked black ship put on a burst of speed and veered wildly to the right, Reece rolled Aurelia hard to left so she tipped up her starboard wing. The two ships skated narrowly by each other, belly to belly, and Aurelia zipped along the length of the enemy ship and sped on towards freedom. The Euclid Stream, misty and nebulous, running in a vertical slant like a slash across the black of space, glittered in welcome.

             
Reece blew out a breath that turned into a laugh. Grinning, he glanced at Nivy, who looked downright grim. He cleared his throat. “I realize this might not be the time or place, but you should know…that aerobatic maneuver is
extremely
difficult to execute.” He broke off to frown down at the graph radar, which was twittering like an angry bluebird, and cursed as he realized—

             
“Brace yourself!”

             
Whatever The Kreft had launched hit home, and the yoke almost spun out of Reece's hands as Aurelia bucked and rumbled in agony. The pressurized pipes overhead roared like they were channeling a waterfall, yet the warning peels sounding from the flightpanel sliced easily through the noise. It seemed he'd been a little premature in calling The Kreft's bluff.

             
“Po!” Reece shouted into his mouthpiece. “Po, how are we?”

             
No answer. Aurelia continued to labor towards the Euclid, but something was off with the Afterquin. Reece could feel it in the hesitant controls of the flightpanel; it was like they were flying with a limp. The Kreft were going to overtake them if they didn't just settle for blowing them into flotsam.

             
One thing at a time. The projectile must have hit something on Aurelia's port side, because she seemed to want to spin over her left wing.
There.
He had it.

             
“You might want to close your eyes,” Reece warned Nivy through his teeth. Then he let go of the yoke.

             
Aurelia spun, wing over wing, down and to the left, and Reece thanked his good luck he didn't get queasy easily. Outside the canopy window, the stars were a kaleidoscopic blur, white and faintly-colored specks that turned into streaks the faster they spun. The yoke, idle in front of Reece's vacant hands, leaned almost vertically on its side. The tired whine of the Afterquin morphed into a protesting screech.

             
Suddenly, Aurelia wrenched to an ungainly stop, snapping Reece sideways. He was slow to regain his bearings—it kind of felt like they'd been flung pell-mell in every direction—and for a second, he couldn't make sense of what he was seeing. An oily white vapor was rolling back over the fore of the ship. As far as he could see forward, there was only streaming, glittery white that wavered slightly as he stared at it, like heat over a hot horizon. It was as though Aurelia had been seized by the galaxy's longest, straightest river. Her speed, her strokes, meant nothing here; there was only the steady pace of the current as it swept between stars like rocks on a riverbank.

             
Reece sank back into his leather seat with a sigh that was almost a moan. They'd made it into the Euclid Stream. Even if The Kreft followed them in, the Streams bore all ships at the same rate, and that meant no catching up.

             
Of course, The Kreft did
make
the Streams…so if any ship was the exception to the rule, it would be theirs. Time would tell. There was nothing for it now but for Reece to power down the aft thrusters and make sure he hadn't accidentally killed anybody. Starting with Nivy, who was slouched so low in her seat, he could only make out her shoulders and head. She looked over at him, and seemed to have trouble focusing.

             
“Cap'n?” Po's voice timidly ventured from Reece's headset, startling him.

             
His relief wrestling his agitation, Reece testily replied into his mouthpiece, “Po, where have you been?”

             
“I'm sorry, Cap'n, it's just, Mordecai and Gideon—”

             
“Are they alright?”

             
“Oh, yeah, we're all fine. But they…I mean, they meant well…they just didn't want me in with the Afterquin with all the turbulence, and then there was a fire we had to put out, and then we started spinnin'—” Po paused, and then said again, “I'm
really
sorry, Cap'n.”

             
“Listen, it's fine,” Reece assured her, irritably batting a hand at Nivy, who was trying to show him the read that had popped up on the flightpanel datascreen. “Just tell me what's going on. The helm's pulling a little slow, and there's a lot of resistance in the port rudders.” He spared the datascreen a squinted glance just to get Nivy off his case. “And I'm getting a warning about a…sudden temperature drop?”

             
Po was quiet for a long moment before asking carefully, “Describe the slowness in the helm. Is there a delayed response, or—”

             
“No,” Reece pushed the yoke forward just slightly and met a sluggish weight. He unpoetically described the sensation. “It's like trying to wade through pudding.”

             
“Puddin'? Really? Are you sure it's not maybe more like pushin' a pin through a marshmallow?”

             
“I—maybe. Does it matter?”

             
“Well, if it's puddin', you're probably about to lose all manual control, in which case we'll spin outta the Euclid and get ripped apart by the deceleration. If it's a marshmallow, then that's the thermal turbine burnin' out.”

             
“Then it's that.”

             
“That's not good either, Cap'n,” Po insisted. The speaker in Reece's ear crackled she pushed away her mouthpiece to say something that sounded grave and then returned it to her mouth. “The thermal turbine is one'a the pieces we substituted because we didn't have Aurelia's original. We just now got the fire under control, and it didn't mar up the Afterquin too bad, but that one nasty shot The Kreft sent at our hull scrambled her pretty good all the same.”

             
“And the turbine?”

             
“Source'a the fire, looks like. Overheated when it tried to compensate for the BC Sim…um, the Bio-Conditions Simulator…which shorted when the volleys started. I can fix what you're feelin' in the rudders, but without the turbine and the BC Sim, Aurelia's gonna start shuttin' down around us. And the systems that are gonna go first are gonna be the one's nonessential to her runnin'. Environmental controls. Life support.”

             
“The sudden temperature drop,” Reece realized. He leaned over the flightpanel, craning his neck, and read with a nervous dip in his stomach that the temperature had already gone down two degrees. A two degree temperature drop wasn't much—unless it happened in under fifteen minutes. Going strong at this rate, Aurelia would be supporting arctic temperatures before midnight.

             
“Can you fix them? Or at least the Sim?”

             
“I'll try my best. But I'll need another set of hands.”

             
“You can keep Mordecai. Send Gideon up. We need to talk.”

             
Po's voice was small. “Okay.”

             
Gid showed up a few minutes later. His face was covered in grease and oil, his clothes were stained in patches of black, and he had a swelling burn on one side of his neck. Reece would've gone easy on him for that alone, only Gid's expression was…well, if Reece didn't know better, he'd say his friend had mutiny on the mind.

             
“Po said you and Mordecai wouldn't let her go to the Afterquin,” Reece began levelly. As he watched over his shoulder, Gideon glared out the canopy window and clenched his jaw.

             
“She could'a run into that bleedin' engine room on your order and gotten herself killed. Don't that bother you?”

             
Reece's fingers tightened around the yoke. “You know it does.”

             
After a beat, Gideon jerkily nodded and dropped his eyes.

             
Suppressing a sigh, Reece shook his head and made his shoulders loosen. “Don't stop my mechanic from doing her job again, Gid. Tell Mordecai the same. I need her on the Afterquin.”

             
“Fine. That it?” Gideon grunted.

             
“Almost. Nivy?” At Reece's gesture, Nivy obediently took up the secondary yoke, steering so he could turn his seat and face Gideon in full. “Now, second question. Where the bleeding bogrosh is Hayden?”

             
The good news was, since they were on an airship, there were only so many places Hayden could have gotten lost. The bad news—along with the fact he was lost at all—was that the auxiliary lighting in the port wing of the ship had been knocked out, which meant Gideon and Reece had to conduct their search by photon wand. Mordecai might've just tripped and smacked his head on a railing, but Gid didn't think so, and Reece had had too many bad experiences
not
heeding one of Gideon's telltale feelings to ignore one now. They crept down the ship's tunnel-like corridors with hob and revolver in hand. Reece knew he shouldn't be able to feel the difference in temperature yet, but he could've sworn the old corridors had gotten chillier.

             
“Cap'n,” Gid suddenly hissed.

             
Reece turned, caught Gideon's scowling expression with the beam of his photon wand, and immediately clicked it off. “What?”

             
“I heard voices. And look. Down there.”

             
Creeping warily past his friend, Reece found the corner of the corridor with his hands and peered around it. On the wall about twenty feet away, one lone, dully blue photon globe flickered behind a cobwebbed shade, scattering shadows on the wooden floor. Its buzz sounded as loud as a kinetic motorsaw's in the quiet.

             
“Someone must have turned it on manually,” he realized, frowning to himself.

             
“Not Aitch,” Gideon added. “If he knew how to rig these lights, he would'a turned them all on before ever comin' down this way.”

             
“Right, but—” Pausing, Reece tipped his head to the side and listened closely. He could hear the voices now, a quiet murmur of laughter. “See, that's weird. That actually
does
sound like Hayden's laugh.”

             
Gideon's revolver went
click-click
in the dark. “Maybe he ain't laughin'.”

             
Reece doubtfully arched an eyebrow even as he cocked his hob and skirted the corner on his tiptoes. The oval door beneath the photon globe was slightly ajar, its edges traced in dim light. He sidled along the wall until his shoulder pressed against the steel door, then held up a fist to stop Gideon, turned the fist into three fingers, and counted down. Three, two, one…             

             
With his hob in one hand and his photon wand held like a club in the other, Reece shouldered open the door and shouted, “Hold it!”

             
He tripped to a graceless stop. He'd leaped into someone's clean, furnished, definitely
lived-in
quarters. The bed built into the wall was made up with a red blanket and different colored pillows with dangling tassels, and shaded photon stands stood in each of the four corners of the room, bouncing warm colors off the dust-free floors. The wardrobe, also built into the wall, was open, and what was more, stuffed to bursting with dresses, petticoats, and blouses.

             
And there in the middle of it all, smiling to herself as she sifted through the contents of a three-foot tall steamer trunk, was Scarlet Ashdown.

             
“Is the captain above knocking, now?” she teased as she added to the pile of clothes by her feet.

             
Reece heard a shocked Pantedan curse and a barked laugh, followed by hurried footsteps, and ascertained Gideon had stuck his head into the room, identified their stowaway, and decided that he'd seen enough explosions for one day. This one was likely to take the bird-in-a-cake.