The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (30 page)

             
After drawing a few deep breaths, Nivy clenched her eyes shut and flipped upside-down in the mud, her boots disappearing with a kick.

             
Reece glanced at Scarlet as she pulled off her Letoian cloak and tossed it aside. “Are you going to be alright?”

             
“Please, Reece,” she chided, smiling at him in her old feminine-wiles sort of way. “You are looking at The Aurelian Academy's five time blue ribbon winner of The Young Lady's Division for Aquatic Precision. Although your concern is very flattering.” She folded her hands and gracefully dove into the tunnel, and Reece was sincerely glad she'd aimed for the right spot.

             
Owon went under without any fanfare, and Gideon after him, until it was just Reece left in the gorge. Stepping into the tunnel—and yelping, because the drop-off was steeper than he'd expected—he gathered his breath and flipped under. There wasn’t much room to kick, but he tried, using his hands to guide him along, feeling the tunnel's rough, rocky edges. All too soon, his lungs started to burn and his head ache with the need to breathe. He thrust down the walls of the tunnel with his hands more insistently, feeling mud swirl around his face, stirred by Gideon's feet.

             
He broke surface with a wild gasp that broke down into hacking coughs. Stroking blindly, he swam after the sounds of someone else coughing and spitting and hoped they'd found the shore. In a few strokes, he could feel the bottom of the pond with his feet. Giving his arms a rest, he stumbled till he had firm footing and crumpled to his hands and knees in warm, soft sand.

             
When he'd gotten his breath back, he shook out his head and tried to open his eyes. The mud he'd just come through was thinner than the stuff down in Karadur, and had helped to wash his face…though he almost wished it hadn't, once he got a horror-struck look around.

             
They had just swum up through the bottom of the Pool.

             
Owon was already on his feet, collected and not even breathless, though the greenish dark hid his expression—it might've been terrified, for all Reece could tell. The supine shapes of Scarlet, Nivy, and Gideon were spread out along the ring of the Pool's gently lapping tide.

             
“Up! Everybody up!” Reece barked. Gideon cursed as he realized where they were. “Don't think, just run!
Run
!”

             
They dashed in a loose cluster up the sloping sand, Owon leading the charge, maybe even seeing where they were headed. Not that Reece trusted him to not lead them right into the jaws of a patiently-waiting Ripper.

             
Scarlet suddenly screamed, and Reece saw her shadow drop to the sand beside another shadow, an unmoving one that was wet when he knelt and touched it.

             
“It's the girl,” Scarlet said, her voice hitching as she used Reece's arm to claw her way to her feet again, “it's the Raider girl.”

             
“She's over here, too,” Gideon said from up ahead, and Reece's stomach tried to roll over.

             
“Just keep running!” he growled, roughly towing Scarlet over the top of the dune. “Don't look—”

             
He had to throw his forearm over his eyes to keep from being blinded by the powerful search beam of white hot light sweeping across the desert.

             
“Stop there, Captain Sheppard,” Mayor Petric's slightly distorted voice ordered through a sonic transducer.

             
Arrayed in a neat formation, Letoian soldiers with their rifles raised and aimed walled off the three forward sides of the dune, leaving the Ripper's Pool to pen in the crew. The Letoian version of a photon generator, manned by three men, shot the search beam at them through a lens the size of a window. Using his hand as a visor against the light, Reece glared at the ranks of men, trying to pick out the mayor. Petric obligingly stepped out from behind the generator and strode forward, just a silhouette in uniform with her hands behind her back.

             
“Very clever, Captain,” Petric complimented in her hard, clipped accent. “No one has discovered that egress—or dared to use it, for that matter—in years. Did you use the bald one as a plant, to spring you in the case your little ruse was caught on to?”

             
“My little…ruse,” Reece repeated slowly, stalling, watching the dark horizon for signs of his ship. Except for the occasional flash of muted lightning, the sky was dark and empty. “Which one would that be, again?”

             
Petric stopped a few yards from him, where her face finally materialized, wearing a humorless smile. “Your plot to steal our generator. Did you think I wouldn't suspect?” She held up a small silver stick about as wide and long as Reece's thumb with a rounded red button on top, almost like a spark-starter. “We have proof, Captain.”

             
As she pressed the button, Reece's muffled voice claimed,
“The Letoians know we know our only way out is to steal the turbine. They've brought this on themselves; we don't have a choice. We're taking it.”

             
Tsking, the mayor tossed him the stick; he clumsily caught it, confused.

             
“Keep it. We have the same recorded in several dozen locations. Coercion, theft, escape from a government prison…I'm afraid this time, you will not be afforded the time to contemplate what you have done in the mines. This time, it will have to be the firing squad.”

             
“Reece…” Scarlet murmured under her breath, her hand clammy in his. “The plan?”

             
He nodded, eyes still skimming the desert. He hadn't the heart to tell her that without Aurelia, the plan was just words. He could spin those words around Petric, but she would still give the order for them to be riddled with holes.

             
“Have you nothing to say for yourself? No final words?”

             
There. An engine, faint and soft in the distance, a bare rumble, but to him, instantly familiar. He gave Scarlet's hand a reassuring squeeze before letting it go. It was time to have those choice words.

             
“Yes,” Reece decided. “You're a liar.”

             
Mayor Petric flashed him a wintry smile. “I'm sorry?”

             
“You will be,” he promised dryly. The soldiers shifted uneasily behind Petric, maybe picking up on the gentle thrumming vibrations in the air.

             
Scarlet took a step forward and drew herself up to her full height. “You've been spinning quite the web around us, Mayor Petric. And by us, I of course mean the crew of
The Aurelia
and probably the larger half of your cabinet, which I'm sure will be duly noted of these accusations by the authorities here present.”

             
“I…I'm sure I don't know what you mean,” Petric replied, her voice distracted. Her eyes stared uncertainly past the dune. The rumble of engines grew louder still.

             
Even with her dress appearing to be made of solid mud and her hair sticking out in tufts where it wasn't slicked to her skin, Scarlet looked totally in her element. “So you deny this is all a part of your elaborate plan to appropriate our ship for yourself, so that you and your chosen few could break Leto's tentative truce with the Rippers by flying it to safety?”

             
Shaking herself—her eyes kept locking on something in the distance, growing wider and wider—Petric spat, “How dare
you! You would suggest that I, the Mayor of Leto City…that
I
would break the truce? I helped
write
the truce!”

             
“And you paid for it, didn't you, when you had a daughter.” Scarlet took another challenging step forward. “You never realized the cost, until then. Your little daughter, who so wanted to be an adventurer herself one day, bound by the oppressive law you helped pass. Did you become mayor just so you could find a way out, when the time was right?”

             
Aurelia was close, now; Scarlet kept raising her voice to be heard over the swelling sounds of the Afterquin. Petric looked stunned.

             
“Your mayor,” Scarlet addressed the soldiers, “plotted to steal your city's generator as a means for her own escape from this planet, and in so doing, would have left Leto City defenseless against the Rippers after shamelessly breaking the truce that protects you from them!”

             
“Firing squad!” Petric screamed furiously, her eyes bulging. “Take aim! I order you to take aim
now
!”

             
Half the soldiers hefted their guns, but the other half hesitated, exchanging glances and shooting dark scowls at the mayor.

             
“And as for proof,” Scarlet cried, and pointed over the dune. Grinning, Reece looked back at Aurelia as she settled into a low hover over the Pool. Her cargo bay ramp hung open, and light—not leek light, but warm, common photon light—cast a square of orange onto the sand. “That ship has
your
generator in it as we speak! The generator
she
ordered removed from The Plant and carried here to be installed, using the plans she overheard and stole from
us
!”

             
Petric yowled like an angry cat and spun to face her uneasy soldiers. “What are you doing? I told you to TAKE AIM!”

             
“Now, there’s no need to shout,” a new voice declared. Mordecai's, projected over the ship's sonic transducer so it echoed over the sounds of the purring Afterquin. His gangly silhouette stepped up to the cargo bay ramp, the snouted shape of a rifle nestled into his shoulder. “As I have my sights set on your dear mayor, what say you boys lower your weapons? Don't matter if you like her or wanna see her stand trial, you all need her alive.”

             
Plan or no plan, Reece was shamelessly relieved when in a wave of movement, the soldiers pointed the noses of their guns at the ground.

             
“Wisely done,” Mordecai said approvingly, a smile in his booming voice, “now how's about returnin' any weapons that don't belong to you? I'm lookin' for one in particular. Stands out, some. Double barreled, spins on its—ah.”

             
A soldier that had planted the butt of his gun deep in the sand awkwardly came forward, Gideon's revolver held flat on his palms. Gideon went, jerked it out of his hands, and walked back up the slope with a wide, wolfish grin.

             
“Now, there's another dozen'a you boys bein' escorted this way by the Rippers, who'll be wantin' to reaffirm the truce post haste. It'd do you well not to open up fire…they're none too pleased with the mayor here, and I think they'd like an excuse to turn a parlay into a dinner party. So remember…manners is everythin’!”

             
Reece approached Petric, who had gone down to her knees in the sand and was gazing up into the light of Aurelia with her hair blowing back from her face. Her eyes twitched to Reece and burned with hate. “When you go back to your home tonight,” he told her quietly, “you're going to be replaying this over and over in your head, wondering what went wrong. But before you take the time to feel sorry for yourself, or to conjure up more lies to feed your council members, do this much.” Holding out the silver broadcaster receiver, Reece rolled back on its tiny thumb pad dial, scanning back through Petric's recorded material. Then he stopped and let it play at random.

             
“
—and once you attach the applicators to the rotational fastening pin…that's on this blue panel, here—”

             
Po's voice cut out with a chirp as he stopped the receiver playing.

             
“Everything you need to take my mechanic's new generator and set it up in The Plant is right here.” He popped the silver stick into the air, and the mayor wisely scrambled to catch it. “Take it. Get the generator installed before anyone gets hurt. And then, when you go back to that wondering went wrong part, remember. You tried to take my ship. You tried to hurt my crew. And that's all.”

             
Aurelia set down in the sand with a soft rush of wind, tossing Reece's hair. With a last frown for Petric, who was beginning to look appropriately frightened as she glanced up and down the glowering ranks of her men, he turned for the cargo bay. Scarlet and Owon were nearly there already, and Gideon was standing with his grandfather, but Nivy had waited for him. She gave him a congratulatory dig in the ribs as they started for home together.

             
He heard a dull thud, that was all. But when she fell sideways into him, there was an arrow stuck in her side. Time slowed down; Reece's mind sped up, frantic, jumbled, as he caught her under the arms.

             
“Raiders!” one of the soldiers cried, raising the alarm. The Letoians raised their rifles in a chorus of snaps just as the grey-skinned desert people poured over the surrounding dunes like ants kicked out of their hill, hefting bows, spears, and slingshots, or firing with stolen Letoian firearms. The desert was suddenly a battlefield, noisy with shouts and gunfire and stampeding feet. The white search spotlight rolled, unmanned, across patches of fighting as its soldiers joined the clash.

             
Reece tried picking Nivy up, but she grit her teeth and arched away from him, clutching the shaft of the arrow.

             
“Reece!” Hayden, his medical bag slung over his shoulder, splashed up sand with his knees as he landed beside them. “One of us under each of her arms—we'll drag her!”

             
Together, they folded Nivy's arms around their necks, and with their backs bent, started pulling her towards the cargo bay ramp. Reece could feel the electric jitters of the Band shorting out her voice before she could even cry out. It made him angry enough to wish he could put her down and start shooting things.

             
At some point before they reached the cargo bay, the Rippers joined the battle, snatching up Raider and Letoian alike, beating men aside like dolls, sending them flying over the dunes. Once, a cloaked Raider with a spear came at them, howling, only to be jumped by a Ripper. The rusty smell of blood soon draped the thick air.

             
At the bottom of the ramp, Mordecai and Gideon were standing back to back, whipping their barrels into blurs, the sound of their firing revolvers rolling into one long peal of thunder.

             
Hayden and Reece dragged Nivy up the ramp and behind the cover of a crate, laying her out gently on her back.

             
“Who's flying?” Reece demanded.

             
Hayden answered as he brought his satchel around to his lap and dug out a pair of scissors, “Po.”

             
“Gideon! Mordecai! On board!” Lurching to the log interface in its barred steel box, Reece ripped the speaker com up to his mouth and shouted, “Po, take us up!”

             
The ramp was still lifting as Aurelia began to gain altitude; wind flapped at Reece's muddy clothes, pushed around the empty crates in the bay. When Gideon and Mordecai together locked the sealants on the door, shutting out the clamor of the battlefield below, the cargo bay seemed too quiet, hushed. Reece could hear everyone breathing, and Hayden muttering over Nivy.

             
He dragged himself over to the crate and stared fixedly down at his friend as he expertly examined the inflamed flesh around the head of the burrowed arrow. Nivy had passed out.

“
Her bottom rib stopped the arrow from getting her lung, but I need to make sure the bone didn't splinter,” Hayden murmured. “She needs the infirmary. So do you,” he called to Gideon without looking up.

             
Gideon acknowledged him with a wave of his revolver, but made no move to get up from where he was sitting on the winding stairs, his head hanging between his shoulders. Mordecai had a bullet graze along his knee, Reece noticed. Scarlet was helping him bind it with a strip of clean canvas bonding she must have gotten from Hayden. That was three patients he had provided Hayden. Three out of seven…eight, he dully corrected himself. He'd reclaimed the Vee he'd sworn would never set foot on his ship again. Owon looked up from his dark corner across the bay as if hearing his name thought, and smiled pitilessly.

             
Reece's feet—his whole body—felt painfully heavy as he forced them into a slow walk towards the bridge.

             
“Reece—”

             
“Not now, Hayden.”

             
“No, it's not that,” Hayden said quietly. Reece could only assume
that
meant Hayden’s exclusion from the plan; he'd counted on there being a great to-do about it, but he had hoped it would come later. A cold bath and a shot of burnthroat later. “It's the crates. They were sliding when we took off. But they shouldn't be empty.”

             
Staring, Reece turned around, a bad feeling creeping up from his stomach. Mordecai, Gideon, and Scarlet were returning his stare with varying expressions of dread. Hayden was right. Those crates had been packed with cans of meat, vegetables, and rolls of protein; even the momentum of the ship shouldn't have been able to send them skittering like they had. All at once, Gideon stood and jogged to one crate while Reece marched to another, and Mordecai and Scarlet split off and examined two more.

             
At the bottom of Reece's crate, three cans of Glaucan beans rolled and nudged together. There had been hundreds.

             
Gideon angrily kicked his crate. “Empty.”

             
“Same here,” Mordecai announced from across the bay. “Raiders, must'a been. If I hadn't been busy with them soldiers earlier, I might'a noticed. They must'a struck last night, after we got in. Looks like they left the bims, though. Guess that's lucky.”

             
Lucky. Right. Reece hadn't been lucky since the day his Nyad had crashed into the bleeding lake at The Owl.

             
“Gid,” he said in an empty voice, “help Hayden get Nivy to the infirmary, and get yourself fixed up. Scarlet, I need you to get to the galley and see if they cleaned out the cupboards, or if it's only the cargo bay they hit. Mordecai…Owon.”

             
Mordecai raised a furry eyebrow as he looked back at the Vee, who was lurking in the shadows, watching with interest. “So he's back, is he?”

             
“Until Oceanus.”

             
“Oceanus?” Scarlet and Hayden asked together, then exchanged a look that Hayden quickly lowered his eyes from with a bothered frown.

             
As he started for the bridge again, feeling worse than he had in a long time, Reece explained in a monotone, “That's the next inhabited planet. I told him I'd take him that far. And it's where we'll have to stop to restock. We’ll pick up the Rhea Stream from there—it’s the next most direct route to The Ice Ring.”

             
“So,” Scarlet ventured hopefully, “we were going to stop anyways. We can resupply and continue on. This is just a…set back…” She trailed off at Reece's expressionless stare.

             
“Oceanus is ten days out, Scarlet. Let's hope we have food and water enough to make it that far.”

             
Hayden spoke up just as Reece reached the door. “She's right, though. It could have been much worse.”

             
“Really?” Without turning around, Reece leaned his shoulder against the doorframe and stared blindly down the corridor. The others were uncomfortably silent behind him. “Three of my crew needing patched up, our food stolen right out of our cargo bay, a Vee back among us, another detour ahead, and all signs saying we just started a war on Leto and possibly made life-long enemies out of one of Honora's oldest allies. And that's all because of
my
plan, Hayden.”

             
After a moment, Hayden offered feebly, “We're alive.”

             
“Yeah.” Straightening, Reece sighed, stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets, and started wandering towards the bridge. Even though he knew where he was headed, he felt…aimless. “But I wonder how many back on Leto aren't.”

XV

Good Sterling Eve to All Except Owon

             
There was a reserved quietness about
The Aurelia
, the next several days. The same sort of polite soft-spokenness that follows a funeral.

             
Reece was the only one who spoke at their first moot back on the ship, and that was to review their itinerary up till Oceanus and lay out the basic food plan. Luckily (there was that bleeding word again), the Raiders hadn't appeared to set foot past the cargo bay, and the infirmary, galley, bridge, and quarters were untouched, leaving the crew with just enough canned food to see them to Oceanus, if no one was picky and everyone conserved. It was a momentous occasion, Reece discovering a second good thing that could be said about Owon. With his serum, the Vee didn't need food.

             
Despite Hayden's advice that she do nothing of the kind, Nivy was up and about inside of three days. Up and about and doing her remedial napping in the navigator's chair rather than the cot in the infirmary, which was back to doubling as Owon's brig. Reece didn't blame her. With Gideon's shoulder not up to manning the helm, he and Mordecai had swapped chores. Mornings in the infirmary consisted of him and Owon holding glaring contests while a flustered Hayden tried to study in the corner, whereas mornings on the bridge with Mordecai at the helm were close to happy, if still subdued. Usually, Reece crawled up to his bunk and exhaustedly rolled over to the sound of the old Pan telling Nivy—and Scarlet and Po, once they figured out what was going on—stories about Panteda, and his wife, Esther.

             
Hayden's great to-do over being left out of the plan never came.  Reece wasn't sure why. If he was angry or upset, he didn't show it, just went about his studying and taking care of everybody with a few more sighs than usual. Reece almost wished he
would
yell at him, because the more days passed without comment on the matter, the guiltier he felt.

             
If there was a silver lining to all this, it was that The Kreft were still nowhere to be seen. Aurelia had merged back into the Perseus Stream without incident, and the green graph radar was clear in all directions. It might be too much to hope that the crew's hold up at Leto had put the black ships off their scent…but Reece was hoping anyways.

             
On the morning of their ninth day out of Leto, he wearily trudged into the galley, fresh off his nightlong shift at the helm and thinking happy thoughts about turtle bacon, poached eggs, and other things he'd never had cravings for until he couldn't have them. Grainy string music warbled from Po's old wireless, propped on the red countertop where she was sitting cross-legged with a tin of paint in one hand and a fine-tipped paintbrush in the other.

             
“Mornin',” she greeted distractedly as she made a loop in the vine she was painting up one of the galley's columns. He'd given her permission to do this in her downtime, now that the turbine didn't need her constant supervision. Green and brown twisted branches had already been painted over the arching doorway, while a spiral of leaves blew across the wall, like they'd spilt out of her paint can and gotten caught in a breeze.

             
With a grunt, Reece plopped down at the table. “You're missing Mordecai's stories. He's doing a bit on Gid that's pretty good.”

             
Gideon, who at the other end of the table was meticulously taking apart and cleaning the pieces of his revolver, shook his head without looking up from his work. He was supposed to be wearing his left arm in a sling, but the loop of fabric was hooked over the back of his chair, practically unworn.