Wings of Retribution (62 page)

Athenais wrapped the unconscious bodies in as much rope as she could find and carried them all below decks.  Then she threw Ragnar’s limp form into a barrel and shut the lid.  The shifter was much lighter than the last time she had seen him, but she didn’t have time to worry about it.  She climbed back out into the fresh air and slammed the hatch down behind her.  Then she dragged the pile of anchor chain over the top of the hatch, pinning it.

Satisfied, Athenais jogged down the ramp and up into the dark tunnel in the rock.  She took the steps two at a time, then paused for air when she reached the top.  Head high, she walked up to the first man she saw and punched him in the face.

Ragnar woke to total darkness, his body cramped and aching, his neck crammed up against the side of a too-small container.  He felt a horrible clenching in his gut, knowing that he was on his way to the black market.    He examined his prison with his fingers and determined it was some sort of barrel.  Tentatively, he pushed against the lid.

To his surprise, it lifted without resistance.  Ragnar blinked to the light of morning easing its way through the portholes.

He stood up slowly, his head pounding from the aborted
yeit.

“Athenais?” he whispered.  “Where are you?”

Nothing.  He glanced around the dark, dank room.  In one corner, four bound prisoners stared back at him in gagged, brooding silence.  Ragnar looked around, confused.

“Athenais?” he whispered again.  “You there?”

When no one answered, he climbed out of the barrel and checked the tiny rooms in the bottom of the ship.  Early morning light warmed the weather-beaten wood, but the ship was otherwise deserted.

Ragnar went to the ladder and tried to open the hatch.  It was blocked from the other side, but still moved slightly.  He could have managed to get it open if he worked at it, but he backed down the ladder.  Athenais’s message was clear—stay on the ship.

Ragnar touched the collar around his neck, then looked back to the four prisoners that Athenais had left trussed up like turkeys on the floor behind him.  His eyes came to rest on the hard-faced woman that had served them the fish and he allowed a slow smile to cross his face.

One of them had a key.

Tommy glanced at the satellite images and allowed a satisfied smile.  A storm was coming.  A big one.  With its current trajectory, it would hit the island of Paradise in a day, two days at the most.

“Is the weather satisfactory, captain?” a Trader asked apprehensively.  “This is the time of year Paradise gets hit with some mighty storms.”

“The weather is superb,” Tommy said, switching off the screen.  “Get your goods inside.  We’ll get you to your destination.”

“These ships sink, don’t they?” the Trader whined.  “I usually do my business with wooden sailing vessels.  At least parts of them float.  How can a ship that’s made of metal float?”

“Magic,” Tommy said. 

“These are very important goods,” the Trader insisted.  “Ordered for the Emperor himself.  Floater wash.  Forty liters, distilled.  Do you
know
how much that’s worth?”

“
The goddamn ship’s not going down!
” Tommy barked, pushed past his limit by the whiny civilian.  “Now get your goods on board or I’ll leave you on this blighted pile of flotsam.”  He threw his arms out to indicate the enormous floating raft and the crowd of sailors watching them.  “Is that what you want?”

The Trader peered at him.  “You don’t sound like an Emperor’s pilot.  How long have you been flying?  How do I know you’re not trying to rob me?”

Tommy twisted to point at the ship’s hull.  “You see those big things that look like toothpicks?”

The Trader nodded.

“This is a gunship.  Those are high-intensity lasers.  Computer-operated.  Very accurate.  If I had wanted to rob you, I would have told the ship to vaporize the fifty-seven humanoid life-forms the scanners picked up before I landed.”  Not true, of course, but this country bumpkin wouldn’t know the difference between antennae and laser arrays.

The Trader glanced up at the antennae and back at the sailors.  “What are lasers?”

Tommy dropped his face into his palm and dragged his hand down his face.  “All right.  You know what?  Fine.  I’ll just go back to the Emperor and tell him you didn’t feel like sending the goods right now.”  He turned on heel and started marching back up his gangplank.

“Wait!” the Trader babbled.  “I’m sorry.  Please, I was not questioning the Emperor’s Will.”  Turning quickly to his underlings, he shouted, “Load them up!  Now!  Stop standing around and
move!”

Forty liters turned out to be a lot more than Tommy originally anticipated.  Each individual milliliter was packaged in a glass tube and boxed with about two pounds of packing material.  The result ended up filling Tommy’s entire cargo bay.

“What’s this stuff for?” Tommy asked once both he and the Trader were boarded and the doors locked.

The Trader gave him an odd look.  “You don’t know?”

“Never seen it before,” Tommy said as he plotted the course back to Paradise.  “The way you guys handle it, it would seem you found the Fountain of Life.”

“It is the drink of the gods,” the Trader replied.  “If you’re normal, one taste washes away all your troubles and leaves you with a clean mind and soul.  It is the secret of happiness.”

Sounds a lot like a damn weeder,
Tommy thought.  It was refreshing to have the conversation, though.  Every other soul in this place seemed to be willfully stupid.  Adjusting the controls, he said, “If you’re normal.  What exactly does that mean?”

The man shrugged.  “In a very small number of people…infinitely small…the drink does something else entirely.  It opens up a corridor with the gods.”

“The Priestesses?”

The Trader nodded.

“Are there any Priests?”

“Of course,” the Trader replied.  “But they are killed.”

Tommy’s face twisted.  “Killed?  Why?”

“So they do not pass the taint on to others.”

“Taint?  But you just said they have a open corridor with the gods.”

“You don’t understand much, do you?”

“Nothing on this damned planet makes sense,” Tommy growled.  “That’s why I’m asking.”

The Trader answered him with silence.  Then, “What’s a planet?”

Frustrated, Tommy concentrated on flying.  They were already encountering turbulence ahead of the storm and the gunship was getting knocked around.  Tommy scanned the weather ahead and cursed.

“Buckle in.”

The wide-eyed Trader ripped his eyes away from the window.  “We’re going down?”

“No, but it’s about to get pretty rough.”

And rough it was.  Like flying a kite in a goddamned hurricane.  Yet, through it all, Tommy
could not
convince the moron to strap himself in.  He kept babbling something about sinking and being stuck to the ship, and he clung to the navigator’s chair with a death-grip on the armrests, staring out into the zero-visibility storm with wide eyes.

“How do you know we’re not going down?” the man babbled.  “It feels like we’re going down.”

Tommy glanced at his gauges.  “We’re not going down.  We’re level”

“But it feels like we’re going
down
,” the man began hyperventilating.  “You can’t see!  We’re headed straight into the ocean!”  He started screaming in panic.  “We’re going to sink, we’re going to
sink
!”

Tommy closed his eyes, his neck twitching.  Clouds did funny things to a person’s senses—especially clouds, turbulence, and a moving ship.  Total disorientation was actually very common in even the most seasoned pilots, and at least point-one percent of atmo-flying Academy graduates died each year when, in the grips of a cloud or some other zero-visibility blackout condition, they became convinced that their instrumentation was off and began to fly in the direction they
thought
they should be going, instead.

…which usually ended up being headlong into a mountain.  Or a skyscraper.  Or, in this idiot’s case, the ocean.

Tommy calmly adjusted his nose down a bit, keeping the craft on a level plane.  Beside him, the Trader was in the process of devolving to complete animal panic.  His eyes were like wide little saucers as he realized Tommy had lowered the nose.  Seeing that the adjustment hadn’t been enough, Tommy tipped the nose again.

“You
can’t!”
the man cried, reaching for Tommy’s controls.

Tommy twisted in his chair, catching the man squarely by the throat.  As the wide-eyed Trader hung there, gagging, Tommy calmly said, “We are not losing altitude.  We are not going to sink.  You will go to your chair, sit down, and strap yourself in, or I will throw you out the back door and give you a
real
taste what sinking feels like.”  He smiled as the man’s eyes bulged outward from the internal pressure.  “Do we understand each other?”

The man couldn’t respond, but Tommy released him anyway.  He spent the rest of the trip in relative peace, with the terrified Trader huddled against the far wall, babbling about drowning.

By the time they finally made landfall, the Trader was too sick to supervise the unloading of his goods.  He stumbled off the ship, fell, vomited up the stuff that had somehow stayed down throughout the trip, and crawled away.  Tommy himself had grown a little nauseous on the flight, but being at the wheel always eased the symptoms. 

Tommy pressed open the bay doors and startled the army of Strangers that had gathered to unload it when half the contents of the bay spilled out onto the wet concrete.  They let out horrifed sounds of dismay and began pulling the boxes from the rubble, re-packing those that had fallen open or were crushed in flight.

Tommy was turning to leave when his eye caught on a blue tube lying to the side of the mass of panicking Strangers.  Glancing around to see if anyone had spotted it, seeing that none had, he picked it up.