Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  I told myself to get a grip, I had jumped twice now into places where I didn’t have so much as a good intention between me and the ground. Of course, both cases lasted less than a second, and I could have the Mark push me back into the relative safety of the airship.

  I think my body knew the difference. I could feel terror boiling inside me as I grabbed the guide cable and followed Ivan. It got worse with every step away from the safe confines of the airship. My stomach clenched itself into an acid-soaked ball, trying to squeeze the Emperor’s dinner back up my throat.

  I pulled myself along the gangway, up next to Ivan, and gulped down the rising gorge when I reached the edge of the protective netting.

  The gangway paralleled the track that had led out the main hangar door and under one of the stubby wings that projected from the airship’s skin. The track ended here, buried in the wing above me in an impenetrable mass of struts and cables. Cables and pulleys descended from the track above, past the level of the gangway, to suspend one of the biplanes below me.

  On either side of the complex system of cables holding the plane dangled a pair of ladders. Each ladder was nothing more than a pair of chains set about a foot apart, with a metal bar joining them every two feet along its length. They swayed slightly in the harsh wind.

  So did the plane beneath us.

  So did the gangway.

  So did my stomach.

  And each one moved at a slightly different frequency and amplitude.

  I swore, but whatever sour words I managed to say were lost under the sound of the wind.

  Ivan didn’t have to tell me what to do. It was pretty obvious. The biplane was a two-seater, and the ladders fore and aft were the only way down. Ivan had already grabbed the forward ladder and was climbing down into the pilot’s seat.

  I reached out for the other ladder, leaning around the edge of the netting one-handed. The metal rung was cold around my fingers, but I held it in a death grip as I let go of the netting with the other. I carefully raised one foot and set it on a lower rung—and the whole ladder swung out with my weight.

  “Fuck!” I screamed as my other foot left the gangway and I swung back and forth. I shoved my other foot into the ladder so forcefully that the swinging got worse. For a moment everything felt wild and chaotic, the cold metal burning the skin of my hands and feet, my shoulder slamming into the cables supporting one wing of the aircraft. The swaying made me so dizzy that I had to screw my eyes shut to keep my grip.

  I think it only lasted a couple of seconds, because the ladder had become mostly still before I heard Ivan yell back up to me, “Are you all right?”

  I managed to choke out one word. “Fine!”

  I started climbing down, eyes shut and burning with tears, groping downward slowly, one naked foot at a time. It felt like hours before I reached down with one foot and briefly panicked when there was no more ladder to descend. Then I felt my sole brush something, and I looked down.

  My left foot was dangling just above the back of the copilot’s seat.

  I sucked in a frigid breath and lowered myself into the plane. I felt an immense relief when I slipped into the seat and was no longer dangling from the ladder, which wasn’t to say I wasn’t still dangling. The whole plane was suspended by the track above and swaying just enough to make me aware of the motion.

  “Get ready and strap yourself in.” Ivan called out to me. I fished around and found a harness attached to the sides of the copilot’s chair. I pulled the straps over my shoulders and buckled myself in, and I realized that the restraints were not designed with women in mind. I’m not particularly busty, but I still had the upper part of the evening gown on, along with underwear at least as structurally complex as the shell of this biplane—and both still conspired to extract extra boob from the ether, while the harness attempted to crush them back where they had come from.

  “Ready?” Ivan called back.

  “Yes,” I gasped, forcing myself to breathe against the restraints.

  I heard a grinding whirr, and the plane started vibrating. In front of us, I saw the propeller begin turning as the engine noise and the vibration intensified. It kept getting louder, going from lawnmower, to chainsaw, all the way to Rammstein concert. Ivan yelled something at me, but I couldn’t hear him over the engine.

  The plane was angled about forty-five degrees off the axis of the airship, pointing forward. As the engine revved, the propeller dragged the body of the biplane forward, the cables attaching us to the track above were now angled away from the ship.

  There was a severe bounce, and my stomach tried to slam up through my diaphragm as the cables all popped free of the wing above me. The biplane fell at an angle toward the silver-lit clouds, the airship shooting away behind us impossibly fast.

  I didn’t breathe, staring unblinking, eyes watering in the freezing air slipping by the stubby windscreen. The silver-backed clouds raced up to meet us, and I felt my dinner racing up to join them. Ivan leveled us out before either decided to meet. Once we seemed to be actually flying, he throttled back the engine to buzz saw levels.

  “You can take us to the enemy now?” Ivan called back.

  I clenched my teeth and closed my watering eyes. I felt battered and abused, every exposed surface of my body burned from the cold and the wind, my insides felt as if they’d gone through a blender. I felt as if I’d have trouble walking five feet, much less to another universe.

  “Yes!” I yelled back.

  My Mark was still there, and unlike the rest of me, nothing about it felt shaken or abused. In fact, the more ragged the sense of my physical body became, the more solid it seemed. I focused on it, and it seemed more real than the world around me, the cold, the nausea, the stinging wind in my eyes. I could feel the world I was in, and I could feel the worlds around it unfolding like petals of a flower blooming in infinite directions. I felt the neighbor spaces; for a brief moment my sense of direction failed me, and I couldn’t find the place the Shadows had come from.

  I panicked and opened my eyes. I couldn’t lose track of this, not now. Then I focused on the full moon as the nose of the Emperor’s airship began to eclipse it.

  Seeing that, something clicked in my brain. I had moved relative to the airship, and I had also moved relative to the place where we were going. Suddenly, my sense of the surrounding worlds fell into place and I knew what direction inside myself I had to look.

  “Get ready!” I called to Ivan.

  I reached out with the Mark and pushed myself, Ivan, and the biplane.

  THIRTY-NINE

  THE CLOUDS SHIFTED around us, and the shadow of the Emperor’s airship vanished from the moon.

  “Be careful!” I called out. “If there’s another Prince on board, they probably felt us arrive!”

  “Where is it?” he shouted back.

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture the brief image I had seen. “Below our airship, just barely above the cloud cover.”

  “Bearing?”

  “Same course, direction. Might have just started turning.”

  Ivan banked the biplane and started ascending toward the clouds that were above us now.

  The plane slid into a towering pillar of clouds and the world briefly turned an opaque silvery black. Something large loomed in the shadows.

  “Look out!” I yelled.

  He was already cursing in Russian as he violently banked to the left and steepened the ascent until we broke out of the top of the clouds. I could feel the biplane flex ominously as it took a turn that it probably wasn’t designed to survive. Below us, close enough to touch, the silver-gray skin of an airship slid by.

  Ivan leveled out the plane with a sickening lurch as we shot over the airship and past the nose. Ivan still cursed in Russian as he brought the plane around in a slow bank in front of the craft.

  It was smaller than the Emperor’s a
irship, but by no means small in absolute terms. It looked as if it still could cover a football field. Our biplane was a buzzing gnat next to it.

  Once he had control back, Ivan called back to me. “What now?”

  “How close can you get?” I had been planning my jump on board the enemy ship ever since I’d used the Mark to drop several decks on the airship. We could fly over it, and I would just push myself outside of the plane, drop, and push back when I had fallen into where the airship was. Sounded simple. Now that I was flying in the open air, wind slicing my cheeks, it didn’t seem nearly as straightforward.

  “I don’t have that much control,” Ivan said. “If I get too close, I might crash into—”

  An explosive banging interrupted Ivan. It sounded something like a stuttering thunderclap. I turned to look toward the airship and saw a small cylindrical projection on the side of the gondola rotating slightly, as if it was tracking us.

  Two or three meters of flame flashed from a nearly invisible slot in the cylinder, then a moment later I heard the thunderous sound of it firing. “They’re shooting at us!”

  At least Ivan didn’t berate me for stating the obvious. He dove and banked and brought the plane up again in an effort to give the enemy a harder target. The firing didn’t stop, as more turrets joined in, the gunfire merging into an apocalyptic roar. I saw a fist-sized hole appear in the wing above me, and I pushed my Mark.

  Sunlight washed us in an explosion of silence. The plane shot into blue sky, and in the absence of the gunfire, the buzzing of the engine was almost soothing.

  “Are we badly damaged?” I yelled at Ivan as he leveled off the violent maneuvering.

  “Engine’s fine, but I’ve lost some maneuverability.”

  I looked back and saw that part of the tail trailed ribbons of fabric as if it was a well-used cat toy.

  “We’re lucky,” Ivan said. “At that range we should have been dead. I’m not that good a pilot.”

  “I guess Shadows don’t have great aim.”

  “Or the gunner’s inexperienced. Those are probably operated by mechanical relays from the bridge.”

  “Damn, is there a way to approach that thing that doesn’t involve machine guns pointed at us?”

  “No. At best, we’ll have a few seconds before the gunner orients on us.”

  I felt my plan falling apart. I’d already started questioning the viability of doing another skydive when we had the option of a leisurely approach. Trying to buzz it at top speed . . . Worse, even if my plan worked, it left Ivan at the mercy of those cannons. He couldn’t escape with the whole plane like I just did.

  The whole plane.

  “Change in plan,” I said. “I just need you to fly this thing as straight as possible.”

  * * *

  —

  I expected more of an objection from Ivan, but it wasn’t the kind of environment that was conducive to an argument. He just shrugged at my plan and said, “I can’t land this thing anyway.”

  “You can’t . . .” I yelled back, unsure I’d heard him correctly over the engine.

  “Pilot has to have a few hundred hours training before they let him attempt to dock with a moving airship.”

  “You should have said something!”

  “I wasn’t sending anyone else to do this.”

  Crap. If I’d gone with my original plan, I would have left Ivan stranded in a plane he couldn’t land . . .

  I told myself to stop that train of thought and concentrate on plan B.

  As directed, Ivan brought our craft around under the blue sunlit sky and started a line of attack on the way we had come. I pushed. The sun went out, and the moonlit shadow of the enemy airship hovered about two miles ahead of us. The plane shook, fighting its damaged control surfaces, as Ivan turned into the airship’s flight path, aiming at the nose of the massive thing. Just as our bumpy course flattened out, I could see flashes from the sides of the gondola. I pushed the Mark again, and sunlight blared down on us. The plane vibrated worse when the universe changed.

  “Keep it on course!”

  “The air current’s different! We dropped a couple hundred feet.”

  “We can’t afford that!”

  “I know!”

  I pushed again, and the sun winked out. The airship loomed less than a mile ahead and above us. Ivan pulled us up into a climb, throttling the engine until it screamed. “Don’t move us again until you have to!”

  “The guns!” I yelled. In response, the airship’s turrets flashed again, and I heard their staccato thunder almost on top of the flashes.

  “Too close!” Ivan yelled over the engine, the screaming wind, and the gunfire. A line of holes tore through the lower wing on my left. The sounds of the airframe protesting were something I felt more than heard. “Wait!” A cherry-red ball of fire erupted on the right side of the engine housing, vomiting oily black smoke. The whole plane shook as the engine’s noise screeched into oblivion.

  The nose of the airship was just visible beyond the oily black smoke from the engine fire. Our nose was already dropping as the propeller stuttered to a stop, but we were too close to avoid hitting.

  “Now!” he yelled as another volley tore through the rear of the biplane, shredding the tail section. I pushed us, and again sunlight washed us, this time in a sudden, complete, silence. We were no longer in an airplane, we sat in a lump of wreckage barely more aerodynamic than my Charger, that had just reached the apex of a ballistic arc that was about to fling us down into the Atlantic.

  Before we plummeted twenty thousand feet into the ocean, I pushed again, and everything went completely black. No moon, no clouds, and even the engine fire flickered out. The silence was even more complete than before, not even the sound of wind. I gasped, and it came out as an inhuman squeak.

  Then we slammed into the floor. Fabric tore, and metal screeched in protest, I felt air rushing by as the impact threw me against the painfully boob-crushing restraints. Everything crunched to a stop, and I fell against the left side of my cockpit, which now canted at a forty-five–degree angle.

  “Ivan? You okay?” My voice sounded like a cartoon mouse. I coughed a few times to clear my throat.

  I heard a high-pitched Russian obscenity above the ticking of cooling metal. “Unhurt.” He caught his breath and grunted. In a more normal tone he followed with, “Mostly.”

  I unbuckled myself and looked around. I’d been more successful than I had a right to be. The biplane was lodged in a catwalk between two of the massive gas cells, one of which we had just burst out of.

  I could still smell smoke from the burning engine and realized I’d answered Jacob’s question, “Hydrogen or helium.” Of course, they’d probably lay off the firearms on a hydrogen-filled airship.

  I pulled myself out of the wreckage and onto the catwalk that extended between the two neighboring gas cells.

  Ivan followed me, looking around at the damage. “We’ll be losing altitude. They may have ballast to drop, but they’ve lost two gas cells.”

  “Two?”

  Ivan pointed away from the massive hole that the biplane had torn out of the one cell. I followed his gesture and saw the nose of the plane next to the canvas skin of the next cell. The propeller had torn a diagonal gash in it the length of my forearm. Not as dramatic, but a hole is a hole, I guess.

  I was still finding my feet from the impact, still shaken, when I sensed an almost familiar touch on my Mark, one that wasn’t the corrupt sensations that preceded the shadows. Whoever it was I sought, that person was here. I was about to say something when I felt something of more immediate concern; vibrations in the metal of the catwalk. It was followed by the sounds of running feet clanging in the echoless space.

  “Ivan—”

  I didn’t need to warn him, he already had his gun out. “This way,” he said with a confidence that didn’t re
ach his eyes.

  I followed him along the catwalk down the length of the ship, unsure myself of what direction the running feet came from. At least, we had a fifty percent chance of moving away from them.

  Not that we were so lucky.

  We only made it a few yards when a trio of rifle-wielding men appeared around a gas cell ahead of us. Ivan practically threw me in a gap between a gas cell and some complicated plumbing, a cramped niche of struts and valves that really wasn’t intended to accommodate one person, much less two.

  “I’m having doubts about your plan,” Ivan said.

  So was I. I thought of reprising my earlier maneuvers, Walking to midair and back, dropping us lower in the airship’s superstructure. But aside from the dangerousness of the maneuver, Ivan had inadvertently cut off that option by wedging me in this cramped space. I did the next best thing and pulled my Luger-analog out of the pocket of my borrowed greatcoat.

  Five shots, three men; those odds weren’t too bad.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t count another trio of men coming from the other direction. With our attention focused on the men down the corridor, we were caught by surprise by another group coming from behind us. We didn’t see them until rifle barrels were pointed at our heads and someone was barking in Old English to drop our weapons.

  Even though Ivan probably didn’t know the language, the meaning was clear enough. He held his hands up, gun dangling from the trigger guard. One of the gruff men snatched it from him. I followed suit, thankful at least that these weren’t Shadows. Another hand shot out and grabbed the Luger, shoving it into a wide leather belt.

  Our captors were an anachronistic lot, even for Ivan’s neck of the woods. They bore rifles that obviously came from the Imperial armory. Otherwise, they appeared out of another century entirely, clad in scale, leather, and fur. They wore hair and beards much longer than Ivan’s contemporaries.

  Not to mention they spoke a dead language that I, somehow, understood.