My lungs ached from holding my breath, and every primal instinct in my brain urged me to panic. It took a supreme effort of will to keep from scrambling madly, swimming in any direction.
I looked around, eyes burning with saltwater, until I saw the direction that seemed lighter, above and behind my left shoulder. I turned myself in the right direction and began kicking toward the light. I was less than twenty feet down, and I broke the surface after three seconds of swimming.
I gasped for air under a cloudless blue sky.
“I’m alive, bitch!” I screamed at the sky. The words were sucked away by the emptiness of the surrounding ocean. I looked around, and saw nothing but water, sky, and horizon.
The starkness of it began sinking in.
“Alive” was a relative term.
* * *
—
THE good news, in terms of schadenfreude anyway, was that my antagonist was in the same boat as I was. In fact, she was probably already dead if my kick had knocked her out. Even if it had stunned her a minute or two, she’d have to Walk out of the wreck underwater, and face the same disorienting panic I had with less air, and from farther down. Even then, she’d end up, at best, in the same position I was, stranded in the middle of an ocean. I didn’t care how many universes there might be surrounding me right now, I was certain that all of them looked pretty much like where I was now. Whoever Napoleon might have married, or if Waterloo happened, or who won the Civil War . . . I doubted any of that changed the size or location of the Atlantic Ocean.
I floated for a while, recovering. Minutes passed without incident, no last-minute Shadow popping up to attack me. The water was calm, and there wasn’t any sound but the gentle rocking of the waves.
Okay, the fight was over, but I couldn’t support myself forever by kicking my legs. I needed something to, at the very least, help me float.
When I felt up to it, I pushed myself back to the only place I thought there might be something like that.
* * *
—
IT was daylight back where the airship had gone down, and it had drifted—or I had—halfway to the horizon. Fortunately, the weather was calm, and I was a good swimmer. It took hours, it seemed, before I started swimming through a grotesque debris field that seemed to be half made of corpses and parts of corpses.
An impractical part of my mind had me look for Ivan in the midst of the dead, until I saw my first shark. After that, I stayed hyperaware of my own location, ready to push myself off into another ocean at the first sign of danger.
Fortunately, there was much easier quarry for the sharks, and none came very close to me.
The airship floated, half-deflated, looming like a half-rotted corpse of a whale, complete with a sky-darkening flock of sea birds looking for an easy meal. The hump of the wreck spilled its shredded envelope to trail in the sea in all directions, and once I was within about ten yards, I had to change from swimming to pulling myself along its flayed skin.
By the time I reached the part of the wreck that still resembled an airship, I was a good five feet above the water, which I could see below me through the occasional tear in the envelope. I couldn’t climb any farther, and I sprawled where I was, facing the sky, letting the sun dry the ocean from my skin.
The relief at my survival slowly gave way to dread as my respite from swimming gave me the leisure to think about my situation. I knew enough about the ocean to realize that I was facing death from thirst or exposure. I was most likely the only survivor, and I was probably hundreds of miles from another living soul. Any people who might want to look for me were in another universe.
I lay there, on the skin of a dead airship, and realized that, as isolated I had felt for most of my life, I had never really known what alone was. Nothing like seeing my own death beating down on me from a clear blue sky to put my earlier self-pity into perspective. Especially when I thought that Ivan did not get this far.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him falling under the Shadows, out the window and into Chaos . . .
“I hope it was quick,” I whispered through lips that were already cracked.
* * *
—
I let my exhaustion play out, and I might have had a few hours of delirious sleep, but I didn’t give up. Jacob was still alive, and I promised I would get him back home. So, when I could manage movement again, I crawled out of the sun, through a large tear in the envelope of the airship, and into the wreckage.
It was cool inside, and enough sunlight shone through holes in the skin for me to see the inner skin of a gas cell that had remained remarkably intact; no longer enough to keep this beast in the air, but more than enough to keep it from sinking.
I crawled through the shade and leaned against it. The skin of the gas cell felt clammy and a little damp. I felt thirsty enough that I sucked some of the damp off my fingers. Surprisingly, I didn’t taste any salt. I wiped my hand against it again and sucked more moisture to make sure.
I wouldn’t call the water fresh. It tasted like old machinery and dirty socks, but it was salt-free. The damp wasn’t spray from the ocean, it was condensation.
I wasn’t going to die from dehydration at least.
* * *
—
I lived alone in that wreck for about two and a half days. Once I found shelter and a source of water, however foul tasting, I was out of immediate danger. I could have lasted as long as my wreck stayed afloat. I even had a food source, as fish had trapped themselves in the maze of drifting canvas and twisted girders trailing in the water below me. When the morning sun hit the water below me, I saw dozens of silver glints floating between the intact gas cell and the skin of the ship.
By the middle of the third day, I had gotten as far as collecting a small pile of fish near where I made my little camp, but not quite as far as biting into one. Sure, I was hungry, but I wasn’t that hungry yet though the smell was no longer that unappetizing.
I also spent my time, most of it, crawling through the accessible parts of the wreck and collecting pieces of it that would be useful in putting together a raft. Unlike my late sister, I wasn’t up to pushing a whole airship through Chaos, but a raft? That I could manage. If I collected enough water and enough fish, I figured I could probably make it to a coastline somewhere, just using my Mark to keep me in seas that were calm with currents going in the right direction.
My Mark still ached inside from my sister’s attack, but I figured I could manage.
I was proud enough of my plan and my budding survival skills that I was almost annoyed when I heard someone calling out to the wreck.
Almost.
I scrambled out of the skin of the airship and waved my arms, screaming to the ship sliding into view around the nose of the dead airship, “Over here!” I was hoarse before I realized I called out in Old English.
* * *
—
SURPRISE number one, the ship was a wooden-clad steamship with long fluted cast-iron stacks emblazoned with the blue-and-gold double eagle of the Empire. Surprise number two, the first person to greet me when they hauled me aboard was Ivan Roskov, Sergeant of the Imperial White Guard.
“You’re alive!” we said to each other. Yelled really. I can’t say who hugged who, but I know we didn’t stop until we were both groaning.
Apparently, the angle of descent of the doomed airship wasn’t quite as steep as it had seemed in the heat of combat. By the time Ivan had fallen out the window, we were already close enough to the surface of the water for the fall to be survivable. Ivan had cracked a few ribs, but he’d managed to remain conscious enough to swim to the surface.
It also turned out that we were not as far from the Empire as I had thought. Movement though Chaos was a complicated product of the ability of the Walker, the physical speed at which the Walker moved, and how much mass the Walker moved along with them. My sister
had been powerful, powerful enough to drag the airship along, but the airship was huge, and had only been moving barely twenty miles an hour. The net effect was that Ivan had been dropped within swimming distance of the Empire.
So had I, for that matter, not that I’d known it.
The steamship was driven back through Chaos by the coordinated efforts of five members of the Guard, and we returned to Ivan’s world in less than twenty minutes.
After that, it was another three days on the cramped steamship before we reached land somewhere on the coast of Greenland. The Emperor’s airship had preceded us there, dominating the sky above the little fishing village that served as the steamship’s port. I saw the massive beast’s silhouette and sighed. I was back where I had started, semiprisoner of an Emperor with an unhealthy interest in marriage as a tool of diplomacy. I would have run as soon as we hit ground, if it wasn’t for the fact that Jacob was still on board that thing.
Turns out I needn’t have worried. The attack of the Shadows within the Emperor’s most secure domain had severely shaken him. And, apparently, the fact that Ivan had returned to report my attack on the Shadows at their source had shaken him more. The man, despite the global Empire, was at heart more cautious than wise. His rescue mission was driven less by a desire to retrieve a potential consort, than it was to ensure that the enemy was, in fact, dead, and no one of any major power was left to plot revenge or a subsequent attack.
The Emperor now seemed much more interested in my goodwill than anything else; enough so that, when I asked for Jacob and me to be returned to my car so we could travel home, he seemed relieved. In the end, I managed to escape simply by signing a formal diplomatic treaty with the Empire.
* * *
—
IT wasn’t until nearly a week later, back in DC, that I discovered the catch.
A contingent of the White Guard escorted us to the fringes of the District. Unlike our arrival, this time our carriage had windows, and I was able to see the city as they took us away from the Mall. I watched the Emperor’s airship disengage from the Washington Monument and float east. It moved slowly enough that it was still hanging above the skyline when we reached our destination.
One of the Guard opened the door for us and we stepped out next to the train station. The station was a small city unto itself, all brick and glass and cast iron, the air heavy with coal smoke, steam, and the sounds of idling machinery.
I looked at the station and sighed. “I was hoping to get my car back.”
Jacob got out next to me and said, “After everything, I’m not going to complain about a train ride back to Cleveland.”
“Even if I could, I don’t think they’d like me to take one of their trains back.”
One of the guards bowed slightly and gestured down a brick-paved street and said, “This way, my Lady.”
“Sure,” I said, following him.
Jacob and I followed the brightly-uniformed guard, and for a moment I was struck by how the whole scene seemed to have been lifted whole out of some nineteenth century novel—Dickens or Austen. We were dressed for the part: Jacob in a brown tweed suit and bowler hat that made him look like the wealthy client in a Sherlock Holmes story, and I had been given a white dress that someone must have lifted out of a Seurat painting. Our guide was in a Napoleonic dress uniform out of central casting, all blue, red, and white.
As we followed him between the low brick buildings and away from the station platforms, Jacob said, “I wonder if I still have a job.”
“I’m sorry I dragged you—”
“Dana, we’ve been over that.”
“I shouldn’t have—”
“I agreed to come with you. Stop with the angst about it.”
I sighed. “We’re probably both out of a job. We’ve been gone nearly a month.”
Jacob laughed.
I gave him a dirty look. “What’s so funny about losing our jobs?”
“You have to admit, after facing a horde of cannibal zombies, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal.”
“It still isn’t funny,” I said. I had to look away from him and bite my lip to keep from laughing myself.
“Here we are, my Lady.” The guard stopped in front of a sliding door in one of the brick buildings. The building looked like a stable, low and long, with half-high windows evenly spaced along the upper part of the wall down its length. The door was heavy, wood, about ten feet square, and painted a deep forest green. It hung on a track mounted on the wall above us.
The guard took out a brass key and removed a heavy padlock from the door before he pulled it aside. It revealed a long brick aisleway between dozens of currently empty stalls.
Something sat between the ranks of stalls, covered by a canvas tarpaulin, something vaguely car-shaped.
“You’re kidding!” I said, running up to it.
“Dana?” Jacob made a token protest, for the sake of decorum I guessed. But I didn’t really care if I was acting like a six-year-old at Christmas. I yanked the canvas until its own weight started pulling it off the car beneath.
There was my Charger, intact. They’d even washed it. The fenders shone in the light from the open door, the rims practically gleamed.
From behind me, I heard a familiar Russian-accented voice. “Meets with your approval?”
I turned around and saw that Ivan had walked up to the doorway behind us. Unlike his fellow guardsman, he wore civilian clothes, much like Jacob’s, except his suit was a forest green and accented with a feathered cap that seemed to have come from an Alp somewhere. He also carried a suitcase.
“Ivan—” I began to say.
“What are you doing here?” Jacob finished the question for me.
He set down the suitcase, reached into the inside of his jacket, and took out a small folded piece of parchment with a prominent wax seal. He walked up and handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“From the Emperor,” Ivan told me. “Open it.”
I peeled the document open, tearing the seal, feeling the apprehension as I faced another complication. If this was somehow keeping me from leaving, I was probably going to punch someone, starting with Ivan.
I looked at the parchment and saw a short paragraph in French, repeated in English. I read the English one a few times before I started laughing.
“What is it?” Jacob asked.
“The first official diplomatic act between our world and the Empire,” I folded the paper and handed it to Jacob. “Keep that safe. It’s probably historic or something.”
He took the paper, frowning. I looked at Ivan and said, “Grab your suitcase.”
I opened the door and was gratified to see that they had left the keys in the ignition. I popped the trunk just in time to hear Jacob say, “Ambassador?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
S. Andrew Swann, also known as S.A. Swiniarski, has published more than twenty novels over the past eighteen years, which include science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He has a background in mechanical engineering. His latest series is his epic space opera, the Apotheosis trilogy, and his humorous fantasy series, the Dragon Princess novels.
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