The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  “I said it's almost like bein' in class again, only boringer.”

  Scarlet went as red as her namesake. “It's more boring, you illiterate ox.”

  After a beat, Gideon glanced questioningly at Hayden, who mumbled something beneath his breath. Gideon's eyebrows shot up towards his dark hairline.

  “I ain't illiterate! Hey!” Gid barked at Owon as the Vee took a seat. “No one told you to sit!”

  Owon sneered. “No, and if you had, you can rest assured we would be standing. We do not obey the whims of—” He looked at Scarlet, who paled a bit under his too-black stare. “—illiterate oxen.”

  “Alright, cut it out,” Reece called tiredly, rubbing his forehead. Tutor Agnes had been right. Once upon a time, she had told his Mechanical Engineering class that a captain was a jack of all trades, more than just the pilot—the cook, the doctor, the mechanic. He tagged peacemaker onto that list not quite happily. “Who wants to be on the expedition team?”

  He should've known better than to ask. Everyone had a perfectly legitimate reason for wanting to come along (well, except for Mordecai, who was merely after some Letoian tobacco he'd heard about on one of his escapades). He sighingly gave them a moment to argue, his chin on his fist.

  “—can't come anyways,” Scarlet was saying to Gideon, calm, but with bite to her words. “You have to stay and watch…him.”

  “It's Mordecai's turn to watch him.” Brightening, Gid grinned and added, “Unless you're sayin' I'm the only one up to the job.”

  Scarlet just looked at him, but the look was packed full of words Reece would have been startled to hear coming from her dignified mouth.

  “Gid and Owon are both coming. Don't get excited,” Reece added when Owon's eyes flickered to him. “Unless the prospect of spending the rest of your life rotting in a Letoian prison cell appeals to you. Then by all means, jump around.”

  “We're dumpin' him?” Gideon exclaimed, and elbowed Hayden excitedly.

  With a slow grace that might very well have been brought on by the presence of Gideon's revolver at his back, Owon stood. “We did not come this far to be cast aside,” he said coolly, his lip curling. It didn't do much for his misshapen nose. “If you leave us now, we will hunt you. We will—”

  “You heard my terms, Owon. Be dumped or be—” Trailing off, Reece floundered a hand in Gideon's direction. When Owon's face darkened, confirming that he'd gotten the hint, he went on, “You can all come, but don't bring more than a bag each. I want to get that turbine and be out of Leto in…what is it, Po?”

  Dropping her wagging hand, Po said, “I'm gonna need a full afternoon with the turbine, at least.”

  “A day, then.”

  A day to get rid of the Vee, replace the thermal turbine, restock on necessaries, and be on their way again. Twenty-four hours should be plenty of time to accomplish all that and maybe get some shuteye on the side. So long as The Kreft didn't show their ugly white faces.

  The rear hatch opened up into blackness as thick as fabric. Reece half expected to reach out and come away with a handful of it. He'd known to expect the constant dark, but the heat came as a surprise; the air was humid enough to make his skin feel sticky. His winter coat lay in a pile with all the others' against the cargo bay wall, and the rucksack strapped over his shoulders was already making his back break out in sweat.

  “I'm surprised they haven't sent any sort of welcome delegation,” Scarlet said as she twisted her hair into a golden bun on top of her head. “Surely they saw us break atmosphere.”

  “I don't know,” Reece admitted, rolling up his shirt sleeves. “They didn't send a log, if they did.”

  Gideon, who had his shoulder pressed against the frame of the hatch, glared out into the night, tapping the barrel of his revolver against the side of his leg. “It's as quiet as a graveyard out there.”

  “That's just the planet's natural environment,” Scarlet told him. “The clouds are responsible for the darkness, but they account for the heat and the silence as well. It's like all of Leto has been shut in a giant warming cupboard.”

  Reece twisted at the sound of footsteps, looking back at Po, Hayden, and Nivy, who he'd sent to fetch photon wands for the lot of them. He accepted his wand and clicked it on to test its charge, then flashed it over Mordecai and Owon, standing in the corner. Owon maintained a flat expression, but there was most definitely a new degree of coldness in his eyes. Reece would've been lying if he'd said he was looking forward to poking around in the dark with Owon a mere crazed pounce away.

  “Lead the way, Gid,” Reece ordered, hesitantly turning away from Owon and his cold-burning eyes.

  Without further ado, Gideon hoisted up his gun and his photon wand, one crossed over the other, and started out the hatch. The beam of his wand stood out like a bold white line drawn across dark parchment.

  Reece ducked outside. One step his boots were on firm metal, the next, on soft, warm sand. His photon wand worked for finding his footing, but beyond that, it was mostly just a comfort, something to hold onto in the darkness that seemed to go on forever. He could dimly make out where the flat horizon stopped and the cloudy sky began, but only because the eastern skies were tinged slightly green.

  Gideon caught him by the shoulder and turned him around, pointing with his photon wand at a place in the sky that seemed somehow blacker than the rest. After a second, there came a series of quick, colorful flashes—blue, yellow, red, purple—that backlit the rolling shapes of the clouds and made Reece's eyes water over. He made a noise of puzzlement. In the half-seconds when the lightning lit the landscape, all that could be seen in every direction was desert. Empty, rolling dessert. No roads, no trees—only some scrappy bushes, and staggered every half-mile or so, tall metallic towers, probably for drawing down lightning.

  “I don't like this place,” Po whispered as she bumped into Reece. He could barely make out the lightness of her hair.

  Scarlet's voice said from the other side of Gideon, “I'm sure this is perfectly…normal.”

  “Last I heard,” Reece said dryly, “Leto was inhabited.”

  He did a quick headcount and looked back at The Aurelia, just a big, hulking shadow now that her rear hatch had been closed. The Letoians better know how to find her again. If the Letoians themselves could be found at all.

  “Pair up,” he ordered. The words were barely out of his mouth before Po wound her arm through his, nearly cutting off his circulation.

  They walked in a slow cluster. Heading north, Reece thought, though it was hard to judge without the stars. The crew was quiet except for when the colored lightning made someone gasp or mutter. He kept expecting to feel raindrops, between the clouds and the lightning and the heaviness in the air. Hoping to feel raindrops, actually. In less than a mile, he had worked up the sweat of a good hard run.

  “What's that?” Hayden's voice asked. He and Gideon were walking on Reece and Po's heels; Reece had been listening to the agitated click-clicks of Gideon toying with his revolver for well over two miles, now. “That reflection in the sand…see it? No, don't shine your beams at it. It's easier to see without. Look.”

  Everyone hesitantly aimed their wands at the ground and stared ahead. Sure enough, something was weakly glittering in the green half-light, something smooth and flat.

  “Water!” Po exclaimed loudly, then slapped a hand over her mouth, looking around. “Sorry. But water means people, don't it?”

  Gently unwinding her fingers from the crook of his elbow—he expected when she wanted to take it again, the grooves she'd made would still be there—Reece eyed the pool uneasily. He guessed it wasn't that much stranger than the rest of this place, but he'd never seen water that looked so still, not on the calmest spring day. It almost looked like a mirror. And everyone knew that mirrors were nothing if not creepy in the dark.

  “Gid, Nivy?” Sand swished against his pants as they shuffled to join him. “The rest of you, stay here. And keep your wands on, pointed up, so we can see them clearly. Got O
won, Mordecai?”

  “Well sure, he's right…oh, dirt.”

  “That ain't funny, old man,” Gideon said, but not before he snorted.

  “We think it is.”

  “No one cares what you think,” Reece told Owon curtly. He wished he could shake the feeling Owon was seeing him clear as day with his serum-enhanced eyes; it made his skin prickle. “Hayden, watch for the all-clear signal.”

  Hayden clicked his photon wand off and then on three times. “That one?” His voice took on a different tone; Reece could just imagine him looking at Scarlet with that loopy smile on his face, aiming to impress. “We used to sneak out of Dormitory Taurus all the time. Out the window. We would climb right down the trellis.”

  Reece wished he could've gotten a good look at Gid's face; he wanted to know if it was as astonished as his. There had been a time when Hayden would never have admitted to sneaking out after hours.

  “You got the signal wrong,” Gideon told Hayden, a grin in his voice. “Three clicks is what?”

  Reece answered sagely, “It's safe to come out, no one's around to see you've been swimming naked in the lake.”

  He could practically hear Hayden swelling up indignantly. “You stole my clothes, Reece! After you tricked me into the lake!”

  “You never did find that injured gursa, did you? I could've sworn we told him it was right there in the shallows,” Reece said to Gideon with a shake of his head.

  “Blind as Freherian swampghost without his glasses. Ow!” Gideon growled. Just as Reece opened his mouth to ask him what was wrong, someone flicked his ear, and he jumped. When he turned his beam on Nivy, she was shaking her head at him disparagingly.

  “Alright, alright,” he grumbled, sourly rubbing his ear. “Just watch for the signal, Hayden. Two clicks.”

  He, Nivy, and Gideon started for the distant pool of water. The pool was really more of a pond, almost perfectly round and nestled in a bowl of sloping sand. It looked like black glass, bouncing off the colors of the lightning in strange ripples of light. His hand sweating on his photon wand, Reece went to the water's edge, and with a careful toe, prodded the surface of the water. It rippled slowly, more like oil, or syrup. They wouldn't be drinking from it any time soon.

  “I'm starting to think we should go back to Aurelia,” he said quietly, more to himself than the others. He looked at Nivy as she hoisted her rucksack, crouched by the pool's edge, and tapped her finger against the water. She rolled the wet fingertip against her thumb, smelling it, then touched it tentatively to her tongue. Spitting, she shuddered and leaped to her feet, holding her hand out to Reece. He aimed his wand at it, confused until he realized the sheen of moisture on her finger was red. Oh, bogrosh. That'd better not be—

  Gideon's hand coming down on his shoulder about made him jump out of his boots.

  “Something's out there,” Gid said, tensing. “On the next rise. Watchin' us.”

  Reece twitched his eyes in the direction of the rise. His lungs went cold. More than one something was out there. The three horse-sized shadows were dark against the green clouds, and they gave a feeling of watching. One was seated on its hind legs, like a dog. They could have been statues for how little they moved…only they hadn't been there a minute ago.

  “Move,” Reece whispered to the others, though he could've just as easily meant it for himself. His legs were trying to lock in place. “Slowly. Move.”

  Together, he, Nivy, and Gideon backed up the opposite bank, waiting for the things to move, to leap, to make any sign of being alive. Nothing. But the feeling of watching grew more pronounced, as though Reece could feel the eyes he couldn't see taking measure of his every step.

  “The others,” Gideon suddenly said. “The others are runnin'.”

  Reece craned his neck a fraction to one side. The beams of light from the others' photon wands were jumping and sweeping as if they were being carried in swinging arms. And they were getting closer. A gunshot sounded.

  “Owon,” Reece guessed through gritted teeth. He wet his lips. The things remained as they were. “Wait till we're down to where they can't see us. Then run.”

  It seemed the longest ten seconds in the world, those ten seconds they crept backward till the creatures on the rise were slowly halved, then cut entirely out of sight by the crest of the hill. As soon as the last silhouetted head slid behind the hilltop, Reece spun and fell into a dead sprint back towards the others, not a step behind Gideon or ahead of Nivy.

  For a second, the adrenaline in his ears garbled the others' distant shouts, and he took them for warnings that Owon was on the loose. He wanted to shout back, to ask which way he'd gone, but the thought of those shapes in the darkness stopped his voice up in his throat.

  Then two words suddenly leaped loud and clear out of the echoes. He cursed, grabbing Gid by the back of his shirt to stop him from barreling onward. The others were materializing into bouncing shadows on the near horizon, heading straight for them.

  “Let go!” Gideon snarled. “If that bleedin' Vee even—”

  “Listen, Gid!”

  They paused together, Reece with a hand on Gideon's arm, Gideon with a bunch of Reece's shirt caught up in his fist. Nivy skidded to a whishing stop in the sand beside them, her eyes bugging.

  “Go back!” Scarlet was screaming. “Not this way! Go back!”

  Every hair on Reece's arms tried to stand on end as that watched feeling returned tenfold. He turned.

  A sequence of violent blue and green flashes froze the picture, made the shape of the hill a stark outline and turned the sand a sickly white. The three creatures crested the hilltop at a calm prowl, then stopped to observe Reece and his friends. Monsters. That's all they could be. They didn't even look animal, though they moved on four legs, with hind feet that were long and flat like a rabbit's. Their hairless skin looked black and slick; spiked vertebrae stood out in a ridge down their backs. But their faces…their faces were the worst. Their heads were almost canine, except their snouts were longer, with gums and teeth their lips couldn't quite cover, and fanned ears pressed flat against their protruding skulls. Lidless albino eyes rolled in deep sockets, making them look rabid. Not that them being rabid would've made much of a difference at this point. More a tip of the iceberg thing.

  The middlemost creature suddenly tilted back its snout and let out a long keen, something like the screech of an eagle and the scream of a woman.

  Nivy latched onto Reece's sleeve and started pulling him, and despite Scarlet's words, he stumbled after her, shocked senseless. He didn't look back to see if the creatures were giving chase, but he thought he could hear the dull, bass thrum-thrum, thrum-thrum of padded feet thumping against sand at a gallop. Gideon spun the barrel of his revolver back over his shoulder, let off two rounds, and cursed. He fired again.

  They were headed for a collision course with their friends and whatever it was they were running from. More monsters, unless Reece's guess was wrong. How many were out there? Three was bad enough…but seven? Eight? He didn't much savor the idea of becoming these things' own personal Reece-on-a-stick. He veered right with Nivy and Gideon and drew out his hob. If Gideon wasn't having luck with his revolver, Reece doubted his hob would do much, but dirt if he was going to get bleeding eaten alive without letting a few bleeding rounds off!

  “Run! Run!” Hayden shouted as the two groups crashed into one. He yelped, tripping after Po and Scarlet, who were running hand in hand.

  Reece didn't bother pointing out there was nowhere to run to. He dove, grabbed Hayden under the arm, and heaved him upright.

  “They came out of…nowhere,” Hayden gasped. “Owon…saw them coming...”

  Reece looked sharply over at Owon, who was keeping pace with them, and not even breaking a sweat besides. In fact, Reece got the feeling that he was actually hanging back to match their stride.

  “You can try to be rid of us, Reece Sheppard,” Owon said as though hearing Reece's thoughts, “but we will return you to our brethren first. On
ly then will you die. Besides. We have no wish to be eaten alive. That is a fate we would only wish on a select few.” The glimmer in his black eyes made it clear that Reece had made the top of that list. Well, today just might be his lucky day.

  Twisting, Reece growled. Mordecai and Gideon had fallen back to the halfway point between the crew and the creatures—there looked to be about six in all—and the creatures were still bounding forward, making less sound than a breeze, even when a Pantedan bullet took one right between the eyes. It took the last of Reece's willpower to not shout a curse when the creature skated forward on its stomach, fountaining up sand, shook out its head, and started forward again.

  “It might interest you to know, Reece Sheppard,” Owon went on almost conversationally, “that there is a tall brass hatch in the sand to the west.”

  “What?”

  “And there are men rising out of it. Flagging us down, it would seem.”

  “What?”

  Looking slightly deranged with her hair half out of its bun and her skirts held up to her knees, Scarlet shrieked at Owon, “Then take us there, Vee! Or you're as dead as the bleeding rest of us!”

  Four gunshots went off in quick succession, and either Gid or Mordecai shouted. Reece dropped out from under Hayden's arm and gave him a shove in the right direction, shouting at Owon, “Just take them!”, then adding for Nivy just as desperately, “Shoot him if he runs!” He turned on his heel, bringing up his hob, only to grunt when Gideon hurtled into him, knocking every last scrape of wind from his lungs. Gid had shoulders like bleeding boulders.

  “No good!” he growled, pushing Reece on. “They ain't goin' down!”

  Reece wheezed out, “Mordecai?”

  With a wicked grin, Gideon looked over his shoulder. Reece squinted. Mordecai had picked a grand old time to go and act his age—one of the creatures was pounding at his heels, about to make a killing bound. As Reece started to shout a warning, the creature pounced. Mordecai spun down into a deep-kneed Handling stance, simultaneously bringing his gun arm around as if throwing a right hook. Hand and revolver both disappeared inside the thing's maw. The creature didn't even have time to clamp its teeth over Mordecai's fist before he fired, one dampened crack. Reece was just as glad he couldn't make out the details of the creature’s head blasting apart, of the dark chunks falling against the green-tinged sky. Before the creature's headless body had finished slumping lifelessly into the sand, the rest of its pack dove at it with claws as long as steak knives, shredding it greedily while Mordecai made his getaway.