The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  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.

  Finishing out a neat brushstroke, Po said, “That's alright. Gideon's been tellin' me stories’a his own. He said when you were little, you always tried jumping outta windows with a bed sheet tied to your hands, so the duke had to have all Emathia's upstairs windows sealed.”

  “Thanks for that,” Reece grumbled in Gideon's direction.

  Gid held a curved piece of metal up to the hanging galley light, squinting. “Pleasure.”

  The significance of Gideon being here and not in the infirmary suddenly caught up to Reece, and he sat up straight. “Where's Owon?” he asked suspiciously.

  With an unhappy grunt, Gid jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. The Vee was sitting on the floor against the wall, reading Legends from The Voice of Space. His black eyes peered over the top of the book at Reece; from their slant, he was grinning slyly.

  “What did you do, reward him for good behavior?”

  “Aitch asked me to take him out. Said he couldn't concentrate.”

  “Sorry,” Hayden said as he came in from the corridor, his head bowed over his datascope and his eyebrows pressed together in thought. “I couldn't think with you two in there, it was too…intense. Has anyone seen Nivy?”

  Mordecai strode into the room on his heels, an empty mug in his fist. “She's up on the bridge, keepin' her eye on the autopilot.” He leaned against the counter next to Po with a muttered complaint about his back as she smilingly took his empty cup and refilled it with hot tea from the dented thermos next to her paint tin.

  “Up on the bridge,” Hayden repeated under his breath, and after making one full circuit of the room without looking up from his datascope, doubled back to the door. “She should be in bed. Honestly.” Not a second after disappearing into the corridor, he ducked his head back in through the door, pointed firmly at Gideon, and ordered in a no-nonsense voice, “Sling on, Gideon. I mean it.”

  Gideon took the sling and started using it to polish the barrel of his revolver. Hayden's irritable murmurs could be followed all the way to the end of the corridor, where they faded into the Afterquin's perpetual humming.

  Resting his forehead on the table, Reece closed his eyes, burning with heaviness. The table was hard, but he thought he might be able to convince himself he was perfectly comfortable and just fall asleep here rather than take the effort to walk the distance to the bridge.

  Click. He opened an eye and glared blurrily at the mug Po had sat by his ear. It seemed the hardest thing in the world, bringing up his head and forcing his other eye open.

  “Hey, um, Cap'n?” Po asked as he tipped back the tea and drank. “Could we maybe talk about tomorrow?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well,” she glanced anxiously at Mordecai, tugging on her braid, “me and Mordecai had an idea…and it wouldn't have to be anythin' fancy…but we thought it might be nice to maybe do somethin'. To bring everyone's spirits up, you know? We could recreate some'a the traditions, and I've got the music on the wireless, and—” Pausing, she studied Reece's blank expression, glanced again at Mordecai, and said, “You know tomorrow’s Sterlin' Eve, right?”

  “Sterling Eve?” Reece repeated, trying to summon up a mental calendar. “Nah. It can't be.”

  “It is, Cap'n,” Po insisted. “It's three weeks to the day since we left Honora.”

  Sterling Eve. That meant for Honora, tonight was the Sterling Eve Festival. Last year's festival was a surreal blur in his memories. He'd eaten the traditional holiday dinner with Mordecai and Gideon at the Rice's before they'd all taken the trolley into Caldonia together, watching as the city powered down its photon energy in favor of old-fashioned hanging lanterns. The main square had been quartered off for dancing and caroling. Bathtub-sized casks of spiced cider and cinnamon nog, sitting next to bars stacked with pumpkin crusts and cider doughnuts, were worked by peddlers wearing the long-tailed, green hat of the Sterling Patron. As midnight grew near, performers on a wooden stage in the middle of the square reenacted the centuries-old story of the Sterling Patron, for whom the holiday was named, battling the evil pirate Lousbard for the right to bring snow to the city.

  Reece had danced with Scarlet that night, he remembered vaguely.

  “What did you have in mind?” he asked, wary of Mordecai and Po putting their heads together without someone to restrain them.

  “Nothin' much,” Po said quickly, brightening. “Mordecai's gonna cook a big dinner—we've both been savin' stuff for the holiday outta our rations since we left. We were gonna bring out what we saved when it looked like the Raiders wiped the cargo bay clean, but since we had enough to make it to Oceanus…we thought…you know, it might make a nice surprise if we—I mean, you're not angry, are you?”

  “What? No.”

  “It's just…you were starin' at me funny.”

  That was probably true. He'd been thinking about her putting her rations aside so everyone else could have a nice dinner for Sterling Eve, and wondering in his delirious tiredness if maybe she'd been adopted from some distant planet where the main trade was in being nice.

  “Yes.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yes. To everything.” Reece returned his forehead to the table, yawning around his words. “Everything you do is good Po. I trust you.”

  “You trust him?” Gid asked, gesturing with his reassembled revolver at Mordecai, who was pouring himself a second cup of tea with a much too innocent smile.

  “It's just Sterling Eve,” Reece slurred, letting himself be pulled off to sleep. “What's the worst he could do?”

  The next morning, by Hayden's request, Reece made Mordecai admit to all the places he'd hung makeshift holly leaves, then went hunting, taking them down one at a time after first making sure none of the girls were around when he stepped beneath them. Despite that particular misadventure, he did feel lighter, knowing there was something to look forward to at the end of another long day at the helm—namely, dinner. Even if it was cooked by Mordecai.

  It didn't feel like Sterling Eve, or like people back on Honora could be doing something as normal as exchanging gifts or having snowball fights. But Aurelia definitely had an air of bubbling eagerness. Anywhere Reece went in his quest to track down Mordecai's holly traps, there were signs the others were as happy as Po for an excuse to celebrate. When he walked by the infirmary, snatching down some cleverly-placed holly that would have trapped Hayden in his study indefinitely, he peered in and discovered his friend humming to himself and drumming his datascope wand on the edge of his desk…when he wasn't using it like a conductor's wand, flicking it in the air.

  On his way back to the bridge, Reece stopped and poked his nose into the galley, following a delicious smell that made his stomach lurch hungrily. What he found was Po, sitting on Gideon's shoulders and draping streamers of red and green silk and velvet from the ceiling over the table as he handed them up to her one at a time. Gid had tied one of the red strips like a band around his forehead.

  “Where'd you get the fabric?” Reece asked, and the Gideon-Po tower turned to face him.

  “Scarlet! She let us rip up a couple'a her dresses!” Pausing, Po traced a finger down one of the hanging, shimmering banners. “It's kinda sad. They were so pretty.”

  “But it was fun rippin' them up,” Gideon offered as he passed her up a piece of red velvet.

  “Yeah, it was,” she admitted.

  Laughing, and glad for a reason to laugh, Reece started backing out of the galley, and noticed Owon, sitting in the corner with his beakish nose pointed down at the book in his lap. Without lifting his head, he humorlessly smiled and turned a page. Reece's high spirits dipped significantly. Without the Vee, he might've been able to make himself forget what had happened on Leto long enough to really enjoy this Sterling Eve, but Owon had a way of rubbing salt in Reece’s wounds. For fun. He marched determinedly out of the galley as O
won leisurely opened his mouth to make an observation, calling over his shoulder, “Gid, you'll probably want to get her off your shoulder before Hayden sees.”

  Unfortunately for Gideon, when Reece turned the corner, it was Hayden he bumped into, hurrying from the other direction with what looked like another dress donation from Scarlet. Try as he might to outrun the storm, Reece hadn't made it far before Hayden's shrill voice rose up behind him, “What part of 'don't put any unnecessary strain on it' didn't translate for you?”

  Reece stared blindly into the Perseus Stream with his boots on the flightpanel, toying with his watch and waiting for its minute hand to move onto six, the allotted hour for The Aurelia's official Sterling Eve celebration. His stomach felt like it was trying to claw its way free and go chasing after the mouth-watering smells wandering up from the galley.

  “Do The Heron celebrate Sterling Eve, Nivy?”

  Nivy, curled up sideways in the navigator's chair, nodded. He stopped playing with his watch and looked at her with it hanging from one of his fingers, frowning. She wore the empty expression of someone dozing, but she was radiating a feeling like she wasn't finished with her answer.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She slowly opened her eyes to stare thoughtfully out the canopy window before signing, Where are The Kreft?

  “Not here. That's all that matters.” He repaid her disparaging look with a helpless shrug. “Look, I'll admit it's odd we haven't seen them, but there’s nothing for it but to keep on to The Ice Ring and see what happens.”

  Unhurriedly picking up his boots one at a time from the flightpanel, Reece straightened, cracked his back, and toggled a few switches on the green graph radar with one eye on the speckled planet the size and color of a robin’s egg in the distance. Exiting the Perseus Stream had been twice as smooth as before they’d swapped turbines; Aurelia had hardly jerked at all as she’d come into Oceanus’s small piece of space. The radar was quiet, the Voice as open and cold as always.