The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  After a full minute of tentatively edging through the shadows, another light bloomed as if in response to Canter’s, this one a good twenty feet over their heads. It leaked in string-thin shafts through the grating of a metal bridge.

  “Hey,” Nekoda called as he flagged them down with his dome light. His blue Pantedan eyes blazed against his washed-out skin. To Reece’s astonishment, there was a tawny hawk perched on his free hand, its talons curled about his gloved fingers. “Up the stairs. Bear left.”

  Canter hurried towards her Handler of a husband, forcing Nivy and Reece to keep up. Climbing the narrow, rickety stairs with his hands bound proved a challenge, but Reece managed, mostly by not letting himself feel stupid every time he tripped.

  As he caught up to Nivy at the top of the stairs, he noticed her toying with her sleeve uneasily as she eyed Nekoda. There was another thing he’d have to eventually ask her about. Gideon hadn’t been the first Pantedan she’d ever met, like she’d left the rest of the crew to assume. She’d acted like The Eudoran War had been news to her, but how could it have been, when she was one step away from being related to someone the war had left homeless?

  “Illie says this one’s cellmate is out with Mose and a team, tryin’ to find one’a their lost crew members,” Nekoda told Canter. She held her wrist up to him; the hawk carefully stepped onto her arm with a rustle of its tawny wings, and she fondly brushed a knuckle down its breast. “Two more are in the infirmary. That accounts for all’a the ones Sheppard mentioned.”

  “Where are we?” Nivy demanded. She nudged Reece with an elbow and nodded at a riveted door mostly obscured by Nekoda’s bulk. When Nekoda leaned a little to the left to wrap a snug arm around Canter’s waist, he revealed a grimy porthole window tinged orange with firelight.

  “Outside our new command center.” Canter shrugged. Her bird shuffled its wings. “Like I said. A lot has changed since you left.”

  “A new—” Nivy echoed incredulously, then broke off with an exasperated look, like she suspected Canter was mocking her. “What was wrong with the old one?”

  Canter smiled and said as though she had maddeningly limitless patience, “They can monitor things better from here. Does it drive you crazy, being so behind on the times? And to think, you used to be such a celebrity around here.”

  “Stop goadin’ her, Canter,” Nekoda said in a lazy voice, half-turning to open the door by its long vertical handle. “Asa and Illie are waitin’.” He considered Reece expressionlessly. “They prolly don’t want him in there.”

  Canter snorted. “It doesn’t matter. Nivy showed him the history. At this point, we’re either going to kill him or decide to trust him.”

  If that was true, Reece would have preferred not to be presented to The Six looking like he’d been raked over a washboard, but Nekoda left him no choice. Shrugging, he planted a pale hand on Reece’s shoulder and pushed him through the door on Nivy’s heels, his leather holsters creaking.

  It didn’t look like a command center. No bright lights, no green graph radars, no hovering, tight-lipped generals. Two people sat across from each other at a stout oak table in front of a stone hearth, warming their hands around tin mugs in silence. A blank screen trailing wires hung on a stake driven through the middle of the table, almost like a road sign.

  Most of the other furnishings were draped with sheets and roped off for good measure, but a long console running the length of the back wall had been exposed, and it was a checkerboard of buttons, levers, and switches. The two people at the table—a petite woman with black hair as short as Reece’s, and a man whose youngish face was belied by his light grey hair and tired eyes—were watching a hunched figure at the console, their postures and expressions tense.

  After a moment, Nivy cleared her throat. The man at the table glanced up, saw Nivy, and murmured, “Illie.”

  Reece caught his breath through his teeth. Illie was Nivy’s mother; that made the man Asa, her father. He straightened deliberately and wished his hands weren’t bound, so he felt more like her captain and less like a pet on a leash, expected to heel. Not the way he usually opted to meet a girl’s parents for the first time.

  When Illie saw Nivy, she popped to her feet and said a little weakly, “Nivy. You’re home.” After obviously fighting with herself for a moment, she jerkily came forward and folded her arms around Nivy like she was rehearsing something she had read about but never tried. Nivy awkwardly suffered the hug. “We feared the worst. When the prisoner spoke of you…” Blinking as she realized Reece was the prisoner, she dropped her hands and frowned, instantly business-like. “So it’s true? Everything he told us?”

  “Yes,” Nivy said, watching her mother. “But you already knew that. You probably knew it the minute you started interrogating him.”

  Asa clapped down his mug. “Must you spoil the moment for your mother? Nekoda, take the prisoner back to his cell. I suspect Nivy’s going to insist on getting her way again, but if we can’t execute him, we can at least keep him under lock and key until we’ve sorted out this mess.”

  Nivy calmly raised a stiff arm to bar Nekoda’s way. She looked neither surprised nor offended, but Reece could hear her grinding her teeth. “You’re angry, Father. I understand. But Reece—”

  “Angry?” Steepling his hands on the table in front of him, Asa leaned forward and snapped, “You stole an invaluable ancestral artifact, hijacked one of our only ships, and went off on an adventure without telling us where you were going only to return with a handful of untrustables. I am appalled.”

  “Asa,” Illie said quietly but sternly, her hand on Nivy’s shoulder. “She would not have compromised the base without good reason.”

  “There can be no good reason for compromising the base!” Asa retorted as he stood, thundering now. “She would have to hand me a button to blink The Kreft out of existence for me to believe her little stunt was more than a quest to prove herself like Tolen!”

  “Do you really think me that selfish?” Nivy demanded. Her anger was the quick, sharp flash of hot lightning in the midst of her father’s booming storm. “Just because I disagree with you on how we ought to be fighting this war—”

  “A war that quarreling will not help win,” interrupted a curt voice.

  Reece had altogether forgotten the figure by the console, but glancing at it again, he didn’t know how. The bald man moved powerfully, like an ancient lion taking his time, as he paced before the hearth. A whole head shorter than Reece but twice as broad in a tight, compact way, he had meaty hands that looked as capable as Gideon’s and eyes that pierced as keenly as Nivy’s.

  “Asa, you said yourself after Nivy left that we would have sent someone to investigate the ships eventually. What’s done is done.” Pausing against the backdrop of fire, the man scrutinized Reece and gave a walrus-like harrumph. “This must be the young captain who piloted The Aurelia?”

  “This is him,” Nivy agreed. As she turned to look at Reece and simultaneously hide her expression from their company, she shot him a grim, determined look that he took to mean she would watch his back. He wondered why she suddenly saw the need to. “Captain Reece Sheppard, Palatine First of Honora.”

  “Nimrod Wells. First of the Martial Guild.” Nimrod’s deeply tanned hand was rocky hard and cold as it clamped Reece’s, jangling his manacles. He half expected the Martial First to examine his canines and check his ears; his eyes were that probing. “I understand Nivy showed you our history, so let’s cut out the middle man, shall we? How much do you know?”

  “Er.” If Reece hadn’t been able to see the resemblance between Asa and Nivy before, him being put on the spot did the trick. Their glares were the exact same kind of fierce as they shot Reece identical warning looks. “Everything?”

  Nimrod nodded, unhappy but seemingly unsurprised. “Ah. Well. What’s done is done,” he repeated. “Asa, order the ship dismantled. The gun and the book, Nivy, are to be returned post haste. Useless relics they might be at this point, but that doesn�
�t—”

  “Wait,” Reece cried in alarm, holding up his hands, strained in their cuffs. Hysteria made his voice thinner than usual, but unless he’d heard wrong, at the moment, hysterics were perfectly appropriate. “Dismantled?”

  “Of course,” Nimrod grunted, sounding pleased, but not at all spiteful. His eyes were full of eager zeal. “Is that not why you helped Nivy return her to us? If she does have something to do with the ancestors’ weapon—a conspiracy I have never been more than cynical of, myself—and your fellow Honorans never caught on, then the secret must be deep in her workings. The ship will undergo a surgical examination, for the good of the Heron, and the good of the war.”

  “A surgical—” Reece whirled to face Nivy and was somewhat mollified by her outright stunned expression. For a second. Then he thought of a couple of Heron thermal torches slicing into Aurelia’s wooden hull, of careless hands yanking apart the priceless limbs of the Afterquin as a matter of meticulousness, and the panic and anger he’d only sort of felt before because his shock had dumbed them down came to a rolling boil. “You didn’t know?”

  Nivy slowly shook her head. “No. I didn’t.”

  The Aurelia…dismantled. The idea would have horrified him even as a little kid, seeing her for the first time from the duke’s shoulders, shining in the white, smoky light of the museum’s glass dome. The duke had leaned over the museum’s velvet observation ropes enough for Reece to touch her warm chestnut wood, and he’d wondered to himself if maybe she was alive, like some ancient, massive whale, and then felt sheepish about it. But as the duke had walked away, and Reece had craned his neck and watched as The Aurelia was blotted out by the shapes of passing people, he’d thought it was sad, that whether she was a whale out of water or an airship out of the sky, she’d never be free again.

  Through Leto and Oceanus and the long days between when Reece had been tempted to wonder what he thought he was doing, crossing the Epimetheus with a crew full of people who were depending on him to do the right thing by them, Aurelia had come to be his single constant. He wasn’t stupid; he understood she was just a ship. But he’d also come to understand that sometimes just things became symbols. A pair of flight wings. A revolver in a puddle of water. Bifocals on a nightstand. Each one meant something different.

  Aurelia meant home.

  Finally, Reece croaked, “I don’t understand. I saw the same histories you did, right? This thing could save you, and you’re treating it like a myth, even though you know it’s not.”

  He didn’t even realize he was leaning forward, moving towards Nimrod, until he felt Nivy take one of his arms as Nekoda grasped the other. “Reece,” Nivy said quietly.

  “No! I brought Aurelia all this way because I thought she was important to The Heron—I thought they actually wanted her. And not as a pile of scrap metal! Sisquicks, Nivy, you could have told me they didn’t even care about the bleeding…”

  The room had gone eerily quiet. Nivy and everyone in some way related to her—which was to say, everyone except Nimrod, who was still scrutinizing Reece—was staring at the rectangular datascreen over the table as it ran wild with flickering code. Its erratic light jumped on their faces, a wan glow.

  “Is that true?” Nivy asked the room at large after a moment.

  As if in answer, in the distance, muted alarms started undulating. Feet pounded nearby—a small squad of soldiers, from the sounds of heavy boots and clanking metal.

  After eyeing the screen shortly, Nimrod snorted and turned to face the fire, his hands clasped in his lap. “Nekoda, Canter, see to that.”

  Canter and her husband were already halfway out the door; Reece could hear the soft thumping of the hawk’s wings carrying it away, maybe to deliver a message. Asa touched Illie’s arm and gave Nivy a stern look before jogging after them.

  In the confusion, Reece was able to shake Nivy off altogether and approach Nimrod at the hearth. He didn’t know what was happening, what the screen, soldiers, and alarms all meant, but he knew what he had to say was at least as important.

  But as he opened his mouth, Nimrod said, “You’re wrong, Captain Sheppard. We care about the weapon. In the past, we’ve cared too much. The invention has been missing for centuries. The war is now. It is time The Heron stood on their own.”

  “But—”

  “It’s a treasure hunt, Captain. It has done nothing but slow our efforts.”

  “Maybe,” Reece admitted. “And maybe once, you could have just let the hunt for it go. But now The Kreft know the weapon is still out there. Doing nothing to keep it from them is as good as giving it to them yourselves.”

  “We will destroy them before that ever becomes a possibility. It will be a glorious victory.”

  He said it with such relish, as if his people hadn’t been at this for five hundred years already, as if he was thrilled to partake in the war. And he did it without even doing Reece the favor of looking at him. Reece had expected The Heron to not trust him, to scoff at him, and maybe even hate him, like Asa seemed to. He hadn’t counted on being dismissed out of hand.

  “Oh, good,” Reece said, gesturing with manacled hands, “that answers all of my questions. Except for the one about how you’re supposed to destroy them without the weapon made to destroy them.”

  “It is Heron business,” Nimrod rumbled, as if that should put an end to all of Reece’s arguments. He was in for a disappointment.

  “Is it?” Reece asked. “Because the way I figure it, The Kreft getting their hands on a weapon of mass destruction concerns all of us.”

  For the first time, Nimrod’s expression shifted. It was like a slowly-building wave, a stirring deep in the ocean. The zealous spark in his eyes was becoming a roaring wildfire. “Don’t you pretend to know anything of war, boy, from your cush planet Honora. There’s an expendable blip on the radar if ever there was one.”

  Immediately, Nivy was at Reece’s elbow. But the glare that would have as good as pinned Reece powerlessly to the wall, Nimrod merely grumbled at. “Reece is right, Nimrod. We don’t have to exhaust our resources looking for the weapon—just a small contingent—”

  “I expected more from you, Nivy,” Nimrod interrupted, seeming genuinely disappointed. “I can excuse your irresponsibility to a point, but I will not tolerate disloyalty to our worthy cause.”

  Reece squawked disbelievingly. Disloyalty? Was Nimrod really talking about the girl who had made herself a mute, flown across the galaxy into enemy territory alone, and been willing to die for a legend all for a chance to help her people in the slightest? The day Nivy was disloyal was the day Reece advertised Captain Pleasant’s Hairstuffs for Gents.

  “I don’t think I believed it till right now,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “that anyone could be so arrogant.”

  “Oh?” Nimrod pointed a knobby-knuckled finger in Reece’s face. “This, from the Palatine First who trailed destruction from one side of the galaxy to the other? Who churned his friends like gravel under his wheels to get where he wanted?”

  For a moment, Reece was too shocked too answer, too alarmed, because he knew, instantly, that Nimrod was right. He had been arrogant; maybe he still was, and that was why realizing it made him so angry at himself. Then he remembered Tutor Agnes in her handkerchief and Mordecai, white-whiskered and grinning, cackling over his cooking, and everything pounding in him went still. “I’ve lost too much to ever be proud of what I’ve done,” he said quietly. “I’m not saying it makes me better, but it makes me different. After everything you’ve lost…you’re still too proud to realize you can’t do this alone. But I know I can’t.”

  The fire popped and crunched as one of its logs gave out. The screen was still spastic with code, a flickering in the corner of Reece’s eye. Abruptly, Nimrod spun, marched to the screen, and violently yanked out one of its wires, so it went dark.

  “We have done this alone for centuries,” he said, angrily throwing down the wire. “And still, for the glory of The Heron, we survive.”

&nb
sp; “But for how much longer?” Illie asked from her seat in the shadows, drawing a sharp look from Nimrod. She returned the look levelly, and that’s when Reece realized he might’ve been premature in assuming Nivy’s fierceness had come from her father. “There is no glory in always being one thread away from unraveling, Nimrod.”

  “But that is just the point, Illiana! We are one thread from unraveling. One clumsy hand could pull us apart. The sunward planets are little more than fodder in this war! We decided that a decade ago…to change our minds now, after what we’ve done…”

  “After what you’ve done?” Reece repeated, turning to Nivy. She shook her head, seemingly at a loss. He believed her. Nivy could mislead, betray, and disappoint him, and he’d still trust her a thousand miles further than Nimrod.

  Nimrod seemed most agitated about the fact Reece had managed to unruffle him. Huffing, he circled the table, shaking his head at Reece as he passed him by. “Our glorious victory is nigh. I would not compromise that now, neither for a mythological weapon, nor for allies. We have no need for either, anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Nivy demanded, heading off Reece as he opened his mouth, about to ask the same thing but in ruder terms.

  “I’m afraid you’re no longer privy to that information.”

  Reece guessed flatly, “Because she’s siding with me?”

  Never mind unruffled—when Nimrod spun on Reece, the man looked insane. Reece got the strangest feeling he wanted to give him pushups for insubordination. “Because I said she isn’t!” he barked.

  Nivy quickly sidestepped in front of Reece, holding up a warning hand to ward Nimrod off. Reece was touched. A little insulted—he kind of wanted an excuse to go toe to toe with Nimrod and make his glorious point—but mostly touched.

  Grumbling, Nimrod agitatedly smoothed down the front of his jacket before abruptly going still, as if something had occurred to him. He nodded once to himself. “Very well. You want a hand in this rebellion, Palatine First? You want to know how we’ll win this war without Honora? I’ll give you something to think on. Bring him, Illie.”