The client, it transpired, was a Laxarian businessman named Jophar Vorin, and was to transport some valuable item or information to the far north province of Lisbia. Better yet, he intended to travel by airship, which could make the passage in a matter of days, and not weeks. Airship travel was expensive, the lighter-than-air gases used to inflate the envelopes a dear resource, but Vorin was in some considerable hurry, and damn the expense.
The three companions could hardly believe their good fortune. The job took care of two birds with a single stone. It would pay each of them ready cash, enough that they'd not need to worry about their finances for some months to come, and would provide quick transportation to the location they wanted to go anyway. They had no idea what it was that Vorin was transporting, just that it was confidential, intended only for the eyes of the ruling zamurin of Lisbia. Vorin carried a leather case with him always, bound to his wrist, and the only task given to his bodyguards was that one of them be with him at all times to ensure that the case did not leave his possession.
Once past the security pickets at the airdocks, and with the Rukh safely in the air, it seemed that they had little more to do than relax in relative luxury for a handful of days, until they reached the airdocks of Lisbia and their responsibilities were discharged. There were only a few dozen passengers onboard the Rukh, most of them merchants or government diplomats, with a few artisans and missionaries among them.
Balam and Hieronymus were convinced these would be the easiest wages they had ever earned.
Leena stood by the windows in the observation lounge of the passenger gondola, watching the airdocks of Laxaria fall away as the Cloud Cutter Rukh cast off from the mooring post and began its slow ascent. The skies were overcast with a solid blanket of low clouds, as dull and flinty as lead, an inauspicious beginning to their journey. Still, as it always had, liftoff gave her a momentary frisson, her pulse quickening and her temperature rising. This must be, Leena knew, what other people meant when they spoke of love at first sight. Not for her the tawdry pleasures of a messy embrace, though, of furtive tumblings in darkened rooms; Leena's passions were reserved for piercing the heavens above.
She turned from the window as the Rukh crested the cloudbank, and the crowded streets of Laxaria disappeared behind a haze of gauzy clouds. Weaving through the travelers and merchants scattered around the lounge, she made her way to the aft passageway, and to the suite of cabins she shared with the others.
That it was good fortune and not ill that she'd encountered Hieronymus Bonaventure was something that Leena had been forced to remind herself time and again, in the days and weeks since. At times the only thing keeping Leena from throttling him, or shooting him, or walking out, or some combination of the three, was the fact that Hieronymus was her best chance of returning to Earth.
This was proving to be one of those occasions.
“Little sister!” Hieronymus called out in English, as Leena stood in the open doorway. “Pray close the hatch! There are unshuttered ports in the passageway, and I can't stomach yet to look down.”
“You are not yet accustomed to flying?” Leena asked with a sly smile, leaning on the open door. Hieronymus sat on a chair riveted to the deckplates, his hands white-knuckled on the chair's arms.
“With my eyes closed, I fancy that we are on a ship at sea, and then I am at peace, but when confronted with our altitude, my blood runs cold.”
Hieronymus Bonaventure was the product of an earlier era than Leena, and though he'd spent the last years making his way across the face of Paragaea, learning its customs and languages, and making a life for himself, in one respect, at least, he was still a man of a different age, and the notion of sailing through the air rather than on waves had never sat well with him.
“Perhaps Hero just needs to be held, like a swaddled infant,” came the rumbling voice of their companion, from the far side of the common area.
Leena turned, and smiled, but the smile was empty and forced. She'd traveled with Balam for some time, but even now, on seeing him, she still felt deep within a brief thrill of terror. Seated just a meter away in another bolted-down chair, the large black-furred jaguar man, outlaw prince of the nation of the Sinaa, idly tapped the emerald dangling from one ear, baring his saber-teeth in a knowing grin. He wrinkled his catlike snout in Hieronymus's direction, laughter rumbling faintly in his barrel chest.
“I'll remind you of the time we took a spill in the Inner Sea, Balam,” Hieronymus shot back, with dark humor. “What was it you cried out, when first your precious fur touched water? ‘Save me, mommy, I'm wet!' or something like that, wasn't it?”
The toothy grin froze on the jaguar man's face, and he narrowed his amber eyes.
“That was different,” Balam answered, his voice lowered. “We could have drowned.”
“We were so near the shore that the water was only knee deep!” Hieronymus shot back, punctuating the statement with a bark of laughter.
The jaguar man crossed his thick arms over his chest, and lowered his eyes.
“I don't like water,” he said sullenly, refusing to meet Hieronymus's gaze.
Leena closed the door, and stood in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips. She'd not had to deal with any such nonsense back in Baikonur. The flight engineers, technicians, even her fellow cosmonauts had all taken their tone from the chief designer, who'd not had much patience for fun and games. Here in Paragaea, where the stakes so often seemed so much higher, one's life so often on the line, her new companions seemed instead to treat everything as a game. It was not an easy transition to make.
“Where is our employer?” Leena asked, looking from Hieronymus to Balam and back again. “I thought it our charter that he was never to leave our sight?”
There came the sounds of suction and gurgling plumbing from beyond the bulkhead, and Hieronymus pointed to the privy door.
“He's in the head,” he answered, “and we're not paid enough for me to follow him in there.”
The door handle rattled, and a heavyset, red-faced man entered the room, drying his hands on a cloth. He was dressed in the high fashion of Laxaria: waistcoat, cravat, and piped trousers, with the medallion of his guild membership hanging from his breast pocket like a pendant. Tucked under his arm was a brass-reinforced leather case, the hasps locked and the handle chained to his left wrist.
The red-faced man looked at Leena with a broad, toothy grin and spoke a few words in the dialect of the Sakrian plains. Leena caught her name, and the word that suggested successful completion, but little else.
“His Lordship wants to know if we're safely away,” Hieronymus translated into English, the only language he and Leena shared.
“Tell him yes,” Leena answered, addressing Hieronymus but keeping her eyes on the heavyset man, her face a polite mask. “We are airborne, and should be clear of the city in moments, and on our way to Lisbia.”
Hieronymus spoke a few short syllables in Sakrian to their employer, who seemed immediately to deflate with relief. The red-faced man crossed the cabin, gave Leena an avuncular pat on the shoulder, and then arranged himself on a low couch set along the bulkhead, laying the case gingerly across his ample lap. He reached up and drew back the shutters covering the port, and looked out as the airship rose towards the blanketing gray clouds above.
Hieronymus blanched, averting his eyes from the view.
“Man was not meant for such heights,” he said, his voice quiet and strained.
Balam laughed again, a leonine rumble deep within his chest, and Leena was tempted to join in.
That afternoon, once Laxaria had disappeared in a haze of clouds and fog behind them, and the Rukh had climbed above the cloud line, Vorin insisted that the quartet leave the cabin together, to share a meal in the dining compartments in the rear of the passenger gondola. Hieronymus was reluctant to leave behind the security of his chair, safely bolted to the deckplates, and Balam made some minor noises about the potential security risks, but in the end Vorin was dea
d set on going, and his were the purse strings.
The dining compartment commanded the rear of the gondola, three walls dominated by large reinforced-glass windows. Steps led down from the passageway to the floor of the dining area, so that the ceilings were twice as high as elsewhere in the passenger sections. Tables and chairs were secured to the deck, here as everywhere through the ship, but aside from this minor concession to air safety all else was just as it would have been in the finest of restaurants on firm ground. Every table was covered in linens imported from the far east, across the Inner Sea, and each place setting had cutlery of the finest ceramics, fired in the Rim Mountains, and delicate porcelain plates and mugs hand painted by the craftsmen of Hele.
The menu was sturdy fare with slight cosmopolitan flourishes. The standard meat and vegetable dishes of the Sakrian plains, but with a scattering of clay-baked items borrowed from the Roaming Empire, and even a few piscine dishes prepared in the manner of the city of Drift.
Vorin and the three companions were seated by the far aft windows, and after they had placed their orders, they sat sipping mugs of mulled wine, looking down on the crenulated landscape of clouds below.
The jolly businessman raised his mug, looking amongst the three companions, and said a few rhyming syllables, the meat of which Leena was unable to follow.
“He wishes us good fortune on the journey,” Balam translated, as Hieronymus was still looking uneasily out on the curtain of clouds below them.
“Schast’e,” Leena answered in her native Russian, raising her own mug and downing the contents in a single pull.
The next morning, after a simple meal served by the ship's stewards in their suite of cabins, Vorin insisted that they repair to the open-air deck.
Leena was well rested and relaxed, perhaps more so than she'd been since Vostok 7 took off from the launchpad in Baikonur. They'd passed the night in shifts, each taking watch for a span of hours while the other two slept, but she'd taken the first shift, which meant that she'd gotten more uninterrupted sleep in the comforts of the cabin's bunk than she'd gotten in weeks. If on rising their employer wanted to take in the morning air, it was all one to her.
Hieronymus was less enthused about the open-air deck. He'd slowly gotten his air-legs under him the previous night, with the distant ground safely masked by a blanket of clouds, but the morning sun had burned the clouds away, and now the view from the Rukh was of the Sakrian plains, hundreds of meters below.
The open-air deck was situated at the forwardmost point in the passenger gondola, just before the control gondola at the prow of the ship. The control gondola held the flight deck, access panels leading into the body of the gas-filled envelope, and the quarters of the captain and crew, and was connected to the passenger gondola by an umbilicus of a passageway, airtight and sealed against the elements. Between the two depended the platform of the open-air deck, which afforded a full circumference view typically enjoyed only by the stoutest of passengers.
The air was cold and sharp outside the safety of the gondola, and even through their thick, layered coats the quartet shivered in the stiff breeze. Above them curved the envelope of the airship's main body, its shape held rigid by the pressure of the ballonets within and the curved spine of the rigid keel. At this pressure height, the majority of the envelope was filled with helium, the air-filled ballonets normally used to control trim now deflated to their smallest circumference. The engine nacelles on either side of the passenger gondola hummed away, their screws turning, propelling the Rukh ahead as fast as a horse at gallop.
Stretched out below them like an immense quilt were cultivated farms, the rotated crops alternating green, tan, and brown like the game board for some unknown variant of chess. Vorin pointed to starboard, where the Inner Sea was just visible over the eastern horizon, and said a few words. Leena recognized the word for “water” in the Sakrian dialect. When Vorin pointed to the port side, and the Rim Mountains barely visible in the far distant west, Leena understood the word for “majesty” or one of its cognates, and something that sounded like the term for “wings.” She was surprised, not having imagined the well-fed businessman as a poetic soul.
Balam began to growl, and Vorin backed away, becoming alarmed. Leena realized it was not poesy that gripped him, but fear.
Approaching from the west were large creatures on leathery wings, with long vicious beaks, and bony crests atop their narrow heads. Each was nearly twelve meters from wing tip to wing tip, and carried on its back one or two men, wearing goggles and wide-brimmed hats, with heavy scarves wrapped around their heads from neck to nose.
“Sky Raiders,” Balam rumbled, unsheathing his claws, amber eyes narrowing.
“Dragons,” Hieronymus said, hands tightening into white-knuckled fists at his side.
Leena had heard tavern talk about the men and women called Sky Raiders, but had dismissed it as the kind of stories one shared over spirits and wine. Evidently they were real, but she knew these were no dragons. These were pterosaurs, extinct on Earth since the age of the dinosaurs, but through ill fortune still surviving here on Paragaea into the age of man. She'd never imagined they could grow so large, but she'd learned that few things in this place were as she would have imagined.
Hieronymus turned from the railing, all his acrophobia forgotten.
“We'll need our weapons,” he said, his tone clipped.
“Locked in a secured locker in the control gondola,” Balam answered, his eyes fixed on the approaching pterosaurs. They were drawing nearer, perhaps just minutes away.
“I'll take care of that,” Hieronymus said. “Little sister, get our employer to safety.”
Leena nodded, and took Vorin by the right hand, his left clutching the leather case. She didn't bother to mutter soothing words or platitudes. There simply wasn't time.
Leena led Jophar Vorin into the control gondola, past crewmen who bustled past them, their attention solely focused on their duties. Vorin would not be safe in the passenger gondola or the crew areas. The ship would simply be too dangerous once the Sky Raider boarding party had come aboard, even if the crew were ultimately successful in repelling the attack. Vorin's best chance was to safely wait out the attack, hidden away and secure.
Leena had paid careful attention as they'd boarded the Rukh the previous morning. She'd lost too many friends on launchpads and in flight to ever climb aboard any sort of plane, rocket, or aerostat without knowing all the contingencies. She led Vorin in a beeline to a side room off the main passageway, and opened the hatch overhead. A rope ladder unspooled, from the ceiling to their feet.
“Vlezt',” Leena said in Russian, then quickly added in English, “Climb!”
Vorin looked at her, nervous and confused.
Leena pointed up towards the hatchway, then grabbed Vorin's shoulder and shoved him towards the rope ladder. Understanding dawned in his small eyes, and he clambered inelegantly up the ladder. Leena followed.
Within the envelope of the airship, things were much as Leena had anticipated, which was some small blessing. The curve of the keel overhead like the spine of a cathedral, the large lunglike shapes of the helium-filled containers pressing against either side of the envelope, and at either side the deflated air-filled ballonets. These last, small bladders that would fill with air from outside the ship when the Rukh descended, were used to help maintain pressure on the envelope when the helium bags were deflated. At full pressure height, with the helium at near-full expansion, the ballonets were little more than partially inflated sacks of breathable air.
Leena took Vorin by the elbow and dragged him to the nearest of the ballonets. There was an airtight access panel near the seam that held the ballonet in place, and it was the work of only a few quick moments to wrest the panel open. It was only a meter or so square, just large enough for a grown man to climb through.
“Inside,” Leena said, pointing. “We'll come back when it is safe.”
Vorin looked from her to the limp air sack, and back again
.
“Ka utok,” Leena said, struggling, trying to piece together what little Sakrian she knew. Through this. She paused, then added, “Uksalke.” Safe.
Vorin at last nodded, understanding. Clutching the leather case to his chest, he wriggled his ponderous bulk through the access panel, and looked out forlornly as Leena closed it up behind him.
“Just wait,” she said, trying to sound reassuring. “You'll be fine. Uksalke. I promise.”
Leena rejoined Hieronymus and Balam on the platform of the open-air deck. They were surrounded by crewmen armed with poleaxes, clubs, and bayonets, half a dozen men ready to repel the boarders.
Hieronymus had his heavy cavalry saber hanging from his belt, his holstered Mauser C96 pistol at his hip. He handed Balam his knives and sling, and Leena her chrome-plated Makarov semiautomatic pistol, snugged in its nylon holster, and the short sword he'd insisted she start carrying. She tucked the blade into her belt, distastefully, and checked that the magazine on the Makarov was full.
“Take care with your firearm,” Hieronymus warned, eyeing Leena's grip on her pistol. “We've precious little ammunition as it is, and besides, I've no desire to go plummeting down to our doom if you start shooting holes in this thing.” He jerked a thumb at the curve of the envelope overhead.
“Not to worry,” Leena answered. “Pressure inside the envelope is low, only a fraction of kilogram per square centimeter. If we were to punch hole in the fabric, it could take hours, even days before we noticed any change.”
“I think we'll have more pressing matters to engage us, in the meantime,” rumbled Balam, baring his teeth.
Leena and Hieronymus followed his gaze to the west.
The Sky Raiders were almost upon them.
The first wave of the Raiders was intended to disorient their prey, the pterosaurs sweeping in close, the Raiders riding pillion letting fly with spears and crossbow bolts at the defenders on the platform.
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