Sky Pirates

by Liesel Schwarz

  “I didn’t.” He grinned at her, and in that moment she realized that he was joking. “Never you mind, Chance,” he said, ruffling her hair. “You’ll get used to us yet. We’re not a bad lot when all is said and done.”

  Despite her apprehensiveness, she found herself smiling at Heller.

  “San Francisco,” Heller said, pointing at the chart. “Got a delivery or two to make.”

  “Right, so due west then,” Elle said, more to herself than to anyone else.

  “Due west,” echoed Mr. Crow as he pushed forward levers and adjusted the flow into the thrusters.

  Slowly the ship creaked as she made a wide arc through the air, righting her course as she went along.

  Elle scanned the maps spread open on the large table before her. The maps were held in place with little brass clips, and there were metal markers with magnets which one could use for positioning. Carefully Elle checked their coordinates and placed the marker to show the Inanna’s position in relation to the earth.

  They were heading for the other side of America, she thought with a sinking heart. Their destination could not be farther from home if she had picked it. But orders were orders and these would have to do for now.

  CHAPTER 12

  SAN FRANCISCO

  The thin winter sun was fighting its way through the relentless mist and drizzle, when the Inanna set down in the city of San Francisco. She bumped against the docking trellises and came to rest with a shudder.

  Elle looked up from her navigation table. Her mouth was set in a determined line of concentration, for she had never berthed a ship this large before.

  “Nicely done, Chance!” Atticus slapped her on the back and gave her a little shake of appreciation.

  “You’re not too shabby yourself, Mr. Crow. Although you did have a docking bay big enough to park two airships. What was that maneuver?”

  The other crew started laughing and, to her surprise, Elle laughed too. Despite her misgivings, she was finding that it was quite fun being part of a crew. She had been on her own since she left the flight academy because none of the commercial ships would hire a woman. But here among these men she found no such prejudice and she had to admit that she missed the camaraderie she had known in flight school.

  She was still the only woman on board, but somehow she did not feel as lonely.

  It was also rather nice for someone else to worry about the welfare of the ship for a change. She stole a glance at Dashwood. This morning he was dressed in his green velvet coat with brass buttons down the front. His boots had been polished to a bright sheen.

  “Ready to disembark, Captain,” Heller said, following her gaze and eyeing Dashwood’s outfit. “I see you’ve brought the old captain’s coat out. Am I to tell Fat Paul that you will be dining out this evening? With a lady friend, perhaps?” Heller, it seemed, was the only one who could get away with teasing the captain.

  “Mr. Heller, let’s see if we can off-load some of that cargo we brought with us from Edinburgh,” Dashwood said with a small smile, avoiding the question. He turned to look out of the window but as he did so, Elle could have sworn she had seen a slight blush form on the planes of his cheeks.

  “Right on, sir.” Heller turned from them and started shouting orders.

  Elle kept her eyes on the charts before her. If Dashwood was due to go drinking and womanizing, this could be a golden opportunity. Granted, she was a world away from home, but as long as she could escape, she would be able to find her way back.

  “A word please, Mrs. Marsh,” Dashwood said, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Sir?” Elle turned to him.

  He took her by the wrist and before she could say anything, he had strapped a slim metal cuff around it. It clicked shut with the decisive sound of something that had been tempered by the Shadow.

  “What are you doing?” Elle withdrew her arm and started tugging on the cuff. It was making her skin tingle with a sensation that could have been only from the Shadow.

  One side of Dashwood’s face lifted in a regretful smile. “This binds you to me. We can’t have you running off the moment I turn my back, now can we?” He stepped closer to her. “And I, for one, am planning to be rather … distracted later today.” The suggestiveness in his gaze left no doubt as to exactly what activities he was planning.

  “How dare you? I am not some dog that needs to be kept on a leash.” She tried to drag the cuff over her hand but it remained resolutely stuck. “I demand that you remove this thing at once,” she said.

  “Once we are back on board safely, I promise I will remove it. But while we are ashore, you are bound to me.” He held up his arm. Around it was a similar cuff. “The two are linked, so no matter where you go, I will be able to follow you. I will always be able to find you, no matter where you run.”

  “So I am to be your prisoner then?” she huffed. “I do have rights, you know!”

  Dashwood smiled at her. “You keep forgetting that I am your captain and my word is law. I may do as I please, and right now it pleases me not to have you escape the moment my back is turned.” He studied her face for a few moments. “You weren’t thinking of escaping, by any chance. Were you, Mrs. Marsh?”

  Elle closed her eyes in frustration. She was starting to develop a serious dislike for mysterious bracelets that could not be removed once worn. And this one had just neatly put an end to her plan.

  “No, Captain. I wasn’t,” she said in a low voice.

  “Fantastic. Then the cuff need not cause you any bother. And I promise you, it’s only until we are back in the air. All right?”

  She did not answer.

  He offered his arm in a gesture that was absurdly gentlemanly, given the circumstances. “Shall we?”

  Elle ignored his gesture and stood aside so he could pass. “Lead on, Captain,” she said with a stiff smile. Despite her protestations, she was itching to be on land. They had been airborne for the better part of a month now and she was starting to crave the oxygen-rich air that one breathed closer to the ground. It was not an unusual phenomenon. Sky sailors called it “the craving.”

  On the ground, San Francisco looked even prettier than it did from above. Elle watched in fascination as the city’s trolley service ran up and down the hills, disappearing into the fog.

  This morning the city was shrouded in a fine mist that turned the buildings sweaty with damp and the streets muddy and black from grime.

  Elle shivered in her leather coat as they walked away from the bustling air docks. At least Dashwood had allowed her to wear her own clothes this morning, she thought resentfully.

  San Francisco was a busy place and not the backwater gold rush village she had pictured. Everywhere she looked, crates of freight were being unloaded at a breakneck pace. Wagons with giant loads of lumber rumbled by, leaving dark slashes in the mud.

  Elle studied a group of women waiting patiently under a corrugated iron awning. Each had a cloth bundle or a battered carpetbag with their belongings. They stared forlornly at the dismal drizzle, faces drawn in apprehension.

  “Bit of a shortage of women in this place. So they fly them in from abroad,” Dashwood said next to her. “Those lovely brides are most likely destined for the ranches and gold fields farther inland. Probably waiting for the trolley to take them to the station.”

  “Brides?” Elle frowned at the thought.

  “Surely you must have seen the advertisements in the newspapers?” Dashwood said.

  Elle nodded. “I have. It’s just that I never thought women actually answered them …” she trailed off, lost in thought.

  “Life’s hard if you don’t have any money, Mrs. Marsh. Those women are looking for a better life. Some say this is the land of opportunity. Not everyone manages to land themselves a husband that is richer than a Roman emperor,” he said with a hint of disdain in his voice.

  “I’ll thank you to keep your comments to yourself, if you don’t mind, Captain. The subject of my marriage is not something I wish to
discuss with you,” she said in icy tones. She was still very angry about the cuff around her wrist and she was not about to take his little dig at her circumstances.

  Dashwood held up his hands. “Just trying to open your eyes,” he said.

  “My eyes are extremely open, thank you very much.” She turned to him. “So what exactly have we come here to do?”

  Dashwood smiled again. “Whiskey, my dear Mrs. Marsh.” He gestured for her to follow him. “Come on, we have an appointment.”

  They started walking down one of the long, broad avenues. It was strange how American cities were laid out in perfect grids. Although poverty and squalor were still in evidence, there were no dark alleys or crooked lanes in the brave cities of the New World. She spared a sideways glance at a huddle of street children in a doorway who stared at them with hungry eyes.

  “Captain, wait!” Elle said as she stopped beside the children. She felt in the pockets of her coat, but she had no money. She started shrugging off her coat in order to give it to them.

  “Wait,” Dashwood said. He pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket and handed them to the children. Dirty little hands scrabbled for the money.

  “Can’t have my navvy dying of exposure without a coat,” he said.

  Elle sized him up. “That was really nice of you,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Now I don’t want a word out of you once we get to our meeting. I only brought you along so you could watch and learn. In silence. Do you understand?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Elle said as they started walking up a steep slope.

  The venue for Dashwood’s appointment turned out to be a saloon called Crazy Jerry’s. It was a tin-roofed place not too far from China Town. The barkeep smiled as he recognized Dashwood.

  “Ah, Captain Dashwood. Nice to see ya,” he drawled as he wiped his hands on his apron to shake Dashwood’s in greeting.

  “Jerry!” He greeted the barkeep with a warm handshake and a wide grin, but Elle was not convinced that they were old friends.

  “Who’s she?” Jerry said, nodding at Elle.

  “New navigator pilot. I’m busy showing her the ropes,” Dashwood said.

  “That’s a bit of a risk,” Jerry said, rubbing his chin. He started laughing. “You’re even crazier than I thought. And you honestly let her drive your ship?”

  “She does all right. As good as any,” Dashwood answered.

  Elle stood slightly behind him, but said nothing. Being spoken about as if she was not there was one thing, but having her skills criticized was quite another. She was sorely tempted to give this man a piece of her mind, but Dashwood gave her a warning look before she could say anything, so she remained where she was, silently annoyed.

  “The boys will be along with the wagon in a few minutes, but I brought this for you to taste.” Dashwood reached into the deep inner pocket of his coat and produced a bottle of amber liquid stoppered with a cork. “Top-of-the-line merchandise all the way from Scotland, as promised.” He placed the bottle on the counter with a flourish.

  The barkeep eyed the bottle with no small measure of skepticism. “I hope for your sake that’s the case. Them fellers been a bit thirsty round these parts. Good whiskey has been in short supply. We’ve had to make do with my cousin’s moonshine on some nights,” the barkeep said as he stepped round the back of the bar. He pulled out three greasy-looking shot glasses and set them out on the counter. He pulled the cork and poured out three measures.

  “Drink up,” he said.

  Elle eyed the cloudy whiskey in the glass with little enthusiasm. The whiskey smelled strange, something earthy and sweet that she could not quite put her finger on.

  “Oh, none for me,” she said. “I’m on duty and it is only ten o’clock in the morning. I tend to limit my whiskey drinking until afternoon.”

  “You first,” Dashwood said, aiming a devastatingly charming smile at the barkeep.

  The barkeep laughed. “Oh no, my friend, you go first.” He gestured at the drink.

  Dashwood gave a nervous laugh.

  Just then, Heller and Atticus Crow burst through the swing doors of the saloon with a wheelbarrow filled with whiskey bottles.

  “Free drinks for everyone!” Heller said in a loud voice.

  Heller’s arrival had the desired effect. Even at this early hour there were punters inside the saloon. The promise of a free drink seemed to galvanize them into action. More materialized from corners Elle had not observed that the saloon possessed, and the barkeep was suddenly overwhelmed with requests for glasses. Some of the drinkers didn’t even wait, and pulled out stoppers with their teeth, swigging from the bottle.

  “Gesture of goodwill! For the special people of San Francisco,” Dashwood said with a flourish. He was grinning from ear to ear now. “So, shall we agree a price?”

  Elle watched the captain with growing suspicion. Was it her imagination or did he look slightly nervous? Elle studied the way he held his shoulders and the way he watched the punters dig into the hooch.

  “Anything the matter, Captain?” she asked sweetly.

  “Not at all,” he drawled. “We have a schedule to keep, is all.”

  He turned to Jerry, who was doing his best to fend off the tide of customers who were suddenly inside his establishment. “Fifty cents a bottle. Six bottles a case. I have a hundred cases, what do you say we call it an even three hundred?” he said.

  Before Jerry could answer, a punter to the side of the bar suddenly spat his whiskey out onto the floor and swore loudly. “Dawg-naggit. It’s rot gut!” he shouted.

  Before him, the gray-blue mist of a specter hovered. It was drifting up and down as it keened sorrowfully.

  Elle turned to Dashwood. “Oh, you have got to be joking.”

  “Afraid not,” he said with a shrug.

  The specter’s keen had intensified as it searched for the human remains it was supposed to be tethered to, but these were probably back in Edinburgh and in the process of being dissected by a student of medicine at the university.

  Rot gut whiskey, Elle thought with a shudder. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the whiskey in the shipment had once been used for preserving corpses in aid of medical research, rot gut also carried the inherent risk of being haunted. Much in the same way that absinthe fairies spirited into liquor, ghosts appeared when the corpses they had been tethered to were soaked in alcohol. This wasn’t a problem until the body was removed from the keg and disposed of. The realization that its earthly tether was no more was usually more than most specters could handle, and judging from the shrillness of the keening filling her ears, Elle estimated that things were about to get very ugly in Crazy Jerry’s saloon.

  Elle took a step away from the counter and looked about. Suddenly, the whole saloon was filled with specters, hovering in midair as they emerged from the bottles that held them.

  One of the saloon girls screamed, which in turn set a few of the ghosts howling and set off the other specters. Within seconds the entire saloon was filled with the angry spirits of the departed, demanding vengeance for the terrible wrong that had been done to them.

  “Dashwoo-ood! It we survive this, I am going to kill you myself!” Jerry shouted.

  “Ah, I think there may have been a bit of a misunderstanding on that front,” Dashwood said. “They assured me that all the spectral energy had been removed when they strained the whiskey. I promise.”

  The air filled with ear-piercing shrieks as one by one the specters transformed into poltergeists. Glass started breaking and mirrors split due to the force with which they changed. One of the punters pulled out his shotgun and started firing at the ghosts. This was a completely pointless course of action and only caused other on-edge punters to start firing back. Elle ducked behind the counter as an empty bottle flew past her head and smashed against the wall behind her. Within seconds, a full-blown gunfight complete with howling poltergeists had erupted.

  “Aw crap,” Dashwood said under his breath as he crawled besi
de Elle. “I thought they’d take a bit longer to show up, but I guess they didn’t take too well to the flight.” He ducked as a chair flew past, narrowly missing his head.

  A few of the ghosts turned on the punters and soon bodies were flying about the room as more shots rang out.

  “Heller! Take the men and get to the ship!” Dashwood shouted. “Each man for himself until we get there!”

  “Aye, Captain,” Heller called from behind a piano on the other side of the room, where he was busy laying down cover fire with a sawn-off shotgun.

  Another bullet whizzed past Elle’s head, closely followed by a keening poltergeist. This time so close that she felt the air move against her cheek. Enough was enough.

  The only way out was blocked by specters and half-drunk trigger-happy brawlers. She sighed. There was only one way out of this mess and that was via the Shadow. This was most inconvenient, given that she was still tethered to the captain. He would have to come with her if they stood any chance of survival.

  “Take a deep breath and don’t let go of me!” Elle shouted, as an upturned table smashed into the wall behind them, sending long splinters of wood flying everywhere.

  Before he could react, she grabbed a handful of Dashwood’s green velvet coat and closed her eyes. Quickly she reached out to the barrier between Shadow and Light. She had not touched the barrier since Khartoum, weeks ago. She could feel it the moment she closed her eyes, humming with energy at the edge of her consciousness.

  She reached into the meta-space and dragged herself and Dashwood into the void. The aetheric turmoil the specters were creating made the transition between worlds feel like crossing the English Channel in a force-ten gale, but she held on to the captain and forged ahead. They hit the golden murk headfirst. The barrier wobbled and engulfed them with a big slurping sound.

  Dashwood looked like a man drowning. His eyes were wide as saucers and she had to grip his collar and his biceps hard to hold on to him as he struggled against the aether. She gave him a little shake to make him look at her.