Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3

by Melissa Scott

  “How are we for weight, anyway?”

  “Fine,” Mitch said. “Lewis and I went over the figures three times, and we’ve got ample margin. Even with the supplemental tank full.”

  Lewis tossed his own bag up the stairs, followed it more gently with Alma’s, and heaved himself aboard.

  “We’re cutting it close,” Jerry said. He shook his head. “He – it – must be about twenty hours from Chicago by now.”

  “We’ll make it in eighteen,” Mitch said. “Maybe less.”

  Jerry looked as though he wanted to say something more, but Alma interrupted him. “We’re next after Western’s Early Bird. Better get settled.” She held out a clipboard. “We’re going a little northerly, there’s weather to the south.”

  Mitch nodded, glancing down the list. Salt Lake, North Platte, Iowa City, and then Chicago: the first leg was the longest, but it should be easy flying, daylight all the way. They wouldn’t have to worry until they got to Iowa City, and then it would be even odds whether they could get in and out before full dark. Iowa City had lights, more or less, for the mail planes, but he’d been through there before. Which meant he wanted the last leg, and the first…. He’d been going to ask Lewis to take the first leg with him, but it looked like Alma could use a break. “Why don’t the two of you take it easy to Salt Lake? Jerry can keep me company up front.”

  For a second, he thought Jerry was going to protest, but then he shrugged and tucked his cane under his arm to make the climb into the cabin. Alma said simply, “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” And he was, he thought, as he climbed into the cabin behind her. He was flying: it didn’t so much matter where, or with who, or into what, as long as he was in the air.

  Jerry had worked himself into the copilot’s chair, wooden leg braced carefully against the edge of the rudder pedals on his side. Mitch double-checked that everything was switched to his side, the copilot’s controls completely disabled, and began running down his checklist. Outside, another set of motors sprang to life: the Early Bird, on its way north to San Francisco.

  “Sorry,” Jerry said, without looking at him. “I’m — this has me worried, Mitch, that’s all.”

  You and me both, Mitch thought. “We’ll figure something out,” he said, and flipped the starter switches. The big engines coughed to life, sputtered, settled to their familiar rhythm. Mitch waited, adjusting the mixture, testing flaps and rudder, while the Early Bird lined itself up into the wind and lifted neatly into the air.

  “Flag,” Jerry said, lifting his voice to be heard over the noise of the motor.

  That was the one thing you could trust Jerry to notice, but Mitch glanced out the side window anyway, saw the flagman waving from the end of the runway. He gave the Terrier power, let it bounce along the taxiway that ran parallel to the runway, feeling the extra weight of fuel in the tail. The flagman signaled a final time, waving him onto the runway, and he kicked the rudder gently, pointing the Terrier’s nose down the midline. He gave her more throttle, easy at first, then harder, the Terrier waddling down the runway like an elderly goose. She’d be fine once some of the fuel burned off, but it took longer than usual to get the tail up, longer still to get her off the ground. She climbed slowly, scratching for altitude, and Mitch kept the power up for longer than usual, leveling off at 6000 feet. That was going to make things interesting over the Rockies, he thought, and did a quick calculation to see how much fuel they would have burned by the time they had to claw their way over the mountains. They’d be down to close to a normal full load, by his rough reckoning: that was manageable. And Alma and Lewis were both good, they could handle it.

  The sky was clear above him, vivid blue, the sun glinting off the tip of the right wing. There were a few low clouds, thin enough to see through, and Jerry had his nose pressed to the side window, looking out and down. You couldn’t blame him, Mitch thought. There was nothing like it, nothing in this world. And that was trite, but he’d never been the one to find the definitions, the one who put things into words. That was Jerry’s job, and from the almost wistful smile, Jerry was having just as much trouble articulating it. And that was Ok. The joy was enough. It had made the War bearable, survivable: there had always been the moments, between the mud and the killing and the misery, when his wings caught the air and he soared for an instant outside himself. It was still there, as reliable as breathing, the beat of the motors and the easy ride of the Terrier. It would always be there, he told himself, and once again believed the lie.

  Lewis and Alma each had a window. They’d never be able to fly otherwise, but looking out opposite windows sharing a thermos of coffee, not being in the cockpit was bearable. Alma wasn’t sure whether Mitch meant for her to take the second or third legs, but it didn’t matter. She and Lewis would both take the cockpit, and Jerry could sit on the chaise where he could get his leg up.

  Alma craned her neck, looking ahead. Mitch was about to thread the Banning Pass, and Mount San Gorgonio raised its barren head above the tree line, more than 11,000 feet. Maybe someday it would be possible to fly over the peak – that day might not be far away – but for now they had to thread the pass just as cars and trains did.

  Lewis came over to look out her window, kneeling on the floor to get a better view. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and so was the expression on his face as he looked out, rapt and delighted. Alma suppressed the urge to ruffle his carefully combed hair.

  Lewis glanced at her sideways, as though he had caught her looking at him, had guessed what she was thinking. “Will you teach me?” he said.

  Alma caught her breath. “I’m not sure I can,” she said.

  “Is it forbidden?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “But I can’t teach you things I don’t know. Your mix of talents is very different from mine. I can show you some basic things, but oracular work…. It’s entirely different from anything I can do. For that matter it’s different from anything Mitch and Jerry can do. We can all show you a few things, but you’d need a different master to go very far, someone whose talents are more like yours.” Alma put her hand on his arm. “Lewis, the oracular talents are very complex and can be unnerving. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I have to if I’m going to be any use,” Lewis said.

  Alma searched his eyes. “You don’t have to do this for me,” she said.

  He nodded slowly. “I know. But do you think I can just go home and forget about it while you and Mitch and Jerry are doing this? That’s the choice, isn’t it? I can bow out or I can figure out what to do.”

  “Yes,” she said. Alma looked down at her hand, and laced her fingers with Lewis’. “This is part of my life, Lewis. Part of who I am. You don’t have to do it. But I’m not going to stop.”

  “I know that,” Lewis said. He looked like he was fumbling for words. “I wouldn’t want you to. I like you different.”

  “I like you too,” Alma said, and put her arm around him, drawing him close to look out the window side by side as clouds as thin as veils drifted from the mountain peak.

  Chapter Eleven

  They took off from Woodward Field a little after noon, Alma at the controls as the Terrier rose into the gentle air. They’d been lucky with the weather so far, she knew, but to her relief it looked as though that luck was going to last a little while longer. The clouds and rain were staying well south of them, and while there was supposed to be a front coming into the California coast, they’d be ahead of it all the way to Chicago. The Terrier was sluggish with the extra fuel, climbing slowly, the controls heavy under her hands, but the engines were all running steadily. She glanced at the instrument panel, confirming RPMs and airspeed and the rate of climb. Everything was in order; it was just the extra weight that she’d have to get used to.

  “That extra tank makes a big difference,” Lewis shouted, and she nodded. She was getting used to the way that he sometimes seemed to read her mind when they were in the air, one pilot matching another.

&nbs
p; “Yeah. It’ll be better when we burn some of it off.”

  “What’s the height of the pass?”

  “8700 feet,” Alma answered. “I want to take us up to 10,000 if the weather stays good.”

  Lewis gave her a sidelong glance. “Will she make it with this load on?”

  “She should,” Alma said. She smiled back at him. “I know she’ll make 9500, and that’s plenty.”

  “Ok.” Lewis hoped he didn’t sound as dubious as he felt. He liked a bit more air between himself and the ground.

  Jerry had settled himself on the chaise, propping up his bad leg among a scatter of books, while Mitch sank into one of the rear facing chairs. He unwrapped the first of the sandwiches they had bought in Salt Lake City, and took a bite. Turkey. That was fine.

  It had been a long six hours in the cockpit, and he was glad to let Alma take the controls for a while. They’d left the door open, and he could hear their voices off and on, but the words were drowned by the roar of the engines. They were still climbing, he could feel that, throttle well open, straining for the altitude they’d need to cross the Rockies. He looked back at Jerry, still frowning over his books, and finished chewing the bits of sandwich.

  “So,” he said. “What are we going to do when we find this guy?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Jerry said distractedly, paging through one of the books on his lap.

  “Can we talk about this for a minute?” Mitch’s voice was sharper than he’d intended, and Jerry looked up.

  “Sure,” he said, adjusting his glasses. Jerry tended to forget they were supposed to be a team, not the Jerry show, sometimes. They needed to work this out together.

  “Ok,” Mitch said slowly, “The way I see it we’ve got three problems. One, we’ve got to find this guy. We’re reasonably sure we can do that. We ought to get into Chicago five or six hours ahead of the Chief, so we can get onto him at the station. Two, we’ve got to bind or banish this thing and get it out of Davenport. I’ve got no idea how we’re going to do that. And three, we have to make sure it doesn’t jump into one of us while we’re trying to do number two.”

  Jerry nodded. “I’m in agreement on all of those, though I think we actually need to address the third one first. If it can jump into one of us, we’re in serious trouble. I think the only reason it didn’t try to do that back at Henry’s house is that it was surprised and scared. If we’d grabbed it there we could have dealt with it. A consecrated Temple, plenty of trained people for the operation, and frankly Henry’s basement to tie Davenport up in while we worked it out. But it surprised us too, and we didn’t get the jump on it when we could have.”

  “I don’t usually tackle somebody and tie them up because they flex a little psychic muscle,” Mitch said.

  “Well, no.” Jerry grinned. “Of course we don’t. That’s because we’re the good guys.”

  Mitch tipped his hypothetical white hat. “And now we can’t nab Davenport. I suppose Lewis and I could ambush him, mug him, knock him out and haul him back to the plane, but….”

  “And then do what with him?” Jerry grimaced. “First of all, I have no idea how to bind that creature yet. Secondly, what do we do with him on the plane? We don’t have nearly the energy we’d need to keep it in a protective circle, even if we used Lewis, and he has no idea what he’s doing.”

  “And that brings us back to the thing jumping,” Mitch said grimly. “If we can’t keep it from jumping into one of us, we can’t risk contact.”

  “That’s what I’m working on now,” Jerry said. “We need an amulet, a sigil. Something that we can wear or carry that will protect the bearer. Otherwise, you’re right. This is too hot to handle.” He waved a book in Mitch’s direction. “There are a lot of things we could do if we had proper equipment and time. And the right materials. But….”

  “We can use Henry’s machine shop at the airport,” Mitch said. “There’s probably equipment we could use as a burin, and there’s sure as hell plenty of sheet metal. Lewis has a pretty good hand in the shop. I’ve seen him do some nice fancy cuts.”

  “Engraving on metal would be better than on paper with ink,” Jerry said.

  “Less likely to get wet or torn.”

  Jerry nodded. “On silver would be ideal.”

  “We’re going to get into Chicago between eleven and midnight,” Mitch said. “You think Henry has silver lying around his machine shop at two in the morning?”

  “Ok, no. Ideally we would need to consecrate the burin at the hour with the correct planetary correspondence to the sigil we desire to grave.”

  “We’ve got five hours,” Mitch said. “And those are the hours we have before the Chief gets in. So one of them better be the right hour.”

  “And then of course we should create the correct sigil. The problem is that the most obvious power to call upon to bind it is Diana, which suggests we should use one of the sigils of the moon. But most of them have the opposite effect of what’s intended. They’re for opening or revealing, for activating oracular talents or making plain what is hidden. I suppose, of course, we could use a non-specific protective device, but….”

  “Like….” Mitch probed.

  “A sigil of Sagittarius would be appropriate, since Diana has a clear correspondence with archery, but I would prefer to get a specific invocation in. Give me a moment, here.” Jerry pulled his pocket notebook out and started scribbling with the stub of a pencil.

  “Ok.” Mitch leaned back and ate his sandwich.

  Lewis glanced at the altimeter again, listening to the engines straining. 8680 and still climbing, though the air was rougher here, lifting and dropping the Terrier at irregular intervals. A lot rougher, he amended, as the bottom seemed to drop out of his seat. The mountains loomed ahead, bare rock too steep even for snow, the peaks higher than the plane itself. Alma was frowning, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel.

  “We could go north to South Pass,” Lewis said.

  He thought she would have looked at him, but the Terrier bucked again, and there was a thump and a curse from the cabin. “We’re all right,” she said.

  “It’s less than 8000 feet,” he said. “South Pass.”

  “It’s an hour longer,” Alma said. “We’d have to put down in Cheyenne then, too.”

  And Cheyenne was a lot busier than North Platte, a regular stop for passenger planes as well as the mail carriers. They wouldn’t just lose time in the air, they’d lose it on the ground as well. The Terrier dropped another ten feet and rose again almost as quickly. This was the way to go, if they could just get the altitude. He glanced at the numbers he’d scribbled on the edge of the flight plan: they would be burning about twenty gallons of fuel per hour, maybe a little more given that Alma was running rich, and the supplemental tank held forty-three gallons. It was getting close to time to switch over to the main tanks — in the next half hour, maybe sooner. And that meant they’d be crossing the mountains with a full normal fuel load: tight, but doable.

  “We’ll need to switch tanks soon,” he said.

  “Ok.” Alma’s hands were steady on the controls, the muscles of her forearms bunching and relaxing as she eased the plane up another hundred feet. “We should probably do it sooner. I’ve had to keep the mix richer than usual to get us going.”

  Even as she spoke, the port engine misfired. Lewis swore under his breath, his heart racing, but then the engine caught again. “How about now?” he asked.

  “Now sounds good,” Alma agreed.

  Lewis leaned forward, remembering the procedure Mitch had drilled into him. Open the right valve, open the left valve, count twenty seconds — the port engine missed again, but he kept counting. The Terrier was designed to fly on any two of its three engines, that was no problem. The main thing was to keep the fuel flow steady, and make the transition without getting air in the lines. Twenty seconds, and he reached between the seats to close the valve on the supplemental tank. He held his breath, waiting for the engines to falt
er, looked sideways to see Alma’s knuckles white on the control wheel. The starboard engine missed, caught; the Terrier steadied again under Alma’s touch. And then the needle twitched on the main fuel gauge, a sure sign that the gas was flowing, and Lewis allowed himself a sigh of relief. Alma grinned, shook her head.

  “It’s always something.”

  The altimeter was hovering at 9200 feet, mountains rising on either side higher than the plane. Below them, Lewis could make out the thread of a road tracing the narrow pass, but there was no other sign of human presence.

  “I’m going to hold her here,” Alma said. “We’re at the peak, no point trying for more.”

  Lewis nodded, and let himself relax into his seat.

  “There.” Jerry thrust his notebook under Mitch’s nose. “What do you think?” There were pages covered in scribbles, bits of mathematical formulas and Hebrew letters, a square of numbers like a strange acrostic puzzle, all the things that made up Jerry’s work. Balanced against the swaying of the plane, he stabbed the pencil at an elaborate square design made up of symmetrical swoops and curves alternated with triangles and an elaborate hexagram. “That.”

  Mitch’s brow furrowed. “I think that’s going to be impossible to engrave.”

  “It’s the best possible sigil,” Jerry said. “I’ve transliterated Diana Nemorensis via numerology, then used the Hebrew letters corresponding with each number to create a grid, then calculated the best way to have a single line pass through each number in correct order to make a symmetrical design….”

  “We’re talking about a machine shop, not a jeweler,” Mitch said. He twisted around. “Hey Lewis! Can you come back here a minute?”

  “Go on. I’ve got it,” he heard Alma say, and Lewis climbed out of the copilot’s chair and came back.

  “Can you engrave this?” Mitch asked as Lewis came between the chairs.

  Lewis took the notebook and turned it so the light from the window hit it better, running his other hand through his hair. It had escaped from its pomade and didn’t lie flat like Valentino’s. He looked doubtful, but replied, “I suppose? I’d give it a try. Something about fourteen inches square….”