Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3

by Melissa Scott

"Since we're going southeast, that will do," Mitch said. He sat down on the deck with his back to the cockpit door. "Lewis, you sit to my right. Stasi, scoot your chair closer to Jerry's so that you're opposite me."

  "North is a perfectly good position for a medium," Stasi said. She moved her wicker chair, making room for Lewis to sit on the floor beside her feet.

  "Hands around then," Mitch said, and closed his eyes, reaching. Lewis to his right, a firm grip like a handshake, the solid grip of a new friend. His energy was bright, constant, clear as a stream of pure current. Jerry to the left, precise, Jerry's hand on top ready to pass counterclockwise, all of the conventions observed without thinking, professional as they come. And Stasi across, hard to feel at first, through the other connections or because she wasn't putting much into the web, but strong. There was more energy than he'd expected there, not as deep as Alma but as practiced as Jerry, just in an entirely different tradition.

  Mitch took a deep breath, opening his hands flat against the Terrier's body beneath him, cool metal under his fingers, smooth as soft skin. His lady. His plane. His Terrier. She struggled against the wind, holding her own, nose into the eye of the wind, only a faint shudder down her body telling her strain. The wind moved over every surface. He could almost feel the eddies, feel the lift beneath her wings, the turbulence in the wake of her props, the silvery path of her slipstream. She could take more than this, his gallant lady, but she was burning fuel to do it. Using energy. She was using energy to fight the wind, certain as a woman struggling to walk in a gale, certain as the figurehead of a sailing ship pointing the way home. She couldn't go on forever this way. Fuel would fail.

  I won't fail you, he whispered to her, fingers against her metal flesh. I'll get you respite.

  Wind. There was energy behind it. Something moved it. Somewhere, out in front along their course, air particles moved in response to energy, a stream of energy unmeasurable by modern standards but nonetheless there, atoms responding to changes. The air moved. Wind was created.

  And the energy, the untraceable track of protons and electrons…it could be followed. It could be followed if you knew how, if something in your own mind was similar enough, if you had energy of your own. He did. He had fuel, and more poured in from Lewis in a steady, solid stream, Jerry regulating it carefully, Stasi on the edge of his consciousness, an auxiliary fuel tank barely tapped.

  Back along the course of the energy over green seas, a diagonal path over deep waters, the Gulf of Mexico warm in the sun. He could follow it. Not a place, not a thing, but a person. Jeff. He'd worked with Jeff this way, his touch as familiar as Lewis'. He knew him. He'd trusted him.

  Mitch gathered the energy up, pooling it, like making a snowball of energy, his and Lewis' and Jerry's and Stasi's, compacting it like ice, harder and tighter and brighter. A snowball. An energy ball. A flame to the engine, a second spark, an unsynchronized flame front that would burn entirely wrong, that would send the stream flying off in unpredictable directions, disrupted entirely from its purpose.

  Jeff. The sense of him, suddenly, surprisingly, open and real as though he had come upon him startlingly quick, walked up behind him wherever he was sitting and grabbed his collar and yanked him to his feet. A punch in the nose, the snowball of energy thrown into the operation, falling straight down the line of energy to its source, exploding into fire, the unsynchronized front that tears up your engine. There was nothing subtle about it. It was a sock to the jaw, all the energy he could muster, fueled by a rage he didn't realize he had. Rage. Pain. Shame. All of it fed a roundhouse of energy, a hit with all his strength.

  He had half a moment to feel the shock, and then the contact broke, the energy trail dissipating, and he rocked back, fingers against the cool metal skin of the Terrier.

  The last of the power wrapped around him, and he felt Jerry grounding it, pulling it down, spreading it between them to absorb evenly. Mitch opened his eyes.

  "Ok?" Jerry said. His glasses reflected the light and there was a thin smile on his face.

  "Ok," Mitch said. He lifted his hands from the deck, flexing his fingers. They were cold. It was probably from the metal, but it felt instead like all the anger had burned out of him like tobacco out of a cigarette, leaving ash in the shape of the paper behind.

  "That was interesting," Stasi said. She looked worried, or maybe that was what respect looked like from her.

  "Did it work?" Lewis asked.

  "Ask Al."

  Lewis opened the cockpit door. "Hey Al? How's it looking?"

  "I think the wind's dropped," she called back. "She's handling differently. Come up and see."

  Lewis scrambled over Mitch and went back into the front, while he leaned back against the door, suddenly tired. The Terrier's engines droned on, but he thought she was laboring less. He thought. So tired. He closed his eyes and let the sound of the engines lull him. Paper. Ash on the wind, the thing that the fire leaves behind.

  "Let him be," Jerry said in some distant place, kind and warm. "We've done all we can for now."

  Chapter Twenty

  The Terrier was moving easier, and Alma eased back on the throttle again, returning it to the setting she had calculated would be the most efficient. They’d burned off ninety, maybe a hundred gallons of fuel in the time since she’d first spotted the problem, and that was thirty or forty gallons more than she’d planned for, cut at least half an hour off the time they could stay in the air. They’d burned more before that, too, maybe another twenty gallons extra, maybe even a bit more, as Lanier built the headwind against them. At least Mitch had stopped that.

  She glanced sideways at Lewis, who was flipping through the almanac again as though he might find a field he hadn’t seen before. “How’s Mitch?”

  “Ok, I think.” Lewis didn’t look up from the flimsy sheets. “Sleeping.”

  “Good.” Actually, it wasn’t all that good, not if she wanted him sharp for the last leg into Coconut Grove, but a working like this, spoiling something as big as Lanier’s wind — that took energy, took it out of everyone. Mitch's pockets weren't as deep as hers, but even she would be exhausted by the amount required. “How about you?”

  “Fine.” Lewis did look up then, a quick, rueful glance as he put the almanac back into the flap beside his seat. “A little tired, but nothing serious.”

  “Good,” Alma said again. The sun was almost at the zenith, easing the glare; there was a streaky haze of cloud a thousand feet above them, and thunderheads to the northwest, marching slowly down the coast. At least they were less likely to run into them on this route, though that wasn’t much of a silver lining, not when the cost of failure was crashing in open ocean…

  “How did he find us?” Lewis asked. “He couldn’t have known what we were trying — could he?”

  “A headwind would have slowed us down, made sure we couldn’t win,” Alma said. “Which I expect he wants. If I were doing it, I’d have dowsed for us, and then I’d have seen what we were trying. He was a flyer, too, you know. He was in the Lodge with Gil and Henry and Mitch and Jerry.”

  “I should have seen it,” Lewis said.

  Alma looked at him quickly, but he looked more thoughtful than guilty.

  He gave a quick smile, as though he’d guessed her thought. “I’m not beating myself up, I just — I was thinking about sailing ships, that the sigil on the tail was like a stern lantern, and — well, that was the answer, wasn’t it? We had a wrong wind. Only I couldn’t read my own mental handwriting.”

  “It takes a while to learn your own symbols, I think,” Alma said. She was grateful for the distraction, something to keep her mind off the pointless calculations, her hands steady on the wheel, not fiddling with throttle and fuel mixture. “We’ve got to find someone who can teach you.”

  “I’d like to learn,” Lewis said. “But it’s not like you can afford for me to take a couple of months off.”

  “No,” Alma said. Nor could they afford to hire someone to come to them, though she coul
d probably find a tutor if she really tried. Not that she wanted to ask Henry particularly: she wasn’t as much of a purist as Jerry, but Henry’s lodge worked in an entirely different tradition. Bullfinch belonged to a more congenial group, and would certainly know someone; Jerry had an even wider range of connections they could tap, but all of those people would need to be paid. At the moment, they were barely making ends meet. Which was why they’d gotten into this whole air race thing in the first place… She shoved that thought aside. They were going to survive, and they were going to win enough money to keep the business going. Somehow. The Terrier bored on to the southeast, the haze thickening to cloud ahead of them.

  Twenty minutes more, and she was worrying again, eyeing the fuel gauge warily. Fifteen minutes more, and she was sure: even at the most economical speed and fuel mixture that she could manage, she wasn’t going to be able to stretch it out to make the coast. She scowled at the instruments, everything perfect except the one crucial gauge, the numbers flickering through her mind. They were coming up about fifty gallons short, half an hour’s flying time or a bit more. If she thinned out the mixture any more, they’d lose airspeed, and going slower wasn’t actually going to help the problem. The slower speeds still burned fuel, and took longer to cover the ground; 80 knots was their most efficient speed, and she’d been holding to that all the way across the Gulf, except when the headwind forced her to increase power. .

  Eighty knots was a given. Any faster, any slower, they’d just run out of fuel sooner — She stopped abruptly, frowning. Eighty knots was the most efficient speed on three engines. On two… She closed her eyes for a moment, juggling the numbers. On two engines, the best speed was around seventy knots; that would get them into Weedon Island in about an hour and a half, and they had just about that much fuel remaining. It would be close, so very close, but it should work. It had to work.

  “All right,” she said. “Lewis, I want you to shut down the center engine.”

  He gave her a sharp look, but reached for the controls, closing the fuel line and readying the engine for shutdown. “Ok.”

  And that was Lewis for you, she thought. He’s not going to flail or ask pointless questions, he’s just going to do what needs doing. The engine sputtered, the last of the fuel feeding in, and Lewis switched off the spark.

  “Done,” he said. “Fuel still a problem?”

  Alma nodded. “We’ll be ok now,” she said, and willed it to be true.

  Mitch woke to a change in the engines, a shift in the steady drone. He sat upright, his body reacting before his mind had caught up: they were down an engine. He looked at Jerry, who shrugged.

  “Alma shut it down.”

  Ok, that was better than a mechanical failure, but still not good. He jammed both hands into his hair, tugging at it as though the pull would help wake him up. Across the cabin, Stasi sat bolt upright, legs crossed, one foot swinging in its pretty shoe. She was scared, he thought, but determined not to show it. He couldn’t quite manage a reassuring smile, and hauled himself to his feet to lean in the cockpit door.

  “Al?”

  “We burned up too much fuel fighting the wind.” Alma spoke without turning. “But we can make it on two.”

  “Ok.” He’d learned years ago to trust Alma’s calculations. If she said they’d have enough fuel this way, then they would. They’d be losing time, but Alma would have factored it in, and, anyway, they had to make it to Tampa Bay without crashing if they were going to have any chance of winning. He braced his hands on the sides of the doorframe. “How far out are we?”

  “I make it about fifty miles from Weedon Island,” Alma said. She nodded to the windscreen. “Closer to the coast.”

  Sure enough, there it was, a line on the horizon, sand rising out of the sea. The question was where they were, exactly, whether they were north or south of the field. A light flashed then, a single point a few degrees north of their heading; a moment later, a double flash appeared in the same spot.

  “That’s the Anclote Key light,” Lewis said. He passed the map over his shoulder, and Mitch took it. “About thirty-five miles north of Weedon Island.”

  “Ok,” Mitch said again. He turned the map in his hands, matching the light’s flash to the markings. Alma was keeping the Terrier on a heading that ought to cross the coast just about Clearwater, and from there it was a straight run across the little peninsula to Weedon Island. “Do you want me to take the landing?”

  “Yes.” Alma’s eyes were on the instruments, her hands steady on the control yoke. “You can swap with Lewis whenever you’re ready.”

  Fifty miles, at their most economical cruising speed… Before he could say anything, Lewis said, “Why don’t you take it now?”

  “Thanks,” Mitch said. If it was him, he’d hate to give up the co-pilot’s seat — but Lewis was a good guy, entirely sensible. Too sensible to take it as a slight on his flying, or as anything but acknowledgement that he, Mitch, had the most hours in the Terrier. Lewis struggled free of his harness, slipped past Mitch into the cabin, and Mitch took his place in the second seat. Alma gave him a quick nod, but all her attention was focused on the Terrier, nursing it toward the coast.

  They crossed the coast over Clearwater at a thousand feet, crossed the peninsula’s narrow waist, and turned further south to follow the coast of old Tampa Bay, Alma beginning the shallow efficient descent as they crept southeast toward the field. Mitch glanced at the fuel gauges. They were low, but not yet on the reserve: good enough, close as they were to the Weedon Island field. Yes, there was the bridge that was their first landmark, the coast swelling to the east, swamp running dark green to the water. And there at last was the flash of flag streaming from the Sky Harbor tower, rising fifty feet above the tin-roofed hangar. The field was empty except for a pair of stub-winged biplanes tied down on the verge.

  “Time to fire her back up,” Mitch said, and Alma nodded.

  “Go ahead.”

  Mitch reached for the controls, began the starting sequence. He pumped the primer, then checked to be sure the throttle was closed. The starter was on, the starter dog engaged; he switched on the ignition and the booster magneto. The engine coughed, caught, and died again.

  “Damn.” Mitch reset the controls, ran through the sequence again. The engine coughed again, but refused to turn over. “Come on…”

  “We’re on the reserve,” Alma said, quietly.

  “Come on,” Mitch said again. More primer, more fuel, the mix boosted to “Full Rich”; the starter and the booster fired. The engine coughed, caught, and failed again with a shudder that shook the entire airplane.

  “Mitch,” Alma said.

  They couldn’t run rich like that, not if they wanted to have enough fuel to land. His hands were already moving on the controls, adjusting the mixture. Alma brought the Terrier around again, lining them up for another pass. Mitch could see people on the ground outside the hangar, staring up at the strange plane.

  “One more time,” Mitch said.

  “Go,” Alma answered, and he reached for the controls, began the sequence once again.

  The engine shook and sputtered without result. Maybe a clogged line somewhere, Mitch thought; but then, it was always tricky restarting in midflight, the slipstream playing merry hell with the spark and the gasoline. Alma looked sideways at him, and for the first time, Mitch thought he saw fear in her eyes.

  “Can we land on two?”

  No. That was the simple answer: the manual strongly recommended only doing landings and takeoffs with all three engines, and disclaimed any responsibility for the crash that it implied was inevitable if you were stupid enough to try it. There was enough power, even on two engines there was enough to bring the Terrier safely down. It was just that there was no margin for error, no chance of changing your mind once you’d picked your line, and God forbid there be a gust of wind, a glitch in the other engines, or any other minor problem. “We’re going to have to,” he said, and knew he sounded grim.

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p; “You’ll have to take it,” Alma said. Her voice was tight. “Get ready to switch over.”

  Mitch was already busy with the controls. “Ready.”

  “She’s yours,” Alma said.

  Mitch felt the controls come alive in his hands, the Terrier swinging east over the swamp. The reserve tank was ticking down, but he took his time getting the feel of the air, the way the Terrier handled on two engines. One chance, that was all he was going to get.

  He brought the Terrier around in a gentle turn, heading back toward the field. No steep angles, no sudden moves, nothing to shake her out of true. The runway was dirt, empty of traffic, but there were even more people outside the terminal and the main hangar, all staring up at the Terrier. A flagman waved from beside the tower, and Mitch wagged his wings in answer, acknowledging the signal, but kept on past the terminal, making another long, gentle turn to bring them into the wind. Into the wind and in line with the runway, bare dirt with sod to either side. He cut his speed, not quite to stalling, letting the Terrier drop from three hundred feet to two to one hundred. He could feel the air under the wings, right on the edge of a stall, the two working engines straining to keep power. Fifty feet, and the dirt rushing to meet them, a glimpse of the flag on the tower, above him now as he brought the Terrier down. Twenty feet, ten, and he dumped the last of the lift, the Terrier dropping the last few feet. She landed hard, bounced, wings wobbling, then settled, rumbling across the uneven ground. Mitch allowed himself a sigh of sheer relief, and Alma reached across to grab his shoulder.

  “Beautiful flying,” she said.

  It had to be, he thought. He owed them for screwing up so badly in New Orleans. Necklace or no necklace, he knew better — “We shouldn't have had to do this,” Mitch began, and she shook her head.

  “Stop it. This is not the time.”

  She was right, and he nodded. He brought the Terrier around in a sharp turn, no longer worried about losing an engine, heading back toward the terminal and the people who’d gathered there to see the unexpected arrival.