Galaxy's Edge Magazine

by Orson Scott Card

  She mostly knew the British as allies of the Japanese and occupiers of Hong Kong, far down the coast of her country. She did not hate them, but this was work, this was money she could send home, and this was for Tsingtau.

  “Do you need help?” Dressler asked.

  On most ships the navigator would use this station by himself since the space was tight, but because Ke-feng could not see well enough to properly direct the wind from the bridge, she would have to stay with him. Kite dancers on other ships participated like regular soldiers, taking stations during combat.

  Ke-feng had no such position, so the L 75 carried an additional soldier. The officer who had assigned her had jokingly told Oberleutnant Walther that it should be okay. She was light and barely weighed forty-five kilos. He had been unaware that she understood enough German to get the jape.

  It was good she was tiny though, because that at least gave her a little room while perched alongside Dressler.

  “No, I found it,” she said, though she was only about eighty percent certain that she recognized the city’s blurry location from the last time they’d gone.

  Though she served on the L 75 she was not considered a part of the German navy, so she did not feel the need to address Dressler as a superior. She would call Walther Herr Oberleutnant since he commanded the ship, but the navigator was not her boss. Her uniform, such as it was, was simply a set of civilian coveralls clumsily tailored to a woman of her size.

  She could hear the whisper of pressure valves and the barking voice of Walther above them, running through their final checks.

  “We’ll be taking off soon,” said Dresser. “We’re currently pointed west by northwest.”

  She considered that and said, “Then the wind’s blowing from the east, but it’s very mild.”

  Ke-feng could feel it slide along the envelope that surrounded the rigid frame of the airship. Inside its shell were over a dozen gasbags filled with hydrogen, ready to lift them into the sky.

  “It’s a good start,” said Dresser, but they both knew the winds could change once they got higher, and at that point it would be up to Ke-feng to keep them on course.

  A bell rung, its clear sound traveling through the speaking tubes of the airship, letting the crew know they were lifting off. She couldn’t see the mooring ropes fall away, even though she knew that the bottom of the navigator pod had a wide opening for the machine gun and its gunner. For her, it was the upward bob of the airship and the change in the currents that said they were on their way.

  * * *

  Together Dressler and Ke-feng guided the L 75 toward London, with him calling the current bearing of the ship and telling her which direction the wind was needed. She could not control the speed of the air, but she could influence the flow of the currents. It was an ancient art, mostly for making kites fly like dragons and birds.

  Westerners don’t know how to do this, said her grandmother. They don’t know to train their children in an art as soon as they have the ability to learn.

  If there were potential kite dancers among the Germans, they did not know themselves, any more than kite dancers knew they could influence the winds around something as massive as an airship until the Germans had taken one up in a zeppelin.

  Nine other ships accompanied the L 75. Eight of them were the same Y-class zeppelins, a relatively new model, with a light skeleton and able to carry the highest payload outside of an air carrier.

  The ninth ship was SMS Silesia, flying escort with a belly full of airplanes. Though the Y-class ships had machine guns for defense, they did not have the maneuverability of smaller aircraft, and even if the Germans evaded the searchlights, the British night fighters would surely appear as soon as the first bomb dropped. The pilots and planes aboard the Silesia would make it difficult for the British to strike the airships without worrying about their own well-being.

  Ke-feng spent most of the afternoon perched on the navigator’s bench, shifting between squatting and kneeling so that she was tall enough to push her face into the hood of the farviewer. It wasn’t necessary to channel the wind, being a navigation tool, but Dressler had taught her to use it.

  Even though the kite dancers kept the ships on course, they could not see any better than the Germans around them. That was the farviewer’s strength.

  And the farviewer did not require eyes to see. Ordinary lens could magnify, but to truly see things as they ought to be, the farviewer projected.

  The viewer clicked as she cycled through the filters and magnification settings by touch, and she could feel the tingle of a weak electrical current around her head as the images bypassed her damaged eyes and fed into her mind through the metal contacts within the hood. She could change the lighting, turning the view before her into something resembling day or night, or anything in between, and by swiveling the wheel mount she could pivot the facing of the navigation pod and see in different directions beneath the airship.

  This was the best part of the L 75. Even if it was only the ocean or distant landmasses, even if the color was not quite right, at least it was a sharper world with details like she remembered, and as long as he did not immediately need the device himself, Dressler allowed her to use it as much as she wanted.

  Someone banged on the rail above the ladder to their pod to get the navigator’s attention. “What do you think, Dressler? Are we still an hour to the coast?”

  It was Oberleutnant Walther.

  “I would guess so,” said Dressler. “We haven’t had much trouble with the wind.”

  Which meant she had done her job. Dressler didn’t do much except tell her their bearing so she could make adjustments.

  Through the gap for the machine gun below she could feel the air currents, the cold outside, as they threaded through her gloved fingers. It had been easy to grasp and pull them the way she wanted to go. She had coiled the breeze around her hands since she was six.

  Ke-feng pulled her head out of the hood, and the navigation pod was little more than a dark haze. She could not distinguish anything at all, not even Dressler’s large frame, and he was perched right next to her. It was past sunset now, but that hadn’t mattered in the farviewer, where the ocean beneath them was blue instead of black.

  “The winds seem manageable enough,” said Walther, “and we’re so close now I doubt we can drift much. Take Ke-feng and get some dinner before we get in the thick of things.”

  “Yes, Herr Oberleutnant.” Then to her he said, “Well, Ke-feng, shall we get dinner?”

  As if she hadn’t heard Walther, which was foolish since she was right beside him. But being petulant would not get her anything, so she simply said, “Let’s eat.”

  Dressler led her to the officer’s rest area, taking her by the hand even though she knew she could find it on her own if she put her hand to the wall and counted how many steps she had taken. She could picture what the gondola looked like in her mind, even if she couldn’t see it very well, or at all, given the current amount of light.

  Ke-feng suspected they could barely see the other zeppelins from their gondola. The L 75 would be running without lights if they were this close to shore. No one wanted to signal to the British that they were coming.

  When she thought about it, she doubted Dressler could see any better, not unless there was a fair bit of moonlight, and still he treated her like some fragile marionette that must be protected. She was already broken and unable to perform like she had been made.

  Dressler raised her hand and set it down on the back of a chair. “Here you are,” he said. “You can sit now.”

  She did, and heard something clink in front of her, a tin plate with food. “Your share,” said a voice. It belonged to an engineer named Sauber. She could tell from his voice that he was quite young, like most of the crew of the L 75, and probably not much older than her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she carefully sl
id her hand around the table until her fingers found the plate’s rim.

  She would have liked some chopsticks, which she could use blind better than most people expected, but the crew of the L 75 did not even bother with the Western-style utensils while eating on the airships. All the food was simple, and relatively dry; easy to hold with the hands.

  At least their rations often came with sausages made from pig, one of the few foods that the Chinese and Germans had in common, though they were spiced differently and Ke-feng missed eating it chopped with rice.

  Dressler’s voice came from across the table, which she knew from previous exploration was not very large. “Can you find your food all right?”

  Ke-feng had her plate right in front of her. Did he think she could miss it? Or was it because he could barely see as well? But she said, “Yes.”

  The air was frigid, not just because of the spring season, but because of the altitude. After she removed her gloves she blew on her hands to keep them warm. There wasn’t a proper kitchen on the L 75 for cooking food, but they did have hot coffee, courtesy of running pipes of water by the engines. The two sausages on her plate were cold, and so was the bread.

  They had given her a full set of rations again. Walther’s orders. He never undercut her meals, even though she was tiny and could not assume as many duties as another soldier.

  But she noticed on handling them that the sausages were shorter this time, maybe even thinner.

  “How is your meal?” she asked.

  “Good enough,” said Dressler, which told her that in actuality it wasn’t.

  She would miss the larger sausages, but if the Oberleutnant cut her share, then rations were probably smaller for everyone. Even if she could make do, she did not think her dinner would fill the stomach of a soldier twice her weight. Dressler’s belly would probably be growling on the way back from their raid tonight.

  Ke-feng took her hunk of bread and tore it in two. Unsure which piece was actually bigger, she held one out across the table. “I don’t care for this sort of bread. Perhaps you would like it?”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  She wasn’t. A part of her still wanted to eat it even if she didn’t like its coarse texture, because it was food, but she said, “Yes.”

  His hand touched hers and she flinched. Clearly the darkness was enough that he couldn’t see either, because he quickly apologized as he took the bread from her.

  She ate the piece she had held on to and it would be her luck to have kept the smaller half, but at least she wouldn’t have to listen to his stomach. This whole rationing process bothered her. She didn’t know how a nation that was struggling to feed its soldiers was going to be able to help her country.

  * * *

  “Go ahead. Bring us in,” said Dressler.

  Bauer, their pilot, would handle the steering once they spotted their target, but the kite dancer still handled the approach. Ke-feng stood on her knees to keep her face pressed into the farviewer. She could recognize landmarks from their previous raid, or rather she could when the clouds cooperated.

  Ke-feng spun through the filters, trying to find something that might mitigate the effect. They always wanted to approach with cover, but sometimes the clouds were too heavy even for the farviewer.

  At least she was able to spot the Thames, and the L 75 followed it up.

  Walther shouted down into their pod. “How is our distance from the other ships?”

  Ke-feng swiveled their station around and could see the L 81 to their right, where it should be. When she checked the air currents, she found another ship above and behind them, just at the farthest end of her reach. Probably the L 72.

  “We’re adequately spread out,” she said to Dressler, who really should have been the one on the farviewer, but neither he nor Walther commented on that.

  “We’re clear!” he said to the Oberleutnant. Then to Ke-feng he said, “There are searchlights on either side of the river. They’re sweeping the sky for us.”

  “I can’t do anything about that,” she said. “If you want lift, it’s the Oberleutnant’s decision. You want fine maneuvering, talk to Bauer.”

  She only controlled heading, and while she could channel the wind to blow up or down, such control could not be sustained. Air did not naturally flow that way, not without abrupt differences in temperature.

  “I’m just letting you know,” said Dressler. “Even though you can see through there, your vision is still very limited because it is so focused.”

  It wasn’t just focused. It was limited because all she got were landscapes. She couldn’t make out individual people with this, couldn’t see the texture of the cobblestones on a street.

  A beam of light waved before her, and she sucked in a breath. It was too close, and the cloud cover was thinning.

  “Do you see anything that looks like a factory?” said Dressler.

  “No.”

  “Let me have a look. It’s about time I take over anyway.”

  She scooted to the side and sat on the edge of the bench, once again surrounded in darkness and even darker shapes that were the walls of the airship. Currents flowed beneath her, coming in from the gaps around the machine gun. When she had gone on her first raid under Walther they had made it to Britain and back without having to return fire. The night fighters hadn’t found them in time.

  But every raid since had ended in gunfire, and they had lost a few of their gunners over the year she had been with them.

  The L 75 itself was sturdy, and the multiple gasbags inside the envelope made it difficult to lose lift. After they came back from one raid, Dressler had told her that the L 75 had been punctured over a hundred times, and yet it was not enough to bring the airship down.

  He had probably been trying to reassure her, but that was the same raid where they had lost the L 73. The British were getting better with their incendiary ammunition.

  “Target spotted,” said Dressler, loud enough for Walther to hear. “Bring us southwest. You might be able to see it soon unaided.”

  Dressler had told her the city was dark outside of the searchlights around the periphery. They knew about the raids, and that the light of homes gave their invaders a means to see. That’s why the Germans needed the farviewer. It wasn’t just for the distance, but for the filters to turn night into day.

  Ke-feng monitored the air currents as the L 75 split off from the other ships toward its target. She could hear the radio operator chattering on the wireless above her. The Silesia would remain positioned over the middle of the city as the bombers splintered in different directions. Dressler spun the pod around as he adjusted his view of the landscape below.

  “The night fighters will be coming soon,” he said. “We’re close enough that their listening posts should have picked us up.”

  “I don’t feel anything yet,” she said. The currents would change once other aircraft joined them.

  Dressler called up the bridge. “We’ll be over the target shortly. Estimate: thirty seconds!”

  “We see it!” said Walther.

  “Searchlights in the city!” It was Bauer’s voice that carried from above.

  Walther’s command was immediate. “Man the guns! Prepare for bombardment.”

  Dressler got out of his seat and jumped down to the next level of the navigation pod. Ke-feng couldn’t feel them yet, but if additional searchlights had gone up inside the city itself, the British definitely knew they were here. Somewhere nearby, the Silesia would be opening its cavernous belly and Germany’s own airplanes would be lowered into the sky.

  Then she felt the change in the air.

  “Incoming fighters!” she shouted.

  “You heard the girl,” said Walther. “Stay sharp!”

  Bauer called out that the L 75 was almost over their target. Walther ordered the dropping of the bombs. Servo
s whirred, opening up the belly of the ship.

  She knew they had fallen before she heard the impact below. The L 75 suddenly lifted, buoyed by the weight that was shed, but before they shot too high, she felt the air change again. The crew was letting hydrogen out of the gasbags. Better to do it now before the night fighters and their flaming ammunition came to bear.

  Voices chattered above her, excited. It sounded like they hit the building they hoped for.

  “I can feel them closing,” said Ke-feng. She turned down to Dressler. “Can you see if they’re ours or theirs?” she asked.

  “Judging from the direction, they’re probably British, but at this distance it’s hard to tell without the farviewer’s filters,” said Dressler. “We’ll know soon enough. If they’re smart they’ll stay clear.”

  The German planes knew to avoid flying too close to the zeppelins, to avoid accidentally being pitched by the kite dancers. Though the British were aware of the Chinese wind artists, they were not certain of their reach, nor that the Central Powers changed the distance the kite dancers were allowed to interfere with enemy fighters with every raid, to avoid revealing their full range. It kept the German pilots safer, the load on the kite dancers lighter, and the British uncomfortable.

  “A few are coming close,” said Dressler. “Stay where you are. Make sure you have cover.”

  Night fighters would strafe beneath the zeppelins, guns aimed upward at the airships’ bellies. The floor beneath the farviewer’s bench was plated to protect it, and when she knelt she could hardly be struck by anything save a ricocheting bullet. She huddled tight, knees almost to her chest and tugged her scarf closer around her neck.

  Ke-feng knew that the British liked to aim for the navigation pod. She wasn’t sure if they were aware of the farviewer and its capabilities, but she was certain that the fact it had a gun and dangled from beneath the bridge was reason enough.

  “How many?” she asked, daring to lean out just far enough to Dressler to hear. She could feel the trembling currents of the airplanes’ approach, but it was too hard to figure out their numbers.