Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  With restless feet on the pedals and anxious fingers drumming on the throttles, Taziri waited for the marshal to sit up. Through the windows, she saw the harbor waters glittering blue and white around the gray and brown shapes of boats. “Are you all right back there?”

  Kenan grunted and nodded.

  “Well, we’re going to need a plan, and fast. The major is still down there somewhere, and those two heavies may be looking for him right now. What do we do?”

  Kenan-in-the-mirror shook his sweaty head. “I don’t know.”

  “Kenan, we have no time.” Taziri looked back over her shoulder. “The major is in danger every minute that we’re up here and he’s outnumbered down there. You said you just left him, so where is he? Where did he go?”

  Ghanima slipped into the cockpit and sat down beside her. “We left him near the ferry. He said he was going to check the ships.”

  “The ferry.” Taziri unbalanced the throttles and the Halcyon spun a long and lazy half-circle. The view of the harbor below rotated to reveal the lighthouse, the pier, and the empty slip beside it. “Where is it?”

  “There!” Ghanima pointed across the water to the far side of the harbor, where the white bulk of the ferry was slowly churning its way into the mouth of the Bou Regreg River heading toward the Zemmour Canal.

  “Well, that’s just perfect,” Taziri said. “So either he’s still wandering the docks, or he’s sailing inland, or he’s somewhere else entirely.”

  “I think we should go back to Tingis and tell the marshals. Let them figure it out.” Ghanima raised her hands in a helpless gesture. “We’re just pilots. They should have a whole team of marshals and police officers tracking down the ambassador and the major. We should get out of this mess.”

  “There’s nothing I’d like more,” Taziri muttered. Menna. Yuba. Isoke. My arm. So many reasons. “Which is why this is so hard to do.” She turned the propellers up and eased the throttles forward, driving the ship down.

  “What are you doing?” Ghanima rose from her seat, eyes darting from window to window. “We can’t land there!”

  “Of course we can. We shouldn’t. We really, really shouldn’t. But we can.” Taziri watched the shapes below resolve from toys into ships and the ants evolve into women and men. Directly below them, a slender brown finger sharpened into the broad wooden pier where dozens of people, many brandishing fishing poles, were pointing upward or jogging back toward the street. In the center of the pier a ring of bizarre figures became a carousel of tiny wooden sailboats and airships rotating around a central engine, all dressed in waving flags and painted in garish blues, yellows, and reds.

  The propellers flipped back down and the Halcyon roared, cavitating violently as the engines chewed through their own downwash, and then the tires thumped down on the pier, which creaked and groaned beneath them.

  Taziri winced at the noise. “Now we just need to hold still for a bit without breaking the pier and falling into the water. How about it? Think you’re up for a little parking management?”

  Ghanima nodded and quickly took the pilot’s seat as Taziri slipped back into the cabin and spun the hatch wheel to unlock it. “Kenan, I think I might need that gun of yours again. May I?”

  The marshal paused, his eyes fixed on the hatch, his hand resting on his holster. With a sigh, he came to life again and pulled out the revolver. “Keep it out of sight, if you can.”

  “That’s the plan.” Taziri shoved the gun into her jacket’s inner pocket and ducked out the hatch onto the pier. There was no one nearby, only a few fish in a bucket beside an abandoned net and pole. She jogged up the pier toward the shore, toward the small crowd of gawkers gathered at the edge of the street near the harbor master’s office. As Taziri neared them she scanned their faces, young and old, light and dark, hair and hats and…there they were. Two men shouldering their way through the crowd. The two heavies from the lighthouse, the same pair from the airfield a few hours earlier.

  For a brief moment, their eyes met. Then the two men pushed out of the crowd and strode down the pier.

  Taziri stopped just beside the carousel, her hand going to the metallic lump inside her jacket. Her mind raced for options as her gaze came to rest on the little wooden airship on the carousel beside her and she frowned. The toy’s design was all wrong, distorted to create a space for a child to sit in the middle of the balloon.

  The heavies reached the far side of the empty amusement ride, their weapons held low. They were muttering to each other.

  Taziri closed her hand around the gun in her pocket. “Are you working for Ambassador Chaou?”

  The men snorted and exchanged another look. “A little slow, aren’t you?” The taller one shouted over the low huffing of the carousel engine.

  “So it is her.” Taziri called back, “Where is Major Zidane?”

  “Is that what you came back for?” The shorter one with the gun shook his head. “God, Medur must really hate you by now. Coming back for a Redcoat. How stupid are you? You got away, and then you came straight back here for him?” He grinned. “Girl, you are just begging for a bullet.”

  “Where is he?” Taziri thumbed the revolver’s hammer.

  The two men sauntered around the carousel. The tall one with the knife called out, “I think he’s a few miles back that way.” He pointed at the canal. “Don’t worry. Chaou will keep him company. In fact, she sent us to keep you company, too.”

  That little old woman is holding the major? That’s ridiculous, unless… “Is Zidane still alive?”

  “Chaou’s got him.” The tall one shrugged. “That little bitch is pretty tough, what with that thing in her arm. I bet she’s zapped the marshal a dozen times by now.”

  “Zapped? You mean electrocuted?” Taziri’s mind raced as the fragments of conversation slowly fell into place together.

  Wait, what did Hamuy say about Chaou? The doctor did something to her, and it’s in her arm. And it’s something that can electrocute a man as large as the major? A powerful electrical device housed inside a human body. The voltage needed to injure a person would require far more energy than could be stored in any conventional battery. She felt her stomach plummeting into oblivion and her numb fingers suddenly felt cold. She could only come up with one explanation.

  “Yeah, she did it to me once.” The tall one winced. “Or twice.”

  “Stop right there.” Taziri drew the revolver and leveled it at the two men. “Just get out of here. Walk away now or I start shooting.”

  The knife man said, “Take it easy, flygirl. I think we both know you’re not going to shoot anyone. In fact, I’ll bet that’s the first time you’ve ever held a gun, isn’t it?”

  “Actually, it’s the second.” Taziri swung the weapon to the center of the carousel and started firing. Bullets pinged and thumped against the engine, and one of them burst the oil pan into a small fireball, and another shot ruptured the boiler. The metal barrel tore apart and a roaring gust of steam rushed out directly into the rising curtain of flaming oil. The burning wave swept across the carousel, igniting the rotating dais and all of the tiny wooden ships on its rim.

  The men’s eyes went wide as the crimson flare painted their faces in red and yellow. They dove over the railing to plummet into the harbor below as the flaming thunderhead rolled across the pier and set fire to the rail. Taziri threw up an arm to shield her face from the heat as she stumbled back down the pier. She paused to watch the little wooden airships crackle and snap, bathed in flames and spitting cinders. Then she put the gun away and jogged back to the Halcyon.

  She leapt into the cabin, ignoring Kenan’s demands for his gun and the doctor’s mad sputtering in Hellan. Taziri crossed the cabin and put her boot on Hamuy’s crusty black hand. “You said before that they did something to Chaou. They put something electrical in her, didn’t they? When did they put it in her? When?”

  Hamuy grimaced and looked up through heavy lids. His face shone with sweat and his eyes twitched. “Four or five
years back, maybe?”

  Taziri straightened up and backed away. Without looking at the marshal, she handed back the warm revolver. In the cockpit, she took the pilot’s seat and slowly draped her scarf across her face as she took the controls.

  “Taziri?” Ghanima leaned over her shoulder. “What was that all about? What does it mean?”

  “It means this is my fault and I have to fix it.” She shoved the throttles forward and the Halcyon rose off the pier to the very soft droning of its propellers. The view spun quickly to the left as they turned toward the walled canal. Taziri kept her eyes on her instruments. The view below shifted slowly from the sparkling blue of the harbor to the gray tiled roofs of the city to the green fields that lined the canal, while above them a white sun baked the sky into a vast and colorless expanse.

  Ghanima tapped softly on the engineer’s console. “How exactly is this your fault?”

  “Not everything.” Taziri tensed. “Or maybe everything. I don’t know. But the major is in danger because of me.”

  “All right. And that has something to do with the shock gizmo in Chaou’s hand, I get that. But what does that have to do with you, exactly?”

  “To incapacitate a big gorilla like Zidane, you would need a huge shock. So that device must have a high-capacity battery.” Taziri swallowed. “And the only person who’s published a design for a high-capacity battery in the last five years is me.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “You don’t follow the journals, do you?” Taziri frowned and ran her tongue around her teeth. “Do you know what happened to the Silver Shearwater?”

  “It exploded over the Tingis harbor. Some sort of engine problem.”

  She smiled sadly. Close enough. “I was just finishing school when it happened. I was studying electrical engineering. For my final thesis, I wrote a paper proposing a new type of high-capacity battery design. It got shouted down in the journals by several big names at the university, but a few weeks later I got a letter from Isoke Geroubi, captain of what was left of the Shearwater. She read my paper and wanted me on the team rebuilding her ship. After the primary construction was complete, she dismissed the rest of the crew, and she and I built the engine by ourselves.”

  Ghanima shook her head. “Why would she want an electrician? I mean, no offense, but there isn’t that much in the way of electrics on a…” She snapped around to stare at the outline of the engine behind the cabin, and then slowly turned back to look at her. “What did you do?”

  Taziri said, “We perfected my battery idea. It wasn’t cheap, but it turned out to be fairly easy. The new battery provides enough power to drive the electric motors on the propellers for days.” She cleared her throat. “It works. No dangerous boiler, no waiting for it to heat up. Instant acceleration, high torque. And with a large array of solar sheets on the top of the balloon, you can charge the battery all day long and fly forever without landing.”

  Ghanima pointed to the back. “But you do have a boiler. It’s too small, but it’s right there.”

  Taziri shook her head. “That’s just a decoy for the safety inspectors. Although, we did realize that we can use the turbine as an emergency generator to recharge the battery in a pinch. So it’s not completely useless. But there’s no water in it right now. Too much weight.”

  “And you’ve been keeping it a secret this whole time? Why?”

  “It was all part of Isoke’s plan. After the Shearwater disaster, she wanted to make airships safer by getting rid of the whole steam engine. But since the Air Corps wanted to downplay any talk about airships being dangerous, no one in the Corps was willing to help her. Politics. So she went outside the bureaucracy and recruited me. In fact, she was the only person who thought my battery might work. Isoke thought they might pay attention to the idea if we proved it, so we were going to keep the Halcyon’s engine a secret at first, and then after a few years we would unveil it as a proven prototype with thousands of hours of flight time. No one would be able to question our track record,” Taziri said. “We just needed another few months. She was so excited about it. She was working on a speech for the big unveiling.”

  Ghanima nodded slowly and cast her a few brief, uncomfortable glances. “I’m sorry. I don’t know her, but…I’m sorry. I hope she’s all right. At least she was right about the idea. I mean, the Halcyon works, right? You can still unveil it and change the Air Corps.” She rattled her orange flight jacket. “And if the engine can’t explode, then maybe we can stop wearing all this heavy armor, right?”

  Taziri smiled again briefly. Smiling felt wrong when talking about Isoke. Her throat began to ache. “I don’t know, I haven’t had time to think about it. But one way or another, the secret’s going to come out when a new captain is assigned to the Halcyon. I mean, if. If she’s not—you know, it doesn’t really matter right now.”

  “Right.” Ghanima sighed and picked at an old oil spot on her trousers. “And Chaou?”

  “Yeah,” Taziri said. “Well, I guess Isoke wasn’t the only one who took my battery idea seriously.”

  “So you think someone put your battery inside Chaou so she can electrocute people?”

  Taziri grimaced. “Apparently. The timing is right, five years ago. And they also put that armor in Hamuy. It’s got to be some sort of coated metal to not get infected under the skin. How much would you bet they found the idea for that coating in the journals, too?”

  “Yeah, but if these are such great inventions, then how come there aren’t high-capacity batteries and armored soldiers all over the place?”

  “My battery got shot down in all the journals.” Taziri chewed her lip. “Or was it? New stuff gets refuted in the journals all the time, but what if these people go around publicly discrediting new ideas so they can privately control the actual inventions for themselves?”

  “Maybe, but why? Who is ‘they’? And what do they want?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Taziri said. “We need to get to the major, and then we need to find the doctor performing these operations. Hamuy mentioned an Espani called Medina in Arafez. That’s where we start.”

  “So we’re not going back to Tingis?” Ghanima pouted.

  “So we’re not going on to Orossa?” Evander glared.

  Chapter 14

  As the sun reached its zenith, Qhora began to finally feel some faint heat creeping in through her feathered cloak and Espani dress. The warmth cradled her, breathing life into her flesh, life she had almost forgotten in the frozen fortresses and churches of España. She felt like standing and stretching and running, or at the very least casting off her garments to bathe in the sun. But she couldn’t remove her dress now, and she wouldn’t remove her cloak and be mistaken for an Espani, so she sat in her soft saddle atop her beautiful Wayra and silently prayed to Inti that his heavenly fires would never die.

  The Mazigh highway bored her. There were no forests, no rivers, no flocks of colorful birds, no screaming troupes of monkeys, no ponderous ground sloths lumbering through the jungles, no giant armadillos huddled at the waters’ edge, and not a hint of civilization. In the Empire, one could not travel a thousand paces without seeing a shrine festooned with flowers, or an ancient stone monument to some wise sage, or at least a traveler’s marker to tell the distance from one place to another. Lorenzo claimed he could see farms on the distant eastern hills, but here, caught between the towering Atlas Mountains and the restless Atlanteen Ocean, there was nothing but the dead gravel road and the dead metal rails lying in the sun-baked plains.

  “We should stop to eat, Enzo,” she said. “Wayra needs a rest.”

  “As you wish.” Lorenzo headed back to the wagon.

  A high-pitched whistle pierced the stillness of the plain, a steam-powered shriek that echoed across the vast sea of grass. Qhora peered into the distance and saw the black blot on the horizon, just to her right where the two steel rails converged at the bottom of the sky. “Enzo, it looks like we’ll finally get to see one
of these trains of theirs after all.”

  The hidalgo frowned. “I suppose so. Although, I hadn’t expected to see one here. I assumed they would telegraph the other cities and tell the trains not to come to Tingis with the station and rails destroyed. Clearly, I was wrong.”

  “That’s not a crime. Being wrong.” Qhora smiled at him and then turned to watch the distant black dot grow larger and sharper, white steam streaming above it as the clickety-clack of its wheels echoed off the cloudless sky. Wayra swayed beneath her, squawking and hissing at the machine huffing toward them. Qhora patted the hatun-anka’s neck. “Shh, girl. Steady.”

  The clopping of hooves told her that Enzo was not preparing her food. “Is there a problem?” she asked without turning.

  “Yes.” He drew up beside her again and pointed at the approaching train. “Well, maybe. It’s not a whole train. Only an engine.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Why would Arafez send a single engine to Tingis? I would expect a train full of materials to repair the station, or maybe food, or even soldiers. But why just an engine?”

  Qhora didn’t care about the engine. But she saw the anxiety in the young Espani’s eyes and heard the iron creeping into his voice. Over the last year she had all but forgotten who he had been when they first met. Lorenzo Quesada had come to her country full of passion and joy, his tiny whip of a sword as devastating as lightning. He had been loud and brash, his eyes bright, his lips eager to smile, a young man with the sun in his blood. But then they had returned to his homeland, a colorless wasteland of ice and snow where the only sounds were the howls of the wind and wolves.

  The Silver Prince had bestowed on him the rank of hidalgo, which had seemed grander before she learned it brought no wealth or lands, only an empty title and exemption from the Prince’s taxes. But that was when the light went out of him. Thereafter, she had promenaded for Enzo’s gaunt and grim courts, and sat through the endless sermons of his dismal priests, and eaten his tasteless food. And all the while, she had seen him retreat into a quiet and colorless shell of a man, old before his time, a passionless servant who whispered to ghosts and despaired at the cruel realities of the world. Injustices that once drove him to great deeds now drove him into dark church corners to light candles and mutter to his three-faced god.