Gaia's Brood

by Nick Travers

  Chapter 20

  After evading Borker and his assassins by leaping from the Newark platform onto the Shonti Bloom waiting below, I am hoping for a good lie in.

  “Nina, we got company.”

  I open a blurry eye and eventually focus on Scud’s tired face.

  “Fernando says you need to come have a look,” he says,

  “Oh my muscles.” Everything aches as I swing out of my hammock; my legs stiff from all the running and bruised from my collision with the Shonti’s hull; my arms and chest still burn from the effort of leaping onto the blimp; my burned hand throbs beneath thick layers of bandages. I wipe sleepy dust from my eyes. “Whatever he wants had better be important,” I grumble hobbling to the door. I know I am being ungracious, but right now I don’t care.

  Fernando hands me a telescope the moment I step on deck. He points into the sunrise in our wake. “On the horizon.”

  For a moment my heart stops and I think, ‘Reavers.’ Then reality cuts in, Fernando wouldn’t require my opinion if we were about to encounter a Reaver raiding party. He would have the ship running in the opposite direction with all hands on deck handing out weapons. Fernando has a healthy aversion to becoming a Reaver’s lunch, as do I.

  The air smells fresh—a new day. I stare at the pink tinged horizon and my mind clicks into alertness.

  The newly risen sun highlights the uniform colors of two shark-tailed air ships, far too smart for Reaver ships. No hiding now—that sun has already picked us out like a beacon. The shark-tails are too distant for me to see the rows of Evinrude bio engines or the bristling weapons, but I can picture them in my mind.

  I hand the telescope back to Fernando. “Constables.”

  “Exactly.”

  “They might have nothing to do with us,” I say hopefully, but I know it’s a false hope—too many coincidences.

  Fernando rolls his eyes. “Scud and I changed tack half an hour ago and they immediately matched our course.”

  Trent and Izzy emerge onto the deck for the morning watch, mugs of steaming coffee in their hands.

  Izzy notices the tension between us immediately. “What’s up?”

  “The constables have found us,” I say simply.

  Trent scrutinizes his cup. “That’s quick. How?”

  How indeed?

  I shrug my aching shoulders. “Someone recognized my face? The assassins tipped them off? They got lucky? Does it matter?” All I really want to do is return to bed, but as Captain I have to deal with this situation first.

  When entering an uneven contest, you need to work your strengths and force your opponents onto their weaknesses.

  Shark-tailed ships sprint over short distances. They need large batteries and lots of sunshine to maintain that speed. To further boost their sprinting abilities, they sport banks of engines, which eat lots of heavy bio-fuel. Large-fluked whale-tails, like the Shonti Bloom, endure over long distances; light, fuel efficient, good at altitude, but slower, especially in a race.

  Our best chance is to lose them during the night, but we have to stay ahead until nightfall and it’s only dawn.

  I study the race course: Light stratospheric clouds above; not much below—nowhere to hide. All this light and sunshine is going to favor the shark-tails. Somehow, I need to neutralize those banks of powerful engines.

  I watch Izzy take the helm from Fernando—the night shift is over. Hopefully, it’s going to be a long day.

  “Take us high,” I order, “as high above those clouds as you can get. And find a jet-stream to boost us along.” The thin chill air will give the shark-tails little to thrash against and hopefully freeze their engines. Our large flukes should give us the advantage.

  “Full throttle and burn the engines until they freeze up. It’s going to get cold guys. I’m going back to bed.”

  By mid-day, when we break through the stratos clouds, the constables have drawn so close we can read the registration marks printed on their envelopes, without the aid of telescopes. I start to sweat—maybe I have misjudged. Thankfully, we are still out of weapons range.

  The atmosphere aboard the Shonti Bloom is growing tense; the others are starting to doubt my judgment. If the constables close the gap sufficiently to use their weapons, we are finished. Unable to sleep below in my cabin, I pace the deck annoying everyone else. They try their best to ignore me, knowing there is no plan B. No one speaks.

  Eventually, we gain sufficient height to make a difference. The higher we climb the more the constable ships labor in the thinning atmosphere. Every stroke of the Shonti Bloom’s huge flukes powers us marginally ahead. At last we can kill the engines and save fuel for maneuvering. I shrug myself deeper into my fur-lined flight jacket against the dropping temperature. Ice sparkles from the rigging and on the blades of the redundant engines. Time to pull on our fur hats and gloves.

  Then luck strikes and we find our slipstream. The gap between us and the constables opens up again. With every extra meter we forge ahead, the tension on the deck eases slightly. I make the crew break out spare blimp material to jury-rig heavy spinnaker sails. We fly them from the bow like giant kites. Everyone jumps to their task with renewed enthusiasm. With the sails up, we can catch every last molecule of the pursuing slipstream, to help power us along. Smiles start to crack the lips of my stressed-out crew. Then we wait. The silence broken only by the cracking of the sail canvas, the swish of the Shonti’s tail, and my nervous pacing.

  Mid-way through the afternoon, their engines long frozen solid, the constables find the slipstream too. They produce their own sails and pick up speed again, but they have lost their advantage and the distance between us remains constant.

  Finally, I can relax. “We’re going to make it to nightfall guys.” To celebrate, I take my aching body back to bed with instructions for my crew to wake me no later than an hour before sunset. To follow the long day, we have a long night ahead of us. Eventually, I allow the swish of the Shonti Bloom’s great tail to lull me to sleep.

  As the sun finally sets and the Shonti Bloom’s lights flicker on, we complete preparation of our secret weapon.

  The constable airships of the constable skim the high cloud in the moonlight, like schooners on an ocean of cloud, looking ghostly and beautiful. I try to imagine what the Shonti Bloom looks like from the constables’ point of view. Are they admiring the beauty of my ship’s lines, silhouetted against the sunset, or do they just see a quarry they must capture? I bet Borker has no concept of beauty.

  Fernando dashes back from the forward lookout. “Thick bank of clouds straight ahead, Captain.”

  After their initial doubts, the whole crew has pulled together as one—even if we lose this race, I know I will feel a glow of pride in all of them: the reward of command.

  “Everyone ready?”

  They all give me thumbs up and I take over the helm.

  Gently, I steer the Shonti Bloom into the thick cloud. Initially, a light mist blurs our vision, but soon visibility drops to nil.

  “Blimp’s covered,” Scud calls, sliding confidently down the rigging from the top lookout.

  “Haul those sails in!” I order. “We’re diving in ten, nine, eight, seven—”

  Frantically, my crew claws in the spinnakers. The sudden frantic activity at odds with the lazy race of the previous fifteen hours.

  “—three, two, one—.” The last of the sail material slithers down through a deck hatch, where the crew abandons it in great heaps as they race to their next stations.

  “—Dive! Dive! Dive!” Together, Izzy and I throw our shoulders against the helm, forcing the ship into a steep dive. It protests with loud groans and creaks from the rigging, but, with a hiss of compressing gas it obeys. “Full power to the port engine, Fernando! Release the device, Scud!”

  Trent and Scud heave our final hope of losing the constables over the side and watch it disappear into the murk. We all listen for the crash which would signal defeat. We hear nothing.

  “Clear,” Scud r
eports. The weapon has deployed.

  “Level up! Hard to starboard!” I throw my weight against the opposite side of the helm while Izzy pulls back and spins the wheel at the same time.

  “One, two, three…” I count to ten as the Shonti Bloom levels out onto her new heading below the cloud layer.

  “All stop!” I order. “Kill everything! Silent running!”

  The tail hangs motionless, and all the electrics, especially the tail lights, fade. To anyone looking down, as the constables are, with the moonlight blocked by cloud, the Shonti Bloom should merge into the black shadow of the land below. Invisible.

  It is amazing how far sound can travel in the air, especially at night. I, and the rest of the crew, hold our breaths. I watch the spare tail light, connected to a battery and dangling from a small hydrogen balloon, sink rapidly into the distance; blown along on our previous heading—the secret weapon. I pray the cloud has damped the sounds of our maneuvers sufficiently to escape the attention of the constables.

  When attempting to deceive a pursuer, providing something for them to focus on helps create the deception that they are still following the same quarry, even if the source of that focus has switched.

  It is not long before we hear two airships pounding and clanking through the cloud layer in hot pursuit. We high-five each other silently as they continue past in hot pursuit of our decoy. We watch, with satisfaction, as both sets of tail lights descend into the blackness. They have bought our deception.

  Silently, we get under way on our new heading.

  A speech is required. “If my Mother were here…’

  “Which she is not,” I hear Izzy hiss.

  “She would say amazing work everyone. So well done.” I am so proud of my crew; I feel tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. Thankfully, the darkness covers my reaction. An emotional captain would never do.

  I regain my composure and clear my throat. “New course; new plan. We head straight for the third clue first—the eyes of Gaia.”