Gaia's Brood

by Nick Travers

  Chapter 44

  “Reavers.”

  I am awoken by a shout from the deck above my head. I scramble from my cabin and up the gangway.

  On deck, I snatch up a telescope and run to join Izzy on watch. Through patches in the cloud I see a Reaver scout ship cruising under sail in the distance. It is at a much lower altitude.

  We change course immediately. The scout must have seen us, but makes no move to pursue as we power away. Anxiously, I stay on watch with Izzy.

  An hour later we encounter two more Reavers, one almost at our altitude—high for a Reaver—and the other on a parallel course at a lower altitude. Both under sail. Again, when we turn away they make no move to follow us.

  “I think,” Izzy says, still watching the scouts through her telescope, “we just found that Reaver Hive Summer mentioned.”

  That makes sense and explains why the scout ships are showing no interest—their job is to guard and prevent incursions to the home hub.

  “A Reaver Hive—now that is a sight I would like to see.” Actually, for the sake of my health, I should keep well clear. That still doesn’t stop me wanting to see it, just out of curiosity. Reavers, from what I understand, live entirely aboard their ships. Each ship, depending on size, is home to a family or clan. A Hive is like a city made entirely out of home ships lashed together. The entire structure is held in place by an old tech portable gravity well, passed down from chief to chief. The patrol ships we just encountered are the first line of defense for a Hive.

  We alter course again to skirt the area. For the rest of that day and night we remain on high alert, but encounter no trouble. Fernando uses the patrol ship sightings to calculate the probable position of the Reaver Hive, to ensure we don’t encounter it again.

  The morning brings another challenge: if we approach our mountain destination at too high an altitude, the up-draft from the hills will lift us clear over the range. Leaving no chance of a landing on the mountain top. To succeed, we must approach from below—well within the operating altitude of Reavers.

  “The odds of encountering Reavers,” Scud nervously points out, “are pretty low. But not as low as you having a clone, or being wanted for murder, or Lieutenant Borker being an assassin, or—”

  “Are you saying we shouldn’t do it?” Fernando asks.

  “Uh, no—it’s just what the numbers say.”

  “But the numbers, as you said, Scud, are not behaving themselves,” Fernando replies with a snide smile.

  I step into the fray. “We have no choice, guys. To know if my mother solved the mystery of the journal, we have to go low and approach this mountain from below.”

  As we sink lower towards a bleak inhospitable desert, we remain vigilant for Reavers.

  Is it worth the risk? We have followed the clues in the journal to find what happened to my mother. So far, we have encountered a whole lot of trouble: become wanted criminals, acquired my mysterious clone, all of this with no trace of my mother. To top it all, Jack McGraw and Lieutenant Borker are pursuing us with more vigor then ever.

  Maybe this mountain top holds the answers. But what if my mother found something and moved on. If the trail goes cold here, I have no idea where to look next. Everything depends what we find on this mountain.

  “I see something.” It’s mid-morning, Scud is on watch. No sign of Reavers. He hands me a telescope and points over the side to the desert below. “Down there, among the rocks.”

  Wind swept rock stacks, twisted into fantastical shapes by blasted sand, stand sentry over the barren landscape. Among the sparse, bleached bushes, are regular shapes that look man-made. There is definitely something down there worth investigating.

  “Take us lower.” Is this how my mother’s adventure ended? In this bleak landscape among the rocks?

  Scud is hanging over the side studying the objects. “I think…yes, it’s the wreck of an airship.”

  “Navigational error,” Fernando comments from his position at the wheel. “If it were headed the same place we are, it stayed too high for too long.”

  Another gem from our navigational genius? “How do you figure that?”

  “The ship comes in high, the up-draft from the mountains starts to lift them higher, and they realize they need to lose altitude. When they drop, they drop too fast—it’s okay while they’re still in the up-draft, but lose the updraft’s support and they plummet like a stone.” He throws his arms dramatically into the air. “Boom.”

  “Well if you don’t keep your hands on the wheel,” Izzy snaps, “that’s where we’ll end up.”

  Fernando grins and winks at her before lowering his hands to the wheel again.

  A navigational error? Could an aviatrix as experienced as my mother really end her life in a navigational error?

  My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Fernando adds a comforter. “We all make mistakes. Even me, occasionally.”

  Izzy, Trent, and I leap over the side to secure mooring lines when the Shonti Bloom touches down in the desert.

  “You don’t need a weapon,” Trent calls over, seeing the compression pistol I’ve strapped to my right leg.

  “You know what, Trent? Given our recent luck, I think I do need a weapon.” I secure my anchor point and anxiously survey the desert—I’m already thinking of it as my mother’s crash site. I feel like there’s a dam inside, holding back a tide of emotions, I just don’t know which emotions. Part of me wants to know what happened, another part does not.

  We all wander among the wreckage, which is spread over a wide area—consistent with a high altitude crash. I spot the remains of a propeller and the casing of a bio engine, still in good shape—the place must be too dry for rust.

  “No sign of the blimp,” Izzy observes, “but here is the compressor, almost intact.” Liquid hydrogen is heavier than air. Controlling how much gas in a blimp is compressed at any one time gives the pilot pinpoint control of an airship’s altitude. Decompressing the liquid fills the blimp with lighter-than-air hydrogen which causes the airship to rise. A nifty solution, which eliminates the need to carry spare gas bottles, but it’s also the largest and heaviest component. Fully half the volume of the blimp is given to lofting this one piece of equipment.

  Scud rubs at the unit. “No sign of fire, I can even see the part codes. It’s like…” He stops mid-sentence, distracted by something, runs over to the bio-engine casing, and scrubs frantically at that too.

  I shrug and let him go, knowing once his mind is full of numbers he might never remember whatever he intended to say. “Okay guys, this is definitely the site of an airship crash, but whose? We need to concentrate on finding something which ties this airship to my mother.”

  “How about a body?” Fernando asks, poking around behind a rock.

  “You found a body?” I screech. Suddenly my heart is hammering against my chest as I run over to join him. I can’t bear to see the withered and decayed body of my mother. What if there’s just a pile of bones, or a skeleton? I steel myself for the worst. Just a quick glance.

  No body. No bones. Just a worn pair of goggles poking out of the dirt and a leather flying cap which looks a bit chewed. I suppose the chances of finding an intact body, after all this time, even a single sun-bleached bone, is virtually impossible.

  I turn the goggles over and over in my hands, studying them for any sign of my Mother. Nothing. In fact, they are just a scratched pair of ordinary metal rimmed goggles—much like a pair I have in my cabin. Nothing at all identifies them as belonging to my mother.

  The flying cap is much the same: nondescript, plain, ordinary.

  Scud comes back from his wandering. “Nina, I think—”

  “Not now, Scud, Fernando’s found something,” I interrupt.

  “The goggles were right here,” Fernando says, “just sticking out of the ground.”

  I hand the cap and goggles to Scud to examine. Almost without looking, he passes these important finds to Izzy. Empathy is not one of Scud’s strong
points.

  “Nina, I…”

  “Not now, Scud.” Frustrated with his lack of interest, I turn back to the others. “We should dig around here a bit. Maybe find something to identify who owned these.”

  Scud joins in as we scrabble around in the dirt. Any moment I expect my hand to recoil from a bone. The thought of touching my mother’s last remains abhors me. If it were anyone else I’d be okay, but not my mother. In the end I just sit back and watch the others.

  “I got something,” Izzy calls.

  Eagerly, we crowd round to see her find. She scrapes caked soil from a palm sized object: it’s a brass pocket watch, with the chain still attached. Solemnly, Izzy passes her treasure to me.

  It’s the sort of watch that has a hinged flap over the face for protection. The brass watch case is scratched and dented. I find a catch and slowly open the cover. My heart stops:

  The engraving, on the inside of the protective cover, shines like new. “To Eve Swift, Mayor. From the grateful citizens of New Frisco.”

  This is it. There’s no doubt. This is my mother’s last resting place.

  Even though I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, I feel tears welling up—the dam threatening to burst. I close my hand over the watch and hold it tightly to my heart, thrusting my emotions back into their box. My quest is over. This is where she died. This is how she died.

  All this time I thought she couldn’t be bothered to come back for me. Now I know she wasn’t able to come back. She didn’t abandon me; she died here of a stupid navigation error.

  I feel Trent’s hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Nina.”

  Izzy reaches for Fernando’s hand and together they make sympathetic noises in agreement.

  Scud slowly reaches down, unfolds my fingers from the watch, takes hold of the brass chain, and lifts the watch from my hands. I let him, because I know he hates emotion—this is probably as close as he will ever get to voicing his sorrow at my loss. More tears prick at my eyes and I struggle to hold them back.

  Scud holds the watch up to the sky.

  “Nina, it’s a fake.”