by Scott McKay
The small cabins of the three airships filled with customers willing to pay through the nose to complete a trip in 15-18 hours or less, when otherwise it could take as long as three days on a locomotive to access Airbound’s destinations. Cross’ corporation looked for all the world like the next great disruptive enterprise on the economic scene and the possibilities were endless. Plans and orders for additional airships to open service to more destinations were on the drawing board. Eventually, as the public embraced air travel as safe, Cross expected he’d have a network connecting every city of size via the skies, using the four cities he was already servicing as hubs, and slowly, too slowly, he thought, it was coming.
All that had been true until three months ago, when the Justice exploded as it took off from the newly-built Pelgreen Aerodrome on Principia’s South End. Thirty-four passengers bound for Alvedorne were killed in the blaze, and the Justice collapsed and fell into a middle-class residential neighborhood, lighting some four dozen houses afire and destroying millions of decirans in property to go with a grand total of sixty-four deaths. To date no explanation had been found for what caused the explosion. Gresham had insisted it couldn’t have been a design flaw, while Cross had lost much confidence in his partner’s engineering prowess.
At a prohibitive cost, Cross had the three airships and their flights insured by the Yellowvine Indemnity Company in Principia. Unfortunately, that seemingly-rock solid firm had its foundations tested in paying damages to the victims of the crash, and Yellowvine’s liquidity was found wanting. Worse, as the risk associated with such a new venture as air travel couldn’t be adequately calculated, the company had been unable to purchase reinsurance to back its coverage of Cross’s airships. That meant when the Justice crashed a rolling financial disaster followed. Yellowvine had declared bankruptcy as the claims rolled in, leaving Airbound exposed to suit from the victims with no financial protection.
He was going broke, and fast. And after the Justice’s explosion the passenger bookings dried up on the Clyde’s Port Excelsior line and even the Ann Marie’s commuter shuttle from Principia to Belgarden. They were hemorrhaging money with a lot more exposure to come in the way of those pending legal claims, and Cross saw little future.
He attempted to stanch the bleeding by taking the Clyde on a cross-country public relations tour, charging small amounts to put them on display as exhibits in towns where an airship was a never-before-seen exotic curiosity. They were a particular success in the bustling little hayseed town of Dunnansport at the mouth of the Tweade, for example. Cross knew, nevertheless, that charming the rubes out of a copper or two was anything but a sustainable business plan for what was supposed to be a high-end passenger airline. If he couldn’t put his airships to use as a means of carrying loads of swells from metropolis to metropolis, there had to be some better way to survive than becoming a traveling carnival.
In the meantime Cross was forced to cut costs whenever he could, and today that involved piloting the Ann Marie back from Belgarden himself, having laid off the line’s regular airship pilot along with halving the frequency of the commuter service. He had a rare full cabin today, the product of a special call to Parliament at the Societam due to some national security development in the south. Belgarden’s delegation knew that the Ann Marie could make the trip to Principia a lot faster than could a locomotive or steamship.
Maybe we’ll turn a profit today, he thought. Maybe if enough todays stack up we can get out of this mess.
Cross knew that was a foolish, desperate fantasy. Soon he would have to go to his father and make the dreaded request for a bailout from the family to either save the company or wrap up its affairs and consign himself to the status of failed scion of a dynastic Morgan River Valley house. It was the last thing he wanted to do; as the third son of Preston Cross VII, Sebastian had always been treated as little more than a playboy. Asking for help this time would be a surrender beyond what he could bear.
“Please, everyone, take your seats,” he said with false cheer as he made his way through the Ann Marie’s posh cabin, greeting the even more posh passengers: the men in their silk peacoats, embroidered vests and leather knee-high riding boots, as was the style among the Ardenian upper class, and the women in fur stoles over lace-encrusted shirtwaist blouses and flowing ankle-length skirts, their ears, necks and wrists dripping with sparkling adornments, along the way to the cockpit. “We’ll be departing for Principia in short order.”
“Cross,” barked a voice from the front row. He recognized the gruff little white-haired man as Delegate Horace Harms, Peace Party, for 25 years the member of Parliament from Belgarden’s working-class northeast district and currently the chairman of the powerful Defense Committee.
“Why aren’t you taking this gasbag down to Dunnan’s Claim?” Harms demanded, waving his oaken walking stick at Sebastian to punctuate his utterances.
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” he replied. “We did take the Clyde to Dunnansport on an exhibition last month. Are you suggesting we do that again?”
“No, dammit,” Harms fumed. “Don’t you know? It just come over the teletext. We’re at war again. The savages have plundered Dunnan’s Claim, and we’re to Parliament to attend a levy for the largest military force ever sent south. You ought to mobilize what’s left of your airship line for the effort.”
Now that isn’t a bad idea at all, thought Cross, who quickly recognized that a military contract or two might just be a lifeline for Airbound’s failing fortunes. When he got to the capital he and Gresham would have to have a talk, and then he and his family’s solicitor Madison Gregg, who handled parliamentary matters at the capitol for the Cross clan, including Airbound, would have to have a similar one.
“May we have a conversation on that very subject when we arrive, sir?” Cross answered.
“I am ever at the service of one of Ardenia’s great entrepreneurs and celebrities,” Harms gushed in false obsequiousness. “Get your people in touch with my people.”
…
SEVEN
Port William – Afternoon (First Day)
Robert Stuart was just seventeen and in his first year away from Hilltop Farm, the place of his birth and his childhood home. He had only matriculated at the Defense Academy at Aldingham in the fourth month that year; the six months away were, to put it mildly, difficult for him.
He missed his mother. He wasn’t ashamed to say it. He wasn’t the only one. His longings were perhaps a little worse than those of his peers among the first-year cadets, but it wasn’t something to be teased and bullied over.
Sadly, though, to bear the brunt of teasing and bullying was Robert’s experience. He wasn’t the smallest of the cadets at the academy, but he wasn’t quite average – at 5’9” and a little less than 11 stone, Robert was too small for rugby and was a low juniorweight boxer. And the bigger boys saw him as a figure of fun. Rob the Knob, they called him, due to his emotional state and the limitations of his size in making their torments end. He’d spent too much time locked in closets and steamer trunks, and he’d endured too many cruel pranks and been subjected to too much humiliation to have made his transition to living away from home a good one.
Things got so bad that after the first three months, Robert wrote a letter to his father asking to be relieved of tutelage at the academy. He’d suggested something else as part of his future, something he thought was a perfectly well-constructed compromise. Rather, Robert requested in the letter, than pursue military service through the early part of his adulthood before going into commerce, as his father and uncle had done, couldn’t he simply start his real career? He would take an apprenticeship in Dunnansport with his Uncle David’s commodities storage and brokerage business, he would learn its ropes and he would then help build the family’s commercial fortune from there. He promised to make his father proud as a businessman, and he suggested everyone knew his talents would best be served in that line of endeavor.
The response did not come by post. It
came in person.
Two weeks after Robert sent the letter, his father appeared at the academy. Having so august a presence as Col. George Stuart, hero of Sutton Hill and Rogers Rock, on campus set off quite a buzz, so much so that morning classes were canceled and the cadets were summoned to the auditorium, where a hastily-arranged lecture starring Robert’s father had taken place. Rob found himself seated prominently in the front row for what turned out to be quite a spectacle; his father regaled the assemblage with true stories of horror and heroism in Dunnan’s War a generation before, describing in detail the fearsome and diabolical enemy they’d faced, his crude but deadly weapons and the never-ending threat of aggression by the Udar hordes.
And then George Stuart had a message to the crowd which, it was quite obvious, was intended for one particular cadet.
“You are here,” he reminded them, “because you are the toughest, bravest, slickest little bastards we have.” The cadets laughed.
“I’m serious. You’re our best,” George pressed. “And while the vast majority of you are destined to be captains of industry and commerce, or great intellectuals, healers, inventors or statesmen, all of which don’t require a military background, what we are asking of you is five to ten years of service to your country to keep those demons to our south at bay.
“You are here because the motherland needs you to put your talents toward protecting your sisters and mothers, brothers and nephews. And even washed-up old horse soldiers like me.”
That earned a chorus of guffaws and a loud standing ovation, and George gave a short bow before exiting the lectern.
Robert then saw him in the mess hall, as the academy had scrambled together a luncheon reception.
George handed him his letter of two weeks before and gave him a tight, loving embrace. He then stood off, gently put his hands on each side of Robert’s head just below the ears, looked him square in the eyes, and said, “We’ll have no more discussion of what’s in that letter. You will satisfy your obligation to this country which has given you so much, and then you will make of yourself a grander success in business than either I or your uncle could ever dream. Do you understand?”
“Yes, father,” Robert said, and meant it.
George then clutched his son tightly. As he departed, he ran into Robert’s old friend and Dunnan’s Claim neighbor Will Forling, whom Robert hadn’t had much interaction with at the academy to date. Robert saw his father and Forling having a short conversation, and then off the old man went, bound for Hilltop Farm and home.
Things did get slightly better from there. Some of Robert’s tormentors approached him with gestures of respect. “Didn’t know you were one of those Stuarts, Knob,” said one. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.” And while he’d struggled to make any close friends with his own classmates, following his father’s visit he’d renewed acquaintances and become much closer again with Will – who had made a sincere effort to take Robert under his wing over the last few weeks.
It was a difficult first year, but Robert was hopeful and determined to finish it better than it began.
And while he’d been miserable, at least to date he wasn’t a miserable failure.
His academic marks were average, but passing. For soldiery, he was better. As a farm boy and a hunter, Robert was an expert horseman and a crack shot with both pistol and rifle. Physical combat was not quite his strength; he could somewhat hold his own with a sword, but in bare-hand combat and dagger-fighting, he flopped. Robert’s best marks came in military tactics, which was a gift from his father. George had educated him thoroughly in the history of Dunnan’s War and kept a board of war-chess constantly open in the study at Hilltop Farm. Before leaving for the academy Robert had even beaten the old man once or twice. When he had the chance to play among the students at Aldingham, he was a terror at the game.
And now Rob was looking forward to putting those refined strategic skills in another classic matchup in the study with George in a day or so as the locomotive carrying him from Aldingham click-clacked its way to Port William, the last stop before the Dunnansport station where, after an overnight stay at his uncle David and aunt Rebecca’s house, they would board a riverboat for Barley Point and then home. They’d be there soon.
“What are you reading, Will?” Robert asked his travel mate.
“The Last Days of Abraham Wise,” was the answer. “I’m getting a start on the history course for the next session, but this is a hell of a read. I’ll be done by the time we get to Dunnansport and I’ll let you borrow it if you want.”
“I’ve heard of Wise,” Robert said. “Father had me read about him. He was the first of our people to locate the source of the Morgan River.”
“He was. 200 years ago. Mapped the whole thing. His whole party got wiped out in a raptor attack in the Venseline Hills, but he managed to survive and he made it back to civilization with his maps and notes before he died.”
“Glad that horror is in the past,” said Robert, meaning the deadly avian monsters.
“No kidding. You ever see one of those things?”
“I have. We did a family trip to Trenory when I was 10 and went to the Museum of the Wild. They had a stuffed one and a skeleton of another. Scared the hell out of me.”
“Little man, everything scares the hell out of you,” said Will, jokingly. “But you’re right. My grandfather back in Lake Valledge has a stuffed one in his library. Raptors are no joke. I don’t want to see a live one.”
“Speaking of nasty, predatory birds, are you going to make another run at my sister at the ball this weekend?”
“That’s what you’re going to ask me?” said Will. “After everything I’ve done for you?”
Though he suspected it had taken a plea from his father to reinvigorate the friendship, Robert and Will had been close friends since both were small, though “small” had never been an apt description of Will. At 6’4” and sixteen stone he was a mountain of a young man, and at twenty, with two and a half years of training at the academy, he’d matured into the very model of a budding cavalry officer. Will had won the academy’s seniorweight boxing title in his second year (and had won a not-small amount of coin as a prizefighter in the saloons of Aldingham in his off-hours), he was the captain of the rugby team and the best swimmer in his class, and he held the highest rank – First Lieutenant – of all the third-year students.
To Robert, he was still the gangly, stuttering oaf he’d chased puppies with back in Dunnan’s Claim, but he couldn’t hide his envy of Will’s amazing transformation at school – and his frustration at not making similar progress. Needling Will over his unrequited love for Sarah was Robert’s best revenge, and he used it often.
Besides, Robert had always thought his sister’s behavior toward Will was dreadful. He wanted Will as a brother-in-law, after all. Keeping those fires lit was a good tactic, and Robert knew tactics. He’d convinced Will to restart his regular letters to Sarah and had even contributed a few ideas for him to include in order to win her attention. The inner workings of the female mind weren’t precisely a specialty of Robert’s, though he did claim to hold a certain popularity with the girls at the Barley Point Society Hall during his younger years prior to matriculating at the Defense Academy.
Rob knew Will was less accomplished in the consortial arts, which made sense. After all, Will had six brothers, each of whom was at least ten years older than he was and most of whom had been gone to seek their fortunes by the time he was old enough to pay attention to girls. His mother had been the only female resident of Grayvern Farm, and Lillian Forling was a stern, unapproachable woman whose constant admonition to her youngest son was that he must make something of himself before considering a dalliance with other people’s female children.
To this, Will’s father, who was a crusty, declining man past seventy years old, heartily agreed. Though Old John, as the neighbors all called him, had quietly, earnestly suggested to Will that Sarah Stuart was his best bet at marital bliss, as well as t
he fortune he wouldn’t otherwise have. Grayvern Farm, after all, was mortgaged to the hilt and Will’s inheritance was only one-seventh of it when his parents were gone. The lack of society among people his age growing up led Will to spend much of his childhood as a tag-along at Hilltop Farm with the Stuarts, and it was Rob and Sarah he spent most of his time around. Being the oldest, Matthew’s time was mostly occupied with George, rather than the other children, as he learned the ropes as the eventual landholder of the Stuart Estate.
Therefore, Robert’s affinity for Will was mutual. The older cadet had in the last few weeks become Robert’s principal defender from the bullies and smart-alecks at the academy, and had beaten some decency into more than a few of them. That included a brisk throttling he’d given just last week to Alexander Keane, a particularly nasty heavyset second-year ogre who insisted on trapping Robert on his stomach and then sitting on his head while flatulating vigorously.
Sadly, boys of that age are difficult to control, and it bothered Willy greatly that as a third-year student Will wasn’t able to serve as Robert’s bodyguard at all times. While he had hoped the adversity would toughen Rob up a bit, Will was starting to believe he’d need to step in personally and mentor his friend in the art of self-defense. Will had a story to tell in that regard, He also had some highly productive suggestions he thought would pay dividends to the younger boy.
“At some point we’re going to have that talk I mentioned, Rob,” he told his friend. “You’re not a little kid anymore. And I can’t keep beating the shit out of every hellion who whips up on you.”
“I know, Will. Maybe I’m just not cut out for all this.”