⇤First ←Prev Archive Next→ Latest⇥
Part 10: FIRST FLIGHT
Maira started as she was woken early the next morning. Ham clapped a hand on her shoulder and offered her a hot, black coffee.
‘Morning Captain!’ he said jovially. ‘Thought I’d wake you early – there’s a bunch of papers need signing already, and that’s not the half of it!’
‘Geez, Ham, the sun’s not even risen!’ Maira groaned. She rubbed her eyes and looked around; she was still in the helm. ‘You let me sleep here all night?’ she asked. Ham shrugged.
‘I follow the captain’s orders, Captain,’ he said and flashed her a grin. ‘I’ll see you in your office in ten minutes.’
‘Thirty,’ Maira argued. She got to her feet, feeling the tension in her muscles as she stretched. ‘I’m not signing anything until I’m changed.’
The light was barely creeping over the horizon, judging by the golden glow rising in the clouds, as Maira made her way over the short walkway to the captain’s quarters. As she did so, she happened to glance towards Bolthead.
There were a dozen or more people at the gates of Ham’s yard, staring at the Fallen Star.
Thirty-seven minutes later Maira reappeared, clad in breeches and a loose shirt. Her hair was still damp from the shower, and she scowled at the messy stack of paperwork Ham had left on the desk. She sat down and went through it.
Ham entered presently, as she was reading through an appraisal of the ship. He saluted jauntily and stood opposite her, waiting for her to speak.
‘You’re not putting on airs, are you Ham?’ she asked. Her eyes didn’t leave the paperwork.
‘Dunno what you mean, Captain,’ Ham said.
‘I mean,’ Maira replied, ‘that you saluted, you’re waiting for me to speak, and you’re not just launching into a whole spiel about the crowd that’s gathering outside your scrappers.’ Ham’s face fell.
‘Oh. You noticed?’ Maira finally took her eyes off the appraisal.
‘It was difficult not to,’ she said. She gestured to the paper in her hands. ‘Is this appraisal up to date?’
‘Got it done just six weeks ago, Captain!’ Ham replied, stung. Maira shook her head.
‘Yet somehow the appraiser missed six storage rooms filled with illegal light running equipment?’ she asked pointedly. ‘And the outdated communications equipment, I note.’ Ham scratched the back of his neck, sweating.
‘Well there’re so few appraisers willing to come out here,’ he muttered.
‘So who was the registered appraiser who appraised this ship?’ Maira turned the paper to face him and tapped the spot where the appraiser’s signature was scrawled messily.
‘Well as we’re so out of the way,’ Ham said, ‘I figured it was probably fine if…’ he withered under Maira’s steely gaze. ‘I did it, Captain,’ he finished.
‘Hm.’ Maira’s stare bore into him for a few more uncomfortable seconds, before she brought the page back and signed it. She folded it up and handed it to him.
‘That should be all, then,’ she added. ‘What else have we got?’
‘There’s the contract regarding my stake in this-’
‘Already signed.’
‘Then there’s the work order for the aerial, he’s got the money but it still needs-’
‘Signed by the captain. Yeah, done.’
‘And there are some telegrams from your friends in Medicine Leaf,’ Ham finished. ‘Just need looking over, see if we’ve got a job before we head out.’
Maira shuffled them in her hands and read them. She’d worked under enough captains to know several who flew into Medicine Leaf regularly, but she’d written to two she knew had retired from privateering to work there; for a ship’s captain who was getting on in years, Medicine Leaf’s logistics division proved a welcome semi-retirement, and knowledge of pirate operating bases came in handy.
Figures – she’d paid good money to send half a dozen notes, and got three replies. Two were apologetic, they knew of nothing going because of the work strike. But the third.
‘Captain Benson,’ Maira said. ‘He was first mate on the Griffon Lance six years ago – eighth ship I worked.’
‘Has he got something for us?’ Ham asked, taking a seat.
‘Possibility of transport work… in ten days. Up to six passengers, headed east as far as Twin Knee Camp. They’ll pay handsomely.’ She pulled open the top drawer of the desk and pulled a yellowing scroll of paper out. She spread it open on the desk top, revealing a map of the world.
‘That’s three weeks’ travel?’ she guessed. ‘Long trip. Never done a long hop like that – we’ll need to get some food on board and maybe… damn! They’ll have to be okay with day flight only, unless we can pick up some crew fast.’
‘Day flight should be fine, so long as they’re not in a hurry,’ Ham suggested. ‘We can get going today, spend a couple days getting contracts and vetting crew, and pitch off ready for some night watches.’
‘Worst comes to the worst, we can reduce the cost and ask them to pitch in to keep the flight going. I’ll be kind, let them take the day watches.’
‘Right you are captain,’ Ham said, saluting jauntily. Maira scoffed and turned away. She glanced out of the window and saw the grimy yellow lantern crawling up the clouds. She sighed and stood, stretching again – this time her shoulders cracked loudly, she’d already spent far too long hunching over a desk.
‘Time’s a-wasting, Ham,’ she said. ‘Let’s go meet that crowd of yours, see if your junker’s somewhere in it.’
Ham’s new partner in the scrapping business turned out to be a stout woman named Jeannie-May, the wife of a day-labourer who relished the opportunity to get paid to sit on the edge of the sunlight. She was serious and critical, and she levelled all of it at Ham.
‘I trust you’ve been keeping your books in better order than you did last summer?’ she asked pointedly, looking around the small office. She bent to click the wheel on the office safe – it opened at her fingers.
‘I never told you that code!’ Ham gasped, affronted. He wagged a finger, ready to lecture her, but Maira pulled him away.
‘Thank you Jeannie-May,’ she said, shoving Ham out of the door. ‘You look after the place, you hear?’
‘Aye, I will,’ Jeannie-May replied shortly. ‘And better than that layabout, too!’
Outside the crowd had swollen – there were even a few hopefuls who wanted to be taken on as crew. They pounded on the gate, which Ham had kept padlocked, but the chain now strained against the weight of people pressing on it.
‘We need to get going,’ Maira said, casting her eye over the press of desperate folk.
‘We could take on a few lads before we go,’ Ham suggested, but Maira shook her head.
‘If they’re really interested in the work, they can wait until we come back for a restock in a month or two,’ she said. ‘I’ll page Jeannie-May on our way out, ask her to keep an eye on who comes asking after the ship every day.’
They returned to the ship. As Maira stood at the helm she looked once more over the hilltop and Deanfleet Manor, and she was never sure if it was her imagination, or if she really did spy three silhouettes outlined against the grass, watching the Fallen Star rise once again.
‘Take us up,’ she said into the radio, and the Fallen Star lurched into the sky.
While it may once have been a graceful ship, in modern times the Fallen Star was something of a clunker. Her ample cargo bay made her rear-heavy and pushed the bell back towards the rear, making the forecastle feel isolated and awkwardly extended. Maira found in manoeuvring that she had a tendency to dive on a turn, and her speed was once fast, but compared to the Umbrella Men’s sleek skiffs she was a cruise liner.
‘How did dad ever make his great escapes in this barge?’ Maira complained to Ham as they sculled the skies. Ham laughed.
‘Well she had an engine powered by dragon’s blood back in the day!’ he said. ‘That made a lot of difference, I can tell you. But she’ll surprise you yet – you’re only an hour into the air with her, give her time and learn her tricks.’
‘I know, I know!’ Maira said irritably. ‘Doesn’t help that we’ve got the wind across us – that’s making her heavy. But we’re on a straight heading for the next week – I’ll man the wheel, see if I can work out her kinks before we hit Medicine Leaf. What have we got in the way of provisions?’
‘I stowed her with good airman’s food: we’ve got plenty of hard tack, a tun of water, and I even found a barrel of rum for the hold!’
‘So we’ve got plain biscuits a water,’ Maira deadpanned. ‘Oh good.’
So passed the first day. Maira found keeping the heading difficult – where in a modern ship she’d have systems to support her, streamlining and bell-warping, the Fallen Star was a brute that required a lot of muscle mass just to hold against the wind. She felt it fighting against her anytime there was a moderate crosswind. As the light began to fade she turned the helm towards a distant beacon of light, locked the wheel straight, and collapsed into the captain’s chair, breathing heavily. It had been a full day of holding the wheel against the wind and the going had been slow; sweat beaded on her forehead, neck and shoulders – after the first few hours she’d thrown her jacket off, and now her tunic was sticking to her skin and soaked dark around her collar and down her back.
The beacon resolved itself into a wide wooden platform, held aloft by a narrow cylinder of scaffolding which flowered out as it neared the top of the structure. There was a long, low shed building on top, and a metal aerial continued up from the centre column into the sky, the light at the top radiating out a welcome. This was the airman’s refuge – a rest stop between cities.
They came in high and fast, but a deft turn from Maira and some good timing from Ham prevented a collision. Maira locked the wheel in place again and sprinted along the catwalk, unhooking rope and tossing it to the stevedores on the dock below. They were built like stevedores the world over: heavy and square, with thick arms and little imagination. They hauled on the ropes, pulling the Fallen Star flush with the outcropping wharf and tying it off to three bollards, widely-spaced. Seeing the job done, Maira jogged to the engine to see her engineer and financier shutting things down with practised ease. He took a rag from his overalls and mopped his brow; turning to her, he grinned.
‘Not bad for a first try!’ he called. Maira barked a laugh.
‘We didn’t break anything, I call it a win!’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s get some food!’
‘We have food!’
‘Real food, Ham! I’m not living off water and crackers all year!’
The shed at this rest stop was a combination warehouse, general store, inn. Cargo unloaded here went by cable to the nearby villages, nestled in the dense jungle, exchanged with the workers who rode the cable cars to the top of the platform. Around a third of the space was given to the amenities: a general store which sold hard tack, survival gear, and any odds and ends a skyfarer might need – often taking directly from the stacks of creates that were piled up just a few feet away; and an inn, which could only be called so because there were bunks beds and a bar in that same general area. For a nominal fee one could purchase a bunk for the night, if they didn’t mind the constant noise from the warehouse, and the shouts and cajoling from the drinkers and the porters both.
Maira looked at them with an almost-fond nostalgia: she’d spent many a night curled around her bag in a bunk like that, falling asleep to the sound of thumping crates and off-key drinking songs. She ate a bowl of chili and grains ravenously, barely tasting it and occasionally moving to sip cocoa spiked with rum from a cheap tin cup; in the jungles they grew cacao and sugar cane, which made hot chocolate with rum a popular local speciality, and everything was spiced with chili peppers. The general store sold dried peppers, which testosterone-fuelled airmen ate raw and whole to prove their masculinity. Maira had heard that sailing the skies gave you a palate akin to a heavy smoker even without the cigars, because the amount of chilis you ate singed off your taste buds.
‘This isn’t sustainable,’ she said to Ham. He glanced at her and returned to his food.
‘It is kinda expensive for two bowls of chili and a couple hot chocolates,’ he said. ‘And if you ate this every day you’d probably drop your cargo every twenty minutes.’
‘That tortured double-entendre aside, that’s not what I meant,’ Maira said. ‘I mean, we can’t keep running day-hops like this – holding that wheel ten, eleven hours a day is a job for one of these stevedores, not me.’
‘Well we’re in the right place for it,’ Ham said. ‘I bet if you offered one of those guys a couple hundred fins, he’d come on board like that.’ He clicked his fingers to illustrate the point. Maira shrugged.
‘Feels like hiring someone for the wrong reasons again,’ she said. ‘I don’t just wanna make a better offer because my dad was rich – I want people who want to be up there.’
Behind her, someone coughed. Maira glanced over her shoulder.
It was a young man, his hair messy blonde and pulled back into a ponytail. He was wearing a rumpled navy uniform – Maira hadn’t seen any navy ships when they’d arrived, so she cocked an eyebrow at this.
‘Can I help you, kid?’ she asked. The boy’s eyes were wide as saucers and he started at her question.
‘Um… is that your ship docked out there?’ he asked quietly. ‘The one with the axehead rests and the Portobello bell?’
Maira looked to Ham; his eyebrows were raised in appreciation and he nodded slightly. She turned her chair to face the boy.
‘What’s your name, kid?’ she asked.
‘Lance.’ Maira leaned forward.
‘Well Lance, that might just be my ship. But what’s it to a junior like you?’
‘Begging your pardon, miss, but it’s cadet actually,’ Lance replied, pointing to a gold pip on his chest. ‘I just want to say, I’m a big fan of the Fallen Star! My mom read me all the stories, I had a poster of Dorian Deanfleet on my wall back home!’
‘Well that’s very kind of you,’ Maira said uncertainly. ‘Are your navy buddies around to hear you say this stuff?’ Lance stared at his feet, hands clasped awkwardly.
‘They marooned me here, miss,’ he said quietly. ‘Put something in my drink. When I woke up they were gone.’
His eyes rose and met Maira’s. She stared at him hard, her expression inscrutable. Finally, she sat back and raised a hand. A server approached.
‘Get me another bowl of chili,’ she said. ‘And some bread. And a cocoa, without rum.’ She pulled a chair from a nearby table and set it at hers. ‘Take a seat, Lance. Tell me what happened.’