Crystal Rain (12 page)

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Authors: Tobias S. Buckell

BOOK: Crystal Rain
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John watched tall clouds heavy with water drop down toward the airship, blocking out light. Waves of chilly wind gusted over John and Oaxyctl and shook the airship. They both shivered in the undercarriage. Compared to the massive clouds that spread in all directions and towered up into the sky, they were nothing more than a small dot.
It rained softly for an hour. Rivulets trickled down the sides of the airship to form a miniature waterfall of concentrated raindrops that soaked them. John looked up at the dripping panel above Oaxyctl and hoped someone had waterproofed it.
Eventually the steady drenching ceased. Water randomly dripped down off the gasbag to fall far down to the ground. John shook himself to get the pockets of water on his lap off and kept shivering.
“Will you be okay?” Oaxyctl asked.
“It’s cold,” John said.
Oaxyctl nodded. He adjusted dials and the airship lowered. “I can’t go too far down or we’ll lose our wind. But let’s warm up.”
The sun appeared: long shafts of a welcome golden light beamed at the ground as the shower clouds dissipated. Oaxyctl maneuvered them low enough that the cold didn’t pierce John’s skin to his bones. The wind wasn’t as strong. John couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked as if they were moving over the ground at a more leisurely pace.
If he had a sextant, he could tell for sure, though the beginnings of a mental map were suggesting itself to his mind’s eye, as it usually did whenever John traveled. He
looked around for anything he could adapt to make sightings with, but saw nothing. He took off his shirt and wrung it out over the edge, then laced it to the bamboo handrail to dry off. The lowest edge of the gasbag’s rope net swung near him.
With a mighty shiver John wrapped his arms around himself and rubbed his skin real hard to warm up.
“Food?” Oaxyctl offered. He opened his pack and dug around. Oaxyctl had more jerky. But he also had some chewy, stale johnnycake and a small jar of honey. They dipped the johnnycake in the honey as if it were dessert and sipped at the canteen as they passed over a swatch of land shaped in squares. Farmland out in the middle of the jungle. Some group forging into the virgin land.
“Do you think about your family much?” John asked, looking out for some familiar landmark. Right now every hour in the wind was an hour away from the coast most familiar to him.
“My wife.” The wind lessened and Oaxyctl twisted dials. Hoses hissed. “I think about her.” They slowly rose. The wind picked back up.
“My wife’s name was Shanta.” It hurt John to use the word was. He realized he had started to bottle up the black scar, his loss, into the middle of himself. Words like was were a first step.
What scared John was how easy it came to him. Some long-forgotten instinct allowed him to cauterize his emotions. What kind of person could do that as a matter of fact? Someone who had lived a rough life, John thought. Maybe that was why he had no memories of it.
He shivered. Not because of cold, but a sense of dread that settled in on him. A small figment of the past, and not returning in some hazy, forgotten dream.
“Necahual,” Oaxyctl said, after the long moment’s silence.
John shook himself. “I’m sorry?”
“Necahual was my wife’s name. It’s a common one. It means ‘survivor.’” Oaxyctl smiled. “And for her, appropriate. She could sniff out positions that would help me earn respect with a second sense I admired. I wonder sometimes what she is doing now.”
John smiled as well. It was hard to picture the hardened warrior, once bloodthirsty worshiper of human sacrifice, as having a family life.
“Do you have children?” John asked.
“Children …” Oaxyctl paused to check the dials above him. He cleared his throat. “No.” He bit his lip. John wondered what emotions Oaxyctl struggled with. “Didn’t have time for children before I had to cross the Great Mountains.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Oaxyctl dug around in his pack and pulled out a dirty blanket. His fingers turned white as he pulled the knot loose that bound the blanket into a small, tight package. “Here. Wrap this around your neck and head, it should keep you warm while we fly.”
John did so, then chuckled.
“What?” Oaxyctl asked.
“You suddenly seem to have a soul.”
Oaxyctl looked at him. “After saving your life, John deBrun, it would make no sense to let you die.”
John blinked and bit his lower lip. “True. I owe you much.” He settled into his seat as best he could. More questioning advice from his deepest instincts bubbled up. Did he really trust this man?
Yes. Of course.
Okay, the tiny instinct guided him. Next he needed shelter, water, food, sleep.
Act strongly
only after sleep
. The mind without sleep is not geared for survival, he thought to himself.
The words and concepts made sense.
“Would you mind if I took a nap?” John asked.
Oaxyctl shook his head.
They flew on into the clear skies, moving with the wind over the land. Occasionally a bump would force John to unconsciously grab something with his good hand.
 
Something shook John awake. His eyes fluttered open, and he realized that his good hand clutched the straps holding him in. They chafed hard against his chest.
The airship dropped suddenly, shaken by the air. John felt as if his chest had been shoved under several feet of
water; he had to suck at the air to get rid of the suffocating feeling.
“What’s going on?” he asked. Wind buffeted them again.
Oaxyctl had a strained look on his face. “We’re being followed.”
John looked around. Many miles behind them a larger craft followed, though John squinted to make it out. Oaxyctl had sharp eyes.
“I’ve climbed as high as I dare,” Oaxyctl said. “I have some length on them, but they gain on us.”
“Why don’t you use the engine?”
“It won’t do us much good, not enough fuel, and we need that fuel to navigate when we get lower to the ground.”
“Damnit, what
do
we do?”
Oaxyctl tapped a dial. “For now we try going higher.”
The airship lay over on its side like a ship as more wind hit them. Oaxyctl led the lighter-than-air machine even higher in search of faster winds. John hoped he could handle that sort of tossing.
And not pass out for lack of air.
 
 
The Azteca airship chasing them looked larger than their own courier airship. John guessed its gasbag to be easily twice the size of theirs. Highly stylized terra-cotta-colored feathers ornamented the nose, and a pair of propellers jutted out from the sides of the canopy.
Three sharp cracks spat through the air. John instinctively ducked, then looked upward.
Oaxyctl nodded. “They’re trying to drop us out of the sky. They don’t want us to get north with any reports on where they are.” Oaxyctl turned around and yanked on the cord. The motor coughed and spluttered, but did not start. “We’re too high. We need to drop our altitude.”
More shots pierced the wind’s low roar. Oaxyctl grimaced and worked a lever. John heard hissing, not from the hoses, but from farther up on the gasbag. They dropped.
John turned around and looked. The Azteca airship followed.
The sound of wind passing them picked up, and John’s stomach flip-flopped. They were falling fast.
“How much air did you let out?” John asked.
“Helium.” Oaxyctl twisted dials and the hoses leapt to life. Condensation ran along the bottom of the black rubber tubes leading under the carriage to the tanks strapped underneath. Oaxyctl yanked on the cord behind him again. Once, twice, three times. On the fourth try the alcohol engine cleared its throat and groggily roared to life.
Oaxyctl pushed the lever throttle on the panel above him as far forward as he could. They both turned around to look through the blur of the propeller. “Where’d he go?” Oaxyctl peered around.
John looked up at the stained canvas above him. Oaxyctl followed his gaze. “Damn.”
They heard another series of shots. A bullet whizzed past, too close. Oaxyctl unbuckled the straps holding him into his seat.
“What are you doing?” John asked.
“Going up the side to see where they are.”
John shook his head. “You have to fly this thing.” They’d fallen far out of the sky, and even with more gas in the airship, he could feel them still dropping. He yawned to pop his ears. “Do we have a gun of any sort?”
“There is no way I’ll let you go up there.” Oaxyctl pointed at John’s hook. “I don’t know who’s more dangerous, you or them.”
John grabbed a strap on his wrist and popped it off. He ignored the smell of unwashed skin as he pulled the rest of the straps loose to remove his hook.
“You could die,” Oaxyctl said.
“We stand the best chance of surviving this way.” John tried to keep the nervousness out of his voice. Heights never bothered him. But he’d never been on rigging in the middle of the sky.
And what was in Oaxyctl’s deep, calculating eyes? John couldn’t tell. But after furrowing his thin eyebrows, Oaxyctl nodded. “Here.” He reached down beneath his seat and forced open a first aid box. He pulled out a flare gun and a cartridge of flares.
John wrapped the gun and ammo in his shirt and tied the bundle in on itself with a knot. “Just don’t make any sudden movements, okay?”
Oaxyctl nodded. He didn’t look happy about this in the slightest. John would have thought anyone would be relieved to stay in the undercarriage, but Oaxyctl looked more nervous than John did.
John unstrapped himself from the chair. He wrapped a foot around the rail and leaned out. He looked down, saw the world far below his knees, and looked right back up at the distant and safe horizon. He grabbed the rope net swaying from the gasbag with the outstretched fingers of his right hand.
John held his breath and wrapped his good wrist around the thin rope. He hopped forward and hung in the air by one securely wrapped hand.
He let his legs dangle out and pushed his left arm up through netting until he hung from his elbow. Then with his right, John pulled himself up. Once he had his legs hooked into the netting, he could scramble up; he’d done this on ships’ masts without a hook before.
John followed the pregnant curve of the airship up toward the sky.
The wind rushing past the sides of the machine pulled at him, but it didn’t tug hard enough to startle him. What did make him jump were the sounds of three more gunshots. John crabbed his way along the netting and looked up to see the Azteca airship above them. Someone leaned over the side to point a rifle.
John flattened himself as close to the varnished canvas as he could. He wrapped his legs around the netting and untied his shirt.
Years of sailing had taught him to gauge the distance without a second thought. The Azteca sharpshooter, used to stable ground, couldn’t aim accurately enough to hit them yet, thanks to the swaying and wind.
The Azteca airship, though, kept trying to drop down closer for an easy shot.
John laid the flare gun against his forearm to aim it as best he could. It looked small and not very accurate, but he’d used something similar to fire ropes to other ships. He didn’t fire yet; he waited, getting a feel for the wallow of the airship. Just like at sea. The Azteca airship, above and slightly behind them, sank even closer. John squinted, waited for the great mass of fabric and gas beneath him to shift, and fired.
He quickly snapped the gun open and emptied the spent cartridge. It spun off with the wind down toward the distant ground.
Nothing happened. He’d missed. Yes, he saw the flare well over both airships, shining and smoking its way slowly back to ground.
John slid another flare in, snapped the gun shut, and fired again. They had given him their belly, and he took advantage by aiming for the tanks slung to the midsection of the undercarriage.
The warrior leaning over the edge started craning around. Looking for John. The Azteca aimed several more shots, but if he couldn’t hit the airship, John guessed only a fluke shot would hit him. So he stayed carefully wrapped around the netting and fired again.
A fireball exploded out of the side of the Azteca airship. One of the engines caught fire and exploded, the propeller spiraling fire as it fell down through the air.
“Got them!” John yelled.
He opened the gun, slid in another flare, and fired at the Azteca gasbag. And then again. That was the last flare, but he saw it melting through a section of the gasbag.
The fire quickly leapt along the entire undercarriage. One of the warriors jumped from the edge. Spread-eagle, his pants on fire, he screamed as he dropped past John’s airship. Up above, the Aztecan machine staggered in the air as numerous holes appeared in the bag. It dropped. Slowly at first, then quickly.
Shit.
John scrambled down the netting. He dropped the flare gun out into the air, not wanting to try holding on to it with
only one good hand. He folded his legs around netting and let go with his hand, falling to swing upside down, his head level with the bamboo rail.
“Go go go go,” he yelled at Oaxyctl. “Go right! They’re coming down on us.”
Oaxyctl swore in his own language, a long fluid series of vowels, then he spun dials. John jackknifed his whole body and swung out from under the airship as best he could to look up.
Flames and smoke.
Something struck the top of their airship and screamed. The whole thing shook. John tensed his leg muscles as he swung back and hit the side of the airship. An Azteca warrior slipped down the side of the netting, grabbing for anything but not succeeding.
He fell down toward the ground. Though from John’s inverted point of view, it looked as if he fell upward. John pulled himself upright, still watching.
Things took forever to fall all the way down to the ground, John thought, waiting until the Azteca disappeared into the green. Oaxyctl finally coaxed the speed he needed from the airship, and they aimed down at the ground to pick up speed. John couldn’t tell if his imagination was playing tricks on him, but he saw ripples race across beneath the netting.
They couldn’t let out that much gas.
Could they?
No, the undercarriage swung violently as the airship tilted. They’d been struck. Hoses hissed loudly as Oaxyctl filled them with gas again. It sounded as if he’d spun the valves open as far as they would go.
They rose into the sky, now. John watched the flaming wreck of the Aztecan airship fall quickly away beneath them. As they rose, he gave himself time to let out the breath he’d been holding.
But even then he only had time for a breath before Oaxyctl yelled at him.
“Check for fire!”
John unhooked his legs and scrambled up toward the top of the airship.
 
 
After several more panicked minutes, John found only smoldering netting. He used his shirt to beat it out. Once he was sure it wouldn’t reignite, John made his way back down.
When John clambered into the undercarriage, hanging on with a single hand and swinging his feet in, he found that Oaxyctl did not look relieved.
“There isn’t any fire,” John reported.
“No,” Oaxyctl said. “But we lost a lot of helium getting out of that. It will be only a matter of time now before we have to land.”
John strapped himself into his chair. The once creaky and unsafe-seeming undercarriage now felt like firm ground compared to scampering around on the netting.
“How long do we have?” John asked.
“Maybe a few hours.”
John looked up at the material over his head. “Is it still safe to fly, then?” he asked nervously, the image of the large Aztecan airship plummeting to the ground still strong in his head.
Oaxyctl nodded. “I will fly it until the last moments. Then we land. And hopefully we live.”
Hopefully? John looked over. He grabbed the straps holding him in. At least they were far away from the advancing Azteca. A small consolation, but he would take it.
“Any landing we make that we walk away from,” the Aztecan said, “will be a good landing.” Then he muttered to himself, “I truly was born under an unlucky sign.”

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