Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (5 page)

With a view over Kayl’s shoulder, Reece could see when Varque slipped out of the room, lowering his mask to return to his gunsmithing, and Gideon, tugging on a pale green shirt, stepped in. Gideon, a runt among Pans, a contender among Honorans. Years of gunsmithing had made him broad of chest and shoulder so that he was built like a solid V. He looked neither surprised nor impressed to see his friends standing at gunpoint.

“Kayl,” he said in his low, drawling voice, “you wanna be leavin’ this room right about now.”

Without turning, Kayl grimaced. Gideon might be the runt of the litter, but if anything, that had just given him sharper teeth than all the rest. “Yeah? And if I don’t?”

Gid shrugged. “I’ll just shoot you, I guess.”

For a second, Kayl hesitated, but only a second. Muttering and glaring, the Pan pumped the unused bullets out into his palm, replaced the hob on the wall, and shouldered his way past Gideon.

When the three friends were completely alone, Hayden blew out a long breath and leaned his weight on the stair railing. “Did he really think you would shoot him?”

Pulling a grubby rag out of the back pocket of his trousers, Gideon began wiping oil from his hands. His blue eyes twinkled. “Why wouldn’t he?” It was clear Hayden didn’t know quite what to say—or think—about that, so Gideon turned to Reece. “What’s goin’ on?”

“We’re going hunting for the fake meteorite that wrecked my Nyad to prove I passed my test,” Reece said simply, and left it at that. Things didn’t have to be polished with Gid; words didn’t need to be fancy. Not because he was slow, but because fancy words wasted breath. That’s how he would’ve put it.

For example. There was a pause after Reece’s statement, and then Gideon carelessly tossed his rag away and said, “Sounds fun. I’ll get my guns.”

IV

All Manner of Creepy

It was early evening when the three friends drove their bims out of Praxis. Honora consumed the horizon, but Nix and Telesto, her green and red moons, stood out brightly against the pink and purple-swirled sky. The colors made Reece feel like he was a small customer in a giant candy emporium.

After driving north for a good hour, they turned off the road, pulled their bims into the trees flanking it, and gathered around Hayden’s handheld datascope. Even though the sun hadn’t quite set, their breath swirled in white clouds about their heads.

“My readings put the landing site about a half hour east. On foot.” Hayden cringed. “We have to cut through the forest, and I don’t think the bims will fit.”

“And they’ll be too loud,” Reece added.

Gid looked up from the belt holster he was strapping above his hips, interested. “You think there’s someone else out here?”

It was hard to imagine anyone but themselves tramping through the Atlasian Wilds after dark, especially with it getting colder every minute. But if Hayden was right…and this wasn’t a meteorite…

In answer to Gideon’s question, Reece reached under the rucksack on the back of his bim and dug out his coppery hob. He knew better than to carry it in plain sight. He was no Handler, and he didn’t want some Pan like Kayl thinking he was claiming to be. But, call him old fashioned, he liked to feel safe when wandering through dark forests and encroaching on alien objects’ landing sites.

Gideon smiled without showing teeth and glanced at Hayden, who was whispering to himself and punching calculations into his datascope with a shivering finger. “Hey, you want—”

“No thank you,” Hayden said without looking up. “I’m not carrying a gun. I’d probably end up shooting one of you in the foot like last time.”

“I’d nearly forgotten about the old foot shooting incident,” Reece said quietly as he loaded his hob. Feet bled a lot more than you’d think.

The Pan snorted. “I
was
gonna offer you a spare pair’a gloves.”

Eyes still on his datascope, Hayden smiled. “No, thank you. It’ll be more—”

“Alright then.” Gideon reached into his holster, pulled out his double-barreled revolver, and loaded it with a few swift clicks.

“Reece,” Hayden cut in, finally looking up. He was frowning fretfully, eying Gideon sideways. “Do you think the guns are really…necessary?”

“Yup,” said Gideon. His forefinger moved deftly over the three triggers of the revolver, and he gave his wrist a small, practiced jerk that sent the barrels of the gun sliding at an angle, till they aimed off to one side. With another jerk, the barrels slid frontward again. It took a Handler to use a revolver and its ball-in-socket design to its full functionality. Come to think of it, it might have been with a revolver that Hayden had almost shot off Gideon’s toes.

“There are animals in the Wilds, Hayden. Non-friendly ones that occasionally like to chew on human appendages. The guns are for self defense only,” Reece said with a pointed glance at Gideon.

Gideon grunted and slid the revolver home in its cradle. Hayden let down his shoulders with a sigh. And Reece, Reece just tried hard not to smile.

Dark blue bled out into the colorful sky as the friends hiked into the forest. By Reece’s pocket watch, it was about twenty minutes before they saw signs of the crash. Heard, rather. Everywhere else in the dense Atlasian Wilds, owls would be hooting and nightcats would be screaming, trying to frighten field mice out of their holes. Here, now, there wasn’t the tiniest hoot to be heard. The animals had all cleared out.

Gideon, who was leading the march with his thumbs looped comfortably through his gun belt, suddenly stopped and moved a hand towards his revolver. “Lights up ahead,” he said quietly.

Reece saw them. White flood lights, probably from some sort of photon generator judging by their flickering quality, were turning several of the pine trees into hazy silhouettes. It was nearly fog hour. Back at The Owl and in Praxis, the streets would all be rivers of white mist.

Stepping up beside Reece, using one hand to shade the lit screen of his datascope, Hayden whispered, “It’s thirty yards west.” He was breathing hard; his bifocals were fogging up. “Maybe we should—”

“Shoulda brought a gun,” Gideon said without looking back at them.

Drawing himself up, Hayden whirled on him, voice hoarse. “I brought a
real
weapon.” He held up his datascope, and, exasperated, Reece lifted a hand to block the light of its blinking screen.

With a glance over his shoulder, Gideon snorted. “Don’t be so bleedin’ superior.”

“That’s enough,” Reece said sharply, grabbing Hayden by the sleeve and towing him past Gideon. Truth be told, he was feeling a little high-strung what with being only—what was it?—thirty yards from a crash site that was probably quarantined and off-limits to boot.

They crept the last ten or fifteen yards, squeezing around trees one at a time and keeping well away from where shafts of foggy light broke up the branches. Ahead, voices shouted back and forth, and there was a whining engine sound, and a shuffling noise. Chains rattled. Someone yelled at someone else for being a clumsy fool.

Reece dropped to his hands and knees, then dragged himself forward on his belly till he had a narrow view of the site from under a low-hanging branch. He stayed back in the shadows and took it all in, stumped.

There had definitely been a crash of some kind. There was a shallow crater about ten yards across cut out of the forest, framed by rubble and trees that had surged up around it. But what the men in olive jumpsuits were drawing up out of it with a chain as thick as Reece’s arm…it could have been an escape capsule, he supposed. But it wasn’t like any he’d ever seen. The Pantedans’ had been boxy, a mass of wires and airpumps to provide life support. This capsule, if that’s what it was, was a sleek patinaed oval with a glass top. And the emblem on its side…an A inside a circle, inside a pair of wings…that emblem was famous. It was on
The Aurelia
and
The Aurelius
, the first of all airships. It was on Reece’s bleeding uniform!

Hayden slithered up on Reece’s left, Gideon on his right, to watch as the jumpsuited men swung the capsule away from the crater with their crank-crane and then clustered around it, making observations and taking notes or pinching dirt from its window with tiny metal prongs. Others walked around the site with huge dark chambers and paused now and again to pull the curtain over their head, frame their picture, and set off their flash to capture it. There were still others hanging back from the glare of the photon globes suspended on portable tin towers, faceless observers who made Reece’s skin crawl.

“Thoughts?” Reece muttered.

“It’s empty?” Hayden offered.

Shifting to get a better view of the capsule, Gideon grunted. “Dirt if it don’t look like a hunk’a metal broke right off Aurelia.”

He was right. The vintage gold design, the way the glass looked more fine than functional. If Aurelia had ever had escape capsules, this could have been one. But she hadn’t. And she hadn’t moved her belly from the floor of The Owl’s museum in centuries.

Hayden started to say something, but choked and gave a noise of despair instead. Reece glanced up sharply. A lean man with a black crop of hair and long sideburns had stepped into the light. The Aurelian Academy’s very own headmaster, Charles Eldritch. This was bad, worse than judges, worse than sentries. Eldritch—

“I think it’s time to go, Reece,” Hayden said, and it sounded close to a plea.

—Eldritch had the power to crush the future of any student in an iron fist. He reveled in this. He used this. And if he found Reece, Hayden, and Gideon out here, there would be more than expulsion to fear. Eldritch ruined lives.

So Reece was inclined to agree with Hayden.

“Findings?” Eldritch called in his breathy manner of speaking as he stalked the circumference of the crater. His wore black everything—suit, ascot, tight leather gloves—and it made his skin look sallow. His nose was very sharp, his eyebrows thin and manicured, his chin a little too long. He looked too young to have been the headmaster for thirty-five years, even with the wings of white at his temples.

“Strange, sir,” one of the jumpsuits reported, scratching his head. “We got boot prints comin’ in, and boot prints goin’ out, but no sign’a what was in the capsule.”

Eldritch stopped walking to stare at the man for a long moment, not blinking. “And?”

The man fidgeted, unsure. “My guess? Someone came and carried the cargo out. Threw it over his shoulder, put it on a bim, somethin’. And the emblem on the capsule—”

The man stopped as Eldritch dismissively turned and started walking back the way he had come, circling the crater again. Hayden gave Reece’s arm a pinch, but Reece shook him off.

Halfway around the crater, not ten feet from where the friends lay concealed, a squat little man spinning a bowler cap in his hands came and met Eldritch, his pencil thin mustache quivering. Reece thought he recognized him: Robert Gustley, Secretary to the Headmaster.

Eldritch held up a finger to keep Gustley from speaking and said quietly, “It’s sad, isn’t it, Gustley?”

“What’s sad, sir?” Gustley stammered, crumpling the rim of his hat.

“That none of these men survive the crash.”

“C-crash, sir?”

“Yes. The one that will happen later this evening, when the engine of their transit-ship inexplicably fails.”

Reece grit his teeth against wanting very badly to mutter an invective. Gideon didn’t bother gritting; he muttered away.

“I—that’s tragic, sir. Tragic.”

“Indeed,” Eldritch mumbled thoughtfully, then stooped, throwing out the tails of his black jacket as he knelt to examine something on the ground. A boot print. “Do you know how a fox steals eggs? She waits till the goose leaves its nest, then wades upstream to hide her scent. She takes the eggs one at a time in her mouth, careful not to hurt them. So careful.” He dragged a leather-clothed finger through the dirt, outlining the print. “So how does the fox steal the eggs, Gustley?”

Gustley opened and closed his mouth stupidly.

Standing, Eldritch turned to stare at the capsule twirling on its chain. He held up a gloved hand, pretended to be the one orchestrating the twirling, turning the capsule around and around. “One at a time. She steals them one at a time.”

“That fellow is all manner’a creepy,” Gideon mumbled. “Thinkin’ we best get us outta here, Cap’n.”

Reece nodded and started to slide backward, not caring if he was streaking the front of his clothes with dirt. His head was swimming, and it wasn’t from his concussion. Something in the capsule had been worth stealing, to somebody. Eldritch seemed to think so too. He was going to have his workers killed just to keep them quiet. And that emblem—

Crunch
. Jumping, Reece glanced sideways at Hayden, who stood frozen. The branch under his foot was cleanly snapped in two.

“Keep moving,” Reece mouthed.  “Watch your feet.”

Despite his size, Gideon moved easily through the trees, one hand on his revolver, the other gesturing sharply at sticks he spotted before they did, or branches that could snag. Reece followed without breaking a sweat, but Hayden...
crack, crunch, thwack
. Finally, Reece stopped and traded him for his place at the rear. At least he had a gun. If someone jumped Hayden, all he could really do was throw his datascope at them—though he’d probably hesitate before even letting go of the bleeding thing.