Winged: A Novella (Of Two Girls) (7 page)

She readied her vox-reader and was about to
carry it, all heavy load and all, when she met Stenton coming her
way.

“Have you heard about the meeting?” Stenton
began, catching his breath. He had come running from the Flying
Field at the news of the meeting.

“Yes. Sounds urgent, I believe.” Lady
Westmoreland nodded and lifted the vox-reader carefully. “I hazard
a guess that it has something to do with the Golden Jubilee.”

They walked briskly to the meeting chamber
where the other lecturers and teachers were already milling
about.

“Some were saying,” Stenton nodded to a few
of his friends and opened the door for Lady Westmoreland, “that the
Jubilee was meant to be political.”

Judith glanced at him while she set the
machine up. “It is always political, Stenton. Everything is
political.”

She was a well-read suffragist and had come
across (and collected) numerous tracts, including her personal
favorite, Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman
. There were new ideas and concepts coming in, thanks to
the explosion of the popularity of the printing press. With the
nations converging on London a few months’ time, she foresaw an
explosion of ideas, some of them potentially negative and
dangerous. She normally kept these thoughts to herself and
contemplated sharing them with Karlida privately over tea and warm
scones.

“Talk is rife about the new flying design,”
Stenton helped to hand out notes while the group of lecturers
flowed in, taking their places and muttering in groups. “It is
supposed to be revolutionary.”

“I see,” Lady Westmoreland inclined her head
politely. “But talk is talk.”

Then Pilotmaster Lee appeared, stern and
cold, and the meeting began in earnest.

It was going to be Her Majesty’s Aerial
Fleet
, a proud assembly of her finest fins and other
aerodynamic marvels. It was going to be a great display of
Britannia’s ingenuity and talent – and Paul Forrester mused as he
scrutinized the blue prints before him closely – and military
prowess as well. As much as he hated war and politics, he knew that
the Queen was keen to declare to the world that Britannia was a
strong military nation, even in the New Age of Science and
Logic.

He had read many historical texts and knew
that wars, bloody and destructive as they were, were products of
dynamics. Like the cog-wheels in his machines and inventions, these
dynamics depended on each other in a deadly symbiosis of needs,
desires and interests.

The blue prints were not lying. The clear
lines were there, drawn, defined. He managed to get a copy from his
colleague Smith who obtained it from the inventor designing the
ship.

Are we going to be minnows in a vast
ocean?
Forrester stared at the shape of the vessel.
Everyone
would just end up eating one another
.

Mrs Pott appeared with a tray of tea and
some homemade oatmeal cookies. The fresh sweet smell filled his
workshop. It was a comforting scent, reminding him of the warm
kitchen.

“Just received Alethia’s letter from the
Academy.” She flourished an envelope dramatically. It was the color
of parchment, sealed with red wax.

Alethia. His precious daughter. He looked
away from the damning blue prints and thanked the housekeeper
warmly. She had looked after his little girl ever since she was a
baby, pulled from her mother’s stomach to save her life. She was
the only mother Alethia had known in her whole childhood. She would
be turning twenty soon, no longer his little girl, but a young
woman.

His heart sank when he read the letter. She
was one of the chosen few to take part in the Great Gathering. He
should be brimming with fatherly pride. Yet… yet, seeing the blue
prints and knowing what kind of vessels would be launched made him
more perturbed.

He kept seeing her in front of him. Pale,
almost white hair, smooth-skinned, looking as if she was fragile.
She was not. She was no porcelain doll. She was made of stronger
stuff, all steel inside. When she was just a toddler, people would
make comments about her blindness, that he should be pampering and
coddling her. She was not an invalid, as he always told himself.
Never. She had her mother’s fierce determination, a fiery spirit,
though she did not display it often.

It would be a Great Gathering. Of what
manner
of greatness, Paul Forrester did not want to think
about. With an heavy heart, he went back to the blue prints and
started to make notes about it.

~*~

Far away from the machinations of London,
Cornwall was a quiet county and Victor very much preferred it to
remain that well. He was only a fisherman, from a long line of
fishermen. The sea was in his blood and he was more than happy to
spend his mornings in his boat and netting fish.

There was some talk in the marketplace,
where the fishermen would gather and sort out their catch, about
the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.
God bless Her Majesty
. And life
would still go on. His wife, Martha, had just given birth to a boy,
his fifth child. Food on the table and clean clothes to wear were
more important than courtly pomp and pageantry.

Oh bloody hell, the net was exceedingly
heavy today. Heavier than his usual catch which he would easily
haul with his considerably strong right hand. Must be something big
– a large salmon, perhaps – caught in the net. A fat salmon with
roe would feed his family well or fetch a few shillings from the
market. Either way, it was good.

He pulled the net, heaved it into the boat
dripping with seawater and writhing with live fish. Looked like a
sizeable catch. As expected, there was something large bulging the
net. He leaned forward to look at it…

… only to stare into baleful eyes, the color
of black polished stone. And a crescent-grin filled with toothy
malice.

Victor jumped back. He should be accustomed
to the sight of sharks. But this one was an odd blighter, with a
long horn protruding from its head.
And what a strange tail
.
It was more serpent than shark. He prodded it; it was already dead,
probably of exertion, crimson blood trickling from its gills.

A serpent shark
. Now that would scare
his children, though his oldest – Henry – might just relish the
tale as all pre-adolescent boys would when it comes to the macabre
and the strange.

He yanked it to one side of the boat, noting
how heavy it was, though streamlined. It must have been beautiful
in water. This random thought startled Victor and he laughed at
himself for being such a sentimental fool. Back to work.

~*~

The streets of London teemed with her
citizens. There were boys holding the day’s broadsheets, shouting
to attract business. Fashionable ladies and well-dressed gentlemen,
dapper in well-tailored coats and pants, walked down Hyde Park. By
now, the word that there would be a Golden Jubilee and a Great
Gathering had spread throughout the city like wild fire.
Extravagantly painted posters were pasted in prominent areas, so
that people would take note of the date and the time.

Gossip was rampant in the salons, in the
coffeehouses and in Kew Gardens where spectators had gathered to
watch the blooming of yet another exquisite tropical orchid
species. Who were the nations invited? Japan? Austria? France? The
protectorates of the British East India Company? What kind of
flying marvels would be showcased? What kind of Fleet was Her
Majesty putting together? Was it solely Her Majesty’s idea or was
it by her ambitious Chamberlain and his cronies?

One thing was for sure: they could hardly
wait to see the new flying vessels. A new design, purportedly by a
secret inventor. It would be grand.
Magnificent
.

She was in the same blimp-fin again, its
controls familiar to the touch. For this training run, the winds
were favorable – calm, without bustling gusts, considering it was
now Autumn and the wintry currents were arriving soon. She
self-consciously touched the half-wing brooch on her left breast,
the badge of an Intermediate Pilot-In-Training. Captain Sagan
pinned it on her chest in a private ceremony and whispered quiet
words of encouragement like “Work harder.”

Beside her, Misato Kanaka took her place as
navigator. She was an exchange student from Meiji Japan, roughly
around Katherine’s age. Her jet-black hair was pulled back in a
severe bun and she wore the same kind of uniform as Katherine:
light brown, the color of a senior student. On her left shoulder
was the House emblem: she was assigned College Sable. Misato had
the same quiet mildness as Alethia but when it came to games like
lacrosse or even gymnastics, she excelled and positively
thrived.

“Check the wind gauge,” Katherine said,
keeping her eye on their goal: a red-stripped flag. It was a
training flight, with an element of competition. They had to
collect ribbon-ed rings along the way. Misato was issued a pole so
that she could collect the rings positioned at certain
locations.

“Wind gauge normal. Wind is easterly.”
Misato reported dutifully. They were coming up to a set of three
rings and Misato readied her pole.

A flash of grey passed by beneath them. The
passage of another blimp-fin. The blast of air left by its wake
rocked Katherine’s own vessel and Misato stumbled, shouting
something in Japanese. She sounded alarmed and rightly so. It was
an illegal move and it had already gotten the rival blimp-fin ahead
of them.

“You alright?” Katherine asked the shaken
Misato who nodded. That was not a nice way to fly. In fact, it was
not a safe way to fly either, not thinking about safety at all.
Thomas Von Dyke had gotten too cocky for his own good. She powered
the blimp-fin forward, furious.

Thomas and his navigator – Edward – were
already in the act of collecting the rings –
our
rings
, Katherine thought angrily – when she piloted her
blimp-fin towards the errant vessel. With a growl, she nudged it
against the other blimp-fin, knocking it out of its position. She
opened the pothole and shouted, “You do not have to cheat, Thomas
Von Dyke! You nearly got us killed!”

The rings scattered, fell. Edwards almost
lost his balance and hung on for dear life. Thomas’s face emerged,
ruddy with anger. Katherine had enough of Thomas and his tendency
to needle her all the time. With a quick word to Misato to hang on,
she pushed forth and her blimp-fin barreled forward, approaching
another marker with two rings. A look back saw Thomas’s blimp-fin
pursuing her.

“Ready the pole,” Katherine bit out and
Misato stood at the door. They reached the marker and with a deft
flick of her wrist, Misato scooped the two rings up with the pole.
The two girls grinned triumphantly and added the two rings to the
existing pool of four.

Thomas’s blimp-fin thundered past them,
misjudging the distance. Katherine could hear faint rude curses.
Good. She got them.

When they landed the blimp-fin, Katherine
waited for the inevitable: Thomas storming up to her, all indignant
anger.

“Edward lost his footing!” Thomas shouted at
her. He was as tall as her, seeing eye-to-eye. He was so close that
she could smell his breath redolent of onions.

Katherine looked at him squarely, coolly.
“You knocked us off our position, Thomas Von Dyke. Tit for
tat.”

With a guttural roar, Thomas launched himself at
Katherine who sidestepped easily and the young man fell face-first
into the grass.

“Admit it, Thomas,” Katherine remained cold,
unmoved. “You cheated. You moved ahead of us. It was an illegal
move and you knew it. Have you not thought about Edward’s safety?
Your
own safety?”

“Safety?” Thomas’s face and uniform were stained
green. His eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I tell you safety!”
He leapt towards Katherine, his hands grappling for her throat.
Edward yelled and held onto the livid youth with his arms.

“
Peace, Thomas
!” Edward was saying
anxiously, his face almost tearing. “Do you want us to get
Solitary? You are
friends
, remember?”

Captain Sagan was striding up to them, a
statuesque Athenian figure dressed in khaki. The expression on her
face brought everything to an uneasy halt.

~*~

Katherine sat in the Solitary Room. Thomas
was somewhere else, in a similar chamber, cooling off.
Beige
walls, a small cot and a square window
. She rubbed her face
tiredly. They had already explained verbatim to Captain Sagan who
then announced she would deliberate on her decision.