The book of all skies, p.22
The Book of All Skies, page 22
Katka took a sighting with the theodolite, then started the propellers. Gradually the edge dropped below the horizontal, implying that to rise was to move away from it. Once she was satisfied that they were spiraling gently outward, she shut off the engine.
Del watched the rocky plain of the nub continue to tip as the Dreyas ascended, for the moment traveling almost orthogonally to the Apasa’s vertical.
“Start the air,” Katka said. Del hesitated; she’d been inclined to ascribe any light-headedness she was feeling to the sheer strangeness of their surroundings. But then Katka tapped the instrument panel impatiently; the ambient pressure had already dropped to eighty-five percent of normal. Del turned the valve and began inhaling bottled air; there was a metallic taste to it that always threw her for a moment, but after a few breaths her lungs declared it perfectly satisfying, and her less-addled skull admitted that the switch was warranted.
The last sliver of the nub vanished behind the Hoop, leaving them alone among the stars. Del hunted for the Dreyas; after a while, she saw the beacon of their signaling light flash three times then go dark again, an automated sequence that caught the eye without overtaxing their batteries. The edge was harder to fix on now, but the Apasa’s motion and the abundance of stars produced a line of extinction and emergence that, once located and tracked against the background, she could find again without too much trouble.
She checked the ambient pressure; it was seventy-eight percent. The ballonets were empty now, so their lift could not be increased. She looked to the edge again; its bearing was almost constant. But the stars were reeling around the basket, constellations rising up as she watched, proving that the Apasa was still making progress.
“We’re through the aperture,” Katka announced, sounding about as calm as anyone could be who’d lost all sight of land for the first time in her life, while her notion of up turned a full circle. Del was embarrassed that she hadn’t been navigating well enough to mark the event herself; she looked to the edge and watched five stars emerging, fixing them in her mind as the vertices of a pyramid.
The pressure crept down to seventy-two, then seemed to sit there; the march of the constellations became agonisingly slow.
“Have we hit the top?” she asked Katka.
“I don’t think so,” Katka replied. “We shouldn’t be neutrally buoyant yet. But we’re farther from the edge, so everything is changing more slowly.” She pointed to the spring balance; gravity was two-thirds what it had been at the surface. Del had been too preoccupied to notice the burden slipping away.
Finally, the stars of the pyramid vanished one by one, replaced by a butterfly. The pressure read sixty-eight percent. Del looked from dial to butterfly and back, willing them to keep moving, but they refused to budge.
Katka said, “Now we’ve hit the top.” She started the engine, setting the propellers whirring gently above them, sending the Apasa in closer to the edge.
Del had no need to check the charts they were carrying; she’d committed the level surfaces of each sky to memory. Here, the curves of constant potential didn’t plunge straight into the edge; they spiraled around it, and those that were high enough never touched it, instead bottoming out as circles when they crossed into the middle sky.
“We didn’t need an air supply on the bridge,” she said. “I don’t think the pressure dropped below eighty percent. So we must be able to make it across the midpoint at sixty-eight, right?”
“Absolutely,” Katka assured her. Del knew full well that the question wasn’t that simple; reaching a level that escaped the edge was one thing, maintaining it was another. But at least they had some significant leeway; if the bridge had still been standing, they would have been flying high above its decks right now.
The edge dropped down below the basket and the stars began turning again, while the pointer on the pressure dial merely trembled. Del checked the spring balance; their weight was climbing as the adjacent spirals wound together more tightly. Whatever the strength of gravity, perfect neutral buoyancy remained neutral: the weights of displaced air, hydrogen and cargo were all multiplied by the same factor, so if they added up to zero before, they would add up to zero afterward. But perfect was a lot to ask for, and if the balance slipped and they began to fall or rise, they would fall or rise faster.
The flashes from the Dreyas were no longer visible; it was probably stalled at the same point where the Apasa had lingered. Del didn’t trust her sense of time, but as the stars flowed by it felt like the swiftest circuit she had ever made.
When they passed through the aperture again the edge ran almost directly below them, but now that she’d stopped looking for the closest segment, she could catch hints of the entire Hoop sweeping across the sky. While they raced around one point on the ring, the rest of it formed a giant arch that was toppling from the zenith, changing the stars as it fell.
This beautiful structure had killed billions of people. It had sterilized the world of her ancestors, melting and dispersing it beneath a thousand skies. She did not know what to do with that knowledge – but the ache of grief and guilt it induced was part of her now. The people of the Overgap had accepted their history. She had to do the same; there was no other choice.
“We’re halfway there,” Katka announced.
The whole arch had fallen below them. Del said, “Now you know for sure that the gap’s not infinite.” She glanced back, and saw three flashes; Lena and Imogen were catching up with them again.
The basket shuddered, and Del felt the drop in the pit of her stomach before she had the presence of mind to check the panel. The ambient pressure was rising: seventy, seventy-two, seventy-four. But there was no sign of a hydrogen leak. They’d hit some kind of down-draft, some instability in the air flowing around the edge.
She turned to Katka, who stood frozen. The ballonets were empty, they couldn’t squeeze out any more lift.
“We can throw the food out,” Del suggested.
“That won’t be enough,” Katka replied grimly.
“Then ... ?” Del’s head swam. Did one of them need to jump, to save the other? Katka and her cousins had risked their lives for two strangers; Del was the one in their debt. There was no doubt about the rightness of it, but she had to find the courage quickly, or even her death would be in vain. She looked down toward the edge, and willed herself to accept it. A few moments in free fall, then she’d be crushed before she knew she was in pain.
Katka said, “We need to dump the second battery.” She crouched down and pulled out the leads, then motioned frantically to Del for assistance.
Del squatted beside her and they seized the leaden block. Katka started bellowing and Del joined in, as they fought to straighten their legs and then draw the battery up to the basket’s edge.
For a moment it hung cradled in their hands, high enough, but held so awkwardly that the final move sideways seemed impossible. Then Katka straightened her spine a fraction more and worked the base of the battery onto the wooden rail. With the tension on their arms relieved, Del recovered first, and heaved the thing over the side.
The Apasa reacted immediately; she could feel it snap upward like a bottle full of air rising through water. The pressure dial was plummeting: seventy, sixty-eight, sixty-six.
Katka was bent double with pain. She waved her hand at Del. “Fill the ballonets!” she commanded. “If we go too high, we’ll burst the capsule!”
Del hit the button. The pump made a weak, sickly noise, but nothing happened to the ballonets. “Shut off the—” Katka croaked, but Del had already grasped the problem: with one battery, they couldn’t run the propellers and pump at the same time. She shut down the engine and started the pump.
Their ascent slowed, and they began to level off. When Del finally stopped the pump, the pressure read sixty-one percent.
“Do you want to sit?” she asked Katka.
“That would just hurt more.”
“Where’s the pain?”
“I think I’ve pulled a muscle in my back.” Katka laughed weakly. “I’ll survive, don’t worry. But it will be faster if you work the controls.”
“All right. Should I start the engine again?”
“Yes.”
Del complied. “How bad is it, losing the battery?” she asked.
“It’s not a disaster,” Katka insisted, wincing and trying to find a less painful position. “We can still run one motor at a time; that’s all we need.”
Del’s arms were aching, but she wasn’t injured. She checked all the dials again anxiously, then looked around, trying to get oriented. When she saw the triple flash from the Dreyas, she felt a surge of relief, then confusion: they seemed to be in the wrong position entirely. But then she understood what had happened, and her relief turned to elation. Their friends had overtaken them, at a lower altitude. Whatever phenomenon had afflicted the Apasa had been narrow or transient enough to have spared the second airship – and with luck, Asha and Sejan would come through untroubled as well.
With the Apasa lightened, they could probably pump more air into the ballonets and return to their old altitude, but Katka seemed satisfied with their present conditions, and Del was reluctant to start second-guessing her.
“Is there anything that would make you more comfortable?” Del asked. They didn’t have a lot to work with, but maybe she could improvise some kind of brace.
“I’m all right,” Katka assured her. “So long as I don’t move.”
“Forget what I said about winches. What we need are lighter batteries.”
“You can blame the Hoops for that.”
“I’m sorry?”
Katka said, “On Old Jierra, it would have been easy to find lighter metals that had risen up to the surface. Now there’s more surface, so they’re much more diluted.”
They passed through the aperture again, entering the last of the landless skies. Looking back, Del saw a quadruple flash: the Medoun was not far behind.
“Do you recognize any of these constellations, from before?” Katka asked.
“I’m not sure.” Del tried to think back to her time on the bridge with Clarissa. Had she seen those five stars that reminded her of bellows? The six that looked like an angry rat? “One of my friends memorized all the skies on our side of the gap, but that kind of thing was always a struggle for me.”
Katka said, “It’s just that ... if we threaded the second Hoop as well, by mistake, we might not be headed quite where we planned.”
Del stared at her, dumbfounded, then realized she was joking. “Please don’t tease me again until we’re on solid ground.”
“Fair enough.”
When they’d almost come full circle, Katka said, “Time to shut off the propellers and descend.” Del followed her instructions, knowing they made perfect sense, but it still felt more perilous to begin lowering the airship with no land in sight beneath them than it had to undertake the reverse maneuver at the corresponding point at the start of the crossing.
She pumped up the ballonets slowly, wary of the possibility of another sudden lurch, and she stopped well before they were full, giving the Apasa a chance to drift down to a new equilibrium. The stars kept turning around them; the edge of the Hoop moved into its expected place.
When a sliver of pale rock appeared through the aperture, she let out an involuntary sob of relief. However hard the journey, at least the Hoops were not fickle. She had found a way to unwind her thread, and they had not changed the rules and pulled the ground out from under her.
As the plains of Celema slowly tilted toward her, Del saw the flashes from the Dreyas again. “Imogen will never stop gloating about beating us,” she said.
“We can always come down a little faster,” Katka replied.
“No, I’m only joking. It’s not a race.” Before long, she could see the other airship by starlight alone, following its own path below them, gently spiraling toward the nub.
Something hot and bright moved across her view, much faster than the stars. She closed her eyes and saw the streak of its motion; it had started between her and the ground, crossed the sky, and then passed out of sight behind the basket. She looked to the other side of the Apasa, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
“Did you see that?” she asked Katka.
“What?”
Del described the object.
Katka said, “Are you sure you didn’t just catch the flash from our signal light?”
As Del watched the Dreyas come nearer to the ground, she saw the ruins of the bridge’s foundations. There was timber strewn across the rock – far more than at the other side of the gap – but even so it did not look sufficient to account for the whole structure. The edge must have taken most of the bridge and turned it to dust. And Montano, Clarissa, Silvio? There was no trace of the old village, or a new one in its place.
“We shouldn’t need bottled air now,” Katka suggested, switching off her own supply. Del did the same; she thought about removing her helmet, but her arms were still aching, and there was no reason it couldn’t wait.
A second bright streak rose up from the ground and collided with the Dreyas. Del bellowed to Katka to look, half out of fear and alarm, half because she doubted her own perceptions.
Katka’s expression shifted rapidly from astonishment to outrage. “Some fucker’s trying to kill us!”
There were flames on one side of the basket now. “What do we do?” Del pleaded. She could see Lena and Imogen beating the fire with a blanket, trying to subdue it, but it was showing no signs of capitulating.
“Drop us faster,” Katka replied. Del started the pump, speeding the Apasa’s descent. Katka quickly sketched the rest of the plan; Del took the rolled up rope ladder, her hands shaking, and stood by the edge of the basket.
Katka groaned with pain as she moved toward the control panel. Del kept her eyes on the burning airship, but she heard the pump switch off and the propellers start up again. The Apasa was still falling faster than the Dreyas, and now it was closing the gap between their trajectories.
As they approached, Del started yelling, “Get ready to grab the ladder! Get ready to grab the ladder!”
Imogen turned, saw the Apasa, and pulled Lena away from the fire. They took off their helmets, moved to the nearer side of the basket, and stood, arms outstretched, waiting.
Del flung the ladder out, aiming high. It unfurled as it ascended, reached a peak, then the last quarter draped itself over the Dreyas’s lifting capsule. As the Apasa dropped lower, Katka steered directly under the basket, drawing the ladder back around the side of the capsule. Del looked on, her heart bursting, as Lena and Imogen reached out to seize the nearest rungs, then leaped into the air.
She watched the rope swing down as Katka started venting the ballonets. When the tug of extra weight from their new passengers arrived, it jolted the Apasa, but they continued ascending.
Behind them, the basket of the abandoned airship was now entirely filled with flames. Suddenly, the lifting capsule ruptured, and a ball of pale blue fire burst from the jagged hole to engulf the whole structure. The propeller housing broke free and plummeted toward the ground; the rest of the fiery wreckage drifted down after it, panels and struts brightening and fading as the rush of air rekindled smouldering portions and burned them more completely.
Del leaned over and looked down along the ladder. Lena and Imogen were clinging on, but it would be insane to expect them to climb up to the basket – least of all under this gravity, while the Apasa accelerated upward.
“We need to set them down on the ground,” she urged Katka.
“Is it safe down there? Someone’s lobbing flaming projectiles at us!”
“I’d rather dodge flaming projectiles on the ground than in a balloon full of flammable gas.”
Katka said, “What else is down there? Who else, with what weapons?”
“I don’t know.” Del still couldn’t see where the attack had come from. “But what are we going to do? Turn around and fly back, with one battery and two people dangling from a rope? Whoever’s down there, I don’t believe it’s some great army. We’re more likely to outnumber them, than they us.”
“All right, we’ll risk it,” Katka agreed reluctantly. “This is your land, you know how things work here.”
Del thought: Not all the time, but kept that verdict to herself. She yelled down to Lena and Imogen, “Hold on! We’re going to descend!”
“About time!” Imogen shouted back.
With Katka hunched over the instrument panel, Del acted as her eyes, monitoring their approach toward the ground. As the end of the ladder brushed the rock, another blazing projectile flew past the Apasa, missing them by four or five strides.
The catapult’s range was impressive ... but it was probably heavy, slow to redirect and aim, and close to immovable. It had not been put in place with some plan to attack the airships; no one on this side of the gap even knew what an airship was, let alone that the arrival of three of them was imminent. It had to be intended to deal with the only thing its builders knew had crossed the gap before: a bridge. Someone had camped here and waited all this time, with the goal of setting fire to any bridge that appeared, reaching across from the other side.
Lena and Imogen stepped onto the ground and released the ladder together. As the Apasa rebounded upward, Del surveyed the plain. She’d scrutinized the wreckage of the foundations before, but whether it was the change in angle or a change in her expectations, she could now see exactly what she’d been hunting for. The catapult itself was, mostly, a long piece of timber, but the camouflage was no longer fooling her. She could make out a single figure beside it; maybe their attacker had companions, but she doubted there was room in the hiding spot for more than one or two.
She explained what she’d found to Katka. “Can you put me down?”
