Royal Airs (36 page)

Its purr grew louder and its trembling more pronounced. A harder pull, a quicker response, and in minutes he was
hurtling
down the roadway, faster than any elaymotive, jouncing along more roughly than he’d expected, but it didn’t matter. Faster now and then even faster—top land speed. He gripped the altitude lever and pulled it toward his chest.

And all the rattling and bumping smoothed away as the LNR lifted cleanly into the air. Two feet—ten feet—twenty feet—a hundred, on a perfectly calculated angle. The land dropped farther below him, and the sun stooped closer to take a look. Higher. Straight into the untouched blue.

Simulated training was
nothing
like flying.

Oh, the hours in the practice box had taught him where to place his hands, how to compensate for the sudden quick shifts of wind; he didn’t even have to think about it to correctly adjust the angle of his wings when a stiff breeze tilted him unexpectedly to the left. The rehearsal had even taught him how to adapt his body to the constant dizzying changes in height and speed, how to keep his sense of focus and direction, how to ride out the buffeting winds.

But it hadn’t prepared him for the exhilarating way the air tore at his face as it raced by, hardly screened out at all by the scarf. It hadn’t prepared him for the unbelievably fresh taste of the cold air, as chill and delicious as starlight. It hadn’t prepared him for the assault on his senses, the almost battering effect of the rumbling motor and the shrieking wind.

It hadn’t prepared him for the elation. He felt drunk with euphoria, light-headed with delight.
It might be altitude sickness,
he warned himself, keeping one hand on the lever that would bring him closer to the ground. He had leveled out at about a thousand feet up, though he was pretty sure the LNR could go higher. Indeed, it seemed to chafe under his restraint like a restive horse eager to break into a gallop. He had the thought that if he lifted his hands from the controls, it would point its nose upward and just keep going.

Those are crazy thoughts,
he said sternly.
It’s not alive. You’re in control. You must think quickly and clearly or you’ll crash and die.

Those were never thoughts he’d had in the training facility, either.

He forced himself to focus, to concentrate, to shut down his sense of wonder and call up a sense of clinical detachment. He had traveled maybe a mile from the hangar in this short time; within another ten minutes, he thought, he would be able to see the ocean. Kayle hadn’t thought he would get that far, but if he did, he was supposed to make a hard turn and follow the shoreline.

Bad enough to come down over land,
Kayle had said with his usual bluntness.
But you certainly don’t want to land in water. I can’t imagine you’d survive.

Shielding his face with one hand, Rafe peered over the side, trying to see any landmarks. But he was over open country, all green and brown in gentle hills and flat stretches of vegetation; not even a road or a pocket of civilization to give him any hints of his location. He knew by the placement of the sun that he was still heading south, though, and he had to think that any moment—

There it was! The great dark bruise of the ocean, spilling over the horizon ahead of him, eating up more and more of the skyline as he made his rapid approach. Rafe muttered under his breath as he fought to turn the craft west, using both hands to pull on the controls that would tilt his right wing downward and enable him to pivot. The machine fought him, bucking against the energetic wind blowing off the sea. Rafe tasted the salt air and wondered briefly if the heavy humidity this close to the ocean could clog his fuel lines this quickly. He was close enough to the shoreline that he could see the waves foaming against the sand; another minute and he would be over the water.

He came to his feet and pulled the lever with all his weight, and the LNR made a slow, graceful curve to the right, losing a little altitude as it did. Rafe kicked the throttle open and lifted its nose again, and it climbed back to a more comfortable height. But he found it harder to keep the craft steady as they hugged the coastline, cutting across all the vagrant breezes that rolled in off the ocean. Rafe glanced down to gauge how close he was to the water, and saw the shadow of the aeromotive sliding along the ruffled surface of the sea.

Impossible but true. He was flying.

He followed the coastline for another mile, but it was hard work. The wind was so strong that it constantly rocked the aeromotive, and the repeated pulling on recalcitrant levers was rubbing his hands raw, even through the leather gloves. He had lost altitude again and was having a harder time regaining it, and his fuel gauge was hovering at the halfway mark. Time to head for home.

The aircraft acquiesced more courteously this time when he asked it to turn. At first they had the sea wind at their backs, pushing them along even faster, but that died off within a half mile. In fact, the air was so calm, the sky was so clear, and the aeromotive was so responsive that Rafe had almost relaxed into the smug exuberance of a successful flight when the motor failed and the world grew silent and the LNR began to fall toward the earth.

Rafe had a single blank moment of absolute terror before he remembered that he had practiced this moment a hundred times. He worked the fuel pump and hauled on the controls, hoping to reignite the engine, while desperately seeking to catch any errant winds that might help him glide down instead of plummeting. With a sudden roar, the motor growled to life; Rafe’s head was slammed against the back of the seat by the pressure of acceleration. Relief and euphoria flooded his veins, and he instantly tilted the craft skyward again, hoping to make up for lost altitude. A glance at his gauge showed that the maneuver had gulped down a good portion of his remaining fuel. He needed to get back to base, and without any more detours.

He was still on high alert, the adrenaline singing in his ears, so this time he caught the first warning sounds of impending disaster—a cough and stutter in the steady chugging of the engine. His hands were already on the throttle, throwing it wide open, his foot jammed on the fuel pump. Almost immediately, the engine caught again, and the craft surged forward with renewed energy.

But Rafe had a sense of cold certainty that he was on borrowed time. The LNR was struggling. He didn’t know how much longer it could stay aloft or how many more times he could coax it into restarting in midair. He had thought to keep the craft as high as he could, to give himself more time to recover if the engine failed again, but now he realized he’d better start looking for a landing spot and bring the LNR down as soon as he had a clear, straight stretch of road. While he actually had the power to direct it.

Accordingly, he canted to the right, edging eastward, hoping to intersect the main road some distance from the hangar. Hoping there was no other traffic between the port and the assembly building. Hoping the LNR had another mile in it at least, maybe two . . .

Twice more the engine shuddered and fell still, and twice more Rafe was able to flood the fuel lines and spark it into life again. By now he was sweating with heat and effort and fear; his scarf had unraveled from around his face, and his skin was burning from a combination of wind and sun. The glare was bright enough that he was having trouble seeing, and he had lost all sense of time and distance. All he knew was sound—that choke and gurgle in the engine’s full-throated roar—and altitude. Which was lower. And lower. And lower.

He was actually astonished when two landmarks appeared on the horizon simultaneously—the long dark ribbon of the paved roadway, and the hunched silhouette of the hangar. He’d traveled farther than he’d thought, or faster. He was within sight of haven. He felt his heart lift with hope, and the aircraft’s nose lifted with him.

Then the craft fell ominously silent as the engine cut out again. Rafe stomped on the fuel pump and saw his gauge spin to zero. He was too low to hope the engine would catch in time to power the LNR upward again—too high to hope he would land in anything less spectacular than calamity. Probably didn’t have to worry about fire, though, since there wasn’t anything left to burst into flames. So Josetta wouldn’t have to stand there and watch him burn to death—

Josetta—

Knowing it would do no good, he jumped on the fuel pump with the full weight of his body, hauled maniacally on the gears, trying to get the slightest bit of lift, just enough power to cruise those final yards. But the LNR, which had seemed so sentient before, was nothing now but a lifeless metal coffin careening toward land. Rafe felt like his head was about to detach from his body from the force of the rapid descent. He wrapped his hands around his chain of blessings and prepared for catastrophic impact.

Then a mighty force slammed against the LNR and hurled it sideways, lifting it a hundred feet in the air and spinning it like a leaf. Rafe loosed an inarticulate shout and grabbed the steering mechanism, trying grimly to avoid being pitched over the side. Now the craft was flung in the opposite direction, rocked on a furious wind. Rafe’s head smashed against the wheel, against the back of the seat, against the metal sidewall. He was too dizzy and jostled to operate the controls, to try with levers and rudders to steer into the gale that had swept in to keep him aloft. He merely held on grimly as he was thrown from side to side, shaken like a child’s toy, then dumped to the ground in a screeching, bumping, endlessly spinning tumble.

When everything finally stopped moving, Rafe sat motionless, trembling, panting, half blinded, and damn near deaf. He wasn’t sure which direction was up and which was down, though he thought the LNR’s right wing was tilted skyward, which must mean the left one had gouged itself deep into the soil. He knew he should try to extricate himself from the wreckage, clamber down the folded sides of the aircraft, show everyone in the watching audience that he had survived, but he didn’t think he could do it. Couldn’t free himself from the crumpled edges of the pilot’s box, couldn’t figure out how to lower himself to the ground, wasn’t sure his legs would take his weight.

Wasn’t sure, to be honest about it, that he actually
had
survived.

His first piece of affirmative proof was pain. His arm was on fire. His rib cage felt like someone had run a sword from his armpit to his hip, slicing precisely through each individual curved bone. His head was booming, every pulse of blood through his veins searing like a lightning strike. His right hand felt strange, both hot and sweaty; he had a feeling that if he managed to pull off his glove, he would find it filled with blood.

His second form of proof was sound. Muffled and dull—more nuanced than the grinding, wordless belligerence of the engine—and growing louder. Voices. Questions.
Rafe! Rafe! Are you all right? Rafe, can you hear us? Can anybody see him?

He was alive. The elay prime—he knew it for a fact—had called up the winds to blow him to the roughest kind of safety. He had gambled his life and almost lost it, but he had had a hidden wildcard all along. The thought made him smile even as he closed his eyes and slipped into darkness.

NINETEEN

T
 his is becoming altogether too common,
Rafe thought as he swam fuzzily to consciousness.
Waking up in an unfamiliar place half dead from injuries.
The last time had been when he was attacked in the slums of Chialto. Recently enough for him to remember how wretched the experience could be.

It was no less painful this time—maybe slightly worse. He thought it was possible his head would crack right open, and the whole left side of his body felt as if it had been stripped raw. But the setting was different. Bigger, brighter, bustling with more purpose, and crowded with more people. The quality of the light made him think he’d been transported inside the aeromotive hangar and not much time had elapsed.

“His eyes are open,” someone said. A woman leaned over him, her head blocking out almost everything else.

“Can you talk? Do you know your name? Do you remember what day it is?” she asked solemnly.

“Rafe Adova. It’s the middle of the third nineday of Quinnahunti. My brains haven’t been scrambled.”

“That’s good. Can you wiggle your fingers? Move your feet?”

He was tempted to not only flutter his fingers, but to lift his hands and wrap them around her throat. Maybe outsized irritation was a side effect of the concussion she clearly worried he might have. “Yes. See? Is anything broken?”

“Couple of toes. Maybe a couple of ribs, but I think you just flayed some skin off. I’m more worried about your head. And the possibility of internal bleeding. Let me know if this hurts.”

She proceeded to apply pressure to various spots on his torso and seemed pleased when he didn’t cry out. He wasn’t paying as much attention as he should have been, maybe; he was trying, without lifting his head, to look around the room and figure out who else was in it and where exactly he might be. He spotted a man and a woman nearby, holding what looked like medical supplies, but neither of them, unfortunately, was Josetta. The space was too clean and brightly lit to be Kayle’s office. Maybe they kept an infirmary right at the hangar. They probably had need of one often enough.

“What happened to the LNR?” he asked, grunting as the medic poked at his stomach.

“Worry about that later,” she said. “Can you sit up?”

He struggled a bit, but with the man’s help he made it upright. His senses reeled and for a moment he thought he might throw up, but then the nausea passed. That was the point at which he realized he was wearing nothing except a strategically placed sheet and an impressive array of bandages around his left leg, left arm, right hand, and chest.

“What happened to it?” he insisted. “Is it beyond repair?”

“Still being assessed,” the man said briefly.

“You should be more worried about whether or not
you’re
beyond repair,” the woman said with grim humor.