Sly Mongoose (18 page)

A bit of turbulence hit. The airship rumbled and kicked against them. Timas gripped the edges of his seat, and Pepper looked around at the crew.

They were inching toward the portholes.

Looking for something visible.

Pepper sat up. “What is it?”

The airship pitched, gaining altitude in a hurry while doing a slow figure eight.

“I’m cut out!” Katerina grabbed the backs of their seats. She looked panicked. “I got dropped. I can’t reach anything Aeolian outside the ship.”

Pepper looked to the front. “Captain!”

An Aeolian stood up. Pepper remembered her voice from back in the courtyard. “We’re being followed. The blimps won’t identify themselves, so assume the worse. And we can’t get anything out. You’re right, we’re being jammed.”

The Aeolians all stood now, crowding the aircar as their cloaks shifted around. They pulled up the floorboards, unzipping their large duffel bags.

“Boarding party? Or worse?” Pepper asked. “And you’re leaving me all trussed up!”

The Aeolian who’d spoke removed her helmet. Her hair had been completely shaved to let the helmet make contact with skin. Green tattoos of scimitars ran up the side of her neck and the back of her head. Outside of the helmet’s protective visor her brown eyes scanned the aircar with a few blinks. “We caught you, that should speak to our abilities. The boarding party will be in for a nasty surprise.”

Pepper cocked his head. “You’re really going to leave me to be delivered like a wrapped gift?”

“You really are so arrogant to assume you’re the only thing of value on this airship?”

“How often does this sort of thing happen out here, then?” Pepper asked.

“Not often,” Itotia spoke up from behind him. “There is a lot of smuggling. The Ehactl cities like Yatapek, around the Great Storm, allow the smugglers safe harbor, we often need the goods. But outright attacks like this haven’t happened in years.”

“Yeah, but you still have guns mounted around the city docks.”

“Rare doesn’t equal none,” Itotia said.

Pepper looked back at the Aeolian. She rubbed the top of her scalp
and pulled her helmet back on. Green light danced over her eyes. “Tennaes, Andrew, Shella, Joquim, get up in the airbag.”

They didn’t respond verbally, but the four Aeolians stood up and walked over to the crew. One of them undogged a hatch at the top of the aircar and pulled the ladder down.

“After you.”

The four Aeolians clambered up, pulling their bags after them. All without a word.

Pepper looked back at the woman he suspected led this small group. “Just promise me, if it gets dire, you’ll let me stand for myself.”

“Of course.” She walked up the aisle to stand behind the captain and looked forward. No doubt she could see more information through her helmet, but that human core that wanted to see out at the situation with real eyes and real senses always overruled, Pepper knew.

“How did they find us?” Timas asked, his eyes wide.

“We’re pretty high profile, all they had to do was listen carefully to public Aeolian democracy in action. A kidnap and ransom, with high stakes; whoever is planning this knows things are crazy enough right now.” Katerina looked disgusted and had folded her arms. “They take advantage of us at the weakest point. As representative, I’m empowered to say that
we’ll
do everything in our power to hunt them down and bring them to justice, but that we can’t get any official help out to us in time.”

“Everything is changing around us very quickly,” Pepper said, trying to reassure her. She was feeling left out to dry, no doubt, and regretting that chance had put her here. He couldn’t blame her for the emotions obvious on her face.

“You live this sort of life.” Katerina looked at him like he was a bug of some sort. “And you’re the valuable resource here. You’ll get ransomed. Timas, Itotia, and me, we all stand a chance of getting caught in the crossfire.”

Far from being the calm ambassador to the Aeolian body, she was an angry young girl right now, facing the prospect of death by herself without the protective embrace of her entire civilization.

At least she had a self-defense mechanism, Pepper knew. Timas and
his mother didn’t have anything, and both of them seemed calmer to him. They both faced a harder life, and Timas, every time he was dropped to the surface in some ancient, substandard groundsuit, faced dangers that most men Pepper knew couldn’t handle.

He looked back at her. “You’ll be fine. You’re a living avatar. You’ll fetch a nice ransom.”

Then he realized what he’d said and glanced at Itotia, who just shook her head at him. Timas, to his credit, bit his lip and said nothing.

The captain held up his hand and looked back, goggled eyes blinking. “You’ll feel some thumping and shaking. We’re dropping cargo and then chaff.”

“We’re only an hour away from Yatapek,” Timas said. “Shouldn’t we be returning?”

“We are.” Katerina pointed at the sun. “Part of the figure eights. Your people already scrambled a couple fighter blimps our way.”

“Then why are we still climbing?” Timas’s frustration filled the words.

“So that when they hit us, we’ll have more time to fall,” Katerina said. “They’re underneath, blocking our way to the clouds in case we try and run to hide in them. The heavy metals in the cloud vapor wreaks hell with radar.”

Itotia fingered a small bracelet and muttered to herself. Prayers for their survival.

Pepper chose not to castigate her. It was as productive as anything else they could do for the next fifteen minutes as they waited for their predators to rise up to them.

T
he airship made one particularly hard turn toward the oncoming pirates behind them. The sound of compressors filled the cabin, sucking lifting air into heavy bottles. Everything shivered as the airship props pitched down and struggled to keep them in the air now that the bag lost more and more buoyancy.

“I’m so sorry. So sorry,” Timas said to Itotia. He’d tried to make his own way, make people pay, and now he’d caught his mother up in the damage he’d done.

“Don’t apologize. I’m the one who let you down. I let this man into our house.” She gripped his hand, and he squeezed back.

“Okay,” the captain murmured over the speakers in the cabin. “The oncoming ships are popping up fast and calling for us to heave-to. Make sure you’re strapped in, we’re going to be dropping really quickly any second now.”

Timas grabbed Katerina’s hand. She looked confused for a second.

The engines swung back to their normal orientation with a thud. The pilot pitched the nose of the airship down and dove. Timas’s stomach hit the back of his throat, but not in the normal queasy manner he knew all too well.

Despite a well-snugged belt, he rose off the padded seat. That changed as the pilot angled the nose of the airship down even farther and Timas pressed into the back of the chair.

Looking ahead at the long sets of chairs and over the back of the pilot’s large chair, he could see through the pilot’s windows. The familiar orange clouds lurked below them.

“Five thousand,” Katerina whispered.

“What?” Timas looked over at her. She had closed her eyes tight.

“Feet. The ones chasing us are just seconds below us at this dive rate.”

The propellers wailed, trying to help them as they gained enough speed to hopefully flash past the attackers underneath them.

“Captain says that they’ve stopped ascending now,” Katerina reported.
“They figured his tactic out.” The previous announcements had just been for Timas and his mother. Now the pilot was too caught up in his world to remember to voice this out loud.

Katerina grabbed Timas and pointed ahead. He could see five shiny darts in a loose pentagon. They grew larger as the pilot dove right at them. A bold move.

Tiny bits of dust twinkled in the air between the approaching airships and Timas.

“They’re firing on us!” Katerina gasped. At the same time three Aeolians broke out of their chairs and jumped in front of everyone. They threw their cloaks wide open.

Small smacking sounds filled the cabin. The cloaks protected them, a shield that flared and rippled as if stones had hit calm water, dissipating the impact of weapons fire.

“Small caliber warning fire with tracers,” the captain said. “They’re repeating surrender demands.”

“They need him alive,” the woman Aeolian said. “They know we’re armored. They won’t do anything much more serious, but it will force us out of the cabin.”

Acrid sulfur-tinged atmosphere leaked in through the bullet holes. They’d dropped far enough down that Chilo’s atmosphere pushed in through the tiny punctures. Timas started coughing. Masks dropped from the ceiling with oxygen, and Timas grabbed the first one and took a deep breath. Itotia had hers on, and Katerina did, too.

The sounds quit, but as one all the Aeolians looked at the ceiling and airbag. All three of them chorused “shit.”

Distant popping sounds and one minor explosion, the sound of rigging shaking and slapping, made Timas shrink farther down into his chair. The airship struggled to maneuver.

“We’re through them.” Katerina sounded muffled through the emergency oxygen mask. The acidic air made her eyes tear up.

The Aeolians behind them leaped up, cloaks spread out, covering them from the rear.

More popping made Timas jump, but no more shots hit the cabin—they all hit the airbag above. The other ships were trying to get them to
lose enough buoyancy to surrender and be taken off, but not enough to send them plummeting into Chilo’s unsurvivable depths.

Katerina, Itotia, and Timas scrunched down, trying to keep a low profile. Timas heard a chuckle from Pepper in the chair in front of him.

Gravity hit Timas and shoved him deep into his chair. The airship had leveled and straightened out. “Twenty thousand feet lower now.” Katerina looked out the porthole. “The pilot found some cloud cover.”

“Go go go.” The Aeolian behind Timas unbuckled his straps and then wrenched him up. “We need to get out of the cabin.”

Timas took a deep final breath from the mask and scrambled out with Itotia to follow. The ladder had been pulled down again. He was picked up and handed to a pair of hands that yanked him up into the airlock.

“We stay here, the cabin’s damaged and won’t survive the next trick,” said the soldier who pulled him up.

Itotia came next, then Pepper, and finally Katerina.

Pepper slumped in the corner of the tiny airlock.

Timas looked through the porthole in the upper door. Overhead three large round balloons hung, cradled by catwalks and rigging, pipes and hoses that threaded all throughout. Several large generators sat mounted on bellowslike suspension rigs between each balloon.

“Coming through.” The Aeolians pushed through the lock and past them up the ladder. They fanned out into the interior of the airship’s giant bag.

In the cabin they’d been lined up in the chairs and cramped. Now among the trembling catwalks, it felt like just a handful of them were up there, lost in the airship’s innards.

The pilot shouldered his way up last. His data goggles trailed cables that he’d slung over his shoulder. “Come on come on,” he hissed as he shoved past. The airship still dove, but not as rapidly.

Pepper needed to be pulled through, which the two Aeolians left in the lock did. Once Pepper was up, Timas, Itotia, and Katerina joined everyone.

“There aren’t any seats.” One of the Aeolians tossed straps and rope at them. “Find a railing, bind yourself to it.”

The pilot ran toward the nose cone where he sat down on a tiny jumpseat, strapped himself in, and plugged his goggles in.

Without the insulation of the cabin everything sounded louder, more mechanical. Everything echoed several times inside, bouncing off the sides of the giant balloon. The drone of the propellers outside permeated the air and reached into the back of Timas’s throat.

“It’s weird,” Katerina said as the three of them huddled around Pepper. His guards lashed themselves to the railings as best they could.

“That we’re being attacked?” Timas saw that she stared down at the catwalk, and at the airlock they’d just come through.

“I’ve never been cut off for this long. From everything Aeolian.”

Timas stared at her. They might both be teenagers, but their worlds were so far apart. She had her perfectly engineered body, modifications available for the right money, and the constant babble in her head that linked her to the ghosts of her entire city and the Consensus it belonged to.

What a strange thing to be.

The airship leaned to the right. The catwalk shifted and twisted underneath them. Smacking sounds made Timas jump. “We’re being shot at again?”

Itotia looked up. “I don’t see any new holes.”

“No, it’s the pressure, we’re still dropping a bit,” Katerina said. “We’re deep in the clouds now. But this airship isn’t made for it.”

The skin of the airbag looked like it was being sucked inward. It strained against the metal skeleton. Tiny jets of Chilo’s atmosphere seeped in through bullet holes in the outer fabric. Eventually that would affect the air in here, making it dense, and less able to lift them.

A distant explosion thudded. The shock wave shook them. Another random pop from even farther away made them all jump. For a few moments the distant explosions continued in rapid fashion, then stopped.

“Balloon charges,” Timas said. “They’re under us.”

The pirate ships were tougher than this airship. They were designed to drop into the clouds as they hid and smuggled their goods. That was why they’d gleamed silver when Timas had spotted them. Their hulls had been stripped clean by flying through clouds laden with sulfuric acid.

Another balloon charge exploded, closer, and the entire airbag rippled. To the rear a pipe exploded. Acidic steam shrieked out into the catwalks.

The pilot glanced back and a pair of Aeolians converged on the pipe at his silent order. They used a wrench to close a valve, and the steam subsided.

But the next explosion Timas felt in his chest. Three pipes exploded, and shrapnel bounced, clattering to the floor.