Airborn (24 page)

He was smiling as he said this, as though it were another of his gentlemen’s jests, all in the best of fun.

“To the northwest,” I lied.

Szpirglas looked at me with disgust.

“There’s no place there where a ship could land. I see you don’t take me at all seriously, lad.”

“The ship did not land,” I said doggedly. “She ditched and some two dozen of us made it ashore.”

I saw in his face that same cold anger as when he’d shot Mr. Featherstone. His gun was holstered through his belt, and I knew he could use it on me at any moment.

“Let’s take them both to the pit, Mr. Crumlin.”

Szpirglas seized Kate by the arm, and Crumlin
grabbed me in his butcher-block fists and marched me out of the bungalow. Even if I could struggle free, they’d shoot me in the back. We crossed the village and took the path toward the airfield, then turned off onto another path I hadn’t noticed before. The smell of mangoes bloomed heavily in the air. In the speckled starlight I saw huge spools of hosing near a great stony mound. Set into the stone face at an angle was a narrow metal hatch. In its middle was a round collared opening, capped right now. Crumlin grabbed the hatch’s handle and pulled it open. Hydrium hissed out loudly from the dark shaft.

The entire island seemed porous with hydrium. No wonder this place was so precious to the pirates. Hidden and with an eternal supply of lifting gas.

“Your ship was gutted,” Szpirglas said as if I’d personally insulted him. “She should have sunk.”

“She did sink.”

“I think you managed to save her somehow. Or slow her enough to land here. I applaud your captain and crew. You must have been mending her at a furious pace.”

I said nothing. Szpirglas was smiling, as though marveling at our ingenuity.

“Now, then,” he said, nodding at the shaft, “the
fall isn’t much, just enough to bruise you up some. It’s the hydrium that will kill you. There’s no room for air down there. You start telling me the truth, or you both go down.”

My entire body burned with cold. Not even in my worst nightmares had I imagined such powerlessness. My legs were weak. I could not run. I could not fly.

“You first, then,” said Szpirglas to Kate. “If I’m to ransom you, I’ll need your parents’ particulars, not that pretty address in Honolulu you concocted.”

“I’ll not tell you,” said Kate, giving him one of her nostril-narrowing gazes. I was amazed she had the courage at such a time.

“Excellent,” said Szpirglas. “I’m most impressed. Of course, the alternative for you is a particularly nasty death.”

She said nothing, only looked at me. I nodded. She told Szpirglas her real name and address.

“A fancy address for a fancy girl. Very good. Now, Mr. Cruse, the whereabouts of your ship.”

“There’s no ship,” I said once more. “Only some survivors, on the island’s leeward side.”

He looked at me thoughtfully, almost sympathetically, I thought. “Take heart, Mr. Cruse, there are only three or four places on the island where one
could land a vessel the size of the
Aurora
. It will not be hard for us to scout out.”

“You’ll not find any ship,” I said, lying in vain even now. The sickly gush of hydrium was giving me a headache.

“It’s a shame,” Szpirglas said. “I had no intention of damaging the
Aurora.
You must blame Mother Nature and her storm winds. I take no pleasure in killing. As it is, you must know I can never let you leave the island. I’ve got a whole village to take care of, men and women and children. My own son. This is my home. I can’t have anyone giving me away. Last year, some benighted fool in a hot air balloon came bumbling over the island and had a good long look. We had to go after him and slit his envelope and make sure he’d never see land again. He was a sick old man; I don’t think he would have lasted long anyway. I didn’t enjoy doing it, but it was not a choice I had.”

I looked at Kate, pale in the starlight, staring with silent hatred at the man who’d helped kill her grandfather. I now understood the last entry in Benjamin Molloy’s journal:
Airship in the distance. Will signal for help.
It wasn’t the
Aurora
he’d signaled but the pirates’ airship.

Szpirglas looked at Kate. “Your parents only
need to think you’re alive for me to ransom you,” he said, and he gave her a shove that sent her sprawling down the shaft into darkness.

“No!” I shouted, but already Crumlin had me by the shoulders and was half lifting, half pushing me toward the shaft opening. I kicked and struggled and jammed my feet against the sides, but they battered me until finally I was dangling over the pit, and then with one great push I was sliding down on my backside. Darkness gobbled me up. The steep slope fell away altogether and there was a big drop and I hit the ground. All the breath was knocked out of me.

Only the faintest pulse of light slanted down from the open hatch, at least thirty feet overhead. Kate lurched toward me, wheezing. The cave floor was scored with countless little hydrium vents, and the gas boiled invisibly all around us, leaving no room for air. When the metal hatch clanged shut we were plunged into a blackness more total than I had ever known. I had Kate by the hand. An hour ago I was free in the forest, running through the night.

I forced myself up, staggered forward until my outstretched hand hit a wall. Too steep to climb. I kept moving, smacking at the rock. Too steep, no footholds, no way out here. A geyser of hydrium
blasted me in the face, making my head spin. I tripped and fell, my nose in the dirt and—

—breathed.

Air, a little pool of it, lay silent and heavy against the earth, undisturbed. I grabbed Kate and pushed her head to the ground. She struggled at first, thinking I’d gone mad.

“Breathe,” I croaked.

It wasn’t much, just enough to keep our hearts kicking, for a little while.

“What now?” was all she could say.

I shook my head, grunted. Didn’t want to waste air on words. This was a cruel way to kill someone. Much better to be shot or thrown off a cliff into the waves.

I felt a little eddy of hydrium slip into my shirtsleeve, the fabric ballooning. Its lift was so powerful that my arm started to rise. My sluggish brain began to work.

“Take your pants off!” I told Kate.

“What?”

“They’re perfect,” I gasped. I grabbed at the waist of her harem pants and yanked them down. I heard her give a yelp. I was too breathless and too muddy-brained to explain more. The material of my own trousers and shirt was too porous, but Kate’s
pants were silky, just like the ship’s impermeable gas cells. They were baggy and a bit stretchy, and they’d carry a lot of hydrium.

“Balloon,” I wheezed, and luckily she seemed to understand, because she stopped struggling and helped me peel the pants off. In the dark I worked as carefully and quickly as I could. I knotted both legs tightly at the ankles.

“This way,” I said, dragging her over to a hydrium vent. I felt its gush and held the harem pants, waist down, over it. Within seconds they were ballooning with gas. The pull started dragging me off my feet.

“Hold tight!” I gasped at Kate, guiding her hands to the waistband.

We rose very slowly, but up we floated, dangling beneath the ballooning harem pants. It was lucky we were slender, but even so our combined weight was almost too much for it. I kept pushing off against the walls with my bare feet, trying to give us a little more lift.

Lighter than air, I thought groggily, that’s our Mr. Cruse.

After a moment I felt our balloon nudge up against something, and we were no longer moving. We’d hit the top of the shaft. Now, where was the
hatch? I kicked about with my feet until I hit something metal.

I prayed the hatch was not locked, but I could not recall seeing any bolt or bar on it. My lungs were ready to burst. I kicked harder, and the hatch jumped a bit, moonlight gilding the edges. I hoped the pirates had left us to our death, and we would not find them waiting for us. I’d need to kick harder to fling the hatch wide.

“Hold on,” I grunted to Kate.

I started swinging to get a bit of momentum then gave a big kick, and the hatch lurched open. Night. Sky. Air. The pent-up hydrium in the pit burst out in an eager rush, carrying Kate and me with it. Our harem-pants balloon bobbed us up out of the pit.

We collapsed on the ground, sucking air greedily. No pirates. I thought my lungs would never feel full. My heart clattered sickeningly. I looked at Kate; her lips were blue, her face white as cream. Slowly our bodies came back to themselves. I crawled over to where Kate’s pants had fallen and brought them back to her. Like a sleepwalker she pulled them back on over her knee-length cotton knickers. My body felt so heavy. Before my eyes, the night forest pulsed and shimmered. I closed the metal hatch; no sense
giving notice we’d escaped.

Run, I thought. But I could not speak—I was still too short of breath. Back to the ship. Warn them. The pirates would be looking for them. We staggered into the trees. We were weak as newborn kittens—had the pirates been close at hand they could have lifted us by the scruffs of our neck and drowned us. I lurched along, Kate keeping pace at my side. Some part of my brain must have remembered the way. I was trying to calculate how long we had been gone. Since yesterday before noon. It was coming on dawn now. Almost eighteen hours. The ship might soon be refueled and repaired, ready to go aloft.

We moved, and kept moving. My feet felt shredded. Trees and leaves and birds blurred around us. It grew lighter. At the bank of a creek we crumpled together and drank. Neither of us could take another step.

“Just a few minutes,” I said. I put my forehead against the mossy ground and told myself I must not sleep, not yet. There would be sleep later, waiting for me in my cabin on the
Aurora
when we were aloft.

Kate was crying. She was shaking her head and dragging her hands over her face and saying it was all her fault Bruce Lunardi had been hurt, and the
pirates knew about the ship now, and that she’d put us all in danger. I grabbed her hands and tried to calm her. But she shut her eyes so tightly her eyelids were just crinkled slits. She pulled her hands free, and her lips trembled and were wet with her tears.

I kissed her mouth.

I wanted to do it, so I did it.

She stopped crying and opened her eyes and looked at me.

“That kiss could get us both in a lot of trouble.”

“Worse than what we’re in?” I said.

“Do it again.”

I kissed her again, and for longer this time, and when she pulled back her head she was smiling. She looked off past me into the trees.

“That was very nice,” she said. “That was the second time I’ve been kissed.”

“You were kissed before?” I said jealously.

“Yes, just now by you, but I thought I’d count each time.”

I wanted to kiss her some more. I don’t know why, for there could be no less suitable time. Maybe it was pure relief that we were alive and away from the pirates. Maybe it was jealousy, because she and Bruce had seemed to get along so well. Mostly it was just because I wanted to, had wanted to for days.

“You ready?” I asked.

I was anxious to keep moving. I didn’t fancy another run-in with the cloud cat. We trudged on across the island, back toward the ship. My bare feet were raw and bleeding now, but it did not matter. All I wanted was to get back to the
Aurora
. I kept track of the time through the treetops, watching the rising sun.

“Hurry,” I said.

I was trying to feel the wind in the clearings, studying the edges of the clouds. The wind was right. The
Aurora
could take off without risk of being blown toward the island. She would have a good launch.

In another hour we reached the hydrium cave. The rubber hosing still ran out from the mouth into the forest, but there was no crew about. I wondered if this meant the ship had already been refilled. It made me nervous, seeing that hosing disappearing into the trees, like a trail leading straight to the
Aurora.

I squeezed Kate’s arm at the sound of footfalls. We huddled down among some thick ferns and held our breath. A thin pirate flashed through the forest, coming from the direction of the
Aurora.
He was a natural runner, his strides smooth and long, and he
ducked and veered through the undergrowth like he was well used to the terrain. His breathing came in quick smooth bursts. I watched him disappear and waited until I could no longer hear the crunch of his feet on earth.

“Hurry,” I said to Kate. “He’s seen the ship.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s a scout. He’s going back to the village to tell them. They’ll send everyone.”

She looked a little ill.

“What time is it?” I asked her.

She checked her watch. “Half past nine.”

I didn’t want to waste time taking the easy path by the stream. We went downhill the fastest way I could think of, and it was steep and uncomfortable, bumping down on our bottoms, clutching hold of roots and creepers. From time to time I cast a wary eye into the higher branches, to see if the cloud cat was prowling above us.

Light filtered in from the open beach. The trees thinned. We came out into the palms and sand. The lagoon sparkled. There was the
Aurora
, and my heart swelled to see her looking so well, hovering in the miraculous way of airships, eight feet off the sand. Her frame had been repaired, and her rudder, and she looked as taut and full and well fed as a blue whale.

She was snugly tethered, but there was no one about, which made me nervous. Was she about to depart? But she couldn’t, not without ground crew ready to cast off the lines.

We had to warn them they’d been spotted. We had to leave at once.

Keeping to the palms, I led us closer toward the
Aurora
.

Her gangways were shut tight.

The control car was empty.

I looked across to the windows of the starboard passenger lounge.

A figure moved past the glass and I could see his face.

It was Szpirglas.