five years back, maybe?”
Taziri straightened up and backed away. Without looking at the marshal, she handed back the warm revolver. In the cockpit, she took the pilot’s seat and slowly draped her scarf across her face as she took the controls.
“Taziri?” Ghanima leaned over her shoulder. “What was that all about? What does it mean?”
“It means this is my fault and I have to fix it.” She shoved the throttles forward and the Halcyon rose off the pier to the very soft droning of its propellers. The view spun quickly to the left as they turned toward the walled canal. Taziri kept her eyes on her instruments. The view below shifted slowly from the sparkling blue of the harbor to the gray tiled roofs of the city to the green fields that lined the canal, while above them a white sun baked the sky into a vast and colorless expanse.
Ghanima tapped softly on the engineer’s console. “How exactly is this your fault?”
“Not everything.” Taziri tensed. “Or maybe everything. I don’t know. But the major is in danger because of me.”
“All right. And that has something to do with the shock gizmo in Chaou’s hand, I get that. But what does that have to do with you, exactly?”
“To incapacitate a big gorilla like Zidane, you would need a huge shock. So that device must have a high- capacity battery.” Taziri swallowed. “And the only person who’s published a design for a high-capacity battery in the last five years is me.”
“What? How do you know?”
“You don’t follow the journals, do you?” Taziri frowned and ran her tongue around her teeth. “Do you know what happened to the Silver Shearwater?”
“It exploded over the Tingis harbor. Some sort of engine problem.”
She smiled sadly. Close enough. “I was just finishing school when it happened. I was studying electrical engineering. For my final thesis, I wrote a paper proposing a new type of high-capacity battery design. It got shouted down in the journals by several big names at the university, but a few weeks later I got a letter from Isoke Geroubi, captain of what was left of the Shearwater. She read my paper and wanted me on the team rebuilding her ship. After the primary construction was complete, she dismissed the rest of the crew, and she and I built the engine by ourselves.”
Ghanima shook her head. “Why would she want an electrician? I mean, no offense, but there isn’t that much in the way of electrics on a…” She snapped around to stare at the outline of the engine behind the cabin, and then slowly turned back to look at her. “What did you do?”
Taziri said, “We perfected my battery idea. It wasn’t cheap, but it turned out to be fairly easy. The new battery provides enough power to drive the electric motors on the propellers for days.” She cleared her throat. “It works. No dangerous boiler, no waiting for it to heat up. Instant acceleration, high torque. And with a large array of solar sheets on the top of the balloon, you can charge the battery all day long and fly forever without landing.”
Ghanima pointed to the back. “But you do have a boiler. It’s too small, but it’s right there.”
Taziri shook her head. “That’s just a decoy for the safety inspectors. Although, we did realize that we can use the turbine as an emergency generator to recharge the battery in a pinch. So it’s not completely useless. But there’s no water in it right now. Too much weight.”
“And you’ve been keeping it a secret this whole time? Why?”
“It was all part of Isoke’s plan. After the Shearwater disaster, she wanted to make airships safer by getting rid of the whole steam engine. But since the Air Corps wanted to downplay any talk about airships being dangerous, no one in the Corps was willing to help her. Politics. So she went outside the bureaucracy and recruited me. In fact, she was the only person who thought my battery might work. Isoke thought they might pay attention to the idea if we proved it, so we were going to keep the Halcyon ’s engine a secret at first, and then after a few years we would unveil it as a proven prototype with thousands of hours of flight time. No one would be able to question our track record,” Taziri said. “We just needed another few months. She was so excited about it. She was working on a speech for the big unveiling.”
Ghanima nodded slowly and cast her a few brief, uncomfortable glances. “I’m sorry. I don’t know her, but… I’m sorry. I hope she’s all right. At least she was right about the idea. I mean, the Halcyon works, right? You can still unveil it and change the Air Corps.” She rattled her orange flight jacket. “And if the engine can’t explode, then maybe we can stop wearing all this heavy armor, right?”
Taziri smiled again briefly. Smiling felt wrong when talking about Isoke. Her throat began to ache. “I don’t know, I haven’t had time to think about it. But one way or another, the secret’s going to come out when a new captain is assigned to the Halcyon. I mean, if. If she’s not-you know, it doesn’t really matter right now.”
“Right.” Ghanima sighed and picked at an old oil spot on her trousers. “And Chaou?”
“Yeah,” Taziri said. “Well, I guess Isoke wasn’t the only one who took my battery idea seriously.”
“So you think someone put your battery inside Chaou so she can electrocute people?”
Taziri grimaced. “Apparently. The timing is right, five years ago. And they also put that armor in Hamuy. It’s got to be some sort of coated metal to not get infected under the skin. How much would you bet they found the idea for that coating in the journals, too?”
“Yeah, but if these are such great inventions, then how come there aren’t high-capacity batteries and armored soldiers all over the place?”
“My battery got shot down in all the journals.” Taziri chewed her lip. “Or was it? New stuff gets refuted in the journals all the time, but what if these people go around publicly discrediting new ideas so they can privately control the actual inventions for themselves?”
“Maybe, but why? Who is ‘they’? And what do they want?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Taziri said. “We need to get to the major, and then we need to find the doctor performing these operations. Hamuy mentioned an Espani called Medina in Arafez. That’s where we start.”
“So we’re not going back to Tingis?” Ghanima pouted.
“So we’re not going on to Orossa?” Evander glared.
Chapter 14. Qhora
As the sun reached its zenith, Qhora began to finally feel some faint heat creeping in through her feathered cloak and Espani dress. The warmth cradled her, breathing life into her flesh, life she had almost forgotten in the frozen fortresses and churches of Espana. She felt like standing and stretching and running, or at the very least casting off her garments to bathe in the sun. But she couldn’t remove her dress now, and she wouldn’t remove her cloak and be mistaken for an Espani, so she sat in her soft saddle atop her beautiful Wayra and silently prayed to Inti that his heavenly fires would never die.
The Mazigh highway bored her. There were no forests, no rivers, no flocks of colorful birds, no screaming troupes of monkeys, no ponderous ground sloths lumbering through the jungles, no giant armadillos huddled at the waters’ edge, and not a hint of civilization. In the Empire, one could not travel a thousand paces without seeing a shrine festooned with flowers, or an ancient stone monument to some wise sage, or at least a traveler’s marker to tell the distance from one place to another. Lorenzo claimed he could see farms on the distant eastern hills, but here, caught between the towering Atlas Mountains and the restless Atlanteen Ocean, there was nothing but the dead gravel road and the dead metal rails lying in the sun-baked plains.
“We should stop to eat, Enzo,” she said. “Wayra needs a rest.”
“As you wish.” Lorenzo headed back to the wagon.
A high-pitched whistle pierced the stillness of the plain, a steam-powered shriek that echoed across the vast sea of grass. Qhora peered into the distance and saw the black blot on the horizon, just to her right where the two steel rails converged at the bottom of the sky. “Enzo, it looks like we’ll finally get to see one of these trains of theirs after all.”
The hidalgo frowned. “I suppose so. Although, I hadn’t expected to see one here. I assumed they would telegraph the other cities and tell the trains not to come to Tingis with the station and rails destroyed. Clearly, I was wrong.”
“That’s not a crime. Being wrong.” Qhora smiled at him and then turned to watch the distant black dot grow
