It wasn’t long until Hankirk grew pale from the effort and excused himself from the dance, and from their company. Talis dragged Dug from his seat to take Hankirk’s place, and the four of them whooped and hollered and jigged until the metal cylinder ran to its end.
As they returned breathless to their seats, Dug also left the cabin, but returned minutes later with a soot-streaked metal flask of home-brew that somehow survived the flames. Not as strong as the volcanic whiskey that awaited them in the Rakkar cities, but it still stung going down. They relaxed around the table, sipping the torturous moonshine and talking quietly about nothing of import until that bottle, too, was gone, and their eyelids drooped.
Sophie, the only one of them who could still walk with any sort of skysuredness, fetched two pitchers of cool water and a bowl of lemon wedges. She forced them each to drink two full glasses and suck half a salted lemon before she’d let them leave the table to sleep it off.
Talis didn’t remember undressing or crawling into her bunk, but when Wind Sabre began to shake, she was tangled in the blankets. She clawed for consciousness, struggling to free herself from the sheets twisted around her legs.
Bless Sophie’s ministrations, she was sober enough, and her stomach solid, though her mind was still muddled, either from the drink or deep sleep—or both. Muddled enough that she forgot Nexus wasn’t causing headaches anymore, and that hers was all her own doing. She pulled on her pants and clumsily tightened their laced closure as she ran out of her cabin, barefoot and wild-eyed.
The deck vibrated as though the keel was dragging across solid ground. Wind Sabre was doing her best, but the resistance of wind against the unbalanced weight was pushing her limits.
Though no longer accosted by Silus Cutter’s stolen winds, the ship was still taking abuse from traveling through Peridot’s natural air currents. Both lift lines at aft had been severed by the alien weapons. The port line at midship, too. The hull sagged heavy at its stern, leaning to port and pulling them incessantly to that side.
Thick as Talis’s forearm, the lift lines couldn’t be replaced from what they had onboard. The heavy ropes were reinforced with steel wires, coated against moisture with tar, and tightly braided with coils as dense as stone to discourage flames. They only got stronger from use, pulled tighter by the weight of the ship. A seasoned lift line might as well have been a length of tempered steel. They were designed to last a lifetime, or at least give a smart captain time to notice and repair or replace them if they were damaged.
Just about every airship in the skies flew in confidence that a line wouldn’t fail altogether. And certainly not three at once. The canvas lift envelope might get eaten by moths, the wood of the railing might rot away. But a captain could count on the lift lines.
The design had never accounted for alien beams of light that sliced like knives.
On deck, Talis found Sophie crawling out of the starboard engine house, arms and face streaked with grease. If she felt any effects of the previous night’s celebrations, there was no sign of it. Her eyes were clear. Also clear was that she had nothing good to report from the Number Two engine.
Talis pulled Sophie to her feet. “Can we make it to Heddard Bay?”
Sophie’s face didn’t reassure her. “Can’t say, Captain. It’s not a matter of if the engines will fail, but when.”
“Gods, both of them?” Talis had to put a hand on the engine house to steady herself, not sure if the alcohol was still running rampant in her body or if she’d reached the limit of how much bad news she could take. Before she realized what she was doing, she’d tangled the fingers of her other hand around her prayerlocks and tugged. Her heart ached at the futility of it.
Airships were little more than wooden buckets built around the symbiosis of their twin engines and the lift balloon above. They needed both systems intact, and both systems needed to work together, or a ship was just a rock waiting to drop out of the sky. If one of the two engines failed, they’d limp for a while until the stress on the second got to be too much, and that would be it for their propulsion. Minutes later, that’d be it for the hot air that the engines fed to the lift balloons. As the air cooled to the same temperature as the sky around them, the weight of the hull would drag the ship down.
“The compressor in Number One is barely working.” Sophie pulled a rag from her pocket and wiped at the grease coating her skin. “A bunch of pieces got shook free in there. I was able to put most of them back in place, but they’ve banged around real good and almost everything’s got to be realigned. I can hear some other piece kicking around loose in there, but I can’t get to it. It’s gonna stress ’til it fails, then Number Two is only going to be able to get us so far under this strain.”
Sophie put the rag down on the engine block, closed her eyes as her chest lifted with a big inhale. She let it out in a sigh. “Hells. It could be the piston come free of its cylinder.”
Talis put a steadying hand on her shoulder. This was Sophie’s area of expertise, and they needed
