She heard the uneven footsteps of the manager as he rushed off, probably to log another fee against her account. There was no profit in banning her, she knew. But he could make a tidy sum leveling all appropriate fines against her.
Once her captain was aboard, Sophie left her lookout position on the catwalk that wrapped around the lift balloon above. She slid down the ratlines, padded barefoot across the deck to the companionway, and went below to monitor their engines.
The panels of the bay door trembled, then clattered into motion, the cacophony bouncing through the multi-tiered docks once again. The rolling door stretched far below them and moved so slow, Talis started pacing.
“Don’t wait for clearance,” she ordered Tisker. “Take us down a few levels and get us the hell out of here.”
“Aye, Cap,” he said.
The deck made a small lurch into motion. Fully fueled engines were far less sluggish than when the firebox was near empty. Their berth was in back and on the third level of the five-level docking bay, with at least seven ships between them and their escape. Dug crossed forward and stood his own watch upon the bowsprit.
Tisker deftly maneuvered the ship down and around the others tied off at the berths below them. Sophie called up from her new position at the observation windows in Wind Sabre’s belly to help him avoid snagging their ventral rigging on someone else’s gantry or lift envelope. Watch crews on the other airships’ decks cried out in alarm at the unorthodox flying, but they could do little more than shake their tiny fists from the railings of their ships.
Wind Sabre slipped out beneath the edge of the rolling door into the dark purple night skies of Peridot, and Tisker palmed the brass acceleration levers forward as far as they’d go.
Chapter 19
The Yu’Nyun ship cast a large shadow across Wind Sabre’s deck. Talis took a deep breath and stepped up from the worn wooden planks of her ship onto the smooth gleaming ramp that beckoned her aboard the starship. She felt a chill rise from the metal plating, run like ice water across her bones, and settle at the nape of her neck. Sophie stepped up behind her with a light, eager hop.
The alien vessel, both inside and out, was like no airship Talis had ever seen or could ever have imagined on her own. Everything was smooth, as shiny in its guts as it was across the outside of its hull. Not beautiful though, she decided. Sterile. Its entirety was crafted of the aliens’ glossy white material and gleaming silver metal. Everything reflected the glare of the harsh white lights recessed into the overhead. It stung her eyes and felt brighter than the yellow daytime glow of the pumpkins, brighter than the piercing green of Nexus.
Four aliens greeted Talis and Sophie in a small austere compartment between the multi-paned external hatch and a matching one in the opposite bulkhead. The welcome party was dressed similarly to the veiled alien’s entourage from the day before, but Talis couldn’t tell if any of them were the same individuals. They did not carry weapons, Talis saw, and she was surprised to realize that she had expected them to. She wore her pistol on her own hip and wondered if she ought to have left it behind, though she’d been wearing that and the revolvers the first time she met the aliens. At least today her clothes were clean and there were no bugs left in her hair.
“Follow,” one said to them via the disembodied voice of its translator, and Talis and Sophie were folded into the middle of the group.
The interior hatch spun open, onto a corridor that curved away in both directions. Talis squinted against the overwhelming whiteness and wished for her tinted goggles. Sterile, cold light flooded from perforated panels in the overhead. Matching deck plates cast the same lighting up from narrow strips at the bottom edges of seamless curving bulkheads, to either side of a felted carpet walkway, so that no matter in which direction she looked, the eye-watering brightness pervaded her vision.
Apparently unfazed by the blinding interior, Sophie turned her head every which way, taking in every detail as they were led along. A long list of questions was clearly building up behind her lips, but all Talis cared to see was a vent or porthole, and the friendly purple-black of open skies beyond. Instead, the ice-white bulkhead stretched on, interrupted only by nondescript hatches along the interior, each with a smooth square panel beside it at approximately shoulder height for their hosts, or eye level for Talis and Sophie.
The entire way, one corridor seemed to be twin to the next. Access doors retracted into the bulkhead, opening on new concentric round corridors. Wherever the engines were installed—which was not obvious from the exterior—their guides did not bring Talis and Sophie past them.
Assuming Talis had her bearings true, they were led to the fore of the ship. Their group squeezed into a narrow compartment that carried them up, or at least the sensation felt like up, and deposited them into a short corridor, the first straight one they’d encountered. At its far end, a tall arching hatch split into three triangular sections that receded into the bulkhead as they approached. Through the doorway came such sounds and rhythms as Talis felt certain she would know anywhere: The operations bridge. Her own crew was not large enough to require formality in their shifts and watches, but the murmur of reports and commands passing back and forth, the hum and tones of systems readouts, and the particular sensation of focus pervading the cabin was as similar to her academy experience as the alien ship itself was foreign.
They entered onto a
