The view, already impeded by the pounding rain, became fully obscured as they reached the thickest portions of the cloud. Dug stood watch on the starboard side and Talis to port. They stared into the squall, eyes squinted against the raindrops that bounced off every surface. As they spotted each buoy marker, they called out course corrections or echoed those they heard, so Tisker could hear them over the sound of the rain pounding the outer hull and the canvas lift balloon, and the creaking of lines and wood as he fought the gusting winds.
Turbulence rocked the ship. Lightning danced within the cloud all around them. The hidden device, wired through the hull, absorbed the flashes that came near enough, and output a low regulated charge to deter the mermaids. Talis tried to ease her clenched jaw. The way was slow, but her chest pounded with excitement. There was no room for error.
Chapter 21
Maybe her imagination was just inspired by Sophie’s comments, but Talis swore she could hear singing out in the gray murk. She placed a hand on one of the metal cleats to assure herself that the prickling charge from her alchemical device was pulsing through the ship. The mermaids wouldn’t land on the ship so long as they kept the noise down and kept that device running.
“It is like nothing I have ever experienced,” came the clack of Scrimshaw’s accent beside her. She jumped, bracing her hands in panic against the railing of the ship. She had been so focused on watching for the signal lights that she hadn’t noticed xist approach over the sound of the storm. If she was being honest with herself, she was also straining her ears for the sound of a feminine voice coming out of the driving rain. The tension was making her jumpy.
“The storms are dangerous,” she said. “But damned if they aren’t beautiful. A view you can’t get anywhere else, close enough to rip you out of the sky.”
“And a necessity of your way of life.”
Talis called out another buoy as its light became visible in the murk, then turned to xin as the ship leaned that way. Scrimshaw had not attempted the foul weather gear. Xist leather-and-silk uniform seemed to repel the water. Though the materials looked as though an unguarded sneeze could ruin them, the rain hit, beaded up, and ran off as if it was treated oilcloth.
“How do your people collect water if not from storms?”
“It was pumped from groundwater tables on our home planet,” xe said. “There were also moving weather systems, mountain runoff, or glacial melt. Water would run in great rivers across our continents until it joined the salt-rich oceans. On other planets we have explored, water was trapped beneath the surface and accessible once we drilled wells. On most, however, there is no water at all. Yours is the first that we have encountered where water is sourced from fixed weather systems.”
“Some islands have mountains, and rain systems,” she said. “And those have their streams, but it’s nowhere near enough to supply all the airships in the skies.”
“Other planets’ inhabitants have more access to water than here, but it is remarkable that your storm systems are infinite in their duration. While your steam-power transports you across the unnatural space between destinations, lifeforms on most planets are able to walk between any two points where the oceans do not prevent passage. We believe this was once also the case on your planet.”
“Only place our ocean stops us from going is Nexus.”
Scrimshaw turned xist head, as if xe could see through the cloud toward the center of the world. “Your ocean is peculiar.”
“Since your ship arrived, we’ve heard you find a lot about our world peculiar,” she said. She didn’t mean to sound defensive, but the point of this conversation escaped her, and her mind was out of energy to spend imagining distant worlds and what it would be like to live on the outside of a spinning ball, as Scrimshaw told her was ‘normal.’
“It is an anomaly among the stars,” Scrimshaw agreed. “Most fascinating.”
Talis shrugged. “It’s just home.”
She meant the statement to signal the end of the conversation, hoping xe’d wander off to go talk to Sophie instead. But that hint sailed past xin, and xe kept talking.
“I theorize that this is why the answers we seek do not appear in your historical records. You are not aware that some aspects of your planet are anomalous, and so you offer no commentary or explanation for them. We hope the ancient beings you worship will supply the remaining answers required to complete our understanding.”
Peridot had its own explorers. Mostly among the Bone and Cutter folk. Talis understood the appeal of being somewhere where no one had been before. She tried to picture Peridot the way that aliens might. The floating rocky outcroppings of islands. Glow stations with their luminous pumpkins. The dust motes spinning off the edges of landmasses. Nexus, locking it all in place. And, of course, the massive storms.
Lightning leaped in the clouds off their port rail, and she felt her skin tingle with electricity again. She had allowed Scrimshaw to distract her, and now they were off course for the buoy. As she called out the belated adjustment, a loud wet thud hit the deck just fore of the wheelhouse, followed by the sharp smack of a slapping tail fin.
“Get back,” she warned Scrimshaw. “Watch out for more of them.”
She ran back, grabbing a spare belay pin from the rack on the aft steam chimney on her way.
“Mermaid!” she called as she ran. “Get me a net!”
She had no time to see whether anyone was moving to do so because the mermaid was upon her. Twice her size, counting the tail, it looked like a drowned woman half-swallowed by a fish, but it might have been male or female. It had slick scales, long claws,
