Halcyon The Complete Trilogy (15 page)

She leapt into the cabin, ignoring Kenan’s demands for his gun and the doctor’s mad sputtering in Hellan. Taziri crossed the cabin and put her boot on Hamuy’s crusty black hand. “You said before that they did something to Chaou. They put something electrical in her, didn’t they? When did they put it in her?
When?
”

Hamuy grimaced and looked up through heavy lids. His face shone with sweat and his eyes twitched. “Four or 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 España. 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 larger and sharper, white steam streaming above it as the clickety-clack of its wheels echoed off the cloudless sky. Wayra swayed beneath her, squawking and hissing at the machine huffing toward them. Qhora patted the hatun-anka’s neck. “Shh, girl. Steady.”

The clopping of hooves told her that Enzo was not preparing her food. “Is there a problem?” she asked without turning.

“Yes.” He drew up beside her again and pointed at the approaching train. “Well, maybe. It’s not a whole train. Only an engine.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Why would Arafez send a single engine to Tingis? I would expect a train full of materials to repair the station, or maybe food, or even soldiers. But why just an engine?”

Qhora didn’t care about the engine. But she saw the anxiety in the young Espani’s eyes and heard the iron creeping into his voice. Over the last year she had all but forgotten who he had been when they first met. Lorenzo Quesada had come to her country full of passion and joy, his tiny whip of a sword as devastating as lightning. He had been loud and brash, his eyes bright, his lips eager to smile, a young man with the sun in his blood. But then they had returned to his homeland, a colorless wasteland of ice and snow where the only sounds were the howls of the wind and wolves.

The Silver Prince had bestowed on him the rank of hidalgo, which had seemed grander before she learned it brought no wealth or lands, only an empty title and exemption from the Prince’s taxes. But that was when the light went out of him. Thereafter, she had promenaded for Enzo’s gaunt and grim courts, and sat through the endless sermons of his dismal priests, and eaten his tasteless food. And all the while, she had seen him retreat into a quiet and colorless shell of a man, old before his time, a passionless servant who whispered to ghosts and despaired at the cruel realities of the world. Injustices that once drove him to great deeds now drove him into dark church corners to light candles and mutter to his three-faced god.

“Enzo, do you still love me?”

He swallowed. “I don’t think this is the time or place.”

She looked around. “We’re alone in the middle of nowhere with nothing else to do for the rest of the day. When would be a better time? Perhaps when we arrive in the capital. We can include the queen. What shall I say? Your Royal Highness, I, Lady Qhora Yupanqui of the Jisquntin Suyu Empire, cousin to His Imperial Highness Manco Inca, have ridden the length of your fine kingdom and killed many of your wretched subjects to bring you a birthday gift on behalf of His Excellency, Prince Argenti Valero of España. Behold these two young kirumichi hunting cats from my homeland. And may I introduce my escort, Don Lorenzo Quesada de Gadir, a renowned diestro and my lover of the past two years who has recently found religion and now refuses to share my bed. Have you any wisdom that might resolve our impasse, Your Highness?”

Qhora saw the shame in Lorenzo’s eyes just before he looked away. She almost apologized, but she was still angry enough to continue. “He won’t talk to me, except to mutter about his imaginary friend, Ariel, who was so holy and perfect when she was supposedly alive that now he can’t stand anything about his own life.”

“I meant…” Lorenzo broke off to clear his throat and steady his voice. “I meant, we should be more concerned with this engine and why it’s out here, alone.”

Nothing. He gives me nothing. Not even anger. His heart is as cold and dead as his country
. She shrugged and turned away from him. “Perhaps we will see the reason when it passes.”

He nodded. “Or maybe we should move off the road until it passes.”

He’s terrified of everything now, even a little machine in the distance.
“Is this your ghost talking again? Is she telling you that we need to hide from this engine?”

“No,” he whispered. “It’s too bright, too hot today. I can’t hear her or see her here. I wish I could.” He blinked and looked her in the eye, something he rarely dared now, though he had dared often enough in the beginning.

It’s time I stopped indulging his fears
. She said, “No, Enzo, I’m not going to hide in a ditch. We will stay here and watch it pass. You will see. It’s nothing but a machine and a few men, not some unholy monster. And then we will eat.” Qhora folded her hands on her knee and sat as tall as she could.

Behind her, she knew Xiuhcoatl would be sitting just as calmly as she was.
He may be old and he may not speak much, but at least I can rely on him.
Wayra clucked and hissed, her huge head darting playfully at Enzo’s horse. The mare skittered back a few steps before the hidalgo got her under control. Qhora smiled a little.
And at least I can rely on you, Wayra.

The steam engine was much closer now, close enough for her to see its black funnel and gray boiler, and the gleaming steel railings and fittings along its side. The clacking wheels measured out the seconds as the engine roared along, accompanied now by the deep puffing and chuffing of the steam. But just as the engine came near enough for her to see two faces staring back at her from the cab, there was a stutter in the rhythm. She was about to wave to them when she heard the clacking of the wheels and the huffing of the steam begin to slow. A series of short steely squeals burst from under the engine and Qhora saw the wheels locking and shuddering as the train decelerated.