The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (58 page)

Seeming distracted as she glanced around—though Reece doubted she could make out anything more than a yard away—Nivy asked,
“Where are we going?”

“
I told you, Asa and Illie want to see you. They’ve been preoccupied with reports of the peculiar Kreft activity and haven’t had the chance to talk over everything your brown-eyed captain gave Nekoda last night, but I think it goes without saying they’re feeling a mite stern.”

“
That’s not what I meant,” Nivy said dryly. “What is this place? I’ve never been here before. It can’t be
new
.”

“
It’s as new as everything else ever is around here. Which is to say bleeding
old
.”

Probably owing to the fact he had just been over this part The Heron’s wild history, Reece beat Nivy to what that meant.
“You found more of the infrastructure left behind by the ancestors,” he guessed. Nivy shot him an amused sideways glance. He decided to let it mean she was impressed.

“
Oh, look,” Canter remarked, “a good looking one that’s actually smart.”

“
How much did you find?” Nivy interrupted. “And how? When?”

Canter actually seemed gratified by Nivy’s interest, though she played it off with a casual wave of her hand.
“Not long after you left. There had been a bad raid on Elpis and we were packed to capacity, so The Six pushed the need for expansion into the mountains. A bit of tunneling and accidental avalanching later…” She broke off as they suddenly stopped at a stout steel door, exchanging low words with its hooded guard. He stepped aside and waved them through the checkpoint, into a room too big and black for Canter’s light to more than dent.

Something about the cool shift in the air gave Reece the sense of wide open space and vast emptiness. They could easily be on the edge of a cliff or the bottom of a pit at the heart of the moon…he couldn’t tell. But the uneasy prickling feeling of being watched at least told him they weren’t alone. Something was looming in the shadows, silent, asleep, biding its time. The sound of their boots shuffling over dusty cement floors echoed like whispers.

After a full minute of tentatively edging through the shadows, another light bloomed as if in response to Canter’s, this one a good twenty feet over their heads. It leaked in string-thin shafts through the grating of a metal bridge.

“
Hey,” Nekoda called as he flagged them down with his dome light. His blue Pantedan eyes blazed against his washed-out skin. To Reece’s astonishment, there was a tawny hawk perched on his free hand, its talons curled about his gloved fingers. “Up the stairs. Bear left.”

Canter hurried towards her Handler of a husband, forcing Nivy and Reece to keep up. Climbing the narrow, rickety stairs with his hands bound proved a challenge, but Reece managed, mostly by not letting himself feel stupid every time he tripped.

As he caught up to Nivy at the top of the stairs, he noticed her toying with her sleeve uneasily as she eyed Nekoda. There was another thing he’d have to eventually ask her about. Gideon hadn’t been the first Pantedan she’d ever met, like she’d left the rest of the crew to assume. She’d acted like The Eudoran War had been news to her, but how could it have been, when she was one step away from being related to someone the war had left homeless?

“
Illie says this one’s cellmate is out with Mose and a team, tryin’ to find one’a their lost crew members,” Nekoda told Canter. She held her wrist up to him; the hawk carefully stepped onto her arm with a rustle of its tawny wings, and she fondly brushed a knuckle down its breast. “Two more are in the infirmary. That accounts for all’a the ones Sheppard mentioned.”

“
Where are we?” Nivy demanded. She nudged Reece with an elbow and nodded at a riveted door mostly obscured by Nekoda’s bulk. When Nekoda leaned a little to the left to wrap a snug arm around Canter’s waist, he revealed a grimy porthole window tinged orange with firelight.

“Outside our new command center.” Canter shrugged. Her bird shuffled its wings. “Like I said. A lot has changed since you left.”

“
A new—” Nivy echoed incredulously, then broke off with an exasperated look, like she suspected Canter was mocking her. “What was wrong with the old one?”

Canter smiled and said as though she had maddeningly limitless patience,
“They can monitor things better from here. Does it drive you crazy, being so behind on the times? And to think, you used to be such a celebrity around here.”

“
Stop goadin’ her, Canter,” Nekoda said in a lazy voice, half-turning to open the door by its long vertical handle. “Asa and Illie are waitin’.” He considered Reece expressionlessly. “They prolly don’t want him in there.”

Canter snorted.
“It doesn’t matter. Nivy showed him the history. At this point, we’re either going to kill him or decide to trust him.”

If that was true, Reece would have preferred not to be presented to The Six looking like he’d been raked over a washboard, but Nekoda left him no choice. Shrugging, he planted a pale hand on Reece’s shoulder and pushed him through the door on Nivy’s heels, his leather holsters creaking.

It didn’t look like a command center. No bright lights, no green graph radars, no hovering, tight-lipped generals. Two people sat across from each other at a stout oak table in front of a stone hearth, warming their hands around tin mugs in silence. A blank screen trailing wires hung on a stake driven through the middle of the table, almost like a road sign.

Most of the other furnishings were draped with sheets and roped off for good measure, but a long console running the length of the back wall had been exposed, and it was a checkerboard of buttons, levers, and switches. The two people at the table—a petite woman with black hair as short as Reece’s, and a man whose youngish face was belied by his light grey hair and tired eyes—were watching a hunched figure at the console, their postures and expressions tense.

After a moment, Nivy cleared her throat. The man at the table glanced up, saw Nivy, and murmured, “Illie.”

Reece caught his breath through his teeth. Illie was Nivy’s mother; that made the man Asa, her father. He straightened deliberately and wished his hands weren’t bound, so he felt more like her captain and less like a pet on a leash, expected to heel.
Not the way he usually opted to meet a girl’s parents for the first time.

When Illie saw Nivy, she popped to her feet and said a little weakly,
“Nivy. You’re home.” After obviously fighting with herself for a moment, she jerkily came forward and folded her arms around Nivy like she was rehearsing something she had read about but never tried. Nivy awkwardly suffered the hug. “We feared the worst. When the prisoner spoke of you…” Blinking as she realized Reece
was
the prisoner, she dropped her hands and frowned, instantly business-like. “So it’s true? Everything he told us?”

“
Yes,” Nivy said, watching her mother. “But you already knew that. You probably knew it the minute you started interrogating him.”

Asa clapped down his mug.
“Must you spoil the moment for your mother? Nekoda, take the prisoner back to his cell. I suspect Nivy’s going to insist on getting her way again, but if we can’t execute him, we can at least keep him under lock and key until we’ve sorted out this mess.”

Nivy calmly raised a stiff arm to bar Nekoda’s way. She looked neither surprised
nor offended, but Reece could hear her grinding her teeth. “You’re angry, Father. I understand. But Reece—”

“
Angry?” Steepling his hands on the table in front of him, Asa leaned forward and snapped, “You stole an invaluable ancestral artifact, hijacked one of our only ships, and went off on an adventure without telling us where you were going only to return with a handful of untrustables. I am
appalled
.”

“
Asa,” Illie said quietly but sternly, her hand on Nivy’s shoulder. “She would not have compromised the base without good reason.”

“
There can be no good reason for compromising the base!” Asa retorted as he stood, thundering now. “She would have to hand me a button to blink The Kreft out of existence for me to believe her little stunt was more than a quest to prove herself like Tolen!”

“
Do you really think me that
selfish
?” Nivy demanded. Her anger was the quick, sharp flash of hot lightning in the midst of her father’s booming storm. “Just because I disagree with you on how we ought to be fighting this war—”

“
A war that quarreling will not help win,” interrupted a curt voice.

Reece had altogether forgotten the figure by the console, but glancing at it again, he didn’t know how. The bald man moved powerfully, like an ancient lion taking his time, as he paced before the hearth. A whole head shorte
r than Reece but twice as broad in a tight, compact way, he had meaty hands that looked as capable as Gideon’s and eyes that pierced as keenly as Nivy’s.

“
Asa, you said yourself after Nivy left that we would have sent someone to investigate the ships eventually. What’s done is done.” Pausing against the backdrop of fire, the man scrutinized Reece and gave a walrus-like harrumph. “This must be the young captain who piloted
The Aurelia
?”

“This is him,” Nivy agreed. As she turned to look at Reece and simultaneously hide her expression from their company, she shot him a grim, determined look that he took to mean she would watch his back. He wondered why she suddenly saw the need to. “Captain Reece Sheppard, Palatine First of Honora.”

“
Nimrod Wells. First of the Martial Guild.” Nimrod’s deeply tanned hand was rocky hard and cold as it clamped Reece’s, jangling his manacles. He half expected the Martial First to examine his canines and check his ears; his eyes were that probing. “I understand Nivy showed you our history, so let’s cut out the middle man, shall we? How much do you know?”

“
Er.” If Reece hadn’t been able to see the resemblance between Asa and Nivy before, him being put on the spot did the trick. Their glares were the exact same kind of fierce as they shot Reece identical warning looks. “Everything?”

Nimrod nodded, unhappy but seemingly unsurprised.
“Ah. Well. What’s done is done,” he repeated. “Asa, order the ship dismantled. The gun and the book, Nivy, are to be returned post haste. Useless relics they might be at this point, but that doesn’t—”

“
Wait,” Reece cried in alarm, holding up his hands, strained in their cuffs. Hysteria made his voice thinner than usual, but unless he’d heard wrong, at the moment, hysterics were perfectly appropriate. “
Dismantled
?”

“
Of course,” Nimrod grunted, sounding pleased, but not at all spiteful. His eyes were full of eager zeal. “Is that not why you helped Nivy return her to us? If she does have something to do with the ancestors’ weapon—a conspiracy I have never been more than cynical of, myself—and your fellow Honorans never caught on, then the secret must be deep in her workings. The ship will undergo a surgical examination, for the good of the Heron, and the good of the war.”

“
A surgical—” Reece whirled to face Nivy and was somewhat mollified by her outright stunned expression. For a second. Then he thought of a couple of Heron thermal torches slicing into Aurelia’s wooden hull, of careless hands yanking apart the priceless limbs of the Afterquin as a matter of meticulousness, and the panic and anger he’d only
sort of
felt before because his shock had dumbed them down came to a rolling boil. “You didn’t know?”

Nivy
slowly shook her head. “No. I didn’t.”

The Aurelia
…dismantled. The idea would have horrified him even as a little kid, seeing her for the first time from the duke’s shoulders, shining in the white, smoky light of the museum’s glass dome. The duke had leaned over the museum’s velvet observation ropes enough for Reece to touch her warm chestnut wood, and he’d wondered to himself if maybe she was alive, like some ancient, massive whale, and then felt sheepish about it. But as the duke had walked away, and Reece had craned his neck and watched as T
he Aurelia
was blotted out by the shapes of passing people, he’d thought it was sad, that whether she was a whale out of water or an airship out of the sky, she’d never be free again.

Through Leto and Oceanus and the long days between when Reece had been tempted to wonder what he thought he was doing, crossing the Epimetheus with a crew full of people who were depending on him to do the right thing by them, Aurelia had come to be his single constant. He wasn’t stupid; he understood she was just a ship. But he’d also come to understand that sometimes
just things
became symbols. A pair of flight wings. A revolver in a puddle of water. Bifocals on a nightstand. Each one meant something different.

Aurelia meant
home
.

Finally, Reece croaked,
“I don’t understand. I saw the same histories you did, right? This thing could save you, and you’re treating it like a myth, even though you
know
it’s not.”

He didn’t even realize he was leaning forward, moving towards Nimrod, until he felt Nivy take one of his arms as Nekoda grasped the o
ther. “Reece,” Nivy said quietly.