The Aviator (7 page)

“What on Earth are you doing?”

Grabbing hold of the pommel, she dragged herself into the saddle, the tatters of her dress, sans petticoat, accommodating a reasonable seat.

“Gilda!”

“Come now, surely you don’t believe this animal has a bomb strapped to it. I assure you, it is perfectly fit for flying.”

“My dear—”

“Back for tea.” She kicked the mare’s haunches, rising in the stirrups and balancing against its jostling stride as the animal galloped for the road.

The guards were impossible, but Nathan’s flight technicians, a pair of wide-eyed men barely out of their mother’s arms, were easily convinced, unlocking door after door for the Mad Lady Sinclair in her ruined dress. A soft globe of lantern light played around them as they led her through the hangar, the scraping sound of their boots creating long echoes in the darkness. Vague shapes loomed in shadow, pieces of skeletal metal framework and heavy, elongated cages. Desks and drawing boards, lumber, wire and rolls of pale canvas lined the path. Plastic heads, torsos and arms lay scraped and dismembered in piles.

“Good Lord,” she whispered.

“Testers, your ladyship. Mr. Lanchard went through hundreds of them. We always bring back what we can find from the crashes.”

Her breath quickened, the air thick and dizzying. “Very thorough.”

“He’s particular about things.”

“Has he made any successful flights?”

“The last one flew over the ocean for quite some time.”

“Before crashing?”

“Harder to find all the pieces in the water. But he’s got this new one all sorted out. It’s the best looking of the lot, God knows.”

The technician trotted ahead to pull back an enormous canvas curtain. Metal rings screeched along the length of the wire, wide sheets of billowing fabric sliding out of view, revealing a machine unlike any she had ever seen.

Gilda shook her head in amazement. “It is so beautiful.”

It was a light and bird-like craft attached to a rail, with a fin-like rudder and a long, canvas-covered wing. A wooden slip, much like a skiff, provided a place for the pilot and the controls, with a wooden wheel connected to a cable and pulley system for rudder control. A triple row of riveted iron canisters was fitted under the wing, connected through an elaborate manifold of shaped copper tubes to a single conical nozzle.

She approached the machine, running her fingertips over the wing then tracing the shining outline of the nozzle with her fingers. The metal was ice cold and sweating.

“The reticulated exhaust nozzle,” the smaller technician said. “It shapes and controls the stream of the gas from the solid propellant in the tanks. He ordered us to prepare it for a test in the morning, but then he left on short notice and now we have to take it apart.”

“The gas propels the craft?”

“That’s the idea, your ladyship. You go as high as you can on the tanks, then you drop them with the tank rack release and glide down for as long as possible. The skiff allows this model to land on the water, though we’ve had some structural problems with that too.”

A reconnaissance glider.

“Incredible,” she murmured, ducking underneath the shadowed frame to examine the rail attachment beneath the skiff. It looked like a modified pulley wheel designed to ride a steel track. Confused, she stood, following the riveted rail to the massive doors in the hangar’s outer wall. “And this?”

“The catapult.”

“The what?”

The technician pointed to the steam boilers in the corner, their copper tanks surrounded by gears. A panel with a single lever appeared in the center of the machinery, its purpose fairly obvious.

“He hurtles this thing out those doors?”

“And over the cliff.”

Gilda lost her breath. “I see.”

They all waited a moment.

Nathan…

“Very well, then,” she said. “Is it ready?”

The technicians shared the same horrified expression. The taller one shook his head. “With respect, your ladyship, you can’t possibly pilot this craft. It would be suicide.”

“I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard that before.”

“Yes, but at night—”

“There’s a nearly full moon. I can see the compass, the dials, and am well versed in star navigation, as all Sinclair pilots must be.”

“A night landing is impossible.”

“Challenging, I prefer to think.”

“And there’s no way for us to find you.”

“I’ve been assured that a search vessel will be underway shortly.”

The smaller technician looked sick. “But—”

“I would appreciate a flare pistol, a fresh pair of clothes, some water, blankets, a lantern, and whatever medical supplies you have here.”

“Mr. Lanchard will be furious.”

“Yes,” she said softly, the pain in her heart unbearable. “I hope so.”

The retracting hangar doors rumbled open to the moonlight, the shining expanse of the ocean forming a breathtaking horizon beyond them. Gilda lowered the heavy pair of goggles over her eyes, bracing against the seat, her fingers pressed white on the wooden wheel. Against the wall, the short technician gripped the catapult release lever, steam hissing through pipes and release valves behind him.

“Ready!” he shouted.

Ready.
She couldn’t breathe. The world narrowed to single, terrifying second. Clenching her teeth, she focused on the dark blue horizon, hearing the other technician yelling at her from beside the glider.

“Keep it steady at thirty degrees, ride it up as far as you can until burnout, then make your course change after you’ve dropped the tanks!”

She nodded her acknowledgement.

From the corner of her vision, she caught his sharp retreat as he ripped the release cable through the exhaust nozzle. The catapult clicked. The glider jolted forward, scraping along the rail.

Gilda swallowed a scream, thrown back against the seat as the machine shot out of the hangar and soared into the starlit sky. She fought a surge of panic, the wind buffeting around her in a violent gale, gas exploding through the air. The glider shook as it withstood the full force of ascent.

Breathe. Keep it straight. Breathe…

Grimacing, she fought the wheel, steadying the rudder as the ocean slipped far beneath her, the dark glitter of waves surrendering to the pale light of the moon in its cloudless sky.

The propellant grew thinner and began to sputter out, the force ebbing enough to allow her body to settle comfortably in the seat. Leaning forward, she pulled the rack release for the tanks. The canisters slid from under the wing and fell, tumbling toward the ocean.

The world became quiet, liquid and dreamlike. The machine suddenly felt weightless, its long wingtips trembling in the air, its wood creaking softly as it rode the wind.

Turning the wheel, she angled the rudder, banking the craft into a long westerly turn to line up on the flight path to the mainland. It sailed gracefully through the night, high above the water, above the world.

She shook her head in awe. “You’ve outdone yourself, Nate. You’ve outdone us all.”

Fire cut a wide swath across the water, oil and flotsam shimmering on the waves, smoke and heat blurring objects bobbing on the surface. Gilda passed over it with a heartbroken cry, the glow of flames dancing over the glider’s fabric wing, casting hot reflections in the lenses of her goggles

There were no lifeboats, no collection of survivors clinging to floating debris, just empty, burning silence. The sealed cargo containers dotted the edge of the slick, rocking half-submerged under the waves, either intentionally dropped by the pilot or blown loose.

Did you know? Did you understand what was happening? Did you fight? Nathan!

Gritting her teeth, she turned the wheel, banking the glider in a wide arc until the wreckage lined up in front of her. With the pull of another lever, she raised the fabric spoilers on top of the wing, following the hasty instructions provided by Nathan’s flight technicians.

The machine descended toward the water.

Waves grew larger, their writhing crests highlighted by the flames, blurring underneath her as she dropped through smoke. Wincing, she strained in the seat and dropped the flaps, bracing as the skiff skimmed the foam then crashed into a thick swell.

Gilda snapped forward in the seat, the air knocked painfully from her chest. She ducked her head, covering it with her arms as wood splintered around her, tearing pulleys loose and whipping cables free. The wing collapsed, cracking in half at the center point and breaking away, leaving her sitting in a skiff with an aerial rudder.

She wet her lips, blinking with the realization that it was over.

The skiff floated closer to the flames, the air hissing with fire. She frowned and unbuckled the strap around her waist. Leaning forward in the small craft, she pulled loose a remnant of the wing to use as a paddle.

Shapes appeared in the water around her, silver fabric and destroyed cushion foam, papers floating with the ink washed from their pages, echoes of a sudden, terrifying moment, something dark and unfair.

He could not have lived through this. Not this.

She stifled a sob, the weight of everything lost now too great to bear, strength ebbing to exhaustion and pain.

A dark head appeared in the water ahead, floating face down behind a lifeless sprawl of arms. The figure’s hair bloomed along the surface, long and black in the firelight.

“Nathan? Nathan!” She paddled the skiff in clumsy stabs, breathless in the agonizing stretch of minutes it took to reach him. “Nathan!”

His body drifted close, nudging up against the bow of the skiff. His head dipped lower before she could catch it, his shoulders loose and disjointed as she grabbed onto his jacket.

“No, no, no.” It was a senseless sob, a weak recognition of death.

Heaving against his weight, she drew him up, water pouring from his ruined face, a fractured vision, bloody and unrecognizable.

“Nathan!” She let him go and staggered back, dropping to bottom of the skiff and pressing her palms tightly to her eyes. The image burned, her heart twisted and broken with the memory of it.

“But you don’t understand, do you?” The tears wouldn’t stop, the words spilling loose, offered to an empty ocean, a lost life. “I love you. I’ve loved you for years, wrongly, pathetically…blaming you for everything, yes, of course. But it was love all the same. After my mother died, I could not read your letters, I couldn’t…But this is so much more unfair. You cannot leave me like this. I am not as strong as you suppose. You cannot leave me…”

“Gilda?”

She turned to see him lying on his side along the top of a nearby cargo container, his teeth clenched, one arm held tightly over his ribs. His eyes shimmered hot in the firelight, angered disbelief giving way to fear, as if he thought he might have lost his mind.

“You can’t be here,” he said.

You’re alive. You’re—
She nearly laughed, so light with relief she thought she might fly. “Nate!”

She paddled the destroyed glider closer, forcing the craft to bump against the compartment and slide along its metal corner. Balancing on the seat, she secured the skiff with a loose cable, then untied the cargo bag of supplies and climbed to the top of the floating container.