Young Writers Society

As one of the Aerial Stalker’s nine oil-run engines lets out a belch of black smoke for the fifth time in two minutes, I let out a long, heavy sigh. The third engine—located with the fourth and fifth engine in the underbelly of the machine to supply power to the hyperbrass propellers—almost took out the hyperglass flooring when it overheated and exploded a half-hour ago.

“Seems like this ‘state of the art’ machine you’ve got here ain’t so much fine as it is ‘in the state of a fart’,” the little biter snorts, crossing his right leg over his left as he leans up against the railing on the west side of the upper deck.

I can’t help but snarl. “Don’t be vulgar,”

“Erm,” I hear the Dock master grunt and turn to see her rump up in the air as she crawls under the Control Frame that’s holding up the steering devices. Part of me wishes wistfully that we would run through an aether current and the machine would surge, frying her amongst copper wires, miniature pistons, and steam boilers. The other part—which is, admittedly, considerably smaller than the other—is screaming at the top of its imaginary lungs that I need the Dock Master alive. The little witch hid the paperwork and ownership documents to this grumbling clunker of a vessel so well, you’d think she had the full map to the Iron Spires. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to make it through Aerial Checkpoints, random inspections from the Aether Patrol, or dock the damned thing.

“What now?” I snap, irritated to an unbelievable level. When the biter isn’t laughing and giggling and spitting out childish ‘jokes’ and other nonsense, the Dock Master is breaking things, asking stupid questions, and being nosy about my relationship with the Queen.

“Well, it was looking like we might have been d’ifting off cou’se, so I checked on the aetha’pulse Intelligence, and I was ‘ight.” She shouts, her voice nearly lost in a sudden gust of wind that blows up from the sea-side cliffs below us and the roaring of the engines.

“Did you touch it?” I growl menacingly.

Red hair matted down with sweat and oil—how the Hell did she get so filthy?!—she wiggles out from under the Control Frame, sits back, and turns to look up at me. “I jiggled it just a bit,” she holds up her left cyber-hand, pinching her forefinger and thumb till they almost touch. She’s smiling, but all I see is ‘GUILTY’ written on top of her facial features.

“The casing protecting Intelligences are extremely sensitive, for the thousandth time!” I hiss, shoving her out of the way with my boot as I fall to my knees, reaching my right arm as deep into the mass of roaring mechanisms as I can manage. Feeling around for the smooth, glassy casing that coats the delicate Intelligence device, I let my fingers clasp the small little thing when my pinky nail brushes against it. As I pull my hand out, my wrist bumps up against a boiler. Panicking, I jerk my hand away, which—of course—only serves to make things worse. When I finally get my hand out, I inspect the damage; a nasty burn on the top of my wrist and a deep gash along the bottom of my palm and down my lower wrist. I must have hit it on a sharp frame or boiler piston on the way out. Damn it.

“You alright, lady?” I hear the boy ask. He’s moved from his place by the rail, coming to lean over my shoulder.

“I’m fine.” Shrugging off the hand he’s placed on my shoulder, I unclench my fingers to reveal the pale blue casing of the Intelligence. I hear him grunt, miffed. No matter.

The device is cracked horribly, fractured veins trailing all over the rounded rectangle. No chance for this one to be recovered without professional—and by default, expensive—attention. Bloody Hell! If one more thing goes wrong today, I swear to the heavens that I’m shoving the Dock Master over the side, the papers be damned. She’s the reason most of these unnecessary complications keep arising.

“Can you fix it?” The Dock master asks tentatively, obviously aware that she was treading on glass. Make that molten glass.

“No.”

The boy exhales sharply, turns away from us, and runs his delicate little hands through his dark hair. “Crackers, that ain’t good.” I ignore the strange form of profanity he’s conjured up, my mind working furiously to think of something. Without an Intelligence connecting the various systems throughout the vessel, each engine cluster, navigation device, and aether slicer has to be worked manually on-site. There are a total of seventeen of these ‘sites’ where the mechanisms need guidance; highly inefficient, but there still the same. We have only three people… well, two if you count the usefulness of each person. I seriously doubt the biter can successfully navigate himself through a machine’s belly.

Since we can’t do this manually… “Without the Intelligence, the concept of steering this thing is now a happy—but false—dream. So… we have to drift, and pray the winds don’t carry us too far off course. So long as we don’t—“ I stop myself before I can say ‘run out of fuel’; I’ll be damned if we fall out of the sky because I basically ask for it to happen, however little I believe in such supersticious foolishness. “We just need to dock as soon as we can.”

“Or get help from another, much larger, Aerial vessel?” The boy asks, leaning much too far over the eastern side of the railing. I stand quickly, rushing over to him. Gripping his waist with my hands—he is far too thin for someone of his age—I jerk him away from the railing. If he dies, I’ll be in the depths of the fog as of to the location of my Lady.

“That isn’t going to happen.” I sigh, not releasing him in case he tries to tempt fate and fly over the rails. He does have what appears to be the brain of a bird, so who knows? Maybe he’ll try to take to the air. Oh, heavens, the very thought… please, worthless biter, don’t do anything even vaguely similar to that…

I nearly tell him that, too, but he stops me before I can. “Well, it’s ‘appening right now!” Pointing behind us, he wriggles free of my grip, and I can’t help but follow. I feel the Dock Master press up against my right side and cringe away from her before she can feel anything I’d rather her not—like, for example, one of many cyber prosthetic patches that litter my body like the plague. They’re usually covered with a Surface Mesh, which is programmed with its own miniature Intelligence to look and feel like whatever material a person happens to plug into the code. In this case, it’s human skin. However, within the last few days, it appears I’ve been shedding grotesquely. Large clumps of realistic-looking mesh will tingle against my cyber prosthetics mere seconds before peeling away with sickening sticky noises that I attempt to cover with quiet coughs and sudden movements.

She frowns at me, but other than that I escape unscathed. I’d rather neither the boy nor the Dock Master realizes the extent of my cyber prosthetics. That sort of thing raises eyebrows; a cyber prosthetic arm is one thing, but a hundred or so military-grade hyperiron patches is not only suspicious, but is also only obtainable via intimate connections to my Lady. Very intimate. Actually, other than myself, the only other person I know of who has an military-grade custom cyber prosthetics or patches is the damned King.

Sure enough, just as the boy has said, a massive Aerial Investigator is coming up behind us. I can see why we didn’t notice it, though; it’s a good seventy yards below and behind us. Thinking quickly, I dive for my leather satchel that is securely hooked to a rail near the door to the underbelly of our vessel. Opening it, I pull out a small Emergency Flare Projector, pulling back the iron hammer as I move back to the railing. Pushing the boy behind me—the Dock Master, thank goodness, is smart enough to back away on her own—I aim the gun to where the barrel points a good twenty degrees above their main sail that arcs up from the back half of their ship.

“Cover your ears.” I say as I fire. Both the Dock Master and the boy shriek in pain as the bellowing boom of the small gun blasts their ears, smoke curling out of the barrel like a large cigar. The kickback is intense, even for me, the force of the shot bucking against my stiffened wrist, causing my arm to jerk back. The flare sputters for a few seconds, then lights with a flash of sparks and pulsing red illumination as the projectile flies past the other vessel’s upper deck.

I hear a shout—or at least I hope I do—and return the gun to my satchel, satisfied. The boy and the Dock Master grumble a healthy storm, cursing me to the depths of the sea, the mines of Hell, and the most taboo burial grounds before returning to idle sailor mouths. I don’t hear them; not really, anyways. The last time I fired a flare, it was to let my Lady know where I was in the depths of the forest. That… that hadn’t ended well. Hopefully this flare brought better luck.

About fifteen minutes later, the larger vessel has lined itself up just below us, and a far smaller Aerial Transporter is sputtering up towards our miniature dock lines. Hyperbrass hull glinting in the midday sun, the small ship hardly makes any noise at all, the engines protected by what appears to be a pure-titanium frame bolted with physterglass nails. The whole thing looks incredibly expensive, from the steel wire-lined sails on the back and sides that add to support to the copper-encases Intelligence consoles ringed with physterglass bolts that protect them from aether transmission or other forms of disruption, intentional or otherwise.

The boy greets the man—oh, heavens, no; despite her clothing and haircut, this is most certainly a woman—who smiles up at us as she takes the thick iron chains from the boy’s hands and latches them onto the docking hooks on her own vessel. As she straightens her pale brown felt-lined overcoat, brass buttons reflecting light into my eyes, she looks up at me. Why wouldn’t she? I’m the tallest one here. My blood runs cold as soon as my eyes meet hers.

Black, jaggedly-cut hair flutters in the sharp bursts of wind that pound at us, forest-green eyes hooded deviously as her smile falters slightly, curling into a far more subtly menacing shape. Black fingerless gloves cover the tattoo that I am certain is there as she reaches out her hand, offering to shake my own. I’m not stupid; I keep my hands to myself, glaring at her as I grind my teeth. Lifting her head slightly, she lowers her hand slowly, crossing both arms across her chest. “Lovely to meet you, my lady,” she purrs, mid-tone voice lowering into a well-hidden growl as she cocks her hip to the left.

So, we’re playing that game, then. “And you,” I snip, tilting my head as I rake my eyes over her form. There are no prominent ‘red flags’ visible to the naked eye on her person; no tell-tale lumps or strange wrinkles and folds in her clothing that might hide a weapon, no odd jewelry that might give away a recorder or transmitter, or anything else similar to that. “You’ll have to excuse my anti-physical reaction; I try to touch people as little as possible due to personal ailments.”

“Ah,” she smiles faintly—and very fakely—stepping closer to me. Too fast, I realize, because she’s managed to come within a foot of me before I can even begin to react. “A matter of the heart, then?”

The bloody nerve. There’s a smugness in her voice, lacing every word with double meaning. “No.” I hiss, stepping aside so she has a good view of the Control Frame. “Our Intelligence has broken horribly. Any way we could patch this vessel up and make it to our destination?”

“Which would be…?” The woman asks, bending over to peek at the machinery. I refuse to answer, but the damned biter doesn’t think twice. He works for the King! How the bloody Hell does he not recognize this brutal little cur?

“The Eastern Port; I think they call it Fyndir now, what with the change in management and all.” The boy grins, putting his right hand above his eyes to block out the relentless sun.

I watch her smile, a sinking feeling dragging down my stomach. “Oh, what a perfect little coincidence! From the looks of things, your ship isn’t going to be taking orders till you get another Intelligence installed. My vessel happens to be heading towards the very same dock. Why don’t I hook your ship up to one of our docking anchors and tow you along behind us? You can settle yourselves in our spare cabins below-deck. Even with our engines, powerful as they are, we won’t make it to Fyndir till tomorrow morning.”

“Sounds swell!” The biter replies happily—and too damned quickly, curse him to Hell—before I can protest. He turns to me, giving me a thumbs-up. “The sheer luck of it, right?”

“The sheer luck,” I repeat under my breath, wondering at much of the same thing. What are the chances I run into the Queen’s traitor and the newest Head Inventor under the King in the middle of nowhere directly after our Aerial vessel breaks down? Either this is some disgusting, humorless joke, or it isn’t a ‘by chance’ at all.

The Dock Master, surprisingly silent during all of this, steps out from behind me—how long had she been cowering in my shadow?—hands on hips as she sizes up the visitor. I can see it in her eyes; she recognizes the queer inventor.

“Evo’a,” the Dock Master says, her voice low and… hurt? The dark-haired woman turns, her smile disappearing as her eyes feast on the Dock Master for the first time.

“Corvailia,” she whispers, the sound hardly heard over the roar of the wind and the engines. Her eyes drift to the Dock Master’s cyber prosthetic left arm as she winces. “You didn’t make it out so lucky.”

“Guess not.” The Dock Master say curtly, turning to go below-deck. “I’ll fetch ou’ baggage, doll.”

I nod at the Dock Master as she limps down the stairs, closing the door behind her. What in the…? I’m wondering at what, exactly, the Dock Master didn’t make it out of when I become aware that the inventor is studying me; I can feel her eyes drift over me like poison. “I suppose we’ll be taking you up on your… generous offer, Ms…?” I choose to ignore the exchange between the Dock Master and this evil little witch, saving it for another time.

“Traditoryn, my lady. Evora Traditoryn.” Glancing back at me as she turns to step back onto her vessel, she holds out a hand to help the boy over. He takes it, jumping onto the smaller ship with childish excitement. “And you are?”

“Ms. Ayers,” choosing to answer carefully, I smile to myself, keeping my exterior expression cold and solid. Evora was always too affectionate for her own good, especially when in the vicinity of a pretty face. Seems my Lady was fond of hiring women with ‘abnormal’ sexual tastes in the wake of a man-loves-woman, woman-loves-man society. She’d slip up eventually; I’m sure of it.

The Dock Master comes up with our meager baggage, her cyber prosthetic supporting far more weight than her unaltered arm would have been able to. She unhooks my satchel with a flick of her good wrist, adding it to the stack that has formed on her left arm as she passes me. I step aside for her, nearly laughing when the Dock Master not only ignores Evora’s outstretched hand, but also ‘accidentally’ bumps into the inventor.

As I also turn a blind eye to Evora’s helpful hand—I know what happens when she gets ahold of my hand, what with me being former Royal personnel—I begin to think that our meeting might be lucky, indeed. At least we’ll be headed toward my Lady… and in the process, why not give the inventor Hell?