Khang was a brute of a man, tough and mean, his sinewy muscles stretched on his gangly frame. The rest of the crew steered clear of him not because of his physicality, but his general deportment. He never killed a man, there were too few remaining as it was, but there were many ways to exact a price upon those who dared provoke him.
Life aboard the sky ship was hard, hellishly so. There was little reason to make it worse.
Engineer Willem knew this but men like Khang were a rare breed of useful. Survivors. Creative and pragmatic as much as ruthless.
Willem needed all of that right now, they all did. The desert and sandstorms of the Saragossa tested them all. They had to fly too low for too long to stay beneath their tempestuousness.
But now, the foggy swamp of Lake Georgia forced them into the clouds again, high above the canopy of the newly primordial forest. The tops of the occasional tree poked through the cottony blanket like polka dots. It was hard to stay true to the Spirit when the glory of Merika passed unseen below them.
The thin becalmed air required more heat for the balloons to keep the ship aloft and denied them tack and sail. Yet the weight of the moist clouds made it harder for the ventral props to screw their way through the dank below. Sailing the clouds was only for tougher folk.
Willem stared up the useless mainsail mast as Khang made his way down from the crow’s nest. He’d signaled some urgency. A sighting. Something different. And different was more than welcome.
“Report,” said the Sky Captain to Khang, Willem now playing the role of Chief Cartographer nearby.
Khang fingered his braided beard and bowed deeply. He may have been hard and mean to others, but always respected rank.
“It’s hard to explain, sir,” he said in his perfectly educated English, a thing that still caught men off-guard, even after more than a year at sail.
“Spit it out, man, for Spirit’s sake.” Willem waved a hand. “We haven’t the shale.”
The Captain waived him quiet without turning, his attention on his First Mate. “Still your thoughts, friend. What did you see? Something rising from the clouds?”
“Nay,” said Khang. “What I espied came from above.”
“Another weather system?” asked Willem. The ungainly man began to pace the deck. “We can’t withstand another assault. Port or starboard? We can–”
The other men ignored the question and the Captain pressed. “What is it?”
Khang stood tall. “A mighty fortress, sir. Floating aft and above us, seventy clicks and z-plus two-hundred. By the measure of sextant and glass, at this point. We’d need to power the Machine to know more.”
“Intriguing,” said the Captain. “We’re not alone after all.” He paused. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“Aye, sir. More indeed. Cannons mounted on turrets. Trained on us. And a squadron approaches.”
“How long?” asked Willem.
Khang switched to Pidgin. “Tomorrow we meet. Friends or guns.”
The Captain ordered intercept. Willem protested the shale cost of powering the Machine. The Captain didn’t answer, just looked at him until he went below to spin it up.
First the squadron. As they climbed and closed, the movement that had looked like approach resolved into stillness. Five hulls trailing on tow-lines, strung out behind the great structure like beads on a broken rosary. No balloons. No lights. They hadn’t been moving toward anything. That had been the Resolute closing distance, nothing more. The tow-lines weren’t lines at all. They were cables, thick as a man’s arm, fixed and permanent. Those ships hadn’t been captured. They’d been loaded.
Khang said nothing from the crow’s nest. That alone was information.
Then the structure itself, resolving through the glass as they climbed toward it. Not a fortress. The Captain had known it wasn’t a fortress for several minutes but had not said so. It was a ship. Vast. Long enough to swallow their vessel three times over. But a ship. The turrets were gun mounts, old design, fixed forward. Not tracking. Whatever they’d been aimed at a thousand years ago, they were still aimed at it.
Willem emerged from below with the Machine’s readings. He opened his mouth and the Captain said, “The hull dimensions. Don’t.”
Willem closed his mouth. Then, quietly: “Two carbuoys of shale. For that.”
The Captain didn’t answer. The shale was gone. The knowing was worth it.
They came alongside in silence. The hull was iron gone dark with age, scarred in long lateral gouges that no sandstorm made. Weapon strikes, patched with materials the Captain couldn’t name, alloys that no longer existed in any forge he knew. The repairs were old. Older than the damage.
Khang descended from the crow’s nest without being asked. He stood at the rail beside the Captain and raised his glass.
They found the name together.
A name in an alphabet the Captain recognized but didn’t speak. Old-tongue. Pre-War. Cut deep into the iron, not painted, not affixed. Carved as though whoever did it understood that paint would not last but stone might, and iron was the closest thing to stone that flew.
He read it anyway.
“Elpis,” said Khang, sounding the letters carefully, a man who knew when a word was a name.
Willem had come to stand with them. He was quiet for a moment.
“Pandora’s box,” Willem said, almost to himself. “When all the evils escaped into the world, one thing remained.” He paused. “Elpis. Hope.”
Nobody added to that.
The Captain boarded alone. He told Khang this wasn’t a discussion and Khang, who disagreed with everything in his posture, said nothing.
The interior was cold and preserved the way high altitude preserves things. Desiccated, the moisture pulled out over centuries until what remained was simply matter, patient and dry. His lamp threw shadows that hadn’t moved.
The scale was wrong. Corridors wide enough for four abreast. Quarters stacked six high. Mess halls that could seat hundreds. This ship wasn’t crewed. It was populated. Someone had built it to carry not a company but a people.
A coat hung on a hook outside one cabin. He didn’t touch it.
A child’s shoe in the corridor, small enough to fit in his palm. He stepped around it.
The helm was locked. A manual brake, simple and absolute, set to a fixed heading. He checked his compass against the bearing. Mericka. Due west, give or take the drift of a millennium.
The log was not paper. Metal plates, etched, stacked in a housing beside the helm. The final entry was dated in First Era notation. He did the conversion in his head. A thousand years. Roughly. Give or take a decade that no longer mattered.
The entry was four lines. A fuel note. A heading correction. A list of the tow-ships by name. Then: Continuing on course. All aboard. Cargo secured.
No distress. No farewell. The next plate in the housing was blank.
Whoever wrote it expected to write again.
He found the cargo hold by following the sound of boots on iron: Khang, who had not listened, and Willem behind him, who had followed Khang. The Captain said nothing. Some orders dissolved on contact with Khang.
They stood together at the edge of the lamp-light, looking at the containers. Sealed with mechanisms none of them had seen, dull metal untouched by rust, stacked from deck to ceiling in rows that disappeared into the dark.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
“Are we going to–”
“No.” He turned back toward the ladder. “That’s for Mericka.”
If we reach it, was the rest of the sentence. He didn’t say it. Willem knew.
On deck, the Captain stood at the rail a moment, looking at the great dark hull beside them.
A thousand years. Still going.
“New vector,” he said. “Same heading.”
Willem was already at the charts. “And the– and her?”
The Captain looked back once. The Elpis sat enormous in the clouds, her tow-ships trailing, her cargo sealed, her helm locked to the same bearing they were sailing.
“She knows the way,” he said.
He went below.
Behind them, the first ship sailed on.
