He frowned at her over his beer. “Well I did promise not to walk away.”
She nodded. “Good, good! Now we’ll need to outfit your ornithopter with conductive glass—I’ve enough for a standard Type Six chassis—and fly under the electromagnition factory. It won’t take longer than ten minutes! It’ll be the easiest four thousand you ever made!”
Reece hadn’t changed expression during the whole explanation. He put his beer on the counter and swiveled to face her full-on. “One,” he began to hold up fingers. “Flying under an electromag factory is suicide. That’s directly in the storm!”
“Yes, but—“
“Two,” he shoved two fingers in front of her face so that she had to jerk back. “The factory is government-owned and patrolled by military gunboats. It’s a no-fly zone for fifty miles from the border of the storm. Unless you’ve obtained some kind of University permit, it’s illegal to violate that zone, and you can be legally shot down without warning.” While this was true, he knew it rarely ever happened. Most of the crackpots and thrill-seekers that flew craft near the border storms were harmless.
She pondered that for a microsecond, then said, “I know—
“Three,” he said, jamming three fingers in the air between them, “the sky under the storm is a great hiding place for scum like Jesus Zombies, flying mutants, mobsters, brood slavers, and worse.
“So what you’re proposing is that we avoid robbery, brainwashing, rape, and cannibalism—not necessarily in that order—and then dodge military patrols with the goal of getting ourselves fried to a crisp in a lightning storm. You need four million for a pilot to do that, kid. Four thousand is for sane people.”
He turned his hips back to the bar and reached for the fresh beer that Mike had put there, but she grabbed it away before he could pick it up.
“One,” she said, gesturing with the bottle. “The glass rig I invented will protect us from lightning and I can prove it. I mean, I’ve already proven it or the University wouldn’t have funded my project. I just have to prove it to you—which is good, because a scientist should prove her theory many times before—“ she broke off when he reached for the beer. “Two and three,” she paused, as if for dramatic effect. “I can make us invisible.”
She waited for that revelation to take effect and nonchalantly took a long swig from his beer, then made the most comical whiskey face he had ever seen. “Mmguahh!” she swore, eyes watering. “That’s beer?”
He scowled and took the bottle from her unresisting hand. “It’s an acquired taste, Doctor. Looks like you never had any wild drinking parties in school, eh?”
“We had—I mean, um, we did fun, uh… stuff…”
He rolled his eyes at her and guzzled a third of his beer. The kid trailed off into silence and fidgeted while he regarded their reflections in the bar’s wall-mirror. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, she asked, “Well?”
He sucked his teeth and frowned at her. “Invisible. And immune to lightning.”
She nodded, wide-eyed and hopeful. “Uh huh.”
“Four thousand.”
“Yes.”
He sighed heavily. “Alright kid, prove it to me and you gotta deal.”
*****
The Flying Monkey had a standard Stinger-class chassis: two main turbo-prop engines on the wings and a half dozen “steering props” throughout the nose and tail. (Reece knew the mechanics and tech types had a real name for them, but pilots called them “steering props.”) The turbo-props were held in wing-mounted gyroscopes that allowed them to swivel fore and aft, enabling vertical takeoff. The gyros also connected to a Hearsten’s Type II Self-Adjusting (self-adjusting, my ass! I have to adjust that fecker every day!) Perpetual Motion Drive. Reece’s six-foot one-inch frame fit comfortably in the cockpit, while the aft-facing double gunner seat behind him swallowed up the kid—kinda like a great white shark swallowing up a guppy. Her feet just barely reached the push-pedals—
“What are these for?” she had asked while he was strapping her in.
“Backup drive.”
Her mouth had dropped open, part of a comical look of disbelief. Between snorts of laughter he had explained the Kinetic Motion Battery that backed up the PM drive. “If ya go up without a backup to your PM, you might as well butter yourself and crash-land in a mutant barbecue.”
Right now, though, they were invisible.
Guilt started to creep into his thoughts again. The kid’s invisibility gizmo had kicked in as soon as they hit the outer edges of the never-ending lightning storm that brewed a hundred miles east of Detroit airspace. “It reacts to the Aetherhydromagnetic fluxuations that permeate the air here!” the kid had beamed, waving a tangle of clockwork gears and glass tubes under his nose. He had zero comprehension about her explanation but he believed his eyes, which told him he was suspended in mid-flight without a thopter around him. The experience was eerie but thrilling once he got used to it. What he could have done, back in the Wars, with an invisible fighter-ship!
Then a bolt of lightning had struck the Monkey full on her nose—and harmlessly fanned into the glasswork lattice that the kid had installed over the chassis. “Haha, I told you!” the kid had crowed. “Glass blown from volcanic sand with entellium bombardment that—“ he tuned her out after that, and decided not to ask her for explanations about anything, ever again.
So the kid had been as good as she advertised, and this was turning into a milk run. They were near the edge of the storm and the invisibility was starting to flicker on and off. He let his hands do the piloting and watched in fascination. The Monkey, covered in the kid’s Aether-glass, backlit by flashes of lightning and flickering in and out of sight like some giant mythical dragonfly. It was a sight he would take to his grave.
He was pondering the merits of giving the kid back two thousand when the gunfire started.
He felt the kid shift her weight and guessed she had popped her head up from her science gear. “What was that?”
He snapped out of the reverie and scanned his airspace. Nothing on visual, but there went the crack of small weapons fire again.
“Gunfire, kid! Stow your gear and make yourself small!” He felt her frantically shifting about as he opened the throttle on the repellium panel and angled the props to gain altitude. As the Monkey shot upward he caught sight of muzzle flashes below. “Pistol fire, low starboard!” he called out.
The kid paused. “What?”
Inwardly, he cursed himself for an idiot. The kid was his client, not his gunner! “There are three fools in a civvie scooter below us on the right, shooting at us with their little pistols.”
“Shouldn’t we be worried?”
He shrugged, even though he knew she couldn’t see the gesture while strapped into the aft-facing gunnery station. “They gotta be Lotto-lucky to hit us with handguns, and even if they do, they gotta be double Lotto-lucky to hit anything important. We’ll just keep above ‘em and dodge a lot.”
“But we’ve installed Wilson’s Aetherglass Volcanic—“
“Allah-Christ, kid! Just call it ‘glass!’”
“But we’ve installed glass on the bottom of your ornithopter!”
He swung the Monkey to port as more gunfire cracked from below. “Yeah but it’s all separate panels, right? You don’t need them all to prove your thingy.”
“Reece, the glass is charged with lightning! We’re flying with approximately one thousand bolts of lightning strapped to your hull! If one is broken it will release the transelectrical—we’ll explode! In a thermoelectric—uh, like we’ve been struck by a hundred lightning bolts!”
He was silent as he swung them starboard side to avoid the suddenly ominous pistol fire. The guilt about charging four thousand for this job was a very small thing, dimly remembered, as if from a past life.
The reason there was a floating factory in a lightning storm was for the military to harvest the electricity to make lightning grenades—glass globes half the size of his fist, with living lightning in the middle. Big ships and cities had mesh screens and seeker clockworks to defend against them, but smaller ships like the Flying Monkey could only dodge. Just one was enough to kill both him and the kid if it hit amidships, and here he was, flying with a lightning superbomb attached to his fuselage.
“We have to get away from them! We can’t—“
“I know, kid! But we ain’t got teeth, so there aint much to do but juke and jive!” They had both agreed that leaving behind the Monkey’s Gatling guns—and their highly explosive ammunition—was the best idea when going out to harvest lightning.
But wait… didn’t they have teeth? “Hey kid, I have a crazy idea.”
“You have?”
“Yeah, you’re a bad influence. How big would the explosion be from one of these panels?”
“Um.” She was silent for a moment. Crack, cra-crack, went the distant guns.
He juked to starboard and gunned the throttle. Wind whistled through the sinister lightning glass. “Well?”
“Hush, I’m doing calculations.”
Crack! WHANG! One of the support struts over his cockpit took a bullet. He suffered an eternal half-second of mind-numbing terror as one of the straps holding a glass panel came loose and the panel started to shake and rattle against the hull. With practice born of combat necessity, he held the joystick in his knees while he reached out and removed a glass panel the size of a dinner plate from the strut.
“Take your time, kid. Only getting shot at here.”
“FECK!” she swore. “I estimate the blast radius would be one hundred feet!”
“Feck,” he echoed. This would be close. “Hang on kid! And uh, make sure you got that barf bag handy.”
A horrified groan was her only reply.
Not allowing himself to consider the merits of sitting on a lighting bomb, he made sure the glass panel was secure under his thigh, then angled the props to kill forward motion and gain more altitude. In his mirrors, he could see their pursuers inexpertly bank and start a slow spiral upward. Crack, went their pistols. Crack, crack.
He savagely thrust the joystick forward and released the safety catches on the aft steering props. The Monkey began a screaming power dive in a tight spiral toward the civilian craft.
Through the howling wind and the roaring turbines, he caught the kid moaning, “Buuuuuuuuudhaaaaaa Aaaaaaaaaaaalllaaaaahhhhhh Chriiiiiiiiiiiiisst…” in a pitch and volume that rose and fell as they dived. The civvy flier zoomed larger and larger into view. He could see three crewmen scrambling around the deck—did they think he was going to ram them? All good to him, then. If they were having an old-school freakout, then they weren’t shooting at him.
“Only one shot at this,” he muttered, digging the glass plate out. He waited until the Monkey was fifty feet away and flung the glass sideways across the empty space. With a shock, he realized their pursuers were the three rats from the Brass Nail. It was bright and sunny this far out from the storm, and he could see the whites of their eyes, even through goggles. He locked gazes with Louis the pickpocket. Louis brought up his revolver—
And the Monkey was hurtling past the three criminals, and he could only see them in his rear views. Louis continued to raise his pistol—shouldn’t he be aiming down? Reece’s mouth went dry as he realized Louis was aiming at the glass lightning-plate—
Bang! Went the pickpocket’s gun.
In his rearview Reece could see the sparkle of the glass turn into an angry maelstrom of thunder and electricity that completely engulfed the rats and their airship. The kid screamed then; a good honest shriek that abruptly cut off. He was sure she had jammed her fist in her mouth.
“Ruh—ruh—Reece! We’re out of lightning range!”
He continued the dive. “Ain’t lightning I worry about, kid! We’re covered in your glass, remember?”
“Then why—“
“Shrapnel!” As if to prove his point, he fought the stick hard a-port to dodge a still-rotating propeller flung from the criminal airship. “Come on, ya filthy son of a whore!” he cursed as he fought the stick, which seemed bound and determined to kiss the ground. It seemed a lot closer than it was when he finally won the battle and leveled their descent. He engaged the safety catches on the aft steering props and began a normal ascent to Detroit airspace.
*****
“Hey Mike! A round for the house on me!” he called.
A ragged cheer went up from the dozen or so shady types clustered in twos and threes around the Brass Nail. A free drink or two never hurt when you were trying to create contacts and connections… even if it did mean it was more likely someone tried to mug him on the way out.
“Eh,” he muttered under his breath, “wouldn’t be the first time.” He looked across the table at the kid. She looked pretty down for someone that had just proven her thesis or theory or hypotenuse or whatever it was. She was absently fiddling with her soda bottle and muttering calculations.
“Hey kid. Whassamatta?”
She didn’t hear him. She continued to mutter “Hearsten’s Laws of Perpetual Motion as applied to practical use in Repellium craft…”
“Hey.” He leaned across the table into her field of vision. “Doctor Pony-house. What’s up?”
She blinked and straightened. “Oh! Sorry… just… uh, just thinking.”
“No sheeyeh,” he said. “Bout what?”
“Those men.”
Ah. Of course. She had probably never even been in a fistfight, let alone seen someone buy the farm. “The rat-men? Don’t worry bout them , kid. They got what they deserved.”
Face twisted with emotion, she looked him directly in the eyes. “I saw them, you know. I had a considerably better view than you did. Plus you were busy. I saw my electroglass shatter and the lightning release. It… it… devoured them. It made a lightning bolt for each man, and each man was shot through his solar plexus with a lightning bolt. Three more bolts hit their ornithopter and that made it explode and—and—and I was relieved that I didn’t have to watch them die and I thought—“
She balled her hand into a fist and pressed it against her mouth. He nodded slighty. “Let it out, Doctor.”
She shoved her hands flat onto the table and regarded them for a moment, then looked back into his eyes. “I thought: ‘I did that.’”
He frowned. “Kid—Emily, you can’t—“
She waved him silent and brushed a tear away from her cheek. “I know, I know, don’t think I don’t know. If I hadn’t hired you, if you hadn’t been here, if I hadn’t been a genius, if they hadn’t been so stupid and mean... if, if, if. Can’t second-guess any of it.” She poked an ink-stained finger on her temple. “Up here I know it.” He expected her to point to her heart next, but she tapped the back of her head. “Back here, in the reptile brain… that’s the part that thinks ‘I did that.’ And you know what, Captain Reece? That part of me liked it. ‘Ha, that’s what you get,’ it says.” She clutched her soda bottle with shaking hands. “And that is what’s scary.”
“Buddha-Christ, kid. You are a genius.”
She blinked back tears and looked up in surprise. “Wh… what?”
He leaned back in his chair and took a drink of his beer. “I joined the Corps when I was your age. Signed up for a five year tour. Minimum’s three year, but you get a way bigger bonus if you sign for five. In my five years, we had three wars and a dozen ‘incidents.’” Still holding his beer, he used his fingers to air-quote the word. “I killed a lotta men. The first one is the roughest—not the actual kill, but dealing with it after. I still remember like it happened five minutes ago; that Jesus Zombie look in his eye, how he was weak with his right side guard, how easy it was to shove my shortsword right up under his ribcage into his heart.” He looked down at a ring of condensation from his beer bottle and stuck his finger in the middle of it. “’Praise Jesus,’ he said, like I was doin’ him a favor.” He wiped his finger through the moisture on the table to make a line off the edge and let his hand drop to his thigh. “Praise Jesus.”
He looked up at her face. She had a sober look on, and the tears were gone. “For all the photographic memory I have, the one thing that sticks with me is the thought I had, right after he died. Do you know what that thought was?” She shook her head slightly. He leaned forward and said, “I thought, ‘huh, that was easy.’”
He leaned back and repeated, “’Huh, that was easy.’” He gestured with his bottle to the kid. “’I did that.’ What makes you a genius, Emily, is that you figured out in your head what was wrong right when it happened.” He downed half of his beer while she mulled that over. “It took me two years to figure out why I woke up every night with the sweats, scared to death.”
“Did it stop then? The night terrors?”
“Not that day. But I saw a Corps psychist and they got better.” He paused. “Not gonna piss down your back and tell you it’s rainin’ Emily. It’s scary, how easy it is. People die so easy. All you can do is live like your momma taught you—or Allah Christ or Buddha Christ or whatever. You know where your moral compass is and how it swings. Let it guide you.”
She pondered that for a moment. A sly look came over her face. “That’s it? You’re supposed to tell me a story that makes me feel better and wraps it all up, like on teevee. Where’s the wisdom imparted to the ingénue from the grizzled veteran?”
He was shocked for just a moment. He had seen men grow up in a matter of minutes and this kid had done it like a pro. He laughed. “Whatevs, Doctor. You are a horrible little girl.”
She straightened her spine and jutted her jaw out. “No, I’m not. I’m a scientist.”
He nodded and clinked bottles with her. “Best one I ever met.”
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