It turned out the Lark ambulance airship was slower than the Skiffer.
June discovered this within thirty seconds of leaving the Lewis’s receiving platform, when she pulled alongside the ascending Lark and found herself reducing throttle to avoid overrunning it. The Lark’s bladeless engine system -- a turbine design that moved air through smooth-walled channels with no rotating external components, the exhaust directed through vectoring nozzles for thrust and attitude control -- was quiet and reliable. It rose at a steady, measured rate toward the Lewis, rotating as it climbed so that by the time it reached the receiving platform its rear hatch was already oriented toward the platform’s edge.
She held the Skiffer in a wide orbit around the ascending Lark, watching it dock, and then climbed past it and came in over the Lewis’s receiving platform from above.
The platform was larger than the hospital’s rooftop pad -- a full working surface with marked landing areas, ground crew stations, equipment lockers along the forward wall, and three other Lark-class vessels in various stages of cradling or preparation. She found an unoccupied corner of the marked area and set the Skiffer down, cut the systems, pulled the crystal, and climbed out.
The Lewis’s structure was immediately apparent as something different from the hospital below. The ceilings were higher, the corridors wider, the equipment visible through open doorways more current than anything she had seen at Grisham General. The floors were a polished composite material that reflected the overhead electric lighting with a clean, even surface. The air had the same antiseptic quality as the ground hospital but fresher, moved by a specialized ventilation system she could hear as a low background hum.
She followed the orderlies with Vernon’s wheeled bed through a set of double doors and into a junction of colored corridors. Yellow, green, blue, red, each one marked with a painted stripe along the upper wall and a corresponding symbol at the junction. The orderlies turned into the yellow corridor and she followed.
The yellow corridor was surgical. It was obvious from the equipment she could see through the open doors they passed; the theater lights, the instrument trays, the operating tables with their adjustable positioning. The orderlies stopped at a set of closed double doors and a nurse met them, checked Vernon’s chart, spoke briefly to the orderlies, and looked at June.
“Are you family?” the nurse said.
“Friend,” June said.
“You can wait in the family room at the end of the yellow corridor. We’ll find you when he’s out.”
The double doors swung open and Vernon and the orderlies and the nurse went through them and the doors swung closed again and June was standing in the yellow corridor with nothing to do.
She stood there for a moment, taking stock of herself.
She had slept perhaps three hours in the last thirty, none of it in a bed. She was wearing a coat that had seen a considerable amount of the previous day’s events.
She found the family room. It was small but the chairs were upholstered rather than wooden, and there was a window looking out at the open sky to the east where the morning was fully established now, the sun above the horizon and the city below catching its light. She sat in the nearest chair, put her head back, and was asleep before she had completed the thought that she should try to sleep.
~*~
The young doctor who woke her was perhaps thirty, with the alert, slightly hurried manner of someone managing more patients than time.
“Miss Hughes?”
She came awake cleanly, present and oriented within two seconds, the location and the context establishing themselves without the slow surfacing of normal waking.
“How is he?” she said.
“Recovering well.” The doctor sat in the chair across from her, which she took as a good sign as doctors who sat down were delivering news they did not need to stand up for or leave quickly having once delivered it. “The rib fractures have been properly set and immobilized. The orbital swelling is being managed with cold compresses and will resolve on its own schedule. The concussion was mild and is clearing.
He was coherent and responsive throughout the procedure, which is the relevant indicator.” He paused. “He needs rest and he needs to avoid physical strain for several weeks. The ribs are the primary concern. Any significant impact to that area in the near term would be serious.”
“Can I see him?”
“He’s medicated, but yes. Room four, yellow corridor.” He stood, confirming the good-news interpretation. “He may be somewhat confused. The medication we use has that effect for an hour or two.”
She found room four and pushed the door open.
Vernon was in the bed with his eyes open, the bandaging considerably neater than it had been at Grisham General, purposeful dressings over tended wounds rather than the emergency field work of the night before. He had color in his face that had not been there on the Tinkery floor. When he saw her his expression changed, and what came onto his face was not the complicated sorrow and guilt of the early morning conversation, or the managed warmth of the man she had known at the workbench. It was something simpler than either of those.
He smiled.
“Hey there, June bug,” he said.
She stopped just inside the door.
The nickname. He had called her that during the apprenticeship years, when she was fifteen and he was nineteen and they were both learning from Silas and the age gap had felt enormous to her and apparently insignificant to him. He had called her June bug with the easy affection of an older sibling, and she had pretended to find it irritating but had not actually found it irritating. He had not called her that since he left for Grisham University with his scholarship and his fine suit and his future assembling itself around him.
The medication had taken him somewhere behind the present, to a place where the present had not yet happened.
She pulled the chair to the bedside and sat.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“Bit foggy,” he said. His voice was loose, the careful management of the morning’s conversation entirely absent. “Silas is going to be angry. I left my tools on the bench again.”
She looked at him.
“He told me to put them away,” Vernon said, with the gravity of someone reporting a genuine concern. “I keep forgetting.”
“I’ll tell him you’re sorry,” she said.
“Tell him I’ll do it after lunch.” He looked at the ceiling with the comfortable focus of someone watching something pleasant. “Do you remember the summer we built the model telegraph? The one that actually worked?”
She did remember. The summer she was sixteen. Silas had assigned them the project as a study in electrical principles, two weeks of work that had produced a functioning two-station model that could transmit in Morse code. Vernon had been impatient with the wiring in the early stages and she had been methodical, and they had argued about it, and the argument had resolved itself when his rushed wiring had produced a short that had taken them two days to trace and correct and which Silas had declined to help them find on the grounds that finding it was the lesson.
“I remember,” she said.
“You were right about the wiring,” he said, to the ceiling. “I should have listened.” He smiled again, the loose uncomplicated smile of the medication. “I should have listened more. To both of you.” His voice was getting slower. “Best summers of my life, June bug. Right here.” He turned his head slightly toward her, his eyes drowsy. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. This is the best of it.”
His eyes closed.
She sat beside him for a moment after his breathing settled into sleep. The room was warm and quiet, the ventilation system a low background hum, the window showing a section of clear sky.
She stood carefully, so as not to disturb him, and looked at his sleeping face -- the bandaging and the fading bruises and the medical stillness of him, and underneath all of that, the face of the nineteen-year-old who had called her June bug and argued about wiring and eaten lunch on the Tinkery floor with sawdust on his trousers.
She turned and went to find the cafeteria.
~*~
On the busy platform, another Lark arrives, this one bearing visitors to the wounded.
Amidst the throng the leaves the airship, two young men, impeccably dressed and clearly brothers, step off the boarding ramp. Instead of heading for one of the colored corridors with everyone else from their flight, they look around, getting their bearings.
One spots the skiffer and nudges his brother and they move toward the machine, calmly and coolly, as if they own the place.
One circles the craft noting the continuations and changes and the other squeezes into the tight seat between the protective rails. Clearly the machine was designed for a smaller pilot.
He flicks switches in a memorized order and nothing happens. He tries again, more carefully this time and still nothing happens.
The one in the craft climbs out and they stand together quietly murmuring to each other. A consensus reached, they head toward the yellow corridor.
~*~
June chose the longer route, the route that took her past the receiving platform rather than straight through the junction to the green corridor. She wanted to see the Skiffer, to confirm its presence with her eyes rather than trust the assumption that it remained where she had left it.
She passed from the yellow corridor to the green at the junction, and as she turned into the green corridor two young men stepped to one side to let her through.
She registered them in the peripheral way one registers people who are courteous, passed them and continued toward the platform door.
She did not look back.
Behind her, a smile passed between the two men. Not a word. An exchange of a different kind, brief and sufficient.
They turned into the yellow corridor.
~*~
The platform in the morning light was busy with the ordinary operation of the Lewis’s shuttle service, Larks arriving and departing on their continuous cycle between the airship and the hospital below, ground crew moving between the vessels with purpose and efficiency.
June crossed the platform to the corner where she had left the Skiffer and stood beside it for a moment, running her eyes over the exterior.
The crystal was in her pocket. The systems were shut down. The surfaces were dry -- the morning condensation had burned off in the sun. Nothing had been touched.
Then she turned and went back inside.
The green corridor was wide and well-lit and smelled of breakfast, the cafeteria at its far end producing aromas that her body responded to with a sudden and emphatic insistence that had nothing to do with her conscious priorities. She followed the smell.
The cafeteria was large, the tables filled with the mixed population of a hospital ship in the middle of its morning. The noise was the noise of many conversations at once, silverware on plates, the movement of chairs, the background clatter of the kitchen.
She found a stool at the long counter and sat. A woman in a white apron appeared before she had fully settled.
“Coffee?” the woman said.
“Please,” June said. “And whatever is fastest.”
The coffee came immediately. The apple pie came thirty seconds later, a generous slice with a flaky crust and a filling that smelled of cinnamon and cooked apple, and she ate it with ravenous abandon. She ate every bite and pushed the plate back.
“Another?” the woman said.
“Please,” June said.
She ate the second slice more slowly, the urgency of the first having been addressed, and drank the second cup of coffee with the full attention it deserved. She sat for a moment after she had finished, both hands around the cup, listening to the cafeteria noise and feeling as restored as a good meal and mediocre sleep would allow.
She left a coin on the counter and stood.
She took the shorter route back to the yellow corridor. Left at the junction, past the surgical theater doors, and into the residential section where Vernon’s room was.
The corridor was wrong.
She registered it before she had processed what specifically was wrong. It registered as a disruption in the visual order of the space that her eyes reported to her brain as anomalous. A picture on the wall was askew, its lower right corner jutting outward from the wall. A small occasional table that had been against the wall outside room two was now at an angle to it, one leg in the corridor. A wheeled equipment stand further down was tipped, the items from its upper shelf on the floor.
She was running before she had completed the analysis.
Vernon’s door was open. Not ajar, wide open, pushed back against its stop, the doorway fully clear. One of the bed’s wool blankets was on the floor half inside and half outside the room, dragged there by something moving through the doorway at speed.
She hit the doorway and looked in.
The bed was empty.
The sheets were pulled to one side in the way sheets get pulled when someone is removed from a bed quickly and without cooperation. The pillow was on the floor. The bedside table was intact but the water glass that had been on it was not.
She heard shouting from the direction of the platform.
She ran.
Past room three, past room five, past the nursing station where a nurse was on the telephone with the receiver pressed to her ear and her voice raised to a register that carried down the corridor behind June as she passed -- “they have taken a patient and attacked staff, I need --” and then June was past the station and the words were gone.
She rounded the corner at the yellow corridor’s platform end and nearly ran into the figure on the floor.
The doctor who had woken her in the family room was on his back on the corridor tile with one knee bent and his arms at his sides and his face turned to the left, the lower half of it covered in blood that was coming from his nose at a rate that indicated recent and substantial impact. A nurse was crouched beside him, her hand on his shoulder, calling his name.
June went past them both and through the platform doors.
The platform was filled with the chaos of a contained space where something violent has recently occurred and the people in it are in the various stages of response to that violence.
Two ground crew members were on the far side of the platform, one helping the other to his feet. A Lark crew member was in the doorway of her vessel with her hand on the door frame, looking at the platform in stupor, indecisive about leaving the Lark or staying
A second nurse was moving quickly toward the ground crew from the direction of the corridors.
June knew where the men would have gone.
She ran along the platform edge, past the cradled Larks, past the equipment lockers, around the nose of the outermost Lark, and found them.
Two young men, impeccably dressed. She recognized them from the corridor at the platform junction, thirty minutes ago, stepping aside to let her pass. They had stepped aside very deliberately, she understood now. They had wanted to see her face. They had wanted to confirm who she was.
Brothers. The resemblance was clear in the jawline and the brow, the same dark hair, the same well-made clothes. They were perhaps twenty-five and twenty-seven, both of them with the physical ease of young men who had maintained their bodies well. They were not large men, but they were strong.
One of them had Vernon.
His fist was wrapped in the front of Vernon’s hospital gown, the fabric bunched in his grip, and Vernon was at the platform’s edge. Not near the edge. At it, his heels at the boundary, the city two thousand feet below him a fact that he was visibly, acutely aware of. His face was gray. His hands were at his sides and not moving, the stillness of someone who understood that movement in this situation was its own kind of risk.
The other brother was standing between his brother and the Skiffer, and he was smiling.
It was not a complicated smile. It was the smile of someone who was enjoying themselves.
She stopped.
The cold came down over her, the way it had come down in the flat spin at one hundred and thirty-six miles per hour, the way it had come down in the alley when the revolvers appeared. Her heartbeat registered in her ears for two seconds and then the cold settled and it stopped.
She looked at the brother holding Vernon. She looked at Vernon’s face, at the gray, the stillness, the eyes on her. She looked at the platform edge and the open sky beyond it and the city two thousand feet below.
She looked at the Skiffer, four feet from the smiling brother.
She thought about what the Skiffer was. What it had cost. The notebooks and the calculations and the three notebooks of cam profile derivations and the bus bars and the casting and the disc turbine and the months. She thought about her mother in room seven at Grisham General and her brothers at home with Mr. Jerry and the contest in nine days and the medical bills and everything the Skiffer was supposed to solve.
She looked at Vernon.
The one holding Vernon made a meaningful look at the skiffer and June knew what they wanted. Without the crystal, they couldn’t have activated the skiffer. The man and Vernon stood with skiffer between her and them.
The calculus was not complicated. It resolved itself in approximately two seconds and produced a single clear answer.
“Bring him off the edge first,” she said. Her voice was level.
The brother holding Vernon looked at his brother. Some communication passed between them that had no visible component. Then he took a step back from the edge, bringing Vernon with him.
She crossed to the Skiffer.
She reached under the nose cowling and found the crystal pocket and seated the crystal, felt the click, withdrew her hand. She reached over the left side bar and, for the last time, closed the master switch. She heard the hydro-ionic converter begin its relay sequence of three clicks, the accumulator beginning to build pressure.
She stood upright and looked at the platform while the machine started.
The smiling brother watched her with his arms loose at his sides and his weight balanced. He glanced at the Skiffer when the startup sounds began, then back at her. The smile did not change.
The turbine spun up. She heard the familiar rising note of it, the generator output climbing, the voltage stabilizing.
She looked at Vernon. He was watching her face with an expression that was trying to read what she was thinking and was not succeeding. She gave him nothing.
They would take it, take her dream, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Rage filled her, and with it came the ice cold sensation as her mind calmed and began calculating. She was a being of fire and ice and these two would not break her.
The skiffer started its startup sequence without complaint. Heat and pressure rose and the generator began its not familiar slow climb to appropriate voltage. All the while the brothers watched her like vultures, ready to pounce.
Finally the needle indicating voltage reached its final place and she stood straight.
“It’s ready now.”
The brother holding Vernon released him and moved toward the skiffer. His brother moved out the way and toward Vernon. The smile was there still, a cruel, happy smile.
From those perfect teeth came a threat would have skilled her had she not already been frozen inside. “Tell anyone and we’ll go for you mother next.”
Then several things happened at the same time.
The smile darkened at her lack of response, then he whirled and shoved Vernon off the platform edge.
Vernon’s cry started the moment his weight left the platform surface and continued as he fell, one long sustained note of pure terror, and June was already moving.
She went over the left side bar and into the seat in a single motion that she did not plan, her hands finding the collective and the stick by position rather than sight, and she threw the directional control to its full forward position and hauled the collective up hard.
The Skiffer responded the way it had always responded to full inputs, immediately and completely, all four cyclorotors reaching their maximum output in the same instant, the thrust vectoring simultaneously. The vehicle surged forward over the platform edge and the playform wall dropped away on both sides and then there was nothing around her but open sky and the city two thousand feet below and the Skiffer’s nose pointing straight down.
The brother in front of her fell back with a cry of his own as the skiffer dove into him and over the edge, its rear racing its front and leaving June facing straight down. The city spread out before her, in all directions. The only thing she could see was the ground, and for the pilot of an Aerial vehicle, that was a terrifying thing to realize.
The cold took hold and she threw the throttle forward. She’d seen her target, a small flailing, falling man.
With a speed that took her breath away, she shot downward, rage and cold and utter terror coursing through her.
The ground drew closer and Vernon did too. He was still spinning and screaming, one long loud scream. In that moment she realized how little time had passed since he was shoved off the edge. He hadn’t even drawn in a new breath yet.
She threw the stick and the Skiffer moved, falling alongside him now, matching his fall, and she looked at the ground and thought about the distance and the rate at which it was growing less.
Less than a hundred feet.
She yanked the stick hard left and the Skiffer slid under Vernon in the last available moment and she hit the collective with everything she had. The thrust reversed from downward to upward, from falling to braking and the deceleration hit her like a physical blow, pressing her into the seat, the frame flexing around her.
Vernon hit the Skiffer’s upper surface.
She felt it through every component of the vehicle the impact transmitted through the frame to the seat to her spine, a sudden addition of weight that the already-stressed system registered as a change in the collective’s feel, the rotors asking for more current, the ammeters spiking. Vernon’s scream changed quality as his newly-set ribs contacted the overhead bars and produced a new pain over the original terror.
She was still fifty feet from the ground. Forty.
She pushed the collective further. The Skiffer’s descent rate slowed, and slowed again, the four rotors fighting the combined weight of the vehicle and Vernon and whatever remained of their downward velocity. The ammeters were in the red. The generator voltage was dropping under the load, the turbine RPM fighting to maintain its output against the demand.
Thirty feet.
Twenty.
The descent rate slowed to something she could manage and she held it there, not ascending yet, just arresting the fall, buying the rotors time to find their equilibrium under the unexpected load.
Ten feet.
She pushed the collective past its normal maximum. The Skiffer shuddered, the whole vehicle, frame and rotors and every component simultaneously, a vibration she had not felt before because she had never asked this of it before and then it began to climb.
Slowly. Reluctantly. With the labored, lumbering quality of that first tethered flight it began to climb.
The ammeters were pegged to their stops, deep in the red.
She looked at the ground below her and watched it stop getting closer and begin getting further away. The Skiffer was going up. Mercifully, It kept going up.
She heard Vernon above her but not screaming now, the scream having converted into something between a groan and a sustained exhalation. She could feel his weight on the upper structure of the Skiffer, distributed across the overhead bars, shifting slightly as he found something to grip.
“Hold on,” she yelled, to him and to the Skiffer both.
She pointed the nose west.
The Lewis Hospital Airship was above and behind her. The city spread in every direction, the grid of Grisham’s streets from a height she had never intended to be at with a passenger and a rotor system that was running at the absolute limit of its electrical output and had been for the last ninety seconds.
She thought about where to go.
The Tinkery: no. They knew it. Her home: no. They would know about home. The hospital: no, they had just come from there and demonstrated what they were willing to do in a hospital.
The farm.
Silas’s family farm, twenty miles outside the city, at the end of an overgrown driveway between two stone posts. No one had lived there in years. No one knew about it except Silas, and herself, and Ned the driver. It would have to do.
She turned the nose toward the western highway.
The Skiffer flew at sixty miles per hour, which was the most she was willing to ask of a machine carrying a second person on its exterior. She did not know whether Vernon was conscious. She did not know whether his grip on the overhead bars was deliberate or whether his weight was simply resting there and would shift if she banked. She kept the Skiffer level and the throttle at fifty percent and watched the ammeters, which were in the high yellow and staying there, and thought about the distance to the farm.
Twenty miles at sixty miles per hour. Twenty minutes.
The city fell away beneath her as she flew west, the dense grid of Grisham’s streets thinning into the outer neighborhoods and then the market garden districts and then the open farmland of the highway corridor. Beneath her she could see the ribbon of the highway with vehicles on it, all of them proceeding unaware of the Skiffer overhead.
From somewhere above and behind her she heard Vernon’s voice, faint against the wind.
“June.” A pause. “June.”
“I hear you,” she yelled against the rotor noise and the wind. “Don’t move. Hold the bars.”
“All right,” he said, agreement being his only real option at the moment.
She watched the ground below and the horizon ahead and the ammeters and the airspeed indicator and did not look at the city behind her.
The fields opened up. She began looking for landmarks. The highway had been straight and they had followed it before. The barn with the collapsed roof section should be visible from altitude as a specific shape, the intact sections standing, the collapsed section a gap in the roofline.
She saw it.
She turned toward it and began her descent and that was when she felt it, a harmonic in the Skiffer’s frame that she had not felt before, a vibration that started at the left rear corner and propagated through the entire structure in a frequency that was not the normal vibration of the rotors at speed but something insistent and deteriorating.
A fastener.
She thought about the witness paint on the mounting hardware. She thought about the left rear mount that Silas had noted fretting on the upper face during the post-first-flight inspection.
Vernon had felt it. She heard him make a sound above her that was not words.
“Almost there,” she called.
The harmonic became something worse. Not a vibration now but an oscillation, the left rear rotor mount moving in a pattern that was outside its designed tolerance, each cycle adding to the previous, the bolt that was failing spending the last of its integrity with every revolution of the rotor above it.
She heard Vernon shout something. A warning, because he could see the left rear mount from where he was and she could not.
She dropped the collective. They just needed to make it to the barnyard. Then they’d be safe.
The harmonic grew worse, blurring her vision. They cleared the barn roof and were fifteen feet above the ground when the second bolt sheared through. They dipped and dropped the remaining height to the ground. Vernon gave another cry as his ribs smashed against the skiffer once more.
She closed every system in sequence. Converter off. Boiler down. Generator disconnected. Main bus open.
The silence came in from the edges of the barnyard.
Then slowly, courage returned to the crickets, and one by one they filled the dusk with their sound.
She climbed out.
Vernon was on the upper surface of the Skiffer, both hands on the overhead bars, face down, his hospital gown inadequate for the April air at altitude and now inadequate for the April evening at ground level as well. His knuckles on the bars were the color of bone.
She reached up and got her hands under his nearest arm.
“Can you move?” she said.
“Questionably,” he said, into the Skiffer’s upper surface.
“I need you to move.”
A silence. Then: “All right.”
It took several minutes. She held his weight from below as he got his legs off the bars and onto the Skiffer’s side frame, and then to the ground. He stood beside the Skiffer in the barnyard with both hands on the frame and his eyes closed, breathing in a precise way designed to minimize pain during the collection of oxygen. Carefully each breath managed, the ribs governing everything.
She looked at the farmhouse.
The front door was intact. The windows on the ground floor were boarded from the outside and the boards had been there long enough to have weathered to the same grey as the siding. The porch roof sagged where it had been sagging when they were here that morning, which felt like a different week.
She put her arm around Vernon’s waist and he put his arm across her shoulders and they walked toward the farmhouse, and whatever secrets it held.