024 -- Aboard the Zeta

The Zeta's galley was directly aft of Andrew's cabin. It was cramped even though there were only three of them eating breakfast. Emma, Thom, and Andrew sat in silence over three bowls of steaming gray porridge.

Thom finished his first. “Well --” he said, stretching, “I've got to head aft . . . take a look at that heat exchanger that broke loose yesterday. It'll probably take most of the morning to fix.” He shot a significant look at Emma.

She pretended not to see it. “Oh, don't worry, Thom, I'm sure Danny and I can keep an eye on things just fine. Right, hon?”

Andrew nodded.

“Alright. Remember, call me on the tube if you see anything.”

“Of course.”

Thom left. Emma turned to Andrew. “You just about done, hon?”

He choked down one last gulp of the piping hot mash. “Yep.” They rinsed their tin utensils before heading forward along the passageway. During the day, the cloth walls glowed slightly with light from the outside.

Emma stepped through the hatchway through which Andrew had eavesdropped the night before. “Have you ever been in the cockpit of an airship before, Danny?”

Andrew shook his head.

“Well, I'll just have to give you the tour then, hon.” He followed her through the hatchway.

“This is the operations room.” There was a wide table in the center of the room, lit with a large electric lamp and covered in detailed maps of topography and air currents. The walls were covered in gauges, tachometers, levers, valves, and large two pronged electrical scissor switches. Most of the instruments were mounted on thin metal brackets to save weight, exposing the twisted mass of cables and wires behind them. It was the greatest concentration of machinery Andrew had ever seen in one place.

“That hatch on the port side goes to the captain's quarters – that's Thom, of course – and the one on the starboard side is the first mate's – me. The table – oh, hold on a minute . . .” Emma was examining one of the pressure gauges, frowning. She leaned over to a large, flared tube that protruded from the deck just forward of the table. “Thom!”

“What?!?” His voice came back after a brief pause, tinny but clearly audible.

“Did you turn off the number three compressor?”

“Yeah – snapped belt. Gimme a minute, damn it!”

“No, no hurry. Just making sure.”

Thom grunted something. Emma turned back to Andrew. “Come on, hon, let's go up to the cockpit.”

Andrew followed her, stepping over another hatchway lip. “And here's where we fly the Zeta.”

He gaped. The cockpit was a round room, but there was no floor. Instead, triangular glass panels stretched down and inward on all sides, leading to a pair of battered leather seats mounted on swivels at the bottom of the inverted pyramid. Below them the view was breathtaking – the blue ocean stretched out on all sides to the horizon, glittering in the sun. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

Emma stepped out over the glass on a narrow metal gangway without a second thought, descending to the seats. “Come on, Danny, I'll let you sit in the copilot's chair.” There was no handrail – Andrew gulped, and then followed her. Don't look down, don't look down, don't look . . .he grabbed the leather armrest with relief, hauling himself up into the chair. An instrument column stretched down from the ceiling, many of its gauges matching the readings from the operations room, while another brass speaking tube wound through the center of it.

“The Zeta used to be a customs airship, that's why it has such great visibility. That's one of the reasons we picked it.”

Andrew took a deep breath, and then peered over the edge of the seat. He was hanging ten thousand feet above the ocean, with nothing but a few centimeters of glass between him and the sky . . . it was enough to make him feel lightheaded.

“Try moving around.”

“Huh?”

“Like this.” Emma put her feet on a metal bar that circled the pilot's seat. By moving her feet along it, she could spin the chair left or right, affording herself a full range of vision around the Zeta.

Andrew spun all they way around a few times. “Wow!”

“Let me show you something else – but you have to promise not to touch anything.”

“Okay.”

She reached over behind his chair. A moment later, another panel of controls swung out from behind his head. In the center was a worn metal control yoke, surrounded by another series of levers, knobs, and dials. Someone had marked a series of knobs labeled “trim tabs” with grease pencil, while another few levers had bits of colored string hanging from them. One lever had been removed entirely, with a small scribbled note ending in an exclamation point covering the gap.

“The yoke controls pitch and roll, while the levers are mostly throttles. There are pedals, too, for controlling yaw, but I won't pull those out right now.” She swung the control arm back behind his head.

“So where are we going?”

“Well, we're headed North right now.” Emma pointed to a large compass set into the ceiling just forward of the instrument mast. “We're crossing the ocean, but we haven't had a sighting since the storm and so we're not entirely where we'll make landfall. Longitude is a bit more tricky to measure in midair than on the ocean.”

“You mean we don't know where we are?”

“Don't worry, Hon. We've got a pretty good idea. Thom's usually right about these sorts of things.”

They sat for a moment, looking at the sea roll by far below them.

“You know, Danny . . . Thom is usually right about some other things as well.”

Here it comes.

“What do you mean?”

“Danny . . . he thinks you aren't telling us the truth.”

Andrew looked down at his hands.

“He thinks . . . he knows that you weren't a cabin boy.”

Andrew said nothing.

“Danny . . . Thom's not a bad man. Believe me, I should know . . . but he's had a tough go of it. If you lie to him, hon, he'll know, and he doesn't like it when people lie to him on his ship.”

Let's make her work for it. Andrew shook his head back and forth, still staring down. “I can't tell him, I can't tell anybody . . . they told me not to . . .”

“Danny, you can tell me. Tell me, and we can think of some way to explain it to Thom.”

“. . . can't . . .”

“You have to, Danny! Listen, we were working late last night, and he told me that if you didn't come clean by lunch time today he was going to have to force it out of you. He was going to start this morning, but I only just talked him out of it!”

Andrew turned to Emma. He let his voice crack. “R-really?”

“Like I said, hon, he's not a bad man, but he won't stop until you tell the truth. You've got to give me something!”

“They told me I couldn't. That if I told anyone, people would get hurt.” He hugged his knees through the baggy pants.

“No one will get hurt, hon. I promise.”

“Really?”

“I promise. But please, give me something to tell Thom.”

“Well . . .” Andrew hesitated. “. . . we were headed for Cimbria.”

“Who?”

“Me and . . . my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“Yes. She . . .”

“Oh, hon . . . I'm so sorry . . . Oh, hon . . . come here.”

Emma wrapped him in a warm hug from the other chair. It felt genuine. Andrew sniffled a bit for effect.

Eventually she let him go. “Where were you going?”

Andrew rubbed his eyes once before continuing. “I don't know . . . somewhere in Oberon. She couldn't tell me exactly where.”

“Why?”

“We got a letter. My mother read it, and then burned it. She said we had to leave right away. I don't know much else for certain, but I've guessed some.”

“Like what?”

“My father is Cimbrian, but I've never met him. Mother never told me anything, but she used to get letters. She would burn the letters, but one time she forgot to burn the envelope. It had no name on it, but it was from Oberon. I think my father sent her money to put me through school.”

Emma's eyes bored into him, very different than the soft sympathy she had been giving him just a moment ago. Andrew swallowed and then pushed on.

“Also . . . no, I shouldn't.”

“What?”

“I can't . . . I don't want Captain Roving to know about this.”

“Why not?”

“I don't think I could trust him if he knew. I'm not totally naïve . . . it might make things complicated.” Andrew looked at his hands. “I'll tell you, but only if you can keep it secret from him.”

Emma nodded. “Of course, hon, your secret is safe with me.” She reached over and squeezed his hands with her own. Andrew looked up and rewarded her with a smile. She's good.

“The last letter she got before we left came differently than the others. A soldier came to the house on horseback, exhausted. He gave her the letter and a purse full of money. As soon as she read it, he said that the arrangements had all been made and we needed to leave that evening. And he also said something else.”

He looked around once, to see if anyone was eavesdropping, before leaning in towards Emma.

“This is what he said. He said, 'He may not last long, but he wants to see you and the boy before he goes.' I think my father is dying, and he's spent a lot to get my mom and I to him. And now that mom is . . . I'm the only . . .”

Emma leaned back, nodding. “You don't want Thom to know that your father may be rich, do you?”

“I'm afraid of what he might do. You won't tell him, will you?”

“Of course not, hon. I gotta tell him something to get you back to Oberon, though.” Emma twisted her mouth up like she was thinking.

Andrew breathed an internal sigh of relief. I think she bought it.

“Alright, here's what we'll tell Thom. Listen carefully.”

Andrew nodded.

“We'll mention your mom, but not the letters or the rider. Let's just say you were just headed to Cimbria to find work, and you were afraid to talk to Thom when you first woke up. Then, after we drop this cargo, I'll send a wire to your father, and we'll get you sent off his direction. How does that sound?”

“Good. Emma, thank you.”

“Don't worry about it, hon.” She smiled at him. “Now, would you mind grabbing me an apple from the kitchen? I always forget to bring one with me when I come up here. They're in the cabinet on the port side.”

“Sure.” Andrew lowered himself from the chair onto the narrow metal catwalk. He climbed out of the cockpit, but instead of heading straight to the galley he paused in the operations room. Glancing back at the hatch to the cockpit, he moved to the speaking tube and placed his ear to it. He heard nothing for minute – then –

“Thom? Did you catch all that?” It was Emma's voice, coming from the cockpit.

“Yeah. So, I'm a hardened criminal now?”

“Relax. I was helping him open up.”

“Well, I think you laid it on a bit thick.”

“We got what we wanted, right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Exactly what you said. Drop the cargo, send a telegram to Oberon. We gotta find out who was expecting the Lydia and send them a little note of our own. I think a nice little finder's fee should be in order.”

“What about the kid?”

“Keep on like I don't know. That way he won't try to run. And we lock the cabin at night once we're on the ground.”

“'Kay. Think his dad really is loaded?”

“Only one way to find out. If not, we let him go. 'Till then, lock and key.”

“I'll tell you his story in front of him over lunch, okay?”

“Yeah.”

Andrew left the tube and tip-toed through the hatch towards the galley. That didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would.