Skybreaker

  “Hoods up,” said Dorje, “I’m about to open the hatch.”

  I pulled up the hood, feeling the soft fur encase me. The lower portion buttoned up, leaving only a slit for my eyes, now covered by goggles. All sound was muffled. I was eager to get outside, for I was starting to sweat.

  Dorje pulled a lever and the bay doors split apart and rolled flush with the ship’s underbelly. Cold gushed in. But I felt it only against the exposed portion of my face, for the snow leopard suit protected me so well.

  I looked straight down to the Hyperion’s back, shimmering like a mirage, glinting with ice. I could not understand how she had stayed aloft so many years, uncaptained, clawed and pummeled by the winds.

  Dorje went first. He clipped his safety harness to the winch and sat down at the edge of the hatch.

  “Ready?” Kami Sherpa asked.

  Dorje nodded and pushed off into open air. The winch paid out line quickly. We all watched. Though light, the wind still twirled him about some. From our vantage point, it looked like he was swinging far out over the ship’s flanks. As he neared the ship’s back, he bent his knees and set down gracefully, dead center. He quickly cleated his safety line to an icy guide rail, then unclipped himself from the winch. He gave the signal, and Kami Sherpa started rolling the cable back in.

  “Are you all right with this?” I quietly asked Kate.

  “Yes,” she said tightly.

  “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “I daresay I’ll quite enjoy it,” she replied with a vigorous nod.

  “Cruse, you’re next,” said Hal. “Get that mask on.”

  “See you all down there,” I said.

  I reached back into my rucksack and opened the tap on my oxygen tank. The mask was a translucent glass shield, rimmed with rubber insulation, that fit snugly over nose and mouth. It hissed faintly as I strapped it on. Instantly I felt like I was suffocating. I yanked it down.

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Breathe deep. Slow, even breaths,” Hal said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I’m fine. I don’t need it.”

  “Put it on, or you don’t go down.”

  Reluctantly I strapped the mask back across my face. I did not want Kate and Nadira to think I was afraid of the descent; truly, I was eager to be in the sky. It was the mask alone that scared me, the way it sealed off my mouth and nose from the air. It felt wholly unnatural. Claustrophobia clutched at my chest. I fought my panic and took a long pull through my mouth. The air had an unpleasant metallic tang.

  After a few more breaths, I felt the oxygen enter my lungs, and my muscles unclenched a bit. I did not like it, but I could do it.

  “All right?” Hal said.

  I nodded. Kami Sherpa helped me hook my harness to the winch. I sat, and pushed off over the edge and—

  Sky.

  Twenty thousand feet of it, spreading out around me to all the horizons of the world. This high, it seemed the sky no longer had anything to do with the land or sea below it. It was its own kingdom up here. Here, above the clouds, it scoffed at the idea of earth. These were the wild deeps of the sky, where water existed only as unseen ice crystals, and the wind moved in secret aerial tides. I was but a speck. For a moment I felt I had no right to be here, encased within my fur suit, breathing tanked air. Yet this was my birthplace: not so high, of course, but here nonetheless, and the sky could not disown me. This was still my element more than the earth.

  Down I went.

  The wind met my face like a chisel. Even through the sky suit, I could feel the ferocious cold, just held at bay like some starving animal. Below me, far below the great bulk of the Hyperion, the clouds looked solid as sand dunes. I hoped none of those electrocuting aerozoans would cross my path, or another diabolical creature not yet discovered. It seemed whenever I was with Kate, some new species popped up and tried to eat us.

  On the ship’s back Dorje was waiting for me, crouched low. My feet had barely touched down when he was clipping my safety line to the rail. I unclasped myself from the winch and gave Kami the signal to reel in. Dorje pointed at the forward crow’s nest, and I began to make my way over while he stayed behind to help Kate and Nadira. Hal would come last.

  Bent low against the wind, I stepped carefully, for the ship’s skin was icy, gritty in some places, sheer in others, as if a film of water had frozen instantaneously. I kept my safety line fastened to the rail, though it was rusty and pockmarked, and I had to wonder at its strength. The wind punched at me; the cold etched a fissure of pain across my forehead. There was no sound but the muffled howl of the sky beyond the hood and my own panting through the mask.

  I reached the crow’s nest, its glass observation dome thickly matted with frost. I tried the hatch. Locked. Hal’s instructions were to get inside as quickly as possible. I reached into my rucksack and drew out the small pry bar. I wedged it under the latch, heaved down, and felt the lock give way. Bending to get a grip on the hatch’s rim, I put my face to the dome.

  Through a clear patch in the ice, an eye was looking out at me.

  I gave a cry and jerked back, spluttering inside my mask and fighting the urge to rip it off. I forced myself to take deep breaths. With the edge of the pry bar I scratched away more of the ice.

  Inside the crow’s nest was a sailor, his head tipped against the glass, forehead frozen to it. His eyes were wide open. His skin was blackened by sun and time, but his body had been preserved completely. He was shrunken in his uniform. His mouth was slightly parted. One of his withered hands was frozen closed around the speaking tube. He seemed about to say something, only death had come along and interrupted him.

  Looking over my shoulder I saw Kate cautiously shambling up beside me. Behind her, Nadira had just touched down, and soon Hal would arrive. I needed to get the hatch open. I removed my mask and shouted close to Kate’s hood so she could hear me.

  “There’s a body!”

  I pointed at the crow’s nest, and she nodded. Then I bent down and heaved up the dome. Kate helped. Hinges shrieked and ice danced up in the air as the dome lifted. The sailor’s forehead snapped free of the glass, and his whole body toppled forward, rigid as a mannequin. His face clunked against the metal rim of the open hatch, chipping away a piece of his cheek.

  I looked at Kate to see how she was doing, but her entire face was hidden behind hood and goggles and mask.

  The body had to be moved, for it blocked the ladder. I jumped down into the crow’s nest and began to shift it. It was difficult—he was heavy with ice and his arms were sticking out. For a horrible moment I worried I might drop him and he would shatter into a hundred pieces before my eyes.

  But suddenly Hal was in the crow’s nest with me. He grabbed the body by the armpits, hefted it up, and heaved it out onto the ship’s back. Before I could even object, Hal gave the body a good shove and sent it skidding over the hull’s curve into the great blue sky. Without further ado, Hal started down the ladder.

  Dorje, standing near the hatch, gestured for Kate and Nadira to follow. Then I headed down myself. Out of the wind, it was not nearly as cold. The pain across my forehead eased. Light from the open hatch spilled down the thin rungs and faintly illuminated the ship’s wooden ribs and the sides of her enormous gas cells. They were made from a kind of goldbeater’s skin that hadn’t been used for more than twenty years. Some of the bracing wires, I noticed, were rope instead of alumiron cable. The Hyperion was a venerable ship, among the first large airships to ply the skies. She was a piece of history. And it was a testament to the craftsmen who built her that she was still aloft.

  Above me, Dorje closed the hatch, and the companionway would have been plunged into gloom were it not for Hal’s torchlight aimed from below. He was waiting on the catwalk with Kate and Nadira, who had removed their goggles and masks. I did the same. After the tanked oxygen, the thin air seemed meager fare at first, but within a few breaths, I was used to it once more. Seeing Hal and Dorje breathing normally with
out any help at all, I was determined not to use my mask again.

  “Everyone all right?” Hal asked.

  Kate and Nadira were breathing heavily, but they both nodded. In the frigid air, our breath plumed from our noses and mouths like dragon’s smoke.

  “I can’t believe you threw that man overboard,” I said. My voice was small and hollow in the dark ship.

  “He’s not a man anymore,” retorted Hal. “He’s ice. And he was in our way. It’s not safe hanging about on the ship’s back. The crow’s nest needs to be clear for us and our cargo. It’s our main thoroughfare.”

  “Everyone deserves a proper burial,” said Kate.

  “We could have lowered him down the ladder,” I told Hal.

  “If we snapped his arms clean off, maybe. That’s time I won’t waste. Now, all of you, stow your sentimentality and save your breath.”

  “Hal’s right,” said Nadira. “The way needed clearing.”

  I glanced at Dorje, hoping for his support, but he said nothing. He either agreed with Hal or was too loyal to criticize his captain before others. I looked about in the dim light. Flanking the catwalk were the rippling walls of the gas cells, sparkling with ice crystals, forming a kind of canyon. We were on the axial catwalk, the maintenance corridor that ran through the very center of the ship, from bow to stern. Beyond the reach of Hal’s torch beam, the corridor stretched on into darkness, and I felt the cavernous immensity of the ship all around me, a lair of unseen spaces.

  “This way,” said Hal, starting down another ladder. “To the keel catwalk.”

  Maybe it was the ship’s wooden ribs, or my sky suit, or the tanked air I carried on my back, but with every slow, careful step I felt like a deep-sea diver. The air around me was as cold and heavy as arctic water.

  “Take out your torches,” Hal said when we’d all reached the bottom.

  I switched mine on. I had expected many things, but not the sight that greeted us. It was like the inside of a shipwreck, frozen at the ocean’s floor. All the tanks and pipelines overhead had burst and their various liquids—water, fuel, and lubricants—had congealed mid-flow. Great oily stalactites spiked from overhead, releasing phantasmagoric rainbows as our torch beams struck them. Walls and girders and wires bore coatings of frost in purples and oranges and blood reds that resembled strange coral and sea anemones. The Aruba fuel had turned brilliant green as it froze and shaped itself into bizarre spirals and arches and buttresses as though an army of pixie artisans had been hard at work.

  “Control car first,” said Hal, unmoved by the unearthly beauty around him.

  He led the way cautiously forward. Dorje, I noticed, was deftly making a map as he went. We paused only to throw open the doors of a few crew cabins. In two, my torch beam passed over the dark hump of sailors, frozen in their bunks. They looked like the bodies found in Pompeii after Vesuvius had erupted.

  “That’s how I want to go,” Hal said. “In my sleep.”

  Whatever it was that doomed the Hyperion forty years ago, it had happened swiftly, and at night.

  We descended an icy ladder to the control car.

  The high windows were thick with frost, but let in enough light so that we could turn off our torches. Rivulets of frozen water corded the glass and walls. Icicles hung from the ceiling. Most of the crew lay twisted on the floor, their bodies fused with pools of ice. The captain, hat still atop his head, perched on the stool before the rudder wheel, his torso slumped against it. His hands gripped the spokes, though I saw they were no longer connected with his wrists. They had snapped off long ago.

  “What happened to them all?” Kate wondered aloud.

  The sight of all these dead men was truly terrible to behold, and my mind became very practical and turned them into objects, or else I could not have looked upon them with a steady eye or pulse.

  The captain twitched suddenly, and I gave a shout, but it was only the wheel moving, shaking his rigid body as it turned.

  “That’s good news,” said Dorje, watching the wheel turn.

  “The rudder chains are still working,” I said, glad to be fixing my mind on concrete matters.

  “We can steer her at least,” said Hal. “We won’t be at the mercy of the winds quite as much. I told Jangbu we’d heave to if we could. That should keep us out of trouble for the salvage.”

  “What’s heaving to?” Nadira asked.

  “Bringing the ship into the wind,” I told her, “and locking her rudder to keep her stationary.” Even with only four engines, the Saga would provide enough power to keep the Hyperion from blowing backward.

  Hal and Dorje unceremoniously took hold of the captain and wrenched him off his stool. They tipped him against the wall. Hal took hold of the wheel.

  “Let’s see how she moves.”

  For forty years, the winds alone had steered the Hyperion. Now she once more had a helmsman. Very slowly Hal turned the wheel.

  “She’s moving,” I said.

  Knowing that Jangbu above needed to match the Saga to his movements, Hal brought the Hyperion about gradually.

  “That should do it. Let’s tie her off,” he said.

  Dorje took two ropes from his rucksack, and he and I worked together to secure the wheel. The Hyperion wavered in the wind, wanting to turn, but the rudder held her in check, aided by the Sagarmatha’s powerful engines overhead. We still drifted slightly, but no longer rode the sky like a porpoise.

  “That’s much better,” said Kate.

  The ship’s clock had stopped at 23:48 hours. I looked at the altimeter, the glass dome cracked, the needle frozen at 19,625 feet.

  “She went too high,” I said. “That’s what killed everyone. This was no mutiny. No pirates either. Everyone was still at their posts, or asleep.”

  “No,” said Hal. “This altitude isn’t fatal.”

  “It is if she rose fast enough.”

  “Why would she?” Hal asked.

  “An updraft maybe. I saw it on the Flotsam. If they went from two thousand to twenty thousand feet in a minute, it might’ve undone them.”

  “They froze to death, you mean?” Nadira asked.

  “No,” I said, “they would’ve suffocated long before that. Going up so fast, it would’ve been like having all the air sucked out of their lungs. They would’ve passed out. That’s why everyone is on the floor. Only the captain managed to hang on for a bit.”

  Dorje silently nodded his agreement.

  “Well, it’s a nice theory, anyway,” said Hal. “I hope you’re right. If they weren’t attacked by pirates, it means we’ll be the first to plunder her holds. Let’s get moving.”

  A sound, very much like someone exhaling, whispered through the control car.

  We all went rigid. My eyes skittered over the bodies on the floor, half expecting them to stir and crack free of the ice. Hal, a pistol suddenly in his hand, whirled toward the ladder, which was the only way in and out of the control car. No one was poised on its rungs, or in the hatchway above.

  “Who’s there!” he shouted.

  “Crowwwwsnesssss…” came the reply.

  This time I caught its source, and gave a shout, pointing. The unearthly whisper was emanating from an icy grille mounted on the side of the control car. It was the endpoint of the crow’s nest speaking tube. Heat flashed across my back and down my arms. I pictured the lookout, raising the mouthpiece to his frozen lips, exhaling his last sounds from his ice-crusted throat. We stared, mute, at the grille.

  “…essssssssssssss,” said the voice, and then it became nothing more than a shushing of dead air along the speaking tube.

  “It’s just the wind,” Kate said. “Making voices.”

  “Obviously,” Hal agreed.

  We all cleared our throats and gave dry little laughs and generally tried to make light of it.

  “You brought a pistol,” I said to Hal.

  “Just a negotiating tool,” he said. “You never know who else might show up, claiming right of salvage.”

/>   “Look at this,” said Kate. She was standing at the navigation table, peering down through the thick ice flow that had formed over the chart. Its markings were all but obliterated, but I could still make out the telltale outlines of Norway and Finland and the coast of Russia. “Grunel was supposed to be flying to America. So, why would they have a chart of Scandinavia and Russia?”

  “Curious, but it doesn’t matter,” said Hal, barely taking a glance. “I want to get to those holds.”

  Back up the ladder we went, and aft along the ice-encrusted keel catwalk, past the companion ladder we’d come down, squeezing around stalactites. We soon reached a short stairway that led up to the main passenger deck, but Hal ushered us past, saying we’d return later. On either side of the corridor we passed the closed doorways of the kitchens and pantry and various other crew’s quarters. Some of the doors were half-sealed behind frozen waterfalls, and it would take some doing to crack through.

  Our five torch beams plowed the darkness before us as we entered the guts of the ship. Cargo bays are usually built amidships, port and starboard, so their weight is evenly distributed at the ship’s center. On either side of the catwalk were built strong walls, much higher than the usual cargo bay. These ones were two stories tall, and were not made of wood, but metal, studded with rivets. They looked impregnable as a battleship’s armor.

  Hal came to a stop. On the port side of the catwalk was a single door, glinting with mauve frost. There was no sign. In the door’s center was a metal plate with a handle, and below it a complicated circular keyhole.