Above The Clouds

almost sure already. "My name is Rosie. What's yours?" she asked.

  Rosie. A pilot's name. I knew it. I couldn't tell her my name was Red Baron. She'd know I wasn't supposed to be talking to her, and she wouldn't want to talk to me. "Red," I answered. It wasn't a lie. Pilots tended to call me that, right? I needed to change the subject fast.

  "What else do you think of that no one else does?" I pressed on. Anyway, I wanted to know.

  "Nothing useful. I look at the stars, because they're pretty and they're out when Mom's asleep. I imagine that they're grouped together in pictures, like the whole sky is a story. Stupid stuff," she told me, her voice dropping on those last two words.

  "Wow," was all I could answer her. The stars were above me. They'd been above me every night, but she was right. It wasn't just the bright band running down the middle. There were so many. "Like straight up, by the stripe, that boxy shape - it looks like a kite, doesn't it?" I asked as it sank in.

  "I thought so, too. Look behind it. It's trapped against the wall the stripe makes, because that long string of stars with the big group at the front is a shark," she suggested.

  "You're right. It's like there's another sky above us, with the same stories playing out up there," I told her.

  "It could be. At least you can see it. I've always wondered if there's another sky below us. What's on the other side of the clouds?" she asked.

  No one had ever said. I'd never thought to ask. The clouds were where you didn't go, not the ones below, not the ones you sometimes found floating in the sky. "I don't know," I answered. I sounded breathless now, like I was a pilot who could breathe.

  While I looked up at the stars and down at the rough shape of the clouds far below, she said very softly, "I'm going to go now. Thank you for talking to me, Red. It's better than talking to the stars."

  I assured her, "It was my pleasure." It had been. "You've given me a lot to think about." She had. "Sleep well." I hoped she would. It wasn't something I would ever do, unless I was badly hurt.

  I had all night to think about Rosie, and the way she saw the world.

  Our dock was a speck in the distance when Father broke his silence the next morning. "You know you're not my first," he announced out of the blue. There was no way to tell what he meant. He held onto the wheel with both hands, watching the sky through the windshield, his voice and expression grimly solemn. He always looked like that. Always.

  "I've heard it mentioned. I knew I couldn't be," I replied, trying to sound just as calm. He wouldn't like me to be meek any more than defiant. At his age, as good a pilot as he was, there was no way I was his first airship.

  "Your older brother's name was Albatross," Father went on. "I didn't inherit my parents' airship. I was talented, and they made a new airship just for me. Albatross was more of a brother and a partner than a son. We learned to fly together. He was fast, agile, and could fly himself if he had to."

  I listened silently. Father hadn't asked me to say anything, and I didn't know what to do anyway. "I fought my first real battle in Albatross, against pilots and machines, not animals. I earned my ace ranking fighting the Traitors in Albatross. It seemed like no one could hit us, and in the battle at the Black Rift, when a Traitor airship proved that wrong, he dropped so fast that their harpoon line snapped and their wing tore off."

  He stopped there for a moment. His brow, already heavy, lowered angrily. Then he went on, "Albatross died when the Traitors attacked the Wind Shear Fortress. No airship could match him, but a cannon shell fired at someone else tore open his canopy." I didn't want to imagine that. Not just the pain. It would sever half my control linkages, maybe break off a lift tank.

  "I didn't try to grab my wings. If Albatross fell, we would fall together. He didn't give me a choice. He rolled as we fell past a heavy gunship, dropping me on top of it where I could be dragged in. He was that good. Are you that good?" he asked me.

  With half my body broken open? Control of one wing at best? "No, Father."

  Emotion crept into Father's voice. A hint of a growl. "They wouldn't build me another of his model. They had a new design, they said. You were supposed to be faster, a better flier than Albatross. You're not."

  What did he want me to say? I didn't know. So I said nothing, and let him finish. I was having trouble avoiding the thought of a cannon shell ripping me in half. Father's voice was so cold as he told me, "You have to be as good as Albatross. You don't have any choice. If you're not, we're both going to die."

  He'd been talking a long time. The dock had gone from a speck to a looming nest of whale bone in the middle of a web of struts. Father turned us in to dock at one of those piers. It was the simplest and most casual of maneuvers, but with that conversation fresh in mind I watched the angle of every control surface, and eased up on the switches to my lift tanks. We cruised into place as delicately as a starfish settling on a whale.

  I opened up the hatch, and Father climbed out and strolled up the pier into the dock itself. Then I let go, and floated out with the other airships to wait for our pilots to get back.

  "Manfred never seems to be happy," Aviatic commented as we sat and waited.

  "No, he's not," I agreed. I didn't want to say more than that. I felt uncomfortable bad talking any pilot, much less my Father.

  "Flying is the only thing he cares about. That's why my Father's in charge, and it's why Manfred is the best pilot around," Aviatic told me.

  "Was Albatross really that good?" I asked. I was the youngest. They had to have known him.

  "Yeah. He was. He was the only person, airship or pilot, Manfred was never disappointed with," Sopwith Camel assured me.

  "It should be an honor not to be good enough for Manfred Richtoffen," Aviatic added.

  His tone was so stern. I didn't have the right to be angry with my pilot, and I knew it. Only to try to meet his expectations.

  Sopwith Camel had drifted a bit too close as we talked over the Chatter. The tip of his lower front wing nearly brushed one of my active propellers. I leaned away, shifted some lift down to ballast, and eased myself down out of the way, then back around the other side of him.

  That had been clumsy. If he'd hit my propeller, even idling like this, I'd have gone spinning. I might have smacked into the dock! How could he have not noticed drifting that close?

  It was Aviatic's place to reprimand him, not mine. Aviatic wasn't saying anything. None of the other airships were saying anything.

  It hadn't been an accident.

  I slid around to the other side of the pier and shut the Chatter off while I waited. If they had anything more to say, I didn't want to hear it anymore.

  The pilots came back. The moment his boot touched my floor plate Father was all business. He stepped straight into the cockpit and swung the wheel away. I got the message, and spun up my propellers and pulled us away before he had to reach for the acceleration handle.

  "We have orders. We're bearing for the Eye," he informed me. I picked up speed, but one of his strong hands grabbed the accelerator and swung it up and forward farther than I would. We sped ahead, taking the lead in front of the rest of the squadron.

  I compared our location on the Magnet to the charts. Of course, Father had the right direction just on instinct, but I flipped up a wind break and adjusted us a couple of degrees.

  Orders. Not a hunt. Maybe combat. Almost certainly combat. That's why we were out front. Even if he had to fly me, Father would be the pilot most likely to evade an ambush.

  Combat. Where Albatross had been broken open, and fallen down through the clouds that interested Rosie so much.

  "Father, why do we never fly through the clouds?" I asked.

  "For the same reason we don't land on a whale and let them carry us. Too much can go wrong. It's never worth it, even for the tactical advantage," he answered. He was talking to me freely, at least.

  He thought I meant clouds like
The Eye. "I meant down there, to rescue a falling airship, or just to find out what's on the other side," I corrected.

  "Because we don't, and that's enough," he answered crisply. I couldn't tell if he was angry or not. He did go on. "If an airship hits the cloud layer, it's dead. We try to live, Red Baron, but we can't be afraid of death. We have a duty. Not just a duty, a purpose. You live to serve me, and I live to serve the Fleet. If those lives are lost, they aren't wasted."

  He flipped the Chatter back on, and turned it to the main band, where our squadron's voices stood out against the distant background babble from around the world.

  "Are we ready for this, Captain? We're well out of practice," a voice asked. That was Shorthorn's father, Lewis.

  "We'll get in practice fast. The border's going to explode," Captain Todd answered.

  "Whatever the consequences, we follow orders," Father gruffed.

  "True enough, but we need to look to the future, Manfred. This is a beginning," Captain Todd responded.

  I wished they would stop talking, but they didn't. They talked about supplies, and whether we should be traveling so light. It didn't make a difference to me. All I was going to carry was the replacement shells and harpoons I'd been loaded with while Father boarded.

  They talked about what other squadrons might be at the dock when we got back, or if we'd be moved to a new base now that we were off foraging duty.

  They talked about the recent