I WAS GLAD to have Ivan back on my side, but I was also irritated that he did have a point. Not only had I never flown an aircraft, I’d only flown in an aircraft once—my current airship ride excluded. If I was going to do anything, I needed a pilot.
I glanced over at Jacob, who shook his head—which wasn’t very surprising. Even if Jacob, by some miracle, had a pilot’s license, I doubt it would have qualified him to fly one of these biplanes.
I turned back toward Ivan and said, “I guess I’m going to have to learn how.”
He gave me an “Are you serious?” look, then said, “I’ll fly you.” One of the guardsmen raised an objection in Russian, but Ivan cut him short.
“You’re a pilot?” I asked incredulously.
“No,” Ivan said. “However, standard training for the White Guard includes fifteen hours of flight training.”
Fifteen hours did not sound like a lot. Jacob must have felt the same way because he touched my arm and asked, “Are you sure about this?”
“It’s this, or try not to die as we wait for the Bad Guy to attack from a more accessible location.”
Jacob sighed and said, “Here.” He held out the gun Mikhail had given him. It was an oversized automatic, bearing some resemblance to a Luger if the Luger had started taking steroids and doing some serious weight training. “I checked the magazine. There are five shots left.”
It took me a moment to figure out where the safety was on the thing. Just when I found it and was trying to decide what part of my underwear could be used as a holster, Ivan cleared his throat. I turned around to see him holding out a long coat that must have come from one of the other guards. “You’ll need this,” he said.
I almost made an asinine remark about not worrying about my modesty when I realized that these biplanes had open-air cockpits and I was naked from cleavage upward. The only reason I wasn’t freezing now was because of the adrenaline rush from fighting the Shadows.
I let him put the jacket on me. The thing hung on me like I was a little girl trying on daddy’s sports coat. It smelled of gun smoke and a stranger’s sweat, and the heavy wool was not meant to rest on naked skin. My shoulders started itching immediately.
But at least it answered the question of where to put Mr. Luger’s big brother. The gun went into one of the coat’s oversized pockets.
“Come this way,” Ivan waved toward the large doors opposite the folded biplanes.
THERE was an elaborate system of tracks and cables in the ceiling, leading from where the folded biplanes were parked and out the skin of the airship above the hangar doors. The cable and pulley system would suspend the folded plane like a cable car from the track above and allow it to roll out the door.
The doors felt large, but objectively they weren’t any bigger than the garage door at my townhouse. With the wings folded, and the propeller vertical, the biplanes weren’t any wider than my Charger.
Ivan didn’t go to one of the parked planes. Instead he walked up to a smaller, human-sized door set next to the big door. He checked a lighted console between the big door and the small one, opened a panel, and threw a pair of knife switches that looked like they belonged in Frankenstein’s laboratory.
“This one is fueled and ready,” he said. He began turning the wheel on the smaller door.
I looked back at the parked biplanes and said, “What about . . .” I trailed off when I realized that when I had seen the airship from the outside there were biplanes suspended from the sides of the airship already. What I saw parked on the deck here were reserves.
The one Ivan wanted to fly was already outside.
He opened the door, and frigid air started rushing by me. He shouted over the sound of the wind ripping by us. “Come through! I have to close the door!”
I stepped over the threshold and winced as my feet touched the metal ledge on the other side of the door. I’d kicked off my impractical shoes earlier; now I wanted them back. The metal was cold enough to have a layer of frost. I grabbed a wall of mesh netting to keep from falling and found myself looking down along the shadowed length of the airship into the moonlit clouds.
I gasped, and the frigid wind cut at my throat.
Ivan pulled the door shut behind us, and we were alone outside the airship.
“Come on!”
He held on to a cable strung along a gangway that led away from the airship. It was only about twenty or thirty feet long, but that was thirty feet into midair, and from where I cowered, it looked like a mile.
I told myself to get a grip, I had jumped twice now into places where I didn’t have so much as a good intention between me and the ground. Of course, both cases lasted less than a second, and I could have the Mark push me back into the relative safety of the airship.
I think my body knew the difference. I could feel terror boiling inside me as I grabbed the guide cable and followed Ivan. It got worse with every step away from the safe confines of the airship. My stomach clenched itself into an acid-soaked ball, trying to squeeze the Emperor’s dinner back up my throat.
I pulled myself along the gangway, up next to Ivan, and gulped down the rising gorge when I reached the edge of the protective netting.
The gangway paralleled the track that had led out the main hangar door and under one of the stubby wings that projected from the airship’s skin. The track ended here, buried in the wing above me in an impenetrable mass of struts and cables. Cables and pulleys descended from the track above, past the level of the gangway, to suspend one of the biplanes below me.
On either side of the complex system of cables holding the plane dangled a pair of ladders. Each ladder was nothing more than a pair of chains set about a foot apart, with a metal bar joining them every two feet along its length. They swayed slightly in the harsh wind.
So did the plane beneath us.
So did the gangway.
So did my stomach.
And each one moved at a slightly different frequency and amplitude.
I swore, but whatever sour words I managed to say were lost under the sound of the wind.
Ivan didn’t have to tell me what to do. It was pretty obvious. The biplane was a two-seater, and the ladders fore and aft were the only way down. Ivan had already grabbed the forward ladder and was climbing down into the pilot’s seat.
I reached out for the other ladder, leaning around the edge of the netting one-handed. The metal rung was cold around my fingers, but I held it in a death grip as I let go of the netting with the other. I carefully raised one foot and set it on a lower rung—and the whole ladder swung out with my weight.
“Fuck!” I screamed as my other foot left the gangway and I swung back and forth. I shoved my other foot into the ladder so forcefully that the swinging got worse. For a moment everything felt wild and chaotic, the cold metal burning the skin of my hands and feet, my shoulder slamming into the cables supporting one wing of the aircraft. The swaying made me so dizzy that I had to screw my eyes shut to keep my grip.
I think it only lasted a couple of seconds, because the ladder had become mostly still before I heard Ivan yell back up to me, “Are you all right?”
I managed to choke out one word. “Fine!”
I started climbing down, eyes shut and burning with tears, groping downward slowly, one naked foot at a time. It felt like hours before I reached down with one foot and briefly panicked when there was no more ladder to descend. Then I felt my sole brush something, and I looked down.
My left foot was dangling just above the back of the copilot’s seat.
I sucked in a frigid breath and lowered myself into the plane. I felt an immense relief when I slipped into the seat and was no longer dangling from the ladder, which wasn’t to say I wasn’t still dangling. The whole plane was suspended by the track above and swaying just enough to make me aware of the motion.
“Get ready and strap yourself in.” Ivan called out to me. I fished around and found a harness attached to the sides of the copilot’s chair. I pulled the straps over my shoulders and buckled myself in, and I realized that the restraints were not designed with women in mind. I’m not particularly busty, but I still had the upper part of the evening gown on, along with underwear at least as structurally complex as the shell of this biplane—and both still conspired to extract extra boob from the ether, while the harness attempted to crush them back where they had come from.
“Ready?” Ivan called back.
“Yes,” I gasped, forcing myself to breathe against the restraints.
I heard a grinding whirr, and the plane started vibrating. In front of us, I saw the propeller begin turning as the engine noise and the vibration intensified. It kept getting louder, going from lawnmower, to chainsaw, all the way to Rammstein concert. Ivan yelled something at me, but I couldn’t hear him over the engine.
The plane was angled about forty-five degrees off the axis of the airship, pointing forward. As the engine revved, the propeller dragged the body of the biplane forward, the cables attaching us to the track above were now angled away from the ship.
There was a severe bounce, and my stomach tried to slam up through my diaphragm as the cables all popped free of the wing above me. The biplane fell at an angle toward the silver-lit clouds, the airship shooting away behind us impossibly fast.
I didn’t breathe, staring unblinking, eyes watering in the freezing air slipping by the stubby windscreen. The silver-backed clouds raced up to meet us, and I felt my dinner racing up to join them. Ivan leveled us out before either decided to meet. Once we seemed to be actually flying, he throttled back the engine to buzz saw levels.
“You can take us to the enemy now?” Ivan called back.
I clenched my teeth and closed my watering eyes. I felt battered and abused, every exposed surface of my body burned from the cold and the wind, my insides felt as if they’d gone through a blender. I felt as if I’d have trouble walking five feet, much less to another universe.
“Yes!” I yelled back.
My Mark was still there, and unlike the rest of me, nothing about it felt shaken or abused. In fact, the more ragged the sense of my physical body became, the more solid it seemed. I focused on it, and it seemed more real than the world around me, the cold, the nausea, the stinging wind in my eyes. I could feel the world I was in, and I could feel the worlds around it unfolding like petals of a flower blooming in infinite directions. I felt the neighbor spaces; for a brief moment my sense of direction failed me, and I couldn’t find the place the Shadows had come from.
I panicked and opened my eyes. I couldn’t lose track of this, not now. Then I focused on the full moon as the nose of the Emperor’s airship began to eclipse it.
Seeing that, something clicked in my brain. I had moved relative to the airship, and I had also moved relative to the place where we were going. Suddenly, my sense of the surrounding worlds fell into place and I knew what direction inside myself I had to look.
“Get ready!” I called to Ivan.
I reached out with the Mark and pushed myself, Ivan, and the biplane.