Tin Swift(40)

The Bickern pounded up behind them. And so did the Saginaw.

The sails held. They could glide her down, but they’d be dead under the other ships’ guns before they touched earth.

There had to be a way out of this, a card he hadn’t played.

“Looks like we’re going to have to finish this fight on land, ladies and gents. Strap in tight, and I’ll try to put our back to a wall.”

The hills were coming on fast, darkness in the darkness, as he struggled to keep the Swift’s nose up and into the wind. He’d come out of worse situations with his bones in order.

Okay, maybe not.

The trees were rushing up awful fast now.

“We need lift,” he yelled.

Seldom squirreled down the ladder and hooked gear to the overhead. “Envelope’s torn up, so’s the rudder and port engine.”

“What does that mean?” Cedar Hunt asked.

“It means you’d better start praying for miracles.” Captain Hink didn’t have time to say more. The ship was making a pained wail, her voice mingling with Ansell’s song as she dove toward her final meeting with the Almighty Himself, hot enough to burn feathers.

Cannons shot off again, searing the sky with an explosive round. The Bickern didn’t want to scrap them, she wanted to end them.

And then the woman, Mae Lindson, stood right up beside Captain Hink, boots spread to take the tilt of the ship, no harness, and not holding on to anything. Just standing there like a copilot looking out across a calm sea.

She was glassy-eyed, as if caught in a fever, half whispering, half singing some kind of prayer as she stared out the windows.

Folks all have a different way to say howdy to death, he supposed, but he’d rather kick death in the eye than go out singing a little ditty.

“Mrs. Lindson, you’d better hold on—”

She reached up and clamped her hand on his shoulder. With a harsh word that wasn’t made of the King’s English, she wrapped her other hand around the overhead bar. A shock of lightning whipped through him.

Then, all he could hear was the woman’s prayer, lifted and harmonized by a dozen women’s voices. All he could see was her eyes, soft, brown, warm as the earth turned on a summer day. He tasted wildflower nectar on his tongue, smelled rich honey.

And then he somehow fell all apart and was strung back together by that prayer. He found himself stretched out in a familiar shape, wearing wings and an engine with tin skin that feared no storm nor sky. He wore the Swift as if he were a part of it, as if he were the beating heart to a machine that trod the air.

Hink was a questioning sort of man, but he was not going to question this.

She was dying, his ship. Plummeting to her death. He wasn’t going to let that happen. Mae Lindson’s song that echoed through his veins wasn’t going to let that happen.

Captain Hink knew how to trim the wings, he understood the wind as if he had been born to it. And he knew he called out commands to his men. He knew that they answered, just as his own hands fell to the wheel and steered her steady, over a landside he could see beneath him as if he had eyes in his feet.

The gunshots didn’t mean anything. He could flick the tip of a wing, and never be touched. But there was only so much the wind could give him. He needed a place to land, a safe place, a hidden place. Somewhere nearby that the other birds wouldn’t see.

There was a crack through the mountains that led to a canyon. Most ships didn’t bother with it, being too narrow to land in, and nothing in the canyon worth landing for.

It would be perfect. A safe place to make repairs. A safe place to rest.

Hink steered toward the narrow slit in the mountainside, an act of suicide on a bright and sunny day, and a handshake with death at night with a crippled ship.

“You won’t make it, Captain,” Guffin shouted from somewhere behind the woman’s song.

“Like hell I won’t.” Hink laughed.

The Swift pushed her way on, the wind laying the sky on her back, and pushing her belly up, up. Foothills, trees, scraping the hull. Hink gritted his teeth. There’d be more to repair, landing gear fouled. But he could make it. She could make it. All he needed was one good gust of tailwind.

“Wind,” he said. “Give me wind.”

And it was there for him, wind rising, warm as a blessing, lifting his wings, pushing the Swift just a little faster, aiming at the notch in the rocks, as his crew cursed and prayed and the Swift beneath him, around him, responded to his every command.

Captain Hink could see the path as clear as if it were lit by a hundred gas lanterns. He steered the little ship straight and true through the crack in the mountainside, and out to the canyon beyond.

The Swift tucked wing tight, and slid down, like a feather on a string, toward the little hollow hidden from above by the overhang of rocks.