Chapter 14: Chapter 13: Landing

Brother Davvis’s skimmer ate the ground up faster than Hildesman could believe. The Vice-Marshal had said that their assignment was the far side of the exile camp. He tried to track landmarks, craning against the gunnery cage to peer down at the forest, but from this perspective, none looked familiar.

“How will you know where the target is?” He called forward, after perhaps twenty or thirty minutes had passed. Time was harder to track after sunset, at least without a good view of the sky.

Brother Davvis turned his head slightly to the side, and called back “I have a range bouncer hooked up,” he tapped one dial with his left hand, his right hand still holding what must be the main control lever, “But it’s going to be a bit of guesswork, based on compass heading and distance. Once we land, I should be able to get a reading from the stars.”

Which meant that Brother Davvis meant to land tonight, before sunrise. Or else they would be flying through the night. Hildesman estimated that in order to approach from the far side of their target they’d have to travel seventy or eighty miles from the city on foot. It would have taken him three days on foot, assuming a good trail was available. Probably two days extra, since he would have to circle around. He started to trace the gunnery cage’s metal with a finger, trying to work out how fast the machine was going. He had just worked out that the flight distance was probably closer to sixty miles when his stomach made a nauseating shudder.

No, the skimmer had shuddered, and Hildesman had merely reacted. In fact, the whole craft was slowly turning to the left and tilting unsettlingly upward. Brother Davvis was struggling against the main control lever with all his weight, one hand desperately flailing at a small valve under one of the dials.

“Hold on, Mister Hildesman!” the young engineer shouted back. Hildesman looked around, and saw nothing to hold on to. Instead, he braced himself against the walls of his gunnery cage.

“What’s happening?” he shouted.

“Back left repulsor!” was all Brother Davvis managed, raising one foot to kick at a bit of pipe while he hauled on the control lever once again. The craft stopped spinning, but Hildesman noticed it was still tilting upward and, looking at the ground again, that it was losing height. They weren’t plummeting, yet. More like an airship with a leaky envelope. Swiveling his seat around, he saw that a brilliant blue jet of steam was spraying from the rear left orb. That was probably not supposed to happen.

“Looks like it’s got a leak!” he informed Brother Davvis. “What can I do to help?”

“Brace yourself,” Brother Davis hollered back, his voice increasingly drowned out by the building wind noise. “I can’t fix that in the air, we’re going to have to set down!”

There were a few leather handles fixed on the inside of the gunnery cage, and Hildesman grabbed hold of one with each hand. Then he looked down again. The forest was dense in this area. If Brother Davvis tried to land in a tree they’d never be able to recover this machine. And the branches could splinter and give either of them severe lacerations, if they weren’t lucky. With a sickening sensation, he realized that he had likely made a fatal error in joining Brother Davvis’s experimental flight.

“Set down where?” he asked.

“Here!” Brother Davvis answered, and Hildesman saw him look down for the first time. “Nineshadows!” he swore. A manic part of Hildesman’s mind noted that it was technically blasphemy. The part that kept him alive when direbeasts tried to eat him took over. He swiveled his chair, left, then right. The forest had a lot of little creeks, and those usually led to little ponds. He hadn’t spent a lot of time in the air, but he knew the forest. He just needed to spot the telltale signs of…there! He tried to estimate their angle of falling. He wasn’t sure, but he thought their angle would carry them past it. If Davvis could control the descent enough, they might be able to land on it.

“Thirty points right, that patch of forest where the leaves are darker!” Brother Davvis craned his neck, then threw himself at his controls again. Slowly, the nose of the skimmer rotated until they were pointed straight at the darker region.

“What am I looking for?” Davvis asked.

“Should be a creek or a pond near there!” Hildesman answered. His grip tightened on his leather strap. From this high up and this far away, it was hard to spot the actual stream. Hopefully Brother Davvis would be able to see it enough to guide them in.

“Found it! Impact in twenty seconds!”

Twenty seconds. Hildesman counted them down in his head, the stimulant chew and the emergency of the situation mingling to make each second seem like ten. Brother Davvis did something that made the skimmer tilt a nauseating quarter turn, so that it was nearly flying sideways to the ground. Hildesman managed to stay in his seat only through the grace of his good reflexed and the stability offered by the leather handles. He wasn’t sure how the other man kept his, but they were now descending with the left half of their machine pointed at the ground. The descent did slow at that point, though.

Fifteen. Brother Davvis threw a switch on the main control lever and it stayed more-or-less in place as he devoted both hands to managing other controls. The boiler that powered Hildesman’s gun started venting steam in a great column.

Five. Brother Davvis grabbed the bars of his seat. Though only the back of his helmet was visible, Hildesman could tell them man was clenching his teeth by the set of his shoulders. That was a good way to lose teeth, in a situation like this.

One. The ship was still a solid twenty feet over the crowns of the trees, but Hildesman could see that they were aimed at a narrow creek. The trees reached across it, so they’d be going through branches, but at least they wouldn’t land on the trunk. Hopefully they avoided being impaled.

It took four seconds longer than Brother Davvis’s prediction, or perhaps Hildesman counted four seconds too fast. Regardless, there was a sudden change in speed that threatened to crack Hildesman’s skull against the cage, even bracing himself as he was. Branches shattered with a sound that would be deafening, if Hildesman’s ears hadn’t already been ringing from the unexpected descent. A couple of them poked through the security of his seat, but they broke off before they could more than mildly scratch him. Brother Davvis had tucked his head down against his chest, leaving only his cheeks exposed between his helmet and breastplate. Kid had good instincts, Hildesman would give him that. Other than the teeth thing.

They broke through the crown trailing splintered wood, and the next thud came as the right front repulsor sphere touched ground. The whole machine rotated wildly again, until it was nearly on its nose. Brother Davvis reached out to his controls, his forearms bleeding from several shallow cuts, and pressed two plungers down with all his force. Suddenly, the skimmer rocked back to its sideways orientation, and it dug a long furrow in the ground as it grinded to a stop.

Like a coin flipped in a pub game, the whole thing slowly flopped back onto the ground. Hildesman felt the rush of relief he normally associated with winning a fight. He had some minor cuts and he had overworked one shoulder keeping himself from being scrambled like an egg, but he was alive. Brother Davvis let go of his own support grabs and slumped in his chair, but Hildesman could see his shoulders rising and falling with each breath. After a few seconds, Brother Davvis started to laugh, audibly.

Hildesman laughed with him. It wasn’t the closest he’d ever been to dying, but it was definitely closer than he liked to get.

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“I think,” he managed, after a few seconds. “That you have too many controls for two hands on your seat there.”

“Hey, I got us on the ground, didn’t I?” Brother Davvis chuckled. With a wince, he heaved himself out of his chair and helped Hildesman unfasten the latch to the gunnery cage.

“Indeed you did, Brother. Good to know you can handle a crisis.” Hildesman climbed out of his own cage, favoring his injured shoulder. Face to face, he could see that Brother Davvis had been scored several times by the branches of the trees they had crashed through, but none of the wounds looked deep enough to be life threatening. They’d need to be covered soon, though. Direwolves could smell blood, and Hildesman knew at least two big old brutes hunted the forests east of the city that hadn’t been found yet.

“We need to get this thing under treecover and get our cuts dressed.” He said. Brother Davvis, still silently grinning, moved to the machine, grabbing one of the support struts for the back of the skimmer. Hildesman followed his cue and moved to the front, grabbing the support struts there. He noticed that the one on the left had been bent rather severely, leaving the pod out of alignment with the other three. A break in what must have been a pipe hidden in the strut was slowly leaking more of the bluish vapor he had seen coming from the broken pod in midair.

With a heave, the two men were able to lift the skimmer and carry it a few dozen yards away from the crash site. Hildesman was surprised to note that the whole assembly only weighed about three times as much as a canoe. He had expected more weight to the machine, all things considered.

They found a space underneath an ancient willow that was big enough to set the skimmer down and walk around it. Brother Davvis sat begrudgingly still while Hildesman put antiseptics from his pack on their wounds and bound them in cloth bandages. The antiseptic Hildesman used should also serve to mask their scent, though it wouldn’t stop the direwolves from tracing the blood they had already lost. Hopefully neither of the brutes was in range.

“Can you repair it?” he asked.

Brother Davvis was still inspecting the damage, but he spoke as he worked. “I’ve got some sealing glue in the front compartment that should serve to patch the holes, and I was able to reclaim enough of the lift gas to get us airborne again. The real trick is going to be getting that strut back into place. I’ve got some clamps around that should be strong enough, but it’s gonna be a bear to get them in place, and there’s no guarantee the bar will stay in place.”

“Can you fly with it like that?”

“No. But if I could get it even halfway back we could get back in the sky. Wouldn’t be a smooth flight, but it would be enough.”

Hildesman nodded. Either the engineer would figure it out, or they would hide the machine and Hildesman could guide them on foot from here. “How can I help?”

“I’m gonna need a flame to seal the glue. Is it safe to build a fire here?”

“I’m not sure,” Hildesman answered. “I don’t know exactly where we are.”

“We’re about forty miles east of the city.”

“Directly east?”

“I followed the compass heading. Minus half a mile or so for the uh--emergency landing. Probably not even south of the wall yet.”

“I felt a crosswind,” Hildesman noted. He had been on an airship before, but he didn’t know much about actually operating one other than stories the pilots sometimes shared if they found their way to the Glass.

“Which way?”

“Blowing south.”

Brother Davvis considered that, then looked up. The branches of the willow tree were all there was to see. “We’re mostly east and a bit south. Not the most helpful…” he seemed to be talking to himself. “I need a better way to track where we are than a range sounder in the next iteration.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Hildesman offered. “Get started on what you can do without a fire. If needs be, I can build one that’s hidden.”

“Okay,” Brother Davvis said, rolling his cuffs back down over his bandages. “Six hours, Mister Hildesman. I’ll get us back in the air by then if it can be done with the tools at hand.”

“I’ll be back before one is up. And Brother? Keep your ears perked. We’re never alone out in this forest.”

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