“We do.” Riuza tapped one of her indicators, and was rewarded with a little wave of a needle. “It’s called the Bayonne Glacier.”
He nodded. “Ah. I see.”
Why do I sense that she doesn’t like me very much? Such a pity. She has such a nicely shaped head. I’ll bet she has a beautiful smile as well.
“You should try to get some sleep,” she said. “We’ll probably need your help in the morning to secure the ship when we land.”
“All right then. Good night.” Omar shuffled back to his seat between the apples and the toilet, wrapped his new wool coat tightly around himself, and closed his eyes.
He awoke to the hideous noise of metal vibrating against metal. Sitting up, he saw the naked fear in Garai’s unblinking eyes and the breathless panic in Kosoko’s pale face. Both of them were gripping the seats and bags beside them, and all around the men their stores and supplies were shaking against the cabin walls.
“What’s happening?” he shouted over the rattling noise, but the two men only stared back at him in silence.
Omar lurched to his feet, clutching the shaking rails overhead for balance. Through the windows he could see the thick stormheads of the gray clouds all across the horizon with their edges set ablaze by the rising sun. Heavy rain drops pelted the windows of the gondola and the heavens thundered without pause as the clouds flashed with lightning again and again.
He stumbled to the front of the cabin and leaned into the cockpit. “What’s going on?”
Riuza clutched the controls tightly with both hands and Morayo lay on the floor, a wrench in her teeth and both hands thrust into an open panel by Riuza’s feet.
“Just some weather, Mister Bakhoum,” the captain said. “Best if you sit back down.”
Omar didn’t move. Through the forward windscreen, he could see a great plain of black and white ice shining across the ground. And the ground was growing closer. “What can I do to help?”
“Just sit down.”
“But look how fast we’re coming down! Are we going to crash?”
“Sit down!”
The Finch shook violently and leaned over on its port side, and Omar could feel the freezing wind whistling through some unseen crack in the walls. Behind them, the engine sputtered and the droning of the propellers began to skip and stutter and choke on the winter air. The cabin shook harder.
Morayo slammed her panel closed and scrambled back up into her seat as she shoved her tools into her pockets. “We’re screwed until I can get outside, captain!”
Omar glared at the two women, and opened his mouth to demand more information about what was happening when he caught sight of the ground out of the port side windows. The frozen tips of ice spires whipped by the glass, clattering on the hull. And ahead of them, tilted at a drunken angle, he saw the face of the glacier about to strike the gondola. The world that had once looked so distant and smooth now appeared terribly close and riddled with jagged outcroppings of ice. “We’re going to crash! Do something!”
“Morayo!” the captain shouted, “The anchor! Now!”
The engineer leapt from her seat, shoved Omar out of her way, and dashed to the thick brass gunstock welded into the inner panel of the starboard wall. Omar fell to the floor, cracking his head on a railing. Squinting and fumbling for a handhold, he watched Morayo jerk the gunstock up and left and then she pulled the heavy iron trigger. A sudden shock ran through the cabin floor and Omar heard a sharp whistling rip through walls. Briefly he glimpsed the wire cable zipping down from the ceiling above the gunstock and vanishing through a brass eyelet into the world outside.
The Finch jerked to starboard and Omar stumbled as he rose to his feet. Through the window he saw the jagged spears of ice so close that he could almost reach out and touch them, but no nearer, and no longer coming any closer.
The Finch had become stuck in midair.
He turned to ask what had happened, but just then Morayo grabbed a winch handle beside the gunstock and began cranking it around. Omar climbed the uneven deck to her side and lent a hand, forcing the winch over and under, and with each turn he felt the Finch lurch a short distance to starboard. Then the engineer shoved a lockbar into place beside it and waved him back. “We’re good. Thanks.”
He followed her back to the cockpit and watched as the glacier rose in short hops and slips up toward their feet, until at last the Finch banged down against the hard ground.
Morayo squeezed past him again, this time to unlock the hatch and let a torrent of freezing air into the cabin. She jogged outside and Omar followed, and he saw that she meant to lash a pair of ropes from the gondola to the nearby columns of ice. The spires had been thrust up from a crack in the glacier, each one stabbing the heavens at a different angle, and half of them had been sheared off by the screaming wind.
He worked quickly with her, squinting into the howling winds that sprayed his face with needling ice crystals. Snow dust swirled across the ground and the blasted spires shuddered like prisoners in fear for their lives. Overhead he saw an angry maelstrom of white mists and gray clouds colliding and warring for mastery of the skies, and bolts of lightning danced from one thunderhead to another, rumbling like the bellies of hungry gods.
With the lines secured, Omar climbed back into the cabin behind Morayo and slammed the hatch shut. He blinked. The sudden transition from the freezing noise of the outside world to the warm stillness of the airship was like stepping into a stolen corner of paradise.
He took a moment to catch his breath while watching the women slump in their seats to glance at their dials and flick their little switches. The Finch ’s engine chugged on, its propellers still spinning swiftly but not powerfully outside, only fast enough to fend off the elements.
“Now,” he said, “would you please tell me what’s happened? What’s gone wrong?”
Riuza sighed. Morayo laughed. “Nothing’s wrong,” the engineer said. “We just hit a little weather. Just a little squall over the mountains. It’s nothing, really, it happens all the time. Welcome to Europa, Mister Bakhoum.”
He exhaled slowly and glanced back at other men, who nodded at him sheepishly.
“So this is normal?”
They nodded again.
“And will probably happen again?”
They nodded again.
“Ah.” Omar swallowed and straightened up. “All right then. Good. Then I can make us a nice hot breakfast now. Where’s the stove?”
He made them a heavy Espani breakfast of sausages and red potatoes while Morayo explained that the gunstock in the cabin wall connected to a harpoon gun outside that they had modified to fire their emergency anchor down into the ice or rocks to stop the Finch from blowing about in a storm, which happened rather often near the Pyrenees.
After they finished eating, everyone trooped outside into the freezing ice wind to inspect the Finch ’s hull and check the lines. Omar followed Morayo, marveling at the young woman’s ability to notice tiny dings and scrapes in the outer walls of the gondola through the blinding snow gusts. She shouted over the wind to tell him that the ice did this or a rock did that, and which were superficial, and which she would spend the day hammering out or welding over. With the lines secure and the engineer’s repair plan ready, their last task was to follow the steel cable from the harpoon gun across an uneven sheet of ice to find the emergency anchor.
Peering through his blue-tinted glasses, Omar spotted the anchor hooked under a block of ice that rested on the glacier like a boulder. Staring down at the device, he despaired at the thought of having to chip the anchor free of the ice using hammers and shovels, and he wondered if he might convince the others to leave the task to him alone so that he might make short work of it with his blazing seireiken.
But Morayo slipped around him, yanked a pin from the anchor’s base, and the long jagged arms of the anchor slid neatly back into its central shaft. The engineer stood up and shoved the cold anchor into his arms. “Here. Thanks.”