“Get a rope over there,” she commanded the two burly sailors at the front of the launch. They duly cast a weighted rope to the gondola as the ensign at the tiller steered them alongside. The last of Lizanne’s Green gave out as she closed the distance between the two craft. She slumped in her seat, chest heaving thanks to the effects of burning so much product so quickly. So she barely heard the thump and clatter of feet on the boards, sitting with her aching head bowed and chest thumping like a drum.
“Lizanne.”
She raised her head as a pair of soft hands met her cheeks, looking up to find herself confronted by a familiar, doll-like countenance, albeit one that seemed to have suddenly become much more womanly in expression if not form. “It is very good to see you again, miss,” Lizanne said with a tired smile.
Tekela’s face blossomed into a smile of her own, tears welling in her eyes, and she pressed a kiss to Lizanne’s forehead before pulling her into a tight embrace. Lizanne swallowed, her throat hard and tight. “My aunt?”
Tekela drew back, tears falling as she shook her head. “I’m sorry. It was horrible . . .” She trailed off, face clouded with confusion and unwanted memories. “Sirus . . . Sirus was there.”
“What?”
“He was there. Changed, Spoiled. But it was him. He saved me.”
The resurrection of a youth Lizanne had last seen strapped into a chair and apparently dead in a Corvantine torture-chamber was a singular mystery, but one that would have to wait. As would her grief.
“The box,” Lizanne said. “Do you still have the box?”
Tekela had deposited two bulky objects on the deck of the launch. One was wrapped in waxed canvas against the damp but Lizanne could make out a familiar if much-reduced shape under the covering. Jermayah’s been busy, I see. She turned to the other object, also concealed in canvas. Tekela crouched and pulled the wrapping away to reveal a familiar, shiny, box-shaped device of numerous cogs and gears.
“Good,” Lizanne said. “Keep it close.”
Tekela’s eyes widened in surprise. “You want me to look after it?”
“You seem to have done a fair job so far. I assume that thing works,” she added, nudging the other object with her toe.
“Six hundred rounds a minute on the slowest setting,” Tekela replied, face suddenly grim with no doubt ugly remembrance. “It works very well.”
“No, young man, I will not abandon this craft.” Her father’s voice tore her gaze from Tekela. Jermayah had already clambered onto the launch but the esteemed Professor Graysen Lethridge stood resolute on the rapidly descending deck of his latest invention. “Do you have any notion of the import of this device?” he demanded of the ensign. “I insist you see to its salvage.”
Lizanne stood, moving on unsteady legs to slump against the side of the boat, staring at her father until he met her gaze, not without some reluctance. She saw his resolve falter, but not completely. “It’s important,” he said, a faint pleading note in his voice. “Surely you can see that.”
Lizanne gave an involuntary roll of her eyes which she knew must have made her resemble a sulky adolescent, but found herself too weary to care. “He’s right,” she told the ensign. “Lash the launch to it then use your flags to signal the Profitable for more boats.” He began to protest but she waved a dismissive hand. “Exceptional Initiatives. Just get on with it, unless you’d like to be posted to a research station in the northern polar region.”
She assumed either Verricks put a great deal more weight on her authority than she really deserved or Director Thriftmor intervened again. In either case the Profitable Venture soon came to an almost complete stop, raising flags and blasting her sirens to order the rest of the convoy to follow suit. Within minutes the cruiser’s twenty-foot steam-powered pinnace had been lowered over the side and was making a steady progress towards the floundering aerostat.
Her father and Jermayah used a valve on the balloon’s underside to vent the remaining gas, provoking a worried question from Lizanne as the pinnace drew alongside. “Isn’t it flammable?”
“Helium,” Jermayah said. “Take more than a spark to set it off. Tried a few experiments with hydrogen but they nearly burned the shop down.”
“Helium is more plentiful in any case,” her father added. “And cheaper.”
Soon the balloon was just a flaccid sprawl of wet silk on the water. Professor Lethridge ordered it gathered up whilst Jermayah oversaw the recovery of the gondola. “Not so much the carriage we need,” he said, slapping a hand to a bulky cylindrical apparatus at the rear of the gondola, “it’s the engine.”
“Thermoplasmic?” Lizanne asked, recognising the tell-tale pipe-work visible through a gap in the engine’s carapace.
“It’s a hybrid,” Jermayah replied and she saw the glimmer of professional pride in his eyes. “Kerosene or blood. Both burn in the same combustion chamber. She’ll give out more power if you feed her Red, of course, but kerosene is fine for basic manoeuvring.”
“Speed?” Lizanne enquired receiving a reply from an unexpected source.
“I had her up to thirty miles per hour using kerosene,” Tekela said. “We hadn’t yet managed to conduct a trial with blood.”
Lizanne scowled at Jermayah. “You let her fly this thing?”
“She’s our test pilot,” he answered with a grin far too lacking in contrition for Lizanne’s liking. “We weren’t too sure about the lifting properties at first, needed someone who wouldn’t weigh her down. Tekela volunteered. Got a right good feel for the controls too.”
Lizanne shifted her baleful gaze to her father. “I told you to find her a decent school, not subject her to your experiments.”
“We did,” Professor Lethridge replied. “Miss Hisselwyck’s Finishing Academy. She wouldn’t go. Your aunt tried to march her there but she fought her off, then threatened to run off and live in the refugee camp.”
Lizanne rounded on Tekela, who met her angry visage with a shrug and a purse of her lips. “I’m too old for school anyway.”
“And too young to be careening around the sky in one of his mad contraptions.”
“Well, you gave him the plans.” A small vestige of the old Tekela appeared then, pouty and defiant in the face of legitimate concern. At this juncture Lizanne wasn’t sure if she preferred that Tekela to this one. At least the brat had been predictable, up to a point.
Lizanne took a calming breath and turned back to her father as he helped drag the last of the depleted balloon onto the fore-deck of the pinnace. “If you’re quite finished we need to return,” she said. “You’ll also have to provide a full account of Feros’s fall to Captain Verricks and Director Thriftmor. It seems we have some more hard decisions to make.”