“Aye, sir.” His footman, Hans, gave him an odd look, but hurried down off the battlements all the same. He clearly thought his master was somewhat cracked. Well, he’ll change his mind before the day is out, Rudi told himself. Along with everyone else. Just as long as nothing goes wrong. He was acutely aware that he hadn’t kept his flying hours up since the emergency began, and there were no luxuries (or necessities) like air traffic control or meteorology services over here.
In fact, he didn’t even have as much fuel as he’d have liked: he’d managed to squirrel away nearly twenty gallons of gas before some killjoy or other—he harbored dark suspicions about Erik—had ratted out his scheme to Riordan, who’d had no option but to shout a lot and notify the duke. Who in turn had threatened to have him flogged, and lectured him coldly for almost half an hour about the idiocy of not complying with long-standing orders…
Rudi had bitten his tongue while the duke threatened to burn the trike, but in the end the old man had relented just a little. “You will maintain it in working order, and continue to practice your skills in America, but you will not fly that thing over our lands without my explicit orders, delivered in person.” Eorl Riordan wasn’t the duke, but on the other hand, he was in the chain of command: and that was enough for Rudi. Flying today.
It took him closer to half an hour to make his way down to the courtyard, by way of his room—his flying jacket and helmet were buried deeper than he’d remembered, and he took his time assembling a small survival kit. Then he had to divert via the guardhouse to check out a two-way radio and a spare battery. “Where do you think you’re going, cuz?” asked Vincenze, looking up from the girlie magazine he was reading: “A fancy dress party?”
Rudi grinned at him. “Got a date with an angel,” he said. “See you later.”
“Heh. I’ll believe it when I see it—” But he was talking to Rudi’s back.
Down in the courtyard next to the stables, he found that Hans had enlisted a couple of guards to move the crates, but hadn’t thought to bring the long tubular sack or the trike itself. “Come on, do I have to do everything myself?” he demanded.
“I didn’t know what you wanted, sir,” Hans said apologetically. “You said it was delicate…”
“Huh. Okay. Come here. Take this end of the bag. I’ll take the other. It’s heavy. Now! The courtyard!”
Half an hour later, performing in front of an audience of mostly useless gawpers (occasionally he’d need one of them to hold a spar in position while he tightened a guy wire), Rudi had the wing unpacked and tensioned. At eight meters long and weighing fifty kilos the Sabre 16 had been murder to world-walk across—it was too long to fit in the Post Office room—but it was about the smallest high performance trike wing he’d been able to find. At least he’d been able to unbolt the engine from the trike body. “Go get the trike,” he told Hans and the guards. “Push it gently, it’ll roll easily enough once you get it off the straw.”
Another half hour passed by in what felt like seconds. By then he’d gotten the wing mounted on top of the trike’s mast and bolted together. The odd machine—a tricycle with a pair of bucket seats and a petrol engine with a propeller mounted on the back—was beginning to resemble a real, flyable ultralight. He was double-checking his work, making sure there was no sign of wear on any of the cables and that everything was secure, when someone cleared his throat behind him. He glanced round: it was Eorl Riordan, along with a couple of sergeants he didn’t recognize. “How’s it going?” asked Riordan, his tone deceptively casual.
“It’s going all right, for now.” Rudi glanced up at the sky. Partial cloud cover, at least five thousand feet up—no problem for the time being. “Thing is, I’m about to trust my neck to this machine. There’s no backup and no air traffic control and no help if something goes wrong. So I want to make sure everything is perfect before I take her up.”
“Good.” Riordan paused. “You’ve got a radio.”
“Yeah. And binoculars.” He gestured to the small pile sitting beside the fuel drum. “If you need it, I can take a camera. But right now, this is going to be pretty crude, visual flying only in good weather, staying below two thousand feet, and if I see anything I’ll probably only be able to pinpoint it to within a mile or so. I max out at about fifty-five miles per hour, so that’s not going to take me far from here, and I’ve got enough fuel for a couple of three-hour-long flights, but I’d prefer not to go up twice in one day. It’s pretty physical.”
“Three hours and a hundred and fifty miles ought to be enough.” Riordan nodded to himself. “What I wanted to say—I’d like you to do a circuit of the immediate area. If there’s any sign of troops on the ground within thirty miles, I’d like to know about it. We’re expecting a move from the southeast, and I know it’s well forested down there so I don’t expect miracles, but if you do see anything, it’s probably important. Also, I’d like you to take a look at Wergatfurt. We got an odd call half an hour ago, there’s something going on down there. Can you do that?”
“Probably, yes.” Rudi patted his pocket. “I’m using relief maps from the other side for navigation, it’s close enough to mostly work, and the Wergat’s pretty hard to miss. The only thing I will say is, if the weather starts closing in I need to get down on the ground fast. The Hjalmar palace is about an hour, hour and ten minutes away from here, as the trike flies—it’ll cut into my ability to do a sweep around to the north. Are you sure you want that?”
Riordan rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully. “I think…if you don’t see signs of soldiers southeast of here within thirty miles, then I definitely want to know what’s going on down along the Wergat. If you see those soldiers, call me up and we’ll discuss it.” He nodded to himself. Then he pointed at Rudi’s survival kit. “Why the gun? Can you shoot from a moving aircraft?”
“It’s not for when the trike’s flying: but if anything goes wrong while I’m forty miles out, over open forest…”
Riordan nodded. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll try not to need it.”
In the end, what saved them was Huw’s nose hair.
It was, Huw sometimes reflected, one of those fine ironies of life that despite being unable to grow a proper beard, he suffered inordinately from the fine hairs that clogged his nostrils. Nostril hair was neither sexy nor obviously problematic to people who didn’t have to put up with it: it was just…icky. That was the word Elena had used when she caught him in the bathroom with an open jar of Vaseline and one finger up a nostril. Yet it played seven shades of hell with his sense of smell, and had driven his teenage self into an orgy of nose-picking that resulted in a series of nosebleeds before he’d figured out what to do about it. And now…
In the flashlight-lit wreckage of a building inside a shattered dome, standing before a wall with a tightly sealed doorway in it, his kid brother raised a fire ax and swung it down hard towards the left side of the door.
As the ax struck the door, Huw, who was standing a good two meters behind and to the left of him, sneezed. The sneeze had been building up for some time, aggravated by the cold, damp air in this new world and the low priority Huw had attached to his manicure in the face of the mission of exploration. Nevertheless, the eruption took Huw by surprise, forcing him to screw his eyes shut and hunch his shoulders, turning his face towards the floor. The noise startled Yul, who began to turn to his right, towards Huw. The movement took him out of the direct line of the door. And it also surprised Elena, who was standing off to the right near the entrance to the building with her vicious little machine pistol at the ready. She ducked, and this took her out of the direct line of sight on the portal.