The Traveler shook hard as a strong gust of wind hit. Ian Wright had to hold onto one of the cargo nets to stay upright as the dirigible careened to the side. They said that landing was the most dangerous part of any dirigible flight, so doing it in a storm, especially one that you’d inflicted on yourself, was completely reckless. Another gust struck and took them in the opposite direction.
Twenty-five Grimnoir were going on the raid. Most of them were clustered in the cargo bay, dressing in incredibly bulky winter clothing and doing last minute checks of their equipment. The wind changed again, spinning the Traveler sideways. An open ammo can toppled, spilling rifle cartridges everywhere. One of the knights stumbled to the side and vomited on the floor.
A red bulb began to flash off and on. The marauder on the catwalk shouted orders to some of the other crew, but he was cut off by a terrible grinding noise.
“What’s going on?” Ian asked the knight next to him nervously. After all, Chris Schirmer was a Fixer and a protégée of the great Cog John Moses Browning, so he had more experience with mechanical goings on.
“How would I know?” he answered, busy stuffing loaded magazines into pouches on his belt. “I was a gunsmith, not a blimp builder.” But then he watched the running crewmen, analyzed where they were going and what tools they were scrambling for. “I think one of the landing skids is stuck.”
“Isn’t that bad?”
“It’s not good. I better go see if I can help.” Schirmer got up and made his way across the wildly tilting deck.
Ian closed his eyes and concentrated on everything but his growing nausea. “I volunteered for this? Why the hell did I volunteer for this?”
“To fight an outer-space monster,” answered someone. Ian opened his eyes to see that it was Steve Diamond, one of the knights he had fought alongside against the OCI at Mason Island. The Mover was cheating and using his Power to gather up all of the spilled cartridges. The .30-06 rounds rolled across the floor like they were being swept, and then the pile floated up and neatly into the ammo can. Diamond used his real hand to close the lid. “That’s something special.”
“Assuming that this Pathfinder thing is even real in the first place.”
“Come on, Ian. Not this again.” Diamond sighed. “This is an adventure.”
Another knight looked up from his cleaning his rifle. They’d been told to rub down their bolts with powdered graphite, since the temperature outside would freeze grease or oil and cause their weapons to malfunction. “Hey, are you the Summoner who was trying to talk the elders into stopping this mission?”
“Yeah. I’m the Summoner.”
“Genesse,” the knight introduced himself. “Mouth. Easy…” He must have caught Ian’s flinch. “I’m not trying to sway you.” He was a short, thin man with an olive complexion. Ian thought he might be Italian, but he sounded like an American. Then again, Ian was a Scot who talked like an American, since he’d spent so much time there. Grimnoir tended to be well travelled. “If you don’t think it’s real, why volunteer?”
“I changed my mind.” Ian didn’t elaborate. He’d had this out with the others before. There was no need to rehash old arguments five minutes before an attack on the Imperium.
Jake Sullivan was persuasive for a Heavy, or maybe it was because he was a Heavy. The man just would not move on an argument. It was like arguing with a boulder. He was so adamant about what he perceived to be the truth that he’d convinced many of the Grimnoir of the existence of the Pathfinder. To Ian, that information had come from the Chairman, and was thus tainted. Only a fool would believe anything that came from a madman, and it was even worse when it came from a madman’s ghost.
To Ian, they didn’t need to look out into space for an enemy. There were plenty of real enemies right here at home. While a big chunk of the society’s best wasted their time on a wild-goose chase, the OCI was registering Actives in America, and registration was sure to lead to camps or pogroms. While they were attacking a useless Imperium installation on an iceberg in the middle of nowhere, real Imperium schools were torturing and killing innocents all over Asia.
Like Beatrice.
He wouldn’t argue with the knights that Sullivan had already convinced. That was pointless. Ian had volunteered for this mission for other reasons entirely. “Regardless what happens, at least we’ll give the Imperium a black eye.”
“That’s the spirit,” Diamond said.
Diamond had a sort of constant understated enthusiasm that Ian found annoying. The elders called it a can-do attitude. It was probably also why Diamond had always found himself in positions of leadership while Ian had been bounced around from one petty assignment to another, even though they’d joined the society about the same time and were about the same age.
Of course, it was easy for Diamond and the others like him to have a can-do attitude. It hadn’t been his wife who had been tortured in an Imperium school until she’d gone insane. None of them had been forced to Summon a demon to sneak in and put her out of her misery.
Ian looked around the room at the knights surrounding him. He knew many of them. They were all volunteers, and each of them was here for his own reasons. The Reader, Mike Willis, was the noble heroic type, and an old friend of George Bolander’s. Willis was here because that’s what his mentor would have wanted. Mottl was an Icebox and Simmons was a Torch; they were Diamond’s men, and that whole bunch was always looking for a scrape. Their lone Healer, Dianatkhah, had the reputation of a lady’s man with a thirst for danger. He only knew the others in passing, but the lot of them were capable, dangerous Actives. Regardless of what had gotten them on this ship, heaven help anyone who got in their way.
While the knights had been talking, Schirmer had used his Power to quickly understand the complex mechanism of the landing gear and exactly how it had broken. The Fixer temporarily corrected the problem with some bubble gum and a length of wire. He gave an okay sign to the crewmen on the catwalk.
“Ramp down in two minutes!” the lead marauder shouted.
Jake Sullivan appeared in the cargo bay, holding a bullpup Browning Automatic Rifle, surely enchanted by the master himself. The Heavy seemed even larger and more intimidating than normal all wrapped in fur. Give him a helmet with cow horns and he’d look like a Viking. “All right, boys. It’s time to go.”
The assembled knights cheered. Ian played along even though it made him sick. The society had truly been blinded by Sullivan’s story. They were wasting their time on a fairytale while Actives suffered. Ian’s father-in-law, Isaiah Rawls, had understood who the real enemies were, and he’d sacrificed his honor, but in doing so had won the greatest victory against tyranny the Society had ever seen.
Genesse had asked why he’d volunteered. The Mouth would never understand. Ian’s real mission was to make this fool’s errand of an expedition count for something. For too long the society had been holding back, being cautious. This mission was the most overt action the Grimnoir had taken in years.
Ian didn’t believe in Sullivan’s Pathfinder, but he did believe in killing Imperium.
Axel Heiberg Island
The patrol never knew what hit them.
Sullivan had been a soldier. He understood what cold and monotony could do to a man, and winter in a trench in France was a tropical paradise compared to this blasted place. It didn’t matter how tough or how well trained a soldier was. There were only so many hours someone could stare off into a field of nothing and stay alert. There were only so many days you could guard something that no one knew, nor cared about, before it began to seem pointless. Even for Imperium soldiers, men so fanatical that they’d follow any order without hesitation, the freezing monotony would erode that sense of duty. It would dull you down until you were only pulling your patrols because your superiors demanded it, but even then, you’d just be punching a clock, freezing your ass off, staring at ice, until it was your turn to go back inside.