Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 2 of 63

The temperature gauge climbed another notch. Bram tapped the glass. The needle did not fall. Below, the last lamps of the depot were gone. Above, the brass serpent wrapped around his envelope hissed white vapor through the rigging, and every hiss meant the coil was eating his gasbag faster. He checked his pocket watch. Fifty minutes, maybe less. The pass was still two hours out. The math had not changed since launch. He was going to rupture over open air. His mechanical owl clicked on the console rail, steam curling from its vents. Bram unlatched the manifest tube on its leg and read the cargo list again. Medical crates. A sealed case marked FRAGILE — LIVE. He unstrapped that one from the cargo net and pried the lid. Inside sat a brass orchid on a polished base, its tubing coiled like a small pipe organ, its bloom-heads shut tight. A weather instrument. He had carried three of them last spring for a mountain observatory. They vented pressure. They also caught updrafts and held altitude in thin air, if you knew how to crack the valves. He knew how to crack the valves. Bram cut the cargo net and hauled the orchid to the rail. He was breaking his contract. He did not have time to care. He twisted the base coupling and screwed it into the ballast port under the gondola. The tubes shivered. The bloom-heads opened one by one, each petal a thin brass fan. "Hold," he told the owl. The owl blinked. He cut the thaw coil's feed line. The brass serpent stopped breathing. Steam sagged out of the rigging in a long white sheet and fell away below him. The envelope groaned. Ice, still clinging in patches, began to build back along the seams almost at once. The temperature gauge dropped. The rupture warning eased. The airship also began to sink. Bram opened the orchid's valves. Warm air pushed up through the brass tubing and into the belly of the gondola. The petals sang a thin note. The ship's descent slowed. Slowed more. Then held. He was not flying now. He was drifting. The wind carried him sideways, off the pass line, toward the lower ridges. The envelope would last the night at this heat. It would not last a climb. Bram looked at the compass. The needle swung toward the foothills. There was a sky harbor down there, an inn with a mast. Not his destination. Not even close. But solid ground under a warm roof, and a mooring he could reach before the envelope froze shut for good. He throttled the orchid down a quarter turn and let the wind take him. The owl clicked once. Bram did not answer. He had saved the ship. He had lost the route. Somewhere ahead, in the dark, a lantern on a mast came into view.