Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 49 of 63

The valley wind held steady, and the bag climbed clean of the shelf. Bram set the wheel west and pushed for speed. Then Cora leaned over the rail and pointed down at the snowfield below. "Branches," she said. "And boards. Everywhere." Bram looked. The storm had ripped a stand of pines off the ridge and scattered the wreckage across the valley floor. Splinters of timber stood upright in the drifts. Rope and canvas from some other pilot's cargo lay tangled in the brush. The approach lane to the next harbor ran straight through it. Some of the debris rose thirty feet on the updrafts, tumbling like knives. Omondi pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted. "One strike on the envelope and we bleed lift. The patches on the crown won't take a tear." Bram opened the journal on the rail and flipped to the valley page. He had marked two approach lanes. The main lane cut low along the river. The second ran high along the north shoulder, longer by twenty minutes, but above the tree line. He tapped the second line. "We go over the top." "That climb," Omondi said. "The crown seam." "Not a hard climb. A slow one. We ride the shoulder wind up." Cora already had her mechanical owl on her wrist. One brass wing hung stiff from the sleet run, but the eyes still tracked. "Send him?" "Send him. I want the shoulder wind read before we commit." She wound the key and whispered to the owl. It lifted off her glove and beat north up the slope. Bram held the bag steady at low pressure and watched the debris churn below. A length of broken spar spun up on a gust and passed twenty feet under the hull. Cora flinched. The owl came back inside ten minutes and landed hard on her wrist. She read the dial on its chest. "Steady lift. Six knots up the shoulder. Clean above the pines." Bram pulled the compass from his jacket and checked bearing. Then he eased the orchid vent a quarter closed. The bag answered slow. The crown seam creaked once and held. They climbed above the debris field on the shoulder wind, the way the owl had read it, and the wreckage passed harmless beneath them. The long lane cost them the twenty minutes he had counted on. When the harbor mast came into view, a stripped-down pursuit vessel was already moored at the near pin. Kesh's rig. The ledger stamp would be his. Bram set the wheel for the far pin and did not speak. Omondi looked at him and said nothing. Cora put the owl back in her belt. Bram wrote the shoulder route into the journal in pencil. Then he drew a small circle around the harbor and set the bag down to land second.