Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 55 of 63

An hour past the warm crossing, the wind shifted. Bram felt the bag settle wrong under his hand. He tapped the thermometer. The needle was climbing down again, steady and mean. A second cold front was rolling in behind the first, and the coil that had saved them was empty brass now. "Read it again," Bram said. Cora leaned over the console. She wore her cap low against the wind, grease still on her wrist from the last repair. "Front's an hour out. Maybe less. Pressure's dropping faster than the last one." Omondi checked the crown seam through his glasses, nose almost against the fabric. His pencil slipped from his fingers and skittered across the deck. He caught it against his boot. "The patch will not hold cold like that. Not a second time. The panel is already tired." Bram looked west. The sky was the same pale flat. He had one warming used and none left. He would not reach the next harbor before the front closed on them. "We go down," Bram said. "Now. Before the seam is loaded." Omondi blinked. "Down where?" Bram pointed at a bare rock shoulder a mile ahead, two dark pins already driven into the stone from a prior route. He had marked them in his journal two winters back. "Moor there. Ride it out on the ground. Warm the bag with a fire under a canvas tent, not with the coil." Cora frowned. "Kesh gets another half day." "Kesh gets nothing if we crack open at four thousand feet." He brought the bag down in a long slow glide, hand on the orchid vent the whole way. The brass tubing hissed under his glove. Cora sent the owl ahead to test the wind at the shoulder. It came back with steady readings. Omondi rigged the mooring lines while Bram held the wheel one-handed. They caught both pins on the first pass. Bram vented the bag a quarter turn and it settled onto the rock. The front hit six minutes later. Sleet, then hard cold. The seam creaked once and held, slack and unloaded, the way Bram wanted it. Under the canvas tent they lit a small stove. Cora fed it slow. The fabric above them warmed by inches, not by steam. It would take four hours instead of ten minutes, but it would not spend anything they could not replace. Omondi wrote it in the journal for him. Coil spent. Ground warming used. Half day lost. Bram watched the sleet run off the canvas. Kesh was ahead again. The bag was whole. He would take whole over ahead every time now. "When the front passes," he said, "we launch cold and we fly hard. We do not stop again until the next stamp." Cora nodded and fed the stove.