Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 58 of 63

The corrected heading held for twenty minutes before Bram saw the problem. The land under them was wrong. His journal showed no pages for the country south of the pine flat, only a blank spread where a chart should have been. The bag was flying over ground he had never mapped, and above him the crown seam creaked every time a gust pushed the envelope up. He kept his hand loose on the vent. A hard climb here would open the seam. A hard drop would put them into rock he could not read. Omondi leaned over the console and tapped the empty page. He was the engineer who had built the bag with Bram in the depot loft; he knew the seam better than anyone. "We can't climb over anything. Not one foot of lift more than we need." "I know." "Then we need a ground read. What's ahead, how high." Cora was already winding the owl. Her hands moved fast even with the wing joint ticking. "Low pass," she said. "I'll send it low and slow. It logs terrain height off the pressure floor. No climb reading. Nothing that makes it work hard." "Wing won't like a long run." "It'll like a crash less." Bram nodded. She threw the owl underhand off the rail. It dropped, caught, and skimmed west a hundred feet below them. They flew straight and level. Bram held the vent by feel. Every rise in the ground pushed warm air up against the envelope and he felt the seam tick above his head. He kept the nose down a hair each time, trading altitude for the seam. The owl came back at eight minutes. It hit Cora's glove hard and one feather-plate popped loose. She read the belly dial with her thumb. "Ridge in four miles. Two hundred feet higher than us. After that it drops into a river cut. If we go around south, we add twenty minutes and lose the harbor on fuel. If we cross it, we climb two hundred feet." Omondi did not look up from the gauge. "We don't have twenty minutes of fuel to spare." Bram set his hand on the vent wheel. Two hundred feet was a slow climb if he took it long. He turned the nose five degrees off the ridge line and began to feed the vent closed a quarter turn at a time. The bag rose. The seam ticked once, twice, then held. He watched the ridge come up under them and slide past below the basket by less than a spear length. The ground fell away into the river cut. Cora let out a breath. Omondi wrote in the journal. "Harbor in an hour," Bram said. "Quarter tank." The seam had held. But he felt the give in it now under his hand, softer than yesterday. One more climb like that would open it. He would reach the harbor. He would not leave it in this bag without a repair.