Jake Morrison's Arc

Chapter 50 of 54

A week into construction, the shipyard swarmed with strangers. Three hundred workers from the new town welded hulls and hauled steel beside Jake's own people. But every day the questions came. Why do you build guns on flying machines? Why arm a ship this big? Jake heard it at the mess line and on the scaffolds. One man had asked Marcus why the enclave stockpiled weapons at all. Jake knew where such questions led. Sooner or later someone would ask about the vaccine, and then his blood. Jake found Darrell walking the shipyard floor with a clipboard. Darrell led the Heartward Enclave, and he'd kept Jake's secret since the day he learned it. He was Jake's old coworker, stocky, tattooed, calm under pressure. Jake pulled him aside behind a stack of steel plate. "The new people won't stop asking why we build weapons," Jake said. "One of them gets close to the truth, we're finished." Darrell set down his clipboard. "Then we give them a reason they'll believe. One that shuts the door." That afternoon Darrell climbed onto a fuel drum and called the shipyard to order. Hundreds of workers stopped and gathered. Jake stood beside him. Marisol and Marcus took positions at the crew stations, ready to move people back to work the moment Darrell finished. "You've asked why we build weapons," Darrell said. His voice carried across the yard. "A tyrant north of here breeds monsters to hunt us. He's sent boats already. We threw them back. He's building more." He pointed at the half-built carrier looming above them. "This ship ends him. We don't build weapons for war. We build them to defend everyone who wants peace. That's the whole of it." The crowd was quiet. Then a welder near the front nodded, and others followed. The reason landed. It was true, and it was complete. No one needed to look past a tyrant and his monsters. Jake watched the questions die in their faces. Darrell had closed the door. With the answer settled, the work surged. Marisol drove the flight-propeller crews. Marcus ran the engine bays. Sofia sailed to the town they called Falltown and taught their people gardening, turning bare lots into rows of seedlings. Every hand had a place. The strangers stopped wondering and started building. One month later, exactly, the last propeller bolted into place. Jake stood on the flight deck as the lift rotors spun up. The old carrier shuddered. Steel groaned. Then the wheels lifted off the ground, and the whole vessel rose into the air. Thirteen hundred people cheered from the shipyard below. Marisol gripped the rail beside Jake, grinning. But Jake didn't cheer. The airship flew. That meant the attack on the tyrant's base could begin. And when he flew north with three hundred strangers crewing his ship, he'd carry them all straight into the tyrant's fortress walls.