Pinion by Jay Lake

dire glee at the fate of Imperial malefactors filled the sergeant’s voice. “Fine thing you’re doing, sir, giving them such a chance to make amends.”
    Kitchens thought of the sheaf of death warrants in the locked attaché case he carried. Traveling to Dover with Amberson, he’d still not been able to examine the Queen’s token. Kitchens pushed the reflections aside and mounted the stairs leading upward to his future home.
    He had always harbored a horror of flight. Being so far from safe, safe ground made his gut twitch. While training as a special clerk, he’d barely passed the roof-running and bridge-diving exercises. Here, so far above the soil on a tower that only swayed and creaked a bit, he felt a touch of the panic that pursued him in dreams.
    Notus
hung stolidly, sufficiently large to provide the illusion of stability. The platform at the top of the tower was mounted on a turntable, ensuringthe airship stayed facing into the wind at all times. Pumps kept her gasbag at neutral buoyancy, but she still appeared a bit sad and wrinkled. He crossed a wooden bridge to her deck, for the first time in his life aboard an airship. A completely deserted one at that.
    The vessel seemed empty even of rats, though he seriously doubted that could be true. Deck gear sat in place, but not square and polished. The air of abandonment was peculiar.
    “Ain’t been nobody aboard but the maintenance detail,” Penstock announced from behind Kitchens. “Out here on the third line, no one can get close without half the aerodrome knowing.”
    “The crew is in for a long, slow march, I should think,” Kitchens said absently. He mounted to the poop, where the helm stood.
    These ships were relics, he knew, built in a fashion that had been obsolete on the water these fifty years and more. Everything crossing the waves under a naval ensign these days was iron-built with great turbine engines and long, smooth guns that could bark a shell to the horizon. In the sky, where weight efficiency was paramount, they invested metal only in the engines, while using the experience of older times to build a light, sturdy hull out of a mix of woods. The result was as if Admiral Nelson’s fleet had taken to the air, slung beneath the long, gray sausages of balloons.
    He touched the polished brass of her wheel. Chains through the spokes locked it down. The engine telegraph and the binnacle stood adjacent. The captain conned his ship from an open deck, much as they had a hundred years earlier.
    Only now they flew, dying in the air instead of on the water. Taking a deep breath, Kitchens looked to the rail. His knees almost gave way at the sight of the ground two hundred perilous feet below.
    How would he manage at cruising altitude? These vessels passed two miles in the air and more, depending on wind and weather and the needs of their mission.
    He dragged himself step by step to the rail. Penstock trailed behind, silent now. Kitchens did not care for what the man thought, but he did care what the man might say in some written report to Admiralty.
    Gripping the rail so tight his fingernails ached, Kitchens leaned forward and looked at the next rows of masts, the neatly mowed green below, the hills beyond where the town spilled toward the aerodrome. A knot of figures at the rail of another airship along the distant row of masts stared back at him.
    Well
, Kitchens thought, Notus
probably has something of a reputation as a ghost ship by now
.
    He wondered if he would soon become a ghost clerk.
PAOLINAA
    A bowl of cliffs rose to surround them as they walked down off the Wall. The path descended into a snowy mountaintop crater that held a strange building, though it resembled a gargantuan termite mound more than any of the buildings of Europe. How the builders had buttressed its rising masses, Paolina could not say. She caught glimpses of long, tawny vistas of grassland leading away south and east and west from the foot of this mountain.
    Soon enough those