by Phylis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Captain Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”), Airship Commander for Aerosud, a luxury liner airship company based out of São Paulo in the Empire of Brazil, who is searching for her father, Commodore Jack Cheése, an outlaw and antigovernmental rabble rouser.

Professor Doctor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, who has abducted Lydia to get her to pilot an illegal unregistered airship to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republic) on a mission of mercy in exchange for helping her find her father.

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Pyare, a young man with dreams of being an airship pilot, and member of LBFDS (the League Bousculier Francaise Du Sud) helping Lydia and Serpina rendezvous with Serre-Pain and Vlady at an illegal airship.

Pax Victoriana, a period of peace imposed by the Clockwork Commonwealth and its enforcement arm, The Admiralty, dating from the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign to the present for a total of 180 years which includes the TSR (Temporal Shift Realignment) of 56 PV (1893 AD) after which Commonwealth calendars where recalibrated to reflect Her Royal Majesty’s peaceful rule (following the devastation of the first Pandem and its resurgence 30 years later as Pandem II).

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Chapter XXV

Lydia felt dirty. She hadn’t washed in days, really washed bio clean in weeks. Her pores were caked. And a hard rain was falling, chilling the air and blocking the light. They had made it to the chapel just as the rain began. The primary reason the chapel was abandoned was that it did not have a roof. A stone archway and overgrown trellis provided a refuge of sorts out of the rain from the downpour. Pyare had removed the slot velo’s bioweave tarpaulin from the boot and they clustered under it as large drops splashed in the pooling rain at their feet.

Serpina had withdrawn into herself, huddled, arms folded acrost her chest. Pyare was agitated, scowling and fidgeting. They had hidden their vehicles in the underbrush overtaking the crumbling stone walls at the edge of a deep darker wood. Now they awaited a let up in the weather. They could travel cross country following the occasional stream or animal track and the contours of the landscape keeping to a southwest direction. They would undoubtedly run into clansmen. Everything depended on which of the clans they encountered. If they were Fourierists or Communards, there could be a problem. Briefly that was Pyare’s plan and he assured Lydia that he had an acutely sensitive sense of direction.

Lydia had not been impressed. With the best of luck it would take them at least two days to reach Autre Lyons. The biobars were not enough to sustain them over that time.

“We’ll have to go raw,” he’d offered cavalierly, “We’ll forage, berries, wild fruit, gardens, maybe even fish.”

The thought still alarmed her. Organic material. Lydia shuddered.

Why am I here? She stared at her hands clasped before her around her knees. It was simple enough, or started out that way. She remembered her father as the most reasonable of men, except. There was a flash point. She’d heard stories, and witnessed once while her grandmother, Brie, was dying, the incredible energy of his anger. The last time she saw him was when he wished her good luck as she left to train at the Admiralty Air Academy. Brie had passed the year before and left her son a small fortune, large even by Commonwealth standards. He was never around much, traveling. She never really knew him as an adult. And now ten years later she was a hunted fugitive because she was looking for him.

Jack Cheése had retired as a ranking officer in the Admiralty Medical Corps, a top bio research clinician with the rank of Commodore, as had been his father, Harvey T., and the aged patriarch, great grandfather Bart who had been in the forefront in the fight against the global black mold infestation and variant spoors which some had claimed was an invasion from a hostile planet, disproved by great grandfather and his formulated bacterial strain that neutralized the spread of the invasive rapidly reproducing mold. Bart was one of the heroes of Pandem One, as they called it, a team of men in white lab coats conducting tests, analyzing, experimenting, failing, succeeding, and finally producing a strain that would stop the replication. From that work a number of novel bacterial strains were developed and later refined to serve industry and society. A second outbreak, long after the great Bart had retired, of a mutating fractal variant that further devastated large regions of the globe, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, wiping out vast tracts of forests and grass lands down to mineral soil. Grandfather, Harvey T, was involved in what was dubbed Pandem Two, but primarily in research on the campus of the Mendel Institute for Biological Research which had developed the reproductive drive, the technology that revolutionized modern airship transportation. She had never learned what her father’s work involved only that it was top secret. His retirement from the Corps was unexpected, hardly anyone retired from the Admiralty, but was attributed to his mother’s death.

When she returned at holiday break after her first semester she found him gone, He had disappeared, leaving not a word. His friends in Rio Paulo were mystified. Everyone feared the worst, an accident. Polite inquiries were made with the police, hospitals, a missing person’s report filed. IOTA was notified as he was a retired Admiralty officer. The men in the black hats had interviewed her, asking their probing insinuating questions. She was put off by their arrogant demeanor.

And then it was time to return to the Academy overlooking the dunes of Gdansk. She’d considered dropping out when she received a message in the most unlikely place. She had wandered into a bookstore in a plaza near the family home in Rio Rio which everyone pronounced Rio-io. She was browsing for something to keep her mind off the worry for her missing father and resigning her dream of becoming an airship captain.

She’d picked up a book titled Don’t Tell Anyone, the story of an illicit affair late in the reign of the Queen, around the time of her rapprochement with her nephew, Wilhelm. It was by the bestselling Commonwealth author Anthony Blair, also available on voice box. It was on a table display of a new memoir of a Panam War veteran titled, I Am Alive. She was also attracted by a rather bold spine that read Have Faith in large gilt letters.

Lydia had returned to the Triple A, as the cadets called it, and resumed her studies and training under the sponsorship of the Brazilian airship behemoth, Aerosud Luxury Air Ships. Friends in Rio Rio kept her apprised of any news of which there was none. Jack Cheése had disappeared without a trace. The Emperor’s secret service had closed its investigation. She had friends and in-laws at the Court in Nova Brasilia because of her Guzman connection, her husband being one of that royal clan. No one knew anything or was saying anything if they knew. He was missing and presumed dead.

She had graduated at the top of her class with distinction as well as a gold medal in combat arts in her final year, defeating the reigning champion, her Russair rival, Karla Kola. Her compulsory two year service in the Admiralty Air Corps was spent in an intelligence brigade stationed at the Clockwork Commonwealth’s embassy compound in Greater Houllas in the Slave State Republic of Texas in charge of the lighter than air transport pens, an assignment certainly well below her abilities. She did distinguish herself during the Bushwhacker Rebellion, ferrying hostages to safety after the ceasefire. She should have been stationed at the Admiralty Headquarters in Greater London, but that post went to Karla Kola, her raven haired nemesis. The feeling that she had been singled out, sidelined, isolated from the real intelligence action stayed with her through her service. Upon discharge she began her career as an airship pilot, rising in rank to Captain with the honorific of Commander when she was put in charge of the large luxury dirigibles.

It was while she was stationed in Greater Houllas that she’d first heard the rumors of an anti-government agitator known as Commodore Jack. She had gone to the favelas that had grown up around Greater Houllas and found herself in an early American artifact shop. The shopkeeper, obviously a native with long white hair and a scar on his forehead, had eyed her suspiciously. She browsed among the artifacts of the old West, native bead work and antique weapons, arrowheads and real skin moccasins. On the door to the shop was an announcement for a boxcast titled The Queen Is Light, The Victorian Mirage, one whose subject would be banned in the CC, by an underground boxcaster who went by the name of Commodore Jack. She noted that the broadcast was on a prohibited band, one most certainly monitored by IOTA as not only was it illegal to tune in to the frequency but it required some illegal modifications to the box receiver filter. In the lawless USSR, those prohibitions were regularly ignored, despite the treaty with the Crown.

The modifications were easy enough to make on an unsanctioned box she bought on the black market. She recognized the voice of the boxcast immediately and it shock her so that she had to power down the device. Once the spinning of her thoughts subsided and the realization that it was her father’s voice, she tuned back in to the banned frequency. Yes, it was her father spewing toxic chemtrails, a soup of gibberish antigovernment conspiracy theories and ICER propaganda, and invective against the royal family, especially the crown prince, Victor, whom Commodore Jack claimed was a hologram. It was trash and she was mortified that it was in her father’s voice. She soon learned, after discrete inquiries, that Commodore Jack’s boxcasts were immensely popular in the unaffiliated states of North America and on the African and Indian subcontinents. She couldn’t comprehend that her father would subscribe to such sloppy thinking and base idiocy. It disgusted her.

Nonetheless, she was determined to find him. Perhaps he had been kidnapped by anti-monarchists and rebel environmentalists who were predicting a climate change that would cover the earth in glaciers. She felt that she had to talk to him, convince him of his error, and if all else failed, commit him to a care facility in Rio Rio. Her first inquiries resulted in visits from the men in the black hats with more of their insinuations. She realized then that she was under surveillance by IOTA.

She had hit upon a solution. She remembered that her father read the London Tines, a micro-macro manufactured food gastro culture magazine, religiously. He read every word even the classified ads at the back of the magazine. She had placed her notice asking for information to his whereabouts using her father’s childhood nickname of “Pepper” along with a tidy reward to be paid in Victorines.

The answer had come in the person of Jean-Pierre Sere Pain and his itinerant medicine snake show at which point she was effectively kidnapped to pilot an unregistered airship from the vicinity of Autre Lyons to Djibouti in the Horn Of Africa Republic, a rat’s nest of air pirates, Icers, and anti-Commonwealth discontents, on a mission of mercy. In return for her assistance, she would be reunited with her father or at least receive assurances of his proof of life.

Which was how she found herself listening to the rain beat on the tarp covering her and her two companions and watching pearls of light form along its frayed edge.

Chapter  XXVI

A house stood attended by large oaks and surrounded by a gaggle of geese, picking and rooting and disputing loudly suddenly alert to their presence. The house was quiet in itself and a lazy canopy of smoke hovered about the chimney and indicated that it was inhabited. The road leading up to it appeared well traveled and as Lydia and her companions drew closer they could make out a faded signboard hanging over the entrance. It depicted a lion and a bear in an embrace, either dancing or fighting. The geese raised a ruckus and reared back with their wings flapping in challenge to the intruders.

The trio had spent the previous day slogging through the underbrush. Once the rain had let up, they had left the soggy shelter of the abandoned chapel, their destination, the vague misty shape of the steep sided razorback ridge of the upper Massif. They made their way slowly, laboriously, climbing higher, scurrying across the barren fields from copse to copse of trees and in the shadows of large boulders. They’d watched the air activity taking place below, close to where they had just left, from their vantage point on the steep hillside. The gendarmes had deployed observation blimps and light gliders that circled over the tree tops like birds of prey.

Once the sun went down, they had had to take shelter under a rock outcropping on the upside of the slope. The bio energy bars had long been devoured and their trek having itself devoured the consumed energy, they ended up hungrier than ever. Fortunately Pyare had had the presence of mind to roll up the tarp, slinging it over his shoulder, and they huddled under it, keeping close to each other and sharing their exhaustion and sweaty body heat.

The earthy scents assailed Lydia’s nostrils. It reminded her of bivouacking with the other cadets in her squad at the Air Academy. It had been pleasant because of the camaraderie of her peers. And she didn’t dream that years later she’d ever be called to experience exposure to the elements again. She didn’t feel like making small talk, numb as she was from the encroaching cold. And Pyare’s enthused optimism had retreated to dour brooding. Yet Serpina’s physical closeness to the young man had turned her cheeks rosy, eyes half closed as if she were seeing something at a distance.

The discomfort of the makeshift shelter had caused them to continuously shift position and displace previously advantageous perches in trying to seek some comfort on the rough rocky ground. Finally, Pyare rolled himself up into a ball and Serpina spooned him, Lydia having no other choice but to wrap her arms and the trap around both of them.

First light found them cresting a ridge and staring down into a rough rock strewn valley coursed with ravines and fissures. Conifers and oak groves dotted the rolling expanse as clumps of bright greenery.

Serpina had pointed down to a layer of smoke hovering above a row of oaks. There was a small settlement in the crook of a paved road. They knew that they could get food in the village but also ran the risk of being detained by the local militia. They’d agreed to keep to the fields and the hillside, avoiding the inhabitants if at all possible. They could easily be mistaken for refugees and turned over to the authorities.

Pyare had gone ahead of them to reconnoiter, looking for a farm or an orchard where food might be found. He’d returned shortly grinning, a smear of purple around his mouth. He had found an abandoned vineyard and had retrieved a few clusters of grapes the birds and animals had missed.

Serpina had plucked the fruit eagerly. Lydia was a little more cautious. Ingesting unprocessed organic matter was something she was not wild about. She had brought the deep purple pearl to her nose to gauge its scent, but that told her nothing. She put it in her mouth and rolled it around her taste buds. Earthy, but then she was covered in dirt so why should it matter. She bit down. The liquid that filled her mouth shocked her and she’d almost spit it out. A sweet sourish taste that wasn’t entirely unpleasant led her to sample a few more until she was no longer concerned that the fruit was not factory grown.

Somewhat refreshed they’d followed a stream from which Lydia had wet a handkerchief to wipe some of the dirt from her face but according to Serpina’s comments, now her face was streaked with mud and she looked like a wild savage.

It was about then that they crossed a little stone bridge to find themselves before the public house at the sign of the bear and the lion guarded by a flock of geese. Accompanying the honking fowl was the aroma of cooking food which hasten their advance at the behest of their stomachs.

Lydia in the lead paid no heed to Pyare’s comment that they were about to encounter one of the clans, the most dreaded of them all, the Ancient Order of the Phalange, if the sign board said what he thought it meant.

Next Time:  The Ancient Order Has An Odor

by Phylis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Captain Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”), Airship Commander for Aerosud, a luxury liner airship company based out of São Paulo in the Empire of Brazil, who is searching for her father, Commodore Jack Cheése, an outlaw and antigovernmental rabble rouser.

Professor Doctor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, who has abducted Lydia to get her to pilot an illegal unregistered airship to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republic) on a mission of mercy in exchange for helping her find her father.

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Pyare, a young man with dreams of being an airship pilot, and member of LBFDS (the League Bousculier Francaise Du Sud) helping Lydia and Serpina rendezvous with Serre-Pain and Vlady at an illegal airship.

Pax Victoriana, a period of peace imposed by the Clockwork Commonwealth and its enforcement arm, The Admiralty, dating from the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign to the present for a total of 180 years which includes the TSR (Temporal Shift Realignment) of 56 PV (1893 AD) after which Commonwealth calendars where recalibrated to reflect Her Royal Majesty’s peaceful rule (following the devastation of the first Pandem and its resurgence 30 years later as Pandem II).

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Chapter XXII

Lydia Cheése, Airship Commander, cast an eye across the small fenced courtyard cluttered with an array of rusted hulks and parts to land conveyances. The chaos was reflective of the way she saw her own predicament, also chaotic. She had been abducted into this other world less than two weeks earlier. She had been grasping at straws in finding ways to reach her father. She was desperate, and that straw had floated her up the Loire to Oldest Orleans, from whose ramshackle suburbs she was trying to flee. Now she was looking at sorry excuses for transportation. That wasn’t the only thing that made her heart race. There was no telling how soon the two policemen they had overcome and trussed up would be discovered and raise the alarm.

Serpina stood off to one side as Pyare pushed open the iron door to the large rusted metal shed with broken windows replaced by the thick webs of the gallows spiders and a faded sign that read “Steam Is Clean. There was the stink of lubricant and bio sludge among the innards of bio drives tinged with surviving colonies, some as large as a hand, iridescent, and imploded bio batteries leaking a pale florescent coral ready to burst at a touch like giant puff ball mushrooms.

The door to the shop groaned open. In the dark unlit space, Lydia recognized the shiny bulk of the heavy transport SLOT, the Spring Loaded Overland Transport. The spring turbine took up two thirds of the triple track axles giving the vehicle its wedge shape. They were notoriously slow and she couldn’t imagine outrunning police flitters or even their bio boosted velos in one of them.

Pyare must have read her thoughts, or perhaps Serpina had read them and transmitted them to him. He yanked at a tarp to uncover the double wheeled SLOT V model. It was an updated version of the ones she remembered from the SLOT V races she attended when she was enrolled at the Admiralty Air Academy. Often her fellow cadets would compete on the tarmac in the shadows of the large dirigible pens. That had been long ago, forever, it seemed. This particular SLOT with the magnetic torque rewinder could be quite fast. It still looked like a segmented bug with the seat and wide handlebars in front of its oversized turbine.

“There’s only one problem.” Pyare made a face. “It can only carry two.”

“Yes, Serpina and myself.”

“You won’t be able to traverse the Massif without my help. And there are the Clans.” At Lydia’s frown, he added, “And have you ever driven a SLOT V? It can be pretty tricky.”

Something had caught her eye otherwise she would have made a point of decisively correcting his assumptions with a litany of her accomplishments on spring loaded velos. She had made out the shape of the hoop behind a stack of boxes and shelving. It had been a while since she’d seen one or even thought of them, an item from her youth in São Paulo, competing in the Junior Brazilian Monoroda League tournaments, a monowheel. She strode closer to get a better look. The gilded letters of its manufacturer said it was a Hemming. She glanced over her shoulder at Pyare, “Does the monowheel still run?”

Pyare laughed, “It does if you want a broken arm. Or head.” When Lydia continued to move the large wheel out from behind the clutter, “Only maniacs can ride that thing. And Doyle, the guy who owns this shop, is the only maniac I know who’s been able to stay in the saddle for more than a kilometer!”

“Too bad I can’t show you my first place trophy from the LBJM, Liga Brasileira Júnior de Monoroda. My ability to steer one of these was one of the factors that qualified me for the Air Academy. An Airship is a snap compared to these contraptions.” All of a sudden she felt elated, here was something she could control and it solved their problem. “Serpina can ride with you and I will follow on the mono.”

Lydia rolled the wheel out into the courtyard. The seat had collected dust and some harmless mold, the kickstand resisted at first but finally sprung loose to prop the monowheel up so that she could examine it more closely. The gyro gear was stiff and she had to give it a few turns before it responded. The traction hub looked well lubricated. And the ratchet lever on the spring mount took a few kicks before the key began to wind. She straddled the seat within the hoop of the wheel, gripped the handlebars and released the clutch. The monowheel leapt forward like an eager colt.

Chapter XXIII

There had to be a plan. Lydia insisted. Mere setting out across open country in the belief that they would arrive in Autre Lyons without a map or a guide was folly. What were the expectations of success without proper planning? Her Academy training was showing. First, how many klicks would they have to cover?

Pyare said he had heard of a man who had traveled the distance in two days, dawn to dusk. The man had been shown the secret path by an old clansman, an ancient track traveled by the local inhabitants for hundreds, even thousands, of years.

The Massif had been spared the infestations that had devastated the countryside to the Northwest, a vast area now under the governance of the Clockwork Commonwealth since the very first viral bio infestation, more than a hundred years ago, and administered from Greater London, the seat of the Crown and the Admiralty. Every country that had been afflicted was in some way indebted to the Commonwealth for its quick work in staunching and containing the spread of the toxic bacteria. Large tracts of land around the world, some the size of small countries, bore the scars of these vast deserts. Some blamed the weather patterns and, of course, bio pollution. It was learned only too late that the biologic solution to stopping the spread of the plague on photosynthetic life acted as well as a petro-phage, reducing much of the world’s underground oil wealth to mere brackish water, coal veins collapsing to dust, mountains crumbling, sink holes undermining, entire villages swallowed up by the earth.

The great devastation occurred worldwide leaving large swaths unlivable and even contaminated. The countryside suffered the most and then the urban centers suffered from the influx of refugees. There were food shortages as once arable land had been rendered barren. And riots. It was brutal. Many many people lost their lives to the “human epidemic” as it was sometimes called. What humans did to each other was madness in the service of survival.

The Clockwork Commonwealth under the direction of the Queen and the Admiralty had signed an agreement with most of the world’s countries and independent states, including the Empire of Brazil and its subsidiary clients on the African continent, but particularly those of the Northern Hemisphere affected by the worst loss of territory—the snow dunes of Siberia, the dead lands of subarctic Canada, the wastelands of St. Louis, the Missouri breaks, and the Mississippi trickle—that they would work together to never allow a situation like that to develop again. But all that was ancient history.

“But of course, some areas like the Massif have survived.” It was almost like Serpina was reading her mind. “And because it has survived, it has become a special property, frozen in time by governmental edict, penetrable but impenetrable. People have been known to disappear travelling through the Massif, never to be seen again. Nothing has changed there in over a hundred years, probably even longer, eons perhaps. It is populated with robbers and thieves, poachers, secret blood thirsty cults, and peasants.”

“Don’t believe what you’ve heard about the Massif. Most of the horror stories are put out by those who live there. They don’t want people nosing about, especially refugees.” Pyare shrugged, “And they don’t like strangers—can’t say I blame them.”

“Then how do you propose to cross this so-called hostile terrain. We can’t very well fly over it.” Although at that very moment, Lydia wished that she could. She was a sky pilot, her feet did not belong on the ground.

“There’s something else. I need to find something else to wear. This makeshift skirt will not last long on the monowheel. I need trousers!”

Serpina giggled.

Pyare quipped, “Yes, I was wondering about your Frida the Fearless outfit. Is it some kind of costume?”

“Your trousers!”

Serpina laughed out loud.

Pyare smiled at Serpina and Lydia, and then stopped. “You’re serious.”

Chapter XXIV

Lydia slipped into Pyare’s trousers. The urgency of their plight didn’t leave any room for argument thought that certainly was the young man’s intent, Serpina had laid a hand on his arm at his first objection. The legs were long and required a few upward turns to clear the ankles of her heavy real leather boots. The belt with the large brass clasp depicting Frida the Fearless cinched her waist waspishly. “This is real wool? Not lab manufactured?” She ran her hands over her hips. “Rough but with. . .substance. I will return them when I can find suitable exchange, perhaps when we arrive in Autre Lyons.” She folded the hood of the burnoose back keeping it fastened at the neck and over the shoulders of her snakeskin jacket. She fit the bullet shaped helmet she had found under the seat compartment, along with the gauntleted gloves, on her head.

Pyare had to be satisfied with the saggy stained coveralls that belonged to the mechanic who was shorter and not as slim. He glared at Lydia as he seated himself on the SLOT V with Serpina mounting behind him. “You look formidable.”

Lydia touched two fingers to her temple in salute and bade him to go ahead with a wide but grim smile. “You don’t look so bad yourself.” She was referring to the dark purple tugglemus he’d wrapped around his head. A large shop smock engulfed his makeshift outfit making him seem larger, intimidating. The turbine whined straining against the clutch before the SLOT V shot out onto the road

She eased the monowheel forward to follow them. It was going to be a bumpy challenge considering the road’s patchwork of pavements and pot holes. The monowheel was designed for the smooth surface of the racing tracks in the velodromes. She had rarely taken one out of the stadium, and then only her great skill had averted any spills, the centers of gravity so unpredictable but she finally got the wobbles under control. She raced to catch up with Pyare and Serpina who had disappeared around a curve on the road ahead. Leaning into the turn, she felt it. What it was like to be in full control as a singular force of being and machine returning as a visceral memory. How old had she been then? That ambition and that drive, a certain recklessness. It had been tucked away, a memento of a transition into life as a cadet in the air academy, graduating as a lighter than air pilot with a gold medal in the close combat competition, and her term of service as an ensign with the Admiralty at the embassy in Greater Houllas, the capitol of the United Slave State Republics, during the Bushwacker’s Insurrection. Her installation as a pilot with the Aero Sud fleet upon her release from service. And soon, as had been planned by her mother and aunts, she wed.

In no time, Lydia had sight of Pyare and Serpina as they were emerging out into the countryside, leaving behind the sparsely populated edges of Outer Orleans. Now the roads followed the contours of the terrain. Terraced knolls and fields were covered with bio tents where workers tended the rows in wide straw hats. The original plan had been to join one of these labor gangs as a way out of Oldest Orleans. Until Chief Inspector Karla Kola, her nemesis from their Air Academy days, and whose Russair team she had helped defeat in the close combat competitions, showed up at the checkpoint with a squad of her IOTA agents. At least now they were well away from the city. But by now the police were likely on the alert, and they had become fugitives and refugees. The road sped past tangles of growth reclaiming the ground where houses sat abandoned. The few heavy transports, steamers or the lumbering cargo SLOTS, were easily overtaken and passed without peril. She was feeling comfortable in her monowheel, still alert to any quirks, like the gyro ratio always needed adjustment, especially after navigating curves. But it had the requisite power. At one point in the road, a stretch that ran like a straight line to the horizon, she sped up and passed Pyare with the wave of her gloved hand. He glared back at her grimly, Serpina, a beatific smile on her lips, her head pressed against the young man’s back, arms secured around his waist, and holding on like she was riding on a cloud.

Lydia’s sense of triumph didn’t last. The wheel was losing speed, the rotations slowing like the spring had come unwound. A peculiar odor said the power pack under the seat had overheated. She should have checked the coolant before they set off. But this model usually had an auxiliary. Unless it had been cannibalized. She hated dealing with chemistry. She came from a family of scientists and doctors. A lot of her Academy mates had gone into industrial bioengineering when they couldn’t pass the flight requirements but elected to stay in the Navair sector. She would have just as soon joined the circus, like her mother, than become an airship drive chemists. They all had God complexes.

Pyare screeched to a stop. He wasn’t gloating. “A good thing you stopped.” He pointed further down the road. “Serpina says we’ve gone too far. Something’s there, beyond those trees. Something lurking.”

“Lurking?”

Serpina nodded solemnly. “Yes, I feel it. Anxiety. Elation. Fear. Rage.”

“Possibly police, a checkpoint?”

Pyare nodded. “Possibly. Or a farmer’s market. Either way we don’t want to take any chances.” He pointed behind them, “There’s a road a few klicks back. It leads to an old abandoned chapel. We can hide the slot and the wheel there. Then we walk.”

Lydia nodded in agreement, staring at the open drive compartment. The odor of the power pack spelled trouble. “The pack is baked. I have to change it out. If there is an auxiliary.”

Pyare dismounted, the spring of his velo whining at the restraint. “Doyle always kept one.” He opened a compartment on the inside rim of the wheel behind the seat. He reached in and held up a charged power pack wrapped in a coolant net. He pulled back when Lydia reached for it. “Let me do it.” He yanked the pungent spent pack out with the thongs set in the compartment door. It crackled when it hit the ground. The auxiliary unit fit snuggly and engaged immediately, the wheel chain spinning with new energy.

Reversing course, Lydia followed close behind the slot velo and considered their future prospects. Walking would require energy and unlike the monowheel they didn’t have auxiliary packs for themselves. How were they going to cross the Massif on foot without food or drink? Pyare had liberated a few bio power bars from the mechanic’s pantry that smelled as unappetizing as they looked. Still, the future looked bleak as if they were staring into an abyss of uncertainty. The path she was on had started out of concern for her fugitive antigovernment father, Commodore Jack Cheése, and now she had become a fugitive as well, pursued by agents of IOTA. Soon enough, they arrived at the turn off and the rugged road to the abandoned chapel. There was something else she didn’t care for and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Dark ominous clouds had rushed across the sky and blocked the light of the already hazy sun. It was going to rain.

Next Time: The Clans of the Massif