Free Web NovelChapter 232: Chapter 225: The first flight
The night before he was to become the first man in Elarion to leave the ground, Tomas Renner sat on the edge of his bunk and cleaning a pair of goggles again and again that were already clean.
He had volunteered for the blimp, months ago, and ridden it tethered to sixty feet while a cut cable screamed and the whole world tilted, and he had climbed down afterward with his hands shaking and put his name down again the same afternoon.(thats exactly why women lives longer,if you somehow survived once then lets try again). The other volunteers called it courage. Tomas knew it for something simpler and harder to explain — that once you had seen the ground fall away beneath you, the idea of spending the rest of your life standing on it became quietly unbearable.
Tomorrow the machine would be different. The blimp had wanted to float; it forgave. The Fw 189 wanted nothing. It stayed in the sky only because a thousand small clevernesses held it there, and every one of those clevernesses had been argued over, broken, and rebuilt in front of him across the past two weeks. He trusted the men who had built it. That was not quite the same thing as trusting the thing they had built.
He set the goggles down and somewhere across the field, in the great lamplit hangar, the aircraft sat on its wheels in the dark, waiting for him.
"Get some sleep, Renner," he told himself, and did not.
Dawn came grey and windless, which was the best weather they could have asked for, and Cedric said as much in the tone of a man reporting a bad omen.
"No wind. No cloud. Nothing to blame if it goes wrong." He watched the limp banner on the mast with open distrust. "I’ve spent too long in my work to enjoy a morning this cooperative."
"You could try," Gandalf offered.
"I could also retire and keep bees. Neither is going to happen."
They had all come — Lucien with Malen a half-step behind him, the mages, Ironbreaker, even Brakka down from Titanworks with the transparent excuse of inspecting landing gear he had personally signed off twice already. Aurethar had draped himself along the roofline of the nearest hangar, gold scales catching the grey light, one eye cracked open in an expression of ancient skepticism.
"A man wishes to fly," the dragon observed, to no one in particular, "and instead of simply doing it, he spends two weeks arguing with iron until the iron agrees to carry him. Your species is endlessly inefficient."
"Your species," Cedric said, without looking up from the wind flag, "has wings on its back and ours doesnt."
The dragon’s tail flicked once against the hangar roof, which from Aurethar was as close to conceding a point as the morning was likely to produce.
Out on the field the Fw 189 sat gleaming and fueled. In the observation position behind the pilot’s seat, the camera had been bolted down the previous evening — a real machine of lens and shutter, built by the same instrument shop that made the artillery sights, but where film should have gone there was instead a slotted rack of mana-treated plates, each one blank and waiting to catch whatever the shutter showed it. Maerath had loaded six. Beside the aircraft stood Tomas, goggles pushed up, listening to the engine-sync procedure for the fourth time with the patience of a man who had memorized it days ago and understood exactly why he was being told again anyway.
Lucien crossed the grass to him alone.
"You know you can refuse," he said. "Today, tomorrow, at the end of the runway with the throttles open. At any point, for any reason, and nothing changes for you. I need you to hear that from me and not from a procedure sheet."
Tomas considered him — this lord who had built five cities in a year and now stood on wet grass at dawn making sure one pilot knew he had a door out.
"With respect," Tomas said, "if I refuse, you’ll only find someone worse at it, and then I’ll have to watch him fly my aircraft badly. I’d rather die of something quicker."
"That’s not a no."
"It’s the only shape of yes I have in me this early." He pulled the goggles down. "Let’s find out what we built."
The morning ran on Lucien’s discipline, and the discipline was iron.
First the fast taxi — full power down the runway with the tail coming light, then throttles back, three times, until the sync held under every abuse Tomas could offer it. Then the hop: a short lift, a few feet of air, back down. It sounded modest right up until it happened.
Because at the third run’s end, on the hop attempt, the wheels left the grass.
It lasted four seconds. The Fw 189 rose perhaps the height of a man, floated the length of the hangar in a straight trembling line, and settled back onto its gear with a bounce and a rumble — four seconds, and yet the men at the runway’s edge made a sound Tomas heard even over the engines, a single ragged shout torn from all of them at once, because for four seconds a machine of iron and borrowed magic had flown, and every one of them had seen it.
In the cockpit, Tomas sat very still and grinned until his face hurt.
"Ground to Renner." Maerath’s voice came through the communication set clipped above the instrument panel — one half of a paired crystal, its twin sitting on the ground station table where any man could speak into it, mage or not. It was not entirely steady. "Readings were clean. Gauges honest, sync held, controls answered. How did it feel?"
"Like the whole world let go of my collar," Tomas said. "Send me up properly. Please."
There was a pause, and Tomas knew the question was being asked with the eyes down there, knew Lucien was weighing it — deadline against danger, discipline against the moment. When Maerath’s voice came back it carried the decision’s weight behind it.
"You’re cleared to climb. One wide circuit, five hundred feet, gentle in the turns. Expose your plates on the second leg. The moment anything sings out of tune, you come home."
"Understood."
He turned into the runway’s length, ran the engines up until the airframe strained against the brakes like a hound against a leash, and let it go.
The speed came fast, the grass blurring, the tail lifting, the controls going firm and alive under his hands — and then the moment arrived, not chosen but offered, the machine telling him it was ready — and Tomas eased back on the stick and the rumble of the wheels simply stopped.
Silence, under the engine song. The ground fell away.
He was flying. Not floating, as the blimp had floated, held up by a bag of gas and hope. Flying — carried on wings, on speed, on a thousand clevernesses holding, climbing into the grey morning with the runed windows pouring the brightening world in around him. Fifty feet. A hundred. He shouted something wordless that no one would ever hear, and the aircraft climbed on, steady as a drawn line.
On the hangar roof, Aurethar had gone very still. The easy scorn had drained out of his posture without anyone marking the moment it left, replaced by the fixed, tracking stillness of a creature that had spent centuries reading the air beneath its own wings and now found itself reading someone else’s flight. He said nothing. From Aurethar, that was the loudest reaction available.
The scare came at three hundred feet.
The port engine coughed — one missed beat, the nose twitching left as the thrust stumbled — and Tomas’s body went cold and calm at once, hands moving before thought. But even as he caught the yaw, the sync linkage caught the engines, dragging the port feed level before the mismatch could grow teeth. Ironbreaker’s iron and Maerath’s runes, arguing faster than any pilot could, settling their dispute in half a second. The engine caught its breath. The note steadied. The aircraft flew on as if mildly embarrassed.
"Renner." Maerath, sharp. "We saw a flicker."
"Port engine skipped a beat and the linkage caught it before I did." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "Ask Ironbreaker whether he’d like his apology now or in writing."
The set carried, faintly, the sound of a dwarf being extremely dignified about vindication.
At five hundred feet, Tomas leveled out and looked down — and forgot, for a long moment, that he had a body at all.
He had known this territory his whole life. He had walked its roads, ridden its rails, sweated in two of its cities. He thought he had known what it was. He had known nothing. From up here it lay revealed all at once, whole — five railway lines running out from the capital like silver rivers, Iron Junction sprawled at their meeting with a freight train crawling through it small as a toy, Titanworks staining its own patch of sky with furnace smoke, and far off, at the rim of sight, a grey gleam that could only be the sea at Seastar. Everything Lucien had built, laid out beneath one man’s eyes in a single glance.
He worked the camera through the second leg the way he’d been drilled — shutter, advance the rack, next plate — six dry snaps of the mechanism, each one feeding a blank mana-plate its slice of the world below. And he understood, with a jolt that had nothing to do with the aircraft, that he was seeing what no soldier, no spy, no general in this world’s history had ever seen. A battlefield the size of a nation, read as easily as a map.
"Ground," he said slowly. "I can see everything. You don’t understand. I can see everything."
He came home twelve minutes later, dropped the Fw 189 onto the grass with a landing Brakka would later describe as "adequate, and I’m being generous," and taxied into a crowd that had abandoned all discipline. They pulled him from the cockpit onto their shoulders before his boots found the ground, and Skyforge roared like a foundry.
While they carried him, Maerath climbed into the observation position and drew the plate rack out with the care of a man handling relics. He pressed his palm to the first plate, let a thread of mana pass through it — and the image rose out of the blank surface like a memory surfacing in still water: Iron Junction from five hundred feet, sharp enough to count the wagons.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he carried it to Lucien without a word, because there were no words that would have improved it.
Lucien held Elarion’s first photograph from the sky, and around him the celebration surged on, and from the hangar roof Aurethar’s voice came down low, stripped of its usual edge.
"I have flown over a hundred kingdoms, small lord, and counted their armies from a mile up more times than I care to remember. I did it alone, because that is what my kind is. Singular." His golden eyes followed the ground crew swarming the cooling aircraft. "What that man did in twelve minutes — in a machine built by men who could not fly a month ago — history has always reserved for creatures like me. I find many will not entirely enjoy the observation."
"Then they will get used to it," Lucien said, not looking up from the plate. "It’s what we do here."
"Yes," Aurethar said. "And that is rather the problem because the motivation you have given to demons and even the allies is rather too big."
Lucien turned to Gandalf, the image of Iron Junction still cold and impossible in his hands. "How many of these can we build in a year?"
"With the framework, and the engines cooperating — a dozen. Perhaps more."
"Then start. And triple the plate production." He watched the crowd, and thought of demonstrations, and dignitaries, and everything a territory could show the world once it owned the sky above itself. "We’re going to need every eye we can get."
