Building Wings On the Way Up.
Chapter 1, Waiting on the Wing Woman.
It was a cool summer night, and the engineers were watching airships dock with the space needle. They were all sitting in a bar somewhere in old Westlake on top of a long abandoned parking warehouse. Bad acoustic music was on the radio, the bar reeked of sour coffee and stale beer. But the view of the tall ships coming into dock at the harbors and seaplanes landing in the late sun did a lot to make up for that. Even then, most of the industry was quieting down now as it was around two hours past sundown. The engineers had been there since noon and by now most of them had shuffled off.
“Have you seen them yet?” A wiry looking engineer asked.
“No same answer,” Clover replied.
The wiry engineer sighed and cursed under his breath. “Shoulda brought the ham radio in.”
“This is getting outrageous,” A woman in a shabby tweed coat harked. “We built the damn thing, we didn’t lie about its top speed. What did they do? Decide to start trying to drift it around a mountain and do donuts on the ice caps? In an airship? That’s solar powered? After dark? In this economy?”
“Another round Veldt?” Another engineer asked downing her last beer.
The woman in the shabby coat replied, “Are the trolleys on? Of course it’s friday. Yea sure bartender the day’s a bust and I don’t plan on remembering it. Give me one of those dark looking rum things on the side. No to the left, my left, ok it’s a whisky let’s pretend my liver knows the distance, yes. Who else wants one?”
Clover raised her hand, she had been listening to Veldt rant all day. As did the last few engineers who were waiting with them. The five of them downed the shots and kept looking out over the city. There were ever fewer lights out. Part of the downside of living in a city that ran mostly off natural lighting and solar energy, is that the city itself tended to slow down when the sun went down. Two engineers put money on the table and headed out. Other than Clover and Veldt, the only one left was their quiet friend who was still trying to figure out the pinball machine in the corner. Clover got up to take a look at the machine, she gave up midway through that as it looked as if it had been kitbashed between six other machines and bit’s of a model railway set. She left the engineer to mutter to himself, trying to figure out how the whole thing worked and whether it would accept new coins or not.
“What kind of chuck e cheese monstrosity were you built out of?” the engineer whispered. “Where are your secrets? What was your original theme?”
Clover sighed and sat back at the bar. At this rate she was going to be here all night and have to drag Veldt home, with Veldt complaining the whole way. There was probably some way of her talking Veldt into going home before the sunrise, but at this point she had no idea how to even start that. Veldt had been talking up this night for a bit, watching the airship dock, meeting up with Sarah, opening up some kind of fancy wine, then Clover would be asked to get lost for a few hours.
“This whisky tastes like it was brewed in a cement mixer,” Veldt started. “Maybe it was but they need to do the honest thing and just make fuel if that’s their starting plant. Christ bartender man I’ll take another beer. That one of the far right that the sailor man ordered earlier. Yea that one.”
The bartender shrugged a bit before pouring a random beer. The beer was in front of Veldt who drank it but not before blowing a few bubbles in it. The bartender raised an eyebrow at this but Clover figured she was either checking the carbonation type, or ranting to the beer itself.
“I’ll take one of whatever barrel you need to get rid of,” Clover said.
“Yea probably the pawpaw wheat,” the bartender said, grabbing a mug. “Someone tried to make a banana bread beer and it failed spectacularly.”
“I’ll take it, I like banana,”
“YEA you do,” Veldt shouted.
Clover winced.
“What’s up with her?” the bartender mouthed.
“She’s waiting on her ship to come in and it’s about four hours late at this point,” Clover sighed.
“That’s not even the start of the beginning of this screwery,” Veldt interjected. “This whole finish line thing was their idea and they can’t even make good on their own idea. Hang on, let me get the map out.”
Veldt began rummaging through her twenty odd coat pockets and searching through her satchel for some kind of map. While she was pulling out everything from toolkits to empty fliptop bottles the bartender gave Clover a look.
“Yea I know,” Clover added.
“So why are you hanging around?”
“Long story short I’m her apprentice,” Clover sighed.
“Oh dear god.”
“Yea I know.”
“Yours is on the house,” The bartender went on. “It’s not like anyone else drinks this stuff anyway. Heck at this rate I’ll be handing it off to the distiller a few floors down. Maybe we’ll get some semi-decent whisky out of this, or maybe some fuel to trade.”
“It could be worse,” Clover replied, nearly coughing up her sip. She refused to admit it smelled like some burnt 50 bananas and spread it on even more burnt toast. Though she did wonder if this was what having a stroke was like.
“Found it, I was using it as a bookmark,” Veldt shouted before unfurling a heavily stained and drawn over map of Cascadia. “Allright take a look at this, it started off somewhere around Bremerton heading south. Would it have been better if it started here? Absolutely! But symbolism be damned I guess. Meanwhile as soon as sunlight hits the panels they take off and go east by southeast, jump across the sound and begin following the old I90 through the mountain.”
“Err,” the bartender tried to find where she was pointing in the scribbled over map.
“Yes, exactly why would that happen?” Veldt agreed, nodding along. “Then as soon as they can wave to all the Yakima folks. Then book it north and head out on the edge of mountains. Their job is pretty simple at this point, waving at all the farmers and lumberjacks in all the little valleys.”
The bartender began nodding a lot. Silently he began pouring himself a drink and began sipping it.
“Now I know what you’re probably wondering,” Veldt explained. “How on earth could you get lost? Well there are all these fiddly valleys around the mountains up there. For all we know they might have gone over the Canadian border by accident. Boom by the time they’ve realized their mistake they’ve probably gone two hundred miles off course. Then the sun sets and they’re running off batteries only.”
“Naturally,” The bartender said while taking a long drink.
“Naturally indeed,” Veld continued. “And wouldn't you know it we barely have battery power to run the engines an hour or two on high. I told them we need to triple those numbers easily, but I was told that would remove most of the cargo weight capacity. Plus their expensive yada yada yada. You have any idea how expensive an airship is?”
“... Wait this thing is going, what four or five hundred miles?” the bartender asked. “Don’t airships kinda…”
“Suck?” Clover suggested. “Yea they all do abit, except this one.”
“I mean I can see them launch from here, they’re all just big balloons with fans attached,” the bartender pointed out. “Heck I saw one earlier that could fit onto a flatbed. It looked like a motorcycle hanging off of a radish.”
“Ah the Warblers!” Veldt beamed. “Yea I actually worked on the prototype for that one. Built the engine myself. Had to hand wind the coils overnight since we couldn’t spare the energy in winter. I think they got named Turms or something else stupid. Anyway, a great little aircraft for doing surveys in the redwoods. Completely terrible for everything else. Took us ages to fix the rider getting off sends the ship careening off into the sky issue. Great year! Shame we only built twelve of them. Ah.”
Veldt looked out over the space needle for a while with a look of distant pleasure.
“So I take it that this thing is better?”
“By every standard imaginable,” Clover started. “I pretty much held the light while they built it, but for starters this thing is about a thousand times bigger than the Turms you saw earlier.”
“Sounds like an exaggeration.”
“Ten times bigger in every direction so multiply them together,”
“Ten times cubed is a thousandfold,” the pinball engineer shouted between jabbing at the paddles. “Nice round number.”
“So that’d be ten train cars long so about…” the bartender thought. “Five hundred-ish feet long?”
“Just under,” the pinball engineer shouted. “They refused to give us more than 500 ft of hanger space, and we had to fit the thing in there.”
“... Wait so you’re the guys building those UFOs in Boetown!”
“I mean I guess anything’s a UFO if you don’t ask what it is,” Clover replied. “But yea they’re all engineers for stuff in Boetown.”
“Sweet!” the bartender prompted. “You guys should come by for those airshows in spring. We always get a big crowd in for those, heck it might be nice to know what we’re looking at for once.”
“I will be here!” Veldt beamed. “I mean I’ll probably be doing something else and forget and get involved in something else. But if that doesn’t happen I’ll be here!”
“...Thanks that’s all I could ask for I guess.”
“Anytime,” Veldt replied between massive gulps of odd flavored beer.
“Anyway,” the bartender started looking back at Clover. “Well I think you’ll know when it gets here if it’s that big. Guess it’s not coming in by railcar then.”
“We considered towing it by tying it to a train!” the pinball engineer stated. “That lasted all of five minutes before realizing how many overhead wires there were. “
“Hmm,” the bartender nodded. “Well maybe that’s what happened.”
“What?”
“Maybe someone let go of the line and now they’re chasing after it,”
“My brother in Christ they better not have,” Veldt spuddred. “There’s twenty odd people on the ship and an AI who knows how to keep the thing from crashing into a mountain.”
“An AI?”
“... I don’t remember if that part’s classified,” Veldt wondered. “I’m going to say maybe.”
“The pilot's initials are AI if anyone asks,” Clover put in.
“Right…” the bartender started. “Well I’ll keep that in mind if I see anyone asking questions.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m betting they just ran out of gas,” the pinball engineer shouted. “Maybe it was cloudy where they were meant to be flying. Probably tied off to an old radio tower to overnight it.”
“We had every weather station we could find on high alert!” Veldt shouted. “I checked them personally this morning.”
“You told me to do that.” Clover stated.
“I delegate better than I talk to people!”
“That’s literally what that… yea alright.” Clover started. “ Anyway they said next to no cloud cover today or any signs of wildfires. So they’re not low on power and the cells didn’t catch on fire. Maybe there’s one coming from the other direction though?”
Both the other engineers groaned a bit.
“What?”
“First off the hydrogen cells can’t catch on fire,” the pinball engineer started. “They need oxygen to get in there first.”
“Second off all the wind has been going east to west all day,” Veldt explained. “There’s weather stations all over the coast, so they’d spot a swarm of clouds going over there.”
“Now what could happen is the Bamboo laminate could burn,” the pinball engineer started. “Heck some of those battery cells are ancient too, who knows if they didn’t explode from the pressure difference.”
“Oh come on we both know those were refurbished and tested twenty times before they got anywhere close to here.”
“Yea but think about it! I mean floating the thing over Boetown twice and maybe going a thousand feet up is hardly a test.”
“Every bit of that ship was checked!”
“Oh yea sure, in theory there’s no difference between in theory and in practice. But In practice there is.”
“I’ll have you know-”
The bartender shot Clover a glance and she gave a shrug. The two engineers kept arguing for a while over what could break and why that couldn’t happen and it had to be their idea of what was wrong. Clover gave it a minute before heading outside to take a look at the sky.
“I need a day off,” Clover sighed.
There was still no sign of the ship at the space needle. And there wasn’t anything that even vaguely looked like an airship in the sky. Light pollution cost power and power was money nowadays, so the night sky was easily visible and a good deal of stars were out. A half moon was making its way over Puget Sound and a few tall ships were in dock, taking down their sails for the night. A few late night trains were strolling by, taking people home from whatever their Fridays had entailed.
“Maybe I should just head for the couch,” Clover mumbled to herself. “Veldt can stumble her own way back.”
Maybe she should just go, had been the question on her mind now for the past year or so. First year of college she found out her family was broke and she needed to get a job immediately to help out. After a series of bad gigs at everything from kelp farming to turbine maintenance she wound up hearing that her second cousin Veldt could sponsor a semi paid apprenticeship as an engineer. Within a week she was sleeping on Veldt’s couch despite having not talked to her in nearly five years. It had been the best job she’d had, even if it did cause her to tear her hair out from stress occasionally. And there were worse things than following around Veldt, writing down notes, keeping her on task, and sometimes double checking all her math and schematics. That being said, Clover was ninety per sure her job could have been done by an intelligent dog with a calculator taped to his side
“What am I doing here?”
Truth was that Clover didn’t think she understood most of what was going on in Boetown. She didn’t think she’d wind up staying there for long at the current rate, Clover figured she probably had a year or two before the engineers got sick of her misremembering what type of aluminum to grab or what type of the five hundred copper wires to use. After that was the big question, go back to California and try to at least work with the rest of her family? Or would she bum around the Cascadia a bit longer trying odd job after odd job.
Clover choked back the last of her beer and looked out over the city. There were still a few lights down in the streets. She could barely see in the richer part of town as some of the bioluminescent trees began to glow a soft blue light. Down the road a few late businesses still had people shuffling in, hole in the wall restaurants and hotels mainly. A cop and K9 wandered out of an all night cafe, their headlamps flickered on and they started the night watch. Hundreds if not thousands of tiny magenta lights bristled the city as grow lights whirled away providing light to the greenhouses and vivariums of Seattle. The sight was spoiled somewhat by hearing a few biodiesel trucks road up from the docks carrying late night cargo. Clover got over the intrusion though, after she thought she could smell old peanut oil burning in the exhaust. The rumble of her stomach brought her back to reality and she wondered if the bar inside had food.
“Alright later all,” the pinball engineer announced.
Clover sighed and headed off the balcony, Veldt would get bored soon and she didn’t want her ranting at the bartender too much. Aside from the bad drinks, poor music and bit of a walk to get up here it was a nice spot. Clover groaned and stretched her legs to march back in. But before she could, she heard the ring of the main door open.
“Somebody forgot their wallet.”
As Clover headed back inside she saw that it wasn’t one of the engineers from earlier, but instead an exhausted looking government worker wearing an ancient suit.
“People from Boetown here?”
“Hey man, they've been here all night drinking,” the bartender stated. “They haven’t said anything or done anything.”
The suit ignored him and turned to Veldt. “You work for Boetown?”
“Shit I run Boetown, did it fall apart when I left earlier?”
“Almost, we need yours and everyone else’s expertise involved in your recent project.”
“... did it actually catch on fire?” Clover asked.
“We’ll explain everything in the meeting there,” the suit stated. “We’ll need you to report to the Boetown scout base by sunrise tomorrow morning.”
“Alright but don’t expect me not to be hungover,” Veldt stammered before downing the last dregs of her drink.
“Is everyone ok?” Clover asked.
“We can’t reveal that information right now, and we may need your help in determining that.”
“Oh my god you lost contact with it,” Veldt gasped. “All that work, all that carbon fiber, all the planning, and dear god my sweet Sarah is onboard isn’t she.”
“We’re unable to confirm-”
“Don’t worry I will be there,” Veldt announced, tossing on her coat and putting random objects in her pockets. “They can try and stop me if they want, but I’ll find her.”
“That’s-”
“Come on Clover we’ve got to catch the train back.”
“What’s going on here?” Clover inquired.
“We’ve got a job to do!”
“What?”
“Come on Clover, it’ll be just like one of your stupid adventure pulps.”
Veldt scrambled out of the bar. Clover turned towards the government worker.
“What’s happening exactly?”
“I’m not sure, but I’d follow her if I were you.”
Clover turned towards the bartender.
“Good luck with whatever all that is.” the bartender shrugged.
Clover sighed and headed out the front door. She was pretty sure Veldt was going the right way and took off after her.
