The craft lurched when Mikel cut us free of the rigging of the burning globeship, and then we fell toward crush depth so fast my feet rose off of the floor grates. Jeral instantly threw himself toward the gas pump levers. I should have helped, but I still clung to the midrailing and stared out of the porthole.
Mikel’s body plummeted past, along with flaming debris.
I twisted myself to look down into the ochre clouds below us. Mikel’s body vanished into their gloom.
“Pyetr!” Jeral shouted at me. “Pyetr, help me.”
“It’s too late,” I said.
“What?” Jeral’s face reddened with frustration. “All we need to do is flip the reserve—”
I tapped the window. “The starboard brace snapped, I can see it twisted over to the porthole.”
Jeral couldn’t see it from up front as he valiantly struggled to save us.
“No…” Jeral flew to my side and craned his neck to look up. “No.”
This high up, the air looked clean and bright. We could get out the airlock and try and fix the damage outside if we wanted. At these heights, the temperature was comfortable, the sunlight kissed your skin, and the plants grew like they were possessed. All you needed was your own air.
But below us the pressure grew, the rain became acidic, the temperature rose past boiling, and then it rose even further. Hothouse.
“No,” Jeral said, staring at the mangled rack that had once held our reserve gasbag. He curled up into a ball.
I gave him a hug as we plummeted toward our death.
***
The raiders hit our city hard. Five miles of anchored bubble, the Empire City controlled trade for hundreds of miles in any direction, and it had folded when their cutters slammed their needle-tipped prows into the skin of Empire City like daggers into ripe fruit.
A city could still float as its lifeblood trickled out around the prows of the enemy. So each ship punctured our shell, then reversed before striking again in a different location. Our emergency patch teams were overwhelmed, able-bodied defenders had to step into the gap.
That’s when the ships boarded us, knowing they could cut through weak civilians. They kicked through our paper windows and set fires, dragged people out, and took their fruits, seeds, and anything else precious.
Mikel, Jeral, and I ran out to our trade barge the moment we saw the raiders strike. We had four harpoons aboard, triggered from the cockpit via electrics once they were wound up, enough to harass at least one of the raiders.
“We got two raiders,” I said to Jeral. “We’ll be remembered well.”
It would take about four minutes to reach the ground. At these heights there was less resistance, but as we passed into the clouds and kept dropping the already dense atmosphere would get thicker. We would slow down, and all the wreckage of what should have been our reserve gasbag would add some drag.
Four minutes to live.
What did you do with four minutes?
We’d fired three harpoons at the first raider as we rose up from the trailing hydrogen docks. Two to puncture the main bag, one to hit the reserve.
In our arrogance, we’d assumed we would never be the ones corkscrewing off down into the cloudy depths to never be seen again.
The second raider caught us while we tried to bobble around the rim of the Empire City toward the main cluster of action. We missed our shot, the last harpoon. By then, the dock fires had spread. Some idiot raider set off the counterweight store houses.
“Ram them! Ram them into the docks,” Mikel had shouted.
A brilliant idea. Set them on fire.
But we hadn’t anticipated our airship getting caught up in their rigging and the fire spreading to our craft.
Mikel hadn’t even thought about it. She just dashed out to the airlock, cutlass in hand, and shut it before we could move. We could hear her hacking away, moving about in the flames, and then we’d jerked loose.
And fallen.
Fallen.
We were through the thick clouds and deep into the atmosphere. Parts of the old craft creaked and complained at the pressure outside.
We might die well before those… now three minutes… were up.
***
A hothouse planet is one where the atmosphere once supported life, but something tipped the balance in one direction or another. Usually, our tutors explained, it was carbon.
We lived in floating cities that had to be carefully monitored. We knew about runaway atmospheric events.
But our ancestors didn’t.
Those fuckers ran this world like a raider depot. Consume what you needed, ignore the delicate balance of air, life, and city, and when the city started to choke you with its air and swampiness, move on.
“Here it is,” I said.
We continued to fall in the murk, but my feet had drifted to the grating and we were standing up.
“What is it?” Jeral asked.
I held up a finger to hush him. I stood up on the railing and pushed my ear against the metal. Beyond the creaking of pressure, I could hear something fluttering.
“There’s some bag left, it’s acting like a parachute.” It hadn’t slowed us much up above the clouds. But the crush depth atmosphere roiled about us like soup, thick enough for the remnants of our bag to slow us down.
The natural air inside our craft also buoyed us.
“Is it…”
I couldn’t tell in the horrible mix down here. I couldn’t see anything…
“Look,” I pointed.
Dark shapes from within the murk rose toward us.
Buildings.
We’d fallen from the city, and we must have followed its chains. I could see the three anchor points in the roads below us.
“There it is.”
We had the sigil all over our city. We were named after it.
“The Empire State,” Jarel breathed.
Something snapped inside, something else popped. My stomach curled in on itself with anticipatory dread.
The city we fell toward was vast, glimpsed here and there in the fog of the underworld. It stretched on and on, heavy, grounded. On the actual ground.
“All that space,” Jeral muttered.
We may be about to die, but awe still washed over us.
I pressed my lips together. “All that, and open skies, and air to breath, and they squeezed it until it was desiccated and bare.”
Then, when the hothouse spiral began, they fled for higher ground.
“I’d despise them,” Jeral said. “But it’s not like the raiders are any different.”
“Do you think Mikel saw it?” I wondered.
I knew the answer, so Jeral didn’t bother to ruin it for me. Mikel would have choked on the acidic clouds and had the air pushed out of her lungs long before she could have seen this.
“There’s the Chrysler,” I said as we drifted.
Floors and floors and floors of gap toothed stone and steel passed us by as we lurched the final feet to the ground. I closed my eyes and waited for the pop and crushing heat to slice me apart.
It didn’t come.
***
“Gavvy said he built this one strong,” Jeral said after a few minutes. “No lie.”
I squinted at the portholes. “It wasn’t just Gavvy. I did the retrofit. You were there.”
We did Empire City to High Tampa under cloud cover the whole way once, when raider activity had gotten unbearable. Made us a pretty profit on the banana trade. Ship craft was in my blood, my grandmother was one of the last bonafide ship designers.
“Okay, but in some way its crueler. We just sit here and wait? For what? To starve? For some small bolt to finally shear?”
The ghosts of the past looked all around us. They’d called them ‘skyscrapers.’
Cute.
Jeral rooted around and found a small bento box. “Did you have time to eat before the bells sounded?”
I shook my head.
“A last meal?” He held it in the air between us.
I rubbed my shaking hands. “Sure.”
***
In the old days they had electrics that let you speak through the air to other cities or ships. Old Hodin had one of the last working units, but metals and parts were scarce, and city council had paid him in work release retirements to get their hands on it.
Nothing but a fantasy to wish for one now.
“How about a flare?” Jeral wondered.
They would only get up a few thousand feet at best. Even if we floated one with a small bag, who would notice it? The winds would carry it on.
And going outside wasn’t an option. This wasn’t like above the clouds where you just needed a bottle of air. Cycle the airlock and you’d be crushed. And probably the inner door would blow out and kill whover was inside.
We spent an hour batting ideas around before falling silent to contemplate our fate.
And that was when the knock came at the airlock.
***
There were tall tales, bullshit tales, of ghostlike voices on the electrics. Chatter that, when older generations tried to figure out where it came from, swore that the sources were below.
It was boogie man stuff to scare the kids. Beware the shadows.
Something was here for us.
I imagined the slavering jaws of a mist dragon, like in the Tales of Adwalker, with its hypersteel body immune to the crush depth.
The knock came.
“I recognize that,” I said.
Dat dat dee dat dat… Shave and a haircut…
It repeated again.
Shave and a haircut.
I stood up and walked toward the airlock.
“What are you doing?” Jarel hissed and grabbed my arm.
Shave and a haircut…
I yanked away from him. “It’s clearly a person. We do this all the time as kids. It’s human.”
“But how?”
“I have no idea.”
I pounded on the airlock: dat dat.
An excited set of knocks came back. From right on the other side. Whatever it was had already come through the outer door and waited *inside* the airlock.
I grabbed the wheel and spun it to release the door’s clamps as Jeral screamed for his life and tried to pull me away.
***
Some took to sky, and some burrowed deep into the ground with machines that ate dirt and created caverns. And they never in their lives seen the sky or the sun.
They knew we were up there, though. They always remembered us, we just forgot them when the electrics on our craft failed.
But sometimes we fell out of the sky, like broken butterflies fluttering down into the dirty muck.
Most died, crushed as they fall below the clouds. But some survived, and the men and women who called themselves Mist Wolves sallied out from their warrens below to save who they could.
They hoped, now, one day to start building skycraft to reach the cities in the sky again. I’m working with them on plans for a chain ascender that can climb its way back up to Empire City.
No one has come back to the surface in all the floating city’s histories or memories.
People won’t know what to think when Jeral and I become the first, along with our new friends.