In the passenger seat, Earl hugged one arm to his chest. “Slow down! You trying to break my other arm? The brake—step on the brake!”
Jael must have stomped it with both feet. Dust boiled up behind the rear tires, and the whole car swerved, first to one side of the road, then the other. It skidded to a stop, left front wheel about two inches over the edge of the ditch. Both Jael and Earl bounced in their seats.
Hitch ran over. “What do you think you’re doing? She can’t drive!”
Earl’s shoulders sagged. “You’re telling me, brother.” He still held his left arm cradled against his chest.
“What happened to you?” Hitch asked.
“Arm’s busted.”
“So you come tearing out here instead of finding somebody to set it?”
“You were about to crash my plane—again. You think I was going to just sit back there?”
Hitch opened the door. He reached to steady Earl’s good elbow.
Earl dodged and, with a grimace, eased himself out. He hobbled over to the plane, his face the color of flour paste. “What’d you do to her this time?”
“Busted propeller and an engine leak. But this one wasn’t my fault, and you know it.” He looked at Jael. The wind splattered raindrops against his face. “We’re in trouble now, aren’t we?”
She swiped her hair out of her eyes and held it back with one hand. “Yes. You have no hurt?”
He looked down at himself. He hadn’t stopped to check if he’d gotten hit or broken anything. Aside from the taste of castor oil in his mouth—and the beginnings of nausea from inhaling too much of it—and cramps in both forearms—and the fact he was still shaking all over and couldn’t get enough air—he seemed fine.
Jael climbed out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I am fine.” But she was limping worse than ever. She supported herself against the car as she hobbled around the corner. “We have put marking on underside.”
“Yeah, I saw the wing. It about took my head off.”
“The idea was Walter’s.”
“This Schturming of yours—” He dug around in his brain for the words to describe what he was feeling. “Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t that. Where’d it come from? It’s not German. You’re not German. It looks like it’s been floating around up there for ages. But why? I don’t get it. And these storms.” He raised both hands into the wind. “Past time you brought me up to speed, don’t you think?”
She opened her mouth, hesitated, then nodded.
“Doggone it, Hitch!” Earl hollered. “I’m going to have to carve a whole new propeller. I’d like to know how I’m supposed to do that with one arm!”
“Quit about the plane, will you? Get over here and let me set that arm of yours before it swells up bigger’n Rick’s head.” He looked around at Jael. “Whose car is that?”
“J.W.’s.”
“Well, see if you can’t find something in there to use as a splint.” He tromped across the field and practically dragged Earl back. “Sit down and quit carping. Pretend you’re the plane and I’m the mechanic.”
Earl grunted in pain. “I wouldn’t let you be mechanic on a Sopwith LRT.”
Jael surfaced from the backseat with a couple plaid shirts and an old buck-bow handsaw.
Earl huffed through his clenched teeth. “Amputation’s a little drastic, don’t you think?”
Hitch ignored him. “That’ll work. Tear up one of those shirts.” He took the saw and stomped it apart. The crosspiece would be about the right length to support Earl’s forearm. He shot Jael a sideways glance. “Tell me what happened up there. What is that thing?”
“You sure you can doctor and think at the same time?” Earl said.
“You, shut up.” Hitch pulled his knife from the sheath in his boot and slit Earl’s jumpsuit sleeve.
The arm was already swelling around a crooked bump halfway between the wrist and elbow. Definitely broken, but it looked pretty clean. He would immobilize it now, then let the doc in town set it.
Jael handed him the saw’s crosspiece. “Schturming is… I don’t know where to be starting.”
“Who built it?”
“The _glavni_—the leaders.” With both hands, she steadied the crosspiece against Earl’s arm. “They made it and they launched it in year of one thousand eight hundred sixty.”
“Explains the elderly cannon. How come you never updated it?”
She shrugged. “I have told you. My people they are not trusting your technologicals.”
“We haven’t got anything as technological as a flying weather machine.”
“I think maybe they are afraid of that even. They see its power, and they do not trust even ourselves with it.”
“When did you get on board?” Earl asked.
Realization hit Hitch between the eyes. “You were born there, weren’t you? So was Zlo.”
“Yes. All of us there now. It has never landed since one thousand eight hundred sixty.”
Isolation. That explained things, partly—like why she thought of Groundspeople as practically another race, and maybe even why the descendants of the machine’s inventors had ended up scared of the thing.
“How’s that work?” Earl gritted out. “You gotta eat, you gotta fuel the thing.”
“We send down what you called the elevators—so we can gain what we need.”
“But why?” Hitch started winding the longest strip of torn shirt around Earl’s arm. He overlapped the wraps and kept the cloth snug. “I don’t get it. Why’s it up there at all? It was an early army airship or something?”
“No.” She frowned with her eyebrows. “Schturming was not made for war. It is for nauka_—for science. The makers—they were men of studies. They made _Schturming and took their families, so they could fly all across world and study weather. And I think, too, they wanted to protect their families from Groundsworld. They tell us all our lives that Groundspeople are ignorant, greedy, and having no responsibility.” She shot a glance at both of them. “But in this I am seeing now they were wrong.”
Hitch tightened the wrap over Earl’s break. “You’ve been flying around up there for sixty years. How many people are up there now?”
“Hundred, more maybe.”
Earl winced. “All up there in that flying sardine barrel?”
He had a point. It was a big ship, but not that big.
“That is being part of why Zlo has taken over it.” She spoke in a low, even voice, as if she had to control each word. “Even in engines, I am hearing that changes are happening. People want to come to ground, and other people are thinking that is wrong and dangerous.”
“And what’d Zlo want?” Hitch asked.
She snorted. “Zlo wants everyone else to go to ground, so he can be glavni of Schturming and gain for himself fame and richness. Once, I heard him tell Nestor that he is hating our leaders—even the first ones—for making us stay in Schturming. He was Forager. He saw your world. I think… I think he thought Schturming was like prison to him.” She looked up at Hitch. “When Nestor let him see dawsedometer, he knew what he could do with it.”
Hitch stopped wrapping. “That was your original mandate, then? Study and learn how to control the weather with the dawsedometer?”
He’d heard of such things before. During one of the bad droughts when he was a kid, some of the farmers had hired a quack out of Omaha to use his weather machine to bring rain. The whole thing had been hush-hush. Nobody had actually seen the machine: the guy had kept it barricaded inside a wooden tower. A few days later, when it rained in Morrill County to the east, he’d taken credit for it.