Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Eight - Avianation

Once, a long time ago, I’d gone on a field trip with my school to an aerospace museum. It was only a half-day trip, coordinated by a bunch of parent volunteers, and it was free so my parents didn’t have to sit me down and explain why I couldn’t go like they had with other trips.

I had loved every minute of it. The planes were so big. The newer ones were all sleek and shiny and the old ones just had so much panache and this weird aesthetic that screamed ‘functional yet pretty’ that I’d never seen in modern stuff. Best of all, everything was so big. It was enough to make a small Broccoli gape all day.

My neck hurt for half a week from the strain of looking up so much! It was wonderful!

The memory of that day came back in force as Rosaline pushed open a pair of doors and led us into the front of a huge building. The Albatross Aeronautics main building was a big blocky thing with a lot of windows on its front. Behind it was a huge compound surrounded by metal fencing that stopped people from wandering into a yard where two dozen baby airships were coming together.

“This,” Rosaline said as she spun around, her wings held high around her. “Is the showroom!”

I gasped.

The entrance room had ships in it. Not full-size airships, but a dozen or so airships the size of vans, with teeny tiny rigging and itty bitty sails and little figurines glued onto their decks and sides. They were tethered in place by some cords, but still bobbed and juked around in the air.

There were little podiums below each ship holding up a brass plaque. I skipped over to the first and leaned over it to read.

Presenting the Albatross Aeronautics Astute-Class Destroyer!

This light destroyer is a fearsome warrior of the skies! Capable of speeds up to fifty-five knots, the Astute can keep up with any modern cargo vessel and its four weapons platforms will give even the most daring pirate a reason to think twice!

I looked up to the ship above me, noting the plaque on its side that read Astute in pretty gilded letters. The ship looked to be half wood and half metal, with a sleek pair of balloons above it and two metal platforms jutting out of the front with a big ballista mounted atop each of them.

“So cool,” I said.

“Isn’t it?” Rosaline said. “I wanted to name them something nicer, but the board is filled with boring old birds who want things sounding bland and officious. Apparently warships shouldn’t be named after birds or flowers or some dog I petted that morning.”

“That’s too bad,” I said as I spun around to take in the other ships. Some looked a lot more utilitarian and a bit square, while others, especially the warships, had sleek prows and a lot more metal on their bodies. They even tended to have more gilding and railings with shiny trim along the sides and especially at the back where the castle was.

“This room was my idea,” Rosaline said with obvious pride. “The old ones whined and complained until it started to drive up sales, then I rubbed the fact that they complained in their faces so that they couldn’t pretend that they were onboard with the idea the entire time.”

“Um,” I said. That sounded a bit too political for me. “It sounds like you have to do a lot of work.”

“She does,” Amaryllis said. “And yet she manages to not do half of it.”

“I work very hard to find the best ways not to work and yet still get things done,” Rosaline said. “It’s why I only hire the best, most hardworking people to do my work for me.”

I blinked at that. “Okay,” I said. “How much for a ship like that one?”

Pointing up, I gestured to the biggest ship in the room. It was an Adamant-Class Battleship. It was, judging by the hundreds of inch-tall figures on its many decks, the size of a small castle. Unlike the other ships, it didn’t have a balloon above it, but it was rather bulbous, so I figured the balloons were probably inside it.

“We never actually built one of those,” Rosaline said. “Though we have started negotiations for one. It’ll cost nearly twenty-thousand gold just for the materials to start the project.”

I winced. That was more than the eight I had. “Darn. I bet that one’s big enough to build a house with a fence on the deck.”

“Uh,” Rosaline said. “Probably?” She shook her head. “Nevermind that! Come on, we can take one of the movers over to the wrecking yard. I’m sure I can bug my engineers into fixing up one of those smaller ships for your trip in no time flat.”

I skipped after Rose, my other friends following after at a more boring pace. “What’s a move?” I asked.

“Well, we installed these big platforms a few years ago that go up and down and carry materials. The shipyard is built in a dozen levels, you see. Anyway, I asked if we could have platforms that move from side to side too, and the answer was, as always, ‘if you have the gold for it.’ So now we have moving platforms. I named them moves because they move you, and the ones that go up and down are called lifts because they lift you.”

“Don’t they also bring you down?”

“That’s what I said! But they said calling them ‘drops’ would be a bad idea.”

I nodded. That made sense.

We crossed the building, Rosaline waving and sometimes even hugging the occasional office harpy until we stumbled out of the back and walked over to a place that had a bunch of moves all lined up atop some rails. Moves, as it turned out, had rails all around them and a small engine at the back.

Rosaline flagged down a young harpy boy in a newsboy cap and grease-stained overalls and he jumped onto the move’s controls.

With a hiss of steam from the move’s engine, we were off at a blistering pace that I could have outwalked.

“These aren’t very fast,” I pointed out as I hung off the edge and watched the rails slide past below.

“Nope,” Rosaline said. “But they can carry a lot. Real handy for moving parts around the yards.”

I hummed agreeably and decided to just take in the sights. There were cranes overhead, some of them moving big pallets covered in stuff, others were holding onto the skeletal frames of airships coming together bit by bit.

Those frames had entire teams of workers crawling over them and laying out tarps and wooden planks with easy efficiency. There were flashes sometimes as little welders went off, and the constant pinging clang of hammers meeting metal.

Even the air smelled like new stuff, probably from the piles of fresh lumber and the long sheets of folded tarp being moved around on dollies by burly harpy men.

“You work in the coolest place,” I said.

Rosaline grinned, then she pointed to the side. “That’s our lift!”

We hopped off the move and walked over to a place where a few lifts were waiting. I slowed down so that I was between Awen and Amaryllis. “This place is great, isn’t it?”

Amaryllis nodded. “It’s an impressive use of the clan’s logistical might, a symbol of our current prosperity and one of the ways that the Albatross are making a mark not only in the Nesting Kingdom, but across Dirt.”

“Aw... I think it’s very nice? The ships are a bit bigger than Uncle’s Shady Lady though.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess the Shady Lady is more of a personal sort of ship, made to go on adventures and such, while those big ones are all big important ships for big important things. Do you think we could man a ship with just the three of us?”

“Woman, more like,” Amaryllis said.

I blinked, then let out a giggle. “Did you make a pun?” I asked.

“No, I merely corrected you,” she said.

“With a pun.”

“It wasn’t a pun,” Amaryllis said.

“Awa, I think it was.”

“Puns are crass and a kind of humour reserved for fools and idiots,” Amaryllis declared.

I wrapped a hand around her waist and pulled her in for a side hug. “We still love you, even if you’re a fool and an idiot who makes puns.”

She broke out of the hug with much wing flapping and protesting. I shared a look with Awen and we both worked hard not to laugh too much.

Rosaline was smiling as she waited by one of the lifts. It looked like she’d shooed off a bunch of workers so that she could use it herself, which I guessed was a perk of being the boss.

The lift brought us down with a rattle of chains and a few bumpy little skips, but it seemed sturdy enough. That all faded from my thoughts as we came down a level and into a huge room, the biggest I’d ever seen in my life. As it turned out, the ground level of the shipyards was built off of the side of the mountain, and now we were heading under it in a world filled with pillars and struts that held up the shipyard.

Large hangers held airships, some looking brand new, while a few were going through some repairs. As we dipped lower, the ships started to look a bit rougher.

“This is the shipbreaking level,” Rosaline said as she gestured. There were maybe a dozen airships in all, which was still an impressive number of ships to see. “These are all decommissioned ships that will be stripped for parts. There aren’t all that many yet. The business is too new for that, but I’m sure by the time we’re all old, the first and second generation of ships will all pass away in a place like this.”

“That’s a bit sad,” I said as I took in the ships due to be broken down. They did look older, with more wooden constructions and a lot less flair in their appearance.

All except for one.

It caught my eye like gold glinting atop fresh snow.

It wasn’t the biggest ship. Far from it, in fact. The thing was maybe half again as long as the Shady lady, though it was quite a bit wider. It probably owed that to the fact that it had two hulls instead of just the one, each one connected to the one next to it by a web of gantries and pipes and ropes.

At the end of its twin prows were two figureheads. Not of pretty naked women, but of a pair of stately, top-hat wearing ducks with their wings outstretched and holding up a pair of rusty... knives?

There had been a coat of yellow paint over its hull once, but it was chipping off all over, as if the ship had spent too much time in the wind and weather, and the back end, with its two little cabins, had more rust on it than was probably proper.

There was only one big oblong balloon, and it was deflated. The only thing holding the ship up was a large gantry crane beneath it, but that didn’t matter. I could still imagine it resting in the air in defiance of gravity.

“Broccoli? Broc?”

I blinked and looked over to Amaryllis. She pointed to one side where a nice, simple ship was resting. It was... plain, but functional-looking. “We’re going to check that one out.”

“What about that one?” I asked as I pointed to the ship that had caught my eye.

She stared. “Broccoli, I might not know as much about ships as my dearest sister, but that thing looks like it very much belongs here.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s beautiful,” I said. “It has character.”

Rosaline made her way closer. “Yeah. That class never took off though. Too many problems.”

“See, it’s problematic. Now, that one over there only needs a bit of repair work to get going,” Amaryllis said.

“What’s her name?” I asked Rosaline.

She grinned. “Her name, dearest Broccoli, is the Beaver Cleaver.”

***