Chapter 360: The Sky Between Two Eras
The rough shudder of the takeoff run vanished. The landing gear left the ice. The aircraft climbed smoothly into the polar air, its nose angled upward at a comfortable ten-degree pitch, its wings biting cleanly into the thin high-latitude atmosphere. The airframe steadied. The trembling stopped. The roar of the engines softened into a smooth, sustained thrum.
Stan let out a breath.
Beside him, Camilla was leaning slightly forward against her seatbelt, her red eyes fixed on the world falling away beneath them through the cockpit window.
She was smiling, she genuinely was...
The polar plain shrank below them. The compacted white terrain that had seemed endless from the ground revealed itself, from altitude, as a small pale wedge at the edge of a vast dark ocean. The horizon curved. The sky above deepened from pale blue into something richer.
"...I have not flown in a very long time," she said quietly. "Not like this."
"How did you fly, in the old era?"
"Cultivators of my rank flew directly. Through Qi manipulation. Without a construct. The wind supports the practitioner if the practitioner has sufficient comprehension of it."
"Faster than this?"
"Faster than a New Age airplane, yes. But not faster than this specific aircraft’s cruising speed for a sustained duration. Even Royal Bloods tire." She tapped the frame of the cockpit lightly with one long finger. "Whereas your machine simply carries you. Effortlessly. Endlessly. As long as the fuel holds."
"Fuel is easy to acquire."
"So I see."
She was quiet for a long moment. The polar landscape scrolled past beneath them.
"In the old era," she said, "flight was a mark of achievement. A practitioner who could ride the wind was a practitioner of considerable rank. The sky belonged to us. To cultivators. To the strong."
"And now?"
She gestured with one long finger at the world through the cockpit window.
"Now the sky belongs to whoever can afford a ticket."
Stan considered that.
"That’s one way to put it."
"It is not a criticism, cultivator. It is an observation. Your era has democratized what mine reserved for the mighty." Her red eyes tracked the wing outside the window. "There is something admirable in that. And something troubling."
"Which one wins?"
"I have not decided yet."
She turned her attention back to the window.
"But all these I just said are for those without tamed beast, after all one can easily ride a Flying QI beast to any location they want... You have a strange life, cultivator."
"I’ve been told."
He set the autopilot for Inksea and let the aircraft cruise.
The Antarctic interior fell away beneath them. The rough white terrain gave way to grey ocean. The elongated dusk of the polar latitudes gradually shifted into more ordinary daylight as they moved north. The engines hummed steadily. The cabin remained comfortable.
Camilla, in the seat beside him, watched the world scroll past through the window with the quiet, absorbing attention of a being who had emerged from decades of a constructed sky and was, for the first time in her lifetime, seeing a real one.
Stan let her look.
He busied himself with the small, ordinary business of flying, trim adjustments, altitude confirmations, the slow patient dance of transferring authority to the autopilot and confirming that the autopilot was, in fact, going to keep them in the air.
At cruising altitude, he tested the aircraft’s onboard satellite communications system. The polar interior had been a signal dead zone. As they crossed north into ordinary trans-oceanic airspace, the system reconnected to the global network with the small, cheerful chime of a device rejoining the world.
His phone lit up in his pocket.
Notification after notification stacked in rapid succession. Missed calls. Unread messages. News alerts. Snapchat pings. A voicemail from Sacha. Two voicemails from Maya. A blocked-number voicemail he could already guess the origin of.
The world, in the several days he had been away from it, had continued without him.
He sighed.
Camilla glanced over. "Trouble?"
"Just the world."
"Ah." She turned back to the window. "That one is always trouble."
Stan almost laughed.
He silenced the phone and slid it back into his pocket. Whatever the world wanted from him, it could wait until Inksea.
The Bombardier flew on.
The satellite chime faded and Stan looked out through the cockpit window at the world spooling past beneath them, grey ocean, thin cloud, the pale afternoon light of the middle latitudes, and did the calculation he had been quietly avoiding for the past hour.
The plane could not simply vanish on approach.
The last time he had willed the Bombardier back into the inventory, he had done it over open Antarctic ice with no witnesses within a thousand kilometers in any direction. A thirty-ton aircraft blinking out of existence a hundred meters above a private strip on Inksea Island was a different proposition. Air traffic control would notice. Coastal radar would notice. The half-dozen ground-crew on shift at any given hour would notice. Someone with a phone camera would notice.
Questions would follow. Stan was not in the mood for questions.
He tapped the comm panel awake and dialed the frequency for Inksea’s private aviation authority. The connection opened with the small cheerful blip of a modern tower answering a modern aircraft.
"Inksea Ground, this is Bombardier Global, inbound from the south, requesting priority approach and hangar accommodation for extended stay."
The voice on the other end was crisp, pleasant, unhurried. Stan gave a tail number. He gave a rough arrival window. He mentioned, in the practiced, unemphatic tone of a man who spent money the way other men spent breath, that expedited handling and discreet ground service would be appreciated and would be reflected accordingly on the invoice.
The voice on the other end became, if possible, even more pleasant. Approach was cleared inside of ninety seconds.
Camilla, in the seat beside him, watched the exchange with the small focused frown of a person cataloguing a new form of ritual etiquette.
"That was quick."
"Money is fast."
"It is?" Camilla’s brows furrowed, not getting the joke...