Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4), Aaron Ritchey [best beach reads txt] 📗

The maelstrom spun snow around us in the dark of night, and the only thing we could really see was the zeppelin and the guards below.

I motioned to Wren to give me the Swarsky spotting scope. She handed it over, and I got a good look at the ARK soldiers waiting down by their dirigible. There were only about a half dozen; it’d be easy to swat them like flies—Wren being our main flyswatter, even still a little drunk after her battle with Aces.

All the killing felt grim. Aces needed to die, and I was glad he’d been put down. Did the Regios down there need to be exterminated? They weren’t exactly human, and right then I’d have wiped them all out just to get Micaiah and Pilate back. However, the one Regio I’d killed still haunted me. Over and over, I heard her last plea for mercy. Over and over, I felt my finger pull the trigger.

I was a good Catholic girl; murder was a mortal sin, and yet I’d murdered. And most likely, I’d have to do it again. How could I live with such conflict?

I didn’t know. But I needed to get my head straight. I recalled Pilate’s ten-second boot camp. He’d given me the basic principles of combat, but of course, Pilate being Pilate, he had ended it in his own inimitable way:

Those are not people down there ... they do not eat, they do not sleep, they do not love their babies. They are killers, and when you’re sleeping, they’re awake, making plans on the best way to BBQ our horses and deep-fry us. God did not create the women down there. Satan did. And it’s our job to rid the world of them.

The wire and grass bracelet from Micaiah tickled my wrist.

Morality questions aside, we had a mission.

Could be the ARK convoy holding our boys was supposed to rendezvous with the Jimmy below us but missed it ’cause of the storm. We didn’t have enough intel to really know, but as I lay in the snow with my sisters, Wren’s idea was making sense. If we could commandeer the zeppelin, we could use it to overtake the convoy.

Who would drive the Jimmy blimp?

Uh, that would be me.

Wren guessed what I was thinking. “You still a-scared of heights? I’m assuming since you could drive a goddamn train, you could drive a goddamn zeppelin.”

I sighed. “A train is on the ground and goes right down the tracks. You want me to pilot an airship in bad wind, and if I mess up, we’ll all die. Yeah, I’m scared, but it seems I ain’t got a choice, now do I?”

“Not much of one,” Sharlotte murmured.

“It’s only a little blimp,” Wren added, “but it should have enough lift for Marilyn and Audrey. I’m thinking we rope the Stanleys and lift them up, and then we can fly right in front of the ARK convoy. Catch ’em in an ambush. We know about them, but they ain’t got no clue about us.”

I pondered the situation. Jimmy-class zeppelins were the smallest and most swift of the zeppelins built by Boeing for use in the Juniper, but still, the airship below us was nearly a hundred meters long and around forty meters in diameter. It prolly had ten air-cells full of theta-helium, what we called thelium, and a skin of reinforced Kevlar around a frame of Neofiber, a lightweight plastic as strong as steel.

I’d studied zeppelins, I’d watched Sketchy fly the Moby Dick for hours and hours, and I had a good understanding of the technology, the physics, and the general use of one. All that book knowledge was fine, but a far cry from piloting one myself.

Butterflies the size of bats choked up my belly. No choice. We’d have to seize the Jimmy, rope up the Stanleys, and take off into the wind to get our boys back.

Though it was past midnight, I was wide awake, my system sucking up a new serving of adrenaline.

We withdrew back to where the Marilyn Monroe and the Audrey Hepburn stood, their dark shapes outlined by the snow covering them. I opened the boiler to toss in more wood. In the light, I saw Wren grinning.

“You’re liking this, aren’t you?” I asked a little nastily.

She heard the question and not the nasty. “No, Princess, I’m loving this.”

“Don’t call me ‘princess,’” I growled back.

Wren grinned. “Me and Dutch will get to the other side and wait. Once you attack in the Stanleys, Dutch and I will use the distraction to either kill them guards or sneak aboard the blimpy or do both. Then you’ve got to get into the airship fast and learn how to fly it. Show us some of that genius you got.”

It was a good plan, but I was scared.

And the snow wasn’t helping my nerves.

We had to get up and over Independence Pass, and if the snow continued, we might find ourselves stranded, then starved, then dead. The pass had been my brilliant idea to outmaneuver the army chasing us. We figured they’d be searching the old I-70 corridor.

So, I was scared of the snow, and I was equally as frightened by Edger; she’d come crawling out of her grave to chase us. On top of that, I had to get ready to fly a zeppelin in the next half an hour or so.

If only Micaiah had been there to help me. If only I’d insisted that Sketchy give me flying lessons. If only we’d never been captured by Aces in the first place.

“If onlys” are cheap. Especially in the Juniper.

(ii)

Ten minutes later, I sat in the Marilyn’s cockpit, waiting for Wren and Dutch to get into place. Sharlotte was above me in the gunner’s seat. We didn’t have much to say. Inside our Stanley, we were warm but wet. Nice thing about steam engines: they run hot.

A jagged crack marred the windshield from where Aces had hit us with a grenade during battle with him in the Glenwood pool.