Chapter 2: Gray Skies and Snowfields

In the previous afternoon Ingrid had seen a storm far out over the ocean and in the night the storm arrived. The weather controllers used their elementals to prevent damage to the airship and it was mostly quiet. In the morning Vaska rose and walked over to the window. She was still naked. She placed her hands on her hips and puffed up her chest.

"Can they see through these windows?" Ingrid asked.

"No. Come look."

The sky was gray and Wave Crest was coated in a thin blanket of snow. Everything was shades of gray except for the airfield which was green. Soldiers roamed the airfield accompanied by blazing red-orange fire elementals which left plumes of steam as they went. There were a dozen little airplanes on the ground, cute little things like the ones Ingrid had seen towing the Taisian flag the day before. The White Ravens were also parked on the side of the field along with half a dozen fighter jets painted gray. The gray fighter jets all had longer glass canopies.

"What are those?"

"Those are trainers. An experienced pilot flies in the back and the trainee flies in the front."

Ingrid pondered this for the rest of the morning. They showered together and the soap smelled of lavender and lemon peel. After, Ingrid stood naked and dripping wet in the bathroom and she said, "I don't have any clean clothes."

"I'll go find something," Vaska promised.

Vaska made note of the size of Ingrid's clothes and then she left Ingrid alone and naked. Ingrid explored the room while Vaska was gone and she found many more nude paintings with the anatomy of the women rendered in exquisite detail.

Vaska quickly returned with a Taisian Air Navy officer's uniform except without the marks of rank. A black skirt that didn't even reach to Ingrid's knees, a white shirt, and a fur-lined leather cap with brass-rimmed glass goggles. After she got dressed they went out on deck and Ingrid saw many other pilots dressed in similar clothes. She felt like she was one of them.

"Do you think it would be possible for me to fly in one of the jets?" Ingrid asked.

"Certainly," Vaska said. "My eyes are bad and I can't fly airplanes by myself but Glenice can take you up. Let me go find her."

Glenice was a tall blonde foreigner with shining blue eyes like Ingrid. She wore white trousers and the black uniform jacket common to the imperial marines. The man named Algot Gunn leaned against an airplane on the deck and he watched Ingrid but his face betrayed nothing.

"Hey Glenice! Can you take Ingrid up in one of the fighter jets?"

"It depends," Glenice said. "Who's Ingrid?"

"I'm Ingrid. Nice to meet you."

"Hell no," Glenice said. "Are you going to clean up the puke?"

"Oh," Vaska said. "There is that. Well can you at least take her up in one of the highwings?"

"Sure."

"Hey Algot!"

"Yes?" the man grunted.

Vaska handed him the note marked with the sizes of Ingrid's clothes. "Make yourself useful and go into town and fetch Ingrid some new clothes. The best materials you can find. Maybe something lacy and spicy too."

Ingrid blushed. The imperial marine grumbled and stalked off.

Vaska summoned her heaven elemental and they all floated over the side of the airship down to the place where the cute little airplanes were parked in the grass. Glenice pointed to one and said "Shoo" to the crew nearby and she waved her hand dismissively and the crew went away.

The airplane was a lot bigger than Ingrid had guessed from a distance. It was shaped like a squared tube that grew narrow towards the tail, with high wings supported by diagonal struts. Glenice reached up and started to manipulate the surface near the tip of the wing.

"This is the aileron," Glenice said. "This is how we turn the airplane. The aileron on the opposite wing moves up when I move this one down. Notice that the stick inside also moves around when I move this."

On the back of the airplane there was a cross-shaped structure with a smaller pair of wings and a vertical fin. Glenice grabbed the surface on the smaller pair of wings and lifted it up.

"This is the elevator. This is how we can aim the nose up or down. And here," she said as she grabbed the fin and twitched it side-to-side, "this is the rudder. It has a variety of uses. Mostly, you use it to stay straight when the wheels are on the ground, during takeoff and landing."

Ingrid nodded. "Aileron and elevator. Turn or point up or down. Rudder on the ground. Got it."

Glenice walked to the wing again and pointed to the surface which did not move, on the inside of the wing. It was clearly a separate piece of metal from the wing itself.

"This is one of the flaps," Glenice said. "It goes up and down in tandem with the flap on the other wing. It changes the shape of the wing to increase lift and decrease the stall speed. It is used to land, because we will want to be going slow when we land, and we don't want to stall."

Glenice went to the life-ward side and opened the door and fetched a small pouch which clinked when she jostled it. She reached inside and plucked out a blue contract crystal.

"That doesn't belong to the bank?" Ingrid asked.

"The Taisian Air Navy has a permanent lease," Glenice said.

"That means the bank can't summon these contracts," Vaska said. "Not without a request from a captain or higher. You don't want to lose a crystal in the middle of a battle."

"And the Air Navy lets imperial marines handle them?" Ingrid asked.

"It's not like they can be stolen," Glenice said with a shrug.

"Yeah," Vaska said. "If a contract gets lost the bank can just summon it back."

Glenice offered the blue contract and Ingrid took it. A voice echoed in Ingrid's mind. A breathy feminine voice that somehow captured the aspect of a babbling brook. It said, "Hello mortal."

"You'll grow accustomed to it quickly," Glenice said. She gave Ingrid a second crystal. This one was mostly ruby with swirls of sapphire.

Ingrid took it. The voice was angry and it somehow captured the aspect of a crackling campfire. It said, "Consume! Consume!"

"There is a certain structure to invoking the contracts," Glenice said. "Specific words that need to be said."

"Can you guess?" Vaska asked eagerly.

Glenice glared at Vaska but she said nothing.

"The red one is a fire elemental, yes?" Ingrid asked. They both nodded. "So that would be something like this… Daughter of the Queen of Fire. I invoke this contract!"

The crystal began to glow. The air began to ripple. In front of Ingrid, to the side of Glenice, the ripples began to form into the shape of a tall woman. Her curved and naked form began to solidify. She had just the impression of a face, but the other details of her body were indistinct, sexless. She began to glow orange and then develop texture. The colors fluctuated, from orange to darker red-orange, like a log left too long in the fire.

"Who shall I consume?" the elemental hissed.

"Go into the engine," Glenice said, pointing at the airplane.

"This again," the elemental said, resigned. Then, she began to flow into the airplane, through holes in the front of the engine. A little after she had vanished into the engine, it became very loud and the propeller began to spin slowly.

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"Hop in the heaven-ward seat," Glenice said. "Let's go."

"I'm going with you!" Vaska said.

"Hell no. You think I want to fly with your cursed ass?"

"Cursed?" Ingrid asked.

"I am cursed with terrible luck," Vaska explained.

"Which is why you're not going. Do you think I want a double bird strike and an engine fire ten seconds after takeoff?"

"That only happened one time."

The inside of the airplane was upholstered with leather. The seats were soft as if filled with down. Glenice sat in the right seat, with Ingrid in the left seat. There was a stick jutting up between Ingrid's knees, but the skirts of the officer's uniform were thankfully designed to be short. There were four pedals, two at each foot, one above the other. In front of Ingrid there was a console covered in a variety of circular gauges with needles inside, each marked with numbers.

"You have the commander's seat," Glenice said. "I will give you instructions. Grab the stick with your left hand, and grab this knob with your right, but do not pull it out yet."

She pointed to a black knob in between them.

"Also put both feet on the upper pedals. The upper pedals control the brakes. You use your feet to steer on the ground at low speeds, and at high speeds you use the lower pedals. The lower pedals control the rudder."

Glenice flipped a switch on the dashboard and the propeller began to spin very quickly. A lever between the two seats caused the craft to lurch forward along the ground slowly.

"It's moving!" Ingrid said.

"Press both upper pedals," Glenice said.

Ingrid did so. The movement stopped. With some effort, Ingrid began to practice moving the craft around on the ground. Relaxing one leg allowed it to turn, relaxing both legs allowed it to move forward. Compressing both pedals caused it to stop. Under Glenice's direction, Ingrid drove the craft slowly across the field, to the far end, and rotated the nose to face into the wind, lined up with the long white line painted on the grass parallel to the strip of smooth stone.

"Press the brakes in all the way and then pull the knob all the way out until it stops," Glenice said.

Ingrid pulled the knob out, and as she did so the propeller began to whirl violently. The nose began to drop, then the craft began to bounce in place.

"When we start to move I will keep us straight using the rudders. Now, release both brakes."

The craft shot forward. It immediately began to drift to one side, but then recovered as the rudder pedals moved on their own. Faster and faster it went, and the ground below began to blur. The engine roared. Waves of heat-rippling air flowed from the two dark exhaust pipes on the sides of the engine cowl. The craft rattled and bounced on imperfections in the grass field. One of the needles rose rapidly until it was pointing to a slice of the gauge that was colored green.

"Pull on the stick," Glenice said.

As Ingrid pulled, the nose went up, and the ground dropped rapidly. It was not so much that she was flying, but that the space outside was going down.

"Turn heaven-ward," Glenice said casually. "Continue to pull up on the stick slightly."

Ingrid pulled the stick to the left side, and the airplane began to tilt, with the left wing dropping and the right wing rising. The ground was still dropping away rapidly, but the world began to rotate to the right. Soon they were facing the white-capped peaks in the distance.

"Push life-ward on the stick until the wings are level," Glenice said. When the wings were level, she said, "Every time you turn you do three things. Push the stick one way while pulling on the stick slightly so you don't lose altitude. Hold the stick there until you want to stop, then push the stick to the opposite side until the wings are level."

"Understood," Ingrid said.

Glenice pointed to a gauge with two needles inside, one of which was moving more quickly than the other. "This is the altimeter. When this gets to three on the fat needle, turn heaven-ward again." Then she pointed to the needle in the green arc. "This is airspeed. The green arc means we can fly. If the airspeed drops below the green arc, we will stall and the nose will drop on its own. If you keep pulling up during a stall, we fall out of the sky and die."

Ingrid's eyes went wide as she looked over at Glenice in the right seat. Glenice nodded.

"I'm serious. If airspeed starts to fall you push down on the stick until it goes back up."

The fat needle on the altimeter reached three, and Ingrid began to turn left as instructed. Then she leveled the wings. As they flew, Glenice asked Ingrid to repeat the principles of three-axis control that she had learned so far. Ingrid's answers were correct. "I'm surprised, I wish all my students were like you," Glenice said.

"This is really easy," Ingrid said. "But I am guessing that I might panic if we fall out of the sky."

"You are bright. I like you. What were you doing before Vaska kidnapped you?"

"Kidnapped?" Ingrid chuckled. "I was a baker."

"Can you read and write?"

Ingrid nodded. "Yes, the matron of my orphanage taught us all how to read and write and do numbers."

"How old are you?"

"I'm not sure. Old King Varelion had kids with hundreds of different women at almost the same time. I'm probably about eighteen or nineteen."

"I can believe that," Glenice said.

To the heaven-ward side, across the snowfields and past the frosty town, the moody ocean was roiling in the misty morning light. They turned heaven-ward once again, and began to fly towards the ocean.

"So are you Vaska's friend?" Glenice asked.

"We are in love," Ingrid was forced to say.

"Oh, I'm happy for you. And happy for Vaska. She spends too much time in her room painting pictures of nude women."

Glenice chuckled.

"What's so funny?"

"It's nothing. Half the girls in the Taisian Air Navy are like you. The other half are flexible like me."

"This stuff is supposed to be private," Ingrid said. "You're taking advantage of my curse right now, I think. Or maybe you're from a big city and you're comfortable talking about this with a stranger."

"I'm from Heyl," Glenice said. "The imperial capital. My father is the Minister of Defense."

"Wave Crest is a small town. For a girl like me, word gets around. The men don't bother me but some of the women say mean things about me when I'm not there."

As they flew over the town Ingrid once again saw it from the sky and this time the town was resplendent in its wintery regalia. Ingrid recognized every street and every building as she had seen them all thousands of times but with a new angle and with a new hue. She could see the colorful umbrellas outside the cafes which were being beaten free of snow by the workers. Everything was quiet, as it usually was on snowy days. In fact, the roar of the engine was not very strong either.

"How can we hear each other?" Ingrid asked. "The engine should be very loud, right?"

Glenice held up a swirling crystal of teal with a hint of umber. "A wind elemental," she said. "The crew had already summoned it before I sent them away. You cannot see it, but it is blocking most of the sound from the engine. We would go deaf in just a few minutes otherwise. This airplane has a turbine engine attached to a propeller. It's not as powerful as the turbines that the fighters use, and it doesn't need to be. However, it is still quite loud."

They passed over the shore and then flew out over the ocean. The harbor was filled with steel warships with enormous guns but they were difficult to see. The water was ominously dark down through the wraiths of white fog and the naked steel blended in somewhat.

Out over the ocean, Glenice began to explain the relationship between pitch and airspeed. When climbing in altitude, the airspeed went down. When pointing the nose down and descending, the airspeed rapidly increased, and the throttle needed to be relaxed to compensate. Soon, Ingrid was changing altitude and controlling the throttle at the same time.

"You are a natural!" Glenice said. "I don't usually do this, but I'll let you land the plane. Turn around and go back to the airstrip."

They lined up far away from the airstrip, with the nose pointed down towards the white line in the grass. With the throttle pulled back to slow down, Glenice pointed to a lever between them with three settings. "Drop this down one notch," she said.

The flaps on both wings began to drop slightly, the nose went up slightly and the airspeed went down.

"Push the nose down slightly and then drop the flaps one more notch. Keep the airspeed constant right here," she said, pointing to a spot on the airspeed gauge below the green area.

"That's below the green," Ingrid said.

"Yeah, but the flaps are down, and it's still in the smaller white arc. Like I said, we will need to be going very slow to land."

With all three notches of flaps down and constant adjustments to the throttle, Ingrid pointed the nose at the edge of the airfield.

"Pull up on the stick at the last second and hover across the airfield. It is fine to float for a while, since this is your first time. Keep the nose pointed just above the airfield as you push the throttle all the way in slowly."

As Glenice had warned, the airplane did seem to just float over the airfield for a while, before a loud horn sounded and the airplane dropped violently onto the ground. The shock of the bounce knocked Ingrid forward slightly. They went forward but were losing speed, and soon they were going slow enough to use the brakes.

"Good enough landing I think. Use the throttle and the brakes again to take us over to where Vaska is standing over there."

Ingrid parked the plane and she shut down the engine and then she went outside and hugged Vaska. "What did you think?" Vaska asked.

"This is such a wonderful machine," Ingrid said. She felt tears in her eyes, partly for the joy of flying, and partly for the loss of that joy while back on the ground. "I wish I could fly forever."

"You can!" Vaska said. "Let's go sign you up with the Air Navy. You'll come in as an officer and you'll get your own fighter jet!"

"I will?"

"I'm certain of it. I have a lot of influence with the top brass and they'll listen to me if I tell them to make you an officer. I'll get you on the fast track to a promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade. You'll have your own fighter jet with your name painted on the side and a team of minions to maintain it."

"And I'll get to stay with you on the airship?"

"Yes!" Vaska said. The smile on her face suddenly turned wicked. "And this way I don't need to kidnap you."

They went to the airship and they found the captain and Vaska explained the situation. Ingrid swore her oaths and she was given the rank of Ensign and the marks of her rank were pinned to her shirt. The airship departed Ingrid's hometown of Wave Crest and they went south into the gray skies and snowfields to patrol the border with Ayaru. Ingrid spent the days learning to fly with Glenice and she spent the nights making love to Vaska. After a month eating a diet of vegetables and meats and exercising in the airship's gymnasium and studying the dynamics of flight and training with the highwing at last they allowed her to fly with Glenice in a real fighter jet.