Ahn-Kha, who was eyeballing the shape of the Bucking Bronc’s seats and already shifting his feet in discomfort, flattened his ears against his head.
“I do not enjoy heights or constant motion,” he grumbled.
“Prone to airsickness, Old Horse?” Valentine asked.
“I hope not,” Ahn-Kha said. “It might be best to provide me with a very large bucket.”
“I hope Postle didn’t offend you,” Sime said, picking up Duvalier’s bag for her. “He’s always in the locker room, so to speak. You’ll get used to it, hopefully sooner than I did.”
Pistols reached up and rubbed Sime’s bald head. “We should all do this for luck on the flight.” He sat down next to Duvalier.
“Sergeant Postle, please,” Sime said. “You have your seat at the back. Get in it.”
“That big Grog’s going to need to take up two seats, and I don’t want to be anywhere near him if he spews. I’m comfortable right here.”
Duvalier just settled deeper into her duster and put a towel behind her neck to make her head more comfortable.
The plane lurched into motion as the ground crew dispersed from the final checks, taking the chock blocks with them. It took up so much runway on takeoff that she had a brief moment of terror when it appeared they were going to run out of runway before getting the tires off the ground. But the plane clawed its way into the sky, picking up altitude and speed.
She felt Pistols’s poke in the tit for the first hours of the flight, not that he’d pushed into her flesh so hard, but just from the shock of the greeting.
The plane had one major shortcoming. The heaters for the cabin were either broken or entirely inadequate. She huddled in her duster, hands jammed into pockets, colder than she’d ever been on any stakeout, or at least that’s how it seemed to her.
Pistols pressed against her shoulder for much of the flight. In more comfortable surroundings she would have objected, but under the circumstances she was grateful for the shared body warmth. He mistook comfort for interest, and when he purposely moved her hand, pressing it against his half-erect penis down the pant leg nearest her, she got up and changed seats, risking Ahn-Kha’s airsickness.
When they made it to the wooded hinterlands of Michigan for the first fuel and maintenance check, she had to use all four limbs just to get out of her seat. The field had a single building about the size of a gas station and a wind sock on a high flagstaff. There were pine trees all around and above them some overgrown power lines. She couldn’t even see any roads on her side of the plane.
“That was a weenie-shrinker,” Pistols said. He stamped life back into his feet as he reached up for her bag.
“One-hour break, everybody,” Sime said. “They’ll have coffee and rolls and some kind of protein in the main building of the airport.”
“You mean the only building of the airport,” Alexander said with an implied sniff. His nose and cheeks were bright red—perhaps he’d been fortifying himself against the cold the old-fashioned way.
“Ten bucks to a quarter it’s venison sausage,” Valentine said, emerging from the cabin where he’d been helping Montee with the navigation. He’d grown up in the Northwoods a few states over.
“And a warm toilet seat, please, God,” Stamp said. Duvalier could sympathize. “I apologize for being crass, everyone, but it’s an icebox back there.”
Though he treated her dreadfully, she liked Pistols better than Sime, as at least he was authentic and up-front. He was an awful bastard, but you could just climb into the big-girl panties, deal, and move on. Sime was like an overalert dog—she nervously waited for him to reveal his nature and bite. Or piddle.
She didn’t like how Sime looked at her. A snake looking at a bird with a broken wing would show more empathy. When you met his gaze, even by accident, he either stared you down, unblinking, until you broke off or he looked at something in the neighborhood of your face, say, your earlobe, and stared through and past it as if you and your earlobe weren’t even there.
As for the other two in Sime’s party, she was hoping to keep clear of Alexander; about Thérèse Stamp, she hadn’t quite made up her mind. Like the others in Sime’s contingent, apart from Pistols, she believed she could throw her into a New Universal Church fertility-enhancer cocktail party and not be able to tell Quisling from freeholder.
She didn’t mind having another woman along, to tell the truth. Stamp could siphon off some of the male energy.
The Bucking Bronc was a tough little plane. Montee said it was day/night and all-weather, which was good for a flight north of the Great Lakes in April, when the first Midwestern thunderstorms met winter weather still boiling out of Canada and the always unpredictable North Atlantic. The passengers might be bounced around in the rough air like pills in a stunt cyclist’s pocket, but the aircraft itself pushed bravely northeast at cruising speed through two fronts’ worth of weather.
Valentine liked Montee as well. Val took a couple of turns in the front seat working the controls or helping with the radio getting weather reports from exotically named Canadian operators and stations. Valentine had picked up flying out west somewhere or other. She vaguely knew his father had something to do with aircraft in the pre-Kurian years. After the novelty of being at the altitude the Bucking Bronc could reach wore off, she relaxed and slept pillowed against Ahn-Kha’s softly hairy arm, waking to find that someone had tucked a blanket around her.
She didn’t speak much with Ahn-Kha or Val, and everyone but Pistols pretended to sleep on the flight.
The cold was dreadful. Even Val, who never complained about weather, admitted that the enforced idleness of the plane seat drove the cold between buttons and gaps, ever inward.
Flying made her wistful for the lost comforts of the old, pre-Kurian world. She’d ruined her feet walking innumerable miles, paralleling old railroad tracks or tree-broken roads. How easy it was to skip from cloud to cloud rather than plod along, down in the thorns and the bugs, desperate for cool, clean drinking water and famished for a good roast potato just dripping with sour cream.
All those wasted days, with nights shivering in some ruin full of bats and raccoons. It’s so much nicer up in the clear blue air, watching the patterns clouds made on the ground. No wonder birds sing all the time.
In the air, all your stops were planned days in advance. Hot food, warm rooms, flush toilets with paper. Montee was no dummy. Well, obviously he was no dummy to handle all the math and weather analysis and navigation and mechanical checks. He had brains, and the good sense to put them to use in a comfortable cockpit with a big reclining chair.