Chapter Thirty-Two

This was bad.

It was also great, because the ship had managed to cross over the tip of the mountain before running out. So as they plummeted, they slipped into the mountain's shadowed shelter.

He was not ready for an uncontrolled descent, though. Storms. They'd run out of water far faster than he'd planned. Everything he and the engineers had done involved enormous amounts of guesswork. That considered, they were lucky it had gone as well as it had.

In growing darkness, he crossed the deck of the ship. At least up here he didn't have to worry about being swept off by the wind. He fell at the same speed as the ship, and though he had to use Auxiliary at some points to give him handholds, he eventually made it back to the hub and climbed up to reach the Dawnchaser's door.

He'd anticipated hitting the mountain on the way down, but so far, nothing. The steep, craterlike cliff on this side was a tiny blessing. He hauled himself through the door, noticing Elegy unconscious—hopefully just unconscious—in the corner. In his absence, the cabin had depressurized completely.

He pulled himself through the room, now fully in free fall, gravity meaningless for the next few moments. Engines. He had to get the regular engines going. He was starting to hear wind whistling outside the still-open door. Once they got back into thicker air, the regular engines should work again. Only, once he reached the control panel, he found them stalled completely. Running out of water—which had also been acting as a coolant—had caused them to lock up.

Storms. He looked at the button that Jeffrey Jeffrey had explained, in passing, was for reigniting the system. It all came down to this? After all his effort, it was about pushing a button?

That, and waiting.

The engines wouldn't start if he pushed it too soon. Storms, they might not start anyway. Running out of coolant while superheated in a vacuum…that was the sort of thing that completely destroyed machinery.

He resisted the urge to pound that button repeatedly. Warning lights indicating overheating flashed all across the panel. Air. They needed air. That would cool the engines as they fell. Allow the heat to dissipate.

Nomad, the knight asks with marked hesitance, what are you doing? Push the button.

He waited, watching the readouts, his feet hooked under the chair to hold him to the seat. He tried to explain, but there wasn't enough air yet. So he waited. Excruciatingly he waited.

Nomad, I really think you should push the stupid button.

Outside the window, he could see the dark slope of the mountain moving faster and faster as their descent accelerated. That was air rushing outside.

Nomad. Please.

He took a deep breath of actual air—and spoke. "Not yet."

When?

He watched the indicators on the dials crawl from the red toward the orange for a few seconds. As soon as they hit the line, he slammed down on the button.

Four of the ten remaining engines fired up. With blasts that made his teeth rattle, they strained to slow the ship.

And then Beacon crashed into the ground.

He slammed the emergency release button, which would unseal the doors of every room holding the people of Beacon. They could open the doors from the inside, but there was a good chance many of them were unconscious. It depended on how well the rooms had been sealed and how much the occupants had hyperventilated. One of the great ironies of life was that people running out of air often worried so much, they used it up faster.

That done, he checked Elegy—still alive. At least, the cinderheart was still glowing, and he thought she was breathing. No heartbeat, of course. No heart. He wasn't sure how that worked for her—there were different ways an Invested body made sure its cells were being sustained.

Time to see how much damage had been done to the ships. He stumbled to the door, but then immediately realized a danger he hadn't yet considered. He was standing on top of a containment unit housing extremely volatile, incorporeal Invested beings. Ghosts. Shades. Whatever one wanted to call them, they were among the most dangerous entities in the cosmere.

He'd just crashed their enclosure to the ground, then hit the door release button without a second thought. He hesitated on the threshold of his ship, wondering if he'd have time to get the vessel disengaged and flying on its own before they came for him, eyes red, hungry.

Fortunately he soon saw a few unsteady figures stumble out of the main hub ship just below. They didn't look like they'd been eaten. He descended, passing the majority who chose to quickly settle down on the deck. Inside, the ghost enclosure looked solid, not even cracked. Wisely they had built it out of their strongest stuff.

He checked to make sure all the other doors had opened, and found that two of the ten had leaked badly. The people inside had fared worse than the others, but there were no dead—just a few unconscious people, a lot of bumps, several broken limbs. At his suggestion, the Greater Good had been separated across three different ships, and all had survived the landing basically intact.

Rebeke emerged from a different ship, helping an older man Nomad didn't know. The man looked up at the stars, tears in his eyes, and began a quiet prayer of thanks. Noticing Nomad, Rebeke stepped over, clearly still dazed.

"It worked," she whispered. "I…I doubted you. I thought it wouldn't work. Why didn't I believe?"

"Because you're smart," Nomad replied. "It was a crazy plan."

"It was your plan."

"And I'm an expert on how risky my ideas get," he said. "I'm amazed we're both standing here right now."

The knight doesn't understand why Rebeke is glaring. After all, this is exactly the sort of stupid thing Nomad says all the time.

"Well," Rebeke finally said, "we're alive."

"Agreed," he said, looking over the gathering group of sore, partially suffocated, emotionally battered people. "For now. Let's go find the engineers. We're going to want to find out how badly I've wrecked your city."

* * *

"You want to know how bad it is?" Solemnity Divine asked. "I'd offer that we're somewhere between ‘Oh, shades, what a mess' and ‘I didn't even know that part could come off!'"

They stood inside the hall surrounding the Chorus's mist-filled enclosure that had blessedly remained intact. The usual team. Jeffrey Jeffrey, Zeal, Rebeke, and the Greater Good. Compassion sat on the ground, wrapped in a blanket, while the others stood.

Having jettisoned the previous building they'd used for meetings, they had picked this one for some insane reason. Perhaps it was seen as official or something. Or maybe it had just been the first of the chambers to be evacuated following the wreck.

"Lay it out straight, if it pleases you, Solemnity Divine," Confidence said. "How dire is our current situation?"

"Six engines locked up completely and will need a full injector replacement," she said. "Mud rammed into all the downward-facing jets. Smashed-up intakes on three junction points, and some of the clasping mounts were broken by the crash. I'd suggest we fly separately from here on out, as I can't guarantee the integrity of the whole."

"That's not…too bad," Jeffrey Jeffrey said. "Is it?"

"Depends," Solemnity Divine said, spreading her hands wide. "My team can fix this. We might even be able to do it before the sun rises."

"We have extra time," Contemplation agreed. "Because of the mountains. Though we'll need a corridor of shadow from the sun to escape—so we can't hide here forever."

"Two and a half hours, maybe a little more," Zeal said. "That's what the navigators told me. Any longer than that, and we'd have to cross a field of fire to get back into the dusk."

Two and a half of their hours. Those mountains were extremely tall for the size of the planet, giving quite a shadow to shelter Beacon. Particularly with the slow rotation of the planet, he could understand where that much time came from.

It was still a frighteningly small amount of time to solve their problems.

"I already have the Chorus fabricating parts," Solemnity Divine said. Indeed, sounds came softly from the center of the enclosure. More unnervingly though, Nomad was sure he heard someone whisper an echo to her words each time she spoke. "And in the time remaining, I might be able to get the ships into flying shape. Except they won't move, even once they're repaired."

"Sunhearts," Nomad guessed. "We're out of power."

"The engines burned hotter—but less efficiently—than we'd hoped," she said, nodding in agreement. "We've got almost nothing left. It's a miracle we landed—only four of the engines fired, and with many that didn't, it was because their sunhearts were depleted."

"So," Compassion said from her seated position, "we're stopped. Frozen."

The word seemed to carry more weight for them, burdened with context that Nomad could guess at. This was a world where being frozen, being stopped, was death.

"We're going to have to steal some souls," Zeal said with a firm nod. "If it pleases all, I shall gather my team. Do we have enough power to fly one ship on a raid, then back?"

"Yes," Solemnity Divine said. "But…who are you going to raid?"

"You can't go south, Zeal," Jeffrey Jeffrey said. "Not unless we want to try to cross even more highlands."

"North is the Cinder King," Rebeke said softly, from where she stood just outside their circle. As if she weren't sure she was wanted or not.

"He's got plenty of sunhearts to spare," Nomad said, "after feeding your captive friends to the sun. Won't those be coming up soon? The sunhearts that were made the first time I stood in the sunlight?"

"First time?" Rebeke asked.

Nomad nodded upward with his chin. "Up there, the sunlight struck me on the deck of Beacon, but didn't do anything. I'm still trying to figure out why…"

They all regarded him with reverence.

"It wasn't me being Sunlit," he said. "The ship didn't melt either."

That didn't help their looks of amazement. As if they thought he had protected the entire ship—as if he had the power to shield them all from the sunlight somehow.

You know, the knight says with a wry sense of amusement, you always complain about the legends you start. Then you say things like this…

"Regardless," Nomad said, forging forward, "the Cinder King created a whole big group of new sunhearts yesterday—and the spot where he did should be just ahead of us."

"The souls of our friends, left in the sunlight," Zeal said with a solemn nod. "We know the longitude. If we use the prospector, we could find them."

"The Cinder King always guards the border between the great maelstrom and the shadow," Confidence said. "He doesn't want anyone else to claim the sunhearts there."

"Explain this to me again," Nomad said, frowning, trying to form a mental image. "The day side of the planet is incinerating heat and melted rock. I understand that. But there's also a…storm you call the great maelstrom? Is this storm more violent than the one we flew through in the darkness?"

"Yes," Compassion whispered. "The great maelstrom follows the sunset, when the planet first passes into night. It's a raging tempest of incredible violence. When the land finally cools and the storm dissipates, the shadow begins—the cloud cover we hide in. That line is where sunhearts are collected."

"We raid him right there, then," Nomad said. "Attack at the collection point and steal some. How far away is that?"

"For a fast ship?" Zeal said. "It can be as little as an hour's flight from near-dawn to the great maelstrom."

Again Nomad was struck by the tiny size of this planet. Around two hundred miles at most in diameter, by his quick calculations. Amazing.

"So there's a chance," he said. "We have two and a half hours. We fly in, we steal sunhearts, we get back here."

"It won't work," Confidence said, folding her bony arms. "We raided him just recently. He's not going to be taken unaware again."

"Perchance," Zeal said. "But if I may offer a counterargument, he can't have expected us to survive that ascent, right? So far as he presumes, we were destroyed and he is the victor. Perhaps we can steal a Union scout ship, so that nobody realizes it's us, and get in close enough to steal some sunhearts right out of his vessels."

"Steal one of their ships?" Contemplation said. "In time? Yes, your words have merit, and he might assume we are dead. But I cannot imagine stealing a ship and executing such a plan in the span we have. I agree with Confidence, Zeal. We had weeks to plan the previous raid and were blessed by your device that could freeze his Charred."

"I can do it," Zeal promised. "Please. Let me try to save our people."

"Or," Nomad said, "we could try something else." He thumbed upward. "That's Elegy's Dawnchaser, right? A reinforced prospector?"

"And?" Contemplation said.

"And, as you've explained, the Cinder King always collects his sunhearts after the maelstrom has passed. What if we didn't wait? What if we were to fly ahead of him and steal them right out of the ground before he gets to them? Inside the storm?"

Collectively they gaped at him.

All right, the knight says, that's fun. I like the way you make their brains melt. It's cute.

Confidence sputtered. "Survive the great maelstrom? It's impossible."

"Nobody goes into the maelstrom," Contemplation said. "It's madness."

"Same is said of the storm on my homeworld," Nomad said. "But I know someone who survived it, then inspired a whole host of us to do the same." He pointed at Elegy's ship again. "You told me that was reinforced for flying into the maelstrom."

"It never managed to go fully into the storm!" Solemnity Divine said. "I helped reinforce it, but the sensors always told her she'd die. She always backed down."

"She never actually flew into the great maelstrom?" Nomad asked.

"No," Rebeke said. "Because she's not insane."

Nomad gestured to the sides, indicating the entire ship below them. One that had just climbed a mountain. "It's a day for insanity, folks. A day for risks."

They were all silent.

"I'm in," Zeal said. "Let's do it, Sunlit. Let's steal from the sun itself."