Page 70 of Sea of Stars

Herovinci shook his head. He couldn’t believe he was

spending his last seconds thinking about made-up gods. Think! There must be a solution.

And then it came to him. It was too late to get over the highest peak. And it was too late for a drastic turn. But their altitude increase coupled with a slight turn might just be enough. He nudged the wheel to the right and held his breath. His stomach twisted into a knot tighter than the knots holding the balloon to the hull of his airship. Not even the final exam to receive the official title of axion from the university had made him this nervous, although at the time it had felt like a life or death situation.

A second passed. Two seconds. They were still alive. Three seconds. The mountain was now visible directly to his left, so close to the ship that Herovinci might be able to reach out and touch it.

And then they were past it.

Herovinci let out the breath he had been holding in. Not only had they avoided the mountain, but as the climbed, the wind and rain began to subside.

His ship was the first of his fleet to poke above the dark grey nimbus clouds. He wondered if the others would follow. Either the Eliza or the Christo, the two other ships in his fleet, each named after his parents, could have easily been destroyed in the storm or crashed into the mountain. Or just chosen not to climb.

Herovinci looked back and forth hoping they would appear, but lightning bolts streaking between the clouds beneath him were the only thing he could identify in the storm.

The brown balloon of the Eliza finally crested above the storm clouds. Herovinci still thought the silver gear and wrench - the sigil of House Turbine - painted on the balloon was hideous, but for once he was relieved to see it.

The Christo appeared next. At first glance, both airships appeared to have made it through relatively unscathed, but as the Christo gained altitude, Herovinci could see that half the hull had been demolished, sliced off by the peak of the mountain. The balloon and engine room, however, must have remained intact, because the Christo still flew.

That's a mighty fine design of mine, thought Herovinci.

"Herovinci," said Enzo, gasping for breath.

Herovinci hadn't noticed how thin the air had become. And cold.

"We made it," Herovinci said with a smile.

"No...look ahead."

For the first time since they surfaced above the clouds, Herovinci focused his attention ahead rather than port or starboard.

He didn't think he'd be able to see much of anything at all in the moonlight, but the moonlight was not the predominant light source. An almost constant stream of lightning bolts zapped between the enormous clouds up ahead. Herovinci thought he saw the tops of more mountains between the clouds, but they were in the inverse of how they should have looked. Rather than coming to a peak, they were flat on the top and sloped inward as they stretched toward the ground.

"Now what?" asked Enzo. "Should we climb again?"

Herovinci needed no calculations to tell him that increasing their altitude was not feasible. They would freeze or suffocate to death long before they could fly high enough to get over this storm. They were already higher than they should have been.

"Or maybe we should turn back?"

This time Herovinci did need calculations. Was there enough time to turn back before they reached the second storm? Under standard wind conditions, at normal altitude, with an undamaged ship, there might have been enough time. But when all three of those variables were tweaked, such a sharp turn was much more likely to cause a catastrophic failure of the vessel than be successful. The Christo especially, given its current state, had no chance of a successful turn. It was almost as risky to fly through the thunderstorm, but at least there would be land on the other side, and hopefully answers about those upside-down mountain tops. Herovinci had a hypothesis about their origin. Now he needed to confirm it.

Enzo shook him. "Climb or turn back?" he asked again.

"Neither," said Herovinci. "No time to turn. Straight through is the only option."

"But that's suicide."

"Maybe so, but it's all we've got."

“You're sure?" asked Enzo.

"Always."

Enzo paused to think of other options. "What about landing on one of those...peaks?"

Herovinci shook his head. "Even if we could navigate the landing, the air up here is too thin. We'd all be dead by morning."

"Then we'd better plot a course." Enzo pulled out a sextant and called out coordinates.

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