Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 01

If my life depended upon being able to fly my way out of here, then I was already seriously screwed! This was another damnable reason against flying when I should have been on a nice enjoyable train trip!

"Fight or flight time." Sean suggested. "And hurry... I think our Deseret friend is about ready to explode his bomb and go meet his infernal maker!"

That was exactly what I was afraid of!

From what I could now tell outside my door, just about every member of the airship crew was now trying to force open the door to engineering, where apparently our zealot assassin had locked himself and was quite good and ready to blow everything up sky high. Or at least sky higher than we were already at. They weren't making much progress as the door seemed to be jammed tightly shut, but I knew a trick or two for that.

"Guys..." I suggested to the aircrew. "Unless you've got the urge to go skydiving without a parachute, get out of my way and let me deal with him. He's going to blow up the airship, and rather messily... and I'd rather not let him get away with it... your government would probably only put me back onboard another fucking airship! Now give me some room -- or better yet, fix me up a nice table for lunch down in the first class diner, with a pretty companion in a short skirt and with some nice big tits... that's some good chaps!"

The door to the engine room wasn't just locked, it was also barred as well. Fortunately, since I had been reminiscing about old school days, I remember an old trick that a classmate had taught me to jinx open any door, usually locked bathroom stalls. It still worked like a charm... and it was also still extremely destructive and tended to not leave much if any door left over. It worked off of an elegantly simple process -- the more the door was jammed or barred, the more force was slowly exerted to open it! In this particular case, the door exerted itself backwards completely off its hinges about forty feet, with a destruction wave pattern in its shattered wake not unlike that of a shotgun shell. The blast, and a three-foot square chunk of metal door, had blown our zealot enthusiast right off of his feet, and knocked him a further ten feet away from the hydrogen airbag.

The gas airbag was supposedly magically protected, but it wasn't remotely resistant enough against a very close ranged magically enhanced explosive, of the sort that our nutjob had been holding in his hand and was nearly ready to activate. The explosion of the door, and the impact of the shrapnel had caused him to drop the explosive for a moment, but already the shock of our entrance was beginning to wear off. We matched eyes for a moment and then he drove dove to reclaim his bomb, and now I had an instant decision to make.

I've never been good about doing two things at once. Some folks might say I've even had difficulties doing one simple thing at once. Ha-ha! I thought for an instant about just wrapping a shield around the Deseret loon and his device and hope that I could muffle and absorb the explosion, protecting myself, the aircrew and not least, the gas bag. Sean had other ideas.

"Quick lad! Just shield the doorway and the air bag. Now!" I didn't have any time to think about it, so I just did it. There was no time at all to be subtle or clever. I just threw up my hands, grunted to exert my force field and tried to think happy thoughts. With my left arm touching the base of the gas bag I could feel my power flow through the coated fabric, increasing its magical protection strength, and with not a moment really to spare.

The explosion was loud, bright and blinding, but other than being slammed against the wall by the force, my shield held, as did the gas bag... or rather most of it. The force of the shield flexing had split the gas bag in three places, but the explosive energy -- and its flame, had all channeled mostly away. The outside skin of the airship had been blown wide open, but at least there was no 'Kaboom'... at least not today.

I've always been good with shields. They've saved my life several times and I've had enough practice with them that with some preparation time I can do some fairly clever things with them. In this case, if I concentrated hard I could cap them over the exposed open areas of the gas bag that were releasing hydrogen, and reduce the flow of the escaping lift gas a bit... sort of. I did sort of have that sinking feeling that we were quickly losing altitude and I was none too sure about what I could do now, if even anything about our predicament. I thought if I collapsed my shields entirely now, we'd definitely start to fall like a rock, and probably even fast enough to bounce when we smacked into the ground.

"Someone, anyone... go take a look outside and see if we're holding enough air to float down, or if we're going to crash down instead. I'd rather know now, rather than discover the hard way! And someone go turn off that damned engine, or better yet put it into full reverse! Yesterday, ladies!"

Already I could tell that we were tilting down by the nose, listing a good 30 degrees to forward, as if the airship were gathering speed to slam nose first into the ground... and with the propellers still going at full speed to increase our impact. The stewards wouldn't like the 'ladies' insult, but I had a bad feeling that the normal engineer on duty was probably already dead before he was blown up and pieces scattered to the winds, and now someone needed to do something about our forward descending movement. I certainly was doing already more than my share. As I said, doing two things at once, with magic anyway, was a recipe for disaster.

"Aye, and disaster or not, you'll be needing to do a wee bit more, at least if you'll be wanting even a remotely soft landing. Feel behind you, up high and to your left a wee bit... there's a strong high Air Ley. Grasp it -- pretend even you want to anchor yourself to it. Fix yourself firm to it... harder! Try to wrap your thoughts around it like a loop, or even a knot it you can... yes, like that! Now, without letting go of your tie, use your shield to anchor the other end, secure and then use it like a winch, to ratchet the tie tightly. Pull yourself up now towards the Ley, slowly but don't let go at either end!"

Like a ship that had dropped its anchor during a storm, I was now doing the equivalent of slowly reeling in that anchor line. How I quite kept the focus line from stretching out until it snapped with weakness, I'm not quite sure. This was definitely wizard level magic, something I could never have hoped to do when I was an Adept. Slowly though, our downward speed decreased until an indeterminate eternity later one of the crew returned to report that our descent had finally stopped. For the moment we were level, more or less, and slowly still under way.

Once we had a buoyancy equilibrium, sort of... we were still losing hydrogen slowly but steadily, the mental pressure to hold us in place wasn't too bad. Now that I could stop and actually think a bit, I realized that I could also do a few aeromancy tricks that I'd just read about, and with a little trial and error I found I could use some wind to push up against the bottom and rear of the airship, to help give us a little bit more lift.

Not for the first time, I regretted spending most of my school classes thinking about nubile young female breasts and doodling plans for Arc-Tec circuitry.

"Aye lad. Better later late than never! And well and crisply done on anchoring on that Air Ley. No flames here today! And of that, ye should be well proud!"

Amen to that!

**********

Our sturdy but wounded airship, never a swift eagle of the air even to begin with, wallowed its way north... slowly, until I began to develop a major splitting headache. Holding on to that Air Ley for nearly two hours was probably the longest that I'd ever had to concentrate on anything in my entire life. This gave Sean the opportunity to remark that a bit of dedicated concentration was a good learning experience for me. In turn I remarked that I didn't need any more lip from snarky visitors... especially ones that had expensive Home Shopping Network habits.

Eventually, as my patience wore out, I sent off a steward off to the bridge with a polite request (firm order) suggesting (demanding) that the pilot get his head out of his ass and start finding a place to bring his wounded airship safely down to the ground... the alternative being that I'd do it for him, albeit rather more quickly and suddenly, and probably involving a lot of gratuitous property damage and an abundance of grievous bodily harm. He got the hint quick, and made an emergency landing at an airfield just outside of Gary, Indiana.

I never did get my fancy first class luncheon in the 1st class diner. I did glare menacingly at one of the stewards until he brought me a glass of red wine to sip for a respite, along with about four swift refills. No, I didn't offer the swine one of my silvers for the pleasure. Really, it was the very least they could offer me. I'm still not quite sure if I ever did get a proper, let alone vaguely sincere 'Thank You' from anyone! There was even a rumor later that some executive in some corporate ivory tower actually considered billing me for all of the damages, but fortunately someone with a modicum of common sense talked him out of it.

***********

I wasn't quite the first passenger off of the airship, but I sure wasn't the last! I sent a telegraph to the Chicago FBMR office saying that my flight had been grounded and that I'd be on the next train from Gary. I was, but the train then sat on a siding at the rail yard in Calumet City for about sixteen hours without any word, rhyme or reason. I've never learned how to do any Transalteration, even simple stuff like turning grape juice into wine. You either have the knack for it or you don't. I don't -- and it's just as well, otherwise more than a few union rail workers would be now enjoying their new careers as frogs in the nearby local pond!

About two days after our airship aborted its journey, my slow train to nowhere finally gasped its last few lurching yards into the protective safety of Chicago Union Station where it could at last happily have its long overdue complete mechanical breakdown in relative peace. I couldn't have cared less. My First Class cabin on the train was probably twice the size of the tiny airship cabin, it was quieter, and the passengers were easier to deal with... not to mention it had a real dining service, although the attendents seemed to be unionized as well, and nearly equally exempt from having to demean themselves by waiting upon hungry customers. Still, I had two fairly decent days of relative peace and quiet where I could sleep, catch up on my reading, and occasionally even get a reheated semi-reconstituted meal that was worlds better than automat chow.

I'd made it to Chicago in one piece and with a tiny modicum of decent good humor and I was even more or less ready to be helpful to my new FBMR masters. Things could have been much worse.