Against the Tide of Years Read Online Free

from examining the blueprints.
    “If you don’t mind me asking, Lieutenant Cofflin, what did you think you’d be piloting?” he said.
    “F-16s,” she said. “I was going to go to Colorado Springs, the year the Event happened.” At his blank look, she went on: “The Air Force Academy, in Colorado. Up in the twentieth.”
    “Oh,” he nodded, polite but somehow . . . not indifferent. Just as if I was talking about flying to the moon. Real, but not really real.
    It was amazing what an effect it had—exactly how old you’d been at the Event. Even a couple of years, and the outlook was entirely different.
    I was on the cusp, she thought. Eighteen. Not quite an adult but not a kid either. Alex had been sixteen on that memorable day; not a little kid, she judged, but unambiguously a kid. He had grown up in a world where steam engines were high tech, and schooners and flintlocks everyday realities. He probably didn’t get that occasional feeling of alienation, as if a glass wall had dropped between him and the world.
    Vicki ran a hand over her close-cropped reddish-brown hair and turned her attention back to the drawings. The frame of the airship was made up of two long strips that curled from bow to stern, crisscrossing each other in an endless series of elongated diamonds like a stretched-out geodesic dome. Inside that framework was a series of strengthening rings, each braced with spokes reaching in to a central metal hub.
    “That wire’s the only metal,” Leaton said, his finger tapping a horizontal view of one of the rings. “Everything else is laminated birchwood and balsa and wicker.” He cleared his throat. “Only steel, rather. The clamps will have to be aluminum.”
    Everyone winced slightly. The Republic’s new industries, here on the Island and the mainland and Alba, could turn out steel of a sort, iron, copper, bronze, and brass, but aluminum had to come from pre-Event stockpiles. Leaton had a plan for a small hydropower plant on the mainland to convert Jamaican bauxite; the only unworkable thing about it was it would take the entire national labor force ten years to get it going, in which time they’d all starve to death. Like so much else, it would simply have to wait a generation, or two or three.
    “Good thing we can get the engines burning that liquid fuel-hydrogen mix,” Alex said.
    “Ayup,” Leaton replied.
    Vicki nodded. That way, the reduction in lift would precisely match the lesser weight as the methanol or gasoline or whatever burned, meaning you wouldn’t have to dump gallast or valve gas, which extended range. So did the middle cell of the five cylindrical gasbags inside the hull. The forward and the rear two would be inflated with hydrogen, cracked out of water with a portable generator wherever the airship was based, to give the ship pretty well neutral buoyancy. The middle one was a hot-air balloon. That would provide the variable lift, again reducing the need to dump water ballast or release precious hydrogen to rise or fall.
    Leaton rested one hand on Vicki’s shoulder and the other on the younger Guard officer’s. “Damned fine piece of work, if I say so myself—couldn’t have done it without you. It’s going to work.” He cleared his throat again; it was a gesture of his, like knocking on wood. “Once we’ve got the bugs out of it, of course.”
    “Of course,” Vicki said dryly. Then she snorted. “Commodore Alston was . . . impressed . . . too, when she saw the plans on Monday.”
    “She was?” Leaton said, brightening; Alex looked eager as well. “What did she say?”
    “She said . . .” Vicki stretched her Yankee vowels to try and match the sea-island Gullah of the Republic’s military leader. “Do Jesus, ah’m glaaayd ah ain’ goin’ up on that -theah!”
    They shared a laugh. “Got to go,” Leaton said. “Washington Street Mills is having problems with their new powerloom, and if they don’t get it fixed the Commodore will flay me—they’ve