Skies of Steel: The Ether Chronicles Read Online Free Page B

towns sped beneath them.
    They crested a rugged hill, and she gave another gasp. There, half a mile above the ground, was his airship. Bielyi Voron . His stolen prize.
    Like other airships, she had a wooden hull, with two large turbines mounted in the stern. Russian airships had their ether tanks in the aft, unlike their British and Italian foes. All naval insignias had long ago been scraped or torn off the Bielyi Voron , though Mikhail left the scars there as a badge of … honor. Or defiance. Both.
    He’d kept the figurehead of the white raven that gave the ship her name, but gouged out the imperial eagle on its chest. That, he’d done himself, a blade in each hand digging at the painted wood. At the time, he’d wished he’d been burying the blades in one particular man’s chest, but the eagle had sufficed.
    The entire top deck was open, save for the pilot house at the middle of the ship, and crewmen hurried back and forth as they went about their duties. Some of them moved slower than others—a consequence of one wild night in Palermo.
    Mikhail hadn’t had a wild night. After leaving Daphne Carlisle’s shabby pensione , he’d been restless, too restless to find another tavern or the arms of a willing woman, and he’d spent the hours before dawn pacing up and down the esplanade in Palermo, watching the ships enter and leave the harbor. Now he inwardly grimaced. A fine rogue Man O’ War he made, brooding when he should have been carousing. As soon as this mission was over, he’d remedy that.
    Bringing the jolly boat closer, he let his gaze stray from his airship to Miss Carlisle. She studied the ship, craning her neck to better see its different parts, completely absorbed with scrutinizing the Bielyi Voron . An academic, through and through. Although she didn’t quite move like an academic.
    Perhaps he could get more out of this job than her gold.
    As the jolly boat approached, doors opened in the keel. He steered the boat up into the waiting cargo bay. The loading doors shut beneath it. Herrera, his quartermaster, came forward as soon as Mikhail brought the jolly boat down. Levkov immediately jumped out and stomped away.
    Like the rest of the crew, Herrera had been told about their next job and Daphne Carlisle’s presence on the ship. He simply nodded at her as she gaped at the interior of the cargo bay.
    “Have Polzin and O’Keefe take Miss Carlisle’s trunk to her cabin.” Mikhail unbuckled his harness and leapt out of the jolly boat, then pulled his goggles down so they hung around his neck.
    “What about that, Captain?” Herrera eyed the strongbox at Daphne Carlisle’s feet.
    “Take it to the strong room.”
    “I didn’t agree to that,” she said. Tugging off her goggles, she glared at Herrera and then Mikhail.
    “It was yours until I took you aboard.” He leaned over the edge of the boat and unfastened the harness around her lap. The backs of his hands brushed against her thighs. She tensed beneath him. “Now you’re on the ship, and the gold is mine.”
    She ignored his offered assistance out of the jolly boat, climbing down on her own. “If you take the gold now, what’s to keep you from pitching me overboard? We’re, what, fifteen hundred feet above the ground? A bit difficult to survive that kind of trip over the side.”
    “Twenty-six hundred feet up,” he said, “and nothing’s stopping me.”
    “Except your honor.”
    He laughed at that.
    She was less amused. “It stays in my cabin. At the very least, until we reach Medinat al-Kadib.”
    A token gesture. They both knew he could take it whenever he so desired. But he’d indulge her. Because it amused him.
    “Carry it there yourself,” he said.
    After shooting him a look, she grabbed the handles of the strongbox and, with a groan, hefted it up. “Where is … my … cabin?”
    He waved a hand at the quartermaster. “Herrera will take you there.”
    “I will?” Herrera asked. At Mikhail’s stony stare, the quartermaster