Eudokia Tzitzinia (eudokia) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2009-04-15 14:09:00 |
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Current mood: | desperate |
Thursday evening, 17 September 1942, somewhere over Europe...
Eudokia Tzitzinia studied the jerry-rigged dials in the cockpit of their plane—his plane, Thierry Jeannot's plane, which made it her plane now—uneasily. Her job, really, was meant to be riding herd in the back over whomever they were carrying. Thierry had always talked about being shot of the ballast, that it ought to be him and her, and if he was in a good mood, Rainer Pfeifenberger to fly the plane, and a someone or two handy with a gun too. But it somehow never worked out that way, there was always some green kid in tow, or some other someone who needed keeping an eye on. Even big mercenary Kostya, who had fought in every side of every battle with enough coin for him, sometimes both sides at once, always both sides at once, had been like that to them.
Now, of all times, she needed to be up back keeping an eye on Halasz Sándor, whom she basically liked, or would have, in peace-time. In war-time he always knew just enough to decide he wanted to do the dangerous thing. And Jael Moody and Nikola Tesla, who were basically unknown quantities and most likely kittens lost in a snowstorm. And if they weren't, they were even more dangerous. And then there was Fujiwara Kenjiro and Sándor's brilliant, ruined sister Sharolt, there was no looking after them but that's why they needed every eye on them that Eudokia had and several she didn't.
It ought to be Thierry up here, tonight, and her out back, listening, and not saying much. If Thierry was alive, he'd have to agree what a pickle he'd got Eudokia into, and that was all Eudokia was going to let herself think about Thierry not being alive tonight. So she straightened up and kept paying attention and kept an eye on the dials. Doing her job.
"'Stay in the noumenal,'" the pilot, her not-husband Fife, shouted to himself, over the engines, quoting Sharolt's directions. "'It’s coming through Q7 and it’s rolling out in all directions.' Because it would have made any sense to do anything else. 'Stay in the noumenal.' I'm staying in the noumenal, dear."
Eudokia avoided the temptation to snap at him: she had learned, slowly to be sure, that just because she only spoke in stressful times to convey an order or get an answer, that that wasn't true for him. He talked to fill the silence.
She also knew better than to stress him with information he didn't immediately need, while he was flying, so she kept her thoughts about what Sharolt had said to herself. It wasn't sophisticated navigational advice. They didn't always fly in the noumenal: none of she, Thierry or Fife were noted for their caution relative to the rest of the world, but they didn't muck around with those kinds of risks on a night like tonight. And even as she caught herself thinking a night like tonight, she shuddered internally, because she could feel something about tonight down deep, same as the feeling she had had about Sándor even though Thierry had assessed his rescue plans for Sharolt as "merely extremely stupid." She knew that vague forebodings were nothing like what Sharolt did, or her long-lost sister Andromeda for that matter, that anyone with eyes and ears and her life experience could smell something bad brewing without any magic at all, she didn't like it. She wanted to live in the present, and in her own head.
But, her mind nagged her, if Sharolt had given them obvious advice, it wasn't advice. Which might mean it was a foretelling, but which way did it go? It was dark outside, how it was supposed to be, and their altitude held level, and their course, what she knew of it, was true. It all seemed to be holding. So what had Sharolt been trying to tell them? Anything coming out of Q7, Eudokia knew, was pretty much bad news for any conceivable purposes. Anything raised from the Continent, doubly or triply so. This was about more than Sharolt, she felt, it wouldn't make sense to raise something so powerful for Sharolt, because as far as she knew Sharolt basically had herself, only, for protection. They could just come and take her, essentially. Eudokia was a good leader and a good shot, but she wasn't a sufficient guard for Sharolt, or for Kenjiro for that matter, not one hundredth of what they needed if that. Which raised certain questions. Eudokia refused to consider them, they weren't questions whose answers had any impact on immediate decisions.
Another quarter of an hour passed before Fife yelped like he'd just burned his hand. Eudokia sat still, upright, watchful and unmoving, too well-trained to express alarm openly. The dials still read correctly for half a minute more, exactly as if they were flying quiet and level and true. But the green flashes of lightning around them told a different story. And Fife was yelling, yelling, yelling, even as he expertly held the plane true against the advice of the dials, by instinct alone.
A moment later the gauges were useless, spinning madly. "I'm a leaf on the wind!" Fife yelled to her over the noise, something he'd said to Thierry once. Eudokia shook her head: this was not a wind they wanted to have behind them. She didn't reach for the intercom: if there was any explaining to the passengers, it was Sharolt, of all of them, who could do it now.
fife and eudokia