Summary: By Gareth Owens Read by Pip Ballantine Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Immersion Book of Steampunk All stories by Gareth Owens All stories read by Pip Ballantine Rated 13 and up Follow that Cathedral! By Gareth Owens …and with that Pixie dived from the open door of the Zeppelin. The air around her suddenly becoming liquid, rushing over the smooth leather of her helmet and bringing tears to her eyes. “Always some bloody thing!” she grinned into the gale, falling headlong towards the welcoming embraces of Mother Earth and Mother Russia below. Siberian night enveloped her, storm filled frozen darkness, cloud shrouded full moon, and below, the steam powered lightning of The Iron Czar. A hissing, glowing, monster of a train, three storeys high, and even longer than the leviathan Fourteen Bags of Mischief hanging above. Pixie saw the orange furnaces erupting sparks through the twin stacks, as if Hephaestus himself stoked on the imperial railways. Kirby wires between Pixie and the nose of the airship took up the slack, her harness tightened, squeezing the breath from her as she slid down the gradient gravity prescribes for a pendulum. Spreading her arms out wide she released the winglets of her full-length leather drop-coat, ankle wings for trim springing from her boots. Suddenly the harness became her trapeze and she somersaulted with creak of leather, freed into the hundred-knot headwind. Orange fire below and frozen storm above, these were the moments Pixie lived for. Card tricks in the dark. A moment of genius for her own consumption and not for the sharing. She flew alone, arms wide, graceful as an angel dancer sweeping over a darkened stage. The first swing reached the peak of gravity assistance and Pixie saw the roof of the train below her slow in comparison, stopping for a second just past the midpoint of her pendulum arc, then once more seeming to gather pace against her, leaving her trailing as she fell back. “There have got to be easier ways for a pirate girl to catch a train,” she said. With an emphatic flick, she opened her drop-coat out wide, catching the full blast of the wind, whipping her back up the arc of swing like a human kite. Then, pulling her arms into her sides she rocketed forwards again, a bullet through the air, streamlining, catching the train once more but this time lower as Jeti tried to match the altitude of the dirigible. Eyes wide, Pixie saw the end of the last carriage, a black wall lit with a single dim red eye of a lamp. A sudden graunch through the cable, the winch bit, dragging her six feet further up in the air. Her speed increased as the cable shortened. She flew far too close and far too fast, sweeping up, only just carrying over the edge of the roof, arms held out backwards like the Spirit of Ecstasy. The bitter smelling pitch of the Russian rustproof coating mere inches below her nose. She lifted at the end of the swing, snapping upright, and with a perfect matching of momentum, she stood, placing her boots down and solid on Imperial rolling stock. A single twist to the circular brass locking clasp and she shrugged free of the harness and drop-coat, before it could pull her over backwards. Jingling cable fading away into the storm as her crew winched it back. Pixie’s knee length mini-crini sprang back into shape, like a chrysanthemum released from a fist. She wore the dark red corset, all the rage in St Petersburg Jeti assured her, but always with that twinkle in her eye. Pixie never knew whether her second-in-command was joking at her expense or not. Pixie set off at the run towards the storming volcano of the armour-plated engine. She knew she should put Jeti off at the next port, but she just couldn’t do it to her. Dear, sweet Jeti van Borkel, the girl might not have been the best steersman this side of the Roaring Forties, but she did have such a cute popo, particularly in those Oxford bags she wore. Momentarily distracted, Pixie nearly tripped over a spinning [...]
