Better Than Gold
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I love to fly more than anything else in life! And sometimes, I like to write too. "Better Than Gold" is a serial-style short story I've been writing for nearly a year now, purely for fun. A new part will be typed and posted here when I can find the time.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Midnight, Part One

A full moon shone over the miles of open ocean. Where it reflected on the water it glittered in bright shards, like a broken china plate. The sky was fine, clear and cold, deep blue on the horizon and crowned above with black universe. Violet clouds pillowed up here and there, drifting slowly out to sea on the night breeze; they seemed to sail backwards, Kate thought as she gazed out her cockpit and watched them glide past.

Her aeroplane slipped through the night, barely visible save as a dark hole moving against a sky strewn with stars. Its engine rumbled a mellow current, just a texture of sound within a vast rind of thin altitude air.

After a minute or two Kate forced her eyes away from the moonlit view and scanned the sky around her instead. Without any lights turned on an approaching aeroplane could be near well impossible to spot at night, even if the moon were full and the sky flaked with luminous clouds. Even two aeroplanes flying in formation could pass unseen, unless they were polished just right and the moon shone just so to make their glass canopies turn into twinkling stars.

As for any more aeroplanes than that, well, on a night like tonight she really couldn’t give a damn. Tonight, all she needed to find were two aeroplanes in particular, and preferably before their tracers drew a pair of fiery lines back from her tail to the muzzles of their machine guns. Their pilots were, she remembered fondly, exceptionally keen shots.

Far below, the Black Wall slid past her right wingtip. The giant island was as dark as a well, darker even than the ocean, as if it were a long crevasse that sucked water down into its subterranean depths. Only the moonlit surf that rolled up on its beaches and smashed into foam against its cliffs gave it any sort of outline against the ocean, like tinsel washed ashore from the sea. Kate regarded it warily as she edged her aeroplane in its direction, taking care not to draw too close.

Even from six thousand feet she could spot the tiny orange bonfires that sparkled along a small cove on the north-eastern edge of the island. Torches flamed along the beach, smudging the cove with smoke. Judging from the number of fires she could count from that distance, the Brigade appeared to be throwing one hell of a midnight party. She was amazed that the carousing pirates weren’t taking more caution in keeping themselves hidden. Then again, it was true that very few people who weren’t pirates dared to fly near the Black Wall after dark.

She pressed the stick against her left thigh and pushed her foot against the left rudder; Red Rum obediently banked away from the firelit cove and turned back towards the western end of the island, where the rock and water and sky had melded together into an inky darkness. Kate peered through her prop and down into the gloom but could barely make out the edge of the shore in that direction, much less the ashy embers of a dead fire tucked well out of sight on a lonely spit. Duke and Fran were already winging their way to the Brigade camp, she imagined, leaving her to circle at a safe distance and wait for their signal.

Aglow with the lurid red lamp light that backlit the dials on her instrument panel, what little of Kate’s face that was visible between her goggles and her muffled up scarf curled up into a grin. It would be nice to make a big difference while she was here, she thought. And if all of the noise and frenzy she was prepared to unleash were to attract the attention of two pirates in particular, well…!

With one eye on her compass Kate kept the plane's long nose pointed west. The fires burning in the cove behind her tail were ignored for the moment and she stared into the stars instead. Red and green light strobed at the corners of her eyes as she reached forward and flicked the switch for her navigational lights. Christmas-flavoured flashes of her aeroplane blinked on and off against the night sky.

“Come on, boys,” she muttered into her scarf. “I’m lost, I’m alone, I’m not very smart and I’m over here…”

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wahey! More BTG! :D I'm absolutely loving this stuff, totally. *hearts*

I'd leave some sorta intelligent comment, but it's after midnight and I've been animating for -days-, so, uh... oh look, shiny!

*runs away~~~*

-- Skits ;)

11:12 a.m.  
Blogger btg said...

Holy cats! Skitcat! Hahaha, hi! Wow, thank you for reading, and hey, good luck with the animation. Whatever you do, don't start sleeping under your desk to find the hours to get it all finished- it only makes you look, sound and smell like a zombie, trust me XD.

11:15 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bwahaha! Oh, I know all about the zombie-sleeping-under-desks, believe me. XD Luckily I didn't have to suffer that fate this time, hoorah! :D

-- Skits ;)

11:17 a.m.  

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