Europa by Joseph Robert Lewis Read Free Book Online

Morayo explained that the gunstock in the cabin wall connected to a harpoon gun outside that they had modified to fire their emergency anchor down into the ice or rocks to stop the Finch from blowing about in a storm, which happened rather often near the Pyrenees.
    After they finished eating, everyone trooped outside into the freezing ice wind to inspect the Finch ’s hull and check the lines. Omar followed Morayo, marveling at the young woman’s ability to notice tiny dings and scrapes in the outer walls of the gondola through the blinding snow gusts. She shouted over the wind to tell him that the ice did this or a rock did that, and which were superficial, and which she would spend the day hammering out or welding over. With the lines secure and the engineer’s repair plan ready, their last task was to follow the steel cable from the harpoon gun across an uneven sheet of ice to find the emergency anchor.
    Peering through his blue-tinted glasses, Omar spotted the anchor hooked under a block of ice that rested on the glacier like a boulder. Staring down at the device, he despaired at the thought of having to chip the anchor free of the ice using hammers and shovels, and he wondered if he might convince the others to leave the task to him alone so that he might make short work of it with his blazing seireiken.
    But Morayo slipped around him, yanked a pin from the anchor’s base, and the long jagged arms of the anchor slid neatly back into its central shaft. The engineer stood up and shoved the cold anchor into his arms. “Here. Thanks.”
    Omar trekked back to the ship and reloaded the anchor into the harpoon gun, and then went inside to winch the entire steel cable back onto its spool, a job that took nearly half an hour of continuous winching. But when that was done, he was free to flop back down into his narrow crevice between the apples and the toilet, and for the first time in two days he couldn’t imagine a more restful place to be.
    After a short break, he turned to Kosoko, whose mood had improved considerably since the landing and was now reading a small leather-bound book, and Omar said, “If the weather is this rough in the winter, why don’t you make your expeditions in the summer?”
    The cartographer snorted. “In the summer, the warm air off the sea mixes with the cold of the glaciers to make storms so violent that they would shatter this ship like kindling before we got anywhere near the Pyrenees. In the winter, all of the air is cold and thus more predictable. This isn’t rough weather, Mister Bakhoum. This is the calm season in this part of the world.”
    Omar nodded slowly. “I see.”
    “We learned that the hard way three summers back.” Kosoko returned to his book. “Don’t worry. If anyone is going to get us all home safely, it’ll be Captain Ngozi. You can trust in that.”

 
Chapter 5. Death march
    Riuza let Morayo fiddle with the Finch all day long, and the little engineer spent as much time outside banging on the hull as she spent inside banging on the pipes. The men were also called out for a bit of work breaking up the ice under the Finch and hauling the freezing chunks and shards inside to refill the engine’s boiler. The bits of ice bobbed in the warm tank for a moment or two before melting away and Omar marveled that something as simple as steam was driving the huge propellers of the airship. As night fell, he resumed his cooking duties to prepare a traditional Mazigh tajine of lamb, apples, olives, raisins, and almonds with a dash of cinnamon and pepper from the tiny spice kit that Morayo kept hidden in an overhead locker.
    As darkness fell upon the frozen wastes of the Bayonne Glacier, Omar noticed the tiny flickering light bulb in the center of the ceiling. Frowning, he jerked his chin at it and said, “I thought those lights needed sunlight to power them?”
    “Sunlight is just one way to make electricity. Another is wind,” Riuza said. She had tilted back her pilot’s