Zachariah watched his dashboard. The numbers told him that his air speed had flipped

  the numbers, the Rocket was below its ceiling so he didn’t have to worry about the

  engine choking off, and the map function said he was holding the course.

  “I only see the Kellers, and Brother Rabbit,” said Sola. “We must be leaving the

  others way behind.”

  “They may have diverted off the path,” said Bolan. “The Riordianians might have

  needed a break, and we still don’t know how fast Sir Dormir’s tree is supposed to be.”

  “He’ll need to land in the middle of the fliers to have a chance at the best time,” said

  Zachariah. “Right now, we have it according to our watch clock.”

  “So he has to beat our times for the rest of the race,” said Bolan. “There’s no way he

  can do it.”

  “Running last might be all the tree is good for,” said Zachariah. “We can’t assume

  that. The Alvas are as deserving of their reputation as the Shae. Crossing one is

  unwise.”

  The Kellers flew by on the right. The boys waved at their rivals as they passed. The

  duckbilled monster gave them an obscene gesture. Then their flying machine flew

  into the lead on a trail of flame.

  “Did you see what I saw?,” said Bolan.

  “Yes,” said Zachariah. “I wonder how much fuel they are burning up to do that.”

  “It might have been some kind of secret weapon,” said Bolan. “I don’t know why they

  wanted to use it now.”

  “Maybe because the cloud is still chasing us,” said Sola.

  “That’s a fast cloud,” said Bolan. “All my readings are at the top of the board. If we

  went any faster, the Rocket would break in two.”

  “The engine would have to be worked on to get any more speed out of it,” said

  Zachariah. “That’s not something I would like to try while in flight.”

  “All right,” said Zachariah. “We have to buy some time for the others to disperse so

  the cloud can’t chase them all.”

  “How are we going to do that?,” asked Bolan.

  “We’re going to have to do something incredibly stupid,” said Zachariah.

  He turned the Rocket in a wide loop to face the cloud. Lightning blasted at the rest

  of the racers. One of the propellor driven machines blew up from one of the strikes.

  The riders split apart, their daemons firing into the cloud with their breath weapons.

  “I think this is a job for Gold Bug,” said Zachariah. He opened the cockpit. Octo

  rushed in, firing his jet’s weapons into the cloud. “The problem is we can’t see what

  we need to do.”

  Lightning missed the Rocket as it barreled at the cloud. Zachariah realized that he

  couldn’t just take the thing apart if he couldn’t see what he was doing. He needed a

  better plan.

  “Knife, see if you can do something about the fog,” said Zachariah. He altered course

  so the ship wouldn’t enter the fog. “Then we’ll know what we have to work with for

  this.”

  The spider extruded the force ball projector from its back. It fired at the cloud. It

  didn’t matter where the target was as long as there was something to hit. The first

  volley trapped the fog in a roughly rectangular shape against its flying base.

  “That is a big flying machine,” said Bolan. “That’s years beyond what we have.”

  “Months,” said Zachariah. “We just need more hands to help us out.”

  “What are we going to do about helping the others?,” said Sola. “Let’s stay on

  course.”

  “I have a crazy plan that might work,” said Zachariah.

  He looped around the cloud. He noted that one of the force balls blew up. A lightning

  gun must have been behind that one. He cut the rear output and opened the belly jets

  so the Rocket hovered in place behind the huge ship.

  “We need you to damage the engines, Knife,” said Zachariah. “Maybe a cutter will

  do for this.”

  Knife switched tools as he climbed to the top of the cockpit opening. He took aim at

  one of the juggernaut’s round openings spewing exhaust. He fired blasts of light that

  he used to cut things into the vent. Black smoke joined the gray fog. The giant flying

  platform listed in the air.

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  “All right,” said Zachariah. “We may have hampered their ability to pursue. Let’s get

  out of here before they figure out how to fix the problem we caused and chase after

  us.”

  He switched back to directional thrust and pushed pass the behemoth. He closed the

  cockpit as he guided the Rocket back on course.

  Zachariah watched the leviathan as he flew around her. The slower fliers circled and

  took shots at the slowed down ship. The force balls took most of the hits, but

  occasionally they would hit an open spot and something would catch fire.

  Octo circled the behemoth, and then the racers followed him away from the pirate

  boat. Small explosions marked where something had caught fire from the racers

  attacking and reached something volatile inside the shell.

  Zachariah pointed the Rocket after the Kellers. They were in the lead. He wondered

  how far their engine modification had carried them before their flying machine had

  to land.

  Could he do the same thing with the gravity engine? He turned the thoughts over in

  his head as he cruised along. He decided against it. It was better to be able to increase

  the upper limit of what the engine could lift, and how it worked on the material

  already in place rather than adding on something that might kill the crew with a

  button push.

  A booster that increased the speed that you flew could be done under the right

  circumstances.

  Maybe weapons and a tougher hull might be a better modification to work on to keep

  other sky pirates at bay while in the air.

  If he could build something like Knife’s force ball beam, that would be a great

  offensive weapon. Once trapped in one of those, the other flier would have to break

  out before they could do anything else. He thought about it and shook his head. The

  other flier could still ram the Rocket.

  Still something on the back of the Rocket would allow for coverage of the sky if he

  mounted it on a spinning wheel. Then he would only have to worry about the belly

  of the flying machine. The belly jets would destroy anything placed in front of them.

  What would be a good alternative? He didn’t think he could weaponize the jets

  against targets moving at a distance.

  “Here’s a sandwich, Da,” said Sola. “We’re halfway to Lobster Castle.”

  “Thank you,” said Zachariah. He took the bread and meat. He looked at the

  chronometer. He had spent an hour in a fugue thinking about what he could do to the

  Rocket. He took a bite and nodded to himself.

  They had made better time than what he had thought. The modification to the engine

  must be pushing them faster than they had dreamed when they started out.

  “I didn’t see any sign of the Kellers at all,” said Bolan. “Do you think they made it

  to Lobster Castle.”

  “I don’t know,” said Zachariah. “It depends on a lot of variables that we don’t know

  and have no way to check unless we can take their flying machine apart. A lot

  depends on how much fuel they had, and how fast they burned it with that flare they

  did.”

  “What about that giant flying ship?,” asked Bolan. “I can totally see building one of

  those, but it would take us years.”

  “Once the design work was done, it might take two years to build a hull as big as

  that,” said Zachariah. “The question is why would you want it? A Green Light could

  take one of those apart in an instant.”

  “Good point,” said Bolan. “Wait. It could be used for a cargo hauler.”

  “A cargo hauler?,” said Sola.

  “Yes,” said Bolan. “Look at that thing. It had to have hauled those little fliers. That

  means we can build something to do the same thing.”

  “That is a lot of cargo,” said Zachariah. “You would be able to supply part of a large

  city with a cargo hauler that big.”

  “And who would pay for that cargo?,” asked Sola.

  “I don’t know,” said Bolan. “But we can ask around.”

  “Let’s put it on the idea list,” said Zachariah. “The Rocket is doing better than we

  thought. Governments will pay to have their own. We can use those resources to think

  about building something to fly products across the realm.”

  “They’ll want them for flying weapons, Da,” said Sola. “Do we want to let anyone

  have that much power in their hands?”

  “That’s a good point,” said Zachariah. “The problem is there is already one flying

  fortress in the sky. We have a decision to create a counterforce, or specialize in small

  flying machines to try to knock it out of the sky.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Sola.

  “Let’s table this for later,” said Zachariah. “We don’t know if we’ll reach Lobster

  Castle. When we get there, we can look the Rocket over and talk about the future.”

  “All right,” said Bolan. “What should I look for when we land?”

  “We need to make sure Gold Bug’s patches are stable and won’t come off,” said

  Zachariah. “If not, we’ll have to make more solid patches and weld them on. I’ll have

  to look at the modifications of the engine. If there is a danger of blowing the engine

  up, I’ll have to take the engine apart and put it back together with the spare parts.”

  “How can I help, Da?,” said Sola.

  “We’re going to need you and Hardy to help Bolan with the inspection,” said

  Zachariah. “You might have to scavenge parts from Lobster Castle, or get material

  so we can build our own. We won’t know how bad things are until we land. Right

  now, everything looks okay. Tomorrow when we launch might be a different story.”

  “Sounds okay,” said Sola. “Hopefully we won’t have any more trouble before we get

  to the landing zone.”

  “I hope so,” said Zachariah.

  He thought about the strange warning he had received from the man with the wooden

  dog. Everything would be simpler once he had dealt with the Lightning.

  He should have warned the others, but the conversation had slipped his mind. He put

  the guilt away. He had done what he could to save the racers. He wasn’t responsible

  for the man they had lost. There was nothing he could do about that.

  He didn’t like the thought that he might have been able to get that one flier to take

  another route if he had remembered. He examined the thought from all sides as he

  chewed on his food. He put it away.

  You couldn’t change the past, and he hadn’t initiated the attack. The loss of the one

  racer was on the flying ship, and its crew of pirates. He was pleased to have caused

  some of them to crash and give the other racers a fighting chance to get away, even

  the Kellers.

  He wanted to go back and shoot the thing out of the sky. He frowned at himself at the

  thought. He would have to add that to the list of things he wanted to do. The Rocket

  would be blown apart just as fast as that other racer if it took a direct hit from the

  ship’s lightning guns.

  The only course before him was to report to the authority at Lobster Castle and let

  them spread the word to the other city states.