The Orphan Fleet: The Orphan Fleet, #1

By Brendan Detzner

Adventure and strange magic in a city above the clouds! Jiaire is a dock worker at the Mountain Skyport, an independent oasis where airships from across the known world can thaw their engines before they finish their journey across the endless frozen wastes. By day he loads and unloads ships. By night, he dreams of the Show, when characters like Golden Sam, the Reptile, and the mysterious Count do battle under the big top for an audience of thousands.

To its friends, the Mountain offers warmth, smiles, and entertainment. To its enemies, it offers lightning— powerful storms that appear from nowhere and clear the skies of enemy ships. When an invading army attacks and the storms fail to appear, Jiaire must stand up for his home and learn the secrets behind the mystic forces protecting it.

Brendan Detzner's work has appeared in Podcastle, Chizine, Pseudopod, One Buck Horror, Bizarrocast, Edge of Propinquity, Untied Shoelaces of the Mind, and many other venues. He is the author of the short story collections "Scarce Resources" and "Beasts", and of the novel "Millersville". "The Orphan Fleet" is his debut in the fantasy genre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brendan Detzner
• Release date: Jul 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386978398

Book preview

PART ONE

1

Jiaire made an exaggerated bow to the guests standing on the deck of the ship and vaulted over the railing, after his friends, down into the air. The guests gasped in horror and he ignored them. Even if he missed, he was pretty sure there was another ship down there somewhere to break his fall. And he wasn't going to miss. And even if he missed, sometimes people fell. Growing old was not a guaranteed thing on the Mountain.

He felt a rush of warm air, flowers from somewhere overhead mixed with raspberries and fireworks. He reached out and grabbed the rope, swung forward and back. The vending balloon rose up, carrying the three of them, with Jiaire at the very bottom. He heard the others giggling and looked down to see what they were laughing at.

There was nothing directly underneath him but fluffy white clouds, but what caught Jiaire's attention was the guest girl with the long purple dress, long black hair, very pale skin, looking his way. It was hard to tell at this distance if she was pretty. She was paying attention to him. He decided she was pretty.

He saw a glider arc up and down again out of the corner of his eye, and got an idea, a thing he could do or try to do. Was he the kind of person to do it? He decided he would be, at least for right now. He climbed the rope past his two friends— Hunleigh let him go, but Sunald slapped him in the face playfully for his rudeness, and Jiaire returned the favor with a smile. Jiaire hoisted himself up over the railing of the vending balloon, momentarily turning his body upside down before flipping back over like a domino.

The store was tiny and full, overstuffed shelves all facing inward, rows and rows of tiny expensive things to eat or play with or make you think of the girlfriend or the kids back home. Jiaire had three copper coins in his pocket. He threw one of them at the one-legged man behind the counter, grabbed a red rose, and jumped back off the edge of the balloon without turning, falling shoulders first, arcing his back and spinning so that he could see the girl in the purple dress again. She was looking up at him, covering her mouth with her hands, frozen in terror as he plummeted towards her.

He smiled, winked, and let go of the flower. He curled up into a ball, reached out with the same hand that had been holding the rose, and caught the tail of a glider as it went past. The flower was caught in the breeze and blew right into the girl's hands. His last glimpse was of her looking down at the flower, and only just beginning to look back up.

Jiaire kept it together until he was just out of sight, then he laughed, giggled like a little kid. He wondered what she thought of him, if she was impressed or thought he was crazy. He hoped both, hoped she'd tell her friends when her ship carried her home, hoped she'd keep the flower.

That was the thing about living on the Mountain. People came from all over the world, you could catch a glimpse of anything, everything. But only a glimpse. They went home. You stayed where you were.

Then again, where you were was here.

Jiaire pulled himself up on top of the glider. The sun was coming up over the clouds and the skydocks, cutting the sky into a layer cake of purple and orange and dark blue. The first wave of the day was arriving, circling and waiting for clearance to land, and the vending balloons were swooping in on them like vultures while their colleagues on the skydocks were still getting set up, the food stands and the puppeteers and the magicians and the medicine show bands tuning their fiddles and beating their drums.

All this, and there was a show tonight.

2

Two weeks ago had been the birthday that Jiaire had picked for himself. He didn't know what day of the year he was born any more than he knew his parents, but he'd chosen a day and stuck with it, which meant that he was sixteen now, give or take. The day after the birthday that wasn't his birthday, Aevin, Jiaire's older sister who wasn't his older sister, pulled him off work for a little while, bought him a cupcake and told him he was on the other side of a change, that he knew what there was to know, that he didn't have to stay on the Mountain if he didn't want to. Any time he felt like it, he could get on a ship and go wherever, do, see. And he could come back, or not, and people would remember him even if he didn't. No matter what he did or where he went, the Mountain would always be home.

He knew he hadn't done enough; he'd thanked her for the cupcake and told her what she said was true, but he'd laughed and hadn't stopped smiling the whole time, the way he acted sometimes when he got nervous. She was telling him something important, something she'd been thinking about, which meant she'd been thinking about him, which meant she cared about him. And he'd taken it like a joke.

He had to do something. Maybe tonight? It didn't even have to be anything big. Maybe he'd buy her some cotton candy, she'd understand what he meant. He'd figure out something.

He dropped from the glider as it came over the dock, tucked and rolled and came up with a spring in his step. The glider pilot was pissed off about the drag and yelled at him, but Jiaire didn't listen. The pilot called him fat but Jiaire didn't care about that either. Jiaire was big, but he could jump and land with anybody. Other kids didn't even bother challenging him to race anymore. They didn't want to look stupid.

Sunald and Hunleigh made it to the dock a minute later, and started giving Jiaire shit a half second before the soles of their shoes touched wood.

Prettygirl. Sunald landed, curled into a ball, came up walking. Loverboy.

Hunleigh fell into a crouch and didn't even bother to roll, he just laughed. Hunleigh didn't seem human sometimes— jumps that would break a normal person's legs didn't bother him. He was the acknowledged young Mountain champion of cutfighting the way Jiaire was the best racer. Hunleigh's forearms were covered with scrapes, but if he took his shirt off his chest was almost untouched.

Jiaire swung at Sunald, and Sunald ducked under it, smiling, playing.

Bestboy.

Jiaire pushed Sunald as he came back up. Sunald pushed him back and all three of them laughed.

The horn rang and they all dropped the game and started running. They were late. It