The starter’s pistol had not yet fired, and already Cobb Maddren was being laughed at.
He stood on the observation deck of The Patched Pelican — his airship, his home, his inheritance — and watched the crowd below point and snicker. He couldn’t blame them, really. Lined up along the launch rail at Valenport Aerodrome, the other eleven vessels in the Grand Circumnavigation Race gleamed like jewelry. Lord Harwick’s Sovereign Wind was a triple-hulled titan plated in burnished copper. The Marchetti sisters had arrived in a razor-thin racing dirigible called La Strega, its envelope painted blood red. Even the smallest competitor, a two-man skimmer out of the Eastern Territories, had brand-new boiler fittings that caught the morning sun.
The Patched Pelican had a cracked observation window held together with riveted steel straps, an envelope the color of old mustard, and a steam engine that knocked on cold mornings like an impatient neighbor. It had belonged to Cobb’s father, and his father’s father before that. It was, by any reasonable measure, a relic.
But it was his. And right now, it was all he had to save her.
He pulled the photograph from his vest pocket — worn soft at the edges, creased down the middle. His sister, Petra. Fourteen years old when it was taken, gap-toothed and laughing, holding up a fish she’d caught in the Calven River. She was twenty-three now, and she wasn’t laughing anymore. She was in the custody of the Meridian Debt Consortium, held as collateral against the loan their father had taken out a decade ago — the loan Cobb had promised to repay, and hadn’t.
The prize for winning the Grand Circumnavigation Race: fifty thousand imperials. Enough to buy Petra’s freedom twice over.
He tucked the photo away as the race marshal’s voice boomed through the aerodrome’s brass horn array. “Competitors, take position! The course proceeds as follows: northeast over the Arken Mountains, east across the Verath Sea, south through the Kessian Straits by submersible, then overland by steam-rail through the Dunmore Flats, and back to Valenport by air! First vessel to complete all four legs and cross the finish line wins the prize!”
Four legs. Four vehicles. Most of the wealthy competitors had crews of specialists — a dedicated airship pilot, a submarine commander, a rail engineer. Cobb had himself, and his engineer, a stout woman named Brix who communicated primarily through grunts and had a gift for coaxing power from machinery that had no business still running.
“She’s not going to make it over the Arken Range,” said a voice behind him.
Cobb didn’t turn around. He knew the voice.
“Hello, Farren.”
Farren Solt stepped up beside him, lean and composed in a tailored racing coat, his dark hair swept back beneath a captain’s cap bearing a silver sigil — the crest of his new sponsors, the Meridian Debt Consortium. The same people who held Petra.
Of course. Of course it was them.
“I’m not here to antagonize you,” Farren said, with the particular tone of a man who absolutely was. “I’m here to offer you a graceful exit. Withdraw now. The Consortium will consider the debt partially satisfied.”
“Partially.”
“Goodwill gesture. Cobb, look at your ship.” He gestured toward The Patched Pelican with an open hand, almost sympathetically. “We used to fly together. I know what she can and cannot do.”
“You used to know.” Cobb finally looked at him. They had been partners once — two young pilots running courier routes along the coast, saving every imperial, dreaming of the big races. Then Farren had taken the Consortium’s money, bought himself a sleek new vessel, and left without so much as a forwarding address. “People change. So do ships.”
Farren studied him for a moment, and something shifted behind his eyes — old familiarity, maybe, or something closer to regret. Then it was gone. “Don’t do this to yourself,” he said, and walked away.
The pistol fired.
The Patched Pelican crossed the Arken Mountains by sheer stubbornness.
Cobb pushed her hard through the first leg, trading altitude for speed in the downslope runs, threading passes that the bigger ships had to go around. Sovereign Wind was faster in open sky, but Lord Harwick didn’t like tight spaces — Cobb had read every profile on every competitor, spending evenings at the public library while Brix read engineering manuals and ate hard cheese. By the time the Verath Sea came into view, they were in fifth place.
“Not bad for a flying bucket,” Brix said, wiping her hands on a rag that only made them dirtier.
“We need to be faster on the sea crossing,” Cobb said. “The submersible transition at Kessian — that’s where we can gain.”
The Verath crossing was brutal. A storm system that wasn’t on any chart rose up from the south and scattered the fleet. La Strega dropped two positions after losing a stabilizer fin. A smaller ship from the northern provinces turned back entirely. Cobb flew The Pelican low, below the worst of the winds, close enough to the whitecapped waves that Brix refused to come out of the engine room. They arrived at the Kessian Straits in third place, soaked and exhilarated.
The submersible transition point was a floating platform anchored at the mouth of the Straits — a narrow underwater passage cutting beneath the Kessian Peninsula that saved three hundred miles of open sea travel. Each team’s submersible was pre-docked and waiting. Cobb’s was a compact, single-hulled vessel his father had nicknamed The Mudfish — graceless, slow-looking, and equipped with an experimental pressure-compression drive that Brix had been quietly modifying for six months.
“How experimental are we talking?” Cobb had asked her, back in the workshop.
“On a scale of one to ten?” She’d tilted her head. “Seven. Maybe eight.”
Under the Kessian Straits, the experimental drive sang.
The compression system worked by storing expelled water pressure and releasing it in controlled bursts — in theory, giving the vessel short surges of speed without the constant fuel drain of a traditional propeller engine. In practice, it gave The Mudfish the underwater maneuverability of something alive, something that wanted to move. They shot through the Straits while Farren’s sleek submersible — a Consortium-built racing model with every advantage money could provide — fell behind in the dark water, its wide racing hull struggling through the narrower channels.
Cobb surfaced at the eastern platform to find he was in first place.
He didn’t celebrate. He’d read enough race history to know that first place at the halfway point was often just a target painted on your back.
The steam-rail leg across the Dunmore Flats was where it fell apart — and then, improbably, where it came back together.
Each competitor’s rail vehicle was a custom locomotive built for speed across the flat, cracked expanse of the Dunmore basin. Cobb’s was an old narrow-gauge engine called Kettle, which had been his father’s survey train and still had a compass mounted where the throttle grip should have been. He’d barely cleared the first checkpoint when Farren’s locomotive — longer, heavier, and powered by a modern triple-expansion engine — came screaming up from behind and sideswiped him.
Not an accident. A deliberate nudge, calculated to send Kettle off the racing line without technically violating rules. Cobb fought the wheel, lost thirty seconds recovering, and came out of the encounter in fourth place with a bent front coupling.
He pushed anyway. Brix crawled along the outside of the moving train to inspect the damage and came back inside shaking her head. “She’ll hold,” she shouted over the engine roar, “but I’d rather she didn’t have to.”
It was on the final straightaway of the Dunmore Flats, with Valenport’s distant skyline finally visible on the horizon, that Cobb noticed the signal flags.
They were planted along the race route — nothing unusual, just course markers. But these ones were arranged in a sequence he recognized from his courier days: a code he and Farren had invented together, years ago, for flagging bad weather on the coastal routes. Nobody else would know it.
He slowed just enough to read them properly.
Route closed ahead. Bridge pulled. Go north ten miles.
He looked up. The official course markers pointed straight ahead. And in the distance, barely visible, he could see the racing forms of three other competitors heading that direction at full speed.
He went north.
It cost him two minutes. When he rejoined the course, he was back in third — but behind him, he could hear the distant screech of brakes and the sounds of locomotives that had discovered, too late, that the bridge over the Calven gorge had been quietly sabotaged. Not destroyed — nobody was getting killed — but compromised enough that no racing locomotive could safely cross it at speed. The race officials, he would learn later, had been fed false inspection reports.
The entire race was a setup. A spectacle organized by the Meridian Debt Consortium to launder their investments, fix the outcome, and collect on side wagers placed through a dozen intermediary firms. The winner was meant to be Farren — their asset, their champion — and the prize money was meant to cycle back through their own accounts. The other competitors were obstacles and window dressing.
But Farren had left him the flags.
Kettle crossed the finish line over Valenport in second place. Lord Harwick’s train, which had avoided the bridge entirely by virtue of a navigational error earlier in the race, came in first. Farren, who had gone back to help two stranded competitors rather than finish the race, was disqualified for abandoning his vehicle.
The Consortium’s scheme unraveled within days, exposed by a journalist who had been tipped off — anonymously — about the bridge sabotage and the fixed wagers. Race officials were investigated. Prize money was frozen pending review.
And then, quietly, Farren Solt sent Cobb a banker’s note for fifty thousand imperials, drawn from accounts that the investigators hadn’t yet frozen.
No note. No explanation. Just the money.
Cobb stood in the Consortium’s administrative office three days later, slid the payment across the desk, and walked out with his sister.
Petra looked at The Patched Pelican for a long time when she first saw it — the cracked window, the mustard envelope, the engine that was already knocking despite the warm afternoon.
“Dad’s ship,” she said.
“Our ship,” Cobb said. “Come on. Brix will want to show you the engine.”
They climbed aboard, and The Patched Pelican lifted slowly, steadily, into a clear sky.
Feature Photo by Kelly
The Confusing Middle 