Sky-Skipper

The Sky-Skipper on the Free Companies' southern hiring-board is Courier-Pilot Juno Adair, age twenty-two, listed under 'mail — Hedra passes' and, in a second hand, 'and whatever else arrives from above.' The wings are Syndicate-built, dragonfly-pattern, four vanes of etched brass on a wound mana-core that sits between her shoulders, and she bought them second-hand at nineteen from a courier who had lost his nerve over the Hedra saddle and sold them on the ground where he landed, with the dial reading forty seconds. The core gives eleven minutes of flight. Juno has never landed with less than one on the dial, in three years and some nine hundred flights, and the board has recorded her rule in her own words: 'the last minute is the one you pay for.'

Her combat-grant is arrival. She is not a fighter in the way the Companies train fighters; she is a courier who learned, over the saddle in her first winter, that arriving from above with a blade ends most arguments before they have properly begun, and the Companies that hire her have learned to put her mail-run over whatever ground they expect to argue on. She drops out of the climb, cuts once, and is gone into the next thermal, and the after-action reports describe her, uniformly, as 'not seen coming.' The goggles leave marks. The scarf, she tells people, is for the cold; it is for the sound the wings make at the top of a dive, which she has never described and which the courier she bought them from described, once, on the ground, as the reason he was selling.

She flies the Vanguard's ridge-post to Adaeze Fenwick and drops it from a hundred feet onto the cairn, and has never missed the cairn, and found a note in it once that read 'you had ninety seconds left,' which she has kept in the flight-suit's inside pocket and has not answered. She carries for Nyx Varela's crews when Varela is working the passes, on the grounds that Varela's contracts are honest and the mail is heavy, and she has declined, three times, an offer from the Syndicate's southern vault to service the core in exchange for its flight-logs. The core has not been serviced in three years. It has not needed to be. She says the previous owner's nerve is still in it somewhere, and that hers is holding it down.