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1.

Hadros Valentide addressed the hostile audience of reporters the same way he'd addressed most of the crowds he'd been forced to explain himself to. The immaculately dressed gray wolf straightened his tie, walked to the podium at the front of Eternal Progress Hall, and promptly ignored the gathered journalists, professors and spectacle seeking public. All hoping for his failure.

He gave his carefully crafted speech to himself, the jeering naysayers were incidental. "The equatorial lands have tightly held their secrets for far, far too long," he opened. "Since the dawn of the Second Empire, when our great ships radiated out to the four corners of the world, nothing has remained hidden. Nothing but the lands of the hot latitudes."

"Then why sail there? Any land in the equatorial zone is uninhabitable to anything but plants and bugs," interrupted one of the crowd.

Hadros shielded his eyes against the lights focused towards the podium, but he could not pick out the heckler. "I don't know if you're a journalist of a faculty member - you seem as poorly versed in natural science in either case - but the old way of thinking was based on old knowledge; from a time before we had a better understanding of the air currents. In the last hundred years we've come to chart some of the subtleties of the wind's tides. I firmly believe that given the evidence, a cool current, sucked directly from the stratosphere, washes over this mysterious land, making it quite livable, indeed!" He straightened his tie and waited for the outraged clamor to die down.

The University's dean, seated on the dais behind the wolf, slammed his fist on the table in a call for order. Hadros smiled inwardly. He'd not given details of his latest endeavor to more than a handful of furs, and very few of those had all the pieces to fit together. It was in keeping with his penchant for shocking, but announcing an expedition to the equatorial continent, long thought to be an uninhabitable deathtrap would surprise even the most jaded and cynical amongst the crowd.

"How will you get there?" A voice loud enough to reverberate above the others called out.

"Yes, how?" demanded another voice, this one from behind him. Hadros turned to look at one of the professors, their sharp eyes behind thick lenses staring daggers of derision. "Do you know the amount of ships lost when they drift too close to the Boiling Sea?"

"I'm not traveling by boat," Hadros replied smugly, daring them to ask the obvious.

"Then, how?" shouted an intrepid reporter.

Hadros smiled and looked up. All eyes followed his gaze, taking a moment to comprehend what he wasn't saying.

"An airship?" sputtered the quarrelsome professor. "Why do you waste our time with this nonsensical fantasy?"

"Not fantasy. And not a waste." Hadros pulled out a slip of paper, his only written notes for his proclamation. "I quote to from the King's Colonial Encouragement Act," he cleared his throat. "Upon endeavoring to lay claim to lands uncontested, or of the heathens, in the name of His Lordship, a public address, in front of worthy and learned witnesses, must be made in order to lay claim for said adventurer an amount no less than two percent of the total wealth found in the King's new dominion." Hardos folded the paper and returned it to his pocket. There, he thought, that should shut them up. And it did, for a few moments.

"This is preposterous!" exclaimed his detractor. "To come into a hall of science, with this nonsense about taking an airship to a land of death, and citing laws that haven't been invoked in decades- It offends me!"

"Never the less, it's legal," Hadros said cooly.

"What about the Crown? Don't they need to be informed?" piped some know-it-all reporter.

Hadros winced at that. The Royal family had been reluctant to be associated with the visionary wolf ever since his plan to make a desert bloom resulted in the flooding of a formerly lucrative trade route it the south. When he tried to offer the government a more active role in his newest expedition, he was expressly asked not to involve them any further than need be.

"They're aware," Hadros lost a touch of his confidence. "In fact, the government liasion is here with me, now."

In the front row of the audience a short wolf, fur mostly white, swallowed nervously and sunk lower in the uncomfortable seat.

"Vernon Alexander, official surveyor, trained cartographer and map maker, will you please join me at the podium," Hadros boomed.

Vernon groaned and wished he'd worn a hat to hide his flattened ears, clear signs of the situation intimidating him. As prestigious as Hadros tried to make it sound, Vernon Alexander was told by his superiors, in no uncertain terms, dung rolls down hill. The tragic fact was that even seventy years after abolishing the vestiges of the Pack Hierarchy system, the government ladder was controlled by an old boys network of wolves who could trace their lineage back to Alpha stock. Vernon, born of lower stock, was literally risking his life to make a name for himself.

The crowd teetered on the edge of applause and jeers, not knowing how to respond to the nameless bureaucrat set to accompany a mad egotist on an almost certainly doomed voyage. Vernon was reluctantly thrust up to the podium. Hadros whispered in his ear, "just tell them what we discussed."

Vernon nodded and looked out at the sea of lupine faces. "Um, yes, I- I am Vern-"

"Louder!" shouted someone.

"Sorry," Vernon mumbled, then louder, "I am Vernon Alexander, and I will be joining Professor Valentide's expedition as both a representative of His Majesty's government, and as an independent witness to whatever discoveries are made."

The silence lasted a full three seconds before the members of the press took to him like starving sharks to a wounded seal. Questions like teeth bit into him. What do you put your odds of surviving? What are your qualifications? How much is lunatic paying you? Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Workers Party?

Vernon gave a valiant effort as he managed half answer's to a question before jumping to an even more outrageous query that would demand being addressed. The ten minutes felt like an eternity.

"No! I- I've never fathered an illegitimate pup with a vulpine immigrant! Where do you even get tha-" A hand clasped his shoulder, gently pulling him back from the podium.

"That's enough," Hadros whispered to him. "Let the vultures choke on that. When we come back as heros - rich heros! - we'll reap our vengeance."

Hadros might have chuckled at his cartographer's shell shocked expression, but there would be time for levity upon his return. For now he jumped back into fray, delivering mocking retorts to a press pool of representatives from glorified tabloids and gossip rags. The intelligentsia of the University provided more focused questions, but still missed the big picture.

Hadros went into great detail on how he'd come to suspect, and later believe, the air currents contrived to make massive pressure zones that filled with the cool air from the upper atmosphere, pockmarking the Equatorial Hot Belt, where temperatures were too much for any known higher life, with seasonal and permanent blisters of temperate climate. A discussion found interesting by, maybe, a dozen of the hundreds crammed into the Hall.

Vernon stood rigid as a ship's mast, back and to the side of Hadros, glad the focus was back on the other wolf. Many of the things Hadros spoke of were new to the cartographer also. Hadros was always masterful at crafting shocking revelations. He ended the conference on one, having put off the repeated question of when this expedition would be readied to move out. With a satisfied grin, Hadros casually announced, "the finishing touches are being attended to by my capable assistant as we speak. After a hearty supper and good night's rest, we will get under way tomorrow morning."

Amidst the cacophony of new questions, Hadros collected his stunned companion and made a hasty exit.

***

Nathin Glasse tugged on the line that anchored his harness. Though he kept well away from the open hanger doors, he was still two thousand feet off the ground, inside the mushroomed landing field platform that sprouted atop the Triumph Tower Sky Port. Nathin was tasked with going over the great airship for the last time until tomorrow morning. A task he'd become familiar with, helping design and build the ship with Hadros. Nathin had come close to losing his fear of heights over the course of the last year. Close, but not close enough, he thought with another tug on his line.

The airship was dubbed the Occulator. Hadros decided on it saying it reflected its mission to make new lands visible. Nathin was the only other learned wolf to have been as fully involved in it as Hadros, and intrusted with stocking the expedition's provisions. Two years worth of food and nearly enough supplies to rebuild half the ship from scratch. Being the wolf of science that he was, Nathin had assured that the Occulator was better provisioned than all but the best laboratories, and could, if need be, offer the crew all that a top rate hospital could in the event of injury or illness.

This expedition may have been partially financially motivated for Hadros, but to Nathin this was about a treasures far more valuable than new spices, or untapped mineral deposits. Knowledge was his gold. The chance to slay the last blotch on the map labeled with "here be dragons." The last great unknown would be his to explore and document. It was enough to give him a heady feeling.

"Hey!"

A sudden shout made Nathin jump, dropping his clipboard and seizing his safety line.

The voice laughed now. "Scared ya, eh? Be glad I'm on your side," said the dark brown bear.

Nathin looked up at the towering slab of ursine masculinity, utterly unintimidated. "You ass. You made me lose count."

"Of what? You were jus' staring off."

Nathin could feel his skin start to warm under his black and gray patchwork of fur. If Donner Bensven knew how easy it was for him to annoy the dark wolf, one of them might not make it back from the uncharted lands. "Don't you have a gun to clean, or something?"

Donner chuckled. "As a matter of fact, I do. And when it comes to the point when we need one, you'll see just why Hadros hired me to see that you fellas make it back in one piece.

Nathin rolled his eyes and picked up his clipboard. Donner was supposedly a one bear army, having a lengthy career as a guide in some of the most wild and distant colonies of the Kingdom, and a lengthy career as a mercenary, bounty hunter, strike breaker, body guard, and God knew what else that Donner thought too risque to put on his resume. It was one of the few moves he and Hadros had disagreed on. In Nathin's view it was the antithesis of what the voyage of discovery was intended to be about. Let's meet the inhabitants of this strange and wonderful new world, and promptly shoot them, he thought ruefully.

"Just don't go shooting them off into the balloon. Need I remind you what that could do to flammable gases?"

Donner laughed again at the wolf's teacher like scolding. "Maybe I should write it down so I don't forget."

"You can write?" Nathin called after the bear with mock incredulity. He sighed as Donner boarded the Occulator, never bothering to put on the recommended safety harness so a sudden gust of wind wouldn't convert him to a liquid splash, three thousand feet below. And as nice as that image was for Nathin, he could only imagine the headache and delays to the expedition it would cause.

After delaying entering the ship as long as he reasonably could, Nathin followed after the hired muscle.

The airship, although large, was nowhere close to being the biggest in the Kingdom. A three decked, vaguely nautical, crew and cargo structure, roughly the size of a mid range passenger ship was secured to the ridged egg shaped balloon. The balloon itself was nearly the size of a football pitch and compartmentalized with smaller gas filled bladders.

The Occulator's innovation was more subtle than her conventional appearance let on. A faster navigation system that halved the delay in adjustments to the rudders, made from the cockpit at the opposite end of the ship. A front mounted spotlight of the strength used in lighthouses allowed for more accurate night flying. A dockable gyroplane that could, theoretically, be launched mid-flight from the cargo hold for reconnaissance. And the crowning achievement was the newly designed turbines, capable of getting enough force out of the airship's propellers to counteract all but the strongest jet streams.

Nathin unhooked his safety line once through the threshold. Everything should already be in the storage rooms, but a fourth check to make sure none of the laborers pilfered anything important was warranted. He flipped through the pages of the manifest, working his way from the forward living quarters, through the lab and infirmary, into the galley. An ice box would have been impractical, so most of the food stuffs were nonperishables or cured and dried. Not the gourmet fare Nathin had grown accustomed to in the city, but a year or so of roughing it was more than a bargain to be one of the furs to bring light to the last uncharted continent.

As he left the galley a dark form flashed across the deck. Nathin stifled an instinctual scream. Rats, he thought bitterly. The tiny feral devils had been parasitic companions to the wolves every triumph. When they first discovered the Northlands, it had been in ships with rat infested holds. The Western Spice Isles had lost many indigenous species to the vermin. Even the caravans carried the precocious vermin across the southern deserts.

In the preceding months Nathin made it a personal crusade to minimize the number of rodents infesting Occulator. Plates of poisoned meat, cats left to roam before take off, mechanical contraptions of his own devices, everything short of witchcraft. Nathin had now conceded defeat.

As he made his way through the various store rooms, he was pleased to find the damage from the rats was minimal. Well within the planned tolerances as long as they didn't reach a plague level in numbers. He stopped by the weapons room to find Donner was indeed cleaning a gun. A long four barreled thing that looked like it would have taken two of Nathin to lift and aim the monster. Donner shifted it around like it was nothing.

"Do try to remember this is a scientific expedition. Not an invasion," Nathin huffed.

Donner smiled and gave a mocking salute to the annoyed wolf and went back to oiling the clockwork firing mechanism of his rifle.

***

Roe spat out every curse he knew in the Lupine tongue and in the Vulpine patois he was raised in. His lungs burned from the chase he'd been in. A moment longer and he was sure he would have collapsed, but trapping himself in Triumph Tower was only delaying the inevitable. The mechanical lift would allow him a few minutes to catch his breath before stranding him in a cloud as dozens of angry constables closed in on him.

"Never get cornered, you bastard idiot!" he yelled at himself. It was one of the first lessons in being a thief. But the opened lift door, the attendant distracted with the cargo he was helping to onload, a chance that the wolves might not see him duck in, it was all too enticing for the exhausted fox. Unfortunately, the constables and market guards did notice his getaway and were probably riding in a neighboring lift less than a minute behind him.

For years Roe had lived in the shadow of the lattice of welded iron that climbed above the clouds before blooming into a vast elevated field held aloft with floating buttresses and modern understandings of physics that were as good as the magic that was once rumored to have been common before the Age of Steam and Reason. But Roe had never been to the skyport. His world was the sprawling market that ran for miles from the tower, to the bay, and to the train depot. The wealth of the empire flowed through the merchant city, but if he didn't resort to thievery, he would never have known it. He and the rest of the city's poor and immigrants were relegated to walled ghettos or shanty towns in the nearby hills.

The lift lurched to a sudden halt, leaving Roe's stomach in motion a moment too long. The doors opened.

"Shitshitshitshit!" He'd imagined a maze of crates he might have been able to lose his pursuers in. Instead, the fox found a well ordered landscape of tethered airships, floating a few dozen feet out of reach, and a ring of huge hangers fringing the elevated field. He made a split second decision and kicked the lift's lever, sending it back down empty and ran for the nearest hanger.

Roe was unprepared for the change in temperature the altitude brought. His bare paws soon stung as he sprinted across the frosty metallic plates of the ground. He just made it to the door of the nearest hanger when his sensitive ears picked up the opening of a lift. Without a second to spare, Roe squeezed through a gap in the massive hangar doors.

A sudden and fleeting sense of vertigo washed over him as he saw beyond the anchored airship the hanger lacked a fourth wall. For the first time he saw a birdseye view of the city. No time to enjoy it, if the wolves had an ounce of brains they would know this was the only hanger Roe could have made it too before their lift arrived. He ran towards the edge, hoping to find a ledge or something he might be able to get out of sight on. The wolves had to be reluctant to risk their lives over a simple thief, he hoped.

Before reaching the edge, Roe heard the sounds of an argument. Two voices. The echoing clang of the docked ship's cargo door hitting the floor.

"Of course I couldn't tell you the dangers we might face!" shouted an indignant voice with a hint of upperclass wolf to it.

"Then why not bring an arsenal? You seem ta have packed a hospital."

Roe stood still and held his breath. A bickering bear and wolf exited from the rear of the craft and were on their way to the hangar door. There had been no sound of the ship's door closing... Roe tip-toed after them, soundlessly ducking into the dark unknown of the airship.

From the dark, Roe could hear the arrival of the guards who were chasing him. There was a muffled exchange of words. The fox felt blindly in what he guessed was a cargo hold, eventually finding the lip of a tightly pulled tarp, and contorting his agile frame under it. Sounds of footsteps grew louder. Roe clawed his way to the top of the crate, doing all he could to not disturb the coverings. He laid flat on top, just above head level for most wolves, and there he awaited his fate..

"See," proclaimed the nasally voice of the wolf who'd argued with the bear. "We've been here all afternoon. No one could have entered without my notice."

"All the same," said a constable, "this thief is up here somewhere. And he could be armed and desperate. We need to make sure you're not in any danger."

Danger? thought Roe.

"What did he do?" asked the annoyed wolf.

Robbed an elderly wolfess in the market. Probably looking for coin to buy his drink."

Roe bit his tongue. It was food, he wanted to shout, I stole food and knocked into a wolfess after you started chasing me!

There was a silence as the hunting wolf listened for the slightest noise. "And you're sure you and the bear have been here the entirety of the past hour?"

"Longer than that. Now if you'll excuse me, I will lock up the ship. There are some fragile pieces of equipment that I'd prefer not to have you and your furs pawing at. Please search for your thief elsewhere.

A moment of silence. "Alright, sir, but make sure you securely lock down your ship and hangar." Louder, to the unseen number of guards, Roe heard the orders to fan out and begin another search being given. As the doors slammed shut and locks began to click, Roe allowed himself a sigh of relief. He pulled tight the tattered rags he called clothes and wished the black fur that covered his extremities from toe to knee, and finger to elbow, really were the socks and gloves they resembled. It would be a long cold night.