Dar awoke to a world of pain and noise, bolting upright in his bed, eyes wide. His leg was killing him and the air was rent with explosions!

Looking out his window, he could see dawn’s light casting its long shadows across the room. Immediately outside, Pop was working on the generator set, and he had the spark arresters wrong again.

He yawned and stretched, grimacing at the pain in his leg and the pounding in his ears. Experimentally, he tried to flex his knee. The joint moved, but stiffly and with some overt protest. Kisêyiniw had assured him that the liniment would set him right, but it didn’t look like that was happening just yet. Maybe it just needed loosening and warming up.

Without pain and all that, right?

Yawning again, he slid his blankets aside and rolled out of bed, shivering at the cold morning air. Gasping with each step, he hobbled for the bathroom down the hall, hoping neither of his sisters had as yet established camp inside.

The wagon was in the shed when he came outside some few minutes later, dressed and washed, his short black hair still damp, parted at the middle and plastered to either side of his head. He wondered when the old man had brought it in, and was he still here?

Martal Palanna looked up as his son hobbled into view still adjusting his suspenders. He was an older, stouter, shorter version of his son, sporting a thick, brushy mustache in place of the boy’s clean-shaven face. In dress, he added an open vest over his own shirt, the sleeves of the latter rolled up past his elbows. He had an old and faded fedora pressed down over his thick black hair.

He noted sourly that the boy —young man— was favoring his left leg this time. Last week it had been his right. Before that... He bit his tongue lest the demand to know what the lad had been up to all day yesterday and late into the night work its way out. He’d already checked the fuel gauge on the wagon and noted the extravagant squandering of fuel oil, and now this.

Only a few years ago, the lot would have netted the youngster some quality time over Martal’s knee, but gottdamnit, the boy was nearly nineteen years old! Well past the time when he should be a man grown and accepting responsibility. He should be married by now — starting a stead of his own.

Instead, he wasted his time hanging around the edge of the island and mooning over airships of all the damned things. No good ever came of that! Martal ought to know.

The senior Palanna forced his breathing to calm and watched his son draw near, not giving voice to his anger.

“You have to put the spark arresters on, Pop,” the boy winced as he drew within speaking distance. “I don’t care what the manual says, these old Jennings won’t run without ‘em in place — not enough back pressure in those short exhaust stacks.”

Martal scowled volcanically back at him, leaning on the generator’s cowling, a grease smeared box end wrench in his equally smudged hand. “If you know so much,” he asked evenly. “Why isn’t it already running?”

“Because I had to deliver old man Entigh’s grain yesterday instead of working on it,” Dar answered simply.

“And today you’ll be working for him at the garage instead of fixing it. And your mother won’t have electricity for another day. Or I can fix it.”

Dar sighed more heavily than the situation probably called for. Near theatrically. The old man was always this way. Had been ever since he could remember. Wound tight as a lawyer’s pocket watch.

You could see it in him constantly, like he couldn’t help it. Like he was forever stuck in a cage he’d long since outgrown and was always pressing out against bars that held him rigidly upright, unable to relax or breathe. And he took it out on everybody near him, with his rigid expectations and his unwavering lack of understanding.

“Or I suppose I could just fix it before I leave,” he sighed. “If I skipped breakfast.”

“Or you could do that,” the older Palanna agreed. “Did that happen I might even forget to dock your pay for the extra two gallons of fuel oil you used yesterday.”

It was Dar’s turn to scowl. Not that he hadn’t expected it, but it would be nice to occasionally be wrong about his father.

* * *

Dar was grease and kerosene to his armpits and in a foul mood of his own when the noise caught his attention. He looked up from the freshly serviced generator to behold a somewhat horrifying sight.

Old man Entigh’s old Oshkosh two ton stakebed was careering down the road at a ludicrous pace, slewing mud and debris in long rooster tails from all four tires, its old Hercules flathead screaming like the driver was trying to blow it up.

It was going to take weeks of backbreaking work to re-plow and re-grade that road after this! He threw the wrench he’d been holding viciously against the generator platform, cursing. Somebody was going to be getting a sock in the jaw for this!

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“POP!” he called over his shoulder in the unlikely event that his father couldn’t already hear the screaming engine approaching. “Pop, you’d better get out here!”

“Coming!” the older Palanna called out through the kitchen window.

The old truck wallowed into the yard and skidded to a halt in a cloud of disrupted crud, narrowly missing the irate youth with the spray as he stormed towards it.

Then Dar stopped dead, jaw dropping. Hendrel Entigh himself hauled open the door of the old Model A and leapt to the muddy ground, his face pale, his eyes half wild.

Dar might well not have been there for all the notice Mailyn’s normally staid father paid him. Entigh’s eyes were only for the house and the elder Palanna exiting the front door of it, wiping his hands on an old kitchen towel.

“Martin!” Entigh shouted in a panic-tinged voice. “Martin, I need your help!”

Dar’s surprise deepened. Martin? What was he on about? He turned to his father and saw a look of panic in his eyes! What the hell was—?

But then Martal’s face closed in, going as grim as his son had ever seen it. “That’s not who I am, Hendrel,” he said in a voice harsh as death.

“But it’s who I need,” Entigh insisted.

Martal Palanna spared his son another worried glance before turning back to the island’s second richest citizen, and —he’d thought up until just now— his closest friend. “Martin Palin died twenty years ago, Hendrel,” he said, overtly stressing the last syllable of the man’s name.

Entigh started to blurt a response, but he cut him off. “You promised me! You gave me your word when I agreed to move my family here that he was dead and buried. That he’d never be dug up.”

Entigh’s shoulders slumped at that response, and his head drooped. He seemed to shrink visibly in Dar’s eyes.

“Northridge was attacked last night, Martin,” he said hollowly, noting the older Palanna’s start. “They got off a partial message before the phone line went dead.”

“The—?”

“Mailyn?” Dar overrode his father’s question. “Is Mailyn okay?”

“she’s safe at home, Darnan,” Entigh spared him barely a glance.

“The constables?” Palanna finished his question, favoring his son with a stern look.

“Oh, sure,” Entigh sighed. “They were off like a shot in their fancy new armored car,” he waved a hand airily. “All four of them. When they didn’t report back or return, and when we still couldn’t make contact with Northridge, I took a squad of irregulars out to check on them....” His voice trailed off.

“And?” Palanna prompted.

“Dead, near as we can tell,” Entigh said. “Somebody shot hell out of that fancy armored car of theirs and left it sitting in the road most of a mile this side of Northridge. The road around it looked like churned butter. Like they’d used an automatic cannon on it! We didn’t get too close for fear that whatever had done it was still there.

“Martin,” he hesitated, again using that name. “Martin, there’s an airship.”

“A what?” Palanna demanded, nonplused. “Here? What the hell would an airship—?”

“A bright red airship,” Entigh pressed. “With a skull and crossed rifles insignia painted on its hull.”

“Pirates?” Dar blurted, drawing both sets of older eyes to him.

Entigh nodded, turning back to the older Palanna. “Looks like.”

“That’s absur—” Martal started.

“I saw it myself!” Entigh insisted. “Hunkered down over the wall of the stead, it was, like a cat guarding the carcass of a mouse.

“That airship is a couple of hundred feet long if it’s an inch,” he informed Palanna urgently. “The militia won’t stand a chance against the number of experienced pirates that thing will hold and you know it.”

Palanna looked down, not meeting his eyes. That would depend entirely on how many militia they were prepared to deploy. And on how many they were prepared to lose.

“She’s my daughter, Martin!” Entigh all but wept. “My first born!”

Still Palanna hesitated. Martin Palin wasn’t anybody he wanted to meet ever again, no matter—

“Please, Martin!” Entigh begged, hands clasped before him. “What if it were your daughter out there?”

The man who had once been Martin Palin, and who would appear destined to be him again, gave brief thought to suggesting that the residents of Northridge were probably already dead. He didn’t voice it. Of what matter probabilities? They were or they weren’t. At this point, the matter at hand was the need for determination, not the answer it would reveal.

Instead, he concentrated on fighting the demons welling up from deep within himself. Those demons he’d been hiding from for two decades behind the mask of Martal Palanna, gentleman rancher. Those demons he’d been keeping from his family. Those demons he’d banished to allow himself to even have a family.

But the mask had slipped now, and they’d found him again, just that quickly. Even as he stood there watching his son out of the corner of his eye, he could feel Martal Palanna die and slough away from him —feel Martin Palin — Marty Palin — Pale Horse Palin — rise exultantly from the ashes of his long ago pyre. Feel the demons dance around the renewed flame of his eagerness.

The stony look that Dar had noticed with such concern only moments ago shifted itself into something strange and different. Not quite a smile, not quite a scowl, settling along well-worn lines. An inner fire seemed to come alight deep behind his eyes as his shoulders squared themselves almost unconsciously. He seemed almost to grow taller.

“Alright Henry,” he said softly, but no less stonily. “I’ll check it out. I’ll nee—”

“In the truck,” Entigh blurted anxiously. “Everything I could think of, already loaded.”

Martin Palin raised an eyebrow, unsmiling. “You were that sure?”

Heinrich “Henry” Entmann —late of Munich, Germany, old Earth, and points very much further east— peered out from behind the mask of Hendrel Entigh and nodded. “You’ve always been a good friend, Martin,” he said simply. “And a good man. I knew that you wouldn’t let me down.”

Palin turned to his son, ignoring the stunned look on the boy’s face. “You’d better go find Tall Pines, Son,” he told the boy.

“Darnan!” he spat when Dar didn’t immediately move.

Dar jumped.

“I said go find Tall Pines!”

“Who?” Dar was confused and growing more so by the moment.

“That old timer you’re always hanging around with,” his father prompted. “Avery Tall Pines. You go find him and tell him that Marty Palin needs him. And tell him to hurry!”

“Old timer?” Dar asked, bewildered. “D’you mean Kisêyiniw?”

Martin rolled his eyes. “Kisêyiniw is Cree for ‘old man’, Darnan,” he told his son. “His name is Avery Tall Pines, and you should already be out of this yard and on your way to his stead.”

Dar jumped again, but this time forward, headed for the house and his leathers, sore leg be damned. Kisêyiniw’s stead was a good ways up the mountain and through some pretty mean brush. Later, at some point, he’d have to ask Kisêyiniw what Cree was.