1635 The Papal Stakes by Eric Flint, Charles E. Gannon

ambush. Up until now, he’d always felt like a soldier. Now…he tried not to think of himself as a murderer.
     
    The complement in the gondola had grown very quiet. Alps this big, when seen close up, were no longer scenic, were no longer even majestic: they were ominous gargantuas. The figure in the hooded clerical robe stood very still at the rear of the gondola, watching the towering monsters slide slowly past.
    Angling to enter the north of the Sur Valley from the east, Franchetti had swept around the Piz d’Err with about one thousand yards to spare, and well under the level of its 11,080 foot peak. But as he drew closer to the Marmelsee, he seemed to be struggling to maintain a steady course.
    “What’s wrong?” Miro shouted above the engines.
    “Nothing, Don Estuban.”
    “Virgilio—”
    “Well, the air currents are—are hard to predict here. The drafts around these mountains, they can speed up very quickly.”
    Miro looked up at the next alp in the line of snow-and-stone giants arrayed in a frozen, southward parade; this one was even taller, more jagged. Miro pointed. “And that one is called?”
    “Piz Calderas.”
    Gray horns and fangs protruded from its upper reaches; lower down, where they were, the topography was less forbidding.
    “And isn’t that one the Matterhorn?” Sherrilyn pointed across the valley and the Marmelsee, where a great monolith of stone was now framed by the rapidly setting sun. She sounded almost giddy; she seemed to be the last passenger whose enjoyment of the trip was undiminished.
    Miro smiled. “No. That is Piz Platta.”
    “What?” Sherrilyn sounded personally affronted. “That’s a rip-off! It’s a, a…a damned look-alike. A fake.”
    Miro’s smiled widened. “Can God steal a creative property from himself? A worthy question for Talmudic scholars, though I suspect—”
    Franchetti’s “Don Estuban!” was uttered in the very same second that the gondola seemed to plummet away from under them. Miro fell to the deck, glad not to be falling further. Franchetti was giving orders to Gerd and Donald, who were his assistant engineers on this trip. Donald opened up the burner, which sent a hoarse, bright roar of flame up into the dirigible. A wave of sultry warmth washed over the gondola. At the same time, Gerd was adjusting the engine pitch for a steep climb.
    Between the two adjustments, Miro expected the blimp to shoot higher. Instead, it laboriously crawled upward. Miro rose, crouched behind Franchetti, and smelled the sour stink of sudden, panicked sweat. “Virgilio, what is our situation?”
    “I—I am not sure, Don Estuban. One minute I was correcting for side draft. The next a slight updraft, then a gust came down off the peak, hard. It is the air over the lake, near dusk. With the temperatures changing this quickly—”
    “—wind directions and speeds are changing just as quickly.”
    Harry Lefferts spat over the side of the gondola. “Damn it. I knew this was a lousy idea. Flying just before sunset: it’s nuts.”
    Miro watched the steep sides of the Piz Calderas come closer. “Virgilio, is it wise that we—?”
    “Don Estuban, the air is calmer here, farther away from the surface of the lake. I think we can probably—”
    Then they were shooting upwards, rapidly closing with the Piz Calderas. “What the fuck—?” shouted Sherrilyn.
    Miro knew better than to interrogate Franchetti, who was trying to both save their lives and adapt to conditions he had never encountered in the more predictable flying conditions of central Germany. Besides, Miro had a pretty good idea of what the problem was.
    They had entered a fierce new westerly draft. Glancing across the valley, Miro guessed it was produced by the funneling effects the two immense alps he saw there: the Piz Platta and its northerly partner, the Piz Arblatsch. Winds from the west were pinched between the peaks and accelerated, as would a stream of water that is forced to flow through a narrow