Chapter 15
The Wind Breaker breeched through the surface of the fug at full speed, dragging lavender streamers behind. Their mission in the fug had taken them far from the city center of Keystone, but not so far that the local mountaintops weren’t speckled with homes, workshops, and lantern-topped mooring posts. Night had fallen while they were below, but families sitting down at the dinner table were treated to quite a show as Captain Mack turned his prow toward the mountains while the tow ship burst from beneath them.
“Is that cart of yours secure? If we lose that loot, we’re through,” he barked into the speaking tube.
“I’m on it, Cap’n,” Coop replied.
“Gunner and Nita, I want you on deck. Lil, reload all cannons.”
The crew stowed their masks in the gig room equipment chest and jumped to their tasks. Gunner climbed out onto the deck first, Nita close behind. It had not fared well. Lines of fléchettes crisscrossed the deck, splintering struts, severing ropes, and turning the envelope into a veritable pincushion. The gummy layer of self-sealant and a few strategically placed reinforcement patches had kept it reasonably intact despite the assault, but even so a few leaks still faintly fluoresced from the residual fug.
“Nita, I’m hearing some steam escaping, and the second starboard turbine is feeling sluggish. Get on that,” Captain Mack ordered.
Nita nodded, looking to Mack.
“Oh my gosh! Captain, are you all right?!”
The captain had not fared much better than his ship. A long, bloody wound ran across his left side, presumably where a fléchette had brushed him, and a crooked metal dart stuck out of this thigh. Butch was already by his side on one knee, applying a bandage while the captain continued to guide the ship. Wink cowered at his healthy leg.
“It was a ricochet. It’s nothing. Get on the repairs!”
She lingered for a moment more but forced her concern aside and scanned the darkness for venting steam.
“Gunner, I don’t want another grappling hook taking any more of my ship. Get that tow ship off our back. I think it’s time we broke out a ‘telescope.’”
“With pleasure,” Gunner said, running to the railing and pulling free one of the blankets concealing an installed and operational fléchette gun salvaged from the wailer.
“I’ll swing around. Make quick work of it,” the captain ordered.
The engines labored and the ship slowly came around. Gunner’s eyes gleamed as he leveled the weapon at the moonlit tow ship. “Let’s see what this can do.”
He pulled the trigger and sent a string of stolen darts at the enemy. They swiftly disappeared into the night, none seeming to have hit the target.
“A bit difficult to aim at night,” he said, furrowing his brow. He adjusted and fired again, this time receiving the reward of a distant patter of impacts. Another string punched a large enough hole in their pursuer’s envelope to prevent it from maintaining altitude, and it disappeared back into the fug, where the escaping gas lit up the cloud like green lightning.
“Good work, Gunner,” the captain said. “How’s the repair coming, Ms. Graus?”
“Won’t be a moment. It was just a pipe puncture,” she said, clamping a cuff onto a pipe. “I’ll do a more permanent repair when I can.”
“Okay,” Coop yelled from the hatch. “Loot’s all hooked up. You folks know there’s a sleeping fugger down here?”
“Ignore him. Just get up here and keep your eyes peeled. Wink still seems a bit concerned.”
He climbed up, a look of disappointment on his face. “You mean you already took out the tow ship?”
“Indeed. The new gun worked like a charm!” Gunner said like a proud father.
Coop tipped his head and furrowed his brow in the effort of thought. “How many fuggers you figure we killed?”
“Aw, I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t kill any. The nice thing about these ships is they tend to crash pretty slow. And them fuggers are tough,” the captain said, wincing as Butch yanked free the dart in his leg without warning.
Coop sighed. “That was pretty easy, when you really think about it.”
Gunner scowled. “Didn’t we just have that chat about tempting fate?”
“What else could they throw at us?”
Wink, who seldom made a sound besides his incessant tapping, audibly squealed. He hopped desperately for the hatch below decks until he reached the end of his harness leash and was jerked from his feet. A few moments later, the sound that his sensitive ears had picked up became audible to the others. It sounded like propellers, the sort that might be on a patrol ship, but wrong somehow. The sound was deeper and less distinct. Then came the motion. A section of the fug began to bulge upward, like a bubble forming on the surface of a tar pit. A vigorous churning appeared around nearly half the dome, at least a dozen propellers chopping at the surface of the fug. The purple mist slid away from the top of the bulge, revealing first several strings of serrated fins, then the gleaming sheen of some sort of metallic cloth.
Two brilliant shafts of light suddenly erupted from beneath the fug, spotlights of some kind, burning like lime lights. They pivoted and swept as the thing continued to rise. It was an airship, but larger than anything they’d encountered before. When it finally cleared the fug, it was revealed to have three envelopes keeping it aloft. The main one was an armored and barbed mountain of a sack, easily five times the size of the whole of the Wind Breaker. The secondary balloons were a bit less than half the size of the main one, slung behind the main one to support what was less a ship and more a multitier gun platform. Cannons and lesser guns utterly ringed the platform, and manned turrets even spanned along the front edge of the envelope, while droning fans lined the entire rear half of the main envelope’s circumference. It was a vicious and predatory thing, a warship without question.
“Ho-lee hell… a dreadnought…” Coop said, his jaw dropping open.
“Gunner, slap Coop for me, would you?” the captain said.
Gunner obliged, delivering a motivating slap to the back of his crewmate’s head. “Your talking privileges are revoked.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Nita asked once she’d wrestled aside enough fear to speak.
“Withholding repairs is how the fuggers keep ships in line. Withholding resources is how they keep cities in line. The dreadnought is how they keep nations in line. Just knowing the thing exists has been enough to keep both Circa and Westrim from forming an army and breaking their hold on us,” he explained, shutting down the turbines and turning a knob that shut off the lights. “We must have got our hands on something really good, if they sent that thing after us.”
“Why did you shut off the turbines? Shouldn’t we escape?”
“It is faster than us, and there’s nothing we have that will be able to knock it out before it can knock us out. Best we can do is run silent and hope it looks the wrong way, then run.”
They all stood in silence, watching the spotlights at the forward edge of the dreadnought methodically scan for the Wind Breaker. As it did, the captain spoke orders just loudly enough to be heard.
“Gunner, how are we on ammunition for the dart gun?”
“Not much left, Captain. We only had what was left in the wailer, and what we could salvage from what had been fired at us.”
“Make sure it is ready to fire. If you’ve got anything in that collection of yours that might do some good, be ready to use it. Coop, help him haul up whatever he thinks he can use. Glinda, you’d best load up on fresh bandages.” They quickly got to work. “Ms. Graus, how is that repair?”
“Strong enough.”
“Strong enough to take a little more pressure than perhaps your new boiler was really meant for?”
“For a little while, probably.”
He was silent for a time, the two of them alone on the deck.
“You done good work for us in these last few days, Nita,” he said. “It takes a special sort to find a place on a ship like this. Y
ou ain’t perfect, but I think there’d be a place for you.”
She sensed that, for this moment, he wasn’t speaking as a superior officer addressing his crew. He was McCulloch West, the man, wishing to share something that he might not get a chance to say in the future.
“I never would have set foot on a ship like this if I didn’t have to… but I must admit that I feel I’ve lived more in these last few days than in the years before,” she said.
He nodded. “A ship may cut your days short, but it’ll make sure the ones you’ve got are filled to the brim. I call it a fair trade.” He squinted his eyes, and his face hardened. When he spoke, it was once again with the tone of authority. “That spotlight is coming our way. We’re made. Go find Lil and help her feed the firebox. A double load of coal. No slow-burn. I want us running hot, Ms. Graus. Too hot.”
By the time he finished delivering the order, a spotlight cast its blinding light upon them. He pushed the turbines to life. Nita dashed for the hatch and navigated the halls of the ship. Lil waited near the aft magazine.
“Come on, we need to feed the firebox. A double load,” Nita said.
“He wants to overstoke? Must be something real bad out there, huh?” Lil said, running quickly toward the fuel room.
“A dreadnought.”
She shot Nita a look that seemed wholly out of place. It was fear. “The dreadnought. I never seen it. I was always kind of glad about that.”
“What is this overstoking?” Nita asked.
They reached the fuel room and began to load up. “It was something he used to tell us about. He got in a real bad scrape on his first ship, years ago. The Vanguard or something like that. A dozen wailers. He overstoked the boiler to squeeze some extra speed out.”
“Did it work?”
“Well, he’s alive, but he ain’t got that ship no more, so yes and no.”
They made their way to the boiler and began to feed in the coal. There was a distant thump, then the ship rocked violently to the side. The captain’s voice came blaring out of the speaking tube.
“We are taking fire. Get that box stoked. Lil, you’ll be on both fore and aft cannons. Keep them loaded. Grapeshot aft, standard shot fore. Nita, on deck. I want you on hand for repairs. I’m going to need everything this ship can give me. I can’t afford to be coping with disabled controls, or we’re through.”
They finished their current task and Nita rushed for the deck. The ship lurched aside again, not with the suddenness of a weapon hit but with the swing of a dodge. She climbed to the deck to find the dreadnought already nearly on top of them. Captain Mack pushed his ship to climb, but their heavy load robbed them of their nimbleness. The dreadnought, for its size, was terrifying in its maneuverability. The one thing it didn’t seem to be able to do was climb quickly, so the battle was, for the moment, a slow race skyward. Mack had been able to keep them just barely above the main cannons. The attack ship did not appear to be fully manned, leaving several of the upper turrets without operators, but at least two were harrying them with darts that made those of the patrollers and the wailers look like toothpicks.
“They aren’t aiming for the envelope, and they weren’t targeting direct hits when we were in range of the main cannons. They must be trying to recover the cargo intact. The higher we go, the less likely they are to be willing to shoot us down,” the captain said as Gunner heaved a sack of weaponry onto the deck. “Gunner, I want those lights out. Those fuggers can see well enough in the dark, we don’t need them getting any help. Once those are out, fire at will. Now’s not the time to hold anything back.”
“On it, Captain,” Gunner said. He rushed to the fléchette gun and pitched it down toward the spotlights.
The brilliance of the light made it difficult to target directly, but a few quick crisscrosses of the approximate area managed to shatter the glass of the first light and fracture its workings. While targeting the second one, the fléchette gun ran dry of ammo.
“Give me the grinder,” Gunner said. Coop tugged free a weapon made from a ring of gun barrels attached to a box with a crank on one side and a belt of ammunition on the other. The bottom side had a wide clamp, which he heaved onto the railing and tightened up before tilting the contraption in the general direction of the light and turning the handle. With a sound like a row of soldiers firing off their rifles at once, the weapon slung a stream of bullets at their enemy. Barely a dozen shots before it reached the end of its ammo belt, the second light fizzled and died.
Without their lights, the accuracy of the smaller guns suffered, though that was not entirely in the Wind Breaker’s favor. Their focus on disabling the ship rather than destroying it suffered as well, and more than a few darts chewed into the envelope. There was no rupture, but a thin stream of gas escaped from a handful of holes too large to be patched by their improvised self-sealing system. At least one inner section of the envelope was compromised.
“Okay, we’re going to run for it,” Mack said, angling the ship out over the mountains now far below them. “Let’s see just how tough their ship really is.”
The Wind Breaker roared as her rear cannon fired. At this range there was no missing the massive attacker, but despite the direct hit on the envelope, little evidence of any damage, beyond a barely visible plume of green gas at first, appeared. Then it became clear that the dreadnought, though still rising in pursuit, wasn’t rising as quickly. They were slowly but steadily gaining a height advantage. After a minute they were well above the top of the enemy and still rising. Perhaps sensing that their quarry was on the verge of being out of range, the gunners intensified their attacks. A flurry of darts thumped against the belly and side of the ship, with a stray shot whizzing past and lodging itself in the harness of one of the pumps under the envelope. It began to vent gas freely, and The Wind Breaker swiftly started to descend.
“Ms. Graus, the starboard lift pump is hit. That thing is hooked to all of the envelope chambers. I need you to cut off the flow, or we’re going to fall right into the jaws of that monster.”
Nita looked up to the malfunctioning machinery, swallowed hard, and took to the rigging.
Captain Mack swung the ship around. “As long as we’re tipping down, might as well let them have it with both barrels. Stand by, all crew. Big jolt coming.”
She had just reached the broken pump when the order came. It left her with barely the time to hold on tight to the rigging before the guns fired, forcing the already forward-pitched ship to tilt drastically. Anything not tied down, including the crew, tumbled forward. Nita was almost shaken free but managed to keep her grip. She looked down and saw two new green plumes coming from the dreadnought but still no sign that it was on the verge of destruction. Shaking her head, she tried to focus on her work. On the deck of the ship, dealing with the pump would have been a simple task. There were a few manual valves that needed to be closed. Here in the rigging of a ship at battle, it seemed impossible. She could only reach three of the five necessary valves. There was no telling how she would close the others, but she would cross that bridge when she came to it.
“It looks like they won’t be able to target us as well if we are directly above them! I’m taking us over! If we have to come down, maybe we can tear them up on the way!”
Nita finished the three accessible valves and then eyed the remaining ones. There were no two ways about it. She’d never be able to reach them from the rigging. Without a second thought she climbed out onto the broken pump itself, which dangled from its mounting braces and coughed at the gas it was venting. She moved hand over hand until she could reach the valves, then swung her legs up to hook a brace. She reached out with a wrench and made short work of the fourth valve, then got busy on the last.
As she gave it a final turn, she heard a thump from below that was different from the rest, followed by the worrying crunch of wood. The dreadnought had launched ropes tipped with barbed harpoons directly up from the main deck, between the main envelope and the first small one. They bi
t into the belly of the ship near the stern and yanked downward, swinging the ship forward. Nita’s precarious grip slipped, and she tumbled down to the deck, striking the planks painfully and sliding toward the rear of the ship as the angle became ever more extreme. She picked up speed, knocking free lines of fléchettes, and her eyes briefly met with those of Coop and Gunner as she skated past them. Then, suddenly, there was no deck beneath her.
Again time slowed. She had slipped off the back of the gondola, past where the missing railing should have been. Now she was falling toward the dreadnought below, flipping end over end. Darts whizzed past her. With an odd, resonant thud she smacked into the main envelope with enough force to knock the wind from her lungs. It sent her back into the air, striking it again where its slope was steeper. Now she was skidding directly toward one of the slicing propellers. She flipped over, fingers grasping madly for something to hold onto. Finally she found a support rope leading down from the top of the envelope. She was moving too fast to get a firm grip, but she slowed herself enough to avoid being launched into the blades of the propeller when she ran out of envelope. Instead she was dumped into the rigging and thrown violently from strut to rope to chain, then finally down to the deck below.
She coughed and fought to regain her breath, her mind not yet recovered enough to appreciate the miracle of falling from one airship and landing on another. She swept the deck around her with blurred vision. Either because of its hasty need to launch, or simply by design, the ship operated on a skeleton crew. Each fug person rushed to follow orders bellowed through megaphones from a helm near the fore end of the main deck. The crew was so busy they had not yet noticed her.
Reason wormed its way slowly back into her mind. They wanted the stolen cargo back. That was the only reason they hadn’t decimated the Wind Breaker. Chances were very good they would have no such qualms about killing a stray crewman. If she wanted to survive, even for a few minutes more, she was going to have to get out of sight before they noticed her. And if there was any hope of getting the stolen medicine back to her mother, she was going to have to find some way to help the Wind Breaker get away. Stumbling to her feet, she rushed for the nearest hatch to the lower decks.