Washington's Dirigible (The Timeline Wars, 2)

by John Barnes

  After his first pass, I had considerable help on the rail; there were a half dozen Royal Marines on board the Great George, and they took up posts with rifles, plus of course there were the ship’s machine guns. His first try had told me he was desperate, but “given the outfit he’s working for, that only means he’s afraid of what they’ll think of him. He’s more afraid of his bosses than he is of us. So there could be thousands of them on the way, but he may need to shoot us down single-handed to avoid death by torture, or worse,” I shouted, explaining it to Sheridan. “How far does Pearson say we are from the rendezvous?”

  “He’s started our descent!” the younger man shouted back. “If we can only—here he comes again—”

  This time we were ready, and I think his .45 jammed on him after the second shot—given all the abuse the thing had been through, I was surprised it had held out this long. One of the machine guns managed to rake the disks on which his strange, spidery vehicle sat, and abruptly one of those shattered and stopped.

  The effect was dramatic. At once the craft fell sideways toward the stopped and broken disk, and then it began to turn slowly in a circle and rise gently upward. Two of its windows shattered as our ship’s Marines found the range, and abruptly it climbed up and away from us.

  There were a couple of premature cheers, but I wasn’t about to believe he’d given up.

  Sure enough, in a moment we heard that high-pitched whir, almost a whistle, that the strange little flying machine made, and it came back, flying not quite level and not quite straight, zigging and zagging as it approached, until abruptly it darted between our propeller towers. We fired at it as it came in and as it went out, the red blazes of our machine guns and rifles lighting up the silvery sides of Great George.

  But the airship had been designed to bombard things below it or to fight other airships that moved as slowly and clumsily as it did. There had never really been any provision for firing much above our own heads, and in any case we didn’t want to hit our own propellers. By coming in high and climbing on his getaway, he avoided most of our fire, though if a stray round had gotten one of those disks as he was coming in, we’d all have died together—I suppose that didn’t matter as much to him as it did to us, and that was one advantage he had.

  In the wash of his passage, two of the propeller towers twisted and bucked, and the whole ship shuddered, but they righted themselves—for now.

  “He’s coming in again,” Sheridan said, drawing one of his useless little dueling pistols.

  He’d figured it out now, and this time his dive was steep and directly over our bow, where only two machine guns could be brought to bear. Moreover, it’s very hard anyway to aim accurately at a diving aircraft from underneath it, and it’s harder the faster it comes at you, so our forward speed worked to his advantage. In moments the strange disked flyer hurtled down upon us out of the starry sky, grew huge, slammed through barely off our upper deck, and climbed away swiftly, futile rifle shots chasing after, as its great wake of air shook and battered our propeller towers.

  With a shuddering scream, we lost the forward port prop, the structure that held it twisting just a little too far, and the big pieces of wood crashed and fell across the upper deck and dug into the surface of the Great George. The bulk of it slid over the back, taking one cannon with it as it shattered part of a catwalk, and fell away in a tumbling array of junk that would eventually crash into the flat black sea so far below us.

  The big gas-heated Sterling engine at the base of the tower, suddenly relieved of its load, thundered as if to tear itself free of its moorings, but the tenders jumped on it and shut it down; it merely shook the whole ship for a few long, frightening moments, and then coughed and died as they turned off the gas flame that supplied its heat.

  Far out there, the black dot that was the other Mark Strang in that weird craft was coming around again. If you didn’t know where to look, you could easily lose him until he crossed a star—or until the instant the dark shape flashed across the Moon.

  Then he was above us, climbing, getting ready for another pass.

  Pearson came out onto the catwalk, briefly, megaphone in hand, and shouted word to all of us—if there were more damage, we’d find it hard to make our rendezvous; as we were going lower, we were losing our maneuvering room.

  There was nothing much, really, to do about it except to try to get him again. He came in at a different angle this time, across our bow so that he zoomed across the top of the ship diagonally; the three Marines crouching up there with rifles fired at him as he tore through the space.

  He surprised us that time by diving farther after he passed the ship; in the long moment it took to depress the guns, he got out of range.

  The towers were shuddering and twisting violently, and with a horrible crack, the two propeller towers amidships got close enough to each other to bring their props into contact. There was an instant spray of splinters everywhere and a wobbling, thudding noise as the prop that had lost one blade yanked its tower around like a drunken sailor with a greased walking stick. The other tower recoiled and went over the side; chunks of debris hit the starboard amidships machine-gun crew from behind in a deadly hail of chunks of wood bigger than ball bats; then a piece of the truss, as big as a small car, carried off the catwalk on which they stood. They fell away into the darkness.

  Was it only my imagination that I heard one of them screaming on his way down? We were still almost a mile above the sea, though Captain Pearson was bringing her down rapidly.

  Then I heard a whoop from a ship’s Marine, and turned to see him point; someone had gotten a hit on one of the three remaining disks, for the distant flyer was now shedding bits of it. As we watched, squinting at the distance, the little ship abruptly flipped over, so that it now hung from the disks like a helicopter; it dropped precipitately toward the water, then bounced back upward a little and seemed to stabilize, still hanging upside down from its two whirling disks.

  The Great George was bucking and rolling like a whale that was slowly deciding it didn’t like what was riding on its back. The three remaining engines, overloaded and not arranged symmetrically, could not keep the ship in trim or on a steady course.

  Pearson bellowed more bad news through the megaphone. “We’ve got bad leaks in three gas cells. We’ll be sinking toward the water. All crew not fighting or running the ship, get to stations for the lifeboats. And no one is to fire any weapon near any rent or hole in the ship! It could blow us all to kingdom come!”

  The dying airship sank slowly toward the water, and all around I could hear the bustle of men readying the life rafts, shutting down the inessential services; there was a rattle of telegraph keys from the radio room in the pilothouse as they called in a last position, hoping to help rescue crews find them in time.

  We drew lower; there was nothing for me to do in the evacuation, so I decided I was one of those people who was fighting.

  The engines above were backing down to half and lower, trying to find a mix of speeds and positions where they would stabilize us instead of making matters worse, and perhaps just as importantly getting some of the producer gas burned so that it wasn’t around to fuel an explosion.

  The only thing you could say for that was that we were only yawing slowly back and forth, and we had been in some danger of actually spinning.

  The water wasn’t more than four hundred feet away when my counterpart came back at us one more time. I’d have to give him some kind of credit for his performance under the circumstances—he was flying upside down, and I don’t think he’d had very much training as a pilot—but it was still a sloppy, messy approach, for whatever reason.

  Maybe at that moment he just didn’t want to live, figuring that the Closers were not particularly sentimental, and if he failed on this mission, whether he lived or died, they’d probably kill the version of his family that the other Strang had sacrificed everything to preserve. At least if he died in action, they were less likely to “make an examp
le” by torturing them or selling them off as one of the lower kinds of slaves.

  He lurched through our three remaining propeller towers, the cabin of the little ship mere feet above our top deck. Sheridan managed to empty his brace of three pistols at the cabin, breaking a window, and I gave him the rest of the magazine in the .45, but veering around as he was, and protected to some extent by the cabin, he seemed unhurt.

  Then the little craft plunged wildly out of control—maybe one of us had gotten him after all—and swept through the port aft propeller tower and engine housing, carrying all of it away in one big sweep, slapping off the shack that covered the engine and the wooden tower in one blow and hurling the whole wrecked mass to the water below.

  The shock to the body of the airship made it turn and pitch, and a great convulsion ran through it as if it were alive; structurally, after all, it was built like a big spring, and so much weight being removed and so much force applied at the end made the whole thing slam and jump like a coil bedspring hit into the air with a tennis racket. Sheridan and I were thrown to the catwalk, and the walk itself tore partway away from the Great George.

  Suddenly we were hanging by a twisting, turning, smooth-surfaced rope ladder, a thousand feet off the water, as the George rolled back and forth. Sheridan clawed for a grip on the line next to me; I reached for him, got him by the collar, and wrenched him over toward the line.

  He got his grip, and we began to climb upward in parallel. The line above swayed alarmingly, dancing and wriggling like a poisoned snake, and it was all you could do to work your way forward a handhold at a time. Below us, rungs were dropping from the catwalk, and then whole sections of plank. Twice, we heard the bellow of a man falling from the airship.

  Each time something fell, the ship lurched upward and rolled again. Even though it was losing gas quickly and sinking because of that, an airship is always in a delicate balance—after all, what keeps it in place and holds it up is that the air density at the top is just that much less than the air density at the bottom, and the difference is just enough so that the buoyant craft cannot rise into the thinner air above or sink into the thicker air below. The difference is no more than three or four stories of an ordinary building, or the height of a moderate sledding hill—you never notice a pressure differential across that short distance, but it’s real, and it’s there.

  Change the mass of the dirigible by even a few pounds, and that alters the density; alter the density and the equilibrium height—the altitude at which the dirigible is stable—will change.

  So as things fell from the airship, even with gas spilling out as well, the equilibrium height rose rapidly, and the airship, single-mindedly chasing that abstraction, wobbled and lurched its way upward, shaking the ladders, catwalks, decks, and everything else to which most of the crew was frantically clinging. Moreover, when weight falls from one side of the ship, the ship rolls to get the heaviest part downward; thus as it shook off pieces of itself like a dog shaking off water, it spun now this way, now that, on its axis.

  Far below, the craft and tower had made a huge splash, big enough to throw water up against us even as the Great George, unburdened by the weight, swung up into the sky. I don’t recall thinking at that moment that it was the end of my counterpart; I know that I stopped worrying about him and concentrated on staying alive.

  It had been a long climb up the twenty-five feet or so of the broken catwalk, and Sheridan and I were almost at the top. It was a good thing we were both fairly young, fairly athletic, and not at all overweight, because this had been tough, but we had only about five feet to go.

  Then a line parted, and my side of the catwalk and his were abruptly separated. Sheridan suddenly swung clear out to the side, just as the ship rolled. I was swung, too, but not far and not hard, and I just brushed against the heavy canvas side of the main body.

  Sheridan swung out almost to horizontal, still just five feet or so away—I was reaching for his hand, but he was holding on with both—and then the piece of catwalk he was on snapped like a whip, and his hands began to slip just as the airship itself surged sideways. He slammed into the side, right where one of those hard pine ribs pressed out against the outer wall, and his head snapped sideways; he might have only been dazed for an instant, though I hope he was knocked unconscious.

  I grabbed at his coat, but I got only the tails. He was limp inside it, and so, with a horrible yank, his arms withdrew through the sleeves the way a kindergartner’s do when he takes his coat off over his head, and I was left holding Sheridan’s coat, still warm from his body, still strong with the smell of his sweat, by its tail as he fell into the blackness below.

  The airship again lurched upward, though as it died it was lurching with less vigor at every loss of mass.

  For a long moment I clung to the coat as if he might somehow come back for it; then I let it fall, and it whirled away into the night, sleeves flapping.

  This timeline would never have its own School for Scandal.

  Sick at heart, I climbed the last few feet in seconds, and then scuttled along, always holding on, toward the bow and the pilothouse.

  Pearson was still keeping some semblance of order, and the ship was going down fairly gently. His biggest worries were keeping the King from jumping in to help in dangerous situations, and the danger that the coal-gas generator, which was still burning—there was no way to put it out quickly—might ignite a gas cell and cause the whole airship to blow. “And Jones should be here any moment,” he said. “He’s irritating, but he’ll manage. We only have to get to where …”

  There was another hard slam, but this time we began to sink rapidly; a crew had finally succeeded in cutting the two most-damaged gas cells free, and they had broken through the surface of the dirigible and climbed high into the sky.

  The ship was slowly spiraling downward, its keel now almost level, spinning end for end just a little faster than it would have to make perfect circles, because the propellers that were giving us headway and letting us make some use of the rudders were a bit off-center.

  “The main gondola is designed to float,” Pearson said, “and it has the lifeboats. The sea is dead calm. I think our best chance, almost surely, is to get it set down on the water, to begin to release as much gas as we can, and then to cut first the gas generator and then the bag free. The generator will go right to the bottom, where it can hardly do any harm, and if we get the gas cells deflated far enough, then the weight of the gondola alone should be enough to keep her down; at that point we can cut ourselves free, let the body float up and away from us, and then get into the lifeboats.”

  I hate feeling useless, so I volunteered for grunt duty on the crew cutting the gas generator free; there were five of us, and the job was simple enough—severing every other line holding it on. It was a little frightening because even though the generator had been sealed for more than an hour, since we got into trouble, it was still radiating tremendous heat at us, and though we were now on a mostly even keel, we were still settling rapidly enough to warp the frame up above us, and thus things bucked and swung unpredictably.

  Thus, as we cut it more and more free, there was the constant danger of having it swing and brush against one of us, giving us massive burns immediately. “It’s worse than that, sir,” one sailor commented to me as we swung in close again. “We’ll be closest to it if it goes.”

  “If it does what?” I asked.

  “If it goes, sir. The water in there is enough to keep the coal burning, don’t ask me how, I ain’t a scientist, without no more air getting in. That’s why it’s still hot. And when coal burns in steam it makes gas, sir, and that’s what it’s doing. But with all the vents shut up in it, the pressure just keeps building and building—and the gas in there is so hot we don’t dare vent it, for it would go off as soon as air got to it. So you leave that thing to itself, sir, and it will go off like the biggest bomb you ever seen, sooner or later. I do suppose the old man could have ordered it vented and run the ris
k of starting a fire from that, but I rather fancy he’s gambling all or nothing—if we get this away and into the sea before anything happens, we win it all, and if we don’t—well, sir, where we’re hanging, there’s suddenly going to be a lot of nothing, and I don’t imagine even those in the gondola will feel much.”

  Ever been in a lightning storm when someone points out to you that if you get hit, you’ll be the person who never knows it happened? It doesn’t help much. I kept climbing around, and we kept cutting lines—we were down to just a few, and after that we would have to wait until the generator was actually sinking into the water.

  Sailors at the time weren’t noted for their long life spans to begin with, and the conversion of the Royal Navy to steam—many decades before it would normally have occurred—had cost even more lives. The survivors were a little too … well, let’s say philosophic for my tastes. During the ten minutes as the great dirigible finally sank to the calm surface of the Channel south of Kent, my coworkers developed a set of bets about whether or not dunking the hot vessel in cold salt water would distort it enough to make it rupture (and thus blow us all halfway to the Moon, I added mentally), whether when it sank it would blow up near enough to capsize lifeboats, and whether the dirigible would hold together long enough, under the strains of settling onto the waves, for us to get back to the gondola and lifeboats.

  I didn’t ask anyone how they intended to collect if they won; they were all betting fractions of their life insurance. I did notice that no one seemed to be betting that it would all go just as Pearson said it would, but when I ventured that opinion they all shook their heads.