Ichor Well

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “You’re bloody well right you won’t win it with cannonballs! The destroyer has a reinforced hull, a triple-layer envelope, and inner chambers to prevent full rupture! Even if you score a direct hit to the envelope, you’ll barely hobble the ship!”

  “The dreadnought had all that and a hell of a lot more, and word is they still ain’t found all the pieces. A load of armor makes for sluggish maneuvering, and if I remember right, one thing a destroyer ain’t got is gunners for up top. We go high, they can’t get us.”

  “But you’ll have to close all the distance between you. They’ll be firing again in moments!”

  “Then you’d best keep your mouth shut and quit distracting me.”

  After what seemed like nowhere near enough time to load a cannon, Gunner appeared on deck, bearing his long-barreled rifle.

  “Gunner, I said deck guns, not a rifle.”

  “All due respect, Captain, a destroyer is going to shrug off a few spikes. If we’re going to do any good at this range, we need more precision than that.”

  “In this soup, you reckon you can manage precision?”

  He steadied himself against the railing, took aim, and flipped a colored lens in front of the sight. A grin crept across his face. “We shall have our answer momentarily, Captain.”

  #

  “Haha!” Alabaster laughed gleefully. “I should have brought a camera. A moment this delicious ought to be immortalized in the medium of photography! How much longer until you’ve sent that ship to the ground, Captain?”

  “Less than a minute.”

  “Glorious! Time enough for what I’ve got in mind!” He hurried to the railing, batting aside some of the spikes that had been lodged there. “Mallow! Take the spyglass and give me the megaphone once more! Yes, excellent. Ahem. Attention! Well Diggers and Wind Breakers. You no doubt have fought this pointless battle for so long only out of the distant hope that the legendary Wind Breaker itself would come from above, carried on the wings of avenging angels, to strike us down and sweep you to safety! I take no small amount of delight in informing you that your beloved ship has arrived, and when next you hear these cannons fire, it will finally and irrevocably earn its place in history as the first great victory of Lucius P. Alabaster!”

  “Well said, sir,” said Mallow.

  “Of course it was well said. I said it. I am, if nothing else, a man destined for greatness. And there is no such thing as a great man who lacks the capacity for great words.” He gazed down. “They’ve ceased firing their guns. My words alone have all but beaten them. I’ve crushed their spirits in a way mere violence never could. I wonder, if I were to listen closely, do you think I might hear the cries of anguish when those below hear their savior blotted from the sky?”

  He leaned over the railing, now that the scattered whistle of flying spikes seemed to have fallen away, and cupped a hand to his ear. It was merely a gesture, of course. He’d not truly expected to hear anything over the rumble of the destroyer’s engines. He did, however, expect to hear the report of the destroyer’s cannons as they unloaded toward the Wind Breaker. Instead, he heard the soft crack and plink of sounds he couldn’t easily identify, followed by the shouts of crewmen.

  “Blast it, Captain, what is happening now?” he demanded with the air of a petulant child.

  A pressure gauge beside the captain shattered, then the second of three spotters’ telescopes burst into fragments of fragile metal.

  “We’re taking sharpshooter fire,” the captain said, stepping into the lee of a support beam for some semblance of cover. “How the hell are they getting shots off with that degree of precision at this range?”

  “What does it matter? Just fire the cannons and be done with them!” Alabaster said.

  “We’re down to one ranged spotter.”

  The final spotter’s telescope took a bullet.

  “… And now none. We haven’t a prayer of hitting them with the cannons now until they’re practically on top of us.”

  “Feh. A fine excuse for your own incompetence. If there was concern of sharpshooter fire, you should have attacked sooner.”

  “There wasn’t concern of sharpshooter fire, no one should have been able to aim at this distance in this light!”

  #

  “They’re blind, Captain,” Gunner said, clicking open the breech of his rifle. “But I’m fresh out of cartridges for this. I knew I should have packed a few extra shells.”

  “If you had your way, Gunner, our cargo hold would be nothing but packed shells.”

  “At this moment, I think you would agree it would be quite useful. That’s the extent of the weapons we can safely deploy at this range without risk of hitting those on the ground. And there is a tremendous amount of distance to cover before we’re in position to move something more potent. What are the ground forces going to do until then?”

  “We’ve got good people down there, Gunner,” Captain Mack said. “They’ll do their part until we can do ours.”

  #

  Alabaster stood impatiently at the railing, waiting for the next opportunity to gloat. It was a considerable testament to the towering ego he effortlessly displayed, despite the death and destruction all around him, that he managed to behave as though the greatest injustice was that his eventual glory was being delayed.

  From his vantage at the edge of the deck, however, he did catch a glimpse of a new pool of green light rising toward them.

  “Oh, bother. This again? Captain, they seem to have launched another of those flares. Just below us this time.”

  “I’ll deal with it when the Wind Breaker has been destroyed,” the captain said.

  “Yes, yes. At your leisure. It has already been made quite clear that nothing the fools beneath us can muster can be of any threat.”

  Two balloons, each belching plumes of phlogiston that illuminated the whole of the deck, bumped into the belly of the destroyer’s gondola and began to drag upward. They came to a stop just as the balloons themselves peeked up over the railing of the deck. The crew squinted at the bright light.

  “Damn it, they must be tangled on the port cannons. Someone fetch a gaff and shove them off,” the captain ordered.

  A deckhand scrambled to obey the order, and Alabaster resumed his somewhat theatric listening to the unseen sorrow below. The smile on his face faded as he realized there was a sound he’d not heard before.

  “What… what is that sizzling sound?” he muttered.

  He leaned a bit farther and shielded his eyes as best he could from the painful brightness of the flares. Just beneath them he spied a crate. The sound appeared to be coming from…

  “A fuse?!” Alabaster gasped. “A bomb! They’ve sent up a bomb!”

  Alabaster and Mallow sprinted away from the railing. They hadn’t even crossed half the deck when the crate of explosives detonated. The sound instantly robbed him of his hearing, and the blast rocked the whole of the destroyer viciously to the side. It was a swift enough motion to knock every last crewman on the deck from their feet. Alabaster hit the deck hard. As his head spun and a dull hiss of slowly returning hearing filled his head, the deck began to tip further. A sizable portion of the ship had been blown away. Much of the port side was damaged. All but two of the heavy cannons lining that side of the craft broke free of their mounts and plummeted to the forest floor along with a handful of the crewmen and much of the ammunition. Thus lightened, the ship was no longer balanced. The return swing from the blast continued farther and farther, the reduced half of the gondola rising higher than the rest.

  By the time the swing reached its peak, the deck was nearing a forty-five-degree pitch. Alabaster had begun to slide toward the starboard railing along with Mallow and two of the deckhands. The blast had shaken free a barrel of tar, which struck the railing ahead of them, splintering it. Alabaster was the next to strike it, followed by Mallow. The deckhands proved to be the straws that broke the camel’s back, and the whole of the struggling heap of fug folk pitched off the edge a
nd into the canopy of the trees below. They bashed painfully down into the branches, snapping through the thinner ones and bouncing off the stouter limbs, all the while being scoured by thorny vines.

  Alabaster came to a stop just barely above the blanket of thickened fug concealing the ichor well. He peered up through the broken branches and past the others who had fallen with him. Dazed and confused, he saw the ship overhead, bits of debris and fractured decking still dangling from the up-tilted end of the gondola. Flames were beginning to spread at the edge of the blast damage.

  “Y-you cowards!” he slurred, indignant the first state of mind to assert itself after the explosion. “You come back here! I am Lucius P. Alabaster! Mayor Ebonwhite will not be pleased to learn you abandoned his sanctioned representative! M-mallow! Help me to my feet.”

  The only reply was a groan from a few branches up.

  “… Lazy… Lout…”

  He rolled sluggishly and clutched at the branch supporting him. When he was somewhat more steady, he glanced down to the mostly obscured stretch of tree beneath him, then glared at the liberal coating of tar staining the hem of his cape.

  “Will the indignity never cease…”

  #

  A cheer rose up from the Well Diggers as debris from their attack continued to rain down, forming a trail leading toward the wall. Lil and Nita, fresh from lighting the fuse and cutting the tether on their hastily improvised aerial mine, crouched at the edge of the trench and watched the bright green of the damaged envelope and the dull yellow of the burning deck through the dense blanket overhead.

  “Well heck!” Lil said. “We should’ve done that right at the start!”

  “Do you suppose that took care of the destroyer?” Nita said.

  “Depends on who’s calling the shots. A good cap’n’ll get them fires out and start shuffling ballast pretty quick. Course, with the Wind Breaker inbound, that ship ain’t long for this world.”

  Nita took a breath. “Good. Because I’m seeing an awful lot of steam venting from the other trench. I’ve got to go do some service before we have an explosion of our own.”

  A weak, pathetic chatter came from a gun on the east side of their defenses.

  “That gun ain’t sounding too good neither. And if he’s shooting, that means we got something coming from that side. Probably whoever was on them ships that dropped down.” Lil took out her pistol and spun the chamber. “No rest for the wicked I suppose.”

  The members of the Wind Breaker crew parted company, one heading for the east wall, one headed for the south trench. Nita pushed the odd thump of stray cannonballs striking the earth from her mind. Worrisome as it might be to have a massive ship overhead with only marginal control, the looming threat of boiler failure was her main concern, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  When she slid into the boiler trench, she found her work cut out for her. Three of the five boilers had taken at least some damage from the fléchette guns of the destroyer and smaller ships. The heavy cast iron kettles shrugged off the attacks with little more than a shiny scratch to show for it, but the less sturdy pipes and valves weren’t quite so lucky. Steam belched from two of the main pipes, bleeding pressure from the system and hamstringing the efforts of the gunners to keep them safe. She’d done her best to build in redundancy where she could, but time and resources left her with little flexibility. To fix this problem she was going to have to improvise, which tended to be exciting when it involved scalding water vapor and random gunfire.

  She slid down her goggles and scrambled out of the trench, heading instead to a smaller hole dug to contain some odds and ends they weren’t quite so dedicated to defending.

  “You! Are you mad! What sort of a monster are you!” cried a series of voices from a few yards away.

  The voices belonged to Alabaster’s moles. The Well Diggers weren’t so cruel as to leave them out in the open, but neither were they so kind as to keep them in the same trench as the less traitorous among the group. A happy balance of punishment and mercy had been to stow them with the replacement parts for the boilers.

  “Just give in!” Branca pleaded. “If you keep fighting, they’re bound to kill us all!”

  “At least untie us! Let us take cover for ourselves!” Nerys said.

  “I could do that,” Nita said. “But I think you’d rather me fix that pipe rupture before this whole half of the camp fills with scalding steam and boiling water.”

  Nita revealed a pipe cuff from the mound of debris and hauled herself back out into the open.

  “This is horrid! It is torture to leave us here! Deplorable treatment! And I suppose you fancy yourself a hero,” Branca said. “You are merely violent hooligans!”

  At the edge of the site, the first shots of the ground troops began to ring out. It was clear they had either been instructed or had chosen on their own to target the boilers, because of the dozen or so shots taken, no less than five ricocheted off the top of one of the kettles.

  “I’m sorry I can’t stay and listen to you lecture me about how violent we all are, but I’ve got to stop the people on your side from killing us all,” Nita said, dashing for the boiler trench.

  #

  Chaos had consumed the destroyer. The flames were slowly spreading inward to the exposed lower decks, and the unbalanced load left the craft unstable. Turbines on either side of the envelope and across its belly put the ship into a spin about its new center of mass. It was all the captain could do to keep some semblance of order among his crew.

  “The throttle is jammed. Someone in the boiler room cut pressure to turbines two and four. And someone give me status on the fire in the hold and any crew loss,” he cried.

  His first mate answered, “We lost five in the blast. Two more out the hole it left during the recoil. And two more off the deck. Plus Alabaster and his servant.”

  “Alabaster is overboard? Seems some good came of it…”

  “The fire is mostly under control. We’ll have it out soon, but the armory officer says he’s afraid it’ll hit the powder room and bomb bay before then.”

  The captain and his mate stumbled to the side as the ship pitched farther. “Adjusting the engines won’t do it. We need to lighten the load. Since Alabaster is no longer here to object, and our cannons are pointed down…” He leaned down to his speaking tube. “Starboard cannons, fire on my mark. Staggered solution. And shift all bombs as ballast. We’ll lighten this load and straighten ourselves yet!”

  He watched the treetops slide by beneath the ship as its uncontrolled spin continued. When the starboard side of the ship was roughly aligned with the obscured site below, he issued the order.

  “Fire!”

  The cannons fired off one by one, alternating fore and aft. Even with this precaution, the recoil of each blast nudged the ship into a steeper and steeper pitch. Any crewmen not already braced had to scramble to a railing or strut. There was some doubt, as the cannons continued to fire, that the ship would be able to hold together. One thing was certain, though. If this was their final attack, it would be one those on the surface wouldn’t soon forget.

  #

  Lil, Kent, and the three Well Diggers not manning the guns had the good fortune of being clustered at the east wall, hunkered behind cover and taking what shots they could at the mercenaries approaching through the trees. If they’d been closer to the center of the site, the cannon attack would certainly have been the end of them. The thunderous report of the cannons firing was punishing enough, shaking the trees and shattering the lenses of the phlo-lights on the west side. The destroyer’s weapons, large even for ship-to-ship battle, were practically siege weapons. Even if they had built their stronghold into a fortress, it wouldn’t have lasted long against the rounds The Fist of Alabaster slung forth. At such a short distance, each cannonball gouged a crater into the earth. Shattered projectiles and kicked-up dirt and stone sprayed in all directions with deadly force.

  Until now they had been lucky. Foresight and proper
use of cover and armor had spared the Well Diggers any real injuries. That was no longer so. One of the spike guns took a direct hit, destroyed along with its operator. Two men, one not two paces from Lil, took bits of debris across their faces, shoulders, and arms. And still the cannons roared.

  The deckhand scanned the clearing they’d made for themselves, peering through the billowing columns of dust, and spotted Nita. The engineer had scrambled from the trench containing the boilers and was dashing madly for the relative safety of the spare-parts bunker. As insane as it seemed to be to abandon the boiler trench in the midst of a barrage, the second-to-last cannonball proved the wisdom of the decision. It struck the edge of boiler two, rupturing it and sending a rush of steam and debris in all directions. Pieces of cast iron scythed through the air, skipped across the ground, and clashed with other boilers. A chain reaction destroyed two more boilers and sent a third rocketing into the sky. A wall of white steam and black soil rushed across the war zone. Lil screamed as she saw it overtake Nita a few yards from the well.

  “No!” Lil screeched.

  Her mind ceased to have any say in her actions as her heart and body took the initiative. She threw down her pistol—an unwanted weight and encumbrance for a hand that she might need to pull Nita to safety. She tore away her coat—it would only slow her. In three strides she was at full speed, sprinting across ground barely visible through the settling dust and thinning steam.

  She slid to a stop where she’d last seen Nita and called her name. The ground was thick with a slurry of loose stone and simmering water. Lil’s heart pounded in her chest as she searched with growing desperation. Then her eyes caught a glimpse of motion. She dove for the mound of pulverized stone and clawed at it.

  “Nita! Nita, hold on, I’m coming!” she called out, scooping away more of the mounded gravel that had been solid rock before the onslaught began.

  Finally her fingers brushed a leather and fur coat. She clutched an arm and pulled the fallen figure upright. Nita threw her head back, first in a gasp, then in a scream.