Captain Fenna's Dirigible Valentine

by Heather Hiestand

  His attempt to escape hadn’t lasted long, perhaps four hours before he’d been found in a barn five miles from the Blockader yard. Someone had turned him in for a few pounds. His commanding officer had cut off his hand the next day, not even allowing him to get drunk first, then pushed him to the surgeon who attached his brass hand.

  The first officer, Everard, tossed a spyglass into the air, shouting for Ian to count the number of air pirates he could see. Ian snatched the equipment and put it to his eye. At first glance, he had the lens trained on the hull, not the deck. He almost dropped the spyglass when he saw the airship’s name. Valentine.

  Surely it was a Fenna airship. Everyone knew the Fennas named their airships after holidays. Or at least people from the Sussex coast knew that. They were in Wales. That made sense—the Fennas were Welsh. Had they reformed the Owlers in Wales?

  He felt a strange sensation on his face and realized his lips had drawn back in a smile. How long had it been since he’d done that? He moved the spyglass to the dock and froze in shock. No, it couldn’t be.

  Was she a ghost? Terrwyn Fenna herself looked to be manning the coal burner. He couldn’t mistake that wild, fae beauty for anyone else. She wasn’t pretty — no, she was the most beautiful girl Hastings had ever produced, a dark-eyed, sultry goddess. No man could be immune from lust when he saw her, but she had spent most of her time onboard her father’s airships, so she rarely took to the streets like an ordinary mortal. He’d thought her dead, hanged as an air pirate in London, just about the time the Blockaders came through the Stade and swept the streets clean of young men. Ian had been twenty-one then, a year older than Terrwyn.

  He should have known even the Blockaders couldn’t kill her. It would be like destroying precious art. He peered through the glass at her again. She wore a shapeless gown in some dull shade of blue, covered by a large canvas apron streaked with dirt. Her glorious hair was covered by a boy’s cap, though one long curl rested on her shoulder. That face was still unlined, perfection itself. Long, curved red lips, stubborn chin, molded cheekbones, and deep brown eyes very intent on her airship.

  “Cavill?” Everard called.

  With a sigh, Cavill swept the deck with the spyglass. “Only two, sir.”

  Everard grunted. “One a woman?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The first officer gestured for the spyglass. Reluctantly, Cavill tossed it down. He’d have liked to take another look at Terrwyn. But at least he hadn’t had to reveal he knew the woman frantically trying to save her airship. The balding man at the wheel was around a decade older than Terrwyn and Cavill didn’t recognize him, but the pilot had the same facial contours as she did. He was most likely a relative. Ian knew the man was not a Hastings native or he’d have recognized him too.

  “Airships on the horizon!” called a man from the other side of the balloon.

  Curious, Ian climbed to the top of the fabric envelope and watched as three small airships flew in their direction. Though their balloons were black, they weren’t striped with red and blue like a Blockader vessel. They weren’t regulation size either.

  “Pirates!” called another man. “It’s the Red Kite Free Traders!”

  Ian saw Everard run to the bow and train his spyglass to the north. The free traders never flew in formation, much less at a Blockader ship. They focused on evading the authorities.

  “Move the cannons!” Captain Clawbeam called from the wheelhouse. The order was passed down the line to below deck, and the percussion of the cannons stopped. The sound of the engines and the wind was all that remained.

  Ian grabbed hard at his ratline as the airship shifted beneath him, indicating the cannons were being rolled to the opposite side far below.

  He felt that unfamiliar grin on his face yet again as banners unfurled at each end of the lead airship, imitating white feathers closest to the balloon, then black, a familiar pattern. The red kite was a bird of prey, long considered vermin, but also the national bird of Wales.

  Yes, these airships belonged to air pirates. Ian hoped they hadn’t given their base away by rising into the air where they had. He hadn’t seen where they came from since he’d been on the wrong side of the balloon, but someone might have noticed and he was sure the Blockaders’ next mission would be to tear up their nest, wherever it was.

  As the airships came closer, they shot beams of light into the air. He never did determine if they were decoration or weapon, because at that moment he heard a cry of “Cannon!” from an officer with a spyglass.

  Ian could just barely see one cannon door open in each Red Kite airship hull. He didn’t want to be on the top of the balloon when the cannons fired. He fastened his brass hand around a ratline and jumped. His ears popped as he dropped, deafening him to the booms of the cannons. The Defender shook as its own cannons fired.

  Ian bounced against the balloon. It had a little give now. Either it had been hit or someone had opened a gas valve to lower the airship. Suddenly, he found himself swinging over the water, instead of bouncing against the balloon. All he could see were foamy waves and cloudy sky. Where was the deck? A red light on his brass hand winked on, a sign that he was too far away from his duties. He’d get a nasty shock through his body if he wasn’t back in range within five seconds. If he lost his grip during the shock, he’d probably fall to his death, since they were too high up for him to survive plunging into the Channel.

  He glanced down and saw a cannon or heater had sliced the ratline where it attached to the hull. Knowing he only had seconds before he plunged to his death, he leaned toward the airship, trying to get the swinging line back within range.

  The light on his hand started flashing, an indication that the shock was imminent. Just then, the airship tilted as the cannons fell back from their hull doors, empty of shot for the moment. He swung toward the balloon and hit hard. The red light winked out.

  He lost his grip on the cut ratline and somersaulted down the balloon. As he headed down, he saw the wheelhouse coming at him, too fast for him to stop. For a split second, hot pain sliced through him and then he knew nothing more.

  *****

  Ian shook his head as he came to, a buzzing in his ears. He opened his eyes, then realized the noise came from a black substance-filled jam jar inserted with a smoking wick two inches from his nose. Acting on instinct, he threw it and covered his ears, ducking back down onto the deck as he did. A blast of noise and heat and water overwhelmed his senses. When he opened his eyes again, he saw a black-ballooned airship clearly through a shattered wall.

  He lifted his head and looked around, realizing he’d fallen through the wheelhouse floor into the captain’s cabin below. In front of him was a black iron pedestal. He scrambled to his feet. Swaying, he regarded with loathing his nemesis, the device that tracked the Brass Hands’ whereabouts.

  The automaton that controlled him by means of the brass hand he wore was a brass, silver and iron arachnid, the body about two feet wide. Each of its eight spindly brass legs, half the length of the body, weren’t used for movement, but the ends of the legs winked an inconsistent pattern of white lights, tracking the location of all the enslaved men with brass hands aboard. As he watched, one of the lights blinked red. He looked at his hand but no light had come on. Someone must have fallen overboard.

  Another poor sod gone. For months now, he’d been the last of the men and boys impressed from Hastings in eighteen-eighty-nine and he’d been careful to avoid friendships with others, but still, confined to a airship like this, he knew all the crew stories. Who had sweethearts who would never know they hadn’t been willingly deserted, who had left children and wives or aging mothers to starve. He couldn’t stop hearing, caring.

  Staring hard at the automaton, he circled the creature. Was there any sentience there, or was it basically a large, ugly electrocution device? Dr. Castle’s Man Management Automaton did not offer any clues. Ian touched the surface of the spider body. Warm to the touch, it didn’t smell unpleasant, just a bit oi
ly, but he’d barely pressed a finger to the top when he heard a chittering sound and the beast rattled on its pedestal. He drew back and saw the light on his brass hand had gone red.

  Swearing, he wondered how to turn it off. He was in range, had never been told that touching it turned on the shocking punishment mechanism. Five seconds, four seconds…what would happen if he touched the beast again? Might it stop the countdown, or make the shock instantaneous?

  He heard boots above, then glanced up and saw a man with shaggy black locks staring down at him. The man wore black pants tucked into muddy boots and a coarse cotton shirt covered by a leather apron. He didn’t belong aboard a Blockader vessel, but in a blacksmith shop or some such. However, he held a heater in his hand and as Ian stared, the man tossed it to him.

  “Shoot the bloody spider,” the air pirate ordered.

  The Free Traders must have lifted into the air very quickly. Ian saw the man’s boots still showed damp spots. “Where? We’ve been told that we all die if the automaton is damaged.”

  Another of the arachnid’s legs blinked red, then another. Were the air pirates killing his fellow captives? What was going on? How much longer before he was shocked? He steeled himself.

  “It’s a lie, my friend, at least it is if you shoot the thing through its eye.”

  “I don’t care about myself, but I can’t murder my crewmates,” Ian protested. “The ones like me, they’re good men.”

  “Trust me.”

  Ian knew he had only moments before he and his fellow crew received nasty, perhaps fatal shocks. He’d seen the brain damage just one shock could cause to the unfortunate. “How can I?”

  The pirate grinned, exposing three gold teeth, and held up his right arm, which had been behind him. When Ian saw the man’s arm ended in a hook, he knew that he too had been enslaved at some point. Without a second thought, he fired into the spider’s eye. The chittering sounds stopped in a tinkle of broken glass.

  All the arms went dark. Ian counted to five slowly, then took a breath. This beast wouldn’t be shocking any more crew members.

  With a grin, he saluted the air pirate with his heater. “Permission to come aboard the Red Kite?”

  ~*~

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hastings, April 24, 1893

  “That should be the last crate the hotel purchased,” Terrwyn called to the automan controlled by the brain of her late father, Captain Rhys Fenna. She swiped a sleeve over the perspiration on her forehead, then pressed her hands to her aching back.

  Pleased by the excellent selection she’d liberated from a British government warehouse in Calais, she didn’t mind the hours of hard work. The sea air, blowing in from the shingle beach below the hotel, kept her senses alert as she tromped between the beach and the hotel under-basement where she now stood. She surveyed the neat row of crates stocked five high--brandy, liqueurs, champagne, fine fabric, even some tax-free Darjeeling tea. The Valentine had been hard to control on the windy way back over the Channel, but she’d done her captain proud.

  Behind her, someone cleared his throat, a sound the brass gear and catgut vocal cords her father’s brain operated could never make again, thanks to the butchers of Newgate Prison and the Blockaders.

  She turned to see not a seven-foot-tall metal being shaped like a cylinder, but a strapping, russet-haired young man in a black stuff suit, his trousers folded into salt-stained riding boots. He held the crate in question, a selection of France’s finest brandy. How had he gotten it from Rhys?

  Her fingers danced over the leather closure of the heater holster at her belt, but when her infant daughter stirred in the shawl tied around her neck, she relaxed her hand. She wouldn’t get into a gun battle with an infant strapped to her chest, expensive brandy or not. At least not with a man who was dressed like a civilian.

  “Friend or foe?” she asked in a steady voice. Years of being an apprentice screwsman, or lockpicker, in her father’s smuggling outfit, followed by a thousand days in Newgate Prison kept her face blank and her posture relaxed.

  “I’m Midwife Cavill’s son,” said the handsome stranger, pointing a gloved hand toward her chest. “She helped you deliver Miss Noelle Fenna there on Christmas day.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, Mr. Cavill,” she said. “I didn’t offer you that crate.”

  He glanced down at the crate with its navy blue Rosebery stamp clearly marking it as government property, then lifted it to one shoulder and walked over to the wall to deposit it on the top of a row. She couldn’t help admiring his easy strength and broad shoulders. His muscles would have come in handy as she toted boxes around that day.

  “I hope that answered your question. I’m not here to steal from you.”

  She answered that with an unintelligible noise, wishing he wasn’t between her and her airship. The tiny cabin onboard had been her home since she’d made her first successful flight on Valentine’s Day as she escaped the clutches of the Blockaders. While it wasn’t as large as the Christmas, the airship her parents had lived on before she was born, it suited her and little Noelle’s needs for now. Captain Andrew, the current captain of the Christmas, had helped set up her cousin Owen with a locksmith business, one focused on the Owlers’ needs at this time, along with other members of the underworld, cracksmen and the like. Owen had been able to rent a house for his little family, which Cari appreciated since she was with child again, and had lost her taste for free trading after their Valentine’s Day adventure. Terrwyn couldn’t blame her, but she’d been raised in the skies and couldn’t want anything else.

  “So you aren’t a thief. What do you want?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He grinned. “I’ve been crewing with the Red Kites up north, but I had word that my mother was ill so they released me to come home.”

  He had a scoundrel’s grin. Some kernel of spirit inside her awakened as she recognized the kind of person she’d been before Newgate broke her. She wanted a grin like that for her own again. “Looking for a job then, are you?”

  He nodded, his mouth sobering while his eyes, the color of a clear summer sky, regarded her with alarming intensity. “I have years of experience working on airships.”

  She narrowed her eyes and tried to stare at his nose so that his piercing gaze wouldn’t affect her thoughts. A man hadn’t intrigued her so in years. “As I recall, the midwife’s son had training to be a cobbler, like her husband was.”

  He tilted his head, drawing her attention to those beautiful eyes again. “I was impressed into service about the time you were captured, Captain Fenna. Changed my life.”

  But not his appeal to the ladies, she suspected. “What do you plan to do with your life now, Mr. Cavill?”

  Slowly, he pulled the glove from his left hand. His brass hand! Terrwyn took a step back at the sight. The Blockaders had mutilated him. She’d heard the tales of what they did to recaptured escapees. Controlling her revulsion with difficulty, she, seeking comfort, folded her arms around her sleeping daughter. “You were with the British Air Enforcement.”

  “Until the day you left Cardiff. The Red Kites successfully boarded the Defender and rescued those of the crew who’d survived the battle.”

  Her thoughts went to Brecon. “A man was hit on my airship, fell overboard.” She hesitated. “Did you ever hear what happened to him?”

  Cavill’s hand twitched, as if in sympathy for Brecon’s fate. “No, I never did hear, though I saw him fall. His body didn’t wash ashore near the Red Kite camp.”

  She nodded, wincing. At least Brecon hadn’t been impressed into the Blockader world. He, with his free trader soul, would have hated that. “I guess we’ll never know. What happened to the rest of the men aboard the Defender?”

  “About half of them died in the battle, the captain included.”

  She remembered the hairy man. “And the others?”

  “If they were local, they were sent back home. Three or four were recently impressed. Then a couple like me were too far fr
om home, so they offered us work.”

  “What about the other officers? I know there were at least two. Everard and another whose name I didn’t hear.”

  “The young kid? He didn’t last long. Everard escaped though.”

  So two of the three men who had ruined her life in Cardiff were dead. Terrwyn couldn’t feel sorry for them. It was the first time anyone who’d tormented her these past three and a half years had suffered for it. Her greatest tormenter of all, in fact, had recently been promoted to sheriff of Newgate Prison from his former position as under-sheriff. His life hadn’t suffered any consequences for forcing her to be his mistress for two years. She’d endured many a nightmare during her pregnancy, wondering what he intended to do with her child. Thank heavens she was free of Rand Hardcastle forever.

  “I had the impression that Everard was from around here. Any idea what happened to him?”

  Cavill shook his head. “He isn’t a Hastings man. I’d know him.”

  Admittedly, she’d never seen him before Valentine’s Day either. So why did he know her name? “Tell me about that brass hand of yours.”

  “It’s functional, in a limited way. Not as good as a real hand, except I can slide down rope faster with it, since it can’t be burned.”

  “I’d heard they are used to control prisoners.”

  “It can’t be used against me unless I get near an automaton again. Then it would link to me and it would be able to shock me severely if I moved out of its range.”

  She regretted the words she was about to say, considering what a strong, intelligent man he seemed to be. “That makes you unreliable.”

  He slowly closed his eyes, his long red-brown lashes brushing his cheeks before he fixed that sea blue gaze on her again. “I have no reason to go aboard a Blockader airship ever again. And they don’t keep those kinds of automatons anywhere else. Also, I know how to disarm them now, thanks to the Free Traders.”