by Robyn Bennis
* * *
THIS WAS EXACTLY what Josette had planned, and represented the best success she could have hoped for. She repeated this to herself over and over again, as she ran frantically down the street, legs pumping for dear life. The company of Vinzhalian fusiliers chasing her meant one less company on the wall.
But really, why did her best plans always end with someone trying to kill her? Bernie had a point about that. It was a mystery she would have to contemplate—provided, of course, that she lived out the minute.
Ahead, Jutes had nearly reached the safety of the next corner. She glanced back to make sure Bernat was running in the right direction. He was, thank God, but Pesha lagged far behind. The Vins were only twenty yards away from her, and in a boiling rage.
At an order, they halted and put themselves into a firing line. They raised their muskets and took aim. “Find cover!” Josette cried.
Jutes spun on his heel and dove out of sight, around the corner. Bernat skittered into the space between two houses, while Josette pressed herself as flat as she could into a doorway. Pesha kept running, either not hearing or not comprehending in the confusion of battle.
“Get down!” Bernat screamed after her, and that finally got through. Pesha threw herself flat just as the volley went off, and for a second it seemed she had escaped its wrath.
Even she seemed to think so, for in the next instant she tried to push herself to her feet using an arm that was missing a musket-ball-sized scallop of flesh halfway between shoulder and elbow. She only appeared to understand when she saw white bone sticking through her skin, and the blood sopping her shirtsleeve and pouring onto the street. Bernat leapt out of his hiding place and ran to her. Josette joined him, and together they got her up and helped her around the next corner, where Jutes was waiting to fire a covering shot at the Vins.
Josette tried to clear her mind and think of her next move. This deep in the city, the defensive civic planning of the outer blocks gave way to an older, less coherent urban landscape. Durum’s streets had the usual quirks of their era: blind alleys, constricted avenues, and side streets which split off or looped back on themselves for some obscure purpose, lost to time.
She remembered a blind alley nearby, with an old, long-abandoned blacksmithy at the end of it. From the street, it gave every appearance of a dead-end, but in fact the wall behind the blacksmith’s forge had been dismantled, its bricks stolen and sold off, and now a person could duck under the forge’s hood and step out into a hedge behind the building, and so escape pursuers. Josette knew this because, as a teenager, she was the one who’d dismantled it.
She led them down a street, around a bend, and into the alley. And there was the smithy, its front wall long since cut down for firewood, its anvil long since sold for scrap iron, but its forge standing cold, dark, and inviting.
They had to get through fast, before the first Vins looked into the alley, or the deception wouldn’t work. “There’s a gap in the back of the forge,” she explained as she ran, counting on instant comprehension for the plan to go off. She ducked under the hood and saw light showing mottled from the other side. Thank God no one had patched up the wall in the intervening years.
But neither had anyone trimmed the goddamn hedge on the other side, as she soon discovered while pressing her way into it. It had grown thick and sturdy since the last time she had to squeeze through, and pushing through the tangled mass of branches and creeping vines slowed them down.
“Just leave me,” Pesha said, as the others struggled to drag her through.
“No” was all Bernat said, and they finally pushed and pulled, leaving her much the worse for wear.
Jutes shook his head on the other side and said, “They saw us.”
Of course they had. Josette was beginning to think her mother’s sabotage of the magazine had used up the very last allotment of the luck her family possessed. She looked over the field behind the smithy, which was much as she remembered it: fallow, flat, with no cover, and surrounded on three sides by open street. Perfect for target practice, which might well have been its original purpose, and would soon be again if she didn’t think of something. The Vins would be coming around the long way any minute.
“You don’t suppose there’s another cache of gunpowder someone could blow up, do you?” Bernat asked.
She hushed him with a hand held up, palm forward. “Do you hear that?”
No one else did, and perhaps it was only her imagination. But at this point, it would hardly hurt to indulge it. She looked up at the hedges, which had grown quite high since she was a teenager.
“You could get away if you leave me behind,” Pesha said.
Bernat shook his head. “We’ve settled that question already.”
“No, she’s right,” Josette said. “We’ll hide her in the hedge and climb to the roof.”
Bernat didn’t look happy, but he didn’t have a better plan, either. They shoved Pesha into a hollow at the base of the hedge, doing yet more damage to her arm, and covered her with vines—a camouflage that might fool the half-blind or anyone who didn’t look at it very hard. They left her to bandage her own wound as they made their ascent.
Josette shot quickly up, heaving herself from hedge to vine to masonry and grabbing whichever made the best handhold with hardly a second thought. At the top, she threw her rifle around the forge chimney, then swung herself up and over the edge. Sergeant Jutes was not far behind her, and Bernat came last, grumbling and muttering the whole way. They sheltered together in the shadow of the chimney.
While Josette and Jutes reloaded their weapons, Bernat was picking over his jacket. It was severely torn and scuffed, in addition to being covered with his blood, Pesha’s blood, ancient soot from the forge, and residue from the hedges. “How many suits must this damnable war take from me,” he asked no one in particular, “before it’s finally sated?”
While Josette was ramming a ball down the muzzle of her rifle, she stretched to look out at the field below and scan the horizon. She grinned at what she saw. “The Vins are coming cautiously, ducked behind the fence over there,” she said, pointing with her nose. “Must still think there’s more of us. Hard to shake off a notion like that, once it’s firmly in place.”
She took a shot at them, and the party of fusiliers answered her with a full volley. She ducked back as they fired, their bullets plinking against the stone chimney, or sending puffs of splinters flying from the roof.
“Just hold out a little longer,” she said.
“What, do you think they’ll get bored of us?” Bernat asked, glancing around the other side.
By way of answer, she only pointed him to the east-southeast, where Mistral was coming toward them, her envelope gleaming bright orange in the morning light.
19
ENSIGN KEMBER STUDIED the situation through a telescope, and found it grim.
The Garnian battalion’s forlorn hope was being pinned in the breach, raked by grapeshot and musket volleys, and cut to bloody ribbons. The supporting companies—the companies that were supposed to exploit the hope’s sacrifice—were formed up in the rear, and showed no sign of advancing.
The column of smoke rising over the city said that the captain’s mob of townsfolk must have had some success, but the penned-up mass of civilians said that their career as a fighting force had been short-lived. She hoped the captain herself wasn’t stuck in that pen, or worse.
“Sir, there,” the deck lookout said, pointing two points to port. “There’s a couple score of Vins chasing after a small group.” He leaned forward over the rail, as if being a foot closer would make all the difference in resolving pertinent details. “They’ve got the Vins hopping mad.”
Kember nodded. “That must be the captain. Pass the word to rig signal lamp.” She went to the taffrail to look aft. The Ayezderhau was still about a mile behind, but now several thousand feet above them and still climbing. She would follow Mistral and set up shop, no doubt, so that if Mistral came in to give close
support to the assaulting 132nd, the Ayezderhau could fire shells at her from the safety of altitude.
And so Mistral would have no choice but to stand safely away and watch the men of the 132nd die in the breach, or spend precious time matching Ayezderhau’s altitude, while the men of the 132nd died in the breach. She could see no other options.
But the captain would know what to do. The captain always had an idea.
The signalman, Private Turk, called from the forward rail, “Signal lamp rigged, sir.”
She stepped back to the commander’s station, ahead of and between the steersmen. “Signal, enemy of greater force in pursuit, request orders, then repeat it.”
“Captain signaling,” the lookout said. “Wigwag. Message reads, Maintain course and speed, rig ladder for one pickup. Bernie and Jutes will remain to aid resistance.” He looked back, lowering his telescope. “Ladder for pickup? That can’t be right. Want me to ask her to repeat it, sir?”
Kember took a good look at the man, while most of the deck crew snickered. He was one of the replacement crew, and hadn’t been with them during their actions the previous year. “No need,” she said. “Secure signal lamp. Pass the word to rig ladder.”
It wouldn’t take long to close on the captain’s position, but even that short time seemed to go by at an accelerated rate, for Ensign Kember had still come up with no possible explanation or excuse for Lieutenant Hanon’s death. None that could reasonably be believed, at any rate. Whenever Kember tried to imagine a way out, it always ended with her running to the rail and jumping overboard.
It wasn’t just that. It was that she’d never killed anyone before. Well, she’d killed people with a cannon, now that she thought of it, but that didn’t count. They were so far away.
“We’re coming up on the town, sir.”
The lookout’s warning snapped her out of her reflections and cut off any hope of developing a better plan of action. When the time came, she would just have to jump overboard and hope things worked out somehow.
She heard the horsefly buzz of a bullet passing by her head, and though she tried to remain steady, she couldn’t help but look to her left, where the Vin fusiliers on the wall were shooting at Mistral. Another bullet hit the envelope above her, sending a puff of its borate doping jumping from the fabric to be swept back by the slipstream.
The captain was below and directly ahead, standing astride a sharply slanting roof, with Jutes and Lord Hinkal sheltering behind the chimney. The ladder was lined up on her, but the slightest change in the wind, if not immediately corrected, would yank the ladder and pitch even the sure-footed captain over the edge, and it wouldn’t take much more to drag it over the roof and knock Bernat and Jutes over as well. If she thought Hanon’s death was hard to explain, it would be a hell of a thing to account for that sort of massacre.
“Reverse!” Kember called, then ran to the rail to keep the captain in sight even as the hurricane deck passed over her. The steamjack turbine groaned as Mistral’s airscrews came to a bouncing halt, twisting clockwise and counterclockwise a few times before springing into reverse and nearly blasting Kember off the rail with their wash.
The ship slowed, came to a full stop with the tail above the captain’s head, and the ladder dipped just far enough for its lowest rung to touch the roof. All the captain had to do was step onto it, and they had her.
* * *
AN AIR OF anxiety and guilt filled the ship. As Josette went forward through the keel, there were no warm faces or welcome-homes, only grim countenances, stiff salutes, and eyes fixed on the wounded side of her face. She stepped down the companionway to find that the unpopular Lieutenant Hanon was nowhere to be seen, and knew instantly that something had happened here. Something damn ugly.
She forced herself to ignore it for the moment, while she assessed the tactical situation. Kember seemed quite relieved to describe it to her, treating the task as a condemned man would treat a stay of execution. But for all that, Kember had made the right decisions. She was gaining altitude and in the meantime staying out of the firing arc of the Vin ship. Still, Mistral was out of the fight until she could claw her way up to the enemy ship’s lofty altitude, or until Josette gained the power to change the fundamental realities of air combat.
And so she had time to get some answers. “Where the hell have you been, and where the hell is Lieutenant Hanon?”
“Well, sir…” Kember began, then stood with her mouth open, at a loss for words.
Josette gave up on Kember, and looked to Lupien at the rudder. “Corporal?” she asked. “Anything to say about this?”
“No, sir,” he said, never meeting her eyes.
“Corporal, I assume you steered Mistral off station. Was an order given to that effect, or was that your own initiative?” She stepped up to him and put her face an inch from his, though his eyes never flinched, never pointed anywhere but directly ahead. “Perhaps you were bored with the view over Durum? Perhaps there was a lady you fancied aboard the Vin airship?”
“Lieutenant Hanon ordered it,” Kember said.
Josette turned to her. “Found your tongue? Good. Where is he, so that I may solicit an explanation? Quickly now, Ensign. There’s a battle on, and it would be embarrassing to miss it.”
“He’s dead, sir,” Kember said, and looked again at the rail.
That’s what she had thought. There was some bitter story behind those three little words, but it was a story she’d never hear, even if she lived to be a hundred. Given time, the account would coalesce into something the whole crew agreed on, and it might even bear some small resemblance to the facts, but the real truth would never come out. “It’s a loss to the service,” she said, knowing better than to squeeze a stone, “but we must carry on. What’s the disposition of the Vin chasseur?”
Kember turned her head from the rail and stared at Josette for a while, eyes wide.
Josette leaned over and whispered, “Don’t embarrass us in front of the Vins, Ensign.”
“She’s…” Kember’s voice broke, but she swallowed and went on, “She’s the Ayezderhau, a two-gun chasseur, sir, of our design. I mean, sir, that she’s our exact design. The Vins must have gotten hold of the plans.”
Josette’s face contorted into a snarl so wretched that it invented its own special category of anger. Ensign Kember ceased prattling, took a step back, and tensed as if she expected to be struck.
“Goddamn her,” Josette muttered. “She couldn’t even leave me my ship.”
“Sir?”
“You’re certain?” Josette asked through clenched teeth.
“She’s Mistral to a tee, sir. Except she’s got to be full of luftgas, right? And have a healthy steamjack. And us with inflammable air and a steamjack that’s … that’s been sorely overtaxed. I mean, sir, one good shot with shell or carcass, or if our engine catches fire again, and we’ll be done for!”
Josette only shook her head and considered her options. “If we do climb to engage her, do you have an idea of how she’ll react?”
Kember didn’t have to think long. “She’ll decline action, if she can. She’s not here to sink us, I think, and her captain doesn’t want to risk an engagement on even terms. She’s here to support the city, or at least preserve the garrison. I think that’s why she drew us off station in the first place, sir. She doesn’t want a fight. She just wants us out of it.”
“Well, I want us in it,” Josette said. But how was she supposed to kill a ship that was four thousand feet above her, when merely shooting off her own guns could blow Mistral to hell, never mind enemy fire? “We’ll steer a wide circle around the city, and watch for a chance to slip in. Elevators, level us off at one thousand feet, just high enough to offer support to our forces on the ground, should the opportunity arise.”
As Kember turned to go up the companionway, Josette said, “Remain here, Ensign. I may require your council.”
* * *
ON THE ROOFTOP, Jutes was staring
up at the Vin airship and cursing up a storm. “It’s the bloody cheek of it,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Bernat said, traversing Elise’s rifle over the field and streets below, watching for movement.
“They couldn’t’a changed it just a little? Just to set themselves apart? No, they had to copy it all exactly. The bloody cheek of it.”
If the Vin detachment had returned after scattering at Mistral’s approach, it had returned with damn good hiding spots. “I think it’s safe to climb down.”
“Bloody cheek.”
“I said, I think it’s safe to climb down.”
They descended to find Pesha alive and, if not well, then at least far enough from exsanguination that she wouldn’t die within the next hour or so.
At least, that’s what Bernat told himself, as he followed Jutes back toward the prisoner pen. As he went, he looked off to the southeast, where Mistral was still orbiting well away from the Vin airship, having already steered half a circle around the town. “The Shark doesn’t seem very hungry today.”
Jutes looked at the sky and grinned. “She’s workin’ up an appetite.”
* * *
THE AIRSHIPS CIRCLED in concentric orbits, Mistral on the outside, her course describing a circle that stretched well beyond the walls, and Ayezderhau in a tighter circle, always over the city. Ayezderhau could merge into Mistral’s orbit and bring her to action on highly favorable terms, but the Vin ship had no incentive to do so, as it already held the position most favorable to its mission. Mistral could not at once fight an engagement a mile in the air and support the assault at ground level. And even if Mistral did bring the Vins to action, she would be drawn into a long, tedious turning fight rather than the short, decisive engagement Josette desired.
She turned to Kember and said, “You know this captain’s habits. What’s he hoping we’ll do?”
“He’ll be happiest if we try to support the infantry. That way, he can lob shells down on us from the safety of altitude. And I bet he’s itching to pull some ruse to trick us into doing just that, but he’s worried we won’t be fooled again. Besides which, he probably knows our reputation, and figures he only has to wait and we’ll try something, despite the risk.”