The Guns Above

by Robyn Bennis

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  Dedicated to

  PHILIP BENNIS,

  Master Sergeant, USAF

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my editor, Diana M. Pho, without whose suggestions this book would be much less interesting. Thanks are also due to my agent, Paul Lucas at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, who is an absolute rockstar.

  Thank you to my incredibly helpful beta readers: Sheila Haab, Jill Bailin, Richard Bruce, and Becky Chambers. Around the time she was helping me out, Becky made her own debut with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and has since followed it up with A Closed and Common Orbit. They’re both great reads, so make sure to pick them up when you’re heading to the bookstore to buy a second copy of this book.

  Above all others, I must give credit to the people most responsible for making me who I am today: the baristas at Clocktower Coffee. Thank you. In the story of my life, you’re the real heroes.

  Now, if I went on acknowledging everyone who made this book possible, it would seem that I only did a tiny fraction of the total work. This hews a little too close to the truth for my comfort, so I’m going to cut these acknowledgments short. But if you don’t see your name here, I’d like to thank you twice: once for your contribution, and again for your anonymity, through which you preserve the illusion that novel writing is a solitary affair.

  THE MISTRAL

  of the Air Signal Corps

  The Gondola Section of

  THE MISTRAL

  1

  JOSETTE DUPRE WOKE atop a bleak and stony hill, her head throbbing, her uniform soaked in blood, and the thunder of the cannons still echoing in her ears. Incandescent embers danced above her, swarming past her body and disappearing into the oily smoke all around.

  Her only living companion was a carrion crow that stood atop her boot. She tried to kick it off, but lacked the strength for even that trifling movement. The crow held firm, staring back at her with little black eyes that reflected the flaming wreck of the airship Osprey. She had no memory of her escape from the stricken ship, but she must have gotten out somehow. If she were still inside, she would be on fire, and she was reasonably convinced that this was not the case.

  From somewhere down the hill came the sounds of hoofbeats and musketry. The musket fire was sparse—not the crisp, hearty bang of a fusillade, or even the rolling crackle of skirmishers. Rather, these were the sounds of a rout; of an army not merely defeated but shattered, its remnants a panicked mob fleeing from pursuing horsemen. But which army had been routed? Hers or the enemy’s?

  At that moment, she couldn’t recall who was winning when Osprey went down. She remembered the crash, and the hostile soldiers who swarmed over Osprey’s railing. She remembered commanding the crew to burn the ship. But after that, there was a most curious gap in her memory, beginning from the moment a skirmisher cracked the butt of his rifle into her skull.

  Now that she thought of it, she couldn’t even recall what enemy they were fighting. Was it Brandheim or Vinzhalia? But this couldn’t be Brandheim—it wasn’t cold enough. Yes, yes. Brandheim was last year’s war. This year’s was Vinzhalia, which meant the battle had been against the Vins.

  But who the hell had won the damn thing?

  She had to work it out quickly. Scavengers from the victorious army were already approaching. She couldn’t see them through the smoke, but she could hear their boots clomping on the rocky earth, their bayonets slicing open pockets and packs, and the gurgling cries of wounded men who were too addled or stupid to play dead.

  They chatted while looting, but Josette couldn’t discern their language. By the sound of it, this regiment had been drawn from some border county and spoke a dialect neither quite Garnian nor Vinzhalian. She did her best to place it, but she had no ear for that sort of thing.

  They came so close that she could see their silhouettes, like shades lurking in the gloom. She closed her eyes, for she couldn’t hold them open in this stinging smoke, but now she couldn’t see their uniforms. Moreover, she was only delaying the inevitable, consigning herself by inaction to a lingering death on this miserable hill.

  Footsteps approached and the crow took flight. Above her, a young man spoke. She could barely make out his mutt dialect, but he seemed to be lamenting the waste of a woman killed in battle. This sentimentality did not stop him from kneeling down and rifling through Josette’s pockets. Finding nothing of value, he drew a knife, cut away her flight harness, and sliced open all the hems and folds in her uniform where a soldier’s wealth might be hidden.

  She stayed limp through it all, even when an exploratory hand groped under her waistcoat and lingered there far longer than was required to check for coins. Her resolve wavered only when she heard the pliers click together. She’d heard that a good set of teeth could fetch as much as five liras, and now lamented the lack of decay in hers. Could she stay still, stay quiet, while her teeth were being yanked out one by one? How many would he take? How long would she have to endure it? Perhaps it was better to cry out now and risk the bayonet.

  And then she heard the airship above. By its sound, she judged it a light semi-rigid with six airscrews, a Deacon steamjack engine, and Merle reduction gearing. That made it an N3-class scout—probably Captain Ravi Salicar’s ship, the Sparrowhawk. And since the fusiliers weren’t alarmed by its presence above them, they were surely Garnian as well.

  Her eyes shot open and she called out, “Stop!”

  The Garnian fusilier froze with his pliers an inch from her mouth. Another man came to help, and together they pulled Josette to her feet. As she rose, the throbbing in her head turned into a sucking, hollow feeling. Her vision filled with stars, and the world went black.

  2

  WHEN JOSETTE NEXT woke, the air was filled with the mingled odors of blood, putrescence, and the unnerving sweetness of gangrene. She opened her eyes and flinched at the intensity of the morning sun shining through a dirty window.

  Her hand rose to shield her eyes, brushing the bandages over her forehead. Pressing on them, she could feel a dull ache just above the hairline on the left side. The area was numb in the middle, and she worried that she’d been trepanned.

  She was nearly certain she hadn’t, but it probably didn’t matter in any case. No officer, to Josette’s knowledge, had ever been dismissed from the army for having brain damage. Indeed, she knew several gentlemen for whom it seemed to be an advantage.

  She sat up and looked around the room, idly picking flecks of blood from her matted brown hair. It was a narrow room, large enough for only two cots. In the other cot lay a patient wrapped head to foot in bandages. Burned, no doubt. Josette knew that it must be a woman, but only because the army wouldn’t pu
t her in a room with a man—even a dying one. They might cheerfully send men and women alike into the jaws of death, to be shot, bayoneted, and torn to pieces by cannonballs, but they would never violate propriety.

  A stone bottle sat on the table next to the burned woman’s cot. It tempted Josette, for there was no water by her cot, and she’d had nothing to drink since before the battle. And after all, the woman wouldn’t be wanting it. She would soon want nothing at all, judging by her thin and ever-shortening breaths.

  Josette decided, in the end, that she would not steal water from the dying woman. If nothing else, it would be a hard thing to explain to the orderlies.

  She stepped out of the room and into the dim hospital corridor, where the smell of decay was even more oppressive. Across the hall, a door opened into a ward crammed with wounded men. The corridor was almost as crowded, with cots lining both walls. But there were more men than cots—so many that men were stretched out on the floor or propped against the wall as their wounds dictated.

  She recognized one of them. He was a wiry, graying, weather-beaten man of about fifty, sleeping with his chin against his chest outside her door. It was Sergeant Jutes, chief of the Osprey. His legs were splayed, with the left one bandaged and resting under a cot, where it was less apt to be stepped on. He looked pale—paler than usual, even—and she had to watch for the rise and fall of his chest to be sure he was only sleeping.

  “Sergeant,” she said, the words rising as a croak from her parched throat.

  Jutes’s head whipped up and his eyes shot open. “Sir,” he said, crisp and clear. He was halfway into a salute when he froze, his light gray eyes going wide at the sight of Josette.

  Oh no. Had she walked into the corridor half-naked, in one of those flimsy hospital gowns? She looked down and was relieved to find herself still in uniform, save that her bloodstained pea jacket was missing both rows of brass buttons, in addition to the other damage inflicted upon it by her rescuers. Perhaps it was only the copious amount of dried blood, then, which alarmed Sergeant Jutes.

  “Not to fear,” she said. “Only a small portion is mine. I wish I could remember who the rest belongs to, but I don’t imagine they’re in a position to ask for it back.”

  Jutes was pulling himself to his feet in such a hurry that he nearly overturned the nearest cot.

  “For God’s sake, man. You don’t have to get up.” But it was too late for that. Josette knelt down and helped him the rest of the way.

  Standing upright, Jutes completed his salute, touching knuckle to forelock in the older fashion. Sergeant Jutes wasn’t tall, but he stood a full head taller than the diminutive Josette. “Wasn’t sure you’d make it, sir,” he said. His eyes flitted to Josette’s forehead.

  “I’ve had worse,” she said, feeling the wound. “I’m doing a hell of a lot better than my roommate.”

  “That’s Auxiliary Ensign Naylor, sir.”

  “From the Mallard?” Josette looked back into the room, aghast. “Good God. And I was about to steal her water.” She turned back to him. “How’s your leg?”

  “Hain’t turned putrid yet,” Jutes said, in a tone that mingled gratitude and hope.

  “Hurt it in the crash?”

  Jutes looked at her in surprise. “Sir?” he asked.

  “Did you gash your leg when we went down?”

  “No, sir,” he said, and was silent for a moment. “I caught a bayonet pulling you out of the wreckage. Sorry I couldn’t stay with you after that, sir.”

  She’d never been any good at thanking people, especially those subordinate to her, and this was the first time anyone had saved her life. Overwhelmed, she could only pat him on the shoulder and say, “Well, it’s damn bad luck about the leg. Where’s Captain Tobel?”

  Jutes hesitated. “Sir?” he asked.

  “Captain Tobel. I thought I recalled that he was wounded.”

  Jutes stammered out, “No, sir. I mean … he’s dead, sir.”

  Her gasp turned half the heads in the corridor. She simply couldn’t imagine a world in which Captain Tobel was one of the bodies rotting on that hill. “Good God, is anyone but us alive?”

  “Sadiq and Ancel were killed by skirmisher fire, along with the cap’n, before we landed. Borden lost both legs in the crash and may live yet, and Rouget caught a bullet in the chest going over the rail. Talbot, Ferat, and Jobert died in the melee on the hill, and the Guilbert brothers lost an arm, an ear, and a dozen teeth between them.”

  That was half the crew—half the men she’d worked with every day for the past two years. She caught herself wondering how Captain Tobel had allowed such a massacre to happen, before she remembered that he had been the first to go. When he fell, she had taken command. She wasn’t supposed to take command. Auxiliary lieutenants such as Josette were not permitted to take command of an airship. Indeed, the auxiliary officer ranks had been created to accommodate the peculiarity of female air officers, who had to be protected from the burden of command—particularly in battle, when a single moment of womanly hysteria might result in disaster.

  Or so they’d explained to Josette, back when they made her an auxiliary ensign. Now she was an auxiliary lieutenant, a rank which permitted her to be the second-in-command of any airship bearing a crew of up to thirty souls, and even to stand night and morning watches if the weather was especially mild. But it did not entitle her to take command of a ship in battle, no matter the circumstances.

  But she’d taken command anyway. She’d taken command, and half the crew had lain dead or mangled within a quarter of an hour.

  “And Ensign Sandali stayed aboard to fire the ship,” Jutes said. “It went alight something beautiful, but the poor lad never came out. Everyone else is alive and well. That’s thanks to you, sir, and I’d venture somewhere north of two thousand fusiliers owe you their lives, too.”

  Jutes’s last comment hardly had room to register inside her mind. It took everything she had to keep from weeping in front of her sergeant—or rather, the man who had been her sergeant until she crashed her airship.

  “You all right, sir? It was a high butcher’s bill, to be sure, but it needed doing. There ain’t many who could have pulled it off as well.”

  Through the mental fog, she noticed that the squawking chatter of the packed corridor had abated, to be replaced by infectious whispering. Somewhere on the edge of earshot, she heard someone say, “That’s her.”

  “Nah it ain’t,” another voice replied. “She’s taller. Over six feet, I heard.”

  She looked at Sergeant Jutes. “Perhaps we should continue this conversation elsewhere.”

  Jutes said, “I ain’t allowed in the officers’ rooms, sir.”

  Josette found that she could not endure the stares of the men in the hall, nor the thought of returning to her room alone to count the seconds between Ensign Naylor’s labored breaths. “Then what do you say to getting the hell out of this hospital?” she asked.

  Jutes looked relieved. “Been tryin’ to since they sewed me up, sir, but I can’t outrun the damn nurses on this leg.”

  She nodded. “Good. Any other surviving Ospreys in here?” By which she meant other crew members from the late airship.

  “No, sir. Apart from us and Private Borden, they’ve all been given to other ships.”

  “Then we’ll just have to do it ourselves.” She supported him with one of her arms under his. “Put your hand on my shoulder there, and I’ll help you walk.”

  Jutes looked like he might jump out of his skin from the sheer impropriety of it. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I ain’t sure it’s proper for an officer to be holding up a sergeant like this.”

  Josette began to move, forcing him to walk along with her or else be pushed over. “Don’t be an ass, Jutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and hobbled down the corridor at her side.

  The soldiers in the corridor parted at their approach, stepping or crawling out of the way to leave a space so wide that Josette and Jutes had a foot of clea
rance on either side. The whole spectacle made her cringe.

  A pair of nurses came down the corridor, obviously aiming to intercept the escapees, but when they saw Josette, they moved aside so quickly that one of them stepped on a man’s hand in her haste to get out of the way.

  The fleeing patients passed another ward, where the casualties were worse than those in the hall. Some of the men there were already dead and had been so for hours, left to stiffen in their dying contortions by a hospital staff too busy to remove them.

  Josette saw the entryway ahead. The front door opened and a corporal pushed his way inside. He shouted down the hall, “Another trainload of wounded is coming in.”

  A wrinkled nurse stuck her head out of the nearest ward and shouted back, “No more room! Put them in the street!”

  Josette whispered, “We did win the battle, didn’t we, Jutes?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said firmly. “It was a stunning victory.”

  Josette ran her eyes over the dead and wounded, packed shoulder to shoulder in the wards. “God help the enemy,” she said.

  * * *

  LORD BERNAT MANATIO Jebrit Aoue Hinkal, son of His Lord the Marquis of Copia Lugon, woke shortly before noon. This was rather earlier than was his fashion, but the snoring of his bedmate made it impossible to sleep any later. The bedmate was a matronly woman of at least fifty, which made her twice his age, but this thought caused him no shame, for he valued maturity in his lovers.

  Bernat rose to stand, tall, thin, and quite naked in what little sunlight made it through his hotel room’s soot-encrusted windows. He stepped to the washbasin, scraped away the night’s growth of whiskers, and brushed his short, midnight-black hair. He donned the accouterments of nobility, putting on silk stockings, a fine pair of breeches, a ruffle-sleeved shirt, and a rose-colored sherwani. He applied a layer of powder to his cheeks and a dab of lightener under his brown eyes. He contemplated his wig for a moment, but decided against it. The damn thing was itchy, and he wasn’t planning on visiting anyone important.