by Robyn Bennis
“Let’s try a ranging shot,” Dupre said.
Ensign Kember cleared her throat at Bernat and said, “Excuse me, my lord. We’d like to shoot back, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, uh … yes, of course. Please do.” While the gun crew ran out the port cannon, Bernat scooted to the right, edging between the starboard cannon and the railing. He looked down to see the town below. They were nearly over it now, with the scout well past the city and running for the clouds to the east.
“Thank you for making room, my lord,” Dupre said as she walked up behind him and held on to the corner deck cable. “Although, in general, it’s considered unwise to stand in front of a loaded cannon.” She patted the starboard gun, which was pointed directly at his posterior.
“Ah, yes,” he said, and promptly scooted to the right. He wouldn’t have made that mistake if he hadn’t been so nervous. Why was he so bloody nervous? None of the enemy’s rockets had yet scored a hit, and Mistral was about to reply with a cannon. Ensign Kember was already sighting along the barrel, holding her hand up to signal steering corrections to Corporal Lupien.
“Oh, and … my lord?” Dupre said. “You really ought to clip on.”
Kember stepped aside and pulled the lanyard. The cannon’s mouth exploded in smoke and flame as the deck came out from under Bernat’s feet and the forward rail hurled itself into his belly. Only Dupre grabbing his safety harness at the last moment kept him from going overboard.
“Short!” Dupre called, and coughed as the smoke blew back into her face.
The gun crew was already reloading the cannon as Dupre returned to her station. Bernat looked forward. He hadn’t even seen the cannonball in flight. “How can you tell it was short?”
“You look at their envelope and watch for the ball streaking in front of it,” Dupre said.
He was about to ask how the hell she could keep her eyes on the enemy with a cannon going off next to her, when he heard the shrieking whistle of a rocket and looked forward to see it explode directly in front of Mistral. A moment later he heard the bang, and, for all that he had been expecting it, it still made his heart skip a beat. “I do wish they would stop doing that,” he said, and heard his own voice crack.
Dupre said, “Make a request in writing. We’ll send it over on the next cannonball.”
“Maybe three-quarters of a mile now, sir,” Kember said. “And the gun’s warming up. Should increase the range.”
Dupre nodded. “Port gun, commence firing. Fire as she bears.” While Kember set to aiming, Dupre looked at Bernat and said, slow and loud, as if to a child or a foreigner, “My lord, may I once more remind you to clip on. If I have to save you from going overboard every time we fire a gun, I won’t have time left to command the ship.”
Good God, he couldn’t believe he had forgotten again. He grabbed the clip at the end of the life line hanging off his harness and looked around for someplace to attach it. The first thing he saw was the thick suspension cable holding up the corner of the hurricane deck, but the little hook wouldn’t fit around it, and then another one of those damn rockets was going off, its shriek so close now that he was certain it would hit, and he knew he was doing something wrong with his clip, but he couldn’t think with all the damn noise around him. Unable to fasten the hook, he held it to the cable with his other hand, not because he thought it would do him any good, but from a fervent belief that he had to do something or he would surely perish.
The rocket exploded and he held on so hard the clip’s metal hook bit into his hand, cutting his palm open. He looked up to see fragments of the rocket falling a hundred yards off the starboard bow, tendrils of smoke trailing behind them. Only then, when he was sure he wouldn’t die in the next few seconds, did he noticed the jack line hanging above his head, so close it almost brushed his hair. The line was perfectly sized to fit the hook, but he had to make several attempts to clip on, so severely were his hands shaking.
Kember pulled the lanyard again. This time, Bernat was ready for it. He stared at the enemy ship, so close now that it looked like a long white cigar below and in front of them. Through the smoke of the shot, he could see a blurry streak pass just behind the scout’s cruciform tail. “Short,” he said. “But not by much, I think.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Dupre said, her voice strangely sincere, for once. “Starboard gun, commence firing. Fire as she bears. My lord, will you please join us back here, well away from the cannons?”
While the crew reloaded the port gun, Bernat went aft and leaned over the starboard rail to keep an eye on the enemy ship. Kember fired the starboard gun and Bernat saw another blurry streak against the enemy’s tail. “Still short,” he said.
The scout fired another rocket, this one coming on straight and level. Bernat wanted to run, for all the good it would do, but he was frozen against the rail, eyes locked on the oncoming missile. When it seemed the rocket would fly straight through him, it exploded so close that the bang followed instantly. He tucked against the rail, held fast, and closed his eyes.
And heard a shower of metal bits clink against the forward wicker railing, as if someone had thrown a handful of nails at it.
“Rockets are a sign of desperation,” Dupre said without concern. “Terribly inaccurate weapons. Mainly meant to rattle us.”
Bernat stood and brushed himself off. He cleared his throat and willed his voice to be steady. “Does it ever work?”
She glanced at him. “In some cases. But the Dumplings are as likely to set themselves on fire with those rockets as they are to do us any harm.”
“Dumplings?”
“The Vins.”
“Oh, I see.” Bernat pondered it, and in his nervousness he pondered aloud. “Because they eat dumplings?”
Dupre made no reply, unless rolling her eyes counted.
“I’ve been known to enjoy a good dumpling, myself. I hope that’s not unpatriotic.”
The port bref gun fired, its report followed by a sound from the enemy ship like a pane of glass breaking. Kember rushed to the rail and looked out. “Hit! Hit!” she cried. “Hit on the tail!”
“Very good, Ensign. Let’s put the celebration off until we finish the job.”
Bernat looked out to see the damage they’d inflicted on the enemy. There didn’t seem to be any. No, now that he looked carefully, he could see a small hole in the scout’s tail, edged with flapping fabric. It seemed a pitiful little injury. “Doesn’t seem like much,” he said.
“It adds up,” Dupre said. “Besides which, we can only fire round shot at this range—solid iron cannonballs. When we get closer, we’ll switch to explosive shell, and then you’ll get some real fireworks.”
The starboard gun fired. Bernat watched another hole appear in the scout’s tail. “Hit on the tail fin,” he said. “The one on the right that goes up and down. It doesn’t look broken, though.” Bernat didn’t know if calling the fall of shot was needed or even welcome, but he desperately needed to do something.
The next cannonball hit the Dumplings in the aft section of their envelope. Bernat thought the scout, pierced through, would surely go down, but it didn’t. In fact, it continued to rise. Before long it had risen to a mere a hundred yards or so below Mistral, and perhaps six hundred ahead.
“Reload with shell,” Dupre said. This order brought the gun crews a positively salacious joy. The powder monkey ran down the gangway with a smaller gunpowder charge, along with a length of fuse. The powder went to the cannoneers, while Ensign Kember took the fuse, measured it against markings carved into the gun carriage, and shortened it with a knife.
The powder monkey made a second trip to deliver the shell itself. Kember inserted the custom-length fuse, and the shell was loaded into its gun. When they fired, the shell’s burning fuse traced a thin line of smoke in an arc through the air. The shell exploded above the scout’s tail, bursting into fragments that peppered the envelope, piercing it in half a dozen places and showering it with burning embers.
�
��Hit! Hit! Hit!” Bernat cried.
“She’s turning to starboard,” Kember said.
“Starboard as hard as you dare, Corporal Lupien,” Dupre said crisply, as if she had been expecting this. She reached up and laid her fingertips on the girder above her.
The Vin ship swung right and Mistral followed, but Mistral, with her compromised tail, couldn’t turn quite as lively as the smaller scout. Bernat saw the scout’s broadside swivel guns come into view along the length of her keel. They were so close he could even see the cannoneers standing behind them, already aiming their swivels right at Mistral’s hurricane deck.
The bref guns fired two more shells, one exploding short and the other doing some small damage to the enemy’s tail, and then the Vinzhalian ship was too far to the right for Mistral’s bref guns to bear. Mistral could no longer use her fangs, but the prey was about to show hers.
“Lord Hinkal,” Dupre said, “we should like you to take up station with the riflemen now. I suggest you aim for their cannoneers, for they will surely be aiming at you.”
Bernat picked up a rifle, put it to his shoulder, and aimed for the nearest Vinzhalian cannoneer. The range was perhaps two hundred and fifty yards—not so difficult a shot, if only he could steady himself. He knelt and rested the rifle on the rail. It helped, but the shaking was not only in his hands. A continuous quiver had taken up residence in his chest, just below his heart. It coursed out in waves, through his shoulders and out to his hands. No matter how much he tried to calm himself, how precise and controlled he made his breathing, his heart raced and his entire body vibrated like a struck tuning fork.
He tried to swallow the fear, but it wasn’t only fear that robbed his composure. It was the energy of the moment, the way it felt more real, more now, than anything he’d ever experienced before. It seemed that he resonated with the frequency of the battle itself.
He judged the wind as best he could from the rustle of the trees far below, and aimed just to the left of his target, at a point from which wind—if it was the same above as below—would nudge the bullet just enough to send it squarely through the man’s chest. He’d nearly steadied himself when the rifleman next to him fired, and the crack of the rifle set him to shaking again.
The Vinzhalian ship was noticeably closer now, her unscathed cannoneers still aiming their swivels at him, waiting only to come within range. Bernat sighted again, shaking even more. And when his sights were wobbling in front of his target, he fired.
And missed. He knew he’d missed before the smoke had cleared, knew it even as he pulled the trigger, for he had repeated the very first mistake he’d ever made while firing a rifle, the first mistake his marksmanship tutors had trained out of him: firing off a hasty shot in the fleeting moment when unsteady aim happened to swing the sights across the target. He hadn’t accounted for the wind either, and not because he’d forgotten.
So why the hell had he fired? Because he knew the swivel guns were coming closer and that soon they would be in range, and during that barest instant in which a decision had to be made, some part of him calculated that a wasted shot fired in time was better than an effective shot fired too late.
It was madness, and he knew it was madness, but somehow the madness had taken hold of him, and still had hold of him. He threw his rifle to the deck in his haste to take a fresh one and get another shot off before it was too late.
“Steady.” Dupre’s voice seemed to come from another time. It could not possibly be coming from this one, for she was far too calm for the current situation. “The battle is very much in our favor,” she said. “It couldn’t be going better.”
But she was wrong, for that was the moment Private Corne decided to blow his hands off.
* * *
ANOTHER FEW MINUTES ought to do it, she thought. The Vin airship was already sprung aft and losing gas, her tail cone a wreck of splintered girders and smoldering shell fragments. A ship in that condition could not sustain such a tight turn for long. She’d have to straighten out soon, and then Mistral would have her.
There was the matter of the swivel guns, but their range was scarcely longer than pistol shot, so her riflemen would have time to work on the Vin cannoneers before they came into range. The swivels might have proved troublesome if Mistral were carrying mere muskets, but with rifles aboard, Josette hardly needed to think about it.
“Hurry up on that gun, please.” The starboard gun crew, their pace slowed by the inexperienced Private Corne, was taking an eternity to reload. Private Kiffer, on the left side of the cannon, had just set the powder charge into the bref gun’s bore. Corne, after trying to use the wrong end of the rammer, finally had it positioned correctly. He rammed the charge home, and was just pulling the rammer free when the cannon went off unexpectedly and the whole world turned to smoke and noise and heat.
The cannon, run all the way back and locked into its carriage for reloading, couldn’t recoil smoothly along its slide. Instead, the force of its accidental firing was concentrated into a single, furious moment as a quarter ton of metal shot back under the impetus of a full pound of exploding gun powder, but had nowhere to go. The hanging deck swung back so fast it came out from under Josette’s feet. The forward martingales, the lines meant to limit the deck’s movement, snapped and whipped against the envelope.
The gun kicked up hard and came off its mount, its barrel pirouetting through the air to smash into Private Kiffer’s leg. It bent his femur back on itself and kept falling, pulling Kiffer with it, its trajectory barely deviating from the impact. It hit the deck, plunged straight through the reinforced wicker, and fell into open sky, tumbling end over end as it returned to earth. On the way, it had pulled Kiffer’s leg through the hole, but the edges of the wicker flicked back once the cannon was free, trapping the jellied limb just above the knee. Kiffer was the first to scream.
Then Corne, his face crisp and black with powder burns, opened his eyes and began to whimper. Of his left hand, there was nothing but a misshapen stump. The right one still had a few fingers, though it was hard to distinguish them in the amorphous, bloody mass of tissue and splintered bone above the wrist.
There followed several seconds of quiet, in which nothing moved but the wind. Even Josette was stunned into inaction, until she noticed that her ship was on fire. The bref gun had been run all the way back to its loading position when it had gone off, well behind the gun port, so the cone-shaped blast from its muzzle had blown apart the railing and deck in front of it. The edge of the damaged area had smoldered until the blast of air across the hurricane deck stoked it into flame.
Josette unclipped herself, snatched a fire blanket off the deck, and ran forward, dropping across the flaming rail with the blanket held in front of her. Despite her goggles, she reflexively closed her eyes in the face of the fire. When she looked again, it was smothered, and she was staring at the ground through a mile of sky. She could see the cannon still tumbling far below, and its ejected rammer arcing away in front.
She scrambled back from the abyss, leaving the fire blanket in place. She took one look at Kiffer and called up the companionway, “Get Chips down here! Tell him to bring fine sail thread, a sharp knife, and a good saw!”
“No!” Kiffer grabbed at her harness.
She found that she couldn’t look the man in the eye, but she spoke as softly as she could. “There’s no way you’re keeping that leg, Private. Better to have done with it right now.” She looked to Kember. “Take Private Corne back to his berth.”
Ensign Kember was helping Corne up into the keel when Chips arrived. His eyes bulged when he realized what the saw was for.
“Goddamn it, man, hurry up,” Josette said.
Josette felt a vague obligation to help with the amputation, but she was far too preoccupied. The elevatorman was struggling to keep Mistral from rising after the sudden loss of five hundred pounds of bref gun. The enemy scout was fifty yards below them and a little farther to starboard, looking up at the underside of Mistral’s dec
k and envelope. They’d be within swivel range in seconds.
And something was missing. She realized what it was with sudden anger: none of her riflemen were firing. They were, in fact, staring at Kiffer with mouths agape.
Chips was just making the first stroke with his saw, but Kiffer’s scream couldn’t match Josette’s when she cried, “We’re still in a battle, goddamn you! Shoot! Shoot, damn you, or I swear I’ll throw you all over the side myself!”
Bernat and the other rifleman turned and fired simultaneously, so fast they couldn’t possibly have aimed properly. They each took a fresh rifle and sighted more carefully before firing again. And yet, though the Vins were nearly within pistol shot, a quick glance over the side showed that her crew had so far failed to hit a single enemy cannoneer.
The punishment for their laxity—for Josette could think of no other way to describe it—came seconds later, when the scout’s swivel guns popped off together, and dozens of musket balls hit Mistral’s hurricane deck from below.
A cluster of them hit the empty starboard gun carriage, not a yard from Kiffer. One pinged off Chips’ saw and left a splatter of new blood, having passed through Kiffer’s already-wounded leg. The growing blossom under Kiffer’s armpit spoke to yet another wound, where a ball had gone into his shoulder. One of the Dumpling bastards must have aimed his swivel at the spot where Kiffer’s leg stuck out.
Her eyes scanned the deck, looking first to the suspension cables. One had been hit and was frayed, but holding. The girders above it were splintered in several places, but they too held, at least for the moment. Above the catwalk, the bags and envelope must have gotten a good peppering, but that damage could wait.
Bernat was standing and still firing, to his credit, but one of her riflemen was down, a wound in his foot and a graze across his head. Corporal Lupien called forward, “My cable’s cut, sir.” He spun the rudder wheel. It turned without resistance.