by Quincy Allen
They worked great with small-arms fire, but larger, high-velocity rounds went through most of them before losing their momentum. The central portion of the envelope was lined with an inner framework that held rack upon rack of boxy, gas-filled envelopes made from the same material as the curtains. These, however, were all bright green. The color came from the chemical they were treated with in order to contain the aether that gave a zeppelin its buoyancy.
Early zeppelins had been filled with hydrogen and helium, which worked well, but had limitations in both lifting capacity and altitude. In the 1860s, someone had figured out that a variant of aether had significantly greater lifting capacity and was less volatile than hydrogen. It also could be exposed to an electrical current that gave it even greater lifting capacity.
The framework of these lifting envelopes ran from the nose of the zeppelin to its tail, and the boxy green shapes came in a variety of sizes, from about a foot to twenty feet on a side. They filled every nook and cranny they could while leaving room for catwalks and access ladders. They were laid out in a three-dimensional array designed to maintain the zeppelin’s buoyancy even if a number of them were ruptured.…
Like in a firefight, Jake thought.
“Okay! I think that’s it, Cole. Turn off the fans, unharness, and come on down.”
“I think I just fell in love,” Cole shouted back, chuckling.
“Jake,” Tyler called down to the catwalk below, “I think we’ve got a natural here.”
“Really?” Jake asked, a toothy grin growing on his face.
“He drilled ’em all on the first pass,” Tyler said, obviously impressed. “A lot better than the over-tracking you were doing.”
“What are y’all talking about?” Cole yelled from the gun chair. He hung the earmuffs on a peg in front of the chair and started unbuckling the straps that held him in.
“It seems I’m out of a job, amigo!” Jake yelled up. “You’ve got Diablo-duty, if that’s alright with you. I’ll take the Thumper aft.”
“Hell yes!” Cole shouted back. He clambered out of the gun chair and poked his head through the entry hatch. Tyler slid down the ladder, and Cole quickly followed behind. “But what about the dark? You can see better than me.”
“Should be almost a full moon tonight, with lots of clouds.” Tyler said confidently. “Even with the damn thing black, you should be able to pick out Szilágyi’s zeppelin if it’s in the clear.”
“You sure you want me to take El Diablo, Jake?” Cole asked, but there was no mistaking his desire to man El Diablo.
“No doubt about it. It sounded like you were having plenty of fun up there,” Jake pointed out. Cole nodded, and the smile splitting his face reminded Jake of a gambler about to rake in a killer pot. “Besides, you know me. Always put the best one for the job where they’re supposed to go. The best one is you. Hell, I’d lay even odds that Skeeter would be hell on wheels in that thing. If she was here, I’d say give her a go, and we’d probably both end up aft with the Thumper.”
Tyler gave Jake an appraising smile.
“Thanks, Jake,” Cole said and clapped him on the arm.
“Nothing to thank me for, Cole. You know that. I’ll go get set up with the Thumper. Now get back up there and keep your eyes peeled. If these guys are coming, it’ll be soon. They can’t wait too long after we enter that storm, or they run the risk of losing us.” Jake turned to Tyler and stood at attention. “Any last orders, Mister Jones?” He gave him a salute.
Tyler smiled and eyeballed Jake mischievously. “I don’t recall you falling under my command, Mister Lasater.”
“It’s your boat. As long as we’re on it, we work for you.”
“I’m glad you see it my way,” Tyler laughed. “And the only order I have for both of you is to blast that son-of-a-bitch Szilágyi out of the sky and straight to hell. Do either of you have a problem with that?”
“No, sir!” Jake and Cole shouted, both of them throwing Tyler salutes, which he returned in a very unmilitary fashion. “You’ll hear a lot of chatter over the comm during the fight. Listen, and only chime in if you have something important to say. Now get to it, boys. Let’s see if we can get through the night in one piece.”
Tyler headed forward along the catwalk while Cole clambered back up the ladder into the turret. Jake strolled aft. A narrow spiral staircase wound its way down through the network of power and control cables that made a spider web of the zeppelin’s tail section.
Jake passed through the bottom of the superstructure into the gondola section and through the double doors of the observation lounge. He had to drop down one more level to get to the passenger compartments.
He exited the stairwell, and walked around the corner to his cabin. Slinging the Thumper over his shoulder, he went back up to the double doors and stepped into the aft observation lounge. Five Gatling gun emplacements were arrayed around the perimeter of the lounge, which had floor-to-ceiling windows. The six-barrel Gatlings rested upon four tall legs that would let the shooters stand upright, and they rested in steel runners bolted to the floor that allowed the weapons to slide forward and back.
Four young, nervous-looking men turned from their weapons and nodded to Jake. Each one wore a headset just like the one in El Diablo, and the cables ran back along the floor, plugged into a panel in the wall. The furniture had all been stacked up on either side of the doors, and each gun position had a high circle of sandbags around it. A stack of ammo drums lay within each gun emplacement. The fifth Gatling, at the center of the emplacements, beckoned to Jake.
“Hey, boys,” Jake tipped his hat to the gunners. “Y’all ready for a ruckus?”
“Yes, sir,” they replied in unison. Their voices sounded a lot more confident than their eyes looked. He’d seen it plenty of times on fresh recruits who didn’t have any idea what they were in for. Jake stepped up to the unoccupied emplacement and shifted a large telescope propped up against the sandbags. It was considerably longer and thicker than the ones he was used to. He stepped up, leaned the Thumper up against the sandbags, and picked up the telescope.
A quick twist of his ocular expanded the iris completely. Putting the telescope up to it, the night opened up to him, and he easily picked out the details of the thickening clouds behind the Jezebel as she entered the leading edge of the storm. Larger masses of clouds passed by as Jake settled in.
The tail section of the zeppelin obscured much of the sky above, but behind and below held a beautiful sight, even in the mostly obsidian darkness. A wide desert rolled beneath the Jezebel, broken by low ridges and curling arroyos that cast a jagged pattern of shadows across the entire landscape, heavily mottled by cloud-shadow.
Scanning left and right, he searched the darkness for any sign of pursuit by the colonel’s ship. Each pass revealed only gilt-edged, dark clouds and highlights of the landscape of the Free Territories below.
Jake thought of Cole’s time as a Buffalo Soldier, spent in the lands below, fighting Cromwell’s troops, and before that, fighting raiding parties of bandits and Comanche while attached to Apache companies.
The Apache and the U.S. government had established a treaty in 1850, signed into law by then President Zachary Taylor. The New Mexico territory was called the Badlands back east, but the people who lived there, Indians, settlers, farmers, and cattlemen alike, named the rugged landscape the Free Territories. From what Jake understood, the peoples below—made up of many cultures from all over the world—had adopted a particularly rare notion that all people were the same. Created the same and entitled to a single set of laws that applied to everyone, high and low. Cole had described some of it to him over the past year, and he had to admit there was a real allure to the place.
Jake had to smile. The Constitution read, “All men are created equal,” but what it should have said was all white men were created equal. Women and people of color were someplace further down in the pecking order.
Rich man politics.
The folks below seemed
to have taken what was a good idea back in 1776 and made it even better … meaningful.
He spotted the occasional flicker of campfires, and suspected they were either Apache or the Buffalo Soldiers who worked with them to fight off President Cromwell’s militia. Cromwell had it in for any pagan, having turned his little Republic of Texas into a zealous, Christian theocracy with an iron boot.
Cromwell’s troops raided the Native settlements along the Free Territories’ border, killing everything in their path … and leaving burning crosses in their wake. He had declared war on the Free Territories shortly after orchestrating a secession from the Union back in sixty-nine, which got him elected almost unanimously as the first President of Texas. Only white, Christian men had been allowed to vote.
The Union, having run itself ragged beating the Confederacy, didn’t have the gumption to get into another all-out fighting war and ended up making an uneasy truce and rather loose trade agreement with Cromwell.
Texas had become a haven for the Confederate die-hards Jake had lost his limbs to. It was also the last bastion of legalized slavery in North America. It made Jake sick just to think about it.
As Jake panned the telescope directly aft of the zeppelin, his eye picked up a small dark shape in the distance. He moved the telescope back and forth in a tight pattern to try and spot it again. After a few passes, he finally picked it out of the night, and his belly tightened. There was no doubt that Szilágyi’s black zeppelin was behind them, and he quickly figured out that it was gaining on them.
“Lock and load, boys,” Jake said over his shoulder as he set the telescope down and grabbed the comm gear. All four men dropped heavy ammo drums into their Gatling guns and then cranked their windows open with the handles jutting out of the frames.
The tops of the windows in front of each emplacement slowly swung out and downward on cables, disappearing out of view. Cold night air poured into the observation lounge. Jake set the earmuffs over his head and pressed the button on the receiver. “Get ready everyone,” Jake commanded. “Szilágyi’s zeppelin is coming in directly behind us. I figure we have about ten more minutes and then things are likely to get pretty noisy.”
“This is the conn,” Captain Wordsworth barked, his voice coming over the comm. “Battle stations, everyone! I want all runners to notify gun crews on every deck. Fire teams, report to your posts immediately!” The captain lowered his voice as he continued. “Mister Lasater, please notify me when the enemy is at a thousand yards and call out altitude and position as it closes in on us. Give the command to fire at three hundred yards. Once the shooting starts, you can forgo the reports. Mister McJunkins and our spotters amidships will call out the target as it moves. I want everyone to keep the comm clear unless you have something to report. All gunners are to aim for their turbines or control surfaces, and in that order. Good hunting, gentlemen. Conn out.”
Jake grabbed one of the ammo drums from the stack at the front of his emplacement and dropped it into the receiver of the Gatling. The Gatling drums were spring-loaded, and the 400-round drums allowed for an easy rotation from one feeder to the next. Jake stepped up to the wide window in front of his emplacement and cranked the handle. The four-foot-wide window slowly swung down and locked into place against the gondola.
“Any of y’all ever been in a gun fight?” Jake asked, as he turned away from the window. The wide eyes on all four white-knuckled men stared back at him. They remained silent, their chests rising and falling quickly. Their shoulders remained slack and they could barely look him in the eyes. They were obviously terrified, and Jake had to do something to put a little steel in their backbones. He reached into his vest and pulled out a fresh cigar. Biting the end off, he spat it out the window and pulled a match, running it slowly along a barrel of his Gatling. It ignited, and cupping it in the strong wind, he set it to the end of his cigar, pulling slowly until a steady billow of smoke streamed out the window. He smiled and nodded to the frightened gunners he might die with. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“The captain doesn’t allow smoking outside of the lounge, sir,” one of the men said nervously.
“Don’t call me sir. It’s Jake. And I reckon he doesn’t,” he said, taking a long pull and then flicking a bit of ash out the window behind him. “But if I’m gonna die this young, son, I plan on doing it on my feet with a cigar in my mouth.” He narrowed his eyes and looked at each man, shifting the cigar back and forth. “Y’all got two choices. You can sit behind those guns, your knees shaking and your knuckles white, or you can man up and get pissed off at that son-of-a-bitch back there who means to do you and your captain harm.” He took another long pull from the cigar and stared at it for a few seconds, letting his words sink in. Then he took a deep breath and looked at them again with stern resolve. “It’s up to each one of you, but I for one don’t plan on dying scared.” He let out a short laugh, thinking about all the times he’d cheated death. “That just don’t sit too well with me.”
One at a time he stared at each man, and one at a time they nodded back to him, straightened their shoulders, and relaxed their grips on the Gatlings. One of them pulled out a cigar of his own and lit it up exactly as Jake had.
“I think the captain would agree with you … Jake,” the one with the cigar said, a bit of steel coming through in his voice.
“Now that’s a little more like it,” Jake replied smoothly, grinning around his cigar. “You boys are gonna do just fine.” He nodded once, turned, pushed his Gatling forward so the barrel stuck out the window, and then picked up the telescope. The clouds had grown thicker around the Jezebel, and it took a minute to finally pick out the dark shape following them. “There she is, right where she’s supposed to be.”
The pursuing zeppelin had shortened the distance and was almost at the thousand-yard mark.
“She’s fast, I’ll give her that.” Jake picked up the Thumper, holding it left-handed and sighting with his left eye. He spotted the faint outline of Szilágyi’s gondola suspended beneath the black envelope. I may get that son-of-a-bitch with one shot, Jake thought to himself as he dialed the Thumper up to the Hammer setting.
“I’ve got her spotted, Jake,” Cole’s voice came in over the comm.
“She’s at a thousand yards, Captain,” Jake said clearly into the receiver.
“Acknowledged,” Wordsworth replied. “Load all weapons and prepare to fire.”
“Nine hundred yards and closing,” Jake said steadily as the black zeppelin put on a burst of speed. “Eight hundred … seven hundred … six … five …”
Cole’s voice interrupted the countdown. “Jake, there’s something weird about the zepp … it looks longer than the last time, but it’s hard to see any details.”
“Just stay focused and shoot the shit out of that thing,” Jake ordered. “Four hundred … three-fifty … three hundred!”
“OPEN FIRE!” the captain shouted into the comm as the flash of automatic gunfire from the nose of the enemy poured into the tail section of the Jezebel.
The men around Jake cranked on the handles of their Gatling guns. The thunder of gunfire filled everyone’s ears as flame and smoke poured into the night. Jake could see flashes of hot lead streaking out toward the oncoming zeppelin. Streams of gunfire arced out from the observation lounge, the upper turret, and the two emplacements at the rear of the cargo hold.
For an instant, Jake almost felt sorry for the men in the black zeppelin. And then the first round hit the envelope of the enemy ship, prompting a flash of light identical to the one that had surrounded Qi and Lumpy when they were shot, except this one was blue, and the surface of the zeppelin crackled with sparks of electricity wherever it was hit.
His heart sank.
Szilágyi’s got shields of some kind, Jake thought.
“What the hell?” Cole’s voice came urgently over the comm.
“Keep the comm clear, Mr. McJunkins,” Wordsworth ordered curtly.
“They’ve got a shield!” Jake hollered.
Flashes erupted from the nose of Szilágyi’s gondola, and then pieces of the Jezebel’s tail rained down behind the zeppelin.
There was a pause on the comm, and then, “Bloody hell.” It was the captain’s voice, loud and clear.
Jake’s guts tightened.
“Pour it into them!” The captain hollered. “Wear their shields down!”
Every gun aboard the Jezebel with a bead on the enemy zeppelin erupted anew with fire and thunder … except Jake’s.
He aimed the Thumper and lined up his shot, hoping that the Hammer setting would tear apart the envelope and knock the command crew senseless. Just as he settled his finger on the trigger, a spotlight as bright as the sun shone from the nose of Szilágyi’s zeppelin, blinding everyone who had an eye on the enemy ship. The men around him screamed, slamming their eyes shut, but they all kept firing.
“Damn it!” Jake screamed as he flinched at the searing pain in his left eye. The barrel of the Thumper jerked as his finger came down on the trigger, and the blast shot harmlessly wide of its target. Jake closed his now useless left eye and squinted just in time to see the nose of the enemy zeppelin angle down sharply. The spotlight kept a steady bead on the rear section of the Jezebel, tracking as the pursuing airship dropped below. Two more spotlights appeared behind it, one moving up and to the right, the other up and to the left.
“There’s three of them!” Jake shouted. “I repeat, there’s three enemy zepps behind us!” Gatlings flashed from the noses of the two upper zeppelins and then the Jezebel’s rear turbines sputtered and smoked, getting torn to pieces.
Jake leapt behind the Gatling and cranked down on the handle hard, spinning it as fast as his flesh-and-bone arm could manage. His Gatling added its own thunder to the air around him. He could make out a blue halo around the spotlight, making it look like a great, glowing eye that stared down into him.
With a shudder, both rear propellers of the Jezebel tore free and dropped away into the night below.