Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles)

by J. S. Morin

  The hulls of the Errol Company steamships were designed to withstand cannonfire from even Acardian-made long guns. They had no protections that would stop runed projectiles. Madlin couldn’t tell what the runes did precisely, but it was simpleton’s guesswork to figure it was for punching through steel hulls.

  Madlin noticed something as she finished examining the cannonball. It was a peculiar quiet, one of the loudest she’d ever heard, in fact. The ship’s crew was still scrambling to enact makeshift repairs, and the bilgeworks still pumped away as two men powered the see-saw handle. There was still the waterfall crash of water spilling into the ship. What had gone quiet were the guns. Neither side was firing.

  There was nothing Madlin could do to weld the gaping holes in the hull. There was no point in taking a shift on the bilge pump; her arms would never keep pace with the hearty lads her father employed for such tasks. There was nothing salvageable about the engines, and she doubted her revolver would be of much aid unless the fighting came deck-to-deck, as it did in cheap swashbuckling stories that glorified piracy. Madlin could only think of one way she could lend aid. She dropped the cannonball in the wreckage of the ship’s engine.

  The nearest wall was as good a place as any. Madlin scratched at it with her knife, the hardened steel of the blade able to gouge lines in the low carbon steel of the engine room wall. Steam ships weren’t made of wood, like sailing ships. No piece aboard could float on its own; it relied wholly on water volume displacement to maintain buoyancy. It was time to add a little levitation to that equation.

  Jamile cowered in the corner of her cabin farthest from the window, bunched up in a blanket and wedged behind the bunk bed. There was nothing she could do until the fighting was over. She’d only be in the way, and she doubted she could keep her footing, let alone stitch a wound. The world shook and rocked and shifted, attempting to dislodge her from her haven. At any moment a cannonball could rip through the wall of the cabin and end her life in an instant.

  The shouts of the crew were all muffled and incoherent. She felt their sense of urgency, of fear, of panic. She knew Madlin was probably one of those voices, trying to do something to help. Jamile wished that Madlin hadn’t run off, hadn’t left her alone. She was too scared even to cry.

  The guns had been silent for a time Jamile hadn’t thought to measure. It wasn’t like lightning, where you could play the game of counting seconds until the thunder came to guess how close the storm was. The guns were thunder without lightning, and the storm was all around her. In that lingering absence of guns, she heard ... cheering?

  Had the Darksmith prevailed? Jamile hugged the blanket around her body and tiptoed over to the window, the icy steel of the floor hurrying her along. She could see nothing. Whatever battle was taking place was on the far side of the ship.

  Jamile dressed hurriedly. She pulled on a dress over her nightshirt, ridiculous as she felt doing so, and a jacket over that. She slipped her shoes on, and noticed that Madlin’s boots were still in the cabin, though they’d been thrown around like everything else. Jamile picked them up on her way out the door.

  On deck, the crew was gathered along the starboard railing—which was decidedly lower than the port, though no one seemed bothered by it right then. The night was lit by the stars above and the fires burning aboard the sailing ship a few hundred paces distant. The pirate ship that had been battling them was a magnificent specimen, with three masts and elaborate rigging supporting more sails than Jamile could count. Her difficulty in counting was compounded by the fact that nearly all of them were ablaze.

  Her first thought was that the Darksmith’s gunners had hit their target. Then she saw it. Half the fires on the pirate vessel went out at once. There was a flash of light and a bolt like lightning arced across the ship, striking a shimmering globe that appeared around one of the man-shaped silhouettes on deck. That figure dodged among a knot of larger silhouettes who fell away in short order, wounded or dead. The crew of the Darksmith hooted and cheered as if they were spectators at a crashball game or a pit fight. They shouted encouragements, suggestions, and some general purpose invectives against the pirates. All but one.

  “Dan!” Tanner shouted, his voice as discordant as a fan of a rival side attending a visiting match. “Don’t start a war! Dan, get back here!”

  Jamile edged her way down the angled deck until she was behind Tanner. “Is that Dan over there?” she asked, feeling stupid for having asked the obvious first off. “What’s he doing?” There was some part of Jamile’s mind that would not allow a thoughtful, insightful question to form until she had been assured of the reality of what she was witnessing.

  “Bloody-handed fool’s going to get us all killed,” Tanner muttered over his shoulder.

  “It looks like he’s handling himself well,” Jamile replied.

  Tanner grabbed her by the jacket collar and pulled her close. “It’s not here I’m worried about. This isn’t piracy anymore, it’s politics.” Tanner checked over both shoulders, but nobody was paying them any mind. The flashes of aether on the pirates’ ship had them all mesmerized. “They’re my kind, Zayne and his boy. Dan kills them and it’s war in Veydrus.”

  “Then why is Dan—”

  “Because the kid hates the idea of war as much as he hates honey candy and tupping chambermaids,” Tanner said.

  “What can we do?” Jamile asked.

  Tanner turned away and looked to the pirate ship. There was a blue flash, like a ray of colored sunlight, followed by a crack and a lumberjack’s groan as one of the masts split and toppled. “Nothing.”

  Madlin slumped against the open hatch of the engine room. Three rune patterns glowed a faint blue in the dark; the magnesium lights had burned out. The bilge pumps had seen three shifts of workers and with the aid of the levitation runes, the pumps were starting to make headway. The knee-deep water had receded back to Madlin’s shins. Much as she’s pressed her father to upgrade Tinker’s Island with spark amenities, she was just as glad now that the Darksmith was run on coal and lamp oil.

  There was a dull ache within her, like sunburn on the insides of her veins. Three sets of runes hadn’t seemed so daunting a task, but she knew better than to draw assumptions about how aether worked. If there was rhyme or reason to the arcane, it escaped her. Its workings seemed faulty based on all she knew of physics.

  The cheering persisted up on deck, and the curiosity was too much to bear now that she had exhausted what she could do with runes for the time being. Madlin sloshed through the indoor portion of the Katamic until she reached the stairs.

  Out on deck, the scene was something from a storybook. As the crew of the Darksmith shouted encouragements, a wizards’ duel played out on the decks of an Acardian heavy frigate. Its sails and rigging blazed with fire and one of her masts lay in the water like a gangplank to the bottomless depths of the sea.

  Madlin shambled across the deck like a sleepwalker, transfixed. Flashes of blue and silver, red and fiery orange stabbed and crackled back and forth across the deck of the Acardian ship. Shimmering auras flashed into view around the combatants as some form of protective magic thwarted each attack. The action was too far away for her to make out details, but one of them had to be Dan.

  “Madlin,” Jamile called out. She was standing at the railing beside Tanner, though in the starlight she could only tell by his foreign clothes and the sword at his hip. “Dan’s fighting off Zayne’s pirates by himself.”

  At least that explains where he went. In the confusion of the attack and her hurried repairs, she had forgotten about him.

  Madlin kept an eye to the battle as she joined Jamile and Tanner. Captain Toller fell in beside her before she arrived.

  “I heard what you did down below,” Toller said. “You’ve probably saved us from a float home in the Katamic.”

  “We’re little better than a raft right now,” Madlin replied. “We’ve got no engine, no rudder control, and most of the lower decks are filled with water. Even if we rigg
ed an engine, the coal’s soaked.”

  “How long will the runes keep us afloat?” Toller asked.

  Tanner perked up. He hooked a thumb at Madlin. “This one’s runecarving is all that’s keeping us up?”

  “Dunno,” Madlin replied, ignoring Tanner. She pointed to the battle. “Longer than that one’s going to last.”

  “They look evenly matched,” Jamile said. “This might go on for hours.”

  Madlin shook her head. “Half the ship’s aflame. It’s only a matter of time before—”

  KTHOOOOM.

  The Acardian frigate was split in half as a great billowing gout of flame and smoke exploded out the side.

  “... it reaches the powder.”

  The midmorning sun made the Katamic sparkle and shimmer, bright enough to hurt any eyes that lingered too long. Madlin sat on the aft deck, starboard side, letting her feet dangle over the edge of the ship. She stared off ahead as the current carried them along, watching for signs of life among the wooden wreckage of the ship, which she had learned was the Fair Trader. Four of the pirates had managed to swim to the Darksmith and were locked up in a soggy crew compartment below decks. At times she thought she could see movement among the debris, but the two spyglasses aboard the ship were in great demand and she hadn’t the energy to argue for a longer turn.

  Tanner and Jamile had gone to bed—separately, as far as she knew. The two seemed to be growing closer as Jamile and Madlin argued more and more often, so the other possibility wouldn’t have surprised her. Captain Toller was working with his navigator and the nautical charts to determine where the current would take them. She had spent a few moments watching them before growing bored and frustrated. They had no idea where they were thanks to the ship’s compass being damaged in the battle and the fact that neither of them could find a sextant. The current maps were bunk as far as Madlin could tell, anyway—more of a guideline to the lay of the shipping lanes than a means to calculate a course.

  Of Dan there had been no sign. If he was the storybook warlock he claimed to be, he should have survived. If he was the spiteful little shit she had grown to consider him, he was probably already aboard and was just making her worry.

  On the subject of the Mad Tinker, there was agreement among the three Korrish twinborn aboard: he needed to know nothing until they knew where they were. For a man with a thousand worries, adding one he could do nothing about would benefit no one. For now, they would bide their time and see where the current took them.

  Chapter 11

  “When Jennai died, I swore I’d raise Madlin right, have her follow in my footsteps. Maybe I should have worn daintier shoes.” -Cadmus Errol

  A steady rain fell in what they’d come to call the Valley of Twisted Steel. The Jennai—which had absorbed the Cloudsmith, name and all—sat with engines at idle as welders worked under tarpaulin tents to connect the two ships more securely. After the attack three days prior, they had set down near the wreck of the Ruttanian vacu-dirge and set about salvaging materials at once. Crews in breather-cloth masks cleared kuduk bodies from the site and stacked them for the crows at the far end of the valley; they weren’t worth the risk of a smoke plume to burn, or the effort of digging a grave to bury.

  Mechanics and welders stripped the outer structure for beams and hull plates, but Chipmunk waited until the interior of the ship was cleared before leading salvage crews aboard to go through the lighter supplies. It was awkward as a snake in shoes getting around on her crutches, both for the frequent jutting of parts from one cabin into another and for the fact that the majority of the walking was done on walls, as the hulk had settled on its side.

  “Grab those charts,” Chipmunk ordered, pointing to a pile of papers that had survived the fires and shards of blasted glass that sweepers had already cleared away. “The spy glass, too.”

  “Lens is shattered,” one of the workers reported, holding the offending spyglass for her to see.

  “Take it anyway. I might be able to grind a new one,” she replied. She pointed with a crutch to a hatch in the adjoining wall, oriented sideways from waist to head high. “Let’s check the briefing room.” The Ruttanian ship was the same make of Horlaide Company airframe, with only minor differences in accommodations and armaments differentiating them. She knew the layout, even sideways, nearly as well as she knew the Jennai.

  “Aye, General Rynn.” Another of the salvage crew took three hearty tugs on the handle before the catch released, letting the door swing open into the next room with a clang that had Chipmunk and the rest of her team clutching at their ears. Chipmunk managed to keep one of her crutches tucked under her elbow, but the other fell to the floor.

  “Let me get that for you, General.” If it weren’t for the fact that she went to bed each night with hands sore as a brawler’s and arms that ached from holding up her weight all day, she’d have felt as if she were the laziest human in the rebellion. Her troops and workers went out of their way to not only follow orders, but anticipate them. They coddled her every opportunity they got.

  “Thanks,” she muttered as she rebalanced herself on three points instead of two. “First two of you in there, give me a boost up.”

  With her crew’s aid, she went from one compartment to the next, picking through the debris of over a hundred kuduk lives that had been lost in the crash. The bodies at the valley’s end had all of their pockets emptied, their rings pocketed, their wallets’ contents bundled into the rebels’ little treasury. The crew quarters contained far more useful—and occasionally heartrending—loot. They found books and magazines, extra clothes and uniforms, sweets, bottles of liquor, and a few pocketclocks. From all the ship, they also found seventeen decks of playing cards, eight pairs of dice, and a chessboard with most of the marble-carved pieces broken. Walls in the crew quarters were often adorned with flashpops stuck to the walls with painter’s tape. They came in two basic styles: flirty images of kuduk women, and various family flashpops with wives and children.

  “Peel those off the walls,” Chipmunk ordered after the fifth room with the portraits. “I’m sick of kuduks staring at us while we work.”

  “Yes ma’am. But what do you want done with them?”

  Chipmunk thought a moment. Shredding them didn’t seem fitting. There would just be bits and pieces of kuduks staring up from the floor with their sepia eyes. Burning seemed like more trouble than the portraits warranted. “Pile them up in a sack and leave them with the bodies of the ship’s crew.”

  There was so much to salvage in the rooms. Chipmunk had to order personnel rotations to send sacks of plunder to the Jennai and fresh legs and backs to continue gathering. While she lifted nothing but her own weight and carried nothing but her crutches, Chipmunk was growing weary from the exertion.

  “Can’t we just take this whole ship in a sack and sort it out later?” Chipmunk mumbled. She intended the comment solely for herself, but a woman from her salvage crew overheard.

  “If the Jennai can lift while it’s full o’ holes, why not this heap?” she asked.

  The gearworks in Chipmunk’s head made a grinding, grating sound as a lever wedged a new pinion into her thinking engine. “One hour break,” she called out. “Someone give me a lift out.”

  The planning room of the Jennai had a central table strewn with maps and charts that gave detailed accountings of the surrounding terrain. Atop the pile was the log book from the Ruttanian ship Sulfurous, lying open to its most recent entries. Pages scattered around the table bore hastily scratched calculations, and more were being added by the minute.

  “Best case, I think we’ve got at least a day and a half before the Ruttanian Air Corps finds us, assuming they sent a ship as soon as the Sulfurous didn’t return on schedule,” Chipmunk said.

  Erefan shook his head. “Not conservative enough. You’re making assumptions that might not be true. What if they weren’t scheduled to turn back?” He pointed to the map. “What if they weren’t a patrol, but traveling point to point. If they w
ere heading—”

  “Wouldn’t they be here already?” Chipmunk asked. “If Twincrag Sky Aerodrome sent out a search vessel as soon as the Sulfurous failed to arrive, it would have been here ....” She scribbled as she talked, lines of numerals and mathematical symbols, “... eight hours ago, at least.” She flipped the page around so that her father, Kandrel, Bosley, and Sosha could see her sums.

  “Could be that the Tephis Aerodrome cables Twincrag, has them investigate when the ship goes missing,” Kandrel suggested. Bosley and Chipmunk bent over their sums to calculate.

  “They’d be here in anywhere between an hour to three, depending on the local winds,” Erefan said, interrupting the hasty mathematics of his daughter and the ship captain. “I figured that scenario already. It’s more likely than the worst case, but it still means we ought to get our arses off the grass and above cloud level.”

  “I think it’s worth the risk staying,” Chipmunk replied. “The most likely scenario in my mind, Ruttanian Air Command doesn’t brown their trouserbacks the minute an airship is late. Plus, we’re assuming that if they hadn’t encountered us when they did, the Sulfurous was heading straight back to dock.”

  “It’s the only assumption that lets us even begin calculating scenarios,” Erefan said. “We don’t get trial runs at this. We figure the least time we have safe on the ground, and make sure we’re off it before anyone’s the wiser. Rynn, I taught you all this, why are you being so obstinate?”

  Chipmunk slapped her pencil down on the table. Silence hung in the air for a moment before she spoke. “That’s General Rynn,” she said. “And it’s not my job to play safe and hide. This is a rebellion, not an emigration, and certainly not a gutted math problem. It’s good information to have, but it’s not the only consideration. That ship has enough steel to complete all our modifications, and room to house another few hundred troops once we fix it up a bit. It’s also got more supplies than we can fit aboard the Jennai; we’re busting out at the rivets of this teakettle as it is.”