by J. S. Morin
Eight voices shouted in martial unison. “Yes, ma’am!”
Rynn turned to the four soldiers flanking the machine. “I want cover fire from this side only. None of you are to pass through the hole unless I give the order. If I order the view moved, you are to hold fire until I give the order to resume. I don’t want wild shots while the world is swinging around in front of you. Is that understood?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Letting out a deep breath, Rynn nodded to herself and addressed the waiting eight once again. “Any questions?”
“No, ma’am!”
“Open the hole in five ... four ... three ...”
Sosha’s heart hammered in her chest. Sounds from the world around her grew fuzzy. What am I doing here? She should never have insisted on flying Rynn to safety when first rescuing her. If Rynn had taken the controls, she could have wiped her hands of piloting and stuck to being a nurse. Through the amber lenses of her goggles, she focused on the airship that would be hers. Her leather pilot’s jacket was stifling in the crowded confines of the machine’s room, filled with humans radiating heat. It would be different in the air. At her hip was a holster with a coil gun that she and Rynn both knew she wouldn’t fire—but all the other pilots had one, and so she had to match.
I’m not like them. It was too late to point that out to anyone.
“Three ... two ... one ...” Rynn pointed to Erefan, her finger shooting out like a bullet.
The switch closed with a clack-thump. The dynamo whined and crackled. The view turned real and beckoned.
Pilots sprinted through the hole, each to their assigned vessel. Sosha hesitated just long enough to be last through, but not long enough to be called a laggard. She blinked at the sudden glare, shuddered at the sudden chill. Clicks from behind, and sizzling whistles through the air signaled the start of cover fire from the Cloudsmith. Sosha spared a look over her shoulder and saw the four soldiers each on a knee. One was already reloading.
Her feet pounded the poured-stone as she dodged among the grounded airships and found her own. First thing, she popped the catch and lifted the hood. She slipped a glove off and put a hand to the cool metal of the runed engine. Taking a steady breath, the tingling coolness seeped through her, a sensation no jacket could protect against. Aether flowed into her and out again, directly into the engine. She slammed the hood shut.
There was a three-rung ladder built into the side of the liftwing, but Sosha was in a rush. With a hop, she caught hold of the edge of the cockpit, brought one foot up until it caught one of the rungs, and thrust herself over the edge. It took a few scrambling seconds to reorient herself to a seated position—she could already hear engines firing up in the other airships. The controls were laid out differently, but everything was there. Pulling the knob by her left knee engaged the engine.
There was no time to waste. Sosha heard kuduks shouting as realization dawned on them that they were under attack and being robbed of liftwings. With a quick glance to either side to check for other pilots, she gave the airship some throttle. The buzz through the seat was strange; a different engine, a different chassis. It lacked the comforting feel of the two-seaters she’d flown previously.
“Come on, you little bucket,” she coaxed it, “let’s get off this poured-stone and into some nice fresh air. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Whether her pep talk had any effect or not, the vessel picked up speed, bouncing along toward the aerodrome take-off strip well behind the rest of the rebel thieves. Once she was well clear of the one-seaters for which the rebellion lacked pilots, coil-gun rounds tore through the rest of the Grangian fleet. None of the other liftwings would be coming after them once they were aloft.
One by one the liftwings took to the air, like birds flying in formation. Sputtering along, Sosha’s bird was the one that falls from the nest to be eaten by cats. Each time she gave it more throttle, it seemed to shake more, but not pick up speed. Shots cracked the air, traditional cartridge bullets, not Rynn’s coil guns. The kuduks were mounting a ground assault, and she was the only target still on the ground. Answering fire from the world hole was scant comfort when two rounds punched through the liftwing’s hull, and another shattered one panel of the windscreen. With gritted teeth, and curses bottled up behind them, Sosha pounded her gloved fist against the control panel. It was a problem solving method ill-reputed among tinkers, but for the non-tinker, it was a fix-all for mechanical problems.
“Eziel, I don’t ask you for much, but if you could just help me get this you-damned thing in the air, I’ll try to be better about getting to sermons.”
Sosha slammed the throttle full forward. The engine rattled like a thunderail careening over rough tracks, then settled into a steady whirr, and the propeller pulled Sosha along with it. The bouncing smoothed out and she raced along the takeoff strip, taking a few more shots to the hull, but none so close as the first few. Pulling back on the control stick, the liftwing did as its name implied and tore itself free of Korr’s grasp. The buzzing in the seat died down and the echo of the engines off the poured-stone faded.
With one hand on the stick, Sosha pushed loose glass from the ledge where the windscreen met the control panel. Taking both hands from the stick for just a moment, she squirmed until she got both halves of the safety harness pulled around front and buckled. The liftwing wobbled, but once she regained control, all seemed well. Seven liftwing airships trailed off into the distance in a ragged row, with her taking up the rear guard.
Sosha breathed. It was impossible that she’d held her breath through the whole of her escape, but it felt like it as her lungs unclenched and she settled in to follow the little convoy back to the Jennai.
“We ready to cut power?” Erefan asked, shouting to be heard over the cheering and boisterous congratulations being bandied about the hold.
Rynn held up a hand in Erefan’s direction while she stared through the hole to Korr. The single-seat liftwings had been reduced to scrap metal, but they weren’t the only vessels at the aerodrome. Six vacu-dirges sat idle near a loading platform. Two were chained down, meaning that they were pulling at least some vacuum already.
A nagging bit of geometry tickled Rynn’s brain. There were three such airships welded together to form the behemoth Jennai: the original by that name, with the former Cloudsmith to its right and the Sulfurous behind it. It was asymmetrical, ugly, and awkward. She told herself that it was a hazard to liftwings landing in the plaza, that the open structure was weaker without a good way to tie the Sulfurous to the Cloudsmith. She imagined the extra crew and cargo they could carry with a fourth vessel, once it was runed and hollowed out. All these were true, but drugged with pentothal she’d admit that it was the pattern that bothered her. A piece was missing, and she meant to fill it.
“Close the hole, but leave the view.”
Erefan didn’t hesitate. His hand was already waiting on the switch.
“Now, bring it around and sweep through that one,” said Rynn, pointing to the leftmost of the Grangian vacu-dirges. “I want to see who is aboard, and how many.”
“Rynn, what are you thinking?”
Rynn raised her voice for all to hear. She shouted over all their conversations. “I’m thinking we’re not done today.” She drew her coil gun and pointed it skyward. “We’re taking one of the big ones, too.”
A cheer rose in the echo of her pronouncement. Erefan shouted something, but the cheering drowned him out and she couldn’t read his lips. She pointed to the machine. He shook his head. She waved a finger across the crowd of rebels, then pointed it at the view of Glenwood Sky’s aerodrome, then nodded emphatically. Erefan pursed his lips and the muscles in his jaw bulged. Rynn jabbed a finger at the world-ripper’s controls, and Erefan broke under her gaze. The view moved.
Kezudkan sat at a table formed from a single slab of stone the size of a trolley car. The surface was strewn with maps and books. At one end, chests of various sizes and descriptions lay open, revealing gol
d and coins within. His world-ripper gaped, opening into the vault of a bank in some hovel of a human sky.
“Not a single muddy city has so much as a tunnel beneath it,” said Kezudkan, “except to wash their filth downstream. Disgusting. They deserve to lose all their gold.”
“Pretty simple creatures,” Draksgollow said as he watched his workers carrying chests and strongboxes into their hideaway. “Follow any river and it’s like a chain of human cities. You’d think they were part fish.”
“They’re lazy creatures, most of them. Can’t work stone, don’t like to dig. If they don’t live where water delivers itself, they’ll dry up and die. Hmm, I suppose they do sound a bit like fish now, don’t they?”
“So what now, we just plunder every bank and palace we can find?” Draksgollow didn’t sound displeased with the prospect.
“And we’ll buy better equipment, hire more troops, build more machines,” Kezudkan said. He picked up a map between thumb and first finger. “We’ll get better maps from their world, capture locals and learn their tongue, get them to tell us where to find more. Then we’ll do the same in Veydrus when we’re done. After that, we tackle those strange worlds that don’t look like ours.”
“When do you plan to hunt down that slave of yours? The sooner we’re the only ones with the machines, the better, if you ask me.”
“I don’t,” said Kezudkan. “We’re not hunting all over Korr for a human on a stolen airship. We bait the trap and count on his curiosity to spring it.”
Draksgollow grunted and went back to supervising the unloading of the bank vault. Kezudkan had lost count of how many times they had trod that path.
The ship had been empty—not so much as a janitor aboard or a mechanic rollicking with his sweetheart in the engine room. Empty. But that was five minutes ago, and now the Kelleb swarmed with humans. Five mechanics ascertained that it was air-ready. A rune tender pumped aether into the vacuum pump, whether it needed it or not. A hundred guns fanned out through the ship, taking up positions to fire back at ground forces who tried to stop them.
Rynn took command herself. Stairs still gave her trouble, and her leg ached from the exercise, but it felt good to stand without holding onto anything for balance. She held tight to the ship’s wheel because it was hers to steer as she liked, not because it was the only thing keeping her from toppling.
Rynn cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted down the stairs from the bridge. “Cut her loose. Full engines, full pumps.”
Something outside the window caught her eye. “STOP! EVERYONE DOWN!” A hangar at the far end of the air strip slid open, four kuduk workers hauling it out of the way. No sooner had they gotten the door clear, than the nose of an enormous liftwing poked out, and the noise of its propellers—four across the wings, each twice the height of a human—roared across the aerodrome. It lumbered free of the hangar’s confines, gathering speed as it rolled. Its wings were like a ship’s sails, its body nearly the size of the vacu-dirge’s gondola, bristling with gun turrets. The liftwing battleship lined itself up with the takeoff strip and gained speed in earnest.
Rynn clomped over to the stairs, gripped the railings on both sides, and swung herself down in two pendulum steps. She raced at a hopping gallop to the spot where Erefan had left the world hole. “Liftwing’s after the pilots. Do something!”
Erefan gave a nod in reply. The last thing Rynn saw was his hand gripping the handle of the switch. At his first tug, the image disappeared.
There was nothing more she could do to help. She still had a job to do. “Fire up the engines and pumps! Time to get this turkey off the ground.”
Sosha let her craft drift gently off the course of the seven airships ahead of hers. She made corrections with the delicate touch she normally reserved for stitch work on children. Anything more forceful and her ship began shaking again, and each time she feared it would shake itself to pieces. It had its peculiarities, Sosha’s liftwing. She hesitated to call it junk, even in her head, while she still needed it to carry her back to the Jennai. The last thing she needed was for the poor beast to take offense, and dump her into the Sea of Kerum out of spite. That assumed that she would make it as far as the sea. The aerial convoy was still over land for the next few minutes, at least.
Due to its peculiarities, Sosha had developed a keen ear for the sounds her liftwing made. It was a musical instrument with one note, a sonorous hum like a trumpet, but not as sharp on the ear. When it developed an undertone, Sosha’s first thought was that she had reached the end of the liftwing’s patience with her. Something was wrong in the engine, and it was humming a new tune. It grew louder, which told her the problem was growing worse.
Unfortunately for Sosha, most of her conclusions were correct, though the causes she imagined missed bullseye and hit hay. Gunfire broke her from her worries over the engine and replaced them with new ones, like getting carved into pieces by rotorifle fire. She was suddenly glad she had found a chamber pot just before leaving.
Twisting in the safety harness, Sosha saw the Grangian liftwing looming up behind her, a great storm cloud trying to roll across and rain bullets onto her. Even under fire, she hesitated to jerk the control stick. Another burst of fire made her duck down in the cockpit. While she was there, she slipped her coil gun from its holster. Maybe I can disable it.
Sosha’s first shot was the blind lobbing of a cleverly crafted hunk of runed steel and copper over the side of her liftwing. Soon as she brought it up to aim, the terrific wind from her air speed tore the gun from her fingers. A reach and a fruitless grab after it, and she ended up jostling the stick anyway. The liftwing rolled to starboard—Sosha couldn’t recall if it was right or starboard when flying a liftwing—and started a gradual climb.
Up was no place to be, with the Grangian liftwing hanging in the sky between her and the sun. The engine was already shuddering like a seizure patient; there was nothing to be done but try flying it despite its protests. Sosha took firm control of the stick and leveled the craft with the horizon, then put it into a dive. The larger liftwing was clearly the faster of the two, so outrunning it seemed hopeless. At least she could get herself away in one direction.
The vibrations from the engine were rattling Sosha’s teeth, but with gunfire still crackling in the air from high above, she didn’t dare to change her course or slow down. They were missing her, and she bloody well intended for them to keep missing her.
Two cracks, in rapid succession, ended the airborne earthquake. A thump on one wing followed instantly behind. A quiet whirr and the rush of air past her head were the only sounds left—except continued gunfire. The welcome relief was short lived. Something was missing. Though it spun faster than the eye could track, the propeller blurred the air before it, leaving a streak of propeller afterimages that she could see through with little trouble. Now the air at the nose of the liftwing was clearer than glass.
The propeller was gone.
Erefan’s hands danced across the world-ripper’s controls. He had the viewfinder up and airborne in seconds. It took him just a moment to gain his bearings and head off in the direction of the stolen liftwings and their Grangian pursuers.
“Should have sapped the Ruttanian Air Corps first,” Erefan muttered. “Grangians are too proud not to chase.”
He brought the airship into range of the viewer. It was shrinking into the distance, but the world-ripper was not bound by conventional locomotion. Erefan switched to a coarser dial and the airship grew by the second as he turned it. The thing was a monster. A hundred feet long with a steel hull and gun turrets protruding from the sides and bottom, it was a skybound battleship.
Tiny dots in the distant sky were his pilots, fleeing in their stolen liftwings. The Grangian craft was gaining on them. Worse, they were leading the way to the Jennai.
“Bring guns!” Erefan shouted. “I want that airship turned into a sieve.” He kept a steady pace at the dials of the world-ripper. The Grangians were traveling off-axis from the machine’s
setup, so it took coordination of two dials at different rates to keep it somewhat fixed in view.
Vaulk shouldered his way through the chaos of soldiers and onlookers scrambling to arm themselves. “Your daughter took all the coil guns with her. All we’ve got are rifles.”
Erefan growled, his hands stuck to the controls, lest they lose their quarry. “Fine. We’ll fire what we have.”
“Want me to get Kandrel?” Vaulk asked. “He can wake as Orris and rouse the boy. Let the little prat earn his keep.”
“No!” Erefan snapped. “The boy’s a hazard. Get Kandrel, but have him wait. We’ll use the boy as a last resort.”
Vaulk departed as men arrived back with their rifles. The cheering onlookers who had celebrated the pilots’ success turned into a militia to rescue them as they watched it evaporate. They were quick; it hadn’t been two minutes since Erefan gave the order to arm. Errol Company men. Worth every fonn he paid them and more.
“Someone get over here and man the switch,” said Erefan. One of the soldiers shouldered his rifle and came to the tinker’s side. “When I give the word, pull.” He raised his voice and shouted for all to hear. “When I give the word, put holes in that thing. Aim for the wings and spinners if you can. If you can’t, hit any part of it.”
The liftwing fluttered in the viewfinder like a butterfly. Erefan knew it was his own fumbling fingers that couldn’t keep a steady rate on two dials at once. A curse of his trade, he found himself thinking how he could rig a device to keep a constant rotation on each dial, and adjust that rate on the fly. Of course, he hadn’t the weeks he’d need to fabricate and tweak the design, even if the crude schematic in his head was viable. He got the liftwing centered as best he could.