“Now,” he said. He was not entirely sure if he was talking to himself or to the landship—maybe both. The purr of the engine suggested the landship understood. “Let's hope I can clear this city before the Iron Guard gets here.”
He had not intended to land this early, not until the Skyshaker lived up to its name, but Whistler's plea told him that that the team on the ground was in trouble. That wisecracker Jacob had smuggled them inside, but Rommond would smuggle them out.
He headed for where the ruined smog gun left a rising pillar of smoke, like the souls of the machine spirits rising to the heavens. He drove with such haste that he clipped the corners of buildings as he thundered through the thoroughfare. The mere presence of the Hopebreaker, with its brightly-painted Resistance emblems, scared many of the civilians away, while the few shocked soldiers who dared to fire on it wasted bullets better spent on the trio of saboteurs that Rommond hoped would last just long enough to sabotage again.
He turned the final corner sharply, only to find a Menacer Mark I there, with its crew languishing outside a local bar. They jumped up, grabbing their hats and guns, and raced towards their landship, but Rommond raced towards it faster. Then a Moving Castle stepped out from the street behind the Mark I, and its crew were anything but languishing; their guns were all aimed at the Hopebreaker, with just a second left to fire. Rommond used that second wisely, for he rammed the Mark I with his own landship, and drove it back into the Moving Castle, which collapsed upon its mate. Rommond ignored the crew who tumbled from its crenellations. He had no time for prisoners, and he only took human ones.
He belted down the city's streets, crushing placards, knocking the signs off shops, and he was grateful that, on his arrival, many of the civilians had already barricaded themselves indoors. Yet some were civilians only in name, for many rushed to grab their uniforms and guns. Some of them were just teenagers. When a home city was under attack, everyone became a soldier. Mothers became the generals of families. Homes became barracks or bunkers. The streets became trenches. Every door became the front line.
Rommond turned the final corner leading to the ruins of the smog gun, and saw the troublesome trio resting on those ruins. For a moment he almost thought they were Regime soldiers, and had to take his finger off the trigger. The disguise was almost too good. Demons could pose as humans, but it seemed that humans could do the reverse.
But there were no demons around, no real soldiers running to and fro, no mob bankers waving their infamous bats, and no one tying up Jacob and company, or parading them through the streets.
Rommond halted the Hopebreaker and pushed his head through the hatch.
“What's going on?” he asked. “I thought you were in trouble.”
“We were,” Soasa told him. “The Treasury's debt collectors almost had us.”
“Where are they now?” the general said, looking about.
“I think you rolled over them,” Jacob said.
Soasa smirked. “Your little parachute jump was all the distraction I needed.”
“So you're not in trouble,” Rommond said with a sigh of relief.
Then they heard the rumble of at least a dozen engines, and they quickly saw a convoy of landships and trucks, armed to the teeth, rolling into the street.
“We are now,” Jacob blurted.
Rommond ducked inside, and the Regime's roaming arsenal turned to greet him.
“Kill the Resistance!” Jacob shouted, pointing towards the Hopebreaker, and hoping his disguise was still as good as ever.
He fired a token shot at the general's landship, knowing it would bounce off the hull, and hoping it would not accidentally fly through one of the tiny viewports and strike Rommond dead inside. The guns of the Regime's landships swivelled into place, and the gunners had no qualms with bringing down the hawk that had hunted them for years.
17 – THE GOLDEN HOST
The smog cleared like dispersing clouds, only it did not reveal the probing rays of the sun, for the curtain of night had been drawn tightly shut. Dotted in the sky like stars were dozens of hot air balloons, some large and some small, but all of them lavishly decorated, bearing numerous lanterns, and who knew what they bore for guns.
Taberah watched as the fleeing fog revealed more and more of the Treasury's golden host, and though the Skyshaker would have given the most doubtful person a firm confidence, the growing fleet of balloons eroded hers. She expected resistance, but she did not expect to find so much.
“Damn,” she said. Everyone was thinking it. Their only hope was that it might be a collective curse upon the Treasury, and hope that the Treasury was not voicing their own hex in return.
Mudro stepped up beside Taberah. “Let's hope they're decoys.”
Yet Taberah knew for certain that they were not.
* * *
The Treasury never fired first. They could afford to wait. The balloons were every colour imaginable, but the one colour they all shared was in the trimmings, and it was gold. Bands of the metal wrapped around the balloons, chains of golden coins hung down from the baskets, and some even had large golden emblems stuck to the balloons like targets.
The Skyshaker drifted between them, and the Treasury's golden fleet drew in closer and began to crowd around it. As it did, the large guns inside the baskets became intimately visible. Taberah knew that Rommond's airship could take out half the Treasury's force, maybe even all, but it could not block or dodge every bullet. If the battle started now, the Skyshaker would be its own bomb, falling upon the city of Blackout.
“I think it's time for you to do your magic,” Taberah said, turning to Doctor Mudro.
Mudro took a final, slow puff of his pipe, savouring the taste. He raised the pipe to Taberah, then turned and hobbled off hurriedly to the aft of the vessel, where Boulder was panting and laying out a series of uninflated balloons.
“This is a waste,” he said.
“They don't cost much.”
“A waste of helium.”
“I think we've reached our destination,” Mudro said.
“I was hoping this wouldn't be our final one.”
Mudro did not seem so sure.
“Well,” Boulder said, extending his arms to show the assortment he had laid out. “This is everything you stored away. I've counted ninety-five.”
“I had a hundred.”
“Well, you must have lost them.”
“No matter,” Mudro said, taking up one of the balloons, which had a wooden gondola attached to it, painted to look like iron. “The exact number isn't that important. What matters is the larger number that is planted in the Treasury's mind.”
Boulder assembled his men, who brought in cannisters of oxygen and helium, and began filling up the balloons. Because they were not real airships, and because they were so light, they only needed a fraction of the helium required otherwise, but they needed oxygen to give the balloons mass, the kind of mass that might frighten the enemy.
“We can't send these out yet,” Boulder said. “They'll see us launching them.”
Mudro was not fazed. “Let Taberah take care of that.”
* * *
On the ground, the success of Soasa's mission was cut short by a crackle and a muffled voice over the two-way radio. She held it up to everyone's ears, and they squinted and strained their hearing. It sounded like Taberah on the other end.
“Turn back ... the ...”
Soasa shook her head in frustration. “I didn't get that. Say it again.”
“... back on ...”
“Is she asking us to get back on the airship?” Jacob postulated.
“Maybe she's telling us to watch our backs?” Whistler suggested.
“One more time, Taberah,” Soasa said.
“Turn … on … smog gun.”
“Turn back on the smog gun,” Whistler said.
Everyone looked up to where the Skyshaker was surrounded by a hundred glimmering Treasury balloons, and then they looked back to the ruins of the smog
gun beside them, sending up only a thin stream of smoke from the cinders. If only the dynamite had not worked so well.
* * *
Taberah slammed down the two-way radio on the dashboard. She hoped they had received the message. She knew for certain that the Regime had received it too. If the Treasury had not already notified its puppet-master, this was sure to let them know. Taberah knew with grim certainty that the Regime would now send stronger puppets. All she could do was wait, but it often felt that when it came to time, the Iron Emperor still pulled the strings.
Alakovi stormed onto the cockpit of the Skyshaker. “What are we waiting for?” she bellowed. She looked as though she might throw herself through the window and onto one of the enemy balloons, and merely dust off the glass.
“If we fire now, we're done for,” Taberah said, turning back to the window, where she could see all those glistening balloons, and all those well-aimed guns.
“It's not like you to wait,” the Copper Matron said. Several of her Vixens entered the cockpit and stood beside her.
“Well, sometimes Rommond is right,” Taberah said. “Play your cards on your own time, he used to say.”
Alakovi scowled at her. “One of these days, Taberah, you won't have anything to play.”
18 – HELL IN THE HEAVENS
In the sky above Blackout, the Resistance endured their agonising wait. Alakovi argued with Taberah, and others joined the dispute, until it seemed that Taberah was outnumbered by more than just Treasury balloons. She gave herself a silent deadline. One more minute. One final chance to give Soasa time to get that smog gun working again. Taberah was eager for action, but she was not eager for death. She only hoped that if she gave in to Alakovi's demands, they would not later think of life, and ask: one more minute.
The seconds died, one by one, until there were no more of them to count. Alakovi looked at Taberah, who nodded in defeat. There was no more time for waiting. They had all been through limbo long enough. It was time to go to Hell.
“Here goes nothing,” Cantro said, as he prepared to change gears.
“Here goes everything,” Taberah replied, and she marched down to the glass dome beneath the front of the airship, where the largest gun with the most plentiful supply of ammunition was situated. She sat down in the leather seat and tapped the glass. She was not sure if it was for luck or if she was testing its fragility. It was almost like the bulging belly of the airship, and it reminded her of her own. How she ached, and she felt an inner ache that was not merely physical. The glass showed the heavens, and the earth far beneath, and the many gunners in the crowding balloons, with the many lanterns illuminating their anxious faces and nervous fingers.
She took a hold of the trigger, and she almost felt like holding her breath. It was now or never. They could no longer wait for events on the ground, and the longer they did, the more likely it was that everyone down there would be caught or killed. It was all or nothing. She knew that she could not do nothing, so she had to give it her all, even if that meant her life, and the life of her unborn child.
She gave the signal, and then she fired, and the other gunners fired in unison, sending a hail of bullets in almost all directions, bar up, where the gods cowered, and bar down, where another battle raged.
Several of the Treasury's hot air balloons went down in the first volley, but there were so many of them, and not enough guns jutting out of the Skyshaker's hull to take them all out. The Treasury, however, could afford plenty of those little iron pellets, which might as well have been money firing from their guns.
Cantro led the airship through in crusader mode, gaining height and gaining speed. The bullets whisked by. The Resistance fired up and down, where balloons appeared seemingly from nowhere, and the Treasury launched an answering fire, a vertical hail, their own metal hate. Each round cost them a tiny fortune, but by God, they would spend it all to stop someone else from taking it from them.
The Skyshaker zig-zagged through the canopy of colours, through the glint of golden adornments, through the dull gleam of gunfire. At times Cantro brought them dangerously close to the balloons, and at other times he bumped straight into them. Rommond had secured the best material for the Skyshaker's outer shell, the envelope that housed several smaller balloons inside, each attached to its own separate air cannisters. The Skyshaker could take some hits, but the question was: how many?
The bullets did not zig or zag, but with so many gunners out there, they might as well have. Cantro found his aerial road blocked by a barrage on many occasions, and at the speed he was going, he could not halt. So he pulled up higher into the sky, or he dived down lower. Yet everywhere he went, the Treasury was there, as if every angry banker had taken to the skies.
Taberah took them out by the dozen. The seat swivelled, and the gun swivelled too, with a thick rubber surround that creaked and whined as she pushed and tugged the gun into place. Mostly she aimed for the balloons, some of which fizzed out and slowly descended, others of which popped and plummeted, but here and there her only shot was the baskets, and the gunners inside them. They were mostly fellow humans, fighting for the side that was quickly wiping them out. Now Taberah was reluctantly doing the same.
Alakovi was in charge at the back of the airship. She armed large missiles, which she fired periodically into a pile of Treasury balloons. Sometimes the explosions hit them directly, and other times the force merely knocked them away. It took much longer to arm and fire these missiles, but they devastated the heavens, and left the evidence of their devastation far below.
What the people on the ground must have seen. Explosions in the sky, dark lines of bullets criss-crossing over one another, and a lightning-fast airship whizzing between them all. The tattered red, yellow, green, and blue balloons fell by the dozen, some draping over the roofs of buildings like a veil of mourning, others gathering in the murky streets, giving them a bit of much-needed colour, at a monumental loss of life.
“We've got this,” Taberah called out to her comrades, when it seemed that a patch of the sky was clearing, that they had cut their way through the barrier of balloons. She thought of Rommond far below, waiting for his bombs, waiting to liberate the ground like she had liberated the sky.
Then she heard an angry hiss of air, which seemed louder in the glass dome than it might have done in the deck above. She knew instantly that there was a puncture in the Skyshaker's envelope, that Cantro's skilful dodging was not enough to escape the endless stream of enemy gunfire.
Taberah thought with bitterness that she should not have tempted the fates, not when she was so high up, not when she was so close to them. Yet it was their favour that had let the Resistance survive this long. You either tried and tempted, or you did not try at all.
“We've got a breach!” Cantro called out over the intercom.
They heard the heavy pants of Boulder as he tried to issue a reply.
“Patch it up, Boulder!” Taberah cried. “Patch it up!”
* * *
Boulder waddled through the corridors with a speed that almost matched the airship. He threw himself up several rungs of ladders, pushing through hatches until he came to the section just beneath the envelope. He grabbed one of the gas masks in the nearby storage area and hurriedly placed it on as he stepped into the enormous rubber shell that housed the Skyshaker's own treasury of balloons.
The air was thinner there. He could feel it before the gas mask slipped into place. There were two tiny oxygen cannisters attached to the sides of the mouth-piece, just enough for ten minutes of air. Not enough, he thought. He was already out of breath before he hauled up his toolkit.
The chamber was very dark, and this might have been an obstacle, were it not for the fact that he could see clearly a beam of light from outside where the puncture was. He hurried over to it, stumbling as he went, grabbing hold of the ropes holding the balloons in place as Cantro continued his aerial acrobatics.
Two other engineers clambered in after him, grabbing gas masks a
s they went. They helped him hold up a large patch of stiff rubber, which was just big enough to seal the breach.
“Hold that up,” Boulder shouted through the gas mask, his voice muffled.
The engineers held the patch in place, but it blocked the incoming light, and the gaslight one of the engineers had brought up with him was too dim. Boulder cursed, and kicked his toolbox when his thick fingers could not find the sealant he was desperately looking for.
Then he heard a stifled shout, and the light shone in suddenly from the even larger rupture in the Skyshaker's outer shell. He saw one of the engineer's slumped on the ground, blood pouring from his head. And he heard a sharp whistle to his left, where two of the inner balloons were pierced, and were now leaking precious helium by the second.
He felt the Skyshaker begin to sink.
“Hold it up!” Boulder shouted to the remaining engineer, and even as he did, several others, even some of Alakovi's Copper Vixens, climbed into the chamber. They donned their gasmasks, and they took up rubber patches and raced to the inner balloons, even as Boulder tried desperately to seal the outer one.
The air filtered out of the airship, and time went with it. Boulder felt his own oxygen reserves running low, as if his own lungs were punctured too. Everything became harder. His body burned. His brow poured. His eyes stung. There was no warning that his ten minutes were up. His symptoms were the only warning he would get.
The patch was put in place, and Boulder began to apply the sealant around the rim. The goggles that were part of his gas mask began to steam up, and he found it hard to see. By now he was guessing where the sealant should go. For all he knew he could be sealing his own hand.
Damn it if this goes down on my watch, he thought, and he barely had his wits left to think it. He pulled his gas mask off, and he felt the sudden shift in air pressure. He held his breath, and cast his eyes on the remainder of the rubber patch he had left to seal. Just another minute.
Skyshaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 3) Page 9