He did not know if the others had completed their jobs, their frenzied duties, but if he could just seal the outer hull, then any escaping helium from the inner balloons would still be trapped there. The Skyshaker would still have enough buoyancy to support its weight, to let it dip and rise as Cantro needed to avoid another stream of bullets, and another dangerous puncture.
Boulder applied the last of the sealant, and he and his fellow engineers held it in place. It had to hold. If they took their hands away, who knew if it would come away with them. It seemed to be working. The airship rose again, just a little, but it was enough. Everything would be okay.
But Boulder's eyes were growing dark. He could no longer hold his breath. There was nothing left to hold. The darkness seemed a little different then. It was not just the dim of the chamber, which the gaslight could barely illuminate. It was an inner kind of darkness, one that no light could chase away. Boulder collapsed upon the ground, gasping for breath. He had saved the ship's air supply, but he had not saved his own.
19 – URBAN MAZE
The Regime on the ground fired in unison, as if they had one mind, one mission. They did: kill Rommond, at any cost. The bullets battered off the hull of the Hopebreaker, and though it withstood them, the general did not want to take his chances against missiles and other more dangerous ammunition.
He drove off, with his gunner Tomdan turning the turret as he went. How he wished to have a full platoon at his disposal, to show the enemy what a real army was like.
Tomdan fired at the advancing landships as Rommond led the Hopebreaker away. Several of the enemy vehicles halted in flames, but there were many of them, too many for the shells of a single turret gun.
Rommond drove the Hopebreaker into a narrow alley, just big enough to squeeze through. He knew this would stop some of the larger enemy vehicles from pursuing, but he just hoped they would not find another way around. He had studied the street maps of Blackout for days, but the Regime had ruled that city for years, and they knew it better than he ever could.
“Faster!” Tomdan cried, when he saw several trucks loaded with explosives, and pumping smoke and steam like their drivers pumped sweat, thundering down towards the Hopebreaker. The fumes they left behind masked the numerous landships that followed in their train.
Rommond gave it everything he had, accelerating as fast he could while still maintaining control. He could not reach maximum speed in an urban environment, not if he wanted to stop and turn, as he often had to do through the city's meandering streets. How he was glad that the people had been warned to stay indoors. If they had not, he was not so sure he could slow down enough in time to save them.
The people were not entirely safe in their homes, however. Shells exploded in buildings close to the Hopebreaker. The Regime did not care if some civilians died, or even if they all did, so long as Rommond's body was found among the ruins. He mused with melancholy on what the Iron Emperor might have done to Blackout if he had access to that same bomb that Rommond had been working on.
“Tabs,” Rommond called into the two-way radio. “We could do with a little help here.”
There was no response. She was probably busy. He could hear what sounded like a rolling thunder in the heavens, and every so often he saw the ruins of a Treasury balloon collapse into the street. It seemed that she was winning that battle up above. The Treasury could afford to lose it; it had enough money, enough gold and iron, to win the war.
The Hopebreaker left the narrow streets and climbed a mountain of debris in the central courtyard of the city, the same place he had first met the Regime's iron arsenal. Tomdan knew Rommond's tactics well. The general wanted to take out some of the larger guns from behind. Tomdan was more than happy to oblige.
The large, box-shaped landships were almost planted firmly in the ground. Their turrets faced in all directions. The Regime had fought Rommond long enough to know what he might try. They did not expect him to try it so soon, however, and the Regime gunners were not as watchful as they should have been.
Tomdan fired several volleys, which took out four landships before the Hopebreaker ducked into the dingy alleys on the far side. By the time the enemy bullets followed, they caught two of the pursuing trucks instead. The explosion rocked the city and added more bricks and dust to the growing monument of debris in the city centre.
But the Regime was not altogether unwary. Rommond found anti-landship guns placed in several of the smaller streets, primed and ready, and packing a punch that could easily pierce even the Hopebreaker's thick metal hide. He avoided some of these with sharp turns, the kind of turns that many of his older models simply not could make. But the guns spat their lethal venom, which burrowed through the hull at the back of the Hopebreaker, adding more light, and adding more risk, to those inside.
“The fuel tanks,” Tomdan called out. They were dangerously close to where the gun holes were. The diesel engine gave Rommond the advantage, but it could also be his doom.
“I know,” he grumbled.
He was driving like a madman, crushing everything in his path, cutting corners and even crashing through the edges of buildings. There was no time left for safety, for careful guiding, and no time left for planning. Everything was instinct. There were no actions, only responses.
Rommond barked into the radio. “Tabs, we need some iron rain.”
“A little busy up here,” Taberah responded, with the sound of gunfire muffling her voice.
Rommond found himself praying silently. He was not sure who he was praying to. He did not believe in the god of the solar cult that had sprung up in the city, or the many pantheons of the tribes that lived in the wilderness. He found he was praying to metal, to iron rivets and copper bolts, to cogs and pistons, to the very tracks and treads that locked and sprung into place as the wheels of the landship span with a religious frenzy. Perhaps, he thought, that he was really praying to the spirits of the machines, like Brooklyn used to.
The chase continued into the night, and though the Hopebreaker destroyed many of its assailants, it seemed that there were always more to replace them. Tomdan had gotten in many lucky shots, but the Regime gunners only needed one, and they had lots of guns, lots of chances.
Then Rommond heard a grunt from Tomdan, and when he glanced to see, the man was slumped on the floor in a pool of blood.
Damn. Rommond knew he could not drive and shoot at the same time. He either let them chase him, and survived, or he took up the gun position, and would likely be gunned down in the process. It was not much of a choice: Flee or Die. Yet sometimes flight felt just as bad as death, if not worse.
“Tabs, get me those bloody bombs!” Rommond shouted into the radio.
No response.
It became a game of cat and mouse, a game Rommond often enjoyed in the early days of the war, when he was the cat. Now he was the Hawk, and he should have been the predator, but he ran and drove like prey.
He glanced through the viewports to the sky above, where the lanterns of the Treasury balloons were one by one blotted out, and where new lights, the light of tremendous explosions, took their place. Dark shapes, and flashing fires, fell from the heavens, like demons and angels hurtling to the ground. It reminded Rommond of the bombs that should be falling, but the bombs never came.
Then something blocked his vision, and everything inside the Hopebreaker went dark. Rommond checked the viewports. He reached his hand through one, hoping it would not get blown off. He felt the fabric of a Treasury balloon. Of all the places to land, he thought.
“I need to get out,” he said. He had forgotten that Tomdan was dead. The dead did not need to give permission.
Rommond opened the hatch at the top of the landship and popped his head outside. The balloon covered most of the vehicle. He only hoped it covered it from the view of the Regime. He climbed out and jumped to the ground. The he grabbed the balloon and tried to reef it off his prized landship. He managed to remove some of it, but it was so big and unwieldy, and pa
rts of it were caught on the machinery, that he could not get it loose. Some was even jammed between the treads.
Then Rommond heard the revving of an engine and the pumping of pistons, and he knew that another landship was nearby. He turned his head and saw the turret twisting into place. He knew he had only seconds to react. He ran from the Hopebreaker and dived behind a broken wall, just in time to see the flash of fire, and hear the initial boom, and feel the hail of landship parts fall down upon him.
He had little time to feel. He emerged from the rubble, checked himself for serious injuries, and glanced about. The haze of dust, and the dirt lodged in his eyes, made it hard to survey his surroundings. He could hear the purring of the enemy landships as they drove by. He peered above the broken wall and saw them driving in almost all directions. Then he saw a truck pull up, and the doors sprung open. A dozen troops hopped out, racing with guns raised to the ruins of the Hopebreaker. Rommond knew what they were looking for. Half the city's posters made it clear. They were looking for him—dead or alive.
He watched for a moment as they hauled Tomdan out, badly burned. They were not gentle with his body. The dead no longer needed pillows. “We got him!” they shouted, cheering to each other, cheering into their radios. “We got the Hawk!”
The posters clearly were not good enough.
* * *
Jacob, Soasa and Whistler struggled to get the main smog gun back in working order. Much of it was in ruin, and the metal was still hot, scalding them when they tried to position it in place.
To their surprise, other Regime soldiers came up to help them.
“We need to blind the Resistance,” Jacob told them. He was getting good at lying, so good, in fact, that he was frequently blinding the Regime. There was something powerful in those pips upon his shoulders, and those medals upon his chest. Now he knew what Rommond felt, but he felt it deep behind enemy lines.
Supplies were called in, and several engineers began working on the smog gun, tearing out the old cogs and pistons, and putting new ones in. The barrel was half-destroyed, but there was still enough of it left to send up a heavy plume of smoke. It would not be quite as thick as it was before, but it would be enough. The city's own natural smoky skies would do the rest.
As soon as the work was completed, the engineers were called away. There was no end of things to fix. While the city had still not been bombed, Rommond had caused significant destruction in the Hopebreaker alone.
A few soldiers stayed behind to guard the smog gun, which Soasa cranked and aimed at the Skyshaker, giving their comrades their much-needed cover. But Jacob knew that Taberah would only want the smoke for so long, a brief respite before the bombing truly begun. As soon as the guards turned their backs, he knocked them out with the butt of his gun. They were lucky. Soasa might have blown them up instead.
* * *
Rommond ran, keeping low to the ground, using the wall as cover, and the haze as camouflage. He took his pistol out. It would not do much, but if he was to die this day, he would at least take half a dozen demons with him. In Hell, he would kill some more.
He took out several lone soldiers, pulling them into the dark alleyways, but he stayed near his destroyed landship, periodically surveying the troopers there, who carried Tomdan away. He almost felt like charging after them, but he knew it would be suicide. Part of him almost did not care.
When they were gone, the shell of the Hopebreaker was abandoned. Rommond returned to it and placed his hands upon the hull, and he grimaced from the heat. His head sunk down, and he whispered a lament, a little obituary for the iron dead.
It's just a piece of a metal, a part of him thought.
“No!” he whispered firmly to himself. “It's a symbol.”
You broke them, he thought. You don't need that symbol any more.
But it was a symbol of many things.He ripped the name plate from the landship and held it up. He was reminded of the one he already had in his quarters, from the landship that Brooklyn took his name. Not his real name, not the one the Ootana tribe gave to him, but it was real to Brooklyn, and that made it real to Rommond too. He patted the buckled hull of the Hopebreaker, reminded that it was the last thing Brooklyn had worked on before his capture, before his death. To Rommond, it was all that was left of him.
Anyone else might have said: What about the memories? But as Rommond held up the name plate, he felt a growing anguish, because no matter how strong his love for Brooklyn was, he was finding it hard to remember all the little details that he once cherished.
“I'm starting to forget your face,” he whispered, speaking to the metal, to the flames, to the husk and ruin, perhaps even to the fleeting memories themselves.
He heard a footstep behind him, and then a voice. “Perhaps I can remind you.”
20 – AN IRON RAIN
The smog filled up the sky, until the spires of buildings could not be seen, until the city itself did not look like a city, but a place where the smoke gathered. It wafted up in plumes, offering the Skyshaker shelter, blinding the Treasury's greedy eyes.
The gunfire stopped, and there was peace in the heavens, even if it might only be a momentary peace, a truce called by man-made weather. Cantro stopped the engines, which clattered noisily until they wound down to no sound at all. The Skyshaker drifted there, letting the gentle winds guide it, letting the air support it.
“How long did you ask for?” Cantro queried when Taberah emerged from the gun turret and returned to the wheel.
“I didn't specify.”
Cantro pursed his lips, and Taberah knew that he did not approve.
I don't know how long we'll need, she thought.
* * *
Boulder never returned to the cargo bay, where Doctor Mudro toiled endlessly to get his own balloons prepared. The desperate flight of the Skyshaker, the rocking and the dodging, had damaged some of them, and had mixed up others, tangling their wires, which Mudro spent ages trying to unravel.
Then the smog came back, and Mudro knew that he had no more time to prepare. He pulled the lever down on the hatch door and let some of the balloons slip out. They inflated as they went, and the thin cords kept them attached to the vessel, all at varying lengths. He worked until his fingers had blisters, puffing on his pipe between each wave of balloons shoved through the hatch.
It took over an hour to get them all out, by which time Mudro was looking for more leaf to fill up his pipe again.
“We're all set,” he called into the intercom.
“Let's hope it works,” Taberah replied.
Mudro took a long inhale. He hoped it would not be his last.
* * *
The crew of the Skyshaker waited for a long time, knowing that this respite offered them sanctuary, but did nothing for Rommond or the others down below. For now the smog was helping, but if it remained for too long, it would be the end of them all.
Then, as if to answer all those fervent prayers, it began to break. A vicious and cold wind blew from the north, and though the smog gun still spewed its grey venom, the breeze dispersed it, until here and there parts of the Treasury balloons began to appear through the haze.
Yet they were not the only ones, for dozens of other balloons, bearing the emblem of the Resistance, filled the sky. Though the Treasury still had close to a hundred of its own fleet up there, they knew they were no match for the Skyshaker and its reinforcements, which appeared as if by magic.
And so they fled. The gunners abandoned their posts and helped the other crew guide the balloons far from the city, to the other Treasury refuges. The Treasury was a betting sort, but it did not continue raising the stakes on what it thought to be a losing bet. Money could not be made if they were dead.
“They bought it!” Mudro cried out, and he took a celebratory puff.
“Good work,” Taberah replied. “Your decoys look just like the real thing.”
“From afar,” Mudro said. “Thank the heavens they didn't look at them up close. And thank the hea
vens the Treasury did not open fire anew. My decoys can't fire back.”
* * *
To anyone in the city below, it seemed that the Treasury had all but abandoned them, though they still had many coin-counters in the city's banks. The sky was firmly in the control of the Resistance, whose emblems were illuminated by moonlight and gaslight. Regime soldiers far below attempted to shoot them down, but none of them had expected the Resistance to find a way of taking to the sky. That had always been the Treasury's domain, and with the Treasury essentially working for the Regime, or not openly opposing it, few saw a need to develop anti-aircraft guns.
Yet they should have.
The bombs began to fall on Blackout. Cantro drove the Skyshaker over the city, high enough to avoid the sentry gunfire, and low enough to see and strike the landships down below. The airship swept over the roofs of buildings, dropping its deadly ordnance on the barracks and bunkers, on the mounted gun positions and the moving convoys, and on every single target on Rommond's exhaustive list.
Some of the bombs went astray, blowing up buildings, or destroying monuments, though the latter were of the Iron Emperor, who had destroyed the more artistic monuments of the city's older times. Though many of those monstrosities fell, there were always more carvings of that illusive ruler, making his presence felt in places he had never visited.
The bombs fell like the iron tears of gods, who seemed forever weeping. While the smaller gods seemed to shed bullets, the greater gods had now joined in the metal mourning. For every tear dropped, a thousand more would flow from the eyes of the wounded and bereaved in the city far below.
Skyshaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 3) Page 10