As if I needed another reason to nobble this skyfleet, Aubrey thought.
He pushed off and let his negative buoyancy drift him upward until he reached the wing-like stabiliser. He felt a tug on the cord around his waist and he looked down to see that Caroline had emerged from under the hull and was on her way to joining him. He gave her an encouraging wave, then he clambered around the stabiliser and rose again.
Overhead, the guns roared again, but soon their job was taken over by the lesser armaments, the twenty-millimetres peppering the sky. Ornithopters darted and dived, doing their best to remain below the angle of the big guns, but they were still exposed. They were fewer in numbers now, and Aubrey flinched when one exploded and tumbled away.
Aubrey had judged things so that their rate of ascent was gentle enough to get them to the gangway smoothly without leaving them exposed for too long. Soon, while the aerial battle raged around them, they were past what would have been the waterline of the great vessel and the landing platform was within reach. Aubrey held his breath and, when the platform came close, he seized the metal with both hands and closed his eyes, briefly, grateful for the solidity that was now underfoot after half an hour of having nothing beneath them except a very distant and very hard Trinovant.
One by one, his friends joined him. George untied the silk rope and looped it until he could stow it in his pack. Aubrey peered up the ladder and along the sides of the ship, looking for anyone who could be at the rails to observe the aerial battle, but the ship was free of spectators.
Despite seeing no crew on any of the flanking ships, Aubrey couldn’t be sure that Dr Tremaine wouldn’t have a crew of soldiers aboard the flagship.
He shared his concerns and Sophie had a suggestion. ‘A change of appearance?’
‘Just the thing.’
Sophie cast a light Familiarity spell. It was very delicate – Aubrey didn’t want to risk bringing them to the notice of Dr Tremaine – and the casting didn’t take long. Sophie frowned, but before she could wonder aloud if it had worked, Aubrey reassured her. ‘I can feel the magic. Any Holmlanders will think we look like Holmlanders, once we’re inside.’
The hatch at the head of the inclined ladder was open – arrogantly open – and Aubrey paused again for a moment. He tried to listen over the sound of the guns, but shook his head with frustration. With the din of the battle, he wouldn’t have heard a draught horse galloping up and down the corridor.
After a deep, steadying breath, he stepped inside Dr Tremaine’s flagship.
A passageway, dark apart from a crusty electric light right at the end, twenty yards away. The hatch and the bulkheads were military grey, the no-nonsense colour announcing that this ship was all about lethal guns and heavy armour, not namby-pamby things like colour schemes. Aubrey spread himself along one wall, doing his best to merge with it while a part of him marvelled at how real it was. Inside, there was nothing cloud-like about it. It had the phlegmatic solidity of a real battleship.
He shook his head. Was some level of magic involved here? Was Dr Tremaine’s magic using Aubrey’s own expectations of how a battleship should appear and shaping the surroundings? Wherever he looked, the details were perfect: fire hoses neatly coiled by brass outlets, raised thresholds of doors (hatches!), the smell of oil and cordite, sweat and boiled cabbage.
He beckoned. Caroline slipped through the hatch with her pistol at the ready, then Sophie, then George. The rapid thumping of the guns eased for a moment and the dominant sound became the turbines, which Aubrey now realised he’d been feeling through the soles of his boots ever since they stepped onto the landing platform.
Aubrey signalled to the others to holster their pistols. Sophie’s Familiarity spell could cope with much dissonance, but the outright threat signalled by a drawn firearm would probably strain its ameliorating influence. It was far better to act as if they belonged there, strolling with confidence and speaking in Holmlandish, anything to help any Holmlanders they might find on the ship to overlook the details that set Aubrey and his friends apart.
This, of course, meant that George had to remain silent, a part that he played assiduously. He took up a position next to Sophie and behind Aubrey and Caroline. A glance over Aubrey’s shoulder told him that his friend was walking with his hands behind his back – confident, at ease, in charge – as Sophie spoke. George was judging by the rhythms of her speech and the expressions on her face when to shake his head, when to nod, when to essay a disbelieving grunt.
The hands behind the back was a nice touch, Aubrey thought, but it served the double purpose of keeping George’s hands near the small pistol he had secreted in the rear of his waistband under his jacket.
Since the magical connection he shared with Tremaine was currently vague and unhelpful, careful exploration was the key if they were to find Dr Tremaine. The bridge – the domain of any good commander – was atop the superstructure in the middle of the main deck, so Aubrey took the first ladder that presented itself, then kept moving through passageways and breezeways, ignoring intersections that, to judge from the noise, led to engineering sections and machinery spaces, pumps and foundries.
So intent was he on the charade, listening to Caroline’s bland points about victualling and giving the Familiarity spell something to work with, that it took Aubrey some time to realise that they hadn’t encountered anyone.
They’d passed crew quarters and what looked like a carpenter’s shop, but they hadn’t run into, passed or overtaken any Holmland sailors. In between the thumping of the guns, their feet actually echoed on the polished timber. Even when an massive explosion nearby made the Sylvia stagger, no curious faces presented themselves at hatches, no cries of alarm went up from the depths of the boiler room.
‘A ghost ship,’ he said in Holmlandish to Caroline.
She gave him a startled look and paused in the middle of her explanation of how to make pea soup for four hundred sailors. ‘Not literally, I hope.’
‘I was alluding to the lack of crew. We seem to be alone.’
‘Or the sailors are all somewhere else,’ Sophie said, but the suggestion wasn’t comforting. Aubrey didn’t really want to imagine a place where the entire crew of a battleship would be gathered, waiting, armed and ready for them.
78
They stepped out onto the main deck through a hatch near the portside rails and were once again in the middle of a raging aerial battle. A few hundred yards away one of the skyfleet’s destroyers was on fire, flames rising high along its entire length. An explosion burst through its side and the stern dropped precipitously so that the whole ship was sailing at an awkward angle, bow up, stern down, more evidence that in Dr Tremaine’s efforts to create a threatening skyfleet, the cloudstuff had become solid and material – to the detriment of the vessels, in this circumstance.
This moment of satisfaction was balanced by the bleak possibility of a rain of solid cloudstuff falling on Trinovant. It would be almost as destructive as bombs.
Aubrey found himself hoping that Dr Tremaine’s spellwork was up to its usual standard and that the skyships would keep their structural integrity once damaged. He’d be happy if the damaged ships drifted away from the battle, harmless, instead of falling apart and subjecting Trinovant to more death from the skies.
A hideous ratcheting nearby made Aubrey spin around to see the massive central turret of the Sylvia moving, with its fifteen-inch guns turning in their direction.
Caroline pulled him down behind a ventilator. He clapped his hands over his ears just as the big guns cut loose. The deck shook and air itself punched him hard enough to take the breath from his lungs. The shells screamed as they flew from the massive barrels, shrieking maniacally as if gleeful at being set free.
Aubrey squirmed around on his stomach and saw four ornithopters darting about near the crippled vessel. His heart went out to plucky pilots who’d coaxed their uncooperative machines that far.
The big guns fell silent, as if embarrassed at their inabili
ty to bring down a few flapping nuisances, and the machine guns and smaller armaments on the deck took over with sharp, emphatic chattering, a metallic chorus that mounted in intensity as round after round howled toward the Albion aircraft.
Aubrey wasn’t surprised, really, that all of this aiming, firing and reloading was happening without any sign of a human hand. The machine guns swivelled and the six-inch guns tracked targets entirely by themselves. He was aware of the magic that enabled such autonomous, implacable behaviour and it efficiently made the most of mechanical processes while supplementing them with magical power. The ships may have once been as insubstantial as the clouds they were made of, but Dr Tremaine had made them as solid as anything in the Holmland navy.
One of the ornithopters was swooping over the stern of the crippled destroyer. Tracer bullets lanced from it as it tried to damage the rudder and propellers. Aubrey had no idea if the steering mechanism were of any use in sailing through the sky – he suspected not – but he applauded the ingenuity of the attack, even while he was aghast at such close manoeuvring, where a minute misjudgement could doom the ornithopter and its crew.
The ornithopter became a fireball. One moment it was banking close to the stern of the ship it was attacking, the next it erupted. It tumbled, trailing a tail of fire behind it like a comet, and Aubrey was momentarily crushed. That such bravery was rewarded with such a death. There was no poetry, no deserved outcomes, just messy and inconvenient ends.
Aubrey didn’t want to ignore the deaths he’d just witnessed, nor try to forget them, but he wasn’t going to allow them to stop him. They had been a reminder that there was little nobility in a conflict like this, but that didn’t mean that he should give up.
George and Sophie were scrambling toward the rails on the port side of the Sylvia, both open-mouthed in astonishment as a dirigible rose, rapidly piercing the gap between the Sylvia and its companion battleship half a mile away. Its metallic surface caught the flames of the crippled destroyer and made it a shimmering presence; as it rose, it blotted out a fair portion of the skies. Amid the darting, jerky flight of the ornithopters and the ponderous motion of the warships, the dirigible was eerily graceful in the aerial battleground, moving with majestic calm.
It was the A 405 – assisted by a bank of magical altitude enhancers.
The giant airship was fully as long as the Sylvia, a match for it in size and, perhaps, capable of contesting it for domination of the skies. Aubrey held his breath as it ascended rapidly, the massive engines straining to push it past the lethal level where the guns of the skyfleet could be brought to bear. Tracer bullets whipped from machine guns toward the A 405, but either the aluminium cladding was sufficient to deflect the bullets or the distance was too great and the great airship was unaffected as it climbed.
Aubrey wanted to stand up and cheer the brave aviators who were crewing the A 405, but he was grateful for the protection of the ventilator when the airship returned fire – proof that the time spent in regassing and fitting the airship with altitude enhancers had also been spent on more lethal improvements. The ventilator rang when a volley of shots stitched it. Aubrey and Caroline flattened themselves to the deck. When the shooting moved on with the progress of the airship, crossing the deck and making a mess of a series of wooden covered hatchways, Aubrey risked a peek. With so many gun barrels protruding, the gondola attached to the underside of the A 405 looked like a porcupine. Flame flashed from the barrels as the machine guns chattered, filling the air with humming death.
Ornithopters were streaking about, using the distraction provided by the presence of the A 405 to pepper the warships. Explosions erupted on skyfleet vessels, the result of bombs dropped by game ornithopter crew members. For a time, the scene was reminiscent of one of the gaudier fireworks displays commemorating the late King’s birthday.
A deep-throated thump came from the A 405. The airship heaved and yawed, bucking like a skittish horse, a sight remarkable in such a large craft. The bow of the battleship on the far side of the A 405 was enveloped in a gigantic fireball. The airship actually staggered, its nose pushed aside by the violence of the explosion. A few seconds later and the Sylvia itself was struck by the concussion. The massive flagship rolled sickeningly and Aubrey found the deck tilting away from him. Desperately, he grasped Caroline’s forearm when she began to slide away from him. With his other hand he clutched the corner of a hatch cover and hung on until the ship caught itself, hesitated, then began the long roll back.
As the aerial battlefield returned to view, Aubrey lifted his head to see that the A 405 was no longer the sleek, elegant craft that had come to fight. The front third of the dirigible was rapidly losing its shape, with aluminium panels falling from it like confetti. The guns in the gondola kept firing, but their volleys were now haphazard as the airship wallowed, having lost its airworthiness.
On the other side, however, the battleship the A 405 had attacked was fully aflame. The fireball that had swallowed the bow was fiercely working its way along the length of the vessel, which was listing badly and losing its way. The ship began to curve away from the skyfleet formation, crippled and useless, its superstructure canted at forty-five degrees or more, but still buoyed by the magic of Dr Tremaine.
The A 405 began to fall. It went slowly, and Aubrey could only hope that many of the gasbags were undamaged by the assault that had torn open the bow of the massive craft. In a last effort, firing from the gondola redoubled. Heavier calibre bullets replaced the light machine gun fire, ricocheting from the turrets and the cranes of the Sylvia, then small shells followed and began to do significant damage. Glass shattered, and one of the antenna arms snapped from the main array over the bridge. It crashed to the deck near the forecastle, narrowly missing George and Sophie, who were huddled behind the conning tower.
Dr Tremaine may have a magically enhanced aerial weapon platform, Aubrey decided, holding onto his beret with both hands, but someone quick-thinking in the Albion military had decided that two could play that game.
He signalled to his friends and then he ran for the nearest deckhouse – a narrow structure near the gun turret – and flung it open. He took one last look at the crazily brave A 405 and its crew firing for all they were worth and he wished them well. If it didn’t take any more damage, it should be able to land safely, but it wasn’t about to continue the battle, which was a pity. More ornithopters were joining the fray, however, as the pilots came to terms with the altitude enhancers. In the distance, a brace of incendiary devices struck a destroyer. It was ablaze, but still kept formation in the dogged circling of Trinovant.
Aubrey found himself in an ammunition supply shaft, something that he wasn’t sanguine about. When under attack, he would have preferred not being near ordnance or anything else explosive. He climbed down the ladder hastily, to allow his friends to escape from the dangerously exposed deck. The deckhouse hatch slammed shut, George crying out that they were all safe. Aubrey descended faster, past the racks and racks of shells waiting to be fed into the hungry maws of the guns above.
At the bottom of the shaft was the generous powder and shot magazine, which not only provided the shells for the big guns, but was also one of the main stores for the ammunition for the rest of the ship’s armaments. A knuckle rap confirmed that the walls were far thicker than in the rest of the ship, which was sensible even in a ship made of cloudstuff, as the munitions store was a place that any enemy would love to hit. Aubrey found time – a lingering instant or two – to admire the magically enhanced conveyance and loading apparatus, a combination of clever machinery and friction-reducing spellwork that worked entirely without human intervention. Remarkable stuff.
When Aubrey reached the bottom of the shaft, he waited anxiously for his friends to join him while the Sylvia rang to the battle around it. Caroline steered him out of the munitions store and onto a heavy meshed walkway. It extended out over a dark and clangorous area that shook with the hammering of pumps, so his ears had no respite from the as
sault they had been exposed to. Again, Aubrey wondered at Dr Tremaine’s efforts at verisimilitude. The ship had no water to pump out of the hold – what was the point of operational pumps?
Gone were the narrow corridors of the upper decks. This part of the ship was more like a large factory with open walkways and exposed machinery, the ceiling far overhead, studded with electrical lights.
They reached an intersection. Boiler rooms were ahead, but a ghostly wave of magic brushed Aubrey as he tried to puzzle out the Holmlandish sign that detailed what they might find to their left and right. The industrial clamour of the bowels of the ship was overlaid with a pungent floral sensation, sound and smell being swirled together as his magical senses tried to cope with what they were experiencing.
Then Caroline asked the question which had remained unasked – but needed asking. ‘Where is he?’
Aubrey touched his chest. The magical connection that linked him with Dr Tremaine was quiescent, barely there at all and giving no indication of the rogue sorcerer’s location, but having come so far he wasn’t about to let such a thing stop him, especially not since he’d been thinking about the challenge of finding Dr Tremaine ever since the ornithopter had left the ground.
Back in Stalsfrieden, in Baron von Grolman’s factory, Aubrey had observed Dr Tremaine enhance the connection when he wanted to examine its nature – and Aubrey’s curiosity made him a very good observer. If Dr Tremaine could augment the connector, why couldn’t Aubrey do the same? He’d have to be careful, but if he could awaken it – just slightly – it could be enough to show the way.
‘I need to do some magic,’ he announced.
‘I hope this isn’t just a whim,’ George said. Like the others, he was scanning their surroundings, as if expecting a horde of Holmlanders to descend on them at any minute. ‘Tell me it’s something useful.’
‘If I’m right, it should tell me where Dr Tremaine is.’
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