The Guns Above Page 10

  The tower was in sight by the time Bernat woke and came on deck, a little before noon. Josette ordered Ensign Kember to break out the quicklime signal lamp and then asked Bernat, “Slept well, I trust?”

  “Very poorly at first,” he said, stretching his arms high enough to touch the keel girder overhead. “But once the sun came up, I managed to slip away.” He waited for Kember to go up the companionway ladder, then leaned in to speak to Josette in a whisper. “That girl has the bunk in front of mine, and she breaks wind continuously from the moment she falls asleep. Makes it dreadfully hard to nod off.” He kept looking at Josette, as if expecting her to present a solution.

  Josette shot him a sideways glance. “What do you want me to do, have a word with her?”

  “Couldn’t you?”

  She was about to offer a very curt answer, when Kember came back down the companionway, trailing a length of hose behind her and carrying a signal lamp. As Kember prepared the lamp, Josette said, “Just be happy you’re not in the navy, where there’s no fresh air.”

  “And while we’re on the subject,” Bernat said, “it’s terribly noisy aboard this ship.” He paused, as if waiting for commiseration, or perhaps admiration for making such a cogent observation. “I wonder if you might consider having the engine shut down while people are trying to sleep?”

  The entire deck crew paused in their duties so they could turn and stare at Bernat.

  “Or perhaps only reduced to an idle?”

  “I’ve often proposed as much,” Josette said. “Along with having a nursemaid aboard every airship to tuck us in and read a story at night. Sadly, the army has been perfectly intransigent on the subject. Something about there being a war on.”

  That shut the fop up. He slunk over to his now-habitual spot at the starboard rail and started writing in his little notebook, holding it over the side where no one could see. He looked up from time to time and cast sly looks at her.

  When the signal lamp was ready, Kember flashed a message to the semaphore station, summarizing the progress of Mistral’s air trials.

  Josette, telescope trained on the station, read the acknowledging triple flash from their signal lamp. While the semaphore arms spelled out some routine message bound for the next station, the lamp flashed weather updates, along with a sketchy report of a Vinzhalian airship snooping around Durum, up to the north.

  Josette didn’t mention the report of the Vin airship to the crew, but Kember must have read the flashing message with her naked eye and whispered it to someone, because there was a palpable sense of resentment when Josette ordered the ship westward, to avoid the possibility of enemy contact during their trials.

  After several hours, they were cruising over scattered farms and woodland, well away from the putative enemy ship. Josette called up the companionway to Sergeant Jutes, “Inform Chips that I want a repair party standing ready, and let the crew know we’re performing high-speed maneuvering trials.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jutes said, his voice more subdued than usual. Perhaps, with life hanging in the balance, he was feeling sentimental. He relayed the order and the information.

  Josette steeled herself. “Steamjack to emergency power. Corporal Lupien, hard right rudder.”

  “Hard right, sir.” Lupien spun the wheel, hand over hand.

  Mistral’s nose swung to the right with increasing speed. At the rail, Bernat was taken by surprise, but grabbed a suspension rope in time to avoid falling overboard. Mistral really was nimble in a turn, which was a credit to her ugly sardine shape, but a quicker turn also increased the stress on her superstructure.

  “Do clip on, my lord,” Josette said. Her eyes were on the rudder wheel, her fingers wrapped loosely around the keel girder above her station.

  “She’s hard over, sir,” Lupien said. “Rudder’s a bit mushy.”

  Josette had already felt it in the pops and sprangs echoing down the keel. The ship was bending in the middle, shortening the direct length between bow and stern, which created slack in the rudder cable.

  It was perfectly normal. Ideal, in fact, for the keel had to bend so it wouldn’t break. “Hard left rudder,” she said. “Elevators up full.”

  The bow angled up and the ship reversed its turn, rising in a tight spiral. Bernat looked like he was about to puke.

  “If you’re not feeling well, go up into the keel,” Josette said. It was good advice, though she really just wanted him and his stupid notebook off her deck. “You only feel sick because you’re looking out at the horizon, but if you—”

  She felt a sharper pop in the girder under her fingertips. She relaxed slowly, and was nearly convinced it was only her imagination, when there followed a flurry of snaps echoing along the girder. It reminded her of the sound of a handful of dry pasta being cracked in half.

  “Rudder amidships!” she called, spinning on her heels. “Level elevators!” She was already halfway up the companionway and running hard. “Landing stations!” She leapt into the keel and sprinted aft.

  Jutes’s voice cracked as he repeated, “Landing stations!” He shouted it once toward the stern and once down the companionway to the deck.

  She was past him now and around the gearbox. All along the keel, the crew froze as terror splashed across their faces. Everyone, even the rookies, knew what an unscheduled call to landing stations meant.

  It meant the ship was going down.

  “Work party aft! Planks and cable!” As the crew scrambled, Josette saw Gears ahead of her, already rushing aft but at half her speed. The bisected catwalk amidships was too narrow for her to get past him. She was just short of running into him when she planted her hand on the steamjack housing and vaulted over it to the other side. The skin on her palm sizzled against the hot metal, and the passage left her trousers smoking where they had skidded across.

  The pain didn’t slow her down. With a clear path on this side, she ran even faster, past the boiler, streaking through the sleeping berths, pushing past Corne, who stood wide-eyed in the middle of the walkway, frightened and overwhelmed.

  She could see the damage now. In frame two, just forward of the tail cone, the five longitudinal keel girders, the girders that made up the very spine of the ship, were twisting as if an invisible colossus had grabbed the ship around the middle. Splinters spit out of the strained girders as she ran. She was a few yards away when one of the two overhead keel girders failed entirely, shearing in half with a hard crack, like the report of a rifle. The shock went through the ship, buckling the catwalk under her feet and sending dust and splinters flying up all along the keel. The jagged ends of the broken girder tore a long gash in the number-two luftgas bag immediately above it.

  She could see the plywood already splintering from the adjacent overhead girder as it took the strain from its broken neighbor. It was not a great deal of force, but it was in exactly the wrong place, and in another second this girder would snap too, transferring its strain to the three girders below, which would then snap in turn. The whole affair might take a minute, if that, and then the entire tail cone would tear open from top to bottom, shredding the four aftmost gas bags and sending Mistral spiraling to the ground.

  In those fractions of fractions of seconds, in the space between two pounding heartbeats, Josette still ran toward the broken girder, not because she could do any good, but because it had simply not occurred to her to stop. She was barely in frame two when the other overhead longitudinal snapped, one broken end ratcheting upward to tear a second gash in the bag above, while the other just vibrated like a plucked guitar string.

  Here it comes, she thought.

  Another heartbeat thumped in her chest. In her head, she saw the forces that were tearing her ship apart with amazing clarity. She could have written an exacting scientific paper on them, if she’d only had the time. It would certainly save the engineers in Kuchin a lot of guesswork as they picked through the wreckage.

  It was with this thought in mind, and not hope for herself or even for her crew, tha
t she leapt and grabbed for the second severed girder, pulling herself up as if onto a tree’s lowest branch. She wrapped her arms around the near end of the break and her legs around the far end, her body spanning the empty space between to hold her ship together with mere flesh and bone.

  But it was not the strength of her body that she now utilized. It was her weight, small but precisely placed, that countered the forces acting on the failed girder. With that weight, she took enough of the strain off the remaining girders to put off their failure for a few precious seconds.

  “Grab me around the belly and pull!” she cried as Gears finally reached frame two. Before he even had a chance to hesitate, she added, “Now!”

  Standing on the catwalk, he reached up, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled.

  “Pull yourself all the way up, goddamn it!”

  She groaned as he put his full weight on her abdomen. The man weighed a ton, and thank God for it. She held on, half expecting him to rip her in two.

  Grey, the mechanic’s mate, had come with line under one arm and a plank under the other, but it would all be meaningless if they couldn’t relieve the stress on the tail. “Pass the word,” she shouted. “Elevators hard down.” Three people relayed the order simultaneously. “Now bring that line here!”

  Josette, her arms occupied, pointed with her nose to the first failed girder. “Lash the ends of the break to the keel girders in frame three, wherever they can stand the strain.” She noticed that she was speaking in a ridiculous, high-pitched voice that might have been comical at another time. It meant they were losing luftgas from the number-two bag, but that was a distant worry.

  She felt some of the strain come off the girder as the ship pitched down, but she didn’t dare allow Gears to let go. Grey was making quick work of the lines. The carpenter arrived and, instantly assessing the situation, lashed another rope to the spot just beyond Josette’s head.

  Now Martel arrived. For a moment, Josette worried there was too much weight in frame two, but instantly damned herself for her own stupidity. More weight under the break might delay the next girder failure, and they needed every second. “Nic,” she said, “send Kember aft to shift weight out of frame one.”

  Ensign Kember, the lightest person aboard and therefore the most qualified to venture aft without breaking the tail off, stepped quickly but lightly into frame one, and began throwing everything that wasn’t tied down forward along the keel.

  The repair party lashed line after line, and as each line was pulled taut, Josette could feel the strain coming off. In the time between, though, it seemed the strain was creeping back in, robbing them of all their progress. Or even outstripping it, she thought, when the girders gave an ominous creak.

  She couldn’t imagine what could be increasing the strain, until she suddenly realized that the culprit was the luftgas leak in bag two. She should have known that immediately, and would have if she’d spent a second thinking about it before dismissing the leak as inconsequential. The diminishing lift in the leaking bag was reducing the support on the tail, causing it to droop. “Martel!” she called down the keel, her voice squeaky and breathless. “We’re hogging! Bring a work party and patch these leaks.” As she spoke, her vision narrowed into a tunnel, the inert luftgas having robbed the outside air of its vitality as they mixed.

  “Sir,” Gears said. “Getting a bit dizzy, sir. I’m not sure I can hold on any longer.”

  “Goddamn it, man, not now! We’re right on the edge here!” Stars swirled in front of her eyes as she spit out the words, and her vision narrowed until all she could see was a pinpoint of light. But even as her vision failed, she could hear the creak of the girders growing louder. There was a thump as Gears fell to the catwalk, and then even her hearing faded.

  She was insensible for what seemed only an instant, but when she came to, she was staring into the face of Private Grey. “Captain,” Grey said, as she slathered a cloth patch with steaming pitch and positioned it over a puncture in the bag.

  “Private.” Josette nodded back. She must have been out for at least a minute, but she was still hanging from the girder. “I didn’t let go?”

  Grey looked away. “Er, not as such, sir,” she said.

  Josette became aware of an odd, steady pressure against her back, like a lumpy hammock holding her up. She noticed a pair of hands on the longitudinals on either side of her head, and looked down to see another pair of legs wrapped around the girder on the other side of the break. Some quick-thinking crewman must have grabbed on underneath her, relieving Gears and becoming a human hammock to hold Josette’s insensible body up. Their combined weight had kept the keel stable when otherwise it would have snapped.

  “Whoever these hands belong to,” she said, “I hope you know you’ve saved all our lives.”

  The work party became strangely quiet. From somewhere forward, she heard Gears clearing his throat.

  “Is that so?” asked a squeaky but still ostentatious voice directly below her head. “Saved everyone? Well, I shall have to write Mother about this. She’ll be thrilled.”

  Only then did Josette notice the frilly ruffles on her savior’s sleeves. She closed her eyes and thumped her aching forehead into the girder.

  * * *

  HE COULDN’T SEE her face, and the luftgas made it difficult to read her voice, but Bernat had a very good read on Dupre’s carriage, since he was pressed rather firmly against it. And, though everyone warned that the ship would crash if he let go, he could tell that Dupre was on the fence about shrugging him off.

  She said in a quiet hiss, “I swear, if that isn’t a roll of coins in your trousers, I will throw you overboard and tell everyone it was a tragic accident.”

  The object in his pants was, in fact, a roll of coins—part of his first week’s payment from Uncle Fieren. “My dear captain,” he said, loud enough for the entire work party to hear, “take it as a compliment.”

  She tensed even more. “Are all aristocrats such uncouth animals?”

  “If I have given any offence,” he said, “you need only call me out, and I will happily offer satisfaction.”

  This elicited some snickers from the crew, which Dupre silenced with a glance. “I take that to mean a duel,” she said, “and I am sorely tempted by the thought.”

  “Would you prefer pistols at dawn, or shall I visit you in the night with my longsword?”

  “Chips!” she called. “When the hell will this goddamn girder be braced?”

  “Very soon, sir,” the carpenter answered from directly under them. He stood up with a plank under his arm and, climbing on a pile of sandbags, positioned it over the girder and tied it across the break. Chips added three more planks, one to each side of the girder, spanning the break. “There you are, sir. Better’n new.”

  “That means you can let go,” Dupre said, after hardly a second.

  “Sorry, I’m … just a little stiff,” Bernat said, as he slowly uncoiled from the girder. He put his feet on the sandbags and stood.

  Before he could even brush off his coat, Dupre was down and pushing past him. “Reinforce the rest of this frame,” she said, and went forward at a brisk pace.

  Bernat sat on the sandbags and massaged the feeling back into his legs. “So we all nearly died, did we?”

  Most of the work party simply nodded their heads respectfully, but Grey smiled at him and said, “We would have, if not for you, my lord.”

  “I only saw everyone’s distress and followed the captain’s example,” Bernat said. “It was she who saved us.” He didn’t want to bolster Dupre’s image with the crew, but he detected a certain bashfulness in Grey’s voice. It suggested a romantic sentiment, which he wished to head off as soon as possible.

  “My lord is too modest,” she said.

  He gave her a purposefully strained, neutral smile and then went forward. It was a damn shame she’d chased him off, too, for he’d come up with a particularly biting line about Dupre “fainting in the midst of a crisis, and so e
ndangering all souls aboard” and he wanted to duck into his berth and jot it down before he forgot.

  Instead, he continued forward, receiving accolades from the crew through the entire length of the ship. These were men of a station who would otherwise have shied away from even speaking to an aristocrat unless spoken to first, but passing them on the narrow catwalk necessitated physical contact, which they now seemed to take as an invitation for handshakes and pats on the back. He made it to the companionway just in time to watch a pigeon being released, and to hear Dupre say, “Of course; it would have to be Durum.”

  She was examining a map with Martel, in the relatively calm air of the keel forward of the companionway. “Durum’s shed is on the small side, but it should hold us,” Martel said.

  “It’s not that. It’s…” She trailed off, tracing a bandaged finger over the map. Her left hand was wrapped in linen. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll overfly the semaphore station at The Knuckle and then set course for Durum.”

  Martel nodded and went down to the hurricane deck to order a course change, reminding Corporal Lupien to “turn her easy.”

  Dupre stowed the maps and spread a diagram of the ship’s tail out on the bench. She began marking it with a pencil.

  Bernat hit his head on an overhead girder as he approached her, and felt one of the little sideways bits of wood cracking from the force of it. Dupre was close enough to hear it but didn’t pay it any mind, so he supposed it wasn’t a terribly important part of the ship. “I’ve always wanted to visit Durum,” he said, looking down at her map.

  “Just say the word,” she said, without looking up, “and I will happily arrange a long vacation for you.”

  “Tempting,” he said. “I would like to meet the former lover you left behind.”

  The timbre of her annoyed sigh told him that he’d guessed wrong. She didn’t have a former lover in Durum. Well, of course she didn’t. He should have known that. With this woman, there would likely be no future lover, either.