By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel Read online

  The annoyance was all the greater because these days Bernat didn’t like where his mind went when unoccupied. It followed his eyes now to the northeast, where Durum lay far over the horizon. Somewhere in that war-ravaged town, Elise Dupre was trying to survive under the bootheel of the Vins.

  He shoved another lump of porridge into his mouth and swallowed without chewing. Stale, sharp bits of hardtack scratched the back of his throat and hurt all the way down his gullet, but he found the pain a welcome distraction.

  “Coming up on the Knees, sir,” Ensign Kember reported from the forward rail, her voice hoarser than the day before. The bandage around her neck rode a little higher this morning, and Bernat hoped the girl wasn’t hiking it up to conceal spreading putrefaction. There’d already been quite enough death aboard this ship.

  “That’s about a third of the way to Arle,” Josette said, apparently for his benefit.

  He tried to speak but found his words blocked by porridge. He spent some time clearing the obstruction, then said, “Is that all? It’s taking longer than the trip out.”

  “The wind was fair on the trip out,” Josette said. “Now it’s fighting us, and we with a damaged steamjack, limping along at a quarter power.”

  He looked over the side, gauging their speed by the passage of the fields below, where stalks of winter wheat bent under a wind in direct opposition to Mistral’s movement. The ship was hardly making headway against that chill breeze. “Rather different from an oceangoing vessel,” he said.

  Josette shrugged. “They live by the wind. We live in it.”

  It seemed to Bernat that her “we” had a more inclusive tone than he remembered, the last time she’d explained something about airship life to him.

  “What are you smiling at?” she asked.

  He hadn’t realized he was. He looked away, abashed. “Just a joke I heard.”

  *   *   *

  IN HER NEAR-CRIPPLED state, it took another two days and most of a night to bring Mistral to Arle. Apart from the delay itself, always anathema to an airship captain, it meant there was no hope of seeing Gears alive. Mistral’s chief engineer had been hit with canister shot over Canard and had almost as many holes in him as the steamjack. He’d been loaded onto a wagon bound for Arle with the rest of the wounded, and if he hadn’t died on the way, might have lingered in the hospital long enough for a final goodbye, if only Mistral had made better time. As it was, he was surely already in the grave, and if not already covered by earth, then covered by those who’d died after him.

  Josette focused on the beacon atop the airship shed, only a few minutes out. Dawn was still hours away, and that beacon was their only guide as they steamed toward the signal base’s landing circle.

  Mistral slid through the dark sky, slicing down toward the mooring mast until she was so close that the monkey rigger in the airship’s nose could reach out and take a line from the yardsman stationed atop the mast. The approach was so well-timed, despite the variable winds heaving the ship about, that the nose and mast did not make contact, but hung inches from each other until the monkey rigger drew in the line and tied on. With the ship secured forward, the ground crews clapped onto lines and kept a tight hold to keep Mistral from flopping like a fish in the blustery weather.

  They were reasonably successful, until Mistral was halfway into the shed. In that position, with her forward half shielded from the wind, but her great tailfins exposed to it and acting like a weathervane, a sudden gust blew the ship’s stern sharply to port, where there were only a few yards of clearance with the massive shed door. Josette called to the yardsmen, but before she could get an order out, she heard the crunch of plywood girders as the ship impacted at frame five.

  She ran to the port rail and took the measure of the situation in a fraction of a second, noting the angle of the ship, the relative positions of the door and starboard airscrews, the depth to which the superstructure was impaled, and the reactions of the men on the ground. She ran then to starboard, where the yardsmen were hauling on their ropes to yank Mistral off the door.

  “Hold!” she called. “Don’t pull! Watch for the rebound! Eyes on the tail!”

  In a rare display, and perhaps only due to the confusion of the moment, the yardsmen actually obeyed her orders. And well they did, for in another second the wind reversed, wrenching Mistral off the door, and threatened to swing her to port with equal force, where she would impact Ibis, the chasseur in the next berth. But the yardsmen were ready for it, and brought her back into alignment with little fuss.

  Josette looked back along the envelope to assess the damage. Girders were stove in and canvas ripped in a vertical line that stretched fifty feet up Mistral’s superstructure. The hurricane deck crew were utterly silent, waiting for her to explode into a frothing rage. But she only sighed and shook her head as Mistral was secured into her berth.

  Lieutenant Martel came forward from his station in the keel. Josette asked him, “Eager to get away from us?”

  “Not as such, Captain,” he said with a grin. “But I would like to get a start on securing spare planks and girders from the warehouse, before the quartermaster wakes up.”

  Josette had rarely won a battle with the quartermaster, but Martel seemed to have a knack for outmaneuvering her. “Then go, by all means,” Josette said. “Come back with our girders, or on them.”

  Martel went over the side, but was immediately stopped by a signal lieutenant, who said to him, “Congratulations, Captain.”

  This was not the first time someone had called Mistral’s first officer “captain.” Josette, in fact, had sometimes encouraged him to indulge the mistake, since the sort of person who made it was invariably someone she didn’t want to deal with. But alas, Martel answered, “You’re mistaken. The captain is still aboard ship, if you’d like to hail her.”

  “No mistake, Captain Martel,” the lieutenant said, handing over a folded piece of paper. Martel’s face lit up as he read it.

  Josette didn’t have to ask. She called down to him, “Well done, Captain.” He was still technically a lieutenant, as was she, but the Aerial Signal Corps had borrowed the navy’s manner of referring to any ship’s commander as its captain. “What ship did you get?”

  “Goose.”

  Goose was a semi-rigid, moored two berths over from Mistral. She was a reliable ship, if a bit on the sluggish side, even for a high-altitude scout. Josette had heard that Goose’s commander was leaving the air corps and joining the regular army after promotion to the rank of major, which was how it usually went with airship officers. An air officer with even the smallest measure of talent could advance from ensign to major in under ten years—or they could become a twisted, charred corpse in under a month. But for men who didn’t possess connections or family influence, the air corps might be their only chance at promotion.

  It was then that Bernat came down the companionway ladder to the hurricane deck, yawning, dabs of shaving powder still stuck to his jaw.

  “You’re not usually up this early,” Josette said. “It’s not even light out.”

  “I couldn’t sleep with the engine off.” He looked over the rail. “What’s going on down there?”

  “Martel has gotten the Goose,” Josette said. She hadn’t realized how it would sound until that moment.

  Bernat gave a sleepy smile. “I’m happy for him, of course, but I must ask: how many of Garnia’s airships are named in the service of some inane pun or un-clever turn of phrase?”

  Josette thought about it. “A little over half, I’d say.”

  “Captain.” Martel’s voice came from over the side. “About those girders…”

  “You must see to your ship, Captain,” Josette called back. “We’ll manage.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Martel said. “I mean … thank you.” He saluted her and, before she could even return it, had spun on his heels and was heading for Goose.

  “So,” Bernat said, watching him go, “if Martel gets the Goose, what do you g
et?”

  “The goose egg, probably.”

  Bernat flashed a triumphant smile, as if he’d asked with the particular hope of receiving that very response. When she eyed him, the smile faded to an expression of innocence, pure but for a small undercurrent of resentment at the unspoken accusation.

  She shook her head and called out, “Ensign Kember.”

  The girl appeared almost instantly.

  “Ensign, you will act as first officer until a replacement is appointed.”

  Kember first beamed, then went pale with a sudden fear. “Does that mean I have to deal with the quartermaster, sir?”

  Josette was about to answer in the affirmative, when she happened to glance down at the girl’s bandage. Every day, Ensign Kember had worn it a little higher, until it now covered not only her neck but her jaw and half her cheek on the right side. “No,” Josette said instead, “you will proceed without delay to the flight surgeon, to have that wound checked.”

  At this, Kember turned even more pale. “Sir, I’m sure I can help with—”

  “Without delay, Ensign.”

  *   *   *

  “IT HARDLY HURTS,” Kember said. “Ow!” She recoiled from the flight surgeon’s metal probe, convinced he had pricked the tender edge of the wound deliberately.

  Eyes stern, he continued to prod at the wound without speaking, and to tug at the stitches one of the riggers had sewn it shut with. Now and then he would press a square of gauze against the wound, then sniff at it. After each sniff, he cast his eyes up and shook his head in silent accusation.

  “It was only a graze,” she said. “It just tore the skin away.”

  “And you went back to work afterward?” It was the first time he’d opened his mouth since he began his examination.

  “Light duty,” Kember lied.

  He only grunted as he palpated the splotchy bruise on her face, which had grown upward from the wound over the past few days. Kember stared sidelong at him and tried to keep from squirming.

  He let go with a final snort. “I’ll have to have a word with your captain,” he said, in the same tone her schoolmasters had once used on her. “If you’d been resting instead of traipsing around, or if it wasn’t sewn up so tight, perhaps there’d be hope.”

  Kember’s eyes went wide at that last word.

  “It’s gone putrid, and there’s nothing I can do about it, so you’ll have to go to the hospital.”

  Her eyes went even wider at the thought of being sent to the hospital, where so many soldiers emerged in pieces, if they emerged at all.

  “If it weren’t so close to the artery, I’d only have to cut one or two ligatures and let it drain. As it is, they’ll have to slice halfway up your face and lay the skin open, so the corruption suppurates in the open air.” He shook his head once more, unwilling to look at her. “I’m sorry to say, you’ll never be pretty.”

  Never in her life had it occurred to Kember that she would be, nor did she expect it to ever be relevant, but now she faced the possibility that she’d end up hideous. Even so, her most immediate worry was that she’d cry out under the knife and make a fool of herself, and this was what occupied her thoughts as she made her way through the streets of Arle. Or, at least, it occupied her thoughts until she came within a block of the hospital, and the smell of that place nearly overwhelmed her. It wasn’t only the smell of corruption, of putrefying limbs and gangrenous flesh. Blended with those were the smell of an open latrine and the general reek of unwashed humanity. This stench came not from the hospital itself but from the camp that had grown up around it, occupied by soldiers maimed in recent battles.

  By law and custom, these men ought to have been shipped back to their hometowns, where they would have been dumped just as unceremoniously onto streets that would at least be familiar to them, but something must have gone wrong with the paperwork.

  As she moved through the camp, their resentful eyes followed her, peering out from what little shelter they’d managed to cobble together in the streets. “S’one of them lady officers,” a legless man said, for the benefit of his blinded companion.

  She had half a block to go, and picked up her pace. She passed a man whose shelter was covered by a broadsheet with the headline, “GARNIA’S HEROES!” She wondered if he’d chosen this for his roof out of a sense of pride or a sense of irony. That was assuming, of course, that he could read it at all.

  After a final dash past a score of Garnia’s heroes engaged in searching for their breakfast in a pile of fresh garbage from a nearby inn, Kember reached the hospital. It was more crowded than the street, with men packed into every square of floor save for a narrow corridor through the middle of the central hallway.

  Toward the back of the hospital, she found the officer’s ward only half full. The atmosphere was, if anything, jovial. Wounded officers hobbled about, or sat up in bed, chatting with each other. When she stepped inside, a major with a pencil-thin mustache stood up from a stool next to one of the beds, plucked the loosely rolled cigarette from between his lips, and asked, “Looking for something, Ensign?”

  She snapped to attention and saluted. “Flight surgeon sent me over to find a physician, sir.”

  “That’d be me.” Looking annoyed, the major stuck the cigarette back into the corner of his mouth. He walked right up to her, took her jaw in his hands, and turned it left and right, examining her wound as if it were an interesting trinket.

  A lieutenant in a nearby bed piped up, “Take care not to cry, Ensign. They treat officers like horses. If they think you’re in pain, they shoot you to put you out of your misery.”

  The major snorted and blew smoke into her face. “That’d be a waste of a goddamn bullet,” he said. Then he let her go. “You’ll be fine, but it’ll have to be cut open. Stay here.”

  The nearby lieutenant grinned and said, “Don’t worry, girl, I was only joking. The doctors here are the best in the army. They’ll have that head off so fast, you’ll hardly even feel it.”

  “Yes, sir,” was all Kember could think to respond, and this inspired a roar of laughter among the wounded officers. She didn’t get the joke, but she was glad she could serve as entertainment.

  The major returned, along with an assistant carrying a case of equipment. They sat her down on the edge of a bed.

  “Am I going to be hideous?” she asked.

  The major didn’t meet her eyes, keeping his attention on her bandages as he removed them. “Kid,” he said, “this morning I had to stretch the skin of a man’s ass cheek out and sew it over the bloody hole where his leg and his genitals used to be.”

  Ensign Kember was duly impressed, but she didn’t see how that answered her question. Still, she was too nervous to ask another, as the medical personnel began their work. The process was surprisingly painless, for the major began by making Kember swallow so much tincture of laudanum that she hardly knew what was going on. She gathered from their conversation that they were slicing into her face, laying the flesh open to ulcerate, and applying a bread poultice. But she was so dull and mellow that they really might have attempted to amputate her head, and she wouldn’t have raised more than a fuss over it.

  When it was finished, they led her to a small, solitary room. She remained there for the rest of the day and another night, of which she retained very little coherent memory, except for the vague impression of dogs scratching and growling outside her window.

  In the dark of the pre-dawn morning on the second day, the major visited her, examined the wound, and declared it to be weeping with “laudable pus.” What was laudable about it, Kember didn’t know. Perhaps it gave to charity. In any event, its appearance was sufficient to have her dismissed. Kember was pleased to hear it, for by now the effects of the laudanum were well behind her, and she had regained sense enough to fear the hospital.

  On her way out, she passed just as many men as she had on her way in, the hospital having made no real headway between admissions and discharges. So she moved carefully
through the space between them, stepping precisely so as not to squash someone’s hand or, God forbid, step on the stump of an amputation.

  But then, halfway down the hall, she saw a ghost. She ran the rest of the way, and didn’t slow down until she reached Mistral.

  *   *   *

  ALONE IN THE darkness of the shed, Josette and the mechanic’s mate stood on the hurricane deck of the scout airship Smew, surveying the instrument panel above them. The panel was suspended by stout springs between two girders, the better to preserve delicate instruments against the shocks and concussions of battle. Josette hauled herself up, set her back against one girder, snaked a leg around the other, and so suspended herself above the deck, within easy reach of the instruments.

  She reached down. Private Grey slapped a small wrench into her palm, then held up a lantern. As Josette went to work, Grey cleared her throat and said, “Are you sure this is okay, sir? Taking Captain Daumac’s instruments?”

  “Of course it is,” Josette said, without looking away from her work. “Captain Daumac and his ship are bound for Imix in Quah-Halach, where there will be plenty of spare instruments. Mistral is stuck here, where the quartermaster swears there are none. So all we’re doing, really, is helping to sort out the army’s logistics problems.”

  “I follow you, sir, but this isn’t exactly regular, is it? Pulling instruments out of another ship, in the dark, while everyone else is asleep?”

  Josette looked down from the panel and waved a greasy wrench at her. “Private Grey, in the Royal Aerial Signal Corps we stand as one. In both manpower and material, what belongs to one ship belongs to them all. We all pull together for the good of the service.”

  “I understand that, sir. My only question is, does Captain Daumac understand it?”

  “He will when he finds his chronometer missing.” With that, Josette freed the instrument and handed it down to Grey. “Install it in our panel. Don’t forget to add some dents and scratches, and blacken it with candle smoke so it matches the others.”