By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel Read online

  The inhabitants of the basement froze where they were, every eye raised to the ceiling. Above, furniture was pushed over with enough force to dislodge streamers of dust, and boots stomped from one side of the cottage to the other. There were more than four Vins, Bernat thought. Perhaps as many as ten, and they were searching every square inch.

  The Garnians in Heny’s basement had not been prepared. They were less prepared, indeed, than they had been at any other time since Bernat and his party arrived, for everything had been set for them to return to Mistral.

  Their rifles were unprimed, unloaded, and bundled tight in canvas, in the perfect order for travel, and in the absolute worst order for fighting the Vins. They couldn’t even be unwrapped now, let alone loaded, without risking a sound that would carry through the floor and betray them.

  Josette had quietly freed a cutlass from her bundle, but that was the group’s only viable weapon. Bernat didn’t even have his cane. When it happened, he’d been talking with Zeren—talking in quite a friendly manner, in fact. Now he stood frozen in place, looking across the writing desk that separated them. The prisoner was tied to his chair by his ankles, but the chair wasn’t restrained at all, and could be clattered about on the floor. None of them had thought of that, until the danger made the oversight both too obvious to miss and too late to correct.

  One of the men from the signal base had stuffed a rag into Khirklov’s mouth and was now leaning on his shoulders to hold him down, but Bernat didn’t think either precaution would keep him quiet, if he was determined to give them away. And so Bernat implored him to silence with nothing more than a mute expression. Zeren didn’t meet his eyes—a bad sign.

  Suddenly, Bernat felt cold steel on his shoulder, and whipped his head around so fast that he almost cut his own throat on the cutlass Private Kiffer was trying to give him. It was the one Josette had retrieved, and must have been quietly passed from man to man across the room.

  For a moment he believed that Josette only meant to arm him in case the Vins upstairs broke in.

  No, that was a lie. He didn’t believe that was her intent for even for a moment. But perhaps for a moment he wished that he believed it. Of course the sword was not being given to him for his defense, which would be pointless in any case if the Vins stormed the basement in force. The sword was being given as a tool of murder—cold-blooded murder—in case Zeren tried to make a sound.

  Now Zeren met his eyes, and though the prisoner could hardly shrug with someone holding him down, his resigned smile had much the same effect.

  Bernat despaired. Not two minutes earlier, he’d been chatting amiably with the man. And it wasn’t only that he’d been chatting amiably, but the fact that he could chat amiably—he had conquered the urge to violence, and never more would that urge rule him. Here was this man whom Bernat had once wanted to beat to death, for no other reason than he was the enemy. If he was being honest with himself, Bernat knew even then that he wouldn’t really have done it. He’d known, as soon as Josette forebade him to harm the man, that while he would struggle with the order, he would not struggle in vain.

  He had always believed—believed on a level so deep that it went unquestioned by dint of never being noticed in the first place—that just such a test would be put before him. Now he clung to that buried idea, that God or fate or some other force had brought him to this moment and put the very sword in his hand, so that he wouldn’t use it.

  Questioning it now, he found hope, for he knew that this was the final test, that he only had to hold out for a few seconds longer, and the trapdoor would open, and Heny would stick her head through to tell them the Vins were gone, that they were safe, that Bernat was free again.

  But the trapdoor did not open. Heny did not stick her head through.

  Zeren—his friend Zeren, his private struggle Zeren, Zeren the final test before Bernat could mend himself and become a whole person again—Zeren spat out his gag and drew in a breath.

  Bernat’s cutlass was up and clean through Zeren’s windpipe before a single syllable could pass the man’s lips. He stared back at Bernat, eyes wide with the most genuine surprise, breath escaping from around the steel blade in a hiss punctuated by soft gurgling.

  Bernat held it there while Zeren’s life drained away, down the front of his uniform. He held it there until Josette finally walked up behind him and, with exquisite gentleness, took the blade from his hand. At some point in between—he couldn’t say exactly when, but far too late in any case—Heny had stuck her head through the trapdoor to tell them the Vins were gone.

  *   *   *

  WORD SPREAD QUICKLY through the ship: they were gaining.

  Well, of course they were gaining. The Vin captain was sharp enough to remain at full power, and not be baited into overtaxing his steamjack. If he was committed to teasing Mistral along, he would steam at full power until Mistral was just on the edge of cannon range, then take his pick from any number of sound gambits. He might match her speed then, or pull away under proper emergency power, confident that Mistral would by then be too overstrained to keep up. Or he might simply stay at full power, risking a few cannonballs at long range until the onset of night gave him a brand-new range of options with which to amuse himself.

  Even if he wanted to fight, he’d certainly let Mistral damage her own engine for a while longer before he came about, for why not take every advantage that his enemy freely offered?

  Kember had not voiced these thoughts, not least of all because she could be hanged for doing so. But she had seen networks of whispered words, centered on the more experienced crewmen, and could only assume that they’d all come to the same conclusion. This concerned her almost as much as the tactical situation, for a crew that understood the magnitude of their commander’s stupidity might embark on any number of rash endeavors.

  She worried even more when their whispering stopped, and changed to short, silent, meaningful glances between crewmen, with an occasional eye cast on her. Something was brewing aboard her ship, and it could only end in a gallows yard, if it didn’t end much sooner in a fireball.

  She didn’t know what to do, and despaired for want of any viable option. She had always known that she might be called upon to help restore authority during a mutiny, but it had never occurred to her, even in her most pessimistic daydreams, that she’d have to stop a mutiny of good men against a rotten officer. When she thought of mutiny at all, she always imagined herself in a band of upstanding officers and loyal crew, bravely facing off against a pack of brutish, frothing malcontents with no motive nobler than mere anarchy.

  She never thought she’d have to put down a mutiny against a man she’d like to do away with herself, a man whose removal from command might well be worth the price of a hangman’s noose.

  No solution had yet occurred to her when, a quarter of an hour later, the order came back: “Increase steamjack to three-quarters between full and emergency power.” The order alone was worrying, but the lack of an answer was more worrying by far. There was no acknowledgement, nor did the turbine’s speed increase by the slightest.

  This was mutiny already, and it could cost Private Grey and Chief Megusi their lives.

  And there was Lieutenant Hanon, up from the hurricane deck, coming around the port side of the steamjack to shout at the mechanics. To shout at them from a predictable place on the catwalk—from a spot that could be marked out ahead of time.

  With Kember’s attention drawn that way, she noticed something even more peculiar. No one except Hanon had their safety lanyard clipped to the overhead jack line on the port side of the keel. She looked up to double-check her own. Starboard side.

  She unclipped herself, and reached over as if to shift her lanyard to the port line. The crewmen working nearby froze instantly when she made the motion, their eyes going wide with alarm, then darting away when she noticed. Ensign Kember decided that it might be safest to remain unclipped for the moment, and tucked the lanyard under the shoulder strap of her
harness.

  She went forward, still not knowing what to do, but knowing she must do something. She came around the left side of the boiler and saw Private Davies above her, sandwiched between two gas bags, hanging in the spiderweb of lines and cables stretching across frame five. He was adjusting the tension on one of the lines, using the ship’s tension gauge to do it.

  That was another oddity. Experienced riggers didn’t use the gauge. No one had taken the heavy steel tool into the rigging since the ship’s flight trials, and only then because the trials called for precise data. A good airman didn’t need the gauge for routine adjustments; they could read the tension on a line by flicking it and listening for the pitch of the twang.

  She tried to meet Davies’s eyes, but the moment she looked up, he was already looking away, giving his most rapt attention to the rigging. She thought of ordering him down, but it would be such a strange thing for an ensign to do, with her commanding officer just steps away, that it could only draw more attention to whatever plot was afoot.

  She ducked under the end of the turbine and gasped when she saw Hanon. The man looked like he was in the third day of trench fever, pallid and sweating buckets. He wasn’t yelling, as she’d expected. She didn’t think he had the spirit left for yelling. He could only plead, barely audible above the steamjack, “You don’t understand. If I come back alone again, what will they think of me?”

  “Alone, sir?” Megusi asked.

  Hanon turned even more pallid, and shone with a fresh gleam of sweat. “I mean, if I come back with nothing.” He steeled himself, and recovered some semblance of focus. “If we come back with nothing, what will it look like? With more power, we might catch up to them before nightfall, and the wind often shifts in the night. We might be back in time to support a morning attack. And the glory will be as much yours as mine. I’ll see to it that you all share. I’ll note every exertion in my report. You’ve done a heroic job of keeping the engine going, Gears … Chief. I’ll make sure that’s known. But what good is it all, if we come back with nothing?”

  Kember wondered if her presence was even necessary, for who could think of hurting a creature as pathetic as this?

  But Davies must not have had a clear view of Hanon’s pleading face from high in the rigging, for in the next moment the tension gauge fell and cracked against Hanon’s skull.

  The lieutenant crumpled. He reached out to grab Chief Megusi for balance, but Megusi stepped briskly out of the way, as if he’d been primed to do so, and Hanon toppled over the edge of the catwalk. The overhead jack line should have stopped his fall, but instead it tore clean out of its anchor point aft, and Hanon fell through Mistral’s thin canvas skin.

  If Kember had planned to catch the safety line as it whipped past, she could have never managed it, but pure reflex accomplished a feat that preparation never could have. She snagged the line with one hand, and got the other around it before it went taut with Hanon’s full weight and yanked her off her feet.

  The keel became a confusion of shouts and streaking motion as she fell. Her chest thumped painfully against the catwalk, then her belly. Her vision resolved into the image of Lieutenant Hanon staring up at her with equal parts entreaty and panic, his face streaked with blood.

  He had the jack line firm in both hands, but it wasn’t secured to anything, and Kember wasn’t strong enough to make up the difference. It slipped, inches at a time, through her hands, and she would have lost it entirely if she hadn’t landed atop it and pinned it to the catwalk. She fumbled with her feet until she managed to tangle the slipping line around her leg. It cinched up, squeezing with excruciating force, but it stopped the line from playing out.

  Stopped it, that is, until Hanon started to climb up, and the force of hauling himself hand over hand dragged Kember right over the edge of the catwalk. They would have fallen together if someone in the keel hadn’t thrown their body over her legs. Still, it wasn’t enough. Kember slid toward the edge until she was bent at the waist. She felt a thump above, as another airman added their weight to the pile, and finally her slide was arrested.

  Hanon was frozen below, no longer trying to climb. She saw his grip relax, as if he meant to let himself fall to save her life. He only held firm again when he saw that she was no longer slipping.

  Not that her position was at all enviable. She was doubled over with her hips and legs on the catwalk, and her head and torso stuck through the bottom of the ship, hanging inverted in empty space. But she was anchored above, and once Hanon saw that, he began climbing the rope again, until he came within arm’s reach of her. He reached up, one hand closing around her right harness strap, and then he used that to haul himself high enough to grab the left strap with his other hand.

  She let go of the line, and it slipped easily through her fingers, through the clip of his lanyard, and fluttered away below the ship, dancing in the wash of the airscrews.

  Hanon made the mistake of looking down, at the forest a thousand feet below him, and when he looked up again, his eyes were filled with panic. He tried to climb up her, his grasping hands battering her about the head as he struggled to hold fast against the buffeting slipstream. “Stay calm!” she shouted over the wind, but had to repeat it three times to get both words out without an intervening punch to the side of her face. If he could only control his panic, she could help him up.

  And he would return the favor by putting a noose around half the necks on the ship, wouldn’t he? Davies, Grey, and Megusi would be just the start of it.

  While he struggled, she forced herself to think clearly, despite the wind and the thrashing and the sight of the ground so far below. She had seen the captain do this, pausing in the midst of a crisis to consider every angle of the problem with that keen, quick insight that airship officers either acquired, or perished for want of.

  Her eyes refocused on Hanon. She reached to her left side and unhooked the clasps securing her harness. They popped loose, and the shoulder strap on that side slipped an inch. The thigh strap on the right side dug into her leg as it took up Hanon’s full weight.

  As she reached for the clasps on the right, Lieutenant Hanon looked up at her and opened his mouth to speak, but she never heard what he said. The right clasp popped open and her harness slid over her head as easily as a dressing gown coming off.

  Lieutenant Hanon still had his hands around the straps as he fell. His knuckles were white, grasping her harness all the tighter despite the futility of it. She watched him, not blinking despite the wind in her eyes, as he receded away. His features blurred with distance, his body grew smaller and smaller, and finally it disappeared against the background of the forest canopy. Whatever disturbance he created there, it wasn’t even visible from this height.

  And then she was being hauled up by strong hands, turned upright and set on her feet. By instinct, she reached for her lanyard to clip onto the jack line. After the fourth try, she looked up and found it missing, remembered what had happened to it, and burst into absurd, braying laughter.

  She stopped herself only when she noticed the crew looking at her. All of the crew. Not just the mechanics and riggers in the keel, but the deck crew as well, crowded onto the companionway ladder with their heads sticking up over the lip of the catwalk. None of them said a thing, nor moved to return to their stations. They only stared at her, waiting.

  She stared back for several seconds, then closed her eyes, and willed her lungs to take a breath. “Reduce steamjack to three-quarters power.”

  Chief Megusi didn’t say anything, but when she opened her eyes again, he was shaking his head.

  “Three-quarters power until dark, Chief, unless you want that Vin up our ass.” She turned forward. “Come about and steer west northwest. And somebody sew up this damaged fabric.” She looked back to the crewmen around her, and found them still frozen in place. “Stop your goddamn gawking and put this ship back on station.”

  They leapt to work.

  *   *   *

  IT WAS
EARLY morning, just after dawn. She was not atop the goat shed, nor even in sight of the town. She stood at the end of a mile-long trail of blood leading from the shed into the woods, more blood than she ever thought a single wolf could hold, yet the stuff still oozed fresh from the beast’s hip, where Josette’s rifle bullet had passed through.

  The two cubs, drawn from the nearby den by the scent of their mother, but equally wary at the sight and scent of a person, stumbled clumsily in the snow a few feet ahead. They first advanced and then retreated, tripping over each other or their own fuzzy legs, and always whining for their mother’s attention, trying to draw her to them. But the wolf lay unmoving where it had collapsed, and its fresh blood was the only sign that the carcass still held some tenuous spark of life.

  “The hell of it is, I thought I’d be the one to save him from these damn brutes.”

  Her eyes shot open. She was sitting upright against Heny’s basement wall, near the blocked stairs. On the other side of the room, the body of the Vin fusilier was wrapped in linen and set in the corner. There was no offensive odor yet, or at least none that made itself known over the odors of habitation already permeating the basement.

  “Oh, pardon me,” Bernat said. “I didn’t realize you were asleep.”

  “Only resting my eyes. What were you saying?”

  Bernat looked to the writing desk, where Josette’s mother was having a subdued game of cards with Jutes, Kiffer, and Corne. “Nothing that seems worth saying, now that I reflect on it.”

  Ordinarily, she would have leapt at the chance to escape an uncomfortable conversation before it began, but perhaps remembering the wolf cubs had made her sentimental. “You did what you had to do, to keep us alive,” she said. “If the cost is you don’t like who you are anymore, then ask yourself if that’s such a bad trade, after all.”

  He was quiet a moment, and then said softly, “You’ve had this conversation with yourself before, haven’t you?”

  “A hundred times or more,” she said, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her chin on them. “Anyway, if it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else.”