By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel Read online

  Grey took the pilfered instrument and ran to her duty. When she was aboard Mistral, she lit the deck lanterns, turning the wide wicker gondola of the hurricane deck into an island of light within the dark shed. The reflection off the deck lit the whole curved underside of Mistral’s superstructure from frame six all the way up to the nose. The once-white canvas envelope was pockmarked with holes, many charred around the edges. It was a wonder the ship held together.

  Josette disentangled herself from Smew and strolled to the edge of the shed, where she stood looking up at her battered airship. She remembered back to something Captain Tobel had told her, again and again, when she was first officer aboard Osprey: “Love a ship and she’ll treat you kindly.”

  She certainly loved Mistral, though Mistral had been anything but kind. She was an accident-prone ship. No doubt she was fast and turned tighter than any two-gun airship Josette had ever known, but she was liable to become suddenly unwieldy if mishandled in the slightest. It seemed now that Captain Tobel had been describing a certain species of domesticated airship, whereas Mistral was an untamed creature that longed for blood, and made up its own fun when denied it.

  Yet she was still a damn fine ship, for all that. Josette stood admiring her for so long that dawn broke outside, and light began to creep in through spaces in the shed roof. Josette craned her neck to look at the full height of Mistral’s superstructure, towering above her in the upper reaches of the shed. Yes, she was a damn fine ship, for all that. Josette only wished she could get her hands on the parts to set her right.

  Dawn meant that the yardsmen would be coming to continue repairs, and that realization finally snapped Josette out of her reverie. She went to one of the smaller, man-sized doors inlaid into larger shed doors, and there met Sergeant Jutes leading the three dozen men of the repair crews on their way in.

  “Captain,” he said, touching a knuckle to his forelock.

  “Morning, Sergeant. Please remind the yardsmen, as some of them seemed to forget yesterday, that our priority is replacing sprung girders. Not merely charred girders. Replacing them is a luxury, considering how few spare girders we have. So sprung girders only for now. Not charred girders, and certainly not ‘whatever girders are easiest to get at.’”

  “I’ll see to it, sir,” Jutes said, and led the repair crews over to Mistral.

  Only half the men were aboard when Ensign Kember came running out of the morning mist, a poultice wrapped against her cheek. “What the hell happened to you?” Josette asked, when the girl was within earshot.

  Kember clopped to a halt in front of Josette, saluted, and spoke in a hoarse and breathless voice. “Gears is alive, sir.”

  “Good God!” Josette spun about and shouted, “Sergeant!”

  But Jutes had heard and was already hobbling toward them, his eyes wide and hopeful.

  *   *   *

  BERNAT WAS ON his way back to the signal base when he saw Josette, Kember, Grey, and Jutes go past. They did not see him, however, because in this case, “on his way back to the signal base” meant that he was in a tavern, where he’d stopped to refresh himself six hours earlier. But as the tavern was undeniably on his way, he considered the trip still in progress.

  He left his mug on the table and followed after them. He had trouble closing the distance, for they were walking briskly and he, entirely apart from the effects of his libations, was having trouble with the ground. Apart from the recent, disconcerting addition of bright white dog shit to Arle’s byways, no street could have the comfortable give of a wicker catwalk, nor the gentle sway of the hurricane deck. He thought it an injustice that he’d already had to walk on this flawed surface for so much of his life.

  “You look better with most of your hair burned off, you should keep it that way,” he said, when he finally caught up.

  Josette glanced back at him and asked, “How much have you drunk this morning?”

  “Just enough,” he answered. “What’s going on?”

  Josette kept her eyes forward. “Gears is alive.”

  Bernat thought he’d misheard, or that it was some of the captain’s black humor, taken too far this time. But when she looked at him, her face equal parts hope and worry, he knew she was serious. “You told me no one ever recovered from a gutshot,” he said, “and Gears had half a dozen.”

  “It wasn’t that many,” Josette said, her voice flat and cold, her face tightening back into its usual stony expression. “And I have heard of soldiers surviving, in some rare cases.”

  Bernat wasn’t sure what it was about Gears that made his survival seem so important, compared to all the others who had died aboard Mistral. Perhaps it was that Sergeant Jutes was so fond of him, and Jutes being fond of hardly anyone.

  They reached the hospital, where wounded soldiers had erected a shanty town in which to convalesce. Bernat couldn’t help but stop to admire their industry. The conditions would never do for someone of his birth, of course, but for men accustomed to hardship it must certainly have been comfortable enough. He did wonder, though, why they hadn’t been put to work on some civic project in exchange for inhabiting the avenue rent-free.

  When he caught up to the others, they were gathered just inside a long ward off the main hall. Bernat expected an argument over visiting hours, but he was surprised to find only one nurse in the entire ward, to attend to perhaps two hundred men. She moved to intercept them, but was cowed when she got a look at Josette’s scowling, eyebrow-less face.

  Gears was near the door, resting in a proper bed, thank God. And he wasn’t comatose, as half the men in this ward were. As Bernat looked around, he saw that they all had the most terrible wounds. Blood soaked through their bandages to stain bedclothes. Some weren’t even bandaged. Their flesh, pierced by bullets, laid open by sword and bayonet wounds, was left to fester unimpeded. Few had surgical amputations, but many bore limbs that ended in a tattered mass of shredded meat, left to bleed and to rot with little medical attention.

  Surely this was only a momentary oversight. Perhaps these men had come in recently, just when the shifts were changing, and there was no one to give them proper care. Soon, no doubt, there would be a dozen doctors and nurses swarming the ward.

  Jutes knelt beside the bed and asked, “How you doing, you old arsehole?”

  Bernat couldn’t follow the chief mechanic’s reply, but it was something about superheating and steam injectors.

  Private Grey reached out to take his hand, and said, “Don’t worry. As soon as we have the parts, we’ll be giving it a complete overhaul.”

  They went back and forth like that for some time, Gears giving instructions or making inquiries about the state of the ship—sometimes the very same series of instructions and inquiries, repeated several times in the same order—and Grey or Jutes giving reassuring answers. After perhaps half an hour, Gears settled into a light sleep, still speaking from time to time, but seeming to rest in spite of it.

  It was then that Bernat noticed his earlier prediction had not come true. No company of medical men had come in to see to the wounded here. It was only the same nurse as before, and she doing precious little to treat injuries. Rather, she only adjusted the positions of those who had contorted in their sleep, fluffed the pillows of those who were awake, and spoke softly to those who were crying out in pain, until they quieted. In a flash, Bernat understood why.

  “This is a death ward!” he cried out.

  Faces throughout the ward turned to him, and the single nurse fixed him with an acid glare.

  “Calm yourself,” Josette said, quite softly. “He’s as well here as anywhere. The doctors won’t bother with a gut wound, which is all the better. It isn’t up to them to cure him, now. It’s up to him to survive.”

  “He’ll survive,” Sergeant Jutes said. “He survives.”

  “Come on,” Josette said to Kember and Bernat. “Let’s leave them to it.”

  Bernat put a hand on Jutes’s shoulder—it seemed the right thing to do—and left
him with Grey, to watch over their chief mechanic.

  In the days that followed, Sergeant Jutes and Private Grey split their time between repairs to Mistral and their vigil at the hospital, with precious little left over for sleep. Bernat visited when he could, when he was sober enough and when he had the stomach for it—conditions which were, for the most part, exclusive of each other. But when he did attend, he found the watchers to be as attentive as the most diligent nursemaid. They spoke to Gears, whether he was awake or not. They held his hand and wiped the sweat from his fevered brow. They spoon-fed him broth, and more than a little brandy.

  In a week’s time, the fever was subsiding and Gears could speak lucidly, though he still slept through most of the day. As he improved, and as the hospital discharged its wounded by one way or the other, room was made for him in one of the sick wards, where he was attended to by proper doctors and nurses. He was well on his way to recovery.

  And so it seemed to Bernat that it was all the greater an injustice when Sergeant Jutes returned from the hospital one morning and told them Gears was dead—gone in the night.

  “It’s not how it’s supposed to go,” Bernat said to Josette.

  She only shook her head and replied, “It’s exactly how it’s supposed to go, as a point of fact.”

  *   *   *

  REPAIRS CONTINUED AT a steady, slow pace, with the yardsmen often sitting idle for want of materials. Even when trains came in with fresh girders, luftgas, or goldbeater’s skin, the quartermaster would only let a little out at a time, and kept the balance in the warehouse. Josette was by now convinced that the quartermaster thought it was her job to amass as much stock as possible, until the warehouse was filled to the rafters and no airship could fly.

  In the case of the goldbeater’s, the situation was particularly dire. Made from the intestines of oxen, it was becoming more and more scarce. You only got a few square feet of goldbeater’s per ox, and the bags were several layers thick, which meant the guts of tens of thousands of animals went into just one chasseur. With more and more chasseurs in the sky, and so many of them the larger two-gun ships, the service was having trouble finding enough oxen willing to die for their country.

  Josette didn’t need an entire airship’s worth of goldbeater’s. She only needed enough to repair the damage to Mistral’s bags, but she couldn’t get her hands on even that much. She’d have to sacrifice one bag to repair the rest, and rebuild the sacrificial bag out of rubberized silk, which was cheaper and easier to obtain than goldbeater’s, despite its two components being shipped from opposite sides of the world. It was also heavier and leakier than goldbeater’s, and had an unfortunate tendency to spark if torn—a particularly frightening prospect, since there wasn’t enough luftgas to replace the inflammable air, either.

  Even that wasn’t the end of her problems. Half the damaged girders still hadn’t been replaced. The steamjack turbine was a mess, the primary condenser in shambles. Private Grey was working on them, but she didn’t have the material to do a proper overhaul. Mistral’s steamjack was a prototype design, so the logistics office hadn’t planned on needing spare parts for it so soon.

  So Josette’s airship remained very much a wounded bird on the drizzling, cold afternoon when her orders came in. Heading to open them, she passed Kember’s berth, and saw the girl inside, hastily pulling a blanket over a package wrapped in waxed paper.

  No sooner had Josette closed the curtain on her cabin than Bernat pushed it open again and followed her in. He’d been sleeping aboard ship, and hung about even during his waking hours, when he wasn’t off carousing.

  Josette pulled the curtain closed behind him. “Bernie, you haven’t gotten a look at what’s in those packages our ensign has been bringing aboard, have you?”

  “No,” he said, “but I recognize the watermark on the wax paper. It’s from a cosmetics shop in the Septenian quarter. I get a discount there, which I offered to share with her last week, but she only sputtered, apologized to me—for what offence, I can’t imagine—and ran off, tripping over her own feet on the way.”

  Josette peeked around the edge of her curtain, arched a stubbly eyebrow, and said, “She’s an odd girl.” She turned her attention back to her orders, breaking the wax seal with her fingers.

  “Something from the general?” Bernat asked, referring to his uncle. Bernat had somehow gained the impression that General Lord Fieren Hinkal handled every single detail of the operation of the army. “A promotion perhaps? A decoration?”

  “More likely an order sending us up north, to the Meat Grinder. I only hope they leave us a few more weeks to finish repairs, and see to it that we get some goddamned luftgas.”

  Bernat settled into the hammock chair across from Josette, the small cabin table between them. He parted his lips to speak, hesitated, wet them, and then finally went on, “Meat Grinder? I take that to be one of those fanciful names you airmen give to distinctive landmarks, yes?” When she gave no answer, but only ignored him and began to read, he went on, “I have of course heard of the Knuckle. The Fingers. The Nose. The Knees. I’ve been taking note of them all, and have nearly enough body parts to construct an entire person. I only lack a torso, though I’ve amassed several superfluous sets of genitalia—many of them from saints.” He laughed nervously, and when she still didn’t answer him, his mouth continued to run on. “So, I can only conclude that this ‘Meat Grinder’ is some such memorable piece of terrain. Perhaps a natural chimney or a bluff?” She said nothing. “I have even heard tell of a geological phenomenon called a kopje, and have always wanted to see one.” Silence. “If that’s it, I’m quite looking forward to it.”

  She looked up after reading to find him pallid and sweating. “We’ve been ordered to Kuchin, to overfly the city on a goddamn publicity tour.”

  “Oh thank God,” he said.

  She did not share in his relief. “Next week,” she said. “We have to be underway by next week!” She hit the table in frustration.

  Bernat was not in the least perturbed by this. “At least the citizens of Kuchin won’t be shooting at us,” he said, “as I imagine might happen, were we to go to that other place you mentioned, which I take it is not a kopje.”

  She stared at him so hard that he recoiled. “Properly repaired and manned, this ship might make a difference. The war needs us, but they’re sending us to show off in front of a bunch of fops and bankers.” She leaned across the table, wagging her finger, and Bernat leaned away. “This ship and a single battalion could retake…” She trailed off, hit the table with her fist again, and slumped in her chair.

  “Durum?” Bernat asked.

  She didn’t give an answer, but only looked out at the shed floor through an open port.

  3

  THE PACE OF repairs picked up, and in a week’s time Mistral looked like a brand-new ship. At least, she looked like a new ship from the outside, white-clad and gleaming in her pristine outer envelope. Inside, even Bernat could see that she was hiding a greater sickness. Along the keel, many of the box girders were still braced with rope to shore up battle damage. Up in the superstructure, it was even worse. There, cracked girders were tied precariously to other cracked girders, for lack of a sound girder near enough to secure them to. In areas, this pattern repeated itself several times, with three or even four damaged girders strung together in a line before the last was secured to a sound one, in a configuration with all the structural integrity of a ball of yarn.

  The steamjack was in even worse condition, if that could be believed. Every time Grey dared to push it past half power, it spewed smoke and noxious gases into the keel. At full power, it shook so hard it threatened to tear itself out of the keel entirely, and made sharp plinking sounds at irregular intervals, each of which made Grey freeze up, as if she expected it to explode in the next moment. On the single occasion when it was tested at emergency power, it caught fire after five minutes, and the crew had to scramble to keep it from burning the ship at her moorings.


  The state of the crew wasn’t much better. A little over half of the fire-forged veterans of Mistral’s recent actions remained, with the other half made of new volunteers with little airship experience between them. Still absent were a chief mechanic—sorely missed, given the state of the steamjack—and a first officer. Bernat attempted to make up the deficit by volunteering his own natural leadership, but was not met with the enthusiastic gratitude he’d expected.

  So it was not a sound or a happy ship that took off from Arle, but it was a beautiful one, with her envelope so bright it dazzled the eye. The trip, at least, went off without incident, which is to say that nothing exploded.

  For two days, they had fair winds and made quick progress despite their ramshackle steamjack. From dawn to dusk, the bountiful fields of eastern Garnia whipped past below. In the evenings, Ensign Kember came onto the hurricane deck to stand her watches, each time wearing a new beauty product to conceal the scars on her face and neck. One evening it might be something from Pekstrom’s Terra Cotta Princess Palette, while another might find her wearing a thick smear of their lead-based Golden Goddess Foundation—an absolutely ill-conceived idea, because it was from the summer collection.

  Bernat dined with Josette most nights, and even talked her into playing a few hands of cards with him. On the third day, the fields thinned and turned to grassland in the morning, grassland turned to rocky wastes in the afternoon, and mountains rose over the horizon at evening. Mistral passed over them in the night, and the next dawn found her struggling against blustery headwinds, with terraced hills barely moving under her keel. They had covered two-thirds of the distance to Kuchin already, but the winds were so strong during the last third that Mistral was often reduced to an absolute standstill for hours at a time, hovering in a slow wobble over the same patch of ground, her airspeed entirely cancelled out by the wind. It was even worse on the afternoon of the seventh day, when Mistral had to turn around and run back the way she’d come, to dodge the first of the big winter storms sweeping down from the north.