The Guns Above Read online

  She seems to relish her dubious right to give orders to men. The airmen, loyal and dutiful all, must surely suffer under this blatant abuse of power. It pains me, truly pains me, to see valiant fighting men in their prime withering under the tyranny of this brutish woman.

  That might not play well with the newspapers, but it would please his uncle, who was, after all, his most important audience. But Uncle Fieren would not be truly pleased unless this woman was gone, so Bernat settled in to contemplate how best to hang her in a noose of ink and paper.

  * * *

  SHE LEFT THE fop to worry about his death trap of a sleeping bay. All he had to do was sling his bags in the netting above the bunk, but with any luck it would take him the entire morning to figure that out.

  In frame five, amidships, she found Gears, Lieutenant Martel, and the mechanic’s mate gathered around the steamjack. The carpenter wasn’t far away, looking over their shoulders. “So what’s wrong with her?” Josette asked.

  “Can’t find anything wrong, Cap’n,” Gears said. He glanced at Martel, as if for assistance.

  “She’s not a slow ship, sir,” Lieutenant Martel said. “She’ll outrun any scout or bomber at full power, and I’ve never heard of a chasseur with such a fast cruise.”

  “Her cruising speed only tells me she has more in her, Nic. Something’s holding her back at full power.”

  “I think I might get some extra power with adjustments to the condenser,” the mechanic’s mate said. “Might be good for another knot.” Her expression was conciliatory, as if she were trying to meet an unreasonable person halfway.

  “That’d only be pushing on a wet noodle. The steamjack’s giving us excellent rotation already, so the problem lies further along the power train. Find out where the problem is and fix it.” Josette noted their skeptical expressions. “I want fewer blank stares and more goddamn answers on this ship, starting now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gears said, though his face told her that she was on a wild goose chase.

  An hour in the air and they all think I’m hysterical, she thought as she walked forward. Past the companionway, where Jutes stood watch, Corne was still practicing his avian agitation skills. “Stop bothering those damn birds, man,” she said, “and go fetch the reduction schematics from my cabin. You know what those are?”

  Private Corne nodded and hopped to it.

  “And try not to drag that damn fop behind you when you come back!” she shouted after him.

  “She really isn’t a slow ship, sir,” Jutes said from his post at the head of the companionway.

  She shot him a scowl that shut him up.

  When Corne brought the schematics, she sat in the slope of the bow and worked out the gearbox reduction factor, gear by gear, with pencil and paper. When she finished, she thought she’d made a mistake, but a second and third set of calculations confirmed her original conclusion: the reduction factor was far too high, leaving the airscrews with excess torque and a sluggish rotation speed. That’s where the wet noodle was.

  She called Martel over to check her math. He stooped carefully into the narrowing keel at the bow—in a naval vessel, failure to mind one’s head might result in a painful lump, but in the air corps it could crack a girder strut, causing minor damage to the ship but rather more to the offending party’s reputation. He sat for a while and worked through the calculations. Sure enough, he arrived at the same conclusion. After he checked over his numbers again, he frowned and said, “But those engineers must know what they’re doing, right?”

  She snorted. “I take it you’ve never met one.”

  He still looked skeptical. “These new airscrews are longer. Maybe we really need this much torque to turn them.”

  “One way to find out,” Josette said. She called Gears over, and the three of them worked out a new reduction scheme using the gears they had on hand.

  “Sure you want to do this, Cap’n?” Gears asked, when she got him to agree to the narrow premise that the plan was technically feasible. “It’ll take hours.”

  “That’s what aerial trials are for, Mr. Sourdeval.” She turned to Martel. “Rig the ship as a free balloon and take charge of reballasting.”

  As Gears and Martel went aft to see to their duties, Josette was suddenly struck by the strangest feeling of doubt. Those airscrews, after all, were a revolutionary new design. Could Martel be right? Could the flight engineers have really intended them to turn this slowly? Such a thing seemed idiotic, even by their standards, but they did have a funny habit of trying to cheat nature with their half-baked notions.

  While the mechanics dug into the gearbox, Josette made a few calculations, thinking that perhaps Martel’s intuition about torque was correct. It took her only a few minutes to prove, with mathematical certainty, that he was wrong. The reduction scheme they’d planned would provide higher speed and more than enough torque. In the privacy of the forward section, she permitted herself a moment of smug reflection. Martel was not only wrong, but fantastically wrong. In fact, under the new reduction scheme, the airscrews would be spinning so fast that their tips would be moving at …

  Her smug expression suddenly sank, and she felt a chill of sweat. “Oh hell,” she said, realizing that her new reduction scheme was nothing but a very creative way to commit suicide. At emergency power, the tips of the airscrew blades would be moving at something approaching the muzzle velocity of a cannonball.

  At that speed, the airscrews would disintegrate, exploding into a shower of deadly mahogany splinters. She looked aft, where the mechanics already had the gearbox in pieces. Taking it apart was easy, of course, but it would take them an hour or longer just to put it back in its original configuration. So she’d already wasted that much of the crew’s time, on top of nearly getting them killed. And she’d been captain of an airship for less than four hours.

  She wondered if she did have brain damage, after all.

  “Shifting ballast!” Martel shouted along the keel. With the engine off, the steersman could not control the trim of the ship, so sandbag ballast had to be moved to compensate for any movement between frames.

  “Ah, there you are!” Bernat said, squeezing between ballast bags. “Lieutenant Martel is not referring to me when he says ballast, is he?”

  “Of course not, my lord,” Josette said. “Mr. Martel is referring to something useful.”

  Bernat smiled, seeming to miss the insult. “I did notice we’ve stopped.”

  “You have a keen eye for detail,” Josette said. She tried to ignore him as she looked over the schematics, searching for a way out. There was, she realized, one way to keep the blade tips from moving so quickly, but she’d look an even greater fool if she tried it and it didn’t work.

  Yet she couldn’t stand the thought of going to her own crew, hat in hand, and telling them she’d wasted their time with her foolishness. She’d be admitting that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. So, to hell with it. “Jutes, pass the word for Chips.”

  When he arrived, the older man saluted first her and then Bernat by touching his knuckle to his forehead, the way Jutes did it.

  “While we’re stopped,” Josette said, “I’d like you to shave eleven inches off the end of the airscrew blades.”

  Chips leaned back, as if physically bowled over by that order. “Yes, sir,” he said, in a subdued voice. It was just about the reaction she’d expected. “I’d like a few men to help.”

  She nodded. “Take anyone you need, but leave me the musketmen. I want to train them on the new rifles.”

  “Ah yes, I’d forgotten that you shoot,” Bernat said. “Not many women poachers out there.”

  Chips, Josette, and even Jutes, who was standing at his post at the companionway, all whipped their eyes around to stare at Bernat.

  The fop chuckled softly. “You mentioned that you hunted in Durum. But, of course, anyone who’s ever studied a map knows that the forests near Durum are King’s Woods, which makes you…”

  “That was a l
ong time ago,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m not making an accusation, my dear captain. I’m only asking if you’d like to have a match.”

  She snorted. “You? Use a rifle? Do you know which end to hold?”

  He smiled back, cool as ice. “I always figure it out by the second shot.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Once the airscrews are unshipped, we’ll do best of twenty.”

  “Unshipped?”

  “Taken off the booms and brought aboard. I don’t want shooting during the operation. If someone is distracted and drops an airscrew over the side, it’ll be right turns all the way home.”

  Once the airscrews were aboard, Josette had the rifles unpacked and brought to the hurricane deck, where they were set on an upright rack secured to the rail. Ballast was shifted so that the crewmen could crowd onto the companionway, while the mechanics and crew working amidships found excuses to open ports in the keel and look forward to the hurricane deck. Wagers ran the length of the ship.

  Mistral was drifting parallel to an arterial road that ran northeast from Arle, cutting though orchards and farmland. The musketmen were busy with the laborious process of loading rifles, which was a much slower business than loading the muskets they were used to.

  Josette tucked her goggles into a pocket, took a loaded rifle, stepped to the rail, and pointed to a stone mile marker on the road below. The marker was no larger than a man and was at least two hundred yards away on the diagonal, a nearly impossible shot for a musket.

  She adjusted the notched backsight to account for the distance, tucked the wooden stock against her cheek, and sighted along the barrel. She aimed nearer to the upper-left corner of the stone, to account for the influence of wind. She let half the air out of her lungs in a slow sigh and squeezed the trigger.

  The hammer came down, sparking against the frizzen and igniting the powder in the pan. She shut her eyes against the hot flash as smoke and fire poured from the muzzle and the rifle slammed back against her shoulder. The heat on her face was already gone, but when she opened her eyes, she couldn’t see her target through the obscuring smoke.

  “Hit!” Martel shouted, lowering his telescope.

  In the still air, the rifle smoke hung in an expanding, churning cloud under the airship’s envelope. She stepped aside to get a clear view, and saw through her own telescope that the mile marker had gained a new pockmark a foot from the top, at about neck level.

  Josette set the rifle back in its cradle. “Your shot, my lord.”

  Bernat took the next rifle off the rack and aimed at the same marker. A few snickers sounded from the gathered crew as he raised the gun to his shoulder. He squeezed the trigger and nothing happened, except that the hammer clicked down into the pan. There wasn’t even a spark.

  “Oh dear, a misfire. What rotten luck.” Bernat kept the rifle tight against his shoulder and aimed safely over the side, much to Josette’s disappointment. She’d bet Martel a whole lira that the fop would look down the barrel to see what was wrong.

  “My lord,” Josette said, “I believe you’ll find this rifle is missing a flint. A small oversight by the loaders, I’m sure.” She took a spare flint from the box, made sure it was sharp, and handed it to him.

  Bernat, unsurprisingly, required help getting it into the doghead. He offered an abashed smile to the musketman who helped him, saying, “In Kuchin, we have a fellow who handles these sorts of details.”

  By the time Bernat was ready to fire, they’d drifted twenty yards closer to the target, but the advantage did not leave Josette particularly concerned. He aimed and fired, and the bullet kicked up a clod of turf as far from the marker as the marker was tall.

  “I dare say that’s a miss,” Martel said. The crew guffawed and slapped their knees. One man leaning out of the keel nearly toppled over in his merriment.

  The fop, meanwhile, was inspecting the rifle, as if he imagined some fault with it—some tampering that went beyond the missing flint.

  “I zeroed the sights on these rifles myself,” Martel said. “I can assure you, my lord, that this one is as perfectly sound as the others.”

  “It certainly bears no flaw that would make it shoot sideways,” Josette added. “Apart from the man holding it.”

  Bernat made an indignant sniff and handed the rifle to the nearest crewman, Corporal Lupien. Lupien shrugged and set it back on the rack, which was nearer Bernat than he was.

  She pointed past the mile marker. “For the next target, how about that fence post on the other side of the road?” It was ten yards farther and a fraction of the width of the mile marker, but the fop hardly took notice. He was busy wafting his hand in front of his face and wrinkling his brow in thought, as if he were trying to blame the air itself for his poor aim.

  She aimed and fired.

  And missed.

  Well, it hardly mattered. It wasn’t as if the fop would make such a difficult shot.

  Bernat selected a rifle—one with a flint this time. He fired. Through her glass, Josette could see a splash of turf behind the post as the bullet plowed into earth. It was a miss, but a near miss. A bit nearer than her shot had come, in fact, which was surely a matter of luck.

  Josette called the next target: one of the squat snow markers along the road. It was only two feet high and about as far away as the mile marker had been. She fired, and missed by a hair. It was not shaping up to be a good day, but she could console herself in having such an incompetent opponent.

  Bernat took his time, seeming to contemplate everything from the rustling of the trees in the distance to the tip of his own nose. “Perhaps he’s hoping the contest will be canceled if he can delay until the end of the world,” Josette remarked. At that, a strange smugness came over the fop’s face, and without looking at her he lifted his rifle, sighted, and fired.

  Josette was shocked to see a puff of dust on the face of the marker, at its exact center. A second later, Martel said, “Hit,” without enthusiasm.

  Bernat smiled at Josette. “A balloon is such a lovely, stable platform to shoot from, once one learns to account for the peculiarity of movement. I’ll have to recommend that the palace acquire one.”

  “This is an airship, my lord,” Josette said in an even tone, as she took the next loaded rifle from the rack.

  Over the course of the next seven targets, Bernat hit six to Josette’s four. At this point, they took a break from the game so the rifles could be cleaned and reloaded, the powder scorches washed from the contestants’ faces, and ballast dropped to keep the ship from drifting too near the ground. When these matters were seen to, they returned to the rail. This time, the crew who gathered to watch were subdued, and no wagers passed between them.

  By previous agreement, Bernat called the shots for the second set. “The next mile marker,” he said. With the ship’s drift, the next mile marker was scarcely farther away than the first had been at the beginning of the contest. Both of their shots hit it dead center. It seemed to Josette that the fop was trying to hold his lead by calling easy shots, but he surprised her with his next call. He pointed to the next snow marker, perhaps two hundred and fifty yards away on the diagonal.

  Again, they both hit.

  “The stone after that,” he said.

  This one was almost three hundred yards, but again they both hit.

  “And the one after that,” he said, to whispers of surprise. Now this was a shot. A stone about twice the size of a man’s head, at over three hundred and fifty yards’ distance.

  They both missed, but neither by much.

  He grinned at her, and she knew what was coming. “The one after that.” It was about four hundred yards away, its gray shape hardly visible against the gravel of the road.

  Bernat hit. Josette missed.

  He took the next rifle and sighted along it without saying a word. The bastard was drawing out the suspense, but she knew what he was going to do. Sure enough, he finally grinned and said, “And the one after that,” just before squeezing the
trigger. And he hit the damn thing.

  She selected a rifle and sighted carefully, first aligning the weapon so that the front sight post was visible in the notch at the top of the backsight, then pointing both at the target. It was so far away that the front sight nearly covered it. Worse, the backsight was only adjustable out to three hundred yards, which meant she had to aim high to account for the effect of gravity, holding the target’s location in her mind and aiming into the formless turf beyond it. At this range, the mere beating of her heart moved the barrel enough to make the difference between a hit or a miss. All she could do was remain as calm as possible and wait for the moment when the minute, capricious shifts in her acuity of sight, concentration, and muscular precision all aligned to minimize the wobble in her aim. When that moment came, she eased steadily back on the trigger until the rifle fired.

  “Hit!” Martel said, excited. “And blasted to bits!”

  The crew gave a cheer that went on and on, until Bernat finally quieted them with, “And the next marker.”

  Josette peered at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  He smiled. “I don’t have much choice. You’ve just blasted the nearer one to bits.” He fired and missed.

  She also missed, hardly making an effort on such a ridiculous long shot.

  “Perhaps we’ll try the same one again,” Bernat said.

  Josette glanced at Martel’s slate, which recorded the scores. With three shots remaining, Josette would have to make all her shots just to tie, and could only do so if Bernat missed all his. She watched through the telescope as he fired. A moment after the rifle’s bang, the stone jumped, though she couldn’t see the point of impact.

  “I think it bounced off the side,” Martel said, “but it might be a ricochet off the ground.”

  Bernat put the rifle back and gave a shallow bow. “I defer to your judgment.” That judgment would determine the outcome of the match, but the fop showed no sign of impatience or even concern over it.

  “I suppose it’s a hit,” Martel said. This inspired disapproving murmurs from every crewman who could do math above ten.