On the Oceans of Eternity (75 page)

“Listen up, people!” she said, a little louder.

That meant everyone could hear her, except the Gatling crew in the observation bubble topside. She pressed the button on the intercom so that they could listen too.

“We’re going to make one run, straight in, and bomb whatever we can get over. The crate is going to head for the Goddamned moon when we shed all that weight. Keep your hands on the valve and ballast controls, and keep your ears open for the word.”

A murmur, taut readiness. She nodded and kept her eyes and binoculars scanning through the slanted windows to either side of the commander’s chair. Black night outside, and the hiss of rain starting to strike the tight doped fabric stretched over the
Emancipator’s
hull.

“Vents closed—neutral buoyancy at three thousand feet.”

“There!” she said, an involuntary exclamation.

Thunder rumbled above them. Lightning glinted off the Eurotas, just like the maps for one bright instant. For a while she’d been afraid they were going to end up in Italy. Or the way this damned gale was blowing, in China.

“Right fifty, helm.”

The dirigible’s nose turned right in a descending curve that brought her facing north as she fell. The gondola rocked, the craft pitching and rolling a little in the more turbulent air near the surface.

“She’s slightly heavy, Skipper.”

“That’s the rain. On superheat—ten percent ought to do her.”

Vicki kept her eye peeled to port, where the tree-clad mountains seemed to reach for her with crooked witch-fingers every time one of the lightning bolts struck.
Emancipator
was well below the level of the peaks now; she’d have to crane her head to see them. All her attention was focused northward. Walkeropolis didn’t have a blackout; but it didn’t have electric light, either. Lanterns ought to stand out, or forge-flare from the manufacturies.

“Latest report from Meteorology, ma’am-HQ says a major weather system is building up clear from the Pillars to here.”

No kidding; black above as a yard up a hog’s arse, except for the increasingly frequent flash of lightning, as often horizontal as down to the ground below. She made herself not think about what one of those bolts into an engine or the metallic fasteners of the hull would do. The wind was picking up, too.

“Fire up the searchlight.” Alex looked at her. “We’ll be bombing blind, otherwise.”

He nodded and unstrapped himself, lifting a hatch on the laminated-wood deck. It held a crank, and he worked that to open the doors below and lower the searchlight out into the airstream. An aluminum tube rose as he did so. Into that he thrust a metal rod with a small wheel on the end; there was a chink-
chunk
sound as it fit into the sleeve of the universal joint. Forward or back on the rod would turn the searchlight under the gondola’s chin up or down; a twist on the wheel to port or starboard.

“Searchlight ...
on
!
”

Light glinted up through gaps in the hatchway. Much more poured down on the landscape below. She could see the tops of trees swaying, the slick line of a wet asphalt highway. And ... there, ahead and to port! Buildings, a great clump of them. The stubby brick pyramids of blast furnaces against a hillside, and the courtyard-and-siding arrangement of manufacturing plant downslope of them, all neat and tiny like a model on a table.

Easier to think of it as a model, not as homes ...

“Horizontal rudder, left ten,” she said, her voice smooth and cool and remote. “Engines, ahead three-quarters.” The roar of the Cessna pistons muted slightly. Over it, thunder rolled frighteningly close. “Bomb-bay doors open.” The airship’s ride grew noticeably rougher, as the panels opened and caught the slipstream. “Bomb-aimer, over to you.”

“Ma’am,” he said calmly, from his prone position behind the command section; he was using a telescope aimed through the keel. “Sir, if you could swing the light to port about fifteen degrees—yes! Right on those buildings—helm, follow that.”

“Barrage balloons going up!” the observers called.

Seconds later, the same came through her headphones from the Gatling post topside. Two of the six-barreled weapons pointed out either side of the gondola as well, but they probably wouldn’t get close enough to use them. She could see the barrage balloons herself now, and trained her binoculars on them—nothing else to do, unless she intervened to abort the run. They weren’t blimp-shaped; more like giant letter A’s made of sausages, instead. The armament was topside on a decking of light planks, they and the men who served them tiny and indistinct at this distance. Reports said it was two-pounder rifled guns on pivot mounts—useful in itself, taking up Walker’s scarce precision-machining capacity.

The shape of the balloons turned them into the wind as the cables holding them payed out, a harness like a kite’s leading to a single thick line on a windlass. That was no calm nosing into a steady breeze, not tonight; they pitched and tossed as they rose, fighting the ropes that held them. The buffeting the
Emancipator
was taking was bad enough; what it was like on those bare open decks, lashed by rain and lit by lightning, she hated to imagine. Particularly to a local, unused to the whole concept of flight except as something the Gods did.

Brave men,
she thought unwillingly. It would be an easier world if all the villains were cowards, but nobody who’d seen Assyrians in operation would think that.

Little red lights began to snap at her from the ground as well, like malignant winks. More light cannon in counterweighted cradles; swing the muzzle down, ram a shell down the barrel, swing it up, and fire. Her grandfather had flown B-17s over the Ruhr, and a Flying Fortress would have laughed at such antiaircraft fire. So would her great-grandfather’s Sopwith Camel. Neither of those craft were five-hundred-odd feet long, or flying at less than a mile up at fifty miles an hour, or hanging under hundreds of thousands of square feet of explosive gas.

Searchlights lit on the ground as well. They were yellower than her ten-thousand-candlepower electric pre-Event model; probably burning lime in a stream of gas, in front of a mirror. Still capable of spiking her for the absurd muzzle-loading flak, though. And rockets were rising as well, glorified Fourth-of-July models, but they didn’t have far to rise, either.

“Coming up on target,” the bomb-aimer said.

Something burst with a red
snap
not too far away. Crewfolk scrambled up the ladders into the hull to find and patch leaks in the gasbags.

“Preparing to release bombs,” the man’s voice said.

And the Gatling crew screamed in her ears through the headphones:
“Jesus Christ they’ve got rocket pods on the balloons!”
The ripping-canvas sound of the machine gun came in the same instant.

Vicki’s head came up with a snap. Her mouth opened to give an order, and then the sky to their right lit up. In that light she could see what was on the balloon’s upper decking; long bundles of tubes on simple pintle mounts. Flame washed out behind the tubes, and ahead of them as the warheads raced at her.

“Valve crew, stand fast,” she said. The last thing in the world they needed right now was a flood of hydrogen above the hull.

“Release bombs!” she went on, keeping her voice from rising with an effort of will that made sweat stand out on her immobile face. “Charlie, now!”

The
Emancipator
began to leap and shudder as the finned steel eggs nestled in her lower cargo compartments streamed down. At the same instant a dozen tracks of fire raced through the space she had occupied instants earlier. By some malign freak of ballistics, one rocket intersected the trajectory of a bomb at precisely the wrong moment. The explosion heaved the
Emancipator
upward and pitched her nose-down at the same instant, throwing everyone not strapped in flying; Vicki could hear frames cracking in the hull, and bracers along the wall of the gondola.

The rest of the rockets burst soon after, forelorn fireworks in the rainy darkness of the storm. But something also thudded into the airship, pitching her to the side with a sharp motion totally unlike the battering of the winds. Something else burst right in front of Vicki’s station, and she flung up her arms to shield her face.

Another red flare, and stinging pain in her arms and chest and in her forehead. It was too dark; she pawed at her eyes and cheeks, and wiped the blood away. Rain and wind battered at her through the shattered windows. They roared, too, but not too much for her to hear:

Fire hissed through her. The worst nightmare of anyone who flew these motorized balloons. Fire below, too, as the footprint of the
Emancipator’s
bombs slashed across the landscape. More fire in the sky, as the burning barrage balloon pitched sideways, falling in a graceful arc as its gasbags burst, ignited by the backblast of its own weapons. Most of the airship’s crew still standing hurled themselves up the ladders into the hull, in trained damage-control reflex, snatching Nantucket’s hoarded store of fire extinguishers as they went. Nothing else mattered if the dirigible was reduced to an exploding smear across the sky of Walkeropolis.

Vicki scrabbled clumsily at the release of her harness. “Oh, Jesus,” she heard herself saying, as the ground fell away and the airship leaped upward, freed of the weight of its deadly cargo.

The slopes of Taygetos were rushing at them, faster and faster as the upper-level winds caught them and the unbalanced force of the engines slewed the
Emancipator
around toward them.

“Helm, left full rudder! Shut down starboard One and Three! Up elevators!”

“Ma’am, she won’t answer! Horizontal attitude controls are jammed!”

Vicki Cofflin wiped the sopping sleeve of her jacket over her face again, trying to get the flowing blood out of her eyes.

“Valve ballast—emergency dump,” she called. “All engines ninety degrees.”

The problem with
that
was that most of the hands were up above. She and Alex and the helm crew rushed backward along the long gondola, heaving at the control wheels that turned the engine pods and the propellers downward, at the release levers that opened the stopcocks and let the water from the keel tanks stream out. It went with a rumbling rush that she could feel even now, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

“Hold on all!” she shouted to be heard over the rain coming through the broken prow. “I’m going to drop the emergency ballast!”

The
Emancipator
was nose-up—the vertical controls were still working. All that meant was that she’d hit the mountain-side keel-forward. And it made her journey back to the captain’s position a climb; she ripped the wire cage off the button and hit with a reaching palm.

There was a shark
kerak... kerack ... kerack
as the explosive bolts released cast-iron weights fastened into the keel. They tumbled free, and the airship leaped like a goosed kangaroo.

Vicki Cofflin had one final glimpse of the onrushing cliff face.

Blackness.

The horse snorted and shied beneath Marian Alston-Kurlelo at the sound of a bicycle bell, moving sideways in a crablike skitter. King Isketerol had proved ready to receive a diplomatic mission, but he’d insisted on a place in the no-man’s-land between the Islander base at the site of Cadiz and his own outposts, a day’s travel northward.

She controlled her mount with the absentminded skill of someone who’d spent a lot of the last ten years in the saddle. The horses she and Swindapa rode were local, part of the herd they’d requisitioned from villages near their landfall at Cadiz Base over the past two weeks, and still uncertain about their new owners. The standard-bearer with the Stars and Stripes flying above a white truce-pennant was mounted likewise, for dignity’s sake, and the westering sun gilded the eagle at the top of the staff afresh. Hooves clopped hollow on the hard surface, and wheels moved with a whine and crunch; the flag snapped and fluttered in the onshore breeze.

The platoon behind her were on the cycles, pre-Event ten-speed models refitted for current conditions, and a four-seater side-by-side hauling a Gatling; the Guard had requisitioned nearly every cycle on Nantucket for this expedition, giving money, apologies, and the heavier, clunkier output of Seahaven in recompense. The highway they were following ran northwest from the Cadiz area along the shore of a great inlet—what had been solid ground and marsh at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in the twentieth was open water here. A rough rectangle of sea stretched in from the coast for miles, almost to the edge of the chalk hills that had been the heart of the sherry country in Marian’s birth-century.