Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (28 page)

“Pretty simple creatures,” Draksgollow said as he watched his workers carrying chests and strongboxes into their hideaway. “Follow any river and it’s like a chain of human cities. You’d think they were part fish.”

“They’re lazy creatures, most of them. Can’t work stone, don’t like to dig. If they don’t live where water delivers itself, they’ll dry up and die. Hmm, I suppose they do sound a bit like fish now, don’t they?”

“So what now, we just plunder every bank and palace we can find?” Draksgollow didn’t sound displeased with the prospect.

“And we’ll buy better equipment, hire more troops, build more machines,” Kezudkan said. He picked up a map between thumb and first finger. “We’ll get better maps from their world, capture locals and learn their tongue, get them to tell us where to find more. Then we’ll do the same in Veydrus when we’re done. After that, we tackle those strange worlds that don’t look like ours.”

“When do you plan to hunt down that slave of yours? The sooner we’re the only ones with the machines, the better, if you ask me.”

“I don’t,” said Kezudkan. “We’re not hunting all over Korr for a human on a stolen airship. We bait the trap and count on his curiosity to spring it.”

Draksgollow grunted and went back to supervising the unloading of the bank vault. Kezudkan had lost count of how many times they had trod that path.

The ship had been empty—not so much as a janitor aboard or a mechanic rollicking with his sweetheart in the engine room. Empty. But that was five minutes ago, and now the
Kelleb
swarmed with humans. Five mechanics ascertained that it was air-ready. A rune tender pumped aether into the vacuum pump, whether it needed it or not. A hundred guns fanned out through the ship, taking up positions to fire back at ground forces who tried to stop them.

Rynn took command herself. Stairs still gave her trouble, and her leg ached from the exercise, but it felt good to stand without holding onto anything for balance. She held tight to the ship’s wheel because it was hers to steer as she liked, not because it was the only thing keeping her from toppling.

Rynn cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted down the stairs from the bridge. “Cut her loose. Full engines, full pumps.”

Something outside the window caught her eye. “STOP! EVERYONE DOWN!” A hangar at the far end of the air strip slid open, four kuduk workers hauling it out of the way. No sooner had they gotten the door clear, than the nose of an enormous liftwing poked out, and the noise of its propellers—four across the wings, each twice the height of a human—roared across the aerodrome. It lumbered free of the hangar’s confines, gathering speed as it rolled. Its wings were like a ship’s sails, its body nearly the size of the vacu-dirge’s gondola, bristling with gun turrets. The liftwing battleship lined itself up with the takeoff strip and gained speed in earnest.

Rynn clomped over to the stairs, gripped the railings on both sides, and swung herself down in two pendulum steps. She raced at a hopping gallop to the spot where Erefan had left the world hole. “Liftwing’s after the pilots. Do something!”

Erefan gave a nod in reply. The last thing Rynn saw was his hand gripping the handle of the switch. At his first tug, the image disappeared.

There was nothing more she could do to help. She still had a job to do. “Fire up the engines and pumps! Time to get this turkey off the ground.”

Sosha let her craft drift gently off the course of the seven airships ahead of hers. She made corrections with the delicate touch she normally reserved for stitch work on children. Anything more forceful and her ship began shaking again, and each time she feared it would shake itself to pieces. It had its peculiarities, Sosha’s liftwing. She hesitated to call it junk, even in her head, while she still needed it to carry her back to the
Jennai
. The last thing she needed was for the poor beast to take offense, and dump her into the Sea of Kerum out of spite. That assumed that she would make it as far as the sea. The aerial convoy was still over land for the next few minutes, at least.

Due to its peculiarities, Sosha had developed a keen ear for the sounds her liftwing made. It was a musical instrument with one note, a sonorous hum like a trumpet, but not as sharp on the ear. When it developed an undertone, Sosha’s first thought was that she had reached the end of the liftwing’s patience with her. Something was wrong in the engine, and it was humming a new tune. It grew louder, which told her the problem was growing worse.

Unfortunately for Sosha, most of her conclusions were correct, though the causes she imagined missed bullseye and hit hay. Gunfire broke her from her worries over the engine and replaced them with new ones, like getting carved into pieces by rotorifle fire. She was suddenly glad she had found a chamber pot just before leaving.

Twisting in the safety harness, Sosha saw the Grangian liftwing looming up behind her, a great storm cloud trying to roll across and rain bullets onto her. Even under fire, she hesitated to jerk the control stick. Another burst of fire made her duck down in the cockpit. While she was there, she slipped her coil gun from its holster.
Maybe I can disable it
.

Sosha’s first shot was the blind lobbing of a cleverly crafted hunk of runed steel and copper over the side of her liftwing. Soon as she brought it up to aim, the terrific wind from her air speed tore the gun from her fingers. A reach and a fruitless grab after it, and she ended up jostling the stick anyway. The liftwing rolled to starboard—Sosha couldn’t recall if it was right or starboard when flying a liftwing—and started a gradual climb.

Up was no place to be, with the Grangian liftwing hanging in the sky between her and the sun. The engine was already shuddering like a seizure patient; there was nothing to be done but try flying it despite its protests. Sosha took firm control of the stick and leveled the craft with the horizon, then put it into a dive. The larger liftwing was clearly the faster of the two, so outrunning it seemed hopeless. At least she could get herself away in one direction.

The vibrations from the engine were rattling Sosha’s teeth, but with gunfire still crackling in the air from high above, she didn’t dare to change her course or slow down. They were missing her, and she bloody well intended for them to keep missing her.

Two cracks, in rapid succession, ended the airborne earthquake. A thump on one wing followed instantly behind. A quiet whirr and the rush of air past her head were the only sounds left—except continued gunfire. The welcome relief was short lived. Something was missing. Though it spun faster than the eye could track, the propeller blurred the air before it, leaving a streak of propeller afterimages that she could see through with little trouble. Now the air at the nose of the liftwing was clearer than glass.

The propeller was gone.

Erefan’s hands danced across the world-ripper’s controls. He had the viewfinder up and airborne in seconds. It took him just a moment to gain his bearings and head off in the direction of the stolen liftwings and their Grangian pursuers.

“Should have sapped the Ruttanian Air Corps first,” Erefan muttered. “Grangians are too proud not to chase.”

He brought the airship into range of the viewer. It was shrinking into the distance, but the world-ripper was not bound by conventional locomotion. Erefan switched to a coarser dial and the airship grew by the second as he turned it. The thing was a monster. A hundred feet long with a steel hull and gun turrets protruding from the sides and bottom, it was a skybound battleship.

Tiny dots in the distant sky were his pilots, fleeing in their stolen liftwings. The Grangian craft was gaining on them. Worse, they were leading the way to the
Jennai
.

“Bring guns!” Erefan shouted. “I want that airship turned into a sieve.” He kept a steady pace at the dials of the world-ripper. The Grangians were traveling off-axis from the machine’s setup, so it took coordination of two dials at different rates to keep it somewhat fixed in view.

Vaulk shouldered his way through the chaos of soldiers and onlookers scrambling to arm themselves. “Your daughter took all the coil guns with her. All we’ve got are rifles.”

Erefan growled, his hands stuck to the controls, lest they lose their quarry. “Fine. We’ll fire what we have.”

“Want me to get Kandrel?” Vaulk asked. “He can wake as Orris and rouse the boy. Let the little prat earn his keep.”

“No!” Erefan snapped. “The boy’s a hazard. Get Kandrel, but have him wait. We’ll use the boy as a last resort.”

Vaulk departed as men arrived back with their rifles. The cheering onlookers who had celebrated the pilots’ success turned into a militia to rescue them as they watched it evaporate. They were quick; it hadn’t been two minutes since Erefan gave the order to arm. Errol Company men. Worth every fonn he paid them and more.

“Someone get over here and man the switch,” said Erefan. One of the soldiers shouldered his rifle and came to the tinker’s side. “When I give the word, pull.” He raised his voice and shouted for all to hear. “When I give the word, put holes in that thing. Aim for the wings and spinners if you can. If you can’t, hit any part of it.”

The liftwing fluttered in the viewfinder like a butterfly. Erefan knew it was his own fumbling fingers that couldn’t keep a steady rate on two dials at once. A curse of his trade, he found himself thinking how he could rig a device to keep a constant rotation on each dial, and adjust that rate on the fly. Of course, he hadn’t the weeks he’d need to fabricate and tweak the design, even if the crude schematic in his head was viable. He got the liftwing centered as best he could.

“Pull ... FIRE!”

The deafening roar of the liftwing’s propellers chopping up the air thundered through the cargo hold. A hurricane blew in along with it, spoiling the riflemen’s aim. A few recovered enough to get shots off, but nothing had a visible impact. The liftwing lurched and slung itself from the viewer as Erefan failed to keep the dials moving as required to keep on the liftwing’s tail.

“Undo the switch!” He repeated the order, but there was neither comprehension nor quiet enough to make his need known. He took a hand from the dials and opened the switch himself. The hurricane subsided, the noise cut short in an instant. A chill that had gone overlooked amid the chaos sent shivers through the crowded hold as it did not depart willingly.

Eyes turned to him, but Erefan was already back to working the dials, catching back up with the Grangian battleship. “Make ready with the switch, and flip it the other way when I call the order.”

“Yes, sir,” the switch soldier replied.

“Get ready for another try at them,” Erefan said. The liftwing disappeared below the view of the world-ripper. Erefan changed tactics and angled the view downward. Soldiers clambered to get away from the view, which showed the Grangian airship a hundred feet below and the ground uncounted thousands below that. A very real, very fatal fall was just a flip of a switch away. The bravest among them took up marksman’s positions, kneeling just a few paces from the view frame. “Aim for the pilot’s windows at the front.”