by Tee Morris
*****
Their small airships were prepping for flight at the compound’s modest landing field when they arrived. A light snow-drizzle deepened the November morning chill. The other henchmen went straight to the two-seater cockpits of their craft. Kuro spotted Beverly by the airfield’s hydrogen pump, watching his approach across the gravel. He’d taken the time to return to his room and put on his Samurai armour before meeting her. The weight of its metal plates felt right, along with the leather scent of its bonds and padding. She smiled appreciatively, looking him up and down, and whacked him across the arm with her cold steamsword; steel ringing off of brass.
“You’d better ignite your weapon,” he said.
“Not near the hydrogen-filled balloon, thanks,” she said. Her smile was radiant in the gaslight glow.
“Do we have a plan?”
“Not exactly. How about—” Her eyes suddenly grew wide, and she flung herself upon him, burying her face against his breastplate, speaking with exaggerated, breathless desperation. “Oh, Mista Campbell, sir. My cousin and that awful Chinaman are keeping me prisoner back there. Please take me with you, oh please!”
Her hair smelled of lavender. He could feel his face growing hot. “Do you think he’s that much a fool?”
“All men are. Present company excepted, of course.” She smiled, pulled her knit cap onto her head. “Now let’s go out there and find us our worthy opponent.”
A signal flare ascended into the early morning sky, and the dozen mini-zeppelins created a chorus of turbines and propellers, rising into the black-purple pre-dawn sky.
The rapturous scent of lavender lingered in Kuro’s memory. They flew west in a loose formation, watching the terrain below for movement. The silence inside their own craft was deepened by the winds and light snowfall.
“There. There’s a boat crossing English Bay.” He saw the lights of the vessel when she pointed. A flag of dense white smoke flew from above its sole smokestack. His brow knotted. “What are those things sticking out of its sides?”
There were four large protrusions on its port and starboard gunwales, two astern and two near the prow. They looked almost like squat barrels, striped with bolted-on iron bands and cables.
“Could that be the gunboat that Campbell warned us about?” Kuro asked. “If we fly too low, they’ll just shoot our zeppelins out of the sky.”
“I love the way you say ‘zeppelin,’” she said. “They’re still close enough to shore. We’ll get the other blimps to land with us at the water’s edge. That lake’s half-frozen already; with this cold, we can show Amboy that he’s not the only one with mechanical tricks.” She motioned for Kuro to take the stick for a moment as she sent out on her heliograph landing orders. The snowy eastern lakeshore didn’t offer much room, but the mini-zeppelins all managed to stake down without trouble.
“Get the hoses into the water! Work those pumps!” she shouted from the cockpit, their henchmen scrambling to obey. With the autumn dawn sleeping in late, they were forced to plan their assault by lantern-light. Stepping out of the zeppelin, the narrow belt of shoreline sand was packed and hard beneath his boots.
Hoses plugged into ports on the mini-zeppelin balloons, leading to waist-high brass and iron welded boxes, which fed cannon-sized tubes that the men were dipping into the water. The lackeys toiled in pairs at the see-saw pumps protruding from the boxes sides, causing embedded needles and gauges to flutter wildly. “The hydrogen converters are experimental Usher technology, a pet project of my uncle’s that Roderick carried on after he died. Half-science, half-sorcery. A chemical reaction inside those cauldrons converts the hydrogen to a hyper-freezing agent, which gets pumped out of those hoses there,” she explained to Kuro. “It was intended for the moat we dug around the monastery, but it should cover this small lake too. At least long enough for our purposes.”
Sure enough, even as she spoke, the calm lake surface began to crystallise. Kuro watched with amazement as a sheen of ice began to freeze around the submerged tubes along the shore. The henchmen looked up at her excitedly from their contraptions. “Not yet!” she shouted back. “Keep pumping! Get the ice firm enough to support your fat arses!” The taut zeppelin chambers began to deflate as the hydrogen drained into the converter boxes, into the solidifying lake.
Beverly picked up a few stones of varying weight, threw them and watched them skid across the ice surface. None broke through.
“The boat has stopped moving!” shouted a henchman. “It’s stuck in the ice!”
Her smile was triumphant, vapour escaped her lips with a relieved exhale. “The low air temperature should help keep the ice in place, yes?” she said, raising her eyebrows to add the question mark. Kuro shrugged. She and he both looked over his heavy suit of armour. “Well, for most of us, at least.” Beverly shouted back to her crew, “OK, that’s enough, lay off the pumps! Charge the gunboat before they get free! Recapture that boy!”
Scharnusser’s henchmen powered up what Kuro recognised as Edison-Wesson rifles, rapidly spinning the cranks bored into their stocks. Three dozen men stormed from the beach onto the lake surface, yet most of them skid, slid, and fell on their arses as soon as their boots hit the ice.
“And this is what happens,” Beverly sighed again, “when you don’t prepare properly.” She turned to Kuro. “The Gatling is in our cargo hold. I’ll aim, you feed the bullets.”
“With deepest respect and apologies, I cannot help you with this weapon.”
Beverly straightened as if she were just slapped in the face. Kuro did not care for her posture or expression. “What?”
“A true Samurai does not use guns, in any form. It would be a dishonour I could not bear.”
He’d seen fury before in her face, but had never seen it directed at him; it was unsettling. She stepped up to him, her nose nearly touching his. “Damn your honour, we have a duty to our boss, to my murdered uncle.”
He felt the heat of her rage, felt Hideo’s disappointment in contrast. “I apologise, Miss Beverly. Perhaps one of the men can—”
“Let’s get something straight, Chinaman—” and coming from Beverly, the insult cut him to the quick. “—you serve me, and I don’t take kindly to problems with my tools in the field. Are you a problem, or a solution?”
Kuro forced back the bitter bile building in his throat. “I thought you understood my way, Bev—”
“Just go get onto Zachary Amboy’s boat,” she snapped. “If the father is on-board, then your duty is to kill the son before his eyes.”
Kuro felt his own jaw set now with anger, the give of Hideo’s neck beneath his blade tingling in his brass hand. “I will find the Amboy child and deliver the Australian back to Master Roderick, as ordered.”
I will harm no child, Kuro pledged silently.
Neither moved for a long moment further, each sculpting the cold frustration between them. Beverly finally broke eye contact and singled out the nearest of Scharnusser’s henchmen. “You two! Come help me with the Gatling gun.”
