Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles

by Larry Correia

  “Seventy thousand, five hundred feet,” Barns said.

  “Grab Mr. Sullivan and get down there. The hold will depressurize the second we open the doors, and it won’t do to have you two get sucked outside.”

  “That’s mighty thoughtful of you, Captain.”

  Something was wrong. Faye tilted her head to the side, like her head map had just made her inner ear feel off balance. Barns had stiffened too, as his Power had just recoiled against something that even he couldn’t help shift the odds on. She checked her head map. One of the Imperium navy ships far below them felt different from the others swarming around it. It was bigger, faster. Moving quickly across the ocean, and the magic that was gathering inside of it was deadly and familiar. “Peace Ray charging up!” Faye warned. Now that was something that would be a whole lot more effective than the explosive shells the Imperium had been lobbing up at them. A Tesla beam could shoot clear out into space if it felt like it.

  “Barns, evasive maneuvers.” Southunder ordered.

  But Faye knew that would be next to useless. The ray would travel in a perfectly straight line seemingly as fast as the light from the sun. Their altitude was protecting them from everything else in the sky, but that same altitude would just make them a better target for the Peace Ray. They might miss a few times, maybe, but that was it. The Imperium certainly weren’t stupid. Faye had already done the math. “Keep going, Captain. I got this.” She didn’t wait for the inevitable response.

  There was a scary white skull face looking down at her with big black eyes in the cargo hold. Mr. Sullivan’s voice seemed odd coming through all that steel plate. “It time?”

  She reached down and picked up the bundle of guns and bombs she’d left here. There were a bunch of pistols already holstered on her body. Behind her, the Cogs had fired up their new machine, and it was crackling with magical energy. “Can’t. Peace Ray incoming. Gotta stop it.”

  Sullivan may have seemed slow to most folks, but he was anything but, especially when it came down to matters pertaining to them not getting dead. “I’ll catch up.”

  Faye checked her head map, picked a spot nearly sixteen miles away, and set off to absolutely wreck a battleship all by herself.

  Imperium Warship K3 Auspicious Dragon

  Faye quickly realized that the main reason the massive airship hadn’t fired its Peace Ray at the Traveler yet was because the designers hadn’t ever thought they’d ever have to fire it nearly straight up.

  She had to hand it to whoever the captain of the Japanese battleship was, because he’d pumped hydrogen forward and swiveled the engines so that the front end of the ship was rising hard and fast. She’d never set foot in an airship which was pointed at this steep of an angle before—well, except for the Tempest while it was crashing, but she’d been in a coma for that. Normally when an airship climbed it was a sort of floating with just a bit of an upward angle inside. They were actually pretty gentle. This, on the other hand, felt rather extreme, and if she’d been anybody other than Sally Faye Vierra, landing on a catwalk at such a sharp angle would have been disconcerting.

  To Faye, it merely threw her aim off a bit. Her first bullet hit the Japanese soldier in the shoulder, but that was the beauty of the Suomi Gun. She’d only picked the Finnish gun out of the locker because it had had the prettiest wooden stock, but it was really easy to shoot, so she just adjusted her aim and put the next few in the center of his chest. In her defense, she’d been holding the heavy gun in one hand, and her other hand had been holding the handles on her big sack of guns, which weighed a ton. She dropped the sack with a clatter and used her other hand to grab the magazine.

  Of course her gunshots had gotten the attention of everyone else in the room. They looked up in surprise. She wasn’t even sure what this room did, but it had a lot of energy flowing through it, so she figured it must be important, and everybody inside looked like mechanics, so killing them might help.

  Mashing the trigger, Faye worked the muzzle back and forth. The compensator on the end kept the gun from rising too much. The rest of the thirty rounds was gone in one long, angry burst. Most of the men had been struck. Bodies hit the deck. Some still shouting, a few crawling, others still. Steam was squirting from a pipe. A few had run for it, and a couple of them had even escaped, not yet aware that there were bullets stuck in them. She’d deal with them later, but right now she could still feel the energy building in the Peace Ray. She dropped the Suomi and reached for the sack of guns. Last time she’d done this she’d realized that stopping to reload took up precious seconds which could be better spent murdering Imperium. The ship was at such a crazy angle that the bag had slid down the floor until it hit a wall.

  That reminded her that the captain had to be pretty clever to steer his battleship like this, so she’d deal with him next. Her hand landed on a Browning Auto Five shotgun. It was one of her all-time favorites.

  It was easy to pick out the bridge. It had lots of equipment, big chairs, and electricity flowing up to the various devices and displays. Faye landed on top of one of those banks of instruments. The man operating it looked up at her in confusion. She kicked him in the teeth and he spilled from his chair.

  There were lots of Imperium in this room, but the Captain had to be the one with the fanciest hat, so she blew his head clean off.

  There was an Iron Guard on the bridge. If she hadn’t been able to tell by all the extra magic bonded to him through the ritual kanji scars, she would have been tipped off by the way he quickly drew a sidearm and started shooting at her. She disappeared as the bullets perforated the console.

  Iron Guards were tricky, and she’d found that they sometimes they could get lucky and predict where a Traveler might reappear, so Faye played it smart. There was a big air-conditioning conduit that ran under the floor. She put herself in it, right under the grating beneath the Iron Guard’s feet. She couldn’t lift the shotgun, but she got one of her .45s out and popped eight rounds up through the grate, shredding the Iron Guard’s feet and legs. The way he just grimaced and stayed standing told Faye he was a Brute.

  The Imperium Marines were pretty sharp, and they figured out where she was shooting from right quick, but it didn’t matter, since she was on the opposite end of the ship before their first bullets punctured the grate in response. She’d pulled the pin on a grenade and left it under the bridge for them as a present. She was far enough away she didn’t hear the explosion, but she clearly felt the Spellbound curse stealing the magical connection of the Iron Guard and several of the marines after the grenade shrapnel killed them.

  The Peace Ray fired.

  It didn’t make much noise. There wasn’t much outward show as the particles were magically accelerated and hurled into the distance. Just a sort of snap and a flickering of the lights.

  No!

  She checked. The Traveler was still there. They’d missed. If they’d been hit then the Traveler would have simply been swept away. They would adjust and fire again. She scanned her head map. This ship was over a thousand feet long and packed with life. Who looked busiest?

  That room was busy! Surely somebody in there was involved in shooting the Peace Ray. She arrived unseen. Since nobody even noticed little old her, she stuffed another mag into her pistol, stuck it back in the holster and lifted the shotgun, but then thought better of it. A man in coveralls was working next to a big machine with giant gears grinding together. That machine looked super important and worth stopping, so she walked over, thumped the man over the head with the shotgun butt, and knocked him into the gears. Sadly, he didn’t so much as slow the big gears as they mulched him to pieces, but he sure did scream a lot, which got everybody’s attention.

  So she lifted the shotgun and went to work, dropping Imperium left and right. The Auto Five kicked really hard, but it ran fast. Like her. Everyone scrambled. Some rushed her, screaming, brave, not even armed, while others ran for help, but to the Imperium’s credit, nobody stood there stupidly. They all did something. Not
that it did them any good, since ten seconds later the entire engine room had been depopulated.

  Faye went back to the slowly turning gears. They looked too important not to break, so she jammed the empty Auto Five between them. The big machine shrieked and ground to a halt. The whole airship shuddered, so that was more like it. That had broken something, and fire came shooting out a pipe in the wall. Faye couldn’t read the weird Japanese letters, but luckily a nearby drum had a flame drawn on it. She hoped that meant it was flammable, so she lifted her .45 and poked a hole in the tank before Traveling away.

  Sure enough, the contents of that tank weren’t just flammable. They were explosive. She sure heard that one, even felt it through the soles of her feet as the floor vibrated, but she was already four hundred feet away and three floors up, to pick up something new from her big sack of guns. Two of the crew had approached the abandoned bag cautiously, poking at it with their toes, so she simply shot each one once in the back of the head. The airship was still pointing up drastically, so that told Faye she needed to hurry up and use one of the biggest guns. She picked the bazooka. It had gotten brains on it. Icky.

  Lance had told her bazooka wasn’t its real name, just something they called it for short. It was really the something-something-mark-something-or-other launcher, but she preferred the slang term bazooka, and she figured it would do a real number to the delicate membranes inside the giant hydrogen cells. Lance had been fond of the bazooka, so she figured this was for him.

  There was a great spot on the swaying platform suspended between the hulls. This place wasn’t so armored as the outside, because, come on, how was a bomb going to end up in here? There were ten men on the platform, one of whom was an armed Imperium marine, so she made sure to land right behind him. He had his back to her. Faye took a knee and shouldered the big tube. Lance had always warned her about the dangerous hot gases that came shooting out the back of the bazooka when you fired, but she figured it wouldn’t hurt if she hit an Imperium man with it. She didn’t even really have to aim, since pretty much everything in the wide-open red space was vulnerable. She pulled the trigger and was rewarded with a terrific BOOM.

  It made all of the Imperium men jump or hit the deck, except for the marine who had been standing behind her, of course. He never knew what hit him. The bazooka’s back blast had knocked him right over the railing. He was falling toward the lower hull, burning and screaming. Faye found that amusing for some reason. She turned back in time to see the explosive shell’s impact. There was a great shower of sparks and smoke as the big round tore through multiple cell walls. There was a blue flash as gas ignited.

  The Torches on the damage-control team were easy to pick out. They were the ones not coming to kill her. They were concentrating on the explosion, trying to keep the fire in check while the other armored cells sealed themselves off. Everybody else was charging at her, but you can’t hardly tackle a Traveler. Faye simply dropped the empty bazooka, stepped through space, and let all those tough guys dogpile each other. Then she lifted her .45, shot one Torch in the throat, turned and shot the other right between the shoulder blades. Then she Traveled back to her bag of guns, because the oncoming wall of fire would take care of the rest.

  An alarm began to sound. Why had it taken them so darn long? But then she realized that she’d only been aboard for one minute and fifteen seconds. She could sense the Peace Ray recharging, but the ship was listing a bit to the side. She’d certainly upset their aim, but they could still get themselves corrected, and that simply wouldn’t do. She had to take this big battleship down. There would be other Torches on a ship this big, and they’d all be concentrating on controlling the fires she had started, which meant it was time to switch tactics. She had to find other things to blow up.

  She went back to her bag and pulled out the two really big Russian stick grenades. She could barely lift them and couldn’t imagine how some poor sucker was expected to throw these further than the blast radius. Lance had said these things could blow up a tank!

  Her boots landed on a narrow catwalk. She was out in the open. The blue ocean was visible through the grating. The hangar was filled with biplanes. They were suspended by hooks and chains, dangling over the open floor. Airplanes were filled with gas, but more importantly, they could be loaded with bombs, and if she was a bomb, where would she be kept?

  There.

  There was a big armored door in the side of the hangar. The bombs were fed down a mechanized chute. She followed the chute up with her head map . . . And landed in an armored room absolutely filled with deadly steel ovals, thousands of them, each one weighing hundreds of pounds. Faye grinned. This was perfect. The armor was supposed to keep explosions out, but it was going to have a heck of a time holding this one in . . . She struggled to pull the massive cotter pin out of the Russian grenade, but she managed. Then she dropped it and hurried out of there. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing when it went off.

  She landed on the far end of the ship, and good thing she did, because the bottom middle section came apart five seconds later. Not counting Tesla devices, it was the biggest explosion Faye had ever seen. Debris, people, even whole airplanes got launched out by the blast and went spinning toward the ocean. Her head map told her it was actually hundreds of smaller blasts all piled on top of each other, but nobody else would be able to tell that.

  The bottom hull’s hydrogen was burning. The explosion must have killed several of their damage-control Torches, because they weren’t doing nearly as good a job stopping this fire.

  Somebody must have had the good sense to try to steer this thing. Faye had to hand it to the Imperium Navy, they were very steady under pressure. They’d realized they were crashing, and they were going to try and put it down soft. Faye didn’t think so. Her head map told her which engines were being used to power the compressors on the remaining bags which would enable them to control their descent, and she still had one of the big stick grenades left.

  This room was filled with roaring turbines, big as trucks, and pumping pistons as big around as trees. The alarm was blaring. The lights were flashing. Men were scrambling. They’d all been rocked by the big explosion and they were scared.

  Faye grabbed hold of the pin, but it didn’t want to budge. She pulled, straining, hard as she could. The darn thing was stuck.

  There was an Iron Guard in this room. A big, terrifying man, and Faye could sense the magic roiling off of him. He was moving quickly, bounding between the machines. She could tell what he was because he had made himself so very light. He was a Heavy, like Mr. Sullivan. And he’d been pursuing her futilely through the ship. She could respect the effort, but she wasn’t planning on sticking around.

  The grenade’s pin wouldn’t come out. As long as this Kaga was in the air, then the Traveler was in danger. Faye tugged and pulled, but the pin was stuck, and she had cow-milking hands, so it wasn’t like she was weak. Stupid Soviet junk!

  Gravity intensified. She could feel it building on top of her. The Heavy was hurling Imperium engineers out of his way. He drew his sword. Her head map screamed as the weight of ten worlds tried to squish her flat.

  This stupid bomb was stuck and she wasn’t strong enough to free it. Her body wasn’t strong enough to shrug off all the extra gravity, and in a couple of seconds, some of her internal organs were going to pop. She needed to be stronger.

  The Heavy roared a battle cry and threw himself at her.

  She’d met the Chairman briefly. She’d seen how he’d changed his Powers back and forth, tapping whatever part of the Power he needed to. Faye hadn’t understood it then, heck, she barely understood it now, but the Power wasn’t that much different than Lady Origami’s folded animals. Every type of magic had a shape, and that shape touched other shapes, and all those shapes together made up the world. Your type of magic just determined which part of the world you could tweak. If you reshaped your own connection, you could steer it to a different part of the Power and call on a whole n
ew form of magic.

  She’d changed this before, instinctually calling on Whisper’s fire magic while inside the belly of the God of Demons. Faye felt for the connection to the Power she’d just stolen from the Brute on the bridge, found it, studied the complex geometry . . .

  And in the half a second it took for the Heavy to cover the distance, Faye figured out how to make herself strong.

  Faye easily shrugged off all of the extra gravity like it wasn’t even there. The pin came right out of the grenade. The Heavy’s sword was coming right for her head, but it seemed so slow. Faye simply moved her body out of the way.

  The grenade and the Heavy hit the floor at the same time. So this must be how Delilah felt. The Heavy swung the sword at her ankles, but she just hopped over it like she was playing jump rope. She kicked him in the ribs, and the big man flew back and crashed hard into a pylon. That big old razor sword could come in handy. She crossed the distance in a blur, reached down, grabbed him by the arm, not even that hard, mind you, and his bones snapped like brittle twigs. Faye had surprised herself. The Heavy bellowed.

  Fun as that was, that big Russian grenade was about to go off, so Faye focused, realized that she couldn’t Travel because she was currently a Brute, let her Power spring back to its comfortable state, and stepped outside.

  She was whistling through the sky. The Pacific Ocean was bright blue and pretty. It was a beautiful day.