Skykeep

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Gunner, get on that deck gun. The scout is on the move. It hasn’t spotted us yet, but it won’t be friendly if it does,” said the captain.

  “Then we’d best hope he holds still. In this weather, the effective range of this gun is going to be pitiful, and we’re going to run out of ammo if there’s a firefight.”

  “Well, that’s mighty unfortunate, Gunner,” the captain said, pushing the turbines to full. A distant clap heralded the enemy cannon firing, and the ruins of a church just off the ship’s starboard bow burst into a cloud of splinters. “Because there’s already a firefight.”

  The Wind Breaker maneuvered low to the ground, its gondola barely above the roofs of the ghost town.

  “If you don’t get up above them, our envelope is fodder for their deck guns, Captain,” Gunner said.

  “Did you kill all four cannon operators?” the captain asked.

  “No, Captain, just one.”

  “Then even if both crewmen working the scout are former cannon operators, we’ve still got one cannon to worry about. I’ve got to stay low until I know they can’t target us, or the scout’s the least of our problems. And this low, I can’t put the cannons to work on that thing.”

  A second distant clap peppered the area with lesser impacts, two of which splintered but didn’t penetrate the hull.

  “They switched to grapeshot. That won’t make this any easier,” Mack said. “Get to firing!”

  “At this range all we’d be doing is wasting ammo, Captain!”

  “Then waste it! If it’s an outside chance at a lucky shot or no shot at all, I’ll roll the dice.”

  Gunner growled and muscled the deck gun into position. When he had it pointed as precisely as possible as the distant form of the approaching scout, he began firing. Even in broad daylight and a dead calm it would have been difficult tracking his shots until they hit the distant ship, but in these conditions he based his aim entirely on intuition.

  Captain Mack pulled a sharp turn, swinging the ship aside and dipping the gondola even lower, such that Gunner’s shots were barely missing the peaks of the roofs around them. Another shot fell just to their aft, demolishing half a block of buildings.

  Finally, a dozen shots before running dry of ammunition, one of Gunner’s darts finally found the envelope of the enemy ship. It wasn’t nearly enough to take it out of the air, but the escaping phlogiston lit them up as bright as day.

  “Coop! Leave your rifle, then run down to my quarters and bring up anything with a long barrel. Rifles preferred, but at this point we can’t be choosy.”

  The scout ship turned, attempting to put the highly visible leak on its far side, which also meant it couldn’t use its cannons, but it had drawn near enough that it could put its own deck guns to use. Scattered shots of the imprecise weapon began to bite into the hull and thunk into the envelope. Most were glancing shots, but two met their mark.

  In another ship the successful hits would have meant a slow death without repair, but the Wind Breaker had been so frequently repaired, and hardened against attack so frequently, that most sections of the envelope had a thick layer of tar beneath the surface. It cost them some maneuverability, but it also made the skin at least moderately self-sealing. A dribble of phlogiston painted them as a target just as visible as their foe, but they weren’t in any danger of dropping out of the sky anytime soon.

  “They’ll be able to target us from a hell of a lot farther now,” the captain said.

  “They won’t have to if we take too many more hits,” Gunner said, shouldering a rifle and pumping a few rounds at the enemy ship.

  “The prison is dead ahead now. I’ll take us below it and bring us up on the other side, evasive maneuvers all the way. Keep us alive until then.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Gunner said, dropping an emptied rifle and reaching for the next weapon.

  The captain flipped a few levers and twisted a few valves to haul the Wind Breaker up into the air. Just when the whole of the ship was free of the sheltering roofs of the deserted town, a sound stopped the collective hearts of the crew. It wasn’t something as simple as a roll of thunder or a blast of cannon fire, though both of those were in no short supply. This sound was altogether terrifying. It was a grinding, sputtering whine, the sound of blades dropping down from their full speed.

  “Damn it! We’ve lost three turbines,” Mack bellowed.

  “I don’t see any hits on the equipment,” Gunner said.

  “Then I guess the old girl misses her engineer,” Mack growled. He fought with the wheel to keep the ship on track, but they were losing speed by the second. “I’m down to the left and center turbine. Just keeping her on course is going to be rough. Someone get down below decks and get this fixed.”

  Coop popped up from below decks with an armload of weapons. “There’s an awful lot of steam rushing about where it ought not be down there, Cap’n!”

  “So I noticed, Coop. Get down there and fix it!”

  He dumped the weapons beside Gunner. “That’s Nita’s thing, Cap’n. I don’t know half of what I’d need to—”

  “You are a deckhand, Coop. When the right crewman for the job isn’t available, that means you get it done. Now get it done!”

  “Aye, Cap’n!” Coop said, sucking an edgy breath through his teeth before hopping back down through the hatch.

  “And when you’re done, haul up some more guns!” Gunner called after him. He then turned his head. “Captain? What do you suppose the odds are that Coop is about to blow us all to scalding hot fragments?”

  “About even money that the scout ship’ll do it, I’d reckon. So keep firing!”

  #

  Coop rushed below decks. The halls were quickly filling with steam, which had the mixed blessing of making it very easy to narrow down where the problem was but very difficult to actually navigate. Fortunately Coop had stumbled through the ship in a bleary haze of half-sleep or drunkenness enough times that he was an old hand at finding his way through blind groping. Before long the thickening cloud of sweltering steam was joined by a worrying hiss, and then angry shouts.

  “That you, Butch?!” Coop called, stumbling aside as a successful attack splashed against the Wind Breaker’s outer hull.

  Their cook and medic shouted something agitated and incomprehensible. Her form was vaguely visible through the haze, and she was gesturing vigorously at a jet of steam whistling out from the elbow joint at one end of a pipe.

  “Yeah, Butch, I see it. You reckon it’s a clog?” Coop said, scratching his head and whipping the torrent of sweat from his eyes.

  Butch responded in the affirmative. She’d fetched one of Nita’s many scattered tool kits and shook it urgently at Coop.

  “How d’you reckon I should get it unstuck?”

  If Butch knew the answer, she certainly didn’t share it. Coop scratched his head again and fell back against the wall as a crackling slap signaled yet another solid blow. With little in the way of intuition and virtually nothing in the way of understanding, Coop tackled the problem with his usual tact: brute force and persistence. He took the heaviest wrench from the tool kit and began to hammer violently at the offending pipe. In his experience, extreme violence was usually enough to coax things into submission, animate or otherwise.

  A dozen good hard whacks and as many dents in the pipe later, something solid rattled along the inside. The escaping steam reduced to a trickle, and the ship tipped under the force of suddenly revitalized turbines.

  “There… This engineering stuff isn’t so—”

  His ill-informed observation was cut short by a metallic crunch and a deafening whistle that sent both Butch and Coop diving to the ground.

  “Damn it, Coop. Now all five turbines are down!” bellowed Mack over a speaking tube. “We’re adrift!”

  Coop squinted through the once again thickening steam to find that the far end of the pipe he’d been “adjusting” had completely ruptured. Any steam that would have been making it to the turbines was
instead venting down the hallway with terrifying intensity. Worse, the whistle of pressure was rising swiftly, and while Coop didn’t know the first thing about steam systems, he did know the last thing about them, which was that if the pressure got too high, it stopped being a system and started being a hole in the ship.

  He didn’t panic because in Coop’s head there usually wasn’t much room to spare for things like panic. Instead he crawled forward to where the wrench had landed and plotted out the next part of the system he intended to beat on until it started behaving. Butch, still on the floor, had found a shiny piece of hand-etched brass attached to the wall beside a valve near the point where the offending pipe and its parallel twin separated.

  “What you got there?” Coop asked, crawling up to the floor-level valve. He squinted through the steam at the careful, precise letters that could only be Nita’s handiwork. “By… bypass valve to… to reroute…”

  The pitch of the whistling steam rose sharply, and Butch started screaming something with enough urgency and concern that even Coop couldn’t understand.

  “Aw heck, it can’t make it worse, right?”

  He grasped the valve and muscled it open. From the first fraction of a turn, it was clear it was having an effect. The second pipe began to rattle with increasing flow, and the wail of escaping steam began to drop off. Better yet, the hum of turbines started to pick up, and with them the speed of the ship. He twisted with all of his might and got the valve almost entirely closed before a grind and creak suggested some combination of overpressure and Coop’s attempted maintenance had damaged it enough to prevent complete closure.

  Coop climbed to his feet and hauled Butch up, then ran to the nearest speaking tube. “Where we at, Cap’n?”

  “Four of five turbines, but they’re not where they ought to be. Something still ain’t right!” he answered.

  Coop looked to Butch. “So things got better when steam stopped coming out from over there. Probably things’ll be right again when there’s no steam at all coming out from over there. But the valve’s busted…” He looked at the wrench, then the dented pipe. Finally he turned to the tube. “Okay, Cap’n. I’ll have this fixed up right quick. Don’t mind the clanging.”

  He reared back and began hammering the pipe flat, each blow cutting the flow off just a bit more, and restoring a fraction more power to the turbines.

  “I hope Nita won’t be too sore about me busting up her pretty little pipes…”

  #

  Assistant Warden Blanc loaded his pistol. Minutes earlier Warden Linn had reached the central tower, managing to escape the riot below through careful use of the staff passages. The wardens were joined by two guards and two of the snipers. They were the last remaining staff that was healthy and armed.

  “All right, men. We all know that it is only a matter of time before the inmates advance on the offices. We drop as many of them as we can. Protect the warden at all costs,” Blanc ordered.

  “No…” Warden Linn said slowly.

  Unlike his men, who were fighting off various states of panic and showing it, Linn seemed entirely composed. If not for the rain that had drenched him in his sprint for the tower, one would think this was an everyday situation he was quite equipped to deal with.

  “Warden, this is a full scale riot. We must meet force with force!” Blanc urged.

  “We are jailors, not executioners!” Warden Linn stated. It was the first time any in the room had heard him raise his voice. When he continued, he was once again composed. “Few of our inmates are here for violent crimes, Blanc. They aren’t after our blood. They are after freedom. And despite their appearance, those surface women aren’t after blood, either. Whitman took a bullet to the thigh, the only serious injury. It could easily have been to the heart if they had been after blood. This, all of this, is in pursuit of freedom… And freedom is what we are charged with denying them. Sharpshooters, you are with me. Weapons steady, and fingers off the trigger. No one fires without my order.”

  “Warden, the chains have been severed. The prison is no more.”

  “We control what we can and cope with what we cannot, Blanc. I intend to see to it that the inmates remain within the prison regardless of its state. Secure the door behind me. And prepare the countermeasures.”

  He opened the door, wind blasting through and drenching him without prompting even a flinch. He simply strode out onto the reeling courtyard and turned aside to stalk toward one of the remaining shelters at the foot of the tower. There was one final point of preparation before he faced the inmates…

  #

  Nita and Lil stalked slowly up the stairs into the pounding rain. They took a wide stance, putting their air legs to the test. Both of them held their pistols at the ready.

  “It’s a heck of a storm to be flying a prison in,” Lil called out. “At least those boys won’t be able to draw a bead on us unless they’re…”

  Through the wind and rain, she saw them. Warden Linn, both snipers, and Anthus. The hound was standing with his head down and his hackles up. He bared his teeth and released a growl that could be heard even through the downpour. Though his gunmen and even Anthus wavered as the prison pitched and rolled, Linn was as steady as the girls, legs wide and planted, face stern and impassive.

  “Miss Graus, Miss Cooper,” he said, his voice even.

  “Warden,” Nita said.

  “I must say, I underestimated you. But I don’t think anyone could have foreseen so suicidal an action.”

  “Well, you’ll know better next time. The Wind Breaker crew stops at nothing,” Lil said.

  “In your zeal for freedom, you have likely sentenced yourselves and each one of your fellow inmates to death. A far heavier sentence than even their peers and your enemies saw necessary. But the nature of the sentence is not my concern. My role is to be sure that it is carried out.”

  “All we have to do is bring the facility down slowly. There are controls for that in the tower, aren’t there?” Nita began.

  “There are,” he said.

  “Then if you’ll just let us bring this down, once—”

  “No, Miss Graus. You’ve crossed a great many lines since you arrived. This last line, you shall not cross. Gentleman, take aim. If they come a step closer to the office… dissuade them.”

  “Well hell, there’s more than one way to let the gas out of these things,” Lil said. “We can just blow a few holes in them, or let some of them go. Won’t be a smooth landing, but I walked away from plenty of hard landings before.”

  “And what then?”

  “Then the Wind Breaker arrives,” Nita said.

  “If your crew attacks, then they will die, because I will defend this prison.”

  “With what? We’re probably miles away from your precious cannons, and they wouldn’t be able to aim without the prison to spot for them anyway,” Lil said.

  “That isn’t your concern. All you need to know is that there is no way that this will turn out in your favor.”

  “Warden Linn, with all due respect, I think the same can be said for you.”

  “Perhaps, but we shall all do our jobs until the very moment we are unable,” Linn said. “I will give you and your fellow inmates one final chance to end this. Return to your cells.”

  Nita stood in awe of the warden. She didn’t know if she admired or pitied the man’s iron resolve to do his job even in the face of incomprehensible disaster. He was like a statue, rain pouring down on a suit that, for the first time, was less than tidy. He almost seemed to feel that through raw will he could return the prison to its foundation.

  A distant bolt of lightning filled the sky and drew Nita’s eyes to the central tower above. Two guards were there, and each of them held a curious contraption.

  “Lil… in the tower.” Nita kept her voice low so that over the wind and rain only Lil could hear the words.

  “I see them… What’re those things they got?”

  “I think I’ve seen Gunner tinkering with thing
s like that from the warehouse heist. He said it was called a rocket-propelled… something.”

  “Aw heck. If Gunner was messing with it, it must be pretty dang dangerous.”

  “If there’s even a chance that it might be a danger to the Wind Breaker, I don’t think we can risk leaving it.”

  “I am growing impatient, ladies. I suggest you head down and speak to the others. Quickly,” Linn warned.

  “Your gosh dang prison’s blowing in the wind, Warden! There’s dedicated and there’s just plain stubborn.”

  Another flash of lightning illuminated the sky. One of the guards called out.

  “Incoming ship! Zephyr class! Heavily damaged! With a heavy scout on its tail!”

  “Okay, no more waiting,” Lil whispered. “I say we scatter. Save our shots for the guys in the tower.”

  “Agreed… Go!”

  Lil went left, Nita right, each sprinting across the slick planks of the courtyard. Both rifleman fired, narrowly missing their targets as the prison shuddered in a gale.

  “So be it,” the warden declared.

  He released Anthus, and the beast charged, choosing Nita as his prey. In three strides the creature closed the gap between them, but Nita dove to the side. For all of its speed, the hound couldn’t change direction very quickly, and its feet slid out from under it.

  Lil had gone straight for the supports of the tower, aiming to reach the catwalk the same way she left it. The gunmen focused their attention on her, but the rain and wind made it impossible to aim properly.

  Anthus was back on his feet and up to speed as Nita ran for the firmly secured door. She holstered her weapon and leaped for a strut that supported the lower of two catwalks above the door. With inches to spare, she pulled herself above it while the mass and momentum of the hound carried him through it. She knew better than to follow him inside, but neither could she stay put, lest the gunmen turn to her. She dropped down and dashed around to the opposite side of the tower.