#
“All this climbing and I might as well be an inspector, huh, Nikita?” Lil said breathlessly as she swung hand over hand along the bottom of the upper catwalk, working her way around the tower. The aye-aye crawled under her shirt again in response.
Once she was safe from the guns for at least a moment or two, she turned to the Wind Breaker. It was getting closer, and from the looks of the lingering glow around its leaks, it hadn’t been having a terribly pleasant ride. It unloaded its rear cannon, but the violent wind was clearly making navigation, and thus the aiming of the cannons, an issue.
“There! Fire on my word!”
Lil opened her eyes wide and swung out to the edge of the catwalk, pulling her head up to peek over it. The feet of a guard were right before her eyes, and on his shoulder was a rather unimpressive tube with a trigger and sight.
“Steady… Fire!” ordered the spotter.
With no time left, Lil acted out of reflex. She reached out and grabbed the gunman’s ankle. Immediately her other hand slipped and she was supporting her full weight from the man’s leg. The gunner was yanked from his feet, firing as he fell. A projectile hissed from the tube. It burned like a flare and moved almost faster than the eye could follow.
The fouled attack streaked by the Wind Breaker, narrowly missing, and continued into the fug. Not long after, there was a fiery blast from below.
“Someone’s got me!” cried the former gunman and current piece of climbing apparatus.
Lil’s weight dragged him between the slats of the catwalk railing, and he released the weapon to grab hold. When he finally got a firm grip, he was dangling entirely off the edge, with Lil hanging from one of his legs. He tried to shake her free, but Lil climbed him effortlessly, slipping through the railing and giving his fingers a good hard kick for good measure, sending the man crashing down to the deck below. Before anyone could stop her, she snatched up the tube and pointed the business end at the spotter.
“Hold it right here. No one’s shooting at that ship!” she said, finger on the trigger.
The remaining guard froze, glancing first to her, then to the crate at her feet, then back to her. Lil looked briefly at the crate. Inside was a pile of small cylindrical objects with a bulge on one side and fins on the other. She looked to the guard.
“This thing isn’t loaded anymore, is it?” she muttered.
He dove for her, and she dove for the crate, snatching at its contents. The guard struck her on the side and sent her rolling to her back, very nearly crushing Nikita in the process, but not before Lil got a handful of something from the crate. Her hand came up without a round. Instead she found wire tangled around her fingers, and a worrying hiss coming from the crate.
The sound was enough to convince the guard to dive through the central hatch and shut it behind him. Lil scrambled to her feet and saw one of the rockets attempting to fizzle to life. She snatched it up, but it finally ignited in her fingers, flashing off into the sky and startling her off her feet. The blast of the rocket set the wood of the ammo crate on fire, and Lil didn’t need Gunner’s knowledge of explosives to know what would follow. Rather than attempt to extinguish the flame, she scrambled to her feet and hopped the railing.
#
“Cap’n, did you see that?” Coop cried, dropping the latest armload of weapons from Gunner’s personal collection. With his “repairs” complete, he now resumed arming Gunner with whatever he could find.
“I got my eyes open, Coop. I don’t know what it was they just shot at us, but I don’t want to take a chance of being hit by one. I’m taking her back down below the surface.”
“Damn it, Captain! I can’t get a clear shot if you keep taking us down into that soup!” Gunner said. “And I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to small arms ammunition!”
Heedless of the complaints, Mack angled the ship downward. The wind-whipped shroud of purple fumes washed over the ship, renewing the bright glow of the scattered leaks in its envelope. Behind them the trailing scout ship plunged down after them. It had it’s own smattering of leaks, but neither ship had taken damage enough to force it from the sky.
Gunner fired a handful of shots from an elaborate rifle of his own design, punching three more holes in the enemy envelope. He threw the weapon down for Coop to collect and reload while he pulled up the next weapon.
“Coop! Tell me this isn’t the last long-barrel you found.”
“That’s it, Gunner. You packed away a mess of your stuff in the stash to make room for that fugger stuff you like tinkering with.”
Gunner looked down at the last weapon. It was one he’d been working on intermittently for weeks. It had the overall look of a rifle, but based on the fittings, it seemed more like part of the steam system of the ship, and even on the surface the thing had the lingering smell of fug and phlogiston. He’d never been able to get it to do much more than spray phlogiston from a small canister, which didn’t seem like a terribly useful function for a weapon. He was about to toss it aside and wait for his rifle to be reloaded when he noticed a glow coming from within a compartment at the base of the barrel. He pulled it open, revealing a brilliant, painfully bright light.
“Of course… it was designed in the fug. It must only work in the fug!” Gunner said.
“I don’t know what you’re on about, but if you don’t start harrying that scout, we’re going to have more holes than Nita will be able to patch!” Captain Mack said.
Gunner began to attach the fittings of the canister and dashed for the back of the ship.
“Coop, you might want to give me some room. I’m not entirely sure what is going to happen.”
“Way ahead of you!” Coop called from a hatch leading to the lower decks.
When everything seemed to be properly affixed, Coop raised the weapon and pulled the trigger. At first nothing happened beyond the hissing release of gas and a strange whining sound. Then, gradually, a dim shaft of light began to shine forth from the barrel. It was perfectly straight and barely diminished at all as it sliced into the mist around them.
“What the hell is it?” Coop called out.
“I don’t know… It doesn’t have any recoil at all. Doesn’t seem to be doing much good, either!”
He kept it trained on the envelope of the trailing ship, and the brightness of the beam grew steadily more intense. A forward cannon on the scout fired. It missed the Wind Breaker, but the attack was close enough to its target that the whole crew could hear it whistle by.
“Quit toying with that thing and get the scout off our tail!”
Coop took a hand off the weapon and grasped one of the valves, spinning it open. The shaft of light flashed brighter than lightning, and the barrel began to quickly sizzle in the rain. The enemy envelope peeled open where the beam struck it, releasing a wave of escaping phlogiston. As the weapon’s canister emptied, the beam sputtered and died away, but not before the damaged ship quickly descended out of sight.
“Any idea what you just took that ship down with?” Mack asked.
“No, but if the fuggers have many more of these, those cannons down there are going to be the least of our concern.”
“I’m taking us back up. You boys get ready to drop down on the deck of that drifting prison. I’m all for setting the rest of those prisoners loose, but I’m getting our girls off there first!”
He spun the wheel and pushed the Wind Breaker to full speed. Ahead of them, deep thumps, spiraling trails of light, and bright flashes were erupting from the deck of the prison just above the surface of the fug.
“And we’d best hurry before they destroy the place.”
#
Nita curled up against the base of one of the central tower’s support pillars as unguided ordnance poured out of the upper platform. Most of the rockets sprayed out into the darkness and detonated above. The remainder either exploded immediately—reducing the platform to burning splinters—or rained back down on the deck. When the explosions died away, there was a pair of
smoking holes blasted into the planks. The largest of the holes represented the smoldering remains of one of the corner towers. The anchor point of the nearest support balloon had been badly damaged in the bombardment as well.
Somewhere below the ringing in her ears and the pounding of the rain, Nita was able to distinguish some crackling above her. She looked up to find Lil dangling from the former railing of the tower’s lower catwalk. It had pivoted out, and she was a few feet above the deck. From the look on her face, the pyrotechnics had left her a bit disoriented. She reluctantly opened an eye, saw how near the ground was, and dropped shakily to the deck where she quickly stumbled and fell.
“Lil, are you all right?” Nita asked, rushing out to help her to her feet.
“I’m okay… I… kind of overdid it up there, I think,” Lil said. “Where’s the Wind Breaker?”
“I don’t know. I think I saw a flash of phlogiston a moment ago. An envelope must have let go under the fug.”
“Well it couldn’t have been—”
Whatever Lil had been preparing to say suddenly became a distant afterthought as a long, rumbling creak of breaking wood signaled the release of the damaged balloon anchor. With the loss of the balloon, the corner of the prison began to tip. Wind caught the deck and forced it down, causing the whole of the facility to tilt dangerously.
Lil and Nita ran back to the tower. Nita held tight to the support and offered her hand to Lil, who grasped it gratefully. The two remaining gunmen were not so lucky, just a few steps too far away from the tower to reach it before the angle of the deck and the slickness of the planking began to force them toward the lagging edge. One of them managed to grab the railing around the stairs leading inside. The other slid out and just barely grabbed the railing on the edge of the platform.
The tilting of the platform seemed to reach its maximum and the prison was losing altitude, dropping down below the surface of the fug. The first of the gunmen reached out to his partner. Then a new figure emerged from the stairway. Before the gunman could react, the newcomer tore away his rifle and bashed him with it, then shoved him free of the stairwell to slide off the edge. He then fired the rifle at the man dangling off the edge and turned toward the center of the platform. It was Ebonwhite.
From the sound of the cries coming from within what was left of the central tower, Nita and Lil were not the only ones to notice the new threat. Shots began to ring out from within the tower, likely the assistant warden putting his pistol to work, but all it managed to do was convince Ebonwhite to fire back. It was doubtful the inmate had ever fired a weapon in his life. He managed three shots before he was struck in the arm and took cover, but the final shot intended for the shooter in the tower instead grazed Nita’s arm. She cried out and lost her grip. Lil, Nita, Wink, and Nikita slid helplessly along the soaking wet deck.
Lil struck the post of the railing, her flailing arms just barely finding their way to Nita’s ankle as she slid by. It took every ounce of strength she had, but she managed to keep Nita from flying off the edge. She began to slide forward, but a wild kick of her leg hooked the railing itself. Now folded over the post with her leg wrapped around the railing, she held tight and fought to regain her breath.
“You okay, Nita?! Where’d you get hit?” Lil called down.
“I’m okay. I’m okay. It was just my shoulder. I… I lost the gun. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to pull myself up,” she called back, sputtering as she hung upside down in the rain, water seeping through the vents of her mask.
“Don’t worry. I got you. I won’t let you go,” Lil said.
Nita looked up, trying to steel herself for an attempt to grab Lil’s wrists with her hands, then froze.
“Lil!” she cried out.
Lil looked up to find Ebonwhite standing over them, madness in his eyes. He had one foot on the post of the railing and the other on the deck. The rifle was in his hands, its barrel practically pressed to Lil’s back.
“When my uncle finds out you killed my brother, and that I killed you, I’ll have my—”
In an act that illustrated both their loyalty to their crew and their lack of respect for dramatic speeches, Nikita and Wink scurried up along Lil and Nita to attack Ebonwhite before his crazed proclamation was through. A pair of aye-ayes can’t do a lot of damage, but they can certainly make their presence known. As they put their teeth to work, he dropped the rifle and tried desperately to pull them free. He got his hand around Nikita’s neck, but Wink crawled up and sank his teeth into Ebonwhite’s wrist. He howled in pain and released her, then tore Wink free.
Wrapping both hands around Wink’s neck, he tried to strangle the beast, but a hand reached out from behind him and grasped him by the front of his shirt. His assailant spun him around.
“Warden Linn!” Ebonwhite yelped.
The warden grasped both of Ebonwhite’s shoulders and pulled him forward into a devastating head-butt that forced the inmate into unconsciousness. He muscled the now motionless man back to the stairs and heaved him inside while the inspectors scattered to what they perceived to be a safe distance, watching him warily.
“Ms. Cooper? Have you got a firm grip on Ms. Graus?”
“I got her… but… I don’t know how much longer,” Lil said.
Linn turned and released a piercing whistle. Anthus padded up to him, a pronounced limp indicating the collision with the door and the resulting partial collapse had not been without consequence. Linn pulled the leash around and lowered it down. Nita grasped it, and Linn and Anthus pulled her up. Linn clicked a manacle onto her wrist, the other on his own, then pulled Lil to the safety of the stairwell.
The pitch of the prison was such that the stairs were nearly level. The inmates, the hound, and the warden moved far enough along the steps to be out of the rain. Wink and Nikita crawled in shortly after.
“Why’d you help us, Warden?” Lil asked, once she’d recovered enough to do so. “And I never would have figured you to be a head-butt man.”
“I’ve said many times, I am not an executioner. You’ve done an adequate job of that yourself.”
“We’re not sunk yet, Warden. We don’t want to kill no one that didn’t try to kill us,” Lil said.
“Nor do I. Which is why I suggest you do not attempt to escape. Ms. Graus is manacled to me. If any of you attempt to do anything foolish, I will be forced to take regrettable action.”
Lil ignored the threat and turned to Nita. “That arm of yours all right? You need to rest it?”
“It will be sore tomorrow, but I’m well enough,” Nita said.
“You figure you and me can get this thing sorted so it don’t tear itself up before it touches down?”
“I’ve never landed a prison before, but in theory we could release the balloon on the opposite side. We’ll descend a bit faster, but we’ll level out, which should take some of the stress off.”
“A theory that will not be tested, as I’m afraid you girls won’t be going anywhere. You’ve both lost your weapons, and you are my prisoners. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve made your bed, and it is my job to see to it you sleep in it.”
“That don’t make much sense, Warden. You make your bed after you sleep in it, not before.”
Outside the stairwell, the drum of rain on the planks was joined by the hum of engines.
Lil smiled. “And that sound means it isn’t bedtime, regardless.”
She paced forward and stuck her head out in time to see the Wind Breaker drift over the pitched deck of the prison, nestling itself down between the envelopes. A rope ladder hit the deck, and not two seconds later Coop touched down. A rope was fastened around his waist, the slack held in one hand.
“Coop!” she cried. “Over here!”
“Lil!” he called back.
Like a mountaineer, he fed out the slack and worked his way down the sloped deck, stepping toward the stairwell.
“Lil, where’s Nita! I don’t know how long the cap’n can keep the ship close enough to t
his floating death trap.”
“She’s right here, brother!” she proclaimed, tackling him with a hug when he was finally near enough.
“Dang it, you two! You know how worried you had us?” he said, throwing an arm around her and squeezing her tight. At the sound of his voice, Nikita climbed his leg and snuggled between him and Lil, taking her rightful place in his jacket. “Did they hurt you girls?”
He turned, for the first time noticing both Linn and Anthus, as well as the manacle tying Nita to the former. This was particularly impressive considering the massive hound had been growling viciously since his arrival and would have attacked if not for the cautioning hand of Linn.
“You want I should shoot this fugger?” he growled.
“Nah, Coop. He’s all right. Figures we’d find the only decent fug folk in the prison. Come on. We’ve got to get Nita loose from him and up to the Wind Breaker. Then we’ve got to set this thing down.”
“He gonna try to stop us? Because I ain’t got no problem shooting a fugger, but the dog don’t know no better.”
Nita drummed out a message against the waterlogged wood with her free hand. Wink skittered across the walls of the stairwell.
“It is my purpose to keep order. I will not see you killed, but all the same I will not see you freed,” Warden Linn said.
There was the quiet jingle of chain.
“So that mean you’re going to stop us, because I like I said, I haven’t got much time to waste here,” Coop said.
“The women are my prisoners, and they shall remain. But you, sir, are trespassing. I offer you one opportunity to leave this place.”
“Not without the girls,” Coop said.
“I respect that. But it leaves me with no recourse. Anthus,” Linn said calmly. “Attack.”
The hound lunged, and Coop raised his rifle, but the monster stopped short as its chain went taut. Linn turned down the stairwell to see that somehow the loop of his leash had been thrown over the end of the handrail. Without a running start, the hound could not muster the strength to tear the wood free, and it was far too intent on attempting to tear Coop’s throat out to allow Linn to free it. Wink dashed back to the others, a look of proud achievement on his face.
Skykeep Page 24
