“Are you all right?” Lil asked urgently.
“J-just get to the trench,” Nita wheezed.
“Get us to the trench, more like,” Lil huffed. “I ain’t leaving you out here to take a cannonball to the backside after the job you did of dodging the last set.”
Lil crouched and pulled Nita’s arm around her neck. When she stood, hoisting Nita upright, the engineer hissed in pain again.
“What’s hurt?”
“My ankle. I can’t move it.”
Lil glanced down and spied a left foot that wasn’t quite at the angle nature intended.
“Aw heck,” Lil said, working as best she could to keep the weight off the afflicted limb. “That ain’t nothin’. I did that once, jumping down onto a pier that was farther than I thought it was. Butch’ll fix you up fine. Plus, from now on you’ll know if it’s aching, that it’s going to rain.”
A bullet stuck the soil a few paces back. Both Lil and Nita turned to the impact, then to the east wall. The mercenaries had reached it. Without the boilers, the fléchette guns were useless. The Well Diggers did their best to ward them off with rifles of their own, but they were thoroughly outmanned and could scarcely risk a moment to aim before retreating to their cover again.
“We’re going to move a little faster now, Nita. You just lean right on me. We’ll get to the trench just fine.”
Nita looked to the other side. “The gunmen aren’t our only concern…”
Lil turned and spotted a glimmer near the edge of the fresh air. The eye-shine from at least six beasts glinted among the trees beyond the barbed wire. Already the fence had been damaged in places. Thanks to their size, the fence as it was had only been a mild deterrent to the larger creatures of The Thicket when it was intact. With the snapped wires here and there and the broken gate, if the creatures decided they wanted to enter, it would be difficult to convince them otherwise.
“Leave it to the fug to whip up a monster that runs toward explosions and such. Come on, Nita. Almost there.”
They limped along, trying to stay as low as they could in hopes of presenting a smaller target to the mercenaries that were swiftly approaching the damaged main gate. Though the pain was evident on her face and in her motions, Nita did not seem frightened. If anything, she seemed to be deep in thought. Finally they reached the trench and Lil helped Nita inside as smoothly as possible. The two of them and a terrified Nikita were the only ones safely inside, the rest of the crew either injured or doing their best to hold off the surface troops.
Lil propped Nita against the wall and looked her over. Though the leg was the most glaring injury, it was hardly the only one. The back of Nita’s coat smoldered. Streaks of blood mixed with the smears of mud and grease on her dark skin. If not for the layers of leather and canvas, Nita could easily have been killed by anything from the steam to the debris. Lil plucked a shard of wood from the side of Nita’s jacket. It was as long as her hand and had bitten deep into the layers of clothing, but it hadn’t pierced the tough leather and bracing of her corset.
“I guess I understand why you dress the way you do,” Lil said, smiling weakly. “I really gotta get me one of them corsets.”
“I’ll have to… ah… get you one the next time I go home.”
“Yeah…” Lil said. “And once we get you home again, you ain’t leaving. You were right. Livin’ like this ain’t a recipe for livin’ very long. I ain’t letting something like this happen to you again. You holding together all right at least? Anything you need me to do?”
“You’ve done more than enough.”
“Okay. You sit tight, Nita. I… I left my dang pistol. I gotta go get it.”
“One pistol isn’t going to do this, Lil,” Nita said, gritting her teeth and easing herself to an emptied ammunition case to have a better vantage.
“Well I gotta do something.”
Nita glanced at the trees they’d strung the barbed wire between, then shifted her eyes to the tops of the fences.
“I have an idea.” She grimaced as her ankle throbbed. “It’s not the most sane idea I’ve come up with.”
“That’s fine. The crazy ones seem to work better anyways.”
“It might leave us with an even bigger problem.”
“Big problems are great. They’re harder to miss, so you don’t have to spend all your time trying to figure them out.”
“Okay, listen closely…”
#
“I don’t like that squealing!” Captain Mack said. “Sounds like turbine one is working on seizing up!”
“Yeah, that’s what it sounded like when number four locked up last month,” Coop said, dangling from the rigging and trying to make his way up the side of the envelope.
“We didn’t take any spikes. That’s just bad maintenance.”
“Well we ain’t had Nita on board.” He reached the edge of the envelope and stared up at the noisy, rattling engine.
“You and Gunner were supposed to take on her duties.”
“Sorry, Cap’n. You had me digging through that fancy ship and babysitting Lester here so—”
“Did I ask you for excuses?”
“No, Cap’n.”
Lester, still clinging to the base of the rigging, interjected, “Can you please take this seriously!”
“Would you prefer panic? Because it seems you’ve got that aspect well handled,” Gunner said, lining up the deck gun he was manning for a short burst of spikes.
“It wasn’t my idea to be kept up here while you maniacs did battle! Why couldn’t I stay in the galley with Miss Prist?”
“Because Dr. Prist doesn’t much like you, Lester, which makes it unanimous. Get that turbine working, Coop. This steering is getting sluggish.”
“I’m on it, Cap’n.”
“Just how is that idiot supposed to fix a turbine while it is running? He didn’t even bring any tools!” Lester said.
“Yeah I did! I brung this here persuader,” Coop called from his unseen vantage above.
“What is a persuader?” Lester asked.
His answer came in the form of a sequence of loud, clumsy clanks and thumps. After five good shots, the rattling died down and the turbine spun up to the proper speed. A moment later, Coop slid down the rigging and hopped onto the deck.
“I’m getting dang good at this engineerin’,” he said, flipping a hammer and catching it before tucking it into his belt.
The captain peered ahead at the destroyer, which was slowly righting itself. Flames still licked at the bottom of the ship where the gaping hole left by Nita’s improvised mine had done its damage, but not nearly as many as there should have been. The crew had worked quickly and efficiently. In a few more minutes, despite the severe damage, the destroyer could be battle-ready again. That simply wouldn’t do.
“We’re almost over them. Gunner, get ready,” Captain Mack said.
“Aye, Captain.” He pulled a rather substantial knife from his boot. “You realize with the frequency you’ve been using this tactic, it could well be called the West Maneuver.”
“Suits me fine,” Captain Mack said. “They don’t name something after a cap’n who didn’t put it to proper use.”
“Just what are you planning?” Lester asked.
“To return something we borrowed,” Coop explained.
#
On the destroyer, the main deck had reverted to an almost level pitch. The captain continued to bark orders, eyeing the instruments on the helm to direct his men.
“Three more degrees. Move another bank of bombs. That should compensate. What is the status on the enemy ship?”
“It is directly above us, Captain. The spotters got a good look at it. Only basic deck weapons and cannons. There is a mid-size ancillary craft and a small gig. No room for dropped armaments. No weapons with sufficient force to breach our envelope.”
“I don’t care. Set a north heading at least two hundred yards past the edge of that hazy patch. I don’t want to risk the ground forces send
ing up another mine, and I’ve heard stories about Captain West. I don’t trust that man out of our sight. In fact…” He called to a trio of deckhands. “You three, to the maintenance walk. One of you go to the edge of the envelope. The rest, space yourselves to relay messages. I want moment-to-moment descriptions of the Wind Breaker’s actions until they are back in weapons range.”
The deckhands, with clear reluctance, obeyed their orders. They shakily made their way up the rigging, taking up relay positions and weaving legs and arms through to keep themselves steady as the ship lurched into motion.
“Report!”
The messages worked their way slowly back from the man at the top.
“It seems they are having some payload issues. One of the ships is… what? … Oh dear lord!”
Further clarification for the outburst was not required, as mere moments later the envelope bowed outward, dislodging two of the deckhands, and then ruptured. A sleek white ship burst through the bottom and drove itself into the deck. Steam pipes burst, boards ruptured, and amid the blinding glare of nearly all the phlogiston pouring out at once, the captain caught a brief glimpse of the name Alabaster painted on the ship that the Wind Breaker had used as a weapon.
#
The green ball of light rushing skyward and the deafening crunch of wood and metal succumbing to the ship-to-ship impact was enough to draw the attention of friend and foe alike in the ichor well site. Hidden away on the other side of the blanket of haze, it wasn’t clear what precisely had happened, but the sheer size of the flash meant it could only have been the destroyer’s destruction.
Kent, hunkered behind cover and struggling to reload his rifle from his dwindling stock of ammunition, shook his head. “I don’t know how they did it. But I know they did it. I’m damn glad they’re on my side,” he said.
“If they don’t hurry, I don’t think it’ll do much good,” said one of the other Well Diggers, a man called Fesk.
“There’s always the chance they’ll listen to reason,” Kent said.
A bullet ricocheted off the mound of struts that had served as their cover thus far, but the angle from the gate was such that the first mercenary to break inside would be able to pick them off. If something wasn’t done soon, things would end quickly and poorly for Kent and the men with him.
“Hey! Hey!” Kent called as the gate began to rattle. “Think about this! That’s your destroyer that just got taken down. The folks calling the shots and paying the fees just went with it. The job’s through! What are you risking your lives for?”
The gate rattled harder, three more mercs joining in.
“Are you listening! You aren’t going to get paid!” Kent called out.
For people like these, the appeal to the wallet was always more effective than the appeal to mercy or principle.
“Shut your mouth!” called one of the mercenaries. “We’ve got contracts. We’re to secure this patch of dirt. We can do it with you dead or you surrendering. Dead’s easier.”
“Yeah… that’s about how I thought this would go,” Kent said.
The next voice anyone heard was Lil’s distant bellow.
“You all better back away from that gate! That goes for folks on both sides. If you don’t clear out, you’re going to be awful sorry!”
All eyes turned to her. It was telling that even the hardened mercenaries had quickly learned that this diminutive young woman, if she was from the Wind Breaker crew, was nothing to be trifled with. The deckhand had scaled one of the trees that had been called into service as a fence post. One hand held tight to the last limb before the air began to thicken into the toxic soup that covered the rest of the continent. The other clutched a pair of wire cutters.
“She’s unarmed. Someone take her out!” ordered the lead mercenary.
A few rifles turned in her direction, but she deftly pivoted around to the back of the tree before they could fire. A moment later she reappeared, now clutching a bizarre contraption: a long, thin cylinder with a canister at the tip and wires dangling from either side.
“You were warned. This is on you now,” Lil called.
She took one of the wires in her teeth and gave it a yank. Smoke drifted from the near end of the gadget as she aligned it with them. Then a bright yellow flare sent the thing firing toward the gate. The rocket began squealing out a high-pitched whistle along the way, and to Lil’s dismay, fell well short of the gate. Instead it fizzled out and dropped to the ground two yards on the inside of the fence, still dumping the compressed contents of the canister out through a jury-rigged noisemaker to produce a near-deafening tone.
The lead mercenary called something out, but over the sound of the noisemaker no one could make it out. His next, far more motivated remark, came through loud and clear.
“What the hell are those?!”
Four beasts, each varying somewhat in size and appearance but all roughly reminiscent of the so-called fug-squirrels, stalked from the forest beside them. From this distance and with the lingering brightness of the destroyer’s vented envelope, Lil could see the twisted resemblance these monsters had with the woodland creatures they had been before the fug had done its grim work. They certainly moved with the same bounding agility, driven in a leaping gait by powerful legs onto cunning little paws. The only differences were that those cunning paws could easily tear a man apart, and the earth trembled with each leap.
It had taken mere moments for the creatures that had been lingering just beyond the walls, drawn by the noise of battle, to converge at the main gate. Something about the high pitch or the volume of the whistle seemed to drive them mad. They seemed to not even notice the mercenaries themselves, ignoring the scattering crowd as they approached. Two monsters reared on their hind legs and clawed at the gate, easily shearing through the steel cable with their chisel-like teeth. Another bounded to the stoutest tree nearby and leaped over the fence. The last, to its dismay, chose to scale the fence itself and learned just how unpleasant the barbed wire could be. Regardless, the gate soon gave way and the monsters viciously clawed and stomped at the lure, shattering it.
The mercenaries, confronted with the menace of mountain-lion-size beasts in an evident frenzy, did the only rational thing and put their rifles to use. A more steady mind might have reasoned that the monsters hadn’t yet acknowledged their existence, and thus it might be best to retreat to a better defensible position first. The Well Diggers and Wind Breaker crew certainly took this approach, diving for whatever trench was nearest and most intact and topping off the ammunition in their weapons. Thus, as they unloaded their weapons into the monsters, the mercenary attacks did little more than get the beasts’ attention. All four charged from within the walls. The two mercenaries nearest to the gate met with a fate terrifying enough to finally convince the others to scatter. Their retreat was too little too late, doing little more than catching the eyes of the other monsters, who eagerly gave chase.
Kent and the others crouched in the trench, clutching their weapons and trying to ignore the stomach-turning sounds of the mercenaries getting their comeuppance. He turned to those with him, and for the first time since the fléchette guns had gone silent, took a head count.
“Okay. Looks like we’ve got… did we lose Benson? Roger too? And who’s hurt…”
“I’m bleeding pretty bad,” Fesk said. “And Lou’s going to have scars.”
“Anyone know where the traitors are?”
“Don’t know, and don’t particularly care,” Fesk said.
“Seeing how much damage they did, and how much they could do if they got their hands on some weapons, I care.”
A pained voice answered, “They’re behind some repair parts and pipes. I think they were clear of the blast when the steam explosions went.”
The Well Diggers peered down the dim length of the trench to spy Nita, still sitting where Lil had left her. She was bent over, fumbling with gloved hands to tie a makeshift splint from some rope, some canvas, and two appropriately sized wrenc
hes from her sash. Peeking out from within her jacket was Nikita, who had recently taken refuge there. The inspector Lil had dubbed Lardo was huddled against the wall beside her.
“Nita! You okay? What happened to your leg?” Kent asked, moving with the rest of the group toward her.
“I wasn’t clear of the blast when the boilers went. I got caught in a wave of slurry.”
“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” he said.
“Believe it or not, this is what I do for a living. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to run from a steam explosion. Just the first time I’ve had to do it while people were firing rifles at me.”
“Boy, that sure ain’t pretty what’s going on out there,” said Lil, dropping down into the trench beside them.
Her sudden appearance startled the Well Diggers enough for one of them to involuntarily fire his weapon into the ground.
“Good heavens, Lil. Are you working to get killed? Strung as tight as we are, you can’t just pop up like that.”
“You reckon I should have just hung out in the trees while a bunch of squirrel things are romping about? I got news for you, Kent. Squirrels climb trees.”
“They also dig in the ground,” Nita added.
“Oh… yeah… for hidin’ nuts and stuff… Well, heck. Where do you hide from a squirrel?”
“That wouldn’t be a problem if you hadn’t fired off a lure right inside the camp!”
“Oh, well shucks, I’m sorry. I suppose I should have just let them soldier boys shoot you all full of holes while I tried to work out how far that rocket was liable to fire. You try firing a rocket by hand. It ain’t made for sharpshootin’.”
“Now we don’t even have a gate!” remarked Fesk.
“You mean the one the squirrels bit through quicker than you could blink, or the one the mercenaries were fixin’ to break down in two or three blinks? A real loss to the cause that was.”
“It was better than nothing!”
“Not by much!”
“Quiet!” Nita hissed. “The gunfire stopped.”
All in the trench shut their mouths and listened. It was eerie. The sound of screaming and rifles had silenced. Now the only sound was the distant crackle of what was probably the smoldering remains of the The Fist of Alabaster, the hum of some airship engines, and their own panicked breathing.
Ichor Well Page 32
