By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel

by Robyn Bennis

  “Set gears to reverse!” she ordered, when she thought she heard the nosecone connect with the mooring mast.

  “Monkey rigger reports we’re tied off to the mooring cable,” Jutes said.

  Soon she could feel the deck jerking underfoot as the ground crew began to winch Mistral out of the sky. She was pulled in, turn by turn, fighting it all the way as the wind played on her, twisting her about like a fish flopping at the end of the line.

  “Increase steamjack to full power,” Josette ordered.

  “Full power, sir?” Jutes asked.

  “Full power, Sergeant. We may catch fire, we may even steam straight into the ground, but if we don’t get down soon, they’re going to reel in half a ship.”

  Bernat, in the calmest voice he could muster, asked, “We’re not in peril, are we?”

  “Of course not,” she said, without looking at him.

  “Good, good,” Bernat said. “Only, you seem to be in a particular hurry to be on the ground.”

  “I have opera tickets.”

  A moment later, a hard pull on the mooring cable coincided with a heavy gale, and the sudden force wrenched at Mistral’s nosecone, where a cleat held the mooring line secure. The cleat held, and the girder the cleat was attached to held—that girder was specially reinforced for exactly this contingency—but the girders in the frame behind the nosecone had been cracked in battle and never replaced, and those began to sheer off by ones and twos.

  “Emergency power forward! Elevators down!”

  Her order brought strain off the line, but it was too late. The damage was already too great, and what was left of the forwardmost frame could no longer take the stress. When it came apart, it pulled the bottom third of the nosecone with it, which in turn peeled away a string of longitudinal girders from the underside of the superstructure, running halfway back to the hurricane deck.

  The ship lurched, throwing everyone forward who wasn’t clipped on, Josette among them. She let the lurch take her to the forward rail, where she grabbed on, steadied herself, tore off her goggles, and squinted through the storm. She could just make out the silhouette of a person—the monkey rigger, she thought—dangling from the bow, clinging to nothing but a narrow strip of torn envelope. The strip grew longer as it peeled from the underside of the ship, so that even as the rigger climbed hand over hand up it, she was losing ground. When it seemed she could not but plummet, an arm came down from the bow and held the fabric in place until she could clamber up to safety.

  Josette took a breath. But for that flap of canvas, yet another member of her crew would be dead.

  Above, she could hear Chips running along the keel, heading forward to inspect the damage. But she didn’t need his report to know it would take at least an hour to shore up the nose for another landing attempt. With the storm growing worse by the minute, they didn’t have that kind of time.

  As a flash of lightning outlined the shed, she called out, “Steamjack to half power. Bring the wind on her tail, up angle three degrees. Quench lanterns. We’re running for it.”

  *   *   *

  MISTRAL’S STARBOARD RAIL might have been the wettest place on the hurricane deck, if not the entire world, but Bernat clung to it with one hand as tightly as he held his safety line in the other. Apart from drawing some small comfort from the familiar place, he felt a vague sense that this was his station, and as important a station as any other aboard the ship—the pesky fact that he had no official function notwithstanding. Besides which, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make his way anywhere else in the dark, with the ship being buffeted and the deck swinging randomly underfoot.

  Below, the streetlights of Kuchin were just visible through the clouds, still lit inside their ornate glass casings. They went by at a fantastic speed, and rather more sideways than Bernat would have preferred. “Are we meant to be moving right to left?” he asked.

  “Yes, actually.” Josette must have seen his incredulous expression in a flash of lightning, for she went on, “With our steamjack in the condition it’s in, it’s too late to run straight away from the storm. It’ll only sweep us in. So we’re going to use the storm’s own vortex to slingshot around the worst of it and come out the back.”

  Her unrattled confidence made him feel quite a bit better. “So you’ve done this before?”

  She didn’t answer, but only looked briefly toward him in the darkness, and he hoped to God she was rolling her eyes, or at least shooting him a nasty expression. Anything, really, but the cocky smirk he was imagining—the one that said she was learning as she went.

  Jutes descended the companionway ladder, his arms full of pea jackets. Even the sure-footed sergeant lurched across the deck as he distributed them to the deck crew. Bernat donned a jacket, just as lightning struck the spire atop the Pagoda of the Luminous Sky, half a mile ahead of them and not very far below. Five heartbeats later, with the ghostly image of the bolt still burned into Bernat’s eyes, the whole ship rattled from a thunderclap. He tried not to think of the great mass of inflammable air just yards above his head, of the whole ship lit up like a lantern if the bags should take fire.

  The ship’s canvas skin, already taut before the damp stretched it even tighter, beat like a drum in the buffeting winds. Near the nose, a strip of envelope flapped spastically, tearing more and more of itself clear of the ship, until it was only held on by a corner. The whole strip, perhaps three feet by ten, gyrated around its single remaining anchor for several seconds, then came loose and flew toward him.

  He ducked, but it didn’t go over his head. When he came up, he saw it had caught around one of the suspension cables holding the hurricane deck gondola to the ship. He felt a hand tapping him on the shoulder, and Josette was pulling him forward. He stopped only to adjust his safety clip on the jack line, and joined the captain and two crewmen at the forward rail.

  “If it tangles in the airscrews, it’ll be the end of us,” she shouted through wind and rain.

  Bernat grabbed a sopping fold of it in each hand and held tight, bracing his feet against the bottom of the railing as wet fabric slapped him painfully in the face. Over his shoulder, he could hear the thrum of the airscrews even over the storm. He rocked back, hauling on the fabric until it slid aboard, leaving half its weight in water wrung out into the suspension cable.

  *   *   *

  THE SHIP EMERGED into a pocket of calm air between thunderclouds. Over the rail, Bernat had a fine view of Kuchinites going about their business in the streets below, bent into the wind and either soaked to the bone or holding tight to their umbrellas. For a moment it struck him that they were unusually stout and ascetic to be out in this weather. But then he realized, as the ship slipped back into rain and cloud, that the cyclone tearing Mistral apart was no more than an ordinary winter storm. He’d seen a thousand of them, and hardly noticed when he was on the ground. It was only from the inside and aboard a ship made of plywood and canvas that this ordinary storm seemed the great tempest of the world.

  There were fewer streetlights to judge by, as the ship skimmed the outskirts of the city, but it seemed to Bernat that Mistral was taking a truer course now, her nose pointing closer to the actual direction of travel. In ten minutes’ time, his suspicion was confirmed when Mistral burst out into clear air, leaving the cloud and rain away to port.

  “We made it!” he called out, in the relative quiet. Even in the darkness of the deck, he could tell that everyone was looking at him. “Sorry, is it bad luck to say that?”

  “More like premature,” Josette said, and pointed forward.

  A wall of cloud lay ahead, alive and crackling with lightning. He looked backward, where the air was untroubled. “Why, uh, why don’t we head off in that direction?” he asked, pointing toward open skies.

  “Because it’s a trap,” she said. “If we went that way, the storm would roll right over us and we’d be sucked up into the heart of it. Forward’s the way—a quick jump up and over the edge. That’s the sh
ortest path to clear air.” She reached up to clip on to the nearest jack line. Apart from the times she’d intentionally leapt over the side to inspect something, this was the very first time he could remember seeing her clipped on. He rechecked his own line five times, to make sure it was secure.

  Ahead, the storm front was coming up fast. “Pass the word,” Josette called through the companionway, “hold tight and don’t panic.” Then to the rudder and elevator steersmen, she said, “Don’t overcorrect. Be careful of lash in the control cables. Above all, remain calm. Ready?”

  Bernat was expecting some stalwart quip from Corporal Lupien, the most relentlessly cheerful of Mistral’s crew, but he and the elevator steersman only nodded gravely back at their captain.

  “Full power!” she called. From amidships, the steamjack began to shake and rattle, and gave a keening sound that nearly matched the wind for volume.

  The bow hit the squall head on, dipped for an instant, then kicked up so fast and so far that it seemed Mistral was standing on her tail, with all the waters of heaven pouring down her throat. Bernat clutched the rail for dear life, and instantly abandoned Josette’s advice to remain calm. In complete darkness, with the thunder crashing all around, with so much water hitting him in the face that he couldn’t breathe, with the hurricane deck thrashing so violently that it seemed it could not possibly remain attached to the ship, all he could do was clap on and pray.

  He spat out a mouthful of water and gasped for breath, and after a few moments found that the deluge had diminished enough for him to breathe regularly, if not easily. He realized that his eyes were closed, and opened them to find himself staring backward, toward the stern, with no idea how he’d come to be turned around. In the darkness, he could hear girders straining, popping, and grinding all along the length of the ship.

  A flash of lightning outlined the superstructure, which was bent left in a curve that had to be at least twenty degrees. The lightning died and total darkness returned, until another bolt lit the clouds, revealing the ship was bent at least twenty degrees in the other direction. After a few moments’ intervening darkness, another flash showed Mistral bent in the first direction again. All along the envelope, fabric which had been pristine this morning was torn open and flapping in the wind.

  He looked away from it, not wishing to see what state the ship would be in by the next lightning flash, whether it might be bent double this time and going down. When the next flash came, he was looking across the hurricane deck. He saw a moment captured in time, the steersmen holding white-knuckled and straining against their wheels, Josette with one hand on a girder and the other hauling on emergency pull ropes. In the next flash, he saw her shouting to him, but he couldn’t hear a word of it over the fury of the storm.

  Without taking his hands off the rail, he raised a thumb at her, until the next flash illuminated the signal. The lightning’s last dying flicker showed her nodding gravely back to him. The thunder followed a moment later, and at the next flash he found that his eyes were closed again.

  Soaked to the bone and holding on for his life, he gradually slipped into a strange state of detachment. The thunder became distant, the rain and cold insignificant, the stabbing pain in his ears a mere nothing, and the promise of death irrelevant.

  Sometime later—he couldn’t say how long—a voice by his ear whispered out of a perfect silence. In the quiet, motionless air, it said nothing more than, “Bernie, look.”

  He opened his eyes to find Josette leaning next to him, staring over the side, and wearing the most disconcerting smile. He looked out over the rail.

  Clouds stretched far below them, running away to the north like a snow-covered mountain range. The storm was lit from above by the moon and stars, and intermittently from within by flashes of lightning. Bernat’s breath fogged the icy but untroubled air. Soft, calming moonlight illuminated the deck. Mistral’s superstructure did not bend. The envelope was still, the girders unperturbed.

  And everything was perfectly quiet. Even the steamjack had stopped.

  “We’ve gone up two miles in ten minutes,” Josette said, still whispering. “We’re so high, we had to vent a quarter of the gas so the bags wouldn’t burst in the low pressure.”

  The serenity he’d been cultivating for the past few seconds evaporated. “Isn’t that quite a long way up? How will we get down again, after losing all that gas?”

  “Less gas makes it quite a bit easier to get down, actually.”

  “I mean, without crashing.”

  She shrugged. “We have ten thousand feet to think of something.”

  “Oh God,” he said, closing his eyes again.

  “Not so loud. We’re so high he might hear.”

  Bernat held tight to his safety line and said, “And it’s obvious he hates us.”

  *   *   *

  SHE DIDN’T HAVE the heart to tell him they were already falling.

  If she dropped enough ballast, the steamjack might have the power to hold them to a steady altitude, but the bearings had overheated while fighting the updraft. All Josette could do was wait for them to cool, and hope the ship didn’t hit another updraft that forced her to vent even more gas.

  She heard someone coming down the companionway, and turned to find Kember. The girl stepped to Josette’s right and said in a quiet voice, “Bags two, seven, and eight are losing gas. Friction tears, we think, from the frames twisting around so much in the storm. Riggers are having a hard time getting to them. And number six had a vent stuck open, but we’ve repaired it now.”

  Josette lit a mesh-enclosed lantern to have a look at the aneroid altimeter. Their fall was definitely accelerating. “Drop five hundred in sand ballast,” she told Kember. “Make sure they pour it out, or we might accidentally drop sandbags on the goddamn palace. And make sure the keel is well ventilated.”

  Sand was dropped in short order, but Mistral’s descent was still accelerating. She ordered another five hundred pounds dropped, which brought them to a steady rate of fall.

  They were fast running out of disposable ballast, and coming up on the turbulent top side of the storm, with the steamjack still inoperable. Josette ordered three hundred pounds of galloping ballast—that is to say, two crewmen—into the forward frames to bring Mistral down by the nose. In that attitude, the ship did not fall straight into the storm, but slid along the air currents of its rear-facing slope, like a toboggan riding the sky.

  Halfway down, the welcome sound of the steamjack’s whine cut the silence. “Private Grey says she can give you one-third power,” Sergeant Jutes reported.

  “One-third power it is. Steer northwest, and we’ll try to get a bearing on the signal base.”

  They were behind the storm, but the leaking bags still ate away at their buoyancy. Within an hour, Mistral was flying with the bow up ten degrees just to maintain altitude, enough pitch to tire the crew out from standing at an angle. After another hour they were still at ten degrees, and falling, even though the steamjack had been brought back to half power against Private Grey’s advice. Half an hour after that, with the sand ballast gone, the cannonballs and shot went over the side, with dearest hope they didn’t land on anyone important. After that it was the reserve fuel and all the ship’s stores that went by the board.

  Mistral still fell. There was nothing left to drop but the bref guns and the water ballast, and Josette wanted to reserve water ballast for landing. So she had hatchets distributed, and together with the deck crew hacked away the lines and supports holding the cannons, letting them fall, with the dearest hope that they’d land on someone soft.

  With that dismal task finished, she called landing stations and had Jutes hand out knives. When Bernat took his, he blinked at it a few times and said, “Oh, thank you.”

  “If you end up inside a bag after we’ve landed,” Josette said, “use that to cut your way out. Don’t tarry, or you’ll drown in the gas.”

  He looked at her in disbelief, and then suddenly cried, “Why in
hell do I come aboard this deathtrap?”

  She smirked and looked forward. “Same reason the rest of us do: irredeemable insanity.”

  They slipped into cloud cover behind the storm, and the turbulence began again, though not so bad as on the leading side. Then again, Mistral had been in better shape on the leading side, with a more capable steamjack and ballast to spare.

  She leaned over and said, “We might die in a minute, Bernie. Anything left to say?”

  He spent a few moments staring contemplatively into the lightning-lit clouds. Finally, he said, “I’m not the slightest bit sorry I slept with your mother.”

  Josette considered this, and answered, “Neither am I.”

  She might have said more, but the next flash showed them clear of the clouds. In the flickering lightning, the hills and treetops outside the city appeared no more than a hundred feet below.

  At the next flash, they were noticeably closer to the ground. So low, in fact, that in the next moment the tail caught on a copse of trees. Now anchored aft, the rest of the ship pivoted down like a flail threshing wheat, so fast that anyone on the hurricane deck would surely be squashed between it and the keel.

  “Everyone into the keel, now!” Josette screamed. “Bernie, up! Someone quench the boiler fire!”

  Josette was the only one not scrambling for the companionway. Instead, she leapt for the ballast controls and put all her weight on the pull-ropes. Another lightning flash showed ballast water pouring from ports forward—every second reducing the force of the inevitable crash. The hurricane deck now lay forty feet above the treetops, which were arrayed like a pit of spikes below. At the next flash, it was only twenty feet.

  “Where the hell’s the captain?” she heard Jutes ask, a second before the hurricane deck hit the tallest pine.

  She yanked herself up by the pull cords and slipped between two keel girders just as the deck came up into the space she’d been occupying. She heard the companionway snap into pieces, felt branches slap her body as a pine tree tore through the deck, inches from her head. Somewhere aft, she could hear the buzz of the airscrews clipping branches.