The Guns Above

by Robyn Bennis

  “We are free aft, sir,” Jutes called down the companionway.

  Now the only thing holding Mistral to the earth was the weight of the ground crew. Josette paused for a moment—not for any technical reason, but merely to savor the moment. Then she took a deep breath and shouted, “Up ship!”

  Ensign Kember and Sergeant Jutes repeated the order at once, she over the starboard side and he along the keel. The ensign ran to the port side and shouted it again. The remaining ground crew heaved the ship upward before letting go.

  “Set gears to reverse.”

  Jutes shouted, “Reverse gears.” There was a clank as the gears engaged, connecting the spinning steam turbine to six booms, three on either side of the ship, each of which turned a two-bladed airscrew. The ship slid gracefully back from the mast, rising as it went.

  At the rail, Bernat’s short hair blew in the wash of the reversed airscrews, his lace flapping against the fringes of his coat. Josette donned her leather cap and goggles, as did the rest of the deck crew, but Bernat did not appear to have any. As he tried to hold his hair in place against the blast of wind, he shouted, “I was wondering, why do they call this the hurricane deck?”

  “Nobody knows,” Josette answered.

  As the ship ascended and backed away from the stubby mooring mast, the ground crew came into view ahead of them, growing smaller and smaller. At two hundred feet altitude, Josette ordered, “Set gears to forward. Steamjack to one-quarter power.”

  The hurricane deck became a less turbulent place as Mistral’s backward movement slowed. The ship came to a halt, and for a single moment the air was completely still.

  And then Mistral drove forward.

  5

  BERNAT WATCHED ARLE go past below. With the wind coming from the east, it would be another smoky day, but at this time of morning the manufactories had only just begun to belch soot, so the view was still clear. They passed over Arle’s semaphore tower, so close that Bernat thought he could reach down and touch one of the articulated signal arms, and so close over the top floor of the Pagoda of the Pallid Jird that he could have tossed down an almond cake, or whatever it was monks ate.

  He looked to Dupre, but her attention was fixed on the instruments mounted above her station. Bernat had no idea what the various needles and floats meant, but whatever it was, it inspired something vaguely like a smile in Dupre. Which is not to say that her mouth smiled, but her lips did tighten at the corners, and her habitual scowl diminished incrementally.

  Bernat found it unsettling.

  Dupre went to the rail and looked back along the length of the airship. When Bernat followed her example, she pushed him back. “If you’re going to do that,” she said, “put your harness on right side up and clip on to one of the jack lines. Then you won’t fall out.”

  “But you’re not clipped on.”

  “I’m not going to fall out.” She leaned over the rail, so far that her feet left the deck and she pivoted on the rail like a seesaw. She hung there in that precarious stance, from which any stray gust or eddy of wind might have sent her plummeting. Bernat wanted to grab her feet to keep her from going overboard, if only because he didn’t think he’d get his money if she accidentally killed herself.

  Martel came down the companionway, a logbook open in one hand. “First aerial test,” he said to Dupre’s boots, “is rate of climb at one degree up elevator, while weighed off.”

  Dupre tilted back onto the deck, looked at him, and said, “Later. I want to do the speed trial.”

  Martel grinned and said, “Yes, sir. I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “Pass the word to the mechanics: increase steamjack power to one-half. Let’s see what her cruising speed is.”

  The steamjack’s whine grew louder and higher. The corners of Dupre’s mouth tightened further as she watched what Bernat now took to be the kinemeter, which measured airspeed. Its needle climbed steadily until it reached twenty-five knots, then settled to a stop.

  “Pass the word: increase steamjack to three-quarters power.”

  Bernat watched Dupre’s face to see what she looked like when her scowl went away entirely, despite a nagging worry that the sight could turn him to stone. But as the steamjack and airscrews grew louder, the tightening at the corners of Dupre’s lips relaxed, and they drooped downward into their habitual orientation. Bernat looked up to see that the needle of the kinemeter indicator had hardly budged, rising only one knot, to twenty-six.

  “Increase to full power.”

  Again, the needle twitched upward only a little. Now Dupre looked more unhappy than usual, something that Bernat had heretofore believed humanly impossible.

  “Increase to emergency power,” she said.

  The whole ship vibrated as the steamjack’s whine became a screaming wail, but the airspeed needle didn’t rise by even a full knot. It seemed to be stuck halfway between twenty-seven and twenty-eight. Dupre pulled herself up by an overhead girder and tapped the dial. The indicator needle shivered, but didn’t rise.

  “Reduce power to full,” she said, dropping back to the deck. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “She’s not slow, sir,” Martel said, as he recorded the data in the logbook.

  “Well, she’s not fast.” Dupre took the logbook from Martel, double-checked the figures, and put her initials in the margin.

  Bernat, meanwhile, was working on his letter to Uncle Fieren. He couldn’t very well pull out his notebook, but he already had the latest section composed in his head:

  Lieutenant Dupre has so little command of the flying characteristics of airships that, in the midst of performing her air trials (out of the order so carefully prescribed by army engineers), she was caught entirely unawares by the ship’s top speed. She went on to whine petulantly that the army had not supplied her with a faster ship, as if the entire Garnian army existed only to serve her whims.

  Or maybe, “as if the ship were her plaything” would be better. As he was contemplating it, Dupre looked over, as if noticing him for the first time. “Why don’t we get you situated, my lord. Lieutenant Martel, you have the deck.”

  Dupre took one of Bernat’s bags, testing its weight. “What do you have in here?” she asked.

  “Just the essentials,” he said, smiling and picking up the second bag. They went up the companionway together. Inside the keel, the air was relatively still, though Bernat’s hair continued to blow in a light breeze.

  He was surprised at how much of the giant ship’s insides he could see, standing at the top of the companionway ladder. There were no internal cabins or bulkheads, as he’d imagined. Rather, the interior reminded him of the great whale skeleton on display in the Kuchin Museum of Natural Science. If one turned the skeleton on its back and multiplied its size several times, the creature’s ribs might be comparable to Mistral’s transverse frames, as he believed they were called. The only difference was that a whale’s ribs didn’t meet at the ends, whereas the frames made a complete circle around the ship at regular intervals along its length.

  And if the frames were the whale’s ribs, then the keel was obviously its spine. Though, contrary to his expectations, he was not standing atop the keel, but within it. Five long lines of girders, running from bow to tail and twice as thick as any of the other girders, surrounded him and seemed to give the keel most of its strength. Two ran overhead, one ran at waist level on either side, and one ran directly underneath the wicker catwalk. The fact that he could see it through the spaces in the wicker did nothing to help his faith in the ship’s sturdiness.

  At each frame, the spinelike keel girders were joined at right angles to the riblike transverse girders. Short, narrow girders linked the keel girders to each other, also at right angles, so that the narrow girders traced the outline of a pentagon around the outside of the keel. Another pair of narrow girders connected the two overhead keel girders to the one under the catwalk, making an inverted triangle inside the pentagon outlined at each frame, with the perilously narr
ow catwalk running down the middle. With something like ten frames, this made for quite a lot of keel girders, but they were spread so far across the length of the ship that the entire affair still appeared skeletal.

  There was no ceiling above the keel. He could see straight up into the giant luftgas bags that filled the superstructure—something like the whale’s lungs and other organs. Only over the engine area, farther aft, did a fabric barrier separate the bags from the keel.

  Forward of the companionway ladder, halfway to the bow, there were cages full of pigeons attended by an airman, though he seemed to be agitating them more than caring for them. Bernat also noticed a board, apparently serving as a desk, which had some writing materials on it. Good. At the rate he was going, he would soon run out of space for Dupre’s faults in his notebook. Beyond the pigeons, the keel corridor narrowed, the five lines of keel girders squeezing in close to each other as they curved upward toward the nose-cone.

  Aft, the keel catwalk narrowed as it ran between a pair of cylinders, and beyond that it split in two, bisecting around a tangle of tubes and gears in the middle of the airship. He couldn’t see it with those tubes in the way, but he knew the steamjack turbine and boiler lay farther aft.

  “Hold the jack line,” Dupre said, indicating the single line running above their heads.

  “Even inside?”

  “You’re in more danger of falling here than on the hurricane deck,” she said. She pointed to the canvas walls covering the bottom two sides of the keel’s pentagon, which were apparently the only barrier between the keel and the outside air. “You could punch through these walls quite easily, my lord.”

  Bernat cocked his fist.

  “Although I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”

  He lowered it and shrugged.

  She looked past him and asked, “Private Corne, what the hell are you doing?”

  Corne looked up from the pigeons, but continued to rattle their cages with both hands. “Er, Corporal Lupien told me I had to keep the pigeons flying, so we’d be light enough to stay in the air, sir. He said we’ll crash if more than half of them land at once.”

  Despite the noise of the engine and the airscrews, Bernat could hear snickering coming from the hurricane deck.

  “And you believed him?” Dupre asked.

  Corne swallowed. “Er—no, sir.”

  She put her hand on her hip and took a deep breath. “Then why are you harassing those birds, man?”

  “Well, you see, sir, he is my superior, sir. That and, well, better safe than sorry?”

  Dupre seemed to consider this. “Very well, Private. Carry on.” She walked aft along the catwalk.

  Bernat followed. “You’re just going to let him keep at it?”

  “Well, I don’t want the ship to crash,” she said, turning sideways to pass between the cylinders that constricted the catwalk.

  Bernat squeezed between them, and was surprised to find them cold and leathery. A poke confirmed that they were massive water skins. “Good to know there’s plenty of water to draw a bath with,” he said.

  She looked back. “Wouldn’t take a bath in that water, my lord,” Dupre said. “It’s ballast water mixed with kerosene to keep it from freezing. The drinking water’s back in frame three.”

  “Frame three?” he asked.

  “The third transverse frame, counting from the tail forward.” She pointed up, to the nearest of the whale’s ribs, just aft of the water skins. “This is frame six.” She pointed forward, to the frame closer to the pigeons. “That is frame seven.” She pointed up at the enormous luftgas bag directly above. “And that is bag six.”

  Continuing aft, he paused near the pentagon of girders at frame six and looked up. He could see straight to the top of the ship, in between bag six and what must have been bag five. The space in the middle of the circle formed by the transverse frame was filled with rigging lines that crisscrossed the encircling girders. The bags were connected at intervals to those crisscrossing lines, and to great nets, which in turn connected directly to the keel.

  He did not envy the riggers, who might have to climb up there and splice severed lines back together in battle. Just working out which went where must be a nightmare. A rope ladder threaded through the lines in that narrow space between bags, starting at the very top of the ship and ending within arm’s reach of the keel, but the mere thought of ascending it made him dizzy. Thus it was with astonishment that he realized the tiny shape at the distant top of the ladder was a crewman, performing some adjustment to the rigging.

  Past the water skins and partially eclipsed by them was a small compartment on the port side, set off with heavy leather curtains. Bernat peeked inside to see a caisson, like the ones he’d seen towed behind cannons in parades, and a few rockets.

  “For pity’s sake,” Dupre said, “please stay out of there while you’re dressed like that. You’ll set off all the powder in the magazine with the static of your various garments rubbing together. And don’t get any of your frippery caught in the gears.”

  Bernat quickly set the curtain back in place and followed her past the gearbox. He lifted his bag high over his head and took care to keep his lace out of the gears as he pushed past them.

  Farther aft, the air became humid and sweltering, despite a breeze coming in through the air scoops on either side of the catwalk. Here, cutting through the middle of the corridor, what appeared to be a single, six-inch-wide copper tube looped back on itself dozens of times. Its aft end connected to the engine, while the forward end split into two and led, he thought, to tubes he’d seen running along the outer skin of the keel.

  “It’s terribly humid here,” he said, tapping her on the shoulder.

  It was very loud, too. Dupre turned and held her hand to her ear.

  Bernat shouted. “I said, it’s terribly humid in here.”

  She nodded and shouted back, “It’s from the condenser. It’s hell on the wood. Soaks up the moisture, no matter how much we varnish. The girders in this frame will only be good for eight months—a year at most—before we have to replace them.”

  They continued aft to the steamjack turbine, which looked to Bernat like nothing so much as a fifteen-foot-long iron trumpet, perhaps because he’d run out of whale comparisions. The narrow front end of the trumpet hardly intruded into either branch of the catwalk, but farther aft it expanded to take up nearly the entire keel. It was this mechanical monstrosity that was producing the dreadful whine that so grated on Bernat’s ears. He plugged them up as he ducked under the aft end.

  Behind the steamjack was the boiler, and then two more giant water skins, and then a smaller pair of brass fuel tanks. Beyond that, the catwalk ran between twin rows of curtained sleeping bays, most with two cloth bunks each, but some with only one.

  Several crewmen were milling about and settling in. They stood at attention when Dupre approached, but she gave them a nod and they went on with their business.

  She led Bernat to the last bay on the right. Blessedly, it was a single bunk, so he could retain some tiny vestige of privacy on this ship. It wasn’t much privacy, of course, for only canvas separated the adjacent bunks, and the “ceiling” was only a net hanging between the overhead keel girders. She helped him stow his bags, one atop his bunk, the other underneath. The bay was so small that his bottom bag stuck out into the corridor, and the top one intruded into the bunk, which was just cloth stretched over a rectangular wooden frame and attached to the waist-level keel girder by hinges. The bunk bulged above his baggage, tilting to make an acute angle with the ship’s outer skin. “If I roll over in the night,” he said, “I’ll go right through the wall.”

  Dupre shrugged. “Then don’t roll over. Seems to work for everyone else.”

  Just past his sleeping bay were four more water skins, two on each side, each tucked into individual curtained alcoves. They were at least two hundred gallons each, but squatter than the skins forward and capped with hinged wooden lids.

  “Reservoirs,�
�� Dupre said. “You drink from the front ones. You shit in the back ones. Please try not to mix them up. It would be a great inconvenience for everyone.”

  Curiosity compelled Bernat to lift the lid of the reservoir on the portside, aft. The scent of kerosene wafted out, but dissipated quickly when he closed the lid. He noticed an open port behind the skin, which sucked air out into the slipstream.

  “One of the advantages of airship service,” Dupre said, closing the curtains. “Fresh air. If this were an army bivouac, it would already be filled with that musty, farty smell that follows the army around wherever it goes, like some olfactory badge of shame.”

  “You missed your calling as a poet,” Bernat said, rubbing his fingers together where they’d touched the lid.

  “Many have said so.”

  He looked farther aft and saw a pair of steering wheels, just like the ones on the hurricane deck. “Can the ship be maneuvered from here?”

  “In an emergency,” she said. She walked back and he followed. As he reached out to touch a wheel, she stopped him. “They’re connected to the control fins. Best not touch them, unless you’d like to kill us all.”

  “Ah,” he said, pulling his hand away. “Perhaps there ought to be a sign.”

  Dupre snorted. “If you put a sign on everything that could kill you aboard this ship, we’d never get airborne for the weight of them all.”

  Bernat looked farther aft, where the keel curved up like it did at the bow. Halfway up the slope, a pair of curtains, thicker than those on the sleeping bays, cut across the walkway.

  “Captain’s quarters,” Dupre said. “And if I find you snooping around in there, you’ll get a clear but receding view of the underside of the ship. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have duties to see to.”

  When she was gone, Bernat sat on his bunk with his feet on the catwalk. He closed the bay’s curtain across his lap as far as it would go, though that still left a fair inch of space through which passing crewmen could peer in at him. In the moments when no one was watching, he wrote in his notebook: