Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘The Skullboys,’ he said. ‘Can they even survive up here, without pressurisation?’

  ‘Not for long,’ Curtana said. ‘But they don’t need long, either. They climb fast and get down just as quickly. High-altitude exposure doesn’t last more than a few minutes. Maybe they lose a few digits, get a few new frostbite scars. You think that’s going to be a deterrent when you’re already ugly as fucking sin?’

  ‘I still can’t see what possible good it does them.’

  Agraffe called over from his speaking tube. ‘Dorsal spotter reports raiders are loose from third-wave balloon,’ he said. ‘Six units, standard attack formation.’

  Curtana snatched up the speaking tube again. ‘All stations! Raiders incoming. Repeat, raiders incoming! Secure for close action! I don’t want those bastards getting their nails into my ship!’

  ‘Is this going to get bloody?’ Quillon asked.

  Curtana nodded gravely. ‘I sincerely hope so. Feel like lending a hand?’

  ‘Certainly, if there are injuries to be treated.’

  ‘Not quite what I had in mind. We could use extra help topside, now that we’re down to one spingun. You’ve a head for heights, haven’t you?’ She turned to one of the other officers. ‘Poitrel: show the doctor to the armoury and issue him with something useful. If you want to kill a few Skullboys while you’re up there, be my guest.’

  ‘Come with me,’ Poitrel said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  They went to the armoury. Poitrel took out four rifle-like weapons, slinging one over Quillon’s shoulder and handing him another. Then they started up the narrow spiral staircase that climbed all the way from the gondola up through the echoing vault of the airship’s interior, the buoyancy cells looming huge and vulnerable as dragon’s eggs.

  They came out topside next to the dorsal spingun turret, still manned and operational. The air was breezeless, precisely as if Painted Lady lay becalmed in the sky. Halfway to the front, two airmen were manning a small machine-gun position - two pedestal-mounted weapons set on a railinged platform - but as yet they weren’t firing. Presumably they didn’t have the range of the spinguns, and so wouldn’t be used until the raiders were closer.

  The turret was drilling death into the sky. Without the bulk of the airship to muffle them, the noise from the twin spinguns was nearly unbearable. Quillon watched the hot barrels dervish round at a fearsome cyclic fire rate. Through a slit in the back of the turret he could just see the two masked and goggled gunners, with a third man peering through fixed binoculars and working hard on the crank wheels of the manual steering gear. The guns could be elevated and lowered with relative ease, but turning the turret had now become a laborious, muscular business. For the moment it scarcely mattered: the raiders were still far enough away that the guns could be concentrated on a fixed spot in the sky. Quillon saw them with his own eyes: a tight cluster of sickle-thin wings, a flock of cadaverous birds passing at great height. Behind the shapes, the balloon that the raiders had jumped out of, before unfurling their wings, was still hauling its empty basket. Closer still - almost level with Painted Lady - the remaining two balloons of the fourth wave were still rising with their cargoes. The balloons of the fifth and sixth waves - however many were left - were still beneath the ship.

  It seemed quite impossible that the raiders could withstand the continued assault from the turret, but that was exactly what they were doing. Quillon reminded himself that the bullets were subject to parabolic deflection as well as momentum loss, and that while the wind velocity was steady around the airship, it would take very little variation to bend the bullets off-target once they had travelled half a league or so. In reality, the raiders were probably spread much further apart than they appeared at this distance, with a lot of sky between them.

  ‘Follow me,’ Poitrel said, leading Quillon around the turret, along the narrow, railinged walkway running the length of the airship’s spine, until they were halfway to the rear of the envelope, with the bulbous fin of the empennage blocking the view to the immediate rear. Here, the walkway widened to accommodate another pair of pedestal-mounted machine guns equipped with double-handed grips. ‘It’s simple,’ Poitrel said, shouting to be heard above the spinguns. ‘Point and shoot. They come in fast, so you’ll need to fire deflection shots. Aim the gun to where they’re going to be, not where they are, keep the trigger down and let them fly into your bullet stream.’

  ‘What are they hoping to do?’

  ‘Land on us.’ Poitrel released a safety catch on the starboard gun. ‘And then take the ship and slaughter every one of her crew, you included. They’re fully capable of it, believe me.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘They’ll be within range in about twenty seconds. Wait for me to start firing, then join in.’

  Quillon placed his hands on the grips and swung the starboard gun around until the aiming cross hairs lay centred on the six approaching raiders. They were visibly larger than even a few moments ago, streaking towards Painted Lady at a surprisingly shallow angle. He began to make out details of their bat-black wings, the hard, paperlike angles of fold-points and stiffening spines. The human fliers were knots of armoured darkness where the wings met.

  Poitrel had not yet opened fire with the port gun when the spingun turret found its mark, ripping apart one of the flanking raiders. The attacker’s wings disintegrated into dark flapping shreds, losing integrity as the bullets tore through stiffening veins and control ligatures. In the same instant the raider erupted into a cloud of shattered armour, splintered bones and crimson gore. It was as if a drab firework had just gone off at midday.

  As their dead comrade spilled towards the ground, the five remaining raiders closed up formation. For a few moments it looked as if the spinguns would be able to maintain their simultaneous fire, but then the noise from the turret changed, and Quillon realised that only one of the guns was now operational. The zone was intensifying its hold on them, slowly robbing Painted Lady of anything that might have given her a significant edge over the enemy.

  Poitrel opened fire, Quillon a moment later. Even though it was mounted on a pillar, he could still feel the machine gun’s recoil, trying to wrench itself from its mount. Flames belched from the gun’s exhaust vents, bright enough to obscure his view of the raiders unless he released his hold on the trigger from time to time. Poitrel, more practised, maintained continuous fire. Again the remaining spingun found its mark, and another of the flanking raiders yawed away from its companions in a lazy arc, wings collapsing behind it as it arrowed to the ground. Then that spingun ceased firing, leaving only the dorsal machine-gun positions. The four surviving raiders split into two groups, veering apart to present fast-moving targets breaking to port and starboard. They were very close now, almost alongside Painted Lady, and Quillon could make out details of their armour and weaponry. They needed both arms to control their wings, so there was no possibility of them aiming pistols or rifles. But the raiders all had small strafing cannon strapped to their bellies, aimed to shoot slightly downwards if the raiders were flying horizontally.

  Poitrel took one of them down. It was a textbook deflection shot - laying a razoring line of bullets ahead of the flier, letting him fly into it as if it were invisible cheese wire. A pink horror of entrails bannered the sky. In the instants of consciousness left to him the grinning raider still had enough wing control to flex around and bring his belly-cannon onto Painted Lady. The gun fired once, a muffled bark. The projectile howled into the airship’s side, punching a surgical line straight through, sucking tattered fabric in its wake.

  ‘We’re holed!’ Quillon called, swinging his gun around to chase the two raiders on the starboard side, trying to anticipate their line.

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Poitrel shouted back. ‘Don’t think it took out a gas cell.’

  Quillon’s gun sliced the last half from one of the raider’s wings, severing his arm at the wrist and sending him spinning out of control. Two more succumbed to the
other machine-gun position, dying before they could bring their belly-cannons to bear.

  ‘Well done,’ Poitrel said, easing back on his trigger. ‘But we’re not home and dry yet. The next twelve are incoming, and this time we don’t have the spinguns. Think you’re ready for them?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  It seemed to Quillon that the raiders came in faster this time: two groups of six from the two remaining balloons of the fourth wave. He was acutely aware that the four balloons of the fifth wave were beginning to climb above Painted Lady, ready to disgorge their own raiders. Twelve this time; twenty-four the next.

  It can’t be done, he told himself. We’re going to lose.

  Poitrel started firing. Quillon joined in, the gun quivering with demonic rage. In the confusion of battle, with the machine-gun fire criss-crossing around the ship, it was soon all but impossible to tell who had killed who. It was equally impossible to keep tally of the surviving raiders. He couldn’t survey the whole sky at once, and Painted Lady obscured a huge percentage of it. It was almost like standing on the ground, except that the enemy were able to dart beneath the horizon and under his feet. The raiders came in hard and then cranked their wings forwards at the last instant, matching the airship’s speed and circling around, above and below her, flexing to bring their belly-cannons into use. They grinned and howled and screamed, tearing through the air like banshees. The cannon fired and he felt Painted Lady shudder every time something went through her. Once he felt the sickening lurch that surely meant a gas cell had been punctured, robbing her of vital lift. A short while later came the counter-lurch that meant Curtana had dropped more ballast (whatever now counted as ballast), and thereby regained the slope that would eventually bring them to Spearpoint. With all the spinguns now out of commission, it was down to machine-gunners and riflemen to defend the ship. The air crackled with an unending fusillade.

  None of the twelve raiders from the fourth wave managed to land on the ship, but they had inflicted damage on her and the machine guns were beginning to overheat and jam. One gunner had been killed by cannon fire, decapitated at his position, so that for a few moments some dire reflex kept his headless body working the gun, appearing to track the raider who had killed him. Then his body slumped and the gun was silent and smoking.

  But by then assistance was beginning to arrive from below. Spingun and long-range gunners had abandoned their useless weapons and grabbed rifles and small arms. They were emerging from the hatch next to the turret, goggled and masked, scanning the sky with the expressionless glass circles of their eyeholes. When at last Quillon’s machine gun jammed into scrap, he remembered the rifle slung over his left shoulder and swung it into position. There was no possibility of laying down deflection shots now, but in compensation it was much easier to track the incoming raiders as they swooped by. Two appeared to die when Quillon was shooting at them, but by then it was all but impossible to know who was responsible for the kills. He was content just to be playing his part in Painted Lady’s defence.

  For all that there were now more airmen on the narrow spine of the envelope, there were also more raiders to deal with. Soon none of the machine guns were operable and the men had turned to rifles. When the rifles failed, or exhausted their magazines, the men switched to muskets or clumsy single-shot pistols, making each shot count. The fusillade had become more attenuated; now every shot was audible and distinct, and there was enough silence between the shots for shouts and screams to ring through. Though the muskets and pistols continued to function in the zone, they were cumbersome to reload and some of the airmen had switched to crossbows. Aimed skilfully, they proved surprisingly effective against the raiders’ armour. But the raiders were arriving in such numbers that they could absorb more losses than before, and with each swooping approach they came closer to landing on Painted Lady. When at last a raider did touch down, landing just beyond the turret, he shrugged out of the complicated harness of his wings and pulled twin pistols from hip-holsters, hitting two of the airmen before they had a chance to return fire. Someone shot him through the throat with a crossbow, the arrow ramming out from the back of his neck. The raider slid from the walkway, slipping between the railings and down the ever-steepening slope of the envelope, long-nailed fingers scratching at the rushing surface for a handhold, until the curvature of the hull took him out of sight.

  Quillon’s rifle was dead and he was reaching for his musket, trusting that it was loaded and ready to be used, when he heard his name.

  ‘Doctor Quillon,’ Agraffe called, emerging from the turret, bereft of either mask or goggles. ‘We need you down below!’

  Poitrel took the musket from him. ‘Go. You’ve done your bit out here. Now put your hands to better use.’

  ‘There are injured?’ Quillon asked. He had seen casualties on the deck, but in the heat of the battle it did not seem likely that anyone could have been taken below.

  ‘Enough to keep you busy,’ Agraffe said, cupping a hand around his mouth to shout. ‘Captain’s hoping you can stitch at least some of them back together before we hit Spearpoint.’

  Quillon started along the walkway, crouching to avoid being shot by either side. At the other end of the envelope a raider touched down and was immediately set upon by scimitar-wielding defenders. Another joined his comrade, shrugging out of his wings just in time to join in the vicious engagement. Quillon understood now precisely what Curtana had meant by close action. It was metal on metal, blade against blade. Victory would lie not with those who could shoot with the most skill, but with those who could hack and stab with the most vigour.

  Then he was inside the envelope, descending the metal staircase, his hands shaking so hard he could barely grasp the rail. Something was different, and it took him a moment to realise what it was. The once gloomy vault was now a cathedral of wintery light, the envelope punctured in so many places that it was almost like being outdoors again. One of the gas cells was gone, the deflated bag lying in folds, and a handful of airmen were struggling to effect some emergency repair on a second cell. One man lay dead on the floor; from his broken-limbed posture Quillon judged that he must have fallen from one of the over-arching scaffolds of the airship’s rigid frame. Of the battle going on above him he could hear almost nothing save the drumming of booted feet on the walkway, and the occasional muffled boom of a raider’s belly-cannon. He was nearly down when a shot tore through the envelope, missing the gas cells but wrenching part of the staircase away right under him. He had to squeeze past the gap, trusting that lightning would not strike twice. By the time he reached the gondola, he was shaking more than ever.

  He didn’t need to be told where to go. The most severely injured airmen had been brought to the infirmary room, while those who were merely wounded were stationed in the chart room. There were no dead in the gondola, which surprised him until he realised that Curtana would have no compunctions about disposing of useless weight if it meant the continued survival of the airship.

  The preliminaries of surgery steadied his nerve. He assessed his patients, moved one man from the infirmary to the chart room and another back in his place, and set to work. The injuries were many and various, but almost all had been occasioned by belly-cannon shots ripping through the envelope or the less well protected parts of the gondola. Only one airman had survived a direct strike, but he would lose the remains of one leg below the thigh: even with the best medicine in Neon Heights it couldn’t be saved now. Others had been hit by splinters of wood, metal and glass, resulting in deep cuts, lacerations, simple and compound fractures and profuse bleeding. Few of the injuries would have been troubling under normal circumstances. But these airmen were all suffering from the combined ailments of altitude, residual zone sickness and the side effects of the antizonal medicine they were supposed to have taken. Some of the most effective drugs in Quillon’s arsenal would have killed them instantly, so he was forced to make do with less potent medicines, falling back on the wisdom he had gleaned from Gambes
on’s notebooks.

  As always when he was working, the outside world shrank to a tiny, buzzing distraction, a fly trapped between windowpanes. He was intermittently aware of the ongoing battle; he processed the shudders and lurches of the airship’s continuous descent; he was conscious of other wounded being brought down from above; but at no point did these matters impinge on his ability to heal, or where healing was not an option, to provide comfort to the dying. Not all of the injured could be saved, even with an angel at their bedside.

  It was only during a lull, when one patient was being moved off the table and another prepared, that he found the time to ask, ‘What about Kalis and Nimcha? Are they all right?’

  ‘They’re safe,’ Agraffe said.

  ‘And Meroka?’

  ‘Fine. We pulled her out of the turret screaming and kicking, but there was nothing else she could do down there once the guns seized. We’ve got her on signals now.’

  ‘And Curtana?’

  ‘She’ll die at the wheel rather than let someone relieve her. I feel I should force her to take a rest: it would, technically, be within my rights as another captain. Then again, I’m not sure who else I’d trust to bring us in.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I know my limitations, Doctor.’

  Quillon nodded: there was no point flattering the man when they both knew Curtana was the better pilot. ‘We’re still on target for Spearpoint?’

  ‘We’ve just seen off the last of the fifth wave - we should break through the zone before much longer. The Skullboys are still taking pot-shots at us from the ground, but they don’t have any more balloons left now. We haven’t lost too much altitude, as far as I understand.’ Agraffe hesitated, the strain written on his face. ‘You did well up there, Doctor. It wasn’t expected of you, but we’re all grateful.’

  ‘You didn’t think I could kill as well as heal.’