8. OUR PLAYERS ARE COMPELLED TO COLLABORATE

Hainey swung himself into the captain’s chair and snarled when a hail of bullets struck the windshield-chipping it here and nicking it there, but barely scratching the foot-thick swath of polished glass. He found the thruster pedal and pumped it with his foot while his hand searched all the logical spots for a starter switch. His fingers fumbled across the console, feeling into the nooks and slots where such switches tended to be located, and finally he found a red lever so he pulled it, and the burners fired at top power, and top volume.

Behind the dirigible someone who had been standing too close to the engine mounts screamed and probably died as the craft howled violently to life.

Simeon adjusted himself in the first mate’s chair and reached overhead for the steering and undocking levers; he tested the former and yanked hard on the latter, and somewhere beyond their hearing a hydraulic clasp unfastened and began to retreat into the body of the ship.

Lamar busied himself by bounding back and forth between two secondary crewmen’s chairs, adjusting settings and turning dials, and the captain asked him, “We ready to fly?” to which the engineer said, “As ready as we’re going to get.” And he cast Maria Boyd an anxious glance.

She held her position by the crew quarters door, but her gun was at her side now and she caught him looking at her, she met his stare without a waver. But no one had time to stare, really. On the Valkyrie’s underbelly men were taking kerosene torches to task, trying to find a place to cut where the metal would split enough to do damage. And the hammers were joined by crowbars, and by pipes, and by anything else hard and reckless, and the sound against the hull was like hail.

Maria said, “They really will kill us all, won’t they?”

And Hainey replied without taking his eyes off the console, “Sure enough. They’ll never give you the five minutes you’d need to explain yourself; they’ll pull you out of the bird and pound you flat, just for being inside it in the first place. Now take yourself a seat.”

“Is that an order, Captain?”

He said, “It’s a suggestion you’d be wise to heed. We’ve never flown a bird this big before, and it might get rough.”

“You’re asking me to trust you enough to quit holding you at gunpoint.”

Before Lamar had time to point out that she’d already lowered her weapon, the captain said, “No, I’m asking you to trust that we’re too busy to pay you any attention.”

With the back of his hand, he swiped at three parallel switches and the howling hum of the engines leaped to a keening pitch. “Here we go,” he announced.

Behind him, Maria slipped into a seat beside the nearest glass gun turret and reached over her head, pulling the safety straps across her chest. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said.

“Don’t worry about us,” Simeon said to her. He rubbed his injured hand against the top of his thigh and reached with his good one for a row of buttons. “And don’t interfere with anything we’re doing, you understand?” he demanded, and in his haste, pain, or excitement, his island accent was more pronounced than it often sounded.

“I’ll stay out of the way,” she swore.

“And be quiet,” the first mate added. Then he said to the captain. “Steering checks out.”

Lamar said, “Thrusters and primary weapon systems check out. Engines are at full power. Throw the arm and let’s lift her up, Captain.”

“Here goes the arm,” Hainey declared as he pulled on a floor-mounted lever, drawing it towards his chest with all the smoothness he could muster and all the speed the ship could handle. Fuel coursed to the engines and the thrusters beneath the ship rotated in their slots, aiming at the ground and pushing away from it-nudging the Union warbird into the air with a hop that was cleaner than anyone had expected.

“Nice,” Simeon said.

“Thanks, and tell me how the steering paddles are holding.”

“Holding fine. You going to turn her on the way up?”

“Hard to port,” the captain told them. “We need to get our backside to the south end of the service docks; the security detail launches from the north end,” he explained, and as the ship rose it crested the last of the other dirigibles until it alone had a clear view of the clouds. “Keep us steady,” the captain said as he manned the prime steering paddles and the ship began a rotation that could’ve too easily toppled into a spin; but Simeon worked the fine steering and the ship stopped where the crew meant for it to-only to bring new trouble into the windscreen.

Lamar called it. “Two security detail flyers. Eleven and one o’clock. Sir, I think they’re-”

A spray of bullets grazed the Valkyrie’s lower cargo hold.

Hainey said, “Loaded. They’re loaded with birdshot, damn them all to hell.”

“Not enough to crack this egg,” Simeon said with less than his usual easy confidence.

“They’re rising fast. They’ll be on our flight level in half a minute or less,” Lamar warned. “Then their aim’ll be better. We’ve got to get out of their way; we don’t know how much shot they’re carrying.”

“Those are little birds,” Simeon insisted, though it was unclear who he meant to convince. “They can’t be carrying too much on board. They’re just security flyers; they’re meant to scare folks off, not shoot them down.”

But another rain of shot peppered the craft, higher on the hull as the other ships crested the service yard docks and neared the Valkyrie’s altitude. The captain observed, “They don’t have the swivel turrets like this one does. They can’t hit us unless they keep our altitude.”

“They’ve got some wiggle room,” Lamar argued. “There’s no telling how much. Higher, let’s get us higher; let’s hit some real thin air and then outrun them.”

“Heavy as this thing is?” Simeon groused. “We’ll do well to stay above them. It’d be one thing if we could return fire, but we barely have enough manpower to fly as it is. What’s the normal crew on this thing, anyway?” he asked Lamar.

The engineer answered, “Six, as a skeleton. Maybe we can bash ’em. The Valkyrie can take it, and I bet those fellows can’t.”

Hainey said, “They’re only chasing us because they know we ain’t got enough men to fight ’em off properly.” He drew harder on the lever and the ship continued to rise, and with Simeon’s contribution from the thrusters it began to warm up to an eastern course.

“Where are you pointing us?” Hainey asked.

“Past town. But we’ve got to shake these things or knock ’em out of the sky. If they chase us too far we’ll only have unwanted company, wherever we arrive.”

From her seat near the glass gun turret Maria Boyd asked, “Where are we going? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“After my ship!” Hainey almost yelped as more gunfire strafed the ship, higher, and a couple of bullets went cracking against the windshield. Unlike the smaller bullets used on the ground, these were designed to break even the thickest glass, and even the hardest armor. Whether or not they could split the Valkyrie remained to be seen, but no one wanted to find out, so the captain drew the ship around.

“They’re only going to summon more help if we keep hovering here,” Lamar said.

Simeon shouted, “We ain’t hovering! We’re moving, just…we’re moving. Jesus, this thing is a cast-iron tank of a bastard. It’s none too easy to swing, I swear to God.”

“But she spins all right,” Hainey observed. “Let’s try this then, back us up.”

The first mate asked, “What?”

And the captain reiterated, “Back us up! Thrusters reverse, let’s retreat and make like a spinning top. We’ll charge them with a little backspin and knock them down, maybe. It won’t hurt us, no-how.”

“You’re truly daft,” Maria said, but no one answered her.

“All men buckle down,” Hainey ordered as he used his elbow to whack a steering paddle into place enough to make the ship spiral. “Simeon, kick that stabilizer-pump it, don’t hold it in place. We want to keep spinning, and cast ourselves at them like a knuckleball.“

Centrifugal force was straining the interior, and the men and woman who struggled to hold themselves upright in their seats. Lamar’s hands flew over the valves and buttons, and Simeon dutifully pumped the stabilizers to pitch the craft forward-on a course directly between the two smaller ships.

“We’re bowling for birds!” the captain said almost gleefully, then added, “Impact in ten, nine, eight…hang on everybody…six…oh shit, I might be off a count or two-”

They collided, but just barely between the two security birds-winging the one and knocking the other hard enough to rock it out of its altitude. The crash was loud and the squeal of metal on metal was hard to listen to; but smoke puffed from the right side engine of the one o’clock ship, and it careened in a crazy, sinking pattern, headed back down to earth.

“We didn’t get the both of them!” Maria said.

The captain said, “I know it, and I thought I told you to be quiet!”

“No,” she corrected him. “It was your first mate. But I’ll add that to your pile of suggestions.”

“Woman! Don’t you antagonize me! Can’t you see we’re busy?”

Lamar swallowed hard and said, “We’re about to get busier. Two more dirigibles-one official security detail, it looks like…and one…sir, it looks like a Union cruiser.”

“Goddamn,” the captain said. He gritted his teeth while he wrestled with the knobs to steady the craft, and drag it out of its spinning whirl. Then he said, “We might have to make a run for it. Those security tweeters can’t be holding much live freight, but a cruiser…we don’t know. If we had another three or four men handy, that’d be one thing. Lamar, you said the primary weapons systems were all working?”

“That’s right. Nothing wrong with any of them, and the secondaries are probably fine too-but we don’t have time to figure out how to work them, and anyway, it’s just the three of us.”

“Four of us,” Maria said from her seat.

“I beg your pardon?” Hainey asked, finally turning around to see what she was doing.

She was unbuckling herself.

“Four of us. You don’t have another three or four men, but you’ve got an able-bodied woman on board, and I’ve fired more kinds of guns in my day then most men have ever held.”

“You’ve lost your ever-loving mind,” Simeon swore at her, and said, “Get back down in your chair. Ain’t nobody here trusts you with a firearm, much less with a gun turret, you crazy woman.”

“She can shoot,” Hainey said. “I’ve heard about her. I know she can shoot.”

“Yes, she can shoot,” Maria said impatiently. “And she wants to get far enough out of town for you to set her down, so we can have a civilized conversation about how I’m bringing you home for justice’s sake-but she can’t very well do that if she dies up here in the clouds, now can she?”

Simeon almost laughed. He said, “Hey, Captain, she wants to save our hides so she can tan them later. What do you think of that?”

“I think we’re desperate and she wants to live long enough to have that conversation. Lamar?”

“Yes sir?”

“Which turret has the best range?”

“Sir, you can’t be serious?”

“He’s serious,” Maria answered for him. “Put me where I can make the most trouble.”

“Sir, the bottom left turret probably has the best range. The right one is pinned so it can’t take out the right engine, and it has less room to swivel. The left one’s mounted lower, so it won’t clip our own armor when it fires.”

“Then show her how it works. You know how it works, don’t you man?” Hainey was still lifting the ship, drawing it higher and higher, up into the sky, doing his best to show the intruders nothing but the underside of the craft.

“I know how it works,” he said, lifting himself out of the seat and with great trepidation, gesturing to Maria Boyd. “This way, over here. Down in the cargo bay.”

Simeon’s voice rose in disbelief. “You’re going to put that woman behind a powerful gun, someplace where you can’t even see her?”

“Any port in a storm, isn’t that what they say?” the captain responded. “She can’t shoot us from down there, anyway. She could’ve shot us better from her seat by the right turret.”

“Point taken,” Simeon said, but it was said with complaint.

Down the cargo stairs and over by the bottom left turret, Lamar stood beside Maria Boyd and hemmed uncertainly. “Ma’am,” he said, “I don’t know about this. You’ll hardly fit, wearing that.”

“Well I’m not going to strip, so I’ll have to fit. Is this a Gatling? A four-eighty model, with the automatic line feed? They must’ve modified it for air use. I’ve seen them on the ground, and been behind one-once or twice.”

Lamar’s brows knitted together to form a very puzzled V. “Yes…yes ma’am? I believe so? If it’s not a four-eighty, it’s a four-ninety-and they work pretty much the same way. So you…you know what to do with it?”

“I know what to do with it. One thing: Do you have a mask down here? Something to keep the heat off my face and the powder out of my eyes? I can operate one of these things just fine, but they make my eyes water like mad.”

Lamar nodded. “There’s a line of them, hanging around the corner. I’ll get you one,” he said, and he dashed to the row of pegs along the cargo wall. He grabbed the nearest mask as well as the gloves that were stuffed inside it, and he ran back to the low glass turret, where Maria Boyd had somehow managed to cram her entire bulk of skirts and corsetry into the chamber-but beside the chamber was a stack of undergarments.

The engineer handed her the mask while staring at the petticoats.

“I know I said I wasn’t going to strip, but I had to make room, you understand.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, and if Maria Boyd had known him any better, she would’ve gathered that he was blushing.

Hainey hollered from the bridge. “Can you see all right down there?”

“Give me a moment!” she cried back.

“We don’t have a moment!”

“I’m getting my mask on!” she told him. “Now, all right. I’m ready and yes, I can see. Three o’clock, six o’clock, and…and I can’t see the third ship!”

“He’s in front of us, working up to playing chicken!” Hainey called. “Lamar, get yourself back here! We need you at your station.”

“Coming sir!”

“And woman, you can hear me all right?”

“If you yell, I can hear you!” But when she turned the crank and turned the switch to start the gun revving, she wasn’t sure she’d continue to communicate so easily. Inside the glass bubble, suspended over the earth, Maria tried not to gaze down too long or too hard at the shrinking service yard docks, or the tiny blocks of Kansas City that were dropping away underneath her. It made her dizzy and almost nauseous, though she wouldn’t have confessed it if her life had depended on it.

She stuffed her hands into the gloves and they were far too big, but they’d keep the gun from burning her. The bottom of the glass ball vibrated with the gun’s power as it cranked, rolled, and hummed in its slot.

She took a deep breath, pointed the gun as best she could, and opened fire.

The kick thrust her hands back, jerking at her elbows and shoulders and beating them in her joints; but she held the thing steady and pushed her weight against it-holding its aim true and correct, and splitting the gas dome of the second security detail ship.

The craft exploded into a fireball so fast and hot that it flashed like a magician’s trick, no sooner burning than falling, and no sooner alight than dropping in a gyre’s course, like a soap bubble circling the drain.

But that was the easy one.

The second ship, the Union cruiser, was gaining ground fast from the other direction, not quite meeting the Valkyrie’s altitude but matching its pace-and soon, it would be out of her gun’s range. The gun’s cylindrical barrel purred as it spun, waiting for the directive to shoot; but Maria didn’t know how much ammunition she had, and she didn’t want to waste it so she waited until the cruiser was right in her crosshairs before squeezing off another brutal spray.

The cruiser wouldn’t go down, not like the little security craft. Its armor plating wasn’t as dense and reliable as the Valkyrie’s outer hull; but the cruiser was lighter and more maneuverable, and it could take a bigger beating than anything else anywhere near them. It rocked under the assault of Maria’s firepower but it didn’t crack, split or fall out of the sky.

She scanned the thing for a weak point, but as she’d already confessed, she didn’t know anything about dirigibles so she shouted over the whirring rumble of the churning barrels, “Captain!”

“What?”

“What do I aim for?”

He yelled back, “Aim for the goddamned ship!”

“Be more specific! Does it have a weak spot?”

There was a pause. Then he yelled, “You won’t take their tanks; they’re covered up good. Crack for the engines, down underneath!”

“Got it!” she said, and she used her body’s weight to crank the gun around, back at the cruiser, which was winding itself up for a direct assault.

“Good! Now hang on-we’re going to have to ram that last little bastard! Keep shooting for the cruiser! Keep it off our tail so we can clear the other one out of the sky! It’s staying up too high for you to hit it from down there!”

She didn’t respond but she felt the surge of the ship taking some new path, coiling itself up again, building the inertia to crash the smaller craft down to earth, and back behind them. The underside ball turret teetered up, giving her a few seconds of a breathtaking stomach drop and a clear shot at the cruiser, so she took it-she shifted her weight and kicked the gun crossways with her knees, changing the aim to shoot for the cruiser’s protruding engines. They were mounted on its underside, thrusters that steered and powered the forward motion of the machine; and in front of those powerful machines, automatic guns were mounted on pivoting arms.

The cruiser’s guns cranked, twisted, and fired at the Valkyrie, and the Valkyrie shook off the shots with a grumpy spin and a dip, but then recovered. The pursuing ship unleashed another set of rapid-fire rounds, determined to force the bird back down to earth.

One of the birdshot rounds punched hard against the reinforced glass of the ball turret, striking to Maria’s left with a concussion that made her ears ring and her head pound. When her vision had cleared she wiggled the gun back and forth, making sure it was still solidly affixed; and then she spied the long chip and fine line of a split that was creaking its way along the glass. The round hadn’t penetrated, but it had broken the small dome and God only knew how much longer it’d hold.

But Maria had another good shot, and she took it.

She rocked the active switch and crushed her hands around the oversized triggers, throwing another dozen slugs at the cruiser-this time aiming lower. Though the gun was almost impossible to guide with any finesse, she did her damnedest and the gun responded better than she had any right to expect. The arc of the bullets dipped and cut a punctured line along the lower hull of the cruiser, and one of the last slugs clipped the bottom left thruster-lodging inside it, perhaps, or maybe only blasting through it.

The thruster sparked and smoked, but didn’t fail altogether…and she couldn’t tell if any real damage had been done because at that moment, the Valkyrie collided head-on with the second smaller vessel, and the sound of an explosion shook the bird hard from the far side, relative to Maria’s captive position in the ball turret.

She clung to the gun though the heat of it warmed her too much through her clothes and through the big gloves that flopped around on her fingers. The split on the glass stretched-she watched it widen like a smile, and she held her breath.

The weight of the automatic gun and the weight of the glass itself, not to mention the weight of Maria’s body suspended there, thighs clenched around a narrow seat meant for a man…how much would the wounded bubble hold? She closed her eyes and waited for the Valkyrie to settle, and as the ship rolled she saw the other small ship toppling down to earth in a widening ball of fire that drew a comet’s tail of soot and sparks down through the sky.

Had there been another ship? She couldn’t remember.

Too many things to keep track of at once.

But the cruiser was still there, hovering-she could see it again when the Valkyrie swung itself around, pulling out of the spin and righting itself. The cruiser was blowing smoke, but not very much of it. She’d nicked something important but it wasn’t enough to slow their pursuer so she rounded the gun again and, praying she had enough ammunition to keep the threat coming, she clamped down on the triggers and blew more air-to-air birdshot slugs into the clouds.

The cruiser fired back, but it leaned backwards and the shots went too high to do more than graze the edge of the Valkyrie’s hull.

Along the glass the crack’s smile stretched all the longer, and now it was accompanied by the sickening, deep tinkle of ice that won’t hold for more than another few minutes.

“Captain!” she shouted.

“What now?”

“I have to…” The ball shifted and Maria’s seat dropped half an inch that nearly stopped her heart. She released her grip on the gun and scrambled backward, off the seat and in hurried retreat until she had one leather-booted foot on the edge.

A whistling hiss joined the slow shatter; air was entering from somewhere, and it was colder than ordinary winter. It smelled like water.

“Oh Jesus,” she swore as she got one hand up over the edge, but the gloves she wore were meant for a man more than twice her size and she lost her grip; she relaxed her fingers, swung her hand, and the gloves flew off, then she grabbed again at the edge and found it. She was suspended that way, using the width and breath of her reach to hoist herself above the glass ball with the rocking gun, and the glass ball was breaking beneath her. Hinges were stretching with unfamiliar unevenness and the pressure of the craft’s motion was tugging the turret apart.

The cruiser reared into view, once more, and much closer. It was coming in fast and high-its underbelly exposed, its lower engines and thrusters a target almost too sweet to resist. But the glass was splitting and the gun, which was mounted on a set of tracks, was drooping as the structure failed.

She braced her feet, pinning them against the curved rim of the glass bowl; she released one hand’s worth of grip, and when she put her fingertips on the back end of the gun’s firing mechanism, it was so frigid that she nearly stuck to it. The air that seeped and squirted into the ball and up against Maria’s face was bitterly cold but she worked against it, straining to feel her way up to the trigger paddle even from her precarious position.

The cruiser wouldn’t hold its position long, but she couldn’t hold her position long either and it was a war of time between her muscles, the glass ball turret, and the cruiser’s path.

With the cold air came cold water, condensing and freezing, and Maria’s buttressing hand slid. She grappled for her handhold and lost it, and was an instant shy of toppling down onto the increasingly fragile surface below her when an enormous black hand seized her scrambling fingers.

She whipped her head around to see Croggon Hainey, feet planted apart, and shortly with both hands wrapped around her wrist.

“Woman, are you mad?” he demanded.

She said, “Yes! Or no! Or look-” and she pointed at the cruiser with its upturned belly. “I can take it down!”

“That ball turret is going to go, any second!”

“No!” she shouted at him, and struggled to dip herself down, letting him hold most of her weight. “This is my life at stake here too, you’ve made it more than clear you bastard, so let me help us survive!”

The length of his arms gave her a few precious extra inches to lean, and when she touched the trigger paddle she jerked herself forward to seize it, and squeeze with all her might.

A spray of half a dozen bullets went soaring through a low-flying cloud, into the underside of the Yankee cruiser and straight through its already-wounded thruster. Three new sets of smoke and sparks burst to life and she cheered, “See! I told you!”

But the pressure of the gun’s kickback was too much for the glass, and it split.

And it fell, out from underneath her.

Just like that, the sky was a sucking thing, blowing ice up her skirt and against her skin, and beneath her the ground was amazingly far away. She held her breath because she could not breathe, and she swung her legs because she lacked the strength to do anything else. Wisps of cloud billowed past her, screamed between her legs, and lashed at her arms, but she did not fall.

She spun like a ballerina in a music box, suspended from the vise of the captain’s hands.