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"Eight thousand two hundred seventy feet," came the crisp reply.
The drone of the engines rose to a snarling bellow. The fabric of the ship creaked and bent as the engines pushed it against the wind.
"Prepare to vent. Neutral buoyancy at three thousand feet," she said. "Vent-off superheat!"
"Superheat off-vent!"
The hissing roar of hot exhaust being fu
There was a faint, edge-of-perception sensation like a descending elevator.
That brought a few silent winces; awfully low, with high winds, in this type of terrain. It was also the only way to get a radius-of-error less than a couple of miles when it came to aiming bombs. Walkeropolis wasn't a completely defenseless target the way Nineveh and Asshur had been, where they could loiter a few hundred feet up in broad daylight. Great Achaea had rockets, upward-firing rifled ca
"Listen up, people!" she said, a little louder.
That meant everyone could hear her, except the Gatling crew in the observation bubble topside. She pressed the button on the intercom so that they could listen too.
"We're going to make one run, straight in, and bomb whatever we can get over. The crate is going to head for the Goddamned moon when we shed all that weight. Keep your hands on the valve and ballast controls, and keep your ears open for the word."
A murmur, taut readiness. She nodded and kept her eyes and binoculars sca
"Vents closed-neutral buoyancy at three thousand feet."
God-damn this cloud. God-damn me; I could be back in Nantucket Town, making babies and teaching people how to fly ultralights… after this stinking war is over I am definitely going to ask Alex for that date…
"There!" she said, an involuntary exclamation.
Thunder rumbled above them. Lightning glinted off the Eurotas, just like the maps for one bright instant. For a while she'd been afraid they were going to end up in Italy. Or the way this damned gale was blowing, in China.
"Right fifty, helm."
The dirigible's nose turned right in a descending curve that brought her facing north as she fell. The gondola rocked, the craft pitching and rolling a little in the more turbulent air near the surface.
"She's slightly heavy, Skipper."
"That's the rain. On superheat-ten percent ought to do her."
Vicki kept her eye peeled to port, where the tree-clad mountains seemed to reach for her with crooked witch-fingers every time one of the lightning bolts struck. Emancipator was well below the level of the peaks now; she'd have to crane her head to see them. All her attention was focused northward. Walkeropolis didn't have a blackout; but it didn't have electric light, either. Lanterns ought to stand out, or forge-flare from the manufactories.
"Latest report from Meteorology, ma'am-HQ says a major weather system is building up clear from the Pillars to here."
No kidding; black above as a yard up a hog's arse, except for the increasingly frequent flash of lightning, as often horizontal as down to the ground below. She made herself not think about what one of those bolts into an engine or the metallic fasteners of the hull would do. The wind was picking up, too.
"Fire up the searchlight." Alex looked at her. "We'll be bombing blind, otherwise."
He nodded and unstrapped himself, lifting a hatch on the laminated-wood deck. It held a crank, and he worked that to open the doors below and lower the searchlight out into the airstream. An aluminum tube rose as he did so. Into that he thrust a metal rod with a small wheel on the end; there was a chink-chunk: sound as it fit into the sleeve of the universal joint. Forward or back on the rod would turn the searchlight under the gondola's chin up or down; a twist on the wheel to port or starboard.
"Searchlight… on!"
Light glinted up through gaps in the hatchway. Much more poured down on the landscape below. She could see the tops of trees swaying, the slick line of a wet asphalt highway. And… there, ahead and to port! Buildings, a great clump of them. The stubby brick pyramids of blast furnaces against a hillside, and the courtyard-and-siding arrangement of manufacturing plant downslope of them, all neat and tiny like a model on a table.
Easier to think of it as a model, not as homes…
"Horizontal rudder, left ten," she said, her voice smooth and cool and remote. "Engines, ahead three-quarters." The roar of the Cessna pistons muted slightly. Over it, thunder rolled frighteningly close. "Bomb-bay doors open." The airship's ride grew noticeably rougher, as the panels opened and caught the slipstream. "Bomb-aimer, over to you."
"Ma'am," he said calmly, from his prone position behind the command section; he was using a telescope aimed through the keel. "Sir, if you could swing the light to port about fifteen degrees-yes! Right on those buildings-helm, follow that."
"Barrage balloons going up!" the observers called.
Seconds later, the same came through her headphones from the Gatling post topside. Two of the six-barreled weapons pointed out either side of the gondola as well, but they probably wouldn't get close enough to use them. She could see the barrage balloons herself now, and trained her binoculars on them-nothing else to do, unless she intervened to abort the run. They weren't blimp-shaped; more like giant letter A's made of sausages, instead. The armament was topside on a decking of light planks, they and the men who served them tiny and indistinct at this distance. Reports said it was two-pounder rifled guns on pivot mounts-useful in itself, taking up Walker's scarce precision-machining capacity.
The shape of the balloons turned them into the wind as the cables holding them payed out, a harness like a kite's leading to a single thick line on a windlass. That was no calm nosing into a steady breeze, not tonight; they pitched and tossed as they rose, fighting the ropes that held them. The buffeting the Emancipator was taking was bad enough; what it was like on those bare open decks, lashed by rain and lit by lightning, she hated to imagine. Particularly to a local, unused to the whole concept of flight except as something the Gods did.
Brave men, she thought unwillingly. It would be an easier world if all the villains were cowards, but nobody who'd seen Assyrians in operation would think that.
Little red lights began to snap at her from the ground as well, like malignant winks. More light ca
Searchlights lit on the ground as well. They were yellower than her ten-thousand-candlepower electric pre-Event model; probably burning lime in a stream of gas, in front of a mirror. Still capable of spiking her for the absurd muzzle-loading flak, though. And rockets were rising as well, glorified Fourth-of-July models, but they didn't have far to rise, either.
"Coming up on target," the bomb-aimer said.