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Something burst with a red snap not too far away. Crewfolk scrambled up the ladders into the hull to rind and patch leaks in the gasbags.
"Preparing to release bombs," the man's voice said.
And the Gatling crew screamed in her ears through the headphones: "Jesus Christ they've got rocket pods on the balloons!" The ripping-canvas sound of the machine gun came in the same instant.
Yield's head came up with a snap. Her mouth opened to give an order, and then the sky to their right lit up. In that light she could see what was on the balloon's upper decking; long bundles of tubes on simple pintle mounts. Flame washed out behind the tubes, and ahead of them as the warheads raced at her.
"Valve crew, stand fast," she said. The last thing in the world they needed right now was a flood of hydrogen above the hull.
"Release bombs!" she went on, keeping her voice from rising with an effort of will that made sweat stand out on her immobile face. "Charlie, now!"
The Emancipator began to leap and shudder as the fi
The rest of the rockets burst soon after, forlorn fireworks in the rainy darkness of the storm. But something also thudded into the airship, pitching her to the side with a sharp motion totally unlike the battering of the winds. Something else burst right in front of Vicki's station, and she flung up her arms to shield her face.
Another red flare, and stinging pain in her arms and chest and in her forehead. It was too dark; she pawed at her eyes and cheeks, and wiped the blood away. Rain and wind battered at her through the shattered windows. They roared, too, but not too much for her to hear:
"Fire in the hull! Fire at Ring Frame A7! Fire!"
Fire hissed through her. The worst nightmare of anyone who flew these motorized balloons. Fire below, too, as the footprint of the Emancipator's bombs slashed across the landscape. More fire in the sky, as the burning barrage balloon pitched sideways, falling in a graceful arc as its gasbags burst, ignited by the backblast of its own weapons. Most of the airship's crew still standing hurled themselves up the ladders into the hull, in trained damage-control reflex, snatching Nantucket's hoarded store of fire extinguishers as they went. Nothing else mattered if the dirigible was reduced to an exploding smear across the sky of Walkeropolis.
"One and Three portside engines down!"
Vicki scrabbled clumsily at the release of her harness. "Oh, Jesus," she heard herself saying, as the ground fell away and the airship leaped upward, freed of the weight of its deadly cargo.
The slopes of Taygetos were rushing at them, faster and faster as the upper-level winds caught them and the unbalanced force of the engines slewed the Emancipator around toward them.
"Helm, left full rudder! Shut down starboard One and Three! Up elevators!"
"Ma'am, she won't answer! Horizontal attitude controls are jammed!"
Vicki Cofflin wiped the sopping sleeve of her jacket over her face again, trying to get the flowing blood out of her eyes.
"Valve ballast-emergency dump," she called. "All engines ninety degrees."
The problem with that was that most of the hands were up above. She and Alex and the helm crew rushed backward along the long gondola, heaving at the control wheels that turned the engine pods and the propellers downward, at the release levers that opened the stopcocks and let the water from the keel tanks stream out. It went with a rumbling rush that she could feel even now, but it wasn't going to be enough.
"Hold on all!" she shouted to be heard over the rain coming through the broken prow. "I'm going to drop the emergency ballast!"
The Emancipator was nose-up-the vertical controls were still working. All that meant was that she'd hit the mountainside keel-forward. And it made her journey back to the captain's position a climb; she ripped the wire cage off the button and hit with a reaching palm.
There was a shark kerak… kerack… kerack as the explosive bolts released cast-iron weights fastened into the keel. They tumbled free, and the airship leaped like a goosed kangaroo.
Vicki Cofflin had one final glimpse of the onrushing cliff face.
Blackness.
The horse snorted and shied beneath Marian Alston-Kurlelo at the sound of a bicycle bell, moving sideways in a crablike skitter. King Isketerol had proved ready to receive a diplomatic mission, but he'd insisted on a place in the no-man's-land between the Islander base at the site of Cadiz and his own outposts, a day's travel northward.
She controlled her mount with the absentminded skill of someone who'd spent a lot of the last ten years in the saddle. The horses she and Swindapa rode were local, part of the herd they'd requisitioned from villages near their landfall at Cadiz Base over the past two weeks, and still uncertain about their new owners. The standard-bearer with the Stars and Stripes flying above a white truce-pe
The platoon behind her were on the cycles, pre-Event ten-speed models refitted for current conditions, and a four-seater side-by-side hauling a Gatling; the Guard had requisitioned nearly every cycle on Nantucket for this expedition, giving money, apologies, and the heavier, clunkier output of Seahaven in recompense. The highway they were following ran northwest from the Cadiz area along the shore of a great inlet-what had been solid ground and marsh at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in the twentieth was open water here. A rough rectangle of sea stretched in from the coast for miles, almost to the edge of the chalk hills that had been the heart of the sherry country in Marian's birth-century.
They would eventually wear out the horses; even with solid tires cyclists covered ground six times faster than troops on foot, especially with good roads.
And these roads are excellent, she thought. I wonder if Isketerol has thought through all the implications of that?
The one they followed was twenty-five feet broad, with a topping of neatly cambered crushed limestone pounded to a hard smooth surface, graveled shoulders, deep flanking ditches… what the English of the Regency era would have called a MacAdamized turnpike. There were even young trees planted on either side, to grow and eventually shade travelers.
Hate to think of the labor this must have taken, she thought.
The day was hot enough to send trickles of sweat down her flanks under the blue uniform jacket despite the cool breeze from the water and the lingering freshness of this morning's rainfall; summer here must be like being on an anvil under the hammer of the sun. There was a scattering of clouds, growing thicker since noon, gilded now in the west where they piled mountain high above the flat horizon; she thought it would probably rain again soon. Fall and winter were the wet season here, the time of growth and life that ended as late spring faded into the dry death of summer, more or less the opposite of Alba or Nantucket.