Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (13 page)

Kthooom. Kthooom.

The
Darksmith
shook. The deck was blasted with metal fragments as one of their own deck guns was hit, sending shrapnel among the crew. The screams of the wounded and shouts for help joined the chorus of orders and the occasional prayer.

Madlin dashed across the deck, her bare feet sliding and skidding on the cold, wet steel. She caught herself against the mount for the bait sail, then hooked her arm around the magazine holding shells for the starboard deck gun. At the far end of the ship, she caught hold of the door handle leading below as the
Darksmith
shook under the force of her own guns.

There were handrails to both sides of the stairwell that lead down into the hold. Madlin clutched both of them as another pair of strikes had the
Darksmith
convulsing in what she hoped were not its death throes. The emergency magnesium lights threw the corridors into a surreal chaos of brilliant white and harsh shadow. Crewman jostled past each other, some carrying tools, others looking to get out of the way or escape onto the deck. Madlin pushed past them and found herself ankle-deep in seawater. It was an ominous sign, with another deck below and a smaller cargo hold below that one, that water was already flooding the corridor.

“Status?” Madlin shouted. “How bad is the damage?” Everyone else was shouting too. She could only hope that someone recognized her voice and realized that she was better qualified than the ship’s mechanic.

“Three hits below level,” a voice shouted over the din. “Engine’s out.” Madlin tried to pinpoint the speaker, but elbows and shoulders knocked her around like a billiard ball as she wove through; it was hard enough keeping her bearings. Someone stepped on her foot, and she cursed in Korrish and shoved a deckhand away from her.

She ducked down a side corridor and saw a bulkhead, shut but leaking a fine spray of saltwater along the lower edge. They’d need caulking or a welder to seal it, and welding a pressurized leak was daredeath work. If it was the worst of the damage though, Madlin would have been shocked. The ship was already listing to starboard, so there had to be other compartments open to the sea. She threaded her way through the main corridor before giving up and shouting, “Clear a path!” Enough of the crewmen obeyed that she was able to squeeze through to the engine room.

“Holy Eziel, save us,” Madlin whispered when she saw the engine. It had taken a direct hit. The engine room was taking on water through two head-sized holes in the hull, and a pair of men were manually working the bilge pump to stem the influx of Katamic ale. The engine itself was a wreck of shattered steel and cast iron, hopelessly irreparable. The scent of brine should never overpower the odors of grease and charcoal in an engine room, but the furnace was cold and soaked, the engine shredded and washed with seawater. Something incongruous caught Madlin’s eye, something no one who hadn’t taken a steam engine to pieces and reassembled it a hundred times would have noticed: a piece that didn’t belong. It was an apple-sized sphere, embedded in the side of a ruptured boiler. Madlin pulled a pocket knife from her jacket pocket and pried it loose. It was a cannonball, a perfect sphere that had been flatted on one side by its impact on the
Darksmith
. What stood out were the runes carved all over the iron surface.

The hulls of the Errol Company steamships were designed to withstand cannonfire from even Acardian-made long guns. They had no protections that would stop runed projectiles. Madlin couldn’t tell what the runes did precisely, but it was simpleton’s guesswork to figure it was for punching through steel hulls.

Madlin noticed something as she finished examining the cannonball. It was a peculiar quiet, one of the loudest she’d ever heard, in fact. The ship’s crew was still scrambling to enact makeshift repairs, and the bilgeworks still pumped away as two men powered the see-saw handle. There was still the waterfall crash of water spilling into the ship. What had gone quiet were the guns. Neither side was firing.

There was nothing Madlin could do to weld the gaping holes in the hull. There was no point in taking a shift on the bilge pump; her arms would never keep pace with the hearty lads her father employed for such tasks. There was nothing salvageable about the engines, and she doubted her revolver would be of much aid unless the fighting came deck-to-deck, as it did in cheap swashbuckling stories that glorified piracy. Madlin could only think of one way she could lend aid. She dropped the cannonball in the wreckage of the ship’s engine.

The nearest wall was as good a place as any. Madlin scratched at it with her knife, the hardened steel of the blade able to gouge lines in the low carbon steel of the engine room wall. Steam ships weren’t made of wood, like sailing ships. No piece aboard could float on its own; it relied wholly on water volume displacement to maintain buoyancy. It was time to add a little levitation to that equation.

Jamile cowered in the corner of her cabin farthest from the window, bunched up in a blanket and wedged behind the bunk bed. There was nothing she could do until the fighting was over. She’d only be in the way, and she doubted she could keep her footing, let alone stitch a wound. The world shook and rocked and shifted, attempting to dislodge her from her haven. At any moment a cannonball could rip through the wall of the cabin and end her life in an instant.

The shouts of the crew were all muffled and incoherent. She felt their sense of urgency, of fear, of panic. She knew Madlin was probably one of those voices, trying to do something to help. Jamile wished that Madlin hadn’t run off, hadn’t left her alone. She was too scared even to cry.

The guns had been silent for a time Jamile hadn’t thought to measure. It wasn’t like lightning, where you could play the game of counting seconds until the thunder came to guess how close the storm was. The guns were thunder without lightning, and the storm was all around her. In that lingering absence of guns, she heard ... cheering?

Had the
Darksmith
prevailed? Jamile hugged the blanket around her body and tiptoed over to the window, the icy steel of the floor hurrying her along. She could see nothing. Whatever battle was taking place was on the far side of the ship.

Jamile dressed hurriedly. She pulled on a dress over her nightshirt, ridiculous as she felt doing so, and a jacket over that. She slipped her shoes on, and noticed that Madlin’s boots were still in the cabin, though they’d been thrown around like everything else. Jamile picked them up on her way out the door.

On deck, the crew was gathered along the starboard railing—which was decidedly lower than the port, though no one seemed bothered by it right then. The night was lit by the stars above and the fires burning aboard the sailing ship a few hundred paces distant. The pirate ship that had been battling them was a magnificent specimen, with three masts and elaborate rigging supporting more sails than Jamile could count. Her difficulty in counting was compounded by the fact that nearly all of them were ablaze.

Her first thought was that the
Darksmith’s
gunners had hit their target. Then she saw it. Half the fires on the pirate vessel went out at once. There was a flash of light and a bolt like lightning arced across the ship, striking a shimmering globe that appeared around one of the man-shaped silhouettes on deck. That figure dodged among a knot of larger silhouettes who fell away in short order, wounded or dead. The crew of the
Darksmith
hooted and cheered as if they were spectators at a crashball game or a pit fight. They shouted encouragements, suggestions, and some general purpose invectives against the pirates. All but one.

“Dan!” Tanner shouted, his voice as discordant as a fan of a rival side attending a visiting match. “Don’t start a war! Dan, get back here!”

Jamile edged her way down the angled deck until she was behind Tanner. “Is that Dan over there?” she asked, feeling stupid for having asked the obvious first off. “What’s he doing?” There was some part of Jamile’s mind that would not allow a thoughtful, insightful question to form until she had been assured of the reality of what she was witnessing.

“Bloody-handed fool’s going to get us all killed,” Tanner muttered over his shoulder.

“It looks like he’s handling himself well,” Jamile replied.

Tanner grabbed her by the jacket collar and pulled her close. “It’s not here I’m worried about. This isn’t piracy anymore, it’s politics.” Tanner checked over both shoulders, but nobody was paying them any mind. The flashes of aether on the pirates’ ship had them all mesmerized. “They’re my kind, Zayne and his boy. Dan kills them and it’s war in Veydrus.”

“Then why is Dan—”

“Because the kid hates the idea of war as much as he hates honey candy and tupping chambermaids,” Tanner said.

“What can we do?” Jamile asked.

Tanner turned away and looked to the pirate ship. There was a blue flash, like a ray of colored sunlight, followed by a crack and a lumberjack’s groan as one of the masts split and toppled. “Nothing.”

Madlin slumped against the open hatch of the engine room. Three rune patterns glowed a faint blue in the dark; the magnesium lights had burned out. The bilge pumps had seen three shifts of workers and with the aid of the levitation runes, the pumps were starting to make headway. The knee-deep water had receded back to Madlin’s shins. Much as she’s pressed her father to upgrade Tinker’s Island with spark amenities, she was just as glad now that the
Darksmith
was run on coal and lamp oil.

There was a dull ache within her, like sunburn on the insides of her veins. Three sets of runes hadn’t seemed so daunting a task, but she knew better than to draw assumptions about how aether worked. If there was rhyme or reason to the arcane, it escaped her. Its workings seemed faulty based on all she knew of physics.

The cheering persisted up on deck, and the curiosity was too much to bear now that she had exhausted what she could do with runes for the time being. Madlin sloshed through the indoor portion of the Katamic until she reached the stairs.

Out on deck, the scene was something from a storybook. As the crew of the
Darksmith
shouted encouragements, a wizards’ duel played out on the decks of an Acardian heavy frigate. Its sails and rigging blazed with fire and one of her masts lay in the water like a gangplank to the bottomless depths of the sea.

Madlin shambled across the deck like a sleepwalker, transfixed. Flashes of blue and silver, red and fiery orange stabbed and crackled back and forth across the deck of the Acardian ship. Shimmering auras flashed into view around the combatants as some form of protective magic thwarted each attack. The action was too far away for her to make out details, but one of them had to be Dan.

“Madlin,” Jamile called out. She was standing at the railing beside Tanner, though in the starlight she could only tell by his foreign clothes and the sword at his hip. “Dan’s fighting off Zayne’s pirates by himself.”

At least that explains where he went.
In the confusion of the attack and her hurried repairs, she had forgotten about him.

Madlin kept an eye to the battle as she joined Jamile and Tanner. Captain Toller fell in beside her before she arrived.

“I heard what you did down below,” Toller said. “You’ve probably saved us from a float home in the Katamic.”

“We’re little better than a raft right now,” Madlin replied. “We’ve got no engine, no rudder control, and most of the lower decks are filled with water. Even if we rigged an engine, the coal’s soaked.”