The Aeronaut's Windlass (81 page)

Sections of
Glorious
fully thirty feet across simply vanished, charred to clouds of soot. Her main dorsal mast was cut in half and plummeted toward the deck. Human screams could not be heard amidst that destruction, but Gwen’s imagination placed them for her near the small figures she could see consumed in violence that rendered even the doughtiest mortal form into a glass figurine.

Glorious
listed to one side, groaning and shrieking in her pain—but even so, incredibly, the ship withstood the horrible destruction visited upon her by the enemy, wounded but not destroyed, her heavy armor enabling her to survive the punishment laid out upon her.

Itasca
, meanwhile, rocked back to level, her steam turbines chugging and roaring, giving her some maneuverability even as her aeronauts labored to deploy more lengths of her ethersilk web from her masts, to harness the greater power and grace they offered. If she was not untouched, she had been marked only lightly in comparison to the ship that had appeared to have every advantage on her in the outset of the engagement, and she was ready to fight on.

“God in Heaven,” Kettle swore, without a trace of mockery in his tone. “Now,
that
is how you handle a ship.”

“Keep us moving, Mister Kettle,” Captain Grimm snapped. “Circle us toward
Glorious
and stay in her shadow.” He raised his voice to bellow, “Guns! Keep raking
Itasca
’s web! We’ve got to keep her lamed so that she can’t get more fire into the holes she’s put in
Glorious
’s armor!”

“Rake her web, aye!” Commander Creedy’s voice echoed.
Predator
’s cannon shrieked, and sections of
Itasca
’s web went up in flames even as the large ship’s reels spooled more out.
Itasca
’s momentum slowed, the ship hovering sluggishly for a moment—a moment in which
Glorious
’s massive firepower could make a proper reply to
Itasca
’s greeting of a moment before.

“Hah!” Grimm said, clenching his fist. “We can have her yet.”

“Guts and rot!” snarled Kettle, sudden and furious. “Captain, look at
Glorious
!”

Grimm’s head whipped around to stare at the Fleet battlecruiser. Over the distance, Gwen’s stunned hearing could just barely make out a loud, frantic ringing sound. It took her only a second or two to recognize it as the same bell cadence
Predator
herself had used to signal emergency maneuvers.

And seconds later she watched as
Glorious
plunged back down into the mists, moving in a rapid, panicked-looking descent.

Gwen stared after the wounded leviathan, stunned. Only the swirling mists remained, spinning in a slow, circular vortex where
Glorious
had vanished.

“The coward!” Kettle howled. “Damn you, Rook, you rotten-crotched
coward
! Did you think you could take a fighter like
Itasca
without getting a few lumps along the way?”

Gwen shook her head dazedly, her eyes moving to Captain Grimm.

The man was staring after the vanished
Glorious
, just as she had been, and she could see the truth in the sickened horror in his eyes.

Glorious
had left
Predator
behind to die.

Dimly Gwen could hear
Itasca
’s aeronauts howling in wild defiance and exultation—as well they might, having just turned an ambush back upon their attackers to send them diving out of the blue sky for the cover of the mists.

And then
Itasca
began turning, to bring her broadside to bear on lamed, fragile
Predator
.

Chapter 68

AMS
Predator

G
rimm watched as
Itasca
banked toward them, steam engines chugging, turbines roaring, and lined up the shot that would scatter
Predator
and her crew to the winds.

Like everything else
Itasca
had done, the maneuver was performed flawlessly. Grimm could just see, at this distance, the outlines of the officers standing on
Itasca
’s bridge, including the high-crowned hat of her captain. The man’s dark red uniform was marred by a blob of white—a sling for his arm, perhaps? Some of the blast from
Glorious
’s opening salvo must have gotten through
Itasca
’s shroud, and heat or shrapnel from the impact upon the ship’s armor must have wounded the man. Yet he stood where a captain ought, doing what a captain should. Grimm could respect that.

At least if he was to be gunned down, it would not be by some simpering, cowardly nepotist like Rook, or by the guns of some ragged, sloppy, desperately violent pirate. There was some comfort in the thought.

Though it was a given, of course, that he and
Predator
would not simply lie down and die, either.

He could not outrun
Itasca
, not now. Half of
Predator
’s web had been shot away, severely limiting her speed, whereas the larger ship could simply deploy more ethersilk from her expansive reels. Grimm could order the men to raise sail, but the winds were not favorable in their current position, and turbine-driven
Itasca
would end the matter before the canvas sails could be deployed.

He could not escape in the traditional fashion—they were too far from the mist to try anything but an almost certainly suicidal dive, given that one trim crystal had already folded on them. For that matter, even a sharp ascent could be equally dangerous.

To stand and shoot it out with
Itasca
would be an utterly futile gesture. Oh, a lucky shot might strike a weakened point in
Itasca
’s shroud—she had been in a heavy exchange at close quarters with
Glorious
, after all—but a single fortunate shot from
Predator
’s guns would be unlikely to inflict heavy damage against the battlecruiser’s armor with anything but luck guided by the hands of the Merciful Builders, the Archangels, and God in Heaven Himself. In contrast, it would take a similar stroke of fortune for
Predator
to survive obliteration from
Itasca
’s broadside.

Grimm turned his head to regard the flag of Albion, snapping out straight in the cold wind from the main dorsal mast. He could strike his colors. The universal sign of surrender in aerial battle would almost certainly be honored by a professional of the caliber of
Itasca
’s captain. Of course, doing so would mean the loss of
Predator
, either taken as prize or destroyed and sent to the surface as an act of war, and Grimm’s soul screamed out against that course of action.

But what other option did he have?

“Captain Grimm?” Miss Lancaster asked. “What is that sound?”

Grimm frowned at her for a second and then tilted one ear to the air, listening. His hearing still rang with the fury of recent battle, but . . . yes, there was a sound coming from high above.

A sound like distant trumpets.

And it was coming from directly out of the blinding midmorning sun.

Grimm whirled to stare at
Itasca
, thundering along under the rattle of her steam engines, the roar of her turbines, and realized that the enemy ship was effectively deafened by her own propulsion. Was there time?

Yes. Yes, there might be.

Grimm felt a smile stretch his lips from his teeth and bellowed, “Hard to port at flank speed, Mister Kettle! Stay ahead of her turn! Guns! Ripple fire on
Itasca
’s bridge!”

“Sir?” Creedy called back. Grimm could hear the incredulity in the young officer’s voice. Not only was he deliberately aiming for an enemy’s bridge an unworthy and generally unrewarding tactic, but ripple fire—loosing blasts from one cannon after another—would accomplish nothing against
Itasca
’s heavy shroud at this distance. It would, in fact, do little more than provide a fireworks display.

“That is an order, Mister Creedy!” Grimm thundered. “Fire!”

Creedy’s voice bawled out the order, and within seconds
Predator
’s cannon began hurling defiance into
Itasca
’s teeth. Blasts of fire exploded against the shroud near
Itasca
’s bow, blotting her bridge from view in intermittent washes of flame.

“Captain!” came Journeyman’s near-furious scream from the speaking tube. “Port-side trim crystal array is about to fold on us! We’ve got to get somewhere quiet and stable and cut power!”

“Understood!” Grimm called back. “Prepare to cut power to the port trim array!”

“
What?
” Journeyman blurted.

Grimm turned to Miss Lancaster and began tightening her safety straps, checking each carefully. “Excuse me, miss.”

The young woman stared at him, her eyes widening. “Captain?”

“Hold on to your straps tight with both hands, and do not adjust them, if you please,” Grimm said.

Itasca
continued her turn, bringing the annihilation of her broadside to bear, though Kettle kept wounded
Predator
racing ahead of it, banking into an arc that would circle around the other ship. The gesture was a futile one in the long term. Already
Itasca
was cutting her forward speed slightly to send more power screaming through the lateral thrusters of her turbines, to spin her faster and catch
Predator
in the firing arc of her own port-side guns.

The foremost trio of guns in
Itasca
’s array managed to traverse enough to catch
Predator
in their sights and spat angry spheres of flame. Her heavy cannon were considerably larger than those
Predator
boasted, and the enemy fire leapt across the sky to splash against
Predator
’s shroud. It illuminated in a brilliant sphere of green light, and the roar of the cannon charges felt as if they shook Grimm’s very bones. Grimm could all but feel his ship’s determination to persevere, feel her stubborn endurance—but he could also feel some of the heat from the enemy rounds leak through the shroud, sending the heavy scent of ozone washing over the deck.

Predator
kept up her steady pounding of the area around
Itasca
’s bridge, and Grimm knew that it would look like the tactic of a truly desperate man, hoping to end the threat to his ship by effectively cutting off the head of his foe. Stories and dramas often relied upon such a tactic—but in the messy practice of actual battle, targeting so precise was problematic, shrouds not so easily penetrated, and a determined enemy could usually batter through a foe’s shroud amidships more accurately and rapidly than an enemy attempting to directly strike the enemy’s bridge.

But, Grimm thought, it was not his goal to wreak havoc on
Itasca
with his cannon. He had something far more dangerous in mind. After all, she was already deaf.

Grimm wanted her
blind
, too.

Itasca
dropped even more of her speed to sharpen her turn, her armored flanks gleaming in the sun as she struggled to catch the smaller, nimbler ship in her guns’ firing arcs, like a cat whirling on a darting mouse. Grimm could feel his heart beating in pure, frantic terror as he
felt
the angles of the ships changing, felt more of the enemy’s guns beginning to catch up to
Predator
, and knew he and his ship had only seconds to live.
Itasca
was determined to finish what she had begun those weeks ago, and was focused wholly upon
Predator
’s destruction.

And because she was, she never knew a thing until the sound of strident trumpets suddenly rose over even the thunder of her own engines and
Predator
’s cannon fire.

Commodore Alexander Bayard’s AFS
Valiant
came crashing down from the sun, the heavy cruiser dropping in a descent that was very nearly as sharp as the combat dive of a far lighter vessel, her war cry a clarion call. On her flanks were her division mates, AFS
Thunderous
, roaring like a storm, and AFS
Victorious
, her spars shaking with the steady rumble of a vast war drum.