The Aeronaut's Windlass (82 page)

A roar of unadulterated ferocity went up from the crew of
Predator
as the three Albion heavy cruisers pivoted with the coordination of a troupe of dancers, bringing their broadsides to bear on
Itasca
, and unleashed the fury of forty-five cannon in a nearly simultaneous flash of light and sound.

The range was brutally close: Bayard had brought his ships down
between
Grimm’s ship and
Itasca
.

Albion cannon blasts smashed into
Itasca
’s already tested shroud, hammered through it, and gouged into her hull itself.
Itasca
’s heavy armor plating had been designed to withstand guns exactly like those now being used against her, in odds exactly like those she now faced—but even
Itasca
could not ignore Bayard’s opening remarks. His ships’ cannon tore into
Itasca
’s armor, tearing gaping holes in her outer hull and setting everything in the compartments behind them on fire. In an instant, nearly half of
Itasca
’s port-side hull simply vanished, blown into clouds of ash and flame and cinder and shattered, glowing-hot armor.

And yet
Itasca
’s crew was too disciplined to be rendered impotent, despite the speed of Bayard’s nearly perfect execution of a classic attack. Even as the cruiser division opened fire,
Itasca
howled her defiance back at her foes, her cannon screaming—and the weight of her entire broadside came crashing down upon
Thunderous
.

The battlecruiser’s heavy cannon made light work of
Thunderous
’s shroud, and the greater density of
Itasca
’s fire meant that
Thunderous
never had a chance. Though her outer hull was armored with copper-clad steel, at that range, and against those guns, she might as well have been protected by so much glass. Cannon charges erupted against the heavy cruiser’s armored exterior, tore a hole in her large enough to sail through in a yacht, and erupted out the far side of
Thunderous
’s hull in a spray of shattered armor, fire, and incinerated wood, gutting her in a single salvo.

Grimm saw
Thunderous
’s starboard trim crystal array fail in a shower of small explosions, and her aft lift crystal faltered, so that she slumped abruptly to stern and starboard, her deck tilting at a precarious angle, and she began dropping swiftly. The strain on her timbers was too much, and with a cracking sound as loud as a cannon, her back broke. The rear half of the airship simply plunged—and became fouled in the long lengths of ethersilk web, jerking the forward section of the doomed, burning airship down, down, down. She vanished into the mists—but not before a quick-thinking aeronaut deployed an emergency buoy, basically nothing more than a tiny lift crystal attached to a colored pennant.

“Shift fire to her webs!” Grimm bellowed. “Let’s give the commodore the chance to wear her down!”

“Fire on enemy web, aye!” Creedy responded, and
Predator
’s cannon began raking
Itasca
’s webs, preventing her from building any speed beyond that provided by her turbines.

Itasca
kept up her original turn, trying to shelter her ravaged flank from her enemies, but
Valiant
and
Victorious
split apart like a pair of wolves circling a lumberbulk. The two Albion ships had been unable to entirely halt their descent in such a short distance, and they slid under the
Itasca
’s plane and to either side of her, each ship tilting on its axis to keep one broadside on the enemy. In response,
Itasca
rolled her undamaged starboard broadside down toward
Victorious
, exposing her belly to
Valiant
.

Itasca
’s fresh broadside fired first, and this time all of her cannon were focused on
Victorious
. The gun crews of Spire Aurora’s prize battlecruiser knew their trade well, but had a poor shooting angle, and their hits were more dispersed.
Victorious
’s shroud flared brilliant emerald green, blunting much of the fire, but even so what got through pounded her dorsal and starboard mastworks to splinters and tore ragged holes in her starboard gun deck, taking a horrible toll among her gunners and setting much of the starboard side of the ship ablaze.

Victorious
and
Valiant
fired again, but
Victorious
’s broadside was at a feeble half of its strength. Between
Itasca
’s shroud and her heavy armor, the battlecruiser shrugged off the hits, though she rang like some vast gong as
Victorious
’s fury pounded her hull.

Valiant
, meanwhile, rolled almost to the horizontal as she slipped beneath
Itasca
—and then ripple-fired directly up into her belly.

Itasca
’s shroud held for the first half dozen impacts, but then Bayard’s gunners began to gouge out great pieces of her armored hull, wrecking her forward ventral mastworks and pushing more and more deeply up into the ship, like a fine, slender knife being pressed into a man’s belly beneath the ribs, questing for the heart.

Itasca
shuddered and simply took the pounding, keeping her starboard guns on
Victorious
until her cannon cycled and howled again.

The second salvo was of no great accounting in terms of its accuracy, with Bayard pounding its gun crews with regular shocks of impact from below—but against wounded
Victorious
, it was enough. Though the cruiser tried to turn her mangled flanks from
Itasca
’s guns, the only thing she could do was rotate her wounded side down, exposing her only lightly armored deck to enemy fire. Her shroud failed in a catastrophic burst of sparks, and the heavy cannon of the Auroran vessel pounded her deck, tearing open huge sections, and setting dozens of fires in the unarmored compartments of her interior.

Victorious
faltered and dropped like a man hit with a sledgehammer. A power surge must have hit her starboard trim crystal array, because she abruptly rolled, flipped, and began tumbling as she sank, whirling over and over her long axis, entangling herself hopelessly in her own web.

Itasca
shuddered and continued her turn, descending with too much grace for a vessel so large, steam engines chugging, turning her intact starboard broadside toward
Valiant
with a ponderous sense of finality, a behemoth ready to crush the last of its smaller opponents.

The proper thing for Bayard to do would have been to increase his pace and stay ahead of
Itasca
’s spin, just as Grimm had done only moments before—but instead Bayard broke in the other direction, as if seeking to disengage.

It was a seemingly foolish movement, one that might have been expected from a panicked merchant skipper or a green captain in his first action. It would only carry
Valiant
into Itasca’s sights that much more quickly, and could not possibly open up enough range to make a significant difference in the accuracy of
Itasca
’s gunners. Worse, the move exposed more of the ship’s stern, where armor plating was thinner and the ship’s superstructure more vulnerable. Grimm could all but see
Itasca
’s sudden eagerness to bring her cannon to bear and destroy the last of her serious opponents.

And in doing so, to expose the gaping hole in her belly armor to
Predator
.

“Kettle!” Grimm shouted.

“Aye!” the pilot called. He had seen the opening as well, and nimble
Predator
banked and dipped lower, sliding into the shadow of
Itasca
’s hull into the dead area where her guns could not reach—and where, if she rolled,
Predator
would be annihilated in a single glorious flash of luminous thunder.

“Creedy!” Grimm called. “Prepare salvo fire!”

“Salvo fire, aye!” Creedy screamed.

“Mister Journeyman!” Grimm called into the speaking tube.
“Cut the port trim array!”

Grimm felt it when the power to the port-side trim crystals went out.
Predator
’s deck suddenly flipped entirely to the vertical, the motion a shock against his safety harness, a blow to his rib cage. Miss Lancaster let out a sharp cry of surprise, her voice tight with a terror that she quickly choked off.

And
Predator
’s starboard guns rolled up to
Itasca
’s belly from a range of fifty yards.

“Fire!” Grimm roared.

Predator
’s starboard cannon howled as one.

There was no shroud left to defeat the lighter charges
Predator
’s guns could throw, and
Valiant
’s heavier weapons had taken a disastrous toll on
Itasca
’s armored hull and interior armor alike. In the open space of the sky,
Predator
’s rounds may not have done much more than put red-hot dents in
Itasca
’s outer hull—but within the contained spaces of her interior compartments, the salvo of the lighter guns exploded with savage fury, a jet of fire washing back out of the relatively small opening in her armor.

Itasca
staggered violently, and the salvo sent after Bayard’s ship went sailing wildly in every direction. The roar of the Auroran’s thrusters abruptly stopped, and for a few seconds the only sounds in the sky were the creak of timbers and the crackle of fire and the distant chugging of
Valiant
’s engines.

And then with a sound like furious thunder,
Itasca
’s boiler exploded.

The shock wave of it smashed into
Predator
like some vast, fleshy hand, and knocked the air from Grimm’s lungs. He tried to give an order to Kettle, but no sound came from his lips. Kettle was already descending, though, and continuing forward, sailing out from under
Itasca
.

The enormous armored ship had been entirely deformed by the explosion, armored hull warped and dented outward by the force of the blast, torn open in dozens of places. Her mastworks were wreckage, around the clock, and multiple trim crystals had failed, so that she was listing to one side and adrift, rotating slowly. Helpless aeronauts dangled from safety lines. Her entire port-side gun deck had been consumed in fire, and aeronauts were screaming as they struggled to escape the blaze, many dying as the safety harnesses meant to protect them now trapped them within the flames.

Valiant
’s steam whistle wailed in triumph as she came about, taking a course that would bring her back to
Itasca
without crossing the firing arc of her remaining gun deck, and one of Bayard’s chase cannon sent a single shot flashing across
Itasca
’s bow.

“Hold fire!” Grimm called.

“Hold fire, aye!” Creedy echoed from the guns.

For a long moment,
Itasca
hung in the sky like a great, stunned beast, too dazed to understand its surroundings. Grimm could hear orders being shouted frantically up and down the larger ship.

And then her colors came fluttering off of their few remaining masts, and went spinning away into the breeze.

Predator
drifted far enough forward on
Itasca
that Grimm could see her captain on his listing bridge, braced against the tilt of his ship, held in place by three neat, taut safety lines. He looked of an age with Grimm, a tall, lean man with weathered skin and a blaze of silver in his otherwise coal-black hair. The man stared back at Grimm, then nodded, unhooked his sheathed sword from his side, and held its handle out toward
Predator
.

Grimm straightened as much as he could in the nearly vertical position from which he depended from his own safety lines. He doffed his cap and nodded in reply to the Auroran captain.

Itasca
had surrendered.

The battle was over.

Chapter 69

AMS
Predator