The Aeronaut's Windlass (5 page)

There was a roar of released energy, a flash of hellishly bright light. A section of hull a good thirty feet across simply vanished, transformed into a cloud of soot and deadly splinters that flew up through the ship above them, hurled like spears by the force of the blast. Fire consumed the hull around the hole, and roiled and boiled through the vulnerable guts of the Auroran ship above them. Shattered ventral web-masts fell from the ship, only to become tangled in their own rigging and in the finer, nearly invisible shimmers of her ventral web. The sudden drag and the abrupt absence of her ventral web changed both the ship’s propulsive balance and her center of gravity, and she began listing heavily to port. The blast had also smashed one of her two ventral planes to splinters, and as she rolled, she began to yaw as well.

Creedy, Kettle, and every crewman on the deck let out fierce, savage cries of triumph. Though they had by no means dealt the Auroran a mortal blow, she was, for the moment, severely lamed. She was still deadly, with her more numerous guns, bloodied but whole behind her mostly solid shroud, but in a duel between the two ships,
Predator
would now have the upper hand.

Grimm didn’t watch the secondary explosions in the other ship, as flickering discharges of etheric energy found volatile crystals aboard the Auroran, probably upon the gauntlets in a weapons locker. He had already flipped his telescoptic back down and was raking the surrounding skies with his gaze and the telescopic lenses, searching for whomever the Auroran had been signaling.

The second vessel rose out of the mists of the mezzosphere, murky clouds roiling off of her spars and rigging, boiling down off of her plated flanks and leaving her armored sides gleaming as she rose into the harsh light of the sun. The banner of the armada of Spire Aurora flew bold from both dorsal and ventral masts, two blue stripes on a field of white, with five scarlet stars spangled between the blue stripes. Across her prow was painted in gold:
ASA Itasca
.

Staring at her, Grimm felt his bones turn cold.
Itasca
was a ship of legend, with a battle record stretching back more than five hundred years, and the Aurorans considered her a fine prize to be given to veteran captains on the fast route to their own admiralty. Grimm couldn’t remember her commander’s name at the moment, but he would be one of the Aurorans’ best.

Worse,
Itasca
was a battlecruiser, a vessel designed specifically to run down ships like
Predator
and hammer them into clouds of glowing splinters. She could take the full punishment of
Predator
’s guns without flinching, and her own weapons—some four times Grimm’s own broadside, and nearly as heavy as those of a battleship—would slam aside
Predator
’s shroud and destroy the ship and crew behind it in a single salvo. Worse, trusting in her armored plates and shroud,
Itasca
could stand off and fire accurately from a range
Predator
could never hope to match. Even worse, she had an armored warship’s multiple power cores, and could store, deploy, and charge a far greater length of web than
Predator
, so that even with her vast additional mass, Grimm might not be able to outrun
Itasca
before her guns brought the race to a premature conclusion.

The only thing they had going for them was blind luck: The Auroran warship had come up from the mist almost two thousand yards away—though Grimm thought it worth noting that if
Predator
had come down at the standard angle of attack instead of at Kettle’s more daring dive angle,
Itasca
would have come up barely a hundred yards to port.
Itasca
’s captain, whoever he was, had been lucky in positioning his vessel—after all, the Albion privateer could have dived down on the merchant cruiser from any angle, and
Itasca
’s captain had no way of knowing from which way he’d come. But he’d outthought Grimm and predicted his attack successfully. That was the kind of luck a smart captain made for himself.

“Kettle!” he snapped. “Dive, now!”

The helmsman’s hand was moving toward the throttle in instant obedience even as he blinked in surprise—and then looked past the captain to see
Itasca
turning her overwhelming broadside to them.

The ship dropped again, without any maneuvers warning, catching many off guard. There were screams. Grimm saw Leftenant Hammond fly upward from the deck, held down by only a single safety line—the gunnery officer had to have rushed up and down the line of gunners, giving his crews instructions in rapid succession in order to pull off his ripple-fire maneuver. Grimm thanked God in Heaven that the man had remembered to keep one line secure despite his haste.

For an instant, Grimm thought he’d avoided engaging
Itasca
entirely—and then, just as
Predator
reached the top layer of the mists,
Itasca
opened fire.

Grimm’s ship was a small target, as ships went:
Predator
was barely more than a destroyer in terms of mass. She was moving fast as well, and at an oblique angle. Considering how far away
Itasca
rode, it would take a fiendishly skilled or lucky gunner indeed to place blasts on target, especially with crews whose eyes were used to the dimness of the mists and now rose into the brilliance of the aerosphere.

Someone on
Itasca
was skilled. Or lucky.

The blast of the warship’s heavy cannon ripped a hole in
Predator
’s shroud as easily as a stone hurtling through a cobweb. The round burst at the top of the rearmost dorsal mast, and only the steep angle of
Predator
’s renewed dive saved her. The explosion tore her topside masts away completely, hungrily devouring her entire dorsal web in a lacework of fire as it went. Shards and splinters of wood went flying, and Grimm heard crewmen scream as a cloud of deadly missiles ripped into the starboard gun crews. Shrapnel hit the main crystal of the starboard number three gun, and it went up in a green-white flash that killed its crew and left a gaping wound a good twelve feet across in the ship’s flank. An aeronaut named Aricson in one of the adjacent crews screamed as the section of deck to which his safety lines were fastened went flying out and away from
Predator
, dragging him with it. He shrieked in terror for an instant, and then man and scream both vanished into the mist, as the swirling sea of fog reached up and swallowed
Predator
whole.

“Evasive action!” Grimm ordered. The distant screaming roars of the
Itasca
’s guns continued, and he heard the hungry hissing of blasts streaking through the mists around them, making them glow with hellish light. They had been lucky to survive a single glancing hit. Thirty guns raked the mist, and Grimm knew the enemy ship would be rolling onto her starboard side, giving the gunners a chance to track their approximate line of descent. If the same gunner or one of his fellows got lucky again,
Predator
would not be returning home to Spire Albion.

Kettle turned the steering grips hard as the cold mist enveloped them, and the ship slalomed lower into the mezzosphere while Grimm waited for the round that would kill his ship and his crew, forcing himself not to hold his breath. All the while,
Predator
sang her defiance to the mists, the chord shifting and changing with each alteration of her course, and the sound drifted up behind them like mocking laughter.

Grimm clenched his fists and ground his teeth. It was all very well for his ship to behave in such a fashion, but he sometimes wished that
Predator
could
think
as well as taunt the enemy. There was nothing to be done for it. Grimm simply had to hope that the mists of the mezzosphere would muffle and confuse the source of the sound, giving
Itasca
’s gunners no clear target.

He waited for as long as he dared, nearly a minute, and then screamed, “Pull her up!”

Kettle signaled the engine room, and their wild descent began to slow. A few measured breaths later,
Predator
leveled out, and they simply waited, everyone on deck entirely silent while Kettle struggled to trim the wounded ship as she completed her dash.

After a time, Grimm slowly exhaled and bowed his head. He reached up and wearily removed his goggles. The wet air felt cold and sticky against the skin around his eyes.

“They aren’t chasing us,” Creedy breathed, bringing his own goggles down.

“Of course not.
Itasca
’s too damned big,” Grimm replied. His voice sounded hoarse and thin in his own ears. His neck and shoulders felt as if they’d been replaced with bars of brass. “A monster like that can’t dive with
Predator
. Besides, no Auroran captain would try to follow us in this murk for fear of looking ridiculous. Two blind men can’t have a very dignified chase.”

Creedy snorted through his nose.

“Damage control,” Grimm said quietly, unfastening his safety lines. “Make sure Doctor Bagen has everything he needs to see to the wounded. Call the roll. I’ll be in my cabin.”

Creedy nodded, looking slowly around them. “Sir?”

Grimm paused.

“This ship’s shroud . . . it’s extremely powerful for a vessel of this size.”

The young officer hadn’t actually asked the question, but it hung unspoken in the air between them. Grimm didn’t like prevarication. It complicated life. But though he thought the young officer was a decent enough sort, he wasn’t ready to extend that much trust. Not yet. So he gave the XO a flat gaze and said, “See to the ship, if you please, Mister Creedy.”

Creedy snapped to attention and threw him an academy-perfect salute. “Yes, sir, Captain.”

Grimm turned and went to the privacy of his cabin. He closed the door behind him and sat down on his bunk. The battle was over.

His hands started to shake, and then his arms, and then his belly. He curled his chest up to his knees and sat quietly for a moment, shuddering in the terror and excitement he hadn’t allowed himself to feel during the engagement.

Aricson’s scream echoed in Grimm’s head. He closed his eyes, and the purple blotch the dying number three gun had burned on his retina hovered in his darkened vision.

Stupid. He’d been stupid. He’d been tearing huge swaths of profit from the Auroran merchant fleet. It had been inevitable that they would eventually respond to him. Some idiot would probably say that the fact that they’d sent
Itasca
to deal with him was a high compliment. Said idiot wouldn’t be visiting the families of the dead men to give them his condolences and their death pay. He knew that he’d made sound decisions given what he’d known at the time, but some of his men were dead because of them nonetheless.

They were dead because he’d commanded them, and they’d followed. They’d known the risks, to a man, and every one of them was ex-Fleet. Things could have gone immeasurably worse than they had—but that would be little comfort to the newly minted widows back at the home Spire.

He sat and shuddered and regretted and promised dead men’s shades that he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

He was the captain.

*   *   *

B
y the time Creedy arrived with the damage report, Grimm had reassembled himself.

“Captain,” Creedy said respectfully. “I don’t think your accomplishments have been properly appreciated at home.”

“Oh?” Grimm asked.

“Yes, sir,” Creedy said. Controlled admiration crept into his tone. “I mean, for the Aurorans to dispatch
Itasca
to mousetrap a lone privateer . . . when you think about it, it’s really a kind of compliment, sir.”

Grimm sighed.

“Captain Castillo is one of their best,” Creedy went on. “His attack was nearly perfect, but you slipped right through his fingers. If you were a captain in the Fleet you’d have merited tactical honors for . . .”

Creedy’s face reddened and his voice trailed off.

“There are worse things to happen to a man than being drummed out of the Fleet, XO,” Grimm said quietly. “Casualties, then damage reports. How bad?”

“Bad enough,” Creedy said. “Five dead, six injured—shrapnel, mostly, and a concussion from an aeronaut in engineering who unhooked his second line too soon.”

Grimm nodded. “The ship?”

“The dorsal masts are stubs. We’ll need to get to a yard to replace them. We had to cut the rigging loose and drop it, so we lost most of the dorsal web. There’s a hole in the gun deck where the number three gun was—we’ll need a yard to repair that, too. And we blew two cables in our suspension rig.”

Grimm took a slow breath. The suspension rig was the central structure of the ship, built around the main lift crystal. The weight of the entire ship hung suspended from the rig, and was distributed through its cables. There were eight of them, any two enough to bear the weight of the entire vessel . . . but the more cables broke, the more likely it was that those remaining would break—especially during any high-speed maneuvers. The loss of the occasional cable was expected, but was never to be taken lightly.

“You’re saving the best for last, I think,” Grimm said.

Creedy grimaced. “Chief Journeyman says there are fractures in the main lift crystal.”

Grimm stopped himself from spitting an acid curse and closed his eyes. “That second dive, so soon after the first.”

“That was his theory, sir. He’s cut power to the lift crystal, and is running extra to the trim crystals to make up the difference in buoyancy and keep us afloat.”

Grimm smiled faintly and opened his eyes. There would be no prize money on this trip, and no bounty, either. The trim crystals that helped adjust the ship’s attitude were expensive, and using them to help maintain the ship’s lift would be hard on them, but replacing them was a standard operating cost. The large crystals sufficiently powerful to suspend airships were another matter—they were far rarer and much more bitterly expensive. Only a power core cost more, assuming one could be found at all.