Tin Swift

The big boilers and fans of the Coin de Paradis caught hold and puffed out steam. Then the fans picked up and threw so much wind and dust and smoke around, it was impossible to see half a foot in any direction.

“Fire!” Old Jack hollered.

Jack’s men powdered the air with shots, bullets lost to the sound of the fans angling for the climb. Hink and his crew fired back, taking scant cover from the few crates of supplies still scattered out on the field.

“The ship!” Captain Hink yelled. “Seldom, Guffin, Ansell. Out, out! Get her out before they fire the cannons.”

The men ran for it under the clamor and god-awful racket of the Coin de Paradis’s slow launch. Cedar didn’t know why the ship was so loud. But what he did know was there was an ax strapped next to the Swift’s door.

He grabbed the ax, stuck it in his belt, and drew his gun, wishing for his rifle. He jumped out of the Swift, Wil right beside him, and fired at Old Jack and his boys so the crew could make the ship.

But Captain Hink, Miss Dupuis, and her companions were pinned against one side of the landing pad, concentrating their fire at the cannon stands, to keep Old Jack’s men from firing on the crew and ship.

“Get to the ship!” Cedar yelled. “Dupuis, Theobald, Wright. Get to the Swift.”

But Miss Dupuis and her crew did not budge. “We stay with you,” she said.

Captain Beaumont’s ship cleared the landing pad, lifting up straight at Old Jack and his boys. Old Jack used the ship as cover, and by the time the last board on the ship’s hull had scraped the wall of rocks, Old Jack was gone.

But his men had made the cannons, and let loose a blast straight at the Swift. It missed, but not by much.

Cedar ducked behind the corner of stone where the captain and others were huddled, just as Captain Hink ran out into the middle of the landing pad, waving his arms and airing his lungs in full shout. “…backstabbing devil! Don’t you go hide in that hole of yours and leave them out here to fight for you. And you!” He yelled up to the men on the cannons. “Stop shooting at my ship!”

Through the dense shifting smoke, another shadow loomed over the field.

Cedar looked up just as a new gout of gunfire ricocheted off the cliff walls, throwing sprays of dirt and rock like someone had tossed dynamite.

Hink ran for cover. “Fly!” he yelled, throwing his hands up twice, as if by will alone he could push the ship into the air. “Get the hell out of here!”

For a moment, Cedar didn’t think Ansell, Guffin, Seldom, and Molly were going to do what the captain said, didn’t think the Swift would take to the air. She had a few holes in her, but hadn’t yet been hit by a cannon.

“That’s an order!” Hink added.

And then, so fast that Cedar had to suck in a hard breath, the ship was up and screaming over the edge of the cliffs, rocketing to the clouds.

The looming shadow passed across the landing pad, and as the smoke cleared, Cedar craned his neck to see the sky. A ship was coming in for a landing.

Easily as big as the Coin de Paradis but built with a closed deck and plenty of portholes with cannons set to fire, she rose up from the cover of the mountain peak, turned into the wind, and bore down on them.

Old Jack’s signal must have reached its intended party.

“It’s Les Mullins’s boat,” Hink said as he, Cedar, Miss Dupuis, Mr. Theobald, and Miss Wright pressed their backs against the rock wall. Wil was there with them too. Not a lot of cover, but it was either stand out in the open flat with an armed ship homing into view, or take a chance in the mazelike tunnels of Old Jack’s place. Tunnels Jack and his men knew like the insides of their eyelids.

“Who’s Les Mullins?” Cedar asked.

They were all busy reloading their weapons, and glancing up at the ship closing down on the field, while the singing cry of the Swift beating against the wind to make her retreat filled the air.

“He’s a man I should of killed when he was in my sights. Works for a general who wants me and mine dead.”

“Which general?” Miss Dupuis asked.

“General Alabaster Saint,” Hink said. “Heard of him?”

“Yes,” Miss Dupuis said, pumping the shotgun in her hands. “I have. Dismissed from command for trading weapons between the North and South, among other offenses.” She glanced at Cedar. “He is in league with the forces you and I were speaking of earlier, Mr. Hunt. Dark forces.”

“The darker, bloodier, plain crazy hell on earth thing the Saint can find,” Hink said, “is what he’s going to be in league with. Never saw a more bloodthirsty insane rabid demon in my life.”

“What does he want with you?” Cedar asked.

“He wants me dead.” Captain Hink holstered his gun and picked up a modified Smith and Wesson. “I served under him. Mutinied. Saved a hundred and fifty men’s lives that day, and got the Saint discharged for disobeying the president’s direct orders. He’s wanted my head ever since. The feeling is mutual.”

The shadow of the airship had passed over them now, and the ship itself was coming into position just to one side of the landing pad. It wasn’t moving in fast, whether due to the shifting winds or smoke, or if they were waiting to see if the cannons were manned, Cedar wasn’t sure.

“Well, that’s some good news,” Captain Hink said. “They’re looking for us.”

“And how do you define that as good news, Captain?” Theobald asked.

Hink grinned at him over his shoulder. “Son, so long as the Swift’s in the sky, we all have a chance of getting out of here. I know Les Mullins. He’s got a gut wound from our last meeting and a crew who’d just as soon kick him out of the boat as take a bullet for him. We shoot, we put a few holes in that ship, and Mullins is gonna turn tail and run.”

Cedar lifted his head. There was a scent on the wind, a song he could feel in his bones.

Wil snarled.

The Strange. He narrowed his eyes and searched the ship’s portholes. Steely-faced men stood there, rifles, shotguns, and flamethrowers at the ready.

Theobald pressed his spectacles closer to his face, glanced at the same portholes Cedar was looking at, and swore. “I think we’ll need more than guns for this fight.”

The men staring out of the ship were not human. Well, not all of them.

They were strangeworked.

Just like the things that had nearly killed Mae, Wil, and little Elbert back in Hallelujah. Just like Mr. Shunt.

“Why do you say that, Theobald?” Captain Hink asked.

Cedar’s heart thumped against his ribs. “Those aren’t men.”

“What?” Hink asked. “Of course they’re men. I know his crew.”

“They aren’t men,” Cedar continued as Theobald got busy unpacking things from his carpetbag and handing them to Miss Dupuis and Miss Wright. “They stink of the Strange.”

Hink took a moment to give Cedar a long look. Then, “Strange. All right. So they’re not men. Haven’t met a thing that breathes that can’t be unlunged. Take the ship first. Fans, and rudder, don’t aim for the envelope. Unless we have fire, a few rounds of bullets won’t take her down. And if we ground this beast, be ready to aim for the head of anything that crawls out of her belly.

“We clear on that?” he asked.

“Yes, Captain,” Miss Dupuis said, latching a contraption of brass and tubes and gauges that fit over her shotgun, like a second weapon.

“Aye, sir,” Theobald said, adjusting his goggles and shrugging a belt of bullets over his shoulder, that fed into the chamber of the blunderbuss in his hand.

“Aye,” Miss Wright said, winding a coil of wires up her left arm and sliding her gun into a fanned-out device of brass and copper that looked like a dinner plate–sized shield with tubes and wires rolling around it.