So intent was he on the charade, listening to Caroline’s bland points about victualling and giving the Familiarity spell something to work with, that it took Aubrey some time to realise that they hadn’t encountered anyone.
They’d passed crew quarters and what looked like a carpenter’s shop, but they hadn’t run into, passed or overtaken any Holmland sailors. In between the thumping of the guns, their feet actually echoed on the polished timber. Even when an massive explosion nearby made the Sylvia stagger, no curious faces presented themselves at hatches, no cries of alarm went up from the depths of the boiler room.
‘A ghost ship,’ he said in Holmlandish to Caroline.
She gave him a startled look and paused in the middle of her explanation of how to make pea soup for four hundred sailors. ‘Not literally, I hope.’
‘I was alluding to the lack of crew. We seem to be alone.’
‘Or the sailors are all somewhere else,’ Sophie said, but the suggestion wasn’t comforting. Aubrey didn’t really want to imagine a place where the entire crew of a battleship would be gathered, waiting, armed and ready for them.
78
They stepped out onto the main deck through a hatch near the portside rails and were once again in the middle of a raging aerial battle. A few hundred yards away one of the skyfleet’s destroyers was on fire, flames rising high along its entire length. An explosion burst through its side and the stern dropped precipitously so that the whole ship was sailing at an awkward angle, bow up, stern down, more evidence that in Dr Tremaine’s efforts to create a threatening skyfleet, the cloudstuff had become solid and material – to the detriment of the vessels, in this circumstance.
This moment of satisfaction was balanced by the bleak possibility of a rain of solid cloudstuff falling on Trinovant. It would be almost as destructive as bombs.
Aubrey found himself hoping that Dr Tremaine’s spellwork was up to its usual standard and that the skyships would keep their structural integrity once damaged. He’d be happy if the damaged ships drifted away from the battle, harmless, instead of falling apart and subjecting Trinovant to more death from the skies.
A hideous ratcheting nearby made Aubrey spin around to see the massive central turret of the Sylvia moving, with its fifteen-inch guns turning in their direction.
Caroline pulled him down behind a ventilator. He clapped his hands over his ears just as the big guns cut loose. The deck shook and air itself punched him hard enough to take the breath from his lungs. The shells screamed as they flew from the massive barrels, shrieking maniacally as if gleeful at being set free.
Aubrey squirmed around on his stomach and saw four ornithopters darting about near the crippled vessel. His heart went out to plucky pilots who’d coaxed their uncooperative machines that far.
The big guns fell silent, as if embarrassed at their inability to bring down a few flapping nuisances, and the machine guns and smaller armaments on the deck took over with sharp, emphatic chattering, a metallic chorus that mounted in intensity as round after round howled toward the Albion aircraft.
Aubrey wasn’t surprised, really, that all of this aiming, firing and reloading was happening without any sign of a human hand. The machine guns swivelled and the six-inch guns tracked targets entirely by themselves. He was aware of the magic that enabled such autonomous, implacable behaviour and it efficiently made the most of mechanical processes while supplementing them with magical power. The ships may have once been as insubstantial as the clouds they were made of, but Dr Tremaine had made them as solid as anything in the Holmland navy.
One of the ornithopters was swooping over the stern of the crippled destroyer. Tracer bullets lanced from it as it tried to damage the rudder and propellers. Aubrey had no idea if the steering mechanism were of any use in sailing through the sky – he suspected not – but he applauded the ingenuity of the attack, even while he was aghast at such close manoeuvring, where a minute misjudgement could doom the ornithopter and its crew.
The ornithopter became a fireball. One moment it was banking close to the stern of the ship it was attacking, the next it erupted. It tumbled, trailing a tail of fire behind it like a comet, and Aubrey was momentarily crushed. That such bravery was rewarded with such a death. There was no poetry, no deserved outcomes, just messy and inconvenient ends.
Aubrey didn’t want to ignore the deaths he’d just witnessed, nor try to forget them, but he wasn’t going to allow them to stop him. They had been a reminder that there was little nobility in a conflict like this, but that didn’t mean that he should give up.
George and Sophie were scrambling toward the rails on the port side of the Sylvia, both open-mouthed in astonishment as a dirigible rose, rapidly piercing the gap between the Sylvia and its companion battleship half a mile away. Its metallic surface caught the flames of the crippled destroyer and made it a shimmering presence; as it rose, it blotted out a fair portion of the skies. Amid the darting, jerky flight of the ornithopters and the ponderous motion of the warships, the dirigible was eerily graceful in the aerial battleground, moving with majestic calm.
It was the A 405 – assisted by a bank of magical altitude enhancers.
The giant airship was fully as long as the Sylvia, a match for it in size and, perhaps, capable of contesting it for domination of the skies. Aubrey held his breath as it ascended rapidly, the massive engines straining to push it past the lethal level where the guns of the skyfleet could be brought to bear. Tracer bullets whipped from machine guns toward the A 405, but either the aluminium cladding was sufficient to deflect the bullets or the distance was too great and the great airship was unaffected as it climbed.
Aubrey wanted to stand up and cheer the brave aviators who were crewing the A 405, but he was grateful for the protection of the ventilator when the airship returned fire – proof that the time spent in regassing and fitting the airship with altitude enhancers had also been spent on more lethal improvements. The ventilator rang when a volley of shots stitched it. Aubrey and Caroline flattened themselves to the deck. When the shooting moved on with the progress of the airship, crossing the deck and making a mess of a series of wooden covered hatchways, Aubrey risked a peek. With so many gun barrels protruding, the gondola attached to the underside of the A 405 looked like a porcupine. Flame flashed from the barrels as the machine guns chattered, filling the air with humming death.
Ornithopters were streaking about, using the distraction provided by the presence of the A 405 to pepper the warships. Explosions erupted on skyfleet vessels, the result of bombs dropped by game ornithopter crew members. For a time, the scene was reminiscent of one of the gaudier fireworks displays commemorating the late King’s birthday.
A deep-throated thump came from the A 405. The airship heaved and yawed, bucking like a skittish horse, a sight remarkable in such a large craft. The bow of the battleship on the far side of the A 405 was enveloped in a gigantic fireball. The airship actually staggered, its nose pushed aside by the violence of the explosion. A few seconds later and the Sylvia itself was struck by the concussion. The massive flagship rolled sickeningly and Aubrey found the deck tilting away from him. Desperately, he grasped Caroline’s forearm when she began to slide away from him. With his other hand he clutched the corner of a hatch cover and hung on until the ship caught itself, hesitated, then began the long roll back.
As the aerial battlefield returned to view, Aubrey lifted his head to see that the A 405 was no longer the sleek, elegant craft that had come to fight. The front third of the dirigible was rapidly losing its shape, with aluminium panels falling from it like confetti. The guns in the gondola kept firing, but their volleys were now haphazard as the airship wallowed, having lost its airworthiness.
On the other side, however, the battleship the A 405 had attacked was fully aflame. The fireball that had swallowed the bow was fiercely working its way along the length of the vessel, which was listing badly and losing its way. The ship began to curve away from the skyfleet formation, crippled and useless, its superstructure canted at forty-five degrees or more, but still buoyed by the magic of Dr Tremaine.
The A 405 began to fall. It went slowly, and Aubrey could only hope that many of the gasbags were undamaged by the assault that had torn open the bow of the massive craft. In a last effort, firing from the gondola redoubled. Heavier calibre bullets replaced the light machine gun fire, ricocheting from the turrets and the cranes of the Sylvia, then small shells followed and began to do significant damage. Glass shattered, and one of the antenna arms snapped from the main array over the bridge. It crashed to the deck near the forecastle, narrowly missing
