Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles (49 page)

“Pressure compensators?”

Faye looked over. That board had several lights flashing yellow and one that was red. “Fifty percent, Captain.” The pirate thumped the panel with his fist a few times and the red one turned yellow. Now that was engineering that Faye could understand. “Back up to seventy.” The light went red. “Hell. Fifty.”

She didn’t know what was going on, except there wasn’t any air up here at all, it was freezing, stuff was starting to break, and if certain specific things broke on the machine that was pumping in heated air, they’d all pass out and choke to death or have their blood boil off before they even had a chance to fall to their deaths. Her head map was feeding her information that even the Captain didn’t know. Barns was Lucky, and he was using his Power hard. The tremble in his hands and the sweat on his face wasn’t from flying the ship, it was from the physical stress of unconsciously burning his Power to manipulate probability in their favor. He was better at it than he knew, and Faye got a little mad at herself when she realized how jealous she was of that particular Power, and just how much better she would be able to put it to use. Meanwhile, a few things had snapped from the cold and the stress deep inside the ship. There had been a spark, and it had immediately ignited the fuel in a machine, but Lady Origami had forced the fire out from here merely by getting stern with the unruly fire.

Faye was impressed. She wondered if the Captain realized just how many times those two Actives had saved his ship. Probably not, since he was so distracted. The man who could control weather was probably feeling extra uncomfortable, since for the first time in his long life, he was in a place that didn’t have weather as he knew it. He was trying not to show it, but Faye could tell. The energy and currents that existed up here for him to manipulate were too alien for him to understand.
Poor Captain Southunder.

In the hold, the genius Cogs were using their magic to make sure Buckminster Fuller’s contraption was going to work, and she could see how they were folding and unfolding bits of the Power to grant themselves flashes of extra wisdom. That type of magic was starting to make more sense to her, and, in fact, it even seemed familiar for some reason. Not too far away from them was Mr. Sullivan, all suited up in steel, his body made extra dense to keep out the cold. He was impervious as stone, waiting, thinking . . . About what, she didn’t know, but heaven help anybody who got in Mr. Sullivan’s way after he’d had a chance to think through how to get them.

Now the Captain was addressing her, so Faye had to pull out of her head map and snap back to reality. “Faye, can you reach the Imperium target from here?”

“Yes, Captain,” she answered with what surely seemed like no hesitation to everyone else. In reality, she’d had to think it over hard, for nearly one-eighth of a second. She’d be falling through the air, carrying a thousand pounds of steel and Mr. Sullivan, but even then she’d be able to Travel up to forty times to correct her trajectory and get them in the right place before she built up too much speed and hit the ground and went splat. Once again, it wasn’t the distance, but the view, and if you were going four hundred miles an hour, it sure made landing challenging. “No problem.”

“Seventy thousand, five hundred feet,” Barns said.

“Grab Mr. Sullivan and get down there. The hold will depressurize the second we open the doors, and it won’t do to have you two get sucked outside.”

“That’s mighty thoughtful of you, Captain.”

Something was wrong. Faye tilted her head to the side, like her head map had just made her inner ear feel off balance. Barns had stiffened too, as his Power had just recoiled against something that even he couldn’t help shift the odds on. She checked her head map. One of the Imperium navy ships far below them felt different from the others swarming around it. It was bigger, faster. Moving quickly across the ocean, and the magic that was gathering inside of it was deadly and familiar. “Peace Ray charging up!” Faye warned. Now that was something that would be a whole lot more effective than the explosive shells the Imperium had been lobbing up at them. A Tesla beam could shoot clear out into space if it felt like it.

“Barns, evasive maneuvers.” Southunder ordered.

But Faye knew that would be next to useless. The ray would travel in a perfectly straight line seemingly as fast as the light from the sun. Their altitude was protecting them from everything else in the sky, but that same altitude would just make them a better target for the Peace Ray. They might miss a few times, maybe, but that was it. The Imperium certainly weren’t stupid. Faye had already done the math. “Keep going, Captain. I got this.” She didn’t wait for the inevitable response.

There was a scary white skull face looking down at her with big black eyes in the cargo hold. Mr. Sullivan’s voice seemed odd coming through all that steel plate. “It time?”

She reached down and picked up the bundle of guns and bombs she’d left here. There were a bunch of pistols already holstered on her body. Behind her, the Cogs had fired up their new machine, and it was crackling with magical energy. “Can’t. Peace Ray incoming. Gotta stop it.”

Sullivan may have seemed slow to most folks, but he was anything but, especially when it came down to matters pertaining to them not getting dead. “I’ll catch up.”

Faye checked her head map, picked a spot nearly sixteen miles away, and set off to absolutely wreck a battleship all by herself.

Imperium Warship K3
Auspicious Dragon

Faye quickly realized
that the main reason the massive airship hadn’t fired its Peace Ray at the
Traveler
yet was because the designers hadn’t ever thought they’d ever have to fire it nearly straight up
.

She had to hand it to whoever the captain of the Japanese battleship was, because he’d pumped hydrogen forward and swiveled the engines so that the front end of the ship was rising hard and fast. She’d never set foot in an airship which was pointed at this steep of an angle before—well, except for the
Tempest
while it was crashing, but she’d been in a coma for that. Normally when an airship climbed it was a sort of floating with just a bit of an upward angle inside. They were actually pretty gentle. This, on the other hand, felt rather extreme, and if she’d been anybody other than Sally Faye Vierra, landing on a catwalk at such a sharp angle would have been disconcerting.

To Faye, it merely threw her aim off a bit. Her first bullet hit the Japanese soldier in the shoulder, but that was the beauty of the Suomi Gun. She’d only picked the Finnish gun out of the locker because it had had the prettiest wooden stock, but it was really easy to shoot, so she just adjusted her aim and put the next few in the center of his chest. In her defense, she’d been holding the heavy gun in one hand, and her other hand had been holding the handles on her big sack of guns, which weighed a ton. She dropped the sack with a clatter and used her other hand to grab the magazine.

Of course her gunshots had gotten the attention of everyone else in the room. They looked up in surprise. She wasn’t even sure what this room did, but it had a lot of energy flowing through it, so she figured it must be important, and everybody inside looked like mechanics, so killing them might help.

Mashing the trigger, Faye worked the muzzle back and forth. The compensator on the end kept the gun from rising too much. The rest of the thirty rounds was gone in one long, angry burst. Most of the men had been struck. Bodies hit the deck. Some still shouting, a few crawling, others still. Steam was squirting from a pipe. A few had run for it, and a couple of them had even escaped, not yet aware that there were bullets stuck in them. She’d deal with them later, but right now she could still feel the energy building in the Peace Ray. She dropped the Suomi and reached for the sack of guns. Last time she’d done this she’d realized that stopping to reload took up precious seconds which could be better spent murdering Imperium. The ship was at such a crazy angle that the bag had slid down the floor until it hit a wall.

That reminded her that the captain had to be pretty clever to steer his battleship like this, so she’d deal with him next. Her hand landed on a Browning Auto Five shotgun. It was one of her all-time favorites.

It was easy to pick out the bridge. It had lots of equipment, big chairs, and electricity flowing up to the various devices and displays. Faye landed on top of one of those banks of instruments. The man operating it looked up at her in confusion. She kicked him in the teeth and he spilled from his chair.

There were lots of Imperium in this room, but the Captain had to be the one with the fanciest hat, so she blew his head clean off.

There was an Iron Guard on the bridge. If she hadn’t been able to tell by all the extra magic bonded to him through the ritual kanji scars, she would have been tipped off by the way he quickly drew a sidearm and started shooting at her. She disappeared as the bullets perforated the console.

Iron Guards were tricky, and she’d found that they sometimes they could get lucky and predict where a Traveler might reappear, so Faye played it smart. There was a big air-conditioning conduit that ran under the floor. She put herself in it, right under the grating beneath the Iron Guard’s feet. She couldn’t lift the shotgun, but she got one of her .45s out and popped eight rounds up through the grate, shredding the Iron Guard’s feet and legs. The way he just grimaced and stayed standing told Faye he was a Brute.

The Imperium Marines were pretty sharp, and they figured out where she was shooting from right quick, but it didn’t matter, since she was on the opposite end of the ship before their first bullets punctured the grate in response. She’d pulled the pin on a grenade and left it under the bridge for them as a present. She was far enough away she didn’t hear the explosion, but she clearly felt the Spellbound curse stealing the magical connection of the Iron Guard and several of the marines after the grenade shrapnel killed them.

The Peace Ray fired.

It didn’t make much noise. There wasn’t much outward show as the particles were magically accelerated and hurled into the distance. Just a sort of snap and a flickering of the lights.

No!

She checked. The
Traveler
was still there. They’d missed. If they’d been hit then the
Traveler
would have simply been swept away. They would adjust and fire again. She scanned her head map. This ship was over a thousand feet long and packed with life. Who looked busiest?

That room was busy! Surely somebody in there was involved in shooting the Peace Ray. She arrived unseen. Since nobody even noticed little old her, she stuffed another mag into her pistol, stuck it back in the holster and lifted the shotgun, but then thought better of it. A man in coveralls was working next to a big machine with giant gears grinding together. That machine looked super important and worth stopping, so she walked over, thumped the man over the head with the shotgun butt, and knocked him into the gears. Sadly, he didn’t so much as slow the big gears as they mulched him to pieces, but he sure did scream a lot, which got everybody’s attention.

So she lifted the shotgun and went to work, dropping Imperium left and right. The Auto Five kicked really hard, but it ran
fast
. Like her. Everyone scrambled. Some rushed her, screaming, brave, not even armed, while others ran for help, but to the Imperium’s credit, nobody stood there stupidly. They all did
something
. Not that it did them any good, since ten seconds later the entire engine room had been depopulated.

Faye went back to the slowly turning gears. They looked too important not to break, so she jammed the empty Auto Five between them. The big machine shrieked and ground to a halt. The whole airship shuddered, so that was more like it. That had broken something, and fire came shooting out a pipe in the wall. Faye couldn’t read the weird Japanese letters, but luckily a nearby drum had a flame drawn on it. She hoped that meant it was flammable, so she lifted her .45 and poked a hole in the tank before Traveling away.

Sure enough, the contents of that tank weren’t just flammable. They were
explosive
. She sure heard that one, even felt it through the soles of her feet as the floor vibrated, but she was already four hundred feet away and three floors up, to pick up something new from her big sack of guns. Two of the crew had approached the abandoned bag cautiously, poking at it with their toes, so she simply shot each one once in the back of the head. The airship was still pointing up drastically, so that told Faye she needed to hurry up and use one of the biggest guns. She picked the bazooka. It had gotten brains on it.
Icky.

Lance had told her
bazooka
wasn’t its real name, just something they called it for short. It was really the something-something-mark-something-or-other launcher, but she preferred the slang term
bazooka
, and she figured it would do a real number to the delicate membranes inside the giant hydrogen cells. Lance had been fond of the bazooka, so she figured this was for him.

There was a great spot on the swaying platform suspended between the hulls. This place wasn’t so armored as the outside, because, come on, how was a bomb going to end up in here? There were ten men on the platform, one of whom was an armed Imperium marine, so she made sure to land right behind him. He had his back to her. Faye took a knee and shouldered the big tube. Lance had always warned her about the dangerous hot gases that came shooting out the back of the bazooka when you fired, but she figured it wouldn’t hurt if she hit an Imperium man with it. She didn’t even really have to aim, since pretty much everything in the wide-open red space was vulnerable. She pulled the trigger and was rewarded with a terrific BOOM.

It made all of the Imperium men jump or hit the deck, except for the marine who had been standing behind her, of course. He never knew what hit him. The bazooka’s back blast had knocked him right over the railing. He was falling toward the lower hull, burning and screaming. Faye found that amusing for some reason. She turned back in time to see the explosive shell’s impact. There was a great shower of sparks and smoke as the big round tore through multiple cell walls. There was a blue flash as gas ignited.